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

6 months to
27 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,159 3,805 4,137
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.44% 11.51% 10.81%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.25% 34.94% 33.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,458 2,588 2,887
10th Percentile £350 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £600 £600 £638
90th Percentile £688 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 90 84 53
10th Percentile £21.61 £25.90 £19.67
25th Percentile £27.14 £32.50 £25.99
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +36.99% -20.44%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £77.00 - £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £30.00
% change year-on-year -11.00% +66.67% -33.98%

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 14,230 10,889 12,248
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.04% 32.95% 32.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,261 7,184 8,144
10th Percentile £363 £342 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.88% -3.74% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £649
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £494
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.85% -1.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 541 295 343
10th Percentile £24.25 £29.00 £26.04
25th Percentile £46.80 £41.25 £45.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £78.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 27 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 27 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 27 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 -4 4,445 £500 - 6,180
London -6 2,509 £525 - 3,475
UK excluding London -6 2,059 £475 - 3,373
Work from Home -3 1,510 £500 - 2,752
North of England 0 588 £475 +5.56% 894
Midlands -4 447 £469 +1.41% 535
South East -15 442 £475 -3.06% 837
West Midlands -4 349 £469 -6.20% 321
North West +1 289 £500 +14.03% 515
Yorkshire +3 247 £456 -4.05% 284
South West 0 234 £525 +16.67% 331
Scotland -6 204 £429 -7.80% 279
East of England -5 115 £498 -1.00% 257
East Midlands -5 96 £463 +13.81% 214
North East -4 58 £400 -15.79% 101
Wales -6 37 £475 +4.97% 105
Northern Ireland -7 19 £363 -29.27% 172
Channel Islands - 1 £450 -

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
1 254 (4.92%) Apache Airflow
2 235 (4.56%) Confluence
3 212 (4.11%) Apache Spark
4 171 (3.31%) Apache
5 94 (1.82%) SharePoint
6 86 (1.67%) SAS
7 39 (0.76%) Oracle Workflow
8 37 (0.72%) WebLogic
9 36 (0.70%) IIS
10 30 (0.58%) Jupyter
11 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
12 23 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
13 22 (0.43%) nginx
14 21 (0.41%) CMS
15 19 (0.37%) Camunda
16 16 (0.31%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
17 15 (0.29%) WebSphere
18 10 (0.19%) Tomcat
19 9 (0.17%) Appian
Applications
1 301 (5.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 67 (1.30%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.74%) MS Visio
4 35 (0.68%) Spreadsheet
5 24 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.16%) Windchill
8 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
9 4 (0.078%) Acrobat
9 4 (0.078%) Notion
9 4 (0.078%) Photoshop
10 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
10 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
11 2 (0.039%) Mingle
12 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
12 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 45 (0.87%) Oracle EBS
2 43 (0.83%) Dynamics CRM
3 30 (0.58%) Aladdin
3 30 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
4 28 (0.54%) Oracle Payables
5 26 (0.50%) Remedy ITSM
6 19 (0.37%) Oracle ERP
7 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
8 15 (0.29%) Oracle EBS R12
8 15 (0.29%) Oracle General Ledger
9 13 (0.25%) Finacle
10 12 (0.23%) Oracle Financials
10 12 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
11 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
11 11 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
11 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.19%) NetSuite
12 10 (0.19%) Oracle FAH
13 9 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
13 9 (0.17%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,571 (30.45%) Azure
2 1,260 (24.42%) AWS
3 967 (18.74%) Power Platform
4 530 (10.27%) GCP
5 412 (7.99%) Azure DevOps
6 407 (7.89%) Snowflake
7 360 (6.98%) GitHub
