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

6 months to
15 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,449 3,193 3,549
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.62% 11.67% 10.89%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.12% 35.74% 33.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,003 2,237 2,568
10th Percentile £356 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £543
Median % change year-on-year - -7.83% -1.36%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £688 £741 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -0.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 81 76 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% -2.72%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £55.63
90th Percentile £77.00 - £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +25.00% -12.82%

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 11,985 8,934 10,568
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 25.92% 32.65% 32.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,755 6,049 7,284
10th Percentile £363 £345 £355
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 500 259 305
10th Percentile £28.45 £31.25 £30.80
25th Percentile £51.25 £42.25 £51.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +1.56%
75th Percentile £70.13 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £79.00 £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 15 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 15 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 15 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 2,497 £525 - 4,469
North of England -1 589 £475 +5.56% 845
South East -11 458 £490 -2.00% 742
Midlands -5 454 £469 +4.22% 503
West Midlands -4 354 £469 -6.20% 316
North West 0 295 £500 +12.99% 485
Yorkshire +6 250 £475 +1.23% 257
South West -6 227 £513 +17.14% 342
East of England -10 120 £495 -1.49% 250
East Midlands -3 98 £464 +17.41% 187
North East -12 53 £413 -11.29% 107
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
1 222 (4.99%) Apache Airflow
2 185 (4.16%) Confluence
3 182 (4.09%) Apache Spark
4 144 (3.24%) Apache
5 84 (1.89%) SharePoint
6 70 (1.57%) SAS
7 34 (0.76%) Oracle Workflow
8 30 (0.67%) WebLogic
9 29 (0.65%) IIS
10 25 (0.56%) Jupyter
10 25 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
11 20 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
12 19 (0.43%) CMS
13 18 (0.40%) nginx
14 17 (0.38%) Camunda
15 15 (0.34%) WebSphere
16 12 (0.27%) ArcGIS
17 11 (0.25%) Oracle SOA Suite
18 9 (0.20%) Tomcat
19 6 (0.13%) MTS
Applications
1 271 (6.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.28%) Microsoft Office
3 39 (0.88%) Spreadsheet
4 26 (0.58%) MS Visio
5 23 (0.52%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.27%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.090%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.090%) Notion
8 4 (0.090%) Photoshop
8 4 (0.090%) Windchill
9 3 (0.067%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.067%) Microsoft Project
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 46 (1.03%) Dynamics CRM
2 40 (0.90%) Oracle EBS
3 27 (0.61%) Oracle Payables
4 25 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
5 22 (0.49%) Aladdin
5 22 (0.49%) Remedy ITSM
6 21 (0.47%) Oracle ERP
7 17 (0.38%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.34%) Oracle EBS R12
8 15 (0.34%) Oracle General Ledger
9 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
9 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
9 11 (0.25%) Summit
10 10 (0.22%) Finacle
10 10 (0.22%) Oracle Assets
10 10 (0.22%) Oracle FAH
11 9 (0.20%) NetSuite
11 9 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
11 9 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
12 8 (0.18%) Front Arena
Cloud Services
1 1,370 (30.79%) Azure
2 1,067 (23.98%) AWS
3 850 (19.11%) Power Platform
4 421 (9.46%) GCP
5 376 (8.45%) Azure DevOps
6 339 (7.62%) Snowflake
7 312 (7.01%) GitHub
8 300 (6.74%) Azure Data Factory
9 282 (6.34%) dbt
10 272 (6.11%) Serverless
11 228 (5.12%) Amazon S3
12 191 (4.29%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 176 (3.96%) AWS Lambda
