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

6 months to
28 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,098 2,985 3,634
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.81% 12.53% 9.92%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.85% 36.91% 32.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,785 2,141 2,692
10th Percentile £350 £360 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £503 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.50% -8.64% -
75th Percentile £588 £626 £650
90th Percentile £688 £775 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £530
% change year-on-year - -5.66% -0.93%
Number of hourly rates quoted 71 54 54
10th Percentile £25.05 £20.02 £23.13
25th Percentile £33.88 £29.30 £31.26
Median hourly rate £46.80 £36.00 £43.75
Median % change year-on-year +30.00% -17.71% -12.12%
75th Percentile £70.47 £62.50 £56.66
90th Percentile £82.25 £76.91 £62.07
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £38.85 £43.75
% change year-on-year +28.72% -11.21% -12.50%

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 11,122 8,087 11,020
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.63% 33.93% 30.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,297 5,623 8,012
10th Percentile £357 £363 £350
25th Percentile £417 £414 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £548
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -4.11% -2.75%
75th Percentile £613 £645 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £500 £518 £525
% change year-on-year -3.38% -1.43% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 539 185 454
10th Percentile £36.25 £28.27 £37.51
25th Percentile £54.55 £36.25 £49.28
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.84% -0.80% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.75
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +13.04% -8.00% -

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 2,284 £523 -2.56% 894
Midlands +2 532 £469 +4.22% 193
North of England -9 494 £460 -3.16% 411
West Midlands +6 427 £461 +0.27% 108
South East -16 383 £475 -4.76% 433
North West -4 255 £460 -3.16% 244
Yorkshire -15 207 £475 -2.56% 117
South West -3 205 £475 - 130
East Midlands -1 101 £525 +34.27% 85
East of England -15 97 £495 +1.54% 108
North East -9 44 £450 -2.70% 56
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
1 230 (5.61%) Apache Spark
2 164 (4.00%) Apache Airflow
3 143 (3.49%) Apache
4 141 (3.44%) Confluence
5 85 (2.07%) SAS
6 68 (1.66%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.93%) WebLogic
8 32 (0.78%) IIS
9 30 (0.73%) Oracle Workflow
10 23 (0.56%) Tomcat
11 19 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
12 17 (0.41%) Jupyter
13 16 (0.39%) Appian
14 15 (0.37%) CMS
14 15 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
14 15 (0.37%) Tuxedo
15 13 (0.32%) HCL Notes
15 13 (0.32%) Mendix
15 13 (0.32%) nginx
16 12 (0.29%) WebSphere
Applications
1 275 (6.71%) Microsoft Excel
2 45 (1.10%) Microsoft Office
2 45 (1.10%) MS Visio
3 30 (0.73%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 27 (0.66%) Spreadsheet
5 10 (0.24%) Chatbot
6 7 (0.17%) Microsoft Project
7 5 (0.12%) Notepad++
7 5 (0.12%) Notion
8 3 (0.073%) Oracle Smart View
8 3 (0.073%) Trello
