SQL Contracts

SQL (Structured Query Language)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring SQL skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited SQL over the 6 months leading up to 3 July 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Jul 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 13 13 12
Rank change year-on-year 0 -1 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,723 4,388 6,210
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 11.88% 10.09% 11.13%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.32% 33.03% 33.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,596 3,156 4,453
10th Percentile £350 £350 £363
25th Percentile £410 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -2.78%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £750 £749 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £475 £488
% change year-on-year -1.05% -2.56% +2.63%
Number of hourly rates quoted 72 61 83
10th Percentile £23.05 £21.73 £21.48
25th Percentile £31.42 £26.25 £30.85
Median hourly rate £41.66 £42.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year -1.98% -15.00% +42.86%
75th Percentile £53.75 £51.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £67.35 £60.00 £82.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £40.13 £47.73
% change year-on-year +24.61% -15.93% +96.82%

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 10,540 13,285 18,753
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 33.64% 30.56% 33.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,109 9,334 13,427
10th Percentile £350 £350 £375
25th Percentile £413 £425 £455
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £511 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.60% -4.55% -
75th Percentile £625 £650 £675
90th Percentile £750 £775 £790
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £489 £500
% change year-on-year -2.86% -2.20% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 254 537 447
10th Percentile £26.52 £31.25 £28.84
25th Percentile £34.55 £46.25 £50.00
Median hourly rate £55.00 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year -12.00% - +19.05%
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £70.30
90th Percentile £79.61 £75.00 £79.31
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.00 £65.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year -4.62% +4.00% +18.42%

SQL
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing SQL as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for SQL in the UK

SQL
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing SQL.

Daily rate trend for SQL in the UK

SQL
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SQL over the 6 months to 3 July 2025.

Daily rate histogram for SQL in the UK

SQL
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing SQL.

Hourly rate trend for SQL in the UK

SQL
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing SQL over the 6 months to 3 July 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for SQL in the UK

SQL
Top 17 Contract 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 3 July 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 3,175 £500 -6.98% 6,183
London -2 1,909 £535 -5.31% 3,610
UK excluding London +8 1,435 £470 -1.05% 3,092
Work from Home -3 1,309 £510 -2.86% 2,785
North of England -2 337 £475 - 878
South East +13 321 £500 +3.15% 902
Midlands +6 258 £425 +6.25% 470
Scotland +3 246 £450 +1.69% 198
North West 0 190 £473 -0.53% 522
West Midlands +8 183 £450 +5.88% 270
South West +13 142 £458 -14.88% 271
Yorkshire -2 122 £475 -5.00% 267
East of England +20 92 £488 +8.33% 256
East Midlands -2 71 £380 -5.00% 194
Northern Ireland +3 33 £506 +26.56% 66
North East 0 26 £464 -2.37% 93
Wales +2 19 £425 -6.85% 100

