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

6 months to
10 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,435 3,271 3,770
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.90% 12.10% 10.17%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.95% 36.30% 32.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,980 2,336 2,809
10th Percentile £350 £354 £350
25th Percentile £413 £411 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £535
Median % change year-on-year - -6.54% -0.93%
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 76 64 52
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.14 £22.88
25th Percentile £32.80 £31.00 £29.06
Median hourly rate £45.00 £43.16 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.27% +1.55% -15.00%
75th Percentile £69.58 £53.75 £51.75
90th Percentile £82.63 £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 12,004 9,012 11,491
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.78% 33.34% 31.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,827 6,215 8,231
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £520 £540
Median % change year-on-year - -3.70% -1.82%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £737 £775 £788
UK median daily rate £513 £510 £525
% change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 506 229 471
10th Percentile £34.57 £28.36 £35.58
25th Percentile £55.00 £36.25 £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 £78.96 £75.00
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 10 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 10 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 10 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 2,379 £525 -0.94% 952
North of England -6 577 £463 -2.63% 384
Midlands +2 569 £460 +7.48% 228
West Midlands +4 468 £459 +2.00% 110
South East -9 456 £475 -5.00% 453
North West -3 307 £475 +1.17% 217
South West -5 237 £500 +14.29% 241
Yorkshire -7 232 £475 - 105
East of England -16 106 £491 +0.77% 116
East Midlands 0 97 £525 +40.00% 118
North East -16 51 £425 -8.36% 66
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 (4.83%) Apache Spark
2 182 (4.10%) Apache Airflow
3 177 (3.99%) Confluence
4 147 (3.31%) Apache
5 96 (2.16%) SAS
6 52 (1.17%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.86%) WebLogic
8 37 (0.83%) Oracle Workflow
9 35 (0.79%) IIS
10 24 (0.54%) Tomcat
11 22 (0.50%) Jupyter
12 20 (0.45%) CMS
13 19 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
14 18 (0.41%) Microsoft Exchange
14 18 (0.41%) WebSphere
15 16 (0.36%) nginx
16 14 (0.32%) Appian
17 13 (0.29%) Tuxedo
18 11 (0.25%) Camunda
19 8 (0.18%) Red Hat Fuse
Applications
1 287 (6.47%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.31%) Microsoft Office
3 40 (0.90%) MS Visio
4 39 (0.88%) Spreadsheet
5 30 (0.68%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.090%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.090%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.068%) Notion
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.045%) Microsoft Project
11 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.023%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.023%) InDesign
11 1 (0.023%) Mingle
11 1 (0.023%) 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 (0.41%) NEC Housing
8 18 (0.41%) 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 (0.23%) 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 1,420 (32.02%) Azure
2 1,066 (24.04%) AWS
3 834 (18.80%) Power Platform
4 408 (9.20%) Azure DevOps
5 368 (8.30%) GCP
6 323 (7.28%) Azure Data Factory
7 317 (7.15%) GitHub
8 277 (6.25%) Serverless
9 276 (6.22%) Snowflake
10 248 (5.59%) Amazon S3
11 233 (5.25%) dbt
12 213 (4.80%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 178 (4.01%) AWS Lambda
