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

6 months to
11 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,459 3,276 3,761
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.90% 12.08% 10.19%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.96% 36.31% 32.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,998 2,339 2,805
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £410 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -0.46%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £638
90th Percentile £688 £763 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 77 64 50
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.14 £24.00
25th Percentile £33.75 £31.00 £30.09
Median hourly rate £45.00 £43.16 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.27% +1.55% -15.00%
75th Percentile £69.44 £53.75 £51.75
90th Percentile £82.55 £67.05 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £45.00 £42.82 £41.50
% change year-on-year +5.10% +3.17% -19.02%

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 12,063 9,023 11,463
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.79% 33.29% 31.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,863 6,216 8,206
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £520 £541
Median % change year-on-year - -3.93% -1.59%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £736 £775 £788
UK median daily rate £513 £510 £525
% change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 506 231 468
10th Percentile £34.57 £28.41 £35.89
25th Percentile £55.00 £36.99 £50.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.60 £80.00 £75.38
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% -

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 -0.94% 757
North of England -4 581 £463 -2.63% 339
Midlands +3 572 £460 +8.24% 219
West Midlands +5 470 £459 +2.00% 105
South East -10 457 £475 -5.00% 436
North West -1 310 £469 - 186
South West -5 237 £500 +14.29% 128
Yorkshire -9 232 £475 - 98
East of England -13 106 £491 +0.77% 117
East Midlands -1 98 £525 +38.16% 114
North East -11 52 £425 -8.11% 59
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 (4.80%) Apache Spark
2 183 (4.10%) Apache Airflow
3 178 (3.99%) Confluence
4 147 (3.30%) Apache
5 96 (2.15%) SAS
6 53 (1.19%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.85%) WebLogic
8 37 (0.83%) Oracle Workflow
9 36 (0.81%) IIS
10 24 (0.54%) Tomcat
11 22 (0.49%) Jupyter
12 20 (0.45%) CMS
13 19 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
14 18 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
14 18 (0.40%) WebSphere
15 16 (0.36%) nginx
16 14 (0.31%) Appian
17 13 (0.29%) Tuxedo
18 11 (0.25%) Camunda
19 8 (0.18%) Red Hat Fuse
Applications
1 289 (6.48%) Microsoft Excel
2 59 (1.32%) Microsoft Office
3 41 (0.92%) MS Visio
4 39 (0.87%) Spreadsheet
5 31 (0.70%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.22%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.090%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.090%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.067%) Notion
9 3 (0.067%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.045%) Microsoft Project
11 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.022%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.022%) InDesign
11 1 (0.022%) Mingle
11 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 41 (0.92%) Oracle EBS
2 40 (0.90%) Dynamics CRM
3 28 (0.63%) Aladdin
4 25 (0.56%) Oracle Payables
5 24 (0.54%) Oracle ERP
6 23 (0.52%) SAP S/4HANA
7 19 (0.43%) Oracle EBS R12
8 18 (0.40%) NEC Housing
8 18 (0.40%) Oracle Receivables
9 16 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
10 12 (0.27%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.25%) Findur
11 11 (0.25%) Oracle General Ledger
11 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.22%) Finacle
13 9 (0.20%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.20%) Fidessa
13 9 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
14 8 (0.18%) Summit
15 7 (0.16%) Oracle 11i
Cloud Services
1 1,429 (32.05%) Azure
2 1,071 (24.02%) AWS
3 837 (18.77%) Power Platform
4 411 (9.22%) Azure DevOps
5 372 (8.34%) GCP
6 324 (7.27%) Azure Data Factory
7 318 (7.13%) GitHub
8 278 (6.23%) Serverless
8 278 (6.23%) Snowflake
9 250 (5.61%) Amazon S3
10 235 (5.27%) dbt
11 214 (4.80%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 180 (4.04%) AWS Lambda
13 164 (3.68%) GitHub Actions
