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

6 months to
17 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 12 13
Rank change year-on-year -6 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,828 3,604 4,306
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.59% 12.14% 9.88%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.76% 35.80% 32.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,213 2,533 3,099
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% -
75th Percentile £588 £613 £634
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 85 71 61
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.00 £22.61
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.36 £30.00
Median hourly rate £47.50 £40.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +17.28% -4.71% -20.93%
75th Percentile £70.00 £55.63 £54.13
90th Percentile £82.25 £76.25 £62.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.15 £41.96 £42.50
% change year-on-year +12.38% -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 13,503 10,066 13,166
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.83% 33.91% 30.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,798 6,822 9,246
10th Percentile £358 £350 £350
25th Percentile £417 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £715 £756 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £489 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +2.91% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 235 542
10th Percentile £35.25 £25.98 £31.35
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% +2.97%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.63 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.85 £84.80 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.84% -4.62% +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 17 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 17 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 17 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 -3 4,236 £500 - 1,899
London -3 2,303 £523 -1.78% 730
UK excluding London -10 2,045 £469 -0.64% 1,606
Work from Home -6 1,436 £500 -2.44% 1,056
North of England -5 540 £461 -2.89% 453
Midlands +4 537 £463 +8.06% 232
West Midlands +5 439 £459 +1.32% 121
South East -12 413 £475 -5.00% 466
North West -3 284 £463 -2.63% 282
South West -2 231 £500 +5.26% 146
Yorkshire -11 215 £475 - 115
Scotland -10 192 £468 +3.89% 79
East of England -11 107 £491 +0.77% 134
East Midlands -1 94 £525 +38.16% 111
North East -10 53 £425 -8.36% 59
Wales +10 42 £450 +5.88% 51
Northern Ireland -10 13 £394 -21.25% 77

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
1 246 (5.10%) Apache Spark
2 198 (4.10%) Apache Airflow
3 195 (4.04%) Confluence
4 177 (3.67%) Apache
5 111 (2.30%) SAS
6 59 (1.22%) SharePoint
7 43 (0.89%) Tomcat
8 33 (0.68%) IIS
8 33 (0.68%) Oracle Workflow
9 32 (0.66%) WebLogic
10 31 (0.64%) WebSphere
11 25 (0.52%) Jupyter
12 22 (0.46%) Apache Geronimo
12 22 (0.46%) Apache ServiceMix
12 22 (0.46%) Red Hat Fuse
13 19 (0.39%) nginx
14 18 (0.37%) Appian
14 18 (0.37%) Microsoft Exchange
14 18 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
15 16 (0.33%) CMS
Applications
1 308 (6.38%) Microsoft Excel
2 55 (1.14%) Microsoft Office
3 50 (1.04%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.77%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 32 (0.66%) Spreadsheet
6 10 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.062%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.041%) Acrobat
10 2 (0.041%) Notion
10 2 (0.041%) Photoshop
11 1 (0.021%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.021%) InDesign
11 1 (0.021%) Mingle
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
11 1 (0.021%) Weka
Business Applications
1 39 (0.81%) Oracle EBS
2 33 (0.68%) Dynamics CRM
3 27 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
4 26 (0.54%) Aladdin
5 23 (0.48%) Oracle Payables
6 21 (0.43%) NEC Housing
6 21 (0.43%) Oracle ERP
7 16 (0.33%) Oracle EBS R12
7 16 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
8 15 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 11 (0.23%) Findur
9 11 (0.23%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 10 (0.21%) Endur
10 10 (0.21%) NetSuite
10 10 (0.21%) Oracle General Ledger
10 10 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
10 10 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
11 9 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
11 9 (0.19%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
12 8 (0.17%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,571 (32.54%) Azure
2 1,188 (24.61%) AWS
3 920 (19.06%) Power Platform
