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

6 months to
21 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +1 -9
Contract jobs citing SQL 254 153 147
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 10.73% 9.78% 8.16%
As % of the Programming Languages category 43.20% 39.64% 36.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 173 93 98
10th Percentile £367 £346 £260
25th Percentile £449 £425 £370
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £500 £463
Median % change year-on-year +3.00% +8.11% -12.74%
75th Percentile £550 £588 £575
90th Percentile £638 £648 £661
England median daily rate £500 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 2 0
10th Percentile £38.80 £37.50 -
25th Percentile £43.00 £41.25 -
Median hourly rate £50.00 £47.50 -
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% - -
75th Percentile - £53.75 -
90th Percentile - £57.50 -
England median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £43.50
% change year-on-year -4.76% +20.69% -12.12%

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 588 386 403
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 24.83% 24.68% 22.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 399 223 286
10th Percentile £366 £353 £275
25th Percentile £451 £413 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £500 £475
Median % change year-on-year +3.00% +5.26% -9.52%
75th Percentile £575 £603 £575
90th Percentile £633 £700 £675
England median daily rate £513 £538 £550
% change year-on-year -4.65% -2.27% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 10 9
10th Percentile £40.20 £16.98 £17.43
25th Percentile £46.50 £17.81 £17.50
Median hourly rate £50.00 £23.87 £18.50
Median % change year-on-year +109.47% +29.03% -15.91%
75th Percentile £56.88 £33.44 £50.00
90th Percentile £69.25 £53.25 £61.50
England median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.50
% change year-on-year +4.00% +3.31% -6.92%

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 21 January 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 21 January 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 21 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
Shropshire +1 110 £515 +2.75% 24
Birmingham -14 54 £488 -13.09% 51
Warwickshire -12 28 £513 -10.87% 15
Herefordshire -2 21 £550 - 7
Coventry -19 11 £275 -38.89% 23
Worcestershire -13 8 £675 - 5
Solihull +1 7 £555 +13.50% 1
Staffordshire -8 3 £463 +1.37% 12
Wolverhampton +3 1 - - 5
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 41 (16.14%) SAS
1 41 (16.14%) WebLogic
2 27 (10.63%) Apache
3 15 (5.91%) Confluence
4 9 (3.54%) nginx
5 8 (3.15%) JBoss
5 8 (3.15%) SharePoint
5 8 (3.15%) Tuxedo
6 3 (1.18%) Apache Pig
7 2 (0.79%) Anypoint
7 2 (0.79%) Apache Airflow
7 2 (0.79%) Apache Spark
7 2 (0.79%) Liferay
8 1 (0.39%) CMS
8 1 (0.39%) Drupal
8 1 (0.39%) FileNet
8 1 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 11 (4.33%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (3.54%) Mozilla Thunderbird
3 2 (0.79%) Maya
3 2 (0.79%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.79%) Microsoft Project
3 2 (0.79%) MS Visio
3 2 (0.79%) NUKE
4 1 (0.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 1 (0.39%) Oracle Smart View
Business Applications
1 3 (1.18%) Dynamics CRM
1 3 (1.18%) Oracle EBS
1 3 (1.18%) Oracle EBS R12
2 2 (0.79%) Maximo
2 2 (0.79%) Primavera
2 2 (0.79%) SAP FI
3 1 (0.39%) Aareon QL
3 1 (0.39%) MIS ActiveH
3 1 (0.39%) NEC Housing
3 1 (0.39%) OPENHousing
3 1 (0.39%) Orchard Housing
3 1 (0.39%) SAP CRM
