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 13 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -3 0 -3
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,583 3,091 3,847
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.50% 11.86% 10.17%
As % of the Programming Languages category 34.83% 35.34% 34.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,468 2,077 2,802
10th Percentile £350 £354 £356
25th Percentile £413 £413 £426
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £715 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £504 £540
% change year-on-year -0.74% -6.71% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 66 52 63
10th Percentile £21.77 £25.26 £21.64
25th Percentile £33.19 £34.12 £26.29
Median hourly rate £52.25 £52.75 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% +24.12% -15.00%
75th Percentile £57.50 £65.15 £53.50
90th Percentile £74.47 £77.10 £61.75
UK median hourly rate £54.75 £52.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year +4.29% +23.53% -15.84%

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 10,287 8,746 11,102
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 30.14% 33.56% 29.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,837 5,647 8,009
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £658
90th Percentile £725 £775 £763
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £535
% change year-on-year -4.76% -1.87% -4.89%
Number of hourly rates quoted 437 201 473
10th Percentile £41.25 £25.26 £36.25
25th Percentile £52.50 £41.50 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.17% +5.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.50
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 13 February 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 13 February 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 13 February 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 2,179 £513 -6.82% 576
North of England -4 376 £450 -5.26% 341
Midlands -5 362 £500 +7.53% 291
South East -17 297 £480 -4.00% 570
West Midlands +1 276 £500 +1.52% 187
North West +4 214 £420 -7.69% 199
South West -3 183 £475 -5.94% 144
Yorkshire -28 141 £500 -2.20% 104
East Midlands -11 86 £525 +34.87% 104
East of England -16 81 £550 +12.82% 118
North East -7 26 £475 -5.00% 40
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
1 185 (5.16%) Apache Spark
2 150 (4.19%) Apache Airflow
3 111 (3.10%) Apache
3 111 (3.10%) Confluence
4 87 (2.43%) SharePoint
5 55 (1.54%) SAS
6 46 (1.28%) WebLogic
7 25 (0.70%) IIS
8 24 (0.67%) Microsoft Exchange
9 19 (0.53%) Skype for Business
10 18 (0.50%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 17 (0.47%) CMS
12 14 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
12 14 (0.39%) Tomcat
13 13 (0.36%) Jupyter
13 13 (0.36%) Mattermost
13 13 (0.36%) nginx
14 12 (0.33%) Appian
14 12 (0.33%) JBoss
14 12 (0.33%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 233 (6.50%) Microsoft Excel
2 76 (2.12%) Microsoft Office
3 43 (1.20%) MS Visio
4 36 (1.00%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 13 (0.36%) Microsoft Project
6 11 (0.31%) Spreadsheet
7 9 (0.25%) Chatbot
8 6 (0.17%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 5 (0.14%) Trello
