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 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 15 12 11
Rank change year-on-year -3 -1 -4
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,862 4,068 4,886
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.17% 11.14% 10.53%
As % of the Programming Languages category 34.50% 34.76% 33.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,602 2,763 3,500
10th Percentile £325 £338 £350
25th Percentile £405 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £523 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.31% -0.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £709 £731 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 86 54 64
10th Percentile £22.83 £19.71 £21.08
25th Percentile £30.24 £27.19 £26.19
Median hourly rate £50.00 £40.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +25.00% -11.11% +0.36%
75th Percentile £57.50 £53.75 £56.11
90th Percentile £60.00 £65.00 £77.10
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.90 £30.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year +69.67% -33.33% +28.57%

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 11,193 11,702 14,523
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.37% 32.04% 31.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,353 7,566 10,347
10th Percentile £342 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £620 £645 £663
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 314 284 438
10th Percentile £29.00 £25.14 £33.67
25th Percentile £42.81 £40.06 £47.56
Median hourly rate £62.50 £62.50 £61.92
Median % change year-on-year - +0.94% +0.68%
75th Percentile £67.75 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.00 £78.23
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 5 November 2025.

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 November 2025.

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 November 2025. 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 -1 3,339 £500 -4.76% 5,509
London -1 1,998 £525 -4.55% 2,744
UK excluding London -4 1,486 £475 - 4,297
Work from Home -6 1,219 £500 - 2,703
South East -1 353 £475 -9.52% 2,256
Midlands -2 315 £492 +9.33% 461
North of England -11 314 £450 -7.93% 697
West Midlands +1 215 £515 +8.65% 285
Scotland -3 203 £450 - 168
North West -4 177 £428 -5.00% 422
South West +2 150 £475 -5.00% 273
Yorkshire -24 122 £475 -6.31% 187
East of England +11 97 £503 +25.63% 289
East Midlands -3 95 £430 +7.50% 170
Wales +5 46 £465 -7.00% 101
Northern Ireland +1 35 £513 -2.38% 45
North East -8 17 £500 +0.50% 93

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
1 160 (4.14%) Apache Airflow
2 144 (3.73%) Apache Spark
3 126 (3.26%) Confluence
4 100 (2.59%) Apache
5 67 (1.73%) SharePoint
6 55 (1.42%) WebLogic
7 53 (1.37%) SAS
8 32 (0.83%) Oracle Workflow
9 30 (0.78%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 23 (0.60%) IIS
11 22 (0.57%) nginx
11 22 (0.57%) Skype for Business
12 20 (0.52%) JBoss
12 20 (0.52%) WebSphere
13 18 (0.47%) CMS
13 18 (0.47%) Tomcat
14 17 (0.44%) Mattermost
14 17 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
15 15 (0.39%) Jupyter
16 12 (0.31%) Oracle Service Bus
Applications
1 277 (7.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 74 (1.92%) Microsoft Office
