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

6 months to
13 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,477 3,258 3,513
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.83% 11.78% 10.53%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.37% 36.16% 33.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,016 2,305 2,624
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 £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 83 65 42
10th Percentile £23.15 £23.18 £25.99
25th Percentile £31.86 £30.25 £30.09
Median hourly rate £45.00 £37.50 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -10.71% -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 11,981 9,011 10,587
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.29% 32.59% 31.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,773 6,183 7,551
10th Percentile £363 £345 £358
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 £656
90th Percentile £738 £763 £788
UK median daily rate £515 £503 £530
% change year-on-year +2.49% -5.19% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 497 240 360
10th Percentile £33.70 £29.07 £30.00
25th Percentile £53.53 £37.45 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.13 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.79% -12.12% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £84.55 £78.75
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +17.12% -14.62% +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 13 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 13 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 13 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 2,434 £525 -0.47% 1,437
North of England -3 591 £475 +1.28% 434
Midlands +1 540 £459 +2.68% 237
South East -10 469 £475 -5.00% 497
West Midlands +4 441 £459 +1.25% 132
North West -2 301 £500 +6.50% 238
Yorkshire -2 251 £470 -1.16% 124
South West -3 223 £500 +17.65% 177
East of England 0 120 £488 -2.50% 105
East Midlands -2 95 £465 +24.00% 105
North East -17 50 £413 -10.81% 81
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 (4.62%) Apache Airflow
2 194 (4.33%) Apache Spark
3 176 (3.93%) Confluence
4 153 (3.42%) Apache
5 98 (2.19%) SAS
6 68 (1.52%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.83%) Oracle Workflow
8 34 (0.76%) WebLogic
9 31 (0.69%) IIS
10 26 (0.58%) Jupyter
11 20 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
11 20 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
12 17 (0.38%) CMS
12 17 (0.38%) nginx
12 17 (0.38%) WebSphere
13 16 (0.36%) Tomcat
14 12 (0.27%) Tuxedo
15 11 (0.25%) Camunda
16 7 (0.16%) ArcGIS
16 7 (0.16%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 290 (6.48%) Microsoft Excel
2 48 (1.07%) Microsoft Office
3 35 (0.78%) Spreadsheet
4 34 (0.76%) MS Visio
5 22 (0.49%) 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 43 (0.96%) Dynamics CRM
2 42 (0.94%) Oracle EBS
3 27 (0.60%) Aladdin
4 26 (0.58%) Remedy ITSM
5 25 (0.56%) Oracle ERP
6 23 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
7 22 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
8 18 (0.40%) Oracle EBS R12
9 14 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
10 12 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
11 11 (0.25%) Findur
11 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
11 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.22%) Finacle
13 9 (0.20%) Oracle Assets
14 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
14 8 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
15 7 (0.16%) Fidessa
15 7 (0.16%) Oracle 11i
15 7 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 1,409 (31.47%) Azure
2 1,054 (23.54%) AWS
3 849 (18.96%) Power Platform
4 408 (9.11%) Azure DevOps
5 387 (8.64%) GCP
6 320 (7.15%) GitHub
7 317 (7.08%) Azure Data Factory
8 309 (6.90%) Snowflake
9 271 (6.05%) Serverless
10 255 (5.70%) dbt
