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

6 months to
1 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 9 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +6 -3
Contract jobs citing Python 5,250 3,883 4,072
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.75% 13.37% 9.20%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.18% 39.39% 31.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,576 2,729 2,873
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £418 £450 £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 £813 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £514
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.68% -6.59%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 53 104
10th Percentile £27.61 £21.25 £20.95
25th Percentile £41.25 £25.09 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.25 £42.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.65% -15.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile £73.37 £60.75 £66.38
90th Percentile £80.14 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.00 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +15.56% -2.56% -28.68%

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 12,748 9,859 12,934
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.53% 33.95% 29.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,489 6,631 9,140
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £414 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £753 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 524 244 486
10th Percentile £41.25 £22.30 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £32.88 £46.20
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.56 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.72
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.56% +3.90% -1.44%

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 April 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 April 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 April 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 4,410 £518 -5.91% 2,695
London -3 2,496 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London -1 2,000 £481 -3.75% 1,990
Work from Home +1 1,554 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +10 678 £476 -4.75% 475
South East -5 408 £500 -4.76% 576
Yorkshire +1 377 £479 -4.20% 164
Midlands +2 287 £495 +8.02% 255
North West +10 255 £481 -2.18% 230
Scotland +1 252 £425 -9.91% 104
South West -5 238 £519 -5.68% 280
West Midlands -2 229 £500 +2.04% 130
East of England +4 135 £500 -0.25% 219
East Midlands -12 57 £450 +5.88% 125
North East +13 55 £488 -1.27% 83
Wales -15 28 £475 -10.38% 78
Northern Ireland +13 26 £550 - 33

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
1 262 (4.99%) Apache Spark
2 202 (3.85%) Apache Airflow
3 167 (3.18%) Confluence
4 159 (3.03%) Apache
5 68 (1.30%) SAS
6 60 (1.14%) SharePoint
7 26 (0.50%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
8 24 (0.46%) nginx
8 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 19 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
10 15 (0.29%) Appian
11 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
12 11 (0.21%) Camunda
13 10 (0.19%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 4 (0.076%) CICS
15 4 (0.076%) Tomcat
15 4 (0.076%) WebSphere
16 3 (0.057%) IIS
Applications
1 138 (2.63%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 22 (0.42%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.11%) Weka
7 5 (0.095%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
6 3 (0.057%) Actimize
6 3 (0.057%) BambooHR
6 3 (0.057%) IntelliMatch
6 3 (0.057%) Remedy ITSM
6 3 (0.057%) SAP IBP
7 2 (0.038%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
7 2 (0.038%) Global One
7 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.038%) Odoo
7 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 1 (0.019%) Loan IQ
8 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 2,034 (38.74%) AWS
2 1,826 (34.78%) Azure
3 800 (15.24%) GCP
4 703 (13.39%) GitHub
5 517 (9.85%) Power Platform
6 514 (9.79%) Serverless
7 403 (7.68%) Azure DevOps
8 360 (6.86%) Amazon S3
9 354 (6.74%) GitHub Actions
10 347 (6.61%) AWS Lambda
11 278 (5.30%) Azure Data Factory
12 247 (4.70%) Snowflake
13 244 (4.65%) AWS CloudFormation
14 184 (3.50%) Amazon EKS
15 179 (3.41%) OpenShift
16 165 (3.14%) Amazon ECS
