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

6 months to
25 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,542 4,262 3,995
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.33% 13.02% 10.28%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.56% 39.68% 32.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,627 2,821 2,845
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £533 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.43% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £642 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £508
% change year-on-year - -1.48% -3.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 129 81 113
10th Percentile £29.70 £26.32 £20.65
25th Percentile £42.50 £34.75 £31.25
Median hourly rate £57.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.00% -13.04% -11.54%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £82.96 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.74 £51.25 £68.75
% change year-on-year +14.60% -25.45% +14.58%

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 14,008 10,742 12,240
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.11% 32.81% 31.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,121 7,165 8,478
10th Percentile £363 £341 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £505 £530
Median % change year-on-year +2.48% -4.72% -3.64%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 296 383
10th Percentile £28.50 £28.25 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.19 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.55%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.55 £79.38 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +4.00%

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 25 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 25 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 25 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 4,730 £545 +0.93% 2,194
London -4 2,780 £575 - 913
UK excluding London -7 2,124 £500 - 1,829
Work from Home -9 1,502 £530 -3.73% 830
North of England +3 720 £500 +2.56% 399
South East -10 439 £538 +7.50% 568
Yorkshire -1 367 £500 - 123
South West -3 292 £525 - 346
Scotland -3 277 £450 -10.00% 105
North West -2 270 £500 +5.26% 202
Midlands -17 237 £477 +0.42% 201
West Midlands -19 188 £488 +2.63% 114
East of England -13 139 £500 -0.50% 185
North East -2 94 £425 -18.27% 78
East Midlands -11 49 £469 +11.61% 86
Wales -7 29 £530 +30.86% 36
Northern Ireland +3 18 £363 -32.56% 19

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
1 290 (5.23%) Apache Airflow
2 272 (4.91%) Apache Spark
3 216 (3.90%) Apache
4 163 (2.94%) Confluence
5 57 (1.03%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.69%) SAS
8 29 (0.52%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.42%) ArcGIS
10 20 (0.36%) nginx
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 13 (0.23%) IIS
12 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
13 8 (0.14%) CMS
14 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
15 6 (0.11%) Apache Superset
15 6 (0.11%) CICS
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
15 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 5 (0.090%) Camunda
Applications
1 110 (1.98%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.58%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.45%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
5 16 (0.29%) CPLEX
5 16 (0.29%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.036%) Revit
8 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.018%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 21 (0.38%) Aladdin
2 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 13 (0.23%) Oracle EBS
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
6 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
8 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.090%) Salesforce CRM
9 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.054%) Endur
10 3 (0.054%) Front Arena
10 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
10 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) Odoo
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 2,067 (37.30%) AWS
2 1,887 (34.05%) Azure
3 855 (15.43%) GCP
4 696 (12.56%) GitHub
5 501 (9.04%) Power Platform
6 467 (8.43%) Serverless
7 438 (7.90%) Azure DevOps
8 409 (7.38%) GitHub Actions
9 389 (7.02%) Amazon S3
10 354 (6.39%) AWS Lambda
11 323 (5.83%) Snowflake
12 224 (4.04%) dbt
13 221 (3.99%) Azure Data Factory
