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

6 months to
27 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 0
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,106 3,852 4,127
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.67% 11.69% 10.28%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.27% 35.44% 33.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,391 2,675 3,047
10th Percentile £355 £338 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £606 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £464 £475
% change year-on-year +0.27% -2.37% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 102 67 49
10th Percentile £24.33 £21.18 £21.41
25th Percentile £34.01 £29.66 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.90 £38.85 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.16% -6.40% -12.63%
75th Percentile £69.86 £50.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.59
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £33.91 £36.00
% change year-on-year +32.70% -5.81% -20.77%

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 14,079 10,868 12,475
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.67% 32.98% 31.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,151 7,328 8,818
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £424 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.40% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £498
% change year-on-year +3.16% -4.62% -0.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 522 258 431
10th Percentile £33.70 £27.98 £30.00
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.06 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.38 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.30% -13.27% +7.35%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.18 £80.89 £76.25
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 27 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 27 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 27 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 -4 4,443 £500 - 1,750
London -6 2,387 £525 - 773
UK excluding London -9 2,168 £465 +0.27% 1,251
Work from Home -5 1,536 £500 - 840
North of England -5 583 £463 -1.60% 342
Midlands +1 543 £459 +7.37% 208
South East -10 463 £475 -5.00% 400
West Midlands +4 447 £459 +2.00% 118
North West -4 310 £475 +1.71% 180
Yorkshire -9 235 £470 -1.05% 99
South West -8 232 £500 +14.29% 140
Scotland -4 201 £450 - 41
East of England -3 122 £484 -3.25% 93
East Midlands -5 92 £488 +25.53% 90
North East -16 51 £419 -9.46% 71
Wales -3 43 £468 +3.89% 34
Northern Ireland -7 15 £375 -27.36% 19

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
1 235 (4.60%) Apache Spark
2 218 (4.27%) Confluence
3 212 (4.15%) Apache Airflow
4 191 (3.74%) Apache
5 112 (2.19%) SAS
6 67 (1.31%) SharePoint
7 46 (0.90%) Oracle Workflow
8 42 (0.82%) WebLogic
9 40 (0.78%) IIS
10 38 (0.74%) Tomcat
11 32 (0.63%) WebSphere
12 27 (0.53%) Jupyter
13 22 (0.43%) Apache Geronimo
13 22 (0.43%) Apache ServiceMix
13 22 (0.43%) Red Hat Fuse
14 21 (0.41%) nginx
14 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
15 19 (0.37%) CMS
16 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
17 13 (0.25%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 322 (6.31%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.29%) Microsoft Office
3 53 (1.04%) MS Visio
4 40 (0.78%) Spreadsheet
5 32 (0.63%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 11 (0.22%) 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%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Mingle
10 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 51 (1.00%) Oracle EBS
2 42 (0.82%) Dynamics CRM
3 32 (0.63%) Aladdin
4 29 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
6 24 (0.47%) Remedy ITSM
7 18 (0.35%) NEC Housing
7 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
8 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
9 13 (0.25%) Oracle General Ledger
10 12 (0.24%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.22%) Findur
11 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.20%) Fidessa
12 10 (0.20%) Finacle
12 10 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
13 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 9 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,603 (31.39%) Azure
2 1,219 (23.87%) AWS
3 944 (18.49%) Power Platform
4 453 (8.87%) GCP
5 437 (8.56%) Azure DevOps
6 354 (6.93%) GitHub
7 345 (6.76%) Azure Data Factory
8 332 (6.50%) Snowflake
9 308 (6.03%) Serverless
10 272 (5.33%) dbt
11 269 (5.27%) Amazon S3
