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

6 months to
18 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,629 4,317 4,135
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.35% 13.10% 10.73%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.79% 39.84% 33.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,656 2,805 2,871
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £445 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £700
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £503 £500 £507
% change year-on-year +0.50% -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 140 85 102
10th Percentile £30.30 £28.18 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.00 £40.06
Median hourly rate £61.97 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +23.95% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £78.19 £57.50 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.21 £81.00 £78.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -28.57% +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 14,147 10,836 12,360
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.00% 32.89% 32.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,184 7,163 8,335
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £503 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.98% -4.29% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 549 294 347
10th Percentile £26.51 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £46.75 £41.25 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.45 £79.63 £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 18 September 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 18 September 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 18 September 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 4,802 £550 +3.77% 9,970
London -4 2,836 £575 - 6,269
UK excluding London -7 2,153 £503 +0.50% 4,475
Work from Home -5 1,530 £530 -3.73% 3,536
North of England +1 740 £500 +5.04% 964
South East -4 456 £543 +8.50% 1,147
Yorkshire -1 381 £500 - 315
Scotland -4 295 £450 -10.00% 502
North West 0 282 £525 +11.94% 519
South West -2 280 £550 +4.76% 546
Midlands -21 220 £500 +5.26% 461
West Midlands -19 178 £500 - 256
East of England -8 152 £475 -9.52% 623
North East -7 87 £425 -5.56% 133
East Midlands -17 42 £478 +16.59% 205
Wales -10 26 £530 +29.27% 99
Northern Ireland +2 17 £363 -30.95% 171

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
1 292 (5.19%) Apache Airflow
2 273 (4.85%) Apache Spark
3 223 (3.96%) Apache
4 165 (2.93%) Confluence
5 57 (1.01%) SharePoint
6 56 (0.99%) Jupyter
7 36 (0.64%) SAS
8 30 (0.53%) OpenStack
9 25 (0.44%) nginx
10 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
11 21 (0.37%) IIS
11 21 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
12 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 7 (0.12%) CMS
13 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
14 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.089%) Apache Superset
15 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 107 (1.90%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 18 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
5 16 (0.28%) CPLEX
6 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
8 2 (0.036%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 19 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
2 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
2 18 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
3 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
4 8 (0.14%) Front Arena
4 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
5 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Summit
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Endur
9 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) BambooHR
10 2 (0.036%) OneSumX
10 2 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 2,083 (37.00%) AWS
2 1,898 (33.72%) Azure
3 884 (15.70%) GCP
4 745 (13.24%) GitHub
5 488 (8.67%) Power Platform
6 486 (8.63%) Serverless
7 439 (7.80%) GitHub Actions
8 434 (7.71%) Azure DevOps
9 395 (7.02%) Amazon S3
10 363 (6.45%) AWS Lambda
11 336 (5.97%) Snowflake
12 238 (4.23%) dbt
13 211 (3.75%) Azure Data Factory
14 196 (3.48%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 180 (3.20%) AWS CloudFormation
