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 15 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 15 12 11
Rank change year-on-year -3 -1 -4
Contract jobs citing SQL 3,892 4,059 4,940
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.96% 11.08% 10.55%
As % of the Programming Languages category 34.00% 34.61% 33.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,646 2,750 3,547
10th Percentile £325 £338 £350
25th Percentile £405 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £709 £731 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 84 52 69
10th Percentile £23.02 £19.63 £21.20
25th Percentile £30.72 £26.00 £26.00
Median hourly rate £50.00 £39.25 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.39% -12.78% -1.10%
75th Percentile £57.50 £52.06 £56.06
90th Percentile £63.38 £64.58 £75.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £30.00 £42.66
% change year-on-year +83.33% -29.68% +21.89%

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 11,446 11,729 14,641
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.23% 32.02% 31.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,541 7,557 10,442
10th Percentile £345 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £623 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 335 281 447
10th Percentile £29.13 £22.00 £31.40
25th Percentile £45.88 £38.50 £47.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year - +4.17% -
75th Percentile £67.92 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £78.00
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 15 November 2025.

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 15 November 2025.

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 15 November 2025. 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 -3 3,370 £500 -4.76% 3,930
London -2 2,024 £525 -4.55% 1,937
UK excluding London -4 1,487 £475 - 2,480
Work from Home -7 1,223 £500 - 1,964
South East +1 351 £475 -9.52% 737
North of England -9 322 £445 -8.25% 586
Midlands -1 316 £500 +11.11% 484
West Midlands 0 219 £515 +8.42% 302
Scotland -5 202 £450 - 151
North West -2 182 £425 -5.56% 357
South West +3 152 £475 -5.00% 226
Yorkshire -20 125 £475 -5.00% 171
East Midlands -3 93 £447 +11.75% 177
East of England +10 88 £505 +30.32% 218
Wales +2 45 £465 -7.00% 75
Northern Ireland +2 35 £400 -23.81% 38
North East -8 17 £500 +0.50% 60

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
1 162 (4.16%) Apache Airflow
2 152 (3.91%) Apache Spark
3 121 (3.11%) Confluence
4 107 (2.75%) Apache
5 73 (1.88%) SharePoint
6 54 (1.39%) SAS
7 50 (1.28%) WebLogic
8 28 (0.72%) Oracle Workflow
9 26 (0.67%) IIS
9 26 (0.67%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 23 (0.59%) nginx
11 21 (0.54%) Skype for Business
12 19 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
12 19 (0.49%) WebSphere
13 18 (0.46%) CMS
13 18 (0.46%) JBoss
13 18 (0.46%) Tomcat
14 16 (0.41%) Jupyter
14 16 (0.41%) Mattermost
15 12 (0.31%) Oracle Service Bus
Applications
1 285 (7.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 74 (1.90%) Microsoft Office
3 48 (1.23%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 30 (0.77%) MS Visio
5 14 (0.36%) Maya
6 12 (0.31%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 11 (0.28%) Chatbot
