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

6 months to
26 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,849 2,956 3,754
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.25% 12.18% 9.96%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.90% 35.99% 34.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,663 2,077 2,732
10th Percentile £350 £355 £355
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% -6.82% -
75th Percentile £588 £638 £650
90th Percentile £709 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -2.42%
Number of hourly rates quoted 55 58 61
10th Percentile £23.90 £24.58 £21.64
25th Percentile £34.01 £30.06 £25.79
Median hourly rate £45.00 £50.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -10.00% +17.65% -15.00%
75th Percentile £69.72 £65.62 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £78.71 £61.75
UK median hourly rate £48.11 £47.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year +1.28% +11.76% -15.00%

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 10,720 8,213 10,917
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 28.54% 33.85% 28.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,128 5,601 7,900
10th Percentile £352 £360 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.42% -5.61%
75th Percentile £613 £650 £656
90th Percentile £725 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 476 216 439
10th Percentile £41.42 £25.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £55.00 £40.75 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.59% +4.58% -4.38%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £68.75
90th Percentile £76.25 £85.00 £76.72
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -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 26 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 26 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 26 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 2,253 £512 -4.78% 840
Midlands +2 471 £470 +2.17% 280
North of England -11 437 £450 -5.26% 459
West Midlands +6 374 £465 -2.31% 157
South East -19 295 £500 - 526
North West +2 250 £447 -5.89% 248
South West -6 204 £475 -5.94% 165
Yorkshire -23 166 £500 - 149
East Midlands -4 95 £537 +37.34% 123
East of England -24 80 £500 +6.95% 147
North East -1 33 £475 +5.56% 66
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
1 210 (5.46%) Apache Spark
2 156 (4.05%) Apache Airflow
3 132 (3.43%) Apache
4 119 (3.09%) Confluence
5 77 (2.00%) SharePoint
6 75 (1.95%) SAS
7 48 (1.25%) WebLogic
8 28 (0.73%) IIS
9 23 (0.60%) Tomcat
10 22 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
11 19 (0.49%) Jupyter
12 17 (0.44%) CMS
13 16 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
14 15 (0.39%) Tuxedo
15 14 (0.36%) Oracle Workflow
16 12 (0.31%) Appian
16 12 (0.31%) HCL Notes
16 12 (0.31%) WebSphere
17 11 (0.29%) Mendix
17 11 (0.29%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 261 (6.78%) Microsoft Excel
2 55 (1.43%) Microsoft Office
3 46 (1.20%) MS Visio
4 33 (0.86%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 18 (0.47%) Spreadsheet
6 11 (0.29%) Microsoft Project
7 6 (0.16%) Chatbot
8 3 (0.078%) Notion
8 3 (0.078%) Oracle Smart View
8 3 (0.078%) Trello
