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

6 months to
5 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,114 3,010 3,643
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.81% 12.50% 9.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.86% 36.77% 32.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,797 2,155 2,694
10th Percentile £350 £359 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -9.09% -
75th Percentile £588 £625 £650
90th Percentile £688 £767 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -1.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 66 58 54
10th Percentile £26.50 £21.72 £22.65
25th Percentile £34.01 £30.06 £27.28
Median hourly rate £47.50 £37.25 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +27.52% -12.35% -15.00%
75th Percentile £72.63 £57.50 £54.03
90th Percentile £83.00 £76.53 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £52.49 £38.85 £42.50
% change year-on-year +35.13% -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 11,161 8,186 11,102
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.61% 33.99% 30.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,327 5,658 8,007
10th Percentile £358 £358 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -2.78% -4.26%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 530 196 468
10th Percentile £37.25 £28.30 £35.50
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.75 £48.43
Median hourly rate £65.00 £61.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -1.20% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £85.00 £78.23
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.00
% change year-on-year +13.04% -7.26% -0.80%

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 5 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 5 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 5 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 -2 2,284 £523 -2.34% 1,023
Midlands +2 522 £465 +7.89% 224
North of England -9 501 £463 -2.63% 436
West Midlands +5 420 £459 +1.25% 134
South East -15 393 £475 -3.80% 448
North West -5 255 £461 -2.89% 264
Yorkshire -13 211 £475 - 114
South West -3 209 £500 +5.26% 158
East of England -14 101 £495 +1.54% 109
East Midlands -2 98 £525 +35.92% 90
North East -7 47 £425 -8.11% 62
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
1 228 (5.54%) Apache Spark
2 168 (4.08%) Apache Airflow
3 144 (3.50%) Apache
3 144 (3.50%) Confluence
4 85 (2.07%) SAS
5 61 (1.48%) SharePoint
6 31 (0.75%) IIS
6 31 (0.75%) WebLogic
7 28 (0.68%) Oracle Workflow
8 24 (0.58%) Tomcat
9 20 (0.49%) Jupyter
9 20 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
10 16 (0.39%) Appian
11 15 (0.36%) CMS
11 15 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
12 14 (0.34%) nginx
12 14 (0.34%) WebSphere
13 11 (0.27%) Camunda
13 11 (0.27%) Mendix
14 10 (0.24%) HCL Notes
Applications
1 259 (6.30%) Microsoft Excel
2 40 (0.97%) Microsoft Office
2 40 (0.97%) MS Visio
3 29 (0.70%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 29 (0.70%) Spreadsheet
4 10 (0.24%) Chatbot
5 6 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
6 5 (0.12%) Notepad++
7 3 (0.073%) Oracle Smart View
8 2 (0.049%) Notion
8 2 (0.049%) Trello
9 1 (0.024%) InDesign
9 1 (0.024%) Mingle
9 1 (0.024%) Weka
Business Applications
1 38 (0.92%) Oracle EBS
2 30 (0.73%) Dynamics CRM
3 26 (0.63%) Aladdin
4 20 (0.49%) NEC Housing
4 20 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
5 19 (0.46%) Oracle ERP
5 19 (0.46%) SAP S/4HANA
6 17 (0.41%) Oracle EBS R12
7 16 (0.39%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
9 13 (0.32%) Oracle General Ledger
10 12 (0.29%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 10 (0.24%) Findur
11 10 (0.24%) Oracle Assets
11 10 (0.24%) Payment Gateway
12 9 (0.22%) Endur
12 9 (0.22%) NetSuite
12 9 (0.22%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 8 (0.19%) Oracle Cash Management
14 7 (0.17%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,367 (33.23%) Azure
2 1,013 (24.62%) AWS
3 790 (19.20%) Power Platform
4 396 (9.63%) Azure DevOps
5 344 (8.36%) GCP
6 333 (8.09%) Azure Data Factory
7 310 (7.54%) GitHub
8 254 (6.17%) Serverless
