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

6 months to
11 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,489 3,279 3,517
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.85% 11.87% 10.55%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.41% 36.29% 33.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,015 2,328 2,632
10th Percentile £355 £340 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -0.46%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 85 61 42
10th Percentile £23.30 £23.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £33.75 £30.25 £30.09
Median hourly rate £45.00 £37.50 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -10.71% -8.46%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £56.56
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £41.16
% change year-on-year +14.56% -5.61% -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 11,998 9,036 10,580
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.32% 32.70% 31.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,785 6,214 7,550
10th Percentile £363 £345 £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 £655
90th Percentile £738 £763 £788
UK median daily rate £513 £503 £530
% change year-on-year +1.99% -5.19% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 496 234 359
10th Percentile £33.70 £29.07 £30.00
25th Percentile £52.88 £38.33 £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 £79.75 £84.85 £78.75
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +14.54% -12.69% +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 11 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 11 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 11 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 2,446 £525 - 1,474
North of England -3 590 £468 -0.32% 444
Midlands 0 548 £459 +2.68% 245
South East -10 470 £475 -5.00% 482
West Midlands +4 450 £459 +1.32% 132
North West -3 303 £478 +2.36% 247
Yorkshire -2 248 £474 -0.21% 129
South West -4 218 £500 +17.65% 176
East of England -3 118 £478 -4.50% 114
East Midlands -4 94 £465 +24.00% 113
North East -16 50 £413 -10.81% 78
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
1 206 (4.59%) Apache Airflow
2 193 (4.30%) Apache Spark
3 181 (4.03%) Confluence
4 149 (3.32%) Apache
5 97 (2.16%) SAS
6 65 (1.45%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.85%) Oracle Workflow
8 37 (0.82%) WebLogic
9 31 (0.69%) IIS
10 26 (0.58%) Jupyter
11 21 (0.47%) Palantir Foundry
12 20 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
13 18 (0.40%) CMS
14 17 (0.38%) nginx
14 17 (0.38%) WebSphere
15 16 (0.36%) Tomcat
16 12 (0.27%) Tuxedo
17 11 (0.25%) Camunda
18 8 (0.18%) Oracle Self-Service HR
19 7 (0.16%) ArcGIS
Applications
1 299 (6.66%) Microsoft Excel
2 49 (1.09%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.85%) Spreadsheet
4 35 (0.78%) MS Visio
5 22 (0.49%) 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
10 2 (0.045%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.022%) InDesign
11 1 (0.022%) Mingle
11 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 44 (0.98%) Dynamics CRM
2 42 (0.94%) Oracle EBS
3 27 (0.60%) Aladdin
4 25 (0.56%) Oracle ERP
4 25 (0.56%) Remedy ITSM
5 23 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
6 22 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
7 18 (0.40%) Oracle EBS R12
8 15 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
9 12 (0.27%) NEC Housing
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.25%) Findur
10 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.22%) Finacle
11 10 (0.22%) Oracle Assets
12 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
12 8 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
13 7 (0.16%) Fidessa
13 7 (0.16%) Oracle 11i
13 7 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 1,416 (31.54%) Azure
2 1,063 (23.68%) AWS
3 861 (19.18%) Power Platform
4 413 (9.20%) Azure DevOps
5 390 (8.69%) GCP
6 320 (7.13%) GitHub
7 319 (7.11%) Azure Data Factory
8 306 (6.82%) Snowflake
9 275 (6.13%) Serverless
10 257 (5.73%) dbt
11 228 (5.08%) Amazon S3
12 202 (4.50%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 179 (3.99%) AWS Lambda
14 165 (3.68%) GitHub Actions
15 91 (2.03%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 91 (2.03%) Entra ID
