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 7 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 11
Rank change year-on-year -5 -2 0
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,198 3,762 4,150
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.47% 11.39% 11.02%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.19% 34.66% 34.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,490 2,539 2,867
10th Percentile £350 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -0.94%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £626
90th Percentile £688 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 94 86 53
10th Percentile £21.37 £24.60 £19.67
25th Percentile £26.60 £31.25 £25.99
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +36.99% -19.67%
75th Percentile £69.69 £57.50 £51.75
90th Percentile £76.00 - £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.75 £50.00 £30.00
% change year-on-year -10.50% +66.67% -33.98%

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 14,363 10,855 12,072
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.16% 32.88% 32.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,331 7,129 7,950
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £647
90th Percentile £725 £731 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 553 300 330
10th Percentile £23.00 £29.00 £26.22
25th Percentile £45.20 £40.94 £46.05
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.60 £75.13 £77.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +0.78% -0.77% -

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 7 October 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 7 October 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for SQL in the UK

SQL
Top 18 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 7 October 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 4,467 £500 - 7,003
London -7 2,541 £525 - 4,179
UK excluding London -4 2,057 £475 - 3,445
Work from Home -3 1,517 £500 - 2,925
North of England +2 597 £475 +5.56% 903
South East -15 442 £475 -3.06% 932
Midlands -6 435 £469 -1.26% 528
West Midlands -4 341 £470 -6.00% 333
North West +7 298 £500 +13.64% 529
Yorkshire +7 244 £475 - 249
South West 0 234 £525 +16.67% 296
Scotland -6 210 £425 -9.96% 294
East of England -9 113 £500 -0.30% 272
East Midlands -8 92 £463 +12.80% 194
North East 0 65 £406 -9.72% 132
Wales -7 36 £475 +4.97% 101
Northern Ireland -9 19 £363 -30.95% 150
Channel Islands - 1 £450 -

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
1 262 (5.04%) Apache Airflow
2 243 (4.67%) Confluence
3 223 (4.29%) Apache Spark
4 178 (3.42%) Apache
5 96 (1.85%) SharePoint
6 73 (1.40%) SAS
7 41 (0.79%) WebLogic
8 36 (0.69%) IIS
8 36 (0.69%) Oracle Workflow
9 33 (0.63%) Jupyter
10 27 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
11 24 (0.46%) Palantir Foundry
12 21 (0.40%) CMS
13 20 (0.38%) Camunda
14 19 (0.37%) nginx
15 16 (0.31%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
16 15 (0.29%) WebSphere
17 10 (0.19%) Tomcat
18 8 (0.15%) Appian
Applications
1 297 (5.71%) Microsoft Excel
2 67 (1.29%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.73%) MS Visio
4 36 (0.69%) Spreadsheet
5 22 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.15%) Windchill
8 4 (0.077%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.077%) Notion
8 4 (0.077%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) Mingle
10 2 (0.038%) Notepad++
11 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 42 (0.81%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.75%) Oracle EBS
3 31 (0.60%) SAP S/4HANA
4 30 (0.58%) Aladdin
5 28 (0.54%) Oracle Payables
6 26 (0.50%) Remedy ITSM
7 19 (0.37%) Oracle ERP
8 16 (0.31%) Oracle General Ledger
8 16 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 13 (0.25%) Oracle Financials
10 12 (0.23%) Finacle
10 12 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
10 12 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
11 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
11 11 (0.21%) Oracle EBS R12
11 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.19%) NetSuite
12 10 (0.19%) Oracle FAH
13 9 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
13 9 (0.17%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,596 (30.70%) Azure
2 1,270 (24.43%) AWS
3 970 (18.66%) Power Platform
4 542 (10.43%) GCP
5 420 (8.08%) Azure DevOps
6 411 (7.91%) Snowflake
7 372 (7.16%) GitHub
8 325 (6.25%) Azure Data Factory
9 315 (6.06%) dbt
10 298 (5.73%) Serverless
