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

6 months to
23 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -2
Contract jobs citing SQL 4,881 3,609 4,313
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.61% 12.04% 9.89%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.73% 35.54% 32.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,237 2,533 3,100
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 £594 £613 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -1.26% - -3.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 88 72 62
10th Percentile £26.06 £23.05 £22.61
25th Percentile £34.01 £31.42 £27.19
Median hourly rate £45.90 £41.66 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.18% -1.98% -17.07%
75th Percentile £69.11 £53.75 £53.29
90th Percentile £82.48 £72.50 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.25
% change year-on-year -11.00% +24.22% -18.80%

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 13,661 10,154 13,202
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.90% 33.89% 30.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,886 6,888 9,262
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.58% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 239 554
10th Percentile £35.00 £25.65 £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 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £83.27 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £64.50
% change year-on-year +4.84% -3.88% +3.20%

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 23 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 23 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 23 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 -2 4,278 £500 - 1,526
London -4 2,321 £525 -1.87% 607
UK excluding London -10 2,071 £469 -1.26% 1,273
Work from Home -6 1,450 £500 -1.96% 764
North of England -6 544 £460 -3.16% 346
Midlands +3 539 £463 +8.06% 197
West Midlands +5 446 £459 +1.32% 99
South East -11 427 £475 -5.00% 439
North West -3 290 £463 -2.63% 210
South West -3 231 £500 +5.26% 110
Yorkshire -11 214 £475 - 91
Scotland -8 195 £465 +3.33% 42
East of England -11 108 £495 +1.54% 97
East Midlands -1 89 £525 +40.00% 98
North East -12 52 £425 -8.36% 51
Wales +7 45 £450 +5.88% 31
Northern Ireland -13 12 £388 -22.50% 40

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 (5.00%) Apache Spark
2 200 (4.10%) Apache Airflow
3 199 (4.08%) Confluence
4 178 (3.65%) Apache
5 112 (2.29%) SAS
6 60 (1.23%) SharePoint
7 42 (0.86%) Tomcat
8 35 (0.72%) Oracle Workflow
9 34 (0.70%) IIS
9 34 (0.70%) WebLogic
10 33 (0.68%) WebSphere
11 25 (0.51%) Jupyter
12 22 (0.45%) Apache Geronimo
12 22 (0.45%) Apache ServiceMix
12 22 (0.45%) Red Hat Fuse
13 21 (0.43%) nginx
14 19 (0.39%) Appian
14 19 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
15 18 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
16 16 (0.33%) CMS
Applications
1 308 (6.31%) Microsoft Excel
2 60 (1.23%) Microsoft Office
3 52 (1.07%) MS Visio
4 36 (0.74%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 32 (0.66%) Spreadsheet
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.061%) Acrobat
9 3 (0.061%) Oracle Smart View
9 3 (0.061%) Photoshop
10 2 (0.041%) Notion
11 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.020%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.020%) InDesign
