SQL Contract Job Trends

SQL (Structured Query Language)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring SQL skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 13 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 12 13
Rank change year-on-year -6 +1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,783 3,577 4,310
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.56% 12.12% 9.87%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.56% 35.70% 32.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,187 2,520 3,109
10th Percentile £350 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £410 £418
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -0.94%
75th Percentile £588 £613 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -0.21% -1.05% -3.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 82 71 61
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.00 £22.61
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.36 £30.00
Median hourly rate £47.50 £40.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +17.28% -4.71% -22.73%
75th Percentile £70.99 £61.25 £54.13
90th Percentile £82.25 £76.25 £62.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.15 £41.96 £42.50
% change year-on-year +12.38% -1.28% -15.00%

All Programming Languages
UK

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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for coding skills 13,450 10,021 13,173
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.88% 33.96% 30.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,774 6,799 9,279
10th Percentile £358 £354 £350
25th Percentile £417 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £603 £625 £650
90th Percentile £718 £750 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +2.63% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 549 235 534
10th Percentile £35.25 £25.98 £31.55
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.60 £85.00 £75.88
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +4.00% - -

SQL
Job Vacancy Trend

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

SQL job vacancy trend in the UK

SQL
Daily Rate Trend

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

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

SQL
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SQL over the 6 months to 13 June 2026.

Daily rate histogram for SQL in the UK

SQL
Hourly Rate Trend

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

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

SQL
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing SQL over the 6 months to 13 June 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for SQL in the UK

SQL
Top 17 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 within the UK over the 6 months to 13 June 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 -4 4,203 £500 - 1,814
London -3 2,296 £525 -0.94% 786
UK excluding London -9 2,013 £469 -0.21% 1,347
Work from Home -6 1,417 £500 -1.96% 915
Midlands +4 534 £463 +5.59% 231
North of England -7 526 £460 -3.16% 386
West Midlands +5 437 £459 +1.32% 135
South East -12 407 £475 -5.00% 427
North West -2 272 £460 -3.16% 249
South West -2 229 £500 +5.26% 123
Yorkshire -10 213 £475 - 88
Scotland -8 187 £468 +3.89% 50
East of England -13 105 £491 +0.77% 103
East Midlands 0 93 £525 +36.36% 96
North East -9 53 £425 -8.36% 51
Wales +8 42 £450 +5.88% 28
Northern Ireland -13 13 £400 -8.57% 30

