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 26 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,449 3,274 3,529
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.74% 11.88% 10.62%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.50% 36.26% 33.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,988 2,312 2,616
10th Percentile £358 £335 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -0.46%
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 82 79 40
10th Percentile £23.08 £25.29 £25.99
25th Percentile £29.96 £31.64 £31.03
Median hourly rate £43.75 £50.00 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +19.05% -8.46%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £54.69
90th Percentile £81.73 £58.50 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £43.50 £41.16
% change year-on-year +2.30% +5.70% -10.30%

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 11,864 9,028 10,639
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 25.97% 32.77% 32.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,693 6,169 7,493
10th Percentile £363 £345 £356
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £788
UK median daily rate £519 £505 £530
% change year-on-year +2.77% -4.72% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 488 264 335
10th Percentile £29.99 £29.53 £31.25
25th Percentile £51.31 £40.94 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.59%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £79.63 £79.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.55%

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 26 August 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 26 August 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 26 August 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 - 767
North of England -2 583 £470 +0.21% 253
Midlands -4 470 £463 +2.78% 152
South East -10 466 £490 -2.00% 192
West Midlands -2 370 £460 -0.54% 86
North West -1 295 £478 +1.70% 134
Yorkshire 0 248 £475 +2.70% 79
South West -3 226 £505 +18.82% 165
East of England -2 126 £480 -4.10% 55
East Midlands -5 97 £463 +20.13% 66
North East -16 49 £413 -11.29% 45
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
1 209 (4.70%) Apache Airflow
2 191 (4.29%) Apache Spark
3 178 (4.00%) Confluence
4 145 (3.26%) Apache
5 75 (1.69%) SAS
5 75 (1.69%) SharePoint
6 36 (0.81%) Oracle Workflow
7 31 (0.70%) IIS
8 29 (0.65%) WebLogic
9 25 (0.56%) Jupyter
10 21 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
10 21 (0.47%) Palantir Foundry
11 17 (0.38%) CMS
11 17 (0.38%) nginx
11 17 (0.38%) WebSphere
12 16 (0.36%) Camunda
13 11 (0.25%) Tomcat
14 9 (0.20%) ArcGIS
15 8 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 8 (0.18%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 289 (6.50%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.21%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.85%) Spreadsheet
4 30 (0.67%) MS Visio
5 25 (0.56%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.22%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.090%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.090%) Microsoft Project
8 4 (0.090%) Notion
8 4 (0.090%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.067%) CPLEX
10 2 (0.045%) Windchill
11 1 (0.022%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.022%) InDesign
11 1 (0.022%) Mingle
11 1 (0.022%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.022%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 44 (0.99%) Dynamics CRM
2 42 (0.94%) Oracle EBS
3 25 (0.56%) Aladdin
4 24 (0.54%) Oracle ERP
4 24 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
5 23 (0.52%) Oracle Payables
5 23 (0.52%) Remedy ITSM
6 17 (0.38%) Oracle EBS R12
7 15 (0.34%) Oracle Receivables
8 13 (0.29%) 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
11 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
11 8 (0.18%) Findur
11 8 (0.18%) NetSuite
12 7 (0.16%) Oracle Financials
12 7 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 7 (0.16%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,415 (31.80%) Azure
2 1,040 (23.38%) AWS
3 848 (19.06%) Power Platform
4 407 (9.15%) Azure DevOps
5 387 (8.70%) GCP
6 321 (7.22%) GitHub
7 312 (7.01%) Snowflake
8 311 (6.99%) Azure Data Factory
9 276 (6.20%) Serverless
10 259 (5.82%) dbt
11 217 (4.88%) Amazon S3
12 199 (4.47%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 175 (3.93%) AWS Lambda
14 162 (3.64%) GitHub Actions
