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

6 months to
9 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 14 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 -2 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,168 3,762 4,187
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.48% 11.34% 11.03%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.13% 34.61% 34.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,471 2,537 2,888
10th Percentile £350 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £600 £600 £625
90th Percentile £688 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 94 85 54
10th Percentile £21.25 £23.08 £19.71
25th Percentile £26.60 £31.25 £25.99
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £36.25
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +37.93% -20.99%
75th Percentile £69.69 £57.50 £51.75
90th Percentile £75.70 - £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £30.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +66.67% -33.98%

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 14,302 10,869 12,198
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.24% 32.77% 32.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,290 7,140 8,017
10th Percentile £363 £342 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £645
90th Percentile £725 £734 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 551 298 333
10th Percentile £21.65 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £44.75 £40.00 £44.49
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £75.38 £76.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 9 October 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 9 October 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 9 October 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 4,441 £500 - 6,648
London -6 2,519 £525 - 4,181
UK excluding London -5 2,056 £475 - 2,893
Work from Home -3 1,504 £500 - 2,721
North of England +2 597 £475 +5.56% 796
South East -13 442 £475 -5.00% 666
Midlands -5 433 £469 -2.60% 448
West Midlands -3 343 £469 -6.85% 285
North West +5 300 £500 +15.61% 475
Yorkshire +10 243 £475 - 217
South West +2 234 £538 +14.36% 261
Scotland -7 208 £425 -10.24% 288
East of England -7 115 £500 -0.30% 227
East Midlands -9 88 £450 +9.76% 160
North East -5 64 £400 -11.11% 109
Wales -8 36 £475 +4.97% 87
Northern Ireland -6 21 £413 -21.43% 149
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
1 262 (5.07%) Apache Airflow
2 242 (4.68%) Confluence
3 224 (4.33%) Apache Spark
4 179 (3.46%) Apache
5 96 (1.86%) SharePoint
6 71 (1.37%) SAS
7 41 (0.79%) WebLogic
8 36 (0.70%) IIS
9 34 (0.66%) Oracle Workflow
10 31 (0.60%) Jupyter
11 28 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
12 24 (0.46%) Palantir Foundry
13 20 (0.39%) Camunda
13 20 (0.39%) CMS
14 18 (0.35%) nginx
15 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
15 15 (0.29%) WebSphere
16 14 (0.27%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 10 (0.19%) Tomcat
18 8 (0.15%) Appian
Applications
1 296 (5.73%) Microsoft Excel
2 67 (1.30%) Microsoft Office
3 36 (0.70%) MS Visio
3 36 (0.70%) Spreadsheet
4 22 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 11 (0.21%) Chatbot
6 8 (0.15%) Windchill
7 4 (0.077%) Acrobat
7 4 (0.077%) Notion
7 4 (0.077%) Photoshop
8 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.058%) Mingle
9 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.019%) Notepad++
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 44 (0.85%) Dynamics CRM
2 38 (0.74%) Oracle EBS
3 30 (0.58%) Aladdin
4 29 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
5 28 (0.54%) Oracle Payables
6 26 (0.50%) Remedy ITSM
7 19 (0.37%) Oracle ERP
8 16 (0.31%) Oracle General Ledger
8 16 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 13 (0.25%) Oracle Financials
10 12 (0.23%) Finacle
10 12 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
10 12 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
11 11 (0.21%) Oracle EBS R12
11 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.19%) NEC Housing
12 10 (0.19%) NetSuite
12 10 (0.19%) Oracle FAH
13 9 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
14 8 (0.15%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,581 (30.59%) Azure
2 1,270 (24.57%) AWS
3 962 (18.61%) Power Platform
4 541 (10.47%) GCP
5 411 (7.95%) Azure DevOps
6 408 (7.89%) Snowflake
7 376 (7.28%) GitHub
8 319 (6.17%) Azure Data Factory
9 316 (6.11%) dbt
10 300 (5.80%) Serverless
11 267 (5.17%) Amazon S3
12 200 (3.87%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 195 (3.77%) AWS Lambda
14 174 (3.37%) GitHub Actions
15 118 (2.28%) SaaS
16 115 (2.23%) Entra ID
17 107 (2.07%) Power Automate
18 104 (2.01%) PowerApps
19 101 (1.95%) Azure Databricks
20 85 (1.64%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 72 (1.39%) DNS
2 46 (0.89%) Firewall
3 36 (0.70%) HTTP
4 32 (0.62%) SSL
5 29 (0.56%) Network Security
6 24 (0.46%) Broadband
7 23 (0.45%) TCP/IP
8 22 (0.43%) VPN
9 21 (0.41%) Internet
10 16 (0.31%) DHCP
11 14 (0.27%) SSH
12 12 (0.23%) Reverse Proxy
12 12 (0.23%) SAN
12 12 (0.23%) SNMP
12 12 (0.23%) WAN
13 11 (0.21%) Kerberos
14 8 (0.15%) HTTPS
14 8 (0.15%) Multicast
15 7 (0.14%) 5G
15 7 (0.14%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 879 (17.01%) Power BI
2 696 (13.47%) Data Warehouse
3 666 (12.89%) SQL Server
4 350 (6.77%) Relational Database
5 333 (6.44%) PostgreSQL
6 325 (6.29%) Data Lake
7 290 (5.61%) Metadata
8 272 (5.26%) Tableau
9 253 (4.90%) NoSQL
10 244 (4.72%) Oracle Database
11 218 (4.22%) BigQuery
12 205 (3.97%) Azure SQL Database
13 146 (2.83%) Delta Lake
14 145 (2.81%) Amazon Redshift
14 145 (2.81%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 126 (2.44%) MySQL
16 125 (2.42%) MongoDB
17 118 (2.28%) Big Data
18 117 (2.26%) Amazon Athena
19 109 (2.11%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 714 (13.82%) Git
2 437 (8.46%) JIRA
3 291 (5.63%) Jenkins
4 266 (5.15%) GitLab
5 100 (1.93%) Selenium
6 98 (1.90%) JUnit
7 91 (1.76%) Maven
8 85 (1.64%) Gradle
9 71 (1.37%) Postman
10 58 (1.12%) Mockito
11 46 (0.89%) Bitbucket
12 44 (0.85%) SonarQube
13 43 (0.83%) Oracle Forms
14 37 (0.72%) Visual Studio
14 37 (0.72%) Zephyr
15 33 (0.64%) REST Assured
16 31 (0.60%) Team Foundation Server
17 29 (0.56%) Artifactory
18 27 (0.52%) MLflow
19 25 (0.48%) Cucumber
General
1 1,415 (27.38%) Social Skills
2 1,367 (26.45%) Finance
3 1,070 (20.70%) Analytical Skills
4 619 (11.98%) Banking
5 490 (9.48%) Public Sector
6 160 (3.10%) Retail
7 155 (3.00%) Marketing
8 152 (2.94%) Investment Banking
9 143 (2.77%) Front Office
10 103 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 90 (1.74%) Manufacturing
12 86 (1.66%) Documentation Skills
13 61 (1.18%) Legal
14 59 (1.14%) Financial Institution
15 51 (0.99%) Back Office
16 48 (0.93%) Local Government
16 48 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
17 45 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
17 45 (0.87%) Military
18 43 (0.83%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,141 (22.08%) Developer
2 940 (18.19%) Data Engineer
3 777 (15.03%) Analyst
4 762 (14.74%) Senior
5 366 (7.08%) Lead
6 337 (6.52%) Data Analyst
7 255 (4.93%) Architect
8 253 (4.90%) Business Analyst
9 224 (4.33%) Senior Data Engineer
10 211 (4.08%) Consultant
11 205 (3.97%) DBA
12 201 (3.89%) Java Developer
13 182 (3.52%) Senior Developer
14 128 (2.48%) Python Developer
15 124 (2.40%) Azure Engineer
16 123 (2.38%) Full-Stack Developer
17 122 (2.36%) Software Engineer
18 121 (2.34%) Python Engineer
19 120 (2.32%) Data Architect
20 117 (2.26%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 531 (10.27%) REST
2 444 (8.59%) .NET
3 432 (8.36%) Terraform
4 366 (7.08%) Kafka
5 354 (6.85%) PySpark
6 288 (5.57%) Spring
7 280 (5.42%) Spring Boot
8 244 (4.72%) React
9 217 (4.20%) JSON
10 211 (4.08%) RESTful
11 209 (4.04%) HTML
12 182 (3.52%) XML
13 168 (3.25%) CSS
14 142 (2.75%) Web Services
15 135 (2.61%) SOAP
16 131 (2.53%) AngularJS
17 106 (2.05%) Middleware
18 96 (1.86%) OAuth
19 95 (1.84%) .NET Framework
19 95 (1.84%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 341 (6.60%) Cloud Native
2 280 (5.42%) Data Structures
3 262 (5.07%) Product Ownership
4 167 (3.23%) Legacy Systems
5 149 (2.88%) Enterprise Software
5 149 (2.88%) Onboarding
6 147 (2.84%) Distributed Systems
7 115 (2.23%) Management Information System
8 105 (2.03%) AI Agents
9 90 (1.74%) Replication
9 90 (1.74%) Self-Motivation
10 84 (1.63%) Derivative
11 72 (1.39%) Data Protection Act
12 66 (1.28%) Algorithms
12 66 (1.28%) Analytical Mindset
12 66 (1.28%) Reference Data
13 63 (1.22%) Clustering
14 55 (1.06%) Data Centre
15 50 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
16 49 (0.95%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 377 (7.29%) Linux
2 314 (6.08%) Windows
3 236 (4.57%) Unix
4 133 (2.57%) Windows Server
5 30 (0.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.46%) Solaris
7 13 (0.25%) Ubuntu
8 12 (0.23%) VMS
