Spark SQL Contract Job Trends

Apache Spark SQL
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Spark SQL skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 8 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 645 539 505
Rank change year-on-year -106 -34 +87
Contract jobs citing Spark SQL 46 19 54
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.084% 0.057% 0.14%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 0.57% 0.32% 0.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 27 12 24
10th Percentile £385 £425 £331
25th Percentile £425 £444 £397
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £475 £440
Median % change year-on-year - +7.95% -20.00%
75th Percentile £550 £553 £503
90th Percentile £710 £623 £794
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £600 £350
% change year-on-year -22.50% +71.43% -41.67%

All Database & BI Skills
UK

Spark SQL falls under the Databases and Business Intelligence category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring database or business intelligence skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for database or business intelligence skills 8,110 6,002 6,805
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 14.87% 18.16% 17.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,395 4,007 4,601
10th Percentile £356 £340 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £623 £625 £650
90th Percentile £713 £738 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £485
% change year-on-year - -2.06% -3.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 290 82 91
10th Percentile £16.70 £21.02 £17.50
25th Percentile £22.58 £29.00 £21.25
Median hourly rate £41.36 £39.48 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.75% +12.80% -33.33%
75th Percentile £57.50 £64.69 £61.60
90th Percentile £74.68 £79.88 £71.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.71 £35.49 £30.00
% change year-on-year +17.53% +18.30% -42.86%

Spark SQL
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Spark SQL job vacancy trend in the UK

Spark SQL
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Spark SQL.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Spark SQL

Spark SQL
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Spark SQL over the 6 months to 8 October 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Spark SQL in the UK

Spark SQL
Top 12 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Spark SQL within the UK over the 6 months to 8 October 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
England -72 44 £475 - 48
London -72 29 £475 - 24
UK excluding London -90 16 £465 -22.50% 25
Work from Home -69 7 £488 -22.00% 27
South East - 7 £425 - 4
North of England -57 4 £550 -8.33% 13
Yorkshire -33 3 £550 -8.33% 8
Midlands - 2 £450 - 1
South West - 2 £425 - 4
West Midlands - 2 £450 -
Scotland - 1 £545 - 2
North West - 1 - - 4