14 84 (1.88%) Entra ID
15 81 (1.82%) SaaS
16 79 (1.77%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 76 (1.70%) Power Automate
18 74 (1.66%) Amazon EC2
19 68 (1.53%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 44 (0.99%) DNS
2 38 (0.85%) Firewall
3 21 (0.47%) SNMP
4 20 (0.45%) Internet
4 20 (0.45%) Network Security
4 20 (0.45%) SSL
5 19 (0.43%) HTTP
6 18 (0.40%) VPN
7 13 (0.29%) WAN
8 10 (0.22%) TCP/IP
9 9 (0.20%) Wireshark
10 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
10 8 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
10 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
11 7 (0.16%) Kerberos
11 7 (0.16%) SAN
12 6 (0.13%) BGP
12 6 (0.13%) DHCP
12 6 (0.13%) LAN
12 6 (0.13%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 771 (17.29%) Power BI
2 593 (13.30%) Data Warehouse
3 580 (13.01%) SQL Server
4 299 (6.71%) Tableau
5 296 (6.64%) Relational Database
6 284 (6.37%) PostgreSQL
7 277 (6.21%) Data Lake
8 223 (5.00%) NoSQL
9 208 (4.66%) Metadata
10 179 (4.01%) Azure SQL Database
11 176 (3.95%) Oracle Database
12 153 (3.43%) BigQuery
13 150 (3.36%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 138 (3.09%) Amazon Redshift
15 130 (2.92%) Delta Lake
16 108 (2.42%) Big Data
17 105 (2.35%) MySQL
18 103 (2.31%) Oracle Reports
19 101 (2.27%) Snowflake Schema
20 92 (2.06%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 475 (10.65%) Git
2 348 (7.80%) JIRA
3 237 (5.32%) Jenkins
4 188 (4.22%) GitLab
5 70 (1.57%) JUnit
6 56 (1.26%) Maven
7 54 (1.21%) Postman
8 49 (1.10%) Gradle
9 48 (1.08%) Mockito
9 48 (1.08%) Selenium
10 35 (0.78%) Oracle Forms
11 33 (0.74%) SonarQube
11 33 (0.74%) Visual Studio
12 31 (0.70%) Bitbucket
13 29 (0.65%) Cucumber
13 29 (0.65%) MLflow
14 27 (0.61%) JMeter
15 26 (0.58%) ERwin
15 26 (0.58%) Liquibase
15 26 (0.58%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,176 (26.37%) Finance
2 1,151 (25.81%) Social Skills
3 865 (19.40%) Analytical Skills
4 425 (9.53%) Banking
5 389 (8.72%) Public Sector
6 129 (2.89%) Marketing
7 123 (2.76%) Front Office
8 103 (2.31%) Investment Banking
8 103 (2.31%) Retail
9 93 (2.09%) Documentation Skills
10 78 (1.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 55 (1.23%) Manufacturing
12 53 (1.19%) Presentation Skills
13 52 (1.17%) Legal
14 51 (1.14%) Financial Institution
15 39 (0.87%) Organisational Skills
16 38 (0.85%) Back Office
16 38 (0.85%) Publishing
17 35 (0.78%) Telecoms
18 29 (0.65%) Law
Job Titles
1 954 (21.39%) Developer
2 899 (20.16%) Data Engineer
3 642 (14.40%) Analyst
4 585 (13.12%) Senior
5 308 (6.91%) Lead
6 276 (6.19%) Data Analyst
7 243 (5.45%) Architect
8 208 (4.66%) Consultant
9 188 (4.22%) Business Analyst
10 180 (4.04%) Java Developer
11 177 (3.97%) Senior Data Engineer
12 158 (3.54%) DBA
13 140 (3.14%) Senior Developer
14 128 (2.87%) Software Engineer
15 110 (2.47%) Azure Engineer
16 108 (2.42%) SQL Developer
17 105 (2.35%) C# Developer
17 105 (2.35%) SQL DBA
18 90 (2.02%) Python Developer
19 87 (1.95%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 367 (8.23%) .NET
2 349 (7.83%) REST
3 271 (6.08%) PySpark
4 266 (5.97%) Kafka
5 228 (5.11%) Spring
6 211 (4.73%) Spring Boot
7 204 (4.58%) React
8 187 (4.19%) RESTful
9 160 (3.59%) JSON
10 157 (3.52%) XML
11 143 (3.21%) HTML
12 125 (2.80%) CSS
13 121 (2.71%) AngularJS
14 116 (2.60%) Pandas
15 103 (2.31%) SOAP
16 101 (2.27%) Web Services
17 95 (2.13%) Middleware
18 91 (2.04%) .NET Framework
19 70 (1.57%) Node.js
20 67 (1.50%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 293 (6.57%) Cloud Native
2 181 (4.06%) Data Structures
3 158 (3.54%) Legacy Systems
4 150 (3.36%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.85%) Distributed Systems
6 84 (1.88%) Derivative
6 84 (1.88%) Onboarding
7 76 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
8 74 (1.66%) Management Information System
9 72 (1.61%) Analytical Mindset
10 68 (1.53%) Self-Motivation
11 66 (1.48%) Data Protection Act
12 61 (1.37%) Clustering
13 56 (1.26%) Algorithms
14 54 (1.21%) Equities
15 51 (1.14%) Fixed Income
15 51 (1.14%) Greenfield Project
15 51 (1.14%) Replication
16 41 (0.92%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
17 39 (0.87%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 295 (6.62%) Linux
2 273 (6.12%) Windows
3 216 (4.84%) Unix
4 102 (2.29%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.54%) AIX
6 21 (0.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 16 (0.36%) Solaris
