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 25 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 12 14
Rank change year-on-year -6 +2 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,510 3,563 4,255
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.67% 12.07% 9.75%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.11% 35.47% 33.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,073 2,487 3,058
10th Percentile £350 £355 £352
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £536
Median % change year-on-year - -6.72% -0.28%
75th Percentile £588 £623 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -1.26% - -2.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 72 64 66
10th Percentile £33.78 £22.64 £22.61
25th Percentile £36.44 £30.19 £26.05
Median hourly rate £54.75 £45.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +20.33% +7.06% -16.26%
75th Percentile £77.80 £65.71 £54.03
90th Percentile £83.98 £76.91 £62.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £60.75 £33.91 £42.50
% change year-on-year +79.15% -20.21% +1.08%

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 12,847 10,044 12,821
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.55% 34.03% 29.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,519 6,801 9,116
10th Percentile £352 £360 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £479 £488
% change year-on-year -0.78% -1.80% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 555 246 482
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.49 £31.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £34.18 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -1.92%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £68.75
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.68
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% -

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 25 April 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 25 April 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 25 April 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 3,993 £500 -3.38% 1,625
London 0 2,264 £513 -6.82% 636
UK excluding London -8 1,806 £469 -1.26% 1,363
Work from Home -6 1,333 £500 -3.85% 1,162
Midlands +7 517 £465 +1.31% 217
North of England -8 476 £450 -5.26% 314
West Midlands +8 410 £460 -0.65% 126
South East -18 322 £500 - 485
North West -1 264 £450 -5.26% 187
South West -7 214 £475 -5.00% 133
Yorkshire -17 190 £463 -2.63% 84
Scotland -5 162 £485 +7.78% 49
East Midlands +3 104 £525 +25.00% 91
East of England -21 89 £503 +9.54% 119
Wales +8 36 £400 -8.05% 27
North East -9 33 £475 +4.40% 46
Northern Ireland -9 13 £400 -2.44% 32

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
1 260 (5.76%) Apache Spark
2 181 (4.01%) Apache Airflow
3 176 (3.90%) Apache
4 141 (3.13%) Confluence
5 97 (2.15%) SAS
6 90 (2.00%) SharePoint
7 47 (1.04%) WebLogic
8 44 (0.98%) Tomcat
9 34 (0.75%) IIS
10 27 (0.60%) WebSphere
11 24 (0.53%) Apache Geronimo
11 24 (0.53%) Apache ServiceMix
11 24 (0.53%) Oracle Workflow
11 24 (0.53%) Red Hat Fuse
12 23 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
13 21 (0.47%) nginx
14 16 (0.35%) Tuxedo
15 14 (0.31%) HCL Notes
15 14 (0.31%) Mendix
15 14 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 299 (6.63%) Microsoft Excel
2 60 (1.33%) Microsoft Office
