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 26 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,216 3,951 3,988
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.16% 13.46% 9.14%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.55% 39.53% 31.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,518 2,781 2,843
10th Percentile £363 £388 £395
25th Percentile £421 £454 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £622 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £814 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.44% -6.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 129 52 103
10th Percentile £29.58 £21.25 £21.78
25th Percentile £43.81 £25.25 £33.75
Median hourly rate £54.50 £37.16 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +46.66% -32.44% -15.38%
75th Percentile £70.00 £57.81 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £70.88 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £62.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -27.42% +2.39%

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 12,864 9,995 12,830
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.53% 34.04% 29.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,524 6,772 9,114
10th Percentile £352 £359 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £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 £767 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £478 £487
% change year-on-year -0.70% -1.82% -2.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 556 247 487
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.49 £31.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £79.25
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 26 April 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 26 April 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 26 April 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 4,381 £523 -5.17% 2,202
London -3 2,501 £550 -8.33% 954
UK excluding London -3 1,993 £481 -3.75% 1,696
Work from Home 0 1,500 £525 -4.55% 1,421
North of England +9 670 £475 -3.06% 419
South East -3 412 £500 -4.76% 557
Yorkshire +1 385 £475 -5.00% 119
Scotland +2 267 £425 -10.53% 91
Midlands -11 256 £498 +8.67% 195
South West -2 242 £500 -9.09% 185
North West +2 239 £490 +3.16% 215
West Midlands -6 194 £500 - 101
East of England -3 135 £500 -0.50% 191
East Midlands -15 61 £463 +9.47% 92
North East +7 52 £475 -1.30% 87
Northern Ireland +15 24 £463 -11.90% 37
Wales -13 23 £463 -11.90% 45

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
1 285 (5.46%) Apache Spark
2 219 (4.20%) Apache Airflow
3 166 (3.18%) Apache
4 148 (2.84%) Confluence
5 50 (0.96%) SAS
5 50 (0.96%) SharePoint
6 28 (0.54%) nginx
7 27 (0.52%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
10 15 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
11 13 (0.25%) Appian
11 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.17%) Camunda
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) CMS
14 6 (0.12%) CICS
14 6 (0.12%) WebSphere
15 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
15 5 (0.096%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 139 (2.66%) Microsoft Excel
2 26 (0.50%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.46%) Spreadsheet
4 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
5 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.12%) CPLEX
7 5 (0.096%) Weka
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 6 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
7 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
8 2 (0.038%) Actimize
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
9 1 (0.019%) IBM Planning Analytics
Cloud Services
1 1,990 (38.15%) AWS
2 1,791 (34.34%) Azure
3 771 (14.78%) GCP
4 672 (12.88%) GitHub
5 521 (9.99%) Power Platform
6 494 (9.47%) Serverless
7 386 (7.40%) Azure DevOps
8 382 (7.32%) Amazon S3
9 357 (6.84%) AWS Lambda
10 350 (6.71%) GitHub Actions
11 274 (5.25%) Azure Data Factory
12 237 (4.54%) Snowflake
13 232 (4.45%) AWS CloudFormation
14 173 (3.32%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 168 (3.22%) Amazon EKS
16 160 (3.07%) OpenShift
17 156 (2.99%) dbt
18 153 (2.93%) Amazon ECS
19 143 (2.74%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 136 (2.61%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 176 (3.37%) Firewall
