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

6 months to
30 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,765 4,226 4,548
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.29% 11.65% 9.93%
As % of the Programming Languages category 42.06% 36.14% 32.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,133 2,798 3,265
10th Percentile £358 £375 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £738 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 84 85 131
10th Percentile £27.73 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £40.00 £25.09 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.86% -12.50% -7.69%
75th Percentile £71.07 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.25 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year -13.20% +4.17% -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 11,330 11,692 14,161
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.61% 32.24% 30.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,468 7,478 10,086
10th Percentile £345 £350 £360
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £507 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.43% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £763 £756
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -4.04% -1.00% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 337 294 429
10th Percentile £31.25 £22.00 £31.45
25th Percentile £50.00 £40.06 £47.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £60.14
Median % change year-on-year +3.59% +4.34% -0.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.50 £75.88 £78.00
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 30 November 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 30 November 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 30 November 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 0 4,054 £525 -12.50% 2,718
London +1 2,390 £550 -12.00% 1,125
UK excluding London +4 1,812 £500 -2.44% 2,428
Work from Home -1 1,441 £534 -2.90% 835
North of England +7 557 £476 -5.84% 433
South East +3 391 £500 -4.76% 963
Yorkshire +9 290 £500 -5.57% 135
Scotland +12 284 £475 -3.55% 133
Midlands +11 270 £500 +5.26% 334
North West +7 230 £445 -10.06% 245
West Midlands +15 225 £507 +1.40% 212
South West -10 171 £550 -8.33% 268
East of England +8 147 £525 +6.06% 242
East Midlands -14 45 £402 +0.50% 121
North East +9 42 £518 -11.54% 59
Wales -9 30 £495 -1.00% 75
Northern Ireland -4 19 £594 +13.10% 19

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
1 252 (5.29%) Apache Airflow
2 209 (4.39%) Apache Spark
3 177 (3.71%) Apache
4 174 (3.65%) Confluence
5 67 (1.41%) SAS
6 51 (1.07%) SharePoint
7 35 (0.73%) nginx
7 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
8 23 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
9 21 (0.44%) Jupyter
10 12 (0.25%) IIS
11 11 (0.23%) Appian
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
14 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
15 6 (0.13%) JBoss
15 6 (0.13%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.10%) CMS
16 5 (0.10%) Luigi
17 4 (0.084%) Camunda
Applications
1 136 (2.85%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.71%) Chatbot
3 30 (0.63%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 27 (0.57%) Microsoft Office
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 11 (0.23%) MS Visio
7 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 7 (0.15%) Maya
8 7 (0.15%) NUKE
9 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.042%) Maple
10 1 (0.021%) Microsoft Project
10 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
10 1 (0.021%) SPSS
10 1 (0.021%) Stata
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
10 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 15 (0.31%) Aladdin
2 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
2 9 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
3 6 (0.13%) Fidessa
4 5 (0.10%) Maximo
5 4 (0.084%) Remedy ITSM
6 3 (0.063%) Actimize
6 3 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
6 3 (0.063%) Teamcenter
7 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
7 2 (0.042%) Endur
7 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.042%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.042%) Shopify
7 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
8 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
8 1 (0.021%) NEC Housing
8 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
8 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,888 (39.62%) AWS
