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

6 months to
24 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 504 380 408
Rank change year-on-year -124 +28 -1
Contract jobs citing RDBMS 100 148 175
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.24% 0.49% 0.39%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 1.50% 2.63% 2.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 76 98 126
10th Percentile £400 £388 £363
25th Percentile £446 £444 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £533 £513 £527
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -2.66% -4.27%
75th Percentile £628 £550 £639
90th Percentile £766 £595 £713
UK excluding London median daily rate £463 £470 £533
% change year-on-year -1.60% -11.82% +6.07%

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 6,668 5,631 7,233
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 16.27% 18.64% 16.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,599 3,791 5,140
10th Percentile £342 £350 £350
25th Percentile £412 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £650
90th Percentile £700 £763 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 92 169
10th Percentile £18.25 £22.27 £15.98
25th Percentile £29.00 £25.21 £20.98
Median hourly rate £54.50 £38.31 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +42.28% -9.87% -22.73%
75th Percentile £75.00 £65.00 £62.50
90th Percentile £85.70 £70.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £53.75 £30.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +79.17% -25.00% -27.27%

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 24 February 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 24 February 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 -102 90 £550 +4.76% 25
UK excluding London -86 49 £463 -1.60% 18
London -57 47 £575 +4.55% 10
Work from Home -24 31 £550 +11.00% 10
North of England -61 19 £442 -0.67% 8
South East -30 12 £500 -10.07% 5
North West -34 11 £414 -7.08% 6
Yorkshire - 8 £550 - 1
Midlands -69 5 £470 -4.67% 3
Scotland +4 4 £350 -25.53% 1
South West -32 4 £550 - 1
West Midlands -66 4 £485 -1.62% 2
East of England -19 3 - -
Wales - 2 £495 -
East Midlands -29 1 £402 +12.92% 1