9 1 (0.026%) InDesign
9 1 (0.026%) Mingle
9 1 (0.026%) SPSS
9 1 (0.026%) Weka
Business Applications
1 32 (0.83%) Oracle EBS
2 29 (0.75%) Aladdin
3 25 (0.65%) Oracle Payables
4 23 (0.60%) Oracle Receivables
5 21 (0.55%) Oracle General Ledger
6 20 (0.52%) NEC Housing
7 18 (0.47%) Oracle EBS R12
8 16 (0.42%) Dynamics CRM
9 15 (0.39%) Oracle ERP
10 14 (0.36%) NetSuite
10 14 (0.36%) Oracle Assets
10 14 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
11 11 (0.29%) Oracle Cash Management
11 11 (0.29%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
12 10 (0.26%) Oracle 11i
12 10 (0.26%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
12 10 (0.26%) Remedy ITSM
13 9 (0.23%) Advent Geneva
14 8 (0.21%) Endur
14 8 (0.21%) Findur
Cloud Services
1 1,352 (35.13%) Azure
2 949 (24.66%) AWS
3 742 (19.28%) Power Platform
4 402 (10.44%) Azure DevOps
5 322 (8.37%) GCP
6 317 (8.24%) Azure Data Factory
7 308 (8.00%) GitHub
8 274 (7.12%) Serverless
9 248 (6.44%) Snowflake
10 217 (5.64%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 207 (5.38%) Amazon S3
12 168 (4.36%) dbt
13 156 (4.05%) GitHub Actions
14 146 (3.79%) AWS Lambda
15 93 (2.42%) SaaS
16 86 (2.23%) Azure Functions
17 84 (2.18%) Power Automate
18 73 (1.90%) Entra ID
19 72 (1.87%) AWS CloudFormation
20 68 (1.77%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 52 (1.35%) Firewall
2 39 (1.01%) DNS
3 23 (0.60%) Network Security
4 19 (0.49%) HTTP
5 17 (0.44%) TCP/IP
6 15 (0.39%) Internet
7 14 (0.36%) WAN
8 13 (0.34%) 5G
8 13 (0.34%) SSL
8 13 (0.34%) VPN
9 11 (0.29%) LAN
10 10 (0.26%) 4G
10 10 (0.26%) DHCP
11 9 (0.23%) 2G
11 9 (0.23%) Radio Access Network
12 8 (0.21%) SNMP
13 7 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
14 6 (0.16%) Multicast
14 6 (0.16%) SMS
14 6 (0.16%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 677 (17.59%) Power BI
2 484 (12.57%) Data Warehouse
3 460 (11.95%) SQL Server
4 263 (6.83%) NoSQL
5 258 (6.70%) Relational Database
6 253 (6.57%) Tableau
7 247 (6.42%) PostgreSQL
8 246 (6.39%) Data Lake
9 207 (5.38%) Azure SQL Database
10 194 (5.04%) Metadata
11 142 (3.69%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 136 (3.53%) Oracle Database
13 115 (2.99%) BigQuery
13 115 (2.99%) MySQL
14 109 (2.83%) Delta Lake
15 108 (2.81%) Big Data
16 106 (2.75%) Amazon Redshift
17 96 (2.49%) Amazon RDS
17 96 (2.49%) MongoDB
18 90 (2.34%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 425 (11.04%) Git
2 308 (8.00%) JIRA
3 212 (5.51%) Jenkins
4 155 (4.03%) GitLab
5 59 (1.53%) JUnit
6 57 (1.48%) Selenium
7 41 (1.07%) Postman
8 40 (1.04%) Oracle APEX
9 37 (0.96%) Cucumber
10 35 (0.91%) MLflow
11 34 (0.88%) Maven
12 29 (0.75%) Mockito
13 28 (0.73%) REST Assured
14 25 (0.65%) Bitbucket
14 25 (0.65%) ERwin
15 22 (0.57%) Cypress.io
15 22 (0.57%) SpecFlow
15 22 (0.57%) Visual Studio
16 21 (0.55%) JMeter
16 21 (0.55%) SonarQube
General
1 1,106 (28.73%) Social Skills
2 1,065 (27.67%) Finance
3 715 (18.58%) Analytical Skills
4 398 (10.34%) Banking
5 339 (8.81%) Public Sector
6 103 (2.68%) Investment Banking
7 102 (2.65%) Front Office
8 92 (2.39%) Documentation Skills
9 84 (2.18%) Marketing
10 63 (1.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 58 (1.51%) Retail
12 54 (1.40%) Financial Institution
