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 10 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 12 13
Rank change year-on-year -6 +1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,714 3,585 4,286
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.53% 12.21% 9.82%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.56% 35.80% 32.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,150 2,521 3,102
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% -0.47%
75th Percentile £588 £613 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £472 £475
% change year-on-year -0.64% -0.63% -3.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 76 70 61
10th Percentile £26.50 £22.57 £22.61
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.31 £30.00
Median hourly rate £50.00 £39.67 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +26.03% -6.65% -20.93%
75th Percentile £71.88 £58.44 £54.13
90th Percentile £83.00 £76.34 £62.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.25 £41.96 £42.50
% change year-on-year +22.15% -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 13,257 10,013 13,127
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.79% 34.09% 30.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,653 6,790 9,257
10th Percentile £358 £355 £350
25th Percentile £416 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £715 £752 £764
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +2.63% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 539 234 531
10th Percentile £36.25 £26.52 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.64 £34.05 £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 £76.25
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 10 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 10 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 10 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 -5 4,150 £500 - 1,724
London -3 2,280 £523 -1.32% 709
UK excluding London -10 1,970 £469 -0.64% 1,307
Work from Home -6 1,398 £500 -2.44% 928
Midlands +2 523 £463 +4.10% 211
North of England -5 521 £460 -3.16% 375
West Midlands +4 426 £459 +1.17% 131
South East -15 399 £475 -5.00% 416
North West -4 266 £460 -3.16% 229
South West 0 222 £500 +5.26% 132
Yorkshire -14 215 £475 - 95
Scotland -9 180 £475 +5.56% 47
East of England -16 101 £495 +1.54% 98
East Midlands -3 93 £525 +38.16% 80
North East -4 52 £425 -8.11% 54
Wales +10 42 £450 +5.88% 28
Northern Ireland -13 12 £400 -5.88% 26

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
1 252 (5.35%) Apache Spark
2 194 (4.12%) Apache Airflow
3 180 (3.82%) Confluence
4 178 (3.78%) Apache
5 108 (2.29%) SAS
6 61 (1.29%) SharePoint
7 42 (0.89%) Tomcat
8 32 (0.68%) IIS
9 31 (0.66%) Oracle Workflow
10 30 (0.64%) WebLogic
11 29 (0.62%) WebSphere
12 24 (0.51%) Jupyter
13 22 (0.47%) Apache Geronimo
13 22 (0.47%) Apache ServiceMix
13 22 (0.47%) Red Hat Fuse
14 19 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
15 18 (0.38%) nginx
16 17 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
17 16 (0.34%) Appian
18 14 (0.30%) CMS
Applications
1 292 (6.19%) Microsoft Excel
2 47 (1.00%) MS Visio
3 46 (0.98%) Microsoft Office
4 36 (0.76%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 31 (0.66%) Spreadsheet
6 10 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.15%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.064%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.042%) Notion
10 2 (0.042%) Trello
11 1 (0.021%) Acrobat
11 1 (0.021%) InDesign
11 1 (0.021%) Mingle
11 1 (0.021%) Photoshop
11 1 (0.021%) Weka
Business Applications
1 41 (0.87%) Oracle EBS
2 29 (0.62%) Dynamics CRM
3 26 (0.55%) Aladdin
3 26 (0.55%) SAP S/4HANA
4 21 (0.45%) NEC Housing
5 20 (0.42%) Oracle ERP
6 18 (0.38%) Oracle Payables
7 16 (0.34%) Oracle EBS R12
7 16 (0.34%) Remedy ITSM
8 14 (0.30%) Oracle Receivables
9 12 (0.25%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 10 (0.21%) Findur
10 10 (0.21%) Oracle General Ledger
10 10 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
11 9 (0.19%) Endur
11 9 (0.19%) NetSuite
11 9 (0.19%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
11 9 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
12 8 (0.17%) Oracle Assets
13 7 (0.15%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,557 (33.03%) Azure
2 1,170 (24.82%) AWS
3 893 (18.94%) Power Platform
