Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in London

Data Engineer
England > London

The median Data Engineer daily rate in London is £535, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 29 November 2025.

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

6 months to
29 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 95 78 87
Rank change year-on-year -17 +9 +22
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 438 506 522
As % of all contract jobs in London 3.09% 3.19% 2.64%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.35% 3.41% 2.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 317 362 388
10th Percentile £380 £400 £400
25th Percentile £450 £475 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.96% +4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £650
90th Percentile £725 £751 £725
England median daily rate £513 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -6.73% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 8 9
10th Percentile £31.22 £46.85 £35.00
25th Percentile £38.75 £61.06 £35.63
Median hourly rate £43.50 £78.75 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year -44.76% +30.17% +56.13%
75th Percentile £86.25 £97.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £110.00 - £71.40
England median hourly rate £43.50 £65.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year -33.08% +7.44% +4.31%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 13,090 14,839 18,513
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.31% 93.65% 93.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,692 9,606 13,396
10th Percentile £333 £339 £338
25th Percentile £425 £450 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £533 £550 £563
Median % change year-on-year -3.18% -2.22% -2.22%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £688
90th Percentile £763 £799 £788
England median daily rate £505 £525 £535
% change year-on-year -3.81% -1.87% -2.73%
Number of hourly rates quoted 232 161 216
10th Percentile £17.50 £17.25 £18.08
25th Percentile £21.35 £23.80 £21.69
Median hourly rate £27.50 £37.50 £36.14
Median % change year-on-year -26.67% +3.76% +3.26%
75th Percentile £51.48 £58.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £76.42 £81.18 £72.50
England median hourly rate £25.32 £39.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year -35.08% -13.33% +38.46%

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 29 November 2025.

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 29 November 2025.

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 29 November 2025. 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 +8 57 £538 -6.52% 27
West London -14 8 £575 +4.55% 6
South London -6 3 £479 -18.55% 3
East London +3 1 - - 3
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 29 November 2025, 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.

1 296 (67.58%) Python
2 280 (63.93%) SQL
3 223 (50.91%) Data Pipeline
4 210 (47.95%) Azure
5 183 (41.78%) Data Engineering
6 174 (39.73%) ETL
7 168 (38.36%) Databricks
8 167 (38.13%) AWS
9 162 (36.99%) Data Modelling
10 137 (31.28%) Analytics
10 137 (31.28%) CI/CD
11 117 (26.71%) Data Quality
12 107 (24.43%) Data Warehouse
13 99 (22.60%) Business Intelligence
13 99 (22.60%) DevOps
13 99 (22.60%) Security Cleared
14 98 (22.37%) Agile
15 91 (20.78%) Data Science
16 87 (19.86%) Azure Data Factory
17 85 (19.41%) SC Cleared
18 83 (18.95%) Power Platform
18 83 (18.95%) PySpark
19 82 (18.72%) Power BI
20 79 (18.04%) Apache Airflow
21 74 (16.89%) Data Governance
21 74 (16.89%) Snowflake
22 67 (15.30%) Apache Spark
22 67 (15.30%) Problem-Solving
23 65 (14.84%) Infrastructure as Code
24 64 (14.61%) Data Lake

