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

6 months to
10 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,476 3,276 3,549
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.67% 11.79% 10.84%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.28% 35.90% 33.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,019 2,301 2,576
10th Percentile £358 £332 £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 81 79 39
10th Percentile £23.00 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £28.50 £33.91 £30.25
Median hourly rate £42.50 £50.00 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year -15.00% +20.48% +3.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £62.75 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +25.00% -11.97%

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 12,008 9,125 10,558
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 25.93% 32.83% 32.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,763 6,191 7,318
10th Percentile £363 £350 £356
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 502 264 302
10th Percentile £28.50 £31.25 £30.58
25th Percentile £51.25 £42.25 £50.66
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.12% -14.62% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.88 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £80.00 £79.92
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 10 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 10 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 10 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 2,531 £525 - 1,537
North of England -2 592 £475 +5.56% 391
South East -11 460 £500 - 500
Midlands -4 449 £469 +4.22% 272
West Midlands -3 349 £469 -6.20% 160
North West 0 297 £483 +7.33% 227
Yorkshire +4 253 £474 +5.33% 112
South West -2 221 £513 +20.59% 221
East of England -7 119 £495 -1.49% 132
East Midlands -6 98 £464 +19.68% 112
North East -17 51 £406 -12.63% 56
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
1 225 (5.03%) Apache Airflow
2 192 (4.29%) Apache Spark
3 182 (4.07%) Confluence
4 149 (3.33%) Apache
5 84 (1.88%) SharePoint
6 72 (1.61%) SAS
7 36 (0.80%) Oracle Workflow
8 30 (0.67%) IIS
9 29 (0.65%) WebLogic
10 26 (0.58%) Jupyter
11 25 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
12 21 (0.47%) Palantir Foundry
13 20 (0.45%) CMS
14 18 (0.40%) nginx
15 17 (0.38%) Camunda
16 15 (0.34%) WebSphere
17 11 (0.25%) ArcGIS
17 11 (0.25%) Oracle SOA Suite
18 9 (0.20%) Tomcat
19 7 (0.16%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 278 (6.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 56 (1.25%) Microsoft Office
3 39 (0.87%) Spreadsheet
4 26 (0.58%) MS Visio
5 24 (0.54%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.27%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.089%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.089%) Microsoft Project
8 4 (0.089%) Notion
8 4 (0.089%) 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%) Weka
Business Applications
1 45 (1.01%) Dynamics CRM
2 40 (0.89%) Oracle EBS
3 28 (0.63%) Oracle Payables
4 25 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
5 23 (0.51%) Remedy ITSM
6 22 (0.49%) Aladdin
7 21 (0.47%) Oracle ERP
8 19 (0.42%) 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%) NetSuite
14 8 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,406 (31.41%) Azure
2 1,078 (24.08%) AWS
3 854 (19.08%) Power Platform
4 409 (9.14%) GCP
5 393 (8.78%) Azure DevOps
6 331 (7.39%) Snowflake
7 325 (7.26%) GitHub
8 312 (6.97%) Azure Data Factory
9 277 (6.19%) dbt
10 276 (6.17%) Serverless
11 225 (5.03%) Amazon S3
12 197 (4.40%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 177 (3.95%) AWS Lambda
14 159 (3.55%) GitHub Actions
15 98 (2.19%) SaaS
16 97 (2.17%) Power Automate
17 88 (1.97%) Azure Databricks
17 88 (1.97%) PowerApps
18 85 (1.90%) Entra ID
19 82 (1.83%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 60 (1.34%) DNS
2 45 (1.01%) Firewall
3 26 (0.58%) HTTP
3 26 (0.58%) SSL
4 24 (0.54%) Network Security
5 19 (0.42%) Internet
