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 £570, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 2 September 2026.

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

6 months to
2 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 52 62 78
Rank change year-on-year +10 +16 -8
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 98 61 50
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.30% 3.42% 2.40%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.56% 3.65% 2.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 80 46 34
10th Percentile £410 £329 £436
25th Percentile £459 £474 £493
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £570 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year +8.57% -2.33% -6.52%
75th Percentile £625 £586 £647
90th Percentile £725 £684 £688
Central London median daily rate £565 £525 £550
% change year-on-year +7.62% -4.55% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 0
Median hourly rate £19.34 - -
Central London median hourly rate £19.34 - -

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 2,149 1,673 1,968
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 94.30% 93.78% 94.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,450 1,114 1,273
10th Percentile £363 £325 £363
25th Percentile £456 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £675 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £788
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £575
% change year-on-year - -4.35% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 24 22 14
10th Percentile - £17.35 £15.87
25th Percentile £17.60 £23.98 £20.88
Median hourly rate £20.25 £28.33 £27.00
Median % change year-on-year -28.51% +4.91% -27.03%
75th Percentile £31.52 £53.50 £89.06
90th Percentile £49.64 £65.39 £137.50
Central London median hourly rate £23.58 £28.33 £27.00
% change year-on-year -16.75% +4.91% -23.94%

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 2 September 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 2 September 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 54 (55.10%) Python
1 54 (55.10%) SQL
2 50 (51.02%) Data Engineering
3 45 (45.92%) Data Pipeline
4 40 (40.82%) Analytics
5 35 (35.71%) CI/CD
6 33 (33.67%) Data Modelling
7 32 (32.65%) ETL
8 31 (31.63%) Azure
9 30 (30.61%) Data Quality
10 28 (28.57%) AWS
11 25 (25.51%) DevOps
12 22 (22.45%) Databricks
13 21 (21.43%) Apache Airflow
14 18 (18.37%) Data Warehouse
15 17 (17.35%) Azure Data Factory
15 17 (17.35%) dbt
15 17 (17.35%) Migration
15 17 (17.35%) PySpark
15 17 (17.35%) Snowflake
16 16 (16.33%) Data Governance
16 16 (16.33%) Data Science
17 15 (15.31%) AI
17 15 (15.31%) Power BI
17 15 (15.31%) Power Platform
18 14 (14.29%) Business Intelligence
19 13 (13.27%) Performance Optimisation
19 13 (13.27%) Software Engineering
19 13 (13.27%) Validation
20 12 (12.24%) Amazon S3

