Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in London

Data Engineer
England > London

The median Data Engineer daily rate in London is £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 19 April 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 48 70 77
Rank change year-on-year +22 +7 +18
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 797 466 515
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.58% 3.67% 2.88%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.94% 3.92% 3.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 580 348 421
10th Percentile £388 £400 £350
25th Percentile £463 £455 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year - - -8.70%
75th Percentile £614 £650 £650
90th Percentile £735 £800 £704
England median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 7 9
10th Percentile £23.72 £47.25 £48.75
25th Percentile £30.30 £58.13 £49.25
Median hourly rate £42.50 £65.00 £51.75
Median % change year-on-year -34.62% +25.60% -19.14%
75th Percentile £49.75 £85.63 £61.75
90th Percentile £53.35 £93.75 £66.13
England median hourly rate £57.00 £65.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year -12.31% -3.70% +5.47%

All Contract IT Job Roles
London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in London. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in London with a recognized job title 16,123 11,879 16,647
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.73% 93.48% 93.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,755 8,148 12,048
10th Percentile £350 £340 £325
25th Percentile £425 £427 £440
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £800 £788
England median daily rate £508 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -3.33% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 262 142 341
10th Percentile £18.75 £21.21 £16.00
25th Percentile £25.04 £24.66 £20.00
Median hourly rate £37.25 £35.00 £27.81
Median % change year-on-year +6.43% +25.85% -20.54%
75th Percentile £63.08 £50.75 £43.75
90th Percentile £76.58 £64.88 £64.53
England median hourly rate £45.00 £32.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year +38.46% -7.14% -19.08%

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Data Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in London.

Data Engineer job vacancy trend in London

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in London

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineer in London over the 6 months to 19 April 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineer in London

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in London.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in London

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram in London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Engineer in London over the 6 months to 19 April 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineer in London

Data Engineer
Contract Job Locations in London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Data Engineer within the London region over the 6 months to 19 April 2026. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
Central London +28 114 £544 +7.67% 57
West London +1 32 £603 +6.73% 4
South London -11 8 £500 +3.90% 1
East London -2 2 £425 -15.00% 3
Data Engineer
England

Data Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in London

For the 6 months to 19 April 2026, Data Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the London region featuring Data Engineer in the job title.

1 472 (59.22%) SQL
2 458 (57.47%) Python
3 356 (44.67%) Data Pipeline
4 348 (43.66%) Azure
5 328 (41.15%) Data Engineering
6 325 (40.78%) ETL
7 299 (37.52%) Analytics
8 288 (36.14%) Data Modelling
9 266 (33.38%) AWS
10 252 (31.62%) Databricks
11 240 (30.11%) Data Quality
12 220 (27.60%) CI/CD
13 192 (24.09%) Security Cleared
14 178 (22.33%) SC Cleared
15 176 (22.08%) Business Intelligence
16 172 (21.58%) Data Warehouse
17 171 (21.46%) DevOps
18 161 (20.20%) Power Platform
19 151 (18.95%) Data Governance
19 151 (18.95%) Power BI
20 139 (17.44%) Agile
21 138 (17.31%) PySpark
22 135 (16.94%) Azure Data Factory
23 134 (16.81%) Terraform
24 127 (15.93%) Data Science
25 120 (15.06%) AI
26 117 (14.68%) Microsoft
27 115 (14.43%) Data Lake
28 114 (14.30%) Amazon S3
29 111 (13.93%) Snowflake

Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in London by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 105 (13.17%) Apache Airflow
2 100 (12.55%) Apache Spark
3 55 (6.90%) Apache
4 10 (1.25%) Palantir Foundry
5 7 (0.88%) Confluence
6 5 (0.63%) Jupyter
6 5 (0.63%) Microsoft Exchange
7 3 (0.38%) SAS
8 2 (0.25%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.13%) Appian
9 1 (0.13%) Camunda
9 1 (0.13%) Luigi
9 1 (0.13%) R Markdown
Applications
1 14 (1.76%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.25%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.25%) Aladdin
1 2 (0.25%) BambooHR
1 2 (0.25%) SAP BPC
2 1 (0.13%) Actimize
2 1 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.13%) iTrent
2 1 (0.13%) Maximo
2 1 (0.13%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.13%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 348 (43.66%) Azure
2 266 (33.38%) AWS
3 161 (20.20%) Power Platform
4 135 (16.94%) Azure Data Factory
5 114 (14.30%) Amazon S3
6 111 (13.93%) Snowflake
7 101 (12.67%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 93 (11.67%) GCP
9 89 (11.17%) dbt
10 88 (11.04%) Azure DevOps
11 83 (10.41%) GitHub
12 71 (8.91%) Serverless
13 63 (7.90%) AWS Lambda
14 40 (5.02%) GitHub Actions
15 32 (4.02%) AWS CloudFormation
16 25 (3.14%) Dagster
17 22 (2.76%) Amazon Kinesis
18 19 (2.38%) AWS Step Functions
19 18 (2.26%) Amazon SQS
20 17 (2.13%) Collibra
Communications & Networking
1 3 (0.38%) Firewall
1 3 (0.38%) SAN
2 2 (0.25%) Structured Cabling
3 1 (0.13%) 4G
3 1 (0.13%) 5G
3 1 (0.13%) Network Security
3 1 (0.13%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 172 (21.58%) Data Warehouse
2 151 (18.95%) Power BI
3 115 (14.43%) Data Lake
4 82 (10.29%) SQL Server
5 66 (8.28%) BigQuery
6 61 (7.65%) Azure SQL Database
7 60 (7.53%) Delta Lake
8 57 (7.15%) Metadata
9 49 (6.15%) Tableau
10 48 (6.02%) Amazon Redshift
11 44 (5.52%) Amazon Athena
11 44 (5.52%) NoSQL
12 43 (5.40%) Snowflake Schema
13 40 (5.02%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 35 (4.39%) Big Data
14 35 (4.39%) PostgreSQL
15 27 (3.39%) Star Schema
16 25 (3.14%) Relational Database
17 21 (2.63%) Data Vault
17 21 (2.63%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 87 (10.92%) Git
2 24 (3.01%) JIRA
3 21 (2.63%) GitLab
4 20 (2.51%) Jenkins
5 18 (2.26%) MLflow
6 2 (0.25%) SonarQube
6 2 (0.25%) Sonatype Nexus
7 1 (0.13%) Jaeger
7 1 (0.13%) Poetry
7 1 (0.13%) Selenium
7 1 (0.13%) Team Foundation Server
7 1 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 182 (22.84%) Finance
2 120 (15.06%) Social Skills
3 94 (11.79%) Analytical Skills
4 56 (7.03%) Public Sector
5 45 (5.65%) Banking
6 29 (3.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 15 (1.88%) Pharmaceutical
8 13 (1.63%) Telecoms
9 11 (1.38%) Front Office
10 10 (1.25%) Retail
11 9 (1.13%) Marketing
11 9 (1.13%) Publishing
12 6 (0.75%) Investment Banking
13 5 (0.63%) Documentation Skills
14 4 (0.50%) Back Office
14 4 (0.50%) Corporate Banking
14 4 (0.50%) Games
14 4 (0.50%) Law
14 4 (0.50%) Manufacturing
15 3 (0.38%) Financial Institution
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 138 (17.31%) PySpark
2 85 (10.66%) Kafka
3 34 (4.27%) Pandas
4 24 (3.01%) Great Expectations
5 23 (2.89%) YAML
6 14 (1.76%) REST
6 14 (1.76%) scikit-learn
7 12 (1.51%) Matplotlib
8 10 (1.25%) JSON
8 10 (1.25%) PyTorch
9 9 (1.13%) GeoJSON
9 9 (1.13%) NumPy
9 9 (1.13%) Polars
9 9 (1.13%) Spring
9 9 (1.13%) Spring Boot
9 9 (1.13%) XML
10 7 (0.88%) OAuth
10 7 (0.88%) React
10 7 (0.88%) Spark Streaming
11 6 (0.75%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 75 (9.41%) Cloud Native