14 150 (3.37%) GitHub Actions
15 99 (2.23%) Power Automate
16 94 (2.11%) SaaS
17 88 (1.98%) PowerApps
18 85 (1.91%) Entra ID
19 82 (1.84%) Azure Databricks
20 80 (1.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 58 (1.30%) DNS
2 40 (0.90%) Firewall
3 27 (0.61%) SSL
4 26 (0.58%) HTTP
5 23 (0.52%) Network Security
6 21 (0.47%) Internet
7 19 (0.43%) Broadband
7 19 (0.43%) VPN
8 18 (0.40%) TCP/IP
9 17 (0.38%) SNMP
10 15 (0.34%) DHCP
11 11 (0.25%) SSH
12 9 (0.20%) Kerberos
12 9 (0.20%) SAN
13 8 (0.18%) Multicast
13 8 (0.18%) Reverse Proxy
13 8 (0.18%) RTP
13 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
14 7 (0.16%) Wireshark
15 6 (0.13%) 3GPP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 781 (17.55%) Power BI
2 614 (13.80%) Data Warehouse
3 577 (12.97%) SQL Server
4 298 (6.70%) Relational Database
5 280 (6.29%) PostgreSQL
6 260 (5.84%) Tableau
7 257 (5.78%) Data Lake
8 235 (5.28%) Metadata
9 214 (4.81%) NoSQL
10 200 (4.50%) Oracle Database
11 182 (4.09%) BigQuery
12 155 (3.48%) Azure SQL Database
13 134 (3.01%) Amazon Redshift
14 128 (2.88%) Delta Lake
15 125 (2.81%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 118 (2.65%) MySQL
17 101 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
18 93 (2.09%) Big Data
19 92 (2.07%) MongoDB
19 92 (2.07%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 558 (12.54%) Git
2 354 (7.96%) JIRA
3 244 (5.48%) Jenkins
4 206 (4.63%) GitLab
5 88 (1.98%) Selenium
6 78 (1.75%) JUnit
7 76 (1.71%) Gradle
8 72 (1.62%) Maven
9 58 (1.30%) Postman
10 49 (1.10%) Mockito
11 45 (1.01%) SonarQube
12 39 (0.88%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.79%) Oracle Forms
14 29 (0.65%) Visual Studio
15 28 (0.63%) Zephyr
16 25 (0.56%) JMeter
16 25 (0.56%) Liquibase
17 24 (0.54%) MLflow
18 23 (0.52%) REST Assured
18 23 (0.52%) TeamCity
General
1 1,244 (27.96%) Social Skills
2 1,185 (26.64%) Finance
3 940 (21.13%) Analytical Skills
4 512 (11.51%) Banking
5 382 (8.59%) Public Sector
6 153 (3.44%) Marketing
7 132 (2.97%) Front Office
8 126 (2.83%) Retail
9 118 (2.65%) Investment Banking
10 92 (2.07%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 77 (1.73%) Documentation Skills
12 70 (1.57%) Manufacturing
13 53 (1.19%) Financial Institution
14 51 (1.15%) Presentation Skills
15 45 (1.01%) Legal
16 39 (0.88%) Back Office
17 38 (0.85%) Local Government
18 37 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
19 35 (0.79%) Influencing Skills
20 33 (0.74%) Law
Job Titles
1 940 (21.13%) Developer
2 848 (19.06%) Data Engineer
3 666 (14.97%) Analyst
4 635 (14.27%) Senior
5 309 (6.95%) Lead
6 271 (6.09%) Data Analyst
7 224 (5.03%) Architect
8 197 (4.43%) Consultant
9 196 (4.41%) Business Analyst
10 195 (4.38%) Senior Data Engineer
11 173 (3.89%) DBA
12 164 (3.69%) Java Developer
13 154 (3.46%) Senior Developer
14 119 (2.67%) Software Engineer
15 107 (2.41%) SQL DBA
16 102 (2.29%) Data Architect
16 102 (2.29%) Full-Stack Developer
16 102 (2.29%) SQL Developer
17 101 (2.27%) Azure Engineer
18 95 (2.14%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 400 (8.99%) REST
2 392 (8.81%) .NET
3 370 (8.32%) Terraform
4 305 (6.86%) PySpark
5 290 (6.52%) Kafka
6 228 (5.12%) Spring
7 220 (4.94%) React
8 218 (4.90%) Spring Boot
9 185 (4.16%) HTML
10 173 (3.89%) RESTful
11 169 (3.80%) JSON
12 162 (3.64%) CSS
13 141 (3.17%) XML
14 110 (2.47%) AngularJS
15 100 (2.25%) SOAP
15 100 (2.25%) Web Services
16 95 (2.14%) Pandas
17 93 (2.09%) Middleware
18 82 (1.84%) .NET Framework
19 81 (1.82%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 276 (6.20%) Cloud Native
2 221 (4.97%) Data Structures
3 198 (4.45%) Product Ownership
4 138 (3.10%) Legacy Systems
5 124 (2.79%) Distributed Systems
6 117 (2.63%) Enterprise Software
7 114 (2.56%) Onboarding
8 96 (2.16%) Management Information System
9 78 (1.75%) AI Agents
10 75 (1.69%) Derivative
10 75 (1.69%) Self-Motivation
11 66 (1.48%) Replication
12 65 (1.46%) Analytical Mindset
13 60 (1.35%) Data Protection Act
14 58 (1.30%) Reference Data
15 57 (1.28%) Clustering
16 51 (1.15%) Algorithms
17 47 (1.06%) Fixed Income
18 45 (1.01%) Greenfield Project
