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

6 months to
16 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 12 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 0 -3
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,526 3,051 3,863
As % of all contract jobs in England 10.37% 11.83% 10.16%
As % of the Programming Languages category 34.63% 35.36% 34.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,431 2,041 2,804
10th Percentile £350 £354 £357
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £523 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.40% -4.91% -
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £540
% change year-on-year -0.05% -7.36% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 64 52 64
10th Percentile £21.26 £25.26 £21.64
25th Percentile £32.19 £34.12 £25.78
Median hourly rate £50.00 £55.25 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -9.50% +30.00% -15.00%
75th Percentile £58.06 £65.62 £53.38
90th Percentile £74.55 £79.72 £61.75
UK median hourly rate £51.25 £52.75 £42.50
% change year-on-year -2.84% +24.12% -15.84%

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 10,182 8,628 11,139
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 29.94% 33.44% 29.31%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,777 5,564 8,019
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £661
90th Percentile £727 £775 £763
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £531
% change year-on-year -4.76% -1.13% -5.60%
Number of hourly rates quoted 432 202 475
10th Percentile £41.25 £25.26 £36.25
25th Percentile £52.50 £42.63 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £60.14
Median % change year-on-year +3.17% +4.76% -7.48%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.45 £85.00 £77.50
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 16 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 16 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 16 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 2,142 £512 -6.88% 679
North of England -3 375 £450 -5.26% 342
Midlands -6 362 £500 +7.07% 299
South East -19 282 £475 -5.00% 587
West Midlands 0 276 £500 +0.50% 193
North West +5 215 £424 -7.49% 206
South West -3 183 £475 -5.00% 149
Yorkshire -24 140 £500 - 100
East Midlands -10 86 £525 +35.48% 106
East of England -15 78 £550 +14.88% 126
North East -6 25 £475 -1.04% 38
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
1 183 (5.19%) Apache Spark
2 136 (3.86%) Apache Airflow
3 107 (3.03%) Apache
4 106 (3.01%) Confluence
5 84 (2.38%) SharePoint
6 55 (1.56%) SAS
7 47 (1.33%) WebLogic
8 26 (0.74%) IIS
9 23 (0.65%) Microsoft Exchange
10 19 (0.54%) Skype for Business
11 18 (0.51%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 17 (0.48%) CMS
13 16 (0.45%) Tomcat
14 15 (0.43%) Jupyter
15 14 (0.40%) Palantir Foundry
16 13 (0.37%) Mattermost
16 13 (0.37%) nginx
17 12 (0.34%) Appian
17 12 (0.34%) JBoss
17 12 (0.34%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 230 (6.52%) Microsoft Excel
2 75 (2.13%) Microsoft Office
3 43 (1.22%) MS Visio
4 34 (0.96%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.34%) Microsoft Project
5 12 (0.34%) Spreadsheet
6 9 (0.26%) Chatbot
