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

6 months to
8 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,170 3,848 4,014
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.65% 11.70% 10.31%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.36% 35.51% 33.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,446 2,659 2,947
10th Percentile £356 £331 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £464 £475
% change year-on-year +1.13% -2.37% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 94 70 48
10th Percentile £23.23 £22.40 £21.25
25th Percentile £33.82 £29.07 £29.06
Median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £40.58
Median % change year-on-year +14.56% -4.27% -11.79%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £54.69
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £33.91 £34.97
% change year-on-year +31.23% -3.02% -22.30%

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 14,218 10,836 12,152
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.53% 32.94% 31.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,232 7,276 8,539
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £503 £530
Median % change year-on-year +1.99% -5.19% -3.64%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 531 265 408
10th Percentile £29.96 £28.07 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.00 £45.80
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -12.69% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.50 £84.80 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +0.78% -0.77% +7.35%

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 8 August 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 8 August 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 8 August 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 4,521 £500 - 2,731
London -6 2,465 £525 -0.94% 1,450
UK excluding London -10 2,166 £469 +1.13% 1,622
Work from Home -3 1,552 £500 - 1,196
North of England -3 594 £464 -1.12% 451
Midlands 0 543 £459 +2.91% 247
South East -9 476 £490 -2.00% 488
West Midlands +4 443 £459 +1.66% 131
North West -4 312 £475 +1.28% 238
Yorkshire -2 244 £474 -0.21% 143
South West -6 223 £500 +17.65% 177
Scotland -9 190 £434 -3.61% 86
East of England -2 118 £475 -5.00% 118
East Midlands -3 96 £463 +23.33% 116
North East -17 49 £413 -10.81% 80
Wales 0 40 £475 +5.56% 49
Northern Ireland -7 16 £375 -26.83% 31

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
1 224 (4.33%) Confluence
2 222 (4.29%) Apache Airflow
3 218 (4.22%) Apache Spark
4 178 (3.44%) Apache
5 119 (2.30%) SAS
6 75 (1.45%) SharePoint
7 45 (0.87%) Oracle Workflow
8 40 (0.77%) IIS
8 40 (0.77%) WebLogic
9 29 (0.56%) Jupyter
10 28 (0.54%) Tomcat
11 25 (0.48%) WebSphere
12 21 (0.41%) nginx
12 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
13 20 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
14 19 (0.37%) CMS
15 13 (0.25%) Apache Geronimo
15 13 (0.25%) Apache ServiceMix
15 13 (0.25%) Red Hat Fuse
16 12 (0.23%) Camunda
Applications
1 332 (6.42%) Microsoft Excel
2 62 (1.20%) Microsoft Office
3 53 (1.03%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.74%) Spreadsheet
5 29 (0.56%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.077%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.077%) Notion
8 4 (0.077%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.019%) InDesign
10 1 (0.019%) Mingle
10 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 53 (1.03%) Oracle EBS
2 44 (0.85%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.56%) Aladdin
3 29 (0.56%) Remedy ITSM
3 29 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
4 26 (0.50%) Oracle ERP
5 25 (0.48%) Oracle Payables
6 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
7 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
8 14 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
9 13 (0.25%) NEC Housing
10 12 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.21%) Findur
11 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.19%) Finacle
12 10 (0.19%) Oracle Financials
13 9 (0.17%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.17%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 9 (0.17%) Unit4 Business World
14 8 (0.15%) Fidessa
Cloud Services
1 1,627 (31.47%) Azure
2 1,214 (23.48%) AWS
3 974 (18.84%) Power Platform
4 460 (8.90%) Azure DevOps
5 459 (8.88%) GCP
6 367 (7.10%) GitHub
7 352 (6.81%) Azure Data Factory
8 351 (6.79%) Snowflake
9 309 (5.98%) Serverless
10 277 (5.36%) dbt
11 252 (4.87%) Amazon S3
