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 27 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,822 4,227 4,492
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.35% 11.52% 9.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.77% 35.84% 31.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,168 2,801 3,226
10th Percentile £358 £375 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £738 £825 £798
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £505 £525
% change year-on-year -0.99% -3.81% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 87 86 134
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.25 £25.50 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.86% -12.50% -7.69%
75th Percentile £69.38 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.25 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year -13.20% +4.17% -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 11,543 11,795 14,045
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.96% 32.15% 30.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,606 7,538 10,004
10th Percentile £350 £350 £360
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £756 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 345 304 433
10th Percentile £30.00 £22.00 £31.60
25th Percentile £48.75 £40.06 £47.50
Median hourly rate £63.50 £62.75 £60.14
Median % change year-on-year +1.20% +4.34% +0.23%
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 27 November 2025.

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 27 November 2025.

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 27 November 2025. 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 4,106 £525 -12.50% 2,928
London +1 2,421 £550 -12.00% 1,201
UK excluding London +4 1,837 £500 -0.99% 2,502
Work from Home -1 1,464 £535 -2.73% 1,060
North of England +9 569 £476 -5.84% 454
South East +4 390 £500 -4.76% 979
Yorkshire +11 301 £500 -6.67% 137
Scotland +13 287 £475 -1.86% 153
Midlands +9 272 £500 +5.26% 337
North West +6 232 £445 -9.09% 264
West Midlands +14 225 £507 +1.30% 213
South West -9 175 £550 -8.33% 266
East of England +7 149 £525 +8.25% 252
East Midlands -10 47 £406 +1.50% 123
North East +10 41 £518 -11.54% 59
Wales -9 30 £495 -1.00% 74
Northern Ireland -2 21 £588 +11.90% 26

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
1 252 (5.23%) Apache Airflow
2 207 (4.29%) Apache Spark
3 179 (3.71%) Apache
3 179 (3.71%) Confluence
4 66 (1.37%) SAS
5 52 (1.08%) SharePoint
6 38 (0.79%) nginx
7 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
8 23 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
9 21 (0.44%) Jupyter
10 12 (0.25%) IIS
11 11 (0.23%) Appian
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 8 (0.17%) JBoss
13 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
14 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
14 7 (0.15%) WebSphere
15 5 (0.10%) CMS
15 5 (0.10%) Luigi
16 4 (0.083%) Camunda
Applications
1 138 (2.86%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.71%) Chatbot
3 32 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
4 30 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 11 (0.23%) MS Visio
7 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 7 (0.15%) Maya
8 7 (0.15%) NUKE
9 2 (0.041%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.041%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.041%) Maple
10 1 (0.021%) Microsoft Project
10 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
10 1 (0.021%) SPSS
10 1 (0.021%) Stata
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
10 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 14 (0.29%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 8 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) Fidessa
5 5 (0.10%) Maximo
6 4 (0.083%) Remedy ITSM
7 3 (0.062%) Actimize
7 3 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
7 3 (0.062%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.041%) Distributed Ledger
8 2 (0.041%) Endur
8 2 (0.041%) Loan IQ
8 2 (0.041%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.041%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.041%) Shopify
8 2 (0.041%) Temenos T24
9 1 (0.021%) Cerner Millennium
9 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
9 1 (0.021%) SAP ERP
9 1 (0.021%) SAP GRC
Cloud Services
1 1,910 (39.61%) AWS
2 1,430 (29.66%) Azure
3 722 (14.97%) GCP
