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 30 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,250 3,911 3,994
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.13% 13.38% 9.16%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.64% 39.34% 31.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,530 2,749 2,842
10th Percentile £363 £391 £396
25th Percentile £425 £455 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.36% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £624 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -2.50% -2.44% -5.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 52 101
10th Percentile £30.00 £21.25 £21.73
25th Percentile £46.25 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £37.16 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +48.01% -35.37% -10.68%
75th Percentile £70.36 £57.81 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £70.88 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +16.67% -28.00% +4.17%

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 12,918 9,941 12,854
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.38% 34.02% 29.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,548 6,741 9,130
10th Percentile £355 £360 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £769 £760
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £489
% change year-on-year - -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 563 245 485
10th Percentile £42.05 £22.49 £31.25
25th Percentile £54.78 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +3.31% -0.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.87 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.77% +2.20% -

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 30 April 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 30 April 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 30 April 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 4,396 £525 -4.55% 2,163
London -3 2,490 £550 -8.33% 954
UK excluding London -2 2,041 £488 -2.50% 1,644
Work from Home 0 1,502 £525 -4.55% 816
North of England +8 683 £481 -1.79% 392
South East -2 409 £500 -4.76% 546
Yorkshire +1 388 £479 -4.20% 110
Scotland +2 288 £425 -10.53% 92
Midlands -6 265 £500 +8.93% 201
South West -1 251 £500 -9.09% 178
North West +3 244 £500 +5.26% 205
West Midlands -8 201 £500 -1.19% 108
East of England -2 137 £500 -0.50% 173
East Midlands -9 63 £470 +11.24% 92
North East +9 59 £475 -1.30% 79
Northern Ireland +17 24 £463 -11.90% 33
Wales -16 23 £463 -11.90% 50

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
1 292 (5.56%) Apache Spark
2 214 (4.08%) Apache Airflow
3 169 (3.22%) Apache
4 149 (2.84%) Confluence
5 50 (0.95%) SAS
6 49 (0.93%) SharePoint
7 29 (0.55%) Jupyter
8 28 (0.53%) nginx
9 23 (0.44%) OpenStack
10 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 14 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
12 13 (0.25%) Appian
12 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.17%) Camunda
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 7 (0.13%) IIS
16 6 (0.11%) CICS
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.095%) Tomcat
Applications
1 136 (2.59%) Microsoft Excel
2 26 (0.50%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Spreadsheet
4 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
5 6 (0.11%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.076%) Weka
7 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
6 4 (0.076%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.038%) Actimize
7 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
7 2 (0.038%) Global One
7 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.038%) Odoo
7 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.038%) Oracle ERP
7 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 1,998 (38.06%) AWS
2 1,796 (34.21%) Azure
3 770 (14.67%) GCP
4 668 (12.72%) GitHub
5 535 (10.19%) Power Platform
6 487 (9.28%) Serverless
7 376 (7.16%) Amazon S3
7 376 (7.16%) Azure DevOps
8 352 (6.70%) AWS Lambda
9 345 (6.57%) GitHub Actions
10 275 (5.24%) Azure Data Factory
11 240 (4.57%) Snowflake
12 233 (4.44%) AWS CloudFormation
13 174 (3.31%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 169 (3.22%) Amazon EKS
15 162 (3.09%) OpenShift
16 157 (2.99%) dbt
17 150 (2.86%) Amazon ECS
