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

6 months to
29 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,098 2,998 3,659
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.80% 12.53% 9.97%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.77% 36.91% 33.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,783 2,150 2,709
10th Percentile £350 £360 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.05% -9.05% -
75th Percentile £588 £625 £650
90th Percentile £688 £768 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -1.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 71 54 55
10th Percentile £25.05 £20.02 £22.66
25th Percentile £33.88 £29.30 £28.31
Median hourly rate £46.80 £36.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +30.00% -15.29% -15.00%
75th Percentile £70.47 £62.50 £55.81
90th Percentile £82.25 £76.91 £61.78
UK median hourly rate £49.36 £38.85 £42.50
% change year-on-year +27.07% -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 11,144 8,122 11,086
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.65% 33.94% 30.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,317 5,643 8,041
10th Percentile £358 £363 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £545
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -3.67% -3.37%
75th Percentile £613 £641 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £500 £515 £525
% change year-on-year -2.91% -1.90% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 537 187 461
10th Percentile £36.25 £28.32 £35.64
25th Percentile £54.55 £36.13 £49.25
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 £77.50 £85.00 £78.75
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.36
% change year-on-year +13.04% -7.79% -0.23%

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 29 May 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 29 May 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 29 May 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 0 2,291 £525 -1.87% 462
Midlands +1 529 £469 +4.57% 158
North of England -8 491 £460 -3.16% 320
West Midlands +6 423 £460 - 83
South East -15 380 £475 -5.00% 408
North West -9 251 £460 -3.16% 183
Yorkshire -10 207 £475 - 91
South West -5 203 £475 - 101
East Midlands -2 102 £525 +34.62% 75
East of England -16 99 £495 +1.54% 92
North East -8 45 £450 -2.70% 51
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
1 230 (5.61%) Apache Spark
2 167 (4.08%) Apache Airflow
3 145 (3.54%) Apache
4 142 (3.47%) Confluence
5 84 (2.05%) SAS
6 68 (1.66%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.93%) WebLogic
8 31 (0.76%) IIS
9 30 (0.73%) Oracle Workflow
10 23 (0.56%) Tomcat
11 19 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
12 18 (0.44%) Jupyter
13 16 (0.39%) Appian
14 15 (0.37%) CMS
14 15 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
14 15 (0.37%) Tuxedo
15 13 (0.32%) HCL Notes
15 13 (0.32%) Mendix
15 13 (0.32%) nginx
15 13 (0.32%) WebSphere
Applications
1 273 (6.66%) Microsoft Excel
2 44 (1.07%) MS Visio
3 42 (1.02%) Microsoft Office
4 30 (0.73%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 27 (0.66%) Spreadsheet
6 10 (0.24%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.17%) Microsoft Project