8 322 (6.24%) Azure Data Factory
9 315 (6.11%) dbt
10 302 (5.85%) Serverless
11 268 (5.19%) Amazon S3
12 202 (3.92%) AWS Lambda
12 202 (3.92%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 173 (3.35%) GitHub Actions
14 112 (2.17%) SaaS
15 111 (2.15%) Power Automate
16 104 (2.02%) PowerApps
17 99 (1.92%) Entra ID
18 93 (1.80%) Azure Databricks
19 88 (1.71%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 66 (1.28%) DNS
2 41 (0.79%) Firewall
3 38 (0.74%) HTTP
4 29 (0.56%) SSL
5 22 (0.43%) Broadband
5 22 (0.43%) Internet
5 22 (0.43%) Network Security
5 22 (0.43%) TCP/IP
6 19 (0.37%) VPN
7 15 (0.29%) DHCP
7 15 (0.29%) SNMP
8 14 (0.27%) SSH
9 12 (0.23%) WAN
10 11 (0.21%) Kerberos
11 10 (0.19%) SAN
11 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
12 8 (0.16%) HTTPS
12 8 (0.16%) Reverse Proxy
12 8 (0.16%) RTP
12 8 (0.16%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 886 (17.17%) Power BI
2 709 (13.74%) Data Warehouse
3 654 (12.68%) SQL Server
4 349 (6.76%) Relational Database
5 335 (6.49%) PostgreSQL
6 324 (6.28%) Data Lake
7 289 (5.60%) Metadata
8 283 (5.49%) Tableau
9 247 (4.79%) NoSQL
10 240 (4.65%) Oracle Database
11 219 (4.25%) BigQuery
12 190 (3.68%) Azure SQL Database
13 151 (2.93%) Amazon Redshift
14 146 (2.83%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 142 (2.75%) Delta Lake
16 129 (2.50%) MySQL
17 122 (2.36%) Amazon Athena
18 118 (2.29%) MongoDB
19 117 (2.27%) Big Data
20 103 (2.00%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 690 (13.37%) Git
2 424 (8.22%) JIRA
3 291 (5.64%) Jenkins
4 257 (4.98%) GitLab
5 102 (1.98%) Selenium
6 95 (1.84%) JUnit
7 87 (1.69%) Maven
8 85 (1.65%) Gradle
9 70 (1.36%) Postman
10 58 (1.12%) Mockito
11 48 (0.93%) Oracle Forms
12 46 (0.89%) SonarQube
13 42 (0.81%) Bitbucket
14 36 (0.70%) Visual Studio
15 35 (0.68%) Zephyr
16 30 (0.58%) REST Assured
16 30 (0.58%) Team Foundation Server
17 28 (0.54%) MLflow
18 27 (0.52%) Artifactory
19 26 (0.50%) JMeter
General
1 1,398 (27.10%) Social Skills
2 1,361 (26.38%) Finance
3 1,063 (20.60%) Analytical Skills
4 594 (11.51%) Banking
5 474 (9.19%) Public Sector
6 158 (3.06%) Marketing
7 152 (2.95%) Retail
8 143 (2.77%) Front Office
9 142 (2.75%) Investment Banking
10 105 (2.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 89 (1.73%) Documentation Skills
12 87 (1.69%) Manufacturing
13 61 (1.18%) Legal
14 54 (1.05%) Financial Institution
15 51 (0.99%) Presentation Skills
16 48 (0.93%) Back Office
16 48 (0.93%) Local Government
17 45 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
18 43 (0.83%) Law
19 41 (0.79%) Military
Job Titles
1 1,135 (22.00%) Developer
2 956 (18.53%) Data Engineer
3 770 (14.93%) Analyst
4 747 (14.48%) Senior
5 366 (7.09%) Lead
6 332 (6.44%) Data Analyst
7 259 (5.02%) Architect
8 251 (4.87%) Business Analyst
9 222 (4.30%) Senior Data Engineer
10 217 (4.21%) Consultant
11 203 (3.93%) Java Developer
12 201 (3.90%) DBA
13 186 (3.61%) Senior Developer
14 125 (2.42%) Python Developer
14 125 (2.42%) SQL Developer
15 123 (2.38%) Software Engineer
16 122 (2.36%) Data Architect
17 120 (2.33%) Azure Engineer
17 120 (2.33%) Python Engineer
17 120 (2.33%) SQL DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 503 (9.75%) REST
2 441 (8.55%) .NET
3 406 (7.87%) Terraform
4 347 (6.73%) Kafka
5 341 (6.61%) PySpark
6 285 (5.52%) Spring
7 279 (5.41%) Spring Boot
8 239 (4.63%) React
9 209 (4.05%) HTML
10 208 (4.03%) RESTful
11 206 (3.99%) JSON
12 181 (3.51%) XML
13 175 (3.39%) CSS
14 141 (2.73%) Web Services
15 136 (2.64%) SOAP
16 125 (2.42%) AngularJS
17 111 (2.15%) Middleware
18 101 (1.96%) Pandas
19 94 (1.82%) .NET Framework
20 87 (1.69%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 332 (6.44%) Cloud Native
2 276 (5.35%) Data Structures
3 251 (4.87%) Product Ownership
4 168 (3.26%) Legacy Systems
5 149 (2.89%) Onboarding
6 144 (2.79%) Distributed Systems
7 138 (2.67%) Enterprise Software
8 110 (2.13%) Management Information System
9 96 (1.86%) AI Agents
10 88 (1.71%) Self-Motivation
11 84 (1.63%) Derivative
12 78 (1.51%) Replication
13 70 (1.36%) Data Protection Act
14 65 (1.26%) Analytical Mindset
15 64 (1.24%) Clustering
16 61 (1.18%) Reference Data
17 56 (1.09%) Algorithms
18 54 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
19 49 (0.95%) Data Centre
20 48 (0.93%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 380 (7.37%) Linux
2 315 (6.11%) Windows
3 254 (4.92%) Unix
4 127 (2.46%) Windows Server
5 29 (0.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 25 (0.48%) Solaris
7 12 (0.23%) Ubuntu
