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

6 months to
4 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,108 3,009 3,621
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.83% 12.54% 9.86%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.96% 36.88% 32.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,790 2,157 2,677
10th Percentile £350 £359 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £545
Median % change year-on-year - -8.26% -0.91%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £650
90th Percentile £688 £766 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -1.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 66 58 54
10th Percentile £26.50 £21.72 £22.65
25th Percentile £34.01 £30.06 £27.28
Median hourly rate £47.50 £37.25 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +27.52% -12.35% -15.00%
75th Percentile £72.63 £57.50 £54.03
90th Percentile £83.00 £76.53 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £52.49 £38.85 £42.50
% change year-on-year +35.13% -8.60% -15.00%

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 11,114 8,160 11,074
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.60% 34.02% 30.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,306 5,650 7,993
10th Percentile £358 £359 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -2.78% -4.09%
75th Percentile £613 £641 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 526 197 468
10th Percentile £37.25 £28.32 £35.50
25th Percentile £55.00 £36.00 £48.43
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.84% -0.80% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.88 £85.00 £78.75
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.00
% change year-on-year +13.04% -7.26% -0.80%

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 4 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 4 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 4 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 -2 2,283 £523 -2.24% 997
Midlands +3 525 £465 +4.49% 217
North of England -10 500 £463 -2.63% 427
West Midlands +5 422 £459 +1.25% 132
South East -13 391 £475 -3.06% 454
North West -6 254 £461 -2.89% 254
Yorkshire -14 211 £475 - 111
South West -4 205 £488 +2.63% 161
East of England -16 101 £495 +1.54% 106
East Midlands -2 99 £525 +35.05% 85
North East -8 47 £425 -8.11% 66
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
1 231 (5.62%) Apache Spark
2 167 (4.07%) Apache Airflow
3 145 (3.53%) Confluence
4 144 (3.51%) Apache
5 83 (2.02%) SAS
6 61 (1.48%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.80%) WebLogic
8 31 (0.75%) IIS
9 28 (0.68%) Oracle Workflow
10 24 (0.58%) Tomcat
11 20 (0.49%) Jupyter
11 20 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.39%) Appian
13 15 (0.37%) CMS
13 15 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
14 14 (0.34%) nginx
14 14 (0.34%) WebSphere
15 11 (0.27%) Camunda
15 11 (0.27%) Mendix
16 10 (0.24%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 261 (6.35%) Microsoft Excel
2 42 (1.02%) MS Visio
3 40 (0.97%) Microsoft Office
4 29 (0.71%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 29 (0.71%) Spreadsheet
5 10 (0.24%) Chatbot
6 6 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
7 5 (0.12%) Notepad++
8 3 (0.073%) Oracle Smart View
