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 17 January 2026.

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

6 months to
17 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 64 69 69
Rank change year-on-year +5 0 +36
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 63 51 68
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 3.41% 2.68% 2.80%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.62% 2.88% 2.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 51 32 58
10th Percentile £325 £450 £385
25th Percentile £411 £483 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £525
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +9.52% -4.55%
75th Percentile £594 £638 £606
90th Percentile £700 £731 £678
Central London median daily rate £525 £575 £540
% change year-on-year -8.70% +6.48% -1.82%

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 1,739 1,770 2,286
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 94.15% 93.11% 94.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,210 1,084 1,640
10th Percentile £340 £363 £355
25th Percentile £425 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £570
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +0.88% -0.87%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £688
90th Percentile £775 £788 £788
Central London median daily rate £530 £575 £563
% change year-on-year -7.83% +2.22% -2.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 9 15
10th Percentile £19.98 £13.45 £17.00
25th Percentile £24.37 £22.00 £20.09
Median hourly rate £31.00 £32.50 £24.00
Median % change year-on-year -4.62% +35.42% -26.15%
75th Percentile £42.65 £112.00 £42.38
90th Percentile £50.63 £117.10 £63.75
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £35.00 £26.00
% change year-on-year -25.40% +34.62% -10.34%

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 17 January 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 17 January 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 36 (57.14%) Data Pipeline
1 36 (57.14%) Python
1 36 (57.14%) SQL
2 31 (49.21%) Azure
3 28 (44.44%) Databricks
3 28 (44.44%) ETL
4 25 (39.68%) AWS
5 23 (36.51%) Data Quality
6 21 (33.33%) Data Modelling
7 20 (31.75%) Data Engineering
8 18 (28.57%) Analytics
9 15 (23.81%) CI/CD
10 14 (22.22%) Data Governance
10 14 (22.22%) Security Cleared
11 13 (20.63%) Data Warehouse
11 13 (20.63%) Microsoft
11 13 (20.63%) PySpark
12 12 (19.05%) Apache Airflow
12 12 (19.05%) Business Intelligence
13 11 (17.46%) Data Lake
13 11 (17.46%) Data Science
13 11 (17.46%) Power BI
13 11 (17.46%) Power Platform
13 11 (17.46%) SC Cleared
14 10 (15.87%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 10 (15.87%) Data Integration
14 10 (15.87%) Snowflake
15 9 (14.29%) Amazon S3
15 9 (14.29%) dbt
15 9 (14.29%) DevOps

