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 £550, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 30 April 2026.

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

6 months to
30 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 43 65 73
Rank change year-on-year +22 +8 +11
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 108 55 53
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.71% 3.13% 2.40%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.97% 3.37% 2.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 81 35 45
10th Percentile £325 £418 £396
25th Percentile £420 £459 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% - -12.66%
75th Percentile £600 £592 £600
90th Percentile £663 £664 £711
Central London median daily rate £550 £500 £500
% change year-on-year +10.00% - -12.28%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - £46.75
Median hourly rate £19.34 - £48.50
75th Percentile - - £50.25
90th Percentile - - -
Central London median hourly rate £19.34 - £48.50

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 2,171 1,634 2,100
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 94.76% 92.95% 94.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,455 1,024 1,491
10th Percentile £353 £352 £350
25th Percentile £450 £463 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £563
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% +2.22% -6.25%
75th Percentile £675 £684 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £792
Central London median daily rate £550 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -4.35% +4.55% -5.98%
Number of hourly rates quoted 27 13 17
10th Percentile £18.14 £22.00 £16.46
25th Percentile £18.75 £24.66 £20.22
Median hourly rate £27.50 £31.00 £23.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.29% +34.78% -34.29%
75th Percentile £52.33 £48.75 £27.50
90th Percentile £61.83 £92.75 £44.10
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £29.07 £25.78
% change year-on-year -10.18% +12.76% -26.34%

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 April 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 30 April 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 50 (46.30%) SQL
2 48 (44.44%) Data Pipeline
2 48 (44.44%) Python
3 41 (37.96%) Analytics
4 39 (36.11%) Azure
5 37 (34.26%) ETL
6 35 (32.41%) Data Engineering
7 30 (27.78%) Data Quality
8 29 (26.85%) Data Modelling
9 25 (23.15%) AWS
10 23 (21.30%) Databricks
11 22 (20.37%) Data Warehouse
12 21 (19.44%) Data Science
12 21 (19.44%) Power Platform
12 21 (19.44%) Security Cleared
13 19 (17.59%) CI/CD
13 19 (17.59%) Snowflake
13 19 (17.59%) Tableau
14 18 (16.67%) Apache Airflow
14 18 (16.67%) Business Intelligence
14 18 (16.67%) Power BI
15 17 (15.74%) SC Cleared
16 16 (14.81%) dbt
16 16 (14.81%) Microsoft
17 15 (13.89%) Data Governance
17 15 (13.89%) Performance Tuning
18 14 (12.96%) Azure Data Factory
18 14 (12.96%) GCP
18 14 (12.96%) PySpark
18 14 (12.96%) Validation

