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 4 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,855 4,224 4,438
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.30% 11.74% 9.93%
As % of the Programming Languages category 42.17% 36.26% 32.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,192 2,793 3,181
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 £508 £525
% change year-on-year -1.48% -3.33% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 89 83 131
10th Percentile £27.30 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.25 £25.75 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.86% -12.50% -7.69%
75th Percentile £68.75 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.00 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year -13.60% +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 11,512 11,648 13,810
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.54% 32.37% 30.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,587 7,451 9,818
10th Percentile £349 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -2.87%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -4.04% -1.00% -3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 345 286 427
10th Percentile £31.08 £22.00 £31.40
25th Percentile £48.75 £40.19 £47.50
Median hourly rate £64.00 £63.00 £60.21
Median % change year-on-year +1.59% +4.63% -3.66%
75th Percentile £68.00 £69.45 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £76.25 £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 4 December 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 4 December 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 4 December 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 4,131 £525 -12.50% 2,618
London +1 2,437 £550 -12.00% 1,030
UK excluding London +3 1,840 £500 -1.48% 2,158
Work from Home -1 1,459 £525 -5.83% 1,219
North of England +9 569 £480 -4.95% 461
South East +3 396 £500 -4.76% 788
Yorkshire +11 294 £500 -6.67% 148
Scotland +12 289 £475 -2.56% 111
Midlands +9 276 £500 +5.26% 289
North West +9 238 £448 -9.55% 254
West Midlands +16 228 £506 +1.20% 184
South West -10 174 £550 -8.33% 235
East of England +7 146 £525 +5.53% 245
East Midlands -10 48 £402 +0.50% 103
North East +7 42 £518 -11.54% 65
Wales -12 30 £495 -1.00% 58
Northern Ireland -3 19 £594 +13.10% 18

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
1 251 (5.17%) Apache Airflow
2 211 (4.35%) Apache Spark
3 178 (3.67%) Apache
4 174 (3.58%) Confluence
5 69 (1.42%) SAS
6 56 (1.15%) SharePoint
7 35 (0.72%) OpenStack
8 34 (0.70%) nginx
9 22 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
10 21 (0.43%) Jupyter
11 12 (0.25%) Appian
11 12 (0.25%) IIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 8 (0.16%) Oracle Application Server
14 7 (0.14%) ArcGIS
15 6 (0.12%) JBoss
15 6 (0.12%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.10%) Camunda
16 5 (0.10%) CMS
16 5 (0.10%) Luigi
Applications
1 140 (2.88%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.72%) Chatbot
3 31 (0.64%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 29 (0.60%) Microsoft Office
5 13 (0.27%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 9 (0.19%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.16%) Weka
9 5 (0.10%) Maya
9 5 (0.10%) NUKE
10 2 (0.041%) CPLEX
10 2 (0.041%) GNU Octave
11 1 (0.021%) Microsoft Project
11 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
11 1 (0.021%) SPSS
11 1 (0.021%) Stata
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
11 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 15 (0.31%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) Fidessa
5 5 (0.10%) Maximo
6 4 (0.082%) 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%) Exchequer
9 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
9 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
9 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,915 (39.44%) AWS
2 1,459 (30.05%) Azure
3 714 (14.71%) GCP
4 582 (11.99%) GitHub
5 490 (10.09%) Serverless
6 414 (8.53%) Power Platform
7 373 (7.68%) Amazon S3
8 338 (6.96%) AWS Lambda
9 310 (6.39%) GitHub Actions
10 300 (6.18%) Azure DevOps
11 258 (5.31%) Snowflake
12 235 (4.84%) AWS CloudFormation
13 200 (4.12%) Amazon EC2
