SQL Contract Job Trends in London

SQL (Structured Query Language)
England > London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in London requiring SQL skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 29 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 9 7
Rank change year-on-year -6 -2 +1
Contract jobs citing SQL 2,385 1,965 2,309
As % of all contract jobs in London 12.01% 14.45% 14.07%
As % of the Programming Languages category 38.67% 37.41% 35.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,621 1,398 1,796
10th Percentile £368 £363 £363
25th Percentile £425 £415 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £568
Median % change year-on-year - -7.49% -1.30%
75th Percentile £638 £679 £688
90th Percentile £738 £788 £775
England median daily rate £500 £500 £538
% change year-on-year - -6.98% -0.46%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 23 14
10th Percentile £29.41 £25.86 £25.99
25th Percentile £35.25 £29.07 £40.75
Median hourly rate £47.50 £42.82 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.94% -4.86% -23.40%
75th Percentile £54.75 £56.25 £51.75
90th Percentile £60.04 £63.75 £53.15
England median hourly rate £45.90 £37.50 £42.00
% change year-on-year +22.40% -10.71% -8.58%

All Programming Languages
London

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 London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for coding skills 6,168 5,253 6,490
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in London 31.07% 38.63% 39.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,123 3,696 4,894
10th Percentile £387 £368 £375
25th Percentile £450 £427 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £663 £700 £713
90th Percentile £775 £825 £850
England median daily rate £524 £515 £550
% change year-on-year +1.85% -6.45% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 55 49 42
10th Percentile £34.35 £26.31 £23.80
25th Percentile £36.25 £33.25 £31.71
Median hourly rate £54.50 £44.50 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +22.47% -6.32% -20.83%
75th Percentile £73.00 £62.50 £60.45
90th Percentile £88.75 £86.25 £74.69
England median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +4.00%

SQL
Job Vacancy Trend in London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing SQL relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in London.

SQL job vacancy trend in London

SQL
Daily Rate Trend in London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in London citing SQL.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in London citing SQL

SQL
Daily Rate Histogram in London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SQL in London over the 6 months to 29 July 2026.

Daily rate histogram for SQL in London

SQL
Hourly Rate Trend in London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in London citing SQL.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in London citing SQL

SQL
Hourly Rate Histogram in London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing SQL in London over the 6 months to 29 July 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for SQL in London

SQL
Contract Job Locations in London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing SQL within the London region over the 6 months to 29 July 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
Central London -6 296 £550 - 157
West London +10 65 £520 +4.00% 44
South London -2 39 £513 -22.64% 10
East London 0 13 £450 -7.69% 15
North London - 6 £495 - 4
SQL
England

