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

6 months to
7 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,139 3,840 4,023
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.62% 11.69% 10.31%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.36% 35.43% 33.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,425 2,653 2,950
10th Percentile £356 £331 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £465 £475
% change year-on-year +0.86% -2.11% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 94 71 48
10th Percentile £23.23 £22.81 £21.25
25th Percentile £33.82 £29.07 £29.06
Median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £40.58
Median % change year-on-year +14.56% -4.27% -13.20%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £54.69
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £33.91 £34.97
% change year-on-year +31.23% -3.02% -23.05%

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 14,132 10,838 12,172
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.46% 32.98% 31.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,185 7,283 8,549
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £503 £530
Median % change year-on-year +1.89% -5.09% -3.64%
75th Percentile £617 £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 528 264 409
10th Percentile £30.35 £28.05 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £35.75 £46.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -12.69% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.15 £84.04 £77.50
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 7 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 7 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 7 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 -4 4,493 £500 - 2,714
London -6 2,445 £525 -0.24% 1,441
UK excluding London -10 2,157 £469 +0.86% 1,604
Work from Home -3 1,547 £500 - 1,205
North of England -4 591 £463 -1.60% 447
Midlands 0 540 £459 +2.91% 240
South East -11 474 £490 -2.00% 485
West Midlands +4 442 £459 +1.32% 126
North West -2 311 £475 +1.28% 238
Yorkshire -3 242 £465 -2.11% 138
South West -4 223 £500 +17.65% 177
Scotland -9 190 £434 -3.61% 83
East of England -6 118 £475 -5.00% 121
East Midlands -4 94 £465 +24.00% 114
North East -16 49 £413 -10.81% 80
Wales +1 39 £471 +4.72% 43
Northern Ireland -8 16 £375 -26.83% 32

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
1 223 (4.34%) Confluence
2 221 (4.30%) Apache Airflow
3 217 (4.22%) Apache Spark
4 177 (3.44%) Apache
5 119 (2.32%) SAS
6 73 (1.42%) SharePoint
7 45 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
8 40 (0.78%) IIS
8 40 (0.78%) WebLogic
9 29 (0.56%) Jupyter
9 29 (0.56%) Tomcat
10 26 (0.51%) WebSphere
11 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
12 20 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
12 20 (0.39%) nginx
13 19 (0.37%) CMS
14 14 (0.27%) Apache Geronimo
14 14 (0.27%) Apache ServiceMix
14 14 (0.27%) Red Hat Fuse
15 12 (0.23%) Camunda
Applications
1 329 (6.40%) Microsoft Excel
2 62 (1.21%) Microsoft Office
3 53 (1.03%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.74%) Spreadsheet
5 29 (0.56%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.19%) 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 53 (1.03%) Oracle EBS
2 43 (0.84%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.56%) Aladdin
3 29 (0.56%) Remedy ITSM
3 29 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
4 26 (0.51%) Oracle ERP
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
6 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
7 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.29%) NEC Housing
9 14 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
10 12 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.21%) Findur
11 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.19%) Finacle
12 10 (0.19%) Oracle Financials
13 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 9 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
14 8 (0.16%) Fidessa
Cloud Services
1 1,617 (31.47%) Azure
2 1,207 (23.49%) AWS
3 962 (18.72%) Power Platform
4 459 (8.93%) GCP
5 457 (8.89%) Azure DevOps
6 363 (7.06%) GitHub
7 349 (6.79%) Snowflake
8 346 (6.73%) Azure Data Factory
9 306 (5.95%) Serverless
10 277 (5.39%) dbt
11 251 (4.88%) Amazon S3
12 215 (4.18%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 201 (3.91%) AWS Lambda
