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 5 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 12 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 +1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,524 3,548 4,215
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.52% 12.11% 9.77%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.06% 35.45% 33.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,084 2,484 3,049
10th Percentile £350 £355 £357
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% +0.28%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -0.21% -1.05% -2.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 72 61 63
10th Percentile £33.78 £22.48 £23.00
25th Percentile £36.44 £30.00 £27.00
Median hourly rate £54.75 £42.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +28.82% - -15.00%
75th Percentile £76.25 £65.62 £57.50
90th Percentile £83.98 £77.19 £62.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £60.75 £33.51 £42.50
% change year-on-year +81.29% -21.15% +4.71%

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 12,903 10,009 12,769
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.14% 34.17% 29.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,518 6,797 9,080
10th Percentile £355 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £416 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £774 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +0.21% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 562 250 487
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.50 £31.70
25th Percentile £54.55 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £61.60
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +1.46% +1.73%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £79.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% +1.07%

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 5 May 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 5 May 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 5 May 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 3,991 £500 -3.38% 2,243
London 0 2,254 £519 -5.59% 967
UK excluding London -10 1,818 £469 -0.21% 1,649
Work from Home -5 1,347 £500 -3.85% 1,058
Midlands +5 521 £469 +2.18% 279
North of England -9 479 £450 -5.26% 419
West Midlands +7 416 £463 +0.27% 163
South East -17 329 £500 +0.25% 531
North West -1 262 £450 -5.26% 234
South West -9 200 £475 -1.30% 167
Yorkshire -15 193 £463 -2.63% 126
Scotland -7 170 £485 +7.78% 78
East Midlands +2 102 £525 +24.26% 116
East of England -20 92 £500 +8.99% 131
Wales +7 36 £425 +11.48% 50
North East -10 36 £475 +5.56% 61
Northern Ireland -12 12 £400 -2.44% 14

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
1 259 (5.73%) Apache Spark
2 172 (3.80%) Apache
3 169 (3.74%) Apache Airflow
4 150 (3.32%) Confluence
5 102 (2.25%) SAS
6 85 (1.88%) SharePoint
7 44 (0.97%) Tomcat
8 40 (0.88%) WebLogic
9 33 (0.73%) IIS
10 27 (0.60%) WebSphere
11 24 (0.53%) Apache Geronimo
11 24 (0.53%) Apache ServiceMix
11 24 (0.53%) Oracle Workflow
11 24 (0.53%) Red Hat Fuse
12 23 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
13 17 (0.38%) nginx
14 16 (0.35%) Tuxedo
15 15 (0.33%) Jupyter
16 14 (0.31%) HCL Notes
16 14 (0.31%) Mendix
Applications
1 300 (6.63%) Microsoft Excel
2 59 (1.30%) Microsoft Office
