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

6 months to
23 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,465 3,244 3,530
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.59% 11.75% 10.97%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.97% 35.80% 33.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,000 2,268 2,532
10th Percentile £355 £331 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -7.06% -2.18%
75th Percentile £600 £619 £638
90th Percentile £688 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 83 72 42
10th Percentile £21.33 £29.00 £25.33
25th Percentile £27.42 £33.91 £30.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £50.00 £40.58
Median % change year-on-year -15.00% +23.22% -11.56%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £76.80 - £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £38.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +31.58% -17.28%

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 12,077 9,061 10,485
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 25.95% 32.82% 32.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,806 6,114 7,139
10th Percentile £363 £350 £351
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £514 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.14% -6.55% -
75th Percentile £626 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £788
UK median daily rate £523 £505 £526
% change year-on-year +3.47% -3.90% -4.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 521 257 305
10th Percentile £26.52 £31.25 £30.00
25th Percentile £51.25 £42.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.07% -13.85% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £79.25 £79.67
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.59%

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 23 September 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 23 September 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 23 September 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 2,501 £525 - 3,275
North of England -3 593 £475 +5.56% 867
Midlands -5 455 £469 +1.68% 533
South East -14 451 £475 -2.06% 773
West Midlands -4 352 £469 -6.20% 334
North West +1 289 £500 +12.99% 511
Yorkshire +3 253 £459 -3.42% 266
South West -2 237 £525 +20.00% 319
East of England -7 120 £495 -1.49% 238
East Midlands -5 101 £464 +15.54% 199
North East -7 58 £406 -12.63% 95
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
1 229 (5.13%) Apache Airflow
2 189 (4.23%) Confluence
3 188 (4.21%) Apache Spark
4 145 (3.25%) Apache
5 85 (1.90%) SharePoint
6 72 (1.61%) SAS
7 31 (0.69%) Oracle Workflow
8 30 (0.67%) WebLogic
9 29 (0.65%) IIS
10 27 (0.60%) Jupyter
11 25 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
12 22 (0.49%) Palantir Foundry
13 19 (0.43%) CMS
14 18 (0.40%) nginx
15 17 (0.38%) Camunda
16 15 (0.34%) WebSphere
17 12 (0.27%) ArcGIS
18 11 (0.25%) Oracle SOA Suite
19 7 (0.16%) OpenStack
19 7 (0.16%) Tomcat
Applications
1 270 (6.05%) Microsoft Excel
2 56 (1.25%) Microsoft Office
3 39 (0.87%) Spreadsheet
4 25 (0.56%) MS Visio
5 21 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 11 (0.25%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.16%) Windchill
8 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
9 4 (0.090%) Acrobat
9 4 (0.090%) Notion
9 4 (0.090%) Photoshop
10 3 (0.067%) CPLEX
10 3 (0.067%) Microsoft Project
11 2 (0.045%) Mingle
12 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.022%) Mozilla Thunderbird
12 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 46 (1.03%) Dynamics CRM
2 34 (0.76%) Oracle EBS
3 27 (0.60%) Oracle Payables
4 25 (0.56%) Aladdin
5 24 (0.54%) Remedy ITSM
5 24 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
6 20 (0.45%) Oracle ERP
7 17 (0.38%) Oracle Receivables
8 16 (0.36%) Oracle General Ledger
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle EBS R12
10 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
10 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.22%) Finacle
11 10 (0.22%) Oracle Assets
11 10 (0.22%) Oracle FAH
12 9 (0.20%) NetSuite
12 9 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
12 9 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
12 9 (0.20%) Summit
13 8 (0.18%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 1,366 (30.59%) Azure
2 1,085 (24.30%) AWS
3 859 (19.24%) Power Platform
4 437 (9.79%) GCP
5 365 (8.17%) Azure DevOps
6 353 (7.91%) Snowflake
