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

6 months to
13 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,821 3,004 3,786
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.46% 12.18% 9.98%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.97% 35.99% 34.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,631 2,088 2,738
10th Percentile £350 £356 £355
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £518 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.43% -5.86% -
75th Percentile £588 £638 £650
90th Percentile £710 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £502 £525
% change year-on-year -0.30% -4.48% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 53 56 61
10th Percentile £18.70 £20.87 £21.64
25th Percentile £34.01 £29.07 £25.79
Median hourly rate £45.00 £50.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -10.00% +17.65% -20.93%
75th Percentile £70.00 £65.15 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £79.72 £61.75
UK median hourly rate £48.11 £47.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year +1.28% +11.76% -22.73%

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 10,624 8,346 10,986
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 29.08% 33.83% 28.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,070 5,588 7,910
10th Percentile £352 £359 £350
25th Percentile £415 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -2.42% -6.43%
75th Percentile £613 £650 £656
90th Percentile £725 £775 £768
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -5.75%
Number of hourly rates quoted 454 213 460
10th Percentile £41.94 £25.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £55.00 £41.25 £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 £68.75 £67.50
90th Percentile £77.35 £85.00 £75.00
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 13 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 13 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 13 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 2,263 £513 -6.82% 893
Midlands +4 467 £475 +2.98% 270
North of England -12 418 £450 -6.83% 428
West Midlands +6 372 £469 -3.70% 160
South East -18 290 £483 -3.50% 530
North West -1 240 £447 -5.89% 242
South West -2 200 £475 -9.52% 158
Yorkshire -21 156 £475 -5.94% 132
East Midlands -8 93 £537 +38.58% 108
East of England -26 76 £500 +6.95% 111
North East -3 31 £475 +5.56% 60
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
1 219 (5.73%) Apache Spark
2 151 (3.95%) Apache Airflow
3 131 (3.43%) Apache
4 120 (3.14%) Confluence
5 79 (2.07%) SharePoint
6 75 (1.96%) SAS
7 52 (1.36%) WebLogic
8 28 (0.73%) IIS
9 24 (0.63%) Microsoft Exchange
10 21 (0.55%) Tomcat
11 18 (0.47%) Jupyter
12 17 (0.44%) CMS
13 16 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
14 15 (0.39%) Tuxedo
15 13 (0.34%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 13 (0.34%) WebSphere
16 12 (0.31%) Appian
16 12 (0.31%) HCL Notes
16 12 (0.31%) JBoss
17 11 (0.29%) Mendix
Applications
1 264 (6.91%) Microsoft Excel
2 59 (1.54%) Microsoft Office
3 49 (1.28%) MS Visio
4 35 (0.92%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
6 12 (0.31%) Microsoft Project
