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

6 months to
16 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 4,761 3,950 4,159
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.80% 12.40% 9.76%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.60% 37.66% 32.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,203 2,612 2,889
10th Percentile £358 £380 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £685 £688
90th Percentile £749 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 95 62 118
10th Percentile £28.50 £20.23 £30.20
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.15 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £46.18 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.93% -23.03% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.26 £66.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.45 £77.25 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £60.00
% change year-on-year +10.89% -23.03% -7.69%

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 11,445 10,489 12,927
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.78% 32.92% 30.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,608 6,665 9,128
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -3.08%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -1.79% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 396 241 422
10th Percentile £37.01 £21.25 £35.05
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.75 £47.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% - -0.79%
75th Percentile £68.88 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.59% -3.46% -

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 16 January 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 16 January 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 16 January 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 0 4,045 £525 -8.70% 3,337
London 0 2,342 £550 -8.33% 993
UK excluding London 0 1,809 £500 -2.44% 2,907
Work from Home 0 1,440 £525 -4.55% 1,377
North of England +8 589 £478 -4.98% 539
South East +2 393 £481 -12.50% 1,040
Yorkshire +7 296 £500 -6.98% 205
Midlands +5 278 £503 +5.89% 307
Scotland +4 263 £473 -1.56% 144
North West +5 248 £450 -6.35% 245
West Midlands +14 234 £515 +3.00% 126
South West -8 177 £550 -9.09% 356
East of England +3 125 £525 +10.53% 394
North East +5 49 £488 -10.55% 93
East Midlands -20 44 £425 +6.25% 174
Wales -11 28 £523 +4.50% 123
Northern Ireland +1 21 £588 +11.90% 65

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
1 211 (4.43%) Apache Airflow
1 211 (4.43%) Apache Spark
2 156 (3.28%) Apache
3 155 (3.26%) Confluence
4 62 (1.30%) SAS
5 57 (1.20%) SharePoint
6 34 (0.71%) nginx
7 33 (0.69%) OpenStack
8 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
8 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
9 18 (0.38%) Appian
10 11 (0.23%) ArcGIS
11 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
12 7 (0.15%) IIS
13 6 (0.13%) Camunda
13 6 (0.13%) CMS
13 6 (0.13%) Luigi
13 6 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
14 4 (0.084%) Tomcat
15 3 (0.063%) Apache Superset
Applications
1 130 (2.73%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.71%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 15 (0.32%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 9 (0.19%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 3 (0.063%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.063%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.042%) Maya
10 2 (0.042%) NUKE
11 1 (0.021%) SPSS
11 1 (0.021%) Stata
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.34%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 3 (0.063%) Actimize
5 3 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 3 (0.063%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.042%) Bloomberg AIM
6 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.042%) Shopify
6 2 (0.042%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.021%) Cloudability
7 1 (0.021%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
7 1 (0.021%) Maximo
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,880 (39.49%) AWS
2 1,539 (32.33%) Azure
3 727 (15.27%) GCP
4 592 (12.43%) GitHub
5 511 (10.73%) Serverless
6 437 (9.18%) Power Platform
7 361 (7.58%) Amazon S3
8 348 (7.31%) AWS Lambda
9 316 (6.64%) GitHub Actions
10 311 (6.53%) Azure DevOps
