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

6 months to
10 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,150 3,048 3,709
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.82% 12.46% 9.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.98% 36.61% 32.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,810 2,190 2,743
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £540
Median % change year-on-year - -7.41% -1.82%
75th Percentile £592 £625 £650
90th Percentile £688 £763 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -0.47%
Number of hourly rates quoted 66 61 56
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.00 £22.68
25th Percentile £34.01 £30.25 £29.06
Median hourly rate £47.50 £40.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +17.28% -4.71% -15.00%
75th Percentile £72.63 £58.75 £53.84
90th Percentile £83.00 £77.19 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £39.67 £42.50
% change year-on-year +26.03% -6.65% -20.93%

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 11,223 8,326 11,325
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.57% 34.03% 30.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,354 5,778 8,132
10th Percentile £358 £358 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £524 £540
Median % change year-on-year -2.10% -3.06% -4.00%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £505 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 508 198 478
10th Percentile £36.43 £28.18 £35.52
25th Percentile £55.00 £36.06 £49.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £58.88 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.40% -5.80% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.23 £85.00 £77.65
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -

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 10 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 10 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 10 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 -3 2,280 £523 -1.32% 713
Midlands +2 523 £463 +4.10% 212
North of England -5 521 £460 -3.16% 379
West Midlands +4 426 £459 +1.17% 132
South East -15 399 £475 -5.00% 417
North West -4 266 £460 -3.16% 230
South West 0 222 £500 +5.26% 130
Yorkshire -14 215 £475 - 97
East of England -16 101 £495 +1.54% 98
East Midlands -3 93 £525 +38.16% 80
North East -4 52 £425 -8.11% 55
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
1 225 (5.42%) Apache Spark
2 170 (4.10%) Apache Airflow
3 146 (3.52%) Confluence
4 143 (3.45%) Apache
5 88 (2.12%) SAS
6 56 (1.35%) SharePoint
7 30 (0.72%) IIS
8 29 (0.70%) WebLogic
9 28 (0.67%) Oracle Workflow
10 24 (0.58%) Tomcat
11 21 (0.51%) Jupyter
12 19 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
13 16 (0.39%) Appian
13 16 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
14 15 (0.36%) WebSphere
15 14 (0.34%) CMS
16 13 (0.31%) nginx
16 13 (0.31%) Tuxedo
17 11 (0.27%) Camunda
18 9 (0.22%) Mendix
Applications
1 262 (6.31%) Microsoft Excel
2 41 (0.99%) Microsoft Office
2 41 (0.99%) MS Visio
3 30 (0.72%) Spreadsheet
4 29 (0.70%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 10 (0.24%) Chatbot
6 5 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
6 5 (0.12%) Notepad++
7 3 (0.072%) Oracle Smart View
8 2 (0.048%) Notion
8 2 (0.048%) Trello
