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 £513, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 3 March 2026.

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

6 months to
3 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 51 67 73
Rank change year-on-year +16 +6 +17
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 82 50 57
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.12% 2.79% 2.42%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.39% 3.01% 2.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 61 28 50
10th Percentile £325 £421 £385
25th Percentile £401 £461 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £516 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.73% -1.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £606 £598
90th Percentile £700 £743 £707
Central London median daily rate £517 £516 £525
% change year-on-year +0.19% -1.67% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - £46.75
Median hourly rate - - £48.50
75th Percentile - - £50.25
90th Percentile - - -
Central London median hourly rate - - £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 1,870 1,663 2,226
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.97% 92.91% 94.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,279 1,028 1,596
10th Percentile £350 £358 £340
25th Percentile £440 £463 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £540 £575 £556
Median % change year-on-year -6.09% +3.51% -5.85%
75th Percentile £675 £684 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £788
Central London median daily rate £550 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -4.35% +4.55% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 10 19
10th Percentile £18.75 £22.00 £16.15
25th Percentile £20.18 £26.25 £17.97
Median hourly rate £40.64 £35.50 £22.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.48% +57.78% -35.71%
75th Percentile £52.56 £96.19 £40.00
90th Percentile £60.25 £119.55 £49.05
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £35.00 £25.50
% change year-on-year -25.40% +37.25% -24.44%

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 3 March 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 3 March 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 48 (58.54%) SQL
2 44 (53.66%) Data Pipeline
3 42 (51.22%) Python
4 40 (48.78%) Azure
5 39 (47.56%) ETL
6 30 (36.59%) Data Quality
7 29 (35.37%) Data Modelling
8 28 (34.15%) Analytics
8 28 (34.15%) Data Engineering
9 27 (32.93%) AWS
10 26 (31.71%) Databricks
11 19 (23.17%) Data Warehouse
11 19 (23.17%) Power Platform
12 17 (20.73%) Business Intelligence
12 17 (20.73%) CI/CD
12 17 (20.73%) Microsoft
12 17 (20.73%) Security Cleared
13 16 (19.51%) Performance Tuning
13 16 (19.51%) Power BI
14 15 (18.29%) Apache Airflow
14 15 (18.29%) Snowflake
15 14 (17.07%) Data Governance
15 14 (17.07%) Data Science
15 14 (17.07%) PySpark
16 13 (15.85%) Azure Data Factory
16 13 (15.85%) SC Cleared
17 12 (14.63%) Data Lake
17 12 (14.63%) Data Transformation
17 12 (14.63%) dbt
17 12 (14.63%) GCP

