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

6 months to
25 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,115 3,981 4,117
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.38% 13.07% 9.34%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.34% 38.67% 31.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,470 2,664 2,912
10th Percentile £360 £378 £400
25th Percentile £414 £458 £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 £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £525
% change year-on-year -2.50% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 105 55 105
10th Percentile £28.73 £20.12 £25.37
25th Percentile £41.94 £23.80 £40.00
Median hourly rate £54.00 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £65.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.80 £79.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £56.00
% change year-on-year +13.80% -19.64% -13.85%

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 12,373 10,296 12,974
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.96% 33.80% 29.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,255 6,625 9,182
10th Percentile £352 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -5.36%
75th Percentile £606 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £483 £500
% change year-on-year -0.52% -3.50% -1.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 476 236 493
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.63 £35.10
25th Percentile £53.53 £35.56 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.76%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.97% +1.99% -3.85%

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 25 February 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 25 February 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 25 February 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 0 4,279 £518 -9.91% 2,429
London 0 2,437 £550 -8.33% 1,062
UK excluding London -1 1,979 £488 -2.50% 1,918
Work from Home -1 1,574 £525 -4.55% 946
North of England +13 670 £476 -4.90% 446
South East -3 417 £492 -8.47% 599
Yorkshire +5 357 £488 -2.50% 148
Scotland +2 292 £447 -5.89% 153
Midlands 0 280 £500 +5.04% 227
North West +11 271 £465 -3.23% 225
West Midlands -1 233 £500 - 113
South West -6 198 £550 -8.33% 241
East of England +3 133 £525 +6.06% 200
North East +3 48 £475 -7.32% 74
East Midlands -20 46 £444 +11.64% 113
Wales -14 32 £473 -7.80% 61
Northern Ireland +3 29 £600 +14.29% 24

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
1 248 (4.85%) Apache Spark
2 196 (3.83%) Apache Airflow
3 159 (3.11%) Confluence
4 148 (2.89%) Apache
5 74 (1.45%) SAS
6 61 (1.19%) SharePoint
7 29 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
8 27 (0.53%) nginx
8 27 (0.53%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.47%) Jupyter
10 23 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
11 20 (0.39%) Appian
12 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
13 8 (0.16%) Camunda
14 6 (0.12%) CMS
15 5 (0.098%) Apache Superset
15 5 (0.098%) Tomcat
16 4 (0.078%) Oracle Application Server
16 4 (0.078%) Traefik
17 3 (0.059%) WebLogic
Applications
1 126 (2.46%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
4 24 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.39%) MS Visio
6 13 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 3 (0.059%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.059%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 2 (0.039%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
10 1 (0.020%) NUKE
10 1 (0.020%) Trello
Business Applications
1 19 (0.37%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.078%) Bloomberg AIM
5 3 (0.059%) Actimize
5 3 (0.059%) IntelliMatch
5 3 (0.059%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
6 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.039%) Oracle EBS
6 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
6 2 (0.039%) Shopify
7 1 (0.020%) Advent Geneva
7 1 (0.020%) Cerner Millennium
7 1 (0.020%) ION MarketView
7 1 (0.020%) Loan IQ
7 1 (0.020%) Salesforce CRM
7 1 (0.020%) SAP BPC
7 1 (0.020%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 2,016 (39.41%) AWS
2 1,739 (34.00%) Azure
3 796 (15.56%) GCP
4 659 (12.88%) GitHub
5 543 (10.62%) Serverless
6 478 (9.35%) Power Platform
7 374 (7.31%) Amazon S3
8 358 (7.00%) AWS Lambda
8 358 (7.00%) Azure DevOps
9 331 (6.47%) GitHub Actions
10 255 (4.99%) AWS CloudFormation
