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

6 months to
18 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,097 3,816 4,220
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.63% 11.72% 10.02%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.88% 35.39% 32.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,382 2,650 3,119
10th Percentile £352 £340 £350
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £613 £630
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £465 £475
% change year-on-year +0.81% -2.11% -3.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 98 71 54
10th Percentile £24.81 £22.81 £21.67
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.36 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £40.50 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% -3.57% -15.64%
75th Percentile £69.33 £53.75 £51.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £66.00 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £41.96 £40.00
% change year-on-year +7.26% +4.89% -12.09%

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 14,207 10,782 12,935
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.85% 33.12% 30.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,236 7,259 9,143
10th Percentile £360 £347 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 530 260 493
10th Percentile £34.01 £28.16 £30.75
25th Percentile £52.49 £36.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.13 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.79% -8.60% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.30 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +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 18 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 18 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 18 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 4,432 £500 - 1,311
London -6 2,371 £525 - 586
UK excluding London -9 2,181 £469 +0.81% 984
Work from Home -6 1,531 £500 - 610
North of England -3 584 £463 -2.63% 245
Midlands +1 555 £459 +8.00% 168
South East -11 459 £475 -5.00% 336
West Midlands +3 455 £459 +2.00% 82
North West -3 310 £475 +0.53% 128
South West -5 239 £500 +14.29% 105
Yorkshire -7 237 £475 - 82
Scotland -5 203 £450 - 39
East of England -7 116 £488 -2.50% 71
East Midlands -3 96 £525 +32.74% 86
North East -11 52 £425 -8.11% 40
Wales +1 45 £468 +7.47% 31
Northern Ireland -10 15 £375 -26.83% 9

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
1 238 (4.67%) Apache Spark
2 215 (4.22%) Confluence
3 214 (4.20%) Apache Airflow
4 190 (3.73%) Apache
5 116 (2.28%) SAS
6 64 (1.26%) SharePoint
7 47 (0.92%) Oracle Workflow
8 42 (0.82%) IIS
8 42 (0.82%) Tomcat
9 36 (0.71%) WebLogic
10 32 (0.63%) WebSphere
11 25 (0.49%) Jupyter
12 23 (0.45%) CMS
12 23 (0.45%) nginx
13 22 (0.43%) Apache Geronimo
13 22 (0.43%) Apache ServiceMix
13 22 (0.43%) Red Hat Fuse
14 19 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
15 16 (0.31%) Microsoft Exchange
16 14 (0.27%) Appian
Applications
1 324 (6.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 69 (1.35%) Microsoft Office
3 54 (1.06%) MS Visio
4 40 (0.78%) Spreadsheet
5 34 (0.67%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 9 (0.18%) 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%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.039%) Microsoft Project
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%) Weka
Business Applications
1 51 (1.00%) Oracle EBS
2 41 (0.80%) Dynamics CRM
3 32 (0.63%) Aladdin
4 30 (0.59%) SAP S/4HANA
5 27 (0.53%) Oracle Payables
6 25 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
7 21 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
8 19 (0.37%) NEC Housing
8 19 (0.37%) Oracle EBS R12
8 19 (0.37%) Oracle Receivables
9 13 (0.26%) Oracle Assets
9 13 (0.26%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.22%) Findur
10 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.20%) Fidessa
11 10 (0.20%) Finacle
11 10 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
12 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 8 (0.16%) Infor LN
13 8 (0.16%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,602 (31.43%) Azure
2 1,222 (23.97%) AWS
3 938 (18.40%) Power Platform
4 443 (8.69%) Azure DevOps
5 442 (8.67%) GCP
6 362 (7.10%) GitHub
7 342 (6.71%) Azure Data Factory
8 330 (6.47%) Snowflake
9 309 (6.06%) Serverless
10 273 (5.36%) Amazon S3
11 266 (5.22%) dbt
12 218 (4.28%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 200 (3.92%) AWS Lambda
