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 19 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,839 3,606 4,350
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.57% 12.09% 9.91%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.64% 35.63% 32.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,216 2,541 3,122
10th Percentile £350 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £410 £418
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £613 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -0.21% -1.05% -3.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 88 71 63
10th Percentile £26.50 £23.00 £22.64
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.36 £30.00
Median hourly rate £50.00 £40.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +23.46% -4.71% -20.93%
75th Percentile £73.42 £55.63 £53.94
90th Percentile £83.75 £76.25 £62.37
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £41.96 £41.38
% change year-on-year +19.18% +1.40% -17.25%

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 13,578 10,121 13,285
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.87% 33.94% 30.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,847 6,867 9,316
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £418 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £507 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.59% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £716 £756 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +3.16% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 553 236 550
10th Percentile £35.25 £25.50 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.13 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £84.75 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.84% -4.62% +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 19 June 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 19 June 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 19 June 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 4,245 £500 - 1,499
London -5 2,298 £525 -1.87% 582
UK excluding London -10 2,059 £469 -0.21% 1,286
Work from Home -6 1,445 £500 -1.96% 740
North of England -6 541 £460 -3.16% 344
Midlands +3 539 £463 +3.93% 200
West Midlands +5 441 £459 +1.32% 107
South East -12 424 £475 -5.00% 429
North West -3 287 £463 -2.37% 215
South West -2 231 £500 +5.26% 118
Yorkshire -12 214 £475 - 83
Scotland -9 192 £465 +3.33% 45
East of England -14 106 £495 +1.54% 102
East Midlands +1 94 £525 +38.16% 93
North East -12 52 £425 -8.36% 51
Wales +7 43 £450 +5.88% 33
Northern Ireland -13 13 £394 -21.25% 42

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
1 244 (5.04%) Apache Spark
2 199 (4.11%) Apache Airflow
3 198 (4.09%) Confluence
4 175 (3.62%) Apache
5 111 (2.29%) SAS
6 60 (1.24%) SharePoint
7 42 (0.87%) Tomcat
8 34 (0.70%) Oracle Workflow
9 33 (0.68%) IIS
10 32 (0.66%) WebLogic
11 31 (0.64%) WebSphere
12 25 (0.52%) Jupyter
13 22 (0.45%) Apache Geronimo
13 22 (0.45%) Apache ServiceMix
13 22 (0.45%) Red Hat Fuse
14 19 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
14 19 (0.39%) nginx
15 18 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
16 17 (0.35%) Appian
17 16 (0.33%) CMS
Applications
1 308 (6.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 55 (1.14%) Microsoft Office
3 50 (1.03%) MS Visio
4 36 (0.74%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 32 (0.66%) Spreadsheet
