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

6 months to
25 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,245 3,837 4,036
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.83% 13.32% 9.47%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.58% 39.03% 31.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,456 2,685 2,905
10th Percentile £363 £380 £388
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £521 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -5.27% -1.79% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £493 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -1.50% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 52 106
10th Percentile £30.00 £23.23 £21.01
25th Percentile £43.81 £28.18 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.00 £40.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.00% -33.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £67.92 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £74.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.25 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.11% -30.77% +13.04%

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 12,925 9,832 12,806
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.70% 34.14% 30.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,450 6,691 9,127
10th Percentile £356 £356 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £518 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.38% -1.43% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £630 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.68% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 560 218 505
10th Percentile £36.25 £26.45 £32.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.12 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -8.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -

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 May 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 May 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 May 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 4,359 £525 -4.55% 2,501
London -3 2,500 £550 -5.98% 1,061
UK excluding London -1 2,021 £493 -1.50% 1,919
Work from Home -1 1,477 £525 -4.55% 1,117
North of England +9 710 £485 -0.87% 505
Yorkshire +1 403 £485 -3.10% 153
South East -7 391 £525 +3.19% 564
Scotland +2 297 £430 -9.47% 113
South West +2 252 £500 -9.09% 221
North West -3 243 £500 +5.26% 271
Midlands -12 234 £488 +8.33% 249
West Midlands -11 181 £482 +7.03% 121
East of England -9 129 £500 -0.25% 187
North East +5 72 £475 +5.56% 84
East Midlands -11 52 £497 +16.82% 127
Northern Ireland +15 25 £463 -21.28% 36
Wales -13 23 £450 -5.26% 64

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
1 278 (5.30%) Apache Spark
2 219 (4.18%) Apache Airflow
3 175 (3.34%) Apache
4 143 (2.73%) Confluence
5 46 (0.88%) SAS
6 44 (0.84%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.74%) Jupyter
8 21 (0.40%) nginx
9 19 (0.36%) OpenStack
10 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.31%) ArcGIS
12 14 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
13 11 (0.21%) Appian
13 11 (0.21%) IIS
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) Camunda
15 7 (0.13%) CMS
16 6 (0.11%) Tomcat
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.095%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 123 (2.35%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
4 21 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
5 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.019%) SPSS
8 1 (0.019%) Weka
8 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 17 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.057%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.057%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.057%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.038%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,956 (37.29%) AWS
2 1,741 (33.19%) Azure
3 745 (14.20%) GCP
4 638 (12.16%) GitHub
5 515 (9.82%) Power Platform
6 449 (8.56%) Serverless
7 371 (7.07%) Azure DevOps
8 358 (6.83%) Amazon S3
9 334 (6.37%) GitHub Actions
10 318 (6.06%) AWS Lambda
11 260 (4.96%) Azure Data Factory
12 242 (4.61%) Snowflake
13 181 (3.45%) AWS CloudFormation
14 168 (3.20%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 166 (3.16%) OpenShift
16 164 (3.13%) dbt
17 154 (2.94%) Amazon EKS