15 95 (2.14%) Power Automate
16 92 (2.07%) SaaS
17 83 (1.87%) Entra ID
17 83 (1.87%) PowerApps
18 81 (1.82%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 66 (1.48%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 59 (1.33%) DNS
2 44 (0.99%) Firewall
3 27 (0.61%) Network Security
4 25 (0.56%) HTTP
5 22 (0.49%) SSL
6 21 (0.47%) SNMP
7 20 (0.45%) Internet
7 20 (0.45%) TCP/IP
8 19 (0.43%) VPN
9 15 (0.34%) DHCP
10 11 (0.25%) Broadband
10 11 (0.25%) SSH
10 11 (0.25%) WAN
11 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
11 9 (0.20%) Wireshark
12 8 (0.18%) Multicast
12 8 (0.18%) RTP
12 8 (0.18%) SAN
12 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
13 7 (0.16%) 3GPP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 781 (17.55%) Power BI
2 621 (13.96%) Data Warehouse
3 570 (12.81%) SQL Server
4 286 (6.43%) Relational Database
5 270 (6.07%) Tableau
6 263 (5.91%) PostgreSQL
7 261 (5.87%) Data Lake
8 234 (5.26%) Metadata
9 223 (5.01%) NoSQL
10 196 (4.41%) Oracle Database
11 174 (3.91%) Azure SQL Database
12 169 (3.80%) BigQuery
13 144 (3.24%) Amazon Redshift
14 130 (2.92%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 126 (2.83%) Delta Lake
16 104 (2.34%) MySQL
17 99 (2.23%) Big Data
18 97 (2.18%) Amazon Athena
19 91 (2.05%) MongoDB
20 87 (1.96%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 512 (11.51%) Git
2 344 (7.73%) JIRA
3 250 (5.62%) Jenkins
4 203 (4.56%) GitLab
5 78 (1.75%) Selenium
6 77 (1.73%) JUnit
7 65 (1.46%) Gradle
8 60 (1.35%) Maven
9 58 (1.30%) Postman
10 49 (1.10%) Mockito
11 39 (0.88%) SonarQube
12 37 (0.83%) Bitbucket
13 33 (0.74%) JMeter
13 33 (0.74%) Oracle Forms
14 32 (0.72%) Visual Studio
15 28 (0.63%) Zephyr
16 27 (0.61%) Liquibase
16 27 (0.61%) TeamCity
17 26 (0.58%) ERwin
18 25 (0.56%) MLflow
General
1 1,208 (27.15%) Social Skills
2 1,155 (25.96%) Finance
3 921 (20.70%) Analytical Skills
4 475 (10.68%) Banking
5 387 (8.70%) Public Sector
6 145 (3.26%) Marketing
7 132 (2.97%) Front Office
8 122 (2.74%) Retail
9 113 (2.54%) Investment Banking
10 87 (1.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 78 (1.75%) Documentation Skills
12 66 (1.48%) Manufacturing
13 53 (1.19%) Financial Institution
14 51 (1.15%) Presentation Skills
15 48 (1.08%) Legal
16 43 (0.97%) Organisational Skills
17 41 (0.92%) Telecoms
18 36 (0.81%) Back Office
19 35 (0.79%) Local Government
20 34 (0.76%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 956 (21.49%) Developer
2 840 (18.88%) Data Engineer
3 650 (14.61%) Analyst
4 612 (13.76%) Senior
5 305 (6.86%) Lead
6 267 (6.00%) Data Analyst
7 234 (5.26%) Architect
8 226 (5.08%) Consultant
9 193 (4.34%) Business Analyst
10 182 (4.09%) DBA
11 177 (3.98%) Senior Data Engineer
12 159 (3.57%) Java Developer
13 151 (3.39%) Senior Developer
14 123 (2.76%) Software Engineer
15 111 (2.49%) SQL DBA
16 110 (2.47%) SQL Developer
17 100 (2.25%) Azure Engineer
18 99 (2.23%) Data Architect
19 98 (2.20%) Full-Stack Developer
20 97 (2.18%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 397 (8.92%) REST
2 390 (8.77%) .NET
3 363 (8.16%) Terraform
4 305 (6.86%) PySpark
5 289 (6.50%) Kafka
6 222 (4.99%) Spring
7 212 (4.77%) React
8 203 (4.56%) Spring Boot
9 181 (4.07%) RESTful
10 176 (3.96%) HTML
11 169 (3.80%) JSON
12 158 (3.55%) XML
13 147 (3.30%) CSS
14 121 (2.72%) AngularJS
15 102 (2.29%) Pandas
15 102 (2.29%) Web Services
16 98 (2.20%) Middleware
17 95 (2.14%) SOAP
18 89 (2.00%) .NET Framework
19 75 (1.69%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 287 (6.45%) Cloud Native
2 205 (4.61%) Data Structures
3 183 (4.11%) Product Ownership
4 141 (3.17%) Legacy Systems
5 129 (2.90%) Distributed Systems
6 109 (2.45%) Onboarding
7 101 (2.27%) Enterprise Software
8 87 (1.96%) Management Information System
9 79 (1.78%) Derivative
9 79 (1.78%) Self-Motivation
10 66 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
11 61 (1.37%) Data Protection Act
12 59 (1.33%) Replication
13 58 (1.30%) Reference Data
14 57 (1.28%) Clustering
15 55 (1.24%) AI Agents
16 51 (1.15%) Fixed Income
17 50 (1.12%) Algorithms
18 46 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
19 43 (0.97%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 314 (7.06%) Linux
2 271 (6.09%) Windows
3 210 (4.72%) Unix
4 98 (2.20%) Windows Server
5 21 (0.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.40%) AIX
7 15 (0.34%) Solaris
8 9 (0.20%) Ubuntu
8 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
8 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
