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 13 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,169 3,842 3,964
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.95% 13.26% 9.27%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.77% 38.95% 31.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,443 2,692 2,834
10th Percentile £363 £384 £388
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -1.79% -6.67%
75th Percentile £623 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £813 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -2.50% -2.06% -7.18%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 51 96
10th Percentile £30.44 £21.25 £21.49
25th Percentile £46.25 £26.41 £38.00
Median hourly rate £55.00 £39.32 £61.25
Median % change year-on-year +39.88% -35.80% -4.85%
75th Percentile £72.43 £56.25 £71.41
90th Percentile £85.10 £71.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -30.77% +13.04%

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 12,679 9,864 12,664
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.86% 34.04% 29.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,340 6,705 9,004
10th Percentile £352 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £414 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £530
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -1.89% -3.64%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £711 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +0.53% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 559 238 486
10th Percentile £41.25 £25.07 £33.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £35.00 £46.48
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% - +1.07%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +0.78% +3.20% -

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 13 May 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 13 May 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 13 May 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 -2 4,305 £525 -4.55% 2,646
London -3 2,439 £550 -8.33% 1,187
UK excluding London -1 2,005 £488 -2.50% 1,913
Work from Home -2 1,473 £525 -4.55% 1,037
North of England +10 689 £478 -2.20% 503
South East -4 401 £513 -0.39% 582
Yorkshire 0 385 £475 -5.00% 142
Scotland +2 284 £438 -7.89% 116
South West 0 249 £500 -9.09% 225
Midlands -10 249 £499 +10.89% 233
North West +5 248 £500 +4.17% 273
West Midlands -11 192 £500 - 111
East of England -5 126 £500 - 198
North East +8 65 £475 +5.56% 92
East Midlands -13 56 £497 +17.51% 122
Northern Ireland +15 23 £463 -18.68% 23
Wales -14 22 £463 -7.50% 58

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
1 281 (5.44%) Apache Spark
2 207 (4.00%) Apache Airflow
3 167 (3.23%) Apache
4 137 (2.65%) Confluence
5 50 (0.97%) SAS
6 45 (0.87%) SharePoint
7 35 (0.68%) Jupyter
8 22 (0.43%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.39%) nginx
10 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
11 15 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
12 11 (0.21%) Appian
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) CMS
13 8 (0.15%) IIS
14 7 (0.14%) Camunda
15 6 (0.12%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.097%) CICS
16 5 (0.097%) Tomcat
Applications
1 124 (2.40%) Microsoft Excel
2 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Chatbot
4 20 (0.39%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 18 (0.35%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 7 (0.14%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.019%) SPSS
10 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 15 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.14%) Fidessa
4 7 (0.14%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.097%) BambooHR
5 5 (0.097%) Remedy ITSM
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.058%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.039%) Actimize
8 2 (0.039%) Global One
8 2 (0.039%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.039%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.039%) Odoo
8 2 (0.039%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.039%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.039%) Oracle ERP
8 2 (0.039%) SimCorp Dimension
8 2 (0.039%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 1,946 (37.65%) AWS
2 1,745 (33.76%) Azure
3 747 (14.45%) GCP
4 631 (12.21%) GitHub
5 510 (9.87%) Power Platform
6 455 (8.80%) Serverless
7 373 (7.22%) Azure DevOps
8 361 (6.98%) Amazon S3
