Python Contract Job Trends

Python
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Python skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 29 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,843 3,956 4,115
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.58% 12.57% 9.39%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.15% 37.59% 31.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,262 2,622 2,900
10th Percentile £358 £386 £400
25th Percentile £416 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -5.55% -1.83% -6.62%
75th Percentile £638 £676 £675
90th Percentile £743 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £520 £525
% change year-on-year -4.81% -0.95% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 96 59 115
10th Percentile £28.75 £21.02 £26.84
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.80 £46.18
Median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.67% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £71.60 £67.26 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.50 £81.50 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £62.50
% change year-on-year +10.89% -26.11% -4.58%

All Programming Languages
UK

Python 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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for coding skills 11,768 10,523 13,019
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.58% 33.43% 29.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,801 6,657 9,220
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £503 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.29% -2.42% -4.78%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -1.37% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 444 245 492
10th Percentile £39.72 £21.25 £35.50
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.75 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.62
90th Percentile £76.25 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -3.85%

Python
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Python relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Python job vacancy trend in the UK

Python
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Python.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Python

Python
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Python over the 6 months to 29 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Python in the UK

Python
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Python.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Python

Python
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Python over the 6 months to 29 January 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Python in the UK

Python
Top 17 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Python within the UK over the 6 months to 29 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
England 0 4,078 £525 -8.70% 3,508
London 0 2,343 £550 -8.33% 1,141
UK excluding London -1 1,858 £495 -4.81% 3,002
Work from Home 0 1,457 £525 -4.55% 1,552
North of England +8 597 £475 -5.94% 556
South East +1 406 £481 -12.50% 1,087
Yorkshire +5 303 £500 -6.98% 221
Midlands +4 285 £506 +4.65% 325
Scotland +1 272 £464 -2.83% 172
North West +5 249 £450 -7.79% 255
West Midlands +10 243 £517 -0.34% 133
South West -7 187 £550 -10.20% 375
East of England +5 123 £525 +6.06% 392
North East +6 51 £488 -10.55% 84
East Midlands -22 42 £444 +12.34% 187
Northern Ireland +2 30 £575 +9.52% 47
Wales -16 27 £523 +4.50% 113

