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

6 months to
31 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 9 7
Rank change year-on-year -6 -2 +1
Contract jobs citing SQL 2,477 1,936 2,308
As % of all contract jobs in London 12.31% 14.38% 14.21%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.26% 37.38% 35.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,726 1,378 1,756
10th Percentile £365 £363 £363
25th Percentile £425 £413 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £563
Median % change year-on-year - -6.67% -2.17%
75th Percentile £635 £675 £694
90th Percentile £738 £788 £775
England median daily rate £500 £500 £540
% change year-on-year - -7.41% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 29 17
10th Percentile £26.51 £26.21 £25.99
25th Percentile £26.52 £32.50 £40.75
Median hourly rate £37.50 £42.82 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year -12.41% -9.86% +29.99%
75th Percentile £52.49 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £53.75 £65.30 £64.25
England median hourly rate £43.75 £50.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year -12.50% +17.65% +5.39%

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 6,309 5,179 6,492
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in London 31.36% 38.46% 39.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,234 3,603 4,764
10th Percentile £381 £375 £370
25th Percentile £450 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £657 £688 £706
90th Percentile £775 £825 £850
England median daily rate £525 £513 £550
% change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 55 62 42
10th Percentile £26.52 £26.43 £25.32
25th Percentile £36.25 £33.25 £40.06
Median hourly rate £52.50 £44.70 £48.50
Median % change year-on-year +17.46% -7.84% -19.45%
75th Percentile £73.00 £63.06 £60.45
90th Percentile £88.75 £86.25 £78.50
England median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.59%

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 31 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 31 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 31 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 -6 309 £550 -4.35% 135
West London +11 71 £520 +15.36% 88
South London -10 43 £535 -2.73% 19
East London +3 13 £450 -1.66% 25
North London +5 6 £550 - 6
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
1 164 (6.62%) Apache Airflow
2 136 (5.49%) Apache Spark
3 105 (4.24%) Apache
4 84 (3.39%) Confluence
5 52 (2.10%) SharePoint
6 24 (0.97%) IIS
6 24 (0.97%) SAS
7 15 (0.61%) nginx
7 15 (0.61%) Palantir Foundry
8 14 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
8 14 (0.57%) Oracle Workflow
9 13 (0.52%) Camunda
9 13 (0.52%) CMS
10 12 (0.48%) Jupyter
11 8 (0.32%) Tomcat
12 7 (0.28%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 7 (0.28%) WebLogic
13 6 (0.24%) Appian
14 5 (0.20%) MTS
15 4 (0.16%) CICS
Applications
1 155 (6.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 26 (1.05%) Microsoft Office
3 22 (0.89%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 19 (0.77%) MS Visio
5 16 (0.65%) Spreadsheet
6 7 (0.28%) Chatbot
7 4 (0.16%) Acrobat
