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 11 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 12 13
Rank change year-on-year -6 +1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,766 3,585 4,286
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.55% 12.21% 9.82%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.55% 35.80% 32.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,181 2,521 3,102
10th Percentile £350 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £410 £418
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -0.47%
75th Percentile £588 £613 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £472 £475
% change year-on-year -0.64% -0.63% -3.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 80 70 61
10th Percentile £26.50 £22.57 £22.61
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.31 £30.00
Median hourly rate £48.75 £39.67 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +22.88% -6.65% -20.93%
75th Percentile £71.88 £58.44 £54.13
90th Percentile £82.40 £76.34 £62.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.75 £41.96 £42.50
% change year-on-year +16.20% -1.28% -15.00%

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 13,405 10,013 13,127
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.87% 34.09% 30.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,743 6,790 9,257
10th Percentile £358 £355 £350
25th Percentile £416 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £601 £625 £650
90th Percentile £716 £752 £764
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +2.63% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 234 531
10th Percentile £36.25 £26.52 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.05 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +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 11 June 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 11 June 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 11 June 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 4,194 £500 - 1,752
London -3 2,303 £524 -1.13% 726
UK excluding London -9 1,995 £469 -0.64% 1,329
Work from Home -6 1,417 £500 -2.44% 921
Midlands +2 530 £463 +3.93% 217
North of England -6 525 £460 -3.16% 381
West Midlands +4 433 £459 +1.17% 135
South East -14 405 £475 -5.00% 424
North West -5 268 £460 -3.16% 235
South West -1 226 £500 +5.26% 131
Yorkshire -10 217 £475 - 96
Scotland -9 183 £475 +5.56% 48
East of England -12 101 £495 +1.54% 102
East Midlands -4 93 £525 +38.16% 82
North East -5 52 £425 -8.11% 52
Wales +10 42 £450 +5.88% 28
Northern Ireland -11 13 £400 -5.88% 26

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
1 254 (5.33%) Apache Spark
2 194 (4.07%) Apache Airflow
3 183 (3.84%) Confluence
4 178 (3.73%) Apache
5 108 (2.27%) SAS
6 61 (1.28%) SharePoint
7 42 (0.88%) Tomcat
8 32 (0.67%) IIS
8 32 (0.67%) Oracle Workflow
9 30 (0.63%) WebLogic
10 29 (0.61%) WebSphere
11 24 (0.50%) Jupyter
12 22 (0.46%) Apache Geronimo
12 22 (0.46%) Apache ServiceMix
12 22 (0.46%) Red Hat Fuse
13 19 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
14 18 (0.38%) nginx
15 17 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
16 16 (0.34%) Appian
17 14 (0.29%) CMS
Applications
1 294 (6.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 48 (1.01%) MS Visio
3 47 (0.99%) Microsoft Office
4 36 (0.76%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 31 (0.65%) Spreadsheet