SQL
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in London 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
1 139 (5.83%) Apache Airflow
2 128 (5.37%) Apache Spark
3 99 (4.15%) Apache
4 81 (3.40%) Confluence
5 38 (1.59%) SharePoint
6 26 (1.09%) IIS
7 23 (0.96%) SAS
8 18 (0.75%) Palantir Foundry
9 15 (0.63%) nginx
9 15 (0.63%) Oracle Workflow
10 14 (0.59%) CMS
11 13 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
12 12 (0.50%) Jupyter
13 10 (0.42%) Camunda
13 10 (0.42%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.34%) Appian
15 7 (0.29%) WebLogic
16 6 (0.25%) CICS
17 3 (0.13%) ArcGIS
17 3 (0.13%) HCL Notes
Applications
1 149 (6.25%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (1.17%) MS Visio
3 27 (1.13%) Microsoft Office
4 24 (1.01%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.84%) Spreadsheet
6 7 (0.29%) Chatbot
7 4 (0.17%) Acrobat
7 4 (0.17%) Notion
7 4 (0.17%) Photoshop
8 3 (0.13%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.13%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.042%) Mingle
9 1 (0.042%) Oracle Smart View
Business Applications
1 28 (1.17%) Aladdin
2 24 (1.01%) Oracle EBS
3 15 (0.63%) Oracle ERP
4 14 (0.59%) Dynamics CRM
4 14 (0.59%) Oracle Payables
5 11 (0.46%) Findur
5 11 (0.46%) Oracle EBS R12
5 11 (0.46%) Oracle General Ledger
5 11 (0.46%) Oracle Receivables
5 11 (0.46%) SAP S/4HANA
6 10 (0.42%) Finacle
7 9 (0.38%) Fidessa
8 7 (0.29%) OpenText MBPM
8 7 (0.29%) Oracle BPM
8 7 (0.29%) Oracle FAH
8 7 (0.29%) Oracle Financials
8 7 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
8 7 (0.29%) Unit4 Business World
9 6 (0.25%) Oracle Assets
9 6 (0.25%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 813 (34.09%) Azure
2 580 (24.32%) AWS
3 453 (18.99%) Power Platform
4 261 (10.94%) Azure DevOps
5 258 (10.82%) GCP
6 213 (8.93%) GitHub
7 207 (8.68%) Snowflake
8 183 (7.67%) dbt
9 175 (7.34%) Azure Data Factory
10 157 (6.58%) Serverless
11 156 (6.54%) Amazon S3
12 127 (5.32%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 115 (4.82%) AWS Lambda
14 110 (4.61%) GitHub Actions
15 53 (2.22%) Entra ID
16 51 (2.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 46 (1.93%) SaaS
18 45 (1.89%) Amazon EC2
19 42 (1.76%) Collibra
20 41 (1.72%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 17 (0.71%) Firewall
1 17 (0.71%) Internet
2 13 (0.55%) HTTP
2 13 (0.55%) VPN
3 12 (0.50%) DNS
4 10 (0.42%) Network Security
5 7 (0.29%) Multicast
6 6 (0.25%) SAN
6 6 (0.25%) TCP/IP
7 5 (0.21%) SSL
8 3 (0.13%) Broadband
8 3 (0.13%) FTP
8 3 (0.13%) Intranet
8 3 (0.13%) IPv4
8 3 (0.13%) NAS
8 3 (0.13%) SMS
8 3 (0.13%) WAN
8 3 (0.13%) WinSCP
9 2 (0.084%) DMZ
9 2 (0.084%) NaaS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 409 (17.15%) Power BI
2 348 (14.59%) Data Warehouse
3 287 (12.03%) SQL Server
4 174 (7.30%) Data Lake
4 174 (7.30%) Relational Database
5 173 (7.25%) Tableau
6 143 (6.00%) Metadata
7 133 (5.58%) PostgreSQL
8 125 (5.24%) NoSQL
9 122 (5.12%) BigQuery
10 99 (4.15%) Azure SQL Database
11 89 (3.73%) Oracle Database
12 82 (3.44%) Amazon Redshift
12 82 (3.44%) Delta Lake
13 70 (2.94%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 62 (2.60%) Snowflake Schema
15 55 (2.31%) Big Data
16 53 (2.22%) Amazon Athena
16 53 (2.22%) Star Schema
17 52 (2.18%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 243 (10.19%) Git
2 176 (7.38%) JIRA
3 111 (4.65%) Jenkins
4 72 (3.02%) GitLab
5 34 (1.43%) Gradle
6 33 (1.38%) JUnit
