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

6 months to
16 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,412 3,276 3,672
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.86% 12.05% 10.04%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.04% 36.35% 32.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,969 2,326 2,781
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £409 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £535
Median % change year-on-year - -6.54% -0.93%
75th Percentile £595 £625 £638
90th Percentile £688 £763 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 79 63 49
10th Percentile £24.79 £22.85 £24.00
25th Percentile £29.96 £29.66 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £40.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% -4.71% -14.26%
75th Percentile £62.88 £51.88 £51.75
90th Percentile £82.40 £65.70 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.75 £39.67 £42.00
% change year-on-year +12.80% -5.54% -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 11,913 9,012 11,277
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.62% 33.15% 30.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,754 6,201 8,125
10th Percentile £361 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £520 £540
Median % change year-on-year - -3.70% -1.82%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £775 £788
UK median daily rate £513 £508 £525
% change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 500 233 456
10th Percentile £34.01 £28.23 £35.61
25th Percentile £54.28 £37.50 £50.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.25 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £82.37 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% -

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 2,357 £525 - 596
North of England -4 583 £463 -2.63% 271
Midlands +2 556 £460 +7.48% 191
South East -9 459 £475 -5.00% 360
West Midlands +4 456 £459 +2.00% 88
North West -1 310 £475 +0.53% 148
South West -6 236 £500 +11.11% 120
Yorkshire -7 236 £475 - 88
East of England -10 111 £488 -2.50% 84
East Midlands -1 96 £525 +34.62% 103
North East -16 52 £425 -8.36% 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
1 206 (4.67%) Apache Spark
2 185 (4.19%) Apache Airflow
3 174 (3.94%) Confluence
4 148 (3.35%) Apache
5 95 (2.15%) SAS
6 54 (1.22%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
8 36 (0.82%) IIS
9 35 (0.79%) WebLogic
10 24 (0.54%) Tomcat
11 22 (0.50%) CMS
11 22 (0.50%) Jupyter
12 19 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
13 18 (0.41%) WebSphere
14 16 (0.36%) nginx
15 15 (0.34%) Microsoft Exchange
16 14 (0.32%) Appian
17 13 (0.29%) Tuxedo
18 12 (0.27%) Camunda
19 8 (0.18%) Red Hat Fuse
Applications
1 284 (6.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.29%) Microsoft Office
3 40 (0.91%) 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 (0.091%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.091%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.068%) Notion
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 29 (0.66%) Aladdin
4 25 (0.57%) Oracle Payables
5 24 (0.54%) Oracle ERP
5 24 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
6 19 (0.43%) Oracle EBS R12
7 18 (0.41%) NEC Housing
7 18 (0.41%) Oracle Receivables
8 17 (0.39%) Remedy ITSM
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle Assets
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.25%) Findur
10 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.23%) Finacle
12 9 (0.20%) Elite 3E
13 8 (0.18%) Fidessa
13 8 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
13 8 (0.18%) Summit
14 7 (0.16%) Oracle Financials
Cloud Services
1 1,401 (31.75%) Azure
2 1,047 (23.73%) AWS
3 831 (18.83%) Power Platform
4 407 (9.22%) Azure DevOps
5 373 (8.45%) GCP
6 316 (7.16%) Azure Data Factory
7 314 (7.12%) GitHub
8 281 (6.37%) Snowflake
9 276 (6.26%) Serverless
10 246 (5.58%) Amazon S3
11 238 (5.39%) dbt
12 205 (4.65%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 175 (3.97%) AWS Lambda
