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

6 months to
1 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 9 7
Rank change year-on-year -6 -2 +1
Contract jobs citing SQL 2,437 1,968 2,308
As % of all contract jobs in London 12.09% 14.43% 14.13%
As % of the Programming Languages category 38.83% 37.31% 35.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,660 1,404 1,801
10th Percentile £365 £363 £363
25th Percentile £425 £415 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £526 £563
Median % change year-on-year -0.24% -6.44% -2.17%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £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 15
10th Percentile £29.41 £25.86 £25.99
25th Percentile £35.25 £29.07 £40.66
Median hourly rate £47.50 £42.82 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.94% +0.74% -27.66%
75th Percentile £54.75 £56.25 £51.75
90th Percentile £60.04 £63.75 £52.95
England median hourly rate £45.00 £37.50 £41.50
% change year-on-year +20.00% -9.64% -9.55%

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 6,276 5,275 6,466
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in London 31.14% 38.68% 39.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,200 3,719 4,880
10th Percentile £385 £375 £375
25th Percentile £450 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £545 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -0.91% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £661 £700 £710
90th Percentile £775 £825 £850
England median daily rate £521 £515 £550
% change year-on-year +1.07% -6.36% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 56 50 42
10th Percentile £34.50 £26.31 £23.80
25th Percentile £36.25 £33.25 £31.71
Median hourly rate £53.50 £44.75 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +19.55% -5.79% -20.83%
75th Percentile £73.00 £63.06 £57.50
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 1 August 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 1 August 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 1 August 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 -5 301 £550 - 262
West London +10 67 £520 +4.00% 42
South London -1 38 £513 -22.64% 13
East London 0 13 £450 -7.69% 18
North London +2 5 £500 - 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
1 154 (6.32%) Apache Airflow
2 132 (5.42%) Apache Spark
3 106 (4.35%) Apache
4 82 (3.36%) Confluence
5 41 (1.68%) SharePoint
6 26 (1.07%) IIS
7 23 (0.94%) SAS
8 18 (0.74%) Palantir Foundry
9 15 (0.62%) nginx
9 15 (0.62%) Oracle Workflow
10 14 (0.57%) CMS
11 13 (0.53%) Jupyter
11 13 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
12 10 (0.41%) Camunda
12 10 (0.41%) Tomcat
13 8 (0.33%) Appian
14 7 (0.29%) WebLogic
15 6 (0.25%) CICS
16 3 (0.12%) ArcGIS
16 3 (0.12%) HCL Notes
Applications
1 152 (6.24%) Microsoft Excel
2 29 (1.19%) Microsoft Office
3 28 (1.15%) MS Visio
4 23 (0.94%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.82%) Spreadsheet
6 7 (0.29%) Chatbot
7 4 (0.16%) Acrobat
7 4 (0.16%) Notion
7 4 (0.16%) Photoshop
8 3 (0.12%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.041%) Mingle
