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

6 months to
28 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,126 3,783 4,140
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.42% 11.53% 10.84%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.26% 34.98% 33.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,433 2,569 2,885
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 £631
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 90 84 53
10th Percentile £21.61 £25.90 £19.67
25th Percentile £27.14 £32.50 £25.99
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +36.99% -19.67%
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% -34.61%

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 14,136 10,815 12,233
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 25.99% 32.96% 32.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,194 7,136 8,127
10th Percentile £363 £342 £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 £646
90th Percentile £725 £738 £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 537 294 337
10th Percentile £24.05 £29.00 £26.14
25th Percentile £46.25 £41.25 £46.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.90 £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 28 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 28 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 28 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 -5 4,414 £500 - 5,200
London -6 2,490 £525 - 2,982
UK excluding London -6 2,047 £475 - 2,608
Work from Home -3 1,502 £500 - 2,296
North of England -1 587 £475 +5.56% 722
Midlands -5 445 £469 +1.41% 436
South East -15 440 £475 -3.06% 560
West Midlands -5 347 £469 -6.20% 276
North West +1 290 £500 +14.03% 426
Yorkshire +6 245 £458 -3.68% 217
South West -2 229 £525 +16.67% 252
Scotland -8 203 £429 -9.16% 238
East of England -6 114 £495 -1.49% 199
East Midlands -4 96 £463 +13.81% 160
North East -4 58 £400 -15.79% 83
Wales -8 37 £475 +4.97% 81
Northern Ireland -7 19 £363 -29.27% 151
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
1 253 (4.94%) Apache Airflow
2 234 (4.56%) Confluence
3 210 (4.10%) Apache Spark
4 168 (3.28%) Apache
5 94 (1.83%) SharePoint
6 84 (1.64%) SAS
7 39 (0.76%) Oracle Workflow
8 36 (0.70%) IIS
8 36 (0.70%) WebLogic
9 30 (0.59%) Jupyter
10 25 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
11 23 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
12 21 (0.41%) CMS
12 21 (0.41%) nginx
13 19 (0.37%) Camunda
14 16 (0.31%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
15 15 (0.29%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.18%) Appian
16 9 (0.18%) Tomcat
Applications
1 296 (5.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 67 (1.31%) Microsoft Office
3 37 (0.72%) MS Visio
4 35 (0.68%) Spreadsheet
5 23 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.16%) Windchill
8 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
9 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
9 4 (0.078%) Notion
9 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
10 3 (0.059%) CPLEX
10 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
11 2 (0.039%) Mingle
12 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.020%) Mozilla Thunderbird
12 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 43 (0.84%) Dynamics CRM
1 43 (0.84%) Oracle EBS
2 30 (0.59%) Aladdin
2 30 (0.59%) SAP S/4HANA
3 28 (0.55%) Oracle Payables
4 26 (0.51%) Remedy ITSM
5 19 (0.37%) Oracle ERP
6 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
7 15 (0.29%) Oracle General Ledger
8 14 (0.27%) Oracle EBS R12
9 13 (0.25%) Finacle
10 12 (0.23%) Oracle Financials
10 12 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
11 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
11 11 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.20%) NetSuite
12 10 (0.20%) Oracle FAH
13 9 (0.18%) Maximo
13 9 (0.18%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,562 (30.47%) Azure
2 1,248 (24.35%) AWS
3 959 (18.71%) Power Platform
4 525 (10.24%) GCP
5 409 (7.98%) Azure DevOps
6 403 (7.86%) Snowflake
7 359 (7.00%) GitHub
8 321 (6.26%) Azure Data Factory
9 315 (6.15%) dbt
10 300 (5.85%) Serverless
11 266 (5.19%) Amazon S3
12 201 (3.92%) AWS Lambda
