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

6 months to
1 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,494 3,278 3,555
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.88% 11.88% 10.53%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.34% 36.22% 33.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,009 2,338 2,684
10th Percentile £355 £345 £350
25th Percentile £413 £406 £422
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -0.46%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £646
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 89 57 42
10th Percentile £23.60 £21.18 £24.20
25th Percentile £29.96 £29.07 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £37.50 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -9.64% -9.55%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £56.56
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £41.16
% change year-on-year +14.56% -5.61% -13.36%

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 12,035 9,049 10,639
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.45% 32.79% 31.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,808 6,247 7,661
10th Percentile £363 £350 £355
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £521 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.07% -6.36% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £768 £800
UK median daily rate £513 £503 £525
% change year-on-year +1.99% -4.29% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 497 227 369
10th Percentile £33.70 £29.07 £31.07
25th Percentile £53.53 £40.00 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.08 £83.58 £78.15
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +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 1 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 1 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 1 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 2,437 £525 -0.24% 1,259
North of England -2 594 £461 -2.89% 429
Midlands +1 537 £459 +8.00% 217
South East -9 474 £475 -5.00% 451
West Midlands +5 440 £459 +2.00% 130
North West -3 313 £475 +1.28% 235
Yorkshire -3 241 £465 -2.11% 131
South West -5 226 £500 +17.65% 164
East of England -4 118 £478 -4.50% 111
East Midlands -4 93 £473 +22.06% 87
North East -14 52 £413 -10.81% 72
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
1 203 (4.52%) Apache Airflow
1 203 (4.52%) Apache Spark
2 184 (4.09%) Confluence
3 157 (3.49%) Apache
4 94 (2.09%) SAS
5 60 (1.34%) SharePoint
6 40 (0.89%) WebLogic
7 38 (0.85%) Oracle Workflow
8 32 (0.71%) IIS
9 26 (0.58%) Jupyter
10 22 (0.49%) Palantir Foundry
11 19 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
12 18 (0.40%) CMS
12 18 (0.40%) Tomcat
13 16 (0.36%) nginx
13 16 (0.36%) WebSphere
14 13 (0.29%) Tuxedo
15 11 (0.24%) Camunda
16 9 (0.20%) Appian
17 8 (0.18%) Apache Superset
Applications
1 296 (6.59%) Microsoft Excel
2 53 (1.18%) Microsoft Office
3 40 (0.89%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.85%) Spreadsheet
5 26 (0.58%) 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
9 3 (0.067%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.022%) InDesign
10 1 (0.022%) Mingle
10 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 44 (0.98%) Dynamics CRM
2 42 (0.93%) Oracle EBS
3 28 (0.62%) Aladdin
4 25 (0.56%) Oracle ERP
5 24 (0.53%) Remedy ITSM
6 23 (0.51%) Oracle Payables
6 23 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
7 18 (0.40%) Oracle EBS R12
8 16 (0.36%) Oracle Receivables
9 15 (0.33%) NEC Housing
10 12 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
11 11 (0.24%) Findur
11 11 (0.24%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.24%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.22%) Finacle
13 9 (0.20%) Fidessa
13 9 (0.20%) Unit4 Business World
14 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
14 8 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
15 7 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 1,424 (31.69%) Azure
2 1,062 (23.63%) AWS
3 859 (19.11%) Power Platform
4 411 (9.15%) Azure DevOps
5 396 (8.81%) GCP
6 324 (7.21%) Azure Data Factory
7 322 (7.17%) GitHub
8 302 (6.72%) Snowflake
9 275 (6.12%) Serverless
10 263 (5.85%) dbt
11 234 (5.21%) Amazon S3
12 206 (4.58%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 175 (3.89%) AWS Lambda
14 166 (3.69%) GitHub Actions
15 90 (2.00%) Entra ID
16 88 (1.96%) Power Automate
