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 £550, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 June 2026.

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

6 months to
1 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 36 62 77
Rank change year-on-year +26 +15 +3
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 114 62 50
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.89% 3.64% 2.32%
As % of the Job Titles category 5.18% 3.89% 2.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 83 39 41
10th Percentile £354 £410 £413
25th Percentile £425 £464 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -4.76% -8.70%
75th Percentile £613 £581 £588
90th Percentile £675 £649 £719
Central London median daily rate £550 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +10.00% -4.76% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - £46.75
Median hourly rate £19.34 - £48.50
75th Percentile - - £50.25
90th Percentile - - -
Central London median hourly rate £19.34 - £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 2,199 1,594 2,052
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 94.42% 93.60% 95.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,485 1,009 1,430
10th Percentile £350 £350 £343
25th Percentile £450 £450 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year - - -8.33%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £788
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £550
% change year-on-year - - -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 26 15 14
10th Percentile £17.42 £18.70 £14.90
25th Percentile £18.75 £24.21 £20.22
Median hourly rate £26.64 £28.50 £22.75
Median % change year-on-year -6.54% +25.27% -35.00%
75th Percentile £52.41 £46.25 £37.34
90th Percentile £65.00 £85.50 £47.18
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £28.15 £27.41
% change year-on-year -7.25% +2.72% -21.70%

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 June 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 June 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 55 (48.25%) Data Pipeline
2 54 (47.37%) SQL
3 51 (44.74%) Python
4 47 (41.23%) Analytics
5 46 (40.35%) Data Engineering
6 40 (35.09%) ETL
7 39 (34.21%) Azure
8 33 (28.95%) Data Modelling
9 29 (25.44%) Data Quality
10 25 (21.93%) AWS
10 25 (21.93%) Power Platform
11 23 (20.18%) Databricks
12 22 (19.30%) Business Intelligence
12 22 (19.30%) Data Warehouse
12 22 (19.30%) Power BI
13 21 (18.42%) Apache Airflow
13 21 (18.42%) Data Science
14 20 (17.54%) CI/CD
14 20 (17.54%) Tableau
15 19 (16.67%) Security Cleared
16 18 (15.79%) Snowflake
17 17 (14.91%) Azure Data Factory
18 16 (14.04%) PySpark
18 16 (14.04%) SC Cleared
18 16 (14.04%) Validation
19 15 (13.16%) Data Governance
19 15 (13.16%) dbt
19 15 (13.16%) DevOps
20 14 (12.28%) GCP
21 13 (11.40%) AI

