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

6 months to
1 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -3
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,463 3,094 3,871
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.53% 11.68% 10.15%
As % of the Programming Languages category 34.78% 35.00% 34.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,391 2,046 2,804
10th Percentile £344 £356 £363
25th Percentile £413 £413 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £513 £540
% change year-on-year -2.44% -5.09% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 65 51 67
10th Percentile £21.51 £25.26 £21.64
25th Percentile £31.25 £35.00 £30.04
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +23.53% -15.00%
75th Percentile £57.50 £65.31 £53.75
90th Percentile £74.51 £77.19 £64.51
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year -4.76% +23.53% -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 9,957 8,841 11,262
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 30.27% 33.37% 29.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,622 5,632 8,135
10th Percentile £350 £358 £354
25th Percentile £413 £425 £430
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £535 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.21% -2.73% -4.35%
75th Percentile £623 £650 £661
90th Percentile £726 £770 £763
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £538
% change year-on-year -4.76% -2.33% -4.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 411 208 479
10th Percentile £41.25 £25.26 £35.61
25th Percentile £52.50 £42.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.59% +4.58% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £69.62
90th Percentile £76.00 £85.00 £77.60
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%

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 1 February 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 1 February 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 1 February 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 2,114 £510 -7.27% 862
Midlands -4 360 £514 +8.11% 296
North of England -6 349 £450 -5.26% 374
South East -14 287 £475 -5.00% 588
West Midlands +2 272 £513 +2.50% 164
North West +2 197 £423 -8.65% 210
South West -3 178 £475 -5.00% 177
Yorkshire -24 133 £475 -5.94% 120
East Midlands -9 88 £525 +33.76% 132
East of England -10 76 £550 +9.45% 139
North East -9 23 £475 -9.52% 48
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
1 171 (4.94%) Apache Spark
2 141 (4.07%) Apache Airflow
3 105 (3.03%) Confluence
4 100 (2.89%) Apache
5 91 (2.63%) SharePoint
6 68 (1.96%) SAS
7 43 (1.24%) WebLogic
8 26 (0.75%) Microsoft Exchange
9 23 (0.66%) IIS
10 19 (0.55%) Skype for Business
11 17 (0.49%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 16 (0.46%) CMS
12 16 (0.46%) nginx
13 14 (0.40%) Tomcat
14 13 (0.38%) Jupyter
14 13 (0.38%) Mattermost
15 12 (0.35%) Oracle Workflow
15 12 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
16 11 (0.32%) HCL Notes
16 11 (0.32%) JBoss
Applications
1 229 (6.61%) Microsoft Excel
2 73 (2.11%) Microsoft Office
3 41 (1.18%) MS Visio
4 35 (1.01%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 13 (0.38%) Microsoft Project
