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

6 months to
29 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 8 7
Rank change year-on-year -7 -1 +2
Contract jobs citing SQL 2,507 1,944 2,312
As % of all contract jobs in London 12.40% 14.64% 14.33%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.51% 37.81% 35.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,755 1,349 1,699
10th Percentile £363 £363 £363
25th Percentile £423 £413 £454
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £635 £663 £680
90th Percentile £725 £775 £782
England median daily rate £500 £500 £538
% change year-on-year - -6.98% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 28 20
10th Percentile £26.51 £25.06 £25.99
25th Percentile £26.51 £31.25 £35.56
Median hourly rate £43.25 £39.00 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.91% -7.15% +13.45%
75th Percentile £53.75 £54.69 £52.25
90th Percentile £67.25 £64.05 £56.38
England median hourly rate £45.00 £50.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year -10.00% +25.00% -11.11%

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 6,346 5,141 6,450
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in London 31.38% 38.72% 39.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,303 3,516 4,545
10th Percentile £375 £375 £369
25th Percentile £447 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £663 £688 £700
90th Percentile £775 £813 £850
England median daily rate £525 £515 £545
% change year-on-year +1.94% -5.50% -0.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 53 64 46
10th Percentile £26.52 £26.25 £25.99
25th Percentile £36.25 £33.25 £37.58
Median hourly rate £55.00 £44.20 £48.50
Median % change year-on-year +24.44% -8.87% -17.45%
75th Percentile £73.00 £63.38 £71.66
90th Percentile £88.75 £87.13 £97.50
England median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +3.17%

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 September 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 September 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 September 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 -5 309 £550 -4.35% 388
West London +7 68 £520 +24.70% 87
South London -8 38 £535 +12.63% 19
East London 0 16 £450 -11.76% 10
North London +5 6 £550 - 1
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
1 176 (7.02%) Apache Airflow
2 131 (5.23%) Apache Spark
3 99 (3.95%) Apache
4 96 (3.83%) Confluence
5 59 (2.35%) SharePoint
6 25 (1.00%) IIS
7 20 (0.80%) SAS
8 15 (0.60%) CMS
9 14 (0.56%) nginx
10 13 (0.52%) Camunda
10 13 (0.52%) Jupyter
10 13 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
10 13 (0.52%) Oracle Workflow
11 12 (0.48%) Palantir Foundry
12 9 (0.36%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 7 (0.28%) WebLogic
14 6 (0.24%) Appian
14 6 (0.24%) MTS
14 6 (0.24%) Tomcat
15 4 (0.16%) WebSphere
Applications
1 144 (5.74%) Microsoft Excel
2 30 (1.20%) Microsoft Office
3 17 (0.68%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 16 (0.64%) MS Visio
5 11 (0.44%) Spreadsheet
6 8 (0.32%) Chatbot
7 4 (0.16%) Acrobat
7 4 (0.16%) Notion
7 4 (0.16%) Photoshop
7 4 (0.16%) Windchill