9 333 (6.44%) GitHub Actions
10 323 (6.25%) AWS Lambda
11 261 (5.05%) Azure Data Factory
12 233 (4.51%) Snowflake
13 198 (3.83%) AWS CloudFormation
14 171 (3.31%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 162 (3.13%) OpenShift
16 159 (3.08%) dbt
17 155 (3.00%) Amazon EKS
18 134 (2.59%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 127 (2.46%) Amazon ECS
20 121 (2.34%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 185 (3.58%) Firewall
2 131 (2.53%) DNS
3 110 (2.13%) Network Security
4 91 (1.76%) TCP/IP
5 84 (1.63%) BGP
6 79 (1.53%) WAN
7 76 (1.47%) VPN
8 58 (1.12%) HTTP
9 57 (1.10%) OSPF
10 46 (0.89%) SAN
11 39 (0.75%) SNMP
11 39 (0.75%) VXLAN
12 38 (0.74%) BIG-IP
12 38 (0.74%) SD-WAN
13 33 (0.64%) DHCP
13 33 (0.64%) LAN
13 33 (0.64%) MPLS
14 32 (0.62%) SSL
15 31 (0.60%) Ethernet VPN
15 31 (0.60%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 447 (8.65%) Power BI
2 336 (6.50%) PostgreSQL
3 281 (5.44%) Data Warehouse
4 239 (4.62%) SQL Server
5 233 (4.51%) Data Lake
6 196 (3.79%) Tableau
7 184 (3.56%) Relational Database
8 170 (3.29%) NoSQL
9 164 (3.17%) Big Data
10 158 (3.06%) Metadata
11 137 (2.65%) Delta Lake
12 133 (2.57%) BigQuery
13 119 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
14 113 (2.19%) Amazon Redshift
15 105 (2.03%) MongoDB
16 89 (1.72%) MySQL
17 88 (1.70%) DynamoDB
18 86 (1.66%) Amazon RDS
19 85 (1.64%) Azure SQL Database
20 78 (1.51%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 643 (12.44%) Git
2 466 (9.02%) Jenkins
3 356 (6.89%) GitLab
4 245 (4.74%) JIRA
5 92 (1.78%) MLflow
6 70 (1.35%) Selenium
7 58 (1.12%) Postman
8 36 (0.70%) Cucumber
9 32 (0.62%) Artifactory
10 30 (0.58%) JMeter
11 28 (0.54%) SonarQube
12 27 (0.52%) Bitbucket
12 27 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
13 25 (0.48%) Cypress.io
13 25 (0.48%) JUnit
14 23 (0.44%) Robot Framework
15 22 (0.43%) Maven
16 20 (0.39%) REST Assured
17 19 (0.37%) SpecFlow
18 18 (0.35%) Gatling
General
1 1,130 (21.86%) Social Skills
2 997 (19.29%) Finance
3 695 (13.45%) Analytical Skills
4 466 (9.02%) Public Sector
5 358 (6.93%) Banking
6 178 (3.44%) Front Office
7 129 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
8 99 (1.92%) Investment Banking
9 76 (1.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 67 (1.30%) Marketing
11 58 (1.12%) Retail
12 54 (1.04%) Telecoms
13 51 (0.99%) Pharmaceutical
14 50 (0.97%) Legal
15 46 (0.89%) Influencing Skills
16 35 (0.68%) Financial Institution
17 34 (0.66%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.64%) Publishing
19 32 (0.62%) Military
20 29 (0.56%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 973 (18.82%) Developer
2 789 (15.26%) Data Engineer
3 744 (14.39%) Senior
4 483 (9.34%) Python Developer
5 335 (6.48%) Architect
6 327 (6.33%) Lead
7 303 (5.86%) Python Engineer
8 280 (5.42%) Analyst
9 270 (5.22%) DevOps Engineer
10 253 (4.89%) Software Engineer
11 217 (4.20%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 217 (4.20%) AWS Engineer
12 205 (3.97%) Data Scientist
13 164 (3.17%) Azure Engineer
14 159 (3.08%) Senior Data Engineer
14 159 (3.08%) Senior Developer
15 154 (2.98%) Platform Engineer
16 147 (2.84%) Data Analyst
17 142 (2.75%) Full-Stack Developer
18 127 (2.46%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 379 (7.33%) REST
2 358 (6.93%) React
3 349 (6.75%) PySpark
4 323 (6.25%) Kafka
5 236 (4.57%) .NET
6 227 (4.39%) Node.js
7 211 (4.08%) Pandas
8 183 (3.54%) FastAPI
9 181 (3.50%) PyTorch
10 180 (3.48%) RESTful
11 162 (3.13%) JSON
12 128 (2.48%) NumPy
13 127 (2.46%) Django
13 127 (2.46%) TensorFlow
14 125 (2.42%) Flask
15 119 (2.30%) scikit-learn
16 115 (2.22%) LangChain
17 113 (2.19%) AngularJS
18 107 (2.07%) LDAP
19 100 (1.93%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 532 (10.29%) Cloud Native
2 223 (4.31%) Distributed Systems
3 152 (2.94%) Algorithms
4 131 (2.53%) Product Ownership
5 120 (2.32%) Data Protection Act
6 119 (2.30%) Data Centre
7 118 (2.28%) AI Agents
8 116 (2.24%) Onboarding
9 114 (2.21%) Data Structures
10 109 (2.11%) Derivative
11 102 (1.97%) Equities
11 102 (1.97%) Fixed Income
12 99 (1.92%) Management Information System
13 95 (1.84%) Legacy Systems
14 90 (1.74%) Enterprise Software
14 90 (1.74%) Hybrid Cloud
15 84 (1.63%) Security Posture
16 69 (1.33%) Public Cloud
17 46 (0.89%) Greenfield Project
17 46 (0.89%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 631 (12.21%) Linux
2 293 (5.67%) Windows
3 214 (4.14%) Unix
