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

6 months to
16 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,983 2,994 3,667
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.14% 12.27% 9.82%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.47% 36.26% 33.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,760 2,113 2,691
10th Percentile £350 £355 £353
25th Percentile £413 £410 £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 £700 £763 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 64 56 59
10th Percentile £26.50 £24.13 £22.43
25th Percentile £35.19 £30.19 £26.12
Median hourly rate £51.25 £50.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +2.49% +17.65% -14.63%
75th Percentile £74.37 £65.71 £53.75
90th Percentile £83.30 £79.72 £61.99
UK median hourly rate £54.75 £47.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +16.49% +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 10,922 8,256 10,829
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 27.82% 33.83% 29.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,297 5,690 7,869
10th Percentile £355 £361 £350
25th Percentile £414 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.67% -2.42% -5.61%
75th Percentile £608 £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 513 211 430
10th Percentile £41.94 £25.26 £35.00
25th Percentile £55.00 £39.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £61.05
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +2.38% -2.32%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.63 £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 16 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 16 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 16 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 2,284 £513 -5.09% 841
Midlands +6 517 £465 +1.31% 283
North of England -10 455 £450 -5.26% 417
West Midlands +8 411 £460 -1.92% 159
South East -18 307 £500 - 486
North West -2 258 £450 -5.26% 242
South West -10 217 £475 -5.00% 151
Yorkshire -20 178 £465 -2.11% 123
East Midlands 0 104 £525 +34.27% 124
East of England -21 91 £500 +8.99% 133
North East -13 30 £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
1 228 (5.72%) Apache Spark
2 159 (3.99%) Apache Airflow
3 140 (3.51%) Apache
4 121 (3.04%) Confluence
5 90 (2.26%) SAS
6 82 (2.06%) SharePoint
7 47 (1.18%) WebLogic
8 32 (0.80%) IIS
9 24 (0.60%) Tomcat
10 20 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
10 20 (0.50%) Oracle Workflow
11 18 (0.45%) Jupyter
12 15 (0.38%) Tuxedo
13 14 (0.35%) nginx
13 14 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
14 13 (0.33%) Appian
15 12 (0.30%) CMS
15 12 (0.30%) HCL Notes
15 12 (0.30%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 11 (0.28%) WebSphere
Applications
1 275 (6.90%) Microsoft Excel
2 55 (1.38%) Microsoft Office
3 49 (1.23%) MS Visio
4 34 (0.85%) 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 (0.075%) Notion
9 3 (0.075%) Oracle Smart View
9 3 (0.075%) Trello
10 1 (0.025%) InDesign
10 1 (0.025%) Mingle
10 1 (0.025%) SPSS
10 1 (0.025%) Weka
Business Applications
1 41 (1.03%) Oracle EBS
2 27 (0.68%) Aladdin
3 21 (0.53%) Dynamics CRM
3 21 (0.53%) NEC Housing
3 21 (0.53%) Oracle EBS R12
3 21 (0.53%) Oracle Payables
4 19 (0.48%) Oracle Receivables
5 17 (0.43%) Oracle General Ledger
5 17 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
6 15 (0.38%) NetSuite
6 15 (0.38%) Oracle ERP
7 11 (0.28%) Oracle Assets
8 10 (0.25%) Oracle 11i
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%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
Cloud Services
1 1,378 (34.60%) Azure
2 972 (24.40%) AWS
3 781 (19.61%) Power Platform
4 419 (10.52%) Azure DevOps
5 342 (8.59%) Azure Data Factory
6 315 (7.91%) GCP
7 299 (7.51%) GitHub
8 274 (6.88%) Serverless
9 235 (5.90%) Amazon S3
10 231 (5.80%) Snowflake
11 229 (5.75%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 177 (4.44%) dbt
13 161 (4.04%) AWS Lambda
14 155 (3.89%) GitHub Actions
15 89 (2.23%) Power Automate
16 82 (2.06%) SaaS
