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

6 months to
17 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,681 4,304 4,077
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.39% 13.07% 10.66%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.88% 39.89% 33.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,684 2,811 2,841
10th Percentile £375 £356 £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 £701
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £500 £507
% change year-on-year +1.00% -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 140 83 102
10th Percentile £30.30 £28.18 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £34.88 £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 £58.13 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.21 £83.00 £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 14,245 10,791 12,230
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.06% 32.76% 31.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,249 7,144 8,276
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.40% -4.67% -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 542 293 341
10th Percentile £27.75 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £48.16 £37.77 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.03 £80.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +0.78% -0.77% -

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 17 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 17 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 17 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 4,853 £550 +2.61% 12,288
London -3 2,867 £575 - 7,909
UK excluding London -8 2,172 £505 +1.00% 5,355
Work from Home -4 1,554 £529 -3.77% 4,448
North of England +1 748 £500 +5.04% 1,152
South East -5 461 £544 +8.75% 1,254
Yorkshire -2 391 £500 - 371
Scotland -4 294 £450 -10.00% 660
South West -2 285 £550 +4.76% 672
North West -3 281 £525 +10.53% 636
Midlands -21 224 £500 +5.26% 541
West Midlands -20 180 £500 - 310
East of England -10 150 £478 -9.05% 788
North East -4 88 £425 -2.86% 150
East Midlands -10 44 £469 +12.95% 231
Wales -8 27 £530 +29.27% 113
Northern Ireland +2 17 £363 -30.95% 213

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
1 294 (5.18%) Apache Airflow
2 270 (4.75%) Apache Spark
3 224 (3.94%) Apache
4 164 (2.89%) Confluence
5 57 (1.00%) Jupyter
5 57 (1.00%) SharePoint
6 36 (0.63%) SAS
7 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
8 25 (0.44%) nginx
9 24 (0.42%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 21 (0.37%) IIS
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 (0.088%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.088%) CICS
15 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 109 (1.92%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 18 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
5 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
6 15 (0.26%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.035%) 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%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 19 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
2 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
2 18 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
3 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
5 8 (0.14%) Front Arena
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.070%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.035%) Orchestrade
11 2 (0.035%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 2,103 (37.02%) AWS
2 1,917 (33.74%) Azure
3 889 (15.65%) GCP
4 755 (13.29%) GitHub
5 495 (8.71%) Power Platform
6 490 (8.63%) Serverless
7 442 (7.78%) GitHub Actions
8 439 (7.73%) Azure DevOps
9 396 (6.97%) Amazon S3
10 366 (6.44%) AWS Lambda
11 335 (5.90%) Snowflake
12 240 (4.22%) dbt
13 215 (3.78%) Azure Data Factory
14 197 (3.47%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 183 (3.22%) AWS CloudFormation
16 177 (3.12%) Amazon EKS
17 160 (2.82%) Entra ID
18 142 (2.50%) Amazon EC2
19 128 (2.25%) Amazon ECS
20 127 (2.24%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 286 (5.03%) Firewall
2 220 (3.87%) DNS
3 154 (2.71%) Network Security
