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 September 2026.

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

6 months to
21 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 65 97 86
Rank change year-on-year +32 -11 +11
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 820 401 470
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.07% 3.00% 2.89%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.37% 3.23% 3.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 609 295 344
10th Percentile £375 £380 £413
25th Percentile £447 £450 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -
75th Percentile £625 £611 £653
90th Percentile £713 £700 £751
England median daily rate £500 £504 £550
% change year-on-year -0.79% -8.36% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 9 4
10th Percentile £30.00 £33.23 -
25th Percentile £31.21 £42.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £34.84 £52.50 £72.75
Median % change year-on-year -33.64% -27.84% +20.25%
75th Percentile £41.52 £62.50 £97.50
90th Percentile £58.75 £110.00 -
England median hourly rate £41.56 £48.00 £80.00
% change year-on-year -13.43% -40.00% +29.55%

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 18,782 12,397 15,304
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.25% 92.74% 94.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,136 8,290 10,213
10th Percentile £363 £331 £343
25th Percentile £450 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £545 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.92% -0.91% -4.35%
75th Percentile £660 £675 £675
90th Percentile £775 £775 £800
England median daily rate £525 £510 £525
% change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 395 204 180
10th Percentile £17.39 £17.00 £17.48
25th Percentile £22.00 £22.98 £23.80
Median hourly rate £40.00 £29.54 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.43% -15.61% -3.50%
75th Percentile £63.10 £50.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £81.25 £65.40 £75.13
England median hourly rate £44.46 £25.15 £46.18
% change year-on-year +76.76% -45.54% +2.62%

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 September 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 September 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 September 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 +15 106 £565 +6.35% 108
West London -15 12 £450 -14.29% 23
East London +8 5 £450 - 13
South London -6 4 £475 +3.83% 10
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 21 September 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.

1 457 (55.73%) SQL
2 454 (55.37%) Python
3 393 (47.93%) Data Pipeline
4 389 (47.44%) Data Engineering
5 307 (37.44%) Data Modelling
5 307 (37.44%) ETL
6 306 (37.32%) Analytics
7 303 (36.95%) AWS
8 292 (35.61%) Azure
9 251 (30.61%) Data Quality
10 248 (30.24%) CI/CD
11 196 (23.90%) Databricks
12 178 (21.71%) Security Cleared
13 168 (20.49%) Data Warehouse
14 167 (20.37%) Agile
15 161 (19.63%) AI
15 161 (19.63%) DevOps
16 160 (19.51%) SC Cleared
17 158 (19.27%) dbt
18 149 (18.17%) Snowflake
19 148 (18.05%) PySpark
20 147 (17.93%) Apache Airflow
21 135 (16.46%) Data Governance
22 129 (15.73%) Business Intelligence
23 126 (15.37%) Migration
24 125 (15.24%) Data Transformation
25 118 (14.39%) Power Platform
26 116 (14.15%) Power BI
26 116 (14.15%) Terraform
27 115 (14.02%) Azure Data Factory

