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

6 months to
18 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,486 3,276 3,497
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.81% 11.86% 10.55%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.42% 36.29% 33.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,026 2,310 2,621
10th Percentile £356 £338 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -0.37%
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 83 69 41
10th Percentile £23.15 £23.36 £25.99
25th Percentile £29.96 £30.96 £30.37
Median hourly rate £45.00 £42.82 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +5.10% +3.17% -9.55%
75th Percentile £70.00 £53.75 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £62.75 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £40.58
% change year-on-year +14.56% -4.27% -11.56%

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 11,988 9,028 10,579
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.21% 32.70% 31.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,779 6,177 7,549
10th Percentile £363 £345 £358
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 £651
90th Percentile £738 £753 £788
UK median daily rate £515 £505 £533
% change year-on-year +1.98% -5.25% -3.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 494 249 347
10th Percentile £31.83 £29.07 £30.00
25th Percentile £53.13 £40.00 £50.69
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -12.69% +8.14%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £83.27 £79.50
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 18 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 18 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 18 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 2,454 £525 -0.94% 699
North of England -3 589 £475 +1.28% 364
Midlands -1 522 £459 +2.00% 204
South East -12 480 £490 -2.00% 444
West Midlands +2 419 £459 +1.25% 113
North West -3 298 £500 +6.61% 191
Yorkshire -1 253 £475 - 103
South West -7 222 £500 +17.65% 144
East of England -2 121 £488 -2.50% 87
East Midlands -3 99 £473 +22.86% 91
North East -16 50 £413 -11.05% 79
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
2 194 (4.32%) Apache Spark
3 177 (3.95%) Confluence
4 150 (3.34%) Apache
5 93 (2.07%) SAS
6 75 (1.67%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.82%) Oracle Workflow
8 31 (0.69%) IIS
9 29 (0.65%) WebLogic
10 24 (0.53%) Jupyter
11 21 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
11 21 (0.47%) Palantir Foundry
12 17 (0.38%) CMS
13 16 (0.36%) nginx
13 16 (0.36%) WebSphere
14 14 (0.31%) Tomcat
15 12 (0.27%) Tuxedo
16 11 (0.25%) Camunda
17 8 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
18 7 (0.16%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 293 (6.53%) Microsoft Excel
2 55 (1.23%) Microsoft Office
3 35 (0.78%) Spreadsheet
4 34 (0.76%) MS Visio
5 25 (0.56%) 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 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.022%) InDesign
10 1 (0.022%) Mingle
10 1 (0.022%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.022%) Weka
10 1 (0.022%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 43 (0.96%) Dynamics CRM
2 42 (0.94%) Oracle EBS
3 26 (0.58%) 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 14 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
10 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.22%) Finacle
11 10 (0.22%) Findur
12 9 (0.20%) Oracle Assets
13 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 8 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
14 7 (0.16%) Oracle 11i
14 7 (0.16%) Oracle Financials
14 7 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 1,425 (31.77%) Azure
2 1,057 (23.56%) AWS
3 859 (19.15%) Power Platform
4 416 (9.27%) Azure DevOps
5 386 (8.60%) GCP
6 325 (7.24%) GitHub
7 315 (7.02%) Azure Data Factory
8 307 (6.84%) Snowflake
9 268 (5.97%) Serverless
10 257 (5.73%) dbt
11 219 (4.88%) Amazon S3
12 202 (4.50%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 173 (3.86%) AWS Lambda
14 164 (3.66%) GitHub Actions
15 91 (2.03%) Power Automate
