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

6 months to
6 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 15 19
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -16
Contract jobs citing SQL 233 157 141
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 10.13% 9.82% 8.01%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.39% 40.36% 36.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 155 97 97
10th Percentile £362 £348 £261
25th Percentile £453 £413 £409
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £490 £500
Median % change year-on-year +5.10% -2.00% -4.76%
75th Percentile £550 £575 £575
90th Percentile £650 £643 £700
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 £49.36 £52.50 £45.00
% change year-on-year -5.98% +16.67% -1.10%

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 563 389 391
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 24.48% 24.33% 22.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 378 225 279
10th Percentile £364 £351 £289
25th Percentile £453 £409 £384
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year +3.00% - -4.76%
75th Percentile £575 £594 £600
90th Percentile £638 £695 £688
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 £19.25
90th Percentile £69.25 £53.25 £25.80
England median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -3.85%

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 6 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 6 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 6 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 0 96 £515 +2.75% 19
Birmingham -9 58 £475 -13.64% 33
Warwickshire -10 28 £525 -4.55% 13
Herefordshire -2 17 £575 +4.55% 7
Worcestershire -15 7 £650 +57.58% 7
Coventry -24 7 £273 -42.63% 15
Solihull +3 5 £600 +22.70% 5
Staffordshire -9 3 £463 +27.59% 15
Wolverhampton +4 1 - - 12
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 38 (16.31%) WebLogic
2 36 (15.45%) SAS
3 24 (10.30%) Apache
4 16 (6.87%) Confluence
5 10 (4.29%) nginx
6 9 (3.86%) SharePoint
7 8 (3.43%) JBoss
7 8 (3.43%) Tuxedo
8 4 (1.72%) Apache Airflow
8 4 (1.72%) Apache Spark
9 3 (1.29%) Apache Pig
10 2 (0.86%) Anypoint
10 2 (0.86%) FileNet
10 2 (0.86%) Liferay
11 1 (0.43%) CMS
11 1 (0.43%) Drupal
11 1 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 13 (5.58%) Microsoft Excel
2 10 (4.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
3 3 (1.29%) Microsoft Office
3 3 (1.29%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 2 (0.86%) Maya
4 2 (0.86%) Microsoft Project
4 2 (0.86%) MS Visio
4 2 (0.86%) NUKE
5 1 (0.43%) Oracle Smart View
Business Applications
1 3 (1.29%) Dynamics CRM
1 3 (1.29%) Oracle EBS
1 3 (1.29%) Oracle EBS R12
2 2 (0.86%) Maximo
2 2 (0.86%) Primavera
2 2 (0.86%) SAP FI
3 1 (0.43%) Aareon QL
3 1 (0.43%) MIS ActiveH
3 1 (0.43%) NEC Housing
3 1 (0.43%) OPENHousing
3 1 (0.43%) Orchard Housing
3 1 (0.43%) SAP CRM
3 1 (0.43%) SAP ERP
3 1 (0.43%) SAP GRC
3 1 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 76 (32.62%) Azure
2 60 (25.75%) AWS
3 32 (13.73%) Power Platform
4 29 (12.45%) Serverless
5 24 (10.30%) Amazon S3
6 19 (8.15%) Amazon EC2
7 17 (7.30%) GCP
8 16 (6.87%) Azure DevOps
9 15 (6.44%) Azure Monitor
10 13 (5.58%) Microsoft 365
11 12 (5.15%) GitHub
12 11 (4.72%) GitHub Actions
12 11 (4.72%) PowerApps
13 10 (4.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 10 (4.29%) Amazon ECS
