Senior Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in London

Senior Data Engineer
England > London

The median Senior Data Engineer daily rate in London is £550, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 14 October 2026.

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

6 months to
14 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 285 282 308
Rank change year-on-year -3 +26 +65
Contract jobs requiring a Senior Data Engineer 180 79 80
As % of all contract jobs in London 0.88% 0.59% 0.50%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.94% 0.64% 0.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 137 57 61
10th Percentile £421 £425 £468
25th Percentile £450 £500 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -7.69%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £650
90th Percentile £768 £715 £675
England median daily rate £538 £560 £600
% change year-on-year -4.02% -6.67% -6.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 3 3
10th Percentile - £70.00 -
25th Percentile £71.25 £81.25 £92.50
Median hourly rate £72.50 £105.00 £95.00
Median % change year-on-year -30.95% +10.53% +11.76%
75th Percentile £73.75 £110.00 £97.50
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £68.00 £92.50 £95.00
% change year-on-year -26.49% -2.63% +26.67%

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 19,079 12,384 15,047
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.04% 92.45% 94.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,336 8,275 9,801
10th Percentile £363 £334 £340
25th Percentile £450 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £543 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.29% -1.27% -4.35%
75th Percentile £663 £663 £675
90th Percentile £775 £775 £800
England median daily rate £525 £510 £525
% change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 423 209 173
10th Percentile £16.96 £17.00 £17.30
25th Percentile £21.93 £22.50 £24.15
Median hourly rate £41.00 £27.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +51.85% -22.86% -13.58%
75th Percentile £65.30 £49.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £81.25 £68.00 £79.75
England median hourly rate £42.31 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.23% -41.51% -6.89%

Senior Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Senior Data Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in London.

Senior Data Engineer job vacancy trend in London

Senior Data Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Senior Data Engineer job vacancies in London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Senior Data Engineer job vacancies in London

Senior Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Senior Data Engineer in London over the 6 months to 14 October 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Senior Data Engineer in London

Senior Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Senior Data Engineer job vacancies in London.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Senior Data Engineer job vacancies in London

Senior 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 Senior Data Engineer within the London region over the 6 months to 14 October 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 -8 21 £600 +8.11% 22
West London -22 3 £485 -2.27% 1
South London - 2 £438 -
East London +4 1 £450 -
Senior Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 14 October 2026, Senior 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 Senior Data Engineer in the job title.

1 127 (70.56%) SQL
2 116 (64.44%) Python
3 101 (56.11%) AWS
4 97 (53.89%) Data Pipeline
5 93 (51.67%) Data Engineering
6 84 (46.67%) Data Modelling
7 83 (46.11%) ETL
8 75 (41.67%) CI/CD
9 73 (40.56%) Azure
9 73 (40.56%) Data Quality
10 60 (33.33%) Analytics
11 58 (32.22%) Databricks
12 55 (30.56%) PySpark
13 54 (30.00%) Data Warehouse
14 49 (27.22%) Agile
14 49 (27.22%) dbt
15 48 (26.67%) DevOps
16 45 (25.00%) Snowflake
17 44 (24.44%) AI
18 43 (23.89%) Lakehouse
19 42 (23.33%) Machine Learning
20 40 (22.22%) Apache Airflow
20 40 (22.22%) GCP
21 39 (21.67%) Apache Spark
22 37 (20.56%) Terraform
23 36 (20.00%) Infrastructure as Code
24 35 (19.44%) Git
24 35 (19.44%) Kafka
24 35 (19.44%) Security Cleared
25 33 (18.33%) Amazon S3