2 135 (2.59%) DNS
3 111 (2.13%) Network Security
4 90 (1.73%) TCP/IP
5 76 (1.46%) VPN
6 70 (1.34%) BGP
7 64 (1.23%) WAN
8 61 (1.17%) HTTP
9 44 (0.84%) SAN
10 43 (0.82%) OSPF
11 35 (0.67%) MPLS
12 34 (0.65%) SNMP
13 31 (0.59%) LAN
14 30 (0.58%) DHCP
14 30 (0.58%) SSL
14 30 (0.58%) VLAN
15 29 (0.56%) Wireshark
16 27 (0.52%) VXLAN
17 24 (0.46%) SD-WAN
18 23 (0.44%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 444 (8.51%) Power BI
2 347 (6.65%) PostgreSQL
3 288 (5.52%) Data Warehouse
4 240 (4.60%) Data Lake
5 232 (4.45%) SQL Server
6 199 (3.82%) Tableau
7 186 (3.57%) NoSQL
8 173 (3.32%) Relational Database
9 161 (3.09%) Big Data
10 160 (3.07%) Metadata
11 135 (2.59%) Delta Lake
12 133 (2.55%) BigQuery
13 118 (2.26%) Amazon Athena
13 118 (2.26%) Amazon Redshift
14 104 (1.99%) Amazon RDS
14 104 (1.99%) MongoDB
15 100 (1.92%) MySQL
16 94 (1.80%) DynamoDB
17 92 (1.76%) Azure SQL Database
18 81 (1.55%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 654 (12.54%) Git
2 485 (9.30%) Jenkins
3 356 (6.83%) GitLab
4 272 (5.21%) JIRA
5 91 (1.74%) MLflow
6 78 (1.50%) Selenium
7 60 (1.15%) Postman
8 44 (0.84%) Cucumber
9 42 (0.81%) Bitbucket
10 33 (0.63%) Sonatype Nexus
11 31 (0.59%) JMeter
12 28 (0.54%) SonarQube
13 27 (0.52%) Artifactory
13 27 (0.52%) Cypress.io
13 27 (0.52%) SpecFlow
14 26 (0.50%) JUnit
15 24 (0.46%) Maven
16 23 (0.44%) Gatling
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
18 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,176 (22.55%) Social Skills
2 1,003 (19.23%) Finance
3 718 (13.77%) Analytical Skills
4 494 (9.47%) Public Sector
5 362 (6.94%) Banking
6 171 (3.28%) Front Office
7 134 (2.57%) Documentation Skills
8 87 (1.67%) Investment Banking
9 71 (1.36%) Marketing
10 68 (1.30%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 65 (1.25%) Retail
12 55 (1.05%) Pharmaceutical
13 54 (1.04%) Telecoms
14 50 (0.96%) Legal
15 49 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
16 38 (0.73%) Manufacturing
17 36 (0.69%) Financial Institution
18 32 (0.61%) Publishing
19 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
20 28 (0.54%) Military
Job Titles
1 988 (18.94%) Developer
2 777 (14.90%) Data Engineer
3 730 (14.00%) Senior
4 484 (9.28%) Python Developer
5 353 (6.77%) Architect
6 337 (6.46%) Lead
7 291 (5.58%) Python Engineer
8 283 (5.43%) Analyst
9 276 (5.29%) DevOps Engineer
10 252 (4.83%) Software Engineer
11 236 (4.52%) AWS Engineer
12 227 (4.35%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 217 (4.16%) Data Scientist
14 172 (3.30%) Platform Engineer
15 160 (3.07%) Azure Engineer
16 159 (3.05%) Senior Developer
17 151 (2.89%) Senior Data Engineer
18 144 (2.76%) Data Analyst
19 135 (2.59%) Full-Stack Developer
20 119 (2.28%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 411 (7.88%) REST
2 354 (6.79%) React
3 344 (6.60%) PySpark
4 333 (6.38%) Kafka
5 264 (5.06%) Node.js
6 232 (4.45%) .NET
7 231 (4.43%) Pandas
8 197 (3.78%) PyTorch
9 177 (3.39%) FastAPI
10 173 (3.32%) RESTful
11 167 (3.20%) JSON
12 148 (2.84%) NumPy
13 147 (2.82%) TensorFlow
14 137 (2.63%) scikit-learn
15 128 (2.45%) LangChain
16 127 (2.43%) Flask
17 122 (2.34%) AngularJS
18 118 (2.26%) Django
19 110 (2.11%) OAuth
20 108 (2.07%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 511 (9.80%) Cloud Native
2 220 (4.22%) Distributed Systems
3 166 (3.18%) Algorithms
4 146 (2.80%) Product Ownership
5 128 (2.45%) AI Agents
6 118 (2.26%) Data Protection Act
7 111 (2.13%) Data Structures
7 111 (2.13%) Fixed Income
8 110 (2.11%) Equities
9 108 (2.07%) Derivative
10 105 (2.01%) Onboarding
11 96 (1.84%) Management Information System
12 92 (1.76%) Enterprise Software
13 90 (1.73%) Data Centre
13 90 (1.73%) Legacy Systems
14 87 (1.67%) Hybrid Cloud
15 85 (1.63%) Security Posture
16 73 (1.40%) Public Cloud
17 48 (0.92%) Virtual Team
18 46 (0.88%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 644 (12.35%) Linux
2 281 (5.39%) Windows
3 203 (3.89%) Unix
4 95 (1.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 60 (1.15%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.75%) VMS
7 36 (0.69%) Ubuntu
8 27 (0.52%) Android
9 20 (0.38%) AIX
9 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
10 19 (0.36%) CentOS
