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 11 May 2026.

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

6 months to
11 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 47 72 80
Rank change year-on-year +25 +8 +13
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 825 459 499
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.63% 3.65% 2.83%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.99% 3.91% 3.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 599 348 405
10th Percentile £388 £400 £350
25th Percentile £457 £455 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year - - -8.70%
75th Percentile £614 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £800 £700
England median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 7 9
10th Percentile £23.72 £51.25 £48.75
25th Percentile £30.30 £58.13 £49.25
Median hourly rate £42.50 £65.00 £51.75
Median % change year-on-year -34.62% +25.60% -28.13%
75th Percentile £49.75 £85.63 £61.75
90th Percentile £53.35 £93.75 £66.13
England median hourly rate £52.50 £65.00 £66.25
% change year-on-year -19.23% -1.89% +3.52%

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 16,526 11,742 16,474
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.79% 93.37% 93.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,960 8,045 11,903
10th Percentile £350 £345 £325
25th Percentile £425 £428 £444
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £650 £680 £686
90th Percentile £755 £800 £800
England median daily rate £513 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -2.38% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 271 148 325
10th Percentile £18.75 £20.24 £16.01
25th Percentile £24.03 £23.95 £20.02
Median hourly rate £37.50 £34.00 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.29% +23.64% -23.61%
75th Percentile £63.10 £50.75 £46.48
90th Percentile £76.58 £65.00 £65.02
England median hourly rate £47.00 £30.26 £37.50
% change year-on-year +55.32% -19.31% -16.67%

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 11 May 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 11 May 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 11 May 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 +25 118 £550 +10.00% 43
West London -1 30 £603 +6.73% 5
South London -9 8 £500 +5.26% 5
East London - 3 £450 - 6
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 11 May 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.

1 472 (57.21%) SQL
2 457 (55.39%) Python
3 362 (43.88%) Data Pipeline
4 348 (42.18%) Azure
5 334 (40.48%) Data Engineering
5 334 (40.48%) ETL
6 307 (37.21%) Analytics
7 290 (35.15%) Data Modelling
8 268 (32.48%) AWS
9 243 (29.45%) Databricks
10 235 (28.48%) Data Quality
11 223 (27.03%) CI/CD
12 200 (24.24%) Security Cleared
13 188 (22.79%) SC Cleared
14 181 (21.94%) DevOps
15 168 (20.36%) Business Intelligence
16 165 (20.00%) Data Warehouse
17 155 (18.79%) Power Platform
18 146 (17.70%) PySpark
19 145 (17.58%) Power BI
20 144 (17.45%) Agile
21 143 (17.33%) Data Governance
22 137 (16.61%) Azure Data Factory
23 126 (15.27%) Terraform
24 124 (15.03%) AI
25 122 (14.79%) Data Lake
25 122 (14.79%) Microsoft
26 119 (14.42%) Data Science
27 109 (13.21%) Amazon S3
28 105 (12.73%) Azure Synapse Analytics