10 3 (0.084%) Notion
11 2 (0.056%) Maya
11 2 (0.056%) NUKE
11 2 (0.056%) Oracle Smart View
12 1 (0.028%) SPSS
12 1 (0.028%) Weka
Business Applications
1 26 (0.73%) Oracle Payables
2 24 (0.67%) Aladdin
3 22 (0.61%) Oracle Receivables
4 21 (0.59%) Dynamics CRM
4 21 (0.59%) Oracle General Ledger
5 20 (0.56%) NEC Housing
5 20 (0.56%) Oracle EBS
6 19 (0.53%) Remedy ITSM
7 16 (0.45%) Oracle Assets
8 14 (0.39%) SAP S/4HANA
9 13 (0.36%) Endur
9 13 (0.36%) NetSuite
9 13 (0.36%) Oracle EBS R12
9 13 (0.36%) Oracle ERP
10 12 (0.33%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
11 11 (0.31%) Oracle Cash Management
12 10 (0.28%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
13 9 (0.25%) Advent Geneva
13 9 (0.25%) Maximo
14 8 (0.22%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,206 (33.66%) Azure
2 875 (24.42%) AWS
3 680 (18.98%) Power Platform
4 344 (9.60%) Azure DevOps
5 303 (8.46%) GCP
6 276 (7.70%) Azure Data Factory
7 273 (7.62%) GitHub
8 255 (7.12%) Serverless
9 245 (6.84%) Snowflake
10 195 (5.44%) Amazon S3
11 187 (5.22%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 150 (4.19%) dbt
13 141 (3.94%) GitHub Actions
14 125 (3.49%) AWS Lambda
15 98 (2.74%) SaaS
16 85 (2.37%) Azure Functions
17 78 (2.18%) Power Automate
18 67 (1.87%) PowerApps
19 60 (1.67%) AWS CloudFormation
20 58 (1.62%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 49 (1.37%) Firewall
2 38 (1.06%) DNS
3 26 (0.73%) HTTP
4 23 (0.64%) Skype
5 18 (0.50%) Network Security
6 17 (0.47%) TCP/IP
7 14 (0.39%) DHCP
7 14 (0.39%) Internet
8 12 (0.33%) SSL
8 12 (0.33%) Unified Communications
9 9 (0.25%) 2G
9 9 (0.25%) 5G
9 9 (0.25%) LAN
9 9 (0.25%) VPN
9 9 (0.25%) WAN
10 8 (0.22%) SMS
10 8 (0.22%) SSH
11 7 (0.20%) Multicast
11 7 (0.20%) Radio Access Network
11 7 (0.20%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 617 (17.22%) Power BI
2 406 (11.33%) SQL Server
3 386 (10.77%) Data Warehouse
4 256 (7.14%) Relational Database
5 253 (7.06%) NoSQL
6 250 (6.98%) PostgreSQL
7 228 (6.36%) Tableau
8 225 (6.28%) Data Lake
9 180 (5.02%) Azure SQL Database
10 149 (4.16%) Metadata
10 149 (4.16%) Oracle Database
11 120 (3.35%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 114 (3.18%) BigQuery
13 110 (3.07%) Big Data
14 107 (2.99%) MySQL
15 102 (2.85%) MongoDB
16 86 (2.40%) Amazon RDS
17 85 (2.37%) Delta Lake
18 84 (2.34%) Amazon Redshift
19 72 (2.01%) SQL Server Reporting Services
Development Applications
1 394 (11.00%) Git
2 293 (8.18%) JIRA
3 173 (4.83%) Jenkins
4 134 (3.74%) GitLab
5 58 (1.62%) Selenium
6 57 (1.59%) JUnit
7 43 (1.20%) Oracle APEX
8 40 (1.12%) Postman
9 37 (1.03%) Cucumber
10 31 (0.87%) REST Assured
11 28 (0.78%) Bitbucket
11 28 (0.78%) Maven
12 27 (0.75%) MLflow
13 24 (0.67%) Mockito
14 23 (0.64%) ERwin
15 22 (0.61%) Visual Studio
16 21 (0.59%) Cypress.io
17 20 (0.56%) SpecFlow
18 18 (0.50%) Gradle
19 17 (0.47%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,107 (30.90%) Social Skills
2 1,035 (28.89%) Finance
3 644 (17.97%) Analytical Skills
4 394 (11.00%) Banking
5 286 (7.98%) Public Sector
6 111 (3.10%) Investment Banking
7 96 (2.68%) Front Office
8 95 (2.65%) Documentation Skills
9 82 (2.29%) Marketing
10 63 (1.76%) Retail
