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 26 August 2026.

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

6 months to
26 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 43 62 75
Rank change year-on-year +19 +13 -6
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 103 61 50
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.44% 3.38% 2.41%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.71% 3.61% 2.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 82 46 34
10th Percentile £410 £329 £436
25th Percentile £450 £474 £493
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £565 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year +7.62% -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £586 £669
90th Percentile £724 £684 £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 2,185 1,692 1,962
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 94.18% 93.79% 94.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,476 1,118 1,282
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 £771 £775 £788
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £575
% change year-on-year - -4.35% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 26 22 14
10th Percentile £17.60 £17.35 £15.87
25th Percentile £17.89 £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 £32.57 £53.50 £89.06
90th Percentile £58.75 £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 26 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 26 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 54 (52.43%) Python
1 54 (52.43%) SQL
2 50 (48.54%) Data Engineering
3 48 (46.60%) Data Pipeline
4 42 (40.78%) Analytics
5 34 (33.01%) Data Modelling
5 34 (33.01%) ETL
6 33 (32.04%) CI/CD
7 29 (28.16%) Azure
8 28 (27.18%) Data Quality
9 26 (25.24%) AWS
10 23 (22.33%) DevOps
11 22 (21.36%) Apache Airflow
12 21 (20.39%) Data Warehouse
13 20 (19.42%) Databricks
14 19 (18.45%) dbt
15 18 (17.48%) Snowflake
16 17 (16.50%) Migration
16 17 (16.50%) Power BI
16 17 (16.50%) Power Platform
16 17 (16.50%) PySpark
17 16 (15.53%) Business Intelligence
18 15 (14.56%) Data Science
19 14 (13.59%) AI
19 14 (13.59%) Azure Data Factory
19 14 (13.59%) Data Governance
19 14 (13.59%) Tableau
19 14 (13.59%) Validation
20 13 (12.62%) Performance Optimisation
21 12 (11.65%) BigQuery

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 22 (21.36%) Apache Airflow
2 9 (8.74%) Apache Spark
3 5 (4.85%) 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 29 (28.16%) Azure
2 26 (25.24%) AWS
3 19 (18.45%) dbt
4 18 (17.48%) Snowflake
5 17 (16.50%) Power Platform
6 14 (13.59%) Azure Data Factory
7 11 (10.68%) Amazon S3
7 11 (10.68%) GCP
8 8 (7.77%) AWS Lambda
8 8 (7.77%) Serverless
9 7 (6.80%) Azure DevOps
9 7 (6.80%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 6 (5.83%) GitHub
10 6 (5.83%) Prefect
11 5 (4.85%) Amazon Kinesis
11 5 (4.85%) GitHub Actions
12 3 (2.91%) Dagster
12 3 (2.91%) Fivetran
13 2 (1.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 2 (1.94%) Amazon EventBridge
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.97%) Structured Cabling
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (20.39%) 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
8 5 (4.85%) Amazon RDS
8 5 (4.85%) Data Lake
8 5 (4.85%) Snowflake Schema
9 4 (3.88%) 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%) Hadoop
11 2 (1.94%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 5 (4.85%) 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 36 (34.95%) Finance
2 14 (13.59%) Social Skills
3 11 (10.68%) Analytical Skills
4 9 (8.74%) Banking
5 3 (2.91%) Front Office
5 3 (2.91%) Public Sector
6 2 (1.94%) Back Office
6 2 (1.94%) Investment Banking
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%) Law
7 1 (0.97%) Military
7 1 (0.97%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (16.50%) PySpark
2 11 (10.68%) Kafka
3 8 (7.77%) Terraform
4 4 (3.88%) Spring
4 4 (3.88%) Spring Boot
5 2 (1.94%) ActiveMQ
5 2 (1.94%) JSON
5 2 (1.94%) RabbitMQ
5 2 (1.94%) REST
6 1 (0.97%) EDI
6 1 (0.97%) FastAPI
6 1 (0.97%) Great Expectations
6 1 (0.97%) Jinja
6 1 (0.97%) Middleware
6 1 (0.97%) Node.js
6 1 (0.97%) pytest
6 1 (0.97%) React
6 1 (0.97%) SOAP
6 1 (0.97%) XML
6 1 (0.97%) XSLT
Miscellaneous
1 17 (16.50%) Cloud Native
2 5 (4.85%) Legacy Systems
3 4 (3.88%) Clustering
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
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%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 1 (0.97%) Legacy Code
6 1 (0.97%) Life Science
6 1 (0.97%) NHS
6 1 (0.97%) Reinsurance
Processes & Methodologies
1 50 (48.54%) Data Engineering
2 48 (46.60%) Data Pipeline
3 42 (40.78%) Analytics
4 34 (33.01%) Data Modelling
4 34 (33.01%) ETL
5 33 (32.04%) CI/CD
6 23 (22.33%) DevOps
7 17 (16.50%) Migration
8 16 (15.53%) Business Intelligence
9 15 (14.56%) Data Science
10 14 (13.59%) AI
10 14 (13.59%) Data Governance
10 14 (13.59%) Validation
11 13 (12.62%) Performance Optimisation
12 11 (10.68%) Data Transformation
12 11 (10.68%) Platform Engineering
12 11 (10.68%) Software Engineering
13 10 (9.71%) Data Architecture
14 9 (8.74%) Agile
14 9 (8.74%) Data Analytics
Programming Languages
1 54 (52.43%) Python
1 54 (52.43%) SQL
2 7 (6.80%) Java
3 5 (4.85%) Scala
4 3 (2.91%) C#
5 2 (1.94%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 2 (1.94%) Korn
5 2 (1.94%) PowerShell
5 2 (1.94%) T-SQL
6 1 (0.97%) Bicep
6 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 28 (27.18%) 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 5 (4.85%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 20 (19.42%) Databricks
2 12 (11.65%) Microsoft
3 5 (4.85%) Informatica
4 4 (3.88%) Oracle
5 3 (2.91%) SAP
6 2 (1.94%) Google
6 2 (1.94%) Palantir
6 2 (1.94%) Salesforce
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