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

6 months to
2 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,002 3,002 3,650
As % of all contract jobs in England 9.90% 12.30% 9.82%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.53% 36.36% 33.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,766 2,139 2,689
10th Percentile £350 £358 £355
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £518 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.38% -5.91% -
75th Percentile £588 £638 £650
90th Percentile £688 £775 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £538
% change year-on-year - -6.98% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 63 54 57
10th Percentile £29.73 £20.02 £23.50
25th Percentile £35.75 £29.30 £26.25
Median hourly rate £50.00 £43.66 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.53% +2.72% -14.63%
75th Percentile £73.84 £65.46 £54.13
90th Percentile £83.45 £80.73 £62.24
UK median hourly rate £54.75 £42.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year +28.82% - -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 10,956 8,256 10,937
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 27.11% 33.83% 29.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,276 5,716 7,945
10th Percentile £355 £363 £350
25th Percentile £415 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £542
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -3.05% -4.16%
75th Percentile £613 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £788 £775
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 530 216 440
10th Percentile £42.44 £25.25 £35.52
25th Percentile £55.00 £37.96 £48.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +3.59% +0.40% +4.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £80.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.50
% change year-on-year +4.00% +3.31% +0.83%

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 May 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 May 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 May 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 -6.82% 923
Midlands +6 521 £469 +2.77% 260
North of England -7 480 £450 -5.26% 387
West Midlands +7 414 £463 +0.27% 151
South East -18 331 £500 - 511
North West 0 263 £450 -5.26% 223
South West -8 205 £475 -5.00% 148
Yorkshire -14 193 £463 -5.13% 118
East Midlands +2 104 £525 +25.00% 109
East of England -17 92 £500 +8.99% 119
North East -9 36 £475 +4.40% 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
1 228 (5.70%) Apache Spark
2 150 (3.75%) Apache Airflow
3 136 (3.40%) Apache
4 130 (3.25%) Confluence
5 86 (2.15%) SAS
6 79 (1.97%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.97%) WebLogic
8 34 (0.85%) IIS
9 24 (0.60%) Tomcat
10 21 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
11 20 (0.50%) Oracle Workflow
12 15 (0.37%) Tuxedo
13 14 (0.35%) HCL Notes
14 13 (0.32%) Appian
14 13 (0.32%) Jupyter
14 13 (0.32%) Mendix
15 12 (0.30%) nginx
15 12 (0.30%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 12 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
16 11 (0.27%) WebSphere
Applications
1 276 (6.90%) Microsoft Excel
2 56 (1.40%) Microsoft Office
3 48 (1.20%) MS Visio
4 33 (0.82%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 23 (0.57%) Spreadsheet
