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 21 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -6 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,997 3,029 3,645
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.69% 12.51% 10.01%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.68% 37.10% 33.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,729 2,156 2,694
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% -6.82% -
75th Percentile £588 £638 £650
90th Percentile £688 £769 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £538
% change year-on-year - -6.98% +0.47%
Number of hourly rates quoted 68 56 55
10th Percentile £26.50 £20.87 £23.25
25th Percentile £34.75 £30.19 £29.06
Median hourly rate £47.50 £45.50 £43.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.40% +4.60% -12.62%
75th Percentile £71.88 £65.15 £57.50
90th Percentile £82.70 £79.72 £61.93
UK median hourly rate £52.49 £42.82 £43.50
% change year-on-year +22.60% -1.57% -13.00%

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 10,896 8,165 10,903
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.43% 33.72% 29.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,183 5,667 7,919
10th Percentile £356 £361 £350
25th Percentile £415 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -4.55% -2.22%
75th Percentile £613 £650 £656
90th Percentile £720 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £500 £520 £530
% change year-on-year -3.85% -1.89% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 528 206 446
10th Percentile £40.88 £28.09 £37.59
25th Percentile £55.00 £39.25 £49.53
Median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £79.59
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.36
% change year-on-year +4.00% +0.23% +2.73%

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 21 May 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 21 May 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 21 May 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 0 2,244 £520 -3.26% 765
Midlands +3 511 £468 +6.74% 209
North of England -8 481 £460 -3.16% 419
West Midlands +4 408 £460 - 120
South East -14 358 £500 - 499
North West -2 256 £460 -3.16% 228
South West -4 202 £475 - 140
Yorkshire -13 198 £467 -1.79% 124
East Midlands 0 99 £525 +35.05% 89
East of England -15 95 £500 +2.56% 124
North East -10 39 £450 - 75
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
1 229 (5.73%) Apache Spark
2 150 (3.75%) Apache Airflow
3 136 (3.40%) Apache
3 136 (3.40%) Confluence
4 80 (2.00%) SAS
5 63 (1.58%) SharePoint
6 38 (0.95%) WebLogic
7 31 (0.78%) IIS
8 26 (0.65%) Oracle Workflow
9 23 (0.58%) Tomcat
10 17 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.38%) Jupyter
11 15 (0.38%) Tuxedo
12 14 (0.35%) Appian
13 13 (0.33%) CMS
13 13 (0.33%) HCL Notes
13 13 (0.33%) Mendix
14 12 (0.30%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 12 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
14 12 (0.30%) WebSphere
Applications
1 264 (6.60%) Microsoft Excel
2 47 (1.18%) MS Visio
3 46 (1.15%) Microsoft Office
4 30 (0.75%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 23 (0.58%) Spreadsheet
6 9 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.18%) Microsoft Project
