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

6 months to
21 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -3 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,274 3,071 3,750
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.88% 12.31% 9.93%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.01% 36.30% 32.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,881 2,206 2,762
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £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 £766 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 77 61 57
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.00 £22.69
25th Percentile £34.01 £30.25 £30.00
Median hourly rate £47.50 £40.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +17.28% -4.71% -15.00%
75th Percentile £73.00 £53.75 £53.75
90th Percentile £83.30 £77.19 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £47.50 £39.67 £42.50
% change year-on-year +19.73% -6.65% -19.05%

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 11,549 8,459 11,467
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.71% 33.92% 30.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,549 5,878 8,187
10th Percentile £360 £356 £350
25th Percentile £423 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £520 £538
Median % change year-on-year -0.96% -3.35% -3.93%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £788
UK median daily rate £510 £510 £525
% change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 519 198 501
10th Percentile £36.25 £28.13 £35.52
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.25 £50.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.88 £63.50
Median % change year-on-year +16.33% -12.01% +1.60%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.10 £85.00 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% +3.69%

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 -4 2,317 £525 -1.87% 558
North of England -6 545 £460 -3.16% 328
Midlands +3 539 £463 +8.06% 189
West Midlands +5 445 £459 +1.32% 99
South East -10 428 £475 -5.00% 423
North West -2 290 £463 -2.63% 206
South West -2 231 £500 +5.26% 109
Yorkshire -13 215 £475 - 76
East of England -12 109 £495 +1.54% 94
East Midlands -2 90 £525 +40.00% 90
North East -11 52 £425 -8.36% 52
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
1 219 (5.12%) Apache Spark
2 176 (4.12%) Apache Airflow
3 161 (3.77%) Confluence
4 144 (3.37%) Apache
5 91 (2.13%) SAS
6 57 (1.33%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.77%) WebLogic
8 32 (0.75%) IIS
8 32 (0.75%) Oracle Workflow
9 24 (0.56%) Tomcat
10 22 (0.51%) Jupyter
11 19 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
11 19 (0.44%) WebSphere
12 17 (0.40%) Appian
12 17 (0.40%) Palantir Foundry
13 16 (0.37%) CMS
13 16 (0.37%) nginx
14 13 (0.30%) Camunda
14 13 (0.30%) Tuxedo
15 9 (0.21%) Mendix
Applications
1 275 (6.43%) Microsoft Excel
2 52 (1.22%) Microsoft Office
3 41 (0.96%) MS Visio
4 31 (0.73%) Spreadsheet
5 29 (0.68%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
7 5 (0.12%) Notepad++
8 3 (0.070%) Oracle Smart View
9 2 (0.047%) Acrobat
9 2 (0.047%) Notion
9 2 (0.047%) Photoshop
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.023%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.023%) InDesign
10 1 (0.023%) Mingle
10 1 (0.023%) Trello
10 1 (0.023%) Weka
Business Applications
1 35 (0.82%) Dynamics CRM
2 33 (0.77%) Oracle EBS
3 25 (0.58%) Aladdin
4 22 (0.51%) Oracle Payables
5 21 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
5 21 (0.49%) SAP S/4HANA
6 18 (0.42%) NEC Housing
7 16 (0.37%) Oracle EBS R12
8 15 (0.35%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.35%) Remedy ITSM
9 11 (0.26%) Findur
9 11 (0.26%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 10 (0.23%) Oracle General Ledger
10 10 (0.23%) Siebel CRM
11 9 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
11 9 (0.21%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
11 9 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
12 8 (0.19%) Finacle
12 8 (0.19%) Oracle Cash Management
12 8 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,385 (32.41%) Azure
2 1,051 (24.59%) AWS
3 823 (19.26%) Power Platform
4 397 (9.29%) Azure DevOps
5 346 (8.10%) GCP
6 323 (7.56%) Azure Data Factory
7 310 (7.25%) GitHub
8 285 (6.67%) Serverless
9 254 (5.94%) Amazon S3
9 254 (5.94%) Snowflake
10 211 (4.94%) dbt
11 207 (4.84%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 181 (4.23%) AWS Lambda