3 48 (1.24%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 30 (0.78%) MS Visio
5 16 (0.41%) Maya
6 12 (0.31%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 10 (0.26%) NUKE
8 9 (0.23%) Chatbot
9 8 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
9 8 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
10 6 (0.16%) Adobe Captivate
11 3 (0.078%) Trello
12 2 (0.052%) Maple
12 2 (0.052%) Oracle Smart View
13 1 (0.026%) GNU Octave
13 1 (0.026%) Photoshop
13 1 (0.026%) Revit
13 1 (0.026%) SPSS
13 1 (0.026%) Stata
13 1 (0.026%) Weka
Business Applications
1 57 (1.48%) Oracle EBS
2 38 (0.98%) Oracle EBS R12
3 35 (0.91%) Oracle Assets
4 33 (0.85%) Dynamics CRM
5 31 (0.80%) Oracle BPM
5 31 (0.80%) Oracle Payables
6 29 (0.75%) Aladdin
7 28 (0.73%) Oracle General Ledger
8 24 (0.62%) Oracle ERP
9 22 (0.57%) Endur
10 17 (0.44%) Remedy ITSM
11 16 (0.41%) Oracle Receivables
12 15 (0.39%) Oracle Financials
13 13 (0.34%) Maximo
13 13 (0.34%) Oracle E-Business Tax
13 13 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
14 11 (0.28%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
14 11 (0.28%) SAP ERP
15 10 (0.26%) NetSuite
16 9 (0.23%) SAP HR
Cloud Services
1 1,181 (30.58%) Azure
2 870 (22.53%) AWS
3 664 (17.19%) Power Platform
4 325 (8.42%) GCP
5 296 (7.66%) Azure DevOps
6 263 (6.81%) GitHub
7 251 (6.50%) Snowflake
8 215 (5.57%) Serverless
9 210 (5.44%) Azure Data Factory
10 171 (4.43%) Amazon S3
11 165 (4.27%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 154 (3.99%) dbt
13 123 (3.18%) GitHub Actions
14 109 (2.82%) AWS Lambda
15 83 (2.15%) Dynamics 365
16 82 (2.12%) SaaS
17 75 (1.94%) Azure Functions
17 75 (1.94%) Power Automate
18 68 (1.76%) PowerApps
19 62 (1.61%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 62 (1.61%) Firewall
2 55 (1.42%) HTTP
3 41 (1.06%) DNS
4 27 (0.70%) Skype
5 24 (0.62%) TCP/IP
6 18 (0.47%) Internet
6 18 (0.47%) iSCSI
6 18 (0.47%) SSL
6 18 (0.47%) VPN
7 17 (0.44%) Fibre Channel
7 17 (0.44%) SSH
8 16 (0.41%) DHCP
9 15 (0.39%) Unified Communications
10 13 (0.34%) SMTP
11 12 (0.31%) IMAP
11 12 (0.31%) OpenLDAP
12 11 (0.28%) SAN
13 10 (0.26%) FTP
14 9 (0.23%) Multicast
14 9 (0.23%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 603 (15.61%) Power BI
2 423 (10.95%) Data Warehouse
2 423 (10.95%) SQL Server
3 328 (8.49%) Relational Database
4 319 (8.26%) PostgreSQL
5 265 (6.86%) NoSQL
6 250 (6.47%) Tableau
7 202 (5.23%) Data Lake
8 186 (4.82%) Oracle Database
9 173 (4.48%) Azure SQL Database
10 144 (3.73%) BigQuery
11 127 (3.29%) Big Data
12 126 (3.26%) MongoDB
13 109 (2.82%) Metadata
14 105 (2.72%) MySQL
15 89 (2.30%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 87 (2.25%) Amazon Redshift
17 79 (2.05%) DB2
18 76 (1.97%) Amazon RDS
19 73 (1.89%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 405 (10.49%) Git
2 311 (8.05%) JIRA
3 219 (5.67%) Jenkins
4 112 (2.90%) GitLab
5 111 (2.87%) JUnit
6 60 (1.55%) Selenium
7 46 (1.19%) Maven
8 43 (1.11%) Cucumber
9 42 (1.09%) Bitbucket
10 40 (1.04%) Mockito
11 39 (1.01%) SonarQube
12 38 (0.98%) Oracle APEX
13 36 (0.93%) Postman
14 31 (0.80%) ERwin
15 26 (0.67%) Gradle
16 23 (0.60%) Cypress.io
16 23 (0.60%) Eclipse
17 22 (0.57%) ER Studio
17 22 (0.57%) SpecFlow
18 21 (0.54%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,245 (32.24%) Social Skills
2 1,066 (27.60%) Finance
3 725 (18.77%) Analytical Skills
