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

6 months to
2 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,951 3,697 4,376
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.62% 11.94% 10.08%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.77% 35.41% 32.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,265 2,576 3,144
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £590 £613 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -0.21% -1.05% -2.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 90 72 61
10th Percentile £26.35 £23.05 £22.61
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.42 £30.00
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 £51.91
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 13,842 10,442 13,271
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.90% 33.72% 30.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,981 7,047 9,322
10th Percentile £358 £350 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £511 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.20% -2.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £753 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £491 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.37% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 547 253 538
10th Percentile £34.08 £26.46 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.75 £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 £77.70 £79.74 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.25 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.42% -4.23% +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 2 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 2 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 2 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 4,336 £500 - 2,224
London -4 2,326 £525 -1.87% 1,027
UK excluding London -10 2,123 £469 -0.21% 1,519
Work from Home -6 1,471 £500 -1.96% 1,101
North of England -4 567 £463 -2.63% 413
Midlands +3 550 £460 +8.24% 248
West Midlands +5 452 £459 +2.00% 124
South East -11 444 £490 -2.00% 482
North West -2 300 £472 -0.11% 247
South West -4 232 £503 +9.84% 147
Yorkshire -6 230 £475 - 107
Scotland -9 193 £450 - 60
East of England -10 108 £495 +1.54% 117
East Midlands -3 94 £525 +38.16% 124
North East -12 49 £413 -11.05% 63
Wales +6 45 £450 +5.88% 39
Northern Ireland -11 14 £375 -25.93% 38

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
1 237 (4.79%) Apache Spark
2 213 (4.30%) Confluence
3 203 (4.10%) Apache Airflow
4 178 (3.60%) 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
1 307 (6.20%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.23%) Microsoft Office
3 53 (1.07%) 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 42 (0.85%) 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 17 (0.34%) Oracle EBS R12
9 16 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
10 13 (0.26%) Oracle Receivables
11 11 (0.22%) Findur
11 11 (0.22%) Salesforce CRM
11 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.20%) Elite 3E
12 10 (0.20%) Finacle
13 9 (0.18%) Fidessa
13 9 (0.18%) Oracle Assets
13 9 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
14 8 (0.16%) Oracle General Ledger
14 8 (0.16%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,586 (32.03%) Azure
2 1,201 (24.26%) AWS
3 924 (18.66%) Power Platform
4 445 (8.99%) Azure DevOps
5 407 (8.22%) GCP
6 353 (7.13%) GitHub
7 343 (6.93%) Azure Data Factory
8 307 (6.20%) Snowflake
9 305 (6.16%) Serverless
10 266 (5.37%) Amazon S3
11 242 (4.89%) dbt
12 216 (4.36%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 194 (3.92%) AWS Lambda
14 183 (3.70%) GitHub Actions
15 91 (1.84%) SaaS
16 87 (1.76%) Entra ID
16 87 (1.76%) Power Automate