6 9 (0.22%) Microsoft Project
7 8 (0.20%) Chatbot
8 5 (0.12%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.12%) Notion
9 3 (0.075%) Oracle Smart View
9 3 (0.075%) Trello
10 1 (0.025%) InDesign
10 1 (0.025%) Mingle
10 1 (0.025%) SPSS
10 1 (0.025%) Weka
Business Applications
1 41 (1.02%) Oracle EBS
2 24 (0.60%) Aladdin
2 24 (0.60%) NEC Housing
3 21 (0.52%) Dynamics CRM
4 20 (0.50%) Oracle EBS R12
4 20 (0.50%) Oracle Payables
5 19 (0.47%) Oracle Receivables
5 19 (0.47%) SAP S/4HANA
6 17 (0.42%) NetSuite
6 17 (0.42%) Oracle General Ledger
7 16 (0.40%) Oracle ERP
8 13 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
9 12 (0.30%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 11 (0.27%) Oracle Assets
10 11 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
11 10 (0.25%) Oracle 11i
12 9 (0.22%) Oracle Cash Management
13 8 (0.20%) Endur
13 8 (0.20%) Findur
13 8 (0.20%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
Cloud Services
1 1,369 (34.21%) Azure
2 949 (23.71%) AWS
3 787 (19.67%) Power Platform
4 405 (10.12%) Azure DevOps
5 344 (8.60%) Azure Data Factory
6 325 (8.12%) GCP
7 290 (7.25%) GitHub
8 253 (6.32%) Serverless
9 234 (5.85%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 222 (5.55%) Snowflake
11 219 (5.47%) Amazon S3
12 170 (4.25%) dbt
13 150 (3.75%) GitHub Actions
14 144 (3.60%) AWS Lambda
15 87 (2.17%) Power Automate
16 75 (1.87%) SaaS
17 72 (1.80%) Entra ID
18 71 (1.77%) Azure Functions
19 68 (1.70%) AWS CloudFormation
20 67 (1.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 48 (1.20%) Firewall
2 38 (0.95%) DNS
3 22 (0.55%) Network Security
4 18 (0.45%) TCP/IP
5 16 (0.40%) HTTP
5 16 (0.40%) Internet
6 15 (0.37%) SNMP
6 15 (0.37%) WAN
7 12 (0.30%) LAN
8 11 (0.27%) SSL
8 11 (0.27%) VPN
9 10 (0.25%) Wi-Fi
10 9 (0.22%) DHCP
11 7 (0.17%) Wireshark
12 6 (0.15%) 3GPP
12 6 (0.15%) IPsec
12 6 (0.15%) VLAN
13 5 (0.12%) Kerberos
13 5 (0.12%) NetScaler
13 5 (0.12%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 719 (17.97%) Power BI
2 512 (12.79%) Data Warehouse
3 508 (12.69%) SQL Server
4 280 (7.00%) Tableau
5 267 (6.67%) Data Lake
6 252 (6.30%) PostgreSQL
6 252 (6.30%) Relational Database
7 244 (6.10%) NoSQL
8 212 (5.30%) Metadata
9 204 (5.10%) Azure SQL Database
10 147 (3.67%) Oracle Database
11 144 (3.60%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 121 (3.02%) BigQuery
13 116 (2.90%) Amazon Redshift
13 116 (2.90%) Delta Lake
14 114 (2.85%) MySQL
15 108 (2.70%) Big Data
16 101 (2.52%) Oracle Reports
17 93 (2.32%) MongoDB
18 92 (2.30%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 425 (10.62%) Git
2 318 (7.95%) JIRA
3 207 (5.17%) Jenkins
4 161 (4.02%) GitLab
5 58 (1.45%) Selenium
6 52 (1.30%) JUnit
7 47 (1.17%) Postman
8 41 (1.02%) Maven
9 37 (0.92%) Cucumber
10 36 (0.90%) Mockito
11 35 (0.87%) MLflow
12 28 (0.70%) REST Assured
12 28 (0.70%) SonarQube
13 27 (0.67%) Bitbucket
13 27 (0.67%) Gradle
14 26 (0.65%) ERwin
15 24 (0.60%) JMeter
16 23 (0.57%) Oracle APEX
17 22 (0.55%) TeamCity
18 21 (0.52%) SpecFlow
General
1 1,093 (27.31%) Finance
2 1,070 (26.74%) Social Skills
3 748 (18.69%) Analytical Skills
4 381 (9.52%) Banking
5 340 (8.50%) Public Sector
6 101 (2.52%) Front Office
7 98 (2.45%) Marketing
8 95 (2.37%) Investment Banking
9 87 (2.17%) Documentation Skills
