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

6 months to
11 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,194 3,048 3,709
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.85% 12.46% 9.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.93% 36.61% 32.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,839 2,190 2,743
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £540
Median % change year-on-year - -7.41% -1.82%
75th Percentile £594 £625 £650
90th Percentile £688 £763 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -0.47%
Number of hourly rates quoted 69 61 56
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.00 £22.68
25th Percentile £34.01 £30.25 £29.06
Median hourly rate £47.50 £40.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +17.28% -4.71% -15.00%
75th Percentile £73.00 £58.75 £53.84
90th Percentile £82.55 £77.19 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £48.75 £39.67 £42.50
% change year-on-year +22.88% -6.65% -20.93%

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 11,356 8,326 11,325
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.66% 34.03% 30.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,440 5,778 8,132
10th Percentile £358 £358 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £524 £540
Median % change year-on-year -2.10% -3.06% -4.00%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £505 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 522 198 478
10th Percentile £36.28 £28.18 £35.52
25th Percentile £55.00 £36.06 £49.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £58.88 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.40% -5.80% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.65
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -

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 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 11 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 11 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 -3 2,303 £524 -1.13% 727
Midlands +2 530 £463 +3.93% 219
North of England -6 525 £460 -3.16% 381
West Midlands +4 433 £459 +1.17% 135
South East -14 405 £475 -5.00% 428
North West -5 268 £460 -3.16% 237
South West -1 226 £500 +5.26% 131
Yorkshire -10 217 £475 - 94
East of England -12 101 £495 +1.54% 102
East Midlands -4 93 £525 +38.16% 84
North East -5 52 £425 -8.11% 52
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
1 227 (5.41%) Apache Spark
2 170 (4.05%) Apache Airflow
3 148 (3.53%) Confluence
4 143 (3.41%) Apache
5 88 (2.10%) SAS
6 56 (1.34%) SharePoint
7 30 (0.72%) IIS
8 29 (0.69%) Oracle Workflow
8 29 (0.69%) WebLogic
9 24 (0.57%) Tomcat
10 21 (0.50%) Jupyter
11 19 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.38%) Appian
12 16 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
13 15 (0.36%) WebSphere
14 14 (0.33%) CMS
14 14 (0.33%) Tuxedo
15 13 (0.31%) nginx
16 11 (0.26%) Camunda
17 9 (0.21%) Mendix
Applications
1 263 (6.27%) Microsoft Excel
2 41 (0.98%) Microsoft Office
2 41 (0.98%) MS Visio
3 30 (0.72%) Spreadsheet
4 29 (0.69%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 10 (0.24%) Chatbot
6 5 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
6 5 (0.12%) Notepad++
7 3 (0.072%) Oracle Smart View
8 2 (0.048%) Notion
8 2 (0.048%) Trello
