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 26 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -3 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,304 3,100 3,778
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.92% 12.30% 10.11%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.03% 36.24% 33.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,894 2,223 2,783
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -0.46%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £644
90th Percentile £688 £765 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 74 61 57
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.00 £22.69
25th Percentile £33.82 £31.25 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.90 £42.82 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +7.21% +0.74% -15.00%
75th Percentile £69.86 £50.00 £51.91
90th Percentile £82.78 £67.50 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £45.90 £41.66 £42.50
% change year-on-year +10.18% -1.98% -17.07%

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 11,623 8,554 11,429
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.78% 33.94% 30.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,579 5,927 8,171
10th Percentile £362 £355 £350
25th Percentile £424 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £520 £540
Median % change year-on-year -0.48% -3.70% -3.57%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £788
UK median daily rate £510 £510 £525
% change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 516 203 491
10th Percentile £36.25 £28.18 £35.52
25th Percentile £55.38 £35.50 £50.31
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £64.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -14.06% +2.40%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.38 £84.90 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £54.94 £62.50
% change year-on-year +18.32% -12.10% -

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 26 June 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 26 June 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 26 June 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 -4 2,330 £525 -1.87% 652
North of England -5 550 £460 -3.16% 340
Midlands +3 546 £463 +8.82% 196
West Midlands +4 451 £459 +2.00% 103
South East -9 432 £475 -5.00% 446
North West -2 291 £463 -2.63% 209
South West -4 229 £500 +6.38% 116
Yorkshire -11 220 £475 - 88
East of England -12 105 £491 +0.77% 100
East Midlands -1 91 £525 +40.00% 93
North East -8 51 £425 -8.36% 50
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
1 215 (5.00%) Apache Spark
2 177 (4.11%) Apache Airflow
3 171 (3.97%) Confluence
4 144 (3.35%) Apache
5 92 (2.14%) SAS
6 53 (1.23%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.79%) Oracle Workflow
8 33 (0.77%) IIS
8 33 (0.77%) WebLogic
9 24 (0.56%) Tomcat
10 22 (0.51%) Jupyter
11 20 (0.46%) WebSphere
12 18 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
12 18 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
13 17 (0.39%) CMS
14 16 (0.37%) Appian
14 16 (0.37%) nginx
15 13 (0.30%) Tuxedo
16 12 (0.28%) Camunda
17 9 (0.21%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 273 (6.34%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.25%) Microsoft Office
3 40 (0.93%) MS Visio
4 31 (0.72%) Spreadsheet
