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

6 months to
11 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,126 3,828 4,315
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.69% 11.80% 10.03%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.87% 35.40% 32.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,396 2,669 3,145
10th Percentile £351 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £613 £630
90th Percentile £688 £750 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -0.21% -1.05% -3.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 92 73 57
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.09 £21.69
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.47 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £42.82 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +5.10% +3.17% -19.02%
75th Percentile £65.25 £53.75 £51.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £67.20 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.13
% change year-on-year -11.00% +24.61% -17.03%

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 14,292 10,813 13,253
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.02% 33.32% 30.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,289 7,288 9,322
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £610 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 544 265 525
10th Percentile £34.01 £27.68 £31.25
25th Percentile £52.50 £36.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £78.22 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% +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 11 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 11 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 11 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 -3 4,459 £500 - 1,797
London -6 2,395 £525 -0.94% 777
UK excluding London -10 2,186 £469 -0.21% 1,334
Work from Home -6 1,533 £500 - 867
North of England -4 581 £463 -2.63% 341
Midlands +3 572 £460 +8.24% 221
West Midlands +5 470 £459 +2.00% 106
South East -10 457 £475 -5.00% 430
North West -1 310 £469 - 188
South West -5 237 £500 +14.29% 133
Yorkshire -9 232 £475 - 99
Scotland -9 200 £450 - 51
East of England -13 106 £491 +0.77% 116
East Midlands -1 98 £525 +38.16% 115
North East -11 52 £425 -8.11% 59
Wales +3 49 £450 +1.12% 31
Northern Ireland -9 15 £375 -25.93% 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
1 242 (4.72%) Apache Spark
2 219 (4.27%) Confluence
3 208 (4.06%) Apache Airflow
4 184 (3.59%) Apache
5 115 (2.24%) SAS
6 63 (1.23%) SharePoint
7 45 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
8 44 (0.86%) IIS
8 44 (0.86%) Tomcat
9 41 (0.80%) WebLogic
10 32 (0.62%) WebSphere
11 25 (0.49%) Jupyter
12 23 (0.45%) nginx
13 22 (0.43%) Apache Geronimo
13 22 (0.43%) Apache ServiceMix
13 22 (0.43%) Red Hat Fuse
14 21 (0.41%) CMS
15 20 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
16 18 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
17 16 (0.31%) Appian
Applications
1 324 (6.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 71 (1.39%) Microsoft Office
3 55 (1.07%) MS Visio
4 40 (0.78%) Spreadsheet
5 36 (0.70%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.059%) Notion
9 3 (0.059%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.039%) Microsoft Project
11 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.020%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.020%) InDesign
11 1 (0.020%) Mingle
11 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 51 (0.99%) Oracle EBS
2 40 (0.78%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.57%) Aladdin
3 29 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
4 27 (0.53%) Oracle Payables
5 24 (0.47%) Oracle ERP
6 19 (0.37%) NEC Housing
6 19 (0.37%) Oracle EBS R12
6 19 (0.37%) Oracle Receivables
7 17 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
8 13 (0.25%) Oracle Assets
9 12 (0.23%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.21%) Findur
10 11 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
10 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.20%) Elite 3E
11 10 (0.20%) Finacle
12 9 (0.18%) Fidessa
13 8 (0.16%) Oracle Cash Management
13 8 (0.16%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,636 (31.92%) Azure
2 1,236 (24.11%) AWS
3 946 (18.45%) Power Platform
4 458 (8.93%) Azure DevOps
5 434 (8.47%) GCP
6 363 (7.08%) GitHub
7 351 (6.85%) Azure Data Factory
8 320 (6.24%) Snowflake
9 312 (6.09%) Serverless
10 274 (5.35%) Amazon S3
11 255 (4.97%) dbt
