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

6 months to
1 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,952 3,675 4,338
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.63% 11.95% 10.05%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.79% 35.40% 32.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,265 2,562 3,116
10th Percentile £350 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £589 £613 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £746
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -0.21% -1.05% -2.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 90 72 60
10th Percentile £26.35 £23.05 £22.52
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.42 £29.06
Median hourly rate £44.75 £41.66 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +7.42% -1.98% -15.00%
75th Percentile £67.75 £53.75 £52.37
90th Percentile £82.33 £67.35 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.25
% change year-on-year -11.00% +24.22% -15.67%

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 13,838 10,381 13,183
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.92% 33.75% 30.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,976 7,005 9,251
10th Percentile £358 £350 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 548 251 540
10th Percentile £34.09 £26.32 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.62 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.65 £80.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.84% -4.62% +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 1 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 1 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 1 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 -3 4,331 £500 - 1,841
London -5 2,326 £525 -1.87% 784
UK excluding London -10 2,119 £469 -0.21% 1,473
Work from Home -6 1,472 £500 -1.96% 915
North of England -6 569 £463 -2.63% 390
Midlands +3 547 £460 +8.24% 237
West Midlands +5 449 £459 +2.00% 128
South East -10 440 £483 -3.50% 446
North West -1 301 £466 -1.95% 236
South West -4 231 £500 +7.53% 132
Yorkshire -9 230 £475 - 103
Scotland -9 195 £450 - 55
East of England -11 108 £495 +1.54% 110
East Midlands 0 94 £525 +38.16% 109
North East -10 50 £419 -9.70% 55
Wales +7 45 £450 +5.88% 93
Northern Ireland -10 14 £375 -25.93% 36

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
1 238 (4.81%) Apache Spark
2 214 (4.32%) Confluence
3 204 (4.12%) Apache Airflow
4 178 (3.59%) Apache
5 112 (2.26%) SAS
6 59 (1.19%) SharePoint
7 42 (0.85%) Tomcat
8 37 (0.75%) Oracle Workflow
9 36 (0.73%) IIS
10 35 (0.71%) WebLogic
11 32 (0.65%) WebSphere
12 25 (0.50%) Jupyter
13 22 (0.44%) Apache Geronimo
13 22 (0.44%) Apache ServiceMix
13 22 (0.44%) Red Hat Fuse
14 21 (0.42%) nginx
15 19 (0.38%) CMS
15 19 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
16 18 (0.36%) Appian
16 18 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 305 (6.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.23%) Microsoft Office
3 54 (1.09%) MS Visio
4 35 (0.71%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 35 (0.71%) Spreadsheet
5 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
6 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
7 4 (0.081%) Acrobat
7 4 (0.081%) Microsoft Project
7 4 (0.081%) Photoshop
8 3 (0.061%) Notion
8 3 (0.061%) Oracle Smart View
9 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.020%) CPLEX
9 1 (0.020%) InDesign
9 1 (0.020%) Mingle
9 1 (0.020%) Trello
9 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 41 (0.83%) Oracle EBS
2 38 (0.77%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.59%) SAP S/4HANA
4 26 (0.53%) Aladdin
5 23 (0.46%) Oracle ERP
6 21 (0.42%) Oracle Payables
7 19 (0.38%) NEC Housing
8 16 (0.32%) Oracle EBS R12
8 16 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
9 13 (0.26%) Oracle Receivables
10 11 (0.22%) Findur
10 11 (0.22%) Salesforce CRM
10 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.20%) Elite 3E
11 10 (0.20%) Finacle
12 9 (0.18%) Fidessa
12 9 (0.18%) Oracle Assets
12 9 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
13 8 (0.16%) NetSuite
13 8 (0.16%) Oracle General Ledger
Cloud Services
1 1,587 (32.05%) Azure
2 1,200 (24.23%) AWS
3 923 (18.64%) Power Platform
4 451 (9.11%) Azure DevOps
5 405 (8.18%) GCP
6 358 (7.23%) GitHub
7 345 (6.97%) Azure Data Factory
8 308 (6.22%) Serverless
9 306 (6.18%) Snowflake
10 267 (5.39%) Amazon S3
11 243 (4.91%) dbt
12 220 (4.44%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 193 (3.90%) AWS Lambda
