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

6 months to
25 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -3 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,293 3,092 3,757
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.89% 12.32% 10.03%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.99% 36.24% 32.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,889 2,217 2,770
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 £695 £766 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 74 61 56
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.00 £22.68
25th Percentile £33.82 £30.25 £29.06
Median hourly rate £45.90 £40.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.33% -4.71% -15.00%
75th Percentile £69.86 £50.00 £52.37
90th Percentile £82.78 £67.50 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £45.90 £39.67 £42.50
% change year-on-year +15.70% -6.65% -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 11,605 8,533 11,426
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.73% 33.99% 30.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,570 5,922 8,174
10th Percentile £362 £355 £350
25th Percentile £424 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £520 £540
Median % change year-on-year -0.48% -3.70% -3.57%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £726 £775 £788
UK median daily rate £510 £510 £525
% change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 201 492
10th Percentile £36.25 £28.18 £35.52
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.00 £50.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £63.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.70% +0.80%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.08 £85.00 £77.38
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £54.94 £62.50
% change year-on-year +18.32% -12.10% -

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 25 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 25 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 25 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 -5 2,326 £525 -1.41% 523
Midlands +3 545 £463 +8.82% 190
North of England -6 545 £461 -2.89% 325
West Midlands +4 449 £459 +2.00% 99
South East -11 432 £475 -5.00% 424
North West -2 291 £463 -2.63% 196
South West -7 229 £500 +6.38% 111
Yorkshire -11 215 £475 - 85
East of England -13 107 £495 +2.86% 95
East Midlands -1 92 £525 +40.00% 91
North East -12 51 £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
1 214 (4.98%) Apache Spark
2 176 (4.10%) Apache Airflow
3 165 (3.84%) Confluence
4 143 (3.33%) Apache
5 92 (2.14%) SAS
6 55 (1.28%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.77%) Oracle Workflow
7 33 (0.77%) WebLogic
8 32 (0.75%) IIS
9 24 (0.56%) Tomcat
10 22 (0.51%) Jupyter
11 19 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
11 19 (0.44%) WebSphere
12 18 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
13 17 (0.40%) Appian
13 17 (0.40%) CMS
14 16 (0.37%) nginx
15 13 (0.30%) Camunda
15 13 (0.30%) Tuxedo
16 9 (0.21%) Mendix
Applications
1 272 (6.34%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.26%) Microsoft Office
3 39 (0.91%) 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 36 (0.84%) Dynamics CRM
2 34 (0.79%) Oracle EBS
3 26 (0.61%) 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%) Finacle
10 10 (0.23%) Oracle General Ledger
10 10 (0.23%) Siebel CRM
11 9 (0.21%) Elite 3E
11 9 (0.21%) Fidessa
11 9 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
11 9 (0.21%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
11 9 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,387 (32.31%) Azure
2 1,042 (24.27%) AWS
3 820 (19.10%) Power Platform
4 396 (9.22%) Azure DevOps
5 342 (7.97%) GCP
6 324 (7.55%) Azure Data Factory
7 309 (7.20%) GitHub
8 277 (6.45%) Serverless
9 258 (6.01%) Snowflake
10 246 (5.73%) Amazon S3
11 213 (4.96%) dbt
12 208 (4.85%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 176 (4.10%) AWS Lambda
14 163 (3.80%) GitHub Actions
15 80 (1.86%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 79 (1.84%) Power Automate
