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

6 months to
27 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,107 3,795 4,059
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.51% 11.59% 10.46%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.42% 35.38% 33.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,413 2,609 2,952
10th Percentile £358 £331 £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 £469 £475
% change year-on-year +0.21% -1.26% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 92 92 46
10th Percentile £23.08 £23.68 £20.12
25th Percentile £29.96 £31.54 £30.00
Median hourly rate £44.50 £43.50 £40.58
Median % change year-on-year +2.30% +7.20% -11.56%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.29
90th Percentile £81.73 £62.00 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +42.86% -17.96%

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 14,022 10,725 12,235
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.12% 32.74% 31.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,124 7,149 8,472
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £501 £530
Median % change year-on-year +3.70% -5.57% -3.64%
75th Percentile £620 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 519 299 376
10th Percentile £28.50 £28.25 £27.00
25th Percentile £49.50 £36.25 £46.14
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +5.11%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.15 £79.00 £75.63
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 27 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 27 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 27 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 4,443 £500 - 4,696
London -6 2,483 £525 - 2,956
UK excluding London -8 2,080 £470 +0.21% 2,360
Work from Home -3 1,519 £500 - 1,897
North of England 0 583 £466 -0.59% 628
Midlands -4 464 £464 +3.06% 348
South East -12 464 £490 -2.00% 650
West Midlands -2 364 £465 +0.54% 199
North West -1 295 £478 +1.70% 369
Yorkshire +1 249 £475 +4.11% 164
South West -4 226 £509 +19.71% 285
Scotland -5 190 £426 -7.84% 166
East of England -3 123 £478 -4.69% 173
East Midlands -5 97 £463 +20.13% 149
North East -17 48 £413 -11.29% 102
Wales -5 42 £475 +5.56% 65
Northern Ireland -10 17 £363 -29.27% 71
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
1 226 (4.43%) Apache Airflow
2 215 (4.21%) Confluence
3 212 (4.15%) Apache Spark
4 170 (3.33%) Apache
5 93 (1.82%) SAS
6 85 (1.66%) SharePoint
7 45 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
8 39 (0.76%) IIS
9 29 (0.57%) WebLogic
10 28 (0.55%) Jupyter
11 22 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
11 22 (0.43%) nginx
12 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
13 20 (0.39%) WebSphere
14 18 (0.35%) Camunda
14 18 (0.35%) CMS
15 17 (0.33%) Tomcat
16 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
17 9 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
18 8 (0.16%) Appian
Applications
1 315 (6.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.23%) Microsoft Office
3 42 (0.82%) MS Visio
4 39 (0.76%) Spreadsheet
5 27 (0.53%) 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 ERP
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
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 12 (0.23%) Finacle
11 11 (0.22%) NEC Housing
11 11 (0.22%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.20%) NetSuite
12 10 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
13 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
14 8 (0.16%) Infor LN
14 8 (0.16%) Salesforce CRM
14 8 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 1,622 (31.76%) Azure
2 1,203 (23.56%) AWS
3 947 (18.54%) Power Platform
4 465 (9.11%) GCP
5 458 (8.97%) Azure DevOps
6 373 (7.30%) GitHub
7 362 (7.09%) Snowflake
8 340 (6.66%) Azure Data Factory
