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 31 January 2026.

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

6 months to
31 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 63 72 70
Rank change year-on-year +9 -2 +38
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 65 49 66
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 3.46% 2.61% 2.70%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.67% 2.81% 2.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 51 30 54
10th Percentile £325 £447 £385
25th Percentile £400 £469 £453
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £563 £525
Median % change year-on-year -8.89% +7.14% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £634 £598
90th Percentile £700 £739 £638
Central London median daily rate £513 £563 £540
% change year-on-year -8.89% +4.17% -1.82%
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 1,770 1,743 2,311
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 94.15% 93.01% 94.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,220 1,059 1,662
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £431 £463 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £575 £563
Median % change year-on-year -7.83% +2.22% -4.26%
75th Percentile £675 £675 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £788
Central London median daily rate £540 £575 £551
% change year-on-year -6.09% +4.45% -4.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 8 22
10th Percentile £19.98 £13.18 £17.00
25th Percentile £24.37 £20.00 £19.18
Median hourly rate £37.25 £27.25 £24.00
Median % change year-on-year +36.70% +13.54% -5.88%
75th Percentile £43.86 £58.19 £40.00
90th Percentile £52.96 £112.00 £50.10
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £35.00 £26.91
% change year-on-year -25.40% +30.09% +6.55%

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 31 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 31 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 38 (58.46%) SQL
2 37 (56.92%) Data Pipeline
3 36 (55.38%) Python
4 33 (50.77%) Azure
5 31 (47.69%) ETL
6 28 (43.08%) Databricks
7 26 (40.00%) AWS
8 25 (38.46%) Data Modelling
8 25 (38.46%) Data Quality
9 21 (32.31%) Data Engineering
10 20 (30.77%) Analytics
11 16 (24.62%) CI/CD
12 15 (23.08%) Data Governance
13 14 (21.54%) Data Warehouse
13 14 (21.54%) PySpark
13 14 (21.54%) Security Cleared
14 13 (20.00%) Apache Airflow
14 13 (20.00%) Business Intelligence
15 12 (18.46%) Microsoft
15 12 (18.46%) Power BI
15 12 (18.46%) Power Platform
15 12 (18.46%) SC Cleared
15 12 (18.46%) Snowflake
16 11 (16.92%) dbt
16 11 (16.92%) Performance Tuning
17 10 (15.38%) Amazon S3
17 10 (15.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 10 (15.38%) Data Integration
17 10 (15.38%) Data Lake
17 10 (15.38%) Data Science

