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 16 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 9 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +6 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,181 3,975 4,105
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.02% 13.45% 9.23%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.11% 39.29% 31.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,517 2,749 2,887
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £415 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -7.00% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £749 £807 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £515
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.91% -6.36%
Number of hourly rates quoted 105 52 109
10th Percentile £28.73 £20.23 £21.16
25th Percentile £41.94 £22.88 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.00 £43.50 £50.50
Median % change year-on-year +24.14% -13.86% -22.31%
75th Percentile £70.00 £65.25 £66.75
90th Percentile £79.80 £78.58 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.75 £46.18
% change year-on-year +5.05% +5.57% -28.95%

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 12,604 10,118 12,938
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.23% 34.22% 29.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,366 6,717 9,149
10th Percentile £353 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £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 £716 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £488 £480
% change year-on-year -2.56% +1.56% -4.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 498 242 492
10th Percentile £41.49 £21.33 £30.69
25th Percentile £54.55 £33.69 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.76%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.37
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.97% +3.48% -5.23%

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 16 March 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 16 March 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 16 March 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 -1 4,332 £518 -10.00% 2,661
London -1 2,453 £550 -8.33% 1,106
UK excluding London -1 1,996 £481 -3.75% 2,105
Work from Home 0 1,567 £525 -4.55% 998
North of England +10 661 £475 -5.00% 493
South East -6 418 £500 -6.93% 651
Yorkshire +3 346 £481 -3.80% 189
Midlands -3 288 £498 +1.63% 246
Scotland +2 274 £425 -9.57% 152
North West +11 268 £475 -4.19% 216
West Midlands -3 236 £500 - 110
South West -4 227 £538 -6.52% 271
East of England -5 128 £500 - 222
North East +16 53 £475 -7.32% 92
East Midlands -13 51 £447 +5.18% 136
Wales -13 31 £473 -10.85% 85
Northern Ireland +9 29 £613 +16.67% 29

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
1 270 (5.21%) Apache Spark
2 196 (3.78%) Apache Airflow
3 166 (3.20%) Confluence
4 155 (2.99%) Apache
5 64 (1.24%) SAS
6 60 (1.16%) SharePoint
7 27 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.48%) Jupyter
9 24 (0.46%) nginx
9 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
10 23 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.35%) Appian
12 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
13 10 (0.19%) Camunda
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 7 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 4 (0.077%) Oracle Application Server
16 4 (0.077%) Tomcat
17 3 (0.058%) CICS
17 3 (0.058%) IIS
Applications
1 130 (2.51%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
4 24 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.31%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.15%) Weka
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
10 2 (0.039%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 7 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
5 6 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.058%) Actimize
7 3 (0.058%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.058%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
8 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.039%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.039%) Odoo
8 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.039%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.039%) Shopify
9 1 (0.019%) Advent Geneva
9 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
9 1 (0.019%) Salesforce CRM
9 1 (0.019%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 2,005 (38.70%) AWS
2 1,807 (34.88%) Azure
3 807 (15.58%) GCP
4 696 (13.43%) GitHub
5 531 (10.25%) Serverless
