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 23 November 2025.

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

6 months to
23 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 94 79 88
Rank change year-on-year -15 +9 +24
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 426 503 525
As % of all contract jobs in London 3.03% 3.16% 2.62%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.28% 3.37% 2.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 305 357 387
10th Percentile £380 £400 £400
25th Percentile £444 £475 £466
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £653
90th Percentile £725 £751 £725
England median daily rate £513 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -6.82% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 7 9
10th Percentile £31.22 £46.05 £35.00
25th Percentile £38.75 £57.13 £35.63
Median hourly rate £43.50 £65.00 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year -33.08% +7.44% +56.13%
75th Percentile £86.25 £97.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £110.00 - £71.40
England median hourly rate £43.50 £65.00 £61.75
% change year-on-year -33.08% +5.26% +14.35%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 13,004 14,917 18,757
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.44% 93.75% 93.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,617 9,680 13,598
10th Percentile £334 £338 £338
25th Percentile £425 £450 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £550 £563
Median % change year-on-year -2.36% -2.25% -2.14%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £688
90th Percentile £775 £799 £790
England median daily rate £508 £525 £534
% change year-on-year -3.33% -1.69% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 236 164 218
10th Percentile £17.50 £17.25 £18.11
25th Percentile £21.00 £23.80 £21.75
Median hourly rate £26.54 £37.50 £36.59
Median % change year-on-year -29.24% +2.49% +4.54%
75th Percentile £49.56 £58.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £72.25 £80.75 £72.50
England median hourly rate £25.15 £40.00 £45.21
% change year-on-year -37.13% -11.52% +41.28%

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 23 November 2025.

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 23 November 2025.

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 23 November 2025. 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 +12 56 £538 -6.52% 23
West London -13 6 £575 +4.55% 10
South London -7 3 £479 -18.55% 3
East London +5 1 - - 3
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 23 November 2025, 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.

1 286 (67.14%) Python
2 274 (64.32%) SQL
3 216 (50.70%) Data Pipeline
4 200 (46.95%) Azure
5 178 (41.78%) Data Engineering
6 167 (39.20%) ETL
7 165 (38.73%) AWS
8 159 (37.32%) Data Modelling
9 155 (36.38%) Databricks
10 132 (30.99%) Analytics
11 128 (30.05%) CI/CD
12 109 (25.59%) Data Quality
13 102 (23.94%) Data Warehouse
14 100 (23.47%) Business Intelligence
15 96 (22.54%) Security Cleared
16 94 (22.07%) DevOps
17 92 (21.60%) Agile
18 88 (20.66%) Data Science
19 85 (19.95%) Azure Data Factory
20 84 (19.72%) Power Platform
21 83 (19.48%) Power BI
21 83 (19.48%) SC Cleared
22 79 (18.54%) Apache Airflow
23 78 (18.31%) PySpark
24 75 (17.61%) Snowflake
25 67 (15.73%) Data Governance
26 65 (15.26%) Terraform
27 64 (15.02%) Problem-Solving
28 62 (14.55%) Apache Spark
28 62 (14.55%) Data Lake

