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

6 months to
28 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,131 3,787 4,064
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.55% 11.58% 10.48%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.50% 35.34% 33.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,430 2,601 2,956
10th Percentile £357 £331 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £600 £600 £638
90th Percentile £688 £738 £749
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £469 £475
% change year-on-year +0.21% -1.26% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 93 91 46
10th Percentile £23.15 £28.00 £20.12
25th Percentile £29.96 £31.70 £30.00
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.58
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +23.22% -11.56%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.29
90th Percentile £81.20 £62.50 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +42.86% -13.21%

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 14,057 10,715 12,221
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.15% 32.76% 31.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,142 7,134 8,465
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £530
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -5.57% -3.64%
75th Percentile £623 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 525 296 368
10th Percentile £28.50 £29.00 £29.33
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.64 £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 £67.31 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.80 £79.38 £75.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.25 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.42% -4.23% +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 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 28 August 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 28 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 -5 4,460 £500 - 4,556
London -6 2,495 £525 - 2,921
UK excluding London -9 2,083 £470 +0.21% 2,262
Work from Home -4 1,523 £500 - 1,918
North of England -3 588 £466 -0.59% 592
Midlands -3 467 £465 +3.33% 329
South East -12 460 £490 -2.00% 627
West Midlands -2 366 £469 -1.26% 184
North West -2 297 £477 +1.60% 350
Yorkshire +2 251 £475 +1.33% 154
South West -2 227 £505 +18.82% 283
Scotland -5 191 £426 -7.84% 160
East of England -3 122 £479 -4.49% 162
East Midlands -6 98 £463 +19.35% 145
North East -17 49 £413 -11.29% 95
Wales -7 40 £475 +5.56% 63
Northern Ireland -11 17 £363 -29.27% 70
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
1 230 (4.48%) Apache Airflow
2 215 (4.19%) Confluence
3 211 (4.11%) Apache Spark
4 170 (3.31%) Apache
5 93 (1.81%) SAS
6 84 (1.64%) SharePoint
7 44 (0.86%) Oracle Workflow
8 37 (0.72%) IIS
9 29 (0.57%) WebLogic
10 28 (0.55%) Jupyter
11 25 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
12 22 (0.43%) nginx
12 22 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
13 19 (0.37%) WebSphere
14 18 (0.35%) Camunda
14 18 (0.35%) CMS
15 16 (0.31%) Tomcat
16 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
17 9 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
18 8 (0.16%) Appian
Applications
1 314 (6.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.23%) Microsoft Office
3 41 (0.80%) MS Visio
4 39 (0.76%) Spreadsheet
5 27 (0.53%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.078%) Microsoft Project
8 4 (0.078%) Notion
8 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
10 2 (0.039%) Windchill
11 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.019%) Mingle
11 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.019%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 50 (0.97%) Oracle EBS
2 45 (0.88%) Dynamics CRM
3 32 (0.62%) SAP S/4HANA
4 29 (0.57%) Aladdin
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
6 24 (0.47%) Remedy ITSM
7 17 (0.33%) Oracle EBS R12
8 16 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 14 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
10 12 (0.23%) Finacle
11 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
11 11 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.19%) NetSuite
12 10 (0.19%) Oracle Financials
13 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
14 8 (0.16%) Infor LN
14 8 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 1,626 (31.69%) Azure
2 1,221 (23.80%) AWS
3 956 (18.63%) Power Platform
4 468 (9.12%) GCP
5 456 (8.89%) Azure DevOps
6 378 (7.37%) GitHub
