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

6 months to
6 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,265 3,939 3,985
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.06% 13.44% 9.23%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.84% 39.35% 31.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,520 2,766 2,847
10th Percentile £363 £386 £388
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.91% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £681
90th Percentile £738 £819 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -2.50% -2.44% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 132 54 99
10th Percentile £30.05 £21.25 £21.63
25th Percentile £45.64 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £38.41 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +43.19% -35.98% -7.25%
75th Percentile £70.18 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £84.88 £70.13 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +16.67% -28.00% +7.53%

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 12,892 10,011 12,769
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.07% 34.15% 29.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,507 6,800 9,080
10th Percentile £355 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £418 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £775 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 563 252 487
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.55 £31.70
25th Percentile £54.55 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £61.60
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +1.46% +2.67%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £79.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% +3.09%

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 6 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 6 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 6 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 -2 4,387 £525 -4.55% 2,786
London -3 2,482 £550 -8.33% 1,287
UK excluding London -2 2,051 £488 -2.50% 1,950
Work from Home 0 1,509 £525 -4.55% 1,084
North of England +10 683 £481 -2.31% 484
South East -1 414 £510 -2.86% 627
Yorkshire 0 383 £475 -5.00% 139
Scotland +2 297 £425 -10.53% 121
Midlands -11 261 £500 +10.01% 234
South West +1 254 £500 -9.09% 218
North West +1 249 £500 +5.26% 248
West Midlands -7 199 £500 - 114
East of England -3 133 £500 - 208
East Midlands -9 61 £470 +10.59% 120
North East +8 60 £475 +2.70% 98
Northern Ireland +16 25 £463 -15.91% 22
Wales -16 23 £475 -9.52% 58

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
1 289 (5.49%) Apache Spark
2 206 (3.91%) Apache Airflow
3 167 (3.17%) Apache
4 137 (2.60%) Confluence
5 50 (0.95%) SAS
6 49 (0.93%) SharePoint
7 31 (0.59%) Jupyter
8 23 (0.44%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.40%) nginx
10 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
11 14 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
12 12 (0.23%) Appian
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) Camunda
13 8 (0.15%) CMS
14 7 (0.13%) IIS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.095%) CICS
16 5 (0.095%) Tomcat
Applications
1 132 (2.51%) Microsoft Excel
2 26 (0.49%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.057%) Weka
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 22 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 13 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
4 7 (0.13%) Fidessa
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
5 5 (0.095%) Remedy ITSM
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 2 (0.038%) Actimize
7 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
7 2 (0.038%) Global One
7 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.038%) Odoo
7 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.038%) Oracle ERP
7 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 1,994 (37.87%) AWS
2 1,797 (34.13%) Azure
3 778 (14.78%) GCP
4 656 (12.46%) GitHub
5 534 (10.14%) Power Platform
6 476 (9.04%) Serverless
7 376 (7.14%) Azure DevOps
8 374 (7.10%) Amazon S3
9 344 (6.53%) GitHub Actions
10 342 (6.50%) AWS Lambda
11 269 (5.11%) Azure Data Factory
12 236 (4.48%) Snowflake
13 226 (4.29%) AWS CloudFormation
14 173 (3.29%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 166 (3.15%) Amazon EKS