10 63 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 56 (1.40%) Retail
12 55 (1.37%) Financial Institution
12 55 (1.37%) Legal
13 38 (0.95%) Telecoms
14 36 (0.90%) Publishing
15 35 (0.87%) Presentation Skills
16 34 (0.85%) Organisational Skills
17 33 (0.82%) Law
18 30 (0.75%) Local Government
19 28 (0.70%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 862 (21.54%) Developer
2 807 (20.16%) Data Engineer
3 592 (14.79%) Analyst
4 502 (12.54%) Senior
5 277 (6.92%) Lead
6 249 (6.22%) Data Analyst
7 227 (5.67%) Architect
8 192 (4.80%) Business Analyst
9 179 (4.47%) Consultant
10 148 (3.70%) Java Developer
11 137 (3.42%) Senior Data Engineer
12 126 (3.15%) Senior Developer
13 123 (3.07%) DBA
14 112 (2.80%) Azure Engineer
14 112 (2.80%) Software Engineer
15 102 (2.55%) C# Developer
16 87 (2.17%) Data Scientist
17 86 (2.15%) Data Architect
18 85 (2.12%) Python Developer
19 82 (2.05%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 354 (8.85%) .NET
2 313 (7.82%) REST
3 246 (6.15%) Kafka
4 241 (6.02%) PySpark
5 188 (4.70%) React
5 188 (4.70%) Spring
6 180 (4.50%) Spring Boot
7 169 (4.22%) RESTful
8 136 (3.40%) HTML
9 134 (3.35%) XML
10 122 (3.05%) JSON
11 121 (3.02%) Pandas
12 115 (2.87%) CSS
13 105 (2.62%) AngularJS
14 90 (2.25%) Middleware
15 86 (2.15%) .NET Framework
15 86 (2.15%) SOAP
16 74 (1.85%) Node.js
17 73 (1.82%) Web Services
18 67 (1.67%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 258 (6.45%) Cloud Native
2 144 (3.60%) Data Structures
3 137 (3.42%) Legacy Systems
4 126 (3.15%) Product Ownership
5 99 (2.47%) Distributed Systems
6 90 (2.25%) Management Information System
7 76 (1.90%) Derivative
8 71 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
9 69 (1.72%) Onboarding
10 66 (1.65%) Analytical Mindset
11 55 (1.37%) Equities
11 55 (1.37%) Fixed Income
12 50 (1.25%) Clustering
13 47 (1.17%) Algorithms
13 47 (1.17%) Enterprise Software
14 45 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
15 41 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
16 40 (1.00%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
17 38 (0.95%) NHS
17 38 (0.95%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 282 (7.05%) Linux
2 247 (6.17%) Windows
3 193 (4.82%) Unix
4 80 (2.00%) Windows Server
5 27 (0.67%) AIX
6 19 (0.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 15 (0.37%) Windows Server 2019
8 11 (0.27%) Windows Server 2016
9 9 (0.22%) Windows 10
10 7 (0.17%) Windows Server 2008
10 7 (0.17%) zOS
11 6 (0.15%) Android
11 6 (0.15%) Apple iOS
11 6 (0.15%) Solaris
12 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
13 3 (0.075%) Oracle Linux
14 2 (0.050%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.050%) VMS
15 1 (0.025%) Ubuntu
15 1 (0.025%) VME
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,077 (26.91%) CI/CD
2 1,034 (25.84%) Analytics
3 1,011 (25.26%) Agile
4 995 (24.86%) Data Modelling
5 958 (23.94%) ETL
6 933 (23.31%) Business Intelligence
7 906 (22.64%) DevOps
8 819 (20.46%) Problem-Solving
9 730 (18.24%) Data Pipeline
10 643 (16.07%) Data Engineering
11 508 (12.69%) AI
12 498 (12.44%) Migration
13 489 (12.22%) Validation
14 482 (12.04%) Data Governance
15 390 (9.75%) Decision-Making
16 388 (9.70%) Test Automation
17 380 (9.50%) Data Analysis
18 361 (9.02%) Performance Tuning
