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

6 months to
25 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,903 3,622 4,328
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.63% 12.03% 9.94%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.78% 35.42% 32.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,252 2,534 3,112
10th Percentile £350 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £410 £418
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £594 £613 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -0.21% -1.05% -3.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 88 70 62
10th Percentile £26.06 £22.57 £22.61
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.31 £27.19
Median hourly rate £45.90 £39.67 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.70% -6.65% -17.07%
75th Percentile £69.11 £53.26 £53.29
90th Percentile £82.48 £68.00 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £41.96 £40.25
% change year-on-year +6.07% +4.24% -18.80%

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 13,705 10,225 13,227
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.93% 33.95% 30.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,915 6,922 9,291
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £608 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £756 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.58% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 240 548
10th Percentile £35.00 £25.70 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £54.94 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.32% -12.10% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £83.11 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £60.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +7.00% -6.54% +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 25 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 25 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 25 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 -3 4,293 £500 - 1,520
London -5 2,326 £525 -1.41% 615
UK excluding London -10 2,084 £469 -0.21% 1,228
Work from Home -6 1,458 £500 -1.96% 756
Midlands +3 545 £463 +8.82% 195
North of England -6 545 £461 -2.89% 335
West Midlands +4 449 £459 +2.00% 101
South East -11 432 £475 -5.00% 430
North West -2 291 £463 -2.63% 199
South West -7 229 £500 +6.38% 114
Yorkshire -11 215 £475 - 91
Scotland -8 198 £460 +2.22% 42
East of England -13 107 £495 +2.86% 99
East Midlands -1 92 £525 +40.00% 94
North East -12 51 £425 -8.36% 51
Wales +7 45 £450 +5.88% 32
Northern Ireland -12 13 £388 -22.50% 11

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
1 241 (4.92%) Apache Spark
2 205 (4.18%) Confluence
3 200 (4.08%) Apache Airflow
4 177 (3.61%) Apache
5 111 (2.26%) SAS
6 60 (1.22%) SharePoint
7 42 (0.86%) Tomcat
8 36 (0.73%) Oracle Workflow
9 34 (0.69%) IIS
9 34 (0.69%) WebLogic
10 33 (0.67%) WebSphere
11 25 (0.51%) Jupyter
12 22 (0.45%) Apache Geronimo
12 22 (0.45%) Apache ServiceMix
12 22 (0.45%) Red Hat Fuse
13 21 (0.43%) nginx
14 19 (0.39%) Appian
14 19 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
14 19 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
15 17 (0.35%) CMS
Applications
1 307 (6.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 60 (1.22%) Microsoft Office
3 53 (1.08%) MS Visio
4 36 (0.73%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 32 (0.65%) Spreadsheet
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.061%) Acrobat
9 3 (0.061%) Oracle Smart View
9 3 (0.061%) Photoshop
10 2 (0.041%) Notion
11 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.020%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.020%) InDesign
11 1 (0.020%) Mingle
11 1 (0.020%) Trello
11 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 41 (0.84%) Oracle EBS
2 36 (0.73%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.59%) SAP S/4HANA
4 27 (0.55%) Aladdin
5 23 (0.47%) Oracle Payables
6 22 (0.45%) Oracle ERP
7 19 (0.39%) NEC Housing
8 16 (0.33%) Oracle EBS R12
8 16 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
9 15 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
10 11 (0.22%) Findur
10 11 (0.22%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 11 (0.22%) Salesforce CRM
11 10 (0.20%) Elite 3E
11 10 (0.20%) Finacle
11 10 (0.20%) Oracle General Ledger
11 10 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
11 10 (0.20%) Siebel CRM
12 9 (0.18%) NetSuite
12 9 (0.18%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
Cloud Services
1 1,585 (32.33%) Azure
2 1,193 (24.33%) AWS
3 927 (18.91%) Power Platform