7 26 (1.09%) Mockito
8 24 (1.01%) Maven
9 21 (0.88%) ERwin
10 19 (0.80%) Selenium
10 19 (0.80%) SonarQube
11 18 (0.75%) MLflow
12 17 (0.71%) TeamCity
13 16 (0.67%) Liquibase
13 16 (0.67%) Oracle Forms
13 16 (0.67%) Visual Studio
14 15 (0.63%) Bitbucket
14 15 (0.63%) ER Studio
15 13 (0.55%) Cucumber
16 12 (0.50%) PowerDesigner
General
1 865 (36.27%) Finance
2 661 (27.71%) Social Skills
3 518 (21.72%) Analytical Skills
4 357 (14.97%) Banking
5 165 (6.92%) Public Sector
6 122 (5.12%) Front Office
7 96 (4.03%) Marketing
8 93 (3.90%) Investment Banking
9 59 (2.47%) Retail
10 51 (2.14%) Financial Institution
11 50 (2.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 46 (1.93%) Documentation Skills
13 34 (1.43%) Back Office
14 30 (1.26%) Publishing
15 29 (1.22%) Organisational Skills
16 28 (1.17%) Legal
17 26 (1.09%) Telecoms
18 21 (0.88%) Pharmaceutical
18 21 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
19 19 (0.80%) Law
Job Titles
1 515 (21.59%) Developer
2 460 (19.29%) Data Engineer
3 395 (16.56%) Analyst
4 347 (14.55%) Senior
5 178 (7.46%) Lead
6 167 (7.00%) Data Analyst
7 143 (6.00%) Business Analyst
8 130 (5.45%) Architect
9 98 (4.11%) Consultant
10 97 (4.07%) Senior Data Engineer
11 92 (3.86%) Senior Developer
12 85 (3.56%) Java Developer
13 84 (3.52%) C# Developer
14 81 (3.40%) Software Engineer
15 68 (2.85%) Data Scientist
16 67 (2.81%) Azure Engineer
16 67 (2.81%) Python Engineer
17 61 (2.56%) Python Developer
18 59 (2.47%) Snowflake Engineer
19 58 (2.43%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 239 (10.02%) .NET
2 197 (8.26%) REST
3 178 (7.46%) Kafka
4 169 (7.09%) PySpark
5 126 (5.28%) React
6 115 (4.82%) Spring
7 99 (4.15%) JSON
8 96 (4.03%) RESTful
9 94 (3.94%) HTML
9 94 (3.94%) Spring Boot
10 93 (3.90%) AngularJS
11 89 (3.73%) Pandas
12 80 (3.35%) CSS
13 66 (2.77%) XML
14 61 (2.56%) .NET Framework
15 58 (2.43%) SOAP
16 56 (2.35%) Web Services
17 54 (2.26%) Middleware
18 50 (2.10%) NumPy
19 48 (2.01%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 188 (7.88%) Cloud Native
2 113 (4.74%) Data Structures
3 95 (3.98%) Legacy Systems
3 95 (3.98%) Product Ownership
4 92 (3.86%) Distributed Systems
5 78 (3.27%) Derivative
6 58 (2.43%) Onboarding
7 54 (2.26%) Self-Motivation
8 52 (2.18%) Fixed Income
9 49 (2.05%) Equities
10 43 (1.80%) Analytical Mindset
10 43 (1.80%) Management Information System
11 40 (1.68%) Algorithms
12 38 (1.59%) Reference Data
13 37 (1.55%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 35 (1.47%) Enterprise Software
15 34 (1.43%) Greenfield Project
16 27 (1.13%) Data Protection Act
17 24 (1.01%) AI Agents
18 23 (0.96%) Clustering
Operating Systems
1 141 (5.91%) Windows
2 132 (5.53%) Linux
3 84 (3.52%) Unix
4 37 (1.55%) Windows Server
5 12 (0.50%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 10 (0.42%) Windows Server 2008
7 9 (0.38%) Windows Server 2019
8 8 (0.34%) zOS
9 7 (0.29%) Solaris
10 5 (0.21%) Android
10 5 (0.21%) Apple iOS
11 4 (0.17%) VMS
11 4 (0.17%) Windows Server 2016
12 3 (0.13%) Ubuntu
13 2 (0.084%) OpenVMS
13 2 (0.084%) Windows 10
13 2 (0.084%) Windows Server 2012
14 1 (0.042%) AIX
14 1 (0.042%) Oracle Linux
14 1 (0.042%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 684 (28.68%) CI/CD
2 679 (28.47%) Analytics
3 643 (26.96%) Data Modelling
4 610 (25.58%) Agile
5 514 (21.55%) DevOps
6 504 (21.13%) ETL
7 499 (20.92%) Business Intelligence
8 493 (20.67%) Data Pipeline
9 468 (19.62%) Data Engineering
