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

6 months to
21 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 -1 0
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,864 2,986 3,759
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.32% 12.19% 9.97%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.89% 36.08% 34.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,678 2,079 2,722
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
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 £709 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -2.42%
Number of hourly rates quoted 54 60 62
10th Percentile £21.26 £25.03 £21.65
25th Percentile £34.01 £30.19 £25.91
Median hourly rate £45.25 £50.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -9.50% +17.65% -15.00%
75th Percentile £69.86 £65.62 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £77.70 £61.61
UK median hourly rate £48.72 £50.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year -2.56% +17.65% -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 10,765 8,276 10,897
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 28.75% 33.79% 28.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,186 5,597 7,872
10th Percentile £352 £358 £350
25th Percentile £414 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -2.33% -6.03%
75th Percentile £613 £650 £656
90th Percentile £725 £775 £774
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 458 218 445
10th Percentile £41.94 £25.25 £35.20
25th Percentile £55.00 £39.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £67.50
90th Percentile £76.48 £85.00 £75.00
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 21 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 21 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 21 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 2,290 £513 -5.09% 851
Midlands +2 465 £471 +2.39% 254
North of England -9 431 £450 -5.26% 432
West Midlands +5 371 £466 -2.32% 157
South East -18 294 £500 - 526
North West +1 248 £447 -5.89% 236
South West -3 199 £475 -6.86% 145
Yorkshire -22 162 £500 - 139
East Midlands -7 92 £525 +34.87% 96
East of England -21 79 £500 +8.99% 131
North East -4 32 £475 +5.56% 62
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
1 216 (5.59%) Apache Spark
2 150 (3.88%) Apache Airflow
3 130 (3.36%) Apache
4 118 (3.05%) Confluence
5 78 (2.02%) SharePoint
6 76 (1.97%) SAS
7 48 (1.24%) WebLogic
8 28 (0.72%) IIS
9 23 (0.60%) Tomcat
10 22 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
11 19 (0.49%) Jupyter
12 17 (0.44%) CMS
13 16 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
14 15 (0.39%) Tuxedo
15 13 (0.34%) Oracle Workflow
16 12 (0.31%) Appian
16 12 (0.31%) HCL Notes
16 12 (0.31%) WebSphere
17 11 (0.28%) Mendix
17 11 (0.28%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 264 (6.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.50%) Microsoft Office
3 46 (1.19%) MS Visio
4 34 (0.88%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 15 (0.39%) Spreadsheet
6 11 (0.28%) Microsoft Project
7 7 (0.18%) 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 29 (0.75%) Aladdin
2 28 (0.72%) Oracle EBS
3 25 (0.65%) Oracle Payables
4 22 (0.57%) Oracle Receivables
5 20 (0.52%) NEC Housing
5 20 (0.52%) Oracle General Ledger
6 17 (0.44%) Dynamics CRM
6 17 (0.44%) Oracle EBS R12
7 15 (0.39%) Oracle Assets
7 15 (0.39%) SAP S/4HANA
8 14 (0.36%) Oracle ERP
9 13 (0.34%) NetSuite
10 11 (0.28%) Oracle Cash Management
10 11 (0.28%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
11 10 (0.26%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
12 9 (0.23%) Advent Geneva
12 9 (0.23%) Oracle 11i
13 8 (0.21%) Endur
13 8 (0.21%) Findur
13 8 (0.21%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 1,354 (35.04%) Azure
2 953 (24.66%) AWS
3 741 (19.18%) Power Platform
4 403 (10.43%) Azure DevOps
5 322 (8.33%) Azure Data Factory
6 318 (8.23%) GCP
7 310 (8.02%) GitHub
8 275 (7.12%) Serverless
9 259 (6.70%) Snowflake
10 217 (5.62%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 206 (5.33%) Amazon S3
12 158 (4.09%) dbt
13 157 (4.06%) GitHub Actions
14 144 (3.73%) AWS Lambda
15 94 (2.43%) SaaS
16 88 (2.28%) Azure Functions
