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 3 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,697 3,015 3,824
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.39% 12.05% 10.09%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.13% 35.75% 34.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,549 2,069 2,773
10th Percentile £350 £354 £353
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -5.45% -
75th Percentile £588 £630 £658
90th Percentile £709 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £505 £538
% change year-on-year -0.99% -6.05% -0.46%
Number of hourly rates quoted 51 55 63
10th Percentile £18.25 £20.44 £21.66
25th Percentile £28.86 £29.07 £26.02
Median hourly rate £45.00 £47.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -5.26% +11.76% -16.67%
75th Percentile £69.72 £65.00 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £76.81 £61.75
UK median hourly rate £46.50 £46.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year - +9.41% -19.05%

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 10,524 8,433 11,027
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 29.57% 33.70% 29.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,023 5,555 7,931
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £414 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £614 £650 £663
90th Percentile £727 £775 £763
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -6.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 447 208 473
10th Percentile £41.45 £25.25 £35.50
25th Percentile £55.00 £40.75 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £69.62
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.31
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -6.98%

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 3 March 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 3 March 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 3 March 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 0 2,200 £510 -7.27% 797
Midlands 0 444 £483 +4.43% 327
North of England -7 399 £450 -7.93% 492
West Midlands +3 353 £475 -2.86% 195
South East -19 277 £500 - 632
North West -1 226 £425 -10.53% 269
South West -5 191 £475 -7.77% 213
Yorkshire -22 152 £500 -2.44% 165
East Midlands -9 90 £531 +37.48% 130
East of England -21 78 £535 +14.44% 192
North East -2 29 £475 +2.70% 63
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
1 196 (5.30%) Apache Spark
2 152 (4.11%) Apache Airflow
3 116 (3.14%) Confluence
4 115 (3.11%) Apache
5 82 (2.22%) SharePoint
6 79 (2.14%) SAS
7 52 (1.41%) WebLogic
8 26 (0.70%) IIS
9 23 (0.62%) Microsoft Exchange
10 19 (0.51%) Tomcat
11 18 (0.49%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 17 (0.46%) CMS
12 17 (0.46%) Jupyter
13 15 (0.41%) Tuxedo
14 14 (0.38%) Oracle Workflow
14 14 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
15 12 (0.32%) Appian
15 12 (0.32%) JBoss
16 11 (0.30%) HCL Notes
16 11 (0.30%) WebSphere
Applications
1 235 (6.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 70 (1.89%) Microsoft Office
3 49 (1.33%) MS Visio
4 36 (0.97%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.32%) Microsoft Project
6 11 (0.30%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.22%) Chatbot