8 9 (0.23%) Microsoft Project
8 9 (0.23%) NUKE
9 8 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
10 5 (0.13%) Adobe Captivate
11 3 (0.077%) Trello
12 2 (0.051%) Maple
12 2 (0.051%) Oracle Smart View
12 2 (0.051%) SPSS
13 1 (0.026%) Adobe Illustrator
13 1 (0.026%) InDesign
13 1 (0.026%) Photoshop
13 1 (0.026%) Stata
13 1 (0.026%) Weka
Business Applications
1 47 (1.21%) Oracle EBS
2 34 (0.87%) Dynamics CRM
3 31 (0.80%) Oracle EBS R12
4 30 (0.77%) Oracle Payables
5 29 (0.75%) Oracle Assets
6 27 (0.69%) Oracle BPM
7 26 (0.67%) Oracle General Ledger
8 25 (0.64%) Aladdin
9 21 (0.54%) Endur
10 19 (0.49%) Oracle Receivables
11 17 (0.44%) Oracle ERP
11 17 (0.44%) Remedy ITSM
12 15 (0.39%) Maximo
12 15 (0.39%) SAP S/4HANA
13 13 (0.33%) Oracle Financials
14 11 (0.28%) NetSuite
15 10 (0.26%) Oracle E-Business Tax
15 10 (0.26%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
15 10 (0.26%) SAP ERP
16 9 (0.23%) Advent Geneva
Cloud Services
1 1,198 (30.78%) Azure
2 873 (22.43%) AWS
3 680 (17.47%) Power Platform
4 326 (8.38%) GCP
5 298 (7.66%) Azure DevOps
6 263 (6.76%) GitHub
7 257 (6.60%) Snowflake
8 223 (5.73%) Serverless
9 216 (5.55%) Azure Data Factory
10 183 (4.70%) Amazon S3
11 167 (4.29%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 151 (3.88%) dbt
13 123 (3.16%) GitHub Actions
14 112 (2.88%) AWS Lambda
15 86 (2.21%) Dynamics 365
16 82 (2.11%) Azure Functions
17 81 (2.08%) Power Automate
18 73 (1.88%) PowerApps
18 73 (1.88%) SaaS
19 63 (1.62%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 58 (1.49%) Firewall
2 55 (1.41%) HTTP
3 41 (1.05%) DNS
4 27 (0.69%) Skype
5 23 (0.59%) TCP/IP
6 19 (0.49%) Internet
7 18 (0.46%) VPN
8 17 (0.44%) DHCP
8 17 (0.44%) iSCSI
8 17 (0.44%) SSH
9 16 (0.41%) Fibre Channel
10 15 (0.39%) SSL
11 14 (0.36%) Unified Communications
12 13 (0.33%) SMTP
13 12 (0.31%) IMAP
13 12 (0.31%) OpenLDAP
14 11 (0.28%) FTP
14 11 (0.28%) Network Security
14 11 (0.28%) SAN
15 9 (0.23%) 2G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 615 (15.80%) Power BI
2 433 (11.13%) SQL Server
3 415 (10.66%) Data Warehouse
4 328 (8.43%) Relational Database
5 319 (8.20%) PostgreSQL
6 267 (6.86%) NoSQL
7 248 (6.37%) Tableau
8 204 (5.24%) Data Lake
9 180 (4.62%) Oracle Database
10 173 (4.45%) Azure SQL Database
11 136 (3.49%) BigQuery
12 131 (3.37%) MongoDB
13 123 (3.16%) Big Data
14 118 (3.03%) Metadata
15 109 (2.80%) MySQL
16 90 (2.31%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 89 (2.29%) Amazon Redshift
18 83 (2.13%) Amazon RDS
18 83 (2.13%) DB2
19 77 (1.98%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 405 (10.41%) Git
2 310 (7.97%) JIRA
3 207 (5.32%) Jenkins
4 116 (2.98%) GitLab
5 111 (2.85%) JUnit
6 60 (1.54%) Selenium
7 47 (1.21%) Oracle APEX
8 44 (1.13%) Maven
9 43 (1.10%) Cucumber
10 41 (1.05%) Bitbucket
11 40 (1.03%) Postman
12 39 (1.00%) SonarQube
13 38 (0.98%) Mockito
14 33 (0.85%) ERwin
15 25 (0.64%) Cypress.io
15 25 (0.64%) Gradle
16 24 (0.62%) ER Studio
17 22 (0.57%) Eclipse
17 22 (0.57%) Oracle Forms
18 21 (0.54%) SpecFlow
General
1 1,265 (32.50%) Social Skills
2 1,081 (27.77%) Finance
3 745 (19.14%) Analytical Skills
4 425 (10.92%) Banking
5 287 (7.37%) Public Sector
6 165 (4.24%) Investment Banking
7 133 (3.42%) Front Office
8 99 (2.54%) Marketing
9 97 (2.49%) Documentation Skills
