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

6 months to
10 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 14 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 -2 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,182 3,755 4,189
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.49% 11.34% 11.04%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.19% 34.63% 34.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,482 2,527 2,884
10th Percentile £350 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £600 £600 £625
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 95 85 54
10th Percentile £21.25 £23.08 £19.71
25th Percentile £26.68 £31.25 £25.99
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £37.75
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +32.45% -16.11%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.25
90th Percentile £76.00 - £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.75 £50.00 £30.00
% change year-on-year -10.50% +66.67% -33.33%

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 14,320 10,843 12,172
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.23% 32.73% 32.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,296 7,113 7,980
10th Percentile £363 £345 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £645
90th Percentile £725 £734 £774
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 299 334
10th Percentile £21.55 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £45.00 £40.00 £45.25
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 £81.28 £76.50 £75.00
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 10 October 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 October 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 10 October 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 -5 4,451 £500 - 6,523
London -7 2,529 £525 - 4,054
UK excluding London -5 2,063 £475 - 2,874
Work from Home -3 1,509 £500 - 2,702
North of England +2 596 £475 +5.56% 800
South East -13 442 £475 -5.00% 669
Midlands -4 436 £469 -1.26% 456
West Midlands -5 347 £469 -6.85% 283
North West +5 302 £500 +15.61% 468
Yorkshire +10 241 £475 - 221
South West -1 234 £538 +14.36% 250
Scotland -7 211 £425 -9.96% 263
East of England -9 116 £503 +0.20% 229
East Midlands -7 87 £450 +9.76% 173
North East -4 63 £406 -9.72% 117
Wales -6 37 £475 +4.97% 86
Northern Ireland -6 21 £413 -21.43% 153
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
1 260 (5.02%) Apache Airflow
2 244 (4.71%) Confluence
3 227 (4.38%) Apache Spark
4 181 (3.49%) Apache
5 99 (1.91%) SharePoint
6 74 (1.43%) SAS
7 40 (0.77%) WebLogic
8 36 (0.69%) IIS
9 34 (0.66%) Oracle Workflow
10 31 (0.60%) Jupyter
11 29 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
12 24 (0.46%) Palantir Foundry
13 20 (0.39%) Camunda
13 20 (0.39%) CMS
14 18 (0.35%) nginx
15 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
15 15 (0.29%) WebSphere
16 14 (0.27%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 10 (0.19%) Tomcat
18 8 (0.15%) Appian
Applications
1 300 (5.79%) Microsoft Excel
2 67 (1.29%) Microsoft Office
3 37 (0.71%) MS Visio
4 36 (0.69%) Spreadsheet
5 23 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 11 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.15%) Windchill
8 4 (0.077%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.077%) Notion
8 4 (0.077%) Photoshop
9 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
9 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) Mingle
10 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.019%) Notepad++
10 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 44 (0.85%) Dynamics CRM
2 37 (0.71%) Oracle EBS
3 30 (0.58%) Aladdin
4 29 (0.56%) Oracle Payables
4 29 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
5 27 (0.52%) Remedy ITSM
6 20 (0.39%) Oracle ERP
7 17 (0.33%) Oracle General Ledger
8 16 (0.31%) Oracle Receivables
9 14 (0.27%) Oracle Financials
10 13 (0.25%) Oracle Assets
11 12 (0.23%) Finacle
11 12 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
12 11 (0.21%) Oracle EBS R12
12 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
13 10 (0.19%) NEC Housing
13 10 (0.19%) NetSuite
13 10 (0.19%) Oracle FAH
14 9 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
15 8 (0.15%) Actimize
Cloud Services
1 1,588 (30.64%) Azure
2 1,267 (24.45%) AWS
3 965 (18.62%) Power Platform
4 548 (10.58%) GCP
5 412 (7.95%) Azure DevOps
6 411 (7.93%) Snowflake
7 376 (7.26%) GitHub
8 320 (6.18%) Azure Data Factory
