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 26 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,114 3,814 4,056
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.53% 11.66% 10.44%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.55% 35.50% 33.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,412 2,621 2,951
10th Percentile £358 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £594 £600 £638
90th Percentile £688 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £468 £475
% change year-on-year +0.48% -1.53% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 92 91 47
10th Percentile £23.08 £23.45 £20.12
25th Percentile £29.96 £31.45 £30.00
Median hourly rate £44.50 £43.50 £41.16
Median % change year-on-year +2.30% +5.70% -10.30%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £81.73 - £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £35.50
% change year-on-year -11.00% +40.85% -16.79%

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 13,990 10,743 12,235
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.08% 32.84% 31.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,106 7,166 8,475
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £505 £530
Median % change year-on-year +2.77% -4.72% -3.64%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £498 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.93% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 518 297 383
10th Percentile £28.50 £28.25 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.25 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.55%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.23 £79.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.25 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.42% -4.23% +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 26 August 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 26 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for SQL in the UK

SQL
Top 18 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 26 August 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 4,449 £500 - 1,562
London -6 2,478 £525 - 823
UK excluding London -9 2,089 £470 +0.48% 911
Work from Home -3 1,521 £500 - 686
North of England -2 583 £470 +0.21% 258
Midlands -4 470 £463 +2.78% 148
South East -10 466 £490 -2.00% 194
West Midlands -2 370 £460 -0.54% 85
North West -1 295 £478 +1.70% 138
Yorkshire 0 248 £475 +2.70% 80
South West -3 226 £505 +18.82% 168
Scotland -5 189 £430 -4.44% 59
East of England -2 126 £480 -4.10% 61
East Midlands -5 97 £463 +20.13% 63
North East -16 49 £413 -11.29% 45
Wales -6 41 £475 +5.56% 23
Northern Ireland -10 18 £375 -26.83% 20
Channel Islands - 1 £450 -

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
1 227 (4.44%) Apache Airflow
2 215 (4.20%) Confluence
3 213 (4.17%) Apache Spark
4 169 (3.30%) Apache
5 94 (1.84%) SAS
6 85 (1.66%) SharePoint
7 45 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
8 39 (0.76%) IIS
9 31 (0.61%) WebLogic
10 28 (0.55%) Jupyter
11 21 (0.41%) Microsoft Exchange
11 21 (0.41%) nginx
11 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
12 20 (0.39%) WebSphere
13 18 (0.35%) CMS
14 17 (0.33%) Camunda
14 17 (0.33%) Tomcat
15 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
16 9 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 8 (0.16%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 318 (6.22%) Microsoft Excel
2 64 (1.25%) Microsoft Office
3 44 (0.86%) MS Visio
4 39 (0.76%) Spreadsheet
5 28 (0.55%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.078%) Microsoft Project
8 4 (0.078%) Notion
8 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.059%) CPLEX
10 2 (0.039%) Windchill
11 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.020%) InDesign
11 1 (0.020%) Mingle
11 1 (0.020%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.020%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 50 (0.98%) Oracle EBS
2 44 (0.86%) Dynamics CRM
3 30 (0.59%) SAP S/4HANA
4 28 (0.55%) Aladdin
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
6 24 (0.47%) Oracle ERP
6 24 (0.47%) Remedy ITSM
7 17 (0.33%) Oracle EBS R12
8 16 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 14 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.22%) NEC Housing
10 11 (0.22%) Oracle Assets
10 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.20%) Finacle
11 10 (0.20%) NetSuite
11 10 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
12 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
12 9 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 8 (0.16%) Infor LN
13 8 (0.16%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,622 (31.72%) Azure