17 84 (2.17%) Power Automate
18 72 (1.86%) Entra ID
19 71 (1.84%) AWS CloudFormation
20 69 (1.79%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 51 (1.32%) Firewall
2 40 (1.04%) DNS
3 22 (0.57%) Network Security
4 19 (0.49%) HTTP
5 18 (0.47%) TCP/IP
6 15 (0.39%) Internet
6 15 (0.39%) WAN
7 14 (0.36%) VPN
8 13 (0.34%) 5G
8 13 (0.34%) SSL
9 12 (0.31%) LAN
10 11 (0.28%) DHCP
11 10 (0.26%) 4G
12 9 (0.23%) 2G
12 9 (0.23%) Radio Access Network
13 8 (0.21%) SMS
14 7 (0.18%) Multicast
14 7 (0.18%) SNMP
14 7 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
15 6 (0.16%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 676 (17.49%) Power BI
2 480 (12.42%) Data Warehouse
3 461 (11.93%) SQL Server
4 269 (6.96%) Relational Database
5 265 (6.86%) NoSQL
6 252 (6.52%) PostgreSQL
7 245 (6.34%) Tableau
8 244 (6.31%) Data Lake
9 207 (5.36%) Azure SQL Database
10 193 (4.99%) Metadata
11 140 (3.62%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 138 (3.57%) Oracle Database
13 120 (3.11%) Big Data
14 114 (2.95%) BigQuery
15 109 (2.82%) MySQL
16 107 (2.77%) Delta Lake
17 106 (2.74%) Amazon Redshift
18 97 (2.51%) MongoDB
19 94 (2.43%) Amazon RDS
20 85 (2.20%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 432 (11.18%) Git
2 308 (7.97%) JIRA
3 212 (5.49%) Jenkins
4 156 (4.04%) GitLab
5 61 (1.58%) JUnit
6 57 (1.48%) Selenium
7 43 (1.11%) Postman
8 41 (1.06%) Oracle APEX
9 38 (0.98%) Cucumber
10 35 (0.91%) Maven
10 35 (0.91%) MLflow
11 30 (0.78%) Mockito
12 29 (0.75%) REST Assured
13 26 (0.67%) ERwin
14 25 (0.65%) Bitbucket
15 24 (0.62%) Cypress.io
16 23 (0.60%) Visual Studio
17 22 (0.57%) SpecFlow
18 21 (0.54%) JMeter
19 20 (0.52%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,112 (28.78%) Social Skills
2 1,066 (27.59%) Finance
3 709 (18.35%) Analytical Skills
4 399 (10.33%) Banking
5 344 (8.90%) Public Sector
6 106 (2.74%) Investment Banking
7 103 (2.67%) Front Office
8 94 (2.43%) Documentation Skills
9 84 (2.17%) Marketing
10 59 (1.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 58 (1.50%) Retail
12 55 (1.42%) Financial Institution
13 52 (1.35%) Legal
14 40 (1.04%) Publishing
15 36 (0.93%) Telecoms
16 35 (0.91%) Organisational Skills
17 34 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
18 32 (0.83%) Law
19 31 (0.80%) Manufacturing
20 26 (0.67%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 899 (23.27%) Developer
2 719 (18.61%) Data Engineer
3 557 (14.42%) Analyst
4 497 (12.86%) Senior
5 278 (7.19%) Lead
6 234 (6.06%) Data Analyst
7 210 (5.43%) Architect
8 198 (5.12%) Business Analyst
9 164 (4.24%) Consultant
10 146 (3.78%) Senior Developer
11 139 (3.60%) Java Developer
12 113 (2.92%) Azure Engineer
13 111 (2.87%) Software Engineer
14 108 (2.80%) Senior Data Engineer
15 102 (2.64%) C# Developer
15 102 (2.64%) DBA
16 90 (2.33%) Python Developer
17 89 (2.30%) Full-Stack Developer
18 86 (2.23%) Data Scientist
19 84 (2.17%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 343 (8.88%) .NET
2 308 (7.97%) REST
3 258 (6.68%) Kafka
4 241 (6.24%) PySpark
5 191 (4.94%) React
6 183 (4.74%) RESTful
7 166 (4.30%) Spring
8 153 (3.96%) XML
9 149 (3.86%) Spring Boot
10 133 (3.44%) HTML
11 120 (3.11%) JSON
12 116 (3.00%) AngularJS
13 115 (2.98%) Pandas
14 114 (2.95%) CSS
15 92 (2.38%) Node.js
16 84 (2.17%) .NET Framework
17 77 (1.99%) SOAP
18 76 (1.97%) Middleware
19 73 (1.89%) scikit-learn
19 73 (1.89%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 259 (6.70%) Cloud Native
2 130 (3.36%) Data Structures
3 127 (3.29%) Legacy Systems
4 114 (2.95%) Product Ownership
5 84 (2.17%) Management Information System
6 82 (2.12%) Distributed Systems
7 76 (1.97%) Derivative
8 71 (1.84%) Data Protection Act
9 70 (1.81%) Analytical Mindset
10 62 (1.60%) Equities
11 61 (1.58%) Fixed Income
12 59 (1.53%) Algorithms
13 57 (1.48%) Onboarding
14 49 (1.27%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
15 43 (1.11%) Enterprise Software
16 42 (1.09%) Replication
16 42 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
17 41 (1.06%) Clustering
18 37 (0.96%) Market Risk
19 31 (0.80%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 285 (7.38%) Linux
2 225 (5.82%) Windows
3 187 (4.84%) Unix
4 75 (1.94%) Windows Server
5 17 (0.44%) AIX
