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 14 June 2026.

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

6 months to
14 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 47 79 81
Rank change year-on-year +32 +2 +18
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 851 404 509
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.51% 3.28% 2.88%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.85% 3.51% 3.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 612 305 404
10th Percentile £388 £400 £353
25th Percentile £450 £454 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year - - -8.70%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £800 £738
England median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 5 7
10th Percentile £27.09 - £48.25
25th Percentile £34.84 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £38.67 £52.50 £50.50
Median % change year-on-year -26.34% +3.96% -29.86%
75th Percentile £52.75 £77.50 £53.94
90th Percentile £64.75 £87.25 £61.48
England median hourly rate £45.00 £52.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year -14.29% -22.22% -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 17,531 11,515 16,561
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.94% 93.56% 93.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,574 7,799 11,898
10th Percentile £358 £343 £325
25th Percentile £431 £425 £440
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.64% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £675
90th Percentile £760 £799 £800
England median daily rate £520 £513 £525
% change year-on-year +1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 287 165 324
10th Percentile £18.75 £20.10 £16.00
25th Percentile £25.15 £24.66 £20.17
Median hourly rate £39.50 £34.00 £27.81
Median % change year-on-year +16.18% +22.26% -22.75%
75th Percentile £63.10 £50.75 £46.59
90th Percentile £78.63 £64.50 £66.85
England median hourly rate £45.00 £29.00 £39.50
% change year-on-year +55.17% -26.58% -11.30%

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 14 June 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 14 June 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 14 June 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 +24 118 £550 +10.00% 30
West London -2 28 £603 +9.15% 3
South London -3 7 £500 +5.26%
East London - 4 £450 - 4
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 14 June 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 (56.05%) SQL
2 473 (55.58%) Python
3 379 (44.54%) Data Pipeline
4 342 (40.19%) Data Engineering
5 333 (39.13%) ETL
6 326 (38.31%) Analytics
7 322 (37.84%) Azure
8 301 (35.37%) Data Modelling
9 299 (35.14%) AWS
10 245 (28.79%) Data Quality
11 224 (26.32%) CI/CD
12 210 (24.68%) Databricks
13 196 (23.03%) Security Cleared
14 184 (21.62%) SC Cleared
15 178 (20.92%) Business Intelligence
15 178 (20.92%) DevOps
16 168 (19.74%) Power Platform
17 162 (19.04%) Data Warehouse
18 158 (18.57%) Power BI
19 139 (16.33%) Agile
19 139 (16.33%) AI
20 136 (15.98%) PySpark
21 132 (15.51%) Microsoft
22 130 (15.28%) Data Governance
23 128 (15.04%) Azure Data Factory
23 128 (15.04%) Terraform
24 122 (14.34%) Data Lake
25 119 (13.98%) Migration
26 116 (13.63%) Amazon S3
27 115 (13.51%) 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
1 115 (13.51%) Apache Airflow
2 90 (10.58%) Apache Spark
3 60 (7.05%) Apache
4 11 (1.29%) Confluence
5 6 (0.71%) Palantir Foundry
6 5 (0.59%) Microsoft Exchange
6 5 (0.59%) SharePoint
7 4 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.35%) SAS