13 52 (1.35%) Legal
14 39 (1.01%) Publishing
15 38 (0.99%) Telecoms
16 35 (0.91%) Organisational Skills
17 33 (0.86%) Presentation Skills
18 31 (0.81%) Law
19 29 (0.75%) Manufacturing
20 26 (0.68%) General Ledger
Job Titles
1 886 (23.02%) Developer
2 719 (18.68%) Data Engineer
3 562 (14.60%) Analyst
4 488 (12.68%) Senior
5 270 (7.01%) Lead
6 236 (6.13%) Data Analyst
7 210 (5.46%) Architect
8 198 (5.14%) Business Analyst
9 175 (4.55%) Consultant
10 142 (3.69%) Senior Developer
11 138 (3.59%) Java Developer
12 110 (2.86%) Azure Engineer
13 107 (2.78%) Senior Data Engineer
13 107 (2.78%) Software Engineer
14 103 (2.68%) DBA
15 101 (2.62%) C# Developer
16 88 (2.29%) Full-Stack Developer
17 87 (2.26%) Python Developer
18 83 (2.16%) Data Architect
18 83 (2.16%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 342 (8.89%) .NET
2 313 (8.13%) REST
3 254 (6.60%) Kafka
4 237 (6.16%) PySpark
5 192 (4.99%) React
6 184 (4.78%) RESTful
7 168 (4.36%) Spring
8 153 (3.98%) Spring Boot
9 151 (3.92%) XML
10 138 (3.59%) HTML
11 125 (3.25%) JSON
12 118 (3.07%) CSS
13 117 (3.04%) Pandas
14 114 (2.96%) AngularJS
15 88 (2.29%) Node.js
16 84 (2.18%) .NET Framework
17 79 (2.05%) SOAP
18 75 (1.95%) Middleware
19 74 (1.92%) scikit-learn
20 72 (1.87%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 261 (6.78%) Cloud Native
2 131 (3.40%) Data Structures
3 127 (3.30%) Legacy Systems
4 119 (3.09%) Product Ownership
5 84 (2.18%) Distributed Systems
5 84 (2.18%) Management Information System
6 76 (1.97%) Derivative
7 70 (1.82%) Data Protection Act
8 67 (1.74%) Analytical Mindset
9 61 (1.58%) Equities
9 61 (1.58%) Fixed Income
10 59 (1.53%) Algorithms
10 59 (1.53%) Onboarding
11 46 (1.20%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 44 (1.14%) Clustering
12 44 (1.14%) Enterprise Software
13 43 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
14 41 (1.07%) Replication
15 36 (0.94%) Market Risk
16 31 (0.81%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 279 (7.25%) Linux
2 227 (5.90%) Windows
3 183 (4.75%) Unix
4 77 (2.00%) Windows Server
5 18 (0.47%) AIX
6 17 (0.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 13 (0.34%) Windows Server 2019
8 10 (0.26%) Windows 10
9 9 (0.23%) Windows Server 2016
10 6 (0.16%) Android
10 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2012
10 6 (0.16%) zOS
11 5 (0.13%) Apple iOS
12 4 (0.10%) Solaris
12 4 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
13 3 (0.078%) CentOS
13 3 (0.078%) VMS
14 2 (0.052%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.052%) Oracle Linux
14 2 (0.052%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,032 (26.81%) Agile
2 1,031 (26.79%) CI/CD
3 1,005 (26.11%) Analytics
4 940 (24.42%) Data Modelling
5 903 (23.46%) DevOps
6 899 (23.36%) Business Intelligence
7 894 (23.23%) ETL
8 827 (21.49%) Problem-Solving
9 657 (17.07%) Data Pipeline
10 611 (15.87%) Data Engineering
11 479 (12.44%) AI
12 462 (12.00%) Data Governance
13 452 (11.74%) Migration
14 439 (11.41%) Validation
15 378 (9.82%) Data Analysis
16 363 (9.43%) Test Automation
17 351 (9.12%) Decision-Making
18 341 (8.86%) Data Science
18 341 (8.86%) Performance Tuning
18 341 (8.86%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 1,447 (37.59%) Python