6 10 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.15%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.063%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.042%) Notion
10 2 (0.042%) Trello
11 1 (0.021%) Acrobat
11 1 (0.021%) InDesign
11 1 (0.021%) Mingle
11 1 (0.021%) Photoshop
11 1 (0.021%) Weka
Business Applications
1 41 (0.86%) Oracle EBS
2 29 (0.61%) Dynamics CRM
3 27 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
4 26 (0.55%) Aladdin
5 21 (0.44%) NEC Housing
6 20 (0.42%) Oracle ERP
6 20 (0.42%) Oracle Payables
7 17 (0.36%) Oracle EBS R12
8 16 (0.34%) Remedy ITSM
9 15 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
10 12 (0.25%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 11 (0.23%) Findur
12 10 (0.21%) Endur
12 10 (0.21%) NetSuite
12 10 (0.21%) Oracle General Ledger
12 10 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
12 10 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
13 9 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
13 9 (0.19%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
14 8 (0.17%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,571 (32.96%) Azure
2 1,178 (24.72%) AWS
3 899 (18.86%) Power Platform
4 447 (9.38%) Azure DevOps
5 396 (8.31%) GCP
6 361 (7.57%) Azure Data Factory
7 359 (7.53%) GitHub
8 311 (6.53%) Serverless
9 287 (6.02%) Snowflake
10 267 (5.60%) Amazon S3
11 226 (4.74%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 217 (4.55%) dbt
13 192 (4.03%) AWS Lambda
14 188 (3.94%) GitHub Actions
15 91 (1.91%) SaaS
16 84 (1.76%) Power Automate
17 83 (1.74%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 81 (1.70%) Entra ID
19 80 (1.68%) Azure Functions
20 72 (1.51%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 56 (1.17%) DNS
2 49 (1.03%) Firewall
3 23 (0.48%) WAN
4 21 (0.44%) HTTP
4 21 (0.44%) SNMP
5 20 (0.42%) SSL
6 19 (0.40%) Network Security
7 18 (0.38%) TCP/IP
8 16 (0.34%) Internet
9 15 (0.31%) VPN
10 11 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
11 10 (0.21%) LAN
11 10 (0.21%) SAN
12 9 (0.19%) Wireshark
13 8 (0.17%) 3GPP
13 8 (0.17%) HTTPS
13 8 (0.17%) Kerberos
14 7 (0.15%) NAS
14 7 (0.15%) PuTTY
14 7 (0.15%) WinSCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 829 (17.39%) Power BI
2 610 (12.80%) Data Warehouse
3 587 (12.32%) SQL Server
4 331 (6.95%) Data Lake
5 313 (6.57%) Relational Database
6 312 (6.55%) PostgreSQL
7 310 (6.50%) Tableau
8 262 (5.50%) NoSQL
9 241 (5.06%) Metadata
10 231 (4.85%) Azure SQL Database
11 176 (3.69%) Oracle Database
12 167 (3.50%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 154 (3.23%) Big Data
14 148 (3.11%) BigQuery
15 138 (2.90%) Amazon Redshift
16 136 (2.85%) Delta Lake
17 127 (2.66%) MySQL
18 114 (2.39%) Oracle Reports
19 108 (2.27%) MongoDB
20 102 (2.14%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 520 (10.91%) Git
2 384 (8.06%) JIRA
3 246 (5.16%) Jenkins
4 234 (4.91%) GitLab
5 70 (1.47%) JUnit
6 65 (1.36%) Selenium
7 60 (1.26%) Postman
8 50 (1.05%) Maven
8 50 (1.05%) Mockito
9 45 (0.94%) Gradle
10 44 (0.92%) Cucumber
11 36 (0.76%) MLflow
11 36 (0.76%) Visual Studio
12 34 (0.71%) SonarQube
13 32 (0.67%) REST Assured
14 30 (0.63%) JMeter
14 30 (0.63%) Oracle Forms
15 28 (0.59%) Liquibase
16 27 (0.57%) Bitbucket
16 27 (0.57%) ERwin
General
1 1,229 (25.79%) Finance
2 1,211 (25.41%) Social Skills
3 876 (18.38%) Analytical Skills
4 443 (9.30%) Banking
