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

6 months to
17 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -3 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,236 3,070 3,729
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.87% 12.41% 9.95%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.07% 36.63% 32.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,859 2,208 2,752
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -1.38%
75th Percentile £591 £625 £649
90th Percentile £688 £766 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 73 62 56
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.05 £22.68
25th Percentile £34.01 £30.50 £29.06
Median hourly rate £47.50 £41.66 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.03% -1.98% -15.00%
75th Percentile £71.50 £53.75 £53.84
90th Percentile £82.25 £77.10 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £47.50 £40.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year +17.28% -4.71% -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 11,428 8,381 11,359
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.62% 33.88% 30.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,471 5,816 8,125
10th Percentile £359 £356 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £521 £538
Median % change year-on-year -1.25% -3.25% -3.93%
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 521 196 488
10th Percentile £36.25 £28.18 £35.52
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.75 £49.84
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £85.00 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% +2.97%

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 17 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 17 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 17 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 £523 -1.78% 780
North of England -5 540 £461 -2.89% 806
Midlands +4 537 £463 +8.06% 498
West Midlands +5 439 £459 +1.32% 235
South East -12 413 £475 -5.00% 881
North West -3 284 £463 -2.63% 408
South West -2 231 £500 +5.26% 295
Yorkshire -11 215 £475 - 262
East of England -11 107 £491 +0.77% 452
East Midlands -1 94 £525 +38.16% 263
North East -10 53 £425 -8.36% 139
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
1 220 (5.19%) Apache Spark
2 174 (4.11%) Apache Airflow
3 157 (3.71%) Confluence
4 143 (3.38%) Apache
5 91 (2.15%) SAS
6 54 (1.27%) SharePoint
7 31 (0.73%) IIS
7 31 (0.73%) WebLogic
8 30 (0.71%) Oracle Workflow
9 25 (0.59%) Tomcat
10 22 (0.52%) Jupyter
11 18 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
12 17 (0.40%) Appian
12 17 (0.40%) Palantir Foundry
12 17 (0.40%) WebSphere
13 16 (0.38%) CMS
14 14 (0.33%) nginx
15 13 (0.31%) Tuxedo
16 12 (0.28%) Camunda
17 10 (0.24%) Mendix
Applications
1 275 (6.49%) Microsoft Excel
2 49 (1.16%) Microsoft Office
3 42 (0.99%) MS Visio
4 31 (0.73%) Spreadsheet
5 30 (0.71%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.24%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
7 5 (0.12%) Notepad++
8 3 (0.071%) Oracle Smart View
9 2 (0.047%) Acrobat
9 2 (0.047%) Notion
9 2 (0.047%) Photoshop
10 1 (0.024%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.024%) InDesign
10 1 (0.024%) Mingle
10 1 (0.024%) Trello
10 1 (0.024%) Weka
Business Applications
1 33 (0.78%) Dynamics CRM
1 33 (0.78%) Oracle EBS
2 25 (0.59%) Aladdin
3 22 (0.52%) Oracle Payables
4 21 (0.50%) Oracle ERP
4 21 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
5 20 (0.47%) NEC Housing
6 16 (0.38%) Oracle EBS R12
7 15 (0.35%) Oracle Receivables
7 15 (0.35%) Remedy ITSM
8 11 (0.26%) Findur
8 11 (0.26%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
9 10 (0.24%) Endur
9 10 (0.24%) Oracle General Ledger
10 9 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
10 9 (0.21%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
11 8 (0.19%) NetSuite
11 8 (0.19%) Oracle Cash Management
11 8 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
11 8 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,370 (32.34%) Azure
2 1,038 (24.50%) AWS
3 816 (19.26%) Power Platform
4 399 (9.42%) Azure DevOps
5 337 (7.96%) GCP
6 330 (7.79%) Azure Data Factory
7 312 (7.37%) GitHub
8 282 (6.66%) Serverless
9 252 (5.95%) Snowflake
10 250 (5.90%) Amazon S3