11 222 (4.96%) Amazon S3
12 199 (4.44%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 175 (3.91%) AWS Lambda
14 163 (3.64%) GitHub Actions
15 89 (1.99%) Entra ID
16 88 (1.97%) Power Automate
17 87 (1.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 83 (1.85%) SaaS
19 78 (1.74%) PowerApps
20 65 (1.45%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 58 (1.30%) DNS
2 45 (1.01%) 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
1 782 (17.47%) Power BI
2 637 (14.23%) Data Warehouse
3 567 (12.66%) SQL Server
4 280 (6.25%) Relational Database
5 273 (6.10%) Tableau
6 272 (6.08%) PostgreSQL
7 268 (5.99%) Data Lake
8 228 (5.09%) Metadata
9 219 (4.89%) NoSQL
10 191 (4.27%) Oracle Database
11 173 (3.86%) Azure SQL Database
12 163 (3.64%) BigQuery
13 142 (3.17%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 140 (3.13%) Amazon Redshift
15 123 (2.75%) Delta Lake
16 105 (2.35%) MySQL
17 102 (2.28%) Oracle Reports
18 99 (2.21%) Big Data
19 93 (2.08%) Snowflake Schema
20 91 (2.03%) Pentaho
Development Applications
1 521 (11.64%) Git
2 351 (7.84%) JIRA
3 262 (5.85%) Jenkins
4 200 (4.47%) GitLab
5 73 (1.63%) JUnit
6 64 (1.43%) Postman
7 60 (1.34%) Maven
7 60 (1.34%) Selenium
8 59 (1.32%) Gradle
9 47 (1.05%) Mockito
10 41 (0.92%) SonarQube
11 36 (0.80%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.78%) Zephyr
13 33 (0.74%) Oracle Forms
14 32 (0.71%) JMeter
15 31 (0.69%) Visual Studio
16 28 (0.63%) TeamCity
17 27 (0.60%) ERwin
17 27 (0.60%) Liquibase
18 24 (0.54%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,183 (26.42%) Social Skills
2 1,138 (25.42%) Finance
3 912 (20.37%) Analytical Skills
4 446 (9.96%) Banking
5 407 (9.09%) Public Sector
6 139 (3.10%) Marketing
7 130 (2.90%) Front Office
8 116 (2.59%) Retail
9 104 (2.32%) Investment Banking
10 82 (1.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 81 (1.81%) Documentation Skills
12 71 (1.59%) Manufacturing
13 52 (1.16%) Financial Institution
13 52 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
14 49 (1.09%) Legal
15 45 (1.01%) Organisational Skills
16 39 (0.87%) Telecoms
17 36 (0.80%) Back Office
18 35 (0.78%) Publishing
19 33 (0.74%) Law
Job Titles
1 946 (21.13%) Developer
2 887 (19.81%) Data Engineer
3 631 (14.09%) Analyst
4 599 (13.38%) Senior
5 309 (6.90%) Lead
6 266 (5.94%) Data Analyst
7 231 (5.16%) Architect
8 226 (5.05%) Consultant
9 186 (4.15%) Business Analyst
9 186 (4.15%) DBA
10 172 (3.84%) Senior Data Engineer
11 171 (3.82%) Java Developer
12 149 (3.33%) Senior Developer
13 128 (2.86%) Software Engineer
14 118 (2.64%) SQL DBA
15 110 (2.46%) SQL Developer
16 99 (2.21%) Azure Engineer
17 96 (2.14%) Data Architect
18 95 (2.12%) Full-Stack Developer
19 94 (2.10%) C# Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 379 (8.47%) REST
2 375 (8.38%) .NET
3 288 (6.43%) PySpark
4 277 (6.19%) Kafka
5 226 (5.05%) Spring
6 204 (4.56%) Spring Boot
7 196 (4.38%) React
8 184 (4.11%) RESTful
9 165 (3.69%) JSON
10 158 (3.53%) XML
11 157 (3.51%) HTML
12 130 (2.90%) CSS
13 127 (2.84%) AngularJS
14 104 (2.32%) Web Services
15 102 (2.28%) Pandas
16 97 (2.17%) Middleware
16 97 (2.17%) SOAP
17 89 (1.99%) .NET Framework
18 72 (1.61%) Node.js
19 67 (1.50%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 296 (6.61%) Cloud Native
2 200 (4.47%) Data Structures
3 169 (3.77%) Product Ownership
4 150 (3.35%) Legacy Systems
5 129 (2.88%) Distributed Systems
6 98 (2.19%) Onboarding
7 96 (2.14%) Enterprise Software
8 84 (1.88%) 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 61 (1.36%) Clustering
14 52 (1.16%) Fixed Income
14 52 (1.16%) Reference Data
15 51 (1.14%) Algorithms
16 49 (1.09%) AI Agents
17 48 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
18 47 (1.05%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 312 (6.97%) Linux
2 277 (6.19%) Windows
3 208 (4.65%) Unix
