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

6 months to
30 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,872 2,963 3,738
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.21% 12.12% 9.92%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.92% 35.99% 34.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,688 2,100 2,723
10th Percentile £350 £356 £353
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% -6.82% +0.09%
75th Percentile £588 £638 £650
90th Percentile £709 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 56 58 61
10th Percentile £24.12 £24.58 £21.64
25th Percentile £34.01 £30.06 £25.79
Median hourly rate £45.25 £50.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -9.50% +17.65% -15.00%
75th Percentile £69.58 £65.62 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £78.71 £61.75
UK median hourly rate £51.25 £47.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year +7.89% +11.76% -15.42%

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 10,779 8,232 10,923
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 28.42% 33.67% 28.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,170 5,640 7,901
10th Percentile £355 £359 £350
25th Percentile £414 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.42% -5.45%
75th Percentile £613 £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 488 217 438
10th Percentile £41.25 £25.25 £35.00
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 £68.56
90th Percentile £77.00 £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 30 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 30 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 30 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 2,256 £513 -4.65% 840
Midlands +3 475 £470 +2.40% 280
North of England -10 440 £450 -5.26% 459
West Midlands +7 380 £465 -2.11% 157
South East -18 300 £500 - 526
North West +2 251 £447 -5.89% 248
South West -6 210 £475 -5.94% 165
Yorkshire -22 168 £500 - 149
East Midlands -2 93 £537 +35.78% 123
East of England -25 85 £500 +6.67% 147
North East -4 33 £475 +3.26% 66
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
1 212 (5.48%) Apache Spark
2 155 (4.00%) Apache Airflow
3 133 (3.43%) Apache
4 120 (3.10%) Confluence
5 78 (2.01%) SAS
6 77 (1.99%) SharePoint
7 49 (1.27%) WebLogic
8 28 (0.72%) IIS
9 24 (0.62%) Tomcat
10 21 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
11 19 (0.49%) Jupyter
12 16 (0.41%) CMS
13 15 (0.39%) Oracle Workflow
13 15 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
13 15 (0.39%) Tuxedo
14 12 (0.31%) Appian
14 12 (0.31%) HCL Notes
14 12 (0.31%) WebSphere
15 11 (0.28%) nginx
15 11 (0.28%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 266 (6.87%) Microsoft Excel
2 55 (1.42%) Microsoft Office
3 47 (1.21%) MS Visio
4 34 (0.88%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.49%) Spreadsheet
6 11 (0.28%) Microsoft Project
7 6 (0.15%) Chatbot
8 3 (0.077%) Notion
8 3 (0.077%) Oracle Smart View
8 3 (0.077%) Trello
9 1 (0.026%) InDesign
9 1 (0.026%) Mingle
9 1 (0.026%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 34 (0.88%) Oracle EBS
2 26 (0.67%) Aladdin
