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

6 months to
13 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,122 3,820 4,026
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.60% 11.60% 10.34%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.36% 35.42% 33.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,422 2,625 2,941
10th Percentile £358 £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 £606 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £465 £475
% change year-on-year +0.86% -2.11% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 93 76 49
10th Percentile £23.15 £22.92 £20.12
25th Percentile £33.75 £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 £50.00 £34.97
% change year-on-year -11.00% +43.00% -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 14,085 10,786 12,183
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.40% 32.75% 31.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,162 7,227 8,532
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £503 £530
Median % change year-on-year +2.49% -5.19% -3.64%
75th Percentile £618 £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 526 272 408
10th Percentile £30.25 £28.19 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.88 £35.75 £45.80
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.12% -14.62% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.88 £84.35 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% +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 13 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 13 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 13 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 4,477 £500 - 4,502
London -6 2,434 £525 -0.47% 2,857
UK excluding London -10 2,147 £469 +0.86% 2,163
Work from Home -5 1,529 £500 - 1,788
North of England -3 591 £475 +1.28% 607
Midlands +1 540 £459 +2.68% 308
South East -10 469 £475 -5.00% 577
West Midlands +4 441 £459 +1.25% 169
North West -2 301 £500 +6.50% 341
Yorkshire -2 251 £470 -1.16% 164
South West -3 223 £500 +17.65% 244
Scotland -10 180 £434 -3.61% 156
East of England 0 120 £488 -2.50% 152
East Midlands -2 95 £465 +24.00% 139
North East -17 50 £413 -10.81% 113
Wales -3 40 £475 +5.56% 69
Northern Ireland -8 17 £375 -26.83% 74

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
1 224 (4.37%) Apache Airflow
2 215 (4.20%) Apache Spark
3 214 (4.18%) Confluence
4 179 (3.49%) Apache
5 120 (2.34%) SAS
6 78 (1.52%) SharePoint
7 44 (0.86%) Oracle Workflow
8 39 (0.76%) IIS
9 36 (0.70%) WebLogic
10 29 (0.57%) Jupyter
11 24 (0.47%) Tomcat
12 22 (0.43%) WebSphere
13 21 (0.41%) nginx
14 20 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
14 20 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
15 18 (0.35%) CMS
16 12 (0.23%) Camunda
16 12 (0.23%) Tuxedo
17 11 (0.21%) ArcGIS
18 10 (0.20%) Red Hat Fuse
Applications
1 317 (6.19%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.13%) Microsoft Office
3 48 (0.94%) MS Visio
4 36 (0.70%) Spreadsheet
5 25 (0.49%) 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 (1.02%) Oracle EBS
2 43 (0.84%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
4 28 (0.55%) Aladdin
5 27 (0.53%) 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 11 (0.21%) Findur
11 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
11 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.20%) Finacle
12 10 (0.20%) Oracle Assets
12 10 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
13 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 9 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
14 8 (0.16%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,605 (31.34%) Azure
2 1,208 (23.58%) AWS
3 943 (18.41%) Power Platform
4 457 (8.92%) GCP
5 452 (8.82%) Azure DevOps
6 363 (7.09%) GitHub
7 354 (6.91%) Snowflake
8 345 (6.74%) Azure Data Factory