14 187 (3.78%) GitHub Actions
15 91 (1.84%) SaaS
16 86 (1.74%) Entra ID
16 86 (1.74%) Power Automate
17 84 (1.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 79 (1.60%) PowerApps
19 76 (1.53%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 50 (1.01%) DNS
2 43 (0.87%) Firewall
3 25 (0.50%) SSL
4 23 (0.46%) HTTP
4 23 (0.46%) Network Security
5 22 (0.44%) SNMP
6 21 (0.42%) WAN
7 19 (0.38%) Internet
8 18 (0.36%) VPN
9 12 (0.24%) TCP/IP
10 10 (0.20%) Kerberos
10 10 (0.20%) SAN
11 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
11 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
11 9 (0.18%) WinSCP
11 9 (0.18%) Wireshark
12 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
12 8 (0.16%) LAN
13 7 (0.14%) NAS
13 7 (0.14%) PuTTY
Database & Business Intelligence
1 848 (17.12%) Power BI
2 650 (13.13%) Data Warehouse
3 619 (12.50%) SQL Server
4 338 (6.83%) Relational Database
5 319 (6.44%) Tableau
6 318 (6.42%) PostgreSQL
7 312 (6.30%) Data Lake
8 258 (5.21%) NoSQL
9 246 (4.97%) Metadata
10 221 (4.46%) Azure SQL Database
11 190 (3.84%) Oracle Database
12 168 (3.39%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 158 (3.19%) BigQuery
14 149 (3.01%) Amazon Redshift
15 142 (2.87%) Big Data
16 140 (2.83%) Delta Lake
17 126 (2.54%) MySQL
18 118 (2.38%) MongoDB
18 118 (2.38%) Oracle Reports
19 110 (2.22%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 543 (10.97%) Git
2 400 (8.08%) JIRA
3 263 (5.31%) Jenkins
4 224 (4.52%) GitLab
5 77 (1.55%) JUnit
6 59 (1.19%) Selenium
7 56 (1.13%) Maven
7 56 (1.13%) Postman
8 53 (1.07%) Mockito
9 50 (1.01%) Gradle
10 40 (0.81%) Oracle Forms
11 39 (0.79%) Visual Studio
12 35 (0.71%) Cucumber
12 35 (0.71%) MLflow
13 33 (0.67%) SonarQube
14 32 (0.65%) JMeter
15 29 (0.59%) Bitbucket
16 28 (0.57%) ERwin
16 28 (0.57%) Liquibase
17 27 (0.55%) Zephyr
General
1 1,273 (25.71%) Finance
2 1,272 (25.69%) Social Skills
3 938 (18.94%) Analytical Skills
4 472 (9.53%) Banking
5 450 (9.09%) Public Sector
6 139 (2.81%) Front Office
7 129 (2.61%) Investment Banking
8 128 (2.58%) Marketing
9 120 (2.42%) Retail
10 105 (2.12%) Documentation Skills
11 92 (1.86%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 61 (1.23%) Legal
13 59 (1.19%) Financial Institution
13 59 (1.19%) Manufacturing
14 52 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
15 42 (0.85%) Publishing
16 38 (0.77%) Back Office
17 36 (0.73%) Organisational Skills
18 35 (0.71%) Telecoms
19 31 (0.63%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,053 (21.26%) Developer
2 997 (20.13%) Data Engineer
3 722 (14.58%) Analyst
4 649 (13.11%) Senior
5 344 (6.95%) Lead
6 305 (6.16%) Data Analyst
7 278 (5.61%) Architect
8 239 (4.83%) Consultant
9 230 (4.64%) Business Analyst
10 207 (4.18%) Java Developer
11 187 (3.78%) Senior Data Engineer
12 175 (3.53%) DBA
13 152 (3.07%) Senior Developer
14 146 (2.95%) Software Engineer
15 121 (2.44%) Azure Engineer
16 116 (2.34%) SQL Developer
17 109 (2.20%) C# Developer
17 109 (2.20%) Python Developer
18 106 (2.14%) Data Architect
19 102 (2.06%) SQL DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 412 (8.32%) .NET
2 371 (7.49%) REST
3 313 (6.32%) PySpark
4 302 (6.10%) Kafka
5 258 (5.21%) Spring
6 248 (5.01%) Spring Boot
7 232 (4.68%) React
8 216 (4.36%) RESTful
9 184 (3.72%) JSON
10 165 (3.33%) XML
11 156 (3.15%) HTML
12 139 (2.81%) CSS
13 129 (2.61%) AngularJS
14 125 (2.52%) Web Services
15 123 (2.48%) Pandas
16 120 (2.42%) Middleware
17 114 (2.30%) SOAP
18 96 (1.94%) .NET Framework
19 77 (1.55%) OAuth
20 76 (1.53%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 324 (6.54%) Cloud Native
2 210 (4.24%) Data Structures
3 178 (3.59%) Legacy Systems
4 167 (3.37%) Product Ownership
5 141 (2.85%) Distributed Systems
6 96 (1.94%) Derivative
7 94 (1.90%) Onboarding
8 86 (1.74%) Management Information System
9 84 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
10 75 (1.51%) Analytical Mindset
11 74 (1.49%) Data Protection Act
12 72 (1.45%) Self-Motivation
13 69 (1.39%) Algorithms
14 64 (1.29%) Clustering
15 58 (1.17%) Replication
16 55 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
17 54 (1.09%) Equities
18 51 (1.03%) Fixed Income
19 45 (0.91%) Low-Code
19 45 (0.91%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 318 (6.42%) Linux
2 287 (5.80%) Windows
3 226 (4.56%) Unix
4 110 (2.22%) Windows Server
5 27 (0.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.48%) AIX
7 17 (0.34%) Solaris
8 16 (0.32%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (0.22%) Windows Server 2008
