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

6 months to
29 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 10 14
Rank change year-on-year -2 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,605 4,255 3,958
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.67% 12.97% 9.94%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.12% 39.41% 31.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,658 2,856 2,876
10th Percentile £375 £360 £375
25th Percentile £431 £432 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £531 £575
Median % change year-on-year -1.06% -7.72% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £707
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £505
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.97% -3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 133 69 120
10th Percentile £28.80 £26.00 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.50 £33.91 £30.63
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -13.04% -6.66%
75th Percentile £74.26 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.67 £50.00 £66.25
% change year-on-year +5.33% -24.53% +15.22%

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 13,969 10,796 12,393
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.58% 32.90% 31.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,075 7,277 8,754
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.58% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 254 421
10th Percentile £33.70 £27.96 £27.75
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.06 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.13 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.79% -12.12% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £82.07 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +7.08%

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 July 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 July 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 July 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 -3 4,749 £538 -2.27% 2,976
London -4 2,734 £575 - 1,735
UK excluding London -5 2,201 £500 +2.04% 1,658
Work from Home -6 1,551 £529 -3.77% 1,152
North of England +1 765 £500 +4.17% 421
South East -10 446 £538 +7.50% 481
Yorkshire +1 399 £500 +0.70% 115
Scotland +2 297 £430 -13.13% 111
North West +3 289 £513 +7.89% 224
South West -2 287 £500 -8.05% 226
Midlands -12 252 £477 +6.00% 182
West Midlands -13 201 £469 +4.22% 103
East of England -12 134 £500 -0.50% 173
North East -4 88 £425 -2.86% 88
East Midlands -8 50 £488 +11.93% 79
Wales -5 31 £500 +17.65% 48
Northern Ireland +3 19 £363 -34.09% 41

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
1 282 (5.03%) Apache Spark
2 265 (4.73%) Apache Airflow
3 209 (3.73%) Apache
4 180 (3.21%) Confluence
5 54 (0.96%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.87%) SAS
7 41 (0.73%) SharePoint
8 25 (0.45%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
9 22 (0.39%) nginx
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 12 (0.21%) IIS
12 9 (0.16%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.12%) CICS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.089%) JBoss
16 5 (0.089%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 117 (2.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.55%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
5 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
6 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
6 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
8 1 (0.018%) Navisworks
8 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.018%) Revit
8 1 (0.018%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.43%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Remedy AR System
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Bloomberg AIM
10 2 (0.036%) Distributed Ledger
10 2 (0.036%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.036%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 2,095 (37.38%) AWS
2 1,889 (33.70%) Azure
3 848 (15.13%) GCP
4 692 (12.35%) GitHub
5 512 (9.13%) Power Platform
6 470 (8.39%) Serverless
7 409 (7.30%) Amazon S3
8 408 (7.28%) Azure DevOps
9 387 (6.90%) GitHub Actions
10 357 (6.37%) AWS Lambda
11 297 (5.30%) Snowflake
12 230 (4.10%) Azure Data Factory
13 219 (3.91%) dbt
14 194 (3.46%) AWS CloudFormation
15 178 (3.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 177 (3.16%) Amazon EKS
