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

6 months to
8 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -3 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,994 3,003 3,633
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.86% 12.39% 9.86%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.76% 36.66% 33.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,748 2,137 2,689
10th Percentile £350 £356 £356
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.91% -6.36% -
75th Percentile £588 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £775 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £538
% change year-on-year - -6.98% +0.47%
Number of hourly rates quoted 64 54 60
10th Percentile £30.23 £20.02 £23.88
25th Percentile £36.00 £29.30 £27.38
Median hourly rate £50.00 £43.66 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.53% +1.53% -12.75%
75th Percentile £73.42 £65.46 £57.50
90th Percentile £83.30 £80.73 £61.87
UK median hourly rate £54.50 £42.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +28.24% -1.16% -14.00%

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 10,865 8,191 10,855
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 26.82% 33.80% 29.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,182 5,676 7,891
10th Percentile £352 £363 £350
25th Percentile £415 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -2.22%
75th Percentile £606 £650 £656
90th Percentile £725 £788 £775
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £530
% change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 531 218 443
10th Percentile £41.94 £26.10 £36.89
25th Percentile £55.00 £38.40 £48.43
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% - +2.97%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £80.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £61.60
% change year-on-year +4.00% +1.46% +2.20%

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 May 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 May 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 May 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 2,256 £520 -5.45% 833
Midlands +5 526 £469 +3.53% 250
North of England -8 479 £450 -5.26% 393
West Midlands +6 424 £463 +0.54% 142
South East -17 332 £500 - 519
North West -2 264 £450 -5.26% 220
South West -8 200 £475 - 136
Yorkshire -13 191 £460 -3.16% 118
East Midlands +4 99 £525 +34.27% 108
East of England -17 90 £500 +8.99% 119
North East -9 36 £475 +5.56% 57
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 (5.61%) Apache Spark
2 149 (3.73%) Apache Airflow
3 135 (3.38%) Confluence
4 134 (3.36%) Apache
5 84 (2.10%) SAS
6 76 (1.90%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.95%) WebLogic
8 32 (0.80%) IIS
9 25 (0.63%) Tomcat
10 21 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
10 21 (0.53%) Oracle Workflow
11 15 (0.38%) Tuxedo
12 14 (0.35%) Jupyter
13 13 (0.33%) Appian
13 13 (0.33%) HCL Notes
13 13 (0.33%) Mendix
13 13 (0.33%) Palantir Foundry
14 12 (0.30%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 11 (0.28%) CMS
15 11 (0.28%) nginx
Applications
1 271 (6.79%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.35%) Microsoft Office
3 49 (1.23%) MS Visio
4 33 (0.83%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 23 (0.58%) Spreadsheet
