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

6 months to
1 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,467 3,264 3,549
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.78% 11.84% 10.74%
As % of the Programming Languages category 37.51% 36.09% 33.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,008 2,301 2,604
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 83 82 39
10th Percentile £23.00 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £28.50 £32.85 £32.59
Median hourly rate £42.50 £50.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -15.00% +17.65% +6.25%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £55.63
90th Percentile £81.20 £63.63 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £41.33
% change year-on-year -11.00% +20.98% -8.16%

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 11,908 9,045 10,638
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.08% 32.80% 32.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,704 6,165 7,453
10th Percentile £363 £349 £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 £525
% change year-on-year +3.90% -4.67% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 493 266 315
10th Percentile £29.96 £30.61 £31.98
25th Percentile £51.25 £42.25 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.60 £79.38 £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 1 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 1 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 1 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 2,493 £525 - 3,039
North of England -1 595 £475 +2.43% 616
Midlands -4 468 £469 +4.22% 338
South East -8 465 £490 -2.00% 642
West Midlands -3 365 £469 -1.26% 192
North West 0 301 £478 +2.80% 364
Yorkshire +4 253 £475 +5.56% 159
South West -4 228 £509 +19.71% 287
East of England -8 119 £495 -1.49% 177
East Midlands -5 100 £465 +20.00% 145
North East -17 51 £406 -12.63% 97
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
1 216 (4.84%) Apache Airflow
2 188 (4.21%) Apache Spark
3 178 (3.98%) Confluence
4 151 (3.38%) Apache
5 80 (1.79%) SharePoint
6 73 (1.63%) SAS
7 35 (0.78%) Oracle Workflow
8 29 (0.65%) IIS
9 27 (0.60%) WebLogic
10 26 (0.58%) Jupyter
11 24 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
12 22 (0.49%) Palantir Foundry
13 18 (0.40%) CMS
13 18 (0.40%) nginx
14 17 (0.38%) Camunda
14 17 (0.38%) WebSphere
15 11 (0.25%) Tomcat
16 10 (0.22%) ArcGIS
17 8 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
18 7 (0.16%) Oracle Self-Service HR
Applications
1 283 (6.34%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.21%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.85%) Spreadsheet
4 27 (0.60%) 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
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%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 47 (1.05%) Dynamics CRM
2 40 (0.90%) Oracle EBS
3 26 (0.58%) Aladdin
3 26 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
4 25 (0.56%) Oracle ERP
5 24 (0.54%) Oracle Payables
6 23 (0.51%) Remedy ITSM
7 16 (0.36%) Oracle Receivables
8 14 (0.31%) Oracle EBS R12
9 13 (0.29%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.25%) NEC Housing
10 11 (0.25%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.22%) Finacle
11 10 (0.22%) Oracle Assets
12 8 (0.18%) Elite 3E
12 8 (0.18%) Findur
12 8 (0.18%) NetSuite
12 8 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
12 8 (0.18%) Summit
13 7 (0.16%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,413 (31.63%) Azure
2 1,061 (23.75%) AWS
3 856 (19.16%) Power Platform
4 410 (9.18%) Azure DevOps
5 386 (8.64%) GCP
6 323 (7.23%) GitHub
6 323 (7.23%) Snowflake
7 307 (6.87%) Azure Data Factory
8 282 (6.31%) Serverless
9 271 (6.07%) dbt
10 222 (4.97%) Amazon S3
11 195 (4.37%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 179 (4.01%) AWS Lambda
13 160 (3.58%) GitHub Actions
14 99 (2.22%) Power Automate
15 97 (2.17%) SaaS
16 89 (1.99%) PowerApps
17 86 (1.93%) Azure Databricks
18 82 (1.84%) Entra ID
19 81 (1.81%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 61 (1.37%) DNS
