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

6 months to
22 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -3 0 -3
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,413 3,135 3,794
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.54% 11.68% 10.36%
As % of the Programming Languages category 34.44% 35.30% 34.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,360 2,103 2,729
10th Percentile £350 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £416 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £515 £540
% change year-on-year -2.91% -4.63% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 65 51 68
10th Percentile £21.51 £25.26 £21.64
25th Percentile £31.25 £35.00 £31.18
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +22.09% -10.42%
75th Percentile £57.50 £65.31 £53.75
90th Percentile £74.51 £80.00 £64.51
UK median hourly rate £45.50 £50.00 £43.00
% change year-on-year -9.00% +16.28% -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 9,911 8,881 10,956
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 30.61% 33.10% 29.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,609 5,707 7,910
10th Percentile £350 £356 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.65% -2.27% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £663
90th Percentile £731 £775 £763
UK median daily rate £503 £525 £540
% change year-on-year -4.29% -2.78% -4.42%
Number of hourly rates quoted 400 216 443
10th Percentile £40.00 £25.26 £35.50
25th Percentile £52.50 £44.81 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.14
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +3.92% -7.48%
75th Percentile £69.58 £68.75 £69.81
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%

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 22 January 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 22 January 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 22 January 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 2,097 £510 -7.27% 657
North of England -3 351 £450 -5.26% 486
Midlands -3 341 £515 +8.42% 348
South East -17 291 £472 -5.60% 853
West Midlands +2 259 £515 +3.00% 165
North West +1 197 £420 -9.19% 236
South West -4 162 £475 -5.00% 279
Yorkshire -27 137 £475 -5.94% 183
East Midlands -10 82 £503 +28.03% 179
East of England -9 76 £550 +9.45% 288
North East -12 21 £475 -4.04% 72
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
1 162 (4.75%) Apache Spark
2 134 (3.93%) Apache Airflow
3 112 (3.28%) Confluence
4 103 (3.02%) Apache
5 91 (2.67%) SharePoint
6 68 (1.99%) SAS
7 50 (1.46%) WebLogic
8 26 (0.76%) Microsoft Exchange
9 22 (0.64%) IIS
10 19 (0.56%) Skype for Business
11 18 (0.53%) nginx
12 16 (0.47%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 14 (0.41%) CMS
13 14 (0.41%) Oracle Workflow
14 13 (0.38%) Jupyter
14 13 (0.38%) Mattermost
14 13 (0.38%) Tomcat
15 11 (0.32%) HCL Notes
15 11 (0.32%) JBoss
16 9 (0.26%) Adobe Experience Manager
Applications
1 231 (6.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 68 (1.99%) Microsoft Office
3 42 (1.23%) MS Visio
4 36 (1.05%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 13 (0.38%) Microsoft Project
6 9 (0.26%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.23%) Chatbot