3 48 (1.06%) MS Visio
4 39 (0.86%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 24 (0.53%) Spreadsheet
6 10 (0.22%) Microsoft Project
7 7 (0.16%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.16%) Notepad++
8 3 (0.067%) Notion
8 3 (0.067%) Oracle Smart View
8 3 (0.067%) Trello
9 1 (0.022%) InDesign
9 1 (0.022%) Mingle
9 1 (0.022%) SPSS
9 1 (0.022%) Weka
Business Applications
1 49 (1.09%) Oracle EBS
2 26 (0.58%) Aladdin
3 24 (0.53%) NEC Housing
4 23 (0.51%) Dynamics CRM
4 23 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
5 22 (0.49%) Oracle EBS R12
5 22 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
6 20 (0.44%) Oracle Receivables
7 17 (0.38%) Oracle General Ledger
8 16 (0.35%) NetSuite
8 16 (0.35%) Oracle ERP
9 13 (0.29%) Payment Gateway
9 13 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
10 12 (0.27%) Oracle Assets
10 12 (0.27%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
11 11 (0.24%) Oracle 11i
12 10 (0.22%) Oracle Cash Management
13 9 (0.20%) Advent Geneva
13 9 (0.20%) Maximo
14 8 (0.18%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
Cloud Services
1 1,562 (34.63%) Azure
2 1,090 (24.17%) AWS
3 869 (19.27%) Power Platform
4 466 (10.33%) Azure DevOps
5 375 (8.31%) Azure Data Factory
6 360 (7.98%) GCP
7 344 (7.63%) GitHub
8 301 (6.67%) Serverless
9 259 (5.74%) Snowflake
10 254 (5.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 249 (5.52%) Amazon S3
12 189 (4.19%) dbt
13 180 (3.99%) GitHub Actions
14 167 (3.70%) AWS Lambda
15 103 (2.28%) Power Automate
16 96 (2.13%) Azure Functions
17 86 (1.91%) SaaS
18 83 (1.84%) Entra ID
19 82 (1.82%) AWS CloudFormation
19 82 (1.82%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 54 (1.20%) Firewall
2 41 (0.91%) DNS
3 25 (0.55%) Network Security
4 21 (0.47%) TCP/IP
5 20 (0.44%) HTTP
5 20 (0.44%) WAN
6 16 (0.35%) Internet
7 15 (0.33%) LAN
8 14 (0.31%) SSL
9 12 (0.27%) VPN
10 11 (0.24%) SNMP
11 9 (0.20%) DHCP
11 9 (0.20%) Kerberos
12 8 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
13 7 (0.16%) NAS
13 7 (0.16%) PuTTY
13 7 (0.16%) SAN
13 7 (0.16%) VLAN
13 7 (0.16%) WinSCP
14 6 (0.13%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 791 (17.54%) Power BI
2 572 (12.68%) Data Warehouse
3 549 (12.17%) SQL Server
4 309 (6.85%) Tableau
5 307 (6.81%) PostgreSQL
6 297 (6.59%) Data Lake
7 283 (6.27%) Relational Database
8 281 (6.23%) NoSQL
9 248 (5.50%) Azure SQL Database
10 246 (5.45%) Metadata
11 162 (3.59%) Oracle Database
12 157 (3.48%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 148 (3.28%) Big Data
14 137 (3.04%) MySQL
15 132 (2.93%) BigQuery
16 130 (2.88%) Amazon Redshift
17 128 (2.84%) Delta Lake
18 114 (2.53%) MongoDB
19 109 (2.42%) Oracle Reports
20 102 (2.26%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 480 (10.64%) Git
2 352 (7.80%) JIRA
3 229 (5.08%) Jenkins
4 188 (4.17%) GitLab
5 69 (1.53%) Selenium
6 62 (1.37%) JUnit
7 53 (1.18%) Postman
8 42 (0.93%) MLflow
9 41 (0.91%) Maven
10 40 (0.89%) Cucumber
11 39 (0.86%) Mockito
12 35 (0.78%) Oracle APEX
13 32 (0.71%) Bitbucket
13 32 (0.71%) Visual Studio
14 31 (0.69%) ERwin
14 31 (0.69%) REST Assured
15 29 (0.64%) JMeter
16 27 (0.60%) Oracle Forms
16 27 (0.60%) SonarQube
17 25 (0.55%) Cypress.io
General
1 1,225 (27.16%) Social Skills
2 1,187 (26.32%) Finance
3 843 (18.69%) Analytical Skills
