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 15 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 10 11
Rank change year-on-year -5 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,751 4,479 4,179
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.40% 13.49% 11.10%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.53% 41.31% 34.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,731 2,907 2,831
10th Percentile £375 £358 £363
25th Percentile £440 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -2.13%
75th Percentile £650 £638 £700
90th Percentile £750 £750 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 86 95
10th Percentile £35.55 £28.25 £20.12
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.06 £34.38
Median hourly rate £60.81 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +21.62% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £77.50 £61.44 £70.00
90th Percentile £91.27 £81.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.82 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +25.64% -25.93% +5.88%

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 14,548 10,843 12,068
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.31% 32.65% 32.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,448 7,116 7,897
10th Percentile £363 £345 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.93% -3.79% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £623 £649
90th Percentile £725 £733 £770
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 566 297 323
10th Percentile £21.25 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £44.50 £41.25 £42.87
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 £78.88 £78.00 £75.00
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 15 October 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 15 October 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 15 October 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 -5 4,877 £550 +4.76% 1,325
London -4 2,898 £575 - 552
UK excluding London -7 2,202 £500 - 976
Work from Home -8 1,601 £529 -1.76% 706
North of England 0 766 £500 +5.26% 248
South East -9 442 £550 +10.00% 251
Yorkshire -3 384 £500 - 86
Scotland -1 325 £467 -6.60% 49
North West -2 304 £525 +20.69% 117
South West -4 276 £550 - 177
Midlands -18 242 £475 -5.00% 116
West Midlands -17 208 £484 -4.54% 76
East of England -17 142 £478 -5.21% 118
North East -1 87 £425 -17.48% 47
East Midlands -18 34 £438 +6.71% 40
Wales -9 30 £530 +23.98% 20
Northern Ireland +2 20 £419 -28.72% 15

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
1 287 (4.99%) Apache Airflow
2 277 (4.82%) Apache Spark
3 240 (4.17%) Apache
4 166 (2.89%) Confluence
5 63 (1.10%) SharePoint
6 57 (0.99%) Jupyter
6 57 (0.99%) SAS
7 30 (0.52%) OpenStack
8 28 (0.49%) nginx
9 23 (0.40%) ArcGIS
9 23 (0.40%) IIS
9 23 (0.40%) Palantir Foundry
10 11 (0.19%) CMS
11 10 (0.17%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 6 (0.10%) WebSphere
14 5 (0.087%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.087%) Camunda
14 5 (0.087%) PowerExchange
15 4 (0.070%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 107 (1.86%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.61%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.38%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.35%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.24%) CPLEX
5 14 (0.24%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 3 (0.052%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.052%) Revit
8 2 (0.035%) LaTeX
8 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.035%) Simulink
8 2 (0.035%) SPSS
9 1 (0.017%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.017%) AutoCAD
9 1 (0.017%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.017%) Civil 3D
9 1 (0.017%) Houdini
9 1 (0.017%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.017%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.40%) Remedy ITSM
2 17 (0.30%) Aladdin
2 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
5 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
6 6 (0.10%) Front Arena
6 6 (0.10%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.10%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.10%) Summit
7 5 (0.087%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.070%) Cloudability
8 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.070%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.052%) Actimize
9 3 (0.052%) Endur
9 3 (0.052%) SAP IBP
