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 22 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,228 3,803 4,025
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.82% 13.20% 9.48%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.53% 38.78% 31.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,459 2,657 2,892
10th Percentile £363 £380 £396
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -4.91% -1.79% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -1.00% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 129 50 99
10th Percentile £30.00 £22.83 £21.15
25th Percentile £43.81 £28.18 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.50 £40.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +36.25% -33.33% -1.03%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £70.63
90th Percentile £83.75 £75.37 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £63.75
% change year-on-year +16.67% -29.41% +11.20%

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 12,899 9,807 12,745
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.69% 34.04% 30.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,454 6,659 9,081
10th Percentile £356 £357 £350
25th Percentile £414 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £526
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -1.14% -4.36%
75th Percentile £600 £636 £650
90th Percentile £711 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.68% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 557 226 495
10th Percentile £37.25 £26.75 £32.25
25th Percentile £53.75 £35.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.84% -0.80% +2.97%
75th Percentile £70.00 £69.69 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.45
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% -

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 22 May 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 22 May 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 22 May 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 4,347 £525 -4.55% 2,858
London -3 2,489 £550 -5.98% 1,302
UK excluding London -1 2,011 £495 -1.00% 2,124
Work from Home -1 1,477 £530 -3.64% 1,447
North of England +10 706 £487 -0.10% 486
Yorkshire 0 400 £482 -3.60% 141
South East -6 389 £525 +2.14% 678
Scotland +2 293 £434 -8.68% 111
South West +2 252 £500 -9.09% 270
North West +2 243 £500 +5.26% 267
Midlands -14 235 £491 +9.17% 235
West Midlands -5 180 £482 +7.11% 113
East of England -6 127 £500 - 258
North East +3 72 £475 +5.56% 82
East Midlands -12 54 £497 +17.51% 122
Northern Ireland +13 25 £463 -21.28% 51
Wales -17 22 £463 -7.50% 67

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
1 280 (5.36%) Apache Spark
2 211 (4.04%) Apache Airflow
3 172 (3.29%) Apache
4 142 (2.72%) Confluence
5 47 (0.90%) SAS
6 44 (0.84%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.73%) Jupyter
8 21 (0.40%) nginx
9 20 (0.38%) OpenStack
10 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.31%) ArcGIS
12 12 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
13 11 (0.21%) Appian
13 11 (0.21%) IIS
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) Camunda
15 7 (0.13%) CMS
16 6 (0.11%) Tomcat
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.096%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 122 (2.33%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
4 21 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
5 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.019%) SPSS
8 1 (0.019%) Weka
8 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 16 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.057%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.057%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.057%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.038%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Orchestrade
Cloud Services
1 1,946 (37.22%) AWS
2 1,738 (33.24%) Azure
3 741 (14.17%) GCP
4 638 (12.20%) GitHub
5 515 (9.85%) Power Platform
6 450 (8.61%) Serverless
7 372 (7.12%) Azure DevOps
8 353 (6.75%) Amazon S3
9 335 (6.41%) GitHub Actions
10 319 (6.10%) AWS Lambda
11 263 (5.03%) Azure Data Factory
12 239 (4.57%) Snowflake
13 182 (3.48%) AWS CloudFormation
14 167 (3.19%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 165 (3.16%) OpenShift
16 161 (3.08%) dbt
17 152 (2.91%) Amazon EKS
