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 5 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 12 11
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 0
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,415 3,252 3,636
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.58% 11.64% 11.21%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.99% 35.48% 34.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,972 2,247 2,548
10th Percentile £350 £328 £350
25th Percentile £413 £407 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -2.27%
75th Percentile £600 £615 £638
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -1.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 81 74 46
10th Percentile £21.25 £25.90 £25.26
25th Percentile £26.52 £33.91 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £50.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -10.00% +25.00% -11.97%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £76.00 - £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £37.75
% change year-on-year -11.00% +32.45% -16.92%

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 11,937 9,166 10,578
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 25.89% 32.82% 32.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,721 6,146 7,060
10th Percentile £363 £345 £355
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £543
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -5.07% -1.36%
75th Percentile £636 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £788
UK median daily rate £525 £505 £525
% change year-on-year +3.96% -3.81% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 508 269 301
10th Percentile £26.51 £31.25 £30.50
25th Percentile £51.25 £42.25 £48.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.13 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £78.75 £79.17
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 5 October 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 5 October 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 5 October 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 -7 2,506 £525 - 3,942
North of England +2 593 £475 +5.56% 1,019
South East -15 437 £475 -3.06% 977
Midlands -5 433 £469 -1.26% 593
West Midlands -4 339 £470 -6.00% 354
North West +4 295 £500 +12.99% 567
Yorkshire +9 243 £475 - 297
South West +3 228 £530 +17.78% 352
East of England -6 113 £500 -0.30% 355
East Midlands -5 92 £463 +12.80% 238
North East 0 65 £406 -9.72% 164
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
1 235 (5.32%) Apache Airflow
2 200 (4.53%) Confluence
3 196 (4.44%) Apache Spark
4 153 (3.47%) Apache
5 84 (1.90%) SharePoint
6 60 (1.36%) SAS
7 34 (0.77%) WebLogic
8 28 (0.63%) IIS
8 28 (0.63%) Jupyter
9 27 (0.61%) Oracle Workflow
10 25 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
11 23 (0.52%) Palantir Foundry
12 20 (0.45%) CMS
13 18 (0.41%) Camunda
14 16 (0.36%) nginx
15 15 (0.34%) WebSphere
16 11 (0.25%) ArcGIS
16 11 (0.25%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 7 (0.16%) OpenStack
17 7 (0.16%) Tomcat
Applications
1 255 (5.78%) Microsoft Excel
2 59 (1.34%) Microsoft Office
3 34 (0.77%) Spreadsheet
4 25 (0.57%) MS Visio
5 19 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.27%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Windchill
8 4 (0.091%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.091%) Notion
