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 30 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,203 3,800 4,085
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.48% 11.57% 10.86%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.32% 35.00% 33.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,486 2,573 2,836
10th Percentile £350 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £600 £600 £633
90th Percentile £688 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 91 86 53
10th Percentile £21.25 £26.00 £19.67
25th Percentile £26.68 £31.56 £25.99
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +36.99% -18.89%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £77.00 - £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £30.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +66.67% -33.33%

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 14,326 10,858 12,053
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.10% 33.07% 32.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,317 7,158 7,983
10th Percentile £363 £342 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £507 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.65% -3.52% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £648
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £491
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.31% -1.75%
Number of hourly rates quoted 540 296 332
10th Percentile £23.72 £29.00 £26.33
25th Percentile £46.00 £40.94 £46.14
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.23 £75.00 £78.63
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 30 September 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 30 September 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 30 September 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 -5 4,479 £500 - 5,530
London -6 2,528 £525 - 3,160
UK excluding London -6 2,076 £475 - 2,784
Work from Home -3 1,523 £500 - 2,497
North of England 0 595 £475 +5.56% 797
Midlands -5 449 £469 -1.26% 454
South East -15 445 £475 -3.06% 607
West Midlands -6 351 £469 -6.20% 294
North West +1 292 £500 +12.36% 473
Yorkshire +4 248 £458 -3.68% 231
South West 0 236 £525 +16.67% 274
Scotland -4 207 £426 -9.98% 253
East of England -7 114 £495 -1.49% 203
East Midlands -3 96 £463 +12.80% 160
North East -3 61 £400 -15.79% 99
Wales -9 38 £475 +4.97% 74
Northern Ireland -8 19 £363 -29.27% 155
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
1 259 (4.98%) Apache Airflow
2 238 (4.57%) Confluence
3 213 (4.09%) Apache Spark
4 172 (3.31%) Apache
5 96 (1.85%) SharePoint
6 84 (1.61%) SAS
7 40 (0.77%) WebLogic
8 39 (0.75%) Oracle Workflow
9 38 (0.73%) IIS
10 31 (0.60%) Jupyter
11 26 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
12 23 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
13 21 (0.40%) CMS
13 21 (0.40%) nginx
14 19 (0.37%) Camunda
15 16 (0.31%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
16 15 (0.29%) WebSphere
17 9 (0.17%) Appian
17 9 (0.17%) Tomcat
Applications
1 299 (5.75%) Microsoft Excel
2 67 (1.29%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.73%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.71%) Spreadsheet
5 23 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.15%) Windchill
8 7 (0.13%) Notepad++
9 4 (0.077%) Acrobat
9 4 (0.077%) Notion
9 4 (0.077%) Photoshop
10 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
10 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
10 3 (0.058%) Mingle
11 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 43 (0.83%) Dynamics CRM
1 43 (0.83%) Oracle EBS
2 31 (0.60%) SAP S/4HANA
3 30 (0.58%) Aladdin
4 28 (0.54%) Oracle Payables
5 27 (0.52%) Remedy ITSM
6 19 (0.37%) Oracle ERP
7 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.29%) Oracle General Ledger
9 14 (0.27%) Oracle EBS R12
10 13 (0.25%) Finacle
11 12 (0.23%) Oracle Financials
11 12 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
12 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
12 11 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
12 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
13 10 (0.19%) Maximo
13 10 (0.19%) NetSuite
13 10 (0.19%) Oracle FAH
14 9 (0.17%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,594 (30.64%) Azure
2 1,273 (24.47%) AWS
3 973 (18.70%) Power Platform
4 533 (10.24%) GCP
5 414 (7.96%) Azure DevOps
6 410 (7.88%) Snowflake
7 365 (7.02%) GitHub
8 326 (6.27%) Azure Data Factory
9 321 (6.17%) dbt
