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 22 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,505 3,285 3,508
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.82% 11.91% 10.56%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.50% 36.26% 33.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,031 2,318 2,612
10th Percentile £356 £335 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 79 74 40
10th Percentile £23.00 £24.14 £25.99
25th Percentile £29.96 £31.64 £31.03
Median hourly rate £42.50 £43.50 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year -2.30% +3.57% -8.46%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £54.69
90th Percentile £82.25 £61.00 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £39.67 £41.16
% change year-on-year +12.18% -3.61% -10.30%

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 12,014 9,060 10,630
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.19% 32.83% 32.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,799 6,190 7,519
10th Percentile £363 £345 £356
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £788
UK median daily rate £518 £503 £530
% change year-on-year +2.88% -5.09% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 497 259 340
10th Percentile £32.63 £29.28 £30.33
25th Percentile £53.53 £40.00 £50.72
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.70 £80.00 £78.79
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +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 22 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 22 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 22 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 2,498 £525 -0.47% 888
North of England -1 586 £474 +1.94% 382
Midlands -2 497 £459 +2.00% 222
South East -11 476 £500 - 485
West Midlands -2 391 £459 -0.76% 118
North West -2 296 £478 +2.36% 206
Yorkshire +2 251 £475 +1.23% 112
South West -5 228 £505 +18.82% 170
East of England -2 123 £479 -4.30% 113
East Midlands -4 102 £465 +20.00% 104
North East -19 51 £406 -12.63% 71
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
1 210 (4.66%) Apache Airflow
2 192 (4.26%) Apache Spark
3 181 (4.02%) Confluence
4 148 (3.29%) Apache
5 83 (1.84%) SAS
6 77 (1.71%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.82%) Oracle Workflow
8 32 (0.71%) IIS
9 28 (0.62%) WebLogic
10 25 (0.55%) Jupyter
11 23 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
12 21 (0.47%) Palantir Foundry
13 17 (0.38%) CMS
14 16 (0.36%) WebSphere
15 14 (0.31%) nginx
16 13 (0.29%) Camunda
17 12 (0.27%) Tomcat
18 10 (0.22%) Tuxedo
19 9 (0.20%) ArcGIS
20 8 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 298 (6.61%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.29%) Microsoft Office
3 37 (0.82%) Spreadsheet
4 33 (0.73%) MS Visio
5 28 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.22%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.089%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.089%) Microsoft Project
8 4 (0.089%) Notion
8 4 (0.089%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.067%) CPLEX
10 2 (0.044%) Windchill
11 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.022%) InDesign
11 1 (0.022%) Mingle
11 1 (0.022%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 44 (0.98%) Dynamics CRM
2 42 (0.93%) Oracle EBS
3 25 (0.55%) Aladdin
3 25 (0.55%) Remedy ITSM
4 24 (0.53%) SAP S/4HANA
5 23 (0.51%) Oracle ERP
6 22 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
7 17 (0.38%) Oracle EBS R12
8 14 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 13 (0.29%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.24%) NEC Housing
10 11 (0.24%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.22%) Finacle
12 9 (0.20%) Oracle Assets
13 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 8 (0.18%) Findur
13 8 (0.18%) NetSuite
14 7 (0.16%) Oracle Financials
14 7 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
14 7 (0.16%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,435 (31.85%) Azure
2 1,059 (23.51%) AWS
3 856 (19.00%) Power Platform
4 418 (9.28%) Azure DevOps
5 391 (8.68%) GCP
6 322 (7.15%) GitHub
7 316 (7.01%) Azure Data Factory
8 315 (6.99%) Snowflake
9 277 (6.15%) Serverless
10 260 (5.77%) dbt
11 217 (4.82%) Amazon S3
12 203 (4.51%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 175 (3.88%) AWS Lambda
14 162 (3.60%) GitHub Actions
15 93 (2.06%) Power Automate
