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

6 months to
7 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,277 3,914 4,021
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.57% 13.38% 9.16%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.87% 39.42% 31.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,594 2,748 2,854
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £420 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £749 £813 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -3.00% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 120 53 99
10th Percentile £27.84 £21.25 £20.81
25th Percentile £41.94 £25.09 £30.94
Median hourly rate £55.00 £42.50 £48.50
Median % change year-on-year +29.41% -12.37% -25.38%
75th Percentile £74.26 £60.75 £66.25
90th Percentile £83.08 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £53.25 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +18.33% -2.56% -28.82%

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 12,912 9,929 12,821
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.32% 33.93% 29.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,601 6,680 9,095
10th Percentile £355 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £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 £720 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £478 £488
% change year-on-year -0.37% -2.00% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 537 243 478
10th Percentile £41.80 £22.27 £30.63
25th Percentile £55.00 £32.51 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.25 £67.29
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.61
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +5.79% -3.20%

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 7 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 7 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 7 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 -1 4,437 £520 -7.14% 2,695
London -3 2,517 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London -1 2,008 £485 -3.00% 1,990
Work from Home 0 1,545 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +9 678 £481 -3.70% 475
South East -5 404 £500 -4.76% 576
Yorkshire +1 378 £478 -4.40% 164
Midlands -3 287 £495 +6.00% 255
North West +6 255 £490 -0.41% 230
Scotland +1 251 £425 -10.29% 104
South West -1 248 £525 -4.55% 280
West Midlands -1 229 £500 +2.04% 130
East of England +2 135 £500 - 219
East Midlands -12 57 £450 +3.21% 125
North East +11 54 £500 +1.27% 83
Wales -11 30 £475 -10.80% 78
Northern Ireland +8 25 £550 +10.00% 33

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
1 269 (5.10%) Apache Spark
2 209 (3.96%) Apache Airflow
3 165 (3.13%) Apache
4 162 (3.07%) Confluence
5 67 (1.27%) SAS
6 59 (1.12%) SharePoint
7 30 (0.57%) Jupyter
8 26 (0.49%) nginx
9 25 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
10 24 (0.45%) OpenStack
11 19 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.28%) Appian
13 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
14 11 (0.21%) Camunda
15 9 (0.17%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.13%) CMS
17 4 (0.076%) CICS
17 4 (0.076%) Tomcat
18 3 (0.057%) IIS
18 3 (0.057%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 137 (2.60%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.11%) Weka
7 5 (0.095%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 25 (0.47%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 4 (0.076%) BambooHR
5 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
5 4 (0.076%) SAP IBP
6 3 (0.057%) Actimize
6 3 (0.057%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.038%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
7 2 (0.038%) Global One
7 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.038%) Odoo
7 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 1 (0.019%) OneSumX
8 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 2,038 (38.62%) AWS
2 1,819 (34.47%) Azure
3 790 (14.97%) GCP
4 696 (13.19%) GitHub
5 526 (9.97%) Power Platform
6 523 (9.91%) Serverless
7 399 (7.56%) Azure DevOps
8 374 (7.09%) Amazon S3
9 361 (6.84%) AWS Lambda
10 354 (6.71%) GitHub Actions
11 278 (5.27%) Azure Data Factory
12 249 (4.72%) Snowflake
13 248 (4.70%) AWS CloudFormation
14 188 (3.56%) Amazon EKS
15 180 (3.41%) OpenShift
16 165 (3.13%) Amazon ECS
17 164 (3.11%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 158 (2.99%) dbt