7 7 (0.18%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.10%) Oracle Smart View
9 3 (0.079%) Notion
9 3 (0.079%) Trello
10 1 (0.026%) InDesign
10 1 (0.026%) Mingle
10 1 (0.026%) SPSS
10 1 (0.026%) Weka
Business Applications
1 29 (0.76%) Aladdin
2 25 (0.65%) Oracle Payables
3 24 (0.63%) Oracle EBS
4 22 (0.58%) Oracle Receivables
5 20 (0.52%) NEC Housing
5 20 (0.52%) Oracle General Ledger
6 19 (0.50%) Dynamics CRM
7 17 (0.44%) Oracle EBS R12
8 16 (0.42%) SAP S/4HANA
9 15 (0.39%) Oracle Assets
10 14 (0.37%) Oracle ERP
11 13 (0.34%) NetSuite
12 11 (0.29%) Oracle Cash Management
12 11 (0.29%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
12 11 (0.29%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 9 (0.24%) Advent Geneva
13 9 (0.24%) Endur
14 8 (0.21%) Maximo
14 8 (0.21%) Oracle 11i
14 8 (0.21%) SAP HR
Cloud Services
1 1,333 (34.89%) Azure
2 941 (24.63%) AWS
3 734 (19.21%) Power Platform
4 392 (10.26%) Azure DevOps
5 321 (8.40%) GCP
6 315 (8.24%) Azure Data Factory
7 303 (7.93%) GitHub
8 274 (7.17%) Serverless
9 257 (6.73%) Snowflake
10 205 (5.37%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 203 (5.31%) Amazon S3
12 159 (4.16%) dbt
13 153 (4.00%) GitHub Actions
14 141 (3.69%) AWS Lambda
15 95 (2.49%) SaaS
16 88 (2.30%) Azure Functions
17 84 (2.20%) Power Automate
18 76 (1.99%) Entra ID
19 69 (1.81%) AWS CloudFormation
19 69 (1.81%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 50 (1.31%) Firewall
2 42 (1.10%) DNS
3 22 (0.58%) Network Security
4 21 (0.55%) HTTP
5 20 (0.52%) TCP/IP
6 15 (0.39%) Internet
6 15 (0.39%) VPN
6 15 (0.39%) WAN
7 13 (0.34%) 5G
7 13 (0.34%) DHCP
7 13 (0.34%) SSL
8 12 (0.31%) LAN
9 10 (0.26%) 4G
10 9 (0.24%) 2G
10 9 (0.24%) Radio Access Network
11 8 (0.21%) SMS
12 7 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
13 6 (0.16%) Multicast
13 6 (0.16%) Skype
13 6 (0.16%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 669 (17.51%) Power BI
2 466 (12.20%) Data Warehouse
3 450 (11.78%) SQL Server
4 265 (6.94%) NoSQL
5 255 (6.67%) Relational Database
6 251 (6.57%) PostgreSQL
7 242 (6.33%) Tableau
8 238 (6.23%) Data Lake
9 200 (5.23%) Azure SQL Database
10 187 (4.89%) Metadata
11 144 (3.77%) Oracle Database
12 140 (3.66%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 120 (3.14%) BigQuery
14 118 (3.09%) Big Data
15 111 (2.90%) MySQL
16 104 (2.72%) Amazon Redshift
16 104 (2.72%) Delta Lake
17 101 (2.64%) MongoDB
18 96 (2.51%) Amazon RDS
19 80 (2.09%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 437 (11.44%) Git
2 303 (7.93%) JIRA
3 205 (5.37%) Jenkins
4 157 (4.11%) GitLab
5 62 (1.62%) JUnit
5 62 (1.62%) Selenium
6 46 (1.20%) Postman
7 41 (1.07%) Oracle APEX
8 38 (0.99%) Cucumber
9 32 (0.84%) Maven
9 32 (0.84%) MLflow
10 28 (0.73%) Bitbucket
10 28 (0.73%) REST Assured
11 25 (0.65%) Mockito
12 24 (0.63%) Cypress.io
12 24 (0.63%) ERwin
12 24 (0.63%) Visual Studio
13 22 (0.58%) SpecFlow
14 20 (0.52%) JMeter
15 19 (0.50%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 1,113 (29.13%) Social Skills
2 1,047 (27.40%) Finance
3 689 (18.03%) Analytical Skills
4 391 (10.23%) Banking
5 338 (8.85%) Public Sector
6 103 (2.70%) Investment Banking
7 102 (2.67%) Front Office
8 97 (2.54%) Documentation Skills
9 81 (2.12%) Marketing
