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

6 months to
2 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,919 2,923 3,725
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.24% 12.06% 9.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.12% 35.76% 34.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,724 2,062 2,714
10th Percentile £350 £354 £353
25th Percentile £413 £410 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% -6.82% +0.92%
75th Percentile £588 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £756 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 56 58 60
10th Percentile £25.85 £24.58 £21.64
25th Percentile £34.01 £30.06 £25.64
Median hourly rate £45.25 £50.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -9.50% +17.65% -14.63%
75th Percentile £69.58 £65.62 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £78.71 £61.87
UK median hourly rate £51.25 £47.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +9.04% +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 10,849 8,173 10,892
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 28.36% 33.71% 28.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,238 5,597 7,877
10th Percentile £352 £358 £350
25th Percentile £414 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.67% -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 493 216 434
10th Percentile £41.25 £25.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £55.00 £39.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.59% +4.58% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £68.75
90th Percentile £76.85 £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 2 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 2 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 2 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 2,276 £513 -4.65% 840
Midlands +4 485 £469 +2.18% 280
North of England -11 445 £450 -5.26% 459
West Midlands +7 388 £464 -2.32% 157
South East -21 300 £500 - 526
North West +1 255 £450 -5.26% 248
South West -7 217 £475 -5.94% 165
Yorkshire -20 169 £481 -2.53% 149
East Midlands 0 95 £525 +35.48% 123
East of England -23 85 £500 +4.44% 147
North East -3 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
1 215 (5.49%) Apache Spark
2 154 (3.93%) Apache Airflow
3 138 (3.52%) Apache
4 119 (3.04%) Confluence
5 83 (2.12%) SAS
6 79 (2.02%) SharePoint
7 49 (1.25%) WebLogic
8 29 (0.74%) IIS
9 25 (0.64%) Tomcat
10 21 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
11 19 (0.48%) Jupyter
12 18 (0.46%) Oracle Workflow
13 15 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
13 15 (0.38%) Tuxedo
14 14 (0.36%) CMS
15 13 (0.33%) nginx
16 12 (0.31%) Appian
16 12 (0.31%) HCL Notes
17 11 (0.28%) Mendix
17 11 (0.28%) WebSphere
Applications
1 269 (6.86%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.38%) Microsoft Office
3 47 (1.20%) MS Visio
4 34 (0.87%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.54%) 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 2 (0.051%) Notepad++
10 1 (0.026%) InDesign
10 1 (0.026%) Mingle
10 1 (0.026%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 37 (0.94%) Oracle EBS
2 26 (0.66%) Aladdin
3 25 (0.64%) Oracle Payables
4 23 (0.59%) Oracle Receivables
5 21 (0.54%) Dynamics CRM
5 21 (0.54%) Oracle EBS R12
6 20 (0.51%) NEC Housing
6 20 (0.51%) Oracle General Ledger
7 16 (0.41%) Oracle ERP
8 15 (0.38%) NetSuite
9 14 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
10 13 (0.33%) Oracle Assets
11 12 (0.31%) Remedy ITSM
12 11 (0.28%) Oracle 11i
12 11 (0.28%) Oracle Cash Management
12 11 (0.28%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 10 (0.26%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
14 9 (0.23%) Advent Geneva
14 9 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
15 8 (0.20%) Endur
Cloud Services
1 1,360 (34.70%) Azure
2 963 (24.57%) AWS
3 763 (19.47%) Power Platform
4 408 (10.41%) Azure DevOps
5 329 (8.39%) Azure Data Factory
6 318 (8.11%) GCP
7 308 (7.86%) GitHub
8 272 (6.94%) Serverless
9 240 (6.12%) Snowflake
10 220 (5.61%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 214 (5.46%) Amazon S3
12 173 (4.41%) dbt
13 157 (4.01%) GitHub Actions
14 147 (3.75%) AWS Lambda
