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

6 months to
18 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -3
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,358 3,138 3,844
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.56% 11.68% 10.47%
As % of the Programming Languages category 34.47% 35.41% 34.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,315 2,101 2,753
10th Percentile £348 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £413 £430
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -
75th Percentile £600 £638 £655
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £513 £550
% change year-on-year -2.53% -6.73% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 64 50 65
10th Percentile £21.26 £25.26 £22.03
25th Percentile £31.18 £35.00 £27.75
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £43.50
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +20.69% -4.40%
75th Percentile £57.50 £65.00 £53.75
90th Percentile £74.55 £77.47 £64.52
UK median hourly rate £47.11 £47.50 £44.25
% change year-on-year -0.82% +7.34% -3.80%

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 9,742 8,861 11,049
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 30.63% 32.97% 30.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,480 5,689 7,963
10th Percentile £350 £357 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £435
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 £735 £775 £763
UK median daily rate £505 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -3.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 383 215 424
10th Percentile £39.68 £25.26 £35.50
25th Percentile £52.50 £44.63 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.18
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +0.52% -4.34%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £78.53
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £61.72
% change year-on-year +4.00% +1.26% -2.03%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 2,064 £510 -7.27% 674
North of England -5 347 £444 -6.58% 472
Midlands -2 330 £515 +8.88% 332
South East -15 287 £475 -5.47% 859
West Midlands +1 248 £515 +3.52% 149
North West +1 198 £420 -9.19% 226
South West -5 156 £475 -5.00% 271
Yorkshire -26 132 £472 -5.70% 176
East Midlands -8 82 £500 +27.39% 181
East of England -8 75 £575 +11.92% 291
North East -15 19 £475 -4.04% 77
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
1 154 (4.59%) Apache Spark
2 131 (3.90%) Apache Airflow
3 109 (3.25%) Confluence
4 95 (2.83%) Apache
5 92 (2.74%) SharePoint
6 66 (1.97%) SAS
7 50 (1.49%) WebLogic
8 26 (0.77%) Microsoft Exchange
9 20 (0.60%) IIS
10 19 (0.57%) Skype for Business
11 18 (0.54%) nginx
12 16 (0.48%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 14 (0.42%) Oracle Workflow
14 13 (0.39%) Jupyter
14 13 (0.39%) Mattermost
14 13 (0.39%) Tomcat
15 12 (0.36%) CMS
15 12 (0.36%) HCL Notes
16 11 (0.33%) JBoss
17 10 (0.30%) Mendix
Applications
1 223 (6.64%) Microsoft Excel
2 65 (1.94%) Microsoft Office
3 41 (1.22%) MS Visio
4 35 (1.04%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 13 (0.39%) Microsoft Project
6 11 (0.33%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.27%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 6 (0.18%) Trello