10 19 (0.36%) Solaris
11 15 (0.29%) Apple iOS
12 9 (0.17%) Debian
12 9 (0.17%) zOS
13 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
14 7 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
15 5 (0.096%) Rocky
15 5 (0.096%) Windows 7
15 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,901 (36.45%) CI/CD
2 1,400 (26.84%) DevOps
3 1,158 (22.20%) Agile
3 1,158 (22.20%) AI
4 1,067 (20.46%) Analytics
5 977 (18.73%) Problem-Solving
6 912 (17.48%) Infrastructure as Code
7 858 (16.45%) Data Pipeline
8 820 (15.72%) Machine Learning
9 721 (13.82%) Containerisation
10 699 (13.40%) Data Engineering
11 692 (13.27%) Data Modelling
12 684 (13.11%) ETL
13 604 (11.58%) Data Science
14 597 (11.45%) Software Engineering
15 546 (10.47%) Test Automation
16 523 (10.03%) Business Intelligence
16 523 (10.03%) Observability
17 436 (8.36%) LLM
18 405 (7.76%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,713 (32.84%) SQL
2 767 (14.70%) Java
3 643 (12.33%) PowerShell
4 560 (10.74%) Bash
5 482 (9.24%) JavaScript
6 351 (6.73%) C#
7 342 (6.56%) TypeScript
8 202 (3.87%) Go
9 177 (3.39%) R
10 154 (2.95%) C++
11 142 (2.72%) Scala
12 108 (2.07%) Shell Script
13 96 (1.84%) Ruby
14 81 (1.55%) Perl
15 80 (1.53%) Bicep
16 54 (1.04%) C
17 53 (1.02%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 53 (1.02%) Kusto Query Language
18 49 (0.94%) PL/SQL
18 49 (0.94%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,210 (23.20%) Security Cleared
2 993 (19.04%) SC Cleared
3 391 (7.50%) Degree
4 177 (3.39%) Computer Science Degree
5 143 (2.74%) BPSS Clearance
6 138 (2.65%) DV Cleared
7 104 (1.99%) Azure Certification
8 102 (1.96%) AWS Certification
9 91 (1.74%) CISSP
9 91 (1.74%) Master's Degree
10 67 (1.28%) Cisco Certification
11 58 (1.11%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 49 (0.94%) CCNP
12 49 (0.94%) CISM
13 42 (0.81%) PhD
14 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
15 31 (0.59%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 27 (0.52%) ISTQB
17 24 (0.46%) CEH
18 23 (0.44%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 513 (9.84%) Data Quality
2 220 (4.22%) QA
3 170 (3.26%) GDPR
4 110 (2.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 104 (1.99%) NIST
6 78 (1.50%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) SLA
8 32 (0.61%) PCI DSS
9 29 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 27 (0.52%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.35%) NCSC
13 17 (0.33%) WCAG
14 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.23%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.17%) GRC
18 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
19 7 (0.13%) MiFID
System Software
1 833 (15.97%) Docker
2 161 (3.09%) Active Directory
3 96 (1.84%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.32%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.81%) VMware NSX
6 40 (0.77%) vSphere
7 32 (0.61%) Firmware
8 31 (0.59%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) KVM
11 13 (0.25%) HDFS
12 9 (0.17%) Ceph
12 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.17%) SRDF
13 7 (0.13%) Lustre
13 7 (0.13%) NFS
14 6 (0.12%) GPFS
14 6 (0.12%) Postfix
14 6 (0.12%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 6 (0.12%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,114 (21.36%) Terraform
2 955 (18.31%) Kubernetes
3 510 (9.78%) Ansible
4 339 (6.50%) Grafana
5 282 (5.41%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.42%) Argo
7 73 (1.40%) Puppet
8 52 (1.00%) Istio
9 48 (0.92%) vRealize
10 44 (0.84%) Kibana
11 34 (0.65%) vCenter Server
12 33 (0.63%) Progress Chef
13 27 (0.52%) Nessus
14 26 (0.50%) Single Sign-On
15 23 (0.44%) Control-M
15 23 (0.44%) Nagios
16 22 (0.42%) Rancher
17 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
18 19 (0.36%) Kubeflow
18 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 626 (12.00%) Microsoft
2 571 (10.95%) Databricks
3 274 (5.25%) Google
4 219 (4.20%) Splunk
5 217 (4.16%) Oracle
6 180 (3.45%) VMware
7 122 (2.34%) OpenAI
8 121 (2.32%) Red Hat
9 117 (2.24%) Cisco
10 98 (1.88%) ServiceNow
11 90 (1.73%) CyberArk
12 75 (1.44%) BeyondTrust
13 65 (1.25%) Informatica
14 63 (1.21%) Foundry
15 62 (1.19%) IBM
16 60 (1.15%) Dynatrace
17 50 (0.96%) F5
18 49 (0.94%) Palo Alto
19 48 (0.92%) SAP
20 41 (0.79%) Salesforce