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

6 months to
16 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 12 13
Rank change year-on-year -6 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,808 3,588 4,305
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.58% 12.11% 9.88%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.67% 35.71% 32.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,199 2,520 3,098
10th Percentile £350 £353 £350
25th Percentile £413 £410 £418
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £613 £631
90th Percentile £688 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £471 £475
% change year-on-year -0.42% -0.84% -3.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 85 72 61
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.05 £22.61
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.42 £30.00
Median hourly rate £47.50 £41.66 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.03% -1.98% -20.93%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.81 £54.13
90th Percentile £82.25 £75.88 £62.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.15 £50.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year -5.70% +17.65% -15.00%

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 13,481 10,047 13,164
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.85% 33.91% 30.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,783 6,803 9,244
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 £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £764
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +2.63% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 236 542
10th Percentile £35.25 £26.04 £31.35
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 £68.56 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £84.75 £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 16 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 16 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 16 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 4,220 £500 - 2,022
London -3 2,302 £523 -1.32% 909
UK excluding London -10 2,028 £469 -0.42% 1,481
Work from Home -6 1,426 £500 -1.96% 975
Midlands +3 535 £463 +7.31% 237
North of England -6 529 £460 -3.16% 409
West Midlands +4 439 £459 +1.32% 127
South East -13 411 £475 -5.00% 448
North West -1 276 £463 -2.63% 260
South West -4 231 £500 +5.26% 140
Yorkshire -11 212 £475 - 95
Scotland -8 191 £465 +3.33% 72
East of England -16 106 £491 +0.77% 114
East Midlands -1 92 £525 +38.16% 110
North East -11 53 £425 -8.36% 56
Wales +8 42 £450 +5.88% 42
Northern Ireland -12 13 £394 -17.11% 49

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 (5.10%) Apache Spark
2 196 (4.08%) Apache Airflow
3 190 (3.95%) Confluence
4 175 (3.64%) Apache
5 111 (2.31%) SAS
6 60 (1.25%) SharePoint
7 43 (0.89%) Tomcat
8 33 (0.69%) WebLogic
9 32 (0.67%) IIS
9 32 (0.67%) Oracle Workflow
10 31 (0.64%) WebSphere
11 24 (0.50%) Jupyter
12 22 (0.46%) Apache Geronimo
12 22 (0.46%) Apache ServiceMix
12 22 (0.46%) Red Hat Fuse
13 19 (0.40%) nginx
14 18 (0.37%) Microsoft Exchange
14 18 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
15 17 (0.35%) Appian
16 15 (0.31%) CMS
Applications
1 303 (6.30%) Microsoft Excel
2 53 (1.10%) Microsoft Office
3 50 (1.04%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.77%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 32 (0.67%) Spreadsheet
6 10 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.15%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.062%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.042%) Acrobat
10 2 (0.042%) Notion
10 2 (0.042%) Photoshop
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 (0.69%) Dynamics CRM
3 27 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
4 26 (0.54%) Aladdin
5 21 (0.44%) NEC Housing
5 21 (0.44%) Oracle ERP
5 21 (0.44%) Oracle Payables
6 17 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
7 16 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
8 15 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 12 (0.25%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 11 (0.23%) Findur
11 10 (0.21%) Endur
11 10 (0.21%) NetSuite
11 10 (0.21%) Oracle General Ledger
11 10 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
12 9 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
12 9 (0.19%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
12 9 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
