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

6 months to
3 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 0
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,128 3,858 4,037
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.65% 11.65% 10.34%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.35% 35.40% 33.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,410 2,680 2,976
10th Percentile £355 £337 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £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 £465 £463 £473
% change year-on-year +0.54% -2.12% -5.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 99 66 48
10th Percentile £23.60 £20.78 £21.25
25th Percentile £33.88 £29.37 £29.06
Median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £40.58
Median % change year-on-year +14.56% -4.27% -13.20%
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% -23.05%

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 14,109 10,898 12,197
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.55% 32.91% 31.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,165 7,338 8,619
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £503 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.99% -4.29% -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £498
% change year-on-year +3.61% -4.57% -0.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 527 257 407
10th Percentile £32.63 £27.98 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.38 £36.25 £45.94
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.70 £81.18 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +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 3 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 3 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 3 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 4,478 £500 - 2,361
London -6 2,430 £525 -0.24% 1,210
UK excluding London -10 2,156 £465 +0.54% 1,526
Work from Home -6 1,545 £500 - 1,170
North of England -2 589 £460 -3.16% 402
Midlands +1 536 £459 +8.00% 224
South East -11 474 £475 -5.00% 443
West Midlands +5 438 £459 +2.00% 131
North West -1 313 £475 +1.28% 216
Yorkshire -7 237 £460 -3.16% 126
South West -5 226 £500 +17.65% 170
Scotland -6 191 £434 -3.61% 64
East of England -2 117 £475 -5.00% 106
East Midlands -2 94 £473 +22.06% 92
North East -14 51 £413 -10.81% 70
Wales -1 41 £468 +5.06% 42
Northern Ireland -10 16 £375 -26.83% 96

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
1 223 (4.35%) Apache Spark
1 223 (4.35%) Confluence
2 219 (4.27%) Apache Airflow
3 187 (3.65%) Apache
4 116 (2.26%) SAS
5 70 (1.37%) SharePoint
6 45 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
7 42 (0.82%) WebLogic
8 40 (0.78%) IIS
9 32 (0.62%) Tomcat
10 29 (0.57%) Jupyter
11 27 (0.53%) WebSphere
12 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
13 20 (0.39%) nginx
14 19 (0.37%) CMS
14 19 (0.37%) Microsoft Exchange
15 17 (0.33%) Apache Geronimo
15 17 (0.33%) Apache ServiceMix
15 17 (0.33%) Red Hat Fuse
16 13 (0.25%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 326 (6.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 64 (1.25%) Microsoft Office
3 54 (1.05%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.74%) Spreadsheet
5 30 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.078%) Notion
8 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.059%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.059%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Mingle
10 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 53 (1.03%) Oracle EBS
2 44 (0.86%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.57%) Aladdin
3 29 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
4 27 (0.53%) Remedy ITSM
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
6 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
7 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
8 16 (0.31%) NEC Housing
9 13 (0.25%) Oracle General Ledger
10 12 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.21%) Findur
11 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.20%) Finacle
12 10 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
12 10 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
12 10 (0.20%) Unit4 Business World
13 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 1,609 (31.38%) Azure
2 1,217 (23.73%) AWS
3 958 (18.68%) Power Platform
4 459 (8.95%) GCP
5 449 (8.76%) Azure DevOps
6 366 (7.14%) GitHub
7 346 (6.75%) Azure Data Factory
7 346 (6.75%) Snowflake