18 146 (2.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 132 (2.51%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 182 (3.47%) Firewall
2 132 (2.51%) DNS
3 110 (2.10%) Network Security
4 87 (1.66%) TCP/IP
5 80 (1.52%) BGP
6 75 (1.43%) VPN
7 72 (1.37%) WAN
8 57 (1.09%) HTTP
9 53 (1.01%) OSPF
10 44 (0.84%) SAN
11 36 (0.69%) SNMP
12 35 (0.67%) VXLAN
13 34 (0.65%) MPLS
14 32 (0.61%) BIG-IP
14 32 (0.61%) LAN
15 31 (0.59%) SD-WAN
16 30 (0.57%) VLAN
16 30 (0.57%) Wireshark
17 29 (0.55%) DHCP
17 29 (0.55%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 460 (8.76%) Power BI
2 350 (6.67%) PostgreSQL
3 285 (5.43%) Data Warehouse
4 244 (4.65%) Data Lake
5 239 (4.55%) SQL Server
6 201 (3.83%) Tableau
7 187 (3.56%) NoSQL
8 179 (3.41%) Relational Database
9 165 (3.14%) Big Data
10 159 (3.03%) Metadata
11 137 (2.61%) Delta Lake
12 131 (2.50%) BigQuery
13 120 (2.29%) Amazon Athena
14 118 (2.25%) Amazon Redshift
15 105 (2.00%) Amazon RDS
15 105 (2.00%) MongoDB
16 96 (1.83%) MySQL
17 95 (1.81%) DynamoDB
18 93 (1.77%) Azure SQL Database
19 82 (1.56%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 658 (12.53%) Git
2 477 (9.09%) Jenkins
3 368 (7.01%) GitLab
4 266 (5.07%) JIRA
5 94 (1.79%) MLflow
6 74 (1.41%) Selenium
7 56 (1.07%) Postman
8 43 (0.82%) Bitbucket
9 39 (0.74%) Cucumber
10 33 (0.63%) Sonatype Nexus
11 30 (0.57%) JMeter
12 29 (0.55%) SonarQube
13 28 (0.53%) Artifactory
14 27 (0.51%) Cypress.io
15 25 (0.48%) JUnit
16 24 (0.46%) Maven
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
17 22 (0.42%) SpecFlow
18 21 (0.40%) Gatling
18 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,179 (22.46%) Social Skills
2 1,017 (19.37%) Finance
3 714 (13.60%) Analytical Skills
4 502 (9.56%) Public Sector
5 364 (6.93%) Banking
6 174 (3.31%) Front Office
7 131 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
8 90 (1.71%) Investment Banking
9 74 (1.41%) Marketing
10 73 (1.39%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 62 (1.18%) Retail
12 54 (1.03%) Telecoms
13 53 (1.01%) Pharmaceutical
14 49 (0.93%) Influencing Skills
14 49 (0.93%) Legal
15 37 (0.70%) Financial Institution
15 37 (0.70%) Manufacturing
16 34 (0.65%) Publishing
17 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
18 30 (0.57%) Military
Job Titles
1 1,002 (19.09%) Developer
2 788 (15.01%) Data Engineer
3 758 (14.44%) Senior
4 493 (9.39%) Python Developer
5 349 (6.65%) Architect
6 344 (6.55%) Lead
7 294 (5.60%) Python Engineer
8 282 (5.37%) Analyst
9 271 (5.16%) DevOps Engineer
10 251 (4.78%) Software Engineer
11 236 (4.50%) AWS Engineer
12 223 (4.25%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 217 (4.13%) Data Scientist
14 168 (3.20%) Platform Engineer
14 168 (3.20%) Senior Developer
15 157 (2.99%) Senior Data Engineer
16 156 (2.97%) Azure Engineer
17 145 (2.76%) Data Analyst
18 141 (2.69%) Full-Stack Developer
19 121 (2.30%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 398 (7.58%) REST
2 353 (6.72%) React
3 349 (6.65%) PySpark
4 334 (6.36%) Kafka
5 260 (4.95%) Node.js
6 234 (4.46%) .NET
7 230 (4.38%) Pandas
8 197 (3.75%) PyTorch
9 184 (3.50%) FastAPI
10 179 (3.41%) RESTful
11 162 (3.09%) JSON
12 144 (2.74%) NumPy
12 144 (2.74%) TensorFlow
13 135 (2.57%) scikit-learn
14 130 (2.48%) Flask
15 126 (2.40%) LangChain
16 122 (2.32%) Django
17 120 (2.29%) AngularJS
18 106 (2.02%) LDAP
19 103 (1.96%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 528 (10.06%) Cloud Native
2 218 (4.15%) Distributed Systems
3 164 (3.12%) Algorithms
4 146 (2.78%) Product Ownership
5 126 (2.40%) AI Agents
6 118 (2.25%) Data Protection Act
7 112 (2.13%) Data Structures
8 111 (2.11%) Fixed Income
9 110 (2.10%) Equities
10 109 (2.08%) Onboarding
11 107 (2.04%) Derivative
12 105 (2.00%) Data Centre
13 97 (1.85%) Management Information System
14 93 (1.77%) Legacy Systems
15 90 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
15 90 (1.71%) Hybrid Cloud
16 85 (1.62%) Security Posture
17 71 (1.35%) Public Cloud
18 48 (0.91%) Virtual Team
19 47 (0.90%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 648 (12.34%) Linux
2 281 (5.35%) Windows
3 210 (4.00%) Unix
4 95 (1.81%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 60 (1.14%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.72%) VMS
7 36 (0.69%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.50%) Android
9 22 (0.42%) AIX
