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

6 months to
29 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,468 3,282 3,530
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.73% 11.83% 10.71%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.36% 36.09% 33.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,008 2,314 2,603
10th Percentile £357 £335 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £540
Median % change year-on-year - -7.41% -
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 82 38
10th Percentile £23.08 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £29.96 £32.85 £31.92
Median hourly rate £45.00 £50.00 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year -10.00% +19.05% -1.55%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £81.73 £63.63 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £41.16
% change year-on-year -11.00% +21.49% -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 11,960 9,094 10,593
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.06% 32.77% 32.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,752 6,197 7,439
10th Percentile £363 £348 £356
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £514 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.14% -6.55% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £788
UK median daily rate £520 £501 £530
% change year-on-year +3.90% -5.57% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 492 266 316
10th Percentile £29.96 £30.61 £32.16
25th Percentile £51.83 £42.25 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.88 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.68 £79.38 £78.75
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 29 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 29 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 29 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 2,501 £525 - 3,078
North of England -1 588 £472 +1.51% 622
Midlands -3 471 £465 +3.33% 337
South East -14 458 £490 -2.00% 640
West Midlands -2 369 £469 -1.26% 190
North West -2 296 £478 +2.36% 370
Yorkshire +2 252 £475 +5.56% 160
South West -3 228 £505 +18.82% 296
East of England -6 122 £479 -4.68% 165
East Midlands -4 99 £463 +19.35% 147
North East -14 50 £413 -11.29% 99
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
1 214 (4.79%) Apache Airflow
2 189 (4.23%) Apache Spark
3 178 (3.98%) Confluence
4 148 (3.31%) Apache
5 75 (1.68%) SAS
5 75 (1.68%) SharePoint
6 35 (0.78%) Oracle Workflow
7 29 (0.65%) IIS
8 27 (0.60%) Jupyter
8 27 (0.60%) WebLogic
9 24 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
10 22 (0.49%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.40%) nginx
12 17 (0.38%) Camunda
12 17 (0.38%) CMS
12 17 (0.38%) WebSphere
13 11 (0.25%) Tomcat
14 10 (0.22%) ArcGIS
15 8 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 7 (0.16%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 285 (6.38%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.21%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.85%) Spreadsheet
4 28 (0.63%) 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%) Mingle
11 1 (0.022%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.022%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 45 (1.01%) Dynamics CRM
2 41 (0.92%) Oracle EBS
3 26 (0.58%) Aladdin
3 26 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
4 24 (0.54%) Oracle ERP
5 23 (0.51%) Oracle Payables
5 23 (0.51%) Remedy ITSM
6 15 (0.34%) Oracle EBS R12
6 15 (0.34%) Oracle Receivables
7 13 (0.29%) Oracle General Ledger
8 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
8 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
9 10 (0.22%) Finacle
9 10 (0.22%) Oracle Assets
10 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
10 8 (0.18%) Findur
10 8 (0.18%) NetSuite
10 8 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
10 8 (0.18%) Summit
11 7 (0.16%) Infor LN
Cloud Services
1 1,416 (31.69%) Azure
2 1,059 (23.70%) AWS
3 857 (19.18%) Power Platform
4 409 (9.15%) Azure DevOps
5 388 (8.68%) GCP
6 331 (7.41%) GitHub
7 321 (7.18%) Snowflake
8 312 (6.98%) Azure Data Factory
9 280 (6.27%) Serverless
10 269 (6.02%) dbt
11 224 (5.01%) Amazon S3
12 197 (4.41%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 179 (4.01%) AWS Lambda
