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

6 months to
10 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,770 3,006 3,809
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.42% 12.14% 10.00%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.72% 35.83% 34.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,593 2,096 2,752
10th Percentile £350 £355 £355
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £524 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.49% -4.82% -
75th Percentile £588 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £510 £533
% change year-on-year -1.96% -4.23% -1.39%
Number of hourly rates quoted 52 56 63
10th Percentile £18.48 £20.87 £21.66
25th Percentile £28.93 £29.07 £26.02
Median hourly rate £45.00 £50.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -10.00% +17.65% -19.05%
75th Percentile £69.58 £65.15 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £79.72 £62.72
UK median hourly rate £47.50 £47.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +1.06% +10.59% -20.93%

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 10,554 8,390 11,035
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 29.16% 33.89% 28.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,040 5,609 7,932
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -2.78% -6.09%
75th Percentile £613 £650 £660
90th Percentile £726 £775 £763
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -5.75%
Number of hourly rates quoted 447 216 470
10th Percentile £41.94 £25.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £55.00 £40.75 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.19 £68.75
90th Percentile £77.20 £85.00 £75.15
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -6.80%

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 10 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 10 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 10 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 2,229 £512 -6.95% 612
Midlands +2 471 £475 +1.28% 270
North of England -10 405 £450 -9.09% 393
West Midlands +5 373 £469 -4.29% 164
South East -18 286 £483 -3.50% 538
North West +1 232 £438 -7.89% 217
South West -1 198 £475 -9.52% 154
Yorkshire -23 151 £475 -8.87% 130
East Midlands -6 96 £537 +37.96% 104
East of England -27 74 £500 +6.95% 110
North East -3 31 £475 +3.26% 52
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
1 204 (5.41%) Apache Spark
2 147 (3.90%) Apache Airflow
3 123 (3.26%) Apache
4 116 (3.08%) Confluence
5 79 (2.10%) SharePoint
6 78 (2.07%) SAS
7 52 (1.38%) WebLogic
8 27 (0.72%) IIS
9 24 (0.64%) Microsoft Exchange
10 21 (0.56%) Tomcat
11 18 (0.48%) Jupyter
12 17 (0.45%) CMS
13 15 (0.40%) Palantir Foundry
13 15 (0.40%) Tuxedo
14 13 (0.34%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 13 (0.34%) WebSphere
15 12 (0.32%) Appian
15 12 (0.32%) HCL Notes
15 12 (0.32%) JBoss
16 11 (0.29%) Mendix
Applications
1 254 (6.74%) Microsoft Excel
2 62 (1.64%) Microsoft Office
3 49 (1.30%) MS Visio
4 35 (0.93%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 13 (0.34%) Spreadsheet
6 12 (0.32%) Microsoft Project
7 8 (0.21%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.11%) Oracle Smart View
9 3 (0.080%) Notion
