Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in London

Data Engineer
England > London

The median Data Engineer daily rate in London is £513, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 19 February 2026.

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

6 months to
19 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 62 64 78
Rank change year-on-year +2 +14 +25
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 661 475 527
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.24% 3.51% 2.89%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.58% 3.75% 3.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 469 353 418
10th Percentile £363 £400 £373
25th Percentile £425 £463 £451
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £525
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% +4.76% -8.70%
75th Percentile £614 £650 £638
90th Percentile £725 £800 £700
England median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 8 11
10th Percentile £28.19 £57.88 £35.63
25th Percentile £32.73 £65.00 £48.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £83.75 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -46.27% +59.52% -17.97%
75th Percentile £69.31 £94.69 £63.14
90th Percentile £93.73 £97.50 £68.00
England median hourly rate £58.25 £70.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year -16.79% +15.70% -5.47%

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 14,448 12,681 16,978
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.69% 93.64% 93.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,636 8,215 12,242
10th Percentile £350 £331 £325
25th Percentile £425 £438 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -5.17%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £800 £778
England median daily rate £501 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.67% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 228 142 335
10th Percentile £18.25 £21.02 £16.00
25th Percentile £23.94 £24.66 £19.05
Median hourly rate £34.75 £37.25 £29.00
Median % change year-on-year -6.72% +28.45% -17.14%
75th Percentile £59.79 £53.75 £49.48
90th Percentile £76.58 £78.72 £66.60
England median hourly rate £33.00 £35.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -5.71% - -12.50%

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 February 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 February 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 February 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 +15 82 £513 -2.38% 39
West London -4 26 £603 +5.93% 4
South London -10 9 £500 +1.27% 2
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 19 February 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.

1 396 (59.91%) SQL
2 395 (59.76%) Python
3 313 (47.35%) Azure
4 291 (44.02%) Data Pipeline
5 280 (42.36%) ETL
6 274 (41.45%) Data Engineering
7 246 (37.22%) Databricks
8 239 (36.16%) Data Modelling
9 238 (36.01%) Analytics
10 214 (32.38%) AWS
11 197 (29.80%) Data Quality
12 182 (27.53%) CI/CD
13 166 (25.11%) Security Cleared
14 163 (24.66%) Business Intelligence
15 148 (22.39%) SC Cleared
16 142 (21.48%) Data Warehouse
16 142 (21.48%) Power Platform
17 136 (20.57%) Power BI
18 134 (20.27%) DevOps
19 124 (18.76%) PySpark
20 123 (18.61%) Azure Data Factory
21 120 (18.15%) Agile
22 118 (17.85%) Data Governance
23 116 (17.55%) Data Science
24 107 (16.19%) Terraform
25 97 (14.67%) AI
26 96 (14.52%) Snowflake
27 95 (14.37%) Infrastructure as Code
28 94 (14.22%) Data Lake
28 94 (14.22%) Problem-Solving