12 218 (4.22%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 202 (3.91%) AWS Lambda
14 184 (3.56%) GitHub Actions
15 101 (1.95%) Entra ID
16 98 (1.90%) Power Automate
16 98 (1.90%) SaaS
17 94 (1.82%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 92 (1.78%) PowerApps
19 78 (1.51%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 66 (1.28%) DNS
2 47 (0.91%) Firewall
3 30 (0.58%) SSL
4 28 (0.54%) HTTP
5 27 (0.52%) Network Security
6 24 (0.46%) VPN
7 22 (0.43%) SNMP
8 21 (0.41%) TCP/IP
9 20 (0.39%) Internet
10 19 (0.37%) WAN
11 12 (0.23%) Broadband
11 12 (0.23%) DHCP
12 10 (0.19%) SSH
12 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
12 10 (0.19%) Wireshark
13 9 (0.17%) HTTPS
13 9 (0.17%) SAN
13 9 (0.17%) Wi-Fi
14 8 (0.15%) 3GPP
14 8 (0.15%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 896 (17.33%) Power BI
2 722 (13.97%) Data Warehouse
3 643 (12.44%) SQL Server
4 334 (6.46%) Relational Database
5 321 (6.21%) PostgreSQL
6 318 (6.15%) Data Lake
7 316 (6.11%) Tableau
8 275 (5.32%) Metadata
9 260 (5.03%) NoSQL
10 222 (4.29%) Azure SQL Database
11 211 (4.08%) Oracle Database
12 177 (3.42%) BigQuery
13 171 (3.31%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 153 (2.96%) Amazon Redshift
15 141 (2.73%) Delta Lake
16 131 (2.53%) Oracle Reports
17 127 (2.46%) Big Data
18 118 (2.28%) MongoDB
19 114 (2.21%) MySQL
20 105 (2.03%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 613 (11.86%) Git
2 411 (7.95%) JIRA
3 296 (5.73%) Jenkins
4 236 (4.56%) GitLab
5 83 (1.61%) JUnit
6 73 (1.41%) Maven
7 68 (1.32%) Selenium
8 67 (1.30%) Gradle
9 62 (1.20%) Postman
10 55 (1.06%) Mockito
11 49 (0.95%) Oracle Forms
12 40 (0.77%) Bitbucket
12 40 (0.77%) SonarQube
13 39 (0.75%) Visual Studio
14 33 (0.64%) Zephyr
15 32 (0.62%) MLflow
16 31 (0.60%) ERwin
16 31 (0.60%) JMeter
16 31 (0.60%) Team Foundation Server
17 30 (0.58%) Liquibase
General
1 1,349 (26.09%) Social Skills
2 1,290 (24.95%) Finance
3 1,042 (20.15%) Analytical Skills
4 497 (9.61%) Banking
5 490 (9.48%) Public Sector
6 146 (2.82%) Marketing
7 141 (2.73%) Front Office
8 139 (2.69%) Retail
9 125 (2.42%) Investment Banking
10 100 (1.93%) Documentation Skills
11 90 (1.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 79 (1.53%) Manufacturing
13 57 (1.10%) Financial Institution
13 57 (1.10%) Legal
13 57 (1.10%) Presentation Skills
14 47 (0.91%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.89%) Organisational Skills
16 43 (0.83%) Publishing
17 41 (0.79%) Back Office
18 38 (0.74%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,128 (21.82%) Developer
2 1,003 (19.40%) Data Engineer
3 766 (14.82%) Analyst
4 689 (13.33%) Senior
5 363 (7.02%) Lead
6 326 (6.31%) Data Analyst
7 272 (5.26%) Architect
8 260 (5.03%) Consultant
9 257 (4.97%) Business Analyst
10 212 (4.10%) DBA
10 212 (4.10%) Java Developer
11 195 (3.77%) Senior Data Engineer
12 172 (3.33%) Senior Developer
13 141 (2.73%) Software Engineer
14 135 (2.61%) SQL DBA
15 131 (2.53%) SQL Developer
16 119 (2.30%) Azure Engineer
17 115 (2.22%) Full-Stack Developer
18 111 (2.15%) Python Developer
19 109 (2.11%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 428 (8.28%) REST
2 427 (8.26%) .NET
3 329 (6.36%) PySpark
4 318 (6.15%) Kafka
5 271 (5.24%) Spring
6 254 (4.91%) Spring Boot
7 227 (4.39%) React
8 219 (4.24%) RESTful
9 203 (3.93%) JSON
10 189 (3.66%) XML
11 176 (3.40%) HTML
12 145 (2.80%) AngularJS
13 143 (2.77%) CSS
14 128 (2.48%) Web Services
15 121 (2.34%) Pandas
16 115 (2.22%) SOAP
17 112 (2.17%) Middleware
18 102 (1.97%) .NET Framework
19 84 (1.62%) Node.js
20 74 (1.43%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 346 (6.69%) Cloud Native
2 252 (4.87%) Data Structures
3 205 (3.97%) Product Ownership
4 179 (3.46%) Legacy Systems
5 148 (2.86%) Distributed Systems
6 120 (2.32%) Onboarding
7 106 (2.05%) Enterprise Software
8 96 (1.86%) Derivative
9 95 (1.84%) Management Information System
10 86 (1.66%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.47%) Replication
12 75 (1.45%) Analytical Mindset
12 75 (1.45%) Data Protection Act
13 70 (1.35%) Clustering
14 66 (1.28%) Algorithms
15 55 (1.06%) AI Agents
16 53 (1.03%) Fixed Income
16 53 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
17 50 (0.97%) Reference Data
18 49 (0.95%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 358 (6.92%) Linux
2 315 (6.09%) Windows
3 238 (4.60%) Unix
4 122 (2.36%) Windows Server
5 27 (0.52%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.41%) AIX
7 17 (0.33%) Solaris
8 14 (0.27%) VMS
8 14 (0.27%) Windows Server 2019