16 92 (2.04%) SaaS
17 88 (1.95%) Entra ID
18 84 (1.86%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 82 (1.82%) PowerApps
20 64 (1.42%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 58 (1.29%) DNS
2 45 (1.00%) Firewall
3 27 (0.60%) Network Security
4 23 (0.51%) SSL
5 22 (0.49%) VPN
6 21 (0.47%) Internet
6 21 (0.47%) SNMP
7 20 (0.44%) HTTP
8 19 (0.42%) TCP/IP
9 14 (0.31%) DHCP
10 12 (0.27%) WAN
11 11 (0.24%) Broadband
12 10 (0.22%) Wireshark
13 9 (0.20%) SAN
13 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
14 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
14 8 (0.18%) Multicast
14 8 (0.18%) RTP
14 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
15 7 (0.16%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 791 (17.56%) Power BI
2 638 (14.16%) Data Warehouse
3 579 (12.85%) SQL Server
4 287 (6.37%) Relational Database
5 271 (6.02%) PostgreSQL
5 271 (6.02%) Tableau
6 265 (5.88%) Data Lake
7 235 (5.22%) Metadata
8 225 (4.99%) NoSQL
9 194 (4.31%) Oracle Database
10 178 (3.95%) Azure SQL Database
11 171 (3.80%) BigQuery
12 146 (3.24%) Amazon Redshift
13 136 (3.02%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 124 (2.75%) Delta Lake
15 104 (2.31%) MySQL
16 99 (2.20%) Big Data
17 96 (2.13%) Amazon Athena
18 91 (2.02%) Oracle Reports
19 89 (1.98%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 523 (11.61%) Git
2 354 (7.86%) JIRA
3 254 (5.64%) Jenkins
4 202 (4.48%) GitLab
5 75 (1.66%) Selenium
6 72 (1.60%) JUnit
7 62 (1.38%) Gradle
7 62 (1.38%) Postman
8 59 (1.31%) Maven
9 45 (1.00%) Mockito
10 39 (0.87%) Bitbucket
11 38 (0.84%) SonarQube
12 33 (0.73%) JMeter
12 33 (0.73%) Oracle Forms
12 33 (0.73%) Zephyr
13 32 (0.71%) Visual Studio
14 28 (0.62%) TeamCity
15 27 (0.60%) Liquibase
16 25 (0.55%) ERwin
17 24 (0.53%) MLflow
General
1 1,219 (27.06%) Social Skills
2 1,161 (25.77%) Finance
3 923 (20.49%) Analytical Skills
4 478 (10.61%) Banking
5 397 (8.81%) Public Sector
6 145 (3.22%) Marketing
7 134 (2.97%) Front Office
8 124 (2.75%) Retail
9 113 (2.51%) Investment Banking
10 89 (1.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 78 (1.73%) Documentation Skills
12 68 (1.51%) Manufacturing
13 54 (1.20%) Financial Institution
14 50 (1.11%) Legal
14 50 (1.11%) Presentation Skills
15 42 (0.93%) Organisational Skills
16 39 (0.87%) Telecoms
17 37 (0.82%) Back Office
18 35 (0.78%) Law
19 33 (0.73%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 967 (21.47%) Developer
2 855 (18.98%) Data Engineer
3 649 (14.41%) Analyst
4 621 (13.78%) Senior
5 312 (6.93%) Lead
6 264 (5.86%) Data Analyst
7 247 (5.48%) Architect
8 229 (5.08%) Consultant
9 193 (4.28%) Business Analyst
10 181 (4.02%) DBA
11 178 (3.95%) Senior Data Engineer
12 160 (3.55%) Java Developer
13 152 (3.37%) Senior Developer
14 127 (2.82%) Software Engineer
15 112 (2.49%) SQL Developer
16 111 (2.46%) SQL DBA
17 103 (2.29%) Data Architect
18 99 (2.20%) Azure Engineer
19 97 (2.15%) Full-Stack Developer
20 96 (2.13%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 396 (8.79%) .NET
2 395 (8.77%) REST
3 373 (8.28%) Terraform
4 306 (6.79%) PySpark
5 284 (6.30%) Kafka
6 220 (4.88%) Spring
7 208 (4.62%) React
8 199 (4.42%) Spring Boot
9 184 (4.08%) RESTful
10 174 (3.86%) HTML
11 170 (3.77%) JSON
12 162 (3.60%) XML
13 139 (3.09%) CSS
14 128 (2.84%) AngularJS
15 106 (2.35%) Web Services
16 101 (2.24%) Pandas
17 99 (2.20%) Middleware
18 96 (2.13%) SOAP
19 90 (2.00%) .NET Framework
20 73 (1.62%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 290 (6.44%) Cloud Native
2 200 (4.44%) Data Structures
3 181 (4.02%) Product Ownership
4 142 (3.15%) Legacy Systems
5 129 (2.86%) Distributed Systems
6 107 (2.38%) Onboarding
7 101 (2.24%) Enterprise Software
8 87 (1.93%) Management Information System
9 81 (1.80%) Self-Motivation
10 80 (1.78%) Derivative
11 65 (1.44%) Analytical Mindset
12 61 (1.35%) Data Protection Act
12 61 (1.35%) Replication
13 59 (1.31%) Clustering
14 56 (1.24%) Reference Data
15 53 (1.18%) AI Agents
16 52 (1.15%) Algorithms
16 52 (1.15%) Fixed Income
17 48 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
18 45 (1.00%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 311 (6.90%) Linux
2 280 (6.22%) Windows
3 211 (4.68%) Unix
4 100 (2.22%) Windows Server
5 20 (0.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.40%) AIX
7 15 (0.33%) Solaris
8 10 (0.22%) Windows Server 2019
9 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