4 153 (2.69%) TCP/IP
5 131 (2.31%) BGP
6 126 (2.22%) VPN
7 117 (2.06%) WAN
8 87 (1.53%) DHCP
9 78 (1.37%) OSPF
10 71 (1.25%) SD-WAN
11 62 (1.09%) BIG-IP
12 61 (1.07%) VLAN
13 59 (1.04%) SSL
14 56 (0.99%) VXLAN
15 54 (0.95%) HTTP
16 52 (0.92%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 47 (0.83%) Ethernet VPN
18 39 (0.69%) SAN
18 39 (0.69%) SSH
19 38 (0.67%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 444 (7.82%) Power BI
2 331 (5.83%) Data Warehouse
3 320 (5.63%) PostgreSQL
4 217 (3.82%) Metadata
5 214 (3.77%) SQL Server
6 207 (3.64%) Relational Database
7 187 (3.29%) Data Lake
8 180 (3.17%) Tableau
9 177 (3.12%) BigQuery
10 154 (2.71%) NoSQL
11 136 (2.39%) Big Data
12 132 (2.32%) Amazon RDS
13 129 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
13 129 (2.27%) Amazon Redshift
14 122 (2.15%) Delta Lake
15 120 (2.11%) MongoDB
16 111 (1.95%) DynamoDB
17 98 (1.73%) MySQL
18 72 (1.27%) Redis
19 64 (1.13%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 804 (14.15%) Git
2 511 (8.99%) Jenkins
3 477 (8.40%) GitLab
4 303 (5.33%) JIRA
5 116 (2.04%) Selenium
6 58 (1.02%) Postman
7 57 (1.00%) SonarQube
8 56 (0.99%) Claude Code
9 55 (0.97%) JMeter
10 51 (0.90%) MLflow
11 43 (0.76%) Bitbucket
12 36 (0.63%) Artifactory
12 36 (0.63%) Maven
13 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
14 32 (0.56%) Cucumber
14 32 (0.56%) Gatling
14 32 (0.56%) REST Assured
15 31 (0.55%) Sonatype Nexus
16 25 (0.44%) LoadRunner
17 19 (0.33%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,323 (23.29%) Social Skills
2 1,270 (22.36%) Finance
3 852 (15.00%) Analytical Skills
4 550 (9.68%) Public Sector
5 496 (8.73%) Banking
6 178 (3.13%) Front Office
7 150 (2.64%) Investment Banking
8 110 (1.94%) Retail
9 109 (1.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 108 (1.90%) Documentation Skills
11 95 (1.67%) Marketing
12 84 (1.48%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.04%) Military
14 56 (0.99%) Pharmaceutical
15 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
16 51 (0.90%) Law
17 47 (0.83%) Legal
18 45 (0.79%) Financial Institution
19 44 (0.77%) Publishing
20 42 (0.74%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 1,000 (17.60%) Senior
2 894 (15.74%) Developer
3 836 (14.72%) Data Engineer
4 482 (8.48%) Lead
5 471 (8.29%) Python Developer
6 422 (7.43%) Python Engineer
7 356 (6.27%) DevOps Engineer
8 300 (5.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 295 (5.19%) Analyst
10 284 (5.00%) Software Engineer
11 268 (4.72%) Architect
12 229 (4.03%) AWS Engineer
13 195 (3.43%) Cloud Engineer
14 194 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
14 194 (3.41%) Senior Data Engineer
14 194 (3.41%) Senior Developer
15 185 (3.26%) Azure Engineer
16 183 (3.22%) Data Scientist
17 152 (2.68%) Network Engineer
18 144 (2.53%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,381 (24.31%) Terraform
2 509 (8.96%) REST
3 377 (6.64%) PySpark
4 364 (6.41%) Kafka
5 306 (5.39%) React
6 254 (4.47%) .NET
7 215 (3.78%) JSON
8 203 (3.57%) FastAPI
9 202 (3.56%) Django
10 191 (3.36%) RESTful
11 165 (2.90%) Node.js
12 163 (2.87%) Pandas
13 150 (2.64%) LangChain
13 150 (2.64%) pytest
14 124 (2.18%) OAuth
15 117 (2.06%) Flask
16 112 (1.97%) YAML
17 110 (1.94%) PyTorch
18 106 (1.87%) HTML
18 106 (1.87%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 793 (13.96%) Cloud Native
2 312 (5.49%) Distributed Systems
3 278 (4.89%) AI Agents
4 238 (4.19%) Onboarding
5 166 (2.92%) Data Centre
6 160 (2.82%) Product Ownership
7 150 (2.64%) Data Structures
8 134 (2.36%) Legacy Systems
9 132 (2.32%) Algorithms
10 116 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
11 109 (1.92%) Management Information System
12 108 (1.90%) Data Protection Act
13 106 (1.87%) Enterprise Software
14 103 (1.81%) Derivative
15 89 (1.57%) Security Posture
16 79 (1.39%) Equities
17 77 (1.36%) Public Cloud
18 71 (1.25%) Linux Command Line
19 70 (1.23%) PKI
20 67 (1.18%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 763 (13.43%) Linux
2 338 (5.95%) Windows
3 252 (4.44%) Unix
4 160 (2.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.58%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.81%) Ubuntu
7 37 (0.65%) VMS