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 79 (18.04%) Apache Airflow
2 67 (15.30%) Apache Spark
3 38 (8.68%) Apache
4 14 (3.20%) Confluence
5 5 (1.14%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.68%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 2 (0.46%) ArcGIS
7 2 (0.46%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.46%) Luigi
7 2 (0.46%) SAS
8 1 (0.23%) Apache Pig
8 1 (0.23%) IIS
8 1 (0.23%) Microsoft Exchange
8 1 (0.23%) Oracle Application Server
Applications
1 8 (1.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
2 2 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.23%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.23%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 3 (0.68%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.46%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.23%) Actimize
3 1 (0.23%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.23%) Maximo
3 1 (0.23%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 210 (47.95%) Azure
2 167 (38.13%) AWS
3 87 (19.86%) Azure Data Factory
4 83 (18.95%) Power Platform
5 74 (16.89%) Snowflake
6 61 (13.93%) Amazon S3
7 60 (13.70%) dbt
7 60 (13.70%) GCP
8 55 (12.56%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 52 (11.87%) GitHub
10 39 (8.90%) Serverless
11 34 (7.76%) Azure DevOps
12 29 (6.62%) GitHub Actions
13 25 (5.71%) AWS Lambda
14 16 (3.65%) AWS CloudFormation
14 16 (3.65%) SaaS
15 15 (3.42%) Amazon Kinesis
16 13 (2.97%) Amazon EMR
17 8 (1.83%) Microsoft Purview
18 7 (1.60%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.91%) Firewall
2 3 (0.68%) SAN
3 2 (0.46%) Internet
4 1 (0.23%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 107 (24.43%) Data Warehouse
2 82 (18.72%) Power BI
3 64 (14.61%) Data Lake
4 38 (8.68%) SQL Server
5 37 (8.45%) Big Data
6 30 (6.85%) BigQuery
7 29 (6.62%) Hadoop
8 27 (6.16%) PostgreSQL
9 26 (5.94%) Amazon Redshift
9 26 (5.94%) Delta Lake
10 25 (5.71%) Azure SQL Database
10 25 (5.71%) Metadata
11 23 (5.25%) Relational Database
11 23 (5.25%) Tableau
12 22 (5.02%) NoSQL
12 22 (5.02%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 21 (4.79%) Star Schema
14 19 (4.34%) Amazon QuickSight
15 14 (3.20%) Amazon Athena
16 11 (2.51%) DataStage
Development Applications
1 63 (14.38%) Git
2 19 (4.34%) Jenkins
3 15 (3.42%) JIRA
4 14 (3.20%) MLflow
5 8 (1.83%) GitLab
6 3 (0.68%) Bitbucket
7 1 (0.23%) DBeaver
7 1 (0.23%) ERwin
7 1 (0.23%) GoCD
7 1 (0.23%) Gradle
7 1 (0.23%) Jaeger
7 1 (0.23%) Poetry
7 1 (0.23%) Selenium
7 1 (0.23%) Team Foundation Server
7 1 (0.23%) TeamCity
7 1 (0.23%) Visual Studio
General
1 100 (22.83%) Finance
2 91 (20.78%) Social Skills
3 59 (13.47%) Analytical Skills
4 31 (7.08%) Public Sector
5 21 (4.79%) Banking
6 17 (3.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 11 (2.51%) Investment Banking
7 11 (2.51%) Pharmaceutical
8 10 (2.28%) Front Office
9 7 (1.60%) Marketing
9 7 (1.60%) Retail
10 4 (0.91%) Telecoms
11 3 (0.68%) Organisational Skills
12 2 (0.46%) Corporate Banking
12 2 (0.46%) Documentation Skills
12 2 (0.46%) Financial Institution
12 2 (0.46%) International Banking
12 2 (0.46%) Law
12 2 (0.46%) Military
12 2 (0.46%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 83 (18.95%) PySpark
2 53 (12.10%) Kafka
3 12 (2.74%) XML
4 11 (2.51%) Apache NiFi
4 11 (2.51%) Pandas
5 10 (2.28%) RabbitMQ
5 10 (2.28%) YAML
6 8 (1.83%) Jinja
6 8 (1.83%) PyTorch
7 7 (1.60%) JSON
7 7 (1.60%) NumPy
8 6 (1.37%) GraphQL
8 6 (1.37%) HTML
8 6 (1.37%) RESTful
9 5 (1.14%) pytest
9 5 (1.14%) REST
9 5 (1.14%) TensorFlow
10 4 (0.91%) CSS