10 61 (1.60%) Retail
11 60 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 54 (1.41%) Legal
13 53 (1.39%) Financial Institution
14 38 (0.99%) Publishing
15 37 (0.97%) Telecoms
16 36 (0.94%) Presentation Skills
17 35 (0.92%) Organisational Skills
18 31 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
18 31 (0.81%) Law
19 30 (0.79%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 908 (23.76%) Developer
2 700 (18.32%) Data Engineer
3 549 (14.37%) Analyst
4 486 (12.72%) Senior
5 274 (7.17%) Lead
6 230 (6.02%) Data Analyst
7 205 (5.37%) Architect
8 198 (5.18%) Business Analyst
9 160 (4.19%) Consultant
10 143 (3.74%) Senior Developer
11 137 (3.59%) Java Developer
12 115 (3.01%) Azure Engineer
13 105 (2.75%) Software Engineer
14 103 (2.70%) Senior Data Engineer
15 99 (2.59%) C# Developer
16 93 (2.43%) DBA
17 89 (2.33%) Python Developer
18 88 (2.30%) Full-Stack Developer
19 85 (2.22%) Data Scientist
20 78 (2.04%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 337 (8.82%) .NET
2 307 (8.03%) REST
3 248 (6.49%) Kafka
4 237 (6.20%) PySpark
5 182 (4.76%) React
6 175 (4.58%) RESTful
7 163 (4.27%) Spring
8 153 (4.00%) XML
9 141 (3.69%) Spring Boot
10 138 (3.61%) HTML
11 113 (2.96%) CSS
12 112 (2.93%) AngularJS
12 112 (2.93%) Pandas
13 111 (2.90%) JSON
14 97 (2.54%) Node.js
15 84 (2.20%) .NET Framework
16 80 (2.09%) SOAP
17 79 (2.07%) Middleware
18 73 (1.91%) Web Services
19 72 (1.88%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 260 (6.80%) Cloud Native
2 128 (3.35%) Data Structures
3 125 (3.27%) Legacy Systems
4 107 (2.80%) Product Ownership
5 83 (2.17%) Management Information System
6 77 (2.02%) Distributed Systems
7 73 (1.91%) Data Protection Act
7 73 (1.91%) Derivative
8 68 (1.78%) Analytical Mindset
9 63 (1.65%) Equities
10 58 (1.52%) Algorithms
11 57 (1.49%) Fixed Income
12 53 (1.39%) Onboarding
13 48 (1.26%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 41 (1.07%) Clustering
14 41 (1.07%) Enterprise Software
15 39 (1.02%) Self-Motivation
16 38 (0.99%) Replication
17 36 (0.94%) Market Risk
18 29 (0.76%) Credit Risk
Operating Systems
1 281 (7.35%) Linux
2 225 (5.89%) Windows
3 186 (4.87%) Unix
4 73 (1.91%) Windows Server
5 17 (0.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 15 (0.39%) AIX
7 14 (0.37%) Windows Server 2016
8 13 (0.34%) Windows Server 2019
9 12 (0.31%) Windows 10
10 6 (0.16%) Android
10 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2012
11 5 (0.13%) Apple iOS
11 5 (0.13%) zOS
12 4 (0.10%) Solaris
12 4 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
13 3 (0.079%) CentOS
13 3 (0.079%) VMS
14 2 (0.052%) Oracle Linux
14 2 (0.052%) Ubuntu
15 1 (0.026%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,027 (26.88%) Agile
2 1,019 (26.67%) CI/CD
3 998 (26.12%) Analytics
4 910 (23.82%) Data Modelling
5 885 (23.16%) DevOps
6 882 (23.08%) Business Intelligence
7 868 (22.72%) ETL
8 838 (21.93%) Problem-Solving
9 633 (16.57%) Data Pipeline
10 587 (15.36%) Data Engineering
11 467 (12.22%) Migration
12 452 (11.83%) Data Governance
13 447 (11.70%) AI
14 410 (10.73%) Validation
15 378 (9.89%) Data Analysis
16 360 (9.42%) Test Automation
17 345 (9.03%) Data Science
18 342 (8.95%) Visualisation
19 339 (8.87%) Decision-Making
