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

6 months to
6 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,136 3,852 4,044
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.63% 11.70% 10.34%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.38% 35.46% 33.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,424 2,662 2,966
10th Percentile £356 £332 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £463 £475
% change year-on-year +1.41% -2.63% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 96 68 48
10th Percentile £23.38 £21.59 £21.25
25th Percentile £32.80 £29.07 £29.06
Median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £40.58
Median % change year-on-year +14.56% -4.27% -14.57%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £54.69
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £33.91 £34.97
% change year-on-year +31.23% -3.02% -23.79%

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 14,117 10,862 12,229
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.48% 33.00% 31.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,165 7,304 8,594
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £501 £530
Median % change year-on-year +2.35% -5.52% -3.64%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £497
% change year-on-year +4.21% -4.50% -0.53%
Number of hourly rates quoted 532 260 409
10th Percentile £30.05 £27.99 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £35.75 £46.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.13 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.79% -12.12% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.45 £83.11 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +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 6 August 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 6 August 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 6 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
England -4 4,484 £500 - 2,801
London -6 2,435 £525 - 1,474
UK excluding London -10 2,159 £469 +1.41% 1,685
Work from Home -3 1,553 £500 - 1,220
North of England -3 587 £463 -1.39% 469
Midlands 0 539 £459 +4.02% 255
South East -9 476 £495 -1.00% 502
West Midlands +4 441 £459 +1.66% 133
North West -3 311 £475 +1.28% 251
Yorkshire -6 238 £460 -3.16% 144
South West -6 225 £500 +17.65% 181
Scotland -8 192 £430 -4.44% 90
East of England -4 119 £475 -5.00% 128
East Midlands -3 94 £465 +22.37% 122
North East -16 49 £413 -10.57% 83
Wales -2 39 £471 +5.90% 48
Northern Ireland -9 16 £375 -26.83% 36

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
1 224 (4.36%) Confluence
2 219 (4.26%) Apache Airflow
3 217 (4.23%) Apache Spark
4 178 (3.47%) Apache
5 119 (2.32%) SAS
6 74 (1.44%) SharePoint
7 45 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
8 41 (0.80%) WebLogic
9 40 (0.78%) IIS
10 30 (0.58%) Tomcat
11 29 (0.56%) Jupyter
12 27 (0.53%) WebSphere
13 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
14 20 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
14 20 (0.39%) nginx
15 19 (0.37%) CMS
16 15 (0.29%) Apache Geronimo
16 15 (0.29%) Apache ServiceMix
16 15 (0.29%) Red Hat Fuse
17 13 (0.25%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 326 (6.35%) Microsoft Excel
2 62 (1.21%) Microsoft Office
3 53 (1.03%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.72%) Spreadsheet
5 29 (0.56%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.078%) Notion
8 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.019%) InDesign
10 1 (0.019%) Mingle
10 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 52 (1.01%) Oracle EBS
2 42 (0.82%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.56%) Aladdin
3 29 (0.56%) Remedy ITSM
3 29 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
4 26 (0.51%) Oracle ERP
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
6 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
7 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.29%) NEC Housing
9 13 (0.25%) Oracle General Ledger
10 12 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.21%) Findur
11 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.19%) Finacle
12 10 (0.19%) Oracle Financials
13 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 9 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
14 8 (0.16%) Fidessa
Cloud Services
1 1,609 (31.33%) Azure
2 1,211 (23.58%) AWS
3 959 (18.67%) Power Platform
4 460 (8.96%) GCP
5 450 (8.76%) Azure DevOps
6 362 (7.05%) GitHub
7 345 (6.72%) Azure Data Factory
7 345 (6.72%) Snowflake