9 2 (0.049%) Notion
9 2 (0.049%) Trello
10 1 (0.024%) InDesign
10 1 (0.024%) Mingle
10 1 (0.024%) Weka
Business Applications
1 39 (0.95%) Oracle EBS
2 30 (0.73%) Dynamics CRM
3 26 (0.63%) Aladdin
4 20 (0.49%) NEC Housing
4 20 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
5 19 (0.46%) SAP S/4HANA
6 18 (0.44%) Oracle EBS R12
6 18 (0.44%) Oracle ERP
7 15 (0.37%) Oracle Receivables
7 15 (0.37%) Remedy ITSM
8 13 (0.32%) Oracle General Ledger
9 12 (0.29%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 11 (0.27%) Oracle Assets
11 10 (0.24%) Findur
11 10 (0.24%) NetSuite
11 10 (0.24%) Payment Gateway
12 9 (0.22%) Endur
12 9 (0.22%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 8 (0.19%) Oracle Cash Management
14 7 (0.17%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,365 (33.23%) Azure
2 1,010 (24.59%) AWS
3 788 (19.18%) Power Platform
4 397 (9.66%) Azure DevOps
5 343 (8.35%) GCP
6 335 (8.15%) Azure Data Factory
7 308 (7.50%) GitHub
8 253 (6.16%) Serverless
9 248 (6.04%) Snowflake
10 235 (5.72%) Amazon S3
11 214 (5.21%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 196 (4.77%) dbt
13 160 (3.89%) AWS Lambda
14 159 (3.87%) GitHub Actions
15 78 (1.90%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 78 (1.90%) SaaS
16 73 (1.78%) Entra ID
17 72 (1.75%) Amazon EC2
17 72 (1.75%) Power Automate
18 58 (1.41%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 46 (1.12%) Firewall
2 45 (1.10%) DNS
3 19 (0.46%) SNMP
4 17 (0.41%) HTTP
4 17 (0.41%) Network Security
5 15 (0.37%) Internet
5 15 (0.37%) TCP/IP
5 15 (0.37%) VPN
6 14 (0.34%) SSL
6 14 (0.34%) WAN
7 11 (0.27%) Wi-Fi
8 10 (0.24%) LAN
9 9 (0.22%) Wireshark
10 8 (0.19%) 3GPP
11 7 (0.17%) SAN
12 6 (0.15%) IPsec
12 6 (0.15%) RTP
13 5 (0.12%) BGP
13 5 (0.12%) DHCP
13 5 (0.12%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 722 (17.58%) Power BI
2 534 (13.00%) Data Warehouse
3 514 (12.51%) SQL Server
4 282 (6.86%) Data Lake
5 279 (6.79%) Tableau
6 263 (6.40%) PostgreSQL
7 257 (6.26%) Relational Database
8 225 (5.48%) NoSQL
9 205 (4.99%) Metadata
10 190 (4.63%) Azure SQL Database
11 158 (3.85%) Oracle Database
12 151 (3.68%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 134 (3.26%) BigQuery
14 125 (3.04%) Delta Lake
15 115 (2.80%) Amazon Redshift
16 113 (2.75%) Big Data
17 106 (2.58%) MySQL
18 105 (2.56%) Oracle Reports
19 92 (2.24%) Amazon RDS
20 89 (2.17%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 434 (10.56%) Git
2 325 (7.91%) JIRA
3 221 (5.38%) Jenkins
4 202 (4.92%) GitLab
5 64 (1.56%) JUnit
6 57 (1.39%) Selenium
7 54 (1.31%) Postman
8 49 (1.19%) Maven
9 47 (1.14%) Mockito
10 40 (0.97%) Cucumber
10 40 (0.97%) Gradle
11 35 (0.85%) SonarQube
12 31 (0.75%) MLflow
13 28 (0.68%) ERwin
13 28 (0.68%) REST Assured
14 25 (0.61%) Bitbucket
14 25 (0.61%) JMeter
15 24 (0.58%) TeamCity
15 24 (0.58%) Zephyr
16 23 (0.56%) Liquibase
General
1 1,105 (26.90%) Finance
2 1,054 (25.66%) Social Skills
3 763 (18.57%) Analytical Skills
4 386 (9.40%) Banking
5 342 (8.33%) Public Sector
6 113 (2.75%) Marketing
7 111 (2.70%) Front Office
8 98 (2.39%) Investment Banking
9 83 (2.02%) Documentation Skills
10 70 (1.70%) Retail
11 62 (1.51%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 57 (1.39%) Financial Institution
13 52 (1.27%) Legal
14 42 (1.02%) Publishing