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 79 (18.54%) Apache Airflow
2 62 (14.55%) Apache Spark
3 39 (9.15%) Apache
4 14 (3.29%) Confluence
5 4 (0.94%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.70%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 2 (0.47%) ArcGIS
7 2 (0.47%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.47%) Luigi
7 2 (0.47%) SAS
8 1 (0.23%) Apache Pig
8 1 (0.23%) IIS
8 1 (0.23%) Oracle Application Server
Applications
1 9 (2.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.47%) Microsoft Office
2 2 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.23%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.23%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 3 (0.70%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.47%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.23%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.23%) Maximo
3 1 (0.23%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 200 (46.95%) Azure
2 165 (38.73%) AWS
3 85 (19.95%) Azure Data Factory
4 84 (19.72%) Power Platform
5 75 (17.61%) Snowflake
6 61 (14.32%) dbt
7 59 (13.85%) Amazon S3
8 57 (13.38%) GCP
9 53 (12.44%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 49 (11.50%) GitHub
11 39 (9.15%) Serverless
12 35 (8.22%) Azure DevOps
13 28 (6.57%) GitHub Actions
14 25 (5.87%) AWS Lambda
15 15 (3.52%) SaaS
16 14 (3.29%) Amazon EMR
16 14 (3.29%) Amazon Kinesis
16 14 (3.29%) AWS CloudFormation
17 7 (1.64%) AWS Step Functions
17 7 (1.64%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.94%) Firewall
2 3 (0.70%) SAN
3 2 (0.47%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 102 (23.94%) Data Warehouse
2 83 (19.48%) Power BI
3 62 (14.55%) Data Lake
4 37 (8.69%) SQL Server
5 33 (7.75%) Big Data
6 29 (6.81%) BigQuery
7 28 (6.57%) Hadoop
8 27 (6.34%) PostgreSQL
9 26 (6.10%) Amazon Redshift
10 24 (5.63%) Delta Lake
11 22 (5.16%) Metadata
11 22 (5.16%) Relational Database
11 22 (5.16%) Tableau
12 21 (4.93%) Azure SQL Database
12 21 (4.93%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 20 (4.69%) Star Schema
14 19 (4.46%) Amazon QuickSight
15 18 (4.23%) NoSQL
16 14 (3.29%) Amazon Athena
17 11 (2.58%) DataStage
Development Applications
1 59 (13.85%) Git
2 15 (3.52%) Jenkins
2 15 (3.52%) JIRA
3 11 (2.58%) MLflow
4 7 (1.64%) GitLab
5 3 (0.70%) Bitbucket
6 1 (0.23%) DBeaver
6 1 (0.23%) ERwin
6 1 (0.23%) GoCD
6 1 (0.23%) Gradle
6 1 (0.23%) Selenium
6 1 (0.23%) Team Foundation Server
6 1 (0.23%) TeamCity
6 1 (0.23%) Visual Studio
General
1 98 (23.00%) Finance
2 87 (20.42%) Social Skills
3 59 (13.85%) Analytical Skills
4 31 (7.28%) Public Sector
5 20 (4.69%) Banking
6 17 (3.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 11 (2.58%) Investment Banking
7 11 (2.58%) Pharmaceutical
8 10 (2.35%) Front Office
9 8 (1.88%) Retail
10 6 (1.41%) Marketing
11 3 (0.70%) Corporate Banking
11 3 (0.70%) Retail Banking
11 3 (0.70%) Telecoms
12 2 (0.47%) Financial Institution
12 2 (0.47%) International Banking
12 2 (0.47%) Law
12 2 (0.47%) Legal
12 2 (0.47%) Military
12 2 (0.47%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 78 (18.31%) PySpark
2 50 (11.74%) Kafka
3 12 (2.82%) XML
4 11 (2.58%) Apache NiFi
5 10 (2.35%) RabbitMQ
6 9 (2.11%) Pandas
7 8 (1.88%) Jinja
7 8 (1.88%) YAML
8 7 (1.64%) PyTorch
9 6 (1.41%) GraphQL
9 6 (1.41%) NumPy
9 6 (1.41%) RESTful
10 5 (1.17%) HTML
10 5 (1.17%) JSON
10 5 (1.17%) pytest
10 5 (1.17%) REST
10 5 (1.17%) TensorFlow
11 4 (0.94%) CSS
11 4 (0.94%) OAuth