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
1 104 (12.61%) Apache Airflow
2 103 (12.48%) Apache Spark
3 58 (7.03%) Apache
4 9 (1.09%) Palantir Foundry
5 8 (0.97%) Confluence
6 5 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
7 4 (0.48%) Jupyter
7 4 (0.48%) SAS
8 2 (0.24%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.12%) Appian
9 1 (0.12%) Camunda
9 1 (0.12%) Luigi
9 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
Applications
1 13 (1.58%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.24%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 5 (0.61%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.24%) BambooHR
2 2 (0.24%) SAP BPC
2 2 (0.24%) SimCorp Dimension
3 1 (0.12%) Actimize
3 1 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.12%) iTrent
3 1 (0.12%) SAP Business ByDesign
Cloud Services
1 348 (42.18%) Azure
2 268 (32.48%) AWS
3 155 (18.79%) Power Platform
4 137 (16.61%) Azure Data Factory
5 109 (13.21%) Amazon S3
6 105 (12.73%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 102 (12.36%) Snowflake
8 99 (12.00%) Azure DevOps
9 91 (11.03%) GCP
10 89 (10.79%) dbt
10 89 (10.79%) GitHub
11 66 (8.00%) Serverless
12 59 (7.15%) AWS Lambda
13 42 (5.09%) GitHub Actions
14 25 (3.03%) AWS CloudFormation
15 21 (2.55%) Dagster
16 19 (2.30%) Amazon Kinesis
17 16 (1.94%) Amazon SQS
18 15 (1.82%) Collibra
18 15 (1.82%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 2 (0.24%) Structured Cabling
2 1 (0.12%) 4G
2 1 (0.12%) 5G
2 1 (0.12%) Firewall
2 1 (0.12%) Network Security
2 1 (0.12%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 165 (20.00%) Data Warehouse
2 145 (17.58%) Power BI
3 122 (14.79%) Data Lake
4 85 (10.30%) SQL Server
5 66 (8.00%) BigQuery
6 64 (7.76%) Delta Lake
7 60 (7.27%) Azure SQL Database
7 60 (7.27%) Metadata
8 48 (5.82%) Tableau
9 46 (5.58%) Amazon Redshift
10 45 (5.45%) NoSQL
10 45 (5.45%) Snowflake Schema
11 41 (4.97%) Amazon Athena
11 41 (4.97%) Big Data
12 39 (4.73%) PostgreSQL
13 36 (4.36%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 26 (3.15%) Relational Database
15 25 (3.03%) Star Schema
16 24 (2.91%) MongoDB
17 23 (2.79%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 86 (10.42%) Git
2 26 (3.15%) JIRA
3 22 (2.67%) GitLab
4 19 (2.30%) Jenkins
5 16 (1.94%) MLflow
6 2 (0.24%) SonarQube
6 2 (0.24%) Sonatype Nexus
6 2 (0.24%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 1 (0.12%) Jaeger
7 1 (0.12%) Poetry
7 1 (0.12%) Selenium
7 1 (0.12%) Team Foundation Server
7 1 (0.12%) Terragrunt
General
1 200 (24.24%) Finance
2 118 (14.30%) Social Skills
3 98 (11.88%) Analytical Skills
4 53 (6.42%) Public Sector
5 46 (5.58%) Banking
6 25 (3.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.58%) Telecoms
8 12 (1.45%) Marketing
9 11 (1.33%) Front Office
9 11 (1.33%) Pharmaceutical
9 11 (1.33%) Retail
10 10 (1.21%) Publishing
11 6 (0.73%) Documentation Skills
11 6 (0.73%) Investment Banking
12 5 (0.61%) Games
13 4 (0.48%) Back Office
13 4 (0.48%) Corporate Banking
13 4 (0.48%) Financial Institution
13 4 (0.48%) Manufacturing
13 4 (0.48%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 146 (17.70%) PySpark
2 84 (10.18%) Kafka
3 33 (4.00%) Pandas
4 22 (2.67%) Great Expectations
5 21 (2.55%) YAML
6 19 (2.30%) Spring
6 19 (2.30%) Spring Boot
7 13 (1.58%) REST
8 12 (1.45%) scikit-learn
9 11 (1.33%) Matplotlib
10 10 (1.21%) PyTorch
11 9 (1.09%) GeoJSON
11 9 (1.09%) JSON
11 9 (1.09%) Polars
12 8 (0.97%) NumPy
13 7 (0.85%) React
14 6 (0.73%) Apache Beam
14 6 (0.73%) HTML
14 6 (0.73%) XML
15 5 (0.61%) LangChain
Miscellaneous
