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

6 months to
28 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,450 3,292 3,588
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.87% 12.00% 10.45%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.34% 36.43% 33.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,974 2,342 2,713
10th Percentile £354 £345 £350
25th Percentile £413 £406 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -0.46%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £640
90th Percentile £688 £751 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 88 58 42
10th Percentile £23.53 £21.59 £24.20
25th Percentile £29.96 £29.37 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.90 £39.00 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.69% -7.14% -8.46%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £56.56
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £45.00 £38.85 £41.50
% change year-on-year +15.85% -6.40% -12.63%

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 11,916 9,037 10,779
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.43% 32.94% 31.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,730 6,231 7,773
10th Percentile £363 £350 £351
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £521 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.07% -6.36% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £651
90th Percentile £738 £775 £793
UK median daily rate £513 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 485 226 381
10th Percentile £34.01 £29.07 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £39.25 £52.50
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 £80.12 £83.73 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +14.54% -12.69% +7.35%

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 2,395 £525 - 862
North of England -5 582 £463 -2.63% 367
Midlands +1 541 £459 +8.00% 217
South East -11 469 £475 -5.00% 411
West Midlands +4 445 £459 +2.00% 113
North West -4 309 £475 +1.28% 199
Yorkshire -8 235 £465 -2.11% 104
South West -5 230 £500 +14.29% 154
East of England -5 121 £480 -4.00% 107
East Midlands -5 92 £488 +25.94% 104
North East -19 51 £419 -9.46% 72
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
1 205 (4.61%) Apache Spark
2 187 (4.20%) Apache Airflow
3 181 (4.07%) Confluence
4 151 (3.39%) Apache
5 92 (2.07%) SAS
6 57 (1.28%) SharePoint
7 40 (0.90%) WebLogic
8 38 (0.85%) Oracle Workflow
9 32 (0.72%) IIS
10 24 (0.54%) Jupyter
11 21 (0.47%) Palantir Foundry
12 19 (0.43%) Tomcat
13 18 (0.40%) CMS
14 17 (0.38%) Microsoft Exchange
14 17 (0.38%) WebSphere
15 16 (0.36%) nginx
16 13 (0.29%) Tuxedo
17 11 (0.25%) Camunda
18 9 (0.20%) Appian
19 8 (0.18%) Apache Superset
Applications
1 289 (6.49%) Microsoft Excel
2 53 (1.19%) Microsoft Office
3 40 (0.90%) MS Visio
4 39 (0.88%) Spreadsheet
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%) Notion
8 4 (0.090%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.067%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.067%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.067%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.022%) InDesign
10 1 (0.022%) Mingle
10 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 42 (0.94%) Dynamics CRM
1 42 (0.94%) Oracle EBS
2 30 (0.67%) Aladdin
3 25 (0.56%) Oracle ERP
4 23 (0.52%) Oracle Payables
4 23 (0.52%) Remedy ITSM
4 23 (0.52%) SAP S/4HANA
5 18 (0.40%) Oracle EBS R12
6 17 (0.38%) NEC Housing
7 16 (0.36%) Oracle Receivables
8 12 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
9 11 (0.25%) Findur
9 11 (0.25%) Oracle Assets
9 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
10 10 (0.22%) Fidessa
10 10 (0.22%) Finacle
11 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
11 8 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
11 8 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 8 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,408 (31.64%) Azure
2 1,049 (23.57%) AWS
3 843 (18.94%) Power Platform
4 399 (8.97%) Azure DevOps
5 389 (8.74%) GCP
6 317 (7.12%) Azure Data Factory
7 312 (7.01%) GitHub
8 292 (6.56%) Snowflake
9 276 (6.20%) Serverless
10 252 (5.66%) dbt
11 241 (5.42%) Amazon S3
12 201 (4.52%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 180 (4.04%) AWS Lambda
14 159 (3.57%) GitHub Actions