4 450 (9.32%) Azure DevOps
5 393 (8.14%) GCP
6 356 (7.37%) Azure Data Factory
7 355 (7.35%) GitHub
8 318 (6.59%) Serverless
9 293 (6.07%) Snowflake
10 273 (5.65%) Amazon S3
11 226 (4.68%) dbt
12 223 (4.62%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 197 (4.08%) AWS Lambda
14 185 (3.83%) GitHub Actions
15 89 (1.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 87 (1.80%) Power Automate
17 81 (1.68%) Azure Functions
17 81 (1.68%) Entra ID
17 81 (1.68%) SaaS
18 77 (1.59%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 56 (1.16%) DNS
2 48 (0.99%) Firewall
3 24 (0.50%) WAN
4 22 (0.46%) HTTP
4 22 (0.46%) SNMP
5 20 (0.41%) Network Security
5 20 (0.41%) SSL
6 17 (0.35%) Internet
7 15 (0.31%) TCP/IP
7 15 (0.31%) VPN
8 11 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
9 10 (0.21%) LAN
9 10 (0.21%) SAN
10 9 (0.19%) Wireshark
11 8 (0.17%) 3GPP
11 8 (0.17%) HTTPS
11 8 (0.17%) Kerberos
12 7 (0.14%) NAS
12 7 (0.14%) PuTTY
12 7 (0.14%) WinSCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 847 (17.54%) Power BI
2 625 (12.95%) Data Warehouse
3 589 (12.20%) SQL Server
4 330 (6.84%) Data Lake
5 321 (6.65%) Relational Database
6 320 (6.63%) PostgreSQL
7 314 (6.50%) Tableau
8 264 (5.47%) NoSQL
9 252 (5.22%) Metadata
10 228 (4.72%) Azure SQL Database
11 184 (3.81%) Oracle Database
12 167 (3.46%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 154 (3.19%) BigQuery
14 148 (3.07%) Big Data
15 146 (3.02%) Amazon Redshift
16 134 (2.78%) Delta Lake
17 125 (2.59%) MySQL
18 116 (2.40%) Oracle Reports
19 110 (2.28%) MongoDB
20 105 (2.17%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 525 (10.87%) Git
2 387 (8.02%) JIRA
3 247 (5.12%) Jenkins
4 232 (4.81%) GitLab
5 71 (1.47%) JUnit
6 55 (1.14%) Selenium
7 53 (1.10%) Postman
8 52 (1.08%) Maven
9 51 (1.06%) Mockito
10 49 (1.01%) Gradle
11 38 (0.79%) Visual Studio
12 36 (0.75%) MLflow
13 35 (0.72%) Cucumber
14 33 (0.68%) SonarQube
15 32 (0.66%) Oracle Forms
16 30 (0.62%) JMeter
17 28 (0.58%) Liquibase
18 27 (0.56%) Bitbucket
18 27 (0.56%) ERwin
19 26 (0.54%) Zephyr
General
1 1,240 (25.68%) Finance
2 1,222 (25.31%) Social Skills
3 897 (18.58%) Analytical Skills
4 449 (9.30%) Banking
5 443 (9.18%) Public Sector
6 131 (2.71%) Front Office
7 125 (2.59%) Investment Banking
8 121 (2.51%) Marketing
9 107 (2.22%) Documentation Skills
10 99 (2.05%) Retail
11 86 (1.78%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 58 (1.20%) Legal
13 55 (1.14%) Financial Institution
14 49 (1.01%) Publishing
15 44 (0.91%) Manufacturing
16 43 (0.89%) Presentation Skills
17 34 (0.70%) Back Office
17 34 (0.70%) Organisational Skills
17 34 (0.70%) Telecoms
18 32 (0.66%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,004 (20.80%) Data Engineer
2 1,002 (20.75%) Developer
3 703 (14.56%) Analyst
4 623 (12.90%) Senior
5 324 (6.71%) Lead
6 306 (6.34%) Data Analyst
7 276 (5.72%) Architect
8 229 (4.74%) Consultant
9 214 (4.43%) Business Analyst
10 203 (4.20%) Java Developer
11 188 (3.89%) Senior Data Engineer
12 166 (3.44%) DBA
13 148 (3.07%) Software Engineer
14 144 (2.98%) Senior Developer
15 119 (2.46%) Azure Engineer
16 109 (2.26%) C# Developer
16 109 (2.26%) SQL Developer
17 107 (2.22%) Python Developer
18 103 (2.13%) Data Architect
19 95 (1.97%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 397 (8.22%) .NET
2 361 (7.48%) REST
3 308 (6.38%) PySpark
4 298 (6.17%) Kafka
5 253 (5.24%) Spring
6 245 (5.07%) Spring Boot
7 224 (4.64%) React
8 214 (4.43%) RESTful
9 171 (3.54%) JSON
10 158 (3.27%) HTML
11 152 (3.15%) XML
12 141 (2.92%) CSS
13 129 (2.67%) Pandas
14 114 (2.36%) Middleware
15 113 (2.34%) SOAP
16 112 (2.32%) AngularJS
17 110 (2.28%) Web Services
18 89 (1.84%) .NET Framework
19 85 (1.76%) OAuth
20 79 (1.64%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 321 (6.65%) Cloud Native
2 197 (4.08%) Data Structures
3 177 (3.67%) Legacy Systems
4 148 (3.07%) Product Ownership
5 142 (2.94%) Distributed Systems
6 96 (1.99%) Management Information System
7 93 (1.93%) Derivative
8 92 (1.91%) Onboarding
9 78 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
10 69 (1.43%) Analytical Mindset
10 69 (1.43%) Enterprise Software
10 69 (1.43%) Self-Motivation
11 61 (1.26%) Algorithms
12 60 (1.24%) Clustering
13 54 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
14 51 (1.06%) Equities
15 49 (1.01%) Fixed Income
15 49 (1.01%) Replication
16 47 (0.97%) Low-Code
17 43 (0.89%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 319 (6.61%) Linux
2 275 (5.70%) Windows
3 224 (4.64%) Unix
4 104 (2.15%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.52%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.50%) AIX
