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 15 September 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 59 80 68
Rank change year-on-year +21 -12 +62
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 59 48 90
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the City of London 3.37% 2.31% 2.93%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.59% 2.45% 3.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 43 32 68
10th Percentile £314 £430 £463
25th Percentile £454 £500 £509
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £593
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -7.17% +7.73%
75th Percentile £592 £656 £666
90th Percentile £686 £688 £788
Central London median daily rate £525 £550 £595
% change year-on-year -4.55% -7.56% +8.18%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 1,643 1,960 2,904
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.83% 94.37% 94.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,099 1,245 2,008
10th Percentile £325 £363 £363
25th Percentile £423 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £600
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% +4.35%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £706
90th Percentile £775 £785 £813
Central London median daily rate £550 £575 £580
% change year-on-year -4.35% -0.86% +2.65%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 15 12
10th Percentile £17.35 £16.49 £14.42
25th Percentile £23.98 £21.25 £16.90
Median hourly rate £28.33 £27.00 £35.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.91% -23.94% -14.97%
75th Percentile £53.50 £85.63 £44.87
90th Percentile £65.39 £137.50 £67.13
Central London median hourly rate £28.15 £35.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -19.57% - -15.66%

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the City of London

Job postings that featured Data Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the City of London.

Job vacancy trend for Data Engineer 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 15 September 2025.

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 and Capabilities in the City of London

For the 6 months to 15 September 2025, Data Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number 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 41 (69.49%) SQL
2 40 (67.80%) Python
3 36 (61.02%) Azure
4 33 (55.93%) Data Pipeline
5 27 (45.76%) Data Engineering
5 27 (45.76%) Data Modelling
6 24 (40.68%) ETL
6 24 (40.68%) AWS
6 24 (40.68%) Data Quality
7 22 (37.29%) Analytics
7 22 (37.29%) Databricks
8 19 (32.20%) Finance
9 18 (30.51%) Data Science
10 17 (28.81%) Data Governance
11 16 (27.12%) Data Warehouse
11 16 (27.12%) Data Lake
12 13 (22.03%) Data Ingestion
12 13 (22.03%) Analytical Skills
13 12 (20.34%) Apache Airflow
13 12 (20.34%) Agile
13 12 (20.34%) Degree
13 12 (20.34%) Scala
14 11 (18.64%) Business Intelligence
14 11 (18.64%) Power BI
14 11 (18.64%) PySpark
14 11 (18.64%) GCP
14 11 (18.64%) Social Skills
14 11 (18.64%) Problem-Solving
14 11 (18.64%) Power Platform
14 11 (18.64%) CI/CD

Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the City of London by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 12 (20.34%) Apache Airflow
2 10 (16.95%) Apache Spark
3 5 (8.47%) Apache
4 3 (5.08%) Luigi
5 2 (3.39%) Jupyter
6 1 (1.69%) Confluence
6 1 (1.69%) Oracle SOA Suite
6 1 (1.69%) SAS
Applications
1 2 (3.39%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 1 (1.69%) Aladdin
1 1 (1.69%) Oracle BPM
Cloud Services
1 36 (61.02%) Azure
2 24 (40.68%) AWS
3 11 (18.64%) GCP
3 11 (18.64%) Power Platform
4 9 (15.25%) Azure Data Factory
4 9 (15.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
5 8 (13.56%) Microsoft Purview
6 6 (10.17%) Snowflake
7 5 (8.47%) Collibra
8 4 (6.78%) Amazon S3
8 4 (6.78%) Azure DevOps
9 3 (5.08%) Cloud Composer
9 3 (5.08%) Cloud Functions
9 3 (5.08%) dbt
9 3 (5.08%) GitHub
10 2 (3.39%) Amazon SageMaker
10 2 (3.39%) Azure Machine Learning
10 2 (3.39%) GitHub Actions
10 2 (3.39%) Google Compute Engine
10 2 (3.39%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 2 (3.39%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 16 (27.12%) Data Lake
1 16 (27.12%) Data Warehouse
2 11 (18.64%) Power BI
3 10 (16.95%) Delta Lake
3 10 (16.95%) Metadata
4 7 (11.86%) Hadoop
4 7 (11.86%) NoSQL
5 5 (8.47%) Apache Hive
5 5 (8.47%) Big Data
5 5 (8.47%) Relational Database
6 4 (6.78%) Azure SQL Database
6 4 (6.78%) BigQuery
6 4 (6.78%) Data Mining
6 4 (6.78%) Snowflake Schema
6 4 (6.78%) SQL Server
7 3 (5.08%) Amazon QuickSight
7 3 (5.08%) PostgreSQL
8 2 (3.39%) DataStage
8 2 (3.39%) Parquet
8 2 (3.39%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 5 (8.47%) Git
2 4 (6.78%) JIRA
3 2 (3.39%) MLflow
3 2 (3.39%) RStudio
4 1 (1.69%) Bitbucket
4 1 (1.69%) Jenkins
4 1 (1.69%) Terragrunt
General
1 19 (32.20%) Finance
2 13 (22.03%) Analytical Skills
3 11 (18.64%) Social Skills
4 8 (13.56%) Banking
5 4 (6.78%) Police
5 4 (6.78%) Public Sector
6 3 (5.08%) Investment Banking
7 2 (3.39%) Documentation Skills
7 2 (3.39%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 2 (3.39%) Retail
8 1 (1.69%) Back Office
8 1 (1.69%) Financial Institution
8 1 (1.69%) Front Office
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (18.64%) PySpark
2 6 (10.17%) Kafka
3 3 (5.08%) JSON
3 3 (5.08%) XML
4 2 (3.39%) CSS
4 2 (3.39%) HTML
4 2 (3.39%) pydantic
4 2 (3.39%) YAML
5 1 (1.69%) ActiveMQ
5 1 (1.69%) ADO
5 1 (1.69%) Apache Avro
5 1 (1.69%) Apache Beam
Miscellaneous
1 2 (3.39%) Data Structures
1 2 (3.39%) Distributed Computing
1 2 (3.39%) Linux Command Line
1 2 (3.39%) Product Ownership
1 2 (3.39%) Reference Data
1 2 (3.39%) Virtual Team
2 1 (1.69%) Derivative
2 1 (1.69%) Equities
2 1 (1.69%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
2 1 (1.69%) IoT
2 1 (1.69%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 3 (5.08%) Linux
2 2 (3.39%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 33 (55.93%) Data Pipeline
2 27 (45.76%) Data Engineering
2 27 (45.76%) Data Modelling
3 24 (40.68%) ETL
4 22 (37.29%) Analytics
5 18 (30.51%) Data Science
6 17 (28.81%) Data Governance
7 13 (22.03%) Data Ingestion
8 12 (20.34%) Agile
9 11 (18.64%) Business Intelligence
9 11 (18.64%) CI/CD
9 11 (18.64%) Problem-Solving
10 10 (16.95%) Data Integration
10 10 (16.95%) Data Transformation
10 10 (16.95%) Decision-Making
11 9 (15.25%) Computer Science
11 9 (15.25%) DevOps
12 8 (13.56%) Actionable Insight
12 8 (13.56%) Data Security
13 7 (11.86%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 41 (69.49%) SQL
2 40 (67.80%) Python
3 12 (20.34%) Scala
4 6 (10.17%) Java
5 3 (5.08%) JavaScript
6 2 (3.39%) Bash
6 2 (3.39%) R
7 1 (1.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 1 (1.69%) SAS Macro
7 1 (1.69%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 12 (20.34%) Degree
2 9 (15.25%) Security Cleared
3 7 (11.86%) SC Cleared
4 4 (6.78%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (3.39%) AWS Certification
5 2 (3.39%) Master's Degree
6 1 (1.69%) Azure Certification
6 1 (1.69%) BPSS Clearance
6 1 (1.69%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 24 (40.68%) Data Quality
2 3 (5.08%) GDPR
3 2 (3.39%) NIST
4 1 (1.69%) Accessibility
4 1 (1.69%) MiFID
Systems Management
1 5 (8.47%) Terraform
2 4 (6.78%) Kubernetes
3 1 (1.69%) Ambari
3 1 (1.69%) Puppet
3 1 (1.69%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 22 (37.29%) Databricks
2 10 (16.95%) Microsoft
3 5 (8.47%) Informatica
4 4 (6.78%) Google
5 3 (5.08%) Foundry
5 3 (5.08%) Palantir
6 2 (3.39%) Oracle
7 1 (1.69%) MicroStrategy
7 1 (1.69%) Workday