3 1 (0.39%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 83 (32.68%) Azure
2 69 (27.17%) AWS
3 30 (11.81%) Serverless
4 29 (11.42%) Power Platform
5 22 (8.66%) Amazon S3
6 21 (8.27%) Azure DevOps
7 19 (7.48%) Amazon EC2
8 16 (6.30%) GCP
9 15 (5.91%) Azure Monitor
10 12 (4.72%) Microsoft 365
11 11 (4.33%) Azure Data Factory
11 11 (4.33%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 11 (4.33%) GitHub
11 11 (4.33%) OpenShift
12 10 (3.94%) GitHub Actions
12 10 (3.94%) Power Automate
13 9 (3.54%) Amazon ECS
13 9 (3.54%) AWS KMS
13 9 (3.54%) Azure Key Vault
13 9 (3.54%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 10 (3.94%) DNS
1 10 (3.94%) Firewall
2 9 (3.54%) FTP
2 9 (3.54%) HTTP
2 9 (3.54%) IMAP
2 9 (3.54%) OpenLDAP
2 9 (3.54%) SMTP
2 9 (3.54%) SSH
3 4 (1.57%) Network Security
4 1 (0.39%) AMQP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 47 (18.50%) Pentaho
2 32 (12.60%) PostgreSQL
3 27 (10.63%) Amazon RDS
4 22 (8.66%) Power BI
5 17 (6.69%) MongoDB
5 17 (6.69%) Relational Database
6 13 (5.12%) Oracle Database
7 12 (4.72%) MySQL
8 9 (3.54%) Amazon Aurora
8 9 (3.54%) Redis
9 8 (3.15%) Data Warehouse
9 8 (3.15%) NoSQL
10 6 (2.36%) Hadoop
10 6 (2.36%) SAS Enterprise Guide
10 6 (2.36%) Tableau
11 5 (1.97%) Data Mining
11 5 (1.97%) InfluxDB
12 4 (1.57%) Apache Hive
12 4 (1.57%) Oracle Reports
13 3 (1.18%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 77 (30.31%) Git
2 64 (25.20%) Jenkins
3 58 (22.83%) JIRA
4 14 (5.51%) GitLab
5 11 (4.33%) JUnit
6 10 (3.94%) Selenium
7 9 (3.54%) MSI
7 9 (3.54%) Vagrant
8 8 (3.15%) Eclipse
8 8 (3.15%) IntelliJ
9 4 (1.57%) Liquibase
9 4 (1.57%) Toad
10 3 (1.18%) Maven
10 3 (1.18%) Mockito
11 2 (0.79%) ERwin
11 2 (0.79%) Gatling
11 2 (0.79%) Oracle APEX
11 2 (0.79%) Oracle Forms
11 2 (0.79%) SoapUI
12 1 (0.39%) SonarQube
General
1 84 (33.07%) Social Skills
2 46 (18.11%) Public Sector
3 26 (10.24%) Analytical Skills
4 18 (7.09%) Finance
5 16 (6.30%) Presentation Skills
6 8 (3.15%) Banking
6 8 (3.15%) Influencing Skills
7 6 (2.36%) Legal
8 5 (1.97%) Retail
9 4 (1.57%) Financial Institution
9 4 (1.57%) Manufacturing
10 3 (1.18%) Automotive
10 3 (1.18%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (1.18%) Organisational Skills
11 2 (0.79%) Games
11 2 (0.79%) General Ledger
11 2 (0.79%) Marketing
12 1 (0.39%) Billing
12 1 (0.39%) Law
12 1 (0.39%) Military
Job Titles
1 42 (16.54%) Data Engineer
2 40 (15.75%) Developer
3 16 (6.30%) Analyst
3 16 (6.30%) Platform Engineer
4 15 (5.91%) Consultant
4 15 (5.91%) DevOps Engineer
5 13 (5.12%) Senior
6 12 (4.72%) AWS Engineer
7 11 (4.33%) Site Engineer
7 11 (4.33%) Site Reliability Engineer
8 10 (3.94%) Architect
8 10 (3.94%) AWS DevOps
8 10 (3.94%) AWS DevOps Engineer
8 10 (3.94%) Cloud Platform Engineer
8 10 (3.94%) Java Engineer
8 10 (3.94%) Lead
8 10 (3.94%) Python Developer
8 10 (3.94%) SAS Engineer
9 9 (3.54%) Data Scientist
9 9 (3.54%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 31 (12.20%) REST
2 23 (9.06%) Spring
3 19 (7.48%) XML
4 13 (5.12%) HTML
4 13 (5.12%) Spring Boot
5 12 (4.72%) FastAPI
5 12 (4.72%) Flask
5 12 (4.72%) RESTful
6 10 (3.94%) JSON
6 10 (3.94%) SOAP
7 9 (3.54%) GraphQL
7 9 (3.54%) Hibernate
7 9 (3.54%) LDAP
7 9 (3.54%) WebSockets
8 8 (3.15%) .NET
8 8 (3.15%) EJB
8 8 (3.15%) HTML5
8 8 (3.15%) J2EE
8 8 (3.15%) J2SE
8 8 (3.15%) Play Framework
Miscellaneous
1 22 (8.66%) Cloud Native
2 9 (3.54%) Replication
3 6 (2.36%) Algorithms
4 5 (1.97%) Data Structures
4 5 (1.97%) Legacy Systems
4 5 (1.97%) Onboarding
4 5 (1.97%) Product Ownership
5 4 (1.57%) Distributed Systems