9 5 (0.15%) Spreadsheet
10 3 (0.089%) Notion
11 2 (0.060%) Maya
11 2 (0.060%) NUKE
11 2 (0.060%) Oracle Smart View
11 2 (0.060%) SPSS
12 1 (0.030%) Stata
12 1 (0.030%) Weka
Business Applications
1 30 (0.89%) Oracle EBS
1 30 (0.89%) Oracle Payables
2 28 (0.83%) Oracle General Ledger
3 23 (0.68%) Aladdin
4 22 (0.66%) Oracle Receivables
5 20 (0.60%) Dynamics CRM
5 20 (0.60%) Oracle Assets
6 19 (0.57%) Oracle EBS R12
7 17 (0.51%) Remedy ITSM
8 15 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
9 14 (0.42%) NetSuite
9 14 (0.42%) Oracle Financials
10 12 (0.36%) Endur
10 12 (0.36%) Oracle ERP
10 12 (0.36%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
11 10 (0.30%) Oracle Cash Management
12 9 (0.27%) Maximo
12 9 (0.27%) NEC Housing
12 9 (0.27%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
12 9 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,110 (33.06%) Azure
2 798 (23.76%) AWS
3 638 (19.00%) Power Platform
4 303 (9.02%) Azure DevOps
5 280 (8.34%) GCP
6 244 (7.27%) GitHub
7 236 (7.03%) Azure Data Factory
8 227 (6.76%) Serverless
8 227 (6.76%) Snowflake
9 167 (4.97%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 166 (4.94%) Amazon S3
11 126 (3.75%) dbt
12 121 (3.60%) GitHub Actions
13 108 (3.22%) AWS Lambda
14 88 (2.62%) SaaS
15 83 (2.47%) Azure Functions
16 78 (2.32%) Power Automate
17 70 (2.08%) PowerApps
18 57 (1.70%) Azure Logic Apps
19 56 (1.67%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 56 (1.67%) Firewall
2 40 (1.19%) DNS
3 37 (1.10%) HTTP
4 25 (0.74%) Skype
5 17 (0.51%) Network Security
6 16 (0.48%) TCP/IP
7 14 (0.42%) DHCP
7 14 (0.42%) Internet
8 13 (0.39%) SSH
9 12 (0.36%) Unified Communications
10 10 (0.30%) SMTP
10 10 (0.30%) VPN
11 9 (0.27%) 2G
11 9 (0.27%) 5G
11 9 (0.27%) FTP
11 9 (0.27%) IMAP
11 9 (0.27%) LAN
11 9 (0.27%) OpenLDAP
11 9 (0.27%) WAN
12 8 (0.24%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 579 (17.24%) Power BI
2 368 (10.96%) SQL Server
3 347 (10.33%) Data Warehouse
4 244 (7.27%) Relational Database
5 243 (7.24%) PostgreSQL
6 238 (7.09%) NoSQL
7 202 (6.02%) Tableau
8 197 (5.87%) Data Lake
9 167 (4.97%) Azure SQL Database
10 155 (4.62%) Oracle Database
11 129 (3.84%) Metadata
12 107 (3.19%) Big Data
13 106 (3.16%) MySQL
14 101 (3.01%) MongoDB
15 97 (2.89%) BigQuery
16 92 (2.74%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 83 (2.47%) Amazon RDS
18 72 (2.14%) Amazon Redshift
19 68 (2.03%) Delta Lake
20 64 (1.91%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 376 (11.20%) Git
2 306 (9.11%) JIRA
3 183 (5.45%) Jenkins
4 129 (3.84%) GitLab
5 58 (1.73%) JUnit
6 57 (1.70%) Selenium
7 46 (1.37%) Oracle APEX
8 35 (1.04%) Cucumber
9 34 (1.01%) Postman
10 32 (0.95%) Bitbucket
11 23 (0.68%) REST Assured
12 22 (0.66%) Cypress.io
12 22 (0.66%) ERwin
12 22 (0.66%) Maven
12 22 (0.66%) SpecFlow
13 21 (0.63%) Mockito
14 20 (0.60%) Oracle Forms
15 19 (0.57%) MLflow
16 18 (0.54%) Visual Studio
17 17 (0.51%) Gradle
General
1 1,049 (31.24%) Social Skills
2 969 (28.86%) Finance
3 589 (17.54%) Analytical Skills
4 387 (11.52%) Banking
5 263 (7.83%) Public Sector
6 115 (3.42%) Investment Banking
7 94 (2.80%) Front Office
8 87 (2.59%) Marketing