7 4 (0.11%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 4 (0.11%) Trello
8 3 (0.085%) Notion
9 2 (0.057%) Maya
9 2 (0.057%) NUKE
9 2 (0.057%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.028%) SPSS
10 1 (0.028%) Weka
Business Applications
1 26 (0.74%) Oracle Payables
2 25 (0.71%) Aladdin
3 22 (0.62%) Oracle Receivables
4 21 (0.60%) Dynamics CRM
4 21 (0.60%) Oracle General Ledger
5 20 (0.57%) NEC Housing
5 20 (0.57%) Oracle EBS
6 19 (0.54%) Remedy ITSM
7 16 (0.45%) Oracle Assets
8 14 (0.40%) SAP S/4HANA
9 13 (0.37%) Endur
9 13 (0.37%) NetSuite
9 13 (0.37%) Oracle EBS R12
9 13 (0.37%) Oracle ERP
10 12 (0.34%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
11 11 (0.31%) Oracle Cash Management
12 10 (0.28%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
13 9 (0.26%) Advent Geneva
13 9 (0.26%) Maximo
14 8 (0.23%) SAP HR
Cloud Services
1 1,191 (33.78%) Azure
2 857 (24.31%) AWS
3 671 (19.03%) Power Platform
4 337 (9.56%) Azure DevOps
5 301 (8.54%) GCP
6 274 (7.77%) Azure Data Factory
7 258 (7.32%) GitHub
8 251 (7.12%) Serverless
9 246 (6.98%) Snowflake
10 186 (5.28%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 181 (5.13%) Amazon S3
12 141 (4.00%) dbt
13 133 (3.77%) GitHub Actions
14 127 (3.60%) AWS Lambda
15 98 (2.78%) SaaS
16 79 (2.24%) Azure Functions
17 77 (2.18%) Power Automate
18 65 (1.84%) PowerApps
19 59 (1.67%) AWS CloudFormation
20 58 (1.64%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 46 (1.30%) Firewall
2 35 (0.99%) DNS
3 25 (0.71%) HTTP
4 22 (0.62%) Skype
5 18 (0.51%) Network Security
6 16 (0.45%) TCP/IP
7 15 (0.43%) Internet
8 13 (0.37%) DHCP
9 12 (0.34%) SSL
9 12 (0.34%) Unified Communications
10 10 (0.28%) VPN
11 9 (0.26%) 2G
11 9 (0.26%) 5G
11 9 (0.26%) LAN
11 9 (0.26%) WAN
12 8 (0.23%) SMS
13 7 (0.20%) Multicast
13 7 (0.20%) Radio Access Network
14 6 (0.17%) 4G
14 6 (0.17%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 609 (17.27%) Power BI
2 402 (11.40%) SQL Server
3 387 (10.98%) Data Warehouse
4 253 (7.18%) Relational Database
5 245 (6.95%) NoSQL
6 244 (6.92%) PostgreSQL
7 225 (6.38%) Tableau
8 223 (6.32%) Data Lake
9 178 (5.05%) Azure SQL Database
10 151 (4.28%) Metadata
11 150 (4.25%) Oracle Database
12 120 (3.40%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 112 (3.18%) BigQuery
14 108 (3.06%) Big Data
15 105 (2.98%) MySQL
16 99 (2.81%) MongoDB
17 85 (2.41%) Delta Lake
18 83 (2.35%) Amazon Redshift
19 81 (2.30%) Amazon RDS
20 72 (2.04%) SQL Server Reporting Services
Development Applications
1 380 (10.78%) Git
2 281 (7.97%) JIRA
3 164 (4.65%) Jenkins
4 128 (3.63%) GitLab
5 55 (1.56%) JUnit
5 55 (1.56%) Selenium
6 43 (1.22%) Oracle APEX
7 38 (1.08%) Postman
8 35 (0.99%) Cucumber
9 28 (0.79%) REST Assured
10 27 (0.77%) MLflow
11 26 (0.74%) Bitbucket
11 26 (0.74%) Maven
12 23 (0.65%) ERwin
13 22 (0.62%) Mockito
13 22 (0.62%) Visual Studio
14 21 (0.60%) Cypress.io
14 21 (0.60%) SpecFlow
15 17 (0.48%) Eclipse
15 17 (0.48%) Oracle Forms
General
1 1,098 (31.14%) Social Skills
2 1,013 (28.73%) Finance
3 639 (18.12%) Analytical Skills
4 386 (10.95%) Banking
5 282 (8.00%) Public Sector
6 110 (3.12%) Investment Banking
7 94 (2.67%) Front Office
8 93 (2.64%) Documentation Skills
9 84 (2.38%) Marketing