5 19 (0.42%) TCP/IP
5 19 (0.42%) VPN
6 17 (0.38%) SNMP
7 16 (0.36%) Broadband
7 16 (0.36%) DHCP
8 11 (0.25%) SSH
9 9 (0.20%) SAN
10 8 (0.18%) Kerberos
10 8 (0.18%) Multicast
10 8 (0.18%) RTP
10 8 (0.18%) WAN
10 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
11 7 (0.16%) Wi-Fi
11 7 (0.16%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 784 (17.52%) Power BI
2 624 (13.94%) Data Warehouse
3 584 (13.05%) SQL Server
4 295 (6.59%) Relational Database
5 280 (6.26%) PostgreSQL
6 264 (5.90%) Tableau
7 263 (5.88%) Data Lake
8 242 (5.41%) Metadata
9 218 (4.87%) NoSQL
10 204 (4.56%) Oracle Database
11 174 (3.89%) BigQuery
12 164 (3.66%) Azure SQL Database
13 140 (3.13%) Amazon Redshift
14 131 (2.93%) Delta Lake
15 127 (2.84%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 121 (2.70%) MySQL
17 98 (2.19%) Big Data
18 96 (2.14%) Amazon Athena
19 90 (2.01%) MongoDB
20 89 (1.99%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 539 (12.04%) Git
2 348 (7.77%) JIRA
3 244 (5.45%) Jenkins
4 207 (4.62%) GitLab
5 91 (2.03%) Selenium
6 79 (1.76%) JUnit
7 73 (1.63%) Gradle
8 65 (1.45%) Maven
9 58 (1.30%) Postman
10 51 (1.14%) Mockito
11 45 (1.01%) SonarQube
12 38 (0.85%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.78%) Oracle Forms
14 31 (0.69%) JMeter
15 29 (0.65%) Visual Studio
16 28 (0.63%) Zephyr
17 27 (0.60%) Liquibase
18 25 (0.56%) MLflow
19 24 (0.54%) ERwin
20 23 (0.51%) TeamCity
General
1 1,249 (27.90%) Social Skills
2 1,187 (26.52%) Finance
3 952 (21.27%) Analytical Skills
4 504 (11.26%) Banking
5 390 (8.71%) Public Sector
6 153 (3.42%) Marketing
7 132 (2.95%) Front Office
8 128 (2.86%) Retail
9 118 (2.64%) Investment Banking
10 93 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 78 (1.74%) Documentation Skills
12 69 (1.54%) Manufacturing
13 53 (1.18%) Presentation Skills
14 52 (1.16%) Financial Institution
15 48 (1.07%) Legal
16 40 (0.89%) Organisational Skills
17 38 (0.85%) Back Office
17 38 (0.85%) Local Government
18 37 (0.83%) Publishing
18 37 (0.83%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 938 (20.96%) Developer
2 861 (19.24%) Data Engineer
3 665 (14.86%) Analyst
4 636 (14.21%) Senior
5 308 (6.88%) Lead
6 271 (6.05%) Data Analyst
7 227 (5.07%) Architect
8 200 (4.47%) Consultant
9 194 (4.33%) Business Analyst
10 192 (4.29%) Senior Data Engineer
11 182 (4.07%) DBA
12 160 (3.57%) Java Developer
13 156 (3.49%) Senior Developer
14 120 (2.68%) Software Engineer
15 110 (2.46%) SQL DBA
16 104 (2.32%) Azure Engineer
17 103 (2.30%) Data Architect
18 101 (2.26%) SQL Developer
19 100 (2.23%) Full-Stack Developer
20 97 (2.17%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 394 (8.80%) REST
2 393 (8.78%) .NET
3 368 (8.22%) Terraform
4 315 (7.04%) PySpark
5 300 (6.70%) Kafka
6 223 (4.98%) Spring
7 222 (4.96%) React
8 210 (4.69%) Spring Boot
9 182 (4.07%) HTML
10 172 (3.84%) RESTful
11 170 (3.80%) JSON
12 159 (3.55%) CSS
13 147 (3.28%) XML
14 110 (2.46%) AngularJS
15 102 (2.28%) Pandas
15 102 (2.28%) Web Services
16 96 (2.14%) SOAP
17 95 (2.12%) Middleware
18 83 (1.85%) .NET Framework
19 79 (1.76%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 283 (6.32%) Cloud Native
2 216 (4.83%) Data Structures
3 189 (4.22%) Product Ownership
4 144 (3.22%) Legacy Systems
5 124 (2.77%) Distributed Systems
6 114 (2.55%) Enterprise Software
7 111 (2.48%) Onboarding
8 97 (2.17%) Management Information System
9 80 (1.79%) Self-Motivation
10 74 (1.65%) Derivative
11 73 (1.63%) AI Agents
12 66 (1.47%) Replication
13 65 (1.45%) Analytical Mindset
14 58 (1.30%) Data Protection Act
15 57 (1.27%) Clustering
15 57 (1.27%) Reference Data
16 52 (1.16%) Algorithms
17 50 (1.12%) Fixed Income
18 47 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
19 41 (0.92%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 317 (7.08%) Linux
2 280 (6.26%) Windows
3 214 (4.78%) Unix
4 111 (2.48%) Windows Server
5 22 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 22 (0.49%) Solaris
6 14 (0.31%) AIX
7 10 (0.22%) Ubuntu
7 10 (0.22%) Windows Server 2019
8 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