11 4 (0.94%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 22 (5.16%) Cloud Native
2 16 (3.76%) Legacy Systems
3 14 (3.29%) Data Structures
4 10 (2.35%) Onboarding
5 8 (1.88%) Distributed Computing
5 8 (1.88%) Product Ownership
6 7 (1.64%) Algorithms
6 7 (1.64%) Virtual Team
7 6 (1.41%) Life Science
7 6 (1.41%) Reinsurance
8 5 (1.17%) Genomics
8 5 (1.17%) Linux Command Line
9 4 (0.94%) Credit Risk
9 4 (0.94%) Data Protection Act
9 4 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
10 3 (0.70%) Derivative
10 3 (0.70%) EMC VNX
10 3 (0.70%) Equities
10 3 (0.70%) Hedge funds
10 3 (0.70%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 7 (1.64%) Linux
2 4 (0.94%) Unix
3 1 (0.23%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 216 (50.70%) Data Pipeline
2 178 (41.78%) Data Engineering
3 167 (39.20%) ETL
4 159 (37.32%) Data Modelling
5 132 (30.99%) Analytics
6 128 (30.05%) CI/CD
7 100 (23.47%) Business Intelligence
8 94 (22.07%) DevOps
9 92 (21.60%) Agile
10 88 (20.66%) Data Science
11 67 (15.73%) Data Governance
12 64 (15.02%) Problem-Solving
13 62 (14.55%) Infrastructure as Code
14 60 (14.08%) Machine Learning
15 59 (13.85%) AI
16 54 (12.68%) Migration
17 49 (11.50%) Data Integration
18 48 (11.27%) Data Transformation
19 44 (10.33%) Data Architecture
20 42 (9.86%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 286 (67.14%) Python
2 274 (64.32%) SQL
3 40 (9.39%) Scala
4 39 (9.15%) Java
5 12 (2.82%) Bash
6 10 (2.35%) JavaScript
7 9 (2.11%) PowerShell
8 7 (1.64%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 6 (1.41%) PL/SQL
9 6 (1.41%) R
10 5 (1.17%) C#
10 5 (1.17%) T-SQL
11 4 (0.94%) Shell Script
11 4 (0.94%) TypeScript
12 3 (0.70%) Go
12 3 (0.70%) Korn
13 2 (0.47%) C++
14 1 (0.23%) C
14 1 (0.23%) HiveQL
Qualifications
1 96 (22.54%) Security Cleared
2 83 (19.48%) SC Cleared
3 24 (5.63%) Degree
4 18 (4.23%) DV Cleared
5 12 (2.82%) Azure Certification
6 11 (2.58%) AWS Certification
7 9 (2.11%) Computer Science Degree
8 4 (0.94%) Master's Degree
9 3 (0.70%) BPSS Clearance
10 2 (0.47%) DBS Check
10 2 (0.47%) SnowPro
11 1 (0.23%) CTC Cleared
11 1 (0.23%) MCP
11 1 (0.23%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 109 (25.59%) Data Quality
2 23 (5.40%) GDPR
3 8 (1.88%) QA
4 6 (1.41%) Accessibility
5 3 (0.70%) HIPAA
5 3 (0.70%) NIST
5 3 (0.70%) SLA
6 2 (0.47%) Dodd-Frank
6 2 (0.47%) EMIR
6 2 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 20000
6 2 (0.47%) MiFID
7 1 (0.23%) EU AI Act
7 1 (0.23%) HL7
7 1 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 1 (0.23%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.23%) SOC 2
System Software
1 20 (4.69%) Docker
2 5 (1.17%) Virtual Machines
2 5 (1.17%) zsh
3 1 (0.23%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 65 (15.26%) Terraform
2 23 (5.40%) Kubernetes
3 4 (0.94%) Kubeflow
3 4 (0.94%) Puppet
4 3 (0.70%) Ambari
4 3 (0.70%) Grafana
4 3 (0.70%) ZABBIX
5 2 (0.47%) Ansible
5 2 (0.47%) EMC NetWorker
5 2 (0.47%) Tivoli Storage Manager
6 1 (0.23%) Argo
6 1 (0.23%) NetBackup
6 1 (0.23%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 155 (36.38%) Databricks
2 50 (11.74%) Microsoft
3 25 (5.87%) Foundry
4 24 (5.63%) Palantir
5 20 (4.69%) Google
5 20 (4.69%) Oracle
6 12 (2.82%) Cloudera
7 8 (1.88%) SAP
8 7 (1.64%) Informatica
9 5 (1.17%) IBM
9 5 (1.17%) Virgin Media
10 4 (0.94%) Denodo
10 4 (0.94%) ServiceNow
11 3 (0.70%) EMC
11 3 (0.70%) Isilon
11 3 (0.70%) Teradata
12 2 (0.47%) Cisco
12 2 (0.47%) Salesforce
12 2 (0.47%) Splunk
12 2 (0.47%) Talend