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

6 months to
26 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,197 3,810 4,140
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.47% 11.52% 10.80%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.31% 34.92% 33.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,481 2,600 2,897
10th Percentile £350 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £600 £600 £638
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 93 83 53
10th Percentile £21.72 £25.85 £19.67
25th Percentile £28.00 £33.21 £25.99
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +36.99% -20.44%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £77.00 - £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 14,311 10,910 12,269
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.08% 32.98% 32.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,300 7,204 8,174
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £507 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.65% -3.52% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £495
% change year-on-year +5.26% -4.04% -1.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 550 295 344
10th Percentile £24.97 £29.00 £26.06
25th Percentile £46.39 £41.25 £44.87
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £77.75 £78.38
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 26 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 26 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 26 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 -4 4,479 £500 - 6,771
London -6 2,522 £525 - 4,037
UK excluding London -5 2,080 £475 - 3,400
Work from Home -3 1,525 £500 - 2,882
North of England +1 593 £475 +5.56% 904
Midlands -5 452 £469 +1.41% 535
South East -15 446 £475 -3.06% 843
West Midlands -3 354 £469 -6.20% 324
North West +2 292 £500 +13.64% 520
Yorkshire +5 249 £456 -4.05% 285
South West 0 235 £525 +16.67% 328
Scotland -9 204 £429 -7.80% 293
East of England -10 121 £505 +0.50% 265
East Midlands -6 96 £463 +13.81% 211
North East -9 58 £400 -13.98% 105
Wales -6 37 £475 +4.97% 107
Northern Ireland -8 19 £363 -29.27% 163
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
1 254 (4.89%) Apache Airflow
2 236 (4.54%) Confluence
3 216 (4.16%) Apache Spark
4 173 (3.33%) Apache
5 94 (1.81%) SharePoint
6 90 (1.73%) SAS
7 40 (0.77%) Oracle Workflow
8 37 (0.71%) WebLogic
9 36 (0.69%) IIS
10 30 (0.58%) Jupyter
11 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
12 23 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
13 22 (0.42%) nginx
14 21 (0.40%) CMS
15 19 (0.37%) Camunda
16 16 (0.31%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
17 15 (0.29%) WebSphere
18 10 (0.19%) Tomcat
19 9 (0.17%) Appian
Applications
1 304 (5.85%) Microsoft Excel
2 67 (1.29%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.73%) MS Visio
4 36 (0.69%) Spreadsheet
5 24 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.15%) Windchill
8 7 (0.13%) Notepad++
9 4 (0.077%) Acrobat
9 4 (0.077%) Notion
9 4 (0.077%) Photoshop
10 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
10 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
11 2 (0.038%) Mingle
12 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
12 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 46 (0.89%) Dynamics CRM
2 45 (0.87%) Oracle EBS
3 30 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
4 29 (0.56%) Aladdin
5 28 (0.54%) Oracle Payables
6 26 (0.50%) Remedy ITSM
7 19 (0.37%) Oracle ERP
8 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
9 15 (0.29%) Oracle EBS R12
9 15 (0.29%) Oracle General Ledger
10 13 (0.25%) Finacle
11 12 (0.23%) Oracle Financials
11 12 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
12 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
12 11 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
12 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
13 10 (0.19%) NetSuite
13 10 (0.19%) Oracle FAH
14 9 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
14 9 (0.17%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,584 (30.48%) Azure
2 1,270 (24.44%) AWS
3 975 (18.76%) Power Platform
4 531 (10.22%) GCP
5 417 (8.02%) Azure DevOps
6 410 (7.89%) Snowflake
7 362 (6.97%) GitHub
8 328 (6.31%) Azure Data Factory
9 316 (6.08%) dbt
10 305 (5.87%) Serverless
11 269 (5.18%) Amazon S3
12 204 (3.93%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 203 (3.91%) AWS Lambda
