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

6 months to
30 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 12 11
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 0
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,479 3,280 3,546
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.62% 11.82% 11.04%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.03% 35.82% 33.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,011 2,276 2,492
10th Percentile £350 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £406 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -2.27%
75th Percentile £600 £618 £638
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 80 73 45
10th Percentile £21.25 £26.80 £25.26
25th Percentile £26.52 £33.91 £30.00
Median hourly rate £42.25 £50.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.50% +25.00% -11.11%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £77.53 - £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £36.50
% change year-on-year -11.00% +36.99% -18.89%

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 12,094 9,156 10,452
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 25.98% 33.00% 32.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,840 6,169 7,000
10th Percentile £363 £345 £354
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £545
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -5.50% -0.91%
75th Percentile £630 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £788
UK median daily rate £525 £507 £525
% change year-on-year +3.65% -3.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 506 260 299
10th Percentile £26.51 £31.25 £30.40
25th Percentile £51.25 £42.44 £48.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.04% -12.31% -
75th Percentile £71.00 £67.63 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.13 £76.50 £80.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%

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 30 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 30 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 30 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 2,528 £525 - 3,156
North of England 0 595 £475 +5.56% 791
Midlands -5 449 £469 -1.26% 451
South East -15 445 £475 -3.06% 592
West Midlands -6 351 £469 -6.20% 292
North West +1 292 £500 +12.36% 466
Yorkshire +4 248 £458 -3.68% 232
South West 0 236 £525 +16.67% 274
East of England -7 114 £495 -1.49% 205
East Midlands -3 96 £463 +12.80% 159
North East -3 61 £400 -15.79% 100
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
1 232 (5.18%) Apache Airflow
2 197 (4.40%) Confluence
3 191 (4.26%) Apache Spark
4 148 (3.30%) Apache
5 86 (1.92%) SharePoint
6 68 (1.52%) SAS
7 33 (0.74%) WebLogic
8 30 (0.67%) IIS
8 30 (0.67%) Oracle Workflow
9 27 (0.60%) Jupyter
10 25 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
11 23 (0.51%) Palantir Foundry
12 20 (0.45%) CMS
13 18 (0.40%) Camunda
14 17 (0.38%) nginx
15 15 (0.33%) WebSphere
16 11 (0.25%) ArcGIS
16 11 (0.25%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 7 (0.16%) OpenStack
18 6 (0.13%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 262 (5.85%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.29%) Microsoft Office
3 36 (0.80%) Spreadsheet
4 25 (0.56%) MS Visio
5 20 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.27%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Windchill
8 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
9 4 (0.089%) Acrobat
9 4 (0.089%) Notion
9 4 (0.089%) Photoshop
10 3 (0.067%) CPLEX
10 3 (0.067%) Microsoft Project
10 3 (0.067%) Mingle
11 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.022%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 43 (0.96%) Dynamics CRM
2 30 (0.67%) Oracle EBS
3 27 (0.60%) Aladdin
4 26 (0.58%) Oracle Payables
4 26 (0.58%) Remedy ITSM
5 25 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
6 19 (0.42%) Oracle ERP
7 16 (0.36%) Oracle Receivables
8 14 (0.31%) Oracle General Ledger
9 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
9 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
10 10 (0.22%) Finacle
10 10 (0.22%) Oracle Assets
10 10 (0.22%) Oracle EBS R12
10 10 (0.22%) Oracle FAH
10 10 (0.22%) Salesforce CRM
11 9 (0.20%) Maximo
11 9 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
11 9 (0.20%) Summit
12 8 (0.18%) NetSuite
Cloud Services
1 1,370 (30.59%) Azure
2 1,088 (24.29%) AWS
