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

6 months to
10 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,091 3,827 4,329
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.67% 11.83% 10.03%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.82% 35.45% 32.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,372 2,669 3,152
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £613 £630
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -0.21% -1.05% -2.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 91 73 59
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.09 £21.34
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.47 £26.12
Median hourly rate £45.00 £42.82 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +5.10% +3.17% -19.02%
75th Percentile £66.50 £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% -17.29%

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 14,214 10,796 13,278
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.01% 33.36% 30.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,243 7,282 9,344
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 544 263 528
10th Percentile £34.01 £27.59 £31.25
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £77.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +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 10 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 10 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 10 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 -3 4,435 £500 - 1,929
London -6 2,379 £525 -0.94% 861
UK excluding London -9 2,175 £469 -0.21% 1,410
Work from Home -6 1,518 £500 - 911
North of England -6 577 £463 -2.63% 370
Midlands +2 569 £460 +7.48% 224
West Midlands +4 468 £459 +2.00% 109
South East -9 456 £475 -5.00% 452
North West -3 307 £475 +1.17% 206
South West -5 237 £500 +14.29% 139
Yorkshire -7 232 £475 - 106
Scotland -9 197 £450 - 61
East of England -16 106 £491 +0.77% 118
East Midlands 0 97 £525 +40.00% 115
North East -16 51 £425 -8.36% 62
Wales +4 49 £450 +1.12% 33
Northern Ireland -10 15 £375 -25.93% 41

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
1 241 (4.73%) Apache Spark
2 218 (4.28%) Confluence
3 206 (4.05%) Apache Airflow
4 183 (3.59%) Apache
5 115 (2.26%) SAS
6 61 (1.20%) SharePoint
7 44 (0.86%) Oracle Workflow
7 44 (0.86%) Tomcat
8 42 (0.82%) IIS
9 41 (0.81%) WebLogic
10 32 (0.63%) WebSphere
11 25 (0.49%) Jupyter
12 23 (0.45%) nginx
13 22 (0.43%) Apache Geronimo
13 22 (0.43%) Apache ServiceMix
13 22 (0.43%) Red Hat Fuse
14 21 (0.41%) CMS
15 20 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
16 18 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
17 16 (0.31%) Appian
Applications
1 322 (6.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 69 (1.36%) Microsoft Office
3 54 (1.06%) MS Visio
4 40 (0.79%) Spreadsheet
5 35 (0.69%) 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 40 (0.79%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.57%) Aladdin
3 29 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
4 27 (0.53%) Oracle Payables
5 24 (0.47%) Oracle ERP
6 19 (0.37%) NEC Housing
6 19 (0.37%) Oracle EBS R12
6 19 (0.37%) Oracle Receivables
7 17 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
8 13 (0.26%) Oracle Assets
9 12 (0.24%) Oracle General Ledger
10 11 (0.22%) Findur
10 11 (0.22%) Salesforce CRM
10 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.20%) Elite 3E
11 10 (0.20%) Finacle
12 9 (0.18%) Fidessa
13 8 (0.16%) Payment Gateway
13 8 (0.16%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,622 (31.86%) Azure
2 1,225 (24.06%) AWS
3 942 (18.50%) Power Platform
4 454 (8.92%) Azure DevOps
5 426 (8.37%) GCP
6 362 (7.11%) GitHub
7 350 (6.87%) Azure Data Factory
8 317 (6.23%) Snowflake
9 310 (6.09%) Serverless
10 271 (5.32%) Amazon S3
11 252 (4.95%) dbt
12 228 (4.48%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 199 (3.91%) AWS Lambda