6 498 (9.61%) Power Platform
7 393 (7.59%) Azure DevOps
8 358 (6.91%) Amazon S3
9 347 (6.70%) AWS Lambda
10 344 (6.64%) GitHub Actions
11 267 (5.15%) Azure Data Factory
12 257 (4.96%) Snowflake
13 251 (4.84%) AWS CloudFormation
14 191 (3.69%) Amazon EKS
15 177 (3.42%) OpenShift
16 168 (3.24%) Amazon ECS
17 161 (3.11%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 160 (3.09%) Amazon EC2
19 147 (2.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 143 (2.76%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 211 (4.07%) Firewall
2 139 (2.68%) DNS
3 109 (2.10%) Network Security
4 108 (2.08%) TCP/IP
5 76 (1.47%) VPN
6 63 (1.22%) BGP
6 63 (1.22%) HTTP
7 59 (1.14%) WAN
8 41 (0.79%) Wireshark
9 40 (0.77%) MPLS
9 40 (0.77%) SAN
10 39 (0.75%) SSL
11 35 (0.68%) OSPF
12 34 (0.66%) DHCP
13 33 (0.64%) LAN
14 32 (0.62%) SD-WAN
15 28 (0.54%) VLAN
16 23 (0.44%) SNMP
16 23 (0.44%) VXLAN
17 22 (0.42%) BIG-IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 415 (8.01%) Power BI
2 394 (7.60%) PostgreSQL
3 316 (6.10%) Data Warehouse
4 240 (4.63%) Data Lake
5 225 (4.34%) NoSQL
6 197 (3.80%) Relational Database
6 197 (3.80%) SQL Server
7 167 (3.22%) Tableau
8 161 (3.11%) Big Data
9 137 (2.64%) Metadata
10 124 (2.39%) Amazon RDS
11 123 (2.37%) BigQuery
12 121 (2.34%) Delta Lake
13 119 (2.30%) MySQL
14 108 (2.08%) Amazon Redshift
15 103 (1.99%) MongoDB
16 98 (1.89%) Amazon Athena
17 92 (1.78%) Azure SQL Database
18 83 (1.60%) Hadoop
19 80 (1.54%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 660 (12.74%) Git
2 545 (10.52%) Jenkins
3 418 (8.07%) GitLab
4 301 (5.81%) JIRA
5 94 (1.81%) MLflow
6 91 (1.76%) Selenium
7 52 (1.00%) Postman
8 49 (0.95%) Bitbucket
9 47 (0.91%) Cucumber
10 42 (0.81%) JUnit
11 41 (0.79%) JMeter
11 41 (0.79%) Sonatype Nexus
12 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
12 28 (0.54%) Visual Studio
13 26 (0.50%) Cypress.io
14 24 (0.46%) CircleCI
15 23 (0.44%) Artifactory
16 21 (0.41%) SonarQube
17 19 (0.37%) Maven
17 19 (0.37%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,272 (24.55%) Social Skills
2 1,022 (19.73%) Finance
3 716 (13.82%) Analytical Skills
4 494 (9.53%) Public Sector
5 415 (8.01%) Banking
6 179 (3.45%) Front Office
7 129 (2.49%) Documentation Skills
8 102 (1.97%) Investment Banking
9 70 (1.35%) Retail
10 66 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 65 (1.25%) Marketing
12 60 (1.16%) Pharmaceutical
13 57 (1.10%) Financial Institution
14 53 (1.02%) Legal
15 52 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
16 51 (0.98%) Telecoms
17 47 (0.91%) Manufacturing
18 34 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
19 33 (0.64%) Military
20 24 (0.46%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 975 (18.82%) Developer
2 730 (14.09%) Data Engineer
3 717 (13.84%) Senior
4 442 (8.53%) Python Developer
5 345 (6.66%) Lead
6 340 (6.56%) Architect
7 292 (5.64%) DevOps Engineer
8 290 (5.60%) Python Engineer
9 279 (5.39%) Analyst
10 259 (5.00%) AWS Engineer
11 258 (4.98%) Software Engineer
12 243 (4.69%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 204 (3.94%) Data Scientist
14 178 (3.44%) Platform Engineer
15 160 (3.09%) Azure Engineer
16 153 (2.95%) Senior Developer
17 139 (2.68%) Full-Stack Developer
18 137 (2.64%) Data Analyst
19 136 (2.62%) Senior Data Engineer
20 129 (2.49%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 446 (8.61%) REST
2 366 (7.06%) React
3 334 (6.45%) PySpark
4 329 (6.35%) Kafka
5 289 (5.58%) Node.js
6 231 (4.46%) Pandas
7 223 (4.30%) PyTorch
8 218 (4.21%) .NET
9 216 (4.17%) FastAPI
10 204 (3.94%) RESTful
11 185 (3.57%) TensorFlow
12 161 (3.11%) NumPy
13 153 (2.95%) scikit-learn
14 141 (2.72%) AngularJS
15 135 (2.61%) Flask
16 128 (2.47%) JSON
17 125 (2.41%) LangChain
18 119 (2.30%) Django
19 112 (2.16%) pytest
20 104 (2.01%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 516 (9.96%) Cloud Native
2 203 (3.92%) Algorithms
3 202 (3.90%) Distributed Systems
4 140 (2.70%) Product Ownership
5 130 (2.51%) Equities
6 119 (2.30%) Data Protection Act
7 116 (2.24%) Fixed Income
8 106 (2.05%) AI Agents
8 106 (2.05%) Data Structures
9 105 (2.03%) Derivative
9 105 (2.03%) Onboarding
10 95 (1.83%) Legacy Systems
11 92 (1.78%) Hybrid Cloud
12 88 (1.70%) Data Centre
12 88 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
13 86 (1.66%) Security Posture
14 84 (1.62%) Public Cloud
15 82 (1.58%) Management Information System
16 58 (1.12%) Hedge funds
17 55 (1.06%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 682 (13.16%) Linux
2 326 (6.29%) Windows
3 183 (3.53%) Unix