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 86 (13.01%) Apache Spark
2 71 (10.74%) Apache Airflow
3 51 (7.72%) Apache
4 13 (1.97%) Palantir Foundry
5 11 (1.66%) Confluence
6 4 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
7 3 (0.45%) SAS
8 2 (0.30%) ArcGIS
8 2 (0.30%) Jupyter
8 2 (0.30%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.15%) Apache Pig
9 1 (0.15%) Appian
9 1 (0.15%) Camunda
9 1 (0.15%) IIS
9 1 (0.15%) Luigi
9 1 (0.15%) Oracle Application Server
9 1 (0.15%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 8 (1.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.15%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.15%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.15%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (0.30%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.15%) Actimize
2 1 (0.15%) Aladdin
2 1 (0.15%) iTrent
2 1 (0.15%) Maximo
2 1 (0.15%) Oracle BPM
2 1 (0.15%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.15%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 313 (47.35%) Azure
2 214 (32.38%) AWS
3 142 (21.48%) Power Platform
4 123 (18.61%) Azure Data Factory
5 96 (14.52%) Snowflake
6 84 (12.71%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 81 (12.25%) Amazon S3
8 79 (11.95%) GCP
9 66 (9.98%) Serverless
10 64 (9.68%) dbt
11 63 (9.53%) GitHub
12 61 (9.23%) Azure DevOps
13 49 (7.41%) AWS Lambda
14 33 (4.99%) GitHub Actions
15 25 (3.78%) AWS CloudFormation
16 19 (2.87%) AWS Step Functions
17 18 (2.72%) Amazon Kinesis
18 16 (2.42%) SaaS
19 13 (1.97%) Amazon SQS
19 13 (1.97%) Collibra
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.61%) Firewall
2 3 (0.45%) SAN
3 1 (0.15%) 4G
3 1 (0.15%) 5G
3 1 (0.15%) Network Security
3 1 (0.15%) Software-Defined Networking
3 1 (0.15%) Structured Cabling
Database & Business Intelligence
1 142 (21.48%) Data Warehouse
2 136 (20.57%) Power BI
3 94 (14.22%) Data Lake
4 84 (12.71%) SQL Server
5 51 (7.72%) Delta Lake
6 47 (7.11%) Azure SQL Database
6 47 (7.11%) Metadata
7 45 (6.81%) BigQuery
8 43 (6.51%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 38 (5.75%) Amazon Redshift
10 37 (5.60%) NoSQL
11 33 (4.99%) Tableau
12 32 (4.84%) Amazon Athena
12 32 (4.84%) Big Data
12 32 (4.84%) PostgreSQL
13 24 (3.63%) Snowflake Schema
14 23 (3.48%) Relational Database
15 16 (2.42%) Data Vault
15 16 (2.42%) Hadoop
15 16 (2.42%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 82 (12.41%) Git
2 20 (3.03%) JIRA
3 19 (2.87%) Jenkins
4 17 (2.57%) GitLab
4 17 (2.57%) MLflow
5 2 (0.30%) Selenium
6 1 (0.15%) Bitbucket
6 1 (0.15%) DBeaver
6 1 (0.15%) Gradle
6 1 (0.15%) Jaeger
6 1 (0.15%) Poetry
6 1 (0.15%) Team Foundation Server
6 1 (0.15%) TeamCity
6 1 (0.15%) Terragrunt
6 1 (0.15%) Visual Studio
General
1 131 (19.82%) Finance
2 117 (17.70%) Social Skills
3 70 (10.59%) Analytical Skills
4 39 (5.90%) Public Sector
5 34 (5.14%) Banking
6 26 (3.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.97%) Front Office
8 11 (1.66%) Pharmaceutical
8 11 (1.66%) Retail
9 10 (1.51%) Investment Banking
10 9 (1.36%) Marketing
11 8 (1.21%) Telecoms
12 6 (0.91%) Publishing
13 4 (0.61%) Back Office
13 4 (0.61%) Corporate Banking
14 3 (0.45%) Documentation Skills
14 3 (0.45%) Law
14 3 (0.45%) Military
14 3 (0.45%) Organisational Skills
15 2 (0.30%) Manufacturing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 124 (18.76%) PySpark
2 73 (11.04%) Kafka
3 30 (4.54%) Pandas
4 18 (2.72%) YAML
5 12 (1.82%) Great Expectations
5 12 (1.82%) NumPy
5 12 (1.82%) REST
6 11 (1.66%) PyTorch
7 10 (1.51%) Matplotlib
7 10 (1.51%) scikit-learn
8 9 (1.36%) XML
9 8 (1.21%) Apache NiFi
10 7 (1.06%) JSON
10 7 (1.06%) RabbitMQ