5 4 (1.57%) Public Cloud
6 3 (1.18%) Data Protection Act
6 3 (1.18%) IoT
7 2 (0.79%) Analytical Mindset
7 2 (0.79%) Animation
7 2 (0.79%) Data Centre
7 2 (0.79%) Derivative
7 2 (0.79%) Mainframe
7 2 (0.79%) Management Information System
7 2 (0.79%) Renewable Energy
8 1 (0.39%) Enterprise Software
8 1 (0.39%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 48 (18.90%) Linux
2 42 (16.54%) Windows
3 38 (14.96%) Unix
4 9 (3.54%) Amazon Linux
4 9 (3.54%) Ubuntu
4 9 (3.54%) VMS
5 1 (0.39%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.39%) VME
5 1 (0.39%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 114 (44.88%) CI/CD
2 97 (38.19%) DevOps
3 90 (35.43%) Agile
4 80 (31.50%) Analytics
5 74 (29.13%) Problem-Solving
6 72 (28.35%) Business Intelligence
7 67 (26.38%) Continuous Improvement
8 61 (24.02%) ETL
9 55 (21.65%) Scrum
10 54 (21.26%) Data Modelling
11 51 (20.08%) Data Pipeline
12 46 (18.11%) Test Automation
13 42 (16.54%) Data Integration
13 42 (16.54%) Deployment Automation
14 41 (16.14%) Data Analytics
15 37 (14.57%) Data Virtualisation
16 36 (14.17%) Visualisation
17 35 (13.78%) Microservices
18 33 (12.99%) Business Analytics
19 28 (11.02%) Containerisation
Programming Languages
1 61 (24.02%) Python
2 49 (19.29%) Java
3 17 (6.69%) Go
3 17 (6.69%) PL/SQL
3 17 (6.69%) Scala
3 17 (6.69%) Shell Script
4 12 (4.72%) PowerShell
5 9 (3.54%) Groovy
6 7 (2.76%) JavaScript
7 6 (2.36%) R
7 6 (2.36%) VBA
8 5 (1.97%) C#
8 5 (1.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 4 (1.57%) Bicep
10 3 (1.18%) C++
10 3 (1.18%) TypeScript
11 2 (0.79%) Bash
11 2 (0.79%) COBOL
11 2 (0.79%) Kotlin
11 2 (0.79%) VB
Qualifications
1 127 (50.00%) Security Cleared
2 114 (44.88%) SC Cleared
3 28 (11.02%) Degree
4 18 (7.09%) DV Cleared
5 15 (5.91%) AWS Certification
6 13 (5.12%) Azure Certification
7 11 (4.33%) Computer Science Degree
8 7 (2.76%) BPSS Clearance
9 6 (2.36%) Master's Degree
10 5 (1.97%) Microsoft Certification
11 3 (1.18%) ISTQB
11 3 (1.18%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
12 2 (0.79%) AWS Certified Developer
12 2 (0.79%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 2 (0.79%) ISEB
12 2 (0.79%) TOGAF Certification
13 1 (0.39%) IIBA
13 1 (0.39%) PhD
13 1 (0.39%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 47 (18.50%) Data Quality
2 7 (2.76%) QA
3 6 (2.36%) Accessibility
4 2 (0.79%) SLA
5 1 (0.39%) GDPR
5 1 (0.39%) PMO
5 1 (0.39%) WCAG
System Software
1 86 (33.86%) Docker
2 9 (3.54%) DFS Replication
2 9 (3.54%) Dovecot
2 9 (3.54%) Postfix
2 9 (3.54%) Squid
3 5 (1.97%) Active Directory
4 3 (1.18%) Oracle Clusterware
4 3 (1.18%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 81 (31.89%) Kubernetes
2 35 (13.78%) Grafana
3 33 (12.99%) Prometheus
4 31 (12.20%) Terraform
5 17 (6.69%) Ansible
6 11 (4.33%) Progress Chef
7 10 (3.94%) Puppet
8 9 (3.54%) Nessus
8 9 (3.54%) Proxmox
9 5 (1.97%) Kibana
10 4 (1.57%) Oracle RMAN
11 3 (1.18%) Data Guard
11 3 (1.18%) Docker Swarm
12 1 (0.39%) HP ALM
12 1 (0.39%) HP Quality Center
12 1 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
12 1 (0.39%) SCCM
12 1 (0.39%) WSUS
Vendors
1 85 (33.46%) Oracle
2 49 (19.29%) Talend
3 39 (15.35%) Microsoft
4 38 (14.96%) Denodo
5 24 (9.45%) Splunk
6 19 (7.48%) Dynatrace
7 14 (5.51%) AppDynamics
7 14 (5.51%) ServiceNow
8 13 (5.12%) Cisco
9 12 (4.72%) Google
10 10 (3.94%) Informatica
10 10 (3.94%) SAP
10 10 (3.94%) webMethods
11 9 (3.54%) Jaspersoft
12 8 (3.15%) Databricks
13 6 (2.36%) Fujitsu
14 3 (1.18%) Anaplan
14 3 (1.18%) IBM
15 2 (0.79%) MuleSoft
15 2 (0.79%) PagerDuty