8 5 (0.13%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.13%) Notion
9 3 (0.075%) Oracle Smart View
9 3 (0.075%) Trello
10 1 (0.025%) InDesign
10 1 (0.025%) Mingle
10 1 (0.025%) Weka
Business Applications
1 42 (1.05%) Oracle EBS
2 28 (0.70%) Aladdin
3 27 (0.68%) Dynamics CRM
4 21 (0.53%) NEC Housing
5 20 (0.50%) Oracle EBS R12
6 19 (0.48%) Oracle Payables
7 18 (0.45%) Oracle ERP
7 18 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
8 16 (0.40%) Oracle Receivables
9 14 (0.35%) NetSuite
9 14 (0.35%) Oracle General Ledger
9 14 (0.35%) Remedy ITSM
10 12 (0.30%) Oracle Assets
10 12 (0.30%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 10 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
12 9 (0.23%) Endur
13 8 (0.20%) Findur
13 8 (0.20%) Oracle 11i
13 8 (0.20%) Oracle Cash Management
13 8 (0.20%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
Cloud Services
1 1,334 (33.38%) Azure
2 958 (23.97%) AWS
3 770 (19.26%) Power Platform
4 389 (9.73%) Azure DevOps
5 339 (8.48%) Azure Data Factory
6 327 (8.18%) GCP
7 295 (7.38%) GitHub
8 250 (6.25%) Serverless
9 227 (5.68%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 224 (5.60%) Snowflake
11 223 (5.58%) Amazon S3
12 178 (4.45%) dbt
13 149 (3.73%) AWS Lambda
13 149 (3.73%) GitHub Actions
14 79 (1.98%) Power Automate
15 73 (1.83%) SaaS
16 71 (1.78%) Entra ID
17 70 (1.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 67 (1.68%) Amazon EC2
19 65 (1.63%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 47 (1.18%) Firewall
2 41 (1.03%) DNS
3 20 (0.50%) SNMP
4 17 (0.43%) Network Security
5 16 (0.40%) HTTP
5 16 (0.40%) Internet
5 16 (0.40%) TCP/IP
6 15 (0.38%) WAN
7 12 (0.30%) SSL
7 12 (0.30%) Wi-Fi
8 11 (0.28%) LAN
9 10 (0.25%) VPN
10 8 (0.20%) Wireshark
11 7 (0.18%) 3GPP
12 6 (0.15%) DHCP
12 6 (0.15%) IPsec
13 5 (0.13%) Kerberos
13 5 (0.13%) PuTTY
13 5 (0.13%) RTP
13 5 (0.13%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 705 (17.64%) Power BI
2 511 (12.78%) Data Warehouse
3 504 (12.61%) SQL Server
4 281 (7.03%) Tableau
5 274 (6.86%) Data Lake
6 258 (6.45%) PostgreSQL
7 249 (6.23%) Relational Database
8 239 (5.98%) NoSQL
9 211 (5.28%) Metadata
10 194 (4.85%) Azure SQL Database
11 152 (3.80%) Oracle Database
12 147 (3.68%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 134 (3.35%) BigQuery
14 120 (3.00%) Delta Lake
15 110 (2.75%) Big Data
16 109 (2.73%) Amazon Redshift
17 105 (2.63%) MySQL
18 99 (2.48%) Oracle Reports
19 92 (2.30%) Amazon RDS
20 91 (2.28%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 421 (10.53%) Git
2 307 (7.68%) JIRA
3 210 (5.25%) Jenkins
4 170 (4.25%) GitLab
5 59 (1.48%) JUnit
6 57 (1.43%) Selenium
7 48 (1.20%) Maven
8 47 (1.18%) Postman
9 44 (1.10%) Mockito
10 40 (1.00%) Cucumber
11 36 (0.90%) Gradle
12 34 (0.85%) MLflow
12 34 (0.85%) SonarQube
13 29 (0.73%) REST Assured
14 28 (0.70%) ERwin
15 24 (0.60%) JMeter
16 23 (0.58%) Bitbucket
16 23 (0.58%) Visual Studio
17 22 (0.55%) Team Foundation Server
17 22 (0.55%) TeamCity
General
1 1,060 (26.52%) Finance
2 1,032 (25.82%) Social Skills
3 735 (18.39%) Analytical Skills
4 377 (9.43%) Banking
5 336 (8.41%) Public Sector
6 104 (2.60%) Front Office
7 99 (2.48%) Marketing
8 96 (2.40%) Investment Banking