14 174 (3.35%) GitHub Actions
15 113 (2.17%) SaaS
16 111 (2.14%) Power Automate
17 104 (2.00%) PowerApps
18 99 (1.90%) Entra ID
19 93 (1.79%) Azure Databricks
20 88 (1.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 66 (1.27%) DNS
2 41 (0.79%) Firewall
3 38 (0.73%) HTTP
4 29 (0.56%) SSL
5 22 (0.42%) Broadband
5 22 (0.42%) Internet
5 22 (0.42%) Network Security
5 22 (0.42%) TCP/IP
6 19 (0.37%) VPN
7 15 (0.29%) DHCP
7 15 (0.29%) SNMP
8 14 (0.27%) SSH
9 12 (0.23%) WAN
10 11 (0.21%) Kerberos
11 10 (0.19%) SAN
11 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
12 8 (0.15%) HTTPS
12 8 (0.15%) Reverse Proxy
12 8 (0.15%) RTP
12 8 (0.15%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 895 (17.22%) Power BI
2 713 (13.72%) Data Warehouse
3 658 (12.66%) SQL Server
4 351 (6.75%) Relational Database
5 337 (6.48%) PostgreSQL
6 327 (6.29%) Data Lake
7 291 (5.60%) Metadata
8 283 (5.45%) Tableau
9 248 (4.77%) NoSQL
10 242 (4.66%) Oracle Database
11 218 (4.19%) BigQuery
12 191 (3.68%) Azure SQL Database
13 152 (2.92%) Amazon Redshift
14 146 (2.81%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 144 (2.77%) Delta Lake
16 131 (2.52%) MySQL
17 123 (2.37%) Amazon Athena
18 120 (2.31%) Big Data
19 118 (2.27%) MongoDB
20 104 (2.00%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 694 (13.35%) Git
2 429 (8.25%) JIRA
3 293 (5.64%) Jenkins
4 257 (4.95%) GitLab
5 103 (1.98%) Selenium
6 95 (1.83%) JUnit
7 87 (1.67%) Maven
8 85 (1.64%) Gradle
9 70 (1.35%) Postman
10 58 (1.12%) Mockito
11 48 (0.92%) Oracle Forms
12 47 (0.90%) SonarQube
13 43 (0.83%) Bitbucket
14 36 (0.69%) Visual Studio
15 35 (0.67%) Zephyr
16 30 (0.58%) REST Assured
16 30 (0.58%) Team Foundation Server
17 29 (0.56%) MLflow
18 28 (0.54%) Artifactory
19 27 (0.52%) JMeter
General
1 1,408 (27.09%) Social Skills
2 1,368 (26.32%) Finance
3 1,069 (20.57%) Analytical Skills
4 599 (11.53%) Banking
5 474 (9.12%) Public Sector
6 158 (3.04%) Marketing
7 152 (2.92%) Retail
8 143 (2.75%) Front Office
8 143 (2.75%) Investment Banking
9 106 (2.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 90 (1.73%) Documentation Skills
11 87 (1.67%) Manufacturing
12 60 (1.15%) Legal
13 55 (1.06%) Financial Institution
14 51 (0.98%) Presentation Skills
15 48 (0.92%) Back Office
15 48 (0.92%) Local Government
16 45 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
17 43 (0.83%) Law
18 41 (0.79%) Military
Job Titles
1 1,140 (21.94%) Developer
2 968 (18.63%) Data Engineer
3 776 (14.93%) Analyst
4 752 (14.47%) Senior
5 369 (7.10%) Lead
6 333 (6.41%) Data Analyst
7 260 (5.00%) Architect
8 253 (4.87%) Business Analyst
9 223 (4.29%) Senior Data Engineer
10 216 (4.16%) Consultant
11 204 (3.93%) DBA
12 203 (3.91%) Java Developer
13 187 (3.60%) Senior Developer
14 125 (2.41%) Python Developer
14 125 (2.41%) SQL Developer
15 124 (2.39%) Software Engineer
16 123 (2.37%) Data Architect
17 121 (2.33%) Python Engineer
17 121 (2.33%) SQL DBA
18 120 (2.31%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 504 (9.70%) REST
2 442 (8.50%) .NET
3 409 (7.87%) Terraform
4 350 (6.73%) Kafka
5 346 (6.66%) PySpark
6 285 (5.48%) Spring
7 279 (5.37%) Spring Boot
8 239 (4.60%) React
9 209 (4.02%) HTML
10 208 (4.00%) RESTful
11 206 (3.96%) JSON
12 181 (3.48%) XML
13 175 (3.37%) CSS
14 142 (2.73%) Web Services
15 136 (2.62%) SOAP
16 125 (2.41%) AngularJS
17 113 (2.17%) Middleware
18 102 (1.96%) Pandas
19 94 (1.81%) .NET Framework
20 87 (1.67%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 334 (6.43%) Cloud Native
2 279 (5.37%) Data Structures
3 253 (4.87%) Product Ownership
4 168 (3.23%) Legacy Systems
5 151 (2.91%) Onboarding
6 145 (2.79%) Distributed Systems
7 137 (2.64%) Enterprise Software
8 110 (2.12%) Management Information System
9 96 (1.85%) AI Agents
10 88 (1.69%) Self-Motivation
11 84 (1.62%) Derivative
12 78 (1.50%) Replication
13 72 (1.39%) Data Protection Act
14 67 (1.29%) Analytical Mindset
15 64 (1.23%) Clustering
16 61 (1.17%) Reference Data
17 56 (1.08%) Algorithms
18 54 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
19 49 (0.94%) Data Centre
20 48 (0.92%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 381 (7.33%) Linux
2 315 (6.06%) Windows
3 258 (4.96%) Unix
4 127 (2.44%) Windows Server
5 30 (0.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 25 (0.48%) Solaris
7 12 (0.23%) Ubuntu
8 11 (0.21%) AIX
9 10 (0.19%) VMS
9 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.13%) Android
12 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
13 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.096%) zOS
14 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2016
15 3 (0.058%) CentOS
15 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
15 3 (0.058%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,411 (27.15%) Agile
2 1,407 (27.07%) CI/CD
3 1,372 (26.40%) Data Modelling
4 1,292 (24.86%) Analytics
5 1,112 (21.40%) Business Intelligence
6 1,111 (21.38%) ETL
7 1,011 (19.45%) Problem-Solving
8 995 (19.15%) Data Pipeline
9 988 (19.01%) DevOps
10 869 (16.72%) Data Engineering
11 864 (16.62%) AI
12 814 (15.66%) Validation
13 788 (15.16%) Migration
14 775 (14.91%) Stakeholder Management
15 615 (11.83%) Test Automation
16 613 (11.80%) Data Governance
17 598 (11.51%) Data Analysis
18 585 (11.26%) Continuous Improvement
19 545 (10.49%) Decision-Making
20 444 (8.54%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,857 (35.73%) Python
2 659 (12.68%) Java
3 458 (8.81%) C#
4 414 (7.97%) JavaScript
5 409 (7.87%) PL/SQL
6 261 (5.02%) PowerShell
7 252 (4.85%) T-SQL
8 206 (3.96%) TypeScript
9 153 (2.94%) Shell Script
10 147 (2.83%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 128 (2.46%) Bash
12 87 (1.67%) R
13 86 (1.65%) Scala
14 46 (0.89%) C++
15 44 (0.85%) VBA
16 38 (0.73%) Bicep
17 30 (0.58%) C
17 30 (0.58%) Go
18 29 (0.56%) VB.NET
19 28 (0.54%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,113 (21.42%) Security Cleared
2 893 (17.18%) SC Cleared
3 361 (6.95%) Degree
4 172 (3.31%) BPSS Clearance
5 132 (2.54%) DV Cleared
6 127 (2.44%) Computer Science Degree
7 83 (1.60%) Azure Certification
8 60 (1.15%) ISTQB
9 54 (1.04%) Microsoft Certification
10 47 (0.90%) AWS Certification
11 43 (0.83%) Master's Degree
12 20 (0.38%) CISSP
13 19 (0.37%) DBS Check
13 19 (0.37%) ISEB
14 17 (0.33%) ACCA
14 17 (0.33%) CIMA
15 16 (0.31%) Oracle Certification
16 15 (0.29%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
17 14 (0.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 13 (0.25%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1,046 (20.13%) Data Quality
2 422 (8.12%) QA
3 140 (2.69%) GDPR
4 70 (1.35%) Accessibility
5 53 (1.02%) SLA
6 34 (0.65%) ISO 20022
7 29 (0.56%) Actionable Recommendations
8 23 (0.44%) IFRS
8 23 (0.44%) NIST
9 22 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 18 (0.35%) MiFID
11 16 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 15 (0.29%) COBIT
13 13 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
13 13 (0.25%) GMP
13 13 (0.25%) GxP
14 12 (0.23%) SEPA
15 11 (0.21%) Basel III
15 11 (0.21%) GRC
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
System Software
1 487 (9.37%) Docker
2 124 (2.39%) Active Directory
3 53 (1.02%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.81%) Oracle RAC
5 38 (0.73%) Virtual Machines
6 21 (0.40%) Hyper-V
7 19 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
8 16 (0.31%) vCloud
8 16 (0.31%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 6 (0.12%) Postfix
10 5 (0.096%) KVM
11 4 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
11 4 (0.077%) NFS
11 4 (0.077%) Squid
12 3 (0.058%) GPFS
13 2 (0.038%) Ceph
13 2 (0.038%) DFS Replication
13 2 (0.038%) Dovecot
14 1 (0.019%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 415 (7.99%) Kubernetes
2 112 (2.16%) Grafana
3 96 (1.85%) Ansible
4 56 (1.08%) Prometheus
5 47 (0.90%) Oracle RMAN
6 44 (0.85%) Control-M
6 44 (0.85%) Data Guard
7 40 (0.77%) Kibana
7 40 (0.77%) SCOM
8 16 (0.31%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 16 (0.31%) vCenter Server
9 13 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
10 12 (0.23%) Istio
10 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
11 11 (0.21%) Microsoft Intune
11 11 (0.21%) Netcool
12 10 (0.19%) Argo
12 10 (0.19%) Tivoli
13 9 (0.17%) Nagios
13 9 (0.17%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 917 (17.64%) Oracle
2 875 (16.84%) Microsoft
3 658 (12.66%) Databricks
4 239 (4.60%) Google
5 148 (2.85%) Informatica
6 141 (2.71%) SAP
7 121 (2.33%) Talend
8 115 (2.21%) IBM
9 98 (1.89%) ServiceNow
10 90 (1.73%) Splunk
11 89 (1.71%) Salesforce
12 71 (1.37%) VMware
13 58 (1.12%) Denodo
14 40 (0.77%) Foundry
15 39 (0.75%) Adobe
15 39 (0.75%) Bloomberg
16 37 (0.71%) OpenAI
17 36 (0.69%) Dynatrace
17 36 (0.69%) Murex
17 36 (0.69%) UiPath