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 19 July 2026.

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

6 months to
19 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 55 91 83
Rank change year-on-year +36 -8 +10
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 832 412 497
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.18% 3.02% 2.90%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.50% 3.24% 3.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 619 302 387
10th Percentile £390 £401 £367
25th Percentile £453 £454 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £612 £650
90th Percentile £712 £713 £750
England median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 7 4
10th Percentile £26.80 £47.65 £47.50
25th Percentile £30.00 £51.25 £48.63
Median hourly rate £34.84 £52.50 £50.50
Median % change year-on-year -33.64% +3.96% -30.34%
75th Percentile £46.75 £70.00 £51.75
90th Percentile £61.15 £84.00 -
England median hourly rate £45.00 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -14.29% -30.00% -3.23%

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 18,505 12,718 16,157
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.92% 93.26% 94.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,140 8,609 11,529
10th Percentile £360 £331 £331
25th Percentile £450 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £548 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.45% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £681
90th Percentile £763 £788 £800
England median daily rate £525 £513 £525
% change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 322 198 268
10th Percentile £17.60 £17.98 £17.00
25th Percentile £22.10 £22.79 £21.66
Median hourly rate £38.25 £30.90 £31.61
Median % change year-on-year +23.78% -2.22% -18.96%
75th Percentile £59.72 £50.38 £50.06
90th Percentile £78.73 £63.75 £70.03
England median hourly rate £45.50 £27.50 £40.33
% change year-on-year +65.45% -31.80% -8.35%

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 19 July 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 19 July 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 19 July 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 +22 114 £555 +11.00% 17
West London -1 19 £603 +9.15% 4
South London -9 5 £500 +9.29% 4
East London +5 4 £450 - 4
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 19 July 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.

