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

6 months to
1 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,334 3,840 4,040
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.90% 13.18% 9.40%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.52% 38.57% 31.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,533 2,676 2,905
10th Percentile £363 £380 £381
25th Percentile £425 £450 £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 £738 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -2.50% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 49 111
10th Percentile £29.85 £25.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.25 £40.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.63% -33.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.03 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.88 £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 13,163 9,956 12,927
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.90% 34.17% 30.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,618 6,768 9,170
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 £627 £650
90th Percentile £713 £762 £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 564 227 522
10th Percentile £36.25 £27.00 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.75 £34.20 £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 £78.53 £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 1 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 1 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 1 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 4,439 £525 -4.55% 3,688
London -3 2,547 £550 -5.58% 1,981
UK excluding London 0 2,066 £488 -2.50% 2,200
Work from Home -1 1,506 £525 -4.55% 1,718
North of England +10 749 £481 -1.28% 517
Yorkshire +2 420 £488 -2.50% 148
South East -6 394 £525 +5.00% 680
Scotland +2 302 £439 -7.63% 120
North West +3 258 £490 +3.16% 279
South West +1 248 £500 -13.04% 279
Midlands -14 235 £482 +7.11% 218
West Midlands -11 182 £481 +6.94% 98
East of England -11 128 £500 - 286
North East +5 81 £475 +5.56% 93
East Midlands -15 52 £495 +13.53% 119
Wales -6 27 £450 -10.00% 49
Northern Ireland +15 25 £446 -24.04% 73

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
1 281 (5.27%) Apache Spark
2 232 (4.35%) Apache Airflow
3 185 (3.47%) Apache
4 150 (2.81%) Confluence
5 45 (0.84%) Jupyter
6 43 (0.81%) SAS
6 43 (0.81%) SharePoint
7 23 (0.43%) nginx
8 21 (0.39%) OpenStack
9 16 (0.30%) ArcGIS
9 16 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
9 16 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
10 13 (0.24%) IIS
11 10 (0.19%) Appian
12 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
12 8 (0.15%) Tomcat
13 7 (0.13%) Camunda
13 7 (0.13%) CICS
13 7 (0.13%) CMS
14 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 123 (2.31%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 22 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
5 21 (0.39%) MS Visio
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.075%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.056%) 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 19 (0.36%) 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 (0.056%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.056%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.056%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.056%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.037%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.037%) Global One
8 2 (0.037%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.037%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.037%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.037%) Odoo
8 2 (0.037%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.037%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,002 (37.53%) AWS
2 1,775 (33.28%) Azure
3 771 (14.45%) GCP
4 646 (12.11%) GitHub
5 516 (9.67%) Power Platform
6 455 (8.53%) Serverless
7 379 (7.11%) Azure DevOps
8 370 (6.94%) Amazon S3
9 345 (6.47%) GitHub Actions
10 327 (6.13%) AWS Lambda
11 259 (4.86%) Azure Data Factory
12 252 (4.72%) Snowflake
13 179 (3.36%) AWS CloudFormation
14 174 (3.26%) dbt
15 172 (3.22%) OpenShift
16 164 (3.07%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 157 (2.94%) Amazon EKS