6 10 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.062%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.041%) Acrobat
10 2 (0.041%) Notion
10 2 (0.041%) Photoshop
11 1 (0.021%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.021%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.021%) InDesign
11 1 (0.021%) Mingle
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
11 1 (0.021%) Weka
Business Applications
1 40 (0.83%) Oracle EBS
2 33 (0.68%) Dynamics CRM
3 26 (0.54%) Aladdin
3 26 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
4 23 (0.48%) Oracle Payables
5 21 (0.43%) Oracle ERP
6 19 (0.39%) NEC Housing
7 16 (0.33%) Oracle EBS R12
7 16 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
8 15 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 11 (0.23%) Findur
9 11 (0.23%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 10 (0.21%) Oracle General Ledger
10 10 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
10 10 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
10 10 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
11 9 (0.19%) NetSuite
11 9 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
11 9 (0.19%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
12 8 (0.17%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,578 (32.61%) Azure
2 1,190 (24.59%) AWS
3 920 (19.01%) Power Platform
4 448 (9.26%) Azure DevOps
5 398 (8.22%) GCP
6 351 (7.25%) Azure Data Factory
7 350 (7.23%) GitHub
8 317 (6.55%) Serverless
9 291 (6.01%) Snowflake
10 274 (5.66%) Amazon S3
11 227 (4.69%) dbt
12 219 (4.53%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 197 (4.07%) AWS Lambda
14 184 (3.80%) GitHub Actions
15 87 (1.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 87 (1.80%) Power Automate
16 86 (1.78%) SaaS
17 84 (1.74%) Entra ID
18 80 (1.65%) Azure Functions
19 77 (1.59%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 55 (1.14%) DNS
2 45 (0.93%) Firewall
3 24 (0.50%) WAN
4 22 (0.45%) HTTP
4 22 (0.45%) SNMP
5 21 (0.43%) Network Security
6 20 (0.41%) SSL
7 17 (0.35%) Internet
7 17 (0.35%) VPN
8 14 (0.29%) TCP/IP
9 11 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
10 10 (0.21%) LAN
10 10 (0.21%) SAN
11 9 (0.19%) Wireshark
12 8 (0.17%) 3GPP
12 8 (0.17%) HTTPS
12 8 (0.17%) Kerberos
13 7 (0.14%) NAS
13 7 (0.14%) PuTTY
13 7 (0.14%) WinSCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 846 (17.48%) Power BI
2 623 (12.87%) Data Warehouse
3 591 (12.21%) SQL Server
4 324 (6.70%) Data Lake
5 322 (6.65%) Relational Database
6 317 (6.55%) PostgreSQL
7 314 (6.49%) Tableau
8 263 (5.44%) NoSQL
9 251 (5.19%) Metadata
10 230 (4.75%) Azure SQL Database
11 182 (3.76%) Oracle Database
12 165 (3.41%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 152 (3.14%) BigQuery
14 146 (3.02%) Big Data
15 144 (2.98%) Amazon Redshift
16 133 (2.75%) Delta Lake
17 123 (2.54%) MySQL
18 116 (2.40%) Oracle Reports
19 111 (2.29%) MongoDB
20 106 (2.19%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 528 (10.91%) Git
2 387 (8.00%) JIRA
3 246 (5.08%) Jenkins
4 230 (4.75%) GitLab
5 71 (1.47%) JUnit
6 55 (1.14%) Selenium
7 53 (1.10%) Maven
7 53 (1.10%) Postman
8 51 (1.05%) Mockito
9 49 (1.01%) Gradle
10 39 (0.81%) Visual Studio
11 35 (0.72%) Cucumber
11 35 (0.72%) MLflow
11 35 (0.72%) Oracle Forms
12 33 (0.68%) SonarQube
13 30 (0.62%) JMeter
14 28 (0.58%) Bitbucket
14 28 (0.58%) ERwin
14 28 (0.58%) Liquibase
15 26 (0.54%) Zephyr
General
1 1,246 (25.75%) Finance
2 1,230 (25.42%) Social Skills
3 902 (18.64%) Analytical Skills
4 445 (9.20%) Banking