8 3 (0.081%) Notion
8 3 (0.081%) Oracle Smart View
8 3 (0.081%) Trello
9 1 (0.027%) InDesign
9 1 (0.027%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.027%) SPSS
9 1 (0.027%) Weka
Business Applications
1 26 (0.70%) Aladdin
2 24 (0.65%) Oracle Payables
3 22 (0.60%) Oracle EBS
4 21 (0.57%) Oracle Receivables
5 20 (0.54%) NEC Housing
5 20 (0.54%) Oracle General Ledger
6 19 (0.51%) Dynamics CRM
7 16 (0.43%) Oracle EBS R12
8 15 (0.41%) Oracle Assets
8 15 (0.41%) Oracle ERP
9 14 (0.38%) Remedy ITSM
9 14 (0.38%) SAP S/4HANA
10 13 (0.35%) Endur
10 13 (0.35%) NetSuite
11 11 (0.30%) Oracle Cash Management
11 11 (0.30%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
12 10 (0.27%) Advent Geneva
12 10 (0.27%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
13 8 (0.22%) Maximo
13 8 (0.22%) SAP HR
Cloud Services
1 1,274 (34.46%) Azure
2 919 (24.86%) AWS
3 698 (18.88%) Power Platform
4 363 (9.82%) Azure DevOps
5 316 (8.55%) GCP
6 297 (8.03%) Azure Data Factory
7 276 (7.47%) GitHub
8 265 (7.17%) Serverless
9 257 (6.95%) Snowflake
10 198 (5.36%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 192 (5.19%) Amazon S3
12 152 (4.11%) dbt
13 142 (3.84%) GitHub Actions
14 136 (3.68%) AWS Lambda
15 95 (2.57%) SaaS
16 84 (2.27%) Azure Functions
17 80 (2.16%) Power Automate
18 67 (1.81%) PowerApps
19 66 (1.79%) AWS CloudFormation
19 66 (1.79%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 48 (1.30%) Firewall
2 40 (1.08%) DNS
3 23 (0.62%) HTTP
4 18 (0.49%) Network Security
4 18 (0.49%) TCP/IP
5 14 (0.38%) Skype
6 13 (0.35%) Internet
6 13 (0.35%) SSL
6 13 (0.35%) VPN
7 12 (0.32%) DHCP
8 11 (0.30%) 5G
8 11 (0.30%) WAN
9 10 (0.27%) LAN
10 9 (0.24%) 2G
11 8 (0.22%) 4G
11 8 (0.22%) Radio Access Network
11 8 (0.22%) SMS
11 8 (0.22%) Unified Communications
12 6 (0.16%) Multicast
13 5 (0.14%) NetScaler
Database & Business Intelligence
1 636 (17.20%) Power BI
2 440 (11.90%) Data Warehouse
3 427 (11.55%) SQL Server
4 259 (7.01%) NoSQL
5 254 (6.87%) Relational Database
6 250 (6.76%) PostgreSQL
7 226 (6.11%) Data Lake
7 226 (6.11%) Tableau
8 189 (5.11%) Azure SQL Database
9 168 (4.54%) Metadata
10 141 (3.81%) Oracle Database
11 132 (3.57%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 116 (3.14%) BigQuery
13 109 (2.95%) Big Data
14 106 (2.87%) MySQL
15 99 (2.68%) MongoDB
16 94 (2.54%) Amazon Redshift
16 94 (2.54%) Delta Lake
17 93 (2.52%) Amazon RDS
18 82 (2.22%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 427 (11.55%) Git
2 304 (8.22%) JIRA
3 198 (5.36%) Jenkins
4 148 (4.00%) GitLab
5 63 (1.70%) JUnit
6 58 (1.57%) Selenium
7 45 (1.22%) Postman
8 42 (1.14%) Oracle APEX
9 36 (0.97%) Cucumber
10 33 (0.89%) Maven
11 29 (0.78%) Bitbucket
11 29 (0.78%) MLflow
11 29 (0.78%) REST Assured
12 27 (0.73%) Mockito
13 24 (0.65%) ERwin
14 22 (0.60%) SpecFlow
14 22 (0.60%) Visual Studio
15 21 (0.57%) Cypress.io
16 18 (0.49%) SonarQube
16 18 (0.49%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,120 (30.29%) Social Skills
2 1,030 (27.86%) Finance
3 658 (17.80%) Analytical Skills
4 391 (10.58%) Banking
5 323 (8.74%) Public Sector
6 100 (2.70%) Investment Banking
7 96 (2.60%) Front Office
8 95 (2.57%) Documentation Skills
9 85 (2.30%) Marketing