14 164 (3.70%) GitHub Actions
15 83 (1.87%) Entra ID
16 79 (1.78%) SaaS
17 78 (1.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 76 (1.71%) Power Automate
19 74 (1.67%) Amazon EC2
20 68 (1.53%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 44 (0.99%) DNS
2 38 (0.86%) 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 (0.41%) VPN
7 13 (0.29%) WAN
8 10 (0.23%) 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 (0.14%) BGP
12 6 (0.14%) DHCP
12 6 (0.14%) LAN
12 6 (0.14%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 768 (17.32%) Power BI
2 591 (13.33%) Data Warehouse
3 572 (12.90%) SQL Server
4 299 (6.74%) Tableau
5 293 (6.61%) Relational Database
6 281 (6.34%) PostgreSQL
7 275 (6.20%) Data Lake
8 222 (5.01%) NoSQL
9 206 (4.64%) Metadata
10 177 (3.99%) Azure SQL Database
11 176 (3.97%) Oracle Database
12 151 (3.40%) BigQuery
13 149 (3.36%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 136 (3.07%) Amazon Redshift
15 130 (2.93%) Delta Lake
16 108 (2.44%) Big Data
17 103 (2.32%) MySQL
17 103 (2.32%) Oracle Reports
18 101 (2.28%) Snowflake Schema
19 91 (2.05%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 471 (10.62%) Git
2 347 (7.82%) JIRA
3 236 (5.32%) Jenkins
4 188 (4.24%) GitLab
5 70 (1.58%) JUnit
6 54 (1.22%) Maven
6 54 (1.22%) Postman
7 48 (1.08%) Mockito
7 48 (1.08%) Selenium
8 47 (1.06%) Gradle
9 35 (0.79%) Oracle Forms
10 33 (0.74%) SonarQube
11 31 (0.70%) Bitbucket
12 29 (0.65%) Cucumber
12 29 (0.65%) MLflow
12 29 (0.65%) Visual Studio
13 27 (0.61%) JMeter
14 26 (0.59%) ERwin
14 26 (0.59%) Liquibase
14 26 (0.59%) Zephyr
General
1 1,172 (26.43%) Finance
2 1,146 (25.84%) Social Skills
3 858 (19.35%) Analytical Skills
4 423 (9.54%) Banking
5 386 (8.70%) Public Sector
6 129 (2.91%) Marketing
7 122 (2.75%) Front Office
8 103 (2.32%) Investment Banking
9 102 (2.30%) Retail
10 93 (2.10%) Documentation Skills
11 76 (1.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 54 (1.22%) Manufacturing
13 52 (1.17%) Legal
13 52 (1.17%) Presentation Skills
14 51 (1.15%) Financial Institution
15 39 (0.88%) Organisational Skills
16 38 (0.86%) Publishing
17 37 (0.83%) Back Office
18 35 (0.79%) Telecoms
19 29 (0.65%) Law
Job Titles
1 947 (21.35%) Developer
2 894 (20.16%) Data Engineer
3 639 (14.41%) Analyst
4 583 (13.15%) Senior
5 305 (6.88%) Lead
6 274 (6.18%) Data Analyst
7 242 (5.46%) Architect
8 208 (4.69%) Consultant
9 187 (4.22%) Business Analyst
10 178 (4.01%) Java Developer
11 176 (3.97%) Senior Data Engineer
12 155 (3.49%) DBA
13 140 (3.16%) Senior Developer
14 128 (2.89%) Software Engineer
15 111 (2.50%) Azure Engineer
16 108 (2.44%) SQL Developer
17 104 (2.34%) C# Developer
18 102 (2.30%) SQL DBA
19 90 (2.03%) Python Developer
20 86 (1.94%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 365 (8.23%) .NET
2 349 (7.87%) REST
3 269 (6.07%) PySpark
4 266 (6.00%) Kafka
5 226 (5.10%) Spring
6 209 (4.71%) Spring Boot
7 203 (4.58%) React
8 185 (4.17%) RESTful
9 159 (3.59%) JSON
10 156 (3.52%) XML
11 141 (3.18%) HTML
12 124 (2.80%) CSS
13 121 (2.73%) AngularJS
14 115 (2.59%) Pandas
15 103 (2.32%) SOAP
16 101 (2.28%) Web Services
17 94 (2.12%) Middleware
18 89 (2.01%) .NET Framework
19 70 (1.58%) Node.js
20 67 (1.51%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 291 (6.56%) Cloud Native
2 180 (4.06%) Data Structures
3 156 (3.52%) Legacy Systems
4 150 (3.38%) Product Ownership
5 126 (2.84%) Distributed Systems
6 84 (1.89%) Derivative
7 82 (1.85%) Onboarding
8 74 (1.67%) Enterprise Software
9 73 (1.65%) Management Information System
10 72 (1.62%) Analytical Mindset
11 68 (1.53%) Self-Motivation
12 66 (1.49%) Data Protection Act
13 61 (1.38%) Clustering
14 56 (1.26%) Algorithms
15 54 (1.22%) Equities
16 51 (1.15%) Fixed Income
