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

6 months to
10 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,123 3,865 4,019
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.60% 11.66% 10.36%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.34% 35.50% 33.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,409 2,669 2,950
10th Percentile £355 £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 £600 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £748
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £464 £475
% change year-on-year +1.13% -2.37% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 94 72 49
10th Percentile £23.23 £22.81 £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% -10.42%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £53.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £63.75 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £34.96 £34.97
% change year-on-year +27.31% -0.03% -18.30%

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 14,096 10,888 12,128
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.43% 32.84% 31.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,150 7,308 8,531
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £504 £530
Median % change year-on-year +1.69% -4.91% -3.64%
75th Percentile £616 £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 526 267 407
10th Percentile £29.98 £28.11 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.00 £45.61
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -12.69% +7.96%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.75 £84.70 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +5.65%

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 10 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 10 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 10 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 4,480 £500 - 2,737
London -6 2,437 £525 -0.71% 1,469
UK excluding London -10 2,150 £469 +1.13% 1,605
Work from Home -5 1,534 £500 - 1,221
North of England -1 589 £463 -1.39% 443
Midlands +1 543 £459 +2.34% 241
South East -9 471 £490 -2.00% 485
West Midlands +4 444 £459 +1.32% 132
North West -3 306 £475 +1.71% 248
Yorkshire -4 244 £474 -0.21% 128
South West -7 222 £500 +17.65% 180
Scotland -10 185 £428 -5.00% 86
East of England -1 118 £480 -4.00% 113
East Midlands -2 95 £464 +23.67% 109
North East -16 50 £413 -10.81% 77
Wales -5 39 £475 +5.56% 49
Northern Ireland -10 16 £375 -26.83% 30

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
1 221 (4.31%) Apache Airflow
1 221 (4.31%) Confluence
2 215 (4.20%) Apache Spark
3 174 (3.40%) Apache
4 119 (2.32%) SAS
5 74 (1.44%) SharePoint
6 45 (0.88%) Oracle Workflow
7 39 (0.76%) IIS
7 39 (0.76%) WebLogic
8 29 (0.57%) Jupyter
9 24 (0.47%) Tomcat
10 22 (0.43%) WebSphere
11 21 (0.41%) nginx
11 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
12 20 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
13 19 (0.37%) CMS
14 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
14 12 (0.23%) Camunda
14 12 (0.23%) Tuxedo
15 10 (0.20%) Red Hat Fuse
Applications
1 328 (6.40%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.19%) Microsoft Office
3 50 (0.98%) 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
9 3 (0.059%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.020%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Mingle
10 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 53 (1.03%) Oracle EBS
2 44 (0.86%) Dynamics CRM
3 29 (0.57%) Aladdin
3 29 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
4 26 (0.51%) Oracle ERP
4 26 (0.51%) Remedy ITSM
5 25 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
6 18 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
7 17 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
8 14 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
9 12 (0.23%) NEC Housing
9 12 (0.23%) Oracle Assets
10 11 (0.21%) Findur
10 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
11 10 (0.20%) Finacle
11 10 (0.20%) Oracle Financials
12 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