8 305 (5.95%) Serverless
9 283 (5.52%) dbt
10 258 (5.03%) Amazon S3
11 217 (4.23%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 199 (3.88%) AWS Lambda
13 187 (3.65%) GitHub Actions
14 97 (1.89%) Entra ID
15 94 (1.83%) SaaS
16 93 (1.81%) Power Automate
17 91 (1.77%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 90 (1.76%) PowerApps
19 73 (1.42%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 59 (1.15%) DNS
2 44 (0.86%) Firewall
3 31 (0.60%) SSL
4 25 (0.49%) HTTP
5 23 (0.45%) Network Security
5 23 (0.45%) VPN
6 22 (0.43%) SNMP
7 20 (0.39%) Internet
8 19 (0.37%) WAN
9 17 (0.33%) TCP/IP
10 12 (0.23%) Broadband
11 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
11 10 (0.20%) Wireshark
12 9 (0.18%) DHCP
12 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
12 9 (0.18%) SAN
12 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
13 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
13 8 (0.16%) Kerberos
13 8 (0.16%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 881 (17.18%) Power BI
2 711 (13.87%) Data Warehouse
3 637 (12.42%) SQL Server
4 335 (6.53%) Relational Database
5 323 (6.30%) Tableau
6 317 (6.18%) PostgreSQL
7 310 (6.05%) Data Lake
8 276 (5.38%) Metadata
9 257 (5.01%) NoSQL
10 213 (4.15%) Azure SQL Database
11 207 (4.04%) Oracle Database
12 179 (3.49%) BigQuery
13 170 (3.32%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 151 (2.94%) Amazon Redshift
15 137 (2.67%) Delta Lake
16 131 (2.55%) Oracle Reports
17 130 (2.54%) Big Data
18 114 (2.22%) MongoDB
19 112 (2.18%) MySQL
20 108 (2.11%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 594 (11.58%) Git
2 399 (7.78%) JIRA
3 284 (5.54%) Jenkins
4 226 (4.41%) GitLab
5 83 (1.62%) JUnit
6 72 (1.40%) Maven
7 66 (1.29%) Gradle
8 58 (1.13%) Postman
9 57 (1.11%) Selenium
10 55 (1.07%) Mockito
11 50 (0.98%) Oracle Forms
12 40 (0.78%) Bitbucket
13 38 (0.74%) SonarQube
13 38 (0.74%) Visual Studio
14 32 (0.62%) ERwin
14 32 (0.62%) Team Foundation Server
15 31 (0.60%) JMeter
16 30 (0.59%) Liquibase
16 30 (0.59%) MLflow
17 29 (0.57%) Zephyr
General
1 1,317 (25.68%) Social Skills
2 1,277 (24.90%) Finance
3 1,022 (19.93%) Analytical Skills
4 488 (9.52%) Public Sector
5 485 (9.46%) Banking
6 144 (2.81%) Marketing
7 143 (2.79%) Front Office
8 134 (2.61%) Retail
9 124 (2.42%) Investment Banking
10 100 (1.95%) Documentation Skills
11 88 (1.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 74 (1.44%) Manufacturing
13 58 (1.13%) Legal
14 55 (1.07%) Financial Institution
14 55 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
15 47 (0.92%) Organisational Skills
16 43 (0.84%) Publishing
16 43 (0.84%) Telecoms
17 41 (0.80%) Back Office
18 37 (0.72%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,119 (21.82%) Developer
2 1,011 (19.72%) Data Engineer
3 752 (14.66%) Analyst
4 693 (13.51%) Senior
5 368 (7.18%) Lead
6 324 (6.32%) Data Analyst
7 271 (5.28%) Architect
8 258 (5.03%) Consultant
9 244 (4.76%) Business Analyst
10 217 (4.23%) Java Developer
11 201 (3.92%) DBA
11 201 (3.92%) Senior Data Engineer
12 171 (3.33%) Senior Developer
13 144 (2.81%) Software Engineer
14 132 (2.57%) SQL Developer
15 129 (2.52%) SQL DBA
16 120 (2.34%) Azure Engineer
17 115 (2.24%) Full-Stack Developer
18 110 (2.15%) Data Architect
18 110 (2.15%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 419 (8.17%) .NET
2 414 (8.07%) REST
3 334 (6.51%) PySpark
4 318 (6.20%) Kafka
5 275 (5.36%) Spring
6 260 (5.07%) Spring Boot
7 230 (4.49%) React
8 218 (4.25%) RESTful
9 202 (3.94%) JSON
10 183 (3.57%) XML
11 174 (3.39%) HTML
12 143 (2.79%) CSS
13 142 (2.77%) AngularJS
14 129 (2.52%) Web Services
15 119 (2.32%) Pandas
16 118 (2.30%) Middleware
17 115 (2.24%) SOAP
18 104 (2.03%) .NET Framework
19 85 (1.66%) Node.js
20 74 (1.44%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 345 (6.73%) Cloud Native
2 248 (4.84%) Data Structures
3 199 (3.88%) Product Ownership
4 181 (3.53%) Legacy Systems
5 154 (3.00%) Distributed Systems
6 116 (2.26%) Onboarding
7 102 (1.99%) Enterprise Software
8 95 (1.85%) Management Information System
9 94 (1.83%) Derivative
10 83 (1.62%) Self-Motivation
11 75 (1.46%) Analytical Mindset
12 74 (1.44%) Clustering
13 72 (1.40%) Data Protection Act
13 72 (1.40%) Replication
14 68 (1.33%) Algorithms
15 54 (1.05%) Fixed Income
16 53 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
17 52 (1.01%) AI Agents
18 51 (0.99%) Equities
19 49 (0.96%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 340 (6.63%) Linux
2 312 (6.08%) Windows
3 233 (4.54%) Unix
4 121 (2.36%) Windows Server