17 85 (1.89%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 81 (1.80%) SaaS
19 79 (1.76%) PowerApps
20 69 (1.54%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 50 (1.11%) DNS
2 42 (0.93%) Firewall
3 25 (0.56%) SSL
4 23 (0.51%) VPN
5 21 (0.47%) Network Security
5 21 (0.47%) SNMP
6 20 (0.45%) Internet
7 19 (0.42%) HTTP
8 15 (0.33%) TCP/IP
9 12 (0.27%) WAN
10 10 (0.22%) Wireshark
11 9 (0.20%) Broadband
11 9 (0.20%) DHCP
11 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
12 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
12 8 (0.18%) Kerberos
12 8 (0.18%) SAN
12 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
13 7 (0.16%) Multicast
13 7 (0.16%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 793 (17.65%) Power BI
2 631 (14.04%) Data Warehouse
3 572 (12.73%) SQL Server
4 294 (6.54%) Tableau
5 279 (6.21%) Relational Database
6 271 (6.03%) PostgreSQL
7 270 (6.01%) Data Lake
8 225 (5.01%) NoSQL
9 223 (4.96%) Metadata
10 184 (4.09%) Oracle Database
11 174 (3.87%) Azure SQL Database
12 168 (3.74%) BigQuery
13 153 (3.40%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 140 (3.12%) Amazon Redshift
15 123 (2.74%) Delta Lake
16 105 (2.34%) Oracle Reports
17 103 (2.29%) Big Data
18 98 (2.18%) Snowflake Schema
19 96 (2.14%) MySQL
20 89 (1.98%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 504 (11.21%) Git
2 347 (7.72%) JIRA
3 250 (5.56%) Jenkins
4 190 (4.23%) GitLab
5 72 (1.60%) JUnit
6 61 (1.36%) Maven
7 57 (1.27%) Gradle
8 52 (1.16%) Postman
9 50 (1.11%) Selenium
10 49 (1.09%) Mockito
11 37 (0.82%) SonarQube
12 35 (0.78%) Bitbucket
13 34 (0.76%) Oracle Forms
14 30 (0.67%) ERwin
15 28 (0.62%) Liquibase
15 28 (0.62%) TeamCity
15 28 (0.62%) Visual Studio
15 28 (0.62%) Zephyr
16 26 (0.58%) JMeter
16 26 (0.58%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,169 (26.01%) Social Skills
2 1,156 (25.72%) Finance
3 904 (20.12%) Analytical Skills
4 434 (9.66%) Banking
5 405 (9.01%) Public Sector
6 138 (3.07%) Marketing
7 129 (2.87%) Front Office
8 112 (2.49%) Retail
9 103 (2.29%) Investment Banking
10 85 (1.89%) Documentation Skills
11 74 (1.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 66 (1.47%) Manufacturing
13 52 (1.16%) Financial Institution
13 52 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
14 49 (1.09%) Legal
15 47 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
16 39 (0.87%) Publishing
17 38 (0.85%) Telecoms
18 37 (0.82%) Back Office
19 32 (0.71%) Law
Job Titles
1 954 (21.23%) Developer
2 903 (20.09%) Data Engineer
3 645 (14.35%) Analyst
4 607 (13.51%) Senior
5 316 (7.03%) Lead
6 275 (6.12%) Data Analyst
7 235 (5.23%) Architect
8 224 (4.98%) Consultant
9 186 (4.14%) Business Analyst
10 178 (3.96%) Senior Data Engineer
11 175 (3.89%) Java Developer
12 171 (3.81%) DBA
13 151 (3.36%) Senior Developer
14 131 (2.91%) Software Engineer
15 114 (2.54%) SQL Developer
16 113 (2.51%) SQL DBA
17 108 (2.40%) Azure Engineer
18 98 (2.18%) C# Developer
19 93 (2.07%) Data Architect
19 93 (2.07%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 371 (8.26%) REST
2 366 (8.14%) .NET
3 285 (6.34%) PySpark
4 277 (6.16%) Kafka
5 228 (5.07%) Spring
6 207 (4.61%) Spring Boot
7 200 (4.45%) React
8 181 (4.03%) RESTful
9 170 (3.78%) JSON
10 157 (3.49%) XML
11 148 (3.29%) HTML
12 127 (2.83%) AngularJS
13 126 (2.80%) CSS
14 109 (2.43%) Pandas
15 102 (2.27%) Web Services
16 99 (2.20%) SOAP
17 94 (2.09%) Middleware
18 92 (2.05%) .NET Framework
19 75 (1.67%) Node.js
20 73 (1.62%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 295 (6.56%) Cloud Native
2 202 (4.49%) Data Structures
3 167 (3.72%) Product Ownership
4 158 (3.52%) Legacy Systems
5 136 (3.03%) Distributed Systems
6 94 (2.09%) Onboarding
7 88 (1.96%) Enterprise Software
8 82 (1.82%) Management Information System
9 81 (1.80%) Derivative
10 76 (1.69%) Self-Motivation
11 71 (1.58%) Analytical Mindset
12 69 (1.54%) Clustering
13 62 (1.38%) Data Protection Act
14 59 (1.31%) Replication
15 54 (1.20%) Algorithms
16 53 (1.18%) Fixed Income
17 51 (1.13%) Equities
18 49 (1.09%) Greenfield Project
19 47 (1.05%) Reference Data
20 44 (0.98%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 295 (6.56%) Linux
2 278 (6.19%) Windows
3 201 (4.47%) Unix
4 106 (2.36%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.53%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.47%) AIX
7 16 (0.36%) Solaris
8 14 (0.31%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (0.24%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.18%) zOS