12 9 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 9 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
13 8 (0.16%) Fidessa
Cloud Services
1 1,608 (31.39%) Azure
2 1,208 (23.58%) AWS
3 959 (18.72%) Power Platform
4 457 (8.92%) Azure DevOps
5 451 (8.80%) GCP
6 361 (7.05%) GitHub
7 348 (6.79%) Snowflake
8 343 (6.70%) Azure Data Factory
9 308 (6.01%) Serverless
10 273 (5.33%) dbt
11 249 (4.86%) Amazon S3
12 214 (4.18%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 201 (3.92%) AWS Lambda
14 183 (3.57%) GitHub Actions
15 101 (1.97%) Entra ID
16 98 (1.91%) SaaS
17 97 (1.89%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 97 (1.89%) Power Automate
18 91 (1.78%) PowerApps
19 76 (1.48%) Azure Monitor
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%) TCP/IP
9 20 (0.39%) Internet
10 19 (0.37%) WAN
11 13 (0.25%) Broadband
12 12 (0.23%) DHCP
13 10 (0.20%) SSH
13 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
13 10 (0.20%) Wireshark
14 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
14 9 (0.18%) SAN
14 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
15 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
15 8 (0.16%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 882 (17.22%) Power BI
2 714 (13.94%) Data Warehouse
3 640 (12.49%) SQL Server
4 332 (6.48%) Relational Database
5 318 (6.21%) PostgreSQL
6 313 (6.11%) Data Lake
7 310 (6.05%) Tableau
8 273 (5.33%) Metadata
9 255 (4.98%) NoSQL
10 219 (4.27%) Azure SQL Database
11 211 (4.12%) Oracle Database
12 175 (3.42%) BigQuery
13 169 (3.30%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 152 (2.97%) Amazon Redshift
15 140 (2.73%) Delta Lake
16 129 (2.52%) Oracle Reports
17 126 (2.46%) Big Data
18 118 (2.30%) MongoDB
19 116 (2.26%) MySQL
20 104 (2.03%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 613 (11.97%) Git
2 408 (7.96%) JIRA
3 295 (5.76%) Jenkins
4 235 (4.59%) GitLab
5 83 (1.62%) JUnit
6 73 (1.42%) Maven
7 67 (1.31%) Gradle
7 67 (1.31%) Selenium
8 62 (1.21%) Postman
9 55 (1.07%) Mockito
10 49 (0.96%) Oracle Forms
11 40 (0.78%) Bitbucket
11 40 (0.78%) SonarQube
12 39 (0.76%) Visual Studio
13 33 (0.64%) Zephyr
14 31 (0.61%) JMeter
14 31 (0.61%) MLflow
15 30 (0.59%) ERwin
15 30 (0.59%) Team Foundation Server
16 29 (0.57%) Liquibase
General
1 1,334 (26.04%) Social Skills
2 1,275 (24.89%) Finance
3 1,031 (20.12%) Analytical Skills
4 496 (9.68%) Banking
5 491 (9.58%) Public Sector
6 147 (2.87%) Marketing
7 142 (2.77%) Front Office
8 138 (2.69%) Retail
9 126 (2.46%) Investment Banking
10 98 (1.91%) Documentation Skills
11 92 (1.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 76 (1.48%) Manufacturing
13 57 (1.11%) Legal
14 56 (1.09%) Presentation Skills
15 54 (1.05%) Financial Institution
16 46 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
16 46 (0.90%) Telecoms
17 42 (0.82%) Back Office
18 40 (0.78%) Publishing
19 37 (0.72%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,121 (21.88%) Developer
2 990 (19.32%) Data Engineer
3 757 (14.78%) Analyst
4 687 (13.41%) Senior
5 360 (7.03%) Lead
6 321 (6.27%) Data Analyst
7 268 (5.23%) Architect
8 258 (5.04%) Consultant
9 256 (5.00%) Business Analyst
10 214 (4.18%) DBA
11 211 (4.12%) Java Developer
12 195 (3.81%) Senior Data Engineer
13 171 (3.34%) Senior Developer
14 140 (2.73%) Software Engineer
15 134 (2.62%) SQL DBA
16 127 (2.48%) SQL Developer
17 118 (2.30%) Azure Engineer
18 115 (2.24%) Full-Stack Developer
19 110 (2.15%) Python Developer
19 110 (2.15%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 427 (8.33%) .NET
2 424 (8.28%) REST
3 322 (6.29%) PySpark
4 317 (6.19%) Kafka
5 271 (5.29%) Spring
6 254 (4.96%) Spring Boot
7 225 (4.39%) React
8 217 (4.24%) RESTful
9 202 (3.94%) JSON
10 189 (3.69%) XML
11 176 (3.44%) HTML
12 143 (2.79%) AngularJS
12 143 (2.79%) CSS
13 128 (2.50%) Web Services
14 117 (2.28%) Pandas
15 114 (2.23%) SOAP
16 109 (2.13%) Middleware
17 101 (1.97%) .NET Framework
18 84 (1.64%) Node.js
19 73 (1.42%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 343 (6.70%) Cloud Native
2 249 (4.86%) Data Structures
3 206 (4.02%) Product Ownership
4 177 (3.46%) Legacy Systems
5 148 (2.89%) Distributed Systems
6 119 (2.32%) Onboarding
7 105 (2.05%) Enterprise Software
8 96 (1.87%) Management Information System
9 95 (1.85%) Derivative
10 86 (1.68%) Self-Motivation
11 77 (1.50%) Replication
12 75 (1.46%) Data Protection Act
13 73 (1.42%) Analytical Mindset
14 69 (1.35%) Clustering
15 66 (1.29%) Algorithms
16 55 (1.07%) AI Agents
17 53 (1.03%) Fixed Income
17 53 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
18 50 (0.98%) Equities
18 50 (0.98%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 356 (6.95%) Linux
2 312 (6.09%) Windows
3 238 (4.65%) Unix
4 121 (2.36%) Windows Server
5 27 (0.53%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.41%) AIX
7 17 (0.33%) 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%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,366 (26.66%) Agile
2 1,351 (26.37%) CI/CD
3 1,350 (26.35%) Data Modelling
4 1,285 (25.08%) Analytics
5 1,148 (22.41%) ETL
6 1,125 (21.96%) Business Intelligence
7 1,044 (20.38%) DevOps
8 998 (19.48%) Data Pipeline
9 986 (19.25%) Problem-Solving
10 845 (16.49%) Data Engineering
11 741 (14.46%) Migration
12 725 (14.15%) AI
13 703 (13.72%) Validation
14 584 (11.40%) Data Governance
15 571 (11.15%) Stakeholder Management
16 542 (10.58%) Test Automation
17 520 (10.15%) Decision-Making
18 517 (10.09%) Data Analysis
19 514 (10.03%) Continuous Improvement
20 453 (8.84%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,798 (35.10%) Python
2 661 (12.90%) Java
3 494 (9.64%) C#
4 424 (8.28%) PL/SQL
5 369 (7.20%) JavaScript
6 274 (5.35%) T-SQL
7 264 (5.15%) PowerShell
8 177 (3.46%) TypeScript
9 153 (2.99%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 141 (2.75%) Shell Script
11 120 (2.34%) Bash
12 95 (1.85%) R
13 74 (1.44%) Scala
14 59 (1.15%) C++
15 51 (1.00%) Bicep
16 50 (0.98%) VBA
17 32 (0.62%) C
18 29 (0.57%) Perl
19 28 (0.55%) VB
20 25 (0.49%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,159 (22.62%) Security Cleared
2 944 (18.43%) SC Cleared
3 346 (6.75%) Degree
4 138 (2.69%) BPSS Clearance
5 122 (2.38%) Computer Science Degree
6 109 (2.13%) DV Cleared
7 77 (1.50%) Azure Certification
8 63 (1.23%) ISTQB
9 48 (0.94%) Master's Degree
10 44 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
11 37 (0.72%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.35%) CISSP
13 16 (0.31%) DBS Check
14 15 (0.29%) ISEB
15 13 (0.25%) PhD
16 12 (0.23%) FFIEC
16 12 (0.23%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 12 (0.23%) Oracle Certification
17 10 (0.20%) ACCA
17 10 (0.20%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 948 (18.50%) Data Quality
2 391 (7.63%) QA
3 172 (3.36%) GDPR
4 65 (1.27%) Accessibility
5 45 (0.88%) SLA
6 26 (0.51%) ISO 20022
6 26 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 24 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 23 (0.45%) PMO
9 22 (0.43%) NIST
10 20 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
11 16 (0.31%) IFRS
11 16 (0.31%) MiFID
12 15 (0.29%) Solvency II
13 13 (0.25%) HIPAA
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
1 507 (9.90%) Docker
2 139 (2.71%) Active Directory
3 53 (1.03%) VMware Infrastructure
4 45 (0.88%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.82%) Oracle RAC
6 20 (0.39%) 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%) HDFS
16 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 2 (0.039%) GridGain
17 1 (0.020%) GPFS
17 1 (0.020%) Varnish
17 1 (0.020%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 434 (8.47%) Kubernetes
2 388 (7.57%) Terraform
3 107 (2.09%) Grafana
4 100 (1.95%) Ansible
5 50 (0.98%) Oracle RMAN
6 49 (0.96%) Prometheus
7 46 (0.90%) Data Guard
8 33 (0.64%) 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
1 904 (17.65%) Oracle
2 830 (16.20%) Microsoft
3 590 (11.52%) Databricks
4 192 (3.75%) Google
5 182 (3.55%) Informatica
6 144 (2.81%) Talend
7 139 (2.71%) SAP
8 129 (2.52%) ServiceNow
9 93 (1.82%) 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%) Citrix
16 38 (0.74%) Bloomberg
16 38 (0.74%) BMC
17 36 (0.70%) Murex
18 35 (0.68%) Adobe
18 35 (0.68%) Sybase