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 12 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,124 3,827 4,034
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.60% 11.61% 10.36%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.35% 35.39% 33.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,418 2,633 2,950
10th Percentile £356 £331 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £601 £638
90th Percentile £675 £750 £748
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £465 £475
% change year-on-year +0.86% -2.11% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 94 75 49
10th Percentile £23.23 £22.90 £20.12
25th Percentile £33.82 £29.07 £30.00
Median hourly rate £44.50 £38.85 £41.16
Median % change year-on-year +14.56% -5.61% -10.30%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £43.00 £34.97
% change year-on-year +3.49% +22.98% -13.86%

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 14,097 10,814 12,180
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.41% 32.80% 31.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,179 7,253 8,533
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £530
Median % change year-on-year +1.49% -4.72% -3.64%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 523 269 408
10th Percentile £30.10 £28.18 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £35.00 £45.80
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.07% -13.85% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.95 £84.60 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +8.33%

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 12 August 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 12 August 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 12 August 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 4,482 £500 - 4,512
London -6 2,435 £525 - 2,862
UK excluding London -10 2,149 £469 +0.86% 2,155
Work from Home -5 1,535 £500 - 1,807
North of England -2 594 £475 +2.15% 609
Midlands +1 547 £459 +2.34% 308
South East -11 466 £475 -5.00% 579
West Midlands +4 448 £459 +1.32% 170
North West -4 305 £481 +2.45% 339
Yorkshire -3 250 £474 -0.21% 172
South West -3 222 £500 +17.65% 244
Scotland -9 179 £430 -5.75% 153
East of England -1 117 £480 -4.00% 149
East Midlands -1 95 £465 +24.00% 138
North East -16 50 £413 -10.81% 109
Wales 0 40 £475 +5.56% 66
Northern Ireland -8 17 £375 -26.83% 72

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
1 226 (4.41%) Apache Airflow
2 219 (4.27%) Confluence
3 215 (4.20%) Apache Spark
4 179 (3.49%) Apache
5 119 (2.32%) SAS
6 76 (1.48%) SharePoint
7 44 (0.86%) Oracle Workflow
8 39 (0.76%) IIS
8 39 (0.76%) WebLogic
9 29 (0.57%) Jupyter
10 24 (0.47%) Tomcat
11 22 (0.43%) WebSphere
12 21 (0.41%) nginx
12 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
13 20 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
14 19 (0.37%) CMS
15 12 (0.23%) Camunda
15 12 (0.23%) Tuxedo
16 11 (0.21%) ArcGIS
17 10 (0.20%) Red Hat Fuse
Applications
1 326 (6.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 60 (1.17%) Microsoft Office
3 49 (0.96%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.74%) Spreadsheet
5 27 (0.53%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.078%) Notion
8 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.059%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.039%) Oracle Smart View
11 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.020%) InDesign
11 1 (0.020%) Mingle
11 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 52 (1.01%) Oracle EBS
2 44 (0.86%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
4 28 (0.55%) Aladdin
5 26 (0.51%) Remedy ITSM
6 25 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
7 24 (0.47%) Oracle Payables
8 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
9 15 (0.29%) Oracle Receivables
10 13 (0.25%) Oracle General Ledger
11 12 (0.23%) NEC Housing
12 11 (0.21%) Findur
12 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
13 10 (0.20%) Finacle
13 10 (0.20%) Oracle Assets
13 10 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
14 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
14 9 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
14 9 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
15 8 (0.16%) Infor LN
Cloud Services
1 1,609 (31.40%) Azure
2 1,211 (23.63%) AWS
3 947 (18.48%) Power Platform
4 456 (8.90%) Azure DevOps
5 453 (8.84%) GCP
6 365 (7.12%) GitHub
7 350 (6.83%) Snowflake
8 345 (6.73%) Azure Data Factory
9 306 (5.97%) Serverless