8 4 (0.091%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.068%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.068%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.068%) Mingle
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.023%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.023%) Notepad++
10 1 (0.023%) Weka
Business Applications
1 42 (0.95%) Dynamics CRM
2 26 (0.59%) Aladdin
2 26 (0.59%) Oracle EBS
3 25 (0.57%) Oracle Payables
3 25 (0.57%) Remedy ITSM
4 24 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
5 18 (0.41%) Oracle ERP
6 15 (0.34%) Oracle Receivables
7 14 (0.32%) Oracle General Ledger
8 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
8 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
9 10 (0.23%) Finacle
9 10 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
9 10 (0.23%) Oracle FAH
9 10 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
10 9 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
10 9 (0.20%) Summit
11 8 (0.18%) Oracle Payroll
12 7 (0.16%) Actimize
12 7 (0.16%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 1,357 (30.74%) Azure
2 1,074 (24.33%) AWS
3 846 (19.16%) Power Platform
4 450 (10.19%) GCP
5 363 (8.22%) Azure DevOps
6 359 (8.13%) Snowflake
7 308 (6.98%) GitHub
8 288 (6.52%) Azure Data Factory
8 288 (6.52%) dbt
9 257 (5.82%) Serverless
10 233 (5.28%) Amazon S3
11 180 (4.08%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 161 (3.65%) AWS Lambda
13 142 (3.22%) GitHub Actions
14 102 (2.31%) SaaS
15 99 (2.24%) Entra ID
16 96 (2.17%) Power Automate
17 91 (2.06%) PowerApps
18 87 (1.97%) Azure Databricks
19 75 (1.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 65 (1.47%) DNS
2 42 (0.95%) Firewall
3 29 (0.66%) Network Security
4 27 (0.61%) HTTP
4 27 (0.61%) SSL
5 21 (0.48%) Internet
5 21 (0.48%) TCP/IP
5 21 (0.48%) VPN
6 20 (0.45%) Broadband
7 16 (0.36%) DHCP
8 12 (0.27%) Reverse Proxy
8 12 (0.27%) SSH
9 11 (0.25%) SNMP
10 10 (0.23%) SAN
11 9 (0.20%) Kerberos
12 8 (0.18%) Multicast
12 8 (0.18%) RTP
12 8 (0.18%) Wireshark
13 7 (0.16%) 5G
14 6 (0.14%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 775 (17.55%) Power BI
2 590 (13.36%) Data Warehouse
3 575 (13.02%) SQL Server
4 285 (6.46%) Relational Database
5 270 (6.12%) PostgreSQL
6 255 (5.78%) Data Lake
7 248 (5.62%) Tableau
8 228 (5.16%) Metadata
9 211 (4.78%) NoSQL
10 201 (4.55%) BigQuery
11 196 (4.44%) Oracle Database
12 152 (3.44%) Azure SQL Database
13 133 (3.01%) Amazon Redshift
14 128 (2.90%) Delta Lake
15 121 (2.74%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 112 (2.54%) MySQL
17 100 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
18 99 (2.24%) Big Data
19 89 (2.02%) Power Query
20 88 (1.99%) Looker
Development Applications
1 585 (13.25%) Git
2 365 (8.27%) JIRA
3 237 (5.37%) Jenkins
4 222 (5.03%) GitLab
5 93 (2.11%) Selenium
6 77 (1.74%) Maven
7 76 (1.72%) JUnit
8 75 (1.70%) Gradle
9 60 (1.36%) Postman
10 46 (1.04%) Mockito
11 40 (0.91%) Bitbucket
12 39 (0.88%) SonarQube
13 30 (0.68%) Visual Studio
13 30 (0.68%) Zephyr
14 27 (0.61%) REST Assured
15 26 (0.59%) Oracle Forms
16 25 (0.57%) Team Foundation Server
17 23 (0.52%) Artifactory
17 23 (0.52%) JMeter
18 22 (0.50%) Cucumber
General
1 1,240 (28.09%) Social Skills
2 1,191 (26.98%) Finance
3 931 (21.09%) Analytical Skills
4 538 (12.19%) Banking
