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

6 months to
31 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,436 3,282 3,548
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.70% 11.83% 10.74%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.33% 36.10% 33.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,989 2,315 2,605
10th Percentile £356 £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 39
10th Percentile £23.08 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £28.87 £32.85 £32.59
Median hourly rate £43.75 £50.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +17.65% +5.39%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £55.63
90th Percentile £81.73 £63.63 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £41.33
% change year-on-year -11.00% +20.98% -9.05%

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 11,884 9,092 10,633
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 25.97% 32.76% 32.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,696 6,195 7,454
10th Percentile £363 £348 £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 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 493 267 315
10th Percentile £29.96 £30.68 £31.98
25th Percentile £51.33 £42.25 £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 £78.60 £79.25 £79.67
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 31 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 31 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 31 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 2,477 £525 - 1,509
North of England -1 586 £472 +1.51% 428
Midlands -4 465 £465 +3.33% 265
South East -11 461 £490 -2.00% 555
West Midlands -2 364 £469 -1.26% 146
North West -1 294 £478 +2.36% 246
Yorkshire +4 252 £475 +5.56% 117
South West -4 227 £505 +18.82% 224
East of England -4 120 £488 -2.79% 133
East Midlands -6 98 £463 +19.35% 117
North East -13 50 £413 -11.29% 70
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
1 212 (4.78%) Apache Airflow
2 189 (4.26%) Apache Spark
3 178 (4.01%) Confluence
4 147 (3.31%) Apache
5 76 (1.71%) SharePoint
6 74 (1.67%) SAS
7 35 (0.79%) Oracle Workflow
8 29 (0.65%) IIS
9 27 (0.61%) WebLogic
10 26 (0.59%) Jupyter
11 24 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
12 22 (0.50%) Palantir Foundry
13 18 (0.41%) nginx
14 17 (0.38%) Camunda
14 17 (0.38%) CMS
14 17 (0.38%) WebSphere
15 11 (0.25%) Tomcat
16 10 (0.23%) ArcGIS
17 8 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
18 7 (0.16%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 282 (6.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.22%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.86%) Spreadsheet
4 27 (0.61%) MS Visio
5 25 (0.56%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.23%) 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 (0.068%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.068%) Windchill
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.023%) Mingle
10 1 (0.023%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.023%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.023%) Weka
Business Applications
1 45 (1.01%) Dynamics CRM
2 40 (0.90%) Oracle EBS
3 26 (0.59%) Aladdin
3 26 (0.59%) SAP S/4HANA
4 24 (0.54%) Oracle ERP
5 23 (0.52%) Oracle Payables
5 23 (0.52%) Remedy ITSM
6 15 (0.34%) Oracle Receivables
7 14 (0.32%) Oracle EBS R12
8 13 (0.29%) Oracle General Ledger
9 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
9 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
10 10 (0.23%) Finacle
10 10 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
11 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
11 8 (0.18%) Findur
11 8 (0.18%) NetSuite
11 8 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
11 8 (0.18%) Summit
12 7 (0.16%) Infor LN
Cloud Services
1 1,403 (31.63%) Azure
2 1,055 (23.78%) AWS
3 851 (19.18%) Power Platform
