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

6 months to
9 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,491 3,259 3,527
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.70% 11.81% 10.82%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.34% 36.04% 33.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,033 2,290 2,558
10th Percentile £358 £331 £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 81 79 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% +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 £40.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +25.00% -11.97%

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 12,027 9,043 10,510
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 25.97% 32.77% 32.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,780 6,139 7,282
10th Percentile £363 £346 £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 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 500 262 303
10th Percentile £29.81 £31.25 £30.65
25th Percentile £51.25 £42.25 £50.69
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.63 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £80.00 £79.83
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 9 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 9 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 9 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 2,538 £525 - 2,993
North of England -3 592 £475 +5.56% 552
South East -10 459 £495 -1.00% 582
Midlands -5 454 £469 +4.22% 350
West Midlands -3 354 £469 -6.20% 199
North West +1 297 £481 +6.89% 327
Yorkshire +4 253 £474 +5.33% 148
South West -4 226 £513 +20.59% 270
East of England -3 119 £495 -1.49% 173
East Midlands -4 97 £464 +19.68% 151
North East -19 51 £406 -12.63% 81
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
1 225 (5.01%) Apache Airflow
2 192 (4.28%) Apache Spark
3 182 (4.05%) Confluence
4 150 (3.34%) Apache
5 85 (1.89%) SharePoint
6 72 (1.60%) SAS
7 35 (0.78%) Oracle Workflow
8 30 (0.67%) IIS
9 29 (0.65%) WebLogic
10 26 (0.58%) Jupyter
10 26 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
11 22 (0.49%) Palantir Foundry
12 20 (0.45%) CMS
13 18 (0.40%) Camunda
13 18 (0.40%) nginx
14 16 (0.36%) WebSphere
15 11 (0.24%) ArcGIS
15 11 (0.24%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 10 (0.22%) Tomcat
17 7 (0.16%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 277 (6.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 55 (1.22%) Microsoft Office
3 37 (0.82%) Spreadsheet
4 26 (0.58%) MS Visio
5 24 (0.53%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.27%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.11%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.089%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.089%) Microsoft Project
8 4 (0.089%) Notion
8 4 (0.089%) 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 (1.00%) Dynamics CRM
2 40 (0.89%) Oracle EBS
3 27 (0.60%) Oracle Payables
4 26 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
5 23 (0.51%) Remedy ITSM
6 22 (0.49%) Aladdin
6 22 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
7 19 (0.42%) Oracle Receivables
8 16 (0.36%) Oracle General Ledger
9 15 (0.33%) Oracle EBS R12
10 11 (0.24%) NEC Housing
10 11 (0.24%) Oracle Assets
10 11 (0.24%) Siebel CRM
10 11 (0.24%) 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 1,417 (31.55%) Azure
2 1,082 (24.09%) AWS
3 859 (19.13%) Power Platform
4 408 (9.08%) GCP
5 404 (9.00%) Azure DevOps
6 330 (7.35%) Snowflake
7 328 (7.30%) GitHub
8 314 (6.99%) Azure Data Factory
9 282 (6.28%) Serverless
10 278 (6.19%) dbt
11 226 (5.03%) Amazon S3
12 200 (4.45%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 181 (4.03%) AWS Lambda
14 162 (3.61%) GitHub Actions
15 98 (2.18%) SaaS
16 97 (2.16%) Power Automate
17 90 (2.00%) Azure Databricks
18 88 (1.96%) PowerApps