10 7 (0.16%) Ubuntu
10 7 (0.16%) VMS
10 7 (0.16%) Windows 10
10 7 (0.16%) zOS
11 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
12 4 (0.089%) Android
12 4 (0.089%) Apple iOS
12 4 (0.089%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.089%) Windows Server 2016
13 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
14 2 (0.044%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,240 (27.52%) CI/CD
2 1,179 (26.17%) Agile
3 1,133 (25.15%) Analytics
4 1,129 (25.06%) Data Modelling
5 1,012 (22.46%) ETL
6 1,000 (22.20%) Business Intelligence
7 912 (20.24%) DevOps
8 884 (19.62%) Problem-Solving
9 872 (19.36%) Data Pipeline
10 753 (16.71%) Data Engineering
11 685 (15.21%) AI
12 640 (14.21%) Migration
13 636 (14.12%) Validation
14 543 (12.05%) Stakeholder Management
15 498 (11.05%) Test Automation
16 495 (10.99%) Data Governance
17 471 (10.46%) Continuous Improvement
18 468 (10.39%) Decision-Making
19 457 (10.14%) Data Analysis
20 373 (8.28%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,605 (35.63%) Python
2 554 (12.30%) Java
3 447 (9.92%) C#
4 356 (7.90%) JavaScript
5 353 (7.84%) PL/SQL
6 248 (5.50%) PowerShell
7 233 (5.17%) T-SQL
8 181 (4.02%) TypeScript
9 140 (3.11%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 132 (2.93%) Shell Script
11 93 (2.06%) Bash
12 84 (1.86%) R
13 64 (1.42%) Scala
14 47 (1.04%) C++
15 42 (0.93%) VBA
16 37 (0.82%) Bicep
17 28 (0.62%) C
18 27 (0.60%) VB
19 22 (0.49%) Go
19 22 (0.49%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 984 (21.84%) Security Cleared
2 787 (17.47%) SC Cleared
3 330 (7.33%) Degree
4 119 (2.64%) Computer Science Degree
5 108 (2.40%) DV Cleared
6 98 (2.18%) BPSS Clearance
7 70 (1.55%) Azure Certification
8 62 (1.38%) ISTQB
9 45 (1.00%) Microsoft Certification
10 43 (0.95%) Master's Degree
11 37 (0.82%) AWS Certification
12 19 (0.42%) CISSP
13 17 (0.38%) ISEB
13 17 (0.38%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
15 13 (0.29%) ACCA
15 13 (0.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 13 (0.29%) CIMA
15 13 (0.29%) FFIEC
16 12 (0.27%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 845 (18.76%) Data Quality
2 362 (8.04%) QA
3 147 (3.26%) GDPR
4 49 (1.09%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.98%) SLA
6 26 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 23 (0.51%) NIST
8 21 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 20 (0.44%) IFRS
9 20 (0.44%) ISO 20022
10 19 (0.42%) Actionable Recommendations
11 16 (0.36%) MiFID
12 15 (0.33%) PMO
13 13 (0.29%) COBIT
13 13 (0.29%) Solvency II
14 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
15 10 (0.22%) HIPAA
16 9 (0.20%) GRC
16 9 (0.20%) HL7
16 9 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 445 (9.88%) Docker
2 131 (2.91%) Active Directory
3 49 (1.09%) VMware Infrastructure
4 38 (0.84%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
6 17 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
7 15 (0.33%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.31%) vCloud
9 13 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 10 (0.22%) Hyper-V
11 6 (0.13%) Postfix
12 4 (0.089%) KVM
13 3 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 3 (0.067%) HDFS
14 2 (0.044%) GridGain
15 1 (0.022%) GPFS
15 1 (0.022%) RACF
15 1 (0.022%) Slurm Workload Manager
15 1 (0.022%) Varnish
15 1 (0.022%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 379 (8.41%) Kubernetes
2 95 (2.11%) Ansible
3 85 (1.89%) Grafana
4 44 (0.98%) Prometheus
5 42 (0.93%) Oracle RMAN
6 40 (0.89%) Control-M
7 39 (0.87%) Data Guard
8 29 (0.64%) SCOM
9 18 (0.40%) Kibana
10 16 (0.36%) Nagios
10 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
11 15 (0.33%) Tivoli
11 15 (0.33%) vCenter Server
12 14 (0.31%) Netcool
13 13 (0.29%) OpenView
13 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
15 11 (0.24%) Microsoft Intune
16 10 (0.22%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
16 10 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 762 (16.91%) Oracle
2 760 (16.87%) Microsoft
3 535 (11.88%) Databricks
4 175 (3.88%) Google
5 147 (3.26%) Informatica
6 123 (2.73%) SAP
7 107 (2.38%) Talend
8 105 (2.33%) ServiceNow
9 86 (1.91%) IBM
10 81 (1.80%) Splunk
11 65 (1.44%) VMware
12 61 (1.35%) Denodo
13 57 (1.27%) Salesforce
14 41 (0.91%) BMC
15 40 (0.89%) Bloomberg
16 39 (0.87%) Dynatrace
17 37 (0.82%) Citrix
18 33 (0.73%) Adobe
18 33 (0.73%) Alteryx
18 33 (0.73%) Murex