19 151 (2.86%) Amazon EC2
20 146 (2.77%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 198 (3.75%) Firewall
2 143 (2.71%) DNS
3 108 (2.05%) Network Security
4 93 (1.76%) TCP/IP
5 78 (1.48%) VPN
6 76 (1.44%) BGP
7 62 (1.17%) WAN
8 61 (1.16%) HTTP
9 45 (0.85%) OSPF
10 43 (0.81%) SAN
11 42 (0.80%) MPLS
12 35 (0.66%) VLAN
13 34 (0.64%) DHCP
13 34 (0.64%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) SNMP
15 30 (0.57%) Wireshark
16 29 (0.55%) SSL
17 26 (0.49%) SD-WAN
18 25 (0.47%) VXLAN
19 23 (0.44%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 437 (8.28%) Power BI
2 356 (6.75%) PostgreSQL
3 306 (5.80%) Data Warehouse
4 240 (4.55%) Data Lake
5 202 (3.83%) NoSQL
6 201 (3.81%) SQL Server
7 180 (3.41%) Relational Database
7 180 (3.41%) Tableau
8 155 (2.94%) Metadata
9 150 (2.84%) Big Data
10 132 (2.50%) Delta Lake
11 126 (2.39%) BigQuery
12 118 (2.24%) Amazon RDS
13 111 (2.10%) Amazon Redshift
14 110 (2.08%) Amazon Athena
15 109 (2.07%) MySQL
16 94 (1.78%) MongoDB
17 92 (1.74%) Azure SQL Database
18 88 (1.67%) DynamoDB
19 76 (1.44%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 668 (12.66%) Git
2 527 (9.99%) Jenkins
3 403 (7.64%) GitLab
4 286 (5.42%) JIRA
5 97 (1.84%) Selenium
6 90 (1.71%) MLflow
7 54 (1.02%) Postman
8 45 (0.85%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.81%) Cucumber
10 42 (0.80%) JUnit
11 37 (0.70%) JMeter
12 34 (0.64%) Sonatype Nexus
13 28 (0.53%) SpecFlow
14 26 (0.49%) Visual Studio
15 25 (0.47%) Artifactory
15 25 (0.47%) Cypress.io
16 24 (0.45%) SonarQube
17 22 (0.42%) Maven
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
18 20 (0.38%) Gatling
General
1 1,228 (23.27%) Social Skills
2 1,004 (19.03%) Finance
3 715 (13.55%) Analytical Skills
4 500 (9.48%) Public Sector
5 400 (7.58%) Banking
6 172 (3.26%) Front Office
7 130 (2.46%) Documentation Skills
8 89 (1.69%) Investment Banking
9 64 (1.21%) Marketing
10 63 (1.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 61 (1.16%) Retail
12 59 (1.12%) Legal
12 59 (1.12%) Telecoms
13 54 (1.02%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
15 48 (0.91%) Financial Institution
16 41 (0.78%) Manufacturing
17 32 (0.61%) Presentation Skills
18 28 (0.53%) Military
18 28 (0.53%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 984 (18.65%) Developer
2 768 (14.55%) Data Engineer
3 746 (14.14%) Senior
4 467 (8.85%) Python Developer
5 356 (6.75%) Architect
6 343 (6.50%) Lead
7 299 (5.67%) Python Engineer
8 284 (5.38%) DevOps Engineer
9 270 (5.12%) Analyst
10 259 (4.91%) Software Engineer
11 255 (4.83%) AWS Engineer
12 239 (4.53%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 209 (3.96%) Data Scientist
14 197 (3.73%) Platform Engineer
15 162 (3.07%) Azure Engineer
15 162 (3.07%) Senior Developer
16 149 (2.82%) Senior Data Engineer
17 140 (2.65%) Data Analyst
18 138 (2.62%) Full-Stack Developer
19 126 (2.39%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 454 (8.60%) REST
2 361 (6.84%) React
3 342 (6.48%) Kafka
3 342 (6.48%) PySpark
4 285 (5.40%) Node.js
5 243 (4.60%) Pandas
6 231 (4.38%) .NET
7 199 (3.77%) PyTorch
8 190 (3.60%) RESTful
9 186 (3.52%) FastAPI
10 163 (3.09%) NumPy
11 157 (2.98%) TensorFlow
12 154 (2.92%) JSON
13 148 (2.80%) scikit-learn
14 136 (2.58%) Flask
15 127 (2.41%) AngularJS
16 125 (2.37%) LangChain
17 123 (2.33%) Django
18 115 (2.18%) pytest
19 108 (2.05%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 516 (9.78%) Cloud Native
2 217 (4.11%) Distributed Systems
3 189 (3.58%) Algorithms
4 148 (2.80%) Product Ownership
5 117 (2.22%) Equities
6 115 (2.18%) AI Agents
6 115 (2.18%) Data Protection Act
6 115 (2.18%) Fixed Income
7 114 (2.16%) Data Structures
8 108 (2.05%) Derivative
9 97 (1.84%) Data Centre
10 93 (1.76%) Hybrid Cloud
11 92 (1.74%) Legacy Systems
12 91 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
12 91 (1.72%) Onboarding
13 84 (1.59%) Public Cloud
14 82 (1.55%) Security Posture
15 80 (1.52%) Management Information System
16 58 (1.10%) Virtual Team
17 56 (1.06%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 671 (12.72%) Linux
2 304 (5.76%) Windows
3 180 (3.41%) Unix
4 106 (2.01%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.27%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.72%) VMS
7 33 (0.63%) Ubuntu
8 29 (0.55%) Android
9 21 (0.40%) AIX
10 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
