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

6 months to
27 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -3 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,310 3,111 3,782
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.91% 12.31% 10.14%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.03% 36.29% 33.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,891 2,225 2,788
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 £644
90th Percentile £688 £763 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 74 62 55
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.05 £23.25
25th Percentile £33.82 £31.31 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.90 £43.16 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +6.35% +1.55% -14.63%
75th Percentile £69.86 £52.81 £52.83
90th Percentile £82.78 £67.35 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £45.90 £42.82 £42.50
% change year-on-year +7.21% +0.74% -15.00%

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 11,638 8,572 11,424
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.77% 33.92% 30.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,580 5,930 8,162
10th Percentile £362 £355 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £520 £541
Median % change year-on-year -0.24% -3.93% -2.87%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £726 £775 £788
UK median daily rate £510 £511 £525
% change year-on-year -0.20% -2.67% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 507 204 487
10th Percentile £35.85 £28.18 £35.61
25th Percentile £55.25 £35.75 £51.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.85 £84.85 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% +1.46%

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 27 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 27 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 27 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 2,331 £525 -1.41% 623
North of England -5 555 £463 -2.63% 339
Midlands +1 544 £463 +8.82% 200
West Midlands +4 449 £459 +2.00% 108
South East -10 434 £475 -5.00% 433
North West -3 292 £466 -1.95% 208
South West -5 228 £500 +5.26% 116
Yorkshire -8 224 £475 - 87
East of England -14 107 £491 +0.77% 96
East Midlands -1 91 £525 +40.00% 92
North East -11 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 (4.97%) Apache Spark
2 179 (4.15%) Apache Airflow
3 173 (4.01%) Confluence
4 145 (3.36%) Apache
5 92 (2.13%) SAS
6 53 (1.23%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.79%) Oracle Workflow
7 34 (0.79%) WebLogic
8 33 (0.77%) IIS
9 24 (0.56%) Tomcat
10 22 (0.51%) Jupyter
11 20 (0.46%) WebSphere
12 18 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
12 18 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
13 17 (0.39%) CMS
14 16 (0.37%) Appian
14 16 (0.37%) nginx
15 13 (0.30%) Tuxedo
16 12 (0.28%) Camunda
17 9 (0.21%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 273 (6.33%) Microsoft Excel
2 55 (1.28%) Microsoft Office
3 40 (0.93%) MS Visio
4 31 (0.72%) Spreadsheet
5 29 (0.67%) 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%) Notion
8 3 (0.070%) Oracle Smart View
8 3 (0.070%) Photoshop
9 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.023%) CPLEX
9 1 (0.023%) InDesign
9 1 (0.023%) Mingle
9 1 (0.023%) Trello
9 1 (0.023%) Weka
Business Applications
1 37 (0.86%) Dynamics CRM
2 34 (0.79%) Oracle EBS
3 26 (0.60%) Aladdin
4 23 (0.53%) 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%) Siebel CRM
10 10 (0.23%) Finacle
11 9 (0.21%) Elite 3E
11 9 (0.21%) Fidessa
11 9 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
11 9 (0.21%) Oracle General Ledger
11 9 (0.21%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 9 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
12 8 (0.19%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,383 (32.09%) Azure
2 1,047 (24.29%) AWS
3 816 (18.93%) Power Platform
4 397 (9.21%) Azure DevOps
5 346 (8.03%) GCP
6 318 (7.38%) Azure Data Factory
7 316 (7.33%) GitHub
8 277 (6.43%) Serverless
9 261 (6.06%) Snowflake
10 246 (5.71%) Amazon S3
11 219 (5.08%) dbt
12 207 (4.80%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 177 (4.11%) AWS Lambda