5 29 (0.67%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
7 5 (0.12%) Notepad++
8 3 (0.070%) Acrobat
8 3 (0.070%) Notion
8 3 (0.070%) Oracle Smart View
8 3 (0.070%) Photoshop
9 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.023%) CPLEX
9 1 (0.023%) InDesign
9 1 (0.023%) Mingle
9 1 (0.023%) Trello
9 1 (0.023%) Weka
Business Applications
1 37 (0.86%) Dynamics CRM
2 34 (0.79%) Oracle EBS
3 26 (0.60%) Aladdin
4 23 (0.53%) SAP S/4HANA
5 22 (0.51%) Oracle ERP
5 22 (0.51%) Oracle Payables
6 18 (0.42%) NEC Housing
7 16 (0.37%) Oracle EBS R12
8 15 (0.35%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.35%) Remedy ITSM
9 11 (0.26%) Findur
9 11 (0.26%) Siebel CRM
10 10 (0.23%) Finacle
10 10 (0.23%) Oracle General Ledger
10 10 (0.23%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 9 (0.21%) Elite 3E
11 9 (0.21%) Fidessa
11 9 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
11 9 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
12 8 (0.19%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,387 (32.23%) Azure
2 1,046 (24.30%) AWS
3 814 (18.91%) Power Platform
4 396 (9.20%) Azure DevOps
5 345 (8.02%) GCP
6 323 (7.50%) Azure Data Factory
7 314 (7.30%) GitHub
8 277 (6.44%) Serverless
9 259 (6.02%) Snowflake
10 245 (5.69%) Amazon S3
11 217 (5.04%) dbt
12 209 (4.86%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 177 (4.11%) AWS Lambda
14 165 (3.83%) GitHub Actions
15 80 (1.86%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 78 (1.81%) SaaS
17 77 (1.79%) Power Automate
18 76 (1.77%) Entra ID
19 72 (1.67%) Amazon EC2
20 68 (1.58%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 47 (1.09%) DNS
2 39 (0.91%) Firewall
3 21 (0.49%) SNMP
4 20 (0.46%) Network Security
5 19 (0.44%) HTTP
5 19 (0.44%) Internet
6 17 (0.39%) VPN
7 15 (0.35%) WAN
8 14 (0.33%) SSL
9 10 (0.23%) TCP/IP
9 10 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
10 9 (0.21%) Wireshark
11 8 (0.19%) 3GPP
11 8 (0.19%) LAN
12 7 (0.16%) SAN
12 7 (0.16%) WinSCP
13 6 (0.14%) BGP
13 6 (0.14%) Reverse Proxy
13 6 (0.14%) RTP
14 5 (0.12%) IPsec
Database & Business Intelligence
1 749 (17.40%) Power BI
2 569 (13.22%) Data Warehouse
3 541 (12.57%) SQL Server
4 288 (6.69%) Tableau
5 286 (6.64%) Relational Database
6 282 (6.55%) Data Lake
7 276 (6.41%) PostgreSQL
8 225 (5.23%) NoSQL
9 200 (4.65%) Metadata
10 184 (4.28%) Azure SQL Database
11 167 (3.88%) Oracle Database
12 146 (3.39%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 141 (3.28%) BigQuery
14 132 (3.07%) Amazon Redshift
15 127 (2.95%) Delta Lake
16 104 (2.42%) MySQL
17 103 (2.39%) Big Data
18 99 (2.30%) Oracle Reports
19 98 (2.28%) Snowflake Schema
20 89 (2.07%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 462 (10.73%) Git
2 347 (8.06%) JIRA
3 233 (5.41%) Jenkins
4 192 (4.46%) GitLab
5 68 (1.58%) JUnit
6 53 (1.23%) Postman
7 51 (1.18%) Maven
8 49 (1.14%) Mockito
8 49 (1.14%) Selenium
9 45 (1.05%) Gradle
10 33 (0.77%) Cucumber
10 33 (0.77%) SonarQube
11 29 (0.67%) JMeter
11 29 (0.67%) MLflow
12 28 (0.65%) Bitbucket
12 28 (0.65%) Visual Studio
13 27 (0.63%) ERwin
13 27 (0.63%) Oracle Forms
14 26 (0.60%) Liquibase
15 25 (0.58%) Zephyr
General
1 1,149 (26.70%) Finance
2 1,119 (26.00%) Social Skills
3 822 (19.10%) Analytical Skills
4 417 (9.69%) Banking
5 369 (8.57%) Public Sector
6 122 (2.83%) Front Office
7 116 (2.70%) Marketing
8 103 (2.39%) Investment Banking
9 94 (2.18%) Retail