12 215 (4.21%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 203 (3.98%) AWS Lambda
14 180 (3.53%) GitHub Actions
15 96 (1.88%) SaaS
16 95 (1.86%) Entra ID
17 90 (1.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 87 (1.70%) Power Automate
19 81 (1.59%) PowerApps
20 74 (1.45%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 54 (1.06%) DNS
2 41 (0.80%) Firewall
3 29 (0.57%) SSL
4 26 (0.51%) HTTP
5 22 (0.43%) SNMP
6 21 (0.41%) Network Security
6 21 (0.41%) VPN
7 20 (0.39%) Internet
8 19 (0.37%) WAN
9 16 (0.31%) TCP/IP
10 10 (0.20%) Broadband
10 10 (0.20%) Kerberos
10 10 (0.20%) SAN
10 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
10 10 (0.20%) Wireshark
11 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
12 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
12 8 (0.16%) HTTPS
13 7 (0.14%) DHCP
13 7 (0.14%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 869 (17.02%) Power BI
2 700 (13.71%) Data Warehouse
3 649 (12.71%) SQL Server
4 338 (6.62%) Relational Database
5 324 (6.35%) Tableau
6 321 (6.29%) PostgreSQL
7 317 (6.21%) Data Lake
8 278 (5.44%) Metadata
9 259 (5.07%) NoSQL
10 215 (4.21%) Azure SQL Database
11 209 (4.09%) Oracle Database
12 176 (3.45%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 175 (3.43%) BigQuery
14 153 (3.00%) Amazon Redshift
15 140 (2.74%) Big Data
16 137 (2.68%) Delta Lake
17 130 (2.55%) Oracle Reports
18 120 (2.35%) MySQL
19 109 (2.13%) MongoDB
20 107 (2.10%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 582 (11.40%) Git
2 401 (7.85%) JIRA
3 273 (5.35%) Jenkins
4 218 (4.27%) GitLab
5 79 (1.55%) JUnit
6 71 (1.39%) Maven
7 64 (1.25%) Gradle
8 58 (1.14%) Postman
8 58 (1.14%) Selenium
9 51 (1.00%) Mockito
10 50 (0.98%) Oracle Forms
11 41 (0.80%) Visual Studio
12 36 (0.71%) Bitbucket
13 34 (0.67%) SonarQube
14 32 (0.63%) Team Foundation Server
15 31 (0.61%) ERwin
16 30 (0.59%) JMeter
16 30 (0.59%) Zephyr
17 29 (0.57%) MLflow
18 28 (0.55%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 1,307 (25.60%) Social Skills
2 1,263 (24.74%) Finance
3 1,006 (19.70%) Analytical Skills
4 492 (9.64%) Public Sector
5 471 (9.22%) Banking
6 141 (2.76%) Front Office
6 141 (2.76%) Marketing
7 123 (2.41%) Retail
8 117 (2.29%) Investment Banking
9 104 (2.04%) Documentation Skills
10 88 (1.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 68 (1.33%) Manufacturing
12 58 (1.14%) Legal
12 58 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
13 54 (1.06%) Financial Institution
14 47 (0.92%) Organisational Skills
15 44 (0.86%) Publishing
16 42 (0.82%) Back Office
17 40 (0.78%) Telecoms
18 37 (0.72%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,113 (21.80%) Developer
2 1,002 (19.62%) Data Engineer
3 741 (14.51%) Analyst
4 684 (13.40%) Senior
5 359 (7.03%) Lead
6 330 (6.46%) Data Analyst
7 277 (5.42%) Architect
8 251 (4.92%) Consultant
9 233 (4.56%) Business Analyst
10 214 (4.19%) Java Developer
11 203 (3.98%) DBA
12 196 (3.84%) Senior Data Engineer
13 169 (3.31%) Senior Developer
14 142 (2.78%) Software Engineer
15 130 (2.55%) SQL DBA
15 130 (2.55%) SQL Developer
16 122 (2.39%) Azure Engineer
17 116 (2.27%) Data Architect
18 112 (2.19%) Full-Stack Developer
19 110 (2.15%) C# Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 416 (8.15%) .NET
2 405 (7.93%) REST
3 324 (6.35%) PySpark
4 311 (6.09%) Kafka
5 271 (5.31%) Spring
6 257 (5.03%) Spring Boot
7 230 (4.50%) React
8 220 (4.31%) RESTful
9 205 (4.01%) JSON
10 188 (3.68%) XML
11 169 (3.31%) HTML
12 143 (2.80%) CSS
13 140 (2.74%) AngularJS
14 132 (2.59%) Web Services
15 121 (2.37%) Pandas
16 119 (2.33%) Middleware
16 119 (2.33%) SOAP
17 107 (2.10%) .NET Framework
18 83 (1.63%) Node.js
19 76 (1.49%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 339 (6.64%) Cloud Native
2 247 (4.84%) Data Structures
3 197 (3.86%) Product Ownership
4 183 (3.58%) Legacy Systems
5 155 (3.04%) Distributed Systems
6 112 (2.19%) Onboarding
7 99 (1.94%) Enterprise Software
8 95 (1.86%) Management Information System
9 92 (1.80%) Derivative
10 80 (1.57%) Self-Motivation
11 77 (1.51%) Analytical Mindset
12 74 (1.45%) Data Protection Act
12 74 (1.45%) Replication
13 71 (1.39%) Clustering
14 69 (1.35%) Algorithms
15 54 (1.06%) Fixed Income
15 54 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
16 52 (1.02%) Equities
17 51 (1.00%) NHS
18 50 (0.98%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 342 (6.70%) Linux
2 312 (6.11%) Windows
3 233 (4.56%) Unix
4 122 (2.39%) Windows Server
5 27 (0.53%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 23 (0.45%) AIX
7 18 (0.35%) Solaris
