SQL Contract Job Trends in the West Midlands

SQL (Structured Query Language)
England > West Midlands

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the West Midlands requiring SQL skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 23
Rank change year-on-year -1 +12 -11
Contract jobs citing SQL 400 203 125
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 11.64% 11.92% 6.61%
As % of the Programming Languages category 53.91% 46.45% 31.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 305 128 81
10th Percentile £357 £235 £310
25th Percentile £404 £400 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £459 £460 £430
Median % change year-on-year -0.22% +6.98% -14.00%
75th Percentile £511 £538 £575
90th Percentile £582 £625 £626
England median daily rate £500 £500 £539
% change year-on-year - -7.28% +0.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 20 3
10th Percentile - £32.39 £31.08
25th Percentile £21.25 £33.91 £32.15
Median hourly rate £21.50 £50.00 £33.93
Median % change year-on-year -57.00% +47.36% +34.38%
75th Percentile £53.75 - £34.47
90th Percentile £57.35 - £34.79
England median hourly rate £41.00 £42.82 £41.50
% change year-on-year -4.24% +3.17% -9.55%

All Programming Languages
West Midlands

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 in the West Midlands.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for coding skills 742 437 403
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 21.60% 25.66% 21.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 535 268 273
10th Percentile £360 £298 £313
25th Percentile £413 £400 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £469 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -1.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £541 £538 £575
90th Percentile £629 £614 £650
England median daily rate £525 £515 £550
% change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 23 10
10th Percentile £21.25 £28.18 £33.57
25th Percentile £25.00 £33.91 £36.25
Median hourly rate £56.00 £50.00 £47.75
Median % change year-on-year +12.00% +4.71% +98.96%
75th Percentile £67.84 - £56.25
90th Percentile - - £60.38
England median hourly rate £65.00 £56.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +15.04% -13.08% +4.00%

SQL
Job Vacancy Trend in the West Midlands

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing SQL relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands.

SQL job vacancy trend in the West Midlands

SQL
Daily Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing SQL.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing SQL

SQL
Daily Rate Histogram in the West Midlands

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SQL in the West Midlands over the 6 months to 20 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for SQL in the West Midlands

SQL
Hourly Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing SQL.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing SQL

SQL
Hourly Rate Histogram in the West Midlands

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing SQL in the West Midlands over the 6 months to 20 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for SQL in the West Midlands

SQL
Contract Job Locations in the West Midlands

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing SQL within the West Midlands region over the 6 months to 20 August 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
Shropshire 0 172 £459 -12.15% 15
Birmingham -3 59 £475 - 41
Warwickshire -11 57 £500 +17.65% 14
Coventry +3 44 £407 +36.01% 9
Solihull -16 13 £481 +6.89% 4
Worcestershire - 10 £425 - 9
Staffordshire +2 9 £431 - 19
Dudley - 8 £400 - 1
Herefordshire -3 4 £700 +75.00% 4
Wolverhampton - 3 - - 1
Wednesbury - 1 - -
SQL
England