16 51 (1.15%) Greenfield Project
17 50 (1.13%) Replication
18 41 (0.92%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
19 39 (0.88%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 295 (6.65%) Linux
2 271 (6.11%) Windows
3 216 (4.87%) Unix
4 101 (2.28%) 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 (0.14%) 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 (0.068%) Windows Server 2012
15 2 (0.045%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,196 (26.97%) CI/CD
2 1,142 (25.75%) Analytics
3 1,128 (25.43%) Agile
4 1,076 (24.26%) Data Modelling
5 1,024 (23.09%) ETL
6 984 (22.19%) Business Intelligence
7 904 (20.38%) DevOps
8 873 (19.68%) Problem-Solving
9 850 (19.17%) Data Pipeline
10 738 (16.64%) Data Engineering
11 641 (14.45%) AI
12 589 (13.28%) Migration
13 576 (12.99%) Validation
14 463 (10.44%) Data Governance
15 459 (10.35%) Test Automation
16 455 (10.26%) Decision-Making
17 437 (9.85%) Continuous Improvement
17 437 (9.85%) Data Analysis
18 422 (9.52%) Stakeholder Management
19 391 (8.82%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,602 (36.12%) Python
2 554 (12.49%) Java
3 444 (10.01%) C#
4 340 (7.67%) PL/SQL
5 304 (6.85%) JavaScript
6 241 (5.43%) T-SQL
7 228 (5.14%) PowerShell
8 165 (3.72%) TypeScript
9 135 (3.04%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 121 (2.73%) Shell Script
11 98 (2.21%) R
12 84 (1.89%) Bash
13 77 (1.74%) Scala
14 53 (1.20%) C++
15 43 (0.97%) VBA
16 37 (0.83%) Bicep
17 35 (0.79%) C
18 32 (0.72%) VB
19 24 (0.54%) Go
20 20 (0.45%) Perl
Qualifications
1 932 (21.01%) Security Cleared
2 753 (16.98%) SC Cleared
3 336 (7.58%) Degree
4 109 (2.46%) Computer Science Degree
5 104 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
6 96 (2.16%) DV Cleared
7 65 (1.47%) Azure Certification
8 50 (1.13%) Master's Degree
9 47 (1.06%) ISTQB
10 39 (0.88%) 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 (0.23%) CISM
14 10 (0.23%) 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
1 787 (17.75%) Data Quality
2 337 (7.60%) QA
3 172 (3.88%) GDPR
4 47 (1.06%) 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 (0.41%) NIST
9 17 (0.38%) IFRS
9 17 (0.38%) Solvency II
10 15 (0.34%) MiFID
11 14 (0.32%) Actionable Recommendations
11 14 (0.32%) HIPAA
12 13 (0.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 12 (0.27%) ISO 20022
13 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
14 10 (0.23%) HL7
15 9 (0.20%) GRC
15 9 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 450 (10.15%) Docker
2 104 (2.34%) Active Directory
3 44 (0.99%) Virtual Machines
4 30 (0.68%) VMware Infrastructure
5 27 (0.61%) Oracle RAC
6 18 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
7 15 (0.34%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.32%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.29%) vCloud
10 10 (0.23%) KVM
11 9 (0.20%) Postfix
12 6 (0.14%) 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 (0.023%) Varnish
16 1 (0.023%) vSphere
16 1 (0.023%) XenApp
16 1 (0.023%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 381 (8.59%) Kubernetes
2 357 (8.05%) Terraform
3 97 (2.19%) Grafana
4 82 (1.85%) Ansible
5 51 (1.15%) Prometheus
6 35 (0.79%) Oracle RMAN
7 29 (0.65%) Data Guard
8 22 (0.50%) Control-M
8 22 (0.50%) 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 (0.32%) Nagios
13 14 (0.32%) 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
1 768 (17.32%) Oracle
2 695 (15.67%) Microsoft
3 511 (11.52%) Databricks
4 171 (3.86%) Google
5 157 (3.54%) Informatica
6 125 (2.82%) Talend
7 124 (2.80%) ServiceNow
8 107 (2.41%) SAP
9 82 (1.85%) Splunk
10 75 (1.69%) IBM
11 62 (1.40%) Denodo
12 52 (1.17%) Salesforce
13 47 (1.06%) VMware
14 43 (0.97%) 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