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 £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 30 December 2025.

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

6 months to
30 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 65 72 68
Rank change year-on-year +7 -4 +37
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 60 50 68
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 3.26% 2.47% 2.74%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.49% 2.66% 2.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 49 31 58
10th Percentile £313 £463 £385
25th Percentile £409 £511 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -
75th Percentile £600 £638 £638
90th Percentile £710 £738 £779
Central London median daily rate £525 £575 £558
% change year-on-year -8.70% +3.14% +1.36%

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 1,718 1,883 2,330
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.47% 92.94% 93.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,200 1,155 1,668
10th Percentile £331 £363 £350
25th Percentile £424 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £540 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -6.09% - -
75th Percentile £675 £677 £688
90th Percentile £775 £788 £790
Central London median daily rate £550 £575 £564
% change year-on-year -4.35% +2.00% -1.96%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 12 14
10th Percentile £20.18 £14.80 £17.00
25th Percentile £26.25 £22.00 £19.51
Median hourly rate £34.00 £48.00 £24.50
Median % change year-on-year -29.17% +95.92% -24.62%
75th Percentile £42.65 £112.00 £44.56
90th Percentile £52.50 £134.95 £66.25
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £35.00 £25.50
% change year-on-year -25.40% +37.25% -12.07%

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 30 December 2025.

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 30 December 2025, 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 36 (60.00%) SQL
2 33 (55.00%) Python
3 32 (53.33%) Data Pipeline
4 30 (50.00%) ETL
5 27 (45.00%) AWS
5 27 (45.00%) Azure
6 23 (38.33%) Data Quality
7 22 (36.67%) Databricks
8 19 (31.67%) Data Modelling
9 17 (28.33%) Data Engineering
10 16 (26.67%) Analytics
10 16 (26.67%) CI/CD
11 15 (25.00%) Data Warehouse
11 15 (25.00%) Security Cleared
12 13 (21.67%) Business Intelligence
12 13 (21.67%) Data Governance
13 12 (20.00%) Apache Airflow
13 12 (20.00%) PySpark
13 12 (20.00%) SC Cleared
14 11 (18.33%) Amazon S3
14 11 (18.33%) Data Science
14 11 (18.33%) Power BI
14 11 (18.33%) Power Platform
15 10 (16.67%) Data Integration
15 10 (16.67%) Data Lake
15 10 (16.67%) DevOps
15 10 (16.67%) Microsoft
15 10 (16.67%) Snowflake
16 9 (15.00%) dbt
17 8 (13.33%) Azure Synapse Analytics