8 6 (0.18%) Trello
9 5 (0.15%) Spreadsheet
10 3 (0.088%) Notion
11 2 (0.059%) Maya
11 2 (0.059%) NUKE
11 2 (0.059%) Oracle Smart View
12 1 (0.029%) SPSS
12 1 (0.029%) Weka
Business Applications
1 31 (0.91%) Oracle Payables
2 30 (0.88%) Oracle EBS
3 28 (0.82%) Oracle General Ledger
4 23 (0.67%) Oracle Receivables
5 22 (0.64%) Aladdin
6 20 (0.59%) Dynamics CRM
6 20 (0.59%) Oracle Assets
7 19 (0.56%) Oracle EBS R12
8 17 (0.50%) Remedy ITSM
9 15 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
10 14 (0.41%) Endur
10 14 (0.41%) NetSuite
10 14 (0.41%) Oracle Financials
11 12 (0.35%) NEC Housing
11 12 (0.35%) Oracle ERP
11 12 (0.35%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
12 10 (0.29%) Oracle Cash Management
13 9 (0.26%) Advent Geneva
13 9 (0.26%) Maximo
13 9 (0.26%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
Cloud Services
1 1,133 (33.20%) Azure
2 814 (23.85%) AWS
3 650 (19.04%) Power Platform
4 319 (9.35%) Azure DevOps
5 285 (8.35%) GCP
6 254 (7.44%) GitHub
7 240 (7.03%) Azure Data Factory
8 232 (6.80%) Serverless
9 230 (6.74%) Snowflake
10 171 (5.01%) Amazon S3
11 169 (4.95%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 129 (3.78%) GitHub Actions
13 127 (3.72%) dbt
14 110 (3.22%) AWS Lambda
15 90 (2.64%) SaaS
16 83 (2.43%) Azure Functions
17 80 (2.34%) Power Automate
18 70 (2.05%) PowerApps
19 57 (1.67%) Azure Monitor
19 57 (1.67%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 57 (1.67%) Firewall
2 40 (1.17%) DNS
3 37 (1.08%) HTTP
4 25 (0.73%) Skype
5 17 (0.50%) Network Security
6 16 (0.47%) TCP/IP
7 15 (0.44%) Internet
8 14 (0.41%) DHCP
9 13 (0.38%) SSH
10 12 (0.35%) Unified Communications
11 11 (0.32%) SMTP
12 10 (0.29%) LAN
12 10 (0.29%) VPN
12 10 (0.29%) WAN
13 9 (0.26%) 2G
13 9 (0.26%) 5G
13 9 (0.26%) FTP
13 9 (0.26%) IMAP
13 9 (0.26%) OpenLDAP
14 8 (0.23%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 589 (17.26%) Power BI
2 376 (11.02%) SQL Server
3 352 (10.31%) Data Warehouse
4 248 (7.27%) Relational Database
5 244 (7.15%) NoSQL
5 244 (7.15%) PostgreSQL
6 203 (5.95%) Tableau
7 201 (5.89%) Data Lake
8 169 (4.95%) Azure SQL Database
9 156 (4.57%) Oracle Database
10 137 (4.01%) Metadata
11 108 (3.16%) MySQL
12 107 (3.14%) Big Data
13 102 (2.99%) MongoDB
14 98 (2.87%) BigQuery
15 95 (2.78%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 84 (2.46%) Amazon RDS
17 73 (2.14%) Amazon Redshift
18 70 (2.05%) Delta Lake
19 65 (1.90%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 391 (11.46%) Git
2 309 (9.05%) JIRA
3 187 (5.48%) Jenkins
4 130 (3.81%) GitLab
5 59 (1.73%) JUnit
6 58 (1.70%) Selenium
7 46 (1.35%) Oracle APEX
8 36 (1.05%) Cucumber
8 36 (1.05%) Postman
9 33 (0.97%) Bitbucket
10 25 (0.73%) REST Assured
11 23 (0.67%) Cypress.io
11 23 (0.67%) ERwin
11 23 (0.67%) Maven
11 23 (0.67%) Mockito
12 22 (0.64%) SpecFlow
13 21 (0.62%) MLflow
14 20 (0.59%) Oracle Forms
14 20 (0.59%) Visual Studio
15 18 (0.53%) Gradle
General
1 1,061 (31.09%) Social Skills
2 980 (28.71%) Finance
3 608 (17.81%) Analytical Skills
4 393 (11.51%) Banking
5 268 (7.85%) Public Sector
6 116 (3.40%) Investment Banking
7 96 (2.81%) Front Office
8 87 (2.55%) Documentation Skills
9 85 (2.49%) Marketing
10 63 (1.85%) Retail
11 54 (1.58%) Financial Institution