15 36 (0.88%) Manufacturing
15 36 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
16 34 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
16 34 (0.83%) Telecoms
17 32 (0.78%) Law
18 29 (0.71%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 859 (20.91%) Data Engineer
2 850 (20.69%) Developer
3 573 (13.95%) Analyst
4 526 (12.80%) Senior
5 281 (6.84%) Lead
6 255 (6.21%) Data Analyst
7 231 (5.62%) Architect
8 189 (4.60%) Consultant
9 168 (4.09%) Business Analyst
10 164 (3.99%) Java Developer
11 156 (3.80%) Senior Data Engineer
12 131 (3.19%) Senior Developer
13 128 (3.12%) DBA
14 122 (2.97%) Software Engineer
15 105 (2.56%) Azure Engineer
16 101 (2.46%) C# Developer
17 87 (2.12%) SQL Developer
18 86 (2.09%) Data Architect
19 85 (2.07%) Python Developer
20 83 (2.02%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 355 (8.64%) .NET
2 339 (8.25%) REST
3 258 (6.28%) PySpark
4 251 (6.11%) Kafka
5 208 (5.06%) Spring
6 196 (4.77%) Spring Boot
7 195 (4.75%) React
8 181 (4.41%) RESTful
9 149 (3.63%) HTML
10 140 (3.41%) JSON
11 137 (3.33%) XML
12 131 (3.19%) CSS
13 120 (2.92%) Pandas
14 108 (2.63%) AngularJS
15 102 (2.48%) SOAP
16 91 (2.22%) Web Services
17 88 (2.14%) Middleware
18 82 (2.00%) .NET Framework
19 77 (1.87%) OAuth
20 70 (1.70%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 271 (6.60%) Cloud Native
2 145 (3.53%) Data Structures
3 134 (3.26%) Legacy Systems
4 128 (3.12%) Product Ownership
5 115 (2.80%) Distributed Systems
6 83 (2.02%) Management Information System
7 78 (1.90%) Derivative
7 78 (1.90%) Onboarding
8 68 (1.66%) Analytical Mindset
9 67 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
10 56 (1.36%) Clustering
11 53 (1.29%) Enterprise Software
11 53 (1.29%) Self-Motivation
12 51 (1.24%) Equities
13 49 (1.19%) Greenfield Project
14 47 (1.14%) Fixed Income
15 43 (1.05%) Algorithms
16 41 (1.00%) Replication
17 38 (0.93%) Low-Code
17 38 (0.93%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 292 (7.11%) Linux
2 250 (6.09%) Windows
3 203 (4.94%) Unix
4 85 (2.07%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.58%) AIX
6 21 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 15 (0.37%) Windows Server 2019
8 10 (0.24%) Solaris
9 9 (0.22%) Windows Server 2016
9 9 (0.22%) zOS
10 8 (0.19%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.17%) Android
11 7 (0.17%) Apple iOS
11 7 (0.17%) Windows 10
12 4 (0.097%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.097%) VMS
13 3 (0.073%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.049%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.049%) HPUX
14 2 (0.049%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,150 (27.99%) CI/CD
2 1,032 (25.12%) Analytics
3 1,021 (24.85%) Data Modelling
4 999 (24.32%) Agile
5 995 (24.22%) ETL
6 917 (22.32%) Business Intelligence
7 891 (21.69%) DevOps
8 797 (19.40%) Problem-Solving
9 776 (18.89%) Data Pipeline
10 670 (16.31%) Data Engineering
11 559 (13.61%) AI
12 538 (13.10%) Migration
13 501 (12.20%) Validation
14 456 (11.10%) Data Governance
15 430 (10.47%) Test Automation
16 401 (9.76%) Decision-Making
17 398 (9.69%) Data Analysis
18 369 (8.98%) Performance Tuning
19 366 (8.91%) Microservices
20 365 (8.89%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,527 (37.17%) Python
2 549 (13.36%) Java