9 8 (0.18%) VMS
10 7 (0.16%) Windows 10
11 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
11 6 (0.13%) zOS
12 4 (0.090%) Android
12 4 (0.090%) Apple iOS
12 4 (0.090%) Oracle Linux
12 4 (0.090%) Windows Server 2016
13 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
14 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,225 (27.53%) CI/CD
2 1,157 (26.01%) Agile
3 1,115 (25.06%) Data Modelling
4 1,108 (24.90%) Analytics
5 994 (22.34%) ETL
6 983 (22.09%) Business Intelligence
7 895 (20.12%) DevOps
8 873 (19.62%) Problem-Solving
9 862 (19.38%) Data Pipeline
10 747 (16.79%) Data Engineering
11 676 (15.19%) AI
12 639 (14.36%) Validation
13 629 (14.14%) Migration
14 554 (12.45%) Stakeholder Management
15 491 (11.04%) Data Governance
16 484 (10.88%) Test Automation
17 465 (10.45%) Continuous Improvement
18 463 (10.41%) Decision-Making
19 459 (10.32%) Data Analysis
20 369 (8.29%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,584 (35.60%) Python
2 555 (12.47%) Java
3 433 (9.73%) C#
4 351 (7.89%) JavaScript
5 350 (7.87%) PL/SQL
6 243 (5.46%) PowerShell
7 226 (5.08%) T-SQL
8 183 (4.11%) TypeScript
9 139 (3.12%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 136 (3.06%) Shell Script
11 95 (2.14%) Bash
12 82 (1.84%) R
13 63 (1.42%) Scala
14 47 (1.06%) C++
15 39 (0.88%) VBA
16 37 (0.83%) Bicep
17 28 (0.63%) C
18 26 (0.58%) VB
19 22 (0.49%) Go
19 22 (0.49%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 949 (21.33%) Security Cleared
2 755 (16.97%) SC Cleared
3 328 (7.37%) Degree
4 122 (2.74%) Computer Science Degree
5 106 (2.38%) DV Cleared
6 100 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
7 71 (1.60%) Azure Certification
8 57 (1.28%) ISTQB
9 45 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
10 43 (0.97%) Master's Degree
11 39 (0.88%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.40%) CISSP
13 17 (0.38%) ISEB
14 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
14 16 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 13 (0.29%) ACCA
15 13 (0.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 13 (0.29%) CIMA
16 12 (0.27%) FFIEC
17 11 (0.25%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 837 (18.81%) Data Quality
2 356 (8.00%) QA
3 144 (3.24%) GDPR
4 51 (1.15%) Accessibility
5 43 (0.97%) SLA
6 26 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 21 (0.47%) ISO 20022
8 20 (0.45%) Actionable Recommendations
8 20 (0.45%) IFRS
8 20 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 19 (0.43%) NIST
10 16 (0.36%) MiFID
11 13 (0.29%) PMO
11 13 (0.29%) Solvency II
12 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
13 11 (0.25%) COBIT
14 9 (0.20%) GRC
14 9 (0.20%) WCAG
15 8 (0.18%) HIPAA
15 8 (0.18%) HL7
System Software
1 442 (9.93%) Docker
2 123 (2.76%) Active Directory
3 48 (1.08%) VMware Infrastructure
4 39 (0.88%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.85%) Oracle RAC
6 18 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
7 15 (0.34%) vCloud
7 15 (0.34%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
9 10 (0.22%) Hyper-V
10 7 (0.16%) Postfix
11 4 (0.090%) KVM
12 3 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 2 (0.045%) DFS Replication
13 2 (0.045%) Dovecot
13 2 (0.045%) GridGain
13 2 (0.045%) Squid
14 1 (0.022%) Microsoft App-V
14 1 (0.022%) RACF
14 1 (0.022%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 371 (8.34%) Kubernetes
2 91 (2.05%) Ansible
3 83 (1.87%) Grafana
4 47 (1.06%) Prometheus
5 43 (0.97%) Oracle RMAN
6 40 (0.90%) Control-M
6 40 (0.90%) Data Guard
7 30 (0.67%) SCOM
8 21 (0.47%) Kibana
9 16 (0.36%) Nagios
9 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
10 15 (0.34%) Tivoli
10 15 (0.34%) vCenter Server
11 14 (0.31%) Netcool
12 13 (0.29%) OpenView
12 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
13 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
14 11 (0.25%) Microsoft Intune
15 10 (0.22%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 10 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 749 (16.84%) Microsoft
2 748 (16.81%) Oracle
3 536 (12.05%) Databricks
4 170 (3.82%) Google
5 142 (3.19%) Informatica
6 122 (2.74%) SAP
7 101 (2.27%) ServiceNow
7 101 (2.27%) Talend
8 91 (2.05%) IBM
9 81 (1.82%) Splunk
10 64 (1.44%) VMware
11 57 (1.28%) Salesforce
12 53 (1.19%) Denodo
13 39 (0.88%) Bloomberg
13 39 (0.88%) BMC
13 39 (0.88%) Dynatrace
14 35 (0.79%) Citrix
15 34 (0.76%) Alteryx
16 33 (0.74%) Murex
17 32 (0.72%) Adobe