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

6 months to
2 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,298 3,814 4,045
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.86% 13.18% 9.39%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.42% 38.58% 31.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,505 2,661 2,908
10th Percentile £363 £380 £381
25th Percentile £425 £449 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £522 £540 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% -1.82% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
90th Percentile £741 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -2.50% -2.15% -6.15%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 49 111
10th Percentile £29.40 £25.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.50 £40.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +36.25% -33.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £71.86 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £84.25 £65.60 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -30.77% +9.66%

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 13,106 9,887 12,939
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.87% 34.17% 30.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,565 6,726 9,176
10th Percentile £358 £358 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £514 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.72% -2.10% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £626 £650
90th Percentile £713 £758 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.32% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 560 226 522
10th Percentile £36.25 £27.00 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.94 £34.05 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -7.26% -0.80%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.78 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +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 2 June 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 2 June 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 2 June 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 4,408 £525 -4.55% 3,457
London -3 2,529 £550 -4.35% 1,866
UK excluding London -1 2,055 £488 -2.50% 2,073
Work from Home -1 1,499 £525 -4.55% 1,870
North of England +11 749 £481 -1.28% 449
Yorkshire +2 421 £488 -2.50% 115
South East -6 389 £525 +5.00% 670
Scotland +2 301 £440 -7.37% 113
North West +3 257 £490 +3.16% 250
South West -1 246 £500 -13.04% 275
Midlands -15 232 £482 +7.11% 201
West Midlands -13 179 £481 +6.94% 97
East of England -11 127 £500 - 272
North East +5 81 £475 +5.56% 87
East Midlands -16 52 £495 +13.53% 103
Wales -7 27 £450 -10.00% 45
Northern Ireland +15 25 £446 -24.04% 70

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 (5.32%) Apache Spark
2 230 (4.34%) Apache Airflow
3 185 (3.49%) Apache
4 150 (2.83%) Confluence
5 45 (0.85%) Jupyter
6 43 (0.81%) SAS
7 42 (0.79%) SharePoint
8 22 (0.42%) nginx
9 21 (0.40%) OpenStack
10 16 (0.30%) ArcGIS
10 16 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
10 16 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
11 13 (0.25%) IIS
12 10 (0.19%) Appian
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.13%) Camunda
14 7 (0.13%) CICS
14 7 (0.13%) CMS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 118 (2.23%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.53%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.42%) Microsoft Office
3 22 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 21 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.36%) MS Visio
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.019%) SPSS
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
9 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.43%) Aladdin
2 18 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.094%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.057%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.057%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.057%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,988 (37.52%) AWS
2 1,763 (33.28%) Azure
3 771 (14.55%) GCP
4 643 (12.14%) GitHub
5 510 (9.63%) Power Platform
6 454 (8.57%) Serverless
7 379 (7.15%) Azure DevOps
8 368 (6.95%) Amazon S3
9 345 (6.51%) GitHub Actions
10 327 (6.17%) AWS Lambda
11 256 (4.83%) Azure Data Factory
12 250 (4.72%) Snowflake
13 174 (3.28%) AWS CloudFormation