9 3 (0.052%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.035%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,094 (36.41%) AWS
2 1,969 (34.24%) Azure
3 928 (16.14%) GCP
4 764 (13.28%) GitHub
5 480 (8.35%) Power Platform
5 480 (8.35%) Serverless
6 451 (7.84%) Azure DevOps
6 451 (7.84%) GitHub Actions
7 382 (6.64%) Amazon S3
8 356 (6.19%) Snowflake
9 341 (5.93%) AWS Lambda
10 251 (4.36%) dbt
11 219 (3.81%) Azure Data Factory
12 212 (3.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 201 (3.50%) Amazon EKS
14 194 (3.37%) Entra ID
15 191 (3.32%) AWS CloudFormation
16 148 (2.57%) Amazon EC2
17 138 (2.40%) SaaS
18 132 (2.30%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 289 (5.03%) Firewall
2 218 (3.79%) DNS
3 172 (2.99%) Network Security
4 154 (2.68%) TCP/IP
5 134 (2.33%) VPN
6 131 (2.28%) BGP
7 115 (2.00%) WAN
8 83 (1.44%) DHCP
9 80 (1.39%) OSPF
10 77 (1.34%) SD-WAN
11 63 (1.10%) BIG-IP
12 59 (1.03%) SSL
12 59 (1.03%) VLAN
13 55 (0.96%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 52 (0.90%) HTTP
15 49 (0.85%) Broadband
15 49 (0.85%) VXLAN
16 46 (0.80%) Ethernet VPN
17 44 (0.77%) Internet
18 43 (0.75%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 423 (7.36%) Power BI
2 338 (5.88%) Data Warehouse
3 307 (5.34%) PostgreSQL
4 231 (4.02%) Metadata
5 205 (3.56%) Data Lake
6 196 (3.41%) Relational Database
7 181 (3.15%) SQL Server
8 179 (3.11%) BigQuery
9 156 (2.71%) Tableau
10 143 (2.49%) NoSQL
11 137 (2.38%) Amazon RDS
12 130 (2.26%) Amazon Redshift
13 127 (2.21%) Big Data
13 127 (2.21%) Delta Lake
14 116 (2.02%) MongoDB
15 114 (1.98%) Amazon Athena
16 103 (1.79%) DynamoDB
17 99 (1.72%) MySQL
18 76 (1.32%) Redis
19 64 (1.11%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 881 (15.32%) Git
2 550 (9.56%) Jenkins
3 509 (8.85%) GitLab
4 335 (5.83%) JIRA
5 124 (2.16%) Selenium
6 76 (1.32%) Postman
7 65 (1.13%) Claude Code
8 61 (1.06%) JMeter
9 58 (1.01%) MLflow
10 54 (0.94%) SonarQube
11 48 (0.83%) Bitbucket
11 48 (0.83%) Cucumber
12 41 (0.71%) REST Assured
13 38 (0.66%) Sonatype Nexus
14 37 (0.64%) Artifactory
14 37 (0.64%) Maven
15 33 (0.57%) Cypress.io
16 31 (0.54%) LoadRunner
17 30 (0.52%) Gatling
18 26 (0.45%) JUnit
General
1 1,358 (23.61%) Social Skills
2 1,347 (23.42%) Finance
3 853 (14.83%) Analytical Skills
4 556 (9.67%) Banking
5 555 (9.65%) Public Sector
6 167 (2.90%) Front Office
7 155 (2.70%) Investment Banking
8 120 (2.09%) Retail
9 111 (1.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 94 (1.63%) Documentation Skills
11 92 (1.60%) Marketing
12 85 (1.48%) Telecoms
13 65 (1.13%) Military
14 56 (0.97%) Law
15 52 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
16 51 (0.89%) Aerospace
17 50 (0.87%) Financial Institution
18 49 (0.85%) Legal
19 41 (0.71%) Publishing
20 37 (0.64%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 1,019 (17.72%) Senior
2 899 (15.63%) Developer
3 854 (14.85%) Data Engineer
4 511 (8.89%) Lead
5 474 (8.24%) Python Developer
6 425 (7.39%) Python Engineer
7 382 (6.64%) DevOps Engineer
8 318 (5.53%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 298 (5.18%) Analyst
10 279 (4.85%) Software Engineer
11 237 (4.12%) Architect
12 223 (3.88%) AWS Engineer
13 199 (3.46%) Cloud Engineer
14 196 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
15 195 (3.39%) Azure Engineer
16 191 (3.32%) Senior Data Engineer
17 182 (3.16%) Senior Developer
18 180 (3.13%) Data Scientist
19 157 (2.73%) Data Analyst
20 148 (2.57%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,437 (24.99%) Terraform
2 569 (9.89%) REST
3 383 (6.66%) Kafka
4 382 (6.64%) PySpark
5 320 (5.56%) React
6 244 (4.24%) .NET
7 223 (3.88%) FastAPI
8 219 (3.81%) JSON
9 216 (3.76%) Django
10 184 (3.20%) RESTful
11 168 (2.92%) pytest
12 160 (2.78%) LangChain
13 145 (2.52%) Node.js
14 140 (2.43%) Pandas
15 134 (2.33%) OAuth
16 128 (2.23%) Flask
17 116 (2.02%) LangGraph
18 111 (1.93%) YAML
19 102 (1.77%) PyTorch
20 98 (1.70%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 841 (14.62%) Cloud Native
2 315 (5.48%) AI Agents
3 281 (4.89%) Distributed Systems
4 267 (4.64%) Onboarding
5 166 (2.89%) Data Centre
6 155 (2.70%) Data Structures
7 148 (2.57%) Product Ownership
8 135 (2.35%) Legacy Systems
9 120 (2.09%) Algorithms
10 119 (2.07%) Enterprise Software
11 114 (1.98%) Hybrid Cloud
12 106 (1.84%) Management Information System
13 104 (1.81%) Data Protection Act
14 100 (1.74%) Security Posture
15 96 (1.67%) Derivative
16 89 (1.55%) Public Cloud
17 85 (1.48%) PKI
18 78 (1.36%) Equities
19 70 (1.22%) Replication
