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 15 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,175 3,834 4,041
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.65% 11.63% 10.40%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.53% 35.45% 33.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,465 2,632 2,964
10th Percentile £358 £330 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £590 £605 £638
90th Percentile £688 £749 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £468 £475
% change year-on-year +0.32% -1.58% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 92 77 49
10th Percentile £23.08 £22.94 £20.12
25th Percentile £32.80 £29.07 £30.00
Median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £41.16
Median % change year-on-year +14.56% -5.61% -10.30%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.00 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £35.50
% change year-on-year -11.00% +40.85% -12.54%

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 14,168 10,816 12,191
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.41% 32.82% 31.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,220 7,232 8,545
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £502 £533
Median % change year-on-year +2.64% -5.86% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 523 277 405
10th Percentile £30.10 £28.22 £27.00
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.00 £45.22
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.07% -13.85% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.95 £83.58 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.96% -1.92% +8.33%

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 15 August 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 15 August 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 15 August 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 4,523 £500 - 4,069
London -6 2,464 £525 -0.94% 2,635
UK excluding London -10 2,165 £469 +0.32% 1,895
Work from Home -4 1,546 £500 - 1,647
North of England -4 594 £475 +1.28% 510
Midlands +2 540 £459 +2.00% 279
South East -10 482 £490 -2.00% 534
West Midlands +4 440 £459 +1.25% 154
North West -5 302 £500 +6.61% 293
Yorkshire +1 253 £474 -0.21% 135
South West -9 222 £500 +17.65% 206
Scotland -10 181 £434 -3.61% 131
East of England 0 121 £488 -2.50% 135
East Midlands -4 96 £464 +20.45% 125
North East -19 50 £413 -10.81% 91
Wales -3 40 £475 +5.56% 55
Northern Ireland -9 17 £375 -26.83% 71

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
1 230 (4.44%) Apache Airflow
2 220 (4.25%) Apache Spark
3 214 (4.14%) Confluence
4 179 (3.46%) Apache
5 120 (2.32%) SAS
6 82 (1.58%) SharePoint
7 44 (0.85%) Oracle Workflow
8 38 (0.73%) IIS
9 35 (0.68%) WebLogic
10 28 (0.54%) Jupyter
11 22 (0.43%) Tomcat
11 22 (0.43%) WebSphere
12 21 (0.41%) Microsoft Exchange
13 20 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
14 19 (0.37%) nginx
15 18 (0.35%) CMS
16 12 (0.23%) Camunda
16 12 (0.23%) Tuxedo
17 11 (0.21%) ArcGIS
18 10 (0.19%) Apache Geronimo
Applications
1 320 (6.18%) Microsoft Excel
2 62 (1.20%) Microsoft Office
3 48 (0.93%) MS Visio
4 35 (0.68%) Spreadsheet
5 27 (0.52%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
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
10 2 (0.039%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.019%) InDesign
11 1 (0.019%) Mingle
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
11 1 (0.019%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 52 (1.00%) Oracle EBS
2 43 (0.83%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
4 27 (0.52%) Aladdin
4 27 (0.52%) Remedy ITSM
5 25 (0.48%) Oracle ERP
6 24 (0.46%) Oracle Payables
7 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
8 15 (0.29%) Oracle Receivables
9 13 (0.25%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.21%) Findur
10 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
10 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.19%) Finacle
11 10 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
11 10 (0.19%) Oracle Financials
12 9 (0.17%) Elite 3E
12 9 (0.17%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 9 (0.17%) Unit4 Business World
13 8 (0.15%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,632 (31.54%) Azure
2 1,227 (23.71%) AWS
3 960 (18.55%) Power Platform
4 465 (8.99%) GCP
5 457 (8.83%) Azure DevOps
6 372 (7.19%) GitHub
7 354 (6.84%) Snowflake
8 350 (6.76%) Azure Data Factory