9 3 (0.080%) Trello
10 1 (0.027%) InDesign
10 1 (0.027%) Mingle
10 1 (0.027%) SPSS
10 1 (0.027%) Weka
Business Applications
1 29 (0.77%) Aladdin
2 24 (0.64%) Oracle EBS
2 24 (0.64%) Oracle Payables
3 20 (0.53%) NEC Housing
3 20 (0.53%) Oracle Receivables
4 19 (0.50%) Dynamics CRM
4 19 (0.50%) Oracle General Ledger
5 17 (0.45%) Oracle EBS R12
6 15 (0.40%) SAP S/4HANA
7 14 (0.37%) Oracle Assets
7 14 (0.37%) Oracle ERP
8 13 (0.34%) NetSuite
9 11 (0.29%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
10 10 (0.27%) Advent Geneva
10 10 (0.27%) Endur
10 10 (0.27%) Oracle Cash Management
10 10 (0.27%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 9 (0.24%) Remedy ITSM
12 8 (0.21%) Oracle 11i
12 8 (0.21%) SAP HR
Cloud Services
1 1,305 (34.62%) Azure
2 921 (24.43%) AWS
3 721 (19.12%) Power Platform
4 382 (10.13%) Azure DevOps
5 310 (8.22%) GCP
6 305 (8.09%) Azure Data Factory
7 288 (7.64%) GitHub
8 267 (7.08%) Serverless
9 256 (6.79%) Snowflake
10 202 (5.36%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 197 (5.23%) Amazon S3
12 154 (4.08%) dbt
13 148 (3.93%) GitHub Actions
14 138 (3.66%) AWS Lambda
15 95 (2.52%) SaaS
16 85 (2.25%) Azure Functions
17 84 (2.23%) Power Automate
18 73 (1.94%) Entra ID
19 69 (1.83%) AWS CloudFormation
20 68 (1.80%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 50 (1.33%) Firewall
2 41 (1.09%) DNS
3 21 (0.56%) HTTP
3 21 (0.56%) Network Security
4 20 (0.53%) TCP/IP
5 15 (0.40%) Internet
5 15 (0.40%) VPN
6 13 (0.34%) 5G
6 13 (0.34%) SSL
6 13 (0.34%) WAN
7 12 (0.32%) DHCP
7 12 (0.32%) LAN
8 10 (0.27%) 4G
9 9 (0.24%) 2G
9 9 (0.24%) Radio Access Network
10 8 (0.21%) Skype
10 8 (0.21%) SMS
11 6 (0.16%) Multicast
11 6 (0.16%) VLAN
11 6 (0.16%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 657 (17.43%) Power BI
2 451 (11.96%) Data Warehouse
3 445 (11.80%) SQL Server
4 260 (6.90%) NoSQL
5 252 (6.68%) Relational Database
6 246 (6.53%) PostgreSQL
7 233 (6.18%) Tableau
8 231 (6.13%) Data Lake
9 194 (5.15%) Azure SQL Database
10 173 (4.59%) Metadata
11 143 (3.79%) Oracle Database
12 138 (3.66%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 118 (3.13%) BigQuery
14 113 (3.00%) Big Data
15 108 (2.86%) MySQL
16 100 (2.65%) MongoDB
17 99 (2.63%) Amazon Redshift
17 99 (2.63%) Delta Lake
18 94 (2.49%) Amazon RDS
19 78 (2.07%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 439 (11.64%) Git
2 304 (8.06%) JIRA
3 206 (5.46%) Jenkins
4 152 (4.03%) GitLab
5 61 (1.62%) JUnit
6 57 (1.51%) Selenium
7 46 (1.22%) Postman
8 43 (1.14%) Oracle APEX
9 38 (1.01%) Cucumber
10 32 (0.85%) Maven
10 32 (0.85%) MLflow
11 29 (0.77%) Bitbucket
11 29 (0.77%) REST Assured
12 25 (0.66%) Mockito
13 24 (0.64%) Visual Studio
14 23 (0.61%) Cypress.io
15 22 (0.58%) ERwin
15 22 (0.58%) SpecFlow
16 19 (0.50%) Team Foundation Server
17 18 (0.48%) SonarQube
General
1 1,106 (29.34%) Social Skills
2 1,033 (27.40%) Finance
3 663 (17.59%) Analytical Skills
4 391 (10.37%) Banking
5 330 (8.75%) Public Sector
6 102 (2.71%) Front Office
6 102 (2.71%) Investment Banking
7 96 (2.55%) Documentation Skills
8 83 (2.20%) Marketing
9 61 (1.62%) Retail
10 59 (1.56%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 53 (1.41%) Financial Institution
12 47 (1.25%) Legal