14 189 (3.89%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 178 (3.67%) Amazon ECS
16 171 (3.52%) dbt
17 168 (3.46%) Azure Data Factory
18 161 (3.32%) Amazon EKS
19 145 (2.99%) OpenShift
20 136 (2.80%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 272 (5.60%) Firewall
2 182 (3.75%) DNS
3 142 (2.92%) TCP/IP
4 115 (2.37%) Network Security
5 92 (1.89%) HTTP
6 87 (1.79%) VPN
7 84 (1.73%) BGP
8 69 (1.42%) SSL
9 54 (1.11%) OSPF
10 52 (1.07%) WAN
11 44 (0.91%) MPLS
12 42 (0.87%) SSH
13 40 (0.82%) SMTP
13 40 (0.82%) Wireless
14 37 (0.76%) LAN
14 37 (0.76%) Wireshark
15 36 (0.74%) DHCP
15 36 (0.74%) SD-WAN
16 33 (0.68%) FTP
17 28 (0.58%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 398 (8.20%) PostgreSQL
2 358 (7.37%) Power BI
3 289 (5.95%) Data Warehouse
4 249 (5.13%) Relational Database
5 247 (5.09%) NoSQL
6 186 (3.83%) Data Lake
7 177 (3.65%) Big Data
8 173 (3.56%) Amazon RDS
9 160 (3.30%) Tableau
10 143 (2.95%) SQL Server
11 130 (2.68%) MongoDB
12 120 (2.47%) MySQL
13 104 (2.14%) Amazon Athena
13 104 (2.14%) BigQuery
14 99 (2.04%) Hadoop
15 89 (1.83%) Metadata
16 86 (1.77%) Amazon Redshift
17 82 (1.69%) DynamoDB
18 76 (1.57%) Elasticsearch
19 63 (1.30%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 652 (13.43%) Git
2 617 (12.71%) Jenkins
3 416 (8.57%) GitLab
4 317 (6.53%) JIRA
5 75 (1.54%) Selenium
6 65 (1.34%) MLflow
7 64 (1.32%) Bitbucket
8 63 (1.30%) SonarQube
9 58 (1.19%) Sonatype Nexus
10 54 (1.11%) JUnit
11 44 (0.91%) Liquibase
12 39 (0.80%) Cucumber
13 34 (0.70%) JMeter
14 33 (0.68%) Artifactory
15 30 (0.62%) Postman
16 29 (0.60%) Eclipse
17 27 (0.56%) Gradle
17 27 (0.56%) Maven
17 27 (0.56%) Vagrant
18 26 (0.54%) Cypress.io
General
1 1,352 (27.85%) Social Skills
2 1,086 (22.37%) Finance
3 699 (14.40%) Analytical Skills
4 491 (10.11%) Banking
5 433 (8.92%) Public Sector
6 227 (4.68%) Front Office
7 186 (3.83%) Investment Banking
8 108 (2.22%) Documentation Skills
9 84 (1.73%) Financial Institution
10 81 (1.67%) Marketing
11 74 (1.52%) Telecoms
12 69 (1.42%) Retail
13 68 (1.40%) Pharmaceutical
14 62 (1.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 50 (1.03%) Legal
16 44 (0.91%) Presentation Skills
17 43 (0.89%) Manufacturing
18 34 (0.70%) Influencing Skills
19 28 (0.58%) Military
20 27 (0.56%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 886 (18.25%) Developer
2 666 (13.72%) Senior
3 552 (11.37%) Data Engineer
4 359 (7.39%) Python Engineer
5 349 (7.19%) Python Developer
6 342 (7.04%) DevOps Engineer
7 338 (6.96%) Analyst
8 302 (6.22%) AWS Engineer
9 268 (5.52%) Software Engineer
10 255 (5.25%) Architect
11 223 (4.59%) Lead
12 206 (4.24%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 193 (3.98%) Platform Engineer
14 183 (3.77%) Data Scientist
15 162 (3.34%) Data Analyst
16 138 (2.84%) Senior Developer
17 129 (2.66%) Consultant
18 119 (2.45%) Cloud Engineer
19 118 (2.43%) Automation Engineer
20 113 (2.33%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 393 (8.09%) REST
2 332 (6.84%) React
3 327 (6.74%) Kafka
4 251 (5.17%) Node.js
5 244 (5.03%) Pandas
6 241 (4.96%) RESTful
7 227 (4.68%) FastAPI
8 211 (4.35%) PySpark
9 194 (4.00%) NumPy
9 194 (4.00%) PyTorch
10 169 (3.48%) TensorFlow
11 157 (3.23%) AngularJS
12 147 (3.03%) .NET
13 136 (2.80%) Elastic Stack
14 121 (2.49%) scikit-learn
15 118 (2.43%) LangChain
16 104 (2.14%) Flask
16 104 (2.14%) GraphQL
16 104 (2.14%) pytest
17 102 (2.10%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 391 (8.05%) Cloud Native
2 209 (4.30%) Algorithms
3 204 (4.20%) Distributed Systems
4 146 (3.01%) Equities
5 141 (2.90%) Data Protection Act
6 137 (2.82%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 134 (2.76%) Fixed Income
8 127 (2.62%) Product Ownership
9 115 (2.37%) Data Structures
10 113 (2.33%) Derivative
11 106 (2.18%) Onboarding
12 105 (2.16%) Hedge funds
13 102 (2.10%) AI Agents
14 83 (1.71%) Public Cloud
15 79 (1.63%) Data Centre
16 78 (1.61%) Hybrid Cloud
17 76 (1.57%) Management Information System
18 67 (1.38%) Legacy Systems
18 67 (1.38%) Replication
19 55 (1.13%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 869 (17.90%) Linux
2 368 (7.58%) Windows
3 242 (4.98%) Unix
4 92 (1.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 65 (1.34%) Windows Server
6 45 (0.93%) Ubuntu
