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

6 months to
9 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,429 3,278 3,801
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.91% 12.15% 10.20%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.99% 36.32% 32.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,971 2,338 2,826
10th Percentile £350 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £410 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -0.46%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £642
90th Percentile £688 £763 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 76 64 54
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.14 £23.13
25th Percentile £32.80 £31.00 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £43.16 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.27% +1.55% -15.00%
75th Percentile £69.58 £53.75 £51.75
90th Percentile £82.63 £67.05 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £45.00 £42.82 £42.50
% change year-on-year +5.10% +0.74% -17.07%

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 11,974 9,026 11,540
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.78% 33.45% 30.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,808 6,220 8,272
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £520 £540
Median % change year-on-year - -3.70% -1.82%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £735 £775 £788
UK median daily rate £513 £513 £525
% change year-on-year - -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 505 225 475
10th Percentile £34.48 £28.27 £35.55
25th Percentile £55.00 £36.48 £49.63
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £79.48 £75.00
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 9 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 9 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 9 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 2,375 £525 -0.94% 921
North of England -4 577 £463 -2.63% 378
Midlands +3 569 £460 +8.24% 220
West Midlands +5 468 £459 +2.00% 104
South East -10 454 £483 -3.50% 441
North West 0 305 £475 +1.06% 211
South West -6 237 £500 +14.29% 152
Yorkshire -9 234 £475 - 109
East of England -13 106 £491 +0.77% 110
East Midlands -2 97 £525 +38.16% 116
North East -12 51 £425 -8.36% 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
1 211 (4.76%) Apache Spark
2 182 (4.11%) Apache Airflow
3 177 (4.00%) Confluence
4 146 (3.30%) Apache
5 96 (2.17%) SAS
6 52 (1.17%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.86%) Oracle Workflow
7 38 (0.86%) WebLogic
8 35 (0.79%) IIS
9 24 (0.54%) Tomcat
10 22 (0.50%) Jupyter
11 20 (0.45%) CMS
12 19 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
13 18 (0.41%) Microsoft Exchange
13 18 (0.41%) WebSphere
14 16 (0.36%) nginx
15 14 (0.32%) Appian
16 13 (0.29%) Tuxedo
17 11 (0.25%) Camunda
18 9 (0.20%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 286 (6.46%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.31%) Microsoft Office
3 39 (0.88%) MS Visio
3 39 (0.88%) Spreadsheet
4 29 (0.65%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 10 (0.23%) Chatbot
6 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
7 4 (0.090%) Acrobat
7 4 (0.090%) Photoshop
8 3 (0.068%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.068%) Notion
8 3 (0.068%) Oracle Smart View
9 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.023%) CPLEX
9 1 (0.023%) InDesign
9 1 (0.023%) Mingle
9 1 (0.023%) Weka
Business Applications
1 41 (0.93%) Oracle EBS
2 40 (0.90%) Dynamics CRM
3 28 (0.63%) Aladdin
4 26 (0.59%) Oracle Payables
5 24 (0.54%) Oracle ERP
6 23 (0.52%) SAP S/4HANA
7 19 (0.43%) Oracle EBS R12
7 19 (0.43%) Oracle Receivables
8 18 (0.41%) NEC Housing
9 16 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
10 13 (0.29%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.25%) Findur
11 11 (0.25%) Oracle General Ledger
11 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.23%) Finacle
13 9 (0.20%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.20%) Fidessa
13 9 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
14 8 (0.18%) Oracle Cash Management
14 8 (0.18%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,418 (32.02%) Azure
2 1,065 (24.05%) AWS
3 833 (18.81%) Power Platform
4 409 (9.23%) Azure DevOps
5 364 (8.22%) GCP
6 323 (7.29%) Azure Data Factory
7 317 (7.16%) GitHub
8 278 (6.28%) Serverless