8 12 (0.27%) Windows Server 2019
9 8 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
9 8 (0.18%) zOS
10 7 (0.16%) Android
10 7 (0.16%) Apple iOS
11 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
12 5 (0.11%) Windows 10
13 4 (0.090%) Oracle Linux
13 4 (0.090%) Ubuntu
13 4 (0.090%) VMS
14 3 (0.067%) Windows Server 2012
15 2 (0.045%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,202 (26.96%) CI/CD
2 1,148 (25.75%) Analytics
3 1,134 (25.43%) Agile
4 1,082 (24.27%) Data Modelling
5 1,028 (23.05%) ETL
6 989 (22.18%) Business Intelligence
7 908 (20.36%) DevOps
8 877 (19.67%) Problem-Solving
9 853 (19.13%) Data Pipeline
10 743 (16.66%) Data Engineering
11 643 (14.42%) AI
12 592 (13.28%) Migration
13 579 (12.98%) Validation
14 467 (10.47%) Data Governance
15 460 (10.32%) Test Automation
16 458 (10.27%) Decision-Making
17 442 (9.91%) Continuous Improvement
18 439 (9.85%) Data Analysis
19 424 (9.51%) Stakeholder Management
20 394 (8.84%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,608 (36.06%) Python
2 557 (12.49%) Java
3 446 (10.00%) C#
4 342 (7.67%) PL/SQL
5 305 (6.84%) JavaScript
6 243 (5.45%) T-SQL
7 228 (5.11%) PowerShell
8 166 (3.72%) TypeScript
9 135 (3.03%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 121 (2.71%) Shell Script
11 98 (2.20%) R
12 84 (1.88%) Bash
13 77 (1.73%) Scala
14 53 (1.19%) C++
15 44 (0.99%) VBA
16 37 (0.83%) Bicep
17 35 (0.78%) C
18 32 (0.72%) VB
19 24 (0.54%) Go
20 20 (0.45%) Perl
Qualifications
1 942 (21.13%) Security Cleared
2 759 (17.02%) SC Cleared
3 338 (7.58%) Degree
4 109 (2.44%) Computer Science Degree
5 106 (2.38%) BPSS Clearance
6 97 (2.18%) DV Cleared
7 67 (1.50%) Azure Certification
8 50 (1.12%) Master's Degree
9 47 (1.05%) ISTQB
10 40 (0.90%) Microsoft Certification
11 31 (0.70%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.38%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.38%) PhD
13 15 (0.34%) CISSP
14 10 (0.22%) CISM
14 10 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
15 9 (0.20%) ACCA
15 9 (0.20%) CIMA
15 9 (0.20%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 9 (0.20%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 790 (17.72%) Data Quality
2 340 (7.63%) QA
3 174 (3.90%) GDPR
4 47 (1.05%) Accessibility
5 45 (1.01%) SLA
6 23 (0.52%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 21 (0.47%) PMO
7 21 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 18 (0.40%) NIST
9 17 (0.38%) IFRS
9 17 (0.38%) Solvency II
10 15 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
10 15 (0.34%) MiFID
11 14 (0.31%) HIPAA
12 13 (0.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 12 (0.27%) ISO 20022
13 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
14 10 (0.22%) HL7
15 9 (0.20%) GRC
15 9 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 453 (10.16%) Docker
2 104 (2.33%) Active Directory
3 44 (0.99%) Virtual Machines
4 30 (0.67%) VMware Infrastructure
5 29 (0.65%) Oracle RAC
6 18 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
7 15 (0.34%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.29%) vCloud
10 10 (0.22%) KVM
11 9 (0.20%) Postfix
12 6 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
13 5 (0.11%) RACF
14 4 (0.090%) HDFS
15 2 (0.045%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.045%) GridGain
16 1 (0.022%) Varnish
16 1 (0.022%) vSphere
16 1 (0.022%) XenApp
16 1 (0.022%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 384 (8.61%) Kubernetes
2 359 (8.05%) Terraform
3 97 (2.18%) Grafana
4 82 (1.84%) Ansible
5 51 (1.14%) Prometheus
6 35 (0.78%) Oracle RMAN
7 31 (0.70%) Data Guard
8 22 (0.49%) Control-M
8 22 (0.49%) Kibana
9 20 (0.45%) vCenter Server
10 19 (0.43%) SCOM
11 16 (0.36%) Single Sign-On
11 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.34%) Tivoli
13 14 (0.31%) Nagios
13 14 (0.31%) Netcool
14 13 (0.29%) OpenView
14 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 9 (0.20%) HP Quality Center
15 9 (0.20%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 776 (17.40%) Oracle
2 697 (15.63%) Microsoft
3 513 (11.50%) Databricks
4 173 (3.88%) Google
5 157 (3.52%) Informatica
6 126 (2.83%) Talend
7 124 (2.78%) ServiceNow
8 107 (2.40%) SAP
9 82 (1.84%) Splunk
10 75 (1.68%) IBM
11 62 (1.39%) Denodo
12 52 (1.17%) Salesforce
13 47 (1.05%) VMware
14 44 (0.99%) Citrix
15 40 (0.90%) Bloomberg
15 40 (0.90%) Dynatrace
16 37 (0.83%) Murex
17 31 (0.70%) Alteryx
18 29 (0.65%) BMC
19 28 (0.63%) Adobe