18 130 (2.49%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 123 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
20 119 (2.28%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 190 (3.63%) Firewall
2 137 (2.62%) DNS
3 111 (2.12%) Network Security
4 88 (1.68%) BGP
4 88 (1.68%) TCP/IP
5 85 (1.63%) WAN
6 76 (1.45%) VPN
7 62 (1.19%) HTTP
8 61 (1.17%) OSPF
9 52 (0.99%) SAN
10 45 (0.86%) BIG-IP
10 45 (0.86%) VXLAN
11 38 (0.73%) SD-WAN
12 37 (0.71%) SNMP
12 37 (0.71%) SSL
13 36 (0.69%) LAN
14 35 (0.67%) Ethernet VPN
14 35 (0.67%) VLAN
15 33 (0.63%) DHCP
15 33 (0.63%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 448 (8.57%) Power BI
2 338 (6.47%) PostgreSQL
3 276 (5.28%) Data Warehouse
4 255 (4.88%) SQL Server
5 233 (4.46%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.83%) Tableau
7 186 (3.56%) Relational Database
8 174 (3.33%) NoSQL
9 162 (3.10%) Big Data
10 160 (3.06%) Metadata
11 136 (2.60%) BigQuery
11 136 (2.60%) Delta Lake
12 117 (2.24%) Amazon Athena
13 111 (2.12%) Amazon Redshift
14 110 (2.10%) MongoDB
15 90 (1.72%) MySQL
16 87 (1.66%) DynamoDB
17 84 (1.61%) Amazon RDS
18 80 (1.53%) Azure SQL Database
19 76 (1.45%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 644 (12.32%) Git
2 471 (9.01%) Jenkins
3 352 (6.73%) GitLab
4 254 (4.86%) JIRA
5 84 (1.61%) MLflow
6 77 (1.47%) Selenium
7 60 (1.15%) Postman
8 39 (0.75%) Cucumber
9 35 (0.67%) JMeter
10 31 (0.59%) Cypress.io
11 30 (0.57%) Artifactory
12 28 (0.54%) Bitbucket
12 28 (0.54%) SonarQube
13 26 (0.50%) JUnit
13 26 (0.50%) Sonatype Nexus
14 24 (0.46%) REST Assured
14 24 (0.46%) Robot Framework
15 23 (0.44%) Maven
16 20 (0.38%) Gatling
17 18 (0.34%) SpecFlow
General
1 1,112 (21.27%) Social Skills
2 1,018 (19.47%) Finance
3 695 (13.29%) Analytical Skills
4 472 (9.03%) Public Sector
5 368 (7.04%) Banking
6 182 (3.48%) Front Office
7 124 (2.37%) Documentation Skills
8 118 (2.26%) Investment Banking
9 77 (1.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 68 (1.30%) Marketing
11 58 (1.11%) Retail
12 55 (1.05%) Pharmaceutical
13 53 (1.01%) Legal
14 47 (0.90%) Telecoms
15 43 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 36 (0.69%) Financial Institution
16 36 (0.69%) Publishing
17 34 (0.65%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.65%) Military
18 28 (0.54%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 980 (18.75%) Developer
2 798 (15.26%) Data Engineer
3 765 (14.63%) Senior
4 500 (9.56%) Python Developer
5 335 (6.41%) Lead
6 327 (6.25%) Architect
7 321 (6.14%) Python Engineer
8 277 (5.30%) Analyst
9 276 (5.28%) DevOps Engineer
10 265 (5.07%) Software Engineer
11 225 (4.30%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 221 (4.23%) AWS Engineer
13 211 (4.04%) Data Scientist
14 170 (3.25%) Senior Developer
15 164 (3.14%) Azure Engineer
16 158 (3.02%) Senior Data Engineer
17 151 (2.89%) Platform Engineer
18 147 (2.81%) Data Analyst
18 147 (2.81%) Full-Stack Developer
19 130 (2.49%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 392 (7.50%) REST
2 369 (7.06%) React
3 350 (6.69%) PySpark
4 321 (6.14%) Kafka
5 233 (4.46%) .NET
6 228 (4.36%) Node.js
7 212 (4.06%) Pandas
8 188 (3.60%) FastAPI
9 179 (3.42%) RESTful
10 175 (3.35%) PyTorch
11 170 (3.25%) JSON
12 132 (2.52%) Django
13 129 (2.47%) Flask
14 125 (2.39%) NumPy
15 121 (2.31%) TensorFlow
16 120 (2.30%) LangChain
17 115 (2.20%) scikit-learn
18 114 (2.18%) AngularJS
19 101 (1.93%) HTML
20 99 (1.89%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 546 (10.44%) Cloud Native
2 229 (4.38%) Distributed Systems
3 152 (2.91%) Algorithms
4 137 (2.62%) Product Ownership
5 129 (2.47%) Data Centre
6 123 (2.35%) AI Agents
7 122 (2.33%) Data Structures
8 121 (2.31%) Data Protection Act
9 119 (2.28%) Onboarding
10 114 (2.18%) Derivative
11 104 (1.99%) Equities
12 102 (1.95%) Legacy Systems
12 102 (1.95%) Management Information System
13 99 (1.89%) Fixed Income
14 90 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
15 89 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
16 83 (1.59%) Security Posture
17 65 (1.24%) Public Cloud
18 51 (0.98%) Greenfield Project
19 47 (0.90%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 622 (11.90%) Linux
2 291 (5.57%) Windows
3 221 (4.23%) Unix
4 94 (1.80%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 70 (1.34%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.71%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.63%) VMS
8 26 (0.50%) AIX
9 23 (0.44%) Android
