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 26 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 0
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,141 3,854 4,145
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.69% 11.71% 10.26%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.26% 35.47% 33.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,409 2,674 3,061
10th Percentile £355 £338 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £606 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £463 £475
% change year-on-year +0.54% -2.63% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 102 67 49
10th Percentile £24.33 £21.18 £21.41
25th Percentile £34.01 £29.66 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.90 £38.85 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.16% -6.40% -11.45%
75th Percentile £69.86 £50.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.59
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £33.91 £36.00
% change year-on-year +32.70% -5.81% -20.77%

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 14,178 10,865 12,539
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.72% 33.00% 31.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,208 7,323 8,862
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £423 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.40% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £498
% change year-on-year +3.16% -4.62% -0.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 523 258 438
10th Percentile £33.71 £27.98 £30.00
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.06 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.38 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.30% -13.27% +7.22%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.89 £75.38
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 26 July 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 26 July 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 26 July 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 4,474 £500 - 1,654
London -6 2,407 £525 - 763
UK excluding London -10 2,179 £465 +0.54% 1,163
Work from Home -7 1,552 £500 - 752
North of England -5 586 £463 -1.60% 317
Midlands +1 546 £459 +7.37% 187
South East -10 464 £475 -5.00% 381
West Midlands +4 449 £458 +1.78% 107
North West -4 311 £475 +1.71% 164
Yorkshire -7 236 £465 -2.11% 96
South West -7 235 £500 +14.29% 132
Scotland -5 202 £450 - 41
East of England -7 122 £484 -3.25% 78
East Midlands -4 93 £495 +27.33% 80
North East -18 52 £425 -8.11% 65
Wales -5 43 £468 +3.89% 34
Northern Ireland -7 15 £375 -27.36% 18

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
1 237 (4.61%) Apache Spark
2 219 (4.26%) Confluence
3 213 (4.14%) Apache Airflow
4 193 (3.75%) Apache
5 113 (2.20%) SAS
6 67 (1.30%) SharePoint
7 46 (0.89%) Oracle Workflow
8 42 (0.82%) WebLogic
9 40 (0.78%) IIS
10 39 (0.76%) Tomcat
11 32 (0.62%) WebSphere
12 27 (0.53%) Jupyter
13 22 (0.43%) Apache Geronimo
13 22 (0.43%) Apache ServiceMix
13 22 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
13 22 (0.43%) Red Hat Fuse
14 21 (0.41%) nginx
15 19 (0.37%) CMS
16 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
17 13 (0.25%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 324 (6.30%) Microsoft Excel
2 67 (1.30%) Microsoft Office
3 53 (1.03%) MS Visio
4 40 (0.78%) Spreadsheet
5 32 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 11 (0.21%) 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 51 (0.99%) Oracle EBS
2 42 (0.82%) Dynamics CRM
3 32 (0.62%) Aladdin
4 30 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
6 24 (0.47%) Remedy ITSM
7 18 (0.35%) NEC Housing
7 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
8 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
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%) Fidessa
12 10 (0.19%) Finacle
12 10 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
13 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 9 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,610 (31.32%) Azure
2 1,231 (23.94%) AWS
3 946 (18.40%) Power Platform
4 458 (8.91%) GCP
5 439 (8.54%) Azure DevOps
6 358 (6.96%) GitHub
7 347 (6.75%) Azure Data Factory
8 332 (6.46%) Snowflake
9 309 (6.01%) Serverless
10 273 (5.31%) dbt
11 272 (5.29%) Amazon S3
12 218 (4.24%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 203 (3.95%) AWS Lambda
14 181 (3.52%) GitHub Actions
15 97 (1.89%) SaaS
16 96 (1.87%) Entra ID
