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

6 months to
14 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,960 2,983 3,642
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.13% 12.23% 9.83%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.33% 36.16% 33.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,746 2,105 2,673
10th Percentile £350 £355 £355
25th Percentile £413 £411 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £514 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.72% -6.55% -
75th Percentile £588 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £762 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 60 56 59
10th Percentile £26.50 £24.13 £22.43
25th Percentile £34.75 £30.19 £26.12
Median hourly rate £48.11 £50.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -3.78% +17.65% -14.26%
75th Percentile £72.19 £65.71 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.40 £79.72 £61.99
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £47.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +11.70% +10.59% -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 10,900 8,250 10,738
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 27.89% 33.83% 28.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,265 5,680 7,805
10th Percentile £352 £361 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.67% -2.42% -5.61%
75th Percentile £610 £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 515 212 426
10th Percentile £41.94 £25.31 £35.00
25th Percentile £55.00 £39.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £60.32
Median % change year-on-year +3.59% +4.03% -3.49%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.56 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £80.00
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 14 April 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 14 April 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 14 April 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 2,271 £512 -5.22% 834
Midlands +5 508 £465 +1.20% 296
North of England -12 453 £450 -5.26% 421
West Midlands +6 404 £460 -2.54% 169
South East -19 302 £500 - 504
North West -3 255 £450 -5.26% 245
South West -6 223 £475 -5.00% 167
Yorkshire -18 178 £465 -2.11% 125
East Midlands +1 102 £525 +34.27% 127
East of England -18 88 £510 +9.09% 144
North East -12 31 £475 +4.40% 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
1 218 (5.51%) Apache Spark
2 151 (3.81%) Apache Airflow
3 137 (3.46%) Apache
4 121 (3.06%) Confluence
5 89 (2.25%) SAS
6 81 (2.05%) SharePoint
7 48 (1.21%) WebLogic
8 31 (0.78%) IIS
9 25 (0.63%) Tomcat
10 21 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
11 20 (0.51%) Oracle Workflow
12 18 (0.45%) Jupyter
13 15 (0.38%) Tuxedo
14 14 (0.35%) nginx
14 14 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
15 13 (0.33%) Appian
16 12 (0.30%) CMS
16 12 (0.30%) HCL Notes
16 12 (0.30%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 11 (0.28%) WebSphere
Applications
1 271 (6.84%) Microsoft Excel
2 56 (1.41%) Microsoft Office
3 49 (1.24%) MS Visio
4 34 (0.86%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.53%) Spreadsheet
6 11 (0.28%) Microsoft Project
7 6 (0.15%) Chatbot
