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 7 September 2026.

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

6 months to
7 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 61 94 93
Rank change year-on-year +33 -1 -5
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 854 400 447
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.23% 2.99% 2.75%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.53% 3.22% 2.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 629 296 328
10th Percentile £388 £394 £409
25th Percentile £450 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £570
Median % change year-on-year - -7.89% -0.87%
75th Percentile £625 £600 £650
90th Percentile £712 £700 £750
England median daily rate £500 £500 £530
% change year-on-year - -5.66% -3.64%
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% +13.67%
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% +25.00%

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 18,858 12,435 15,274
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.31% 92.85% 94.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,185 8,333 10,422
10th Percentile £363 £325 £344
25th Percentile £450 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £540 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.85% -1.82% -4.35%
75th Percentile £656 £675 £681
90th Percentile £775 £775 £800
England median daily rate £525 £508 £525
% change year-on-year +3.45% -3.33% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 370 207 188
10th Percentile £17.60 £17.05 £17.76
25th Percentile £21.93 £23.00 £22.84
Median hourly rate £39.00 £30.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.87% -12.86% -6.67%
75th Percentile £63.10 £50.38 £56.38
90th Percentile £81.25 £66.34 £72.81
England median hourly rate £43.56 £25.15 £47.37
% change year-on-year +73.20% -46.91% +8.01%

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 7 September 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 7 September 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 7 September 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 +14 103 £565 +7.62% 38
West London -7 14 £463 -7.50% 12
East London +5 4 £450 - 8
South London -5 4 £475 +3.83% 9
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 7 September 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.