5 17 (0.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 13 (0.34%) Windows Server 2019
7 10 (0.26%) Windows 10
8 9 (0.23%) Windows Server 2016
9 6 (0.16%) Android
9 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2012
10 5 (0.13%) Apple iOS
10 5 (0.13%) zOS
11 4 (0.10%) Solaris
11 4 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
12 3 (0.078%) CentOS
12 3 (0.078%) VMS
13 2 (0.052%) Data ONTAP
13 2 (0.052%) Oracle Linux
13 2 (0.052%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,037 (26.84%) Agile
1 1,037 (26.84%) CI/CD
2 1,002 (25.93%) Analytics
3 930 (24.07%) Data Modelling
4 901 (23.32%) DevOps
5 891 (23.06%) ETL
6 890 (23.03%) Business Intelligence
7 830 (21.48%) Problem-Solving
8 651 (16.85%) Data Pipeline
9 609 (15.76%) Data Engineering
10 473 (12.24%) AI
11 458 (11.85%) Data Governance
12 457 (11.83%) Migration
13 428 (11.08%) Validation
14 378 (9.78%) Data Analysis
15 369 (9.55%) Test Automation
16 350 (9.06%) Decision-Making
17 347 (8.98%) Data Science
18 338 (8.75%) Microservices
19 336 (8.70%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 1,460 (37.78%) Python
2 546 (14.13%) Java
3 424 (10.97%) C#
4 317 (8.20%) JavaScript
5 277 (7.17%) PL/SQL
6 163 (4.22%) T-SQL
7 154 (3.99%) PowerShell
8 148 (3.83%) TypeScript
9 110 (2.85%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 110 (2.85%) Shell Script
10 103 (2.67%) R
11 95 (2.46%) Scala
12 69 (1.79%) C++
13 65 (1.68%) Bash
14 58 (1.50%) VBA
15 47 (1.22%) Perl
16 46 (1.19%) Bicep
17 40 (1.04%) VB
18 36 (0.93%) Go
19 25 (0.65%) PHP
Qualifications
1 775 (20.06%) Security Cleared
2 616 (15.94%) SC Cleared
3 328 (8.49%) Degree
4 112 (2.90%) Computer Science Degree
5 81 (2.10%) BPSS Clearance
6 66 (1.71%) Azure Certification
7 57 (1.48%) Master's Degree
8 51 (1.32%) ISTQB
9 50 (1.29%) DV Cleared
10 40 (1.04%) Microsoft Certification
11 38 (0.98%) AWS Certification
12 21 (0.54%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 16 (0.41%) 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 (17.65%) Data Quality
2 287 (7.43%) QA
3 171 (4.43%) GDPR
4 57 (1.48%) Accessibility
5 29 (0.75%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 28 (0.72%) SLA
7 26 (0.67%) PMO
8 20 (0.52%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 20 (0.52%) MiFID
9 17 (0.44%) NIST
10 16 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
10 16 (0.41%) HIPAA
11 15 (0.39%) PCI DSS
12 14 (0.36%) WCAG
13 12 (0.31%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 12 (0.31%) IFRS
13 12 (0.31%) SEPA
14 11 (0.28%) EMIR
15 10 (0.26%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.26%) Solvency II
System Software
1 453 (11.72%) Docker
2 95 (2.46%) Active Directory
3 32 (0.83%) Virtual Machines
4 16 (0.41%) Oracle RAC
4 16 (0.41%) VMware Infrastructure
5 12 (0.31%) Hyper-V
6 8 (0.21%) HDFS
6 8 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
7 6 (0.16%) KVM
8 5 (0.13%) RACF
8 5 (0.13%) XenApp
8 5 (0.13%) XenDesktop
9 4 (0.10%) Postfix
10 3 (0.078%) Oracle Clusterware
10 3 (0.078%) VMware ESXi
11 2 (0.052%) GridGain
11 2 (0.052%) VMware NSX
11 2 (0.052%) vSphere
12 1 (0.026%) Lustre
12 1 (0.026%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 411 (10.64%) Kubernetes
2 305 (7.89%) Terraform
3 86 (2.23%) Grafana
4 65 (1.68%) Ansible
5 61 (1.58%) Prometheus
6 23 (0.60%) Oracle RMAN
7 22 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
8 17 (0.44%) Progress Chef
9 16 (0.41%) SCCM
10 15 (0.39%) Data Guard
11 14 (0.36%) Control-M
12 12 (0.31%) Kibana
13 9 (0.23%) HP Quality Center
13 9 (0.23%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
13 9 (0.23%) Puppet
14 8 (0.21%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 8 (0.21%) Kiali
15 7 (0.18%) HP ALM
15 7 (0.18%) vCenter Server
15 7 (0.18%) WSUS
Vendors
1 628 (16.25%) Microsoft
2 623 (16.12%) Oracle
3 469 (12.14%) Databricks
4 164 (4.24%) Google
5 113 (2.92%) Informatica
6 109 (2.82%) ServiceNow
7 96 (2.48%) Talend
8 93 (2.41%) SAP
9 67 (1.73%) Splunk
10 61 (1.58%) Salesforce
11 57 (1.48%) IBM
12 49 (1.27%) Citrix
13 44 (1.14%) OpenAI
14 42 (1.09%) MuleSoft
15 41 (1.06%) Denodo
16 35 (0.91%) Bloomberg
17 29 (0.75%) Foundry
17 29 (0.75%) VMware
18 26 (0.67%) Dynatrace
18 26 (0.67%) Palantir