17 90 (1.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 88 (1.71%) Power Automate
19 81 (1.58%) PowerApps
20 75 (1.46%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 54 (1.05%) DNS
2 42 (0.82%) Firewall
3 30 (0.58%) SSL
4 26 (0.51%) HTTP
5 22 (0.43%) SNMP
6 21 (0.41%) Network Security
6 21 (0.41%) VPN
7 20 (0.39%) Internet
8 19 (0.37%) WAN
9 16 (0.31%) TCP/IP
10 11 (0.21%) Kerberos
11 10 (0.19%) Broadband
11 10 (0.19%) SAN
11 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
11 10 (0.19%) Wireshark
12 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
13 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
13 8 (0.16%) HTTPS
14 7 (0.14%) DHCP
14 7 (0.14%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 871 (16.94%) Power BI
2 701 (13.64%) Data Warehouse
3 654 (12.72%) SQL Server
4 340 (6.61%) Relational Database
5 328 (6.38%) Tableau
6 323 (6.28%) PostgreSQL
7 321 (6.24%) Data Lake
8 280 (5.45%) Metadata
9 259 (5.04%) NoSQL
10 217 (4.22%) Azure SQL Database
11 212 (4.12%) Oracle Database
12 178 (3.46%) BigQuery
13 176 (3.42%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 154 (3.00%) Amazon Redshift
15 140 (2.72%) Big Data
16 138 (2.68%) Delta Lake
17 131 (2.55%) Oracle Reports
18 121 (2.35%) MySQL
19 109 (2.12%) MongoDB
20 107 (2.08%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 586 (11.40%) Git
2 402 (7.82%) JIRA
3 274 (5.33%) Jenkins
4 220 (4.28%) GitLab
5 79 (1.54%) JUnit
6 72 (1.40%) Maven
7 63 (1.23%) Gradle
8 59 (1.15%) Selenium
9 58 (1.13%) Postman
10 51 (0.99%) Mockito
10 51 (0.99%) Oracle Forms
11 41 (0.80%) Visual Studio
12 37 (0.72%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.68%) SonarQube
14 33 (0.64%) Team Foundation Server
15 31 (0.60%) ERwin
15 31 (0.60%) MLflow
16 30 (0.58%) JMeter
16 30 (0.58%) Zephyr
17 28 (0.54%) Liquibase
General
1 1,316 (25.60%) Social Skills
2 1,277 (24.84%) Finance
3 1,012 (19.68%) Analytical Skills
4 495 (9.63%) Public Sector
5 473 (9.20%) Banking
6 141 (2.74%) Front Office
6 141 (2.74%) Marketing
7 124 (2.41%) Retail
8 119 (2.31%) Investment Banking
9 104 (2.02%) Documentation Skills
10 90 (1.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 68 (1.32%) Manufacturing
12 58 (1.13%) Legal
12 58 (1.13%) Presentation Skills
13 55 (1.07%) Financial Institution
14 46 (0.89%) Organisational Skills
15 44 (0.86%) Publishing
16 42 (0.82%) Back Office
16 42 (0.82%) Telecoms
17 37 (0.72%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,121 (21.81%) Developer
2 1,008 (19.61%) Data Engineer
3 743 (14.45%) Analyst
4 692 (13.46%) Senior
5 366 (7.12%) Lead
6 331 (6.44%) Data Analyst
7 279 (5.43%) Architect
8 251 (4.88%) Consultant
9 234 (4.55%) Business Analyst
10 217 (4.22%) Java Developer
11 203 (3.95%) DBA
12 197 (3.83%) Senior Data Engineer
13 174 (3.38%) Senior Developer
14 143 (2.78%) Software Engineer
15 132 (2.57%) SQL Developer
16 130 (2.53%) SQL DBA
17 123 (2.39%) Azure Engineer
18 116 (2.26%) Data Architect
19 113 (2.20%) Full-Stack Developer
20 111 (2.16%) C# Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 420 (8.17%) .NET
2 409 (7.96%) REST
3 325 (6.32%) PySpark
4 315 (6.13%) Kafka
5 273 (5.31%) Spring
6 258 (5.02%) Spring Boot
7 231 (4.49%) React
8 222 (4.32%) RESTful
9 207 (4.03%) JSON
10 190 (3.70%) XML
11 171 (3.33%) HTML
12 145 (2.82%) CSS
13 141 (2.74%) AngularJS
14 134 (2.61%) Web Services
15 126 (2.45%) Pandas
16 120 (2.33%) Middleware
16 120 (2.33%) SOAP
17 107 (2.08%) .NET Framework
18 83 (1.61%) Node.js
19 78 (1.52%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 343 (6.67%) Cloud Native
2 248 (4.82%) Data Structures
3 197 (3.83%) Product Ownership
4 187 (3.64%) Legacy Systems
5 156 (3.03%) Distributed Systems
6 112 (2.18%) Onboarding
7 99 (1.93%) Enterprise Software
8 96 (1.87%) Management Information System
9 94 (1.83%) Derivative
10 79 (1.54%) Self-Motivation
11 77 (1.50%) Analytical Mindset
12 74 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
12 74 (1.44%) Replication
13 71 (1.38%) Clustering
14 70 (1.36%) Algorithms
15 55 (1.07%) Fixed Income
16 54 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
17 52 (1.01%) Equities
18 51 (0.99%) NHS
19 50 (0.97%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 349 (6.79%) Linux
2 313 (6.09%) Windows
3 240 (4.67%) Unix
4 122 (2.37%) Windows Server
5 27 (0.53%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.47%) AIX
7 18 (0.35%) Solaris
8 13 (0.25%) Windows Server 2019
9 10 (0.19%) VMS
10 9 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
11 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