Senior 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 40 (22.22%) Apache Airflow
2 39 (21.67%) Apache Spark
3 31 (17.22%) Apache
4 6 (3.33%) Confluence
5 4 (2.22%) Jupyter
6 3 (1.67%) SAS
7 1 (0.56%) Luigi
7 1 (0.56%) SharePoint
Applications
1 2 (1.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.56%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 3 (1.67%) Aladdin
2 2 (1.11%) SAP BPC
2 2 (1.11%) SAP Oil and Gas
2 2 (1.11%) SimCorp Dimension
2 2 (1.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 1 (0.56%) FIS Private Capital Suite
3 1 (0.56%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.56%) SAP CAR
3 1 (0.56%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 101 (56.11%) AWS
2 73 (40.56%) Azure
3 49 (27.22%) dbt
4 45 (25.00%) Snowflake
5 40 (22.22%) GCP
6 33 (18.33%) Amazon S3
7 27 (15.00%) GitHub
7 27 (15.00%) Power Platform
8 19 (10.56%) Azure Data Factory
8 19 (10.56%) Azure DevOps
8 19 (10.56%) Serverless
9 18 (10.00%) AWS Lambda
9 18 (10.00%) GitHub Actions
10 14 (7.78%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 12 (6.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 12 (6.67%) Amazon EC2
11 12 (6.67%) Amazon Kinesis
12 11 (6.11%) Amazon EMR
13 7 (3.89%) AWS Step Functions
13 7 (3.89%) Dagster
Database & Business Intelligence
1 54 (30.00%) Data Warehouse
2 27 (15.00%) Power BI
3 23 (12.78%) Data Lake
3 23 (12.78%) Delta Lake
4 21 (11.67%) Amazon Athena
4 21 (11.67%) Amazon Redshift
5 20 (11.11%) BigQuery
6 16 (8.89%) Metadata
7 13 (7.22%) Snowflake Schema
8 12 (6.67%) NoSQL
9 11 (6.11%) Data Vault
10 10 (5.56%) Apache Iceberg
11 9 (5.00%) Big Data
11 9 (5.00%) Relational Database
12 8 (4.44%) PostgreSQL
12 8 (4.44%) SQL Server
12 8 (4.44%) Star Schema
13 7 (3.89%) Amazon RDS
14 5 (2.78%) Hadoop
14 5 (2.78%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 35 (19.44%) Git
2 10 (5.56%) GitLab
3 7 (3.89%) JIRA
4 5 (2.78%) Bitbucket
5 3 (1.67%) MLflow
5 3 (1.67%) SonarQube
6 2 (1.11%) ERwin
6 2 (1.11%) Terragrunt
7 1 (0.56%) Jenkins
7 1 (0.56%) Liquibase
7 1 (0.56%) Selenium
General
1 63 (35.00%) Finance
2 30 (16.67%) Social Skills
3 28 (15.56%) Analytical Skills
4 19 (10.56%) Banking
5 10 (5.56%) Public Sector
6 6 (3.33%) Back Office
6 6 (3.33%) Investment Banking
6 6 (3.33%) Pharmaceutical
6 6 (3.33%) Retail
7 4 (2.22%) Financial Institution
7 4 (2.22%) Front Office
8 3 (1.67%) Aerospace
8 3 (1.67%) Aviation
9 2 (1.11%) General Ledger
9 2 (1.11%) Legal
9 2 (1.11%) Manufacturing
9 2 (1.11%) Marketing
9 2 (1.11%) Military
10 1 (0.56%) Automotive
10 1 (0.56%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 55 (30.56%) PySpark
2 37 (20.56%) Terraform
3 35 (19.44%) Kafka
4 5 (2.78%) Apache Beam
4 5 (2.78%) OAuth
4 5 (2.78%) OpenID
4 5 (2.78%) PyTorch
4 5 (2.78%) REST
5 4 (2.22%) ActiveMQ
5 4 (2.22%) Great Expectations
5 4 (2.22%) Pandas
5 4 (2.22%) pytest
5 4 (2.22%) RabbitMQ
5 4 (2.22%) Spark Streaming
5 4 (2.22%) XGBoost
6 2 (1.11%) .NET