1 485 (56.79%) SQL
2 479 (56.09%) Python
3 411 (48.13%) Data Pipeline
4 399 (46.72%) Data Engineering
5 328 (38.41%) Analytics
6 322 (37.70%) Data Modelling
7 321 (37.59%) ETL
8 312 (36.53%) AWS
8 312 (36.53%) Azure
9 264 (30.91%) Data Quality
10 257 (30.09%) CI/CD
11 203 (23.77%) Databricks
12 193 (22.60%) Security Cleared
13 178 (20.84%) DevOps
14 177 (20.73%) SC Cleared
15 176 (20.61%) Data Warehouse
16 170 (19.91%) Agile
17 162 (18.97%) AI
18 161 (18.85%) dbt
19 158 (18.50%) PySpark
20 153 (17.92%) Apache Airflow
21 150 (17.56%) Snowflake
22 149 (17.45%) Data Governance
23 143 (16.74%) Business Intelligence
24 135 (15.81%) Migration
25 132 (15.46%) Power Platform
26 129 (15.11%) Data Transformation
26 129 (15.11%) Power BI
27 127 (14.87%) Azure Data Factory
28 120 (14.05%) 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
1 153 (17.92%) Apache Airflow
2 103 (12.06%) Apache Spark
3 85 (9.95%) Apache
4 13 (1.52%) Confluence
5 12 (1.41%) Palantir Foundry
6 9 (1.05%) SharePoint
7 8 (0.94%) SAS
8 4 (0.47%) Jupyter
9 1 (0.12%) Luigi
9 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.12%) PowerExchange
9 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
Applications
1 12 (1.41%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.35%) Chatbot
2 3 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 9 (1.05%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.23%) Maximo
2 2 (0.23%) SAP BPC
2 2 (0.23%) SimCorp Dimension
2 2 (0.23%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 1 (0.12%) BambooHR
3 1 (0.12%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.12%) Raiser’s Edge
3 1 (0.12%) Sage X3
3 1 (0.12%) SAP CAR
3 1 (0.12%) SAP EWM
3 1 (0.12%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 312 (36.53%) AWS
1 312 (36.53%) Azure
2 161 (18.85%) dbt
3 150 (17.56%) Snowflake
4 132 (15.46%) Power Platform
5 127 (14.87%) Azure Data Factory
6 113 (13.23%) GCP
7 110 (12.88%) Amazon S3
8 94 (11.01%) Azure DevOps
9 84 (9.84%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 82 (9.60%) GitHub
11 74 (8.67%) Serverless
12 69 (8.08%) AWS Lambda
13 38 (4.45%) Azure Databricks
14 32 (3.75%) GitHub Actions
15 26 (3.04%) Amazon EMR
16 20 (2.34%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 19 (2.22%) Dagster
17 19 (2.22%) Fivetran
18 18 (2.11%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.12%) Firewall
1 1 (0.12%) Structured Cabling
Database & Business Intelligence
1 176 (20.61%) Data Warehouse
2 129 (15.11%) Power BI
3 98 (11.48%) Data Lake
4 78 (9.13%) BigQuery
5 67 (7.85%) Metadata
6 57 (6.67%) Delta Lake
7 52 (6.09%) Amazon Redshift
8 48 (5.62%) Amazon Athena
9 45 (5.27%) SQL Server
10 44 (5.15%) Big Data
11 41 (4.80%) PostgreSQL
11 41 (4.80%) Snowflake Schema
12 40 (4.68%) Tableau
13 38 (4.45%) NoSQL
14 31 (3.63%) Relational Database
15 30 (3.51%) Azure SQL Database
16 28 (3.28%) Star Schema
17 24 (2.81%) Spark SQL
18 23 (2.69%) Amazon RDS
19 22 (2.58%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 86 (10.07%) Git
2 29 (3.40%) GitLab
3 22 (2.58%) JIRA
4 10 (1.17%) MLflow
5 8 (0.94%) Jenkins
6 5 (0.59%) Bitbucket
6 5 (0.59%) SonarQube
7 4 (0.47%) Selenium
8 3 (0.35%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 3 (0.35%) ERwin
9 2 (0.23%) Claude Code
9 2 (0.23%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.23%) Terragrunt
10 1 (0.12%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.12%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.12%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 225 (26.35%) Finance
2 138 (16.16%) Social Skills
3 103 (12.06%) Analytical Skills
4 69 (8.08%) Banking
5 50 (5.85%) Public Sector
6 20 (2.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 14 (1.64%) Marketing
7 14 (1.64%) Retail
8 13 (1.52%) Front Office
8 13 (1.52%) Pharmaceutical
9 8 (0.94%) Telecoms
10 7 (0.82%) Back Office
10 7 (0.82%) Financial Institution
11 6 (0.70%) Legal
11 6 (0.70%) Manufacturing
12 5 (0.59%) Publishing
13 4 (0.47%) Aerospace
13 4 (0.47%) Documentation Skills
13 4 (0.47%) Games
13 4 (0.47%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 158 (18.50%) PySpark