9 310 (6.07%) Serverless
10 282 (5.52%) dbt
11 240 (4.70%) Amazon S3
12 217 (4.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 201 (3.94%) AWS Lambda
14 185 (3.62%) GitHub Actions
15 108 (2.11%) SaaS
16 103 (2.02%) Power Automate
17 94 (1.84%) Entra ID
17 94 (1.84%) PowerApps
18 88 (1.72%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 71 (1.39%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 69 (1.35%) DNS
2 47 (0.92%) Firewall
3 34 (0.67%) HTTP
4 29 (0.57%) Network Security
4 29 (0.57%) SSL
5 23 (0.45%) TCP/IP
6 22 (0.43%) SNMP
7 20 (0.39%) Internet
8 19 (0.37%) VPN
9 17 (0.33%) WAN
10 16 (0.31%) DHCP
10 16 (0.31%) SSH
11 14 (0.27%) Broadband
12 11 (0.22%) HTTPS
13 10 (0.20%) SAN
13 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
14 9 (0.18%) Kerberos
14 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
14 9 (0.18%) Wireshark
15 8 (0.16%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 871 (17.06%) Power BI
2 718 (14.06%) Data Warehouse
3 645 (12.63%) SQL Server
4 344 (6.74%) Relational Database
5 320 (6.27%) Data Lake
6 316 (6.19%) PostgreSQL
7 299 (5.85%) Tableau
8 285 (5.58%) Metadata
9 259 (5.07%) NoSQL
10 225 (4.41%) Oracle Database
11 219 (4.29%) Azure SQL Database
12 186 (3.64%) BigQuery
13 160 (3.13%) Amazon Redshift
14 149 (2.92%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 142 (2.78%) Delta Lake
16 124 (2.43%) MongoDB
17 121 (2.37%) Big Data
18 118 (2.31%) MySQL
19 113 (2.21%) Oracle Reports
20 110 (2.15%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 607 (11.89%) Git
2 397 (7.77%) JIRA
3 291 (5.70%) Jenkins
4 238 (4.66%) GitLab
5 89 (1.74%) JUnit
6 86 (1.68%) Selenium
7 76 (1.49%) Gradle
8 75 (1.47%) Maven
9 64 (1.25%) Postman
10 57 (1.12%) Mockito
11 48 (0.94%) Oracle Forms
12 43 (0.84%) SonarQube
13 42 (0.82%) Visual Studio
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 1,364 (26.71%) Social Skills
2 1,289 (25.24%) Finance
3 1,046 (20.48%) Analytical Skills
4 530 (10.38%) Banking
5 472 (9.24%) Public Sector
6 149 (2.92%) Marketing
7 148 (2.90%) Front Office
8 143 (2.80%) Retail
9 137 (2.68%) Investment Banking
10 98 (1.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 93 (1.82%) Documentation Skills
12 74 (1.45%) Manufacturing
13 57 (1.12%) Financial Institution
13 57 (1.12%) Legal
14 55 (1.08%) Presentation Skills
15 45 (0.88%) Telecoms
16 44 (0.86%) Organisational Skills
17 40 (0.78%) Law
17 40 (0.78%) Publishing
18 39 (0.76%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 1,127 (22.07%) Developer
2 942 (18.45%) Data Engineer
3 766 (15.00%) Analyst
4 709 (13.88%) Senior
5 361 (7.07%) Lead
6 323 (6.32%) Data Analyst
7 275 (5.38%) Architect
8 262 (5.13%) Consultant
9 253 (4.95%) Business Analyst
10 212 (4.15%) DBA
11 203 (3.97%) Java Developer
12 199 (3.90%) Senior Data Engineer
13 176 (3.45%) Senior Developer
14 133 (2.60%) Software Engineer
15 129 (2.53%) SQL DBA
16 128 (2.51%) SQL Developer
17 121 (2.37%) Data Architect
17 121 (2.37%) Python Engineer
18 120 (2.35%) Python Developer
19 119 (2.33%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 463 (9.07%) REST
2 436 (8.54%) .NET
3 400 (7.83%) Terraform
4 345 (6.76%) PySpark
5 341 (6.68%) Kafka
6 276 (5.40%) Spring
7 263 (5.15%) Spring Boot
8 249 (4.88%) React
9 223 (4.37%) RESTful
10 208 (4.07%) JSON
11 199 (3.90%) HTML
12 190 (3.72%) XML
13 167 (3.27%) CSS
14 132 (2.58%) Web Services
15 127 (2.49%) AngularJS
16 116 (2.27%) Middleware
17 113 (2.21%) SOAP
18 112 (2.19%) Pandas
19 96 (1.88%) .NET Framework
20 90 (1.76%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 336 (6.58%) Cloud Native
2 259 (5.07%) Data Structures
3 222 (4.35%) Product Ownership
4 168 (3.29%) Legacy Systems
5 146 (2.86%) Distributed Systems
6 131 (2.57%) Onboarding
7 112 (2.19%) Enterprise Software
8 99 (1.94%) Management Information System