4 420 (9.31%) Banking
5 402 (8.91%) Public Sector
6 114 (2.53%) Investment Banking
7 110 (2.44%) Front Office
8 104 (2.31%) Documentation Skills
9 99 (2.20%) Marketing
10 75 (1.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 74 (1.64%) Retail
12 57 (1.26%) Financial Institution
13 56 (1.24%) Legal
14 40 (0.89%) Telecoms
15 38 (0.84%) Presentation Skills
16 36 (0.80%) Organisational Skills
17 35 (0.78%) Publishing
18 34 (0.75%) Manufacturing
19 33 (0.73%) Local Government
20 32 (0.71%) Law
Job Titles
1 985 (21.84%) Developer
2 892 (19.78%) Data Engineer
3 669 (14.83%) Analyst
4 562 (12.46%) Senior
5 311 (6.90%) Lead
6 286 (6.34%) Data Analyst
7 271 (6.01%) Architect
8 219 (4.86%) Business Analyst
9 211 (4.68%) Consultant
10 169 (3.75%) Java Developer
11 145 (3.22%) Senior Data Engineer
12 143 (3.17%) DBA
13 137 (3.04%) Senior Developer
14 128 (2.84%) Azure Engineer
15 125 (2.77%) Software Engineer
16 116 (2.57%) C# Developer
17 109 (2.42%) Data Architect
18 104 (2.31%) Python Developer
19 99 (2.20%) Data Scientist
19 99 (2.20%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 393 (8.71%) .NET
2 346 (7.67%) REST
3 287 (6.36%) PySpark
4 273 (6.05%) Kafka
5 218 (4.83%) React
6 204 (4.52%) Spring
7 195 (4.32%) RESTful
8 193 (4.28%) Spring Boot
9 162 (3.59%) HTML
10 151 (3.35%) XML
11 145 (3.22%) JSON
12 143 (3.17%) CSS
13 129 (2.86%) Pandas
14 119 (2.64%) AngularJS
15 109 (2.42%) Middleware
16 94 (2.08%) SOAP
17 93 (2.06%) Node.js
18 91 (2.02%) .NET Framework
19 84 (1.86%) Web Services
20 77 (1.71%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 287 (6.36%) Cloud Native
2 172 (3.81%) Data Structures
3 156 (3.46%) Legacy Systems
4 137 (3.04%) Product Ownership
5 108 (2.39%) Distributed Systems
6 96 (2.13%) Management Information System
7 85 (1.88%) Derivative
8 79 (1.75%) Data Protection Act
9 74 (1.64%) Onboarding
10 65 (1.44%) Analytical Mindset
11 58 (1.29%) Algorithms
12 56 (1.24%) Enterprise Software
12 56 (1.24%) Equities
12 56 (1.24%) Fixed Income
13 53 (1.18%) Self-Motivation
14 51 (1.13%) Clustering
15 43 (0.95%) NHS
16 42 (0.93%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 42 (0.93%) Replication
17 41 (0.91%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 320 (7.10%) Linux
2 272 (6.03%) Windows
3 214 (4.75%) Unix
4 91 (2.02%) Windows Server
5 31 (0.69%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 23 (0.51%) AIX
7 17 (0.38%) Windows Server 2019
8 14 (0.31%) Windows Server 2016
9 10 (0.22%) Windows 10
9 10 (0.22%) Windows Server 2008
10 9 (0.20%) Solaris
10 9 (0.20%) VMS
11 7 (0.16%) zOS
12 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.11%) Apple iOS
13 5 (0.11%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.089%) Android
15 2 (0.044%) CentOS
15 2 (0.044%) Data ONTAP
16 1 (0.022%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,202 (26.65%) CI/CD
2 1,166 (25.85%) Agile
3 1,150 (25.50%) Analytics
4 1,122 (24.88%) Data Modelling
5 1,047 (23.22%) ETL
6 1,032 (22.88%) Business Intelligence
7 1,023 (22.68%) DevOps
8 924 (20.49%) Problem-Solving
9 831 (18.43%) Data Pipeline
10 705 (15.63%) Data Engineering
11 568 (12.59%) Data Governance
12 564 (12.51%) Migration
13 548 (12.15%) AI
14 538 (11.93%) Validation
15 433 (9.60%) Decision-Making
16 426 (9.45%) Test Automation
17 411 (9.11%) Data Analysis
17 411 (9.11%) Performance Tuning
