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

6 months to
24 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,465 3,301 3,533
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.77% 11.90% 10.63%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.51% 36.27% 33.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,996 2,328 2,619
10th Percentile £356 £335 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £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 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 82 77 40
10th Percentile £23.08 £24.83 £25.99
25th Percentile £29.96 £31.64 £31.03
Median hourly rate £43.75 £44.50 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year -1.69% +5.95% -8.46%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £54.69
90th Percentile £81.73 £59.50 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £42.82 £41.16
% change year-on-year +3.94% +4.03% -10.30%

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 11,903 9,100 10,641
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.06% 32.80% 32.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,704 6,210 7,496
10th Percentile £363 £345 £356
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £788
UK median daily rate £516 £505 £530
% change year-on-year +2.16% -4.72% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 501 263 335
10th Percentile £30.50 £29.46 £31.25
25th Percentile £52.50 £40.63 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £79.75 £79.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +8.14%

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 24 August 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 24 August 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 24 August 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 2,486 £525 -0.94% 764
North of England -2 580 £474 +1.94% 364
Midlands -2 482 £460 +2.22% 214
South East -9 472 £495 -1.00% 476
West Midlands -1 380 £459 -0.76% 113
North West -1 293 £478 +1.92% 196
Yorkshire 0 248 £475 +1.33% 107
South West -5 227 £505 +18.82% 164
East of England -3 121 £480 -4.10% 106
East Midlands -5 98 £463 +19.35% 101
North East -18 49 £413 -11.29% 68
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
1 207 (4.64%) Apache Airflow
2 190 (4.26%) Apache Spark
3 177 (3.96%) Confluence
4 146 (3.27%) Apache
5 80 (1.79%) SAS
6 76 (1.70%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.83%) Oracle Workflow
8 32 (0.72%) IIS
9 28 (0.63%) WebLogic
10 25 (0.56%) Jupyter
11 23 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
12 20 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
13 17 (0.38%) CMS
14 15 (0.34%) WebSphere
15 14 (0.31%) nginx
16 13 (0.29%) Camunda
17 11 (0.25%) Tomcat
18 9 (0.20%) ArcGIS
18 9 (0.20%) Tuxedo
19 8 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 296 (6.63%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.30%) Microsoft Office
3 37 (0.83%) Spreadsheet
4 33 (0.74%) MS Visio
5 28 (0.63%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.22%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.090%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.090%) Microsoft Project
8 4 (0.090%) Notion
8 4 (0.090%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.067%) CPLEX
10 2 (0.045%) Windchill
11 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.022%) InDesign
11 1 (0.022%) Mingle
11 1 (0.022%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 44 (0.99%) Dynamics CRM
2 42 (0.94%) Oracle EBS
3 25 (0.56%) Aladdin
4 24 (0.54%) Oracle ERP
4 24 (0.54%) Remedy ITSM
4 24 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
5 23 (0.52%) Oracle Payables
6 17 (0.38%) Oracle EBS R12
7 15 (0.34%) Oracle Receivables
8 13 (0.29%) Oracle General Ledger
9 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
9 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
10 10 (0.22%) Finacle
10 10 (0.22%) Oracle Assets
11 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
11 8 (0.18%) Findur
11 8 (0.18%) NetSuite
12 7 (0.16%) Oracle Financials
12 7 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 7 (0.16%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,424 (31.89%) Azure
2 1,047 (23.45%) AWS
3 846 (18.95%) Power Platform
4 416 (9.32%) Azure DevOps
5 390 (8.73%) GCP
6 321 (7.19%) GitHub
7 314 (7.03%) Snowflake
8 312 (6.99%) Azure Data Factory
9 276 (6.18%) Serverless
10 260 (5.82%) dbt
11 216 (4.84%) Amazon S3
12 198 (4.43%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 175 (3.92%) AWS Lambda
