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 21 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 44 63 58
Rank change year-on-year +19 -5 +57
Contract jobs citing Validation 93 54 76
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.75% 2.95% 3.18%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.34% 3.22% 3.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 60 30 51
10th Percentile £356 £413 £363
25th Percentile £445 £451 £506
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £583 £550
Median % change year-on-year -11.23% +6.00% -
75th Percentile £688 £638 £575
90th Percentile £789 £695 £775
Central London median daily rate £505 £571 £550
% change year-on-year -11.55% +3.86% -3.51%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 0
Median hourly rate £17.23 - -
Central London median hourly rate £17.23 - -

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 1,743 1,679 2,140
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 88.97% 91.65% 89.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,207 1,028 1,516
10th Percentile £356 £363 £350
25th Percentile £431 £463 £455
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £540 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -6.09% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £669 £688 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £800
Central London median daily rate £550 £575 £563
% change year-on-year -4.35% +2.22% -4.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 18 9 14
10th Percentile £18.75 £22.00 £17.00
25th Percentile £20.34 £31.00 £19.18
Median hourly rate £34.25 £38.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -11.04% +18.46% -7.14%
75th Percentile £46.29 £48.75 £45.52
90th Percentile £55.54 £112.00 £66.70
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £35.00 £27.81
% change year-on-year -25.40% +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 21 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
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 5 (5.38%) Apache Airflow
2 3 (3.23%) Apache
3 2 (2.15%) Apache Spark
3 2 (2.15%) SharePoint
4 1 (1.08%) Adobe Experience Manager
4 1 (1.08%) CMS
4 1 (1.08%) Confluence
4 1 (1.08%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 5 (5.38%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (1.08%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (1.08%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 3 (3.23%) Workday HCM
2 2 (2.15%) Algo Collateral
3 1 (1.08%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (1.08%) NetSuite
3 1 (1.08%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 21 (22.58%) Azure
2 19 (20.43%) AWS
3 11 (11.83%) Power Platform
4 6 (6.45%) GCP
5 5 (5.38%) AWS Lambda
5 5 (5.38%) Azure DevOps
5 5 (5.38%) SaaS
5 5 (5.38%) Serverless
5 5 (5.38%) Snowflake
6 4 (4.30%) Amazon S3
6 4 (4.30%) GitHub
7 3 (3.23%) Entra ID
8 2 (2.15%) Amazon SageMaker
8 2 (2.15%) Azure Data Factory
8 2 (2.15%) Boomi
8 2 (2.15%) Collibra
8 2 (2.15%) Dynamics 365
8 2 (2.15%) GitHub Actions
8 2 (2.15%) Slack
8 2 (2.15%) SuccessFactors
Communications & Networking
1 2 (2.15%) Firewall
2 1 (1.08%) Internet
2 1 (1.08%) MPLS
2 1 (1.08%) Network Security
2 1 (1.08%) SD-WAN
2 1 (1.08%) WAN
2 1 (1.08%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (8.60%) Power BI
2 6 (6.45%) Data Warehouse
2 6 (6.45%) Metadata
3 5 (5.38%) Tableau
4 4 (4.30%) Amazon Redshift
5 3 (3.23%) Data Lake
6 2 (2.15%) Amazon Athena
6 2 (2.15%) Big Data
6 2 (2.15%) CockroachDB
6 2 (2.15%) DynamoDB
6 2 (2.15%) MySQL
6 2 (2.15%) SQL Server
6 2 (2.15%) SQL Server Integration Services
7 1 (1.08%) Data Mart
7 1 (1.08%) Hadoop
7 1 (1.08%) Informix
7 1 (1.08%) PostgreSQL
7 1 (1.08%) PowerPivot
7 1 (1.08%) Snowflake Schema
7 1 (1.08%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 7 (7.53%) JIRA
2 5 (5.38%) Git
2 5 (5.38%) Postman
2 5 (5.38%) Selenium
3 3 (3.23%) Cucumber
4 2 (2.15%) Bitbucket
4 2 (2.15%) GitLab
4 2 (2.15%) Jenkins
4 2 (2.15%) MLflow
4 2 (2.15%) SonarQube
5 1 (1.08%) JMeter
5 1 (1.08%) LoadRunner
5 1 (1.08%) Robot Framework
5 1 (1.08%) SpecFlow
5 1 (1.08%) TestRail
5 1 (1.08%) WinAutomation
5 1 (1.08%) Zephyr
General
1 47 (50.54%) Finance
2 38 (40.86%) Social Skills
3 24 (25.81%) Analytical Skills
4 19 (20.43%) Banking
5 6 (6.45%) Financial Institution
5 6 (6.45%) Front Office
5 6 (6.45%) Investment Banking
6 5 (5.38%) Presentation Skills
