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

6 months to
29 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,063 3,837 4,100
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.64% 11.69% 10.29%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.24% 35.54% 33.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,358 2,664 3,016
10th Percentile £356 £332 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £606 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £463 £475
% change year-on-year +0.54% -2.63% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 99 66 49
10th Percentile £23.60 £20.78 £21.41
25th Percentile £31.86 £29.37 £30.00
Median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.56% -6.40% -12.84%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.59
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £33.91 £36.00
% change year-on-year +31.23% -5.81% -21.53%

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 13,969 10,796 12,393
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.58% 32.90% 31.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,075 7,277 8,754
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.58% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 254 421
10th Percentile £33.70 £27.96 £27.75
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.06 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.13 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.79% -12.12% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £82.07 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +7.08%

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 -4 4,414 £500 - 1,765
London -6 2,385 £525 - 801
UK excluding London -10 2,136 £465 +0.54% 1,260
Work from Home -6 1,523 £500 - 866
North of England -5 580 £463 -2.63% 343
Midlands +1 533 £459 +8.00% 196
South East -10 467 £475 -5.00% 396
West Midlands +3 439 £459 +2.00% 109
North West -4 307 £475 +1.28% 183
Yorkshire -8 234 £475 -0.11% 97
South West -6 224 £500 +14.29% 144
Scotland -5 192 £438 -2.78% 48
East of England -3 117 £478 -4.50% 102
East Midlands -3 90 £473 +22.06% 87
North East -19 51 £419 -9.46% 72
Wales -2 41 £468 +5.06% 37
Northern Ireland -9 16 £375 -26.83% 18

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
1 223 (4.40%) Apache Spark
2 218 (4.31%) Confluence
3 205 (4.05%) Apache Airflow
4 185 (3.65%) Apache
5 115 (2.27%) SAS
6 67 (1.32%) SharePoint
7 45 (0.89%) Oracle Workflow
8 42 (0.83%) WebLogic
9 40 (0.79%) IIS
10 36 (0.71%) Tomcat
11 31 (0.61%) WebSphere
12 27 (0.53%) Jupyter
13 21 (0.41%) Apache Geronimo
13 21 (0.41%) Apache ServiceMix
13 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
13 21 (0.41%) Red Hat Fuse
14 20 (0.40%) nginx
15 19 (0.38%) CMS
15 19 (0.38%) Microsoft Exchange
16 13 (0.26%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 317 (6.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.20%) Microsoft Office
3 53 (1.05%) MS Visio
4 39 (0.77%) Spreadsheet
5 31 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.079%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.079%) Notion
8 4 (0.079%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.059%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.059%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Mingle
10 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 52 (1.03%) Oracle EBS
2 42 (0.83%) Dynamics CRM
3 30 (0.59%) Aladdin
4 29 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
5 26 (0.51%) Remedy ITSM
6 25 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
6 25 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
7 18 (0.36%) Oracle EBS R12
8 17 (0.34%) NEC Housing
8 17 (0.34%) Oracle Receivables
9 13 (0.26%) Oracle General Ledger
10 12 (0.24%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.22%) Findur
11 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.20%) Finacle
12 10 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
13 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.18%) Fidessa
13 9 (0.18%) Oracle Financials
13 9 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,588 (31.36%) Azure
2 1,203 (23.76%) AWS
3 936 (18.49%) Power Platform
4 453 (8.95%) GCP
5 436 (8.61%) Azure DevOps
6 356 (7.03%) GitHub
7 342 (6.75%) Azure Data Factory
8 331 (6.54%) Snowflake
9 305 (6.02%) Serverless
10 269 (5.31%) dbt
11 260 (5.14%) Amazon S3
12 215 (4.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 199 (3.93%) AWS Lambda