6 9 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.20%) Microsoft Project
8 5 (0.13%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.13%) Notion
9 3 (0.075%) Oracle Smart View
9 3 (0.075%) Trello
10 1 (0.025%) InDesign
10 1 (0.025%) Mingle
10 1 (0.025%) Weka
Business Applications
1 42 (1.05%) Oracle EBS
2 24 (0.60%) Aladdin
2 24 (0.60%) NEC Housing
3 22 (0.55%) Dynamics CRM
3 22 (0.55%) Oracle Payables
4 20 (0.50%) Oracle EBS R12
5 19 (0.48%) Oracle Receivables
5 19 (0.48%) SAP S/4HANA
6 17 (0.43%) Oracle ERP
6 17 (0.43%) Oracle General Ledger
7 16 (0.40%) NetSuite
8 13 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
9 12 (0.30%) Oracle Assets
9 12 (0.30%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 11 (0.28%) Payment Gateway
11 10 (0.25%) Oracle 11i
11 10 (0.25%) Oracle Cash Management
12 9 (0.23%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 8 (0.20%) Endur
13 8 (0.20%) Findur
Cloud Services
1 1,362 (34.10%) Azure
2 957 (23.96%) AWS
3 770 (19.28%) Power Platform
4 401 (10.04%) Azure DevOps
5 341 (8.54%) Azure Data Factory
6 322 (8.06%) GCP
7 293 (7.34%) GitHub
8 252 (6.31%) Serverless
9 232 (5.81%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 224 (5.61%) Snowflake
11 222 (5.56%) Amazon S3
12 173 (4.33%) dbt
13 150 (3.76%) GitHub Actions
14 149 (3.73%) AWS Lambda
15 82 (2.05%) Power Automate
16 75 (1.88%) SaaS
17 71 (1.78%) Entra ID
18 67 (1.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 66 (1.65%) AWS CloudFormation
20 65 (1.63%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 49 (1.23%) Firewall
2 41 (1.03%) DNS
3 21 (0.53%) Network Security
4 18 (0.45%) TCP/IP
5 16 (0.40%) HTTP
6 15 (0.38%) Internet
6 15 (0.38%) SNMP
6 15 (0.38%) WAN
7 12 (0.30%) LAN
8 11 (0.28%) SSL
8 11 (0.28%) VPN
9 10 (0.25%) DHCP
9 10 (0.25%) Wi-Fi
10 7 (0.18%) Wireshark
11 6 (0.15%) 3GPP
11 6 (0.15%) IPsec
11 6 (0.15%) VLAN
12 5 (0.13%) Kerberos
12 5 (0.13%) PuTTY
12 5 (0.13%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 704 (17.63%) Power BI
2 513 (12.84%) Data Warehouse
3 503 (12.59%) SQL Server
4 273 (6.84%) Tableau
5 270 (6.76%) Data Lake
6 255 (6.38%) Relational Database
7 253 (6.33%) PostgreSQL
8 239 (5.98%) NoSQL
9 216 (5.41%) Metadata
10 199 (4.98%) Azure SQL Database
11 148 (3.71%) Oracle Database
12 146 (3.66%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 122 (3.05%) BigQuery
14 119 (2.98%) Delta Lake
15 115 (2.88%) Amazon Redshift
16 110 (2.75%) MySQL
17 108 (2.70%) Big Data
18 103 (2.58%) Oracle Reports
19 91 (2.28%) Amazon RDS
19 91 (2.28%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 419 (10.49%) Git
2 319 (7.99%) JIRA
3 208 (5.21%) Jenkins
4 170 (4.26%) GitLab
5 56 (1.40%) Selenium
6 52 (1.30%) JUnit
7 45 (1.13%) Postman
8 43 (1.08%) Maven
9 38 (0.95%) Mockito
10 37 (0.93%) Cucumber
11 35 (0.88%) MLflow
12 31 (0.78%) Gradle
13 29 (0.73%) SonarQube
14 28 (0.70%) REST Assured
15 27 (0.68%) ERwin
16 24 (0.60%) Bitbucket
17 22 (0.55%) JMeter
18 21 (0.53%) Oracle Forms
18 21 (0.53%) SpecFlow
18 21 (0.53%) TeamCity
General
1 1,085 (27.17%) Finance
2 1,059 (26.51%) Social Skills
3 744 (18.63%) Analytical Skills
4 376 (9.41%) Banking
5 337 (8.44%) Public Sector
6 102 (2.55%) Front Office
7 95 (2.38%) Marketing
8 92 (2.30%) Investment Banking
9 84 (2.10%) Documentation Skills
