RDBMS Contract Job Trends

Relational Database Management System (RDBMS)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring RDBMS skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 16 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 484 399 416
Rank change year-on-year -85 +17 +15
Contract jobs citing RDBMS 106 137 176
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.29% 0.43% 0.41%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 1.69% 2.35% 2.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 82 89 131
10th Percentile £344 £400 £363
25th Percentile £423 £460 £411
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £529 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.76% +0.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £550 £650
90th Percentile £778 £589 £731
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £475 £525
% change year-on-year -5.26% -9.52% -

All Database & BI Skills
UK

RDBMS falls under the Databases and Business Intelligence category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring database or business intelligence skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for database or business intelligence skills 6,255 5,834 7,060
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 16.82% 18.31% 16.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,324 3,848 4,984
10th Percentile £331 £350 £350
25th Percentile £410 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.50% -3.09%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £650
90th Percentile £700 £761 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -0.99%
Number of hourly rates quoted 92 79 150
10th Percentile £18.25 £19.78 £16.12
25th Percentile £29.00 £24.25 £22.61
Median hourly rate £43.50 £35.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +24.29% -24.21% -16.04%
75th Percentile £70.50 £64.61 £64.50
90th Percentile £84.00 £67.55 £77.55
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £29.80 £46.18
% change year-on-year +67.79% -35.47% -16.04%

RDBMS
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing RDBMS relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

RDBMS job vacancy trend in the UK

RDBMS
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing RDBMS.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing RDBMS

RDBMS
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing RDBMS over the 6 months to 16 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for RDBMS in the UK

RDBMS
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing RDBMS.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing RDBMS

RDBMS
Top 15 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing RDBMS within the UK over the 6 months to 16 January 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 -68 92 £550 +2.80% 39
UK excluding London -61 52 £450 -5.26% 28
London -24 49 £570 +3.64% 15
Work from Home -19 33 £550 +6.02% 21
North of England -33 23 £450 +0.78% 9
North West -11 15 £425 -4.82% 6
South East -21 11 £447 -22.26% 11
Yorkshire - 8 £550 - 3
Scotland +4 7 £338 -28.19% 1
South West -25 4 £550 - 2
East of England -16 3 - -
Midlands -57 2 £451 -8.52% 5
Wales - 2 £495 -
East Midlands -26 1 £402 +12.92% 2
West Midlands -49 1 £500 -2.15% 3