9 79 (1.98%) Documentation Skills
10 62 (1.55%) Retail
11 60 (1.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 54 (1.35%) Financial Institution
13 51 (1.28%) Legal
14 38 (0.95%) Publishing
15 35 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
15 35 (0.88%) Telecoms
16 32 (0.80%) Law
16 32 (0.80%) Organisational Skills
17 31 (0.78%) Manufacturing
18 26 (0.65%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 835 (20.89%) Developer
2 823 (20.59%) Data Engineer
3 571 (14.29%) Analyst
4 514 (12.86%) Senior
5 275 (6.88%) Lead
6 249 (6.23%) Data Analyst
7 225 (5.63%) Architect
8 176 (4.40%) Consultant
9 174 (4.35%) Business Analyst
10 161 (4.03%) Java Developer
11 149 (3.73%) Senior Data Engineer
12 125 (3.13%) DBA
12 125 (3.13%) Software Engineer
13 124 (3.10%) Senior Developer
14 116 (2.90%) Azure Engineer
15 99 (2.48%) C# Developer
16 87 (2.18%) Data Scientist
16 87 (2.18%) Python Developer
17 86 (2.15%) Data Architect
18 85 (2.13%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 344 (8.61%) .NET
2 322 (8.06%) REST
3 256 (6.40%) Kafka
4 253 (6.33%) PySpark
5 201 (5.03%) Spring
6 195 (4.88%) React
7 193 (4.83%) Spring Boot
8 173 (4.33%) RESTful
9 144 (3.60%) HTML
10 129 (3.23%) JSON
10 129 (3.23%) XML
11 121 (3.03%) CSS
12 116 (2.90%) Pandas
13 110 (2.75%) AngularJS
14 93 (2.33%) SOAP
15 91 (2.28%) Middleware
16 80 (2.00%) .NET Framework
17 78 (1.95%) Web Services
18 72 (1.80%) Node.js
18 72 (1.80%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 251 (6.28%) Cloud Native
2 146 (3.65%) Data Structures
3 129 (3.23%) Legacy Systems
4 122 (3.05%) Product Ownership
5 108 (2.70%) Distributed Systems
6 85 (2.13%) Management Information System
7 77 (1.93%) Derivative
8 74 (1.85%) Onboarding
9 70 (1.75%) Data Protection Act
10 64 (1.60%) Analytical Mindset
11 54 (1.35%) Clustering
12 52 (1.30%) Enterprise Software
12 52 (1.30%) Equities
13 51 (1.28%) Fixed Income
14 47 (1.18%) Self-Motivation
15 46 (1.15%) Algorithms
15 46 (1.15%) Greenfield Project
16 40 (1.00%) Low-Code
17 39 (0.98%) Replication
18 38 (0.95%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 292 (7.31%) Linux
2 250 (6.25%) Windows
3 195 (4.88%) Unix
4 84 (2.10%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.60%) AIX
6 19 (0.48%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 15 (0.38%) Windows Server 2019
8 10 (0.25%) Windows Server 2016
9 8 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
10 7 (0.18%) Solaris
10 7 (0.18%) zOS
11 6 (0.15%) Android
11 6 (0.15%) Apple iOS
11 6 (0.15%) Windows 10
12 3 (0.075%) Oracle Linux
12 3 (0.075%) VMS
12 3 (0.075%) Windows Server 2012
13 2 (0.050%) Data ONTAP
13 2 (0.050%) Ubuntu
14 1 (0.025%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,090 (27.27%) CI/CD
2 1,005 (25.14%) Analytics
3 1,000 (25.02%) Data Modelling
4 975 (24.39%) Agile
5 964 (24.12%) ETL
6 906 (22.67%) Business Intelligence
7 873 (21.84%) DevOps
8 790 (19.76%) Problem-Solving
9 738 (18.46%) Data Pipeline
10 650 (16.26%) Data Engineering
11 522 (13.06%) AI
12 506 (12.66%) Migration
13 484 (12.11%) Validation
14 471 (11.78%) Data Governance
15 398 (9.96%) Decision-Making
16 397 (9.93%) Test Automation
17 372 (9.31%) Data Analysis
18 368 (9.21%) Performance Tuning
19 365 (9.13%) Microservices