19 352 (8.80%) Microservices
20 338 (8.45%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,510 (37.73%) Python
2 543 (13.57%) Java
3 438 (10.94%) C#
4 307 (7.67%) JavaScript
5 301 (7.52%) PL/SQL
6 194 (4.85%) T-SQL
7 180 (4.50%) PowerShell
8 131 (3.27%) TypeScript
9 123 (3.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 120 (3.00%) R
11 119 (2.97%) Shell Script
12 88 (2.20%) Scala
13 75 (1.87%) Bash
14 61 (1.52%) C++
15 54 (1.35%) VBA
16 43 (1.07%) Bicep
16 43 (1.07%) Perl
17 29 (0.72%) VB
18 27 (0.67%) Go
19 22 (0.55%) C
Qualifications
1 848 (21.19%) Security Cleared
2 688 (17.19%) SC Cleared
3 320 (8.00%) Degree
4 111 (2.77%) Computer Science Degree
5 86 (2.15%) BPSS Clearance
6 70 (1.75%) Azure Certification
7 60 (1.50%) DV Cleared
8 51 (1.27%) Master's Degree
9 49 (1.22%) ISTQB
10 38 (0.95%) Microsoft Certification
11 26 (0.65%) AWS Certification
12 16 (0.40%) PhD
13 15 (0.37%) Oracle Certification
14 14 (0.35%) CBAP
15 11 (0.27%) CISSP
15 11 (0.27%) DBS Check
15 11 (0.27%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 10 (0.25%) PMI Certification
16 10 (0.25%) PMP
17 9 (0.22%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 717 (17.92%) Data Quality
2 312 (7.80%) QA
3 178 (4.45%) GDPR
4 40 (1.00%) Accessibility
5 36 (0.90%) SLA
6 33 (0.82%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 28 (0.70%) PMO
8 23 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 19 (0.47%) NIST
9 19 (0.47%) PCI DSS
10 18 (0.45%) MiFID
11 16 (0.40%) HIPAA
12 15 (0.37%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 15 (0.37%) IFRS
13 14 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
14 13 (0.32%) ISO 20022
15 12 (0.30%) HL7
16 10 (0.25%) GRC
16 10 (0.25%) SEPA
17 9 (0.22%) Solvency II
System Software
1 457 (11.42%) Docker
2 93 (2.32%) Active Directory
3 37 (0.92%) Virtual Machines
4 24 (0.60%) Oracle RAC
5 23 (0.57%) VMware Infrastructure
6 17 (0.42%) Hyper-V
7 10 (0.25%) KVM
8 8 (0.20%) Postfix
8 8 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
9 6 (0.15%) HDFS
9 6 (0.15%) RACF
9 6 (0.15%) VMware ESXi
10 5 (0.12%) XenApp
10 5 (0.12%) XenDesktop
11 3 (0.075%) Oracle Clusterware
12 2 (0.050%) GridGain
12 2 (0.050%) VMware NSX
12 2 (0.050%) vSphere
13 1 (0.025%) Microsoft App-V
13 1 (0.025%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 398 (9.95%) Kubernetes
2 331 (8.27%) Terraform
3 104 (2.60%) Grafana
4 66 (1.65%) Ansible
5 62 (1.55%) Prometheus
6 37 (0.92%) Oracle RMAN
7 26 (0.65%) Data Guard
8 19 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
9 18 (0.45%) Kibana
10 17 (0.42%) SCCM
11 15 (0.37%) ZABBIX
12 14 (0.35%) Control-M
12 14 (0.35%) Nagios
12 14 (0.35%) Netcool
12 14 (0.35%) Progress Chef
12 14 (0.35%) Tivoli
13 13 (0.32%) OpenView
13 13 (0.32%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 9 (0.22%) Kiali
15 8 (0.20%) Active Directory Federation Services
Vendors
1 661 (16.52%) Oracle
2 650 (16.24%) Microsoft
3 474 (11.84%) Databricks
4 158 (3.95%) Google
5 137 (3.42%) Informatica
6 125 (3.12%) ServiceNow
7 107 (2.67%) SAP
8 100 (2.50%) Talend
9 84 (2.10%) Splunk
10 66 (1.65%) IBM
11 60 (1.50%) Salesforce
12 52 (1.30%) Citrix
13 50 (1.25%) Denodo
14 41 (1.02%) OpenAI
15 36 (0.90%) VMware
16 35 (0.87%) Dynatrace
17 34 (0.85%) Bloomberg
18 32 (0.80%) HP
18 32 (0.80%) MuleSoft
19 29 (0.72%) BMC