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 18 (16.67%) Apache Airflow
2 6 (5.56%) Apache
2 6 (5.56%) Apache Spark
3 1 (0.93%) Microsoft Exchange
3 1 (0.93%) SAS
3 1 (0.93%) SharePoint
Applications
1 1 (0.93%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 2 (1.85%) BambooHR
2 1 (0.93%) Aladdin
2 1 (0.93%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 39 (36.11%) Azure
2 25 (23.15%) AWS
3 21 (19.44%) Power Platform
4 19 (17.59%) Snowflake
5 16 (14.81%) dbt
6 14 (12.96%) Azure Data Factory
6 14 (12.96%) GCP
7 11 (10.19%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 10 (9.26%) Amazon S3
9 8 (7.41%) Serverless
10 7 (6.48%) AWS Lambda
11 6 (5.56%) Prefect
12 4 (3.70%) Amazon Kinesis
12 4 (3.70%) Matillion
13 3 (2.78%) Dagster
13 3 (2.78%) Fivetran
14 2 (1.85%) Amazon EventBridge
14 2 (1.85%) AWS Step Functions
14 2 (1.85%) Microsoft Purview
14 2 (1.85%) Textract
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.93%) Software-Defined Networking
1 1 (0.93%) Structured Cabling
Database & Business Intelligence
1 22 (20.37%) Data Warehouse
2 19 (17.59%) Tableau
3 18 (16.67%) Power BI
4 10 (9.26%) Metadata
5 9 (8.33%) BigQuery
6 8 (7.41%) Data Lake
6 8 (7.41%) Snowflake Schema
6 8 (7.41%) SQL Server
7 7 (6.48%) Amazon Redshift
8 5 (4.63%) Azure SQL Database
9 4 (3.70%) Looker
9 4 (3.70%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 3 (2.78%) Big Data
10 3 (2.78%) Delta Lake
10 3 (2.78%) Geospatial Data
10 3 (2.78%) PostgreSQL
11 2 (1.85%) Amazon Athena
11 2 (1.85%) Data Vault
11 2 (1.85%) DynamoDB
11 2 (1.85%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 8 (7.41%) Git
2 2 (1.85%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
3 1 (0.93%) Jaeger
3 1 (0.93%) JIRA
General
1 29 (26.85%) Finance
2 12 (11.11%) Social Skills
3 11 (10.19%) Analytical Skills
4 6 (5.56%) Banking
4 6 (5.56%) Front Office
5 4 (3.70%) Back Office
6 3 (2.78%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 3 (2.78%) Investment Banking
6 3 (2.78%) Publishing
6 3 (2.78%) Telecoms
7 2 (1.85%) Law
7 2 (1.85%) Legal
7 2 (1.85%) Pharmaceutical
7 2 (1.85%) Public Sector
8 1 (0.93%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (0.93%) Financial Institution
8 1 (0.93%) Games
8 1 (0.93%) General Ledger
8 1 (0.93%) International Banking
8 1 (0.93%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (12.96%) PySpark
2 7 (6.48%) Kafka
3 5 (4.63%) Pandas
4 4 (3.70%) Spring
4 4 (3.70%) Spring Boot
5 3 (2.78%) GeoJSON
5 3 (2.78%) JSON
5 3 (2.78%) Matplotlib
5 3 (2.78%) Polars
5 3 (2.78%) REST
5 3 (2.78%) scikit-learn
6 2 (1.85%) boto
6 2 (1.85%) NumPy
6 2 (1.85%) XML
6 2 (1.85%) YAML
7 1 (0.93%) EDI
7 1 (0.93%) HTML
7 1 (0.93%) Jinja
7 1 (0.93%) Middleware
7 1 (0.93%) XSLT
Miscellaneous
1 7 (6.48%) Cloud Native
2 6 (5.56%) Data Structures
3 5 (4.63%) Clustering
4 2 (1.85%) Derivative
4 2 (1.85%) Equities
4 2 (1.85%) Fixed Income
4 2 (1.85%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 2 (1.85%) Greenfield Project
4 2 (1.85%) Life Science
4 2 (1.85%) Management Information System
5 1 (0.93%) Algorithms
5 1 (0.93%) Data Centre
5 1 (0.93%) Legacy Code
5 1 (0.93%) Legacy Systems
5 1 (0.93%) Media Streaming
5 1 (0.93%) Online Games
5 1 (0.93%) Public Cloud
5 1 (0.93%) Reinsurance
5 1 (0.93%) Replication
5 1 (0.93%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 1 (0.93%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 48 (44.44%) Data Pipeline
2 41 (37.96%) Analytics
3 37 (34.26%) ETL
4 35 (32.41%) Data Engineering
5 29 (26.85%) Data Modelling
6 21 (19.44%) Data Science
7 19 (17.59%) CI/CD
8 18 (16.67%) Business Intelligence
9 15 (13.89%) Data Governance
9 15 (13.89%) Performance Tuning
10 14 (12.96%) Validation
11 13 (12.04%) DevOps
12 12 (11.11%) AI
12 12 (11.11%) Decision-Making
13 10 (9.26%) Problem-Solving
14 9 (8.33%) Data Transformation
15 8 (7.41%) Agile
15 8 (7.41%) Asset Management
15 8 (7.41%) Data Analytics
15 8 (7.41%) Dimensional Modelling
Programming Languages
1 50 (46.30%) SQL
2 48 (44.44%) Python
3 8 (7.41%) Java
3 8 (7.41%) Scala
4 4 (3.70%) C#
5 2 (1.85%) T-SQL
6 1 (0.93%) Bicep
6 1 (0.93%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 1 (0.93%) Go
6 1 (0.93%) PL/SQL
6 1 (0.93%) PowerShell
6 1 (0.93%) R
Qualifications
1 21 (19.44%) Security Cleared
2 17 (15.74%) SC Cleared
3 3 (2.78%) BPSS Clearance
4 2 (1.85%) DBS Check
4 2 (1.85%) SnowPro
5 1 (0.93%) BICSI Certification
5 1 (0.93%) City & Guilds
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 30 (27.78%) Data Quality
2 6 (5.56%) GDPR
3 2 (1.85%) EMIR
3 2 (1.85%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 2 (1.85%) MiFID
4 1 (0.93%) GxP
4 1 (0.93%) QA
System Software
1 5 (4.63%) Docker
Systems Management
1 7 (6.48%) Kubernetes
2 3 (2.78%) Terraform
3 1 (0.93%) Grafana
3 1 (0.93%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 23 (21.30%) Databricks
2 16 (14.81%) Microsoft
3 7 (6.48%) Informatica
4 4 (3.70%) SAP
5 3 (2.78%) Google
5 3 (2.78%) Oracle
6 2 (1.85%) Salesforce
6 2 (1.85%) Workday
7 1 (0.93%) Amplitude
7 1 (0.93%) HubSpot
7 1 (0.93%) IBM
7 1 (0.93%) MuleSoft
7 1 (0.93%) OpenAI
7 1 (0.93%) Palantir
7 1 (0.93%) Splunk
7 1 (0.93%) Talend
7 1 (0.93%) Teradata