6 9 (0.26%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.20%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 6 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
8 6 (0.17%) Trello
9 3 (0.087%) Notion
10 2 (0.058%) Maya
10 2 (0.058%) NUKE
10 2 (0.058%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.029%) SPSS
11 1 (0.029%) Weka
Business Applications
1 25 (0.72%) Aladdin
1 25 (0.72%) Oracle Payables
2 23 (0.66%) Oracle EBS
2 23 (0.66%) Oracle General Ledger
3 21 (0.61%) Oracle Receivables
4 19 (0.55%) Dynamics CRM
5 17 (0.49%) Remedy ITSM
5 17 (0.49%) SAP S/4HANA
6 16 (0.46%) NEC Housing
6 16 (0.46%) Oracle Assets
7 14 (0.40%) Endur
7 14 (0.40%) NetSuite
7 14 (0.40%) Oracle EBS R12
8 12 (0.35%) Oracle ERP
8 12 (0.35%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
9 11 (0.32%) Oracle Cash Management
10 9 (0.26%) Advent Geneva
10 9 (0.26%) Maximo
10 9 (0.26%) Oracle Financials
11 8 (0.23%) SAP HR
Cloud Services
1 1,147 (33.12%) Azure
2 827 (23.88%) AWS
3 650 (18.77%) Power Platform
4 325 (9.38%) Azure DevOps
5 287 (8.29%) GCP
6 260 (7.51%) GitHub
7 251 (7.25%) Azure Data Factory
8 238 (6.87%) Snowflake
9 237 (6.84%) Serverless
10 180 (5.20%) Amazon S3
11 175 (5.05%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 137 (3.96%) dbt
13 133 (3.84%) GitHub Actions
14 115 (3.32%) AWS Lambda
15 95 (2.74%) SaaS
16 82 (2.37%) Azure Functions
17 79 (2.28%) Power Automate
18 69 (1.99%) PowerApps
19 57 (1.65%) Dynamics 365
20 56 (1.62%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 53 (1.53%) Firewall
2 37 (1.07%) DNS
3 34 (0.98%) HTTP
4 25 (0.72%) Skype
5 18 (0.52%) Network Security
6 16 (0.46%) TCP/IP
7 15 (0.43%) Internet
8 14 (0.40%) DHCP
9 12 (0.35%) Unified Communications
10 11 (0.32%) SSH
11 9 (0.26%) 2G
11 9 (0.26%) 5G
11 9 (0.26%) LAN
11 9 (0.26%) SMTP
11 9 (0.26%) SSL
11 9 (0.26%) VPN
11 9 (0.26%) WAN
12 8 (0.23%) SMS
13 7 (0.20%) FTP
13 7 (0.20%) OpenLDAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 590 (17.04%) Power BI
2 389 (11.23%) SQL Server
3 364 (10.51%) Data Warehouse
4 248 (7.16%) Relational Database
5 242 (6.99%) PostgreSQL
6 240 (6.93%) NoSQL
7 215 (6.21%) Tableau
8 205 (5.92%) Data Lake
9 174 (5.02%) Azure SQL Database
10 150 (4.33%) Oracle Database
11 143 (4.13%) Metadata
12 108 (3.12%) Big Data
13 107 (3.09%) MySQL
14 104 (3.00%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 102 (2.95%) BigQuery
16 98 (2.83%) MongoDB
17 83 (2.40%) Amazon RDS
18 78 (2.25%) Delta Lake
19 77 (2.22%) Amazon Redshift
20 63 (1.82%) SQL Server Reporting Services
Development Applications
1 391 (11.29%) Git
2 306 (8.84%) JIRA
3 186 (5.37%) Jenkins
4 129 (3.73%) GitLab
5 57 (1.65%) Selenium
6 55 (1.59%) JUnit
7 44 (1.27%) Oracle APEX
8 37 (1.07%) Cucumber
9 35 (1.01%) Postman
10 30 (0.87%) Bitbucket
11 27 (0.78%) REST Assured
12 24 (0.69%) Maven
13 23 (0.66%) MLflow
13 23 (0.66%) Visual Studio
14 22 (0.64%) ERwin
14 22 (0.64%) Mockito
14 22 (0.64%) SpecFlow
15 21 (0.61%) Cypress.io
16 18 (0.52%) Gradle
17 17 (0.49%) Oracle Forms
General
1 1,072 (30.96%) Social Skills
2 997 (28.79%) Finance
3 612 (17.67%) Analytical Skills
4 393 (11.35%) Banking
5 274 (7.91%) Public Sector
6 114 (3.29%) Investment Banking
7 96 (2.77%) Front Office
8 89 (2.57%) Documentation Skills
9 83 (2.40%) Marketing