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 15 (18.29%) Apache Airflow
2 7 (8.54%) Apache
3 6 (7.32%) Apache Spark
4 1 (1.22%) Microsoft Exchange
4 1 (1.22%) SAS
4 1 (1.22%) SharePoint
Applications
1 2 (2.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (1.22%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (1.22%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 1 (1.22%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 40 (48.78%) Azure
2 27 (32.93%) AWS
3 19 (23.17%) Power Platform
4 15 (18.29%) Snowflake
5 13 (15.85%) Azure Data Factory
6 12 (14.63%) dbt
6 12 (14.63%) GCP
7 10 (12.20%) Amazon S3
7 10 (12.20%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 10 (12.20%) Serverless
8 9 (10.98%) AWS Lambda
9 4 (4.88%) Matillion
10 3 (3.66%) AWS Step Functions
11 2 (2.44%) Amazon EventBridge
11 2 (2.44%) Amazon Kinesis
11 2 (2.44%) Azure DevOps
11 2 (2.44%) Dagster
11 2 (2.44%) Microsoft Purview
11 2 (2.44%) Prefect
11 2 (2.44%) Textract
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.22%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (23.17%) Data Warehouse
2 16 (19.51%) Power BI
3 12 (14.63%) Data Lake
4 10 (12.20%) Metadata
5 9 (10.98%) Tableau
6 7 (8.54%) Amazon Redshift
6 7 (8.54%) Snowflake Schema
7 6 (7.32%) SQL Server
8 5 (6.10%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 4 (4.88%) Amazon Athena
9 4 (4.88%) Delta Lake
9 4 (4.88%) PostgreSQL
10 3 (3.66%) Azure SQL Database
10 3 (3.66%) Geospatial Data
10 3 (3.66%) Relational Database
11 2 (2.44%) Amazon QuickSight
11 2 (2.44%) Big Data
11 2 (2.44%) CockroachDB
11 2 (2.44%) DynamoDB
11 2 (2.44%) Looker
Development Applications
1 11 (13.41%) Git
2 2 (2.44%) Jenkins
3 1 (1.22%) Jaeger
3 1 (1.22%) JIRA
General
1 20 (24.39%) Finance
2 12 (14.63%) Social Skills
3 9 (10.98%) Analytical Skills
4 7 (8.54%) Banking
5 5 (6.10%) Front Office
6 4 (4.88%) Back Office
6 4 (4.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 3 (3.66%) Investment Banking
7 3 (3.66%) Public Sector
7 3 (3.66%) Publishing
8 2 (2.44%) Law
8 2 (2.44%) Telecoms
9 1 (1.22%) Games
9 1 (1.22%) International Banking
9 1 (1.22%) Manufacturing
9 1 (1.22%) Military
9 1 (1.22%) Organisational Skills
9 1 (1.22%) Pharmaceutical
9 1 (1.22%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (17.07%) PySpark
2 5 (6.10%) Kafka
2 5 (6.10%) Pandas
3 3 (3.66%) GeoJSON
3 3 (3.66%) Matplotlib
3 3 (3.66%) Polars
3 3 (3.66%) scikit-learn
3 3 (3.66%) XML
4 2 (2.44%) boto
4 2 (2.44%) JSON
4 2 (2.44%) NumPy
4 2 (2.44%) REST
4 2 (2.44%) YAML
5 1 (1.22%) AWS CDK
5 1 (1.22%) EDI
5 1 (1.22%) HTML
5 1 (1.22%) Loki
5 1 (1.22%) Middleware
5 1 (1.22%) OpenTelemetry
5 1 (1.22%) XSLT
Miscellaneous
1 6 (7.32%) Cloud Native
1 6 (7.32%) Data Structures
2 2 (2.44%) Clustering
2 2 (2.44%) Derivative
2 2 (2.44%) Equities
2 2 (2.44%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
2 2 (2.44%) Management Information System
3 1 (1.22%) Algorithms
3 1 (1.22%) Greenfield Project
3 1 (1.22%) Hedge funds
3 1 (1.22%) Legacy Systems
3 1 (1.22%) Life Science
3 1 (1.22%) Media Streaming
3 1 (1.22%) Online Games
3 1 (1.22%) Product Ownership
3 1 (1.22%) Public Cloud
3 1 (1.22%) Reinsurance
3 1 (1.22%) Replication
3 1 (1.22%) Taxonomies
3 1 (1.22%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.22%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 44 (53.66%) Data Pipeline
2 39 (47.56%) ETL
3 29 (35.37%) Data Modelling
4 28 (34.15%) Analytics
4 28 (34.15%) Data Engineering
5 17 (20.73%) Business Intelligence
5 17 (20.73%) CI/CD
6 16 (19.51%) Performance Tuning
7 14 (17.07%) Data Governance
7 14 (17.07%) Data Science
8 12 (14.63%) Data Transformation
9 10 (12.20%) Data Integration
9 10 (12.20%) Decision-Making
9 10 (12.20%) Problem-Solving
9 10 (12.20%) Validation
10 8 (9.76%) Agile
10 8 (9.76%) AI
11 7 (8.54%) DevOps
12 6 (7.32%) Data Lineage
12 6 (7.32%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 48 (58.54%) SQL
2 42 (51.22%) Python
3 9 (10.98%) Scala
4 4 (4.88%) Java
5 3 (3.66%) T-SQL
6 2 (2.44%) C#
7 1 (1.22%) Bicep
7 1 (1.22%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 1 (1.22%) Go
7 1 (1.22%) JavaScript
7 1 (1.22%) PL/SQL
7 1 (1.22%) PowerShell
7 1 (1.22%) R
Qualifications
1 17 (20.73%) Security Cleared
2 13 (15.85%) SC Cleared
3 3 (3.66%) BPSS Clearance
3 3 (3.66%) Computer Science Degree
3 3 (3.66%) Degree
4 2 (2.44%) SnowPro
5 1 (1.22%) AWS Certification
5 1 (1.22%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 30 (36.59%) Data Quality
2 3 (3.66%) GDPR
3 2 (2.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (1.22%) Accessibility
4 1 (1.22%) Dodd-Frank
4 1 (1.22%) EMIR
4 1 (1.22%) QA
System Software
1 2 (2.44%) Docker
Systems Management
1 5 (6.10%) Terraform
2 3 (3.66%) Kubernetes
3 1 (1.22%) Grafana
3 1 (1.22%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 26 (31.71%) Databricks
2 17 (20.73%) Microsoft
3 5 (6.10%) Informatica
4 4 (4.88%) SAP
5 3 (3.66%) Oracle
6 1 (1.22%) Amplitude
6 1 (1.22%) Google
6 1 (1.22%) IBM
6 1 (1.22%) MuleSoft
6 1 (1.22%) Palantir
6 1 (1.22%) Salesforce
6 1 (1.22%) Splunk
6 1 (1.22%) Talend
6 1 (1.22%) Teradata
6 1 (1.22%) Workday