9 8 (0.18%) VMS
10 7 (0.16%) Windows 10
11 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
12 5 (0.11%) zOS
13 4 (0.089%) Android
13 4 (0.089%) Apple iOS
13 4 (0.089%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.045%) HPUX
15 2 (0.045%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,230 (27.48%) CI/CD
2 1,174 (26.23%) Agile
3 1,133 (25.31%) Data Modelling
4 1,118 (24.98%) Analytics
5 986 (22.03%) Business Intelligence
6 980 (21.89%) ETL
7 890 (19.88%) Problem-Solving
8 883 (19.73%) DevOps
9 881 (19.68%) Data Pipeline
10 769 (17.18%) Data Engineering
11 723 (16.15%) AI
12 663 (14.81%) Validation
13 638 (14.25%) Migration
14 599 (13.38%) Stakeholder Management
15 502 (11.22%) Test Automation
16 499 (11.15%) Continuous Improvement
17 497 (11.10%) Data Governance
18 482 (10.77%) Data Analysis
19 476 (10.63%) Decision-Making
20 385 (8.60%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,638 (36.60%) Python
2 551 (12.31%) Java
3 422 (9.43%) C#
4 363 (8.11%) JavaScript
5 353 (7.89%) PL/SQL
6 243 (5.43%) PowerShell
7 212 (4.74%) T-SQL
8 190 (4.24%) TypeScript
9 140 (3.13%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 139 (3.11%) Shell Script
11 105 (2.35%) Bash
12 86 (1.92%) R
13 65 (1.45%) Scala
14 42 (0.94%) C++
15 36 (0.80%) VBA
16 29 (0.65%) Bicep
17 25 (0.56%) C
17 25 (0.56%) Kotlin
17 25 (0.56%) VB
18 23 (0.51%) Go
Qualifications
1 959 (21.43%) Security Cleared
2 757 (16.91%) SC Cleared
3 334 (7.46%) Degree
4 124 (2.77%) DV Cleared
5 120 (2.68%) Computer Science Degree
6 106 (2.37%) BPSS Clearance
7 72 (1.61%) Azure Certification
8 57 (1.27%) ISTQB
9 50 (1.12%) Microsoft Certification
10 43 (0.96%) Master's Degree
11 39 (0.87%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.40%) CISSP
13 17 (0.38%) DBS Check
13 17 (0.38%) ISEB
14 16 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 15 (0.34%) Oracle Certification
16 14 (0.31%) ACCA
16 14 (0.31%) CIMA
17 12 (0.27%) FFIEC
17 12 (0.27%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 877 (19.59%) Data Quality
2 368 (8.22%) QA
3 134 (2.99%) GDPR
4 46 (1.03%) Accessibility
5 45 (1.01%) SLA
6 27 (0.60%) Actionable Recommendations
7 25 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 21 (0.47%) ISO 20022
9 20 (0.45%) IFRS
10 19 (0.42%) NIST
11 18 (0.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 17 (0.38%) MiFID
13 13 (0.29%) PMO
14 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
14 12 (0.27%) Solvency II
15 11 (0.25%) COBIT
16 10 (0.22%) HIPAA
17 9 (0.20%) GRC
18 8 (0.18%) WCAG
19 7 (0.16%) HL7
System Software
1 433 (9.67%) Docker
2 117 (2.61%) Active Directory
3 53 (1.18%) VMware Infrastructure
4 40 (0.89%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.83%) Oracle RAC
6 19 (0.42%) 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 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
11 4 (0.089%) 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%) Lustre
13 1 (0.022%) RACF
13 1 (0.022%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 360 (8.04%) Kubernetes
2 91 (2.03%) Ansible
3 82 (1.83%) Grafana
4 47 (1.05%) Prometheus
5 42 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
6 40 (0.89%) Control-M
6 40 (0.89%) SCOM
7 39 (0.87%) Data Guard
8 22 (0.49%) Kibana
9 16 (0.36%) vCenter Server
10 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
10 12 (0.27%) Nagios
10 12 (0.27%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
10 12 (0.27%) Single Sign-On
10 12 (0.27%) ZABBIX
11 11 (0.25%) Tivoli
12 10 (0.22%) Microsoft Intune
12 10 (0.22%) Netcool
13 9 (0.20%) Progress Chef
13 9 (0.20%) SCCM
Vendors
1 764 (17.07%) Microsoft
1 764 (17.07%) Oracle
2 567 (12.67%) Databricks
3 183 (4.09%) Google
4 134 (2.99%) Informatica
5 121 (2.70%) SAP
6 103 (2.30%) Talend
7 95 (2.12%) ServiceNow
8 90 (2.01%) IBM
9 76 (1.70%) Splunk
10 70 (1.56%) VMware
11 62 (1.39%) Salesforce
12 50 (1.12%) Denodo
13 41 (0.92%) Bloomberg
14 36 (0.80%) BMC
15 35 (0.78%) Dynatrace
16 34 (0.76%) Alteryx
17 33 (0.74%) OpenAI
18 32 (0.71%) Citrix
18 32 (0.71%) Foundry