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

6 months to
21 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,391 3,272 3,614
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.79% 12.01% 10.21%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.02% 36.30% 32.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,938 2,322 2,733
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £408 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £535
Median % change year-on-year - -6.54% -0.93%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £638
90th Percentile £688 £762 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 83 61 43
10th Percentile £25.34 £22.81 £24.40
25th Percentile £31.86 £30.25 £30.19
Median hourly rate £45.00 £40.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% -4.71% -10.52%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £51.83
90th Percentile £82.25 £64.50 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £45.00 £39.67 £42.50
% change year-on-year +13.43% -6.65% -13.26%

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 11,861 9,013 10,986
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.45% 33.07% 31.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,696 6,195 7,904
10th Percentile £363 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £520 £545
Median % change year-on-year +0.05% -4.63% -0.91%
75th Percentile £621 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £775 £788
UK median daily rate £513 £505 £525
% change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 487 228 408
10th Percentile £34.01 £29.07 £35.37
25th Percentile £55.00 £38.97 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £80.89 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% +3.09%

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 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 21 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 21 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 2,342 £525 - 877
North of England -3 581 £463 -2.63% 319
Midlands +2 552 £459 +7.37% 197
South East -10 459 £475 -5.00% 370
West Midlands +3 452 £459 +2.00% 101
North West -1 309 £475 - 170
Yorkshire -7 235 £470 -1.05% 102
South West -7 234 £500 +14.29% 129
East of England -8 115 £488 -2.50% 87
East Midlands -3 96 £525 +32.74% 96
North East -16 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
1 203 (4.62%) Apache Spark
2 189 (4.30%) Apache Airflow
3 175 (3.99%) Confluence
4 147 (3.35%) Apache
5 94 (2.14%) SAS
6 54 (1.23%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.89%) Oracle Workflow
8 35 (0.80%) WebLogic
9 33 (0.75%) IIS
10 22 (0.50%) Jupyter
10 22 (0.50%) Tomcat
11 20 (0.46%) CMS
12 18 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
12 18 (0.41%) WebSphere
13 16 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
13 16 (0.36%) nginx
14 13 (0.30%) Tuxedo
15 12 (0.27%) Camunda
16 11 (0.25%) Appian
17 8 (0.18%) Red Hat Fuse
Applications
1 286 (6.51%) Microsoft Excel
2 55 (1.25%) Microsoft Office
3 39 (0.89%) MS Visio
3 39 (0.89%) Spreadsheet
4 30 (0.68%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 10 (0.23%) Chatbot
6 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
7 4 (0.091%) Acrobat
7 4 (0.091%) Notion
7 4 (0.091%) Photoshop
8 3 (0.068%) Oracle Smart View
9 2 (0.046%) Microsoft Project
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%) Weka
Business Applications
1 42 (0.96%) Oracle EBS
2 41 (0.93%) Dynamics CRM
3 30 (0.68%) Aladdin
4 25 (0.57%) Oracle ERP
4 25 (0.57%) Oracle Payables
5 23 (0.52%) SAP S/4HANA
6 19 (0.43%) Oracle EBS R12
6 19 (0.43%) Remedy ITSM
7 18 (0.41%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.34%) NEC Housing
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%) Fidessa
11 10 (0.23%) Finacle
12 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
12 8 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
13 7 (0.16%) Oracle FAH
13 7 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 1,387 (31.59%) Azure
2 1,043 (23.75%) AWS
3 829 (18.88%) Power Platform
4 392 (8.93%) Azure DevOps
5 378 (8.61%) GCP
6 314 (7.15%) Azure Data Factory
7 311 (7.08%) GitHub
8 289 (6.58%) Snowflake
9 270 (6.15%) Serverless
10 245 (5.58%) Amazon S3
10 245 (5.58%) dbt
11 201 (4.58%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 176 (4.01%) AWS Lambda
13 159 (3.62%) GitHub Actions
14 83 (1.89%) Entra ID
