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

6 months to
27 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 12 14
Rank change year-on-year -6 +2 -3
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,400 3,505 4,418
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.98% 12.08% 9.98%
As % of the Programming Languages category 34.74% 35.39% 34.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,019 2,444 3,140
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £408 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -2.42%
75th Percentile £588 £619 £638
90th Percentile £700 £738 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - -2.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 66 61 65
10th Percentile £25.85 £23.00 £21.64
25th Percentile £34.26 £30.00 £25.79
Median hourly rate £49.36 £47.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +3.92% +11.76% -15.00%
75th Percentile £69.86 £65.62 £53.75
90th Percentile £83.88 £77.19 £62.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.50 £43.06 £40.25
% change year-on-year +45.16% +6.97% +5.11%

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 12,666 9,904 12,925
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.72% 34.12% 29.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,400 6,663 9,134
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £716 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £480 £488
% change year-on-year -1.04% -1.54% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 516 243 482
10th Percentile £40.63 £22.27 £30.69
25th Percentile £53.69 £34.13 £46.20
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.25 £85.00 £74.94
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.56% +3.90% -3.75%

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 27 March 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 27 March 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 27 March 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 3,864 £500 -2.44% 2,193
London 0 2,253 £510 -5.12% 840
UK excluding London -7 1,699 £475 - 1,697
Work from Home -4 1,340 £500 -0.99% 1,097
Midlands +2 475 £470 +2.17% 280
North of England -10 439 £460 -3.16% 459
West Midlands +7 378 £465 -2.52% 157
South East -19 298 £500 - 526
North West +5 252 £449 -5.58% 248
South West -5 204 £475 -6.86% 165
Yorkshire -22 166 £500 - 149
Scotland -7 160 £468 +3.89% 85
East Midlands -4 95 £537 +37.34% 123
East of England -19 86 £500 +6.67% 147
Wales +5 41 £425 +6.25% 46
North East -3 33 £475 +3.26% 66
Northern Ireland -6 21 £400 - 15

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
1 242 (5.50%) Apache Spark
2 177 (4.02%) Apache Airflow
3 165 (3.75%) Apache
4 136 (3.09%) Confluence
5 89 (2.02%) SAS
6 82 (1.86%) SharePoint
7 50 (1.14%) WebLogic
8 43 (0.98%) Tomcat
9 29 (0.66%) IIS
10 28 (0.64%) WebSphere
11 24 (0.55%) Apache Geronimo
11 24 (0.55%) Apache ServiceMix
11 24 (0.55%) Red Hat Fuse
12 23 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
13 20 (0.45%) Jupyter
14 18 (0.41%) Oracle Workflow
15 17 (0.39%) CMS
15 17 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
16 16 (0.36%) Tuxedo
17 15 (0.34%) nginx
Applications
1 293 (6.66%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.39%) Microsoft Office
3 47 (1.07%) MS Visio
