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

6 months to
6 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,142 3,761 4,061
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.51% 11.50% 10.60%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.49% 35.12% 33.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,450 2,579 2,920
10th Percentile £358 £327 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £600 £600 £638
90th Percentile £688 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £465 £475
% change year-on-year +2.15% -2.11% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 93 91 44
10th Percentile £23.00 £29.00 £20.12
25th Percentile £28.50 £32.50 £30.00
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.58
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +23.22% -10.70%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £81.20 £62.50 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £35.50
% change year-on-year -11.00% +40.85% -11.61%

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 14,090 10,710 12,156
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.07% 32.75% 31.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,159 7,108 8,354
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £526
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -4.89% -4.32%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £748 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 527 295 349
10th Percentile £28.00 £29.00 £29.55
25th Percentile £47.75 £37.23 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.90 £80.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +1.27%

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 6 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 6 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 6 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 -3 4,460 £500 - 3,786
London -6 2,511 £525 - 2,323
UK excluding London -8 2,066 £475 +2.15% 2,066
Work from Home -5 1,523 £500 - 1,646
North of England -1 589 £475 +5.56% 480
South East -10 460 £490 -2.00% 568
Midlands -5 454 £469 +4.22% 306
West Midlands -4 355 £469 -6.20% 172
North West -1 298 £480 +6.14% 287
Yorkshire +5 251 £475 +5.44% 125
South West -4 226 £513 +20.59% 258
Scotland -8 188 £426 -7.84% 154
East of England -8 119 £495 -1.49% 159
East Midlands -5 96 £464 +19.68% 133
North East -14 49 £413 -11.29% 71
Wales -10 38 £475 +6.74% 64
Northern Ireland -11 18 £348 -32.05% 102
Channel Islands - 1 £450 - 2

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
1 241 (4.69%) Apache Airflow
2 217 (4.22%) Confluence
3 211 (4.10%) Apache Spark
4 171 (3.33%) Apache
5 92 (1.79%) SharePoint
6 90 (1.75%) SAS
7 45 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
8 38 (0.74%) IIS
9 31 (0.60%) WebLogic
10 28 (0.54%) Jupyter
11 26 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
12 22 (0.43%) nginx
12 22 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
13 21 (0.41%) CMS
14 19 (0.37%) Camunda
15 17 (0.33%) WebSphere
16 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
17 14 (0.27%) Tomcat
18 11 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
19 8 (0.16%) Appian
Applications
1 311 (6.05%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.23%) Microsoft Office
3 39 (0.76%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.74%) Spreadsheet
5 26 (0.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.078%) Microsoft Project
8 4 (0.078%) Notion
8 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.058%) Windchill
10 2 (0.039%) Mingle
11 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 48 (0.93%) Oracle EBS
2 45 (0.88%) Dynamics CRM
3 32 (0.62%) SAP S/4HANA
4 29 (0.56%) Oracle Payables
5 25 (0.49%) Aladdin
6 24 (0.47%) Remedy ITSM
7 22 (0.43%) Oracle ERP
8 20 (0.39%) Oracle Receivables
9 17 (0.33%) Oracle General Ledger
10 15 (0.29%) Oracle EBS R12
11 13 (0.25%) Finacle
12 12 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
12 12 (0.23%) Oracle Financials
13 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
13 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
13 11 (0.21%) Summit
14 10 (0.19%) NetSuite
14 10 (0.19%) Oracle FAH
14 10 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
15 9 (0.18%) FLEXCUBE
Cloud Services
1 1,628 (31.66%) Azure
2 1,238 (24.08%) AWS
3 956 (18.59%) Power Platform
4 479 (9.32%) GCP
5 459 (8.93%) Azure DevOps
6 377 (7.33%) GitHub
7 374 (7.27%) Snowflake