SQL
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the West Midlands 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 48 (12.00%) SAS
2 27 (6.75%) Confluence
3 12 (3.00%) Tuxedo
3 12 (3.00%) WebLogic
4 7 (1.75%) Oracle Workflow
5 6 (1.50%) Oracle Self-Service HR
6 4 (1.00%) Apache Spark
7 3 (0.75%) ArcGIS
7 3 (0.75%) Microsoft Exchange
7 3 (0.75%) SharePoint
8 2 (0.50%) Apache
8 2 (0.50%) Jupyter
9 1 (0.25%) Apache Airflow
9 1 (0.25%) IIS
9 1 (0.25%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 1 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 9 (2.25%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (1.25%) Notepad++
3 2 (0.50%) Chatbot
3 2 (0.50%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.25%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (3.25%) Dynamics CRM
2 6 (1.50%) Oracle HRMS
3 2 (0.50%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.25%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.25%) Dynamics AX
4 1 (0.25%) MIS ActiveH
4 1 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.25%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.25%) SAP EWM
4 1 (0.25%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 115 (28.75%) AWS
2 111 (27.75%) Azure
3 65 (16.25%) Power Platform
4 46 (11.50%) Azure Data Factory
5 35 (8.75%) Azure DevOps
6 29 (7.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 22 (5.50%) Amazon S3
7 22 (5.50%) Serverless
8 21 (5.25%) Snowflake
9 18 (4.50%) GitHub
10 15 (3.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 15 (3.75%) Amazon EC2
11 14 (3.50%) Microsoft Purview
12 13 (3.25%) GitHub Actions
13 12 (3.00%) Matillion
14 11 (2.75%) Amazon SQS
14 11 (2.75%) AWS KMS
14 11 (2.75%) Route 53
15 10 (2.50%) AWS Lambda
16 9 (2.25%) Azure Storage
Communications & Networking
1 9 (2.25%) Firewall
2 7 (1.75%) SNMP
3 5 (1.25%) PuTTY
3 5 (1.25%) WinSCP
4 3 (0.75%) SSL
5 2 (0.50%) DHCP
5 2 (0.50%) DNS
5 2 (0.50%) LAN
5 2 (0.50%) TCP/IP
5 2 (0.50%) VLAN
5 2 (0.50%) VPN
5 2 (0.50%) WAN
5 2 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
6 1 (0.25%) 4G
6 1 (0.25%) BGP
6 1 (0.25%) Internet
6 1 (0.25%) MPLS
6 1 (0.25%) OSPF
6 1 (0.25%) tcpdump
6 1 (0.25%) WPA2
Database & Business Intelligence
1 89 (22.25%) Data Warehouse
2 67 (16.75%) Pentaho
3 63 (15.75%) Power BI
4 30 (7.50%) PostgreSQL
5 23 (5.75%) Oracle Database
5 23 (5.75%) Oracle Reports
6 22 (5.50%) SQL Server
7 20 (5.00%) SQL Server Integration Services
8 19 (4.75%) Amazon RDS
8 19 (4.75%) Azure SQL Database
8 19 (4.75%) Data Lake
9 18 (4.50%) Tableau
10 17 (4.25%) Amazon Redshift
10 17 (4.25%) Metadata
11 16 (4.00%) Relational Database
12 15 (3.75%) BusinessObjects
12 15 (3.75%) DynamoDB
13 14 (3.50%) Delta Lake
13 14 (3.50%) MySQL
14 11 (2.75%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 87 (21.75%) Git
2 72 (18.00%) JIRA
3 62 (15.50%) GitLab
4 41 (10.25%) Jenkins
5 29 (7.25%) Postman
6 28 (7.00%) Zephyr
7 22 (5.50%) Maven
8 16 (4.00%) JUnit
9 14 (3.50%) Mockito
10 12 (3.00%) SonarQube
11 11 (2.75%) Artifactory
12 8 (2.00%) Bitbucket Server
12 8 (2.00%) DbUnit
12 8 (2.00%) jMock
13 7 (1.75%) Selenium
14 5 (1.25%) MLflow
14 5 (1.25%) Oracle Forms
14 5 (1.25%) Team Foundation Server
15 4 (1.00%) Cypress.io
15 4 (1.00%) TestRail
General
1 100 (25.00%) Social Skills
2 72 (18.00%) Public Sector
3 63 (15.75%) Analytical Skills
4 38 (9.50%) Finance
5 10 (2.50%) Banking
5 10 (2.50%) Manufacturing
6 8 (2.00%) Marketing
7 7 (1.75%) Presentation Skills
8 5 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 5 (1.25%) Retail
9 4 (1.00%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (0.75%) Military
11 2 (0.50%) Advertising
11 2 (0.50%) Billing
11 2 (0.50%) Front Office
11 2 (0.50%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (0.50%) Organisational Skills
12 1 (0.25%) Legal
12 1 (0.25%) Local Government
12 1 (0.25%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 163 (40.75%) Data Engineer
2 61 (15.25%) Developer
3 54 (13.50%) Senior
4 32 (8.00%) Analyst
5 30 (7.50%) Senior Data Engineer
6 24 (6.00%) Tester
7 22 (5.50%) Java Developer
8 19 (4.75%) QA Tester
9 16 (4.00%) AWS Engineer
10 15 (3.75%) Architect
11 13 (3.25%) AWS Data Engineer
11 13 (3.25%) Lead
12 11 (2.75%) Azure Engineer
12 11 (2.75%) Data Analyst
13 10 (2.50%) Data Architect
13 10 (2.50%) Test Analyst
