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

6 months to
17 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 19 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -6 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing SQL 5,178 3,771 4,095
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 9.47% 11.45% 10.71%
As % of the Programming Languages category 36.35% 34.95% 33.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,472 2,580 2,910
10th Percentile £356 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £404 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -0.94%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £638
90th Percentile £688 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £474 £475
% change year-on-year +0.32% -0.32% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 94 87 45
10th Percentile £22.65 £29.00 £20.05
25th Percentile £28.50 £32.50 £26.25
Median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +25.00% -12.82%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £77.00 - £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £50.00 £33.22
% change year-on-year -11.00% +50.53% -22.14%

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 14,245 10,791 12,230
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.06% 32.76% 31.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,249 7,144 8,276
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.40% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 542 293 341
10th Percentile £27.75 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £48.16 £37.77 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.03 £80.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +0.78% -0.77% -

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 17 September 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 17 September 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 17 September 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 4,470 £500 - 7,576
London -6 2,505 £525 - 4,827
UK excluding London -7 2,090 £475 +0.32% 3,434
Work from Home -3 1,534 £500 - 3,194
North of England +1 597 £475 +5.56% 905
South East -13 459 £483 -3.50% 816
Midlands -5 454 £469 +4.22% 543
West Midlands -3 352 £469 -6.20% 323
North West +1 294 £500 +13.64% 530
Yorkshire +2 254 £475 - 265
South West -1 232 £513 +17.14% 352
Scotland -6 201 £428 -8.06% 340
East of England -8 118 £495 -1.49% 258
East Midlands -4 100 £464 +15.94% 220
North East -9 58 £413 -11.29% 115
Wales -7 36 £475 +6.15% 98
Northern Ireland -9 19 £363 -29.27% 143
Channel Islands - 1 £450 - 5

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
1 246 (4.75%) Apache Airflow
2 225 (4.35%) Confluence
3 207 (4.00%) Apache Spark
4 166 (3.21%) Apache
5 94 (1.82%) SharePoint
6 91 (1.76%) SAS
7 42 (0.81%) Oracle Workflow
8 38 (0.73%) IIS
9 37 (0.71%) WebLogic
10 28 (0.54%) Jupyter
11 26 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
12 23 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
13 22 (0.42%) nginx
14 20 (0.39%) CMS
15 18 (0.35%) Camunda
16 16 (0.31%) ArcGIS
16 16 (0.31%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 15 (0.29%) WebSphere
18 12 (0.23%) Tomcat
19 8 (0.15%) Appian
Applications
1 304 (5.87%) Microsoft Excel
2 64 (1.24%) Microsoft Office
3 40 (0.77%) Spreadsheet
4 39 (0.75%) MS Visio
