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

6 months to
12 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,482 3,272 3,517
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.83% 11.82% 10.55%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.36% 36.19% 33.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,015 2,318 2,632
10th Percentile £356 £338 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -0.46%
75th Percentile £597 £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 84 64 42
10th Percentile £23.23 £23.14 £25.99
25th Percentile £32.80 £29.96 £30.09
Median hourly rate £45.00 £37.25 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.81% -11.31% -8.46%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £56.56
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £41.16
% change year-on-year +14.56% -5.61% -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 11,996 9,042 10,582
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.32% 32.67% 31.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,794 6,213 7,552
10th Percentile £363 £345 £356
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.46% -6.36% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £654
90th Percentile £738 £763 £788
UK median daily rate £513 £505 £530
% change year-on-year +1.49% -4.72% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 494 237 360
10th Percentile £33.70 £29.07 £30.00
25th Percentile £53.13 £36.48 £51.25
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 £79.00 £84.70 £78.75
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £56.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.07% -13.85% +8.33%

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 12 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 12 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 12 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 2,435 £525 - 2,844
North of England -2 594 £475 +2.15% 602
Midlands +1 547 £459 +2.34% 299
South East -11 466 £475 -5.00% 569
West Midlands +4 448 £459 +1.32% 163
North West -4 305 £481 +2.45% 335
Yorkshire -3 250 £474 -0.21% 171
South West -3 222 £500 +17.65% 243
East of England -1 117 £480 -4.00% 149
East Midlands -1 95 £465 +24.00% 136
North East -16 50 £413 -10.81% 107
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
1 208 (4.64%) Apache Airflow
2 194 (4.33%) Apache Spark
3 180 (4.02%) Confluence
4 153 (3.41%) Apache
5 97 (2.16%) SAS
6 66 (1.47%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.83%) Oracle Workflow
7 37 (0.83%) WebLogic
8 31 (0.69%) IIS
9 26 (0.58%) Jupyter
10 21 (0.47%) Palantir Foundry
11 20 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
12 18 (0.40%) CMS
13 17 (0.38%) nginx
13 17 (0.38%) WebSphere
14 16 (0.36%) Tomcat
15 12 (0.27%) Tuxedo
16 11 (0.25%) Camunda
17 7 (0.16%) ArcGIS
17 7 (0.16%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 298 (6.65%) Microsoft Excel
2 49 (1.09%) Microsoft Office
3 37 (0.83%) Spreadsheet
4 35 (0.78%) MS Visio
5 23 (0.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.22%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.089%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.089%) Notion
8 4 (0.089%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.067%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.067%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.045%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.022%) InDesign
11 1 (0.022%) Mingle
11 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 44 (0.98%) Dynamics CRM
2 42 (0.94%) Oracle EBS
3 27 (0.60%) Aladdin
4 25 (0.56%) Oracle ERP
4 25 (0.56%) Remedy ITSM
5 23 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
6 22 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
7 18 (0.40%) Oracle EBS R12
8 14 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 12 (0.27%) NEC Housing
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.25%) Findur
10 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.22%) Finacle
12 9 (0.20%) Oracle Assets
13 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 8 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
14 7 (0.16%) Fidessa
14 7 (0.16%) Oracle 11i
14 7 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 1,414 (31.55%) Azure
2 1,059 (23.63%) AWS
3 853 (19.03%) Power Platform
4 412 (9.19%) Azure DevOps
5 386 (8.61%) GCP
6 321 (7.16%) GitHub
7 317 (7.07%) Azure Data Factory
8 305 (6.80%) Snowflake
9 274 (6.11%) Serverless
10 256 (5.71%) dbt
11 227 (5.06%) Amazon S3
