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 20 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,573 4,276 3,990
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.41% 13.02% 10.29%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.65% 39.53% 32.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,648 2,844 2,864
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.90% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £644 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.43% -3.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 75 119
10th Percentile £29.85 £26.28 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.50 £33.91 £30.50
Median hourly rate £55.25 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.50% -13.04% -8.37%
75th Percentile £76.88 £58.88 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £84.18 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.50 £52.50 £67.26
% change year-on-year +5.71% -21.94% +19.26%

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 14,055 10,816 12,201
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.27% 32.94% 31.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,153 7,227 8,516
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £503 £535
Median % change year-on-year +2.99% -6.07% -2.73%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 288 395
10th Percentile £29.96 £28.23 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £35.00 £43.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.55 £80.00 £77.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% +8.33%

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 20 August 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 20 August 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 20 August 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 -4 4,766 £549 +2.23% 2,812
London -4 2,778 £575 - 1,437
UK excluding London -7 2,165 £500 - 1,879
Work from Home -9 1,508 £530 -3.64% 1,041
North of England +2 739 £500 +2.30% 406
South East -9 449 £537 +7.40% 594
Yorkshire -1 377 £500 - 123
South West -2 298 £515 -1.90% 241
North West -2 279 £525 +10.53% 206
Scotland -2 276 £450 -10.00% 155
Midlands -15 245 £475 +1.33% 202
West Midlands -16 192 £477 +0.42% 111
East of England -10 139 £500 -0.50% 243
North East -1 95 £425 -18.27% 80
East Midlands -10 53 £470 +11.90% 89
Wales -6 28 £530 +30.86% 42
Northern Ireland +8 19 £363 -32.56% 20

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
1 292 (5.24%) Apache Airflow
2 279 (5.01%) Apache Spark
3 216 (3.88%) Apache
4 172 (3.09%) Confluence
5 58 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SharePoint
7 42 (0.75%) SAS
8 28 (0.50%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.41%) ArcGIS
10 21 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
11 19 (0.34%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.13%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
15 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.090%) Apache Solr
Applications
1 108 (1.94%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.47%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
6 17 (0.31%) CPLEX
6 17 (0.31%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 21 (0.38%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
7 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.090%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Endur
9 3 (0.054%) Front Arena
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 2,087 (37.45%) AWS
2 1,892 (33.95%) Azure
3 859 (15.41%) GCP
4 705 (12.65%) GitHub
5 495 (8.88%) Power Platform
6 462 (8.29%) Serverless
7 438 (7.86%) Azure DevOps
8 409 (7.34%) GitHub Actions
9 389 (6.98%) Amazon S3
10 351 (6.30%) AWS Lambda
11 322 (5.78%) Snowflake
12 226 (4.06%) Azure Data Factory
13 218 (3.91%) dbt
14 185 (3.32%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 185 (3.32%) AWS CloudFormation
15 179 (3.21%) Amazon EKS
16 137 (2.46%) Amazon EC2
16 137 (2.46%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 134 (2.40%) Entra ID
18 124 (2.23%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 277 (4.97%) Firewall
2 213 (3.82%) DNS
3 148 (2.66%) TCP/IP
4 128 (2.30%) Network Security
5 125 (2.24%) BGP
5 125 (2.24%) VPN