10 61 (1.76%) Retail
11 59 (1.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 51 (1.47%) Financial Institution
13 42 (1.21%) Presentation Skills
14 35 (1.01%) Legal
15 30 (0.87%) Organisational Skills
16 29 (0.84%) Local Government
16 29 (0.84%) Telecoms
17 28 (0.81%) Law
17 28 (0.81%) Manufacturing
17 28 (0.81%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 882 (25.47%) Developer
2 541 (15.62%) Analyst
3 534 (15.42%) Data Engineer
4 445 (12.85%) Senior
5 224 (6.47%) Lead
6 215 (6.21%) Data Analyst
7 195 (5.63%) Business Analyst
8 166 (4.79%) Architect
9 141 (4.07%) Senior Developer
10 122 (3.52%) Consultant
11 120 (3.47%) Java Developer
12 106 (3.06%) Software Engineer
13 103 (2.97%) Azure Engineer
14 85 (2.45%) Full-Stack Developer
14 85 (2.45%) Python Developer
15 84 (2.43%) Senior Data Engineer
16 82 (2.37%) C# Developer
17 81 (2.34%) Data Scientist
18 69 (1.99%) Azure Data Engineer
19 63 (1.82%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 329 (9.50%) .NET
2 288 (8.32%) REST
3 214 (6.18%) Kafka
4 192 (5.54%) PySpark
5 169 (4.88%) React
6 156 (4.50%) RESTful
7 142 (4.10%) Spring
8 137 (3.96%) HTML
9 130 (3.75%) XML
10 123 (3.55%) Spring Boot
11 118 (3.41%) CSS
12 101 (2.92%) JSON
13 98 (2.83%) Node.js
14 95 (2.74%) AngularJS
15 84 (2.43%) SOAP
16 83 (2.40%) Pandas
17 79 (2.28%) .NET Framework
18 74 (2.14%) Middleware
19 60 (1.73%) NumPy
20 59 (1.70%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 212 (6.12%) Cloud Native
2 105 (3.03%) Data Structures
3 103 (2.97%) Product Ownership
4 93 (2.69%) Legacy Systems
5 81 (2.34%) Management Information System
6 77 (2.22%) Data Protection Act
7 74 (2.14%) Analytical Mindset
8 64 (1.85%) Derivative
9 62 (1.79%) Algorithms
10 58 (1.67%) Distributed Systems
11 54 (1.56%) Equities
12 49 (1.41%) Fixed Income
12 49 (1.41%) Onboarding
13 48 (1.39%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 40 (1.16%) Replication
15 37 (1.07%) Market Risk
16 35 (1.01%) SWIFT Messaging Network
17 33 (0.95%) Credit Risk
17 33 (0.95%) Greenfield Project
17 33 (0.95%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 312 (9.01%) Linux
2 225 (6.50%) Windows
3 193 (5.57%) Unix
4 62 (1.79%) Windows Server
5 14 (0.40%) Windows 10
5 14 (0.40%) Windows Server 2019
6 12 (0.35%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 12 (0.35%) VMS
6 12 (0.35%) Windows Server 2016
7 10 (0.29%) Ubuntu
8 8 (0.23%) AIX
8 8 (0.23%) Android
9 7 (0.20%) Amazon Linux
9 7 (0.20%) Apple iOS
10 5 (0.14%) Windows Server 2012
11 4 (0.12%) CentOS
11 4 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
12 2 (0.058%) zOS
13 1 (0.029%) Mac OS X
13 1 (0.029%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 970 (28.01%) Agile
2 836 (24.14%) CI/CD
3 818 (23.62%) Analytics
4 812 (23.45%) Problem-Solving
5 768 (22.18%) DevOps
6 767 (22.15%) Business Intelligence
7 746 (21.54%) Data Modelling
8 690 (19.92%) ETL
9 515 (14.87%) Data Pipeline
10 433 (12.50%) Data Engineering
11 386 (11.15%) Migration
12 369 (10.66%) Data Governance
13 357 (10.31%) Validation
14 354 (10.22%) AI
15 335 (9.67%) Data Analysis
16 333 (9.62%) Visualisation
17 312 (9.01%) Test Automation
18 299 (8.63%) Data Science
18 299 (8.63%) Microservices
