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 31 August 2026.

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

6 months to
31 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 61 96 91
Rank change year-on-year +35 -5 +3
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 838 394 451
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.17% 2.93% 2.78%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.46% 3.15% 2.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 616 295 330
10th Percentile £388 £400 £400
25th Percentile £450 £452 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £559
Median % change year-on-year - -6.04% -2.83%
75th Percentile £625 £603 £659
90th Percentile £713 £700 £750
England median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 10 4
10th Percentile £25.74 £34.24 -
25th Percentile £30.00 £42.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £34.84 £52.50 £72.75
Median % change year-on-year -33.64% -27.84% +0.34%
75th Percentile £39.30 £60.31 £97.50
90th Percentile £55.75 £110.00 -
England median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £80.00
% change year-on-year -20.85% -34.38% +12.28%

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 18,774 12,520 15,286
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.33% 92.97% 94.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,129 8,428 10,485
10th Percentile £363 £325 £350
25th Percentile £450 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.33% -2.27% -4.35%
75th Percentile £656 £675 £688
90th Percentile £773 £775 £800
England median daily rate £525 £508 £525
% change year-on-year +3.45% -3.33% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 370 208 194
10th Percentile £17.60 £17.05 £17.88
25th Percentile £21.93 £23.00 £22.28
Median hourly rate £38.25 £30.75 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +24.41% -12.16% -6.67%
75th Percentile £61.31 £50.88 £55.75
90th Percentile £78.88 £65.00 £71.88
England median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +4.65%

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 31 August 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 31 August 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 31 August 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 +17 105 £565 +7.62% 26
West London -9 15 £475 -5.00% 13
East London +6 4 £450 - 6
South London -10 4 £475 +3.83% 4
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 31 August 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.

1 468 (55.85%) SQL
2 467 (55.73%) Python
3 399 (47.61%) Data Pipeline
4 388 (46.30%) Data Engineering
5 318 (37.95%) Analytics
6 312 (37.23%) ETL
7 308 (36.75%) AWS
8 304 (36.28%) Data Modelling
9 297 (35.44%) Azure
10 245 (29.24%) CI/CD
10 245 (29.24%) Data Quality
11 192 (22.91%) Databricks
12 187 (22.32%) Security Cleared
13 173 (20.64%) DevOps
14 172 (20.53%) SC Cleared
15 169 (20.17%) Data Warehouse
16 167 (19.93%) Agile
17 157 (18.74%) dbt
18 153 (18.26%) AI
18 153 (18.26%) PySpark
19 145 (17.30%) Apache Airflow
20 142 (16.95%) Snowflake
21 141 (16.83%) Business Intelligence
22 134 (15.99%) Data Governance
23 131 (15.63%) Migration
24 130 (15.51%) Power Platform
25 127 (15.16%) Power BI
26 121 (14.44%) Data Transformation
27 119 (14.20%) Azure Data Factory
28 113 (13.48%) Microsoft

