SQL Contract Job Trends in England

SQL (Structured Query Language)
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring SQL skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 3 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,478 3,294 3,517
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.87% 11.86% 10.55%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.40% 36.17% 33.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,000 2,349 2,656
10th Percentile £355 £343 £350
25th Percentile £413 £406 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £535
Median % change year-on-year - -6.54% -0.93%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £646
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 89 57 42
10th Percentile £23.60 £21.18 £24.20
25th Percentile £33.75 £29.07 £30.00
Median hourly rate £46.80 £37.50 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +24.80% -9.64% -9.55%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £56.56
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £40.58
% change year-on-year +14.56% -4.27% -13.20%

All Programming Languages
England

SQL falls under the Programming Languages category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring coding skills in England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for coding skills 11,972 9,108 10,562
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.39% 32.79% 31.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,762 6,280 7,616
10th Percentile £363 £350 £356
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.46% -6.36% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £651
90th Percentile £738 £768 £800
UK median daily rate £513 £503 £525
% change year-on-year +1.99% -4.29% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 493 228 359
10th Percentile £33.71 £29.07 £30.00
25th Percentile £53.53 £40.00 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £83.42 £78.75
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +8.33%

SQL
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing SQL relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

SQL job vacancy trend in England

SQL
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing SQL.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing SQL

SQL
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SQL in England over the 6 months to 3 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for SQL in England

SQL
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing SQL.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing SQL

SQL
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing SQL in England over the 6 months to 3 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for SQL in England

SQL
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing SQL within the England region over the 6 months to 3 August 2026. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
London -6 2,430 £525 -0.24% 1,209
North of England -2 589 £460 -3.16% 404
Midlands +1 536 £459 +8.00% 224
South East -11 474 £475 -5.00% 442
West Midlands +5 438 £459 +2.00% 132
North West -1 313 £475 +1.28% 216
Yorkshire -7 237 £460 -3.16% 128
South West -5 226 £500 +17.65% 170
East of England -2 117 £475 -5.00% 106
East Midlands -2 94 £473 +22.06% 91
North East -14 51 £413 -10.81% 70
SQL
UK

