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

6 months to
13 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,089 3,842 4,287
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.66% 11.76% 10.03%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.90% 35.33% 32.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,367 2,678 3,120
10th Percentile £351 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £613 £626
90th Percentile £688 £750 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -0.21% -1.05% -3.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 92 73 56
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.09 £21.69
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.47 £29.06
Median hourly rate £45.00 £42.82 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year +5.10% +1.94% -16.00%
75th Percentile £65.25 £53.75 £51.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £67.20 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +25.00% -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 14,174 10,875 13,174
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.90% 33.28% 30.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,205 7,329 9,262
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £610 £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 540 267 519
10th Percentile £34.01 £27.76 £31.25
25th Percentile £52.50 £36.13 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.28 £79.22 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% +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 13 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 13 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 13 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 4,427 £500 - 2,394
London -6 2,375 £525 -0.28% 1,304
UK excluding London -9 2,175 £469 -0.21% 1,531
Work from Home -6 1,521 £500 - 1,122
North of England -4 576 £463 -2.63% 387
Midlands +3 569 £459 +8.00% 227
West Midlands +5 468 £459 +2.00% 117
South East -11 455 £475 -5.00% 436
North West -1 308 £475 +1.28% 221
South West -6 236 £500 +14.29% 267
Yorkshire -9 229 £475 - 106
Scotland -8 199 £450 - 57
East of England -13 106 £491 +0.77% 111
East Midlands +1 97 £525 +38.16% 110
North East -10 52 £425 -8.11% 64
Wales +3 49 £450 +3.45% 32
Northern Ireland -11 15 £375 -25.93% 40

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
1 239 (4.70%) Apache Spark
2 219 (4.30%) Confluence
3 207 (4.07%) Apache Airflow
4 180 (3.54%) Apache
5 115 (2.26%) SAS
6 63 (1.24%) SharePoint
7 45 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
8 44 (0.86%) Tomcat
9 43 (0.84%) IIS
10 39 (0.77%) WebLogic
11 32 (0.63%) WebSphere
12 25 (0.49%) Jupyter
13 23 (0.45%) nginx
14 22 (0.43%) Apache Geronimo
14 22 (0.43%) Apache ServiceMix
14 22 (0.43%) Red Hat Fuse
15 21 (0.41%) CMS
16 20 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
17 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
18 16 (0.31%) Appian
Applications
1 320 (6.29%) Microsoft Excel
2 71 (1.40%) Microsoft Office
3 55 (1.08%) MS Visio
4 40 (0.79%) Spreadsheet
5 36 (0.71%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.079%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.079%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.059%) Notion
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 (0.81%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.57%) Aladdin
3 29 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
4 26 (0.51%) Oracle Payables
5 24 (0.47%) Oracle ERP
6 19 (0.37%) NEC Housing
6 19 (0.37%) Oracle EBS R12
7 18 (0.35%) Oracle Receivables
8 17 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
9 13 (0.26%) Oracle Assets
10 12 (0.24%) Oracle General Ledger
11 11 (0.22%) Findur
11 11 (0.22%) Salesforce CRM
11 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.20%) Elite 3E
12 10 (0.20%) Finacle
13 9 (0.18%) Fidessa
14 8 (0.16%) Oracle Cash Management
14 8 (0.16%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,620 (31.83%) Azure
2 1,228 (24.13%) AWS
3 943 (18.53%) Power Platform
4 455 (8.94%) Azure DevOps
5 431 (8.47%) GCP
6 361 (7.09%) GitHub
7 346 (6.80%) Azure Data Factory
8 315 (6.19%) Snowflake
9 309 (6.07%) Serverless
10 269 (5.29%) Amazon S3
11 253 (4.97%) dbt
12 224 (4.40%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 200 (3.93%) AWS Lambda
