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

6 months to
15 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 19 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -6 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,146 3,713 4,075
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.46% 11.44% 10.68%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.37% 34.94% 33.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,459 2,537 2,900
10th Percentile £356 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -0.57%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £638
90th Percentile £682 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £470 £475
% change year-on-year +1.06% -1.05% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 93 88 46
10th Percentile £23.00 £29.00 £20.06
25th Percentile £28.50 £32.50 £27.19
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +25.00% -12.82%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £77.00 - £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £33.93
% change year-on-year -11.00% +47.36% -15.18%

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 14,150 10,627 12,177
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.00% 32.74% 31.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,188 7,032 8,268
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 535 292 343
10th Percentile £27.75 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £47.75 £37.50 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.06 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £78.75 £78.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.96% -1.92% -

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 15 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 15 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 15 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 4,449 £500 - 7,267
London -6 2,497 £525 - 4,645
UK excluding London -8 2,075 £475 +1.06% 3,298
Work from Home -4 1,528 £500 - 3,027
North of England -1 589 £475 +5.56% 883
South East -11 458 £490 -2.00% 757
Midlands -5 454 £469 +4.22% 532
West Midlands -4 354 £469 -6.20% 333
North West 0 295 £500 +12.99% 518
Yorkshire +6 250 £475 +1.23% 262
South West -6 227 £513 +17.14% 345
Scotland -6 197 £426 -7.84% 315
East of England -10 120 £495 -1.49% 256
East Midlands -3 98 £464 +17.41% 199
North East -12 53 £413 -11.29% 106
Wales -7 36 £475 +6.15% 96
Northern Ireland -8 19 £363 -29.27% 133
Channel Islands - 1 £450 - 5

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
1 244 (4.74%) Apache Airflow
2 223 (4.33%) Confluence
3 206 (4.00%) Apache Spark
4 166 (3.23%) Apache
5 93 (1.81%) SharePoint
6 88 (1.71%) SAS
7 44 (0.86%) Oracle Workflow
8 37 (0.72%) IIS
9 36 (0.70%) WebLogic
10 28 (0.54%) Jupyter
11 26 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
12 22 (0.43%) nginx
13 20 (0.39%) CMS
13 20 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
14 18 (0.35%) Camunda
15 16 (0.31%) ArcGIS
16 15 (0.29%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 15 (0.29%) WebSphere
17 12 (0.23%) Tomcat
18 8 (0.16%) Appian
Applications
1 303 (5.89%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.28%) Microsoft Office
3 39 (0.76%) MS Visio
3 39 (0.76%) Spreadsheet
4 25 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.23%) Chatbot
6 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
7 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
7 4 (0.078%) Notion
7 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
7 4 (0.078%) Windchill
8 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.039%) Mingle
10 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 52 (1.01%) Oracle EBS
2 46 (0.89%) Dynamics CRM
3 31 (0.60%) SAP S/4HANA
4 29 (0.56%) Oracle Payables
5 25 (0.49%) Aladdin
6 23 (0.45%) Remedy ITSM
7 21 (0.41%) Oracle ERP
8 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
8 18 (0.35%) Oracle Receivables
9 16 (0.31%) Oracle General Ledger
10 13 (0.25%) Finacle
11 12 (0.23%) Oracle Financials
12 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
12 11 (0.21%) NetSuite
12 11 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
12 11 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
12 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
12 11 (0.21%) Summit
13 10 (0.19%) Oracle FAH
14 9 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
Cloud Services
1 1,585 (30.80%) Azure
2 1,244 (24.17%) AWS
3 955 (18.56%) Power Platform
4 503 (9.77%) GCP
5 426 (8.28%) Azure DevOps
6 388 (7.54%) Snowflake
7 362 (7.03%) GitHub
8 327 (6.35%) Azure Data Factory
9 309 (6.00%) Serverless
10 306 (5.95%) dbt
11 256 (4.97%) Amazon S3
12 208 (4.04%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 206 (4.00%) AWS Lambda
14 176 (3.42%) GitHub Actions
15 110 (2.14%) SaaS
16 109 (2.12%) Power Automate
17 101 (1.96%) PowerApps
18 96 (1.87%) Entra ID
19 89 (1.73%) Azure Databricks
20 88 (1.71%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 67 (1.30%) DNS
2 42 (0.82%) Firewall
3 35 (0.68%) HTTP
3 35 (0.68%) SSL
4 23 (0.45%) Network Security
5 22 (0.43%) Broadband
6 21 (0.41%) Internet
7 20 (0.39%) TCP/IP
8 19 (0.37%) VPN
9 18 (0.35%) SNMP
10 16 (0.31%) SSH
11 15 (0.29%) DHCP
12 13 (0.25%) WAN
13 11 (0.21%) HTTPS
13 11 (0.21%) Kerberos
13 11 (0.21%) SAN
14 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
15 8 (0.16%) Multicast
15 8 (0.16%) Reverse Proxy
15 8 (0.16%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 877 (17.04%) Power BI
2 713 (13.86%) Data Warehouse
3 661 (12.84%) SQL Server
4 363 (7.05%) Relational Database
5 345 (6.70%) PostgreSQL
6 323 (6.28%) Data Lake
7 293 (5.69%) Metadata
8 286 (5.56%) Tableau
9 251 (4.88%) NoSQL
10 239 (4.64%) Oracle Database
11 202 (3.93%) BigQuery
12 201 (3.91%) Azure SQL Database
13 150 (2.91%) Amazon Redshift
13 150 (2.91%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 143 (2.78%) Delta Lake
15 132 (2.57%) MySQL
16 129 (2.51%) MongoDB
17 118 (2.29%) Big Data
18 116 (2.25%) Amazon Athena
19 115 (2.23%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 662 (12.86%) Git
2 417 (8.10%) JIRA
3 285 (5.54%) Jenkins
4 244 (4.74%) GitLab
5 94 (1.83%) Selenium
6 93 (1.81%) JUnit
7 86 (1.67%) Gradle
7 86 (1.67%) Maven
8 66 (1.28%) Postman
9 58 (1.13%) Mockito
10 52 (1.01%) Oracle Forms
11 48 (0.93%) SonarQube
12 41 (0.80%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.68%) Visual Studio
14 33 (0.64%) Zephyr
15 31 (0.60%) MLflow
16 28 (0.54%) Team Foundation Server
17 27 (0.52%) Artifactory
17 27 (0.52%) JMeter
17 27 (0.52%) REST Assured
General
1 1,402 (27.24%) Social Skills
2 1,344 (26.12%) Finance
3 1,070 (20.79%) Analytical Skills
4 573 (11.13%) Banking
5 464 (9.02%) Public Sector
6 161 (3.13%) Marketing
7 147 (2.86%) Front Office
8 145 (2.82%) Retail
9 142 (2.76%) Investment Banking
10 106 (2.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 89 (1.73%) Documentation Skills
12 79 (1.54%) Manufacturing
13 57 (1.11%) Financial Institution
13 57 (1.11%) Legal
14 55 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
15 42 (0.82%) Back Office
15 42 (0.82%) Local Government
16 40 (0.78%) Organisational Skills
17 39 (0.76%) Law
17 39 (0.76%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 1,125 (21.86%) Developer
2 956 (18.58%) Data Engineer
3 780 (15.16%) Analyst
4 730 (14.19%) Senior
5 365 (7.09%) Lead
6 332 (6.45%) Data Analyst
7 263 (5.11%) Architect
8 255 (4.96%) Business Analyst
9 231 (4.49%) Consultant
10 216 (4.20%) Senior Data Engineer
11 210 (4.08%) Java Developer
12 209 (4.06%) DBA
13 183 (3.56%) Senior Developer
14 130 (2.53%) Software Engineer
15 126 (2.45%) SQL DBA
16 125 (2.43%) Data Architect
17 122 (2.37%) SQL Developer
18 121 (2.35%) Python Engineer
19 118 (2.29%) Full-Stack Developer
19 118 (2.29%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 482 (9.37%) REST
2 451 (8.76%) .NET
3 402 (7.81%) Terraform
4 347 (6.74%) PySpark
5 345 (6.70%) Kafka
6 286 (5.56%) Spring
7 282 (5.48%) Spring Boot
8 250 (4.86%) React
9 219 (4.26%) RESTful
10 214 (4.16%) HTML
11 210 (4.08%) JSON
12 183 (3.56%) CSS
13 179 (3.48%) XML
14 134 (2.60%) Web Services
15 124 (2.41%) AngularJS
16 123 (2.39%) SOAP
17 110 (2.14%) Middleware
18 105 (2.04%) Pandas
19 93 (1.81%) .NET Framework
20 88 (1.71%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 328 (6.37%) Cloud Native
2 278 (5.40%) Data Structures
3 238 (4.62%) Product Ownership
4 167 (3.25%) Legacy Systems
5 146 (2.84%) Distributed Systems
6 138 (2.68%) Onboarding
7 132 (2.57%) Enterprise Software
8 111 (2.16%) Management Information System
9 91 (1.77%) AI Agents
10 89 (1.73%) Derivative
11 82 (1.59%) Self-Motivation
12 80 (1.55%) Replication
13 68 (1.32%) Analytical Mindset
14 67 (1.30%) Data Protection Act
15 64 (1.24%) Clustering
16 61 (1.19%) Algorithms
17 60 (1.17%) Reference Data
18 51 (0.99%) Fixed Income
18 51 (0.99%) Linux Command Line
19 50 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 378 (7.35%) Linux
2 323 (6.28%) Windows
3 252 (4.90%) Unix