10 4 (0.91%) OAuth
10 4 (0.91%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 25 (5.71%) Cloud Native
2 16 (3.65%) Legacy Systems
3 14 (3.20%) Data Structures
4 10 (2.28%) Onboarding
5 9 (2.05%) Distributed Computing
6 8 (1.83%) Product Ownership
7 7 (1.60%) Algorithms
7 7 (1.60%) Virtual Team
8 6 (1.37%) Life Science
8 6 (1.37%) Reinsurance
9 5 (1.14%) Genomics
9 5 (1.14%) Greenfield Project
9 5 (1.14%) Linux Command Line
10 4 (0.91%) Credit Risk
10 4 (0.91%) Data Protection Act
10 4 (0.91%) Replication
10 4 (0.91%) Self-Motivation
11 3 (0.68%) Derivative
11 3 (0.68%) Equities
11 3 (0.68%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 8 (1.83%) Linux
2 4 (0.91%) Unix
3 1 (0.23%) VMS
3 1 (0.23%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 223 (50.91%) Data Pipeline
2 183 (41.78%) Data Engineering
3 174 (39.73%) ETL
4 162 (36.99%) Data Modelling
5 137 (31.28%) Analytics
5 137 (31.28%) CI/CD
6 99 (22.60%) Business Intelligence
6 99 (22.60%) DevOps
7 98 (22.37%) Agile
8 91 (20.78%) Data Science
9 74 (16.89%) Data Governance
10 67 (15.30%) Problem-Solving
11 65 (14.84%) Infrastructure as Code
12 64 (14.61%) Machine Learning
13 62 (14.16%) AI
14 55 (12.56%) Migration
15 54 (12.33%) Data Integration
16 49 (11.19%) Data Architecture
17 47 (10.73%) Data Transformation
18 39 (8.90%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 296 (67.58%) Python
2 280 (63.93%) SQL
3 48 (10.96%) Scala
4 40 (9.13%) Java
5 13 (2.97%) Bash
6 12 (2.74%) JavaScript
7 9 (2.05%) PowerShell
8 8 (1.83%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 8 (1.83%) R
9 6 (1.37%) C#
9 6 (1.37%) PL/SQL
9 6 (1.37%) T-SQL
10 4 (0.91%) Go
10 4 (0.91%) Shell Script
10 4 (0.91%) TypeScript
11 3 (0.68%) Korn
12 2 (0.46%) C
12 2 (0.46%) C++
13 1 (0.23%) HiveQL
Qualifications
1 99 (22.60%) Security Cleared
2 85 (19.41%) SC Cleared
3 25 (5.71%) Degree
4 18 (4.11%) DV Cleared
5 12 (2.74%) Azure Certification
6 11 (2.51%) AWS Certification
7 10 (2.28%) Computer Science Degree
8 5 (1.14%) Master's Degree
9 3 (0.68%) BPSS Clearance
10 2 (0.46%) DBS Check
10 2 (0.46%) SnowPro
11 1 (0.23%) CTC Cleared
11 1 (0.23%) MCP
11 1 (0.23%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 117 (26.71%) Data Quality
2 25 (5.71%) GDPR
3 8 (1.83%) QA
4 6 (1.37%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.91%) HIPAA
6 3 (0.68%) MiFID
6 3 (0.68%) NIST
6 3 (0.68%) SLA
7 2 (0.46%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.46%) EMIR
7 2 (0.46%) ISO/IEC 20000
8 1 (0.23%) EU AI Act
8 1 (0.23%) HL7
8 1 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.23%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.23%) SOC 2
System Software
1 24 (5.48%) Docker
2 5 (1.14%) Virtual Machines
2 5 (1.14%) zsh
3 1 (0.23%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 64 (14.61%) Terraform
2 28 (6.39%) Kubernetes
3 4 (0.91%) Grafana
3 4 (0.91%) Kubeflow
3 4 (0.91%) Puppet
4 3 (0.68%) Ambari
4 3 (0.68%) ZABBIX
5 2 (0.46%) Ansible
5 2 (0.46%) EMC NetWorker
5 2 (0.46%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.46%) Tivoli Storage Manager
6 1 (0.23%) Argo
6 1 (0.23%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 168 (38.36%) Databricks
2 50 (11.42%) Microsoft
3 25 (5.71%) Foundry
4 24 (5.48%) Palantir
5 21 (4.79%) Google
6 20 (4.57%) Oracle
7 12 (2.74%) Cloudera
8 8 (1.83%) SAP
9 7 (1.60%) Informatica
10 5 (1.14%) IBM
10 5 (1.14%) Virgin Media
11 4 (0.91%) Denodo
11 4 (0.91%) ServiceNow
12 3 (0.68%) Cisco
12 3 (0.68%) EMC
12 3 (0.68%) Isilon
12 3 (0.68%) Splunk
12 3 (0.68%) Teradata
13 2 (0.46%) Salesforce
13 2 (0.46%) Veritas