7 307 (6.88%) GitHub
8 299 (6.70%) Azure Data Factory
9 291 (6.52%) dbt
10 273 (6.11%) Serverless
11 238 (5.33%) Amazon S3
12 185 (4.14%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 176 (3.94%) AWS Lambda
14 146 (3.27%) GitHub Actions
15 100 (2.24%) Power Automate
16 94 (2.11%) SaaS
17 89 (1.99%) PowerApps
18 86 (1.93%) Entra ID
19 82 (1.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 82 (1.84%) Azure Databricks
Communications & Networking
1 59 (1.32%) DNS
2 38 (0.85%) Firewall
3 28 (0.63%) HTTP
4 25 (0.56%) SSL
5 23 (0.52%) Internet
5 23 (0.52%) Network Security
6 19 (0.43%) Broadband
6 19 (0.43%) TCP/IP
6 19 (0.43%) VPN
7 15 (0.34%) DHCP
7 15 (0.34%) SNMP
8 12 (0.27%) SSH
9 9 (0.20%) Kerberos
9 9 (0.20%) SAN
10 8 (0.18%) Reverse Proxy
10 8 (0.18%) RTP
10 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
11 7 (0.16%) 5G
11 7 (0.16%) Multicast
11 7 (0.16%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 791 (17.72%) Power BI
2 615 (13.77%) Data Warehouse
3 567 (12.70%) SQL Server
4 286 (6.41%) Relational Database
5 278 (6.23%) PostgreSQL
6 261 (5.85%) Tableau
7 257 (5.76%) Data Lake
8 231 (5.17%) Metadata
9 212 (4.75%) NoSQL
10 202 (4.52%) Oracle Database
11 191 (4.28%) BigQuery
12 148 (3.31%) Azure SQL Database
13 138 (3.09%) Amazon Redshift
14 129 (2.89%) Delta Lake
15 121 (2.71%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 119 (2.67%) MySQL
17 108 (2.42%) Amazon Athena
18 94 (2.11%) Big Data
18 94 (2.11%) Power Query
19 88 (1.97%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 567 (12.70%) Git
2 354 (7.93%) JIRA
3 248 (5.55%) Jenkins
4 215 (4.82%) GitLab
5 96 (2.15%) Selenium
6 78 (1.75%) JUnit
7 74 (1.66%) Gradle
8 72 (1.61%) Maven
9 60 (1.34%) Postman
10 48 (1.08%) Mockito
11 45 (1.01%) SonarQube
12 40 (0.90%) Bitbucket
13 32 (0.72%) Oracle Forms
14 30 (0.67%) Visual Studio
15 29 (0.65%) Zephyr
16 25 (0.56%) JMeter
17 24 (0.54%) REST Assured
18 23 (0.52%) Cypress.io
19 22 (0.49%) Team Foundation Server
19 22 (0.49%) TeamCity
General
1 1,247 (27.93%) Social Skills
2 1,187 (26.58%) Finance
3 934 (20.92%) Analytical Skills
4 524 (11.74%) Banking
5 386 (8.65%) Public Sector
6 150 (3.36%) Marketing
7 130 (2.91%) Front Office
8 128 (2.87%) Retail
9 117 (2.62%) Investment Banking
10 93 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 77 (1.72%) Documentation Skills
11 77 (1.72%) Manufacturing
12 50 (1.12%) Financial Institution
13 48 (1.08%) Presentation Skills
14 47 (1.05%) Legal
15 43 (0.96%) Local Government
16 42 (0.94%) Back Office
17 40 (0.90%) Influencing Skills
18 36 (0.81%) Law
19 35 (0.78%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 946 (21.19%) Developer
2 855 (19.15%) Data Engineer
3 655 (14.67%) Analyst
4 643 (14.40%) Senior
5 308 (6.90%) Lead
6 264 (5.91%) Data Analyst
7 223 (4.99%) Architect
8 199 (4.46%) Senior Data Engineer
9 194 (4.34%) Business Analyst
10 189 (4.23%) Consultant
11 171 (3.83%) DBA
12 161 (3.61%) Java Developer
13 151 (3.38%) Senior Developer
14 114 (2.55%) Software Engineer
15 105 (2.35%) SQL DBA
16 102 (2.28%) Azure Engineer
16 102 (2.28%) Full-Stack Developer
16 102 (2.28%) SQL Developer
17 99 (2.22%) Data Architect
18 96 (2.15%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 410 (9.18%) REST
2 385 (8.62%) .NET
3 373 (8.35%) Terraform
4 304 (6.81%) PySpark
5 290 (6.49%) Kafka
6 228 (5.11%) Spring
7 216 (4.84%) Spring Boot
8 211 (4.73%) React
9 182 (4.08%) HTML
10 164 (3.67%) RESTful
11 158 (3.54%) CSS
11 158 (3.54%) JSON
12 137 (3.07%) XML
13 107 (2.40%) AngularJS
14 103 (2.31%) SOAP
14 103 (2.31%) Web Services
15 96 (2.15%) Middleware
16 93 (2.08%) Pandas
17 82 (1.84%) .NET Framework
18 79 (1.77%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 280 (6.27%) Cloud Native
2 223 (4.99%) Data Structures
3 207 (4.64%) Product Ownership
4 140 (3.14%) Legacy Systems
5 125 (2.80%) Enterprise Software
6 123 (2.75%) Distributed Systems
7 119 (2.67%) Onboarding
8 94 (2.11%) Management Information System
9 82 (1.84%) AI Agents
10 77 (1.72%) Self-Motivation
11 73 (1.63%) Derivative
12 64 (1.43%) Analytical Mindset
12 64 (1.43%) Replication
13 61 (1.37%) Data Protection Act
14 60 (1.34%) Reference Data
15 55 (1.23%) Clustering
16 50 (1.12%) Algorithms
17 48 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
18 45 (1.01%) Fixed Income
19 43 (0.96%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 318 (7.12%) Linux
2 276 (6.18%) Windows
3 216 (4.84%) Unix
4 111 (2.49%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.54%) Solaris
