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

6 months to
2 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 11 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,405 3,214 3,828
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.74% 11.54% 10.48%
As % of the Programming Languages category 34.81% 35.47% 34.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,345 2,165 2,809
10th Percentile £332 £350 £363
25th Percentile £410 £413 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -
75th Percentile £600 £638 £658
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £515 £545
% change year-on-year -2.91% -5.50% -0.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 65 50 62
10th Percentile £21.42 £25.26 £21.74
25th Percentile £30.96 £35.00 £32.99
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £45.88
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +14.43% -0.26%
75th Percentile £57.50 £65.00 £57.92
90th Percentile £72.56 £76.63 £67.50
UK median hourly rate £45.50 £43.75 £45.88
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.64% -0.26%

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 9,783 9,061 11,104
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 30.87% 32.55% 30.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,513 5,851 8,063
10th Percentile £350 £356 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £440
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.65% -2.27% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £668
90th Percentile £738 £775 £769
UK median daily rate £503 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -4.29% -4.55% -2.65%
Number of hourly rates quoted 356 215 397
10th Percentile £38.51 £25.65 £35.58
25th Percentile £52.00 £44.25 £47.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -3.47%
75th Percentile £68.88 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £78.75
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +4.00% - -0.13%

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 2 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 2 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 2 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 -1 2,093 £506 -7.95% 853
North of England -7 341 £438 -7.79% 393
Midlands -3 322 £514 +12.86% 238
South East -9 306 £475 -6.86% 603
West Midlands -2 235 £515 +5.32% 151
North West -1 195 £415 -8.79% 219
South West 0 156 £475 -5.00% 143
Yorkshire -21 130 £465 -7.00% 136
East Midlands -6 86 £468 +21.04% 83
East of England -4 79 £550 +4.76% 142
North East -8 18 £488 +2.63% 46
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
1 159 (4.67%) Apache Spark
2 139 (4.08%) Apache Airflow
3 109 (3.20%) Confluence
4 94 (2.76%) SharePoint
5 92 (2.70%) Apache
6 61 (1.79%) SAS
7 46 (1.35%) WebLogic
8 22 (0.65%) Microsoft Exchange
9 21 (0.62%) IIS
10 19 (0.56%) nginx
10 19 (0.56%) Skype for Business
11 17 (0.50%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 16 (0.47%) Oracle Workflow
13 13 (0.38%) Jupyter
13 13 (0.38%) Mattermost
14 12 (0.35%) CMS
14 12 (0.35%) HCL Notes
14 12 (0.35%) Tomcat
15 9 (0.26%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 9 (0.26%) JBoss
Applications
1 236 (6.93%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.85%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (1.12%) MS Visio