13 8 (0.17%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,568 (32.61%) Azure
2 1,187 (24.69%) AWS
3 919 (19.11%) Power Platform
4 449 (9.34%) Azure DevOps
5 390 (8.11%) GCP
6 359 (7.47%) Azure Data Factory
7 358 (7.45%) GitHub
8 319 (6.63%) Serverless
9 294 (6.11%) Snowflake
10 271 (5.64%) Amazon S3
11 225 (4.68%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 222 (4.62%) dbt
13 197 (4.10%) AWS Lambda
14 187 (3.89%) GitHub Actions
15 88 (1.83%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 85 (1.77%) Power Automate
17 82 (1.71%) Azure Functions
17 82 (1.71%) SaaS
18 81 (1.68%) Entra ID
19 75 (1.56%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 56 (1.16%) DNS
2 48 (1.00%) Firewall
3 24 (0.50%) WAN
4 22 (0.46%) HTTP
5 21 (0.44%) SNMP
6 20 (0.42%) Network Security
6 20 (0.42%) SSL
7 17 (0.35%) Internet
8 15 (0.31%) TCP/IP
8 15 (0.31%) VPN
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 (0.15%) NAS
13 7 (0.15%) PuTTY
13 7 (0.15%) WinSCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 845 (17.57%) Power BI
2 624 (12.98%) Data Warehouse
3 585 (12.17%) SQL Server
4 337 (7.01%) Data Lake
5 319 (6.63%) Relational Database
6 316 (6.57%) PostgreSQL
7 312 (6.49%) Tableau
8 261 (5.43%) NoSQL
9 255 (5.30%) Metadata
10 226 (4.70%) Azure SQL Database
11 184 (3.83%) Oracle Database
12 167 (3.47%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 151 (3.14%) BigQuery
14 150 (3.12%) Big Data
15 145 (3.02%) Amazon Redshift
16 136 (2.83%) Delta Lake
17 120 (2.50%) MySQL
18 116 (2.41%) Oracle Reports
19 109 (2.27%) MongoDB
20 106 (2.20%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 524 (10.90%) Git
2 382 (7.95%) JIRA
3 241 (5.01%) Jenkins
4 230 (4.78%) GitLab
5 71 (1.48%) JUnit
6 54 (1.12%) Selenium
7 53 (1.10%) Postman
8 52 (1.08%) Maven
9 51 (1.06%) Mockito
10 46 (0.96%) Gradle
11 38 (0.79%) Visual Studio
12 36 (0.75%) MLflow
13 35 (0.73%) Cucumber
14 33 (0.69%) SonarQube
15 32 (0.67%) Oracle Forms
16 30 (0.62%) JMeter
17 28 (0.58%) Liquibase
18 27 (0.56%) Bitbucket
18 27 (0.56%) ERwin
19 25 (0.52%) Artifactory
General
1 1,238 (25.75%) Finance
2 1,210 (25.17%) Social Skills
3 895 (18.61%) Analytical Skills
4 444 (9.23%) Banking
5 438 (9.11%) Public Sector
6 130 (2.70%) Front Office
7 125 (2.60%) Investment Banking
8 121 (2.52%) Marketing
9 105 (2.18%) Documentation Skills
10 97 (2.02%) Retail
11 85 (1.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 58 (1.21%) Legal
13 56 (1.16%) Financial Institution
14 48 (1.00%) Publishing
15 44 (0.92%) Manufacturing
16 43 (0.89%) Presentation Skills
17 35 (0.73%) Back Office
18 34 (0.71%) Organisational Skills
18 34 (0.71%) Telecoms
19 32 (0.67%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,005 (20.90%) Data Engineer
2 1,000 (20.80%) Developer
3 695 (14.46%) Analyst
4 624 (12.98%) Senior
5 323 (6.72%) Lead
6 304 (6.32%) Data Analyst
7 275 (5.72%) Architect
8 229 (4.76%) Consultant
9 212 (4.41%) Business Analyst
10 199 (4.14%) Java Developer
11 188 (3.91%) Senior Data Engineer
12 162 (3.37%) DBA
13 149 (3.10%) Software Engineer
14 147 (3.06%) Senior Developer
15 118 (2.45%) Azure Engineer
16 109 (2.27%) SQL Developer
17 108 (2.25%) C# Developer
18 107 (2.23%) Python Developer
19 106 (2.20%) Data Architect
20 95 (1.98%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 398 (8.28%) .NET
2 359 (7.47%) REST
3 308 (6.41%) PySpark
4 293 (6.09%) Kafka
5 247 (5.14%) Spring
6 239 (4.97%) Spring Boot
7 221 (4.60%) React
8 211 (4.39%) RESTful
9 168 (3.49%) JSON
10 159 (3.31%) HTML
11 151 (3.14%) XML
12 141 (2.93%) CSS
13 129 (2.68%) Pandas
14 113 (2.35%) AngularJS
14 113 (2.35%) Middleware
15 111 (2.31%) SOAP
16 110 (2.29%) Web Services
17 88 (1.83%) .NET Framework
18 85 (1.77%) OAuth
19 81 (1.68%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 319 (6.63%) Cloud Native
2 195 (4.06%) Data Structures
3 177 (3.68%) Legacy Systems
4 146 (3.04%) Product Ownership
5 139 (2.89%) Distributed Systems
6 95 (1.98%) Management Information System
7 92 (1.91%) Derivative
7 92 (1.91%) Onboarding
8 78 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
9 68 (1.41%) Analytical Mindset
10 66 (1.37%) Enterprise Software
11 65 (1.35%) Self-Motivation
12 61 (1.27%) Algorithms
13 60 (1.25%) Clustering
14 55 (1.14%) Greenfield Project
15 51 (1.06%) Equities
16 50 (1.04%) Fixed Income
17 49 (1.02%) Replication
18 47 (0.98%) Low-Code
19 46 (0.96%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 322 (6.70%) Linux
2 273 (5.68%) Windows
