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

6 months to
12 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,469 3,256 3,586
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.64% 11.70% 10.87%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.15% 35.71% 33.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,016 2,284 2,605
10th Percentile £357 £331 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £540
Median % change year-on-year - -7.41% -0.92%
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 80 79 39
10th Percentile £22.95 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £28.38 £33.21 £30.25
Median hourly rate £41.00 £50.00 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.00% +20.48% +2.91%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £77.53 £58.50 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +25.00% -12.82%

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 12,031 9,119 10,664
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 25.96% 32.78% 32.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,777 6,184 7,380
10th Percentile £363 £346 £353
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £788
UK median daily rate £520 £501 £525
% change year-on-year +3.90% -4.67% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 504 265 304
10th Percentile £28.50 £31.25 £30.73
25th Percentile £51.25 £42.25 £50.72
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.13 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.58 £80.00 £80.00
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 12 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 12 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 12 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 2,517 £525 - 2,393
North of England 0 594 £475 +5.56% 491
South East -11 462 £490 -2.00% 591
Midlands -5 453 £469 +4.22% 322
West Midlands -4 352 £469 -6.20% 194
North West -2 295 £481 +6.89% 278
Yorkshire +4 255 £475 +4.11% 154
South West -5 221 £513 +20.59% 247
East of England -6 119 £495 -1.49% 163
East Midlands -4 99 £464 +15.94% 128
North East -15 53 £400 -13.98% 63
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
1 227 (5.08%) Apache Airflow
2 186 (4.16%) Apache Spark
2 186 (4.16%) Confluence
3 147 (3.29%) Apache
4 84 (1.88%) SharePoint
5 70 (1.57%) SAS
6 36 (0.81%) Oracle Workflow
7 29 (0.65%) IIS
7 29 (0.65%) WebLogic
8 26 (0.58%) Jupyter
9 25 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
10 20 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
11 19 (0.43%) CMS
12 18 (0.40%) nginx
13 17 (0.38%) Camunda
14 15 (0.34%) WebSphere
15 12 (0.27%) ArcGIS
16 11 (0.25%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 9 (0.20%) Tomcat
18 7 (0.16%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 274 (6.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.28%) Microsoft Office
3 40 (0.90%) Spreadsheet
4 25 (0.56%) MS Visio
5 23 (0.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.27%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.090%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.090%) Notion
8 4 (0.090%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.067%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.067%) Microsoft Project
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%) Weka
Business Applications
1 45 (1.01%) Dynamics CRM
2 40 (0.90%) Oracle EBS
3 28 (0.63%) Oracle Payables
4 26 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
5 23 (0.51%) Remedy ITSM
6 22 (0.49%) Aladdin
7 21 (0.47%) Oracle ERP
8 18 (0.40%) Oracle Receivables
9 16 (0.36%) Oracle General Ledger
10 15 (0.34%) Oracle EBS R12
11 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
11 11 (0.25%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
11 11 (0.25%) Summit
12 10 (0.22%) Finacle
12 10 (0.22%) Oracle FAH
13 9 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
14 8 (0.18%) Findur
14 8 (0.18%) Front Arena
14 8 (0.18%) NetSuite
Cloud Services
1 1,392 (31.15%) Azure
2 1,072 (23.99%) AWS
3 854 (19.11%) Power Platform
4 418 (9.35%) GCP
5 384 (8.59%) Azure DevOps
6 336 (7.52%) Snowflake
7 321 (7.18%) GitHub
8 305 (6.82%) Azure Data Factory
9 279 (6.24%) dbt
10 277 (6.20%) Serverless
11 223 (4.99%) Amazon S3