9 1 (0.024%) Acrobat
9 1 (0.024%) InDesign
9 1 (0.024%) Mingle
9 1 (0.024%) Photoshop
9 1 (0.024%) Weka
Business Applications
1 35 (0.83%) Oracle EBS
2 29 (0.69%) Dynamics CRM
3 25 (0.60%) Aladdin
4 21 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
5 20 (0.48%) NEC Housing
5 20 (0.48%) Oracle ERP
6 19 (0.45%) Oracle Payables
7 17 (0.41%) Oracle EBS R12
8 15 (0.36%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
9 12 (0.29%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 11 (0.26%) Findur
11 10 (0.24%) Endur
11 10 (0.24%) Oracle General Ledger
12 9 (0.21%) NetSuite
12 9 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
12 9 (0.21%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 8 (0.19%) Oracle Cash Management
13 8 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
13 8 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,376 (32.81%) Azure
2 1,038 (24.75%) AWS
3 798 (19.03%) Power Platform
4 396 (9.44%) Azure DevOps
5 345 (8.23%) GCP
6 335 (7.99%) Azure Data Factory
7 315 (7.51%) GitHub
8 277 (6.60%) Serverless
9 249 (5.94%) Snowflake
10 245 (5.84%) Amazon S3
11 210 (5.01%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 200 (4.77%) dbt
13 173 (4.12%) AWS Lambda
14 164 (3.91%) GitHub Actions
15 77 (1.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 75 (1.79%) Entra ID
16 75 (1.79%) SaaS
17 73 (1.74%) Power Automate
18 69 (1.65%) Amazon EC2
19 65 (1.55%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 50 (1.19%) DNS
2 45 (1.07%) Firewall
3 20 (0.48%) SNMP
4 18 (0.43%) HTTP
5 17 (0.41%) Network Security
5 17 (0.41%) WAN
6 16 (0.38%) Internet
7 15 (0.36%) SSL
7 15 (0.36%) TCP/IP
7 15 (0.36%) VPN
8 11 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
9 9 (0.21%) LAN
9 9 (0.21%) Wireshark
10 8 (0.19%) 3GPP
11 7 (0.17%) SAN
12 6 (0.14%) BGP
12 6 (0.14%) IPsec
12 6 (0.14%) RTP
13 5 (0.12%) DHCP
13 5 (0.12%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 738 (17.60%) Power BI
2 542 (12.92%) Data Warehouse
3 528 (12.59%) SQL Server
4 298 (7.11%) Data Lake
5 280 (6.68%) Tableau
6 273 (6.51%) PostgreSQL
7 269 (6.41%) Relational Database
8 224 (5.34%) NoSQL
9 203 (4.84%) Metadata
10 189 (4.51%) Azure SQL Database
11 158 (3.77%) Oracle Database
12 153 (3.65%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 134 (3.20%) BigQuery
14 125 (2.98%) Amazon Redshift
15 124 (2.96%) Delta Lake
16 113 (2.69%) Big Data
17 108 (2.58%) MySQL
18 101 (2.41%) Oracle Reports
19 90 (2.15%) Amazon RDS
19 90 (2.15%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 451 (10.75%) Git
2 333 (7.94%) JIRA
3 224 (5.34%) Jenkins
4 200 (4.77%) GitLab
5 65 (1.55%) JUnit
6 57 (1.36%) Postman
6 57 (1.36%) Selenium
7 49 (1.17%) Maven
8 47 (1.12%) Mockito
9 42 (1.00%) Gradle
10 41 (0.98%) Cucumber
11 34 (0.81%) SonarQube
12 31 (0.74%) MLflow
13 30 (0.72%) REST Assured
14 26 (0.62%) ERwin
14 26 (0.62%) Liquibase
15 25 (0.60%) Bitbucket
15 25 (0.60%) JMeter
15 25 (0.60%) Team Foundation Server
16 24 (0.57%) Zephyr
General
1 1,117 (26.63%) Finance
2 1,070 (25.51%) Social Skills
3 775 (18.48%) Analytical Skills
4 397 (9.47%) Banking
5 363 (8.66%) Public Sector
6 118 (2.81%) Front Office
7 117 (2.79%) Marketing
8 103 (2.46%) Investment Banking
9 86 (2.05%) Documentation Skills
10 74 (1.76%) Retail
