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

6 months to
23 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,162 3,858 4,040
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.58% 11.70% 10.42%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.50% 35.55% 33.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,448 2,646 2,949
10th Percentile £356 £328 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £599 £604 £638
90th Percentile £688 £738 £746
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 88 47
10th Percentile £23.08 £23.32 £20.12
25th Percentile £29.96 £31.18 £30.00
Median hourly rate £44.50 £41.65 £41.16
Median % change year-on-year +6.84% +1.21% -10.30%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £81.73 £59.00 £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 14,143 10,853 12,212
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.25% 32.91% 31.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,208 7,240 8,482
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £505 £530
Median % change year-on-year +2.48% -4.72% -3.64%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 531 295 386
10th Percentile £29.96 £28.25 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.38 £36.13 £46.05
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +7.65%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £79.50 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +5.11%

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 23 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 23 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 23 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 4,504 £500 - 1,733
London -6 2,499 £525 -0.94% 740
UK excluding London -10 2,121 £470 +0.21% 1,356
Work from Home -3 1,532 £500 - 788
North of England -2 585 £472 +1.51% 351
Midlands -2 497 £459 +2.00% 212
South East -9 477 £500 - 456
West Midlands -1 391 £459 -0.76% 112
North West -2 295 £478 +1.92% 184
Yorkshire 0 251 £475 +1.23% 109
South West -5 228 £505 +18.82% 158
Scotland -8 188 £438 -5.41% 55
East of England -2 122 £479 -4.30% 97
East Midlands -4 102 £465 +20.00% 100
North East -19 51 £406 -12.63% 64
Wales -8 39 £475 +5.56% 30
Northern Ireland -10 17 £375 -26.83% 18
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
1 228 (4.42%) Apache Airflow
2 218 (4.22%) Confluence
3 214 (4.15%) Apache Spark
4 172 (3.33%) Apache
5 103 (2.00%) SAS
6 87 (1.69%) SharePoint
7 45 (0.87%) Oracle Workflow
8 40 (0.77%) IIS
9 30 (0.58%) WebLogic
10 28 (0.54%) Jupyter
11 23 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
12 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
13 19 (0.37%) WebSphere
14 18 (0.35%) CMS
14 18 (0.35%) nginx
14 18 (0.35%) Tomcat
15 14 (0.27%) Camunda
16 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
17 10 (0.19%) Tuxedo
18 9 (0.17%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 326 (6.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 68 (1.32%) Microsoft Office
3 47 (0.91%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.74%) Spreadsheet
5 31 (0.60%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.077%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
8 4 (0.077%) Notion
8 4 (0.077%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
10 2 (0.039%) Windchill
11 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.019%) InDesign
11 1 (0.019%) Mingle
11 1 (0.019%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 51 (0.99%) Oracle EBS
2 44 (0.85%) Dynamics CRM
3 30 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
4 28 (0.54%) Aladdin
5 26 (0.50%) Remedy ITSM
6 25 (0.48%) Oracle Payables
7 24 (0.46%) Oracle ERP
8 17 (0.33%) Oracle EBS R12
9 16 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
10 14 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
11 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
11 11 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.19%) Finacle
12 10 (0.19%) NetSuite
12 10 (0.19%) Oracle Financials
13 9 (0.17%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.17%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
14 8 (0.15%) Infor LN
14 8 (0.15%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,637 (31.71%) Azure
2 1,219 (23.61%) AWS
3 955 (18.50%) Power Platform
4 467 (9.05%) GCP
5 464 (8.99%) Azure DevOps
6 367 (7.11%) GitHub
7 362 (7.01%) Snowflake
8 344 (6.66%) Azure Data Factory
9 309 (5.99%) Serverless
10 280 (5.42%) dbt
