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

6 months to
25 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 11 13
Rank change year-on-year +1 +2 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 4,570 4,140 4,851
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.59% 11.20% 10.15%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.74% 34.86% 32.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,974 2,774 3,476
10th Percentile £358 £363 £400
25th Percentile £425 £463 £481
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £571 £585
Median % change year-on-year -8.10% -2.35% -2.50%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £750 £825 £806
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £505 £525
% change year-on-year -0.99% -3.81% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 89 98 126
10th Percentile £28.25 £20.12 £40.00
25th Percentile £36.00 £27.19 £46.18
Median hourly rate £50.00 £60.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -16.67% -7.69% +8.79%
75th Percentile £63.75 £70.00 £73.75
90th Percentile £79.00 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £64.00 £63.75
% change year-on-year -21.88% +0.39% -1.92%

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 10,950 11,877 15,089
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.56% 32.13% 31.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,178 7,713 10,759
10th Percentile £342 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £440
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £507 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.43% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £619 £645 £669
90th Percentile £725 £760 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -2.56% -2.50% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 309 308 438
10th Percentile £29.00 £25.95 £32.32
25th Percentile £41.94 £41.13 £47.81
Median hourly rate £58.50 £64.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year -8.59% +2.40% +4.17%
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.65 £75.00 £79.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year - - +2.56%

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 October 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 25 October 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 25 October 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 +1 3,881 £525 -9.21% 5,527
London +1 2,305 £565 -9.60% 2,739
UK excluding London +5 1,750 £500 -0.99% 4,221
Work from Home 0 1,432 £543 -3.44% 2,560
North of England +10 527 £476 -4.80% 816
South East +4 354 £500 -3.85% 2,083
Yorkshire +9 284 £500 -1.38% 231
Scotland +13 282 £500 +1.68% 187
Midlands +9 250 £492 +6.38% 371
North West +10 211 £435 -10.31% 485
West Midlands +12 207 £500 - 220
South West -5 170 £550 -8.43% 344
East of England +10 164 £515 +6.19% 324
East Midlands -13 41 £421 +5.31% 148
North East +7 37 £520 -11.11% 104
Wales -6 32 £455 -9.00% 110
Northern Ireland -4 21 £588 +11.90% 39

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 (5.43%) Apache Airflow
2 179 (3.92%) Apache Spark
3 174 (3.81%) Apache
4 168 (3.68%) Confluence
5 58 (1.27%) SAS
6 44 (0.96%) SharePoint
7 36 (0.79%) OpenStack
8 31 (0.68%) nginx
9 25 (0.55%) Jupyter
10 22 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.33%) IIS
12 12 (0.26%) WebSphere
13 10 (0.22%) ArcGIS
14 9 (0.20%) Apache Pig