9 248 (6.03%) Snowflake
10 234 (5.69%) Amazon S3
11 214 (5.20%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 196 (4.76%) dbt
13 161 (3.91%) AWS Lambda
13 161 (3.91%) GitHub Actions
14 77 (1.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 77 (1.87%) SaaS
15 73 (1.77%) Amazon EC2
15 73 (1.77%) Entra ID
16 72 (1.75%) Power Automate
17 58 (1.41%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 46 (1.12%) DNS
1 46 (1.12%) Firewall
2 20 (0.49%) SNMP
3 17 (0.41%) HTTP
3 17 (0.41%) Network Security
4 16 (0.39%) Internet
5 15 (0.36%) TCP/IP
5 15 (0.36%) VPN
6 14 (0.34%) SSL
6 14 (0.34%) WAN
7 11 (0.27%) Wi-Fi
8 10 (0.24%) LAN
9 9 (0.22%) Wireshark
10 8 (0.19%) 3GPP
11 7 (0.17%) SAN
12 6 (0.15%) IPsec
12 6 (0.15%) RTP
13 5 (0.12%) BGP
13 5 (0.12%) DHCP
13 5 (0.12%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 724 (17.60%) Power BI
2 532 (12.93%) Data Warehouse
3 517 (12.57%) SQL Server
4 282 (6.85%) Data Lake
5 279 (6.78%) Tableau
6 265 (6.44%) PostgreSQL
7 257 (6.25%) Relational Database
8 225 (5.47%) NoSQL
9 204 (4.96%) Metadata
10 188 (4.57%) Azure SQL Database
11 159 (3.86%) Oracle Database
12 152 (3.69%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 134 (3.26%) BigQuery
14 126 (3.06%) Delta Lake
15 114 (2.77%) Amazon Redshift
16 113 (2.75%) Big Data
17 106 (2.58%) MySQL
18 105 (2.55%) Oracle Reports
19 93 (2.26%) Amazon RDS
20 88 (2.14%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 433 (10.53%) Git
2 324 (7.88%) JIRA
3 223 (5.42%) Jenkins
4 201 (4.89%) GitLab
5 65 (1.58%) JUnit
6 57 (1.39%) Selenium
7 54 (1.31%) Postman
8 49 (1.19%) Maven
9 47 (1.14%) Mockito
10 41 (1.00%) Cucumber
10 41 (1.00%) Gradle
11 35 (0.85%) SonarQube
12 31 (0.75%) MLflow
13 28 (0.68%) ERwin
13 28 (0.68%) REST Assured
14 25 (0.61%) Bitbucket
14 25 (0.61%) JMeter
15 24 (0.58%) TeamCity
15 24 (0.58%) Zephyr
16 23 (0.56%) Liquibase
General
1 1,107 (26.91%) Finance
2 1,052 (25.57%) Social Skills
3 763 (18.55%) Analytical Skills
4 392 (9.53%) Banking
5 341 (8.29%) Public Sector
6 113 (2.75%) Marketing
7 112 (2.72%) Front Office
8 98 (2.38%) Investment Banking
9 83 (2.02%) Documentation Skills
10 72 (1.75%) Retail
11 61 (1.48%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 57 (1.39%) Financial Institution
13 53 (1.29%) Legal
14 42 (1.02%) Publishing
15 37 (0.90%) Manufacturing
16 36 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
17 34 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
17 34 (0.83%) Telecoms
18 32 (0.78%) Law
19 30 (0.73%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 856 (20.81%) Data Engineer
2 855 (20.78%) Developer
3 571 (13.88%) Analyst
4 527 (12.81%) Senior
5 281 (6.83%) Lead
6 254 (6.17%) Data Analyst
7 231 (5.61%) Architect
8 190 (4.62%) Consultant
9 168 (4.08%) Business Analyst
10 166 (4.04%) Java Developer
11 155 (3.77%) Senior Data Engineer
12 131 (3.18%) DBA
12 131 (3.18%) Senior Developer
13 124 (3.01%) Software Engineer
14 104 (2.53%) Azure Engineer
15 101 (2.46%) C# Developer
16 89 (2.16%) SQL Developer
17 86 (2.09%) Data Architect
18 85 (2.07%) Python Developer
19 82 (1.99%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 356 (8.65%) .NET
2 339 (8.24%) REST
3 257 (6.25%) PySpark
4 254 (6.17%) Kafka
5 207 (5.03%) Spring
6 197 (4.79%) Spring Boot
7 196 (4.76%) React
8 181 (4.40%) RESTful
9 151 (3.67%) HTML
10 140 (3.40%) JSON
11 136 (3.31%) XML
12 133 (3.23%) CSS
13 119 (2.89%) Pandas
14 109 (2.65%) AngularJS
15 102 (2.48%) SOAP
16 91 (2.21%) Web Services
17 89 (2.16%) Middleware
18 82 (1.99%) .NET Framework
19 77 (1.87%) OAuth
20 69 (1.68%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 273 (6.64%) Cloud Native
2 145 (3.52%) Data Structures
3 136 (3.31%) Legacy Systems
4 127 (3.09%) Product Ownership
5 116 (2.82%) Distributed Systems
6 84 (2.04%) Management Information System
7 80 (1.94%) Derivative
8 77 (1.87%) Onboarding
9 67 (1.63%) Analytical Mindset
9 67 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
10 56 (1.36%) Clustering
11 53 (1.29%) Enterprise Software
11 53 (1.29%) Self-Motivation
12 52 (1.26%) Equities
13 49 (1.19%) Greenfield Project
14 48 (1.17%) Fixed Income
15 43 (1.05%) Algorithms
16 41 (1.00%) Replication
17 39 (0.95%) NHS