4 444 (9.42%) Azure DevOps
5 394 (8.36%) GCP
6 357 (7.57%) Azure Data Factory
6 357 (7.57%) GitHub
7 303 (6.43%) Serverless
8 284 (6.02%) Snowflake
9 266 (5.64%) Amazon S3
10 226 (4.79%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 217 (4.60%) dbt
12 192 (4.07%) AWS Lambda
13 187 (3.97%) GitHub Actions
14 90 (1.91%) SaaS
15 82 (1.74%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 80 (1.70%) Power Automate
17 79 (1.68%) Entra ID
18 74 (1.57%) Azure Functions
19 72 (1.53%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 54 (1.15%) DNS
2 49 (1.04%) Firewall
3 22 (0.47%) WAN
4 21 (0.45%) SNMP
5 19 (0.40%) HTTP
5 19 (0.40%) SSL
6 18 (0.38%) Network Security
6 18 (0.38%) TCP/IP
7 16 (0.34%) Internet
8 14 (0.30%) 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
1 823 (17.46%) Power BI
2 606 (12.86%) Data Warehouse
3 582 (12.35%) SQL Server
4 328 (6.96%) Data Lake
5 311 (6.60%) Relational Database
6 309 (6.55%) PostgreSQL
7 308 (6.53%) Tableau
8 260 (5.52%) NoSQL
9 241 (5.11%) Metadata
10 230 (4.88%) Azure SQL Database
11 173 (3.67%) Oracle Database
12 166 (3.52%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 152 (3.22%) Big Data
14 148 (3.14%) BigQuery
15 138 (2.93%) Amazon Redshift
16 136 (2.89%) Delta Lake
17 126 (2.67%) MySQL
18 111 (2.35%) Oracle Reports
19 107 (2.27%) MongoDB
20 102 (2.16%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 513 (10.88%) Git
2 378 (8.02%) JIRA
3 245 (5.20%) Jenkins
4 233 (4.94%) GitLab
5 70 (1.48%) JUnit
6 65 (1.38%) Selenium
7 60 (1.27%) Postman
8 50 (1.06%) Maven
8 50 (1.06%) Mockito
9 45 (0.95%) Gradle
10 44 (0.93%) Cucumber
11 36 (0.76%) Visual Studio
12 35 (0.74%) MLflow
13 34 (0.72%) SonarQube
14 32 (0.68%) REST Assured
15 30 (0.64%) JMeter
16 28 (0.59%) Liquibase
17 27 (0.57%) Bitbucket
17 27 (0.57%) ERwin
17 27 (0.57%) Oracle Forms
General
1 1,209 (25.65%) Finance
2 1,201 (25.48%) Social Skills
3 864 (18.33%) Analytical Skills
4 441 (9.36%) Banking
5 431 (9.14%) Public Sector
6 129 (2.74%) Front Office
7 127 (2.69%) Investment Banking
8 122 (2.59%) Marketing
9 101 (2.14%) Documentation Skills
10 91 (1.93%) Retail
11 84 (1.78%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 57 (1.21%) Legal
13 55 (1.17%) Financial Institution
14 45 (0.95%) Publishing
15 42 (0.89%) Manufacturing
16 39 (0.83%) Presentation Skills
17 35 (0.74%) Telecoms
18 34 (0.72%) Back Office
18 34 (0.72%) Law
19 33 (0.70%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 987 (20.94%) Data Engineer
2 981 (20.81%) Developer
3 667 (14.15%) Analyst
4 607 (12.88%) Senior
5 325 (6.89%) Lead
6 288 (6.11%) Data Analyst
7 270 (5.73%) Architect
8 223 (4.73%) Consultant
9 208 (4.41%) Business Analyst
10 194 (4.12%) Java Developer
11 180 (3.82%) Senior Data Engineer
12 156 (3.31%) DBA
13 143 (3.03%) Senior Developer
14 139 (2.95%) Software Engineer
15 118 (2.50%) Azure Engineer
16 109 (2.31%) SQL Developer
17 107 (2.27%) C# Developer
17 107 (2.27%) Python Developer
18 104 (2.21%) Data Architect
19 94 (1.99%) SQL DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 398 (8.44%) .NET
2 369 (7.83%) REST
3 301 (6.39%) PySpark
4 292 (6.19%) Kafka
5 239 (5.07%) Spring
6 228 (4.84%) Spring Boot
7 219 (4.65%) React
8 209 (4.43%) RESTful
9 167 (3.54%) HTML
10 163 (3.46%) JSON
11 148 (3.14%) CSS
12 147 (3.12%) XML
13 131 (2.78%) Pandas
14 114 (2.42%) AngularJS
15 111 (2.35%) SOAP
16 107 (2.27%) Web Services
17 106 (2.25%) Middleware
18 89 (1.89%) .NET Framework
19 85 (1.80%) OAuth
20 77 (1.63%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 315 (6.68%) Cloud Native
2 179 (3.80%) Data Structures
3 168 (3.56%) Legacy Systems
4 143 (3.03%) Product Ownership
5 134 (2.84%) Distributed Systems
6 95 (2.02%) Management Information System
7 94 (1.99%) Derivative
8 87 (1.85%) Onboarding
9 79 (1.68%) Data Protection Act
10 70 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
11 66 (1.40%) Enterprise Software
12 60 (1.27%) Self-Motivation
13 59 (1.25%) Clustering
14 57 (1.21%) Algorithms
15 55 (1.17%) Greenfield Project
16 53 (1.12%) Equities
17 50 (1.06%) Fixed Income
18 46 (0.98%) NHS
19 45 (0.95%) Replication
20 44 (0.93%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 321 (6.81%) Linux
2 271 (5.75%) Windows
3 223 (4.73%) Unix
4 100 (2.12%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.53%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.51%) AIX