16 88 (1.96%) Power Automate
17 84 (1.87%) SaaS
18 79 (1.76%) PowerApps
19 70 (1.56%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 57 (1.27%) DNS
2 45 (1.00%) Firewall
3 25 (0.56%) Network Security
4 24 (0.53%) VPN
5 23 (0.51%) SSL
6 21 (0.47%) HTTP
6 21 (0.47%) SNMP
7 20 (0.45%) Internet
8 18 (0.40%) TCP/IP
9 12 (0.27%) DHCP
9 12 (0.27%) WAN
10 10 (0.22%) Broadband
10 10 (0.22%) Wireshark
11 9 (0.20%) SAN
11 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
12 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
12 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
13 7 (0.16%) Kerberos
13 7 (0.16%) LAN
13 7 (0.16%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 793 (17.67%) Power BI
2 637 (14.19%) Data Warehouse
3 569 (12.68%) SQL Server
4 279 (6.22%) Tableau
5 277 (6.17%) Relational Database
6 271 (6.04%) PostgreSQL
7 266 (5.93%) Data Lake
8 226 (5.03%) Metadata
9 221 (4.92%) NoSQL
10 187 (4.17%) Oracle Database
11 172 (3.83%) Azure SQL Database
12 163 (3.63%) BigQuery
13 146 (3.25%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 137 (3.05%) Amazon Redshift
15 126 (2.81%) Delta Lake
16 102 (2.27%) Oracle Reports
17 101 (2.25%) MySQL
18 99 (2.21%) Big Data
19 93 (2.07%) Snowflake Schema
20 90 (2.00%) Pentaho
Development Applications
1 529 (11.78%) Git
2 357 (7.95%) JIRA
3 261 (5.81%) Jenkins
4 202 (4.50%) GitLab
5 71 (1.58%) JUnit
6 63 (1.40%) Maven
7 62 (1.38%) Postman
8 58 (1.29%) Gradle
8 58 (1.29%) Selenium
9 49 (1.09%) Mockito
10 40 (0.89%) SonarQube
11 36 (0.80%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.78%) Zephyr
13 33 (0.74%) Oracle Forms
14 30 (0.67%) Visual Studio
15 28 (0.62%) JMeter
15 28 (0.62%) TeamCity
16 27 (0.60%) ERwin
16 27 (0.60%) Liquibase
17 26 (0.58%) MLflow
General
1 1,193 (26.58%) Social Skills
2 1,147 (25.55%) Finance
3 917 (20.43%) Analytical Skills
4 443 (9.87%) Banking
5 416 (9.27%) Public Sector
6 141 (3.14%) Marketing
7 131 (2.92%) Front Office
8 114 (2.54%) Retail
9 105 (2.34%) Investment Banking
10 81 (1.80%) Documentation Skills
10 81 (1.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 69 (1.54%) Manufacturing
12 52 (1.16%) Financial Institution
12 52 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
13 49 (1.09%) Legal
14 46 (1.02%) Organisational Skills
15 41 (0.91%) Telecoms
16 38 (0.85%) Back Office
17 36 (0.80%) Publishing
18 32 (0.71%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 954 (21.25%) Developer
2 892 (19.87%) Data Engineer
3 645 (14.37%) Analyst
4 599 (13.34%) Senior
5 311 (6.93%) Lead
6 268 (5.97%) Data Analyst
7 230 (5.12%) Architect
8 223 (4.97%) Consultant
9 189 (4.21%) Business Analyst
10 182 (4.05%) DBA
11 175 (3.90%) Senior Data Engineer
12 169 (3.76%) Java Developer
13 149 (3.32%) Senior Developer
14 128 (2.85%) Software Engineer
15 116 (2.58%) SQL DBA
16 109 (2.43%) SQL Developer
17 103 (2.29%) Azure Engineer
18 96 (2.14%) C# Developer
19 93 (2.07%) Data Architect
20 92 (2.05%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 375 (8.35%) .NET
2 374 (8.33%) REST
3 283 (6.30%) PySpark
4 272 (6.06%) Kafka
5 225 (5.01%) Spring
6 202 (4.50%) Spring Boot
7 198 (4.41%) React
8 179 (3.99%) RESTful
9 167 (3.72%) JSON
10 160 (3.56%) XML
11 153 (3.41%) HTML
12 128 (2.85%) AngularJS
12 128 (2.85%) CSS
13 106 (2.36%) Pandas
14 102 (2.27%) Web Services
15 98 (2.18%) SOAP
16 93 (2.07%) Middleware
17 89 (1.98%) .NET Framework
18 74 (1.65%) Node.js
19 68 (1.51%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 293 (6.53%) Cloud Native
2 199 (4.43%) Data Structures
3 171 (3.81%) Product Ownership
4 151 (3.36%) Legacy Systems
5 129 (2.87%) Distributed Systems
6 98 (2.18%) Onboarding
7 95 (2.12%) Enterprise Software
8 84 (1.87%) Management Information System
9 82 (1.83%) Derivative
10 79 (1.76%) Self-Motivation
11 68 (1.51%) Analytical Mindset
12 64 (1.43%) Data Protection Act
13 61 (1.36%) Clustering
13 61 (1.36%) Replication
14 54 (1.20%) Fixed Income
15 52 (1.16%) Algorithms
16 51 (1.14%) Reference Data
17 49 (1.09%) Equities
18 48 (1.07%) AI Agents
18 48 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 309 (6.88%) Linux
2 275 (6.13%) Windows
3 203 (4.52%) Unix
4 105 (2.34%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.47%) AIX
7 16 (0.36%) Solaris
8 13 (0.29%) Windows Server 2019
9 12 (0.27%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.18%) VMS