3 862 (19.25%) Power Platform
4 446 (9.96%) GCP
5 361 (8.06%) Snowflake
6 360 (8.04%) Azure DevOps
7 309 (6.90%) GitHub
8 297 (6.63%) dbt
9 294 (6.56%) Azure Data Factory
10 264 (5.89%) Serverless
11 236 (5.27%) Amazon S3
12 183 (4.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 170 (3.80%) AWS Lambda
14 144 (3.22%) GitHub Actions
15 101 (2.25%) Power Automate
16 97 (2.17%) SaaS
17 93 (2.08%) Entra ID
18 92 (2.05%) PowerApps
19 87 (1.94%) Azure Databricks
20 79 (1.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 63 (1.41%) DNS
2 39 (0.87%) Firewall
3 28 (0.63%) HTTP
4 27 (0.60%) Network Security
4 27 (0.60%) SSL
5 22 (0.49%) Internet
6 21 (0.47%) TCP/IP
6 21 (0.47%) VPN
7 20 (0.45%) Broadband
8 15 (0.33%) DHCP
9 13 (0.29%) SNMP
10 12 (0.27%) SSH
11 10 (0.22%) Reverse Proxy
12 9 (0.20%) Kerberos
12 9 (0.20%) SAN
13 8 (0.18%) RTP
13 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
13 8 (0.18%) Wireshark
14 7 (0.16%) 5G
14 7 (0.16%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 789 (17.62%) Power BI
2 611 (13.64%) Data Warehouse
3 576 (12.86%) SQL Server
4 285 (6.36%) Relational Database
5 277 (6.18%) PostgreSQL
6 259 (5.78%) Tableau
7 257 (5.74%) Data Lake
8 226 (5.05%) Metadata
9 210 (4.69%) NoSQL
10 198 (4.42%) BigQuery
11 196 (4.38%) Oracle Database
12 147 (3.28%) Azure SQL Database
13 136 (3.04%) Amazon Redshift
14 130 (2.90%) Delta Lake
15 122 (2.72%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 116 (2.59%) MySQL
17 106 (2.37%) Amazon Athena
18 94 (2.10%) Big Data
18 94 (2.10%) Power Query
19 88 (1.96%) Looker
Development Applications
1 580 (12.95%) Git
2 361 (8.06%) JIRA
3 243 (5.43%) Jenkins
4 221 (4.93%) GitLab
5 95 (2.12%) Selenium
6 79 (1.76%) JUnit
7 76 (1.70%) Maven
8 74 (1.65%) Gradle
9 60 (1.34%) Postman
10 49 (1.09%) Mockito
11 41 (0.92%) Bitbucket
11 41 (0.92%) SonarQube
12 30 (0.67%) Visual Studio
13 29 (0.65%) Oracle Forms
13 29 (0.65%) Zephyr
14 25 (0.56%) REST Assured
14 25 (0.56%) Team Foundation Server
15 24 (0.54%) JMeter
16 23 (0.51%) Artifactory
16 23 (0.51%) Cypress.io
General
1 1,247 (27.84%) Social Skills
2 1,197 (26.72%) Finance
3 932 (20.81%) Analytical Skills
4 531 (11.86%) Banking
5 394 (8.80%) Public Sector
6 147 (3.28%) Marketing
7 135 (3.01%) Retail
8 131 (2.92%) Front Office
9 119 (2.66%) Investment Banking
10 89 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 80 (1.79%) Manufacturing
12 79 (1.76%) Documentation Skills
13 53 (1.18%) Legal
14 50 (1.12%) Financial Institution
15 47 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
16 45 (1.00%) Back Office
17 43 (0.96%) Local Government
18 42 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
19 37 (0.83%) Law
20 36 (0.80%) Military
Job Titles
1 947 (21.14%) Developer
2 855 (19.09%) Data Engineer
3 656 (14.65%) Analyst
4 644 (14.38%) Senior
5 313 (6.99%) Lead
6 265 (5.92%) Data Analyst
7 219 (4.89%) Architect
8 203 (4.53%) Senior Data Engineer
9 197 (4.40%) Business Analyst
10 182 (4.06%) Consultant
11 167 (3.73%) DBA
12 158 (3.53%) Java Developer
13 149 (3.33%) Senior Developer
14 113 (2.52%) Software Engineer
15 105 (2.34%) Azure Engineer
16 103 (2.30%) Full-Stack Developer
17 102 (2.28%) SQL DBA
18 99 (2.21%) Python Developer
18 99 (2.21%) SQL Developer
19 97 (2.17%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 415 (9.27%) REST
2 385 (8.60%) .NET
3 380 (8.48%) Terraform
4 304 (6.79%) PySpark
5 299 (6.68%) Kafka
6 224 (5.00%) Spring
7 213 (4.76%) Spring Boot
8 211 (4.71%) React
9 182 (4.06%) HTML
10 163 (3.64%) JSON
11 162 (3.62%) RESTful
12 154 (3.44%) CSS
13 143 (3.19%) XML
14 110 (2.46%) AngularJS
14 110 (2.46%) SOAP
15 105 (2.34%) Web Services
16 96 (2.14%) Middleware
17 90 (2.01%) Pandas
18 82 (1.83%) .NET Framework
19 81 (1.81%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 284 (6.34%) Cloud Native
2 217 (4.84%) Data Structures
3 211 (4.71%) Product Ownership
4 139 (3.10%) Legacy Systems
5 129 (2.88%) Enterprise Software
6 126 (2.81%) Onboarding
7 123 (2.75%) Distributed Systems
8 96 (2.14%) Management Information System
9 84 (1.88%) AI Agents
10 80 (1.79%) Self-Motivation
11 72 (1.61%) Derivative
12 66 (1.47%) Replication
13 61 (1.36%) Analytical Mindset
14 60 (1.34%) Data Protection Act
15 59 (1.32%) Reference Data
16 57 (1.27%) Clustering
17 49 (1.09%) Algorithms
17 49 (1.09%) Greenfield Project
18 48 (1.07%) Data Centre
19 45 (1.00%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 323 (7.21%) Linux