5 23 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 11 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 7 (0.14%) Notepad++
8 5 (0.097%) Windchill
9 4 (0.077%) Acrobat
9 4 (0.077%) Notion
9 4 (0.077%) Photoshop
10 3 (0.058%) CPLEX
10 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
11 2 (0.039%) Mingle
12 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
12 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 52 (1.00%) Oracle EBS
2 46 (0.89%) Dynamics CRM
3 31 (0.60%) SAP S/4HANA
4 29 (0.56%) Oracle Payables
5 27 (0.52%) Aladdin
6 23 (0.44%) Remedy ITSM
7 21 (0.41%) Oracle ERP
8 19 (0.37%) Oracle EBS R12
9 18 (0.35%) Oracle Receivables
10 17 (0.33%) Oracle General Ledger
11 13 (0.25%) Finacle
12 12 (0.23%) Oracle Financials
13 11 (0.21%) NEC Housing
13 11 (0.21%) NetSuite
13 11 (0.21%) Oracle Assets
13 11 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
13 11 (0.21%) Siebel CRM
13 11 (0.21%) Summit
14 10 (0.19%) Oracle FAH
15 9 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
Cloud Services
1 1,582 (30.55%) Azure
2 1,259 (24.31%) AWS
3 961 (18.56%) Power Platform
4 512 (9.89%) GCP
5 417 (8.05%) Azure DevOps
6 393 (7.59%) Snowflake
7 358 (6.91%) GitHub
8 326 (6.30%) Azure Data Factory
9 311 (6.01%) dbt
9 311 (6.01%) Serverless
10 264 (5.10%) Amazon S3
11 209 (4.04%) AWS Lambda
12 201 (3.88%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 175 (3.38%) GitHub Actions
14 112 (2.16%) Power Automate
15 111 (2.14%) SaaS
16 101 (1.95%) PowerApps
17 97 (1.87%) Entra ID
18 91 (1.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 89 (1.72%) Azure Databricks
Communications & Networking
1 68 (1.31%) DNS
2 41 (0.79%) Firewall
3 37 (0.71%) HTTP
4 35 (0.68%) SSL
5 23 (0.44%) Network Security
6 22 (0.42%) Broadband
6 22 (0.42%) Internet
7 21 (0.41%) TCP/IP
8 19 (0.37%) VPN
9 17 (0.33%) SNMP
9 17 (0.33%) SSH
10 15 (0.29%) DHCP
11 13 (0.25%) WAN
12 11 (0.21%) HTTPS
12 11 (0.21%) Kerberos
12 11 (0.21%) SAN
13 10 (0.19%) WinSCP
14 8 (0.15%) Multicast
14 8 (0.15%) Reverse Proxy
14 8 (0.15%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 883 (17.05%) Power BI
2 716 (13.83%) Data Warehouse
3 664 (12.82%) SQL Server
4 363 (7.01%) Relational Database
5 348 (6.72%) PostgreSQL
6 321 (6.20%) Data Lake
7 295 (5.70%) Metadata
8 284 (5.48%) Tableau
9 249 (4.81%) NoSQL
10 243 (4.69%) Oracle Database
11 204 (3.94%) BigQuery
12 196 (3.79%) Azure SQL Database
13 153 (2.95%) Amazon Redshift
14 150 (2.90%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 145 (2.80%) Delta Lake
16 135 (2.61%) MySQL
17 130 (2.51%) MongoDB
18 121 (2.34%) Amazon Athena
19 115 (2.22%) Big Data
20 114 (2.20%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 671 (12.96%) Git
2 420 (8.11%) JIRA
3 290 (5.60%) Jenkins
4 249 (4.81%) GitLab
5 97 (1.87%) Selenium
6 92 (1.78%) JUnit
7 87 (1.68%) Maven
8 85 (1.64%) Gradle
9 66 (1.27%) Postman
10 57 (1.10%) Mockito
11 52 (1.00%) Oracle Forms
12 48 (0.93%) SonarQube
13 43 (0.83%) Bitbucket
14 35 (0.68%) Visual Studio
15 34 (0.66%) Zephyr
16 29 (0.56%) MLflow
17 28 (0.54%) Artifactory
17 28 (0.54%) Team Foundation Server
18 27 (0.52%) JMeter
19 26 (0.50%) REST Assured
General
1 1,413 (27.29%) Social Skills
2 1,366 (26.38%) Finance
3 1,076 (20.78%) Analytical Skills
4 588 (11.36%) Banking
5 467 (9.02%) Public Sector
6 162 (3.13%) Marketing
7 148 (2.86%) Front Office