17 77 (1.93%) AWS CloudFormation
18 76 (1.91%) Azure Functions
19 73 (1.83%) Entra ID
20 72 (1.81%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 47 (1.18%) Firewall
2 35 (0.88%) DNS
3 22 (0.55%) HTTP
3 22 (0.55%) Network Security
4 17 (0.43%) TCP/IP
5 16 (0.40%) Internet
6 14 (0.35%) WAN
7 11 (0.28%) LAN
7 11 (0.28%) SNMP
7 11 (0.28%) SSL
8 10 (0.25%) VPN
9 8 (0.20%) DHCP
10 7 (0.18%) 5G
10 7 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
11 6 (0.15%) 4G
11 6 (0.15%) IPsec
11 6 (0.15%) VLAN
12 5 (0.13%) Kerberos
12 5 (0.13%) NetScaler
12 5 (0.13%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 711 (17.85%) Power BI
2 513 (12.88%) Data Warehouse
3 489 (12.28%) SQL Server
4 271 (6.80%) Tableau
5 264 (6.63%) NoSQL
5 264 (6.63%) PostgreSQL
6 257 (6.45%) Relational Database
7 252 (6.33%) Data Lake
8 213 (5.35%) Azure SQL Database
9 208 (5.22%) Metadata
10 146 (3.67%) Oracle Database
11 144 (3.62%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 122 (3.06%) Amazon Redshift
12 122 (3.06%) MySQL
13 118 (2.96%) BigQuery
14 113 (2.84%) Delta Lake
15 108 (2.71%) Big Data
16 99 (2.49%) MongoDB
16 99 (2.49%) Oracle Reports
17 98 (2.46%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 440 (11.05%) Git
2 324 (8.13%) JIRA
3 220 (5.52%) Jenkins
4 160 (4.02%) GitLab
5 64 (1.61%) Selenium
6 61 (1.53%) JUnit
7 48 (1.21%) Postman
8 40 (1.00%) Oracle APEX
9 39 (0.98%) Maven
10 38 (0.95%) Cucumber
11 35 (0.88%) MLflow
12 34 (0.85%) Mockito
13 29 (0.73%) REST Assured
14 27 (0.68%) Bitbucket
15 26 (0.65%) SonarQube
16 25 (0.63%) ERwin
16 25 (0.63%) JMeter
16 25 (0.63%) Oracle Forms
17 22 (0.55%) Cypress.io
18 21 (0.53%) SpecFlow
General
1 1,108 (27.82%) Social Skills
2 1,086 (27.27%) Finance
3 749 (18.80%) Analytical Skills
4 386 (9.69%) Banking
5 342 (8.59%) Public Sector
6 104 (2.61%) Front Office
7 101 (2.54%) Investment Banking
8 92 (2.31%) Documentation Skills
9 88 (2.21%) Marketing
10 65 (1.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 57 (1.43%) Retail
12 56 (1.41%) Legal
13 53 (1.33%) Financial Institution
14 39 (0.98%) Telecoms
15 38 (0.95%) Publishing
16 35 (0.88%) Organisational Skills
17 32 (0.80%) Law
17 32 (0.80%) Presentation Skills
18 30 (0.75%) Local Government
19 29 (0.73%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 878 (22.04%) Developer
2 797 (20.01%) Data Engineer
3 582 (14.61%) Analyst
4 496 (12.45%) Senior
5 275 (6.90%) Lead
6 247 (6.20%) Data Analyst
7 219 (5.50%) Architect
8 198 (4.97%) Business Analyst
9 183 (4.59%) Consultant
10 153 (3.84%) Java Developer
11 140 (3.51%) Senior Developer
12 122 (3.06%) Senior Data Engineer
13 117 (2.94%) Azure Engineer
14 115 (2.89%) DBA
15 109 (2.74%) Software Engineer
16 103 (2.59%) C# Developer
17 94 (2.36%) Python Developer
18 87 (2.18%) Data Architect
19 86 (2.16%) Full-Stack Developer
20 84 (2.11%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 346 (8.69%) .NET
2 312 (7.83%) REST
3 250 (6.28%) Kafka
4 246 (6.18%) PySpark
5 196 (4.92%) React
6 184 (4.62%) RESTful
6 184 (4.62%) Spring
7 170 (4.27%) Spring Boot
8 149 (3.74%) XML
9 146 (3.67%) HTML
10 125 (3.14%) CSS
11 124 (3.11%) JSON
11 124 (3.11%) Pandas
12 115 (2.89%) AngularJS
13 88 (2.21%) Node.js
14 87 (2.18%) Middleware
15 80 (2.01%) .NET Framework
15 80 (2.01%) Web Services
16 78 (1.96%) SOAP
17 74 (1.86%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 252 (6.33%) Cloud Native
2 140 (3.51%) Data Structures
3 129 (3.24%) Legacy Systems
4 122 (3.06%) Product Ownership
5 93 (2.33%) Distributed Systems
6 86 (2.16%) Management Information System
7 73 (1.83%) Derivative
8 67 (1.68%) Onboarding
9 66 (1.66%) Data Protection Act
10 63 (1.58%) Analytical Mindset
11 58 (1.46%) Equities
12 57 (1.43%) Fixed Income
13 50 (1.26%) Algorithms
14 49 (1.23%) Clustering
15 47 (1.18%) Self-Motivation
16 45 (1.13%) Enterprise Software
17 44 (1.10%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
18 37 (0.93%) NHS
18 37 (0.93%) Replication
19 35 (0.88%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 277 (6.95%) Linux
