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 16 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,076 3,812 4,222
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.65% 11.73% 9.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 35.88% 35.37% 32.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,372 2,646 3,123
10th Percentile £352 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £613 £626
90th Percentile £684 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -0.11% -1.16% -3.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 94 72 56
10th Percentile £24.49 £22.83 £21.69
25th Percentile £33.82 £31.00 £29.06
Median hourly rate £44.75 £39.67 £42.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.80% -5.54% -15.64%
75th Percentile £63.94 £53.75 £51.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £66.00 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £33.91 £40.00
% change year-on-year +31.23% -15.23% -12.09%

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 14,148 10,777 13,056
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.88% 33.17% 30.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,193 7,253 9,236
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £421 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £610 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 538 265 514
10th Percentile £33.73 £27.44 £31.25
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +2.36% -2.31% +4.00%

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 16 July 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 16 July 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 16 July 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 4,412 £500 - 1,413
London -6 2,357 £525 - 586
UK excluding London -10 2,171 £469 -0.11% 1,108
Work from Home -6 1,521 £500 - 647
North of England -4 583 £463 -2.63% 272
Midlands +2 556 £460 +7.48% 191
South East -9 459 £475 -5.00% 350
West Midlands +4 456 £459 +2.00% 89
North West -1 310 £475 +0.53% 146
South West -6 236 £500 +11.11% 119
Yorkshire -7 236 £475 - 90
Scotland -8 201 £450 - 45
East of England -10 111 £488 -2.50% 83
East Midlands -1 96 £525 +34.62% 102
North East -16 52 £425 -8.36% 41
Wales +4 45 £468 +5.06% 31
Northern Ireland -10 15 £375 -26.83% 36

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
1 236 (4.65%) Apache Spark
2 212 (4.18%) Confluence
3 210 (4.14%) Apache Airflow
4 187 (3.68%) Apache
5 117 (2.30%) SAS
6 64 (1.26%) SharePoint
7 47 (0.93%) Oracle Workflow
8 44 (0.87%) IIS
8 44 (0.87%) Tomcat
9 38 (0.75%) WebLogic
10 32 (0.63%) WebSphere
11 25 (0.49%) Jupyter
12 23 (0.45%) CMS
12 23 (0.45%) nginx
13 22 (0.43%) Apache Geronimo
13 22 (0.43%) Apache ServiceMix
13 22 (0.43%) Red Hat Fuse
14 20 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
15 16 (0.32%) Appian
16 15 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 318 (6.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 69 (1.36%) Microsoft Office
3 54 (1.06%) MS Visio
4 40 (0.79%) Spreadsheet
5 34 (0.67%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 9 (0.18%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.079%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.079%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.059%) Notion
9 3 (0.059%) Oracle Smart View
10 2 (0.039%) Microsoft Project
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%) Weka
Business Applications
1 51 (1.00%) Oracle EBS
2 41 (0.81%) Dynamics CRM
3 30 (0.59%) Aladdin
3 30 (0.59%) SAP S/4HANA
4 27 (0.53%) Oracle Payables
5 24 (0.47%) Oracle ERP
6 19 (0.37%) NEC Housing
6 19 (0.37%) Oracle EBS R12
6 19 (0.37%) Oracle Receivables
6 19 (0.37%) Remedy ITSM
7 13 (0.26%) Oracle Assets
7 13 (0.26%) Oracle General Ledger
8 11 (0.22%) Findur
8 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
9 10 (0.20%) Elite 3E
9 10 (0.20%) Finacle
9 10 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
10 8 (0.16%) Infor LN
10 8 (0.16%) Oracle Cash Management
10 8 (0.16%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 1,598 (31.48%) Azure
2 1,218 (24.00%) AWS
3 936 (18.44%) Power Platform
4 447 (8.81%) Azure DevOps
5 438 (8.63%) GCP
6 359 (7.07%) GitHub
7 341 (6.72%) Azure Data Factory
8 324 (6.38%) Snowflake
9 311 (6.13%) Serverless
10 272 (5.36%) Amazon S3
11 258 (5.08%) dbt
12 218 (4.29%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 199 (3.92%) AWS Lambda
14 182 (3.59%) GitHub Actions