3 50 (1.11%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.84%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 24 (0.53%) Spreadsheet
6 9 (0.20%) Microsoft Project
7 8 (0.18%) Chatbot
8 7 (0.15%) Notepad++
9 5 (0.11%) Notion
10 3 (0.066%) Oracle Smart View
10 3 (0.066%) Trello
11 1 (0.022%) InDesign
11 1 (0.022%) Mingle
11 1 (0.022%) SPSS
11 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 48 (1.06%) Oracle EBS
2 25 (0.55%) Aladdin
2 25 (0.55%) NEC Housing
3 23 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
4 22 (0.49%) Dynamics CRM
5 21 (0.46%) Oracle EBS R12
5 21 (0.46%) Oracle Payables
6 20 (0.44%) Oracle Receivables
7 17 (0.38%) NetSuite
7 17 (0.38%) Oracle ERP
7 17 (0.38%) Oracle General Ledger
8 14 (0.31%) Remedy ITSM
9 13 (0.29%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
9 13 (0.29%) Payment Gateway
10 12 (0.27%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.24%) Oracle 11i
12 10 (0.22%) Oracle Cash Management
13 8 (0.18%) Advent Geneva
13 8 (0.18%) Maximo
13 8 (0.18%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
Cloud Services
1 1,549 (34.24%) Azure
2 1,076 (23.78%) AWS
3 874 (19.32%) Power Platform
4 453 (10.01%) Azure DevOps
5 370 (8.18%) Azure Data Factory
6 360 (7.96%) GCP
7 332 (7.34%) GitHub
8 288 (6.37%) Serverless
9 257 (5.68%) Snowflake
10 254 (5.61%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 246 (5.44%) Amazon S3
12 186 (4.11%) dbt
13 176 (3.89%) GitHub Actions
14 162 (3.58%) AWS Lambda
15 96 (2.12%) Power Automate
16 88 (1.95%) Azure Functions
17 86 (1.90%) SaaS
18 80 (1.77%) Entra ID
19 77 (1.70%) AWS CloudFormation
20 74 (1.64%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 55 (1.22%) Firewall
2 43 (0.95%) DNS
3 23 (0.51%) Network Security
4 21 (0.46%) TCP/IP
4 21 (0.46%) WAN
5 19 (0.42%) HTTP
6 15 (0.33%) Internet
6 15 (0.33%) LAN
6 15 (0.33%) SNMP
6 15 (0.33%) SSL
7 12 (0.27%) VPN
8 10 (0.22%) Wi-Fi
9 9 (0.20%) DHCP
9 9 (0.20%) Kerberos
10 8 (0.18%) SAN
11 7 (0.15%) NAS
11 7 (0.15%) PuTTY
11 7 (0.15%) VLAN
11 7 (0.15%) WinSCP
11 7 (0.15%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 799 (17.66%) Power BI
2 576 (12.73%) Data Warehouse
3 561 (12.40%) SQL Server
4 310 (6.85%) Tableau
5 308 (6.81%) Data Lake
6 293 (6.48%) PostgreSQL
7 292 (6.45%) Relational Database
8 271 (5.99%) NoSQL
9 253 (5.59%) Metadata
10 248 (5.48%) Azure SQL Database
11 161 (3.56%) Oracle Database
12 155 (3.43%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 147 (3.25%) Big Data
14 133 (2.94%) BigQuery
15 132 (2.92%) Delta Lake
16 131 (2.90%) Amazon Redshift
17 129 (2.85%) MySQL
18 111 (2.45%) MongoDB
19 110 (2.43%) Oracle Reports
20 100 (2.21%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 476 (10.52%) Git
2 353 (7.80%) JIRA
3 222 (4.91%) Jenkins
4 191 (4.22%) GitLab
5 66 (1.46%) Selenium
6 55 (1.22%) JUnit
7 52 (1.15%) Postman
8 42 (0.93%) MLflow
9 41 (0.91%) Cucumber
9 41 (0.91%) Maven
10 39 (0.86%) Mockito
11 33 (0.73%) ERwin
12 31 (0.69%) REST Assured
12 31 (0.69%) Visual Studio
13 30 (0.66%) Gradle
14 29 (0.64%) JMeter
15 28 (0.62%) SonarQube
16 27 (0.60%) Oracle Forms
17 26 (0.57%) Bitbucket
18 24 (0.53%) TeamCity
General
1 1,196 (26.44%) Finance
2 1,189 (26.28%) Social Skills
3 845 (18.68%) Analytical Skills
4 424 (9.37%) Banking
5 406 (8.97%) Public Sector
6 115 (2.54%) Investment Banking
7 112 (2.48%) Front Office