13 174 (3.28%) dbt
14 172 (3.25%) OpenShift
15 163 (3.08%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 155 (2.93%) Amazon EKS
17 144 (2.72%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 125 (2.36%) Amazon EC2
19 118 (2.23%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 204 (3.85%) Firewall
2 153 (2.89%) DNS
3 115 (2.17%) Network Security
4 94 (1.77%) WAN
5 90 (1.70%) BGP
6 89 (1.68%) TCP/IP
7 77 (1.45%) VPN
8 61 (1.15%) HTTP
8 61 (1.15%) OSPF
9 57 (1.08%) SAN
10 52 (0.98%) BIG-IP
11 47 (0.89%) SSL
12 45 (0.85%) SD-WAN
12 45 (0.85%) VXLAN
13 38 (0.72%) VLAN
14 36 (0.68%) DHCP
15 35 (0.66%) LAN
15 35 (0.66%) SNMP
16 34 (0.64%) Ethernet VPN
16 34 (0.64%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 444 (8.38%) Power BI
2 333 (6.29%) PostgreSQL
3 275 (5.19%) Data Warehouse
4 260 (4.91%) SQL Server
5 230 (4.34%) Data Lake
6 193 (3.64%) Tableau
7 182 (3.44%) Relational Database
8 172 (3.25%) NoSQL
9 162 (3.06%) Big Data
10 157 (2.96%) Metadata
11 135 (2.55%) Delta Lake
12 134 (2.53%) BigQuery
13 122 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
14 112 (2.11%) MongoDB
15 108 (2.04%) Amazon Redshift
16 93 (1.76%) DynamoDB
17 87 (1.64%) MySQL
18 86 (1.62%) Amazon RDS
19 76 (1.43%) Azure SQL Database
20 75 (1.42%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 632 (11.93%) Git
2 484 (9.14%) Jenkins
3 378 (7.13%) GitLab
4 273 (5.15%) JIRA
5 77 (1.45%) MLflow
5 77 (1.45%) Selenium
6 62 (1.17%) Postman
7 37 (0.70%) Cucumber
8 36 (0.68%) JMeter
9 33 (0.62%) Cypress.io
10 32 (0.60%) Artifactory
11 30 (0.57%) Bitbucket
12 29 (0.55%) SonarQube
13 26 (0.49%) JUnit
13 26 (0.49%) Sonatype Nexus
14 25 (0.47%) REST Assured
15 23 (0.43%) Maven
16 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
17 20 (0.38%) Gatling
18 19 (0.36%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,146 (21.63%) Social Skills
2 1,060 (20.01%) Finance
3 709 (13.38%) Analytical Skills
4 474 (8.95%) Public Sector
5 380 (7.17%) Banking
6 189 (3.57%) Front Office
7 131 (2.47%) Documentation Skills
8 120 (2.27%) Investment Banking
9 85 (1.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 75 (1.42%) Marketing
11 60 (1.13%) Pharmaceutical
11 60 (1.13%) Retail
12 53 (1.00%) Legal
13 46 (0.87%) Telecoms
14 44 (0.83%) Influencing Skills
15 37 (0.70%) Financial Institution
15 37 (0.70%) Publishing
16 34 (0.64%) Manufacturing
17 30 (0.57%) Military
18 29 (0.55%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 960 (18.12%) Developer
2 816 (15.40%) Data Engineer
3 776 (14.65%) Senior
4 496 (9.36%) Python Developer
5 342 (6.46%) Lead
6 332 (6.27%) Architect
7 330 (6.23%) Python Engineer
8 288 (5.44%) DevOps Engineer
9 276 (5.21%) Analyst
10 268 (5.06%) Software Engineer
11 236 (4.45%) AWS Engineer
12 220 (4.15%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 208 (3.93%) Data Scientist
14 165 (3.11%) Senior Developer
15 159 (3.00%) Senior Data Engineer
16 156 (2.94%) Azure Engineer
17 151 (2.85%) Platform Engineer
18 149 (2.81%) Full-Stack Developer
19 147 (2.77%) Data Analyst
20 138 (2.60%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 404 (7.63%) REST
2 369 (6.96%) React
3 357 (6.74%) PySpark
4 315 (5.95%) Kafka
5 233 (4.40%) .NET
6 221 (4.17%) Node.js
7 213 (4.02%) Pandas
8 186 (3.51%) FastAPI
9 185 (3.49%) RESTful
10 177 (3.34%) JSON
11 168 (3.17%) PyTorch
12 136 (2.57%) Django
13 127 (2.40%) Flask
14 126 (2.38%) NumPy
15 119 (2.25%) TensorFlow
16 115 (2.17%) LangChain
17 114 (2.15%) scikit-learn
18 112 (2.11%) AngularJS
19 101 (1.91%) HTML
19 101 (1.91%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 603 (11.38%) Cloud Native
2 239 (4.51%) Distributed Systems
3 147 (2.77%) Algorithms
4 138 (2.60%) Data Centre
5 136 (2.57%) Product Ownership
6 130 (2.45%) Onboarding
7 128 (2.42%) AI Agents
8 119 (2.25%) Data Structures
9 118 (2.23%) Data Protection Act
10 114 (2.15%) Derivative
11 109 (2.06%) Management Information System
12 106 (2.00%) Legacy Systems
13 105 (1.98%) Equities
14 97 (1.83%) Fixed Income
15 94 (1.77%) Security Posture
16 90 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
17 89 (1.68%) Enterprise Software
18 70 (1.32%) Public Cloud
19 55 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
20 50 (0.94%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 627 (11.83%) Linux
2 300 (5.66%) Windows
3 214 (4.04%) Unix
4 114 (2.15%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 76 (1.43%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.79%) Ubuntu
7 31 (0.59%) VMS
8 26 (0.49%) AIX
9 24 (0.45%) Android
10 23 (0.43%) Solaris
11 20 (0.38%) CentOS
12 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
13 16 (0.30%) Mac OS
14 13 (0.25%) zOS
15 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
16 8 (0.15%) Debian
17 7 (0.13%) Rocky
18 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
19 5 (0.094%) Amazon Linux
20 4 (0.076%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,981 (37.39%) CI/CD
2 1,443 (27.24%) DevOps
3 1,229 (23.20%) AI
4 1,137 (21.46%) Agile
5 1,036 (19.55%) Analytics
6 935 (17.65%) Infrastructure as Code
7 919 (17.35%) Problem-Solving
8 905 (17.08%) Data Pipeline
9 817 (15.42%) Machine Learning
10 708 (13.36%) Data Engineering
11 707 (13.34%) Data Modelling
12 695 (13.12%) Containerisation
13 691 (13.04%) ETL
14 647 (12.21%) Software Engineering
15 581 (10.97%) Data Science
16 562 (10.61%) Observability
17 533 (10.06%) Test Automation
18 510 (9.63%) Business Intelligence
19 466 (8.80%) LLM
20 439 (8.29%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,753 (33.09%) SQL
2 766 (14.46%) Java
3 663 (12.51%) PowerShell
4 596 (11.25%) Bash
5 470 (8.87%) JavaScript
6 355 (6.70%) TypeScript
7 335 (6.32%) C#
8 201 (3.79%) Go
9 158 (2.98%) R
10 149 (2.81%) C++
11 128 (2.42%) Scala
12 105 (1.98%) Shell Script
13 80 (1.51%) Bicep
14 78 (1.47%) Perl
15 71 (1.34%) Ruby
16 58 (1.09%) PL/SQL
17 57 (1.08%) T-SQL
18 55 (1.04%) C
19 52 (0.98%) Groovy
20 49 (0.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,185 (22.37%) Security Cleared
2 957 (18.06%) SC Cleared
3 392 (7.40%) Degree
4 160 (3.02%) Computer Science Degree
5 150 (2.83%) DV Cleared
6 122 (2.30%) BPSS Clearance
7 109 (2.06%) Azure Certification
8 99 (1.87%) AWS Certification
9 93 (1.76%) CISSP
10 75 (1.42%) Master's Degree
11 70 (1.32%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (1.02%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.92%) CCNP
14 41 (0.77%) CISM
15 36 (0.68%) PhD
16 33 (0.62%) ISTQB
17 27 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 25 (0.47%) Microsoft Certification
19 21 (0.40%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 21 (0.40%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 519 (9.80%) Data Quality
2 235 (4.44%) QA
3 140 (2.64%) GDPR
4 99 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 97 (1.83%) NIST
6 78 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 37 (0.70%) SLA
8 27 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.49%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.45%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
12 16 (0.30%) WCAG
13 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.25%) NCSC
15 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
18 7 (0.13%) Disclosure Scotland
19 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 793 (14.97%) Docker
2 149 (2.81%) Active Directory
3 99 (1.87%) VMware Infrastructure
4 76 (1.43%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.74%) vSphere
6 38 (0.72%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.62%) Firmware
8 31 (0.59%) Hyper-V
9 19 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
10 17 (0.32%) KVM
10 17 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.25%) Squid
12 12 (0.23%) HDFS
13 10 (0.19%) Ceph
13 10 (0.19%) SRDF
14 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
17 4 (0.076%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
17 4 (0.076%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,101 (20.78%) Terraform
2 952 (17.97%) Kubernetes
3 551 (10.40%) Ansible
4 332 (6.27%) Grafana
5 278 (5.25%) Prometheus
6 72 (1.36%) Puppet
7 57 (1.08%) Argo
8 51 (0.96%) Istio
9 45 (0.85%) vRealize
10 39 (0.74%) Progress Chef
11 35 (0.66%) Kibana
12 33 (0.62%) vCenter Server
13 27 (0.51%) Single Sign-On
14 26 (0.49%) Nessus
15 25 (0.47%) Nagios
16 24 (0.45%) Control-M
16 24 (0.45%) ZABBIX
17 23 (0.43%) NetBackup
18 21 (0.40%) HAProxy
19 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 587 (11.08%) Microsoft
2 563 (10.63%) Databricks
3 283 (5.34%) Google
4 243 (4.59%) Oracle
5 218 (4.11%) Splunk
6 174 (3.28%) VMware
7 134 (2.53%) Red Hat
8 125 (2.36%) OpenAI
9 117 (2.21%) Cisco
10 96 (1.81%) ServiceNow
11 85 (1.60%) CyberArk
12 81 (1.53%) F5
13 76 (1.43%) BeyondTrust
13 76 (1.43%) Dynatrace
13 76 (1.43%) Palo Alto
14 70 (1.32%) IBM
15 66 (1.25%) Informatica
16 51 (0.96%) Foundry
17 48 (0.91%) SAP
18 45 (0.85%) Arista