17 76 (1.77%) SaaS
18 75 (1.75%) Entra ID
19 72 (1.68%) Amazon EC2
20 69 (1.61%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 47 (1.09%) DNS
2 41 (0.96%) Firewall
3 21 (0.49%) SNMP
4 20 (0.47%) Network Security
5 19 (0.44%) HTTP
6 18 (0.42%) Internet
7 17 (0.40%) VPN
8 16 (0.37%) WAN
9 14 (0.33%) SSL
10 11 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
11 10 (0.23%) TCP/IP
12 9 (0.21%) LAN
12 9 (0.21%) Wireshark
13 8 (0.19%) 3GPP
14 7 (0.16%) SAN
14 7 (0.16%) WinSCP
15 6 (0.14%) BGP
15 6 (0.14%) Reverse Proxy
15 6 (0.14%) RTP
16 5 (0.12%) IPsec
Database & Business Intelligence
1 755 (17.59%) Power BI
2 568 (13.23%) Data Warehouse
3 536 (12.49%) SQL Server
4 286 (6.66%) Relational Database
4 286 (6.66%) Tableau
5 284 (6.62%) Data Lake
6 277 (6.45%) PostgreSQL
7 222 (5.17%) NoSQL
8 199 (4.64%) Metadata
9 184 (4.29%) Azure SQL Database
10 170 (3.96%) Oracle Database
11 148 (3.45%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 139 (3.24%) BigQuery
13 132 (3.07%) Amazon Redshift
14 126 (2.94%) Delta Lake
15 104 (2.42%) MySQL
16 103 (2.40%) Big Data
17 101 (2.35%) Oracle Reports
18 94 (2.19%) Snowflake Schema
19 90 (2.10%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 458 (10.67%) Git
2 343 (7.99%) JIRA
3 227 (5.29%) Jenkins
4 193 (4.50%) GitLab
5 68 (1.58%) JUnit
6 52 (1.21%) Maven
6 52 (1.21%) Postman
7 50 (1.16%) Mockito
8 49 (1.14%) Selenium
9 46 (1.07%) Gradle
10 34 (0.79%) Cucumber
11 33 (0.77%) SonarQube
12 30 (0.70%) MLflow
13 28 (0.65%) JMeter
14 27 (0.63%) Bitbucket
14 27 (0.63%) ERwin
14 27 (0.63%) Oracle Forms
15 26 (0.61%) Liquibase
15 26 (0.61%) Visual Studio
16 25 (0.58%) Zephyr
General
1 1,144 (26.65%) Finance
2 1,119 (26.07%) Social Skills
3 816 (19.01%) Analytical Skills
4 416 (9.69%) Banking
5 369 (8.60%) Public Sector
6 122 (2.84%) Front Office
7 116 (2.70%) Marketing
8 103 (2.40%) Investment Banking
9 92 (2.14%) Retail
10 88 (2.05%) Documentation Skills
11 74 (1.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 53 (1.23%) Legal
13 52 (1.21%) Financial Institution
13 52 (1.21%) Manufacturing
14 48 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
15 38 (0.89%) Publishing
16 35 (0.82%) Back Office
16 35 (0.82%) Organisational Skills
17 33 (0.77%) Telecoms
18 27 (0.63%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 891 (20.75%) Developer
2 882 (20.55%) Data Engineer
3 612 (14.26%) Analyst
4 555 (12.93%) Senior
5 300 (6.99%) Lead
6 266 (6.20%) Data Analyst
7 233 (5.43%) Architect
8 202 (4.71%) Consultant
9 182 (4.24%) Business Analyst
10 173 (4.03%) Java Developer
11 165 (3.84%) Senior Data Engineer
12 143 (3.33%) DBA
13 135 (3.14%) Software Engineer
14 131 (3.05%) Senior Developer
15 106 (2.47%) Azure Engineer
16 100 (2.33%) C# Developer
16 100 (2.33%) SQL Developer
17 88 (2.05%) Python Developer
18 86 (2.00%) SQL DBA
19 82 (1.91%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 348 (8.11%) .NET
2 334 (7.78%) REST
3 263 (6.13%) PySpark
4 260 (6.06%) Kafka
5 222 (5.17%) Spring
6 210 (4.89%) Spring Boot
7 206 (4.80%) React
8 187 (4.36%) RESTful
9 150 (3.49%) JSON
10 148 (3.45%) XML
11 137 (3.19%) HTML
12 125 (2.91%) CSS
13 114 (2.66%) AngularJS
14 112 (2.61%) Pandas
15 105 (2.45%) SOAP
16 97 (2.26%) Middleware
17 93 (2.17%) Web Services
18 86 (2.00%) .NET Framework
19 75 (1.75%) OAuth
20 68 (1.58%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 279 (6.50%) Cloud Native
2 169 (3.94%) Data Structures
3 153 (3.56%) Legacy Systems
4 138 (3.21%) Product Ownership
5 129 (3.00%) Distributed Systems
6 80 (1.86%) Onboarding
7 79 (1.84%) Derivative
8 78 (1.82%) Management Information System
9 71 (1.65%) Analytical Mindset
10 65 (1.51%) Data Protection Act
11 64 (1.49%) Enterprise Software
11 64 (1.49%) Self-Motivation
12 56 (1.30%) Clustering
13 52 (1.21%) Equities
14 51 (1.19%) Algorithms
14 51 (1.19%) Greenfield Project
15 49 (1.14%) Fixed Income
16 43 (1.00%) Replication
17 42 (0.98%) Low-Code
18 40 (0.93%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 285 (6.64%) Linux
2 262 (6.10%) Windows