11 18 (0.34%) Solaris
12 17 (0.32%) CentOS
13 16 (0.30%) Apple iOS
14 8 (0.15%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.13%) Windows 7
16 6 (0.11%) zOS
17 5 (0.095%) Rocky
18 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2016
18 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,934 (36.65%) CI/CD
2 1,466 (27.78%) DevOps
3 1,221 (23.14%) Agile
4 1,157 (21.93%) AI
5 1,067 (20.22%) Analytics
6 1,028 (19.48%) Problem-Solving
7 921 (17.45%) Infrastructure as Code
8 871 (16.51%) Data Pipeline
9 834 (15.80%) Machine Learning
10 762 (14.44%) Containerisation
11 725 (13.74%) Data Engineering
12 699 (13.25%) Data Modelling
13 697 (13.21%) ETL
14 625 (11.84%) Data Science
15 606 (11.48%) Software Engineering
16 586 (11.10%) Test Automation
17 519 (9.84%) Observability
18 518 (9.82%) Business Intelligence
19 433 (8.21%) LLM
20 405 (7.67%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,697 (32.16%) SQL
2 750 (14.21%) Java
3 677 (12.83%) PowerShell
4 594 (11.26%) Bash
5 494 (9.36%) JavaScript
6 357 (6.77%) C#
7 350 (6.63%) TypeScript
8 217 (4.11%) Go
9 163 (3.09%) R
10 158 (2.99%) C++
11 127 (2.41%) Scala
12 108 (2.05%) Shell Script
13 104 (1.97%) Ruby
14 94 (1.78%) Perl
15 81 (1.53%) Bicep
16 53 (1.00%) Kusto Query Language
17 50 (0.95%) C
17 50 (0.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 46 (0.87%) T-SQL
19 43 (0.81%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,232 (23.35%) Security Cleared
2 994 (18.84%) SC Cleared
3 416 (7.88%) Degree
4 192 (3.64%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.80%) DV Cleared
6 129 (2.44%) BPSS Clearance
7 111 (2.10%) AWS Certification
8 108 (2.05%) Master's Degree
9 105 (1.99%) Azure Certification
10 95 (1.80%) CISSP
11 75 (1.42%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.10%) CCNP
12 58 (1.10%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.93%) CISM
14 47 (0.89%) PhD
15 36 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 36 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
16 35 (0.66%) ISTQB
17 27 (0.51%) CCNA
17 27 (0.51%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 516 (9.78%) Data Quality
2 215 (4.07%) QA
3 179 (3.39%) GDPR
4 112 (2.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 100 (1.90%) NIST
6 81 (1.53%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.66%) PCI DSS
7 35 (0.66%) SLA
8 27 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.49%) HIPAA
10 22 (0.42%) NCSC
11 18 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
12 17 (0.32%) WCAG
13 16 (0.30%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.25%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
System Software
1 897 (17.00%) Docker
2 163 (3.09%) Active Directory
3 118 (2.24%) VMware Infrastructure
4 63 (1.19%) Virtual Machines
5 57 (1.08%) vSphere
6 52 (0.99%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.63%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.57%) Firmware
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 12 (0.23%) KVM
11 11 (0.21%) HDFS
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
12 8 (0.15%) Lustre
12 8 (0.15%) SRDF
13 7 (0.13%) GPFS
13 7 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
14 6 (0.11%) Postfix
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.095%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 1,125 (21.32%) Terraform
2 1,011 (19.16%) Kubernetes
3 520 (9.85%) Ansible
4 338 (6.41%) Grafana
5 288 (5.46%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.69%) Argo
7 73 (1.38%) Puppet
8 51 (0.97%) Istio
9 50 (0.95%) vRealize
10 38 (0.72%) vCenter Server
11 37 (0.70%) Kibana
12 35 (0.66%) Progress Chef
13 25 (0.47%) Nessus
14 23 (0.44%) NetBackup
15 22 (0.42%) Nagios
15 22 (0.42%) Rancher
15 22 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
16 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
17 19 (0.36%) Control-M
17 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 625 (11.84%) Microsoft
2 581 (11.01%) Databricks
3 291 (5.51%) Google
4 225 (4.26%) Splunk
5 215 (4.07%) Oracle
5 215 (4.07%) VMware
6 143 (2.71%) Red Hat
7 125 (2.37%) Cisco
8 123 (2.33%) OpenAI
9 98 (1.86%) ServiceNow
10 84 (1.59%) CyberArk
11 70 (1.33%) BeyondTrust
12 69 (1.31%) Foundry
13 64 (1.21%) Informatica
14 59 (1.12%) F5
15 57 (1.08%) IBM
16 54 (1.02%) Palo Alto
17 47 (0.89%) Dynatrace
18 46 (0.87%) SAP
19 42 (0.80%) Atlassian