1 465 (55.89%) Python
2 457 (54.93%) SQL
3 389 (46.75%) Data Pipeline
4 348 (41.83%) Data Engineering
5 316 (37.98%) Analytics
6 306 (36.78%) Azure
7 302 (36.30%) ETL
8 292 (35.10%) Data Modelling
9 289 (34.74%) AWS
10 226 (27.16%) Data Quality
11 225 (27.04%) CI/CD
12 186 (22.36%) Security Cleared
13 182 (21.88%) Databricks
14 173 (20.79%) SC Cleared
15 170 (20.43%) DevOps
16 156 (18.75%) Data Warehouse
17 149 (17.91%) Business Intelligence
18 143 (17.19%) Agile
18 143 (17.19%) Power Platform
19 139 (16.71%) Migration
20 134 (16.11%) Data Governance
21 133 (15.99%) Power BI
22 131 (15.75%) PySpark
23 128 (15.38%) dbt
24 126 (15.14%) AI
25 122 (14.66%) Apache Airflow
26 121 (14.54%) Snowflake
27 120 (14.42%) Terraform
28 119 (14.30%) Azure Data Factory
29 113 (13.58%) 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
1 122 (14.66%) Apache Airflow
2 83 (9.98%) Apache Spark
3 66 (7.93%) Apache
4 15 (1.80%) Confluence
5 8 (0.96%) Palantir Foundry
5 8 (0.96%) SharePoint
6 6 (0.72%) SAS
7 3 (0.36%) Jupyter
8 2 (0.24%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.12%) Camunda
9 1 (0.12%) Luigi
9 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
Applications
1 10 (1.20%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.24%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 10 (1.20%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.36%) SAP BPC
2 3 (0.36%) 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
1 306 (36.78%) Azure
2 289 (34.74%) AWS
3 143 (17.19%) Power Platform
4 128 (15.38%) dbt
5 121 (14.54%) Snowflake
6 119 (14.30%) Azure Data Factory
7 111 (13.34%) Amazon S3
8 98 (11.78%) GCP
9 97 (11.66%) Azure DevOps
10 92 (11.06%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 74 (8.89%) GitHub
12 64 (7.69%) Serverless
13 61 (7.33%) AWS Lambda
14 32 (3.85%) GitHub Actions
15 25 (3.00%) Amazon EMR
16 21 (2.52%) Dagster
17 18 (2.16%) Amazon Kinesis
18 16 (1.92%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 16 (1.92%) Amazon SQS
18 16 (1.92%) AWS CloudFormation
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
1 156 (18.75%) Data Warehouse
2 133 (15.99%) Power BI
3 104 (12.50%) Data Lake
4 72 (8.65%) BigQuery
5 53 (6.37%) Metadata
6 52 (6.25%) Delta Lake
7 51 (6.13%) SQL Server
8 49 (5.89%) Amazon Redshift
8 49 (5.89%) Tableau
9 45 (5.41%) Snowflake Schema
10 44 (5.29%) PostgreSQL
11 41 (4.93%) Amazon Athena
12 36 (4.33%) Big Data
13 32 (3.85%) Azure SQL Database
14 30 (3.61%) NoSQL
15 25 (3.00%) Relational Database
15 25 (3.00%) Star Schema
16 23 (2.76%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 22 (2.64%) Spark SQL
18 21 (2.52%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 76 (9.13%) Git
2 25 (3.00%) JIRA
3 23 (2.76%) GitLab
4 9 (1.08%) Jenkins
5 3 (0.36%) Bitbucket
5 3 (0.36%) MLflow
5 3 (0.36%) SonarQube
6 2 (0.24%) Atlassian Bamboo
6 2 (0.24%) Sonatype Nexus
6 2 (0.24%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 1 (0.12%) Claude Code
7 1 (0.12%) Octopus Deploy
7 1 (0.12%) Selenium
7 1 (0.12%) Terragrunt
General
1 222 (26.68%) Finance
2 126 (15.14%) Social Skills
3 106 (12.74%) Analytical Skills
4 59 (7.09%) Banking
4 59 (7.09%) Public Sector
5 21 (2.52%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 14 (1.68%) Pharmaceutical
7 12 (1.44%) Marketing
7 12 (1.44%) Retail
8 11 (1.32%) Front Office
9 10 (1.20%) Publishing
10 8 (0.96%) Telecoms
11 6 (0.72%) Documentation Skills
12 5 (0.60%) Back Office
12 5 (0.60%) Manufacturing
13 4 (0.48%) Billing
13 4 (0.48%) Games
13 4 (0.48%) Legal
14 3 (0.36%) Financial Institution
14 3 (0.36%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 131 (15.75%) PySpark
2 74 (8.89%) Kafka
3 23 (2.76%) Pandas
4 19 (2.28%) Spring
4 19 (2.28%) Spring Boot
5 17 (2.04%) Great Expectations
5 17 (2.04%) REST
6 11 (1.32%) scikit-learn