2 538 (13.98%) Java
3 420 (10.91%) C#
4 318 (8.26%) JavaScript
5 283 (7.35%) PL/SQL
6 164 (4.26%) T-SQL
7 157 (4.08%) PowerShell
8 141 (3.66%) TypeScript
9 112 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 108 (2.81%) Shell Script
11 104 (2.70%) R
12 92 (2.39%) Scala
13 65 (1.69%) Bash
14 63 (1.64%) C++
15 56 (1.45%) VBA
16 47 (1.22%) Perl
17 46 (1.20%) Bicep
18 36 (0.94%) VB
19 34 (0.88%) Go
20 23 (0.60%) PHP
Qualifications
1 775 (20.14%) Security Cleared
2 611 (15.87%) SC Cleared
3 323 (8.39%) Degree
4 112 (2.91%) Computer Science Degree
5 81 (2.10%) BPSS Clearance
6 65 (1.69%) Azure Certification
7 56 (1.45%) Master's Degree
8 50 (1.30%) ISTQB
9 48 (1.25%) DV Cleared
10 40 (1.04%) Microsoft Certification
11 35 (0.91%) AWS Certification
12 20 (0.52%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 16 (0.42%) CBAP
14 15 (0.39%) PhD
15 13 (0.34%) Oracle Certification
16 10 (0.26%) ISEB
16 10 (0.26%) PMP
17 9 (0.23%) PMI Certification
18 8 (0.21%) CFA
18 8 (0.21%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 682 (17.72%) Data Quality
2 288 (7.48%) QA
3 172 (4.47%) GDPR
4 56 (1.45%) Accessibility
5 29 (0.75%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 28 (0.73%) PMO
6 28 (0.73%) SLA
7 21 (0.55%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 19 (0.49%) MiFID
9 17 (0.44%) NIST
10 16 (0.42%) Actionable Recommendations
10 16 (0.42%) HIPAA
10 16 (0.42%) PCI DSS
11 14 (0.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 14 (0.36%) WCAG
12 12 (0.31%) IFRS
12 12 (0.31%) SEPA
13 11 (0.29%) EMIR
14 10 (0.26%) ISO 20022
14 10 (0.26%) Solvency II
System Software
1 449 (11.67%) Docker
2 98 (2.55%) Active Directory
3 32 (0.83%) Virtual Machines
4 16 (0.42%) Oracle RAC
4 16 (0.42%) VMware Infrastructure
5 12 (0.31%) Hyper-V
6 8 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
7 6 (0.16%) HDFS
7 6 (0.16%) KVM
8 5 (0.13%) Postfix
8 5 (0.13%) RACF
8 5 (0.13%) XenApp
8 5 (0.13%) XenDesktop
9 3 (0.078%) Oracle Clusterware
9 3 (0.078%) VMware ESXi
10 2 (0.052%) GridGain
10 2 (0.052%) VMware NSX
10 2 (0.052%) vSphere
11 1 (0.026%) Lustre
11 1 (0.026%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 406 (10.55%) Kubernetes
2 307 (7.98%) Terraform
3 90 (2.34%) Grafana
4 66 (1.71%) Ansible
5 64 (1.66%) Prometheus
6 24 (0.62%) Oracle RMAN
7 22 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
8 18 (0.47%) Progress Chef
9 16 (0.42%) Data Guard
10 15 (0.39%) SCCM
11 13 (0.34%) Control-M
12 12 (0.31%) Kibana
13 9 (0.23%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
13 9 (0.23%) Puppet
14 8 (0.21%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 8 (0.21%) HP Quality Center
14 8 (0.21%) Kiali
14 8 (0.21%) ZABBIX
15 7 (0.18%) Kubeflow
15 7 (0.18%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 627 (16.29%) Oracle
2 624 (16.21%) Microsoft
3 467 (12.13%) Databricks
4 167 (4.34%) Google
5 115 (2.99%) Informatica
6 114 (2.96%) ServiceNow
7 97 (2.52%) Talend
8 94 (2.44%) SAP
9 65 (1.69%) Splunk
10 59 (1.53%) Salesforce
11 57 (1.48%) IBM
12 49 (1.27%) Citrix
13 43 (1.12%) OpenAI
14 42 (1.09%) Denodo
15 40 (1.04%) MuleSoft
16 34 (0.88%) Bloomberg
17 29 (0.75%) Foundry
17 29 (0.75%) VMware
18 27 (0.70%) Dynatrace
19 26 (0.68%) Murex