15 79 (1.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 79 (1.80%) SaaS
16 75 (1.71%) Power Automate
17 70 (1.59%) Amazon EC2
18 67 (1.53%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 44 (1.00%) DNS
2 39 (0.89%) Firewall
3 22 (0.50%) SSL
4 21 (0.48%) SNMP
5 20 (0.46%) Internet
5 20 (0.46%) Network Security
6 19 (0.43%) HTTP
6 19 (0.43%) VPN
7 13 (0.30%) TCP/IP
8 11 (0.25%) WAN
9 10 (0.23%) Wireshark
10 9 (0.20%) Kerberos
10 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
11 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
11 8 (0.18%) SAN
11 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
12 7 (0.16%) Broadband
12 7 (0.16%) Multicast
12 7 (0.16%) RTP
13 6 (0.14%) DHCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 766 (17.44%) Power BI
2 606 (13.80%) Data Warehouse
3 570 (12.98%) SQL Server
4 298 (6.79%) Tableau
5 277 (6.31%) Relational Database
6 274 (6.24%) Data Lake
6 274 (6.24%) PostgreSQL
7 220 (5.01%) Metadata
8 212 (4.83%) NoSQL
9 182 (4.14%) Oracle Database
10 171 (3.89%) Azure SQL Database
11 158 (3.60%) BigQuery
12 153 (3.48%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 136 (3.10%) Amazon Redshift
14 121 (2.76%) Delta Lake
15 104 (2.37%) Big Data
16 103 (2.35%) Oracle Reports
17 100 (2.28%) Snowflake Schema
18 95 (2.16%) MySQL
19 88 (2.00%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 473 (10.77%) Git
2 342 (7.79%) JIRA
3 233 (5.31%) Jenkins
4 177 (4.03%) GitLab
5 67 (1.53%) JUnit
6 55 (1.25%) Maven
7 52 (1.18%) Gradle
8 51 (1.16%) Postman
9 49 (1.12%) Selenium
10 45 (1.02%) Mockito
11 35 (0.80%) Oracle Forms
12 34 (0.77%) SonarQube
13 32 (0.73%) Bitbucket
14 31 (0.71%) Visual Studio
15 28 (0.64%) Team Foundation Server
16 27 (0.61%) Cucumber
16 27 (0.61%) Zephyr
17 26 (0.59%) Liquibase
17 26 (0.59%) MLflow
17 26 (0.59%) TeamCity
General
1 1,136 (25.87%) Finance
2 1,132 (25.78%) Social Skills
3 871 (19.84%) Analytical Skills
4 412 (9.38%) Banking
5 400 (9.11%) Public Sector
6 134 (3.05%) Marketing
7 123 (2.80%) Front Office
8 98 (2.23%) Retail
9 94 (2.14%) Investment Banking
10 87 (1.98%) Documentation Skills
11 74 (1.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 57 (1.30%) Manufacturing
13 54 (1.23%) Presentation Skills
14 50 (1.14%) Legal
15 48 (1.09%) Financial Institution
16 43 (0.98%) Organisational Skills
17 38 (0.87%) Back Office
17 38 (0.87%) Publishing
18 34 (0.77%) Telecoms
19 29 (0.66%) Law
Job Titles
1 939 (21.38%) Developer
2 875 (19.93%) Data Engineer
3 631 (14.37%) Analyst
4 577 (13.14%) Senior
5 306 (6.97%) Lead
6 276 (6.29%) Data Analyst
7 239 (5.44%) Architect
8 209 (4.76%) Consultant
9 178 (4.05%) Business Analyst
10 175 (3.99%) Java Developer
11 172 (3.92%) Senior Data Engineer
12 165 (3.76%) DBA
13 143 (3.26%) Senior Developer
14 124 (2.82%) Software Engineer
15 113 (2.57%) SQL Developer
16 110 (2.51%) SQL DBA
17 108 (2.46%) Azure Engineer
18 102 (2.32%) C# Developer
19 92 (2.10%) Data Architect
20 86 (1.96%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 359 (8.18%) .NET
2 344 (7.83%) REST
3 264 (6.01%) Kafka
4 260 (5.92%) PySpark
5 219 (4.99%) Spring
6 200 (4.55%) Spring Boot
7 196 (4.46%) React
8 175 (3.99%) RESTful
9 163 (3.71%) JSON
10 158 (3.60%) XML
11 139 (3.17%) HTML
12 123 (2.80%) AngularJS
13 122 (2.78%) CSS
14 111 (2.53%) Pandas
15 101 (2.30%) SOAP
16 100 (2.28%) Web Services
17 90 (2.05%) Middleware
18 88 (2.00%) .NET Framework
19 71 (1.62%) Node.js
20 67 (1.53%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 285 (6.49%) Cloud Native
2 188 (4.28%) Data Structures
3 158 (3.60%) Legacy Systems
4 154 (3.51%) Product Ownership
5 131 (2.98%) Distributed Systems
6 89 (2.03%) Onboarding
7 79 (1.80%) Derivative
8 78 (1.78%) Enterprise Software
9 76 (1.73%) Management Information System
10 73 (1.66%) Analytical Mindset
11 72 (1.64%) Self-Motivation
12 65 (1.48%) Clustering
13 63 (1.43%) Data Protection Act
14 59 (1.34%) Replication
15 56 (1.28%) Algorithms
16 51 (1.16%) Fixed Income
17 49 (1.12%) Equities
17 49 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
18 40 (0.91%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
18 40 (0.91%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 292 (6.65%) Linux
2 270 (6.15%) Windows
3 206 (4.69%) Unix
4 101 (2.30%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.57%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.55%) AIX
7 16 (0.36%) Solaris
8 12 (0.27%) Windows Server 2019