9 1 (0.024%) InDesign
9 1 (0.024%) Mingle
9 1 (0.024%) Weka
Business Applications
1 41 (1.00%) Oracle EBS
2 30 (0.73%) Dynamics CRM
3 27 (0.66%) Aladdin
4 22 (0.54%) NEC Housing
5 21 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
6 20 (0.49%) Oracle EBS R12
7 19 (0.46%) Oracle ERP
7 19 (0.46%) Oracle Payables
8 15 (0.37%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.37%) Remedy ITSM
9 13 (0.32%) Oracle General Ledger
10 12 (0.29%) NetSuite
10 12 (0.29%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 11 (0.27%) Oracle Assets
12 10 (0.24%) Payment Gateway
13 9 (0.22%) Endur
13 9 (0.22%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
14 8 (0.20%) Findur
14 8 (0.20%) Oracle 11i
14 8 (0.20%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,376 (33.58%) Azure
2 995 (24.28%) AWS
3 807 (19.69%) Power Platform
4 406 (9.91%) Azure DevOps
5 344 (8.39%) Azure Data Factory
6 338 (8.25%) GCP
7 306 (7.47%) GitHub
8 251 (6.12%) Serverless
9 246 (6.00%) Snowflake
10 228 (5.56%) Amazon S3
11 223 (5.44%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 188 (4.59%) dbt
13 160 (3.90%) GitHub Actions
14 152 (3.71%) AWS Lambda
15 81 (1.98%) Power Automate
16 75 (1.83%) SaaS
17 73 (1.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 71 (1.73%) Entra ID
19 69 (1.68%) PowerApps
20 67 (1.63%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 47 (1.15%) Firewall
2 44 (1.07%) DNS
3 20 (0.49%) SNMP
4 17 (0.41%) Network Security
5 16 (0.39%) HTTP
5 16 (0.39%) Internet
5 16 (0.39%) TCP/IP
6 15 (0.37%) WAN
7 14 (0.34%) SSL
8 13 (0.32%) VPN
9 11 (0.27%) LAN
9 11 (0.27%) Wi-Fi
10 9 (0.22%) Wireshark
11 8 (0.20%) 3GPP
12 6 (0.15%) DHCP
12 6 (0.15%) IPsec
12 6 (0.15%) RTP
12 6 (0.15%) SAN
13 5 (0.12%) PuTTY
13 5 (0.12%) WinSCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 741 (18.08%) Power BI
2 530 (12.93%) Data Warehouse
3 515 (12.57%) SQL Server
4 291 (7.10%) Tableau
5 285 (6.95%) Data Lake
6 259 (6.32%) PostgreSQL
7 255 (6.22%) Relational Database
8 236 (5.76%) NoSQL
9 212 (5.17%) Metadata
10 197 (4.81%) Azure SQL Database
11 157 (3.83%) Oracle Database
12 150 (3.66%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 138 (3.37%) BigQuery
14 123 (3.00%) Delta Lake
15 111 (2.71%) Big Data
16 110 (2.68%) Amazon Redshift
17 104 (2.54%) MySQL
18 102 (2.49%) Oracle Reports
19 92 (2.24%) Snowflake Schema
20 91 (2.22%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 427 (10.42%) Git
2 315 (7.69%) JIRA
3 217 (5.30%) Jenkins
4 192 (4.69%) GitLab
5 61 (1.49%) JUnit
6 57 (1.39%) Selenium
7 53 (1.29%) Postman
8 49 (1.20%) Maven
9 47 (1.15%) Mockito
10 40 (0.98%) Cucumber
11 38 (0.93%) Gradle
12 36 (0.88%) SonarQube
13 32 (0.78%) MLflow
14 30 (0.73%) REST Assured
15 28 (0.68%) ERwin
16 24 (0.59%) Bitbucket
16 24 (0.59%) JMeter
17 23 (0.56%) TeamCity
18 22 (0.54%) Team Foundation Server
18 22 (0.54%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,094 (26.70%) Finance
2 1,065 (25.99%) Social Skills
3 757 (18.47%) Analytical Skills
4 386 (9.42%) Banking
5 342 (8.35%) Public Sector
6 109 (2.66%) Marketing
7 107 (2.61%) Front Office
8 96 (2.34%) Investment Banking
9 82 (2.00%) Documentation Skills
10 64 (1.56%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 64 (1.56%) Retail