16 88 (1.96%) Entra ID
17 86 (1.92%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 86 (1.92%) SaaS
18 81 (1.81%) PowerApps
19 64 (1.43%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 59 (1.32%) DNS
2 47 (1.05%) Firewall
3 27 (0.60%) 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 19 (0.42%) TCP/IP
9 13 (0.29%) DHCP
10 12 (0.27%) WAN
11 11 (0.25%) 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%) WinSCP
15 7 (0.16%) Kerberos
15 7 (0.16%) LAN
15 7 (0.16%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 792 (17.65%) Power BI
2 632 (14.09%) Data Warehouse
3 575 (12.82%) SQL Server
4 284 (6.33%) Relational Database
5 273 (6.09%) PostgreSQL
5 273 (6.09%) Tableau
6 264 (5.88%) Data Lake
7 230 (5.13%) Metadata
8 226 (5.04%) NoSQL
9 188 (4.19%) Oracle Database
10 179 (3.99%) Azure SQL Database
11 166 (3.70%) BigQuery
12 141 (3.14%) Amazon Redshift
13 137 (3.05%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 118 (2.63%) Delta Lake
15 105 (2.34%) MySQL
16 98 (2.18%) Oracle Reports
17 97 (2.16%) Big Data
18 93 (2.07%) Amazon Athena
19 92 (2.05%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 521 (11.61%) Git
2 352 (7.85%) JIRA
3 265 (5.91%) Jenkins
4 202 (4.50%) GitLab
5 75 (1.67%) JUnit
6 67 (1.49%) Selenium
7 63 (1.40%) Postman
8 60 (1.34%) Gradle
8 60 (1.34%) Maven
9 47 (1.05%) Mockito
10 40 (0.89%) SonarQube
11 37 (0.82%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.78%) Zephyr
13 33 (0.74%) Oracle Forms
14 32 (0.71%) JMeter
15 31 (0.69%) Visual Studio
16 28 (0.62%) TeamCity
17 27 (0.60%) ERwin
17 27 (0.60%) Liquibase
18 24 (0.53%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,189 (26.50%) Social Skills
2 1,147 (25.57%) Finance
3 909 (20.26%) Analytical Skills
4 461 (10.28%) Banking
5 399 (8.89%) Public Sector
6 140 (3.12%) Marketing
7 131 (2.92%) Front Office
8 119 (2.65%) Retail
9 106 (2.36%) Investment Banking
10 88 (1.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 78 (1.74%) Documentation Skills
12 69 (1.54%) Manufacturing
13 52 (1.16%) Financial Institution
14 51 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
15 50 (1.11%) Legal
16 43 (0.96%) Organisational Skills
17 38 (0.85%) Telecoms
18 36 (0.80%) Back Office
19 35 (0.78%) Law
20 33 (0.74%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 950 (21.18%) Developer
2 876 (19.53%) Data Engineer
3 635 (14.16%) Analyst
4 613 (13.66%) Senior
5 314 (7.00%) Lead
6 263 (5.86%) Data Analyst
7 236 (5.26%) Architect
8 227 (5.06%) Consultant
9 186 (4.15%) DBA
10 185 (4.12%) Business Analyst
11 173 (3.86%) Senior Data Engineer
12 163 (3.63%) Java Developer
13 153 (3.41%) Senior Developer
14 129 (2.88%) Software Engineer
15 117 (2.61%) SQL DBA
16 109 (2.43%) SQL Developer
17 101 (2.25%) Azure Engineer
18 98 (2.18%) Data Architect
19 97 (2.16%) Full-Stack Developer
20 94 (2.10%) C# Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 386 (8.60%) .NET
1 386 (8.60%) REST
2 291 (6.49%) PySpark
3 278 (6.20%) Kafka
4 221 (4.93%) Spring
5 201 (4.48%) React
6 200 (4.46%) Spring Boot
7 183 (4.08%) RESTful
8 168 (3.74%) JSON
9 162 (3.61%) HTML
10 161 (3.59%) XML
11 131 (2.92%) CSS
12 128 (2.85%) AngularJS
13 108 (2.41%) Web Services
14 98 (2.18%) Pandas
14 98 (2.18%) SOAP
15 95 (2.12%) Middleware
16 88 (1.96%) .NET Framework
17 72 (1.60%) Node.js
18 69 (1.54%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 296 (6.60%) Cloud Native
2 199 (4.44%) Data Structures
3 171 (3.81%) Product Ownership
4 149 (3.32%) Legacy Systems
5 131 (2.92%) Distributed Systems
6 100 (2.23%) Onboarding
7 98 (2.18%) Enterprise Software
8 90 (2.01%) Management Information System
9 79 (1.76%) Self-Motivation
10 77 (1.72%) Derivative
11 68 (1.52%) Analytical Mindset
12 62 (1.38%) Replication
13 61 (1.36%) Clustering
13 61 (1.36%) Data Protection Act
14 53 (1.18%) Reference Data
15 52 (1.16%) Algorithms
15 52 (1.16%) Fixed Income
16 50 (1.11%) AI Agents
17 48 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
18 46 (1.03%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 314 (7.00%) Linux
2 278 (6.20%) Windows
3 211 (4.70%) Unix
4 102 (2.27%) Windows Server
