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

6 months to
9 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,718 4,226 4,152
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.89% 13.08% 9.57%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.35% 39.10% 31.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,759 2,869 2,995
10th Percentile £363 £364 £375
25th Percentile £425 £440 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £555
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -3.15% -7.50%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £700
90th Percentile £738 £800 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £506
% change year-on-year - -1.09% -3.71%
Number of hourly rates quoted 126 66 124
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.91
25th Percentile £41.56 £33.91 £35.94
Median hourly rate £53.25 £45.00 £62.25
Median % change year-on-year +18.33% -27.71% -4.23%
75th Percentile £69.50 £55.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £86.50 £63.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +11.48%

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 14,171 10,809 13,339
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.00% 33.46% 30.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,218 7,288 9,392
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £610 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.58% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 542 260 532
10th Percentile £34.01 £27.36 £31.25
25th Percentile £52.69 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.45 £77.62 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +4.00%

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 9 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 9 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 9 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 -2 4,774 £525 -4.55% 2,500
London -3 2,744 £550 -4.35% 1,246
UK excluding London -2 2,252 £500 - 1,676
Work from Home -3 1,605 £525 -4.55% 998
North of England +7 794 £488 +2.09% 386
South East -7 450 £530 +5.90% 555
Yorkshire +1 432 £500 +1.46% 118
Scotland +3 323 £439 -7.63% 78
North West +7 285 £500 +5.26% 205
South West -3 273 £500 -9.09% 230
Midlands -15 256 £477 +4.89% 195
West Midlands -15 205 £476 +0.21% 98
East of England -15 133 £500 -0.50% 181
North East +9 89 £425 -2.86% 67
East Midlands -8 50 £495 +10.74% 96
Wales -12 33 £490 +7.69% 35
Northern Ireland +15 28 £369 -37.23% 42

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
1 287 (5.02%) Apache Spark
2 262 (4.58%) Apache Airflow
3 204 (3.57%) Apache
4 184 (3.22%) Confluence
5 53 (0.93%) Jupyter
6 52 (0.91%) SAS
7 49 (0.86%) SharePoint
8 26 (0.45%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.42%) nginx
10 20 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.31%) ArcGIS
12 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.21%) IIS
14 11 (0.19%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
15 8 (0.14%) CMS
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.10%) Camunda
17 6 (0.10%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.087%) Appian
Applications
1 121 (2.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.54%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
4 26 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 24 (0.42%) MS Visio
6 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
7 14 (0.24%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.052%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.017%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.017%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.017%) Simulink
9 1 (0.017%) SPSS
9 1 (0.017%) Weka
9 1 (0.017%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.10%) Fidessa
6 6 (0.10%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.087%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.087%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.087%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.052%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.052%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.052%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.035%) Global One
10 2 (0.035%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.035%) Remedy AR System
Cloud Services
1 2,114 (36.97%) AWS
2 1,907 (33.35%) Azure
3 839 (14.67%) GCP
4 689 (12.05%) GitHub
5 531 (9.29%) Power Platform
6 483 (8.45%) Serverless
7 426 (7.45%) Amazon S3
8 403 (7.05%) Azure DevOps