SQL
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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
1 202 (4.51%) Apache Airflow
1 202 (4.51%) Apache Spark
2 185 (4.13%) Confluence
3 157 (3.51%) Apache
4 94 (2.10%) SAS
5 60 (1.34%) SharePoint
6 40 (0.89%) WebLogic
7 38 (0.85%) Oracle Workflow
8 32 (0.71%) IIS
9 26 (0.58%) Jupyter
10 21 (0.47%) Palantir Foundry
11 19 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
12 18 (0.40%) CMS
12 18 (0.40%) Tomcat
13 16 (0.36%) nginx
13 16 (0.36%) WebSphere
14 13 (0.29%) Tuxedo
15 11 (0.25%) Camunda
16 8 (0.18%) Apache Superset
16 8 (0.18%) Appian
Applications
1 297 (6.63%) Microsoft Excel
2 53 (1.18%) Microsoft Office
3 40 (0.89%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.83%) Spreadsheet
5 26 (0.58%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.22%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.089%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.089%) Notion
8 4 (0.089%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.067%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.067%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.067%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.022%) InDesign
10 1 (0.022%) Mingle
10 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 44 (0.98%) Dynamics CRM
2 42 (0.94%) Oracle EBS
3 28 (0.63%) Aladdin
4 25 (0.56%) Oracle ERP
4 25 (0.56%) Remedy ITSM
5 23 (0.51%) Oracle Payables
5 23 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
6 18 (0.40%) Oracle EBS R12
7 16 (0.36%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.33%) NEC Housing
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.25%) Findur
10 11 (0.25%) Oracle Assets
10 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.22%) Finacle
12 9 (0.20%) Fidessa
12 9 (0.20%) Unit4 Business World
13 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 8 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
14 7 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 1,416 (31.62%) Azure
2 1,054 (23.54%) AWS
3 861 (19.23%) Power Platform
4 410 (9.16%) Azure DevOps
5 394 (8.80%) GCP
6 321 (7.17%) Azure Data Factory
6 321 (7.17%) GitHub
7 302 (6.74%) Snowflake
8 271 (6.05%) Serverless
9 263 (5.87%) dbt
10 232 (5.18%) Amazon S3
11 204 (4.56%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 174 (3.89%) AWS Lambda
13 166 (3.71%) GitHub Actions
14 90 (2.01%) Entra ID
15 87 (1.94%) Power Automate
16 83 (1.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 80 (1.79%) SaaS
18 79 (1.76%) PowerApps
19 70 (1.56%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 50 (1.12%) DNS
2 42 (0.94%) Firewall
3 24 (0.54%) SSL
4 23 (0.51%) VPN
5 21 (0.47%) Network Security
5 21 (0.47%) SNMP
6 20 (0.45%) Internet
7 19 (0.42%) HTTP
8 15 (0.33%) TCP/IP
9 12 (0.27%) WAN
10 10 (0.22%) Wireshark
11 9 (0.20%) Broadband
11 9 (0.20%) DHCP
11 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
12 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
12 8 (0.18%) SAN
12 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
13 7 (0.16%) LAN
13 7 (0.16%) Multicast
13 7 (0.16%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 794 (17.73%) Power BI
2 628 (14.02%) Data Warehouse
3 569 (12.71%) SQL Server
4 295 (6.59%) Tableau
5 276 (6.16%) Relational Database
6 268 (5.98%) PostgreSQL
7 267 (5.96%) Data Lake
8 224 (5.00%) NoSQL
9 223 (4.98%) Metadata
10 182 (4.06%) Oracle Database
11 173 (3.86%) Azure SQL Database
12 166 (3.71%) BigQuery
13 150 (3.35%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 137 (3.06%) Amazon Redshift
15 123 (2.75%) Delta Lake
16 104 (2.32%) Oracle Reports
17 102 (2.28%) Big Data
18 98 (2.19%) Snowflake Schema
19 95 (2.12%) MySQL
20 88 (1.97%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 502 (11.21%) Git
2 345 (7.70%) JIRA
3 248 (5.54%) Jenkins
4 188 (4.20%) GitLab
5 72 (1.61%) JUnit
6 61 (1.36%) Maven
7 57 (1.27%) Gradle
8 52 (1.16%) Postman
9 49 (1.09%) Mockito
9 49 (1.09%) Selenium
10 37 (0.83%) SonarQube
11 36 (0.80%) Bitbucket
12 34 (0.76%) Oracle Forms
13 30 (0.67%) ERwin
14 28 (0.63%) Liquibase
14 28 (0.63%) TeamCity
14 28 (0.63%) Visual Studio
15 27 (0.60%) Zephyr
16 26 (0.58%) JMeter
16 26 (0.58%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,166 (26.04%) Social Skills
2 1,151 (25.70%) Finance
3 906 (20.23%) Analytical Skills
4 432 (9.65%) Banking
5 405 (9.04%) Public Sector
6 139 (3.10%) Marketing
7 129 (2.88%) Front Office
8 112 (2.50%) Retail
9 101 (2.26%) Investment Banking
10 85 (1.90%) Documentation Skills
11 76 (1.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 66 (1.47%) Manufacturing
13 53 (1.18%) Financial Institution
14 52 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
15 49 (1.09%) Legal
16 47 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
17 39 (0.87%) Publishing
18 38 (0.85%) Back Office
18 38 (0.85%) Telecoms
19 32 (0.71%) Law
Job Titles
1 950 (21.21%) Developer
2 900 (20.10%) Data Engineer
3 646 (14.43%) Analyst
4 601 (13.42%) Senior
5 316 (7.06%) Lead
6 276 (6.16%) Data Analyst
7 231 (5.16%) Architect
8 224 (5.00%) Consultant
9 186 (4.15%) Business Analyst
10 178 (3.97%) Senior Data Engineer
11 173 (3.86%) Java Developer
12 172 (3.84%) DBA
13 148 (3.31%) Senior Developer
14 131 (2.93%) Software Engineer
15 114 (2.55%) SQL DBA
15 114 (2.55%) SQL Developer
16 107 (2.39%) Azure Engineer
17 98 (2.19%) C# Developer
18 93 (2.08%) Full-Stack Developer
19 92 (2.05%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 369 (8.24%) REST
2 366 (8.17%) .NET
3 284 (6.34%) PySpark
4 273 (6.10%) Kafka
5 227 (5.07%) Spring
6 206 (4.60%) Spring Boot
7 200 (4.47%) React
8 179 (4.00%) RESTful
9 168 (3.75%) JSON
10 155 (3.46%) XML
11 148 (3.31%) HTML