5 444 (9.18%) Public Sector
6 131 (2.71%) Front Office
7 124 (2.56%) Investment Banking
8 119 (2.46%) Marketing
9 104 (2.15%) Documentation Skills
10 102 (2.11%) Retail
11 87 (1.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 56 (1.16%) Legal
13 53 (1.10%) Financial Institution
14 48 (0.99%) Publishing
15 45 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
16 44 (0.91%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.70%) Organisational Skills
17 34 (0.70%) Telecoms
18 33 (0.68%) Back Office
19 31 (0.64%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,016 (21.00%) Developer
2 1,004 (20.75%) Data Engineer
3 695 (14.36%) Analyst
4 628 (12.98%) Senior
5 325 (6.72%) Lead
6 305 (6.30%) Data Analyst
7 276 (5.70%) Architect
8 232 (4.79%) Consultant
9 207 (4.28%) Business Analyst
10 203 (4.20%) Java Developer
11 187 (3.86%) Senior Data Engineer
12 168 (3.47%) DBA
13 146 (3.02%) Software Engineer
14 144 (2.98%) Senior Developer
15 120 (2.48%) Azure Engineer
16 109 (2.25%) C# Developer
16 109 (2.25%) SQL Developer
17 108 (2.23%) Python Developer
18 102 (2.11%) Data Architect
19 94 (1.94%) SQL DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 396 (8.18%) .NET
2 362 (7.48%) REST
3 307 (6.34%) PySpark
4 295 (6.10%) Kafka
5 253 (5.23%) Spring
6 244 (5.04%) Spring Boot
7 228 (4.71%) React
8 214 (4.42%) RESTful
9 175 (3.62%) JSON
10 157 (3.24%) HTML
11 154 (3.18%) XML
12 141 (2.91%) CSS
13 126 (2.60%) Pandas
14 118 (2.44%) AngularJS
15 114 (2.36%) SOAP
16 113 (2.34%) Middleware
17 112 (2.31%) Web Services
18 91 (1.88%) .NET Framework
19 84 (1.74%) OAuth
20 77 (1.59%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 319 (6.59%) Cloud Native
2 199 (4.11%) Data Structures
3 178 (3.68%) Legacy Systems
4 154 (3.18%) Product Ownership
5 141 (2.91%) Distributed Systems
6 96 (1.98%) Management Information System
7 94 (1.94%) Derivative
8 92 (1.90%) Onboarding
9 78 (1.61%) Data Protection Act
10 71 (1.47%) Analytical Mindset
10 71 (1.47%) Enterprise Software
11 68 (1.41%) Self-Motivation
12 64 (1.32%) Algorithms
13 60 (1.24%) Clustering
14 54 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
15 50 (1.03%) Equities
16 49 (1.01%) Replication
17 48 (0.99%) Fixed Income
18 45 (0.93%) Low-Code
19 42 (0.87%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 315 (6.51%) Linux
2 275 (5.68%) Windows
3 223 (4.61%) Unix
4 104 (2.15%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.52%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.50%) AIX
7 18 (0.37%) Windows Server 2019
8 17 (0.35%) Solaris
9 13 (0.27%) Windows Server 2016
10 11 (0.23%) VMS
10 11 (0.23%) Windows Server 2008
11 8 (0.17%) Apple iOS
11 8 (0.17%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Android
12 7 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 4 (0.083%) Oracle Linux
14 3 (0.062%) Windows Server 2012
15 2 (0.041%) Data ONTAP
15 2 (0.041%) HPUX
15 2 (0.041%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,307 (27.01%) CI/CD
2 1,226 (25.34%) Agile
3 1,220 (25.21%) Data Modelling
4 1,217 (25.15%) Analytics
5 1,112 (22.98%) ETL
6 1,067 (22.05%) Business Intelligence
7 1,008 (20.83%) DevOps
8 949 (19.61%) Problem-Solving
9 941 (19.45%) Data Pipeline
10 791 (16.35%) Data Engineering
11 685 (14.16%) AI
12 652 (13.47%) Migration
13 605 (12.50%) Validation
14 543 (11.22%) Data Governance
15 488 (10.08%) Test Automation
16 484 (10.00%) Decision-Making
17 468 (9.67%) Data Analysis
18 454 (9.38%) Stakeholder Management
19 439 (9.07%) Performance Tuning
