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

6 months to
12 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,193 3,047 3,731
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.83% 12.43% 9.96%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.86% 36.57% 32.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,835 2,184 2,760
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £540
Median % change year-on-year - -7.41% -1.82%
75th Percentile £593 £625 £650
90th Percentile £688 £763 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 69 61 56
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.00 £22.68
25th Percentile £34.01 £30.25 £29.06
Median hourly rate £47.50 £40.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +17.28% -4.71% -15.00%
75th Percentile £73.00 £58.75 £53.84
90th Percentile £82.55 £77.19 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £48.75 £39.67 £42.50
% change year-on-year +22.88% -6.65% -20.93%

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 11,377 8,332 11,358
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.68% 33.98% 30.31%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,453 5,776 8,158
10th Percentile £358 £357 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £523 £540
Median % change year-on-year -2.01% -3.15% -4.00%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £505 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 519 194 478
10th Percentile £36.25 £28.18 £35.52
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -8.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.15 £85.00 £77.65
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% +2.97%

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 12 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 12 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 12 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 -3 2,302 £524 -1.13% 639
Midlands +4 532 £463 +3.70% 215
North of England -7 523 £460 -3.16% 354
West Midlands +4 435 £459 +1.17% 130
South East -14 402 £475 -5.00% 409
North West -3 268 £460 -3.16% 226
South West -1 227 £500 +5.26% 121
Yorkshire -12 214 £475 - 83
East of England -15 101 £495 +1.54% 101
East Midlands -2 93 £525 +36.36% 85
North East -11 53 £425 -8.60% 47
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
1 224 (5.34%) Apache Spark
2 172 (4.10%) Apache Airflow
3 150 (3.58%) Confluence
4 142 (3.39%) Apache
5 89 (2.12%) SAS
6 56 (1.34%) SharePoint
7 30 (0.72%) IIS
7 30 (0.72%) WebLogic
8 29 (0.69%) Oracle Workflow
9 24 (0.57%) Tomcat
10 21 (0.50%) Jupyter
11 19 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
12 17 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
13 16 (0.38%) Appian
14 15 (0.36%) WebSphere
15 14 (0.33%) CMS
15 14 (0.33%) Tuxedo
16 13 (0.31%) nginx
17 11 (0.26%) Camunda
18 9 (0.21%) Mendix
Applications
1 264 (6.30%) Microsoft Excel
2 42 (1.00%) Microsoft Office
3 41 (0.98%) MS Visio
4 30 (0.72%) Spreadsheet
5 29 (0.69%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.24%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
7 5 (0.12%) Notepad++
8 3 (0.072%) Oracle Smart View
9 2 (0.048%) Notion
9 2 (0.048%) Trello
10 1 (0.024%) Acrobat
10 1 (0.024%) InDesign
10 1 (0.024%) Mingle
10 1 (0.024%) Photoshop
10 1 (0.024%) Weka