7 4 (4.30%) Public Sector
8 3 (3.23%) Influencing Skills
9 2 (2.15%) Back Office
9 2 (2.15%) Documentation Skills
9 2 (2.15%) Publishing
10 1 (1.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 1 (1.08%) Legal
10 1 (1.08%) Police
10 1 (1.08%) Retail
Job Titles
1 25 (26.88%) Analyst
2 10 (10.75%) Business Analyst
3 9 (9.68%) Data Engineer
3 9 (9.68%) Lead
4 8 (8.60%) Data Analyst
5 7 (7.53%) Migration Manager
5 7 (7.53%) Migration Project Manager
5 7 (7.53%) Project Manager
5 7 (7.53%) Senior
6 6 (6.45%) Consultant
7 5 (5.38%) Architect
8 4 (4.30%) Tester
9 3 (3.23%) Automation Tester
9 3 (3.23%) Business Systems Analyst
9 3 (3.23%) Data Scientist
9 3 (3.23%) Principal Consultant
9 3 (3.23%) Test Engineer
10 2 (2.15%) AWS Engineer
10 2 (2.15%) Data Migration Lead
10 2 (2.15%) User Researcher
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (7.53%) PyTorch
2 6 (6.45%) TensorFlow
3 4 (4.30%) Pandas
3 4 (4.30%) scikit-learn
4 3 (3.23%) .NET
4 3 (3.23%) JSON
4 3 (3.23%) NumPy
4 3 (3.23%) XML
5 2 (2.15%) boto
5 2 (2.15%) HTML
5 2 (2.15%) LangChain
5 2 (2.15%) Middleware
5 2 (2.15%) Playwright
5 2 (2.15%) PySpark
5 2 (2.15%) REST
6 1 (1.08%) Faiss
6 1 (1.08%) Google JAX
6 1 (1.08%) Hugging Face
6 1 (1.08%) JAX
6 1 (1.08%) Model Context Protocol
Miscellaneous
1 8 (8.60%) Legacy Systems
2 6 (6.45%) Data Structures
3 5 (5.38%) Derivative
3 5 (5.38%) Product Ownership
4 4 (4.30%) AI Agents
4 4 (4.30%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 3 (3.23%) Algorithms
5 3 (3.23%) Cloud Native
5 3 (3.23%) Fixed Income
5 3 (3.23%) Management Information System
5 3 (3.23%) Onboarding
5 3 (3.23%) Reference Data
6 2 (2.15%) Data Centre
6 2 (2.15%) Equities
6 2 (2.15%) Greenfield Project
6 2 (2.15%) Synthetic Data
7 1 (1.08%) Blog
7 1 (1.08%) Clustering
7 1 (1.08%) NHS
7 1 (1.08%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.08%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 27 (29.03%) Agile
2 26 (27.96%) Migration
3 21 (22.58%) Problem-Solving
4 20 (21.51%) Analytics
5 19 (20.43%) AI
6 18 (19.35%) ETL
7 17 (18.28%) Data Validation
7 17 (18.28%) Stakeholder Management
8 15 (16.13%) Data Analysis
8 15 (16.13%) Data Pipeline
8 15 (16.13%) Project Delivery
9 14 (15.05%) Business Intelligence
9 14 (15.05%) Data Governance
10 13 (13.98%) Data Engineering
10 13 (13.98%) Data Modelling
10 13 (13.98%) Test Automation
11 12 (12.90%) Actionable Insight
11 12 (12.90%) User Acceptance Testing
12 11 (11.83%) Use Case
12 11 (11.83%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 33 (35.48%) SQL
2 27 (29.03%) Python
3 6 (6.45%) Java
4 5 (5.38%) C#
5 3 (3.23%) C++
5 3 (3.23%) JavaScript
6 2 (2.15%) VB.NET
7 1 (1.08%) Groovy
7 1 (1.08%) Korn
7 1 (1.08%) PL/SQL
7 1 (1.08%) R
7 1 (1.08%) Scala
7 1 (1.08%) TypeScript
7 1 (1.08%) XPath
Qualifications
1 12 (12.90%) Degree
2 8 (8.60%) PMI Certification
2 8 (8.60%) PMP
3 5 (5.38%) Computer Science Degree
3 5 (5.38%) Master's Degree
4 4 (4.30%) Security Cleared
5 3 (3.23%) ISTQB
6 2 (2.15%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
6 2 (2.15%) PhD
6 2 (2.15%) SC Cleared
7 1 (1.08%) CISM
7 1 (1.08%) CISSP
7 1 (1.08%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
7 1 (1.08%) MBA
7 1 (1.08%) MPhil
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 28 (30.11%) Data Quality
2 23 (24.73%) QA
3 14 (15.05%) GDPR
4 10 (10.75%) NIST
5 9 (9.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (3.23%) Accessibility
7 2 (2.15%) Actionable Recommendations
7 2 (2.15%) IFRS
7 2 (2.15%) IFRS 17
7 2 (2.15%) PCI DSS
7 2 (2.15%) SLA
8 1 (1.08%) Basel III
8 1 (1.08%) EMIR
8 1 (1.08%) EU AI Act
8 1 (1.08%) GAAP
8 1 (1.08%) HL7
8 1 (1.08%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 1 (1.08%) MiFID
8 1 (1.08%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (1.08%) Solvency II
System Software
1 1 (1.08%) Docker
Systems Management
1 3 (3.23%) Terraform
2 1 (1.08%) Grafana
2 1 (1.08%) Kubernetes
2 1 (1.08%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 10 (10.75%) Microsoft
2 8 (8.60%) SAP
3 7 (7.53%) CyberArk
3 7 (7.53%) Oracle
4 6 (6.45%) Salesforce
5 5 (5.38%) Google
5 5 (5.38%) Workday
6 4 (4.30%) Databricks
6 4 (4.30%) Murex
7 3 (3.23%) Informatica
8 2 (2.15%) MuleSoft
8 2 (2.15%) SmartStream
8 2 (2.15%) Talend
8 2 (2.15%) UiPath
9 1 (1.08%) Adobe
9 1 (1.08%) Alteryx
9 1 (1.08%) Ariba
9 1 (1.08%) Cerner
9 1 (1.08%) IBM
9 1 (1.08%) OpenAI