4 41 (0.93%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.45%) Spreadsheet
6 11 (0.25%) Microsoft Project
7 6 (0.14%) Chatbot
8 3 (0.068%) Notion
8 3 (0.068%) Oracle Smart View
8 3 (0.068%) Trello
9 1 (0.023%) InDesign
9 1 (0.023%) Mingle
9 1 (0.023%) SPSS
9 1 (0.023%) Weka
Business Applications
1 38 (0.86%) Oracle EBS
2 26 (0.59%) Aladdin
2 26 (0.59%) Oracle Payables
3 24 (0.55%) Oracle Receivables
4 22 (0.50%) Dynamics CRM
5 21 (0.48%) NEC Housing
5 21 (0.48%) Oracle General Ledger
6 19 (0.43%) Oracle EBS R12
7 16 (0.36%) Oracle ERP
7 16 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
8 15 (0.34%) Oracle Assets
9 14 (0.32%) NetSuite
10 12 (0.27%) Oracle Cash Management
11 11 (0.25%) Advent Geneva
11 11 (0.25%) Oracle 11i
11 11 (0.25%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 11 (0.25%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
11 11 (0.25%) Remedy ITSM
12 10 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
13 8 (0.18%) Endur
Cloud Services
1 1,569 (35.66%) Azure
2 1,082 (24.59%) AWS
3 833 (18.93%) Power Platform
4 469 (10.66%) Azure DevOps
5 366 (8.32%) GitHub
6 362 (8.23%) GCP
7 354 (8.05%) Azure Data Factory
8 312 (7.09%) Serverless
9 283 (6.43%) Snowflake
10 247 (5.61%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 234 (5.32%) Amazon S3
12 190 (4.32%) GitHub Actions
13 185 (4.20%) dbt
14 159 (3.61%) AWS Lambda
15 110 (2.50%) Azure Functions
16 101 (2.30%) SaaS
17 97 (2.20%) Power Automate
18 81 (1.84%) AWS CloudFormation
19 80 (1.82%) Entra ID
20 77 (1.75%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 61 (1.39%) Firewall
2 43 (0.98%) DNS
3 29 (0.66%) HTTP
4 27 (0.61%) Network Security
5 20 (0.45%) SSL
5 20 (0.45%) TCP/IP
6 17 (0.39%) WAN
7 15 (0.34%) Internet
7 15 (0.34%) VPN
8 14 (0.32%) LAN
9 13 (0.30%) 5G
10 10 (0.23%) 4G
11 9 (0.20%) 2G
11 9 (0.20%) DHCP
11 9 (0.20%) Radio Access Network
12 8 (0.18%) Kerberos
12 8 (0.18%) SNMP
13 7 (0.16%) HTTPS
13 7 (0.16%) SAN
13 7 (0.16%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 757 (17.20%) Power BI
2 547 (12.43%) Data Warehouse
3 523 (11.89%) SQL Server
4 310 (7.05%) PostgreSQL
5 294 (6.68%) Relational Database
6 289 (6.57%) Data Lake
6 289 (6.57%) NoSQL
7 285 (6.48%) Tableau
8 261 (5.93%) Azure SQL Database
9 228 (5.18%) Metadata
10 158 (3.59%) Oracle Database
11 150 (3.41%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 138 (3.14%) Big Data
12 138 (3.14%) MySQL
13 129 (2.93%) BigQuery
14 126 (2.86%) Delta Lake
15 116 (2.64%) Amazon Redshift
16 110 (2.50%) MongoDB
17 105 (2.39%) Amazon RDS
18 99 (2.25%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 476 (10.82%) Git
2 341 (7.75%) JIRA
3 227 (5.16%) Jenkins
4 180 (4.09%) GitLab
5 71 (1.61%) Selenium
6 67 (1.52%) JUnit
7 50 (1.14%) Postman
8 41 (0.93%) MLflow
8 41 (0.93%) Oracle APEX
9 39 (0.89%) Cucumber
10 38 (0.86%) Visual Studio
11 35 (0.80%) JMeter
11 35 (0.80%) Maven
12 34 (0.77%) ERwin
12 34 (0.77%) Mockito
13 31 (0.70%) REST Assured
14 28 (0.64%) Bitbucket
15 26 (0.59%) Cypress.io
16 24 (0.55%) SpecFlow
17 23 (0.52%) Oracle Forms
General
1 1,239 (28.16%) Social Skills
2 1,163 (26.43%) Finance
3 817 (18.57%) Analytical Skills
4 434 (9.86%) Banking
5 404 (9.18%) Public Sector
6 114 (2.59%) Investment Banking
7 109 (2.48%) Documentation Skills
8 103 (2.34%) Front Office
9 88 (2.00%) Marketing
10 77 (1.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 75 (1.70%) Retail
12 58 (1.32%) Financial Institution
13 54 (1.23%) Legal
14 40 (0.91%) Publishing
14 40 (0.91%) Telecoms
15 38 (0.86%) Organisational Skills
16 37 (0.84%) Presentation Skills
17 36 (0.82%) Manufacturing
18 32 (0.73%) Law
19 28 (0.64%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 995 (22.61%) Developer
2 814 (18.50%) Data Engineer
3 662 (15.05%) Analyst
4 563 (12.80%) Senior
5 305 (6.93%) Lead
6 289 (6.57%) Data Analyst
7 254 (5.77%) Architect
8 225 (5.11%) Business Analyst
9 208 (4.73%) Consultant
10 154 (3.50%) Java Developer
11 152 (3.45%) Senior Developer
12 128 (2.91%) DBA
13 122 (2.77%) Azure Engineer
14 121 (2.75%) Senior Data Engineer
15 119 (2.70%) Software Engineer
16 112 (2.55%) C# Developer
17 104 (2.36%) Data Architect
18 101 (2.30%) Full-Stack Developer
19 98 (2.23%) Data Scientist
20 96 (2.18%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 390 (8.86%) .NET
2 347 (7.89%) REST
3 291 (6.61%) PySpark
4 277 (6.30%) Kafka
5 215 (4.89%) React
6 205 (4.66%) RESTful
7 184 (4.18%) Spring
8 167 (3.80%) Spring Boot
9 158 (3.59%) XML
10 154 (3.50%) HTML
11 151 (3.43%) JSON
12 134 (3.05%) CSS
12 134 (3.05%) Pandas
13 126 (2.86%) AngularJS
14 104 (2.36%) Node.js
15 97 (2.20%) Middleware
16 93 (2.11%) .NET Framework
17 92 (2.09%) Web Services
18 87 (1.98%) SOAP
19 79 (1.80%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 295 (6.70%) Cloud Native
2 158 (3.59%) Data Structures
3 147 (3.34%) Legacy Systems
4 130 (2.95%) Product Ownership
5 93 (2.11%) Management Information System
6 92 (2.09%) Distributed Systems
7 80 (1.82%) Data Protection Act
8 79 (1.80%) Derivative
9 75 (1.70%) Analytical Mindset
10 72 (1.64%) Algorithms
11 70 (1.59%) Onboarding
12 66 (1.50%) Equities
13 60 (1.36%) Fixed Income
14 52 (1.18%) Enterprise Software
14 52 (1.18%) Self-Motivation
15 47 (1.07%) Replication
16 46 (1.05%) Clustering
17 44 (1.00%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
18 39 (0.89%) Virtual Team
19 36 (0.82%) Market Risk
Operating Systems
1 312 (7.09%) Linux
2 258 (5.86%) Windows
3 200 (4.55%) Unix
4 90 (2.05%) Windows Server
5 30 (0.68%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.41%) AIX
7 17 (0.39%) Windows Server 2019
8 13 (0.30%) Windows Server 2016
9 10 (0.23%) VMS
9 10 (0.23%) Windows 10
10 7 (0.16%) Solaris
10 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2008
11 6 (0.14%) Android
11 6 (0.14%) Apple iOS
11 6 (0.14%) zOS
12 5 (0.11%) Oracle Linux
12 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
13 3 (0.068%) CentOS
14 2 (0.045%) Data ONTAP
14 2 (0.045%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,172 (26.64%) Agile
2 1,168 (26.55%) CI/CD
3 1,146 (26.05%) Analytics
4 1,100 (25.00%) Data Modelling
5 1,030 (23.41%) DevOps
6 1,009 (22.93%) Business Intelligence
7 1,001 (22.75%) ETL
8 936 (21.27%) Problem-Solving
9 773 (17.57%) Data Pipeline
10 675 (15.34%) Data Engineering
11 545 (12.39%) Data Governance
12 533 (12.11%) Migration
13 524 (11.91%) AI
14 497 (11.30%) Validation
15 424 (9.64%) Data Analysis
16 407 (9.25%) Test Automation
17 399 (9.07%) Decision-Making
18 398 (9.05%) Performance Tuning
19 396 (9.00%) Visualisation