9 274 (6.19%) Snowflake
10 249 (5.62%) Amazon S3
11 233 (5.26%) dbt
12 213 (4.81%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 179 (4.04%) AWS Lambda
14 165 (3.73%) GitHub Actions
15 82 (1.85%) Entra ID
16 79 (1.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 79 (1.78%) SaaS
17 76 (1.72%) Power Automate
18 74 (1.67%) Amazon EC2
19 68 (1.54%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 45 (1.02%) DNS
2 38 (0.86%) Firewall
3 21 (0.47%) SNMP
4 20 (0.45%) Internet
4 20 (0.45%) Network Security
4 20 (0.45%) SSL
5 19 (0.43%) HTTP
6 18 (0.41%) VPN
7 13 (0.29%) WAN
8 10 (0.23%) TCP/IP
9 9 (0.20%) Wireshark
10 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
10 8 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
11 7 (0.16%) Kerberos
11 7 (0.16%) SAN
11 7 (0.16%) WinSCP
12 6 (0.14%) BGP
12 6 (0.14%) DHCP
12 6 (0.14%) Reverse Proxy
12 6 (0.14%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 767 (17.32%) Power BI
2 584 (13.19%) Data Warehouse
3 568 (12.82%) SQL Server
4 299 (6.75%) Tableau
5 291 (6.57%) Relational Database
6 279 (6.30%) PostgreSQL
7 275 (6.21%) Data Lake
8 222 (5.01%) NoSQL
9 206 (4.65%) Metadata
10 177 (4.00%) Azure SQL Database
11 176 (3.97%) Oracle Database
12 149 (3.36%) BigQuery
13 148 (3.34%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 135 (3.05%) Amazon Redshift
15 130 (2.94%) Delta Lake
16 105 (2.37%) Big Data
17 103 (2.33%) MySQL
17 103 (2.33%) Oracle Reports
18 101 (2.28%) Snowflake Schema
19 91 (2.05%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 467 (10.54%) Git
2 349 (7.88%) JIRA
3 239 (5.40%) Jenkins
4 191 (4.31%) GitLab
5 70 (1.58%) JUnit
6 54 (1.22%) Postman
7 53 (1.20%) Maven
8 50 (1.13%) Selenium
9 48 (1.08%) Mockito
10 46 (1.04%) Gradle
11 35 (0.79%) Oracle Forms
12 33 (0.75%) SonarQube
13 31 (0.70%) Bitbucket
13 31 (0.70%) Cucumber
14 29 (0.65%) MLflow
14 29 (0.65%) Visual Studio
15 27 (0.61%) JMeter
16 26 (0.59%) ERwin
16 26 (0.59%) Liquibase
16 26 (0.59%) Zephyr
General
1 1,170 (26.42%) Finance
2 1,141 (25.76%) Social Skills
3 853 (19.26%) Analytical Skills
4 422 (9.53%) Banking
5 387 (8.74%) Public Sector
6 128 (2.89%) Marketing
7 122 (2.75%) Front Office
8 103 (2.33%) Investment Banking
9 101 (2.28%) Retail
10 92 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
11 76 (1.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 54 (1.22%) Manufacturing
13 53 (1.20%) Legal
14 52 (1.17%) Presentation Skills
15 51 (1.15%) Financial Institution
16 38 (0.86%) Organisational Skills
16 38 (0.86%) Publishing
17 37 (0.84%) Back Office
18 35 (0.79%) Telecoms
19 29 (0.65%) Law
Job Titles
1 943 (21.29%) Developer
2 895 (20.21%) Data Engineer
3 637 (14.38%) Analyst
4 581 (13.12%) Senior
5 305 (6.89%) Lead
6 273 (6.16%) Data Analyst
7 244 (5.51%) Architect
8 208 (4.70%) Consultant
9 187 (4.22%) Business Analyst
10 176 (3.97%) Java Developer
10 176 (3.97%) Senior Data Engineer
11 154 (3.48%) DBA
12 139 (3.14%) Senior Developer
13 127 (2.87%) Software Engineer
14 112 (2.53%) Azure Engineer
15 107 (2.42%) SQL Developer
16 104 (2.35%) C# Developer
17 102 (2.30%) SQL DBA
18 90 (2.03%) Python Developer
19 86 (1.94%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 365 (8.24%) .NET
2 350 (7.90%) REST
3 267 (6.03%) Kafka
4 265 (5.98%) PySpark
5 226 (5.10%) Spring
6 209 (4.72%) Spring Boot
7 203 (4.58%) React
8 184 (4.15%) RESTful
9 158 (3.57%) JSON
10 156 (3.52%) XML
11 140 (3.16%) HTML
12 123 (2.78%) CSS
13 121 (2.73%) AngularJS
14 115 (2.60%) Pandas
15 103 (2.33%) SOAP
16 101 (2.28%) Web Services
17 94 (2.12%) Middleware
18 89 (2.01%) .NET Framework
19 70 (1.58%) Node.js
20 68 (1.54%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 290 (6.55%) Cloud Native
2 180 (4.06%) Data Structures
3 156 (3.52%) Legacy Systems
4 150 (3.39%) Product Ownership
5 125 (2.82%) Distributed Systems
6 84 (1.90%) Derivative
7 81 (1.83%) Onboarding
8 74 (1.67%) Enterprise Software
9 73 (1.65%) Management Information System
10 72 (1.63%) Analytical Mindset
11 68 (1.54%) Self-Motivation
12 66 (1.49%) Data Protection Act
13 61 (1.38%) Clustering
14 56 (1.26%) Algorithms
15 54 (1.22%) Equities
16 51 (1.15%) Fixed Income
16 51 (1.15%) Greenfield Project
17 50 (1.13%) Replication
18 41 (0.93%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
19 39 (0.88%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 296 (6.68%) Linux
2 271 (6.12%) Windows
3 216 (4.88%) Unix