6 11 (1.32%) YAML
7 10 (1.20%) Apache Beam
7 10 (1.20%) Microsoft Graph
8 9 (1.08%) GeoJSON
8 9 (1.08%) JSON
8 9 (1.08%) Matplotlib
8 9 (1.08%) Polars
9 8 (0.96%) XML
10 7 (0.84%) React
11 6 (0.72%) HTML
11 6 (0.72%) PyTorch
12 5 (0.60%) Langfuse
Miscellaneous
1 97 (11.66%) Cloud Native
2 42 (5.05%) Legacy Systems
3 27 (3.25%) Data Structures
4 23 (2.76%) Onboarding
5 18 (2.16%) Reinsurance
6 17 (2.04%) Distributed Systems
7 15 (1.80%) Greenfield Project
8 14 (1.68%) NHS
9 10 (1.20%) Product Ownership
10 9 (1.08%) Virtual Team
11 8 (0.96%) Clustering
12 7 (0.84%) Algorithms
12 7 (0.84%) Life Science
12 7 (0.84%) Reference Data
13 6 (0.72%) Derivative
13 6 (0.72%) Distributed Computing
13 6 (0.72%) Replication
13 6 (0.72%) Self-Motivation
14 5 (0.60%) AI Agents
14 5 (0.60%) Data Protection Act
Operating Systems
1 26 (3.13%) Linux
2 15 (1.80%) Unix
3 3 (0.36%) Windows
4 2 (0.24%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 389 (46.75%) Data Pipeline
2 348 (41.83%) Data Engineering
3 316 (37.98%) Analytics
4 302 (36.30%) ETL
5 292 (35.10%) Data Modelling
6 225 (27.04%) CI/CD
7 170 (20.43%) DevOps
8 149 (17.91%) Business Intelligence
9 143 (17.19%) Agile
10 139 (16.71%) Migration
11 134 (16.11%) Data Governance
12 126 (15.14%) AI
13 108 (12.98%) Data Science
14 97 (11.66%) Infrastructure as Code
14 97 (11.66%) Validation
15 89 (10.70%) Decision-Making
16 85 (10.22%) Data Transformation
17 83 (9.98%) Data Architecture
18 80 (9.62%) Machine Learning
19 77 (9.25%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 465 (55.89%) Python
2 457 (54.93%) SQL
3 77 (9.25%) Java
4 49 (5.89%) Scala
5 22 (2.64%) C#
5 22 (2.64%) T-SQL
6 18 (2.16%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 13 (1.56%) PL/SQL
7 13 (1.56%) PowerShell
7 13 (1.56%) Shell Script
8 11 (1.32%) R
9 9 (1.08%) JavaScript
10 7 (0.84%) Bash
11 6 (0.72%) Bicep
11 6 (0.72%) TypeScript
12 5 (0.60%) Go
13 2 (0.24%) Korn
13 2 (0.24%) LookML
13 2 (0.24%) Ruby
13 2 (0.24%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 186 (22.36%) Security Cleared
2 173 (20.79%) SC Cleared
3 23 (2.76%) Degree
4 21 (2.52%) Azure Certification
4 21 (2.52%) BPSS Clearance
5 11 (1.32%) Computer Science Degree
6 10 (1.20%) AWS Certification
7 8 (0.96%) DBS Check
8 6 (0.72%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 5 (0.60%) DV Cleared
10 4 (0.48%) SnowPro
11 3 (0.36%) Microsoft Certification
12 2 (0.24%) Master's Degree
13 1 (0.12%) BICSI Certification
13 1 (0.12%) CISA
13 1 (0.12%) CISM
13 1 (0.12%) CISSP
13 1 (0.12%) City & Guilds
13 1 (0.12%) Postgraduate
13 1 (0.12%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 226 (27.16%) Data Quality
2 33 (3.97%) QA
3 30 (3.61%) GDPR
4 13 (1.56%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 3 (0.36%) MiFID
7 2 (0.24%) EMIR
7 2 (0.24%) GMP
7 2 (0.24%) PMO
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%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 51 (6.13%) Docker
2 3 (0.36%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.24%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.12%) RACF
Systems Management
1 120 (14.42%) Terraform
2 31 (3.73%) Kubernetes
3 10 (1.20%) Grafana
4 4 (0.48%) Kibana
5 2 (0.24%) Ansible
5 2 (0.24%) Control-M
5 2 (0.24%) Thomson Reuters DACS
6 1 (0.12%) Kubeflow
6 1 (0.12%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 182 (21.88%) Databricks
2 113 (13.58%) Microsoft
3 48 (5.77%) Google
4 46 (5.53%) Informatica
5 32 (3.85%) Oracle
6 15 (1.80%) Palantir
7 12 (1.44%) Foundry
7 12 (1.44%) SAP
8 10 (1.20%) Denodo
9 9 (1.08%) Salesforce
10 8 (0.96%) Bloomberg
10 8 (0.96%) IBM
10 8 (0.96%) Talend
11 7 (0.84%) Amplitude
12 6 (0.72%) MuleSoft
12 6 (0.72%) Splunk
13 5 (0.60%) Alteryx
14 4 (0.48%) Cloudera
14 4 (0.48%) Hortonworks
15 3 (0.36%) SimCorp