9 313 (6.04%) dbt
10 300 (5.79%) Serverless
11 263 (5.08%) Amazon S3
12 200 (3.86%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 195 (3.76%) AWS Lambda
14 173 (3.34%) GitHub Actions
15 118 (2.28%) SaaS
16 117 (2.26%) Entra ID
17 109 (2.10%) Power Automate
18 106 (2.05%) PowerApps
19 102 (1.97%) Azure Databricks
20 82 (1.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 73 (1.41%) DNS
2 46 (0.89%) Firewall
3 36 (0.69%) HTTP
4 32 (0.62%) SSL
5 29 (0.56%) Network Security
6 24 (0.46%) Broadband
7 23 (0.44%) TCP/IP
8 22 (0.42%) VPN
9 21 (0.41%) Internet
10 16 (0.31%) DHCP
11 14 (0.27%) SSH
12 13 (0.25%) SAN
13 12 (0.23%) Reverse Proxy
13 12 (0.23%) SNMP
13 12 (0.23%) WAN
14 11 (0.21%) Kerberos
15 9 (0.17%) Multicast
16 8 (0.15%) HTTPS
17 7 (0.14%) iSCSI
17 7 (0.14%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 881 (17.00%) Power BI
2 694 (13.39%) Data Warehouse
3 670 (12.93%) SQL Server
4 352 (6.79%) Relational Database
5 335 (6.46%) PostgreSQL
6 328 (6.33%) Data Lake
7 293 (5.65%) Metadata
8 272 (5.25%) Tableau
9 253 (4.88%) NoSQL
10 246 (4.75%) Oracle Database
11 219 (4.23%) BigQuery
12 206 (3.98%) Azure SQL Database
13 148 (2.86%) Delta Lake
14 146 (2.82%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 143 (2.76%) Amazon Redshift
16 128 (2.47%) MySQL
17 127 (2.45%) MongoDB
18 118 (2.28%) Big Data
19 115 (2.22%) Amazon Athena
20 110 (2.12%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 713 (13.76%) Git
2 438 (8.45%) JIRA
3 292 (5.63%) Jenkins
4 265 (5.11%) GitLab
5 100 (1.93%) Selenium
6 98 (1.89%) JUnit
7 90 (1.74%) Maven
8 85 (1.64%) Gradle
9 71 (1.37%) Postman
10 59 (1.14%) Mockito
11 45 (0.87%) Bitbucket
12 44 (0.85%) SonarQube
13 43 (0.83%) Oracle Forms
14 37 (0.71%) Visual Studio
14 37 (0.71%) Zephyr
15 33 (0.64%) REST Assured
16 31 (0.60%) Team Foundation Server
17 29 (0.56%) Artifactory
18 27 (0.52%) MLflow
19 25 (0.48%) Claude Code
General
1 1,420 (27.40%) Social Skills
2 1,376 (26.55%) Finance
3 1,075 (20.74%) Analytical Skills
4 632 (12.20%) Banking
5 488 (9.42%) Public Sector
6 160 (3.09%) Retail
7 155 (2.99%) Investment Banking
7 155 (2.99%) Marketing
8 146 (2.82%) Front Office
9 102 (1.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 90 (1.74%) Manufacturing
11 87 (1.68%) Documentation Skills
12 62 (1.20%) Legal
13 60 (1.16%) Financial Institution
14 51 (0.98%) Back Office
15 48 (0.93%) Local Government
15 48 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
16 45 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
16 45 (0.87%) Military
17 44 (0.85%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,141 (22.02%) Developer
2 941 (18.16%) Data Engineer
3 782 (15.09%) Analyst
4 765 (14.76%) Senior
5 368 (7.10%) Lead
6 343 (6.62%) Data Analyst
7 256 (4.94%) Architect
8 254 (4.90%) Business Analyst
9 225 (4.34%) Senior Data Engineer
10 211 (4.07%) Consultant
11 206 (3.98%) DBA
12 200 (3.86%) Java Developer
13 182 (3.51%) Senior Developer
14 128 (2.47%) Python Developer
15 123 (2.37%) Azure Engineer
16 122 (2.35%) Software Engineer
17 121 (2.34%) Python Engineer
18 120 (2.32%) Data Architect
19 119 (2.30%) Full-Stack Developer
20 117 (2.26%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 531 (10.25%) REST
2 443 (8.55%) .NET
3 436 (8.41%) Terraform
4 367 (7.08%) Kafka
5 356 (6.87%) PySpark
6 286 (5.52%) Spring
7 279 (5.38%) Spring Boot
8 242 (4.67%) React
9 216 (4.17%) JSON
10 212 (4.09%) RESTful
11 208 (4.01%) HTML
12 182 (3.51%) XML
13 167 (3.22%) CSS
14 141 (2.72%) Web Services
15 135 (2.61%) SOAP
16 128 (2.47%) AngularJS
17 105 (2.03%) Middleware
18 95 (1.83%) .NET Framework
18 95 (1.83%) OAuth
18 95 (1.83%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 346 (6.68%) Cloud Native
2 282 (5.44%) Data Structures
3 263 (5.08%) Product Ownership
4 170 (3.28%) Legacy Systems
5 153 (2.95%) Enterprise Software
6 149 (2.88%) Onboarding
7 147 (2.84%) Distributed Systems
8 117 (2.26%) Management Information System
9 108 (2.08%) AI Agents
10 91 (1.76%) Replication
11 89 (1.72%) Self-Motivation
12 83 (1.60%) Derivative
13 73 (1.41%) Data Protection Act
14 68 (1.31%) Reference Data
15 66 (1.27%) Algorithms
16 65 (1.25%) Analytical Mindset
17 63 (1.22%) Clustering
18 55 (1.06%) Data Centre
19 49 (0.95%) Fixed Income
20 48 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 379 (7.31%) Linux
2 314 (6.06%) Windows
3 237 (4.57%) Unix
4 134 (2.59%) Windows Server
5 31 (0.60%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.46%) Solaris