8 5 (0.12%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.12%) Notion
9 3 (0.073%) Oracle Smart View
9 3 (0.073%) Trello
10 1 (0.024%) InDesign
10 1 (0.024%) Mingle
10 1 (0.024%) Weka
Business Applications
1 41 (1.00%) Oracle EBS
2 30 (0.73%) Dynamics CRM
3 26 (0.63%) Aladdin
4 22 (0.54%) NEC Housing
5 21 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
6 20 (0.49%) Oracle EBS R12
7 19 (0.46%) Oracle ERP
7 19 (0.46%) Oracle Payables
8 15 (0.37%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.37%) Remedy ITSM
9 13 (0.32%) Oracle General Ledger
10 12 (0.29%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 11 (0.27%) NetSuite
11 11 (0.27%) Oracle Assets
12 10 (0.24%) Payment Gateway
13 9 (0.22%) Endur
13 9 (0.22%) Findur
13 9 (0.22%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
14 8 (0.20%) Oracle Cash Management
15 7 (0.17%) Fidessa
Cloud Services
1 1,368 (33.38%) Azure
2 996 (24.30%) AWS
3 804 (19.62%) Power Platform
4 405 (9.88%) Azure DevOps
5 340 (8.30%) Azure Data Factory
6 338 (8.25%) GCP
7 306 (7.47%) GitHub
8 252 (6.15%) Serverless
9 249 (6.08%) Snowflake
10 229 (5.59%) Amazon S3
11 220 (5.37%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 190 (4.64%) dbt
13 161 (3.93%) GitHub Actions
14 154 (3.76%) AWS Lambda
15 79 (1.93%) Power Automate
16 76 (1.85%) SaaS
17 74 (1.81%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 70 (1.71%) Entra ID
19 67 (1.63%) PowerApps
20 66 (1.61%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 47 (1.15%) Firewall
2 44 (1.07%) DNS
3 20 (0.49%) SNMP
4 17 (0.41%) Network Security
5 16 (0.39%) TCP/IP
6 15 (0.37%) HTTP
6 15 (0.37%) Internet
6 15 (0.37%) WAN
7 14 (0.34%) SSL
8 13 (0.32%) VPN
9 11 (0.27%) LAN
9 11 (0.27%) Wi-Fi
10 9 (0.22%) Wireshark
11 8 (0.20%) 3GPP
12 6 (0.15%) DHCP
12 6 (0.15%) IPsec
12 6 (0.15%) RTP
12 6 (0.15%) SAN
13 5 (0.12%) Kerberos
13 5 (0.12%) WinSCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 737 (17.98%) Power BI
2 526 (12.84%) Data Warehouse
3 510 (12.45%) SQL Server
4 288 (7.03%) Tableau
5 284 (6.93%) Data Lake
6 264 (6.44%) PostgreSQL
7 257 (6.27%) Relational Database
8 231 (5.64%) NoSQL
9 210 (5.12%) Metadata
10 190 (4.64%) Azure SQL Database
11 158 (3.86%) Oracle Database
12 150 (3.66%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 138 (3.37%) BigQuery
14 125 (3.05%) Delta Lake
15 112 (2.73%) Big Data
16 110 (2.68%) Amazon Redshift
17 103 (2.51%) MySQL
18 102 (2.49%) Oracle Reports
19 92 (2.24%) Snowflake Schema
20 91 (2.22%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 427 (10.42%) Git
2 319 (7.78%) JIRA
3 216 (5.27%) Jenkins
4 195 (4.76%) GitLab
5 62 (1.51%) JUnit
6 56 (1.37%) Selenium
7 52 (1.27%) Postman
8 49 (1.20%) Maven
9 48 (1.17%) Mockito
10 40 (0.98%) Cucumber
11 39 (0.95%) Gradle
12 35 (0.85%) SonarQube
13 32 (0.78%) MLflow
14 30 (0.73%) REST Assured
15 29 (0.71%) ERwin
16 25 (0.61%) Bitbucket
17 24 (0.59%) JMeter
18 23 (0.56%) Liquibase
18 23 (0.56%) TeamCity
19 22 (0.54%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,100 (26.84%) Finance
2 1,062 (25.92%) Social Skills
3 755 (18.42%) Analytical Skills
4 386 (9.42%) Banking
5 338 (8.25%) Public Sector
6 110 (2.68%) Marketing
7 109 (2.66%) Front Office
8 97 (2.37%) Investment Banking
9 81 (1.98%) Documentation Skills