4 428 (11.08%) Banking
5 288 (7.46%) Public Sector
6 164 (4.25%) Investment Banking
7 133 (3.44%) Front Office
8 103 (2.67%) Marketing
9 95 (2.46%) Documentation Skills
10 66 (1.71%) Manufacturing
10 66 (1.71%) Retail
11 60 (1.55%) Presentation Skills
12 59 (1.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 56 (1.45%) Telecoms
14 51 (1.32%) Financial Institution
15 39 (1.01%) Local Government
16 37 (0.96%) Back Office
17 34 (0.88%) Influencing Skills
18 32 (0.83%) General Ledger
18 32 (0.83%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,088 (28.17%) Developer
2 687 (17.79%) Analyst
3 493 (12.77%) Senior
4 489 (12.66%) Data Engineer
5 320 (8.29%) Data Analyst
6 210 (5.44%) Java Developer
7 209 (5.41%) Business Analyst
8 207 (5.36%) Lead
9 182 (4.71%) Consultant
10 177 (4.58%) Senior Developer
11 175 (4.53%) Architect
12 121 (3.13%) SQL Developer
13 113 (2.93%) Software Engineer
14 106 (2.74%) Azure Engineer
15 100 (2.59%) Full-Stack Developer
16 97 (2.51%) Python Developer
17 93 (2.41%) .NET Developer
18 87 (2.25%) Data Scientist
19 86 (2.23%) C# Developer
20 77 (1.99%) Senior Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 334 (8.65%) .NET
2 278 (7.20%) REST
3 249 (6.45%) Kafka
4 212 (5.49%) Spring
5 206 (5.33%) React
6 198 (5.13%) HTML
7 187 (4.84%) RESTful
8 174 (4.51%) CSS
9 164 (4.25%) XML
10 160 (4.14%) PySpark
11 142 (3.68%) SOAP
12 139 (3.60%) JSON
13 138 (3.57%) Spring Boot
14 125 (3.24%) AngularJS
15 120 (3.11%) Node.js
16 115 (2.98%) Web Services
17 96 (2.49%) .NET Framework
18 91 (2.36%) Pandas
19 66 (1.71%) .NET Core
20 65 (1.68%) JMS
Miscellaneous
1 169 (4.38%) Cloud Native
2 135 (3.50%) Data Structures
3 111 (2.87%) Product Ownership
4 98 (2.54%) Legacy Systems
5 91 (2.36%) Data Protection Act
6 83 (2.15%) Derivative
7 80 (2.07%) Algorithms
7 80 (2.07%) Equities
8 73 (1.89%) Analytical Mindset
8 73 (1.89%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 69 (1.79%) Management Information System
10 68 (1.76%) Onboarding
11 64 (1.66%) Virtual Team
12 61 (1.58%) Fixed Income
13 58 (1.50%) Replication
14 52 (1.35%) Distributed Systems
15 50 (1.29%) Market Risk
15 50 (1.29%) Self-Motivation
16 46 (1.19%) Greenfield Project
17 34 (0.88%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 397 (10.28%) Linux
2 268 (6.94%) Windows
3 224 (5.80%) Unix
4 75 (1.94%) Windows Server
5 30 (0.78%) VMS
6 25 (0.65%) Windows Server 2019
7 18 (0.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 16 (0.41%) Android
9 14 (0.36%) Ubuntu
10 12 (0.31%) Amazon Linux
11 10 (0.26%) Apple iOS
12 9 (0.23%) Windows 10
12 9 (0.23%) Windows Server 2016
13 5 (0.13%) CentOS
13 5 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.10%) Solaris
14 4 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
15 2 (0.052%) AIX
15 2 (0.052%) Oracle Linux
16 1 (0.026%) OpenVMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,119 (28.97%) Agile
2 885 (22.92%) Problem-Solving
3 806 (20.87%) Business Intelligence
4 792 (20.51%) CI/CD
5 791 (20.48%) Analytics
6 773 (20.02%) Data Modelling
7 766 (19.83%) DevOps
8 638 (16.52%) ETL
9 479 (12.40%) Data Pipeline
10 432 (11.19%) Migration
11 415 (10.75%) Visualisation
12 374 (9.68%) Data Engineering
13 373 (9.66%) Data Analysis
14 348 (9.01%) Data Governance
15 345 (8.93%) Scrum
16 337 (8.73%) Validation