15 166 (3.15%) OpenShift
16 156 (2.96%) dbt
17 140 (2.66%) Amazon ECS
18 137 (2.60%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 125 (2.37%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 182 (3.46%) Firewall
2 130 (2.47%) DNS
3 111 (2.11%) Network Security
4 89 (1.69%) TCP/IP
5 83 (1.58%) BGP
6 78 (1.48%) VPN
7 77 (1.46%) WAN
8 58 (1.10%) HTTP
9 55 (1.04%) OSPF
10 42 (0.80%) SAN
11 40 (0.76%) SNMP
12 36 (0.68%) VXLAN
13 35 (0.66%) MPLS
13 35 (0.66%) SD-WAN
14 34 (0.65%) BIG-IP
15 33 (0.63%) LAN
16 32 (0.61%) SSL
17 31 (0.59%) DHCP
18 30 (0.57%) VLAN
18 30 (0.57%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 457 (8.68%) Power BI
2 345 (6.55%) PostgreSQL
3 283 (5.38%) Data Warehouse
4 243 (4.62%) SQL Server
5 239 (4.54%) Data Lake
6 197 (3.74%) Tableau
7 183 (3.48%) Relational Database
8 178 (3.38%) NoSQL
9 165 (3.13%) Big Data
10 163 (3.10%) Metadata
11 139 (2.64%) Delta Lake
12 132 (2.51%) BigQuery
13 126 (2.39%) Amazon Athena
14 119 (2.26%) Amazon Redshift
15 110 (2.09%) MongoDB
16 98 (1.86%) Amazon RDS
17 93 (1.77%) MySQL
18 92 (1.75%) DynamoDB
19 91 (1.73%) Azure SQL Database
20 79 (1.50%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 654 (12.42%) Git
2 473 (8.98%) Jenkins
3 363 (6.89%) GitLab
4 251 (4.77%) JIRA
5 94 (1.79%) MLflow
6 72 (1.37%) Selenium
7 58 (1.10%) Postman
8 38 (0.72%) Cucumber
9 33 (0.63%) Bitbucket
10 30 (0.57%) Sonatype Nexus
11 29 (0.55%) Artifactory
11 29 (0.55%) JMeter
11 29 (0.55%) SonarQube
12 25 (0.47%) Cypress.io
12 25 (0.47%) JUnit
13 23 (0.44%) Robot Framework
14 22 (0.42%) Maven
15 21 (0.40%) SpecFlow
16 20 (0.38%) REST Assured
17 18 (0.34%) Gatling
General
1 1,168 (22.18%) Social Skills
2 1,020 (19.37%) Finance
3 712 (13.52%) Analytical Skills
4 490 (9.31%) Public Sector
5 365 (6.93%) Banking
6 177 (3.36%) Front Office
7 132 (2.51%) Documentation Skills
8 92 (1.75%) Investment Banking
9 76 (1.44%) Marketing
10 72 (1.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 60 (1.14%) Retail
12 54 (1.03%) Pharmaceutical
13 53 (1.01%) Telecoms
14 52 (0.99%) Legal
15 47 (0.89%) Influencing Skills
16 37 (0.70%) Financial Institution
17 35 (0.66%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.63%) Publishing
19 31 (0.59%) Military
19 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,009 (19.16%) Developer
2 786 (14.93%) Data Engineer
3 765 (14.53%) Senior
4 500 (9.50%) Python Developer
5 352 (6.69%) Architect
6 341 (6.48%) Lead
7 296 (5.62%) Python Engineer
8 277 (5.26%) Analyst
9 271 (5.15%) DevOps Engineer
10 254 (4.82%) Software Engineer
11 223 (4.24%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 222 (4.22%) AWS Engineer
13 217 (4.12%) Data Scientist
14 174 (3.30%) Senior Developer
15 157 (2.98%) Azure Engineer
15 157 (2.98%) Platform Engineer
15 157 (2.98%) Senior Data Engineer
16 144 (2.74%) Data Analyst
17 141 (2.68%) Full-Stack Developer
18 132 (2.51%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 395 (7.50%) REST
2 355 (6.74%) React
3 351 (6.67%) PySpark
4 337 (6.40%) Kafka
5 255 (4.84%) Node.js
6 236 (4.48%) .NET
7 222 (4.22%) Pandas
8 191 (3.63%) PyTorch
9 186 (3.53%) FastAPI
10 180 (3.42%) RESTful
11 162 (3.08%) JSON
12 137 (2.60%) TensorFlow
13 136 (2.58%) NumPy
14 130 (2.47%) Flask
15 128 (2.43%) scikit-learn
16 126 (2.39%) Django
17 122 (2.32%) LangChain
18 120 (2.28%) AngularJS
19 111 (2.11%) LDAP
20 102 (1.94%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 544 (10.33%) Cloud Native
2 220 (4.18%) Distributed Systems
3 162 (3.08%) Algorithms
4 144 (2.74%) Product Ownership
5 122 (2.32%) AI Agents
6 121 (2.30%) Data Protection Act
7 116 (2.20%) Onboarding
8 113 (2.15%) Data Structures
9 109 (2.07%) Data Centre
9 109 (2.07%) Derivative
9 109 (2.07%) Fixed Income
10 104 (1.98%) Equities
11 98 (1.86%) Management Information System
12 94 (1.79%) Legacy Systems
13 92 (1.75%) Hybrid Cloud
14 91 (1.73%) Enterprise Software
15 84 (1.60%) Security Posture
16 70 (1.33%) Public Cloud
17 46 (0.87%) Greenfield Project
17 46 (0.87%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 643 (12.21%) Linux
2 292 (5.55%) Windows
3 206 (3.91%) Unix
4 95 (1.80%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.18%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.70%) VMS
7 36 (0.68%) Ubuntu
8 27 (0.51%) Android
