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 14 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,600 4,257 4,087
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.35% 13.02% 10.64%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.85% 39.76% 33.31%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,634 2,787 2,860
10th Percentile £372 £357 £375
25th Percentile £440 £428 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £710
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 137 83 102
10th Percentile £30.82 £28.18 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £34.88 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -20.00% -4.29%
75th Percentile £78.75 £58.13 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.84 £83.00 £78.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.48 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.96% -28.57% +7.69%

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 14,052 10,706 12,271
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 25.96% 32.75% 31.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,113 7,091 8,339
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £503 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.48% -4.29% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 536 292 345
10th Percentile £27.75 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £47.88 £36.69 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.06 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £78.75 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% -

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 14 September 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 14 September 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 14 September 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 -3 4,780 £550 +2.09% 9,530
London -3 2,824 £575 - 6,309
UK excluding London -7 2,135 £500 - 4,205
Work from Home -5 1,537 £530 -3.73% 7,048
North of England +1 733 £500 +5.04% 861
South East -6 454 £538 +7.50% 1,025
Yorkshire -1 378 £500 - 286
Scotland -4 285 £450 -10.00% 573
South West -1 281 £550 +4.76% 536
North West -4 278 £525 +10.53% 474
Midlands -19 222 £500 +5.26% 401
West Midlands -20 177 £500 - 223
East of England -11 150 £484 -7.86% 598
North East -2 89 £425 -2.86% 106
East Midlands -16 45 £469 +12.95% 177
Wales -10 26 £530 +29.27% 90
Northern Ireland +3 17 £363 -30.95% 155

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 (5.18%) Apache Airflow
2 264 (4.71%) Apache Spark
3 217 (3.88%) Apache
4 164 (2.93%) Confluence
5 57 (1.02%) Jupyter
5 57 (1.02%) SharePoint
6 36 (0.64%) SAS
7 30 (0.54%) OpenStack
8 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
8 24 (0.43%) nginx
9 21 (0.38%) IIS
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
11 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
12 7 (0.13%) CMS
12 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
13 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.089%) Camunda
14 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 110 (1.96%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
4 18 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
5 17 (0.30%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
7 2 (0.036%) 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 18 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
1 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
2 17 (0.30%) Aladdin
3 9 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
3 9 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
4 8 (0.14%) Front Arena
4 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Summit
7 5 (0.089%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Endur
9 3 (0.054%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
10 2 (0.036%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 2,073 (37.02%) AWS
2 1,882 (33.61%) Azure
3 865 (15.45%) GCP
4 731 (13.05%) GitHub
5 496 (8.86%) Power Platform
6 487 (8.70%) Serverless
7 435 (7.77%) Azure DevOps
8 433 (7.73%) GitHub Actions
9 388 (6.93%) Amazon S3
10 364 (6.50%) AWS Lambda
11 331 (5.91%) Snowflake
12 235 (4.20%) dbt
13 212 (3.79%) Azure Data Factory
14 190 (3.39%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 183 (3.27%) AWS CloudFormation
16 174 (3.11%) Amazon EKS
17 150 (2.68%) Entra ID
18 137 (2.45%) Amazon EC2