11 242 (5.08%) AWS CloudFormation
12 238 (5.00%) Snowflake
13 215 (4.52%) Azure Data Factory
14 196 (4.12%) Amazon EC2
15 181 (3.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 176 (3.70%) Amazon ECS
17 167 (3.51%) Amazon EKS
18 140 (2.94%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 140 (2.94%) dbt
19 136 (2.86%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 236 (4.96%) Firewall
2 156 (3.28%) DNS
3 122 (2.56%) TCP/IP
4 116 (2.44%) Network Security
5 81 (1.70%) HTTP
6 78 (1.64%) VPN
7 69 (1.45%) BGP
8 66 (1.39%) SSL
9 48 (1.01%) WAN
10 42 (0.88%) OSPF
11 39 (0.82%) Wireshark
12 37 (0.78%) MPLS
13 34 (0.71%) Wireless
14 33 (0.69%) DHCP
15 32 (0.67%) LAN
15 32 (0.67%) SD-WAN
16 31 (0.65%) SSH
17 29 (0.61%) SMTP
18 24 (0.50%) FTP
19 23 (0.48%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 373 (7.83%) Power BI
2 370 (7.77%) PostgreSQL
3 281 (5.90%) Data Warehouse
4 229 (4.81%) NoSQL
5 228 (4.79%) Relational Database
6 222 (4.66%) Data Lake
7 168 (3.53%) SQL Server
8 160 (3.36%) Amazon RDS
9 156 (3.28%) Big Data
10 147 (3.09%) Tableau
11 125 (2.63%) MySQL
12 106 (2.23%) Metadata
13 100 (2.10%) BigQuery
14 96 (2.02%) Amazon Athena
14 96 (2.02%) MongoDB
15 93 (1.95%) Amazon Redshift
16 84 (1.76%) Hadoop
17 79 (1.66%) DynamoDB
18 77 (1.62%) Azure SQL Database
19 76 (1.60%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 604 (12.69%) Git
2 556 (11.68%) Jenkins
3 429 (9.01%) GitLab
4 276 (5.80%) JIRA
5 82 (1.72%) Selenium
6 75 (1.58%) MLflow
7 48 (1.01%) Cucumber
7 48 (1.01%) Sonatype Nexus
8 45 (0.95%) Bitbucket
9 42 (0.88%) Postman
10 40 (0.84%) JUnit
10 40 (0.84%) SonarQube
11 37 (0.78%) Liquibase
12 35 (0.74%) JMeter
13 28 (0.59%) CircleCI
13 28 (0.59%) Cypress.io
13 28 (0.59%) Maven
13 28 (0.59%) Visual Studio
14 27 (0.57%) Artifactory
15 24 (0.50%) Gradle
General
1 1,301 (27.33%) Social Skills
2 953 (20.02%) Finance
3 665 (13.97%) Analytical Skills
4 445 (9.35%) Public Sector
5 428 (8.99%) Banking
6 164 (3.44%) Front Office
7 140 (2.94%) Investment Banking
8 125 (2.63%) Documentation Skills
9 72 (1.51%) Financial Institution
10 68 (1.43%) Marketing
11 66 (1.39%) Pharmaceutical
12 61 (1.28%) Retail
13 57 (1.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 57 (1.20%) Telecoms
14 43 (0.90%) Legal
14 43 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
15 40 (0.84%) Manufacturing
16 32 (0.67%) Influencing Skills
17 29 (0.61%) Military
18 24 (0.50%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 818 (17.18%) Developer
2 670 (14.07%) Senior
3 619 (13.00%) Data Engineer
4 340 (7.14%) Python Developer
5 321 (6.74%) DevOps Engineer
6 316 (6.64%) Python Engineer
7 292 (6.13%) Analyst
8 281 (5.90%) Architect
9 278 (5.84%) AWS Engineer
10 239 (5.02%) Lead
11 237 (4.98%) Software Engineer
12 229 (4.81%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 179 (3.76%) Data Scientist
14 167 (3.51%) Platform Engineer
15 147 (3.09%) Data Analyst
16 145 (3.05%) Senior Developer
17 127 (2.67%) Azure Engineer
18 125 (2.63%) Senior Data Engineer
19 119 (2.50%) Full-Stack Developer
20 117 (2.46%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 419 (8.80%) REST
2 297 (6.24%) React
3 290 (6.09%) Kafka
4 268 (5.63%) PySpark
5 236 (4.96%) Node.js
6 222 (4.66%) RESTful
7 220 (4.62%) Pandas
8 216 (4.54%) FastAPI
9 191 (4.01%) PyTorch
10 168 (3.53%) NumPy
11 165 (3.47%) .NET
12 163 (3.42%) TensorFlow
13 133 (2.79%) AngularJS
14 120 (2.52%) LangChain
15 116 (2.44%) scikit-learn
16 113 (2.37%) Elastic Stack
17 109 (2.29%) pytest
18 107 (2.25%) LDAP
19 103 (2.16%) Flask
20 99 (2.08%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 403 (8.46%) Cloud Native
2 190 (3.99%) Algorithms
3 186 (3.91%) Distributed Systems
4 130 (2.73%) Product Ownership
5 126 (2.65%) Equities
6 124 (2.60%) Data Protection Act
7 109 (2.29%) Data Structures
8 97 (2.04%) AI Agents
8 97 (2.04%) Derivative
9 95 (2.00%) Onboarding
10 92 (1.93%) Enterprise Software
10 92 (1.93%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
11 87 (1.83%) Fixed Income
12 81 (1.70%) Public Cloud
13 80 (1.68%) Hedge funds
14 78 (1.64%) Security Posture
15 75 (1.58%) Data Centre
15 75 (1.58%) Hybrid Cloud
16 73 (1.53%) Legacy Systems
16 73 (1.53%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 788 (16.55%) Linux
2 359 (7.54%) Windows
3 235 (4.94%) Unix
4 91 (1.91%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.32%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.84%) Android