8 342 (6.65%) Azure Data Factory
9 314 (6.11%) Serverless
10 295 (5.74%) dbt
11 243 (4.73%) Amazon S3
12 219 (4.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 206 (4.01%) AWS Lambda
14 183 (3.56%) GitHub Actions
15 115 (2.24%) SaaS
16 106 (2.06%) Power Automate
17 100 (1.94%) PowerApps
18 96 (1.87%) Entra ID
19 95 (1.85%) Azure Databricks
20 90 (1.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 69 (1.34%) DNS
2 48 (0.93%) Firewall
3 35 (0.68%) HTTP
4 33 (0.64%) SSL
5 24 (0.47%) Network Security
6 21 (0.41%) TCP/IP
7 20 (0.39%) VPN
8 19 (0.37%) Internet
8 19 (0.37%) SNMP
9 18 (0.35%) Broadband
10 16 (0.31%) DHCP
10 16 (0.31%) SSH
11 15 (0.29%) WAN
12 11 (0.21%) HTTPS
13 10 (0.19%) SAN
13 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
14 9 (0.18%) Kerberos
15 8 (0.16%) Multicast
15 8 (0.16%) RTP
16 7 (0.14%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 878 (17.08%) Power BI
2 719 (13.98%) Data Warehouse
3 654 (12.72%) SQL Server
4 356 (6.92%) Relational Database
5 333 (6.48%) PostgreSQL
6 329 (6.40%) Data Lake
7 297 (5.78%) Metadata
8 289 (5.62%) Tableau
9 257 (5.00%) NoSQL
10 238 (4.63%) Oracle Database
11 210 (4.08%) Azure SQL Database
12 189 (3.68%) BigQuery
13 156 (3.03%) Amazon Redshift
14 150 (2.92%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 148 (2.88%) Delta Lake
16 130 (2.53%) MySQL
17 124 (2.41%) MongoDB
18 121 (2.35%) Big Data
19 114 (2.22%) Oracle Reports
20 109 (2.12%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 634 (12.33%) Git
2 406 (7.90%) JIRA
3 287 (5.58%) Jenkins
4 238 (4.63%) GitLab
5 98 (1.91%) Selenium
6 92 (1.79%) JUnit
7 81 (1.58%) Gradle
8 77 (1.50%) Maven
9 64 (1.24%) Postman
10 59 (1.15%) Mockito
11 51 (0.99%) Oracle Forms
12 48 (0.93%) SonarQube
13 40 (0.78%) JMeter
13 40 (0.78%) Visual Studio
14 39 (0.76%) Bitbucket
15 33 (0.64%) MLflow
16 32 (0.62%) Zephyr
17 29 (0.56%) Team Foundation Server
18 28 (0.54%) Liquibase
19 26 (0.51%) Artifactory
General
1 1,399 (27.21%) Social Skills
2 1,316 (25.59%) Finance
3 1,075 (20.91%) Analytical Skills
4 553 (10.75%) Banking
5 476 (9.26%) Public Sector
6 154 (2.99%) Marketing
7 147 (2.86%) Front Office
8 143 (2.78%) Retail
9 138 (2.68%) Investment Banking
10 104 (2.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 94 (1.83%) Documentation Skills
12 74 (1.44%) Manufacturing
13 56 (1.09%) Legal
13 56 (1.09%) Presentation Skills
14 55 (1.07%) Financial Institution
15 43 (0.84%) Organisational Skills
16 42 (0.82%) Local Government
16 42 (0.82%) Telecoms
17 41 (0.80%) Law
17 41 (0.80%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 1,115 (21.68%) Developer
2 959 (18.65%) Data Engineer
3 775 (15.07%) Analyst
4 727 (14.14%) Senior
5 365 (7.10%) Lead
6 329 (6.40%) Data Analyst
7 276 (5.37%) Architect
8 252 (4.90%) Business Analyst
9 247 (4.80%) Consultant
10 212 (4.12%) DBA
11 209 (4.06%) Senior Data Engineer
12 204 (3.97%) Java Developer
13 180 (3.50%) Senior Developer
14 131 (2.55%) Software Engineer
15 128 (2.49%) Data Architect
16 126 (2.45%) SQL DBA
17 124 (2.41%) Python Engineer
18 122 (2.37%) SQL Developer
19 117 (2.28%) Full-Stack Developer
19 117 (2.28%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 470 (9.14%) REST
2 443 (8.62%) .NET
3 398 (7.74%) Terraform
4 350 (6.81%) Kafka
4 350 (6.81%) PySpark
5 280 (5.45%) Spring
6 270 (5.25%) Spring Boot
7 247 (4.80%) React
8 214 (4.16%) RESTful
9 210 (4.08%) JSON
10 207 (4.03%) HTML
11 189 (3.68%) XML
12 177 (3.44%) CSS
13 138 (2.68%) Web Services
14 123 (2.39%) AngularJS
15 118 (2.29%) SOAP
16 114 (2.22%) Middleware
17 110 (2.14%) Pandas
18 95 (1.85%) .NET Framework
19 86 (1.67%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 338 (6.57%) Cloud Native
2 270 (5.25%) Data Structures
3 227 (4.41%) Product Ownership
4 173 (3.36%) Legacy Systems
5 149 (2.90%) Distributed Systems
6 132 (2.57%) Onboarding
7 123 (2.39%) Enterprise Software
8 112 (2.18%) Management Information System
9 88 (1.71%) Derivative
10 83 (1.61%) Self-Motivation
11 81 (1.58%) AI Agents
12 79 (1.54%) Replication
13 68 (1.32%) Analytical Mindset
14 67 (1.30%) Data Protection Act
15 62 (1.21%) Algorithms
16 61 (1.19%) Clustering
17 57 (1.11%) Reference Data
18 54 (1.05%) Fixed Income
19 52 (1.01%) Greenfield Project
20 49 (0.95%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 374 (7.27%) Linux
2 317 (6.16%) Windows
3 250 (4.86%) Unix
4 128 (2.49%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 19 (0.37%) Solaris
7 15 (0.29%) AIX