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
1 147 (17.93%) Apache Airflow
2 100 (12.20%) Apache Spark
3 84 (10.24%) Apache
4 13 (1.59%) Confluence
5 10 (1.22%) Palantir Foundry
5 10 (1.22%) SharePoint
6 7 (0.85%) SAS
7 5 (0.61%) Jupyter
8 2 (0.24%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.12%) Luigi
9 1 (0.12%) Oracle Workflow
9 1 (0.12%) PowerExchange
9 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
Applications
1 10 (1.22%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.24%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 11 (1.34%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.24%) Maximo
2 2 (0.24%) NetSuite
2 2 (0.24%) SAP BPC
2 2 (0.24%) SAP Oil and Gas
2 2 (0.24%) SimCorp Dimension
2 2 (0.24%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 1 (0.12%) BambooHR
3 1 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.12%) Dynamics NAV
3 1 (0.12%) FIS Private Capital Suite
3 1 (0.12%) Markit EDM
3 1 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.12%) Oracle Retail
3 1 (0.12%) Raiser’s Edge
3 1 (0.12%) Sage X3
3 1 (0.12%) SAP CAR
3 1 (0.12%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 303 (36.95%) AWS
2 292 (35.61%) Azure
3 158 (19.27%) dbt
4 149 (18.17%) Snowflake
5 118 (14.39%) Power Platform
6 115 (14.02%) Azure Data Factory
7 112 (13.66%) GCP
8 110 (13.41%) Amazon S3
9 81 (9.88%) Azure DevOps
10 76 (9.27%) Serverless
11 75 (9.15%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 72 (8.78%) AWS Lambda
13 71 (8.66%) GitHub
14 34 (4.15%) Azure Databricks
15 31 (3.78%) GitHub Actions
16 29 (3.54%) Amazon EMR
17 22 (2.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 19 (2.32%) Dagster
18 19 (2.32%) Microsoft Purview
19 17 (2.07%) Amazon Kinesis
Database & Business Intelligence
1 168 (20.49%) Data Warehouse
2 116 (14.15%) Power BI
3 85 (10.37%) Data Lake
4 79 (9.63%) BigQuery
5 61 (7.44%) Metadata
6 57 (6.95%) Delta Lake
7 49 (5.98%) Amazon Redshift
8 48 (5.85%) Amazon Athena
9 43 (5.24%) PostgreSQL
10 42 (5.12%) Big Data
11 41 (5.00%) SQL Server
12 39 (4.76%) NoSQL
12 39 (4.76%) Snowflake Schema
13 36 (4.39%) Tableau
14 29 (3.54%) Relational Database
15 25 (3.05%) Amazon RDS
16 24 (2.93%) Spark SQL
17 22 (2.68%) MongoDB
18 20 (2.44%) Azure SQL Database
18 20 (2.44%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 94 (11.46%) Git
2 28 (3.41%) GitLab
3 19 (2.32%) JIRA
4 12 (1.46%) MLflow
5 8 (0.98%) Bitbucket
5 8 (0.98%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.73%) Selenium
7 5 (0.61%) SonarQube
8 3 (0.37%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 3 (0.37%) Claude Code
8 3 (0.37%) ERwin
8 3 (0.37%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.24%) Terragrunt
10 1 (0.12%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.12%) GoCD
10 1 (0.12%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.12%) Postman
10 1 (0.12%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 218 (26.59%) Finance
2 137 (16.71%) Social Skills
3 99 (12.07%) Analytical Skills
4 75 (9.15%) Banking
5 48 (5.85%) Public Sector
6 19 (2.32%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 16 (1.95%) Retail
8 15 (1.83%) Front Office
9 14 (1.71%) Pharmaceutical
10 11 (1.34%) Marketing
11 10 (1.22%) Back Office
12 8 (0.98%) Telecoms
13 6 (0.73%) Legal
13 6 (0.73%) Manufacturing
14 5 (0.61%) Financial Institution
14 5 (0.61%) Investment Banking
14 5 (0.61%) Local Government
15 4 (0.49%) Aerospace
15 4 (0.49%) Documentation Skills
15 4 (0.49%) Games
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 148 (18.05%) PySpark
2 116 (14.15%) Terraform
3 75 (9.15%) Kafka
4 19 (2.32%) Spring
4 19 (2.32%) Spring Boot
5 16 (1.95%) REST
6 15 (1.83%) Apache Beam
6 15 (1.83%) Pandas
7 13 (1.59%) Great Expectations
8 12 (1.46%) React