12 229 (4.47%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 202 (3.94%) AWS Lambda
14 187 (3.65%) GitHub Actions
15 98 (1.91%) SaaS
16 91 (1.78%) Entra ID
17 86 (1.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 84 (1.64%) Power Automate
19 79 (1.54%) PowerApps
20 78 (1.52%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 52 (1.01%) DNS
2 40 (0.78%) Firewall
3 27 (0.53%) HTTP
4 26 (0.51%) SSL
5 22 (0.43%) Network Security
5 22 (0.43%) SNMP
6 20 (0.39%) Internet
6 20 (0.39%) WAN
7 18 (0.35%) VPN
8 12 (0.23%) TCP/IP
9 10 (0.20%) SAN
9 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
10 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
10 9 (0.18%) Kerberos
10 9 (0.18%) Wireshark
11 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
11 8 (0.16%) Wi-Fi
12 7 (0.14%) LAN
12 7 (0.14%) NAS
12 7 (0.14%) PuTTY
Database & Business Intelligence
1 868 (16.93%) Power BI
2 672 (13.11%) Data Warehouse
3 655 (12.78%) SQL Server
4 353 (6.89%) Relational Database
5 330 (6.44%) PostgreSQL
6 328 (6.40%) Tableau
7 318 (6.20%) Data Lake
8 262 (5.11%) Metadata
9 261 (5.09%) NoSQL
10 225 (4.39%) Azure SQL Database
11 201 (3.92%) Oracle Database
12 173 (3.37%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 168 (3.28%) BigQuery
14 153 (2.98%) Amazon Redshift
15 147 (2.87%) Big Data
16 144 (2.81%) Delta Lake
17 129 (2.52%) Oracle Reports
18 127 (2.48%) MySQL
19 115 (2.24%) MongoDB
20 112 (2.18%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 566 (11.04%) Git
2 404 (7.88%) JIRA
3 271 (5.29%) Jenkins
4 226 (4.41%) GitLab
5 79 (1.54%) JUnit
6 65 (1.27%) Maven
7 57 (1.11%) Postman
7 57 (1.11%) Selenium
8 56 (1.09%) Gradle
9 52 (1.01%) Mockito
9 52 (1.01%) Oracle Forms
10 44 (0.86%) Visual Studio
11 34 (0.66%) MLflow
11 34 (0.66%) SonarQube
12 33 (0.64%) Bitbucket
13 32 (0.62%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.62%) JMeter
13 32 (0.62%) Team Foundation Server
14 28 (0.55%) Liquibase
15 27 (0.53%) Zephyr
General
1 1,307 (25.50%) Social Skills
2 1,303 (25.42%) Finance
3 988 (19.27%) Analytical Skills
4 478 (9.33%) Banking
5 476 (9.29%) Public Sector
6 139 (2.71%) Front Office
7 135 (2.63%) Marketing
8 128 (2.50%) Investment Banking
9 125 (2.44%) Retail
10 110 (2.15%) Documentation Skills
11 96 (1.87%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 62 (1.21%) Manufacturing
13 60 (1.17%) Legal
14 56 (1.09%) Financial Institution
14 56 (1.09%) Presentation Skills
15 43 (0.84%) Publishing
16 41 (0.80%) Back Office
17 39 (0.76%) Organisational Skills
18 37 (0.72%) Telecoms
19 33 (0.64%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,115 (21.75%) Developer
2 1,024 (19.98%) Data Engineer
3 746 (14.55%) Analyst
4 679 (13.25%) Senior
5 361 (7.04%) Lead
6 322 (6.28%) Data Analyst
7 286 (5.58%) Architect
8 247 (4.82%) Consultant
9 238 (4.64%) Business Analyst
10 218 (4.25%) Java Developer
11 201 (3.92%) Senior Data Engineer
12 190 (3.71%) DBA
13 161 (3.14%) Senior Developer
14 142 (2.77%) Software Engineer
15 126 (2.46%) Azure Engineer
16 123 (2.40%) SQL Developer
17 121 (2.36%) SQL DBA
18 116 (2.26%) C# Developer
19 111 (2.17%) Python Developer
20 109 (2.13%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 425 (8.29%) .NET
2 391 (7.63%) REST
3 323 (6.30%) PySpark
4 308 (6.01%) Kafka
5 270 (5.27%) Spring
6 259 (5.05%) Spring Boot
7 233 (4.55%) React
8 224 (4.37%) RESTful
9 195 (3.80%) JSON
10 183 (3.57%) XML
11 168 (3.28%) HTML
12 141 (2.75%) CSS
13 133 (2.59%) AngularJS
14 130 (2.54%) Web Services
15 129 (2.52%) Pandas
16 121 (2.36%) Middleware
17 120 (2.34%) SOAP
18 103 (2.01%) .NET Framework
19 79 (1.54%) Node.js
20 73 (1.42%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 341 (6.65%) Cloud Native
2 222 (4.33%) Data Structures
3 187 (3.65%) Legacy Systems
4 180 (3.51%) Product Ownership
5 144 (2.81%) Distributed Systems
6 102 (1.99%) Onboarding
7 98 (1.91%) Derivative
8 90 (1.76%) Management Information System
9 89 (1.74%) Enterprise Software
10 77 (1.50%) Data Protection Act
10 77 (1.50%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
12 72 (1.40%) Algorithms
13 65 (1.27%) Clustering
14 64 (1.25%) Replication
15 55 (1.07%) Equities
15 55 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
16 53 (1.03%) Fixed Income
17 47 (0.92%) NHS
18 42 (0.82%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 336 (6.55%) Linux
2 306 (5.97%) Windows
3 241 (4.70%) Unix
4 121 (2.36%) Windows Server
5 26 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.47%) AIX
7 20 (0.39%) Solaris
