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 £538, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 December 2025.

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

6 months to
1 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 72 78 66
Rank change year-on-year +6 -12 +39
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 53 51 76
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 2.99% 2.38% 2.84%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.20% 2.56% 3.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 42 33 61
10th Percentile £307 £463 £385
25th Percentile £418 £513 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.52% +4.55% -
75th Percentile £588 £675 £638
90th Percentile £638 £755 £788
Central London median daily rate £538 £575 £565
% change year-on-year -6.52% +1.77% +2.73%

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 1,654 1,994 2,515
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.34% 93.13% 93.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,149 1,224 1,790
10th Percentile £329 £363 £352
25th Percentile £420 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% - -
75th Percentile £675 £688 £688
90th Percentile £765 £779 £800
Central London median daily rate £550 £575 £575
% change year-on-year -4.35% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 16 14
10th Percentile £20.02 £17.25 £17.00
25th Percentile £25.75 £22.00 £19.51
Median hourly rate £34.00 £48.00 £24.50
Median % change year-on-year -29.17% +95.92% -42.69%
75th Percentile £47.50 £112.00 £44.56
90th Percentile £64.48 £137.50 £66.25
Central London median hourly rate £27.75 £35.00 £24.99
% change year-on-year -20.71% +40.08% -40.86%

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 1 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 1 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 33 (62.26%) Python
1 33 (62.26%) SQL
2 29 (54.72%) AWS
3 28 (52.83%) Azure
3 28 (52.83%) Data Pipeline
4 23 (43.40%) ETL
5 21 (39.62%) Data Quality
6 20 (37.74%) Data Modelling
7 18 (33.96%) Data Warehouse
7 18 (33.96%) Databricks
8 16 (30.19%) Analytics
9 15 (28.30%) CI/CD
10 14 (26.42%) Data Engineering
10 14 (26.42%) Data Science
11 12 (22.64%) Apache Airflow
11 12 (22.64%) Security Cleared
12 11 (20.75%) Data Transformation
12 11 (20.75%) Snowflake
13 10 (18.87%) Business Intelligence
13 10 (18.87%) Data Lake
13 10 (18.87%) Degree
14 9 (16.98%) Amazon S3
14 9 (16.98%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 9 (16.98%) Computer Science
14 9 (16.98%) dbt
14 9 (16.98%) DevOps
14 9 (16.98%) Microsoft
14 9 (16.98%) SC Cleared
15 8 (15.09%) Agile
15 8 (15.09%) Apache Spark