Spark SQL
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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 15 (32.61%) Apache Spark
2 7 (15.22%) Apache
3 6 (13.04%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (2.17%) SharePoint
Business Applications
1 1 (2.17%) Aladdin
1 1 (2.17%) FIS Private Capital Suite
Cloud Services
1 34 (73.91%) Azure
2 19 (41.30%) Power Platform
3 16 (34.78%) AWS
4 13 (28.26%) Azure DevOps
5 10 (21.74%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 9 (19.57%) Azure Data Factory
7 8 (17.39%) Azure Databricks
8 7 (15.22%) Microsoft Purview
9 6 (13.04%) AWS Lambda
9 6 (13.04%) Dynamics 365
9 6 (13.04%) GCP
9 6 (13.04%) Serverless
10 5 (10.87%) dbt
11 4 (8.70%) Azure Functions
12 3 (6.52%) Amazon S3
12 3 (6.52%) PowerApps
13 2 (4.35%) AWS CodeCommit
13 2 (4.35%) AWS Step Functions
13 2 (4.35%) GitHub
13 2 (4.35%) Power Automate
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (41.30%) Power BI
2 12 (26.09%) Delta Lake
3 11 (23.91%) Data Warehouse
4 10 (21.74%) Data Lake
4 10 (21.74%) Metadata
5 7 (15.22%) SQL Server
6 5 (10.87%) Big Data
7 4 (8.70%) Apache Iceberg
7 4 (8.70%) Data Vault
7 4 (8.70%) Star Schema
8 3 (6.52%) Azure SQL Database
9 2 (4.35%) Amazon Athena
9 2 (4.35%) Amazon RDS
9 2 (4.35%) Parquet
9 2 (4.35%) Semantic Layer
9 2 (4.35%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 2 (4.35%) SQL Server Reporting Services
9 2 (4.35%) Tableau
10 1 (2.17%) Amazon Redshift
10 1 (2.17%) Neo4j
Development Applications
1 10 (21.74%) Git
2 4 (8.70%) Selenium
3 3 (6.52%) MLflow
4 1 (2.17%) GitLab
4 1 (2.17%) SonarQube
General
1 17 (36.96%) Finance
2 10 (21.74%) Analytical Skills
2 10 (21.74%) Social Skills
3 4 (8.70%) Military
4 3 (6.52%) Retail
5 2 (4.35%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 2 (4.35%) Public Sector
5 2 (4.35%) Publishing
6 1 (2.17%) Banking
6 1 (2.17%) Documentation Skills
6 1 (2.17%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 28 (60.87%) Data Engineer
2 10 (21.74%) Senior
3 8 (17.39%) Databricks Engineer
3 8 (17.39%) Senior Data Engineer
4 7 (15.22%) Architect
4 7 (15.22%) Databricks Data Engineer
4 7 (15.22%) Lead
5 5 (10.87%) Analyst
5 5 (10.87%) Data Analyst
5 5 (10.87%) Databricks Architect
5 5 (10.87%) Lead Data Engineer
6 4 (8.70%) Platform Engineer
7 3 (6.52%) Data Architect
7 3 (6.52%) Tester
8 2 (4.35%) Data Analytics Engineer
8 2 (4.35%) Data Modeller
8 2 (4.35%) Developer
8 2 (4.35%) Enterprise Architect
8 2 (4.35%) Financial Analyst
8 2 (4.35%) Lead Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 40 (86.96%) PySpark
2 10 (21.74%) Terraform
3 5 (10.87%) Great Expectations
3 5 (10.87%) Kafka
4 4 (8.70%) Playwright
4 4 (8.70%) pytest
4 4 (8.70%) React
5 2 (4.35%) Jinja
5 2 (4.35%) JSON
6 1 (2.17%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 5 (10.87%) Cloud Native
2 4 (8.70%) Low-Code
3 3 (6.52%) Greenfield Project
4 2 (4.35%) AI Agents
4 2 (4.35%) Algorithms
4 2 (4.35%) Enterprise Cloud
4 2 (4.35%) Legacy Systems
5 1 (2.17%) Data Fabric
5 1 (2.17%) Data Structures
5 1 (2.17%) Educational Technology
5 1 (2.17%) EPoS
5 1 (2.17%) Product Ownership
5 1 (2.17%) Reference Data
5 1 (2.17%) Renewable Energy
5 1 (2.17%) Video\Live Streaming
5 1 (2.17%) Virtual Team
Processes & Methodologies
1 29 (63.04%) CI/CD
2 25 (54.35%) Analytics
3 24 (52.17%) Business Intelligence
4 23 (50.00%) Data Engineering
4 23 (50.00%) Data Pipeline
4 23 (50.00%) Lakehouse
5 22 (47.83%) Data Governance
6 20 (43.48%) Data Modelling
6 20 (43.48%) ETL
7 19 (41.30%) DevOps
8 16 (34.78%) Validation
9 14 (30.43%) AI
9 14 (30.43%) Migration
10 13 (28.26%) Continuous Improvement
10 13 (28.26%) Infrastructure as Code
11 12 (26.09%) Agile
12 9 (19.57%) Data Ingestion
13 8 (17.39%) Data Architecture
14 7 (15.22%) Test Automation
14 7 (15.22%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 46 (100.00%) SQL
2 29 (63.04%) Python
3 5 (10.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
3 5 (10.87%) T-SQL
4 4 (8.70%) JavaScript
5 2 (4.35%) Java
6 1 (2.17%) PowerShell
6 1 (2.17%) Scala
Qualifications
1 2 (4.35%) DBS Check
1 2 (4.35%) Security Cleared
2 1 (2.17%) SC Cleared
2 1 (2.17%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 26 (56.52%) Data Quality
2 7 (15.22%) QA
3 3 (6.52%) GDPR
4 1 (2.17%) Disclosure Scotland
4 1 (2.17%) GRC
4 1 (2.17%) MiFID
4 1 (2.17%) Sarbanes-Oxley
4 1 (2.17%) SLA
System Software
1 6 (13.04%) Docker
Systems Management
1 4 (8.70%) Ansible
2 2 (4.35%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 32 (69.57%) Databricks
2 18 (39.13%) Microsoft
3 2 (4.35%) Hitachi
3 2 (4.35%) Teradata
4 1 (2.17%) Anaplan
4 1 (2.17%) Bloomberg
4 1 (2.17%) eFront
4 1 (2.17%) OpenAI
4 1 (2.17%) Reuters
4 1 (2.17%) Trayport