9 301 (5.88%) Serverless
10 272 (5.31%) dbt
11 245 (4.78%) Amazon S3
12 212 (4.14%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 198 (3.87%) AWS Lambda
14 183 (3.57%) GitHub Actions
15 98 (1.91%) Entra ID
15 98 (1.91%) SaaS
16 95 (1.85%) Power Automate
17 94 (1.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 89 (1.74%) PowerApps
19 74 (1.44%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 67 (1.31%) 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%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 867 (16.93%) Power BI
2 722 (14.10%) Data Warehouse
3 636 (12.42%) SQL Server
4 336 (6.56%) Relational Database
5 325 (6.35%) Data Lake
6 320 (6.25%) PostgreSQL
7 299 (5.84%) Tableau
8 282 (5.51%) Metadata
9 254 (4.96%) NoSQL
10 215 (4.20%) Azure SQL Database
10 215 (4.20%) Oracle Database
11 178 (3.48%) BigQuery
12 162 (3.16%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 154 (3.01%) Amazon Redshift
14 137 (2.67%) Delta Lake
15 129 (2.52%) Oracle Reports
16 125 (2.44%) Big Data
17 120 (2.34%) MySQL
18 119 (2.32%) MongoDB
19 104 (2.03%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 612 (11.95%) Git
2 406 (7.93%) JIRA
3 300 (5.86%) Jenkins
4 235 (4.59%) GitLab
5 84 (1.64%) JUnit
6 72 (1.41%) Maven
7 70 (1.37%) Postman
7 70 (1.37%) Selenium
8 69 (1.35%) Gradle
9 53 (1.03%) Mockito
10 48 (0.94%) Oracle Forms
11 43 (0.84%) SonarQube
12 41 (0.80%) Visual Studio
13 40 (0.78%) Bitbucket
14 37 (0.72%) JMeter
14 37 (0.72%) Zephyr
15 30 (0.59%) Team Foundation Server
16 29 (0.57%) ERwin
16 29 (0.57%) Liquibase
16 29 (0.57%) MLflow
General
1 1,334 (26.04%) Social Skills
2 1,268 (24.76%) Finance
3 1,028 (20.07%) Analytical Skills
4 499 (9.74%) Banking
5 486 (9.49%) Public Sector
6 144 (2.81%) Front Office
6 144 (2.81%) Marketing
7 138 (2.69%) Retail
8 126 (2.46%) Investment Banking
9 95 (1.85%) Documentation Skills
10 93 (1.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 78 (1.52%) Manufacturing
12 58 (1.13%) Legal
13 55 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
14 54 (1.05%) Financial Institution
15 45 (0.88%) Organisational Skills
16 44 (0.86%) Telecoms
17 40 (0.78%) Publishing
18 39 (0.76%) Back Office
18 39 (0.76%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,112 (21.71%) Developer
2 989 (19.31%) Data Engineer
3 742 (14.49%) Analyst
4 690 (13.47%) Senior
5 362 (7.07%) Lead
6 319 (6.23%) Data Analyst
7 273 (5.33%) Architect
8 261 (5.10%) Consultant
9 248 (4.84%) Business Analyst
10 213 (4.16%) DBA
10 213 (4.16%) Java Developer
11 194 (3.79%) Senior Data Engineer
12 170 (3.32%) Senior Developer
13 140 (2.73%) Software Engineer
14 133 (2.60%) SQL DBA
15 130 (2.54%) SQL Developer
16 117 (2.28%) Data Architect
17 116 (2.26%) Python Engineer
18 115 (2.25%) Azure Engineer
19 114 (2.23%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 434 (8.47%) REST
2 423 (8.26%) .NET
3 332 (6.48%) PySpark
4 325 (6.35%) Kafka
5 273 (5.33%) Spring
6 257 (5.02%) Spring Boot
7 224 (4.37%) React
8 222 (4.33%) RESTful
9 201 (3.92%) JSON
10 188 (3.67%) XML
11 181 (3.53%) HTML
12 145 (2.83%) CSS
13 139 (2.71%) AngularJS
14 132 (2.58%) Web Services
15 114 (2.23%) Middleware
16 113 (2.21%) Pandas
16 113 (2.21%) SOAP
17 97 (1.89%) .NET Framework
18 82 (1.60%) Node.js
19 72 (1.41%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 347 (6.77%) Cloud Native
2 249 (4.86%) Data Structures
3 204 (3.98%) Product Ownership
4 177 (3.46%) Legacy Systems
5 148 (2.89%) Distributed Systems
6 119 (2.32%) Onboarding
7 109 (2.13%) Enterprise Software
8 97 (1.89%) Management Information System
9 93 (1.82%) Derivative
10 85 (1.66%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.48%) Data Protection Act
12 75 (1.46%) Replication
13 72 (1.41%) Analytical Mindset
14 65 (1.27%) Clustering
15 63 (1.23%) Algorithms
16 58 (1.13%) AI Agents
17 54 (1.05%) Fixed Income