11 267 (5.14%) Amazon S3
12 206 (3.96%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 194 (3.73%) AWS Lambda
14 174 (3.35%) GitHub Actions
15 119 (2.29%) SaaS
16 114 (2.19%) Entra ID
17 107 (2.06%) Power Automate
18 105 (2.02%) PowerApps
19 99 (1.90%) Azure Databricks
20 86 (1.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 71 (1.37%) DNS
2 47 (0.90%) Firewall
3 36 (0.69%) HTTP
4 32 (0.62%) SSL
5 29 (0.56%) Network Security
6 23 (0.44%) Broadband
6 23 (0.44%) TCP/IP
7 22 (0.42%) VPN
8 21 (0.40%) Internet
9 16 (0.31%) DHCP
10 14 (0.27%) SSH
11 12 (0.23%) Reverse Proxy
11 12 (0.23%) SAN
11 12 (0.23%) SNMP
11 12 (0.23%) WAN
12 11 (0.21%) Kerberos
13 8 (0.15%) HTTPS
13 8 (0.15%) Multicast
13 8 (0.15%) RTP
13 8 (0.15%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 886 (17.05%) Power BI
2 698 (13.43%) Data Warehouse
3 677 (13.02%) SQL Server
4 353 (6.79%) Relational Database
5 337 (6.48%) PostgreSQL
6 330 (6.35%) Data Lake
7 293 (5.64%) Metadata
8 275 (5.29%) Tableau
9 250 (4.81%) NoSQL
10 242 (4.66%) Oracle Database
11 222 (4.27%) BigQuery
12 207 (3.98%) Azure SQL Database
13 150 (2.89%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 148 (2.85%) Amazon Redshift
15 146 (2.81%) Delta Lake
16 128 (2.46%) MySQL
17 122 (2.35%) MongoDB
18 117 (2.25%) Big Data
19 116 (2.23%) Amazon Athena
20 106 (2.04%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 710 (13.66%) Git
2 434 (8.35%) JIRA
3 288 (5.54%) Jenkins
4 261 (5.02%) GitLab
5 100 (1.92%) Selenium
6 95 (1.83%) JUnit
7 91 (1.75%) Maven
8 85 (1.64%) Gradle
9 70 (1.35%) Postman
10 57 (1.10%) Mockito
11 44 (0.85%) Bitbucket
12 43 (0.83%) Oracle Forms
12 43 (0.83%) SonarQube
13 37 (0.71%) Visual Studio
14 36 (0.69%) Zephyr
15 33 (0.63%) REST Assured
16 31 (0.60%) Team Foundation Server
17 30 (0.58%) Artifactory
18 27 (0.52%) MLflow
19 25 (0.48%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 1,413 (27.18%) Social Skills
2 1,381 (26.57%) Finance
3 1,080 (20.78%) Analytical Skills
4 622 (11.97%) Banking
5 495 (9.52%) Public Sector
6 159 (3.06%) Retail
7 155 (2.98%) Investment Banking
8 154 (2.96%) Marketing
9 143 (2.75%) Front Office
10 103 (1.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 90 (1.73%) Manufacturing
12 89 (1.71%) Documentation Skills
13 62 (1.19%) Legal
14 60 (1.15%) Financial Institution
15 51 (0.98%) Back Office
16 50 (0.96%) Presentation Skills
17 49 (0.94%) Local Government
18 45 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
18 45 (0.87%) Military
19 42 (0.81%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,152 (22.16%) Developer
2 941 (18.10%) Data Engineer
3 783 (15.06%) Analyst
4 761 (14.64%) Senior
5 366 (7.04%) Lead
6 339 (6.52%) Data Analyst
7 258 (4.96%) Business Analyst
8 255 (4.91%) Architect
9 225 (4.33%) Senior Data Engineer
10 211 (4.06%) Consultant
11 206 (3.96%) DBA
12 205 (3.94%) Java Developer
13 181 (3.48%) Senior Developer
14 129 (2.48%) Python Developer
15 128 (2.46%) Azure Engineer
16 124 (2.39%) Python Engineer
16 124 (2.39%) Software Engineer
17 123 (2.37%) Full-Stack Developer
18 121 (2.33%) Data Architect
19 119 (2.29%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 526 (10.12%) REST
2 443 (8.52%) .NET
3 434 (8.35%) Terraform
4 365 (7.02%) Kafka
5 350 (6.73%) PySpark
6 292 (5.62%) Spring
7 284 (5.46%) Spring Boot
8 239 (4.60%) React
9 215 (4.14%) JSON
10 210 (4.04%) RESTful
11 209 (4.02%) HTML
12 183 (3.52%) XML
13 170 (3.27%) CSS
14 140 (2.69%) Web Services
15 133 (2.56%) SOAP
16 130 (2.50%) AngularJS
17 105 (2.02%) Middleware
18 98 (1.89%) Pandas
19 94 (1.81%) .NET Framework
19 94 (1.81%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 340 (6.54%) Cloud Native
2 280 (5.39%) Data Structures
3 262 (5.04%) Product Ownership
4 171 (3.29%) Legacy Systems
5 151 (2.90%) Onboarding
6 148 (2.85%) Distributed Systems
6 148 (2.85%) Enterprise Software
7 116 (2.23%) Management Information System
8 106 (2.04%) AI Agents
9 88 (1.69%) Replication
10 87 (1.67%) Self-Motivation
11 86 (1.65%) Derivative
12 73 (1.40%) Data Protection Act
13 66 (1.27%) Algorithms
13 66 (1.27%) Reference Data
14 65 (1.25%) Analytical Mindset
15 64 (1.23%) Clustering
16 55 (1.06%) Data Centre
17 54 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
18 49 (0.94%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 385 (7.41%) Linux
2 317 (6.10%) Windows
3 239 (4.60%) Unix
4 132 (2.54%) Windows Server
5 30 (0.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.46%) Solaris
7 13 (0.25%) Ubuntu
8 11 (0.21%) VMS