2 113 (13.23%) Terraform
3 81 (9.48%) Kafka
4 19 (2.22%) REST
4 19 (2.22%) Spring
4 19 (2.22%) Spring Boot
5 18 (2.11%) Great Expectations
6 17 (1.99%) Pandas
7 15 (1.76%) Apache Beam
8 14 (1.64%) React
9 11 (1.29%) YAML
10 10 (1.17%) Microsoft Graph
10 10 (1.17%) pytest
11 9 (1.05%) JSON
12 8 (0.94%) .NET
12 8 (0.94%) XML
13 7 (0.82%) LangChain
13 7 (0.82%) PyTorch
14 6 (0.70%) HTML
14 6 (0.70%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 100 (11.71%) Cloud Native
2 43 (5.04%) Legacy Systems
3 30 (3.51%) Data Structures
3 30 (3.51%) Onboarding
4 17 (1.99%) Product Ownership
4 17 (1.99%) Reinsurance
5 16 (1.87%) Distributed Systems
6 15 (1.76%) AI Agents
7 13 (1.52%) Greenfield Project
8 12 (1.41%) NHS
9 11 (1.29%) Algorithms
10 9 (1.05%) Virtual Team
11 8 (0.94%) Clustering
12 7 (0.82%) Reference Data
12 7 (0.82%) Replication
13 6 (0.70%) Self-Motivation
14 5 (0.59%) Analytical Mindset
14 5 (0.59%) Data Protection Act
14 5 (0.59%) Distributed Computing
14 5 (0.59%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 26 (3.04%) Linux
2 19 (2.22%) Unix
3 2 (0.23%) Windows
4 1 (0.12%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.12%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 411 (48.13%) Data Pipeline
2 399 (46.72%) Data Engineering
3 328 (38.41%) Analytics
4 322 (37.70%) Data Modelling
5 321 (37.59%) ETL
6 257 (30.09%) CI/CD
7 178 (20.84%) DevOps
8 170 (19.91%) Agile
9 162 (18.97%) AI
10 149 (17.45%) Data Governance
11 143 (16.74%) Business Intelligence
12 135 (15.81%) Migration
13 129 (15.11%) Data Transformation
14 110 (12.88%) Validation
15 106 (12.41%) Data Science
16 103 (12.06%) Machine Learning
17 95 (11.12%) Infrastructure as Code
18 93 (10.89%) Data Architecture
19 92 (10.77%) Lakehouse
19 92 (10.77%) Performance Optimisation
Programming Languages
1 485 (56.79%) SQL
2 479 (56.09%) Python
3 79 (9.25%) Java
4 56 (6.56%) Scala
5 22 (2.58%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 18 (2.11%) Shell Script
7 16 (1.87%) PowerShell
8 15 (1.76%) T-SQL
9 14 (1.64%) JavaScript
9 14 (1.64%) PL/SQL
10 13 (1.52%) C#
11 9 (1.05%) R
12 8 (0.94%) TypeScript
13 6 (0.70%) Bicep
14 5 (0.59%) Go
15 4 (0.47%) Bash
15 4 (0.47%) Korn
16 3 (0.35%) LookML
17 2 (0.23%) Cypher
18 1 (0.12%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 193 (22.60%) Security Cleared
2 177 (20.73%) SC Cleared
3 22 (2.58%) Degree
4 18 (2.11%) Azure Certification
4 18 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
5 13 (1.52%) Computer Science Degree
6 10 (1.17%) AWS Certification
7 8 (0.94%) DBS Check
8 7 (0.82%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 6 (0.70%) DV Cleared
9 6 (0.70%) SnowPro
10 4 (0.47%) Microsoft Certification
11 3 (0.35%) Master's Degree
12 1 (0.12%) CISA
12 1 (0.12%) CISSP
12 1 (0.12%) City & Guilds
12 1 (0.12%) PMI Certification
12 1 (0.12%) PMP
12 1 (0.12%) Postgraduate
12 1 (0.12%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 264 (30.91%) Data Quality
2 41 (4.80%) QA
3 24 (2.81%) GDPR
4 10 (1.17%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 3 (0.35%) MiFID
7 2 (0.23%) EMIR
7 2 (0.23%) SLA
8 1 (0.12%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.12%) IFRS
8 1 (0.12%) IFRS 17
8 1 (0.12%) IFRS 9
8 1 (0.12%) PMO
8 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 69 (8.08%) Docker
2 3 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.23%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.12%) RACF
Systems Management
1 45 (5.27%) Kubernetes
2 9 (1.05%) Control-M
2 9 (1.05%) Grafana
3 6 (0.70%) Ansible
4 5 (0.59%) Kibana
5 2 (0.23%) Puppet
6 1 (0.12%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 203 (23.77%) Databricks
2 120 (14.05%) Microsoft
3 48 (5.62%) Informatica
4 47 (5.50%) Google
5 43 (5.04%) Oracle
6 19 (2.22%) Palantir
7 18 (2.11%) Foundry
8 13 (1.52%) Salesforce
9 12 (1.41%) Talend
10 10 (1.17%) Bloomberg
10 10 (1.17%) Denodo
11 9 (1.05%) Splunk
12 7 (0.82%) IBM
12 7 (0.82%) OpenAI
12 7 (0.82%) SAP
13 6 (0.70%) Amplitude
13 6 (0.70%) SnapLogic
14 5 (0.59%) Alteryx
14 5 (0.59%) Cloudera
14 5 (0.59%) New Relic