14 9 (2.25%) Full-Stack Developer
14 9 (2.25%) SQL Developer
15 8 (2.00%) Azure Data Engineer
15 8 (2.00%) SAS Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 23 (5.75%) REST
2 19 (4.75%) PySpark
3 18 (4.50%) Spring
3 18 (4.50%) Spring Boot
4 17 (4.25%) Terraform
5 15 (3.75%) JPA
5 15 (3.75%) Node.js
6 14 (3.50%) Web Services
7 13 (3.25%) SOAP
8 12 (3.00%) Hibernate
8 12 (3.00%) Spring Batch
8 12 (3.00%) Spring Integration
9 11 (2.75%) ActiveMQ
9 11 (2.75%) AngularJS
9 11 (2.75%) Flask
10 10 (2.50%) Spring Cloud
11 9 (2.25%) .NET
12 8 (2.00%) Bootstrap
12 8 (2.00%) PowerMock
12 8 (2.00%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 17 (4.25%) Cloud Native
2 12 (3.00%) Legacy Systems
2 12 (3.00%) Linux Command Line
2 12 (3.00%) SCADA
3 10 (2.50%) Distributed Systems
4 8 (2.00%) Enterprise Software
5 6 (1.50%) IoT
6 5 (1.25%) Low-Code
6 5 (1.25%) Self-Motivation
7 4 (1.00%) Onboarding
7 4 (1.00%) Product Ownership
7 4 (1.00%) Robotics
8 3 (0.75%) Credit Risk
8 3 (0.75%) Data Fabric
8 3 (0.75%) Data Structures
9 2 (0.50%) BYOD
9 2 (0.50%) Data Protection Act
9 2 (0.50%) Educational Technology
9 2 (0.50%) Legacy Applications
9 2 (0.50%) Operational Technology
Operating Systems
1 52 (13.00%) Unix
2 39 (9.75%) Linux
3 22 (5.50%) Windows
4 6 (1.50%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.25%) AIX
5 1 (0.25%) HPUX
5 1 (0.25%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 177 (44.25%) ETL
2 149 (37.25%) Agile
3 128 (32.00%) Data Modelling
4 107 (26.75%) CI/CD
5 102 (25.50%) Test Automation
6 99 (24.75%) Data Pipeline
7 97 (24.25%) Analytics
8 96 (24.00%) Business Intelligence
9 78 (19.50%) Migration
10 76 (19.00%) DevOps
11 75 (18.75%) Data Integration
12 74 (18.50%) Problem-Solving
13 62 (15.50%) Data Engineering
14 61 (15.25%) Validation
15 60 (15.00%) Scrum
16 49 (12.25%) Data Migration
17 48 (12.00%) Continuous Improvement
18 43 (10.75%) Decision-Making
19 42 (10.50%) AI
20 34 (8.50%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 81 (20.25%) Python
2 53 (13.25%) PL/SQL
3 39 (9.75%) Java
4 18 (4.50%) Shell Script
5 13 (3.25%) C
5 13 (3.25%) JavaScript
6 11 (2.75%) Bash
6 11 (2.75%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 9 (2.25%) T-SQL
8 8 (2.00%) ProC
9 6 (1.50%) Bicep
9 6 (1.50%) VB
9 6 (1.50%) VB6
10 5 (1.25%) C#
11 3 (0.75%) COBOL
11 3 (0.75%) Go
11 3 (0.75%) HiveQL
11 3 (0.75%) TypeScript
12 2 (0.50%) PowerShell
12 2 (0.50%) R
Qualifications
1 207 (51.75%) Security Cleared
2 182 (45.50%) SC Cleared
3 35 (8.75%) ISTQB
4 22 (5.50%) BPSS Clearance
5 11 (2.75%) Degree
6 9 (2.25%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
7 6 (1.50%) Azure Certification
7 6 (1.50%) DV Cleared
8 4 (1.00%) AWS Certification
8 4 (1.00%) ISEB
8 4 (1.00%) Master's Degree
8 4 (1.00%) Microsoft Certification
8 4 (1.00%) PhD
9 1 (0.25%) Cisco Certification
9 1 (0.25%) Computer Science Degree
9 1 (0.25%) ITIL Certification
9 1 (0.25%) MCSE
9 1 (0.25%) OCP
9 1 (0.25%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 61 (15.25%) Data Quality
2 54 (13.50%) QA
3 8 (2.00%) SLA
4 7 (1.75%) GDPR
5 6 (1.50%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 4 (1.00%) FATCA
7 2 (0.50%) Accessibility
7 2 (0.50%) GRC
8 1 (0.25%) Actionable Recommendations
8 1 (0.25%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.25%) ISO 22301
8 1 (0.25%) WCAG
System Software
1 41 (10.25%) Docker
2 8 (2.00%) Active Directory
3 7 (1.75%) Postfix
4 5 (1.25%) VMware Infrastructure
5 3 (0.75%) HDFS
5 3 (0.75%) Oracle RAC
5 3 (0.75%) Virtual Machines
6 1 (0.25%) Hyper-V
6 1 (0.25%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 36 (9.00%) Kubernetes
2 25 (6.25%) Grafana
3 7 (1.75%) Prometheus
3 7 (1.75%) WMI
4 3 (0.75%) Ansible
4 3 (0.75%) Kibana
5 2 (0.50%) Data Guard
5 2 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
5 2 (0.50%) Oracle RMAN
6 1 (0.25%) HP Quality Center
6 1 (0.25%) SCCM
6 1 (0.25%) SCOM
Vendors
1 169 (42.25%) Oracle
2 82 (20.50%) Talend
3 69 (17.25%) Microsoft
4 61 (15.25%) Informatica
5 50 (12.50%) Denodo
6 43 (10.75%) Databricks
7 20 (5.00%) SAP
7 20 (5.00%) ServiceNow
8 11 (2.75%) Atlassian
8 11 (2.75%) Jaspersoft
9 10 (2.50%) Sage
10 9 (2.25%) Cisco
11 8 (2.00%) Fortinet
12 7 (1.75%) F5
12 7 (1.75%) Palo Alto
12 7 (1.75%) SolarWinds
12 7 (1.75%) Splunk
13 6 (1.50%) Cloudera
13 6 (1.50%) VMware
14 5 (1.25%) IBM