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 17 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 15 12 11
Rank change year-on-year -3 -1 -4
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,841 4,034 4,952
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.94% 11.12% 10.54%
As % of the Programming Languages category 33.99% 34.70% 33.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,610 2,726 3,560
10th Percentile £325 £336 £350
25th Percentile £406 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £710 £731 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 84 52 67
10th Percentile £23.02 £19.63 £21.29
25th Percentile £30.72 £26.00 £26.13
Median hourly rate £50.00 £39.25 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.39% -12.78% -
75th Percentile £57.50 £52.06 £56.16
90th Percentile £63.38 £64.58 £76.20
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £30.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year +83.33% -33.33% +28.57%

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 11,302 11,627 14,618
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.19% 32.04% 31.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,452 7,473 10,428
10th Percentile £350 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £623 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 336 280 445
10th Percentile £29.17 £22.00 £31.70
25th Percentile £46.00 £39.63 £47.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £62.50 £60.21
Median % change year-on-year - +3.80% +0.35%
75th Percentile £67.88 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 17 November 2025.

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 17 November 2025.

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 17 November 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 -4 3,325 £500 -4.76% 4,172
London -2 1,997 £525 -4.55% 2,110
UK excluding London -5 1,467 £475 - 2,553
Work from Home -5 1,205 £500 - 2,128
South East -1 343 £475 -9.52% 739
North of England -9 320 £446 -8.51% 621
Midlands -3 317 £500 +11.11% 497
West Midlands +2 220 £515 +8.42% 310
Scotland -5 198 £450 - 159
North West -4 180 £428 -5.00% 381
South West +5 149 £475 -3.80% 230
Yorkshire -21 125 £475 -5.99% 181
East Midlands -5 93 £447 +11.75% 181
East of England +8 84 £550 +41.94% 224
Wales +1 45 £465 -7.00% 80
Northern Ireland +1 35 £400 -23.81% 42
North East -5 17 £500 +0.50% 61

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
1 162 (4.22%) Apache Airflow
2 150 (3.91%) Apache Spark
3 121 (3.15%) Confluence
4 106 (2.76%) Apache
5 73 (1.90%) SharePoint
6 54 (1.41%) SAS
7 49 (1.28%) WebLogic
8 28 (0.73%) Oracle Workflow
9 26 (0.68%) IIS
9 26 (0.68%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 23 (0.60%) nginx
11 20 (0.52%) Skype for Business
12 19 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
12 19 (0.49%) WebSphere
13 18 (0.47%) JBoss
13 18 (0.47%) Tomcat
14 17 (0.44%) CMS
15 16 (0.42%) Jupyter
16 15 (0.39%) Mattermost
17 12 (0.31%) Oracle Service Bus
Applications
1 282 (7.34%) Microsoft Excel
2 74 (1.93%) Microsoft Office
3 49 (1.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 30 (0.78%) MS Visio
5 14 (0.36%) Maya
6 12 (0.31%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 11 (0.29%) Chatbot