7 37 (0.78%) Ubuntu
8 36 (0.76%) VMS
9 29 (0.61%) CentOS
10 25 (0.53%) Solaris
11 24 (0.50%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.38%) Apple iOS
13 17 (0.36%) Amazon Linux
14 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
15 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
16 4 (0.084%) Debian
16 4 (0.084%) Robot Operating System
16 4 (0.084%) Windows 10
17 3 (0.063%) AIX
17 3 (0.063%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,650 (34.66%) CI/CD
2 1,340 (28.15%) DevOps
3 1,145 (24.05%) Agile
4 1,034 (21.72%) Problem-Solving
5 951 (19.97%) AI
6 860 (18.06%) Infrastructure as Code
7 822 (17.27%) Analytics
8 741 (15.56%) Machine Learning
9 717 (15.06%) Containerisation
10 691 (14.51%) Data Pipeline
11 566 (11.89%) ETL
12 558 (11.72%) Data Engineering
13 552 (11.59%) Data Science
14 550 (11.55%) Software Engineering
15 548 (11.51%) Data Modelling
16 513 (10.78%) Test Automation
17 427 (8.97%) Business Intelligence
18 392 (8.23%) Observability
19 367 (7.71%) LLM
20 366 (7.69%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,456 (30.58%) SQL
2 760 (15.96%) Java
3 652 (13.69%) PowerShell
4 618 (12.98%) Bash
5 488 (10.25%) JavaScript
6 287 (6.03%) TypeScript
7 286 (6.01%) C#
8 258 (5.42%) Go
9 213 (4.47%) C++
10 167 (3.51%) Perl
11 163 (3.42%) R
12 154 (3.23%) Shell Script
13 107 (2.25%) Scala
14 95 (2.00%) Ruby
15 60 (1.26%) Bicep
16 58 (1.22%) Kusto Query Language
17 56 (1.18%) C
18 53 (1.11%) VBA
19 45 (0.95%) PHP
20 38 (0.80%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,046 (21.97%) Security Cleared
2 848 (17.81%) SC Cleared
3 439 (9.22%) Degree
4 236 (4.96%) Computer Science Degree
5 143 (3.00%) DV Cleared
6 134 (2.81%) AWS Certification
7 120 (2.52%) Master's Degree
8 86 (1.81%) BPSS Clearance
9 85 (1.79%) Azure Certification
10 82 (1.72%) CISSP
11 78 (1.64%) Cisco Certification
12 72 (1.51%) MCP
13 49 (1.03%) CCNP
14 47 (0.99%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 43 (0.90%) PhD
16 36 (0.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 36 (0.76%) CCIE
17 34 (0.71%) CEH
17 34 (0.71%) CISM
18 33 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 384 (8.07%) Data Quality
2 177 (3.72%) QA
3 163 (3.42%) GDPR
4 91 (1.91%) NIST
5 89 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 59 (1.24%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.71%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 27 (0.57%) HIPAA
10 24 (0.50%) SLA
11 22 (0.46%) NCSC
12 18 (0.38%) SOC 2
13 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
14 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
14 9 (0.19%) MiFID
15 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
15 8 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
15 8 (0.17%) EMIR
15 8 (0.17%) PMO
15 8 (0.17%) WCAG
System Software
1 952 (20.00%) Docker
2 189 (3.97%) Active Directory
3 110 (2.31%) VMware Infrastructure
4 36 (0.76%) VMware NSX
5 35 (0.74%) vSphere
6 33 (0.69%) Virtual Machines
7 23 (0.48%) Firmware
8 20 (0.42%) HDFS
8 20 (0.42%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.36%) KVM
10 15 (0.32%) Squid
11 14 (0.29%) DFS Replication
11 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.27%) Postfix
13 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) Dovecot
15 9 (0.19%) GPFS
16 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
16 8 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,076 (22.60%) Terraform
2 1,011 (21.24%) Kubernetes
3 599 (12.58%) Ansible
4 348 (7.31%) Grafana
5 291 (6.11%) Prometheus
6 86 (1.81%) Argo
7 81 (1.70%) Puppet
8 53 (1.11%) Kibana
9 45 (0.95%) vRealize
10 42 (0.88%) Istio
11 35 (0.74%) Single Sign-On
12 33 (0.69%) Nessus
13 31 (0.65%) Progress Chef
14 29 (0.61%) NetBackup
15 19 (0.40%) ITRS Geneos
16 18 (0.38%) logstash
17 17 (0.36%) Nmap
18 16 (0.34%) QRadar
18 16 (0.34%) Rancher
18 16 (0.34%) SCCM
Vendors
1 567 (11.91%) Microsoft
2 440 (9.24%) Databricks
3 283 (5.94%) Google
4 249 (5.23%) Splunk
5 232 (4.87%) Oracle
6 212 (4.45%) VMware
7 137 (2.88%) Red Hat
8 122 (2.56%) ServiceNow
9 119 (2.50%) Cisco
10 102 (2.14%) OpenAI
11 93 (1.95%) CyberArk
12 84 (1.76%) F5
13 78 (1.64%) Palo Alto
14 69 (1.45%) Foundry
15 68 (1.43%) BeyondTrust
16 51 (1.07%) SAP
17 44 (0.92%) Atlassian
18 43 (0.90%) Dynatrace
19 39 (0.82%) CrowdStrike
19 39 (0.82%) Salesforce