14 185 (3.64%) GitHub Actions
15 96 (1.89%) SaaS
16 91 (1.79%) Entra ID
17 85 (1.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 84 (1.65%) Power Automate
19 79 (1.55%) PowerApps
20 75 (1.47%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 52 (1.02%) DNS
2 40 (0.79%) Firewall
3 27 (0.53%) HTTP
4 26 (0.51%) SSL
5 22 (0.43%) Network Security
5 22 (0.43%) SNMP
6 20 (0.39%) WAN
7 19 (0.37%) Internet
8 18 (0.35%) VPN
9 12 (0.24%) TCP/IP
10 10 (0.20%) SAN
10 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
11 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
11 9 (0.18%) Kerberos
11 9 (0.18%) Wireshark
12 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
12 8 (0.16%) Wi-Fi
13 7 (0.14%) LAN
13 7 (0.14%) NAS
13 7 (0.14%) PuTTY
Database & Business Intelligence
1 866 (17.02%) Power BI
2 668 (13.13%) Data Warehouse
3 653 (12.83%) SQL Server
4 350 (6.88%) Relational Database
5 328 (6.45%) Tableau
6 326 (6.41%) PostgreSQL
7 314 (6.17%) Data Lake
8 260 (5.11%) Metadata
9 253 (4.97%) NoSQL
10 223 (4.38%) Azure SQL Database
11 198 (3.89%) Oracle Database
12 172 (3.38%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 167 (3.28%) BigQuery
14 152 (2.99%) Amazon Redshift
15 146 (2.87%) Big Data
16 143 (2.81%) Delta Lake
17 129 (2.53%) Oracle Reports
18 125 (2.46%) MySQL
19 113 (2.22%) MongoDB
20 112 (2.20%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 564 (11.08%) Git
2 403 (7.92%) JIRA
3 268 (5.27%) Jenkins
4 225 (4.42%) GitLab
5 77 (1.51%) JUnit
6 66 (1.30%) Maven
7 57 (1.12%) Gradle
8 56 (1.10%) Postman
8 56 (1.10%) Selenium
9 52 (1.02%) Mockito
9 52 (1.02%) Oracle Forms
10 43 (0.84%) Visual Studio
11 34 (0.67%) SonarQube
12 33 (0.65%) Bitbucket
12 33 (0.65%) MLflow
13 32 (0.63%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.63%) JMeter
13 32 (0.63%) Team Foundation Server
14 28 (0.55%) Liquibase
15 27 (0.53%) Zephyr
General
1 1,296 (25.47%) Social Skills
2 1,292 (25.39%) Finance
3 989 (19.43%) Analytical Skills
4 477 (9.37%) Public Sector
5 469 (9.22%) Banking
6 139 (2.73%) Front Office
7 135 (2.65%) Marketing
8 125 (2.46%) Retail
9 124 (2.44%) Investment Banking
10 109 (2.14%) Documentation Skills
11 96 (1.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 62 (1.22%) Manufacturing
13 60 (1.18%) Legal
14 56 (1.10%) Financial Institution
14 56 (1.10%) Presentation Skills
15 43 (0.84%) Publishing
16 41 (0.81%) Back Office
17 39 (0.77%) Organisational Skills
18 37 (0.73%) Telecoms
19 33 (0.65%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,109 (21.79%) Developer
2 1,016 (19.96%) Data Engineer
3 742 (14.58%) Analyst
4 672 (13.20%) Senior
5 361 (7.09%) Lead
6 320 (6.29%) Data Analyst
7 282 (5.54%) Architect
8 245 (4.81%) Consultant
9 236 (4.64%) Business Analyst
10 217 (4.26%) Java Developer
11 198 (3.89%) Senior Data Engineer
12 189 (3.71%) DBA
13 159 (3.12%) Senior Developer
14 140 (2.75%) Software Engineer
15 125 (2.46%) Azure Engineer
16 122 (2.40%) SQL Developer
17 121 (2.38%) SQL DBA
18 114 (2.24%) C# Developer
19 109 (2.14%) Python Developer
20 108 (2.12%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 420 (8.25%) .NET
2 389 (7.64%) REST
3 319 (6.27%) PySpark
4 303 (5.95%) Kafka
5 268 (5.27%) Spring
6 257 (5.05%) Spring Boot
7 232 (4.56%) React
8 221 (4.34%) RESTful
9 194 (3.81%) JSON
10 183 (3.60%) XML
11 168 (3.30%) HTML
12 141 (2.77%) CSS
13 133 (2.61%) AngularJS
14 130 (2.55%) Web Services
15 129 (2.53%) Pandas
16 121 (2.38%) Middleware
17 120 (2.36%) SOAP
18 102 (2.00%) .NET Framework
19 79 (1.55%) Node.js
20 73 (1.43%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 339 (6.66%) Cloud Native
2 221 (4.34%) Data Structures
3 186 (3.65%) Legacy Systems
4 176 (3.46%) Product Ownership
5 144 (2.83%) Distributed Systems
6 101 (1.98%) Onboarding
7 98 (1.93%) Derivative
8 90 (1.77%) Management Information System
9 89 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
10 77 (1.51%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.49%) Analytical Mindset
11 76 (1.49%) Data Protection Act
12 72 (1.41%) Algorithms
13 65 (1.28%) Clustering
14 64 (1.26%) Replication
15 54 (1.06%) Fixed Income
15 54 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
16 53 (1.04%) Equities
17 47 (0.92%) NHS
