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

6 months to
8 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,466 3,217 3,518
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.71% 11.76% 10.80%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.36% 35.92% 33.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,012 2,263 2,572
10th Percentile £358 £332 £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 81 79 38
10th Percentile £23.00 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £28.50 £33.91 £30.69
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 £40.58
% change year-on-year -11.00% +23.22% -10.70%

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 11,954 8,955 10,496
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.00% 32.74% 32.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,734 6,083 7,327
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 £501 £526
% change year-on-year +3.90% -4.76% -4.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 494 260 305
10th Percentile £29.96 £31.25 £31.25
25th Percentile £51.50 £42.44 £51.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.12% -14.62% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.38 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.58 £80.30 £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 8 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 8 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 8 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 2,514 £525 - 3,357
North of England -1 590 £475 +5.56% 602
South East -11 461 £490 -2.00% 622
Midlands -6 454 £469 +4.22% 351
West Midlands -3 355 £469 -6.20% 196
North West -1 298 £480 +5.61% 357
Yorkshire +2 251 £475 +5.44% 160
South West -6 226 £513 +20.59% 287
East of England -7 119 £495 -1.49% 191
East Midlands -5 96 £464 +19.68% 154
North East -15 50 £413 -11.29% 88
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
1 224 (5.02%) Apache Airflow
2 190 (4.25%) Apache Spark
3 182 (4.08%) Confluence
4 150 (3.36%) Apache
5 83 (1.86%) SharePoint
6 72 (1.61%) SAS
7 35 (0.78%) Oracle Workflow
8 30 (0.67%) IIS
9 28 (0.63%) WebLogic
10 26 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
11 25 (0.56%) Jupyter
12 22 (0.49%) Palantir Foundry
13 20 (0.45%) CMS
14 18 (0.40%) Camunda
14 18 (0.40%) nginx
15 16 (0.36%) WebSphere
16 11 (0.25%) ArcGIS
17 10 (0.22%) Tomcat
18 9 (0.20%) Oracle SOA Suite
19 7 (0.16%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 281 (6.29%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.21%) Microsoft Office
3 37 (0.83%) Spreadsheet
4 26 (0.58%) MS Visio
5 24 (0.54%) 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
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 39 (0.87%) Oracle EBS
3 27 (0.60%) Oracle Payables
4 26 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
5 23 (0.52%) Remedy ITSM
6 22 (0.49%) Aladdin
6 22 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
7 19 (0.43%) Oracle Receivables
8 16 (0.36%) Oracle General Ledger
9 14 (0.31%) Oracle EBS R12
10 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
10 11 (0.25%) Oracle Assets
10 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
10 11 (0.25%) Summit
11 10 (0.22%) Finacle
11 10 (0.22%) Oracle FAH
12 9 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
13 8 (0.18%) Findur
13 8 (0.18%) NetSuite
13 8 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,412 (31.62%) Azure
2 1,072 (24.00%) AWS
3 852 (19.08%) Power Platform
4 405 (9.07%) Azure DevOps
5 399 (8.93%) GCP
6 326 (7.30%) Snowflake
7 325 (7.28%) GitHub
8 313 (7.01%) Azure Data Factory
9 281 (6.29%) Serverless
10 273 (6.11%) dbt
11 221 (4.95%) Amazon S3
12 200 (4.48%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 180 (4.03%) AWS Lambda
14 159 (3.56%) GitHub Actions
15 99 (2.22%) SaaS
16 97 (2.17%) Power Automate
17 89 (1.99%) Azure Databricks
18 88 (1.97%) PowerApps
19 86 (1.93%) Entra ID