10 301 (5.79%) Serverless
11 267 (5.13%) Amazon S3
12 205 (3.94%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 201 (3.86%) AWS Lambda
14 173 (3.33%) GitHub Actions
15 112 (2.15%) SaaS
16 111 (2.13%) Power Automate
17 105 (2.02%) Entra ID
17 105 (2.02%) PowerApps
18 96 (1.85%) Azure Databricks
19 89 (1.71%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 69 (1.33%) DNS
2 43 (0.83%) Firewall
3 37 (0.71%) HTTP
4 32 (0.62%) SSL
5 27 (0.52%) Network Security
6 23 (0.44%) Broadband
6 23 (0.44%) TCP/IP
7 22 (0.42%) Internet
8 21 (0.40%) VPN
9 15 (0.29%) DHCP
10 14 (0.27%) SNMP
10 14 (0.27%) SSH
11 12 (0.23%) WAN
12 11 (0.21%) Kerberos
12 11 (0.21%) SAN
13 10 (0.19%) Reverse Proxy
13 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
14 8 (0.15%) HTTPS
14 8 (0.15%) RTP
14 8 (0.15%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 890 (17.11%) Power BI
2 713 (13.70%) Data Warehouse
3 664 (12.76%) SQL Server
4 352 (6.77%) Relational Database
5 341 (6.55%) PostgreSQL
6 327 (6.28%) Data Lake
7 288 (5.54%) Metadata
8 285 (5.48%) Tableau
9 247 (4.75%) NoSQL
10 238 (4.57%) Oracle Database
11 220 (4.23%) BigQuery
12 194 (3.73%) Azure SQL Database
13 151 (2.90%) Amazon Redshift
14 148 (2.84%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 144 (2.77%) Delta Lake
16 130 (2.50%) MySQL
17 121 (2.33%) Amazon Athena
18 118 (2.27%) MongoDB
19 115 (2.21%) Big Data
20 108 (2.08%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 698 (13.42%) Git
2 428 (8.23%) JIRA
3 292 (5.61%) Jenkins
4 260 (5.00%) GitLab
5 102 (1.96%) Selenium
6 97 (1.86%) JUnit
7 90 (1.73%) Maven
8 84 (1.61%) Gradle
9 70 (1.35%) Postman
10 59 (1.13%) Mockito
11 46 (0.88%) Oracle Forms
12 45 (0.86%) SonarQube
13 44 (0.85%) Bitbucket
14 36 (0.69%) Visual Studio
15 35 (0.67%) Zephyr
16 31 (0.60%) Team Foundation Server
17 30 (0.58%) REST Assured
18 29 (0.56%) Artifactory
19 27 (0.52%) MLflow
20 26 (0.50%) JMeter
General
1 1,407 (27.04%) Social Skills
2 1,369 (26.31%) Finance
3 1,066 (20.49%) Analytical Skills
4 603 (11.59%) Banking
5 480 (9.23%) Public Sector
6 157 (3.02%) Marketing
7 155 (2.98%) Retail
8 147 (2.83%) Investment Banking
9 145 (2.79%) Front Office
10 105 (2.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 90 (1.73%) Documentation Skills
12 89 (1.71%) Manufacturing
13 65 (1.25%) Legal
14 54 (1.04%) Financial Institution
15 50 (0.96%) Presentation Skills
16 49 (0.94%) Back Office
16 49 (0.94%) Local Government
17 43 (0.83%) Influencing Skills
17 43 (0.83%) Law
18 41 (0.79%) Military
Job Titles
1 1,143 (21.97%) Developer
2 961 (18.47%) Data Engineer
3 777 (14.93%) Analyst
4 747 (14.36%) Senior
5 368 (7.07%) Lead
6 333 (6.40%) Data Analyst
7 259 (4.98%) Architect
8 254 (4.88%) Business Analyst
9 222 (4.27%) Senior Data Engineer
10 217 (4.17%) Consultant
11 205 (3.94%) Java Developer
12 202 (3.88%) DBA
13 183 (3.52%) Senior Developer
14 126 (2.42%) Python Developer
15 124 (2.38%) Azure Engineer
15 124 (2.38%) Software Engineer
16 123 (2.36%) Data Architect
16 123 (2.36%) SQL Developer
17 121 (2.33%) Full-Stack Developer
17 121 (2.33%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 510 (9.80%) REST
2 443 (8.51%) .NET
3 417 (8.01%) Terraform
4 358 (6.88%) Kafka
5 347 (6.67%) PySpark
6 286 (5.50%) Spring
7 279 (5.36%) Spring Boot
8 239 (4.59%) React
9 210 (4.04%) HTML
10 209 (4.02%) RESTful
11 208 (4.00%) JSON
12 181 (3.48%) XML
13 174 (3.34%) CSS
14 142 (2.73%) Web Services
15 137 (2.63%) SOAP
16 128 (2.46%) AngularJS
17 111 (2.13%) Middleware
18 102 (1.96%) Pandas
19 93 (1.79%) .NET Framework
20 89 (1.71%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 335 (6.44%) Cloud Native
2 273 (5.25%) Data Structures
3 256 (4.92%) Product Ownership
4 169 (3.25%) Legacy Systems
5 152 (2.92%) Onboarding
6 144 (2.77%) Distributed Systems
7 142 (2.73%) Enterprise Software
8 111 (2.13%) Management Information System
9 98 (1.88%) AI Agents
10 88 (1.69%) Self-Motivation
11 85 (1.63%) Derivative
12 81 (1.56%) Replication
13 70 (1.35%) Data Protection Act
14 65 (1.25%) Analytical Mindset
14 65 (1.25%) Clustering
15 61 (1.17%) Reference Data
16 56 (1.08%) Algorithms
17 54 (1.04%) Data Centre
17 54 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
18 51 (0.98%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 385 (7.40%) Linux
2 321 (6.17%) Windows
3 253 (4.86%) Unix
4 132 (2.54%) Windows Server
5 29 (0.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 25 (0.48%) Solaris
7 12 (0.23%) Ubuntu