2 239 (6.00%) Windows
3 198 (4.97%) Unix
4 75 (1.88%) 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 Server 2016
9 9 (0.23%) Windows 10
10 7 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
11 6 (0.15%) Android
11 6 (0.15%) Solaris
11 6 (0.15%) zOS
12 5 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
13 4 (0.10%) Apple iOS
14 3 (0.075%) Oracle Linux
15 2 (0.050%) CentOS
15 2 (0.050%) Data ONTAP
16 1 (0.025%) VME
16 1 (0.025%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,088 (27.32%) CI/CD
2 1,058 (26.56%) Agile
3 1,037 (26.04%) Analytics
4 995 (24.98%) Data Modelling
5 949 (23.83%) ETL
6 942 (23.65%) Business Intelligence
7 927 (23.27%) DevOps
8 848 (21.29%) Problem-Solving
9 711 (17.85%) Data Pipeline
10 632 (15.87%) Data Engineering
11 492 (12.35%) AI
12 489 (12.28%) Migration
13 487 (12.23%) Data Governance
14 475 (11.93%) Validation
15 386 (9.69%) Test Automation
16 380 (9.54%) Data Analysis
17 372 (9.34%) Decision-Making
18 360 (9.04%) Performance Tuning
19 349 (8.76%) Microservices
20 345 (8.66%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 1,502 (37.71%) Python
2 551 (13.83%) Java
3 427 (10.72%) C#
4 322 (8.08%) JavaScript
5 312 (7.83%) PL/SQL
6 188 (4.72%) T-SQL
7 166 (4.17%) PowerShell
8 140 (3.51%) TypeScript
9 117 (2.94%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 113 (2.84%) Shell Script
11 112 (2.81%) R
12 101 (2.54%) Scala
13 71 (1.78%) Bash
14 62 (1.56%) C++
15 61 (1.53%) VBA
16 44 (1.10%) Bicep
17 43 (1.08%) Perl
18 28 (0.70%) Go
19 26 (0.65%) VB
20 22 (0.55%) C
Qualifications
1 842 (21.14%) Security Cleared
2 682 (17.12%) SC Cleared
3 318 (7.98%) Degree
4 113 (2.84%) Computer Science Degree
5 86 (2.16%) BPSS Clearance
6 67 (1.68%) Azure Certification
7 52 (1.31%) Master's Degree
8 51 (1.28%) ISTQB
9 50 (1.26%) DV Cleared
10 40 (1.00%) Microsoft Certification
11 31 (0.78%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.45%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 16 (0.40%) Oracle Certification
13 16 (0.40%) PhD
14 13 (0.33%) CBAP
15 10 (0.25%) PMP
16 9 (0.23%) DBS Check
16 9 (0.23%) PMI Certification
17 8 (0.20%) ISEB
18 7 (0.18%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 718 (18.03%) Data Quality
2 306 (7.68%) QA
3 178 (4.47%) GDPR
4 52 (1.31%) Accessibility
5 32 (0.80%) SLA
6 30 (0.75%) 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
14 12 (0.30%) ISO 20022
15 11 (0.28%) HL7
16 10 (0.25%) SEPA
16 10 (0.25%) Solvency II
16 10 (0.25%) WCAG
System Software
1 465 (11.67%) Docker
2 94 (2.36%) Active Directory
3 34 (0.85%) Virtual Machines
4 21 (0.53%) Oracle RAC
5 17 (0.43%) VMware Infrastructure
6 14 (0.35%) Hyper-V
7 8 (0.20%) KVM
7 8 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
8 7 (0.18%) Postfix
9 6 (0.15%) HDFS
9 6 (0.15%) RACF
10 5 (0.13%) VMware ESXi
10 5 (0.13%) XenApp
10 5 (0.13%) XenDesktop
11 3 (0.075%) Oracle Clusterware
12 2 (0.050%) GridGain
12 2 (0.050%) vSphere
13 1 (0.025%) GPFS
13 1 (0.025%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 1 (0.025%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 408 (10.24%) Kubernetes
2 325 (8.16%) Terraform
3 99 (2.49%) Grafana
4 63 (1.58%) Ansible
5 61 (1.53%) Prometheus
6 33 (0.83%) Oracle RMAN
7 22 (0.55%) Data Guard
8 20 (0.50%) Single Sign-On
9 15 (0.38%) Kibana
9 15 (0.38%) Progress Chef
9 15 (0.38%) SCCM
10 14 (0.35%) Control-M
11 11 (0.28%) ZABBIX
12 10 (0.25%) Nagios
12 10 (0.25%) Netcool
12 10 (0.25%) OpenView
12 10 (0.25%) Tivoli
12 10 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
13 9 (0.23%) Kiali
13 9 (0.23%) Puppet
Vendors
1 667 (16.75%) Oracle
2 654 (16.42%) Microsoft
3 487 (12.23%) Databricks
4 157 (3.94%) Google
5 123 (3.09%) ServiceNow
6 122 (3.06%) Informatica
7 108 (2.71%) Talend
8 102 (2.56%) SAP
9 81 (2.03%) Splunk
10 63 (1.58%) Salesforce
11 60 (1.51%) IBM
12 55 (1.38%) Denodo
13 53 (1.33%) Citrix
14 44 (1.10%) OpenAI
15 33 (0.83%) MuleSoft
16 31 (0.78%) Bloomberg
17 30 (0.75%) Dynatrace
17 30 (0.75%) VMware
18 28 (0.70%) HP
19 26 (0.65%) Atlassian