9 380 (6.65%) GitHub Actions
10 362 (6.33%) AWS Lambda
11 287 (5.02%) Snowflake
12 243 (4.25%) Azure Data Factory
13 211 (3.69%) dbt
14 185 (3.24%) AWS CloudFormation
15 176 (3.08%) Amazon EKS
16 173 (3.03%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 161 (2.82%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 159 (2.78%) OpenShift
19 137 (2.40%) Amazon EC2
20 127 (2.22%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 250 (4.37%) Firewall
2 176 (3.08%) DNS
3 125 (2.19%) Network Security
4 122 (2.13%) BGP
5 118 (2.06%) WAN
6 114 (1.99%) TCP/IP
7 102 (1.78%) VPN
8 77 (1.35%) OSPF
9 58 (1.01%) BIG-IP
10 57 (1.00%) SD-WAN
11 56 (0.98%) DHCP
12 55 (0.96%) HTTP
12 55 (0.96%) SAN
13 52 (0.91%) VLAN
14 51 (0.89%) VXLAN
15 47 (0.82%) SSL
16 45 (0.79%) LAN
17 43 (0.75%) MPLS
18 41 (0.72%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 41 (0.72%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 468 (8.18%) Power BI
2 361 (6.31%) PostgreSQL
3 316 (5.53%) Data Warehouse
4 248 (4.34%) SQL Server
5 208 (3.64%) Data Lake
6 204 (3.57%) Tableau
7 195 (3.41%) Relational Database
8 176 (3.08%) Metadata
9 165 (2.89%) NoSQL
10 164 (2.87%) Big Data
11 143 (2.50%) BigQuery
12 140 (2.45%) Amazon Athena
12 140 (2.45%) Amazon Redshift
13 130 (2.27%) Delta Lake
14 127 (2.22%) MongoDB
15 106 (1.85%) Amazon RDS
16 104 (1.82%) DynamoDB
17 95 (1.66%) MySQL
18 77 (1.35%) Snowflake Schema
19 75 (1.31%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 691 (12.08%) Git
2 510 (8.92%) Jenkins
3 405 (7.08%) GitLab
4 325 (5.68%) JIRA
5 84 (1.47%) Selenium
6 72 (1.26%) MLflow
7 60 (1.05%) Postman
8 43 (0.75%) JMeter
9 41 (0.72%) Bitbucket
10 36 (0.63%) Cypress.io
11 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
11 33 (0.58%) SonarQube
12 32 (0.56%) Artifactory
13 31 (0.54%) REST Assured
14 30 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
15 28 (0.49%) Gatling
15 28 (0.49%) JUnit
15 28 (0.49%) Maven
16 26 (0.45%) Claude Code
17 19 (0.33%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,241 (21.70%) Social Skills
2 1,185 (20.72%) Finance
3 767 (13.41%) Analytical Skills
4 553 (9.67%) Public Sector
5 428 (7.49%) Banking
6 203 (3.55%) Front Office
7 136 (2.38%) Documentation Skills
8 131 (2.29%) Investment Banking
9 111 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 89 (1.56%) Retail
11 81 (1.42%) Marketing
12 63 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
13 62 (1.08%) Telecoms
14 60 (1.05%) Legal
15 49 (0.86%) Financial Institution
16 46 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
16 46 (0.80%) Publishing
17 45 (0.79%) Military
18 36 (0.63%) Manufacturing
19 32 (0.56%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,013 (17.72%) Developer
2 880 (15.39%) Data Engineer
3 876 (15.32%) Senior
4 535 (9.36%) Python Developer
5 416 (7.28%) Lead
6 384 (6.72%) Python Engineer
7 324 (5.67%) DevOps Engineer
8 312 (5.46%) Architect
9 305 (5.33%) Software Engineer
10 284 (4.97%) Analyst
11 257 (4.49%) AWS Engineer
12 246 (4.30%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 226 (3.95%) Data Scientist
14 181 (3.17%) Platform Engineer
15 178 (3.11%) Senior Data Engineer
16 177 (3.10%) Azure Engineer
17 175 (3.06%) Senior Developer
18 173 (3.03%) Cloud Engineer
19 143 (2.50%) Data Analyst
20 139 (2.43%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 413 (7.22%) REST
2 378 (6.61%) PySpark
3 368 (6.44%) React
4 349 (6.10%) Kafka
5 248 (4.34%) .NET
6 220 (3.85%) Node.js
7 214 (3.74%) RESTful
8 210 (3.67%) FastAPI
9 200 (3.50%) Pandas
10 194 (3.39%) JSON
11 175 (3.06%) Django
12 163 (2.85%) PyTorch
13 137 (2.40%) LangChain
14 123 (2.15%) NumPy
15 119 (2.08%) Flask
16 113 (1.98%) scikit-learn
17 110 (1.92%) TensorFlow
18 108 (1.89%) OAuth
19 102 (1.78%) pytest
20 100 (1.75%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 750 (13.12%) Cloud Native
2 307 (5.37%) Distributed Systems
3 175 (3.06%) Onboarding
4 170 (2.97%) AI Agents
5 157 (2.75%) Data Centre
6 149 (2.61%) Product Ownership
7 148 (2.59%) Algorithms
8 126 (2.20%) Legacy Systems
9 125 (2.19%) Data Structures
10 120 (2.10%) Data Protection Act
11 115 (2.01%) Management Information System
12 112 (1.96%) Derivative
13 109 (1.91%) Hybrid Cloud
14 103 (1.80%) Fixed Income
15 98 (1.71%) Equities
16 79 (1.38%) Security Posture
17 75 (1.31%) Public Cloud
18 63 (1.10%) Self-Motivation
19 62 (1.08%) Enterprise Software
20 60 (1.05%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 674 (11.79%) Linux
2 320 (5.60%) Windows
3 225 (3.93%) Unix
