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 23 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
23 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,278 3,076 3,741
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.87% 12.31% 9.98%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.99% 36.33% 32.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,880 2,210 2,758
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £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 £690 £766 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 74 63 56
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.09 £22.68
25th Percentile £33.82 £30.75 £29.06
Median hourly rate £45.90 £42.82 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +7.21% +0.74% -15.00%
75th Percentile £69.86 £53.75 £52.37
90th Percentile £82.78 £76.25 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £45.90 £41.66 £42.50
% change year-on-year +10.18% -1.98% -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 11,566 8,466 11,403
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.69% 33.89% 30.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,547 5,884 8,146
10th Percentile £360 £356 £350
25th Percentile £423 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £520 £540
Median % change year-on-year -0.96% -3.70% -3.57%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £785
UK median daily rate £510 £510 £525
% change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 200 498
10th Percentile £36.25 £28.16 £35.52
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.75 £49.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.13 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.08 £85.00 £77.50
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 23 June 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 23 June 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 23 June 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 -4 2,321 £525 -1.87% 704
North of England -6 544 £460 -3.16% 349
Midlands +3 539 £463 +8.06% 202
West Midlands +5 446 £459 +1.32% 104
South East -11 427 £475 -5.00% 445
North West -3 290 £463 -2.63% 214
South West -3 231 £500 +5.26% 115
Yorkshire -11 214 £475 - 90
East of England -11 108 £495 +1.54% 102
East Midlands -1 89 £525 +40.00% 98
North East -12 52 £425 -8.36% 50
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
1 217 (5.07%) Apache Spark
2 176 (4.11%) Apache Airflow
3 159 (3.72%) Confluence
4 144 (3.37%) Apache
5 92 (2.15%) SAS
6 55 (1.29%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.77%) WebLogic
8 32 (0.75%) IIS
8 32 (0.75%) Oracle Workflow
9 24 (0.56%) Tomcat
10 22 (0.51%) Jupyter
11 19 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
11 19 (0.44%) WebSphere
12 17 (0.40%) Appian
12 17 (0.40%) Palantir Foundry
13 16 (0.37%) CMS
13 16 (0.37%) nginx
14 13 (0.30%) Camunda
14 13 (0.30%) Tuxedo
15 9 (0.21%) Mendix
Applications
1 273 (6.38%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.26%) Microsoft Office
3 41 (0.96%) MS Visio
4 31 (0.72%) Spreadsheet
5 29 (0.68%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
7 5 (0.12%) Notepad++
8 3 (0.070%) Acrobat
8 3 (0.070%) Oracle Smart View
8 3 (0.070%) Photoshop
9 2 (0.047%) Notion
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.023%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.023%) InDesign
10 1 (0.023%) Mingle
10 1 (0.023%) Trello
10 1 (0.023%) Weka
Business Applications
1 35 (0.82%) Dynamics CRM
2 33 (0.77%) Oracle EBS
3 24 (0.56%) Aladdin
4 23 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
5 22 (0.51%) Oracle ERP
5 22 (0.51%) Oracle Payables
6 18 (0.42%) NEC Housing
7 16 (0.37%) Oracle EBS R12
8 15 (0.35%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.35%) Remedy ITSM
9 11 (0.26%) Findur
9 11 (0.26%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 10 (0.23%) Oracle General Ledger
10 10 (0.23%) Siebel CRM
11 9 (0.21%) Elite 3E
11 9 (0.21%) Finacle
11 9 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
11 9 (0.21%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
11 9 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
12 8 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,383 (32.33%) Azure
2 1,048 (24.50%) AWS
3 828 (19.35%) Power Platform
4 395 (9.23%) Azure DevOps
5 344 (8.04%) GCP
6 325 (7.60%) Azure Data Factory
7 311 (7.27%) GitHub
8 280 (6.55%) Serverless
9 255 (5.96%) Snowflake
10 248 (5.80%) Amazon S3