4 406 (9.15%) Azure DevOps
5 384 (8.66%) GCP
6 324 (7.30%) GitHub
7 318 (7.17%) Snowflake
8 307 (6.92%) Azure Data Factory
9 278 (6.27%) Serverless
10 267 (6.02%) dbt
11 223 (5.03%) Amazon S3
12 194 (4.37%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 178 (4.01%) AWS Lambda
14 161 (3.63%) GitHub Actions
15 94 (2.12%) Power Automate
16 93 (2.10%) SaaS
17 84 (1.89%) Entra ID
18 83 (1.87%) Azure Databricks
19 82 (1.85%) PowerApps
20 81 (1.83%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 61 (1.38%) DNS
2 44 (0.99%) Firewall
3 26 (0.59%) Network Security
4 25 (0.56%) HTTP
5 22 (0.50%) 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 (0.23%) 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%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 785 (17.70%) Power BI
2 625 (14.09%) Data Warehouse
3 565 (12.74%) SQL Server
4 288 (6.49%) Relational Database
5 268 (6.04%) Tableau
6 264 (5.95%) Data Lake
7 259 (5.84%) PostgreSQL
8 232 (5.23%) Metadata
9 218 (4.91%) NoSQL
10 197 (4.44%) Oracle Database
11 168 (3.79%) Azure SQL Database
11 168 (3.79%) BigQuery
12 141 (3.18%) Amazon Redshift
13 131 (2.95%) Delta Lake
14 126 (2.84%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 104 (2.34%) MySQL
16 99 (2.23%) Amazon Athena
17 97 (2.19%) Big Data
18 91 (2.05%) Snowflake Schema
19 85 (1.92%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 518 (11.68%) Git
2 341 (7.69%) JIRA
3 252 (5.68%) Jenkins
4 206 (4.64%) GitLab
5 83 (1.87%) Selenium
6 77 (1.74%) JUnit
7 68 (1.53%) Gradle
8 63 (1.42%) Maven
9 59 (1.33%) Postman
10 50 (1.13%) Mockito
11 42 (0.95%) SonarQube
12 37 (0.83%) Bitbucket
13 34 (0.77%) JMeter
14 33 (0.74%) Oracle Forms
15 31 (0.70%) Visual Studio
16 28 (0.63%) Zephyr
17 26 (0.59%) Liquibase
17 26 (0.59%) TeamCity
18 25 (0.56%) MLflow
19 24 (0.54%) ERwin
General
1 1,212 (27.32%) Social Skills
2 1,156 (26.06%) Finance
3 927 (20.90%) Analytical Skills
4 474 (10.69%) Banking
5 385 (8.68%) Public Sector
6 149 (3.36%) Marketing
7 133 (3.00%) Front Office
8 123 (2.77%) Retail
9 113 (2.55%) Investment Banking
10 88 (1.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 78 (1.76%) Documentation Skills
12 65 (1.47%) Manufacturing
13 52 (1.17%) Financial Institution
14 51 (1.15%) Presentation Skills
15 47 (1.06%) Legal
16 42 (0.95%) Organisational Skills
17 40 (0.90%) Telecoms
18 37 (0.83%) Back Office
18 37 (0.83%) Local Government
19 34 (0.77%) Law
Job Titles
1 944 (21.28%) Developer
2 846 (19.07%) Data Engineer
3 654 (14.74%) Analyst
4 617 (13.91%) Senior
5 304 (6.85%) Lead
6 267 (6.02%) Data Analyst
7 230 (5.18%) Architect
8 219 (4.94%) Consultant
9 190 (4.28%) Business Analyst
10 181 (4.08%) Senior Data Engineer
11 180 (4.06%) DBA
12 159 (3.58%) Java Developer
13 149 (3.36%) Senior Developer
14 122 (2.75%) Software Engineer
15 110 (2.48%) SQL DBA
16 107 (2.41%) SQL Developer
17 99 (2.23%) Full-Stack Developer
18 98 (2.21%) Azure Engineer
18 98 (2.21%) Data Architect
19 94 (2.12%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 393 (8.86%) REST
2 383 (8.63%) .NET
3 365 (8.23%) Terraform
4 309 (6.97%) PySpark
5 291 (6.56%) Kafka
6 224 (5.05%) Spring
7 216 (4.87%) React
8 206 (4.64%) Spring Boot
9 177 (3.99%) RESTful
10 172 (3.88%) HTML
11 169 (3.81%) JSON
12 153 (3.45%) XML
13 150 (3.38%) CSS
14 111 (2.50%) AngularJS
15 102 (2.30%) Web Services
16 98 (2.21%) Pandas
17 96 (2.16%) Middleware
18 93 (2.10%) SOAP
19 85 (1.92%) .NET Framework
20 75 (1.69%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 286 (6.45%) Cloud Native
2 210 (4.73%) Data Structures
3 184 (4.15%) Product Ownership
4 138 (3.11%) Legacy Systems
5 128 (2.89%) Distributed Systems
6 105 (2.37%) Onboarding
7 99 (2.23%) Enterprise Software
8 88 (1.98%) Management Information System
9 80 (1.80%) Self-Motivation
10 78 (1.76%) Derivative
11 66 (1.49%) Analytical Mindset
12 60 (1.35%) AI Agents
13 59 (1.33%) Data Protection Act
13 59 (1.33%) Replication