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 13 (20.00%) Apache Airflow
2 5 (7.69%) Apache
2 5 (7.69%) Apache Spark
3 1 (1.54%) SAS
3 1 (1.54%) SharePoint
Applications
1 2 (3.08%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (1.54%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (1.54%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 1 (1.54%) Aladdin
1 1 (1.54%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 33 (50.77%) Azure
2 26 (40.00%) AWS
3 12 (18.46%) Power Platform
3 12 (18.46%) Snowflake
4 11 (16.92%) dbt
5 10 (15.38%) Amazon S3
5 10 (15.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 8 (12.31%) Azure Data Factory
6 8 (12.31%) Serverless
7 7 (10.77%) AWS Lambda
7 7 (10.77%) GCP
8 4 (6.15%) Azure DevOps
9 3 (4.62%) AWS Step Functions
9 3 (4.62%) GitHub
9 3 (4.62%) Microsoft Purview
10 2 (3.08%) Dagster
10 2 (3.08%) GitHub Actions
10 2 (3.08%) Matillion
10 2 (3.08%) Prefect
10 2 (3.08%) Textract
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.54%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 14 (21.54%) Data Warehouse
2 12 (18.46%) Power BI
3 10 (15.38%) Data Lake
4 9 (13.85%) Metadata
5 6 (9.23%) Tableau
6 5 (7.69%) Amazon Redshift
6 5 (7.69%) Delta Lake
6 5 (7.69%) Snowflake Schema
7 4 (6.15%) Amazon Athena
8 3 (4.62%) Amazon QuickSight
8 3 (4.62%) PostgreSQL
8 3 (4.62%) Relational Database
8 3 (4.62%) SQL Server
9 2 (3.08%) Azure SQL Database
9 2 (3.08%) CockroachDB
9 2 (3.08%) DataStage
9 2 (3.08%) DynamoDB
9 2 (3.08%) Star Schema
10 1 (1.54%) Data Vault
10 1 (1.54%) Looker
Development Applications
1 9 (13.85%) Git
2 2 (3.08%) Jenkins
2 2 (3.08%) JIRA
3 1 (1.54%) Jaeger
General
1 16 (24.62%) Finance
2 8 (12.31%) Banking
2 8 (12.31%) Social Skills
3 6 (9.23%) Analytical Skills
4 5 (7.69%) Front Office
4 5 (7.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 4 (6.15%) Back Office
5 4 (6.15%) Investment Banking
6 3 (4.62%) Public Sector
7 2 (3.08%) Law
7 2 (3.08%) Telecoms
8 1 (1.54%) Games
8 1 (1.54%) International Banking
8 1 (1.54%) Manufacturing
8 1 (1.54%) Military
8 1 (1.54%) Organisational Skills
8 1 (1.54%) Pharmaceutical
8 1 (1.54%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (21.54%) PySpark
2 3 (4.62%) Kafka
2 3 (4.62%) XML
3 2 (3.08%) boto
3 2 (3.08%) JSON
3 2 (3.08%) NumPy
3 2 (3.08%) Pandas
3 2 (3.08%) REST
4 1 (1.54%) ADO
4 1 (1.54%) AWS CDK
4 1 (1.54%) EDI
4 1 (1.54%) HTML
4 1 (1.54%) Loki
4 1 (1.54%) Middleware
4 1 (1.54%) OpenTelemetry
4 1 (1.54%) XSLT
4 1 (1.54%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 5 (7.69%) Cloud Native
1 5 (7.69%) Data Structures
2 2 (3.08%) Derivative
2 2 (3.08%) Equities
2 2 (3.08%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
2 2 (3.08%) Management Information System
3 1 (1.54%) Algorithms
3 1 (1.54%) Clustering
3 1 (1.54%) Greenfield Project
3 1 (1.54%) Hedge funds
3 1 (1.54%) Media Streaming
3 1 (1.54%) Online Games
3 1 (1.54%) Operational Technology
3 1 (1.54%) Product Ownership
3 1 (1.54%) Public Cloud
3 1 (1.54%) Reinsurance
3 1 (1.54%) Replication
3 1 (1.54%) Taxonomies
3 1 (1.54%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.54%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 37 (56.92%) Data Pipeline
2 31 (47.69%) ETL
3 25 (38.46%) Data Modelling
4 21 (32.31%) Data Engineering
5 20 (30.77%) Analytics
6 16 (24.62%) CI/CD
7 15 (23.08%) Data Governance
8 13 (20.00%) Business Intelligence
9 11 (16.92%) Performance Tuning
10 10 (15.38%) Data Integration
10 10 (15.38%) Data Science
11 9 (13.85%) Data Transformation
12 8 (12.31%) Agile
12 8 (12.31%) DevOps
12 8 (12.31%) Problem-Solving
13 7 (10.77%) Validation
14 6 (9.23%) AI
14 6 (9.23%) Data Lineage
15 5 (7.69%) Metadata Management
15 5 (7.69%) Performance Optimisation
Programming Languages
1 38 (58.46%) SQL
2 36 (55.38%) Python
3 9 (13.85%) Scala
4 3 (4.62%) Java
5 2 (3.08%) T-SQL
6 1 (1.54%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 1 (1.54%) Go
6 1 (1.54%) JavaScript
6 1 (1.54%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 14 (21.54%) Security Cleared
2 12 (18.46%) SC Cleared
3 3 (4.62%) Computer Science Degree
3 3 (4.62%) Degree
4 2 (3.08%) SnowPro
5 1 (1.54%) AWS Certification
5 1 (1.54%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 25 (38.46%) Data Quality
2 3 (4.62%) GDPR
3 2 (3.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (1.54%) Accessibility
4 1 (1.54%) Dodd-Frank
4 1 (1.54%) EMIR
Systems Management
1 5 (7.69%) Terraform
2 2 (3.08%) Kubernetes
3 1 (1.54%) Grafana
3 1 (1.54%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 28 (43.08%) Databricks
2 12 (18.46%) Microsoft
3 2 (3.08%) Informatica
3 2 (3.08%) Oracle
3 2 (3.08%) SAP
4 1 (1.54%) IBM
4 1 (1.54%) Palantir
4 1 (1.54%) Salesforce
4 1 (1.54%) Splunk
4 1 (1.54%) Teradata
4 1 (1.54%) Workday