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

6 months to
30 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,119 3,837 4,100
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.66% 11.69% 10.29%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.27% 35.54% 33.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,398 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 £467 £463 £475
% change year-on-year +0.94% -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 14,113 10,796 12,393
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.64% 32.90% 31.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,177 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 £493 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.68% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 524 254 421
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 £79.85 £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 30 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 30 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 30 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 -3 4,463 £500 - 1,910
London -6 2,414 £525 - 894
UK excluding London -10 2,157 £467 +0.94% 1,316
Work from Home -6 1,537 £500 - 926
North of England -5 589 £463 -2.63% 380
Midlands +1 537 £459 +8.00% 204
South East -10 471 £490 -2.00% 390
West Midlands +3 443 £459 +2.00% 116
North West -4 313 £475 +1.28% 208
Yorkshire -7 237 £474 -0.21% 106
South West -7 226 £500 +14.29% 147
Scotland -5 194 £438 -2.78% 53
East of England -3 117 £478 -4.50% 103
East Midlands -3 90 £473 +22.06% 88
North East -18 51 £419 -9.46% 74
Wales -2 41 £468 +5.06% 37
Northern Ireland -10 16 £375 -26.83% 24

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
1 224 (4.38%) Apache Spark
2 221 (4.32%) Confluence
3 210 (4.10%) Apache Airflow
4 188 (3.67%) Apache
5 115 (2.25%) SAS
6 69 (1.35%) SharePoint
7 45 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
8 42 (0.82%) WebLogic
9 40 (0.78%) IIS
10 36 (0.70%) Tomcat
11 31 (0.61%) WebSphere
12 27 (0.53%) Jupyter
13 22 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
14 21 (0.41%) Apache Geronimo
14 21 (0.41%) Apache ServiceMix
14 21 (0.41%) Red Hat Fuse
15 20 (0.39%) nginx
16 19 (0.37%) CMS
16 19 (0.37%) Microsoft Exchange
17 13 (0.25%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 323 (6.31%) Microsoft Excel
2 64 (1.25%) Microsoft Office
3 54 (1.05%) MS Visio
4 39 (0.76%) Spreadsheet
5 31 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.078%) Notion
8 4 (0.078%) 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 (1.02%) Oracle EBS
2 42 (0.82%) 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 (0.35%) NEC Housing
7 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
8 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
9 13 (0.25%) Oracle General Ledger
10 12 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.21%) Findur
11 11 (0.21%) 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%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 1,604 (31.33%) Azure
2 1,217 (23.77%) AWS
3 946 (18.48%) Power Platform
4 456 (8.91%) GCP
5 440 (8.60%) Azure DevOps
6 359 (7.01%) GitHub
7 345 (6.74%) Azure Data Factory
8 339 (6.62%) Snowflake
9 307 (6.00%) Serverless
10 277 (5.41%) dbt
11 261 (5.10%) Amazon S3
12 218 (4.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 201 (3.93%) AWS Lambda
14 184 (3.59%) GitHub Actions
15 96 (1.88%) Entra ID
15 96 (1.88%) SaaS
16 93 (1.82%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 91 (1.78%) Power Automate
18 85 (1.66%) PowerApps
19 74 (1.45%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 58 (1.13%) DNS
2 44 (0.86%) Firewall
3 29 (0.57%) SSL
4 25 (0.49%) HTTP
5 23 (0.45%) Network Security
5 23 (0.45%) VPN
6 22 (0.43%) SNMP
7 20 (0.39%) Internet
8 19 (0.37%) WAN
9 17 (0.33%) TCP/IP
10 11 (0.21%) Broadband
11 10 (0.20%) Kerberos
11 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
11 10 (0.20%) Wireshark
12 9 (0.18%) DHCP
12 9 (0.18%) SAN
12 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
