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 £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 2 January 2026.

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

6 months to
2 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 62 71 66
Rank change year-on-year +9 -5 +44
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 61 51 68
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 3.32% 2.55% 2.74%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.54% 2.75% 2.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 50 32 58
10th Percentile £313 £456 £385
25th Percentile £407 £505 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £545
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +5.50% -0.91%
75th Percentile £597 £638 £634
90th Percentile £705 £731 £779
Central London median daily rate £525 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -

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 1,723 1,856 2,327
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.79% 92.89% 93.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,201 1,137 1,666
10th Percentile £338 £360 £350
25th Percentile £425 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -7.83% - -
75th Percentile £675 £675 £688
90th Percentile £775 £788 £793
Central London median daily rate £540 £575 £563
% change year-on-year -6.09% +2.22% -2.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 12 14
10th Percentile £20.18 £14.80 £17.00
25th Percentile £26.31 £22.00 £19.51
Median hourly rate £37.25 £48.00 £24.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.40% +95.92% -27.41%
75th Percentile £42.65 £112.00 £44.56
90th Percentile £51.88 £134.95 £66.25
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £35.00 £25.50
% change year-on-year -25.40% +37.25% -21.54%

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 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 2 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 37 (60.66%) SQL
2 34 (55.74%) Python
3 33 (54.10%) Data Pipeline
4 30 (49.18%) ETL
5 28 (45.90%) Azure
6 27 (44.26%) AWS
7 24 (39.34%) Data Quality
8 23 (37.70%) Databricks
9 19 (31.15%) Data Modelling
10 18 (29.51%) Data Engineering
11 16 (26.23%) Analytics
11 16 (26.23%) CI/CD
12 15 (24.59%) Data Warehouse
12 15 (24.59%) Security Cleared
13 14 (22.95%) Data Governance
14 13 (21.31%) Business Intelligence
14 13 (21.31%) PySpark
15 12 (19.67%) Apache Airflow
15 12 (19.67%) SC Cleared
16 11 (18.03%) Amazon S3
16 11 (18.03%) Data Science
16 11 (18.03%) Microsoft
16 11 (18.03%) Power BI
16 11 (18.03%) Power Platform
17 10 (16.39%) Data Integration
17 10 (16.39%) Data Lake
17 10 (16.39%) DevOps
17 10 (16.39%) Snowflake
18 9 (14.75%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 9 (14.75%) dbt