4 97 (1.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.24%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.72%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.68%) VMS
8 26 (0.50%) AIX
9 24 (0.46%) Android
10 23 (0.44%) Solaris
11 20 (0.39%) CentOS
12 19 (0.37%) Mac OS
13 17 (0.33%) Apple iOS
14 10 (0.19%) Debian
14 10 (0.19%) zOS
15 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
16 7 (0.14%) Rocky
17 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
18 5 (0.097%) Amazon Linux
19 4 (0.077%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,901 (36.78%) CI/CD
2 1,378 (26.66%) DevOps
3 1,154 (22.33%) AI
4 1,105 (21.38%) Agile
5 1,018 (19.69%) Analytics
6 931 (18.01%) Problem-Solving
7 896 (17.33%) Infrastructure as Code
8 869 (16.81%) Data Pipeline
9 787 (15.23%) Machine Learning
10 704 (13.62%) Data Modelling
11 703 (13.60%) Containerisation
12 694 (13.43%) Data Engineering
13 686 (13.27%) ETL
14 600 (11.61%) Software Engineering
15 566 (10.95%) Data Science
16 536 (10.37%) Observability
17 519 (10.04%) Test Automation
18 516 (9.98%) Business Intelligence
19 437 (8.45%) LLM
20 412 (7.97%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,714 (33.16%) SQL
2 741 (14.34%) Java
3 642 (12.42%) PowerShell
4 562 (10.87%) Bash
5 472 (9.13%) JavaScript
6 349 (6.75%) C#
7 348 (6.73%) TypeScript
8 200 (3.87%) Go
9 173 (3.35%) R
10 154 (2.98%) C++
11 140 (2.71%) Scala
12 106 (2.05%) Shell Script
13 82 (1.59%) Ruby
14 77 (1.49%) Perl
15 76 (1.47%) Bicep
16 56 (1.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 55 (1.06%) PL/SQL
17 55 (1.06%) T-SQL
18 53 (1.03%) C
19 49 (0.95%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,189 (23.00%) Security Cleared
2 961 (18.59%) SC Cleared
3 369 (7.14%) Degree
4 165 (3.19%) Computer Science Degree
5 141 (2.73%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.51%) BPSS Clearance
7 103 (1.99%) Azure Certification
8 91 (1.76%) AWS Certification
9 85 (1.64%) CISSP
10 79 (1.53%) Master's Degree
11 70 (1.35%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.12%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.95%) CCNP
14 44 (0.85%) CISM
15 36 (0.70%) PhD
16 31 (0.60%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 30 (0.58%) Microsoft Certification
18 28 (0.54%) ISTQB
19 21 (0.41%) CCIE
19 21 (0.41%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 509 (9.85%) Data Quality
2 230 (4.45%) QA
3 156 (3.02%) GDPR
4 104 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 101 (1.95%) NIST
6 76 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.66%) SLA
8 29 (0.56%) PCI DSS
9 28 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.35%) WCAG
13 17 (0.33%) NCSC
14 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.23%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.17%) GRC
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.15%) MiFID
18 7 (0.14%) PMO
System Software
1 776 (15.01%) Docker
2 153 (2.96%) Active Directory
3 97 (1.88%) VMware Infrastructure
4 70 (1.35%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.75%) VMware NSX
6 35 (0.68%) vSphere
7 34 (0.66%) Firmware
8 33 (0.64%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) KVM
11 13 (0.25%) HDFS
12 11 (0.21%) Squid
13 10 (0.19%) NFS
14 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
14 9 (0.17%) SRDF
15 8 (0.15%) Ceph
16 7 (0.14%) Postfix
16 7 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
17 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
18 3 (0.058%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 1,062 (20.55%) Terraform
2 920 (17.80%) Kubernetes
3 533 (10.31%) Ansible
4 335 (6.48%) Grafana
5 272 (5.26%) Prometheus
6 73 (1.41%) Puppet
7 60 (1.16%) Argo
8 52 (1.01%) Istio
9 48 (0.93%) vRealize
10 40 (0.77%) Kibana
11 34 (0.66%) Progress Chef
12 31 (0.60%) vCenter Server
13 27 (0.52%) Nagios
13 27 (0.52%) Nessus
14 24 (0.46%) Control-M
14 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.46%) ZABBIX
15 20 (0.39%) NetBackup
16 19 (0.37%) Rancher
16 19 (0.37%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 579 (11.20%) Microsoft
2 562 (10.87%) Databricks
3 260 (5.03%) Google
4 229 (4.43%) Oracle
5 221 (4.28%) Splunk
6 180 (3.48%) VMware
7 118 (2.28%) Red Hat
8 115 (2.22%) Cisco
8 115 (2.22%) OpenAI
9 90 (1.74%) ServiceNow
10 88 (1.70%) CyberArk
11 79 (1.53%) BeyondTrust
12 72 (1.39%) Dynatrace
13 69 (1.33%) IBM
14 66 (1.28%) F5
14 66 (1.28%) Palo Alto
15 65 (1.26%) Informatica
16 56 (1.08%) Foundry
17 50 (0.97%) SAP
18 42 (0.81%) Arista