10 61 (1.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 56 (1.40%) Financial Institution
11 56 (1.40%) Retail
12 55 (1.38%) Legal
13 38 (0.95%) Publishing
14 37 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
15 35 (0.88%) Telecoms
16 33 (0.83%) Law
17 32 (0.80%) Organisational Skills
18 29 (0.73%) Back Office
18 29 (0.73%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 838 (20.98%) Developer
2 821 (20.56%) Data Engineer
3 571 (14.30%) Analyst
4 495 (12.39%) Senior
5 281 (7.04%) Lead
6 242 (6.06%) Data Analyst
7 231 (5.78%) Architect
8 183 (4.58%) Business Analyst
9 181 (4.53%) Consultant
10 149 (3.73%) Java Developer
11 140 (3.51%) Senior Data Engineer
12 123 (3.08%) DBA
13 118 (2.95%) Senior Developer
14 117 (2.93%) Software Engineer
15 116 (2.90%) Azure Engineer
16 97 (2.43%) C# Developer
17 85 (2.13%) Data Architect
17 85 (2.13%) Data Scientist
17 85 (2.13%) Python Developer
18 81 (2.03%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 350 (8.76%) .NET
2 310 (7.76%) REST
3 253 (6.33%) Kafka
4 248 (6.21%) PySpark
5 192 (4.81%) Spring
6 188 (4.71%) React
7 183 (4.58%) Spring Boot
8 167 (4.18%) RESTful
9 136 (3.41%) HTML
10 133 (3.33%) XML
11 120 (3.00%) JSON
12 116 (2.90%) Pandas
13 115 (2.88%) CSS
14 104 (2.60%) AngularJS
15 93 (2.33%) Middleware
16 87 (2.18%) SOAP
17 81 (2.03%) .NET Framework
18 75 (1.88%) Web Services
19 73 (1.83%) Node.js
20 69 (1.73%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 259 (6.48%) Cloud Native
2 145 (3.63%) Data Structures
3 137 (3.43%) Legacy Systems
4 121 (3.03%) Product Ownership
5 101 (2.53%) Distributed Systems
6 90 (2.25%) Management Information System
7 75 (1.88%) Derivative
8 71 (1.78%) Data Protection Act
8 71 (1.78%) Onboarding
9 64 (1.60%) Analytical Mindset
10 54 (1.35%) Equities
10 54 (1.35%) Fixed Income
11 50 (1.25%) Clustering
12 48 (1.20%) Enterprise Software
13 45 (1.13%) Algorithms
13 45 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
14 43 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
15 40 (1.00%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 39 (0.98%) Replication
17 38 (0.95%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 282 (7.06%) Linux
2 246 (6.16%) Windows
3 200 (5.01%) Unix
4 82 (2.05%) Windows Server
5 27 (0.68%) AIX
6 19 (0.48%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 16 (0.40%) Windows Server 2019
8 11 (0.28%) Windows Server 2016
9 9 (0.23%) Windows 10
10 8 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.18%) Solaris
11 7 (0.18%) zOS
12 6 (0.15%) Android
12 6 (0.15%) Apple iOS
13 5 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
14 3 (0.075%) Oracle Linux
15 2 (0.050%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.050%) VMS
16 1 (0.025%) CentOS
16 1 (0.025%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,086 (27.19%) CI/CD
2 1,018 (25.49%) Analytics
3 1,003 (25.11%) Data Modelling
4 1,001 (25.06%) Agile
5 972 (24.34%) ETL
6 912 (22.83%) Business Intelligence
7 894 (22.38%) DevOps
8 814 (20.38%) Problem-Solving
9 736 (18.43%) Data Pipeline
10 653 (16.35%) Data Engineering
11 512 (12.82%) AI
12 504 (12.62%) Migration
13 484 (12.12%) Validation
14 479 (11.99%) Data Governance
15 398 (9.96%) Test Automation
16 392 (9.81%) Decision-Making
17 374 (9.36%) Data Analysis