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
1 145 (17.30%) Apache Airflow
2 99 (11.81%) Apache Spark
3 79 (9.43%) Apache
4 13 (1.55%) Confluence
5 12 (1.43%) Palantir Foundry
6 8 (0.95%) SAS
6 8 (0.95%) SharePoint
7 4 (0.48%) Jupyter
8 1 (0.12%) Luigi
8 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
8 1 (0.12%) PowerExchange
8 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
Applications
1 12 (1.43%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.36%) Chatbot
2 3 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 11 (1.31%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.36%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.24%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.24%) Maximo
3 2 (0.24%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.12%) NetSuite
4 1 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.12%) Raiser’s Edge
4 1 (0.12%) Sage X3
4 1 (0.12%) SAP BPC
4 1 (0.12%) SAP CAR
4 1 (0.12%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 308 (36.75%) AWS
2 297 (35.44%) Azure
3 157 (18.74%) dbt
4 142 (16.95%) Snowflake
5 130 (15.51%) Power Platform
6 119 (14.20%) Azure Data Factory
7 110 (13.13%) Amazon S3
8 107 (12.77%) GCP
9 90 (10.74%) Azure DevOps
10 84 (10.02%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 75 (8.95%) GitHub
12 73 (8.71%) Serverless
13 69 (8.23%) AWS Lambda
14 37 (4.42%) Azure Databricks
15 28 (3.34%) GitHub Actions
16 26 (3.10%) Amazon EMR
17 20 (2.39%) Dagster
18 19 (2.27%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 17 (2.03%) Fivetran
20 16 (1.91%) Prefect
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.12%) Firewall
1 1 (0.12%) Structured Cabling
Database & Business Intelligence
1 169 (20.17%) Data Warehouse
2 127 (15.16%) Power BI
3 97 (11.58%) Data Lake
4 75 (8.95%) BigQuery
5 64 (7.64%) Metadata
6 57 (6.80%) Delta Lake
7 50 (5.97%) Amazon Redshift
8 49 (5.85%) Amazon Athena
9 43 (5.13%) SQL Server
10 41 (4.89%) Tableau
11 40 (4.77%) Big Data
11 40 (4.77%) PostgreSQL
11 40 (4.77%) Snowflake Schema
12 34 (4.06%) NoSQL
13 30 (3.58%) Relational Database
14 28 (3.34%) Azure SQL Database
14 28 (3.34%) Star Schema
15 24 (2.86%) Spark SQL
16 22 (2.63%) Amazon RDS
17 21 (2.51%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 77 (9.19%) Git
2 29 (3.46%) GitLab
3 23 (2.74%) JIRA
4 9 (1.07%) Jenkins
5 8 (0.95%) MLflow
6 5 (0.60%) Bitbucket
7 4 (0.48%) Selenium
8 3 (0.36%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 3 (0.36%) ERwin
8 3 (0.36%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.24%) Claude Code
9 2 (0.24%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.24%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.24%) Terragrunt
10 1 (0.12%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.12%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 223 (26.61%) Finance
2 132 (15.75%) Social Skills
3 102 (12.17%) Analytical Skills
4 68 (8.11%) Banking
5 50 (5.97%) Public Sector
6 22 (2.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 15 (1.79%) Front Office
8 14 (1.67%) Pharmaceutical
9 12 (1.43%) Marketing
9 12 (1.43%) Retail
10 9 (1.07%) Telecoms
11 7 (0.84%) Back Office
11 7 (0.84%) Financial Institution
12 6 (0.72%) Manufacturing
13 4 (0.48%) Documentation Skills
13 4 (0.48%) Games
13 4 (0.48%) Legal
13 4 (0.48%) Local Government
13 4 (0.48%) Publishing
14 3 (0.36%) Aviation
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 153 (18.26%) PySpark
2 110 (13.13%) Terraform
3 80 (9.55%) Kafka
4 19 (2.27%) Spring
4 19 (2.27%) Spring Boot
5 18 (2.15%) Great Expectations
6 17 (2.03%) Pandas
7 16 (1.91%) REST
8 13 (1.55%) Apache Beam
8 13 (1.55%) React
9 12 (1.43%) YAML