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 (19.67%) Apache Airflow
2 6 (9.84%) Apache
3 5 (8.20%) Apache Spark
4 1 (1.64%) Confluence
4 1 (1.64%) Oracle SOA Suite
4 1 (1.64%) SAS
Applications
1 2 (3.28%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (1.64%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (1.64%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 1 (1.64%) Aladdin
1 1 (1.64%) Maximo
1 1 (1.64%) Oracle BPM
Cloud Services
1 28 (45.90%) Azure
2 27 (44.26%) AWS
3 11 (18.03%) Amazon S3
3 11 (18.03%) Power Platform
4 10 (16.39%) Snowflake
5 9 (14.75%) Azure Synapse Analytics
5 9 (14.75%) dbt
6 7 (11.48%) Azure Data Factory
6 7 (11.48%) Serverless
7 6 (9.84%) AWS Lambda
7 6 (9.84%) GCP
8 4 (6.56%) Azure DevOps
9 3 (4.92%) AWS Step Functions
9 3 (4.92%) GitHub
9 3 (4.92%) Microsoft Purview
10 2 (3.28%) Amazon EventBridge
10 2 (3.28%) Dagster
10 2 (3.28%) GitHub Actions
10 2 (3.28%) Prefect
10 2 (3.28%) Textract
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.64%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 15 (24.59%) Data Warehouse
2 11 (18.03%) Power BI
3 10 (16.39%) Data Lake
4 7 (11.48%) Metadata
5 6 (9.84%) Amazon Redshift
6 5 (8.20%) Amazon QuickSight
6 5 (8.20%) Delta Lake
6 5 (8.20%) Relational Database
7 4 (6.56%) Amazon Athena
7 4 (6.56%) DataStage
7 4 (6.56%) PostgreSQL
8 3 (4.92%) Snowflake Schema
8 3 (4.92%) SQL Server
8 3 (4.92%) Tableau
9 2 (3.28%) Apache Iceberg
9 2 (3.28%) Azure SQL Database
9 2 (3.28%) CockroachDB
9 2 (3.28%) DynamoDB
9 2 (3.28%) Star Schema
10 1 (1.64%) OLAP
Development Applications
1 8 (13.11%) Git
2 3 (4.92%) Jenkins
3 2 (3.28%) JIRA
4 1 (1.64%) Bitbucket
4 1 (1.64%) Jaeger
General
1 15 (24.59%) Finance
2 8 (13.11%) Social Skills
3 6 (9.84%) Banking
4 5 (8.20%) Analytical Skills
4 5 (8.20%) Front Office
4 5 (8.20%) Public Sector
5 4 (6.56%) Back Office
5 4 (6.56%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 4 (6.56%) Investment Banking
6 2 (3.28%) Law
7 1 (1.64%) Games
7 1 (1.64%) International Banking
7 1 (1.64%) Manufacturing
7 1 (1.64%) Organisational Skills
7 1 (1.64%) Pharmaceutical
7 1 (1.64%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (21.31%) PySpark
2 5 (8.20%) XML
3 2 (3.28%) boto
3 2 (3.28%) JSON
3 2 (3.28%) Kafka
3 2 (3.28%) NumPy
3 2 (3.28%) Pandas
3 2 (3.28%) REST
4 1 (1.64%) ActiveMQ
4 1 (1.64%) ADO
4 1 (1.64%) AWS CDK
4 1 (1.64%) EDI
4 1 (1.64%) HTML
4 1 (1.64%) Loki
4 1 (1.64%) Middleware
4 1 (1.64%) OpenTelemetry
4 1 (1.64%) XSLT
4 1 (1.64%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 4 (6.56%) Cloud Native
1 4 (6.56%) Data Structures
2 2 (3.28%) Derivative
2 2 (3.28%) Equities
2 2 (3.28%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 1 (1.64%) Greenfield Project
3 1 (1.64%) Hedge funds
3 1 (1.64%) IoT
3 1 (1.64%) Management Information System
3 1 (1.64%) Media Streaming
3 1 (1.64%) Online Games
3 1 (1.64%) Product Ownership
3 1 (1.64%) Replication
3 1 (1.64%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.64%) Linux
1 1 (1.64%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 33 (54.10%) Data Pipeline
2 30 (49.18%) ETL
3 19 (31.15%) Data Modelling
4 18 (29.51%) Data Engineering
5 16 (26.23%) Analytics
5 16 (26.23%) CI/CD
6 14 (22.95%) Data Governance
7 13 (21.31%) Business Intelligence
8 11 (18.03%) Data Science
9 10 (16.39%) Data Integration
9 10 (16.39%) DevOps
10 8 (13.11%) Data Transformation
10 8 (13.11%) Performance Tuning
11 7 (11.48%) Agile
11 7 (11.48%) Problem-Solving
12 6 (9.84%) Asset Management
12 6 (9.84%) Data Lineage
12 6 (9.84%) Migration
12 6 (9.84%) Validation
13 5 (8.20%) Performance Optimisation
Programming Languages
1 37 (60.66%) SQL
2 34 (55.74%) Python
3 7 (11.48%) Scala
4 4 (6.56%) Java
5 2 (3.28%) T-SQL
6 1 (1.64%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 1 (1.64%) Go
6 1 (1.64%) JavaScript
6 1 (1.64%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 15 (24.59%) Security Cleared
2 12 (19.67%) SC Cleared
3 4 (6.56%) Degree
4 3 (4.92%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (3.28%) AWS Certification
5 2 (3.28%) SnowPro
6 1 (1.64%) BPSS Clearance
6 1 (1.64%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 24 (39.34%) Data Quality
2 2 (3.28%) GDPR
3 1 (1.64%) Accessibility
3 1 (1.64%) Dodd-Frank
3 1 (1.64%) EMIR
3 1 (1.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 1 (1.64%) MiFID
Systems Management
1 6 (9.84%) Terraform
2 2 (3.28%) Kubernetes
3 1 (1.64%) Ambari
3 1 (1.64%) Grafana
3 1 (1.64%) Prometheus
3 1 (1.64%) Puppet
3 1 (1.64%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 23 (37.70%) Databricks
2 11 (18.03%) Microsoft
3 2 (3.28%) Oracle
3 2 (3.28%) Palantir
3 2 (3.28%) SAP
4 1 (1.64%) Foundry
4 1 (1.64%) IBM
4 1 (1.64%) Informatica
4 1 (1.64%) Splunk
4 1 (1.64%) Teradata
4 1 (1.64%) Workday