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 21 June 2026.

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

6 months to
21 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 48 80 83
Rank change year-on-year +32 +3 +19
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 854 406 509
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.49% 3.24% 2.87%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.83% 3.47% 3.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 615 307 405
10th Percentile £390 £400 £354
25th Percentile £450 £454 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year - - -8.70%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £707 £793 £738
England median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 5 6
10th Percentile £27.09 - £48.00
25th Percentile £34.84 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £38.67 £52.50 £51.13
Median % change year-on-year -26.34% +2.69% -28.99%
75th Percentile £52.75 £77.50 £54.03
90th Percentile £64.75 £87.25 £63.31
England median hourly rate £45.00 £52.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year -14.29% -22.22% -10.60%

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 17,689 11,709 16,611
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.90% 93.43% 93.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,669 7,935 11,918
10th Percentile £358 £338 £325
25th Percentile £436 £425 £440
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.73% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £675
90th Percentile £763 £799 £800
England median daily rate £523 £513 £525
% change year-on-year +1.95% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 293 173 325
10th Percentile £18.21 £19.25 £16.00
25th Percentile £25.15 £24.00 £20.22
Median hourly rate £41.00 £34.00 £27.81
Median % change year-on-year +20.59% +22.26% -24.37%
75th Percentile £63.32 £50.50 £46.48
90th Percentile £81.00 £64.75 £66.80
England median hourly rate £45.50 £29.00 £39.55
% change year-on-year +56.90% -26.68% -12.11%

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 21 June 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 21 June 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 21 June 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 +20 118 £550 +10.00% 12
West London -8 25 £603 +9.15% 3
South London 0 7 £500 +3.90%
East London - 4 £450 - 2
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 21 June 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.

1 480 (56.21%) Python
1 480 (56.21%) SQL
2 379 (44.38%) Data Pipeline
3 342 (40.05%) Data Engineering
4 329 (38.52%) ETL
5 328 (38.41%) Analytics
6 322 (37.70%) Azure
7 303 (35.48%) AWS
7 303 (35.48%) Data Modelling
8 247 (28.92%) Data Quality
9 224 (26.23%) CI/CD
10 204 (23.89%) Databricks
11 195 (22.83%) Security Cleared
12 183 (21.43%) SC Cleared
13 180 (21.08%) DevOps
14 174 (20.37%) Business Intelligence
15 168 (19.67%) Power Platform
16 163 (19.09%) Data Warehouse
17 158 (18.50%) Power BI
18 144 (16.86%) Agile
19 139 (16.28%) AI
20 138 (16.16%) PySpark
21 130 (15.22%) Data Governance
22 129 (15.11%) Microsoft
23 127 (14.87%) Terraform
24 126 (14.75%) Azure Data Factory
25 122 (14.29%) Migration
26 121 (14.17%) Amazon S3
27 119 (13.93%) Data Lake
27 119 (13.93%) Snowflake