10 21 (0.40%) Solaris
11 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.34%) CentOS
13 16 (0.30%) Apple iOS
14 10 (0.19%) Debian
14 10 (0.19%) zOS
15 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
16 7 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
17 6 (0.11%) Rocky
18 5 (0.095%) Windows 7
18 5 (0.095%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,919 (36.55%) CI/CD
2 1,398 (26.63%) DevOps
3 1,173 (22.34%) AI
4 1,164 (22.17%) Agile
5 1,066 (20.30%) Analytics
6 971 (18.50%) Problem-Solving
7 919 (17.50%) Infrastructure as Code
8 867 (16.51%) Data Pipeline
9 825 (15.71%) Machine Learning
10 728 (13.87%) Containerisation
11 708 (13.49%) Data Modelling
12 700 (13.33%) Data Engineering
13 687 (13.09%) ETL
14 609 (11.60%) Software Engineering
15 599 (11.41%) Data Science
16 544 (10.36%) Test Automation
17 538 (10.25%) Business Intelligence
18 537 (10.23%) Observability
19 441 (8.40%) LLM
20 411 (7.83%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,733 (33.01%) SQL
2 766 (14.59%) Java
3 633 (12.06%) PowerShell
4 561 (10.69%) Bash
5 479 (9.12%) JavaScript
6 350 (6.67%) C#
7 348 (6.63%) TypeScript
8 203 (3.87%) Go
9 177 (3.37%) R
10 154 (2.93%) C++
11 143 (2.72%) Scala
12 109 (2.08%) Shell Script
13 97 (1.85%) Ruby
14 80 (1.52%) Bicep
14 80 (1.52%) Perl
15 56 (1.07%) C
16 55 (1.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 52 (0.99%) Kusto Query Language
17 52 (0.99%) PL/SQL
18 49 (0.93%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,224 (23.31%) Security Cleared
2 1,001 (19.07%) SC Cleared
3 390 (7.43%) Degree
4 176 (3.35%) Computer Science Degree
5 143 (2.72%) BPSS Clearance
6 140 (2.67%) DV Cleared
7 105 (2.00%) Azure Certification
8 103 (1.96%) AWS Certification
9 89 (1.70%) Master's Degree
10 88 (1.68%) CISSP
11 69 (1.31%) Cisco Certification
12 59 (1.12%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.95%) CCNP
14 47 (0.90%) CISM
15 40 (0.76%) PhD
16 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
17 31 (0.59%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 27 (0.51%) ISTQB
19 23 (0.44%) CEH
20 22 (0.42%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 510 (9.71%) Data Quality
2 225 (4.29%) QA
3 167 (3.18%) GDPR
4 107 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 101 (1.92%) NIST
6 80 (1.52%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) SLA
8 33 (0.63%) PCI DSS
9 30 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.34%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) WCAG
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
14 11 (0.21%) SOC 2
15 9 (0.17%) GRC
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) MiFID
System Software
1 833 (15.87%) Docker
2 153 (2.91%) Active Directory
3 96 (1.83%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.31%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.80%) VMware NSX
6 40 (0.76%) vSphere
7 33 (0.63%) Firmware
8 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.34%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) HDFS
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.17%) SRDF
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
12 8 (0.15%) NFS
13 6 (0.11%) Lustre
13 6 (0.11%) Postfix
13 6 (0.11%) Squid
14 5 (0.095%) Virtual Desktop
14 5 (0.095%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,111 (21.16%) Terraform
2 968 (18.44%) Kubernetes
3 521 (9.92%) Ansible
4 345 (6.57%) Grafana
5 281 (5.35%) Prometheus
6 76 (1.45%) Puppet
7 72 (1.37%) Argo
8 52 (0.99%) Istio
9 48 (0.91%) vRealize
10 46 (0.88%) Kibana
11 33 (0.63%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.63%) vCenter Server
12 27 (0.51%) Nessus
13 26 (0.50%) Single Sign-On
14 25 (0.48%) Nagios
15 23 (0.44%) Control-M
16 22 (0.42%) Rancher
17 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
18 19 (0.36%) Kubeflow
18 19 (0.36%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 617 (11.75%) Microsoft
2 569 (10.84%) Databricks
3 273 (5.20%) Google
4 226 (4.30%) Oracle
5 220 (4.19%) Splunk
6 180 (3.43%) VMware
7 121 (2.30%) Red Hat
8 119 (2.27%) OpenAI
9 118 (2.25%) Cisco
10 97 (1.85%) ServiceNow
11 88 (1.68%) CyberArk
12 75 (1.43%) BeyondTrust
13 67 (1.28%) Informatica
14 66 (1.26%) IBM
15 65 (1.24%) Dynatrace
16 62 (1.18%) Foundry
17 61 (1.16%) F5
18 60 (1.14%) Palo Alto
19 49 (0.93%) SAP
20 42 (0.80%) Salesforce