15 91 (2.32%) SaaS
16 88 (2.25%) Power Automate
17 82 (2.09%) Azure Functions
18 75 (1.91%) AWS CloudFormation
19 72 (1.84%) Entra ID
20 68 (1.74%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 49 (1.25%) Firewall
2 37 (0.94%) DNS
3 22 (0.56%) Network Security
4 20 (0.51%) HTTP
5 16 (0.41%) TCP/IP
6 14 (0.36%) Internet
6 14 (0.36%) WAN
7 13 (0.33%) 5G
7 13 (0.33%) SSL
7 13 (0.33%) VPN
8 11 (0.28%) LAN
8 11 (0.28%) SNMP
9 10 (0.26%) 4G
10 9 (0.23%) 2G
10 9 (0.23%) DHCP
10 9 (0.23%) Radio Access Network
11 7 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
12 6 (0.15%) Multicast
12 6 (0.15%) SMS
12 6 (0.15%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 697 (17.79%) Power BI
2 502 (12.81%) Data Warehouse
3 469 (11.97%) SQL Server
4 261 (6.66%) NoSQL
4 261 (6.66%) Tableau
5 254 (6.48%) Relational Database
6 251 (6.40%) PostgreSQL
7 249 (6.35%) Data Lake
8 209 (5.33%) Azure SQL Database
9 197 (5.03%) Metadata
10 141 (3.60%) Oracle Database
11 140 (3.57%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 123 (3.14%) MySQL
13 114 (2.91%) BigQuery
14 113 (2.88%) Amazon Redshift
15 112 (2.86%) Delta Lake
16 104 (2.65%) Big Data
17 99 (2.53%) Oracle Reports
18 96 (2.45%) Amazon RDS
19 91 (2.32%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 438 (11.18%) Git
2 318 (8.11%) JIRA
3 213 (5.44%) Jenkins
4 150 (3.83%) GitLab
5 57 (1.45%) JUnit
5 57 (1.45%) Selenium
6 45 (1.15%) Postman
7 40 (1.02%) Oracle APEX
8 36 (0.92%) Maven
9 35 (0.89%) Cucumber
9 35 (0.89%) MLflow
10 31 (0.79%) Mockito
11 28 (0.71%) REST Assured
12 26 (0.66%) Bitbucket
13 24 (0.61%) ERwin
14 23 (0.59%) SonarQube
15 22 (0.56%) JMeter
15 22 (0.56%) Oracle Forms
15 22 (0.56%) SpecFlow
16 21 (0.54%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,111 (28.35%) Social Skills
2 1,071 (27.33%) Finance
3 731 (18.65%) Analytical Skills
4 397 (10.13%) Banking
5 337 (8.60%) Public Sector
6 103 (2.63%) Investment Banking
7 102 (2.60%) Front Office
8 93 (2.37%) Documentation Skills
9 85 (2.17%) Marketing
10 64 (1.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 56 (1.43%) Retail
12 55 (1.40%) Financial Institution
13 53 (1.35%) Legal
14 43 (1.10%) Telecoms
15 38 (0.97%) Publishing
16 37 (0.94%) Organisational Skills
17 34 (0.87%) Presentation Skills
18 33 (0.84%) Law
19 29 (0.74%) Manufacturing
20 27 (0.69%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 891 (22.74%) Developer
2 749 (19.11%) Data Engineer
3 571 (14.57%) Analyst
4 490 (12.50%) Senior
5 269 (6.86%) Lead
6 240 (6.12%) Data Analyst
7 213 (5.44%) Architect
8 200 (5.10%) Business Analyst
9 184 (4.70%) Consultant
10 145 (3.70%) Senior Developer
11 144 (3.67%) Java Developer
12 113 (2.88%) Azure Engineer
13 111 (2.83%) DBA
13 111 (2.83%) Senior Data Engineer
14 104 (2.65%) Software Engineer
15 102 (2.60%) C# Developer
16 92 (2.35%) Python Developer
17 86 (2.19%) Full-Stack Developer
18 84 (2.14%) Data Architect
19 83 (2.12%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 343 (8.75%) .NET
2 311 (7.94%) REST
3 252 (6.43%) Kafka
4 240 (6.12%) PySpark
5 196 (5.00%) React
6 183 (4.67%) RESTful
7 174 (4.44%) Spring
8 159 (4.06%) Spring Boot
9 148 (3.78%) XML
10 142 (3.62%) HTML
11 124 (3.16%) Pandas
12 123 (3.14%) CSS
13 121 (3.09%) JSON
14 112 (2.86%) AngularJS
15 89 (2.27%) Node.js
16 82 (2.09%) .NET Framework
17 80 (2.04%) Middleware
18 79 (2.02%) SOAP
19 74 (1.89%) Web Services
20 73 (1.86%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 256 (6.53%) Cloud Native
2 135 (3.44%) Data Structures
3 126 (3.22%) Legacy Systems
4 121 (3.09%) Product Ownership
5 86 (2.19%) Distributed Systems
6 84 (2.14%) Management Information System
7 74 (1.89%) Derivative
8 70 (1.79%) Data Protection Act
9 65 (1.66%) Analytical Mindset
10 64 (1.63%) Onboarding
11 59 (1.51%) Equities
12 58 (1.48%) Fixed Income
13 51 (1.30%) Algorithms
14 47 (1.20%) Clustering
15 45 (1.15%) Enterprise Software
16 44 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
17 43 (1.10%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
18 40 (1.02%) Replication
19 35 (0.89%) Market Risk
20 32 (0.82%) Credit Risk
Operating Systems
1 276 (7.04%) Linux
2 232 (5.92%) Windows
3 190 (4.85%) Unix
4 77 (1.96%) Windows Server