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
1 116 (13.58%) Apache Airflow
2 90 (10.54%) Apache Spark
3 61 (7.14%) Apache
4 15 (1.76%) Confluence
5 7 (0.82%) SharePoint
6 6 (0.70%) Palantir Foundry
7 5 (0.59%) Microsoft Exchange
8 4 (0.47%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.35%) SAS
10 1 (0.12%) Appian
10 1 (0.12%) Camunda
10 1 (0.12%) Luigi
10 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
Applications
1 10 (1.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.12%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 6 (0.70%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.35%) SAP BPC
2 3 (0.35%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.23%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.23%) 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
1 322 (37.70%) Azure
2 303 (35.48%) AWS
3 168 (19.67%) Power Platform
4 126 (14.75%) Azure Data Factory
5 121 (14.17%) Amazon S3
6 119 (13.93%) Snowflake
7 115 (13.47%) dbt
8 101 (11.83%) Azure DevOps
9 94 (11.01%) GCP
10 93 (10.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 85 (9.95%) GitHub
12 72 (8.43%) Serverless
13 70 (8.20%) AWS Lambda
14 40 (4.68%) GitHub Actions
15 22 (2.58%) Amazon EMR
16 21 (2.46%) AWS CloudFormation
16 21 (2.46%) Dagster
17 20 (2.34%) Amazon Kinesis
18 16 (1.87%) Amazon SQS
19 15 (1.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 2 (0.23%) Structured Cabling
2 1 (0.12%) 4G
2 1 (0.12%) 5G
2 1 (0.12%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 163 (19.09%) Data Warehouse
2 158 (18.50%) Power BI
3 119 (13.93%) Data Lake
4 84 (9.84%) SQL Server
5 68 (7.96%) BigQuery
6 64 (7.49%) Delta Lake
7 61 (7.14%) Metadata
8 56 (6.56%) Amazon Redshift
9 50 (5.85%) Tableau
10 47 (5.50%) Amazon Athena
11 46 (5.39%) Snowflake Schema
12 44 (5.15%) Azure SQL Database
12 44 (5.15%) PostgreSQL
13 36 (4.22%) NoSQL
14 35 (4.10%) Big Data
15 33 (3.86%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 28 (3.28%) Relational Database
17 24 (2.81%) MongoDB
17 24 (2.81%) Spark SQL
17 24 (2.81%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 77 (9.02%) Git
2 33 (3.86%) JIRA
3 26 (3.04%) GitLab
4 9 (1.05%) Jenkins
5 4 (0.47%) MLflow
6 3 (0.35%) SonarQube
7 2 (0.23%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 2 (0.23%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.23%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.23%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 2 (0.23%) Terragrunt
8 1 (0.12%) Claude Code
8 1 (0.12%) Octopus Deploy
8 1 (0.12%) Selenium
General
1 226 (26.46%) Finance
2 130 (15.22%) Social Skills
3 99 (11.59%) Analytical Skills
4 58 (6.79%) Banking
5 55 (6.44%) Public Sector
6 23 (2.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 15 (1.76%) Pharmaceutical
8 14 (1.64%) Retail
9 12 (1.41%) Telecoms
10 11 (1.29%) Marketing
11 10 (1.17%) Publishing
12 8 (0.94%) Front Office
13 6 (0.70%) Documentation Skills
14 5 (0.59%) Manufacturing
15 4 (0.47%) Billing
15 4 (0.47%) Corporate Banking
15 4 (0.47%) Financial Institution
15 4 (0.47%) Games
15 4 (0.47%) Military
16 3 (0.35%) Investment Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 138 (16.16%) PySpark
2 85 (9.95%) Kafka
3 30 (3.51%) Pandas
4 21 (2.46%) Spring
4 21 (2.46%) Spring Boot
5 19 (2.22%) Great Expectations
6 18 (2.11%) REST
7 13 (1.52%) YAML
8 11 (1.29%) scikit-learn
9 10 (1.17%) JSON
9 10 (1.17%) Matplotlib
10 9 (1.05%) Apache Beam
10 9 (1.05%) GeoJSON
10 9 (1.05%) Polars
10 9 (1.05%) XML
11 7 (0.82%) PyTorch
12 6 (0.70%) Microsoft Graph
12 6 (0.70%) Middleware
12 6 (0.70%) NumPy