19 86 (1.91%) Entra ID
20 83 (1.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 61 (1.36%) DNS
2 46 (1.02%) Firewall
3 26 (0.58%) HTTP
3 26 (0.58%) SSL
4 24 (0.53%) Network Security
5 20 (0.45%) VPN
6 19 (0.42%) Internet
6 19 (0.42%) TCP/IP
7 18 (0.40%) SNMP
8 16 (0.36%) Broadband
8 16 (0.36%) DHCP
9 11 (0.24%) SSH
10 9 (0.20%) SAN
11 8 (0.18%) Kerberos
11 8 (0.18%) Multicast
11 8 (0.18%) RTP
11 8 (0.18%) WAN
11 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
12 7 (0.16%) Wi-Fi
12 7 (0.16%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 788 (17.55%) Power BI
2 624 (13.89%) Data Warehouse
3 582 (12.96%) SQL Server
4 297 (6.61%) Relational Database
5 277 (6.17%) PostgreSQL
6 265 (5.90%) Data Lake
7 264 (5.88%) Tableau
8 242 (5.39%) Metadata
9 222 (4.94%) NoSQL
10 204 (4.54%) Oracle Database
11 173 (3.85%) BigQuery
12 165 (3.67%) Azure SQL Database
13 140 (3.12%) Amazon Redshift
14 134 (2.98%) Delta Lake
15 127 (2.83%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 117 (2.61%) MySQL
17 98 (2.18%) Big Data
18 97 (2.16%) Amazon Athena
19 90 (2.00%) MongoDB
20 89 (1.98%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 543 (12.09%) Git
2 348 (7.75%) JIRA
3 247 (5.50%) Jenkins
4 206 (4.59%) GitLab
5 92 (2.05%) Selenium
6 79 (1.76%) JUnit
7 72 (1.60%) Gradle
8 65 (1.45%) Maven
9 59 (1.31%) Postman
10 51 (1.14%) Mockito
11 45 (1.00%) SonarQube
12 38 (0.85%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.78%) Oracle Forms
14 33 (0.73%) JMeter
15 29 (0.65%) Visual Studio
16 28 (0.62%) Zephyr
17 27 (0.60%) Liquibase
17 27 (0.60%) MLflow
18 24 (0.53%) ERwin
19 23 (0.51%) TeamCity
General
1 1,253 (27.90%) Social Skills
2 1,183 (26.34%) Finance
3 953 (21.22%) Analytical Skills
4 503 (11.20%) Banking
5 394 (8.77%) Public Sector
6 151 (3.36%) Marketing
7 135 (3.01%) Front Office
8 128 (2.85%) Retail
9 119 (2.65%) Investment Banking
10 90 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 80 (1.78%) Documentation Skills
12 67 (1.49%) Manufacturing
13 53 (1.18%) Presentation Skills
14 52 (1.16%) Financial Institution
15 47 (1.05%) Legal
16 40 (0.89%) Organisational Skills
17 39 (0.87%) Back Office
18 38 (0.85%) Local Government
19 37 (0.82%) Telecoms
20 36 (0.80%) Law
Job Titles
1 941 (20.95%) Developer
2 863 (19.22%) Data Engineer
3 669 (14.90%) Analyst
4 638 (14.21%) Senior
5 312 (6.95%) Lead
6 274 (6.10%) Data Analyst
7 233 (5.19%) Architect
8 204 (4.54%) Consultant
9 194 (4.32%) Business Analyst
10 192 (4.28%) Senior Data Engineer
11 180 (4.01%) DBA
12 159 (3.54%) Java Developer
13 155 (3.45%) Senior Developer
14 121 (2.69%) Software Engineer
15 108 (2.40%) SQL DBA
16 104 (2.32%) Data Architect
17 103 (2.29%) Azure Engineer
18 101 (2.25%) Full-Stack Developer
18 101 (2.25%) SQL Developer
19 97 (2.16%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 399 (8.88%) REST
2 393 (8.75%) .NET
3 371 (8.26%) Terraform
4 316 (7.04%) PySpark
5 301 (6.70%) Kafka
6 224 (4.99%) Spring
7 221 (4.92%) React
8 208 (4.63%) Spring Boot
9 182 (4.05%) HTML
10 170 (3.79%) JSON
10 170 (3.79%) RESTful
11 159 (3.54%) CSS
12 145 (3.23%) XML
13 113 (2.52%) AngularJS
14 102 (2.27%) Web Services
15 100 (2.23%) Pandas
16 96 (2.14%) Middleware
17 95 (2.12%) SOAP
18 84 (1.87%) .NET Framework
19 80 (1.78%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 291 (6.48%) Cloud Native
2 216 (4.81%) Data Structures
3 190 (4.23%) Product Ownership
4 144 (3.21%) Legacy Systems
5 127 (2.83%) Distributed Systems
6 114 (2.54%) Enterprise Software
7 111 (2.47%) Onboarding
8 97 (2.16%) Management Information System
9 78 (1.74%) Self-Motivation
10 75 (1.67%) Derivative
11 73 (1.63%) AI Agents
12 66 (1.47%) Replication
13 65 (1.45%) Analytical Mindset
14 60 (1.34%) Data Protection Act
15 57 (1.27%) Clustering
16 55 (1.22%) Reference Data
17 52 (1.16%) Algorithms
18 50 (1.11%) Fixed Income
19 47 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
