Principal Engineer Contracts in the City of London

Principal Engineer
Central London > City of London

The median Principal Engineer daily rate in the City of London is £500, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

 6 months to
1 May 2025		 Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 111 122 -
Rank change year-on-year +11 - -
Contract jobs requiring a Principal Engineer 8 5 0
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the City of London 0.46% 0.23% -
As % of the Job Titles category 0.49% 0.24% -
Number of daily rates quoted 1 2 0
10th Percentile - £847 -
25th Percentile £475 £870 -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £944 -
Median % change year-on-year -47.02% - -
75th Percentile £525 £1,020 -
90th Percentile - £1,046 -
Central London median daily rate £500 £944 -
% change year-on-year -47.02% - -

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 1,632 2,086 3,469
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.94% 94.95% 95.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,021 1,483 2,364
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £463 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £563 £600
Median % change year-on-year +2.22% -6.25% +6.19%
75th Percentile £681 £688 £725
90th Percentile £775 £798 £820
Central London median daily rate £575 £550 £585
% change year-on-year +4.55% -5.98% +4.46%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 15 22
10th Percentile £22.00 £15.62 £15.50
25th Percentile £24.66 £20.22 £18.50
Median hourly rate £31.00 £23.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +34.78% -34.29% -6.04%
75th Percentile £48.75 £27.25 £58.75
90th Percentile £92.75 £40.00 £87.97
Central London median hourly rate £29.07 £25.78 £35.00
% change year-on-year +12.76% -26.34% -6.04%

Principal Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the City of London

Job postings that featured Principal Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the City of London.

Job vacancy trend for Principal Engineer in the City of London

Principal Engineer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend in the City of London

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Principal Engineer in the City of London.

Daily rate trend for Principal Engineer in the City of London

Principal Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the City of London

For the 6 months to 1 May 2025, Principal Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the City of London region featuring Principal Engineer in the job title.

1 5 (62.50%) Python
1 5 (62.50%) Low Latency
2 3 (37.50%) TypeScript
2 3 (37.50%) Analytics
2 3 (37.50%) Azure
2 3 (37.50%) SAP HANA
2 3 (37.50%) Big Data
2 3 (37.50%) OLTP
2 3 (37.50%) OLAP
2 3 (37.50%) SAP
2 3 (37.50%) Web Services
2 3 (37.50%) SAP BW
2 3 (37.50%) Finance
2 3 (37.50%) Banking
2 3 (37.50%) NoSQL
2 3 (37.50%) SAP Data Services
2 3 (37.50%) Data Strategy
2 3 (37.50%) Site Reliability Engineering
2 3 (37.50%) Observability
2 3 (37.50%) Containerisation
3 2 (25.00%) Design Patterns
3 2 (25.00%) GitHub Actions
3 2 (25.00%) Platform Engineering
3 2 (25.00%) Infrastructure as Code
3 2 (25.00%) Amazon EKS
3 2 (25.00%) Amazon Aurora
3 2 (25.00%) Jest
3 2 (25.00%) Serverless
3 2 (25.00%) Greenfield Project
3 2 (25.00%) Terraform

Principal Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the City of London by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Business Applications
1 2 (25.00%) SAP BPC
Cloud Services
1 3 (37.50%) Azure
2 2 (25.00%) Amazon EKS
2 2 (25.00%) AWS
2 2 (25.00%) AWS Lambda
2 2 (25.00%) GitHub
2 2 (25.00%) GitHub Actions
2 2 (25.00%) SaaS
2 2 (25.00%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 1 (12.50%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (37.50%) Big Data
1 3 (37.50%) NoSQL
1 3 (37.50%) OLAP
1 3 (37.50%) OLTP
1 3 (37.50%) SAP BW
1 3 (37.50%) SAP Data Services
1 3 (37.50%) SAP HANA
2 2 (25.00%) Amazon Aurora
2 2 (25.00%) Amazon RDS
2 2 (25.00%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 1 (12.50%) GitLab
General
1 3 (37.50%) Banking
1 3 (37.50%) Finance
2 2 (25.00%) Front Office
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (37.50%) Web Services
2 2 (25.00%) .NET
2 2 (25.00%) GraphQL
2 2 (25.00%) Jest
2 2 (25.00%) Node.js
2 2 (25.00%) React
3 1 (12.50%) AngularJS
3 1 (12.50%) OAuth
3 1 (12.50%) OAuth2
3 1 (12.50%) RxJS
Miscellaneous
1 2 (25.00%) Greenfield Project
Processes & Methodologies
1 5 (62.50%) Low Latency
2 3 (37.50%) Analytics
2 3 (37.50%) Containerisation
2 3 (37.50%) Data Strategy
2 3 (37.50%) Observability
2 3 (37.50%) Site Reliability Engineering
3 2 (25.00%) Agile
3 2 (25.00%) Continuous Delivery
3 2 (25.00%) Design Patterns
3 2 (25.00%) Infrastructure as Code
3 2 (25.00%) Platform Engineering
3 2 (25.00%) Risk Management
3 2 (25.00%) Software Engineering
4 1 (12.50%) DevOps
4 1 (12.50%) Fintech
4 1 (12.50%) Front End Development
Programming Languages
1 5 (62.50%) Python
2 3 (37.50%) TypeScript
3 2 (25.00%) C#
3 2 (25.00%) Go
3 2 (25.00%) JavaScript
3 2 (25.00%) Rust
Systems Management
1 2 (25.00%) Kubernetes
1 2 (25.00%) Terraform
Vendors
1 3 (37.50%) SAP
3 Principal Engineer jobs in Central London