20 327 (8.56%) Microservices
Programming Languages
1 1,439 (37.66%) Python
2 540 (14.13%) Java
3 409 (10.70%) C#
4 320 (8.37%) JavaScript
5 269 (7.04%) PL/SQL
6 158 (4.14%) T-SQL
7 151 (3.95%) PowerShell
8 144 (3.77%) TypeScript
9 108 (2.83%) Shell Script
10 105 (2.75%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 101 (2.64%) Scala
12 100 (2.62%) R
13 68 (1.78%) Bash
13 68 (1.78%) C++
14 63 (1.65%) VBA
15 48 (1.26%) Bicep
16 45 (1.18%) Perl
17 42 (1.10%) VB
18 38 (0.99%) Go
19 28 (0.73%) PHP
Qualifications
1 757 (19.81%) Security Cleared
2 599 (15.68%) SC Cleared
3 330 (8.64%) Degree
4 110 (2.88%) Computer Science Degree
5 82 (2.15%) BPSS Clearance
6 72 (1.88%) Azure Certification
7 56 (1.47%) Master's Degree
8 52 (1.36%) DV Cleared
9 51 (1.33%) ISTQB
10 45 (1.18%) Microsoft Certification
11 43 (1.13%) AWS Certification
12 21 (0.55%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 17 (0.44%) Oracle Certification
14 16 (0.42%) CBAP
15 13 (0.34%) PhD
16 10 (0.26%) ISEB
16 10 (0.26%) PMP
17 9 (0.24%) PMI Certification
18 8 (0.21%) CFA
18 8 (0.21%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 662 (17.33%) Data Quality
2 281 (7.35%) QA
3 165 (4.32%) GDPR
4 61 (1.60%) Accessibility
5 28 (0.73%) SLA
6 27 (0.71%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 25 (0.65%) PMO
8 20 (0.52%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 20 (0.52%) MiFID
9 17 (0.44%) NIST
10 16 (0.42%) Actionable Recommendations
10 16 (0.42%) HIPAA
11 15 (0.39%) PCI DSS
12 13 (0.34%) SEPA
12 13 (0.34%) WCAG
13 12 (0.31%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 12 (0.31%) IFRS
14 11 (0.29%) EMIR
14 11 (0.29%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.26%) PSD2
System Software
1 446 (11.67%) Docker
2 99 (2.59%) Active Directory
3 31 (0.81%) Virtual Machines
4 16 (0.42%) VMware Infrastructure
5 15 (0.39%) Oracle RAC
6 12 (0.31%) 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 (0.10%) Postfix
11 3 (0.079%) Oracle Clusterware
11 3 (0.079%) VMware ESXi
12 2 (0.052%) NDS
12 2 (0.052%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 2 (0.052%) Virtual Servers
12 2 (0.052%) vSphere
12 2 (0.052%) zsh
Systems Management
1 409 (10.70%) Kubernetes
2 303 (7.93%) Terraform
3 85 (2.22%) Grafana
4 62 (1.62%) Ansible
4 62 (1.62%) Prometheus
5 22 (0.58%) Oracle RMAN
6 21 (0.55%) Single Sign-On
7 19 (0.50%) SCCM
8 17 (0.44%) Progress Chef
9 14 (0.37%) Data Guard
9 14 (0.37%) Puppet
10 13 (0.34%) Control-M
10 13 (0.34%) Kibana
11 9 (0.24%) HP Quality Center
11 9 (0.24%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
12 8 (0.21%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 8 (0.21%) Kiali
12 8 (0.21%) Microsoft Intune
12 8 (0.21%) WSUS
13 7 (0.18%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 622 (16.28%) Microsoft
2 617 (16.15%) Oracle
3 468 (12.25%) Databricks
4 164 (4.29%) Google
5 104 (2.72%) Informatica
6 102 (2.67%) ServiceNow
7 99 (2.59%) SAP
8 95 (2.49%) Talend
9 67 (1.75%) Splunk
10 62 (1.62%) Salesforce
11 57 (1.49%) IBM
12 50 (1.31%) Citrix
13 47 (1.23%) OpenAI
14 41 (1.07%) MuleSoft
15 39 (1.02%) Denodo
16 35 (0.92%) Bloomberg
17 30 (0.79%) VMware
18 28 (0.73%) Foundry
19 25 (0.65%) Dynatrace
19 25 (0.65%) Palantir