17 54 (1.05%) Reference Data
18 53 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
19 51 (1.00%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 364 (7.11%) Linux
2 315 (6.15%) Windows
3 244 (4.76%) Unix
4 122 (2.38%) Windows Server
5 26 (0.51%) 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 1,371 (26.77%) Agile
2 1,351 (26.38%) CI/CD
3 1,346 (26.28%) Data Modelling
4 1,277 (24.93%) Analytics
5 1,152 (22.49%) ETL
6 1,109 (21.65%) Business Intelligence
7 1,039 (20.29%) DevOps
8 999 (19.50%) Data Pipeline
9 985 (19.23%) Problem-Solving
10 833 (16.26%) Data Engineering
11 744 (14.53%) Migration
12 739 (14.43%) AI
13 717 (14.00%) Validation
14 596 (11.64%) Data Governance
15 583 (11.38%) Stakeholder Management
16 559 (10.91%) Test Automation
17 515 (10.05%) Continuous Improvement
18 514 (10.04%) Data Analysis
19 509 (9.94%) Decision-Making
20 444 (8.67%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,803 (35.20%) Python
2 661 (12.91%) Java
3 478 (9.33%) C#
4 422 (8.24%) PL/SQL
5 376 (7.34%) JavaScript
6 270 (5.27%) T-SQL
7 262 (5.12%) PowerShell
8 179 (3.49%) TypeScript
9 149 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 140 (2.73%) Shell Script
11 120 (2.34%) Bash
12 91 (1.78%) R
13 76 (1.48%) Scala
14 59 (1.15%) C++
15 52 (1.02%) VBA
16 49 (0.96%) Bicep
17 30 (0.59%) C
18 28 (0.55%) VB
18 28 (0.55%) VB.NET
19 27 (0.53%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,158 (22.61%) Security Cleared
2 945 (18.45%) SC Cleared
3 344 (6.72%) Degree
4 139 (2.71%) BPSS Clearance
5 121 (2.36%) Computer Science Degree
6 110 (2.15%) DV Cleared
7 76 (1.48%) Azure Certification
8 72 (1.41%) ISTQB
9 47 (0.92%) Master's Degree
9 47 (0.92%) Microsoft Certification
10 39 (0.76%) AWS Certification
11 19 (0.37%) CISSP
11 19 (0.37%) ISEB
11 19 (0.37%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
12 16 (0.31%) DBS Check
13 12 (0.23%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 12 (0.23%) FFIEC
13 12 (0.23%) Oracle Certification
13 12 (0.23%) PhD
14 10 (0.20%) ACCA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 956 (18.66%) Data Quality
2 404 (7.89%) QA
3 171 (3.34%) GDPR
4 68 (1.33%) Accessibility
5 42 (0.82%) SLA
6 28 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 25 (0.49%) ISO 20022
8 24 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 23 (0.45%) NIST
10 20 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
11 19 (0.37%) PMO
12 17 (0.33%) IFRS
13 14 (0.27%) HIPAA
13 14 (0.27%) MiFID
13 14 (0.27%) Solvency II
14 12 (0.23%) COBIT
14 12 (0.23%) GMP
14 12 (0.23%) PCI DSS
15 11 (0.21%) NCSC
15 11 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 505 (9.86%) Docker
2 138 (2.69%) Active Directory
3 54 (1.05%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (0.84%) Oracle RAC
5 42 (0.82%) Virtual Machines
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 8 (0.16%) 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%) Slurm Workload Manager
17 1 (0.020%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 435 (8.49%) Kubernetes
2 394 (7.69%) Terraform
3 108 (2.11%) Grafana
4 99 (1.93%) Ansible
5 51 (1.00%) Oracle RMAN
6 49 (0.96%) Prometheus
7 47 (0.92%) Data Guard
8 39 (0.76%) 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 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
16 11 (0.21%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
17 10 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 906 (17.69%) Oracle
2 832 (16.24%) Microsoft
3 598 (11.68%) Databricks
4 195 (3.81%) Google
5 185 (3.61%) Informatica
6 146 (2.85%) Talend
7 142 (2.77%) SAP
8 124 (2.42%) ServiceNow
9 98 (1.91%) IBM
10 86 (1.68%) Splunk
11 76 (1.48%) Denodo
12 72 (1.41%) VMware
13 69 (1.35%) Salesforce
14 42 (0.82%) Dynatrace
15 39 (0.76%) Bloomberg
15 39 (0.76%) BMC
15 39 (0.76%) Citrix
16 37 (0.72%) Sybase
17 35 (0.68%) Adobe
17 35 (0.68%) Murex