20 69 (1.20%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 794 (13.81%) Linux
2 344 (5.98%) Windows
3 234 (4.07%) Unix
4 161 (2.80%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.56%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 37 (0.64%) VMS
8 25 (0.43%) CentOS
9 22 (0.38%) Solaris
10 17 (0.30%) Android
11 14 (0.24%) AIX
12 12 (0.21%) Apple iOS
13 11 (0.19%) macOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) zOS
15 6 (0.10%) FreeRTOS
16 5 (0.087%) Rocky
17 4 (0.070%) Alpine Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,480 (43.12%) CI/CD
2 1,712 (29.77%) DevOps
3 1,648 (28.66%) AI
4 1,349 (23.46%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,298 (22.57%) Agile
6 1,111 (19.32%) Analytics
7 1,016 (17.67%) Data Pipeline
8 976 (16.97%) Software Engineering
9 897 (15.60%) Data Engineering
10 889 (15.46%) Problem-Solving
11 846 (14.71%) Machine Learning
12 795 (13.82%) Containerisation
13 792 (13.77%) Data Modelling
14 790 (13.74%) Observability
15 750 (13.04%) Test Automation
16 732 (12.73%) Validation
17 702 (12.21%) ETL
18 698 (12.14%) Continuous Improvement
19 627 (10.90%) Platform Engineering
20 600 (10.43%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,872 (32.55%) SQL
2 802 (13.95%) Bash
3 771 (13.41%) Java
4 768 (13.35%) PowerShell
5 450 (7.82%) JavaScript
6 360 (6.26%) TypeScript
7 313 (5.44%) C#
8 223 (3.88%) Go
9 165 (2.87%) Shell Script
10 147 (2.56%) Bicep
11 134 (2.33%) R
12 124 (2.16%) C++
13 111 (1.93%) Scala
14 107 (1.86%) Perl
15 62 (1.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 60 (1.04%) Groovy
17 48 (0.83%) PL/SQL
17 48 (0.83%) Rust
18 47 (0.82%) T-SQL
19 46 (0.80%) C
Qualifications
1 1,411 (24.53%) Security Cleared
2 1,134 (19.72%) SC Cleared
3 398 (6.92%) Degree
4 260 (4.52%) DV Cleared
5 166 (2.89%) AWS Certification
6 155 (2.70%) Azure Certification
7 146 (2.54%) Computer Science Degree
8 124 (2.16%) BPSS Clearance
9 98 (1.70%) CISSP
10 75 (1.30%) Cisco Certification
11 74 (1.29%) Master's Degree
12 49 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
13 39 (0.68%) ISTQB
14 35 (0.61%) CCNP
15 34 (0.59%) PhD
16 32 (0.56%) CISM
17 31 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 30 (0.52%) CCIE
18 30 (0.52%) Microsoft Certified Professional
19 29 (0.50%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 691 (12.02%) Data Quality
2 333 (5.79%) QA
3 107 (1.86%) NIST
4 104 (1.81%) GDPR
5 91 (1.58%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 87 (1.51%) Accessibility
7 43 (0.75%) SLA
8 38 (0.66%) Actionable Recommendations
9 31 (0.54%) NCSC
10 27 (0.47%) SOC 2
11 25 (0.43%) PCI DSS
11 25 (0.43%) WCAG
12 16 (0.28%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 15 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
14 14 (0.24%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) GRC
17 7 (0.12%) Basel III
17 7 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 1,016 (17.67%) Docker
2 181 (3.15%) Active Directory
3 133 (2.31%) VMware Infrastructure
4 66 (1.15%) Virtual Machines
5 47 (0.82%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.61%) vSphere
7 31 (0.54%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.52%) NFS
9 26 (0.45%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.33%) Firmware
11 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 10 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
15 9 (0.16%) KVM
16 8 (0.14%) Ceph
16 8 (0.14%) zsh
17 6 (0.10%) Postfix
18 5 (0.087%) HDFS
19 4 (0.070%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 1,236 (21.49%) Kubernetes
2 664 (11.55%) Ansible
3 328 (5.70%) Grafana
4 241 (4.19%) Prometheus
5 80 (1.39%) Puppet
6 74 (1.29%) Progress Chef
7 69 (1.20%) Argo
8 52 (0.90%) Single Sign-On
9 35 (0.61%) Istio
10 33 (0.57%) Kibana
11 26 (0.45%) Control-M
11 26 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
12 23 (0.40%) Packer
13 20 (0.35%) FortiGate
14 18 (0.31%) Kustomize
15 17 (0.30%) Podman
15 17 (0.30%) QRadar
15 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
16 15 (0.26%) ITRS Geneos
16 15 (0.26%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 796 (13.84%) Microsoft
2 614 (10.68%) Databricks
3 429 (7.46%) Google
4 251 (4.36%) Oracle
5 208 (3.62%) Splunk
6 181 (3.15%) OpenAI
7 168 (2.92%) VMware
8 151 (2.63%) ServiceNow
9 136 (2.36%) Cisco
10 103 (1.79%) Red Hat
11 102 (1.77%) Dynatrace
12 98 (1.70%) Foundry
13 94 (1.63%) IBM
14 93 (1.62%) F5
15 91 (1.58%) Palo Alto
16 72 (1.25%) Informatica
17 67 (1.17%) Fortinet
18 66 (1.15%) SAP
19 64 (1.11%) CyberArk
20 58 (1.01%) Salesforce