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

6 months to
3 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,120 3,762 4,044
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.55% 11.57% 10.56%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.55% 35.24% 33.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,433 2,580 2,921
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 £600 £606 £638
90th Percentile £688 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £474 £470 £475
% change year-on-year +0.74% -1.05% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 94 95 45
10th Percentile £23.00 £28.40 £20.12
25th Percentile £28.87 £31.70 £30.00
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £41.16
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +21.49% -8.54%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £80.68 £63.25 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £35.50
% change year-on-year -11.00% +40.85% -11.25%

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 14,008 10,674 12,103
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.12% 32.84% 31.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,115 7,100 8,347
10th Percentile £363 £342 £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 £745 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 301 355
10th Percentile £27.98 £29.00 £30.00
25th Percentile £46.79 £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 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £80.00 £78.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +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 3 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 3 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 3 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 -4 4,446 £500 - 4,935
London -6 2,486 £525 - 3,223
UK excluding London -8 2,076 £474 +0.74% 2,403
Work from Home -4 1,512 £500 - 2,039
North of England -1 594 £475 +3.60% 594
South East -8 463 £490 -2.00% 635
Midlands -4 460 £469 +4.22% 323
West Midlands -4 359 £469 -3.79% 175
North West 0 300 £478 +2.80% 358
Yorkshire +6 253 £475 +5.56% 147
South West -3 226 £513 +20.59% 298
Scotland -6 187 £426 -7.84% 200
East of England -9 118 £495 -1.49% 180
East Midlands -8 98 £465 +20.00% 147
North East -15 50 £413 -11.29% 93
Wales -8 39 £475 +6.74% 67
Northern Ireland -11 18 £348 -32.05% 132
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
1 233 (4.55%) Apache Airflow
2 217 (4.24%) Confluence
3 213 (4.16%) Apache Spark
4 173 (3.38%) Apache
5 91 (1.78%) SharePoint
6 90 (1.76%) SAS
7 45 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
8 38 (0.74%) IIS
9 30 (0.59%) WebLogic
10 28 (0.55%) Jupyter
11 26 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
12 22 (0.43%) nginx
12 22 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
13 19 (0.37%) Camunda
13 19 (0.37%) CMS
14 17 (0.33%) WebSphere
15 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
15 14 (0.27%) Tomcat
16 10 (0.20%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 8 (0.16%) Appian
Applications
1 309 (6.04%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.23%) Microsoft Office
3 39 (0.76%) MS Visio
3 39 (0.76%) Spreadsheet
4 26 (0.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
6 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
7 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
7 4 (0.078%) Microsoft Project
7 4 (0.078%) Notion
7 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
8 3 (0.059%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.059%) Windchill
9 2 (0.039%) Mingle
10 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.020%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.020%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 48 (0.94%) Oracle EBS
2 46 (0.90%) Dynamics CRM
3 33 (0.64%) SAP S/4HANA
4 29 (0.57%) Aladdin
5 27 (0.53%) Oracle Payables
6 25 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
7 24 (0.47%) Remedy ITSM
8 18 (0.35%) Oracle Receivables
9 15 (0.29%) Oracle EBS R12
9 15 (0.29%) Oracle General Ledger
10 13 (0.25%) Finacle
11 12 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
12 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
12 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
13 10 (0.20%) NetSuite
13 10 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
13 10 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
14 9 (0.18%) Summit
15 8 (0.16%) Findur
15 8 (0.16%) FLEXCUBE
Cloud Services
1 1,623 (31.70%) Azure