4 37 (1.09%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 11 (0.32%) Microsoft Project
6 10 (0.29%) Chatbot
6 10 (0.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 5 (0.15%) Trello
8 4 (0.12%) Spreadsheet
9 3 (0.088%) Notion
10 2 (0.059%) Maya
10 2 (0.059%) NUKE
10 2 (0.059%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.059%) SPSS
11 1 (0.029%) Stata
11 1 (0.029%) Weka
Business Applications
1 37 (1.09%) Oracle EBS
2 31 (0.91%) Oracle Payables
3 30 (0.88%) Oracle General Ledger
4 24 (0.70%) Aladdin
4 24 (0.70%) Oracle EBS R12
5 22 (0.65%) Oracle Assets
6 21 (0.62%) Dynamics CRM
6 21 (0.62%) Oracle Receivables
7 20 (0.59%) Endur
8 17 (0.50%) Remedy ITSM
9 16 (0.47%) SAP S/4HANA
10 15 (0.44%) NetSuite
11 14 (0.41%) Oracle Financials
12 12 (0.35%) Oracle ERP
13 11 (0.32%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
14 10 (0.29%) Maximo
14 10 (0.29%) NEC Housing
14 10 (0.29%) Oracle Cash Management
14 10 (0.29%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
15 9 (0.26%) Advent Geneva
Cloud Services
1 1,116 (32.78%) Azure
2 798 (23.44%) AWS
3 656 (19.27%) Power Platform
4 296 (8.69%) Azure DevOps
5 288 (8.46%) GCP
6 244 (7.17%) GitHub
7 231 (6.78%) Serverless
8 230 (6.75%) Snowflake
9 220 (6.46%) Azure Data Factory
10 178 (5.23%) Amazon S3
11 161 (4.73%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 125 (3.67%) dbt
13 122 (3.58%) GitHub Actions
14 112 (3.29%) AWS Lambda
15 84 (2.47%) Azure Functions
16 83 (2.44%) SaaS
17 82 (2.41%) Power Automate
18 74 (2.17%) PowerApps
19 58 (1.70%) Azure Logic Apps
19 58 (1.70%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 59 (1.73%) Firewall
2 46 (1.35%) DNS
3 44 (1.29%) HTTP
4 25 (0.73%) Skype
5 20 (0.59%) TCP/IP
6 17 (0.50%) Network Security
6 17 (0.50%) SSH
7 16 (0.47%) DHCP
8 15 (0.44%) Internet
9 12 (0.35%) Unified Communications
10 11 (0.32%) SMTP
10 11 (0.32%) VPN
11 10 (0.29%) FTP
11 10 (0.29%) IMAP
11 10 (0.29%) OpenLDAP
11 10 (0.29%) SSL
12 9 (0.26%) 2G
12 9 (0.26%) 5G
12 9 (0.26%) LAN
12 9 (0.26%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 596 (17.50%) Power BI
2 378 (11.10%) SQL Server
3 358 (10.51%) Data Warehouse
4 254 (7.46%) Relational Database
5 253 (7.43%) PostgreSQL
6 238 (6.99%) NoSQL
7 210 (6.17%) Tableau
8 196 (5.76%) Data Lake
9 168 (4.93%) Azure SQL Database
10 165 (4.85%) Oracle Database
11 125 (3.67%) Metadata
12 120 (3.52%) Big Data
13 102 (3.00%) BigQuery
14 100 (2.94%) MongoDB
14 100 (2.94%) MySQL
15 97 (2.85%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 79 (2.32%) Amazon RDS
17 78 (2.29%) Amazon Redshift
18 69 (2.03%) Oracle Reports
19 67 (1.97%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 387 (11.37%) Git
2 305 (8.96%) JIRA
3 189 (5.55%) Jenkins
4 121 (3.55%) GitLab
5 60 (1.76%) JUnit
6 58 (1.70%) Selenium
7 45 (1.32%) Oracle APEX
8 39 (1.15%) Postman
9 35 (1.03%) Bitbucket
10 34 (1.00%) Cucumber
11 25 (0.73%) Maven
12 24 (0.70%) Oracle Forms
13 23 (0.68%) Cypress.io
13 23 (0.68%) Mockito
13 23 (0.68%) REST Assured
14 22 (0.65%) SonarQube
15 21 (0.62%) ERwin
15 21 (0.62%) SpecFlow
16 19 (0.56%) MLflow
17 18 (0.53%) Gradle
General
1 1,075 (31.57%) Social Skills
2 983 (28.87%) Finance
3 596 (17.50%) Analytical Skills
4 389 (11.42%) Banking
5 270 (7.93%) Public Sector
6 118 (3.47%) Investment Banking
7 97 (2.85%) Front Office
8 86 (2.53%) Marketing