14 187 (3.67%) GitHub Actions
15 96 (1.89%) SaaS
16 90 (1.77%) Entra ID
17 85 (1.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 84 (1.65%) Power Automate
19 79 (1.55%) PowerApps
20 78 (1.53%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 52 (1.02%) DNS
2 40 (0.79%) Firewall
3 26 (0.51%) HTTP
3 26 (0.51%) SSL
4 22 (0.43%) Network Security
4 22 (0.43%) SNMP
5 20 (0.39%) Internet
5 20 (0.39%) WAN
6 18 (0.35%) VPN
7 12 (0.24%) TCP/IP
8 10 (0.20%) SAN
8 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
9 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
9 9 (0.18%) Kerberos
9 9 (0.18%) Wireshark
10 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
10 8 (0.16%) Wi-Fi
11 7 (0.14%) LAN
11 7 (0.14%) NAS
11 7 (0.14%) PuTTY
Database & Business Intelligence
1 864 (16.97%) Power BI
2 668 (13.12%) Data Warehouse
3 645 (12.67%) SQL Server
4 347 (6.82%) Relational Database
5 328 (6.44%) Tableau
6 324 (6.36%) PostgreSQL
7 314 (6.17%) Data Lake
8 259 (5.09%) NoSQL
9 258 (5.07%) Metadata
10 223 (4.38%) Azure SQL Database
11 200 (3.93%) Oracle Database
12 171 (3.36%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 166 (3.26%) BigQuery
14 151 (2.97%) Amazon Redshift
15 147 (2.89%) Big Data
16 143 (2.81%) Delta Lake
17 127 (2.49%) Oracle Reports
18 123 (2.42%) MySQL
19 115 (2.26%) MongoDB
20 112 (2.20%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 558 (10.96%) Git
2 403 (7.92%) JIRA
3 268 (5.26%) Jenkins
4 225 (4.42%) GitLab
5 78 (1.53%) JUnit
6 60 (1.18%) Maven
7 57 (1.12%) Postman
7 57 (1.12%) Selenium
8 52 (1.02%) Gradle
8 52 (1.02%) Mockito
9 51 (1.00%) Oracle Forms
10 39 (0.77%) Visual Studio
11 34 (0.67%) MLflow
12 33 (0.65%) Bitbucket
12 33 (0.65%) SonarQube
13 32 (0.63%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.63%) JMeter
14 30 (0.59%) Team Foundation Server
15 28 (0.55%) Liquibase
16 27 (0.53%) Zephyr
General
1 1,301 (25.55%) Social Skills
2 1,297 (25.48%) Finance
3 977 (19.19%) Analytical Skills
4 475 (9.33%) Banking
5 470 (9.23%) Public Sector
6 138 (2.71%) Front Office
7 135 (2.65%) Marketing
8 128 (2.51%) Investment Banking
9 124 (2.44%) Retail
10 110 (2.16%) Documentation Skills
11 94 (1.85%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 61 (1.20%) Manufacturing
13 60 (1.18%) Legal
14 56 (1.10%) Financial Institution
15 55 (1.08%) Presentation Skills
16 43 (0.84%) Publishing
17 40 (0.79%) Back Office
18 39 (0.77%) Organisational Skills
19 37 (0.73%) Telecoms
20 33 (0.65%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,100 (21.61%) Developer
2 1,018 (20.00%) Data Engineer
3 743 (14.59%) Analyst
4 676 (13.28%) Senior
5 354 (6.95%) Lead
6 320 (6.29%) Data Analyst
7 284 (5.58%) Architect
8 247 (4.85%) Consultant
9 237 (4.66%) Business Analyst
10 214 (4.20%) Java Developer
11 200 (3.93%) Senior Data Engineer
12 187 (3.67%) DBA
13 160 (3.14%) Senior Developer
14 142 (2.79%) Software Engineer
15 127 (2.49%) Azure Engineer
16 122 (2.40%) SQL Developer
17 118 (2.32%) SQL DBA
18 114 (2.24%) C# Developer
19 111 (2.18%) Python Developer
20 107 (2.10%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 420 (8.25%) .NET
2 388 (7.62%) REST
3 320 (6.29%) PySpark
4 306 (6.01%) Kafka
5 265 (5.21%) Spring
6 253 (4.97%) Spring Boot
7 231 (4.54%) React
8 220 (4.32%) RESTful
9 193 (3.79%) JSON
10 180 (3.54%) XML
11 163 (3.20%) HTML
12 138 (2.71%) CSS
13 131 (2.57%) AngularJS
14 129 (2.53%) Web Services
15 128 (2.51%) Pandas
16 119 (2.34%) Middleware
16 119 (2.34%) SOAP
17 99 (1.94%) .NET Framework
18 79 (1.55%) Node.js
19 73 (1.43%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 339 (6.66%) Cloud Native
2 220 (4.32%) Data Structures
3 185 (3.63%) Legacy Systems
4 180 (3.54%) Product Ownership
5 143 (2.81%) Distributed Systems
6 99 (1.94%) Onboarding
7 98 (1.92%) Derivative
8 88 (1.73%) Management Information System
9 87 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
10 77 (1.51%) Data Protection Act
