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

6 months to
23 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 18 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 0 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,094 3,826 4,168
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.66% 11.71% 10.15%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.17% 35.41% 32.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,369 2,652 3,081
10th Percentile £355 £340 £350
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £613 £630
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £465 £475
% change year-on-year - -2.11% -4.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 99 70 47
10th Percentile £24.15 £22.40 £23.09
25th Percentile £33.88 £31.31 £30.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £39.67 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.43% -4.40% -15.30%
75th Percentile £69.72 £53.26 £54.70
90th Percentile £82.25 £66.00 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.75 £41.96 £40.00
% change year-on-year +6.66% +4.89% -11.11%

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 14,084 10,804 12,684
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.71% 33.08% 30.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,136 7,262 8,962
10th Percentile £360 £344 £350
25th Percentile £423 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £503 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.99% -4.29% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £495
% change year-on-year +3.16% -4.04% -1.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 518 262 456
10th Percentile £33.70 £28.18 £30.50
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.31 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.75
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -9.56% +3.51%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +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 23 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 23 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 23 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 4,423 £500 - 1,812
London -6 2,369 £525 - 890
UK excluding London -10 2,171 £465 - 1,168
Work from Home -6 1,532 £500 - 858
North of England -3 581 £463 -2.63% 303
Midlands +2 549 £459 +8.00% 197
South East -11 461 £475 -5.00% 374
West Midlands +4 449 £458 +1.78% 108
North West -4 309 £475 +1.71% 167
Yorkshire -7 235 £460 -3.16% 89
South West -7 234 £500 +14.29% 137
Scotland -3 203 £450 - 43
East of England -9 119 £491 -1.75% 84
East Midlands -6 96 £515 +32.48% 89
North East -16 50 £425 -8.11% 54
Wales -3 43 £468 +3.89% 35
Northern Ireland -6 15 £375 -27.36% 22

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
1 233 (4.57%) Apache Spark
2 218 (4.28%) Confluence
3 212 (4.16%) Apache Airflow
4 189 (3.71%) Apache
5 113 (2.22%) SAS
6 67 (1.32%) SharePoint
7 47 (0.92%) Oracle Workflow
8 42 (0.82%) WebLogic
9 40 (0.79%) IIS
10 39 (0.77%) Tomcat
11 32 (0.63%) WebSphere
12 26 (0.51%) Jupyter
13 22 (0.43%) Apache Geronimo
13 22 (0.43%) Apache ServiceMix
13 22 (0.43%) Red Hat Fuse
14 21 (0.41%) nginx
15 20 (0.39%) CMS
16 19 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
17 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
18 13 (0.26%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 320 (6.28%) Microsoft Excel
2 67 (1.32%) Microsoft Office
3 53 (1.04%) MS Visio
4 40 (0.79%) Spreadsheet
5 34 (0.67%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 4 (0.079%) Acrobat
8 4 (0.079%) Notion
8 4 (0.079%) 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 51 (1.00%) Oracle EBS
2 42 (0.82%) Dynamics CRM
3 31 (0.61%) Aladdin
4 29 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
5 26 (0.51%) Oracle Payables
6 25 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
7 22 (0.43%) Remedy ITSM
8 19 (0.37%) Oracle EBS R12
9 18 (0.35%) NEC Housing
9 18 (0.35%) Oracle Receivables
10 13 (0.26%) Oracle Assets
10 13 (0.26%) Oracle General Ledger
11 11 (0.22%) Findur
11 11 (0.22%) Siebel CRM
12 10 (0.20%) Fidessa
12 10 (0.20%) Finacle
12 10 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
13 9 (0.18%) Elite 3E
13 9 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 9 (0.18%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,595 (31.31%) Azure
2 1,215 (23.85%) AWS
3 935 (18.35%) Power Platform
4 449 (8.81%) GCP
5 437 (8.58%) Azure DevOps
6 356 (6.99%) GitHub
7 346 (6.79%) Azure Data Factory
8 330 (6.48%) Snowflake