11 211 (4.93%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 211 (4.93%) dbt
12 177 (4.14%) AWS Lambda
13 163 (3.81%) GitHub Actions
14 80 (1.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 79 (1.85%) Power Automate
16 73 (1.71%) Entra ID
17 72 (1.68%) Amazon EC2
17 72 (1.68%) SaaS
18 69 (1.61%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 48 (1.12%) DNS
2 40 (0.94%) Firewall
3 21 (0.49%) SNMP
4 19 (0.44%) HTTP
4 19 (0.44%) Network Security
5 18 (0.42%) Internet
6 17 (0.40%) VPN
7 16 (0.37%) WAN
8 14 (0.33%) SSL
9 11 (0.26%) TCP/IP
9 11 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
10 9 (0.21%) LAN
10 9 (0.21%) Wireshark
11 8 (0.19%) 3GPP
12 7 (0.16%) SAN
12 7 (0.16%) WinSCP
13 6 (0.14%) BGP
13 6 (0.14%) RTP
14 5 (0.12%) IPsec
14 5 (0.12%) Reverse Proxy
Database & Business Intelligence
1 763 (17.84%) Power BI
2 563 (13.16%) Data Warehouse
3 536 (12.53%) SQL Server
4 285 (6.66%) Data Lake
4 285 (6.66%) Tableau
5 284 (6.64%) Relational Database
6 275 (6.43%) PostgreSQL
7 226 (5.28%) NoSQL
8 205 (4.79%) Metadata
9 185 (4.32%) Azure SQL Database
10 164 (3.83%) Oracle Database
11 150 (3.51%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 138 (3.23%) BigQuery
13 128 (2.99%) Amazon Redshift
14 124 (2.90%) Delta Lake
15 105 (2.45%) MySQL
16 104 (2.43%) Big Data
17 100 (2.34%) Oracle Reports
18 94 (2.20%) Snowflake Schema
19 90 (2.10%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 457 (10.68%) Git
2 335 (7.83%) JIRA
3 223 (5.21%) Jenkins
4 194 (4.53%) GitLab
5 66 (1.54%) JUnit
6 51 (1.19%) Maven
7 50 (1.17%) Postman
8 48 (1.12%) Mockito
9 47 (1.10%) Selenium
10 45 (1.05%) Gradle
11 33 (0.77%) SonarQube
12 31 (0.72%) Cucumber
13 30 (0.70%) MLflow
14 27 (0.63%) ERwin
14 27 (0.63%) Visual Studio
15 26 (0.61%) Bitbucket
15 26 (0.61%) JMeter
15 26 (0.61%) Liquibase
15 26 (0.61%) Oracle Forms
16 25 (0.58%) Zephyr
General
1 1,141 (26.67%) Finance
2 1,106 (25.85%) Social Skills
3 808 (18.89%) Analytical Skills
4 409 (9.56%) Banking
5 374 (8.74%) Public Sector
6 121 (2.83%) Front Office
7 117 (2.73%) Marketing
8 102 (2.38%) Investment Banking
9 89 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
10 88 (2.06%) Retail
11 72 (1.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 52 (1.22%) Financial Institution
12 52 (1.22%) Legal
13 48 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
14 46 (1.08%) Manufacturing
15 39 (0.91%) Publishing
16 35 (0.82%) Organisational Skills
17 33 (0.77%) Back Office
17 33 (0.77%) Telecoms
18 28 (0.65%) Law
Job Titles
1 885 (20.69%) Data Engineer
1 885 (20.69%) Developer
2 606 (14.17%) Analyst
3 554 (12.95%) Senior
4 296 (6.92%) Lead
5 267 (6.24%) Data Analyst
6 232 (5.42%) Architect
7 202 (4.72%) Consultant
8 173 (4.04%) Business Analyst
8 173 (4.04%) Java Developer
9 166 (3.88%) Senior Data Engineer
10 144 (3.37%) DBA
11 136 (3.18%) Software Engineer
12 130 (3.04%) Senior Developer
13 103 (2.41%) Azure Engineer
14 100 (2.34%) C# Developer
15 97 (2.27%) SQL Developer
16 87 (2.03%) Python Developer
16 87 (2.03%) SQL DBA
17 81 (1.89%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 349 (8.16%) .NET
2 332 (7.76%) REST
3 261 (6.10%) Kafka
4 260 (6.08%) PySpark
5 222 (5.19%) Spring
6 210 (4.91%) Spring Boot
7 203 (4.75%) React
8 186 (4.35%) RESTful
9 148 (3.46%) JSON
10 143 (3.34%) XML
11 136 (3.18%) HTML
12 124 (2.90%) CSS
13 112 (2.62%) AngularJS
13 112 (2.62%) Pandas
14 105 (2.45%) SOAP
15 96 (2.24%) Middleware
16 92 (2.15%) Web Services
17 85 (1.99%) .NET Framework
18 76 (1.78%) OAuth
19 68 (1.59%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 279 (6.52%) Cloud Native
2 167 (3.90%) Data Structures
3 154 (3.60%) Legacy Systems
4 133 (3.11%) Product Ownership
5 129 (3.02%) Distributed Systems
6 82 (1.92%) Onboarding
7 81 (1.89%) Derivative
8 79 (1.85%) Management Information System
9 68 (1.59%) Analytical Mindset
10 66 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
11 62 (1.45%) Self-Motivation
12 59 (1.38%) Enterprise Software
13 57 (1.33%) Clustering
14 50 (1.17%) Algorithms
14 50 (1.17%) Equities
14 50 (1.17%) Greenfield Project
15 47 (1.10%) Fixed Income
16 43 (1.01%) Replication
17 42 (0.98%) Low-Code
18 41 (0.96%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 284 (6.64%) Linux
2 262 (6.12%) Windows
3 205 (4.79%) Unix
4 92 (2.15%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.56%) AIX
6 18 (0.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 15 (0.35%) Windows Server 2019
8 14 (0.33%) Solaris
9 9 (0.21%) Windows Server 2016