13 10 (4.29%) Amazon ELB
13 10 (4.29%) AWS KMS
13 10 (4.29%) Power Automate
13 10 (4.29%) Route 53
13 10 (4.29%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 12 (5.15%) DNS
1 12 (5.15%) SSH
2 11 (4.72%) Firewall
3 10 (4.29%) FTP
3 10 (4.29%) HTTP
3 10 (4.29%) IMAP
3 10 (4.29%) OpenLDAP
3 10 (4.29%) SMTP
4 4 (1.72%) Network Security
5 2 (0.86%) TCP/IP
6 1 (0.43%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 40 (17.17%) Pentaho
2 35 (15.02%) PostgreSQL
3 24 (10.30%) Amazon RDS
3 24 (10.30%) Power BI
4 17 (7.30%) MongoDB
5 16 (6.87%) Relational Database
6 13 (5.58%) Oracle Database
7 12 (5.15%) MySQL
8 10 (4.29%) Amazon Aurora
8 10 (4.29%) Data Warehouse
9 9 (3.86%) NoSQL
10 8 (3.43%) Hadoop
10 8 (3.43%) Redis
11 6 (2.58%) SAS Enterprise Guide
12 5 (2.15%) Data Mining
12 5 (2.15%) SQL Server
13 4 (1.72%) Amazon Redshift
13 4 (1.72%) Apache Hive
13 4 (1.72%) InfluxDB
13 4 (1.72%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 75 (32.19%) Git
2 61 (26.18%) Jenkins
3 57 (24.46%) JIRA
4 10 (4.29%) Selenium
4 10 (4.29%) Vagrant
5 9 (3.86%) GitLab
5 9 (3.86%) JUnit
5 9 (3.86%) MSI
6 8 (3.43%) Eclipse
6 8 (3.43%) IntelliJ
7 4 (1.72%) Liquibase
7 4 (1.72%) Toad
8 3 (1.29%) MLflow
8 3 (1.29%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.86%) ERwin
9 2 (0.86%) Gatling
9 2 (0.86%) Oracle APEX
9 2 (0.86%) SoapUI
9 2 (0.86%) Sonatype Nexus
10 1 (0.43%) Atlassian Bamboo
General
1 81 (34.76%) Social Skills
2 44 (18.88%) Public Sector
3 25 (10.73%) Analytical Skills
4 19 (8.15%) Presentation Skills
5 18 (7.73%) Finance
6 8 (3.43%) Banking
6 8 (3.43%) Influencing Skills
7 6 (2.58%) Legal
8 5 (2.15%) Organisational Skills
9 4 (1.72%) Financial Institution
9 4 (1.72%) Manufacturing
10 3 (1.29%) Documentation Skills
11 2 (0.86%) Automotive
11 2 (0.86%) Games
11 2 (0.86%) Marketing
11 2 (0.86%) Retail
12 1 (0.43%) Billing
12 1 (0.43%) General Ledger
12 1 (0.43%) Law
12 1 (0.43%) Military
Job Titles
1 37 (15.88%) Data Engineer
1 37 (15.88%) Developer
2 18 (7.73%) Analyst
3 17 (7.30%) Platform Engineer
4 16 (6.87%) Consultant
4 16 (6.87%) DevOps Engineer
5 14 (6.01%) Senior
6 13 (5.58%) AWS Engineer
7 11 (4.72%) AWS DevOps
7 11 (4.72%) AWS DevOps Engineer
7 11 (4.72%) Cloud Platform Engineer
8 10 (4.29%) AWS Platform Engineer
8 10 (4.29%) Java Engineer
9 9 (3.86%) Python Developer
9 9 (3.86%) Software Engineer
10 8 (3.43%) Data Scientist
10 8 (3.43%) DBA
10 8 (3.43%) DevOps Platform Engineer
10 8 (3.43%) Monitoring Engineer
10 8 (3.43%) Site Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 31 (13.30%) REST
2 22 (9.44%) Spring
3 19 (8.15%) XML
4 13 (5.58%) Flask
4 13 (5.58%) HTML
4 13 (5.58%) RESTful
5 12 (5.15%) Spring Boot
6 11 (4.72%) FastAPI
7 10 (4.29%) JSON
7 10 (4.29%) LDAP
7 10 (4.29%) SOAP
8 9 (3.86%) Hibernate
9 8 (3.43%) .NET
9 8 (3.43%) EJB
9 8 (3.43%) GraphQL
9 8 (3.43%) HTML5
9 8 (3.43%) J2EE
9 8 (3.43%) J2SE
9 8 (3.43%) Play Framework
9 8 (3.43%) WebSockets
Miscellaneous
1 21 (9.01%) Cloud Native
2 10 (4.29%) Replication
3 6 (2.58%) Algorithms
3 6 (2.58%) Legacy Systems
4 5 (2.15%) Data Structures
4 5 (2.15%) Distributed Systems
5 4 (1.72%) Onboarding
5 4 (1.72%) Product Ownership
5 4 (1.72%) Public Cloud
6 3 (1.29%) Data Centre
6 3 (1.29%) Data Protection Act
6 3 (1.29%) IoT
7 2 (0.86%) Analytical Mindset
7 2 (0.86%) Animation
7 2 (0.86%) Derivative
