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 26 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,768 3,918 4,172
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.64% 12.52% 9.42%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.36% 37.56% 31.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,212 2,590 2,930
10th Percentile £360 £383 £400
25th Percentile £419 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £563
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -2.22% -6.25%
75th Percentile £638 £676 £681
90th Percentile £743 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £520 £525
% change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 94 60 120
10th Percentile £28.25 £21.14 £27.60
25th Percentile £41.25 £24.44 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.86 £45.59 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.74% -24.02% -7.69%
75th Percentile £73.37 £67.14 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.70 £80.75 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £61.25
% change year-on-year +10.89% -24.60% -5.77%

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 11,527 10,431 13,205
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.56% 33.34% 29.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,650 6,596 9,346
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -2.78% -4.42%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £487 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -0.61% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 433 245 495
10th Percentile £39.55 £21.25 £35.51
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.75 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -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 26 January 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 26 January 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 26 January 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 4,025 £525 -8.70% 3,864
London 0 2,318 £550 -8.33% 1,159
UK excluding London 0 1,822 £500 -3.85% 3,364
Work from Home 0 1,421 £525 -4.55% 1,720
North of England +7 588 £480 -4.95% 592
South East +3 405 £481 -12.61% 1,198
Yorkshire +4 293 £500 -6.98% 239
Midlands +4 277 £507 +6.34% 361
Scotland +2 263 £465 -3.13% 189
North West +3 250 £450 -7.79% 259
West Midlands +12 235 £525 +2.44% 141
South West -9 180 £550 -10.39% 446
East of England +4 121 £525 +7.14% 459
North East +5 51 £488 -10.55% 98
East Midlands -20 42 £444 +12.91% 214
Northern Ireland +1 30 £575 +9.52% 58
Wales -16 27 £523 +4.50% 135

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
1 216 (4.53%) Apache Spark
2 196 (4.11%) Apache Airflow
3 151 (3.17%) Apache
4 145 (3.04%) Confluence
5 62 (1.30%) SAS
6 54 (1.13%) SharePoint
7 36 (0.76%) nginx
8 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 19 (0.40%) Appian
11 11 (0.23%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 7 (0.15%) Camunda
13 7 (0.15%) IIS
14 6 (0.13%) CMS
14 6 (0.13%) Luigi
14 6 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
15 5 (0.10%) Tomcat
16 3 (0.063%) Traefik
Applications
1 124 (2.60%) Microsoft Excel
2 30 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 18 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 3 (0.063%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.063%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.042%) Maya
9 2 (0.042%) NUKE
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 15 (0.31%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 3 (0.063%) Actimize
5 3 (0.063%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.042%) Bloomberg AIM
6 2 (0.042%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.042%) NetSuite
6 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.042%) Shopify
6 2 (0.042%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.021%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
7 1 (0.021%) Loan IQ
7 1 (0.021%) Maximo
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,882 (39.47%) AWS
2 1,562 (32.76%) Azure
3 744 (15.60%) GCP
4 603 (12.65%) GitHub
5 510 (10.70%) Serverless
6 429 (9.00%) Power Platform
7 365 (7.66%) Amazon S3
8 342 (7.17%) AWS Lambda
9 322 (6.75%) Azure DevOps
10 320 (6.71%) GitHub Actions
11 246 (5.16%) AWS CloudFormation
12 239 (5.01%) Snowflake
13 219 (4.59%) Azure Data Factory
14 192 (4.03%) Amazon EC2