13 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
13 8 (0.16%) HTTPS
13 8 (0.16%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 870 (17.00%) Power BI
2 707 (13.81%) Data Warehouse
3 638 (12.46%) SQL Server
4 342 (6.68%) Relational Database
5 320 (6.25%) Tableau
6 318 (6.21%) PostgreSQL
7 316 (6.17%) Data Lake
8 275 (5.37%) Metadata
9 255 (4.98%) NoSQL
10 217 (4.24%) Azure SQL Database
11 208 (4.06%) Oracle Database
12 175 (3.42%) BigQuery
13 172 (3.36%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 149 (2.91%) Amazon Redshift
15 136 (2.66%) Delta Lake
16 132 (2.58%) Big Data
17 130 (2.54%) Oracle Reports
18 116 (2.27%) MySQL
19 112 (2.19%) MongoDB
20 107 (2.09%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 588 (11.49%) Git
2 398 (7.77%) JIRA
3 279 (5.45%) Jenkins
4 225 (4.40%) GitLab
5 82 (1.60%) JUnit
6 71 (1.39%) Maven
7 63 (1.23%) Gradle
8 58 (1.13%) Postman
9 56 (1.09%) Selenium
10 54 (1.05%) Mockito
11 50 (0.98%) Oracle Forms
12 38 (0.74%) Bitbucket
13 37 (0.72%) Visual Studio
14 35 (0.68%) SonarQube
15 32 (0.63%) ERwin
15 32 (0.63%) Team Foundation Server
16 31 (0.61%) JMeter
16 31 (0.61%) MLflow
17 30 (0.59%) Zephyr
18 29 (0.57%) Liquibase
General
1 1,315 (25.69%) Social Skills
2 1,269 (24.79%) Finance
3 1,005 (19.63%) Analytical Skills
4 489 (9.55%) Public Sector
5 482 (9.42%) Banking
6 142 (2.77%) Marketing
7 141 (2.75%) Front Office
8 133 (2.60%) Retail
9 122 (2.38%) Investment Banking
10 101 (1.97%) Documentation Skills
11 86 (1.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 73 (1.43%) Manufacturing
13 58 (1.13%) Legal
14 56 (1.09%) Presentation Skills
15 55 (1.07%) Financial Institution
16 48 (0.94%) Organisational Skills
17 43 (0.84%) Publishing
18 41 (0.80%) Telecoms
19 40 (0.78%) Back Office
20 37 (0.72%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,108 (21.64%) Developer
2 1,004 (19.61%) Data Engineer
3 749 (14.63%) Analyst
4 690 (13.48%) Senior
5 368 (7.19%) Lead
6 322 (6.29%) Data Analyst
7 276 (5.39%) Architect
8 256 (5.00%) Consultant
9 240 (4.69%) Business Analyst
10 216 (4.22%) Java Developer
11 202 (3.95%) DBA
12 196 (3.83%) Senior Data Engineer
13 172 (3.36%) Senior Developer
14 143 (2.79%) Software Engineer
15 130 (2.54%) SQL Developer
16 129 (2.52%) SQL DBA
17 123 (2.40%) Azure Engineer
18 113 (2.21%) Data Architect
18 113 (2.21%) Full-Stack Developer
19 109 (2.13%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 414 (8.09%) .NET
2 413 (8.07%) REST
3 329 (6.43%) PySpark
4 316 (6.17%) Kafka
5 271 (5.29%) Spring
6 257 (5.02%) Spring Boot
7 226 (4.41%) React
8 217 (4.24%) RESTful
9 205 (4.00%) JSON
10 185 (3.61%) XML
11 172 (3.36%) HTML
12 142 (2.77%) CSS
13 140 (2.73%) AngularJS
14 129 (2.52%) Web Services
15 121 (2.36%) Pandas
16 119 (2.32%) Middleware
17 116 (2.27%) SOAP
18 103 (2.01%) .NET Framework
19 83 (1.62%) Node.js
20 75 (1.47%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 344 (6.72%) Cloud Native
2 246 (4.81%) Data Structures
3 196 (3.83%) Product Ownership
4 182 (3.56%) Legacy Systems
5 155 (3.03%) Distributed Systems
6 114 (2.23%) Onboarding
7 101 (1.97%) Enterprise Software
8 95 (1.86%) Derivative
9 92 (1.80%) Management Information System
10 82 (1.60%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
12 74 (1.45%) Data Protection Act
13 72 (1.41%) Clustering
13 72 (1.41%) Replication
14 69 (1.35%) Algorithms
15 55 (1.07%) Fixed Income
16 52 (1.02%) Equities
16 52 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
17 49 (0.96%) Reference Data
18 47 (0.92%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 339 (6.62%) Linux
2 315 (6.15%) Windows
3 234 (4.57%) Unix
4 121 (2.36%) Windows Server
5 26 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 22 (0.43%) AIX
7 17 (0.33%) Solaris
8 14 (0.27%) Windows Server 2019
9 12 (0.23%) VMS
10 11 (0.21%) 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 10
13 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.098%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
16 2 (0.039%) HPUX
16 2 (0.039%) OpenVMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,339 (26.16%) Agile