18 143 (2.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 127 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
20 119 (2.23%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 207 (3.88%) Firewall
2 154 (2.89%) DNS
3 116 (2.17%) Network Security
4 95 (1.78%) WAN
5 91 (1.71%) BGP
6 90 (1.69%) TCP/IP
7 78 (1.46%) VPN
8 62 (1.16%) HTTP
8 62 (1.16%) OSPF
9 57 (1.07%) SAN
10 54 (1.01%) BIG-IP
11 48 (0.90%) SSL
12 46 (0.86%) SD-WAN
13 45 (0.84%) VXLAN
14 38 (0.71%) VLAN
15 36 (0.67%) DHCP
15 36 (0.67%) LAN
16 35 (0.66%) SNMP
17 34 (0.64%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 34 (0.64%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 449 (8.42%) Power BI
2 336 (6.30%) PostgreSQL
3 274 (5.14%) Data Warehouse
4 262 (4.91%) SQL Server
5 231 (4.33%) Data Lake
6 197 (3.69%) Tableau
7 184 (3.45%) Relational Database
8 172 (3.22%) NoSQL
9 162 (3.04%) Big Data
10 158 (2.96%) Metadata
11 135 (2.53%) BigQuery
11 135 (2.53%) Delta Lake
12 121 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
13 114 (2.14%) MongoDB
14 108 (2.02%) Amazon Redshift
15 94 (1.76%) DynamoDB
16 90 (1.69%) MySQL
17 87 (1.63%) Amazon RDS
18 76 (1.42%) Azure SQL Database
19 75 (1.41%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 635 (11.90%) Git
2 487 (9.13%) Jenkins
3 379 (7.11%) GitLab
4 273 (5.12%) JIRA
5 77 (1.44%) MLflow
5 77 (1.44%) Selenium
6 63 (1.18%) Postman
7 38 (0.71%) Cucumber
8 36 (0.67%) JMeter
9 33 (0.62%) Cypress.io
10 32 (0.60%) Artifactory
11 30 (0.56%) Bitbucket
12 29 (0.54%) 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 (0.41%) Robot Framework
17 20 (0.37%) Gatling
18 19 (0.36%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,158 (21.71%) Social Skills
2 1,067 (20.00%) Finance
3 711 (13.33%) Analytical Skills
4 477 (8.94%) Public Sector
5 381 (7.14%) Banking
6 189 (3.54%) Front Office
7 131 (2.46%) Documentation Skills
8 120 (2.25%) Investment Banking
9 85 (1.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 75 (1.41%) Marketing
11 61 (1.14%) Retail
12 60 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
13 53 (0.99%) Legal
14 46 (0.86%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 37 (0.69%) Financial Institution
16 37 (0.69%) Publishing
17 34 (0.64%) Manufacturing
18 31 (0.58%) Military
19 29 (0.54%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 966 (18.11%) Developer
2 816 (15.30%) Data Engineer
3 779 (14.60%) Senior
4 499 (9.36%) Python Developer
5 348 (6.52%) Lead
6 335 (6.28%) Architect
7 331 (6.21%) Python Engineer
8 289 (5.42%) DevOps Engineer
9 281 (5.27%) Analyst
10 270 (5.06%) Software Engineer
11 239 (4.48%) AWS Engineer
12 221 (4.14%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 210 (3.94%) Data Scientist
14 166 (3.11%) Senior Developer
15 158 (2.96%) Senior Data Engineer
16 156 (2.92%) Azure Engineer
17 154 (2.89%) Platform Engineer
18 151 (2.83%) Data Analyst
19 149 (2.79%) Full-Stack Developer
20 138 (2.59%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 405 (7.59%) REST
2 371 (6.96%) React
3 356 (6.67%) PySpark
4 316 (5.92%) Kafka
5 233 (4.37%) .NET
6 223 (4.18%) Node.js
7 216 (4.05%) Pandas
8 186 (3.49%) FastAPI
9 185 (3.47%) RESTful
10 178 (3.34%) JSON
11 169 (3.17%) PyTorch
12 136 (2.55%) Django
13 129 (2.42%) NumPy
14 127 (2.38%) Flask
15 120 (2.25%) TensorFlow
16 116 (2.17%) LangChain
16 116 (2.17%) scikit-learn
17 113 (2.12%) AngularJS
18 101 (1.89%) OAuth
18 101 (1.89%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 605 (11.34%) Cloud Native
2 239 (4.48%) Distributed Systems
3 149 (2.79%) Algorithms
4 139 (2.61%) Data Centre
5 138 (2.59%) Product Ownership
6 130 (2.44%) AI Agents
6 130 (2.44%) Onboarding
7 121 (2.27%) Data Structures
8 118 (2.21%) Data Protection Act
9 115 (2.16%) Derivative
10 111 (2.08%) Management Information System
11 107 (2.01%) Equities
12 106 (1.99%) Legacy Systems
13 97 (1.82%) Fixed Income
14 94 (1.76%) Security Posture
15 90 (1.69%) Hybrid Cloud
16 89 (1.67%) Enterprise Software
17 70 (1.31%) Public Cloud
18 55 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
19 51 (0.96%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 637 (11.94%) Linux
2 303 (5.68%) Windows
3 218 (4.09%) Unix
4 114 (2.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 76 (1.42%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.81%) Ubuntu