8 22 (0.39%) CentOS
9 20 (0.35%) AIX
10 18 (0.32%) 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
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 5 (0.088%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,345 (41.28%) CI/CD
2 1,638 (28.83%) DevOps
3 1,561 (27.48%) AI
4 1,291 (22.72%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,271 (22.37%) Agile
6 1,109 (19.52%) Analytics
7 997 (17.55%) Data Pipeline
8 941 (16.56%) Software Engineering
9 914 (16.09%) Problem-Solving
10 856 (15.07%) Machine Learning
11 831 (14.63%) Data Engineering
12 800 (14.08%) Containerisation
13 759 (13.36%) Data Modelling
14 747 (13.15%) Observability
15 665 (11.71%) Test Automation
16 660 (11.62%) ETL
17 652 (11.48%) Continuous Improvement
18 633 (11.14%) Validation
19 581 (10.23%) Platform Engineering
20 570 (10.03%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,861 (32.76%) SQL
2 827 (14.56%) Java
3 780 (13.73%) Bash
4 757 (13.33%) PowerShell
5 451 (7.94%) JavaScript
6 346 (6.09%) TypeScript
7 322 (5.67%) C#
8 213 (3.75%) Go
9 153 (2.69%) Shell Script
10 143 (2.52%) R
11 137 (2.41%) C++
12 135 (2.38%) Bicep
13 127 (2.24%) Scala
14 100 (1.76%) Perl
15 59 (1.04%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 59 (1.04%) Groovy
16 58 (1.02%) C
17 54 (0.95%) Rust
18 53 (0.93%) PL/SQL
19 50 (0.88%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,381 (24.31%) Security Cleared
2 1,117 (19.66%) SC Cleared
3 415 (7.31%) Degree
4 244 (4.30%) DV Cleared
5 158 (2.78%) Azure Certification
6 153 (2.69%) Computer Science Degree
7 141 (2.48%) AWS Certification
8 121 (2.13%) BPSS Clearance
9 94 (1.65%) CISSP
10 84 (1.48%) Cisco Certification
11 62 (1.09%) Master's Degree
12 49 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
13 42 (0.74%) CCNP
14 38 (0.67%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 34 (0.60%) PhD
16 32 (0.56%) CISM
17 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
18 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 29 (0.51%) CCIE
20 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 634 (11.16%) Data Quality
2 312 (5.49%) QA
3 112 (1.97%) NIST
4 97 (1.71%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 94 (1.65%) GDPR
6 81 (1.43%) Accessibility
7 37 (0.65%) SLA
8 34 (0.60%) Actionable Recommendations
9 28 (0.49%) NCSC
10 24 (0.42%) PCI DSS
11 23 (0.40%) WCAG
12 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 18 (0.32%) SOC 2
14 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
15 15 (0.26%) HIPAA
16 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.12%) MiFID
19 6 (0.11%) Basel III
19 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 971 (17.09%) Docker
2 170 (2.99%) Active Directory
3 141 (2.48%) VMware Infrastructure
4 68 (1.20%) Virtual Machines
5 53 (0.93%) Hyper-V
6 40 (0.70%) vSphere
7 38 (0.67%) VMware NSX
8 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
9 25 (0.44%) NFS
10 22 (0.39%) Firmware
11 15 (0.26%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.25%) Squid
13 11 (0.19%) Ceph
13 11 (0.19%) Virtual Desktop
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 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,167 (20.54%) Kubernetes
2 652 (11.48%) Ansible
3 334 (5.88%) Grafana
4 240 (4.22%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.44%) Puppet
6 74 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.18%) Argo
8 44 (0.77%) Single Sign-On
9 33 (0.58%) Istio
9 33 (0.58%) Kibana
10 27 (0.48%) Control-M
11 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
12 24 (0.42%) vRealize
13 23 (0.40%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.39%) FortiGate
14 22 (0.39%) ZABBIX
15 20 (0.35%) Nagios
15 20 (0.35%) Packer
16 18 (0.32%) HAProxy
17 16 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 736 (12.96%) Microsoft
2 580 (10.21%) Databricks
3 384 (6.76%) Google
4 243 (4.28%) Oracle
5 212 (3.73%) Splunk
6 185 (3.26%) VMware
7 158 (2.78%) OpenAI
8 148 (2.61%) Cisco
9 126 (2.22%) ServiceNow
10 104 (1.83%) Red Hat
11 99 (1.74%) Dynatrace
12 92 (1.62%) F5
12 92 (1.62%) IBM
13 89 (1.57%) Palo Alto
14 83 (1.46%) Foundry
15 73 (1.28%) Fortinet
15 73 (1.28%) Informatica
15 73 (1.28%) SAP
16 64 (1.13%) CyberArk
17 61 (1.07%) Salesforce