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

6 months to
28 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,116 3,836 4,125
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.68% 11.71% 10.28%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.31% 35.52% 33.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,386 2,662 3,045
10th Percentile £355 £338 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £606 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £463 £475
% change year-on-year +0.54% -2.63% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 102 67 49
10th Percentile £23.80 £21.18 £21.41
25th Percentile £33.82 £29.66 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £38.85 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.85% -6.40% -12.63%
75th Percentile £69.86 £50.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.59
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £33.91 £36.00
% change year-on-year +31.23% -5.81% -20.77%

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 14,090 10,800 12,470
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.65% 32.98% 31.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,142 7,275 8,813
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £498
% change year-on-year +3.58% -4.52% -0.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 523 257 431
10th Percentile £33.70 £27.98 £30.00
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -12.69% +7.35%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.90 £81.18 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +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 28 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 28 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 28 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 -4 4,450 £500 - 1,833
London -6 2,395 £525 - 795
UK excluding London -10 2,169 £465 +0.54% 1,339
Work from Home -6 1,539 £500 - 867
North of England -5 582 £463 -2.63% 366
Midlands +1 541 £459 +8.00% 224
South East -11 469 £475 -5.00% 415
West Midlands +4 445 £459 +2.00% 117
North West -4 309 £475 +1.28% 192
Yorkshire -8 235 £465 -2.11% 109
South West -5 230 £500 +14.29% 150
Scotland -5 201 £450 - 47
East of England -5 121 £480 -4.00% 101
East Midlands -5 92 £488 +25.94% 107
North East -19 51 £419 -9.46% 73
Wales -4 43 £468 +3.89% 38
Northern Ireland -8 16 £375 -27.36% 23

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
1 233 (4.55%) Apache Spark
2 219 (4.28%) Confluence
3 211 (4.12%) Apache Airflow
4 188 (3.67%) Apache
5 114 (2.23%) SAS
6 67 (1.31%) SharePoint
7 46 (0.90%) Oracle Workflow
8 42 (0.82%) WebLogic
9 40 (0.78%) IIS
10 37 (0.72%) Tomcat
11 31 (0.61%) WebSphere
12 27 (0.53%) Jupyter
13 21 (0.41%) Apache Geronimo
13 21 (0.41%) Apache ServiceMix
13 21 (0.41%) nginx
13 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
13 21 (0.41%) Red Hat Fuse
14 19 (0.37%) CMS
15 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
16 13 (0.25%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 321 (6.27%) Microsoft Excel
2 65 (1.27%) Microsoft Office
3 54 (1.06%) MS Visio
4 40 (0.78%) Spreadsheet
5 32 (0.63%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.078%) Notion
8 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.059%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.059%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Mingle
10 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 52 (1.02%) Oracle EBS
2 42 (0.82%) Dynamics CRM
3 31 (0.61%) Aladdin
4 29 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
5 25 (0.49%) Remedy ITSM
6 18 (0.35%) NEC Housing
6 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
7 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
8 13 (0.25%) Oracle General Ledger
9 12 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
10 11 (0.22%) Findur
10 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.20%) Fidessa
11 10 (0.20%) Finacle
11 10 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
12 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
12 9 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 9 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,606 (31.39%) Azure
2 1,219 (23.83%) AWS
3 943 (18.43%) Power Platform
4 455 (8.89%) GCP
5 437 (8.54%) Azure DevOps
6 357 (6.98%) GitHub
7 343 (6.70%) Azure Data Factory
8 337 (6.59%) Snowflake
9 309 (6.04%) Serverless
10 273 (5.34%) dbt
11 267 (5.22%) Amazon S3
12 214 (4.18%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 204 (3.99%) AWS Lambda