10 88 (2.04%) Documentation Skills
11 75 (1.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 54 (1.25%) Legal
13 51 (1.18%) Manufacturing
14 50 (1.16%) Financial Institution
15 48 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
16 38 (0.88%) Publishing
17 35 (0.81%) Back Office
17 35 (0.81%) Organisational Skills
18 33 (0.77%) Telecoms
19 28 (0.65%) Law
Job Titles
1 903 (20.98%) Developer
2 881 (20.47%) Data Engineer
3 616 (14.31%) Analyst
4 558 (12.96%) Senior
5 298 (6.92%) Lead
6 266 (6.18%) Data Analyst
7 236 (5.48%) Architect
8 201 (4.67%) Consultant
9 183 (4.25%) Business Analyst
10 174 (4.04%) Java Developer
11 166 (3.86%) Senior Data Engineer
12 141 (3.28%) DBA
13 133 (3.09%) Senior Developer
13 133 (3.09%) Software Engineer
14 106 (2.46%) Azure Engineer
15 102 (2.37%) C# Developer
16 101 (2.35%) SQL Developer
17 88 (2.04%) Python Developer
18 86 (2.00%) SQL DBA
19 82 (1.91%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 357 (8.29%) .NET
2 340 (7.90%) REST
3 264 (6.13%) Kafka
4 263 (6.11%) PySpark
5 223 (5.18%) Spring
6 209 (4.86%) Spring Boot
7 204 (4.74%) React
8 187 (4.34%) RESTful
9 156 (3.62%) JSON
10 152 (3.53%) XML
11 138 (3.21%) HTML
12 126 (2.93%) CSS
13 117 (2.72%) AngularJS
14 112 (2.60%) Pandas
15 106 (2.46%) SOAP
16 99 (2.30%) Web Services
17 97 (2.25%) Middleware
18 87 (2.02%) .NET Framework
19 75 (1.74%) OAuth
20 68 (1.58%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 279 (6.48%) Cloud Native
2 171 (3.97%) Data Structures
3 153 (3.55%) Legacy Systems
4 139 (3.23%) Product Ownership
5 128 (2.97%) Distributed Systems
6 80 (1.86%) Derivative
7 79 (1.84%) Onboarding
8 78 (1.81%) Management Information System
9 71 (1.65%) Analytical Mindset
10 69 (1.60%) Enterprise Software
11 65 (1.51%) Data Protection Act
11 65 (1.51%) Self-Motivation
12 56 (1.30%) Clustering
13 53 (1.23%) Algorithms
13 53 (1.23%) Equities
14 51 (1.18%) Greenfield Project
15 49 (1.14%) Fixed Income
16 43 (1.00%) Replication
17 41 (0.95%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
18 40 (0.93%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 287 (6.67%) Linux
2 262 (6.09%) Windows
3 203 (4.72%) Unix
4 92 (2.14%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.56%) AIX
6 21 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 14 (0.33%) Solaris
7 14 (0.33%) Windows Server 2019
8 8 (0.19%) Windows Server 2008
8 8 (0.19%) Windows Server 2016
8 8 (0.19%) zOS
9 7 (0.16%) Android
9 7 (0.16%) Apple iOS
9 7 (0.16%) Windows 10
10 4 (0.093%) Oracle Linux
10 4 (0.093%) Ubuntu
10 4 (0.093%) VMS
11 3 (0.070%) Windows Server 2012
12 2 (0.046%) Data ONTAP
12 2 (0.046%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,187 (27.58%) CI/CD
2 1,102 (25.60%) Analytics
3 1,101 (25.58%) Agile
4 1,048 (24.35%) Data Modelling
5 1,003 (23.30%) ETL
6 955 (22.19%) Business Intelligence
7 891 (20.70%) DevOps
8 857 (19.91%) Problem-Solving
9 819 (19.03%) Data Pipeline
10 712 (16.54%) Data Engineering
11 625 (14.52%) AI
12 573 (13.31%) Migration
13 559 (12.99%) Validation
14 448 (10.41%) Test Automation
15 445 (10.34%) Data Governance
16 434 (10.08%) Decision-Making
17 424 (9.85%) Data Analysis
18 411 (9.55%) Stakeholder Management
19 409 (9.50%) Continuous Improvement
20 375 (8.71%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,562 (36.29%) Python
2 548 (12.73%) Java
3 442 (10.27%) C#