17 147 (2.62%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 147 (2.62%) OpenShift
18 133 (2.37%) Amazon EC2
19 128 (2.28%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 259 (4.62%) Firewall
2 193 (3.44%) DNS
3 131 (2.34%) TCP/IP
4 117 (2.09%) BGP
5 111 (1.98%) VPN
6 106 (1.89%) Network Security
7 105 (1.87%) WAN
8 74 (1.32%) OSPF
9 71 (1.27%) DHCP
10 58 (1.03%) VLAN
11 55 (0.98%) BIG-IP
12 54 (0.96%) SD-WAN
13 53 (0.95%) SAN
14 51 (0.91%) VXLAN
15 50 (0.89%) HTTP
15 50 (0.89%) SSL
16 43 (0.77%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 43 (0.77%) SNMP
17 39 (0.70%) Ethernet VPN
18 34 (0.61%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 461 (8.22%) Power BI
2 342 (6.10%) PostgreSQL
3 315 (5.62%) Data Warehouse
4 228 (4.07%) SQL Server
5 199 (3.55%) Data Lake
6 198 (3.53%) Relational Database
6 198 (3.53%) Tableau
7 185 (3.30%) Metadata
8 167 (2.98%) NoSQL
9 153 (2.73%) Big Data
10 151 (2.69%) BigQuery
11 137 (2.44%) Amazon Athena
12 135 (2.41%) Amazon Redshift
13 129 (2.30%) MongoDB
14 119 (2.12%) Delta Lake
15 111 (1.98%) DynamoDB
16 109 (1.94%) Amazon RDS
17 85 (1.52%) MySQL
18 73 (1.30%) Snowflake Schema
19 67 (1.20%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 686 (12.24%) Git
2 504 (8.99%) Jenkins
3 409 (7.30%) GitLab
4 301 (5.37%) JIRA
5 84 (1.50%) Selenium
6 66 (1.18%) MLflow
7 51 (0.91%) Postman
8 45 (0.80%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.77%) JMeter
10 36 (0.64%) SonarQube
11 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
12 34 (0.61%) REST Assured
13 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
14 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
15 29 (0.52%) Claude Code
16 28 (0.50%) Gatling
16 28 (0.50%) Sonatype Nexus
17 27 (0.48%) JUnit
18 26 (0.46%) Maven
19 20 (0.36%) Zephyr
General
1 1,208 (21.55%) Social Skills
2 1,205 (21.50%) Finance
3 783 (13.97%) Analytical Skills
4 557 (9.94%) Public Sector
5 432 (7.71%) Banking
6 206 (3.68%) Front Office
7 126 (2.25%) Documentation Skills
7 126 (2.25%) Investment Banking
8 108 (1.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 97 (1.73%) Retail
10 84 (1.50%) Marketing
11 70 (1.25%) Telecoms
12 66 (1.18%) Pharmaceutical
13 60 (1.07%) Legal
14 55 (0.98%) Military
15 48 (0.86%) Financial Institution
16 47 (0.84%) Publishing
17 43 (0.77%) Influencing Skills
18 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
19 35 (0.62%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 966 (17.23%) Developer
2 896 (15.99%) Senior
3 839 (14.97%) Data Engineer
4 509 (9.08%) Python Developer
5 449 (8.01%) Lead
6 397 (7.08%) Python Engineer
7 322 (5.74%) Software Engineer
8 321 (5.73%) DevOps Engineer
9 290 (5.17%) Architect
10 283 (5.05%) Analyst
11 254 (4.53%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 242 (4.32%) AWS Engineer
13 216 (3.85%) Data Scientist
14 190 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
15 187 (3.34%) Cloud Engineer
16 179 (3.19%) Senior Developer
17 171 (3.05%) Azure Engineer
17 171 (3.05%) Senior Data Engineer
18 145 (2.59%) Data Analyst
19 142 (2.53%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 415 (7.40%) REST
2 368 (6.57%) PySpark
3 363 (6.48%) React
4 355 (6.33%) Kafka
5 232 (4.14%) .NET
6 213 (3.80%) Node.js
7 208 (3.71%) FastAPI
8 204 (3.64%) RESTful
9 203 (3.62%) JSON
10 187 (3.34%) Pandas
11 176 (3.14%) Django
12 150 (2.68%) PyTorch
13 141 (2.52%) LangChain
14 117 (2.09%) Flask
15 116 (2.07%) NumPy
16 107 (1.91%) scikit-learn
17 104 (1.86%) TensorFlow
18 102 (1.82%) OAuth
19 100 (1.78%) Spring
20 99 (1.77%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 757 (13.51%) Cloud Native
2 321 (5.73%) Distributed Systems
3 200 (3.57%) Onboarding
4 198 (3.53%) AI Agents
5 160 (2.85%) Data Centre
6 151 (2.69%) Product Ownership
7 146 (2.60%) Algorithms
8 135 (2.41%) Data Structures
9 122 (2.18%) Legacy Systems
10 116 (2.07%) Derivative
10 116 (2.07%) Hybrid Cloud
11 110 (1.96%) Data Protection Act
12 104 (1.86%) Fixed Income
13 103 (1.84%) Management Information System
14 98 (1.75%) Equities
15 82 (1.46%) Security Posture
16 67 (1.20%) Public Cloud
17 66 (1.18%) Enterprise Software
18 65 (1.16%) Self-Motivation
19 64 (1.14%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 689 (12.29%) Linux
2 319 (5.69%) Windows
3 222 (3.96%) Unix
4 132 (2.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 74 (1.32%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.73%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.57%) VMS