12 53 (1.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 43 (1.26%) Presentation Skills
14 38 (1.11%) Legal
15 32 (0.94%) Manufacturing
16 28 (0.82%) Organisational Skills
16 28 (0.82%) Publishing
17 27 (0.79%) Back Office
17 27 (0.79%) General Ledger
17 27 (0.79%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 876 (25.67%) Developer
2 540 (15.82%) Analyst
3 515 (15.09%) Data Engineer
4 431 (12.63%) Senior
5 214 (6.27%) Lead
6 211 (6.18%) Data Analyst
7 195 (5.71%) Business Analyst
8 156 (4.57%) Architect
9 134 (3.93%) Senior Developer
10 124 (3.63%) Consultant
11 122 (3.57%) Java Developer
12 110 (3.22%) Software Engineer
13 102 (2.99%) Azure Engineer
14 86 (2.52%) Full-Stack Developer
14 86 (2.52%) Python Developer
15 81 (2.37%) Data Scientist
16 80 (2.34%) C# Developer
17 78 (2.29%) Senior Data Engineer
18 70 (2.05%) Azure Data Engineer
19 62 (1.82%) DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 319 (9.35%) .NET
2 285 (8.35%) REST
3 213 (6.24%) Kafka
4 193 (5.65%) PySpark
5 169 (4.95%) React
6 157 (4.60%) RESTful
7 146 (4.28%) Spring
8 141 (4.13%) HTML
9 127 (3.72%) XML
10 125 (3.66%) Spring Boot
11 120 (3.52%) CSS
12 103 (3.02%) Node.js
13 101 (2.96%) JSON
14 93 (2.72%) AngularJS
15 79 (2.31%) SOAP
16 77 (2.26%) .NET Framework
17 76 (2.23%) Pandas
18 72 (2.11%) Middleware
19 56 (1.64%) Web Services
20 55 (1.61%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 206 (6.04%) Cloud Native
2 101 (2.96%) Data Structures
3 97 (2.84%) Product Ownership
4 88 (2.58%) Legacy Systems
5 81 (2.37%) Data Protection Act
6 76 (2.23%) Management Information System
7 75 (2.20%) Analytical Mindset
8 63 (1.85%) Derivative
9 60 (1.76%) Algorithms
10 54 (1.58%) Equities
11 53 (1.55%) Distributed Systems
11 53 (1.55%) Onboarding
12 49 (1.44%) Fixed Income
12 49 (1.44%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 41 (1.20%) Market Risk
14 40 (1.17%) Replication
15 35 (1.03%) Credit Risk
16 34 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
16 34 (1.00%) SWIFT Messaging Network
17 33 (0.97%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 320 (9.38%) Linux
2 238 (6.97%) Windows
3 199 (5.83%) Unix
4 60 (1.76%) Windows Server
5 15 (0.44%) VMS
6 14 (0.41%) Windows 10
6 14 (0.41%) Windows Server 2019
7 13 (0.38%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 12 (0.35%) Android
8 12 (0.35%) Ubuntu
8 12 (0.35%) Windows Server 2016
9 9 (0.26%) Amazon Linux
10 7 (0.21%) Apple iOS
11 5 (0.15%) AIX
11 5 (0.15%) Windows Server 2012
12 4 (0.12%) CentOS
12 4 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
13 3 (0.088%) zOS
14 1 (0.029%) Mac OS X
14 1 (0.029%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 957 (28.04%) Agile
2 825 (24.17%) CI/CD
3 800 (23.44%) Analytics
4 799 (23.41%) Problem-Solving
5 769 (22.53%) Business Intelligence
6 766 (22.44%) DevOps
7 720 (21.10%) Data Modelling
8 649 (19.02%) ETL
9 497 (14.56%) Data Pipeline
10 411 (12.04%) Data Engineering
11 361 (10.58%) Data Governance
12 358 (10.49%) Migration
13 346 (10.14%) Validation
14 338 (9.90%) Visualisation
15 336 (9.84%) AI
16 329 (9.64%) Data Analysis
17 310 (9.08%) Test Automation
18 305 (8.94%) Microservices
19 295 (8.64%) Data Science