10 273 (5.33%) dbt
11 250 (4.88%) Amazon S3
12 214 (4.18%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 201 (3.92%) AWS Lambda
14 186 (3.63%) GitHub Actions
15 100 (1.95%) Entra ID
16 99 (1.93%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 97 (1.89%) SaaS
18 94 (1.83%) Power Automate
19 88 (1.72%) PowerApps
20 74 (1.44%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 66 (1.29%) DNS
2 47 (0.92%) Firewall
3 30 (0.59%) SSL
4 28 (0.55%) HTTP
5 27 (0.53%) Network Security
6 24 (0.47%) VPN
7 22 (0.43%) SNMP
8 21 (0.41%) Internet
9 19 (0.37%) TCP/IP
9 19 (0.37%) WAN
10 12 (0.23%) Broadband
10 12 (0.23%) DHCP
11 10 (0.20%) SAN
11 10 (0.20%) SSH
11 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
11 10 (0.20%) Wireshark
12 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
12 9 (0.18%) Kerberos
12 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
13 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 870 (16.98%) Power BI
2 717 (13.99%) Data Warehouse
3 637 (12.43%) SQL Server
4 332 (6.48%) Relational Database
5 318 (6.21%) Data Lake
5 318 (6.21%) PostgreSQL
6 302 (5.89%) Tableau
7 279 (5.44%) Metadata
8 254 (4.96%) NoSQL
9 214 (4.18%) Azure SQL Database
10 213 (4.16%) Oracle Database
11 177 (3.45%) BigQuery
12 165 (3.22%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 150 (2.93%) Amazon Redshift
14 139 (2.71%) Delta Lake
15 129 (2.52%) Oracle Reports
16 126 (2.46%) Big Data
17 120 (2.34%) MongoDB
18 119 (2.32%) MySQL
19 104 (2.03%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 618 (12.06%) Git
2 411 (8.02%) JIRA
3 300 (5.85%) Jenkins
4 237 (4.63%) GitLab
5 82 (1.60%) JUnit
6 73 (1.42%) Maven
7 70 (1.37%) Postman
8 69 (1.35%) Selenium
9 68 (1.33%) Gradle
10 55 (1.07%) Mockito
11 48 (0.94%) Oracle Forms
12 43 (0.84%) SonarQube
13 40 (0.78%) Bitbucket
13 40 (0.78%) Visual Studio
14 37 (0.72%) Zephyr
15 35 (0.68%) JMeter
16 32 (0.62%) MLflow
17 30 (0.59%) Team Foundation Server
18 29 (0.57%) ERwin
18 29 (0.57%) Liquibase
General
1 1,337 (26.09%) Social Skills
2 1,271 (24.80%) Finance
3 1,032 (20.14%) Analytical Skills
4 495 (9.66%) Banking
5 493 (9.62%) Public Sector
6 145 (2.83%) Marketing
7 144 (2.81%) Front Office
8 137 (2.67%) Retail
9 125 (2.44%) Investment Banking
10 96 (1.87%) Documentation Skills
11 92 (1.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 76 (1.48%) Manufacturing
13 58 (1.13%) Legal
14 55 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
15 54 (1.05%) Financial Institution
16 45 (0.88%) Organisational Skills
17 44 (0.86%) Telecoms
18 39 (0.76%) Back Office
18 39 (0.76%) Publishing
19 37 (0.72%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,114 (21.74%) Developer
2 991 (19.34%) Data Engineer
3 750 (14.64%) Analyst
4 687 (13.41%) Senior
5 362 (7.06%) Lead
6 321 (6.26%) Data Analyst
7 268 (5.23%) Architect
8 260 (5.07%) Consultant
9 249 (4.86%) Business Analyst
10 211 (4.12%) DBA
11 210 (4.10%) Java Developer
12 193 (3.77%) Senior Data Engineer
13 170 (3.32%) Senior Developer
14 140 (2.73%) Software Engineer
15 131 (2.56%) SQL DBA
16 129 (2.52%) SQL Developer
17 115 (2.24%) Azure Engineer
18 113 (2.21%) Full-Stack Developer
18 113 (2.21%) Python Engineer
19 112 (2.19%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 427 (8.33%) REST
2 424 (8.27%) .NET
3 333 (6.50%) PySpark
4 318 (6.21%) Kafka
5 272 (5.31%) Spring
6 255 (4.98%) Spring Boot
7 226 (4.41%) React
8 217 (4.23%) RESTful
9 202 (3.94%) JSON
10 188 (3.67%) XML
11 178 (3.47%) HTML
12 143 (2.79%) CSS
13 141 (2.75%) AngularJS
14 131 (2.56%) Web Services
15 116 (2.26%) Pandas
16 115 (2.24%) SOAP
17 111 (2.17%) Middleware
18 98 (1.91%) .NET Framework
19 84 (1.64%) Node.js
20 72 (1.41%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 345 (6.73%) Cloud Native
2 248 (4.84%) Data Structures
3 205 (4.00%) Product Ownership
4 179 (3.49%) Legacy Systems
5 147 (2.87%) Distributed Systems
6 118 (2.30%) Onboarding
7 108 (2.11%) Enterprise Software
8 98 (1.91%) Management Information System
9 93 (1.81%) Derivative
10 86 (1.68%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.48%) Data Protection Act
12 75 (1.46%) Replication
13 72 (1.41%) Analytical Mindset
14 65 (1.27%) Algorithms
15 64 (1.25%) Clustering
16 57 (1.11%) AI Agents
17 54 (1.05%) Fixed Income
18 53 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
19 52 (1.01%) Reference Data
20 51 (1.00%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 361 (7.05%) Linux
2 314 (6.13%) Windows
3 239 (4.66%) Unix
4 122 (2.38%) Windows Server