9 8 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
9 8 (0.18%) zOS
10 7 (0.16%) Android
10 7 (0.16%) Apple iOS
11 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 5 (0.11%) Windows 10
13 4 (0.091%) Oracle Linux
13 4 (0.091%) Ubuntu
13 4 (0.091%) VMS
14 3 (0.068%) Windows Server 2012
15 2 (0.046%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.046%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,165 (26.53%) CI/CD
2 1,133 (25.80%) Analytics
3 1,119 (25.48%) Agile
4 1,095 (24.94%) Data Modelling
5 1,024 (23.32%) ETL
6 987 (22.48%) Business Intelligence
7 881 (20.06%) DevOps
8 850 (19.36%) Data Pipeline
9 849 (19.34%) Problem-Solving
10 742 (16.90%) Data Engineering
11 627 (14.28%) AI
12 594 (13.53%) Migration
13 578 (13.16%) Validation
14 474 (10.79%) Data Governance
15 450 (10.25%) Decision-Making
16 448 (10.20%) Test Automation
17 438 (9.97%) Continuous Improvement
18 425 (9.68%) Stakeholder Management
19 420 (9.57%) Data Analysis
20 391 (8.90%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,565 (35.64%) Python
2 546 (12.43%) Java
3 434 (9.88%) C#
4 347 (7.90%) PL/SQL
5 303 (6.90%) JavaScript
6 239 (5.44%) T-SQL
7 232 (5.28%) PowerShell
8 166 (3.78%) TypeScript
9 132 (3.01%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 120 (2.73%) Shell Script
11 95 (2.16%) R
12 86 (1.96%) Bash
13 70 (1.59%) Scala
14 49 (1.12%) C++
15 45 (1.02%) VBA
16 35 (0.80%) Bicep
17 33 (0.75%) C
18 31 (0.71%) VB
19 23 (0.52%) Go
20 22 (0.50%) Perl
Qualifications
1 941 (21.43%) Security Cleared
2 749 (17.06%) SC Cleared
3 319 (7.26%) Degree
4 100 (2.28%) DV Cleared
5 99 (2.25%) Computer Science Degree
6 98 (2.23%) BPSS Clearance
7 63 (1.43%) Azure Certification
8 48 (1.09%) ISTQB
9 47 (1.07%) Master's Degree
10 37 (0.84%) Microsoft Certification
11 30 (0.68%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.39%) DBS Check
13 15 (0.34%) CISSP
14 14 (0.32%) PhD
15 11 (0.25%) ISEB
16 10 (0.23%) CISM
17 9 (0.20%) ACCA
17 9 (0.20%) CIMA
17 9 (0.20%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
17 9 (0.20%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 795 (18.11%) Data Quality
2 326 (7.42%) QA
3 164 (3.73%) GDPR
4 48 (1.09%) Accessibility
5 41 (0.93%) SLA
6 22 (0.50%) PMO
7 21 (0.48%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 19 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 18 (0.41%) NIST
10 17 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
11 16 (0.36%) Solvency II
12 15 (0.34%) IFRS
13 13 (0.30%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.30%) MiFID
14 11 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 11 (0.25%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.23%) HL7
15 10 (0.23%) PCI DSS
16 9 (0.20%) WCAG
17 8 (0.18%) COBIT
System Software
1 434 (9.88%) Docker
2 104 (2.37%) Active Directory
3 45 (1.02%) Virtual Machines
4 32 (0.73%) Oracle RAC
4 32 (0.73%) VMware Infrastructure
5 17 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
6 16 (0.36%) Hyper-V
7 14 (0.32%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.30%) vCloud
9 10 (0.23%) KVM
10 9 (0.20%) Postfix
11 7 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
12 5 (0.11%) RACF
13 4 (0.091%) HDFS
14 2 (0.046%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.046%) GridGain
15 1 (0.023%) Varnish
15 1 (0.023%) vSphere
15 1 (0.023%) XenApp
15 1 (0.023%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 368 (8.38%) Kubernetes
2 343 (7.81%) Terraform
3 90 (2.05%) Grafana
4 79 (1.80%) Ansible
5 46 (1.05%) Prometheus
6 38 (0.87%) Oracle RMAN
7 34 (0.77%) Data Guard
8 26 (0.59%) Control-M
9 21 (0.48%) SCOM
10 20 (0.46%) vCenter Server
11 19 (0.43%) Kibana
12 16 (0.36%) Nagios
12 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.34%) Single Sign-On
13 15 (0.34%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.32%) Netcool
15 13 (0.30%) OpenView
15 13 (0.30%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 10 (0.23%) ITRS Geneos
17 8 (0.18%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 760 (17.31%) Oracle
2 687 (15.65%) Microsoft
3 499 (11.36%) Databricks
4 174 (3.96%) Google
5 156 (3.55%) Informatica
6 121 (2.76%) ServiceNow
6 121 (2.76%) Talend
7 118 (2.69%) SAP
8 81 (1.84%) Splunk
9 75 (1.71%) IBM
10 60 (1.37%) Denodo
11 53 (1.21%) Salesforce
12 50 (1.14%) VMware
13 42 (0.96%) Citrix
14 38 (0.87%) Bloomberg
14 38 (0.87%) Dynatrace
15 33 (0.75%) Alteryx
16 32 (0.73%) BMC
16 32 (0.73%) Murex
17 29 (0.66%) SolarWinds