SQL Optimisation Contract Job Trends

SQL Optimisation
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring SQL Optimisation skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 14 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 559 556 604
Rank change year-on-year -3 +48 +181
Contract jobs citing SQL Optimisation 22 8 8
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.060% 0.023% 0.018%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.068% 0.026% 0.020%
Number of daily rates quoted 12 4 5
10th Percentile £418 £278 -
25th Percentile £474 £300 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £494 £414 £550
Median % change year-on-year +19.34% -24.77% -3.30%
75th Percentile £580 £532 £650
90th Percentile £667 £538 £673
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £503 £675
% change year-on-year -6.47% -25.56% +14.89%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 0
Median hourly rate £36.00 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £36.00 - -

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

SQL Optimisation falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 32,261 30,399 39,447
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.54% 87.91% 88.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,301 18,546 26,335
10th Percentile £300 £306 £310
25th Percentile £406 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £531
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.13% -3.45%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,097 1,021 1,510
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.53 £14.36
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.30 £18.95
Median hourly rate £25.15 £33.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -23.79% -22.35% +21.43%
75th Percentile £48.75 £63.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.00 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.00 £32.50 £44.50
% change year-on-year -29.23% -26.97% +37.98%

SQL Optimisation
Job Vacancy Trend

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

SQL Optimisation job vacancy trend in the UK

SQL Optimisation
Daily Rate Trend

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

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

SQL Optimisation
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SQL Optimisation over the 6 months to 14 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for SQL Optimisation in the UK

SQL Optimisation
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SQL Optimisation.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SQL Optimisation

SQL Optimisation
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 SQL Optimisation within the UK over the 6 months to 14 December 2025. 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 -26 17 £494 +19.34% 6
London +11 12 £500 - 5
UK excluding London -42 8 £470 -6.47% 2
Work from Home +21 7 £500 - 4
Northern Ireland - 4 - -
North of England -36 3 £392 +42.36% 1
North West -19 2 £392 -
Midlands - 1 - -
North East - 1 - -
East of England - 1 £500 -
South West - 1 - -
West Midlands - 1 - -