2 1,226 (23.95%) AWS
3 959 (18.73%) Power Platform
4 472 (9.22%) GCP
5 457 (8.93%) Azure DevOps
6 372 (7.27%) Snowflake
7 371 (7.25%) GitHub
8 339 (6.62%) Azure Data Factory
9 313 (6.11%) Serverless
10 289 (5.64%) dbt
11 243 (4.75%) Amazon S3
12 213 (4.16%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 205 (4.00%) AWS Lambda
14 179 (3.50%) GitHub Actions
15 113 (2.21%) SaaS
16 106 (2.07%) Power Automate
17 100 (1.95%) PowerApps
18 96 (1.88%) Azure Databricks
18 96 (1.88%) Entra ID
19 90 (1.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 71 (1.39%) DNS
2 50 (0.98%) Firewall
3 35 (0.68%) HTTP
4 33 (0.64%) SSL
5 25 (0.49%) Network Security
6 23 (0.45%) TCP/IP
7 21 (0.41%) VPN
8 20 (0.39%) Internet
8 20 (0.39%) SNMP
9 18 (0.35%) Broadband
9 18 (0.35%) DHCP
10 17 (0.33%) WAN
11 16 (0.31%) SSH
12 11 (0.21%) HTTPS
13 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
14 9 (0.18%) Kerberos
14 9 (0.18%) SAN
14 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
15 8 (0.16%) Multicast
15 8 (0.16%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 880 (17.19%) Power BI
2 714 (13.95%) Data Warehouse
3 652 (12.73%) SQL Server
4 351 (6.86%) Relational Database
5 325 (6.35%) PostgreSQL
6 321 (6.27%) Data Lake
7 292 (5.70%) Tableau
8 291 (5.68%) Metadata
9 255 (4.98%) NoSQL
10 234 (4.57%) Oracle Database
11 210 (4.10%) Azure SQL Database
12 187 (3.65%) BigQuery
13 152 (2.97%) Amazon Redshift
14 151 (2.95%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 147 (2.87%) Delta Lake
16 127 (2.48%) MySQL
17 122 (2.38%) Big Data
18 121 (2.36%) MongoDB
19 114 (2.23%) Oracle Reports
20 109 (2.13%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 626 (12.23%) Git
2 407 (7.95%) JIRA
3 286 (5.59%) Jenkins
4 235 (4.59%) GitLab
5 95 (1.86%) Selenium
6 90 (1.76%) JUnit
7 81 (1.58%) Gradle
8 76 (1.48%) Maven
9 64 (1.25%) Postman
10 58 (1.13%) Mockito
11 51 (1.00%) Oracle Forms
12 46 (0.90%) SonarQube
13 40 (0.78%) JMeter
13 40 (0.78%) Visual Studio
14 39 (0.76%) Bitbucket
15 34 (0.66%) MLflow
16 32 (0.63%) Zephyr
17 29 (0.57%) Team Foundation Server
18 28 (0.55%) Liquibase
19 26 (0.51%) REST Assured
General
1 1,389 (27.13%) Social Skills
2 1,308 (25.55%) Finance
3 1,073 (20.96%) Analytical Skills
4 542 (10.59%) Banking
5 470 (9.18%) Public Sector
6 153 (2.99%) Marketing
7 147 (2.87%) Front Office
8 141 (2.75%) Retail
9 140 (2.73%) Investment Banking
10 104 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 93 (1.82%) Documentation Skills
12 74 (1.45%) Manufacturing
13 55 (1.07%) Financial Institution
13 55 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
14 54 (1.05%) Legal
15 43 (0.84%) Organisational Skills
15 43 (0.84%) Telecoms
16 42 (0.82%) Local Government
17 41 (0.80%) Law
17 41 (0.80%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 1,115 (21.78%) Developer
2 952 (18.59%) Data Engineer
3 769 (15.02%) Analyst
4 720 (14.06%) Senior
5 363 (7.09%) Lead
6 330 (6.45%) Data Analyst
7 274 (5.35%) Architect
8 249 (4.86%) Business Analyst
9 245 (4.79%) Consultant
10 211 (4.12%) DBA
11 206 (4.02%) Senior Data Engineer
12 202 (3.95%) Java Developer
13 180 (3.52%) Senior Developer
14 134 (2.62%) Software Engineer
15 127 (2.48%) Python Engineer
16 126 (2.46%) SQL DBA
17 125 (2.44%) SQL Developer
18 124 (2.42%) Data Architect
19 116 (2.27%) Full-Stack Developer
20 115 (2.25%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 468 (9.14%) REST
2 441 (8.61%) .NET
3 393 (7.68%) Terraform
4 350 (6.84%) PySpark
5 346 (6.76%) Kafka
6 280 (5.47%) Spring
7 270 (5.27%) Spring Boot
8 245 (4.79%) React
9 212 (4.14%) RESTful
10 210 (4.10%) JSON
11 203 (3.96%) HTML
12 188 (3.67%) XML
13 173 (3.38%) CSS
14 136 (2.66%) Web Services
15 121 (2.36%) AngularJS
16 119 (2.32%) SOAP
17 114 (2.23%) Middleware
18 111 (2.17%) Pandas
19 94 (1.84%) .NET Framework
20 86 (1.68%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 333 (6.50%) Cloud Native
2 271 (5.29%) Data Structures
3 224 (4.38%) Product Ownership
4 173 (3.38%) Legacy Systems
5 147 (2.87%) Distributed Systems
6 132 (2.58%) Onboarding
7 121 (2.36%) Enterprise Software
8 108 (2.11%) Management Information System
9 87 (1.70%) Derivative
10 82 (1.60%) Self-Motivation
11 80 (1.56%) AI Agents
12 78 (1.52%) Replication
13 69 (1.35%) Analytical Mindset
14 67 (1.31%) Data Protection Act
15 62 (1.21%) Algorithms
16 61 (1.19%) Clustering
17 59 (1.15%) Reference Data
18 56 (1.09%) Fixed Income
19 51 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
