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

6 months to
4 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 11
Rank change year-on-year -5 -2 0
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,179 3,804 4,178
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.48% 11.46% 11.00%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.38% 34.84% 34.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,472 2,573 2,899
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% -0.94%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £626
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 93 86 53
10th Percentile £21.33 £24.60 £19.67
25th Percentile £26.52 £31.25 £25.99
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +36.99% -19.67%
75th Percentile £68.75 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £75.74 - £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £30.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +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 14,235 10,917 12,212
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.05% 32.89% 32.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,241 7,185 8,076
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £506 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.86% -3.71% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £645
90th Percentile £725 £735 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 545 302 333
10th Percentile £23.95 £29.00 £26.40
25th Percentile £46.25 £41.25 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.19 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £75.00 £78.50
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 4 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 4 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 4 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 4,453 £500 - 7,657
London -7 2,517 £525 - 4,340
UK excluding London -6 2,065 £475 - 4,147
Work from Home -4 1,516 £500 - 3,677
North of England 0 600 £475 +5.56% 1,062
Midlands -5 446 £469 -1.26% 620
South East -15 440 £475 -3.06% 1,026
West Midlands -4 349 £469 -6.20% 369
North West +5 297 £500 +12.99% 611
Yorkshire +11 248 £474 -0.21% 309
South West +2 230 £528 +17.22% 411
Scotland -4 208 £425 -10.24% 399
East of England -6 114 £500 -0.30% 357
East Midlands -4 95 £463 +12.80% 250
North East -2 65 £406 -9.72% 155
Wales -8 38 £475 +4.97% 155
Northern Ireland -9 19 £363 -30.95% 157
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
1 262 (5.06%) Apache Airflow
2 241 (4.65%) Confluence
3 218 (4.21%) Apache Spark
4 177 (3.42%) Apache
5 96 (1.85%) SharePoint
6 78 (1.51%) SAS
7 41 (0.79%) WebLogic
8 37 (0.71%) IIS
9 36 (0.70%) Oracle Workflow
10 32 (0.62%) Jupyter
11 26 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
12 23 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
13 21 (0.41%) CMS
14 20 (0.39%) nginx
15 19 (0.37%) Camunda
16 16 (0.31%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
17 15 (0.29%) WebSphere
18 10 (0.19%) Tomcat
19 8 (0.15%) Appian
Applications
1 296 (5.72%) Microsoft Excel
2 68 (1.31%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.73%) MS Visio
4 35 (0.68%) Spreadsheet
5 22 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.15%) Windchill
8 4 (0.077%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.077%) Notion
8 4 (0.077%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) Mingle
9 3 (0.058%) Notepad++
10 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 42 (0.81%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.75%) Oracle EBS
3 30 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
4 29 (0.56%) 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 Financials
11 12 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
12 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
12 11 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
12 11 (0.21%) Oracle EBS R12
12 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
13 10 (0.19%) NetSuite
13 10 (0.19%) Oracle FAH
14 9 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
