Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in the City of London

Data Engineer
Central London > City of London

The median Data Engineer daily rate in the City of London is £555, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 15 October 2026.

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

6 months to
15 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 53 71 72
Rank change year-on-year +18 +1 +1
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 96 56 55
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.44% 3.25% 2.58%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.73% 3.45% 2.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 76 41 36
10th Percentile £400 £300 £444
25th Percentile £425 £413 £512
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £555 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +5.71% -8.70% +0.88%
75th Percentile £675 £583 £675
90th Percentile £750 £688 £734
Central London median daily rate £555 £525 £575
% change year-on-year +5.71% -8.70% -2.13%

All Contract IT Job Roles
City of London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the City of 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 the City of London with a recognized job title 2,029 1,621 1,994
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.94% 94.03% 93.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,384 1,115 1,235
10th Percentile £363 £326 £363
25th Percentile £453 £424 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -2.95%
75th Percentile £675 £675 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £783
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £575
% change year-on-year - -4.35% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 18 16
10th Percentile - £16.90 £17.25
25th Percentile £17.60 £20.63 £26.03
Median hourly rate £21.00 £27.04 £48.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.32% -43.68% +26.32%
75th Percentile £31.00 £35.88 £112.00
90th Percentile £61.50 £64.30 £137.50
Central London median hourly rate £25.00 £27.04 £35.00
% change year-on-year -7.53% -22.76% -5.41%

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the City of 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 the City of London.

Data Engineer job vacancy trend in the City of London

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in the City of London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in the City of London

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in the City of London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineer in the City of London over the 6 months to 15 October 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineer in the City of London

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in the City of London.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in the City of London

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

For the 6 months to 15 October 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 City of London region featuring Data Engineer in the job title.

1 62 (64.58%) SQL
2 58 (60.42%) Python
3 56 (58.33%) Data Engineering
4 50 (52.08%) Data Pipeline
5 39 (40.63%) CI/CD
6 38 (39.58%) Analytics
7 37 (38.54%) Azure
7 37 (38.54%) Data Modelling
8 35 (36.46%) Data Quality
9 34 (35.42%) ETL
10 29 (30.21%) Databricks
11 24 (25.00%) AWS
11 24 (25.00%) DevOps
12 23 (23.96%) Migration
13 21 (21.88%) Data Governance
14 20 (20.83%) Azure Data Factory
15 18 (18.75%) Data Warehouse
15 18 (18.75%) PySpark
16 17 (17.71%) Agile
16 17 (17.71%) Performance Optimisation
17 16 (16.67%) AI
17 16 (16.67%) Apache Airflow
18 15 (15.63%) Infrastructure as Code
18 15 (15.63%) Power Platform
18 15 (15.63%) Serverless
19 14 (14.58%) Data Transformation
19 14 (14.58%) Validation
20 13 (13.54%) Amazon S3
20 13 (13.54%) AWS Lambda
20 13 (13.54%) Business Intelligence

Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the City of 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 16 (16.67%) Apache Airflow
2 11 (11.46%) Apache Spark
3 6 (6.25%) Apache
4 2 (2.08%) Confluence
5 1 (1.04%) SAS
Business Applications
1 2 (2.08%) Aladdin
2 1 (1.04%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 37 (38.54%) Azure
2 24 (25.00%) AWS
3 20 (20.83%) Azure Data Factory
4 15 (15.63%) Power Platform
4 15 (15.63%) Serverless
5 13 (13.54%) Amazon S3
5 13 (13.54%) AWS Lambda
5 13 (13.54%) dbt
6 11 (11.46%) GCP
6 11 (11.46%) Snowflake
7 10 (10.42%) Azure Databricks
7 10 (10.42%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 10 (10.42%) GitHub
8 9 (9.38%) Azure DevOps
9 8 (8.33%) GitHub Actions
10 6 (6.25%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 6 (6.25%) Amazon EKS
10 6 (6.25%) Amazon EventBridge
10 6 (6.25%) AWS Step Functions
11 5 (5.21%) Amazon Kinesis
Database & Business Intelligence
1 18 (18.75%) Data Warehouse
2 13 (13.54%) Power BI
3 11 (11.46%) Amazon Athena
4 8 (8.33%) Amazon RDS
4 8 (8.33%) Data Lake
4 8 (8.33%) Metadata
5 6 (6.25%) BigQuery
5 6 (6.25%) Delta Lake
5 6 (6.25%) SQL Server
6 5 (5.21%) Amazon Redshift
7 4 (4.17%) Azure SQL Database
7 4 (4.17%) Data Mart
7 4 (4.17%) Oracle Database
8 3 (3.13%) Tableau
9 2 (2.08%) Parquet
9 2 (2.08%) Snowflake Schema
9 2 (2.08%) Spark SQL
10 1 (1.04%) Looker
10 1 (1.04%) Mixpanel
10 1 (1.04%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 9 (9.38%) Git
2 7 (7.29%) Bitbucket
3 5 (5.21%) GitLab
4 2 (2.08%) Atlassian Bamboo
4 2 (2.08%) JIRA
4 2 (2.08%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
5 1 (1.04%) CircleCI
5 1 (1.04%) Jenkins
5 1 (1.04%) Terragrunt
General
1 38 (39.58%) Finance
2 18 (18.75%) Social Skills
3 15 (15.63%) Analytical Skills
4 14 (14.58%) Banking
5 6 (6.25%) Back Office
6 5 (5.21%) Public Sector
7 4 (4.17%) Front Office
8 3 (3.13%) Investment Banking
9 2 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
9 2 (2.08%) Pharmaceutical
10 1 (1.04%) Advertising
10 1 (1.04%) Billing
10 1 (1.04%) General Ledger
10 1 (1.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 1 (1.04%) Legal
10 1 (1.04%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 18 (18.75%) PySpark
2 13 (13.54%) Terraform
3 9 (9.38%) Kafka
4 5 (5.21%) ActiveMQ
4 5 (5.21%) RabbitMQ
5 3 (3.13%) Spring
5 3 (3.13%) Spring Boot
6 2 (2.08%) JSON
6 2 (2.08%) XML
7 1 (1.04%) EDI
7 1 (1.04%) FastAPI
7 1 (1.04%) Middleware
7 1 (1.04%) REST
7 1 (1.04%) SOAP
7 1 (1.04%) XSLT
Miscellaneous
1 24 (25.00%) Cloud Native
2 5 (5.21%) Legacy Systems
3 4 (4.17%) Data Structures
3 4 (4.17%) Onboarding
4 3 (3.13%) Distributed Computing
5 2 (2.08%) AI Agents
5 2 (2.08%) Enterprise Software
5 2 (2.08%) PropTech
5 2 (2.08%) Reinsurance
6 1 (1.04%) Algorithms
6 1 (1.04%) Analytical Mindset
6 1 (1.04%) Data Centre
6 1 (1.04%) Distributed Systems
6 1 (1.04%) Enterprise Cloud
6 1 (1.04%) Fixed Income
6 1 (1.04%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 1 (1.04%) Legacy Code
6 1 (1.04%) NHS
6 1 (1.04%) Product Ownership
6 1 (1.04%) Virtual Team
Processes & Methodologies
1 56 (58.33%) Data Engineering
2 50 (52.08%) Data Pipeline
3 39 (40.63%) CI/CD
4 38 (39.58%) Analytics
5 37 (38.54%) Data Modelling
6 34 (35.42%) ETL
7 24 (25.00%) DevOps
8 23 (23.96%) Migration
9 21 (21.88%) Data Governance
10 17 (17.71%) Agile
10 17 (17.71%) Performance Optimisation
11 16 (16.67%) AI
12 15 (15.63%) Infrastructure as Code
13 14 (14.58%) Data Transformation
13 14 (14.58%) Validation
14 13 (13.54%) Business Intelligence
14 13 (13.54%) Data Architecture
14 13 (13.54%) Platform Engineering
14 13 (13.54%) Stakeholder Management
15 12 (12.50%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 62 (64.58%) SQL
2 58 (60.42%) Python
3 7 (7.29%) Scala
4 6 (6.25%) Java
5 3 (3.13%) Korn
5 3 (3.13%) PowerShell
6 2 (2.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 2 (2.08%) T-SQL
7 1 (1.04%) Bicep
7 1 (1.04%) C
7 1 (1.04%) C#
7 1 (1.04%) PL/SQL
7 1 (1.04%) R
Qualifications
1 13 (13.54%) Security Cleared
2 11 (11.46%) SC Cleared
3 5 (5.21%) DBS Check
4 2 (2.08%) AWS Certification
4 2 (2.08%) BPSS Clearance
4 2 (2.08%) DV Cleared
4 2 (2.08%) Microsoft Certification
4 2 (2.08%) SnowPro
5 1 (1.04%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
5 1 (1.04%) AWS Certified Developer
5 1 (1.04%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 35 (36.46%) Data Quality
2 5 (5.21%) QA
3 3 (3.13%) GDPR
4 2 (2.08%) Accessibility
4 2 (2.08%) EMIR
4 2 (2.08%) MiFID
System Software
1 4 (4.17%) Docker
Systems Management
1 5 (5.21%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 29 (30.21%) Databricks
2 13 (13.54%) Microsoft
3 7 (7.29%) Oracle
4 3 (3.13%) Google
4 3 (3.13%) Informatica
4 3 (3.13%) Palantir
5 2 (2.08%) Salesforce
5 2 (2.08%) SAP
6 1 (1.04%) Amplitude
6 1 (1.04%) Cribl.io
6 1 (1.04%) Dell
6 1 (1.04%) Dynatrace
6 1 (1.04%) HubSpot
6 1 (1.04%) IBM
6 1 (1.04%) MuleSoft
6 1 (1.04%) NetApp
6 1 (1.04%) OpenAI
6 1 (1.04%) ServiceNow
6 1 (1.04%) Teradata