11 1 (0.020%) Mingle
11 1 (0.020%) Trello
11 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 40 (0.82%) Oracle EBS
2 35 (0.72%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.59%) SAP S/4HANA
4 25 (0.51%) Aladdin
5 23 (0.47%) Oracle Payables
6 22 (0.45%) Oracle ERP
7 19 (0.39%) NEC Housing
8 16 (0.33%) Oracle EBS R12
8 16 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
9 15 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
10 11 (0.23%) Findur
10 11 (0.23%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 11 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
11 10 (0.20%) Elite 3E
11 10 (0.20%) Oracle General Ledger
11 10 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
11 10 (0.20%) Siebel CRM
12 9 (0.18%) Finacle
12 9 (0.18%) NetSuite
12 9 (0.18%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
Cloud Services
1 1,583 (32.43%) Azure
2 1,197 (24.52%) AWS
3 934 (19.14%) Power Platform
4 446 (9.14%) Azure DevOps
5 400 (8.20%) GCP
6 356 (7.29%) GitHub
7 351 (7.19%) Azure Data Factory
8 315 (6.45%) Serverless
9 296 (6.06%) Snowflake
10 270 (5.53%) Amazon S3
11 229 (4.69%) dbt
12 225 (4.61%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 196 (4.02%) AWS Lambda
14 186 (3.81%) GitHub Actions
15 90 (1.84%) Power Automate
16 88 (1.80%) SaaS
17 86 (1.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 80 (1.64%) Azure Functions
18 80 (1.64%) Entra ID
19 79 (1.62%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 55 (1.13%) DNS
2 44 (0.90%) Firewall
3 23 (0.47%) WAN
4 22 (0.45%) HTTP
4 22 (0.45%) SNMP
5 21 (0.43%) Network Security
6 19 (0.39%) SSL
7 18 (0.37%) Internet
8 17 (0.35%) VPN
9 13 (0.27%) TCP/IP
10 11 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
11 10 (0.20%) LAN
11 10 (0.20%) SAN
12 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
12 9 (0.18%) WinSCP
12 9 (0.18%) Wireshark
13 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
14 7 (0.14%) Kerberos
14 7 (0.14%) NAS
14 7 (0.14%) PuTTY
Database & Business Intelligence
1 859 (17.60%) Power BI
2 634 (12.99%) Data Warehouse
3 595 (12.19%) SQL Server
4 330 (6.76%) Relational Database
5 319 (6.54%) Data Lake
6 316 (6.47%) PostgreSQL
7 315 (6.45%) Tableau
8 264 (5.41%) NoSQL
9 252 (5.16%) Metadata
10 228 (4.67%) Azure SQL Database
11 186 (3.81%) Oracle Database
12 165 (3.38%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 152 (3.11%) BigQuery
14 143 (2.93%) Big Data
15 142 (2.91%) Amazon Redshift
16 137 (2.81%) Delta Lake
17 124 (2.54%) MySQL
18 117 (2.40%) Oracle Reports
19 113 (2.32%) MongoDB
20 107 (2.19%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 530 (10.86%) Git
2 391 (8.01%) JIRA
3 248 (5.08%) Jenkins
4 230 (4.71%) GitLab
5 72 (1.48%) JUnit
6 55 (1.13%) Maven
6 55 (1.13%) Selenium
7 52 (1.07%) Postman
8 51 (1.04%) Mockito
9 50 (1.02%) Gradle
10 39 (0.80%) Visual Studio
11 37 (0.76%) Oracle Forms
12 35 (0.72%) MLflow
13 34 (0.70%) Cucumber
14 33 (0.68%) SonarQube
15 31 (0.64%) JMeter
16 28 (0.57%) Bitbucket
16 28 (0.57%) ERwin
16 28 (0.57%) Liquibase
17 26 (0.53%) Zephyr
General
1 1,258 (25.77%) Finance
2 1,252 (25.65%) Social Skills
3 913 (18.71%) Analytical Skills
4 457 (9.36%) Banking
5 452 (9.26%) Public Sector
6 135 (2.77%) Front Office
7 125 (2.56%) Investment Banking
8 123 (2.52%) Marketing
9 107 (2.19%) Retail
10 104 (2.13%) Documentation Skills