14 182 (3.54%) GitHub Actions
15 100 (1.95%) Entra ID
16 97 (1.89%) Power Automate
17 96 (1.87%) SaaS
18 92 (1.79%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 91 (1.77%) PowerApps
20 77 (1.50%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 65 (1.26%) DNS
2 47 (0.91%) Firewall
3 30 (0.58%) SSL
4 28 (0.54%) HTTP
5 26 (0.51%) Network Security
6 23 (0.45%) 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
11 11 (0.21%) DHCP
12 10 (0.19%) SSH
12 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
12 10 (0.19%) Wireshark
13 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
13 9 (0.18%) SAN
13 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
14 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
14 8 (0.16%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 884 (17.20%) Power BI
2 712 (13.85%) Data Warehouse
3 642 (12.49%) SQL Server
4 332 (6.46%) Relational Database
5 317 (6.17%) PostgreSQL
6 315 (6.13%) Tableau
7 312 (6.07%) Data Lake
8 275 (5.35%) Metadata
9 258 (5.02%) NoSQL
10 219 (4.26%) Azure SQL Database
11 210 (4.09%) Oracle Database
12 177 (3.44%) BigQuery
13 170 (3.31%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 153 (2.98%) Amazon Redshift
15 141 (2.74%) Delta Lake
16 130 (2.53%) Oracle Reports
17 127 (2.47%) Big Data
18 116 (2.26%) MongoDB
19 113 (2.20%) MySQL
20 105 (2.04%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 609 (11.85%) Git
2 406 (7.90%) JIRA
3 295 (5.74%) Jenkins
4 235 (4.57%) GitLab
5 83 (1.62%) JUnit
6 73 (1.42%) Maven
7 67 (1.30%) Gradle
8 65 (1.26%) Selenium
9 59 (1.15%) Postman
10 55 (1.07%) Mockito
11 49 (0.95%) Oracle Forms
12 40 (0.78%) Bitbucket
13 39 (0.76%) SonarQube
13 39 (0.76%) Visual Studio
14 32 (0.62%) MLflow
14 32 (0.62%) Zephyr
15 31 (0.60%) ERwin
15 31 (0.60%) Team Foundation Server
16 30 (0.58%) JMeter
16 30 (0.58%) Liquibase
General
1 1,334 (25.96%) Social Skills
2 1,283 (24.97%) Finance
3 1,035 (20.14%) Analytical Skills
4 494 (9.61%) Banking
5 486 (9.46%) Public Sector
6 145 (2.82%) Marketing
7 140 (2.72%) Front Office
8 137 (2.67%) Retail
9 125 (2.43%) Investment Banking
10 99 (1.93%) Documentation Skills
11 90 (1.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 77 (1.50%) Manufacturing
13 57 (1.11%) Financial Institution
13 57 (1.11%) Legal
13 57 (1.11%) Presentation Skills
14 47 (0.91%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
16 43 (0.84%) Publishing
17 41 (0.80%) Back Office
18 38 (0.74%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,120 (21.79%) Developer
2 1,000 (19.46%) Data Engineer
3 760 (14.79%) Analyst
4 685 (13.33%) Senior
5 360 (7.01%) Lead
6 322 (6.27%) Data Analyst
7 272 (5.29%) Architect
8 258 (5.02%) Consultant
9 256 (4.98%) Business Analyst
10 212 (4.13%) Java Developer
11 210 (4.09%) DBA
12 195 (3.79%) Senior Data Engineer
13 171 (3.33%) Senior Developer
14 140 (2.72%) Software Engineer
15 135 (2.63%) SQL DBA
16 131 (2.55%) SQL Developer
17 118 (2.30%) Azure Engineer
18 115 (2.24%) Full-Stack Developer
19 109 (2.12%) Data Architect
19 109 (2.12%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 426 (8.29%) REST
2 425 (8.27%) .NET
3 328 (6.38%) PySpark
4 315 (6.13%) Kafka
5 271 (5.27%) Spring
6 254 (4.94%) Spring Boot
7 227 (4.42%) React
8 219 (4.26%) RESTful
9 203 (3.95%) JSON
10 188 (3.66%) XML
11 173 (3.37%) HTML
12 144 (2.80%) AngularJS
13 142 (2.76%) CSS
14 127 (2.47%) Web Services
15 121 (2.35%) Pandas
16 114 (2.22%) SOAP
17 113 (2.20%) Middleware
18 102 (1.98%) .NET Framework
19 84 (1.63%) Node.js
20 74 (1.44%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 345 (6.71%) Cloud Native
2 252 (4.90%) Data Structures
3 204 (3.97%) Product Ownership
4 180 (3.50%) Legacy Systems
5 148 (2.88%) Distributed Systems
6 120 (2.34%) Onboarding
7 105 (2.04%) Enterprise Software
8 95 (1.85%) Derivative
9 94 (1.83%) Management Information System
10 86 (1.67%) Self-Motivation
11 75 (1.46%) Analytical Mindset
11 75 (1.46%) Data Protection Act
12 74 (1.44%) Replication
13 70 (1.36%) Clustering
14 66 (1.28%) Algorithms
15 54 (1.05%) AI Agents
16 53 (1.03%) Fixed Income
17 52 (1.01%) Greenfield Project
18 50 (0.97%) Reference Data
19 49 (0.95%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 352 (6.85%) Linux
2 314 (6.11%) Windows
3 236 (4.59%) Unix
4 122 (2.37%) Windows Server
5 26 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.41%) AIX
7 17 (0.33%) Solaris