12 200 (4.46%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 178 (3.97%) AWS Lambda
14 165 (3.68%) GitHub Actions
15 92 (2.05%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 91 (2.03%) Entra ID
17 87 (1.94%) Power Automate
18 83 (1.85%) SaaS
19 77 (1.72%) PowerApps
20 71 (1.58%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 57 (1.27%) DNS
2 45 (1.00%) Firewall
3 25 (0.56%) Network Security
4 24 (0.54%) VPN
5 23 (0.51%) SSL
6 21 (0.47%) HTTP
6 21 (0.47%) Internet
6 21 (0.47%) SNMP
7 17 (0.38%) TCP/IP
8 12 (0.27%) DHCP
8 12 (0.27%) WAN
9 10 (0.22%) Wireshark
10 9 (0.20%) Broadband
10 9 (0.20%) SAN
10 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
11 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
11 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
12 7 (0.16%) Kerberos
12 7 (0.16%) LAN
12 7 (0.16%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 785 (17.51%) Power BI
2 635 (14.17%) Data Warehouse
3 569 (12.70%) SQL Server
4 276 (6.16%) Relational Database
4 276 (6.16%) Tableau
5 271 (6.05%) PostgreSQL
6 264 (5.89%) Data Lake
7 227 (5.06%) Metadata
8 221 (4.93%) NoSQL
9 189 (4.22%) Oracle Database
10 172 (3.84%) Azure SQL Database
11 163 (3.64%) BigQuery
12 145 (3.24%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 136 (3.03%) Amazon Redshift
14 124 (2.77%) Delta Lake
15 104 (2.32%) MySQL
16 102 (2.28%) Oracle Reports
17 100 (2.23%) Big Data
18 93 (2.07%) Snowflake Schema
19 90 (2.01%) Pentaho
Development Applications
1 526 (11.74%) Git
2 355 (7.92%) JIRA
3 262 (5.85%) Jenkins
4 201 (4.48%) GitLab
5 71 (1.58%) JUnit
6 64 (1.43%) Postman
7 61 (1.36%) Maven
8 59 (1.32%) Selenium
9 58 (1.29%) Gradle
10 49 (1.09%) Mockito
11 41 (0.91%) SonarQube
12 36 (0.80%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.78%) Zephyr
14 33 (0.74%) Oracle Forms
15 30 (0.67%) JMeter
15 30 (0.67%) Visual Studio
16 28 (0.62%) TeamCity
17 27 (0.60%) ERwin
17 27 (0.60%) Liquibase
18 26 (0.58%) MLflow
General
1 1,188 (26.51%) Social Skills
2 1,142 (25.48%) Finance
3 916 (20.44%) Analytical Skills
4 442 (9.86%) Banking
5 413 (9.21%) Public Sector
6 140 (3.12%) Marketing
7 130 (2.90%) Front Office
8 115 (2.57%) Retail
9 103 (2.30%) Investment Banking
10 82 (1.83%) Documentation Skills
11 81 (1.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 69 (1.54%) Manufacturing
13 52 (1.16%) Financial Institution
13 52 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
14 49 (1.09%) Legal
15 45 (1.00%) Organisational Skills
16 39 (0.87%) Telecoms
17 36 (0.80%) Back Office
18 35 (0.78%) Publishing
19 31 (0.69%) Law
Job Titles
1 948 (21.15%) Developer
2 889 (19.83%) Data Engineer
3 639 (14.26%) Analyst
4 599 (13.36%) Senior
5 310 (6.92%) Lead
6 268 (5.98%) Data Analyst
7 228 (5.09%) Architect
8 225 (5.02%) Consultant
9 187 (4.17%) Business Analyst
10 184 (4.11%) DBA
11 172 (3.84%) Senior Data Engineer
12 168 (3.75%) Java Developer
13 149 (3.32%) Senior Developer
14 128 (2.86%) Software Engineer
15 116 (2.59%) SQL DBA
16 110 (2.45%) SQL Developer
17 100 (2.23%) Azure Engineer
18 95 (2.12%) C# Developer
19 93 (2.07%) Data Architect
19 93 (2.07%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 375 (8.37%) .NET
1 375 (8.37%) REST
2 288 (6.43%) PySpark
3 271 (6.05%) Kafka
4 225 (5.02%) Spring
5 202 (4.51%) Spring Boot
6 198 (4.42%) React
7 180 (4.02%) RESTful
8 166 (3.70%) JSON
9 157 (3.50%) XML
10 154 (3.44%) HTML
11 128 (2.86%) AngularJS
11 128 (2.86%) CSS
12 104 (2.32%) Pandas
13 103 (2.30%) Web Services
14 99 (2.21%) SOAP
15 94 (2.10%) Middleware
16 89 (1.99%) .NET Framework
17 74 (1.65%) Node.js
18 68 (1.52%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 295 (6.58%) Cloud Native
2 199 (4.44%) Data Structures
3 170 (3.79%) Product Ownership
4 152 (3.39%) Legacy Systems
5 128 (2.86%) Distributed Systems
6 97 (2.16%) Onboarding
7 95 (2.12%) Enterprise Software
8 85 (1.90%) Management Information System
9 79 (1.76%) Derivative
9 79 (1.76%) Self-Motivation
10 68 (1.52%) Analytical Mindset
11 65 (1.45%) Data Protection Act
12 62 (1.38%) Replication
13 60 (1.34%) Clustering
14 52 (1.16%) Algorithms
14 52 (1.16%) Fixed Income
15 51 (1.14%) Reference Data
16 48 (1.07%) AI Agents
16 48 (1.07%) Equities
16 48 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 309 (6.89%) Linux
2 276 (6.16%) Windows
3 203 (4.53%) Unix
4 105 (2.34%) Windows Server
5 26 (0.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.47%) AIX
7 18 (0.40%) Solaris
8 13 (0.29%) Windows Server 2019
9 12 (0.27%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.18%) VMS
11 7 (0.16%) Ubuntu
11 7 (0.16%) zOS