20 435 (8.99%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,785 (36.89%) Python
2 642 (13.27%) Java
3 488 (10.08%) C#
4 361 (7.46%) PL/SQL
5 335 (6.92%) JavaScript
6 250 (5.17%) T-SQL
7 233 (4.82%) PowerShell
8 169 (3.49%) TypeScript
9 141 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 117 (2.42%) Shell Script
11 115 (2.38%) R
12 92 (1.90%) Bash
13 80 (1.65%) C++
14 78 (1.61%) Scala
15 51 (1.05%) Bicep
16 46 (0.95%) VBA
17 35 (0.72%) C
17 35 (0.72%) VB
18 34 (0.70%) Perl
19 25 (0.52%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,041 (21.51%) Security Cleared
2 847 (17.50%) SC Cleared
3 365 (7.54%) Degree
4 123 (2.54%) BPSS Clearance
5 112 (2.31%) Computer Science Degree
6 93 (1.92%) DV Cleared
7 74 (1.53%) Azure Certification
8 66 (1.36%) Master's Degree
9 58 (1.20%) ISTQB
10 43 (0.89%) Microsoft Certification
11 37 (0.76%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.37%) DBS Check
13 17 (0.35%) PhD
14 14 (0.29%) CISSP
15 13 (0.27%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
16 10 (0.21%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 10 (0.21%) SnowPro
16 10 (0.21%) TOGAF Certification
17 9 (0.19%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
17 9 (0.19%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 885 (18.29%) Data Quality
2 371 (7.67%) QA
3 183 (3.78%) GDPR
4 58 (1.20%) Accessibility
5 45 (0.93%) SLA
6 31 (0.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 30 (0.62%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 26 (0.54%) NIST
9 23 (0.48%) PMO
10 18 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
11 17 (0.35%) IFRS
12 16 (0.33%) ISO 20022
12 16 (0.33%) PCI DSS
13 15 (0.31%) Solvency II
14 14 (0.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 14 (0.29%) HIPAA
14 14 (0.29%) MiFID
15 13 (0.27%) NCSC
16 11 (0.23%) HL7
16 11 (0.23%) WCAG
System Software
1 524 (10.83%) Docker
2 106 (2.19%) Active Directory
3 40 (0.83%) Virtual Machines
4 36 (0.74%) VMware Infrastructure
5 30 (0.62%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.43%) Hyper-V
7 19 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
8 12 (0.25%) VMware NSX
9 11 (0.23%) vCloud
10 10 (0.21%) KVM
10 10 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
11 9 (0.19%) Postfix
12 6 (0.12%) RACF
13 5 (0.10%) HDFS
14 4 (0.083%) Ceph
14 4 (0.083%) XenApp
14 4 (0.083%) XenDesktop
15 3 (0.062%) Squid
16 2 (0.041%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 2 (0.041%) GridGain
Systems Management
1 416 (8.60%) Kubernetes
2 387 (8.00%) Terraform
3 117 (2.42%) Grafana
4 86 (1.78%) Ansible
5 59 (1.22%) Prometheus
6 41 (0.85%) Oracle RMAN
7 30 (0.62%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.48%) Control-M
9 22 (0.45%) Kibana
10 20 (0.41%) Single Sign-On
11 18 (0.37%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.33%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.31%) Tivoli
14 14 (0.29%) Nagios
14 14 (0.29%) Netcool
15 13 (0.27%) OpenView
15 13 (0.27%) Tivoli Monitoring
16 12 (0.25%) SCOM
17 8 (0.17%) SCCM
17 8 (0.17%) WMI
Vendors
1 836 (17.28%) Oracle
2 752 (15.54%) Microsoft
3 568 (11.74%) Databricks
4 183 (3.78%) Informatica
5 182 (3.76%) Google
6 145 (3.00%) Talend
7 136 (2.81%) ServiceNow
8 123 (2.54%) SAP
9 90 (1.86%) Splunk
10 85 (1.76%) IBM
11 72 (1.49%) Denodo
12 56 (1.16%) Salesforce
12 56 (1.16%) VMware
13 44 (0.91%) Citrix
14 39 (0.81%) Dynatrace
15 37 (0.76%) Sybase
16 36 (0.74%) Bloomberg
17 34 (0.70%) MuleSoft
17 34 (0.70%) Murex
17 34 (0.70%) OpenAI