14 185 (3.63%) GitHub Actions
15 96 (1.88%) SaaS
16 90 (1.77%) Entra ID
17 86 (1.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 84 (1.65%) Power Automate
19 79 (1.55%) PowerApps
20 75 (1.47%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 52 (1.02%) DNS
2 42 (0.82%) Firewall
3 27 (0.53%) HTTP
3 27 (0.53%) SSL
4 22 (0.43%) Network Security
4 22 (0.43%) SNMP
5 20 (0.39%) Internet
6 19 (0.37%) VPN
6 19 (0.37%) WAN
7 15 (0.29%) TCP/IP
8 12 (0.24%) SAN
9 11 (0.22%) Kerberos
10 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
10 10 (0.20%) Wireshark
11 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
11 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
12 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
12 8 (0.16%) Broadband
13 7 (0.14%) LAN
13 7 (0.14%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 862 (16.91%) Power BI
2 690 (13.54%) Data Warehouse
3 652 (12.79%) SQL Server
4 341 (6.69%) Relational Database
5 329 (6.45%) PostgreSQL
6 325 (6.38%) Tableau
7 316 (6.20%) Data Lake
8 277 (5.43%) Metadata
9 254 (4.98%) NoSQL
10 218 (4.28%) Azure SQL Database
11 210 (4.12%) Oracle Database
12 176 (3.45%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 173 (3.39%) BigQuery
14 150 (2.94%) Amazon Redshift
15 143 (2.81%) Big Data
16 133 (2.61%) Delta Lake
17 131 (2.57%) Oracle Reports
18 121 (2.37%) MySQL
19 112 (2.20%) MongoDB
20 110 (2.16%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 571 (11.20%) Git
2 394 (7.73%) JIRA
3 272 (5.34%) Jenkins
4 217 (4.26%) GitLab
5 78 (1.53%) JUnit
6 67 (1.31%) Maven
7 62 (1.22%) Gradle
8 59 (1.16%) Selenium
9 56 (1.10%) Postman
10 53 (1.04%) Oracle Forms
11 51 (1.00%) Mockito
12 43 (0.84%) Visual Studio
13 37 (0.73%) Bitbucket
14 35 (0.69%) SonarQube
15 34 (0.67%) Team Foundation Server
16 32 (0.63%) JMeter
16 32 (0.63%) MLflow
17 31 (0.61%) Cucumber
18 28 (0.55%) TeamCity
18 28 (0.55%) Zephyr
General
1 1,295 (25.41%) Social Skills
2 1,279 (25.09%) Finance
3 996 (19.54%) Analytical Skills
4 490 (9.61%) Public Sector
5 471 (9.24%) Banking
6 139 (2.73%) Front Office
7 138 (2.71%) Marketing
8 122 (2.39%) Investment Banking
9 121 (2.37%) Retail
10 105 (2.06%) Documentation Skills
11 91 (1.79%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 64 (1.26%) Manufacturing
13 59 (1.16%) Legal
14 57 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
15 53 (1.04%) Financial Institution
16 43 (0.84%) Publishing
17 42 (0.82%) Organisational Skills
18 41 (0.80%) Back Office
19 37 (0.73%) Telecoms
20 35 (0.69%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,118 (21.93%) Developer
2 995 (19.52%) Data Engineer
3 744 (14.60%) Analyst
4 674 (13.22%) Senior
5 361 (7.08%) Lead
6 324 (6.36%) Data Analyst
7 287 (5.63%) Architect
8 244 (4.79%) Consultant
9 238 (4.67%) Business Analyst
10 216 (4.24%) Java Developer
11 197 (3.87%) DBA
12 196 (3.85%) Senior Data Engineer
13 165 (3.24%) Senior Developer
14 139 (2.73%) Software Engineer
15 131 (2.57%) SQL Developer
16 126 (2.47%) SQL DBA
17 123 (2.41%) Azure Engineer
18 117 (2.30%) C# Developer
19 116 (2.28%) Data Architect
20 110 (2.16%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 426 (8.36%) .NET
2 393 (7.71%) REST
3 311 (6.10%) PySpark
4 307 (6.02%) Kafka
5 267 (5.24%) Spring
6 254 (4.98%) Spring Boot
7 233 (4.57%) React
8 221 (4.34%) RESTful
9 200 (3.92%) JSON
10 184 (3.61%) XML
11 168 (3.30%) HTML
12 141 (2.77%) CSS
13 138 (2.71%) AngularJS
14 129 (2.53%) Web Services
15 125 (2.45%) Pandas
16 120 (2.35%) Middleware
17 118 (2.32%) SOAP
18 102 (2.00%) .NET Framework
19 82 (1.61%) Node.js
20 74 (1.45%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 342 (6.71%) Cloud Native
2 233 (4.57%) Data Structures
3 188 (3.69%) Legacy Systems
4 182 (3.57%) Product Ownership
5 149 (2.92%) Distributed Systems
6 107 (2.10%) Onboarding
7 95 (1.86%) Derivative
8 93 (1.82%) Management Information System
9 91 (1.79%) Enterprise Software
10 81 (1.59%) Self-Motivation
11 78 (1.53%) Analytical Mindset
12 76 (1.49%) Data Protection Act
13 73 (1.43%) Algorithms
14 72 (1.41%) Replication
15 69 (1.35%) Clustering
16 56 (1.10%) Fixed Income
17 53 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
18 52 (1.02%) Equities
19 47 (0.92%) NHS
20 44 (0.86%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 344 (6.75%) Linux
2 306 (6.00%) Windows
3 243 (4.77%) Unix
4 121 (2.37%) Windows Server
5 29 (0.57%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.47%) AIX