5 21 (0.54%) AIX
6 19 (0.48%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 14 (0.36%) Windows Server 2019
8 11 (0.28%) Windows Server 2016
9 10 (0.26%) Windows 10
10 7 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
11 6 (0.15%) Android
11 6 (0.15%) Solaris
11 6 (0.15%) Windows Server 2012
11 6 (0.15%) zOS
12 5 (0.13%) Apple iOS
13 3 (0.077%) CentOS
13 3 (0.077%) Oracle Linux
13 3 (0.077%) VMS
14 2 (0.051%) Data ONTAP
15 1 (0.026%) OpenVMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,048 (26.74%) CI/CD
2 1,032 (26.33%) Agile
3 1,022 (26.08%) Analytics
4 971 (24.78%) Data Modelling
5 932 (23.78%) ETL
6 924 (23.58%) Business Intelligence
7 903 (23.04%) DevOps
8 844 (21.54%) Problem-Solving
9 686 (17.50%) Data Pipeline
10 620 (15.82%) Data Engineering
11 481 (12.27%) AI
12 476 (12.15%) Data Governance
13 466 (11.89%) Migration
14 454 (11.58%) Validation
15 378 (9.65%) Data Analysis
16 374 (9.54%) Test Automation
17 358 (9.13%) Performance Tuning
18 356 (9.08%) Decision-Making
19 350 (8.93%) Visualisation
20 345 (8.80%) Microservices
Programming Languages
1 1,482 (37.82%) Python
2 540 (13.78%) Java
3 424 (10.82%) C#
4 319 (8.14%) JavaScript
5 297 (7.58%) PL/SQL
6 170 (4.34%) T-SQL
7 169 (4.31%) PowerShell
8 140 (3.57%) TypeScript
9 115 (2.93%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 113 (2.88%) Shell Script
11 110 (2.81%) R
12 89 (2.27%) Scala
13 65 (1.66%) Bash
14 59 (1.51%) C++
14 59 (1.51%) VBA
15 46 (1.17%) Bicep
15 46 (1.17%) Perl
16 30 (0.77%) Go
17 29 (0.74%) VB
18 22 (0.56%) C
Qualifications
1 806 (20.57%) Security Cleared
2 643 (16.41%) SC Cleared
3 317 (8.09%) Degree
4 114 (2.91%) Computer Science Degree
5 84 (2.14%) BPSS Clearance
6 65 (1.66%) Azure Certification
7 51 (1.30%) ISTQB
8 50 (1.28%) DV Cleared
8 50 (1.28%) Master's Degree
9 41 (1.05%) Microsoft Certification
10 33 (0.84%) AWS Certification
11 18 (0.46%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
12 15 (0.38%) CBAP
12 15 (0.38%) PhD
13 14 (0.36%) Oracle Certification
14 10 (0.26%) PMP
15 9 (0.23%) ISEB
15 9 (0.23%) PMI Certification
16 8 (0.20%) DBS Check
16 8 (0.20%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 706 (18.01%) Data Quality
2 299 (7.63%) QA
3 176 (4.49%) GDPR
4 55 (1.40%) Accessibility
5 33 (0.84%) SLA
6 29 (0.74%) PMO
6 29 (0.74%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 22 (0.56%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 19 (0.48%) MiFID
9 17 (0.43%) PCI DSS
10 16 (0.41%) NIST
11 15 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
11 15 (0.38%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 13 (0.33%) IFRS
14 12 (0.31%) SEPA
14 12 (0.31%) WCAG
15 11 (0.28%) EMIR
16 10 (0.26%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.26%) Solvency II
System Software
1 449 (11.46%) Docker
2 97 (2.48%) Active Directory
3 33 (0.84%) Virtual Machines
4 19 (0.48%) Oracle RAC
5 16 (0.41%) VMware Infrastructure
6 12 (0.31%) Hyper-V
7 8 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
8 6 (0.15%) HDFS
8 6 (0.15%) KVM
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 (0.077%) Oracle Clusterware
11 2 (0.051%) GridGain
11 2 (0.051%) vSphere
12 1 (0.026%) Microsoft App-V
12 1 (0.026%) Varnish
12 1 (0.026%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 403 (10.28%) Kubernetes
2 311 (7.94%) Terraform
3 92 (2.35%) Grafana
4 62 (1.58%) Prometheus
5 61 (1.56%) Ansible
6 32 (0.82%) Oracle RMAN
7 22 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
8 19 (0.48%) Data Guard
9 18 (0.46%) Progress Chef
10 15 (0.38%) Control-M
10 15 (0.38%) SCCM
11 11 (0.28%) ZABBIX
12 10 (0.26%) Nagios
12 10 (0.26%) Netcool
12 10 (0.26%) OpenView
12 10 (0.26%) Tivoli
12 10 (0.26%) Tivoli Monitoring
13 9 (0.23%) Kibana
14 8 (0.20%) HP Quality Center
14 8 (0.20%) Puppet
Vendors
1 649 (16.56%) Oracle
2 642 (16.38%) Microsoft
3 478 (12.20%) Databricks
4 161 (4.11%) Google
5 119 (3.04%) ServiceNow
6 117 (2.99%) Informatica
7 103 (2.63%) Talend
8 97 (2.48%) SAP
9 67 (1.71%) Splunk
10 61 (1.56%) Salesforce
11 60 (1.53%) IBM
12 51 (1.30%) Denodo
13 50 (1.28%) Citrix
14 42 (1.07%) OpenAI
15 37 (0.94%) MuleSoft
16 34 (0.87%) Bloomberg
17 29 (0.74%) HP
17 29 (0.74%) VMware
18 27 (0.69%) Dynatrace
18 27 (0.69%) Foundry