6 2 (1.11%) AngularJS
6 2 (1.11%) GraphQL
6 2 (1.11%) React
6 2 (1.11%) Redux
Miscellaneous
1 29 (16.11%) Cloud Native
2 9 (5.00%) Data Structures
2 9 (5.00%) Onboarding
3 7 (3.89%) Algorithms
4 6 (3.33%) AI Agents
4 6 (3.33%) Distributed Computing
4 6 (3.33%) Product Ownership
5 5 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
6 3 (1.67%) Distributed Architecture
6 3 (1.67%) PropTech
6 3 (1.67%) Reinsurance
7 2 (1.11%) Enterprise Software
7 2 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
7 2 (1.11%) Reference Data
7 2 (1.11%) Replication
8 1 (0.56%) Clustering
8 1 (0.56%) Life Science
8 1 (0.56%) Management Information System
8 1 (0.56%) Marketing Technology
8 1 (0.56%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 5 (2.78%) Linux
1 5 (2.78%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 97 (53.89%) Data Pipeline
2 93 (51.67%) Data Engineering
3 84 (46.67%) Data Modelling
4 83 (46.11%) ETL
5 75 (41.67%) CI/CD
6 60 (33.33%) Analytics
7 49 (27.22%) Agile
8 48 (26.67%) DevOps
9 44 (24.44%) AI
10 43 (23.89%) Lakehouse
11 42 (23.33%) Machine Learning
12 36 (20.00%) Infrastructure as Code
13 32 (17.78%) Data Governance
14 29 (16.11%) Business Intelligence
15 28 (15.56%) Data Transformation
15 28 (15.56%) Validation
16 27 (15.00%) Data Science
17 26 (14.44%) Performance Optimisation
18 25 (13.89%) Decision-Making
18 25 (13.89%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 127 (70.56%) SQL
2 116 (64.44%) Python
3 11 (6.11%) Scala
4 10 (5.56%) Java
5 5 (2.78%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 5 (2.78%) Go
6 4 (2.22%) PL/SQL
6 4 (2.22%) T-SQL
7 3 (1.67%) JavaScript
7 3 (1.67%) Shell Script
8 2 (1.11%) C#
9 1 (0.56%) Bash
9 1 (0.56%) Bicep
9 1 (0.56%) Cypher
9 1 (0.56%) Korn
9 1 (0.56%) PowerShell
9 1 (0.56%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 35 (19.44%) Security Cleared
2 30 (16.67%) SC Cleared
3 5 (2.78%) AWS Certification
3 5 (2.78%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
4 4 (2.22%) Degree
5 3 (1.67%) Azure Certification
5 3 (1.67%) BPSS Clearance
5 3 (1.67%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (1.11%) DV Cleared
6 2 (1.11%) Master's Degree
7 1 (0.56%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 73 (40.56%) Data Quality
2 5 (2.78%) QA
3 2 (1.11%) GDPR
4 1 (0.56%) IFRS
4 1 (0.56%) IFRS 17
4 1 (0.56%) IFRS 9
4 1 (0.56%) PMO
System Software
1 15 (8.33%) Docker
2 1 (0.56%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 16 (8.89%) Kubernetes
2 5 (2.78%) Control-M
3 1 (0.56%) Grafana
Vendors
1 58 (32.22%) Databricks
2 22 (12.22%) Microsoft
3 18 (10.00%) Informatica
4 11 (6.11%) Google
5 9 (5.00%) Oracle
6 6 (3.33%) Denodo
6 6 (3.33%) SAP
6 6 (3.33%) SnapLogic
7 2 (1.11%) SimCorp
7 2 (1.11%) Sparx
7 2 (1.11%) Teradata
8 1 (0.56%) Alteryx
8 1 (0.56%) Anaplan
8 1 (0.56%) Dynatrace
8 1 (0.56%) Foundry
8 1 (0.56%) MicroStrategy
8 1 (0.56%) PagerDuty
8 1 (0.56%) Sybase
8 1 (0.56%) Tagetik
8 1 (0.56%) Talend