11 56 (1.37%) Financial Institution
12 51 (1.24%) Legal
13 41 (1.00%) Publishing
14 35 (0.85%) Manufacturing
14 35 (0.85%) Organisational Skills
14 35 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
15 34 (0.83%) Telecoms
16 33 (0.81%) Law
17 28 (0.68%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 855 (20.86%) Data Engineer
2 846 (20.64%) Developer
3 581 (14.18%) Analyst
4 527 (12.86%) Senior
5 280 (6.83%) Lead
6 262 (6.39%) Data Analyst
7 233 (5.69%) Architect
8 182 (4.44%) Consultant
9 174 (4.25%) Business Analyst
10 166 (4.05%) Java Developer
11 152 (3.71%) Senior Data Engineer
12 128 (3.12%) DBA
12 128 (3.12%) Senior Developer
13 124 (3.03%) Software Engineer
14 108 (2.64%) Azure Engineer
15 100 (2.44%) C# Developer
16 89 (2.17%) Data Scientist
17 88 (2.15%) Data Architect
18 85 (2.07%) SQL Developer
19 84 (2.05%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 353 (8.61%) .NET
2 334 (8.15%) REST
3 258 (6.30%) Kafka
4 257 (6.27%) PySpark
5 208 (5.08%) Spring
6 198 (4.83%) React
7 196 (4.78%) Spring Boot
8 178 (4.34%) RESTful
9 148 (3.61%) HTML
10 139 (3.39%) JSON
11 135 (3.29%) XML
12 126 (3.07%) CSS
13 121 (2.95%) Pandas
14 109 (2.66%) AngularJS
15 101 (2.46%) SOAP
16 86 (2.10%) Middleware
17 84 (2.05%) Web Services
18 82 (2.00%) .NET Framework
19 76 (1.85%) OAuth
20 69 (1.68%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 266 (6.49%) Cloud Native
2 149 (3.64%) Data Structures
3 134 (3.27%) Legacy Systems
4 129 (3.15%) Product Ownership
5 114 (2.78%) Distributed Systems
6 85 (2.07%) Management Information System
7 79 (1.93%) Derivative
8 76 (1.85%) Onboarding
9 68 (1.66%) Data Protection Act
10 67 (1.63%) Analytical Mindset
11 54 (1.32%) Clustering
11 54 (1.32%) Enterprise Software
12 52 (1.27%) Equities
13 51 (1.24%) Greenfield Project
13 51 (1.24%) Self-Motivation
14 49 (1.20%) Fixed Income
15 43 (1.05%) Algorithms
16 41 (1.00%) Low-Code
17 40 (0.98%) Replication
18 38 (0.93%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 291 (7.10%) Linux
2 249 (6.08%) Windows
3 203 (4.95%) Unix
4 84 (2.05%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.61%) AIX
6 20 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 16 (0.39%) Windows Server 2019
8 10 (0.24%) Windows Server 2016
9 9 (0.22%) zOS
10 8 (0.20%) Solaris
10 8 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.17%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.15%) Android
12 6 (0.15%) Apple iOS
13 4 (0.098%) Oracle Linux
14 3 (0.073%) VMS
14 3 (0.073%) Windows Server 2012
15 2 (0.049%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.049%) HPUX
15 2 (0.049%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,129 (27.55%) CI/CD
2 1,040 (25.38%) Analytics
3 1,025 (25.01%) Data Modelling
4 993 (24.23%) Agile
5 989 (24.13%) ETL
6 936 (22.84%) Business Intelligence
7 892 (21.77%) DevOps
8 807 (19.69%) Problem-Solving
9 769 (18.77%) Data Pipeline
10 671 (16.37%) Data Engineering
11 548 (13.37%) AI
12 520 (12.69%) Migration
13 501 (12.23%) Validation
14 466 (11.37%) Data Governance
15 416 (10.15%) Test Automation
16 409 (9.98%) Decision-Making
17 397 (9.69%) Data Analysis
18 371 (9.05%) Microservices
19 370 (9.03%) Performance Tuning
20 361 (8.81%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,532 (37.38%) Python