8 14 (0.27%) VMS
8 14 (0.27%) Windows Server 2019
9 12 (0.23%) Windows Server 2008
10 7 (0.14%) Ubuntu
10 7 (0.14%) zOS
11 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
11 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
11 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
11 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
12 5 (0.097%) Android
13 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
14 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,363 (26.52%) Agile
2 1,355 (26.37%) Data Modelling
3 1,345 (26.17%) CI/CD
4 1,295 (25.20%) Analytics
5 1,145 (22.28%) ETL
6 1,132 (22.03%) Business Intelligence
7 1,045 (20.33%) DevOps
8 1,003 (19.52%) Data Pipeline
9 984 (19.15%) Problem-Solving
10 851 (16.56%) Data Engineering
11 738 (14.36%) Migration
12 729 (14.19%) AI
13 698 (13.58%) Validation
14 593 (11.54%) Data Governance
15 573 (11.15%) Stakeholder Management
16 537 (10.45%) Test Automation
17 518 (10.08%) Data Analysis
17 518 (10.08%) Decision-Making
18 512 (9.96%) Continuous Improvement
19 455 (8.85%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,808 (35.18%) Python
2 661 (12.86%) Java
3 493 (9.59%) C#
4 421 (8.19%) PL/SQL
5 366 (7.12%) JavaScript
6 276 (5.37%) T-SQL
7 261 (5.08%) PowerShell
8 177 (3.44%) TypeScript
9 151 (2.94%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 142 (2.76%) Shell Script
11 118 (2.30%) Bash
12 99 (1.93%) R
13 75 (1.46%) Scala
14 59 (1.15%) C++
15 51 (0.99%) Bicep
16 50 (0.97%) VBA
17 33 (0.64%) C
18 29 (0.56%) Perl
19 28 (0.54%) VB
20 25 (0.49%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,156 (22.49%) Security Cleared
2 937 (18.23%) SC Cleared
3 347 (6.75%) Degree
4 142 (2.76%) BPSS Clearance
5 120 (2.34%) Computer Science Degree
6 111 (2.16%) DV Cleared
7 79 (1.54%) Azure Certification
8 60 (1.17%) ISTQB
9 49 (0.95%) Master's Degree
10 44 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
11 34 (0.66%) AWS Certification
12 19 (0.37%) CISSP
13 17 (0.33%) DBS Check
14 15 (0.29%) ISEB
14 15 (0.29%) PhD
15 12 (0.23%) FFIEC
15 12 (0.23%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 12 (0.23%) Oracle Certification
16 10 (0.19%) ACCA
16 10 (0.19%) CIMA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 955 (18.58%) Data Quality
2 386 (7.51%) QA
3 175 (3.41%) GDPR
4 66 (1.28%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.90%) SLA
6 26 (0.51%) ISO 20022
6 26 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 24 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 23 (0.45%) PMO
9 22 (0.43%) NIST
10 20 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
11 16 (0.31%) IFRS
11 16 (0.31%) Solvency II
12 15 (0.29%) MiFID
13 13 (0.25%) COBIT
13 13 (0.25%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.25%) PCI DSS
14 12 (0.23%) GMP
15 11 (0.21%) NCSC
15 11 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 506 (9.85%) Docker
2 138 (2.69%) Active Directory
3 53 (1.03%) VMware Infrastructure
4 45 (0.88%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.41%) Hyper-V
7 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
8 14 (0.27%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.25%) vCloud
10 10 (0.19%) Virtual Desktop
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
12 7 (0.14%) KVM
13 5 (0.097%) Ceph
14 4 (0.078%) HDFS
14 4 (0.078%) Squid
15 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
16 1 (0.019%) vSphere
16 1 (0.019%) XenApp
16 1 (0.019%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 435 (8.46%) Kubernetes
2 385 (7.49%) Terraform
3 107 (2.08%) Grafana
4 101 (1.97%) Ansible
5 50 (0.97%) Oracle RMAN
6 49 (0.95%) Prometheus
7 46 (0.90%) Data Guard
8 32 (0.62%) Control-M
9 28 (0.54%) SCOM
10 19 (0.37%) Kibana
11 17 (0.33%) 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 11 (0.21%) Microsoft Clustering
15 11 (0.21%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
16 10 (0.19%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 908 (17.67%) Oracle
2 830 (16.15%) Microsoft
3 594 (11.56%) Databricks
4 194 (3.78%) Google
5 181 (3.52%) Informatica
6 143 (2.78%) Talend
7 140 (2.72%) SAP
8 132 (2.57%) ServiceNow
9 92 (1.79%) IBM
10 87 (1.69%) Splunk
11 75 (1.46%) Denodo
12 72 (1.40%) VMware
13 69 (1.34%) Salesforce
14 42 (0.82%) Dynatrace
15 40 (0.78%) BMC
15 40 (0.78%) Citrix
16 38 (0.74%) Bloomberg
17 36 (0.70%) Murex
18 35 (0.68%) Alteryx
18 35 (0.68%) Sybase