7 13 (0.25%) Ubuntu
8 12 (0.23%) VMS
9 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.17%) AIX
11 7 (0.14%) Android
12 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
13 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.096%) zOS
14 4 (0.077%) OpenVMS
15 3 (0.058%) CentOS
15 3 (0.058%) Rocky
16 2 (0.039%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,444 (27.87%) Agile
2 1,428 (27.56%) CI/CD
3 1,384 (26.71%) Data Modelling
4 1,278 (24.66%) Analytics
5 1,095 (21.13%) ETL
6 1,084 (20.92%) Business Intelligence
7 1,004 (19.37%) Problem-Solving
8 983 (18.97%) DevOps
9 980 (18.91%) Data Pipeline
10 916 (17.68%) AI
11 893 (17.23%) Data Engineering
12 849 (16.38%) Validation
13 803 (15.50%) Stakeholder Management
14 780 (15.05%) Migration
15 665 (12.83%) Test Automation
16 618 (11.93%) Data Governance
17 616 (11.89%) Data Analysis
18 600 (11.58%) Continuous Improvement
19 552 (10.65%) Decision-Making
20 468 (9.03%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,842 (35.55%) Python
2 662 (12.77%) Java
3 460 (8.88%) C#
4 430 (8.30%) JavaScript
5 388 (7.49%) PL/SQL
6 262 (5.06%) PowerShell
7 250 (4.82%) T-SQL
8 212 (4.09%) TypeScript
9 151 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 149 (2.88%) Shell Script
11 129 (2.49%) Bash
12 87 (1.68%) Scala
13 77 (1.49%) R
14 47 (0.91%) Bicep
15 44 (0.85%) C++
16 40 (0.77%) VBA
17 34 (0.66%) Kotlin
18 32 (0.62%) Go
19 29 (0.56%) C
19 29 (0.56%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,114 (21.50%) Security Cleared
2 878 (16.94%) SC Cleared
3 366 (7.06%) Degree
4 177 (3.42%) BPSS Clearance
5 146 (2.82%) DV Cleared
6 127 (2.45%) Computer Science Degree
7 88 (1.70%) Azure Certification
8 63 (1.22%) ISTQB
9 53 (1.02%) Microsoft Certification
10 50 (0.96%) AWS Certification
11 44 (0.85%) Master's Degree
12 20 (0.39%) CISSP
12 20 (0.39%) ISEB
13 19 (0.37%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 18 (0.35%) DBS Check
15 16 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 15 (0.29%) ACCA
16 15 (0.29%) CIMA
17 14 (0.27%) PMI Certification
18 13 (0.25%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1,059 (20.44%) Data Quality
2 411 (7.93%) QA
3 134 (2.59%) GDPR
4 74 (1.43%) Accessibility
5 49 (0.95%) SLA
6 33 (0.64%) ISO 20022
7 30 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
8 24 (0.46%) NIST
9 23 (0.44%) IFRS
10 22 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 18 (0.35%) MiFID
12 15 (0.29%) COBIT
13 14 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
13 14 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
14 13 (0.25%) GMP
14 13 (0.25%) GxP
14 13 (0.25%) SEPA
15 12 (0.23%) Basel III
16 10 (0.19%) 21 CFR Part 11
16 10 (0.19%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 476 (9.19%) Docker
2 133 (2.57%) Active Directory
3 52 (1.00%) VMware Infrastructure
4 37 (0.71%) Oracle RAC
4 37 (0.71%) Virtual Machines
5 20 (0.39%) Hyper-V
6 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
7 16 (0.31%) vCloud
7 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
8 15 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
9 6 (0.12%) NFS
10 5 (0.096%) Postfix
11 4 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
11 4 (0.077%) GPFS
11 4 (0.077%) KVM
11 4 (0.077%) Squid
12 2 (0.039%) Ceph
12 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
12 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
13 1 (0.019%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 435 (8.39%) Kubernetes
2 111 (2.14%) Grafana
3 104 (2.01%) Ansible
4 59 (1.14%) Prometheus
5 45 (0.87%) Control-M
6 43 (0.83%) Kibana
7 40 (0.77%) SCOM
8 38 (0.73%) Data Guard
9 36 (0.69%) Oracle RMAN
10 17 (0.33%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
10 17 (0.33%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.31%) Single Sign-On
12 12 (0.23%) Istio
12 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
12 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Intune
13 11 (0.21%) Argo
13 11 (0.21%) Progress Chef
14 9 (0.17%) Puppet
14 9 (0.17%) WMI
15 8 (0.15%) SCCM
Vendors
1 913 (17.62%) Oracle
2 899 (17.35%) Microsoft
3 673 (12.99%) Databricks
4 256 (4.94%) Google
5 152 (2.93%) Informatica
6 140 (2.70%) SAP
7 117 (2.26%) IBM
7 117 (2.26%) Talend
8 96 (1.85%) ServiceNow
9 86 (1.66%) Salesforce
10 84 (1.62%) Splunk
11 70 (1.35%) VMware
12 46 (0.89%) Foundry
13 45 (0.87%) Denodo
14 44 (0.85%) OpenAI
15 39 (0.75%) Bloomberg
15 39 (0.75%) UiPath
16 36 (0.69%) Dynatrace
16 36 (0.69%) Murex
17 35 (0.68%) Sybase