7 4 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
7 4 (0.16%) Notion
7 4 (0.16%) Photoshop
8 3 (0.12%) CPLEX
9 1 (0.040%) Mingle
9 1 (0.040%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.040%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 25 (1.01%) Aladdin
2 23 (0.93%) Oracle EBS
3 19 (0.77%) Dynamics CRM
4 17 (0.69%) Oracle ERP
5 15 (0.61%) Oracle Payables
6 13 (0.52%) Oracle General Ledger
7 12 (0.48%) Oracle Receivables
8 11 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
9 10 (0.40%) Finacle
9 10 (0.40%) Remedy ITSM
10 9 (0.36%) Oracle EBS R12
11 8 (0.32%) Findur
11 8 (0.32%) Summit
12 7 (0.28%) OpenText MBPM
12 7 (0.28%) Oracle Assets
12 7 (0.28%) Oracle BPM
12 7 (0.28%) Oracle FAH
12 7 (0.28%) Oracle Financials
12 7 (0.28%) Unit4 Business World
13 6 (0.24%) Fidessa
Cloud Services
1 821 (33.14%) Azure
2 596 (24.06%) AWS
3 465 (18.77%) Power Platform
4 273 (11.02%) Azure DevOps
5 258 (10.42%) GCP
6 240 (9.69%) Snowflake
7 226 (9.12%) GitHub
8 213 (8.60%) dbt
9 172 (6.94%) Azure Data Factory
10 165 (6.66%) Serverless
11 146 (5.89%) Amazon S3
12 123 (4.97%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 117 (4.72%) GitHub Actions
14 114 (4.60%) AWS Lambda
15 57 (2.30%) SaaS
16 51 (2.06%) Azure Databricks
17 50 (2.02%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 49 (1.98%) Entra ID
19 47 (1.90%) PowerApps
20 43 (1.74%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 17 (0.69%) HTTP
2 16 (0.65%) DNS
2 16 (0.65%) Internet
3 14 (0.57%) Firewall
3 14 (0.57%) VPN
4 11 (0.44%) Network Security
5 9 (0.36%) Broadband
6 8 (0.32%) Multicast
6 8 (0.32%) TCP/IP
7 7 (0.28%) SSH
7 7 (0.28%) SSL
8 6 (0.24%) DHCP
8 6 (0.24%) SAN
9 5 (0.20%) HTTPS
10 4 (0.16%) IPv4
10 4 (0.16%) SMS
11 3 (0.12%) FTP
11 3 (0.12%) Intranet
11 3 (0.12%) Kerberos
11 3 (0.12%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 421 (17.00%) Power BI
2 372 (15.02%) Data Warehouse
3 292 (11.79%) SQL Server
4 178 (7.19%) Relational Database
5 165 (6.66%) Data Lake
6 163 (6.58%) Tableau
7 150 (6.06%) Metadata
8 133 (5.37%) PostgreSQL
9 127 (5.13%) BigQuery
10 126 (5.09%) NoSQL
11 103 (4.16%) Oracle Database
12 97 (3.92%) Azure SQL Database
13 96 (3.88%) Delta Lake
14 86 (3.47%) Amazon Redshift
15 63 (2.54%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 63 (2.54%) Star Schema
16 62 (2.50%) Snowflake Schema
17 59 (2.38%) Power Query
18 58 (2.34%) Amazon Athena
19 56 (2.26%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 278 (11.22%) Git
2 184 (7.43%) JIRA
3 129 (5.21%) Jenkins
4 83 (3.35%) GitLab
5 46 (1.86%) Selenium
6 42 (1.70%) Gradle
7 37 (1.49%) JUnit
8 26 (1.05%) Maven
8 26 (1.05%) Mockito
8 26 (1.05%) SonarQube
9 21 (0.85%) Bitbucket
9 21 (0.85%) Visual Studio
10 19 (0.77%) ERwin
11 18 (0.73%) Liquibase
11 18 (0.73%) MLflow
12 17 (0.69%) Cypress.io
13 16 (0.65%) JMeter
13 16 (0.65%) Oracle Forms
13 16 (0.65%) Postman
13 16 (0.65%) TeamCity
General
1 895 (36.13%) Finance
2 711 (28.70%) Social Skills
3 541 (21.84%) Analytical Skills
4 395 (15.95%) Banking
5 159 (6.42%) Public Sector
6 129 (5.21%) Front Office
7 112 (4.52%) Marketing
8 105 (4.24%) Investment Banking
9 72 (2.91%) Retail