14 185 (3.34%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 182 (3.28%) AWS CloudFormation
16 179 (3.23%) Amazon EKS
17 139 (2.51%) Amazon EC2
18 134 (2.42%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 132 (2.38%) Entra ID
20 122 (2.20%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 272 (4.91%) Firewall
2 216 (3.90%) DNS
3 149 (2.69%) TCP/IP
4 131 (2.36%) Network Security
5 128 (2.31%) BGP
6 125 (2.26%) VPN
7 112 (2.02%) WAN
8 86 (1.55%) DHCP
9 73 (1.32%) OSPF
10 61 (1.10%) SD-WAN
11 60 (1.08%) VLAN
12 57 (1.03%) VXLAN
13 56 (1.01%) HTTP
14 55 (0.99%) SSL
15 52 (0.94%) BIG-IP
16 45 (0.81%) Ethernet VPN
17 44 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 43 (0.78%) SNMP
19 40 (0.72%) MPLS
19 40 (0.72%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 454 (8.19%) Power BI
2 319 (5.76%) Data Warehouse
2 319 (5.76%) PostgreSQL
3 218 (3.93%) SQL Server
4 200 (3.61%) Metadata
4 200 (3.61%) Relational Database
5 193 (3.48%) Tableau
6 180 (3.25%) Data Lake
7 161 (2.91%) BigQuery
8 158 (2.85%) NoSQL
9 141 (2.54%) Big Data
10 138 (2.49%) Amazon Redshift
11 127 (2.29%) Amazon Athena
12 124 (2.24%) MongoDB
13 123 (2.22%) Amazon RDS
14 117 (2.11%) Delta Lake
15 102 (1.84%) DynamoDB
16 90 (1.62%) MySQL
17 70 (1.26%) Redis
18 64 (1.15%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 727 (13.12%) Git
2 499 (9.00%) Jenkins
3 443 (7.99%) GitLab
4 279 (5.03%) JIRA
5 100 (1.80%) Selenium
6 56 (1.01%) JMeter
7 55 (0.99%) Postman
8 53 (0.96%) MLflow
9 49 (0.88%) SonarQube
10 47 (0.85%) Claude Code
11 39 (0.70%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
13 34 (0.61%) Cucumber
14 32 (0.58%) Gatling
15 31 (0.56%) Artifactory
15 31 (0.56%) Maven
15 31 (0.56%) REST Assured
16 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
17 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
18 22 (0.40%) JUnit
General
1 1,243 (22.43%) Social Skills
2 1,187 (21.42%) Finance
3 831 (14.99%) Analytical Skills
4 552 (9.96%) Public Sector
5 447 (8.07%) Banking
6 188 (3.39%) Front Office
7 137 (2.47%) Investment Banking
8 116 (2.09%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (2.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 105 (1.89%) Retail
11 90 (1.62%) Marketing
12 79 (1.43%) Telecoms
13 58 (1.05%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (0.96%) Legal
14 53 (0.96%) Military
15 47 (0.85%) Aerospace
16 46 (0.83%) Financial Institution
17 45 (0.81%) Publishing
18 40 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
18 40 (0.72%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 924 (16.67%) Senior
2 904 (16.31%) Developer
3 795 (14.35%) Data Engineer
4 485 (8.75%) Python Developer
5 474 (8.55%) Lead
6 411 (7.42%) Python Engineer
7 334 (6.03%) DevOps Engineer
8 296 (5.34%) Software Engineer
9 284 (5.12%) Architect
10 275 (4.96%) Analyst
11 255 (4.60%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 232 (4.19%) AWS Engineer
13 193 (3.48%) Data Scientist
14 189 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
15 188 (3.39%) Cloud Engineer
16 177 (3.19%) Senior Developer
17 173 (3.12%) Azure Engineer
18 172 (3.10%) Senior Data Engineer
19 138 (2.49%) Infrastructure Engineer
20 132 (2.38%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,297 (23.40%) Terraform
2 467 (8.43%) REST
3 376 (6.78%) PySpark
4 356 (6.42%) Kafka
5 312 (5.63%) React
6 237 (4.28%) .NET
7 203 (3.66%) JSON
8 201 (3.63%) FastAPI
9 196 (3.54%) Django
9 196 (3.54%) RESTful
10 180 (3.25%) Node.js
11 175 (3.16%) Pandas
12 131 (2.36%) LangChain
13 130 (2.35%) pytest
14 125 (2.26%) PyTorch
15 110 (1.98%) Flask
15 110 (1.98%) HTML
15 110 (1.98%) YAML
16 109 (1.97%) OAuth
17 103 (1.86%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 764 (13.79%) Cloud Native
2 309 (5.58%) Distributed Systems
3 227 (4.10%) AI Agents
4 213 (3.84%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.92%) Data Centre
6 160 (2.89%) Product Ownership
7 140 (2.53%) Algorithms
8 133 (2.40%) Legacy Systems
9 131 (2.36%) Data Structures
10 113 (2.04%) Derivative
10 113 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
11 110 (1.98%) Data Protection Act
12 103 (1.86%) Management Information System
13 91 (1.64%) Equities
14 77 (1.39%) Enterprise Software
15 76 (1.37%) Security Posture
16 71 (1.28%) Fixed Income
17 70 (1.26%) Public Cloud
18 65 (1.17%) Linux Command Line
19 62 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 725 (13.08%) Linux
2 332 (5.99%) Windows
3 233 (4.20%) Unix