12 201 (3.92%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 172 (3.36%) GitHub Actions
14 112 (2.18%) SaaS
15 111 (2.17%) Power Automate
16 103 (2.01%) PowerApps
17 99 (1.93%) Entra ID
18 93 (1.81%) Azure Databricks
19 88 (1.72%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 66 (1.29%) DNS
2 41 (0.80%) Firewall
3 37 (0.72%) HTTP
4 29 (0.57%) SSL
5 22 (0.43%) Broadband
5 22 (0.43%) Internet
5 22 (0.43%) Network Security
5 22 (0.43%) TCP/IP
6 19 (0.37%) VPN
7 15 (0.29%) DHCP
8 14 (0.27%) SNMP
8 14 (0.27%) SSH
9 12 (0.23%) WAN
10 11 (0.21%) Kerberos
11 10 (0.20%) SAN
11 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
12 8 (0.16%) HTTPS
12 8 (0.16%) Reverse Proxy
12 8 (0.16%) RTP
12 8 (0.16%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 878 (17.13%) Power BI
2 706 (13.77%) Data Warehouse
3 652 (12.72%) SQL Server
4 347 (6.77%) Relational Database
5 334 (6.52%) PostgreSQL
6 323 (6.30%) Data Lake
7 288 (5.62%) Metadata
8 281 (5.48%) Tableau
9 244 (4.76%) NoSQL
10 237 (4.62%) Oracle Database
11 220 (4.29%) BigQuery
12 190 (3.71%) Azure SQL Database
13 150 (2.93%) Amazon Redshift
14 146 (2.85%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 141 (2.75%) Delta Lake
16 127 (2.48%) MySQL
17 121 (2.36%) Amazon Athena
18 118 (2.30%) MongoDB
19 115 (2.24%) Big Data
20 103 (2.01%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 685 (13.36%) Git
2 422 (8.23%) JIRA
3 287 (5.60%) Jenkins
4 255 (4.97%) GitLab
5 102 (1.99%) Selenium
6 95 (1.85%) JUnit
7 86 (1.68%) Maven
8 84 (1.64%) Gradle
9 70 (1.37%) Postman
10 58 (1.13%) Mockito
11 46 (0.90%) Oracle Forms
12 45 (0.88%) SonarQube
13 42 (0.82%) Bitbucket
14 36 (0.70%) Visual Studio
15 35 (0.68%) Zephyr
16 30 (0.59%) REST Assured
16 30 (0.59%) Team Foundation Server
17 28 (0.55%) MLflow
18 27 (0.53%) Artifactory
19 26 (0.51%) JMeter
General
1 1,389 (27.10%) Social Skills
2 1,354 (26.41%) Finance
3 1,053 (20.54%) Analytical Skills
4 592 (11.55%) Banking
5 473 (9.23%) Public Sector
6 157 (3.06%) Marketing
7 152 (2.97%) Retail
8 143 (2.79%) Front Office
9 142 (2.77%) Investment Banking
10 105 (2.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 88 (1.72%) Documentation Skills
12 87 (1.70%) Manufacturing
13 61 (1.19%) Legal
14 52 (1.01%) Financial Institution
15 50 (0.98%) Presentation Skills
16 48 (0.94%) Back Office
16 48 (0.94%) Local Government
17 43 (0.84%) Influencing Skills
17 43 (0.84%) Law
18 41 (0.80%) Military
Job Titles
1 1,126 (21.97%) Developer
2 948 (18.49%) Data Engineer
3 767 (14.96%) Analyst
4 743 (14.49%) Senior
5 364 (7.10%) Lead
6 329 (6.42%) Data Analyst
7 258 (5.03%) Architect
8 250 (4.88%) Business Analyst
9 221 (4.31%) Senior Data Engineer
10 214 (4.17%) Consultant
11 200 (3.90%) Java Developer
12 199 (3.88%) DBA
13 183 (3.57%) Senior Developer
14 124 (2.42%) SQL Developer
15 123 (2.40%) Python Developer
16 122 (2.38%) Data Architect
16 122 (2.38%) Software Engineer
17 120 (2.34%) SQL DBA
18 119 (2.32%) Azure Engineer
18 119 (2.32%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 500 (9.75%) REST
2 437 (8.53%) .NET
3 405 (7.90%) Terraform
4 347 (6.77%) Kafka
5 341 (6.65%) PySpark
6 281 (5.48%) Spring
7 274 (5.35%) Spring Boot
8 234 (4.56%) React
9 207 (4.04%) RESTful
10 206 (4.02%) HTML
11 204 (3.98%) JSON
12 180 (3.51%) XML
13 172 (3.36%) CSS
14 141 (2.75%) Web Services
15 136 (2.65%) SOAP
16 125 (2.44%) AngularJS
17 111 (2.17%) Middleware
18 101 (1.97%) Pandas
19 93 (1.81%) .NET Framework
20 86 (1.68%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 331 (6.46%) Cloud Native
2 272 (5.31%) Data Structures
3 251 (4.90%) Product Ownership
4 167 (3.26%) Legacy Systems
5 149 (2.91%) Onboarding
6 142 (2.77%) Distributed Systems
7 137 (2.67%) Enterprise Software
8 109 (2.13%) Management Information System
9 96 (1.87%) AI Agents
10 88 (1.72%) Self-Motivation
11 84 (1.64%) Derivative
12 78 (1.52%) Replication
13 70 (1.37%) Data Protection Act
14 65 (1.27%) Analytical Mindset
15 64 (1.25%) Clustering
16 61 (1.19%) Reference Data
17 56 (1.09%) Algorithms
18 54 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
19 50 (0.98%) Data Centre
20 48 (0.94%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 376 (7.34%) Linux
2 314 (6.13%) Windows
3 252 (4.92%) Unix
4 127 (2.48%) Windows Server