10 62 (2.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 50 (2.02%) Financial Institution
12 40 (1.61%) Documentation Skills
13 34 (1.37%) Back Office
14 28 (1.13%) Telecoms
15 26 (1.05%) Legal
16 25 (1.01%) Organisational Skills
17 24 (0.97%) Publishing
18 23 (0.93%) Local Government
19 22 (0.89%) Presentation Skills
20 20 (0.81%) General Ledger
Job Titles
1 538 (21.72%) Developer
2 468 (18.89%) Data Engineer
3 422 (17.04%) Analyst
4 380 (15.34%) Senior
5 184 (7.43%) Lead
6 166 (6.70%) Data Analyst
7 149 (6.02%) Business Analyst
8 137 (5.53%) Architect
9 110 (4.44%) Senior Data Engineer
10 104 (4.20%) Consultant
11 90 (3.63%) Senior Developer
12 86 (3.47%) Java Developer
13 79 (3.19%) Software Engineer
14 76 (3.07%) Python Engineer
15 71 (2.87%) C# Developer
16 68 (2.75%) Python Developer
17 65 (2.62%) Azure Engineer
18 61 (2.46%) Snowflake Engineer
19 59 (2.38%) Data Architect
20 58 (2.34%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 262 (10.58%) .NET
2 240 (9.69%) Terraform
3 233 (9.41%) REST
4 202 (8.16%) PySpark
5 193 (7.79%) Kafka
6 138 (5.57%) React
7 127 (5.13%) Spring
8 107 (4.32%) JSON
8 107 (4.32%) Spring Boot
9 105 (4.24%) RESTful
10 100 (4.04%) HTML
11 89 (3.59%) CSS
12 85 (3.43%) XML
13 79 (3.19%) AngularJS
13 79 (3.19%) Pandas
14 64 (2.58%) Middleware
14 64 (2.58%) Web Services
15 63 (2.54%) SOAP
16 59 (2.38%) .NET Framework
17 52 (2.10%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 193 (7.79%) Cloud Native
2 126 (5.09%) Product Ownership
3 115 (4.64%) Data Structures
4 84 (3.39%) Distributed Systems
5 82 (3.31%) Legacy Systems
6 77 (3.11%) Derivative
7 71 (2.87%) Onboarding
8 58 (2.34%) Self-Motivation
9 53 (2.14%) Management Information System
10 50 (2.02%) Fixed Income
11 49 (1.98%) Enterprise Software
12 44 (1.78%) Analytical Mindset
13 41 (1.66%) Equities
13 41 (1.66%) Reference Data
14 39 (1.57%) AI Agents
15 38 (1.53%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 35 (1.41%) Algorithms
17 32 (1.29%) Greenfield Project
18 30 (1.21%) Replication
19 28 (1.13%) Data Protection Act
Operating Systems
1 166 (6.70%) Linux
2 138 (5.57%) Windows
3 104 (4.20%) Unix
4 36 (1.45%) Windows Server
5 12 (0.48%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 8 (0.32%) Windows Server 2008
7 7 (0.28%) VMS
8 6 (0.24%) Windows Server 2019
9 5 (0.20%) Ubuntu
9 5 (0.20%) zOS
10 4 (0.16%) Solaris
10 4 (0.16%) Windows 10
11 3 (0.12%) Android
11 3 (0.12%) Apple iOS
11 3 (0.12%) OpenVMS
11 3 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
12 2 (0.081%) Amazon Linux
12 2 (0.081%) Windows 7
12 2 (0.081%) Windows Server 2016
13 1 (0.040%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 751 (30.32%) CI/CD
2 678 (27.37%) Analytics
3 662 (26.73%) Data Modelling
4 660 (26.65%) Agile
5 540 (21.80%) DevOps
6 513 (20.71%) ETL
7 509 (20.55%) Data Pipeline
8 505 (20.39%) Business Intelligence
9 488 (19.70%) Data Engineering
10 483 (19.50%) AI
11 467 (18.85%) Problem-Solving
12 370 (14.94%) Stakeholder Management
13 358 (14.45%) Validation
14 325 (13.12%) Data Governance
15 323 (13.04%) Migration
16 312 (12.60%) Data Analysis
17 271 (10.94%) Decision-Making
18 252 (10.17%) Continuous Improvement
