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

6 months to
8 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 481 392 427
Rank change year-on-year -89 +35 +3
Contract jobs citing RDBMS 111 139 176
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.30% 0.43% 0.42%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 1.77% 2.37% 2.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 86 92 133
10th Percentile £334 £400 £363
25th Percentile £413 £460 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £527 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.38% +0.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £550 £650
90th Percentile £744 £594 £730
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £475 £524
% change year-on-year -5.26% -9.31% -0.24%

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 6,288 5,867 7,017
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 17.04% 18.18% 16.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,347 3,876 4,954
10th Percentile £328 £350 £350
25th Percentile £410 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £534
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.69% -2.91%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £650
90th Percentile £700 £763 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -0.10%
Number of hourly rates quoted 84 78 141
10th Percentile £21.31 £19.59 £16.12
25th Percentile £29.00 £24.25 £22.61
Median hourly rate £52.00 £35.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +48.57% -24.21% -16.04%
75th Percentile £75.26 £64.73 £64.53
90th Percentile £85.00 £70.95 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £60.31 £28.75 £46.18
% change year-on-year +109.76% -37.74% -7.64%

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 8 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 8 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 -69 97 £541 +1.17% 31
UK excluding London -73 55 £450 -5.26% 22
London -21 49 £565 +2.73% 12
Work from Home -14 37 £550 +9.13% 17
North of England -34 24 £442 -0.67% 6
North West -13 16 £418 -6.18% 4
South East -21 11 £447 -22.26% 4
Yorkshire - 8 £550 - 2
Scotland +3 7 £338 -28.19%
South West -18 5 £550 - 3
East of England -18 3 - - 1
Midlands -50 3 £451 -8.52% 7
West Midlands -49 2 £500 -2.15% 3
Wales - 2 £495 - 1
East Midlands -26 1 £402 +12.92% 4

