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

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,480 3,284 3,497
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.81% 11.90% 10.54%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.49% 36.23% 32.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,018 2,316 2,614
10th Percentile £357 £335 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £539
Median % change year-on-year - -7.28% +0.33%
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 78 73 41
10th Percentile £23.00 £23.91 £25.99
25th Percentile £29.96 £30.96 £30.37
Median hourly rate £41.00 £42.82 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year -4.24% +3.17% -9.55%
75th Percentile £70.00 £53.75 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £61.50 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £40.58
% change year-on-year +14.56% -4.27% -11.56%

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 11,950 9,065 10,607
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.18% 32.85% 31.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,760 6,202 7,534
10th Percentile £363 £344 £356
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 £653
90th Percentile £738 £762 £788
UK median daily rate £518 £503 £535
% change year-on-year +2.99% -6.07% -2.73%
Number of hourly rates quoted 490 255 347
10th Percentile £30.98 £29.07 £30.00
25th Percentile £53.13 £37.13 £50.69
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.04% -13.08% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.08 £80.00 £79.50
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +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 20 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 20 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 20 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 2,474 £525 -0.94% 2,224
North of England -1 586 £475 +1.17% 561
Midlands -2 505 £459 +2.00% 284
South East -11 473 £495 -1.00% 571
West Midlands -1 400 £459 -0.22% 154
North West -2 294 £487 +3.62% 314
Yorkshire -1 254 £475 - 154
South West -5 225 £500 +17.65% 200
East of England 0 121 £488 -2.55% 146
East Midlands -3 101 £473 +22.86% 130
North East -14 50 £413 -11.05% 99
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
1 209 (4.67%) Apache Airflow
2 194 (4.33%) Apache Spark
3 182 (4.06%) Confluence
4 148 (3.30%) Apache
5 82 (1.83%) SAS
6 76 (1.70%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.83%) Oracle Workflow
8 31 (0.69%) IIS
9 29 (0.65%) WebLogic
10 25 (0.56%) Jupyter
11 21 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
11 21 (0.47%) Palantir Foundry
12 17 (0.38%) CMS
13 16 (0.36%) nginx
13 16 (0.36%) WebSphere
14 14 (0.31%) Tomcat
15 13 (0.29%) Camunda
16 12 (0.27%) Tuxedo
17 9 (0.20%) ArcGIS
18 8 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 294 (6.56%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.29%) Microsoft Office
3 36 (0.80%) Spreadsheet
4 35 (0.78%) MS Visio
5 27 (0.60%) 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 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.022%) InDesign
10 1 (0.022%) Mingle
10 1 (0.022%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.022%) Weka
10 1 (0.022%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 44 (0.98%) Dynamics CRM
2 42 (0.94%) Oracle EBS
3 25 (0.56%) Aladdin
3 25 (0.56%) Remedy ITSM
4 24 (0.54%) Oracle ERP
5 23 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
6 22 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
7 17 (0.38%) Oracle EBS R12
8 14 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
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%) Findur
14 7 (0.16%) OpenText MBPM
14 7 (0.16%) Oracle Financials
14 7 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
14 7 (0.16%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,430 (31.92%) Azure
2 1,057 (23.59%) AWS
3 853 (19.04%) Power Platform
4 417 (9.31%) Azure DevOps
5 386 (8.62%) GCP
6 321 (7.17%) GitHub
7 316 (7.05%) Azure Data Factory
8 313 (6.99%) Snowflake
9 271 (6.05%) Serverless
10 254 (5.67%) dbt
11 215 (4.80%) Amazon S3
12 201 (4.49%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 171 (3.82%) AWS Lambda
14 161 (3.59%) GitHub Actions
15 91 (2.03%) Power Automate
16 90 (2.01%) SaaS
17 88 (1.96%) Entra ID