17 163 (3.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 154 (2.93%) dbt
19 151 (2.88%) Amazon EC2
20 144 (2.74%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 206 (3.92%) Firewall
2 150 (2.86%) DNS
3 109 (2.08%) Network Security
4 99 (1.89%) TCP/IP
5 84 (1.60%) VPN
6 75 (1.43%) BGP
7 67 (1.28%) WAN
8 59 (1.12%) HTTP
9 44 (0.84%) OSPF
10 43 (0.82%) SAN
11 42 (0.80%) MPLS
12 35 (0.67%) DHCP
12 35 (0.67%) VLAN
13 34 (0.65%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) SD-WAN
15 31 (0.59%) Wireshark
16 30 (0.57%) SNMP
16 30 (0.57%) SSL
17 24 (0.46%) VXLAN
18 22 (0.42%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 432 (8.23%) Power BI
2 359 (6.84%) PostgreSQL
3 300 (5.71%) Data Warehouse
4 236 (4.50%) Data Lake
5 207 (3.94%) NoSQL
6 199 (3.79%) SQL Server
7 183 (3.49%) Relational Database
8 174 (3.31%) Tableau
9 149 (2.84%) Metadata
10 144 (2.74%) Big Data
11 131 (2.50%) Delta Lake
12 119 (2.27%) Amazon RDS
12 119 (2.27%) BigQuery
13 113 (2.15%) MySQL
14 107 (2.04%) Amazon Redshift
15 105 (2.00%) Amazon Athena
16 96 (1.83%) MongoDB
17 90 (1.71%) Azure SQL Database
18 83 (1.58%) DynamoDB
19 74 (1.41%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 669 (12.74%) Git
2 541 (10.30%) Jenkins
3 413 (7.87%) GitLab
4 293 (5.58%) JIRA
5 95 (1.81%) Selenium
6 91 (1.73%) MLflow
7 55 (1.05%) Postman
8 45 (0.86%) Bitbucket
9 44 (0.84%) Cucumber
10 40 (0.76%) JMeter
10 40 (0.76%) JUnit
11 34 (0.65%) Sonatype Nexus
12 28 (0.53%) SpecFlow
13 27 (0.51%) Cypress.io
14 26 (0.50%) Artifactory
14 26 (0.50%) Visual Studio
15 23 (0.44%) Gatling
16 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
17 21 (0.40%) Maven
17 21 (0.40%) SonarQube
General
1 1,235 (23.52%) Social Skills
2 997 (18.99%) Finance
3 712 (13.56%) Analytical Skills
4 503 (9.58%) Public Sector
5 401 (7.64%) Banking
6 169 (3.22%) Front Office
7 129 (2.46%) Documentation Skills
8 86 (1.64%) Investment Banking
9 67 (1.28%) Marketing
10 64 (1.22%) Retail
11 62 (1.18%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 60 (1.14%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.07%) Legal
13 56 (1.07%) Telecoms
14 54 (1.03%) Financial Institution
15 53 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
16 41 (0.78%) Manufacturing
17 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
18 28 (0.53%) Military
18 28 (0.53%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 973 (18.53%) Developer
2 749 (14.27%) Data Engineer
3 735 (14.00%) Senior
4 458 (8.72%) Python Developer
5 360 (6.86%) Architect
6 338 (6.44%) Lead
7 292 (5.56%) Python Engineer
8 282 (5.37%) Analyst
9 280 (5.33%) DevOps Engineer
10 260 (4.95%) Software Engineer
11 252 (4.80%) AWS Engineer
12 242 (4.61%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 205 (3.90%) Data Scientist
14 194 (3.70%) Platform Engineer
15 161 (3.07%) Azure Engineer
16 160 (3.05%) Senior Developer
17 143 (2.72%) Data Analyst
18 138 (2.63%) Senior Data Engineer
19 137 (2.61%) Full-Stack Developer
20 127 (2.42%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 457 (8.70%) REST
2 358 (6.82%) React
3 338 (6.44%) Kafka
4 334 (6.36%) PySpark
5 281 (5.35%) Node.js
6 232 (4.42%) Pandas
7 228 (4.34%) .NET
8 201 (3.83%) PyTorch
9 193 (3.68%) RESTful
10 189 (3.60%) FastAPI
11 161 (3.07%) TensorFlow
12 160 (3.05%) NumPy
13 151 (2.88%) JSON
14 150 (2.86%) scikit-learn
15 134 (2.55%) Flask
16 131 (2.50%) AngularJS
17 123 (2.34%) Django
18 121 (2.30%) LangChain
18 121 (2.30%) pytest
19 106 (2.02%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 524 (9.98%) Cloud Native
2 224 (4.27%) Distributed Systems
3 191 (3.64%) Algorithms
4 149 (2.84%) Product Ownership
5 114 (2.17%) Equities
6 113 (2.15%) Fixed Income
7 112 (2.13%) Data Protection Act
8 109 (2.08%) AI Agents
9 108 (2.06%) Data Structures
10 106 (2.02%) Derivative
11 97 (1.85%) Hybrid Cloud
12 96 (1.83%) Data Centre
13 92 (1.75%) Legacy Systems
13 92 (1.75%) Public Cloud
14 91 (1.73%) Enterprise Software
15 89 (1.70%) Onboarding
16 81 (1.54%) Security Posture
17 80 (1.52%) Management Information System
18 58 (1.10%) Virtual Team
19 53 (1.01%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 671 (12.78%) Linux
2 306 (5.83%) Windows
3 185 (3.52%) Unix
4 104 (1.98%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.28%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.70%) VMS
7 33 (0.63%) Ubuntu
8 30 (0.57%) Android