9 95 (1.86%) Derivative
10 84 (1.64%) Self-Motivation
11 73 (1.43%) Replication
12 72 (1.41%) Data Protection Act
13 70 (1.37%) Analytical Mindset
14 66 (1.29%) AI Agents
15 61 (1.19%) Algorithms
15 61 (1.19%) Clustering
16 59 (1.16%) Reference Data
17 55 (1.08%) Fixed Income
18 51 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
19 49 (0.96%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 372 (7.28%) Linux
2 310 (6.07%) Windows
3 244 (4.78%) Unix
4 119 (2.33%) 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 10 (0.20%) Ubuntu
9 10 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.14%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.098%) zOS
14 4 (0.078%) Android
14 4 (0.078%) Apple iOS
14 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2016
15 3 (0.059%) OpenVMS
16 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,377 (26.96%) CI/CD
2 1,358 (26.59%) Agile
3 1,331 (26.06%) Data Modelling
4 1,249 (24.46%) Analytics
5 1,118 (21.89%) ETL
6 1,100 (21.54%) Business Intelligence
7 1,025 (20.07%) DevOps
8 982 (19.23%) Data Pipeline
9 977 (19.13%) Problem-Solving
10 835 (16.35%) Data Engineering
11 759 (14.86%) AI
12 756 (14.80%) Migration
13 735 (14.39%) Validation
14 643 (12.59%) Stakeholder Management
15 588 (11.51%) Data Governance
16 570 (11.16%) Test Automation
17 544 (10.65%) Data Analysis
18 519 (10.16%) Continuous Improvement
19 510 (9.99%) Decision-Making
20 432 (8.46%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,807 (35.38%) Python
2 659 (12.90%) Java
3 473 (9.26%) C#
4 411 (8.05%) PL/SQL
5 390 (7.64%) JavaScript
6 266 (5.21%) PowerShell
7 261 (5.11%) T-SQL
8 201 (3.94%) TypeScript
9 149 (2.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 148 (2.90%) Shell Script
11 111 (2.17%) Bash
12 97 (1.90%) R
13 72 (1.41%) Scala
14 60 (1.17%) C++
15 49 (0.96%) Bicep
16 46 (0.90%) VBA
17 30 (0.59%) C
17 30 (0.59%) VB.NET
18 26 (0.51%) Perl
18 26 (0.51%) VB
Qualifications
1 1,096 (21.46%) Security Cleared
2 882 (17.27%) SC Cleared
3 355 (6.95%) Degree
4 146 (2.86%) BPSS Clearance
5 133 (2.60%) Computer Science Degree
6 115 (2.25%) DV Cleared
7 81 (1.59%) Azure Certification
8 65 (1.27%) ISTQB
9 47 (0.92%) Master's Degree
10 46 (0.90%) Microsoft Certification
11 43 (0.84%) AWS Certification
12 20 (0.39%) ISEB
13 19 (0.37%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 18 (0.35%) CISSP
15 16 (0.31%) DBS Check
16 13 (0.25%) ACCA
16 13 (0.25%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 13 (0.25%) CIMA
17 12 (0.23%) FFIEC
18 11 (0.22%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 963 (18.86%) Data Quality
2 413 (8.09%) QA
3 165 (3.23%) GDPR
4 73 (1.43%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.86%) SLA
6 31 (0.61%) ISO 20022
7 28 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 23 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 20 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
10 19 (0.37%) 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 (9.73%) Docker
2 141 (2.76%) Active Directory
3 55 (1.08%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (0.84%) Oracle RAC
5 40 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
6 21 (0.41%) 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
1 416 (8.15%) Kubernetes
2 104 (2.04%) Grafana
3 103 (2.02%) 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%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 891 (17.45%) Oracle
2 857 (16.78%) Microsoft
3 611 (11.96%) Databricks
4 193 (3.78%) Google
5 167 (3.27%) Informatica
6 139 (2.72%) SAP
7 122 (2.39%) Talend
8 105 (2.06%) ServiceNow
9 103 (2.02%) IBM
10 87 (1.70%) Splunk
11 73 (1.43%) VMware
12 71 (1.39%) Salesforce
13 62 (1.21%) Denodo
14 42 (0.82%) Dynatrace
15 40 (0.78%) Bloomberg
16 39 (0.76%) BMC
16 39 (0.76%) Sybase
17 35 (0.69%) Adobe
17 35 (0.69%) Citrix
17 35 (0.69%) Murex