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 18 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,432 3,279 3,668
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.85% 12.04% 10.16%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.07% 36.41% 32.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,978 2,330 2,775
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £408 £424
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £535
Median % change year-on-year - -6.54% -0.47%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £638
90th Percentile £688 £760 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 83 62 47
10th Percentile £25.34 £22.83 £24.00
25th Percentile £31.86 £30.50 £30.19
Median hourly rate £45.00 £41.66 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +8.02% -1.98% -14.26%
75th Percentile £70.00 £52.81 £51.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £65.85 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £45.00 £40.50 £42.00
% change year-on-year +11.11% -3.57% -15.64%

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 11,956 9,007 11,173
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.57% 33.08% 30.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,787 6,203 8,043
10th Percentile £361 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £518 £540
Median % change year-on-year +0.48% -4.17% -1.82%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £775 £788
UK median daily rate £513 £505 £525
% change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 492 228 436
10th Percentile £34.02 £29.07 £35.52
25th Percentile £55.00 £38.97 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £59.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +9.24% -8.46% +3.59%
75th Percentile £70.25 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.13 £83.42 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £57.13 £62.50
% change year-on-year +13.79% -8.60% -

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 18 July 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 18 July 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 18 July 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 2,371 £525 - 587
North of England -3 584 £463 -2.63% 248
Midlands +1 555 £459 +8.00% 168
South East -11 459 £475 -5.00% 337
West Midlands +3 455 £459 +2.00% 82
North West -3 310 £475 +0.53% 130
South West -5 239 £500 +14.29% 105
Yorkshire -7 237 £475 - 83
East of England -7 116 £488 -2.50% 74
East Midlands -3 96 £525 +32.74% 86
North East -11 52 £425 -8.11% 40
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
1 208 (4.69%) Apache Spark
2 189 (4.26%) Apache Airflow
3 177 (3.99%) Confluence
4 151 (3.41%) Apache
5 94 (2.12%) SAS
6 54 (1.22%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
8 34 (0.77%) IIS
9 33 (0.74%) WebLogic
10 22 (0.50%) CMS
10 22 (0.50%) Jupyter
10 22 (0.50%) Tomcat
11 18 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.41%) WebSphere
12 16 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.36%) nginx
13 13 (0.29%) Tuxedo
14 12 (0.27%) Appian
14 12 (0.27%) Camunda
15 8 (0.18%) Red Hat Fuse
Applications
1 290 (6.54%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.29%) Microsoft Office
3 40 (0.90%) MS Visio
4 39 (0.88%) Spreadsheet
5 30 (0.68%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 9 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.090%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.090%) Notion
8 4 (0.090%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.045%) Microsoft Project
11 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.023%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.023%) InDesign
11 1 (0.023%) Mingle
11 1 (0.023%) Weka
Business Applications
1 42 (0.95%) Oracle EBS
2 41 (0.93%) Dynamics CRM
3 31 (0.70%) Aladdin
4 25 (0.56%) Oracle ERP
4 25 (0.56%) Oracle Payables
5 24 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
6 19 (0.43%) Oracle EBS R12
6 19 (0.43%) Remedy ITSM
7 18 (0.41%) NEC Housing
7 18 (0.41%) Oracle Receivables
8 12 (0.27%) Oracle Assets
8 12 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
9 11 (0.25%) Findur
9 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
10 10 (0.23%) Fidessa
10 10 (0.23%) Finacle
11 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
11 8 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
11 8 (0.18%) Summit
12 7 (0.16%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,403 (31.66%) Azure
2 1,049 (23.67%) AWS
3 834 (18.82%) Power Platform
4 403 (9.09%) Azure DevOps
5 377 (8.51%) GCP
6 316 (7.13%) Azure Data Factory
6 316 (7.13%) GitHub
