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 22 May 2026.

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

6 months to
22 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 35 57 73
Rank change year-on-year +22 +16 +4
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 116 64 50
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 5.01% 3.79% 2.31%
As % of the Job Titles category 5.30% 4.07% 2.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 85 41 42
10th Percentile £357 £400 £413
25th Percentile £425 £455 £453
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% - -10.71%
75th Percentile £600 £550 £588
90th Percentile £675 £641 £698
Central London median daily rate £550 £500 £513
% change year-on-year +10.00% -2.44% -6.82%
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 2,188 1,573 2,054
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 94.47% 93.19% 94.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,474 984 1,441
10th Percentile £355 £350 £350
25th Percentile £450 £456 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% +4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £788
Central London median daily rate £550 £565 £550
% change year-on-year -2.65% +2.73% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 13 15
10th Percentile £17.84 £22.35 £15.62
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 £52.49 £48.75 £28.44
90th Percentile £62.89 £92.75 £40.00
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £29.07 £26.41
% change year-on-year -10.18% +10.09% -24.56%

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 22 May 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 22 May 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 55 (47.41%) Data Pipeline
2 54 (46.55%) SQL
3 52 (44.83%) Python
4 47 (40.52%) Analytics
5 45 (38.79%) Data Engineering
6 40 (34.48%) ETL
7 39 (33.62%) Azure
8 32 (27.59%) Data Modelling
9 29 (25.00%) Data Quality
10 25 (21.55%) AWS
10 25 (21.55%) Power Platform
11 23 (19.83%) Data Warehouse
12 22 (18.97%) Business Intelligence
12 22 (18.97%) Databricks
12 22 (18.97%) Power BI
13 21 (18.10%) Apache Airflow
13 21 (18.10%) Data Science
14 20 (17.24%) CI/CD
14 20 (17.24%) Security Cleared
14 20 (17.24%) Tableau
15 18 (15.52%) Snowflake
16 17 (14.66%) Azure Data Factory
16 17 (14.66%) SC Cleared
17 16 (13.79%) Data Governance
17 16 (13.79%) PySpark
17 16 (13.79%) Validation
18 15 (12.93%) dbt
19 14 (12.07%) DevOps
19 14 (12.07%) GCP
19 14 (12.07%) Microsoft