14 9 (0.20%) Appian
14 9 (0.20%) JBoss
15 8 (0.18%) Oracle Application Server
16 6 (0.13%) Luigi
17 5 (0.11%) CMS
18 4 (0.088%) WebLogic
Applications
1 115 (2.52%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.77%) Microsoft Office
3 33 (0.72%) Chatbot
4 28 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.26%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 11 (0.24%) Maya
6 11 (0.24%) NUKE
7 9 (0.20%) MS Visio
8 4 (0.088%) Spreadsheet
8 4 (0.088%) Weka
9 2 (0.044%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.044%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.044%) Maple
9 2 (0.044%) Microsoft Project
10 1 (0.022%) NASTRAN
10 1 (0.022%) SPSS
10 1 (0.022%) Stata
10 1 (0.022%) Trello
10 1 (0.022%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 19 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.22%) SAP S/4HANA
3 8 (0.18%) Maximo
4 6 (0.13%) SAP PM
4 6 (0.13%) thinkFolio
5 4 (0.088%) Dynamics CRM
5 4 (0.088%) Endur
5 4 (0.088%) Remedy ITSM
6 3 (0.066%) Fidessa
6 3 (0.066%) Payment Gateway
6 3 (0.066%) Teamcenter
7 2 (0.044%) Distributed Ledger
7 2 (0.044%) Kondor
7 2 (0.044%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.044%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.044%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.044%) Oracle BPM
7 2 (0.044%) Salesforce CRM
7 2 (0.044%) Temenos T24
8 1 (0.022%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 1,781 (38.97%) AWS
2 1,308 (28.62%) Azure
3 711 (15.56%) GCP
4 480 (10.50%) GitHub
5 427 (9.34%) Serverless
6 360 (7.88%) Power Platform
7 337 (7.37%) Amazon S3
8 292 (6.39%) AWS Lambda
9 268 (5.86%) Azure DevOps
10 246 (5.38%) GitHub Actions
11 231 (5.05%) Snowflake
12 190 (4.16%) dbt
13 179 (3.92%) AWS CloudFormation
14 170 (3.72%) Amazon EC2
15 169 (3.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 138 (3.02%) Azure Data Factory
17 134 (2.93%) OpenShift
18 126 (2.76%) Amazon ECS
19 122 (2.67%) Amazon EKS
20 114 (2.49%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 276 (6.04%) Firewall
2 179 (3.92%) DNS
3 146 (3.19%) TCP/IP
4 106 (2.32%) Network Security
5 103 (2.25%) BGP
6 99 (2.17%) VPN
7 93 (2.04%) HTTP
8 68 (1.49%) SSL
9 65 (1.42%) OSPF
10 56 (1.23%) WAN
11 53 (1.16%) MPLS
12 45 (0.98%) LAN
13 39 (0.85%) SSH
14 37 (0.81%) SMTP
15 36 (0.79%) Wireless
16 32 (0.70%) SD-WAN
16 32 (0.70%) VXLAN
16 32 (0.70%) Wireshark
17 31 (0.68%) FTP
18 30 (0.66%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 383 (8.38%) PostgreSQL
2 322 (7.05%) Power BI
3 258 (5.65%) Data Warehouse
4 254 (5.56%) Relational Database
5 241 (5.27%) NoSQL
6 179 (3.92%) Big Data
7 176 (3.85%) Data Lake
8 154 (3.37%) Tableau
9 146 (3.19%) SQL Server
10 144 (3.15%) Amazon RDS
11 133 (2.91%) MongoDB
12 111 (2.43%) BigQuery
13 106 (2.32%) MySQL
14 101 (2.21%) Amazon Athena
15 96 (2.10%) Hadoop
16 80 (1.75%) DynamoDB
17 76 (1.66%) Metadata
18 75 (1.64%) Amazon Redshift
19 71 (1.55%) Elasticsearch
20 65 (1.42%) Apache Iceberg
Development Applications
1 611 (13.37%) Git
2 599 (13.11%) Jenkins
3 361 (7.90%) GitLab
4 307 (6.72%) JIRA
5 74 (1.62%) SonarQube
6 69 (1.51%) Selenium
7 68 (1.49%) JUnit
8 61 (1.33%) Sonatype Nexus
9 58 (1.27%) Bitbucket
10 50 (1.09%) MLflow
11 46 (1.01%) Liquibase
12 43 (0.94%) Artifactory
13 34 (0.74%) Maven
14 31 (0.68%) Cucumber
14 31 (0.68%) Gradle
15 30 (0.66%) Cypress.io
16 28 (0.61%) Eclipse
16 28 (0.61%) JMeter