11 89 (1.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 59 (1.21%) Legal
13 56 (1.15%) Financial Institution
14 51 (1.04%) Presentation Skills
15 50 (1.02%) Manufacturing
16 44 (0.90%) Publishing
17 36 (0.74%) Back Office
18 35 (0.72%) Organisational Skills
19 34 (0.70%) Telecoms
20 32 (0.66%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,021 (20.92%) Developer
2 1,004 (20.57%) Data Engineer
3 703 (14.40%) Analyst
4 638 (13.07%) Senior
5 335 (6.86%) Lead
6 305 (6.25%) Data Analyst
7 276 (5.65%) Architect
8 236 (4.84%) Consultant
9 212 (4.34%) Business Analyst
10 205 (4.20%) Java Developer
11 189 (3.87%) Senior Data Engineer
12 171 (3.50%) DBA
13 149 (3.05%) Software Engineer
14 148 (3.03%) Senior Developer
15 117 (2.40%) Azure Engineer
16 110 (2.25%) SQL Developer
17 109 (2.23%) Python Developer
18 108 (2.21%) C# Developer
19 103 (2.11%) Data Architect
20 96 (1.97%) SQL DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 399 (8.17%) .NET
2 363 (7.44%) REST
3 310 (6.35%) PySpark
4 297 (6.08%) Kafka
5 257 (5.27%) Spring
6 248 (5.08%) Spring Boot
7 231 (4.73%) React
8 215 (4.40%) RESTful
9 175 (3.59%) JSON
10 155 (3.18%) XML
11 154 (3.16%) HTML
12 139 (2.85%) CSS
13 123 (2.52%) Pandas
14 120 (2.46%) AngularJS
15 116 (2.38%) Middleware
16 115 (2.36%) SOAP
17 114 (2.34%) Web Services
18 92 (1.88%) .NET Framework
19 84 (1.72%) OAuth
20 77 (1.58%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 324 (6.64%) Cloud Native
2 203 (4.16%) Data Structures
3 178 (3.65%) Legacy Systems
4 156 (3.20%) Product Ownership
5 143 (2.93%) Distributed Systems
6 95 (1.95%) Derivative
7 93 (1.91%) Onboarding
8 91 (1.86%) Management Information System
9 77 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
10 72 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
11 71 (1.45%) Enterprise Software
12 69 (1.41%) Self-Motivation
13 66 (1.35%) Algorithms
14 60 (1.23%) Clustering
15 54 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
16 52 (1.07%) Replication
17 51 (1.04%) Equities
18 48 (0.98%) Fixed Income
19 46 (0.94%) Low-Code
20 45 (0.92%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 317 (6.49%) Linux
2 284 (5.82%) Windows
3 225 (4.61%) Unix
4 107 (2.19%) Windows Server
5 25 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.49%) AIX
7 18 (0.37%) Windows Server 2019
8 17 (0.35%) Solaris
9 13 (0.27%) Windows Server 2016
10 11 (0.23%) Windows Server 2008
11 10 (0.20%) VMS
12 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
12 8 (0.16%) Windows 10
12 8 (0.16%) zOS
13 7 (0.14%) Android
14 4 (0.082%) Oracle Linux
15 3 (0.061%) Windows Server 2012
16 2 (0.041%) Data ONTAP
16 2 (0.041%) HPUX
16 2 (0.041%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,315 (26.94%) CI/CD
2 1,246 (25.53%) Agile
3 1,235 (25.30%) Analytics
4 1,224 (25.08%) Data Modelling
5 1,112 (22.78%) ETL
6 1,079 (22.11%) Business Intelligence
7 1,007 (20.63%) DevOps
8 964 (19.75%) Problem-Solving
9 952 (19.50%) Data Pipeline
10 807 (16.53%) Data Engineering
11 695 (14.24%) AI
12 657 (13.46%) Migration
13 614 (12.58%) Validation
14 547 (11.21%) Data Governance
15 489 (10.02%) Test Automation
16 488 (10.00%) Decision-Making
17 472 (9.67%) Data Analysis
18 467 (9.57%) Stakeholder Management
19 441 (9.04%) Continuous Improvement
20 439 (8.99%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,787 (36.61%) Python
2 646 (13.23%) Java