15 88 (1.98%) Entra ID
16 84 (1.89%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 81 (1.82%) Power Automate
18 80 (1.80%) SaaS
19 71 (1.60%) PowerApps
20 69 (1.55%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 46 (1.03%) DNS
2 40 (0.90%) Firewall
3 23 (0.52%) SSL
4 21 (0.47%) SNMP
4 21 (0.47%) VPN
5 20 (0.45%) Internet
6 19 (0.43%) HTTP
6 19 (0.43%) Network Security
7 14 (0.31%) TCP/IP
8 12 (0.27%) WAN
9 10 (0.22%) Wireshark
10 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
11 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
11 8 (0.18%) Kerberos
11 8 (0.18%) SAN
11 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
12 7 (0.16%) Broadband
12 7 (0.16%) DHCP
12 7 (0.16%) Multicast
12 7 (0.16%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 779 (17.51%) Power BI
2 620 (13.93%) Data Warehouse
3 576 (12.94%) SQL Server
4 297 (6.67%) Tableau
5 283 (6.36%) Relational Database
6 272 (6.11%) Data Lake
7 269 (6.04%) PostgreSQL
8 223 (5.01%) Metadata
8 223 (5.01%) NoSQL
9 182 (4.09%) Oracle Database
10 174 (3.91%) Azure SQL Database
11 159 (3.57%) BigQuery
12 155 (3.48%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 135 (3.03%) Amazon Redshift
14 124 (2.79%) Delta Lake
15 105 (2.36%) Oracle Reports
16 104 (2.34%) Big Data
17 98 (2.20%) Snowflake Schema
18 95 (2.13%) MySQL
19 89 (2.00%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 493 (11.08%) Git
2 349 (7.84%) JIRA
3 241 (5.42%) Jenkins
4 183 (4.11%) GitLab
5 69 (1.55%) JUnit
6 59 (1.33%) Maven
7 54 (1.21%) Gradle
8 52 (1.17%) Postman
9 50 (1.12%) Selenium
10 46 (1.03%) Mockito
11 34 (0.76%) Oracle Forms
11 34 (0.76%) SonarQube
12 33 (0.74%) Bitbucket
13 31 (0.70%) ERwin
14 30 (0.67%) Visual Studio
15 28 (0.63%) Zephyr
16 27 (0.61%) Liquibase
16 27 (0.61%) Team Foundation Server
16 27 (0.61%) TeamCity
17 25 (0.56%) JMeter
General
1 1,154 (25.93%) Social Skills
2 1,142 (25.66%) Finance
3 886 (19.91%) Analytical Skills
4 423 (9.51%) Banking
5 405 (9.10%) Public Sector
6 137 (3.08%) Marketing
7 126 (2.83%) Front Office
8 101 (2.27%) Retail
9 97 (2.18%) Investment Banking
10 86 (1.93%) Documentation Skills
11 75 (1.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 61 (1.37%) Manufacturing
13 54 (1.21%) Presentation Skills
14 51 (1.15%) Financial Institution
15 49 (1.10%) Legal
16 47 (1.06%) Organisational Skills
17 39 (0.88%) Back Office
17 39 (0.88%) Publishing
18 37 (0.83%) Telecoms
19 33 (0.74%) Law
Job Titles
1 951 (21.37%) Developer
2 890 (20.00%) Data Engineer
3 637 (14.31%) Analyst
4 597 (13.42%) Senior
5 306 (6.88%) Lead
6 282 (6.34%) Data Analyst
7 232 (5.21%) Architect
8 219 (4.92%) Consultant
9 177 (3.98%) Business Analyst
10 175 (3.93%) Senior Data Engineer
11 172 (3.87%) Java Developer
12 170 (3.82%) DBA
13 148 (3.33%) Senior Developer
14 128 (2.88%) Software Engineer
15 115 (2.58%) SQL Developer
16 113 (2.54%) SQL DBA
17 108 (2.43%) Azure Engineer
18 99 (2.22%) C# Developer
19 94 (2.11%) Data Architect
20 93 (2.09%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 363 (8.16%) .NET
1 363 (8.16%) REST
2 276 (6.20%) PySpark
3 269 (6.04%) Kafka
4 226 (5.08%) Spring
5 206 (4.63%) Spring Boot
6 202 (4.54%) React
7 180 (4.04%) RESTful
8 171 (3.84%) JSON
9 160 (3.60%) XML
10 144 (3.24%) HTML
11 129 (2.90%) AngularJS
12 126 (2.83%) CSS
13 110 (2.47%) Pandas
14 103 (2.31%) SOAP
14 103 (2.31%) Web Services
15 94 (2.11%) .NET Framework
16 91 (2.04%) Middleware
17 73 (1.64%) Node.js
18 72 (1.62%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 292 (6.56%) Cloud Native
2 204 (4.58%) Data Structures
3 162 (3.64%) Product Ownership
4 156 (3.51%) Legacy Systems
5 138 (3.10%) Distributed Systems
6 92 (2.07%) Onboarding
7 87 (1.96%) Enterprise Software
8 79 (1.78%) Derivative
8 79 (1.78%) Management Information System
9 73 (1.64%) Analytical Mindset
9 73 (1.64%) Self-Motivation
10 68 (1.53%) Clustering
11 62 (1.39%) Data Protection Act
12 60 (1.35%) Replication
13 55 (1.24%) Algorithms
14 53 (1.19%) Fixed Income
15 51 (1.15%) Equities
16 50 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
17 48 (1.08%) Reference Data
18 43 (0.97%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 292 (6.56%) Linux
2 276 (6.20%) Windows
3 199 (4.47%) Unix
4 103 (2.31%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 23 (0.52%) AIX
7 16 (0.36%) Solaris