5 28 (0.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.41%) AIX
7 19 (0.37%) Solaris
8 14 (0.27%) VMS
9 13 (0.25%) Windows Server 2019
10 12 (0.23%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.14%) Ubuntu
11 7 (0.14%) zOS
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.098%) Windows Server 2016
14 4 (0.078%) Apple iOS
14 4 (0.078%) Oracle Linux
15 3 (0.059%) Android
15 3 (0.059%) OpenVMS
16 2 (0.039%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,375 (26.83%) Agile
2 1,355 (26.44%) CI/CD
3 1,349 (26.33%) Data Modelling
4 1,280 (24.98%) Analytics
5 1,153 (22.50%) ETL
6 1,112 (21.70%) Business Intelligence
7 1,045 (20.39%) DevOps
8 1,003 (19.57%) Data Pipeline
9 988 (19.28%) Problem-Solving
10 837 (16.33%) Data Engineering
11 743 (14.50%) Migration
12 736 (14.36%) AI
13 711 (13.88%) Validation
14 591 (11.53%) Data Governance
15 579 (11.30%) Stakeholder Management
16 552 (10.77%) Test Automation
17 519 (10.13%) Decision-Making
18 517 (10.09%) Data Analysis
19 516 (10.07%) Continuous Improvement
20 446 (8.70%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,804 (35.21%) Python
2 660 (12.88%) Java
3 481 (9.39%) C#
4 421 (8.22%) PL/SQL
5 374 (7.30%) JavaScript
6 272 (5.31%) T-SQL
7 261 (5.09%) PowerShell
8 178 (3.47%) TypeScript
9 152 (2.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 141 (2.75%) Shell Script
11 119 (2.32%) Bash
12 92 (1.80%) R
13 74 (1.44%) Scala
14 60 (1.17%) C++
15 53 (1.03%) VBA
16 50 (0.98%) Bicep
17 30 (0.59%) C
18 29 (0.57%) Perl
19 28 (0.55%) VB
20 26 (0.51%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,162 (22.68%) Security Cleared
2 950 (18.54%) SC Cleared
3 346 (6.75%) Degree
4 139 (2.71%) BPSS Clearance
5 123 (2.40%) Computer Science Degree
6 110 (2.15%) DV Cleared
7 76 (1.48%) Azure Certification
8 70 (1.37%) ISTQB
9 49 (0.96%) Master's Degree
10 46 (0.90%) Microsoft Certification
11 39 (0.76%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.35%) CISSP
13 17 (0.33%) ISEB
13 17 (0.33%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 16 (0.31%) DBS Check
15 12 (0.23%) FFIEC
15 12 (0.23%) Oracle Certification
15 12 (0.23%) PhD
16 11 (0.21%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 10 (0.20%) CIMA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 953 (18.60%) Data Quality
2 400 (7.81%) QA
3 172 (3.36%) GDPR
4 66 (1.29%) Accessibility
5 43 (0.84%) SLA
6 27 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 25 (0.49%) ISO 20022
8 24 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 24 (0.47%) PMO
9 22 (0.43%) NIST
10 20 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
11 17 (0.33%) IFRS
12 14 (0.27%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.27%) MiFID
12 14 (0.27%) Solvency II
13 12 (0.23%) COBIT
13 12 (0.23%) GMP
13 12 (0.23%) PCI DSS
14 11 (0.21%) NCSC
14 11 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 507 (9.89%) Docker
2 139 (2.71%) Active Directory
3 53 (1.03%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (0.84%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.41%) Hyper-V
7 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
8 14 (0.27%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.25%) vCloud
10 11 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
12 7 (0.14%) KVM
13 5 (0.098%) Ceph
14 4 (0.078%) Squid
15 3 (0.059%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 3 (0.059%) HDFS
16 2 (0.039%) GridGain
17 1 (0.020%) GPFS
17 1 (0.020%) Varnish
17 1 (0.020%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 435 (8.49%) Kubernetes
2 395 (7.71%) Terraform
3 110 (2.15%) Grafana
4 99 (1.93%) Ansible
5 50 (0.98%) Oracle RMAN
6 49 (0.96%) Prometheus
7 46 (0.90%) Data Guard
8 37 (0.72%) Control-M
9 28 (0.55%) SCOM
10 19 (0.37%) Kibana
11 17 (0.33%) vCenter Server
12 16 (0.31%) Nagios
12 16 (0.31%) Netcool
12 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
14 13 (0.25%) OpenView
14 13 (0.25%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 11 (0.21%) Microsoft Clustering
15 11 (0.21%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
16 10 (0.20%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 906 (17.68%) Oracle
2 835 (16.30%) Microsoft
3 595 (11.61%) Databricks
4 195 (3.81%) Google
5 185 (3.61%) Informatica
6 145 (2.83%) Talend
7 140 (2.73%) SAP
8 126 (2.46%) ServiceNow
9 95 (1.85%) IBM
10 86 (1.68%) Splunk
11 75 (1.46%) Denodo
12 71 (1.39%) VMware
13 69 (1.35%) Salesforce
14 42 (0.82%) Dynatrace
15 39 (0.76%) Bloomberg
15 39 (0.76%) Citrix
16 38 (0.74%) BMC
17 37 (0.72%) Sybase
18 35 (0.68%) Adobe
18 35 (0.68%) Murex