18 83 (1.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 83 (1.85%) PowerApps
19 62 (1.38%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 57 (1.27%) DNS
2 45 (1.00%) Firewall
3 27 (0.60%) Network Security
4 23 (0.51%) SSL
5 22 (0.49%) VPN
6 21 (0.47%) HTTP
6 21 (0.47%) SNMP
7 20 (0.45%) Internet
8 19 (0.42%) TCP/IP
9 13 (0.29%) DHCP
10 12 (0.27%) WAN
11 11 (0.25%) Broadband
12 10 (0.22%) Wireshark
13 9 (0.20%) SAN
13 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
14 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
14 8 (0.18%) Multicast
14 8 (0.18%) RTP
14 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
15 7 (0.16%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 786 (17.54%) Power BI
2 633 (14.13%) Data Warehouse
3 573 (12.79%) SQL Server
4 282 (6.29%) Relational Database
5 273 (6.09%) PostgreSQL
6 269 (6.00%) Tableau
7 264 (5.89%) Data Lake
8 230 (5.13%) Metadata
9 228 (5.09%) NoSQL
10 191 (4.26%) Oracle Database
11 179 (4.00%) Azure SQL Database
12 167 (3.73%) BigQuery
13 143 (3.19%) Amazon Redshift
14 135 (3.01%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 125 (2.79%) Delta Lake
16 104 (2.32%) MySQL
17 95 (2.12%) Big Data
18 94 (2.10%) Oracle Reports
19 93 (2.08%) Amazon Athena
20 90 (2.01%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 522 (11.65%) Git
2 353 (7.88%) JIRA
3 254 (5.67%) Jenkins
4 200 (4.46%) GitLab
5 73 (1.63%) JUnit
6 70 (1.56%) Selenium
7 64 (1.43%) Postman
8 61 (1.36%) Gradle
9 59 (1.32%) Maven
10 46 (1.03%) Mockito
11 39 (0.87%) Bitbucket
11 39 (0.87%) SonarQube
12 35 (0.78%) Zephyr
13 33 (0.74%) Oracle Forms
14 32 (0.71%) JMeter
14 32 (0.71%) Visual Studio
15 28 (0.63%) TeamCity
16 27 (0.60%) Liquibase
17 25 (0.56%) ERwin
18 23 (0.51%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,207 (26.94%) Social Skills
2 1,152 (25.71%) Finance
3 915 (20.42%) Analytical Skills
4 466 (10.40%) Banking
5 397 (8.86%) Public Sector
6 141 (3.15%) Marketing
7 134 (2.99%) Front Office
8 119 (2.66%) Retail
9 108 (2.41%) Investment Banking
10 87 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 78 (1.74%) Documentation Skills
12 69 (1.54%) Manufacturing
13 52 (1.16%) Financial Institution
13 52 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
14 50 (1.12%) Legal
15 42 (0.94%) Organisational Skills
16 39 (0.87%) Telecoms
17 37 (0.83%) Back Office
18 35 (0.78%) Law
19 33 (0.74%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 958 (21.38%) Developer
2 859 (19.17%) Data Engineer
3 638 (14.24%) Analyst
4 614 (13.71%) Senior
5 311 (6.94%) Lead
6 263 (5.87%) Data Analyst
7 241 (5.38%) Architect
8 229 (5.11%) Consultant
9 188 (4.20%) Business Analyst
10 185 (4.13%) DBA
11 176 (3.93%) Senior Data Engineer
12 160 (3.57%) Java Developer
13 152 (3.39%) Senior Developer
14 127 (2.83%) Software Engineer
15 115 (2.57%) SQL DBA
16 112 (2.50%) SQL Developer
17 101 (2.25%) Azure Engineer
18 100 (2.23%) Data Architect
19 96 (2.14%) Full-Stack Developer
19 96 (2.14%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 391 (8.73%) REST
2 390 (8.71%) .NET
3 367 (8.19%) Terraform
4 299 (6.67%) PySpark
5 282 (6.29%) Kafka
6 220 (4.91%) Spring
7 204 (4.55%) React
8 198 (4.42%) Spring Boot
9 182 (4.06%) RESTful
10 169 (3.77%) JSON
11 167 (3.73%) HTML
12 161 (3.59%) XML
13 133 (2.97%) CSS
14 126 (2.81%) AngularJS
15 107 (2.39%) Web Services
16 101 (2.25%) Pandas
17 99 (2.21%) Middleware
18 96 (2.14%) SOAP
19 90 (2.01%) .NET Framework
20 71 (1.58%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 291 (6.50%) Cloud Native
2 197 (4.40%) Data Structures
3 174 (3.88%) Product Ownership
4 146 (3.26%) Legacy Systems
5 131 (2.92%) Distributed Systems
6 102 (2.28%) Enterprise Software
7 101 (2.25%) Onboarding
8 88 (1.96%) Management Information System
9 81 (1.81%) Self-Motivation
10 80 (1.79%) Derivative
11 67 (1.50%) Analytical Mindset
12 61 (1.36%) Clustering
12 61 (1.36%) Data Protection Act
12 61 (1.36%) Replication
13 52 (1.16%) AI Agents
13 52 (1.16%) Algorithms
13 52 (1.16%) Fixed Income
13 52 (1.16%) Reference Data
14 48 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
15 45 (1.00%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 313 (6.99%) Linux
2 279 (6.23%) Windows
3 208 (4.64%) Unix
4 101 (2.25%) Windows Server