2 560 (13.67%) Java
3 440 (10.74%) C#
4 313 (7.64%) JavaScript
5 294 (7.17%) PL/SQL
6 211 (5.15%) T-SQL
7 196 (4.78%) PowerShell
8 139 (3.39%) TypeScript
9 131 (3.20%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 113 (2.76%) Shell Script
11 111 (2.71%) R
12 81 (1.98%) Scala
13 80 (1.95%) Bash
14 59 (1.44%) C++
15 43 (1.05%) VBA
16 39 (0.95%) Bicep
17 34 (0.83%) Perl
18 29 (0.71%) VB
19 24 (0.59%) C
19 24 (0.59%) Go
Qualifications
1 856 (20.89%) Security Cleared
2 688 (16.79%) SC Cleared
3 332 (8.10%) Degree
4 111 (2.71%) Computer Science Degree
5 90 (2.20%) BPSS Clearance
6 73 (1.78%) Azure Certification
6 73 (1.78%) DV Cleared
7 50 (1.22%) Master's Degree
8 47 (1.15%) ISTQB
9 37 (0.90%) Microsoft Certification
10 23 (0.56%) AWS Certification
11 17 (0.41%) DBS Check
12 16 (0.39%) PhD
13 13 (0.32%) CBAP
14 11 (0.27%) CISSP
14 11 (0.27%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 10 (0.24%) Oracle Certification
15 10 (0.24%) PMI Certification
15 10 (0.24%) PMP
16 9 (0.22%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 745 (18.18%) Data Quality
2 308 (7.52%) QA
3 180 (4.39%) GDPR
4 42 (1.02%) SLA
5 38 (0.93%) Accessibility
6 32 (0.78%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 27 (0.66%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.59%) PMO
9 21 (0.51%) NIST
10 19 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 17 (0.41%) IFRS
12 16 (0.39%) MiFID
13 15 (0.37%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 15 (0.37%) HIPAA
14 12 (0.29%) Actionable Recommendations
14 12 (0.29%) HL7
14 12 (0.29%) Solvency II
15 11 (0.27%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.24%) GRC
17 8 (0.20%) NCSC
System Software
1 466 (11.37%) Docker
2 95 (2.32%) Active Directory
3 35 (0.85%) Virtual Machines
4 27 (0.66%) VMware Infrastructure
5 26 (0.63%) Oracle RAC
6 16 (0.39%) Hyper-V
7 13 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
8 10 (0.24%) KVM
9 9 (0.22%) Postfix
9 9 (0.22%) VMware NSX
10 8 (0.20%) vCloud
10 8 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
11 6 (0.15%) HDFS
11 6 (0.15%) RACF
12 4 (0.098%) XenApp
12 4 (0.098%) XenDesktop
13 3 (0.073%) Oracle Clusterware
14 2 (0.049%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.049%) GridGain
14 2 (0.049%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 385 (9.39%) Kubernetes
2 327 (7.98%) Terraform
3 108 (2.64%) Grafana
4 66 (1.61%) Ansible
5 64 (1.56%) Prometheus
6 41 (1.00%) Oracle RMAN
7 30 (0.73%) Data Guard
8 19 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
9 18 (0.44%) Kibana
10 15 (0.37%) vCenter Server
10 15 (0.37%) ZABBIX
11 14 (0.34%) Nagios
11 14 (0.34%) Netcool
11 14 (0.34%) Tivoli
12 13 (0.32%) Control-M
12 13 (0.32%) OpenView
12 13 (0.32%) Tivoli Monitoring
13 10 (0.24%) Progress Chef
13 10 (0.24%) SCCM
13 10 (0.24%) SCOM
Vendors
1 674 (16.45%) Oracle
2 644 (15.71%) Microsoft
3 500 (12.20%) Databricks
4 159 (3.88%) Google
5 145 (3.54%) Informatica
6 129 (3.15%) ServiceNow
7 113 (2.76%) Talend
8 107 (2.61%) SAP
9 85 (2.07%) Splunk
10 61 (1.49%) IBM
11 59 (1.44%) Denodo
12 52 (1.27%) Salesforce
13 45 (1.10%) Citrix
14 42 (1.02%) VMware
15 36 (0.88%) Dynatrace
16 32 (0.78%) OpenAI
17 31 (0.76%) Bloomberg
17 31 (0.76%) MuleSoft
18 30 (0.73%) HP
19 29 (0.71%) BMC