8 13 (0.25%) VMS
9 10 (0.19%) Ubuntu
9 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.14%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
12 6 (0.12%) zOS
13 4 (0.078%) Android
13 4 (0.078%) Apple iOS
13 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
14 3 (0.058%) Oracle Linux
15 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,392 (27.07%) CI/CD
2 1,381 (26.86%) Agile
3 1,347 (26.20%) Data Modelling
4 1,255 (24.41%) Analytics
5 1,110 (21.59%) ETL
6 1,103 (21.45%) Business Intelligence
7 1,025 (19.93%) DevOps
8 1,000 (19.45%) Problem-Solving
9 998 (19.41%) Data Pipeline
10 851 (16.55%) Data Engineering
11 806 (15.67%) AI
12 765 (14.88%) Migration
12 765 (14.88%) Validation
13 677 (13.17%) Stakeholder Management
14 602 (11.71%) Data Governance
15 581 (11.30%) Test Automation
16 561 (10.91%) Data Analysis
17 535 (10.40%) Continuous Improvement
18 518 (10.07%) Decision-Making
19 429 (8.34%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,850 (35.98%) Python
2 661 (12.85%) Java
3 471 (9.16%) C#
4 413 (8.03%) PL/SQL
5 399 (7.76%) JavaScript
6 269 (5.23%) PowerShell
7 257 (5.00%) T-SQL
8 202 (3.93%) TypeScript
9 154 (2.99%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 153 (2.98%) Shell Script
11 121 (2.35%) Bash
12 98 (1.91%) R
13 75 (1.46%) Scala
14 57 (1.11%) C++
15 43 (0.84%) VBA
16 42 (0.82%) Bicep
17 29 (0.56%) VB.NET
18 28 (0.54%) C
19 26 (0.51%) VB
20 25 (0.49%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,109 (21.57%) Security Cleared
2 889 (17.29%) SC Cleared
3 362 (7.04%) Degree
4 155 (3.01%) BPSS Clearance
5 135 (2.63%) Computer Science Degree
6 130 (2.53%) DV Cleared
7 82 (1.59%) Azure Certification
8 65 (1.26%) ISTQB
9 50 (0.97%) Microsoft Certification
10 46 (0.89%) Master's Degree
11 43 (0.84%) AWS Certification
12 19 (0.37%) DBS Check
12 19 (0.37%) ISEB
12 19 (0.37%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 18 (0.35%) CISSP
14 14 (0.27%) ACCA
14 14 (0.27%) CIMA
14 14 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
15 12 (0.23%) FFIEC
15 12 (0.23%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 998 (19.41%) Data Quality
2 417 (8.11%) QA
3 155 (3.01%) GDPR
4 68 (1.32%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.89%) SLA
6 34 (0.66%) ISO 20022
7 26 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 24 (0.47%) Actionable Recommendations
9 23 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 20 (0.39%) IFRS
11 19 (0.37%) NIST
12 17 (0.33%) MiFID
13 15 (0.29%) PMO
14 13 (0.25%) GMP
14 13 (0.25%) Solvency II
15 12 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 12 (0.23%) GxP
15 12 (0.23%) PCI DSS
16 11 (0.21%) COBIT
17 10 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 17025
System Software
1 492 (9.57%) Docker
2 133 (2.59%) Active Directory
3 60 (1.17%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (0.84%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
6 24 (0.47%) Hyper-V
7 19 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
8 16 (0.31%) vCloud
8 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 15 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 7 (0.14%) Postfix
11 6 (0.12%) Squid
12 5 (0.097%) Ceph
13 4 (0.078%) KVM
14 3 (0.058%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 3 (0.058%) GPFS
15 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
15 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
15 2 (0.039%) NFS
Systems Management
1 410 (7.97%) Kubernetes
2 102 (1.98%) Ansible
2 102 (1.98%) Grafana
3 50 (0.97%) Prometheus
4 49 (0.95%) Oracle RMAN
5 46 (0.89%) Data Guard
6 45 (0.88%) Control-M
7 40 (0.78%) SCOM
8 23 (0.45%) Kibana
9 16 (0.31%) vCenter Server
10 14 (0.27%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
11 13 (0.25%) Nagios
11 13 (0.25%) Netcool
11 13 (0.25%) ZABBIX
12 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
12 12 (0.23%) Tivoli
13 11 (0.21%) Microsoft Intune
14 10 (0.19%) ITRS Geneos
14 10 (0.19%) Single Sign-On
14 10 (0.19%) Tivoli Monitoring
Vendors
1 916 (17.81%) Oracle
2 867 (16.86%) Microsoft
3 642 (12.49%) Databricks
4 204 (3.97%) Google
5 166 (3.23%) Informatica
6 141 (2.74%) SAP
7 127 (2.47%) Talend
8 104 (2.02%) IBM
9 103 (2.00%) ServiceNow
10 83 (1.61%) Splunk
11 79 (1.54%) VMware
12 77 (1.50%) Salesforce
13 59 (1.15%) Denodo
14 41 (0.80%) Bloomberg
14 41 (0.80%) Dynatrace
15 40 (0.78%) Sybase
16 37 (0.72%) BMC
16 37 (0.72%) Murex
17 35 (0.68%) Foundry
18 34 (0.66%) Alteryx