10 62 (1.76%) Retail
11 57 (1.62%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 56 (1.59%) Financial Institution
13 39 (1.11%) Presentation Skills
14 35 (0.99%) Legal
15 34 (0.96%) Publishing
16 33 (0.94%) Telecoms
17 32 (0.91%) Organisational Skills
18 30 (0.85%) Law
19 29 (0.82%) Local Government
20 28 (0.79%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 873 (24.76%) Developer
2 571 (16.19%) Data Engineer
3 564 (16.00%) Analyst
4 470 (13.33%) Senior
5 245 (6.95%) Lead
6 226 (6.41%) Data Analyst
7 198 (5.62%) Business Analyst
8 178 (5.05%) Architect
9 144 (4.08%) Senior Developer
10 123 (3.49%) Java Developer
11 118 (3.35%) Consultant
12 112 (3.18%) Azure Engineer
13 103 (2.92%) Software Engineer
14 93 (2.64%) Data Scientist
15 91 (2.58%) Senior Data Engineer
16 86 (2.44%) Python Developer
17 84 (2.38%) C# Developer
18 81 (2.30%) Full-Stack Developer
19 73 (2.07%) Azure Data Engineer
20 69 (1.96%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 323 (9.16%) .NET
2 283 (8.03%) REST
3 229 (6.49%) Kafka
4 209 (5.93%) PySpark
5 168 (4.76%) React
6 160 (4.54%) RESTful
7 148 (4.20%) Spring
8 134 (3.80%) HTML
9 133 (3.77%) XML
10 131 (3.72%) Spring Boot
11 116 (3.29%) CSS
12 104 (2.95%) JSON
13 97 (2.75%) Pandas
14 95 (2.69%) AngularJS
15 90 (2.55%) Node.js
16 84 (2.38%) SOAP
17 78 (2.21%) .NET Framework
18 72 (2.04%) Middleware
19 70 (1.99%) Web Services
20 67 (1.90%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 211 (5.98%) Cloud Native
2 111 (3.15%) Data Structures
3 104 (2.95%) Product Ownership
4 100 (2.84%) Legacy Systems
5 80 (2.27%) Management Information System
6 76 (2.16%) Data Protection Act
7 73 (2.07%) Analytical Mindset
8 64 (1.82%) Derivative
9 63 (1.79%) Algorithms
9 63 (1.79%) Distributed Systems
10 56 (1.59%) Equities
11 51 (1.45%) Fixed Income
12 49 (1.39%) Onboarding
13 48 (1.36%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 39 (1.11%) Replication
15 37 (1.05%) Market Risk
16 35 (0.99%) Clustering
16 35 (0.99%) Enterprise Software
17 33 (0.94%) Credit Risk
18 32 (0.91%) SWIFT Messaging Network
Operating Systems
1 293 (8.31%) Linux
2 209 (5.93%) Windows
3 184 (5.22%) Unix
4 62 (1.76%) Windows Server
5 15 (0.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 14 (0.40%) Windows Server 2016
6 14 (0.40%) Windows Server 2019
7 11 (0.31%) Windows 10
8 10 (0.28%) Android
8 10 (0.28%) VMS
9 9 (0.26%) Apple iOS
10 8 (0.23%) AIX
11 6 (0.17%) Ubuntu
12 5 (0.14%) Windows Server 2012
13 4 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
14 3 (0.085%) CentOS
14 3 (0.085%) zOS
15 2 (0.057%) Solaris
15 2 (0.057%) Windows Server 2008
16 1 (0.028%) VME
Processes & Methodologies
1 954 (27.06%) Agile
2 873 (24.76%) Analytics
3 862 (24.45%) CI/CD
4 813 (23.06%) Problem-Solving
5 794 (22.52%) Business Intelligence
6 771 (21.87%) DevOps
7 763 (21.64%) Data Modelling
8 718 (20.36%) ETL
9 523 (14.83%) Data Pipeline
10 492 (13.95%) Data Engineering
11 404 (11.46%) Migration
12 384 (10.89%) Data Governance
13 381 (10.81%) AI
14 366 (10.38%) Validation
15 355 (10.07%) Data Analysis
16 339 (9.61%) Visualisation
17 332 (9.42%) Data Science
18 310 (8.79%) Stakeholder Management
19 306 (8.68%) Decision-Making
20 304 (8.62%) Microservices
