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

6 months to
3 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 13 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 -2 0
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,209 3,804 4,181
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.50% 11.48% 10.99%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.39% 34.87% 34.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,493 2,573 2,902
10th Percentile £350 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -0.10%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £628
90th Percentile £688 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 96 86 53
10th Percentile £21.45 £24.60 £19.67
25th Percentile £26.76 £31.25 £25.99
Median hourly rate £44.75 £50.00 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year -10.50% +36.99% -19.67%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £76.50 - £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £50.00 £30.00
% change year-on-year -10.00% +66.67% -33.98%

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 14,313 10,910 12,231
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.09% 32.92% 32.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,293 7,179 8,104
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £507 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.65% -3.52% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £648
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £492
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.36% -1.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 548 298 331
10th Percentile £24.10 £29.00 £26.25
25th Percentile £46.66 £41.25 £46.09
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £75.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 3 October 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 3 October 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for SQL in the UK

SQL
Top 18 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 3 October 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 -5 4,482 £500 - 6,844
London -7 2,528 £525 - 3,675
UK excluding London -6 2,083 £475 - 4,420
Work from Home -4 1,523 £500 - 3,851
North of England 0 606 £475 +5.56% 1,052
Midlands -5 451 £469 -1.26% 610
South East -15 443 £475 -3.06% 970
West Midlands -4 353 £469 -6.20% 374
North West +4 301 £500 +14.29% 596
Yorkshire +8 251 £475 - 305
South West +1 234 £525 +16.67% 380
Scotland -4 208 £425 -10.53% 625
East of England -8 114 £500 -0.50% 310
East Midlands -6 96 £463 +12.80% 236
North East -4 64 £406 -14.47% 166
Wales -8 38 £475 +4.97% 238
Northern Ireland -9 19 £363 -30.95% 289
Channel Islands - 1 £450 -

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
1 263 (5.05%) Apache Airflow
2 241 (4.63%) Confluence
3 220 (4.22%) Apache Spark
4 177 (3.40%) Apache
5 96 (1.84%) SharePoint
6 79 (1.52%) SAS
7 41 (0.79%) WebLogic
8 37 (0.71%) IIS
9 36 (0.69%) Oracle Workflow
10 32 (0.61%) Jupyter
11 26 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
12 23 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
13 21 (0.40%) CMS
14 20 (0.38%) nginx
15 19 (0.36%) Camunda
16 16 (0.31%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
17 15 (0.29%) WebSphere
18 10 (0.19%) Tomcat
19 9 (0.17%) Appian
Applications
1 296 (5.68%) Microsoft Excel
2 68 (1.31%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.73%) MS Visio
4 35 (0.67%) Spreadsheet
5 22 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.15%) Windchill
8 5 (0.096%) Notepad++
9 4 (0.077%) Acrobat
9 4 (0.077%) Notion
9 4 (0.077%) Photoshop
10 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
10 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
10 3 (0.058%) Mingle
11 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 42 (0.81%) Dynamics CRM
2 40 (0.77%) Oracle EBS
3 31 (0.60%) SAP S/4HANA
4 30 (0.58%) Aladdin
5 27 (0.52%) Oracle Payables
6 26 (0.50%) Remedy ITSM
7 18 (0.35%) Oracle ERP
8 16 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 15 (0.29%) Oracle General Ledger
10 13 (0.25%) Finacle
11 12 (0.23%) Oracle EBS R12
11 12 (0.23%) Oracle Financials
11 12 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
12 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
12 11 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
12 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
13 10 (0.19%) Maximo
13 10 (0.19%) NetSuite
13 10 (0.19%) Oracle FAH
14 9 (0.17%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,599 (30.70%) Azure