9 83 (2.44%) Documentation Skills
10 59 (1.73%) Retail
11 52 (1.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 50 (1.47%) Financial Institution
13 48 (1.41%) Presentation Skills
14 37 (1.09%) Legal
15 35 (1.03%) Back Office
15 35 (1.03%) Manufacturing
16 31 (0.91%) Organisational Skills
17 29 (0.85%) General Ledger
17 29 (0.85%) Local Government
18 28 (0.82%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 896 (26.31%) Developer
2 558 (16.39%) Analyst
3 478 (14.04%) Data Engineer
4 436 (12.80%) Senior
5 225 (6.61%) Data Analyst
6 202 (5.93%) Lead
7 194 (5.70%) Business Analyst
8 144 (4.23%) Architect
8 144 (4.23%) Senior Developer
9 133 (3.91%) Consultant
10 123 (3.61%) Java Developer
11 105 (3.08%) Software Engineer
12 95 (2.79%) Azure Engineer
13 90 (2.64%) Data Scientist
14 86 (2.53%) Full-Stack Developer
15 81 (2.38%) Python Developer
16 76 (2.23%) C# Developer
17 73 (2.14%) .NET Developer
18 69 (2.03%) Azure Data Engineer
18 69 (2.03%) Senior Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 324 (9.52%) .NET
2 268 (7.87%) REST
3 214 (6.28%) Kafka
4 179 (5.26%) PySpark
5 162 (4.76%) React
6 147 (4.32%) HTML
7 143 (4.20%) RESTful
8 141 (4.14%) XML
9 138 (4.05%) Spring
10 129 (3.79%) CSS
11 110 (3.23%) Spring Boot
12 109 (3.20%) JSON
13 108 (3.17%) AngularJS
14 105 (3.08%) Node.js
15 85 (2.50%) SOAP
16 83 (2.44%) Pandas
17 74 (2.17%) .NET Framework
18 67 (1.97%) Middleware
19 60 (1.76%) Web Services
20 59 (1.73%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 187 (5.49%) Cloud Native
2 100 (2.94%) Data Structures
3 89 (2.61%) Legacy Systems
4 88 (2.58%) Product Ownership
5 82 (2.41%) Data Protection Act
6 72 (2.11%) Management Information System
7 70 (2.06%) Analytical Mindset
8 65 (1.91%) Derivative
9 60 (1.76%) Algorithms
10 57 (1.67%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
11 55 (1.62%) Equities
12 53 (1.56%) Distributed Systems
13 52 (1.53%) Onboarding
14 50 (1.47%) Fixed Income
15 44 (1.29%) Replication
16 40 (1.17%) Market Risk
17 39 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
18 37 (1.09%) Greenfield Project
19 35 (1.03%) SWIFT Messaging Network
20 33 (0.97%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 316 (9.28%) Linux
2 243 (7.14%) Windows
3 195 (5.73%) Unix
4 65 (1.91%) Windows Server
5 18 (0.53%) VMS
6 17 (0.50%) Windows Server 2019
7 13 (0.38%) Ubuntu
7 13 (0.38%) Windows 10
8 12 (0.35%) Android
8 12 (0.35%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 11 (0.32%) Windows Server 2016
10 10 (0.29%) Amazon Linux
11 7 (0.21%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.18%) AIX
13 5 (0.15%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.12%) CentOS
14 4 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
15 2 (0.059%) Solaris
15 2 (0.059%) zOS
16 1 (0.029%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 963 (28.28%) Agile
2 781 (22.94%) Analytics
3 775 (22.76%) Business Intelligence
4 774 (22.73%) CI/CD
5 771 (22.64%) Problem-Solving
6 739 (21.70%) DevOps
7 704 (20.68%) Data Modelling
8 627 (18.41%) ETL
9 474 (13.92%) Data Pipeline
10 396 (11.63%) Data Engineering
11 372 (10.93%) Migration
12 358 (10.51%) Data Governance
13 341 (10.01%) Visualisation
14 334 (9.81%) Validation
15 318 (9.34%) Data Analysis
16 314 (9.22%) AI
17 300 (8.81%) Test Automation
18 296 (8.69%) Data Science