19 128 (2.29%) Amazon ECS
19 128 (2.29%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 280 (5.00%) Firewall
2 211 (3.77%) DNS
3 148 (2.64%) TCP/IP
4 147 (2.63%) Network Security
5 126 (2.25%) BGP
6 123 (2.20%) VPN
7 114 (2.04%) WAN
8 86 (1.54%) DHCP
9 75 (1.34%) OSPF
10 69 (1.23%) SD-WAN
11 60 (1.07%) VLAN
12 58 (1.04%) BIG-IP
13 57 (1.02%) SSL
14 53 (0.95%) HTTP
15 52 (0.93%) VXLAN
16 49 (0.88%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 43 (0.77%) Ethernet VPN
18 39 (0.70%) SAN
19 37 (0.66%) SNMP
19 37 (0.66%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 445 (7.95%) Power BI
2 327 (5.84%) Data Warehouse
3 314 (5.61%) PostgreSQL
4 212 (3.79%) Metadata
4 212 (3.79%) SQL Server
5 210 (3.75%) Relational Database
6 185 (3.30%) Tableau
7 181 (3.23%) Data Lake
8 171 (3.05%) BigQuery
9 152 (2.71%) NoSQL
10 135 (2.41%) Big Data
11 128 (2.29%) Amazon RDS
12 127 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
12 127 (2.27%) Amazon Redshift
13 120 (2.14%) Delta Lake
14 119 (2.13%) MongoDB
15 109 (1.95%) DynamoDB
16 96 (1.71%) MySQL
17 70 (1.25%) Redis
18 62 (1.11%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 775 (13.84%) Git
2 497 (8.88%) Jenkins
3 459 (8.20%) GitLab
4 298 (5.32%) JIRA
5 114 (2.04%) Selenium
6 57 (1.02%) Postman
7 56 (1.00%) SonarQube
8 54 (0.96%) JMeter
9 53 (0.95%) Claude Code
9 53 (0.95%) MLflow
10 41 (0.73%) Bitbucket
11 35 (0.63%) Artifactory
11 35 (0.63%) Maven
12 34 (0.61%) Cypress.io
13 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
14 31 (0.55%) Gatling
15 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
16 24 (0.43%) LoadRunner
17 18 (0.32%) JUnit
General
1 1,302 (23.25%) Social Skills
2 1,238 (22.11%) Finance
3 838 (14.96%) Analytical Skills
4 552 (9.86%) Public Sector
5 478 (8.54%) Banking
6 176 (3.14%) Front Office
7 144 (2.57%) Investment Banking
8 110 (1.96%) Retail
9 109 (1.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 108 (1.93%) Documentation Skills
11 91 (1.63%) Marketing
12 81 (1.45%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.05%) Military
14 54 (0.96%) Pharmaceutical
15 52 (0.93%) Aerospace
16 50 (0.89%) Law
17 47 (0.84%) Legal
18 45 (0.80%) Financial Institution
19 44 (0.79%) Publishing
20 41 (0.73%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 980 (17.50%) Senior
2 891 (15.91%) Developer
3 815 (14.55%) Data Engineer
4 477 (8.52%) Lead
5 473 (8.45%) Python Developer
6 419 (7.48%) Python Engineer
7 348 (6.21%) DevOps Engineer
8 293 (5.23%) Analyst
9 287 (5.13%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 283 (5.05%) Software Engineer
11 262 (4.68%) Architect
12 228 (4.07%) AWS Engineer
13 193 (3.45%) Senior Developer
14 192 (3.43%) Cloud Engineer
15 190 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
16 186 (3.32%) Senior Data Engineer
17 184 (3.29%) Data Scientist
18 178 (3.18%) Azure Engineer
19 145 (2.59%) Data Analyst
19 145 (2.59%) Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,352 (24.14%) Terraform
2 498 (8.89%) REST
3 369 (6.59%) PySpark
4 360 (6.43%) Kafka
5 304 (5.43%) React
6 253 (4.52%) .NET
7 210 (3.75%) JSON
8 203 (3.63%) Django
9 202 (3.61%) FastAPI
10 189 (3.38%) RESTful
11 163 (2.91%) Node.js
12 161 (2.88%) Pandas
13 146 (2.61%) pytest
14 144 (2.57%) LangChain
15 118 (2.11%) OAuth
16 116 (2.07%) Flask
17 110 (1.96%) PyTorch
18 108 (1.93%) YAML
19 107 (1.91%) HTML
20 101 (1.80%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 777 (13.88%) Cloud Native
2 309 (5.52%) Distributed Systems
3 266 (4.75%) AI Agents
4 227 (4.05%) Onboarding
5 160 (2.86%) Product Ownership
6 156 (2.79%) Data Centre
7 144 (2.57%) Data Structures
8 130 (2.32%) Algorithms
8 130 (2.32%) Legacy Systems
9 114 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
10 108 (1.93%) Data Protection Act
10 108 (1.93%) Management Information System
11 101 (1.80%) Derivative
11 101 (1.80%) Enterprise Software
12 88 (1.57%) Security Posture
13 78 (1.39%) Equities
14 75 (1.34%) Public Cloud
15 69 (1.23%) Linux Command Line
15 69 (1.23%) PKI
16 67 (1.20%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 754 (13.46%) Linux
2 332 (5.93%) Windows
3 246 (4.39%) Unix
4 156 (2.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 89 (1.59%) Windows Server
6 45 (0.80%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.64%) VMS
8 21 (0.38%) AIX
9 20 (0.36%) CentOS
10 18 (0.32%) Solaris