4 93 (1.80%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 69 (1.33%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.64%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.62%) Android
8 31 (0.60%) VMS
9 22 (0.42%) Mac OS
10 21 (0.41%) CentOS
11 18 (0.35%) Apple iOS
12 17 (0.33%) Solaris
13 13 (0.25%) AIX
14 9 (0.17%) Kali Linux
14 9 (0.17%) Windows 7
15 5 (0.097%) Debian
15 5 (0.097%) Embedded Linux
15 5 (0.097%) zOS
16 4 (0.077%) Amazon Linux
16 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,908 (36.83%) CI/CD
2 1,469 (28.35%) DevOps
3 1,225 (23.64%) Agile
4 1,115 (21.52%) AI
5 1,064 (20.54%) Problem-Solving
6 1,025 (19.78%) Analytics
7 904 (17.45%) Infrastructure as Code
8 854 (16.48%) Machine Learning
9 840 (16.21%) Data Pipeline
10 769 (14.84%) Containerisation
11 705 (13.61%) Data Engineering
12 683 (13.18%) Data Modelling
13 679 (13.11%) ETL
14 627 (12.10%) Data Science
15 608 (11.74%) Test Automation
16 592 (11.43%) Software Engineering
17 507 (9.79%) Observability
18 496 (9.57%) Business Intelligence
19 433 (8.36%) LLM
20 392 (7.57%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,649 (31.83%) SQL
2 736 (14.21%) Java
3 673 (12.99%) PowerShell
4 591 (11.41%) Bash
5 503 (9.71%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.79%) TypeScript
7 334 (6.45%) C#
8 226 (4.36%) Go
9 173 (3.34%) C++
10 153 (2.95%) R
11 119 (2.30%) Scala
12 114 (2.20%) Shell Script
13 107 (2.07%) Perl
14 97 (1.87%) Ruby
15 74 (1.43%) Bicep
16 60 (1.16%) Kusto Query Language
17 48 (0.93%) C
18 47 (0.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 44 (0.85%) VBA
20 40 (0.77%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,185 (22.87%) Security Cleared
2 944 (18.22%) SC Cleared
3 454 (8.76%) Degree
4 214 (4.13%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.86%) DV Cleared
6 129 (2.49%) AWS Certification
7 125 (2.41%) Master's Degree
8 122 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
9 103 (1.99%) Azure Certification
10 95 (1.83%) CISSP
11 73 (1.41%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.12%) CCNP
13 50 (0.97%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 47 (0.91%) PhD
15 46 (0.89%) CISM
16 38 (0.73%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.62%) ISTQB
19 31 (0.60%) CEH
19 31 (0.60%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 496 (9.57%) Data Quality
2 217 (4.19%) QA
3 177 (3.42%) GDPR
4 109 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 107 (2.07%) NIST
6 79 (1.52%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.66%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.64%) SLA
9 30 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.44%) NCSC
12 19 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
14 14 (0.27%) WCAG
15 12 (0.23%) EU AI Act
16 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 10 (0.19%) MiFID
17 10 (0.19%) PMO
17 10 (0.19%) PSD2
System Software
1 943 (18.20%) Docker
2 174 (3.36%) Active Directory
3 112 (2.16%) VMware Infrastructure
4 56 (1.08%) Virtual Machines
5 55 (1.06%) vSphere
6 47 (0.91%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.56%) Hyper-V
8 26 (0.50%) Firmware
9 15 (0.29%) KVM
10 14 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
11 12 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 11 (0.21%) HDFS
13 10 (0.19%) Lustre
14 9 (0.17%) GPFS
15 8 (0.15%) SRDF
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
16 5 (0.097%) Ceph
16 5 (0.097%) NetIQ eDirectory
16 5 (0.097%) NFS
16 5 (0.097%) Postfix
Systems Management
1 1,111 (21.44%) Terraform
2 1,049 (20.25%) Kubernetes
3 538 (10.38%) Ansible
4 353 (6.81%) Grafana
5 315 (6.08%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.81%) Argo
7 75 (1.45%) Puppet
8 50 (0.97%) Istio
9 42 (0.81%) vRealize
10 41 (0.79%) Kibana
11 37 (0.71%) Nessus
12 33 (0.64%) Progress Chef
12 33 (0.64%) vCenter Server
13 29 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
14 27 (0.52%) Control-M
15 25 (0.48%) IBM Guardium
16 24 (0.46%) NetBackup
17 22 (0.42%) Microsoft Intune
18 21 (0.41%) Rancher
19 16 (0.31%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 632 (12.20%) Microsoft
2 536 (10.35%) Databricks
3 307 (5.93%) Google
4 223 (4.30%) Splunk
5 217 (4.19%) Oracle
6 206 (3.98%) VMware
7 146 (2.82%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.34%) Cisco
8 121 (2.34%) OpenAI
9 102 (1.97%) ServiceNow
10 83 (1.60%) CyberArk
11 82 (1.58%) Foundry
12 68 (1.31%) BeyondTrust
13 62 (1.20%) F5
14 61 (1.18%) Informatica
15 59 (1.14%) Palo Alto
16 53 (1.02%) IBM
17 47 (0.91%) SAP
18 45 (0.87%) Dynatrace
19 41 (0.79%) Atlassian