15 93 (1.83%) SaaS
16 88 (1.73%) Entra ID
17 86 (1.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 84 (1.65%) Power Automate
19 79 (1.56%) PowerApps
20 75 (1.48%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 52 (1.02%) DNS
2 41 (0.81%) Firewall
3 27 (0.53%) HTTP
3 27 (0.53%) SSL
4 22 (0.43%) Network Security
4 22 (0.43%) SNMP
5 20 (0.39%) Internet
6 19 (0.37%) WAN
7 18 (0.35%) VPN
8 14 (0.28%) TCP/IP
9 12 (0.24%) SAN
10 11 (0.22%) Kerberos
11 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
12 9 (0.18%) HTTPS
12 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
12 9 (0.18%) Wireshark
13 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
14 7 (0.14%) Broadband
14 7 (0.14%) LAN
14 7 (0.14%) PuTTY
Database & Business Intelligence
1 861 (16.96%) Power BI
2 687 (13.53%) Data Warehouse
3 651 (12.83%) SQL Server
4 343 (6.76%) Relational Database
5 331 (6.52%) PostgreSQL
6 323 (6.36%) Tableau
7 316 (6.23%) Data Lake
8 268 (5.28%) Metadata
9 253 (4.98%) NoSQL
10 219 (4.31%) Azure SQL Database
11 209 (4.12%) Oracle Database
12 173 (3.41%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 170 (3.35%) BigQuery
14 154 (3.03%) Amazon Redshift
15 143 (2.82%) Big Data
16 135 (2.66%) Delta Lake
17 131 (2.58%) Oracle Reports
18 124 (2.44%) MySQL
19 111 (2.19%) Snowflake Schema
20 110 (2.17%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 568 (11.19%) Git
2 393 (7.74%) JIRA
3 271 (5.34%) Jenkins
4 220 (4.33%) GitLab
5 77 (1.52%) JUnit
6 67 (1.32%) Maven
7 62 (1.22%) Gradle
8 60 (1.18%) Selenium
9 56 (1.10%) Postman
10 53 (1.04%) Oracle Forms
11 51 (1.00%) Mockito
12 43 (0.85%) Visual Studio
13 35 (0.69%) SonarQube
14 34 (0.67%) Bitbucket
14 34 (0.67%) Team Foundation Server
15 32 (0.63%) Cucumber
15 32 (0.63%) JMeter
15 32 (0.63%) MLflow
16 28 (0.55%) Liquibase
17 27 (0.53%) Zephyr
General
1 1,281 (25.24%) Social Skills
2 1,269 (25.00%) Finance
3 989 (19.48%) Analytical Skills
4 486 (9.57%) Public Sector
5 467 (9.20%) Banking
6 137 (2.70%) Front Office
6 137 (2.70%) Marketing
7 123 (2.42%) Retail
8 120 (2.36%) Investment Banking
9 104 (2.05%) Documentation Skills
10 91 (1.79%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 64 (1.26%) Manufacturing
12 60 (1.18%) Legal
13 57 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
14 55 (1.08%) Financial Institution
15 43 (0.85%) Publishing
16 42 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
17 41 (0.81%) Back Office
18 38 (0.75%) Telecoms
19 35 (0.69%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,111 (21.89%) Developer
2 1,001 (19.72%) Data Engineer
3 736 (14.50%) Analyst
4 670 (13.20%) Senior
5 357 (7.03%) Lead
6 321 (6.32%) Data Analyst
7 283 (5.58%) Architect
8 245 (4.83%) Consultant
9 235 (4.63%) Business Analyst
10 212 (4.18%) Java Developer
11 197 (3.88%) Senior Data Engineer
12 194 (3.82%) DBA
13 160 (3.15%) Senior Developer
14 139 (2.74%) Software Engineer
15 127 (2.50%) SQL Developer
16 123 (2.42%) Azure Engineer
16 123 (2.42%) SQL DBA
17 114 (2.25%) C# Developer
18 111 (2.19%) Data Architect
19 107 (2.11%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 423 (8.33%) .NET
2 395 (7.78%) REST
3 311 (6.13%) PySpark
4 304 (5.99%) Kafka
5 264 (5.20%) Spring
6 253 (4.98%) Spring Boot
7 233 (4.59%) React
8 218 (4.29%) RESTful
9 196 (3.86%) JSON
10 185 (3.64%) XML
11 167 (3.29%) HTML
12 139 (2.74%) CSS
13 135 (2.66%) AngularJS
14 130 (2.56%) Web Services
15 127 (2.50%) Pandas
16 120 (2.36%) SOAP
17 119 (2.34%) Middleware
18 101 (1.99%) .NET Framework
19 81 (1.60%) Node.js
20 74 (1.46%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 339 (6.68%) Cloud Native
2 233 (4.59%) Data Structures
3 184 (3.62%) Legacy Systems
4 177 (3.49%) Product Ownership
5 145 (2.86%) Distributed Systems
6 105 (2.07%) Onboarding
7 96 (1.89%) Derivative
8 90 (1.77%) Enterprise Software
9 89 (1.75%) Management Information System
10 81 (1.60%) Self-Motivation
11 77 (1.52%) Data Protection Act
12 76 (1.50%) Analytical Mindset
13 73 (1.44%) Algorithms
14 71 (1.40%) Replication
15 67 (1.32%) Clustering
16 54 (1.06%) Fixed Income
17 53 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
18 51 (1.00%) Equities
19 47 (0.93%) NHS
20 43 (0.85%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 340 (6.70%) Linux
2 303 (5.97%) Windows
3 241 (4.75%) Unix
4 120 (2.36%) Windows Server
5 29 (0.57%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.47%) AIX
7 20 (0.39%) Solaris