9 23 (0.44%) Solaris
10 19 (0.36%) Mac OS
11 17 (0.33%) Apple iOS
11 17 (0.33%) CentOS
12 10 (0.19%) zOS
13 9 (0.17%) Debian
14 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
14 7 (0.13%) Rocky
15 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
16 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
17 4 (0.077%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,920 (36.73%) CI/CD
2 1,390 (26.59%) DevOps
3 1,202 (22.99%) AI
4 1,117 (21.37%) Agile
5 1,015 (19.41%) Analytics
6 918 (17.56%) Problem-Solving
7 896 (17.14%) Infrastructure as Code
8 874 (16.72%) Data Pipeline
9 802 (15.34%) Machine Learning
10 710 (13.58%) Data Modelling
11 692 (13.24%) ETL
12 691 (13.22%) Data Engineering
13 680 (13.01%) Containerisation
14 624 (11.94%) Software Engineering
15 571 (10.92%) Data Science
16 547 (10.46%) Observability
17 516 (9.87%) Test Automation
18 514 (9.83%) Business Intelligence
19 463 (8.86%) LLM
20 428 (8.19%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,733 (33.15%) SQL
2 756 (14.46%) Java
3 633 (12.11%) PowerShell
4 569 (10.88%) Bash
5 477 (9.12%) JavaScript
6 349 (6.68%) TypeScript
7 341 (6.52%) C#
8 197 (3.77%) Go
9 169 (3.23%) R
10 151 (2.89%) C++
11 137 (2.62%) Scala
12 104 (1.99%) Shell Script
13 79 (1.51%) Ruby
14 78 (1.49%) Perl
15 72 (1.38%) Bicep
16 57 (1.09%) PL/SQL
17 56 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 56 (1.07%) T-SQL
18 54 (1.03%) C
19 50 (0.96%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,178 (22.53%) Security Cleared
2 954 (18.25%) SC Cleared
3 380 (7.27%) Degree
4 160 (3.06%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.83%) DV Cleared
6 126 (2.41%) BPSS Clearance
7 100 (1.91%) Azure Certification
8 85 (1.63%) AWS Certification
9 82 (1.57%) CISSP
10 78 (1.49%) Master's Degree
11 69 (1.32%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (1.03%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.94%) CCNP
14 40 (0.77%) CISM
15 38 (0.73%) PhD
16 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
17 29 (0.55%) ISTQB
18 25 (0.48%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 22 (0.42%) CompTIA Security+
20 21 (0.40%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 512 (9.79%) Data Quality
2 227 (4.34%) QA
3 148 (2.83%) GDPR
4 98 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 94 (1.80%) NIST
6 78 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) SLA
8 29 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.50%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 17 (0.33%) WCAG
13 16 (0.31%) NCSC
14 13 (0.25%) SOC 2
15 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
18 6 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
18 6 (0.11%) PSD2
System Software
1 762 (14.58%) Docker
2 148 (2.83%) Active Directory
3 93 (1.78%) VMware Infrastructure
4 73 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.75%) VMware NSX
6 37 (0.71%) vSphere
7 34 (0.65%) Firmware
8 29 (0.55%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.33%) KVM
9 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) NFS
11 12 (0.23%) HDFS
11 12 (0.23%) Squid
12 10 (0.19%) Ceph
13 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
13 9 (0.17%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
15 5 (0.096%) Postfix
16 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
16 4 (0.077%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,064 (20.35%) Terraform
2 924 (17.67%) Kubernetes
3 540 (10.33%) Ansible
4 331 (6.33%) Grafana
5 273 (5.22%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.42%) Puppet
7 57 (1.09%) Argo
8 49 (0.94%) Istio
9 47 (0.90%) vRealize
10 38 (0.73%) Kibana
11 32 (0.61%) Progress Chef
12 31 (0.59%) vCenter Server
13 28 (0.54%) Nessus
14 26 (0.50%) Nagios
15 24 (0.46%) Control-M
15 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
15 24 (0.46%) ZABBIX
16 22 (0.42%) NetBackup
17 20 (0.38%) HAProxy
18 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 589 (11.27%) Microsoft
2 559 (10.69%) Databricks
3 265 (5.07%) Google
4 241 (4.61%) Oracle
5 219 (4.19%) Splunk
6 175 (3.35%) VMware
7 122 (2.33%) OpenAI
8 121 (2.31%) Red Hat
9 111 (2.12%) Cisco
10 98 (1.87%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.61%) CyberArk
12 75 (1.43%) BeyondTrust
13 74 (1.42%) F5
14 73 (1.40%) Dynatrace
15 69 (1.32%) Palo Alto
16 67 (1.28%) IBM
17 66 (1.26%) Informatica
18 50 (0.96%) Foundry
18 50 (0.96%) SAP
19 44 (0.84%) Arista