Validation Contract Job Trends in the City of London

Validation
Central London > City of London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the City of London requiring Validation skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 65 58
Rank change year-on-year +19 -7 +61
Contract jobs citing Validation 86 53 74
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.43% 2.92% 3.13%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.98% 3.19% 3.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 54 29 49
10th Percentile £352 £413 £358
25th Percentile £438 £450 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £688 £638 £575
90th Percentile £796 £678 £782
Central London median daily rate £510 £568 £550
% change year-on-year -10.13% +3.18% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 0
10th Percentile £18.76 - -
25th Percentile £21.05 - -
Median hourly rate £25.62 - -
75th Percentile £30.93 - -
90th Percentile £33.67 - -
Central London median hourly rate £25.62 - -

All Process & Methodology Skills
City of London

Validation 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 1,728 1,664 2,117
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 88.93% 91.58% 89.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,200 1,006 1,507
10th Percentile £356 £363 £350
25th Percentile £430 £463 £455
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £540 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -6.09% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £669 £679 £688
90th Percentile £775 £783 £800
Central London median daily rate £550 £575 £563
% change year-on-year -4.35% +2.22% -4.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 8 14
10th Percentile £18.75 £22.00 £17.00
25th Percentile £20.66 £28.94 £19.18
Median hourly rate £31.00 £40.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -23.46% +24.62% -7.14%
75th Percentile £43.86 £64.56 £45.52
90th Percentile £54.35 £112.00 £66.70
Central London median hourly rate £26.34 £35.00 £27.81
% change year-on-year -24.74% +25.85% -20.54%

Validation
Job Vacancy Trend in the City of London

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

Validation job vacancy trend in the City of London

Validation
Daily Rate Trend in the City of London

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

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

Validation
Daily Rate Histogram in the City of London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Validation in the City of London over the 6 months to 18 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Validation in the City of London

Validation
Hourly Rate Trend in the City of London

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

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

Validation
Hourly Rate Histogram in the City of London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Validation in the City of London over the 6 months to 18 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Validation in the City of London

