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 17 May 2026.

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

6 months to
17 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 45 68 80
Rank change year-on-year +23 +12 +14
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 847 452 485
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.70% 3.61% 2.78%
As % of the Job Titles category 5.06% 3.87% 2.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 613 343 392
10th Percentile £388 £400 £351
25th Percentile £455 £455 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year - - -8.70%
75th Percentile £614 £625 £638
90th Percentile £723 £800 £700
England median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 7 8
10th Percentile £23.72 £51.25 £48.50
25th Percentile £30.30 £58.13 £49.25
Median hourly rate £42.50 £65.00 £51.13
Median % change year-on-year -34.62% +27.14% -28.99%
75th Percentile £49.75 £85.63 £56.73
90th Percentile £53.35 £93.75 £66.92
England median hourly rate £52.50 £65.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year -19.23% -3.70% -10.60%

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 16,728 11,668 16,314
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.79% 93.28% 93.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,091 7,986 11,794
10th Percentile £350 £343 £325
25th Percentile £430 £426 £445
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £688
90th Percentile £756 £800 £800
England median daily rate £513 £523 £525
% change year-on-year -1.96% -0.43% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 271 143 318
10th Percentile £18.75 £20.24 £16.00
25th Percentile £25.15 £24.42 £20.07
Median hourly rate £37.50 £34.00 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.29% +23.64% -21.43%
75th Percentile £63.10 £50.75 £46.05
90th Percentile £76.58 £65.00 £65.32
England median hourly rate £45.56 £30.00 £37.18
% change year-on-year +51.85% -19.31% -17.38%

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 17 May 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 17 May 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 17 May 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 +20 119 £550 +10.00% 38
West London +1 30 £603 +6.73% 2
South London -5 8 £500 +5.26% 1
East London - 3 £450 - 6
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 17 May 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.

1 477 (56.32%) SQL
2 467 (55.14%) Python
3 368 (43.45%) Data Pipeline
4 351 (41.44%) Azure
5 343 (40.50%) Data Engineering
6 337 (39.79%) ETL
7 314 (37.07%) Analytics
8 297 (35.06%) Data Modelling
9 276 (32.59%) AWS
10 248 (29.28%) Databricks
11 238 (28.10%) Data Quality
12 225 (26.56%) CI/CD
13 204 (24.09%) Security Cleared
14 192 (22.67%) SC Cleared
15 182 (21.49%) DevOps
16 171 (20.19%) Business Intelligence
17 168 (19.83%) Data Warehouse
18 158 (18.65%) Power Platform
19 148 (17.47%) Power BI
20 146 (17.24%) Agile
21 145 (17.12%) Data Governance
21 145 (17.12%) PySpark
22 140 (16.53%) Azure Data Factory
23 127 (14.99%) Terraform
24 124 (14.64%) AI
25 123 (14.52%) Microsoft
26 122 (14.40%) Data Lake
27 114 (13.46%) Data Science
28 108 (12.75%) Amazon S3
29 106 (12.51%) Apache Airflow