11 66 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 53 (1.26%) Financial Institution
13 51 (1.22%) Legal
14 42 (1.00%) Publishing
15 37 (0.88%) Manufacturing
16 36 (0.86%) Presentation Skills
17 34 (0.81%) Telecoms
18 33 (0.79%) Organisational Skills
19 31 (0.74%) Back Office
19 31 (0.74%) Law
Job Titles
1 871 (20.77%) Data Engineer
2 870 (20.74%) Developer
3 587 (14.00%) Analyst
4 544 (12.97%) Senior
5 291 (6.94%) Lead
6 255 (6.08%) Data Analyst
7 229 (5.46%) Architect
8 194 (4.63%) Consultant
9 177 (4.22%) Business Analyst
10 167 (3.98%) Java Developer
11 161 (3.84%) Senior Data Engineer
12 133 (3.17%) DBA
12 133 (3.17%) Senior Developer
13 130 (3.10%) Software Engineer
14 106 (2.53%) Azure Engineer
15 101 (2.41%) C# Developer
16 96 (2.29%) SQL Developer
17 86 (2.05%) Python Developer
17 86 (2.05%) SQL DBA
18 83 (1.98%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 355 (8.46%) .NET
2 341 (8.13%) REST
3 257 (6.13%) Kafka
4 253 (6.03%) PySpark
5 211 (5.03%) Spring
6 201 (4.79%) Spring Boot
7 197 (4.70%) React
8 184 (4.39%) RESTful
9 151 (3.60%) HTML
10 142 (3.39%) JSON
11 138 (3.29%) XML
12 135 (3.22%) CSS
13 119 (2.84%) Pandas
14 108 (2.58%) AngularJS
15 102 (2.43%) SOAP
16 92 (2.19%) Web Services
17 90 (2.15%) Middleware
18 83 (1.98%) .NET Framework
19 77 (1.84%) OAuth
20 70 (1.67%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 274 (6.53%) Cloud Native
2 152 (3.62%) Data Structures
3 146 (3.48%) Legacy Systems
4 128 (3.05%) Product Ownership
5 123 (2.93%) Distributed Systems
6 83 (1.98%) Management Information System
7 82 (1.96%) Derivative
8 77 (1.84%) Onboarding
9 68 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
10 67 (1.60%) Analytical Mindset
11 56 (1.34%) Clustering
11 56 (1.34%) Enterprise Software
12 55 (1.31%) Self-Motivation
13 53 (1.26%) Equities
14 52 (1.24%) Greenfield Project
15 49 (1.17%) Fixed Income
16 44 (1.05%) Algorithms
17 42 (1.00%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
17 42 (1.00%) Low-Code
18 40 (0.95%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 291 (6.94%) Linux
2 252 (6.01%) Windows
3 206 (4.91%) Unix
4 87 (2.07%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.57%) AIX
6 18 (0.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 15 (0.36%) Windows Server 2019
8 10 (0.24%) Solaris
9 9 (0.21%) Windows Server 2016
10 8 (0.19%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.19%) zOS
11 7 (0.17%) Android
11 7 (0.17%) Apple iOS
11 7 (0.17%) Windows 10
12 4 (0.095%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.095%) VMS
13 3 (0.072%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.048%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.048%) HPUX
14 2 (0.048%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,178 (28.09%) CI/CD
2 1,060 (25.27%) Analytics
3 1,037 (24.73%) Data Modelling
4 1,029 (24.54%) Agile
5 1,006 (23.99%) ETL
6 941 (22.44%) Business Intelligence
7 885 (21.10%) DevOps
8 824 (19.65%) Problem-Solving
9 798 (19.03%) Data Pipeline
10 696 (16.60%) Data Engineering
11 593 (14.14%) AI
12 555 (13.23%) Migration
13 529 (12.61%) Validation
14 451 (10.75%) Data Governance
15 437 (10.42%) Test Automation
16 417 (9.94%) Decision-Making
17 395 (9.42%) Data Analysis
18 379 (9.04%) Continuous Improvement
19 375 (8.94%) Stakeholder Management