8 9 (0.23%) Microsoft Project
8 9 (0.23%) NUKE
9 8 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
10 5 (0.13%) Adobe Captivate
11 3 (0.078%) Trello
12 2 (0.052%) Maple
12 2 (0.052%) Oracle Smart View
12 2 (0.052%) SPSS
13 1 (0.026%) Adobe Illustrator
13 1 (0.026%) InDesign
13 1 (0.026%) Photoshop
13 1 (0.026%) Stata
13 1 (0.026%) Weka
Business Applications
1 46 (1.20%) Oracle EBS
2 32 (0.83%) Dynamics CRM
3 30 (0.78%) Oracle EBS R12
4 28 (0.73%) Oracle Payables
5 27 (0.70%) Oracle BPM
6 26 (0.68%) Aladdin
6 26 (0.68%) Oracle Assets
7 24 (0.62%) Oracle General Ledger
8 21 (0.55%) Endur
9 18 (0.47%) Oracle Receivables
10 17 (0.44%) Remedy ITSM
11 16 (0.42%) Oracle ERP
12 15 (0.39%) Maximo
13 14 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
14 13 (0.34%) Oracle Financials
15 11 (0.29%) NetSuite
16 10 (0.26%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
16 10 (0.26%) SAP ERP
17 9 (0.23%) Advent Geneva
17 9 (0.23%) Oracle E-Business Tax
Cloud Services
1 1,189 (30.96%) Azure
2 864 (22.49%) AWS
3 674 (17.55%) Power Platform
4 322 (8.38%) GCP
5 296 (7.71%) Azure DevOps
6 261 (6.80%) GitHub
7 258 (6.72%) Snowflake
8 222 (5.78%) Serverless
9 213 (5.55%) Azure Data Factory
10 182 (4.74%) Amazon S3
11 165 (4.30%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 150 (3.91%) dbt
13 122 (3.18%) GitHub Actions
14 112 (2.92%) AWS Lambda
15 85 (2.21%) Dynamics 365
16 81 (2.11%) Azure Functions
17 80 (2.08%) Power Automate
18 73 (1.90%) PowerApps
19 71 (1.85%) SaaS
20 63 (1.64%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 58 (1.51%) Firewall
2 55 (1.43%) HTTP
3 41 (1.07%) DNS
4 26 (0.68%) Skype
5 23 (0.60%) TCP/IP
6 19 (0.49%) Internet
7 18 (0.47%) VPN
8 17 (0.44%) DHCP
8 17 (0.44%) iSCSI
8 17 (0.44%) SSH
9 16 (0.42%) Fibre Channel
10 15 (0.39%) SSL
11 13 (0.34%) SMTP
11 13 (0.34%) Unified Communications
12 12 (0.31%) IMAP
12 12 (0.31%) OpenLDAP
13 11 (0.29%) FTP
13 11 (0.29%) Network Security
13 11 (0.29%) SAN
14 9 (0.23%) 2G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 609 (15.86%) Power BI
2 427 (11.12%) SQL Server
3 408 (10.62%) Data Warehouse
4 322 (8.38%) Relational Database
5 316 (8.23%) PostgreSQL
6 266 (6.93%) NoSQL
7 245 (6.38%) Tableau
8 203 (5.29%) Data Lake
9 175 (4.56%) Oracle Database
10 173 (4.50%) Azure SQL Database
11 132 (3.44%) BigQuery
12 129 (3.36%) MongoDB
13 123 (3.20%) Big Data
14 116 (3.02%) Metadata
15 108 (2.81%) MySQL
16 89 (2.32%) Amazon Redshift
17 84 (2.19%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 83 (2.16%) Amazon RDS
19 81 (2.11%) DB2
20 74 (1.93%) SQL Server Reporting Services
Development Applications
1 404 (10.52%) Git
2 308 (8.02%) JIRA
3 206 (5.36%) Jenkins
4 114 (2.97%) GitLab
5 108 (2.81%) JUnit
6 60 (1.56%) Selenium
7 47 (1.22%) Oracle APEX
8 43 (1.12%) Cucumber
8 43 (1.12%) Maven
9 41 (1.07%) Bitbucket
10 38 (0.99%) Postman
10 38 (0.99%) SonarQube
11 37 (0.96%) Mockito
12 33 (0.86%) ERwin
13 25 (0.65%) Cypress.io
13 25 (0.65%) Gradle
14 22 (0.57%) Eclipse
14 22 (0.57%) Oracle Forms
15 21 (0.55%) SpecFlow
16 20 (0.52%) ER Studio
General
1 1,249 (32.52%) Social Skills
2 1,068 (27.81%) Finance
3 737 (19.19%) Analytical Skills
4 417 (10.86%) Banking
5 283 (7.37%) Public Sector
6 161 (4.19%) Investment Banking
7 131 (3.41%) Front Office