19 296 (8.55%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 1,260 (36.38%) Python
2 520 (15.02%) Java
3 372 (10.74%) C#
4 312 (9.01%) JavaScript
5 253 (7.31%) PL/SQL
6 152 (4.39%) PowerShell
7 133 (3.84%) TypeScript
8 102 (2.95%) T-SQL
9 97 (2.80%) Shell Script
10 96 (2.77%) R
11 95 (2.74%) Scala
12 80 (2.31%) C++
13 75 (2.17%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 71 (2.05%) VBA
15 63 (1.82%) VB
16 55 (1.59%) Bash
17 48 (1.39%) Perl
18 46 (1.33%) Go
19 37 (1.07%) Bicep
20 28 (0.81%) PHP
Qualifications
1 592 (17.10%) Security Cleared
2 457 (13.20%) SC Cleared
3 343 (9.90%) Degree
4 121 (3.49%) Computer Science Degree
5 76 (2.19%) Azure Certification
6 64 (1.85%) BPSS Clearance
7 62 (1.79%) DV Cleared
8 57 (1.65%) Master's Degree
9 55 (1.59%) AWS Certification
10 44 (1.27%) Microsoft Certification
11 38 (1.10%) ISTQB
12 23 (0.66%) ITIL Certification
13 22 (0.64%) Oracle Certification
14 19 (0.55%) CBAP
15 17 (0.49%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 12 (0.35%) Cisco Certification
16 12 (0.35%) MCSE
16 12 (0.35%) PMI Certification
17 11 (0.32%) CCNA
18 10 (0.29%) ISEB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 520 (15.02%) Data Quality
2 252 (7.28%) QA
3 133 (3.84%) GDPR
4 56 (1.62%) Accessibility
5 27 (0.78%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 23 (0.66%) SLA
7 19 (0.55%) SEPA
8 18 (0.52%) MiFID
9 17 (0.49%) ISO 20022
10 16 (0.46%) PSD2
11 15 (0.43%) HIPAA
11 15 (0.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 14 (0.40%) WCAG
13 13 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
13 13 (0.38%) PMO
14 12 (0.35%) EMIR
14 12 (0.35%) IFRS
15 11 (0.32%) PCI DSS
16 9 (0.26%) NIST
17 8 (0.23%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 416 (12.01%) Docker
2 98 (2.83%) Active Directory
3 27 (0.78%) VMware Infrastructure
4 22 (0.64%) Virtual Machines
5 16 (0.46%) Oracle RAC
6 10 (0.29%) Hyper-V
7 7 (0.20%) DFS Replication
7 7 (0.20%) Dovecot
7 7 (0.20%) HDFS
7 7 (0.20%) Postfix
7 7 (0.20%) Squid
8 6 (0.17%) Virtual Desktop
8 6 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
8 6 (0.17%) zsh
9 5 (0.14%) Microsoft Virtual Server
9 5 (0.14%) Virtual Servers
10 4 (0.12%) VMware Workstation
10 4 (0.12%) XenApp
10 4 (0.12%) XenDesktop
11 3 (0.087%) Oracle Clusterware
Systems Management
1 376 (10.86%) Kubernetes
2 250 (7.22%) Terraform
3 72 (2.08%) Grafana
4 59 (1.70%) Ansible
4 59 (1.70%) Prometheus
5 24 (0.69%) SCCM
5 24 (0.69%) SCOM
6 21 (0.61%) HP SiteScope
7 19 (0.55%) Progress Chef
8 18 (0.52%) Kibana
9 17 (0.49%) Single Sign-On
10 16 (0.46%) Control-M
10 16 (0.46%) Data Guard
10 16 (0.46%) Oracle RMAN
11 15 (0.43%) Puppet
12 12 (0.35%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
13 11 (0.32%) WSUS
14 10 (0.29%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 10 (0.29%) ITRS Geneos
14 10 (0.29%) Proxmox
Vendors
1 596 (17.21%) Oracle
2 591 (17.07%) Microsoft
3 381 (11.00%) Databricks
4 141 (4.07%) Google
5 95 (2.74%) SAP
5 95 (2.74%) Splunk
6 70 (2.02%) ServiceNow
7 67 (1.93%) Salesforce
7 67 (1.93%) Talend
8 60 (1.73%) Informatica
9 45 (1.30%) IBM
10 44 (1.27%) OpenAI
11 43 (1.24%) Citrix
12 40 (1.16%) VMware
13 39 (1.13%) Denodo
14 34 (0.98%) MuleSoft
15 32 (0.92%) Dynatrace
16 28 (0.81%) Bloomberg
17 25 (0.72%) Foundry
18 22 (0.64%) AppDynamics