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

6 months to
16 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,426 3,244 3,570
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.60% 11.68% 10.92%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.01% 35.77% 33.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,983 2,276 2,578
10th Percentile £356 £328 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £542
Median % change year-on-year - -7.79% -1.41%
75th Percentile £600 £620 £650
90th Percentile £688 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 80 75 38
10th Percentile £22.95 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £28.50 £33.91 £30.13
Median hourly rate £43.75 £50.00 £41.33
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +20.98% -8.16%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £77.53 - £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 11,959 9,070 10,616
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 25.94% 32.67% 32.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,738 6,143 7,288
10th Percentile £363 £345 £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 501 260 304
10th Percentile £28.50 £31.25 £30.73
25th Percentile £51.25 £42.25 £50.94
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.12% -14.62% +0.78%
75th Percentile £70.50 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £80.00 £79.75
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 16 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 16 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 16 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 2,478 £525 - 4,710
North of England +1 590 £475 +5.56% 901
South East -11 457 £490 -2.00% 830
Midlands -5 452 £469 +4.22% 541
West Midlands -3 351 £469 -6.20% 330
North West +2 294 £500 +13.64% 529
Yorkshire +1 251 £475 - 267
South West -2 228 £513 +17.14% 356
East of England -5 118 £495 -1.49% 270
East Midlands -5 99 £463 +15.63% 211
North East -12 54 £406 -12.63% 110
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
1 219 (4.95%) Apache Airflow
2 185 (4.18%) Confluence
3 181 (4.09%) Apache Spark
4 142 (3.21%) Apache
5 84 (1.90%) SharePoint
6 72 (1.63%) SAS
7 32 (0.72%) Oracle Workflow
8 30 (0.68%) WebLogic
9 29 (0.66%) IIS
10 25 (0.56%) Jupyter
10 25 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
11 20 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
12 19 (0.43%) CMS
13 18 (0.41%) nginx
14 17 (0.38%) Camunda
15 15 (0.34%) WebSphere
16 12 (0.27%) ArcGIS
17 11 (0.25%) Oracle SOA Suite
18 9 (0.20%) Tomcat
19 7 (0.16%) OpenStack
Applications
1 266 (6.01%) Microsoft Excel
2 55 (1.24%) Microsoft Office
3 39 (0.88%) Spreadsheet
4 26 (0.59%) MS Visio
5 21 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 11 (0.25%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.090%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.090%) Notion
8 4 (0.090%) Photoshop
8 4 (0.090%) Windchill
9 3 (0.068%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.068%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.045%) Mingle
11 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.023%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.023%) Weka
Business Applications
1 46 (1.04%) Dynamics CRM
2 38 (0.86%) Oracle EBS
3 27 (0.61%) Oracle Payables
4 25 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
5 22 (0.50%) Aladdin
5 22 (0.50%) Remedy ITSM
6 21 (0.47%) Oracle ERP
7 17 (0.38%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.34%) Oracle EBS R12
8 15 (0.34%) Oracle General Ledger
9 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
9 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
9 11 (0.25%) Summit
10 10 (0.23%) Finacle
10 10 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
10 10 (0.23%) Oracle FAH
11 9 (0.20%) NetSuite
11 9 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
11 9 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
12 8 (0.18%) Front Arena
Cloud Services
1 1,350 (30.50%) Azure
2 1,066 (24.08%) AWS
3 846 (19.11%) Power Platform
4 422 (9.53%) GCP
5 365 (8.25%) Azure DevOps
6 339 (7.66%) Snowflake
7 305 (6.89%) GitHub
8 295 (6.67%) Azure Data Factory
9 283 (6.39%) dbt
10 271 (6.12%) Serverless