8 98 (2.55%) Marketing
9 96 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
10 61 (1.59%) Manufacturing
10 61 (1.59%) Presentation Skills
10 61 (1.59%) Retail
11 59 (1.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 51 (1.33%) Financial Institution
13 48 (1.25%) Telecoms
14 37 (0.96%) Back Office
14 37 (0.96%) Local Government
15 33 (0.86%) Influencing Skills
16 31 (0.81%) Organisational Skills
17 30 (0.78%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,101 (28.66%) Developer
2 671 (17.47%) Analyst
3 490 (12.76%) Data Engineer
4 485 (12.63%) Senior
5 315 (8.20%) Data Analyst
6 209 (5.44%) Lead
7 204 (5.31%) Business Analyst
8 199 (5.18%) Java Developer
9 180 (4.69%) Consultant
10 178 (4.63%) Senior Developer
11 163 (4.24%) Architect
12 115 (2.99%) SQL Developer
13 112 (2.92%) Software Engineer
14 102 (2.66%) Azure Engineer
15 99 (2.58%) Full-Stack Developer
16 97 (2.53%) Python Developer
17 89 (2.32%) .NET Developer
18 87 (2.27%) C# Developer
18 87 (2.27%) Data Scientist
19 73 (1.90%) AWS Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 342 (8.90%) .NET
2 281 (7.32%) REST
3 244 (6.35%) Kafka
4 202 (5.26%) Spring
5 197 (5.13%) React
6 187 (4.87%) HTML
7 186 (4.84%) RESTful
8 170 (4.43%) XML
9 167 (4.35%) CSS
10 159 (4.14%) PySpark
11 141 (3.67%) SOAP
12 140 (3.64%) JSON
13 135 (3.51%) Spring Boot
14 124 (3.23%) AngularJS
15 123 (3.20%) Node.js
16 110 (2.86%) Web Services
17 99 (2.58%) .NET Framework
18 95 (2.47%) Pandas
19 65 (1.69%) .NET Core
20 63 (1.64%) JMS
Miscellaneous
1 170 (4.43%) Cloud Native
2 136 (3.54%) Data Structures
3 108 (2.81%) Product Ownership
4 101 (2.63%) Legacy Systems
5 93 (2.42%) Data Protection Act
6 79 (2.06%) Derivative
7 78 (2.03%) Algorithms
7 78 (2.03%) Equities
8 74 (1.93%) Analytical Mindset
9 72 (1.87%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 70 (1.82%) Management Information System
11 61 (1.59%) Onboarding
12 60 (1.56%) Virtual Team
13 59 (1.54%) Fixed Income
14 54 (1.41%) Replication
15 50 (1.30%) Distributed Systems
16 48 (1.25%) Market Risk
16 48 (1.25%) Self-Motivation
17 45 (1.17%) Greenfield Project
18 35 (0.91%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 392 (10.21%) Linux
2 275 (7.16%) Windows
3 222 (5.78%) Unix
4 76 (1.98%) Windows Server
5 28 (0.73%) VMS
6 25 (0.65%) Windows Server 2019
7 18 (0.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 16 (0.42%) Android
9 14 (0.36%) Ubuntu
10 12 (0.31%) Amazon Linux
11 11 (0.29%) Windows 10
12 10 (0.26%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.23%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.16%) CentOS
14 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2012
15 5 (0.13%) AIX
16 4 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
17 3 (0.078%) Solaris
18 2 (0.052%) Oracle Linux
19 1 (0.026%) VME
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,124 (29.26%) Agile
2 887 (23.09%) Problem-Solving
3 811 (21.11%) Analytics
4 809 (21.06%) Business Intelligence
5 806 (20.98%) CI/CD
6 781 (20.33%) DevOps
7 762 (19.84%) Data Modelling
8 642 (16.71%) ETL
9 487 (12.68%) Data Pipeline
10 436 (11.35%) Migration
11 420 (10.93%) Visualisation
12 375 (9.76%) Data Engineering
13 371 (9.66%) Data Analysis
14 363 (9.45%) Data Governance
15 343 (8.93%) Validation