19 292 (8.58%) Microservices
20 279 (8.19%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 1,263 (37.09%) Python
2 523 (15.36%) Java
3 377 (11.07%) C#
4 324 (9.52%) JavaScript
5 265 (7.78%) PL/SQL
6 149 (4.38%) PowerShell
7 133 (3.91%) TypeScript
8 112 (3.29%) R
9 98 (2.88%) T-SQL
10 87 (2.56%) Scala
11 86 (2.53%) C++
11 86 (2.53%) Shell Script
12 82 (2.41%) VBA
13 72 (2.11%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 65 (1.91%) VB
15 61 (1.79%) Bash
16 46 (1.35%) Perl
17 43 (1.26%) Go
18 41 (1.20%) PHP
19 40 (1.17%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 552 (16.21%) Security Cleared
2 414 (12.16%) SC Cleared
3 322 (9.46%) Degree
4 118 (3.47%) Computer Science Degree
5 70 (2.06%) Azure Certification
6 59 (1.73%) DV Cleared
7 57 (1.67%) AWS Certification
7 57 (1.67%) Master's Degree
8 47 (1.38%) BPSS Clearance
9 44 (1.29%) Microsoft Certification
10 34 (1.00%) ISTQB
11 24 (0.70%) Oracle Certification
12 23 (0.68%) ITIL Certification
13 19 (0.56%) CBAP
14 16 (0.47%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 16 (0.47%) MCSE
15 12 (0.35%) Cisco Certification
16 11 (0.32%) OCA
16 11 (0.32%) OCP
16 11 (0.32%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 482 (14.16%) Data Quality
2 241 (7.08%) QA
3 129 (3.79%) GDPR
4 63 (1.85%) Accessibility
5 24 (0.70%) MiFID
5 24 (0.70%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 21 (0.62%) SLA
7 18 (0.53%) EMIR
7 18 (0.53%) SEPA
7 18 (0.53%) WCAG
8 17 (0.50%) ISO 20022
9 16 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 15 (0.44%) Actionable Recommendations
11 13 (0.38%) HIPAA
11 13 (0.38%) PSD2
12 12 (0.35%) PMO
13 11 (0.32%) IFRS
14 8 (0.23%) Basel III
14 8 (0.23%) NIST
14 8 (0.23%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 390 (11.45%) Docker
2 98 (2.88%) Active Directory
3 33 (0.97%) VMware Infrastructure
4 16 (0.47%) Virtual Machines
5 15 (0.44%) Oracle RAC
6 10 (0.29%) DFS Replication
6 10 (0.29%) Dovecot
6 10 (0.29%) Postfix
6 10 (0.29%) Squid
7 9 (0.26%) Hyper-V
7 9 (0.26%) VMware ESXi
8 8 (0.23%) HDFS
8 8 (0.23%) zsh
9 7 (0.21%) NFS
9 7 (0.21%) vSphere
10 6 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
11 5 (0.15%) Microsoft Virtual Server
11 5 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
12 4 (0.12%) VMware Workstation
13 3 (0.088%) XenApp
Systems Management
1 358 (10.51%) Kubernetes
2 235 (6.90%) Terraform
3 70 (2.06%) Grafana
4 62 (1.82%) Ansible
5 56 (1.64%) Prometheus
6 24 (0.70%) SCOM
7 23 (0.68%) SCCM
8 21 (0.62%) HP SiteScope
9 19 (0.56%) Oracle RMAN
9 19 (0.56%) Puppet
10 18 (0.53%) Control-M
11 17 (0.50%) Kibana
12 16 (0.47%) Progress Chef
13 15 (0.44%) Data Guard
14 14 (0.41%) Single Sign-On
15 13 (0.38%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 13 (0.38%) Proxmox
16 11 (0.32%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 11 (0.32%) ITRS Geneos
16 11 (0.32%) WSUS
Vendors
1 599 (17.59%) Oracle
2 579 (17.00%) Microsoft
3 347 (10.19%) Databricks
4 136 (3.99%) Google
5 107 (3.14%) Splunk
6 97 (2.85%) SAP
7 71 (2.09%) ServiceNow
8 69 (2.03%) Salesforce
9 54 (1.59%) Talend
10 47 (1.38%) Informatica
11 46 (1.35%) VMware
12 43 (1.26%) Dynatrace
12 43 (1.26%) IBM
13 40 (1.17%) OpenAI
14 39 (1.15%) Citrix
15 36 (1.06%) Denodo
16 33 (0.97%) MuleSoft
17 31 (0.91%) AppDynamics
18 30 (0.88%) Adobe
19 29 (0.85%) Cisco