3 201 (4.68%) Unix
4 92 (2.14%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.56%) AIX
6 20 (0.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 14 (0.33%) Solaris
7 14 (0.33%) Windows Server 2019
8 8 (0.19%) Windows Server 2008
8 8 (0.19%) Windows Server 2016
8 8 (0.19%) zOS
9 7 (0.16%) Android
9 7 (0.16%) Apple iOS
9 7 (0.16%) Windows 10
10 4 (0.093%) Oracle Linux
10 4 (0.093%) Ubuntu
10 4 (0.093%) VMS
11 3 (0.070%) Windows Server 2012
12 2 (0.047%) Data ONTAP
12 2 (0.047%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,185 (27.60%) CI/CD
2 1,098 (25.58%) Analytics
3 1,092 (25.44%) Agile
4 1,045 (24.34%) Data Modelling
5 1,004 (23.39%) ETL
6 959 (22.34%) Business Intelligence
7 894 (20.82%) DevOps
8 858 (19.99%) Problem-Solving
9 819 (19.08%) Data Pipeline
10 712 (16.59%) Data Engineering
11 619 (14.42%) AI
12 570 (13.28%) Migration
13 557 (12.97%) Validation
14 447 (10.41%) Data Governance
15 443 (10.32%) Test Automation
16 435 (10.13%) Decision-Making
17 425 (9.90%) Data Analysis
18 415 (9.67%) Stakeholder Management
19 407 (9.48%) Continuous Improvement
20 376 (8.76%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,559 (36.31%) Python
2 546 (12.72%) Java
3 437 (10.18%) C#
4 321 (7.48%) PL/SQL
5 308 (7.17%) JavaScript
6 232 (5.40%) T-SQL
7 221 (5.15%) PowerShell
8 160 (3.73%) TypeScript
9 133 (3.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 110 (2.56%) Shell Script
11 94 (2.19%) R
12 83 (1.93%) Bash
13 72 (1.68%) Scala
14 52 (1.21%) C++
15 43 (1.00%) VBA
16 34 (0.79%) Bicep
17 33 (0.77%) C
18 32 (0.75%) VB
19 24 (0.56%) Go
20 23 (0.54%) Perl
Qualifications
1 907 (21.13%) Security Cleared
2 733 (17.07%) SC Cleared
3 322 (7.50%) Degree
4 106 (2.47%) Computer Science Degree
5 99 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
6 90 (2.10%) DV Cleared
7 67 (1.56%) Azure Certification
8 52 (1.21%) Master's Degree
9 51 (1.19%) ISTQB
10 40 (0.93%) 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
1 765 (17.82%) Data Quality
2 324 (7.55%) QA
3 171 (3.98%) GDPR
4 43 (1.00%) Accessibility
5 40 (0.93%) SLA
6 28 (0.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 27 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 26 (0.61%) NIST
9 22 (0.51%) PMO
10 18 (0.42%) IFRS
11 16 (0.37%) PCI DSS
12 15 (0.35%) MiFID
12 15 (0.35%) Solvency II
13 14 (0.33%) Actionable Recommendations
13 14 (0.33%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.30%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 12 (0.28%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.23%) HL7
16 10 (0.23%) NCSC
17 9 (0.21%) GRC
System Software
1 460 (10.72%) Docker
2 92 (2.14%) Active Directory
3 42 (0.98%) Virtual Machines
4 29 (0.68%) VMware Infrastructure
5 22 (0.51%) Oracle RAC
6 17 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
7 15 (0.35%) 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 (0.093%) HDFS
15 3 (0.070%) XenApp
15 3 (0.070%) XenDesktop
16 2 (0.047%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 2 (0.047%) GridGain
17 1 (0.023%) Varnish
17 1 (0.023%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 382 (8.90%) Kubernetes
2 352 (8.20%) Terraform
3 99 (2.31%) Grafana
4 73 (1.70%) Ansible
5 55 (1.28%) Prometheus
6 33 (0.77%) Oracle RMAN
7 24 (0.56%) Control-M
7 24 (0.56%) Data Guard
8 22 (0.51%) Kibana
9 19 (0.44%) vCenter Server
10 16 (0.37%) Single Sign-On
10 16 (0.37%) ZABBIX
11 15 (0.35%) Tivoli
12 14 (0.33%) Nagios
12 14 (0.33%) Netcool
13 13 (0.30%) OpenView
13 13 (0.30%) SCOM
13 13 (0.30%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 9 (0.21%) Progress Chef
15 8 (0.19%) HP Quality Center
Vendors
1 737 (17.17%) Oracle
2 668 (15.56%) Microsoft
3 503 (11.72%) Databricks
4 159 (3.70%) Google
5 155 (3.61%) Informatica
6 123 (2.87%) Talend
7 121 (2.82%) ServiceNow
8 111 (2.59%) SAP
9 84 (1.96%) Splunk
10 68 (1.58%) IBM
11 63 (1.47%) Denodo
12 50 (1.16%) Salesforce
13 46 (1.07%) VMware
14 44 (1.02%) Citrix
15 38 (0.89%) Dynatrace
16 37 (0.86%) Bloomberg
17 34 (0.79%) OpenAI
18 33 (0.77%) Murex
19 28 (0.65%) BMC
19 28 (0.65%) SolarWinds