13 35 (0.93%) Publishing
14 34 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
14 34 (0.90%) Telecoms
15 32 (0.85%) Influencing Skills
16 31 (0.82%) Organisational Skills
17 30 (0.80%) Law
17 30 (0.80%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 907 (24.06%) Developer
2 667 (17.69%) Data Engineer
3 546 (14.48%) Analyst
4 486 (12.89%) Senior
5 269 (7.14%) Lead
6 228 (6.05%) Data Analyst
7 201 (5.33%) Architect
8 195 (5.17%) Business Analyst
9 155 (4.11%) Consultant
10 146 (3.87%) Senior Developer
11 135 (3.58%) Java Developer
12 116 (3.08%) Azure Engineer
13 109 (2.89%) Software Engineer
14 100 (2.65%) Senior Data Engineer
15 99 (2.63%) C# Developer
16 88 (2.33%) Full-Stack Developer
16 88 (2.33%) Python Developer
17 87 (2.31%) Data Scientist
18 86 (2.28%) DBA
19 79 (2.10%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 340 (9.02%) .NET
2 304 (8.06%) REST
3 239 (6.34%) Kafka
4 223 (5.92%) PySpark
5 179 (4.75%) React
6 175 (4.64%) RESTful
7 159 (4.22%) Spring
8 145 (3.85%) XML
9 141 (3.74%) HTML
10 140 (3.71%) Spring Boot
11 115 (3.05%) CSS
12 109 (2.89%) AngularJS
13 108 (2.86%) JSON
14 106 (2.81%) Pandas
15 101 (2.68%) Node.js
16 85 (2.25%) .NET Framework
17 82 (2.18%) SOAP
18 78 (2.07%) Middleware
19 71 (1.88%) Web Services
19 71 (1.88%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 247 (6.55%) Cloud Native
2 123 (3.26%) Data Structures
3 118 (3.13%) Legacy Systems
4 108 (2.86%) Product Ownership
5 79 (2.10%) Management Information System
6 74 (1.96%) Data Protection Act
7 73 (1.94%) Distributed Systems
8 72 (1.91%) Derivative
9 70 (1.86%) Analytical Mindset
10 62 (1.64%) Equities
11 56 (1.49%) Algorithms
11 56 (1.49%) Onboarding
12 55 (1.46%) Fixed Income
13 47 (1.25%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 40 (1.06%) Clustering
14 40 (1.06%) Enterprise Software
15 37 (0.98%) Replication
16 35 (0.93%) Market Risk
16 35 (0.93%) Self-Motivation
17 29 (0.77%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 284 (7.53%) Linux
2 225 (5.97%) Windows
3 186 (4.93%) Unix
4 71 (1.88%) Windows Server
5 18 (0.48%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 15 (0.40%) AIX
7 14 (0.37%) Windows Server 2016
8 13 (0.34%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (0.29%) Windows 10
10 7 (0.19%) Android
11 5 (0.13%) Apple iOS
11 5 (0.13%) VMS
11 5 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
11 5 (0.13%) zOS
12 4 (0.11%) Solaris
12 4 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 3 (0.080%) CentOS
14 2 (0.053%) Oracle Linux
14 2 (0.053%) Ubuntu
15 1 (0.027%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,016 (26.95%) Agile
2 999 (26.50%) CI/CD
3 983 (26.07%) Analytics
4 881 (23.37%) Data Modelling
5 873 (23.16%) Business Intelligence
5 873 (23.16%) DevOps
6 850 (22.55%) ETL
7 840 (22.28%) Problem-Solving
8 611 (16.21%) Data Pipeline
9 556 (14.75%) Data Engineering
10 444 (11.78%) Migration
11 440 (11.67%) Data Governance
12 435 (11.54%) AI
13 399 (10.58%) Validation
14 371 (9.84%) Data Analysis
15 356 (9.44%) Test Automation
16 338 (8.97%) Data Science
17 335 (8.89%) Visualisation
18 331 (8.78%) Decision-Making
19 329 (8.73%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,399 (37.11%) Python
2 537 (14.24%) Java
