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 26 July 2026.

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

6 months to
26 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 55 92 83
Rank change year-on-year +37 -9 +9
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 838 407 482
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.19% 2.98% 2.90%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.51% 3.20% 3.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 622 299 370
10th Percentile £391 £405 £375
25th Percentile £450 £452 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £623 £604 £659
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 3
10th Percentile £26.80 £47.65 -
25th Percentile £30.00 £51.25 £49.25
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 £90.50 -
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 18,596 12,715 15,656
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.01% 93.07% 94.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,167 8,604 11,147
10th Percentile £363 £331 £340
25th Percentile £450 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £549 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.23% -0.23% -4.35%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £688
90th Percentile £763 £788 £800
England median daily rate £525 £510 £525
% change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 335 199 233
10th Percentile £17.60 £17.98 £17.25
25th Percentile £22.00 £22.75 £22.00
Median hourly rate £39.00 £30.00 £32.29
Median % change year-on-year +30.00% -7.09% -18.09%
75th Percentile £59.36 £50.25 £52.00
90th Percentile £77.83 £64.00 £71.25
England median hourly rate £45.50 £26.30 £43.00
% change year-on-year +73.00% -38.84% -1.96%

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 26 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 26 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 26 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 +11 111 £565 +13.00% 37
West London -6 18 £603 +9.15% 8
South London -11 6 £500 +9.29% 4
East London +7 4 £450 - 3
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 26 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.

1 471 (56.21%) Python
2 465 (55.49%) SQL
3 393 (46.90%) Data Pipeline
4 360 (42.96%) Data Engineering
5 320 (38.19%) Analytics
6 308 (36.75%) Azure
7 304 (36.28%) ETL
8 297 (35.44%) Data Modelling
9 287 (34.25%) AWS
10 233 (27.80%) Data Quality
11 223 (26.61%) CI/CD
12 187 (22.32%) Security Cleared
13 186 (22.20%) Databricks
14 172 (20.53%) SC Cleared
15 170 (20.29%) DevOps
16 158 (18.85%) Data Warehouse
17 147 (17.54%) Agile
18 146 (17.42%) Business Intelligence
19 143 (17.06%) Power Platform
20 142 (16.95%) Migration
21 137 (16.35%) PySpark
22 136 (16.23%) dbt
23 135 (16.11%) Data Governance
24 133 (15.87%) Power BI
25 130 (15.51%) AI
26 125 (14.92%) Apache Airflow
27 120 (14.32%) Azure Data Factory
28 118 (14.08%) Microsoft
28 118 (14.08%) Snowflake
29 115 (13.72%) Terraform

