Data Science Contract Job Trends in the City of London

Data Science
Central London > City of London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the City of London requiring Data Science skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 12 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 78 58 69
Rank change year-on-year -20 +11 +49
Contract jobs citing Data Science 61 61 55
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 2.67% 3.40% 2.63%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.01% 3.61% 2.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 51 45 38
10th Percentile £425 £478 £443
25th Percentile £494 £525 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £563 £606
Median % change year-on-year +6.67% -7.22% -0.94%
75th Percentile £719 £668 £713
90th Percentile £775 £748 £741
Central London median daily rate £575 £550 £613
% change year-on-year +4.55% -10.20% +0.08%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 2 0
Median hourly rate £52.49 £45.00 -
Median % change year-on-year +16.64% - -
Central London median hourly rate £52.49 £45.00 -
% change year-on-year +16.64% - -

All Process & Methodology Skills
City of London

Data Science falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in the City of London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 2,024 1,690 1,926
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 88.62% 94.15% 92.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,390 1,115 1,235
10th Percentile £368 £325 £386
25th Percentile £456 £422 £475
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 £764 £788
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £575
% change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 23 22 16
10th Percentile - £17.35 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.60 £23.98 £19.79
Median hourly rate £21.00 £28.33 £26.63
Median % change year-on-year -25.86% +6.38% -14.80%
75th Percentile £32.05 £53.50 £82.19
90th Percentile £50.59 £63.75 £137.50
Central London median hourly rate £25.00 £29.07 £33.00
% change year-on-year -14.00% -11.91% +20.00%

Data Science
Job Vacancy Trend in the City of London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Data Science relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London.

Data Science job vacancy trend in the City of London

Data Science
Daily Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Data Science.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Data Science

Data Science
Daily Rate Histogram in the City of London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Science in the City of London over the 6 months to 12 September 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Data Science in the City of London

Data Science
Hourly Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Data Science.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Data Science