16 28 (0.61%) Metasploit
16 28 (0.61%) Vagrant
General
1 1,278 (27.96%) Social Skills
2 1,057 (23.13%) Finance
3 679 (14.86%) Analytical Skills
4 504 (11.03%) Banking
5 355 (7.77%) Public Sector
6 266 (5.82%) Front Office
7 217 (4.75%) Investment Banking
8 87 (1.90%) Financial Institution
9 85 (1.86%) Documentation Skills
10 81 (1.77%) Telecoms
11 71 (1.55%) Marketing
12 68 (1.49%) Pharmaceutical
13 66 (1.44%) Retail
14 57 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 51 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
16 50 (1.09%) Legal
17 38 (0.83%) Manufacturing
18 28 (0.61%) Military
19 27 (0.59%) Aerospace
19 27 (0.59%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 875 (19.15%) Developer
2 602 (13.17%) Senior
3 506 (11.07%) Data Engineer
4 362 (7.92%) Analyst
4 362 (7.92%) Python Engineer
5 337 (7.37%) Python Developer
6 313 (6.85%) DevOps Engineer
7 291 (6.37%) AWS Engineer
7 291 (6.37%) Software Engineer
8 246 (5.38%) Architect
9 186 (4.07%) Lead
10 177 (3.87%) Data Analyst
11 168 (3.68%) Platform Engineer
12 165 (3.61%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 146 (3.19%) Data Scientist
14 135 (2.95%) Network Engineer
15 125 (2.74%) Cloud Engineer
15 125 (2.74%) Consultant
16 122 (2.67%) Full-Stack Developer
17 121 (2.65%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 349 (7.64%) React
2 340 (7.44%) REST
3 297 (6.50%) Kafka
4 230 (5.03%) RESTful
5 228 (4.99%) Pandas
6 219 (4.79%) FastAPI
7 216 (4.73%) Node.js
8 180 (3.94%) NumPy
9 174 (3.81%) PySpark
10 160 (3.50%) PyTorch
11 156 (3.41%) AngularJS
12 139 (3.04%) TensorFlow
13 129 (2.82%) .NET
13 129 (2.82%) Elastic Stack
14 124 (2.71%) HTML
15 114 (2.49%) CSS
16 106 (2.32%) GraphQL
17 101 (2.21%) Flask
18 99 (2.17%) Spring
19 98 (2.14%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 357 (7.81%) Cloud Native
2 194 (4.25%) Algorithms
3 183 (4.00%) Distributed Systems
4 166 (3.63%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 157 (3.44%) Equities
5 157 (3.44%) Fixed Income
6 140 (3.06%) Data Protection Act
7 128 (2.80%) Derivative
8 120 (2.63%) Hedge funds
9 118 (2.58%) Data Structures
10 113 (2.47%) Onboarding
11 105 (2.30%) Product Ownership
12 85 (1.86%) Data Centre
13 80 (1.75%) Public Cloud
14 77 (1.68%) Management Information System
15 73 (1.60%) AI Agents
16 67 (1.47%) Legacy Systems
17 64 (1.40%) Replication
18 62 (1.36%) Hybrid Cloud
19 61 (1.33%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 817 (17.88%) Linux
2 350 (7.66%) Windows
3 245 (5.36%) Unix
4 93 (2.04%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.47%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.96%) Ubuntu
7 42 (0.92%) Android
8 36 (0.79%) CentOS
9 33 (0.72%) VMS
10 28 (0.61%) Apple iOS
11 26 (0.57%) Amazon Linux
12 25 (0.55%) Mac OS
13 21 (0.46%) Solaris
14 9 (0.20%) Debian
14 9 (0.20%) Kali Linux
15 7 (0.15%) AIX
16 6 (0.13%) Windows 7
17 5 (0.11%) SUSE
17 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
18 4 (0.088%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,476 (32.30%) CI/CD
2 1,244 (27.22%) DevOps
3 1,198 (26.21%) Agile
4 961 (21.03%) Problem-Solving
5 758 (16.59%) AI
6 753 (16.48%) Infrastructure as Code
7 654 (14.31%) Machine Learning
8 624 (13.65%) Analytics
9 594 (13.00%) Software Engineering
10 592 (12.95%) Containerisation
11 561 (12.28%) Data Pipeline
12 487 (10.66%) Data Modelling
12 487 (10.66%) ETL
13 472 (10.33%) Data Science