2 1,426 (29.93%) Azure
3 715 (15.01%) GCP
4 568 (11.92%) GitHub
5 478 (10.03%) Serverless
6 397 (8.33%) Power Platform
7 371 (7.79%) Amazon S3
8 332 (6.97%) AWS Lambda
9 301 (6.32%) GitHub Actions
10 298 (6.25%) Azure DevOps
11 255 (5.35%) Snowflake
12 221 (4.64%) AWS CloudFormation
13 197 (4.13%) Amazon EC2
14 190 (3.99%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 175 (3.67%) dbt
16 172 (3.61%) Amazon ECS
17 164 (3.44%) Azure Data Factory
18 160 (3.36%) Amazon EKS
19 135 (2.83%) Virtual Private Cloud
20 134 (2.81%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 270 (5.67%) Firewall
2 179 (3.76%) DNS
3 143 (3.00%) TCP/IP
4 111 (2.33%) Network Security
5 90 (1.89%) HTTP
6 88 (1.85%) VPN
7 85 (1.78%) BGP
8 68 (1.43%) SSL
9 55 (1.15%) OSPF
10 54 (1.13%) WAN
11 44 (0.92%) MPLS
12 42 (0.88%) SSH
13 40 (0.84%) SMTP
13 40 (0.84%) Wireless
14 39 (0.82%) LAN
15 37 (0.78%) DHCP
16 36 (0.76%) Wireshark
17 35 (0.73%) SD-WAN
18 33 (0.69%) FTP
19 30 (0.63%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 394 (8.27%) PostgreSQL
2 344 (7.22%) Power BI
3 285 (5.98%) Data Warehouse
4 247 (5.18%) Relational Database
5 246 (5.16%) NoSQL
6 179 (3.76%) Data Lake
7 177 (3.71%) Big Data
8 171 (3.59%) Amazon RDS
9 155 (3.25%) Tableau
10 140 (2.94%) SQL Server
11 128 (2.69%) MongoDB
12 118 (2.48%) MySQL
13 106 (2.22%) BigQuery
14 102 (2.14%) Amazon Athena
15 99 (2.08%) Hadoop
16 86 (1.80%) Metadata
17 84 (1.76%) Amazon Redshift
18 81 (1.70%) DynamoDB
19 74 (1.55%) Elasticsearch
20 62 (1.30%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 642 (13.47%) Git
2 603 (12.65%) Jenkins
3 410 (8.60%) GitLab
4 315 (6.61%) JIRA
5 74 (1.55%) Selenium
6 66 (1.39%) Bitbucket
7 63 (1.32%) SonarQube
8 62 (1.30%) MLflow
9 59 (1.24%) Sonatype Nexus
10 54 (1.13%) JUnit
11 44 (0.92%) Liquibase
12 35 (0.73%) Cucumber
13 34 (0.71%) JMeter
14 33 (0.69%) Artifactory
15 28 (0.59%) Eclipse
16 27 (0.57%) Gradle
16 27 (0.57%) Postman
16 27 (0.57%) Vagrant
17 26 (0.55%) Cypress.io
17 26 (0.55%) Maven
General
1 1,328 (27.87%) Social Skills
2 1,069 (22.43%) Finance
3 693 (14.54%) Analytical Skills
4 489 (10.26%) Banking
5 421 (8.84%) Public Sector
6 230 (4.83%) Front Office
7 185 (3.88%) Investment Banking
8 108 (2.27%) Documentation Skills
9 84 (1.76%) Financial Institution
10 80 (1.68%) Marketing
11 75 (1.57%) Telecoms
12 68 (1.43%) Pharmaceutical
12 68 (1.43%) Retail
13 62 (1.30%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 51 (1.07%) Legal
15 44 (0.92%) Presentation Skills
16 43 (0.90%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
18 26 (0.55%) Aerospace
18 26 (0.55%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 873 (18.32%) Developer
2 650 (13.64%) Senior
3 545 (11.44%) Data Engineer
4 355 (7.45%) Python Engineer
5 341 (7.16%) Python Developer
6 338 (7.09%) DevOps Engineer
7 331 (6.95%) Analyst
8 299 (6.27%) AWS Engineer
9 267 (5.60%) Software Engineer
10 249 (5.23%) Architect
11 213 (4.47%) Lead
12 200 (4.20%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 186 (3.90%) Platform Engineer
14 176 (3.69%) Data Scientist
15 155 (3.25%) Data Analyst
16 136 (2.85%) Senior Developer
17 128 (2.69%) Consultant
18 118 (2.48%) Cloud Engineer
19 114 (2.39%) Automation Engineer
19 114 (2.39%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 391 (8.21%) REST
2 330 (6.93%) React
3 322 (6.76%) Kafka
4 247 (5.18%) Node.js
5 241 (5.06%) RESTful
6 240 (5.04%) Pandas
7 226 (4.74%) FastAPI
8 209 (4.39%) PySpark
9 191 (4.01%) NumPy
10 190 (3.99%) PyTorch
11 166 (3.48%) TensorFlow
12 158 (3.32%) AngularJS
13 143 (3.00%) .NET
14 133 (2.79%) Elastic Stack
15 118 (2.48%) scikit-learn
16 114 (2.39%) LangChain
17 105 (2.20%) Flask
17 105 (2.20%) GraphQL
18 102 (2.14%) HTML
18 102 (2.14%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 385 (8.08%) Cloud Native
2 206 (4.32%) Algorithms
3 198 (4.16%) Distributed Systems
4 145 (3.04%) Equities
5 141 (2.96%) Data Protection Act
5 141 (2.96%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 137 (2.88%) Fixed Income
7 121 (2.54%) Product Ownership
8 111 (2.33%) Data Structures
8 111 (2.33%) Derivative
9 107 (2.25%) Onboarding
10 105 (2.20%) Hedge funds
11 100 (2.10%) AI Agents
12 85 (1.78%) Public Cloud
13 78 (1.64%) Data Centre
14 77 (1.62%) Hybrid Cloud
15 73 (1.53%) Management Information System
16 68 (1.43%) Legacy Systems
17 66 (1.39%) Replication
18 54 (1.13%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 851 (17.86%) Linux
2 367 (7.70%) Windows