2 46 (1.03%) Firewall
3 26 (0.58%) HTTP
4 25 (0.56%) SSL
5 24 (0.54%) Network Security
6 21 (0.47%) TCP/IP
7 20 (0.45%) SNMP
7 20 (0.45%) VPN
8 19 (0.43%) Internet
9 17 (0.38%) DHCP
10 15 (0.34%) Broadband
11 11 (0.25%) SSH
12 10 (0.22%) WAN
13 9 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
13 9 (0.20%) Wireshark
14 8 (0.18%) Multicast
14 8 (0.18%) RTP
14 8 (0.18%) SAN
14 8 (0.18%) WinSCP
15 7 (0.16%) 3GPP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 787 (17.62%) Power BI
2 625 (13.99%) Data Warehouse
3 573 (12.83%) SQL Server
4 292 (6.54%) Relational Database
5 268 (6.00%) Tableau
6 266 (5.95%) PostgreSQL
7 262 (5.87%) Data Lake
8 234 (5.24%) Metadata
9 220 (4.93%) NoSQL
10 197 (4.41%) Oracle Database
11 168 (3.76%) BigQuery
12 165 (3.69%) Azure SQL Database
13 142 (3.18%) Amazon Redshift
14 133 (2.98%) Delta Lake
15 129 (2.89%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 111 (2.48%) MySQL
17 99 (2.22%) Amazon Athena
17 99 (2.22%) Big Data
18 90 (2.01%) Snowflake Schema
19 85 (1.90%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 519 (11.62%) Git
2 343 (7.68%) JIRA
3 251 (5.62%) Jenkins
4 206 (4.61%) GitLab
5 84 (1.88%) Selenium
6 77 (1.72%) JUnit
7 68 (1.52%) Gradle
8 62 (1.39%) Maven
9 59 (1.32%) Postman
10 50 (1.12%) Mockito
11 42 (0.94%) SonarQube
12 37 (0.83%) Bitbucket
13 34 (0.76%) JMeter
13 34 (0.76%) Oracle Forms
14 31 (0.69%) Visual Studio
15 28 (0.63%) Zephyr
16 26 (0.58%) Liquibase
16 26 (0.58%) MLflow
17 24 (0.54%) ERwin
17 24 (0.54%) TeamCity
General
1 1,229 (27.51%) Social Skills
2 1,163 (26.04%) Finance
3 938 (21.00%) Analytical Skills
4 479 (10.72%) Banking
5 388 (8.69%) Public Sector
6 149 (3.34%) Marketing
7 133 (2.98%) Front Office
8 124 (2.78%) Retail
9 116 (2.60%) Investment Banking
10 90 (2.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 78 (1.75%) Documentation Skills
12 67 (1.50%) Manufacturing
13 52 (1.16%) Financial Institution
14 51 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
15 47 (1.05%) Legal
16 42 (0.94%) Organisational Skills
17 41 (0.92%) Telecoms
18 38 (0.85%) Local Government
19 37 (0.83%) Back Office
20 34 (0.76%) Law
Job Titles
1 944 (21.13%) Developer
2 849 (19.01%) Data Engineer
3 660 (14.78%) Analyst
4 621 (13.90%) Senior
5 308 (6.90%) Lead
6 271 (6.07%) Data Analyst
7 232 (5.19%) Architect
8 215 (4.81%) Consultant
9 191 (4.28%) Business Analyst
10 186 (4.16%) DBA
11 183 (4.10%) Senior Data Engineer
12 159 (3.56%) Java Developer
13 151 (3.38%) Senior Developer
14 122 (2.73%) Software Engineer
15 114 (2.55%) SQL DBA
16 106 (2.37%) SQL Developer
17 102 (2.28%) Data Architect
18 101 (2.26%) Azure Engineer
18 101 (2.26%) Full-Stack Developer
19 95 (2.13%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 397 (8.89%) REST
2 390 (8.73%) .NET
3 365 (8.17%) Terraform
4 314 (7.03%) PySpark
5 292 (6.54%) Kafka
6 224 (5.01%) Spring
7 219 (4.90%) React
8 206 (4.61%) Spring Boot
9 177 (3.96%) HTML
9 177 (3.96%) RESTful
10 171 (3.83%) JSON
11 155 (3.47%) CSS
12 154 (3.45%) XML
13 113 (2.53%) AngularJS
14 102 (2.28%) Web Services
15 98 (2.19%) Pandas
16 97 (2.17%) Middleware
17 94 (2.10%) SOAP
18 86 (1.93%) .NET Framework
19 77 (1.72%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 289 (6.47%) Cloud Native
2 208 (4.66%) Data Structures
3 187 (4.19%) Product Ownership
4 140 (3.13%) Legacy Systems
5 128 (2.87%) Distributed Systems
6 108 (2.42%) Onboarding
7 104 (2.33%) Enterprise Software
8 92 (2.06%) Management Information System
9 78 (1.75%) Self-Motivation
10 76 (1.70%) Derivative
11 66 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
12 65 (1.46%) AI Agents
13 63 (1.41%) Replication
14 58 (1.30%) Clustering
14 58 (1.30%) Data Protection Act
15 56 (1.25%) Reference Data
16 52 (1.16%) Fixed Income
17 49 (1.10%) Algorithms
18 46 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
19 43 (0.96%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 319 (7.14%) Linux
2 273 (6.11%) Windows
3 208 (4.66%) Unix
4 107 (2.40%) Windows Server
5 22 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 17 (0.38%) AIX