11 7 (0.16%) Ubuntu
11 7 (0.16%) zOS
12 6 (0.13%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 4 (0.089%) Oracle Linux
15 3 (0.067%) Android
15 3 (0.067%) Apple iOS
15 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
16 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,213 (27.02%) CI/CD
2 1,175 (26.18%) Agile
3 1,153 (25.69%) Analytics
4 1,147 (25.55%) Data Modelling
5 1,048 (23.35%) ETL
6 1,013 (22.57%) Business Intelligence
7 919 (20.47%) DevOps
8 885 (19.71%) Problem-Solving
9 879 (19.58%) Data Pipeline
10 758 (16.89%) Data Engineering
11 650 (14.48%) AI
12 632 (14.08%) Migration
13 612 (13.63%) Validation
14 493 (10.98%) Stakeholder Management
15 489 (10.89%) Data Governance
16 479 (10.67%) Test Automation
17 478 (10.65%) Decision-Making
18 471 (10.49%) Continuous Improvement
19 438 (9.76%) Data Analysis
20 384 (8.55%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,591 (35.44%) Python
2 557 (12.41%) Java
3 442 (9.85%) C#
4 362 (8.06%) PL/SQL
5 339 (7.55%) JavaScript
6 243 (5.41%) PowerShell
7 239 (5.32%) T-SQL
8 165 (3.68%) TypeScript
9 143 (3.19%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 128 (2.85%) Shell Script
11 105 (2.34%) Bash
12 80 (1.78%) R
13 66 (1.47%) Scala
14 46 (1.02%) C++
14 46 (1.02%) VBA
15 40 (0.89%) Bicep
16 28 (0.62%) C
17 27 (0.60%) VB
18 21 (0.47%) Kotlin
18 21 (0.47%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,010 (22.50%) Security Cleared
2 814 (18.13%) SC Cleared
3 316 (7.04%) Degree
4 113 (2.52%) Computer Science Degree
5 103 (2.29%) DV Cleared
6 98 (2.18%) BPSS Clearance
7 68 (1.51%) Azure Certification
8 60 (1.34%) ISTQB
9 43 (0.96%) Master's Degree
10 42 (0.94%) Microsoft Certification
11 35 (0.78%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.40%) CISSP
13 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
14 13 (0.29%) ISEB
14 13 (0.29%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 12 (0.27%) FFIEC
15 12 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
15 12 (0.27%) PhD
16 10 (0.22%) ACCA
16 10 (0.22%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 833 (18.56%) Data Quality
2 343 (7.64%) QA
3 152 (3.39%) GDPR
4 45 (1.00%) Accessibility
5 42 (0.94%) SLA
6 25 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 22 (0.49%) NIST
7 22 (0.49%) PMO
8 21 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 19 (0.42%) Actionable Recommendations
10 16 (0.36%) IFRS
10 16 (0.36%) ISO 20022
11 15 (0.33%) MiFID
12 14 (0.31%) Solvency II
13 13 (0.29%) HIPAA
14 12 (0.27%) COBIT
14 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
15 10 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 9 (0.20%) HL7
16 9 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 454 (10.11%) Docker
2 124 (2.76%) Active Directory
3 47 (1.05%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (0.96%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
6 17 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
7 14 (0.31%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.29%) vCloud
9 12 (0.27%) Hyper-V
10 9 (0.20%) Postfix
10 9 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
11 7 (0.16%) KVM
12 3 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
12 3 (0.067%) HDFS
13 2 (0.045%) GridGain
14 1 (0.022%) GPFS
14 1 (0.022%) RACF
14 1 (0.022%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 1 (0.022%) Varnish
14 1 (0.022%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 393 (8.75%) Kubernetes
2 360 (8.02%) Terraform
3 92 (2.05%) Grafana
4 88 (1.96%) Ansible
5 46 (1.02%) Prometheus
6 44 (0.98%) Oracle RMAN
7 39 (0.87%) Data Guard
8 32 (0.71%) Control-M
9 28 (0.62%) SCOM
10 18 (0.40%) 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%) Microsoft Clustering
17 10 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
18 9 (0.20%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
Vendors
1 767 (17.09%) Oracle
2 735 (16.37%) Microsoft
3 517 (11.52%) Databricks
4 173 (3.85%) Google
5 156 (3.48%) Informatica
6 124 (2.76%) Talend
7 122 (2.72%) SAP
8 120 (2.67%) ServiceNow
9 82 (1.83%) IBM
10 81 (1.80%) Splunk
11 66 (1.47%) Denodo
12 63 (1.40%) VMware
13 56 (1.25%) Salesforce
14 39 (0.87%) Bloomberg
14 39 (0.87%) Citrix
15 38 (0.85%) BMC
15 38 (0.85%) Dynatrace
16 34 (0.76%) Murex
17 33 (0.74%) Alteryx
18 32 (0.71%) Adobe