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 21 (18.10%) Apache Airflow
2 7 (6.03%) Apache
2 7 (6.03%) Apache Spark
3 1 (0.86%) Microsoft Exchange
3 1 (0.86%) SAS
3 1 (0.86%) SharePoint
Applications
1 1 (0.86%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 2 (1.72%) BambooHR
2 1 (0.86%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 39 (33.62%) Azure
2 25 (21.55%) AWS
2 25 (21.55%) Power Platform
3 18 (15.52%) Snowflake
4 17 (14.66%) Azure Data Factory
5 15 (12.93%) dbt
6 14 (12.07%) GCP
7 10 (8.62%) Amazon S3
7 10 (8.62%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 9 (7.76%) Serverless
9 8 (6.90%) AWS Lambda
10 6 (5.17%) Prefect
11 4 (3.45%) Azure DevOps
11 4 (3.45%) Matillion
12 3 (2.59%) Amazon Kinesis
12 3 (2.59%) Dagster
12 3 (2.59%) Fivetran
13 2 (1.72%) Amazon EventBridge
13 2 (1.72%) Microsoft Purview
13 2 (1.72%) Textract
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.86%) Software-Defined Networking
1 1 (0.86%) Structured Cabling
Database & Business Intelligence
1 23 (19.83%) Data Warehouse
2 22 (18.97%) Power BI
3 20 (17.24%) Tableau
4 11 (9.48%) SQL Server
5 10 (8.62%) BigQuery
6 9 (7.76%) Snowflake Schema
7 8 (6.90%) Metadata
8 7 (6.03%) Amazon Redshift
8 7 (6.03%) Data Lake
9 5 (4.31%) Delta Lake
9 5 (4.31%) Looker
10 4 (3.45%) Azure SQL Database
10 4 (3.45%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 3 (2.59%) Big Data
11 3 (2.59%) DynamoDB
11 3 (2.59%) Geospatial Data
12 2 (1.72%) CockroachDB
12 2 (1.72%) Data Vault
12 2 (1.72%) Mixpanel
12 2 (1.72%) Spatial Data
Development Applications
1 8 (6.90%) Git
2 2 (1.72%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
3 1 (0.86%) Jaeger
3 1 (0.86%) JIRA
General
1 33 (28.45%) Finance
2 11 (9.48%) Analytical Skills
3 9 (7.76%) Social Skills
4 7 (6.03%) Banking
5 6 (5.17%) Front Office
6 4 (3.45%) Back Office
7 3 (2.59%) Investment Banking
7 3 (2.59%) Publishing
7 3 (2.59%) Telecoms
8 2 (1.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 2 (1.72%) Legal
8 2 (1.72%) Pharmaceutical
8 2 (1.72%) Public Sector
9 1 (0.86%) Billing
9 1 (0.86%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (0.86%) Financial Institution
9 1 (0.86%) Games
9 1 (0.86%) General Ledger
9 1 (0.86%) Law
9 1 (0.86%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 16 (13.79%) PySpark
2 9 (7.76%) Kafka
3 5 (4.31%) Pandas
4 4 (3.45%) Spring
4 4 (3.45%) Spring Boot
5 3 (2.59%) GeoJSON
5 3 (2.59%) Matplotlib
5 3 (2.59%) Polars
5 3 (2.59%) REST
5 3 (2.59%) scikit-learn
6 2 (1.72%) boto
6 2 (1.72%) JSON
6 2 (1.72%) NumPy
6 2 (1.72%) YAML
7 1 (0.86%) FastAPI
7 1 (0.86%) Great Expectations
7 1 (0.86%) Jinja
7 1 (0.86%) OpenTelemetry
7 1 (0.86%) pytest
7 1 (0.86%) React
Miscellaneous
1 10 (8.62%) Cloud Native
2 5 (4.31%) Clustering
2 5 (4.31%) Data Structures
3 3 (2.59%) Onboarding
4 2 (1.72%) Algorithms
4 2 (1.72%) Derivative
4 2 (1.72%) Equities
4 2 (1.72%) Fixed Income
4 2 (1.72%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 2 (1.72%) Greenfield Project
4 2 (1.72%) Legacy Systems
4 2 (1.72%) Life Science
4 2 (1.72%) Management Information System
4 2 (1.72%) Reinsurance
5 1 (0.86%) Distributed Computing
5 1 (0.86%) Distributed Systems
5 1 (0.86%) Fibre Optics
5 1 (0.86%) Legacy Code
5 1 (0.86%) Media Streaming
5 1 (0.86%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 1 (0.86%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 55 (47.41%) Data Pipeline
2 47 (40.52%) Analytics
3 45 (38.79%) Data Engineering
4 40 (34.48%) ETL
5 32 (27.59%) Data Modelling
6 22 (18.97%) Business Intelligence
7 21 (18.10%) Data Science
8 20 (17.24%) CI/CD
9 16 (13.79%) Data Governance
9 16 (13.79%) Validation
10 14 (12.07%) DevOps
11 13 (11.21%) AI
11 13 (11.21%) Performance Tuning
12 12 (10.34%) Decision-Making
13 10 (8.62%) Migration
13 10 (8.62%) Performance Optimisation
14 9 (7.76%) Data Analytics
15 8 (6.90%) Problem-Solving
16 7 (6.03%) Data Ingestion
16 7 (6.03%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 54 (46.55%) SQL
2 52 (44.83%) Python
3 10 (8.62%) Scala
4 9 (7.76%) Java
5 4 (3.45%) C#
6 3 (2.59%) T-SQL
7 2 (1.72%) R
8 1 (0.86%) Bicep
8 1 (0.86%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 1 (0.86%) Go
8 1 (0.86%) Korn
8 1 (0.86%) PL/SQL
8 1 (0.86%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 20 (17.24%) Security Cleared
2 17 (14.66%) SC Cleared
3 5 (4.31%) DBS Check
4 3 (2.59%) BPSS Clearance
5 2 (1.72%) SnowPro
6 1 (0.86%) BICSI Certification
6 1 (0.86%) City & Guilds
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (25.00%) Data Quality
2 6 (5.17%) GDPR
3 2 (1.72%) EMIR
3 2 (1.72%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 2 (1.72%) MiFID
4 1 (0.86%) Accessibility
4 1 (0.86%) GxP
4 1 (0.86%) QA
System Software
1 5 (4.31%) Docker
Systems Management
1 6 (5.17%) Kubernetes
2 2 (1.72%) Terraform
3 1 (0.86%) Grafana
3 1 (0.86%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 22 (18.97%) Databricks
2 14 (12.07%) Microsoft
3 7 (6.03%) Informatica
4 4 (3.45%) Oracle
4 4 (3.45%) SAP
5 3 (2.59%) Google
6 2 (1.72%) Amplitude
6 2 (1.72%) Salesforce
6 2 (1.72%) Workday
7 1 (0.86%) HubSpot
7 1 (0.86%) MuleSoft
7 1 (0.86%) OpenAI
7 1 (0.86%) Splunk
7 1 (0.86%) Talend
7 1 (0.86%) Teradata