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 9 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,187 3,780 4,051
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.52% 11.54% 10.63%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.56% 35.24% 33.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,488 2,588 2,891
10th Percentile £358 £325 £350
25th Percentile £414 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £600 £600 £638
90th Percentile £688 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £465 £475
% change year-on-year +2.15% -2.11% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 93 91 45
10th Percentile £23.00 £29.00 £20.05
25th Percentile £28.50 £32.50 £30.00
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +25.00% -11.97%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £81.20 £62.50 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £34.47
% change year-on-year -11.00% +45.07% -14.19%

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 14,186 10,727 12,091
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.04% 32.76% 31.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,216 7,109 8,253
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 535 295 341
10th Percentile £28.00 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £48.32 £37.23 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.25 £67.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £80.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +0.97%

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 9 September 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 9 September 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 9 September 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 4,491 £500 - 5,027
London -6 2,538 £525 - 3,293
UK excluding London -8 2,072 £475 +2.15% 2,410
Work from Home -4 1,536 £500 - 2,101
North of England -3 592 £475 +5.56% 583
South East -10 459 £495 -1.00% 616
Midlands -5 454 £469 +4.22% 362
West Midlands -3 354 £469 -6.20% 199
North West +1 297 £481 +6.89% 344
Yorkshire +4 253 £474 +5.33% 154
South West -4 226 £513 +20.59% 278
Scotland -7 191 £430 -7.03% 220
East of England -3 119 £495 -1.49% 188
East Midlands -4 97 £464 +19.68% 162
North East -19 51 £406 -12.63% 88
Wales -8 38 £475 +6.74% 68
Northern Ireland -11 19 £363 -29.27% 119
Channel Islands - 1 £450 - 2

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
1 243 (4.68%) Apache Airflow
2 217 (4.18%) Confluence
3 215 (4.14%) Apache Spark
4 171 (3.30%) Apache
5 94 (1.81%) SharePoint
6 90 (1.74%) SAS
7 45 (0.87%) Oracle Workflow
8 38 (0.73%) IIS
9 34 (0.66%) WebLogic
10 29 (0.56%) Jupyter
11 27 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
12 22 (0.42%) nginx
12 22 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
13 21 (0.40%) CMS
14 19 (0.37%) Camunda
15 17 (0.33%) WebSphere
16 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
16 15 (0.29%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 14 (0.27%) Tomcat
18 8 (0.15%) Appian
Applications
1 307 (5.92%) Microsoft Excel
2 64 (1.23%) Microsoft Office
3 39 (0.75%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.73%) Spreadsheet
5 26 (0.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.13%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.077%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
8 4 (0.077%) Notion
8 4 (0.077%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.058%) Windchill
10 2 (0.039%) Mingle
11 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 51 (0.98%) Oracle EBS
2 45 (0.87%) Dynamics CRM
3 32 (0.62%) SAP S/4HANA
4 29 (0.56%) Oracle Payables
5 25 (0.48%) Aladdin
6 24 (0.46%) Remedy ITSM
7 22 (0.42%) Oracle ERP
8 20 (0.39%) Oracle Receivables
9 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
10 17 (0.33%) Oracle General Ledger
11 13 (0.25%) Finacle
12 12 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
12 12 (0.23%) Oracle Financials
13 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
13 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
13 11 (0.21%) Summit
14 10 (0.19%) NetSuite
14 10 (0.19%) Oracle FAH
14 10 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
15 9 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
Cloud Services
1 1,641 (31.64%) Azure
2 1,258 (24.25%) AWS
3 964 (18.58%) Power Platform
4 490 (9.45%) GCP
5 458 (8.83%) Azure DevOps
6 382 (7.36%) GitHub
7 379 (7.31%) Snowflake
8 342 (6.59%) Azure Data Factory