3 24 (0.62%) Oracle Payables
4 22 (0.57%) Oracle Receivables
5 20 (0.52%) NEC Housing
5 20 (0.52%) Oracle General Ledger
6 19 (0.49%) Dynamics CRM
6 19 (0.49%) Oracle EBS R12
7 15 (0.39%) Oracle ERP
8 14 (0.36%) NetSuite
8 14 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
9 13 (0.34%) Oracle Assets
10 11 (0.28%) Oracle Cash Management
10 11 (0.28%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
11 10 (0.26%) Oracle 11i
11 10 (0.26%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 10 (0.26%) Remedy ITSM
12 9 (0.23%) Advent Geneva
13 8 (0.21%) Endur
13 8 (0.21%) Findur
Cloud Services
1 1,358 (35.07%) Azure
2 951 (24.56%) AWS
3 754 (19.47%) Power Platform
4 410 (10.59%) Azure DevOps
5 323 (8.34%) Azure Data Factory
6 321 (8.29%) GCP
7 306 (7.90%) GitHub
8 274 (7.08%) Serverless
9 246 (6.35%) Snowflake
10 218 (5.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 208 (5.37%) Amazon S3
12 169 (4.36%) dbt
13 157 (4.05%) GitHub Actions
14 144 (3.72%) AWS Lambda
15 91 (2.35%) SaaS
16 86 (2.22%) Azure Functions
16 86 (2.22%) Power Automate
17 73 (1.89%) AWS CloudFormation
17 73 (1.89%) Entra ID
18 70 (1.81%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 52 (1.34%) Firewall
2 38 (0.98%) DNS
3 23 (0.59%) Network Security
4 20 (0.52%) HTTP
5 16 (0.41%) TCP/IP
6 14 (0.36%) Internet
6 14 (0.36%) WAN
7 13 (0.34%) 5G
7 13 (0.34%) SSL
7 13 (0.34%) VPN
8 11 (0.28%) LAN
9 10 (0.26%) 4G
10 9 (0.23%) 2G
10 9 (0.23%) DHCP
10 9 (0.23%) Radio Access Network
10 9 (0.23%) SNMP
11 7 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
12 6 (0.15%) Multicast
12 6 (0.15%) VLAN
13 5 (0.13%) NetScaler
Database & Business Intelligence
1 689 (17.79%) Power BI
2 488 (12.60%) Data Warehouse
3 466 (12.04%) SQL Server
4 261 (6.74%) NoSQL
5 257 (6.64%) Relational Database
6 253 (6.53%) Tableau
7 248 (6.40%) Data Lake
8 247 (6.38%) PostgreSQL
9 208 (5.37%) Azure SQL Database
10 195 (5.04%) Metadata
11 142 (3.67%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 140 (3.62%) Oracle Database
13 117 (3.02%) MySQL
14 114 (2.94%) BigQuery
15 111 (2.87%) Delta Lake
16 108 (2.79%) Amazon Redshift
16 108 (2.79%) Big Data
17 96 (2.48%) Amazon RDS
18 95 (2.45%) MongoDB
19 92 (2.38%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 429 (11.08%) Git
2 311 (8.03%) JIRA
3 213 (5.50%) Jenkins
4 155 (4.00%) GitLab
5 58 (1.50%) JUnit
6 57 (1.47%) Selenium
7 41 (1.06%) Postman
8 40 (1.03%) Oracle APEX
9 37 (0.96%) MLflow
10 36 (0.93%) Cucumber
11 35 (0.90%) Maven
12 29 (0.75%) Mockito
13 28 (0.72%) REST Assured
14 26 (0.67%) Bitbucket
15 24 (0.62%) ERwin
16 23 (0.59%) SpecFlow
17 22 (0.57%) Cypress.io
17 22 (0.57%) JMeter
17 22 (0.57%) Visual Studio
18 21 (0.54%) Oracle Forms
General
1 1,107 (28.59%) Social Skills
2 1,066 (27.53%) Finance
3 728 (18.80%) Analytical Skills
4 397 (10.25%) Banking
5 336 (8.68%) Public Sector
6 101 (2.61%) Investment Banking
7 98 (2.53%) Front Office
8 93 (2.40%) Documentation Skills
9 83 (2.14%) Marketing
10 64 (1.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 58 (1.50%) Retail
12 56 (1.45%) Financial Institution
13 52 (1.34%) Legal
14 42 (1.08%) Telecoms