11 209 (4.93%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 207 (4.89%) dbt
13 177 (4.18%) AWS Lambda
14 163 (3.85%) GitHub Actions
15 82 (1.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 76 (1.79%) Power Automate
17 74 (1.75%) Entra ID
18 73 (1.72%) Amazon EC2
19 65 (1.53%) Azure Functions
19 65 (1.53%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 49 (1.16%) DNS
2 44 (1.04%) Firewall
3 21 (0.50%) SNMP
4 19 (0.45%) HTTP
5 18 (0.42%) Network Security
6 17 (0.40%) Internet
6 17 (0.40%) WAN
7 15 (0.35%) SSL
7 15 (0.35%) VPN
8 13 (0.31%) TCP/IP
9 11 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
10 9 (0.21%) LAN
10 9 (0.21%) Wireshark
11 8 (0.19%) 3GPP
12 7 (0.17%) SAN
13 6 (0.14%) BGP
13 6 (0.14%) IPsec
13 6 (0.14%) RTP
14 5 (0.12%) DHCP
14 5 (0.12%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 753 (17.78%) Power BI
2 555 (13.10%) Data Warehouse
3 527 (12.44%) SQL Server
4 295 (6.96%) Data Lake
5 284 (6.70%) Tableau
6 277 (6.54%) PostgreSQL
7 275 (6.49%) Relational Database
8 224 (5.29%) NoSQL
9 207 (4.89%) Metadata
10 185 (4.37%) Azure SQL Database
11 163 (3.85%) Oracle Database
12 152 (3.59%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 139 (3.28%) BigQuery
14 132 (3.12%) Amazon Redshift
15 122 (2.88%) Delta Lake
16 109 (2.57%) Big Data
17 105 (2.48%) MySQL
18 101 (2.38%) Oracle Reports
19 92 (2.17%) Snowflake Schema
20 91 (2.15%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 454 (10.72%) Git
2 333 (7.86%) JIRA
3 223 (5.26%) Jenkins
4 194 (4.58%) GitLab
5 66 (1.56%) JUnit
6 50 (1.18%) Maven
6 50 (1.18%) Postman
7 48 (1.13%) Mockito
8 47 (1.11%) Selenium
9 45 (1.06%) Gradle
10 33 (0.78%) SonarQube
11 32 (0.76%) Cucumber
12 31 (0.73%) MLflow
13 26 (0.61%) ERwin
13 26 (0.61%) Liquibase
13 26 (0.61%) Visual Studio
14 25 (0.59%) Bitbucket
14 25 (0.59%) JMeter
14 25 (0.59%) Zephyr
15 23 (0.54%) TeamCity
General
1 1,126 (26.58%) Finance
2 1,079 (25.47%) Social Skills
3 793 (18.72%) Analytical Skills
4 403 (9.51%) Banking
5 366 (8.64%) Public Sector
6 118 (2.79%) Front Office
7 115 (2.71%) Marketing
8 101 (2.38%) Investment Banking
9 91 (2.15%) Documentation Skills
10 81 (1.91%) Retail
11 69 (1.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 51 (1.20%) Financial Institution
12 51 (1.20%) Legal
13 44 (1.04%) Publishing
14 40 (0.94%) Manufacturing
14 40 (0.94%) Presentation Skills
15 34 (0.80%) Organisational Skills
16 33 (0.78%) Telecoms
17 31 (0.73%) Back Office
18 28 (0.66%) Law
Job Titles
1 881 (20.80%) Data Engineer
2 872 (20.59%) Developer
3 609 (14.38%) Analyst
4 545 (12.87%) Senior
5 288 (6.80%) Lead
6 270 (6.37%) Data Analyst
7 231 (5.45%) Architect
8 197 (4.65%) Consultant
9 179 (4.23%) Business Analyst
10 172 (4.06%) Java Developer
11 165 (3.90%) Senior Data Engineer
12 140 (3.31%) DBA
13 135 (3.19%) Software Engineer
14 129 (3.05%) Senior Developer
15 104 (2.46%) Azure Engineer
16 101 (2.38%) C# Developer
17 96 (2.27%) SQL Developer
18 85 (2.01%) Python Developer
18 85 (2.01%) SQL DBA
19 81 (1.91%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 346 (8.17%) .NET
2 333 (7.86%) REST
3 261 (6.16%) Kafka
4 258 (6.09%) PySpark
5 219 (5.17%) Spring
6 210 (4.96%) Spring Boot
7 198 (4.67%) React
8 185 (4.37%) RESTful
9 145 (3.42%) JSON
10 141 (3.33%) HTML
11 140 (3.31%) XML
12 126 (2.97%) CSS
13 117 (2.76%) Pandas
14 105 (2.48%) AngularJS
15 103 (2.43%) SOAP
16 94 (2.22%) Middleware
17 92 (2.17%) Web Services
18 82 (1.94%) .NET Framework
19 77 (1.82%) OAuth
20 70 (1.65%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 276 (6.52%) Cloud Native
2 161 (3.80%) Data Structures
3 153 (3.61%) Legacy Systems
4 130 (3.07%) Product Ownership
5 128 (3.02%) Distributed Systems
6 84 (1.98%) Management Information System
7 81 (1.91%) Onboarding
8 80 (1.89%) Derivative
9 67 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
10 65 (1.53%) Analytical Mindset
11 62 (1.46%) Self-Motivation
12 57 (1.35%) Clustering
12 57 (1.35%) Enterprise Software
13 51 (1.20%) Equities
14 50 (1.18%) Greenfield Project
15 48 (1.13%) Fixed Income
16 45 (1.06%) Algorithms
17 43 (1.02%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
17 43 (1.02%) Low-Code
18 42 (0.99%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 287 (6.78%) Linux
2 253 (5.97%) Windows
3 205 (4.84%) Unix
4 89 (2.10%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.57%) AIX