9 319 (6.15%) Serverless
10 301 (5.80%) dbt
11 251 (4.84%) Amazon S3
12 218 (4.20%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 210 (4.05%) AWS Lambda
14 189 (3.64%) GitHub Actions
15 114 (2.20%) SaaS
16 107 (2.06%) Power Automate
17 101 (1.95%) PowerApps
18 98 (1.89%) Entra ID
19 97 (1.87%) Azure Databricks
20 91 (1.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 70 (1.35%) DNS
2 48 (0.93%) Firewall
3 35 (0.67%) HTTP
4 33 (0.64%) SSL
5 24 (0.46%) Network Security
6 21 (0.40%) TCP/IP
7 20 (0.39%) VPN
8 19 (0.37%) Broadband
8 19 (0.37%) Internet
8 19 (0.37%) SNMP
9 16 (0.31%) DHCP
9 16 (0.31%) SSH
10 15 (0.29%) WAN
11 11 (0.21%) HTTPS
11 11 (0.21%) SAN
12 10 (0.19%) Kerberos
12 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
13 8 (0.15%) Multicast
13 8 (0.15%) RTP
14 7 (0.13%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 884 (17.04%) Power BI
2 721 (13.90%) Data Warehouse
3 661 (12.74%) SQL Server
4 362 (6.98%) Relational Database
5 337 (6.50%) PostgreSQL
6 329 (6.34%) Data Lake
7 298 (5.75%) Metadata
8 292 (5.63%) Tableau
9 258 (4.97%) NoSQL
10 243 (4.68%) Oracle Database
11 212 (4.09%) Azure SQL Database
12 191 (3.68%) BigQuery
13 156 (3.01%) Amazon Redshift
14 152 (2.93%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 148 (2.85%) Delta Lake
16 132 (2.54%) MySQL
17 124 (2.39%) MongoDB
18 123 (2.37%) Big Data
19 115 (2.22%) Oracle Reports
20 110 (2.12%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 646 (12.45%) Git
2 407 (7.85%) JIRA
3 289 (5.57%) Jenkins
4 239 (4.61%) GitLab
5 102 (1.97%) Selenium
6 94 (1.81%) JUnit
7 82 (1.58%) Gradle
8 78 (1.50%) Maven
9 67 (1.29%) Postman
10 60 (1.16%) Mockito
11 51 (0.98%) Oracle Forms
12 48 (0.93%) SonarQube
13 40 (0.77%) Bitbucket
14 39 (0.75%) JMeter
14 39 (0.75%) Visual Studio
15 34 (0.66%) MLflow
16 32 (0.62%) Zephyr
17 29 (0.56%) Team Foundation Server
18 28 (0.54%) Liquibase
19 27 (0.52%) REST Assured
General
1 1,415 (27.28%) Social Skills
2 1,339 (25.81%) Finance
3 1,082 (20.86%) Analytical Skills
4 561 (10.82%) Banking
5 478 (9.22%) Public Sector
6 158 (3.05%) Marketing
7 150 (2.89%) Front Office
8 145 (2.80%) Retail
9 141 (2.72%) Investment Banking
10 104 (2.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 94 (1.81%) Documentation Skills
12 75 (1.45%) Manufacturing
13 59 (1.14%) Legal
14 57 (1.10%) Presentation Skills
15 56 (1.08%) Financial Institution
16 43 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
17 42 (0.81%) Back Office
17 42 (0.81%) Law
17 42 (0.81%) Local Government
17 42 (0.81%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 1,125 (21.69%) Developer
2 967 (18.64%) Data Engineer
3 782 (15.08%) Analyst
4 735 (14.17%) Senior
5 369 (7.11%) Lead
6 333 (6.42%) Data Analyst
7 276 (5.32%) Architect
8 253 (4.88%) Business Analyst
9 241 (4.65%) Consultant
10 214 (4.13%) DBA
10 214 (4.13%) Senior Data Engineer
11 205 (3.95%) Java Developer
12 182 (3.51%) Senior Developer
13 132 (2.54%) Software Engineer
14 128 (2.47%) Data Architect
15 125 (2.41%) Python Engineer
16 124 (2.39%) SQL DBA
17 121 (2.33%) SQL Developer
18 119 (2.29%) Azure Engineer
19 118 (2.27%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 480 (9.25%) REST
2 452 (8.71%) .NET
3 405 (7.81%) Terraform
4 356 (6.86%) PySpark
5 354 (6.82%) Kafka
6 282 (5.44%) Spring
7 272 (5.24%) Spring Boot
8 249 (4.80%) React
9 214 (4.13%) RESTful
10 211 (4.07%) JSON
11 208 (4.01%) HTML
12 183 (3.53%) XML
13 177 (3.41%) CSS
14 139 (2.68%) Web Services
15 126 (2.43%) AngularJS
16 119 (2.29%) SOAP
17 114 (2.20%) Middleware
18 111 (2.14%) Pandas
19 94 (1.81%) .NET Framework
20 87 (1.68%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 343 (6.61%) Cloud Native
2 273 (5.26%) Data Structures
3 229 (4.41%) Product Ownership
4 175 (3.37%) Legacy Systems
5 150 (2.89%) Distributed Systems
6 134 (2.58%) Onboarding
7 128 (2.47%) Enterprise Software
8 112 (2.16%) Management Information System
9 89 (1.72%) Derivative
10 86 (1.66%) AI Agents
11 85 (1.64%) Self-Motivation
12 80 (1.54%) Replication
13 69 (1.33%) Data Protection Act
14 68 (1.31%) Analytical Mindset
15 64 (1.23%) Clustering
16 62 (1.20%) Algorithms
17 57 (1.10%) Reference Data
18 54 (1.04%) Fixed Income
19 53 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
20 51 (0.98%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 381 (7.35%) Linux
2 324 (6.25%) Windows
3 254 (4.90%) Unix
4 131 (2.53%) Windows Server
5 27 (0.52%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 20 (0.39%) Solaris