8 12 (0.27%) Windows Server 2019
9 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.18%) zOS
11 7 (0.16%) Android
11 7 (0.16%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.13%) Ubuntu
12 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
13 5 (0.11%) Windows 10
14 4 (0.090%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.090%) VMS
15 3 (0.067%) Windows Server 2012
16 2 (0.045%) Data ONTAP
16 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,183 (26.58%) CI/CD
2 1,161 (26.09%) Analytics
3 1,135 (25.51%) Agile
4 1,128 (25.35%) Data Modelling
5 1,033 (23.21%) ETL
6 1,007 (22.63%) Business Intelligence
7 892 (20.04%) DevOps
8 868 (19.51%) Data Pipeline
9 854 (19.19%) Problem-Solving
10 764 (17.17%) Data Engineering
11 639 (14.36%) AI
12 611 (13.73%) Migration
13 593 (13.33%) Validation
14 490 (11.01%) Data Governance
15 462 (10.38%) Decision-Making
16 460 (10.34%) Test Automation
17 457 (10.27%) Continuous Improvement
18 442 (9.93%) Stakeholder Management
19 424 (9.53%) Data Analysis
20 396 (8.90%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,585 (35.62%) Python
2 556 (12.49%) Java
3 438 (9.84%) C#
4 353 (7.93%) PL/SQL
5 314 (7.06%) JavaScript
6 242 (5.44%) T-SQL
7 241 (5.42%) PowerShell
8 164 (3.69%) TypeScript
9 135 (3.03%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 125 (2.81%) Shell Script
11 93 (2.09%) R
12 91 (2.04%) Bash
13 68 (1.53%) Scala
14 45 (1.01%) C++
15 43 (0.97%) VBA
16 39 (0.88%) Bicep
17 32 (0.72%) C
18 31 (0.70%) VB
19 21 (0.47%) Go
20 20 (0.45%) Perl
Qualifications
1 960 (21.57%) Security Cleared
2 767 (17.24%) SC Cleared
3 314 (7.06%) Degree
4 101 (2.27%) Computer Science Degree
5 100 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
5 100 (2.25%) DV Cleared
6 69 (1.55%) Azure Certification
7 49 (1.10%) ISTQB
7 49 (1.10%) Master's Degree
8 38 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
9 29 (0.65%) AWS Certification
10 17 (0.38%) DBS Check
10 17 (0.38%) PhD
11 15 (0.34%) CISSP
12 12 (0.27%) ISEB
13 11 (0.25%) Oracle Certification
14 10 (0.22%) CISM
14 10 (0.22%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 9 (0.20%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
16 8 (0.18%) CBAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 828 (18.61%) Data Quality
2 326 (7.33%) QA
3 160 (3.60%) GDPR
4 49 (1.10%) Accessibility
5 42 (0.94%) SLA
6 21 (0.47%) PMO
7 20 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 18 (0.40%) Actionable Recommendations
8 18 (0.40%) NIST
8 18 (0.40%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 16 (0.36%) Solvency II
10 15 (0.34%) MiFID
11 14 (0.31%) IFRS
12 12 (0.27%) HIPAA
12 12 (0.27%) ISO 20022
13 11 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 10 (0.22%) PCI DSS
15 9 (0.20%) HL7
15 9 (0.20%) WCAG
16 8 (0.18%) COBIT
System Software
1 437 (9.82%) Docker
2 112 (2.52%) Active Directory
3 43 (0.97%) Virtual Machines
4 38 (0.85%) VMware Infrastructure
5 35 (0.79%) Oracle RAC
6 17 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
7 15 (0.34%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.29%) vCloud
10 9 (0.20%) KVM
10 9 (0.20%) Postfix
11 7 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
12 4 (0.090%) HDFS
12 4 (0.090%) RACF
13 2 (0.045%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 2 (0.045%) GridGain
14 1 (0.022%) Microsoft App-V
14 1 (0.022%) vSphere
14 1 (0.022%) XenApp
14 1 (0.022%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 376 (8.45%) Kubernetes
2 348 (7.82%) Terraform
3 90 (2.02%) Grafana
4 81 (1.82%) Ansible
5 46 (1.03%) Prometheus
6 41 (0.92%) Oracle RMAN
7 37 (0.83%) Data Guard
8 28 (0.63%) Control-M
9 24 (0.54%) SCOM
10 19 (0.43%) Kibana
10 19 (0.43%) 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%) Single Sign-On
14 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 10 (0.22%) ITRS Geneos
16 8 (0.18%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 761 (17.10%) Oracle
2 702 (15.78%) Microsoft
3 516 (11.60%) Databricks
4 169 (3.80%) Google
5 156 (3.51%) Informatica
6 125 (2.81%) Talend
7 123 (2.76%) ServiceNow
8 120 (2.70%) SAP
9 80 (1.80%) Splunk
10 77 (1.73%) IBM
11 62 (1.39%) Denodo
12 56 (1.26%) Salesforce
12 56 (1.26%) VMware
13 41 (0.92%) Citrix
14 39 (0.88%) Bloomberg
14 39 (0.88%) Dynatrace
15 36 (0.81%) BMC
16 33 (0.74%) Alteryx
17 31 (0.70%) Murex
18 30 (0.67%) Adobe