18 130 (2.48%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 125 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
20 117 (2.23%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 187 (3.57%) Firewall
2 137 (2.61%) DNS
3 112 (2.14%) Network Security
4 88 (1.68%) BGP
5 87 (1.66%) TCP/IP
6 84 (1.60%) WAN
7 75 (1.43%) VPN
8 61 (1.16%) HTTP
8 61 (1.16%) OSPF
9 53 (1.01%) SAN
10 45 (0.86%) BIG-IP
10 45 (0.86%) VXLAN
11 39 (0.74%) SSL
12 38 (0.72%) SD-WAN
13 37 (0.71%) SNMP
14 35 (0.67%) Ethernet VPN
14 35 (0.67%) LAN
14 35 (0.67%) VLAN
15 33 (0.63%) MPLS
16 32 (0.61%) DHCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 448 (8.54%) Power BI
2 339 (6.46%) PostgreSQL
3 277 (5.28%) Data Warehouse
4 254 (4.84%) SQL Server
5 233 (4.44%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.81%) Tableau
7 187 (3.57%) Relational Database
8 173 (3.30%) NoSQL
9 161 (3.07%) Metadata
10 160 (3.05%) Big Data
11 140 (2.67%) Delta Lake
12 136 (2.59%) BigQuery
13 119 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
14 113 (2.15%) MongoDB
15 109 (2.08%) Amazon Redshift
16 89 (1.70%) MySQL
17 87 (1.66%) DynamoDB
18 82 (1.56%) Amazon RDS
19 78 (1.49%) Azure SQL Database
20 76 (1.45%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 636 (12.13%) Git
2 474 (9.04%) Jenkins
3 358 (6.83%) GitLab
4 258 (4.92%) JIRA
5 83 (1.58%) MLflow
6 77 (1.47%) Selenium
7 62 (1.18%) Postman
8 39 (0.74%) Cucumber
9 35 (0.67%) JMeter
10 31 (0.59%) Cypress.io
11 30 (0.57%) Artifactory
12 28 (0.53%) Bitbucket
12 28 (0.53%) SonarQube
13 26 (0.50%) JUnit
13 26 (0.50%) Sonatype Nexus
14 24 (0.46%) REST Assured
14 24 (0.46%) Robot Framework
15 23 (0.44%) Maven
16 20 (0.38%) Gatling
17 18 (0.34%) SpecFlow
General
1 1,118 (21.32%) Social Skills
2 1,028 (19.60%) Finance
3 693 (13.21%) Analytical Skills
4 472 (9.00%) Public Sector
5 373 (7.11%) Banking
6 185 (3.53%) Front Office
7 126 (2.40%) Documentation Skills
8 121 (2.31%) Investment Banking
9 79 (1.51%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 67 (1.28%) Marketing
11 59 (1.12%) Retail
12 56 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
13 54 (1.03%) Legal
14 47 (0.90%) Telecoms
15 43 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 36 (0.69%) Financial Institution
16 36 (0.69%) Publishing
17 34 (0.65%) Military
18 33 (0.63%) Manufacturing
19 28 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 975 (18.59%) Developer
2 808 (15.41%) Data Engineer
3 771 (14.70%) Senior
4 499 (9.51%) Python Developer
5 337 (6.43%) Lead
6 324 (6.18%) Architect
6 324 (6.18%) Python Engineer
7 279 (5.32%) DevOps Engineer
8 276 (5.26%) Analyst
9 267 (5.09%) Software Engineer
10 228 (4.35%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 228 (4.35%) AWS Engineer
11 207 (3.95%) Data Scientist
12 168 (3.20%) Senior Developer
13 162 (3.09%) Azure Engineer
14 159 (3.03%) Senior Data Engineer
15 150 (2.86%) Platform Engineer
16 147 (2.80%) Data Analyst
16 147 (2.80%) Full-Stack Developer
17 129 (2.46%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 396 (7.55%) REST
2 370 (7.05%) React
3 356 (6.79%) PySpark
4 322 (6.14%) Kafka
5 232 (4.42%) .NET
6 225 (4.29%) Node.js
7 213 (4.06%) Pandas
8 188 (3.58%) FastAPI
9 179 (3.41%) RESTful
10 175 (3.34%) PyTorch
11 173 (3.30%) JSON
12 133 (2.54%) Django
13 128 (2.44%) Flask
14 124 (2.36%) NumPy
15 122 (2.33%) TensorFlow
16 118 (2.25%) LangChain
17 116 (2.21%) scikit-learn
18 113 (2.15%) AngularJS
19 102 (1.94%) HTML
20 99 (1.89%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 555 (10.58%) Cloud Native
2 230 (4.39%) Distributed Systems
3 151 (2.88%) Algorithms
4 136 (2.59%) Product Ownership
5 129 (2.46%) Data Centre
6 123 (2.35%) AI Agents
7 121 (2.31%) Data Protection Act
7 121 (2.31%) Onboarding
8 120 (2.29%) Data Structures
9 115 (2.19%) Derivative
10 106 (2.02%) Equities
11 104 (1.98%) Legacy Systems
12 102 (1.94%) Management Information System
13 99 (1.89%) Fixed Income
14 90 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
15 89 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
16 83 (1.58%) Security Posture
17 65 (1.24%) Public Cloud
18 52 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
19 48 (0.92%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 620 (11.82%) Linux
2 291 (5.55%) Windows
3 221 (4.21%) Unix
4 97 (1.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 70 (1.33%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.71%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.61%) VMS