16 178 (3.16%) Amazon EKS
17 164 (2.91%) Entra ID
18 142 (2.52%) Amazon EC2
19 129 (2.29%) Amazon ECS
20 127 (2.26%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 286 (5.08%) Firewall
2 215 (3.82%) DNS
3 155 (2.75%) Network Security
4 153 (2.72%) TCP/IP
5 131 (2.33%) BGP
6 126 (2.24%) VPN
7 118 (2.10%) WAN
8 87 (1.55%) DHCP
9 78 (1.39%) OSPF
10 72 (1.28%) SD-WAN
11 62 (1.10%) BIG-IP
12 60 (1.07%) VLAN
13 59 (1.05%) SSL
14 56 (0.99%) VXLAN
15 54 (0.96%) HTTP
16 52 (0.92%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 47 (0.83%) Ethernet VPN
18 40 (0.71%) Wireless
19 39 (0.69%) SSH
20 38 (0.68%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 437 (7.76%) Power BI
2 329 (5.84%) Data Warehouse
3 317 (5.63%) PostgreSQL
4 220 (3.91%) Metadata
5 208 (3.70%) SQL Server
6 202 (3.59%) Relational Database
7 184 (3.27%) Data Lake
8 178 (3.16%) BigQuery
8 178 (3.16%) Tableau
9 153 (2.72%) NoSQL
10 138 (2.45%) Big Data
11 132 (2.34%) Amazon RDS
12 129 (2.29%) Amazon Athena
12 129 (2.29%) Amazon Redshift
13 120 (2.13%) Delta Lake
14 114 (2.03%) MongoDB
15 110 (1.95%) DynamoDB
16 97 (1.72%) MySQL
17 73 (1.30%) Redis
18 63 (1.12%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 804 (14.28%) Git
2 505 (8.97%) Jenkins
3 480 (8.53%) GitLab
4 308 (5.47%) JIRA
5 117 (2.08%) Selenium
6 59 (1.05%) Postman
7 57 (1.01%) SonarQube
8 56 (0.99%) Claude Code
8 56 (0.99%) JMeter
9 51 (0.91%) MLflow
10 43 (0.76%) Bitbucket
11 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
11 36 (0.64%) Maven
12 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
13 33 (0.59%) REST Assured
14 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
14 32 (0.57%) Gatling
15 31 (0.55%) Sonatype Nexus
16 25 (0.44%) LoadRunner
17 19 (0.34%) Zephyr
General
1 1,309 (23.25%) Social Skills
2 1,261 (22.40%) Finance
3 852 (15.14%) Analytical Skills
4 542 (9.63%) Public Sector
5 499 (8.86%) Banking
6 175 (3.11%) Front Office
7 150 (2.66%) Investment Banking
8 110 (1.95%) Retail
9 109 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 106 (1.88%) Documentation Skills
11 95 (1.69%) Marketing
12 86 (1.53%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.05%) Military
14 56 (0.99%) Pharmaceutical
15 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
16 51 (0.91%) Law
17 47 (0.83%) Legal
18 44 (0.78%) Financial Institution
19 43 (0.76%) Publishing
20 40 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 997 (17.71%) Senior
2 885 (15.72%) Developer
3 824 (14.64%) Data Engineer
4 476 (8.46%) Lead
5 467 (8.30%) Python Developer
6 420 (7.46%) Python Engineer
7 355 (6.31%) DevOps Engineer
8 297 (5.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 291 (5.17%) Analyst
10 283 (5.03%) Software Engineer
11 261 (4.64%) Architect
12 230 (4.09%) AWS Engineer
13 196 (3.48%) Cloud Engineer
14 194 (3.45%) Senior Developer
15 192 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
16 191 (3.39%) Senior Data Engineer
17 186 (3.30%) Azure Engineer
18 182 (3.23%) Data Scientist
19 153 (2.72%) Network Engineer
20 140 (2.49%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,376 (24.44%) Terraform
2 511 (9.08%) REST
3 371 (6.59%) PySpark
4 361 (6.41%) Kafka
5 304 (5.40%) React
6 251 (4.46%) .NET
7 214 (3.80%) JSON
8 202 (3.59%) Django
9 201 (3.57%) FastAPI
10 188 (3.34%) RESTful
11 163 (2.90%) Node.js
12 159 (2.82%) Pandas
13 150 (2.66%) LangChain
13 150 (2.66%) pytest
14 124 (2.20%) OAuth
15 115 (2.04%) Flask
15 115 (2.04%) YAML
16 108 (1.92%) PyTorch
17 106 (1.88%) HTML
17 106 (1.88%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 788 (14.00%) Cloud Native
2 303 (5.38%) Distributed Systems
3 280 (4.97%) AI Agents
4 240 (4.26%) Onboarding
5 166 (2.95%) Data Centre
6 156 (2.77%) Product Ownership
7 146 (2.59%) Data Structures
8 134 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
9 127 (2.26%) Algorithms
10 111 (1.97%) Hybrid Cloud
11 109 (1.94%) Management Information System
12 103 (1.83%) Enterprise Software
13 102 (1.81%) Data Protection Act
14 100 (1.78%) Derivative
15 91 (1.62%) Security Posture
16 78 (1.39%) Equities
16 78 (1.39%) Public Cloud
17 71 (1.26%) Linux Command Line
18 70 (1.24%) PKI
19 67 (1.19%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 759 (13.48%) Linux