9 1 (0.12%) Appian
9 1 (0.12%) Camunda
9 1 (0.12%) Luigi
9 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
Applications
1 10 (1.18%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.12%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 6 (0.71%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.35%) SAP BPC
2 3 (0.35%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.24%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.24%) Maximo
4 1 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.12%) iTrent
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 Business ByDesign
4 1 (0.12%) SAP CAR
4 1 (0.12%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 322 (37.84%) Azure
2 299 (35.14%) AWS
3 168 (19.74%) Power Platform
4 128 (15.04%) Azure Data Factory
5 116 (13.63%) Amazon S3
6 114 (13.40%) Snowflake
7 109 (12.81%) dbt
8 100 (11.75%) Azure DevOps
9 96 (11.28%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 92 (10.81%) GCP
11 87 (10.22%) GitHub
12 69 (8.11%) Serverless
13 67 (7.87%) AWS Lambda
14 42 (4.94%) GitHub Actions
15 22 (2.59%) AWS CloudFormation
16 21 (2.47%) Amazon Kinesis
16 21 (2.47%) Dagster
17 17 (2.00%) Amazon EMR
18 16 (1.88%) Amazon SQS
19 15 (1.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 2 (0.24%) Structured Cabling
2 1 (0.12%) 4G
2 1 (0.12%) 5G
2 1 (0.12%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 162 (19.04%) Data Warehouse
2 158 (18.57%) Power BI
3 122 (14.34%) Data Lake
4 85 (9.99%) SQL Server
5 67 (7.87%) BigQuery
6 64 (7.52%) Delta Lake
7 60 (7.05%) Metadata
8 53 (6.23%) Amazon Redshift
9 50 (5.88%) Tableau
10 47 (5.52%) Amazon Athena
10 47 (5.52%) Snowflake Schema
11 45 (5.29%) Azure SQL Database
12 43 (5.05%) PostgreSQL
13 36 (4.23%) Big Data
13 36 (4.23%) NoSQL
14 34 (4.00%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 26 (3.06%) Relational Database
16 25 (2.94%) Star Schema
17 24 (2.82%) Spark SQL
18 23 (2.70%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 74 (8.70%) Git
2 29 (3.41%) JIRA
3 24 (2.82%) GitLab
4 10 (1.18%) Jenkins
5 5 (0.59%) MLflow
6 3 (0.35%) SonarQube
7 2 (0.24%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.24%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 2 (0.24%) Terragrunt
8 1 (0.12%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 1 (0.12%) Bitbucket
8 1 (0.12%) Claude Code
8 1 (0.12%) Selenium
General
1 218 (25.62%) Finance
2 127 (14.92%) Social Skills
3 95 (11.16%) Analytical Skills
4 56 (6.58%) Banking
5 53 (6.23%) Public Sector
6 23 (2.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 15 (1.76%) Pharmaceutical
8 14 (1.65%) Retail
9 12 (1.41%) Marketing
9 12 (1.41%) Telecoms
10 10 (1.18%) Publishing
11 9 (1.06%) Front Office
12 6 (0.71%) Documentation Skills
13 5 (0.59%) Manufacturing
14 4 (0.47%) Billing
14 4 (0.47%) Corporate Banking
14 4 (0.47%) Financial Institution
14 4 (0.47%) Games
14 4 (0.47%) Military
15 3 (0.35%) Investment Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 136 (15.98%) PySpark
2 84 (9.87%) Kafka
3 31 (3.64%) Pandas
4 20 (2.35%) Great Expectations
4 20 (2.35%) Spring
4 20 (2.35%) Spring Boot
5 17 (2.00%) REST
6 14 (1.65%) YAML
7 11 (1.29%) scikit-learn
8 10 (1.18%) Matplotlib
9 9 (1.06%) Apache Beam
9 9 (1.06%) GeoJSON
9 9 (1.06%) JSON
9 9 (1.06%) Polars
10 8 (0.94%) XML
11 7 (0.82%) PyTorch
12 6 (0.71%) Middleware
12 6 (0.71%) NumPy
12 6 (0.71%) React
13 5 (0.59%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 98 (11.52%) Cloud Native
2 33 (3.88%) Legacy Systems
3 28 (3.29%) Data Structures
4 21 (2.47%) Reinsurance