7 41 (0.84%) Android
8 40 (0.82%) VMS
9 35 (0.72%) CentOS
10 30 (0.62%) Mac OS
11 26 (0.54%) Amazon Linux
12 19 (0.39%) Apple iOS
13 18 (0.37%) Solaris
14 12 (0.25%) Debian
15 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
15 9 (0.19%) Windows 7
16 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
17 4 (0.082%) zOS
18 3 (0.062%) AIX
18 3 (0.062%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,628 (33.53%) CI/CD
2 1,352 (27.85%) DevOps
3 1,250 (25.75%) Agile
4 1,057 (21.77%) Problem-Solving
5 874 (18.00%) AI
6 871 (17.94%) Infrastructure as Code
7 781 (16.09%) Analytics
8 740 (15.24%) Machine Learning
9 696 (14.34%) Containerisation
10 643 (13.24%) Data Pipeline
11 607 (12.50%) Software Engineering
12 539 (11.10%) Data Science
13 528 (10.88%) Data Modelling
14 524 (10.79%) ETL
15 517 (10.65%) Data Engineering
16 498 (10.26%) Test Automation
17 411 (8.47%) Business Intelligence
18 408 (8.40%) Computer Science
19 378 (7.79%) Observability
20 368 (7.58%) Microservices
Programming Languages
1 1,478 (30.44%) SQL
2 861 (17.73%) Java
3 680 (14.01%) Bash
4 632 (13.02%) PowerShell
5 522 (10.75%) JavaScript
6 337 (6.94%) TypeScript
7 306 (6.30%) Go
8 281 (5.79%) C#
9 247 (5.09%) C++
10 189 (3.89%) Perl
11 176 (3.63%) R
12 171 (3.52%) Shell Script
13 102 (2.10%) Scala
14 94 (1.94%) Ruby
15 74 (1.52%) C
16 62 (1.28%) VBA
17 61 (1.26%) PHP
18 53 (1.09%) Bicep
19 51 (1.05%) Groovy
20 45 (0.93%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 940 (19.36%) Security Cleared
2 747 (15.39%) SC Cleared
3 480 (9.89%) Degree
4 241 (4.96%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (3.05%) AWS Certification
6 147 (3.03%) Master's Degree
7 144 (2.97%) DV Cleared
8 96 (1.98%) Cisco Certification
9 89 (1.83%) CISSP
10 83 (1.71%) Azure Certification
11 82 (1.69%) BPSS Clearance
12 59 (1.22%) CCNP
13 54 (1.11%) MCP
13 54 (1.11%) PhD
14 42 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 41 (0.84%) CCIE
16 35 (0.72%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
17 34 (0.70%) CEH
18 33 (0.68%) CISM
19 32 (0.66%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 337 (6.94%) Data Quality
2 185 (3.81%) QA
3 164 (3.38%) GDPR
4 100 (2.06%) NIST
5 99 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 57 (1.17%) Accessibility
7 46 (0.95%) PCI DSS
8 38 (0.78%) HIPAA
9 24 (0.49%) NCSC
9 24 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 23 (0.47%) SLA
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 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
15 8 (0.16%) WCAG
16 7 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 951 (19.59%) Docker
2 167 (3.44%) Active Directory
3 129 (2.66%) VMware Infrastructure
4 41 (0.84%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.78%) vSphere
6 33 (0.68%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.60%) Firmware
8 21 (0.43%) DFS Replication
9 19 (0.39%) Hyper-V
10 18 (0.37%) Squid
11 16 (0.33%) Postfix
12 15 (0.31%) KVM
12 15 (0.31%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 14 (0.29%) HDFS
13 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
14 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
15 11 (0.23%) VMware ESXi
16 10 (0.21%) GPFS
16 10 (0.21%) Lustre
17 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,072 (22.08%) Terraform
2 1,071 (22.06%) Kubernetes
3 625 (12.87%) Ansible
4 384 (7.91%) Grafana
5 324 (6.67%) Prometheus
6 88 (1.81%) Argo
7 83 (1.71%) Puppet
8 55 (1.13%) Kibana
9 47 (0.97%) Progress Chef
10 38 (0.78%) Istio
11 37 (0.76%) Nessus
11 37 (0.76%) vRealize
12 29 (0.60%) NetBackup
12 29 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
13 27 (0.56%) ITRS Geneos
14 24 (0.49%) logstash
14 24 (0.49%) vCenter Server
15 21 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
15 21 (0.43%) Nmap
16 20 (0.41%) Packer
Vendors
1 559 (11.51%) Microsoft
2 374 (7.70%) Databricks
3 275 (5.66%) Google
4 261 (5.38%) Splunk
5 221 (4.55%) Oracle
6 217 (4.47%) VMware
7 144 (2.97%) ServiceNow
8 130 (2.68%) Cisco
9 128 (2.64%) Red Hat
10 88 (1.81%) OpenAI
11 87 (1.79%) Palo Alto
12 85 (1.75%) F5
13 73 (1.50%) Foundry
14 64 (1.32%) SAP
15 59 (1.22%) CyberArk
16 46 (0.95%) IBM
17 45 (0.93%) CrowdStrike
18 44 (0.91%) Atlassian
19 43 (0.89%) Salesforce
20 42 (0.87%) Juniper