20 285 (8.35%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 1,260 (36.92%) Python
2 520 (15.24%) Java
3 369 (10.81%) C#
4 317 (9.29%) JavaScript
5 262 (7.68%) PL/SQL
6 146 (4.28%) PowerShell
7 130 (3.81%) TypeScript
8 101 (2.96%) R
9 96 (2.81%) T-SQL
10 94 (2.75%) Scala
10 94 (2.75%) Shell Script
11 86 (2.52%) C++
12 75 (2.20%) Data Analysis Expressions
12 75 (2.20%) VBA
13 64 (1.88%) VB
14 55 (1.61%) Bash
15 48 (1.41%) Perl
16 42 (1.23%) Go
17 40 (1.17%) Bicep
18 34 (1.00%) PHP
Qualifications
1 586 (17.17%) Security Cleared
2 451 (13.21%) SC Cleared
3 332 (9.73%) Degree
4 124 (3.63%) Computer Science Degree
5 75 (2.20%) Azure Certification
6 62 (1.82%) BPSS Clearance
7 60 (1.76%) DV Cleared
8 57 (1.67%) AWS Certification
9 54 (1.58%) Master's Degree
10 44 (1.29%) Microsoft Certification
11 38 (1.11%) ISTQB
12 23 (0.67%) ITIL Certification
13 22 (0.64%) Oracle Certification
14 19 (0.56%) CBAP
15 17 (0.50%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 12 (0.35%) Cisco Certification
16 12 (0.35%) MCSE
16 12 (0.35%) PMI Certification
17 11 (0.32%) CCNA
17 11 (0.32%) CFA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 498 (14.59%) Data Quality
2 245 (7.18%) QA
3 125 (3.66%) GDPR
4 57 (1.67%) Accessibility
5 26 (0.76%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 23 (0.67%) SLA
7 19 (0.56%) MiFID
8 18 (0.53%) SEPA
9 17 (0.50%) ISO 20022
10 15 (0.44%) Actionable Recommendations
10 15 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 15 (0.44%) PSD2
11 14 (0.41%) HIPAA
11 14 (0.41%) WCAG
12 13 (0.38%) IFRS
13 12 (0.35%) EMIR
14 11 (0.32%) PCI DSS
14 11 (0.32%) PMO
15 9 (0.26%) NIST
16 8 (0.23%) ISO 8583
System Software
1 411 (12.04%) Docker
2 99 (2.90%) Active Directory
3 28 (0.82%) VMware Infrastructure
4 18 (0.53%) Oracle RAC
5 17 (0.50%) Virtual Machines
6 9 (0.26%) DFS Replication
6 9 (0.26%) Dovecot
6 9 (0.26%) Postfix
6 9 (0.26%) Squid
7 8 (0.23%) HDFS
7 8 (0.23%) Hyper-V
8 7 (0.21%) zsh
9 6 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
9 6 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
10 5 (0.15%) Microsoft Virtual Server
10 5 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
11 4 (0.12%) VMware Workstation
11 4 (0.12%) XenApp
11 4 (0.12%) XenDesktop
12 3 (0.088%) NFS
Systems Management
1 372 (10.90%) Kubernetes
2 247 (7.24%) Terraform
3 74 (2.17%) Grafana
4 62 (1.82%) Ansible
5 59 (1.73%) Prometheus
6 24 (0.70%) SCCM
6 24 (0.70%) SCOM
7 21 (0.62%) HP SiteScope
8 19 (0.56%) Kibana
8 19 (0.56%) Progress Chef
9 18 (0.53%) Data Guard
9 18 (0.53%) Oracle RMAN
9 18 (0.53%) Puppet
10 15 (0.44%) Control-M
10 15 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
11 14 (0.41%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
12 12 (0.35%) Proxmox
13 11 (0.32%) WSUS
14 10 (0.29%) ITRS Geneos
15 9 (0.26%) Nessus
Vendors
1 611 (17.90%) Oracle
2 570 (16.70%) Microsoft
3 370 (10.84%) Databricks
4 133 (3.90%) Google
5 102 (2.99%) Splunk
6 93 (2.72%) SAP
7 71 (2.08%) ServiceNow
8 68 (1.99%) Salesforce
9 64 (1.88%) Talend
10 58 (1.70%) Informatica
11 46 (1.35%) IBM
12 42 (1.23%) OpenAI
13 41 (1.20%) Citrix
13 41 (1.20%) Dynatrace
14 39 (1.14%) Denodo
15 38 (1.11%) VMware
16 36 (1.05%) MuleSoft
17 31 (0.91%) AppDynamics
18 30 (0.88%) Cisco
19 28 (0.82%) Bloomberg