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

6 months to
18 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,834 3,599 4,338
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.59% 12.09% 9.89%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.73% 35.67% 32.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,213 2,530 3,120
10th Percentile £350 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £410 £417
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £613 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £471 £475
% change year-on-year -0.42% -0.84% -3.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 86 71 63
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.00 £22.64
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.36 £30.00
Median hourly rate £48.75 £40.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +20.37% -4.71% -20.93%
75th Percentile £71.13 £55.63 £53.94
90th Percentile £82.63 £76.25 £62.37
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £41.96 £41.38
% change year-on-year +13.22% +1.40% -17.25%

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 13,529 10,089 13,246
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.84% 33.90% 30.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,814 6,837 9,299
10th Percentile £358 £350 £350
25th Percentile £417 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £603 £626 £650
90th Percentile £716 £758 £769
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +2.75% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 553 237 546
10th Percentile £35.25 £25.55 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.60 £84.70 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £63.25
% change year-on-year +4.84% -1.98% +1.20%

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 18 June 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 18 June 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 18 June 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 4,242 £500 - 1,777
London -2 2,301 £525 -1.87% 756
UK excluding London -10 2,050 £469 -0.42% 1,452
Work from Home -5 1,439 £500 -2.44% 917
North of England -5 541 £460 -3.16% 387
Midlands +3 538 £463 +7.31% 212
West Midlands +5 440 £459 +1.32% 111
South East -10 416 £475 -5.00% 431
North West -2 286 £463 -2.63% 249
South West 0 232 £500 +5.26% 139
Yorkshire -11 215 £475 - 90
Scotland -9 191 £468 +3.89% 58
East of England -13 107 £495 +1.54% 109
East Midlands -1 94 £525 +38.16% 101
North East -12 52 £425 -8.36% 53
Wales +8 42 £450 +5.88% 39
Northern Ireland -13 13 £394 -21.25% 107

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
1 245 (5.07%) Apache Spark
2 199 (4.12%) Apache Airflow
3 197 (4.08%) Confluence
4 175 (3.62%) Apache
5 111 (2.30%) SAS
6 61 (1.26%) SharePoint
7 43 (0.89%) Tomcat
8 33 (0.68%) IIS
8 33 (0.68%) Oracle Workflow
9 32 (0.66%) WebLogic
10 31 (0.64%) WebSphere
11 25 (0.52%) Jupyter
12 22 (0.46%) Apache Geronimo
12 22 (0.46%) Apache ServiceMix
12 22 (0.46%) Red Hat Fuse
13 19 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
13 19 (0.39%) nginx
14 18 (0.37%) Appian
14 18 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
15 16 (0.33%) CMS
Applications
1 306 (6.33%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.12%) Microsoft Office
3 50 (1.03%) MS Visio
4 36 (0.74%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 32 (0.66%) Spreadsheet
6 10 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.062%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.041%) Acrobat
