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 £565, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 19 August 2026.

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

6 months to
19 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 45 60 71
Rank change year-on-year +15 +11 -5
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 103 66 50
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.40% 3.56% 2.42%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.67% 3.81% 2.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 83 48 34
10th Percentile £411 £340 £436
25th Percentile £456 £459 £493
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £565 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year +7.62% -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £584 £669
90th Percentile £723 £682 £709
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 2,205 1,734 1,962
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 94.23% 93.63% 94.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,490 1,139 1,297
10th Percentile £363 £331 £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 £679 £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 26 23 14
10th Percentile £17.60 £17.62 £15.87
25th Percentile £17.89 £24.21 £20.88
Median hourly rate £19.50 £28.15 £27.00
Median % change year-on-year -30.73% +4.26% -28.95%
75th Percentile £32.57 £50.25 £89.06
90th Percentile £58.75 £65.21 £137.50
Central London median hourly rate £23.16 £28.33 £27.00
% change year-on-year -18.23% +4.91% -22.86%

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 19 August 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 19 August 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 53 (51.46%) SQL
2 52 (50.49%) Data Engineering
2 52 (50.49%) Python
3 48 (46.60%) Data Pipeline
4 44 (42.72%) Analytics
5 35 (33.98%) Data Modelling
6 34 (33.01%) CI/CD
6 34 (33.01%) ETL
7 30 (29.13%) Azure
8 26 (25.24%) AWS
8 26 (25.24%) Data Quality
9 23 (22.33%) Apache Airflow
9 23 (22.33%) Data Warehouse
9 23 (22.33%) DevOps
10 19 (18.45%) Databricks
10 19 (18.45%) dbt
10 19 (18.45%) Power Platform
10 19 (18.45%) Snowflake
11 17 (16.50%) Business Intelligence
11 17 (16.50%) Power BI
12 16 (15.53%) AI
12 16 (15.53%) Data Science
12 16 (15.53%) Migration
12 16 (15.53%) PySpark
13 15 (14.56%) Azure Data Factory
14 14 (13.59%) Data Governance
14 14 (13.59%) Microsoft
14 14 (13.59%) Performance Optimisation
14 14 (13.59%) Tableau
15 13 (12.62%) Validation