14 165 (3.83%) GitHub Actions
15 80 (1.86%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 78 (1.81%) SaaS
17 77 (1.79%) Entra ID
17 77 (1.79%) Power Automate
18 72 (1.67%) Amazon EC2
19 68 (1.58%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 47 (1.09%) DNS
2 39 (0.90%) Firewall
3 21 (0.49%) SNMP
4 20 (0.46%) Network Security
5 19 (0.44%) HTTP
5 19 (0.44%) Internet
6 18 (0.42%) VPN
7 16 (0.37%) SSL
8 15 (0.35%) WAN
9 10 (0.23%) TCP/IP
9 10 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
10 9 (0.21%) Wireshark
11 8 (0.19%) 3GPP
11 8 (0.19%) LAN
12 7 (0.16%) SAN
12 7 (0.16%) WinSCP
13 6 (0.14%) BGP
13 6 (0.14%) Reverse Proxy
13 6 (0.14%) RTP
14 5 (0.12%) IPsec
Database & Business Intelligence
1 751 (17.42%) Power BI
2 568 (13.18%) Data Warehouse
3 546 (12.67%) SQL Server
4 289 (6.71%) Relational Database
4 289 (6.71%) Tableau
5 280 (6.50%) Data Lake
6 276 (6.40%) PostgreSQL
7 224 (5.20%) NoSQL
8 200 (4.64%) Metadata
9 180 (4.18%) Azure SQL Database
10 167 (3.87%) Oracle Database
11 149 (3.46%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 142 (3.29%) BigQuery
13 132 (3.06%) Amazon Redshift
14 127 (2.95%) Delta Lake
15 106 (2.46%) MySQL
16 103 (2.39%) Big Data
17 99 (2.30%) Oracle Reports
18 98 (2.27%) Snowflake Schema
19 89 (2.06%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 462 (10.72%) Git
2 346 (8.03%) JIRA
3 235 (5.45%) Jenkins
4 192 (4.45%) GitLab
5 68 (1.58%) JUnit
6 53 (1.23%) Postman
7 51 (1.18%) Maven
7 51 (1.18%) Selenium
8 49 (1.14%) Mockito
9 45 (1.04%) Gradle
10 33 (0.77%) Cucumber
10 33 (0.77%) SonarQube
11 30 (0.70%) MLflow
12 29 (0.67%) Visual Studio
13 27 (0.63%) Bitbucket
13 27 (0.63%) ERwin
13 27 (0.63%) JMeter
13 27 (0.63%) Oracle Forms
14 26 (0.60%) Liquibase
14 26 (0.60%) Zephyr
General
1 1,152 (26.73%) Finance
2 1,117 (25.92%) Social Skills
3 822 (19.07%) Analytical Skills
4 417 (9.68%) Banking
5 367 (8.52%) Public Sector
6 121 (2.81%) Front Office
7 117 (2.71%) Marketing
8 103 (2.39%) Investment Banking
9 95 (2.20%) Retail
10 89 (2.06%) Documentation Skills
11 75 (1.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 53 (1.23%) Legal
13 51 (1.18%) Financial Institution
13 51 (1.18%) Manufacturing
14 49 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
15 38 (0.88%) Publishing
16 35 (0.81%) Back Office
16 35 (0.81%) Organisational Skills
17 33 (0.77%) Telecoms
18 28 (0.65%) Billing
Job Titles
1 906 (21.02%) Developer
2 878 (20.37%) Data Engineer
3 617 (14.32%) Analyst
4 560 (12.99%) Senior
5 298 (6.91%) Lead
6 266 (6.17%) Data Analyst
7 236 (5.48%) Architect
8 203 (4.71%) Consultant
9 181 (4.20%) Business Analyst
10 174 (4.04%) Java Developer
11 166 (3.85%) Senior Data Engineer
12 142 (3.29%) DBA
13 133 (3.09%) Senior Developer
13 133 (3.09%) Software Engineer
14 105 (2.44%) Azure Engineer
15 102 (2.37%) C# Developer
16 101 (2.34%) SQL Developer
17 88 (2.04%) Python Developer
18 87 (2.02%) SQL DBA
19 82 (1.90%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 361 (8.38%) .NET
2 341 (7.91%) REST
3 265 (6.15%) Kafka
4 261 (6.06%) PySpark
5 223 (5.17%) Spring
6 209 (4.85%) Spring Boot
7 205 (4.76%) React
8 187 (4.34%) RESTful
9 155 (3.60%) JSON
10 149 (3.46%) XML
11 138 (3.20%) HTML
12 126 (2.92%) CSS
13 118 (2.74%) AngularJS
14 114 (2.65%) Pandas
15 104 (2.41%) SOAP
16 100 (2.32%) Web Services
17 99 (2.30%) Middleware
18 88 (2.04%) .NET Framework
19 73 (1.69%) OAuth
20 68 (1.58%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 280 (6.50%) Cloud Native
2 171 (3.97%) Data Structures
3 154 (3.57%) Legacy Systems
4 140 (3.25%) Product Ownership
5 128 (2.97%) Distributed Systems
6 79 (1.83%) Derivative
7 78 (1.81%) Management Information System
7 78 (1.81%) Onboarding
8 70 (1.62%) Analytical Mindset
8 70 (1.62%) Enterprise Software
9 65 (1.51%) Self-Motivation
10 63 (1.46%) Data Protection Act
11 58 (1.35%) Clustering
12 53 (1.23%) Algorithms
12 53 (1.23%) Equities
13 51 (1.18%) Greenfield Project
14 50 (1.16%) Fixed Income
15 46 (1.07%) Replication
16 41 (0.95%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
17 40 (0.93%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 288 (6.68%) Linux
2 263 (6.10%) Windows
3 205 (4.76%) Unix