12 6 (0.13%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 4 (0.089%) Oracle Linux
15 3 (0.067%) Android
15 3 (0.067%) Apple iOS
15 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
16 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,212 (27.04%) CI/CD
2 1,171 (26.13%) Agile
3 1,148 (25.61%) Analytics
4 1,145 (25.55%) Data Modelling
5 1,040 (23.20%) ETL
6 1,005 (22.42%) Business Intelligence
7 917 (20.46%) DevOps
8 884 (19.72%) Problem-Solving
9 881 (19.66%) Data Pipeline
10 754 (16.82%) Data Engineering
11 655 (14.61%) AI
12 632 (14.10%) Migration
13 616 (13.74%) Validation
14 498 (11.11%) Stakeholder Management
15 492 (10.98%) Data Governance
16 480 (10.71%) Test Automation
17 474 (10.58%) Decision-Making
18 470 (10.49%) Continuous Improvement
19 437 (9.75%) Data Analysis
20 381 (8.50%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,592 (35.52%) Python
2 554 (12.36%) Java
3 435 (9.71%) C#
4 360 (8.03%) PL/SQL
5 340 (7.59%) JavaScript
6 243 (5.42%) PowerShell
7 237 (5.29%) T-SQL
8 166 (3.70%) TypeScript
9 142 (3.17%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 128 (2.86%) Shell Script
11 104 (2.32%) Bash
12 80 (1.78%) R
13 66 (1.47%) Scala
14 46 (1.03%) VBA
15 45 (1.00%) C++
16 39 (0.87%) Bicep
17 27 (0.60%) C
17 27 (0.60%) VB
18 21 (0.47%) Kotlin
18 21 (0.47%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,010 (22.53%) Security Cleared
2 815 (18.18%) SC Cleared
3 318 (7.10%) Degree
4 114 (2.54%) Computer Science Degree
5 103 (2.30%) DV Cleared
6 97 (2.16%) BPSS Clearance
7 68 (1.52%) Azure Certification
8 61 (1.36%) ISTQB
9 44 (0.98%) Master's Degree
9 44 (0.98%) Microsoft Certification
10 36 (0.80%) AWS Certification
11 18 (0.40%) CISSP
12 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
13 14 (0.31%) ISEB
13 14 (0.31%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 12 (0.27%) FFIEC
14 12 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
14 12 (0.27%) PhD
15 11 (0.25%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 10 (0.22%) ACCA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 834 (18.61%) Data Quality
2 345 (7.70%) QA
3 152 (3.39%) GDPR
4 46 (1.03%) Accessibility
5 42 (0.94%) SLA
6 25 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 22 (0.49%) NIST
7 22 (0.49%) PMO
8 21 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 19 (0.42%) Actionable Recommendations
10 17 (0.38%) IFRS
10 17 (0.38%) ISO 20022
11 14 (0.31%) MiFID
11 14 (0.31%) Solvency II
12 13 (0.29%) HIPAA
13 12 (0.27%) COBIT
13 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
14 10 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 9 (0.20%) HL7
15 9 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 454 (10.13%) Docker
2 124 (2.77%) Active Directory
3 47 (1.05%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.94%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.83%) Oracle RAC
6 17 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
7 14 (0.31%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.29%) vCloud
9 12 (0.27%) Hyper-V
10 9 (0.20%) Postfix
10 9 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
11 7 (0.16%) KVM
12 3 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
12 3 (0.067%) HDFS
13 2 (0.045%) GridGain
14 1 (0.022%) GPFS
14 1 (0.022%) RACF
14 1 (0.022%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 1 (0.022%) Varnish
14 1 (0.022%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 392 (8.75%) Kubernetes
2 361 (8.05%) Terraform
3 92 (2.05%) Grafana
4 88 (1.96%) Ansible
5 45 (1.00%) Prometheus
6 44 (0.98%) Oracle RMAN
7 39 (0.87%) Data Guard
8 35 (0.78%) Control-M
9 28 (0.62%) SCOM
10 18 (0.40%) Kibana
11 17 (0.38%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.36%) Nagios
12 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.33%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.31%) Netcool
15 13 (0.29%) OpenView
15 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 11 (0.25%) Microsoft Clustering
17 10 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
18 9 (0.20%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
Vendors
1 768 (17.14%) Oracle
2 733 (16.35%) Microsoft
3 520 (11.60%) Databricks
4 173 (3.86%) Google
5 157 (3.50%) Informatica
6 125 (2.79%) Talend
7 123 (2.74%) SAP
8 119 (2.66%) ServiceNow
9 83 (1.85%) IBM
10 81 (1.81%) Splunk
11 66 (1.47%) Denodo
12 63 (1.41%) VMware
13 55 (1.23%) Salesforce
14 39 (0.87%) Bloomberg
14 39 (0.87%) Citrix
15 38 (0.85%) BMC
15 38 (0.85%) Dynatrace
16 33 (0.74%) Alteryx
16 33 (0.74%) Murex
17 32 (0.71%) Adobe