7 12 (0.27%) AIX
7 12 (0.27%) Ubuntu
8 10 (0.22%) Windows Server 2019
9 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.18%) VMS
11 7 (0.16%) Android
12 6 (0.13%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.13%) Windows 10
13 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.11%) zOS
14 4 (0.090%) Windows Server 2016
15 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
16 2 (0.045%) HPUX
16 2 (0.045%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,220 (27.32%) CI/CD
2 1,184 (26.52%) Agile
3 1,145 (25.64%) Data Modelling
4 1,129 (25.29%) Analytics
5 987 (22.11%) Business Intelligence
6 986 (22.08%) ETL
7 893 (20.00%) Problem-Solving
8 874 (19.57%) Data Pipeline
9 845 (18.92%) DevOps
10 774 (17.33%) Data Engineering
11 748 (16.75%) AI
12 691 (15.48%) Validation
13 644 (14.42%) Migration
14 642 (14.38%) Stakeholder Management
15 520 (11.65%) Continuous Improvement
16 514 (11.51%) Test Automation
17 504 (11.29%) Data Governance
18 499 (11.18%) Data Analysis
19 489 (10.95%) Decision-Making
20 386 (8.65%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,617 (36.22%) Python
2 550 (12.32%) Java
3 408 (9.14%) C#
4 370 (8.29%) JavaScript
5 343 (7.68%) PL/SQL
6 234 (5.24%) PowerShell
7 209 (4.68%) T-SQL
8 188 (4.21%) TypeScript
9 142 (3.18%) Shell Script
10 137 (3.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 107 (2.40%) Bash
12 76 (1.70%) R
13 71 (1.59%) Scala
14 37 (0.83%) C++
14 37 (0.83%) VBA
15 28 (0.63%) Bicep
16 27 (0.60%) Kotlin
16 27 (0.60%) VB
17 26 (0.58%) Go
18 25 (0.56%) C
Qualifications
1 946 (21.19%) Security Cleared
2 742 (16.62%) SC Cleared
3 332 (7.44%) Degree
4 128 (2.87%) DV Cleared
5 116 (2.60%) BPSS Clearance
6 113 (2.53%) Computer Science Degree
7 72 (1.61%) Azure Certification
8 54 (1.21%) ISTQB
9 52 (1.16%) Microsoft Certification
10 43 (0.96%) AWS Certification
11 40 (0.90%) Master's Degree
12 17 (0.38%) ACCA
12 17 (0.38%) CIMA
12 17 (0.38%) ISEB
13 16 (0.36%) CISSP
13 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
14 15 (0.34%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 15 (0.34%) Oracle Certification
15 14 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 12 (0.27%) FFIEC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 894 (20.02%) Data Quality
2 368 (8.24%) QA
3 118 (2.64%) GDPR
4 47 (1.05%) Accessibility
4 47 (1.05%) SLA
5 28 (0.63%) Actionable Recommendations
6 23 (0.52%) IFRS
7 21 (0.47%) ISO 20022
7 21 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 19 (0.43%) NIST
9 17 (0.38%) MiFID
10 13 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 11 (0.25%) Basel III
11 11 (0.25%) COBIT
11 11 (0.25%) PCI DSS
11 11 (0.25%) PMO
12 8 (0.18%) HIPAA
12 8 (0.18%) Solvency II
13 7 (0.16%) EMIR
13 7 (0.16%) WCAG
System Software
1 428 (9.59%) Docker
2 111 (2.49%) Active Directory
3 51 (1.14%) VMware Infrastructure
4 37 (0.83%) Virtual Machines
5 36 (0.81%) Oracle RAC
6 19 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
7 16 (0.36%) vCloud
7 16 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.31%) Hyper-V
9 13 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 7 (0.16%) Postfix
11 5 (0.11%) KVM
12 4 (0.090%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 2 (0.045%) DFS Replication
13 2 (0.045%) Dovecot
13 2 (0.045%) Squid
14 1 (0.022%) GPFS
14 1 (0.022%) HDFS
14 1 (0.022%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 1 (0.022%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 362 (8.11%) Kubernetes
2 91 (2.04%) Grafana
3 89 (1.99%) Ansible
4 52 (1.16%) Prometheus
5 40 (0.90%) SCOM
6 38 (0.85%) Control-M
6 38 (0.85%) Data Guard
6 38 (0.85%) Oracle RMAN
7 35 (0.78%) Kibana
8 16 (0.36%) vCenter Server
9 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
10 11 (0.25%) Microsoft Intune
10 11 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
11 10 (0.22%) Nagios
11 10 (0.22%) Tivoli
11 10 (0.22%) ZABBIX
12 9 (0.20%) Argo
12 9 (0.20%) Netcool
12 9 (0.20%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 754 (16.89%) Microsoft
2 752 (16.84%) Oracle
3 574 (12.86%) Databricks
4 204 (4.57%) Google
5 125 (2.80%) Informatica
6 124 (2.78%) SAP
7 99 (2.22%) Talend
8 98 (2.19%) IBM
9 85 (1.90%) ServiceNow
10 80 (1.79%) Splunk
11 69 (1.55%) VMware
12 61 (1.37%) Salesforce
13 49 (1.10%) Denodo
14 39 (0.87%) Bloomberg
15 36 (0.81%) Adobe
15 36 (0.81%) Alteryx
15 36 (0.81%) Foundry
16 35 (0.78%) OpenAI
17 34 (0.76%) UiPath
18 33 (0.74%) Murex