11 58 (1.62%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 56 (1.56%) Financial Institution
13 41 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
14 35 (0.98%) Legal
15 33 (0.92%) Publishing
15 33 (0.92%) Telecoms
16 31 (0.87%) Organisational Skills
17 30 (0.84%) Law
18 29 (0.81%) Back Office
18 29 (0.81%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 878 (24.50%) Developer
2 587 (16.38%) Data Engineer
3 572 (15.96%) Analyst
4 479 (13.37%) Senior
5 246 (6.87%) Lead
6 227 (6.34%) Data Analyst
7 200 (5.58%) Business Analyst
8 180 (5.02%) Architect
9 146 (4.07%) Senior Developer
10 122 (3.40%) Java Developer
11 118 (3.29%) Consultant
12 111 (3.10%) Azure Engineer
13 106 (2.96%) Software Engineer
14 97 (2.71%) Senior Data Engineer
15 92 (2.57%) Data Scientist
16 86 (2.40%) Python Developer
17 83 (2.32%) C# Developer
18 81 (2.26%) Full-Stack Developer
19 73 (2.04%) Azure Data Engineer
20 69 (1.93%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 328 (9.15%) .NET
2 291 (8.12%) REST
3 234 (6.53%) Kafka
4 208 (5.81%) PySpark
5 170 (4.74%) React
6 163 (4.55%) RESTful
7 148 (4.13%) Spring
8 138 (3.85%) XML
9 135 (3.77%) HTML
10 132 (3.68%) Spring Boot
11 117 (3.27%) CSS
12 108 (3.01%) JSON
13 96 (2.68%) Node.js
14 95 (2.65%) AngularJS
15 94 (2.62%) Pandas
16 87 (2.43%) SOAP
17 79 (2.20%) .NET Framework
18 71 (1.98%) Middleware
19 70 (1.95%) Web Services
20 67 (1.87%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 218 (6.08%) Cloud Native
2 113 (3.15%) Data Structures
3 108 (3.01%) Product Ownership
4 100 (2.79%) Legacy Systems
5 81 (2.26%) Management Information System
6 75 (2.09%) Data Protection Act
7 73 (2.04%) Analytical Mindset
8 69 (1.93%) Distributed Systems
9 67 (1.87%) Algorithms
10 66 (1.84%) Derivative
11 56 (1.56%) Equities
12 51 (1.42%) Fixed Income
13 50 (1.40%) Onboarding
14 48 (1.34%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
15 44 (1.23%) Replication
16 37 (1.03%) Market Risk
17 36 (1.00%) Clustering
18 35 (0.98%) Enterprise Software
19 33 (0.92%) Credit Risk
19 33 (0.92%) SWIFT Messaging Network
Operating Systems
1 306 (8.54%) Linux
2 220 (6.14%) Windows
3 189 (5.27%) Unix
4 63 (1.76%) Windows Server
5 14 (0.39%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 14 (0.39%) Windows Server 2019
6 13 (0.36%) Windows Server 2016
7 12 (0.33%) Windows 10
8 11 (0.31%) VMS
9 10 (0.28%) Android
10 9 (0.25%) Apple iOS
10 9 (0.25%) Ubuntu
11 8 (0.22%) AIX
12 6 (0.17%) Amazon Linux
13 5 (0.14%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.11%) CentOS
15 3 (0.084%) zOS
16 1 (0.028%) VME
16 1 (0.028%) Windows Server 2003
16 1 (0.028%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 981 (27.38%) Agile
2 885 (24.70%) CI/CD
3 879 (24.53%) Analytics
4 815 (22.75%) Problem-Solving
5 799 (22.30%) Business Intelligence
6 786 (21.94%) DevOps
7 777 (21.69%) Data Modelling
8 719 (20.07%) ETL
9 537 (14.99%) Data Pipeline
10 497 (13.87%) Data Engineering
11 403 (11.25%) Migration
12 389 (10.86%) Data Governance
13 388 (10.83%) AI
14 371 (10.35%) Validation
15 352 (9.82%) Data Analysis
16 341 (9.52%) Visualisation
17 338 (9.43%) Data Science
18 312 (8.71%) Decision-Making
19 310 (8.65%) Microservices