20 83 (1.86%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 60 (1.34%) DNS
2 46 (1.03%) Firewall
3 26 (0.58%) HTTP
3 26 (0.58%) SSL
4 24 (0.54%) Network Security
5 20 (0.45%) VPN
6 19 (0.43%) Internet
6 19 (0.43%) TCP/IP
7 18 (0.40%) SNMP
8 16 (0.36%) DHCP
9 15 (0.34%) Broadband
10 11 (0.25%) SSH
11 8 (0.18%) Multicast
11 8 (0.18%) RTP
11 8 (0.18%) SAN
11 8 (0.18%) WAN
11 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
12 7 (0.16%) Kerberos
12 7 (0.16%) Wi-Fi
12 7 (0.16%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 782 (17.51%) Power BI
2 622 (13.93%) Data Warehouse
3 579 (12.96%) SQL Server
4 294 (6.58%) Relational Database
5 275 (6.16%) PostgreSQL
6 265 (5.93%) Data Lake
7 261 (5.84%) Tableau
8 241 (5.40%) Metadata
9 221 (4.95%) NoSQL
10 202 (4.52%) Oracle Database
11 171 (3.83%) BigQuery
12 165 (3.69%) Azure SQL Database
13 140 (3.13%) Amazon Redshift
14 133 (2.98%) Delta Lake
15 127 (2.84%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 116 (2.60%) MySQL
17 97 (2.17%) Amazon Athena
18 96 (2.15%) Big Data
19 90 (2.02%) MongoDB
20 86 (1.93%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 536 (12.00%) Git
2 348 (7.79%) JIRA
3 247 (5.53%) Jenkins
4 206 (4.61%) GitLab
5 91 (2.04%) Selenium
6 79 (1.77%) JUnit
7 71 (1.59%) Gradle
8 64 (1.43%) Maven
9 57 (1.28%) Postman
10 51 (1.14%) Mockito
11 45 (1.01%) SonarQube
12 38 (0.85%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.78%) Oracle Forms
14 34 (0.76%) JMeter
15 30 (0.67%) Visual Studio
16 28 (0.63%) Zephyr
17 27 (0.60%) Liquibase
17 27 (0.60%) MLflow
18 24 (0.54%) ERwin
19 23 (0.52%) TeamCity
General
1 1,245 (27.88%) Social Skills
2 1,169 (26.18%) Finance
3 949 (21.25%) Analytical Skills
4 497 (11.13%) Banking
5 392 (8.78%) Public Sector
6 150 (3.36%) Marketing
7 133 (2.98%) Front Office
8 126 (2.82%) Retail
9 117 (2.62%) Investment Banking
10 90 (2.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 80 (1.79%) Documentation Skills
12 66 (1.48%) Manufacturing
13 53 (1.19%) Presentation Skills
14 51 (1.14%) Financial Institution
15 45 (1.01%) Legal
16 40 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
17 38 (0.85%) Back Office
17 38 (0.85%) Local Government
18 37 (0.83%) Telecoms
19 35 (0.78%) Law
Job Titles
1 938 (21.00%) Developer
2 855 (19.14%) Data Engineer
3 664 (14.87%) Analyst
4 631 (14.13%) Senior
5 308 (6.90%) Lead
6 272 (6.09%) Data Analyst
7 233 (5.22%) Architect
8 210 (4.70%) Consultant
9 194 (4.34%) Business Analyst
10 188 (4.21%) Senior Data Engineer
11 179 (4.01%) DBA
12 159 (3.56%) Java Developer
13 153 (3.43%) Senior Developer
14 120 (2.69%) Software Engineer
15 108 (2.42%) SQL DBA
16 104 (2.33%) Data Architect
17 102 (2.28%) Azure Engineer
17 102 (2.28%) Full-Stack Developer
17 102 (2.28%) SQL Developer
18 96 (2.15%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 393 (8.80%) REST
2 389 (8.71%) .NET
3 366 (8.20%) Terraform
4 311 (6.96%) PySpark
5 298 (6.67%) Kafka
6 223 (4.99%) Spring
7 221 (4.95%) React
8 207 (4.64%) Spring Boot
9 182 (4.08%) HTML
10 171 (3.83%) RESTful
11 169 (3.78%) JSON
12 160 (3.58%) CSS
13 151 (3.38%) XML
14 112 (2.51%) AngularJS
15 101 (2.26%) Web Services
16 100 (2.24%) Pandas
17 96 (2.15%) Middleware
18 94 (2.10%) SOAP
19 85 (1.90%) .NET Framework
20 80 (1.79%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 289 (6.47%) Cloud Native
2 214 (4.79%) Data Structures
3 189 (4.23%) Product Ownership
4 142 (3.18%) Legacy Systems
5 126 (2.82%) Distributed Systems
6 112 (2.51%) Enterprise Software
7 110 (2.46%) Onboarding
8 97 (2.17%) Management Information System
9 77 (1.72%) Self-Motivation
10 75 (1.68%) Derivative
11 69 (1.55%) AI Agents
12 65 (1.46%) Analytical Mindset
12 65 (1.46%) Replication
13 60 (1.34%) Data Protection Act
14 56 (1.25%) Clustering
15 55 (1.23%) Reference Data
16 52 (1.16%) Algorithms
17 50 (1.12%) Fixed Income
18 46 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
19 43 (0.96%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 318 (7.12%) Linux