Business Applications
1 34 (0.81%) Oracle EBS
2 30 (0.72%) Dynamics CRM
3 25 (0.60%) Aladdin
4 20 (0.48%) NEC Housing
4 20 (0.48%) Oracle ERP
4 20 (0.48%) SAP S/4HANA
5 19 (0.45%) Oracle Payables
6 17 (0.41%) Oracle EBS R12
7 15 (0.36%) Oracle Receivables
7 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
8 12 (0.29%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
9 11 (0.26%) Findur
10 10 (0.24%) Endur
10 10 (0.24%) Oracle General Ledger
11 9 (0.21%) NetSuite
11 9 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
11 9 (0.21%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
12 8 (0.19%) Oracle Cash Management
12 8 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
13 7 (0.17%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,373 (32.75%) Azure
2 1,038 (24.76%) AWS
3 803 (19.15%) Power Platform
4 395 (9.42%) Azure DevOps
5 342 (8.16%) GCP
6 334 (7.97%) Azure Data Factory
7 314 (7.49%) GitHub
8 279 (6.65%) Serverless
9 250 (5.96%) Snowflake
10 248 (5.91%) Amazon S3
11 209 (4.98%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 202 (4.82%) dbt
13 176 (4.20%) AWS Lambda
14 164 (3.91%) GitHub Actions
15 80 (1.91%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 74 (1.76%) Entra ID
17 73 (1.74%) Power Automate
18 72 (1.72%) SaaS
19 71 (1.69%) Amazon EC2
20 64 (1.53%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 50 (1.19%) DNS
2 44 (1.05%) Firewall
3 20 (0.48%) SNMP
4 18 (0.43%) HTTP
5 17 (0.41%) Network Security
5 17 (0.41%) WAN
6 16 (0.38%) Internet
7 15 (0.36%) SSL
7 15 (0.36%) TCP/IP
7 15 (0.36%) VPN
8 11 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
9 9 (0.21%) LAN
9 9 (0.21%) Wireshark
10 8 (0.19%) 3GPP
11 7 (0.17%) SAN
12 6 (0.14%) BGP
12 6 (0.14%) IPsec
12 6 (0.14%) RTP
13 5 (0.12%) DHCP
13 5 (0.12%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 741 (17.67%) Power BI
2 548 (13.07%) Data Warehouse
3 531 (12.66%) SQL Server
4 298 (7.11%) Data Lake
5 280 (6.68%) Tableau
6 272 (6.49%) PostgreSQL
7 269 (6.42%) Relational Database
8 224 (5.34%) NoSQL
9 206 (4.91%) Metadata
10 188 (4.48%) Azure SQL Database
11 159 (3.79%) Oracle Database
12 155 (3.70%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 135 (3.22%) BigQuery
14 129 (3.08%) Amazon Redshift
15 124 (2.96%) Delta Lake
16 111 (2.65%) Big Data
17 104 (2.48%) MySQL
18 101 (2.41%) Oracle Reports
19 90 (2.15%) Amazon Athena
19 90 (2.15%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 455 (10.85%) Git
2 334 (7.97%) JIRA
3 223 (5.32%) Jenkins
4 201 (4.79%) GitLab
5 65 (1.55%) JUnit
6 55 (1.31%) Postman
7 54 (1.29%) Selenium
8 48 (1.14%) Maven
9 47 (1.12%) Mockito
10 41 (0.98%) Gradle
11 38 (0.91%) Cucumber
12 33 (0.79%) SonarQube
13 31 (0.74%) MLflow
14 27 (0.64%) REST Assured
15 26 (0.62%) ERwin
15 26 (0.62%) Liquibase
15 26 (0.62%) Visual Studio
16 25 (0.60%) Bitbucket
16 25 (0.60%) JMeter
16 25 (0.60%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,117 (26.64%) Finance
2 1,064 (25.38%) Social Skills
3 770 (18.36%) Analytical Skills
4 397 (9.47%) Banking
5 362 (8.63%) Public Sector
6 117 (2.79%) Front Office
7 115 (2.74%) Marketing
8 100 (2.38%) Investment Banking
9 85 (2.03%) Documentation Skills
10 76 (1.81%) Retail
11 66 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 52 (1.24%) Financial Institution
13 51 (1.22%) Legal