9 10 (1.22%) Microsoft Graph
10 9 (1.10%) PyTorch
11 8 (0.98%) pytest
11 8 (0.98%) YAML
12 7 (0.85%) .NET
12 7 (0.85%) JSON
12 7 (0.85%) LangChain
12 7 (0.85%) NumPy
13 6 (0.73%) HTML
13 6 (0.73%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 95 (11.59%) Cloud Native
2 36 (4.39%) Legacy Systems
3 31 (3.78%) Data Structures
4 30 (3.66%) Onboarding
5 17 (2.07%) AI Agents
6 16 (1.95%) Product Ownership
6 16 (1.95%) Reinsurance
7 15 (1.83%) Distributed Systems
8 12 (1.46%) NHS
9 11 (1.34%) Algorithms
9 11 (1.34%) Greenfield Project
10 8 (0.98%) Virtual Team
11 7 (0.85%) Reference Data
11 7 (0.85%) Replication
12 6 (0.73%) Analytical Mindset
12 6 (0.73%) Clustering
12 6 (0.73%) Distributed Computing
13 5 (0.61%) Enterprise Software
13 5 (0.61%) Life Science
14 4 (0.49%) Data Protection Act
Operating Systems
1 21 (2.56%) Linux
2 14 (1.71%) Unix
3 1 (0.12%) Robot Operating System
3 1 (0.12%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 393 (47.93%) Data Pipeline
2 389 (47.44%) Data Engineering
3 307 (37.44%) Data Modelling
3 307 (37.44%) ETL
4 306 (37.32%) Analytics
5 248 (30.24%) CI/CD
6 167 (20.37%) Agile
7 161 (19.63%) AI
7 161 (19.63%) DevOps
8 135 (16.46%) Data Governance
9 129 (15.73%) Business Intelligence
10 126 (15.37%) Migration
11 125 (15.24%) Data Transformation
12 107 (13.05%) Validation
13 104 (12.68%) Machine Learning
14 100 (12.20%) Data Science
15 98 (11.95%) Infrastructure as Code
16 94 (11.46%) Lakehouse
17 91 (11.10%) Performance Optimisation
18 83 (10.12%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 457 (55.73%) SQL
2 454 (55.37%) Python
3 72 (8.78%) Java
4 59 (7.20%) Scala
5 19 (2.32%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 17 (2.07%) PowerShell
7 16 (1.95%) T-SQL
8 15 (1.83%) JavaScript
9 13 (1.59%) Shell Script
10 12 (1.46%) PL/SQL
11 10 (1.22%) C#
11 10 (1.22%) R
12 9 (1.10%) TypeScript
13 6 (0.73%) Bicep
13 6 (0.73%) Go
14 5 (0.61%) Bash
14 5 (0.61%) Korn
15 3 (0.37%) LookML
16 2 (0.24%) Cypher
17 1 (0.12%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 178 (21.71%) Security Cleared
2 160 (19.51%) SC Cleared
3 20 (2.44%) Degree
4 19 (2.32%) BPSS Clearance
5 17 (2.07%) Azure Certification
6 10 (1.22%) Computer Science Degree
7 9 (1.10%) AWS Certification
8 8 (0.98%) DBS Check
9 7 (0.85%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 7 (0.85%) DV Cleared
10 4 (0.49%) Master's Degree
10 4 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
10 4 (0.49%) SnowPro
11 1 (0.12%) CISA
11 1 (0.12%) CISM
11 1 (0.12%) CISSP
11 1 (0.12%) Numerate Degree
11 1 (0.12%) PMI Certification
11 1 (0.12%) PMP
11 1 (0.12%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 251 (30.61%) Data Quality
2 32 (3.90%) QA
3 19 (2.32%) GDPR
4 10 (1.22%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 3 (0.37%) MiFID
7 2 (0.24%) EMIR
7 2 (0.24%) SLA
8 1 (0.12%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.12%) IFRS
8 1 (0.12%) IFRS 17
8 1 (0.12%) IFRS 9
8 1 (0.12%) PMO
8 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 71 (8.66%) Docker
2 3 (0.37%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.12%) RACF
3 1 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 48 (5.85%) Kubernetes
2 9 (1.10%) Control-M
2 9 (1.10%) Grafana
3 7 (0.85%) Ansible
4 5 (0.61%) Kibana
5 2 (0.24%) Puppet
6 1 (0.12%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 196 (23.90%) Databricks
2 115 (14.02%) Microsoft
3 45 (5.49%) Google
4 43 (5.24%) Oracle
5 40 (4.88%) Informatica
6 18 (2.20%) Foundry
7 17 (2.07%) Palantir
8 13 (1.59%) Salesforce
9 11 (1.34%) Talend
10 10 (1.22%) Denodo
11 9 (1.10%) Bloomberg
11 9 (1.10%) Splunk
12 7 (0.85%) OpenAI
12 7 (0.85%) SAP
13 6 (0.73%) Amplitude
13 6 (0.73%) SnapLogic
14 5 (0.61%) Mistral
14 5 (0.61%) New Relic
15 4 (0.49%) Alteryx
15 4 (0.49%) IBM