7 31 (0.58%) VMS
8 26 (0.49%) AIX
9 25 (0.47%) Android
10 23 (0.43%) Solaris
11 20 (0.37%) CentOS
12 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
13 16 (0.30%) Mac OS
14 13 (0.24%) 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 (0.075%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,990 (37.31%) CI/CD
2 1,448 (27.15%) DevOps
3 1,234 (23.13%) AI
4 1,146 (21.48%) Agile
5 1,044 (19.57%) Analytics
6 942 (17.66%) Infrastructure as Code
7 925 (17.34%) Problem-Solving
8 909 (17.04%) Data Pipeline
9 820 (15.37%) Machine Learning
10 711 (13.33%) Data Engineering
10 711 (13.33%) Data Modelling
11 700 (13.12%) Containerisation
12 695 (13.03%) ETL
13 651 (12.20%) Software Engineering
14 583 (10.93%) Data Science
15 569 (10.67%) Observability
16 536 (10.05%) Test Automation
17 515 (9.66%) Business Intelligence
18 470 (8.81%) LLM
19 441 (8.27%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,761 (33.01%) SQL
2 769 (14.42%) Java
3 666 (12.49%) PowerShell
4 603 (11.30%) Bash
5 473 (8.87%) JavaScript
6 356 (6.67%) TypeScript
7 335 (6.28%) C#
8 201 (3.77%) Go
9 160 (3.00%) R
10 150 (2.81%) C++
11 128 (2.40%) Scala
12 106 (1.99%) Shell Script
13 81 (1.52%) Bicep
14 79 (1.48%) Perl
15 73 (1.37%) Ruby
16 58 (1.09%) PL/SQL
17 57 (1.07%) T-SQL
18 55 (1.03%) C
19 52 (0.97%) Groovy
20 51 (0.96%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,195 (22.40%) Security Cleared
2 965 (18.09%) SC Cleared
3 396 (7.42%) Degree
4 163 (3.06%) Computer Science Degree
5 150 (2.81%) DV Cleared
6 123 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
7 112 (2.10%) Azure Certification
8 98 (1.84%) AWS Certification
9 93 (1.74%) CISSP
10 75 (1.41%) Master's Degree
11 71 (1.33%) Cisco Certification
12 55 (1.03%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.94%) CCNP
14 41 (0.77%) CISM
15 36 (0.67%) PhD
16 33 (0.62%) ISTQB
17 29 (0.54%) Microsoft Certification
18 27 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 22 (0.41%) CCIE
20 21 (0.39%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 520 (9.75%) Data Quality
2 237 (4.44%) QA
3 141 (2.64%) GDPR
4 100 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 98 (1.84%) NIST
6 78 (1.46%) Accessibility
7 37 (0.69%) SLA
8 27 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.49%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.45%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
12 16 (0.30%) WCAG
13 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.24%) NCSC
15 12 (0.22%) 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
1 797 (14.94%) Docker
2 149 (2.79%) Active Directory
3 99 (1.86%) VMware Infrastructure
4 76 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.73%) VMware NSX
5 39 (0.73%) vSphere
6 33 (0.62%) Firmware
7 31 (0.58%) Hyper-V
8 19 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
9 17 (0.32%) KVM
9 17 (0.32%) NFS
10 13 (0.24%) Squid
11 12 (0.22%) HDFS
12 10 (0.19%) Ceph
12 10 (0.19%) SRDF
13 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
14 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
16 4 (0.075%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
16 4 (0.075%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,110 (20.81%) Terraform
2 957 (17.94%) Kubernetes
3 559 (10.48%) Ansible
4 335 (6.28%) Grafana
5 281 (5.27%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.39%) Puppet
7 57 (1.07%) Argo
8 51 (0.96%) Istio
9 46 (0.86%) vRealize
10 40 (0.75%) Progress Chef
11 36 (0.67%) Kibana
12 33 (0.62%) vCenter Server
13 27 (0.51%) Nessus
13 27 (0.51%) Single Sign-On
14 25 (0.47%) Nagios
15 24 (0.45%) Control-M
15 24 (0.45%) ZABBIX
16 23 (0.43%) NetBackup
17 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
18 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 594 (11.14%) Microsoft
2 568 (10.65%) Databricks
3 284 (5.32%) Google
4 246 (4.61%) Oracle
5 222 (4.16%) Splunk
6 176 (3.30%) VMware
7 135 (2.53%) Red Hat
8 125 (2.34%) OpenAI
9 118 (2.21%) Cisco
10 98 (1.84%) ServiceNow
11 85 (1.59%) CyberArk
12 83 (1.56%) F5
13 76 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
13 76 (1.42%) Dynatrace
13 76 (1.42%) Palo Alto
14 71 (1.33%) IBM
15 66 (1.24%) Informatica
16 52 (0.97%) Foundry
17 49 (0.92%) SAP
18 46 (0.86%) Arista