SQL Optimisation
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 3 (13.64%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (9.09%) Apache
3 1 (4.55%) Apache Spark
Business Applications
1 1 (4.55%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 7 (31.82%) AWS
2 6 (27.27%) Azure
3 3 (13.64%) Amazon S3
3 3 (13.64%) GitHub
3 3 (13.64%) Snowflake
4 2 (9.09%) AWS Lambda
4 2 (9.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
4 2 (9.09%) dbt
4 2 (9.09%) GCP
4 2 (9.09%) GitHub Actions
4 2 (9.09%) Serverless
5 1 (4.55%) Amazon Cognito
5 1 (4.55%) Azure Cosmos DB
5 1 (4.55%) Azure Data Factory
5 1 (4.55%) Azure DevOps
5 1 (4.55%) Azure Event Grid
5 1 (4.55%) Azure Key Vault
5 1 (4.55%) Azure Logic Apps
5 1 (4.55%) Power Platform
5 1 (4.55%) Pulumi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (31.82%) SQL Server
2 3 (13.64%) PostgreSQL
3 2 (9.09%) Amazon RDS
3 2 (9.09%) Amazon Redshift
3 2 (9.09%) BigQuery
3 2 (9.09%) Data Lake
3 2 (9.09%) Data Warehouse
3 2 (9.09%) Metadata
3 2 (9.09%) NoSQL
3 2 (9.09%) Oracle Database
3 2 (9.09%) Oracle Exadata
3 2 (9.09%) Relational Database
3 2 (9.09%) Snowflake Schema
4 1 (4.55%) Amazon Athena
4 1 (4.55%) Apache Iceberg
4 1 (4.55%) Big Data
4 1 (4.55%) Elasticsearch
4 1 (4.55%) Power BI
4 1 (4.55%) Redis
4 1 (4.55%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 7 (31.82%) Git
2 1 (4.55%) Cypress.io
2 1 (4.55%) Jenkins
2 1 (4.55%) JIRA
2 1 (4.55%) Moq
2 1 (4.55%) Octopus Deploy
2 1 (4.55%) TeamCity
General
1 5 (22.73%) Finance
2 4 (18.18%) Analytical Skills
3 2 (9.09%) Financial Institution
3 2 (9.09%) Marketing
4 1 (4.55%) Advertising
4 1 (4.55%) Arabic Language
4 1 (4.55%) Banking
4 1 (4.55%) Local Government
4 1 (4.55%) Social Skills
Job Titles
1 10 (45.45%) Developer
2 5 (22.73%) C# Developer
3 4 (18.18%) Senior
4 2 (9.09%) Administrator
4 2 (9.09%) Analyst
4 2 (9.09%) Database Specialist
4 2 (9.09%) DBA
4 2 (9.09%) PostgreSQL DBA
4 2 (9.09%) PostgreSQL Specialist
4 2 (9.09%) Python Developer
4 2 (9.09%) Software Engineer
4 2 (9.09%) SQL Developer
5 1 (4.55%) .NET Developer
5 1 (4.55%) AWS Software Engineer
5 1 (4.55%) C# .NET Developer
5 1 (4.55%) Data Analyst
5 1 (4.55%) Data Engineer
5 1 (4.55%) Java Developer
5 1 (4.55%) Optimisation Engineer
5 1 (4.55%) SQL Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (13.64%) .NET
2 2 (9.09%) CSS
2 2 (9.09%) Node.js
2 2 (9.09%) React
2 2 (9.09%) REST
3 1 (4.55%) .NET Core
3 1 (4.55%) ARM Templates
3 1 (4.55%) ASP.NET MVC
3 1 (4.55%) ASP.NET Web API
3 1 (4.55%) ASP.NET Web Forms
3 1 (4.55%) Enzyme
3 1 (4.55%) Jest
3 1 (4.55%) Kafka
3 1 (4.55%) MediatR
3 1 (4.55%) pytest
3 1 (4.55%) RESTful
3 1 (4.55%) Sass
3 1 (4.55%) Spring
3 1 (4.55%) Spring Boot
3 1 (4.55%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 2 (9.09%) Algorithms
1 2 (9.09%) Cloud Native
1 2 (9.09%) Clustering
1 2 (9.09%) Data Centre
1 2 (9.09%) Data Structures
1 2 (9.09%) Linux Command Line
1 2 (9.09%) Replication
2 1 (4.55%) Data Protection Act
2 1 (4.55%) IoT
2 1 (4.55%) Reference Data
2 1 (4.55%) Social Media
Operating Systems
1 4 (18.18%) Linux
2 2 (9.09%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 2 (9.09%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 9 (40.91%) Data Modelling
2 8 (36.36%) CI/CD
3 7 (31.82%) Agile
3 7 (31.82%) ETL
3 7 (31.82%) Performance Tuning
4 4 (18.18%) Analytics
4 4 (18.18%) Data Integration
4 4 (18.18%) DevOps
4 4 (18.18%) Problem-Solving
5 3 (13.64%) API Development
5 3 (13.64%) Data Engineering
5 3 (13.64%) Data Ingestion
5 3 (13.64%) High Availability
5 3 (13.64%) Infrastructure as Code
5 3 (13.64%) Microservices
6 2 (9.09%) Dashboard Development
6 2 (9.09%) Migration
6 2 (9.09%) SDLC
6 2 (9.09%) Test Automation
6 2 (9.09%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 22 (100.00%) SQL
2 7 (31.82%) C#
3 6 (27.27%) Python
4 3 (13.64%) JavaScript
4 3 (13.64%) T-SQL
5 2 (9.09%) AWK
5 2 (9.09%) Bash
5 2 (9.09%) sed
5 2 (9.09%) Shell Script
6 1 (4.55%) Bicep
6 1 (4.55%) Java
6 1 (4.55%) JSX
6 1 (4.55%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 1 (4.55%) Degree
1 1 (4.55%) SC Cleared
1 1 (4.55%) Security Cleared
System Software
1 2 (9.09%) GPFS
1 2 (9.09%) NFS
Systems Management
1 3 (13.64%) Terraform
2 2 (9.09%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
3 1 (4.55%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 2 (9.09%) Google
1 2 (9.09%) Informatica
1 2 (9.09%) Microsoft
1 2 (9.09%) Oracle
1 2 (9.09%) Red Hat
1 2 (9.09%) Teradata
2 1 (4.55%) Salesforce
2 1 (4.55%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud