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

6 months to
28 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 0
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,929 3,653 4,365
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.66% 11.96% 10.05%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.84% 35.37% 32.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,259 2,550 3,138
10th Percentile £350 £353 £350
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £590 £613 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -0.21% -1.05% -3.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 88 71 61
10th Percentile £26.06 £23.00 £22.61
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.56 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.90 £42.82 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +7.21% +0.74% -15.00%
75th Percentile £69.11 £53.75 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.48 £67.50 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.25
% change year-on-year -11.00% +24.22% -15.67%

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 13,752 10,327 13,271
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.96% 33.80% 30.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,930 6,972 9,310
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £511 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.10% -2.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £491 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.37% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 542 246 544
10th Percentile £34.22 £26.66 £31.55
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.55 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% +2.97%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.95 £80.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.84% -4.62% +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 June 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 June 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 June 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 -3 4,317 £500 - 1,608
London -5 2,335 £525 -1.87% 654
UK excluding London -10 2,092 £469 -0.21% 1,290
Work from Home -6 1,467 £500 -2.20% 814
North of England -4 556 £463 -2.63% 346
Midlands +3 544 £463 +8.82% 205
West Midlands +5 449 £459 +2.00% 112
South East -10 435 £475 -5.00% 444
North West -1 293 £466 -1.95% 215
South West -6 229 £500 +7.53% 117
Yorkshire -9 224 £475 - 86
Scotland -8 194 £450 - 38
East of England -13 107 £491 +0.77% 100
East Midlands -2 91 £525 +40.00% 93
North East -11 51 £425 -8.36% 51
Wales +3 44 £450 +5.88% 35
Northern Ireland -12 13 £388 -22.50% 34

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
1 241 (4.89%) Apache Spark
2 213 (4.32%) Confluence
3 204 (4.14%) Apache Airflow
4 179 (3.63%) Apache
5 111 (2.25%) SAS
6 59 (1.20%) SharePoint
7 42 (0.85%) Tomcat
8 37 (0.75%) Oracle Workflow
9 36 (0.73%) IIS
10 35 (0.71%) WebLogic
11 34 (0.69%) WebSphere
12 25 (0.51%) Jupyter
13 22 (0.45%) Apache Geronimo
13 22 (0.45%) Apache ServiceMix
13 22 (0.45%) Red Hat Fuse
14 21 (0.43%) nginx
15 19 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
16 18 (0.37%) Appian
16 18 (0.37%) CMS
16 18 (0.37%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 307 (6.23%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.24%) Microsoft Office
3 54 (1.10%) MS Visio
4 35 (0.71%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 32 (0.65%) Spreadsheet
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.061%) Acrobat
9 3 (0.061%) Notion
9 3 (0.061%) Oracle Smart View
9 3 (0.061%) Photoshop
10 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.020%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Mingle
10 1 (0.020%) Trello
10 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 41 (0.83%) Oracle EBS
2 37 (0.75%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.59%) SAP S/4HANA
4 27 (0.55%) Aladdin
5 23 (0.47%) Oracle ERP
5 23 (0.47%) Oracle Payables
6 19 (0.39%) NEC Housing
7 16 (0.32%) Oracle EBS R12
7 16 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
8 15 (0.30%) Oracle Receivables
9 11 (0.22%) Findur
9 11 (0.22%) Salesforce CRM
9 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
10 10 (0.20%) Elite 3E
10 10 (0.20%) Finacle
11 9 (0.18%) Fidessa
11 9 (0.18%) Oracle Assets
11 9 (0.18%) Oracle General Ledger
11 9 (0.18%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 9 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,580 (32.06%) Azure
2 1,198 (24.31%) AWS
3 922 (18.71%) Power Platform
4 446 (9.05%) Azure DevOps
5 401 (8.14%) GCP
6 363 (7.36%) GitHub
7 344 (6.98%) Azure Data Factory
8 311 (6.31%) Serverless
9 301 (6.11%) Snowflake
10 269 (5.46%) Amazon S3
11 238 (4.83%) dbt
12 221 (4.48%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 197 (4.00%) AWS Lambda
14 190 (3.85%) GitHub Actions
15 94 (1.91%) SaaS
16 87 (1.77%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 86 (1.74%) Power Automate
18 83 (1.68%) Entra ID
19 78 (1.58%) PowerApps
20 76 (1.54%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 54 (1.10%) DNS
2 42 (0.85%) Firewall
3 22 (0.45%) HTTP
3 22 (0.45%) Network Security
3 22 (0.45%) SNMP
3 22 (0.45%) SSL
3 22 (0.45%) WAN
4 19 (0.39%) Internet
5 18 (0.37%) VPN
6 12 (0.24%) TCP/IP
7 10 (0.20%) SAN
7 10 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
8 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
8 9 (0.18%) LAN
8 9 (0.18%) WinSCP
8 9 (0.18%) Wireshark
9 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
10 7 (0.14%) Kerberos
10 7 (0.14%) NAS
10 7 (0.14%) PuTTY
Database & Business Intelligence
1 847 (17.18%) Power BI
2 643 (13.05%) Data Warehouse
3 610 (12.38%) SQL Server
4 337 (6.84%) Relational Database
5 320 (6.49%) Tableau
6 316 (6.41%) PostgreSQL
7 315 (6.39%) Data Lake
8 261 (5.30%) NoSQL
9 249 (5.05%) Metadata
10 221 (4.48%) Azure SQL Database
11 190 (3.85%) Oracle Database
12 167 (3.39%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 156 (3.16%) BigQuery
14 147 (2.98%) Amazon Redshift
15 142 (2.88%) Big Data
16 140 (2.84%) Delta Lake
17 126 (2.56%) MySQL
18 117 (2.37%) MongoDB
18 117 (2.37%) Oracle Reports
19 110 (2.23%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 539 (10.94%) Git
2 402 (8.16%) JIRA
3 263 (5.34%) Jenkins
4 228 (4.63%) GitLab
5 76 (1.54%) JUnit
6 60 (1.22%) Selenium
7 56 (1.14%) Postman
8 55 (1.12%) Maven
9 53 (1.08%) Mockito
10 50 (1.01%) Gradle
11 39 (0.79%) Oracle Forms
11 39 (0.79%) Visual Studio
12 36 (0.73%) Cucumber
13 35 (0.71%) MLflow
14 33 (0.67%) SonarQube
15 32 (0.65%) JMeter
16 29 (0.59%) Bitbucket
17 28 (0.57%) ERwin
17 28 (0.57%) Liquibase
18 27 (0.55%) TeamCity
General
1 1,276 (25.89%) Finance
2 1,263 (25.62%) Social Skills
3 930 (18.87%) Analytical Skills
4 468 (9.49%) Banking
5 445 (9.03%) Public Sector
6 137 (2.78%) Front Office
7 128 (2.60%) Investment Banking
8 124 (2.52%) Marketing
9 117 (2.37%) Retail
10 105 (2.13%) Documentation Skills
11 92 (1.87%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 60 (1.22%) Legal
13 57 (1.16%) Manufacturing
14 55 (1.12%) Financial Institution
15 52 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
16 43 (0.87%) Publishing
17 38 (0.77%) Back Office
18 35 (0.71%) Organisational Skills
19 34 (0.69%) Telecoms
20 32 (0.65%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,044 (21.18%) Developer
2 999 (20.27%) Data Engineer
3 720 (14.61%) Analyst
4 648 (13.15%) Senior
5 340 (6.90%) Lead
6 308 (6.25%) Data Analyst
7 278 (5.64%) Architect
8 238 (4.83%) Consultant
9 227 (4.61%) Business Analyst
10 207 (4.20%) Java Developer
11 189 (3.83%) Senior Data Engineer
12 170 (3.45%) DBA
13 152 (3.08%) Senior Developer
14 146 (2.96%) Software Engineer
15 119 (2.41%) Azure Engineer
16 114 (2.31%) SQL Developer
17 109 (2.21%) C# Developer
17 109 (2.21%) Python Developer
18 104 (2.11%) Data Architect
19 98 (1.99%) SQL DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 410 (8.32%) .NET
2 372 (7.55%) REST
3 311 (6.31%) PySpark
4 302 (6.13%) Kafka
5 259 (5.25%) Spring
6 248 (5.03%) Spring Boot
7 233 (4.73%) React
8 217 (4.40%) RESTful
9 183 (3.71%) JSON
10 163 (3.31%) XML
11 157 (3.19%) HTML
12 140 (2.84%) CSS
13 126 (2.56%) AngularJS
14 125 (2.54%) Pandas
15 123 (2.50%) Web Services
16 120 (2.43%) Middleware
17 115 (2.33%) SOAP
18 95 (1.93%) .NET Framework
19 81 (1.64%) OAuth
20 76 (1.54%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 325 (6.59%) Cloud Native
2 207 (4.20%) Data Structures
3 181 (3.67%) Legacy Systems
4 165 (3.35%) Product Ownership
5 143 (2.90%) Distributed Systems
6 93 (1.89%) Derivative
7 90 (1.83%) Management Information System
7 90 (1.83%) Onboarding
8 82 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
9 74 (1.50%) Analytical Mindset
9 74 (1.50%) Data Protection Act
10 73 (1.48%) Self-Motivation
11 69 (1.40%) Algorithms
12 61 (1.24%) Clustering
13 55 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
14 54 (1.10%) Equities
14 54 (1.10%) Replication
15 52 (1.05%) Fixed Income
16 45 (0.91%) NHS
17 44 (0.89%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 320 (6.49%) Linux
2 285 (5.78%) Windows
3 225 (4.56%) Unix
4 108 (2.19%) Windows Server
5 27 (0.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.49%) AIX
7 17 (0.34%) Solaris
7 17 (0.34%) Windows Server 2019
8 12 (0.24%) Windows Server 2016
9 11 (0.22%) Windows Server 2008
10 10 (0.20%) VMS
11 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
11 8 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Android
12 7 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 4 (0.081%) Oracle Linux
13 4 (0.081%) Ubuntu
14 3 (0.061%) Windows Server 2012
15 2 (0.041%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.041%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,326 (26.90%) CI/CD
2 1,273 (25.83%) Agile
3 1,249 (25.34%) Analytics
4 1,231 (24.97%) Data Modelling
5 1,113 (22.58%) ETL
6 1,073 (21.77%) Business Intelligence
7 1,014 (20.57%) DevOps
8 971 (19.70%) Problem-Solving
9 956 (19.40%) Data Pipeline
10 808 (16.39%) Data Engineering
11 705 (14.30%) AI
12 667 (13.53%) Migration
13 621 (12.60%) Validation
14 545 (11.06%) Data Governance
15 504 (10.23%) Test Automation
16 490 (9.94%) Decision-Making
17 485 (9.84%) Data Analysis
18 473 (9.60%) Stakeholder Management
19 446 (9.05%) Continuous Improvement
20 435 (8.83%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,797 (36.46%) Python
2 652 (13.23%) Java
3 492 (9.98%) C#
4 372 (7.55%) PL/SQL
5 338 (6.86%) JavaScript
6 257 (5.21%) T-SQL
7 238 (4.83%) PowerShell
8 177 (3.59%) TypeScript
9 141 (2.86%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 121 (2.45%) Shell Script
11 112 (2.27%) R
12 94 (1.91%) Bash
13 79 (1.60%) Scala
14 76 (1.54%) C++
15 49 (0.99%) Bicep
16 46 (0.93%) VBA
17 37 (0.75%) C
18 34 (0.69%) VB
19 29 (0.59%) Perl
20 25 (0.51%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,049 (21.28%) Security Cleared
2 851 (17.27%) SC Cleared
3 373 (7.57%) Degree
4 126 (2.56%) BPSS Clearance
5 114 (2.31%) Computer Science Degree
6 97 (1.97%) DV Cleared
7 73 (1.48%) Azure Certification
8 66 (1.34%) Master's Degree
9 56 (1.14%) ISTQB
10 42 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
11 36 (0.73%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.37%) DBS Check
12 18 (0.37%) PhD
13 14 (0.28%) CISSP
14 11 (0.22%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 11 (0.22%) SnowPro
15 10 (0.20%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 10 (0.20%) TOGAF Certification
16 9 (0.18%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 9 (0.18%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 882 (17.89%) Data Quality
2 385 (7.81%) QA
3 184 (3.73%) GDPR
4 60 (1.22%) Accessibility
5 44 (0.89%) SLA
6 31 (0.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 26 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 24 (0.49%) NIST
9 21 (0.43%) PMO
10 20 (0.41%) ISO 20022
11 18 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
12 17 (0.34%) IFRS
13 16 (0.32%) PCI DSS
14 15 (0.30%) MiFID
14 15 (0.30%) Solvency II
15 14 (0.28%) HIPAA
16 13 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 12 (0.24%) NCSC
18 11 (0.22%) HL7
19 10 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 519 (10.53%) Docker
2 110 (2.23%) Active Directory
3 44 (0.89%) Virtual Machines
4 36 (0.73%) VMware Infrastructure
5 28 (0.57%) Oracle RAC
6 20 (0.41%) Hyper-V
6 20 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
7 13 (0.26%) VMware NSX
8 12 (0.24%) vCloud
9 10 (0.20%) KVM
10 9 (0.18%) Postfix
10 9 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
11 5 (0.10%) RACF
12 4 (0.081%) Ceph
12 4 (0.081%) HDFS
13 3 (0.061%) Squid
13 3 (0.061%) XenApp
13 3 (0.061%) XenDesktop
14 2 (0.041%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.041%) GridGain
Systems Management
1 427 (8.66%) Kubernetes
2 390 (7.91%) Terraform
3 114 (2.31%) Grafana
4 91 (1.85%) Ansible
5 56 (1.14%) Prometheus
6 40 (0.81%) Oracle RMAN
7 29 (0.59%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.47%) Control-M
8 23 (0.47%) Kibana
9 19 (0.39%) vCenter Server
10 17 (0.34%) Single Sign-On
11 16 (0.32%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.30%) SCOM
12 15 (0.30%) Tivoli
13 14 (0.28%) Nagios
13 14 (0.28%) Netcool
14 13 (0.26%) OpenView
14 13 (0.26%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 9 (0.18%) Progress Chef
16 8 (0.16%) SCCM
Vendors
1 858 (17.41%) Oracle
2 766 (15.54%) Microsoft
3 581 (11.79%) Databricks
4 183 (3.71%) Informatica
5 178 (3.61%) Google
6 146 (2.96%) Talend
7 137 (2.78%) ServiceNow
8 125 (2.54%) SAP
9 89 (1.81%) Splunk
10 88 (1.79%) IBM
11 72 (1.46%) Denodo
12 59 (1.20%) Salesforce
13 57 (1.16%) VMware
14 44 (0.89%) Citrix
15 41 (0.83%) Dynatrace
16 38 (0.77%) Bloomberg
16 38 (0.77%) Sybase
17 36 (0.73%) Murex
18 33 (0.67%) MuleSoft
18 33 (0.67%) OpenAI