5 22 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.40%) AIX
7 17 (0.38%) Solaris
8 12 (0.27%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (0.25%) 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 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
13 4 (0.089%) Oracle Linux
14 3 (0.067%) Android
14 3 (0.067%) Apple iOS
14 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,222 (27.24%) CI/CD
2 1,175 (26.19%) Agile
3 1,146 (25.55%) Analytics
4 1,139 (25.39%) Data Modelling
5 1,028 (22.92%) ETL
6 1,010 (22.51%) Business Intelligence
7 920 (20.51%) DevOps
8 882 (19.66%) Problem-Solving
9 874 (19.48%) Data Pipeline
10 754 (16.81%) Data Engineering
11 662 (14.76%) AI
12 635 (14.16%) Migration
13 625 (13.93%) Validation
14 517 (11.52%) Stakeholder Management
15 499 (11.12%) Test Automation
16 496 (11.06%) Data Governance
17 471 (10.50%) Continuous Improvement
18 465 (10.37%) Decision-Making
19 440 (9.81%) Data Analysis
20 370 (8.25%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,588 (35.40%) Python
2 551 (12.28%) Java
3 440 (9.81%) C#
4 354 (7.89%) PL/SQL
5 345 (7.69%) JavaScript
6 246 (5.48%) PowerShell
7 234 (5.22%) T-SQL
8 171 (3.81%) TypeScript
9 140 (3.12%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 128 (2.85%) Shell Script
11 98 (2.18%) Bash
12 77 (1.72%) R
13 65 (1.45%) Scala
14 45 (1.00%) C++
15 43 (0.96%) VBA
16 37 (0.82%) Bicep
17 27 (0.60%) C
18 26 (0.58%) VB
19 23 (0.51%) Go
20 21 (0.47%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 996 (22.20%) Security Cleared
2 806 (17.97%) SC Cleared
3 322 (7.18%) Degree
4 113 (2.52%) Computer Science Degree
5 104 (2.32%) DV Cleared
6 94 (2.10%) BPSS Clearance
7 71 (1.58%) Azure Certification
8 66 (1.47%) ISTQB
9 44 (0.98%) Microsoft Certification
10 43 (0.96%) Master's Degree
11 37 (0.82%) AWS Certification
12 20 (0.45%) CISSP
13 18 (0.40%) ISEB
13 18 (0.40%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
15 14 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 13 (0.29%) FFIEC
17 12 (0.27%) PhD
18 11 (0.25%) ACCA
18 11 (0.25%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 834 (18.59%) Data Quality
2 358 (7.98%) QA
3 151 (3.37%) GDPR
4 49 (1.09%) Accessibility
5 41 (0.91%) SLA
6 26 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 24 (0.53%) NIST
8 21 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 19 (0.42%) Actionable Recommendations
10 18 (0.40%) IFRS
10 18 (0.40%) ISO 20022
11 16 (0.36%) PMO
12 14 (0.31%) MiFID
12 14 (0.31%) Solvency II
13 13 (0.29%) COBIT
13 13 (0.29%) HIPAA
14 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
15 11 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 9 (0.20%) HL7
16 9 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 453 (10.10%) Docker
2 130 (2.90%) Active Directory
3 49 (1.09%) VMware Infrastructure
4 38 (0.85%) Oracle RAC
4 38 (0.85%) Virtual Machines
5 18 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
6 15 (0.33%) VMware NSX
7 14 (0.31%) vCloud
8 13 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
9 10 (0.22%) Hyper-V
10 8 (0.18%) Postfix
11 4 (0.089%) 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
1 391 (8.72%) Kubernetes
2 367 (8.18%) Terraform
3 93 (2.07%) Ansible
4 88 (1.96%) Grafana
5 45 (1.00%) Prometheus
6 44 (0.98%) Oracle RMAN
7 40 (0.89%) Data Guard
8 38 (0.85%) Control-M
9 29 (0.65%) SCOM
10 17 (0.38%) Kibana
11 16 (0.36%) Nagios
11 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.33%) Tivoli
12 15 (0.33%) vCenter Server
13 14 (0.31%) Netcool
14 13 (0.29%) OpenView
14 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
16 11 (0.25%) Microsoft Intune
17 10 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 767 (17.10%) Oracle
2 749 (16.70%) Microsoft
3 520 (11.59%) Databricks
4 174 (3.88%) Google
5 154 (3.43%) Informatica
6 125 (2.79%) SAP
7 121 (2.70%) Talend
8 108 (2.41%) ServiceNow
9 84 (1.87%) IBM
10 82 (1.83%) Splunk
11 67 (1.49%) Denodo
12 66 (1.47%) VMware
13 55 (1.23%) Salesforce
14 40 (0.89%) BMC
15 38 (0.85%) Bloomberg
15 38 (0.85%) Dynatrace
16 37 (0.82%) Citrix
17 33 (0.74%) Adobe
17 33 (0.74%) Alteryx
17 33 (0.74%) Murex