4 123 (2.15%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 77 (1.35%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.70%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.56%) VMS
8 26 (0.45%) AIX
9 23 (0.40%) Android
10 19 (0.33%) Solaris
11 17 (0.30%) Apple iOS
12 14 (0.24%) CentOS
12 14 (0.24%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 10 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.12%) Debian
15 7 (0.12%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.12%) Rocky
16 6 (0.10%) Amazon Linux
17 5 (0.087%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,173 (38.00%) CI/CD
2 1,568 (27.42%) DevOps
3 1,387 (24.26%) AI
4 1,274 (22.28%) Agile
5 1,145 (20.02%) Analytics
6 1,060 (18.54%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,017 (17.79%) Data Pipeline
8 942 (16.47%) Problem-Solving
9 901 (15.76%) Machine Learning
10 813 (14.22%) Data Engineering
11 787 (13.76%) Software Engineering
12 778 (13.61%) Containerisation
13 752 (13.15%) Data Modelling
14 705 (12.33%) ETL
15 642 (11.23%) Data Science
15 642 (11.23%) Observability
16 591 (10.34%) Test Automation
17 550 (9.62%) Business Intelligence
18 528 (9.23%) LLM
19 500 (8.74%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,843 (32.23%) SQL
2 821 (14.36%) Java
3 682 (11.93%) Bash
4 668 (11.68%) PowerShell
5 461 (8.06%) JavaScript
6 405 (7.08%) TypeScript
7 339 (5.93%) C#
8 222 (3.88%) Go
9 164 (2.87%) R
10 141 (2.47%) C++
11 135 (2.36%) Scala
12 122 (2.13%) Shell Script
13 90 (1.57%) Bicep
14 74 (1.29%) Perl
15 59 (1.03%) Ruby
16 57 (1.00%) PL/SQL
17 56 (0.98%) C
17 56 (0.98%) Groovy
18 52 (0.91%) Rust
19 51 (0.89%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,280 (22.39%) Security Cleared
2 1,027 (17.96%) SC Cleared
3 434 (7.59%) Degree
4 184 (3.22%) DV Cleared
5 165 (2.89%) Computer Science Degree
6 142 (2.48%) BPSS Clearance
7 121 (2.12%) AWS Certification
8 116 (2.03%) Azure Certification
9 96 (1.68%) CISSP
10 88 (1.54%) Cisco Certification
11 84 (1.47%) Master's Degree
12 57 (1.00%) CCNP
13 51 (0.89%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 38 (0.66%) CISM
15 37 (0.65%) PhD
16 34 (0.59%) Microsoft Certification
17 33 (0.58%) ISTQB
18 32 (0.56%) CCIE
19 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
20 22 (0.38%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 558 (9.76%) Data Quality
2 250 (4.37%) QA
3 130 (2.27%) GDPR
4 114 (1.99%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 114 (1.99%) NIST
5 90 (1.57%) Accessibility
6 35 (0.61%) SLA
7 25 (0.44%) PCI DSS
7 25 (0.44%) WCAG
8 24 (0.42%) HIPAA
9 21 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 20 (0.35%) NCSC
11 19 (0.33%) Actionable Recommendations
12 15 (0.26%) SOC 2
13 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.17%) GRC
14 10 (0.17%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 887 (15.51%) Docker
2 127 (2.22%) Active Directory
3 116 (2.03%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 43 (0.75%) vSphere
6 40 (0.70%) VMware NSX
7 35 (0.61%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.52%) Firmware
9 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.33%) NFS
11 15 (0.26%) KVM
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 10 (0.17%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) Ceph
15 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
16 8 (0.14%) HDFS
17 7 (0.12%) Postfix
18 5 (0.087%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
19 4 (0.070%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,236 (21.62%) Terraform
2 1,055 (18.45%) Kubernetes
3 596 (10.42%) Ansible
4 354 (6.19%) Grafana
5 281 (4.91%) Prometheus
6 75 (1.31%) Puppet
7 68 (1.19%) Argo
8 44 (0.77%) Istio
8 44 (0.77%) Progress Chef
9 42 (0.73%) vRealize
10 37 (0.65%) vCenter Server
11 32 (0.56%) Kibana
12 27 (0.47%) Control-M
12 27 (0.47%) ZABBIX
13 26 (0.45%) Nagios
13 26 (0.45%) Nessus
14 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
15 22 (0.38%) Single Sign-On
16 21 (0.37%) HAProxy
17 20 (0.35%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 651 (11.39%) Microsoft
2 581 (10.16%) Databricks
3 327 (5.72%) Google
4 259 (4.53%) Oracle
5 217 (3.80%) Splunk
6 174 (3.04%) VMware
7 143 (2.50%) OpenAI
8 142 (2.48%) Cisco
9 117 (2.05%) ServiceNow
10 107 (1.87%) Red Hat
11 93 (1.63%) F5
12 90 (1.57%) Palo Alto
13 85 (1.49%) Dynatrace
14 83 (1.45%) Informatica
15 80 (1.40%) IBM
16 67 (1.17%) Fortinet
17 63 (1.10%) CyberArk
18 62 (1.08%) Foundry
19 55 (0.96%) SAP
20 54 (0.94%) Salesforce