8 26 (0.50%) AIX
9 23 (0.44%) Android
9 23 (0.44%) Solaris
10 19 (0.36%) Mac OS
11 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
11 17 (0.32%) CentOS
12 10 (0.19%) zOS
13 8 (0.15%) Debian
14 7 (0.13%) Rocky
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
16 5 (0.095%) Amazon Linux
17 4 (0.076%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,929 (36.78%) CI/CD
2 1,397 (26.63%) DevOps
3 1,209 (23.05%) AI
4 1,123 (21.41%) Agile
5 1,021 (19.47%) Analytics
6 913 (17.41%) Problem-Solving
7 902 (17.20%) Infrastructure as Code
8 887 (16.91%) Data Pipeline
9 805 (15.35%) Machine Learning
10 708 (13.50%) Data Modelling
11 698 (13.31%) ETL
12 697 (13.29%) Data Engineering
13 678 (12.93%) Containerisation
14 630 (12.01%) Software Engineering
15 569 (10.85%) Data Science
16 548 (10.45%) Observability
17 525 (10.01%) Test Automation
18 515 (9.82%) Business Intelligence
19 464 (8.85%) LLM
20 428 (8.16%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,738 (33.14%) SQL
2 758 (14.45%) Java
3 631 (12.03%) PowerShell
4 568 (10.83%) Bash
5 474 (9.04%) JavaScript
6 353 (6.73%) TypeScript
7 339 (6.46%) C#
8 198 (3.78%) Go
9 168 (3.20%) R
10 151 (2.88%) C++
11 135 (2.57%) Scala
12 105 (2.00%) Shell Script
13 78 (1.49%) Perl
14 76 (1.45%) Ruby
15 73 (1.39%) Bicep
16 57 (1.09%) PL/SQL
17 56 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 56 (1.07%) T-SQL
18 54 (1.03%) C
19 50 (0.95%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,181 (22.52%) Security Cleared
2 956 (18.23%) SC Cleared
3 379 (7.23%) Degree
4 158 (3.01%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.82%) DV Cleared
6 122 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
7 101 (1.93%) Azure Certification
8 84 (1.60%) AWS Certification
9 82 (1.56%) CISSP
10 78 (1.49%) Master's Degree
11 70 (1.33%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (1.03%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.95%) CCNP
14 40 (0.76%) CISM
15 38 (0.72%) PhD
16 31 (0.59%) ISTQB
17 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
18 25 (0.48%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 22 (0.42%) CCIE
19 22 (0.42%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 518 (9.88%) Data Quality
2 233 (4.44%) QA
3 147 (2.80%) GDPR
4 99 (1.89%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 95 (1.81%) NIST
6 78 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 36 (0.69%) SLA
8 29 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.50%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 17 (0.32%) WCAG
13 16 (0.31%) NCSC
14 13 (0.25%) SOC 2
15 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
18 6 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
18 6 (0.11%) PSD2
System Software
1 763 (14.55%) Docker
2 148 (2.82%) Active Directory
3 93 (1.77%) VMware Infrastructure
4 71 (1.35%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.72%) VMware NSX
6 37 (0.71%) vSphere
7 33 (0.63%) Firmware
8 29 (0.55%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 16 (0.31%) KVM
11 14 (0.27%) NFS
12 13 (0.25%) Squid
13 12 (0.23%) HDFS
14 10 (0.19%) Ceph
15 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
15 9 (0.17%) SRDF
16 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
17 5 (0.095%) Postfix
18 4 (0.076%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
18 4 (0.076%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,069 (20.38%) Terraform
2 922 (17.58%) Kubernetes
3 543 (10.35%) Ansible
4 333 (6.35%) Grafana
5 275 (5.24%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.41%) Puppet
7 57 (1.09%) Argo
8 49 (0.93%) Istio
9 47 (0.90%) vRealize
10 37 (0.71%) Kibana
11 31 (0.59%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.59%) vCenter Server
12 28 (0.53%) Nessus
13 25 (0.48%) Nagios
14 24 (0.46%) Control-M
14 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.46%) ZABBIX
15 22 (0.42%) NetBackup
16 19 (0.36%) HAProxy
16 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 589 (11.23%) Microsoft
2 561 (10.70%) Databricks
3 268 (5.11%) Google
4 244 (4.65%) Oracle
5 219 (4.18%) Splunk
6 173 (3.30%) VMware
7 123 (2.35%) Red Hat
8 122 (2.33%) OpenAI
9 112 (2.14%) Cisco
10 98 (1.87%) ServiceNow
11 85 (1.62%) CyberArk
12 76 (1.45%) BeyondTrust
13 74 (1.41%) F5
14 73 (1.39%) Dynatrace
15 70 (1.33%) IBM
16 69 (1.32%) Palo Alto
17 67 (1.28%) Informatica
18 50 (0.95%) Foundry
18 50 (0.95%) SAP
19 44 (0.84%) Arista