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 23 December 2025.

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

6 months to
23 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 66 70 69
Rank change year-on-year +4 -1 +38
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 63 50 70
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 3.42% 2.43% 2.79%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.66% 2.62% 2.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 52 31 58
10th Percentile £313 £463 £385
25th Percentile £412 £512 £453
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -
75th Percentile £591 £638 £638
90th Percentile £699 £738 £788
Central London median daily rate £525 £575 £570
% change year-on-year -8.70% +0.88% +3.64%

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 1,722 1,912 2,358
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.54% 93.00% 94.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,206 1,174 1,695
10th Percentile £325 £363 £350
25th Percentile £420 £463 £459
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £540 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -6.09% - -
75th Percentile £675 £683 £688
90th Percentile £775 £788 £800
Central London median daily rate £543 £575 £566
% change year-on-year -5.65% +1.59% -1.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 13 13
10th Percentile £19.98 £15.60 £17.00
25th Percentile £24.36 £22.00 £18.93
Median hourly rate £31.00 £57.50 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -46.09% +130.00% -28.57%
75th Percentile £43.33 £112.00 £46.75
90th Percentile £55.25 £132.40 £68.75
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £35.00 £25.00
% change year-on-year -25.40% +40.00% -23.08%

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 23 December 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 & Capabilities in the City of London

For the 6 months to 23 December 2025, 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%) SQL
2 35 (55.56%) Data Pipeline
3 34 (53.97%) Python
4 31 (49.21%) ETL
5 30 (47.62%) Azure
6 29 (46.03%) AWS
7 25 (39.68%) Data Quality
8 24 (38.10%) Databricks
9 20 (31.75%) Data Modelling
10 18 (28.57%) Data Engineering
11 17 (26.98%) Analytics
12 16 (25.40%) CI/CD
12 16 (25.40%) Data Warehouse
12 16 (25.40%) Security Cleared
13 13 (20.63%) Business Intelligence
13 13 (20.63%) Data Governance
13 13 (20.63%) SC Cleared
14 12 (19.05%) Amazon S3
14 12 (19.05%) Apache Airflow
14 12 (19.05%) Data Science
14 12 (19.05%) PySpark
15 11 (17.46%) Data Lake
15 11 (17.46%) Power BI
15 11 (17.46%) Power Platform
15 11 (17.46%) Snowflake
16 10 (15.87%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 10 (15.87%) Data Integration
16 10 (15.87%) Data Transformation
16 10 (15.87%) DevOps
16 10 (15.87%) Microsoft