11 7 (0.16%) Ubuntu
12 6 (0.13%) Android
12 6 (0.13%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.13%) VMS
12 6 (0.13%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
13 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.089%) Oracle Linux
15 2 (0.045%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.045%) OpenVMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,210 (26.92%) CI/CD
2 1,181 (26.28%) Analytics
3 1,158 (25.77%) Agile
4 1,145 (25.48%) Data Modelling
5 1,035 (23.03%) ETL
6 1,021 (22.72%) Business Intelligence
7 912 (20.29%) DevOps
8 881 (19.60%) Data Pipeline
9 866 (19.27%) Problem-Solving
10 769 (17.11%) Data Engineering
11 659 (14.66%) AI
12 617 (13.73%) Migration
13 601 (13.37%) Validation
14 495 (11.01%) Data Governance
15 475 (10.57%) Decision-Making
16 470 (10.46%) Stakeholder Management
17 468 (10.41%) Continuous Improvement
18 465 (10.35%) Test Automation
19 437 (9.72%) Data Analysis
20 397 (8.83%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,613 (35.89%) Python
2 564 (12.55%) Java
3 442 (9.84%) C#
4 358 (7.97%) PL/SQL
5 326 (7.25%) JavaScript
6 241 (5.36%) T-SQL
7 239 (5.32%) PowerShell
8 167 (3.72%) TypeScript
9 142 (3.16%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 128 (2.85%) Shell Script
11 95 (2.11%) Bash
12 93 (2.07%) R
13 69 (1.54%) Scala
14 46 (1.02%) C++
15 44 (0.98%) VBA
16 40 (0.89%) Bicep
17 32 (0.71%) C
18 30 (0.67%) VB
19 22 (0.49%) Go
19 22 (0.49%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 977 (21.74%) Security Cleared
2 782 (17.40%) SC Cleared
3 322 (7.17%) Degree
4 107 (2.38%) Computer Science Degree
5 101 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
5 101 (2.25%) DV Cleared
6 68 (1.51%) Azure Certification
7 50 (1.11%) ISTQB
8 48 (1.07%) Master's Degree
9 41 (0.91%) Microsoft Certification
10 30 (0.67%) AWS Certification
11 17 (0.38%) DBS Check
12 16 (0.36%) CISSP
12 16 (0.36%) PhD
13 12 (0.27%) ISEB
13 12 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
14 11 (0.24%) FFIEC
14 11 (0.24%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 10 (0.22%) CISM
16 9 (0.20%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 839 (18.67%) Data Quality
2 328 (7.30%) QA
3 155 (3.45%) GDPR
4 49 (1.09%) Accessibility
5 43 (0.96%) SLA
6 22 (0.49%) Actionable Recommendations
6 22 (0.49%) NIST
6 22 (0.49%) PMO
7 20 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 19 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 16 (0.36%) Solvency II
10 15 (0.33%) MiFID
11 14 (0.31%) IFRS
12 12 (0.27%) COBIT
12 12 (0.27%) HIPAA
12 12 (0.27%) ISO 20022
13 11 (0.24%) PCI DSS
14 10 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 9 (0.20%) WCAG
16 8 (0.18%) HL7
System Software
1 450 (10.01%) Docker
2 118 (2.63%) Active Directory
3 42 (0.93%) Virtual Machines
3 42 (0.93%) VMware Infrastructure
4 36 (0.80%) Oracle RAC
5 17 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
6 14 (0.31%) VMware NSX
7 13 (0.29%) Hyper-V
7 13 (0.29%) vCloud
8 9 (0.20%) Postfix
9 8 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
10 7 (0.16%) KVM
11 4 (0.089%) HDFS
11 4 (0.089%) RACF
12 2 (0.045%) Apache ZooKeeper
12 2 (0.045%) GridGain
13 1 (0.022%) Varnish
13 1 (0.022%) vSphere
13 1 (0.022%) XenApp
13 1 (0.022%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 387 (8.61%) Kubernetes
2 357 (7.94%) Terraform
3 92 (2.05%) Grafana
4 84 (1.87%) Ansible
5 47 (1.05%) Prometheus
6 42 (0.93%) Oracle RMAN
7 38 (0.85%) Data Guard
8 31 (0.69%) Control-M
9 26 (0.58%) SCOM
10 21 (0.47%) Kibana
11 17 (0.38%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.36%) Nagios
12 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.33%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.31%) Netcool
15 13 (0.29%) OpenView
15 13 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
15 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 9 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
16 9 (0.20%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
Vendors
1 768 (17.09%) Oracle
2 716 (15.93%) Microsoft
3 525 (11.68%) Databricks
4 175 (3.89%) Google
5 157 (3.49%) Informatica
6 126 (2.80%) Talend
7 124 (2.76%) ServiceNow
8 123 (2.74%) SAP
9 81 (1.80%) Splunk
10 78 (1.74%) IBM
11 64 (1.42%) Denodo
12 59 (1.31%) VMware
13 57 (1.27%) Salesforce
14 40 (0.89%) Citrix
15 38 (0.85%) Bloomberg
15 38 (0.85%) Dynatrace
16 37 (0.82%) BMC
17 33 (0.73%) Alteryx
18 32 (0.71%) Murex
19 31 (0.69%) Adobe