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 (6.00%) Apache Spark
2 4 (4.00%) Apache Airflow
2 4 (4.00%) SharePoint
3 3 (3.00%) Apache
3 3 (3.00%) Microsoft Exchange
4 2 (2.00%) Appian
5 1 (1.00%) Confluence
5 1 (1.00%) SAS
Applications
1 5 (5.00%) Chatbot
2 4 (4.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (4.00%) Microsoft Office
2 4 (4.00%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (2.00%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
1 2 (2.00%) Summit
2 1 (1.00%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 40 (40.00%) AWS
2 22 (22.00%) Azure
3 16 (16.00%) Snowflake
4 12 (12.00%) Amazon S3
4 12 (12.00%) Serverless
5 10 (10.00%) GitHub
6 8 (8.00%) GCP
7 7 (7.00%) AWS Lambda
8 6 (6.00%) Amazon EC2
8 6 (6.00%) OpenShift
9 5 (5.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 5 (5.00%) Amazon ECS
9 5 (5.00%) AWS CloudFormation
10 4 (4.00%) npm
11 3 (3.00%) Amazon Kinesis
11 3 (3.00%) Amazon SQS
11 3 (3.00%) AWS Fargate
11 3 (3.00%) Azure Data Factory
11 3 (3.00%) Azure DevOps
11 3 (3.00%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 4 (4.00%) AMQP
1 4 (4.00%) Internet
2 2 (2.00%) SMS
3 1 (1.00%) Asterisk PBX
3 1 (1.00%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 100 (100.00%) Relational Database
2 34 (34.00%) NoSQL
3 32 (32.00%) PostgreSQL
4 27 (27.00%) SQL Server
5 24 (24.00%) Data Warehouse
6 21 (21.00%) MongoDB
7 17 (17.00%) MySQL
8 13 (13.00%) Big Data
9 10 (10.00%) Oracle Database
10 8 (8.00%) Metadata
11 7 (7.00%) Data Lake
12 6 (6.00%) Amazon RDS
12 6 (6.00%) Oracle Reports
13 5 (5.00%) DynamoDB
14 4 (4.00%) SQLPlus
15 3 (3.00%) Amazon Aurora
15 3 (3.00%) Apache Cassandra
15 3 (3.00%) Azure SQL Database
15 3 (3.00%) Data Vault
15 3 (3.00%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 19 (19.00%) Git
2 13 (13.00%) Jenkins
3 8 (8.00%) Maven
4 7 (7.00%) JIRA
4 7 (7.00%) Team Foundation Server
5 6 (6.00%) PyCharm
6 5 (5.00%) ER Studio
6 5 (5.00%) ERwin
6 5 (5.00%) JUnit
7 4 (4.00%) GitLab
7 4 (4.00%) Gradle
7 4 (4.00%) Octopus Deploy
7 4 (4.00%) TeamCity
7 4 (4.00%) Toad
8 3 (3.00%) Cucumber
9 2 (2.00%) JMeter
9 2 (2.00%) Log4j
9 2 (2.00%) Mockito
9 2 (2.00%) Oracle Forms
9 2 (2.00%) Zephyr
General
1 31 (31.00%) Social Skills
2 23 (23.00%) Finance
3 21 (21.00%) Analytical Skills
4 9 (9.00%) Banking
4 9 (9.00%) Public Sector
5 4 (4.00%) Documentation Skills
5 4 (4.00%) Front Office
6 3 (3.00%) Legal
6 3 (3.00%) Telecoms
7 2 (2.00%) Investment Banking
8 1 (1.00%) Law
8 1 (1.00%) Marketing
8 1 (1.00%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 38 (38.00%) Developer
2 12 (12.00%) Java Developer
2 12 (12.00%) Senior
3 11 (11.00%) Data Engineer
4 9 (9.00%) DBA
5 8 (8.00%) Lead
6 7 (7.00%) Architect
7 6 (6.00%) AWS Developer
8 5 (5.00%) Administrator
8 5 (5.00%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 5 (5.00%) Data Architect
8 5 (5.00%) Data Modeller
8 5 (5.00%) Oracle Developer
8 5 (5.00%) PostgreSQL DBA
8 5 (5.00%) Senior Developer
8 5 (5.00%) Senior Java Developer
9 4 (4.00%) Applications Engineer
9 4 (4.00%) Applications Support Engineer
9 4 (4.00%) Python Developer
9 4 (4.00%) Support Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 21 (21.00%) JSON
2 19 (19.00%) Kafka
3 17 (17.00%) Spring
4 15 (15.00%) Spring Boot
4 15 (15.00%) XML
5 14 (14.00%) REST
6 9 (9.00%) NumPy
6 9 (9.00%) Pandas
7 8 (8.00%) RESTful
8 7 (7.00%) CSS
8 7 (7.00%) HTML
9 6 (6.00%) PySpark
9 6 (6.00%) React
9 6 (6.00%) TensorFlow
10 4 (4.00%) GraphQL
11 3 (3.00%) .NET
12 2 (2.00%) ADO
12 2 (2.00%) COM
12 2 (2.00%) J2EE
12 2 (2.00%) Spring Cloud
Miscellaneous
1 8 (8.00%) Data Structures
2 7 (7.00%) Algorithms
2 7 (7.00%) Data Centre
3 6 (6.00%) Clustering
4 4 (4.00%) Online Banking
4 4 (4.00%) Replication
5 3 (3.00%) Cloud Native
6 2 (2.00%) Credit Risk
6 2 (2.00%) Data Protection Act
6 2 (2.00%) Derivative
6 2 (2.00%) Distributed Systems
6 2 (2.00%) Fixed Income
6 2 (2.00%) Legacy Systems
6 2 (2.00%) Market Risk
6 2 (2.00%) Reference Data
7 1 (1.00%) AI Agents
7 1 (1.00%) Cloud Security Posture
7 1 (1.00%) Enterprise Software
7 1 (1.00%) Onboarding
7 1 (1.00%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 11 (11.00%) Linux
2 6 (6.00%) Unix
3 5 (5.00%) CentOS
4 4 (4.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 2 (2.00%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 33 (33.00%) Agile
2 31 (31.00%) Data Modelling
2 31 (31.00%) Problem-Solving
3 26 (26.00%) ETL
4 24 (24.00%) DevOps
5 23 (23.00%) CI/CD
5 23 (23.00%) Data Engineering
6 22 (22.00%) Microservices
7 20 (20.00%) Migration
8 18 (18.00%) Containerisation
9 17 (17.00%) Data Governance
10 16 (16.00%) Data Migration
10 16 (16.00%) Data Security
11 14 (14.00%) Data Pipeline
12 13 (13.00%) Analytics
13 11 (11.00%) Data Integration
13 11 (11.00%) Database Security
13 11 (11.00%) SDLC
14 10 (10.00%) Continuous Improvement
14 10 (10.00%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 61 (61.00%) SQL
2 31 (31.00%) Python
3 26 (26.00%) Java
4 13 (13.00%) PL/SQL
5 9 (9.00%) JavaScript
6 4 (4.00%) Delphi
6 4 (4.00%) Perl
6 4 (4.00%) PHP
6 4 (4.00%) TypeScript
7 3 (3.00%) Bash
7 3 (3.00%) PowerShell
7 3 (3.00%) Shell Script
8 2 (2.00%) VB
8 2 (2.00%) VB6
9 1 (1.00%) C#
9 1 (1.00%) R
9 1 (1.00%) Scala
9 1 (1.00%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 14 (14.00%) Security Cleared
2 11 (11.00%) Degree
3 5 (5.00%) SC Cleared
4 4 (4.00%) DV Cleared
5 3 (3.00%) AWS Certification
5 3 (3.00%) Azure Certification
5 3 (3.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (3.00%) OCP
5 3 (3.00%) Oracle Certification
6 2 (2.00%) Microsoft Certification
7 1 (1.00%) BPSS Clearance
7 1 (1.00%) CISSP
7 1 (1.00%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (16.00%) Data Quality
2 11 (11.00%) QA
3 6 (6.00%) GDPR
4 2 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 1 (1.00%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 1 (1.00%) HIPAA
5 1 (1.00%) NIST
System Software
1 20 (20.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 14 (14.00%) Kubernetes
2 7 (7.00%) Terraform
3 5 (5.00%) Ansible
3 5 (5.00%) Grafana
4 2 (2.00%) Consul
5 1 (1.00%) Prometheus
5 1 (1.00%) Puppet
Vendors
1 43 (43.00%) Oracle
2 12 (12.00%) Microsoft
3 6 (6.00%) Adobe
4 5 (5.00%) Databricks
5 4 (4.00%) DevExpress
5 4 (4.00%) Informatica
6 3 (3.00%) Cloudera
6 3 (3.00%) SAP
6 3 (3.00%) Sybase
7 2 (2.00%) Actian
7 2 (2.00%) CA Agile Central
7 2 (2.00%) ServiceNow
7 2 (2.00%) Sparx
8 1 (1.00%) Ab Initio
8 1 (1.00%) Alteryx
8 1 (1.00%) CyberArk
8 1 (1.00%) RedGate
8 1 (1.00%) Salesforce
8 1 (1.00%) StreamSets
8 1 (1.00%) Talend