11 239 (4.63%) Amazon S3
12 220 (4.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 200 (3.87%) AWS Lambda
14 184 (3.56%) GitHub Actions
15 106 (2.05%) SaaS
16 101 (1.96%) Power Automate
17 97 (1.88%) Entra ID
18 94 (1.82%) PowerApps
19 91 (1.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 70 (1.36%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 68 (1.32%) DNS
2 46 (0.89%) Firewall
3 29 (0.56%) Network Security
3 29 (0.56%) SSL
4 28 (0.54%) HTTP
5 22 (0.43%) SNMP
5 22 (0.43%) VPN
6 21 (0.41%) Internet
6 21 (0.41%) TCP/IP
7 18 (0.35%) WAN
8 15 (0.29%) DHCP
9 14 (0.27%) Broadband
10 12 (0.23%) SSH
11 10 (0.19%) HTTPS
11 10 (0.19%) SAN
11 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
11 10 (0.19%) Wireshark
12 9 (0.17%) Kerberos
12 9 (0.17%) Wi-Fi
13 8 (0.15%) 3GPP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 880 (17.05%) Power BI
2 724 (14.03%) Data Warehouse
3 651 (12.61%) SQL Server
4 343 (6.64%) Relational Database
5 324 (6.28%) PostgreSQL
6 322 (6.24%) Data Lake
7 296 (5.73%) Tableau
8 288 (5.58%) Metadata
9 263 (5.09%) NoSQL
10 220 (4.26%) Azure SQL Database
11 217 (4.20%) Oracle Database
12 188 (3.64%) BigQuery
13 162 (3.14%) Amazon Redshift
14 155 (3.00%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 139 (2.69%) Delta Lake
16 123 (2.38%) Big Data
16 123 (2.38%) MongoDB
17 119 (2.31%) MySQL
17 119 (2.31%) Oracle Reports
18 110 (2.13%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 619 (11.99%) Git
2 408 (7.90%) JIRA
3 294 (5.70%) Jenkins
4 235 (4.55%) GitLab
5 85 (1.65%) Selenium
6 82 (1.59%) JUnit
7 71 (1.38%) Gradle
7 71 (1.38%) Maven
8 68 (1.32%) Postman
9 50 (0.97%) Mockito
10 48 (0.93%) Oracle Forms
11 42 (0.81%) Visual Studio
12 41 (0.79%) Bitbucket
13 40 (0.77%) SonarQube
14 38 (0.74%) JMeter
15 35 (0.68%) Zephyr
16 30 (0.58%) MLflow
17 29 (0.56%) Team Foundation Server
18 28 (0.54%) Liquibase
18 28 (0.54%) TeamCity
General
1 1,370 (26.54%) Social Skills
2 1,294 (25.07%) Finance
3 1,044 (20.22%) Analytical Skills
4 532 (10.31%) Banking
5 481 (9.32%) Public Sector
6 150 (2.91%) Marketing
7 149 (2.89%) Front Office
8 145 (2.81%) Retail
9 136 (2.63%) Investment Banking
10 100 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 92 (1.78%) Documentation Skills
12 76 (1.47%) Manufacturing
13 59 (1.14%) Legal
14 58 (1.12%) Financial Institution
15 53 (1.03%) Presentation Skills
16 44 (0.85%) Organisational Skills
16 44 (0.85%) Telecoms
17 41 (0.79%) Law
18 40 (0.77%) Back Office
19 39 (0.76%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 1,138 (22.05%) Developer
2 955 (18.50%) Data Engineer
3 763 (14.78%) Analyst
4 719 (13.93%) Senior
5 370 (7.17%) Lead
6 320 (6.20%) Data Analyst
7 289 (5.60%) Architect
8 263 (5.09%) Consultant
9 257 (4.98%) Business Analyst
10 208 (4.03%) DBA
11 202 (3.91%) Java Developer
11 202 (3.91%) Senior Data Engineer
12 177 (3.43%) Senior Developer
13 138 (2.67%) Software Engineer
14 133 (2.58%) SQL Developer
15 126 (2.44%) Data Architect
15 126 (2.44%) SQL DBA
16 120 (2.32%) Python Engineer
17 118 (2.29%) Python Developer
18 115 (2.23%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 458 (8.87%) REST
2 448 (8.68%) .NET
3 404 (7.83%) Terraform
4 345 (6.68%) PySpark
5 335 (6.49%) Kafka
6 269 (5.21%) Spring
7 254 (4.92%) Spring Boot
8 239 (4.63%) React
9 226 (4.38%) RESTful
10 209 (4.05%) JSON
11 201 (3.89%) HTML
12 194 (3.76%) XML
13 158 (3.06%) CSS
14 140 (2.71%) AngularJS
15 136 (2.63%) Web Services
16 118 (2.29%) Middleware
17 113 (2.19%) SOAP
18 111 (2.15%) Pandas
19 98 (1.90%) .NET Framework
20 85 (1.65%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 339 (6.57%) Cloud Native
2 249 (4.82%) Data Structures
3 219 (4.24%) Product Ownership
4 169 (3.27%) Legacy Systems
5 146 (2.83%) Distributed Systems
6 129 (2.50%) Onboarding
7 113 (2.19%) Enterprise Software
8 101 (1.96%) Management Information System
9 94 (1.82%) Derivative
10 87 (1.69%) Self-Motivation
11 73 (1.41%) Data Protection Act
11 73 (1.41%) Replication
12 70 (1.36%) Analytical Mindset
13 63 (1.22%) AI Agents
13 63 (1.22%) Algorithms
14 62 (1.20%) Clustering
15 59 (1.14%) Reference Data
16 55 (1.07%) Fixed Income
17 53 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
18 48 (0.93%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 364 (7.05%) Linux
2 320 (6.20%) Windows
3 247 (4.78%) Unix
4 120 (2.32%) Windows Server
5 22 (0.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.35%) AIX
7 16 (0.31%) Solaris
8 14 (0.27%) VMS