10 65 (1.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 64 (1.56%) Retail
12 59 (1.44%) Financial Institution
13 51 (1.24%) Legal
14 39 (0.95%) Publishing
15 36 (0.88%) Manufacturing
16 35 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
17 34 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
17 34 (0.83%) Telecoms
18 33 (0.81%) Law
19 28 (0.68%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 856 (20.89%) Data Engineer
2 847 (20.67%) Developer
3 578 (14.10%) Analyst
4 519 (12.66%) Senior
5 280 (6.83%) Lead
6 261 (6.37%) Data Analyst
7 230 (5.61%) Architect
8 184 (4.49%) Consultant
9 172 (4.20%) Business Analyst
10 165 (4.03%) Java Developer
11 152 (3.71%) Senior Data Engineer
12 128 (3.12%) DBA
13 127 (3.10%) Senior Developer
14 124 (3.03%) Software Engineer
15 106 (2.59%) Azure Engineer
16 101 (2.46%) C# Developer
17 89 (2.17%) Data Architect
17 89 (2.17%) Data Scientist
18 86 (2.10%) SQL Developer
19 85 (2.07%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 351 (8.57%) .NET
2 337 (8.22%) REST
3 256 (6.25%) Kafka
4 255 (6.22%) PySpark
5 207 (5.05%) Spring
6 198 (4.83%) React
7 195 (4.76%) Spring Boot
8 180 (4.39%) RESTful
9 147 (3.59%) HTML
10 141 (3.44%) JSON
11 136 (3.32%) XML
12 126 (3.07%) CSS
13 122 (2.98%) Pandas
14 107 (2.61%) AngularJS
15 99 (2.42%) SOAP
16 86 (2.10%) Middleware
17 85 (2.07%) Web Services
18 83 (2.03%) .NET Framework
19 76 (1.85%) OAuth
20 72 (1.76%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 269 (6.56%) Cloud Native
2 147 (3.59%) Data Structures
3 135 (3.29%) Legacy Systems
4 127 (3.10%) Product Ownership
5 116 (2.83%) Distributed Systems
6 85 (2.07%) Management Information System
7 79 (1.93%) Derivative
8 77 (1.88%) Onboarding
9 67 (1.63%) Analytical Mindset
9 67 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
10 54 (1.32%) Clustering
10 54 (1.32%) Enterprise Software
11 52 (1.27%) Equities
12 50 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
13 49 (1.20%) Fixed Income
13 49 (1.20%) Greenfield Project
14 43 (1.05%) Algorithms
15 41 (1.00%) Low-Code
16 40 (0.98%) Replication
17 39 (0.95%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 288 (7.03%) Linux
2 248 (6.05%) Windows
3 200 (4.88%) Unix
4 85 (2.07%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.59%) AIX
6 21 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 16 (0.39%) Windows Server 2019
8 10 (0.24%) Windows Server 2016
9 9 (0.22%) zOS
10 8 (0.20%) Solaris
10 8 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.17%) Android
11 7 (0.17%) Apple iOS
11 7 (0.17%) Windows 10
12 4 (0.098%) Oracle Linux
13 3 (0.073%) 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 1,135 (27.70%) CI/CD
2 1,039 (25.35%) Analytics
3 1,025 (25.01%) Data Modelling
4 999 (24.38%) Agile
5 990 (24.16%) ETL
6 932 (22.74%) Business Intelligence
7 891 (21.74%) DevOps
8 805 (19.64%) Problem-Solving
9 769 (18.77%) Data Pipeline
10 672 (16.40%) Data Engineering
11 552 (13.47%) AI
12 525 (12.81%) Migration
13 497 (12.13%) Validation
14 461 (11.25%) Data Governance
15 419 (10.22%) Test Automation
16 409 (9.98%) Decision-Making
17 399 (9.74%) Data Analysis
18 371 (9.05%) Performance Tuning
19 370 (9.03%) Microservices
20 359 (8.76%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,534 (37.43%) Python