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 (19.05%) Apache Airflow
2 6 (9.52%) Apache
3 5 (7.94%) Apache Spark
4 1 (1.59%) SAS
4 1 (1.59%) SharePoint
Applications
1 2 (3.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (1.59%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (1.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 1 (1.59%) Aladdin
1 1 (1.59%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 31 (49.21%) Azure
2 25 (39.68%) AWS
3 11 (17.46%) Power Platform
4 10 (15.87%) Azure Synapse Analytics
4 10 (15.87%) Snowflake
5 9 (14.29%) Amazon S3
5 9 (14.29%) dbt
6 8 (12.70%) Azure Data Factory
7 7 (11.11%) Serverless
8 6 (9.52%) AWS Lambda
8 6 (9.52%) GCP
9 4 (6.35%) Azure DevOps
10 3 (4.76%) AWS Step Functions
10 3 (4.76%) GitHub
10 3 (4.76%) Microsoft Purview
11 2 (3.17%) Amazon EventBridge
11 2 (3.17%) Dagster
11 2 (3.17%) GitHub Actions
11 2 (3.17%) Prefect
11 2 (3.17%) Textract
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.59%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 13 (20.63%) Data Warehouse
2 11 (17.46%) Data Lake
2 11 (17.46%) Power BI
3 8 (12.70%) Metadata
4 5 (7.94%) Amazon Redshift
4 5 (7.94%) Delta Lake
4 5 (7.94%) Tableau
5 4 (6.35%) Amazon Athena
6 3 (4.76%) Amazon QuickSight
6 3 (4.76%) PostgreSQL
6 3 (4.76%) Relational Database
6 3 (4.76%) Snowflake Schema
6 3 (4.76%) SQL Server
7 2 (3.17%) Apache Iceberg
7 2 (3.17%) Azure SQL Database
7 2 (3.17%) CockroachDB
7 2 (3.17%) DataStage
7 2 (3.17%) DynamoDB
7 2 (3.17%) Star Schema
8 1 (1.59%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 7 (11.11%) Git
2 2 (3.17%) Jenkins
2 2 (3.17%) JIRA
3 1 (1.59%) Jaeger
General
1 17 (26.98%) Finance
2 7 (11.11%) Banking
2 7 (11.11%) Social Skills
3 6 (9.52%) Analytical Skills
4 5 (7.94%) Front Office
4 5 (7.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 4 (6.35%) Back Office
5 4 (6.35%) Investment Banking
5 4 (6.35%) Public Sector
6 2 (3.17%) Law
6 2 (3.17%) Telecoms
7 1 (1.59%) Games
7 1 (1.59%) International Banking
7 1 (1.59%) Manufacturing
7 1 (1.59%) Military
7 1 (1.59%) Organisational Skills
7 1 (1.59%) Pharmaceutical
7 1 (1.59%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (20.63%) PySpark
2 3 (4.76%) XML
3 2 (3.17%) boto
3 2 (3.17%) JSON
3 2 (3.17%) Kafka
3 2 (3.17%) NumPy
3 2 (3.17%) Pandas
3 2 (3.17%) REST
4 1 (1.59%) ADO
4 1 (1.59%) AWS CDK
4 1 (1.59%) EDI
4 1 (1.59%) HTML
4 1 (1.59%) Loki
4 1 (1.59%) Middleware
4 1 (1.59%) OpenTelemetry
4 1 (1.59%) XSLT
4 1 (1.59%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 5 (7.94%) Data Structures
2 4 (6.35%) Cloud Native
3 2 (3.17%) Derivative
3 2 (3.17%) Equities
3 2 (3.17%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 2 (3.17%) Management Information System
4 1 (1.59%) Algorithms
4 1 (1.59%) Greenfield Project
4 1 (1.59%) Hedge funds
4 1 (1.59%) Media Streaming
4 1 (1.59%) Online Games
4 1 (1.59%) Operational Technology
4 1 (1.59%) Product Ownership
4 1 (1.59%) Public Cloud
4 1 (1.59%) Reinsurance
4 1 (1.59%) Replication
4 1 (1.59%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.59%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 36 (57.14%) Data Pipeline
2 28 (44.44%) ETL
3 21 (33.33%) Data Modelling
4 20 (31.75%) Data Engineering
5 18 (28.57%) Analytics
6 15 (23.81%) CI/CD
7 14 (22.22%) Data Governance
8 12 (19.05%) Business Intelligence
9 11 (17.46%) Data Science
10 10 (15.87%) Data Integration
11 9 (14.29%) DevOps
12 8 (12.70%) Data Transformation
12 8 (12.70%) Performance Tuning
13 7 (11.11%) Agile
13 7 (11.11%) Data Lineage
14 6 (9.52%) Asset Management
14 6 (9.52%) Problem-Solving
14 6 (9.52%) Validation
15 5 (7.94%) AI
15 5 (7.94%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 36 (57.14%) Python
1 36 (57.14%) SQL
2 8 (12.70%) Scala
3 3 (4.76%) Java
4 2 (3.17%) T-SQL
5 1 (1.59%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 1 (1.59%) Go
5 1 (1.59%) JavaScript
5 1 (1.59%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 14 (22.22%) Security Cleared
2 11 (17.46%) SC Cleared
3 3 (4.76%) Computer Science Degree
3 3 (4.76%) Degree
4 2 (3.17%) SnowPro
5 1 (1.59%) AWS Certification
5 1 (1.59%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (36.51%) Data Quality
2 3 (4.76%) GDPR
3 2 (3.17%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (1.59%) Accessibility
4 1 (1.59%) Dodd-Frank
4 1 (1.59%) EMIR
4 1 (1.59%) MiFID
Systems Management
1 6 (9.52%) Terraform
2 2 (3.17%) Kubernetes
3 1 (1.59%) Grafana
3 1 (1.59%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 28 (44.44%) Databricks
2 13 (20.63%) Microsoft
3 2 (3.17%) Informatica
3 2 (3.17%) Oracle
3 2 (3.17%) Palantir
3 2 (3.17%) SAP
4 1 (1.59%) Foundry
4 1 (1.59%) IBM
4 1 (1.59%) Salesforce
4 1 (1.59%) Splunk
4 1 (1.59%) Teradata
4 1 (1.59%) Workday