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%) Confluence
4 1 (1.59%) Oracle SOA Suite
4 1 (1.59%) SAS
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
1 1 (1.59%) Oracle BPM
Cloud Services
1 30 (47.62%) Azure
2 29 (46.03%) AWS
3 12 (19.05%) Amazon S3
4 11 (17.46%) Power Platform
4 11 (17.46%) Snowflake
5 10 (15.87%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 9 (14.29%) dbt
7 8 (12.70%) Azure Data Factory
7 8 (12.70%) Serverless
8 7 (11.11%) AWS Lambda
8 7 (11.11%) GCP
9 4 (6.35%) Azure DevOps
10 3 (4.76%) AWS Step Functions
10 3 (4.76%) GitHub
11 2 (3.17%) Amazon EventBridge
11 2 (3.17%) Dagster
11 2 (3.17%) GitHub Actions
11 2 (3.17%) Microsoft Purview
11 2 (3.17%) Prefect
11 2 (3.17%) Textract
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.59%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 16 (25.40%) Data Warehouse
2 11 (17.46%) Data Lake
2 11 (17.46%) Power BI
3 6 (9.52%) Amazon Redshift
3 6 (9.52%) Metadata
4 5 (7.94%) Amazon QuickSight
4 5 (7.94%) Delta Lake
4 5 (7.94%) Relational Database
5 4 (6.35%) Amazon Athena
5 4 (6.35%) DataStage
5 4 (6.35%) PostgreSQL
5 4 (6.35%) Snowflake Schema
6 3 (4.76%) SQL Server
6 3 (4.76%) Tableau
7 2 (3.17%) Apache Iceberg
7 2 (3.17%) Azure SQL Database
7 2 (3.17%) CockroachDB
7 2 (3.17%) DynamoDB
7 2 (3.17%) Star Schema
8 1 (1.59%) PowerCenter
Development Applications
1 8 (12.70%) Git
2 3 (4.76%) Jenkins
3 2 (3.17%) JIRA
4 1 (1.59%) Bitbucket
4 1 (1.59%) Jaeger
4 1 (1.59%) MLflow
General
1 17 (26.98%) Finance
2 10 (15.87%) Social Skills
3 6 (9.52%) Banking
4 5 (7.94%) Analytical Skills
4 5 (7.94%) Front Office
4 5 (7.94%) Public Sector
5 4 (6.35%) Back Office
5 4 (6.35%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 4 (6.35%) Investment Banking
6 2 (3.17%) Law
7 1 (1.59%) Documentation Skills
7 1 (1.59%) Games
7 1 (1.59%) International Banking
7 1 (1.59%) Manufacturing
7 1 (1.59%) Organisational Skills
7 1 (1.59%) Pharmaceutical
7 1 (1.59%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (19.05%) PySpark
2 5 (7.94%) 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%) ActiveMQ
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 4 (6.35%) Cloud Native
1 4 (6.35%) Data Structures
2 2 (3.17%) Derivative
2 2 (3.17%) Equities
2 2 (3.17%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 1 (1.59%) Greenfield Project
3 1 (1.59%) Hedge funds
3 1 (1.59%) IoT
3 1 (1.59%) Legacy Systems
3 1 (1.59%) Management Information System
3 1 (1.59%) Media Streaming
3 1 (1.59%) Online Games
3 1 (1.59%) Product Ownership
3 1 (1.59%) Replication
3 1 (1.59%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.59%) Linux
1 1 (1.59%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 35 (55.56%) Data Pipeline
2 31 (49.21%) ETL
3 20 (31.75%) Data Modelling
4 18 (28.57%) Data Engineering
5 17 (26.98%) Analytics
6 16 (25.40%) CI/CD
7 13 (20.63%) Business Intelligence
7 13 (20.63%) Data Governance
8 12 (19.05%) Data Science
9 10 (15.87%) Data Integration
9 10 (15.87%) Data Transformation
9 10 (15.87%) DevOps
10 8 (12.70%) Performance Tuning
11 7 (11.11%) Problem-Solving
12 6 (9.52%) Agile
12 6 (9.52%) AI
12 6 (9.52%) Asset Management
12 6 (9.52%) Machine Learning
12 6 (9.52%) Migration
12 6 (9.52%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 36 (57.14%) SQL
2 34 (53.97%) Python
3 7 (11.11%) Scala
4 4 (6.35%) Java
5 2 (3.17%) T-SQL
6 1 (1.59%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 1 (1.59%) Go
6 1 (1.59%) JavaScript
6 1 (1.59%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 16 (25.40%) Security Cleared
2 13 (20.63%) SC Cleared
3 5 (7.94%) Degree
4 3 (4.76%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (3.17%) AWS Certification
5 2 (3.17%) SnowPro
6 1 (1.59%) BPSS Clearance
6 1 (1.59%) DBS Check
6 1 (1.59%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 25 (39.68%) Data Quality
2 1 (1.59%) Accessibility
2 1 (1.59%) Dodd-Frank
2 1 (1.59%) EMIR
2 1 (1.59%) GDPR
2 1 (1.59%) MiFID
2 1 (1.59%) NIST
Systems Management
1 6 (9.52%) Terraform
2 2 (3.17%) Kubernetes
3 1 (1.59%) Ambari
3 1 (1.59%) Grafana
3 1 (1.59%) Prometheus
3 1 (1.59%) Puppet
3 1 (1.59%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 24 (38.10%) Databricks
2 10 (15.87%) Microsoft
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%) Informatica
4 1 (1.59%) Splunk
4 1 (1.59%) Teradata
4 1 (1.59%) Workday