14 9 (0.17%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,589 (30.68%) Azure
2 1,268 (24.48%) AWS
3 969 (18.71%) Power Platform
4 542 (10.47%) GCP
5 418 (8.07%) Azure DevOps
6 410 (7.92%) Snowflake
7 365 (7.05%) GitHub
8 322 (6.22%) Azure Data Factory
9 317 (6.12%) dbt
10 296 (5.72%) Serverless
11 266 (5.14%) Amazon S3
12 202 (3.90%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 194 (3.75%) AWS Lambda
14 172 (3.32%) GitHub Actions
15 117 (2.26%) SaaS
16 111 (2.14%) Entra ID
17 108 (2.09%) Power Automate
18 105 (2.03%) PowerApps
19 97 (1.87%) Azure Databricks
20 86 (1.66%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 71 (1.37%) DNS
2 47 (0.91%) Firewall
3 36 (0.70%) HTTP
4 32 (0.62%) 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 (0.41%) 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%) Multicast
13 8 (0.15%) RTP
13 8 (0.15%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 886 (17.11%) Power BI
2 696 (13.44%) Data Warehouse
3 670 (12.94%) SQL Server
4 357 (6.89%) Relational Database
5 339 (6.55%) PostgreSQL
6 328 (6.33%) Data Lake
7 290 (5.60%) Metadata
8 278 (5.37%) Tableau
9 247 (4.77%) NoSQL
10 240 (4.63%) Oracle Database
11 224 (4.33%) BigQuery
12 200 (3.86%) Azure SQL Database
13 149 (2.88%) Amazon Redshift
14 148 (2.86%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 144 (2.78%) Delta Lake
16 128 (2.47%) MySQL
17 121 (2.34%) MongoDB
18 120 (2.32%) Big Data
19 119 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
20 104 (2.01%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 708 (13.67%) Git
2 433 (8.36%) JIRA
3 290 (5.60%) Jenkins
4 268 (5.17%) GitLab
5 101 (1.95%) Selenium
6 96 (1.85%) JUnit
7 91 (1.76%) Maven
8 86 (1.66%) Gradle
9 70 (1.35%) Postman
10 57 (1.10%) Mockito
11 44 (0.85%) Bitbucket
12 43 (0.83%) Oracle Forms
12 43 (0.83%) SonarQube
13 36 (0.70%) Visual Studio
13 36 (0.70%) Zephyr
14 32 (0.62%) REST Assured
15 31 (0.60%) Team Foundation Server
16 30 (0.58%) Artifactory
17 27 (0.52%) MLflow
18 26 (0.50%) JMeter
General
1 1,409 (27.21%) Social Skills
2 1,368 (26.41%) Finance
3 1,072 (20.70%) Analytical Skills
4 613 (11.84%) Banking
5 488 (9.42%) Public Sector
6 157 (3.03%) Retail
7 155 (2.99%) Marketing
8 148 (2.86%) Investment Banking
9 141 (2.72%) Front Office
10 104 (2.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 90 (1.74%) Manufacturing
12 88 (1.70%) Documentation Skills
13 63 (1.22%) Legal
14 56 (1.08%) Financial Institution
15 52 (1.00%) Back Office
16 50 (0.97%) Local Government
16 50 (0.97%) Presentation Skills
17 45 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
18 44 (0.85%) Military
19 42 (0.81%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,145 (22.11%) Developer
2 947 (18.29%) Data Engineer
3 777 (15.00%) Analyst
4 756 (14.60%) Senior
5 366 (7.07%) Lead
6 335 (6.47%) Data Analyst
7 253 (4.89%) Business Analyst
8 252 (4.87%) Architect
9 226 (4.36%) Senior Data Engineer
10 210 (4.05%) Consultant
11 204 (3.94%) DBA
11 204 (3.94%) Java Developer
12 180 (3.48%) Senior Developer
13 128 (2.47%) Python Developer
14 126 (2.43%) Azure Engineer
15 122 (2.36%) Full-Stack Developer
15 122 (2.36%) Python Engineer
15 122 (2.36%) Software Engineer
16 119 (2.30%) Data Architect
16 119 (2.30%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 518 (10.00%) REST
2 440 (8.50%) .NET
3 429 (8.28%) Terraform
4 359 (6.93%) Kafka
5 346 (6.68%) PySpark
6 287 (5.54%) Spring
7 280 (5.41%) Spring Boot
8 238 (4.60%) React
9 211 (4.07%) RESTful
10 210 (4.05%) JSON
11 205 (3.96%) HTML
12 182 (3.51%) XML
13 169 (3.26%) CSS
14 140 (2.70%) Web Services
15 133 (2.57%) SOAP
16 128 (2.47%) AngularJS
17 105 (2.03%) Middleware
18 98 (1.89%) Pandas
19 95 (1.83%) .NET Framework
20 93 (1.80%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 337 (6.51%) Cloud Native
2 277 (5.35%) Data Structures
3 256 (4.94%) Product Ownership
4 168 (3.24%) Legacy Systems
5 150 (2.90%) Onboarding
6 145 (2.80%) Distributed Systems
7 143 (2.76%) Enterprise Software
8 112 (2.16%) Management Information System
9 102 (1.97%) AI Agents
10 88 (1.70%) Self-Motivation
11 86 (1.66%) Replication
12 85 (1.64%) Derivative
13 71 (1.37%) Data Protection Act