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
1 106 (12.51%) Apache Airflow
2 104 (12.28%) Apache Spark
3 59 (6.97%) Apache
4 9 (1.06%) Palantir Foundry
5 8 (0.94%) Confluence
6 5 (0.59%) Microsoft Exchange
7 4 (0.47%) Jupyter
7 4 (0.47%) SAS
8 2 (0.24%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.12%) Appian
9 1 (0.12%) Camunda
9 1 (0.12%) Luigi
9 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
Applications
1 12 (1.42%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.12%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 6 (0.71%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.35%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.24%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.24%) SAP BPC
4 1 (0.12%) Actimize
4 1 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.12%) iTrent
4 1 (0.12%) Raiser’s Edge
4 1 (0.12%) SAP Business ByDesign
Cloud Services
1 351 (41.44%) Azure
2 276 (32.59%) AWS
3 158 (18.65%) Power Platform
4 140 (16.53%) Azure Data Factory
5 108 (12.75%) Amazon S3
6 105 (12.40%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 102 (12.04%) Snowflake
8 101 (11.92%) Azure DevOps
9 93 (10.98%) GCP
10 92 (10.86%) dbt
11 88 (10.39%) GitHub
12 65 (7.67%) Serverless
13 58 (6.85%) AWS Lambda
14 42 (4.96%) GitHub Actions
15 25 (2.95%) AWS CloudFormation
16 21 (2.48%) Dagster
17 20 (2.36%) Amazon Kinesis
18 16 (1.89%) Amazon SQS
19 15 (1.77%) Collibra
19 15 (1.77%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 2 (0.24%) Structured Cabling
2 1 (0.12%) 4G
2 1 (0.12%) 5G
2 1 (0.12%) Firewall
2 1 (0.12%) Network Security
2 1 (0.12%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 168 (19.83%) Data Warehouse
2 148 (17.47%) Power BI
3 122 (14.40%) Data Lake
4 86 (10.15%) SQL Server
5 68 (8.03%) BigQuery
6 65 (7.67%) Delta Lake
7 60 (7.08%) Metadata
8 58 (6.85%) Azure SQL Database
9 47 (5.55%) Tableau
10 46 (5.43%) Amazon Redshift
10 46 (5.43%) NoSQL
11 45 (5.31%) Snowflake Schema
12 42 (4.96%) Amazon Athena
13 40 (4.72%) Big Data
13 40 (4.72%) PostgreSQL
14 37 (4.37%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 26 (3.07%) Relational Database
15 26 (3.07%) Star Schema
16 24 (2.83%) MongoDB
17 23 (2.72%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 85 (10.04%) Git
2 26 (3.07%) JIRA
3 21 (2.48%) GitLab
4 18 (2.13%) Jenkins
5 16 (1.89%) MLflow
6 2 (0.24%) SonarQube
6 2 (0.24%) Sonatype Nexus
6 2 (0.24%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 1 (0.12%) Jaeger
7 1 (0.12%) Poetry
7 1 (0.12%) Selenium
7 1 (0.12%) Team Foundation Server
7 1 (0.12%) Terragrunt
General
1 203 (23.97%) Finance
2 118 (13.93%) Social Skills
3 99 (11.69%) Analytical Skills
4 53 (6.26%) Public Sector
5 48 (5.67%) Banking
6 25 (2.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.53%) Pharmaceutical
7 13 (1.53%) Telecoms
8 12 (1.42%) Marketing
9 11 (1.30%) Front Office
9 11 (1.30%) Retail
10 10 (1.18%) Publishing
11 6 (0.71%) Documentation Skills
11 6 (0.71%) Investment Banking
12 5 (0.59%) Games
13 4 (0.47%) Back Office
13 4 (0.47%) Corporate Banking
13 4 (0.47%) Financial Institution
13 4 (0.47%) Manufacturing
13 4 (0.47%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 145 (17.12%) PySpark
2 85 (10.04%) Kafka
3 34 (4.01%) Pandas
4 22 (2.60%) Great Expectations
5 20 (2.36%) YAML
6 19 (2.24%) Spring
6 19 (2.24%) Spring Boot
7 13 (1.53%) REST
8 12 (1.42%) scikit-learn
9 11 (1.30%) Matplotlib
10 10 (1.18%) PyTorch
11 9 (1.06%) GeoJSON
11 9 (1.06%) JSON
11 9 (1.06%) Polars
12 8 (0.94%) NumPy
13 7 (0.83%) Apache Beam
13 7 (0.83%) React
14 6 (0.71%) HTML
14 6 (0.71%) Middleware
14 6 (0.71%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 84 (9.92%) Cloud Native