8 30 (0.54%) AIX
9 20 (0.36%) Android
10 17 (0.30%) Solaris
11 14 (0.25%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
15 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
16 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Debian
16 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 4 (0.071%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,136 (38.11%) CI/CD
2 1,569 (27.99%) DevOps
3 1,397 (24.92%) AI
4 1,270 (22.66%) Agile
5 1,146 (20.45%) Analytics
6 1,088 (19.41%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,007 (17.97%) Data Pipeline
8 905 (16.15%) Problem-Solving
9 894 (15.95%) Machine Learning
10 845 (15.08%) Software Engineering
11 810 (14.45%) Data Engineering
12 762 (13.60%) Containerisation
13 755 (13.47%) Data Modelling
14 670 (11.95%) ETL
15 659 (11.76%) Observability
16 625 (11.15%) Data Science
17 577 (10.29%) Test Automation
18 545 (9.72%) Business Intelligence
19 533 (9.51%) Continuous Improvement
20 526 (9.38%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,799 (32.10%) SQL
2 804 (14.34%) Java
3 718 (12.81%) Bash
4 689 (12.29%) PowerShell
5 462 (8.24%) JavaScript
6 395 (7.05%) TypeScript
7 305 (5.44%) C#
8 214 (3.82%) Go
9 157 (2.80%) R
10 140 (2.50%) C++
11 127 (2.27%) Shell Script
12 123 (2.19%) Scala
13 112 (2.00%) Bicep
14 78 (1.39%) Perl
15 57 (1.02%) Rust
16 56 (1.00%) C
16 56 (1.00%) Groovy
17 55 (0.98%) Ruby
18 54 (0.96%) PL/SQL
19 49 (0.87%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,277 (22.78%) Security Cleared
2 1,028 (18.34%) SC Cleared
3 424 (7.56%) Degree
4 197 (3.51%) DV Cleared
5 147 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
6 138 (2.46%) AWS Certification
7 132 (2.36%) Azure Certification
8 131 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
9 86 (1.53%) CISSP
10 85 (1.52%) Cisco Certification
11 76 (1.36%) Master's Degree
12 54 (0.96%) CCNP
13 47 (0.84%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 42 (0.75%) Microsoft Certification
15 41 (0.73%) PhD
16 34 (0.61%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 33 (0.59%) CISM
18 30 (0.54%) ISTQB
19 29 (0.52%) CCIE
20 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 574 (10.24%) Data Quality
2 263 (4.69%) QA
3 113 (2.02%) GDPR
4 103 (1.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 103 (1.84%) NIST
5 92 (1.64%) Accessibility
6 34 (0.61%) SLA
7 26 (0.46%) WCAG
8 24 (0.43%) NCSC
9 22 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
10 20 (0.36%) PCI DSS
10 20 (0.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
12 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
12 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
13 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
14 8 (0.14%) GRC
15 7 (0.12%) HL7
16 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 893 (15.93%) Docker
2 146 (2.60%) Active Directory
3 125 (2.23%) VMware Infrastructure
4 73 (1.30%) Virtual Machines
5 48 (0.86%) vSphere
6 40 (0.71%) Hyper-V
7 37 (0.66%) VMware NSX
8 31 (0.55%) Firmware
9 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.23%) KVM
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
13 10 (0.18%) SRDF
14 9 (0.16%) HDFS
14 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) PowerHA
16 4 (0.071%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 1,256 (22.41%) Terraform
2 1,066 (19.02%) Kubernetes
3 594 (10.60%) Ansible
4 344 (6.14%) Grafana
5 266 (4.75%) Prometheus
6 83 (1.48%) Puppet
7 74 (1.32%) Argo
8 57 (1.02%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Istio
10 35 (0.62%) vCenter Server
11 33 (0.59%) vRealize
12 27 (0.48%) Kibana
12 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
13 26 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 25 (0.45%) Nagios
15 21 (0.37%) Microsoft Intune
16 20 (0.36%) Control-M
17 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
18 18 (0.32%) NetBackup
18 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 644 (11.49%) Microsoft
2 562 (10.03%) Databricks
3 330 (5.89%) Google
4 243 (4.34%) Oracle
5 205 (3.66%) Splunk
6 174 (3.10%) VMware
7 146 (2.60%) OpenAI
8 135 (2.41%) Cisco
9 115 (2.05%) ServiceNow
10 103 (1.84%) Red Hat
11 94 (1.68%) Dynatrace
12 93 (1.66%) F5
13 87 (1.55%) Palo Alto
14 81 (1.45%) Informatica
15 80 (1.43%) IBM
16 70 (1.25%) Fortinet
17 64 (1.14%) CyberArk
18 63 (1.12%) Foundry
19 61 (1.09%) Salesforce
20 59 (1.05%) SAP