8 304 (5.92%) Serverless
9 277 (5.39%) dbt
10 251 (4.89%) Amazon S3
11 214 (4.17%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 199 (3.87%) AWS Lambda
13 180 (3.50%) GitHub Actions
14 100 (1.95%) Entra ID
15 95 (1.85%) Power Automate
15 95 (1.85%) SaaS
16 90 (1.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 90 (1.75%) PowerApps
17 74 (1.44%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 65 (1.27%) DNS
2 46 (0.90%) Firewall
3 30 (0.58%) SSL
4 28 (0.55%) HTTP
5 25 (0.49%) Network Security
6 23 (0.45%) VPN
7 22 (0.43%) SNMP
8 20 (0.39%) Internet
8 20 (0.39%) TCP/IP
9 19 (0.37%) WAN
10 12 (0.23%) Broadband
11 11 (0.21%) DHCP
12 10 (0.19%) SSH
12 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
12 10 (0.19%) Wireshark
13 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
13 9 (0.18%) SAN
13 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
14 8 (0.16%) Kerberos
14 8 (0.16%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 882 (17.17%) Power BI
2 709 (13.80%) Data Warehouse
3 640 (12.46%) SQL Server
4 333 (6.48%) Relational Database
5 315 (6.13%) PostgreSQL
5 315 (6.13%) Tableau
6 312 (6.07%) Data Lake
7 273 (5.32%) Metadata
8 259 (5.04%) NoSQL
9 217 (4.23%) Azure SQL Database
10 208 (4.05%) Oracle Database
11 177 (3.45%) BigQuery
12 171 (3.33%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 150 (2.92%) Amazon Redshift
14 141 (2.75%) Delta Lake
15 133 (2.59%) Oracle Reports
16 126 (2.45%) Big Data
17 115 (2.24%) MongoDB
18 112 (2.18%) MySQL
19 105 (2.04%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 603 (11.74%) Git
2 404 (7.87%) JIRA
3 291 (5.67%) Jenkins
4 235 (4.58%) GitLab
5 83 (1.62%) JUnit
6 71 (1.38%) Maven
7 65 (1.27%) Gradle
8 59 (1.15%) Postman
8 59 (1.15%) Selenium
9 55 (1.07%) Mockito
10 49 (0.95%) Oracle Forms
11 40 (0.78%) Bitbucket
12 39 (0.76%) SonarQube
13 38 (0.74%) Visual Studio
14 32 (0.62%) MLflow
14 32 (0.62%) Zephyr
15 31 (0.60%) ERwin
15 31 (0.60%) Team Foundation Server
16 30 (0.58%) JMeter
16 30 (0.58%) Liquibase
General
1 1,330 (25.90%) Social Skills
2 1,279 (24.90%) Finance
3 1,024 (19.94%) Analytical Skills
4 488 (9.50%) Banking
5 484 (9.42%) Public Sector
6 145 (2.82%) Marketing
7 141 (2.75%) Front Office
8 137 (2.67%) Retail
9 124 (2.41%) Investment Banking
10 100 (1.95%) Documentation Skills
11 90 (1.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 77 (1.50%) Manufacturing
13 57 (1.11%) Legal
14 56 (1.09%) Financial Institution
14 56 (1.09%) Presentation Skills
15 47 (0.92%) Telecoms
16 46 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
17 43 (0.84%) Publishing
18 41 (0.80%) Back Office
19 37 (0.72%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,125 (21.90%) Developer
2 1,005 (19.57%) Data Engineer
3 758 (14.76%) Analyst
4 685 (13.34%) Senior
5 354 (6.89%) Lead
6 323 (6.29%) Data Analyst
7 271 (5.28%) Architect
8 258 (5.02%) Consultant
9 255 (4.96%) Business Analyst
10 214 (4.17%) Java Developer
11 206 (4.01%) DBA
12 195 (3.80%) Senior Data Engineer
13 173 (3.37%) Senior Developer
14 141 (2.75%) Software Engineer
15 134 (2.61%) SQL DBA
16 131 (2.55%) SQL Developer
17 117 (2.28%) Azure Engineer
18 115 (2.24%) Full-Stack Developer
19 109 (2.12%) Data Architect
19 109 (2.12%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 423 (8.24%) .NET
1 423 (8.24%) REST
2 329 (6.41%) PySpark
3 310 (6.04%) Kafka
4 273 (5.32%) Spring
5 256 (4.98%) Spring Boot
6 230 (4.48%) React
7 219 (4.26%) RESTful
8 201 (3.91%) JSON
9 182 (3.54%) XML
10 173 (3.37%) HTML
11 146 (2.84%) AngularJS
12 143 (2.78%) CSS
13 127 (2.47%) Web Services
14 121 (2.36%) Pandas
15 114 (2.22%) Middleware
15 114 (2.22%) SOAP
16 101 (1.97%) .NET Framework
17 84 (1.64%) Node.js
18 74 (1.44%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 346 (6.74%) Cloud Native
2 251 (4.89%) Data Structures
3 202 (3.93%) Product Ownership
4 179 (3.49%) Legacy Systems
5 150 (2.92%) Distributed Systems
6 118 (2.30%) Onboarding
7 106 (2.06%) Enterprise Software
8 95 (1.85%) Derivative
9 93 (1.81%) Management Information System
10 84 (1.64%) Self-Motivation
11 75 (1.46%) Analytical Mindset
12 74 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
13 72 (1.40%) Replication
14 70 (1.36%) Clustering
15 66 (1.29%) Algorithms
16 54 (1.05%) AI Agents
17 53 (1.03%) Fixed Income
18 52 (1.01%) Greenfield Project
19 50 (0.97%) Reference Data
20 49 (0.95%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 349 (6.80%) Linux
2 315 (6.13%) Windows
3 237 (4.61%) Unix
4 123 (2.39%) Windows Server