14 162 (3.63%) GitHub Actions
15 93 (2.08%) Power Automate
16 92 (2.06%) SaaS
17 87 (1.95%) Entra ID
18 82 (1.84%) PowerApps
19 81 (1.81%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 64 (1.43%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 58 (1.30%) DNS
2 44 (0.99%) Firewall
3 27 (0.60%) Network Security
4 22 (0.49%) SSL
4 22 (0.49%) VPN
5 21 (0.47%) Internet
5 21 (0.47%) SNMP
6 20 (0.45%) HTTP
7 19 (0.43%) TCP/IP
8 15 (0.34%) DHCP
9 11 (0.25%) Broadband
9 11 (0.25%) WAN
10 10 (0.22%) Wireshark
11 9 (0.20%) SAN
11 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
12 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
12 8 (0.18%) Multicast
12 8 (0.18%) RTP
12 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
13 7 (0.16%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 781 (17.49%) Power BI
2 626 (14.02%) Data Warehouse
3 574 (12.86%) SQL Server
4 286 (6.41%) Relational Database
5 268 (6.00%) Tableau
6 267 (5.98%) PostgreSQL
7 260 (5.82%) Data Lake
8 235 (5.26%) Metadata
9 224 (5.02%) NoSQL
10 194 (4.34%) Oracle Database
11 174 (3.90%) Azure SQL Database
12 170 (3.81%) BigQuery
13 145 (3.25%) Amazon Redshift
14 133 (2.98%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 123 (2.75%) Delta Lake
16 104 (2.33%) MySQL
17 98 (2.19%) Big Data
18 96 (2.15%) Amazon Athena
19 88 (1.97%) MongoDB
19 88 (1.97%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 513 (11.49%) Git
2 346 (7.75%) JIRA
3 251 (5.62%) Jenkins
4 200 (4.48%) GitLab
5 75 (1.68%) Selenium
6 71 (1.59%) JUnit
7 62 (1.39%) Gradle
8 59 (1.32%) Postman
9 57 (1.28%) Maven
10 44 (0.99%) Mockito
11 38 (0.85%) Bitbucket
12 37 (0.83%) SonarQube
13 33 (0.74%) JMeter
13 33 (0.74%) Oracle Forms
14 32 (0.72%) Visual Studio
15 30 (0.67%) Zephyr
16 28 (0.63%) TeamCity
17 27 (0.60%) Liquibase
18 25 (0.56%) ERwin
19 24 (0.54%) MLflow
General
1 1,203 (26.94%) Social Skills
2 1,156 (25.89%) Finance
3 921 (20.63%) Analytical Skills
4 474 (10.62%) Banking
5 390 (8.73%) Public Sector
6 145 (3.25%) Marketing
7 133 (2.98%) Front Office
8 123 (2.75%) Retail
9 111 (2.49%) Investment Banking
10 88 (1.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 78 (1.75%) Documentation Skills
12 67 (1.50%) Manufacturing
13 54 (1.21%) Financial Institution
14 50 (1.12%) Legal
14 50 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
15 43 (0.96%) Organisational Skills
16 39 (0.87%) Telecoms
17 37 (0.83%) Back Office
18 35 (0.78%) Law
19 34 (0.76%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 957 (21.43%) Developer
2 845 (18.92%) Data Engineer
3 643 (14.40%) Analyst
4 618 (13.84%) Senior
5 310 (6.94%) Lead
6 262 (5.87%) Data Analyst
7 242 (5.42%) Architect
8 227 (5.08%) Consultant
9 193 (4.32%) Business Analyst
10 181 (4.05%) DBA
11 177 (3.96%) Senior Data Engineer
12 159 (3.56%) Java Developer
13 152 (3.40%) Senior Developer
14 125 (2.80%) Software Engineer
15 111 (2.49%) SQL DBA
15 111 (2.49%) SQL Developer
16 103 (2.31%) Data Architect
17 100 (2.24%) Azure Engineer
18 97 (2.17%) Full-Stack Developer
19 96 (2.15%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 398 (8.91%) .NET
2 394 (8.82%) REST
3 367 (8.22%) Terraform
4 304 (6.81%) PySpark
5 285 (6.38%) Kafka
6 219 (4.90%) Spring
7 208 (4.66%) React
8 198 (4.43%) Spring Boot
9 184 (4.12%) RESTful
10 175 (3.92%) HTML
11 171 (3.83%) JSON
12 161 (3.61%) XML
13 140 (3.14%) CSS
14 127 (2.84%) AngularJS
15 105 (2.35%) Web Services
16 99 (2.22%) Pandas
17 98 (2.19%) Middleware
18 95 (2.13%) SOAP
19 90 (2.02%) .NET Framework
20 74 (1.66%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 288 (6.45%) Cloud Native
2 199 (4.46%) Data Structures
3 181 (4.05%) Product Ownership
4 141 (3.16%) Legacy Systems
5 129 (2.89%) Distributed Systems
6 106 (2.37%) Onboarding
7 101 (2.26%) Enterprise Software
8 87 (1.95%) Management Information System
9 81 (1.81%) Self-Motivation
10 79 (1.77%) Derivative
11 66 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
12 61 (1.37%) Data Protection Act
13 59 (1.32%) Replication
14 58 (1.30%) Clustering
15 56 (1.25%) Reference Data
16 53 (1.19%) AI Agents
17 51 (1.14%) Algorithms
17 51 (1.14%) Fixed Income
18 48 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
19 44 (0.99%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 309 (6.92%) Linux
2 278 (6.23%) Windows
3 209 (4.68%) Unix
4 100 (2.24%) Windows Server
5 20 (0.45%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.40%) AIX
7 15 (0.34%) Solaris
8 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