8 147 (2.84%) Investment Banking
9 146 (2.82%) Retail
10 106 (2.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 89 (1.72%) Documentation Skills
12 82 (1.58%) Manufacturing
13 60 (1.16%) Legal
14 57 (1.10%) Financial Institution
15 54 (1.04%) Presentation Skills
16 46 (0.89%) Back Office
17 43 (0.83%) Local Government
18 40 (0.77%) Influencing Skills
18 40 (0.77%) Organisational Skills
19 39 (0.75%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 1,136 (21.94%) Developer
2 967 (18.68%) Data Engineer
3 783 (15.12%) Analyst
4 736 (14.21%) Senior
5 365 (7.05%) Lead
6 332 (6.41%) Data Analyst
7 264 (5.10%) Architect
8 257 (4.96%) Business Analyst
9 229 (4.42%) Consultant
10 221 (4.27%) Senior Data Engineer
11 213 (4.11%) Java Developer
12 210 (4.06%) DBA
13 182 (3.51%) Senior Developer
14 128 (2.47%) Software Engineer
15 124 (2.39%) Data Architect
15 124 (2.39%) SQL DBA
16 122 (2.36%) Python Engineer
17 121 (2.34%) Full-Stack Developer
18 120 (2.32%) SQL Developer
19 119 (2.30%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 490 (9.46%) REST
2 449 (8.67%) .NET
3 405 (7.82%) Terraform
4 353 (6.82%) PySpark
5 342 (6.60%) Kafka
6 290 (5.60%) Spring
7 284 (5.48%) Spring Boot
8 250 (4.83%) React
9 217 (4.19%) RESTful
10 215 (4.15%) HTML
11 206 (3.98%) JSON
12 185 (3.57%) CSS
13 179 (3.46%) XML
14 139 (2.68%) Web Services
15 130 (2.51%) SOAP
16 127 (2.45%) AngularJS
17 111 (2.14%) Middleware
18 106 (2.05%) Pandas
19 94 (1.82%) .NET Framework
20 89 (1.72%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 330 (6.37%) Cloud Native
2 282 (5.45%) Data Structures
3 245 (4.73%) Product Ownership
4 169 (3.26%) Legacy Systems
5 148 (2.86%) Distributed Systems
6 145 (2.80%) Onboarding
7 137 (2.65%) Enterprise Software
8 111 (2.14%) Management Information System
9 92 (1.78%) AI Agents
10 91 (1.76%) Derivative
11 83 (1.60%) Replication
12 82 (1.58%) Self-Motivation
13 69 (1.33%) Data Protection Act
14 68 (1.31%) Analytical Mindset
15 64 (1.24%) Clustering
16 61 (1.18%) Reference Data
17 60 (1.16%) Algorithms
18 53 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
19 52 (1.00%) Fixed Income
20 51 (0.98%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 380 (7.34%) Linux
2 323 (6.24%) Windows
3 256 (4.94%) Unix
4 129 (2.49%) Windows Server
5 29 (0.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 25 (0.48%) Solaris
7 13 (0.25%) AIX
8 12 (0.23%) Ubuntu
9 10 (0.19%) VMS
9 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2008
11 6 (0.12%) Windows 10
11 6 (0.12%) zOS
12 5 (0.097%) Windows Server 2012
13 4 (0.077%) Android
13 4 (0.077%) Apple iOS
13 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.058%) OpenVMS
15 2 (0.039%) HPUX
15 2 (0.039%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,393 (26.90%) CI/CD
2 1,390 (26.84%) Agile
3 1,360 (26.26%) Data Modelling
4 1,278 (24.68%) Analytics
5 1,110 (21.44%) ETL
6 1,102 (21.28%) Business Intelligence
7 1,026 (19.81%) Problem-Solving
8 1,001 (19.33%) Data Pipeline
9 999 (19.29%) DevOps
10 852 (16.45%) Data Engineering
11 836 (16.15%) AI
12 801 (15.47%) Validation
13 770 (14.87%) Migration
14 734 (14.18%) Stakeholder Management
15 609 (11.76%) Data Governance
16 595 (11.49%) Test Automation
17 578 (11.16%) Data Analysis
18 570 (11.01%) Continuous Improvement
19 528 (10.20%) Decision-Making