19 310 (8.65%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 1,344 (37.51%) Python
2 533 (14.88%) Java
3 387 (10.80%) C#
4 310 (8.65%) JavaScript
5 257 (7.17%) PL/SQL
6 159 (4.44%) PowerShell
7 136 (3.80%) TypeScript
8 113 (3.15%) T-SQL
9 103 (2.87%) Shell Script
10 102 (2.85%) R
11 94 (2.62%) Scala
12 84 (2.34%) Data Analysis Expressions
13 81 (2.26%) C++
14 71 (1.98%) VBA
15 61 (1.70%) VB
16 55 (1.54%) Bash
17 48 (1.34%) Go
17 48 (1.34%) Perl
18 41 (1.14%) Bicep
19 27 (0.75%) PHP
Qualifications
1 608 (16.97%) Security Cleared
2 470 (13.12%) SC Cleared
3 349 (9.74%) Degree
4 116 (3.24%) Computer Science Degree
5 79 (2.20%) Azure Certification
6 72 (2.01%) BPSS Clearance
7 62 (1.73%) DV Cleared
8 61 (1.70%) Master's Degree
9 56 (1.56%) AWS Certification
10 44 (1.23%) Microsoft Certification
11 39 (1.09%) ISTQB
12 22 (0.61%) ITIL Certification
12 22 (0.61%) Oracle Certification
13 20 (0.56%) CBAP
14 19 (0.53%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 12 (0.33%) Cisco Certification
15 12 (0.33%) MCSE
15 12 (0.33%) PMI Certification
16 11 (0.31%) CCNA
17 10 (0.28%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 559 (15.60%) Data Quality
2 265 (7.40%) QA
3 146 (4.07%) GDPR
4 57 (1.59%) Accessibility
5 27 (0.75%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 25 (0.70%) SLA
7 20 (0.56%) MiFID
8 19 (0.53%) PMO
9 17 (0.47%) Actionable Recommendations
9 17 (0.47%) SEPA
10 16 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 15 (0.42%) HIPAA
11 15 (0.42%) ISO 20022
12 14 (0.39%) EMIR
12 14 (0.39%) PSD2
13 13 (0.36%) PCI DSS
13 13 (0.36%) WCAG
14 12 (0.33%) IFRS
15 11 (0.31%) NIST
16 8 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 415 (11.58%) Docker
2 101 (2.82%) Active Directory
3 25 (0.70%) Virtual Machines
4 22 (0.61%) VMware Infrastructure
5 16 (0.45%) Oracle RAC
6 11 (0.31%) Hyper-V
7 7 (0.20%) Postfix
8 6 (0.17%) DFS Replication
8 6 (0.17%) Dovecot
8 6 (0.17%) Squid
8 6 (0.17%) Virtual Desktop
8 6 (0.17%) zsh
9 5 (0.14%) HDFS
9 5 (0.14%) Microsoft Virtual Server
9 5 (0.14%) RACF
9 5 (0.14%) Virtual Servers
9 5 (0.14%) XenApp
9 5 (0.14%) XenDesktop
10 4 (0.11%) VMware ESXi
11 3 (0.084%) KVM
Systems Management
1 371 (10.35%) Kubernetes
2 270 (7.54%) Terraform
3 77 (2.15%) Grafana
4 64 (1.79%) Prometheus
5 57 (1.59%) Ansible
6 23 (0.64%) SCOM
7 22 (0.61%) SCCM
8 21 (0.59%) HP SiteScope
9 20 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
10 17 (0.47%) Control-M
10 17 (0.47%) Progress Chef
11 16 (0.45%) Data Guard
11 16 (0.45%) Oracle RMAN
12 15 (0.42%) Kibana
13 14 (0.39%) Puppet
14 12 (0.33%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 11 (0.31%) WSUS
16 10 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
17 9 (0.25%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 9 (0.25%) Proxmox
Vendors
1 597 (16.66%) Microsoft
2 594 (16.58%) Oracle
3 413 (11.53%) Databricks
4 147 (4.10%) Google
5 94 (2.62%) SAP
6 88 (2.46%) Splunk
7 75 (2.09%) ServiceNow
8 66 (1.84%) Salesforce
9 65 (1.81%) Informatica
10 59 (1.65%) Talend
11 46 (1.28%) IBM
12 45 (1.26%) OpenAI
13 44 (1.23%) Citrix
14 36 (1.00%) VMware
15 35 (0.98%) MuleSoft
16 30 (0.84%) Bloomberg
17 26 (0.73%) Foundry
18 25 (0.70%) Denodo
19 24 (0.67%) Dynatrace
20 23 (0.64%) Remedy