8 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
9 7 (0.16%) Ubuntu
9 7 (0.16%) VMS
9 7 (0.16%) Windows 10
9 7 (0.16%) zOS
10 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
11 4 (0.090%) Android
11 4 (0.090%) Apple iOS
11 4 (0.090%) Oracle Linux
11 4 (0.090%) Windows Server 2016
12 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
13 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,228 (27.50%) CI/CD
2 1,166 (26.11%) Agile
3 1,116 (24.99%) Data Modelling
4 1,115 (24.97%) Analytics
5 999 (22.37%) ETL
6 987 (22.11%) Business Intelligence
7 904 (20.25%) DevOps
8 876 (19.62%) Problem-Solving
9 858 (19.22%) Data Pipeline
10 744 (16.66%) Data Engineering
11 681 (15.25%) AI
12 636 (14.24%) Validation
13 633 (14.18%) Migration
14 542 (12.14%) Stakeholder Management
15 491 (11.00%) Test Automation
16 489 (10.95%) Data Governance
17 466 (10.44%) Continuous Improvement
18 464 (10.39%) Decision-Making
19 455 (10.19%) Data Analysis
20 369 (8.26%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,585 (35.50%) Python
2 551 (12.34%) Java
3 447 (10.01%) C#
4 356 (7.97%) JavaScript
5 350 (7.84%) PL/SQL
6 243 (5.44%) PowerShell
7 233 (5.22%) T-SQL
8 181 (4.05%) TypeScript
9 138 (3.09%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 131 (2.93%) Shell Script
11 92 (2.06%) Bash
12 84 (1.88%) R
13 62 (1.39%) Scala
14 47 (1.05%) C++
15 40 (0.90%) VBA
16 37 (0.83%) Bicep
17 28 (0.63%) C
18 27 (0.60%) VB
19 22 (0.49%) Go
19 22 (0.49%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 967 (21.66%) Security Cleared
2 771 (17.27%) SC Cleared
3 326 (7.30%) Degree
4 119 (2.67%) Computer Science Degree
5 106 (2.37%) DV Cleared
6 95 (2.13%) BPSS Clearance
7 69 (1.55%) Azure Certification
8 59 (1.32%) ISTQB
9 45 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
10 43 (0.96%) Master's Degree
11 37 (0.83%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.40%) CISSP
13 17 (0.38%) ISEB
14 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
14 16 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 13 (0.29%) ACCA
15 13 (0.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 13 (0.29%) CIMA
15 13 (0.29%) FFIEC
16 12 (0.27%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 833 (18.66%) Data Quality
2 357 (8.00%) QA
3 144 (3.23%) GDPR
4 49 (1.10%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.99%) SLA
6 26 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 21 (0.47%) NIST
8 20 (0.45%) IFRS
8 20 (0.45%) ISO 20022
8 20 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 19 (0.43%) Actionable Recommendations
10 16 (0.36%) MiFID
11 13 (0.29%) PMO
11 13 (0.29%) Solvency II
12 12 (0.27%) COBIT
12 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
13 9 (0.20%) GRC
13 9 (0.20%) HL7
13 9 (0.20%) WCAG
14 8 (0.18%) NCSC
System Software
1 440 (9.85%) Docker
2 130 (2.91%) Active Directory
3 48 (1.08%) VMware Infrastructure
4 38 (0.85%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.83%) Oracle RAC
6 18 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
7 16 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 15 (0.34%) vCloud
9 13 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 10 (0.22%) Hyper-V
11 6 (0.13%) Postfix
12 4 (0.090%) KVM
13 3 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.045%) GridGain
14 2 (0.045%) HDFS
15 1 (0.022%) GPFS
15 1 (0.022%) Microsoft App-V
15 1 (0.022%) RACF
15 1 (0.022%) Slurm Workload Manager
15 1 (0.022%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 375 (8.40%) Kubernetes
2 94 (2.11%) Ansible
3 82 (1.84%) Grafana
4 43 (0.96%) Prometheus
5 42 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
6 40 (0.90%) Control-M
7 39 (0.87%) Data Guard
8 30 (0.67%) SCOM
9 18 (0.40%) Kibana
10 16 (0.36%) Nagios
10 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
11 15 (0.34%) Tivoli
11 15 (0.34%) vCenter Server
12 14 (0.31%) Netcool
13 13 (0.29%) OpenView
13 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
15 11 (0.25%) Microsoft Intune
16 10 (0.22%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
16 10 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 750 (16.80%) Oracle
2 749 (16.77%) Microsoft
3 532 (11.91%) Databricks
4 172 (3.85%) Google
5 144 (3.23%) Informatica
6 123 (2.75%) SAP
7 103 (2.31%) ServiceNow
7 103 (2.31%) Talend
8 86 (1.93%) IBM
9 80 (1.79%) Splunk
10 65 (1.46%) VMware
11 57 (1.28%) Denodo
11 57 (1.28%) Salesforce
12 40 (0.90%) Bloomberg
12 40 (0.90%) BMC
13 39 (0.87%) Dynatrace
14 37 (0.83%) Citrix
15 34 (0.76%) Alteryx
16 33 (0.74%) Murex
17 32 (0.72%) Adobe