14 182 (3.59%) GitHub Actions
15 96 (1.90%) Entra ID
16 93 (1.84%) SaaS
17 91 (1.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 88 (1.74%) Power Automate
19 82 (1.62%) PowerApps
20 74 (1.46%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 56 (1.11%) DNS
2 42 (0.83%) Firewall
3 29 (0.57%) SSL
4 25 (0.49%) HTTP
5 22 (0.43%) SNMP
6 21 (0.41%) Network Security
6 21 (0.41%) VPN
7 20 (0.40%) Internet
8 19 (0.38%) WAN
9 16 (0.32%) TCP/IP
10 10 (0.20%) Broadband
10 10 (0.20%) Kerberos
10 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
10 10 (0.20%) Wireshark
11 9 (0.18%) SAN
11 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
12 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
13 7 (0.14%) DHCP
13 7 (0.14%) HTTPS
13 7 (0.14%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 861 (17.01%) Power BI
2 693 (13.69%) Data Warehouse
3 633 (12.50%) SQL Server
4 339 (6.70%) Relational Database
5 319 (6.30%) Tableau
6 317 (6.26%) PostgreSQL
7 312 (6.16%) Data Lake
8 273 (5.39%) Metadata
9 253 (5.00%) NoSQL
10 215 (4.25%) Azure SQL Database
11 206 (4.07%) Oracle Database
12 172 (3.40%) BigQuery
13 170 (3.36%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 146 (2.88%) Amazon Redshift
15 135 (2.67%) Delta Lake
16 132 (2.61%) Big Data
17 130 (2.57%) Oracle Reports
18 115 (2.27%) MySQL
19 112 (2.21%) MongoDB
20 107 (2.11%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 584 (11.53%) Git
2 396 (7.82%) JIRA
3 276 (5.45%) Jenkins
4 220 (4.35%) GitLab
5 80 (1.58%) JUnit
6 70 (1.38%) Maven
7 63 (1.24%) Gradle
8 58 (1.15%) Postman
9 56 (1.11%) Selenium
10 52 (1.03%) Mockito
11 50 (0.99%) Oracle Forms
12 38 (0.75%) Bitbucket
13 37 (0.73%) Visual Studio
14 35 (0.69%) SonarQube
15 31 (0.61%) ERwin
15 31 (0.61%) Team Foundation Server
16 30 (0.59%) JMeter
16 30 (0.59%) MLflow
16 30 (0.59%) Zephyr
17 29 (0.57%) Liquibase
General
1 1,295 (25.58%) Social Skills
2 1,256 (24.81%) Finance
3 995 (19.65%) Analytical Skills
4 484 (9.56%) Public Sector
5 476 (9.40%) Banking
6 139 (2.75%) Front Office
6 139 (2.75%) Marketing
7 126 (2.49%) Retail
8 121 (2.39%) Investment Banking
9 101 (1.99%) Documentation Skills
10 86 (1.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 70 (1.38%) Manufacturing
12 57 (1.13%) Legal
13 56 (1.11%) Presentation Skills
14 54 (1.07%) Financial Institution
15 47 (0.93%) Organisational Skills
16 43 (0.85%) Publishing
17 41 (0.81%) Telecoms
18 40 (0.79%) Back Office
19 36 (0.71%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,097 (21.67%) Developer
2 998 (19.71%) Data Engineer
3 734 (14.50%) Analyst
4 681 (13.45%) Senior
5 363 (7.17%) Lead
6 318 (6.28%) Data Analyst
7 273 (5.39%) Architect
8 254 (5.02%) Consultant
9 234 (4.62%) Business Analyst
10 212 (4.19%) Java Developer
11 201 (3.97%) DBA
12 195 (3.85%) Senior Data Engineer
13 170 (3.36%) Senior Developer
14 141 (2.78%) Software Engineer
15 129 (2.55%) SQL DBA
15 129 (2.55%) SQL Developer
16 122 (2.41%) Azure Engineer
17 113 (2.23%) Data Architect
17 113 (2.23%) Full-Stack Developer
18 107 (2.11%) C# Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 411 (8.12%) .NET
2 406 (8.02%) REST
3 327 (6.46%) PySpark
4 313 (6.18%) Kafka
5 268 (5.29%) Spring
6 254 (5.02%) Spring Boot
7 225 (4.44%) React
8 216 (4.27%) RESTful
9 204 (4.03%) JSON
10 184 (3.63%) XML
11 171 (3.38%) HTML
12 142 (2.80%) CSS
13 140 (2.77%) AngularJS
14 129 (2.55%) Web Services
15 120 (2.37%) Pandas
16 117 (2.31%) Middleware
17 116 (2.29%) SOAP
18 103 (2.03%) .NET Framework
19 82 (1.62%) Node.js
20 75 (1.48%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 338 (6.68%) Cloud Native
2 243 (4.80%) Data Structures
3 194 (3.83%) Product Ownership
4 182 (3.59%) Legacy Systems
5 154 (3.04%) Distributed Systems
6 114 (2.25%) Onboarding
7 100 (1.98%) Enterprise Software
8 93 (1.84%) Derivative
9 88 (1.74%) Management Information System
10 81 (1.60%) Self-Motivation
11 74 (1.46%) Analytical Mindset
12 73 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
13 72 (1.42%) Clustering
14 71 (1.40%) Replication
15 69 (1.36%) Algorithms
16 54 (1.07%) Fixed Income
17 52 (1.03%) Equities
17 52 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
18 49 (0.97%) Reference Data
19 47 (0.93%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 337 (6.66%) Linux
2 312 (6.16%) Windows
3 232 (4.58%) Unix
4 120 (2.37%) Windows Server
5 26 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 22 (0.43%) AIX
7 17 (0.34%) Solaris
8 14 (0.28%) Windows Server 2019