7 20 (0.39%) Solaris
8 15 (0.29%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (0.22%) Windows Server 2008
10 10 (0.20%) VMS
10 10 (0.20%) Windows Server 2016
11 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
11 8 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Android
13 5 (0.098%) Windows 10
14 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.078%) Ubuntu
15 3 (0.059%) Windows Server 2012
16 2 (0.039%) Data ONTAP
16 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,334 (26.17%) CI/CD
2 1,315 (25.80%) Agile
3 1,301 (25.52%) Data Modelling
4 1,288 (25.27%) Analytics
5 1,146 (22.48%) ETL
6 1,106 (21.70%) Business Intelligence
7 1,025 (20.11%) DevOps
8 989 (19.40%) Data Pipeline
9 986 (19.34%) Problem-Solving
10 838 (16.44%) Data Engineering
11 716 (14.05%) AI
12 705 (13.83%) Migration
13 659 (12.93%) Validation
14 586 (11.50%) Data Governance
15 518 (10.16%) Test Automation
16 510 (10.01%) Decision-Making
17 504 (9.89%) Data Analysis
18 501 (9.83%) Stakeholder Management
19 486 (9.54%) Continuous Improvement
20 464 (9.10%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,813 (35.57%) Python
2 675 (13.24%) Java
3 497 (9.75%) C#
4 415 (8.14%) PL/SQL
5 343 (6.73%) JavaScript
6 275 (5.40%) T-SQL
7 254 (4.98%) PowerShell
8 182 (3.57%) TypeScript
9 144 (2.83%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 138 (2.71%) Shell Script
11 114 (2.24%) R
12 98 (1.92%) Bash
13 83 (1.63%) Scala
14 68 (1.33%) C++
15 54 (1.06%) VBA
16 46 (0.90%) Bicep
17 36 (0.71%) C
18 34 (0.67%) VB
19 30 (0.59%) Perl
20 26 (0.51%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,114 (21.86%) Security Cleared
2 899 (17.64%) SC Cleared
3 366 (7.18%) Degree
4 143 (2.81%) BPSS Clearance
5 112 (2.20%) Computer Science Degree
6 109 (2.14%) DV Cleared
7 75 (1.47%) Azure Certification
8 61 (1.20%) Master's Degree
9 54 (1.06%) ISTQB
10 39 (0.77%) Microsoft Certification
11 35 (0.69%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.35%) DBS Check
13 15 (0.29%) CISSP
14 14 (0.27%) PhD
15 11 (0.22%) ISEB
15 11 (0.22%) SnowPro
16 10 (0.20%) CISM
16 10 (0.20%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
17 9 (0.18%) ACCA
17 9 (0.18%) CIMA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 922 (18.09%) Data Quality
2 388 (7.61%) QA
3 183 (3.59%) GDPR
4 66 (1.29%) Accessibility
5 47 (0.92%) SLA
6 25 (0.49%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 22 (0.43%) PMO
7 22 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 21 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
9 19 (0.37%) ISO 20022
10 18 (0.35%) NIST
11 16 (0.31%) IFRS
11 16 (0.31%) Solvency II
12 14 (0.27%) GMP
12 14 (0.27%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.26%) MiFID
14 12 (0.24%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 11 (0.22%) HL7
15 11 (0.22%) NCSC
15 11 (0.22%) WCAG
System Software
1 500 (9.81%) Docker
2 118 (2.32%) Active Directory
3 47 (0.92%) Virtual Machines
4 40 (0.78%) VMware Infrastructure
5 39 (0.77%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.41%) Hyper-V
6 21 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
7 14 (0.27%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.26%) vCloud
9 10 (0.20%) KVM
10 9 (0.18%) Postfix
11 8 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
12 5 (0.098%) RACF
13 4 (0.078%) Ceph
13 4 (0.078%) HDFS
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%) XenApp
Systems Management
1 419 (8.22%) Kubernetes
2 382 (7.49%) Terraform
3 112 (2.20%) Grafana
4 92 (1.80%) Ansible
5 54 (1.06%) Prometheus
6 46 (0.90%) Oracle RMAN
7 41 (0.80%) Data Guard
8 28 (0.55%) Control-M
9 21 (0.41%) Kibana
9 21 (0.41%) SCOM
10 20 (0.39%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.31%) Nagios
11 16 (0.31%) Netcool
11 16 (0.31%) Single Sign-On
11 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
13 13 (0.26%) OpenView
13 13 (0.26%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 11 (0.22%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 9 (0.18%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 921 (18.07%) Oracle
2 802 (15.73%) Microsoft
3 573 (11.24%) Databricks
4 199 (3.90%) Google
5 189 (3.71%) Informatica
6 142 (2.79%) Talend
7 138 (2.71%) ServiceNow
8 129 (2.53%) SAP
9 99 (1.94%) IBM
10 88 (1.73%) Splunk
11 69 (1.35%) Denodo
12 62 (1.22%) Salesforce
12 62 (1.22%) VMware
13 43 (0.84%) Citrix
14 41 (0.80%) Dynatrace
15 38 (0.75%) Bloomberg
16 36 (0.71%) Sybase
17 35 (0.69%) Alteryx
18 34 (0.67%) Murex
18 34 (0.67%) SolarWinds