7 286 (6.45%) Snowflake
8 274 (6.18%) Serverless
9 247 (5.57%) Amazon S3
10 244 (5.51%) dbt
11 205 (4.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 176 (3.97%) AWS Lambda
13 164 (3.70%) GitHub Actions
14 83 (1.87%) Entra ID
15 79 (1.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 79 (1.78%) SaaS
16 78 (1.76%) Power Automate
17 71 (1.60%) Amazon EC2
18 68 (1.53%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 44 (0.99%) DNS
2 40 (0.90%) Firewall
3 21 (0.47%) SNMP
3 21 (0.47%) SSL
4 20 (0.45%) Internet
4 20 (0.45%) Network Security
5 19 (0.43%) HTTP
5 19 (0.43%) VPN
6 13 (0.29%) TCP/IP
7 12 (0.27%) WAN
8 10 (0.23%) Wireshark
9 9 (0.20%) Kerberos
9 9 (0.20%) SAN
9 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
10 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
10 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
11 7 (0.16%) Broadband
11 7 (0.16%) RTP
12 6 (0.14%) BGP
12 6 (0.14%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 770 (17.37%) Power BI
2 607 (13.70%) Data Warehouse
3 577 (13.02%) SQL Server
4 296 (6.68%) Tableau
5 283 (6.39%) Relational Database
6 280 (6.32%) PostgreSQL
7 274 (6.18%) Data Lake
8 221 (4.99%) Metadata
9 215 (4.85%) NoSQL
10 183 (4.13%) Oracle Database
11 174 (3.93%) Azure SQL Database
12 159 (3.59%) BigQuery
13 156 (3.52%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 135 (3.05%) Amazon Redshift
15 119 (2.69%) Delta Lake
16 105 (2.37%) Big Data
17 103 (2.32%) Oracle Reports
18 100 (2.26%) Snowflake Schema
19 98 (2.21%) MySQL
20 90 (2.03%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 481 (10.85%) Git
2 341 (7.69%) JIRA
3 238 (5.37%) Jenkins
4 179 (4.04%) GitLab
5 69 (1.56%) JUnit
6 57 (1.29%) Maven
7 54 (1.22%) Gradle
8 53 (1.20%) Postman
9 50 (1.13%) Selenium
10 47 (1.06%) Mockito
11 36 (0.81%) Oracle Forms
12 34 (0.77%) SonarQube
13 33 (0.74%) Bitbucket
13 33 (0.74%) Visual Studio
14 28 (0.63%) Cucumber
14 28 (0.63%) Team Foundation Server
15 27 (0.61%) JMeter
15 27 (0.61%) MLflow
15 27 (0.61%) Zephyr
16 26 (0.59%) Liquibase
General
1 1,151 (25.97%) Finance
2 1,139 (25.70%) Social Skills
3 876 (19.77%) Analytical Skills
4 418 (9.43%) Banking
5 400 (9.03%) Public Sector
6 132 (2.98%) Marketing
7 123 (2.78%) Front Office
8 98 (2.21%) Retail
9 97 (2.19%) Investment Banking
10 88 (1.99%) Documentation Skills
11 74 (1.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 56 (1.26%) Manufacturing
13 54 (1.22%) Presentation Skills
14 51 (1.15%) Legal
15 48 (1.08%) Financial Institution
16 42 (0.95%) Organisational Skills
17 38 (0.86%) Back Office
17 38 (0.86%) Publishing
18 34 (0.77%) Telecoms
19 29 (0.65%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 955 (21.55%) Developer
2 878 (19.81%) Data Engineer
3 641 (14.46%) Analyst
4 579 (13.06%) Senior
5 310 (6.99%) Lead
6 277 (6.25%) Data Analyst
7 240 (5.42%) Architect
8 206 (4.65%) Consultant
9 185 (4.17%) Business Analyst
10 177 (3.99%) Java Developer
11 172 (3.88%) Senior Data Engineer
12 164 (3.70%) DBA
13 143 (3.23%) Senior Developer
14 126 (2.84%) Software Engineer
15 115 (2.59%) SQL Developer
16 109 (2.46%) Azure Engineer
16 109 (2.46%) SQL DBA
17 105 (2.37%) C# Developer
18 92 (2.08%) Data Architect
19 91 (2.05%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 370 (8.35%) .NET
2 351 (7.92%) REST
3 265 (5.98%) Kafka
4 261 (5.89%) PySpark
5 224 (5.05%) Spring
6 205 (4.63%) Spring Boot
7 204 (4.60%) React
8 184 (4.15%) RESTful
9 165 (3.72%) JSON
10 158 (3.56%) XML
11 143 (3.23%) HTML
12 125 (2.82%) AngularJS
12 125 (2.82%) CSS
13 113 (2.55%) Pandas
14 102 (2.30%) SOAP
15 100 (2.26%) Web Services
16 93 (2.10%) Middleware
17 91 (2.05%) .NET Framework
18 73 (1.65%) Node.js
19 68 (1.53%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 291 (6.57%) Cloud Native
2 190 (4.29%) Data Structures
3 159 (3.59%) Legacy Systems
4 152 (3.43%) Product Ownership
5 132 (2.98%) Distributed Systems
6 87 (1.96%) Onboarding
7 81 (1.83%) Derivative
8 78 (1.76%) Enterprise Software
9 77 (1.74%) Management Information System
10 74 (1.67%) Analytical Mindset
11 72 (1.62%) Self-Motivation
12 65 (1.47%) Clustering
12 65 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
13 58 (1.31%) Replication
14 56 (1.26%) Algorithms
15 54 (1.22%) Fixed Income
16 51 (1.15%) Equities
17 49 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
18 40 (0.90%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
19 39 (0.88%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 297 (6.70%) Linux
2 270 (6.09%) Windows
3 211 (4.76%) Unix
4 102 (2.30%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.54%) AIX
