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 17 February 2026.

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

6 months to
17 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 60 71 70
Rank change year-on-year +11 -1 +41
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 71 46 61
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 3.70% 2.55% 2.55%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.93% 2.75% 2.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 51 27 51
10th Percentile £325 £420 £385
25th Percentile £400 £463 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £613 £595
90th Percentile £700 £745 £700
Central London median daily rate £513 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -2.38% - -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 1,806 1,675 2,260
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 94.01% 92.90% 94.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,240 1,011 1,620
10th Percentile £350 £350 £342
25th Percentile £431 £463 £454
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £575 £569
Median % change year-on-year -6.52% +1.05% -3.56%
75th Percentile £675 £675 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £788
Central London median daily rate £550 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -4.35% +4.50% -4.30%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 7 21
10th Percentile £18.75 £22.00 £17.00
25th Percentile £24.37 £26.63 £18.93
Median hourly rate £37.25 £38.50 £24.00
Median % change year-on-year -3.25% +60.42% -31.43%
75th Percentile £48.67 £80.38 £40.00
90th Percentile £59.72 £112.00 £50.25
Central London median hourly rate £26.34 £35.00 £26.00
% change year-on-year -24.74% +34.62% -20.00%

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 February 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 February 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 43 (60.56%) SQL
2 40 (56.34%) Python
3 38 (53.52%) Data Pipeline
4 36 (50.70%) Azure
5 33 (46.48%) ETL
6 27 (38.03%) Data Quality
7 26 (36.62%) Data Modelling
8 25 (35.21%) AWS
8 25 (35.21%) Databricks
9 23 (32.39%) Analytics
9 23 (32.39%) Data Engineering
10 15 (21.13%) Business Intelligence
10 15 (21.13%) Data Warehouse
10 15 (21.13%) Security Cleared
11 14 (19.72%) Performance Tuning
11 14 (19.72%) Power BI
11 14 (19.72%) Power Platform
12 13 (18.31%) CI/CD
12 13 (18.31%) Data Governance
12 13 (18.31%) Microsoft
12 13 (18.31%) PySpark
12 13 (18.31%) Snowflake
13 12 (16.90%) Apache Airflow
13 12 (16.90%) Azure Data Factory
13 12 (16.90%) Data Science
14 11 (15.49%) Data Transformation
14 11 (15.49%) SC Cleared
15 10 (14.08%) Data Integration
15 10 (14.08%) Data Lake
15 10 (14.08%) 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 12 (16.90%) Apache Airflow
2 5 (7.04%) Apache
2 5 (7.04%) Apache Spark
3 1 (1.41%) SAS
3 1 (1.41%) SharePoint
Applications
1 2 (2.82%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (1.41%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (1.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 1 (1.41%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 36 (50.70%) Azure
2 25 (35.21%) AWS
3 14 (19.72%) Power Platform
4 13 (18.31%) Snowflake
5 12 (16.90%) Azure Data Factory
6 10 (14.08%) dbt
7 9 (12.68%) Amazon S3
7 9 (12.68%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 9 (12.68%) GCP
7 9 (12.68%) Serverless
8 8 (11.27%) AWS Lambda
9 3 (4.23%) AWS Step Functions
9 3 (4.23%) Matillion
10 2 (2.82%) Amazon EventBridge
10 2 (2.82%) Azure DevOps
10 2 (2.82%) Dagster
10 2 (2.82%) Microsoft Purview
10 2 (2.82%) Prefect
10 2 (2.82%) Textract
11 1 (1.41%) Copilot Studio
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.41%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 15 (21.13%) Data Warehouse
2 14 (19.72%) Power BI
3 10 (14.08%) Data Lake