17 317 (8.21%) Microservices
18 304 (7.87%) Software Engineering
19 299 (7.74%) Test Automation
20 294 (7.61%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 1,472 (38.11%) Python
2 642 (16.62%) Java
3 411 (10.64%) C#
4 359 (9.30%) JavaScript
5 265 (6.86%) PL/SQL
6 190 (4.92%) PowerShell
7 148 (3.83%) TypeScript
8 114 (2.95%) Shell Script
9 110 (2.85%) C++
10 106 (2.74%) R
11 105 (2.72%) T-SQL
12 93 (2.41%) VBA
13 87 (2.25%) Scala
14 86 (2.23%) Bash
15 76 (1.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 76 (1.97%) VB
16 42 (1.09%) Bicep
17 41 (1.06%) Go
18 39 (1.01%) Perl
19 32 (0.83%) PHP
Qualifications
1 517 (13.39%) Security Cleared
2 385 (9.97%) SC Cleared
3 362 (9.37%) Degree
4 131 (3.39%) Computer Science Degree
5 69 (1.79%) Azure Certification
6 68 (1.76%) Master's Degree
7 65 (1.68%) AWS Certification
8 63 (1.63%) DV Cleared
9 54 (1.40%) Microsoft Certification
10 49 (1.27%) BPSS Clearance
11 37 (0.96%) ITIL Certification
12 30 (0.78%) ISTQB
13 26 (0.67%) MCSE
14 19 (0.49%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 17 (0.44%) Oracle Certification
16 14 (0.36%) CBAP
17 13 (0.34%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
18 12 (0.31%) PhD
19 11 (0.28%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
19 11 (0.28%) OCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 488 (12.64%) Data Quality
2 243 (6.29%) QA
3 120 (3.11%) GDPR
4 76 (1.97%) Accessibility
5 38 (0.98%) SLA
6 36 (0.93%) MiFID
7 26 (0.67%) EMIR
8 25 (0.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 22 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 22 (0.57%) WCAG
10 16 (0.41%) HIPAA
11 14 (0.36%) Basel III
12 13 (0.34%) ISO 20022
12 13 (0.34%) NIST
13 12 (0.31%) HL7
13 12 (0.31%) SEPA
14 11 (0.28%) Actionable Recommendations
14 11 (0.28%) IFRS
15 10 (0.26%) COBIT
16 8 (0.21%) PSD2
System Software
1 371 (9.61%) Docker
2 101 (2.62%) Active Directory
3 42 (1.09%) VMware Infrastructure
4 21 (0.54%) NFS
5 20 (0.52%) Virtual Machines
6 18 (0.47%) Oracle RAC
6 18 (0.47%) VMware ESXi
7 16 (0.41%) Postfix
8 15 (0.39%) vSphere
9 12 (0.31%) Dovecot
9 12 (0.31%) Squid
10 10 (0.26%) DFS Replication
10 10 (0.26%) zsh
11 7 (0.18%) Hyper-V
12 6 (0.16%) HDFS
13 5 (0.13%) Microsoft Virtual Server
13 5 (0.13%) NDS
13 5 (0.13%) NetIQ eDirectory
13 5 (0.13%) Virtual Servers
14 4 (0.10%) VMware Workstation
Systems Management
1 341 (8.83%) Kubernetes
2 248 (6.42%) Terraform
3 80 (2.07%) Grafana
4 62 (1.61%) Ansible
5 61 (1.58%) Prometheus
6 26 (0.67%) SCOM
7 21 (0.54%) HP SiteScope
8 19 (0.49%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 19 (0.49%) Oracle RMAN
9 18 (0.47%) Control-M
9 18 (0.47%) Kibana
10 17 (0.44%) Puppet
11 16 (0.41%) Data Guard
12 15 (0.39%) SCCM
13 13 (0.34%) Proxmox
14 12 (0.31%) Nessus
15 11 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
16 10 (0.26%) logstash
16 10 (0.26%) Progress Chef
16 10 (0.26%) WSUS
Vendors
1 686 (17.76%) Oracle
2 639 (16.55%) Microsoft
3 343 (8.88%) Databricks
4 152 (3.94%) Google
5 119 (3.08%) SAP
6 117 (3.03%) Splunk
7 73 (1.89%) ServiceNow
8 64 (1.66%) VMware
9 55 (1.42%) IBM
10 53 (1.37%) Salesforce
10 53 (1.37%) Talend
11 50 (1.29%) Informatica
12 45 (1.17%) Sybase
13 42 (1.09%) Dynatrace
14 40 (1.04%) Red Hat
15 39 (1.01%) Cisco
16 31 (0.80%) Denodo
17 30 (0.78%) Citrix
18 28 (0.73%) Adobe
18 28 (0.73%) Bloomberg