5 26 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.41%) AIX
7 17 (0.33%) Solaris
8 15 (0.29%) Windows Server 2019
9 14 (0.27%) VMS
10 12 (0.23%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.14%) Apple iOS
11 7 (0.14%) Ubuntu
11 7 (0.14%) zOS
12 6 (0.12%) Android
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
13 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
14 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,364 (26.56%) Agile
2 1,353 (26.34%) Data Modelling
3 1,332 (25.93%) CI/CD
4 1,292 (25.16%) Analytics
5 1,150 (22.39%) ETL
6 1,137 (22.14%) Business Intelligence
7 1,037 (20.19%) DevOps
8 1,004 (19.55%) Data Pipeline
9 980 (19.08%) Problem-Solving
10 848 (16.51%) Data Engineering
11 738 (14.37%) Migration
12 731 (14.23%) AI
13 691 (13.45%) Validation
14 592 (11.53%) Data Governance
15 570 (11.10%) Stakeholder Management
16 531 (10.34%) Test Automation
17 517 (10.07%) Decision-Making
18 516 (10.05%) Data Analysis
19 506 (9.85%) Continuous Improvement
20 456 (8.88%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,808 (35.20%) Python
2 658 (12.81%) Java
3 488 (9.50%) C#
4 419 (8.16%) PL/SQL
5 361 (7.03%) JavaScript
6 276 (5.37%) T-SQL
7 257 (5.00%) PowerShell
8 175 (3.41%) TypeScript
9 150 (2.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 142 (2.76%) Shell Script
11 116 (2.26%) Bash
12 99 (1.93%) R
13 75 (1.46%) Scala
14 59 (1.15%) C++
15 51 (0.99%) Bicep
16 50 (0.97%) VBA
17 33 (0.64%) C
18 29 (0.56%) Perl
19 28 (0.55%) VB
20 25 (0.49%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,146 (22.31%) Security Cleared
2 930 (18.11%) SC Cleared
3 347 (6.76%) Degree
4 139 (2.71%) BPSS Clearance
5 121 (2.36%) Computer Science Degree
6 109 (2.12%) DV Cleared
7 78 (1.52%) Azure Certification
8 58 (1.13%) ISTQB
9 49 (0.95%) Master's Degree
10 44 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
11 32 (0.62%) AWS Certification
12 19 (0.37%) CISSP
13 17 (0.33%) DBS Check
14 16 (0.31%) PhD
15 15 (0.29%) ISEB
16 12 (0.23%) FFIEC
16 12 (0.23%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 12 (0.23%) Oracle Certification
17 10 (0.19%) CISM
18 9 (0.18%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 952 (18.54%) Data Quality
2 387 (7.54%) QA
3 175 (3.41%) GDPR
4 67 (1.30%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.90%) SLA
6 25 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 24 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 23 (0.45%) NIST
8 23 (0.45%) PMO
9 22 (0.43%) ISO 20022
10 20 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
11 16 (0.31%) Solvency II
12 15 (0.29%) MiFID
13 14 (0.27%) IFRS
14 13 (0.25%) COBIT
14 13 (0.25%) GMP
14 13 (0.25%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.25%) PCI DSS
15 11 (0.21%) NCSC
15 11 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 505 (9.83%) Docker
2 138 (2.69%) Active Directory
3 52 (1.01%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (0.84%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.41%) Hyper-V
7 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
8 14 (0.27%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.25%) vCloud
10 10 (0.19%) Virtual Desktop
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
12 7 (0.14%) KVM
13 5 (0.097%) Ceph
14 4 (0.078%) HDFS
14 4 (0.078%) Squid
15 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
16 1 (0.019%) GPFS
16 1 (0.019%) XenApp
16 1 (0.019%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 434 (8.45%) Kubernetes
2 378 (7.36%) Terraform
3 107 (2.08%) Grafana
4 99 (1.93%) Ansible
5 49 (0.95%) Oracle RMAN
5 49 (0.95%) Prometheus
6 46 (0.90%) Data Guard
7 32 (0.62%) Control-M
8 27 (0.53%) SCOM
9 19 (0.37%) Kibana
10 17 (0.33%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.31%) Nagios
11 16 (0.31%) Netcool
11 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
13 13 (0.25%) OpenView
13 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 11 (0.21%) Microsoft Clustering
14 11 (0.21%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 10 (0.19%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 906 (17.64%) Oracle
2 822 (16.00%) Microsoft
3 596 (11.60%) Databricks
4 193 (3.76%) Google
5 185 (3.60%) Informatica
6 144 (2.80%) Talend
7 140 (2.73%) SAP
8 133 (2.59%) ServiceNow
9 92 (1.79%) IBM
10 86 (1.67%) Splunk
11 75 (1.46%) Denodo
12 71 (1.38%) VMware
13 70 (1.36%) Salesforce
14 42 (0.82%) Dynatrace
15 40 (0.78%) BMC
15 40 (0.78%) Citrix
16 38 (0.74%) Bloomberg
17 36 (0.70%) Murex
18 35 (0.68%) Alteryx
18 35 (0.68%) Sybase