2 276 (6.16%) Windows
3 214 (4.78%) Unix
4 112 (2.50%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.54%) Solaris
6 23 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 12 (0.27%) Ubuntu
8 10 (0.22%) AIX
9 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
10 8 (0.18%) VMS
10 8 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.16%) Android
12 6 (0.13%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.13%) Windows 10
13 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.089%) zOS
15 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
15 3 (0.067%) Windows Server 2016
16 2 (0.045%) HPUX
16 2 (0.045%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,217 (27.17%) CI/CD
2 1,201 (26.81%) Agile
3 1,139 (25.43%) Analytics
4 1,137 (25.39%) Data Modelling
5 981 (21.90%) Business Intelligence
6 971 (21.68%) ETL
7 885 (19.76%) Problem-Solving
8 859 (19.18%) Data Pipeline
9 840 (18.75%) DevOps
10 782 (17.46%) Data Engineering
11 766 (17.10%) AI
12 699 (15.61%) Validation
13 664 (14.82%) Stakeholder Management
14 658 (14.69%) Migration
15 528 (11.79%) Continuous Improvement
16 520 (11.61%) Test Automation
17 505 (11.27%) Data Analysis
18 497 (11.10%) Data Governance
19 496 (11.07%) Decision-Making
20 391 (8.73%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,609 (35.92%) Python
2 554 (12.37%) Java
3 409 (9.13%) C#
4 376 (8.39%) JavaScript
5 330 (7.37%) PL/SQL
6 232 (5.18%) PowerShell
7 212 (4.73%) T-SQL
8 196 (4.38%) TypeScript
9 143 (3.19%) Shell Script
10 134 (2.99%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 111 (2.48%) Bash
12 74 (1.65%) Scala
13 70 (1.56%) R
14 37 (0.83%) C++
15 34 (0.76%) VBA
16 29 (0.65%) Kotlin
17 27 (0.60%) Bicep
17 27 (0.60%) Go
18 26 (0.58%) C
19 25 (0.56%) VB
Qualifications
1 953 (21.28%) Security Cleared
2 750 (16.74%) SC Cleared
3 336 (7.50%) Degree
4 125 (2.79%) DV Cleared
5 122 (2.72%) BPSS Clearance
6 116 (2.59%) Computer Science Degree
7 70 (1.56%) Azure Certification
8 54 (1.21%) ISTQB
9 50 (1.12%) Microsoft Certification
10 41 (0.92%) AWS Certification
11 40 (0.89%) Master's Degree
12 20 (0.45%) CISSP
13 17 (0.38%) ISEB
14 16 (0.36%) ACCA
14 16 (0.36%) CIMA
14 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
15 15 (0.33%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 14 (0.31%) Oracle Certification
16 14 (0.31%) PMI Certification
17 13 (0.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 896 (20.00%) Data Quality
2 367 (8.19%) QA
3 117 (2.61%) GDPR
4 50 (1.12%) SLA
5 44 (0.98%) Accessibility
6 29 (0.65%) Actionable Recommendations
7 23 (0.51%) IFRS
7 23 (0.51%) NIST
8 21 (0.47%) ISO 20022
8 21 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 17 (0.38%) MiFID
10 15 (0.33%) COBIT
10 15 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 12 (0.27%) Basel III
12 9 (0.20%) PCI DSS
13 8 (0.18%) HIPAA
13 8 (0.18%) PMO
13 8 (0.18%) SEPA
13 8 (0.18%) Solvency II
14 7 (0.16%) GRC
System Software
1 422 (9.42%) Docker
2 113 (2.52%) Active Directory
3 49 (1.09%) VMware Infrastructure
4 36 (0.80%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.78%) Oracle RAC
6 18 (0.40%) 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 6 (0.13%) Postfix
11 5 (0.11%) KVM
12 4 (0.089%) 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%) RACF
14 1 (0.022%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 363 (8.10%) Kubernetes
2 88 (1.96%) Ansible
2 88 (1.96%) Grafana
3 50 (1.12%) Prometheus
4 39 (0.87%) Control-M
4 39 (0.87%) SCOM
5 38 (0.85%) Kibana
6 34 (0.76%) Data Guard
7 31 (0.69%) Oracle RMAN
8 16 (0.36%) vCenter Server
9 13 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
10 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
10 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Intune
10 12 (0.27%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
11 10 (0.22%) Argo
12 9 (0.20%) Istio
12 9 (0.20%) Progress Chef
12 9 (0.20%) Tivoli
13 8 (0.18%) Nagios
13 8 (0.18%) Netcool
Vendors
1 764 (17.06%) Microsoft
2 744 (16.61%) Oracle
3 585 (13.06%) Databricks
4 208 (4.64%) Google
5 122 (2.72%) Informatica
6 121 (2.70%) SAP
7 102 (2.28%) IBM
8 96 (2.14%) Talend
9 84 (1.88%) ServiceNow
10 79 (1.76%) Splunk
11 66 (1.47%) Salesforce
11 66 (1.47%) VMware
12 47 (1.05%) Denodo
13 39 (0.87%) Bloomberg
14 37 (0.83%) Foundry
15 36 (0.80%) Adobe
15 36 (0.80%) OpenAI
16 35 (0.78%) UiPath
17 34 (0.76%) Murex
18 33 (0.74%) Alteryx