12 195 (4.36%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 176 (3.94%) AWS Lambda
14 158 (3.54%) GitHub Actions
15 98 (2.19%) Power Automate
16 95 (2.13%) SaaS
17 88 (1.97%) PowerApps
18 86 (1.92%) Entra ID
19 85 (1.90%) Azure Databricks
20 80 (1.79%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 58 (1.30%) DNS
2 43 (0.96%) Firewall
3 27 (0.60%) SSL
4 26 (0.58%) HTTP
5 23 (0.51%) Network Security
6 21 (0.47%) Internet
7 19 (0.43%) VPN
8 18 (0.40%) TCP/IP
9 17 (0.38%) SNMP
10 16 (0.36%) Broadband
11 15 (0.34%) DHCP
12 11 (0.25%) SSH
13 9 (0.20%) Kerberos
13 9 (0.20%) SAN
14 8 (0.18%) Multicast
14 8 (0.18%) Reverse Proxy
14 8 (0.18%) RTP
14 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
15 7 (0.16%) WAN
15 7 (0.16%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 784 (17.54%) Power BI
2 618 (13.83%) Data Warehouse
3 580 (12.98%) SQL Server
4 298 (6.67%) Relational Database
5 284 (6.35%) PostgreSQL
6 262 (5.86%) Data Lake
7 261 (5.84%) Tableau
8 239 (5.35%) Metadata
9 217 (4.86%) NoSQL
10 202 (4.52%) Oracle Database
11 181 (4.05%) BigQuery
12 162 (3.62%) Azure SQL Database
13 137 (3.07%) Amazon Redshift
14 133 (2.98%) Delta Lake
15 126 (2.82%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 119 (2.66%) MySQL
17 97 (2.17%) Amazon Athena
18 96 (2.15%) Big Data
19 94 (2.10%) MongoDB
20 92 (2.06%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 552 (12.35%) Git
2 352 (7.88%) JIRA
3 247 (5.53%) Jenkins
4 208 (4.65%) GitLab
5 88 (1.97%) Selenium
6 79 (1.77%) JUnit
7 76 (1.70%) Gradle
8 69 (1.54%) Maven
9 57 (1.28%) Postman
10 50 (1.12%) Mockito
11 45 (1.01%) SonarQube
12 38 (0.85%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.78%) Oracle Forms
14 29 (0.65%) Visual Studio
15 28 (0.63%) Zephyr
16 26 (0.58%) Liquibase
16 26 (0.58%) MLflow
17 25 (0.56%) JMeter
18 23 (0.51%) ERwin
18 23 (0.51%) TeamCity
General
1 1,248 (27.93%) Social Skills
2 1,185 (26.52%) Finance
3 940 (21.03%) Analytical Skills
4 510 (11.41%) Banking
5 385 (8.61%) Public Sector
6 152 (3.40%) Marketing
7 132 (2.95%) Front Office
8 127 (2.84%) Retail
9 118 (2.64%) Investment Banking
10 93 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 76 (1.70%) Documentation Skills
12 70 (1.57%) Manufacturing
13 53 (1.19%) Financial Institution
14 52 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
15 43 (0.96%) Legal
16 38 (0.85%) Back Office
16 38 (0.85%) Local Government
17 36 (0.81%) Organisational Skills
18 35 (0.78%) Telecoms
19 34 (0.76%) Law
Job Titles
1 940 (21.03%) Developer
2 851 (19.04%) Data Engineer
3 671 (15.01%) Analyst
4 640 (14.32%) Senior
5 310 (6.94%) Lead
6 272 (6.09%) Data Analyst
7 226 (5.06%) Architect
8 197 (4.41%) Business Analyst
8 197 (4.41%) Consultant
9 194 (4.34%) Senior Data Engineer
10 178 (3.98%) DBA
11 161 (3.60%) Java Developer
12 157 (3.51%) Senior Developer
13 122 (2.73%) Software Engineer
14 110 (2.46%) SQL DBA
15 103 (2.30%) Azure Engineer
16 102 (2.28%) Data Architect
16 102 (2.28%) Full-Stack Developer
16 102 (2.28%) SQL Developer
17 95 (2.13%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 400 (8.95%) REST
2 395 (8.84%) .NET
3 375 (8.39%) Terraform
4 314 (7.03%) PySpark
5 294 (6.58%) Kafka
6 229 (5.12%) Spring
7 222 (4.97%) React
8 218 (4.88%) Spring Boot
9 184 (4.12%) HTML
10 174 (3.89%) RESTful
11 167 (3.74%) JSON
12 161 (3.60%) CSS
13 143 (3.20%) XML
14 110 (2.46%) AngularJS
15 100 (2.24%) Web Services
16 99 (2.22%) Pandas
17 97 (2.17%) SOAP
18 93 (2.08%) Middleware
19 83 (1.86%) .NET Framework
20 80 (1.79%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 281 (6.29%) Cloud Native
2 219 (4.90%) Data Structures
3 197 (4.41%) Product Ownership
4 141 (3.16%) Legacy Systems
5 124 (2.77%) Distributed Systems
6 115 (2.57%) Enterprise Software
7 114 (2.55%) Onboarding
8 96 (2.15%) Management Information System
9 79 (1.77%) Self-Motivation
10 76 (1.70%) AI Agents
11 73 (1.63%) Derivative
12 68 (1.52%) Replication
13 65 (1.45%) Analytical Mindset
14 59 (1.32%) Data Protection Act
15 58 (1.30%) Reference Data
16 57 (1.28%) Clustering
17 51 (1.14%) Algorithms
18 48 (1.07%) Fixed Income
19 46 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
20 40 (0.90%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 321 (7.18%) Linux
2 280 (6.27%) Windows
3 215 (4.81%) Unix