3 224 (4.66%) Unix
4 104 (2.16%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.52%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.50%) AIX
7 18 (0.37%) Windows Server 2019
8 13 (0.27%) Solaris
8 13 (0.27%) Windows Server 2016
9 11 (0.23%) VMS
9 11 (0.23%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.17%) Apple iOS
10 8 (0.17%) zOS
11 7 (0.15%) Android
11 7 (0.15%) Windows 10
12 4 (0.083%) Oracle Linux
13 3 (0.062%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.042%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.042%) HPUX
14 2 (0.042%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,304 (27.12%) CI/CD
2 1,216 (25.29%) Data Modelling
3 1,208 (25.12%) Analytics
4 1,207 (25.10%) Agile
5 1,119 (23.27%) ETL
6 1,066 (22.17%) Business Intelligence
7 1,002 (20.84%) DevOps
8 943 (19.61%) Data Pipeline
9 942 (19.59%) Problem-Solving
10 788 (16.39%) Data Engineering
11 682 (14.18%) AI
12 644 (13.39%) Migration
13 604 (12.56%) Validation
14 544 (11.31%) Data Governance
15 486 (10.11%) Test Automation
16 483 (10.05%) Decision-Making
17 463 (9.63%) Data Analysis
18 446 (9.28%) Stakeholder Management
19 435 (9.05%) Performance Tuning
20 422 (8.78%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,788 (37.19%) Python
2 642 (13.35%) Java
3 485 (10.09%) C#
4 360 (7.49%) PL/SQL
5 328 (6.82%) JavaScript
6 250 (5.20%) T-SQL
7 231 (4.80%) PowerShell
8 166 (3.45%) TypeScript
9 142 (2.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 117 (2.43%) Shell Script
11 116 (2.41%) R
12 89 (1.85%) Bash
13 83 (1.73%) C++
14 79 (1.64%) Scala
15 52 (1.08%) Bicep
16 43 (0.89%) VBA
17 35 (0.73%) VB
18 34 (0.71%) Perl
19 33 (0.69%) C
20 26 (0.54%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,026 (21.34%) Security Cleared
2 832 (17.30%) SC Cleared
3 363 (7.55%) Degree
4 127 (2.64%) BPSS Clearance
5 111 (2.31%) Computer Science Degree
6 92 (1.91%) DV Cleared
7 73 (1.52%) Azure Certification
8 66 (1.37%) Master's Degree
9 56 (1.16%) ISTQB
10 42 (0.87%) Microsoft Certification
11 33 (0.69%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.37%) DBS Check
13 17 (0.35%) PhD
14 13 (0.27%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 11 (0.23%) CISSP
15 11 (0.23%) PMI Certification
16 10 (0.21%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 10 (0.21%) SnowPro
17 9 (0.19%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
17 9 (0.19%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 889 (18.49%) Data Quality
2 371 (7.72%) QA
3 186 (3.87%) GDPR
4 56 (1.16%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.96%) SLA
6 31 (0.64%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 30 (0.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.50%) PMO
9 23 (0.48%) NIST
10 17 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
10 17 (0.35%) IFRS
11 16 (0.33%) PCI DSS
12 15 (0.31%) ISO 20022
13 14 (0.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 14 (0.29%) HIPAA
13 14 (0.29%) MiFID
13 14 (0.29%) Solvency II
14 12 (0.25%) NCSC
14 12 (0.25%) WCAG
15 11 (0.23%) HL7
System Software
1 528 (10.98%) Docker
2 105 (2.18%) Active Directory
3 40 (0.83%) Virtual Machines
4 36 (0.75%) VMware Infrastructure
5 31 (0.64%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.44%) Hyper-V
7 19 (0.40%) 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 (0.042%) GridGain
15 2 (0.042%) Oracle Clusterware
Systems Management
1 418 (8.69%) Kubernetes
2 389 (8.09%) Terraform
3 120 (2.50%) Grafana
4 84 (1.75%) Ansible
5 63 (1.31%) Prometheus
6 42 (0.87%) Oracle RMAN
7 31 (0.64%) Data Guard
8 22 (0.46%) Kibana
9 20 (0.42%) Control-M
9 20 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
10 18 (0.37%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.33%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.31%) Tivoli
13 14 (0.29%) Nagios
13 14 (0.29%) Netcool
14 13 (0.27%) OpenView
14 13 (0.27%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 12 (0.25%) SCOM
16 8 (0.17%) HP Quality Center
16 8 (0.17%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 832 (17.30%) Oracle
2 741 (15.41%) Microsoft
3 577 (12.00%) Databricks
4 181 (3.76%) Google
5 180 (3.74%) Informatica
6 144 (3.00%) Talend
7 135 (2.81%) ServiceNow
8 124 (2.58%) SAP
9 90 (1.87%) Splunk
10 85 (1.77%) IBM
11 72 (1.50%) Denodo
12 56 (1.16%) Salesforce
12 56 (1.16%) VMware
13 43 (0.89%) Citrix
14 40 (0.83%) Dynatrace
15 37 (0.77%) Sybase
16 33 (0.69%) Bloomberg
16 33 (0.69%) MuleSoft
17 32 (0.67%) Murex
17 32 (0.67%) OpenAI