8 5 (0.13%) Notepad++
9 3 (0.076%) Notion
9 3 (0.076%) Oracle Smart View
9 3 (0.076%) Trello
10 1 (0.025%) InDesign
10 1 (0.025%) Mingle
10 1 (0.025%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 39 (0.98%) Oracle EBS
2 27 (0.68%) Aladdin
3 21 (0.53%) NEC Housing
3 21 (0.53%) Oracle EBS R12
3 21 (0.53%) Oracle Payables
4 20 (0.51%) Dynamics CRM
5 19 (0.48%) Oracle Receivables
6 17 (0.43%) Oracle General Ledger
6 17 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
7 15 (0.38%) NetSuite
7 15 (0.38%) Oracle ERP
8 10 (0.25%) Oracle 11i
8 10 (0.25%) Oracle Assets
8 10 (0.25%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
8 10 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
8 10 (0.25%) Remedy ITSM
9 9 (0.23%) Advent Geneva
9 9 (0.23%) Oracle Cash Management
10 8 (0.20%) Endur
10 8 (0.20%) Findur
Cloud Services
1 1,369 (34.57%) Azure
2 963 (24.32%) AWS
3 777 (19.62%) Power Platform
4 416 (10.51%) Azure DevOps
5 336 (8.48%) Azure Data Factory
6 316 (7.98%) GCP
7 303 (7.65%) GitHub
8 267 (6.74%) Serverless
9 234 (5.91%) Snowflake
10 227 (5.73%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 225 (5.68%) Amazon S3
12 174 (4.39%) dbt
13 157 (3.96%) GitHub Actions
14 151 (3.81%) AWS Lambda
15 88 (2.22%) Power Automate
16 84 (2.12%) SaaS
17 77 (1.94%) AWS CloudFormation
18 75 (1.89%) Azure Functions
19 72 (1.82%) Entra ID
20 71 (1.79%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 49 (1.24%) Firewall
2 37 (0.93%) DNS
3 22 (0.56%) HTTP
3 22 (0.56%) Network Security
4 16 (0.40%) Internet
4 16 (0.40%) TCP/IP
5 14 (0.35%) WAN
6 13 (0.33%) SSL
7 11 (0.28%) LAN
7 11 (0.28%) SNMP
7 11 (0.28%) VPN
8 9 (0.23%) DHCP
9 8 (0.20%) 5G
10 7 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
11 6 (0.15%) 4G
11 6 (0.15%) VLAN
12 5 (0.13%) NetScaler
12 5 (0.13%) PuTTY
12 5 (0.13%) WinSCP
12 5 (0.13%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 709 (17.90%) Power BI
2 517 (13.06%) Data Warehouse
3 480 (12.12%) SQL Server
4 263 (6.64%) Tableau
5 261 (6.59%) NoSQL
6 258 (6.52%) Relational Database
7 256 (6.46%) PostgreSQL
8 251 (6.34%) Data Lake
9 210 (5.30%) Azure SQL Database
10 207 (5.23%) Metadata
11 142 (3.59%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 141 (3.56%) Oracle Database
13 122 (3.08%) MySQL
14 119 (3.01%) Amazon Redshift
15 114 (2.88%) Delta Lake
16 113 (2.85%) BigQuery
17 101 (2.55%) Big Data
18 99 (2.50%) Oracle Reports
19 95 (2.40%) Amazon RDS
20 93 (2.35%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 436 (11.01%) Git
2 322 (8.13%) JIRA
3 214 (5.40%) Jenkins
4 156 (3.94%) GitLab
5 62 (1.57%) Selenium
6 60 (1.52%) JUnit
7 47 (1.19%) Postman
8 40 (1.01%) Oracle APEX
9 38 (0.96%) Maven
10 37 (0.93%) Cucumber
11 35 (0.88%) MLflow
12 33 (0.83%) Mockito
13 29 (0.73%) REST Assured
14 27 (0.68%) Bitbucket
15 26 (0.66%) ERwin
16 25 (0.63%) JMeter
16 25 (0.63%) SonarQube
17 23 (0.58%) Oracle Forms
18 22 (0.56%) Cypress.io
19 21 (0.53%) SpecFlow
General
1 1,108 (27.98%) Social Skills
2 1,075 (27.15%) Finance
3 744 (18.79%) Analytical Skills
4 389 (9.82%) Banking
5 337 (8.51%) Public Sector
6 103 (2.60%) Front Office
7 101 (2.55%) Investment Banking
8 91 (2.30%) Documentation Skills
9 85 (2.15%) Marketing