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 (21.43%) Apache Airflow
2 10 (10.20%) Apache Spark
3 5 (5.10%) Apache
4 2 (2.04%) Confluence
5 1 (1.02%) SAS
Business Applications
1 2 (2.04%) Aladdin
2 1 (1.02%) BambooHR
2 1 (1.02%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 31 (31.63%) Azure
2 28 (28.57%) AWS
3 17 (17.35%) Azure Data Factory
3 17 (17.35%) dbt
3 17 (17.35%) Snowflake
4 15 (15.31%) Power Platform
5 12 (12.24%) Amazon S3
6 11 (11.22%) GCP
7 9 (9.18%) AWS Lambda
7 9 (9.18%) Serverless
8 8 (8.16%) Azure DevOps
8 8 (8.16%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 7 (7.14%) Azure Databricks
10 6 (6.12%) GitHub
11 5 (5.10%) GitHub Actions
11 5 (5.10%) Prefect
12 4 (4.08%) Amazon Kinesis
13 3 (3.06%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 3 (3.06%) Amazon EventBridge
13 3 (3.06%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.02%) Structured Cabling
Database & Business Intelligence
1 18 (18.37%) Data Warehouse
2 15 (15.31%) Power BI
3 11 (11.22%) BigQuery
3 11 (11.22%) Tableau
4 7 (7.14%) Amazon Athena
4 7 (7.14%) SQL Server
5 6 (6.12%) Amazon RDS
6 5 (5.10%) Amazon Redshift
6 5 (5.10%) Data Lake
6 5 (5.10%) Delta Lake
6 5 (5.10%) Metadata
7 4 (4.08%) Azure SQL Database
7 4 (4.08%) Data Mart
7 4 (4.08%) Oracle Database
7 4 (4.08%) Snowflake Schema
8 2 (2.04%) Big Data
8 2 (2.04%) Hadoop
8 2 (2.04%) NoSQL
8 2 (2.04%) Spark SQL
8 2 (2.04%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 6 (6.12%) Git
2 4 (4.08%) Bitbucket
3 2 (2.04%) Atlassian Bamboo
3 2 (2.04%) GitLab
3 2 (2.04%) JIRA
3 2 (2.04%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
4 1 (1.02%) Jenkins
4 1 (1.02%) Terragrunt
General
1 36 (36.73%) Finance
2 15 (15.31%) Social Skills
3 12 (12.24%) Analytical Skills
3 12 (12.24%) Banking
4 3 (3.06%) Back Office
4 3 (3.06%) Public Sector
5 2 (2.04%) Front Office
5 2 (2.04%) Investment Banking
6 1 (1.02%) Billing
6 1 (1.02%) Documentation Skills
6 1 (1.02%) Financial Institution
6 1 (1.02%) General Ledger
6 1 (1.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 1 (1.02%) Law
6 1 (1.02%) Legal
6 1 (1.02%) Military
6 1 (1.02%) Pharmaceutical
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (17.35%) PySpark
2 10 (10.20%) Kafka
3 9 (9.18%) Terraform
4 4 (4.08%) Spring
4 4 (4.08%) Spring Boot
5 2 (2.04%) ActiveMQ
5 2 (2.04%) JSON
5 2 (2.04%) RabbitMQ
5 2 (2.04%) REST
6 1 (1.02%) EDI
6 1 (1.02%) FastAPI
6 1 (1.02%) Great Expectations
6 1 (1.02%) Jinja
6 1 (1.02%) Middleware
6 1 (1.02%) Node.js
6 1 (1.02%) pytest
6 1 (1.02%) React
6 1 (1.02%) SOAP
6 1 (1.02%) XML
6 1 (1.02%) XSLT
Miscellaneous
1 20 (20.41%) Cloud Native
2 5 (5.10%) Legacy Systems
2 5 (5.10%) Onboarding
3 4 (4.08%) Clustering
4 3 (3.06%) Distributed Computing
5 2 (2.04%) Data Centre
5 2 (2.04%) Data Structures
5 2 (2.04%) Greenfield Project
6 1 (1.02%) Algorithms
6 1 (1.02%) Analytical Mindset
6 1 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
6 1 (1.02%) Enterprise Software
6 1 (1.02%) Enterprise Storage
6 1 (1.02%) Fibre Optics
6 1 (1.02%) Fixed Income
6 1 (1.02%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 1 (1.02%) Hedge funds
6 1 (1.02%) NHS
6 1 (1.02%) Reinsurance
6 1 (1.02%) Smart Meter
Processes & Methodologies
1 50 (51.02%) Data Engineering
2 45 (45.92%) Data Pipeline
3 40 (40.82%) Analytics
4 35 (35.71%) CI/CD
5 33 (33.67%) Data Modelling
6 32 (32.65%) ETL
7 25 (25.51%) DevOps
8 17 (17.35%) Migration
9 16 (16.33%) Data Governance
9 16 (16.33%) Data Science
10 15 (15.31%) AI
11 14 (14.29%) Business Intelligence
12 13 (13.27%) Performance Optimisation
12 13 (13.27%) Software Engineering
12 13 (13.27%) Validation
13 12 (12.24%) Data Transformation
13 12 (12.24%) Platform Engineering
14 11 (11.22%) Agile
14 11 (11.22%) Data Architecture
14 11 (11.22%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 54 (55.10%) Python
1 54 (55.10%) SQL
2 8 (8.16%) Java
3 6 (6.12%) Scala
4 3 (3.06%) C#
5 2 (2.04%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 2 (2.04%) Korn
5 2 (2.04%) PowerShell
5 2 (2.04%) T-SQL
6 1 (1.02%) Bicep
6 1 (1.02%) R
Qualifications
1 11 (11.22%) Security Cleared
2 10 (10.20%) SC Cleared
3 5 (5.10%) DBS Check
4 4 (4.08%) SnowPro
5 2 (2.04%) Microsoft Certification
6 1 (1.02%) AWS Certification
6 1 (1.02%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
6 1 (1.02%) BICSI Certification
6 1 (1.02%) City & Guilds
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 30 (30.61%) Data Quality
2 4 (4.08%) QA
3 3 (3.06%) GDPR
4 2 (2.04%) Accessibility
4 2 (2.04%) EMIR
4 2 (2.04%) MiFID
System Software
1 4 (4.08%) Docker
Systems Management
1 4 (4.08%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 22 (22.45%) Databricks
2 12 (12.24%) Microsoft
3 5 (5.10%) Oracle
4 3 (3.06%) Informatica
5 2 (2.04%) Google
5 2 (2.04%) Palantir
5 2 (2.04%) Salesforce
5 2 (2.04%) SAP
6 1 (1.02%) Amplitude
6 1 (1.02%) Cribl.io
6 1 (1.02%) Dell
6 1 (1.02%) HubSpot
6 1 (1.02%) IBM
6 1 (1.02%) MuleSoft
6 1 (1.02%) NetApp
6 1 (1.02%) OpenAI
6 1 (1.02%) Teradata
6 1 (1.02%) Workday