9 12 (0.23%) Windows Server 2008
10 7 (0.14%) Ubuntu
10 7 (0.14%) Windows 10
10 7 (0.14%) zOS
11 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
11 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
11 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
12 5 (0.097%) Android
13 4 (0.077%) Oracle Linux
14 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.039%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,378 (26.65%) Agile
2 1,364 (26.38%) Data Modelling
3 1,357 (26.25%) CI/CD
4 1,307 (25.28%) Analytics
5 1,156 (22.36%) ETL
6 1,143 (22.11%) Business Intelligence
7 1,053 (20.37%) DevOps
8 1,006 (19.46%) Data Pipeline
9 991 (19.17%) Problem-Solving
10 857 (16.58%) Data Engineering
11 744 (14.39%) Migration
12 732 (14.16%) AI
13 707 (13.68%) Validation
14 595 (11.51%) Data Governance
15 578 (11.18%) Stakeholder Management
16 545 (10.54%) Test Automation
17 523 (10.12%) Decision-Making
18 522 (10.10%) Data Analysis
19 516 (9.98%) Continuous Improvement
20 459 (8.88%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,825 (35.30%) Python
2 664 (12.84%) Java
3 496 (9.59%) C#
4 424 (8.20%) PL/SQL
5 370 (7.16%) JavaScript
6 276 (5.34%) T-SQL
7 265 (5.13%) PowerShell
8 177 (3.42%) TypeScript
9 155 (3.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 142 (2.75%) Shell Script
11 120 (2.32%) Bash
12 99 (1.91%) R
13 76 (1.47%) Scala
14 59 (1.14%) C++
15 51 (0.99%) Bicep
15 51 (0.99%) VBA
16 33 (0.64%) C
17 29 (0.56%) Perl
18 28 (0.54%) VB
19 25 (0.48%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,162 (22.48%) Security Cleared
2 943 (18.24%) SC Cleared
3 352 (6.81%) Degree
4 143 (2.77%) BPSS Clearance
5 123 (2.38%) Computer Science Degree
6 111 (2.15%) DV Cleared
7 79 (1.53%) Azure Certification
8 63 (1.22%) ISTQB
9 49 (0.95%) Master's Degree
10 44 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
11 35 (0.68%) AWS Certification
12 19 (0.37%) CISSP
13 17 (0.33%) DBS Check
14 15 (0.29%) ISEB
14 15 (0.29%) PhD
15 12 (0.23%) FFIEC
15 12 (0.23%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 12 (0.23%) Oracle Certification
16 10 (0.19%) ACCA
16 10 (0.19%) CIMA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 961 (18.59%) Data Quality
2 392 (7.58%) QA
3 175 (3.38%) GDPR
4 66 (1.28%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.89%) SLA
6 26 (0.50%) ISO 20022
6 26 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 25 (0.48%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 23 (0.44%) NIST
8 23 (0.44%) PMO
9 20 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
10 16 (0.31%) IFRS
10 16 (0.31%) Solvency II
11 15 (0.29%) MiFID
12 13 (0.25%) COBIT
12 13 (0.25%) HIPAA
12 13 (0.25%) PCI DSS
13 12 (0.23%) GMP
14 11 (0.21%) NCSC
14 11 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 509 (9.85%) Docker
2 140 (2.71%) Active Directory
3 53 (1.03%) VMware Infrastructure
4 45 (0.87%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.81%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.41%) Hyper-V
7 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
8 14 (0.27%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.25%) vCloud
10 11 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
11 9 (0.17%) Postfix
12 7 (0.14%) KVM
13 5 (0.097%) Ceph
14 4 (0.077%) HDFS
14 4 (0.077%) Squid
15 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
16 1 (0.019%) GPFS
16 1 (0.019%) Slurm Workload Manager
16 1 (0.019%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 437 (8.45%) Kubernetes
2 392 (7.58%) Terraform
3 108 (2.09%) Grafana
4 101 (1.95%) Ansible
5 50 (0.97%) Oracle RMAN
5 50 (0.97%) Prometheus
6 46 (0.89%) Data Guard
7 33 (0.64%) Control-M
8 28 (0.54%) SCOM
9 19 (0.37%) Kibana
10 17 (0.33%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.31%) Nagios
11 16 (0.31%) Netcool
11 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
13 13 (0.25%) OpenView
13 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 11 (0.21%) Microsoft Clustering
14 11 (0.21%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 10 (0.19%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 910 (17.60%) Oracle
2 840 (16.25%) Microsoft
3 601 (11.62%) Databricks
4 195 (3.77%) Google
5 182 (3.52%) Informatica
6 144 (2.79%) Talend
7 141 (2.73%) SAP
8 132 (2.55%) ServiceNow
9 93 (1.80%) IBM
10 87 (1.68%) Splunk
11 75 (1.45%) Denodo
12 72 (1.39%) VMware
13 70 (1.35%) Salesforce
14 42 (0.81%) Dynatrace
15 40 (0.77%) BMC
15 40 (0.77%) Citrix
16 38 (0.74%) Bloomberg
17 36 (0.70%) Murex
18 35 (0.68%) Adobe
18 35 (0.68%) Sybase