18 366 (9.16%) Performance Tuning
19 350 (8.76%) Microservices
20 342 (8.56%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,509 (37.78%) Python
2 544 (13.62%) Java
3 437 (10.94%) C#
4 303 (7.59%) PL/SQL
5 296 (7.41%) JavaScript
6 196 (4.91%) T-SQL
7 183 (4.58%) PowerShell
8 130 (3.25%) TypeScript
9 123 (3.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 116 (2.90%) R
10 116 (2.90%) Shell Script
11 88 (2.20%) Scala
12 75 (1.88%) Bash
13 60 (1.50%) C++
14 50 (1.25%) VBA
15 42 (1.05%) Bicep
15 42 (1.05%) Perl
16 29 (0.73%) VB
17 26 (0.65%) Go
18 22 (0.55%) C
Qualifications
1 847 (21.21%) Security Cleared
2 685 (17.15%) SC Cleared
3 320 (8.01%) Degree
4 109 (2.73%) Computer Science Degree
5 87 (2.18%) BPSS Clearance
6 72 (1.80%) Azure Certification
7 62 (1.55%) DV Cleared
8 52 (1.30%) Master's Degree
9 48 (1.20%) ISTQB
10 38 (0.95%) Microsoft Certification
11 23 (0.58%) AWS Certification
12 16 (0.40%) PhD
13 15 (0.38%) CBAP
13 15 (0.38%) Oracle Certification
14 12 (0.30%) DBS Check
15 11 (0.28%) CISSP
15 11 (0.28%) PMI Certification
16 10 (0.25%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
16 10 (0.25%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 10 (0.25%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 729 (18.25%) Data Quality
2 308 (7.71%) QA
3 177 (4.43%) GDPR
4 38 (0.95%) Accessibility
5 37 (0.93%) SLA
6 34 (0.85%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 27 (0.68%) PMO
8 23 (0.58%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 19 (0.48%) NIST
10 18 (0.45%) MiFID
10 18 (0.45%) PCI DSS
11 16 (0.40%) HIPAA
12 15 (0.38%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 14 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
13 14 (0.35%) IFRS
14 13 (0.33%) ISO 20022
15 12 (0.30%) HL7
16 10 (0.25%) GRC
16 10 (0.25%) SEPA
17 9 (0.23%) Solvency II
System Software
1 457 (11.44%) Docker
2 93 (2.33%) Active Directory
3 38 (0.95%) Virtual Machines
4 26 (0.65%) VMware Infrastructure
5 24 (0.60%) Oracle RAC
6 17 (0.43%) Hyper-V
7 10 (0.25%) KVM
8 8 (0.20%) Postfix
8 8 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
8 8 (0.20%) VMware ESXi
9 6 (0.15%) HDFS
9 6 (0.15%) RACF
10 5 (0.13%) XenApp
10 5 (0.13%) XenDesktop
11 4 (0.10%) VMware NSX
12 3 (0.075%) Oracle Clusterware
12 3 (0.075%) vCloud
13 2 (0.050%) GridGain
13 2 (0.050%) vSphere
14 1 (0.025%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 392 (9.81%) Kubernetes
2 331 (8.29%) Terraform
3 105 (2.63%) Grafana
4 64 (1.60%) Ansible
5 63 (1.58%) Prometheus
6 37 (0.93%) Oracle RMAN
7 26 (0.65%) Data Guard
8 19 (0.48%) Kibana
8 19 (0.48%) Single Sign-On
9 17 (0.43%) SCCM
10 15 (0.38%) ZABBIX
11 14 (0.35%) Control-M
11 14 (0.35%) Nagios
11 14 (0.35%) Netcool
11 14 (0.35%) Tivoli
12 13 (0.33%) OpenView
12 13 (0.33%) Progress Chef
12 13 (0.33%) Tivoli Monitoring
13 10 (0.25%) vCenter Server
14 9 (0.23%) Kiali
Vendors
1 659 (16.50%) Oracle
2 634 (15.87%) Microsoft
3 475 (11.89%) Databricks
4 154 (3.86%) Google
5 138 (3.46%) Informatica
6 124 (3.10%) ServiceNow
7 109 (2.73%) Talend
8 106 (2.65%) SAP
9 87 (2.18%) Splunk
10 66 (1.65%) IBM
11 56 (1.40%) Denodo
12 51 (1.28%) Salesforce
13 50 (1.25%) Citrix
14 40 (1.00%) VMware
15 38 (0.95%) Dynatrace
16 36 (0.90%) OpenAI
17 35 (0.88%) Bloomberg
18 32 (0.80%) HP
19 31 (0.78%) MuleSoft
20 29 (0.73%) BMC