10 63 (1.62%) Retail
11 61 (1.57%) Manufacturing
11 61 (1.57%) Presentation Skills
12 60 (1.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 51 (1.31%) Financial Institution
14 49 (1.26%) Telecoms
15 37 (0.95%) Back Office
15 37 (0.95%) Local Government
16 33 (0.85%) Influencing Skills
16 33 (0.85%) Pharmaceutical
17 31 (0.80%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,122 (28.83%) Developer
2 682 (17.52%) Analyst
3 499 (12.82%) Senior
4 494 (12.69%) Data Engineer
5 322 (8.27%) Data Analyst
6 209 (5.37%) Lead
7 208 (5.34%) Java Developer
8 206 (5.29%) Business Analyst
9 184 (4.73%) Senior Developer
10 181 (4.65%) Consultant
11 167 (4.29%) Architect
12 118 (3.03%) SQL Developer
13 112 (2.88%) Software Engineer
14 104 (2.67%) Azure Engineer
15 100 (2.57%) Python Developer
16 99 (2.54%) Full-Stack Developer
17 91 (2.34%) .NET Developer
18 88 (2.26%) C# Developer
19 87 (2.24%) Data Scientist
20 73 (1.88%) AWS Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 345 (8.86%) .NET
2 285 (7.32%) REST
3 254 (6.53%) Kafka
4 210 (5.40%) Spring
5 200 (5.14%) React
6 189 (4.86%) RESTful
7 188 (4.83%) HTML
8 169 (4.34%) XML
9 168 (4.32%) CSS
10 162 (4.16%) PySpark
11 143 (3.67%) SOAP
12 140 (3.60%) JSON
13 137 (3.52%) Spring Boot
14 127 (3.26%) AngularJS
15 123 (3.16%) Node.js
16 111 (2.85%) Web Services
17 101 (2.60%) .NET Framework
18 97 (2.49%) Pandas
19 65 (1.67%) JMS
20 64 (1.64%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 172 (4.42%) Cloud Native
2 140 (3.60%) Data Structures
3 109 (2.80%) Product Ownership
4 101 (2.60%) Legacy Systems
5 94 (2.42%) Data Protection Act
6 81 (2.08%) Derivative
7 80 (2.06%) Equities
8 79 (2.03%) Algorithms
9 76 (1.95%) Analytical Mindset
10 73 (1.88%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
11 72 (1.85%) Management Information System
12 62 (1.59%) Onboarding
13 60 (1.54%) Virtual Team
14 58 (1.49%) Fixed Income
15 54 (1.39%) Replication
16 53 (1.36%) Distributed Systems
17 51 (1.31%) Market Risk
18 49 (1.26%) Self-Motivation
19 45 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
20 35 (0.90%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 397 (10.20%) Linux
2 275 (7.07%) Windows
3 224 (5.76%) Unix
4 76 (1.95%) Windows Server
5 28 (0.72%) VMS
6 25 (0.64%) Windows Server 2019
7 18 (0.46%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 16 (0.41%) Android
9 14 (0.36%) Ubuntu
10 12 (0.31%) Amazon Linux
11 11 (0.28%) Windows 10
12 10 (0.26%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.23%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.15%) CentOS
14 6 (0.15%) Windows Server 2012
15 5 (0.13%) AIX
16 4 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
17 3 (0.077%) Solaris
18 2 (0.051%) Oracle Linux
19 1 (0.026%) VME
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,137 (29.21%) Agile
2 900 (23.12%) Problem-Solving
3 820 (21.07%) Business Intelligence
4 816 (20.97%) Analytics
5 809 (20.79%) CI/CD
6 785 (20.17%) DevOps
7 774 (19.89%) Data Modelling
8 646 (16.60%) ETL
9 492 (12.64%) Data Pipeline
10 443 (11.38%) Migration
11 424 (10.89%) Visualisation
12 380 (9.76%) Data Analysis
13 378 (9.71%) Data Engineering
14 364 (9.35%) Data Governance
15 346 (8.89%) Scrum
16 345 (8.86%) Validation
17 313 (8.04%) Microservices