15 39 (1.01%) Publishing
16 36 (0.93%) Organisational Skills
17 34 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
18 31 (0.80%) Law
19 29 (0.75%) Manufacturing
20 27 (0.70%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 886 (22.88%) Developer
2 732 (18.90%) Data Engineer
3 567 (14.64%) Analyst
4 489 (12.63%) Senior
5 268 (6.92%) Lead
6 239 (6.17%) Data Analyst
7 211 (5.45%) Architect
8 199 (5.14%) Business Analyst
9 176 (4.55%) Consultant
10 142 (3.67%) Senior Developer
11 139 (3.59%) Java Developer
12 111 (2.87%) Azure Engineer
13 109 (2.82%) DBA
14 108 (2.79%) Senior Data Engineer
15 103 (2.66%) Software Engineer
16 100 (2.58%) C# Developer
17 88 (2.27%) Python Developer
18 87 (2.25%) Full-Stack Developer
19 83 (2.14%) Data Architect
20 82 (2.12%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 338 (8.73%) .NET
2 314 (8.11%) REST
3 251 (6.48%) Kafka
4 237 (6.12%) PySpark
5 194 (5.01%) React
6 183 (4.73%) RESTful
7 170 (4.39%) Spring
8 155 (4.00%) Spring Boot
9 152 (3.93%) XML
10 136 (3.51%) HTML
11 126 (3.25%) JSON
12 117 (3.02%) CSS
13 116 (3.00%) Pandas
14 111 (2.87%) AngularJS
15 89 (2.30%) Node.js
16 83 (2.14%) .NET Framework
17 78 (2.01%) SOAP
18 77 (1.99%) Middleware
19 73 (1.89%) Web Services
19 73 (1.89%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 258 (6.66%) Cloud Native
2 135 (3.49%) Data Structures
3 125 (3.23%) Legacy Systems
4 118 (3.05%) Product Ownership
5 85 (2.20%) Distributed Systems
6 84 (2.17%) Management Information System
7 74 (1.91%) Derivative
8 71 (1.83%) Data Protection Act
9 68 (1.76%) Analytical Mindset
10 62 (1.60%) Onboarding
11 59 (1.52%) Equities
11 59 (1.52%) Fixed Income
12 54 (1.39%) Algorithms
13 45 (1.16%) Enterprise Software
14 44 (1.14%) Clustering
14 44 (1.14%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
15 43 (1.11%) Self-Motivation
16 41 (1.06%) Replication
17 36 (0.93%) Market Risk
18 32 (0.83%) Credit Risk
Operating Systems
1 278 (7.18%) Linux
2 226 (5.84%) Windows
3 187 (4.83%) Unix
4 77 (1.99%) Windows Server
5 19 (0.49%) AIX
5 19 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 14 (0.36%) Windows Server 2019
7 10 (0.26%) Windows 10
7 10 (0.26%) Windows Server 2016
8 6 (0.15%) Android
8 6 (0.15%) zOS
9 5 (0.13%) Apple iOS
9 5 (0.13%) Solaris
9 5 (0.13%) Windows Server 2008
9 5 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
10 3 (0.077%) CentOS
10 3 (0.077%) Oracle Linux
10 3 (0.077%) VMS
11 2 (0.052%) Data ONTAP
11 2 (0.052%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,045 (26.99%) CI/CD
2 1,025 (26.47%) Agile
3 1,018 (26.29%) Analytics
4 959 (24.77%) Data Modelling
5 916 (23.66%) Business Intelligence
6 912 (23.55%) ETL
7 906 (23.40%) DevOps
8 834 (21.54%) Problem-Solving
9 672 (17.36%) Data Pipeline
10 614 (15.86%) Data Engineering
11 483 (12.47%) AI
12 470 (12.14%) Data Governance
13 456 (11.78%) Migration
14 446 (11.52%) Validation
15 376 (9.71%) Data Analysis
16 364 (9.40%) Test Automation
17 355 (9.17%) Decision-Making
18 349 (9.01%) Performance Tuning
19 345 (8.91%) Data Science
19 345 (8.91%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 1,460 (37.71%) Python
2 537 (13.87%) Java