13 162 (3.79%) GitHub Actions
14 81 (1.90%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 79 (1.85%) Power Automate
16 76 (1.78%) Entra ID
17 72 (1.68%) Amazon EC2
17 72 (1.68%) SaaS
18 68 (1.59%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 48 (1.12%) DNS
2 41 (0.96%) Firewall
3 21 (0.49%) SNMP
4 19 (0.44%) HTTP
4 19 (0.44%) Network Security
5 17 (0.40%) Internet
5 17 (0.40%) VPN
6 16 (0.37%) WAN
7 15 (0.35%) SSL
8 12 (0.28%) TCP/IP
9 11 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
10 9 (0.21%) LAN
10 9 (0.21%) Wireshark
11 8 (0.19%) 3GPP
12 7 (0.16%) SAN
13 6 (0.14%) BGP
13 6 (0.14%) IPsec
13 6 (0.14%) RTP
14 5 (0.12%) DHCP
14 5 (0.12%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 759 (17.76%) Power BI
2 559 (13.08%) Data Warehouse
3 534 (12.49%) SQL Server
4 287 (6.72%) Data Lake
5 286 (6.69%) Tableau
6 280 (6.55%) Relational Database
7 277 (6.48%) PostgreSQL
8 224 (5.24%) NoSQL
9 208 (4.87%) Metadata
10 184 (4.31%) Azure SQL Database
11 162 (3.79%) Oracle Database
12 150 (3.51%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 139 (3.25%) BigQuery
14 131 (3.07%) Amazon Redshift
15 123 (2.88%) Delta Lake
16 106 (2.48%) Big Data
17 104 (2.43%) MySQL
18 100 (2.34%) Oracle Reports
19 94 (2.20%) Snowflake Schema
20 92 (2.15%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 460 (10.76%) Git
2 336 (7.86%) JIRA
3 225 (5.26%) Jenkins
4 196 (4.59%) GitLab
5 66 (1.54%) JUnit
6 51 (1.19%) Maven
7 50 (1.17%) Postman
8 48 (1.12%) Mockito
9 47 (1.10%) Selenium
10 45 (1.05%) Gradle
11 33 (0.77%) SonarQube
12 32 (0.75%) Cucumber
13 30 (0.70%) MLflow
14 27 (0.63%) ERwin
14 27 (0.63%) Visual Studio
15 26 (0.61%) Bitbucket
15 26 (0.61%) Liquibase
15 26 (0.61%) Oracle Forms
16 25 (0.58%) JMeter
16 25 (0.58%) Zephyr
General
1 1,139 (26.65%) Finance
2 1,101 (25.76%) Social Skills
3 806 (18.86%) Analytical Skills
4 407 (9.52%) Banking
5 368 (8.61%) Public Sector
6 120 (2.81%) Front Office
7 115 (2.69%) Marketing
8 102 (2.39%) Investment Banking
9 89 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
10 86 (2.01%) Retail
11 70 (1.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 51 (1.19%) Financial Institution
13 50 (1.17%) Legal
14 46 (1.08%) Presentation Skills
15 43 (1.01%) Manufacturing
16 42 (0.98%) Publishing
17 35 (0.82%) Organisational Skills
18 33 (0.77%) Telecoms
19 32 (0.75%) Back Office
20 27 (0.63%) Law
Job Titles
1 892 (20.87%) Developer
2 887 (20.75%) Data Engineer
3 604 (14.13%) Analyst
4 550 (12.87%) Senior
5 291 (6.81%) Lead
6 270 (6.32%) Data Analyst
7 233 (5.45%) Architect
8 201 (4.70%) Consultant
9 174 (4.07%) Java Developer
10 173 (4.05%) Business Analyst
11 165 (3.86%) Senior Data Engineer
12 142 (3.32%) DBA
13 135 (3.16%) Software Engineer
14 130 (3.04%) Senior Developer
15 103 (2.41%) Azure Engineer
16 100 (2.34%) C# Developer
17 97 (2.27%) SQL Developer
18 87 (2.04%) Python Developer
19 86 (2.01%) SQL DBA
20 81 (1.90%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 349 (8.17%) .NET
2 336 (7.86%) REST
3 260 (6.08%) Kafka
4 259 (6.06%) PySpark
5 222 (5.19%) Spring
6 210 (4.91%) Spring Boot
7 202 (4.73%) React
8 186 (4.35%) RESTful
9 149 (3.49%) JSON
10 144 (3.37%) XML
11 138 (3.23%) HTML
12 125 (2.92%) CSS
13 114 (2.67%) Pandas
14 112 (2.62%) AngularJS
15 105 (2.46%) SOAP
16 95 (2.22%) Middleware
17 94 (2.20%) Web Services
18 85 (1.99%) .NET Framework
19 77 (1.80%) OAuth
20 68 (1.59%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 276 (6.46%) Cloud Native
2 167 (3.91%) Data Structures
3 155 (3.63%) Legacy Systems
4 134 (3.14%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.97%) Distributed Systems
6 83 (1.94%) Management Information System
7 82 (1.92%) Onboarding
8 81 (1.90%) Derivative
9 69 (1.61%) Analytical Mindset
10 67 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
11 62 (1.45%) Self-Motivation
12 59 (1.38%) Enterprise Software
13 57 (1.33%) Clustering
14 51 (1.19%) Greenfield Project
15 50 (1.17%) Equities
16 49 (1.15%) Algorithms
17 47 (1.10%) Fixed Income
18 42 (0.98%) Low-Code
18 42 (0.98%) Replication
19 41 (0.96%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 283 (6.62%) Linux
2 258 (6.04%) Windows
3 205 (4.80%) Unix
4 90 (2.11%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.56%) AIX
6 18 (0.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 15 (0.35%) Windows Server 2019
8 14 (0.33%) Solaris
9 9 (0.21%) Windows Server 2016
10 8 (0.19%) Windows 10