5 397 (8.99%) Public Sector
6 144 (3.26%) Marketing
7 136 (3.08%) Retail
8 127 (2.88%) Front Office
9 119 (2.70%) Investment Banking
10 86 (1.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 81 (1.83%) Manufacturing
12 74 (1.68%) Documentation Skills
13 53 (1.20%) Financial Institution
14 51 (1.16%) Legal
15 47 (1.06%) Presentation Skills
16 45 (1.02%) Back Office
17 44 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
18 42 (0.95%) Local Government
19 39 (0.88%) Military
20 36 (0.82%) Law
Job Titles
1 943 (21.36%) Developer
2 827 (18.73%) Data Engineer
3 648 (14.68%) Analyst
3 648 (14.68%) Senior
4 310 (7.02%) Lead
5 263 (5.96%) Data Analyst
6 214 (4.85%) Architect
7 205 (4.64%) Senior Data Engineer
8 195 (4.42%) Business Analyst
9 172 (3.90%) Consultant
10 168 (3.81%) DBA
11 154 (3.49%) Java Developer
12 146 (3.31%) Senior Developer
13 112 (2.54%) Software Engineer
14 107 (2.42%) Azure Engineer
15 104 (2.36%) Full-Stack Developer
16 101 (2.29%) Python Developer
17 100 (2.27%) SQL DBA
18 95 (2.15%) SQL Developer
19 94 (2.13%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 419 (9.49%) REST
2 388 (8.79%) Terraform
3 382 (8.65%) .NET
4 300 (6.80%) PySpark
5 298 (6.75%) Kafka
6 221 (5.01%) Spring
7 211 (4.78%) Spring Boot
8 209 (4.73%) React
9 176 (3.99%) HTML
10 164 (3.71%) JSON
11 162 (3.67%) RESTful
12 148 (3.35%) CSS
13 143 (3.24%) XML
14 108 (2.45%) AngularJS
15 105 (2.38%) SOAP
16 102 (2.31%) Web Services
17 90 (2.04%) Middleware
18 86 (1.95%) Pandas
19 84 (1.90%) OAuth
20 83 (1.88%) .NET Framework
Miscellaneous
1 285 (6.46%) Cloud Native
2 216 (4.89%) Data Structures
3 211 (4.78%) Product Ownership
4 139 (3.15%) Legacy Systems
5 130 (2.94%) Enterprise Software
6 124 (2.81%) Onboarding
7 123 (2.79%) Distributed Systems
8 97 (2.20%) Management Information System
9 88 (1.99%) AI Agents
10 79 (1.79%) Self-Motivation
11 72 (1.63%) Derivative
12 70 (1.59%) Replication
13 62 (1.40%) Analytical Mindset
14 61 (1.38%) Data Protection Act
15 59 (1.34%) Reference Data
16 57 (1.29%) Algorithms
17 55 (1.25%) Clustering
18 49 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
19 48 (1.09%) Data Centre
20 44 (1.00%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 317 (7.18%) Linux
2 270 (6.12%) Windows
3 198 (4.48%) Unix
4 111 (2.51%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 23 (0.52%) Solaris
7 13 (0.29%) Ubuntu
8 9 (0.20%) VMS
8 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
9 8 (0.18%) AIX
10 7 (0.16%) Android
11 6 (0.14%) Apple iOS
11 6 (0.14%) Windows 10
11 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2008
12 4 (0.091%) Windows Server 2012
12 4 (0.091%) zOS
13 3 (0.068%) OpenVMS
14 2 (0.045%) CentOS
14 2 (0.045%) HPUX
14 2 (0.045%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,225 (27.75%) CI/CD
2 1,198 (27.13%) Agile
3 1,133 (25.66%) Data Modelling
4 1,121 (25.39%) Analytics
5 964 (21.83%) Business Intelligence
6 958 (21.70%) ETL
7 885 (20.05%) Problem-Solving
8 848 (19.21%) Data Pipeline
9 843 (19.09%) DevOps
10 789 (17.87%) Data Engineering
11 784 (17.76%) AI
12 703 (15.92%) Validation
13 667 (15.11%) Stakeholder Management
14 640 (14.50%) Migration
15 534 (12.10%) Test Automation
16 529 (11.98%) Continuous Improvement
17 507 (11.48%) Data Analysis
18 496 (11.23%) Decision-Making
19 483 (10.94%) Data Governance
20 395 (8.95%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,588 (35.97%) Python
