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

6 months to
7 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,014 3,777 4,358
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.63% 11.87% 10.07%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.86% 35.34% 32.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,304 2,631 3,149
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £613 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -0.11% -1.16% -3.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 90 73 62
10th Percentile £26.35 £23.09 £21.65
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.47 £27.19
Median hourly rate £44.75 £42.82 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.52% +0.74% -17.07%
75th Percentile £67.75 £53.75 £51.75
90th Percentile £82.33 £67.20 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +25.00% -17.29%

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 13,981 10,688 13,281
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.85% 33.58% 30.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,074 7,205 9,329
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.14% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £721 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +3.58% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 537 255 536
10th Percentile £34.01 £27.00 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £35.00 £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 £79.00 £78.22 £75.00
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 7 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 7 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 7 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 4,384 £500 - 2,410
London -5 2,354 £525 -0.94% 908
UK excluding London -8 2,143 £469 -0.11% 1,952
Work from Home -6 1,489 £500 -1.96% 1,820
North of England -3 572 £465 -2.11% 488
Midlands +3 559 £460 +8.24% 314
West Midlands +5 461 £459 +2.00% 145
South East -8 451 £483 -3.50% 541
North West -1 302 £475 +1.06% 266
South West -5 232 £500 +12.68% 195
Yorkshire -7 232 £481 +1.32% 148
Scotland -8 191 £450 - 118
East of England -15 106 £491 +0.77% 195
East Midlands -2 94 £525 +38.16% 169
North East -18 50 £419 -9.70% 79
Wales +5 47 £450 +5.88% 61
Northern Ireland -9 15 £375 -25.93% 70

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 (4.75%) Apache Spark
2 214 (4.27%) Confluence
3 205 (4.09%) Apache Airflow
4 178 (3.55%) Apache
5 114 (2.27%) SAS
6 57 (1.14%) SharePoint
7 42 (0.84%) Tomcat
8 39 (0.78%) Oracle Workflow
9 38 (0.76%) IIS
10 37 (0.74%) WebLogic
11 32 (0.64%) 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 20 (0.40%) CMS
15 20 (0.40%) Palantir Foundry
16 17 (0.34%) Appian
16 17 (0.34%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 315 (6.28%) Microsoft Excel
2 65 (1.30%) Microsoft Office
3 54 (1.08%) MS Visio
4 35 (0.70%) Spreadsheet
5 34 (0.68%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.080%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.080%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.060%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.060%) Notion
9 3 (0.060%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.020%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Mingle
10 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 43 (0.86%) Oracle EBS
2 39 (0.78%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
4 28 (0.56%) Aladdin
5 24 (0.48%) Oracle ERP
6 21 (0.42%) Oracle Payables
7 19 (0.38%) NEC Housing
8 17 (0.34%) Oracle EBS R12
8 17 (0.34%) 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
13 8 (0.16%) NetSuite
13 8 (0.16%) Oracle Cash Management
13 8 (0.16%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,601 (31.93%) Azure
2 1,213 (24.19%) AWS
3 930 (18.55%) Power Platform
4 446 (8.90%) Azure DevOps
5 416 (8.30%) GCP
6 357 (7.12%) GitHub
7 342 (6.82%) Azure Data Factory
8 311 (6.20%) Snowflake
9 309 (6.16%) Serverless
10 269 (5.36%) Amazon S3
11 247 (4.93%) dbt
12 219 (4.37%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 198 (3.95%) AWS Lambda
14 185 (3.69%) GitHub Actions
15 95 (1.89%) SaaS
16 88 (1.76%) Entra ID
17 85 (1.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 84 (1.68%) Power Automate