8 3 (0.12%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.12%) Mingle
9 1 (0.040%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 26 (1.04%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.84%) Dynamics CRM
2 21 (0.84%) Oracle EBS
3 17 (0.68%) Oracle ERP
3 17 (0.68%) Oracle Payables
4 14 (0.56%) Oracle General Ledger
4 14 (0.56%) Oracle Receivables
5 10 (0.40%) Finacle
5 10 (0.40%) Oracle FAH
5 10 (0.40%) Remedy ITSM
6 9 (0.36%) Oracle Financials
6 9 (0.36%) Summit
7 8 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
8 7 (0.28%) Front Arena
8 7 (0.28%) OpenText MBPM
8 7 (0.28%) Oracle Assets
8 7 (0.28%) Oracle BPM
8 7 (0.28%) Oracle EBS R12
8 7 (0.28%) Unit4 Business World
9 6 (0.24%) Actimize
Cloud Services
1 808 (32.23%) Azure
2 610 (24.33%) AWS
3 472 (18.83%) Power Platform
4 285 (11.37%) GCP
5 267 (10.65%) Snowflake
6 241 (9.61%) Azure DevOps
7 223 (8.90%) dbt
8 217 (8.66%) GitHub
9 161 (6.42%) Azure Data Factory
10 157 (6.26%) Serverless
11 154 (6.14%) Amazon S3
12 115 (4.59%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 111 (4.43%) GitHub Actions
14 107 (4.27%) AWS Lambda
15 58 (2.31%) Azure Databricks
16 56 (2.23%) SaaS
17 54 (2.15%) PowerApps
18 52 (2.07%) Power Automate
19 48 (1.91%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 47 (1.87%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 19 (0.76%) DNS
1 19 (0.76%) HTTP
1 19 (0.76%) Internet
2 16 (0.64%) VPN
3 15 (0.60%) Broadband
4 14 (0.56%) Firewall
5 11 (0.44%) TCP/IP
6 10 (0.40%) Network Security
7 8 (0.32%) SSH
7 8 (0.32%) SSL
8 7 (0.28%) Multicast
9 6 (0.24%) DHCP
9 6 (0.24%) HTTPS
9 6 (0.24%) SAN
10 4 (0.16%) IPv4
10 4 (0.16%) Kerberos
10 4 (0.16%) SMS
11 3 (0.12%) 4G
11 3 (0.12%) WinSCP
11 3 (0.12%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 424 (16.91%) Power BI
2 368 (14.68%) Data Warehouse
3 298 (11.89%) SQL Server
4 168 (6.70%) Relational Database
5 161 (6.42%) Tableau
6 151 (6.02%) Data Lake
6 151 (6.02%) PostgreSQL
7 137 (5.46%) Metadata
8 134 (5.35%) BigQuery
9 124 (4.95%) NoSQL
10 109 (4.35%) Oracle Database
11 96 (3.83%) Delta Lake
12 87 (3.47%) Amazon Redshift
13 80 (3.19%) Azure SQL Database
14 64 (2.55%) Amazon Athena
15 60 (2.39%) Power Query
15 60 (2.39%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 56 (2.23%) Big Data
17 54 (2.15%) Snowflake Schema
18 52 (2.07%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 319 (12.72%) Git
2 192 (7.66%) JIRA
3 130 (5.19%) Jenkins
4 91 (3.63%) GitLab
5 54 (2.15%) Selenium
6 45 (1.79%) Gradle
7 36 (1.44%) JUnit
8 28 (1.12%) Maven
9 26 (1.04%) SonarQube
10 23 (0.92%) Bitbucket
11 22 (0.88%) Mockito
12 21 (0.84%) Visual Studio
13 20 (0.80%) Postman
14 19 (0.76%) Cypress.io
15 17 (0.68%) ERwin
16 16 (0.64%) MLflow
17 15 (0.60%) ER Studio
17 15 (0.60%) Liquibase
17 15 (0.60%) REST Assured
18 14 (0.56%) Oracle Forms
General
1 920 (36.70%) Finance
2 717 (28.60%) Social Skills
3 556 (22.18%) Analytical Skills
4 433 (17.27%) Banking
5 159 (6.34%) Public Sector
6 126 (5.03%) Front Office
7 111 (4.43%) Investment Banking
8 110 (4.39%) Marketing
9 82 (3.27%) Retail
10 62 (2.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 47 (1.87%) Financial Institution