2 548 (12.41%) Java
3 411 (9.31%) C#
4 376 (8.52%) JavaScript
5 317 (7.18%) PL/SQL
6 230 (5.21%) PowerShell
7 207 (4.69%) T-SQL
8 196 (4.44%) TypeScript
9 138 (3.13%) Shell Script
10 131 (2.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 112 (2.54%) Bash
12 73 (1.65%) Scala
13 69 (1.56%) R
14 35 (0.79%) C++
15 32 (0.72%) VBA
16 31 (0.70%) Bicep
17 30 (0.68%) Kotlin
18 27 (0.61%) Go
19 26 (0.59%) C
20 24 (0.54%) VB
Qualifications
1 942 (21.34%) Security Cleared
2 732 (16.58%) SC Cleared
3 335 (7.59%) Degree
4 131 (2.97%) DV Cleared
5 124 (2.81%) BPSS Clearance
6 113 (2.56%) Computer Science Degree
7 72 (1.63%) Azure Certification
8 54 (1.22%) ISTQB
9 50 (1.13%) Microsoft Certification
10 41 (0.93%) AWS Certification
11 40 (0.91%) Master's Degree
12 19 (0.43%) CISSP
13 18 (0.41%) ISEB
14 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
14 16 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 15 (0.34%) ACCA
15 15 (0.34%) CIMA
16 14 (0.32%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 14 (0.32%) PMI Certification
17 13 (0.29%) FFIEC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 889 (20.14%) Data Quality
2 359 (8.13%) QA
3 110 (2.49%) GDPR
4 47 (1.06%) Accessibility
5 46 (1.04%) SLA
6 29 (0.66%) Actionable Recommendations
7 24 (0.54%) NIST
8 23 (0.52%) IFRS
9 21 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 20 (0.45%) ISO 20022
11 17 (0.39%) MiFID
12 15 (0.34%) COBIT
13 14 (0.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
14 12 (0.27%) Basel III
15 10 (0.23%) PCI DSS
16 8 (0.18%) HIPAA
16 8 (0.18%) SEPA
16 8 (0.18%) Solvency II
17 7 (0.16%) EMIR
17 7 (0.16%) PMO
System Software
1 415 (9.40%) Docker
2 117 (2.65%) Active Directory
3 47 (1.06%) VMware Infrastructure
4 34 (0.77%) Oracle RAC
4 34 (0.77%) Virtual Machines
5 18 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
6 16 (0.36%) vCloud
6 16 (0.36%) VMware NSX
7 13 (0.29%) Hyper-V
7 13 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
8 5 (0.11%) Postfix
9 4 (0.091%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 4 (0.091%) KVM
10 2 (0.045%) DFS Replication
10 2 (0.045%) Dovecot
10 2 (0.045%) Squid
11 1 (0.023%) GPFS
11 1 (0.023%) HDFS
11 1 (0.023%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 1 (0.023%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 372 (8.43%) Kubernetes
2 96 (2.17%) Ansible
3 83 (1.88%) Grafana
4 52 (1.18%) Prometheus
5 40 (0.91%) Control-M
6 39 (0.88%) SCOM
7 38 (0.86%) Kibana
8 33 (0.75%) Data Guard
9 28 (0.63%) Oracle RMAN
10 17 (0.39%) vCenter Server
11 13 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
12 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
12 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Intune
12 12 (0.27%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
13 11 (0.25%) Progress Chef
14 10 (0.23%) Argo
15 9 (0.20%) Istio
16 8 (0.18%) Podman
16 8 (0.18%) SCCM
16 8 (0.18%) WMI
Vendors
1 764 (17.30%) Microsoft
2 727 (16.47%) Oracle
3 584 (13.23%) Databricks
4 212 (4.80%) Google
5 126 (2.85%) Informatica
6 118 (2.67%) SAP
7 98 (2.22%) IBM
8 94 (2.13%) Talend
9 82 (1.86%) ServiceNow
10 72 (1.63%) Splunk
11 65 (1.47%) VMware
12 60 (1.36%) Salesforce
13 39 (0.88%) Bloomberg
14 38 (0.86%) Denodo
14 38 (0.86%) Foundry
15 36 (0.82%) OpenAI
15 36 (0.82%) UiPath
16 34 (0.77%) Murex
17 33 (0.75%) Alteryx
18 30 (0.68%) Adobe