9 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.17%) AIX
11 7 (0.14%) Android
12 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
13 5 (0.097%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.097%) zOS
14 4 (0.077%) OpenVMS
15 3 (0.058%) CentOS
15 3 (0.058%) Rocky
16 2 (0.039%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,444 (27.94%) Agile
2 1,428 (27.63%) CI/CD
3 1,378 (26.66%) Data Modelling
4 1,276 (24.69%) Analytics
5 1,091 (21.11%) ETL
6 1,083 (20.96%) Business Intelligence
7 1,000 (19.35%) Problem-Solving
8 982 (19.00%) DevOps
9 975 (18.87%) Data Pipeline
10 908 (17.57%) AI
11 890 (17.22%) Data Engineering
12 842 (16.29%) Validation
13 796 (15.40%) Stakeholder Management
14 776 (15.02%) Migration
15 663 (12.83%) Test Automation
16 615 (11.90%) Data Analysis
17 606 (11.73%) Data Governance
18 596 (11.53%) Continuous Improvement
19 549 (10.62%) Decision-Making
20 464 (8.98%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,833 (35.47%) Python
2 665 (12.87%) Java
3 460 (8.90%) C#
4 430 (8.32%) JavaScript
5 390 (7.55%) PL/SQL
6 260 (5.03%) PowerShell
7 250 (4.84%) T-SQL
8 213 (4.12%) TypeScript
9 151 (2.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 150 (2.90%) Shell Script
11 129 (2.50%) Bash
12 88 (1.70%) Scala
13 77 (1.49%) R
14 45 (0.87%) Bicep
15 43 (0.83%) C++
16 40 (0.77%) VBA
17 33 (0.64%) Kotlin
18 31 (0.60%) Go
19 29 (0.56%) C
19 29 (0.56%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,110 (21.48%) Security Cleared
2 875 (16.93%) SC Cleared
3 365 (7.06%) Degree
4 177 (3.42%) BPSS Clearance
5 143 (2.77%) DV Cleared
6 127 (2.46%) Computer Science Degree
7 87 (1.68%) Azure Certification
8 61 (1.18%) ISTQB
9 53 (1.03%) Microsoft Certification
10 49 (0.95%) AWS Certification
11 43 (0.83%) Master's Degree
12 20 (0.39%) CISSP
12 20 (0.39%) ISEB
13 18 (0.35%) DBS Check
14 17 (0.33%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 16 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 15 (0.29%) ACCA
16 15 (0.29%) CIMA
17 14 (0.27%) PMI Certification
18 13 (0.25%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1,054 (20.39%) Data Quality
2 410 (7.93%) QA
3 130 (2.52%) GDPR
4 77 (1.49%) Accessibility
5 49 (0.95%) SLA
6 33 (0.64%) ISO 20022
7 29 (0.56%) Actionable Recommendations
8 24 (0.46%) NIST
9 23 (0.45%) IFRS
10 22 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 18 (0.35%) MiFID
12 15 (0.29%) COBIT
13 14 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
13 14 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
14 13 (0.25%) GMP
14 13 (0.25%) GxP
15 12 (0.23%) Basel III
15 12 (0.23%) SEPA
16 10 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 17025
16 10 (0.19%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 476 (9.21%) Docker
2 134 (2.59%) Active Directory
3 52 (1.01%) VMware Infrastructure
4 37 (0.72%) Oracle RAC
4 37 (0.72%) Virtual Machines
5 20 (0.39%) Hyper-V
6 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
7 16 (0.31%) vCloud
7 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
8 15 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
9 5 (0.097%) NFS
9 5 (0.097%) Postfix
10 4 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
10 4 (0.077%) GPFS
10 4 (0.077%) KVM
10 4 (0.077%) Squid
11 2 (0.039%) Ceph
11 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
11 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
12 1 (0.019%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 432 (8.36%) Kubernetes
2 112 (2.17%) Grafana
3 104 (2.01%) Ansible
4 59 (1.14%) Prometheus
5 45 (0.87%) Control-M
6 43 (0.83%) Kibana
7 40 (0.77%) SCOM
8 38 (0.74%) Data Guard
9 36 (0.70%) Oracle RMAN
10 17 (0.33%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
10 17 (0.33%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.31%) Single Sign-On
12 12 (0.23%) Istio
12 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
12 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Intune
13 11 (0.21%) Argo
13 11 (0.21%) Progress Chef
14 9 (0.17%) Puppet
14 9 (0.17%) WMI
15 8 (0.15%) SCCM
Vendors
1 908 (17.57%) Oracle
2 891 (17.24%) Microsoft
3 669 (12.95%) Databricks
4 252 (4.88%) Google
5 151 (2.92%) Informatica
6 139 (2.69%) SAP
7 115 (2.23%) IBM
7 115 (2.23%) Talend
8 96 (1.86%) ServiceNow
9 87 (1.68%) Salesforce
10 83 (1.61%) Splunk
11 70 (1.35%) VMware
12 45 (0.87%) Denodo
13 44 (0.85%) Foundry
14 42 (0.81%) OpenAI
15 39 (0.75%) Bloomberg
15 39 (0.75%) UiPath
16 36 (0.70%) Murex
17 35 (0.68%) Sybase
18 34 (0.66%) Adobe