4 320 (7.43%) PL/SQL
5 307 (7.13%) JavaScript
6 233 (5.41%) T-SQL
7 221 (5.13%) PowerShell
8 162 (3.76%) TypeScript
9 133 (3.09%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 111 (2.58%) Shell Script
11 94 (2.18%) R
12 84 (1.95%) Bash
13 74 (1.72%) Scala
14 54 (1.25%) C++
15 42 (0.98%) VBA
16 35 (0.81%) Bicep
16 35 (0.81%) C
17 32 (0.74%) VB
18 23 (0.53%) Go
18 23 (0.53%) Perl
Qualifications
1 904 (21.00%) Security Cleared
2 730 (16.96%) SC Cleared
3 327 (7.60%) Degree
4 108 (2.51%) Computer Science Degree
5 98 (2.28%) BPSS Clearance
6 90 (2.09%) DV Cleared
7 64 (1.49%) Azure Certification
8 52 (1.21%) Master's Degree
9 51 (1.18%) ISTQB
10 38 (0.88%) Microsoft Certification
11 31 (0.72%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.39%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.39%) PhD
13 14 (0.33%) CISSP
14 13 (0.30%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 10 (0.23%) TOGAF Certification
16 9 (0.21%) CISM
16 9 (0.21%) PMI Certification
17 8 (0.19%) SnowPro
18 7 (0.16%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 764 (17.75%) Data Quality
2 330 (7.67%) QA
3 170 (3.95%) GDPR
4 43 (1.00%) Accessibility
5 40 (0.93%) SLA
6 28 (0.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 26 (0.60%) NIST
8 25 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 21 (0.49%) PMO
10 17 (0.39%) IFRS
11 16 (0.37%) PCI DSS
12 15 (0.35%) MiFID
12 15 (0.35%) Solvency II
13 14 (0.33%) Actionable Recommendations
13 14 (0.33%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.30%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 13 (0.30%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.23%) HL7
16 9 (0.21%) GRC
16 9 (0.21%) NCSC
System Software
1 459 (10.66%) Docker
2 96 (2.23%) Active Directory
3 42 (0.98%) Virtual Machines
4 29 (0.67%) VMware Infrastructure
5 22 (0.51%) Oracle RAC
6 17 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
7 15 (0.35%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.30%) VMware NSX
9 12 (0.28%) vCloud
10 10 (0.23%) KVM
11 9 (0.21%) Postfix
12 7 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
13 5 (0.12%) RACF
14 4 (0.093%) HDFS
15 3 (0.070%) XenApp
15 3 (0.070%) XenDesktop
16 2 (0.046%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 2 (0.046%) GridGain
17 1 (0.023%) GPFS
17 1 (0.023%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 383 (8.90%) Kubernetes
2 355 (8.25%) Terraform
3 98 (2.28%) Grafana
4 78 (1.81%) Ansible
5 54 (1.25%) Prometheus
6 33 (0.77%) Oracle RMAN
7 24 (0.56%) Control-M
7 24 (0.56%) Data Guard
8 22 (0.51%) Kibana
9 19 (0.44%) vCenter Server
10 17 (0.39%) Single Sign-On
11 16 (0.37%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.35%) Tivoli
13 14 (0.33%) Nagios
13 14 (0.33%) Netcool
14 13 (0.30%) OpenView
14 13 (0.30%) SCOM
14 13 (0.30%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 9 (0.21%) Progress Chef
16 8 (0.19%) HP Quality Center
Vendors
1 735 (17.08%) Oracle
2 670 (15.57%) Microsoft
3 500 (11.62%) Databricks
4 160 (3.72%) Google
5 155 (3.60%) Informatica
6 124 (2.88%) Talend
7 122 (2.83%) ServiceNow
8 111 (2.58%) SAP
9 83 (1.93%) Splunk
10 69 (1.60%) IBM
11 63 (1.46%) Denodo
12 50 (1.16%) Salesforce
13 46 (1.07%) VMware
14 44 (1.02%) Citrix
15 38 (0.88%) Bloomberg
15 38 (0.88%) Dynatrace
16 34 (0.79%) Murex
17 32 (0.74%) OpenAI
18 28 (0.65%) BMC
18 28 (0.65%) SolarWinds