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 (22.64%) Apache Airflow
2 8 (15.09%) Apache Spark
3 5 (9.43%) Apache
4 1 (1.89%) Confluence
4 1 (1.89%) Luigi
4 1 (1.89%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 2 (3.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (1.89%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (1.89%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 1 (1.89%) Aladdin
1 1 (1.89%) Maximo
1 1 (1.89%) Oracle BPM
Cloud Services
1 29 (54.72%) AWS
2 28 (52.83%) Azure
3 11 (20.75%) Snowflake
4 9 (16.98%) Amazon S3
4 9 (16.98%) Azure Synapse Analytics
4 9 (16.98%) dbt
5 8 (15.09%) GCP
6 7 (13.21%) Azure Data Factory
6 7 (13.21%) Power Platform
7 4 (7.55%) AWS Lambda
7 4 (7.55%) Azure DevOps
7 4 (7.55%) Serverless
8 3 (5.66%) GitHub
9 2 (3.77%) Amazon SageMaker
9 2 (3.77%) Azure Machine Learning
9 2 (3.77%) Dagster
9 2 (3.77%) GitHub Actions
9 2 (3.77%) Microsoft Purview
9 2 (3.77%) Prefect
10 1 (1.89%) ChatGPT
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.89%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 18 (33.96%) Data Warehouse
2 10 (18.87%) Data Lake
3 7 (13.21%) Power BI
4 5 (9.43%) Amazon QuickSight
4 5 (9.43%) PostgreSQL
4 5 (9.43%) Relational Database
5 4 (7.55%) Amazon Redshift
5 4 (7.55%) DataStage
5 4 (7.55%) Delta Lake
5 4 (7.55%) Hadoop
6 3 (5.66%) Amazon Athena
6 3 (5.66%) Snowflake Schema
7 2 (3.77%) Apache Hive
7 2 (3.77%) Azure SQL Database
7 2 (3.77%) Big Data
7 2 (3.77%) Metadata
7 2 (3.77%) Spark SQL
7 2 (3.77%) SQL Server
7 2 (3.77%) Star Schema
7 2 (3.77%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 7 (13.21%) Git
2 3 (5.66%) Jenkins
3 2 (3.77%) JIRA
3 2 (3.77%) MLflow
4 1 (1.89%) Bitbucket
4 1 (1.89%) Jaeger
General
1 19 (35.85%) Finance
2 12 (22.64%) Social Skills
3 6 (11.32%) Analytical Skills
4 5 (9.43%) Banking
4 5 (9.43%) Public Sector
5 4 (7.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 3 (5.66%) Investment Banking
7 2 (3.77%) Documentation Skills
7 2 (3.77%) Front Office
7 2 (3.77%) Law
8 1 (1.89%) Back Office
8 1 (1.89%) Games
8 1 (1.89%) International Banking
8 1 (1.89%) Manufacturing
8 1 (1.89%) Organisational Skills
8 1 (1.89%) Pharmaceutical
8 1 (1.89%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (13.21%) PySpark
2 5 (9.43%) XML
3 3 (5.66%) Kafka
4 2 (3.77%) CSS
4 2 (3.77%) HTML
4 2 (3.77%) JSON
5 1 (1.89%) ActiveMQ
5 1 (1.89%) ADO
5 1 (1.89%) AWS CDK
5 1 (1.89%) EDI
5 1 (1.89%) Loki
5 1 (1.89%) Middleware
5 1 (1.89%) OpenTelemetry
5 1 (1.89%) XSLT
Miscellaneous
1 4 (7.55%) Cloud Native
2 3 (5.66%) Product Ownership
3 2 (3.77%) Distributed Computing
3 2 (3.77%) Virtual Team
4 1 (1.89%) Data Structures
4 1 (1.89%) Derivative
4 1 (1.89%) Equities
4 1 (1.89%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 1 (1.89%) Greenfield Project
4 1 (1.89%) Hedge funds
4 1 (1.89%) IoT
4 1 (1.89%) Legacy Systems
4 1 (1.89%) Media Streaming
4 1 (1.89%) Online Games
4 1 (1.89%) Replication
4 1 (1.89%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.89%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 28 (52.83%) Data Pipeline
2 23 (43.40%) ETL
3 20 (37.74%) Data Modelling
4 16 (30.19%) Analytics
5 15 (28.30%) CI/CD
6 14 (26.42%) Data Engineering
6 14 (26.42%) Data Science
7 11 (20.75%) Data Transformation
8 10 (18.87%) Business Intelligence
9 9 (16.98%) Computer Science
9 9 (16.98%) DevOps
10 8 (15.09%) Agile
10 8 (15.09%) Data Governance
10 8 (15.09%) Data Integration
10 8 (15.09%) Problem-Solving
11 7 (13.21%) Machine Learning
12 6 (11.32%) Migration
12 6 (11.32%) Performance Tuning
13 5 (9.43%) AI
13 5 (9.43%) Asset Management
Programming Languages
1 33 (62.26%) Python
1 33 (62.26%) SQL
2 5 (9.43%) Java
3 4 (7.55%) Scala
4 3 (5.66%) JavaScript
5 1 (1.89%) Go
5 1 (1.89%) R
5 1 (1.89%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 12 (22.64%) Security Cleared
2 10 (18.87%) Degree
3 9 (16.98%) SC Cleared
4 4 (7.55%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (3.77%) AWS Certification
5 2 (3.77%) Master's Degree
5 2 (3.77%) SnowPro
6 1 (1.89%) BPSS Clearance
6 1 (1.89%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 21 (39.62%) Data Quality
2 2 (3.77%) NIST
3 1 (1.89%) Accessibility
3 1 (1.89%) Dodd-Frank
3 1 (1.89%) EMIR
3 1 (1.89%) GDPR
3 1 (1.89%) MiFID
Systems Management
1 6 (11.32%) Terraform
2 4 (7.55%) Kubernetes
3 1 (1.89%) Ambari
3 1 (1.89%) Grafana
3 1 (1.89%) Prometheus
3 1 (1.89%) Puppet
3 1 (1.89%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 18 (33.96%) Databricks
2 9 (16.98%) Microsoft
3 4 (7.55%) Palantir
4 3 (5.66%) Foundry
5 1 (1.89%) IBM
5 1 (1.89%) Oracle
5 1 (1.89%) Splunk
5 1 (1.89%) Workday