4 142 (2.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 83 (1.50%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.60%) VMS
8 31 (0.56%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 17 (0.31%) CentOS
11 16 (0.29%) Android
12 11 (0.20%) Apple iOS
12 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
13 10 (0.18%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.090%) Debian
16 5 (0.090%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,197 (39.64%) CI/CD
2 1,588 (28.65%) DevOps
3 1,444 (26.06%) AI
4 1,233 (22.25%) Agile
5 1,177 (21.24%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,096 (19.78%) Analytics
7 977 (17.63%) Data Pipeline
8 904 (16.31%) Problem-Solving
9 881 (15.90%) Software Engineering
10 842 (15.19%) Machine Learning
11 776 (14.00%) Data Engineering
12 761 (13.73%) Containerisation
13 725 (13.08%) Data Modelling
14 684 (12.34%) Observability
15 645 (11.64%) ETL
16 625 (11.28%) Test Automation
17 591 (10.66%) Continuous Improvement
18 567 (10.23%) Data Science
18 567 (10.23%) Validation
19 536 (9.67%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,800 (32.48%) SQL
2 817 (14.74%) Java
3 751 (13.55%) Bash
4 732 (13.21%) PowerShell
5 440 (7.94%) JavaScript
6 342 (6.17%) TypeScript
7 306 (5.52%) C#
8 191 (3.45%) Go
9 149 (2.69%) R
10 145 (2.62%) C++
11 138 (2.49%) Shell Script
12 135 (2.44%) Bicep
13 129 (2.33%) Scala
14 90 (1.62%) Perl
15 59 (1.06%) C
15 59 (1.06%) Groovy
15 59 (1.06%) PL/SQL
16 55 (0.99%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 52 (0.94%) Rust
18 51 (0.92%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,297 (23.40%) Security Cleared
2 1,055 (19.04%) SC Cleared
3 419 (7.56%) Degree
4 206 (3.72%) DV Cleared
5 161 (2.91%) Computer Science Degree
6 147 (2.65%) Azure Certification
7 140 (2.53%) AWS Certification
8 112 (2.02%) BPSS Clearance
9 91 (1.64%) CISSP
10 86 (1.55%) Cisco Certification
11 70 (1.26%) Master's Degree
12 47 (0.85%) CCNP
13 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
14 35 (0.63%) PhD
15 34 (0.61%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
16 33 (0.60%) ISTQB
17 32 (0.58%) CISM
18 30 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 30 (0.54%) CCIE
19 26 (0.47%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 591 (10.66%) Data Quality
2 286 (5.16%) QA
3 109 (1.97%) NIST
4 104 (1.88%) GDPR
4 104 (1.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 84 (1.52%) Accessibility
6 41 (0.74%) SLA
7 30 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
8 27 (0.49%) NCSC
8 27 (0.49%) WCAG
9 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.43%) PCI DSS
11 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
12 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.22%) SOC 2
15 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.13%) HL7
17 6 (0.11%) GRC
17 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 930 (16.78%) Docker
2 155 (2.80%) Active Directory
3 131 (2.36%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.10%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.81%) Hyper-V
6 43 (0.78%) vSphere
7 35 (0.63%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 24 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.25%) Squid
13 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
14 10 (0.18%) Ceph
15 9 (0.16%) KVM
16 8 (0.14%) Postfix
17 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
17 7 (0.13%) zsh
18 6 (0.11%) HDFS
19 5 (0.090%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,095 (19.76%) Kubernetes
2 619 (11.17%) Ansible
3 335 (6.04%) Grafana
4 243 (4.38%) Prometheus
5 83 (1.50%) Puppet
6 70 (1.26%) Progress Chef
7 68 (1.23%) Argo
8 41 (0.74%) Istio
9 34 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
10 28 (0.51%) ZABBIX
11 27 (0.49%) Kibana
12 26 (0.47%) Control-M
13 25 (0.45%) Nagios
13 25 (0.45%) vCenter Server
14 24 (0.43%) vRealize
15 23 (0.42%) Microsoft Intune
16 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
17 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
17 18 (0.32%) Netcool
17 18 (0.32%) Packer
Vendors
1 698 (12.59%) Microsoft
2 557 (10.05%) Databricks
3 350 (6.32%) Google
4 250 (4.51%) Oracle
5 213 (3.84%) Splunk
6 172 (3.10%) VMware
7 142 (2.56%) Cisco
8 141 (2.54%) OpenAI
9 127 (2.29%) ServiceNow
10 105 (1.89%) Dynatrace
11 97 (1.75%) Red Hat
12 93 (1.68%) IBM
13 87 (1.57%) F5
14 82 (1.48%) Palo Alto
15 79 (1.43%) Informatica
16 69 (1.25%) Fortinet
17 68 (1.23%) SAP
18 67 (1.21%) CyberArk
19 65 (1.17%) Foundry
20 60 (1.08%) Salesforce