5 28 (0.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.47%) Solaris
7 12 (0.23%) Ubuntu
8 10 (0.20%) AIX
8 10 (0.20%) VMS
9 9 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
10 8 (0.16%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.14%) Android
12 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
13 5 (0.098%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.098%) zOS
14 3 (0.059%) CentOS
14 3 (0.059%) OpenVMS
14 3 (0.059%) Rocky
14 3 (0.059%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,399 (27.29%) Agile
2 1,383 (26.98%) CI/CD
3 1,345 (26.24%) Data Modelling
4 1,270 (24.78%) Analytics
5 1,088 (21.23%) Business Intelligence
6 1,087 (21.21%) ETL
7 992 (19.35%) Problem-Solving
8 971 (18.94%) Data Pipeline
9 969 (18.90%) DevOps
10 859 (16.76%) AI
11 855 (16.68%) Data Engineering
12 806 (15.72%) Validation
13 781 (15.24%) Migration
14 766 (14.94%) Stakeholder Management
15 609 (11.88%) Test Automation
16 602 (11.74%) Data Governance
17 594 (11.59%) Data Analysis
18 570 (11.12%) Continuous Improvement
19 540 (10.53%) Decision-Making
20 437 (8.53%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,824 (35.58%) Python
2 650 (12.68%) Java
3 452 (8.82%) C#
4 409 (7.98%) JavaScript
5 400 (7.80%) PL/SQL
6 256 (4.99%) PowerShell
7 252 (4.92%) T-SQL
8 204 (3.98%) TypeScript
9 149 (2.91%) Shell Script
10 144 (2.81%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 127 (2.48%) Bash
12 86 (1.68%) Scala
13 81 (1.58%) R
14 46 (0.90%) C++
15 41 (0.80%) VBA
16 37 (0.72%) Bicep
17 30 (0.59%) C
17 30 (0.59%) Go
18 29 (0.57%) VB.NET
19 28 (0.55%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,096 (21.38%) Security Cleared
2 877 (17.11%) SC Cleared
3 359 (7.00%) Degree
4 171 (3.34%) BPSS Clearance
5 129 (2.52%) DV Cleared
6 125 (2.44%) Computer Science Degree
7 82 (1.60%) Azure Certification
8 60 (1.17%) ISTQB
9 52 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
10 46 (0.90%) AWS Certification
11 43 (0.84%) Master's Degree
12 20 (0.39%) CISSP
13 19 (0.37%) DBS Check
13 19 (0.37%) ISEB
14 16 (0.31%) ACCA
14 16 (0.31%) CIMA
15 15 (0.29%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 15 (0.29%) Oracle Certification
16 14 (0.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 13 (0.25%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1,026 (20.02%) Data Quality
2 417 (8.13%) QA
3 138 (2.69%) GDPR
4 69 (1.35%) Accessibility
5 53 (1.03%) SLA
6 34 (0.66%) ISO 20022
7 29 (0.57%) Actionable Recommendations
8 23 (0.45%) NIST
9 22 (0.43%) IFRS
9 22 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 18 (0.35%) MiFID
11 15 (0.29%) COBIT
11 15 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 13 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
12 13 (0.25%) GMP
12 13 (0.25%) GxP
13 12 (0.23%) SEPA
14 11 (0.21%) Basel III
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
15 10 (0.20%) 21 CFR Part 11
System Software
1 474 (9.25%) Docker
2 124 (2.42%) Active Directory
3 52 (1.01%) VMware Infrastructure
4 40 (0.78%) Oracle RAC
5 38 (0.74%) Virtual Machines
6 21 (0.41%) Hyper-V
7 18 (0.35%) 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 (0.098%) KVM
11 4 (0.078%) Apache ZooKeeper
11 4 (0.078%) NFS
11 4 (0.078%) Squid
12 3 (0.059%) GPFS
13 2 (0.039%) Ceph
13 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
13 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
14 1 (0.020%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 408 (7.96%) Kubernetes
2 110 (2.15%) Grafana
3 95 (1.85%) Ansible
4 56 (1.09%) Prometheus
5 43 (0.84%) Control-M
6 41 (0.80%) Data Guard
6 41 (0.80%) Oracle RMAN
7 40 (0.78%) Kibana
7 40 (0.78%) 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
12 10 (0.20%) Argo
12 10 (0.20%) Netcool
13 9 (0.18%) ITRS Geneos
13 9 (0.18%) Tivoli
13 9 (0.18%) WMI
Vendors
1 905 (17.66%) Oracle
2 860 (16.78%) Microsoft
3 649 (12.66%) Databricks
4 239 (4.66%) Google
5 148 (2.89%) Informatica
6 139 (2.71%) SAP
7 118 (2.30%) Talend
8 113 (2.20%) IBM
9 96 (1.87%) ServiceNow
10 89 (1.74%) Salesforce
11 87 (1.70%) Splunk
12 70 (1.37%) VMware
13 55 (1.07%) Denodo
14 40 (0.78%) Foundry
15 39 (0.76%) Adobe
15 39 (0.76%) Bloomberg
16 38 (0.74%) OpenAI
17 36 (0.70%) Sybase
17 36 (0.70%) UiPath
18 35 (0.68%) Murex