7 18 (0.38%) Windows Server 2019
8 13 (0.28%) Solaris
8 13 (0.28%) 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 (0.085%) Oracle Linux
13 3 (0.064%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.042%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.042%) HPUX
14 2 (0.042%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,296 (27.49%) CI/CD
2 1,198 (25.41%) Data Modelling
3 1,189 (25.22%) Analytics
4 1,177 (24.97%) Agile
5 1,106 (23.46%) ETL
6 1,045 (22.17%) Business Intelligence
7 1,001 (21.23%) DevOps
8 926 (19.64%) Data Pipeline
9 912 (19.35%) Problem-Solving
10 777 (16.48%) Data Engineering
11 661 (14.02%) AI
12 627 (13.30%) Migration
13 579 (12.28%) Validation
14 539 (11.43%) Data Governance
15 484 (10.27%) Test Automation
16 462 (9.80%) Decision-Making
17 437 (9.27%) Data Analysis
18 424 (8.99%) Stakeholder Management
19 422 (8.95%) Performance Tuning
20 421 (8.93%) Microservices
Programming Languages
1 1,770 (37.55%) Python
2 642 (13.62%) Java
3 484 (10.27%) C#
4 340 (7.21%) PL/SQL
5 339 (7.19%) JavaScript
6 242 (5.13%) T-SQL
7 230 (4.88%) PowerShell
8 162 (3.44%) TypeScript
9 136 (2.89%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 120 (2.55%) Shell Script
11 115 (2.44%) R
12 92 (1.95%) Bash
13 82 (1.74%) C++
14 81 (1.72%) Scala
15 54 (1.15%) Bicep
16 42 (0.89%) VBA
17 35 (0.74%) Perl
18 34 (0.72%) VB
19 32 (0.68%) C
20 27 (0.57%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,000 (21.21%) Security Cleared
2 812 (17.23%) SC Cleared
3 361 (7.66%) Degree
4 120 (2.55%) BPSS Clearance
5 116 (2.46%) Computer Science Degree
6 88 (1.87%) DV Cleared
7 73 (1.55%) Azure Certification
8 66 (1.40%) Master's Degree
9 55 (1.17%) ISTQB
10 38 (0.81%) Microsoft Certification
11 30 (0.64%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.36%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.36%) PhD
13 13 (0.28%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 11 (0.23%) CISSP
15 10 (0.21%) PMI Certification
16 9 (0.19%) CISM
16 9 (0.19%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 9 (0.19%) PMP
16 9 (0.19%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 866 (18.37%) Data Quality
2 369 (7.83%) QA
3 188 (3.99%) GDPR
4 55 (1.17%) Accessibility
5 48 (1.02%) SLA
6 32 (0.68%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 30 (0.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.51%) PMO
9 23 (0.49%) NIST
10 17 (0.36%) IFRS
11 16 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
11 16 (0.34%) PCI DSS
12 15 (0.32%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 15 (0.32%) ISO 20022
12 15 (0.32%) MiFID
13 14 (0.30%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.28%) Solvency II
15 12 (0.25%) NCSC
15 12 (0.25%) WCAG
16 11 (0.23%) HL7
System Software
1 531 (11.26%) Docker
2 103 (2.18%) Active Directory
3 37 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
4 36 (0.76%) VMware Infrastructure
5 30 (0.64%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.45%) Hyper-V
7 18 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
8 11 (0.23%) VMware NSX
9 10 (0.21%) KVM
9 10 (0.21%) vCloud
10 9 (0.19%) Postfix
11 8 (0.17%) Virtual Desktop
12 7 (0.15%) HDFS
13 6 (0.13%) RACF
14 4 (0.085%) Ceph
14 4 (0.085%) XenApp
14 4 (0.085%) XenDesktop
15 3 (0.064%) Squid
16 2 (0.042%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 2 (0.042%) GridGain
Systems Management
1 420 (8.91%) Kubernetes
2 383 (8.12%) Terraform
3 122 (2.59%) Grafana
4 80 (1.70%) Ansible
5 65 (1.38%) Prometheus
6 42 (0.89%) Oracle RMAN
7 31 (0.66%) Data Guard
8 20 (0.42%) Kibana
8 20 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
9 17 (0.36%) vCenter Server
10 16 (0.34%) Control-M
11 15 (0.32%) ZABBIX
12 14 (0.30%) Nagios
12 14 (0.30%) Netcool
12 14 (0.30%) Tivoli
13 13 (0.28%) OpenView
13 13 (0.28%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 11 (0.23%) SCOM
15 8 (0.17%) Kiali
15 8 (0.17%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 799 (16.95%) Oracle
2 718 (15.23%) Microsoft
3 575 (12.20%) Databricks
4 175 (3.71%) Google
5 172 (3.65%) Informatica
6 144 (3.05%) ServiceNow
7 140 (2.97%) Talend
8 120 (2.55%) SAP
9 92 (1.95%) Splunk
10 83 (1.76%) IBM
11 71 (1.51%) Denodo
12 55 (1.17%) Salesforce
12 55 (1.17%) VMware
13 42 (0.89%) Citrix
14 40 (0.85%) Dynatrace
15 35 (0.74%) Sybase
16 33 (0.70%) Bloomberg
17 32 (0.68%) MuleSoft
17 32 (0.68%) OpenAI
18 31 (0.66%) Adobe