15 173 (3.63%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 173 (3.63%) Amazon ECS
16 168 (3.52%) Amazon EKS
17 137 (2.87%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 137 (2.87%) OpenShift
18 133 (2.79%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 234 (4.91%) Firewall
2 153 (3.21%) DNS
3 125 (2.62%) TCP/IP
4 124 (2.60%) Network Security
5 80 (1.68%) VPN
6 75 (1.57%) HTTP
7 68 (1.43%) BGP
8 63 (1.32%) SSL
9 51 (1.07%) WAN
10 40 (0.84%) Wireshark
11 39 (0.82%) MPLS
11 39 (0.82%) OSPF
12 37 (0.78%) LAN
13 32 (0.67%) Wireless
14 31 (0.65%) DHCP
15 28 (0.59%) SSH
16 27 (0.57%) SD-WAN
17 25 (0.52%) SMTP
17 25 (0.52%) VLAN
18 21 (0.44%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 367 (7.70%) PostgreSQL
2 364 (7.63%) Power BI
3 283 (5.94%) Data Warehouse
4 226 (4.74%) NoSQL
5 221 (4.64%) Relational Database
6 218 (4.57%) Data Lake
7 167 (3.50%) SQL Server
8 155 (3.25%) Amazon RDS
9 154 (3.23%) Big Data
10 144 (3.02%) Tableau
11 124 (2.60%) MySQL
12 110 (2.31%) Metadata
13 101 (2.12%) BigQuery
14 95 (1.99%) Amazon Redshift
15 90 (1.89%) MongoDB
16 87 (1.82%) Amazon Athena
17 82 (1.72%) Delta Lake
18 81 (1.70%) Hadoop
19 77 (1.61%) Elasticsearch
20 76 (1.59%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 603 (12.65%) Git
2 547 (11.47%) Jenkins
3 424 (8.89%) GitLab
4 270 (5.66%) JIRA
5 82 (1.72%) Selenium
6 75 (1.57%) MLflow
7 51 (1.07%) Sonatype Nexus
8 49 (1.03%) Cucumber
9 46 (0.96%) Bitbucket
10 43 (0.90%) Postman
11 40 (0.84%) SonarQube
12 39 (0.82%) JUnit
13 34 (0.71%) JMeter
14 31 (0.65%) Liquibase
15 30 (0.63%) Maven
16 29 (0.61%) CircleCI
17 28 (0.59%) Visual Studio
18 26 (0.55%) Cypress.io
19 25 (0.52%) Artifactory
20 24 (0.50%) Gradle
General
1 1,284 (26.93%) Social Skills
2 937 (19.65%) Finance
3 668 (14.01%) Analytical Skills
4 437 (9.17%) Public Sector
5 425 (8.91%) Banking
6 159 (3.33%) Front Office
7 130 (2.73%) Investment Banking
8 120 (2.52%) Documentation Skills
9 73 (1.53%) Financial Institution
10 63 (1.32%) Marketing
11 61 (1.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 60 (1.26%) Retail
13 59 (1.24%) Pharmaceutical
14 52 (1.09%) Telecoms
15 42 (0.88%) Legal
15 42 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
16 39 (0.82%) Manufacturing
17 33 (0.69%) Influencing Skills
18 29 (0.61%) Military
19 24 (0.50%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 839 (17.60%) Developer
2 656 (13.76%) Senior
3 622 (13.05%) Data Engineer
4 352 (7.38%) Python Developer
5 316 (6.63%) DevOps Engineer
6 301 (6.31%) Python Engineer
7 298 (6.25%) Architect
8 275 (5.77%) Analyst
9 263 (5.52%) AWS Engineer
10 245 (5.14%) Lead
11 228 (4.78%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 218 (4.57%) Software Engineer
13 178 (3.73%) Data Scientist
14 166 (3.48%) Platform Engineer
15 145 (3.04%) Senior Developer
16 134 (2.81%) Data Analyst
17 130 (2.73%) Azure Engineer
18 124 (2.60%) Full-Stack Developer
19 121 (2.54%) Senior Data Engineer
20 116 (2.43%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 414 (8.68%) REST
2 302 (6.33%) React
3 285 (5.98%) Kafka
4 273 (5.73%) PySpark
5 236 (4.95%) Node.js
6 219 (4.59%) RESTful
7 212 (4.45%) Pandas
8 208 (4.36%) FastAPI
9 196 (4.11%) PyTorch
10 179 (3.75%) .NET
11 166 (3.48%) TensorFlow
12 162 (3.40%) NumPy
13 132 (2.77%) AngularJS
14 122 (2.56%) LangChain
15 119 (2.50%) scikit-learn
16 112 (2.35%) Elastic Stack
17 110 (2.31%) Flask
18 104 (2.18%) pytest
19 103 (2.16%) OAuth
20 99 (2.08%) Django
Miscellaneous
1 422 (8.85%) Cloud Native
2 190 (3.98%) Algorithms
3 186 (3.90%) Distributed Systems
4 128 (2.68%) Product Ownership
5 126 (2.64%) Data Protection Act
6 118 (2.47%) Equities
7 103 (2.16%) Data Structures
8 99 (2.08%) AI Agents
9 98 (2.06%) Onboarding
10 93 (1.95%) Enterprise Software
11 92 (1.93%) Derivative
12 84 (1.76%) Public Cloud
13 81 (1.70%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 80 (1.68%) Fixed Income
15 79 (1.66%) Management Information System
15 79 (1.66%) Security Posture
16 78 (1.64%) Data Centre
16 78 (1.64%) Hybrid Cloud
16 78 (1.64%) Legacy Systems
17 72 (1.51%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 770 (16.15%) Linux
2 348 (7.30%) Windows
3 235 (4.93%) Unix
4 95 (1.99%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.34%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.76%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.73%) Android
7 35 (0.73%) VMS