14 55 (1.24%) Clustering
14 55 (1.24%) Reference Data
15 51 (1.15%) Fixed Income
16 49 (1.10%) Algorithms
17 46 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
18 44 (0.99%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 319 (7.19%) Linux
2 270 (6.09%) Windows
3 207 (4.67%) Unix
4 103 (2.32%) Windows Server
5 22 (0.50%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.41%) AIX
7 15 (0.34%) Solaris
8 10 (0.23%) Ubuntu
8 10 (0.23%) Windows Server 2019
9 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.18%) VMS
11 7 (0.16%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.14%) 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 (0.068%) OpenVMS
16 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,221 (27.52%) CI/CD
2 1,153 (25.99%) Agile
3 1,118 (25.20%) Data Modelling
4 1,116 (25.16%) Analytics
5 987 (22.25%) Business Intelligence
5 987 (22.25%) ETL
6 886 (19.97%) DevOps
7 873 (19.68%) Problem-Solving
8 862 (19.43%) Data Pipeline
9 764 (17.22%) Data Engineering
10 688 (15.51%) AI
11 642 (14.47%) Validation
12 628 (14.16%) Migration
13 561 (12.65%) Stakeholder Management
14 488 (11.00%) Test Automation
15 486 (10.96%) Data Governance
16 466 (10.50%) Continuous Improvement
17 461 (10.39%) Decision-Making
18 459 (10.35%) Data Analysis
19 370 (8.34%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,596 (35.98%) Python
2 555 (12.51%) Java
3 419 (9.45%) C#
4 348 (7.84%) JavaScript
5 343 (7.73%) PL/SQL
6 249 (5.61%) PowerShell
7 216 (4.87%) T-SQL
8 179 (4.04%) TypeScript
9 140 (3.16%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 137 (3.09%) Shell Script
11 98 (2.21%) Bash
12 83 (1.87%) R
13 62 (1.40%) Scala
14 45 (1.01%) C++
15 37 (0.83%) VBA
16 34 (0.77%) Bicep
17 26 (0.59%) C
18 25 (0.56%) VB
19 22 (0.50%) Go
19 22 (0.50%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 944 (21.28%) Security Cleared
2 749 (16.88%) SC Cleared
3 330 (7.44%) Degree
4 124 (2.80%) Computer Science Degree
5 115 (2.59%) DV Cleared
6 100 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
7 68 (1.53%) Azure Certification
8 56 (1.26%) ISTQB
9 43 (0.97%) Master's Degree
10 42 (0.95%) Microsoft Certification
11 40 (0.90%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.41%) 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
1 838 (18.89%) Data Quality
2 356 (8.03%) QA
3 143 (3.22%) GDPR
4 49 (1.10%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.99%) SLA
6 26 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 22 (0.50%) 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
1 435 (9.81%) Docker
2 125 (2.82%) Active Directory
3 51 (1.15%) VMware Infrastructure
4 38 (0.86%) 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 13 (0.29%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
9 7 (0.16%) Postfix
10 4 (0.090%) KVM
11 3 (0.068%) 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 (0.023%) Microsoft App-V
13 1 (0.023%) RACF
13 1 (0.023%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 366 (8.25%) Kubernetes
2 92 (2.07%) Ansible
3 82 (1.85%) Grafana
4 46 (1.04%) Prometheus
5 42 (0.95%) Oracle RMAN
6 40 (0.90%) Control-M
7 39 (0.88%) Data Guard
8 34 (0.77%) SCOM
9 21 (0.47%) Kibana
10 16 (0.36%) Nagios
10 16 (0.36%) vCenter Server
10 16 (0.36%) ZABBIX
11 15 (0.34%) Tivoli
12 14 (0.32%) 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 (0.23%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
16 10 (0.23%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 747 (16.84%) Microsoft
2 743 (16.75%) Oracle
3 541 (12.20%) Databricks
4 174 (3.92%) Google
5 136 (3.07%) Informatica
6 121 (2.73%) SAP
7 101 (2.28%) Talend
8 95 (2.14%) ServiceNow
9 91 (2.05%) IBM
10 80 (1.80%) Splunk
11 68 (1.53%) VMware
12 56 (1.26%) Salesforce
13 53 (1.19%) Denodo
14 42 (0.95%) Bloomberg
15 39 (0.88%) BMC
16 38 (0.86%) Dynatrace
17 35 (0.79%) Murex
18 34 (0.77%) Alteryx
18 34 (0.77%) Citrix
19 32 (0.72%) Foundry