14 161 (3.65%) GitHub Actions
15 81 (1.84%) Entra ID
16 79 (1.79%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 78 (1.77%) Power Automate
18 76 (1.72%) SaaS
19 71 (1.61%) Amazon EC2
20 68 (1.54%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 44 (1.00%) DNS
2 39 (0.88%) Firewall
3 21 (0.48%) SNMP
3 21 (0.48%) SSL
4 20 (0.45%) Internet
4 20 (0.45%) Network Security
5 19 (0.43%) HTTP
6 18 (0.41%) VPN
7 12 (0.27%) TCP/IP
7 12 (0.27%) WAN
8 9 (0.20%) Kerberos
8 9 (0.20%) SAN
8 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
8 9 (0.20%) Wireshark
9 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
9 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
10 6 (0.14%) BGP
10 6 (0.14%) DHCP
10 6 (0.14%) Reverse Proxy
10 6 (0.14%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 768 (17.41%) Power BI
2 603 (13.67%) Data Warehouse
3 577 (13.08%) SQL Server
4 294 (6.66%) Tableau
5 285 (6.46%) Relational Database
6 282 (6.39%) PostgreSQL
7 274 (6.21%) Data Lake
8 214 (4.85%) NoSQL
9 213 (4.83%) Metadata
10 183 (4.15%) Oracle Database
11 175 (3.97%) Azure SQL Database
12 156 (3.54%) BigQuery
13 153 (3.47%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 137 (3.11%) Amazon Redshift
15 121 (2.74%) Delta Lake
16 105 (2.38%) Big Data
17 103 (2.33%) Oracle Reports
18 101 (2.29%) MySQL
19 100 (2.27%) Snowflake Schema
20 90 (2.04%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 477 (10.81%) Git
2 340 (7.71%) JIRA
3 237 (5.37%) Jenkins
4 182 (4.13%) GitLab
5 68 (1.54%) JUnit
6 57 (1.29%) Maven
7 54 (1.22%) Gradle
8 53 (1.20%) Postman
9 51 (1.16%) Selenium
10 47 (1.07%) Mockito
11 36 (0.82%) Oracle Forms
12 34 (0.77%) SonarQube
13 33 (0.75%) Visual Studio
14 31 (0.70%) Bitbucket
15 29 (0.66%) Cucumber
16 28 (0.63%) Team Foundation Server
17 27 (0.61%) JMeter
17 27 (0.61%) MLflow
18 26 (0.59%) Liquibase
18 26 (0.59%) Zephyr
General
1 1,143 (25.91%) Finance
2 1,127 (25.54%) Social Skills
3 870 (19.72%) Analytical Skills
4 414 (9.38%) Banking
5 396 (8.98%) Public Sector
6 131 (2.97%) Marketing
7 121 (2.74%) Front Office
8 100 (2.27%) Retail
9 95 (2.15%) Investment Banking
10 87 (1.97%) Documentation Skills
11 74 (1.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 56 (1.27%) Manufacturing
13 54 (1.22%) Presentation Skills
14 52 (1.18%) Legal
15 50 (1.13%) Financial Institution
16 42 (0.95%) Organisational Skills
17 38 (0.86%) Back Office
17 38 (0.86%) Publishing
18 35 (0.79%) Telecoms
19 29 (0.66%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 948 (21.49%) Developer
2 882 (19.99%) Data Engineer
3 633 (14.35%) Analyst
4 574 (13.01%) Senior
5 307 (6.96%) Lead
6 274 (6.21%) Data Analyst
7 238 (5.39%) Architect
8 207 (4.69%) Consultant
9 182 (4.13%) Business Analyst
10 173 (3.92%) Java Developer
11 172 (3.90%) Senior Data Engineer
12 162 (3.67%) DBA
13 138 (3.13%) Senior Developer
14 126 (2.86%) Software Engineer
15 111 (2.52%) SQL Developer
16 109 (2.47%) Azure Engineer
17 107 (2.43%) SQL DBA
18 102 (2.31%) C# Developer
19 88 (1.99%) Data Architect
19 88 (1.99%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 367 (8.32%) .NET
2 352 (7.98%) REST
3 262 (5.94%) Kafka
4 261 (5.92%) PySpark
5 221 (5.01%) Spring
6 204 (4.62%) React
6 204 (4.62%) Spring Boot
7 181 (4.10%) RESTful
8 161 (3.65%) JSON
9 159 (3.60%) XML
10 142 (3.22%) HTML
11 123 (2.79%) CSS
12 122 (2.77%) AngularJS
13 114 (2.58%) Pandas
14 104 (2.36%) SOAP
15 101 (2.29%) Web Services
16 92 (2.09%) Middleware
17 90 (2.04%) .NET Framework
18 72 (1.63%) Node.js
19 68 (1.54%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 288 (6.53%) Cloud Native
2 190 (4.31%) Data Structures
3 155 (3.51%) Legacy Systems
4 147 (3.33%) Product Ownership
5 128 (2.90%) Distributed Systems
6 86 (1.95%) Onboarding
7 82 (1.86%) Derivative
8 77 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
9 73 (1.65%) Management Information System
10 72 (1.63%) Analytical Mindset
10 72 (1.63%) Self-Motivation
11 66 (1.50%) Data Protection Act
12 63 (1.43%) Clustering
13 57 (1.29%) Replication
14 56 (1.27%) Algorithms