2 275 (6.16%) Windows
3 212 (4.75%) Unix
4 109 (2.44%) Windows Server
5 22 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.40%) Solaris
7 15 (0.34%) AIX
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%) Windows Server 2016
15 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
15 3 (0.067%) Oracle Linux
16 2 (0.045%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,232 (27.59%) CI/CD
2 1,172 (26.24%) Agile
3 1,127 (25.24%) Data Modelling
4 1,114 (24.94%) Analytics
5 982 (21.99%) Business Intelligence
5 982 (21.99%) ETL
6 889 (19.91%) Problem-Solving
7 887 (19.86%) DevOps
8 872 (19.53%) Data Pipeline
9 767 (17.17%) Data Engineering
10 722 (16.17%) AI
11 655 (14.67%) Validation
12 638 (14.29%) Migration
13 585 (13.10%) Stakeholder Management
14 499 (11.17%) Data Governance
15 493 (11.04%) Test Automation
16 485 (10.86%) Continuous Improvement
17 474 (10.61%) Data Analysis
18 469 (10.50%) Decision-Making
19 377 (8.44%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,631 (36.52%) Python
2 555 (12.43%) Java
3 420 (9.40%) C#
4 360 (8.06%) JavaScript
5 349 (7.81%) PL/SQL
6 244 (5.46%) PowerShell
7 220 (4.93%) T-SQL
8 186 (4.16%) TypeScript
9 141 (3.16%) Shell Script
10 140 (3.13%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 104 (2.33%) Bash
12 84 (1.88%) R
13 65 (1.46%) Scala
14 43 (0.96%) C++
15 36 (0.81%) VBA
16 31 (0.69%) Bicep
17 25 (0.56%) C
17 25 (0.56%) VB
18 24 (0.54%) Kotlin
19 22 (0.49%) Go
Qualifications
1 953 (21.34%) Security Cleared
2 751 (16.82%) SC Cleared
3 334 (7.48%) Degree
4 124 (2.78%) DV Cleared
5 122 (2.73%) Computer Science Degree
6 106 (2.37%) BPSS Clearance
7 71 (1.59%) Azure Certification
8 56 (1.25%) ISTQB
9 46 (1.03%) Microsoft Certification
10 42 (0.94%) Master's Degree
11 40 (0.90%) 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 14 (0.31%) ACCA
15 14 (0.31%) CIMA
16 13 (0.29%) Oracle Certification
17 12 (0.27%) FFIEC
17 12 (0.27%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 866 (19.39%) Data Quality
2 365 (8.17%) QA
3 134 (3.00%) GDPR
4 46 (1.03%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.99%) SLA
6 24 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
6 24 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 21 (0.47%) ISO 20022
8 20 (0.45%) IFRS
8 20 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 19 (0.43%) NIST
10 17 (0.38%) MiFID
11 13 (0.29%) PMO
12 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
12 12 (0.27%) Solvency II
13 11 (0.25%) COBIT
14 9 (0.20%) GRC
15 8 (0.18%) HIPAA
15 8 (0.18%) WCAG
16 7 (0.16%) HL7
System Software
1 434 (9.72%) Docker
2 119 (2.66%) Active Directory
3 54 (1.21%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.94%) 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 14 (0.31%) Hyper-V
9 13 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
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
1 361 (8.08%) Kubernetes
2 92 (2.06%) Ansible
3 81 (1.81%) Grafana
4 46 (1.03%) Prometheus
5 42 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
6 41 (0.92%) Control-M
7 40 (0.90%) SCOM
8 39 (0.87%) Data Guard
9 22 (0.49%) Kibana
10 16 (0.36%) vCenter Server
11 13 (0.29%) Nagios
11 13 (0.29%) ZABBIX
12 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
12 12 (0.27%) Tivoli
13 11 (0.25%) Microsoft Intune
13 11 (0.25%) Netcool
13 11 (0.25%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
14 10 (0.22%) OpenView
14 10 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
14 10 (0.22%) Tivoli Monitoring
Vendors
1 760 (17.02%) Microsoft
2 759 (17.00%) Oracle
3 564 (12.63%) Databricks
4 179 (4.01%) Google
5 137 (3.07%) Informatica
6 120 (2.69%) SAP
7 103 (2.31%) Talend
8 95 (2.13%) ServiceNow
9 89 (1.99%) IBM
10 78 (1.75%) Splunk
11 71 (1.59%) VMware
12 60 (1.34%) Salesforce
13 50 (1.12%) Denodo
14 41 (0.92%) Bloomberg
15 38 (0.85%) Dynatrace
16 37 (0.83%) BMC
17 36 (0.81%) Murex
18 34 (0.76%) Alteryx
19 33 (0.74%) Citrix
19 33 (0.74%) Foundry