4 446 (9.10%) Azure DevOps
5 398 (8.12%) GCP
6 356 (7.26%) GitHub
7 350 (7.14%) Azure Data Factory
8 311 (6.34%) Serverless
9 299 (6.10%) Snowflake
10 269 (5.49%) Amazon S3
11 231 (4.71%) dbt
12 222 (4.53%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 196 (4.00%) AWS Lambda
14 188 (3.83%) GitHub Actions
15 92 (1.88%) SaaS
16 90 (1.84%) Power Automate
17 87 (1.77%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 81 (1.65%) Entra ID
19 79 (1.61%) PowerApps
20 77 (1.57%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 54 (1.10%) DNS
2 44 (0.90%) Firewall
3 23 (0.47%) WAN
4 22 (0.45%) HTTP
4 22 (0.45%) Network Security
4 22 (0.45%) SNMP
5 19 (0.39%) SSL
6 18 (0.37%) Internet
7 17 (0.35%) VPN
8 12 (0.24%) TCP/IP
9 11 (0.22%) Wi-Fi
10 10 (0.20%) LAN
10 10 (0.20%) SAN
11 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
11 9 (0.18%) WinSCP
11 9 (0.18%) Wireshark
12 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
13 7 (0.14%) NAS
13 7 (0.14%) PuTTY
14 6 (0.12%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 852 (17.38%) Power BI
2 640 (13.05%) Data Warehouse
3 595 (12.14%) SQL Server
4 334 (6.81%) Relational Database
5 319 (6.51%) Data Lake
6 318 (6.49%) PostgreSQL
7 316 (6.45%) Tableau
8 259 (5.28%) NoSQL
9 246 (5.02%) Metadata
10 225 (4.59%) Azure SQL Database
11 193 (3.94%) Oracle Database
12 165 (3.37%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 153 (3.12%) BigQuery
14 147 (3.00%) Amazon Redshift
15 142 (2.90%) Big Data
16 139 (2.83%) Delta Lake
17 123 (2.51%) MySQL
18 119 (2.43%) Oracle Reports
19 114 (2.33%) MongoDB
20 107 (2.18%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 534 (10.89%) Git
2 400 (8.16%) JIRA
3 254 (5.18%) Jenkins
4 229 (4.67%) GitLab
5 76 (1.55%) JUnit
6 58 (1.18%) Selenium
7 56 (1.14%) Maven
8 55 (1.12%) Postman
9 54 (1.10%) Mockito
10 51 (1.04%) Gradle
11 39 (0.80%) Oracle Forms
12 37 (0.75%) Cucumber
12 37 (0.75%) Visual Studio
13 35 (0.71%) MLflow
14 33 (0.67%) JMeter
14 33 (0.67%) SonarQube
15 29 (0.59%) Bitbucket
16 28 (0.57%) ERwin
16 28 (0.57%) Liquibase
17 27 (0.55%) REST Assured
General
1 1,264 (25.78%) Social Skills
2 1,262 (25.74%) Finance
3 923 (18.83%) Analytical Skills
4 467 (9.52%) Banking
5 448 (9.14%) Public Sector
6 138 (2.81%) Front Office
7 128 (2.61%) Investment Banking
8 122 (2.49%) Marketing
9 111 (2.26%) Retail
10 103 (2.10%) Documentation Skills
11 91 (1.86%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 60 (1.22%) Legal
13 57 (1.16%) Manufacturing
14 56 (1.14%) Financial Institution
15 51 (1.04%) Presentation Skills
16 43 (0.88%) Publishing
17 38 (0.78%) Back Office
18 35 (0.71%) Organisational Skills
19 34 (0.69%) Telecoms
20 31 (0.63%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,027 (20.95%) Developer
2 1,002 (20.44%) Data Engineer
3 713 (14.54%) Analyst
4 642 (13.09%) Senior
5 340 (6.93%) Lead
6 305 (6.22%) Data Analyst
7 275 (5.61%) Architect
8 237 (4.83%) Consultant
9 224 (4.57%) Business Analyst
10 206 (4.20%) Java Developer
11 188 (3.83%) Senior Data Engineer
12 171 (3.49%) DBA
13 150 (3.06%) Senior Developer
14 148 (3.02%) Software Engineer
15 120 (2.45%) Azure Engineer
16 113 (2.30%) SQL Developer
17 109 (2.22%) Python Developer
18 107 (2.18%) C# Developer
19 104 (2.12%) Data Architect
20 96 (1.96%) SQL DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 396 (8.08%) .NET
2 364 (7.42%) REST
3 313 (6.38%) PySpark
4 297 (6.06%) Kafka
5 258 (5.26%) Spring
6 249 (5.08%) Spring Boot
7 234 (4.77%) React
8 217 (4.43%) RESTful
9 177 (3.61%) JSON
10 160 (3.26%) XML
11 155 (3.16%) HTML
12 140 (2.86%) CSS
13 123 (2.51%) Pandas
14 122 (2.49%) AngularJS
15 117 (2.39%) Middleware
16 115 (2.35%) SOAP
16 115 (2.35%) Web Services
17 93 (1.90%) .NET Framework
18 82 (1.67%) OAuth
19 76 (1.55%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 324 (6.61%) Cloud Native
2 205 (4.18%) Data Structures
3 178 (3.63%) Legacy Systems
4 161 (3.28%) Product Ownership
5 144 (2.94%) Distributed Systems
6 93 (1.90%) Derivative
7 92 (1.88%) Onboarding
8 90 (1.84%) Management Information System
9 76 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
9 76 (1.55%) Enterprise Software
10 75 (1.53%) Analytical Mindset
11 71 (1.45%) Self-Motivation
12 67 (1.37%) Algorithms
13 59 (1.20%) Clustering
14 55 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
15 53 (1.08%) Equities
16 52 (1.06%) Replication
17 51 (1.04%) Fixed Income
18 46 (0.94%) Low-Code
18 46 (0.94%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 317 (6.47%) Linux
2 283 (5.77%) Windows
3 221 (4.51%) Unix
4 107 (2.18%) Windows Server