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
1 247 (5.16%) Apache Spark
2 196 (4.10%) Apache Airflow
3 188 (3.93%) Confluence
4 176 (3.68%) Apache
5 109 (2.28%) SAS
6 62 (1.30%) SharePoint
7 42 (0.88%) Tomcat
8 33 (0.69%) WebLogic
9 32 (0.67%) IIS
9 32 (0.67%) Oracle Workflow
10 31 (0.65%) WebSphere
11 24 (0.50%) Jupyter
12 22 (0.46%) Apache Geronimo
12 22 (0.46%) Apache ServiceMix
12 22 (0.46%) Red Hat Fuse
13 19 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
14 18 (0.38%) nginx
14 18 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
15 17 (0.36%) Appian
16 15 (0.31%) CMS
Applications
1 299 (6.25%) Microsoft Excel
2 50 (1.05%) Microsoft Office
3 49 (1.02%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.77%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 32 (0.67%) Spreadsheet
6 10 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.15%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.063%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.042%) Notion
11 1 (0.021%) Acrobat
11 1 (0.021%) InDesign
11 1 (0.021%) Mingle
11 1 (0.021%) Photoshop
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
11 1 (0.021%) Weka
Business Applications
1 40 (0.84%) Oracle EBS
2 30 (0.63%) Dynamics CRM
3 27 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
4 26 (0.54%) Aladdin
5 21 (0.44%) NEC Housing
6 20 (0.42%) Oracle ERP
6 20 (0.42%) Oracle Payables
7 17 (0.36%) Oracle EBS R12
8 16 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
9 15 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
10 12 (0.25%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 11 (0.23%) Findur
12 10 (0.21%) Endur
12 10 (0.21%) NetSuite
12 10 (0.21%) Oracle General Ledger
12 10 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
13 9 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
13 9 (0.19%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 9 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
14 8 (0.17%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,565 (32.72%) Azure
2 1,184 (24.75%) AWS
3 911 (19.05%) Power Platform
4 448 (9.37%) Azure DevOps
5 392 (8.20%) GCP
6 359 (7.51%) GitHub
7 357 (7.46%) Azure Data Factory
8 315 (6.59%) Serverless
9 291 (6.08%) Snowflake
10 270 (5.64%) Amazon S3
11 225 (4.70%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 220 (4.60%) dbt
13 195 (4.08%) AWS Lambda
14 188 (3.93%) GitHub Actions
15 87 (1.82%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 85 (1.78%) Power Automate
17 83 (1.74%) SaaS
18 81 (1.69%) Entra ID
19 80 (1.67%) Azure Functions
20 74 (1.55%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 58 (1.21%) DNS
2 50 (1.05%) Firewall
3 24 (0.50%) WAN
4 21 (0.44%) HTTP
4 21 (0.44%) SNMP
5 20 (0.42%) Network Security
5 20 (0.42%) SSL
6 17 (0.36%) TCP/IP
7 16 (0.33%) Internet
8 15 (0.31%) VPN
9 11 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
10 10 (0.21%) LAN
10 10 (0.21%) SAN
11 9 (0.19%) Wireshark
12 8 (0.17%) 3GPP
12 8 (0.17%) HTTPS
12 8 (0.17%) Kerberos
13 7 (0.15%) NAS
13 7 (0.15%) PuTTY
13 7 (0.15%) WinSCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 839 (17.54%) Power BI
2 619 (12.94%) Data Warehouse
3 583 (12.19%) SQL Server
4 335 (7.00%) Data Lake
5 316 (6.61%) PostgreSQL
6 315 (6.59%) Relational Database
7 310 (6.48%) Tableau
8 259 (5.42%) NoSQL
9 252 (5.27%) Metadata
10 226 (4.73%) Azure SQL Database
11 180 (3.76%) Oracle Database
12 168 (3.51%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 152 (3.18%) Big Data
14 150 (3.14%) BigQuery
15 144 (3.01%) Amazon Redshift
16 136 (2.84%) Delta Lake
17 120 (2.51%) MySQL
18 115 (2.40%) Oracle Reports
19 109 (2.28%) MongoDB
20 106 (2.22%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 522 (10.91%) Git
2 384 (8.03%) JIRA
3 243 (5.08%) Jenkins
4 233 (4.87%) GitLab