20 43 (0.96%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 322 (7.17%) Linux
2 279 (6.21%) Windows
3 214 (4.77%) Unix
4 110 (2.45%) Windows Server
5 23 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 19 (0.42%) Solaris
7 15 (0.33%) 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 (0.089%) Android
14 4 (0.089%) Apple iOS
14 4 (0.089%) Windows Server 2016
15 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
15 3 (0.067%) Oracle Linux
16 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,241 (27.63%) CI/CD
2 1,180 (26.27%) Agile
3 1,137 (25.32%) Data Modelling
4 1,121 (24.96%) Analytics
5 989 (22.02%) Business Intelligence
6 987 (21.98%) ETL
7 895 (19.93%) Problem-Solving
8 894 (19.91%) DevOps
9 882 (19.64%) Data Pipeline
10 773 (17.21%) Data Engineering
11 727 (16.19%) AI
12 661 (14.72%) Validation
13 642 (14.30%) Migration
14 590 (13.14%) Stakeholder Management
15 503 (11.20%) Data Governance
16 502 (11.18%) Test Automation
17 494 (11.00%) Continuous Improvement
18 480 (10.69%) Data Analysis
19 474 (10.55%) Decision-Making
20 386 (8.59%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,645 (36.63%) Python
2 558 (12.42%) Java
3 424 (9.44%) C#
4 362 (8.06%) JavaScript
5 352 (7.84%) PL/SQL
6 245 (5.46%) PowerShell
7 212 (4.72%) T-SQL
8 187 (4.16%) TypeScript
9 141 (3.14%) Shell Script
10 140 (3.12%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 105 (2.34%) Bash
12 85 (1.89%) R
13 65 (1.45%) Scala
14 43 (0.96%) C++
15 36 (0.80%) VBA
16 31 (0.69%) Bicep
17 25 (0.56%) C
17 25 (0.56%) Kotlin
17 25 (0.56%) VB
18 24 (0.53%) Go
Qualifications
1 962 (21.42%) Security Cleared
2 758 (16.88%) SC Cleared
3 336 (7.48%) Degree
4 125 (2.78%) DV Cleared
5 122 (2.72%) Computer Science Degree
6 106 (2.36%) BPSS Clearance
7 72 (1.60%) Azure Certification
8 57 (1.27%) ISTQB
9 47 (1.05%) Microsoft Certification
10 43 (0.96%) Master's Degree
11 40 (0.89%) 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
1 877 (19.53%) Data Quality
2 367 (8.17%) QA
3 137 (3.05%) GDPR
4 46 (1.02%) Accessibility
5 45 (1.00%) SLA
6 26 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
7 25 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 21 (0.47%) ISO 20022
9 20 (0.45%) IFRS
9 20 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 19 (0.42%) NIST
11 17 (0.38%) MiFID
12 13 (0.29%) PMO
13 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
13 12 (0.27%) Solvency II
14 11 (0.24%) COBIT
15 10 (0.22%) HIPAA
16 9 (0.20%) GRC
17 8 (0.18%) WCAG
18 7 (0.16%) HL7
System Software
1 436 (9.71%) Docker
2 119 (2.65%) Active Directory
3 54 (1.20%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.94%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
6 19 (0.42%) 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 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
11 4 (0.089%) 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%) Microsoft App-V
13 1 (0.022%) RACF
13 1 (0.022%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 363 (8.08%) Kubernetes
2 92 (2.05%) Ansible
3 82 (1.83%) Grafana
4 47 (1.05%) Prometheus
5 43 (0.96%) Oracle RMAN
6 41 (0.91%) Control-M
7 40 (0.89%) 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%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
12 12 (0.27%) Single Sign-On
12 12 (0.27%) Tivoli
13 11 (0.24%) Microsoft Intune
13 11 (0.24%) Netcool
14 10 (0.22%) OpenView
14 10 (0.22%) Tivoli Monitoring
Vendors
1 767 (17.08%) Microsoft
2 765 (17.03%) Oracle
3 568 (12.65%) Databricks
4 183 (4.07%) Google
5 137 (3.05%) Informatica
6 122 (2.72%) SAP
7 103 (2.29%) Talend
8 95 (2.12%) ServiceNow
9 90 (2.00%) IBM
10 79 (1.76%) Splunk
11 71 (1.58%) VMware
12 61 (1.36%) Salesforce
13 50 (1.11%) Denodo
14 41 (0.91%) Bloomberg
15 37 (0.82%) BMC
15 37 (0.82%) Dynatrace
16 36 (0.80%) Murex
17 34 (0.76%) Alteryx
18 33 (0.73%) Citrix
18 33 (0.73%) Foundry