14 456 (9.98%) Test Automation
15 452 (9.89%) Data Engineering
16 395 (8.64%) Computer Science
17 372 (8.14%) Business Intelligence
18 332 (7.26%) Migration
19 315 (6.89%) Microservices
Programming Languages
1 1,452 (31.77%) SQL
2 841 (18.40%) Java
3 627 (13.72%) Bash
4 558 (12.21%) PowerShell
5 545 (11.93%) JavaScript
6 351 (7.68%) TypeScript
7 283 (6.19%) Go
8 267 (5.84%) C++
9 257 (5.62%) C#
10 211 (4.62%) Shell Script
11 191 (4.18%) Perl
12 154 (3.37%) R
13 97 (2.12%) Scala
14 83 (1.82%) C
15 65 (1.42%) Ruby
16 58 (1.27%) Groovy
17 54 (1.18%) PHP
18 49 (1.07%) VBA
19 44 (0.96%) Kusto Query Language
20 43 (0.94%) Rust
Qualifications
1 791 (17.31%) Security Cleared
2 620 (13.57%) SC Cleared
3 473 (10.35%) Degree
4 229 (5.01%) Computer Science Degree
5 149 (3.26%) AWS Certification
6 138 (3.02%) Master's Degree
7 130 (2.84%) DV Cleared
8 102 (2.23%) Cisco Certification
9 68 (1.49%) CISSP
10 67 (1.47%) CCNP
11 65 (1.42%) Azure Certification
12 63 (1.38%) BPSS Clearance
13 56 (1.23%) PhD
14 41 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 39 (0.85%) OSCP
16 38 (0.83%) CCIE
16 38 (0.83%) MCP
17 33 (0.72%) CEH
18 27 (0.59%) CCNA
19 26 (0.57%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 316 (6.91%) Data Quality
2 186 (4.07%) QA
3 136 (2.98%) GDPR
4 89 (1.95%) NIST
5 79 (1.73%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 60 (1.31%) Accessibility
7 52 (1.14%) PCI DSS
8 42 (0.92%) HIPAA
9 27 (0.59%) SLA
10 26 (0.57%) NCSC
11 25 (0.55%) SOC 2
12 19 (0.42%) EU AI Act
12 19 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 13 (0.28%) Cyber Essentials
14 12 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 9 (0.20%) EMIR
16 9 (0.20%) MiFID
17 8 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
18 7 (0.15%) WCAG
System Software
1 823 (18.01%) Docker
2 135 (2.95%) Active Directory
2 135 (2.95%) VMware Infrastructure
3 41 (0.90%) vSphere
4 34 (0.74%) Virtual Machines
5 33 (0.72%) VMware NSX
6 30 (0.66%) Firmware
7 22 (0.48%) DFS Replication
8 20 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
9 17 (0.37%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.37%) Squid
10 14 (0.31%) Oracle RAC
11 13 (0.28%) HDFS
11 13 (0.28%) KVM
12 12 (0.26%) Dovecot
12 12 (0.26%) Postfix
13 11 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 10 (0.22%) zsh
15 6 (0.13%) Veritas Cluster Server
16 5 (0.11%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 964 (21.09%) Kubernetes
2 902 (19.74%) Terraform
3 628 (13.74%) Ansible
4 318 (6.96%) Grafana
5 282 (6.17%) Prometheus
6 88 (1.93%) Puppet
7 69 (1.51%) Argo
8 47 (1.03%) Kibana
8 47 (1.03%) Progress Chef
9 39 (0.85%) Nessus
10 34 (0.74%) Istio
11 31 (0.68%) vRealize
12 29 (0.63%) Nmap
12 29 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
13 28 (0.61%) NetBackup
14 25 (0.55%) ITRS Geneos
14 25 (0.55%) logstash
15 23 (0.50%) vCenter Server
16 21 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
17 19 (0.42%) Packer
Vendors
1 489 (10.70%) Microsoft
2 312 (6.83%) Databricks
3 262 (5.73%) Google
4 235 (5.14%) Splunk
5 222 (4.86%) Oracle
6 218 (4.77%) VMware
7 146 (3.19%) ServiceNow
8 137 (3.00%) Cisco
9 130 (2.84%) Red Hat
10 88 (1.93%) Palo Alto
11 86 (1.88%) F5
12 74 (1.62%) SAP
13 66 (1.44%) OpenAI
14 50 (1.09%) Foundry
15 45 (0.98%) IBM
15 45 (0.98%) Juniper
16 43 (0.94%) Arista
16 43 (0.94%) CrowdStrike
17 42 (0.92%) CyberArk
18 39 (0.85%) Sybase