9 305 (5.99%) Serverless
10 272 (5.34%) Amazon S3
11 269 (5.28%) dbt
12 217 (4.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 204 (4.00%) AWS Lambda
14 179 (3.51%) GitHub Actions
15 98 (1.92%) SaaS
16 96 (1.88%) Entra ID
17 88 (1.73%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 86 (1.69%) Power Automate
19 81 (1.59%) PowerApps
20 76 (1.49%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 54 (1.06%) DNS
2 42 (0.82%) Firewall
3 29 (0.57%) SSL
4 26 (0.51%) HTTP
5 22 (0.43%) SNMP
6 21 (0.41%) Network Security
6 21 (0.41%) VPN
7 20 (0.39%) Internet
8 19 (0.37%) WAN
9 16 (0.31%) TCP/IP
10 11 (0.22%) Kerberos
11 10 (0.20%) Broadband
11 10 (0.20%) SAN
11 10 (0.20%) WinSCP
11 10 (0.20%) Wireshark
12 9 (0.18%) Wi-Fi
13 8 (0.16%) 3GPP
13 8 (0.16%) HTTPS
14 7 (0.14%) DHCP
14 7 (0.14%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 861 (16.90%) Power BI
2 693 (13.60%) Data Warehouse
3 650 (12.76%) SQL Server
4 338 (6.64%) Relational Database
5 326 (6.40%) Tableau
6 324 (6.36%) PostgreSQL
7 318 (6.24%) Data Lake
8 277 (5.44%) Metadata
9 261 (5.12%) NoSQL
10 218 (4.28%) Azure SQL Database
11 210 (4.12%) Oracle Database
12 173 (3.40%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 172 (3.38%) BigQuery
14 152 (2.98%) Amazon Redshift
15 139 (2.73%) Big Data
16 135 (2.65%) Delta Lake
17 131 (2.57%) Oracle Reports
18 122 (2.39%) MySQL
19 108 (2.12%) MongoDB
19 108 (2.12%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 579 (11.37%) Git
2 400 (7.85%) JIRA
3 274 (5.38%) Jenkins
4 218 (4.28%) GitLab
5 80 (1.57%) JUnit
6 72 (1.41%) Maven
7 63 (1.24%) Gradle
8 60 (1.18%) Selenium
9 58 (1.14%) Postman
10 52 (1.02%) Mockito
10 52 (1.02%) Oracle Forms
11 41 (0.80%) Visual Studio
12 36 (0.71%) Bitbucket
13 35 (0.69%) SonarQube
14 33 (0.65%) Team Foundation Server
15 30 (0.59%) Cucumber
15 30 (0.59%) ERwin
15 30 (0.59%) JMeter
15 30 (0.59%) MLflow
15 30 (0.59%) Zephyr
General
1 1,302 (25.56%) Social Skills
2 1,269 (24.91%) Finance
3 998 (19.59%) Analytical Skills
4 485 (9.52%) Public Sector
5 469 (9.21%) Banking
6 140 (2.75%) Front Office
7 138 (2.71%) Marketing
8 122 (2.39%) Retail
9 119 (2.34%) Investment Banking
10 104 (2.04%) Documentation Skills
11 88 (1.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 68 (1.33%) Manufacturing
13 58 (1.14%) Legal
13 58 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
14 52 (1.02%) Financial Institution
15 46 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
16 42 (0.82%) Publishing
17 41 (0.80%) Back Office
18 40 (0.79%) Telecoms
19 35 (0.69%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,104 (21.67%) Developer
2 997 (19.57%) Data Engineer
3 734 (14.41%) Analyst
4 681 (13.37%) Senior
5 361 (7.09%) Lead
6 324 (6.36%) Data Analyst
7 278 (5.46%) Architect
8 251 (4.93%) Consultant
9 232 (4.55%) Business Analyst
10 216 (4.24%) Java Developer
11 199 (3.91%) DBA
12 196 (3.85%) Senior Data Engineer
13 169 (3.32%) Senior Developer
14 141 (2.77%) Software Engineer
15 129 (2.53%) SQL Developer
16 127 (2.49%) SQL DBA
17 123 (2.41%) Azure Engineer
18 116 (2.28%) Data Architect
19 111 (2.18%) C# Developer
20 107 (2.10%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 415 (8.15%) .NET
2 404 (7.93%) REST
3 318 (6.24%) PySpark
4 311 (6.11%) Kafka
5 270 (5.30%) Spring
6 256 (5.03%) Spring Boot
7 228 (4.48%) React
8 220 (4.32%) RESTful
9 202 (3.97%) JSON
10 189 (3.71%) XML
11 165 (3.24%) HTML
12 141 (2.77%) AngularJS
13 140 (2.75%) CSS
14 132 (2.59%) Web Services
15 123 (2.41%) Pandas
16 120 (2.36%) SOAP
17 119 (2.34%) Middleware
18 105 (2.06%) .NET Framework
19 81 (1.59%) Node.js
20 76 (1.49%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 339 (6.65%) Cloud Native
2 244 (4.79%) Data Structures
3 192 (3.77%) Product Ownership
4 186 (3.65%) Legacy Systems
5 154 (3.02%) Distributed Systems
6 112 (2.20%) Onboarding
7 94 (1.85%) Enterprise Software
7 94 (1.85%) Management Information System
8 93 (1.83%) Derivative
9 79 (1.55%) Self-Motivation
10 76 (1.49%) Analytical Mindset
11 75 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
12 74 (1.45%) Replication
13 71 (1.39%) Algorithms
14 70 (1.37%) Clustering
15 55 (1.08%) Fixed Income
16 54 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
17 50 (0.98%) Equities
18 49 (0.96%) NHS
19 47 (0.92%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 347 (6.81%) Linux
2 310 (6.09%) Windows
3 240 (4.71%) Unix
4 121 (2.38%) Windows Server
5 27 (0.53%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (0.47%) AIX
7 18 (0.35%) Solaris