9 24 (0.46%) AIX
10 22 (0.42%) Solaris
11 21 (0.40%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.34%) CentOS
13 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
14 10 (0.19%) Debian
14 10 (0.19%) zOS
15 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
17 5 (0.095%) Windows 7
18 4 (0.076%) Amazon Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,933 (36.71%) CI/CD
2 1,402 (26.63%) DevOps
3 1,188 (22.56%) AI
4 1,156 (21.96%) Agile
5 1,063 (20.19%) Analytics
6 968 (18.39%) Problem-Solving
7 923 (17.53%) Infrastructure as Code
8 875 (16.62%) Data Pipeline
9 819 (15.56%) Machine Learning
10 731 (13.88%) Containerisation
11 708 (13.45%) Data Modelling
12 702 (13.33%) Data Engineering
13 688 (13.07%) ETL
14 614 (11.66%) Software Engineering
15 594 (11.28%) Data Science
16 542 (10.29%) Observability
17 541 (10.28%) Test Automation
18 532 (10.10%) Business Intelligence
19 438 (8.32%) LLM
20 417 (7.92%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,729 (32.84%) SQL
2 775 (14.72%) Java
3 652 (12.38%) PowerShell
4 570 (10.83%) Bash
5 480 (9.12%) JavaScript
6 353 (6.70%) TypeScript
7 347 (6.59%) C#
8 205 (3.89%) Go
9 181 (3.44%) R
10 155 (2.94%) C++
11 142 (2.70%) Scala
12 104 (1.98%) Shell Script
13 92 (1.75%) Ruby
14 79 (1.50%) Bicep
14 79 (1.50%) Perl
15 56 (1.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 54 (1.03%) C
16 54 (1.03%) PL/SQL
17 51 (0.97%) T-SQL
18 49 (0.93%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,208 (22.94%) Security Cleared
2 981 (18.63%) SC Cleared
3 385 (7.31%) Degree
4 175 (3.32%) Computer Science Degree
5 143 (2.72%) DV Cleared
6 139 (2.64%) BPSS Clearance
7 106 (2.01%) Azure Certification
8 101 (1.92%) AWS Certification
9 93 (1.77%) CISSP
10 86 (1.63%) Master's Degree
11 71 (1.35%) Cisco Certification
12 60 (1.14%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 52 (0.99%) CISM
14 50 (0.95%) CCNP
15 38 (0.72%) PhD
16 36 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
17 32 (0.61%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 27 (0.51%) ISTQB
19 23 (0.44%) CCIE
20 22 (0.42%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 510 (9.69%) Data Quality
2 227 (4.31%) QA
3 167 (3.17%) GDPR
4 113 (2.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 107 (2.03%) NIST
6 80 (1.52%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.63%) SLA
9 32 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.49%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.34%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) WCAG
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
14 11 (0.21%) SOC 2
15 9 (0.17%) GRC
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) MiFID
System Software
1 815 (15.48%) Docker
2 157 (2.98%) Active Directory
3 98 (1.86%) VMware Infrastructure
4 70 (1.33%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.80%) VMware NSX
6 38 (0.72%) vSphere
7 33 (0.63%) Firmware
8 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) HDFS
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.17%) SRDF
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
12 8 (0.15%) NFS
13 7 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
14 6 (0.11%) Postfix
14 6 (0.11%) Squid
15 5 (0.095%) Lustre
16 4 (0.076%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
Systems Management
1 1,097 (20.84%) Terraform
2 958 (18.20%) Kubernetes
3 528 (10.03%) Ansible
4 344 (6.53%) Grafana
5 281 (5.34%) Prometheus
6 78 (1.48%) Puppet
7 71 (1.35%) Argo
8 52 (0.99%) Istio
9 47 (0.89%) vRealize
10 42 (0.80%) Kibana
11 34 (0.65%) Progress Chef
12 33 (0.63%) vCenter Server
13 27 (0.51%) Nessus
14 26 (0.49%) Nagios
15 24 (0.46%) Control-M
15 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
16 23 (0.44%) ZABBIX
17 21 (0.40%) Rancher
18 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
19 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 615 (11.68%) Microsoft
2 568 (10.79%) Databricks
3 269 (5.11%) Google
4 229 (4.35%) Oracle
5 224 (4.25%) Splunk
6 181 (3.44%) VMware
7 120 (2.28%) Red Hat
8 119 (2.26%) OpenAI
9 117 (2.22%) Cisco
10 96 (1.82%) ServiceNow
11 94 (1.79%) CyberArk
12 83 (1.58%) BeyondTrust
13 69 (1.31%) Dynatrace
14 67 (1.27%) IBM
14 67 (1.27%) Informatica
15 64 (1.22%) Palo Alto
16 63 (1.20%) F5
17 60 (1.14%) Foundry
18 48 (0.91%) SAP
19 41 (0.78%) Salesforce