18 42 (0.83%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 330 (6.48%) Linux
2 302 (5.93%) Windows
3 237 (4.66%) Unix
4 121 (2.38%) Windows Server
5 26 (0.51%) 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 (0.079%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.079%) Ubuntu
15 3 (0.059%) Windows Server 2012
16 2 (0.039%) Data ONTAP
16 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,337 (26.27%) CI/CD
2 1,311 (25.76%) Agile
3 1,293 (25.41%) Analytics
4 1,279 (25.13%) Data Modelling
5 1,138 (22.36%) ETL
6 1,106 (21.73%) Business Intelligence
7 1,034 (20.32%) DevOps
8 1,000 (19.65%) Problem-Solving
9 991 (19.47%) Data Pipeline
10 836 (16.43%) Data Engineering
11 720 (14.15%) AI
12 687 (13.50%) Migration
13 651 (12.79%) Validation
14 570 (11.20%) Data Governance
15 518 (10.18%) Test Automation
16 514 (10.10%) Decision-Making
17 503 (9.88%) Data Analysis
18 494 (9.71%) Stakeholder Management
19 486 (9.55%) Continuous Improvement
20 457 (8.98%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,835 (36.06%) Python
2 672 (13.20%) Java
3 496 (9.75%) C#
4 401 (7.88%) PL/SQL
5 337 (6.62%) JavaScript
6 273 (5.36%) T-SQL
7 246 (4.83%) PowerShell
8 179 (3.52%) TypeScript
9 144 (2.83%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 128 (2.52%) Shell Script
11 115 (2.26%) R
12 95 (1.87%) Bash
13 83 (1.63%) Scala
14 70 (1.38%) C++
15 52 (1.02%) VBA
16 49 (0.96%) Bicep
17 38 (0.75%) C
18 32 (0.63%) VB
19 27 (0.53%) Perl
20 26 (0.51%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,104 (21.69%) Security Cleared
2 898 (17.65%) SC Cleared
3 384 (7.55%) Degree
4 145 (2.85%) BPSS Clearance
5 120 (2.36%) Computer Science Degree
6 104 (2.04%) DV Cleared
7 78 (1.53%) Azure Certification
8 64 (1.26%) Master's Degree
9 53 (1.04%) ISTQB
10 42 (0.83%) Microsoft Certification
11 35 (0.69%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.35%) DBS Check
13 17 (0.33%) PhD
14 15 (0.29%) CISSP
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
17 9 (0.18%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 910 (17.88%) Data Quality
2 395 (7.76%) QA
3 187 (3.67%) GDPR
4 64 (1.26%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.90%) SLA
6 25 (0.49%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 22 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 21 (0.41%) PMO
9 20 (0.39%) ISO 20022
10 19 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
11 18 (0.35%) NIST
12 16 (0.31%) IFRS
12 16 (0.31%) Solvency II
13 15 (0.29%) MiFID
14 14 (0.28%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 13 (0.26%) GMP
16 12 (0.24%) PCI DSS
17 11 (0.22%) HL7
17 11 (0.22%) NCSC
System Software
1 507 (9.96%) Docker
2 118 (2.32%) Active Directory
3 45 (0.88%) Virtual Machines
4 37 (0.73%) VMware Infrastructure
5 35 (0.69%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.39%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.28%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.26%) vCloud
10 10 (0.20%) KVM
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
12 8 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
13 5 (0.098%) RACF
14 4 (0.079%) Ceph
14 4 (0.079%) HDFS
15 3 (0.059%) Squid
16 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 2 (0.039%) GridGain
17 1 (0.020%) GPFS
17 1 (0.020%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 423 (8.31%) Kubernetes
2 391 (7.68%) Terraform
3 113 (2.22%) Grafana
4 92 (1.81%) Ansible
5 54 (1.06%) Prometheus
6 42 (0.83%) Oracle RMAN
7 37 (0.73%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.45%) Control-M
8 23 (0.45%) Kibana
9 20 (0.39%) vCenter Server
10 19 (0.37%) SCOM
11 16 (0.31%) Single Sign-On
11 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
13 14 (0.28%) Nagios
13 14 (0.28%) Netcool
14 13 (0.26%) OpenView
14 13 (0.26%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 9 (0.18%) HP Quality Center
16 8 (0.16%) WMI
Vendors
1 920 (18.08%) Oracle
2 794 (15.60%) Microsoft
3 585 (11.50%) Databricks
4 193 (3.79%) Google
5 186 (3.65%) Informatica
6 148 (2.91%) Talend
7 138 (2.71%) ServiceNow
8 124 (2.44%) SAP
9 94 (1.85%) IBM
10 89 (1.75%) Splunk
11 71 (1.40%) Denodo
12 61 (1.20%) Salesforce
13 59 (1.16%) VMware
14 43 (0.84%) Citrix
15 42 (0.83%) Dynatrace
16 41 (0.81%) Bloomberg
17 37 (0.73%) Murex
18 36 (0.71%) Sybase
19 34 (0.67%) MuleSoft
20 33 (0.65%) Alteryx