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 23 (22.33%) Apache Airflow
2 9 (8.74%) Apache Spark
3 6 (5.83%) Apache
4 2 (1.94%) Confluence
5 1 (0.97%) Microsoft Exchange
Business Applications
1 2 (1.94%) Aladdin
1 2 (1.94%) BambooHR
2 1 (0.97%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 30 (29.13%) Azure
2 26 (25.24%) AWS
3 19 (18.45%) dbt
3 19 (18.45%) Power Platform
3 19 (18.45%) Snowflake
4 15 (14.56%) Azure Data Factory
5 12 (11.65%) GCP
6 11 (10.68%) Amazon S3
7 8 (7.77%) AWS Lambda
7 8 (7.77%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 8 (7.77%) Serverless
8 7 (6.80%) Azure DevOps
9 6 (5.83%) GitHub
9 6 (5.83%) Prefect
10 5 (4.85%) Amazon Kinesis
10 5 (4.85%) GitHub Actions
11 3 (2.91%) Dagster
11 3 (2.91%) Fivetran
12 2 (1.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 2 (1.94%) Amazon EventBridge
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.97%) Structured Cabling
Database & Business Intelligence
1 23 (22.33%) Data Warehouse
2 17 (16.50%) Power BI
3 14 (13.59%) Tableau
4 12 (11.65%) BigQuery
5 8 (7.77%) SQL Server
6 7 (6.80%) Amazon Redshift
7 6 (5.83%) Amazon Athena
7 6 (5.83%) Data Lake
7 6 (5.83%) Snowflake Schema
8 5 (4.85%) Amazon RDS
8 5 (4.85%) Azure SQL Database
9 4 (3.88%) Data Mart
9 4 (3.88%) Delta Lake
9 4 (3.88%) Metadata
9 4 (3.88%) Oracle Database
10 3 (2.91%) Big Data
10 3 (2.91%) Looker
10 3 (2.91%) NoSQL
11 2 (1.94%) MongoDB
11 2 (1.94%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 6 (5.83%) Git
2 4 (3.88%) Bitbucket
3 2 (1.94%) Atlassian Bamboo
3 2 (1.94%) GitLab
3 2 (1.94%) JIRA
3 2 (1.94%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
4 1 (0.97%) Jenkins
4 1 (0.97%) Terragrunt
General
1 34 (33.01%) Finance
2 14 (13.59%) Social Skills
3 11 (10.68%) Analytical Skills
4 8 (7.77%) Banking
5 3 (2.91%) Front Office
5 3 (2.91%) Public Sector
6 2 (1.94%) Back Office
6 2 (1.94%) Legal
6 2 (1.94%) Pharmaceutical
7 1 (0.97%) Billing
7 1 (0.97%) Documentation Skills
7 1 (0.97%) Financial Institution
7 1 (0.97%) General Ledger
7 1 (0.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 1 (0.97%) Investment Banking
7 1 (0.97%) Law
7 1 (0.97%) Military
7 1 (0.97%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 16 (15.53%) PySpark
2 11 (10.68%) Kafka
3 4 (3.88%) Spring
3 4 (3.88%) Spring Boot
4 2 (1.94%) ActiveMQ
4 2 (1.94%) JSON
4 2 (1.94%) RabbitMQ
4 2 (1.94%) REST
5 1 (0.97%) EDI
5 1 (0.97%) FastAPI
5 1 (0.97%) Great Expectations
5 1 (0.97%) Jinja
5 1 (0.97%) Middleware
5 1 (0.97%) Node.js
5 1 (0.97%) pytest
5 1 (0.97%) React
5 1 (0.97%) SOAP
5 1 (0.97%) XML
5 1 (0.97%) XSLT
Miscellaneous
1 18 (17.48%) Cloud Native
2 5 (4.85%) Clustering
2 5 (4.85%) Legacy Systems
3 4 (3.88%) Onboarding
4 3 (2.91%) Fixed Income
5 2 (1.94%) Data Centre
5 2 (1.94%) Data Structures
5 2 (1.94%) Distributed Computing
5 2 (1.94%) Greenfield Project
5 2 (1.94%) Life Science
6 1 (0.97%) AI Agents
6 1 (0.97%) Algorithms
6 1 (0.97%) Analytical Mindset
6 1 (0.97%) Distributed Systems
6 1 (0.97%) Enterprise Cloud
6 1 (0.97%) Fibre Optics
6 1 (0.97%) Hedge funds
6 1 (0.97%) Legacy Code
6 1 (0.97%) Reinsurance
6 1 (0.97%) Smart Meter
Processes & Methodologies
1 52 (50.49%) Data Engineering
2 48 (46.60%) Data Pipeline
3 44 (42.72%) Analytics
4 35 (33.98%) Data Modelling
5 34 (33.01%) CI/CD
5 34 (33.01%) ETL
6 23 (22.33%) DevOps
7 17 (16.50%) Business Intelligence
8 16 (15.53%) AI
8 16 (15.53%) Data Science
8 16 (15.53%) Migration
9 14 (13.59%) Data Governance
9 14 (13.59%) Performance Optimisation
10 13 (12.62%) Validation
11 11 (10.68%) Platform Engineering
11 11 (10.68%) Software Engineering
12 10 (9.71%) Data Architecture
12 10 (9.71%) Data Transformation
12 10 (9.71%) Decision-Making
13 9 (8.74%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 53 (51.46%) SQL
2 52 (50.49%) Python
3 8 (7.77%) Java
4 5 (4.85%) Scala
5 4 (3.88%) C#
6 2 (1.94%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 2 (1.94%) Korn
6 2 (1.94%) PowerShell
6 2 (1.94%) T-SQL
7 1 (0.97%) Bicep
7 1 (0.97%) R
Qualifications
1 12 (11.65%) Security Cleared
2 11 (10.68%) SC Cleared
3 5 (4.85%) DBS Check
4 4 (3.88%) SnowPro
5 2 (1.94%) Microsoft Certification
6 1 (0.97%) AWS Certification
6 1 (0.97%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
6 1 (0.97%) BICSI Certification
6 1 (0.97%) City & Guilds
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 26 (25.24%) Data Quality
2 4 (3.88%) GDPR
2 4 (3.88%) QA
3 2 (1.94%) Accessibility
3 2 (1.94%) EMIR
3 2 (1.94%) MiFID
4 1 (0.97%) GxP
System Software
1 6 (5.83%) Docker
Systems Management
1 8 (7.77%) Terraform
2 5 (4.85%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 19 (18.45%) Databricks
2 14 (13.59%) Microsoft
3 5 (4.85%) Informatica
4 4 (3.88%) Oracle
5 3 (2.91%) Google
6 2 (1.94%) Palantir
6 2 (1.94%) Salesforce
6 2 (1.94%) SAP
6 2 (1.94%) Workday
7 1 (0.97%) Amplitude
7 1 (0.97%) Cribl.io
7 1 (0.97%) Dell
7 1 (0.97%) HubSpot
7 1 (0.97%) IBM
7 1 (0.97%) MuleSoft
7 1 (0.97%) NetApp
7 1 (0.97%) OpenAI