10 8 (0.19%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.19%) zOS
11 7 (0.16%) Android
11 7 (0.16%) Apple iOS
12 4 (0.094%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.094%) VMS
13 3 (0.070%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.047%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.047%) HPUX
14 2 (0.047%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,179 (27.59%) CI/CD
2 1,088 (25.46%) Analytics
3 1,067 (24.96%) Agile
4 1,046 (24.47%) Data Modelling
5 1,007 (23.56%) ETL
6 962 (22.51%) Business Intelligence
7 889 (20.80%) DevOps
8 851 (19.91%) Problem-Solving
9 812 (19.00%) Data Pipeline
10 705 (16.50%) Data Engineering
11 614 (14.37%) AI
12 563 (13.17%) Migration
13 552 (12.92%) Validation
14 447 (10.46%) Data Governance
15 438 (10.25%) Test Automation
16 432 (10.11%) Decision-Making
17 419 (9.80%) Data Analysis
18 402 (9.41%) Continuous Improvement
19 398 (9.31%) Stakeholder Management
20 380 (8.89%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,561 (36.52%) Python
2 545 (12.75%) Java
3 441 (10.32%) C#
4 317 (7.42%) PL/SQL
5 308 (7.21%) JavaScript
6 230 (5.38%) T-SQL
7 214 (5.01%) PowerShell
8 159 (3.72%) TypeScript
9 132 (3.09%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 109 (2.55%) Shell Script
11 97 (2.27%) R
12 82 (1.92%) Bash
13 71 (1.66%) Scala
14 55 (1.29%) C++
15 43 (1.01%) VBA
16 35 (0.82%) Bicep
17 34 (0.80%) C
18 33 (0.77%) VB
19 27 (0.63%) Perl
20 23 (0.54%) Go
Qualifications
1 904 (21.15%) Security Cleared
2 734 (17.17%) SC Cleared
3 321 (7.51%) Degree
4 105 (2.46%) Computer Science Degree
5 96 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
6 87 (2.04%) DV Cleared
7 67 (1.57%) Azure Certification
8 52 (1.22%) Master's Degree
9 51 (1.19%) ISTQB
10 41 (0.96%) Microsoft Certification
11 32 (0.75%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.40%) DBS Check
13 16 (0.37%) PhD
14 14 (0.33%) CISSP
15 13 (0.30%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
16 10 (0.23%) TOGAF Certification
17 9 (0.21%) CISM
17 9 (0.21%) PMI Certification
18 8 (0.19%) PMP
19 7 (0.16%) ACCA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 772 (18.06%) Data Quality
2 320 (7.49%) QA
3 172 (4.02%) GDPR
4 42 (0.98%) Accessibility
5 40 (0.94%) SLA
6 28 (0.66%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 28 (0.66%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 26 (0.61%) NIST
8 23 (0.54%) PMO
9 17 (0.40%) IFRS
10 16 (0.37%) PCI DSS
11 15 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
11 15 (0.35%) Solvency II
12 14 (0.33%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 14 (0.33%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.33%) MiFID
13 13 (0.30%) ISO 20022
14 10 (0.23%) HL7
14 10 (0.23%) NCSC
15 9 (0.21%) GRC
System Software
1 465 (10.88%) Docker
2 94 (2.20%) Active Directory
3 39 (0.91%) Virtual Machines
4 29 (0.68%) VMware Infrastructure
5 22 (0.51%) Oracle RAC
6 16 (0.37%) Hyper-V
6 16 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
7 12 (0.28%) VMware NSX
8 11 (0.26%) vCloud
9 10 (0.23%) KVM
10 9 (0.21%) Postfix
11 8 (0.19%) Virtual Desktop
12 6 (0.14%) RACF
13 4 (0.094%) HDFS
13 4 (0.094%) XenApp
13 4 (0.094%) XenDesktop
14 2 (0.047%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.047%) GridGain
15 1 (0.023%) Varnish
15 1 (0.023%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 379 (8.87%) Kubernetes
2 353 (8.26%) Terraform
3 103 (2.41%) Grafana
4 74 (1.73%) Ansible
5 57 (1.33%) Prometheus
6 33 (0.77%) Oracle RMAN
7 24 (0.56%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.54%) Control-M
9 21 (0.49%) Kibana
10 20 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
11 18 (0.42%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.37%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.35%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.33%) Nagios
14 14 (0.33%) Netcool
15 13 (0.30%) OpenView
15 13 (0.30%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 12 (0.28%) SCOM
17 8 (0.19%) HP Quality Center
17 8 (0.19%) SCCM
Vendors
1 727 (17.01%) Oracle
2 666 (15.58%) Microsoft
3 492 (11.51%) Databricks
4 162 (3.79%) Google
5 156 (3.65%) Informatica
6 123 (2.88%) ServiceNow
6 123 (2.88%) Talend
7 109 (2.55%) SAP
8 84 (1.97%) Splunk
9 68 (1.59%) IBM
10 63 (1.47%) Denodo
11 49 (1.15%) Salesforce
12 45 (1.05%) Citrix
12 45 (1.05%) VMware
13 36 (0.84%) Bloomberg
13 36 (0.84%) Dynatrace
14 33 (0.77%) Murex
14 33 (0.77%) OpenAI
15 28 (0.66%) BMC
15 28 (0.66%) SolarWinds