9 85 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
10 63 (1.88%) Retail
11 54 (1.61%) Financial Institution
12 52 (1.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 43 (1.28%) Presentation Skills
14 36 (1.07%) Legal
15 33 (0.98%) Manufacturing
16 28 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
17 27 (0.80%) Back Office
17 27 (0.80%) Publishing
18 26 (0.77%) General Ledger
18 26 (0.77%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 858 (25.55%) Developer
2 529 (15.75%) Analyst
3 509 (15.16%) Data Engineer
4 433 (12.89%) Senior
5 214 (6.37%) Data Analyst
6 206 (6.13%) Lead
7 188 (5.60%) Business Analyst
8 151 (4.50%) Architect
9 137 (4.08%) Senior Developer
10 125 (3.72%) Consultant
11 122 (3.63%) Java Developer
12 111 (3.31%) Software Engineer
13 99 (2.95%) Azure Engineer
14 83 (2.47%) Python Developer
15 79 (2.35%) Senior Data Engineer
16 78 (2.32%) Data Scientist
16 78 (2.32%) Full-Stack Developer
17 76 (2.26%) C# Developer
18 70 (2.08%) Azure Data Engineer
19 64 (1.91%) DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 306 (9.11%) .NET
2 277 (8.25%) REST
3 216 (6.43%) Kafka
4 190 (5.66%) PySpark
5 159 (4.73%) React
6 148 (4.41%) RESTful
7 142 (4.23%) Spring
8 137 (4.08%) HTML
9 126 (3.75%) XML
10 119 (3.54%) Spring Boot
11 117 (3.48%) CSS
12 101 (3.01%) JSON
13 100 (2.98%) Node.js
14 90 (2.68%) AngularJS
15 79 (2.35%) SOAP
16 73 (2.17%) .NET Framework
17 72 (2.14%) Pandas
18 70 (2.08%) Middleware
19 56 (1.67%) Web Services
20 52 (1.55%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 197 (5.87%) Cloud Native
2 101 (3.01%) Data Structures
3 94 (2.80%) Product Ownership
4 86 (2.56%) Legacy Systems
5 83 (2.47%) Data Protection Act
6 75 (2.23%) Management Information System
7 73 (2.17%) Analytical Mindset
8 60 (1.79%) Derivative
9 58 (1.73%) Algorithms
10 53 (1.58%) Onboarding
11 52 (1.55%) Distributed Systems
11 52 (1.55%) Equities
12 51 (1.52%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 47 (1.40%) Fixed Income
14 41 (1.22%) Replication
15 40 (1.19%) Market Risk
16 36 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
17 35 (1.04%) Self-Motivation
18 34 (1.01%) SWIFT Messaging Network
19 31 (0.92%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 313 (9.32%) Linux
2 236 (7.03%) Windows
3 195 (5.81%) Unix
4 61 (1.82%) Windows Server
5 16 (0.48%) Windows Server 2019
6 15 (0.45%) VMS
7 14 (0.42%) Windows 10
8 12 (0.36%) Android
8 12 (0.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 12 (0.36%) Ubuntu
8 12 (0.36%) Windows Server 2016
9 9 (0.27%) 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 (0.089%) zOS
14 1 (0.030%) Mac OS X
14 1 (0.030%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 944 (28.11%) Agile
2 796 (23.70%) CI/CD
3 795 (23.67%) Analytics
4 783 (23.32%) Problem-Solving
5 758 (22.57%) Business Intelligence
6 741 (22.07%) DevOps
7 715 (21.29%) Data Modelling
8 638 (19.00%) ETL
9 490 (14.59%) Data Pipeline
10 404 (12.03%) Data Engineering
11 356 (10.60%) Migration
12 353 (10.51%) Data Governance
13 342 (10.18%) Validation
14 335 (9.98%) Visualisation
15 323 (9.62%) AI
16 316 (9.41%) Data Analysis
17 303 (9.02%) Test Automation
18 293 (8.73%) Microservices
19 289 (8.61%) Data Science