3 421 (10.87%) C#
4 317 (8.19%) JavaScript
5 288 (7.44%) PL/SQL
6 165 (4.26%) T-SQL
7 162 (4.18%) PowerShell
8 140 (3.62%) TypeScript
9 116 (3.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 112 (2.89%) Shell Script
11 108 (2.79%) R
12 90 (2.32%) Scala
13 64 (1.65%) Bash
14 58 (1.50%) VBA
15 57 (1.47%) C++
16 47 (1.21%) Bicep
17 45 (1.16%) Perl
18 33 (0.85%) VB
19 32 (0.83%) Go
20 22 (0.57%) C
Qualifications
1 783 (20.22%) Security Cleared
2 620 (16.01%) SC Cleared
3 318 (8.21%) Degree
4 112 (2.89%) Computer Science Degree
5 82 (2.12%) BPSS Clearance
6 65 (1.68%) Azure Certification
7 54 (1.39%) Master's Degree
8 50 (1.29%) DV Cleared
9 49 (1.27%) ISTQB
10 41 (1.06%) Microsoft Certification
11 35 (0.90%) AWS Certification
12 19 (0.49%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 15 (0.39%) CBAP
13 15 (0.39%) PhD
14 14 (0.36%) Oracle Certification
15 10 (0.26%) PMP
16 9 (0.23%) ISEB
16 9 (0.23%) PMI Certification
17 8 (0.21%) CFA
17 8 (0.21%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 695 (17.95%) Data Quality
2 290 (7.49%) QA
3 173 (4.47%) GDPR
4 57 (1.47%) Accessibility
5 29 (0.75%) PMO
5 29 (0.75%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 28 (0.72%) SLA
7 22 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 19 (0.49%) MiFID
9 17 (0.44%) NIST
9 17 (0.44%) PCI DSS
10 16 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
11 15 (0.39%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 13 (0.34%) IFRS
13 13 (0.34%) WCAG
14 12 (0.31%) SEPA
15 11 (0.28%) EMIR
16 10 (0.26%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.26%) Solvency II
System Software
1 452 (11.67%) Docker
2 97 (2.51%) Active Directory
3 32 (0.83%) Virtual Machines
4 18 (0.46%) Oracle RAC
5 16 (0.41%) VMware Infrastructure
6 12 (0.31%) Hyper-V
7 8 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
8 6 (0.15%) HDFS
8 6 (0.15%) KVM
9 5 (0.13%) Postfix
9 5 (0.13%) RACF
9 5 (0.13%) XenApp
9 5 (0.13%) XenDesktop
10 4 (0.10%) VMware ESXi
11 3 (0.077%) Oracle Clusterware
12 2 (0.052%) GridGain
12 2 (0.052%) VMware NSX
12 2 (0.052%) vSphere
13 1 (0.026%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 407 (10.51%) Kubernetes
2 310 (8.01%) Terraform
3 91 (2.35%) Grafana
4 65 (1.68%) Ansible
5 64 (1.65%) Prometheus
6 30 (0.77%) Oracle RMAN
7 22 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
8 19 (0.49%) Data Guard
9 18 (0.46%) Progress Chef
10 15 (0.39%) SCCM
11 14 (0.36%) Control-M
12 12 (0.31%) Kibana
13 9 (0.23%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
13 9 (0.23%) ZABBIX
14 8 (0.21%) HP Quality Center
14 8 (0.21%) Nagios
14 8 (0.21%) Netcool
14 8 (0.21%) OpenView
14 8 (0.21%) Tivoli
14 8 (0.21%) Tivoli Monitoring
Vendors
1 638 (16.48%) Microsoft
2 634 (16.37%) Oracle
3 471 (12.16%) Databricks
4 166 (4.29%) Google
5 117 (3.02%) ServiceNow
6 113 (2.92%) Informatica
7 99 (2.56%) Talend
8 96 (2.48%) SAP
9 68 (1.76%) Splunk
10 59 (1.52%) IBM
11 57 (1.47%) Salesforce
12 49 (1.27%) Citrix
13 44 (1.14%) Denodo
14 43 (1.11%) OpenAI
15 40 (1.03%) MuleSoft
16 34 (0.88%) Bloomberg
17 29 (0.75%) VMware
18 28 (0.72%) Foundry
19 27 (0.70%) Dynatrace
19 27 (0.70%) HP