8 15 (0.30%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (0.22%) Windows Server 2008
10 10 (0.20%) VMS
10 10 (0.20%) Windows Server 2016
11 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
11 8 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Android
13 5 (0.099%) Windows 10
14 4 (0.079%) Oracle Linux
14 4 (0.079%) Ubuntu
15 3 (0.059%) Windows Server 2012
16 2 (0.039%) Data ONTAP
16 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,325 (26.10%) CI/CD
2 1,310 (25.81%) Agile
3 1,298 (25.57%) Data Modelling
4 1,283 (25.28%) Analytics
5 1,148 (22.62%) ETL
6 1,102 (21.71%) Business Intelligence
7 1,023 (20.15%) DevOps
8 995 (19.60%) Data Pipeline
9 983 (19.37%) Problem-Solving
10 837 (16.49%) Data Engineering
11 708 (13.95%) AI
12 707 (13.93%) Migration
13 655 (12.90%) Validation
14 581 (11.45%) Data Governance
15 517 (10.19%) Test Automation
16 507 (9.99%) Decision-Making
17 500 (9.85%) Data Analysis
18 498 (9.81%) Stakeholder Management
19 481 (9.48%) Continuous Improvement
20 466 (9.18%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,817 (35.80%) Python
2 671 (13.22%) Java
3 497 (9.79%) C#
4 410 (8.08%) PL/SQL
5 344 (6.78%) JavaScript
6 275 (5.42%) T-SQL
7 252 (4.96%) PowerShell
8 180 (3.55%) TypeScript
9 144 (2.84%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 135 (2.66%) Shell Script
11 113 (2.23%) R
12 97 (1.91%) Bash
13 82 (1.62%) Scala
14 68 (1.34%) C++
15 52 (1.02%) VBA
16 46 (0.91%) Bicep
17 37 (0.73%) C
18 34 (0.67%) VB
19 31 (0.61%) Perl
20 26 (0.51%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,110 (21.87%) Security Cleared
2 897 (17.67%) SC Cleared
3 366 (7.21%) Degree
4 141 (2.78%) BPSS Clearance
5 115 (2.27%) Computer Science Degree
6 108 (2.13%) DV Cleared
7 75 (1.48%) Azure Certification
8 61 (1.20%) Master's Degree
9 54 (1.06%) ISTQB
10 39 (0.77%) Microsoft Certification
11 35 (0.69%) AWS Certification
12 18 (0.35%) DBS Check
13 15 (0.30%) CISSP
14 14 (0.28%) PhD
15 11 (0.22%) SnowPro
16 10 (0.20%) CISM
16 10 (0.20%) ISEB
16 10 (0.20%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
17 9 (0.18%) ACCA
17 9 (0.18%) CIMA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 920 (18.12%) Data Quality
2 390 (7.68%) QA
3 184 (3.62%) GDPR
4 65 (1.28%) Accessibility
5 47 (0.93%) SLA
6 25 (0.49%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 22 (0.43%) PMO
7 22 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 20 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
9 19 (0.37%) ISO 20022
10 18 (0.35%) NIST
11 16 (0.32%) Solvency II
12 15 (0.30%) IFRS
13 14 (0.28%) GMP
13 14 (0.28%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 13 (0.26%) MiFID
15 11 (0.22%) HL7
15 11 (0.22%) NCSC
15 11 (0.22%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 494 (9.73%) Docker
2 114 (2.25%) Active Directory
3 47 (0.93%) Virtual Machines
4 39 (0.77%) Oracle RAC
5 38 (0.75%) VMware Infrastructure
6 21 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.39%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.28%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.26%) vCloud
10 10 (0.20%) KVM
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
12 8 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
13 5 (0.099%) RACF
14 4 (0.079%) Ceph
14 4 (0.079%) HDFS
15 3 (0.059%) Squid
16 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 2 (0.039%) GridGain
17 1 (0.020%) XenApp
17 1 (0.020%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 413 (8.14%) Kubernetes
2 379 (7.47%) Terraform
3 112 (2.21%) Grafana
4 90 (1.77%) Ansible
5 53 (1.04%) Prometheus
6 46 (0.91%) Oracle RMAN
7 41 (0.81%) Data Guard
8 28 (0.55%) Control-M
9 21 (0.41%) Kibana
10 20 (0.39%) vCenter Server
11 19 (0.37%) SCOM
12 16 (0.32%) Nagios
12 16 (0.32%) Single Sign-On
12 16 (0.32%) ZABBIX
13 15 (0.30%) Netcool
13 15 (0.30%) Tivoli
14 13 (0.26%) OpenView
14 13 (0.26%) Tivoli Monitoring
15 11 (0.22%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
16 9 (0.18%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 924 (18.20%) Oracle
2 797 (15.70%) Microsoft
3 574 (11.31%) Databricks
4 198 (3.90%) Google
5 189 (3.72%) Informatica
6 142 (2.80%) Talend
7 138 (2.72%) ServiceNow
8 129 (2.54%) SAP
9 97 (1.91%) IBM
10 87 (1.71%) Splunk
11 69 (1.36%) Denodo
12 60 (1.18%) Salesforce
12 60 (1.18%) VMware
13 43 (0.85%) Citrix
14 41 (0.81%) Dynatrace
15 37 (0.73%) Bloomberg
16 36 (0.71%) Sybase
17 35 (0.69%) Alteryx
17 35 (0.69%) Murex
18 33 (0.65%) MuleSoft