10 10 (1.19%) Microsoft Graph
11 9 (1.07%) JSON
12 8 (0.95%) pytest
12 8 (0.95%) XML
13 7 (0.84%) .NET
14 6 (0.72%) HTML
14 6 (0.72%) PyTorch
14 6 (0.72%) RESTful
14 6 (0.72%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 95 (11.34%) Cloud Native
2 43 (5.13%) Legacy Systems
3 29 (3.46%) Onboarding
4 25 (2.98%) Data Structures
5 17 (2.03%) Product Ownership
5 17 (2.03%) Reinsurance
6 16 (1.91%) Distributed Systems
7 14 (1.67%) Greenfield Project
8 12 (1.43%) AI Agents
8 12 (1.43%) NHS
9 9 (1.07%) Algorithms
9 9 (1.07%) Virtual Team
10 8 (0.95%) Clustering
10 8 (0.95%) Reference Data
11 6 (0.72%) Data Protection Act
11 6 (0.72%) Life Science
11 6 (0.72%) Replication
11 6 (0.72%) Self-Motivation
12 5 (0.60%) Analytical Mindset
13 4 (0.48%) Legacy Code
Operating Systems
1 29 (3.46%) Linux
2 19 (2.27%) Unix
3 3 (0.36%) Windows
4 2 (0.24%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.12%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 399 (47.61%) Data Pipeline
2 388 (46.30%) Data Engineering
3 318 (37.95%) Analytics
4 312 (37.23%) ETL
5 304 (36.28%) Data Modelling
6 245 (29.24%) CI/CD
7 173 (20.64%) DevOps
8 167 (19.93%) Agile
9 153 (18.26%) AI
10 141 (16.83%) Business Intelligence
11 134 (15.99%) Data Governance
12 131 (15.63%) Migration
13 121 (14.44%) Data Transformation
14 108 (12.89%) Validation
15 98 (11.69%) Data Science
16 97 (11.58%) Machine Learning
17 94 (11.22%) Infrastructure as Code
18 93 (11.10%) Lakehouse
19 88 (10.50%) Performance Optimisation
20 86 (10.26%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 468 (55.85%) SQL
2 467 (55.73%) Python
3 78 (9.31%) Java
4 50 (5.97%) Scala
5 21 (2.51%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 19 (2.27%) Shell Script
7 17 (2.03%) PowerShell
8 15 (1.79%) C#
9 14 (1.67%) JavaScript
9 14 (1.67%) PL/SQL
9 14 (1.67%) T-SQL
10 9 (1.07%) R
11 7 (0.84%) TypeScript
12 6 (0.72%) Bicep
13 5 (0.60%) Bash
13 5 (0.60%) Go
14 4 (0.48%) Korn
15 2 (0.24%) Cypher
15 2 (0.24%) LookML
16 1 (0.12%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 187 (22.32%) Security Cleared
2 172 (20.53%) SC Cleared
3 21 (2.51%) Degree
4 17 (2.03%) Azure Certification
4 17 (2.03%) BPSS Clearance
5 12 (1.43%) Computer Science Degree
6 10 (1.19%) AWS Certification
7 8 (0.95%) DBS Check
8 7 (0.84%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 5 (0.60%) DV Cleared
9 5 (0.60%) SnowPro
10 4 (0.48%) Microsoft Certification
11 3 (0.36%) Master's Degree
12 1 (0.12%) BICSI Certification
12 1 (0.12%) CISA
12 1 (0.12%) CISM
12 1 (0.12%) City & Guilds
12 1 (0.12%) PMI Certification
12 1 (0.12%) PMP
12 1 (0.12%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 245 (29.24%) Data Quality
2 39 (4.65%) QA
3 25 (2.98%) GDPR
4 10 (1.19%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 3 (0.36%) MiFID
7 2 (0.24%) EMIR
7 2 (0.24%) SLA
8 1 (0.12%) GxP
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 65 (7.76%) Docker
2 3 (0.36%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.24%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.12%) RACF
Systems Management
1 44 (5.25%) Kubernetes
2 9 (1.07%) Grafana
3 8 (0.95%) Control-M
4 6 (0.72%) Ansible
5 5 (0.60%) Kibana
6 2 (0.24%) Puppet
6 2 (0.24%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 192 (22.91%) Databricks
2 113 (13.48%) Microsoft
3 47 (5.61%) Informatica
4 45 (5.37%) Google
5 40 (4.77%) Oracle
6 19 (2.27%) Palantir
7 16 (1.91%) Foundry
8 11 (1.31%) Bloomberg
8 11 (1.31%) Salesforce
8 11 (1.31%) Talend
9 10 (1.19%) Denodo
10 9 (1.07%) Splunk
11 8 (0.95%) IBM
12 6 (0.72%) Amplitude
12 6 (0.72%) SAP
12 6 (0.72%) SnapLogic
13 5 (0.60%) Alteryx
13 5 (0.60%) Cloudera
13 5 (0.60%) New Relic
14 4 (0.48%) Hortonworks