14 42 (1.00%) Publishing
15 38 (0.91%) Manufacturing
16 36 (0.86%) Presentation Skills
17 34 (0.81%) Telecoms
18 33 (0.79%) Organisational Skills
19 31 (0.74%) Law
20 30 (0.72%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 875 (20.87%) Data Engineer
2 867 (20.68%) Developer
3 589 (14.05%) Analyst
4 546 (13.02%) Senior
5 288 (6.87%) Lead
6 258 (6.15%) Data Analyst
7 228 (5.44%) Architect
8 194 (4.63%) Consultant
9 176 (4.20%) Business Analyst
10 167 (3.98%) Java Developer
11 164 (3.91%) Senior Data Engineer
12 134 (3.20%) DBA
13 133 (3.17%) Senior Developer
13 133 (3.17%) Software Engineer
14 105 (2.50%) Azure Engineer
15 102 (2.43%) C# Developer
16 96 (2.29%) SQL Developer
17 86 (2.05%) SQL DBA
18 85 (2.03%) Python Developer
19 84 (2.00%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 353 (8.42%) .NET
2 339 (8.08%) REST
3 258 (6.15%) PySpark
4 256 (6.11%) Kafka
5 211 (5.03%) Spring
6 200 (4.77%) Spring Boot
7 196 (4.67%) React
8 183 (4.36%) RESTful
9 150 (3.58%) HTML
10 143 (3.41%) JSON
11 138 (3.29%) XML
12 134 (3.20%) CSS
13 119 (2.84%) Pandas
14 108 (2.58%) AngularJS
15 102 (2.43%) SOAP
16 92 (2.19%) Web Services
17 88 (2.10%) Middleware
18 83 (1.98%) .NET Framework
19 77 (1.84%) OAuth
20 69 (1.65%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 274 (6.53%) Cloud Native
2 153 (3.65%) Data Structures
3 147 (3.51%) Legacy Systems
4 126 (3.01%) Product Ownership
5 122 (2.91%) Distributed Systems
6 82 (1.96%) Management Information System
7 81 (1.93%) Derivative
8 80 (1.91%) Onboarding
9 68 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
10 65 (1.55%) Analytical Mindset
11 57 (1.36%) Self-Motivation
12 56 (1.34%) Clustering
12 56 (1.34%) Enterprise Software
13 52 (1.24%) Equities
14 51 (1.22%) Greenfield Project
15 49 (1.17%) Fixed Income
16 44 (1.05%) Algorithms
17 42 (1.00%) Low-Code
18 41 (0.98%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
19 40 (0.95%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 288 (6.87%) Linux
2 251 (5.99%) Windows
3 206 (4.91%) Unix
4 88 (2.10%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.57%) AIX
6 18 (0.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 15 (0.36%) Windows Server 2019
8 10 (0.24%) Solaris
9 9 (0.21%) Windows Server 2016
10 8 (0.19%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.19%) zOS
11 7 (0.17%) Android
11 7 (0.17%) Apple iOS
11 7 (0.17%) Windows 10
12 4 (0.095%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.095%) VMS
13 3 (0.072%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.048%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.048%) HPUX
14 2 (0.048%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,174 (28.00%) CI/CD
2 1,064 (25.38%) Analytics
3 1,038 (24.76%) Data Modelling
4 1,034 (24.66%) Agile
5 1,004 (23.94%) ETL
6 944 (22.51%) Business Intelligence
7 884 (21.08%) DevOps
8 821 (19.58%) Problem-Solving
9 804 (19.17%) Data Pipeline
10 698 (16.65%) Data Engineering
11 595 (14.19%) AI
12 553 (13.19%) Migration
13 532 (12.69%) Validation
14 452 (10.78%) Data Governance
15 439 (10.47%) Test Automation
16 420 (10.02%) Decision-Making
17 398 (9.49%) Data Analysis
18 381 (9.09%) Continuous Improvement
19 376 (8.97%) Stakeholder Management
20 374 (8.92%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,556 (37.11%) Python