14 66 (1.27%) Analytical Mindset
15 64 (1.24%) Algorithms
16 63 (1.22%) Clustering
17 61 (1.18%) Reference Data
18 54 (1.04%) Data Centre
18 54 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
19 48 (0.93%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 386 (7.45%) Linux
2 318 (6.14%) Windows
3 241 (4.65%) Unix
4 132 (2.55%) 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 (0.14%) Android
12 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
13 5 (0.097%) 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 (0.039%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,435 (27.71%) Agile
2 1,427 (27.55%) CI/CD
3 1,364 (26.34%) Data Modelling
4 1,284 (24.79%) Analytics
5 1,099 (21.22%) Business Intelligence
6 1,094 (21.12%) ETL
7 1,008 (19.46%) Problem-Solving
8 990 (19.12%) DevOps
9 976 (18.85%) Data Pipeline
10 889 (17.17%) AI
11 878 (16.95%) Data Engineering
12 831 (16.05%) Validation
13 783 (15.12%) Stakeholder Management
14 774 (14.94%) Migration
15 640 (12.36%) Test Automation
16 608 (11.74%) Data Analysis
17 596 (11.51%) Data Governance
18 594 (11.47%) Continuous Improvement
19 555 (10.72%) Decision-Making
20 455 (8.79%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,836 (35.45%) Python
2 664 (12.82%) Java
3 461 (8.90%) C#
4 419 (8.09%) JavaScript
5 391 (7.55%) PL/SQL
6 259 (5.00%) PowerShell
7 253 (4.89%) T-SQL
8 211 (4.07%) TypeScript
9 151 (2.92%) Shell Script
10 145 (2.80%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 130 (2.51%) Bash
12 91 (1.76%) Scala
13 82 (1.58%) R
14 44 (0.85%) C++
15 41 (0.79%) Bicep
15 41 (0.79%) VBA
16 31 (0.60%) Go
16 31 (0.60%) Kotlin
17 30 (0.58%) C
18 29 (0.56%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,117 (21.57%) Security Cleared
2 885 (17.09%) SC Cleared
3 364 (7.03%) Degree
4 176 (3.40%) BPSS Clearance
5 137 (2.65%) DV Cleared
6 126 (2.43%) Computer Science Degree
7 84 (1.62%) Azure Certification
8 60 (1.16%) ISTQB
9 53 (1.02%) Microsoft Certification
10 48 (0.93%) AWS Certification
11 43 (0.83%) Master's Degree
12 20 (0.39%) ISEB
13 19 (0.37%) CISSP
13 19 (0.37%) 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
16 14 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
16 14 (0.27%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1,037 (20.02%) Data Quality
2 416 (8.03%) QA
3 136 (2.63%) GDPR
4 74 (1.43%) Accessibility
5 49 (0.95%) SLA
6 33 (0.64%) 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%) PCI DSS
16 10 (0.19%) PMO
System Software
1 484 (9.35%) Docker
2 132 (2.55%) Active Directory
3 51 (0.98%) VMware Infrastructure
4 39 (0.75%) Oracle RAC
5 37 (0.71%) Virtual Machines
6 21 (0.41%) 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 (0.097%) KVM
9 5 (0.097%) NFS
9 5 (0.097%) Postfix
10 4 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
10 4 (0.077%) GPFS
10 4 (0.077%) Squid
11 2 (0.039%) Ceph
11 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
11 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
12 1 (0.019%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 433 (8.36%) Kubernetes
2 111 (2.14%) Grafana
3 105 (2.03%) Ansible
4 60 (1.16%) Prometheus
5 44 (0.85%) Control-M
6 43 (0.83%) Kibana
7 40 (0.77%) SCOM
8 39 (0.75%) Data Guard
9 37 (0.71%) Oracle RMAN
10 17 (0.33%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.31%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
12 15 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
13 12 (0.23%) Istio
13 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
13 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Intune
14 11 (0.21%) Argo
14 11 (0.21%) Progress Chef
15 9 (0.17%) Puppet
15 9 (0.17%) WMI
16 8 (0.15%) SCCM
Vendors
1 906 (17.49%) Oracle
2 879 (16.97%) Microsoft
3 666 (12.86%) Databricks
4 247 (4.77%) Google
5 150 (2.90%) Informatica
6 142 (2.74%) SAP
7 115 (2.22%) Talend
8 113 (2.18%) IBM
9 93 (1.80%) ServiceNow
10 86 (1.66%) Salesforce
11 85 (1.64%) Splunk
12 70 (1.35%) VMware
13 47 (0.91%) Denodo
14 42 (0.81%) Foundry
15 40 (0.77%) OpenAI
16 39 (0.75%) Bloomberg
17 37 (0.71%) Adobe
17 37 (0.71%) UiPath
18 35 (0.68%) Murex
18 35 (0.68%) Sybase