8 13 (0.26%) Windows Server 2019
9 10 (0.20%) VMS
10 9 (0.18%) Windows Server 2008
11 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
11 8 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
11 8 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Android
13 6 (0.12%) Ubuntu
14 5 (0.098%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.079%) Oracle Linux
16 3 (0.059%) Windows Server 2012
17 2 (0.039%) Data ONTAP
17 2 (0.039%) HPUX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,321 (25.93%) Agile
2 1,316 (25.83%) Data Modelling
3 1,315 (25.81%) CI/CD
4 1,302 (25.56%) Analytics
5 1,146 (22.50%) ETL
6 1,106 (21.71%) Business Intelligence
7 1,016 (19.95%) DevOps
8 1,002 (19.67%) Data Pipeline
9 976 (19.16%) Problem-Solving
10 849 (16.67%) Data Engineering
11 713 (14.00%) Migration
12 712 (13.98%) AI
13 673 (13.21%) Validation
14 593 (11.64%) Data Governance
15 526 (10.33%) Test Automation
16 514 (10.09%) Stakeholder Management
17 503 (9.87%) Decision-Making
18 499 (9.80%) Data Analysis
19 494 (9.70%) Continuous Improvement
20 460 (9.03%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 1,807 (35.47%) Python
2 680 (13.35%) Java
3 491 (9.64%) C#
4 413 (8.11%) PL/SQL
5 343 (6.73%) JavaScript
6 274 (5.38%) T-SQL
7 256 (5.03%) PowerShell
8 179 (3.51%) TypeScript
9 142 (2.79%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 142 (2.79%) Shell Script
10 109 (2.14%) R
11 103 (2.02%) Bash
12 75 (1.47%) Scala
13 63 (1.24%) C++
14 53 (1.04%) VBA
15 48 (0.94%) Bicep
16 36 (0.71%) C
17 32 (0.63%) VB
18 29 (0.57%) Perl
19 25 (0.49%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 1,113 (21.85%) Security Cleared
2 896 (17.59%) SC Cleared
3 368 (7.22%) Degree
4 143 (2.81%) BPSS Clearance
5 112 (2.20%) Computer Science Degree
6 109 (2.14%) DV Cleared
7 78 (1.53%) Azure Certification
8 64 (1.26%) Master's Degree
9 56 (1.10%) ISTQB
10 39 (0.77%) Microsoft Certification
11 33 (0.65%) AWS Certification
12 17 (0.33%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.33%) PhD
13 15 (0.29%) CISSP
13 15 (0.29%) ISEB
14 13 (0.26%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 11 (0.22%) SnowPro
16 10 (0.20%) CISM
16 10 (0.20%) Oracle Certification
17 9 (0.18%) ACCA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 940 (18.45%) Data Quality
2 386 (7.58%) QA
3 180 (3.53%) GDPR
4 67 (1.32%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.90%) SLA
6 24 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 22 (0.43%) PMO
8 21 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
8 21 (0.41%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 19 (0.37%) ISO 20022
10 18 (0.35%) NIST
11 16 (0.31%) Solvency II
12 15 (0.29%) IFRS
13 13 (0.26%) GMP
13 13 (0.26%) MiFID
14 12 (0.24%) HIPAA
15 11 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 11 (0.22%) HL7
15 11 (0.22%) NCSC
15 11 (0.22%) WCAG
System Software
1 490 (9.62%) Docker
2 123 (2.41%) Active Directory
3 46 (0.90%) Virtual Machines
4 40 (0.79%) VMware Infrastructure
5 39 (0.77%) Oracle RAC
6 21 (0.41%) Hyper-V
7 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
8 14 (0.27%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.26%) vCloud
10 10 (0.20%) KVM
11 9 (0.18%) Postfix
11 9 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
12 5 (0.098%) RACF
13 4 (0.079%) Ceph
13 4 (0.079%) HDFS
14 3 (0.059%) Squid
15 2 (0.039%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
16 1 (0.020%) XenApp
16 1 (0.020%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 418 (8.21%) Kubernetes
2 376 (7.38%) Terraform
3 109 (2.14%) Grafana
4 91 (1.79%) Ansible
5 52 (1.02%) Prometheus
6 46 (0.90%) Oracle RMAN
7 42 (0.82%) Data Guard
8 29 (0.57%) Control-M
9 22 (0.43%) SCOM
10 20 (0.39%) Kibana
10 20 (0.39%) vCenter Server
11 16 (0.31%) Nagios
11 16 (0.31%) Netcool
11 16 (0.31%) ZABBIX
12 15 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
12 15 (0.29%) Tivoli
13 13 (0.26%) OpenView
13 13 (0.26%) Tivoli Monitoring
14 11 (0.22%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 10 (0.20%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 926 (18.18%) Oracle
2 806 (15.82%) Microsoft
3 579 (11.37%) Databricks
4 194 (3.81%) Google
5 190 (3.73%) Informatica
6 144 (2.83%) Talend
7 138 (2.71%) SAP
7 138 (2.71%) ServiceNow
8 95 (1.86%) IBM
9 87 (1.71%) Splunk
10 69 (1.35%) Denodo
11 63 (1.24%) Salesforce
12 61 (1.20%) VMware
13 42 (0.82%) Citrix
13 42 (0.82%) Dynatrace
14 38 (0.75%) Bloomberg
15 37 (0.73%) Sybase
16 35 (0.69%) Alteryx
16 35 (0.69%) SolarWinds
17 34 (0.67%) Murex