11 231 (5.22%) Amazon S3
12 180 (4.07%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 176 (3.98%) AWS Lambda
14 146 (3.30%) GitHub Actions
15 100 (2.26%) Power Automate
16 94 (2.12%) SaaS
17 87 (1.97%) PowerApps
18 86 (1.94%) Entra ID
19 82 (1.85%) Azure Databricks
20 81 (1.83%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 59 (1.33%) DNS
2 39 (0.88%) Firewall
3 27 (0.61%) HTTP
3 27 (0.61%) SSL
4 23 (0.52%) Network Security
5 21 (0.47%) Internet
6 19 (0.43%) Broadband
6 19 (0.43%) TCP/IP
6 19 (0.43%) VPN
7 16 (0.36%) SNMP
8 15 (0.34%) DHCP
9 12 (0.27%) SSH
10 9 (0.20%) Kerberos
10 9 (0.20%) SAN
11 8 (0.18%) Multicast
11 8 (0.18%) Reverse Proxy
11 8 (0.18%) RTP
11 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
12 7 (0.16%) 5G
12 7 (0.16%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 778 (17.58%) Power BI
2 612 (13.83%) Data Warehouse
3 575 (12.99%) SQL Server
4 293 (6.62%) Relational Database
5 282 (6.37%) PostgreSQL
6 258 (5.83%) Tableau
7 253 (5.72%) Data Lake
8 235 (5.31%) Metadata
9 212 (4.79%) NoSQL
10 200 (4.52%) Oracle Database
11 181 (4.09%) BigQuery
12 149 (3.37%) Azure SQL Database
13 136 (3.07%) Amazon Redshift
14 127 (2.87%) Delta Lake
15 124 (2.80%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 120 (2.71%) MySQL
17 104 (2.35%) Amazon Athena
18 93 (2.10%) MongoDB
19 92 (2.08%) Big Data
20 91 (2.06%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 556 (12.56%) Git
2 353 (7.98%) JIRA
3 244 (5.51%) Jenkins
4 210 (4.74%) GitLab
5 90 (2.03%) Selenium
6 77 (1.74%) JUnit
7 75 (1.69%) Gradle
8 73 (1.65%) Maven
9 58 (1.31%) Postman
10 48 (1.08%) Mockito
11 45 (1.02%) SonarQube
12 39 (0.88%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.79%) Oracle Forms
14 29 (0.66%) Visual Studio
15 28 (0.63%) Zephyr
16 25 (0.56%) JMeter
17 23 (0.52%) Liquibase
17 23 (0.52%) TeamCity
18 22 (0.50%) Artifactory
18 22 (0.50%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,243 (28.08%) Social Skills
2 1,185 (26.77%) Finance
3 935 (21.13%) Analytical Skills
4 515 (11.64%) Banking
5 381 (8.61%) Public Sector
6 152 (3.43%) Marketing
7 133 (3.00%) Front Office
8 126 (2.85%) Retail
9 117 (2.64%) Investment Banking
10 92 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 77 (1.74%) Documentation Skills
12 70 (1.58%) Manufacturing
13 53 (1.20%) Financial Institution
14 50 (1.13%) Presentation Skills
15 48 (1.08%) Legal
16 39 (0.88%) Back Office
17 38 (0.86%) Influencing Skills
17 38 (0.86%) Local Government
18 37 (0.84%) Organisational Skills
19 34 (0.77%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 938 (21.19%) Developer
2 843 (19.05%) Data Engineer
3 662 (14.96%) Analyst
4 627 (14.17%) Senior
5 309 (6.98%) Lead
6 268 (6.06%) Data Analyst
7 222 (5.02%) Architect
8 194 (4.38%) Business Analyst
8 194 (4.38%) Senior Data Engineer
9 193 (4.36%) Consultant
10 172 (3.89%) DBA
11 165 (3.73%) Java Developer
12 152 (3.43%) Senior Developer
13 117 (2.64%) Software Engineer
14 105 (2.37%) SQL DBA
15 102 (2.30%) Full-Stack Developer
16 101 (2.28%) Azure Engineer
17 100 (2.26%) SQL Developer
18 99 (2.24%) Data Architect
19 96 (2.17%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 401 (9.06%) REST
2 389 (8.79%) .NET
3 370 (8.36%) Terraform
4 306 (6.91%) PySpark
5 285 (6.44%) Kafka
6 229 (5.17%) Spring
7 218 (4.93%) Spring Boot
8 217 (4.90%) React
9 184 (4.16%) HTML
10 171 (3.86%) RESTful
11 164 (3.71%) JSON
12 162 (3.66%) CSS
13 140 (3.16%) XML
14 109 (2.46%) AngularJS
15 103 (2.33%) SOAP
15 103 (2.33%) Web Services
16 94 (2.12%) Middleware
16 94 (2.12%) Pandas
17 81 (1.83%) .NET Framework
17 81 (1.83%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 273 (6.17%) Cloud Native
2 222 (5.02%) Data Structures
3 199 (4.50%) Product Ownership
4 137 (3.10%) Legacy Systems
5 125 (2.82%) Distributed Systems
6 118 (2.67%) Enterprise Software
7 115 (2.60%) Onboarding
8 96 (2.17%) Management Information System
9 77 (1.74%) AI Agents
10 76 (1.72%) Derivative
11 75 (1.69%) Self-Motivation
12 68 (1.54%) Replication
13 65 (1.47%) Analytical Mindset
14 61 (1.38%) Data Protection Act
15 58 (1.31%) Reference Data
16 56 (1.27%) Clustering
17 50 (1.13%) Algorithms
18 47 (1.06%) Fixed Income
19 45 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