10 7 (1.06%) TensorFlow
11 6 (0.91%) GeoJSON
11 6 (0.91%) Polars
12 5 (0.76%) Middleware
12 5 (0.76%) RESTful
13 4 (0.61%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 55 (8.32%) Cloud Native
2 22 (3.33%) Data Structures
3 18 (2.72%) Legacy Systems
4 14 (2.12%) Onboarding
5 13 (1.97%) Reinsurance
6 12 (1.82%) Product Ownership
7 9 (1.36%) Greenfield Project
8 6 (0.91%) Distributed Computing
8 6 (0.91%) Life Science
8 6 (0.91%) Public Cloud
8 6 (0.91%) Replication
9 5 (0.76%) Algorithms
9 5 (0.76%) Linux Command Line
10 4 (0.61%) Credit Risk
10 4 (0.61%) Derivative
10 4 (0.61%) Distributed Systems
10 4 (0.61%) Equities
10 4 (0.61%) Genomics
10 4 (0.61%) Virtual Team
10 4 (0.61%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 10 (1.51%) Linux
2 1 (0.15%) Unix
2 1 (0.15%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 291 (44.02%) Data Pipeline
2 280 (42.36%) ETL
3 274 (41.45%) Data Engineering
4 239 (36.16%) Data Modelling
5 238 (36.01%) Analytics
6 182 (27.53%) CI/CD
7 163 (24.66%) Business Intelligence
8 134 (20.27%) DevOps
9 120 (18.15%) Agile
10 118 (17.85%) Data Governance
11 116 (17.55%) Data Science
12 97 (14.67%) AI
13 95 (14.37%) Infrastructure as Code
14 94 (14.22%) Problem-Solving
15 90 (13.62%) Data Architecture
16 84 (12.71%) Machine Learning
17 78 (11.80%) Migration
18 73 (11.04%) Data Integration
19 69 (10.44%) Data Transformation
20 60 (9.08%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 396 (59.91%) SQL
2 395 (59.76%) Python
3 73 (11.04%) Scala
4 40 (6.05%) Java
5 21 (3.18%) C#
6 18 (2.72%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 16 (2.42%) T-SQL
8 12 (1.82%) Bash
8 12 (1.82%) Bicep
9 10 (1.51%) JavaScript
9 10 (1.51%) R
10 9 (1.36%) PL/SQL
10 9 (1.36%) PowerShell
11 5 (0.76%) Shell Script
12 3 (0.45%) Korn
13 2 (0.30%) C
13 2 (0.30%) C++
13 2 (0.30%) TypeScript
13 2 (0.30%) VB
14 1 (0.15%) Go
Qualifications
1 166 (25.11%) Security Cleared
2 148 (22.39%) SC Cleared
3 22 (3.33%) Degree
4 21 (3.18%) Azure Certification
5 14 (2.12%) DV Cleared
6 12 (1.82%) AWS Certification
6 12 (1.82%) BPSS Clearance
6 12 (1.82%) Computer Science Degree
7 5 (0.76%) Microsoft Certification
8 4 (0.61%) Master's Degree
9 3 (0.45%) CTC Cleared
9 3 (0.45%) DBS Check
10 2 (0.30%) SnowPro
11 1 (0.15%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 197 (29.80%) Data Quality
2 36 (5.45%) GDPR
3 18 (2.72%) QA
4 7 (1.06%) Accessibility
5 3 (0.45%) HIPAA
5 3 (0.45%) MiFID
6 2 (0.30%) Dodd-Frank
6 2 (0.30%) EMIR
6 2 (0.30%) GMP
6 2 (0.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 1 (0.15%) EU AI Act
7 1 (0.15%) GRC
7 1 (0.15%) NIST
7 1 (0.15%) PMO
7 1 (0.15%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.15%) SLA
7 1 (0.15%) SOC 2
System Software
1 32 (4.84%) Docker
2 5 (0.76%) Virtual Machines
2 5 (0.76%) zsh
3 1 (0.15%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.15%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 107 (16.19%) Terraform
2 32 (4.84%) Kubernetes
3 5 (0.76%) Grafana
4 3 (0.45%) Kubeflow
4 3 (0.45%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.30%) EMC NetWorker
5 2 (0.30%) Tivoli Storage Manager
6 1 (0.15%) Ambari
6 1 (0.15%) Argo
6 1 (0.15%) Puppet
6 1 (0.15%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 246 (37.22%) Databricks
2 91 (13.77%) Microsoft
3 32 (4.84%) Google
4 30 (4.54%) Oracle
5 21 (3.18%) Informatica
6 15 (2.27%) Foundry
7 14 (2.12%) Palantir
8 13 (1.97%) SAP
9 11 (1.66%) ServiceNow
10 9 (1.36%) Talend
11 8 (1.21%) Cloudera
11 8 (1.21%) IBM
12 5 (0.76%) Virgin Media
13 4 (0.61%) Alteryx
13 4 (0.61%) Denodo
13 4 (0.61%) MuleSoft
14 3 (0.45%) EMC
14 3 (0.45%) Isilon
14 3 (0.45%) OpenAI
14 3 (0.45%) Splunk