9 1 (0.041%) Oracle Smart View
Business Applications
1 27 (1.11%) Aladdin
2 24 (0.98%) Oracle EBS
3 15 (0.62%) Dynamics CRM
3 15 (0.62%) Oracle ERP
4 14 (0.57%) Oracle Payables
5 11 (0.45%) Findur
5 11 (0.45%) Oracle EBS R12
5 11 (0.45%) Oracle General Ledger
5 11 (0.45%) Oracle Receivables
5 11 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
6 10 (0.41%) Finacle
7 9 (0.37%) Fidessa
8 8 (0.33%) Unit4 Business World
9 7 (0.29%) OpenText MBPM
9 7 (0.29%) Oracle BPM
9 7 (0.29%) Oracle FAH
9 7 (0.29%) Oracle Financials
9 7 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
10 6 (0.25%) Actimize
10 6 (0.25%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 837 (34.35%) Azure
2 595 (24.42%) AWS
3 468 (19.20%) Power Platform
4 274 (11.24%) Azure DevOps
5 262 (10.75%) GCP
6 226 (9.27%) GitHub
7 221 (9.07%) Snowflake
8 198 (8.12%) dbt
9 181 (7.43%) Azure Data Factory
10 159 (6.52%) Serverless
11 155 (6.36%) Amazon S3
12 131 (5.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 117 (4.80%) GitHub Actions
14 114 (4.68%) AWS Lambda
15 54 (2.22%) Entra ID
16 51 (2.09%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 48 (1.97%) SaaS
18 46 (1.89%) PowerApps
19 45 (1.85%) Amazon EC2
20 42 (1.72%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 17 (0.70%) Firewall
1 17 (0.70%) Internet
2 14 (0.57%) VPN
3 13 (0.53%) DNS
3 13 (0.53%) HTTP
4 11 (0.45%) Network Security
5 7 (0.29%) Multicast
5 7 (0.29%) TCP/IP
6 6 (0.25%) SAN
6 6 (0.25%) SSL
7 4 (0.16%) Broadband
8 3 (0.12%) FTP
8 3 (0.12%) HTTPS
8 3 (0.12%) Intranet
8 3 (0.12%) IPv4
8 3 (0.12%) NAS
8 3 (0.12%) SMS
8 3 (0.12%) WAN
8 3 (0.12%) WinSCP
9 2 (0.082%) NaaS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 423 (17.36%) Power BI
2 360 (14.77%) Data Warehouse
3 293 (12.02%) SQL Server
4 175 (7.18%) Data Lake
4 175 (7.18%) Tableau
5 173 (7.10%) Relational Database
6 142 (5.83%) Metadata
7 135 (5.54%) PostgreSQL
8 129 (5.29%) BigQuery
9 127 (5.21%) NoSQL
10 99 (4.06%) Azure SQL Database
11 90 (3.69%) Oracle Database
12 88 (3.61%) Amazon Redshift
13 85 (3.49%) Delta Lake
14 72 (2.95%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 63 (2.59%) Snowflake Schema
16 56 (2.30%) Big Data
17 55 (2.26%) Star Schema
18 54 (2.22%) Amazon Athena
18 54 (2.22%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 253 (10.38%) Git
2 178 (7.30%) JIRA
3 117 (4.80%) Jenkins
4 75 (3.08%) GitLab
5 36 (1.48%) Gradle
6 34 (1.40%) JUnit
7 27 (1.11%) Mockito
8 25 (1.03%) Maven
9 22 (0.90%) SonarQube
10 21 (0.86%) ERwin
11 20 (0.82%) Selenium
12 18 (0.74%) MLflow
12 18 (0.74%) TeamCity
13 17 (0.70%) Liquibase
13 17 (0.70%) Visual Studio
14 16 (0.66%) Bitbucket
14 16 (0.66%) Oracle Forms
15 15 (0.62%) ER Studio
16 13 (0.53%) Cucumber
17 12 (0.49%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 882 (36.19%) Finance
2 677 (27.78%) Social Skills
3 535 (21.95%) Analytical Skills
4 364 (14.94%) Banking
5 169 (6.93%) Public Sector
6 126 (5.17%) Front Office
7 100 (4.10%) Marketing
8 97 (3.98%) Investment Banking
9 64 (2.63%) Retail
10 52 (2.13%) Financial Institution
11 50 (2.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 45 (1.85%) Documentation Skills
