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 £565, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 October 2026.

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

6 months to
1 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 48 67 68
Rank change year-on-year +19 +1 +4
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 98 56 55
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.45% 3.22% 2.61%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.73% 3.41% 2.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 80 41 36
10th Percentile £400 £304 £444
25th Percentile £437 £434 £498
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £565 £525 £563
Median % change year-on-year +7.62% -6.67% -2.60%
75th Percentile £653 £583 £675
90th Percentile £726 £641 £734
Central London median daily rate £565 £525 £563
% change year-on-year +7.62% -6.67% -4.26%

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 2,074 1,640 1,978
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 94.14% 94.25% 93.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,402 1,109 1,227
10th Percentile £363 £325 £363
25th Percentile £455 £424 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -3.28%
75th Percentile £675 £675 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £788
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £575
% change year-on-year - -4.35% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 24 19 16
10th Percentile £17.06 £16.96 £17.25
25th Percentile £17.60 £22.88 £22.84
Median hourly rate £21.75 £28.15 £48.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.74% -41.35% +33.33%
75th Percentile £39.81 £50.25 £112.00
90th Percentile £63.95 £70.21 £137.50
Central London median hourly rate £28.07 £28.15 £35.00
% change year-on-year -0.30% -19.57% -1.41%

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 1 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 1 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 57 (58.16%) SQL
2 56 (57.14%) Python
3 54 (55.10%) Data Engineering
4 50 (51.02%) Data Pipeline
5 40 (40.82%) Analytics
6 37 (37.76%) CI/CD
7 36 (36.73%) Azure
8 35 (35.71%) Data Modelling
9 33 (33.67%) Data Quality
9 33 (33.67%) ETL
10 28 (28.57%) Databricks
11 27 (27.55%) AWS
12 24 (24.49%) DevOps
13 21 (21.43%) Migration
14 19 (19.39%) Azure Data Factory
14 19 (19.39%) Data Warehouse
15 18 (18.37%) Data Governance
16 17 (17.35%) Apache Airflow
16 17 (17.35%) PySpark
17 16 (16.33%) Agile
17 16 (16.33%) Performance Optimisation
17 16 (16.33%) Power Platform
18 15 (15.31%) Snowflake
19 14 (14.29%) AI
19 14 (14.29%) Power BI
19 14 (14.29%) Serverless
20 13 (13.27%) Business Intelligence
20 13 (13.27%) Data Architecture
20 13 (13.27%) Data Transformation
20 13 (13.27%) dbt