2 23 (2.72%) Legacy Systems
3 22 (2.60%) Data Structures
4 19 (2.24%) Greenfield Project
5 17 (2.01%) Product Ownership
6 14 (1.65%) Reinsurance
7 13 (1.53%) Distributed Systems
8 10 (1.18%) Onboarding
9 9 (1.06%) Replication
9 9 (1.06%) Self-Motivation
10 8 (0.94%) Distributed Computing
11 7 (0.83%) Clustering
11 7 (0.83%) Derivative
11 7 (0.83%) Reference Data
12 6 (0.71%) AI Agents
12 6 (0.71%) Life Science
12 6 (0.71%) NHS
12 6 (0.71%) Public Cloud
13 5 (0.59%) Data Protection Act
14 4 (0.47%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 22 (2.60%) Linux
2 12 (1.42%) Unix
3 3 (0.35%) Windows
4 2 (0.24%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.12%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 368 (43.45%) Data Pipeline
2 343 (40.50%) Data Engineering
3 337 (39.79%) ETL
4 314 (37.07%) Analytics
5 297 (35.06%) Data Modelling
6 225 (26.56%) CI/CD
7 182 (21.49%) DevOps
8 171 (20.19%) Business Intelligence
9 146 (17.24%) Agile
10 145 (17.12%) Data Governance
11 124 (14.64%) AI
12 114 (13.46%) Data Science
13 100 (11.81%) Data Architecture
13 100 (11.81%) Migration
14 97 (11.45%) Infrastructure as Code
15 93 (10.98%) Problem-Solving
15 93 (10.98%) Validation
16 82 (9.68%) Machine Learning
17 79 (9.33%) Decision-Making
18 72 (8.50%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 477 (56.32%) SQL
2 467 (55.14%) Python
3 77 (9.09%) Scala
4 76 (8.97%) Java
5 29 (3.42%) C#
6 23 (2.72%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 23 (2.72%) T-SQL
7 15 (1.77%) R
8 13 (1.53%) Bicep
8 13 (1.53%) PL/SQL
9 10 (1.18%) JavaScript
9 10 (1.18%) Shell Script
10 9 (1.06%) Bash
11 5 (0.59%) PowerShell
11 5 (0.59%) TypeScript
12 3 (0.35%) C
13 2 (0.24%) Go
13 2 (0.24%) LookML
13 2 (0.24%) Ruby
13 2 (0.24%) VB
Qualifications
1 204 (24.09%) Security Cleared
2 192 (22.67%) SC Cleared
3 24 (2.83%) Azure Certification
3 24 (2.83%) Degree
4 17 (2.01%) BPSS Clearance
5 12 (1.42%) Computer Science Degree
6 7 (0.83%) DBS Check
7 6 (0.71%) AWS Certification
7 6 (0.71%) Microsoft Certification
8 4 (0.47%) DV Cleared
8 4 (0.47%) Master's Degree
9 3 (0.35%) CTC Cleared
9 3 (0.35%) SnowPro
10 1 (0.12%) BICSI Certification
10 1 (0.12%) CISA
10 1 (0.12%) CISM
10 1 (0.12%) CISSP
10 1 (0.12%) City & Guilds
10 1 (0.12%) Postgraduate
10 1 (0.12%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 238 (28.10%) Data Quality
2 35 (4.13%) GDPR
3 32 (3.78%) QA
4 7 (0.83%) Accessibility
5 5 (0.59%) MiFID
6 3 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 2 (0.24%) EMIR
7 2 (0.24%) GMP
7 2 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.24%) SLA
8 1 (0.12%) GRC
8 1 (0.12%) GxP
8 1 (0.12%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.12%) IFRS
8 1 (0.12%) IFRS 17
8 1 (0.12%) IFRS 9
8 1 (0.12%) PCI DSS
8 1 (0.12%) PMO
8 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 54 (6.38%) Docker
2 3 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.12%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.12%) RACF
Systems Management
1 127 (14.99%) Terraform
2 40 (4.72%) Kubernetes
3 10 (1.18%) Grafana
4 4 (0.47%) Kibana
5 2 (0.24%) Ansible
5 2 (0.24%) Kubeflow
5 2 (0.24%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.24%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 248 (29.28%) Databricks
2 123 (14.52%) Microsoft
3 44 (5.19%) Google
4 37 (4.37%) Informatica
5 34 (4.01%) Oracle
6 12 (1.42%) Foundry
7 11 (1.30%) SAP
8 10 (1.18%) Denodo
8 10 (1.18%) Talend
9 9 (1.06%) IBM
9 9 (1.06%) Palantir
9 9 (1.06%) ServiceNow
10 7 (0.83%) Alteryx
10 7 (0.83%) Bloomberg
11 6 (0.71%) Cloudera
11 6 (0.71%) MuleSoft
12 5 (0.59%) Salesforce
12 5 (0.59%) Splunk
13 4 (0.47%) Hortonworks
13 4 (0.47%) Refinitiv