5 435 (9.13%) Public Sector
6 131 (2.75%) Front Office
7 127 (2.66%) Investment Banking
8 123 (2.58%) Marketing
9 102 (2.14%) Documentation Skills
10 91 (1.91%) Retail
11 84 (1.76%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 58 (1.22%) Legal
13 57 (1.20%) Financial Institution
14 46 (0.97%) Publishing
15 42 (0.88%) Manufacturing
16 39 (0.82%) Presentation Skills
17 35 (0.73%) Law
17 35 (0.73%) Telecoms
18 34 (0.71%) Back Office
19 33 (0.69%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 993 (20.84%) Data Engineer
1 993 (20.84%) Developer
2 678 (14.23%) Analyst
3 618 (12.97%) Senior
4 327 (6.86%) Lead
5 293 (6.15%) Data Analyst
6 272 (5.71%) Architect
7 226 (4.74%) Consultant
8 211 (4.43%) Business Analyst
9 194 (4.07%) Java Developer
10 183 (3.84%) Senior Data Engineer
11 157 (3.29%) DBA
12 146 (3.06%) Senior Developer
13 142 (2.98%) Software Engineer
14 120 (2.52%) Azure Engineer
15 109 (2.29%) C# Developer
15 109 (2.29%) SQL Developer
16 108 (2.27%) Python Developer
17 104 (2.18%) Data Architect
18 95 (1.99%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 404 (8.48%) .NET
2 369 (7.74%) REST
3 302 (6.34%) PySpark
4 294 (6.17%) Kafka
5 240 (5.04%) Spring
6 230 (4.83%) Spring Boot
7 223 (4.68%) React
8 210 (4.41%) RESTful
9 167 (3.50%) HTML
10 165 (3.46%) JSON
11 149 (3.13%) CSS
11 149 (3.13%) XML
12 131 (2.75%) Pandas
13 114 (2.39%) AngularJS
14 111 (2.33%) SOAP
15 110 (2.31%) Middleware
16 108 (2.27%) Web Services
17 90 (1.89%) .NET Framework
18 85 (1.78%) OAuth
19 80 (1.68%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 317 (6.65%) Cloud Native
2 186 (3.90%) Data Structures
3 171 (3.59%) Legacy Systems
4 144 (3.02%) Product Ownership
5 137 (2.87%) Distributed Systems
6 95 (1.99%) Derivative
6 95 (1.99%) Management Information System
7 87 (1.83%) Onboarding
8 79 (1.66%) Data Protection Act
9 71 (1.49%) Analytical Mindset
10 67 (1.41%) Enterprise Software
11 62 (1.30%) Self-Motivation
12 59 (1.24%) Algorithms
12 59 (1.24%) Clustering
13 56 (1.17%) Greenfield Project
14 53 (1.11%) Equities
15 50 (1.05%) Fixed Income
16 46 (0.97%) Low-Code
16 46 (0.97%) NHS
16 46 (0.97%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 322 (6.76%) Linux
2 273 (5.73%) Windows
3 224 (4.70%) Unix
4 101 (2.12%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.52%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.50%) AIX
7 18 (0.38%) Windows Server 2019
8 13 (0.27%) Solaris
8 13 (0.27%) Windows Server 2016
9 11 (0.23%) VMS
9 11 (0.23%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.17%) Apple iOS
10 8 (0.17%) zOS
11 7 (0.15%) Android
11 7 (0.15%) Windows 10
12 4 (0.084%) Oracle Linux
13 3 (0.063%) Windows Server 2012
14 2 (0.042%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.042%) HPUX
14 2 (0.042%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,311 (27.51%) CI/CD
2 1,208 (25.35%) Data Modelling
3 1,197 (25.12%) Analytics
4 1,191 (24.99%) Agile
5 1,117 (23.44%) ETL
6 1,053 (22.09%) Business Intelligence
7 1,006 (21.11%) DevOps
8 935 (19.62%) Data Pipeline
9 926 (19.43%) Problem-Solving
10 784 (16.45%) Data Engineering
11 671 (14.08%) AI
12 640 (13.43%) Migration
13 588 (12.34%) Validation
14 544 (11.41%) Data Governance
15 488 (10.24%) Test Automation
16 469 (9.84%) Decision-Making
17 442 (9.27%) Data Analysis
18 433 (9.09%) Stakeholder Management
19 426 (8.94%) Performance Tuning
20 423 (8.88%) Microservices