10 445 (18.66%) AI
11 441 (18.49%) Problem-Solving
12 321 (13.46%) Validation
13 319 (13.38%) Data Governance
14 309 (12.96%) Migration
15 289 (12.12%) Data Analysis
16 282 (11.82%) Stakeholder Management
17 262 (10.99%) Decision-Making
18 239 (10.02%) Machine Learning
19 231 (9.69%) Continuous Improvement
20 215 (9.01%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 1,030 (43.19%) Python
2 311 (13.04%) C#
3 310 (13.00%) Java
4 184 (7.71%) JavaScript
5 175 (7.34%) PL/SQL
6 119 (4.99%) T-SQL
7 113 (4.74%) TypeScript
8 103 (4.32%) PowerShell
9 86 (3.61%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 69 (2.89%) Shell Script
11 61 (2.56%) R
12 52 (2.18%) Scala
13 37 (1.55%) C++
14 33 (1.38%) VBA
15 31 (1.30%) Bash
16 17 (0.71%) Bicep
17 16 (0.67%) Groovy
18 15 (0.63%) Go
19 13 (0.55%) C
19 13 (0.55%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 367 (15.39%) Security Cleared
2 310 (13.00%) SC Cleared
3 188 (7.88%) Degree
4 62 (2.60%) Computer Science Degree
5 44 (1.84%) BPSS Clearance
6 42 (1.76%) Azure Certification
7 32 (1.34%) Master's Degree
8 18 (0.75%) AWS Certification
9 12 (0.50%) DV Cleared
9 12 (0.50%) PhD
10 11 (0.46%) FFIEC
10 11 (0.46%) Microsoft Certification
11 9 (0.38%) DBS Check
12 8 (0.34%) CISM
12 8 (0.34%) CISSP
13 7 (0.29%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 7 (0.29%) ISTQB
14 5 (0.21%) CBAP
14 5 (0.21%) ISEB
14 5 (0.21%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 457 (19.16%) Data Quality
2 174 (7.30%) QA
3 97 (4.07%) GDPR
4 34 (1.43%) Accessibility
5 22 (0.92%) SLA
6 16 (0.67%) NIST
7 15 (0.63%) PMO
8 14 (0.59%) MiFID
9 12 (0.50%) Actionable Recommendations
9 12 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 12 (0.50%) Solvency II
10 10 (0.42%) COBIT
11 9 (0.38%) IFRS
11 9 (0.38%) ISO 20022
11 9 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 6 (0.25%) EMIR
12 6 (0.25%) HIPAA
13 5 (0.21%) DICOM
13 5 (0.21%) GAAP
13 5 (0.21%) HL7
System Software
1 225 (9.43%) Docker
2 46 (1.93%) Active Directory
3 17 (0.71%) VMware Infrastructure
4 16 (0.67%) Virtual Machines
5 7 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
6 4 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
7 3 (0.13%) Postfix
8 2 (0.084%) Apache ZooKeeper
8 2 (0.084%) GridGain
8 2 (0.084%) Hyper-V
8 2 (0.084%) Virtual Desktop
9 1 (0.042%) HDFS
9 1 (0.042%) RACF
9 1 (0.042%) Varnish
9 1 (0.042%) VMware NSX
9 1 (0.042%) XenApp
9 1 (0.042%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 224 (9.39%) Terraform
2 208 (8.72%) Kubernetes
3 43 (1.80%) Grafana
4 26 (1.09%) Ansible
5 17 (0.71%) Control-M
5 17 (0.71%) Prometheus
6 14 (0.59%) Kibana
7 10 (0.42%) ITRS Geneos
7 10 (0.42%) Oracle RMAN
8 7 (0.29%) Data Guard
8 7 (0.29%) Microsoft Clustering
9 6 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
10 5 (0.21%) Packer
10 5 (0.21%) SCOM
11 4 (0.17%) Kubeflow
12 3 (0.13%) Argo
12 3 (0.13%) HP ALM
12 3 (0.13%) Podman
12 3 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
13 2 (0.084%) systemd
Vendors
1 322 (13.50%) Microsoft
2 310 (13.00%) Oracle
3 292 (12.24%) Databricks
4 103 (4.32%) Google
5 60 (2.52%) Informatica
6 46 (1.93%) SAP
7 45 (1.89%) ServiceNow
8 36 (1.51%) Bloomberg
8 36 (1.51%) Citrix
9 34 (1.43%) IBM
10 31 (1.30%) Salesforce
11 30 (1.26%) Murex
12 23 (0.96%) Foundry
13 22 (0.92%) Splunk
13 22 (0.92%) VMware
14 20 (0.84%) Adobe
15 19 (0.80%) Palantir
16 18 (0.75%) Alteryx
16 18 (0.75%) Dynatrace
16 18 (0.75%) OpenAI