4 100 (2.26%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.54%) AIX
6 21 (0.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
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 (0.090%) Oracle Linux
13 4 (0.090%) Ubuntu
13 4 (0.090%) VMS
14 3 (0.068%) Windows Server 2012
15 2 (0.045%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,195 (26.98%) CI/CD
2 1,142 (25.78%) Analytics
3 1,125 (25.40%) Agile
4 1,077 (24.32%) Data Modelling
5 1,019 (23.01%) ETL
6 985 (22.24%) Business Intelligence
7 905 (20.43%) DevOps
8 869 (19.62%) Problem-Solving
9 846 (19.10%) Data Pipeline
10 738 (16.66%) Data Engineering
11 640 (14.45%) AI
12 586 (13.23%) Migration
13 571 (12.89%) Validation
14 462 (10.43%) Data Governance
15 457 (10.32%) Test Automation
16 455 (10.27%) Decision-Making
17 438 (9.89%) Data Analysis
18 432 (9.75%) Continuous Improvement
19 422 (9.53%) Stakeholder Management
20 389 (8.78%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,605 (36.24%) Python
2 556 (12.55%) Java
3 445 (10.05%) C#
4 340 (7.68%) PL/SQL
5 304 (6.86%) JavaScript
6 241 (5.44%) T-SQL
7 228 (5.15%) PowerShell
8 165 (3.73%) TypeScript
9 135 (3.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 120 (2.71%) Shell Script
11 97 (2.19%) R
12 84 (1.90%) Bash
13 77 (1.74%) Scala
14 53 (1.20%) C++
15 43 (0.97%) VBA
16 37 (0.84%) Bicep
17 35 (0.79%) C
18 32 (0.72%) VB
19 24 (0.54%) Go
20 21 (0.47%) Perl
Qualifications
1 933 (21.07%) Security Cleared
2 754 (17.02%) SC Cleared
3 337 (7.61%) Degree
4 110 (2.48%) Computer Science Degree
5 104 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
6 96 (2.17%) DV Cleared
7 65 (1.47%) Azure Certification
8 50 (1.13%) Master's Degree
9 47 (1.06%) ISTQB
10 38 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
11 31 (0.70%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.38%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.38%) PhD
13 15 (0.34%) CISSP
14 10 (0.23%) CISM
14 10 (0.23%) TOGAF Certification
15 9 (0.20%) ACCA
15 9 (0.20%) CIMA
15 9 (0.20%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
16 8 (0.18%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 784 (17.70%) Data Quality
2 335 (7.56%) QA
3 172 (3.88%) GDPR
4 47 (1.06%) Accessibility
5 43 (0.97%) SLA
6 24 (0.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 21 (0.47%) PMO
7 21 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 19 (0.43%) NIST
9 17 (0.38%) IFRS
9 17 (0.38%) Solvency II
10 15 (0.34%) MiFID
11 14 (0.32%) Actionable Recommendations
11 14 (0.32%) HIPAA
12 13 (0.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 13 (0.29%) PCI DSS
13 12 (0.27%) ISO 20022
14 10 (0.23%) HL7
15 9 (0.20%) GRC
15 9 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 448 (10.12%) Docker
2 104 (2.35%) Active Directory
3 44 (0.99%) Virtual Machines
4 30 (0.68%) VMware Infrastructure
5 27 (0.61%) Oracle RAC
6 18 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
7 15 (0.34%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.32%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.29%) vCloud
10 10 (0.23%) KVM
11 9 (0.20%) Postfix
12 6 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
13 5 (0.11%) RACF
14 4 (0.090%) HDFS
15 2 (0.045%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.045%) GridGain
16 1 (0.023%) Varnish
16 1 (0.023%) vSphere
16 1 (0.023%) XenApp
16 1 (0.023%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 379 (8.56%) Kubernetes
2 359 (8.11%) Terraform
3 97 (2.19%) Grafana
4 82 (1.85%) Ansible
5 51 (1.15%) Prometheus
6 35 (0.79%) Oracle RMAN
7 29 (0.65%) Data Guard
8 22 (0.50%) Control-M
8 22 (0.50%) Kibana
9 20 (0.45%) vCenter Server
10 19 (0.43%) SCOM
11 16 (0.36%) Single Sign-On
11 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.34%) Tivoli
13 14 (0.32%) Nagios
13 14 (0.32%) Netcool
14 13 (0.29%) OpenView
14 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 9 (0.20%) HP Quality Center
15 9 (0.20%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 768 (17.34%) Oracle
2 693 (15.65%) Microsoft
3 506 (11.42%) Databricks
4 170 (3.84%) Google
5 157 (3.54%) Informatica
6 125 (2.82%) ServiceNow
6 125 (2.82%) Talend
7 107 (2.42%) SAP
8 82 (1.85%) Splunk
9 74 (1.67%) IBM
10 62 (1.40%) Denodo
11 52 (1.17%) Salesforce
12 47 (1.06%) VMware
13 43 (0.97%) Citrix
14 40 (0.90%) Bloomberg
14 40 (0.90%) Dynatrace
15 37 (0.84%) Murex
16 31 (0.70%) Alteryx
17 29 (0.65%) BMC
18 28 (0.63%) Adobe