8 15 (0.29%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (0.21%) Windows Server 2008
10 10 (0.20%) VMS
10 10 (0.20%) Windows Server 2016
11 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
11 8 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Android
13 5 (0.098%) Windows 10
14 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.078%) Ubuntu
15 3 (0.059%) Windows Server 2012
16 2 (0.039%) Data ONTAP
16 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,354 (26.41%) CI/CD
2 1,318 (25.71%) Agile
3 1,302 (25.40%) Analytics
4 1,283 (25.03%) Data Modelling
5 1,146 (22.36%) ETL
6 1,109 (21.63%) Business Intelligence
7 1,041 (20.31%) DevOps
8 1,003 (19.57%) Problem-Solving
9 998 (19.47%) Data Pipeline
10 842 (16.43%) Data Engineering
11 725 (14.14%) AI
12 694 (13.54%) Migration
13 658 (12.84%) Validation
14 575 (11.22%) Data Governance
15 524 (10.22%) Test Automation
16 515 (10.05%) Decision-Making
17 507 (9.89%) Data Analysis
18 498 (9.72%) Stakeholder Management
19 486 (9.48%) Continuous Improvement
20 461 (8.99%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,848 (36.05%) Python
2 673 (13.13%) Java
3 503 (9.81%) C#
4 404 (7.88%) PL/SQL
5 338 (6.59%) JavaScript
6 277 (5.40%) T-SQL
7 246 (4.80%) PowerShell
8 180 (3.51%) TypeScript
9 145 (2.83%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 132 (2.58%) Shell Script
11 115 (2.24%) R
12 95 (1.85%) Bash
13 84 (1.64%) Scala
14 72 (1.40%) C++
15 53 (1.03%) VBA
16 49 (0.96%) Bicep
17 38 (0.74%) C
18 33 (0.64%) VB
19 27 (0.53%) Perl
20 26 (0.51%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,107 (21.60%) Security Cleared
2 901 (17.58%) SC Cleared
3 387 (7.55%) Degree
4 144 (2.81%) BPSS Clearance
5 122 (2.38%) Computer Science Degree
6 104 (2.03%) DV Cleared
7 78 (1.52%) Azure Certification
8 66 (1.29%) Master's Degree
9 54 (1.05%) ISTQB
10 42 (0.82%) Microsoft Certification
11 36 (0.70%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.35%) DBS Check
12 18 (0.35%) PhD
13 15 (0.29%) CISSP
14 11 (0.21%) SnowPro
15 10 (0.20%) CISM
15 10 (0.20%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 10 (0.20%) TOGAF Certification
16 9 (0.18%) ACCA
16 9 (0.18%) CIMA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 918 (17.91%) Data Quality
2 399 (7.78%) QA
3 190 (3.71%) GDPR
4 64 (1.25%) Accessibility
5 50 (0.98%) SLA
6 26 (0.51%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 23 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 21 (0.41%) PMO
9 20 (0.39%) ISO 20022
10 19 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
11 18 (0.35%) NIST
12 17 (0.33%) IFRS
12 17 (0.33%) Solvency II
13 15 (0.29%) MiFID
14 14 (0.27%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 13 (0.25%) GMP
16 12 (0.23%) PCI DSS
17 11 (0.21%) HL7
17 11 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 515 (10.05%) Docker
2 118 (2.30%) Active Directory
3 45 (0.88%) Virtual Machines
4 37 (0.72%) VMware Infrastructure
5 36 (0.70%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.39%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.27%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.25%) vCloud
10 10 (0.20%) KVM
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
12 8 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
13 5 (0.098%) RACF
14 4 (0.078%) Ceph
14 4 (0.078%) HDFS
15 3 (0.059%) Squid
16 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 2 (0.039%) GridGain
17 1 (0.020%) GPFS
17 1 (0.020%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 431 (8.41%) Kubernetes
2 395 (7.71%) Terraform
3 114 (2.22%) Grafana
4 93 (1.81%) Ansible
5 55 (1.07%) Prometheus
6 42 (0.82%) Oracle RMAN
7 37 (0.72%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.45%) Control-M
8 23 (0.45%) Kibana
9 20 (0.39%) vCenter Server
10 19 (0.37%) SCOM
11 16 (0.31%) Single Sign-On
11 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
13 14 (0.27%) Nagios
13 14 (0.27%) Netcool
14 13 (0.25%) OpenView
14 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 9 (0.18%) HP Quality Center
15 9 (0.18%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 925 (18.05%) Oracle
2 805 (15.70%) Microsoft
3 595 (11.61%) Databricks
4 194 (3.78%) Google
5 187 (3.65%) Informatica
6 148 (2.89%) Talend
7 138 (2.69%) ServiceNow
8 124 (2.42%) SAP
9 95 (1.85%) IBM
10 89 (1.74%) Splunk
11 71 (1.39%) Denodo
12 62 (1.21%) Salesforce
13 59 (1.15%) VMware
14 44 (0.86%) Citrix
14 44 (0.86%) Dynatrace
15 40 (0.78%) Bloomberg
15 40 (0.78%) Sybase
16 39 (0.76%) Murex
17 34 (0.66%) MuleSoft
18 33 (0.64%) Alteryx