17 84 (1.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 79 (1.60%) PowerApps
19 76 (1.54%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 50 (1.01%) DNS
2 42 (0.85%) 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%) SAN
11 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
11 9 (0.18%) Kerberos
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
1 849 (17.15%) Power BI
2 647 (13.07%) Data Warehouse
3 620 (12.52%) SQL Server
4 337 (6.81%) Relational Database
5 320 (6.46%) Tableau
6 319 (6.44%) PostgreSQL
7 308 (6.22%) Data Lake
8 256 (5.17%) NoSQL
9 246 (4.97%) Metadata
10 218 (4.40%) Azure SQL Database
11 191 (3.86%) Oracle Database
12 168 (3.39%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 159 (3.21%) BigQuery
14 149 (3.01%) Amazon Redshift
15 142 (2.87%) Big Data
16 141 (2.85%) Delta Lake
17 126 (2.54%) MySQL
18 119 (2.40%) Oracle Reports
19 117 (2.36%) MongoDB
20 109 (2.20%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 542 (10.95%) Git
2 399 (8.06%) JIRA
3 262 (5.29%) Jenkins
4 223 (4.50%) GitLab
5 77 (1.56%) 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 41 (0.83%) Oracle Forms
11 37 (0.75%) Visual Studio
12 36 (0.73%) MLflow
13 35 (0.71%) Cucumber
14 33 (0.67%) SonarQube
15 32 (0.65%) JMeter
16 29 (0.59%) Bitbucket
17 28 (0.57%) ERwin
17 28 (0.57%) Liquibase
18 27 (0.55%) Zephyr
General
1 1,273 (25.71%) Finance
2 1,272 (25.69%) Social Skills
3 941 (19.01%) Analytical Skills
4 471 (9.51%) Banking
5 449 (9.07%) Public Sector
6 136 (2.75%) Front Office
7 127 (2.57%) Investment Banking
7 127 (2.57%) Marketing
8 119 (2.40%) Retail
9 107 (2.16%) Documentation Skills
10 92 (1.86%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 61 (1.23%) Legal
12 59 (1.19%) Financial Institution
12 59 (1.19%) Manufacturing
13 52 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
14 42 (0.85%) Publishing
15 38 (0.77%) Back Office
16 36 (0.73%) Organisational Skills
17 35 (0.71%) Telecoms
18 31 (0.63%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,051 (21.23%) Developer
2 994 (20.08%) Data Engineer
3 723 (14.60%) Analyst
4 647 (13.07%) Senior
5 344 (6.95%) Lead
6 306 (6.18%) Data Analyst
7 275 (5.55%) Architect
8 240 (4.85%) Consultant
9 232 (4.69%) Business Analyst
10 206 (4.16%) Java Developer
11 188 (3.80%) Senior Data Engineer
12 176 (3.55%) DBA
13 151 (3.05%) Senior Developer
14 146 (2.95%) Software Engineer
15 119 (2.40%) Azure Engineer
16 116 (2.34%) SQL Developer
17 109 (2.20%) Python Developer
18 108 (2.18%) C# Developer
19 104 (2.10%) Data Architect
20 103 (2.08%) SQL DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 409 (8.26%) .NET
2 371 (7.49%) REST
3 312 (6.30%) PySpark
4 299 (6.04%) Kafka
5 257 (5.19%) Spring
6 247 (4.99%) Spring Boot
7 230 (4.65%) React
8 217 (4.38%) RESTful
9 183 (3.70%) JSON
10 165 (3.33%) XML
11 154 (3.11%) HTML
12 137 (2.77%) CSS
13 129 (2.61%) AngularJS
14 125 (2.52%) Pandas
14 125 (2.52%) Web Services
15 120 (2.42%) Middleware
16 114 (2.30%) SOAP
17 95 (1.92%) .NET Framework
18 76 (1.54%) Node.js
19 74 (1.49%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 324 (6.54%) Cloud Native
2 211 (4.26%) Data Structures
3 178 (3.60%) Legacy Systems
4 168 (3.39%) Product Ownership
5 141 (2.85%) Distributed Systems
6 95 (1.92%) Derivative
7 92 (1.86%) Onboarding
8 86 (1.74%) Management Information System
9 84 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
10 76 (1.54%) Analytical Mindset
11 75 (1.51%) Data Protection Act
12 73 (1.47%) Self-Motivation
13 69 (1.39%) Algorithms
14 63 (1.27%) Clustering
15 58 (1.17%) Replication
16 55 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
17 53 (1.07%) Equities
18 51 (1.03%) Fixed Income
19 46 (0.93%) NHS
20 45 (0.91%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 318 (6.42%) Linux
2 289 (5.84%) Windows
3 225 (4.54%) Unix