12 6 (0.70%) React
Miscellaneous
1 95 (11.12%) Cloud Native
2 34 (3.98%) Legacy Systems
3 29 (3.40%) Data Structures
4 23 (2.69%) Reinsurance
5 19 (2.22%) Onboarding
6 18 (2.11%) Greenfield Project
7 16 (1.87%) Distributed Systems
8 13 (1.52%) Product Ownership
9 8 (0.94%) Clustering
9 8 (0.94%) NHS
9 8 (0.94%) Reference Data
9 8 (0.94%) Virtual Team
10 7 (0.82%) Life Science
11 6 (0.70%) Data Protection Act
11 6 (0.70%) Derivative
11 6 (0.70%) Distributed Computing
11 6 (0.70%) Self-Motivation
12 5 (0.59%) Algorithms
12 5 (0.59%) Public Cloud
12 5 (0.59%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 23 (2.69%) Linux
2 13 (1.52%) Unix
3 3 (0.35%) Windows
4 2 (0.23%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 379 (44.38%) Data Pipeline
2 342 (40.05%) Data Engineering
3 329 (38.52%) ETL
4 328 (38.41%) Analytics
5 303 (35.48%) Data Modelling
6 224 (26.23%) CI/CD
7 180 (21.08%) DevOps
8 174 (20.37%) Business Intelligence
9 144 (16.86%) Agile
10 139 (16.28%) AI
11 130 (15.22%) Data Governance
12 122 (14.29%) Migration
13 110 (12.88%) Data Science
14 100 (11.71%) Infrastructure as Code
15 94 (11.01%) Decision-Making
16 91 (10.66%) Data Architecture
16 91 (10.66%) Validation
17 90 (10.54%) Problem-Solving
18 76 (8.90%) Data Transformation
18 76 (8.90%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 480 (56.21%) Python
1 480 (56.21%) SQL
2 77 (9.02%) Java
3 53 (6.21%) Scala
4 24 (2.81%) C#
5 23 (2.69%) T-SQL
6 20 (2.34%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 14 (1.64%) PL/SQL
8 12 (1.41%) R
9 11 (1.29%) Bicep
9 11 (1.29%) Shell Script
10 10 (1.17%) PowerShell
11 7 (0.82%) Bash
11 7 (0.82%) JavaScript
12 6 (0.70%) TypeScript
13 4 (0.47%) Go
14 2 (0.23%) C
14 2 (0.23%) Korn
14 2 (0.23%) SPARQL
14 2 (0.23%) VB
Qualifications
1 195 (22.83%) Security Cleared
2 183 (21.43%) SC Cleared
3 23 (2.69%) Azure Certification
3 23 (2.69%) Degree
4 21 (2.46%) BPSS Clearance
5 11 (1.29%) Computer Science Degree
6 10 (1.17%) AWS Certification
7 8 (0.94%) DBS Check
7 8 (0.94%) Microsoft Certification
8 6 (0.70%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 4 (0.47%) SnowPro
10 2 (0.23%) Master's Degree
11 1 (0.12%) CISA
11 1 (0.12%) CISM
11 1 (0.12%) CISSP
11 1 (0.12%) City & Guilds
11 1 (0.12%) CTC Cleared
11 1 (0.12%) DV Cleared
11 1 (0.12%) Postgraduate
11 1 (0.12%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 247 (28.92%) Data Quality
2 34 (3.98%) GDPR
3 32 (3.75%) QA
4 7 (0.82%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.47%) MiFID
5 4 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 2 (0.23%) EMIR
6 2 (0.23%) GMP
6 2 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.23%) SLA
7 1 (0.12%) GRC
7 1 (0.12%) GxP
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 52 (6.09%) Docker
2 3 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.12%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.12%) RACF
Systems Management
1 127 (14.87%) Terraform
2 33 (3.86%) Kubernetes
3 9 (1.05%) Grafana
4 4 (0.47%) Kibana
5 2 (0.23%) Ansible
5 2 (0.23%) Thomson Reuters DACS
6 1 (0.12%) Kubeflow
6 1 (0.12%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 204 (23.89%) Databricks
2 129 (15.11%) Microsoft
3 47 (5.50%) Informatica
4 43 (5.04%) Google
5 38 (4.45%) Oracle
6 13 (1.52%) SAP
7 10 (1.17%) Denodo
7 10 (1.17%) IBM
7 10 (1.17%) Palantir
7 10 (1.17%) Talend
8 9 (1.05%) Foundry
8 9 (1.05%) Salesforce
9 8 (0.94%) ServiceNow
10 7 (0.82%) Alteryx
10 7 (0.82%) Bloomberg
11 6 (0.70%) Amplitude
11 6 (0.70%) MuleSoft
12 4 (0.47%) Cloudera
12 4 (0.47%) Hortonworks
12 4 (0.47%) Splunk