20 40 (0.90%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 318 (7.18%) Linux
2 277 (6.26%) Windows
3 214 (4.84%) Unix
4 109 (2.46%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 24 (0.54%) Solaris
6 13 (0.29%) AIX
7 12 (0.27%) Ubuntu
8 10 (0.23%) Windows Server 2019
9 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.18%) VMS
11 6 (0.14%) Windows 10
12 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
12 5 (0.11%) zOS
13 4 (0.090%) Android
13 4 (0.090%) Apple iOS
13 4 (0.090%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.068%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.045%) HPUX
15 2 (0.045%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,207 (27.27%) CI/CD
2 1,162 (26.25%) Agile
3 1,123 (25.37%) Data Modelling
4 1,117 (25.24%) Analytics
5 974 (22.01%) Business Intelligence
6 966 (21.83%) ETL
7 898 (20.29%) Problem-Solving
8 864 (19.52%) Data Pipeline
9 850 (19.20%) DevOps
10 754 (17.04%) Data Engineering
11 733 (16.56%) AI
12 672 (15.18%) Validation
13 627 (14.17%) Migration
14 618 (13.96%) Stakeholder Management
15 509 (11.50%) Continuous Improvement
16 500 (11.30%) Data Governance
17 496 (11.21%) Test Automation
18 479 (10.82%) Data Analysis
19 473 (10.69%) Decision-Making
20 383 (8.65%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,615 (36.49%) Python
2 556 (12.56%) Java
3 413 (9.33%) C#
4 364 (8.22%) JavaScript
5 349 (7.89%) PL/SQL
6 240 (5.42%) PowerShell
7 205 (4.63%) T-SQL
8 184 (4.16%) TypeScript
9 140 (3.16%) Shell Script
10 136 (3.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 104 (2.35%) Bash
12 78 (1.76%) R
13 61 (1.38%) Scala
14 41 (0.93%) C++
15 36 (0.81%) VBA
16 28 (0.63%) Bicep
17 26 (0.59%) C
17 26 (0.59%) Kotlin
18 25 (0.56%) Go
18 25 (0.56%) VB
Qualifications
1 937 (21.17%) Security Cleared
2 738 (16.67%) SC Cleared
3 330 (7.46%) Degree
4 127 (2.87%) DV Cleared
5 116 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
6 110 (2.49%) BPSS Clearance
7 71 (1.60%) Azure Certification
8 55 (1.24%) ISTQB
9 52 (1.17%) Microsoft Certification
10 41 (0.93%) AWS Certification
11 38 (0.86%) Master's Degree
12 18 (0.41%) 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 14 (0.32%) DBS Check
17 12 (0.27%) FFIEC
17 12 (0.27%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 874 (19.75%) Data Quality
2 366 (8.27%) QA
3 123 (2.78%) GDPR
4 47 (1.06%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.99%) SLA
6 27 (0.61%) 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 13 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 12 (0.27%) PMO
13 11 (0.25%) COBIT
13 11 (0.25%) PCI DSS
14 10 (0.23%) HIPAA
15 9 (0.20%) Basel III
16 8 (0.18%) GRC
16 8 (0.18%) Solvency II
17 7 (0.16%) EMIR
System Software
1 425 (9.60%) Docker
2 116 (2.62%) Active Directory
3 53 (1.20%) VMware Infrastructure
4 40 (0.90%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.84%) Oracle RAC
6 19 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
7 16 (0.36%) vCloud
7 16 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.32%) 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 (0.023%) GPFS
13 1 (0.023%) RACF
13 1 (0.023%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 361 (8.16%) Kubernetes
2 92 (2.08%) Ansible
3 84 (1.90%) Grafana
4 50 (1.13%) Prometheus
5 40 (0.90%) Control-M
5 40 (0.90%) SCOM
6 39 (0.88%) Data Guard
6 39 (0.88%) Oracle RMAN
7 23 (0.52%) Kibana
8 16 (0.36%) vCenter Server
9 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
10 11 (0.25%) Nagios
10 11 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
10 11 (0.25%) ZABBIX
11 10 (0.23%) Microsoft Intune
11 10 (0.23%) Tivoli
12 9 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
12 9 (0.20%) Netcool
12 9 (0.20%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 757 (17.10%) Oracle
2 745 (16.83%) Microsoft
3 559 (12.63%) Databricks
4 194 (4.38%) Google
5 125 (2.82%) SAP
6 124 (2.80%) Informatica
7 100 (2.26%) Talend
8 89 (2.01%) IBM
9 86 (1.94%) ServiceNow
10 78 (1.76%) Splunk
11 70 (1.58%) VMware
12 62 (1.40%) Salesforce
13 49 (1.11%) Denodo
14 39 (0.88%) Bloomberg
15 37 (0.84%) Alteryx
16 35 (0.79%) Murex
17 34 (0.77%) BMC
18 33 (0.75%) Adobe
19 32 (0.72%) Citrix
19 32 (0.72%) Foundry