7 367 (7.15%) Snowflake
8 341 (6.65%) Azure Data Factory
9 311 (6.06%) Serverless
10 289 (5.63%) dbt
11 243 (4.74%) Amazon S3
12 215 (4.19%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 204 (3.98%) AWS Lambda
14 188 (3.66%) GitHub Actions
15 108 (2.10%) SaaS
16 102 (1.99%) Power Automate
17 97 (1.89%) Entra ID
18 94 (1.83%) PowerApps
19 89 (1.73%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 72 (1.40%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 69 (1.34%) DNS
2 48 (0.94%) Firewall
3 33 (0.64%) HTTP
4 30 (0.58%) Network Security
5 29 (0.57%) SSL
6 23 (0.45%) TCP/IP
7 22 (0.43%) SNMP
8 20 (0.39%) Internet
8 20 (0.39%) VPN
9 17 (0.33%) WAN
10 16 (0.31%) Broadband
10 16 (0.31%) DHCP
10 16 (0.31%) SSH
11 11 (0.21%) HTTPS
12 10 (0.19%) SAN
12 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
13 9 (0.18%) Kerberos
13 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
13 9 (0.18%) Wireshark
14 8 (0.16%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 880 (17.15%) Power BI
2 722 (14.07%) Data Warehouse
3 648 (12.63%) SQL Server
4 345 (6.72%) Relational Database
5 327 (6.37%) Data Lake
6 314 (6.12%) PostgreSQL
7 301 (5.87%) Tableau
8 290 (5.65%) Metadata
9 259 (5.05%) NoSQL
10 226 (4.40%) Oracle Database
11 219 (4.27%) Azure SQL Database
12 187 (3.64%) BigQuery
13 159 (3.10%) Amazon Redshift
14 149 (2.90%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 147 (2.86%) Delta Lake
16 122 (2.38%) MongoDB
17 121 (2.36%) Big Data
18 118 (2.30%) MySQL
19 113 (2.20%) Oracle Reports
20 112 (2.18%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 615 (11.99%) Git
2 395 (7.70%) JIRA
3 293 (5.71%) Jenkins
4 241 (4.70%) GitLab
5 90 (1.75%) JUnit
6 88 (1.72%) Selenium
7 77 (1.50%) Gradle
8 76 (1.48%) Maven
9 64 (1.25%) Postman
10 58 (1.13%) Mockito
11 48 (0.94%) Oracle Forms
12 45 (0.88%) SonarQube
13 42 (0.82%) Visual Studio
14 39 (0.76%) Bitbucket
14 39 (0.76%) JMeter
15 31 (0.60%) MLflow
15 31 (0.60%) Zephyr
16 29 (0.57%) Team Foundation Server
17 27 (0.53%) Artifactory
17 27 (0.53%) Liquibase
General
1 1,373 (26.76%) Social Skills
2 1,304 (25.41%) Finance
3 1,050 (20.46%) Analytical Skills
4 531 (10.35%) Banking
5 472 (9.20%) Public Sector
6 152 (2.96%) Marketing
7 148 (2.88%) Front Office
8 144 (2.81%) Retail
9 137 (2.67%) Investment Banking
10 98 (1.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 93 (1.81%) Documentation Skills
12 75 (1.46%) Manufacturing
13 57 (1.11%) Legal
14 56 (1.09%) Financial Institution
15 55 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
16 45 (0.88%) Telecoms
17 44 (0.86%) Organisational Skills
18 40 (0.78%) Back Office
18 40 (0.78%) Law
19 39 (0.76%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 1,127 (21.96%) Developer
2 955 (18.61%) Data Engineer
3 770 (15.01%) Analyst
4 715 (13.93%) Senior
5 362 (7.06%) Lead
6 325 (6.33%) Data Analyst
7 278 (5.42%) Architect
8 260 (5.07%) Consultant
9 252 (4.91%) Business Analyst
10 213 (4.15%) DBA
11 205 (4.00%) Java Developer
12 202 (3.94%) Senior Data Engineer
13 180 (3.51%) Senior Developer
14 132 (2.57%) Software Engineer
15 129 (2.51%) SQL DBA
15 129 (2.51%) SQL Developer
16 123 (2.40%) Data Architect
17 121 (2.36%) Python Engineer
18 120 (2.34%) Python Developer
19 117 (2.28%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 465 (9.06%) REST
2 437 (8.52%) .NET
3 404 (7.87%) Terraform
4 350 (6.82%) PySpark
5 343 (6.68%) Kafka
6 280 (5.46%) Spring
7 267 (5.20%) Spring Boot
8 250 (4.87%) React
9 223 (4.35%) RESTful
10 208 (4.05%) JSON
11 199 (3.88%) HTML
12 189 (3.68%) XML
13 168 (3.27%) CSS
14 134 (2.61%) Web Services
15 125 (2.44%) AngularJS
16 114 (2.22%) Middleware
17 113 (2.20%) SOAP
18 111 (2.16%) Pandas
19 95 (1.85%) .NET Framework
20 91 (1.77%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 335 (6.53%) Cloud Native
2 263 (5.13%) Data Structures
3 222 (4.33%) Product Ownership
4 167 (3.25%) Legacy Systems
5 147 (2.86%) Distributed Systems
6 132 (2.57%) Onboarding
7 111 (2.16%) Enterprise Software
8 99 (1.93%) Management Information System
9 94 (1.83%) Derivative
10 85 (1.66%) Self-Motivation
11 72 (1.40%) Data Protection Act
11 72 (1.40%) Replication
12 70 (1.36%) Analytical Mindset
13 68 (1.33%) AI Agents
14 61 (1.19%) Algorithms
15 60 (1.17%) Clustering
16 59 (1.15%) Reference Data
17 55 (1.07%) Fixed Income
18 51 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
19 49 (0.95%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 375 (7.31%) Linux
2 315 (6.14%) Windows
3 244 (4.76%) Unix
4 122 (2.38%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.35%) AIX
7 16 (0.31%) Solaris
8 15 (0.29%) VMS
9 10 (0.19%) Ubuntu
9 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.14%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.097%) zOS
14 4 (0.078%) Android
14 4 (0.078%) Apple iOS
14 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2016
15 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
16 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,380 (26.90%) CI/CD
2 1,364 (26.58%) Agile
3 1,342 (26.15%) Data Modelling
4 1,264 (24.63%) Analytics
5 1,122 (21.87%) ETL
6 1,110 (21.63%) Business Intelligence
7 1,020 (19.88%) DevOps
8 993 (19.35%) Data Pipeline
9 980 (19.10%) Problem-Solving
10 849 (16.55%) Data Engineering
11 770 (15.01%) AI
12 759 (14.79%) Migration
13 743 (14.48%) Validation
14 652 (12.71%) Stakeholder Management
15 591 (11.52%) Data Governance
16 572 (11.15%) Test Automation
17 545 (10.62%) Data Analysis
18 520 (10.13%) Continuous Improvement
19 511 (9.96%) Decision-Making
20 432 (8.42%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,822 (35.51%) Python
2 661 (12.88%) Java
3 471 (9.18%) C#
4 409 (7.97%) PL/SQL
5 390 (7.60%) JavaScript
6 272 (5.30%) PowerShell
7 257 (5.01%) T-SQL
8 201 (3.92%) TypeScript
9 152 (2.96%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 149 (2.90%) Shell Script
11 115 (2.24%) Bash
12 97 (1.89%) R
13 72 (1.40%) Scala
14 59 (1.15%) C++
15 48 (0.94%) Bicep
16 46 (0.90%) VBA
17 30 (0.58%) C
17 30 (0.58%) VB.NET
18 27 (0.53%) Perl
19 26 (0.51%) VB
Qualifications
1 1,103 (21.50%) Security Cleared
2 892 (17.38%) SC Cleared
3 357 (6.96%) Degree
4 148 (2.88%) BPSS Clearance
5 134 (2.61%) Computer Science Degree
6 119 (2.32%) DV Cleared
7 81 (1.58%) Azure Certification
8 65 (1.27%) ISTQB
9 47 (0.92%) Master's Degree
10 46 (0.90%) Microsoft Certification
11 43 (0.84%) AWS Certification
12 20 (0.39%) ISEB
13 19 (0.37%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 18 (0.35%) CISSP
15 17 (0.33%) DBS Check
16 13 (0.25%) ACCA
16 13 (0.25%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 13 (0.25%) CIMA
17 12 (0.23%) FFIEC
18 11 (0.21%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 972 (18.94%) Data Quality
2 411 (8.01%) QA
3 165 (3.22%) GDPR
4 72 (1.40%) Accessibility
5 47 (0.92%) SLA
6 32 (0.62%) ISO 20022
7 28 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 23 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 22 (0.43%) Actionable Recommendations
10 19 (0.37%) IFRS
10 19 (0.37%) NIST
11 16 (0.31%) MiFID
12 15 (0.29%) PMO
13 14 (0.27%) Solvency II
14 12 (0.23%) PCI DSS
15 11 (0.21%) COBIT
15 11 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.21%) GMP
15 11 (0.21%) GxP
15 11 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 499 (9.73%) Docker
2 144 (2.81%) Active Directory
3 58 (1.13%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
5 40 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
6 24 (0.47%) Hyper-V
7 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
8 15 (0.29%) vCloud
8 15 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
8 15 (0.29%) VMware NSX
9 7 (0.14%) Postfix
10 6 (0.12%) Squid
11 5 (0.097%) Ceph
12 4 (0.078%) KVM
13 3 (0.058%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
14 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
14 2 (0.039%) GPFS
14 2 (0.039%) GridGain
15 1 (0.019%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 418 (8.15%) Kubernetes
2 104 (2.03%) Grafana
3 103 (2.01%) Ansible
4 51 (0.99%) Prometheus
5 48 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
6 46 (0.90%) Data Guard
7 43 (0.84%) Control-M
8 33 (0.64%) SCOM
9 22 (0.43%) Kibana
10 16 (0.31%) Nagios
10 16 (0.31%) Netcool
10 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
11 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
11 15 (0.29%) vCenter Server
12 13 (0.25%) OpenView
12 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
13 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
13 12 (0.23%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
14 11 (0.21%) Microsoft Intune
15 10 (0.19%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 890 (17.35%) Oracle
2 863 (16.82%) Microsoft
3 620 (12.08%) Databricks
4 197 (3.84%) Google
5 166 (3.24%) Informatica
6 141 (2.75%) SAP
7 123 (2.40%) Talend
8 105 (2.05%) ServiceNow
9 104 (2.03%) IBM
10 86 (1.68%) Splunk
11 76 (1.48%) VMware
12 70 (1.36%) Salesforce
13 62 (1.21%) Denodo
14 42 (0.82%) Bloomberg
14 42 (0.82%) Dynatrace
15 39 (0.76%) BMC
15 39 (0.76%) Sybase
16 37 (0.72%) Murex
17 35 (0.68%) Citrix
18 34 (0.66%) Adobe