20 441 (8.52%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,861 (35.94%) Python
2 670 (12.94%) Java
3 467 (9.02%) C#
4 425 (8.21%) PL/SQL
5 412 (7.96%) JavaScript
6 269 (5.20%) PowerShell
7 247 (4.77%) T-SQL
8 201 (3.88%) TypeScript
9 155 (2.99%) Shell Script
10 149 (2.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 122 (2.36%) Bash
12 90 (1.74%) R
13 77 (1.49%) Scala
14 55 (1.06%) C++
15 44 (0.85%) VBA
16 38 (0.73%) Bicep
17 29 (0.56%) C
17 29 (0.56%) Go
17 29 (0.56%) VB.NET
18 27 (0.52%) VB
Qualifications
1 1,111 (21.46%) Security Cleared
2 889 (17.17%) SC Cleared
3 366 (7.07%) Degree
4 160 (3.09%) BPSS Clearance
5 135 (2.61%) DV Cleared
6 131 (2.53%) Computer Science Degree
7 83 (1.60%) Azure Certification
8 61 (1.18%) ISTQB
9 55 (1.06%) Microsoft Certification
10 46 (0.89%) AWS Certification
11 45 (0.87%) Master's Degree
12 19 (0.37%) ISEB
13 18 (0.35%) CISSP
13 18 (0.35%) DBS Check
14 17 (0.33%) ACCA
14 17 (0.33%) CIMA
15 16 (0.31%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 16 (0.31%) Oracle Certification
16 13 (0.25%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 12 (0.23%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1,025 (19.80%) Data Quality
2 426 (8.23%) QA
3 144 (2.78%) GDPR
4 71 (1.37%) Accessibility
5 46 (0.89%) SLA
6 34 (0.66%) ISO 20022
7 27 (0.52%) Actionable Recommendations
8 26 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 23 (0.44%) IFRS
10 19 (0.37%) NIST
11 18 (0.35%) MiFID
12 14 (0.27%) PMO
13 13 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
13 13 (0.25%) GMP
13 13 (0.25%) GxP
13 13 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
14 11 (0.21%) COBIT
14 11 (0.21%) HIPAA
14 11 (0.21%) PCI DSS
15 10 (0.19%) Basel III
System Software
1 487 (9.41%) Docker
2 132 (2.55%) Active Directory
3 60 (1.16%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.81%) Oracle RAC
5 41 (0.79%) Virtual Machines
6 25 (0.48%) Hyper-V
7 19 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
8 16 (0.31%) vCloud
8 16 (0.31%) VMware NSX
9 15 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 7 (0.14%) Postfix
11 6 (0.12%) Squid
12 5 (0.097%) Ceph
13 4 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 4 (0.077%) KVM
14 3 (0.058%) GPFS
15 2 (0.039%) DFS Replication
15 2 (0.039%) Dovecot
15 2 (0.039%) GridGain
15 2 (0.039%) NFS
Systems Management
1 415 (8.01%) Kubernetes
2 111 (2.14%) Grafana
3 103 (1.99%) Ansible
4 57 (1.10%) Prometheus
5 49 (0.95%) Oracle RMAN
6 46 (0.89%) Data Guard
7 44 (0.85%) Control-M
8 41 (0.79%) SCOM
9 29 (0.56%) Kibana
10 16 (0.31%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
10 16 (0.31%) vCenter Server
11 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Clustering
11 12 (0.23%) Single Sign-On
12 11 (0.21%) Nagios
12 11 (0.21%) Netcool
12 11 (0.21%) ZABBIX
13 10 (0.19%) Argo
13 10 (0.19%) ITRS Geneos
13 10 (0.19%) Microsoft Intune
13 10 (0.19%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 934 (18.04%) Oracle
2 864 (16.69%) Microsoft
3 645 (12.46%) Databricks
4 225 (4.35%) Google
5 155 (2.99%) Informatica
6 147 (2.84%) SAP
7 124 (2.39%) Talend
8 106 (2.05%) IBM
9 96 (1.85%) ServiceNow
10 87 (1.68%) Splunk
11 86 (1.66%) Salesforce
12 79 (1.53%) VMware
13 60 (1.16%) Denodo
14 41 (0.79%) Sybase
15 40 (0.77%) Bloomberg
16 38 (0.73%) Adobe
16 38 (0.73%) Alteryx
16 38 (0.73%) Foundry
17 36 (0.70%) Dynatrace
17 36 (0.70%) Murex