10 2 (0.041%) Notion
10 2 (0.041%) Photoshop
11 1 (0.021%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.021%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.021%) InDesign
11 1 (0.021%) Mingle
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
11 1 (0.021%) Weka
Business Applications
1 40 (0.83%) Oracle EBS
2 33 (0.68%) Dynamics CRM
3 27 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
4 26 (0.54%) Aladdin
5 23 (0.48%) Oracle Payables
6 21 (0.43%) Oracle ERP
7 20 (0.41%) NEC Housing
8 16 (0.33%) Oracle EBS R12
8 16 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
9 15 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
10 11 (0.23%) Findur
10 11 (0.23%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 10 (0.21%) Endur
11 10 (0.21%) NetSuite
11 10 (0.21%) Oracle General Ledger
11 10 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
11 10 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
12 9 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
12 9 (0.19%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 8 (0.17%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,582 (32.73%) Azure
2 1,192 (24.66%) AWS
3 918 (18.99%) Power Platform
4 450 (9.31%) Azure DevOps
5 400 (8.27%) GCP
6 354 (7.32%) Azure Data Factory
7 352 (7.28%) GitHub
8 318 (6.58%) Serverless
9 292 (6.04%) Snowflake
10 273 (5.65%) Amazon S3
11 227 (4.70%) dbt
12 221 (4.57%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 196 (4.05%) AWS Lambda
14 184 (3.81%) GitHub Actions
15 88 (1.82%) Power Automate
16 87 (1.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 83 (1.72%) Entra ID
17 83 (1.72%) SaaS
18 82 (1.70%) Azure Functions
19 77 (1.59%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 55 (1.14%) DNS
2 47 (0.97%) Firewall
3 24 (0.50%) WAN
4 22 (0.46%) HTTP
4 22 (0.46%) SNMP
5 21 (0.43%) Network Security
6 20 (0.41%) SSL
7 17 (0.35%) Internet
7 17 (0.35%) VPN
8 14 (0.29%) TCP/IP
9 11 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
10 10 (0.21%) LAN
10 10 (0.21%) SAN
11 9 (0.19%) Wireshark
12 8 (0.17%) 3GPP
12 8 (0.17%) HTTPS
12 8 (0.17%) Kerberos
13 7 (0.14%) NAS
13 7 (0.14%) PuTTY
13 7 (0.14%) WinSCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 845 (17.48%) Power BI
2 623 (12.89%) Data Warehouse
3 591 (12.23%) SQL Server
4 327 (6.76%) Data Lake
5 322 (6.66%) Relational Database
6 320 (6.62%) PostgreSQL
7 314 (6.50%) Tableau
8 263 (5.44%) NoSQL
9 252 (5.21%) Metadata
10 227 (4.70%) Azure SQL Database
11 184 (3.81%) Oracle Database
12 168 (3.48%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 154 (3.19%) BigQuery
14 147 (3.04%) Big Data
15 145 (3.00%) Amazon Redshift
16 135 (2.79%) Delta Lake
17 124 (2.57%) MySQL
18 116 (2.40%) Oracle Reports
19 110 (2.28%) MongoDB
20 106 (2.19%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 526 (10.88%) Git
2 386 (7.99%) JIRA
3 247 (5.11%) Jenkins
4 231 (4.78%) GitLab
5 71 (1.47%) JUnit
6 55 (1.14%) Selenium
7 53 (1.10%) Maven
7 53 (1.10%) Postman
8 51 (1.06%) Mockito
9 49 (1.01%) Gradle
10 38 (0.79%) Visual Studio
11 36 (0.74%) MLflow
12 35 (0.72%) Cucumber
12 35 (0.72%) Oracle Forms
13 33 (0.68%) SonarQube
14 30 (0.62%) JMeter
15 28 (0.58%) Bitbucket
15 28 (0.58%) ERwin
15 28 (0.58%) Liquibase
16 26 (0.54%) Zephyr
General
1 1,245 (25.76%) Finance
2 1,227 (25.38%) Social Skills
3 900 (18.62%) Analytical Skills
4 446 (9.23%) Banking
5 444 (9.18%) Public Sector
6 130 (2.69%) Front Office
7 122 (2.52%) Investment Banking