7 18 (0.37%) Windows Server 2019
8 16 (0.33%) Solaris
9 13 (0.27%) Windows Server 2016
10 11 (0.23%) VMS
10 11 (0.23%) Windows Server 2008
11 8 (0.17%) Apple iOS
11 8 (0.17%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Android
12 7 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 4 (0.083%) Oracle Linux
14 3 (0.062%) Windows Server 2012
15 2 (0.041%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.041%) HPUX
15 2 (0.041%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,306 (27.05%) CI/CD
2 1,222 (25.31%) Data Modelling
3 1,220 (25.27%) Agile
4 1,212 (25.10%) Analytics
5 1,114 (23.07%) ETL
6 1,067 (22.10%) Business Intelligence
7 1,009 (20.90%) DevOps
8 946 (19.59%) Problem-Solving
9 940 (19.47%) Data Pipeline
10 791 (16.38%) Data Engineering
11 682 (14.13%) AI
12 648 (13.42%) Migration
13 609 (12.61%) Validation
14 547 (11.33%) Data Governance
15 490 (10.15%) Test Automation
16 487 (10.09%) Decision-Making
17 468 (9.69%) Data Analysis
18 457 (9.47%) Stakeholder Management
19 435 (9.01%) Performance Tuning
20 429 (8.89%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,784 (36.95%) Python
2 648 (13.42%) Java
3 486 (10.07%) C#
4 360 (7.46%) PL/SQL
5 330 (6.84%) JavaScript
6 249 (5.16%) T-SQL
7 232 (4.81%) PowerShell
8 166 (3.44%) TypeScript
9 141 (2.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 119 (2.46%) Shell Script
11 116 (2.40%) R
12 93 (1.93%) Bash
13 81 (1.68%) C++
14 78 (1.62%) Scala
15 53 (1.10%) Bicep
16 46 (0.95%) VBA
17 35 (0.72%) Perl
17 35 (0.72%) VB
18 33 (0.68%) C
19 27 (0.56%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,036 (21.46%) Security Cleared
2 840 (17.40%) SC Cleared
3 366 (7.58%) Degree
4 125 (2.59%) BPSS Clearance
5 111 (2.30%) Computer Science Degree
6 92 (1.91%) DV Cleared
7 72 (1.49%) Azure Certification
8 66 (1.37%) Master's Degree
9 58 (1.20%) ISTQB
10 44 (0.91%) Microsoft Certification
11 33 (0.68%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.37%) DBS Check
13 17 (0.35%) PhD
14 13 (0.27%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 11 (0.23%) CISSP
15 11 (0.23%) PMI Certification
16 10 (0.21%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 10 (0.21%) SnowPro
17 9 (0.19%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
17 9 (0.19%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 893 (18.50%) Data Quality
2 371 (7.68%) QA
3 187 (3.87%) GDPR
4 59 (1.22%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.95%) SLA
6 30 (0.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 30 (0.62%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 24 (0.50%) NIST
7 24 (0.50%) PMO
8 18 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
9 17 (0.35%) IFRS
10 16 (0.33%) ISO 20022
10 16 (0.33%) PCI DSS
11 15 (0.31%) MiFID
11 15 (0.31%) Solvency II
12 14 (0.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 14 (0.29%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.27%) NCSC
14 12 (0.25%) WCAG
15 11 (0.23%) HL7
System Software
1 530 (10.98%) Docker
2 105 (2.17%) Active Directory
3 40 (0.83%) Virtual Machines
4 36 (0.75%) VMware Infrastructure
5 30 (0.62%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.43%) Hyper-V
7 19 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
8 12 (0.25%) VMware NSX
9 11 (0.23%) vCloud
10 10 (0.21%) KVM
10 10 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
11 9 (0.19%) Postfix
12 6 (0.12%) HDFS
12 6 (0.12%) RACF
13 4 (0.083%) Ceph
13 4 (0.083%) XenApp
13 4 (0.083%) XenDesktop
14 3 (0.062%) Squid
15 2 (0.041%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.041%) GridGain
Systems Management
1 421 (8.72%) Kubernetes
2 390 (8.08%) Terraform
3 120 (2.49%) Grafana
4 85 (1.76%) Ansible
5 62 (1.28%) Prometheus
6 41 (0.85%) Oracle RMAN
7 30 (0.62%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.48%) Control-M
9 22 (0.46%) Kibana
10 20 (0.41%) Single Sign-On
11 18 (0.37%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.33%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.31%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.29%) Nagios
14 14 (0.29%) Netcool
15 13 (0.27%) OpenView
15 13 (0.27%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 12 (0.25%) SCOM
17 8 (0.17%) Progress Chef
17 8 (0.17%) WMI
Vendors
1 839 (17.38%) Oracle
2 747 (15.47%) Microsoft
3 574 (11.89%) Databricks
4 181 (3.75%) Google
4 181 (3.75%) Informatica
5 144 (2.98%) Talend
6 137 (2.84%) ServiceNow
7 125 (2.59%) SAP
8 92 (1.91%) Splunk
9 85 (1.76%) IBM
10 72 (1.49%) Denodo
11 56 (1.16%) Salesforce
11 56 (1.16%) VMware
12 44 (0.91%) Citrix
13 40 (0.83%) Dynatrace
14 37 (0.77%) Sybase
15 35 (0.72%) Bloomberg
16 34 (0.70%) Murex
17 33 (0.68%) MuleSoft
17 33 (0.68%) OpenAI