4 93 (2.16%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.56%) AIX
6 21 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 14 (0.32%) Solaris
7 14 (0.32%) 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 (0.046%) Data ONTAP
12 2 (0.046%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,186 (27.52%) CI/CD
2 1,103 (25.59%) Analytics
3 1,096 (25.43%) Agile
4 1,043 (24.20%) Data Modelling
5 1,000 (23.20%) ETL
6 955 (22.16%) Business Intelligence
7 889 (20.63%) DevOps
8 855 (19.84%) Problem-Solving
9 816 (18.93%) Data Pipeline
10 711 (16.50%) Data Engineering
11 624 (14.48%) AI
12 574 (13.32%) Migration
13 557 (12.92%) Validation
14 449 (10.42%) Test Automation
15 444 (10.30%) Data Governance
16 432 (10.02%) Decision-Making
17 427 (9.91%) Data Analysis
18 408 (9.47%) Stakeholder Management
19 407 (9.44%) Continuous Improvement
20 379 (8.79%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,565 (36.31%) Python
2 549 (12.74%) Java
3 444 (10.30%) C#
4 321 (7.45%) PL/SQL
5 308 (7.15%) JavaScript
6 234 (5.43%) T-SQL
7 223 (5.17%) PowerShell
8 163 (3.78%) TypeScript
9 132 (3.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 112 (2.60%) Shell Script
11 95 (2.20%) R
12 84 (1.95%) Bash
13 73 (1.69%) Scala
14 54 (1.25%) C++
15 42 (0.97%) VBA
16 35 (0.81%) Bicep
16 35 (0.81%) C
17 32 (0.74%) VB
18 23 (0.53%) Go
18 23 (0.53%) Perl
Qualifications
1 904 (20.97%) Security Cleared
2 730 (16.94%) SC Cleared
3 329 (7.63%) Degree
4 105 (2.44%) Computer Science Degree
5 96 (2.23%) BPSS Clearance
6 90 (2.09%) DV Cleared
7 66 (1.53%) Azure Certification
8 51 (1.18%) Master's Degree
9 49 (1.14%) ISTQB
10 40 (0.93%) Microsoft Certification
11 31 (0.72%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.39%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.39%) PhD
13 14 (0.32%) CISSP
14 11 (0.26%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 10 (0.23%) TOGAF Certification
16 9 (0.21%) CISM
17 8 (0.19%) ACCA
17 8 (0.19%) CIMA
17 8 (0.19%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 761 (17.66%) Data Quality
2 331 (7.68%) QA
3 170 (3.94%) GDPR
4 43 (1.00%) Accessibility
5 40 (0.93%) SLA
6 28 (0.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 24 (0.56%) NIST
7 24 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 21 (0.49%) PMO
9 16 (0.37%) IFRS
9 16 (0.37%) PCI DSS
10 15 (0.35%) MiFID
10 15 (0.35%) Solvency II
11 14 (0.32%) Actionable Recommendations
11 14 (0.32%) HIPAA
12 13 (0.30%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 13 (0.30%) ISO 20022
13 10 (0.23%) HL7
14 9 (0.21%) GRC
14 9 (0.21%) NCSC
System Software
1 460 (10.67%) Docker
2 97 (2.25%) Active Directory
3 43 (1.00%) Virtual Machines
4 29 (0.67%) VMware Infrastructure
5 22 (0.51%) Oracle RAC
6 17 (0.39%) 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 7 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
13 5 (0.12%) RACF
14 4 (0.093%) HDFS
15 3 (0.070%) XenApp
15 3 (0.070%) XenDesktop
16 2 (0.046%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 2 (0.046%) GridGain
17 1 (0.023%) GPFS
17 1 (0.023%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 386 (8.96%) Kubernetes
2 355 (8.24%) Terraform
3 99 (2.30%) Grafana
4 79 (1.83%) Ansible
5 54 (1.25%) Prometheus
6 33 (0.77%) Oracle RMAN
7 24 (0.56%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.53%) Control-M
9 22 (0.51%) Kibana
10 19 (0.44%) vCenter Server
11 17 (0.39%) Single Sign-On
12 16 (0.37%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.35%) SCOM
13 15 (0.35%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.32%) Nagios
14 14 (0.32%) Netcool
15 13 (0.30%) OpenView
15 13 (0.30%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 9 (0.21%) Progress Chef
17 8 (0.19%) HP Quality Center
Vendors
1 734 (17.03%) Oracle
2 670 (15.55%) Microsoft
3 500 (11.60%) Databricks
4 160 (3.71%) Google
5 155 (3.60%) Informatica
6 124 (2.88%) ServiceNow
6 124 (2.88%) Talend
7 110 (2.55%) SAP
8 83 (1.93%) Splunk
9 69 (1.60%) IBM
10 63 (1.46%) Denodo
11 50 (1.16%) Salesforce
12 46 (1.07%) VMware
13 44 (1.02%) Citrix
14 38 (0.88%) Bloomberg
14 38 (0.88%) Dynatrace
15 34 (0.79%) Murex
16 32 (0.74%) OpenAI
17 28 (0.65%) BMC
17 28 (0.65%) SolarWinds