8 119 (2.46%) Marketing
9 105 (2.17%) Documentation Skills
10 100 (2.07%) Retail
11 86 (1.78%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 57 (1.18%) Legal
13 55 (1.14%) Financial Institution
14 49 (1.01%) Publishing
15 44 (0.91%) Manufacturing
15 44 (0.91%) Presentation Skills
16 34 (0.70%) Organisational Skills
16 34 (0.70%) Telecoms
17 32 (0.66%) Back Office
18 31 (0.64%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,007 (20.83%) Developer
2 1,005 (20.79%) Data Engineer
3 693 (14.34%) Analyst
4 628 (12.99%) Senior
5 325 (6.72%) Lead
6 304 (6.29%) Data Analyst
7 279 (5.77%) Architect
8 234 (4.84%) Consultant
9 206 (4.26%) Business Analyst
10 203 (4.20%) Java Developer
11 188 (3.89%) Senior Data Engineer
12 168 (3.48%) DBA
13 146 (3.02%) Software Engineer
14 144 (2.98%) Senior Developer
15 120 (2.48%) Azure Engineer
16 110 (2.28%) SQL Developer
17 109 (2.25%) C# Developer
18 108 (2.23%) Python Developer
19 104 (2.15%) Data Architect
20 94 (1.94%) SQL DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 397 (8.21%) .NET
2 362 (7.49%) REST
3 307 (6.35%) PySpark
4 296 (6.12%) Kafka
5 253 (5.23%) Spring
6 245 (5.07%) Spring Boot
7 228 (4.72%) React
8 214 (4.43%) RESTful
9 172 (3.56%) JSON
10 157 (3.25%) HTML
11 155 (3.21%) XML
12 140 (2.90%) CSS
13 129 (2.67%) Pandas
14 115 (2.38%) AngularJS
15 114 (2.36%) Middleware
15 114 (2.36%) SOAP
16 112 (2.32%) Web Services
17 89 (1.84%) .NET Framework
18 85 (1.76%) OAuth
19 78 (1.61%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 319 (6.60%) Cloud Native
2 200 (4.14%) Data Structures
3 178 (3.68%) Legacy Systems
4 148 (3.06%) Product Ownership
5 142 (2.94%) Distributed Systems
6 98 (2.03%) Management Information System
7 92 (1.90%) Derivative
7 92 (1.90%) Onboarding
8 78 (1.61%) Data Protection Act
9 71 (1.47%) Analytical Mindset
9 71 (1.47%) Enterprise Software
10 68 (1.41%) Self-Motivation
11 64 (1.32%) Algorithms
12 60 (1.24%) Clustering
13 54 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
14 49 (1.01%) Replication
15 48 (0.99%) Equities
16 47 (0.97%) Fixed Income
16 47 (0.97%) Low-Code
17 42 (0.87%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 317 (6.56%) Linux
2 274 (5.67%) Windows
3 225 (4.65%) Unix
4 104 (2.15%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.52%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.50%) AIX
7 18 (0.37%) Windows Server 2019
8 17 (0.35%) Solaris
9 13 (0.27%) Windows Server 2016
10 11 (0.23%) VMS
10 11 (0.23%) Windows Server 2008
11 8 (0.17%) Apple iOS
11 8 (0.17%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Android
12 7 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 4 (0.083%) Oracle Linux
14 3 (0.062%) Windows Server 2012
15 2 (0.041%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.041%) HPUX
15 2 (0.041%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,309 (27.08%) CI/CD
2 1,222 (25.28%) Agile
3 1,219 (25.22%) Data Modelling
4 1,214 (25.11%) Analytics
5 1,113 (23.02%) ETL
6 1,067 (22.07%) Business Intelligence
7 1,010 (20.89%) DevOps
8 946 (19.57%) Problem-Solving
9 943 (19.51%) Data Pipeline
10 793 (16.40%) Data Engineering
11 687 (14.21%) AI
12 647 (13.38%) Migration
13 609 (12.60%) Validation
14 547 (11.32%) Data Governance
15 490 (10.14%) Test Automation
16 486 (10.05%) Decision-Making
17 465 (9.62%) Data Analysis
18 454 (9.39%) Stakeholder Management
19 437 (9.04%) Performance Tuning
20 431 (8.92%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,791 (37.05%) Python
2 646 (13.36%) Java
3 487 (10.07%) C#
4 362 (7.49%) PL/SQL
5 333 (6.89%) JavaScript
6 252 (5.21%) T-SQL
7 234 (4.84%) PowerShell
8 165 (3.41%) TypeScript
9 141 (2.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 117 (2.42%) Shell Script
11 116 (2.40%) R
12 92 (1.90%) Bash
13 81 (1.68%) C++
14 78 (1.61%) Scala
15 53 (1.10%) Bicep
16 46 (0.95%) VBA
17 35 (0.72%) Perl
17 35 (0.72%) VB
18 34 (0.70%) C
19 25 (0.52%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,038 (21.47%) Security Cleared
2 843 (17.44%) SC Cleared
3 367 (7.59%) Degree
4 124 (2.57%) BPSS Clearance
5 113 (2.34%) Computer Science Degree
6 93 (1.92%) DV Cleared
7 75 (1.55%) Azure Certification
8 66 (1.37%) Master's Degree
9 58 (1.20%) ISTQB
10 45 (0.93%) Microsoft Certification
11 36 (0.74%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.37%) DBS Check
13 17 (0.35%) PhD
14 13 (0.27%) CISSP
14 13 (0.27%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 10 (0.21%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 10 (0.21%) PMI Certification
15 10 (0.21%) SnowPro
16 9 (0.19%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 9 (0.19%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 888 (18.37%) Data Quality
2 368 (7.61%) QA
3 185 (3.83%) GDPR
4 59 (1.22%) Accessibility
5 45 (0.93%) SLA
6 31 (0.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 30 (0.62%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 25 (0.52%) NIST
9 23 (0.48%) PMO
10 18 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
11 17 (0.35%) IFRS
12 16 (0.33%) ISO 20022
12 16 (0.33%) PCI DSS
13 15 (0.31%) Solvency II
14 14 (0.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 14 (0.29%) HIPAA
14 14 (0.29%) MiFID
15 13 (0.27%) NCSC
16 11 (0.23%) HL7
16 11 (0.23%) WCAG
System Software
1 527 (10.90%) Docker
2 106 (2.19%) Active Directory
3 40 (0.83%) Virtual Machines
4 36 (0.74%) VMware Infrastructure
5 30 (0.62%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.43%) Hyper-V
7 19 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
8 12 (0.25%) VMware NSX
9 11 (0.23%) vCloud
10 10 (0.21%) KVM
10 10 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
11 9 (0.19%) Postfix
12 6 (0.12%) HDFS
12 6 (0.12%) RACF
13 4 (0.083%) Ceph
13 4 (0.083%) XenApp
13 4 (0.083%) XenDesktop
14 3 (0.062%) Squid
15 2 (0.041%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.041%) GridGain
Systems Management
1 420 (8.69%) Kubernetes
2 388 (8.03%) Terraform
3 118 (2.44%) Grafana
4 86 (1.78%) Ansible
5 60 (1.24%) Prometheus
6 41 (0.85%) Oracle RMAN
7 30 (0.62%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.48%) Control-M
9 22 (0.46%) Kibana
10 20 (0.41%) Single Sign-On
11 18 (0.37%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.33%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.31%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.29%) Nagios
14 14 (0.29%) Netcool
15 13 (0.27%) OpenView
15 13 (0.27%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 12 (0.25%) SCOM
17 8 (0.17%) HP Quality Center
17 8 (0.17%) WMI
Vendors
1 839 (17.36%) Oracle
2 751 (15.54%) Microsoft
3 574 (11.87%) Databricks
4 182 (3.76%) Informatica
5 181 (3.74%) Google
6 145 (3.00%) Talend
7 136 (2.81%) ServiceNow
8 125 (2.59%) SAP
9 91 (1.88%) Splunk
10 85 (1.76%) IBM
11 72 (1.49%) Denodo
12 56 (1.16%) VMware
13 55 (1.14%) Salesforce
14 44 (0.91%) Citrix
15 39 (0.81%) Dynatrace
16 37 (0.77%) Sybase
17 36 (0.74%) Bloomberg
17 36 (0.74%) OpenAI
18 34 (0.70%) Murex
19 33 (0.68%) MuleSoft