4 110 (2.46%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 22 (0.49%) Solaris
7 14 (0.31%) AIX
8 12 (0.27%) Ubuntu
9 10 (0.22%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
11 8 (0.18%) VMS
12 6 (0.13%) Windows 10
13 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.11%) zOS
14 4 (0.090%) Android
14 4 (0.090%) Apple iOS
14 4 (0.090%) Windows Server 2016
15 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
16 2 (0.045%) HPUX
16 2 (0.045%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,226 (27.43%) CI/CD
2 1,169 (26.16%) Agile
3 1,125 (25.17%) Data Modelling
4 1,119 (25.04%) Analytics
5 988 (22.11%) Business Intelligence
6 977 (21.86%) ETL
7 896 (20.05%) Problem-Solving
8 876 (19.60%) DevOps
9 874 (19.56%) Data Pipeline
10 763 (17.07%) Data Engineering
11 733 (16.40%) AI
12 670 (14.99%) Validation
13 633 (14.16%) Migration
14 611 (13.67%) Stakeholder Management
15 504 (11.28%) Continuous Improvement
16 499 (11.17%) Test Automation
17 498 (11.14%) Data Governance
18 485 (10.85%) Data Analysis
19 481 (10.76%) Decision-Making
20 391 (8.75%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,634 (36.56%) Python
2 558 (12.49%) Java
3 422 (9.44%) C#
4 365 (8.17%) JavaScript
5 354 (7.92%) PL/SQL
6 245 (5.48%) PowerShell
7 209 (4.68%) T-SQL
8 191 (4.27%) TypeScript
9 139 (3.11%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 138 (3.09%) Shell Script
11 104 (2.33%) Bash
12 83 (1.86%) R
13 63 (1.41%) Scala
14 43 (0.96%) C++
15 35 (0.78%) VBA
16 29 (0.65%) Bicep
17 26 (0.58%) C
17 26 (0.58%) Kotlin
18 25 (0.56%) VB
19 23 (0.51%) Go
Qualifications
1 950 (21.26%) Security Cleared
2 747 (16.72%) SC Cleared
3 334 (7.47%) Degree
4 128 (2.86%) DV Cleared
5 120 (2.69%) Computer Science Degree
6 106 (2.37%) BPSS Clearance
7 73 (1.63%) Azure Certification
8 54 (1.21%) ISTQB
9 50 (1.12%) Microsoft Certification
10 42 (0.94%) Master's Degree
11 39 (0.87%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.40%) CISSP
13 17 (0.38%) ISEB
14 16 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 15 (0.34%) ACCA
15 15 (0.34%) CIMA
15 15 (0.34%) Oracle Certification
16 13 (0.29%) DBS Check
17 12 (0.27%) FFIEC
17 12 (0.27%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 875 (19.58%) Data Quality
2 365 (8.17%) QA
3 126 (2.82%) GDPR
4 48 (1.07%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.98%) SLA
6 27 (0.60%) Actionable Recommendations
7 25 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 21 (0.47%) IFRS
8 21 (0.47%) ISO 20022
9 19 (0.43%) NIST
10 17 (0.38%) MiFID
11 15 (0.34%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 11 (0.25%) COBIT
12 11 (0.25%) PCI DSS
12 11 (0.25%) PMO
13 10 (0.22%) HIPAA
13 10 (0.22%) Solvency II
14 9 (0.20%) GRC
15 8 (0.18%) WCAG
16 7 (0.16%) HL7
System Software
1 437 (9.78%) Docker
2 117 (2.62%) Active Directory
3 53 (1.19%) VMware Infrastructure
4 40 (0.90%) 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 14 (0.31%) Hyper-V
9 13 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 7 (0.16%) Postfix
11 4 (0.090%) Apache ZooKeeper
11 4 (0.090%) KVM
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%) GPFS
13 1 (0.022%) RACF
13 1 (0.022%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 364 (8.14%) Kubernetes
2 93 (2.08%) Ansible
3 84 (1.88%) Grafana
4 50 (1.12%) Prometheus
5 40 (0.90%) Control-M
5 40 (0.90%) Oracle RMAN
5 40 (0.90%) SCOM
6 39 (0.87%) Data Guard
7 22 (0.49%) Kibana
8 16 (0.36%) vCenter Server
9 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
9 12 (0.27%) Nagios
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
9 12 (0.27%) ZABBIX
10 11 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
10 11 (0.25%) Tivoli
11 10 (0.22%) Microsoft Intune
11 10 (0.22%) Netcool
12 9 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
12 9 (0.20%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 761 (17.03%) Oracle
2 759 (16.98%) Microsoft
3 571 (12.78%) Databricks
4 190 (4.25%) Google
5 131 (2.93%) Informatica
6 126 (2.82%) SAP
7 99 (2.22%) Talend
8 94 (2.10%) ServiceNow
9 90 (2.01%) IBM
10 77 (1.72%) Splunk
11 70 (1.57%) VMware
12 63 (1.41%) Salesforce
13 49 (1.10%) Denodo
14 39 (0.87%) Bloomberg
15 36 (0.81%) BMC
16 35 (0.78%) Alteryx
16 35 (0.78%) Murex
17 33 (0.74%) Dynatrace
18 32 (0.72%) Citrix
18 32 (0.72%) Foundry