20 371 (8.85%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,557 (37.12%) Python
2 555 (13.23%) Java
3 445 (10.61%) C#
4 316 (7.53%) JavaScript
5 309 (7.37%) PL/SQL
6 223 (5.32%) T-SQL
7 215 (5.13%) PowerShell
8 151 (3.60%) TypeScript
9 129 (3.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 113 (2.69%) Shell Script
11 101 (2.41%) R
12 82 (1.96%) Bash
13 76 (1.81%) Scala
14 61 (1.45%) C++
15 39 (0.93%) VBA
16 36 (0.86%) Bicep
17 33 (0.79%) VB
18 32 (0.76%) C
19 30 (0.72%) Perl
20 25 (0.60%) Go
Qualifications
1 877 (20.91%) Security Cleared
2 707 (16.86%) SC Cleared
3 327 (7.80%) Degree
4 109 (2.60%) Computer Science Degree
5 97 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
6 81 (1.93%) DV Cleared
7 67 (1.60%) Azure Certification
8 52 (1.24%) Master's Degree
9 49 (1.17%) ISTQB
10 38 (0.91%) Microsoft Certification
11 25 (0.60%) AWS Certification
12 16 (0.38%) DBS Check
12 16 (0.38%) PhD
13 13 (0.31%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 11 (0.26%) CISSP
14 11 (0.26%) PMI Certification
15 9 (0.21%) CISM
15 9 (0.21%) PMP
15 9 (0.21%) TOGAF Certification
16 8 (0.19%) CBAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 753 (17.95%) Data Quality
2 320 (7.63%) QA
3 173 (4.12%) GDPR
4 44 (1.05%) SLA
5 39 (0.93%) Accessibility
6 30 (0.72%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 27 (0.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.57%) PMO
9 23 (0.55%) NIST
10 17 (0.41%) IFRS
11 16 (0.38%) PCI DSS
12 15 (0.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 15 (0.36%) MiFID
13 14 (0.33%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.31%) Solvency II
15 12 (0.29%) Actionable Recommendations
15 12 (0.29%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.24%) GRC
16 10 (0.24%) HL7
17 9 (0.21%) NCSC
System Software
1 470 (11.21%) Docker
2 91 (2.17%) Active Directory
3 39 (0.93%) Virtual Machines
4 29 (0.69%) VMware Infrastructure
5 23 (0.55%) Oracle RAC
6 16 (0.38%) Hyper-V
7 15 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
8 11 (0.26%) VMware NSX
9 10 (0.24%) KVM
9 10 (0.24%) vCloud
10 9 (0.21%) Postfix
11 8 (0.19%) Virtual Desktop
12 6 (0.14%) HDFS
12 6 (0.14%) RACF
13 4 (0.095%) XenApp
13 4 (0.095%) XenDesktop
14 2 (0.048%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.048%) GridGain
14 2 (0.048%) Oracle Clusterware
15 1 (0.024%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 381 (9.08%) Kubernetes
2 352 (8.39%) Terraform
3 107 (2.55%) Grafana
4 69 (1.65%) Ansible
5 62 (1.48%) Prometheus
6 35 (0.83%) Oracle RMAN
7 26 (0.62%) Data Guard
8 20 (0.48%) Kibana
8 20 (0.48%) Single Sign-On
9 17 (0.41%) Control-M
9 17 (0.41%) vCenter Server
10 15 (0.36%) ZABBIX
11 14 (0.33%) Nagios
11 14 (0.33%) Netcool
11 14 (0.33%) Tivoli
12 13 (0.31%) OpenView
12 13 (0.31%) Tivoli Monitoring
13 11 (0.26%) SCOM
14 8 (0.19%) HP Quality Center
14 8 (0.19%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 705 (16.81%) Oracle
2 645 (15.38%) Microsoft
3 501 (11.95%) Databricks
4 162 (3.86%) Google
5 147 (3.51%) Informatica
6 131 (3.12%) ServiceNow
7 119 (2.84%) Talend
8 109 (2.60%) SAP
9 86 (2.05%) Splunk
10 66 (1.57%) IBM
11 62 (1.48%) Denodo
12 48 (1.14%) Salesforce
13 44 (1.05%) VMware
14 43 (1.03%) Citrix
15 37 (0.88%) Dynatrace
16 33 (0.79%) Bloomberg
17 32 (0.76%) OpenAI
18 30 (0.72%) Murex
19 28 (0.67%) BMC
19 28 (0.67%) HP