5 19 (2.23%) Greenfield Project
5 19 (2.23%) Onboarding
6 17 (2.00%) Product Ownership
7 15 (1.76%) Distributed Systems
8 8 (0.94%) Clustering
8 8 (0.94%) NHS
8 8 (0.94%) Reference Data
9 7 (0.82%) Virtual Team
10 6 (0.71%) Data Protection Act
10 6 (0.71%) Derivative
10 6 (0.71%) Distributed Computing
10 6 (0.71%) Life Science
10 6 (0.71%) Self-Motivation
11 5 (0.59%) Algorithms
11 5 (0.59%) Public Cloud
11 5 (0.59%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 22 (2.59%) Linux
2 13 (1.53%) Unix
3 3 (0.35%) Windows
4 2 (0.24%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 379 (44.54%) Data Pipeline
2 342 (40.19%) Data Engineering
3 333 (39.13%) ETL
4 326 (38.31%) Analytics
5 301 (35.37%) Data Modelling
6 224 (26.32%) CI/CD
7 178 (20.92%) Business Intelligence
7 178 (20.92%) DevOps
8 139 (16.33%) Agile
8 139 (16.33%) AI
9 130 (15.28%) Data Governance
10 119 (13.98%) Migration
11 107 (12.57%) Data Science
12 100 (11.75%) Infrastructure as Code
13 95 (11.16%) Validation
14 92 (10.81%) Data Architecture
15 91 (10.69%) Decision-Making
16 88 (10.34%) Problem-Solving
17 75 (8.81%) Data Transformation
17 75 (8.81%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 477 (56.05%) SQL
2 473 (55.58%) Python
3 77 (9.05%) Java
4 56 (6.58%) Scala
5 25 (2.94%) C#
6 23 (2.70%) T-SQL
7 21 (2.47%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 14 (1.65%) PL/SQL
9 12 (1.41%) Bicep
9 12 (1.41%) R
10 11 (1.29%) Shell Script
11 8 (0.94%) PowerShell
12 7 (0.82%) Bash
13 6 (0.71%) JavaScript
14 5 (0.59%) TypeScript
15 4 (0.47%) Go
16 2 (0.24%) C
16 2 (0.24%) Korn
16 2 (0.24%) Ruby
16 2 (0.24%) VB
Qualifications
1 196 (23.03%) Security Cleared
2 184 (21.62%) SC Cleared
3 24 (2.82%) Azure Certification
4 21 (2.47%) BPSS Clearance
4 21 (2.47%) Degree
5 10 (1.18%) AWS Certification
6 9 (1.06%) Computer Science Degree
7 8 (0.94%) DBS Check
7 8 (0.94%) Microsoft Certification
8 5 (0.59%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 4 (0.47%) SnowPro
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%) CTC Cleared
10 1 (0.12%) DV Cleared
10 1 (0.12%) Master's Degree
10 1 (0.12%) Postgraduate
10 1 (0.12%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 245 (28.79%) Data Quality
2 35 (4.11%) GDPR
3 32 (3.76%) QA
4 6 (0.71%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.47%) MiFID
5 4 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 2 (0.24%) EMIR
6 2 (0.24%) GMP
6 2 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.24%) SLA
7 1 (0.12%) GRC
7 1 (0.12%) GxP
7 1 (0.12%) IFRS
7 1 (0.12%) IFRS 17
7 1 (0.12%) IFRS 9
7 1 (0.12%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.12%) PMO
7 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
7 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 50 (5.88%) Docker
2 3 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.12%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.12%) RACF
Systems Management
1 128 (15.04%) Terraform
2 31 (3.64%) Kubernetes
3 9 (1.06%) Grafana
4 4 (0.47%) Kibana
5 2 (0.24%) Ansible
5 2 (0.24%) Thomson Reuters DACS
6 1 (0.12%) Kubeflow
6 1 (0.12%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 210 (24.68%) Databricks
2 132 (15.51%) Microsoft
3 44 (5.17%) Google
4 42 (4.94%) Informatica
5 37 (4.35%) Oracle
6 13 (1.53%) SAP
7 11 (1.29%) IBM
8 10 (1.18%) Denodo
8 10 (1.18%) Palantir
8 10 (1.18%) Talend
9 9 (1.06%) Foundry
10 8 (0.94%) Salesforce
10 8 (0.94%) ServiceNow
11 7 (0.82%) Alteryx
11 7 (0.82%) Bloomberg
12 6 (0.71%) MuleSoft
13 5 (0.59%) Amplitude
14 4 (0.47%) Cloudera
14 4 (0.47%) Hortonworks
14 4 (0.47%) Splunk