9 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
10 19 (0.36%) AIX
11 18 (0.34%) Solaris
12 17 (0.32%) CentOS
13 16 (0.30%) Apple iOS
14 8 (0.15%) Debian
14 8 (0.15%) Windows 7
15 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) zOS
17 5 (0.095%) Kali Linux
17 5 (0.095%) Rocky
18 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,934 (36.84%) CI/CD
2 1,480 (28.19%) DevOps
3 1,220 (23.24%) Agile
4 1,148 (21.87%) AI
5 1,052 (20.04%) Analytics
6 1,036 (19.73%) Problem-Solving
7 929 (17.70%) Infrastructure as Code
8 860 (16.38%) Data Pipeline
9 837 (15.94%) Machine Learning
10 765 (14.57%) Containerisation
11 721 (13.73%) Data Engineering
12 700 (13.33%) Data Modelling
13 682 (12.99%) ETL
14 621 (11.83%) Data Science
15 604 (11.50%) Test Automation
16 603 (11.49%) Software Engineering
17 518 (9.87%) Observability
18 514 (9.79%) Business Intelligence
19 428 (8.15%) LLM
20 405 (7.71%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,674 (31.89%) SQL
2 739 (14.08%) Java
3 672 (12.80%) PowerShell
4 595 (11.33%) Bash
5 495 (9.43%) JavaScript
6 351 (6.69%) C#
7 349 (6.65%) TypeScript
8 223 (4.25%) Go
9 167 (3.18%) R
10 162 (3.09%) C++
11 123 (2.34%) Scala
12 109 (2.08%) Shell Script
13 103 (1.96%) Ruby
14 95 (1.81%) Perl
15 78 (1.49%) Bicep
16 55 (1.05%) Kusto Query Language
17 50 (0.95%) C
18 49 (0.93%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 44 (0.84%) T-SQL
20 43 (0.82%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,231 (23.45%) Security Cleared
2 988 (18.82%) SC Cleared
3 428 (8.15%) Degree
4 197 (3.75%) Computer Science Degree
5 149 (2.84%) DV Cleared
6 128 (2.44%) BPSS Clearance
7 117 (2.23%) Master's Degree
8 113 (2.15%) AWS Certification
9 104 (1.98%) Azure Certification
10 95 (1.81%) CISSP
11 74 (1.41%) Cisco Certification
12 59 (1.12%) CCNP
13 56 (1.07%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 49 (0.93%) CISM
14 49 (0.93%) PhD
15 36 (0.69%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 35 (0.67%) ISTQB
16 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
17 28 (0.53%) CEH
18 26 (0.50%) CCNA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 506 (9.64%) Data Quality
2 217 (4.13%) QA
3 177 (3.37%) GDPR
4 110 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 102 (1.94%) NIST
6 78 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) PCI DSS
7 34 (0.65%) SLA
8 25 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
10 22 (0.42%) NCSC
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 16 (0.30%) SOC 2
12 16 (0.30%) WCAG
13 12 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
15 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.19%) MiFID
16 8 (0.15%) GRC
System Software
1 911 (17.35%) Docker
2 162 (3.09%) Active Directory
3 117 (2.23%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.16%) vSphere
5 58 (1.10%) Virtual Machines
6 52 (0.99%) VMware NSX
7 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
8 31 (0.59%) Firmware
9 16 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 10 (0.19%) HDFS
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
12 8 (0.15%) Lustre
12 8 (0.15%) SRDF
13 7 (0.13%) GPFS
13 7 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
14 6 (0.11%) Postfix
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.095%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 1,132 (21.56%) Terraform
2 1,015 (19.33%) Kubernetes
3 534 (10.17%) Ansible
4 345 (6.57%) Grafana
5 296 (5.64%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.71%) Argo
7 75 (1.43%) Puppet
8 50 (0.95%) Istio
9 49 (0.93%) vRealize
10 39 (0.74%) vCenter Server
11 38 (0.72%) Kibana
12 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
13 26 (0.50%) Nessus
14 25 (0.48%) NetBackup
15 22 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
16 21 (0.40%) Rancher
17 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
18 19 (0.36%) Control-M
18 19 (0.36%) Nagios
19 18 (0.34%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 631 (12.02%) Microsoft
2 571 (10.88%) Databricks
3 291 (5.54%) Google
4 227 (4.32%) Splunk
5 217 (4.13%) Oracle
6 214 (4.08%) VMware
7 147 (2.80%) Red Hat
8 129 (2.46%) Cisco
9 121 (2.30%) OpenAI
10 103 (1.96%) ServiceNow
11 82 (1.56%) CyberArk
12 71 (1.35%) Foundry
13 70 (1.33%) BeyondTrust
14 64 (1.22%) Informatica
15 61 (1.16%) F5
16 58 (1.10%) IBM
17 56 (1.07%) Palo Alto
18 48 (0.91%) Dynatrace
19 44 (0.84%) SAP
20 41 (0.78%) Atlassian