9 306 (5.91%) Serverless
10 279 (5.39%) dbt
11 249 (4.81%) Amazon S3
12 218 (4.21%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 201 (3.88%) AWS Lambda
14 186 (3.59%) GitHub Actions
15 101 (1.95%) SaaS
16 99 (1.91%) Power Automate
17 98 (1.89%) Entra ID
18 95 (1.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 92 (1.78%) PowerApps
20 73 (1.41%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 69 (1.33%) DNS
2 50 (0.97%) Firewall
3 30 (0.58%) SSL
4 29 (0.56%) Network Security
5 27 (0.52%) HTTP
6 23 (0.44%) VPN
7 22 (0.43%) SNMP
8 20 (0.39%) Internet
8 20 (0.39%) TCP/IP
9 19 (0.37%) WAN
10 12 (0.23%) Broadband
10 12 (0.23%) DHCP
11 10 (0.19%) SAN
11 10 (0.19%) SSH
11 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
11 10 (0.19%) Wireshark
12 9 (0.17%) HTTPS
12 9 (0.17%) Kerberos
12 9 (0.17%) Wi-Fi
13 8 (0.15%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 882 (17.04%) Power BI
2 728 (14.07%) Data Warehouse
3 645 (12.46%) SQL Server
4 338 (6.53%) Relational Database
5 324 (6.26%) Data Lake
6 322 (6.22%) PostgreSQL
7 301 (5.82%) Tableau
8 285 (5.51%) Metadata
9 258 (4.99%) NoSQL
10 220 (4.25%) Azure SQL Database
11 212 (4.10%) Oracle Database
12 184 (3.56%) BigQuery
13 162 (3.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 158 (3.05%) Amazon Redshift
15 138 (2.67%) Delta Lake
16 129 (2.49%) Oracle Reports
17 125 (2.42%) Big Data
18 121 (2.34%) MySQL
19 119 (2.30%) MongoDB
20 112 (2.16%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 620 (11.98%) Git
2 406 (7.85%) JIRA
3 304 (5.87%) Jenkins
4 239 (4.62%) GitLab
5 86 (1.66%) JUnit
6 75 (1.45%) Selenium
7 73 (1.41%) Maven
8 70 (1.35%) Gradle
8 70 (1.35%) Postman
9 54 (1.04%) Mockito
10 48 (0.93%) Oracle Forms
11 43 (0.83%) SonarQube
12 41 (0.79%) Visual Studio
13 40 (0.77%) Bitbucket
14 37 (0.71%) JMeter
14 37 (0.71%) Zephyr
15 30 (0.58%) Team Foundation Server
16 29 (0.56%) ERwin
16 29 (0.56%) Liquibase
16 29 (0.56%) MLflow
General
1 1,348 (26.05%) Social Skills
2 1,285 (24.83%) Finance
3 1,032 (19.94%) Analytical Skills
4 507 (9.80%) Banking
5 486 (9.39%) Public Sector
6 145 (2.80%) Front Office
7 143 (2.76%) Marketing
8 139 (2.69%) Retail
9 127 (2.45%) Investment Banking
10 96 (1.86%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 94 (1.82%) Documentation Skills
12 80 (1.55%) Manufacturing
13 60 (1.16%) Legal
14 55 (1.06%) Presentation Skills
15 54 (1.04%) Financial Institution
16 44 (0.85%) Organisational Skills
16 44 (0.85%) Telecoms
17 40 (0.77%) Law
17 40 (0.77%) Publishing
18 39 (0.75%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 1,126 (21.76%) Developer
2 998 (19.29%) Data Engineer
3 753 (14.55%) Analyst
4 706 (13.64%) Senior
5 367 (7.09%) Lead
6 324 (6.26%) Data Analyst
7 276 (5.33%) Architect
8 262 (5.06%) Consultant
9 251 (4.85%) Business Analyst
10 214 (4.14%) DBA
11 212 (4.10%) Java Developer
12 195 (3.77%) Senior Data Engineer
13 174 (3.36%) Senior Developer
14 143 (2.76%) Software Engineer
15 133 (2.57%) SQL DBA
16 132 (2.55%) SQL Developer
17 118 (2.28%) Data Architect
17 118 (2.28%) Full-Stack Developer
17 118 (2.28%) Python Engineer
18 117 (2.26%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 443 (8.56%) REST
2 428 (8.27%) .NET
3 340 (6.57%) PySpark
4 332 (6.42%) Kafka
5 274 (5.29%) Spring
6 259 (5.00%) Spring Boot
7 231 (4.46%) React
8 224 (4.33%) RESTful
9 205 (3.96%) JSON
10 190 (3.67%) XML
11 187 (3.61%) HTML
12 148 (2.86%) CSS
13 140 (2.71%) AngularJS
14 133 (2.57%) Web Services
15 115 (2.22%) SOAP
16 114 (2.20%) Middleware
17 112 (2.16%) Pandas
18 96 (1.86%) .NET Framework
19 85 (1.64%) Node.js
20 74 (1.43%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 349 (6.74%) Cloud Native
2 250 (4.83%) Data Structures
3 206 (3.98%) Product Ownership
4 178 (3.44%) Legacy Systems
5 150 (2.90%) Distributed Systems
6 119 (2.30%) Onboarding
7 110 (2.13%) Enterprise Software
8 100 (1.93%) Management Information System
9 93 (1.80%) Derivative
10 85 (1.64%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
11 76 (1.47%) Replication
12 72 (1.39%) Analytical Mindset
13 65 (1.26%) Algorithms
13 65 (1.26%) Clustering
14 60 (1.16%) AI Agents
15 56 (1.08%) Reference Data
16 54 (1.04%) Fixed Income
17 53 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
18 52 (1.00%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 365 (7.05%) Linux
2 316 (6.11%) Windows
3 249 (4.81%) Unix
4 122 (2.36%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.46%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.41%) AIX