10 66 (1.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 56 (1.41%) Legal
12 55 (1.39%) Retail
13 53 (1.34%) Financial Institution
14 40 (1.01%) Telecoms
15 37 (0.93%) Publishing
16 34 (0.86%) Organisational Skills
17 33 (0.83%) Presentation Skills
18 32 (0.81%) Law
19 30 (0.76%) Manufacturing
20 28 (0.71%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 879 (22.20%) Developer
2 780 (19.70%) Data Engineer
3 578 (14.60%) Analyst
4 494 (12.47%) Senior
5 271 (6.84%) Lead
6 246 (6.21%) Data Analyst
7 215 (5.43%) Architect
8 197 (4.97%) Business Analyst
9 184 (4.65%) Consultant
10 151 (3.81%) Java Developer
11 140 (3.54%) Senior Developer
12 119 (3.01%) Senior Data Engineer
13 117 (2.95%) Azure Engineer
14 113 (2.85%) DBA
15 109 (2.75%) Software Engineer
16 101 (2.55%) C# Developer
17 93 (2.35%) Python Developer
18 87 (2.20%) Full-Stack Developer
19 85 (2.15%) Data Scientist
20 84 (2.12%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 345 (8.71%) .NET
2 313 (7.90%) REST
3 248 (6.26%) Kafka
4 243 (6.14%) PySpark
5 195 (4.92%) React
6 182 (4.60%) RESTful
6 182 (4.60%) Spring
7 169 (4.27%) Spring Boot
8 149 (3.76%) XML
9 140 (3.54%) HTML
10 126 (3.18%) Pandas
11 122 (3.08%) JSON
12 119 (3.01%) CSS
13 113 (2.85%) AngularJS
14 88 (2.22%) Node.js
15 84 (2.12%) Middleware
16 79 (1.99%) .NET Framework
16 79 (1.99%) SOAP
16 79 (1.99%) Web Services
17 74 (1.87%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 251 (6.34%) Cloud Native
2 139 (3.51%) Data Structures
3 128 (3.23%) Legacy Systems
4 118 (2.98%) Product Ownership
5 91 (2.30%) Distributed Systems
6 85 (2.15%) Management Information System
7 73 (1.84%) Derivative
8 67 (1.69%) Data Protection Act
9 66 (1.67%) Onboarding
10 63 (1.59%) Analytical Mindset
11 57 (1.44%) Equities
11 57 (1.44%) Fixed Income
12 52 (1.31%) Algorithms
13 48 (1.21%) Clustering
14 45 (1.14%) Enterprise Software
14 45 (1.14%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
15 44 (1.11%) Self-Motivation
16 39 (0.98%) Replication
17 37 (0.93%) NHS
18 34 (0.86%) Market Risk
Operating Systems
1 277 (6.99%) Linux
2 242 (6.11%) Windows
3 196 (4.95%) Unix
4 78 (1.97%) Windows Server
5 21 (0.53%) AIX
6 19 (0.48%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 13 (0.33%) Windows Server 2019
8 10 (0.25%) Windows 10
8 10 (0.25%) Windows Server 2016
9 7 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
10 6 (0.15%) Android
10 6 (0.15%) Solaris
10 6 (0.15%) Windows Server 2012
10 6 (0.15%) zOS
11 4 (0.10%) Apple iOS
12 3 (0.076%) CentOS
12 3 (0.076%) Oracle Linux
13 2 (0.051%) Data ONTAP
14 1 (0.025%) VME
14 1 (0.025%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,077 (27.20%) CI/CD
2 1,044 (26.36%) Agile
3 1,034 (26.11%) Analytics
4 987 (24.92%) Data Modelling
5 942 (23.79%) ETL
6 940 (23.74%) Business Intelligence
7 920 (23.23%) DevOps
8 850 (21.46%) Problem-Solving
9 699 (17.65%) Data Pipeline
10 622 (15.71%) Data Engineering
11 486 (12.27%) AI
12 481 (12.15%) Data Governance
13 480 (12.12%) Migration
14 471 (11.89%) Validation
15 379 (9.57%) Test Automation
16 378 (9.55%) Data Analysis
17 370 (9.34%) Decision-Making
18 358 (9.04%) Performance Tuning
19 351 (8.86%) Microservices
20 346 (8.74%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,489 (37.60%) Python