20 349 (8.73%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,502 (37.58%) Python
2 547 (13.69%) Java
3 438 (10.96%) C#
4 310 (7.76%) JavaScript
5 288 (7.21%) PL/SQL
6 204 (5.10%) T-SQL
7 188 (4.70%) PowerShell
8 132 (3.30%) TypeScript
9 125 (3.13%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 113 (2.83%) R
11 109 (2.73%) Shell Script
12 88 (2.20%) Scala
13 78 (1.95%) Bash
14 59 (1.48%) C++
15 43 (1.08%) VBA
16 40 (1.00%) Bicep
17 36 (0.90%) Perl
18 29 (0.73%) VB
19 24 (0.60%) C
19 24 (0.60%) Go
Qualifications
1 836 (20.92%) Security Cleared
2 671 (16.79%) SC Cleared
3 324 (8.11%) Degree
4 104 (2.60%) Computer Science Degree
5 89 (2.23%) BPSS Clearance
6 73 (1.83%) Azure Certification
7 69 (1.73%) DV Cleared
8 50 (1.25%) Master's Degree
9 46 (1.15%) ISTQB
10 36 (0.90%) Microsoft Certification
11 23 (0.58%) AWS Certification
12 16 (0.40%) PhD
13 14 (0.35%) CBAP
14 13 (0.33%) DBS Check
15 12 (0.30%) Oracle Certification
16 11 (0.28%) CISSP
16 11 (0.28%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
17 10 (0.25%) PMI Certification
17 10 (0.25%) PMP
18 9 (0.23%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 734 (18.36%) Data Quality
2 300 (7.51%) QA
3 177 (4.43%) GDPR
4 40 (1.00%) SLA
5 38 (0.95%) Accessibility
6 32 (0.80%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 26 (0.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.60%) PMO
9 19 (0.48%) NIST
9 19 (0.48%) PCI DSS
10 16 (0.40%) HIPAA
10 16 (0.40%) MiFID
11 15 (0.38%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 14 (0.35%) IFRS
13 13 (0.33%) Actionable Recommendations
14 12 (0.30%) HL7
14 12 (0.30%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.25%) GRC
15 10 (0.25%) Solvency II
16 8 (0.20%) NCSC
System Software
1 462 (11.56%) Docker
2 92 (2.30%) Active Directory
3 36 (0.90%) Virtual Machines
4 27 (0.68%) VMware Infrastructure
5 25 (0.63%) Oracle RAC
6 16 (0.40%) Hyper-V
7 12 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
8 10 (0.25%) KVM
9 9 (0.23%) Postfix
10 8 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
10 8 (0.20%) VMware NSX
11 7 (0.18%) vCloud
12 6 (0.15%) HDFS
12 6 (0.15%) RACF
13 4 (0.10%) XenApp
13 4 (0.10%) XenDesktop
14 3 (0.075%) Oracle Clusterware
15 2 (0.050%) GridGain
15 2 (0.050%) vSphere
16 1 (0.025%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 386 (9.66%) Kubernetes
2 318 (7.96%) Terraform
3 106 (2.65%) Grafana
4 66 (1.65%) Ansible
5 62 (1.55%) Prometheus
6 38 (0.95%) Oracle RMAN
7 27 (0.68%) Data Guard
8 19 (0.48%) Single Sign-On
9 18 (0.45%) Kibana
10 15 (0.38%) ZABBIX
11 14 (0.35%) Control-M
11 14 (0.35%) Nagios
11 14 (0.35%) Netcool
11 14 (0.35%) SCCM
11 14 (0.35%) Tivoli
11 14 (0.35%) vCenter Server
12 13 (0.33%) OpenView
12 13 (0.33%) Tivoli Monitoring
13 9 (0.23%) Progress Chef
13 9 (0.23%) SCOM
Vendors
1 651 (16.29%) Oracle
2 627 (15.69%) Microsoft
3 481 (12.03%) Databricks
4 159 (3.98%) Google
5 137 (3.43%) Informatica
6 132 (3.30%) ServiceNow
7 106 (2.65%) Talend
8 103 (2.58%) SAP
9 86 (2.15%) Splunk
10 62 (1.55%) IBM
11 53 (1.33%) Denodo
12 51 (1.28%) Salesforce
13 46 (1.15%) Citrix
14 42 (1.05%) VMware
15 36 (0.90%) Dynatrace
16 35 (0.88%) OpenAI
17 31 (0.78%) Bloomberg
17 31 (0.78%) HP
18 30 (0.75%) BMC
18 30 (0.75%) MuleSoft