6 110 (1.97%) WAN
7 85 (1.53%) DHCP
8 72 (1.29%) OSPF
9 60 (1.08%) SD-WAN
10 59 (1.06%) VLAN
11 57 (1.02%) VXLAN
12 54 (0.97%) SSL
13 53 (0.95%) HTTP
14 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
15 46 (0.83%) SAN
16 45 (0.81%) Ethernet VPN
17 44 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 43 (0.77%) SNMP
19 37 (0.66%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 454 (8.15%) Power BI
2 332 (5.96%) PostgreSQL
3 319 (5.72%) Data Warehouse
4 221 (3.97%) SQL Server
5 202 (3.62%) Relational Database
6 196 (3.52%) Metadata
7 192 (3.45%) Tableau
8 181 (3.25%) Data Lake
9 162 (2.91%) NoSQL
10 158 (2.84%) BigQuery
11 142 (2.55%) Big Data
12 139 (2.49%) Amazon Redshift
13 127 (2.28%) Amazon Athena
14 123 (2.21%) MongoDB
15 119 (2.14%) Amazon RDS
16 118 (2.12%) Delta Lake
17 102 (1.83%) DynamoDB
18 90 (1.61%) MySQL
19 71 (1.27%) Redis
20 66 (1.18%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 733 (13.15%) Git
2 509 (9.13%) Jenkins
3 445 (7.98%) GitLab
4 291 (5.22%) JIRA
5 100 (1.79%) Selenium
6 57 (1.02%) Postman
7 55 (0.99%) JMeter
8 52 (0.93%) MLflow
9 50 (0.90%) SonarQube
10 47 (0.84%) Bitbucket
11 46 (0.83%) Claude Code
12 36 (0.65%) Cypress.io
13 34 (0.61%) Cucumber
14 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
14 32 (0.57%) Gatling
15 31 (0.56%) REST Assured
16 30 (0.54%) Maven
17 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
18 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
19 22 (0.39%) JUnit
General
1 1,238 (22.21%) Social Skills
2 1,206 (21.64%) Finance
3 823 (14.77%) Analytical Skills
4 548 (9.83%) Public Sector
5 450 (8.07%) Banking
6 196 (3.52%) Front Office
7 136 (2.44%) Investment Banking
8 116 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
9 114 (2.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 105 (1.88%) Retail
11 88 (1.58%) Marketing
12 77 (1.38%) Telecoms
13 58 (1.04%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (0.95%) Legal
14 53 (0.95%) Military
15 48 (0.86%) Financial Institution
16 47 (0.84%) Aerospace
17 45 (0.81%) Publishing
18 40 (0.72%) Manufacturing
19 39 (0.70%) Law
Job Titles
1 917 (16.45%) Senior
2 909 (16.31%) Developer
3 804 (14.43%) Data Engineer
4 488 (8.76%) Python Developer
5 484 (8.68%) Lead
6 412 (7.39%) Python Engineer
7 329 (5.90%) DevOps Engineer
8 307 (5.51%) Software Engineer
9 280 (5.02%) Architect
10 274 (4.92%) Analyst
11 257 (4.61%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 238 (4.27%) AWS Engineer
13 195 (3.50%) Data Scientist
14 191 (3.43%) Cloud Engineer
15 189 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
16 175 (3.14%) Senior Developer
17 174 (3.12%) Azure Engineer
18 170 (3.05%) Senior Data Engineer
19 138 (2.48%) Infrastructure Engineer
20 132 (2.37%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,295 (23.24%) Terraform
2 459 (8.24%) REST
3 376 (6.75%) PySpark
4 359 (6.44%) Kafka
5 325 (5.83%) React
6 234 (4.20%) .NET
7 204 (3.66%) FastAPI
8 202 (3.62%) JSON
9 199 (3.57%) RESTful
10 190 (3.41%) Django
11 185 (3.32%) Node.js
12 175 (3.14%) Pandas
13 134 (2.40%) LangChain
14 126 (2.26%) PyTorch
15 125 (2.24%) pytest
16 111 (1.99%) Flask
16 111 (1.99%) YAML
17 105 (1.88%) HTML
18 104 (1.87%) NumPy
18 104 (1.87%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 767 (13.76%) Cloud Native
2 312 (5.60%) Distributed Systems
3 224 (4.02%) AI Agents
4 211 (3.79%) Onboarding
5 161 (2.89%) Data Centre
6 155 (2.78%) Product Ownership
7 140 (2.51%) Algorithms
8 132 (2.37%) Data Structures
9 130 (2.33%) Legacy Systems
10 117 (2.10%) Derivative
10 117 (2.10%) Hybrid Cloud
11 110 (1.97%) Data Protection Act
12 108 (1.94%) Management Information System
13 94 (1.69%) Equities
14 83 (1.49%) Fixed Income
15 82 (1.47%) Security Posture
16 76 (1.36%) Enterprise Software
17 68 (1.22%) Linux Command Line
18 67 (1.20%) Public Cloud
19 63 (1.13%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 732 (13.13%) Linux
2 338 (6.06%) Windows
3 239 (4.29%) Unix
4 146 (2.62%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 83 (1.49%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.74%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.59%) VMS
8 31 (0.56%) AIX
9 18 (0.32%) Solaris
10 17 (0.31%) CentOS
11 16 (0.29%) Android