8 103 (2.28%) Marketing
9 100 (2.21%) Documentation Skills
10 73 (1.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 73 (1.61%) Retail
11 59 (1.30%) Financial Institution
11 59 (1.30%) Legal
12 40 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
13 37 (0.82%) Publishing
13 37 (0.82%) Telecoms
14 35 (0.77%) Organisational Skills
15 34 (0.75%) Law
16 31 (0.69%) Local Government
17 30 (0.66%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 960 (21.22%) Developer
2 911 (20.14%) Data Engineer
3 670 (14.81%) Analyst
4 567 (12.53%) Senior
5 316 (6.98%) Lead
6 283 (6.26%) Data Analyst
7 276 (6.10%) Architect
8 221 (4.89%) Business Analyst
9 210 (4.64%) Consultant
10 166 (3.67%) Java Developer
11 154 (3.40%) Senior Data Engineer
12 143 (3.16%) DBA
13 131 (2.90%) Senior Developer
14 126 (2.79%) Azure Engineer
14 126 (2.79%) Software Engineer
15 110 (2.43%) C# Developer
15 110 (2.43%) Data Architect
16 103 (2.28%) Python Developer
17 101 (2.23%) Data Scientist
18 92 (2.03%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 398 (8.80%) .NET
2 345 (7.63%) REST
3 290 (6.41%) PySpark
4 283 (6.26%) Kafka
5 212 (4.69%) React
6 206 (4.55%) Spring
7 198 (4.38%) Spring Boot
8 186 (4.11%) RESTful
9 150 (3.32%) HTML
10 145 (3.21%) JSON
11 140 (3.09%) XML
12 132 (2.92%) Pandas
13 129 (2.85%) CSS
14 112 (2.48%) AngularJS
14 112 (2.48%) Middleware
15 94 (2.08%) SOAP
16 91 (2.01%) .NET Framework
17 85 (1.88%) Web Services
18 83 (1.83%) Node.js
19 79 (1.75%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 293 (6.48%) Cloud Native
2 176 (3.89%) Data Structures
3 155 (3.43%) Legacy Systems
4 138 (3.05%) Product Ownership
5 108 (2.39%) Distributed Systems
6 100 (2.21%) Management Information System
7 88 (1.95%) Derivative
8 82 (1.81%) Onboarding
9 81 (1.79%) Data Protection Act
10 70 (1.55%) Analytical Mindset
11 60 (1.33%) Algorithms
12 57 (1.26%) Enterprise Software
13 56 (1.24%) Equities
13 56 (1.24%) Fixed Income
14 52 (1.15%) Clustering
15 51 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
16 44 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
16 44 (0.97%) Replication
17 43 (0.95%) NHS
18 40 (0.88%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 314 (6.94%) Linux
2 272 (6.01%) Windows
3 209 (4.62%) Unix
4 94 (2.08%) Windows Server
5 28 (0.62%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 27 (0.60%) AIX
7 19 (0.42%) Windows Server 2019
8 15 (0.33%) Windows Server 2016
9 10 (0.22%) Windows Server 2008
10 9 (0.20%) Solaris
10 9 (0.20%) VMS
10 9 (0.20%) Windows 10
11 7 (0.15%) Apple iOS
11 7 (0.15%) zOS
12 6 (0.13%) Android
13 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
14 3 (0.066%) Oracle Linux
15 2 (0.044%) Data ONTAP
16 1 (0.022%) CentOS
16 1 (0.022%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,207 (26.68%) CI/CD
2 1,157 (25.57%) Analytics
3 1,149 (25.40%) Data Modelling
4 1,144 (25.29%) Agile
5 1,064 (23.52%) ETL
6 1,029 (22.75%) Business Intelligence
7 1,007 (22.26%) DevOps
8 910 (20.11%) Problem-Solving
9 852 (18.83%) Data Pipeline
10 719 (15.89%) Data Engineering
11 574 (12.69%) Migration
12 570 (12.60%) AI
13 569 (12.58%) Data Governance
14 532 (11.76%) Validation
15 441 (9.75%) Decision-Making
16 434 (9.59%) Test Automation
17 418 (9.24%) Data Analysis
18 410 (9.06%) Performance Tuning
19 393 (8.69%) Microservices
