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

6 months to
9 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,104 3,993 4,119
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.09% 13.42% 9.21%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.97% 39.22% 31.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,465 2,728 2,890
10th Percentile £363 £380 £400
25th Percentile £415 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £749 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £520
% change year-on-year -2.50% -3.85% -5.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 102 52 114
10th Percentile £28.09 £20.23 £21.39
25th Percentile £41.94 £22.88 £36.56
Median hourly rate £54.25 £43.50 £51.50
Median % change year-on-year +24.71% -15.53% -20.77%
75th Percentile £69.69 £64.06 £67.38
90th Percentile £79.30 £75.00 £74.83
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.75 £47.50
% change year-on-year +5.05% +2.63% -26.92%

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 12,458 10,182 13,018
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.50% 34.22% 29.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,305 6,707 9,167
10th Percentile £353 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -6.17%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £719 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £488 £488
% change year-on-year -2.36% - -3.47%
Number of hourly rates quoted 482 244 513
10th Percentile £41.94 £21.25 £30.75
25th Percentile £54.14 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £68.75
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.00
% change year-on-year +1.97% +2.81% -4.62%

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 March 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 March 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 March 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 -1 4,255 £520 -9.57% 3,428
London -2 2,400 £550 -8.33% 1,404
UK excluding London -1 1,982 £488 -2.50% 2,700
Work from Home 0 1,560 £525 -4.55% 1,621
North of England +10 659 £481 -3.75% 552
South East -6 419 £500 -6.50% 880
Yorkshire +4 352 £485 -5.46% 221
Scotland +2 286 £425 -9.57% 178
Midlands -4 283 £500 +3.41% 295
North West +14 263 £478 -4.50% 256
West Midlands -2 231 £500 - 140
South West -2 217 £538 -6.52% 350
East of England -7 124 £500 +0.50% 372
East Midlands -14 51 £447 +5.18% 151
North East +10 50 £488 -7.14% 82
Wales -14 31 £473 -7.80% 93
Northern Ireland +8 29 £613 +16.67% 29

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
1 257 (5.04%) Apache Spark
2 194 (3.80%) Apache Airflow
3 160 (3.13%) Confluence
4 148 (2.90%) Apache
5 67 (1.31%) SAS
6 62 (1.21%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
8 24 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.47%) nginx
8 24 (0.47%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
10 19 (0.37%) Appian
11 12 (0.24%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.18%) Camunda
13 6 (0.12%) CMS
14 5 (0.098%) Apache Superset
14 5 (0.098%) Tomcat
15 4 (0.078%) Oracle Application Server
16 3 (0.059%) CICS
16 3 (0.059%) WebLogic
Applications
1 125 (2.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.61%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.27%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 3 (0.059%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.039%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 24 (0.47%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.24%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
4 7 (0.14%) SAP S/4HANA
5 4 (0.078%) Bloomberg AIM
5 4 (0.078%) Oracle EBS
6 3 (0.059%) Actimize
6 3 (0.059%) BambooHR
6 3 (0.059%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.039%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.039%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.039%) Shopify
8 1 (0.020%) NetSuite
8 1 (0.020%) Oracle Applications
8 1 (0.020%) RMDS
8 1 (0.020%) SimCorp Dimension
8 1 (0.020%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 1,998 (39.15%) AWS
2 1,765 (34.58%) Azure
3 805 (15.77%) GCP
4 667 (13.07%) GitHub
5 537 (10.52%) Serverless
6 490 (9.60%) Power Platform
7 371 (7.27%) Azure DevOps
8 356 (6.97%) Amazon S3
9 354 (6.94%) AWS Lambda
10 332 (6.50%) GitHub Actions
11 258 (5.05%) Azure Data Factory
12 257 (5.04%) AWS CloudFormation
12 257 (5.04%) Snowflake
13 195 (3.82%) Amazon EKS
14 174 (3.41%) OpenShift