4 105 (2.35%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.54%) 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 1,207 (26.96%) CI/CD
2 1,167 (26.07%) Agile
3 1,142 (25.51%) Analytics
4 1,140 (25.46%) Data Modelling
5 1,036 (23.14%) ETL
6 1,002 (22.38%) Business Intelligence
7 912 (20.37%) DevOps
8 879 (19.63%) Problem-Solving
9 878 (19.61%) Data Pipeline
10 750 (16.75%) Data Engineering
11 657 (14.68%) AI
12 633 (14.14%) Migration
13 622 (13.89%) Validation
14 501 (11.19%) Stakeholder Management
15 494 (11.03%) Data Governance
16 486 (10.86%) Test Automation
17 468 (10.45%) Continuous Improvement
18 463 (10.34%) Decision-Making
19 434 (9.69%) Data Analysis
20 379 (8.47%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,592 (35.56%) Python
2 555 (12.40%) Java
3 432 (9.65%) C#
4 361 (8.06%) PL/SQL
5 341 (7.62%) JavaScript
6 243 (5.43%) PowerShell
7 234 (5.23%) T-SQL
8 167 (3.73%) TypeScript
9 139 (3.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 127 (2.84%) Shell Script
11 105 (2.35%) Bash
12 79 (1.76%) R
13 67 (1.50%) Scala
14 45 (1.01%) VBA
15 44 (0.98%) C++
16 37 (0.83%) Bicep
17 27 (0.60%) C
17 27 (0.60%) VB
18 21 (0.47%) Kotlin
19 20 (0.45%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,006 (22.47%) Security Cleared
2 811 (18.11%) SC Cleared
3 317 (7.08%) Degree
4 112 (2.50%) Computer Science Degree
5 103 (2.30%) DV Cleared
6 96 (2.14%) BPSS Clearance
7 67 (1.50%) Azure Certification
8 63 (1.41%) ISTQB
9 45 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
10 43 (0.96%) Master's Degree
11 36 (0.80%) AWS Certification
12 19 (0.42%) CISSP
13 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
13 16 (0.36%) ISEB
13 16 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 12 (0.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 12 (0.27%) FFIEC
14 12 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
14 12 (0.27%) PhD
15 10 (0.22%) ACCA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 833 (18.61%) Data Quality
2 349 (7.80%) QA
3 151 (3.37%) GDPR
4 47 (1.05%) Accessibility
5 41 (0.92%) SLA
6 26 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 23 (0.51%) NIST
8 21 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 19 (0.42%) Actionable Recommendations
10 17 (0.38%) IFRS
10 17 (0.38%) ISO 20022
10 17 (0.38%) PMO
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
1 452 (10.10%) Docker
2 123 (2.75%) Active Directory
3 48 (1.07%) VMware Infrastructure
4 41 (0.92%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.85%) 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%) Virtual Desktop
11 8 (0.18%) Postfix
12 7 (0.16%) KVM
13 3 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 3 (0.067%) HDFS
14 2 (0.045%) GridGain
15 1 (0.022%) GPFS
15 1 (0.022%) RACF
15 1 (0.022%) Slurm Workload Manager
15 1 (0.022%) Varnish
15 1 (0.022%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 391 (8.73%) Kubernetes
2 361 (8.06%) Terraform
3 90 (2.01%) Grafana
4 88 (1.97%) Ansible
5 45 (1.01%) Oracle RMAN
5 45 (1.01%) Prometheus
6 40 (0.89%) Data Guard
7 37 (0.83%) Control-M
8 28 (0.63%) SCOM
9 18 (0.40%) Kibana
10 17 (0.38%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.36%) Nagios
11 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.34%) Tivoli
13 14 (0.31%) Netcool
14 13 (0.29%) OpenView
14 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
16 10 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
17 9 (0.20%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
Vendors
1 768 (17.15%) Oracle
2 730 (16.31%) Microsoft
3 523 (11.68%) Databricks
4 171 (3.82%) Google
5 157 (3.51%) Informatica
6 126 (2.81%) Talend
7 125 (2.79%) SAP
8 117 (2.61%) ServiceNow
9 86 (1.92%) IBM
10 81 (1.81%) Splunk
11 67 (1.50%) Denodo
12 64 (1.43%) VMware
13 55 (1.23%) Salesforce
14 39 (0.87%) Bloomberg
14 39 (0.87%) BMC
14 39 (0.87%) Citrix
15 38 (0.85%) Dynatrace
16 33 (0.74%) Alteryx
16 33 (0.74%) Murex
17 32 (0.71%) Adobe