14 166 (3.72%) GitHub Actions
15 94 (2.10%) Power Automate
15 94 (2.10%) SaaS
16 85 (1.90%) Entra ID
17 83 (1.86%) PowerApps
18 81 (1.81%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 67 (1.50%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 60 (1.34%) DNS
2 45 (1.01%) Firewall
3 28 (0.63%) Network Security
4 25 (0.56%) HTTP
5 22 (0.49%) SSL
6 21 (0.47%) SNMP
6 21 (0.47%) TCP/IP
7 20 (0.45%) Internet
7 20 (0.45%) VPN
8 16 (0.36%) DHCP
9 13 (0.29%) Broadband
10 11 (0.25%) SSH
11 10 (0.22%) WAN
12 9 (0.20%) SAN
12 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
12 9 (0.20%) Wireshark
13 8 (0.18%) Multicast
13 8 (0.18%) RTP
13 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
14 7 (0.16%) 3GPP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 790 (17.68%) Power BI
2 632 (14.15%) Data Warehouse
3 575 (12.87%) SQL Server
4 289 (6.47%) Relational Database
5 274 (6.13%) Tableau
6 264 (5.91%) Data Lake
7 263 (5.89%) PostgreSQL
8 234 (5.24%) Metadata
9 222 (4.97%) NoSQL
10 199 (4.45%) Oracle Database
11 172 (3.85%) Azure SQL Database
12 169 (3.78%) BigQuery
13 143 (3.20%) Amazon Redshift
14 132 (2.95%) Delta Lake
15 127 (2.84%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 104 (2.33%) MySQL
17 99 (2.22%) Amazon Athena
18 97 (2.17%) Big Data
19 92 (2.06%) Snowflake Schema
20 87 (1.95%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 517 (11.57%) Git
2 341 (7.63%) JIRA
3 254 (5.68%) Jenkins
4 208 (4.66%) GitLab
5 81 (1.81%) Selenium
6 79 (1.77%) JUnit
7 68 (1.52%) Gradle
8 63 (1.41%) Maven
9 59 (1.32%) Postman
10 52 (1.16%) Mockito
11 42 (0.94%) SonarQube
12 37 (0.83%) Bitbucket
13 34 (0.76%) JMeter
14 33 (0.74%) Oracle Forms
15 31 (0.69%) Visual Studio
16 28 (0.63%) Zephyr
17 26 (0.58%) Liquibase
17 26 (0.58%) TeamCity
18 25 (0.56%) MLflow
19 24 (0.54%) ERwin
General
1 1,225 (27.42%) Social Skills
2 1,165 (26.07%) Finance
3 927 (20.75%) Analytical Skills
4 478 (10.70%) Banking
5 387 (8.66%) Public Sector
6 149 (3.33%) Marketing
7 133 (2.98%) Front Office
8 123 (2.75%) Retail
9 114 (2.55%) Investment Banking
10 87 (1.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 79 (1.77%) Documentation Skills
12 67 (1.50%) Manufacturing
13 52 (1.16%) Financial Institution
13 52 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
14 47 (1.05%) Legal
15 41 (0.92%) Organisational Skills
16 40 (0.90%) Telecoms
17 37 (0.83%) Back Office
18 36 (0.81%) Local Government
19 34 (0.76%) Law
Job Titles
1 953 (21.33%) Developer
2 855 (19.14%) Data Engineer
3 656 (14.68%) Analyst
4 622 (13.92%) Senior
5 305 (6.83%) Lead
6 268 (6.00%) Data Analyst
7 233 (5.21%) Architect
8 220 (4.92%) Consultant
9 192 (4.30%) Business Analyst
10 184 (4.12%) DBA
11 182 (4.07%) Senior Data Engineer
12 161 (3.60%) Java Developer
13 153 (3.42%) Senior Developer
14 124 (2.78%) Software Engineer
15 113 (2.53%) SQL DBA
16 109 (2.44%) SQL Developer
17 100 (2.24%) Azure Engineer
17 100 (2.24%) Full-Stack Developer
18 99 (2.22%) Data Architect
19 97 (2.17%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 399 (8.93%) REST
2 387 (8.66%) .NET
3 371 (8.30%) Terraform
4 311 (6.96%) PySpark
5 294 (6.58%) Kafka
6 226 (5.06%) Spring
7 220 (4.92%) React
8 208 (4.66%) Spring Boot
9 178 (3.98%) RESTful
10 173 (3.87%) HTML
11 170 (3.80%) JSON
12 153 (3.42%) XML
13 151 (3.38%) CSS
14 113 (2.53%) AngularJS
15 102 (2.28%) Web Services
16 99 (2.22%) Pandas
17 96 (2.15%) Middleware
18 93 (2.08%) SOAP
19 87 (1.95%) .NET Framework
20 76 (1.70%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 290 (6.49%) Cloud Native
2 211 (4.72%) Data Structures
3 184 (4.12%) Product Ownership
4 139 (3.11%) Legacy Systems
5 129 (2.89%) Distributed Systems
6 105 (2.35%) Onboarding
7 99 (2.22%) Enterprise Software
8 87 (1.95%) Management Information System
9 81 (1.81%) Self-Motivation
10 79 (1.77%) Derivative
11 66 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
12 62 (1.39%) Data Protection Act
13 60 (1.34%) AI Agents
13 60 (1.34%) Replication
14 56 (1.25%) Reference Data
15 55 (1.23%) Clustering
16 51 (1.14%) Fixed Income
17 50 (1.12%) Algorithms
18 46 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
19 44 (0.98%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 320 (7.16%) Linux
2 274 (6.13%) Windows
3 207 (4.63%) Unix
4 103 (2.31%) Windows Server