10 8 (0.19%) Windows 10
10 8 (0.19%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.19%) zOS
11 7 (0.16%) Android
11 7 (0.16%) Apple iOS
12 4 (0.094%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.094%) VMS
13 3 (0.070%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.047%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.047%) HPUX
14 2 (0.047%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,177 (27.51%) CI/CD
2 1,092 (25.53%) Analytics
3 1,072 (25.06%) Agile
4 1,041 (24.33%) Data Modelling
5 1,002 (23.42%) ETL
6 962 (22.49%) Business Intelligence
7 884 (20.66%) DevOps
8 854 (19.96%) Problem-Solving
9 816 (19.07%) Data Pipeline
10 713 (16.67%) Data Engineering
11 614 (14.35%) AI
12 567 (13.25%) Migration
13 556 (13.00%) Validation
14 448 (10.47%) Data Governance
15 438 (10.24%) Test Automation
16 433 (10.12%) Decision-Making
17 419 (9.79%) Data Analysis
18 404 (9.44%) Continuous Improvement
18 404 (9.44%) Stakeholder Management
19 380 (8.88%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,555 (36.35%) Python
2 545 (12.74%) Java
3 436 (10.19%) C#
4 317 (7.41%) PL/SQL
5 307 (7.18%) JavaScript
6 231 (5.40%) T-SQL
7 215 (5.03%) PowerShell
8 158 (3.69%) TypeScript
9 133 (3.11%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 109 (2.55%) Shell Script
11 96 (2.24%) R
12 83 (1.94%) Bash
13 71 (1.66%) Scala
14 54 (1.26%) C++
15 43 (1.01%) VBA
16 36 (0.84%) Bicep
17 33 (0.77%) C
17 33 (0.77%) VB
18 24 (0.56%) Go
18 24 (0.56%) Perl
Qualifications
1 902 (21.08%) Security Cleared
2 728 (17.02%) SC Cleared
3 323 (7.55%) Degree
4 104 (2.43%) Computer Science Degree
5 98 (2.29%) BPSS Clearance
6 89 (2.08%) DV Cleared
7 69 (1.61%) Azure Certification
8 53 (1.24%) Master's Degree
9 51 (1.19%) ISTQB
10 42 (0.98%) Microsoft Certification
11 32 (0.75%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.40%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.40%) PhD
13 14 (0.33%) CISSP
14 13 (0.30%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 10 (0.23%) PMI Certification
15 10 (0.23%) TOGAF Certification
16 9 (0.21%) CISM
17 8 (0.19%) PMP
17 8 (0.19%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 770 (18.00%) Data Quality
2 320 (7.48%) QA
3 174 (4.07%) GDPR
4 42 (0.98%) Accessibility
5 41 (0.96%) SLA
6 28 (0.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 28 (0.65%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 26 (0.61%) NIST
8 23 (0.54%) PMO
9 18 (0.42%) IFRS
10 16 (0.37%) PCI DSS
11 15 (0.35%) Solvency II
12 14 (0.33%) Actionable Recommendations
12 14 (0.33%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 14 (0.33%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.33%) MiFID
13 12 (0.28%) ISO 20022
14 10 (0.23%) HL7
14 10 (0.23%) NCSC
15 9 (0.21%) GRC
System Software
1 461 (10.78%) Docker
2 91 (2.13%) Active Directory
3 39 (0.91%) Virtual Machines
4 29 (0.68%) VMware Infrastructure
5 22 (0.51%) Oracle RAC
6 17 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
7 16 (0.37%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.30%) VMware NSX
9 12 (0.28%) vCloud
10 10 (0.23%) KVM
11 9 (0.21%) Postfix
12 8 (0.19%) Virtual Desktop
13 5 (0.12%) RACF
14 4 (0.094%) HDFS
14 4 (0.094%) XenApp
14 4 (0.094%) XenDesktop
15 2 (0.047%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.047%) GridGain
16 1 (0.023%) Varnish
16 1 (0.023%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 381 (8.91%) Kubernetes
2 353 (8.25%) Terraform
3 101 (2.36%) Grafana
4 73 (1.71%) Ansible
5 56 (1.31%) Prometheus
6 33 (0.77%) Oracle RMAN
7 24 (0.56%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.54%) Control-M
9 21 (0.49%) Kibana
10 19 (0.44%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.37%) Single Sign-On
11 16 (0.37%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.35%) Tivoli
13 14 (0.33%) Nagios
13 14 (0.33%) Netcool
14 13 (0.30%) OpenView
14 13 (0.30%) SCOM
14 13 (0.30%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 8 (0.19%) HP Quality Center
15 8 (0.19%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 729 (17.04%) Oracle
2 668 (15.61%) Microsoft
3 490 (11.45%) Databricks
4 159 (3.72%) Google
5 156 (3.65%) Informatica
6 123 (2.88%) ServiceNow
6 123 (2.88%) Talend
7 110 (2.57%) SAP
8 84 (1.96%) Splunk
9 68 (1.59%) IBM
10 63 (1.47%) Denodo
11 50 (1.17%) Salesforce
12 46 (1.08%) VMware
13 45 (1.05%) Citrix
14 37 (0.86%) Dynatrace
15 36 (0.84%) Bloomberg
16 34 (0.79%) OpenAI
17 33 (0.77%) Murex
18 28 (0.65%) BMC
18 28 (0.65%) SolarWinds