16 342 (8.90%) Scrum
17 309 (8.04%) Microservices
18 307 (7.99%) Software Engineering
18 307 (7.99%) Test Automation
19 298 (7.76%) AI
Programming Languages
1 1,455 (37.88%) Python
2 640 (16.66%) Java
3 416 (10.83%) C#
4 360 (9.37%) JavaScript
5 277 (7.21%) PL/SQL
6 178 (4.63%) PowerShell
7 154 (4.01%) TypeScript
8 112 (2.92%) Shell Script
9 110 (2.86%) T-SQL
10 109 (2.84%) C++
10 109 (2.84%) R
11 95 (2.47%) VBA
12 86 (2.24%) Scala
13 84 (2.19%) Bash
14 78 (2.03%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 73 (1.90%) VB
16 43 (1.12%) Go
17 38 (0.99%) Perl
18 37 (0.96%) Bicep
19 31 (0.81%) PHP
Qualifications
1 540 (14.06%) Security Cleared
2 412 (10.73%) SC Cleared
3 356 (9.27%) Degree
4 128 (3.33%) Computer Science Degree
5 67 (1.74%) AWS Certification
5 67 (1.74%) Azure Certification
6 66 (1.72%) Master's Degree
7 64 (1.67%) DV Cleared
8 55 (1.43%) Microsoft Certification
9 49 (1.28%) BPSS Clearance
10 34 (0.89%) ITIL Certification
11 32 (0.83%) ISTQB
12 27 (0.70%) MCSE
13 20 (0.52%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 20 (0.52%) Oracle Certification
14 13 (0.34%) CBAP
14 13 (0.34%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 11 (0.29%) OCP
15 11 (0.29%) PhD
16 10 (0.26%) MCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 479 (12.47%) Data Quality
2 250 (6.51%) QA
3 118 (3.07%) GDPR
4 81 (2.11%) Accessibility
5 36 (0.94%) MiFID
6 30 (0.78%) SLA
7 25 (0.65%) EMIR
8 23 (0.60%) WCAG
9 21 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 20 (0.52%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 16 (0.42%) HIPAA
12 13 (0.34%) Basel III
12 13 (0.34%) ISO 20022
12 13 (0.34%) SEPA
13 12 (0.31%) Actionable Recommendations
13 12 (0.31%) HL7
14 10 (0.26%) IFRS
14 10 (0.26%) NIST
15 8 (0.21%) PMO
15 8 (0.21%) PSD2
System Software
1 374 (9.74%) Docker
2 102 (2.66%) Active Directory
3 41 (1.07%) VMware Infrastructure
4 20 (0.52%) NFS
4 20 (0.52%) Virtual Machines
5 17 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
6 16 (0.42%) Postfix
7 15 (0.39%) Oracle RAC
8 14 (0.36%) vSphere
9 12 (0.31%) Dovecot
9 12 (0.31%) Squid
10 10 (0.26%) DFS Replication
10 10 (0.26%) zsh
11 7 (0.18%) Hyper-V
12 6 (0.16%) HDFS
13 5 (0.13%) Microsoft Virtual Server
13 5 (0.13%) NDS
13 5 (0.13%) NetIQ eDirectory
13 5 (0.13%) Virtual Servers
14 4 (0.10%) VMware Workstation
Systems Management
1 345 (8.98%) Kubernetes
2 245 (6.38%) Terraform
3 83 (2.16%) Grafana
4 63 (1.64%) Ansible
4 63 (1.64%) Prometheus
5 27 (0.70%) SCOM
6 21 (0.55%) HP SiteScope
7 19 (0.49%) Kibana
8 17 (0.44%) Puppet
9 16 (0.42%) Control-M
9 16 (0.42%) Data Guard
9 16 (0.42%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
9 16 (0.42%) Oracle RMAN
10 14 (0.36%) SCCM
11 13 (0.34%) Proxmox
12 12 (0.31%) Nessus
12 12 (0.31%) WSUS
13 11 (0.29%) ITRS Geneos
13 11 (0.29%) Progress Chef
14 10 (0.26%) logstash
Vendors
1 677 (17.63%) Oracle
2 648 (16.87%) Microsoft
3 333 (8.67%) Databricks
4 143 (3.72%) Google
5 114 (2.97%) Splunk
6 104 (2.71%) SAP
7 76 (1.98%) ServiceNow
8 62 (1.61%) Salesforce
8 62 (1.61%) VMware
9 58 (1.51%) IBM
9 58 (1.51%) Talend
10 46 (1.20%) Informatica
11 43 (1.12%) Sybase
12 41 (1.07%) Dynatrace
13 36 (0.94%) Citrix
13 36 (0.94%) Red Hat
14 34 (0.89%) Cisco
15 31 (0.81%) Denodo
16 28 (0.73%) Adobe
16 28 (0.73%) OpenAI