13 34 (1.40%) Back Office
14 30 (1.23%) Publishing
15 29 (1.19%) Legal
16 27 (1.11%) Organisational Skills
17 26 (1.07%) Telecoms
18 22 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
19 20 (0.82%) Presentation Skills
20 19 (0.78%) Law
Job Titles
1 526 (21.58%) Developer
2 475 (19.49%) Data Engineer
3 407 (16.70%) Analyst
4 361 (14.81%) Senior
5 181 (7.43%) Lead
6 170 (6.98%) Data Analyst
7 148 (6.07%) Business Analyst
8 132 (5.42%) Architect
9 103 (4.23%) Senior Data Engineer
10 98 (4.02%) Consultant
11 94 (3.86%) Senior Developer
12 86 (3.53%) Java Developer
13 85 (3.49%) C# Developer
14 83 (3.41%) Software Engineer
15 74 (3.04%) Python Engineer
16 69 (2.83%) Data Scientist
17 68 (2.79%) Azure Engineer
18 62 (2.54%) Python Developer
19 60 (2.46%) Snowflake Engineer
20 59 (2.42%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 244 (10.01%) .NET
2 206 (8.45%) REST
3 183 (7.51%) Kafka
4 179 (7.35%) PySpark
5 129 (5.29%) React
6 117 (4.80%) Spring
7 102 (4.19%) JSON
8 98 (4.02%) RESTful
9 96 (3.94%) Spring Boot
10 94 (3.86%) AngularJS
10 94 (3.86%) HTML
11 90 (3.69%) Pandas
12 80 (3.28%) CSS
13 69 (2.83%) XML
14 62 (2.54%) .NET Framework
15 58 (2.38%) Middleware
15 58 (2.38%) SOAP
16 57 (2.34%) Web Services
17 51 (2.09%) NumPy
18 49 (2.01%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 194 (7.96%) Cloud Native
2 113 (4.64%) Data Structures
3 101 (4.14%) Product Ownership
4 97 (3.98%) Legacy Systems
5 91 (3.73%) Distributed Systems
6 80 (3.28%) Derivative
7 59 (2.42%) Onboarding
8 55 (2.26%) Self-Motivation
9 52 (2.13%) Fixed Income
10 49 (2.01%) Equities
11 48 (1.97%) Management Information System
12 45 (1.85%) Analytical Mindset
13 40 (1.64%) Algorithms
14 37 (1.52%) Enterprise Software
14 37 (1.52%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 37 (1.52%) Reference Data
15 35 (1.44%) Greenfield Project
16 27 (1.11%) AI Agents
16 27 (1.11%) Data Protection Act
17 25 (1.03%) Market Risk
Operating Systems
1 140 (5.74%) Windows
2 136 (5.58%) Linux
3 87 (3.57%) Unix
4 37 (1.52%) Windows Server
5 12 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 10 (0.41%) Windows Server 2008
7 9 (0.37%) Windows Server 2019
8 8 (0.33%) zOS
9 7 (0.29%) Solaris
10 5 (0.21%) Android
10 5 (0.21%) Apple iOS
11 4 (0.16%) VMS
11 4 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
12 3 (0.12%) Ubuntu
12 3 (0.12%) Windows 10
13 2 (0.082%) OpenVMS
13 2 (0.082%) Windows Server 2012
14 1 (0.041%) AIX
14 1 (0.041%) Oracle Linux
14 1 (0.041%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 710 (29.13%) CI/CD
2 697 (28.60%) Analytics
3 658 (27.00%) Data Modelling
4 633 (25.97%) Agile
5 534 (21.91%) DevOps
6 515 (21.13%) Business Intelligence
6 515 (21.13%) ETL
7 507 (20.80%) Data Pipeline
8 480 (19.70%) Data Engineering
9 463 (19.00%) AI
10 452 (18.55%) Problem-Solving
11 327 (13.42%) Validation
12 325 (13.34%) Data Governance
13 315 (12.93%) Migration
14 299 (12.27%) Stakeholder Management
15 297 (12.19%) Data Analysis
16 275 (11.28%) Decision-Making
17 245 (10.05%) Machine Learning
18 236 (9.68%) Continuous Improvement
19 222 (9.11%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 1,063 (43.62%) Python
