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

6 months to
3 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,446 3,235 3,518
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.74% 11.82% 10.73%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.40% 36.05% 33.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,996 2,279 2,586
10th Percentile £358 £335 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -7.06% -0.37%
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 83 38
10th Percentile £23.00 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £28.50 £32.50 £31.92
Median hourly rate £43.75 £50.00 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +19.05% +5.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £56.56
90th Percentile £81.73 £63.50 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £41.16
% change year-on-year -11.00% +21.49% -8.54%

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 11,888 8,973 10,534
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.06% 32.78% 32.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,703 6,116 7,384
10th Percentile £363 £350 £356
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 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £788
UK median daily rate £520 £503 £525
% change year-on-year +3.48% -4.29% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 486 269 313
10th Percentile £29.23 £30.82 £31.61
25th Percentile £51.25 £42.25 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £80.59 £79.83
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%

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 3 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 3 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 3 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 2,486 £525 - 3,292
North of England -1 594 £475 +3.60% 596
South East -8 463 £490 -2.00% 648
Midlands -4 460 £469 +4.22% 326
West Midlands -4 359 £469 -3.79% 177
North West 0 300 £478 +2.80% 358
Yorkshire +6 253 £475 +5.56% 147
South West -3 226 £513 +20.59% 302
East of England -9 118 £495 -1.49% 182
East Midlands -8 98 £465 +20.00% 148
North East -15 50 £413 -11.29% 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
1 216 (4.86%) Apache Airflow
2 192 (4.32%) Apache Spark
3 181 (4.07%) Confluence
4 152 (3.42%) Apache
5 82 (1.84%) SharePoint
6 72 (1.62%) SAS
7 35 (0.79%) Oracle Workflow
8 30 (0.67%) IIS
9 27 (0.61%) WebLogic
10 25 (0.56%) Jupyter
10 25 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
11 22 (0.49%) Palantir Foundry
12 18 (0.40%) Camunda
12 18 (0.40%) CMS
12 18 (0.40%) nginx
13 16 (0.36%) WebSphere
14 10 (0.22%) ArcGIS
14 10 (0.22%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 7 (0.16%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 279 (6.28%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.21%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.85%) Spreadsheet
4 26 (0.58%) MS Visio
5 24 (0.54%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.22%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.090%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.090%) Microsoft Project
8 4 (0.090%) Notion
8 4 (0.090%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.067%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.067%) Windchill
10 2 (0.045%) Mingle
11 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.022%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.022%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 46 (1.03%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.88%) Oracle EBS
3 27 (0.61%) SAP S/4HANA
4 26 (0.58%) Aladdin
5 25 (0.56%) Oracle ERP
5 25 (0.56%) Oracle Payables
6 23 (0.52%) Remedy ITSM
7 17 (0.38%) Oracle Receivables
8 14 (0.31%) Oracle EBS R12
8 14 (0.31%) Oracle General Ledger
9 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
9 11 (0.25%) Oracle Assets
9 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
10 10 (0.22%) Finacle
11 9 (0.20%) Summit
12 8 (0.18%) Findur
12 8 (0.18%) NetSuite
12 8 (0.18%) Oracle FAH
12 8 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
13 7 (0.16%) Infor LN
Cloud Services
1 1,408 (31.67%) Azure
2 1,058 (23.80%) AWS
3 854 (19.21%) Power Platform
4 406 (9.13%) Azure DevOps
5 394 (8.86%) GCP
6 324 (7.29%) Snowflake
7 320 (7.20%) GitHub
8 312 (7.02%) Azure Data Factory
9 278 (6.25%) Serverless
10 268 (6.03%) dbt
11 220 (4.95%) Amazon S3
12 196 (4.41%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 178 (4.00%) AWS Lambda