5 71 (1.48%) JUnit
6 58 (1.21%) Selenium
7 54 (1.13%) Postman
8 52 (1.09%) Maven
9 51 (1.07%) Mockito
10 46 (0.96%) Gradle
11 38 (0.79%) Visual Studio
12 37 (0.77%) Cucumber
13 36 (0.75%) MLflow
14 33 (0.69%) SonarQube
15 31 (0.65%) Oracle Forms
16 30 (0.63%) JMeter
17 28 (0.59%) Liquibase
18 27 (0.56%) Bitbucket
18 27 (0.56%) ERwin
19 26 (0.54%) REST Assured
General
1 1,234 (25.80%) Finance
2 1,208 (25.26%) Social Skills
3 885 (18.50%) Analytical Skills
4 444 (9.28%) Banking
5 440 (9.20%) Public Sector
6 129 (2.70%) Front Office
7 123 (2.57%) Investment Banking
8 120 (2.51%) Marketing
9 104 (2.17%) Documentation Skills
10 94 (1.97%) Retail
11 85 (1.78%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 58 (1.21%) Legal
13 56 (1.17%) Financial Institution
14 47 (0.98%) Publishing
15 43 (0.90%) Manufacturing
16 42 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
17 35 (0.73%) Telecoms
18 34 (0.71%) Back Office
18 34 (0.71%) Law
19 33 (0.69%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 996 (20.82%) Data Engineer
2 989 (20.68%) Developer
3 691 (14.45%) Analyst
4 617 (12.90%) Senior
5 324 (6.77%) Lead
6 301 (6.29%) Data Analyst
7 274 (5.73%) Architect
8 229 (4.79%) Consultant
9 212 (4.43%) Business Analyst
10 196 (4.10%) Java Developer
11 186 (3.89%) Senior Data Engineer
12 159 (3.32%) DBA
13 146 (3.05%) Software Engineer
14 144 (3.01%) Senior Developer
15 117 (2.45%) Azure Engineer
16 109 (2.28%) C# Developer
17 108 (2.26%) SQL Developer
18 106 (2.22%) Data Architect
18 106 (2.22%) Python Developer
19 95 (1.99%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 396 (8.28%) .NET
2 360 (7.53%) REST
3 305 (6.38%) PySpark
4 293 (6.13%) Kafka
5 245 (5.12%) Spring
6 236 (4.93%) Spring Boot
7 220 (4.60%) React
8 209 (4.37%) RESTful
9 165 (3.45%) JSON
10 162 (3.39%) HTML
11 150 (3.14%) XML
12 144 (3.01%) CSS
13 130 (2.72%) Pandas
14 114 (2.38%) AngularJS
15 112 (2.34%) Middleware
16 111 (2.32%) SOAP
17 109 (2.28%) Web Services
18 89 (1.86%) .NET Framework
19 85 (1.78%) OAuth
20 79 (1.65%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 318 (6.65%) Cloud Native
2 190 (3.97%) Data Structures
3 174 (3.64%) Legacy Systems
4 144 (3.01%) Product Ownership
5 137 (2.86%) Distributed Systems
6 95 (1.99%) Management Information System
7 92 (1.92%) Derivative
8 91 (1.90%) Onboarding
9 78 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
10 67 (1.40%) Analytical Mindset
11 66 (1.38%) Enterprise Software
12 65 (1.36%) Self-Motivation
13 60 (1.25%) Algorithms
13 60 (1.25%) Clustering
14 55 (1.15%) Greenfield Project
15 51 (1.07%) Equities
16 50 (1.05%) Fixed Income
17 48 (1.00%) Replication
18 47 (0.98%) Low-Code
19 46 (0.96%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 322 (6.73%) Linux
2 274 (5.73%) Windows
3 225 (4.70%) Unix
4 103 (2.15%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.52%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.50%) AIX
7 18 (0.38%) Windows Server 2019
8 13 (0.27%) Solaris
8 13 (0.27%) Windows Server 2016
9 11 (0.23%) VMS
9 11 (0.23%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.17%) Apple iOS
10 8 (0.17%) zOS
11 7 (0.15%) Android
11 7 (0.15%) Windows 10
12 4 (0.084%) Oracle Linux
13 3 (0.063%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.042%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.042%) HPUX
14 2 (0.042%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,304 (27.26%) CI/CD
2 1,210 (25.30%) Data Modelling
3 1,203 (25.15%) Analytics
4 1,196 (25.01%) Agile
5 1,115 (23.31%) ETL
6 1,062 (22.20%) Business Intelligence
7 1,001 (20.93%) DevOps
8 939 (19.63%) Data Pipeline
9 937 (19.59%) Problem-Solving
10 785 (16.41%) Data Engineering
11 679 (14.20%) AI
12 642 (13.42%) Migration
13 596 (12.46%) Validation
14 541 (11.31%) Data Governance