4 112 (2.26%) Windows Server
5 26 (0.53%) 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 1,325 (26.76%) CI/CD
2 1,275 (25.75%) Agile
3 1,255 (25.35%) Analytics
4 1,233 (24.90%) Data Modelling
5 1,116 (22.54%) ETL
6 1,074 (21.69%) Business Intelligence
7 1,015 (20.50%) DevOps
8 976 (19.71%) Problem-Solving
9 957 (19.33%) Data Pipeline
10 814 (16.44%) Data Engineering
11 708 (14.30%) AI
12 668 (13.49%) Migration
13 623 (12.58%) Validation
14 550 (11.11%) Data Governance
15 507 (10.24%) Test Automation
16 502 (10.14%) Decision-Making
17 495 (10.00%) Data Analysis
18 479 (9.67%) Stakeholder Management
19 455 (9.19%) Continuous Improvement
20 436 (8.81%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,801 (36.38%) Python
2 649 (13.11%) Java
3 489 (9.88%) C#
4 376 (7.59%) PL/SQL
5 331 (6.69%) JavaScript
6 265 (5.35%) T-SQL
7 243 (4.91%) PowerShell
8 176 (3.55%) TypeScript
9 144 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 121 (2.44%) Shell Script
11 112 (2.26%) R
12 94 (1.90%) Bash
13 82 (1.66%) Scala
14 73 (1.47%) C++
15 46 (0.93%) Bicep
15 46 (0.93%) VBA
16 38 (0.77%) C
17 32 (0.65%) VB
18 27 (0.55%) Go
18 27 (0.55%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,049 (21.19%) Security Cleared
2 848 (17.13%) SC Cleared
3 379 (7.66%) Degree
4 129 (2.61%) BPSS Clearance
5 117 (2.36%) Computer Science Degree
6 98 (1.98%) DV Cleared
7 77 (1.56%) Azure Certification
8 65 (1.31%) Master's Degree
9 55 (1.11%) ISTQB
10 43 (0.87%) Microsoft Certification
11 37 (0.75%) 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 Advanced Certification
15 10 (0.20%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 10 (0.20%) TOGAF Certification
16 9 (0.18%) CIMA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 886 (17.90%) Data Quality
2 382 (7.72%) QA
3 186 (3.76%) GDPR
4 60 (1.21%) Accessibility
5 45 (0.91%) SLA
6 26 (0.53%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 24 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 21 (0.42%) PMO
9 20 (0.40%) NIST
10 19 (0.38%) ISO 20022
11 17 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
12 16 (0.32%) IFRS
12 16 (0.32%) Solvency II
13 15 (0.30%) MiFID
14 14 (0.28%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 14 (0.28%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.26%) PCI DSS
16 12 (0.24%) NCSC
17 11 (0.22%) HL7
18 10 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 511 (10.32%) Docker
2 114 (2.30%) Active Directory
3 46 (0.93%) Virtual Machines
4 37 (0.75%) VMware Infrastructure
5 27 (0.55%) Oracle RAC
6 20 (0.40%) Hyper-V
6 20 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
7 13 (0.26%) VMware NSX
8 12 (0.24%) vCloud
9 10 (0.20%) KVM
10 9 (0.18%) Postfix
10 9 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
11 5 (0.10%) RACF
12 4 (0.081%) Ceph
12 4 (0.081%) HDFS
13 3 (0.061%) Squid
14 2 (0.040%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.040%) GridGain
14 2 (0.040%) XenApp
14 2 (0.040%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 418 (8.44%) Kubernetes
2 384 (7.76%) Terraform
3 113 (2.28%) Grafana
4 92 (1.86%) Ansible
5 55 (1.11%) Prometheus
6 39 (0.79%) Oracle RMAN
7 28 (0.57%) 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%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
17 9 (0.18%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 862 (17.41%) Oracle
2 777 (15.69%) Microsoft
3 582 (11.76%) Databricks
4 184 (3.72%) Google
5 183 (3.70%) Informatica
6 146 (2.95%) Talend
7 138 (2.79%) ServiceNow
8 125 (2.52%) SAP
9 89 (1.80%) IBM
9 89 (1.80%) Splunk
10 71 (1.43%) Denodo
11 61 (1.23%) Salesforce
12 57 (1.15%) VMware
13 43 (0.87%) Citrix
14 42 (0.85%) Dynatrace
15 41 (0.83%) Bloomberg
16 39 (0.79%) Sybase
17 37 (0.75%) Murex
18 33 (0.67%) MuleSoft
19 32 (0.65%) Alteryx