12 127 (2.84%) AngularJS
13 126 (2.81%) CSS
14 108 (2.41%) Pandas
15 100 (2.23%) Web Services
16 99 (2.21%) SOAP
17 94 (2.10%) Middleware
18 92 (2.05%) .NET Framework
19 75 (1.67%) Node.js
20 70 (1.56%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 293 (6.54%) Cloud Native
2 202 (4.51%) Data Structures
3 167 (3.73%) Product Ownership
4 156 (3.48%) Legacy Systems
5 136 (3.04%) Distributed Systems
6 95 (2.12%) Onboarding
7 88 (1.97%) Enterprise Software
8 82 (1.83%) Management Information System
9 80 (1.79%) Derivative
10 76 (1.70%) Self-Motivation
11 71 (1.59%) Analytical Mindset
12 70 (1.56%) Clustering
13 62 (1.38%) Data Protection Act
14 59 (1.32%) Replication
15 54 (1.21%) Algorithms
16 53 (1.18%) Fixed Income
17 50 (1.12%) Equities
18 49 (1.09%) Greenfield Project
19 48 (1.07%) Reference Data
20 44 (0.98%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 292 (6.52%) Linux
2 277 (6.19%) Windows
3 198 (4.42%) Unix
4 106 (2.37%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.47%) AIX
7 16 (0.36%) Solaris
8 14 (0.31%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (0.25%) Windows Server 2008
10 7 (0.16%) Ubuntu
10 7 (0.16%) zOS
11 6 (0.13%) Android
11 6 (0.13%) Apple iOS
11 6 (0.13%) VMS
11 6 (0.13%) Windows 10
11 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
12 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
13 4 (0.089%) Oracle Linux
14 2 (0.045%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.045%) OpenVMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,200 (26.80%) CI/CD
2 1,174 (26.22%) Analytics
3 1,150 (25.68%) Agile
4 1,141 (25.48%) Data Modelling
5 1,026 (22.91%) ETL
6 1,021 (22.80%) Business Intelligence
7 906 (20.23%) DevOps
8 880 (19.65%) Data Pipeline
9 868 (19.38%) Problem-Solving
10 765 (17.08%) Data Engineering
11 654 (14.60%) AI
12 615 (13.73%) Migration
13 597 (13.33%) Validation
14 490 (10.94%) Data Governance
15 474 (10.59%) Decision-Making
16 471 (10.52%) Stakeholder Management
17 469 (10.47%) Continuous Improvement
18 461 (10.29%) Test Automation
19 439 (9.80%) Data Analysis
20 396 (8.84%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,604 (35.82%) Python
2 558 (12.46%) Java
3 439 (9.80%) C#
4 359 (8.02%) PL/SQL
5 324 (7.24%) JavaScript
6 240 (5.36%) T-SQL
7 238 (5.31%) PowerShell
8 165 (3.68%) TypeScript
9 142 (3.17%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 126 (2.81%) Shell Script
11 95 (2.12%) Bash
12 93 (2.08%) R
13 66 (1.47%) Scala
14 45 (1.00%) C++
15 43 (0.96%) VBA
16 40 (0.89%) Bicep
17 32 (0.71%) C
18 30 (0.67%) VB
19 22 (0.49%) Go
19 22 (0.49%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 974 (21.75%) Security Cleared
2 779 (17.40%) SC Cleared
3 322 (7.19%) Degree
4 107 (2.39%) Computer Science Degree
5 101 (2.26%) BPSS Clearance
5 101 (2.26%) DV Cleared
6 68 (1.52%) Azure Certification
7 49 (1.09%) ISTQB
8 48 (1.07%) Master's Degree
9 41 (0.92%) Microsoft Certification
10 29 (0.65%) AWS Certification
11 17 (0.38%) DBS Check
12 16 (0.36%) CISSP
12 16 (0.36%) PhD
13 12 (0.27%) ISEB
13 12 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
14 11 (0.25%) FFIEC
14 11 (0.25%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 10 (0.22%) CISM
16 9 (0.20%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 832 (18.58%) Data Quality
2 328 (7.32%) QA
3 153 (3.42%) GDPR
4 49 (1.09%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.98%) SLA
6 22 (0.49%) Actionable Recommendations
6 22 (0.49%) NIST
6 22 (0.49%) PMO
7 20 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 19 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 16 (0.36%) Solvency II
10 15 (0.33%) MiFID
11 14 (0.31%) IFRS
12 12 (0.27%) COBIT
12 12 (0.27%) HIPAA
12 12 (0.27%) ISO 20022
13 11 (0.25%) PCI DSS
14 10 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 9 (0.20%) WCAG
16 8 (0.18%) GRC
System Software
1 450 (10.05%) Docker
2 118 (2.64%) Active Directory
3 43 (0.96%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.94%) Virtual Machines
5 36 (0.80%) Oracle RAC
6 17 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
7 14 (0.31%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.29%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.29%) vCloud
9 9 (0.20%) Postfix
10 8 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
11 7 (0.16%) KVM
12 4 (0.089%) HDFS
13 2 (0.045%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 2 (0.045%) GridGain
13 2 (0.045%) RACF
14 1 (0.022%) Microsoft App-V
14 1 (0.022%) vSphere
14 1 (0.022%) XenApp
14 1 (0.022%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 387 (8.64%) Kubernetes
2 353 (7.88%) Terraform
3 90 (2.01%) Grafana
4 84 (1.88%) Ansible
5 47 (1.05%) Prometheus
6 42 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
7 38 (0.85%) Data Guard
8 30 (0.67%) Control-M
9 26 (0.58%) SCOM
10 21 (0.47%) Kibana
11 17 (0.38%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.36%) Nagios
12 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.33%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.31%) Netcool
15 13 (0.29%) OpenView
15 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 11 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
17 9 (0.20%) Microsoft Clustering
17 9 (0.20%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
Vendors
1 764 (17.06%) Oracle
2 713 (15.92%) Microsoft
3 524 (11.70%) Databricks
4 173 (3.86%) Google
5 155 (3.46%) Informatica
6 124 (2.77%) Talend
7 123 (2.75%) SAP
7 123 (2.75%) ServiceNow
8 79 (1.76%) Splunk
9 77 (1.72%) IBM
10 64 (1.43%) Denodo
11 60 (1.34%) VMware
12 57 (1.27%) Salesforce
13 40 (0.89%) Citrix
14 38 (0.85%) Bloomberg
14 38 (0.85%) BMC
14 38 (0.85%) Dynatrace
15 33 (0.74%) Alteryx
16 32 (0.71%) Murex
17 31 (0.69%) Adobe