11 253 (4.95%) Azure Data Factory
12 251 (4.91%) Snowflake
13 191 (3.73%) Amazon EKS
14 183 (3.58%) Amazon ECS
15 172 (3.36%) Amazon EC2
16 168 (3.28%) OpenShift
17 166 (3.25%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 158 (3.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 142 (2.78%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 225 (4.40%) Firewall
2 147 (2.87%) DNS
3 113 (2.21%) Network Security
3 113 (2.21%) TCP/IP
4 81 (1.58%) VPN
5 61 (1.19%) BGP
5 61 (1.19%) HTTP
6 50 (0.98%) SSL
7 49 (0.96%) WAN
8 41 (0.80%) Wireshark
9 35 (0.68%) LAN
9 35 (0.68%) MPLS
9 35 (0.68%) OSPF
9 35 (0.68%) SAN
10 31 (0.61%) DHCP
11 28 (0.55%) Wireless
12 27 (0.53%) VLAN
13 26 (0.51%) SD-WAN
14 23 (0.45%) BIG-IP
15 21 (0.41%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 397 (7.76%) Power BI
2 390 (7.62%) PostgreSQL
3 317 (6.20%) Data Warehouse
4 239 (4.67%) Data Lake
5 238 (4.65%) NoSQL
6 202 (3.95%) Relational Database
7 189 (3.70%) SQL Server
8 164 (3.21%) Big Data
9 157 (3.07%) Tableau
10 136 (2.66%) Amazon RDS
11 125 (2.44%) BigQuery
11 125 (2.44%) Metadata
12 119 (2.33%) MySQL
13 108 (2.11%) Delta Lake
14 103 (2.01%) Amazon Redshift
15 98 (1.92%) Amazon Athena
16 97 (1.90%) MongoDB
17 88 (1.72%) Hadoop
18 87 (1.70%) Azure SQL Database
19 79 (1.54%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 637 (12.45%) Git
2 546 (10.67%) Jenkins
3 435 (8.50%) GitLab
4 299 (5.85%) JIRA
5 95 (1.86%) MLflow
6 84 (1.64%) Selenium
7 51 (1.00%) Bitbucket
8 48 (0.94%) Postman
9 45 (0.88%) Cucumber
10 40 (0.78%) Sonatype Nexus
11 36 (0.70%) JUnit
12 34 (0.66%) JMeter
13 29 (0.57%) SpecFlow
14 28 (0.55%) Liquibase
15 25 (0.49%) CircleCI
15 25 (0.49%) Cypress.io
15 25 (0.49%) Visual Studio
16 24 (0.47%) Maven
17 23 (0.45%) Artifactory
18 22 (0.43%) SonarQube
General
1 1,314 (25.69%) Social Skills
2 1,026 (20.06%) Finance
3 705 (13.78%) Analytical Skills
4 474 (9.27%) Public Sector
5 431 (8.43%) Banking
6 175 (3.42%) Front Office
7 131 (2.56%) Documentation Skills
8 110 (2.15%) Investment Banking
9 70 (1.37%) Financial Institution
9 70 (1.37%) Retail
10 68 (1.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 66 (1.29%) Marketing
12 61 (1.19%) Pharmaceutical
13 53 (1.04%) Telecoms
14 47 (0.92%) Legal
15 43 (0.84%) Influencing Skills
15 43 (0.84%) Manufacturing
16 40 (0.78%) Presentation Skills
17 33 (0.65%) Military
18 24 (0.47%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 930 (18.18%) Developer
2 723 (14.13%) Senior
3 718 (14.04%) Data Engineer
4 406 (7.94%) Python Developer
5 321 (6.28%) Architect
6 316 (6.18%) Lead
7 312 (6.10%) DevOps Engineer
8 302 (5.90%) Analyst
9 296 (5.79%) Python Engineer
10 269 (5.26%) AWS Engineer
11 254 (4.97%) Software Engineer
12 245 (4.79%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 204 (3.99%) Data Scientist
14 176 (3.44%) Platform Engineer
15 157 (3.07%) Senior Developer
16 153 (2.99%) Data Analyst
17 145 (2.83%) Azure Engineer
18 139 (2.72%) Senior Data Engineer
19 136 (2.66%) Cloud Engineer
19 136 (2.66%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 438 (8.56%) REST
2 362 (7.08%) React
3 323 (6.31%) PySpark
4 322 (6.30%) Kafka
5 278 (5.43%) Node.js
6 231 (4.52%) Pandas
7 221 (4.32%) FastAPI
7 221 (4.32%) PyTorch
8 212 (4.14%) RESTful
9 209 (4.09%) .NET
10 178 (3.48%) TensorFlow
11 169 (3.30%) NumPy
12 144 (2.82%) scikit-learn
13 140 (2.74%) AngularJS
14 133 (2.60%) Flask
15 131 (2.56%) LangChain
16 117 (2.29%) pytest
17 114 (2.23%) JSON
18 112 (2.19%) Django
19 106 (2.07%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 483 (9.44%) Cloud Native
2 206 (4.03%) Distributed Systems
3 203 (3.97%) Algorithms
4 136 (2.66%) Product Ownership
5 125 (2.44%) Equities
6 124 (2.42%) Data Protection Act
7 114 (2.23%) Data Structures
8 106 (2.07%) Fixed Income
9 105 (2.05%) Onboarding
10 98 (1.92%) Derivative
11 97 (1.90%) AI Agents
12 93 (1.82%) Security Posture
13 92 (1.80%) Enterprise Software
14 89 (1.74%) Hybrid Cloud
14 89 (1.74%) Legacy Systems
14 89 (1.74%) Public Cloud
15 87 (1.70%) Management Information System
16 75 (1.47%) Data Centre
17 66 (1.29%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
18 59 (1.15%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 723 (14.13%) Linux
2 329 (6.43%) Windows
3 210 (4.11%) Unix
4 100 (1.96%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 65 (1.27%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.74%) Android
7 37 (0.72%) Ubuntu
8 34 (0.66%) VMS
9 27 (0.53%) CentOS
10 25 (0.49%) Mac OS