5 26 (0.53%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.49%) AIX
7 17 (0.35%) Solaris
7 17 (0.35%) Windows Server 2019
8 12 (0.24%) Windows Server 2016
9 11 (0.22%) Windows Server 2008
10 10 (0.20%) VMS
11 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
11 8 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Android
12 7 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 4 (0.082%) Oracle Linux
13 4 (0.082%) Ubuntu
14 3 (0.061%) Windows Server 2012
15 2 (0.041%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.041%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,325 (27.02%) CI/CD
2 1,267 (25.84%) Agile
3 1,242 (25.33%) Analytics
4 1,230 (25.09%) Data Modelling
5 1,116 (22.76%) ETL
6 1,078 (21.99%) Business Intelligence
7 1,019 (20.78%) DevOps
8 971 (19.80%) Problem-Solving
9 957 (19.52%) Data Pipeline
10 808 (16.48%) Data Engineering
11 699 (14.26%) AI
12 661 (13.48%) Migration
13 620 (12.65%) Validation
14 546 (11.14%) Data Governance
15 497 (10.14%) Test Automation
16 490 (9.99%) Decision-Making
17 481 (9.81%) Data Analysis
18 479 (9.77%) Stakeholder Management
19 445 (9.08%) Continuous Improvement
20 433 (8.83%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,792 (36.55%) Python
2 649 (13.24%) Java
3 484 (9.87%) C#
4 370 (7.55%) PL/SQL
5 338 (6.89%) JavaScript
6 253 (5.16%) T-SQL
7 236 (4.81%) PowerShell
8 174 (3.55%) TypeScript
9 142 (2.90%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 119 (2.43%) Shell Script
11 111 (2.26%) R
12 93 (1.90%) Bash
13 78 (1.59%) Scala
14 75 (1.53%) C++
15 48 (0.98%) Bicep
16 46 (0.94%) VBA
17 35 (0.71%) C
18 34 (0.69%) VB
19 29 (0.59%) Perl
20 26 (0.53%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,050 (21.42%) Security Cleared
2 851 (17.36%) SC Cleared
3 364 (7.42%) Degree
4 129 (2.63%) BPSS Clearance
5 114 (2.33%) Computer Science Degree
6 97 (1.98%) DV Cleared
7 74 (1.51%) Azure Certification
8 67 (1.37%) Master's Degree
9 58 (1.18%) ISTQB
10 42 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
11 37 (0.75%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.37%) DBS Check
12 18 (0.37%) PhD
13 14 (0.29%) CISSP
14 13 (0.27%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 11 (0.22%) SnowPro
16 10 (0.20%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 10 (0.20%) PMI Certification
16 10 (0.20%) TOGAF Certification
17 9 (0.18%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 884 (18.03%) Data Quality
2 379 (7.73%) QA
3 185 (3.77%) GDPR
4 59 (1.20%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.90%) SLA
6 31 (0.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 29 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 26 (0.53%) NIST
9 22 (0.45%) PMO
10 19 (0.39%) ISO 20022
11 18 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
11 18 (0.37%) IFRS
12 16 (0.33%) PCI DSS
13 15 (0.31%) MiFID
13 15 (0.31%) Solvency II
14 14 (0.29%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.27%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 13 (0.27%) NCSC
16 11 (0.22%) HL7
17 10 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 519 (10.59%) Docker
2 105 (2.14%) Active Directory
3 43 (0.88%) Virtual Machines
4 36 (0.73%) VMware Infrastructure
5 28 (0.57%) Oracle RAC
6 20 (0.41%) Hyper-V
6 20 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
7 13 (0.27%) VMware NSX
8 12 (0.24%) vCloud
9 10 (0.20%) KVM
9 10 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
10 9 (0.18%) Postfix
11 5 (0.10%) RACF
12 4 (0.082%) Ceph
12 4 (0.082%) HDFS
13 3 (0.061%) Squid
13 3 (0.061%) XenApp
13 3 (0.061%) XenDesktop
14 2 (0.041%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.041%) GridGain
Systems Management
1 423 (8.63%) Kubernetes
2 387 (7.89%) Terraform
3 114 (2.33%) Grafana
4 86 (1.75%) Ansible
5 57 (1.16%) Prometheus
6 40 (0.82%) Oracle RMAN
7 29 (0.59%) Data Guard
8 24 (0.49%) Control-M
9 23 (0.47%) Kibana
10 19 (0.39%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.33%) Single Sign-On
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%) SCOM
14 13 (0.27%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 9 (0.18%) Progress Chef
16 8 (0.16%) HP Quality Center
Vendors
1 857 (17.48%) Oracle
2 764 (15.58%) Microsoft
3 584 (11.91%) Databricks
4 184 (3.75%) Informatica
5 177 (3.61%) Google
6 146 (2.98%) Talend
7 134 (2.73%) ServiceNow
8 126 (2.57%) SAP
9 90 (1.84%) Splunk
10 86 (1.75%) IBM
11 72 (1.47%) Denodo
12 59 (1.20%) Salesforce
13 57 (1.16%) VMware
14 44 (0.90%) Citrix
15 41 (0.84%) Dynatrace
16 38 (0.78%) Sybase
17 37 (0.75%) Bloomberg
18 35 (0.71%) Murex
18 35 (0.71%) OpenAI
19 34 (0.69%) MuleSoft