8 13 (0.25%) Windows Server 2019
9 10 (0.20%) VMS
10 9 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
11 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
11 8 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
11 8 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Android
13 6 (0.12%) Ubuntu
14 5 (0.098%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
16 3 (0.059%) Windows Server 2012
17 2 (0.039%) Data ONTAP
17 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,329 (26.03%) Agile
2 1,324 (25.93%) CI/CD
3 1,323 (25.91%) Data Modelling
4 1,305 (25.56%) Analytics
5 1,150 (22.52%) ETL
6 1,120 (21.93%) Business Intelligence
7 1,011 (19.80%) DevOps
8 1,005 (19.68%) Data Pipeline
9 980 (19.19%) Problem-Solving
10 856 (16.76%) Data Engineering
11 720 (14.10%) Migration
12 715 (14.00%) AI
13 676 (13.24%) Validation
14 596 (11.67%) Data Governance
15 526 (10.30%) Test Automation
16 516 (10.11%) Stakeholder Management
17 511 (10.01%) Decision-Making
18 499 (9.77%) Data Analysis
19 497 (9.73%) Continuous Improvement
20 460 (9.01%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,813 (35.51%) Python
2 675 (13.22%) Java
3 492 (9.64%) C#
4 415 (8.13%) PL/SQL
5 348 (6.82%) JavaScript
6 275 (5.39%) T-SQL
7 257 (5.03%) PowerShell
8 179 (3.51%) TypeScript
9 145 (2.84%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 140 (2.74%) Shell Script
11 108 (2.12%) R
12 104 (2.04%) Bash
13 76 (1.49%) Scala
14 61 (1.19%) C++
15 52 (1.02%) VBA
16 48 (0.94%) Bicep
17 35 (0.69%) C
18 32 (0.63%) VB
19 28 (0.55%) Perl
20 25 (0.49%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,123 (21.99%) Security Cleared
2 905 (17.72%) SC Cleared
3 359 (7.03%) Degree
4 142 (2.78%) BPSS Clearance
5 112 (2.19%) Computer Science Degree
6 109 (2.13%) DV Cleared
7 79 (1.55%) Azure Certification
8 63 (1.23%) Master's Degree
9 56 (1.10%) ISTQB
10 40 (0.78%) Microsoft Certification
11 34 (0.67%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.33%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.33%) PhD
13 15 (0.29%) CISSP
13 15 (0.29%) ISEB
14 13 (0.25%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 11 (0.22%) Oracle Certification
16 10 (0.20%) CISM
16 10 (0.20%) SnowPro
17 9 (0.18%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 950 (18.61%) Data Quality
2 384 (7.52%) QA
3 177 (3.47%) GDPR
4 67 (1.31%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.90%) SLA
6 24 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 23 (0.45%) PMO
8 21 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
9 20 (0.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 19 (0.37%) ISO 20022
11 18 (0.35%) NIST
12 16 (0.31%) Solvency II
13 15 (0.29%) MiFID
14 14 (0.27%) IFRS
15 13 (0.25%) GMP
16 12 (0.24%) HIPAA
17 11 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 11 (0.22%) NCSC
17 11 (0.22%) WCAG
18 10 (0.20%) HL7
System Software
1 496 (9.71%) Docker
2 125 (2.45%) Active Directory
3 43 (0.84%) Virtual Machines
3 43 (0.84%) VMware Infrastructure
4 41 (0.80%) Oracle RAC
5 21 (0.41%) Hyper-V
6 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
7 14 (0.27%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.25%) vCloud
9 9 (0.18%) KVM
9 9 (0.18%) Postfix
9 9 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
10 4 (0.078%) Ceph
10 4 (0.078%) HDFS
10 4 (0.078%) RACF
11 3 (0.059%) Squid
12 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
12 2 (0.039%) GridGain
13 1 (0.020%) XenApp
13 1 (0.020%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 418 (8.19%) Kubernetes
2 381 (7.46%) Terraform
3 108 (2.12%) Grafana
4 92 (1.80%) Ansible
5 51 (1.00%) Prometheus
6 48 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
7 44 (0.86%) Data Guard
8 30 (0.59%) Control-M
9 23 (0.45%) SCOM
10 20 (0.39%) Kibana
11 19 (0.37%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.31%) Nagios
12 16 (0.31%) Netcool
12 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.27%) Single Sign-On
15 13 (0.25%) OpenView
15 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 11 (0.22%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
17 10 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 919 (18.00%) Oracle
2 810 (15.86%) Microsoft
3 589 (11.54%) Databricks
4 191 (3.74%) Google
5 190 (3.72%) Informatica
6 145 (2.84%) Talend
7 137 (2.68%) SAP
8 136 (2.66%) ServiceNow
9 96 (1.88%) IBM
10 87 (1.70%) Splunk
11 69 (1.35%) Denodo
12 65 (1.27%) Salesforce
13 64 (1.25%) VMware
14 43 (0.84%) Dynatrace
15 42 (0.82%) Citrix
16 39 (0.76%) Bloomberg
17 37 (0.72%) Sybase
18 35 (0.69%) BMC
18 35 (0.69%) SolarWinds
19 34 (0.67%) Alteryx