6 18 (0.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 15 (0.35%) Windows Server 2019
8 13 (0.31%) 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 (0.094%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.094%) VMS
13 3 (0.071%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.047%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.047%) HPUX
14 2 (0.047%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,171 (27.64%) CI/CD
2 1,070 (25.26%) Analytics
3 1,049 (24.76%) Agile
4 1,044 (24.65%) Data Modelling
5 1,002 (23.65%) ETL
6 952 (22.47%) Business Intelligence
7 886 (20.92%) DevOps
8 836 (19.74%) Problem-Solving
9 802 (18.93%) Data Pipeline
10 698 (16.48%) Data Engineering
11 603 (14.24%) AI
12 561 (13.24%) Migration
13 549 (12.96%) Validation
14 450 (10.62%) Data Governance
15 439 (10.36%) Test Automation
16 431 (10.17%) Decision-Making
17 419 (9.89%) Data Analysis
18 395 (9.32%) Stakeholder Management
19 391 (9.23%) Continuous Improvement
20 377 (8.90%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,552 (36.64%) Python
2 550 (12.98%) Java
3 438 (10.34%) C#
4 314 (7.41%) PL/SQL
5 301 (7.11%) JavaScript
6 227 (5.36%) T-SQL
7 215 (5.08%) PowerShell
8 151 (3.56%) TypeScript
9 132 (3.12%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 111 (2.62%) Shell Script
11 100 (2.36%) R
12 83 (1.96%) Bash
13 72 (1.70%) Scala
14 57 (1.35%) C++
15 43 (1.02%) VBA
16 36 (0.85%) Bicep
17 33 (0.78%) VB
18 31 (0.73%) C
19 29 (0.68%) Perl
20 25 (0.59%) Go
Qualifications
1 896 (21.15%) Security Cleared
2 725 (17.12%) SC Cleared
3 325 (7.67%) Degree
4 103 (2.43%) Computer Science Degree
5 97 (2.29%) BPSS Clearance
6 85 (2.01%) DV Cleared
7 66 (1.56%) Azure Certification
8 51 (1.20%) ISTQB
8 51 (1.20%) Master's Degree
9 42 (0.99%) Microsoft Certification
10 28 (0.66%) AWS Certification
11 17 (0.40%) 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 7 (0.17%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 773 (18.25%) Data Quality
2 316 (7.46%) QA
3 173 (4.08%) GDPR
4 42 (0.99%) Accessibility
4 42 (0.99%) SLA
5 28 (0.66%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 27 (0.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 24 (0.57%) NIST
7 24 (0.57%) PMO
8 17 (0.40%) IFRS
9 16 (0.38%) PCI DSS
10 15 (0.35%) MiFID
10 15 (0.35%) Solvency II
11 14 (0.33%) Actionable Recommendations
11 14 (0.33%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 14 (0.33%) HIPAA
12 13 (0.31%) ISO 20022
13 10 (0.24%) GRC
13 10 (0.24%) HL7
13 10 (0.24%) NCSC
System Software
1 470 (11.10%) Docker
2 92 (2.17%) Active Directory
3 39 (0.92%) Virtual Machines
4 29 (0.68%) VMware Infrastructure
5 23 (0.54%) Oracle RAC
6 16 (0.38%) Hyper-V
6 16 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
7 12 (0.28%) VMware NSX
8 11 (0.26%) vCloud
9 10 (0.24%) KVM
10 9 (0.21%) Postfix
11 8 (0.19%) Virtual Desktop
12 6 (0.14%) HDFS
12 6 (0.14%) RACF
13 4 (0.094%) XenApp
13 4 (0.094%) XenDesktop
14 2 (0.047%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.047%) GridGain
15 1 (0.024%) Varnish
15 1 (0.024%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 380 (8.97%) Kubernetes
2 355 (8.38%) Terraform
3 104 (2.46%) Grafana
4 71 (1.68%) Ansible
5 59 (1.39%) Prometheus
6 34 (0.80%) Oracle RMAN
7 25 (0.59%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.54%) Control-M
9 21 (0.50%) Kibana
10 20 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
11 18 (0.42%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.38%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.35%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.33%) Nagios
14 14 (0.33%) Netcool
15 13 (0.31%) OpenView
15 13 (0.31%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 12 (0.28%) SCOM
17 8 (0.19%) HP Quality Center
17 8 (0.19%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 724 (17.09%) Oracle
2 655 (15.46%) Microsoft
3 493 (11.64%) Databricks
4 163 (3.85%) Google
5 153 (3.61%) Informatica
6 124 (2.93%) ServiceNow
7 121 (2.86%) Talend
8 110 (2.60%) SAP
9 86 (2.03%) Splunk
10 68 (1.61%) IBM
11 63 (1.49%) Denodo
12 48 (1.13%) Salesforce
13 45 (1.06%) VMware
14 44 (1.04%) Citrix
15 37 (0.87%) Dynatrace
16 35 (0.83%) Bloomberg
17 33 (0.78%) Murex
17 33 (0.78%) OpenAI
18 28 (0.66%) BMC
18 28 (0.66%) SolarWinds