2 1,338 (26.14%) Data Modelling
3 1,337 (26.12%) CI/CD
4 1,312 (25.63%) Analytics
5 1,148 (22.43%) ETL
6 1,121 (21.90%) Business Intelligence
7 1,024 (20.00%) DevOps
8 1,008 (19.69%) Data Pipeline
9 971 (18.97%) Problem-Solving
10 857 (16.74%) Data Engineering
11 723 (14.12%) AI
12 720 (14.07%) Migration
13 682 (13.32%) Validation
14 596 (11.64%) Data Governance
15 540 (10.55%) Stakeholder Management
16 530 (10.35%) Test Automation
17 517 (10.10%) Decision-Making
18 508 (9.92%) Continuous Improvement
19 504 (9.85%) Data Analysis
20 460 (8.99%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,817 (35.50%) Python
2 676 (13.21%) Java
3 488 (9.53%) C#
4 415 (8.11%) PL/SQL
5 351 (6.86%) JavaScript
6 275 (5.37%) T-SQL
7 256 (5.00%) PowerShell
8 175 (3.42%) TypeScript
9 149 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 139 (2.72%) Shell Script
11 106 (2.07%) R
12 104 (2.03%) Bash
13 76 (1.48%) Scala
14 61 (1.19%) C++
15 51 (1.00%) VBA
16 48 (0.94%) Bicep
17 35 (0.68%) C
18 31 (0.61%) VB
19 28 (0.55%) Perl
20 25 (0.49%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,120 (21.88%) Security Cleared
2 910 (17.78%) SC Cleared
3 354 (6.92%) Degree
4 143 (2.79%) BPSS Clearance
5 116 (2.27%) Computer Science Degree
6 107 (2.09%) DV Cleared
7 78 (1.52%) Azure Certification
8 56 (1.09%) ISTQB
8 56 (1.09%) Master's Degree
9 39 (0.76%) Microsoft Certification
10 33 (0.64%) AWS Certification
11 17 (0.33%) DBS Check
12 16 (0.31%) CISSP
12 16 (0.31%) PhD
13 15 (0.29%) ISEB
14 13 (0.25%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 12 (0.23%) Oracle Certification
16 11 (0.21%) FFIEC
17 10 (0.20%) CISM
18 9 (0.18%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 952 (18.60%) Data Quality
2 383 (7.48%) QA
3 178 (3.48%) GDPR
4 71 (1.39%) Accessibility
5 45 (0.88%) SLA
6 23 (0.45%) Actionable Recommendations
6 23 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 23 (0.45%) PMO
7 22 (0.43%) NIST
8 21 (0.41%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 19 (0.37%) ISO 20022
10 16 (0.31%) Solvency II
11 15 (0.29%) MiFID
12 14 (0.27%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.27%) IFRS
13 13 (0.25%) GMP
14 12 (0.23%) COBIT
15 11 (0.21%) NCSC
15 11 (0.21%) PCI DSS
15 11 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 498 (9.73%) Docker
2 130 (2.54%) Active Directory
3 47 (0.92%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (0.84%) Virtual Machines
5 41 (0.80%) Oracle RAC
6 20 (0.39%) Hyper-V
7 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
8 14 (0.27%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.25%) vCloud
10 10 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
12 8 (0.16%) KVM
13 4 (0.078%) Ceph
13 4 (0.078%) HDFS
13 4 (0.078%) RACF
14 3 (0.059%) Squid
15 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
16 1 (0.020%) GPFS
16 1 (0.020%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 427 (8.34%) Kubernetes
2 387 (7.56%) Terraform
3 108 (2.11%) Grafana
4 93 (1.82%) Ansible
5 50 (0.98%) Prometheus
6 48 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
7 45 (0.88%) Data Guard
8 30 (0.59%) Control-M
9 25 (0.49%) SCOM
10 21 (0.41%) Kibana
11 18 (0.35%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.31%) Nagios
12 16 (0.31%) Netcool
12 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
14 13 (0.25%) OpenView
14 13 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
14 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 10 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
15 10 (0.20%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
Vendors
1 914 (17.86%) Oracle
2 809 (15.80%) Microsoft
3 598 (11.68%) Databricks
4 191 (3.73%) Google
5 188 (3.67%) Informatica
6 146 (2.85%) Talend
7 141 (2.75%) SAP
8 135 (2.64%) ServiceNow
9 90 (1.76%) IBM
10 87 (1.70%) Splunk
11 72 (1.41%) Denodo
12 69 (1.35%) Salesforce
13 65 (1.27%) VMware
14 43 (0.84%) Dynatrace
15 40 (0.78%) Citrix
16 38 (0.74%) Bloomberg
17 37 (0.72%) BMC
18 36 (0.70%) Sybase
19 35 (0.68%) Alteryx
20 34 (0.66%) Adobe