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 12 (20.00%) Apache Airflow
2 6 (10.00%) Apache
3 5 (8.33%) Apache Spark
4 1 (1.67%) Confluence
4 1 (1.67%) Oracle SOA Suite
4 1 (1.67%) SAS
Applications
1 2 (3.33%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (1.67%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (1.67%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 1 (1.67%) Aladdin
1 1 (1.67%) Maximo
1 1 (1.67%) Oracle BPM
Cloud Services
1 27 (45.00%) AWS
1 27 (45.00%) Azure
2 11 (18.33%) Amazon S3
2 11 (18.33%) Power Platform
3 10 (16.67%) Snowflake
4 9 (15.00%) dbt
5 8 (13.33%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 7 (11.67%) Serverless
7 6 (10.00%) AWS Lambda
7 6 (10.00%) Azure Data Factory
7 6 (10.00%) GCP
8 4 (6.67%) Azure DevOps
9 3 (5.00%) AWS Step Functions
9 3 (5.00%) GitHub
10 2 (3.33%) Amazon EventBridge
10 2 (3.33%) Dagster
10 2 (3.33%) GitHub Actions
10 2 (3.33%) Microsoft Purview
10 2 (3.33%) Prefect
10 2 (3.33%) Textract
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.67%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 15 (25.00%) Data Warehouse
2 11 (18.33%) Power BI
3 10 (16.67%) Data Lake
4 6 (10.00%) Amazon Redshift
4 6 (10.00%) Metadata
5 5 (8.33%) Amazon QuickSight
5 5 (8.33%) Delta Lake
5 5 (8.33%) Relational Database
6 4 (6.67%) Amazon Athena
6 4 (6.67%) DataStage
6 4 (6.67%) PostgreSQL
7 3 (5.00%) Snowflake Schema
7 3 (5.00%) SQL Server
7 3 (5.00%) Tableau
8 2 (3.33%) Apache Iceberg
8 2 (3.33%) Azure SQL Database
8 2 (3.33%) CockroachDB
8 2 (3.33%) DynamoDB
8 2 (3.33%) Star Schema
9 1 (1.67%) OLAP
Development Applications
1 8 (13.33%) Git
2 3 (5.00%) Jenkins
3 2 (3.33%) JIRA
4 1 (1.67%) Bitbucket
4 1 (1.67%) Jaeger
General
1 15 (25.00%) Finance
2 8 (13.33%) Social Skills
3 6 (10.00%) Banking
4 5 (8.33%) Analytical Skills
4 5 (8.33%) Front Office
4 5 (8.33%) Public Sector
5 4 (6.67%) Back Office
5 4 (6.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 4 (6.67%) Investment Banking
6 2 (3.33%) Law
7 1 (1.67%) Games
7 1 (1.67%) International Banking
7 1 (1.67%) Manufacturing
7 1 (1.67%) Organisational Skills
7 1 (1.67%) Pharmaceutical
7 1 (1.67%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (20.00%) PySpark
2 5 (8.33%) XML
3 2 (3.33%) boto
3 2 (3.33%) JSON
3 2 (3.33%) Kafka
3 2 (3.33%) NumPy
3 2 (3.33%) Pandas
3 2 (3.33%) REST
4 1 (1.67%) ActiveMQ
4 1 (1.67%) ADO
4 1 (1.67%) AWS CDK
4 1 (1.67%) EDI
4 1 (1.67%) HTML
4 1 (1.67%) Loki
4 1 (1.67%) Middleware
4 1 (1.67%) OpenTelemetry
4 1 (1.67%) XSLT
4 1 (1.67%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 4 (6.67%) Cloud Native
1 4 (6.67%) Data Structures
2 2 (3.33%) Derivative
2 2 (3.33%) Equities
2 2 (3.33%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 1 (1.67%) Greenfield Project
3 1 (1.67%) Hedge funds
3 1 (1.67%) IoT
3 1 (1.67%) Management Information System
3 1 (1.67%) Media Streaming
3 1 (1.67%) Online Games
3 1 (1.67%) Product Ownership
3 1 (1.67%) Replication
3 1 (1.67%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.67%) Linux
1 1 (1.67%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 32 (53.33%) Data Pipeline
2 30 (50.00%) ETL
3 19 (31.67%) Data Modelling
4 17 (28.33%) Data Engineering
5 16 (26.67%) Analytics
5 16 (26.67%) CI/CD
6 13 (21.67%) Business Intelligence
6 13 (21.67%) Data Governance
7 11 (18.33%) Data Science
8 10 (16.67%) Data Integration
8 10 (16.67%) DevOps
9 8 (13.33%) Data Transformation
9 8 (13.33%) Performance Tuning
10 7 (11.67%) Problem-Solving
11 6 (10.00%) Agile
11 6 (10.00%) Asset Management
11 6 (10.00%) Migration
11 6 (10.00%) Validation
12 5 (8.33%) AI
12 5 (8.33%) Performance Optimisation
Programming Languages
1 36 (60.00%) SQL
2 33 (55.00%) Python
3 7 (11.67%) Scala
4 4 (6.67%) Java
5 2 (3.33%) T-SQL
6 1 (1.67%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 1 (1.67%) Go
6 1 (1.67%) JavaScript
6 1 (1.67%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 15 (25.00%) Security Cleared
2 12 (20.00%) SC Cleared
3 4 (6.67%) Degree
4 3 (5.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (3.33%) AWS Certification
5 2 (3.33%) SnowPro
6 1 (1.67%) BPSS Clearance
6 1 (1.67%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (38.33%) Data Quality
2 1 (1.67%) Accessibility
2 1 (1.67%) Dodd-Frank
2 1 (1.67%) EMIR
2 1 (1.67%) GDPR
2 1 (1.67%) MiFID
Systems Management
1 6 (10.00%) Terraform
2 2 (3.33%) Kubernetes
3 1 (1.67%) Ambari
3 1 (1.67%) Grafana
3 1 (1.67%) Prometheus
3 1 (1.67%) Puppet
3 1 (1.67%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 22 (36.67%) Databricks
2 10 (16.67%) Microsoft
3 2 (3.33%) Oracle
3 2 (3.33%) Palantir
3 2 (3.33%) SAP
4 1 (1.67%) Foundry
4 1 (1.67%) IBM
4 1 (1.67%) Informatica
4 1 (1.67%) Splunk
4 1 (1.67%) Teradata
4 1 (1.67%) Workday