12 41 (1.64%) Back Office
13 39 (1.56%) Documentation Skills
14 31 (1.24%) Influencing Skills
14 31 (1.24%) Legal
15 27 (1.08%) Local Government
16 22 (0.88%) Organisational Skills
17 21 (0.84%) General Ledger
17 21 (0.84%) Manufacturing
17 21 (0.84%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 547 (21.82%) Developer
2 459 (18.31%) Data Engineer
3 435 (17.35%) Analyst
4 401 (16.00%) Senior
5 188 (7.50%) Lead
6 171 (6.82%) Data Analyst
7 153 (6.10%) Business Analyst
8 132 (5.27%) Architect
9 126 (5.03%) Senior Data Engineer
10 102 (4.07%) Consultant
11 90 (3.59%) Senior Developer
12 82 (3.27%) Java Developer
13 73 (2.91%) Python Engineer
14 72 (2.87%) Python Developer
15 68 (2.71%) Full-Stack Developer
16 67 (2.67%) Azure Engineer
17 66 (2.63%) Software Engineer
18 64 (2.55%) Data Architect
19 62 (2.47%) Applications Support
20 61 (2.43%) C# Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 272 (10.85%) .NET
2 250 (9.97%) Terraform
3 246 (9.81%) REST
4 202 (8.06%) PySpark
5 201 (8.02%) Kafka
6 140 (5.58%) React
7 132 (5.27%) Spring
8 115 (4.59%) Spring Boot
9 104 (4.15%) HTML
10 101 (4.03%) RESTful
11 99 (3.95%) JSON
12 94 (3.75%) CSS
13 86 (3.43%) XML
14 77 (3.07%) AngularJS
15 72 (2.87%) SOAP
16 71 (2.83%) Pandas
17 67 (2.67%) Middleware
18 66 (2.63%) Web Services
19 59 (2.35%) .NET Framework
20 55 (2.19%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 191 (7.62%) Cloud Native
2 146 (5.82%) Product Ownership
3 122 (4.87%) Data Structures
4 83 (3.31%) Distributed Systems
4 83 (3.31%) Legacy Systems
5 78 (3.11%) Onboarding
6 75 (2.99%) Enterprise Software
7 71 (2.83%) Derivative
8 57 (2.27%) Self-Motivation
9 54 (2.15%) Management Information System
10 53 (2.11%) AI Agents
11 44 (1.76%) Fixed Income
12 42 (1.68%) Analytical Mindset
12 42 (1.68%) Reference Data
13 38 (1.52%) Algorithms
13 38 (1.52%) Equities
13 38 (1.52%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 34 (1.36%) Data Centre
15 33 (1.32%) Replication
16 32 (1.28%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 175 (6.98%) Linux
2 141 (5.62%) Windows
3 110 (4.39%) Unix
4 38 (1.52%) Windows Server
5 13 (0.52%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 7 (0.28%) VMS
6 7 (0.28%) Windows Server 2008
7 5 (0.20%) Ubuntu
7 5 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
8 4 (0.16%) Android
8 4 (0.16%) Apple iOS
8 4 (0.16%) Windows 10
8 4 (0.16%) zOS
9 3 (0.12%) OpenVMS
9 3 (0.12%) Solaris
9 3 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
10 2 (0.080%) Amazon Linux
10 2 (0.080%) Windows 7
11 1 (0.040%) Oracle Linux
11 1 (0.040%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 744 (29.68%) CI/CD
2 680 (27.12%) Analytics
3 678 (27.04%) Agile
4 658 (26.25%) Data Modelling
5 526 (20.98%) AI
6 512 (20.42%) Business Intelligence
7 502 (20.02%) ETL
8 500 (19.94%) DevOps
9 497 (19.82%) Data Pipeline
10 481 (19.19%) Problem-Solving
11 475 (18.95%) Data Engineering
12 448 (17.87%) Stakeholder Management
13 393 (15.68%) Validation
14 344 (13.72%) Migration
15 343 (13.68%) Data Analysis
16 329 (13.12%) Data Governance
17 296 (11.81%) Decision-Making
18 280 (11.17%) Continuous Improvement