2 546 (13.79%) Java
3 423 (10.68%) C#
4 317 (8.01%) JavaScript
5 303 (7.65%) PL/SQL
6 179 (4.52%) T-SQL
7 170 (4.29%) PowerShell
8 138 (3.48%) TypeScript
9 119 (3.01%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 115 (2.90%) Shell Script
11 112 (2.83%) R
12 94 (2.37%) Scala
13 67 (1.69%) Bash
14 61 (1.54%) C++
14 61 (1.54%) VBA
15 45 (1.14%) Bicep
16 43 (1.09%) Perl
17 29 (0.73%) Go
18 26 (0.66%) VB
19 22 (0.56%) C
Qualifications
1 831 (20.98%) Security Cleared
2 673 (16.99%) SC Cleared
3 316 (7.98%) Degree
4 111 (2.80%) Computer Science Degree
5 84 (2.12%) BPSS Clearance
6 66 (1.67%) Azure Certification
7 51 (1.29%) DV Cleared
8 50 (1.26%) ISTQB
8 50 (1.26%) Master's Degree
9 40 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
10 31 (0.78%) AWS Certification
11 18 (0.45%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
12 16 (0.40%) Oracle Certification
12 16 (0.40%) PhD
13 13 (0.33%) CBAP
14 10 (0.25%) PMP
15 9 (0.23%) DBS Check
15 9 (0.23%) PMI Certification
16 8 (0.20%) ISEB
17 7 (0.18%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 718 (18.13%) Data Quality
2 303 (7.65%) QA
3 176 (4.44%) GDPR
4 52 (1.31%) Accessibility
5 32 (0.81%) SLA
6 30 (0.76%) PMO
7 29 (0.73%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 23 (0.58%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 17 (0.43%) PCI DSS
10 16 (0.40%) NIST
11 15 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
12 14 (0.35%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 14 (0.35%) MiFID
13 13 (0.33%) IFRS
14 12 (0.30%) HIPAA
15 11 (0.28%) HL7
16 10 (0.25%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.25%) SEPA
16 10 (0.25%) Solvency II
16 10 (0.25%) WCAG
System Software
1 461 (11.64%) Docker
2 96 (2.42%) Active Directory
3 34 (0.86%) Virtual Machines
4 20 (0.51%) Oracle RAC
5 18 (0.45%) VMware Infrastructure
6 14 (0.35%) Hyper-V
7 8 (0.20%) KVM
7 8 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
8 6 (0.15%) HDFS
8 6 (0.15%) Postfix
8 6 (0.15%) RACF
9 5 (0.13%) VMware ESXi
9 5 (0.13%) XenApp
9 5 (0.13%) XenDesktop
10 3 (0.076%) Oracle Clusterware
11 2 (0.051%) GridGain
11 2 (0.051%) vSphere
12 1 (0.025%) Microsoft App-V
12 1 (0.025%) Varnish
12 1 (0.025%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 411 (10.38%) Kubernetes
2 319 (8.06%) Terraform
3 94 (2.37%) Grafana
4 63 (1.59%) Ansible
5 61 (1.54%) Prometheus
6 32 (0.81%) Oracle RMAN
7 21 (0.53%) Data Guard
8 20 (0.51%) Single Sign-On
9 17 (0.43%) Progress Chef
10 15 (0.38%) SCCM
11 14 (0.35%) Control-M
12 11 (0.28%) ZABBIX
13 10 (0.25%) Kibana
13 10 (0.25%) Nagios
13 10 (0.25%) Netcool
13 10 (0.25%) OpenView
13 10 (0.25%) Tivoli
13 10 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 9 (0.23%) Kiali
15 8 (0.20%) Active Directory Federation Services
Vendors
1 656 (16.57%) Oracle
2 651 (16.44%) Microsoft
3 483 (12.20%) Databricks
4 157 (3.96%) Google
5 122 (3.08%) ServiceNow
6 121 (3.06%) Informatica
7 103 (2.60%) SAP
8 101 (2.55%) Talend
9 77 (1.94%) Splunk
10 61 (1.54%) Salesforce
11 60 (1.52%) IBM
12 55 (1.39%) Denodo
13 52 (1.31%) Citrix
14 44 (1.11%) OpenAI
15 34 (0.86%) MuleSoft
16 31 (0.78%) VMware
17 30 (0.76%) Bloomberg
17 30 (0.76%) Dynatrace
18 28 (0.71%) HP
19 26 (0.66%) Foundry