9 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
10 8 (0.15%) AIX
11 7 (0.13%) Android
12 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
13 5 (0.096%) zOS
14 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2012
15 3 (0.058%) CentOS
15 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
15 3 (0.058%) Rocky
16 2 (0.038%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,440 (27.70%) Agile
2 1,428 (27.47%) CI/CD
3 1,379 (26.53%) Data Modelling
4 1,291 (24.84%) Analytics
5 1,096 (21.09%) Business Intelligence
5 1,096 (21.09%) ETL
6 1,012 (19.47%) Problem-Solving
7 992 (19.08%) DevOps
8 978 (18.81%) Data Pipeline
9 911 (17.53%) AI
10 887 (17.06%) Data Engineering
11 841 (16.18%) Validation
12 790 (15.20%) Stakeholder Management
13 776 (14.93%) Migration
14 646 (12.43%) Test Automation
15 614 (11.81%) Data Analysis
16 608 (11.70%) Data Governance
17 598 (11.50%) Continuous Improvement
18 555 (10.68%) Decision-Making
19 465 (8.95%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,850 (35.59%) Python
2 667 (12.83%) Java
3 463 (8.91%) C#
4 422 (8.12%) JavaScript
5 392 (7.54%) PL/SQL
6 262 (5.04%) PowerShell
7 254 (4.89%) T-SQL
8 211 (4.06%) TypeScript
9 153 (2.94%) Shell Script
10 148 (2.85%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 130 (2.50%) Bash
12 89 (1.71%) Scala
13 82 (1.58%) R
14 45 (0.87%) Bicep
14 45 (0.87%) C++
15 40 (0.77%) VBA
16 31 (0.60%) Go
16 31 (0.60%) Kotlin
17 30 (0.58%) C
18 29 (0.56%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,121 (21.57%) Security Cleared
2 885 (17.03%) SC Cleared
3 366 (7.04%) Degree
4 177 (3.41%) BPSS Clearance
5 140 (2.69%) DV Cleared
6 127 (2.44%) Computer Science Degree
7 88 (1.69%) Azure Certification
8 60 (1.15%) ISTQB
9 54 (1.04%) Microsoft Certification
10 48 (0.92%) AWS Certification
11 43 (0.83%) Master's Degree
12 20 (0.38%) ISEB
13 19 (0.37%) CISSP
13 19 (0.37%) DBS Check
14 16 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 16 (0.31%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 15 (0.29%) ACCA
15 15 (0.29%) CIMA
16 14 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
16 14 (0.27%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1,053 (20.26%) Data Quality
2 414 (7.96%) QA
3 133 (2.56%) GDPR
4 75 (1.44%) Accessibility
5 49 (0.94%) SLA
6 33 (0.63%) ISO 20022
7 29 (0.56%) Actionable Recommendations
8 24 (0.46%) NIST
9 23 (0.44%) IFRS
10 22 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 18 (0.35%) MiFID
12 15 (0.29%) COBIT
13 14 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
13 14 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
14 13 (0.25%) GMP
14 13 (0.25%) GxP
15 12 (0.23%) Basel III
15 12 (0.23%) SEPA
16 10 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 17025
16 10 (0.19%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 481 (9.25%) Docker
2 132 (2.54%) Active Directory
3 51 (0.98%) VMware Infrastructure
4 39 (0.75%) Oracle RAC
5 37 (0.71%) Virtual Machines
6 20 (0.38%) Hyper-V
7 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
8 16 (0.31%) vCloud
8 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 15 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 5 (0.096%) NFS
10 5 (0.096%) Postfix
11 4 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
11 4 (0.077%) GPFS
11 4 (0.077%) KVM
11 4 (0.077%) Squid
12 2 (0.038%) Ceph
12 2 (0.038%) DFS Replication
12 2 (0.038%) Dovecot
13 1 (0.019%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 436 (8.39%) Kubernetes
2 112 (2.15%) Grafana
3 105 (2.02%) Ansible
4 59 (1.14%) Prometheus
5 44 (0.85%) Control-M
6 43 (0.83%) Kibana
7 40 (0.77%) SCOM
8 39 (0.75%) Data Guard
9 37 (0.71%) Oracle RMAN
10 17 (0.33%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.31%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
12 15 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
13 12 (0.23%) Istio
13 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
13 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Intune
14 11 (0.21%) Argo
14 11 (0.21%) Progress Chef
15 9 (0.17%) Puppet
15 9 (0.17%) WMI
16 8 (0.15%) SCCM
Vendors
1 904 (17.39%) Oracle
2 892 (17.16%) Microsoft
3 672 (12.93%) Databricks
4 248 (4.77%) Google
5 150 (2.89%) Informatica
6 142 (2.73%) SAP
7 113 (2.17%) IBM
8 112 (2.15%) Talend
9 93 (1.79%) ServiceNow
10 85 (1.64%) Salesforce
11 83 (1.60%) Splunk
12 70 (1.35%) VMware
13 44 (0.85%) Denodo
13 44 (0.85%) Foundry
14 41 (0.79%) OpenAI
15 40 (0.77%) Bloomberg
16 37 (0.71%) UiPath
17 35 (0.67%) Murex
17 35 (0.67%) Sybase
18 34 (0.65%) Adobe