2 1,202 (23.50%) AWS
3 951 (18.60%) Power Platform
4 464 (9.07%) GCP
5 454 (8.88%) Azure DevOps
6 366 (7.16%) GitHub
7 360 (7.04%) Snowflake
8 339 (6.63%) Azure Data Factory
9 308 (6.02%) Serverless
10 279 (5.46%) dbt
11 238 (4.65%) Amazon S3
12 216 (4.22%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 200 (3.91%) AWS Lambda
14 183 (3.58%) GitHub Actions
15 107 (2.09%) SaaS
16 103 (2.01%) Power Automate
17 95 (1.86%) PowerApps
18 93 (1.82%) Entra ID
19 89 (1.74%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 70 (1.37%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 68 (1.33%) DNS
2 46 (0.90%) Firewall
3 33 (0.65%) HTTP
4 29 (0.57%) Network Security
4 29 (0.57%) SSL
5 22 (0.43%) SNMP
5 22 (0.43%) TCP/IP
6 20 (0.39%) Internet
7 19 (0.37%) VPN
8 18 (0.35%) WAN
9 16 (0.31%) SSH
10 15 (0.29%) DHCP
11 14 (0.27%) Broadband
12 11 (0.22%) HTTPS
13 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
14 9 (0.18%) Kerberos
14 9 (0.18%) SAN
14 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
14 9 (0.18%) Wireshark
15 8 (0.16%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 873 (17.07%) Power BI
2 712 (13.92%) Data Warehouse
3 644 (12.59%) SQL Server
4 345 (6.75%) Relational Database
5 320 (6.26%) Data Lake
6 316 (6.18%) PostgreSQL
7 297 (5.81%) Tableau
8 289 (5.65%) Metadata
9 262 (5.12%) NoSQL
10 223 (4.36%) Oracle Database
11 219 (4.28%) Azure SQL Database
12 187 (3.66%) BigQuery
13 160 (3.13%) Amazon Redshift
14 150 (2.93%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 141 (2.76%) Delta Lake
16 127 (2.48%) MongoDB
17 123 (2.41%) Big Data
18 119 (2.33%) MySQL
19 113 (2.21%) Oracle Reports
20 110 (2.15%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 608 (11.89%) Git
2 399 (7.80%) JIRA
3 290 (5.67%) Jenkins
4 237 (4.63%) GitLab
5 88 (1.72%) Selenium
6 87 (1.70%) JUnit
7 74 (1.45%) Gradle
8 72 (1.41%) Maven
9 63 (1.23%) Postman
10 54 (1.06%) Mockito
11 48 (0.94%) Oracle Forms
12 42 (0.82%) Visual Studio
13 41 (0.80%) SonarQube
14 39 (0.76%) Bitbucket
15 38 (0.74%) JMeter
16 31 (0.61%) MLflow
16 31 (0.61%) Zephyr
17 29 (0.57%) Team Foundation Server
18 28 (0.55%) Liquibase
19 27 (0.53%) Artifactory
General
1 1,362 (26.63%) Social Skills
2 1,289 (25.21%) Finance
3 1,047 (20.47%) Analytical Skills
4 529 (10.34%) Banking
5 472 (9.23%) Public Sector
6 149 (2.91%) Marketing
7 147 (2.87%) Front Office
8 142 (2.78%) Retail
9 136 (2.66%) Investment Banking
10 98 (1.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 92 (1.80%) Documentation Skills
12 74 (1.45%) Manufacturing
13 58 (1.13%) Legal
14 57 (1.11%) Financial Institution
15 56 (1.10%) Presentation Skills
16 46 (0.90%) Telecoms
17 45 (0.88%) Organisational Skills
18 40 (0.78%) Law
18 40 (0.78%) Publishing
19 39 (0.76%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 1,126 (22.02%) Developer
2 944 (18.46%) Data Engineer
3 765 (14.96%) Analyst
4 708 (13.84%) Senior
5 362 (7.08%) Lead
6 324 (6.34%) Data Analyst
7 279 (5.46%) Architect
8 264 (5.16%) Consultant
9 254 (4.97%) Business Analyst
10 210 (4.11%) DBA
11 201 (3.93%) Senior Data Engineer
12 200 (3.91%) Java Developer
13 175 (3.42%) Senior Developer
14 134 (2.62%) Software Engineer
15 130 (2.54%) SQL Developer
16 127 (2.48%) SQL DBA
17 123 (2.41%) Data Architect
18 120 (2.35%) Python Engineer
19 119 (2.33%) Python Developer
20 116 (2.27%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 462 (9.03%) REST
2 442 (8.64%) .NET
3 396 (7.74%) Terraform
4 344 (6.73%) PySpark
5 339 (6.63%) Kafka
6 272 (5.32%) Spring
7 259 (5.06%) Spring Boot
8 243 (4.75%) React
9 224 (4.38%) RESTful
10 207 (4.05%) JSON
11 203 (3.97%) HTML
12 190 (3.72%) XML
13 166 (3.25%) CSS
14 133 (2.60%) AngularJS
14 133 (2.60%) Web Services
15 117 (2.29%) Middleware
16 113 (2.21%) Pandas
16 113 (2.21%) SOAP
17 97 (1.90%) .NET Framework
18 86 (1.68%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 336 (6.57%) Cloud Native
2 258 (5.04%) Data Structures
3 220 (4.30%) Product Ownership
4 167 (3.27%) Legacy Systems
5 146 (2.85%) Distributed Systems
6 133 (2.60%) Onboarding
7 114 (2.23%) Enterprise Software
8 100 (1.96%) Management Information System
9 94 (1.84%) Derivative
10 85 (1.66%) Self-Motivation
11 72 (1.41%) Data Protection Act
11 72 (1.41%) Replication
12 70 (1.37%) Analytical Mindset
13 65 (1.27%) AI Agents
14 62 (1.21%) Clustering
15 61 (1.19%) Algorithms
15 61 (1.19%) Reference Data
16 55 (1.08%) Fixed Income
17 51 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
18 48 (0.94%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 367 (7.18%) Linux
2 311 (6.08%) Windows
3 246 (4.81%) Unix
4 117 (2.29%) Windows Server
5 23 (0.45%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.35%) AIX