9 1 (0.024%) Acrobat
9 1 (0.024%) InDesign
9 1 (0.024%) Mingle
9 1 (0.024%) Photoshop
9 1 (0.024%) Weka
Business Applications
1 35 (0.84%) Oracle EBS
2 29 (0.70%) Dynamics CRM
3 25 (0.60%) Aladdin
4 21 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
5 20 (0.48%) NEC Housing
5 20 (0.48%) Oracle ERP
6 18 (0.43%) Oracle Payables
7 16 (0.39%) Oracle EBS R12
8 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
9 14 (0.34%) Oracle Receivables
10 12 (0.29%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 10 (0.24%) Findur
11 10 (0.24%) Oracle General Ledger
12 9 (0.22%) Endur
12 9 (0.22%) NetSuite
12 9 (0.22%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 8 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
13 8 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
13 8 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
14 7 (0.17%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,364 (32.87%) Azure
2 1,032 (24.87%) AWS
3 793 (19.11%) Power Platform
4 393 (9.47%) Azure DevOps
5 345 (8.31%) GCP
6 331 (7.98%) Azure Data Factory
7 313 (7.54%) GitHub
8 269 (6.48%) Serverless
9 248 (5.98%) Snowflake
10 244 (5.88%) Amazon S3
11 210 (5.06%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 200 (4.82%) dbt
13 173 (4.17%) AWS Lambda
14 163 (3.93%) GitHub Actions
15 76 (1.83%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 74 (1.78%) SaaS
17 73 (1.76%) Entra ID
18 70 (1.69%) Power Automate
19 69 (1.66%) Amazon EC2
20 59 (1.42%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 48 (1.16%) DNS
2 45 (1.08%) Firewall
3 20 (0.48%) SNMP
4 16 (0.39%) HTTP
4 16 (0.39%) Internet
4 16 (0.39%) Network Security
4 16 (0.39%) WAN
5 15 (0.36%) TCP/IP
6 14 (0.34%) SSL
6 14 (0.34%) VPN
7 11 (0.27%) Wi-Fi
8 9 (0.22%) LAN
8 9 (0.22%) Wireshark
9 8 (0.19%) 3GPP
10 7 (0.17%) SAN
11 6 (0.14%) IPsec
11 6 (0.14%) RTP
12 5 (0.12%) BGP
12 5 (0.12%) DHCP
12 5 (0.12%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 733 (17.66%) Power BI
2 539 (12.99%) Data Warehouse
3 523 (12.60%) SQL Server
4 296 (7.13%) Data Lake
5 278 (6.70%) Tableau
6 272 (6.55%) PostgreSQL
7 267 (6.43%) Relational Database
8 222 (5.35%) NoSQL
9 203 (4.89%) Metadata
10 188 (4.53%) Azure SQL Database
11 156 (3.76%) Oracle Database
12 152 (3.66%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 134 (3.23%) BigQuery
14 125 (3.01%) Amazon Redshift
15 124 (2.99%) Delta Lake
16 111 (2.67%) Big Data
17 107 (2.58%) MySQL
18 99 (2.39%) Oracle Reports
19 90 (2.17%) Amazon RDS
19 90 (2.17%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 444 (10.70%) Git
2 328 (7.90%) JIRA
3 223 (5.37%) Jenkins
4 199 (4.80%) GitLab
5 65 (1.57%) JUnit
6 57 (1.37%) Postman
6 57 (1.37%) Selenium
7 49 (1.18%) Maven
8 47 (1.13%) Mockito
9 42 (1.01%) Gradle
10 41 (0.99%) Cucumber
11 34 (0.82%) SonarQube
12 30 (0.72%) MLflow
12 30 (0.72%) REST Assured
13 26 (0.63%) ERwin
13 26 (0.63%) Liquibase
14 25 (0.60%) Bitbucket
14 25 (0.60%) JMeter
15 24 (0.58%) Team Foundation Server
15 24 (0.58%) Zephyr
General
1 1,100 (26.51%) Finance
2 1,062 (25.59%) Social Skills
3 765 (18.43%) Analytical Skills
4 395 (9.52%) Banking
5 360 (8.67%) Public Sector
6 116 (2.80%) Front Office
6 116 (2.80%) Marketing
7 103 (2.48%) Investment Banking
8 86 (2.07%) Documentation Skills
9 74 (1.78%) Retail
10 66 (1.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 52 (1.25%) Financial Institution