SQL
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 135 (3.63%) Apache Airflow
1 135 (3.63%) Apache Spark
2 134 (3.60%) Confluence
3 113 (3.04%) Apache
4 66 (1.77%) SharePoint
5 39 (1.05%) SAS
6 36 (0.97%) Oracle Workflow
7 35 (0.94%) WebLogic
8 34 (0.91%) IIS
9 33 (0.89%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 29 (0.78%) Tomcat
10 29 (0.78%) WebSphere
11 22 (0.59%) JBoss
11 22 (0.59%) Microsoft Exchange
12 19 (0.51%) Skype for Business
13 16 (0.43%) Oracle Self-Service HR
14 12 (0.32%) Oracle Coherence
15 11 (0.30%) MQSeries
16 10 (0.27%) nginx
17 9 (0.24%) Jupyter
Applications
1 270 (7.25%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.56%) Microsoft Office
3 34 (0.91%) MS Visio
4 18 (0.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 17 (0.46%) Maya
6 16 (0.43%) Oracle Smart View
7 11 (0.30%) NUKE
8 8 (0.21%) Chatbot
8 8 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
9 7 (0.19%) Adobe Captivate
10 6 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
11 2 (0.054%) Maple
11 2 (0.054%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 2 (0.054%) Trello
12 1 (0.027%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.027%) FileZilla
12 1 (0.027%) GNU Octave
12 1 (0.027%) InfoPath
12 1 (0.027%) Revit
12 1 (0.027%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 76 (2.04%) Oracle EBS
2 55 (1.48%) Aladdin
2 55 (1.48%) Dynamics CRM
3 39 (1.05%) Oracle Assets
4 38 (1.02%) Oracle EBS R12
4 38 (1.02%) Oracle Payables
5 33 (0.89%) Oracle General Ledger
6 28 (0.75%) Endur
7 25 (0.67%) Oracle BPM
8 22 (0.59%) Oracle ERP
9 19 (0.51%) Oracle Receivables
9 19 (0.51%) thinkFolio
10 17 (0.46%) SAP S/4HANA
11 15 (0.40%) FLEXCUBE
11 15 (0.40%) Kondor
12 14 (0.38%) Oracle E-Business Tax
12 14 (0.38%) Oracle Financials
13 11 (0.30%) Oracle Cash Management
14 10 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
15 9 (0.24%) Oracle Payroll
Cloud Services
1 968 (26.00%) Azure
2 758 (20.36%) AWS
3 638 (17.14%) Power Platform
4 255 (6.85%) GCP
5 203 (5.45%) Azure DevOps
6 199 (5.35%) Snowflake
7 169 (4.54%) Serverless
8 165 (4.43%) Azure Data Factory
9 143 (3.84%) dbt
10 141 (3.79%) GitHub
11 127 (3.41%) Amazon S3
12 118 (3.17%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 107 (2.87%) SaaS
14 105 (2.82%) PowerApps
15 100 (2.69%) AWS Lambda
16 87 (2.34%) Dynamics 365
17 77 (2.07%) Power Automate
18 59 (1.58%) OCI
18 59 (1.58%) PaaS
19 57 (1.53%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 43 (1.15%) DNS
2 37 (0.99%) Firewall
3 25 (0.67%) Skype
4 22 (0.59%) HTTP
4 22 (0.59%) TCP/IP
5 18 (0.48%) DHCP
5 18 (0.48%) Internet
6 16 (0.43%) VPN
7 15 (0.40%) iSCSI
7 15 (0.40%) Unified Communications
8 14 (0.38%) Fibre Channel
9 12 (0.32%) Network Security
10 10 (0.27%) SSL
10 10 (0.27%) WAN
11 9 (0.24%) LAN
11 9 (0.24%) Softphone
11 9 (0.24%) WebEx
12 8 (0.21%) SAN
13 7 (0.19%) SSH
14 6 (0.16%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 556 (14.93%) Power BI
2 413 (11.09%) SQL Server
3 412 (11.07%) Data Warehouse
4 341 (9.16%) Relational Database
5 275 (7.39%) PostgreSQL
6 253 (6.80%) Tableau
7 246 (6.61%) NoSQL
8 191 (5.13%) Oracle Database
9 173 (4.65%) MongoDB
10 160 (4.30%) Data Lake
11 149 (4.00%) Azure SQL Database
12 116 (3.12%) Big Data
13 98 (2.63%) BigQuery
14 95 (2.55%) DB2
15 94 (2.52%) SQL Server Reporting Services
16 89 (2.39%) MySQL
17 87 (2.34%) Oracle Reports
18 84 (2.26%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 83 (2.23%) Metadata
20 79 (2.12%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 318 (8.54%) Git
2 291 (7.82%) JIRA
3 220 (5.91%) Jenkins
4 150 (4.03%) JUnit