5 24 (0.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 16 (0.36%) Solaris
7 12 (0.27%) Windows Server 2019
8 8 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
8 8 (0.18%) zOS
9 7 (0.16%) Android
9 7 (0.16%) Apple iOS
10 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
11 5 (0.11%) Windows 10
12 4 (0.090%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.090%) Ubuntu
12 4 (0.090%) VMS
13 3 (0.068%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.045%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,185 (26.74%) CI/CD
2 1,138 (25.68%) Analytics
3 1,126 (25.41%) Agile
4 1,095 (24.71%) Data Modelling
5 1,026 (23.15%) ETL
6 990 (22.34%) Business Intelligence
7 899 (20.28%) DevOps
8 861 (19.43%) Problem-Solving
9 845 (19.07%) Data Pipeline
10 739 (16.67%) Data Engineering
11 634 (14.31%) AI
12 598 (13.49%) Migration
13 576 (13.00%) Validation
14 475 (10.72%) Data Governance
15 453 (10.22%) Decision-Making
16 451 (10.18%) Test Automation
17 440 (9.93%) Continuous Improvement
18 431 (9.72%) Data Analysis
19 426 (9.61%) Stakeholder Management
20 394 (8.89%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,577 (35.58%) Python
2 555 (12.52%) Java
3 443 (10.00%) C#
4 349 (7.87%) PL/SQL
5 308 (6.95%) JavaScript
6 242 (5.46%) T-SQL
7 236 (5.32%) PowerShell
8 168 (3.79%) TypeScript
9 133 (3.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 122 (2.75%) Shell Script
11 96 (2.17%) R
12 86 (1.94%) Bash
13 75 (1.69%) Scala
14 50 (1.13%) C++
15 45 (1.02%) VBA
16 34 (0.77%) Bicep
17 33 (0.74%) C
17 33 (0.74%) VB
18 24 (0.54%) Go
19 22 (0.50%) Perl
Qualifications
1 947 (21.37%) Security Cleared
2 755 (17.04%) SC Cleared
3 321 (7.24%) Degree
4 104 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
5 102 (2.30%) DV Cleared
6 100 (2.26%) Computer Science Degree
7 64 (1.44%) Azure Certification
8 47 (1.06%) ISTQB
9 46 (1.04%) Master's Degree
10 37 (0.83%) Microsoft Certification
11 30 (0.68%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.38%) DBS Check
13 15 (0.34%) CISSP
14 14 (0.32%) PhD
15 10 (0.23%) CISM
16 9 (0.20%) ACCA
16 9 (0.20%) CIMA
16 9 (0.20%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
16 9 (0.20%) Oracle Certification
17 8 (0.18%) CBAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 792 (17.87%) Data Quality
2 330 (7.45%) QA
3 167 (3.77%) GDPR
4 49 (1.11%) Accessibility
5 43 (0.97%) SLA
6 22 (0.50%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 22 (0.50%) PMO
7 20 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 18 (0.41%) NIST
9 17 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
10 16 (0.36%) IFRS
10 16 (0.36%) Solvency II
11 14 (0.32%) HIPAA
12 13 (0.29%) MiFID
13 12 (0.27%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 11 (0.25%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.23%) HL7
15 10 (0.23%) PCI DSS
16 9 (0.20%) GMP
16 9 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 440 (9.93%) Docker
2 105 (2.37%) Active Directory
3 46 (1.04%) Virtual Machines
4 33 (0.74%) VMware Infrastructure
5 32 (0.72%) Oracle RAC
6 18 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
7 16 (0.36%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.32%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.29%) vCloud
10 10 (0.23%) KVM
11 9 (0.20%) Postfix
12 6 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
13 5 (0.11%) RACF
14 4 (0.090%) HDFS
15 2 (0.045%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.045%) GridGain
16 1 (0.023%) Varnish
16 1 (0.023%) vSphere
16 1 (0.023%) XenApp
16 1 (0.023%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 374 (8.44%) Kubernetes
2 348 (7.85%) Terraform
3 95 (2.14%) Grafana
4 81 (1.83%) Ansible
5 50 (1.13%) Prometheus
6 38 (0.86%) Oracle RMAN
7 34 (0.77%) Data Guard
8 26 (0.59%) Control-M
9 21 (0.47%) SCOM
10 20 (0.45%) Kibana
10 20 (0.45%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.36%) Nagios
11 16 (0.36%) Single Sign-On
11 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.34%) Tivoli
13 14 (0.32%) Netcool
14 13 (0.29%) OpenView
14 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 9 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
16 8 (0.18%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 768 (17.33%) Oracle
2 697 (15.73%) Microsoft
3 498 (11.24%) Databricks
4 178 (4.02%) Google
5 156 (3.52%) Informatica
6 121 (2.73%) ServiceNow
6 121 (2.73%) Talend
7 112 (2.53%) SAP
8 81 (1.83%) Splunk
9 78 (1.76%) IBM
10 60 (1.35%) Denodo
11 53 (1.20%) Salesforce
12 50 (1.13%) VMware
13 43 (0.97%) Citrix
14 38 (0.86%) Bloomberg
15 37 (0.83%) Dynatrace
16 33 (0.74%) Alteryx
17 32 (0.72%) BMC
17 32 (0.72%) Murex
18 28 (0.63%) Adobe