4 9 (12.68%) Metadata
5 7 (9.86%) Tableau
6 6 (8.45%) Amazon Redshift
7 5 (7.04%) Snowflake Schema
7 5 (7.04%) SQL Server
8 4 (5.63%) Amazon Athena
8 4 (5.63%) Delta Lake
9 3 (4.23%) Geospatial Data
9 3 (4.23%) PostgreSQL
9 3 (4.23%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 2 (2.82%) Amazon QuickSight
10 2 (2.82%) Azure SQL Database
10 2 (2.82%) CockroachDB
10 2 (2.82%) DataStage
10 2 (2.82%) Looker
10 2 (2.82%) Spatial Data
10 2 (2.82%) SQL Server Analysis Services
Development Applications
1 10 (14.08%) Git
2 2 (2.82%) Jenkins
3 1 (1.41%) Jaeger
3 1 (1.41%) JIRA
General
1 18 (25.35%) Finance
2 10 (14.08%) Social Skills
3 7 (9.86%) Analytical Skills
3 7 (9.86%) Banking
4 5 (7.04%) Front Office
5 4 (5.63%) Back Office
5 4 (5.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 3 (4.23%) Investment Banking
6 3 (4.23%) Public Sector
6 3 (4.23%) Publishing
7 2 (2.82%) Law
7 2 (2.82%) Telecoms
8 1 (1.41%) Games
8 1 (1.41%) International Banking
8 1 (1.41%) Manufacturing
8 1 (1.41%) Military
8 1 (1.41%) Organisational Skills
8 1 (1.41%) Pharmaceutical
8 1 (1.41%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (18.31%) PySpark
2 5 (7.04%) Pandas
3 3 (4.23%) GeoJSON
3 3 (4.23%) Kafka
3 3 (4.23%) Matplotlib
3 3 (4.23%) Polars
3 3 (4.23%) scikit-learn
3 3 (4.23%) XML
4 2 (2.82%) boto
4 2 (2.82%) JSON
4 2 (2.82%) NumPy
4 2 (2.82%) REST
4 2 (2.82%) YAML
5 1 (1.41%) AWS CDK
5 1 (1.41%) EDI
5 1 (1.41%) HTML
5 1 (1.41%) Loki
5 1 (1.41%) Middleware
5 1 (1.41%) OpenTelemetry
5 1 (1.41%) XSLT
Miscellaneous
1 5 (7.04%) Cloud Native
1 5 (7.04%) Data Structures
2 2 (2.82%) Derivative
2 2 (2.82%) Equities
2 2 (2.82%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
2 2 (2.82%) Management Information System
3 1 (1.41%) Algorithms
3 1 (1.41%) Clustering
3 1 (1.41%) Greenfield Project
3 1 (1.41%) Hedge funds
3 1 (1.41%) Media Streaming
3 1 (1.41%) Online Games
3 1 (1.41%) Operational Technology
3 1 (1.41%) Product Ownership
3 1 (1.41%) Public Cloud
3 1 (1.41%) Reinsurance
3 1 (1.41%) Replication
3 1 (1.41%) Taxonomies
3 1 (1.41%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.41%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 38 (53.52%) Data Pipeline
2 33 (46.48%) ETL
3 26 (36.62%) Data Modelling
4 23 (32.39%) Analytics
4 23 (32.39%) Data Engineering
5 15 (21.13%) Business Intelligence
6 14 (19.72%) Performance Tuning
7 13 (18.31%) CI/CD
7 13 (18.31%) Data Governance
8 12 (16.90%) Data Science
9 11 (15.49%) Data Transformation
10 10 (14.08%) Data Integration
11 9 (12.68%) Problem-Solving
12 8 (11.27%) Agile
13 7 (9.86%) Decision-Making
13 7 (9.86%) Validation
14 6 (8.45%) Data Lineage
14 6 (8.45%) Machine Learning
15 5 (7.04%) DevOps
15 5 (7.04%) Metadata Management
Programming Languages
1 43 (60.56%) SQL
2 40 (56.34%) Python
3 9 (12.68%) Scala
4 3 (4.23%) Java
4 3 (4.23%) T-SQL
5 1 (1.41%) Bicep
5 1 (1.41%) C#
5 1 (1.41%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 1 (1.41%) Go
5 1 (1.41%) JavaScript
5 1 (1.41%) PL/SQL
5 1 (1.41%) PowerShell
5 1 (1.41%) R
Qualifications
1 15 (21.13%) Security Cleared
2 11 (15.49%) SC Cleared
3 3 (4.23%) BPSS Clearance
3 3 (4.23%) Computer Science Degree
3 3 (4.23%) Degree
4 2 (2.82%) SnowPro
5 1 (1.41%) AWS Certification
5 1 (1.41%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 27 (38.03%) Data Quality
2 3 (4.23%) GDPR
3 2 (2.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (1.41%) Accessibility
4 1 (1.41%) Dodd-Frank
4 1 (1.41%) EMIR
Systems Management
1 5 (7.04%) Terraform
2 2 (2.82%) Kubernetes
3 1 (1.41%) Grafana
3 1 (1.41%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 25 (35.21%) Databricks
2 13 (18.31%) Microsoft
3 2 (2.82%) Informatica
3 2 (2.82%) Oracle
3 2 (2.82%) SAP
4 1 (1.41%) Amplitude
4 1 (1.41%) IBM
4 1 (1.41%) Palantir
4 1 (1.41%) Salesforce
4 1 (1.41%) Splunk
4 1 (1.41%) Teradata
4 1 (1.41%) Workday