11 16 (0.29%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) 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
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 5 (0.089%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,289 (40.88%) CI/CD
2 1,604 (28.64%) DevOps
3 1,535 (27.41%) AI
4 1,256 (22.43%) Agile
5 1,255 (22.41%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,090 (19.46%) Analytics
7 979 (17.48%) Data Pipeline
8 926 (16.54%) Software Engineering
9 900 (16.07%) Problem-Solving
10 848 (15.14%) Machine Learning
11 811 (14.48%) Data Engineering
12 792 (14.14%) Containerisation
13 737 (13.16%) Data Modelling
14 726 (12.96%) Observability
15 654 (11.68%) Test Automation
16 644 (11.50%) ETL
17 630 (11.25%) Continuous Improvement
18 614 (10.96%) Validation
19 570 (10.18%) Platform Engineering
20 560 (10.00%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 1,836 (32.79%) SQL
2 816 (14.57%) Java
3 772 (13.79%) Bash
4 746 (13.32%) PowerShell
5 446 (7.96%) JavaScript
6 340 (6.07%) TypeScript
7 319 (5.70%) C#
8 210 (3.75%) Go
9 150 (2.68%) Shell Script
10 146 (2.61%) R
11 137 (2.45%) C++
12 132 (2.36%) Bicep
13 127 (2.27%) Scala
14 98 (1.75%) Perl
15 60 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 57 (1.02%) Groovy
17 56 (1.00%) C
18 55 (0.98%) PL/SQL
19 53 (0.95%) Rust
20 51 (0.91%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,364 (24.36%) Security Cleared
2 1,104 (19.71%) SC Cleared
3 408 (7.29%) Degree
4 238 (4.25%) DV Cleared
5 152 (2.71%) Azure Certification
5 152 (2.71%) Computer Science Degree
6 138 (2.46%) AWS Certification
7 118 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
8 95 (1.70%) CISSP
9 84 (1.50%) Cisco Certification
10 61 (1.09%) Master's Degree
11 48 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
12 42 (0.75%) CCNP
13 37 (0.66%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 34 (0.61%) PhD
15 33 (0.59%) CISM
16 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
17 28 (0.50%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 28 (0.50%) CCIE
18 26 (0.46%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 614 (10.96%) Data Quality
2 305 (5.45%) QA
3 111 (1.98%) NIST
4 97 (1.73%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 95 (1.70%) GDPR
6 83 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.63%) SLA
8 34 (0.61%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.52%) NCSC
10 24 (0.43%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.43%) WCAG
11 20 (0.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 17 (0.30%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.29%) Disclosure Scotland
14 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
16 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.13%) MiFID
18 6 (0.11%) GRC
18 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 952 (17.00%) Docker
2 169 (3.02%) Active Directory
3 138 (2.46%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.20%) Virtual Machines
5 53 (0.95%) Hyper-V
6 39 (0.70%) vSphere
7 35 (0.63%) VMware NSX
8 25 (0.45%) NFS
8 25 (0.45%) VMware ESXi
9 23 (0.41%) Firmware
10 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Squid
12 11 (0.20%) Ceph
13 10 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) HDFS
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,147 (20.48%) Kubernetes
2 634 (11.32%) Ansible
3 329 (5.88%) Grafana
4 238 (4.25%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.46%) Puppet
6 73 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.20%) Argo
8 42 (0.75%) Single Sign-On
9 33 (0.59%) Istio
10 31 (0.55%) Kibana
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 25 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) vRealize
13 23 (0.41%) ZABBIX
14 22 (0.39%) vCenter Server
15 21 (0.38%) Nagios
16 20 (0.36%) FortiGate
16 20 (0.36%) Packer
17 18 (0.32%) HAProxy
18 16 (0.29%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 727 (12.98%) Microsoft
2 569 (10.16%) Databricks
3 376 (6.71%) Google
4 243 (4.34%) Oracle
5 211 (3.77%) Splunk
6 182 (3.25%) VMware
7 154 (2.75%) OpenAI
8 143 (2.55%) Cisco
9 119 (2.13%) ServiceNow
10 102 (1.82%) Red Hat
11 97 (1.73%) Dynatrace
12 91 (1.63%) IBM
13 88 (1.57%) F5
14 86 (1.54%) Palo Alto
15 79 (1.41%) Foundry
16 74 (1.32%) Informatica
17 73 (1.30%) Fortinet
18 71 (1.27%) SAP
19 65 (1.16%) CyberArk
20 60 (1.07%) Salesforce