3 438 (10.66%) C#
4 313 (7.62%) JavaScript
5 298 (7.25%) PL/SQL
6 215 (5.23%) T-SQL
7 209 (5.09%) PowerShell
8 140 (3.41%) TypeScript
9 120 (2.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 115 (2.80%) Shell Script
11 102 (2.48%) R
12 80 (1.95%) Bash
13 79 (1.92%) Scala
14 59 (1.44%) C++
15 40 (0.97%) VBA
16 38 (0.93%) Bicep
17 31 (0.75%) Perl
18 29 (0.71%) VB
19 25 (0.61%) C
19 25 (0.61%) Go
Qualifications
1 862 (20.98%) Security Cleared
2 695 (16.92%) SC Cleared
3 326 (7.94%) Degree
4 107 (2.60%) Computer Science Degree
5 92 (2.24%) BPSS Clearance
6 74 (1.80%) DV Cleared
7 70 (1.70%) Azure Certification
8 50 (1.22%) Master's Degree
9 49 (1.19%) ISTQB
10 34 (0.83%) Microsoft Certification
11 25 (0.61%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.44%) DBS Check
13 16 (0.39%) PhD
14 12 (0.29%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 11 (0.27%) CISSP
16 10 (0.24%) PMI Certification
16 10 (0.24%) PMP
17 9 (0.22%) CISM
17 9 (0.22%) Oracle Certification
17 9 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 739 (17.99%) Data Quality
2 308 (7.50%) QA
3 174 (4.24%) GDPR
4 43 (1.05%) SLA
5 38 (0.93%) Accessibility
6 32 (0.78%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 28 (0.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.58%) PMO
9 22 (0.54%) NIST
10 19 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 18 (0.44%) IFRS
12 15 (0.37%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 14 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 14 (0.34%) MiFID
14 12 (0.29%) Actionable Recommendations
14 12 (0.29%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.29%) Solvency II
15 11 (0.27%) HL7
16 10 (0.24%) GRC
17 8 (0.19%) NCSC
System Software
1 470 (11.44%) Docker
2 93 (2.26%) Active Directory
3 36 (0.88%) Virtual Machines
4 28 (0.68%) VMware Infrastructure
5 23 (0.56%) Oracle RAC
6 16 (0.39%) Hyper-V
7 14 (0.34%) VMware ESXi
8 10 (0.24%) KVM
8 10 (0.24%) VMware NSX
9 9 (0.22%) Postfix
9 9 (0.22%) vCloud
10 6 (0.15%) HDFS
10 6 (0.15%) RACF
11 4 (0.097%) Virtual Desktop
11 4 (0.097%) XenApp
11 4 (0.097%) XenDesktop
12 3 (0.073%) Oracle Clusterware
13 2 (0.049%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 2 (0.049%) GridGain
14 1 (0.024%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 379 (9.23%) Kubernetes
2 330 (8.03%) Terraform
3 107 (2.60%) Grafana
4 67 (1.63%) Ansible
5 62 (1.51%) Prometheus
6 38 (0.93%) Oracle RMAN
7 29 (0.71%) Data Guard
8 19 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
9 18 (0.44%) Kibana
10 16 (0.39%) Control-M
10 16 (0.39%) vCenter Server
11 15 (0.37%) ZABBIX
12 14 (0.34%) Nagios
12 14 (0.34%) Netcool
12 14 (0.34%) Tivoli
13 13 (0.32%) OpenView
13 13 (0.32%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 10 (0.24%) SCOM
15 9 (0.22%) Kiali
15 9 (0.22%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 688 (16.75%) Oracle
2 639 (15.56%) Microsoft
3 495 (12.05%) Databricks
4 158 (3.85%) Google
5 145 (3.53%) Informatica
6 128 (3.12%) ServiceNow
7 118 (2.87%) Talend
8 106 (2.58%) SAP
9 85 (2.07%) Splunk
10 65 (1.58%) IBM
11 62 (1.51%) Denodo
12 50 (1.22%) Salesforce
13 43 (1.05%) Citrix
13 43 (1.05%) VMware
14 36 (0.88%) Dynatrace
15 32 (0.78%) OpenAI
16 31 (0.75%) Bloomberg
17 30 (0.73%) HP
17 30 (0.73%) MuleSoft
18 29 (0.71%) Murex