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
1 125 (14.92%) Apache Airflow
2 88 (10.50%) Apache Spark
3 72 (8.59%) Apache
4 15 (1.79%) Confluence
5 11 (1.31%) Palantir Foundry
6 8 (0.95%) SharePoint
7 5 (0.60%) SAS
8 3 (0.36%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.24%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.12%) Camunda
10 1 (0.12%) Luigi
10 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
Applications
1 10 (1.19%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.24%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 11 (1.31%) 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
1 308 (36.75%) Azure
2 287 (34.25%) AWS
3 143 (17.06%) Power Platform
4 136 (16.23%) dbt
5 120 (14.32%) Azure Data Factory
6 118 (14.08%) Snowflake
7 107 (12.77%) GCP
8 103 (12.29%) Amazon S3
9 98 (11.69%) Azure DevOps
10 93 (11.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 71 (8.47%) GitHub
12 59 (7.04%) Serverless
13 56 (6.68%) AWS Lambda
14 29 (3.46%) GitHub Actions
15 26 (3.10%) Amazon EMR
16 23 (2.74%) Dagster
17 17 (2.03%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 16 (1.91%) Amazon Kinesis
19 15 (1.79%) Fivetran
20 14 (1.67%) Prefect
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
1 158 (18.85%) Data Warehouse
2 133 (15.87%) Power BI
3 103 (12.29%) Data Lake
4 75 (8.95%) BigQuery
5 55 (6.56%) Delta Lake
6 53 (6.32%) Metadata
7 51 (6.09%) SQL Server
8 48 (5.73%) Amazon Redshift
8 48 (5.73%) Tableau
9 46 (5.49%) PostgreSQL
10 42 (5.01%) Snowflake Schema
11 40 (4.77%) Big Data
12 39 (4.65%) Amazon Athena
13 33 (3.94%) Azure SQL Database
13 33 (3.94%) NoSQL
14 27 (3.22%) Relational Database
15 24 (2.86%) Star Schema
16 23 (2.74%) MongoDB
16 23 (2.74%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 22 (2.63%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 76 (9.07%) Git
2 25 (2.98%) JIRA
3 22 (2.63%) GitLab
4 9 (1.07%) Jenkins
5 4 (0.48%) MLflow
6 3 (0.36%) Bitbucket
6 3 (0.36%) SonarQube
7 2 (0.24%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 2 (0.24%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.24%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 1 (0.12%) Claude Code
8 1 (0.12%) ER Studio
8 1 (0.12%) ERwin
8 1 (0.12%) Octopus Deploy
8 1 (0.12%) Selenium
8 1 (0.12%) Terragrunt
General
1 229 (27.33%) Finance
2 129 (15.39%) Social Skills
3 108 (12.89%) Analytical Skills
4 64 (7.64%) Banking
5 60 (7.16%) Public Sector
6 21 (2.51%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 15 (1.79%) Pharmaceutical
8 14 (1.67%) Front Office
9 12 (1.43%) Marketing
10 11 (1.31%) Retail
11 10 (1.19%) Publishing
12 9 (1.07%) Telecoms
13 6 (0.72%) Back Office
13 6 (0.72%) Documentation Skills
13 6 (0.72%) Manufacturing
14 5 (0.60%) Financial Institution
15 4 (0.48%) Billing
15 4 (0.48%) Games
15 4 (0.48%) Legal
16 3 (0.36%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 137 (16.35%) PySpark
2 70 (8.35%) Kafka
3 27 (3.22%) Pandas
4 19 (2.27%) Spring
4 19 (2.27%) Spring Boot
5 18 (2.15%) REST
6 16 (1.91%) Great Expectations
7 11 (1.31%) Apache Beam
7 11 (1.31%) scikit-learn
7 11 (1.31%) YAML
8 10 (1.19%) Microsoft Graph
9 9 (1.07%) GeoJSON
9 9 (1.07%) JSON
9 9 (1.07%) Matplotlib
9 9 (1.07%) Polars
10 8 (0.95%) React
10 8 (0.95%) XML
11 7 (0.84%) PyTorch
12 6 (0.72%) HTML
13 5 (0.60%) .NET
Miscellaneous
1 93 (11.10%) Cloud Native
2 43 (5.13%) Legacy Systems
3 29 (3.46%) Data Structures
4 24 (2.86%) Onboarding
5 20 (2.39%) Distributed Systems
6 18 (2.15%) Reinsurance
7 15 (1.79%) Greenfield Project
8 14 (1.67%) NHS
9 11 (1.31%) Product Ownership
10 9 (1.07%) Reference Data
11 8 (0.95%) Algorithms
11 8 (0.95%) Life Science
11 8 (0.95%) Virtual Team
12 7 (0.84%) Clustering
13 6 (0.72%) Data Protection Act
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
Operating Systems
1 27 (3.22%) Linux
2 15 (1.79%) Unix
3 3 (0.36%) Windows
4 2 (0.24%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 393 (46.90%) Data Pipeline
2 360 (42.96%) Data Engineering
3 320 (38.19%) Analytics
4 304 (36.28%) ETL
5 297 (35.44%) Data Modelling
6 223 (26.61%) CI/CD
7 170 (20.29%) DevOps
8 147 (17.54%) Agile
9 146 (17.42%) Business Intelligence
10 142 (16.95%) Migration
11 135 (16.11%) Data Governance
12 130 (15.51%) AI
13 112 (13.37%) Data Science
14 100 (11.93%) Data Transformation
15 99 (11.81%) Validation
16 96 (11.46%) Infrastructure as Code
17 92 (10.98%) Decision-Making
18 86 (10.26%) Data Architecture
19 85 (10.14%) Machine Learning
20 79 (9.43%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 471 (56.21%) Python
2 465 (55.49%) SQL
3 79 (9.43%) Java
4 48 (5.73%) Scala
5 21 (2.51%) C#
6 20 (2.39%) T-SQL
7 18 (2.15%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 15 (1.79%) Shell Script
9 13 (1.55%) PL/SQL
9 13 (1.55%) PowerShell
10 11 (1.31%) R
11 10 (1.19%) JavaScript
12 7 (0.84%) Bash
12 7 (0.84%) Bicep
13 6 (0.72%) TypeScript
14 5 (0.60%) Go
15 2 (0.24%) C
15 2 (0.24%) Korn
15 2 (0.24%) Ruby
15 2 (0.24%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 187 (22.32%) Security Cleared
2 172 (20.53%) SC Cleared
3 24 (2.86%) Degree
4 22 (2.63%) BPSS Clearance
5 21 (2.51%) Azure Certification
6 12 (1.43%) Computer Science Degree
7 9 (1.07%) AWS Certification
8 8 (0.95%) DBS Check
9 6 (0.72%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 5 (0.60%) DV Cleared
11 4 (0.48%) SnowPro
12 3 (0.36%) Master's Degree
12 3 (0.36%) Microsoft Certification
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
1 233 (27.80%) Data Quality
2 34 (4.06%) QA
3 30 (3.58%) GDPR
4 13 (1.55%) 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 55 (6.56%) Docker
2 3 (0.36%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.24%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.12%) RACF
Systems Management
1 115 (13.72%) Terraform
2 35 (4.18%) Kubernetes
3 10 (1.19%) 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
1 186 (22.20%) Databricks
2 118 (14.08%) Microsoft
3 53 (6.32%) Google
4 44 (5.25%) Informatica
5 33 (3.94%) Oracle
6 18 (2.15%) Palantir
7 15 (1.79%) Foundry
8 12 (1.43%) SAP
9 10 (1.19%) Denodo
9 10 (1.19%) Salesforce
10 9 (1.07%) Bloomberg
10 9 (1.07%) Talend
11 8 (0.95%) IBM
12 7 (0.84%) Amplitude
12 7 (0.84%) MuleSoft
12 7 (0.84%) Splunk
13 5 (0.60%) Alteryx
14 4 (0.48%) Cloudera
14 4 (0.48%) Hortonworks
15 3 (0.36%) New Relic