3 484 (9.92%) C#
4 366 (7.50%) PL/SQL
5 337 (6.90%) JavaScript
6 252 (5.16%) T-SQL
7 230 (4.71%) PowerShell
8 172 (3.52%) TypeScript
9 142 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 118 (2.42%) Shell Script
11 112 (2.29%) R
12 93 (1.91%) Bash
13 78 (1.60%) C++
14 77 (1.58%) Scala
15 52 (1.07%) Bicep
16 46 (0.94%) VBA
17 35 (0.72%) C
17 35 (0.72%) VB
18 30 (0.61%) Perl
19 26 (0.53%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,045 (21.41%) Security Cleared
2 845 (17.31%) SC Cleared
3 365 (7.48%) Degree
4 127 (2.60%) BPSS Clearance
5 112 (2.29%) Computer Science Degree
6 96 (1.97%) DV Cleared
7 76 (1.56%) Azure Certification
8 68 (1.39%) Master's Degree
9 58 (1.19%) ISTQB
10 44 (0.90%) Microsoft Certification
11 37 (0.76%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.37%) DBS Check
12 18 (0.37%) PhD
13 14 (0.29%) CISSP
14 13 (0.27%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
15 11 (0.23%) SnowPro
16 10 (0.20%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 10 (0.20%) PMI Certification
16 10 (0.20%) TOGAF Certification
17 9 (0.18%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 888 (18.19%) Data Quality
2 375 (7.68%) QA
3 187 (3.83%) GDPR
4 58 (1.19%) Accessibility
5 45 (0.92%) SLA
6 31 (0.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 30 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 26 (0.53%) NIST
9 23 (0.47%) PMO
10 18 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
10 18 (0.37%) IFRS
11 16 (0.33%) ISO 20022
11 16 (0.33%) PCI DSS
12 15 (0.31%) Solvency II
13 14 (0.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 14 (0.29%) HIPAA
13 14 (0.29%) MiFID
14 13 (0.27%) NCSC
15 11 (0.23%) HL7
15 11 (0.23%) WCAG
System Software
1 521 (10.67%) Docker
2 104 (2.13%) Active Directory
3 40 (0.82%) Virtual Machines
4 36 (0.74%) VMware Infrastructure
5 29 (0.59%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.43%) Hyper-V
7 20 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
8 13 (0.27%) VMware NSX
9 12 (0.25%) vCloud
10 10 (0.20%) KVM
10 10 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
12 5 (0.10%) RACF
13 4 (0.082%) Ceph
13 4 (0.082%) HDFS
13 4 (0.082%) XenApp
13 4 (0.082%) XenDesktop
14 3 (0.061%) Squid
15 2 (0.041%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.041%) GridGain
Systems Management
1 422 (8.65%) Kubernetes
2 388 (7.95%) Terraform
3 116 (2.38%) Grafana
4 87 (1.78%) Ansible
5 58 (1.19%) Prometheus
6 41 (0.84%) Oracle RMAN
7 30 (0.61%) Data Guard
8 23 (0.47%) Control-M
9 22 (0.45%) Kibana
10 19 (0.39%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.33%) Single Sign-On
11 16 (0.33%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.31%) Tivoli
13 14 (0.29%) Nagios
13 14 (0.29%) Netcool
14 13 (0.27%) OpenView
14 13 (0.27%) SCOM
14 13 (0.27%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 9 (0.18%) SCCM
16 8 (0.16%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 848 (17.37%) Oracle
2 763 (15.63%) Microsoft
3 570 (11.68%) Databricks
4 185 (3.79%) Informatica
5 177 (3.63%) Google
6 146 (2.99%) Talend
7 136 (2.79%) ServiceNow
8 125 (2.56%) SAP
9 90 (1.84%) Splunk
10 85 (1.74%) IBM
11 72 (1.48%) Denodo
12 59 (1.21%) Salesforce
13 57 (1.17%) VMware
14 45 (0.92%) Citrix
15 40 (0.82%) Dynatrace
16 38 (0.78%) Sybase
17 36 (0.74%) Bloomberg
18 35 (0.72%) OpenAI
19 34 (0.70%) MuleSoft
19 34 (0.70%) Murex