12 11 (0.20%) Apple iOS
12 11 (0.20%) zOS
13 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.090%) Debian
16 5 (0.090%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,206 (39.58%) CI/CD
2 1,601 (28.73%) DevOps
3 1,445 (25.93%) AI
4 1,243 (22.30%) Agile
5 1,167 (20.94%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,109 (19.90%) Analytics
7 985 (17.67%) Data Pipeline
8 913 (16.38%) Problem-Solving
9 893 (16.02%) Software Engineering
10 849 (15.23%) Machine Learning
11 787 (14.12%) Data Engineering
12 759 (13.62%) Containerisation
13 735 (13.19%) Data Modelling
14 687 (12.33%) Observability
15 654 (11.74%) ETL
16 626 (11.23%) Test Automation
17 586 (10.51%) Continuous Improvement
18 577 (10.35%) Data Science
19 556 (9.98%) Validation
20 537 (9.64%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,807 (32.42%) SQL
2 823 (14.77%) Java
3 754 (13.53%) Bash
4 736 (13.21%) PowerShell
5 451 (8.09%) JavaScript
6 358 (6.42%) TypeScript
7 308 (5.53%) C#
8 203 (3.64%) Go
9 146 (2.62%) C++
10 143 (2.57%) R
11 140 (2.51%) Shell Script
12 131 (2.35%) Scala
13 129 (2.31%) Bicep
14 86 (1.54%) Perl
15 63 (1.13%) PL/SQL
16 59 (1.06%) C
17 57 (1.02%) Groovy
18 54 (0.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 54 (0.97%) Rust
19 51 (0.92%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,296 (23.25%) Security Cleared
2 1,051 (18.86%) SC Cleared
3 420 (7.54%) Degree
4 204 (3.66%) DV Cleared
5 163 (2.92%) Computer Science Degree
6 142 (2.55%) AWS Certification
7 141 (2.53%) Azure Certification
8 115 (2.06%) BPSS Clearance
9 95 (1.70%) CISSP
10 91 (1.63%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.27%) Master's Degree
12 52 (0.93%) CCNP
13 43 (0.77%) Microsoft Certification
14 38 (0.68%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 35 (0.63%) PhD
16 33 (0.59%) ISTQB
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 31 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 30 (0.54%) CCIE
20 26 (0.47%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 589 (10.57%) Data Quality
2 279 (5.01%) QA
3 110 (1.97%) GDPR
4 109 (1.96%) NIST
5 103 (1.85%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 82 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 38 (0.68%) SLA
8 30 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
9 27 (0.48%) NCSC
9 27 (0.48%) PCI DSS
10 26 (0.47%) WCAG
11 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 17 (0.31%) HIPAA
13 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
14 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
15 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
16 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.13%) GRC
18 7 (0.13%) HL7
System Software
1 927 (16.63%) Docker
2 157 (2.82%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.37%) VMware Infrastructure
4 62 (1.11%) Virtual Machines
5 43 (0.77%) vSphere
6 42 (0.75%) Hyper-V
7 35 (0.63%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.23%) Squid
12 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
14 9 (0.16%) HDFS
14 9 (0.16%) KVM
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
15 7 (0.13%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,103 (19.79%) Kubernetes
2 626 (11.23%) Ansible
3 344 (6.17%) Grafana
4 248 (4.45%) Prometheus
5 89 (1.60%) Puppet
6 76 (1.36%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.20%) Argo
8 43 (0.77%) Istio
9 34 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
10 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
11 27 (0.48%) Kibana
12 25 (0.45%) Nagios
12 25 (0.45%) vRealize
13 24 (0.43%) vCenter Server
14 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
15 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
16 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
16 18 (0.32%) Netcool
16 18 (0.32%) Packer
Vendors
1 688 (12.35%) Microsoft
2 554 (9.94%) Databricks
3 354 (6.35%) Google
4 254 (4.56%) Oracle
5 216 (3.88%) Splunk
6 176 (3.16%) VMware
7 144 (2.58%) Cisco
8 139 (2.49%) OpenAI
9 127 (2.28%) ServiceNow
10 106 (1.90%) Dynatrace
11 103 (1.85%) Red Hat
12 93 (1.67%) IBM
13 90 (1.61%) F5
14 84 (1.51%) Palo Alto
15 80 (1.44%) Informatica
16 69 (1.24%) CyberArk
16 69 (1.24%) Fortinet
16 69 (1.24%) SAP
17 67 (1.20%) Foundry
18 61 (1.09%) Salesforce