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 14 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 19 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -6 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,106 3,742 4,106
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.43% 11.45% 10.69%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.34% 34.95% 33.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,429 2,554 2,928
10th Percentile £356 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £600 £600 £638
90th Percentile £675 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £470 £475
% change year-on-year +1.06% -1.05% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 92 89 46
10th Percentile £23.00 £28.80 £20.06
25th Percentile £28.50 £32.50 £27.19
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +25.00% -12.82%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £77.00 - £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £33.93
% change year-on-year -11.00% +47.36% -15.18%

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 14,052 10,706 12,271
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 25.96% 32.75% 31.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,113 7,091 8,339
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £503 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.48% -4.29% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 536 292 345
10th Percentile £27.75 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £47.88 £36.69 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.06 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £78.75 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% -

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 14 September 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 14 September 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 14 September 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 4,415 £500 - 5,838
London -6 2,480 £525 - 3,801
UK excluding London -8 2,057 £475 +1.06% 2,721
Work from Home -4 1,514 £500 - 4,225
North of England +2 583 £475 +5.56% 674
South East -10 458 £490 -2.00% 707
Midlands -5 449 £469 +4.22% 398
West Midlands -3 349 £469 -6.20% 240
North West -3 291 £485 +8.99% 388
Yorkshire +7 249 £475 +4.00% 206
South West -3 223 £513 +18.84% 313
Scotland -7 196 £428 -7.57% 262
East of England -8 119 £495 -1.49% 204
East Midlands -4 98 £464 +17.41% 158
North East -14 52 £406 -12.63% 84
Wales -8 35 £475 +6.15% 75
Northern Ireland -8 19 £363 -29.27% 109
Channel Islands - 1 £450 - 2

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
1 240 (4.70%) Apache Airflow
2 221 (4.33%) Confluence
3 203 (3.98%) Apache Spark
4 164 (3.21%) Apache
5 93 (1.82%) SharePoint
6 88 (1.72%) SAS
7 44 (0.86%) Oracle Workflow
8 37 (0.72%) IIS
9 35 (0.69%) WebLogic
10 28 (0.55%) Jupyter
11 26 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
12 22 (0.43%) nginx
13 20 (0.39%) CMS
13 20 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
14 18 (0.35%) Camunda
15 16 (0.31%) ArcGIS
16 15 (0.29%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 15 (0.29%) WebSphere
17 12 (0.24%) Tomcat
18 8 (0.16%) Appian
Applications
1 300 (5.88%) Microsoft Excel
2 65 (1.27%) Microsoft Office
3 39 (0.76%) Spreadsheet
4 38 (0.74%) MS Visio
5 24 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.24%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.078%) Notion
8 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.059%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.059%) Windchill
10 2 (0.039%) Mingle
11 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.020%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 52 (1.02%) Oracle EBS
2 45 (0.88%) Dynamics CRM
3 31 (0.61%) SAP S/4HANA
4 29 (0.57%) Oracle Payables
5 25 (0.49%) Aladdin
6 23 (0.45%) Remedy ITSM
7 21 (0.41%) Oracle ERP
8 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
8 18 (0.35%) Oracle Receivables
9 16 (0.31%) Oracle General Ledger
10 13 (0.25%) Finacle
11 12 (0.24%) Oracle Financials
12 11 (0.22%) NEC Housing
12 11 (0.22%) Oracle Assets
12 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
12 11 (0.22%) Summit
13 10 (0.20%) NetSuite
13 10 (0.20%) Oracle FAH
13 10 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
14 9 (0.18%) FLEXCUBE
Cloud Services
1 1,579 (30.92%) Azure
2 1,229 (24.07%) AWS
3 951 (18.63%) Power Platform
4 495 (9.69%) GCP
5 425 (8.32%) Azure DevOps
6 384 (7.52%) Snowflake
7 359 (7.03%) GitHub