4 564 (11.70%) GitHub
5 486 (10.08%) Serverless
6 403 (8.36%) Power Platform
7 379 (7.86%) Amazon S3
8 340 (7.05%) AWS Lambda
9 306 (6.35%) Azure DevOps
10 300 (6.22%) GitHub Actions
11 252 (5.23%) Snowflake
12 225 (4.67%) AWS CloudFormation
13 202 (4.19%) Amazon EC2
14 195 (4.04%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 176 (3.65%) dbt
16 174 (3.61%) Amazon ECS
17 162 (3.36%) Azure Data Factory
18 157 (3.26%) Amazon EKS
19 137 (2.84%) OpenShift
20 134 (2.78%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 282 (5.85%) Firewall
2 183 (3.80%) DNS
3 154 (3.19%) TCP/IP
4 111 (2.30%) Network Security
5 94 (1.95%) VPN
6 91 (1.89%) BGP
6 91 (1.89%) HTTP
7 68 (1.41%) SSL
8 57 (1.18%) OSPF
9 56 (1.16%) WAN
10 48 (1.00%) MPLS
11 44 (0.91%) SSH
12 41 (0.85%) LAN
13 40 (0.83%) SMTP
13 40 (0.83%) Wireless
14 37 (0.77%) DHCP
15 36 (0.75%) SD-WAN
16 35 (0.73%) Wireshark
17 33 (0.68%) FTP
18 30 (0.62%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 398 (8.25%) PostgreSQL
2 350 (7.26%) Power BI
3 284 (5.89%) Data Warehouse
4 248 (5.14%) Relational Database
5 246 (5.10%) NoSQL
6 181 (3.75%) Data Lake
7 178 (3.69%) Big Data
8 174 (3.61%) Amazon RDS
9 155 (3.21%) Tableau
10 142 (2.94%) SQL Server
11 130 (2.70%) MongoDB
12 118 (2.45%) MySQL
13 109 (2.26%) BigQuery
14 104 (2.16%) Amazon Athena
15 101 (2.09%) Hadoop
16 87 (1.80%) Metadata
17 86 (1.78%) DynamoDB
18 85 (1.76%) Amazon Redshift
19 75 (1.56%) Elasticsearch
20 60 (1.24%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 659 (13.67%) Git
2 626 (12.98%) Jenkins
3 410 (8.50%) GitLab
4 322 (6.68%) JIRA
5 73 (1.51%) Selenium
6 70 (1.45%) Bitbucket
7 63 (1.31%) SonarQube
8 61 (1.27%) Sonatype Nexus
9 60 (1.24%) JUnit
10 59 (1.22%) MLflow
11 45 (0.93%) Liquibase
12 41 (0.85%) Artifactory
13 39 (0.81%) Cucumber
14 35 (0.73%) Postman
15 33 (0.68%) JMeter
15 33 (0.68%) Maven
16 30 (0.62%) Gradle
17 29 (0.60%) Eclipse
18 27 (0.56%) Vagrant
19 26 (0.54%) Cypress.io
General
1 1,352 (28.04%) Social Skills
2 1,094 (22.69%) Finance
3 710 (14.72%) Analytical Skills
4 501 (10.39%) Banking
5 418 (8.67%) Public Sector
6 237 (4.91%) Front Office
7 193 (4.00%) Investment Banking
8 111 (2.30%) Documentation Skills
9 86 (1.78%) Financial Institution
10 81 (1.68%) Marketing
11 76 (1.58%) Telecoms
12 74 (1.53%) Retail
13 69 (1.43%) Pharmaceutical
14 61 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 53 (1.10%) Legal
16 45 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
17 42 (0.87%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.68%) Influencing Skills
19 28 (0.58%) Retail Banking
20 27 (0.56%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 897 (18.60%) Developer
2 656 (13.60%) Senior
3 540 (11.20%) Data Engineer
4 362 (7.51%) Python Engineer
5 357 (7.40%) Python Developer
6 343 (7.11%) Analyst
7 342 (7.09%) DevOps Engineer
8 302 (6.26%) AWS Engineer
9 271 (5.62%) Software Engineer
10 251 (5.21%) Architect
11 217 (4.50%) Lead
12 193 (4.00%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 187 (3.88%) Platform Engineer
14 174 (3.61%) Data Scientist
15 162 (3.36%) Data Analyst
16 137 (2.84%) Senior Developer
17 129 (2.68%) Consultant
18 123 (2.55%) Network Engineer
19 120 (2.49%) Cloud Engineer
20 119 (2.47%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 392 (8.13%) REST
2 336 (6.97%) React
3 326 (6.76%) Kafka
4 249 (5.16%) Node.js
5 243 (5.04%) RESTful
6 240 (4.98%) Pandas
7 224 (4.65%) FastAPI
8 201 (4.17%) PySpark
9 192 (3.98%) NumPy
10 185 (3.84%) PyTorch
11 163 (3.38%) TensorFlow
12 158 (3.28%) AngularJS
13 146 (3.03%) .NET
14 135 (2.80%) Elastic Stack
15 114 (2.36%) scikit-learn
16 110 (2.28%) LangChain
17 108 (2.24%) GraphQL
18 106 (2.20%) Flask
18 106 (2.20%) HTML
18 106 (2.20%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 383 (7.94%) Cloud Native
2 209 (4.33%) Algorithms
3 201 (4.17%) Distributed Systems
4 149 (3.09%) Equities
5 145 (3.01%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 140 (2.90%) Fixed Income
7 139 (2.88%) Data Protection Act
8 121 (2.51%) Product Ownership
9 113 (2.34%) Derivative
10 112 (2.32%) Data Structures
11 109 (2.26%) Hedge funds
11 109 (2.26%) Onboarding
12 98 (2.03%) AI Agents
13 86 (1.78%) Public Cloud
14 78 (1.62%) Data Centre
15 77 (1.60%) Management Information System
16 75 (1.56%) Hybrid Cloud
17 70 (1.45%) Legacy Systems
18 66 (1.37%) Replication
19 56 (1.16%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 864 (17.92%) Linux