8 10 (0.19%) AIX
8 10 (0.19%) VMS
9 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
10 8 (0.15%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.13%) Android
12 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
13 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.096%) zOS
14 3 (0.058%) CentOS
14 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
14 3 (0.058%) Rocky
14 3 (0.058%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,424 (27.37%) Agile
2 1,403 (26.97%) CI/CD
3 1,360 (26.14%) Data Modelling
4 1,293 (24.85%) Analytics
5 1,103 (21.20%) Business Intelligence
6 1,101 (21.16%) ETL
7 1,004 (19.30%) Problem-Solving
8 983 (18.89%) Data Pipeline
9 981 (18.85%) DevOps
10 868 (16.68%) AI
10 868 (16.68%) Data Engineering
11 823 (15.82%) Validation
12 790 (15.18%) Migration
13 777 (14.93%) Stakeholder Management
14 623 (11.97%) Test Automation
15 607 (11.67%) Data Governance
16 600 (11.53%) Data Analysis
17 587 (11.28%) Continuous Improvement
18 549 (10.55%) Decision-Making
19 448 (8.61%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,847 (35.50%) Python
2 666 (12.80%) Java
3 459 (8.82%) C#
4 416 (8.00%) JavaScript
5 402 (7.73%) PL/SQL
6 261 (5.02%) PowerShell
7 255 (4.90%) T-SQL
8 209 (4.02%) TypeScript
9 155 (2.98%) Shell Script
10 148 (2.84%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 128 (2.46%) Bash
12 90 (1.73%) Scala
13 83 (1.60%) R
14 47 (0.90%) C++
15 41 (0.79%) VBA
16 37 (0.71%) Bicep
17 31 (0.60%) Go
18 30 (0.58%) C
18 30 (0.58%) Kotlin
19 29 (0.56%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,120 (21.53%) Security Cleared
2 896 (17.22%) SC Cleared
3 363 (6.98%) Degree
4 173 (3.33%) BPSS Clearance
5 130 (2.50%) DV Cleared
6 128 (2.46%) Computer Science Degree
7 82 (1.58%) Azure Certification
8 60 (1.15%) ISTQB
9 53 (1.02%) Microsoft Certification
10 46 (0.88%) AWS Certification
11 43 (0.83%) Master's Degree
12 20 (0.38%) CISSP
13 19 (0.37%) DBS Check
13 19 (0.37%) ISEB
14 16 (0.31%) ACCA
14 16 (0.31%) CIMA
15 15 (0.29%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 15 (0.29%) Oracle Certification
16 14 (0.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 14 (0.27%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1,038 (19.95%) Data Quality
2 420 (8.07%) QA
3 142 (2.73%) GDPR
4 71 (1.36%) Accessibility
5 53 (1.02%) SLA
6 34 (0.65%) ISO 20022
7 29 (0.56%) Actionable Recommendations
8 23 (0.44%) IFRS
8 23 (0.44%) NIST
9 22 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 18 (0.35%) MiFID
11 15 (0.29%) COBIT
11 15 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 13 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
12 13 (0.25%) GMP
12 13 (0.25%) GxP
13 12 (0.23%) Basel III
13 12 (0.23%) SEPA
14 10 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 17025
14 10 (0.19%) PMO
System Software
1 486 (9.34%) Docker
2 128 (2.46%) Active Directory
3 52 (1.00%) VMware Infrastructure
4 40 (0.77%) Oracle RAC
5 38 (0.73%) Virtual Machines
6 21 (0.40%) Hyper-V
7 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
8 16 (0.31%) vCloud
8 16 (0.31%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 6 (0.12%) Postfix
10 5 (0.096%) KVM
10 5 (0.096%) NFS
11 4 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
11 4 (0.077%) GPFS
11 4 (0.077%) Squid
12 2 (0.038%) Ceph
12 2 (0.038%) DFS Replication
12 2 (0.038%) Dovecot
13 1 (0.019%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 421 (8.09%) Kubernetes
2 115 (2.21%) Grafana
3 96 (1.85%) Ansible
4 58 (1.11%) Prometheus
5 43 (0.83%) Control-M
5 43 (0.83%) Kibana
6 41 (0.79%) Data Guard
6 41 (0.79%) Oracle RMAN
7 40 (0.77%) SCOM
8 16 (0.31%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 16 (0.31%) vCenter Server
9 15 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
10 12 (0.23%) Istio
10 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
10 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Intune
11 11 (0.21%) Argo
12 10 (0.19%) Netcool
13 9 (0.17%) Progress Chef
13 9 (0.17%) Tivoli
13 9 (0.17%) WMI
Vendors
1 915 (17.59%) Oracle
2 877 (16.86%) Microsoft
3 665 (12.78%) Databricks
4 241 (4.63%) Google
5 148 (2.84%) Informatica
6 141 (2.71%) SAP
7 118 (2.27%) Talend
8 117 (2.25%) IBM
9 95 (1.83%) ServiceNow
10 90 (1.73%) Salesforce
11 88 (1.69%) Splunk
12 70 (1.35%) VMware
13 55 (1.06%) Denodo
14 41 (0.79%) Foundry
15 40 (0.77%) Adobe
16 39 (0.75%) Bloomberg
16 39 (0.75%) OpenAI
17 36 (0.69%) Sybase
17 36 (0.69%) UiPath
18 35 (0.67%) Murex