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 21 (18.42%) Apache Airflow
2 7 (6.14%) Apache
2 7 (6.14%) Apache Spark
3 1 (0.88%) Microsoft Exchange
3 1 (0.88%) SharePoint
Applications
1 1 (0.88%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 2 (1.75%) BambooHR
2 1 (0.88%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 39 (34.21%) Azure
2 25 (21.93%) AWS
2 25 (21.93%) Power Platform
3 18 (15.79%) Snowflake
4 17 (14.91%) Azure Data Factory
5 15 (13.16%) dbt
6 14 (12.28%) GCP
7 10 (8.77%) Amazon S3
7 10 (8.77%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 9 (7.89%) Serverless
9 8 (7.02%) AWS Lambda
10 6 (5.26%) Prefect
11 4 (3.51%) Azure DevOps
11 4 (3.51%) Matillion
12 3 (2.63%) Amazon Kinesis
12 3 (2.63%) Dagster
12 3 (2.63%) Fivetran
13 2 (1.75%) AWS Step Functions
13 2 (1.75%) Microsoft Purview
13 2 (1.75%) Textract
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.88%) Structured Cabling
Database & Business Intelligence
1 22 (19.30%) Data Warehouse
1 22 (19.30%) Power BI
2 20 (17.54%) Tableau
3 11 (9.65%) SQL Server
4 10 (8.77%) BigQuery
5 9 (7.89%) Snowflake Schema
6 7 (6.14%) Amazon Redshift
6 7 (6.14%) Data Lake
6 7 (6.14%) Metadata
7 5 (4.39%) Delta Lake
7 5 (4.39%) Looker
8 4 (3.51%) Azure SQL Database
8 4 (3.51%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 3 (2.63%) Big Data
9 3 (2.63%) DynamoDB
9 3 (2.63%) Geospatial Data
10 2 (1.75%) CockroachDB
10 2 (1.75%) NoSQL
10 2 (1.75%) Oracle Database
10 2 (1.75%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 8 (7.02%) Git
2 2 (1.75%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
3 1 (0.88%) JIRA
General
1 33 (28.95%) Finance
2 10 (8.77%) Analytical Skills
3 8 (7.02%) Social Skills
4 7 (6.14%) Banking
5 6 (5.26%) Front Office
6 4 (3.51%) Back Office
7 3 (2.63%) Publishing
7 3 (2.63%) Telecoms
8 2 (1.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 2 (1.75%) Investment Banking
8 2 (1.75%) Legal
8 2 (1.75%) Pharmaceutical
8 2 (1.75%) Public Sector
9 1 (0.88%) Billing
9 1 (0.88%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (0.88%) Financial Institution
9 1 (0.88%) General Ledger
9 1 (0.88%) Law
9 1 (0.88%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 16 (14.04%) PySpark
2 9 (7.89%) Kafka
3 5 (4.39%) Pandas
4 4 (3.51%) Spring
4 4 (3.51%) Spring Boot
5 3 (2.63%) GeoJSON
5 3 (2.63%) Matplotlib
5 3 (2.63%) Polars
5 3 (2.63%) REST
5 3 (2.63%) scikit-learn
6 2 (1.75%) boto
6 2 (1.75%) JSON
6 2 (1.75%) NumPy
6 2 (1.75%) YAML
7 1 (0.88%) HTML
7 1 (0.88%) Jinja
7 1 (0.88%) Node.js
7 1 (0.88%) pytest
7 1 (0.88%) React
7 1 (0.88%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 10 (8.77%) Cloud Native
2 5 (4.39%) Clustering
2 5 (4.39%) Data Structures
3 3 (2.63%) Legacy Systems
3 3 (2.63%) Onboarding
4 2 (1.75%) Algorithms
4 2 (1.75%) Derivative
4 2 (1.75%) Equities
4 2 (1.75%) Fixed Income
4 2 (1.75%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 2 (1.75%) Greenfield Project
4 2 (1.75%) Life Science
4 2 (1.75%) Management Information System
4 2 (1.75%) Reinsurance
5 1 (0.88%) Data Centre
5 1 (0.88%) Fibre Optics
5 1 (0.88%) Legacy Code
5 1 (0.88%) Public Cloud
5 1 (0.88%) Smart Meter
5 1 (0.88%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 1 (0.88%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 55 (48.25%) Data Pipeline
2 47 (41.23%) Analytics
3 46 (40.35%) Data Engineering
4 40 (35.09%) ETL
5 33 (28.95%) Data Modelling
6 22 (19.30%) Business Intelligence
7 21 (18.42%) Data Science
8 20 (17.54%) CI/CD
9 16 (14.04%) Validation
10 15 (13.16%) Data Governance
10 15 (13.16%) DevOps
11 13 (11.40%) AI
11 13 (11.40%) Decision-Making
11 13 (11.40%) Performance Tuning
12 11 (9.65%) Migration
12 11 (9.65%) Performance Optimisation
13 9 (7.89%) Data Analytics
14 7 (6.14%) Data Ingestion
14 7 (6.14%) Data Transformation
14 7 (6.14%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 54 (47.37%) SQL
2 51 (44.74%) Python
3 10 (8.77%) Scala
4 8 (7.02%) Java
5 4 (3.51%) C#
6 3 (2.63%) T-SQL
7 2 (1.75%) R
8 1 (0.88%) Bicep
8 1 (0.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 1 (0.88%) Korn
8 1 (0.88%) PL/SQL
8 1 (0.88%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 19 (16.67%) Security Cleared
2 16 (14.04%) SC Cleared
3 5 (4.39%) DBS Check
4 3 (2.63%) BPSS Clearance
5 2 (1.75%) SnowPro
6 1 (0.88%) BICSI Certification
6 1 (0.88%) City & Guilds
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (25.44%) Data Quality
2 6 (5.26%) GDPR
3 2 (1.75%) EMIR
3 2 (1.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 2 (1.75%) MiFID
4 1 (0.88%) Accessibility
4 1 (0.88%) GxP
4 1 (0.88%) QA
System Software
1 5 (4.39%) Docker
Systems Management
1 5 (4.39%) Kubernetes
2 1 (0.88%) Terraform
Vendors
1 23 (20.18%) Databricks
2 13 (11.40%) Microsoft
3 6 (5.26%) Informatica
4 5 (4.39%) Oracle
5 4 (3.51%) SAP
6 3 (2.63%) Google
7 2 (1.75%) Amplitude
7 2 (1.75%) Salesforce
7 2 (1.75%) Workday
8 1 (0.88%) HubSpot
8 1 (0.88%) MuleSoft
8 1 (0.88%) OpenAI
8 1 (0.88%) Talend