2 554 (13.52%) Java
3 441 (10.76%) C#
4 313 (7.64%) JavaScript
5 295 (7.20%) PL/SQL
6 211 (5.15%) T-SQL
7 196 (4.78%) PowerShell
8 141 (3.44%) TypeScript
9 128 (3.12%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 110 (2.68%) Shell Script
11 109 (2.66%) R
12 81 (1.98%) Bash
13 80 (1.95%) Scala
14 60 (1.46%) C++
15 42 (1.02%) VBA
16 38 (0.93%) Bicep
17 32 (0.78%) Perl
18 28 (0.68%) VB
19 25 (0.61%) C
20 24 (0.59%) Go
Qualifications
1 850 (20.74%) Security Cleared
2 687 (16.76%) SC Cleared
3 328 (8.00%) Degree
4 108 (2.64%) Computer Science Degree
5 90 (2.20%) BPSS Clearance
6 71 (1.73%) Azure Certification
6 71 (1.73%) DV Cleared
7 50 (1.22%) Master's Degree
8 45 (1.10%) ISTQB
9 37 (0.90%) Microsoft Certification
10 23 (0.56%) AWS Certification
11 18 (0.44%) DBS Check
12 16 (0.39%) PhD
13 12 (0.29%) CBAP
14 11 (0.27%) CISSP
15 10 (0.24%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 10 (0.24%) Oracle Certification
15 10 (0.24%) PMI Certification
15 10 (0.24%) PMP
16 9 (0.22%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 741 (18.08%) Data Quality
2 307 (7.49%) QA
3 178 (4.34%) GDPR
4 42 (1.02%) SLA
5 38 (0.93%) Accessibility
6 32 (0.78%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 27 (0.66%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.59%) PMO
9 21 (0.51%) NIST
10 19 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 17 (0.41%) IFRS
12 16 (0.39%) MiFID
13 15 (0.37%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 15 (0.37%) HIPAA
14 12 (0.29%) Actionable Recommendations
14 12 (0.29%) HL7
14 12 (0.29%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.29%) Solvency II
15 10 (0.24%) GRC
16 8 (0.20%) NCSC
System Software
1 470 (11.47%) Docker
2 91 (2.22%) Active Directory
3 35 (0.85%) Virtual Machines
4 27 (0.66%) VMware Infrastructure
5 26 (0.63%) Oracle RAC
6 16 (0.39%) Hyper-V
7 13 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
8 10 (0.24%) KVM
9 9 (0.22%) Postfix
9 9 (0.22%) VMware NSX
10 8 (0.20%) vCloud
11 6 (0.15%) HDFS
11 6 (0.15%) RACF
12 4 (0.098%) Virtual Desktop
12 4 (0.098%) XenApp
12 4 (0.098%) XenDesktop
13 3 (0.073%) Oracle Clusterware
14 2 (0.049%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.049%) GridGain
14 2 (0.049%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 386 (9.42%) Kubernetes
2 328 (8.00%) Terraform
3 107 (2.61%) Grafana
4 65 (1.59%) Ansible
5 63 (1.54%) Prometheus
6 41 (1.00%) Oracle RMAN
7 30 (0.73%) Data Guard
8 19 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
9 18 (0.44%) Kibana
10 15 (0.37%) vCenter Server
10 15 (0.37%) ZABBIX
11 14 (0.34%) Nagios
11 14 (0.34%) Netcool
11 14 (0.34%) Tivoli
12 13 (0.32%) Control-M
12 13 (0.32%) OpenView
12 13 (0.32%) Tivoli Monitoring
13 10 (0.24%) SCOM
14 9 (0.22%) Progress Chef
14 9 (0.22%) SCCM
Vendors
1 677 (16.52%) Oracle
2 641 (15.64%) Microsoft
3 500 (12.20%) Databricks
4 158 (3.86%) Google
5 144 (3.51%) Informatica
6 128 (3.12%) ServiceNow
7 113 (2.76%) Talend
8 106 (2.59%) SAP
9 85 (2.07%) Splunk
10 61 (1.49%) IBM
11 60 (1.46%) Denodo
12 51 (1.24%) Salesforce
13 45 (1.10%) Citrix
14 42 (1.02%) VMware
15 36 (0.88%) Dynatrace
16 32 (0.78%) OpenAI
17 31 (0.76%) Bloomberg
18 30 (0.73%) HP
18 30 (0.73%) MuleSoft
19 29 (0.71%) BMC