20 385 (8.75%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 1,657 (37.66%) Python
2 605 (13.75%) Java
3 480 (10.91%) C#
4 350 (7.95%) JavaScript
5 314 (7.14%) PL/SQL
6 187 (4.25%) PowerShell
7 181 (4.11%) T-SQL
8 162 (3.68%) TypeScript
9 125 (2.84%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 124 (2.82%) R
11 123 (2.80%) Shell Script
12 92 (2.09%) Scala
13 77 (1.75%) Bash
14 76 (1.73%) C++
15 66 (1.50%) Bicep
16 60 (1.36%) VBA
17 47 (1.07%) Perl
18 37 (0.84%) VB
19 35 (0.80%) Go
20 24 (0.55%) PHP
Qualifications
1 897 (20.39%) Security Cleared
2 702 (15.95%) SC Cleared
3 373 (8.48%) Degree
4 125 (2.84%) Computer Science Degree
5 100 (2.27%) BPSS Clearance
6 72 (1.64%) Azure Certification
7 71 (1.61%) Master's Degree
8 57 (1.30%) DV Cleared
8 57 (1.30%) ISTQB
9 46 (1.05%) Microsoft Certification
10 40 (0.91%) AWS Certification
11 27 (0.61%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
12 16 (0.36%) CBAP
12 16 (0.36%) PhD
13 15 (0.34%) Oracle Certification
14 11 (0.25%) ISEB
15 10 (0.23%) CTC Cleared
15 10 (0.23%) DBS Check
15 10 (0.23%) PMP
16 9 (0.20%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 798 (18.14%) Data Quality
2 336 (7.64%) QA
3 193 (4.39%) GDPR
4 73 (1.66%) Accessibility
5 34 (0.77%) SLA
6 33 (0.75%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 32 (0.73%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 28 (0.64%) PMO
9 20 (0.45%) Actionable Recommendations
10 19 (0.43%) MiFID
10 19 (0.43%) WCAG
11 17 (0.39%) HIPAA
11 17 (0.39%) NIST
11 17 (0.39%) PCI DSS
12 14 (0.32%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 12 (0.27%) IFRS
13 12 (0.27%) ISO 20022
13 12 (0.27%) SEPA
14 11 (0.25%) EMIR
14 11 (0.25%) HL7
System Software
1 516 (11.73%) Docker
2 111 (2.52%) Active Directory
3 33 (0.75%) Virtual Machines
4 24 (0.55%) Oracle RAC
5 22 (0.50%) VMware Infrastructure
6 17 (0.39%) Hyper-V
7 8 (0.18%) HDFS
7 8 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
7 8 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
8 6 (0.14%) KVM
9 5 (0.11%) Postfix
9 5 (0.11%) RACF
9 5 (0.11%) XenApp
9 5 (0.11%) XenDesktop
10 3 (0.068%) Ceph
10 3 (0.068%) Oracle Clusterware
11 2 (0.045%) GridGain
11 2 (0.045%) NetIQ eDirectory
11 2 (0.045%) Squid
11 2 (0.045%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 447 (10.16%) Kubernetes
2 356 (8.09%) Terraform
3 95 (2.16%) Grafana
4 82 (1.86%) Ansible
5 66 (1.50%) Prometheus
6 32 (0.73%) Oracle RMAN
7 23 (0.52%) Single Sign-On
8 22 (0.50%) Data Guard
9 20 (0.45%) Progress Chef
10 16 (0.36%) SCCM
11 14 (0.32%) Control-M
12 13 (0.30%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
13 12 (0.27%) Kibana
14 10 (0.23%) WSUS
15 9 (0.20%) Puppet
15 9 (0.20%) vCenter Server
16 8 (0.18%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 8 (0.18%) HP Quality Center
16 8 (0.18%) Kiali
16 8 (0.18%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 726 (16.50%) Oracle
2 719 (16.34%) Microsoft
3 544 (12.36%) Databricks
4 181 (4.11%) Google
5 133 (3.02%) ServiceNow
6 132 (3.00%) Informatica
7 110 (2.50%) Talend
8 104 (2.36%) SAP
9 74 (1.68%) Splunk
10 72 (1.64%) IBM
11 65 (1.48%) Salesforce
12 49 (1.11%) Citrix
13 44 (1.00%) OpenAI
14 43 (0.98%) Denodo
15 41 (0.93%) VMware
16 40 (0.91%) MuleSoft
17 34 (0.77%) Bloomberg
18 30 (0.68%) Dynatrace
18 30 (0.68%) Foundry
18 30 (0.68%) TIBCO