2 1,272 (24.42%) AWS
3 974 (18.70%) Power Platform
4 544 (10.44%) GCP
5 421 (8.08%) Azure DevOps
6 413 (7.93%) Snowflake
7 366 (7.03%) GitHub
8 325 (6.24%) Azure Data Factory
9 318 (6.10%) dbt
10 299 (5.74%) Serverless
11 269 (5.16%) Amazon S3
12 206 (3.95%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 197 (3.78%) AWS Lambda
14 173 (3.32%) GitHub Actions
15 117 (2.25%) SaaS
16 111 (2.13%) Entra ID
17 108 (2.07%) Power Automate
18 105 (2.02%) PowerApps
19 98 (1.88%) Azure Databricks
20 87 (1.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 71 (1.36%) DNS
2 47 (0.90%) Firewall
3 37 (0.71%) HTTP
4 32 (0.61%) SSL
5 29 (0.56%) Network Security
6 23 (0.44%) Broadband
6 23 (0.44%) TCP/IP
7 22 (0.42%) Internet
8 21 (0.40%) VPN
9 16 (0.31%) DHCP
10 14 (0.27%) SSH
11 12 (0.23%) Reverse Proxy
11 12 (0.23%) SAN
11 12 (0.23%) SNMP
11 12 (0.23%) WAN
12 11 (0.21%) Kerberos
13 8 (0.15%) HTTPS
13 8 (0.15%) RTP
13 8 (0.15%) WinSCP
13 8 (0.15%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 891 (17.11%) Power BI
2 703 (13.50%) Data Warehouse
3 672 (12.90%) SQL Server
4 359 (6.89%) Relational Database
5 342 (6.57%) PostgreSQL
6 330 (6.34%) Data Lake
7 295 (5.66%) Metadata
8 279 (5.36%) Tableau
9 249 (4.78%) NoSQL
10 241 (4.63%) Oracle Database
11 225 (4.32%) BigQuery
12 199 (3.82%) Azure SQL Database
13 149 (2.86%) Amazon Redshift
13 149 (2.86%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 144 (2.76%) Delta Lake
15 128 (2.46%) MySQL
16 122 (2.34%) Big Data
17 121 (2.32%) MongoDB
18 119 (2.28%) Amazon Athena
19 106 (2.03%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 709 (13.61%) Git
2 434 (8.33%) JIRA
3 292 (5.61%) Jenkins
4 270 (5.18%) GitLab
5 103 (1.98%) Selenium
6 97 (1.86%) JUnit
7 92 (1.77%) Maven
8 87 (1.67%) Gradle
9 71 (1.36%) Postman
10 57 (1.09%) Mockito
11 44 (0.84%) Bitbucket
11 44 (0.84%) Oracle Forms
12 43 (0.83%) SonarQube
13 36 (0.69%) Visual Studio
13 36 (0.69%) Zephyr
14 33 (0.63%) REST Assured
15 31 (0.60%) Team Foundation Server
16 30 (0.58%) Artifactory
17 27 (0.52%) JMeter
17 27 (0.52%) MLflow
General
1 1,415 (27.16%) Social Skills
2 1,375 (26.40%) Finance
3 1,074 (20.62%) Analytical Skills
4 614 (11.79%) Banking
5 488 (9.37%) Public Sector
6 157 (3.01%) Retail
7 156 (2.99%) Marketing
8 150 (2.88%) Investment Banking
9 142 (2.73%) Front Office
10 104 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 90 (1.73%) Manufacturing
12 88 (1.69%) Documentation Skills
13 64 (1.23%) Legal
14 56 (1.08%) Financial Institution
15 52 (1.00%) Back Office
15 52 (1.00%) Local Government
16 50 (0.96%) Presentation Skills
17 45 (0.86%) Influencing Skills
18 44 (0.84%) Military
19 41 (0.79%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,148 (22.04%) Developer
2 956 (18.35%) Data Engineer
3 780 (14.97%) Analyst
4 765 (14.69%) Senior
5 368 (7.06%) Lead
6 338 (6.49%) Data Analyst
7 254 (4.88%) Architect
8 253 (4.86%) Business Analyst
9 229 (4.40%) Senior Data Engineer
10 210 (4.03%) Consultant
11 205 (3.94%) Java Developer
12 204 (3.92%) DBA
13 182 (3.49%) Senior Developer
14 128 (2.46%) Python Developer
15 126 (2.42%) Azure Engineer
16 123 (2.36%) Software Engineer
17 122 (2.34%) Full-Stack Developer
17 122 (2.34%) Python Engineer
18 119 (2.28%) Data Architect
18 119 (2.28%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 522 (10.02%) REST
2 441 (8.47%) .NET
3 431 (8.27%) Terraform
4 362 (6.95%) Kafka
5 346 (6.64%) PySpark
6 289 (5.55%) Spring
7 282 (5.41%) Spring Boot
8 239 (4.59%) React
9 212 (4.07%) JSON
9 212 (4.07%) RESTful
10 205 (3.94%) HTML
11 184 (3.53%) XML
12 169 (3.24%) CSS
13 141 (2.71%) Web Services
14 136 (2.61%) SOAP
15 129 (2.48%) AngularJS
16 107 (2.05%) Middleware
17 99 (1.90%) Pandas
18 95 (1.82%) .NET Framework
19 93 (1.79%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 339 (6.51%) Cloud Native
2 279 (5.36%) Data Structures
3 257 (4.93%) Product Ownership
4 170 (3.26%) Legacy Systems
5 151 (2.90%) Onboarding
6 146 (2.80%) Distributed Systems
7 143 (2.75%) Enterprise Software
8 112 (2.15%) Management Information System
9 102 (1.96%) AI Agents
10 88 (1.69%) Self-Motivation
11 86 (1.65%) Derivative
11 86 (1.65%) Replication
12 72 (1.38%) Data Protection Act
13 66 (1.27%) Analytical Mindset
14 65 (1.25%) Algorithms
15 63 (1.21%) Clustering
16 61 (1.17%) Reference Data
17 55 (1.06%) Data Centre
18 54 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
19 50 (0.96%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 387 (7.43%) Linux
2 318 (6.10%) Windows
3 247 (4.74%) Unix