14 155 (3.49%) GitHub Actions
15 97 (2.18%) SaaS
16 96 (2.16%) Power Automate
17 89 (2.00%) Azure Databricks
18 87 (1.96%) PowerApps
19 84 (1.89%) Entra ID
20 82 (1.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 62 (1.39%) DNS
2 48 (1.08%) Firewall
3 26 (0.58%) HTTP
3 26 (0.58%) SSL
4 25 (0.56%) Network Security
5 21 (0.47%) TCP/IP
5 21 (0.47%) VPN
6 20 (0.45%) Internet
7 19 (0.43%) SNMP
8 18 (0.40%) DHCP
9 15 (0.34%) Broadband
10 11 (0.25%) SSH
11 10 (0.22%) WAN
12 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
13 8 (0.18%) Multicast
13 8 (0.18%) RTP
13 8 (0.18%) SAN
13 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
13 8 (0.18%) Wireshark
14 7 (0.16%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 784 (17.63%) Power BI
2 618 (13.90%) Data Warehouse
3 575 (12.93%) SQL Server
4 290 (6.52%) Relational Database
5 268 (6.03%) PostgreSQL
6 264 (5.94%) Tableau
7 259 (5.83%) Data Lake
8 235 (5.29%) Metadata
9 219 (4.93%) NoSQL
10 200 (4.50%) Oracle Database
11 169 (3.80%) BigQuery
12 165 (3.71%) Azure SQL Database
13 136 (3.06%) Amazon Redshift
14 133 (2.99%) Delta Lake
15 128 (2.88%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 112 (2.52%) MySQL
17 98 (2.20%) Big Data
18 96 (2.16%) Amazon Athena
19 88 (1.98%) Snowflake Schema
20 87 (1.96%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 527 (11.85%) Git
2 349 (7.85%) JIRA
3 247 (5.56%) Jenkins
4 203 (4.57%) GitLab
5 86 (1.93%) Selenium
6 78 (1.75%) JUnit
7 71 (1.60%) Gradle
8 63 (1.42%) Maven
9 57 (1.28%) Postman
10 51 (1.15%) Mockito
11 43 (0.97%) SonarQube
12 37 (0.83%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.79%) Oracle Forms
14 34 (0.76%) JMeter
15 30 (0.67%) Visual Studio
16 28 (0.63%) MLflow
16 28 (0.63%) Zephyr
17 27 (0.61%) Liquibase
18 24 (0.54%) ERwin
19 23 (0.52%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,231 (27.69%) Social Skills
2 1,161 (26.11%) Finance
3 944 (21.23%) Analytical Skills
4 487 (10.95%) Banking
5 388 (8.73%) Public Sector
6 149 (3.35%) Marketing
7 132 (2.97%) Front Office
8 124 (2.79%) Retail
9 118 (2.65%) Investment Banking
10 90 (2.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 79 (1.78%) Documentation Skills
12 66 (1.48%) Manufacturing
13 51 (1.15%) Financial Institution
13 51 (1.15%) Presentation Skills
14 43 (0.97%) Legal
15 40 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
16 38 (0.85%) Local Government
16 38 (0.85%) Telecoms
17 37 (0.83%) Back Office
18 35 (0.79%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 939 (21.12%) Developer
2 850 (19.12%) Data Engineer
3 658 (14.80%) Analyst
4 626 (14.08%) Senior
5 306 (6.88%) Lead
6 273 (6.14%) Data Analyst
7 231 (5.20%) Architect
8 209 (4.70%) Consultant
9 191 (4.30%) Business Analyst
10 184 (4.14%) Senior Data Engineer
11 181 (4.07%) DBA
12 158 (3.55%) Java Developer
13 154 (3.46%) Senior Developer
14 123 (2.77%) Software Engineer
15 110 (2.47%) SQL DBA
16 105 (2.36%) SQL Developer
17 100 (2.25%) Azure Engineer
17 100 (2.25%) Data Architect
17 100 (2.25%) Full-Stack Developer
18 98 (2.20%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 393 (8.84%) REST
2 386 (8.68%) .NET
3 361 (8.12%) Terraform
4 312 (7.02%) PySpark
5 295 (6.64%) Kafka
6 225 (5.06%) Spring
7 217 (4.88%) React
8 209 (4.70%) Spring Boot
9 177 (3.98%) HTML
10 171 (3.85%) RESTful
11 170 (3.82%) JSON
12 155 (3.49%) CSS
13 152 (3.42%) XML
14 109 (2.45%) AngularJS
15 101 (2.27%) Web Services
16 100 (2.25%) Pandas
17 96 (2.16%) Middleware
17 96 (2.16%) SOAP
18 86 (1.93%) .NET Framework
19 78 (1.75%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 285 (6.41%) Cloud Native
2 215 (4.84%) Data Structures
3 186 (4.18%) Product Ownership
4 142 (3.19%) Legacy Systems
5 126 (2.83%) Distributed Systems
6 109 (2.45%) Onboarding
7 107 (2.41%) Enterprise Software
8 93 (2.09%) Management Information System
9 76 (1.71%) Self-Motivation
10 74 (1.66%) Derivative
11 68 (1.53%) AI Agents
12 66 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
13 65 (1.46%) Replication
14 58 (1.30%) Data Protection Act
15 57 (1.28%) Reference Data
16 56 (1.26%) Clustering
17 52 (1.17%) Algorithms
17 52 (1.17%) Fixed Income
18 46 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
19 43 (0.97%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 317 (7.13%) Linux
2 273 (6.14%) Windows
3 210 (4.72%) Unix
4 107 (2.41%) Windows Server
5 22 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.40%) Solaris
7 16 (0.36%) AIX
8 10 (0.22%) Ubuntu