7 16 (0.31%) Solaris
8 15 (0.29%) VMS
9 9 (0.18%) Ubuntu
9 9 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
9 9 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
10 7 (0.14%) Windows 10
11 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
11 6 (0.12%) zOS
12 5 (0.098%) Apple iOS
13 4 (0.078%) Android
13 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
13 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.059%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,377 (26.93%) CI/CD
2 1,364 (26.67%) Agile
3 1,331 (26.03%) Data Modelling
4 1,247 (24.38%) Analytics
5 1,122 (21.94%) ETL
6 1,097 (21.45%) Business Intelligence
7 1,024 (20.02%) DevOps
8 987 (19.30%) Data Pipeline
9 979 (19.14%) Problem-Solving
10 829 (16.21%) Data Engineering
11 758 (14.82%) AI
12 752 (14.70%) Migration
13 743 (14.53%) Validation
14 643 (12.57%) Stakeholder Management
15 594 (11.62%) Data Governance
16 568 (11.11%) Test Automation
17 543 (10.62%) Data Analysis
18 517 (10.11%) Continuous Improvement
19 511 (9.99%) Decision-Making
20 435 (8.51%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,802 (35.24%) Python
2 659 (12.89%) Java
3 481 (9.41%) C#
4 412 (8.06%) PL/SQL
5 391 (7.65%) JavaScript
6 264 (5.16%) T-SQL
7 263 (5.14%) PowerShell
8 200 (3.91%) TypeScript
9 149 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 149 (2.91%) Shell Script
10 110 (2.15%) Bash
11 96 (1.88%) R
12 72 (1.41%) Scala
13 61 (1.19%) C++
14 49 (0.96%) Bicep
15 46 (0.90%) VBA
16 31 (0.61%) C
17 30 (0.59%) VB.NET
18 27 (0.53%) VB
19 26 (0.51%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,103 (21.57%) Security Cleared
2 889 (17.38%) SC Cleared
3 355 (6.94%) Degree
4 145 (2.84%) BPSS Clearance
5 132 (2.58%) Computer Science Degree
6 114 (2.23%) DV Cleared
7 81 (1.58%) Azure Certification
8 66 (1.29%) ISTQB
9 47 (0.92%) Master's Degree
9 47 (0.92%) Microsoft Certification
10 42 (0.82%) AWS Certification
11 20 (0.39%) ISEB
12 19 (0.37%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 18 (0.35%) CISSP
14 16 (0.31%) DBS Check
15 13 (0.25%) ACCA
15 13 (0.25%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 13 (0.25%) CIMA
16 12 (0.23%) FFIEC
17 11 (0.22%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 968 (18.93%) Data Quality
2 411 (8.04%) QA
3 165 (3.23%) GDPR
4 74 (1.45%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.86%) SLA
6 29 (0.57%) ISO 20022
7 28 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 23 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 20 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
9 20 (0.39%) IFRS
10 19 (0.37%) NIST
11 17 (0.33%) MiFID
12 15 (0.29%) PMO
13 14 (0.27%) Solvency II
14 12 (0.23%) PCI DSS
15 11 (0.22%) COBIT
15 11 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.22%) GMP
15 11 (0.22%) GxP
15 11 (0.22%) WCAG
System Software
1 497 (9.72%) Docker
2 140 (2.74%) Active Directory
3 54 (1.06%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (0.84%) Oracle RAC
5 40 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
6 20 (0.39%) Hyper-V
7 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
8 15 (0.29%) vCloud
8 15 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
8 15 (0.29%) VMware NSX
9 7 (0.14%) Postfix
10 6 (0.12%) Squid
11 5 (0.098%) Ceph
12 4 (0.078%) KVM
13 3 (0.059%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
14 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
14 2 (0.039%) GridGain
15 1 (0.020%) RACF
15 1 (0.020%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 414 (8.10%) Kubernetes
2 104 (2.03%) Grafana
3 102 (1.99%) Ansible
4 51 (1.00%) Prometheus
5 49 (0.96%) Oracle RMAN
6 47 (0.92%) Data Guard
7 43 (0.84%) Control-M
8 30 (0.59%) SCOM
9 22 (0.43%) Kibana
10 16 (0.31%) Nagios
10 16 (0.31%) Netcool
10 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
11 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
11 15 (0.29%) vCenter Server
12 13 (0.25%) OpenView
12 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
13 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
13 12 (0.23%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
14 11 (0.22%) Microsoft Intune
15 10 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 891 (17.42%) Oracle
2 856 (16.74%) Microsoft
3 613 (11.99%) Databricks
4 194 (3.79%) Google
5 172 (3.36%) Informatica
6 141 (2.76%) SAP
7 123 (2.41%) Talend
8 108 (2.11%) ServiceNow
9 103 (2.01%) IBM
10 87 (1.70%) Splunk
11 72 (1.41%) Salesforce
11 72 (1.41%) VMware
12 62 (1.21%) Denodo
13 43 (0.84%) Dynatrace
14 39 (0.76%) Bloomberg
14 39 (0.76%) BMC
14 39 (0.76%) Sybase
15 35 (0.68%) Adobe
15 35 (0.68%) Citrix
15 35 (0.68%) Murex