Data Science
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 4 (6.56%) Apache Airflow
2 3 (4.92%) Apache Spark
3 2 (3.28%) Jupyter
4 1 (1.64%) Apache
Cloud Services
1 13 (21.31%) Azure
2 10 (16.39%) AWS
3 8 (13.11%) GCP
4 7 (11.48%) Snowflake
5 5 (8.20%) Power Platform
6 3 (4.92%) Amazon S3
6 3 (4.92%) Amazon SageMaker
6 3 (4.92%) dbt
7 2 (3.28%) Azure Cognitive Search
7 2 (3.28%) Azure Data Factory
7 2 (3.28%) Prefect
8 1 (1.64%) Amazon Bedrock
8 1 (1.64%) Amazon OpenSearch
8 1 (1.64%) Azure AI
8 1 (1.64%) Azure Monitor
8 1 (1.64%) Dagster
8 1 (1.64%) Google Gemini
8 1 (1.64%) LangSmith
8 1 (1.64%) Serverless
8 1 (1.64%) Vertex AI
Database & Business Intelligence
1 12 (19.67%) Tableau
2 8 (13.11%) BigQuery
3 5 (8.20%) Power BI
4 4 (6.56%) NoSQL
5 3 (4.92%) Data Warehouse
5 3 (4.92%) Relational Database
6 2 (3.28%) Data Mining
6 2 (3.28%) Metadata
6 2 (3.28%) Snowflake Schema
7 1 (1.64%) GIS
7 1 (1.64%) Hadoop
7 1 (1.64%) Looker
7 1 (1.64%) Mixpanel
7 1 (1.64%) MongoDB
7 1 (1.64%) Neo4j
7 1 (1.64%) Oracle Reports
7 1 (1.64%) RDBMS
7 1 (1.64%) Redis
7 1 (1.64%) SQL Server
7 1 (1.64%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 5 (8.20%) Git
2 1 (1.64%) ER Studio
2 1 (1.64%) Vite
General
1 13 (21.31%) Finance
2 8 (13.11%) Analytical Skills
3 7 (11.48%) Social Skills
4 3 (4.92%) Public Sector
5 2 (3.28%) Banking
5 2 (3.28%) Influencing Skills
5 2 (3.28%) Retail
6 1 (1.64%) Legal
6 1 (1.64%) Marketing
6 1 (1.64%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 15 (24.59%) Data Engineer
2 11 (18.03%) Data Scientist
3 10 (16.39%) Architect
4 7 (11.48%) GCP Data Engineer
4 7 (11.48%) GCP Engineer
5 5 (8.20%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
5 5 (8.20%) Technical Architect
6 4 (6.56%) Lead
7 3 (4.92%) Data Architect
7 3 (4.92%) Principal Architect
7 3 (4.92%) Senior
8 2 (3.28%) Analyst
8 2 (3.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 2 (3.28%) Business Data Analyst
8 2 (3.28%) Data Analyst
8 2 (3.28%) Data Manager
8 2 (3.28%) Head of Business Intelligence
8 2 (3.28%) Python Software Engineer
8 2 (3.28%) Software Engineer
8 2 (3.28%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 6 (9.84%) Terraform
2 5 (8.20%) PySpark
3 3 (4.92%) Kafka
3 3 (4.92%) PyTorch
3 3 (4.92%) scikit-learn
4 2 (3.28%) React
4 2 (3.28%) REST
4 2 (3.28%) TensorFlow
5 1 (1.64%) FastAPI
5 1 (1.64%) gRPC
5 1 (1.64%) Model Context Protocol
5 1 (1.64%) NumPy
5 1 (1.64%) Oracle GoldenGate
5 1 (1.64%) Pandas
5 1 (1.64%) pytest
5 1 (1.64%) RESTful
5 1 (1.64%) Snowpark
5 1 (1.64%) Spring
5 1 (1.64%) Spring Boot
5 1 (1.64%) vLLM
Miscellaneous
1 5 (8.20%) Cloud Native
2 3 (4.92%) Analytical Mindset
2 3 (4.92%) Distributed Computing
2 3 (4.92%) Product Ownership
3 2 (3.28%) AI Agents
3 2 (3.28%) Algorithms
3 2 (3.28%) Distributed Systems
3 2 (3.28%) Onboarding
4 1 (1.64%) Clustering
4 1 (1.64%) CMDB
4 1 (1.64%) Life Science
4 1 (1.64%) NHS
4 1 (1.64%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.64%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 36 (59.02%) AI
2 35 (57.38%) Analytics
3 31 (50.82%) Machine Learning
4 19 (31.15%) Generative AI
5 17 (27.87%) CI/CD
6 16 (26.23%) Data Pipeline
6 16 (26.23%) LLM
7 13 (21.31%) Data Engineering
7 13 (21.31%) Decision-Making
8 11 (18.03%) Data Analytics
9 10 (16.39%) Software Engineering
10 9 (14.75%) MLOps
11 8 (13.11%) DevOps
11 8 (13.11%) Infrastructure as Code
11 8 (13.11%) Roadmaps
12 7 (11.48%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
12 7 (11.48%) Stakeholder Management
12 7 (11.48%) Visualisation
13 6 (9.84%) Prompt Engineering
13 6 (9.84%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 28 (45.90%) Python
2 17 (27.87%) SQL
3 6 (9.84%) Java
3 6 (9.84%) R
4 3 (4.92%) Scala
5 2 (3.28%) JavaScript
6 1 (1.64%) C#
6 1 (1.64%) Cypher
6 1 (1.64%) Go
6 1 (1.64%) Gremlin
6 1 (1.64%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 11 (18.03%) Security Cleared
2 10 (16.39%) SC Cleared
3 3 (4.92%) Degree
4 1 (1.64%) Azure Certification
4 1 (1.64%) Computer Science Degree
4 1 (1.64%) Microsoft Certified Professional
4 1 (1.64%) Numerate Degree
4 1 (1.64%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (16.39%) Data Quality
2 3 (4.92%) QA
3 2 (3.28%) Accessibility
3 2 (3.28%) GDPR
4 1 (1.64%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 5 (8.20%) Docker
Systems Management
1 3 (4.92%) Kubernetes
2 1 (1.64%) Grafana
2 1 (1.64%) Istio
2 1 (1.64%) Kubeflow
2 1 (1.64%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 5 (8.20%) Databricks
1 5 (8.20%) Microsoft
2 2 (3.28%) Dynatrace
2 2 (3.28%) Google
2 2 (3.28%) OpenAI
3 1 (1.64%) Alteryx
3 1 (1.64%) Amplitude
3 1 (1.64%) Informatica
3 1 (1.64%) Oracle
3 1 (1.64%) Palantir
3 1 (1.64%) Salesforce
3 1 (1.64%) SAP
3 1 (1.64%) ServiceNow
3 1 (1.64%) Splunk