7 17 (0.33%) Solaris
8 13 (0.25%) VMS
9 11 (0.21%) Windows Server 2019
10 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.14%) Ubuntu
11 7 (0.14%) zOS
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
13 4 (0.077%) Apple iOS
13 4 (0.077%) Oracle Linux
13 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.058%) Android
14 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,389 (26.84%) Agile
2 1,379 (26.65%) CI/CD
3 1,363 (26.34%) Data Modelling
4 1,290 (24.93%) Analytics
5 1,164 (22.49%) ETL
6 1,126 (21.76%) Business Intelligence
7 1,051 (20.31%) DevOps
8 1,008 (19.48%) Data Pipeline
9 992 (19.17%) Problem-Solving
10 850 (16.43%) Data Engineering
11 754 (14.57%) AI
12 751 (14.51%) Migration
13 726 (14.03%) Validation
14 605 (11.69%) Data Governance
15 597 (11.54%) Stakeholder Management
16 569 (11.00%) Test Automation
17 522 (10.09%) Data Analysis
18 521 (10.07%) Continuous Improvement
19 518 (10.01%) Decision-Making
20 447 (8.64%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,825 (35.27%) Python
2 667 (12.89%) Java
3 481 (9.29%) C#
4 422 (8.15%) PL/SQL
5 384 (7.42%) JavaScript
6 272 (5.26%) T-SQL
7 265 (5.12%) PowerShell
8 184 (3.56%) TypeScript
9 153 (2.96%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 142 (2.74%) Shell Script
11 120 (2.32%) Bash
12 91 (1.76%) R
13 76 (1.47%) Scala
14 59 (1.14%) C++
15 51 (0.99%) VBA
16 48 (0.93%) Bicep
17 30 (0.58%) C
17 30 (0.58%) VB.NET
18 27 (0.52%) Perl
18 27 (0.52%) VB
Qualifications
1 1,164 (22.49%) Security Cleared
2 951 (18.38%) SC Cleared
3 347 (6.71%) Degree
4 138 (2.67%) BPSS Clearance
5 121 (2.34%) Computer Science Degree
6 112 (2.16%) DV Cleared
7 78 (1.51%) Azure Certification
8 73 (1.41%) ISTQB
9 47 (0.91%) Master's Degree
10 46 (0.89%) Microsoft Certification
11 40 (0.77%) AWS Certification
12 20 (0.39%) CISSP
12 20 (0.39%) ISEB
12 20 (0.39%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 16 (0.31%) DBS Check
14 13 (0.25%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 13 (0.25%) FFIEC
15 12 (0.23%) Oracle Certification
15 12 (0.23%) PhD
16 10 (0.19%) ACCA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 971 (18.76%) Data Quality
2 415 (8.02%) QA
3 173 (3.34%) GDPR
4 70 (1.35%) Accessibility
5 42 (0.81%) SLA
6 29 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 25 (0.48%) ISO 20022
8 24 (0.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.46%) NIST
9 20 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
10 19 (0.37%) PMO
11 17 (0.33%) IFRS
12 14 (0.27%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.27%) MiFID
12 14 (0.27%) Solvency II
13 13 (0.25%) COBIT
13 13 (0.25%) PCI DSS
14 12 (0.23%) GMP
15 11 (0.21%) NCSC
15 11 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 510 (9.86%) Docker
2 142 (2.74%) Active Directory
3 53 (1.02%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.81%) Oracle RAC
4 42 (0.81%) Virtual Machines
5 22 (0.43%) Hyper-V
6 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
7 15 (0.29%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.27%) vCloud
9 12 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
10 8 (0.15%) Postfix
11 7 (0.14%) KVM
12 5 (0.097%) Ceph
13 4 (0.077%) Squid
14 3 (0.058%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 3 (0.058%) HDFS
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
16 1 (0.019%) GPFS
16 1 (0.019%) Lustre
16 1 (0.019%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 439 (8.48%) Kubernetes
2 406 (7.85%) Terraform
3 109 (2.11%) Grafana
4 101 (1.95%) Ansible
5 50 (0.97%) Oracle RMAN
6 48 (0.93%) Prometheus
7 47 (0.91%) Data Guard
8 41 (0.79%) Control-M
9 29 (0.56%) SCOM
10 19 (0.37%) Kibana
11 18 (0.35%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.31%) Nagios
12 16 (0.31%) Netcool
12 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
14 13 (0.25%) OpenView
14 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
16 11 (0.21%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
16 11 (0.21%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 912 (17.62%) Oracle
2 851 (16.44%) Microsoft
3 611 (11.81%) Databricks
4 198 (3.83%) Google
5 189 (3.65%) Informatica
6 146 (2.82%) Talend
7 144 (2.78%) SAP
8 122 (2.36%) ServiceNow
9 98 (1.89%) IBM
10 88 (1.70%) Splunk
11 76 (1.47%) Denodo
12 72 (1.39%) VMware
13 70 (1.35%) Salesforce
14 42 (0.81%) Dynatrace
15 39 (0.75%) Bloomberg
15 39 (0.75%) BMC
15 39 (0.75%) Sybase
16 38 (0.73%) Citrix
17 36 (0.70%) Adobe
18 35 (0.68%) Murex