2 319 (13.09%) Java
3 316 (12.97%) C#
4 191 (7.84%) JavaScript
5 176 (7.22%) PL/SQL
6 120 (4.92%) T-SQL
7 118 (4.84%) TypeScript
8 105 (4.31%) PowerShell
9 90 (3.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 73 (3.00%) Shell Script
11 62 (2.54%) R
12 55 (2.26%) Scala
13 39 (1.60%) C++
14 33 (1.35%) Bash
14 33 (1.35%) VBA
15 19 (0.78%) Bicep
16 16 (0.66%) Groovy
17 15 (0.62%) Go
18 13 (0.53%) C
18 13 (0.53%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 377 (15.47%) Security Cleared
2 318 (13.05%) SC Cleared
3 192 (7.88%) Degree
4 65 (2.67%) Computer Science Degree
5 44 (1.81%) BPSS Clearance
6 41 (1.68%) Azure Certification
7 32 (1.31%) Master's Degree
8 19 (0.78%) AWS Certification
9 12 (0.49%) DV Cleared
9 12 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
9 12 (0.49%) PhD
10 11 (0.45%) FFIEC
11 9 (0.37%) DBS Check
12 8 (0.33%) CISM
12 8 (0.33%) CISSP
12 8 (0.33%) ISTQB
13 7 (0.29%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 5 (0.21%) CBAP
14 5 (0.21%) PMI Certification
14 5 (0.21%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 469 (19.24%) Data Quality
2 176 (7.22%) QA
3 95 (3.90%) GDPR
4 34 (1.40%) Accessibility
5 23 (0.94%) SLA
6 16 (0.66%) NIST
7 15 (0.62%) Actionable Recommendations
7 15 (0.62%) PMO
8 14 (0.57%) MiFID
9 12 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 12 (0.49%) Solvency II
10 10 (0.41%) COBIT
10 10 (0.41%) ISO 20022
11 9 (0.37%) IFRS
11 9 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 6 (0.25%) EMIR
12 6 (0.25%) HIPAA
13 5 (0.21%) COREP
13 5 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
13 5 (0.21%) NCSC
System Software
1 234 (9.60%) Docker
2 47 (1.93%) Active Directory
3 17 (0.70%) VMware Infrastructure
4 16 (0.66%) Virtual Machines
5 7 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
6 4 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
7 3 (0.12%) Postfix
7 3 (0.12%) Virtual Desktop
8 2 (0.082%) Apache ZooKeeper
8 2 (0.082%) GridGain
8 2 (0.082%) Hyper-V
9 1 (0.041%) HDFS
9 1 (0.041%) RACF
9 1 (0.041%) Varnish
9 1 (0.041%) VMware NSX
9 1 (0.041%) XenApp
9 1 (0.041%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 231 (9.48%) Terraform
2 216 (8.86%) Kubernetes
3 44 (1.81%) Grafana
4 26 (1.07%) Ansible
5 19 (0.78%) Control-M
6 18 (0.74%) Prometheus
7 14 (0.57%) Kibana
8 10 (0.41%) Oracle RMAN
9 9 (0.37%) ITRS Geneos
10 7 (0.29%) Data Guard
10 7 (0.29%) Microsoft Clustering
11 6 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
12 5 (0.21%) Packer
12 5 (0.21%) SCOM
13 4 (0.16%) Kubeflow
14 3 (0.12%) Argo
14 3 (0.12%) HP ALM
14 3 (0.12%) Podman
14 3 (0.12%) SCCM
14 3 (0.12%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 332 (13.62%) Microsoft
2 315 (12.93%) Oracle
3 301 (12.35%) Databricks
4 106 (4.35%) Google
5 61 (2.50%) Informatica
6 47 (1.93%) SAP
7 44 (1.81%) ServiceNow
8 36 (1.48%) Bloomberg
8 36 (1.48%) Citrix
9 35 (1.44%) IBM
10 32 (1.31%) Salesforce
11 31 (1.27%) Murex
12 23 (0.94%) Foundry
12 23 (0.94%) Splunk
13 22 (0.90%) VMware
14 21 (0.86%) Adobe
15 19 (0.78%) OpenAI
15 19 (0.78%) Palantir
16 18 (0.74%) Alteryx
17 17 (0.70%) Dynatrace