5 107 (2.87%) GitLab
6 72 (1.93%) Mockito
7 69 (1.85%) Maven
8 51 (1.37%) Gradle
9 45 (1.21%) Selenium
10 43 (1.15%) Cucumber
11 42 (1.13%) SonarQube
12 41 (1.10%) Bitbucket
12 41 (1.10%) Liquibase
13 36 (0.97%) ERwin
14 34 (0.91%) Oracle Forms
15 31 (0.83%) Postman
16 30 (0.81%) Subversion
17 27 (0.73%) Visual Studio
18 24 (0.64%) Toad
19 19 (0.51%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,178 (31.64%) Social Skills
2 1,090 (29.28%) Finance
3 721 (19.37%) Analytical Skills
4 483 (12.97%) Banking
5 294 (7.90%) Public Sector
6 202 (5.43%) Investment Banking
7 200 (5.37%) Front Office
8 119 (3.20%) Marketing
9 77 (2.07%) Telecoms
10 69 (1.85%) Manufacturing
11 68 (1.83%) Retail
12 65 (1.75%) Presentation Skills
13 63 (1.69%) Documentation Skills
14 60 (1.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 58 (1.56%) Financial Institution
16 49 (1.32%) Organisational Skills
17 48 (1.29%) Back Office
18 35 (0.94%) General Ledger
19 34 (0.91%) Electronics
20 33 (0.89%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 1,113 (29.90%) Developer
2 693 (18.61%) Analyst
3 478 (12.84%) Senior
4 427 (11.47%) Data Engineer
5 295 (7.92%) Data Analyst
6 248 (6.66%) Java Developer
7 237 (6.37%) Business Analyst
8 205 (5.51%) Architect
9 204 (5.48%) Lead
10 174 (4.67%) Senior Developer
11 164 (4.41%) Consultant
12 128 (3.44%) SQL Developer
13 108 (2.90%) .NET Developer
14 106 (2.85%) C# Developer
15 101 (2.71%) Azure Engineer
16 97 (2.61%) Python Developer
17 96 (2.58%) Data Architect
18 92 (2.47%) Software Engineer
19 84 (2.26%) Oracle Developer
20 78 (2.10%) DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 360 (9.67%) .NET
2 272 (7.31%) Kafka
3 247 (6.63%) Spring
4 206 (5.53%) React
5 184 (4.94%) REST
6 177 (4.75%) HTML
7 175 (4.70%) Spring Boot
8 152 (4.08%) CSS
9 143 (3.84%) Web Services
10 142 (3.81%) RESTful
11 138 (3.71%) SOAP
12 130 (3.49%) XML
13 128 (3.44%) PySpark
14 116 (3.12%) .NET Framework
15 114 (3.06%) AngularJS
16 111 (2.98%) JSON
17 92 (2.47%) Node.js
18 77 (2.07%) .NET Core
19 65 (1.75%) Hibernate
20 63 (1.69%) Oracle Fusion
Miscellaneous
1 169 (4.54%) Data Structures
2 136 (3.65%) Derivative
3 120 (3.22%) Product Ownership
4 103 (2.77%) Legacy Systems
5 102 (2.74%) Fixed Income
6 92 (2.47%) Equities
7 88 (2.36%) Onboarding
8 87 (2.34%) Management Information System
9 84 (2.26%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 83 (2.23%) Hedge funds
11 82 (2.20%) Cloud Native
12 78 (2.10%) Algorithms
13 63 (1.69%) Distributed Systems
14 58 (1.56%) Data Protection Act
15 56 (1.50%) Linux Command Line
16 50 (1.34%) Market Risk
17 48 (1.29%) Greenfield Project
18 45 (1.21%) Enterprise Software
18 45 (1.21%) Replication
19 41 (1.10%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 356 (9.56%) Linux
2 268 (7.20%) Windows
3 179 (4.81%) Unix
4 105 (2.82%) Windows Server
5 24 (0.64%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 23 (0.62%) Windows Server 2019
7 17 (0.46%) Windows 10
8 14 (0.38%) VMS
9 13 (0.35%) Windows Server 2016
10 12 (0.32%) Windows Server 2012
11 11 (0.30%) AIX
12 10 (0.27%) Solaris
13 8 (0.21%) Android
14 5 (0.13%) Apple iOS
15 4 (0.11%) CentOS
16 3 (0.081%) Amazon Linux
16 3 (0.081%) Oracle Linux
16 3 (0.081%) Ubuntu
17 2 (0.054%) Mac OS X
17 2 (0.054%) Windows XP
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,049 (28.18%) Agile
2 893 (23.99%) Problem-Solving
3 737 (19.80%) Business Intelligence
4 668 (17.94%) Data Modelling
5 641 (17.22%) Analytics
6 640 (17.19%) DevOps
7 604 (16.22%) ETL
8 578 (15.53%) CI/CD
9 453 (12.17%) Migration
10 411 (11.04%) Data Analysis
11 402 (10.80%) Visualisation