14 180 (3.52%) GitHub Actions
15 96 (1.88%) SaaS
16 95 (1.86%) Entra ID
17 91 (1.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 88 (1.72%) Power Automate
19 82 (1.60%) PowerApps
20 75 (1.47%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 54 (1.06%) DNS
2 42 (0.82%) Firewall
3 29 (0.57%) SSL
4 26 (0.51%) HTTP
5 22 (0.43%) SNMP
6 21 (0.41%) Network Security
6 21 (0.41%) VPN
7 20 (0.39%) Internet
8 19 (0.37%) WAN
9 16 (0.31%) TCP/IP
10 10 (0.20%) Broadband
10 10 (0.20%) Kerberos
10 10 (0.20%) SAN
10 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
10 10 (0.20%) Wireshark
11 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
12 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
12 8 (0.16%) HTTPS
13 7 (0.14%) DHCP
13 7 (0.14%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 868 (16.97%) Power BI
2 704 (13.76%) Data Warehouse
3 650 (12.71%) SQL Server
4 341 (6.67%) Relational Database
5 326 (6.37%) Tableau
6 320 (6.25%) PostgreSQL
7 316 (6.18%) Data Lake
8 277 (5.41%) Metadata
9 259 (5.06%) NoSQL
10 216 (4.22%) Azure SQL Database
11 207 (4.05%) Oracle Database
12 175 (3.42%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 173 (3.38%) BigQuery
14 149 (2.91%) Amazon Redshift
15 139 (2.72%) Big Data
16 138 (2.70%) Delta Lake
17 132 (2.58%) Oracle Reports
18 117 (2.29%) MySQL
19 113 (2.21%) MongoDB
20 108 (2.11%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 585 (11.43%) Git
2 403 (7.88%) JIRA
3 276 (5.39%) Jenkins
4 220 (4.30%) GitLab
5 80 (1.56%) JUnit
6 70 (1.37%) Maven
7 63 (1.23%) Gradle
8 58 (1.13%) Postman
8 58 (1.13%) Selenium
9 51 (1.00%) Mockito
10 50 (0.98%) Oracle Forms
11 40 (0.78%) Visual Studio
12 37 (0.72%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.68%) SonarQube
14 33 (0.65%) Team Foundation Server
15 32 (0.63%) ERwin
16 30 (0.59%) JMeter
16 30 (0.59%) MLflow
16 30 (0.59%) Zephyr
17 29 (0.57%) Liquibase
General
1 1,309 (25.59%) Social Skills
2 1,268 (24.78%) Finance
3 1,004 (19.62%) Analytical Skills
4 492 (9.62%) Public Sector
5 475 (9.28%) Banking
6 143 (2.80%) Marketing
7 141 (2.76%) Front Office
8 123 (2.40%) Retail
9 120 (2.35%) Investment Banking
10 103 (2.01%) Documentation Skills
11 89 (1.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 69 (1.35%) Manufacturing
13 57 (1.11%) Legal
13 57 (1.11%) Presentation Skills
14 54 (1.06%) Financial Institution
15 47 (0.92%) Organisational Skills
16 44 (0.86%) Publishing
17 42 (0.82%) Back Office
18 40 (0.78%) Telecoms
19 37 (0.72%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,116 (21.81%) Developer
2 1,007 (19.68%) Data Engineer
3 740 (14.46%) Analyst
4 691 (13.51%) Senior
5 361 (7.06%) Lead
6 329 (6.43%) Data Analyst
7 276 (5.39%) Architect
8 257 (5.02%) Consultant
9 232 (4.53%) Business Analyst
10 214 (4.18%) Java Developer
11 202 (3.95%) DBA
12 198 (3.87%) Senior Data Engineer
13 171 (3.34%) Senior Developer
14 141 (2.76%) Software Engineer
15 133 (2.60%) SQL Developer
16 129 (2.52%) SQL DBA
17 122 (2.38%) Azure Engineer
18 116 (2.27%) Data Architect
19 115 (2.25%) Full-Stack Developer
20 109 (2.13%) C# Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 417 (8.15%) .NET
2 408 (7.97%) REST
3 327 (6.39%) PySpark
4 315 (6.16%) Kafka
5 272 (5.32%) Spring
6 258 (5.04%) Spring Boot
7 231 (4.52%) React
8 218 (4.26%) RESTful
9 206 (4.03%) JSON
10 188 (3.67%) XML
11 169 (3.30%) HTML
12 143 (2.80%) AngularJS
13 142 (2.78%) CSS
14 132 (2.58%) Web Services
15 122 (2.38%) Pandas
16 119 (2.33%) SOAP
17 118 (2.31%) Middleware
18 106 (2.07%) .NET Framework
19 83 (1.62%) Node.js
20 76 (1.49%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 343 (6.70%) Cloud Native
2 248 (4.85%) Data Structures
3 196 (3.83%) Product Ownership
4 183 (3.58%) Legacy Systems
5 156 (3.05%) Distributed Systems
6 113 (2.21%) Onboarding
7 101 (1.97%) Enterprise Software
8 95 (1.86%) Management Information System
9 93 (1.82%) Derivative
10 80 (1.56%) Self-Motivation
11 77 (1.51%) Analytical Mindset
12 74 (1.45%) Data Protection Act
12 74 (1.45%) Replication
13 72 (1.41%) Clustering
14 71 (1.39%) Algorithms
15 54 (1.06%) Fixed Income
15 54 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
16 52 (1.02%) Equities
17 51 (1.00%) NHS
18 49 (0.96%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 339 (6.63%) Linux
2 314 (6.14%) Windows
3 233 (4.55%) Unix
4 122 (2.38%) Windows Server
5 27 (0.53%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 23 (0.45%) AIX
7 18 (0.35%) Solaris
8 13 (0.25%) Windows Server 2019
9 10 (0.20%) VMS
9 10 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