19 266 (10.61%) Test Automation
20 243 (9.69%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 1,066 (42.52%) Python
2 334 (13.32%) Java
3 302 (12.05%) C#
4 236 (9.41%) JavaScript
5 172 (6.86%) PL/SQL
6 138 (5.50%) TypeScript
7 121 (4.83%) T-SQL
8 108 (4.31%) PowerShell
9 92 (3.67%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 82 (3.27%) Shell Script
11 58 (2.31%) Scala
12 52 (2.07%) Bash
13 48 (1.91%) R
14 33 (1.32%) C++
15 29 (1.16%) VBA
16 20 (0.80%) Go
17 17 (0.68%) Korn
18 16 (0.64%) VB.NET
19 14 (0.56%) Groovy
20 12 (0.48%) VB
Qualifications
1 365 (14.56%) Security Cleared
2 306 (12.21%) SC Cleared
3 202 (8.06%) Degree
4 64 (2.55%) Computer Science Degree
5 53 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
6 40 (1.60%) Azure Certification
7 30 (1.20%) Master's Degree
8 27 (1.08%) AWS Certification
9 19 (0.76%) DV Cleared
10 17 (0.68%) ISTQB
11 13 (0.52%) PMI Certification
12 12 (0.48%) FFIEC
13 11 (0.44%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 11 (0.44%) DBS Check
13 11 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
14 10 (0.40%) ACCA
14 10 (0.40%) CIMA
14 10 (0.40%) ISEB
15 8 (0.32%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 7 (0.28%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 531 (21.18%) Data Quality
2 197 (7.86%) QA
3 71 (2.83%) GDPR
4 30 (1.20%) SLA
5 27 (1.08%) Accessibility
6 21 (0.84%) Actionable Recommendations
7 19 (0.76%) ISO 20022
8 18 (0.72%) NIST
9 17 (0.68%) IFRS
10 15 (0.60%) MiFID
11 14 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 12 (0.48%) COBIT
13 11 (0.44%) Basel III
14 7 (0.28%) EMIR
14 7 (0.28%) HIPAA
14 7 (0.28%) ISO/IEC 27001
15 6 (0.24%) PSD2
15 6 (0.24%) SEPA
15 6 (0.24%) Solvency II
16 5 (0.20%) ISO 15022
System Software
1 237 (9.45%) Docker
2 33 (1.32%) Active Directory
3 22 (0.88%) VMware Infrastructure
4 13 (0.52%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
6 4 (0.16%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 4 (0.16%) Postfix
6 4 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.080%) DFS Replication
7 2 (0.080%) Dovecot
7 2 (0.080%) Hyper-V
7 2 (0.080%) Squid
7 2 (0.080%) VMware ESXi
8 1 (0.040%) KVM
8 1 (0.040%) RACF
8 1 (0.040%) Varnish
8 1 (0.040%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 213 (8.50%) Kubernetes
2 45 (1.79%) Grafana
3 34 (1.36%) Ansible
4 28 (1.12%) Control-M
5 23 (0.92%) Prometheus
6 17 (0.68%) Kibana
7 11 (0.44%) Microsoft Clustering
8 9 (0.36%) Oracle RMAN
9 8 (0.32%) ITRS Geneos
9 8 (0.32%) SCOM
9 8 (0.32%) Single Sign-On
10 7 (0.28%) Istio
11 6 (0.24%) Data Guard
11 6 (0.24%) systemd
12 5 (0.20%) Argo
12 5 (0.20%) HP Fortify
12 5 (0.20%) Microsoft Intune
13 4 (0.16%) HP ALM
13 4 (0.16%) Packer
13 4 (0.16%) Podman
Vendors
1 367 (14.64%) Microsoft
2 355 (14.16%) Databricks
3 330 (13.16%) Oracle
4 114 (4.55%) Google
5 56 (2.23%) IBM
6 53 (2.11%) Informatica
7 44 (1.76%) Salesforce
8 43 (1.72%) SAP
9 38 (1.52%) Bloomberg
10 33 (1.32%) Murex
11 30 (1.20%) Citrix
11 30 (1.20%) ServiceNow
12 27 (1.08%) Splunk
13 26 (1.04%) UiPath
14 25 (1.00%) Foundry
14 25 (1.00%) OpenAI
15 24 (0.96%) VMware
16 22 (0.88%) Adobe
16 22 (0.88%) Talend
17 20 (0.80%) Alteryx