Programming Languages
1 1,789 (37.54%) Python
2 645 (13.53%) Java
3 493 (10.34%) C#
4 350 (7.34%) PL/SQL
5 344 (7.22%) JavaScript
6 244 (5.12%) T-SQL
7 233 (4.89%) PowerShell
8 166 (3.48%) TypeScript
9 137 (2.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 120 (2.52%) Shell Script
11 116 (2.43%) R
12 92 (1.93%) Bash
13 84 (1.76%) C++
14 81 (1.70%) Scala
15 54 (1.13%) Bicep
16 42 (0.88%) VBA
17 35 (0.73%) Perl
17 35 (0.73%) VB
18 34 (0.71%) C
19 27 (0.57%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,008 (21.15%) Security Cleared
2 817 (17.14%) SC Cleared
3 367 (7.70%) Degree
4 120 (2.52%) BPSS Clearance
5 117 (2.45%) Computer Science Degree
6 88 (1.85%) DV Cleared
7 73 (1.53%) Azure Certification
8 67 (1.41%) Master's Degree
9 56 (1.17%) ISTQB
10 40 (0.84%) Microsoft Certification
11 30 (0.63%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.36%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.36%) PhD
13 13 (0.27%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 11 (0.23%) CISSP
14 11 (0.23%) PMI Certification
15 10 (0.21%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 9 (0.19%) CISM
16 9 (0.19%) PMP
16 9 (0.19%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 872 (18.30%) Data Quality
2 373 (7.83%) QA
3 188 (3.94%) GDPR
4 55 (1.15%) Accessibility
5 48 (1.01%) SLA
6 32 (0.67%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 30 (0.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.50%) PMO
9 23 (0.48%) NIST
10 17 (0.36%) IFRS
11 16 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
11 16 (0.34%) PCI DSS
12 15 (0.31%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 15 (0.31%) ISO 20022
12 15 (0.31%) MiFID
13 14 (0.29%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.27%) Solvency II
15 12 (0.25%) NCSC
15 12 (0.25%) WCAG
16 11 (0.23%) HL7
System Software
1 531 (11.14%) Docker
2 104 (2.18%) Active Directory
3 39 (0.82%) Virtual Machines
4 36 (0.76%) VMware Infrastructure
5 30 (0.63%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.44%) Hyper-V
7 18 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
8 11 (0.23%) VMware NSX
9 10 (0.21%) KVM
9 10 (0.21%) vCloud
10 9 (0.19%) Postfix
10 9 (0.19%) Virtual Desktop
11 7 (0.15%) HDFS
12 6 (0.13%) RACF
13 4 (0.084%) Ceph
13 4 (0.084%) XenApp
13 4 (0.084%) XenDesktop
14 3 (0.063%) Squid
15 2 (0.042%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.042%) GridGain
Systems Management
1 422 (8.85%) Kubernetes
2 388 (8.14%) Terraform
3 123 (2.58%) Grafana
4 82 (1.72%) Ansible
5 65 (1.36%) Prometheus
6 42 (0.88%) Oracle RMAN
7 31 (0.65%) Data Guard
8 21 (0.44%) Kibana
9 20 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
10 17 (0.36%) Control-M
10 17 (0.36%) vCenter Server
11 15 (0.31%) ZABBIX
12 14 (0.29%) Nagios
12 14 (0.29%) Netcool
12 14 (0.29%) Tivoli
13 13 (0.27%) OpenView
13 13 (0.27%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 11 (0.23%) SCOM
15 8 (0.17%) HP Quality Center
15 8 (0.17%) SCCM
Vendors
1 812 (17.04%) Oracle
2 728 (15.27%) Microsoft
3 582 (12.21%) Databricks
4 177 (3.71%) Google
5 173 (3.63%) Informatica
6 144 (3.02%) ServiceNow
7 141 (2.96%) Talend
8 123 (2.58%) SAP
9 92 (1.93%) Splunk
10 83 (1.74%) IBM
11 71 (1.49%) Denodo
12 56 (1.17%) Salesforce
13 55 (1.15%) VMware
14 43 (0.90%) Citrix
15 40 (0.84%) Dynatrace
16 35 (0.73%) Sybase
17 33 (0.69%) Bloomberg
17 33 (0.69%) MuleSoft
18 32 (0.67%) OpenAI
19 31 (0.65%) Adobe