10 77 (1.51%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.49%) Analytical Mindset
12 72 (1.41%) Algorithms
13 65 (1.28%) Clustering
14 62 (1.22%) Replication
15 55 (1.08%) Equities
15 55 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
16 53 (1.04%) Fixed Income
17 47 (0.92%) NHS
18 42 (0.82%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 336 (6.60%) Linux
2 302 (5.93%) Windows
3 241 (4.73%) Unix
4 119 (2.34%) 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 1,345 (26.42%) CI/CD
2 1,307 (25.67%) Agile
3 1,293 (25.40%) Analytics
4 1,272 (24.99%) Data Modelling
5 1,141 (22.41%) ETL
6 1,103 (21.67%) Business Intelligence
7 1,034 (20.31%) DevOps
8 996 (19.56%) Problem-Solving
9 992 (19.49%) Data Pipeline
10 837 (16.44%) Data Engineering
11 722 (14.18%) AI
12 689 (13.53%) Migration
13 651 (12.79%) Validation
14 568 (11.16%) Data Governance
15 523 (10.27%) Test Automation
16 512 (10.06%) Decision-Making
17 504 (9.90%) Data Analysis
18 495 (9.72%) Stakeholder Management
19 480 (9.43%) Continuous Improvement
20 457 (8.98%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,841 (36.16%) Python
2 666 (13.08%) Java
3 498 (9.78%) C#
4 401 (7.88%) PL/SQL
5 335 (6.58%) JavaScript
6 274 (5.38%) T-SQL
7 246 (4.83%) PowerShell
8 179 (3.52%) TypeScript
9 145 (2.85%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 132 (2.59%) Shell Script
11 115 (2.26%) R
12 95 (1.87%) Bash
13 84 (1.65%) Scala
14 72 (1.41%) C++
15 51 (1.00%) VBA
16 49 (0.96%) Bicep
17 38 (0.75%) C
18 33 (0.65%) VB
19 27 (0.53%) Perl
20 26 (0.51%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,091 (21.43%) Security Cleared
2 889 (17.46%) SC Cleared
3 385 (7.56%) Degree
4 141 (2.77%) BPSS Clearance
5 122 (2.40%) Computer Science Degree
6 103 (2.02%) DV Cleared
7 76 (1.49%) Azure Certification
8 66 (1.30%) Master's Degree
9 54 (1.06%) ISTQB
10 41 (0.81%) Microsoft Certification
11 36 (0.71%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.35%) DBS Check
12 18 (0.35%) PhD
13 15 (0.29%) CISSP
14 11 (0.22%) SnowPro
15 10 (0.20%) CISM
15 10 (0.20%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 10 (0.20%) TOGAF Certification
16 9 (0.18%) ACCA
16 9 (0.18%) CIMA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 912 (17.91%) Data Quality
2 394 (7.74%) QA
3 188 (3.69%) GDPR
4 64 (1.26%) Accessibility
5 50 (0.98%) SLA
6 26 (0.51%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 23 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 21 (0.41%) PMO
9 20 (0.39%) ISO 20022
10 18 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
10 18 (0.35%) NIST
11 17 (0.33%) IFRS
11 17 (0.33%) Solvency II
12 15 (0.29%) MiFID
13 14 (0.27%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 12 (0.24%) GMP
15 12 (0.24%) PCI DSS
16 11 (0.22%) HL7
16 11 (0.22%) WCAG
System Software
1 509 (10.00%) Docker
2 118 (2.32%) Active Directory
3 45 (0.88%) Virtual Machines
4 37 (0.73%) VMware Infrastructure
5 34 (0.67%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.39%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.27%) 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
2 392 (7.70%) Terraform
3 114 (2.24%) Grafana
4 93 (1.83%) Ansible
5 55 (1.08%) Prometheus
6 42 (0.82%) Oracle RMAN
7 35 (0.69%) 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 (0.27%) Nagios
13 14 (0.27%) Netcool
14 13 (0.26%) OpenView
14 13 (0.26%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 9 (0.18%) HP Quality Center
15 9 (0.18%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 912 (17.91%) Oracle
2 801 (15.73%) Microsoft
3 592 (11.63%) Databricks
4 190 (3.73%) Google
5 187 (3.67%) Informatica
6 147 (2.89%) Talend
7 138 (2.71%) ServiceNow
8 124 (2.44%) SAP
9 95 (1.87%) IBM
10 89 (1.75%) Splunk
11 71 (1.39%) Denodo
12 62 (1.22%) Salesforce
13 59 (1.16%) VMware
14 44 (0.86%) Dynatrace
15 43 (0.84%) Citrix
16 40 (0.79%) Bloomberg
16 40 (0.79%) Sybase
17 39 (0.77%) Murex
18 34 (0.67%) MuleSoft
19 33 (0.65%) Alteryx