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

6 months to
14 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,493 3,261 3,521
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.85% 11.80% 10.57%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.46% 36.15% 33.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,029 2,304 2,635
10th Percentile £356 £338 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -0.46%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 82 65 41
10th Percentile £23.08 £23.18 £25.99
25th Percentile £30.91 £30.25 £30.37
Median hourly rate £45.00 £37.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -11.76% -7.37%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.25 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £41.33
% change year-on-year +14.56% -6.01% -9.92%

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 11,995 9,021 10,594
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.31% 32.64% 31.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,780 6,180 7,555
10th Percentile £363 £345 £358
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £653
90th Percentile £738 £763 £788
UK median daily rate £515 £505 £530
% change year-on-year +1.98% -4.76% -3.59%
Number of hourly rates quoted 495 245 358
10th Percentile £33.70 £29.07 £30.26
25th Percentile £53.53 £40.00 £51.25
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 £79.00 £83.88 £78.75
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £56.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +15.04% -13.08% +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 14 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 14 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 14 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 2,447 £525 -0.94% 2,884
North of England -4 591 £475 +1.28% 602
Midlands 0 538 £459 +2.68% 307
South East -10 476 £475 -5.00% 570
West Midlands +4 439 £459 +1.32% 172
North West -3 300 £500 +6.50% 338
Yorkshire 0 252 £470 -1.16% 163
South West -6 222 £500 +17.65% 245
East of England +1 120 £488 -2.50% 155
East Midlands -5 95 £465 +20.78% 135
North East -18 50 £413 -10.81% 112
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
1 210 (4.67%) Apache Airflow
2 196 (4.36%) Apache Spark
3 176 (3.92%) Confluence
4 153 (3.41%) Apache
5 98 (2.18%) SAS
6 70 (1.56%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.82%) Oracle Workflow
8 33 (0.73%) WebLogic
9 30 (0.67%) IIS
10 25 (0.56%) Jupyter
11 20 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
11 20 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
12 17 (0.38%) CMS
12 17 (0.38%) WebSphere
13 15 (0.33%) nginx
14 14 (0.31%) Tomcat
15 12 (0.27%) Tuxedo
16 11 (0.24%) Camunda
17 7 (0.16%) ArcGIS
17 7 (0.16%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 290 (6.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 48 (1.07%) Microsoft Office
3 34 (0.76%) MS Visio
3 34 (0.76%) Spreadsheet
4 22 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 10 (0.22%) Chatbot
6 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
7 4 (0.089%) Acrobat
7 4 (0.089%) Notion
7 4 (0.089%) Photoshop
8 3 (0.067%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.067%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.045%) 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 43 (0.96%) Dynamics CRM
2 42 (0.93%) Oracle EBS
3 26 (0.58%) Aladdin
3 26 (0.58%) Remedy ITSM
4 25 (0.56%) Oracle ERP
5 23 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
6 22 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
7 18 (0.40%) Oracle EBS R12
8 14 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.24%) Findur
10 11 (0.24%) NEC Housing
10 11 (0.24%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.22%) Finacle
12 9 (0.20%) Oracle Assets
13 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 8 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
14 7 (0.16%) OpenText MBPM
14 7 (0.16%) Oracle Financials
14 7 (0.16%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,421 (31.63%) Azure
2 1,059 (23.57%) AWS
3 858 (19.10%) Power Platform
4 410 (9.13%) Azure DevOps
5 390 (8.68%) GCP
6 324 (7.21%) GitHub
7 320 (7.12%) Azure Data Factory
8 308 (6.86%) Snowflake
9 272 (6.05%) Serverless
10 259 (5.76%) dbt
11 222 (4.94%) Amazon S3
12 202 (4.50%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 176 (3.92%) AWS Lambda
14 163 (3.63%) GitHub Actions
15 92 (2.05%) Power Automate