19 78 (1.56%) PowerApps
20 77 (1.54%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 51 (1.02%) DNS
2 41 (0.82%) Firewall
3 26 (0.52%) SSL
4 25 (0.50%) HTTP
5 22 (0.44%) Network Security
5 22 (0.44%) SNMP
6 20 (0.40%) Internet
6 20 (0.40%) WAN
7 18 (0.36%) VPN
8 12 (0.24%) TCP/IP
9 10 (0.20%) SAN
10 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
10 9 (0.18%) Kerberos
10 9 (0.18%) WinSCP
10 9 (0.18%) Wireshark
11 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
11 8 (0.16%) Wi-Fi
12 7 (0.14%) LAN
12 7 (0.14%) NAS
12 7 (0.14%) PuTTY
Database & Business Intelligence
1 854 (17.03%) Power BI
2 652 (13.00%) Data Warehouse
3 633 (12.62%) SQL Server
4 341 (6.80%) Relational Database
5 326 (6.50%) Tableau
6 317 (6.32%) PostgreSQL
7 309 (6.16%) Data Lake
8 258 (5.15%) NoSQL
9 254 (5.07%) Metadata
10 215 (4.29%) Azure SQL Database
11 198 (3.95%) Oracle Database
12 166 (3.31%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 162 (3.23%) BigQuery
14 149 (2.97%) Amazon Redshift
15 143 (2.85%) Big Data
15 143 (2.85%) Delta Lake
16 123 (2.45%) MySQL
17 120 (2.39%) Oracle Reports
18 115 (2.29%) MongoDB
19 111 (2.21%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 544 (10.85%) Git
2 399 (7.96%) JIRA
3 265 (5.29%) Jenkins
4 225 (4.49%) GitLab
5 78 (1.56%) JUnit
6 59 (1.18%) Selenium
7 57 (1.14%) Maven
8 56 (1.12%) Postman
9 52 (1.04%) Mockito
10 50 (1.00%) Gradle
11 43 (0.86%) Oracle Forms
12 37 (0.74%) Visual Studio
13 35 (0.70%) MLflow
14 34 (0.68%) Cucumber
15 33 (0.66%) SonarQube
16 32 (0.64%) Bitbucket
16 32 (0.64%) JMeter
17 28 (0.56%) ERwin
17 28 (0.56%) Liquibase
18 27 (0.54%) REST Assured
General
1 1,285 (25.63%) Social Skills
2 1,283 (25.59%) Finance
3 959 (19.13%) Analytical Skills
4 470 (9.37%) Banking
5 460 (9.17%) Public Sector
6 139 (2.77%) Front Office
7 132 (2.63%) Marketing
8 127 (2.53%) Investment Banking
9 122 (2.43%) Retail
10 107 (2.13%) Documentation Skills
11 92 (1.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 61 (1.22%) Legal
13 60 (1.20%) Manufacturing
14 57 (1.14%) Financial Institution
15 53 (1.06%) Presentation Skills
16 42 (0.84%) Publishing
17 39 (0.78%) Back Office
18 37 (0.74%) Organisational Skills
19 36 (0.72%) Telecoms
20 31 (0.62%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,069 (21.32%) Developer
2 1,009 (20.12%) Data Engineer
3 733 (14.62%) Analyst
4 662 (13.20%) Senior
5 350 (6.98%) Lead
6 314 (6.26%) Data Analyst
7 283 (5.64%) Architect
8 240 (4.79%) Consultant
9 233 (4.65%) Business Analyst
10 209 (4.17%) Java Developer
11 196 (3.91%) Senior Data Engineer
12 184 (3.67%) DBA
13 154 (3.07%) Senior Developer
14 141 (2.81%) Software Engineer
15 122 (2.43%) Azure Engineer
16 119 (2.37%) SQL Developer
17 115 (2.29%) SQL DBA
18 112 (2.23%) C# Developer
19 110 (2.19%) Python Developer
20 107 (2.13%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 413 (8.24%) .NET
2 379 (7.56%) REST
3 311 (6.20%) PySpark
4 306 (6.10%) Kafka
5 261 (5.21%) Spring
6 250 (4.99%) Spring Boot
7 230 (4.59%) React
8 216 (4.31%) RESTful
9 183 (3.65%) JSON
10 166 (3.31%) XML
11 156 (3.11%) HTML
12 135 (2.69%) CSS
13 130 (2.59%) AngularJS
14 127 (2.53%) Pandas
14 127 (2.53%) Web Services
15 121 (2.41%) Middleware
16 117 (2.33%) SOAP
17 100 (1.99%) .NET Framework
18 77 (1.54%) Node.js
19 74 (1.48%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 330 (6.58%) Cloud Native
2 214 (4.27%) Data Structures
3 181 (3.61%) Legacy Systems
4 171 (3.41%) Product Ownership
5 142 (2.83%) Distributed Systems
6 97 (1.93%) Derivative
7 94 (1.87%) Onboarding
8 88 (1.76%) Management Information System
9 85 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
10 77 (1.54%) Analytical Mindset
11 76 (1.52%) Self-Motivation
12 75 (1.50%) Data Protection Act
13 70 (1.40%) Algorithms
14 64 (1.28%) Clustering
15 58 (1.16%) Replication
16 55 (1.10%) Equities
16 55 (1.10%) Greenfield Project
17 53 (1.06%) Fixed Income
18 47 (0.94%) NHS
19 43 (0.86%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 328 (6.54%) Linux
2 297 (5.92%) Windows
3 234 (4.67%) Unix
4 118 (2.35%) Windows Server
5 26 (0.52%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.48%) AIX
7 19 (0.38%) 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 (0.080%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.080%) Ubuntu