7 2 (0.86%) Mainframe
7 2 (0.86%) Management Information System
7 2 (0.86%) Renewable Energy
8 1 (0.43%) Client/Server
8 1 (0.43%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 46 (19.74%) Linux
2 42 (18.03%) Windows
3 32 (13.73%) Unix
4 11 (4.72%) VMS
5 10 (4.29%) Amazon Linux
5 10 (4.29%) Ubuntu
6 1 (0.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 1 (0.43%) VME
6 1 (0.43%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 103 (44.21%) CI/CD
2 91 (39.06%) DevOps
3 83 (35.62%) Agile
4 71 (30.47%) Business Intelligence
5 70 (30.04%) Analytics
5 70 (30.04%) Problem-Solving
6 61 (26.18%) Continuous Improvement
6 61 (26.18%) ETL
7 53 (22.75%) Data Modelling
8 51 (21.89%) Scrum
9 49 (21.03%) Data Pipeline
10 41 (17.60%) Test Automation
11 39 (16.74%) Deployment Automation
12 36 (15.45%) Data Integration
13 34 (14.59%) Data Analytics
13 34 (14.59%) Data Virtualisation
14 33 (14.16%) Visualisation
15 31 (13.30%) Microservices
16 28 (12.02%) Business Analytics
17 26 (11.16%) Containerisation
Programming Languages
1 64 (27.47%) Python
2 48 (20.60%) Java
3 17 (7.30%) Scala
4 16 (6.87%) Go
5 14 (6.01%) PL/SQL
6 13 (5.58%) PowerShell
7 12 (5.15%) Groovy
7 12 (5.15%) Shell Script
8 7 (3.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 7 (3.00%) JavaScript
8 7 (3.00%) VBA
9 6 (2.58%) R
10 5 (2.15%) C#
11 3 (1.29%) Bash
11 3 (1.29%) C++
11 3 (1.29%) TypeScript
12 2 (0.86%) COBOL
12 2 (0.86%) Kotlin
12 2 (0.86%) Tcl
13 1 (0.43%) Perl
Qualifications
1 106 (45.49%) Security Cleared
2 94 (40.34%) SC Cleared
3 26 (11.16%) Degree
4 17 (7.30%) AWS Certification
5 16 (6.87%) DV Cleared
6 12 (5.15%) Azure Certification
7 11 (4.72%) Computer Science Degree
8 5 (2.15%) Master's Degree
9 4 (1.72%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (1.29%) Microsoft Certification
11 2 (0.86%) AWS Certified Developer
11 2 (0.86%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 2 (0.86%) ISEB
11 2 (0.86%) ISTQB
11 2 (0.86%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
12 1 (0.43%) IIBA
12 1 (0.43%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 43 (18.45%) Data Quality
2 6 (2.58%) Accessibility
3 4 (1.72%) QA
4 1 (0.43%) GDPR
4 1 (0.43%) PMO
4 1 (0.43%) SLA
4 1 (0.43%) WCAG
System Software
1 81 (34.76%) Docker
2 10 (4.29%) DFS Replication
2 10 (4.29%) Dovecot
2 10 (4.29%) Postfix
2 10 (4.29%) Squid
3 3 (1.29%) Active Directory
3 3 (1.29%) Oracle Clusterware
3 3 (1.29%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 72 (30.90%) Kubernetes
2 32 (13.73%) Grafana
3 30 (12.88%) Prometheus
4 26 (11.16%) Terraform
5 14 (6.01%) Ansible
6 10 (4.29%) Nessus
6 10 (4.29%) Proxmox
6 10 (4.29%) Puppet
7 8 (3.43%) Progress Chef
8 4 (1.72%) Oracle RMAN
9 3 (1.29%) Data Guard
9 3 (1.29%) Kibana
10 2 (0.86%) Argo
10 2 (0.86%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.86%) Istio
11 1 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
11 1 (0.43%) SCCM
11 1 (0.43%) WSUS
Vendors
1 75 (32.19%) Oracle
2 41 (17.60%) Talend
3 40 (17.17%) Microsoft
4 35 (15.02%) Denodo
5 24 (10.30%) Splunk
6 16 (6.87%) Dynatrace
7 14 (6.01%) AppDynamics
7 14 (6.01%) ServiceNow
8 13 (5.58%) Cisco
9 11 (4.72%) Google
10 10 (4.29%) Jaspersoft
10 10 (4.29%) SAP
10 10 (4.29%) webMethods
11 8 (3.43%) Databricks
12 6 (2.58%) Fujitsu
13 5 (2.15%) Informatica
14 4 (1.72%) IBM
15 3 (1.29%) Adobe
15 3 (1.29%) Ariba
16 2 (0.86%) Calypso