12 51 (1.23%) Legal
13 42 (1.01%) Publishing
14 37 (0.89%) Manufacturing
15 36 (0.87%) Presentation Skills
16 34 (0.82%) Telecoms
17 33 (0.80%) Organisational Skills
18 31 (0.75%) Back Office
19 30 (0.72%) Law
Job Titles
1 865 (20.84%) Data Engineer
2 860 (20.72%) Developer
3 578 (13.93%) Analyst
4 534 (12.87%) Senior
5 289 (6.96%) Lead
6 251 (6.05%) Data Analyst
7 227 (5.47%) Architect
8 192 (4.63%) Consultant
9 174 (4.19%) Business Analyst
10 167 (4.02%) Java Developer
11 158 (3.81%) Senior Data Engineer
12 133 (3.20%) DBA
13 131 (3.16%) Senior Developer
14 127 (3.06%) Software Engineer
15 104 (2.51%) Azure Engineer
16 99 (2.39%) C# Developer
17 96 (2.31%) SQL Developer
18 86 (2.07%) SQL DBA
19 85 (2.05%) Python Developer
20 83 (2.00%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 349 (8.41%) .NET
2 341 (8.22%) REST
3 255 (6.14%) Kafka
4 252 (6.07%) PySpark
5 210 (5.06%) Spring
6 199 (4.80%) Spring Boot
7 193 (4.65%) React
8 183 (4.41%) RESTful
9 151 (3.64%) HTML
10 142 (3.42%) JSON
11 137 (3.30%) XML
12 134 (3.23%) CSS
13 119 (2.87%) Pandas
14 108 (2.60%) AngularJS
15 102 (2.46%) SOAP
16 92 (2.22%) Web Services
17 87 (2.10%) Middleware
18 82 (1.98%) .NET Framework
19 77 (1.86%) OAuth
20 67 (1.61%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 272 (6.55%) Cloud Native
2 147 (3.54%) Data Structures
3 145 (3.49%) Legacy Systems
4 128 (3.08%) Product Ownership
5 121 (2.92%) Distributed Systems
6 83 (2.00%) Management Information System
7 81 (1.95%) Derivative
8 77 (1.86%) Onboarding
9 68 (1.64%) Data Protection Act
10 66 (1.59%) Analytical Mindset
11 56 (1.35%) Clustering
12 55 (1.33%) Enterprise Software
13 53 (1.28%) Equities
13 53 (1.28%) Self-Motivation
14 51 (1.23%) Greenfield Project
15 49 (1.18%) Fixed Income
16 42 (1.01%) Algorithms
16 42 (1.01%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
17 40 (0.96%) NHS
17 40 (0.96%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 290 (6.99%) Linux
2 250 (6.02%) Windows
3 205 (4.94%) Unix
4 86 (2.07%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.58%) AIX
6 18 (0.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 15 (0.36%) Windows Server 2019
8 10 (0.24%) Solaris
9 9 (0.22%) Windows Server 2016
10 8 (0.19%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.19%) zOS
11 7 (0.17%) Android
11 7 (0.17%) Apple iOS
11 7 (0.17%) Windows 10
12 4 (0.096%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.096%) VMS
13 3 (0.072%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.048%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.048%) HPUX
14 2 (0.048%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,163 (28.02%) CI/CD
2 1,053 (25.37%) Analytics
3 1,030 (24.82%) Data Modelling
4 1,017 (24.51%) Agile
5 998 (24.05%) ETL
6 934 (22.51%) Business Intelligence
7 880 (21.20%) DevOps
8 811 (19.54%) Problem-Solving
9 791 (19.06%) Data Pipeline
10 690 (16.63%) Data Engineering
11 583 (14.05%) AI
12 546 (13.16%) Migration
13 522 (12.58%) Validation
14 446 (10.75%) Data Governance
15 434 (10.46%) Test Automation
16 410 (9.88%) Decision-Making
17 392 (9.45%) Data Analysis
18 377 (9.08%) Continuous Improvement
19 369 (8.89%) Performance Tuning
19 369 (8.89%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 1,540 (37.11%) Python
2 552 (13.30%) Java