8 10 (0.22%) Windows Server 2019
9 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.18%) VMS
11 7 (0.16%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.11%) zOS
14 4 (0.090%) Android
14 4 (0.090%) Apple iOS
14 4 (0.090%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.090%) Windows Server 2016
15 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
16 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,225 (27.55%) CI/CD
2 1,166 (26.23%) Agile
3 1,126 (25.33%) Data Modelling
4 1,107 (24.90%) Analytics
5 986 (22.18%) ETL
6 984 (22.13%) Business Intelligence
7 885 (19.91%) DevOps
8 879 (19.77%) Problem-Solving
9 863 (19.41%) Data Pipeline
10 760 (17.09%) Data Engineering
11 713 (16.04%) AI
12 645 (14.51%) Validation
13 626 (14.08%) Migration
14 575 (12.93%) Stakeholder Management
15 491 (11.04%) Data Governance
16 484 (10.89%) Test Automation
17 480 (10.80%) Continuous Improvement
18 470 (10.57%) Data Analysis
19 466 (10.48%) Decision-Making
20 375 (8.43%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,616 (36.35%) Python
2 554 (12.46%) Java
3 419 (9.42%) C#
4 357 (8.03%) JavaScript
5 349 (7.85%) PL/SQL
6 244 (5.49%) PowerShell
7 220 (4.95%) T-SQL
8 186 (4.18%) TypeScript
9 140 (3.15%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 138 (3.10%) Shell Script
11 100 (2.25%) Bash
12 84 (1.89%) R
13 66 (1.48%) Scala
14 43 (0.97%) C++
15 36 (0.81%) VBA
16 31 (0.70%) Bicep
17 26 (0.58%) VB
18 25 (0.56%) C
19 23 (0.52%) Kotlin
20 22 (0.49%) Go
Qualifications
1 942 (21.19%) Security Cleared
2 745 (16.76%) SC Cleared
3 334 (7.51%) Degree
4 124 (2.79%) Computer Science Degree
5 119 (2.68%) DV Cleared
6 105 (2.36%) BPSS Clearance
7 70 (1.57%) Azure Certification
8 56 (1.26%) ISTQB
9 46 (1.03%) Microsoft Certification
10 42 (0.94%) Master's Degree
11 39 (0.88%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.40%) CISSP
13 17 (0.38%) ISEB
14 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
14 16 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 14 (0.31%) ACCA
15 14 (0.31%) CIMA
16 13 (0.29%) Oracle Certification
17 12 (0.27%) FFIEC
17 12 (0.27%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 855 (19.23%) Data Quality
2 361 (8.12%) QA
3 136 (3.06%) GDPR
4 46 (1.03%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.99%) SLA
6 26 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 24 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
8 21 (0.47%) ISO 20022
9 20 (0.45%) IFRS
9 20 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 19 (0.43%) NIST
11 16 (0.36%) MiFID
12 13 (0.29%) PMO
13 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
13 12 (0.27%) Solvency II
14 11 (0.25%) COBIT
15 9 (0.20%) GRC
16 8 (0.18%) HIPAA
16 8 (0.18%) WCAG
17 7 (0.16%) Basel III
System Software
1 437 (9.83%) Docker
2 117 (2.63%) Active Directory
3 53 (1.19%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.94%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.83%) Oracle RAC
6 19 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
7 16 (0.36%) vCloud
7 16 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.29%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
9 7 (0.16%) Postfix
10 4 (0.090%) KVM
11 3 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
12 2 (0.045%) DFS Replication
12 2 (0.045%) Dovecot
12 2 (0.045%) GridGain
12 2 (0.045%) Squid
13 1 (0.022%) Microsoft App-V
13 1 (0.022%) RACF
13 1 (0.022%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 362 (8.14%) Kubernetes
2 91 (2.05%) Ansible
3 81 (1.82%) Grafana
4 46 (1.03%) Prometheus
5 42 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
6 40 (0.90%) Control-M
7 39 (0.88%) Data Guard
7 39 (0.88%) SCOM
8 22 (0.49%) Kibana
9 16 (0.36%) vCenter Server
10 14 (0.31%) Nagios
10 14 (0.31%) ZABBIX
11 13 (0.29%) Tivoli
12 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
12 12 (0.27%) Netcool
13 11 (0.25%) Microsoft Intune
13 11 (0.25%) OpenView
13 11 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 10 (0.22%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 9 (0.20%) SCCM
Vendors
1 761 (17.12%) Microsoft
2 755 (16.98%) Oracle
3 557 (12.53%) Databricks
4 175 (3.94%) Google
5 135 (3.04%) Informatica
6 121 (2.72%) SAP
7 101 (2.27%) Talend
8 94 (2.11%) ServiceNow
9 90 (2.02%) IBM
10 79 (1.78%) Splunk
11 70 (1.57%) VMware
12 59 (1.33%) Salesforce
13 50 (1.12%) Denodo
14 41 (0.92%) Bloomberg
15 38 (0.85%) BMC
15 38 (0.85%) Dynatrace
16 36 (0.81%) Murex
17 35 (0.79%) Alteryx
18 34 (0.76%) Foundry
19 33 (0.74%) Citrix