2 24 (3.01%) Legacy Systems
3 19 (2.38%) Data Structures
3 19 (2.38%) Product Ownership
4 15 (1.88%) Greenfield Project
5 12 (1.51%) Onboarding
6 11 (1.38%) Reinsurance
7 10 (1.25%) Distributed Systems
8 8 (1.00%) Self-Motivation
9 7 (0.88%) Clustering
9 7 (0.88%) Life Science
9 7 (0.88%) Public Cloud
9 7 (0.88%) Replication
10 6 (0.75%) NHS
11 5 (0.63%) AI Agents
11 5 (0.63%) Data Protection Act
11 5 (0.63%) Derivative
11 5 (0.63%) Distributed Computing
11 5 (0.63%) Reference Data
12 4 (0.50%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 20 (2.51%) Linux
2 10 (1.25%) Unix
3 3 (0.38%) Windows
4 2 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.13%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 356 (44.67%) Data Pipeline
2 328 (41.15%) Data Engineering
3 325 (40.78%) ETL
4 299 (37.52%) Analytics
5 288 (36.14%) Data Modelling
6 220 (27.60%) CI/CD
7 176 (22.08%) Business Intelligence
8 171 (21.46%) DevOps
9 151 (18.95%) Data Governance
10 139 (17.44%) Agile
11 127 (15.93%) Data Science
12 120 (15.06%) AI
13 107 (13.43%) Infrastructure as Code
14 105 (13.17%) Data Architecture
15 93 (11.67%) Problem-Solving
16 91 (11.42%) Migration
17 89 (11.17%) Machine Learning
18 81 (10.16%) Validation
19 75 (9.41%) Decision-Making
20 72 (9.03%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 472 (59.22%) SQL
2 458 (57.47%) Python
3 77 (9.66%) Scala
4 65 (8.16%) Java
5 32 (4.02%) C#
6 23 (2.89%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 17 (2.13%) T-SQL
8 14 (1.76%) R
9 13 (1.63%) Bicep
10 11 (1.38%) JavaScript
11 10 (1.25%) Bash
12 9 (1.13%) PL/SQL
12 9 (1.13%) PowerShell
12 9 (1.13%) Shell Script
13 5 (0.63%) TypeScript
14 3 (0.38%) C
15 2 (0.25%) Korn
15 2 (0.25%) LookML
15 2 (0.25%) Ruby
15 2 (0.25%) VB
Qualifications
1 192 (24.09%) Security Cleared
2 178 (22.33%) SC Cleared
3 25 (3.14%) Degree
4 21 (2.63%) Azure Certification
5 17 (2.13%) BPSS Clearance
6 13 (1.63%) Computer Science Degree
7 12 (1.51%) AWS Certification
8 6 (0.75%) DV Cleared
8 6 (0.75%) Microsoft Certification
9 4 (0.50%) DBS Check
9 4 (0.50%) Master's Degree
9 4 (0.50%) SnowPro
10 3 (0.38%) CTC Cleared
11 1 (0.13%) BICSI Certification
11 1 (0.13%) CISA
11 1 (0.13%) CISM
11 1 (0.13%) CISSP
11 1 (0.13%) City & Guilds
11 1 (0.13%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 240 (30.11%) Data Quality
2 38 (4.77%) GDPR
3 24 (3.01%) QA
4 8 (1.00%) Accessibility
5 3 (0.38%) SLA
6 2 (0.25%) GMP
6 2 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.25%) MiFID
7 1 (0.13%) GRC
7 1 (0.13%) GxP
7 1 (0.13%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.13%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.13%) PMO
7 1 (0.13%) WCAG
System Software
1 47 (5.90%) Docker
2 5 (0.63%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.13%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.13%) RACF
Systems Management
1 134 (16.81%) Terraform
2 34 (4.27%) Kubernetes
3 9 (1.13%) Grafana
4 4 (0.50%) Kibana
4 4 (0.50%) Kubeflow
5 2 (0.25%) EMC NetWorker
5 2 (0.25%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.25%) Thomson Reuters DACS
5 2 (0.25%) Tivoli Storage Manager
6 1 (0.13%) Ansible
Vendors
1 252 (31.62%) Databricks
2 117 (14.68%) Microsoft
3 44 (5.52%) Google
4 34 (4.27%) Informatica
5 29 (3.64%) Oracle
6 13 (1.63%) Foundry
6 13 (1.63%) IBM
7 11 (1.38%) Palantir
7 11 (1.38%) SAP
8 10 (1.25%) ServiceNow
9 9 (1.13%) Denodo
10 8 (1.00%) Talend
11 6 (0.75%) Cloudera
11 6 (0.75%) MuleSoft
12 5 (0.63%) Splunk
13 4 (0.50%) Alteryx
13 4 (0.50%) Bloomberg
13 4 (0.50%) OpenAI
14 3 (0.38%) Salesforce
14 3 (0.38%) Virgin Media