20 388 (8.58%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 1,725 (38.13%) Python
2 619 (13.68%) Java
3 487 (10.76%) C#
4 329 (7.27%) PL/SQL
5 326 (7.21%) JavaScript
6 208 (4.60%) T-SQL
7 204 (4.51%) PowerShell
8 148 (3.27%) TypeScript
9 138 (3.05%) R
10 135 (2.98%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 127 (2.81%) Shell Script
12 90 (1.99%) Scala
13 84 (1.86%) Bash
14 82 (1.81%) C++
15 62 (1.37%) Bicep
16 56 (1.24%) VBA
17 46 (1.02%) Perl
18 30 (0.66%) Go
19 29 (0.64%) VB
20 24 (0.53%) C
Qualifications
1 963 (21.29%) Security Cleared
2 778 (17.20%) SC Cleared
3 360 (7.96%) Degree
4 122 (2.70%) Computer Science Degree
5 102 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
6 74 (1.64%) Azure Certification
7 69 (1.53%) DV Cleared
8 66 (1.46%) Master's Degree
9 52 (1.15%) ISTQB
10 43 (0.95%) Microsoft Certification
11 28 (0.62%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.38%) Oracle Certification
12 17 (0.38%) PhD
13 15 (0.33%) CBAP
14 13 (0.29%) DBS Check
14 13 (0.29%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 12 (0.27%) CISSP
16 11 (0.24%) PMI Certification
17 10 (0.22%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
17 10 (0.22%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 825 (18.24%) Data Quality
2 358 (7.91%) QA
3 199 (4.40%) GDPR
4 57 (1.26%) Accessibility
5 40 (0.88%) SLA
6 35 (0.77%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 28 (0.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 28 (0.62%) PMO
8 19 (0.42%) MiFID
8 19 (0.42%) NIST
8 19 (0.42%) PCI DSS
9 18 (0.40%) Actionable Recommendations
10 16 (0.35%) HIPAA
11 15 (0.33%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 15 (0.33%) IFRS
11 15 (0.33%) ISO 20022
12 14 (0.31%) HL7
12 14 (0.31%) WCAG
13 11 (0.24%) DICOM
13 11 (0.24%) NCSC
System Software
1 523 (11.56%) Docker
2 109 (2.41%) Active Directory
3 38 (0.84%) Virtual Machines
4 31 (0.69%) Oracle RAC
4 31 (0.69%) VMware Infrastructure
5 22 (0.49%) Hyper-V
6 11 (0.24%) VMware ESXi
7 10 (0.22%) KVM
8 9 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
9 8 (0.18%) HDFS
9 8 (0.18%) Postfix
10 6 (0.13%) RACF
11 5 (0.11%) XenApp
11 5 (0.11%) XenDesktop
12 3 (0.066%) Ceph
12 3 (0.066%) Oracle Clusterware
13 2 (0.044%) GridGain
13 2 (0.044%) Squid
13 2 (0.044%) VMware NSX
13 2 (0.044%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 436 (9.64%) Kubernetes
2 376 (8.31%) Terraform
3 120 (2.65%) Grafana
4 82 (1.81%) Ansible
5 66 (1.46%) Prometheus
6 43 (0.95%) Oracle RMAN
7 30 (0.66%) Data Guard
8 20 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
9 19 (0.42%) Kibana
10 18 (0.40%) SCCM
11 16 (0.35%) Progress Chef
12 15 (0.33%) ZABBIX
13 14 (0.31%) Control-M
13 14 (0.31%) Nagios
13 14 (0.31%) Netcool
13 14 (0.31%) Tivoli
14 13 (0.29%) OpenView
14 13 (0.29%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 10 (0.22%) vCenter Server
16 9 (0.20%) Kiali
Vendors
1 748 (16.53%) Oracle
2 724 (16.00%) Microsoft
3 556 (12.29%) Databricks
4 170 (3.76%) Google
5 162 (3.58%) Informatica
6 137 (3.03%) ServiceNow
7 120 (2.65%) Talend
8 115 (2.54%) SAP
9 93 (2.06%) Splunk
10 81 (1.79%) IBM
11 68 (1.50%) Salesforce
12 57 (1.26%) Denodo
13 51 (1.13%) Citrix
14 50 (1.11%) VMware
15 41 (0.91%) OpenAI
16 38 (0.84%) Dynatrace
17 34 (0.75%) Bloomberg
18 33 (0.73%) MuleSoft
19 32 (0.71%) HP
20 29 (0.64%) BMC