8 326 (6.38%) Azure Data Factory
9 306 (5.99%) Serverless
10 303 (5.93%) dbt
11 247 (4.84%) Amazon S3
12 208 (4.07%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 204 (4.00%) AWS Lambda
14 175 (3.43%) GitHub Actions
15 109 (2.13%) SaaS
16 108 (2.12%) Power Automate
17 101 (1.98%) PowerApps
18 95 (1.86%) Entra ID
19 89 (1.74%) Azure Databricks
20 86 (1.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 67 (1.31%) DNS
2 43 (0.84%) Firewall
3 35 (0.69%) HTTP
3 35 (0.69%) SSL
4 23 (0.45%) Network Security
5 21 (0.41%) Internet
6 20 (0.39%) Broadband
6 20 (0.39%) TCP/IP
7 19 (0.37%) VPN
8 18 (0.35%) SNMP
9 16 (0.31%) SSH
10 15 (0.29%) DHCP
11 13 (0.25%) WAN
12 11 (0.22%) HTTPS
12 11 (0.22%) Kerberos
12 11 (0.22%) SAN
13 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
14 8 (0.16%) Multicast
14 8 (0.16%) Reverse Proxy
14 8 (0.16%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 873 (17.10%) Power BI
2 709 (13.89%) Data Warehouse
3 656 (12.85%) SQL Server
4 360 (7.05%) Relational Database
5 339 (6.64%) PostgreSQL
6 322 (6.31%) Data Lake
7 290 (5.68%) Metadata
8 283 (5.54%) Tableau
9 247 (4.84%) NoSQL
10 238 (4.66%) Oracle Database
11 201 (3.94%) Azure SQL Database
12 196 (3.84%) BigQuery
13 150 (2.94%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 149 (2.92%) Amazon Redshift
15 143 (2.80%) Delta Lake
16 130 (2.55%) MySQL
17 127 (2.49%) MongoDB
18 116 (2.27%) Big Data
19 114 (2.23%) Oracle Reports
20 112 (2.19%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 651 (12.75%) Git
2 413 (8.09%) JIRA
3 284 (5.56%) Jenkins
4 240 (4.70%) GitLab
5 94 (1.84%) Selenium
6 93 (1.82%) JUnit
7 85 (1.66%) Gradle
8 83 (1.63%) Maven
9 65 (1.27%) Postman
10 58 (1.14%) Mockito
11 52 (1.02%) Oracle Forms
12 47 (0.92%) SonarQube
13 40 (0.78%) Bitbucket
14 35 (0.69%) Visual Studio
15 33 (0.65%) Zephyr
16 31 (0.61%) MLflow
17 28 (0.55%) Team Foundation Server
18 27 (0.53%) Artifactory
18 27 (0.53%) JMeter
18 27 (0.53%) REST Assured
General
1 1,390 (27.22%) Social Skills
2 1,329 (26.03%) Finance
3 1,055 (20.66%) Analytical Skills
4 566 (11.08%) Banking
5 460 (9.01%) Public Sector
6 159 (3.11%) Marketing
7 146 (2.86%) Front Office
8 145 (2.84%) Retail
9 140 (2.74%) Investment Banking
10 105 (2.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 88 (1.72%) Documentation Skills
12 78 (1.53%) Manufacturing
13 57 (1.12%) Financial Institution
14 55 (1.08%) Presentation Skills
15 54 (1.06%) Legal
16 42 (0.82%) Local Government
17 41 (0.80%) Back Office
18 39 (0.76%) Law
18 39 (0.76%) Publishing
18 39 (0.76%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 1,118 (21.90%) Developer
2 944 (18.49%) Data Engineer
3 776 (15.20%) Analyst
4 729 (14.28%) Senior
5 360 (7.05%) Lead
6 331 (6.48%) Data Analyst
7 263 (5.15%) Architect
8 254 (4.97%) Business Analyst
9 229 (4.48%) Consultant
10 214 (4.19%) Senior Data Engineer
11 208 (4.07%) DBA
12 206 (4.03%) Java Developer
13 183 (3.58%) Senior Developer
14 130 (2.55%) Software Engineer
15 126 (2.47%) SQL DBA
16 125 (2.45%) Data Architect
17 122 (2.39%) SQL Developer
18 120 (2.35%) Python Engineer
19 118 (2.31%) Python Developer
20 117 (2.29%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 475 (9.30%) REST
2 451 (8.83%) .NET
3 399 (7.81%) Terraform
4 347 (6.80%) PySpark
5 342 (6.70%) Kafka
6 283 (5.54%) Spring
7 279 (5.46%) Spring Boot
8 249 (4.88%) React
9 216 (4.23%) RESTful
10 211 (4.13%) HTML
11 206 (4.03%) JSON
12 180 (3.53%) CSS
13 177 (3.47%) XML
14 133 (2.60%) Web Services
15 123 (2.41%) AngularJS
16 120 (2.35%) SOAP
17 110 (2.15%) Middleware
18 105 (2.06%) Pandas
19 93 (1.82%) .NET Framework
20 86 (1.68%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 321 (6.29%) Cloud Native
2 275 (5.39%) Data Structures
3 236 (4.62%) Product Ownership
4 166 (3.25%) Legacy Systems
5 145 (2.84%) Distributed Systems
6 137 (2.68%) Onboarding
7 129 (2.53%) Enterprise Software
8 110 (2.15%) Management Information System
9 90 (1.76%) AI Agents
10 87 (1.70%) Derivative
11 82 (1.61%) Self-Motivation
12 80 (1.57%) Replication
13 68 (1.33%) Analytical Mindset
14 66 (1.29%) Data Protection Act
15 64 (1.25%) Clustering
16 59 (1.16%) Algorithms
16 59 (1.16%) Reference Data
17 51 (1.00%) Fixed Income
18 50 (0.98%) Greenfield Project
18 50 (0.98%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 376 (7.36%) Linux
2 323 (6.33%) Windows
3 250 (4.90%) Unix
4 129 (2.53%) Windows Server
5 28 (0.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 23 (0.45%) Solaris
7 14 (0.27%) AIX
8 12 (0.24%) Ubuntu