3 436 (10.51%) C#
4 311 (7.49%) JavaScript
5 302 (7.28%) PL/SQL
6 221 (5.33%) T-SQL
7 212 (5.11%) PowerShell
8 148 (3.57%) TypeScript
9 128 (3.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 113 (2.72%) Shell Script
11 100 (2.41%) R
12 82 (1.98%) Bash
13 76 (1.83%) Scala
14 59 (1.42%) C++
15 39 (0.94%) VBA
16 36 (0.87%) Bicep
17 32 (0.77%) VB
18 30 (0.72%) C
18 30 (0.72%) Perl
19 25 (0.60%) Go
Qualifications
1 870 (20.96%) Security Cleared
2 702 (16.92%) SC Cleared
3 322 (7.76%) Degree
4 108 (2.60%) Computer Science Degree
5 97 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
6 81 (1.95%) DV Cleared
7 67 (1.61%) Azure Certification
8 51 (1.23%) Master's Degree
9 48 (1.16%) ISTQB
10 36 (0.87%) Microsoft Certification
11 25 (0.60%) AWS Certification
12 16 (0.39%) DBS Check
12 16 (0.39%) PhD
13 13 (0.31%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 11 (0.27%) CISSP
15 10 (0.24%) PMI Certification
16 9 (0.22%) CISM
16 9 (0.22%) PMP
16 9 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
17 7 (0.17%) CIMA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 748 (18.02%) Data Quality
2 316 (7.61%) QA
3 173 (4.17%) GDPR
4 44 (1.06%) SLA
5 39 (0.94%) Accessibility
6 30 (0.72%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 27 (0.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.58%) PMO
9 23 (0.55%) NIST
10 17 (0.41%) IFRS
11 16 (0.39%) PCI DSS
12 15 (0.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 15 (0.36%) MiFID
13 14 (0.34%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.31%) Solvency II
15 12 (0.29%) Actionable Recommendations
15 12 (0.29%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.24%) GRC
16 10 (0.24%) HL7
17 9 (0.22%) NCSC
System Software
1 470 (11.33%) Docker
2 90 (2.17%) Active Directory
3 37 (0.89%) Virtual Machines
4 29 (0.70%) VMware Infrastructure
5 23 (0.55%) Oracle RAC
6 16 (0.39%) Hyper-V
7 15 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
8 11 (0.27%) VMware NSX
9 10 (0.24%) KVM
9 10 (0.24%) vCloud
10 9 (0.22%) Postfix
11 7 (0.17%) Virtual Desktop
12 6 (0.14%) HDFS
12 6 (0.14%) RACF
13 4 (0.096%) XenApp
13 4 (0.096%) XenDesktop
14 2 (0.048%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.048%) GridGain
14 2 (0.048%) Oracle Clusterware
15 1 (0.024%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 379 (9.13%) Kubernetes
2 347 (8.36%) Terraform
3 106 (2.55%) Grafana
4 68 (1.64%) Ansible
5 62 (1.49%) Prometheus
6 35 (0.84%) Oracle RMAN
7 26 (0.63%) Data Guard
8 20 (0.48%) Single Sign-On
9 19 (0.46%) Kibana
10 17 (0.41%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.39%) Control-M
12 15 (0.36%) ZABBIX
13 14 (0.34%) Nagios
13 14 (0.34%) Netcool
13 14 (0.34%) Tivoli
14 13 (0.31%) OpenView
14 13 (0.31%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 11 (0.27%) SCOM
16 8 (0.19%) HP Quality Center
16 8 (0.19%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 696 (16.77%) Oracle
2 639 (15.40%) Microsoft
3 494 (11.90%) Databricks
4 161 (3.88%) Google
5 147 (3.54%) Informatica
6 131 (3.16%) ServiceNow
7 119 (2.87%) Talend
8 108 (2.60%) SAP
9 86 (2.07%) Splunk
10 66 (1.59%) IBM
11 62 (1.49%) Denodo
12 48 (1.16%) Salesforce
13 44 (1.06%) VMware
14 42 (1.01%) Citrix
15 37 (0.89%) Dynatrace
16 33 (0.80%) Bloomberg
17 32 (0.77%) OpenAI
18 30 (0.72%) Murex
19 28 (0.67%) BMC
19 28 (0.67%) HP