1 81 (9.82%) Cloud Native
2 22 (2.67%) Legacy Systems
3 19 (2.30%) Data Structures
4 17 (2.06%) Greenfield Project
4 17 (2.06%) Product Ownership
5 13 (1.58%) Distributed Systems
5 13 (1.58%) Reinsurance
6 9 (1.09%) Onboarding
6 9 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
7 8 (0.97%) Distributed Computing
7 8 (0.97%) Replication
8 7 (0.85%) Clustering
9 6 (0.73%) AI Agents
9 6 (0.73%) Derivative
9 6 (0.73%) Life Science
9 6 (0.73%) NHS
9 6 (0.73%) Public Cloud
9 6 (0.73%) Reference Data
10 5 (0.61%) Data Protection Act
10 5 (0.61%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 21 (2.55%) Linux
2 11 (1.33%) Unix
3 3 (0.36%) Windows
4 2 (0.24%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.12%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 362 (43.88%) Data Pipeline
2 334 (40.48%) Data Engineering
2 334 (40.48%) ETL
3 307 (37.21%) Analytics
4 290 (35.15%) Data Modelling
5 223 (27.03%) CI/CD
6 181 (21.94%) DevOps
7 168 (20.36%) Business Intelligence
8 144 (17.45%) Agile
9 143 (17.33%) Data Governance
10 124 (15.03%) AI
11 119 (14.42%) Data Science
12 99 (12.00%) Data Architecture
13 98 (11.88%) Migration
14 96 (11.64%) Infrastructure as Code
15 94 (11.39%) Problem-Solving
16 92 (11.15%) Validation
17 83 (10.06%) Machine Learning
18 75 (9.09%) Decision-Making
19 71 (8.61%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 472 (57.21%) SQL
2 457 (55.39%) Python
3 76 (9.21%) Scala
4 74 (8.97%) Java
5 29 (3.52%) C#
6 23 (2.79%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 20 (2.42%) T-SQL
8 15 (1.82%) R
9 13 (1.58%) Bicep
10 11 (1.33%) JavaScript
10 11 (1.33%) PL/SQL
11 10 (1.21%) Shell Script
12 9 (1.09%) Bash
13 5 (0.61%) PowerShell
13 5 (0.61%) TypeScript
14 3 (0.36%) C
15 2 (0.24%) LookML
15 2 (0.24%) Ruby
15 2 (0.24%) VB
16 1 (0.12%) Korn
Qualifications
1 200 (24.24%) Security Cleared
2 188 (22.79%) SC Cleared
3 24 (2.91%) Azure Certification
4 23 (2.79%) Degree
5 17 (2.06%) BPSS Clearance
6 12 (1.45%) Computer Science Degree
7 6 (0.73%) AWS Certification
7 6 (0.73%) DBS Check
7 6 (0.73%) Microsoft Certification
8 4 (0.48%) DV Cleared
8 4 (0.48%) Master's Degree
9 3 (0.36%) CTC Cleared
9 3 (0.36%) SnowPro
10 1 (0.12%) BICSI Certification
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%) Postgraduate
10 1 (0.12%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 235 (28.48%) Data Quality
2 35 (4.24%) GDPR
3 31 (3.76%) QA
4 6 (0.73%) Accessibility
5 5 (0.61%) MiFID
6 2 (0.24%) EMIR
6 2 (0.24%) GMP
6 2 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.24%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 2 (0.24%) SLA
7 1 (0.12%) GRC
7 1 (0.12%) GxP
7 1 (0.12%) HIPAA
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 53 (6.42%) Docker
2 3 (0.36%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.12%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.12%) RACF
Systems Management
1 126 (15.27%) Terraform
2 40 (4.85%) Kubernetes
3 10 (1.21%) Grafana
4 4 (0.48%) Kibana
5 2 (0.24%) Ansible
5 2 (0.24%) Kubeflow
5 2 (0.24%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.24%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 243 (29.45%) Databricks
2 122 (14.79%) Microsoft
3 43 (5.21%) Google
4 38 (4.61%) Informatica
5 32 (3.88%) Oracle
6 12 (1.45%) Foundry
7 11 (1.33%) SAP
8 9 (1.09%) Denodo
8 9 (1.09%) IBM
8 9 (1.09%) Palantir
8 9 (1.09%) ServiceNow
8 9 (1.09%) Talend
9 6 (0.73%) Alteryx
9 6 (0.73%) Bloomberg
9 6 (0.73%) Cloudera
9 6 (0.73%) MuleSoft
10 5 (0.61%) Splunk
11 4 (0.48%) Hortonworks
11 4 (0.48%) Salesforce
12 3 (0.36%) OpenAI