9 11 (0.22%) Windows Server 2016
10 10 (0.20%) VMS
11 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
11 8 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Android
13 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
14 4 (0.081%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.081%) Ubuntu
15 3 (0.061%) Windows Server 2012
16 2 (0.040%) Data ONTAP
16 2 (0.040%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,328 (26.82%) CI/CD
2 1,278 (25.81%) Agile
3 1,252 (25.28%) Analytics
4 1,235 (24.94%) Data Modelling
5 1,117 (22.56%) ETL
6 1,072 (21.65%) Business Intelligence
7 1,020 (20.60%) DevOps
8 974 (19.67%) Problem-Solving
9 956 (19.31%) Data Pipeline
10 814 (16.44%) Data Engineering
11 707 (14.28%) AI
12 669 (13.51%) Migration
13 623 (12.58%) Validation
14 551 (11.13%) Data Governance
15 504 (10.18%) Test Automation
16 498 (10.06%) Decision-Making
17 488 (9.85%) Data Analysis
18 476 (9.61%) Stakeholder Management
19 451 (9.11%) Continuous Improvement
20 441 (8.91%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,802 (36.39%) Python
2 650 (13.13%) Java
3 493 (9.96%) C#
4 376 (7.59%) PL/SQL
5 333 (6.72%) JavaScript
6 264 (5.33%) T-SQL
7 241 (4.87%) PowerShell
8 177 (3.57%) TypeScript
9 142 (2.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 121 (2.44%) Shell Script
11 112 (2.26%) R
12 94 (1.90%) Bash
13 80 (1.62%) Scala
14 76 (1.53%) C++
15 49 (0.99%) Bicep
16 46 (0.93%) VBA
17 38 (0.77%) C
18 33 (0.67%) VB
19 27 (0.55%) Perl
20 26 (0.53%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,051 (21.22%) Security Cleared
2 850 (17.16%) SC Cleared
3 377 (7.61%) Degree
4 128 (2.58%) BPSS Clearance
5 116 (2.34%) Computer Science Degree
6 97 (1.96%) DV Cleared
7 76 (1.53%) Azure Certification
8 66 (1.33%) Master's Degree
9 55 (1.11%) ISTQB
10 43 (0.87%) Microsoft Certification
11 36 (0.73%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.36%) DBS Check
12 18 (0.36%) PhD
13 14 (0.28%) CISSP
14 11 (0.22%) SnowPro
15 10 (0.20%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 10 (0.20%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 10 (0.20%) TOGAF Certification
16 9 (0.18%) ACCA
16 9 (0.18%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 888 (17.93%) Data Quality
2 382 (7.71%) QA
3 186 (3.76%) GDPR
4 60 (1.21%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.89%) SLA
6 26 (0.53%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 24 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 21 (0.42%) PMO
9 20 (0.40%) ISO 20022
9 20 (0.40%) NIST
10 17 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
11 16 (0.32%) IFRS
11 16 (0.32%) Solvency II
12 15 (0.30%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 15 (0.30%) MiFID
13 14 (0.28%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.26%) PCI DSS
15 12 (0.24%) NCSC
16 11 (0.22%) HL7
17 10 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 515 (10.40%) Docker
2 113 (2.28%) Active Directory
3 46 (0.93%) Virtual Machines
4 36 (0.73%) VMware Infrastructure
5 28 (0.57%) Oracle RAC
6 20 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
7 19 (0.38%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.26%) VMware NSX
9 12 (0.24%) vCloud
10 10 (0.20%) KVM
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
11 9 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
12 5 (0.10%) RACF
13 4 (0.081%) Ceph
13 4 (0.081%) HDFS
14 3 (0.061%) Squid
15 2 (0.040%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.040%) GridGain
15 2 (0.040%) XenApp
15 2 (0.040%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 420 (8.48%) Kubernetes
2 387 (7.82%) Terraform
3 114 (2.30%) Grafana
4 94 (1.90%) Ansible
5 56 (1.13%) Prometheus
6 40 (0.81%) Oracle RMAN
7 29 (0.59%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.46%) Kibana
9 22 (0.44%) Control-M
10 19 (0.38%) vCenter Server
11 18 (0.36%) SCOM
12 17 (0.34%) Single Sign-On
13 16 (0.32%) ZABBIX
14 15 (0.30%) Tivoli
15 14 (0.28%) Nagios
15 14 (0.28%) Netcool
16 13 (0.26%) OpenView
16 13 (0.26%) Tivoli Monitoring
17 9 (0.18%) Progress Chef
18 8 (0.16%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 861 (17.39%) Oracle
2 777 (15.69%) Microsoft
3 583 (11.77%) Databricks
4 183 (3.70%) Google
4 183 (3.70%) Informatica
5 146 (2.95%) Talend
6 139 (2.81%) ServiceNow
7 125 (2.52%) SAP
8 89 (1.80%) Splunk
9 88 (1.78%) IBM
10 71 (1.43%) Denodo
11 61 (1.23%) Salesforce
12 56 (1.13%) VMware
13 42 (0.85%) Citrix
13 42 (0.85%) Dynatrace
14 39 (0.79%) Bloomberg
14 39 (0.79%) Sybase
15 36 (0.73%) Murex
16 33 (0.67%) MuleSoft
16 33 (0.67%) OpenAI