18 312 (8.02%) Software Engineering
19 309 (7.94%) Test Automation
20 300 (7.71%) AI
Programming Languages
1 1,476 (37.92%) Python
2 652 (16.75%) Java
3 418 (10.74%) C#
4 362 (9.30%) JavaScript
5 279 (7.17%) PL/SQL
6 179 (4.60%) PowerShell
7 155 (3.98%) TypeScript
8 119 (3.06%) Shell Script
9 110 (2.83%) T-SQL
10 109 (2.80%) C++
10 109 (2.80%) R
11 97 (2.49%) VBA
12 87 (2.24%) Scala
13 84 (2.16%) Bash
14 78 (2.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 75 (1.93%) VB
16 43 (1.10%) Go
17 39 (1.00%) Perl
18 37 (0.95%) Bicep
19 31 (0.80%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 545 (14.00%) Security Cleared
2 415 (10.66%) SC Cleared
3 362 (9.30%) Degree
4 131 (3.37%) Computer Science Degree
5 68 (1.75%) Azure Certification
5 68 (1.75%) Master's Degree
6 67 (1.72%) AWS Certification
7 64 (1.64%) DV Cleared
8 55 (1.41%) Microsoft Certification
9 49 (1.26%) BPSS Clearance
10 35 (0.90%) ITIL Certification
11 33 (0.85%) ISTQB
12 27 (0.69%) MCSE
13 20 (0.51%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 20 (0.51%) Oracle Certification
14 13 (0.33%) CBAP
14 13 (0.33%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 12 (0.31%) PhD
16 11 (0.28%) OCP
17 10 (0.26%) MCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 483 (12.41%) Data Quality
2 250 (6.42%) QA
3 119 (3.06%) GDPR
4 82 (2.11%) Accessibility
5 37 (0.95%) MiFID
6 32 (0.82%) SLA
7 25 (0.64%) EMIR
8 23 (0.59%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 23 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 23 (0.59%) WCAG
9 16 (0.41%) HIPAA
10 13 (0.33%) Basel III
10 13 (0.33%) ISO 20022
10 13 (0.33%) NIST
10 13 (0.33%) SEPA
11 12 (0.31%) Actionable Recommendations
11 12 (0.31%) HL7
12 10 (0.26%) COBIT
12 10 (0.26%) IFRS
13 8 (0.21%) PMO
System Software
1 376 (9.66%) Docker
2 103 (2.65%) Active Directory
3 41 (1.05%) VMware Infrastructure
4 20 (0.51%) NFS
4 20 (0.51%) Virtual Machines
5 17 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
6 16 (0.41%) Postfix
7 15 (0.39%) Oracle RAC
8 14 (0.36%) vSphere
9 12 (0.31%) Dovecot
9 12 (0.31%) Squid
10 10 (0.26%) DFS Replication
10 10 (0.26%) zsh
11 7 (0.18%) Hyper-V
12 6 (0.15%) HDFS
13 5 (0.13%) Microsoft Virtual Server
13 5 (0.13%) NDS
13 5 (0.13%) NetIQ eDirectory
13 5 (0.13%) Virtual Servers
14 4 (0.10%) VMware Workstation
Systems Management
1 346 (8.89%) Kubernetes
2 246 (6.32%) Terraform
3 83 (2.13%) Grafana
4 63 (1.62%) Ansible
4 63 (1.62%) Prometheus
5 28 (0.72%) SCOM
6 21 (0.54%) HP SiteScope
7 19 (0.49%) Kibana
8 17 (0.44%) Puppet
9 16 (0.41%) Control-M
9 16 (0.41%) Data Guard
9 16 (0.41%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
9 16 (0.41%) Oracle RMAN
10 14 (0.36%) SCCM
11 13 (0.33%) Proxmox
12 12 (0.31%) Nessus
12 12 (0.31%) WSUS
13 11 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
13 11 (0.28%) Progress Chef
14 10 (0.26%) logstash
Vendors
1 688 (17.68%) Oracle
2 651 (16.73%) Microsoft
3 335 (8.61%) Databricks
4 147 (3.78%) Google
5 116 (2.98%) Splunk
6 106 (2.72%) SAP
7 76 (1.95%) ServiceNow
8 62 (1.59%) Salesforce
8 62 (1.59%) VMware
9 59 (1.52%) Talend
10 58 (1.49%) IBM
11 47 (1.21%) Informatica
12 45 (1.16%) Sybase
13 42 (1.08%) Dynatrace
14 37 (0.95%) Red Hat
15 36 (0.92%) Citrix
16 35 (0.90%) Cisco
17 31 (0.80%) Denodo
18 28 (0.72%) Adobe
18 28 (0.72%) OpenAI