16 88 (1.96%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 88 (1.96%) Entra ID
17 83 (1.85%) SaaS
18 81 (1.80%) PowerApps
19 65 (1.45%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 60 (1.34%) DNS
2 45 (1.00%) Firewall
3 25 (0.56%) Network Security
4 23 (0.51%) SSL
4 23 (0.51%) VPN
5 21 (0.47%) SNMP
6 20 (0.45%) HTTP
6 20 (0.45%) Internet
7 17 (0.38%) TCP/IP
8 12 (0.27%) DHCP
8 12 (0.27%) WAN
9 10 (0.22%) Wireshark
10 9 (0.20%) Broadband
10 9 (0.20%) SAN
10 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
11 8 (0.18%) 3GPP
11 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
12 7 (0.16%) LAN
12 7 (0.16%) Multicast
12 7 (0.16%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 789 (17.56%) Power BI
2 640 (14.24%) Data Warehouse
3 570 (12.69%) SQL Server
4 280 (6.23%) Relational Database
5 274 (6.10%) Tableau
6 273 (6.08%) PostgreSQL
7 265 (5.90%) Data Lake
8 230 (5.12%) Metadata
9 222 (4.94%) NoSQL
10 188 (4.18%) Oracle Database
11 176 (3.92%) Azure SQL Database
12 166 (3.69%) BigQuery
13 142 (3.16%) Amazon Redshift
13 142 (3.16%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 124 (2.76%) Delta Lake
15 106 (2.36%) MySQL
16 102 (2.27%) Oracle Reports
17 99 (2.20%) Big Data
18 93 (2.07%) Snowflake Schema
19 92 (2.05%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 523 (11.64%) Git
2 351 (7.81%) JIRA
3 264 (5.88%) Jenkins
4 201 (4.47%) GitLab
5 74 (1.65%) JUnit
6 64 (1.42%) Postman
7 62 (1.38%) Selenium
8 61 (1.36%) Maven
9 60 (1.34%) Gradle
10 47 (1.05%) Mockito
11 41 (0.91%) SonarQube
12 36 (0.80%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.78%) Zephyr
14 33 (0.73%) Oracle Forms
15 32 (0.71%) JMeter
16 31 (0.69%) Visual Studio
17 28 (0.62%) TeamCity
18 27 (0.60%) ERwin
18 27 (0.60%) Liquibase
19 24 (0.53%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,187 (26.42%) Social Skills
2 1,149 (25.57%) Finance
3 910 (20.25%) Analytical Skills
4 449 (9.99%) Banking
5 402 (8.95%) Public Sector
6 137 (3.05%) Marketing
7 131 (2.92%) Front Office
8 117 (2.60%) Retail
9 104 (2.31%) Investment Banking
10 85 (1.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 80 (1.78%) Documentation Skills
12 72 (1.60%) Manufacturing
13 52 (1.16%) Financial Institution
13 52 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
14 49 (1.09%) Legal
15 44 (0.98%) Organisational Skills
16 39 (0.87%) Telecoms
17 36 (0.80%) Back Office
18 34 (0.76%) Law
18 34 (0.76%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 950 (21.14%) Developer
2 892 (19.85%) Data Engineer
3 636 (14.16%) Analyst
4 607 (13.51%) Senior
5 310 (6.90%) Lead
6 267 (5.94%) Data Analyst
7 231 (5.14%) Architect
8 227 (5.05%) Consultant
9 188 (4.18%) Business Analyst
10 187 (4.16%) DBA
11 172 (3.83%) Senior Data Engineer
12 169 (3.76%) Java Developer
13 151 (3.36%) Senior Developer
14 131 (2.92%) Software Engineer
15 118 (2.63%) SQL DBA
16 112 (2.49%) SQL Developer
17 100 (2.23%) Azure Engineer
18 96 (2.14%) Data Architect
18 96 (2.14%) Full-Stack Developer
19 93 (2.07%) C# Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 382 (8.50%) REST
2 374 (8.32%) .NET
3 293 (6.52%) PySpark
4 280 (6.23%) Kafka
5 225 (5.01%) Spring
6 204 (4.54%) Spring Boot
7 201 (4.47%) React
8 184 (4.10%) RESTful
9 167 (3.72%) JSON
10 158 (3.52%) XML
11 157 (3.49%) HTML
12 129 (2.87%) CSS
13 127 (2.83%) AngularJS
14 103 (2.29%) Web Services
15 101 (2.25%) Pandas
16 97 (2.16%) Middleware
16 97 (2.16%) SOAP
17 88 (1.96%) .NET Framework
18 75 (1.67%) Node.js
19 69 (1.54%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 295 (6.57%) Cloud Native
2 201 (4.47%) Data Structures
3 169 (3.76%) Product Ownership
4 150 (3.34%) Legacy Systems
5 131 (2.92%) Distributed Systems
6 98 (2.18%) Onboarding
7 97 (2.16%) Enterprise Software
8 87 (1.94%) Management Information System
9 79 (1.76%) Derivative
9 79 (1.76%) Self-Motivation
10 68 (1.51%) Analytical Mindset
11 65 (1.45%) Data Protection Act
12 63 (1.40%) Replication
13 61 (1.36%) Clustering
14 53 (1.18%) Algorithms
14 53 (1.18%) Reference Data
15 52 (1.16%) Fixed Income
16 50 (1.11%) AI Agents
17 48 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
18 47 (1.05%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 311 (6.92%) Linux
2 276 (6.14%) Windows
3 209 (4.65%) Unix
4 104 (2.31%) Windows Server
5 22 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.47%) AIX
7 16 (0.36%) Solaris
8 11 (0.24%) Windows Server 2019
9 10 (0.22%) Windows Server 2008
10 7 (0.16%) Ubuntu
10 7 (0.16%) VMS
10 7 (0.16%) zOS