2 371 (7.69%) Windows
3 243 (5.04%) Unix
4 98 (2.03%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.91%) Ubuntu
7 40 (0.83%) Android
8 37 (0.77%) VMS
9 36 (0.75%) CentOS
10 28 (0.58%) Amazon Linux
10 28 (0.58%) Mac OS
11 22 (0.46%) Solaris
12 19 (0.39%) Apple iOS
13 11 (0.23%) Debian
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
14 9 (0.19%) Windows 7
15 6 (0.12%) AIX
16 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
17 4 (0.083%) zOS
18 3 (0.062%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,603 (33.24%) CI/CD
2 1,351 (28.02%) DevOps
3 1,256 (26.05%) Agile
4 1,048 (21.73%) Problem-Solving
5 848 (17.59%) Infrastructure as Code
6 838 (17.38%) AI
7 756 (15.68%) Analytics
8 721 (14.95%) Machine Learning
9 678 (14.06%) Containerisation
10 632 (13.11%) Data Pipeline
11 613 (12.71%) Software Engineering
12 523 (10.85%) Data Science
13 521 (10.80%) ETL
14 512 (10.62%) Data Modelling
15 503 (10.43%) Data Engineering
16 494 (10.24%) Test Automation
17 408 (8.46%) Computer Science
18 399 (8.27%) Business Intelligence
19 364 (7.55%) Microservices
20 354 (7.34%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 1,468 (30.44%) SQL
2 869 (18.02%) Java
3 665 (13.79%) Bash
4 629 (13.04%) PowerShell
5 529 (10.97%) JavaScript
6 344 (7.13%) TypeScript
7 303 (6.28%) Go
8 286 (5.93%) C#
9 262 (5.43%) C++
10 191 (3.96%) Perl
11 174 (3.61%) Shell Script
12 160 (3.32%) R
13 98 (2.03%) Scala
14 85 (1.76%) Ruby
15 79 (1.64%) C
16 62 (1.29%) PHP
17 61 (1.27%) VBA
18 52 (1.08%) Bicep
18 52 (1.08%) Groovy
19 46 (0.95%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 921 (19.10%) Security Cleared
2 734 (15.22%) SC Cleared
3 480 (9.95%) Degree
4 239 (4.96%) Computer Science Degree
5 152 (3.15%) AWS Certification
6 146 (3.03%) DV Cleared
6 146 (3.03%) Master's Degree
7 99 (2.05%) Cisco Certification
8 88 (1.82%) CISSP
9 83 (1.72%) BPSS Clearance
10 78 (1.62%) Azure Certification
11 61 (1.27%) CCNP
12 53 (1.10%) PhD
13 49 (1.02%) MCP
14 42 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 41 (0.85%) CCIE
16 35 (0.73%) CEH
16 35 (0.73%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
17 30 (0.62%) OSCP
18 29 (0.60%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 327 (6.78%) Data Quality
2 187 (3.88%) QA
3 159 (3.30%) GDPR
4 98 (2.03%) NIST
5 97 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 60 (1.24%) Accessibility
7 46 (0.95%) PCI DSS
8 38 (0.79%) HIPAA
9 24 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 24 (0.50%) SLA
10 21 (0.44%) NCSC
11 20 (0.41%) SOC 2
12 19 (0.39%) EU AI Act
13 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.21%) EMIR
14 10 (0.21%) MiFID
14 10 (0.21%) PMO
15 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
15 8 (0.17%) WCAG
16 7 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 944 (19.58%) Docker
2 165 (3.42%) Active Directory
3 145 (3.01%) VMware Infrastructure
4 41 (0.85%) vSphere
5 37 (0.77%) Virtual Machines
6 35 (0.73%) VMware NSX
7 30 (0.62%) Firmware
8 21 (0.44%) DFS Replication
9 18 (0.37%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.37%) Squid
10 16 (0.33%) Postfix
10 16 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
11 15 (0.31%) KVM
11 15 (0.31%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 14 (0.29%) HDFS
12 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
14 10 (0.21%) GPFS
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,055 (21.88%) Kubernetes
2 1,045 (21.67%) Terraform
3 631 (13.09%) Ansible
4 372 (7.71%) Grafana
5 313 (6.49%) Prometheus
6 92 (1.91%) Puppet
7 85 (1.76%) Argo
8 57 (1.18%) Kibana
9 46 (0.95%) Progress Chef
10 39 (0.81%) Istio
11 36 (0.75%) Nessus
11 36 (0.75%) vRealize
12 29 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
13 28 (0.58%) NetBackup
14 26 (0.54%) ITRS Geneos
15 24 (0.50%) logstash
15 24 (0.50%) vCenter Server
16 22 (0.46%) Packer
17 21 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
18 20 (0.41%) Nmap
Vendors
1 549 (11.39%) Microsoft
2 351 (7.28%) Databricks
3 273 (5.66%) Google
4 256 (5.31%) Splunk
5 230 (4.77%) VMware
6 219 (4.54%) Oracle
7 144 (2.99%) ServiceNow
8 139 (2.88%) Cisco
9 130 (2.70%) Red Hat
10 90 (1.87%) Palo Alto
11 86 (1.78%) F5
12 82 (1.70%) OpenAI
13 71 (1.47%) Foundry
14 63 (1.31%) SAP
15 58 (1.20%) CyberArk
16 48 (1.00%) Atlassian
17 45 (0.93%) IBM
18 44 (0.91%) CrowdStrike
18 44 (0.91%) Juniper
18 44 (0.91%) Salesforce