2 338 (6.00%) Windows
3 251 (4.46%) Unix
4 157 (2.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.60%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.82%) Ubuntu
7 40 (0.71%) VMS
8 23 (0.41%) CentOS
9 19 (0.34%) AIX
10 17 (0.30%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Debian
16 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,324 (41.29%) CI/CD
2 1,622 (28.82%) DevOps
3 1,557 (27.66%) AI
4 1,288 (22.88%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,267 (22.51%) Agile
6 1,098 (19.51%) Analytics
7 988 (17.55%) Data Pipeline
8 931 (16.54%) Software Engineering
9 902 (16.02%) Problem-Solving
10 849 (15.08%) Machine Learning
11 825 (14.66%) Data Engineering
12 791 (14.05%) Containerisation
13 749 (13.31%) Observability
14 747 (13.27%) Data Modelling
15 666 (11.83%) Test Automation
16 656 (11.65%) ETL
17 645 (11.46%) Continuous Improvement
18 638 (11.33%) Validation
19 573 (10.18%) Platform Engineering
20 564 (10.02%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,841 (32.71%) SQL
2 807 (14.34%) Java
3 774 (13.75%) Bash
4 750 (13.32%) PowerShell
5 440 (7.82%) JavaScript
6 345 (6.13%) TypeScript
7 318 (5.65%) C#
8 213 (3.78%) Go
9 151 (2.68%) Shell Script
10 142 (2.52%) R
11 136 (2.42%) C++
12 134 (2.38%) Bicep
13 128 (2.27%) Scala
14 101 (1.79%) Perl
15 59 (1.05%) Groovy
16 58 (1.03%) C
16 58 (1.03%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 54 (0.96%) Rust
18 52 (0.92%) PL/SQL
19 47 (0.83%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,369 (24.32%) Security Cleared
2 1,105 (19.63%) SC Cleared
3 412 (7.32%) Degree
4 244 (4.33%) DV Cleared
5 158 (2.81%) Azure Certification
6 152 (2.70%) Computer Science Degree
7 141 (2.50%) AWS Certification
8 121 (2.15%) BPSS Clearance
9 94 (1.67%) CISSP
10 83 (1.47%) Cisco Certification
11 64 (1.14%) Master's Degree
12 49 (0.87%) Microsoft Certification
13 41 (0.73%) CCNP
14 35 (0.62%) PhD
14 35 (0.62%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 32 (0.57%) CISM
16 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
17 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 29 (0.52%) CCIE
19 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 634 (11.26%) Data Quality
2 316 (5.61%) QA
3 111 (1.97%) NIST
4 99 (1.76%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 95 (1.69%) GDPR
6 81 (1.44%) Accessibility
7 37 (0.66%) SLA
8 35 (0.62%) Actionable Recommendations
9 28 (0.50%) NCSC
10 25 (0.44%) PCI DSS
11 22 (0.39%) WCAG
12 20 (0.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 20 (0.36%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
13 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
14 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) MiFID
17 6 (0.11%) Basel III
17 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 967 (17.18%) Docker
2 172 (3.06%) Active Directory
3 137 (2.43%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.23%) Virtual Machines
5 54 (0.96%) Hyper-V
6 37 (0.66%) vSphere
7 34 (0.60%) VMware NSX
8 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
9 25 (0.44%) NFS
10 23 (0.41%) Firmware
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Squid
12 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
13 11 (0.20%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) HDFS
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,159 (20.59%) Kubernetes
2 643 (11.42%) Ansible
3 329 (5.84%) Grafana
4 240 (4.26%) Prometheus
5 80 (1.42%) Puppet
6 73 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 62 (1.10%) Argo
8 44 (0.78%) Single Sign-On
9 35 (0.62%) Kibana
10 33 (0.59%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 22 (0.39%) FortiGate
14 21 (0.37%) vRealize
14 21 (0.37%) ZABBIX
15 20 (0.36%) Packer
16 19 (0.34%) Nagios
16 19 (0.34%) vCenter Server
17 18 (0.32%) HAProxy
18 16 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 732 (13.00%) Microsoft
2 578 (10.27%) Databricks
3 385 (6.84%) Google
4 237 (4.21%) Oracle
5 208 (3.70%) Splunk
6 178 (3.16%) VMware
7 157 (2.79%) OpenAI
8 148 (2.63%) Cisco
9 128 (2.27%) ServiceNow
10 99 (1.76%) Dynatrace
11 97 (1.72%) Red Hat
12 92 (1.63%) F5
13 91 (1.62%) IBM
13 91 (1.62%) Palo Alto
14 82 (1.46%) Foundry
15 75 (1.33%) Informatica
16 74 (1.31%) Fortinet
17 73 (1.30%) SAP
18 65 (1.15%) CyberArk
19 59 (1.05%) Salesforce