19 40 (0.90%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 319 (7.17%) Linux
2 278 (6.25%) Windows
3 214 (4.81%) Unix
4 109 (2.45%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 23 (0.52%) Solaris
7 14 (0.31%) AIX
8 12 (0.27%) Ubuntu
9 10 (0.22%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
11 8 (0.18%) VMS
12 6 (0.13%) Windows 10
13 5 (0.11%) 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
16 2 (0.045%) HPUX
16 2 (0.045%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,214 (27.29%) CI/CD
2 1,165 (26.19%) Agile
3 1,122 (25.22%) Data Modelling
4 1,118 (25.13%) Analytics
5 979 (22.00%) Business Intelligence
6 975 (21.92%) ETL
7 897 (20.16%) Problem-Solving
8 873 (19.62%) Data Pipeline
9 861 (19.35%) DevOps
10 760 (17.08%) Data Engineering
11 739 (16.61%) AI
12 672 (15.10%) Validation
13 626 (14.07%) Migration
14 614 (13.80%) Stakeholder Management
15 504 (11.33%) Continuous Improvement
16 498 (11.19%) Data Governance
16 498 (11.19%) Test Automation
17 481 (10.81%) Data Analysis
18 479 (10.77%) Decision-Making
19 389 (8.74%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,623 (36.48%) Python
2 556 (12.50%) Java
3 419 (9.42%) C#
4 366 (8.23%) JavaScript
5 354 (7.96%) PL/SQL
6 243 (5.46%) PowerShell
7 209 (4.70%) T-SQL
8 189 (4.25%) TypeScript
9 139 (3.12%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 139 (3.12%) Shell Script
10 103 (2.32%) Bash
11 80 (1.80%) R
12 61 (1.37%) Scala
13 42 (0.94%) C++
14 36 (0.81%) VBA
15 28 (0.63%) Bicep
16 26 (0.58%) C
16 26 (0.58%) Kotlin
17 25 (0.56%) VB
18 24 (0.54%) Go
Qualifications
1 945 (21.24%) Security Cleared
2 745 (16.75%) SC Cleared
3 331 (7.44%) Degree
4 127 (2.85%) DV Cleared
5 117 (2.63%) Computer Science Degree
6 109 (2.45%) BPSS Clearance
7 71 (1.60%) Azure Certification
8 54 (1.21%) ISTQB
9 51 (1.15%) Microsoft Certification
10 41 (0.92%) Master's Degree
11 39 (0.88%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.40%) CISSP
13 17 (0.38%) ISEB
14 16 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 15 (0.34%) ACCA
15 15 (0.34%) CIMA
15 15 (0.34%) Oracle Certification
16 14 (0.31%) DBS Check
17 12 (0.27%) FFIEC
17 12 (0.27%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 877 (19.71%) Data Quality
2 366 (8.23%) QA
3 125 (2.81%) GDPR
4 47 (1.06%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.99%) SLA
6 27 (0.61%) Actionable Recommendations
7 25 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 21 (0.47%) IFRS
8 21 (0.47%) ISO 20022
9 19 (0.43%) NIST
10 17 (0.38%) MiFID
11 14 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 12 (0.27%) PMO
13 11 (0.25%) COBIT
13 11 (0.25%) PCI DSS
14 10 (0.22%) HIPAA
15 9 (0.20%) Basel III
15 9 (0.20%) GRC
15 9 (0.20%) Solvency II
16 7 (0.16%) EMIR
System Software
1 432 (9.71%) Docker
2 116 (2.61%) Active Directory
3 53 (1.19%) VMware Infrastructure
4 40 (0.90%) 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%) Apache ZooKeeper
11 4 (0.090%) 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%) GPFS
13 1 (0.022%) RACF
13 1 (0.022%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 364 (8.18%) Kubernetes
2 92 (2.07%) Ansible
3 83 (1.87%) Grafana
4 49 (1.10%) Prometheus
5 40 (0.90%) Control-M
5 40 (0.90%) SCOM
6 39 (0.88%) Data Guard
6 39 (0.88%) Oracle RMAN
7 22 (0.49%) Kibana
8 16 (0.36%) vCenter Server
9 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
9 12 (0.27%) Nagios
9 12 (0.27%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
9 12 (0.27%) ZABBIX
10 11 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
10 11 (0.25%) Tivoli
11 10 (0.22%) Microsoft Intune
11 10 (0.22%) Netcool
12 9 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
12 9 (0.20%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 760 (17.08%) Oracle
2 756 (16.99%) Microsoft
3 564 (12.68%) Databricks
4 192 (4.32%) Google
5 129 (2.90%) Informatica
6 125 (2.81%) SAP
7 99 (2.23%) Talend
8 89 (2.00%) IBM
9 88 (1.98%) ServiceNow
10 77 (1.73%) Splunk
11 70 (1.57%) VMware
12 63 (1.42%) Salesforce
13 49 (1.10%) Denodo
14 40 (0.90%) Bloomberg
15 37 (0.83%) Alteryx
16 35 (0.79%) BMC
16 35 (0.79%) Murex
17 32 (0.72%) Adobe
17 32 (0.72%) Citrix
17 32 (0.72%) Foundry