5 22 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.40%) AIX
7 15 (0.34%) Solaris
8 10 (0.22%) Ubuntu
8 10 (0.22%) Windows Server 2019
9 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.18%) VMS
11 7 (0.16%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.11%) zOS
14 4 (0.090%) Android
14 4 (0.090%) Apple iOS
14 4 (0.090%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.090%) Windows Server 2016
15 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
16 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,232 (27.57%) CI/CD
2 1,159 (25.94%) Agile
3 1,126 (25.20%) Data Modelling
4 1,125 (25.18%) Analytics
5 997 (22.31%) ETL
6 996 (22.29%) Business Intelligence
7 893 (19.99%) DevOps
8 876 (19.61%) Problem-Solving
9 868 (19.43%) Data Pipeline
10 768 (17.19%) Data Engineering
11 692 (15.49%) AI
12 643 (14.39%) Validation
13 634 (14.19%) Migration
14 563 (12.60%) Stakeholder Management
15 491 (10.99%) Test Automation
16 488 (10.92%) Data Governance
17 471 (10.54%) Continuous Improvement
18 465 (10.41%) Decision-Making
19 462 (10.34%) Data Analysis
20 372 (8.33%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,606 (35.94%) Python
2 558 (12.49%) Java
3 424 (9.49%) C#
4 350 (7.83%) JavaScript
5 346 (7.74%) PL/SQL
6 252 (5.64%) PowerShell
7 218 (4.88%) T-SQL
8 183 (4.10%) TypeScript
9 144 (3.22%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 137 (3.07%) Shell Script
11 99 (2.22%) Bash
12 84 (1.88%) R
13 62 (1.39%) Scala
14 45 (1.01%) C++
15 39 (0.87%) VBA
16 35 (0.78%) Bicep
17 27 (0.60%) C
18 25 (0.56%) VB
19 23 (0.51%) Go
20 22 (0.49%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 950 (21.26%) Security Cleared
2 757 (16.94%) SC Cleared
3 333 (7.45%) Degree
4 125 (2.80%) Computer Science Degree
5 113 (2.53%) DV Cleared
6 101 (2.26%) BPSS Clearance
7 71 (1.59%) Azure Certification
8 56 (1.25%) ISTQB
9 44 (0.98%) Microsoft Certification
10 43 (0.96%) Master's Degree
11 40 (0.90%) 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
16 12 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 842 (18.85%) Data Quality
2 358 (8.01%) QA
3 143 (3.20%) GDPR
4 49 (1.10%) Accessibility
5 45 (1.01%) SLA
6 26 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 22 (0.49%) Actionable Recommendations
8 21 (0.47%) ISO 20022
9 20 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 19 (0.43%) IFRS
10 19 (0.43%) NIST
11 15 (0.34%) MiFID
12 13 (0.29%) PMO
12 13 (0.29%) Solvency II
13 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
14 11 (0.25%) COBIT
15 9 (0.20%) GRC
15 9 (0.20%) WCAG
16 8 (0.18%) HIPAA
16 8 (0.18%) HL7
System Software
1 440 (9.85%) Docker
2 126 (2.82%) Active Directory
3 51 (1.14%) VMware Infrastructure
4 40 (0.90%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.83%) Oracle RAC
6 18 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
7 15 (0.34%) vCloud
7 15 (0.34%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.29%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
9 7 (0.16%) Postfix
10 4 (0.090%) KVM
11 3 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
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%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 1 (0.022%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 373 (8.35%) Kubernetes
2 92 (2.06%) Ansible
3 83 (1.86%) Grafana
4 47 (1.05%) Prometheus
5 42 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
6 40 (0.90%) Control-M
7 39 (0.87%) Data Guard
8 33 (0.74%) SCOM
9 21 (0.47%) Kibana
10 16 (0.36%) Nagios
10 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
11 15 (0.34%) Tivoli
11 15 (0.34%) vCenter Server
12 14 (0.31%) Netcool
13 13 (0.29%) OpenView
13 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
15 11 (0.25%) Microsoft Intune
16 10 (0.22%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
16 10 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 757 (16.94%) Microsoft
2 746 (16.70%) Oracle
3 543 (12.15%) Databricks
4 174 (3.89%) Google
5 138 (3.09%) Informatica
6 122 (2.73%) SAP
7 102 (2.28%) Talend
8 96 (2.15%) ServiceNow
9 91 (2.04%) IBM
10 80 (1.79%) Splunk
11 67 (1.50%) VMware
12 56 (1.25%) Salesforce
13 53 (1.19%) Denodo
14 42 (0.94%) Bloomberg
15 39 (0.87%) BMC
16 38 (0.85%) Dynatrace
17 35 (0.78%) Citrix
17 35 (0.78%) Murex
18 34 (0.76%) Alteryx
19 32 (0.72%) Foundry