7 15 (0.29%) AIX
8 13 (0.25%) VMS
9 10 (0.19%) Ubuntu
9 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.13%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
12 6 (0.12%) zOS
13 4 (0.077%) Android
13 4 (0.077%) Apple iOS
13 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
14 3 (0.058%) Oracle Linux
15 2 (0.039%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,408 (27.14%) CI/CD
2 1,396 (26.91%) Agile
3 1,361 (26.24%) Data Modelling
4 1,265 (24.39%) Analytics
5 1,114 (21.48%) ETL
6 1,110 (21.40%) Business Intelligence
7 1,036 (19.97%) DevOps
8 1,010 (19.47%) Problem-Solving
9 1,009 (19.45%) Data Pipeline
10 859 (16.56%) Data Engineering
11 815 (15.71%) AI
12 777 (14.98%) Validation
13 771 (14.86%) Migration
14 684 (13.19%) Stakeholder Management
15 608 (11.72%) Data Governance
16 597 (11.51%) Test Automation
17 571 (11.01%) Data Analysis
18 549 (10.58%) Continuous Improvement
19 523 (10.08%) Decision-Making
20 440 (8.48%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,873 (36.11%) Python
2 667 (12.86%) Java
3 479 (9.23%) C#
4 419 (8.08%) PL/SQL
5 405 (7.81%) JavaScript
6 273 (5.26%) PowerShell
7 251 (4.84%) T-SQL
8 203 (3.91%) TypeScript
9 154 (2.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 154 (2.97%) Shell Script
10 122 (2.35%) Bash
11 99 (1.91%) R
12 75 (1.45%) Scala
13 57 (1.10%) C++
14 43 (0.83%) VBA
15 42 (0.81%) Bicep
16 29 (0.56%) VB.NET
17 28 (0.54%) C
18 27 (0.52%) Go
19 26 (0.50%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,126 (21.71%) Security Cleared
2 902 (17.39%) SC Cleared
3 367 (7.08%) Degree
4 156 (3.01%) BPSS Clearance
5 136 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
6 133 (2.56%) DV Cleared
7 84 (1.62%) Azure Certification
8 66 (1.27%) ISTQB
9 51 (0.98%) Microsoft Certification
10 48 (0.93%) Master's Degree
11 43 (0.83%) AWS Certification
12 20 (0.39%) DBS Check
13 19 (0.37%) ISEB
13 19 (0.37%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 18 (0.35%) CISSP
15 14 (0.27%) ACCA
15 14 (0.27%) CIMA
15 14 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
16 12 (0.23%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 12 (0.23%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1,009 (19.45%) Data Quality
2 419 (8.08%) QA
3 158 (3.05%) GDPR
4 69 (1.33%) Accessibility
5 47 (0.91%) SLA
6 34 (0.66%) ISO 20022
7 27 (0.52%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 26 (0.50%) Actionable Recommendations
9 23 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 20 (0.39%) IFRS
11 19 (0.37%) NIST
12 18 (0.35%) MiFID
13 15 (0.29%) PMO
14 13 (0.25%) GMP
14 13 (0.25%) Solvency II
15 12 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 12 (0.23%) GxP
15 12 (0.23%) PCI DSS
16 11 (0.21%) COBIT
16 11 (0.21%) HIPAA
System Software
1 493 (9.50%) Docker
2 135 (2.60%) Active Directory
3 61 (1.18%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (0.83%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.81%) Oracle RAC
6 25 (0.48%) Hyper-V
7 19 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
8 16 (0.31%) vCloud
8 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 15 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 7 (0.13%) Postfix
11 6 (0.12%) Squid
12 5 (0.096%) Ceph
13 4 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 4 (0.077%) KVM
14 3 (0.058%) GPFS
15 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
15 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
15 2 (0.039%) NFS
Systems Management
1 411 (7.92%) Kubernetes
2 103 (1.99%) Ansible
2 103 (1.99%) Grafana
3 52 (1.00%) Oracle RMAN
4 51 (0.98%) Prometheus
5 46 (0.89%) Data Guard
6 45 (0.87%) Control-M
7 41 (0.79%) SCOM
8 23 (0.44%) Kibana
9 16 (0.31%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
9 16 (0.31%) vCenter Server
10 13 (0.25%) Nagios
10 13 (0.25%) Netcool
10 13 (0.25%) ZABBIX
11 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
11 12 (0.23%) Single Sign-On
11 12 (0.23%) Tivoli
12 11 (0.21%) Microsoft Intune
13 10 (0.19%) ITRS Geneos
13 10 (0.19%) Tivoli Monitoring
Vendors
1 928 (17.89%) Oracle
2 877 (16.91%) Microsoft
3 647 (12.47%) Databricks
4 208 (4.01%) Google
5 166 (3.20%) Informatica
6 143 (2.76%) SAP
7 127 (2.45%) Talend
8 105 (2.02%) IBM
8 105 (2.02%) ServiceNow
9 84 (1.62%) Splunk
10 82 (1.58%) Salesforce
11 80 (1.54%) VMware
12 59 (1.14%) Denodo
13 41 (0.79%) Bloomberg
14 40 (0.77%) Dynatrace
14 40 (0.77%) Sybase
15 37 (0.71%) BMC
15 37 (0.71%) Murex
16 35 (0.67%) Adobe
16 35 (0.67%) Foundry