11 8 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
11 8 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Android
13 6 (0.12%) Ubuntu
14 5 (0.097%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
16 3 (0.058%) Windows Server 2012
17 2 (0.039%) Data ONTAP
17 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,337 (26.01%) Agile
2 1,334 (25.95%) CI/CD
3 1,330 (25.87%) Data Modelling
4 1,312 (25.52%) Analytics
5 1,157 (22.51%) ETL
6 1,121 (21.81%) Business Intelligence
7 1,020 (19.84%) DevOps
8 1,010 (19.65%) Data Pipeline
9 990 (19.26%) Problem-Solving
10 861 (16.75%) Data Engineering
11 724 (14.08%) Migration
12 722 (14.04%) AI
13 679 (13.21%) Validation
14 600 (11.67%) Data Governance
15 529 (10.29%) Test Automation
16 519 (10.10%) Stakeholder Management
17 513 (9.98%) Decision-Making
18 503 (9.78%) Data Analysis
19 499 (9.71%) Continuous Improvement
20 462 (8.99%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,828 (35.56%) Python
2 683 (13.29%) Java
3 496 (9.65%) C#
4 418 (8.13%) PL/SQL
5 351 (6.83%) JavaScript
6 275 (5.35%) T-SQL
7 259 (5.04%) PowerShell
8 183 (3.56%) TypeScript
9 145 (2.82%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 142 (2.76%) Shell Script
11 110 (2.14%) R
12 105 (2.04%) Bash
13 77 (1.50%) Scala
14 63 (1.23%) C++
15 52 (1.01%) VBA
16 48 (0.93%) Bicep
17 36 (0.70%) C
18 32 (0.62%) VB
19 28 (0.54%) Perl
20 25 (0.49%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,128 (21.94%) Security Cleared
2 909 (17.68%) SC Cleared
3 362 (7.04%) Degree
4 143 (2.78%) BPSS Clearance
5 112 (2.18%) Computer Science Degree
6 110 (2.14%) DV Cleared
7 79 (1.54%) Azure Certification
8 64 (1.24%) Master's Degree
9 56 (1.09%) ISTQB
10 40 (0.78%) Microsoft Certification
11 34 (0.66%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.33%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.33%) PhD
13 15 (0.29%) CISSP
13 15 (0.29%) ISEB
14 13 (0.25%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 11 (0.21%) Oracle Certification
16 10 (0.19%) CISM
16 10 (0.19%) SnowPro
17 9 (0.18%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 954 (18.56%) Data Quality
2 388 (7.55%) QA
3 179 (3.48%) GDPR
4 67 (1.30%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.89%) SLA
6 24 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 23 (0.45%) PMO
8 21 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
9 20 (0.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 19 (0.37%) ISO 20022
11 18 (0.35%) NIST
12 16 (0.31%) Solvency II
13 15 (0.29%) IFRS
13 15 (0.29%) MiFID
14 13 (0.25%) GMP
15 12 (0.23%) HIPAA
16 11 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 11 (0.21%) HL7
16 11 (0.21%) NCSC
16 11 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 502 (9.76%) Docker
2 124 (2.41%) Active Directory
3 44 (0.86%) Virtual Machines
4 43 (0.84%) VMware Infrastructure
5 41 (0.80%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.41%) Hyper-V
7 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
8 14 (0.27%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.25%) vCloud
10 10 (0.19%) KVM
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
11 9 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
12 5 (0.097%) RACF
13 4 (0.078%) Ceph
13 4 (0.078%) HDFS
14 3 (0.058%) Squid
15 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
16 1 (0.019%) GPFS
16 1 (0.019%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 422 (8.21%) Kubernetes
2 385 (7.49%) Terraform
3 109 (2.12%) Grafana
4 92 (1.79%) Ansible
5 52 (1.01%) Prometheus
6 48 (0.93%) Oracle RMAN
7 44 (0.86%) Data Guard
8 29 (0.56%) Control-M
9 23 (0.45%) SCOM
10 20 (0.39%) Kibana
10 20 (0.39%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.31%) Nagios
11 16 (0.31%) Netcool
11 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
12 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
13 13 (0.25%) OpenView
13 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 11 (0.21%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 10 (0.19%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 927 (18.03%) Oracle
2 813 (15.81%) Microsoft
3 590 (11.48%) Databricks
4 197 (3.83%) Google
5 192 (3.73%) Informatica
6 146 (2.84%) Talend
7 139 (2.70%) SAP
8 138 (2.68%) ServiceNow
9 97 (1.89%) IBM
10 89 (1.73%) Splunk
11 69 (1.34%) Denodo
12 65 (1.26%) Salesforce
13 64 (1.24%) VMware
14 43 (0.84%) Dynatrace
15 42 (0.82%) Citrix
16 39 (0.76%) Bloomberg
17 37 (0.72%) Sybase
18 35 (0.68%) BMC
18 35 (0.68%) SolarWinds
19 34 (0.66%) Alteryx