2 546 (13.02%) Java
3 442 (10.54%) C#
4 310 (7.39%) JavaScript
4 310 (7.39%) PL/SQL
5 226 (5.39%) T-SQL
6 215 (5.13%) PowerShell
7 149 (3.55%) TypeScript
8 131 (3.12%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 111 (2.65%) Shell Script
10 101 (2.41%) R
11 81 (1.93%) Bash
12 75 (1.79%) Scala
13 59 (1.41%) C++
14 39 (0.93%) VBA
15 35 (0.83%) Bicep
16 33 (0.79%) VB
17 30 (0.72%) C
18 29 (0.69%) Perl
19 25 (0.60%) Go
Qualifications
1 885 (21.11%) Security Cleared
2 715 (17.05%) SC Cleared
3 320 (7.63%) Degree
4 103 (2.46%) Computer Science Degree
5 98 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
6 83 (1.98%) DV Cleared
7 67 (1.60%) Azure Certification
8 50 (1.19%) Master's Degree
9 49 (1.17%) ISTQB
10 38 (0.91%) Microsoft Certification
11 28 (0.67%) AWS Certification
12 16 (0.38%) DBS Check
12 16 (0.38%) PhD
13 13 (0.31%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 11 (0.26%) CISSP
14 11 (0.26%) PMI Certification
15 9 (0.21%) CISM
15 9 (0.21%) PMP
15 9 (0.21%) TOGAF Certification
16 8 (0.19%) CBAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 759 (18.10%) Data Quality
2 318 (7.58%) QA
3 172 (4.10%) GDPR
4 44 (1.05%) SLA
5 39 (0.93%) Accessibility
6 30 (0.72%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 27 (0.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.57%) PMO
9 23 (0.55%) NIST
10 17 (0.41%) IFRS
11 16 (0.38%) PCI DSS
12 15 (0.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 15 (0.36%) MiFID
13 14 (0.33%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.31%) Solvency II
15 12 (0.29%) Actionable Recommendations
15 12 (0.29%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.24%) GRC
16 10 (0.24%) HL7
17 9 (0.21%) NCSC
System Software
1 467 (11.14%) Docker
2 91 (2.17%) Active Directory
3 39 (0.93%) Virtual Machines
4 29 (0.69%) VMware Infrastructure
5 23 (0.55%) Oracle RAC
6 16 (0.38%) Hyper-V
7 15 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
8 11 (0.26%) VMware NSX
9 10 (0.24%) KVM
9 10 (0.24%) vCloud
10 9 (0.21%) Postfix
11 8 (0.19%) Virtual Desktop
12 6 (0.14%) HDFS
12 6 (0.14%) RACF
13 4 (0.095%) XenApp
13 4 (0.095%) XenDesktop
14 2 (0.048%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.048%) GridGain
14 2 (0.048%) Oracle Clusterware
15 1 (0.024%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 377 (8.99%) Kubernetes
2 354 (8.44%) Terraform
3 106 (2.53%) Grafana
4 69 (1.65%) Ansible
5 59 (1.41%) Prometheus
6 35 (0.83%) Oracle RMAN
7 26 (0.62%) Data Guard
8 20 (0.48%) Kibana
8 20 (0.48%) Single Sign-On
9 18 (0.43%) Control-M
10 17 (0.41%) vCenter Server
11 15 (0.36%) ZABBIX
12 14 (0.33%) Nagios
12 14 (0.33%) Netcool
12 14 (0.33%) Tivoli
13 13 (0.31%) OpenView
13 13 (0.31%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 11 (0.26%) SCOM
15 8 (0.19%) HP Quality Center
15 8 (0.19%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 708 (16.89%) Oracle
2 646 (15.41%) Microsoft
3 500 (11.92%) Databricks
4 162 (3.86%) Google
5 151 (3.60%) Informatica
6 130 (3.10%) ServiceNow
7 119 (2.84%) Talend
8 108 (2.58%) SAP
9 85 (2.03%) Splunk
10 66 (1.57%) IBM
11 62 (1.48%) Denodo
12 48 (1.14%) Salesforce
13 44 (1.05%) VMware
14 43 (1.03%) Citrix
15 35 (0.83%) Dynatrace
16 33 (0.79%) Bloomberg
17 32 (0.76%) OpenAI
18 30 (0.72%) Murex
19 28 (0.67%) BMC
20 27 (0.64%) HP