4 129 (2.51%) Windows Server
5 29 (0.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.47%) Solaris
7 14 (0.27%) AIX
8 12 (0.23%) Ubuntu
9 10 (0.19%) VMS
9 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2008
11 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
11 6 (0.12%) zOS
12 5 (0.097%) Windows Server 2012
13 4 (0.078%) Android
13 4 (0.078%) Apple iOS
13 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.039%) HPUX
15 2 (0.039%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,385 (26.91%) CI/CD
2 1,380 (26.82%) Agile
3 1,341 (26.06%) Data Modelling
4 1,265 (24.58%) Analytics
5 1,103 (21.43%) ETL
6 1,099 (21.36%) Business Intelligence
7 1,014 (19.70%) Problem-Solving
8 1,002 (19.47%) DevOps
9 1,000 (19.43%) Data Pipeline
10 849 (16.50%) Data Engineering
11 832 (16.17%) AI
12 791 (15.37%) Validation
13 755 (14.67%) Migration
14 718 (13.95%) Stakeholder Management
15 601 (11.68%) Data Governance
16 587 (11.41%) Test Automation
17 572 (11.12%) Data Analysis
18 561 (10.90%) Continuous Improvement
19 526 (10.22%) Decision-Making
20 443 (8.61%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,851 (35.97%) Python
2 665 (12.92%) Java
3 470 (9.13%) C#
4 423 (8.22%) PL/SQL
5 409 (7.95%) JavaScript
6 272 (5.29%) PowerShell
7 249 (4.84%) T-SQL
8 204 (3.96%) TypeScript
9 152 (2.95%) Shell Script
10 151 (2.93%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 120 (2.33%) Bash
12 94 (1.83%) R
13 73 (1.42%) Scala
14 56 (1.09%) C++
15 43 (0.84%) VBA
16 38 (0.74%) Bicep
17 29 (0.56%) C
17 29 (0.56%) VB.NET
18 28 (0.54%) Go
19 27 (0.52%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,109 (21.55%) Security Cleared
2 887 (17.24%) SC Cleared
3 360 (7.00%) Degree
4 159 (3.09%) BPSS Clearance
5 135 (2.62%) DV Cleared
6 131 (2.55%) Computer Science Degree
7 83 (1.61%) Azure Certification
8 60 (1.17%) ISTQB
9 54 (1.05%) Microsoft Certification
10 46 (0.89%) Master's Degree
11 42 (0.82%) AWS Certification
12 19 (0.37%) ISEB
13 18 (0.35%) CISSP
14 17 (0.33%) DBS Check
15 16 (0.31%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 16 (0.31%) Oracle Certification
16 15 (0.29%) ACCA
16 15 (0.29%) CIMA
17 12 (0.23%) FFIEC
17 12 (0.23%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1,013 (19.69%) Data Quality
2 417 (8.10%) QA
3 145 (2.82%) GDPR
4 71 (1.38%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.89%) SLA
6 34 (0.66%) ISO 20022
7 27 (0.52%) Actionable Recommendations
8 26 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 21 (0.41%) IFRS
10 19 (0.37%) NIST
11 18 (0.35%) MiFID
12 14 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 14 (0.27%) PMO
13 13 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
13 13 (0.25%) GMP
13 13 (0.25%) GxP
14 11 (0.21%) COBIT
14 11 (0.21%) HIPAA
14 11 (0.21%) PCI DSS
15 10 (0.19%) Solvency II
System Software
1 489 (9.50%) Docker
2 132 (2.57%) Active Directory
3 60 (1.17%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
5 41 (0.80%) Virtual Machines
6 25 (0.49%) Hyper-V
7 19 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
8 16 (0.31%) vCloud
8 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 15 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 7 (0.14%) Postfix
11 6 (0.12%) Squid
12 5 (0.097%) Ceph
13 4 (0.078%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 4 (0.078%) KVM
14 3 (0.058%) GPFS
15 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
15 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
15 2 (0.039%) NFS
Systems Management
1 415 (8.06%) Kubernetes
2 106 (2.06%) Grafana
3 103 (2.00%) Ansible
4 55 (1.07%) Prometheus
5 48 (0.93%) Oracle RMAN
6 46 (0.89%) Data Guard
7 44 (0.86%) Control-M
8 41 (0.80%) SCOM
9 24 (0.47%) Kibana
10 16 (0.31%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
10 16 (0.31%) vCenter Server
11 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
11 12 (0.23%) Nagios
11 12 (0.23%) Netcool
11 12 (0.23%) Single Sign-On
11 12 (0.23%) ZABBIX
12 11 (0.21%) Tivoli
13 10 (0.19%) Argo
13 10 (0.19%) ITRS Geneos
13 10 (0.19%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 926 (17.99%) Oracle
2 866 (16.83%) Microsoft
3 641 (12.46%) Databricks
4 221 (4.29%) Google
5 157 (3.05%) Informatica
6 146 (2.84%) SAP
7 123 (2.39%) Talend
8 104 (2.02%) IBM
9 98 (1.90%) ServiceNow
10 85 (1.65%) Salesforce
10 85 (1.65%) Splunk
11 79 (1.54%) VMware
12 58 (1.13%) Denodo
13 41 (0.80%) Sybase
14 40 (0.78%) Bloomberg
15 37 (0.72%) Alteryx
16 36 (0.70%) Dynatrace
16 36 (0.70%) Murex
17 35 (0.68%) Adobe
17 35 (0.68%) BMC