9 12 (0.24%) VMS
10 11 (0.22%) Windows Server 2008
11 8 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Apple iOS
12 7 (0.14%) Ubuntu
13 6 (0.12%) Android
13 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.099%) Windows 10
14 5 (0.099%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.079%) Oracle Linux
16 2 (0.040%) Data ONTAP
16 2 (0.040%) OpenVMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,327 (26.21%) Agile
2 1,322 (26.11%) Data Modelling
3 1,321 (26.09%) CI/CD
4 1,296 (25.60%) Analytics
5 1,133 (22.38%) ETL
6 1,108 (21.88%) Business Intelligence
7 1,013 (20.01%) DevOps
8 997 (19.69%) Data Pipeline
9 961 (18.98%) Problem-Solving
10 846 (16.71%) Data Engineering
11 714 (14.10%) Migration
12 713 (14.08%) AI
13 674 (13.31%) Validation
14 591 (11.67%) Data Governance
15 524 (10.35%) Test Automation
16 521 (10.29%) Stakeholder Management
17 507 (10.01%) Decision-Making
18 505 (9.97%) Continuous Improvement
19 497 (9.82%) Data Analysis
20 458 (9.05%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,799 (35.53%) Python
2 665 (13.13%) Java
3 486 (9.60%) C#
4 413 (8.16%) PL/SQL
5 348 (6.87%) JavaScript
6 271 (5.35%) T-SQL
7 254 (5.02%) PowerShell
8 174 (3.44%) TypeScript
9 146 (2.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 136 (2.69%) Shell Script
11 105 (2.07%) R
12 104 (2.05%) Bash
13 75 (1.48%) Scala
14 59 (1.17%) C++
15 51 (1.01%) VBA
16 48 (0.95%) Bicep
17 35 (0.69%) C
18 31 (0.61%) VB
19 28 (0.55%) Perl
20 25 (0.49%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,113 (21.98%) Security Cleared
2 903 (17.84%) SC Cleared
3 348 (6.87%) Degree
4 140 (2.77%) BPSS Clearance
5 112 (2.21%) Computer Science Degree
6 107 (2.11%) DV Cleared
7 78 (1.54%) Azure Certification
8 56 (1.11%) ISTQB
9 55 (1.09%) Master's Degree
10 39 (0.77%) Microsoft Certification
11 33 (0.65%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.34%) DBS Check
13 16 (0.32%) PhD
14 15 (0.30%) CISSP
14 15 (0.30%) ISEB
15 13 (0.26%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 11 (0.22%) FFIEC
16 11 (0.22%) Oracle Certification
17 10 (0.20%) CISM
18 9 (0.18%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 939 (18.55%) Data Quality
2 381 (7.53%) QA
3 173 (3.42%) GDPR
4 70 (1.38%) Accessibility
5 45 (0.89%) SLA
6 23 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 23 (0.45%) PMO
7 22 (0.43%) NIST
8 20 (0.40%) Actionable Recommendations
8 20 (0.40%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 19 (0.38%) ISO 20022
10 16 (0.32%) Solvency II
11 15 (0.30%) MiFID
12 14 (0.28%) IFRS
13 13 (0.26%) GMP
13 13 (0.26%) HIPAA
14 12 (0.24%) COBIT
15 11 (0.22%) NCSC
15 11 (0.22%) WCAG
16 10 (0.20%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 493 (9.74%) Docker
2 127 (2.51%) Active Directory
3 47 (0.93%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (0.85%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.79%) Oracle RAC
6 20 (0.40%) Hyper-V
7 17 (0.34%) VMware ESXi
8 14 (0.28%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.26%) vCloud
10 9 (0.18%) Postfix
10 9 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
11 8 (0.16%) KVM
12 4 (0.079%) Ceph
12 4 (0.079%) HDFS
12 4 (0.079%) RACF
13 3 (0.059%) Squid
14 2 (0.040%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.040%) GridGain
15 1 (0.020%) GPFS
15 1 (0.020%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 421 (8.32%) Kubernetes
2 383 (7.56%) Terraform
3 108 (2.13%) Grafana
4 92 (1.82%) Ansible
5 50 (0.99%) Prometheus
6 47 (0.93%) Oracle RMAN
7 44 (0.87%) Data Guard
8 30 (0.59%) Control-M
9 25 (0.49%) SCOM
10 20 (0.40%) Kibana
11 18 (0.36%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.32%) Nagios
12 16 (0.32%) Netcool
12 16 (0.32%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.30%) Tivoli
14 13 (0.26%) OpenView
14 13 (0.26%) Single Sign-On
14 13 (0.26%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 10 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
15 10 (0.20%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
Vendors
1 910 (17.97%) Oracle
2 796 (15.72%) Microsoft
3 591 (11.67%) Databricks
4 188 (3.71%) Google
5 187 (3.69%) Informatica
6 144 (2.84%) Talend
7 138 (2.73%) SAP
8 135 (2.67%) ServiceNow
9 89 (1.76%) IBM
10 85 (1.68%) Splunk
11 72 (1.42%) Denodo
12 67 (1.32%) Salesforce
13 65 (1.28%) VMware
14 43 (0.85%) Dynatrace
15 40 (0.79%) Citrix
16 38 (0.75%) Bloomberg
17 37 (0.73%) BMC
18 36 (0.71%) Sybase
19 35 (0.69%) Alteryx
20 33 (0.65%) SolarWinds