15 52 (1.18%) Fixed Income
16 50 (1.13%) Equities
17 49 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
18 39 (0.88%) NHS
19 38 (0.86%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 294 (6.66%) Linux
2 268 (6.07%) Windows
3 210 (4.76%) Unix
4 101 (2.29%) 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 (0.091%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.091%) Ubuntu
12 4 (0.091%) VMS
13 3 (0.068%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.045%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,176 (26.65%) CI/CD
2 1,134 (25.70%) Analytics
3 1,123 (25.45%) Agile
4 1,093 (24.77%) Data Modelling
5 1,028 (23.30%) ETL
6 986 (22.35%) Business Intelligence
7 898 (20.35%) DevOps
8 859 (19.47%) Problem-Solving
9 850 (19.27%) Data Pipeline
10 738 (16.73%) Data Engineering
11 627 (14.21%) AI
12 599 (13.58%) Migration
13 572 (12.96%) Validation
14 471 (10.68%) Data Governance
15 450 (10.20%) Decision-Making
15 450 (10.20%) Test Automation
16 436 (9.88%) Continuous Improvement
17 427 (9.68%) Data Analysis
18 424 (9.61%) Stakeholder Management
19 397 (9.00%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,580 (35.81%) Python
2 552 (12.51%) Java
3 443 (10.04%) C#
4 345 (7.82%) PL/SQL
5 309 (7.00%) JavaScript
6 242 (5.49%) T-SQL
7 234 (5.30%) PowerShell
8 166 (3.76%) TypeScript
9 133 (3.01%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 120 (2.72%) Shell Script
11 96 (2.18%) R
12 85 (1.93%) Bash
13 75 (1.70%) Scala
14 50 (1.13%) C++
15 43 (0.97%) VBA
16 34 (0.77%) Bicep
16 34 (0.77%) C
17 33 (0.75%) VB
18 24 (0.54%) Go
19 23 (0.52%) Perl
Qualifications
1 942 (21.35%) Security Cleared
2 752 (17.04%) SC Cleared
3 321 (7.28%) Degree
4 103 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
4 103 (2.33%) Computer Science Degree
5 101 (2.29%) DV Cleared
6 64 (1.45%) Azure Certification
7 47 (1.07%) ISTQB
8 46 (1.04%) Master's Degree
9 37 (0.84%) Microsoft Certification
10 30 (0.68%) AWS Certification
11 17 (0.39%) DBS Check
12 15 (0.34%) CISSP
13 14 (0.32%) PhD
14 10 (0.23%) CISM
15 9 (0.20%) ACCA
15 9 (0.20%) CIMA
15 9 (0.20%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 9 (0.20%) Oracle Certification
16 8 (0.18%) CBAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 790 (17.91%) Data Quality
2 331 (7.50%) QA
3 168 (3.81%) GDPR
4 48 (1.09%) 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 16 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
9 16 (0.36%) Solvency II
10 15 (0.34%) IFRS
11 14 (0.32%) HIPAA
12 13 (0.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 13 (0.29%) MiFID
13 11 (0.25%) ISO 20022
13 11 (0.25%) PCI DSS
14 10 (0.23%) HL7
15 9 (0.20%) GMP
15 9 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 434 (9.84%) Docker
2 101 (2.29%) Active Directory
3 46 (1.04%) Virtual Machines
4 32 (0.73%) Oracle RAC
5 31 (0.70%) VMware Infrastructure
6 18 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
7 15 (0.34%) 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 (0.091%) HDFS
15 2 (0.045%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.045%) GridGain
16 1 (0.023%) GPFS
16 1 (0.023%) Lustre
16 1 (0.023%) Microsoft App-V
16 1 (0.023%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 368 (8.34%) Kubernetes
2 345 (7.82%) Terraform
3 95 (2.15%) Grafana
4 79 (1.79%) Ansible
5 49 (1.11%) Prometheus
6 38 (0.86%) Oracle RMAN
7 34 (0.77%) Data Guard
8 26 (0.59%) Control-M
9 20 (0.45%) Kibana
9 20 (0.45%) vCenter Server
10 19 (0.43%) SCOM
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 8 (0.18%) ITRS Geneos
15 8 (0.18%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
Vendors
1 772 (17.50%) Oracle
2 692 (15.68%) Microsoft
3 499 (11.31%) Databricks
4 177 (4.01%) Google
5 156 (3.54%) Informatica
6 122 (2.77%) ServiceNow
7 121 (2.74%) Talend
8 112 (2.54%) SAP
9 80 (1.81%) Splunk
10 76 (1.72%) IBM
11 60 (1.36%) Denodo
12 51 (1.16%) Salesforce
13 48 (1.09%) VMware
14 43 (0.97%) Citrix
15 37 (0.84%) Bloomberg
15 37 (0.84%) Dynatrace
16 33 (0.75%) Alteryx
16 33 (0.75%) Murex
17 30 (0.68%) BMC
18 28 (0.63%) Adobe