15 487 (10.18%) Test Automation
16 478 (9.99%) Decision-Making
17 456 (9.53%) Data Analysis
18 440 (9.20%) Stakeholder Management
19 432 (9.03%) Performance Tuning
20 420 (8.78%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,783 (37.28%) Python
2 638 (13.34%) Java
3 484 (10.12%) C#
4 354 (7.40%) PL/SQL
5 330 (6.90%) JavaScript
6 247 (5.16%) T-SQL
7 233 (4.87%) PowerShell
8 165 (3.45%) TypeScript
9 142 (2.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 119 (2.49%) Shell Script
11 117 (2.45%) R
12 91 (1.90%) Bash
13 82 (1.71%) C++
14 79 (1.65%) Scala
15 52 (1.09%) Bicep
16 43 (0.90%) VBA
17 35 (0.73%) VB
18 34 (0.71%) Perl
19 32 (0.67%) C
20 27 (0.56%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,023 (21.39%) Security Cleared
2 830 (17.35%) SC Cleared
3 362 (7.57%) Degree
4 125 (2.61%) BPSS Clearance
5 110 (2.30%) Computer Science Degree
6 91 (1.90%) DV Cleared
7 73 (1.53%) Azure Certification
8 65 (1.36%) Master's Degree
9 56 (1.17%) ISTQB
10 41 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
11 32 (0.67%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.36%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.36%) PhD
13 13 (0.27%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 11 (0.23%) CISSP
14 11 (0.23%) PMI Certification
15 10 (0.21%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 10 (0.21%) SnowPro
16 9 (0.19%) PMP
16 9 (0.19%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 882 (18.44%) Data Quality
2 373 (7.80%) QA
3 187 (3.91%) GDPR
4 55 (1.15%) Accessibility
5 48 (1.00%) SLA
6 32 (0.67%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 30 (0.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.50%) PMO
9 23 (0.48%) NIST
10 17 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
10 17 (0.36%) IFRS
11 16 (0.33%) PCI DSS
12 15 (0.31%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 15 (0.31%) ISO 20022
12 15 (0.31%) MiFID
13 14 (0.29%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.27%) Solvency II
15 12 (0.25%) NCSC
15 12 (0.25%) WCAG
16 11 (0.23%) HL7
System Software
1 528 (11.04%) Docker
2 105 (2.20%) Active Directory
3 40 (0.84%) Virtual Machines
4 36 (0.75%) VMware Infrastructure
5 31 (0.65%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.44%) Hyper-V
7 19 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
8 12 (0.25%) VMware NSX
9 11 (0.23%) vCloud
10 10 (0.21%) KVM
10 10 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
11 9 (0.19%) Postfix
12 7 (0.15%) HDFS
13 6 (0.13%) RACF
14 4 (0.084%) Ceph
14 4 (0.084%) XenApp
14 4 (0.084%) XenDesktop
15 3 (0.063%) Squid
16 2 (0.042%) GridGain
16 2 (0.042%) Oracle Clusterware
Systems Management
1 418 (8.74%) Kubernetes
2 388 (8.11%) Terraform
3 122 (2.55%) Grafana
4 85 (1.78%) Ansible
5 63 (1.32%) Prometheus
6 42 (0.88%) Oracle RMAN
7 31 (0.65%) Data Guard
8 22 (0.46%) Kibana
9 20 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
10 19 (0.40%) Control-M
11 18 (0.38%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.33%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.31%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.29%) Nagios
14 14 (0.29%) Netcool
15 13 (0.27%) OpenView
15 13 (0.27%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 12 (0.25%) SCOM
17 8 (0.17%) HP Quality Center
17 8 (0.17%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 824 (17.23%) Oracle
2 734 (15.35%) Microsoft
3 575 (12.02%) Databricks
4 182 (3.81%) Google
5 179 (3.74%) Informatica
6 143 (2.99%) Talend
7 139 (2.91%) ServiceNow
8 124 (2.59%) SAP
9 93 (1.94%) Splunk
10 84 (1.76%) IBM
11 71 (1.48%) Denodo
12 56 (1.17%) Salesforce
12 56 (1.17%) VMware
13 43 (0.90%) Citrix
14 40 (0.84%) Dynatrace
15 36 (0.75%) Sybase
16 33 (0.69%) Bloomberg
16 33 (0.69%) MuleSoft
17 32 (0.67%) Murex
17 32 (0.67%) OpenAI