8 11 (0.21%) AIX
9 10 (0.19%) VMS
9 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.14%) Android
12 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
13 5 (0.097%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.097%) zOS
14 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2016
15 3 (0.058%) CentOS
15 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
15 3 (0.058%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,404 (27.21%) Agile
2 1,392 (26.98%) CI/CD
3 1,356 (26.28%) Data Modelling
4 1,278 (24.77%) Analytics
5 1,099 (21.30%) Business Intelligence
6 1,096 (21.24%) ETL
7 1,001 (19.40%) Problem-Solving
8 980 (19.00%) Data Pipeline
9 978 (18.96%) DevOps
10 861 (16.69%) AI
11 859 (16.65%) Data Engineering
12 809 (15.68%) Validation
13 782 (15.16%) Migration
14 768 (14.89%) Stakeholder Management
15 612 (11.86%) Test Automation
16 605 (11.73%) Data Governance
17 595 (11.53%) Data Analysis
18 580 (11.24%) Continuous Improvement
19 542 (10.51%) Decision-Making
20 441 (8.55%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,841 (35.69%) Python
2 657 (12.74%) Java
3 457 (8.86%) C#
4 413 (8.01%) JavaScript
5 406 (7.87%) PL/SQL
6 257 (4.98%) PowerShell
7 251 (4.87%) T-SQL
8 206 (3.99%) TypeScript
9 150 (2.91%) Shell Script
10 145 (2.81%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 127 (2.46%) Bash
12 86 (1.67%) Scala
13 85 (1.65%) R
14 46 (0.89%) C++
15 43 (0.83%) VBA
16 37 (0.72%) Bicep
17 30 (0.58%) C
17 30 (0.58%) Go
18 29 (0.56%) VB.NET
19 28 (0.54%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,105 (21.42%) Security Cleared
2 886 (17.17%) SC Cleared
3 361 (7.00%) Degree
4 171 (3.31%) BPSS Clearance
5 131 (2.54%) DV Cleared
6 127 (2.46%) Computer Science Degree
7 83 (1.61%) Azure Certification
8 60 (1.16%) ISTQB
9 52 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
10 47 (0.91%) AWS Certification
11 43 (0.83%) Master's Degree
12 20 (0.39%) CISSP
13 19 (0.37%) DBS Check
13 19 (0.37%) ISEB
14 17 (0.33%) ACCA
14 17 (0.33%) CIMA
15 16 (0.31%) Oracle Certification
16 15 (0.29%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
17 14 (0.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 13 (0.25%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1,036 (20.08%) Data Quality
2 419 (8.12%) QA
3 138 (2.67%) GDPR
4 70 (1.36%) Accessibility
5 53 (1.03%) SLA
6 34 (0.66%) ISO 20022
7 29 (0.56%) Actionable Recommendations
8 23 (0.45%) IFRS
8 23 (0.45%) NIST
9 22 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 18 (0.35%) MiFID
11 15 (0.29%) COBIT
11 15 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 13 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
12 13 (0.25%) GMP
12 13 (0.25%) GxP
13 12 (0.23%) SEPA
14 11 (0.21%) Basel III
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
15 10 (0.19%) 21 CFR Part 11
System Software
1 484 (9.38%) Docker
2 124 (2.40%) Active Directory
3 53 (1.03%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.81%) Oracle RAC
5 38 (0.74%) Virtual Machines
6 21 (0.41%) Hyper-V
7 19 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
8 16 (0.31%) vCloud
8 16 (0.31%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 6 (0.12%) Postfix
10 5 (0.097%) KVM
11 4 (0.078%) Apache ZooKeeper
11 4 (0.078%) NFS
11 4 (0.078%) Squid
12 3 (0.058%) GPFS
13 2 (0.039%) Ceph
13 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
13 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
14 1 (0.019%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 413 (8.01%) Kubernetes
2 111 (2.15%) Grafana
3 96 (1.86%) Ansible
4 56 (1.09%) Prometheus
5 45 (0.87%) Oracle RMAN
6 44 (0.85%) Data Guard
7 43 (0.83%) Control-M
8 40 (0.78%) Kibana
8 40 (0.78%) SCOM
9 16 (0.31%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
9 16 (0.31%) vCenter Server
10 13 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
11 12 (0.23%) Istio
11 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
12 11 (0.21%) Microsoft Intune
12 11 (0.21%) Netcool
13 10 (0.19%) Argo
13 10 (0.19%) Tivoli
14 9 (0.17%) Nagios
14 9 (0.17%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 912 (17.68%) Oracle
2 866 (16.79%) Microsoft
3 653 (12.66%) Databricks
4 239 (4.63%) Google
5 148 (2.87%) Informatica
6 141 (2.73%) SAP
7 120 (2.33%) Talend
8 115 (2.23%) IBM
9 96 (1.86%) ServiceNow
10 89 (1.73%) Salesforce
11 88 (1.71%) Splunk
12 71 (1.38%) VMware
13 57 (1.10%) Denodo
14 40 (0.78%) Foundry
15 39 (0.76%) Adobe
15 39 (0.76%) Bloomberg
16 37 (0.72%) OpenAI
17 36 (0.70%) Sybase
17 36 (0.70%) UiPath
18 35 (0.68%) Murex