9 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2008
9 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
10 7 (0.14%) Ubuntu
10 7 (0.14%) Windows 10
10 7 (0.14%) zOS
11 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
12 5 (0.097%) Apple iOS
13 4 (0.077%) Android
13 4 (0.077%) Oracle Linux
13 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,393 (26.99%) CI/CD
2 1,390 (26.93%) Agile
3 1,342 (26.00%) Data Modelling
4 1,267 (24.54%) Analytics
5 1,134 (21.97%) ETL
6 1,113 (21.56%) Business Intelligence
7 1,041 (20.17%) DevOps
8 991 (19.20%) Data Pipeline
9 986 (19.10%) Problem-Solving
10 837 (16.21%) Data Engineering
11 768 (14.88%) AI
12 758 (14.68%) Migration
13 736 (14.26%) Validation
14 630 (12.20%) Stakeholder Management
15 595 (11.53%) Data Governance
16 583 (11.29%) Test Automation
17 540 (10.46%) Data Analysis
18 523 (10.13%) Continuous Improvement
19 515 (9.98%) Decision-Making
20 437 (8.47%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,817 (35.20%) Python
2 659 (12.77%) Java
3 495 (9.59%) C#
4 414 (8.02%) PL/SQL
5 397 (7.69%) JavaScript
6 270 (5.23%) T-SQL
7 267 (5.17%) PowerShell
8 198 (3.84%) TypeScript
9 150 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 145 (2.81%) Shell Script
11 108 (2.09%) Bash
12 96 (1.86%) R
13 73 (1.41%) Scala
14 63 (1.22%) C++
15 49 (0.95%) Bicep
16 48 (0.93%) VBA
17 31 (0.60%) C
18 30 (0.58%) VB.NET
19 28 (0.54%) VB
20 26 (0.50%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,135 (21.99%) Security Cleared
2 918 (17.78%) SC Cleared
3 356 (6.90%) Degree
4 143 (2.77%) BPSS Clearance
5 129 (2.50%) Computer Science Degree
6 115 (2.23%) DV Cleared
7 79 (1.53%) Azure Certification
8 71 (1.38%) ISTQB
9 47 (0.91%) Master's Degree
9 47 (0.91%) Microsoft Certification
10 40 (0.77%) AWS Certification
11 20 (0.39%) ISEB
11 20 (0.39%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
12 19 (0.37%) CISSP
13 16 (0.31%) DBS Check
14 13 (0.25%) ACCA
14 13 (0.25%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 13 (0.25%) CIMA
14 13 (0.25%) FFIEC
15 12 (0.23%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 972 (18.83%) Data Quality
2 416 (8.06%) QA
3 166 (3.22%) GDPR
4 73 (1.41%) Accessibility
5 45 (0.87%) SLA
6 28 (0.54%) ISO 20022
6 28 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 24 (0.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 23 (0.45%) NIST
9 20 (0.39%) IFRS
10 19 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
11 17 (0.33%) PMO
12 16 (0.31%) MiFID
13 13 (0.25%) COBIT
13 13 (0.25%) Solvency II
14 12 (0.23%) PCI DSS
15 11 (0.21%) GxP
15 11 (0.21%) HIPAA
15 11 (0.21%) NCSC
15 11 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 501 (9.71%) Docker
2 148 (2.87%) Active Directory
3 54 (1.05%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.81%) Oracle RAC
5 39 (0.76%) Virtual Machines
6 20 (0.39%) Hyper-V
7 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
8 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 15 (0.29%) vCloud
9 15 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 6 (0.12%) Postfix
11 5 (0.097%) Ceph
12 4 (0.077%) KVM
12 4 (0.077%) Squid
13 3 (0.058%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 3 (0.058%) HDFS
14 2 (0.039%) GridGain
15 1 (0.019%) GPFS
15 1 (0.019%) Lustre
15 1 (0.019%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 424 (8.21%) Kubernetes
2 106 (2.05%) Ansible
2 106 (2.05%) Grafana
3 48 (0.93%) Oracle RMAN
3 48 (0.93%) Prometheus
4 46 (0.89%) Data Guard
5 43 (0.83%) Control-M
6 30 (0.58%) SCOM
7 19 (0.37%) Kibana
8 16 (0.31%) Nagios
8 16 (0.31%) Netcool
8 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
9 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
9 15 (0.29%) vCenter Server
10 13 (0.25%) OpenView
10 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
11 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
11 12 (0.23%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
12 11 (0.21%) Microsoft Intune
13 10 (0.19%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 902 (17.47%) Oracle
2 863 (16.72%) Microsoft
3 612 (11.86%) Databricks
4 198 (3.84%) Google
5 176 (3.41%) Informatica
6 141 (2.73%) SAP
7 127 (2.46%) Talend
8 112 (2.17%) ServiceNow
9 98 (1.90%) IBM
10 87 (1.69%) Splunk
11 73 (1.41%) VMware
12 72 (1.39%) Salesforce
13 70 (1.36%) Denodo
14 43 (0.83%) Dynatrace
15 41 (0.79%) BMC
16 40 (0.77%) Bloomberg
17 38 (0.74%) Sybase
18 37 (0.72%) Citrix
19 35 (0.68%) Adobe
19 35 (0.68%) Murex