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 17 (17.35%) Apache Airflow
2 10 (10.20%) Apache Spark
3 4 (4.08%) Apache
4 2 (2.04%) Confluence
5 1 (1.02%) SAS
Business Applications
1 2 (2.04%) Aladdin
2 1 (1.02%) BambooHR
2 1 (1.02%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 36 (36.73%) Azure
2 27 (27.55%) AWS
3 19 (19.39%) Azure Data Factory
4 16 (16.33%) Power Platform
5 15 (15.31%) Snowflake
6 14 (14.29%) Serverless
7 13 (13.27%) dbt
8 12 (12.24%) Amazon S3
8 12 (12.24%) AWS Lambda
9 11 (11.22%) GCP
10 10 (10.20%) Azure Databricks
11 9 (9.18%) Azure DevOps
11 9 (9.18%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 9 (9.18%) GitHub
12 8 (8.16%) GitHub Actions
13 6 (6.12%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 6 (6.12%) Amazon EventBridge
13 6 (6.12%) AWS Step Functions
14 5 (5.10%) Amazon EKS
14 5 (5.10%) Amazon Kinesis
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (19.39%) Data Warehouse
2 14 (14.29%) Power BI
3 10 (10.20%) Amazon Athena
4 9 (9.18%) BigQuery
5 8 (8.16%) Amazon RDS
6 7 (7.14%) Data Lake
6 7 (7.14%) Metadata
6 7 (7.14%) Tableau
7 6 (6.12%) Delta Lake
7 6 (6.12%) SQL Server
8 5 (5.10%) Amazon Redshift
9 4 (4.08%) Azure SQL Database
9 4 (4.08%) Data Mart
9 4 (4.08%) Oracle Database
10 2 (2.04%) Looker
10 2 (2.04%) NoSQL
10 2 (2.04%) Parquet
10 2 (2.04%) Snowflake Schema
10 2 (2.04%) Spark SQL
11 1 (1.02%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 8 (8.16%) Git
2 7 (7.14%) Bitbucket
3 5 (5.10%) GitLab
4 2 (2.04%) Atlassian Bamboo
4 2 (2.04%) JIRA
4 2 (2.04%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
5 1 (1.02%) Jenkins
5 1 (1.02%) Terragrunt
General
1 40 (40.82%) Finance
2 16 (16.33%) Social Skills
3 14 (14.29%) Banking
4 12 (12.24%) Analytical Skills
5 6 (6.12%) Back Office
6 4 (4.08%) Front Office
6 4 (4.08%) Public Sector
7 3 (3.06%) Investment Banking
8 2 (2.04%) Legal
8 2 (2.04%) Pharmaceutical
9 1 (1.02%) Advertising
9 1 (1.02%) Billing
9 1 (1.02%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (1.02%) General Ledger
9 1 (1.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 1 (1.02%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (17.35%) PySpark
2 11 (11.22%) Terraform
3 9 (9.18%) Kafka
4 5 (5.10%) ActiveMQ
4 5 (5.10%) RabbitMQ
5 4 (4.08%) Spring
5 4 (4.08%) Spring Boot
6 2 (2.04%) JSON
6 2 (2.04%) REST
6 2 (2.04%) XML
7 1 (1.02%) EDI
7 1 (1.02%) FastAPI
7 1 (1.02%) Middleware
7 1 (1.02%) SOAP
7 1 (1.02%) XSLT
Miscellaneous
1 24 (24.49%) Cloud Native
2 5 (5.10%) Legacy Systems
3 4 (4.08%) Onboarding
4 3 (3.06%) Data Structures
4 3 (3.06%) Distributed Computing
5 2 (2.04%) AI Agents
5 2 (2.04%) Enterprise Software
5 2 (2.04%) PropTech
5 2 (2.04%) Reinsurance
6 1 (1.02%) Algorithms
6 1 (1.02%) Analytical Mindset
6 1 (1.02%) Clustering
6 1 (1.02%) Data Centre
6 1 (1.02%) Distributed Systems
6 1 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
6 1 (1.02%) Fixed Income
6 1 (1.02%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 1 (1.02%) Legacy Code
6 1 (1.02%) NHS
6 1 (1.02%) Product Ownership
Processes & Methodologies
1 54 (55.10%) Data Engineering
2 50 (51.02%) Data Pipeline
3 40 (40.82%) Analytics
4 37 (37.76%) CI/CD
5 35 (35.71%) Data Modelling
6 33 (33.67%) ETL
7 24 (24.49%) DevOps
8 21 (21.43%) Migration
9 18 (18.37%) Data Governance
10 16 (16.33%) Agile
10 16 (16.33%) Performance Optimisation
11 14 (14.29%) AI
12 13 (13.27%) Business Intelligence
12 13 (13.27%) Data Architecture
12 13 (13.27%) Data Transformation
12 13 (13.27%) Infrastructure as Code
12 13 (13.27%) Platform Engineering
12 13 (13.27%) Software Engineering
12 13 (13.27%) Validation
13 11 (11.22%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 57 (58.16%) SQL
2 56 (57.14%) Python
3 7 (7.14%) Java
3 7 (7.14%) Scala
4 3 (3.06%) Korn
4 3 (3.06%) PowerShell
5 2 (2.04%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 2 (2.04%) T-SQL
6 1 (1.02%) Bicep
6 1 (1.02%) C
6 1 (1.02%) C#
6 1 (1.02%) R
Qualifications
1 11 (11.22%) Security Cleared
2 10 (10.20%) SC Cleared
3 5 (5.10%) DBS Check
4 2 (2.04%) AWS Certification
4 2 (2.04%) Microsoft Certification
4 2 (2.04%) SnowPro
5 1 (1.02%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
5 1 (1.02%) AWS Certified Developer
5 1 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 1 (1.02%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 33 (33.67%) Data Quality
2 4 (4.08%) QA
3 3 (3.06%) GDPR
4 2 (2.04%) Accessibility
4 2 (2.04%) EMIR
4 2 (2.04%) MiFID
System Software
1 5 (5.10%) Docker
Systems Management
1 4 (4.08%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 28 (28.57%) Databricks
2 13 (13.27%) Microsoft
3 6 (6.12%) Oracle
4 3 (3.06%) Informatica
5 2 (2.04%) Google
5 2 (2.04%) Palantir
5 2 (2.04%) Salesforce
5 2 (2.04%) SAP
6 1 (1.02%) Amplitude
6 1 (1.02%) Cribl.io
6 1 (1.02%) Dell
6 1 (1.02%) HubSpot
6 1 (1.02%) IBM
6 1 (1.02%) MuleSoft
6 1 (1.02%) NetApp
6 1 (1.02%) OpenAI
6 1 (1.02%) Teradata
6 1 (1.02%) Workday