15 172 (3.37%) Amazon ECS
16 160 (3.13%) Amazon EC2
17 159 (3.12%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 150 (2.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 146 (2.86%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 214 (4.19%) Firewall
2 139 (2.72%) DNS
3 107 (2.10%) Network Security
3 107 (2.10%) TCP/IP
4 75 (1.47%) VPN
5 65 (1.27%) HTTP
6 61 (1.20%) BGP
7 55 (1.08%) WAN
8 40 (0.78%) SAN
8 40 (0.78%) SSL
9 39 (0.76%) Wireshark
10 38 (0.74%) MPLS
11 34 (0.67%) OSPF
12 33 (0.65%) DHCP
13 32 (0.63%) LAN
14 31 (0.61%) SD-WAN
15 28 (0.55%) VLAN
16 23 (0.45%) Wireless
17 22 (0.43%) BIG-IP
17 22 (0.43%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 408 (7.99%) Power BI
2 399 (7.82%) PostgreSQL
3 316 (6.19%) Data Warehouse
4 236 (4.62%) Data Lake
5 227 (4.45%) NoSQL
6 196 (3.84%) Relational Database
7 192 (3.76%) SQL Server
8 162 (3.17%) Tableau
9 157 (3.08%) Big Data
10 132 (2.59%) Metadata
11 125 (2.45%) Amazon RDS
12 123 (2.41%) BigQuery
13 119 (2.33%) MySQL
14 113 (2.21%) Delta Lake
15 107 (2.10%) Amazon Redshift
16 101 (1.98%) MongoDB
17 97 (1.90%) Amazon Athena
18 91 (1.78%) Azure SQL Database
19 83 (1.63%) Hadoop
20 81 (1.59%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 651 (12.75%) Git
2 544 (10.66%) Jenkins
3 422 (8.27%) GitLab
4 296 (5.80%) JIRA
5 92 (1.80%) MLflow
6 88 (1.72%) Selenium
7 51 (1.00%) Bitbucket
8 50 (0.98%) Postman
9 47 (0.92%) Cucumber
10 40 (0.78%) Sonatype Nexus
11 38 (0.74%) JUnit
12 34 (0.67%) JMeter
13 29 (0.57%) SpecFlow
14 25 (0.49%) Cypress.io
14 25 (0.49%) Visual Studio
15 24 (0.47%) CircleCI
16 22 (0.43%) Artifactory
17 20 (0.39%) Maven
18 19 (0.37%) Robot Framework
18 19 (0.37%) SonarQube
General
1 1,269 (24.86%) Social Skills
2 1,013 (19.85%) Finance
3 695 (13.62%) Analytical Skills
4 487 (9.54%) Public Sector
5 419 (8.21%) Banking
6 175 (3.43%) Front Office
7 125 (2.45%) Documentation Skills
8 100 (1.96%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.35%) Retail
10 64 (1.25%) Marketing
11 63 (1.23%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 62 (1.21%) Pharmaceutical
13 57 (1.12%) Financial Institution
14 52 (1.02%) Telecoms
15 50 (0.98%) Legal
16 49 (0.96%) Influencing Skills
17 45 (0.88%) Manufacturing
18 31 (0.61%) Military
18 31 (0.61%) Presentation Skills
19 21 (0.41%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 944 (18.50%) Developer
2 707 (13.85%) Data Engineer
3 706 (13.83%) Senior
4 426 (8.35%) Python Developer
5 333 (6.52%) Lead
6 329 (6.45%) Architect
7 295 (5.78%) Python Engineer
8 294 (5.76%) DevOps Engineer
9 285 (5.58%) Analyst
10 263 (5.15%) Software Engineer
11 258 (5.05%) AWS Engineer
12 250 (4.90%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 199 (3.90%) Data Scientist
14 177 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
15 152 (2.98%) Senior Developer
16 151 (2.96%) Azure Engineer
17 139 (2.72%) Data Analyst
18 138 (2.70%) Full-Stack Developer
19 134 (2.63%) Senior Data Engineer
20 129 (2.53%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 443 (8.68%) REST
2 362 (7.09%) React
3 321 (6.29%) PySpark
4 319 (6.25%) Kafka
5 292 (5.72%) Node.js
6 229 (4.49%) Pandas
7 227 (4.45%) PyTorch
8 225 (4.41%) FastAPI
9 213 (4.17%) .NET
10 208 (4.08%) RESTful
11 182 (3.57%) TensorFlow
12 162 (3.17%) NumPy
13 145 (2.84%) scikit-learn
14 137 (2.68%) AngularJS
15 132 (2.59%) Flask
16 127 (2.49%) LangChain
17 120 (2.35%) JSON
18 117 (2.29%) Django
19 114 (2.23%) pytest
20 109 (2.14%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 496 (9.72%) Cloud Native
2 201 (3.94%) Algorithms
3 200 (3.92%) Distributed Systems
4 138 (2.70%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.49%) Equities
6 122 (2.39%) Data Protection Act
7 114 (2.23%) Fixed Income
8 109 (2.14%) Data Structures
9 108 (2.12%) AI Agents
10 107 (2.10%) Onboarding
11 102 (2.00%) Derivative
12 90 (1.76%) Security Posture
13 88 (1.72%) Legacy Systems
14 87 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
15 86 (1.68%) Enterprise Software
16 85 (1.67%) Public Cloud
17 83 (1.63%) Data Centre
18 81 (1.59%) Management Information System
19 57 (1.12%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
20 56 (1.10%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 685 (13.42%) Linux
2 326 (6.39%) Windows
3 191 (3.74%) Unix
4 98 (1.92%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.69%) Android
6 35 (0.69%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.59%) VMS