Validation
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 (4.65%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (2.33%) Apache
2 2 (2.33%) Apache Spark
2 2 (2.33%) SharePoint
3 1 (1.16%) Adobe Experience Manager
3 1 (1.16%) CMS
3 1 (1.16%) Confluence
3 1 (1.16%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 5 (5.81%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (1.16%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (1.16%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (2.33%) Algo Collateral
1 2 (2.33%) Workday HCM
2 1 (1.16%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (1.16%) NetSuite
2 1 (1.16%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 19 (22.09%) Azure
2 16 (18.60%) AWS
3 9 (10.47%) Power Platform
4 5 (5.81%) AWS Lambda
4 5 (5.81%) Azure DevOps
4 5 (5.81%) SaaS
4 5 (5.81%) Serverless
5 4 (4.65%) Amazon S3
5 4 (4.65%) GCP
5 4 (4.65%) GitHub
5 4 (4.65%) Snowflake
6 3 (3.49%) Azure Data Factory
6 3 (3.49%) Entra ID
7 2 (2.33%) Amazon SageMaker
7 2 (2.33%) AWS Step Functions
7 2 (2.33%) Collibra
7 2 (2.33%) Dynamics 365
7 2 (2.33%) GitHub Actions
7 2 (2.33%) Slack
7 2 (2.33%) Textract
Communications & Networking
1 2 (2.33%) Firewall
2 1 (1.16%) Internet
2 1 (1.16%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (9.30%) Power BI
2 6 (6.98%) Metadata
3 5 (5.81%) Data Warehouse
3 5 (5.81%) Tableau
4 4 (4.65%) Amazon Redshift
5 3 (3.49%) Data Lake
6 2 (2.33%) Amazon Athena
6 2 (2.33%) Big Data
6 2 (2.33%) CockroachDB
6 2 (2.33%) DynamoDB
6 2 (2.33%) MySQL
6 2 (2.33%) SQL Server
7 1 (1.16%) Data Mart
7 1 (1.16%) Hadoop
7 1 (1.16%) Informix
7 1 (1.16%) PostgreSQL
7 1 (1.16%) Relational Database
7 1 (1.16%) Snowflake Schema
7 1 (1.16%) SQL Server Integration Services
7 1 (1.16%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 7 (8.14%) JIRA
2 5 (5.81%) Postman
2 5 (5.81%) Selenium
3 4 (4.65%) Git
4 3 (3.49%) Cucumber
5 2 (2.33%) Bitbucket
5 2 (2.33%) GitLab
5 2 (2.33%) Jenkins
5 2 (2.33%) MLflow
5 2 (2.33%) SonarQube
6 1 (1.16%) JMeter
6 1 (1.16%) LoadRunner
6 1 (1.16%) Robot Framework
6 1 (1.16%) SpecFlow
6 1 (1.16%) TestRail
6 1 (1.16%) WinAutomation
6 1 (1.16%) Zephyr
General
1 45 (52.33%) Finance
2 36 (41.86%) Social Skills
3 23 (26.74%) Analytical Skills
4 18 (20.93%) Banking
5 6 (6.98%) Front Office
5 6 (6.98%) Investment Banking
6 5 (5.81%) Financial Institution
6 5 (5.81%) Presentation Skills
7 3 (3.49%) Influencing Skills
7 3 (3.49%) Public Sector
8 2 (2.33%) Back Office
8 2 (2.33%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (1.16%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 1 (1.16%) Legal
9 1 (1.16%) Police
9 1 (1.16%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 24 (27.91%) Analyst
2 10 (11.63%) Business Analyst
2 10 (11.63%) Lead
3 8 (9.30%) Data Analyst
4 7 (8.14%) Data Engineer
4 7 (8.14%) Senior
5 6 (6.98%) Migration Manager
5 6 (6.98%) Migration Project Manager
5 6 (6.98%) Project Manager
6 5 (5.81%) Architect
6 5 (5.81%) Consultant
7 4 (4.65%) Tester
8 3 (3.49%) Automation Tester
8 3 (3.49%) Business Systems Analyst
8 3 (3.49%) Principal Consultant
8 3 (3.49%) Test Engineer
9 2 (2.33%) Data Scientist
9 2 (2.33%) SAP Analyst
9 2 (2.33%) SAP HR Analyst
9 2 (2.33%) Test Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 6 (6.98%) PyTorch
2 5 (5.81%) TensorFlow
3 3 (3.49%) .NET
3 3 (3.49%) JSON
3 3 (3.49%) NumPy
3 3 (3.49%) Pandas
3 3 (3.49%) scikit-learn
3 3 (3.49%) XML
4 2 (2.33%) boto
4 2 (2.33%) HTML
4 2 (2.33%) LangChain
4 2 (2.33%) Middleware
4 2 (2.33%) Playwright
4 2 (2.33%) PySpark
4 2 (2.33%) REST
5 1 (1.16%) Faiss
5 1 (1.16%) FastAPI
5 1 (1.16%) Google JAX
5 1 (1.16%) JAX
5 1 (1.16%) Model Context Protocol
Miscellaneous
1 7 (8.14%) Legacy Systems
2 5 (5.81%) Data Structures
2 5 (5.81%) Derivative
2 5 (5.81%) Product Ownership
3 4 (4.65%) AI Agents
3 4 (4.65%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 3 (3.49%) Algorithms
4 3 (3.49%) Fixed Income
4 3 (3.49%) Management Information System
4 3 (3.49%) Reference Data
5 2 (2.33%) Cloud Native
5 2 (2.33%) Equities
5 2 (2.33%) Greenfield Project
5 2 (2.33%) Onboarding
5 2 (2.33%) Synthetic Data
6 1 (1.16%) Analytical Mindset
6 1 (1.16%) Distributed Computing
6 1 (1.16%) Self-Motivation
6 1 (1.16%) Virtual Team
6 1 (1.16%) Web Conferencing
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.16%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 25 (29.07%) Agile
2 22 (25.58%) Migration
3 19 (22.09%) Analytics
3 19 (22.09%) Problem-Solving
4 18 (20.93%) Data Validation
5 17 (19.77%) ETL
6 16 (18.60%) AI
7 15 (17.44%) Data Analysis
7 15 (17.44%) Stakeholder Management
8 14 (16.28%) Business Intelligence
8 14 (16.28%) Data Pipeline
9 13 (15.12%) Project Delivery
9 13 (15.12%) Test Automation
10 12 (13.95%) Actionable Insight
10 12 (13.95%) Data Engineering
10 12 (13.95%) Data Governance
10 12 (13.95%) Data Modelling
10 12 (13.95%) User Acceptance Testing
11 11 (12.79%) Requirements Gathering
11 11 (12.79%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 31 (36.05%) SQL
2 26 (30.23%) Python
3 6 (6.98%) Java
4 5 (5.81%) C#
5 3 (3.49%) C++
5 3 (3.49%) JavaScript
6 2 (2.33%) VB.NET
7 1 (1.16%) Groovy
7 1 (1.16%) Korn
7 1 (1.16%) PL/SQL
7 1 (1.16%) R
7 1 (1.16%) Scala
7 1 (1.16%) TypeScript
7 1 (1.16%) XPath
Qualifications
1 12 (13.95%) Degree
2 7 (8.14%) PMI Certification
2 7 (8.14%) PMP
3 5 (5.81%) Computer Science Degree
3 5 (5.81%) Master's Degree
4 4 (4.65%) Security Cleared
5 3 (3.49%) ISTQB
6 2 (2.33%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
6 2 (2.33%) PhD
6 2 (2.33%) SC Cleared
7 1 (1.16%) CISM
7 1 (1.16%) CISSP
7 1 (1.16%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
7 1 (1.16%) MBA
7 1 (1.16%) MPhil
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 26 (30.23%) Data Quality
2 21 (24.42%) QA
3 13 (15.12%) GDPR
4 9 (10.47%) NIST
5 8 (9.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (3.49%) Accessibility
7 2 (2.33%) Actionable Recommendations
7 2 (2.33%) IFRS
7 2 (2.33%) IFRS 17
7 2 (2.33%) SLA
8 1 (1.16%) Basel III
8 1 (1.16%) EMIR
8 1 (1.16%) EU AI Act
8 1 (1.16%) GAAP
8 1 (1.16%) HL7
8 1 (1.16%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 1 (1.16%) MiFID
8 1 (1.16%) PCI DSS
8 1 (1.16%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (1.16%) Solvency II
System Software
1 1 (1.16%) Docker
Systems Management
1 3 (3.49%) Terraform
2 1 (1.16%) Grafana
2 1 (1.16%) Kubernetes
2 1 (1.16%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 8 (9.30%) Microsoft
2 7 (8.14%) SAP
3 6 (6.98%) CyberArk
3 6 (6.98%) Oracle
3 6 (6.98%) Salesforce
4 4 (4.65%) Databricks
4 4 (4.65%) Google
4 4 (4.65%) Murex
4 4 (4.65%) Workday
5 2 (2.33%) Informatica
5 2 (2.33%) SmartStream
5 2 (2.33%) UiPath
6 1 (1.16%) Alteryx
6 1 (1.16%) Ariba
6 1 (1.16%) Bloomberg
6 1 (1.16%) Cerner
6 1 (1.16%) IBM
6 1 (1.16%) MuleSoft
6 1 (1.16%) OpenAI
6 1 (1.16%) Talend