11 6 (0.13%) Windows 10
11 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
12 4 (0.089%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.089%) Windows Server 2016
13 3 (0.067%) Android
13 3 (0.067%) Apple iOS
13 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
14 2 (0.045%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,219 (27.13%) CI/CD
2 1,172 (26.09%) Agile
3 1,149 (25.57%) Data Modelling
4 1,148 (25.55%) Analytics
5 1,038 (23.10%) ETL
6 1,010 (22.48%) Business Intelligence
7 915 (20.37%) DevOps
8 884 (19.68%) Problem-Solving
9 881 (19.61%) Data Pipeline
10 759 (16.89%) Data Engineering
11 666 (14.82%) AI
12 634 (14.11%) Migration
13 627 (13.96%) Validation
14 505 (11.24%) Stakeholder Management
15 498 (11.08%) Data Governance
16 488 (10.86%) Test Automation
17 471 (10.48%) Continuous Improvement
18 469 (10.44%) Decision-Making
19 436 (9.70%) Data Analysis
20 380 (8.46%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,599 (35.59%) Python
2 554 (12.33%) Java
3 433 (9.64%) C#
4 358 (7.97%) PL/SQL
5 343 (7.63%) JavaScript
6 243 (5.41%) PowerShell
7 235 (5.23%) T-SQL
8 170 (3.78%) TypeScript
9 142 (3.16%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 128 (2.85%) Shell Script
11 104 (2.31%) Bash
12 78 (1.74%) R
13 67 (1.49%) Scala
14 44 (0.98%) C++
14 44 (0.98%) VBA
15 36 (0.80%) Bicep
16 27 (0.60%) C
17 26 (0.58%) VB
18 21 (0.47%) Go
18 21 (0.47%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 998 (22.21%) Security Cleared
2 804 (17.89%) SC Cleared
3 319 (7.10%) Degree
4 112 (2.49%) Computer Science Degree
5 104 (2.31%) DV Cleared
6 94 (2.09%) BPSS Clearance
7 69 (1.54%) Azure Certification
8 63 (1.40%) ISTQB
9 44 (0.98%) Microsoft Certification
10 43 (0.96%) Master's Degree
11 37 (0.82%) AWS Certification
12 19 (0.42%) CISSP
13 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
13 16 (0.36%) ISEB
13 16 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 13 (0.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 13 (0.29%) FFIEC
15 12 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
15 12 (0.27%) PhD
16 10 (0.22%) ACCA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 842 (18.74%) Data Quality
2 352 (7.83%) QA
3 152 (3.38%) GDPR
4 47 (1.05%) Accessibility
5 41 (0.91%) SLA
6 26 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 24 (0.53%) NIST
8 21 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 19 (0.42%) Actionable Recommendations
10 17 (0.38%) IFRS
10 17 (0.38%) ISO 20022
10 17 (0.38%) PMO
11 14 (0.31%) MiFID
11 14 (0.31%) Solvency II
12 13 (0.29%) COBIT
12 13 (0.29%) HIPAA
13 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
14 10 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 9 (0.20%) HL7
15 9 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 454 (10.10%) Docker
2 124 (2.76%) Active Directory
3 47 (1.05%) VMware Infrastructure
4 41 (0.91%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
6 17 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
7 15 (0.33%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.31%) vCloud
9 12 (0.27%) Hyper-V
10 8 (0.18%) Postfix
10 8 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
11 7 (0.16%) KVM
12 3 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
12 3 (0.067%) HDFS
13 2 (0.045%) GridGain
14 1 (0.022%) GPFS
14 1 (0.022%) Lustre
14 1 (0.022%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 1 (0.022%) Virtual Servers
14 1 (0.022%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 392 (8.72%) Kubernetes
2 367 (8.17%) Terraform
3 90 (2.00%) Grafana
4 89 (1.98%) Ansible
5 44 (0.98%) Oracle RMAN
5 44 (0.98%) Prometheus
6 40 (0.89%) Data Guard
7 38 (0.85%) Control-M
8 29 (0.65%) SCOM
9 18 (0.40%) Kibana
9 18 (0.40%) vCenter Server
10 16 (0.36%) Nagios
10 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
11 15 (0.33%) Tivoli
12 14 (0.31%) Netcool
13 13 (0.29%) OpenView
13 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
15 10 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
16 9 (0.20%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 769 (17.12%) Oracle
2 739 (16.45%) Microsoft
3 530 (11.80%) Databricks
4 173 (3.85%) Google
5 159 (3.54%) Informatica
6 126 (2.80%) Talend
7 125 (2.78%) SAP
8 115 (2.56%) ServiceNow
9 85 (1.89%) IBM
10 82 (1.83%) Splunk
11 67 (1.49%) Denodo
12 64 (1.42%) VMware
13 55 (1.22%) Salesforce
14 39 (0.87%) Bloomberg
14 39 (0.87%) BMC
15 38 (0.85%) Citrix
15 38 (0.85%) Dynatrace
16 33 (0.73%) Adobe
16 33 (0.73%) Alteryx
16 33 (0.73%) Murex