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 4 (3.60%) SharePoint
2 3 (2.70%) Apache Airflow
2 3 (2.70%) Apache Spark
3 2 (1.80%) Apache
4 1 (0.90%) JBoss
4 1 (0.90%) nginx
4 1 (0.90%) SAS
Applications
1 5 (4.50%) Chatbot
1 5 (4.50%) Microsoft Excel
1 5 (4.50%) Microsoft Office
2 4 (3.60%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (1.80%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 1 (0.90%) Oracle Applications
2 1 (0.90%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 49 (44.14%) AWS
2 25 (22.52%) Azure
3 20 (18.02%) Serverless
4 15 (13.51%) Amazon S3
4 15 (13.51%) AWS Lambda
4 15 (13.51%) Snowflake
5 14 (12.61%) GitHub
6 13 (11.71%) GCP
7 12 (10.81%) Amazon EC2
8 11 (9.91%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 10 (9.01%) Amazon ECS
9 10 (9.01%) Amazon SQS
10 9 (8.11%) AWS Fargate
11 7 (6.31%) Amazon EMR
11 7 (6.31%) Amazon EventBridge
11 7 (6.31%) OpenShift
12 6 (5.41%) AWS CloudFormation
12 6 (5.41%) Datadog
13 5 (4.50%) Apigee
13 5 (4.50%) Loggly
Communications & Networking
1 5 (4.50%) AMQP
2 4 (3.60%) Internet
3 2 (1.80%) SMS
4 1 (0.90%) Asterisk PBX
4 1 (0.90%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 111 (100.00%) Relational Database
2 43 (38.74%) NoSQL
3 37 (33.33%) PostgreSQL
4 28 (25.23%) Data Warehouse
5 25 (22.52%) MySQL
6 21 (18.92%) SQL Server
7 18 (16.22%) MongoDB
8 12 (10.81%) Big Data
8 12 (10.81%) Oracle Database
9 11 (9.91%) Amazon RDS
9 11 (9.91%) DynamoDB
10 8 (7.21%) Amazon Aurora
10 8 (7.21%) BigQuery
11 7 (6.31%) Data Lake
11 7 (6.31%) Metadata
12 6 (5.41%) Oracle Reports
12 6 (5.41%) Redis
13 4 (3.60%) Apache Cassandra
13 4 (3.60%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 4 (3.60%) SQLPlus
Development Applications
1 24 (21.62%) Git
2 19 (17.12%) Jenkins
3 14 (12.61%) Maven
4 9 (8.11%) Gradle
5 7 (6.31%) JIRA
5 7 (6.31%) JUnit
6 6 (5.41%) ER Studio
6 6 (5.41%) ERwin
6 6 (5.41%) PyCharm
6 6 (5.41%) SonarQube
7 5 (4.50%) SonarLint
7 5 (4.50%) Team Foundation Server
7 5 (4.50%) TeamCity
8 4 (3.60%) GitLab
8 4 (3.60%) Octopus Deploy
8 4 (3.60%) Toad
9 3 (2.70%) Cucumber
10 2 (1.80%) Bitbucket
10 2 (1.80%) Mockito
10 2 (1.80%) Zephyr
General
1 38 (34.23%) Social Skills
2 25 (22.52%) Finance
3 19 (17.12%) Analytical Skills
4 10 (9.01%) Public Sector
5 9 (8.11%) Banking
6 4 (3.60%) Documentation Skills
6 4 (3.60%) Front Office
7 3 (2.70%) Legal
8 1 (0.90%) Law
8 1 (0.90%) Marketing
8 1 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
8 1 (0.90%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 43 (38.74%) Developer
2 15 (13.51%) Architect
3 14 (12.61%) Java Developer
4 12 (10.81%) Senior
5 10 (9.01%) Data Engineer
5 10 (9.01%) DBA
6 8 (7.21%) Senior Developer
7 7 (6.31%) AWS Developer
7 7 (6.31%) Data Architect
8 6 (5.41%) Data Modeller
8 6 (5.41%) Lead
8 6 (5.41%) Oracle Developer
9 5 (4.50%) Administrator
9 5 (4.50%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 5 (4.50%) Java Architect
9 5 (4.50%) Java Technical Architect
9 5 (4.50%) PostgreSQL DBA
9 5 (4.50%) Senior Java Developer
9 5 (4.50%) Support Engineer
9 5 (4.50%) Technical Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 21 (18.92%) JSON
1 21 (18.92%) Spring Boot
2 17 (15.32%) Spring
3 15 (13.51%) Kafka
4 14 (12.61%) REST
4 14 (12.61%) RESTful
4 14 (12.61%) XML
5 11 (9.91%) NumPy
5 11 (9.91%) Pandas
6 8 (7.21%) PySpark
6 8 (7.21%) React
7 7 (6.31%) CSS
7 7 (6.31%) HTML
8 6 (5.41%) GraphQL
8 6 (5.41%) TensorFlow
9 5 (4.50%) Dropwizard
9 5 (4.50%) J2EE
9 5 (4.50%) JWT
9 5 (4.50%) Micronaut
10 4 (3.60%) Celery
Miscellaneous
1 10 (9.01%) Data Centre
2 8 (7.21%) Data Structures
3 7 (6.31%) Algorithms
3 7 (6.31%) Clustering
4 6 (5.41%) Cloud Native
5 5 (4.50%) N-Tier
5 5 (4.50%) Product Ownership
6 4 (3.60%) Online Banking
7 3 (2.70%) Replication
8 2 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
8 2 (1.80%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (1.80%) Onboarding
8 2 (1.80%) Public Cloud
8 2 (1.80%) Reference Data
8 2 (1.80%) Video on Demand
9 1 (0.90%) Client/Server
9 1 (0.90%) CMDB
9 1 (0.90%) Distributed Computing
9 1 (0.90%) Enterprise Software
9 1 (0.90%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 12 (10.81%) Linux
2 8 (7.21%) Unix
3 7 (6.31%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 6 (5.41%) CentOS
4 6 (5.41%) Windows
5 1 (0.90%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 37 (33.33%) Problem-Solving
2 35 (31.53%) Agile
3 34 (30.63%) Data Modelling
4 31 (27.93%) CI/CD
5 28 (25.23%) Microservices
6 25 (22.52%) ETL
7 24 (21.62%) DevOps
8 23 (20.72%) Data Engineering
9 19 (17.12%) Migration
10 18 (16.22%) Containerisation
11 17 (15.32%) Data Governance
12 16 (14.41%) Analytics
13 15 (13.51%) Data Security
13 15 (13.51%) SDLC
14 14 (12.61%) Data Migration
15 13 (11.71%) Stakeholder Management
16 12 (10.81%) Continuous Improvement
16 12 (10.81%) Database Security
16 12 (10.81%) Mentoring
16 12 (10.81%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 65 (58.56%) SQL
2 44 (39.64%) Python
3 35 (31.53%) Java
4 16 (14.41%) PL/SQL
5 14 (12.61%) JavaScript
6 7 (6.31%) Perl
7 6 (5.41%) TypeScript
8 4 (3.60%) Delphi
8 4 (3.60%) PHP
9 3 (2.70%) C#
9 3 (2.70%) PowerShell
9 3 (2.70%) T-SQL
10 2 (1.80%) Bash
10 2 (1.80%) Shell Script
11 1 (0.90%) C
11 1 (0.90%) Kotlin
11 1 (0.90%) R
11 1 (0.90%) Scala
Qualifications
1 16 (14.41%) Security Cleared
2 12 (10.81%) Degree
3 5 (4.50%) AWS Certification
3 5 (4.50%) DV Cleared
3 5 (4.50%) SC Cleared
4 4 (3.60%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (2.70%) Azure Certification
5 3 (2.70%) OCP
5 3 (2.70%) Oracle Certification
6 2 (1.80%) Microsoft Certification
7 1 (0.90%) AWS Certified Developer
7 1 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 1 (0.90%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (14.41%) Data Quality
2 8 (7.21%) QA
3 5 (4.50%) GDPR
4 2 (1.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 24 (21.62%) Docker
2 1 (0.90%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 16 (14.41%) Kubernetes
2 13 (11.71%) Terraform
3 5 (4.50%) Ansible
3 5 (4.50%) Grafana
4 2 (1.80%) Consul
5 1 (0.90%) Data Guard
5 1 (0.90%) Kibana
5 1 (0.90%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 43 (38.74%) Oracle
2 12 (10.81%) Microsoft
3 6 (5.41%) Adobe
4 5 (4.50%) Gigya
5 4 (3.60%) Databricks
5 4 (3.60%) DevExpress
6 3 (2.70%) Cloudera
6 3 (2.70%) SAP
6 3 (2.70%) Sybase
7 2 (1.80%) CA Agile Central
7 2 (1.80%) Red Hat
7 2 (1.80%) ServiceNow
7 2 (1.80%) Sparx
7 2 (1.80%) StreamSets
8 1 (0.90%) Ab Initio
8 1 (0.90%) RedGate
8 1 (0.90%) Salesforce
8 1 (0.90%) Splunk
8 1 (0.90%) Teradata
8 1 (0.90%) VMware