20 49 (0.96%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 372 (7.27%) Linux
2 317 (6.19%) Windows
3 248 (4.84%) Unix
4 128 (2.50%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 19 (0.37%) Solaris
7 16 (0.31%) AIX
8 13 (0.25%) VMS
9 10 (0.20%) Ubuntu
9 10 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.14%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.098%) zOS
14 4 (0.078%) Android
14 4 (0.078%) Apple iOS
14 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2016
15 3 (0.059%) OpenVMS
16 2 (0.039%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,383 (27.01%) CI/CD
2 1,375 (26.86%) Agile
3 1,345 (26.27%) Data Modelling
4 1,248 (24.38%) Analytics
5 1,114 (21.76%) ETL
6 1,105 (21.58%) Business Intelligence
7 1,019 (19.90%) DevOps
8 991 (19.36%) Problem-Solving
9 987 (19.28%) Data Pipeline
10 845 (16.50%) Data Engineering
11 799 (15.61%) AI
12 758 (14.80%) Validation
13 753 (14.71%) Migration
14 667 (13.03%) Stakeholder Management
15 593 (11.58%) Data Governance
16 572 (11.17%) Test Automation
17 559 (10.92%) Data Analysis
18 534 (10.43%) Continuous Improvement
19 515 (10.06%) Decision-Making
20 428 (8.36%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,838 (35.90%) Python
2 659 (12.87%) Java
3 470 (9.18%) C#
4 413 (8.07%) PL/SQL
5 396 (7.73%) JavaScript
6 271 (5.29%) PowerShell
7 258 (5.04%) T-SQL
8 202 (3.95%) TypeScript
9 154 (3.01%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 151 (2.95%) Shell Script
11 116 (2.27%) Bash
12 98 (1.91%) R
13 75 (1.46%) Scala
14 57 (1.11%) C++
15 43 (0.84%) VBA
16 42 (0.82%) Bicep
17 28 (0.55%) C
17 28 (0.55%) VB.NET
18 27 (0.53%) VB
19 26 (0.51%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,102 (21.52%) Security Cleared
2 885 (17.29%) SC Cleared
3 363 (7.09%) Degree
4 152 (2.97%) BPSS Clearance
5 137 (2.68%) Computer Science Degree
6 127 (2.48%) DV Cleared
7 81 (1.58%) Azure Certification
8 65 (1.27%) ISTQB
9 50 (0.98%) Microsoft Certification
10 46 (0.90%) Master's Degree
11 42 (0.82%) AWS Certification
12 19 (0.37%) ISEB
12 19 (0.37%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 18 (0.35%) CISSP
13 18 (0.35%) DBS Check
14 14 (0.27%) ACCA
14 14 (0.27%) CIMA
14 14 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
15 12 (0.23%) FFIEC
15 12 (0.23%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 987 (19.28%) Data Quality
2 411 (8.03%) QA
3 157 (3.07%) GDPR
4 67 (1.31%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.90%) SLA
6 33 (0.64%) ISO 20022
7 28 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 24 (0.47%) Actionable Recommendations
9 23 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 20 (0.39%) IFRS
11 19 (0.37%) NIST
12 17 (0.33%) MiFID
13 15 (0.29%) PMO
14 13 (0.25%) GMP
14 13 (0.25%) Solvency II
15 12 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 12 (0.23%) GxP
15 12 (0.23%) PCI DSS
16 11 (0.21%) COBIT
17 10 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 17025
System Software
1 492 (9.61%) Docker
2 133 (2.60%) Active Directory
3 60 (1.17%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (0.84%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
6 24 (0.47%) 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%) KVM
14 3 (0.059%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
15 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
15 2 (0.039%) GPFS
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
16 1 (0.020%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 408 (7.97%) Kubernetes
2 102 (1.99%) Ansible
2 102 (1.99%) Grafana
3 50 (0.98%) Prometheus
4 49 (0.96%) Oracle RMAN
5 46 (0.90%) Data Guard
6 43 (0.84%) Control-M
7 40 (0.78%) SCOM
8 23 (0.45%) Kibana
9 16 (0.31%) vCenter Server
10 14 (0.27%) Nagios
10 14 (0.27%) Netcool
10 14 (0.27%) ZABBIX
11 13 (0.25%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
11 13 (0.25%) Tivoli
12 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
13 11 (0.21%) Microsoft Intune
13 11 (0.21%) OpenView
13 11 (0.21%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 10 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 909 (17.75%) Oracle
2 869 (16.97%) Microsoft
3 634 (12.38%) Databricks
4 198 (3.87%) Google
5 164 (3.20%) Informatica
6 142 (2.77%) SAP
7 124 (2.42%) Talend
8 103 (2.01%) IBM
8 103 (2.01%) ServiceNow
9 84 (1.64%) Splunk
10 79 (1.54%) VMware
11 76 (1.48%) Salesforce
12 59 (1.15%) Denodo
13 41 (0.80%) Bloomberg
13 41 (0.80%) Dynatrace
14 40 (0.78%) Sybase
15 38 (0.74%) BMC
16 37 (0.72%) Murex
17 36 (0.70%) Foundry
18 35 (0.68%) Alteryx