8 29 (0.61%) CentOS
9 26 (0.55%) Solaris
10 24 (0.50%) Mac OS
11 19 (0.40%) Apple iOS
12 15 (0.31%) Amazon Linux
13 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
14 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
15 5 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
16 4 (0.084%) Debian
16 4 (0.084%) Robot Operating System
16 4 (0.084%) Windows 10
17 3 (0.063%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,690 (35.44%) CI/CD
2 1,345 (28.21%) DevOps
3 1,125 (23.59%) Agile
4 1,048 (21.98%) Problem-Solving
5 974 (20.43%) AI
6 854 (17.91%) Infrastructure as Code
7 818 (17.16%) Analytics
8 747 (15.67%) Machine Learning
9 720 (15.10%) Containerisation
10 702 (14.72%) Data Pipeline
11 577 (12.10%) ETL
12 558 (11.70%) Data Engineering
12 558 (11.70%) Data Modelling
13 557 (11.68%) Data Science
14 524 (10.99%) Software Engineering
15 514 (10.78%) Test Automation
16 414 (8.68%) Business Intelligence
17 400 (8.39%) Observability
18 381 (7.99%) LLM
19 360 (7.55%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,444 (30.29%) SQL
2 750 (15.73%) Java
3 649 (13.61%) PowerShell
4 613 (12.86%) Bash
5 483 (10.13%) JavaScript
6 295 (6.19%) C#
7 289 (6.06%) TypeScript
8 244 (5.12%) Go
9 194 (4.07%) C++
10 160 (3.36%) Perl
11 152 (3.19%) R
12 148 (3.10%) Shell Script
13 118 (2.47%) Scala
14 95 (1.99%) Ruby
15 60 (1.26%) Bicep
15 60 (1.26%) Kusto Query Language
16 53 (1.11%) C
17 49 (1.03%) VBA
18 39 (0.82%) PHP
19 37 (0.78%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,050 (22.02%) Security Cleared
2 857 (17.97%) SC Cleared
3 437 (9.17%) Degree
4 234 (4.91%) Computer Science Degree
5 133 (2.79%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.73%) AWS Certification
7 117 (2.45%) Master's Degree
8 90 (1.89%) BPSS Clearance
9 87 (1.82%) Azure Certification
10 86 (1.80%) CISSP
11 79 (1.66%) Cisco Certification
12 70 (1.47%) MCP
13 51 (1.07%) CCNP
13 51 (1.07%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 42 (0.88%) PhD
15 37 (0.78%) CEH
16 35 (0.73%) CCIE
17 34 (0.71%) CISM
18 33 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
19 31 (0.65%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 387 (8.12%) Data Quality
2 175 (3.67%) QA
3 161 (3.38%) GDPR
4 91 (1.91%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 91 (1.91%) NIST
5 58 (1.22%) Accessibility
6 34 (0.71%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.63%) HIPAA
7 30 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 22 (0.46%) SLA
9 21 (0.44%) NCSC
10 19 (0.40%) SOC 2
11 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
12 9 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
12 9 (0.19%) MiFID
12 9 (0.19%) WCAG
13 8 (0.17%) Actionable Recommendations
13 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
13 8 (0.17%) EMIR
13 8 (0.17%) PMO
System Software
1 959 (20.11%) Docker
2 181 (3.80%) Active Directory
3 113 (2.37%) VMware Infrastructure
4 44 (0.92%) VMware NSX
5 37 (0.78%) vSphere
6 36 (0.76%) Virtual Machines
7 22 (0.46%) Firmware
8 21 (0.44%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.42%) HDFS
10 17 (0.36%) KVM
11 14 (0.29%) Squid
12 12 (0.25%) DFS Replication
12 12 (0.25%) Postfix
12 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 10 (0.21%) Lustre
13 10 (0.21%) VMware ESXi
14 9 (0.19%) GPFS
14 9 (0.19%) Oracle RAC
15 8 (0.17%) Dovecot
15 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,074 (22.53%) Terraform
2 1,004 (21.06%) Kubernetes
3 585 (12.27%) Ansible
4 344 (7.21%) Grafana
5 297 (6.23%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.82%) Argo
7 79 (1.66%) Puppet
8 55 (1.15%) Kibana
9 50 (1.05%) vRealize
10 43 (0.90%) Istio
11 35 (0.73%) Single Sign-On
12 34 (0.71%) Nessus
13 30 (0.63%) NetBackup
14 29 (0.61%) Progress Chef
15 19 (0.40%) ITRS Geneos
16 18 (0.38%) logstash
17 17 (0.36%) Nmap
18 16 (0.34%) QRadar
18 16 (0.34%) Rancher
19 15 (0.31%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 578 (12.12%) Microsoft
2 442 (9.27%) Databricks
3 291 (6.10%) Google
4 244 (5.12%) Splunk
5 232 (4.87%) Oracle
6 217 (4.55%) VMware
7 139 (2.92%) Red Hat
8 120 (2.52%) Cisco
9 116 (2.43%) ServiceNow
10 105 (2.20%) OpenAI
11 92 (1.93%) CyberArk
12 85 (1.78%) F5
13 81 (1.70%) Palo Alto
14 71 (1.49%) Foundry
15 67 (1.41%) BeyondTrust
16 49 (1.03%) SAP
17 42 (0.88%) Informatica
18 41 (0.86%) Dynatrace
19 39 (0.82%) Atlassian
19 39 (0.82%) IBM