19 251 (10.13%) Test Automation
20 235 (9.49%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 1,068 (43.12%) Python
2 341 (13.77%) Java
3 305 (12.31%) C#
4 210 (8.48%) JavaScript
5 176 (7.11%) PL/SQL
6 125 (5.05%) TypeScript
7 117 (4.72%) PowerShell
8 110 (4.44%) T-SQL
9 97 (3.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 82 (3.31%) Shell Script
11 54 (2.18%) R
12 48 (1.94%) Scala
13 39 (1.57%) C++
14 37 (1.49%) Bash
15 33 (1.33%) VBA
16 18 (0.73%) Go
16 18 (0.73%) VB.NET
17 15 (0.61%) Groovy
18 14 (0.57%) Bicep
19 12 (0.48%) Korn
Qualifications
1 387 (15.62%) Security Cleared
2 330 (13.32%) SC Cleared
3 199 (8.03%) Degree
4 74 (2.99%) Computer Science Degree
5 42 (1.70%) Azure Certification
5 42 (1.70%) BPSS Clearance
6 31 (1.25%) Master's Degree
7 30 (1.21%) AWS Certification
8 18 (0.73%) ISTQB
9 16 (0.65%) DV Cleared
10 13 (0.52%) Microsoft Certification
11 12 (0.48%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 12 (0.48%) FFIEC
12 10 (0.40%) ISEB
13 9 (0.36%) DBS Check
14 8 (0.32%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
15 7 (0.28%) CIMA
15 7 (0.28%) CISM
15 7 (0.28%) CISSP
15 7 (0.28%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 487 (19.66%) Data Quality
2 196 (7.91%) QA
3 88 (3.55%) GDPR
4 31 (1.25%) Accessibility
5 27 (1.09%) SLA
6 19 (0.77%) ISO 20022
7 17 (0.69%) NIST
8 15 (0.61%) Actionable Recommendations
8 15 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 14 (0.57%) IFRS
10 13 (0.52%) MiFID
11 11 (0.44%) COBIT
12 10 (0.40%) Solvency II
13 9 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
14 8 (0.32%) PMO
15 7 (0.28%) HIPAA
16 6 (0.24%) Basel III
16 6 (0.24%) EMIR
17 5 (0.20%) ISO 15022
17 5 (0.20%) SEPA
System Software
1 236 (9.53%) Docker
2 45 (1.82%) Active Directory
3 23 (0.93%) VMware Infrastructure
4 15 (0.61%) Virtual Machines
5 6 (0.24%) Oracle RAC
6 4 (0.16%) Postfix
6 4 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
7 3 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 3 (0.12%) VMware ESXi
8 2 (0.081%) DFS Replication
8 2 (0.081%) Dovecot
8 2 (0.081%) GridGain
8 2 (0.081%) Hyper-V
8 2 (0.081%) Squid
9 1 (0.040%) RACF
9 1 (0.040%) Varnish
9 1 (0.040%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 212 (8.56%) Kubernetes
2 39 (1.57%) Grafana
3 34 (1.37%) Ansible
4 29 (1.17%) Control-M
5 19 (0.77%) Prometheus
6 11 (0.44%) Microsoft Clustering
7 10 (0.40%) Kibana
7 10 (0.40%) Oracle RMAN
8 9 (0.36%) ITRS Geneos
9 8 (0.32%) SCOM
10 7 (0.28%) Data Guard
11 5 (0.20%) HP Fortify
11 5 (0.20%) Istio
11 5 (0.20%) Packer
11 5 (0.20%) Single Sign-On
12 4 (0.16%) Argo
12 4 (0.16%) HP ALM
12 4 (0.16%) Kubeflow
12 4 (0.16%) Microsoft Intune
12 4 (0.16%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 355 (14.33%) Microsoft
2 324 (13.08%) Oracle
3 312 (12.60%) Databricks
4 107 (4.32%) Google
5 64 (2.58%) Informatica
6 46 (1.86%) SAP
7 44 (1.78%) IBM
8 40 (1.61%) Bloomberg
9 35 (1.41%) Salesforce
10 34 (1.37%) Murex
10 34 (1.37%) ServiceNow
11 31 (1.25%) Citrix
12 25 (1.01%) VMware
13 22 (0.89%) Adobe
13 22 (0.89%) Foundry
13 22 (0.89%) Splunk
14 20 (0.81%) Sybase
15 19 (0.77%) Alteryx
15 19 (0.77%) Talend
16 18 (0.73%) UiPath