3 238 (4.99%) Unix
4 93 (1.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.39%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.90%) Ubuntu
7 39 (0.82%) Android
8 38 (0.80%) VMS
9 36 (0.76%) CentOS
10 30 (0.63%) Mac OS
11 26 (0.55%) Amazon Linux
12 18 (0.38%) Apple iOS
12 18 (0.38%) Solaris
13 11 (0.23%) Debian
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
14 9 (0.19%) Windows 7
15 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
16 4 (0.084%) zOS
17 3 (0.063%) AIX
17 3 (0.063%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,588 (33.33%) CI/CD
2 1,330 (27.91%) DevOps
3 1,233 (25.88%) Agile
4 1,038 (21.78%) Problem-Solving
5 854 (17.92%) AI
6 841 (17.65%) Infrastructure as Code
7 756 (15.87%) Analytics
8 721 (15.13%) Machine Learning
9 676 (14.19%) Containerisation
10 636 (13.35%) Data Pipeline
11 605 (12.70%) Software Engineering
12 527 (11.06%) Data Science
13 515 (10.81%) ETL
14 511 (10.72%) Data Modelling
15 507 (10.64%) Data Engineering
16 489 (10.26%) Test Automation
17 401 (8.42%) Computer Science
18 396 (8.31%) Business Intelligence
19 364 (7.64%) Microservices
20 356 (7.47%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 1,457 (30.58%) SQL
2 850 (17.84%) Java
3 658 (13.81%) Bash
4 620 (13.01%) PowerShell
5 519 (10.89%) JavaScript
6 338 (7.09%) TypeScript
7 300 (6.30%) Go
8 276 (5.79%) C#
9 249 (5.23%) C++
10 188 (3.95%) Perl
11 171 (3.59%) Shell Script
12 165 (3.46%) R
13 101 (2.12%) Scala
14 85 (1.78%) Ruby
15 75 (1.57%) C
16 62 (1.30%) PHP
17 60 (1.26%) VBA
18 50 (1.05%) Bicep
19 48 (1.01%) Groovy
20 44 (0.92%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 925 (19.41%) Security Cleared
2 735 (15.42%) SC Cleared
3 468 (9.82%) Degree
4 235 (4.93%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (3.11%) AWS Certification
6 145 (3.04%) DV Cleared
6 145 (3.04%) Master's Degree
7 96 (2.01%) Cisco Certification
8 86 (1.80%) CISSP
9 80 (1.68%) BPSS Clearance
10 79 (1.66%) Azure Certification
11 59 (1.24%) CCNP
12 53 (1.11%) PhD
13 50 (1.05%) MCP
14 42 (0.88%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 40 (0.84%) CCIE
16 34 (0.71%) CEH
16 34 (0.71%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
17 30 (0.63%) CISM
17 30 (0.63%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 332 (6.97%) Data Quality
2 182 (3.82%) QA
3 158 (3.32%) GDPR
4 99 (2.08%) NIST
5 98 (2.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 56 (1.18%) Accessibility
7 46 (0.97%) PCI DSS
8 37 (0.78%) HIPAA
9 24 (0.50%) NCSC
10 23 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 22 (0.46%) SLA
12 20 (0.42%) SOC 2
13 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
14 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.21%) EMIR
15 10 (0.21%) MiFID
15 10 (0.21%) PMO
16 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
16 8 (0.17%) WCAG
17 7 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 936 (19.64%) Docker
2 167 (3.50%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.77%) VMware Infrastructure
4 40 (0.84%) vSphere
5 37 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
6 34 (0.71%) VMware NSX
7 31 (0.65%) Firmware
8 21 (0.44%) DFS Replication
9 18 (0.38%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.38%) Squid
10 16 (0.34%) Postfix
11 15 (0.31%) KVM
11 15 (0.31%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 14 (0.29%) HDFS
12 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
13 12 (0.25%) VMware ESXi
14 10 (0.21%) GPFS
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,043 (21.89%) Kubernetes
2 1,036 (21.74%) Terraform
3 606 (12.72%) Ansible
4 373 (7.83%) Grafana
5 314 (6.59%) Prometheus
6 88 (1.85%) Argo
7 80 (1.68%) Puppet
8 54 (1.13%) Kibana
9 45 (0.94%) Progress Chef
10 39 (0.82%) Istio
11 36 (0.76%) Nessus
11 36 (0.76%) vRealize
12 29 (0.61%) NetBackup
12 29 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
13 27 (0.57%) ITRS Geneos
14 24 (0.50%) logstash
14 24 (0.50%) vCenter Server
15 21 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
15 21 (0.44%) Nmap
16 20 (0.42%) Packer
Vendors
1 540 (11.33%) Microsoft
2 363 (7.62%) Databricks
3 272 (5.71%) Google
4 256 (5.37%) Splunk
5 218 (4.58%) Oracle
6 217 (4.55%) VMware
7 142 (2.98%) ServiceNow
8 134 (2.81%) Cisco
9 126 (2.64%) Red Hat
10 89 (1.87%) Palo Alto
11 85 (1.78%) F5
12 84 (1.76%) OpenAI
13 72 (1.51%) Foundry
14 61 (1.28%) SAP
15 59 (1.24%) CyberArk
16 45 (0.94%) CrowdStrike
16 45 (0.94%) IBM
17 44 (0.92%) Atlassian
18 43 (0.90%) Juniper
18 43 (0.90%) Salesforce