10 61 (1.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 60 (1.62%) Retail
12 58 (1.57%) Financial Institution
13 40 (1.08%) Legal
14 36 (0.97%) Presentation Skills
14 36 (0.97%) Publishing
15 33 (0.89%) Manufacturing
16 32 (0.87%) Organisational Skills
17 31 (0.84%) Telecoms
18 30 (0.81%) Law
19 29 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 889 (24.05%) Developer
2 655 (17.72%) Data Engineer
3 556 (15.04%) Analyst
4 484 (13.09%) Senior
5 263 (7.11%) Lead
6 231 (6.25%) Data Analyst
7 196 (5.30%) Business Analyst
8 193 (5.22%) Architect
9 148 (4.00%) Senior Developer
10 136 (3.68%) Java Developer
11 135 (3.65%) Consultant
12 114 (3.08%) Azure Engineer
13 111 (3.00%) Software Engineer
14 98 (2.65%) Senior Data Engineer
15 92 (2.49%) C# Developer
16 87 (2.35%) Data Scientist
16 87 (2.35%) Python Developer
17 85 (2.30%) Full-Stack Developer
18 75 (2.03%) Azure Data Engineer
18 75 (2.03%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 330 (8.93%) .NET
2 294 (7.95%) REST
3 235 (6.36%) Kafka
4 217 (5.87%) PySpark
5 179 (4.84%) React
6 172 (4.65%) RESTful
7 158 (4.27%) Spring
8 145 (3.92%) Spring Boot
9 141 (3.81%) HTML
10 139 (3.76%) XML
11 113 (3.06%) CSS
12 111 (3.00%) AngularJS
13 109 (2.95%) JSON
14 102 (2.76%) Pandas
15 94 (2.54%) Node.js
16 84 (2.27%) SOAP
17 82 (2.22%) .NET Framework
18 78 (2.11%) Middleware
19 68 (1.84%) NumPy
19 68 (1.84%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 234 (6.33%) Cloud Native
2 119 (3.22%) Data Structures
3 118 (3.19%) Legacy Systems
4 103 (2.79%) Product Ownership
5 79 (2.14%) Management Information System
6 77 (2.08%) Data Protection Act
7 71 (1.92%) Analytical Mindset
8 70 (1.89%) Distributed Systems
9 67 (1.81%) Derivative
10 60 (1.62%) Algorithms
11 58 (1.57%) Equities
12 54 (1.46%) Onboarding
13 53 (1.43%) Fixed Income
14 47 (1.27%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
15 41 (1.11%) Replication
16 40 (1.08%) Clustering
16 40 (1.08%) Enterprise Software
17 34 (0.92%) Market Risk
18 32 (0.87%) Self-Motivation
19 31 (0.84%) Credit Risk
Operating Systems
1 280 (7.57%) Linux
2 215 (5.82%) Windows
3 187 (5.06%) Unix
4 68 (1.84%) Windows Server
5 16 (0.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 15 (0.41%) Windows Server 2019
7 14 (0.38%) Windows Server 2016
8 11 (0.30%) AIX
8 11 (0.30%) Windows 10
9 8 (0.22%) Android
10 7 (0.19%) VMS
11 6 (0.16%) Apple iOS
12 5 (0.14%) Windows Server 2012
12 5 (0.14%) zOS
13 4 (0.11%) Solaris
13 4 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
14 3 (0.081%) CentOS
14 3 (0.081%) Ubuntu
15 1 (0.027%) OpenVMS
15 1 (0.027%) VME
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,007 (27.24%) Agile
2 960 (25.97%) CI/CD
3 948 (25.64%) Analytics
4 859 (23.24%) Data Modelling
5 855 (23.13%) Business Intelligence
6 845 (22.86%) DevOps
7 838 (22.67%) Problem-Solving
8 820 (22.18%) ETL
9 594 (16.07%) Data Pipeline
10 535 (14.47%) Data Engineering
11 434 (11.74%) Migration
12 428 (11.58%) Data Governance
13 416 (11.25%) AI
14 386 (10.44%) Validation
15 361 (9.76%) Data Analysis
16 347 (9.39%) Test Automation
17 342 (9.25%) Data Science
18 337 (9.12%) Visualisation
19 328 (8.87%) Decision-Making
20 327 (8.85%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,388 (37.54%) Python
