New Research: SQL Rivals Python as America’s Most In-Demand Programming Language – and It’s Needed Far Beyond Silicon Valley
Coding skills are increasingly mentioned across job ads in finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and other sectors.
Vilnius, Lithuania, June 4, 2026. – As AI transforms the demand for worker skills across the U.S., a new analysis, conducted by Oxylabs, a web intelligence company, shows what employers have actually been looking for in their job postings.
The analysis of more than 800,000 U.S. tech job postings published between January 2025 and March 2026 found that Python and SQL remain the most in-demand programming languages, appearing in 46% and 45% of listings. Their demand extends well beyond traditional tech and data industries. Java follows at 21%, while JavaScript appears in 19% of the analyzed postings.
SQL is the most requested language in 38 states, while Python leads in 12 states, including major tech hubs such as California and New York.
“Some surveys and search-based rankings tend to downplay SQL, and many developers don’t even think of it as a real programming language, so it can look less popular while Python gets all the attention,” said Andrius Kūkšta, Tech Lead at Oxylabs. “But when you look at real job postings at scale, you see what employers actually hire for. U.S. companies keep asking for SQL, mostly as the second must‑know programming language alongside another one, which shows its role as part of a broader stack.”
Among the states with the most job ads mentioning programming languages, Virginia ranks fourth (4%), which goes against the pattern of the population size. This can be attributed to the large number of data centers in Virginia: the state ranks second in the U.S. by data center count.
Coding Skills Reach Beyond the Tech Industry
The report found that 43% of U.S. job postings requiring at least one programming language came from the tech, data, and telecom industry, but over 50% also came from professional, legal, and business services, manufacturing, finance, insurance, and real estate.
“Almost half of all coding roles still sit inside tech and telecom, but the really interesting story is the other half. When professional services, manufacturing and finance together account for a huge slice of programming jobs, it means software skills aren’t chained to Silicon Valley. They’re becoming a passport you can use across the wider economy,” explained Kūkšta.
Looking at the top programming language within each industry category, Python ranks first in four of the analyzed industries and SQL in six.
Python is the most mentioned programming language in tech, data and telecom (50% of job postings mention it), energy, utilities and environment (41%), manufacturing, industrial and defense (38%), and media, entertainment and arts (49%).
SQL is the top language in finance, insurance and real estate (62%), logistics, travel and construction (43%), professional, legal and business services (48%), education, government and non-profit (47%), consumer, retail and agriculture (62%), and healthcare, pharma and wellness (62%).
The full research report is available here.
Media contact:
Zivile Kasparaviciute
Senior PR Manager at Oxylabs
zivile.kasparaviciute@oxylabs.io
About the Expert
Andrius Kūkšta is a Tech Lead in the R&D team at Oxylabs. Over more than eight years there, he has progressed through roles including Analyst, Software Engineer, ML Engineer, Data Engineer, and R&D Engineer. He has contributed to several core products and is the author or co-author of five patents based on Oxylabs technologies. His work focuses on the latest AI and emerging technologies, translating trends into practical solutions. Outside of work, he is involved in sports analytics for the basketball club Žalgiris Kaunas.
About the Oxylabs Research Team
Oxylabs Research is the research and storytelling team at Oxylabs. We use ethical, compliant Oxylabs scraping tools to collect only publicly available web data – never private, paywalled, or personal data – and turn it into clear, timely insights that help everyone make sense of a fast‑changing technological, economic, and social reality. Our work is designed to support original reporting and analysis by journalists and to serve the broader public good. If you’re working on a story or investigation and need reliable web data to back it up, get in touch at press@oxylabs.io.
About Oxylabs
Established in 2015, Oxylabs is a web intelligence platform and premium proxy provider, enabling companies of all sizes to utilize the power of big data. Constant innovation, an extensive patent portfolio, and a focus on ethics have allowed Oxylabs to become a global leader in the web intelligence collection industry and forge close ties with dozens of Fortune Global 500 companies. Oxylabs was named Europe’s fastest-growing web intelligence acquisition company in the Financial Times FT 1000 list for several consecutive years. For more information, please visit: https://oxylabs.io/
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