12 361 (9.70%) Data Pipeline
13 321 (8.62%) Microservices
14 290 (7.79%) Data Engineering
15 268 (7.20%) Data Governance
16 265 (7.12%) Software Engineering
17 262 (7.04%) Validation
18 251 (6.74%) Decision-Making
19 248 (6.66%) Scrum
20 244 (6.55%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,311 (35.21%) Python
2 650 (17.46%) Java
3 428 (11.50%) C#
4 353 (9.48%) PL/SQL
5 347 (9.32%) JavaScript
6 185 (4.97%) PowerShell
7 142 (3.81%) TypeScript
8 115 (3.09%) R
9 104 (2.79%) Shell Script
10 103 (2.77%) T-SQL
11 93 (2.50%) Bash
12 81 (2.18%) VBA
13 79 (2.12%) C++
14 72 (1.93%) Scala
15 67 (1.80%) Perl
16 65 (1.75%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 50 (1.34%) VB
18 37 (0.99%) Bicep
19 28 (0.75%) C
19 28 (0.75%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 499 (13.40%) Security Cleared
2 398 (10.69%) SC Cleared
3 351 (9.43%) Degree
4 120 (3.22%) Computer Science Degree
5 58 (1.56%) DV Cleared
6 53 (1.42%) Microsoft Certification
7 45 (1.21%) BPSS Clearance
8 43 (1.15%) Master's Degree
9 37 (0.99%) Azure Certification
10 35 (0.94%) AWS Certification
11 24 (0.64%) PhD
12 22 (0.59%) MCSE
13 19 (0.51%) Cisco Certification
13 19 (0.51%) ISTQB
14 18 (0.48%) ITIL Certification
15 16 (0.43%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
16 15 (0.40%) Numerate Degree
17 13 (0.35%) CBAP
18 12 (0.32%) PMI Certification
19 11 (0.30%) VCP5
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 334 (8.97%) Data Quality
2 202 (5.43%) QA
3 115 (3.09%) GDPR
4 58 (1.56%) Accessibility
4 58 (1.56%) SLA
5 43 (1.15%) MiFID
6 29 (0.78%) Basel III
7 26 (0.70%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 25 (0.67%) EMIR
9 21 (0.56%) Disclosure Scotland
10 18 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 16 (0.43%) HL7
12 15 (0.40%) Actionable Recommendations
12 15 (0.40%) HIPAA
13 14 (0.38%) Basel II
13 14 (0.38%) NIST
14 13 (0.35%) IFRS
15 10 (0.27%) COBIT
15 10 (0.27%) IFRS 9
16 9 (0.24%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 271 (7.28%) Docker
2 122 (3.28%) Active Directory
3 42 (1.13%) VMware Infrastructure
4 29 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
5 19 (0.51%) NFS
6 18 (0.48%) Oracle RAC
7 17 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
7 17 (0.46%) vSphere
8 16 (0.43%) Hyper-V
9 11 (0.30%) Postfix
10 8 (0.21%) GridGain
11 6 (0.16%) Microsoft Virtual Server
11 6 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
11 6 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
12 5 (0.13%) iptables
13 4 (0.11%) GPFS
13 4 (0.11%) HDFS
13 4 (0.11%) Platform Symphony
13 4 (0.11%) XenApp
14 3 (0.081%) FreeRADIUS
Systems Management
1 249 (6.69%) Kubernetes
2 226 (6.07%) Terraform
3 67 (1.80%) Ansible
4 66 (1.77%) Grafana
5 42 (1.13%) Prometheus
6 17 (0.46%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
7 15 (0.40%) SCCM
8 14 (0.38%) Kibana
8 14 (0.38%) SCOM
9 13 (0.35%) Control-M
9 13 (0.35%) Oracle RMAN
9 13 (0.35%) WSUS
10 12 (0.32%) Data Guard
11 11 (0.30%) Progress Chef
12 10 (0.27%) ITRS Geneos
13 8 (0.21%) Puppet
13 8 (0.21%) Single Sign-On
13 8 (0.21%) vCenter Server
14 6 (0.16%) Microsoft Intune
15 5 (0.13%) Microsoft Clustering
Vendors
1 681 (18.29%) Oracle
2 572 (15.36%) Microsoft
3 261 (7.01%) Databricks
4 144 (3.87%) SAP
5 138 (3.71%) Google
6 74 (1.99%) Sybase
7 72 (1.93%) IBM
8 67 (1.80%) Splunk
9 65 (1.75%) VMware
10 63 (1.69%) ServiceNow
11 56 (1.50%) Informatica
12 55 (1.48%) Salesforce
13 54 (1.45%) Cisco
14 40 (1.07%) BISAM
15 38 (1.02%) Red Hat
16 36 (0.97%) Citrix
17 35 (0.94%) Adobe
18 28 (0.75%) Charles River
19 26 (0.70%) OpenLink
20 25 (0.67%) MuleSoft