Python
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
1 227 (4.69%) Apache Spark
2 204 (4.21%) Apache Airflow
3 154 (3.18%) Apache
4 149 (3.08%) Confluence
5 61 (1.26%) SAS
6 58 (1.20%) SharePoint
7 36 (0.74%) nginx
7 36 (0.74%) OpenStack
8 28 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
9 22 (0.45%) Jupyter
10 20 (0.41%) Appian
11 11 (0.23%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 8 (0.17%) Camunda
14 7 (0.14%) IIS
15 6 (0.12%) CMS
15 6 (0.12%) Luigi
15 6 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
16 5 (0.10%) Tomcat
17 3 (0.062%) WebLogic
Applications
1 127 (2.62%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 18 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 3 (0.062%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.062%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.041%) Maya
9 2 (0.041%) NUKE
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.33%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 3 (0.062%) Actimize
5 3 (0.062%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.041%) Bloomberg AIM
6 2 (0.041%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.041%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.041%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.041%) Shopify
6 2 (0.041%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.021%) Cloudability
7 1 (0.021%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
7 1 (0.021%) Maximo
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
7 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
7 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,899 (39.21%) AWS
2 1,583 (32.69%) Azure
3 748 (15.44%) GCP
4 610 (12.60%) GitHub
5 511 (10.55%) Serverless
6 439 (9.06%) Power Platform
7 369 (7.62%) Amazon S3
8 344 (7.10%) AWS Lambda
9 326 (6.73%) Azure DevOps
10 320 (6.61%) GitHub Actions
11 251 (5.18%) AWS CloudFormation
12 240 (4.96%) Snowflake
13 224 (4.63%) Azure Data Factory
14 189 (3.90%) Amazon EC2
15 175 (3.61%) Amazon ECS
16 174 (3.59%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 174 (3.59%) Amazon EKS
17 141 (2.91%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 141 (2.91%) OpenShift
18 136 (2.81%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 236 (4.87%) Firewall
2 150 (3.10%) DNS
3 128 (2.64%) Network Security
4 126 (2.60%) TCP/IP
5 82 (1.69%) VPN
6 74 (1.53%) HTTP
7 70 (1.45%) BGP
8 62 (1.28%) SSL
9 54 (1.12%) WAN
10 42 (0.87%) MPLS
11 41 (0.85%) LAN
11 41 (0.85%) Wireshark
12 40 (0.83%) OSPF
13 33 (0.68%) Wireless
14 30 (0.62%) DHCP
15 28 (0.58%) SSH
16 27 (0.56%) SD-WAN
17 26 (0.54%) VLAN
18 25 (0.52%) SMTP
19 21 (0.43%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 373 (7.70%) PostgreSQL
2 372 (7.68%) Power BI
3 288 (5.95%) Data Warehouse
4 228 (4.71%) NoSQL
5 223 (4.60%) Data Lake
6 221 (4.56%) Relational Database
7 174 (3.59%) SQL Server
8 162 (3.35%) Big Data
9 154 (3.18%) Amazon RDS
10 147 (3.04%) Tableau
11 124 (2.56%) MySQL
12 113 (2.33%) Metadata
13 107 (2.21%) BigQuery
14 98 (2.02%) Amazon Redshift
15 92 (1.90%) MongoDB
16 89 (1.84%) Amazon Athena
17 85 (1.76%) Delta Lake
18 84 (1.73%) Hadoop
19 77 (1.59%) Elasticsearch
20 76 (1.57%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 614 (12.68%) Git
2 549 (11.34%) Jenkins
3 424 (8.75%) GitLab
4 282 (5.82%) JIRA
5 81 (1.67%) Selenium
6 78 (1.61%) MLflow
7 49 (1.01%) Cucumber
7 49 (1.01%) Sonatype Nexus
8 46 (0.95%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.89%) Postman
10 39 (0.81%) JUnit
10 39 (0.81%) SonarQube
11 33 (0.68%) JMeter
12 31 (0.64%) Maven
13 29 (0.60%) CircleCI
14 28 (0.58%) Visual Studio
15 27 (0.56%) Liquibase
16 25 (0.52%) Artifactory
16 25 (0.52%) Cypress.io
16 25 (0.52%) SpecFlow
General
1 1,291 (26.66%) Social Skills
2 941 (19.43%) Finance
3 680 (14.04%) Analytical Skills
4 446 (9.21%) Public Sector
5 427 (8.82%) Banking
6 160 (3.30%) Front Office
7 130 (2.68%) Investment Banking
8 123 (2.54%) Documentation Skills
9 71 (1.47%) Financial Institution
10 64 (1.32%) Marketing
11 63 (1.30%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 61 (1.26%) Retail
13 58 (1.20%) Pharmaceutical
14 52 (1.07%) Telecoms
15 43 (0.89%) Legal
16 42 (0.87%) Presentation Skills
17 39 (0.81%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.68%) Influencing Skills
19 29 (0.60%) Military
20 24 (0.50%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 862 (17.80%) Developer
2 665 (13.73%) Senior
3 639 (13.19%) Data Engineer
4 366 (7.56%) Python Developer
5 315 (6.50%) DevOps Engineer
6 304 (6.28%) Python Engineer
7 303 (6.26%) Architect
8 279 (5.76%) Analyst
9 270 (5.58%) AWS Engineer
10 251 (5.18%) Lead
11 227 (4.69%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 220 (4.54%) Software Engineer
13 183 (3.78%) Data Scientist
14 168 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
15 149 (3.08%) Senior Developer
16 138 (2.85%) Data Analyst
17 129 (2.66%) Azure Engineer
18 125 (2.58%) Senior Data Engineer
19 124 (2.56%) Full-Stack Developer
20 119 (2.46%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 418 (8.63%) REST
2 309 (6.38%) React
3 287 (5.93%) Kafka
4 278 (5.74%) PySpark
5 239 (4.93%) Node.js
6 222 (4.58%) RESTful
7 219 (4.52%) Pandas
8 214 (4.42%) FastAPI
9 197 (4.07%) PyTorch
10 186 (3.84%) .NET
11 167 (3.45%) TensorFlow
12 166 (3.43%) NumPy
13 136 (2.81%) AngularJS
14 122 (2.52%) LangChain
15 120 (2.48%) scikit-learn