RDBMS
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 6 (5.66%) Apache Spark
2 5 (4.72%) Apache Airflow
3 4 (3.77%) Apache
3 4 (3.77%) SharePoint
4 3 (2.83%) Microsoft Exchange
5 1 (0.94%) nginx
5 1 (0.94%) SAS
Applications
1 5 (4.72%) Chatbot
2 4 (3.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (3.77%) Microsoft Office
2 4 (3.77%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (1.89%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 1 (0.94%) Oracle Applications
2 1 (0.94%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 48 (45.28%) AWS
2 28 (26.42%) Azure
3 18 (16.98%) Serverless
4 16 (15.09%) GCP
4 16 (15.09%) Snowflake
5 14 (13.21%) GitHub
6 13 (12.26%) AWS Lambda
7 12 (11.32%) Amazon S3
8 11 (10.38%) Amazon EC2
9 10 (9.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 10 (9.43%) Amazon ECS
10 8 (7.55%) Amazon SQS
10 8 (7.55%) AWS Fargate
11 7 (6.60%) Amazon EMR
12 6 (5.66%) Datadog
13 5 (4.72%) Apigee
13 5 (4.72%) AWS CloudFormation
13 5 (4.72%) Loggly
13 5 (4.72%) OpenShift
13 5 (4.72%) Route 53
Communications & Networking
1 4 (3.77%) AMQP
1 4 (3.77%) Internet
2 2 (1.89%) SMS
3 1 (0.94%) Asterisk PBX
3 1 (0.94%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 106 (100.00%) Relational Database
2 45 (42.45%) NoSQL
3 37 (34.91%) PostgreSQL
4 28 (26.42%) Data Warehouse
5 24 (22.64%) SQL Server
6 23 (21.70%) MySQL
7 21 (19.81%) MongoDB
8 14 (13.21%) Big Data
9 12 (11.32%) Oracle Database
10 11 (10.38%) Amazon RDS
11 10 (9.43%) DynamoDB
12 8 (7.55%) Amazon Aurora
12 8 (7.55%) BigQuery
12 8 (7.55%) Data Lake
13 7 (6.60%) Metadata
14 6 (5.66%) Oracle Reports
14 6 (5.66%) Redis
15 4 (3.77%) Apache Cassandra
15 4 (3.77%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 4 (3.77%) SQLPlus
Development Applications
1 21 (19.81%) Git
2 18 (16.98%) Jenkins
3 13 (12.26%) Maven
4 9 (8.49%) Gradle
5 7 (6.60%) JUnit
6 6 (5.66%) ER Studio
6 6 (5.66%) ERwin
6 6 (5.66%) JIRA
6 6 (5.66%) PyCharm
7 5 (4.72%) SonarLint
7 5 (4.72%) SonarQube
7 5 (4.72%) Team Foundation Server
8 4 (3.77%) GitLab
8 4 (3.77%) Octopus Deploy
8 4 (3.77%) TeamCity
8 4 (3.77%) Toad
9 3 (2.83%) Cucumber
10 2 (1.89%) JMeter
10 2 (1.89%) Mockito
10 2 (1.89%) Zephyr
General
1 37 (34.91%) Social Skills
2 26 (24.53%) Finance
3 18 (16.98%) Analytical Skills
4 10 (9.43%) Public Sector
5 9 (8.49%) Banking
6 4 (3.77%) Documentation Skills
7 3 (2.83%) Front Office
7 3 (2.83%) Legal
8 1 (0.94%) Law
8 1 (0.94%) Marketing
8 1 (0.94%) Presentation Skills
8 1 (0.94%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 39 (36.79%) Developer
2 13 (12.26%) Architect
2 13 (12.26%) Data Engineer
2 13 (12.26%) Java Developer
2 13 (12.26%) Senior
3 10 (9.43%) DBA
4 6 (5.66%) AWS Developer
4 6 (5.66%) Data Architect
4 6 (5.66%) Data Modeller
4 6 (5.66%) Lead
4 6 (5.66%) Oracle Developer
4 6 (5.66%) Senior Developer
5 5 (4.72%) Administrator
5 5 (4.72%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 5 (4.72%) Java Architect
5 5 (4.72%) Java Technical Architect
5 5 (4.72%) PostgreSQL DBA
5 5 (4.72%) Senior Java Developer
5 5 (4.72%) Technical Architect
6 4 (3.77%) Support Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 22 (20.75%) Spring Boot
2 21 (19.81%) JSON
3 19 (17.92%) Spring
4 18 (16.98%) Kafka
5 14 (13.21%) XML
6 13 (12.26%) REST
6 13 (12.26%) RESTful
7 11 (10.38%) NumPy
7 11 (10.38%) Pandas
8 8 (7.55%) PySpark
9 7 (6.60%) CSS
9 7 (6.60%) HTML
9 7 (6.60%) React
10 6 (5.66%) TensorFlow
11 5 (4.72%) Dropwizard
11 5 (4.72%) GraphQL
11 5 (4.72%) J2EE
11 5 (4.72%) JWT
11 5 (4.72%) Micronaut
12 4 (3.77%) Celery
Miscellaneous
1 9 (8.49%) Data Centre
2 8 (7.55%) Data Structures
3 7 (6.60%) Algorithms
3 7 (6.60%) Clustering
4 6 (5.66%) Cloud Native
5 5 (4.72%) N-Tier
6 4 (3.77%) Online Banking
6 4 (3.77%) Product Ownership
7 3 (2.83%) Replication
8 2 (1.89%) Data Protection Act
8 2 (1.89%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (1.89%) Onboarding
8 2 (1.89%) Public Cloud
8 2 (1.89%) Reference Data
9 1 (0.94%) Analytical Mindset
9 1 (0.94%) CMDB
9 1 (0.94%) Distributed Computing
9 1 (0.94%) Distributed Systems
9 1 (0.94%) Enterprise Software
9 1 (0.94%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 10 (9.43%) Linux
2 8 (7.55%) Unix
3 5 (4.72%) CentOS
3 5 (4.72%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 5 (4.72%) Windows
4 1 (0.94%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 37 (34.91%) Problem-Solving
2 34 (32.08%) Agile
3 33 (31.13%) Data Modelling
4 30 (28.30%) CI/CD
5 28 (26.42%) ETL
6 27 (25.47%) Microservices
7 26 (24.53%) Data Engineering
8 24 (22.64%) DevOps
9 21 (19.81%) Containerisation
10 18 (16.98%) Analytics
10 18 (16.98%) Migration
11 17 (16.04%) Data Governance
12 15 (14.15%) Data Pipeline
12 15 (14.15%) Data Security
12 15 (14.15%) SDLC
13 14 (13.21%) Data Migration
14 13 (12.26%) Stakeholder Management
15 12 (11.32%) Clean Code
15 12 (11.32%) Mentoring
15 12 (11.32%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 67 (63.21%) SQL
2 42 (39.62%) Python
3 36 (33.96%) Java
4 16 (15.09%) PL/SQL
5 12 (11.32%) JavaScript
6 6 (5.66%) Perl
7 4 (3.77%) Delphi
7 4 (3.77%) PHP
8 3 (2.83%) PowerShell
8 3 (2.83%) T-SQL
8 3 (2.83%) TypeScript
9 2 (1.89%) Bash
9 2 (1.89%) C#
9 2 (1.89%) Scala
9 2 (1.89%) Shell Script
10 1 (0.94%) R
Qualifications
1 15 (14.15%) Security Cleared
2 11 (10.38%) Degree
3 5 (4.72%) SC Cleared
4 4 (3.77%) Computer Science Degree
4 4 (3.77%) DV Cleared
5 3 (2.83%) AWS Certification
5 3 (2.83%) Azure Certification
5 3 (2.83%) OCP
5 3 (2.83%) Oracle Certification
6 2 (1.89%) Microsoft Certification
7 1 (0.94%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 17 (16.04%) Data Quality
2 8 (7.55%) QA
3 5 (4.72%) GDPR
4 2 (1.89%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 25 (23.58%) Docker
Systems Management
1 17 (16.04%) Kubernetes
2 12 (11.32%) Terraform
3 4 (3.77%) Ansible
3 4 (3.77%) Grafana
4 2 (1.89%) Consul
5 1 (0.94%) Data Guard
Vendors
1 41 (38.68%) Oracle
2 12 (11.32%) Microsoft
3 6 (5.66%) Adobe
4 5 (4.72%) Gigya
5 4 (3.77%) Databricks
5 4 (3.77%) DevExpress
5 4 (3.77%) Informatica
6 3 (2.83%) Cloudera
6 3 (2.83%) SAP
6 3 (2.83%) Sybase
7 2 (1.89%) CA Agile Central
7 2 (1.89%) ServiceNow
7 2 (1.89%) Sparx
7 2 (1.89%) StreamSets
8 1 (0.94%) Ab Initio
8 1 (0.94%) IBM
8 1 (0.94%) Red Hat
8 1 (0.94%) RedGate
8 1 (0.94%) Salesforce
8 1 (0.94%) Talend