6 17 (0.38%) Solaris
7 10 (0.22%) Ubuntu
7 10 (0.22%) Windows Server 2019
8 9 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
9 8 (0.18%) VMS
10 7 (0.16%) Windows 10
11 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
12 5 (0.11%) zOS
13 4 (0.090%) Android
13 4 (0.090%) Apple iOS
13 4 (0.090%) Oracle Linux
13 4 (0.090%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.067%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.045%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,226 (27.45%) CI/CD
2 1,165 (26.08%) Agile
3 1,125 (25.18%) Data Modelling
4 1,119 (25.05%) Analytics
5 989 (22.14%) Business Intelligence
5 989 (22.14%) ETL
6 890 (19.92%) DevOps
7 880 (19.70%) Problem-Solving
8 861 (19.27%) Data Pipeline
9 767 (17.17%) Data Engineering
10 701 (15.69%) AI
11 646 (14.46%) Validation
12 628 (14.06%) Migration
13 570 (12.76%) Stakeholder Management
14 489 (10.95%) Data Governance
15 487 (10.90%) Test Automation
16 475 (10.63%) Continuous Improvement
17 470 (10.52%) Decision-Making
18 466 (10.43%) Data Analysis
19 374 (8.37%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,612 (36.09%) Python
2 556 (12.45%) Java
3 425 (9.51%) C#
4 357 (7.99%) JavaScript
5 344 (7.70%) PL/SQL
6 246 (5.51%) PowerShell
7 218 (4.88%) T-SQL
8 185 (4.14%) TypeScript
9 140 (3.13%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 137 (3.07%) Shell Script
11 98 (2.19%) Bash
12 84 (1.88%) R
13 65 (1.46%) Scala
14 43 (0.96%) C++
15 37 (0.83%) VBA
16 32 (0.72%) Bicep
17 26 (0.58%) C
18 25 (0.56%) VB
19 22 (0.49%) Go
19 22 (0.49%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 949 (21.24%) Security Cleared
2 750 (16.79%) SC Cleared
3 332 (7.43%) Degree
4 123 (2.75%) Computer Science Degree
5 117 (2.62%) DV Cleared
6 105 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
7 69 (1.54%) 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%) ISEB
14 16 (0.36%) DBS Check
14 16 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 14 (0.31%) ACCA
15 14 (0.31%) CIMA
16 13 (0.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 12 (0.27%) FFIEC
17 12 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 847 (18.96%) Data Quality
2 357 (7.99%) QA
3 138 (3.09%) GDPR
4 49 (1.10%) Accessibility
5 45 (1.01%) SLA
6 26 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 24 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
8 21 (0.47%) ISO 20022
9 20 (0.45%) IFRS
9 20 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 19 (0.43%) NIST
11 15 (0.34%) MiFID
12 13 (0.29%) PMO
13 12 (0.27%) PCI DSS
13 12 (0.27%) Solvency II
14 11 (0.25%) COBIT
15 9 (0.20%) GRC
15 9 (0.20%) WCAG
16 8 (0.18%) HIPAA
17 7 (0.16%) HL7
System Software
1 439 (9.83%) Docker
2 121 (2.71%) Active Directory
3 52 (1.16%) VMware Infrastructure
4 41 (0.92%) 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 (0.067%) 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%) Microsoft App-V
13 1 (0.022%) RACF
13 1 (0.022%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 367 (8.22%) Kubernetes
2 92 (2.06%) Ansible
3 82 (1.84%) Grafana
4 46 (1.03%) Prometheus
5 42 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
6 40 (0.90%) Control-M
7 39 (0.87%) Data Guard
8 37 (0.83%) SCOM
9 21 (0.47%) Kibana
10 16 (0.36%) vCenter Server
11 15 (0.34%) Nagios
11 15 (0.34%) ZABBIX
12 14 (0.31%) Tivoli
13 13 (0.29%) Netcool
14 12 (0.27%) Microsoft Clustering
14 12 (0.27%) OpenView
14 12 (0.27%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 11 (0.25%) Microsoft Intune
16 10 (0.22%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
16 10 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 757 (16.95%) Microsoft
2 750 (16.79%) Oracle
3 557 (12.47%) Databricks
4 174 (3.90%) Google
5 137 (3.07%) Informatica
6 121 (2.71%) SAP
7 102 (2.28%) Talend
8 97 (2.17%) ServiceNow
9 90 (2.01%) IBM
10 80 (1.79%) Splunk
11 69 (1.54%) VMware
12 57 (1.28%) Salesforce
13 52 (1.16%) Denodo
14 42 (0.94%) Bloomberg
15 39 (0.87%) BMC
16 38 (0.85%) Dynatrace
17 35 (0.78%) Alteryx
17 35 (0.78%) Murex
18 33 (0.74%) Foundry
19 32 (0.72%) Citrix