11 24 (0.47%) Solaris
12 21 (0.41%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.20%) Windows 7
14 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
15 8 (0.16%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.098%) Debian
16 5 (0.098%) Embedded Linux
17 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2008
17 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2016
17 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,857 (36.30%) CI/CD
2 1,441 (28.17%) DevOps
3 1,236 (24.16%) Agile
4 1,090 (21.31%) AI
5 1,082 (21.15%) Problem-Solving
6 975 (19.06%) Analytics
7 917 (17.93%) Infrastructure as Code
8 842 (16.46%) Machine Learning
9 812 (15.87%) Data Pipeline
10 770 (15.05%) Containerisation
11 679 (13.27%) Data Engineering
12 662 (12.94%) ETL
13 642 (12.55%) Data Modelling
14 627 (12.26%) Data Science
15 588 (11.50%) Software Engineering
16 575 (11.24%) Test Automation
17 475 (9.29%) Observability
18 466 (9.11%) Business Intelligence
19 439 (8.58%) LLM
20 371 (7.25%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,602 (31.32%) SQL
2 733 (14.33%) Java
3 671 (13.12%) PowerShell
4 613 (11.98%) Bash
5 533 (10.42%) JavaScript
6 344 (6.73%) TypeScript
7 329 (6.43%) C#
8 246 (4.81%) Go
9 183 (3.58%) C++
10 156 (3.05%) R
11 125 (2.44%) Shell Script
12 121 (2.37%) Perl
13 113 (2.21%) Scala
14 92 (1.80%) Ruby
15 63 (1.23%) Kusto Query Language
16 62 (1.21%) Bicep
17 49 (0.96%) C
17 49 (0.96%) VBA
18 42 (0.82%) T-SQL
19 41 (0.80%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,160 (22.68%) Security Cleared
2 931 (18.20%) SC Cleared
3 466 (9.11%) Degree
4 226 (4.42%) Computer Science Degree
5 143 (2.80%) DV Cleared
6 142 (2.78%) AWS Certification
7 130 (2.54%) Master's Degree
8 115 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
9 98 (1.92%) Azure Certification
10 94 (1.84%) CISSP
11 73 (1.43%) Cisco Certification
12 63 (1.23%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 57 (1.11%) CCNP
14 46 (0.90%) PhD
15 44 (0.86%) CISM
16 40 (0.78%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.63%) CEH
19 31 (0.61%) Microsoft Certified Professional
20 27 (0.53%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 462 (9.03%) Data Quality
2 202 (3.95%) QA
3 178 (3.48%) GDPR
4 105 (2.05%) NIST
5 102 (1.99%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 76 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 32 (0.63%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.59%) HIPAA
9 29 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.51%) SLA
11 23 (0.45%) NCSC
12 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
13 15 (0.29%) Actionable Recommendations
14 12 (0.23%) EU AI Act
14 12 (0.23%) WCAG
15 11 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.20%) MiFID
16 10 (0.20%) PMO
16 10 (0.20%) PSD2
17 9 (0.18%) EMIR
System Software
1 962 (18.81%) Docker
2 177 (3.46%) Active Directory
3 117 (2.29%) VMware Infrastructure
4 52 (1.02%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.98%) vSphere
6 48 (0.94%) VMware NSX
7 28 (0.55%) Hyper-V
8 22 (0.43%) Firmware
9 15 (0.29%) KVM
9 15 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) HDFS
11 12 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.20%) Lustre
13 9 (0.18%) GPFS
14 8 (0.16%) SRDF
14 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
15 7 (0.14%) Postfix
15 7 (0.14%) Squid
16 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
17 5 (0.098%) NetIQ eDirectory
Systems Management
1 1,136 (22.21%) Terraform
2 1,069 (20.90%) Kubernetes
3 554 (10.83%) Ansible
4 356 (6.96%) Grafana
5 314 (6.14%) Prometheus
6 92 (1.80%) Argo
7 79 (1.54%) Puppet
8 53 (1.04%) vRealize
9 49 (0.96%) Kibana
10 45 (0.88%) Istio
11 40 (0.78%) Nessus
12 34 (0.66%) Progress Chef
13 32 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
14 29 (0.57%) vCenter Server
15 27 (0.53%) Control-M
16 25 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
16 25 (0.49%) NetBackup
17 23 (0.45%) IBM Guardium
18 18 (0.35%) ITRS Geneos
18 18 (0.35%) Nmap
Vendors
1 624 (12.20%) Microsoft
2 517 (10.11%) Databricks
3 308 (6.02%) Google
4 239 (4.67%) Splunk
5 229 (4.48%) Oracle
6 226 (4.42%) VMware
7 151 (2.95%) Red Hat
8 118 (2.31%) Cisco
9 117 (2.29%) OpenAI
10 110 (2.15%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.64%) CyberArk
12 80 (1.56%) Foundry
13 72 (1.41%) Palo Alto
14 71 (1.39%) F5
15 66 (1.29%) BeyondTrust
16 59 (1.15%) Informatica
17 48 (0.94%) IBM
18 47 (0.92%) SAP
19 40 (0.78%) Atlassian
19 40 (0.78%) Dynatrace