15 3 (0.060%) Windows Server 2012
16 2 (0.040%) Data ONTAP
16 2 (0.040%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,334 (26.61%) CI/CD
2 1,290 (25.73%) Agile
3 1,280 (25.53%) Analytics
4 1,251 (24.95%) Data Modelling
5 1,126 (22.46%) ETL
6 1,083 (21.60%) Business Intelligence
7 1,017 (20.28%) DevOps
8 986 (19.66%) Problem-Solving
9 975 (19.45%) Data Pipeline
10 824 (16.43%) Data Engineering
11 719 (14.34%) AI
12 678 (13.52%) Migration
13 639 (12.74%) Validation
14 560 (11.17%) Data Governance
15 516 (10.29%) Test Automation
16 508 (10.13%) Decision-Making
17 501 (9.99%) Data Analysis
18 480 (9.57%) Stakeholder Management
19 466 (9.29%) Continuous Improvement
20 447 (8.92%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,824 (36.38%) Python
2 657 (13.10%) Java
3 494 (9.85%) C#
4 382 (7.62%) PL/SQL
5 334 (6.66%) JavaScript
6 267 (5.33%) T-SQL
7 244 (4.87%) PowerShell
8 177 (3.53%) TypeScript
9 145 (2.89%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 123 (2.45%) Shell Script
11 114 (2.27%) R
12 94 (1.87%) Bash
13 82 (1.64%) Scala
14 72 (1.44%) C++
15 48 (0.96%) Bicep
16 47 (0.94%) VBA
17 38 (0.76%) C
18 33 (0.66%) VB
19 27 (0.54%) Perl
20 26 (0.52%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,071 (21.36%) Security Cleared
2 868 (17.31%) SC Cleared
3 384 (7.66%) Degree
4 134 (2.67%) BPSS Clearance
5 119 (2.37%) Computer Science Degree
6 101 (2.01%) DV Cleared
7 74 (1.48%) Azure Certification
8 65 (1.30%) Master's Degree
9 54 (1.08%) ISTQB
10 41 (0.82%) Microsoft Certification
11 36 (0.72%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.36%) DBS Check
12 18 (0.36%) PhD
13 15 (0.30%) CISSP
14 11 (0.22%) SnowPro
15 10 (0.20%) CISM
15 10 (0.20%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 10 (0.20%) TOGAF Certification
16 9 (0.18%) ACCA
16 9 (0.18%) CIMA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 900 (17.95%) Data Quality
2 389 (7.76%) QA
3 187 (3.73%) GDPR
4 62 (1.24%) Accessibility
5 47 (0.94%) SLA
6 27 (0.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 23 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 21 (0.42%) PMO
9 19 (0.38%) ISO 20022
9 19 (0.38%) NIST
10 17 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
10 17 (0.34%) IFRS
10 17 (0.34%) Solvency II
11 15 (0.30%) MiFID
12 14 (0.28%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 13 (0.26%) PCI DSS
14 11 (0.22%) HL7
14 11 (0.22%) NCSC
14 11 (0.22%) WCAG
System Software
1 506 (10.09%) Docker
2 116 (2.31%) Active Directory
3 45 (0.90%) Virtual Machines
4 37 (0.74%) VMware Infrastructure
5 35 (0.70%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.40%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.28%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.26%) vCloud
10 10 (0.20%) KVM
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
12 8 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
13 5 (0.100%) RACF
14 4 (0.080%) Ceph
14 4 (0.080%) HDFS
15 3 (0.060%) Squid
16 2 (0.040%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 2 (0.040%) GridGain
16 2 (0.040%) XenApp
16 2 (0.040%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 418 (8.34%) Kubernetes
2 390 (7.78%) Terraform
3 113 (2.25%) Grafana
4 92 (1.83%) Ansible
5 54 (1.08%) Prometheus
6 43 (0.86%) Oracle RMAN
7 36 (0.72%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.46%) Kibana
9 22 (0.44%) Control-M
10 20 (0.40%) vCenter Server
11 19 (0.38%) SCOM
12 16 (0.32%) Single Sign-On
12 16 (0.32%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.30%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.28%) Nagios
14 14 (0.28%) Netcool
15 13 (0.26%) OpenView
15 13 (0.26%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 9 (0.18%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
16 9 (0.18%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 884 (17.63%) Oracle
2 780 (15.56%) Microsoft
3 585 (11.67%) Databricks
4 187 (3.73%) Google
5 186 (3.71%) Informatica
6 147 (2.93%) Talend
7 138 (2.75%) ServiceNow
8 124 (2.47%) SAP
9 90 (1.79%) IBM
9 90 (1.79%) Splunk
10 71 (1.42%) Denodo
11 61 (1.22%) Salesforce
12 58 (1.16%) VMware
13 45 (0.90%) Citrix
14 43 (0.86%) Dynatrace
15 41 (0.82%) Bloomberg
16 40 (0.80%) Sybase
17 39 (0.78%) Murex
18 34 (0.68%) MuleSoft
19 33 (0.66%) Alteryx