5 26 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.41%) AIX
7 17 (0.33%) Solaris
8 14 (0.27%) Windows Server 2019
9 12 (0.23%) VMS
10 11 (0.21%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.14%) Apple iOS
11 7 (0.14%) Ubuntu
11 7 (0.14%) zOS
12 6 (0.12%) Android
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
13 5 (0.098%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
15 2 (0.039%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.039%) OpenVMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,355 (26.42%) Agile
2 1,347 (26.27%) Data Modelling
3 1,342 (26.17%) CI/CD
4 1,315 (25.64%) Analytics
5 1,142 (22.27%) ETL
6 1,134 (22.11%) Business Intelligence
7 1,033 (20.14%) DevOps
8 1,012 (19.73%) Data Pipeline
9 978 (19.07%) Problem-Solving
10 856 (16.69%) Data Engineering
11 732 (14.27%) AI
12 725 (14.14%) Migration
13 687 (13.40%) Validation
14 593 (11.56%) Data Governance
15 550 (10.73%) Stakeholder Management
16 531 (10.35%) Test Automation
17 521 (10.16%) Decision-Making
18 516 (10.06%) Continuous Improvement
19 515 (10.04%) Data Analysis
20 463 (9.03%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,827 (35.63%) Python
2 671 (13.09%) Java
3 490 (9.56%) C#
4 418 (8.15%) PL/SQL
5 357 (6.96%) JavaScript
6 275 (5.36%) T-SQL
7 255 (4.97%) PowerShell
8 177 (3.45%) TypeScript
9 152 (2.96%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 139 (2.71%) Shell Script
11 109 (2.13%) Bash
12 106 (2.07%) R
13 74 (1.44%) Scala
14 60 (1.17%) C++
15 50 (0.98%) VBA
16 49 (0.96%) Bicep
17 35 (0.68%) C
18 31 (0.60%) VB
19 28 (0.55%) Perl
20 25 (0.49%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,126 (21.96%) Security Cleared
2 913 (17.80%) SC Cleared
3 355 (6.92%) Degree
4 143 (2.79%) BPSS Clearance
5 117 (2.28%) Computer Science Degree
6 108 (2.11%) DV Cleared
7 78 (1.52%) Azure Certification
8 56 (1.09%) ISTQB
9 54 (1.05%) Master's Degree
10 43 (0.84%) Microsoft Certification
11 34 (0.66%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.33%) DBS Check
13 16 (0.31%) CISSP
13 16 (0.31%) PhD
14 15 (0.29%) ISEB
15 14 (0.27%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 12 (0.23%) Oracle Certification
17 11 (0.21%) FFIEC
18 10 (0.20%) CISM
19 9 (0.18%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 953 (18.58%) Data Quality
2 381 (7.43%) QA
3 172 (3.35%) GDPR
4 72 (1.40%) Accessibility
5 47 (0.92%) SLA
6 24 (0.47%) Actionable Recommendations
6 24 (0.47%) PMO
7 23 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 22 (0.43%) NIST
9 21 (0.41%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 20 (0.39%) ISO 20022
11 16 (0.31%) Solvency II
12 15 (0.29%) MiFID
13 14 (0.27%) IFRS
14 13 (0.25%) GMP
14 13 (0.25%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.23%) COBIT
16 11 (0.21%) NCSC
16 11 (0.21%) PCI DSS
16 11 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 507 (9.89%) Docker
2 130 (2.54%) Active Directory
3 49 (0.96%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (0.84%) Virtual Machines
5 41 (0.80%) Oracle RAC
6 20 (0.39%) Hyper-V
7 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
8 14 (0.27%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.25%) vCloud
10 10 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
12 7 (0.14%) KVM
13 5 (0.098%) Ceph
14 4 (0.078%) HDFS
14 4 (0.078%) Squid
15 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
15 2 (0.039%) RACF
16 1 (0.020%) Microsoft App-V
16 1 (0.020%) XenApp
Systems Management
1 433 (8.44%) Kubernetes
2 385 (7.51%) Terraform
3 107 (2.09%) Grafana
4 95 (1.85%) Ansible
5 51 (0.99%) Prometheus
6 48 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
7 45 (0.88%) Data Guard
8 32 (0.62%) Control-M
9 26 (0.51%) SCOM
10 22 (0.43%) Kibana
11 17 (0.33%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.31%) Nagios
12 16 (0.31%) Netcool
12 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
14 13 (0.25%) OpenView
14 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 11 (0.21%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 11 (0.21%) Single Sign-On
16 9 (0.18%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 908 (17.71%) Oracle
2 813 (15.85%) Microsoft
3 598 (11.66%) Databricks
4 192 (3.74%) Google
5 186 (3.63%) Informatica
6 144 (2.81%) Talend
7 141 (2.75%) SAP
8 134 (2.61%) ServiceNow
9 90 (1.76%) IBM
10 85 (1.66%) Splunk
11 73 (1.42%) Denodo
12 71 (1.38%) Salesforce
13 68 (1.33%) VMware
14 42 (0.82%) Dynatrace
15 40 (0.78%) Citrix
16 38 (0.74%) Bloomberg
16 38 (0.74%) BMC
17 36 (0.70%) Sybase
18 35 (0.68%) Alteryx
19 34 (0.66%) Adobe