Programming Languages
1 1,318 (37.38%) Python
2 524 (14.86%) Java
3 382 (10.83%) C#
4 305 (8.65%) JavaScript
5 262 (7.43%) PL/SQL
6 148 (4.20%) PowerShell
7 136 (3.86%) TypeScript
8 114 (3.23%) T-SQL
9 101 (2.86%) R
9 101 (2.86%) Shell Script
10 91 (2.58%) Scala
11 83 (2.35%) Data Analysis Expressions
12 79 (2.24%) C++
13 69 (1.96%) VBA
14 58 (1.64%) VB
15 51 (1.45%) Bash
16 46 (1.30%) Perl
17 43 (1.22%) Go
18 42 (1.19%) Bicep
19 27 (0.77%) PHP
Qualifications
1 597 (16.93%) Security Cleared
2 462 (13.10%) SC Cleared
3 342 (9.70%) Degree
4 114 (3.23%) Computer Science Degree
5 77 (2.18%) Azure Certification
6 74 (2.10%) BPSS Clearance
7 60 (1.70%) Master's Degree
8 57 (1.62%) DV Cleared
9 53 (1.50%) AWS Certification
10 45 (1.28%) Microsoft Certification
11 39 (1.11%) ISTQB
12 22 (0.62%) ITIL Certification
13 20 (0.57%) Oracle Certification
14 19 (0.54%) CBAP
14 19 (0.54%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 12 (0.34%) Cisco Certification
15 12 (0.34%) MCSE
16 11 (0.31%) CCNA
16 11 (0.31%) PMI Certification
17 10 (0.28%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 553 (15.68%) Data Quality
2 258 (7.32%) QA
3 142 (4.03%) GDPR
4 56 (1.59%) Accessibility
5 26 (0.74%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 25 (0.71%) SLA
7 20 (0.57%) MiFID
8 19 (0.54%) PMO
9 17 (0.48%) Actionable Recommendations
9 17 (0.48%) SEPA
10 16 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 15 (0.43%) ISO 20022
12 14 (0.40%) EMIR
12 14 (0.40%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.40%) PSD2
13 13 (0.37%) PCI DSS
14 12 (0.34%) IFRS
14 12 (0.34%) WCAG
15 11 (0.31%) NIST
16 8 (0.23%) ISO 8583
System Software
1 406 (11.51%) Docker
2 100 (2.84%) Active Directory
3 25 (0.71%) Virtual Machines
4 17 (0.48%) Oracle RAC
4 17 (0.48%) VMware Infrastructure
5 10 (0.28%) Hyper-V
6 7 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
7 6 (0.17%) zsh
8 5 (0.14%) HDFS
8 5 (0.14%) Microsoft Virtual Server
8 5 (0.14%) Postfix
8 5 (0.14%) RACF
8 5 (0.14%) Virtual Servers
8 5 (0.14%) XenApp
8 5 (0.14%) XenDesktop
9 4 (0.11%) DFS Replication
9 4 (0.11%) Dovecot
9 4 (0.11%) Squid
9 4 (0.11%) VMware ESXi
10 3 (0.085%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 363 (10.29%) Kubernetes
2 267 (7.57%) Terraform
3 75 (2.13%) Grafana
4 63 (1.79%) Prometheus
5 54 (1.53%) Ansible
6 23 (0.65%) SCOM
7 21 (0.60%) HP SiteScope
7 21 (0.60%) SCCM
8 20 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
9 17 (0.48%) Control-M
9 17 (0.48%) Oracle RMAN
9 17 (0.48%) Progress Chef
10 16 (0.45%) Data Guard
11 14 (0.40%) Puppet
12 13 (0.37%) Kibana
13 12 (0.34%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
14 11 (0.31%) WSUS
15 8 (0.23%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 8 (0.23%) ITRS Geneos
15 8 (0.23%) Kiali
Vendors
1 588 (16.68%) Microsoft
2 587 (16.65%) Oracle
3 412 (11.68%) Databricks
4 147 (4.17%) Google
5 94 (2.67%) SAP
6 85 (2.41%) Splunk
7 75 (2.13%) ServiceNow
8 64 (1.82%) Informatica
8 64 (1.82%) Salesforce
9 59 (1.67%) Talend
10 48 (1.36%) IBM
11 45 (1.28%) OpenAI
12 44 (1.25%) Citrix
13 35 (0.99%) MuleSoft
14 31 (0.88%) VMware
15 30 (0.85%) Bloomberg
16 26 (0.74%) Foundry
17 25 (0.71%) Denodo
18 23 (0.65%) Dynatrace
18 23 (0.65%) Remedy