2 536 (14.50%) Java
3 401 (10.85%) C#
4 317 (8.57%) JavaScript
5 279 (7.55%) PL/SQL
6 149 (4.03%) PowerShell
7 140 (3.79%) TypeScript
8 135 (3.65%) T-SQL
9 101 (2.73%) Shell Script
10 100 (2.70%) R
11 97 (2.62%) Data Analysis Expressions
12 93 (2.52%) Scala
13 73 (1.97%) C++
14 64 (1.73%) VBA
15 63 (1.70%) Bash
16 45 (1.22%) Perl
17 44 (1.19%) Bicep
18 43 (1.16%) VB
19 41 (1.11%) Go
20 28 (0.76%) PHP
Qualifications
1 715 (19.34%) Security Cleared
2 568 (15.36%) SC Cleared
3 329 (8.90%) Degree
4 105 (2.84%) Computer Science Degree
5 78 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
6 74 (2.00%) Azure Certification
7 56 (1.51%) Master's Degree
8 54 (1.46%) DV Cleared
9 50 (1.35%) AWS Certification
10 48 (1.30%) ISTQB
11 46 (1.24%) Microsoft Certification
12 21 (0.57%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 19 (0.51%) Oracle Certification
14 16 (0.43%) CBAP
15 14 (0.38%) ITIL Certification
16 11 (0.30%) MCSE
16 11 (0.30%) PhD
17 10 (0.27%) Cisco Certification
17 10 (0.27%) ISEB
17 10 (0.27%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 624 (16.88%) Data Quality
2 270 (7.30%) QA
3 151 (4.08%) GDPR
4 58 (1.57%) Accessibility
5 26 (0.70%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 26 (0.70%) SLA
6 23 (0.62%) PMO
7 20 (0.54%) MiFID
8 19 (0.51%) HIPAA
9 17 (0.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 17 (0.46%) NIST
10 15 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
11 14 (0.38%) PCI DSS
12 13 (0.35%) IFRS
12 13 (0.35%) SEPA
13 12 (0.32%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 12 (0.32%) EMIR
13 12 (0.32%) WCAG
14 11 (0.30%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.27%) PSD2
System Software
1 443 (11.98%) Docker
2 100 (2.70%) Active Directory
3 29 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
4 17 (0.46%) Oracle RAC
4 17 (0.46%) VMware Infrastructure
5 12 (0.32%) Hyper-V
6 8 (0.22%) HDFS
6 8 (0.22%) Virtual Desktop
7 6 (0.16%) KVM
8 5 (0.14%) Postfix
8 5 (0.14%) RACF
8 5 (0.14%) VMware ESXi
8 5 (0.14%) XenApp
8 5 (0.14%) XenDesktop
9 4 (0.11%) Microsoft Virtual Server
9 4 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
9 4 (0.11%) VMware NSX
9 4 (0.11%) vSphere
10 3 (0.081%) Oracle Clusterware
10 3 (0.081%) zsh
Systems Management
1 399 (10.79%) Kubernetes
2 294 (7.95%) Terraform
3 84 (2.27%) Grafana
4 64 (1.73%) Prometheus
5 63 (1.70%) Ansible
6 20 (0.54%) SCCM
6 20 (0.54%) Single Sign-On
7 19 (0.51%) Oracle RMAN
8 17 (0.46%) Control-M
8 17 (0.46%) Progress Chef
9 16 (0.43%) Data Guard
10 14 (0.38%) Kibana
10 14 (0.38%) Puppet
11 12 (0.32%) SCOM
12 11 (0.30%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
13 10 (0.27%) HP SiteScope
13 10 (0.27%) WSUS
14 8 (0.22%) HP Quality Center
14 8 (0.22%) ITRS Geneos
14 8 (0.22%) Kiali
Vendors
1 623 (16.85%) Oracle
2 599 (16.20%) Microsoft
3 443 (11.98%) Databricks
4 151 (4.08%) Google
5 96 (2.60%) ServiceNow
6 95 (2.57%) SAP
7 93 (2.52%) Informatica
7 93 (2.52%) Talend
8 75 (2.03%) Splunk
9 66 (1.79%) Salesforce
10 53 (1.43%) IBM
11 47 (1.27%) Citrix
12 46 (1.24%) OpenAI
13 40 (1.08%) Denodo
13 40 (1.08%) MuleSoft
14 33 (0.89%) Bloomberg
14 33 (0.89%) VMware
15 25 (0.68%) Foundry
16 23 (0.62%) NEC
16 23 (0.62%) Sage