4 132 (2.53%) Windows Server
5 30 (0.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.46%) Solaris
7 13 (0.25%) Ubuntu
8 11 (0.21%) VMS
9 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
10 8 (0.15%) AIX
11 7 (0.13%) Android
12 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
13 5 (0.096%) zOS
14 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2012
15 3 (0.058%) CentOS
15 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
15 3 (0.058%) Rocky
16 2 (0.038%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,439 (27.63%) Agile
2 1,433 (27.51%) CI/CD
3 1,368 (26.26%) Data Modelling
4 1,293 (24.82%) Analytics
5 1,104 (21.19%) Business Intelligence
6 1,102 (21.16%) ETL
7 1,010 (19.39%) Problem-Solving
8 996 (19.12%) DevOps
9 980 (18.81%) Data Pipeline
10 891 (17.11%) AI
11 879 (16.87%) Data Engineering
12 834 (16.01%) Validation
13 785 (15.07%) Stakeholder Management
14 784 (15.05%) Migration
15 642 (12.32%) Test Automation
16 608 (11.67%) Data Analysis
17 603 (11.58%) Data Governance
18 595 (11.42%) Continuous Improvement
19 557 (10.69%) Decision-Making
20 457 (8.77%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,847 (35.46%) Python
2 670 (12.86%) Java
3 462 (8.87%) C#
4 420 (8.06%) JavaScript
5 396 (7.60%) PL/SQL
6 262 (5.03%) PowerShell
7 254 (4.88%) T-SQL
8 212 (4.07%) TypeScript
9 155 (2.98%) Shell Script
10 147 (2.82%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 130 (2.50%) Bash
12 91 (1.75%) Scala
13 82 (1.57%) R
14 45 (0.86%) C++
15 42 (0.81%) VBA
16 41 (0.79%) Bicep
17 31 (0.60%) Go
17 31 (0.60%) Kotlin
18 30 (0.58%) C
19 29 (0.56%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,124 (21.58%) Security Cleared
2 891 (17.11%) SC Cleared
3 366 (7.03%) Degree
4 176 (3.38%) BPSS Clearance
5 137 (2.63%) DV Cleared
6 127 (2.44%) Computer Science Degree
7 84 (1.61%) Azure Certification
8 60 (1.15%) ISTQB
9 53 (1.02%) Microsoft Certification
10 48 (0.92%) AWS Certification
11 43 (0.83%) Master's Degree
12 20 (0.38%) ISEB
13 19 (0.36%) CISSP
13 19 (0.36%) DBS Check
14 16 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 16 (0.31%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 15 (0.29%) ACCA
15 15 (0.29%) CIMA
15 15 (0.29%) Oracle Certification
16 14 (0.27%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1,045 (20.06%) Data Quality
2 417 (8.01%) QA
3 137 (2.63%) GDPR
4 74 (1.42%) Accessibility
5 49 (0.94%) SLA
6 34 (0.65%) ISO 20022
7 29 (0.56%) Actionable Recommendations
8 24 (0.46%) NIST
9 23 (0.44%) IFRS
10 22 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 18 (0.35%) MiFID
12 15 (0.29%) COBIT
12 15 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
13 14 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
14 13 (0.25%) GMP
14 13 (0.25%) GxP
15 12 (0.23%) Basel III
15 12 (0.23%) SEPA
16 10 (0.19%) 21 CFR Part 11
16 10 (0.19%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 487 (9.35%) Docker
2 132 (2.53%) Active Directory
3 51 (0.98%) VMware Infrastructure
4 39 (0.75%) Oracle RAC
5 37 (0.71%) Virtual Machines
6 21 (0.40%) Hyper-V
7 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
8 16 (0.31%) vCloud
8 16 (0.31%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 5 (0.096%) KVM
9 5 (0.096%) NFS
9 5 (0.096%) Postfix
10 4 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
10 4 (0.077%) GPFS
10 4 (0.077%) Squid
11 2 (0.038%) Ceph
11 2 (0.038%) DFS Replication
11 2 (0.038%) Dovecot
12 1 (0.019%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 436 (8.37%) Kubernetes
2 111 (2.13%) Grafana
3 106 (2.03%) Ansible
4 60 (1.15%) Prometheus
5 44 (0.84%) Control-M
6 43 (0.83%) Kibana
7 40 (0.77%) Data Guard
7 40 (0.77%) SCOM
8 38 (0.73%) Oracle RMAN
9 17 (0.33%) vCenter Server
10 16 (0.31%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
11 15 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
12 12 (0.23%) Istio
12 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
12 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Intune
13 11 (0.21%) Argo
13 11 (0.21%) Progress Chef
14 9 (0.17%) Puppet
14 9 (0.17%) WMI
15 8 (0.15%) SCCM
Vendors
1 915 (17.57%) Oracle
2 884 (16.97%) Microsoft
3 670 (12.86%) Databricks
4 247 (4.74%) Google
5 156 (2.99%) Informatica
6 144 (2.76%) SAP
7 116 (2.23%) Talend
8 114 (2.19%) IBM
9 93 (1.79%) ServiceNow
10 86 (1.65%) Salesforce
10 86 (1.65%) Splunk
11 70 (1.34%) VMware
12 48 (0.92%) Denodo
13 42 (0.81%) Foundry
14 40 (0.77%) OpenAI
15 39 (0.75%) Bloomberg
16 37 (0.71%) Adobe
16 37 (0.71%) UiPath
17 35 (0.67%) Murex
17 35 (0.67%) Sybase