16 116 (2.40%) Flask
17 109 (2.25%) Elastic Stack
18 107 (2.21%) pytest
19 106 (2.19%) OAuth
20 104 (2.15%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 427 (8.82%) Cloud Native
2 193 (3.99%) Algorithms
3 183 (3.78%) Distributed Systems
4 132 (2.73%) Product Ownership
5 131 (2.70%) Data Protection Act
6 119 (2.46%) Equities
7 105 (2.17%) Data Structures
8 98 (2.02%) AI Agents
8 98 (2.02%) Onboarding
9 93 (1.92%) Enterprise Software
10 92 (1.90%) Derivative
11 84 (1.73%) Public Cloud
12 82 (1.69%) Management Information System
12 82 (1.69%) Security Posture
13 81 (1.67%) Legacy Systems
14 80 (1.65%) Fixed Income
14 80 (1.65%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
15 78 (1.61%) Data Centre
16 77 (1.59%) Hybrid Cloud
17 73 (1.51%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 772 (15.94%) Linux
2 352 (7.27%) Windows
3 231 (4.77%) Unix
4 96 (1.98%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.28%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.72%) Android
7 35 (0.72%) VMS
8 29 (0.60%) CentOS
9 26 (0.54%) Solaris
10 24 (0.50%) Mac OS
11 19 (0.39%) Apple iOS
12 15 (0.31%) Amazon Linux
13 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
14 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
15 5 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
15 5 (0.10%) Windows 10
16 4 (0.083%) Debian
16 4 (0.083%) Robot Operating System
17 3 (0.062%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,719 (35.49%) CI/CD
2 1,358 (28.04%) DevOps
3 1,149 (23.72%) Agile
4 1,063 (21.95%) Problem-Solving
5 983 (20.30%) AI
6 868 (17.92%) Infrastructure as Code
7 835 (17.24%) Analytics
8 754 (15.57%) Machine Learning
9 736 (15.20%) Containerisation
10 717 (14.80%) Data Pipeline
11 595 (12.29%) ETL
12 570 (11.77%) Data Science
13 568 (11.73%) Data Engineering
13 568 (11.73%) Data Modelling
14 529 (10.92%) Software Engineering
15 526 (10.86%) Test Automation
16 421 (8.69%) Business Intelligence
17 413 (8.53%) Observability
18 384 (7.93%) LLM
19 364 (7.52%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,473 (30.42%) SQL
2 745 (15.38%) Java
3 661 (13.65%) PowerShell
4 617 (12.74%) Bash
5 485 (10.01%) JavaScript
6 303 (6.26%) C#
7 296 (6.11%) TypeScript
8 236 (4.87%) Go
9 198 (4.09%) C++
10 157 (3.24%) Perl
10 157 (3.24%) R
11 148 (3.06%) Shell Script
12 120 (2.48%) Scala
13 97 (2.00%) Ruby
14 60 (1.24%) Bicep
14 60 (1.24%) Kusto Query Language
15 54 (1.12%) C
16 50 (1.03%) VBA
17 41 (0.85%) PHP
18 38 (0.78%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,069 (22.07%) Security Cleared
2 869 (17.94%) SC Cleared
3 448 (9.25%) Degree
4 235 (4.85%) Computer Science Degree
5 137 (2.83%) DV Cleared
6 132 (2.73%) AWS Certification
7 123 (2.54%) Master's Degree
8 92 (1.90%) BPSS Clearance
9 90 (1.86%) CISSP
10 87 (1.80%) Azure Certification
11 79 (1.63%) Cisco Certification
12 70 (1.45%) MCP
13 51 (1.05%) CCNP
13 51 (1.05%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 43 (0.89%) PhD
15 38 (0.78%) CEH
15 38 (0.78%) CISM
16 36 (0.74%) CCIE
17 33 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.66%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 398 (8.22%) Data Quality
2 177 (3.65%) QA
3 166 (3.43%) GDPR
4 97 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 97 (2.00%) NIST
5 57 (1.18%) Accessibility
6 33 (0.68%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.62%) HIPAA
7 30 (0.62%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 22 (0.45%) NCSC
8 22 (0.45%) SLA
9 19 (0.39%) SOC 2
10 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
11 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
12 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
12 9 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
12 9 (0.19%) MiFID
12 9 (0.19%) PMO
12 9 (0.19%) WCAG
13 8 (0.17%) EMIR
System Software
1 962 (19.86%) Docker
2 185 (3.82%) Active Directory
3 117 (2.42%) VMware Infrastructure
4 44 (0.91%) VMware NSX
5 38 (0.78%) vSphere
6 37 (0.76%) Virtual Machines
7 23 (0.47%) Firmware
8 22 (0.45%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.41%) HDFS
10 18 (0.37%) KVM
11 14 (0.29%) Squid
12 12 (0.25%) DFS Replication
12 12 (0.25%) Postfix
12 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 12 (0.25%) VMware ESXi
13 10 (0.21%) Lustre
14 9 (0.19%) GPFS
14 9 (0.19%) Oracle RAC
15 8 (0.17%) Dovecot
15 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,085 (22.40%) Terraform
2 1,015 (20.96%) Kubernetes
3 588 (12.14%) Ansible
4 349 (7.21%) Grafana
5 303 (6.26%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.84%) Argo
7 77 (1.59%) Puppet
8 54 (1.12%) Kibana
9 50 (1.03%) vRealize
10 43 (0.89%) Istio
11 40 (0.83%) Nessus
12 35 (0.72%) Single Sign-On
13 29 (0.60%) NetBackup
14 28 (0.58%) Progress Chef
15 20 (0.41%) Control-M
15 20 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
16 19 (0.39%) ITRS Geneos
17 18 (0.37%) logstash
17 18 (0.37%) Nmap
18 17 (0.35%) IBM Guardium
Vendors
1 592 (12.22%) Microsoft
2 451 (9.31%) Databricks
3 295 (6.09%) Google
4 245 (5.06%) Splunk
5 235 (4.85%) Oracle
6 221 (4.56%) VMware
7 140 (2.89%) Red Hat
8 125 (2.58%) Cisco
9 117 (2.42%) ServiceNow
10 105 (2.17%) OpenAI
11 94 (1.94%) CyberArk
12 84 (1.73%) F5
13 83 (1.71%) Palo Alto
14 71 (1.47%) Foundry
15 69 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
16 51 (1.05%) SAP
17 43 (0.89%) Informatica
18 42 (0.87%) Dynatrace
18 42 (0.87%) IBM
19 39 (0.81%) Atlassian