3 411 (10.90%) C#
4 320 (8.49%) JavaScript
5 271 (7.19%) PL/SQL
6 154 (4.08%) T-SQL
7 153 (4.06%) PowerShell
8 144 (3.82%) TypeScript
9 105 (2.79%) Shell Script
10 102 (2.71%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 96 (2.55%) Scala
12 95 (2.52%) R
13 74 (1.96%) C++
14 63 (1.67%) Bash
14 63 (1.67%) VBA
15 48 (1.27%) Bicep
16 45 (1.19%) Perl
17 43 (1.14%) VB
18 38 (1.01%) Go
19 28 (0.74%) PHP
Qualifications
1 737 (19.55%) Security Cleared
2 582 (15.44%) SC Cleared
3 328 (8.70%) Degree
4 106 (2.81%) Computer Science Degree
5 82 (2.18%) BPSS Clearance
6 71 (1.88%) Azure Certification
7 53 (1.41%) Master's Degree
8 52 (1.38%) DV Cleared
9 48 (1.27%) ISTQB
10 44 (1.17%) Microsoft Certification
11 42 (1.11%) AWS Certification
12 21 (0.56%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 17 (0.45%) Oracle Certification
14 16 (0.42%) CBAP
15 13 (0.34%) PhD
16 10 (0.27%) ISEB
16 10 (0.27%) PMP
17 9 (0.24%) PMI Certification
18 8 (0.21%) CFA
18 8 (0.21%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 636 (16.87%) Data Quality
2 271 (7.19%) QA
3 158 (4.19%) GDPR
4 61 (1.62%) Accessibility
5 27 (0.72%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 27 (0.72%) SLA
6 23 (0.61%) PMO
7 20 (0.53%) MiFID
8 19 (0.50%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 17 (0.45%) NIST
10 16 (0.42%) HIPAA
11 15 (0.40%) Actionable Recommendations
12 14 (0.37%) PCI DSS
13 13 (0.34%) SEPA
13 13 (0.34%) WCAG
14 12 (0.32%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 12 (0.32%) EMIR
14 12 (0.32%) IFRS
15 11 (0.29%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.27%) PSD2
System Software
1 445 (11.80%) Docker
2 101 (2.68%) Active Directory
3 31 (0.82%) Virtual Machines
4 16 (0.42%) VMware Infrastructure
5 15 (0.40%) Oracle RAC
6 12 (0.32%) Hyper-V
7 8 (0.21%) HDFS
7 8 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
8 6 (0.16%) KVM
9 5 (0.13%) RACF
9 5 (0.13%) XenApp
9 5 (0.13%) XenDesktop
10 4 (0.11%) Postfix
11 3 (0.080%) Oracle Clusterware
11 3 (0.080%) VMware ESXi
12 2 (0.053%) NDS
12 2 (0.053%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 2 (0.053%) Virtual Servers
12 2 (0.053%) vSphere
12 2 (0.053%) zsh
Systems Management
1 409 (10.85%) Kubernetes
2 297 (7.88%) Terraform
3 83 (2.20%) Grafana
4 62 (1.64%) Ansible
5 61 (1.62%) Prometheus
6 21 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
7 19 (0.50%) Oracle RMAN
8 18 (0.48%) SCCM
9 17 (0.45%) Progress Chef
10 14 (0.37%) Data Guard
10 14 (0.37%) Puppet
11 13 (0.34%) Control-M
11 13 (0.34%) Kibana
12 9 (0.24%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
13 8 (0.21%) Active Directory Federation Services
13 8 (0.21%) HP Quality Center
13 8 (0.21%) Kiali
13 8 (0.21%) Microsoft Intune
13 8 (0.21%) WSUS
14 7 (0.19%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 617 (16.37%) Oracle
2 608 (16.13%) Microsoft
3 457 (12.12%) Databricks
4 159 (4.22%) Google
5 98 (2.60%) Informatica
5 98 (2.60%) SAP
5 98 (2.60%) ServiceNow
6 96 (2.55%) Talend
7 68 (1.80%) Splunk
8 63 (1.67%) Salesforce
9 55 (1.46%) IBM
10 50 (1.33%) Citrix
11 46 (1.22%) OpenAI
12 43 (1.14%) Denodo
13 40 (1.06%) MuleSoft
14 34 (0.90%) Bloomberg
15 30 (0.80%) VMware
16 27 (0.72%) Foundry
17 24 (0.64%) Murex
17 24 (0.64%) Palantir