20 279 (8.31%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 1,247 (37.14%) Python
2 513 (15.28%) Java
3 362 (10.78%) C#
4 312 (9.29%) JavaScript
5 258 (7.68%) PL/SQL
6 143 (4.26%) PowerShell
7 129 (3.84%) TypeScript
8 105 (3.13%) R
9 93 (2.77%) T-SQL
10 90 (2.68%) Shell Script
11 88 (2.62%) C++
12 86 (2.56%) Scala
13 74 (2.20%) Data Analysis Expressions
13 74 (2.20%) VBA
14 62 (1.85%) VB
15 54 (1.61%) Bash
16 46 (1.37%) Perl
17 41 (1.22%) Go
18 40 (1.19%) Bicep
19 35 (1.04%) PHP
Qualifications
1 571 (17.00%) Security Cleared
2 435 (12.95%) SC Cleared
3 328 (9.77%) Degree
4 121 (3.60%) Computer Science Degree
5 73 (2.17%) Azure Certification
6 60 (1.79%) DV Cleared
7 55 (1.64%) Master's Degree
8 54 (1.61%) AWS Certification
8 54 (1.61%) BPSS Clearance
9 44 (1.31%) Microsoft Certification
10 36 (1.07%) ISTQB
11 23 (0.68%) ITIL Certification
12 22 (0.66%) Oracle Certification
13 19 (0.57%) CBAP
14 16 (0.48%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 14 (0.42%) MCSE
16 12 (0.36%) Cisco Certification
16 12 (0.36%) PMI Certification
17 11 (0.33%) CCNA
17 11 (0.33%) CFA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 497 (14.80%) Data Quality
2 238 (7.09%) QA
3 126 (3.75%) GDPR
4 57 (1.70%) Accessibility
5 25 (0.74%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 20 (0.60%) SLA
7 19 (0.57%) MiFID
8 18 (0.54%) SEPA
9 17 (0.51%) ISO 20022
10 15 (0.45%) Actionable Recommendations
10 15 (0.45%) PSD2
11 14 (0.42%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 14 (0.42%) WCAG
12 13 (0.39%) HIPAA
13 12 (0.36%) EMIR
13 12 (0.36%) IFRS
14 11 (0.33%) PCI DSS
14 11 (0.33%) PMO
15 9 (0.27%) NIST
16 8 (0.24%) ISO 8583
System Software
1 400 (11.91%) Docker
2 96 (2.86%) Active Directory
3 30 (0.89%) VMware Infrastructure
4 18 (0.54%) Oracle RAC
5 16 (0.48%) Virtual Machines
6 9 (0.27%) DFS Replication
6 9 (0.27%) Dovecot
6 9 (0.27%) Hyper-V
6 9 (0.27%) Postfix
6 9 (0.27%) Squid
7 8 (0.24%) HDFS
8 7 (0.21%) VMware ESXi
8 7 (0.21%) zsh
9 6 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
10 5 (0.15%) Microsoft Virtual Server
10 5 (0.15%) NFS
10 5 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
10 5 (0.15%) vSphere
11 4 (0.12%) VMware Workstation
11 4 (0.12%) XenApp
Systems Management
1 365 (10.87%) Kubernetes
2 235 (7.00%) Terraform
3 69 (2.05%) Grafana
4 60 (1.79%) Ansible
5 55 (1.64%) Prometheus
6 24 (0.71%) SCCM
6 24 (0.71%) SCOM
7 21 (0.63%) HP SiteScope
8 18 (0.54%) Data Guard
8 18 (0.54%) Kibana
8 18 (0.54%) Oracle RMAN
8 18 (0.54%) Puppet
9 17 (0.51%) Progress Chef
10 16 (0.48%) Control-M
11 14 (0.42%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
11 14 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
12 12 (0.36%) Proxmox
13 11 (0.33%) WSUS
14 10 (0.30%) ITRS Geneos
15 9 (0.27%) Nessus
Vendors
1 595 (17.72%) Oracle
2 565 (16.83%) Microsoft
3 363 (10.81%) Databricks
4 133 (3.96%) Google
5 103 (3.07%) Splunk
6 93 (2.77%) SAP
7 71 (2.11%) Salesforce
7 71 (2.11%) ServiceNow
8 64 (1.91%) Talend
9 57 (1.70%) Informatica
10 43 (1.28%) IBM
11 41 (1.22%) Dynatrace
11 41 (1.22%) OpenAI
11 41 (1.22%) VMware
12 39 (1.16%) Citrix
12 39 (1.16%) Denodo
13 35 (1.04%) MuleSoft
14 31 (0.92%) AppDynamics
15 29 (0.86%) Cisco
16 27 (0.80%) Bloomberg