18 391 (8.67%) Microservices
19 384 (8.51%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 1,714 (38.00%) Python
2 618 (13.70%) Java
3 483 (10.71%) C#
4 353 (7.83%) JavaScript
5 336 (7.45%) PL/SQL
6 204 (4.52%) T-SQL
7 197 (4.37%) PowerShell
8 148 (3.28%) TypeScript
9 134 (2.97%) R
10 131 (2.90%) Shell Script
11 130 (2.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
12 93 (2.06%) Scala
13 83 (1.84%) Bash
14 81 (1.80%) C++
15 64 (1.42%) Bicep
16 60 (1.33%) VBA
17 47 (1.04%) Perl
18 31 (0.69%) Go
19 30 (0.67%) VB
20 23 (0.51%) PHP
Qualifications
1 964 (21.37%) Security Cleared
2 789 (17.49%) SC Cleared
3 365 (8.09%) Degree
4 126 (2.79%) Computer Science Degree
5 106 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
6 73 (1.62%) Azure Certification
7 68 (1.51%) Master's Degree
8 58 (1.29%) DV Cleared
9 53 (1.18%) ISTQB
10 45 (1.00%) Microsoft Certification
11 33 (0.73%) AWS Certification
12 19 (0.42%) Oracle Certification
13 18 (0.40%) PhD
14 17 (0.38%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 13 (0.29%) CBAP
15 13 (0.29%) DBS Check
16 12 (0.27%) CISSP
17 10 (0.22%) PMP
18 9 (0.20%) CISM
18 9 (0.20%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 816 (18.09%) Data Quality
2 355 (7.87%) QA
3 205 (4.55%) GDPR
4 58 (1.29%) Accessibility
5 39 (0.86%) SLA
6 34 (0.75%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 28 (0.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 28 (0.62%) PMO
8 18 (0.40%) Actionable Recommendations
9 17 (0.38%) NIST
9 17 (0.38%) PCI DSS
10 16 (0.35%) HIPAA
11 15 (0.33%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 15 (0.33%) MiFID
11 15 (0.33%) WCAG
12 14 (0.31%) HL7
12 14 (0.31%) IFRS
12 14 (0.31%) ISO 20022
13 11 (0.24%) DICOM
13 11 (0.24%) NCSC
System Software
1 524 (11.62%) Docker
2 113 (2.51%) Active Directory
3 35 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
4 32 (0.71%) Oracle RAC
5 27 (0.60%) VMware Infrastructure
6 22 (0.49%) Hyper-V
7 10 (0.22%) KVM
7 10 (0.22%) VMware ESXi
8 9 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
9 8 (0.18%) HDFS
9 8 (0.18%) Postfix
10 6 (0.13%) RACF
11 5 (0.11%) XenApp
11 5 (0.11%) XenDesktop
12 3 (0.067%) Ceph
12 3 (0.067%) Oracle Clusterware
13 2 (0.044%) GridGain
13 2 (0.044%) Squid
13 2 (0.044%) vSphere
14 1 (0.022%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 440 (9.76%) Kubernetes
2 379 (8.40%) Terraform
3 114 (2.53%) Grafana
4 81 (1.80%) Ansible
5 66 (1.46%) Prometheus
6 42 (0.93%) Oracle RMAN
7 31 (0.69%) Data Guard
8 20 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
9 17 (0.38%) Kibana
9 17 (0.38%) Progress Chef
9 17 (0.38%) SCCM
10 14 (0.31%) Control-M
11 11 (0.24%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
11 11 (0.24%) ZABBIX
12 10 (0.22%) Nagios
12 10 (0.22%) Netcool
12 10 (0.22%) OpenView
12 10 (0.22%) Tivoli
12 10 (0.22%) Tivoli Monitoring
13 9 (0.20%) WSUS
Vendors
1 756 (16.76%) Oracle
2 732 (16.23%) Microsoft
3 560 (12.42%) Databricks
4 171 (3.79%) Google
5 152 (3.37%) Informatica
6 137 (3.04%) ServiceNow
7 121 (2.68%) SAP
8 118 (2.62%) Talend
9 90 (2.00%) Splunk
10 79 (1.75%) IBM
11 70 (1.55%) Salesforce
12 53 (1.18%) Citrix
13 50 (1.11%) Denodo
14 46 (1.02%) VMware
15 44 (0.98%) OpenAI
16 36 (0.80%) Dynatrace
17 34 (0.75%) MuleSoft
18 32 (0.71%) Bloomberg
19 29 (0.64%) HP
19 29 (0.64%) Sage