10 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
10 8 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
10 8 (0.16%) zOS
11 7 (0.14%) Android
12 6 (0.12%) Ubuntu
13 5 (0.098%) Windows 10
14 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
15 3 (0.059%) Windows Server 2012
16 2 (0.039%) Data ONTAP
16 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,335 (26.09%) Agile
1 1,335 (26.09%) Data Modelling
2 1,331 (26.02%) CI/CD
3 1,309 (25.59%) Analytics
4 1,153 (22.54%) ETL
5 1,121 (21.91%) Business Intelligence
6 1,016 (19.86%) DevOps
7 1,010 (19.74%) Data Pipeline
8 975 (19.06%) Problem-Solving
9 865 (16.91%) Data Engineering
10 721 (14.09%) AI
10 721 (14.09%) Migration
11 680 (13.29%) Validation
12 599 (11.71%) Data Governance
13 529 (10.34%) Test Automation
14 520 (10.16%) Stakeholder Management
15 513 (10.03%) Decision-Making
16 503 (9.83%) Continuous Improvement
17 498 (9.73%) Data Analysis
18 465 (9.09%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,818 (35.54%) Python
2 675 (13.19%) Java
3 490 (9.58%) C#
4 416 (8.13%) PL/SQL
5 348 (6.80%) JavaScript
6 276 (5.39%) T-SQL
7 259 (5.06%) PowerShell
8 177 (3.46%) TypeScript
9 145 (2.83%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 139 (2.72%) Shell Script
11 108 (2.11%) R
12 104 (2.03%) Bash
13 76 (1.49%) Scala
14 61 (1.19%) C++
15 51 (1.00%) VBA
16 48 (0.94%) Bicep
17 35 (0.68%) C
18 32 (0.63%) VB
19 28 (0.55%) Perl
20 25 (0.49%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,121 (21.91%) Security Cleared
2 907 (17.73%) SC Cleared
3 356 (6.96%) Degree
4 142 (2.78%) BPSS Clearance
5 112 (2.19%) Computer Science Degree
6 106 (2.07%) DV Cleared
7 79 (1.54%) Azure Certification
8 62 (1.21%) Master's Degree
9 56 (1.09%) ISTQB
10 39 (0.76%) Microsoft Certification
11 34 (0.66%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.33%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.33%) PhD
13 15 (0.29%) CISSP
13 15 (0.29%) ISEB
14 13 (0.25%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 11 (0.22%) Oracle Certification
16 10 (0.20%) CISM
17 9 (0.18%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
17 9 (0.18%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 955 (18.67%) Data Quality
2 382 (7.47%) QA
3 176 (3.44%) GDPR
4 69 (1.35%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.90%) SLA
6 23 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 21 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
7 21 (0.41%) PMO
8 20 (0.39%) ISO 20022
8 20 (0.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 18 (0.35%) NIST
10 16 (0.31%) Solvency II
11 15 (0.29%) MiFID
12 14 (0.27%) IFRS
13 13 (0.25%) GMP
13 13 (0.25%) HIPAA
14 11 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 11 (0.22%) NCSC
14 11 (0.22%) WCAG
15 10 (0.20%) HL7
System Software
1 495 (9.68%) Docker
2 125 (2.44%) Active Directory
3 44 (0.86%) Virtual Machines
3 44 (0.86%) VMware Infrastructure
4 41 (0.80%) Oracle RAC
5 21 (0.41%) Hyper-V
6 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
7 14 (0.27%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.25%) vCloud
9 9 (0.18%) KVM
9 9 (0.18%) Postfix
9 9 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
10 4 (0.078%) Ceph
10 4 (0.078%) HDFS
10 4 (0.078%) RACF
11 3 (0.059%) Squid
12 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
12 2 (0.039%) GridGain
13 1 (0.020%) XenApp
13 1 (0.020%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 422 (8.25%) Kubernetes
2 381 (7.45%) Terraform
3 107 (2.09%) Grafana
4 92 (1.80%) Ansible
5 50 (0.98%) Prometheus
6 48 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
7 44 (0.86%) Data Guard
8 30 (0.59%) Control-M
9 24 (0.47%) SCOM
10 20 (0.39%) Kibana
11 19 (0.37%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.31%) Nagios
12 16 (0.31%) Netcool
12 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
14 13 (0.25%) OpenView
14 13 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
14 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 11 (0.22%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
16 10 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 918 (17.94%) Oracle
2 807 (15.77%) Microsoft
3 593 (11.59%) Databricks
4 189 (3.69%) Google
4 189 (3.69%) Informatica
5 146 (2.85%) Talend
6 139 (2.72%) SAP
7 136 (2.66%) ServiceNow
8 95 (1.86%) IBM
9 87 (1.70%) Splunk
10 71 (1.39%) Denodo
11 66 (1.29%) Salesforce
12 65 (1.27%) VMware
13 43 (0.84%) Dynatrace
14 41 (0.80%) Citrix
15 39 (0.76%) Bloomberg
16 37 (0.72%) Sybase
17 36 (0.70%) BMC
18 35 (0.68%) Alteryx
19 34 (0.66%) SolarWinds