8 24 (0.47%) CentOS
9 22 (0.43%) Mac OS
10 21 (0.41%) Apple iOS
11 20 (0.39%) Solaris
12 10 (0.20%) AIX
13 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
13 9 (0.18%) Windows 7
14 5 (0.098%) Debian
14 5 (0.098%) Embedded Linux
14 5 (0.098%) zOS
15 4 (0.078%) Amazon Linux
15 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,870 (36.64%) CI/CD
2 1,437 (28.15%) DevOps
3 1,222 (23.94%) Agile
4 1,114 (21.83%) AI
5 1,057 (20.71%) Problem-Solving
6 999 (19.57%) Analytics
7 903 (17.69%) Infrastructure as Code
8 853 (16.71%) Machine Learning
9 821 (16.09%) Data Pipeline
10 762 (14.93%) Containerisation
11 679 (13.30%) Data Engineering
12 678 (13.28%) ETL
13 662 (12.97%) Data Modelling
14 616 (12.07%) Data Science
15 593 (11.62%) Test Automation
16 591 (11.58%) Software Engineering
17 492 (9.64%) Observability
18 488 (9.56%) Business Intelligence
19 446 (8.74%) LLM
20 378 (7.41%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,599 (31.33%) SQL
2 718 (14.07%) Java
3 668 (13.09%) PowerShell
4 599 (11.74%) Bash
5 505 (9.89%) JavaScript
6 355 (6.96%) TypeScript
7 329 (6.45%) C#
8 232 (4.55%) Go
9 173 (3.39%) C++
10 149 (2.92%) R
11 114 (2.23%) Scala
11 114 (2.23%) Shell Script
12 113 (2.21%) Perl
13 94 (1.84%) Ruby
14 69 (1.35%) Bicep
15 61 (1.20%) Kusto Query Language
16 48 (0.94%) C
17 46 (0.90%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 45 (0.88%) VBA
19 43 (0.84%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,155 (22.63%) Security Cleared
2 924 (18.10%) SC Cleared
3 447 (8.76%) Degree
4 208 (4.08%) Computer Science Degree
5 142 (2.78%) DV Cleared
6 132 (2.59%) AWS Certification
7 122 (2.39%) Master's Degree
8 119 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
9 102 (2.00%) Azure Certification
10 95 (1.86%) CISSP
11 72 (1.41%) Cisco Certification
12 57 (1.12%) CCNP
13 52 (1.02%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 46 (0.90%) PhD
15 45 (0.88%) CISM
16 39 (0.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.71%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.63%) Microsoft Certified Professional
19 31 (0.61%) CEH
20 27 (0.53%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 473 (9.27%) Data Quality
2 211 (4.13%) QA
3 182 (3.57%) GDPR
4 105 (2.06%) NIST
5 102 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 80 (1.57%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.65%) SLA
9 30 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 28 (0.55%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.45%) NCSC
12 18 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.25%) WCAG
15 12 (0.24%) EU AI Act
16 11 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials
17 10 (0.20%) MiFID
17 10 (0.20%) PMO
17 10 (0.20%) PSD2
18 9 (0.18%) EMIR
System Software
1 935 (18.32%) Docker
2 173 (3.39%) Active Directory
3 114 (2.23%) VMware Infrastructure
4 54 (1.06%) Virtual Machines
4 54 (1.06%) vSphere
5 46 (0.90%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.57%) Hyper-V
7 26 (0.51%) Firmware
8 15 (0.29%) KVM
8 15 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
9 12 (0.24%) HDFS
9 12 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 10 (0.20%) Lustre
11 9 (0.18%) GPFS
12 8 (0.16%) SRDF
12 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
13 6 (0.12%) NFS
14 5 (0.098%) NDS
14 5 (0.098%) NetIQ eDirectory
14 5 (0.098%) Postfix
Systems Management
1 1,104 (21.63%) Terraform
2 1,052 (20.61%) Kubernetes
3 546 (10.70%) Ansible
4 350 (6.86%) Grafana
5 311 (6.09%) Prometheus
6 93 (1.82%) Argo
7 78 (1.53%) Puppet
8 50 (0.98%) Istio
9 44 (0.86%) vRealize
10 43 (0.84%) Kibana
11 38 (0.74%) Nessus
12 35 (0.69%) Progress Chef
13 32 (0.63%) vCenter Server
14 29 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
15 26 (0.51%) Control-M
15 26 (0.51%) NetBackup
16 24 (0.47%) IBM Guardium
17 23 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
18 19 (0.37%) Rancher
19 16 (0.31%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 625 (12.25%) Microsoft
2 518 (10.15%) Databricks
3 301 (5.90%) Google
4 230 (4.51%) Splunk
5 217 (4.25%) Oracle
6 212 (4.15%) VMware
7 144 (2.82%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.41%) Cisco
9 120 (2.35%) OpenAI
10 106 (2.08%) ServiceNow
11 83 (1.63%) CyberArk
12 80 (1.57%) Foundry
13 67 (1.31%) BeyondTrust
14 61 (1.20%) F5
15 58 (1.14%) Palo Alto
16 57 (1.12%) Informatica
17 50 (0.98%) IBM
18 45 (0.88%) SAP
19 40 (0.78%) Atlassian
20 39 (0.76%) Dynatrace