5 22 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.40%) AIX
7 17 (0.38%) Solaris
8 12 (0.27%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (0.25%) Windows Server 2008
10 7 (0.16%) Ubuntu
10 7 (0.16%) VMS
10 7 (0.16%) Windows 10
10 7 (0.16%) zOS
11 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
12 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
13 4 (0.089%) Oracle Linux
14 3 (0.067%) Android
14 3 (0.067%) Apple iOS
14 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,229 (27.43%) CI/CD
2 1,171 (26.14%) Agile
3 1,132 (25.27%) Analytics
4 1,122 (25.04%) Data Modelling
5 1,016 (22.68%) ETL
6 998 (22.28%) Business Intelligence
7 909 (20.29%) DevOps
8 880 (19.64%) Problem-Solving
9 869 (19.40%) Data Pipeline
10 752 (16.79%) Data Engineering
11 675 (15.07%) AI
12 636 (14.20%) Migration
13 627 (14.00%) Validation
14 532 (11.88%) Stakeholder Management
15 500 (11.16%) Test Automation
16 490 (10.94%) Data Governance
17 473 (10.56%) Continuous Improvement
18 465 (10.38%) Decision-Making
19 446 (9.96%) Data Analysis
20 372 (8.30%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,594 (35.58%) Python
2 552 (12.32%) Java
3 443 (9.89%) C#
4 356 (7.95%) PL/SQL
5 348 (7.77%) JavaScript
6 248 (5.54%) PowerShell
7 233 (5.20%) T-SQL
8 177 (3.95%) TypeScript
9 138 (3.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 130 (2.90%) Shell Script
11 95 (2.12%) Bash
12 80 (1.79%) R
13 65 (1.45%) Scala
14 47 (1.05%) C++
15 42 (0.94%) VBA
16 37 (0.83%) Bicep
17 28 (0.63%) C
18 26 (0.58%) VB
19 22 (0.49%) Go
19 22 (0.49%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 985 (21.99%) Security Cleared
2 790 (17.63%) SC Cleared
3 328 (7.32%) Degree
4 118 (2.63%) Computer Science Degree
5 106 (2.37%) DV Cleared
6 96 (2.14%) BPSS Clearance
7 71 (1.58%) Azure Certification
8 65 (1.45%) ISTQB
9 45 (1.00%) Microsoft Certification
10 43 (0.96%) Master's Degree
11 36 (0.80%) AWS Certification
12 20 (0.45%) CISSP
13 17 (0.38%) ISEB
13 17 (0.38%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
15 13 (0.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 13 (0.29%) FFIEC
16 12 (0.27%) PhD
17 11 (0.25%) ACCA
17 11 (0.25%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 832 (18.57%) Data Quality
2 359 (8.01%) QA
3 149 (3.33%) GDPR
4 49 (1.09%) Accessibility
5 43 (0.96%) SLA
6 26 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 24 (0.54%) NIST
8 21 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 19 (0.42%) Actionable Recommendations
9 19 (0.42%) ISO 20022
10 18 (0.40%) IFRS
11 16 (0.36%) MiFID
11 16 (0.36%) PMO
12 14 (0.31%) Solvency II
13 13 (0.29%) COBIT
14 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
15 11 (0.25%) HIPAA
16 9 (0.20%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 9 (0.20%) HL7
16 9 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 443 (9.89%) Docker
2 131 (2.92%) Active Directory
3 49 (1.09%) VMware Infrastructure
4 38 (0.85%) Oracle RAC
4 38 (0.85%) Virtual Machines
5 18 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
6 15 (0.33%) VMware NSX
7 14 (0.31%) vCloud
8 13 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
9 10 (0.22%) Hyper-V
10 7 (0.16%) Postfix
11 4 (0.089%) 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
1 379 (8.46%) Kubernetes
2 93 (2.08%) Ansible
3 86 (1.92%) Grafana
4 44 (0.98%) Prometheus
5 43 (0.96%) Oracle RMAN
6 39 (0.87%) Control-M
6 39 (0.87%) Data Guard
7 29 (0.65%) SCOM
8 18 (0.40%) Kibana
9 16 (0.36%) Nagios
9 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
10 15 (0.33%) Tivoli
10 15 (0.33%) vCenter Server
11 14 (0.31%) Netcool
12 13 (0.29%) OpenView
12 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
13 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
14 11 (0.25%) Microsoft Intune
15 10 (0.22%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 10 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 763 (17.03%) Oracle
2 755 (16.85%) Microsoft
3 529 (11.81%) Databricks
4 170 (3.79%) Google
5 143 (3.19%) Informatica
6 122 (2.72%) SAP
7 107 (2.39%) ServiceNow
7 107 (2.39%) Talend
8 86 (1.92%) IBM
9 83 (1.85%) Splunk
10 65 (1.45%) VMware
11 62 (1.38%) Denodo
12 56 (1.25%) Salesforce
13 40 (0.89%) Bloomberg
13 40 (0.89%) BMC
14 39 (0.87%) Dynatrace
15 36 (0.80%) Citrix
16 33 (0.74%) Adobe
16 33 (0.74%) Alteryx
16 33 (0.74%) Murex