9 10 (0.20%) VMS
9 10 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
11 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
11 6 (0.12%) zOS
12 5 (0.098%) Windows Server 2012
13 4 (0.078%) Android
13 4 (0.078%) Apple iOS
13 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.059%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.039%) Amazon Linux
15 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,374 (26.91%) CI/CD
2 1,366 (26.75%) Agile
3 1,332 (26.09%) Data Modelling
4 1,249 (24.46%) Analytics
5 1,095 (21.45%) Business Intelligence
6 1,092 (21.39%) ETL
7 1,004 (19.66%) Problem-Solving
8 997 (19.53%) DevOps
9 990 (19.39%) Data Pipeline
10 838 (16.41%) Data Engineering
11 824 (16.14%) AI
12 781 (15.30%) Validation
13 747 (14.63%) Migration
14 711 (13.92%) Stakeholder Management
15 595 (11.65%) Data Governance
16 585 (11.46%) Test Automation
17 571 (11.18%) Data Analysis
18 557 (10.91%) Continuous Improvement
19 520 (10.18%) Decision-Making
20 441 (8.64%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,836 (35.96%) Python
2 658 (12.89%) Java
3 469 (9.19%) C#
4 422 (8.26%) PL/SQL
5 405 (7.93%) JavaScript
6 271 (5.31%) PowerShell
7 249 (4.88%) T-SQL
8 203 (3.98%) TypeScript
9 151 (2.96%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 148 (2.90%) Shell Script
11 119 (2.33%) Bash
12 93 (1.82%) R
13 71 (1.39%) Scala
14 56 (1.10%) C++
15 42 (0.82%) VBA
16 38 (0.74%) Bicep
17 29 (0.57%) C
17 29 (0.57%) VB.NET
18 27 (0.53%) Kotlin
19 26 (0.51%) VB
Qualifications
1 1,099 (21.52%) Security Cleared
2 878 (17.20%) SC Cleared
3 355 (6.95%) Degree
4 156 (3.06%) BPSS Clearance
5 135 (2.64%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.55%) Computer Science Degree
7 83 (1.63%) Azure Certification
8 60 (1.18%) ISTQB
9 53 (1.04%) Microsoft Certification
10 44 (0.86%) Master's Degree
11 41 (0.80%) AWS Certification
12 19 (0.37%) ISEB
13 18 (0.35%) CISSP
14 16 (0.31%) DBS Check
14 16 (0.31%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 16 (0.31%) Oracle Certification
15 15 (0.29%) ACCA
15 15 (0.29%) CIMA
16 12 (0.24%) FFIEC
16 12 (0.24%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 993 (19.45%) Data Quality
2 413 (8.09%) QA
3 145 (2.84%) GDPR
4 71 (1.39%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.90%) SLA
6 34 (0.67%) ISO 20022
7 27 (0.53%) Actionable Recommendations
8 26 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 21 (0.41%) IFRS
10 19 (0.37%) NIST
11 18 (0.35%) MiFID
12 14 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
13 13 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
13 13 (0.25%) GMP
13 13 (0.25%) GxP
13 13 (0.25%) PMO
14 11 (0.22%) COBIT
14 11 (0.22%) HIPAA
14 11 (0.22%) PCI DSS
15 10 (0.20%) Solvency II
System Software
1 483 (9.46%) Docker
2 130 (2.55%) Active Directory
3 60 (1.18%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
5 41 (0.80%) Virtual Machines
6 25 (0.49%) Hyper-V
7 19 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
8 16 (0.31%) vCloud
8 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 15 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 7 (0.14%) Postfix
11 6 (0.12%) Squid
12 5 (0.098%) Ceph
13 4 (0.078%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 4 (0.078%) KVM
14 3 (0.059%) GPFS
15 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
15 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
15 2 (0.039%) NFS
Systems Management
1 409 (8.01%) Kubernetes
2 105 (2.06%) Grafana
3 103 (2.02%) Ansible
4 54 (1.06%) Prometheus
5 48 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
6 46 (0.90%) Data Guard
7 44 (0.86%) Control-M
8 41 (0.80%) SCOM
9 23 (0.45%) Kibana
10 16 (0.31%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
10 16 (0.31%) vCenter Server
11 12 (0.24%) Microsoft Clustering
11 12 (0.24%) Nagios
11 12 (0.24%) Netcool
11 12 (0.24%) ZABBIX
12 11 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
12 11 (0.22%) Tivoli
13 10 (0.20%) Argo
13 10 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
13 10 (0.20%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 918 (17.98%) Oracle
2 861 (16.86%) Microsoft
3 637 (12.48%) Databricks
4 217 (4.25%) Google
5 157 (3.07%) Informatica
6 145 (2.84%) SAP
7 123 (2.41%) Talend
8 104 (2.04%) IBM
9 97 (1.90%) ServiceNow
10 85 (1.66%) Splunk
11 84 (1.65%) Salesforce
12 79 (1.55%) VMware
13 58 (1.14%) Denodo
14 41 (0.80%) Sybase
15 39 (0.76%) Bloomberg
16 36 (0.71%) Dynatrace
16 36 (0.71%) Murex
17 35 (0.69%) Adobe
17 35 (0.69%) Alteryx
17 35 (0.69%) BMC