18 38 (0.92%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 293 (7.12%) Linux
2 249 (6.05%) Windows
3 202 (4.91%) Unix
4 86 (2.09%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.58%) AIX
6 21 (0.51%) 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 (0.097%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.097%) 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 1,152 (28.00%) CI/CD
2 1,033 (25.11%) Analytics
3 1,021 (24.82%) Data Modelling
4 1,001 (24.33%) Agile
5 997 (24.23%) ETL
6 917 (22.29%) Business Intelligence
7 889 (21.61%) DevOps
8 799 (19.42%) Problem-Solving
9 773 (18.79%) Data Pipeline
10 671 (16.31%) Data Engineering
11 560 (13.61%) AI
12 538 (13.08%) Migration
13 500 (12.15%) Validation
14 453 (11.01%) Data Governance
15 430 (10.45%) Test Automation
16 401 (9.75%) Decision-Making
17 393 (9.55%) Data Analysis
18 370 (8.99%) Performance Tuning
19 368 (8.95%) Continuous Improvement
19 368 (8.95%) Microservices
Programming Languages
1 1,525 (37.07%) Python
2 551 (13.39%) Java
3 439 (10.67%) C#
4 314 (7.63%) JavaScript
5 300 (7.29%) PL/SQL
6 217 (5.27%) T-SQL
7 210 (5.10%) PowerShell
8 140 (3.40%) TypeScript
9 121 (2.94%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 116 (2.82%) Shell Script
11 101 (2.46%) R
12 80 (1.94%) Bash
13 77 (1.87%) Scala
14 59 (1.43%) C++
15 40 (0.97%) VBA
16 38 (0.92%) Bicep
17 30 (0.73%) Perl
18 29 (0.70%) VB
19 26 (0.63%) C
20 25 (0.61%) Go
Qualifications
1 862 (20.95%) Security Cleared
2 694 (16.87%) SC Cleared
3 324 (7.88%) Degree
4 106 (2.58%) Computer Science Degree
5 91 (2.21%) BPSS Clearance
6 76 (1.85%) DV Cleared
7 70 (1.70%) Azure Certification
8 50 (1.22%) Master's Degree
9 49 (1.19%) ISTQB
10 34 (0.83%) Microsoft Certification
11 25 (0.61%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.41%) DBS Check
13 16 (0.39%) PhD
14 12 (0.29%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 11 (0.27%) CISSP
16 10 (0.24%) PMI Certification
16 10 (0.24%) PMP
17 9 (0.22%) CISM
17 9 (0.22%) Oracle Certification
17 9 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 738 (17.94%) Data Quality
2 311 (7.56%) QA
3 175 (4.25%) GDPR
4 43 (1.05%) SLA
5 38 (0.92%) Accessibility
6 32 (0.78%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 28 (0.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.58%) PMO
9 22 (0.53%) NIST
10 18 (0.44%) PCI DSS
11 17 (0.41%) IFRS
12 15 (0.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 14 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 14 (0.34%) MiFID
14 12 (0.29%) Actionable Recommendations
14 12 (0.29%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.29%) Solvency II
15 11 (0.27%) HL7
16 10 (0.24%) GRC
17 8 (0.19%) NCSC
System Software
1 470 (11.42%) Docker
2 93 (2.26%) Active Directory
3 36 (0.88%) Virtual Machines
4 28 (0.68%) VMware Infrastructure
5 23 (0.56%) 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 6 (0.15%) HDFS
11 6 (0.15%) RACF
12 4 (0.097%) Virtual Desktop
12 4 (0.097%) XenApp
12 4 (0.097%) XenDesktop
13 3 (0.073%) Oracle Clusterware
14 2 (0.049%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.049%) GridGain
15 1 (0.024%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 379 (9.21%) Kubernetes
2 332 (8.07%) Terraform
3 106 (2.58%) Grafana
4 68 (1.65%) Ansible
5 62 (1.51%) Prometheus
6 38 (0.92%) Oracle RMAN
7 29 (0.70%) Data Guard
8 19 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
9 18 (0.44%) Kibana
10 17 (0.41%) Control-M
10 17 (0.41%) vCenter Server
11 15 (0.36%) ZABBIX
12 14 (0.34%) Nagios
12 14 (0.34%) Netcool
12 14 (0.34%) Tivoli
13 13 (0.32%) OpenView
13 13 (0.32%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 11 (0.27%) SCOM
15 9 (0.22%) Kiali
15 9 (0.22%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 690 (16.77%) Oracle
2 639 (15.53%) Microsoft
3 493 (11.98%) Databricks
4 159 (3.86%) Google
5 146 (3.55%) Informatica
6 129 (3.14%) ServiceNow
7 118 (2.87%) Talend
8 106 (2.58%) SAP
9 86 (2.09%) Splunk
10 64 (1.56%) IBM
11 62 (1.51%) Denodo
12 49 (1.19%) Salesforce
13 44 (1.07%) VMware
14 43 (1.05%) Citrix
15 37 (0.90%) Dynatrace
16 33 (0.80%) Bloomberg
17 32 (0.78%) OpenAI
18 31 (0.75%) Murex
19 30 (0.73%) HP
19 30 (0.73%) MuleSoft