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 1 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,742 4,199 4,544
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.27% 11.67% 9.95%
As % of the Programming Languages category 42.10% 36.16% 32.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,121 2,780 3,264
10th Percentile £358 £375 £400
25th Percentile £419 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £738 £825 £798
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £510 £525
% change year-on-year -1.96% -2.86% -2.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 82 83 131
10th Percentile £27.58 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £41.25 £25.75 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.86% -12.50% -7.69%
75th Percentile £73.20 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.60 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year -12.64% +4.17% -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 11,264 11,612 14,115
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.52% 32.27% 30.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,433 7,429 10,054
10th Percentile £345 £350 £360
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -4.04% -1.00% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 331 290 430
10th Percentile £31.25 £22.00 £31.48
25th Percentile £50.00 £40.06 £47.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £60.18
Median % change year-on-year +3.17% +4.69% -1.63%
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £76.38 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 1 December 2025.

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 1 December 2025.

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 1 December 2025. 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 0 4,031 £525 -12.50% 2,603
London +1 2,373 £550 -12.00% 1,017
UK excluding London +3 1,804 £500 -1.96% 2,219
Work from Home 0 1,437 £525 -4.55% 978
North of England +7 553 £475 -5.94% 410
South East +3 391 £500 -4.76% 786
Yorkshire +8 286 £500 -5.57% 125
Scotland +12 282 £475 -3.55% 123
Midlands +8 268 £500 +5.26% 329
North West +8 230 £445 -10.06% 228
West Midlands +15 223 £507 +1.40% 205
South West -10 171 £550 -8.33% 258
East of England +7 147 £525 +6.06% 262
East Midlands -9 45 £402 +0.50% 121
North East +9 42 £518 -11.54% 62
Wales -11 30 £495 -1.00% 75
Northern Ireland -4 19 £594 +13.10% 15

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
1 249 (5.25%) Apache Airflow
2 209 (4.41%) Apache Spark
3 175 (3.69%) Apache
4 173 (3.65%) Confluence
5 67 (1.41%) SAS
6 53 (1.12%) SharePoint
7 35 (0.74%) OpenStack
8 33 (0.70%) nginx
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 21 (0.44%) Jupyter
11 12 (0.25%) IIS
12 11 (0.23%) Appian
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
15 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
16 6 (0.13%) JBoss
16 6 (0.13%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.11%) CMS
17 5 (0.11%) Luigi
18 4 (0.084%) Camunda
Applications
1 134 (2.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.72%) Chatbot
3 30 (0.63%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 26 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 11 (0.23%) MS Visio
7 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 5 (0.11%) Maya
8 5 (0.11%) NUKE
9 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.042%) Maple
10 1 (0.021%) Microsoft Project
10 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
10 1 (0.021%) SPSS
10 1 (0.021%) Stata
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
10 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 15 (0.32%) Aladdin
2 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
2 9 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
3 6 (0.13%) Fidessa
4 5 (0.11%) Maximo
5 4 (0.084%) Remedy ITSM
6 3 (0.063%) Actimize
6 3 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
6 3 (0.063%) Teamcenter
7 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
7 2 (0.042%) Endur
7 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.042%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.042%) Shopify
7 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
8 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
8 1 (0.021%) SAP ERP
8 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
8 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,873 (39.50%) AWS
2 1,422 (29.99%) Azure
3 706 (14.89%) GCP
4 565 (11.91%) GitHub
5 476 (10.04%) Serverless
6 396 (8.35%) Power Platform
7 369 (7.78%) Amazon S3
8 331 (6.98%) AWS Lambda
9 302 (6.37%) GitHub Actions
10 298 (6.28%) Azure DevOps
11 253 (5.34%) Snowflake
12 221 (4.66%) AWS CloudFormation
13 197 (4.15%) Amazon EC2
14 189 (3.99%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 172 (3.63%) Amazon ECS
16 171 (3.61%) dbt
17 163 (3.44%) Azure Data Factory
18 159 (3.35%) Amazon EKS
19 135 (2.85%) Virtual Private Cloud
20 134 (2.83%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 268 (5.65%) Firewall
2 178 (3.75%) DNS
3 140 (2.95%) TCP/IP
4 111 (2.34%) Network Security
5 91 (1.92%) HTTP
6 86 (1.81%) VPN
7 83 (1.75%) BGP
8 68 (1.43%) SSL
9 53 (1.12%) OSPF
10 51 (1.08%) WAN
11 44 (0.93%) MPLS
12 42 (0.89%) SSH
13 40 (0.84%) SMTP
13 40 (0.84%) Wireless
14 36 (0.76%) DHCP
14 36 (0.76%) LAN
14 36 (0.76%) Wireshark
15 35 (0.74%) SD-WAN
16 33 (0.70%) FTP
17 28 (0.59%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 391 (8.25%) PostgreSQL
2 343 (7.23%) Power BI
3 283 (5.97%) Data Warehouse
4 246 (5.19%) Relational Database
5 245 (5.17%) NoSQL
6 179 (3.77%) Data Lake
7 176 (3.71%) Big Data
8 171 (3.61%) Amazon RDS
9 152 (3.21%) Tableau
10 141 (2.97%) SQL Server
11 128 (2.70%) MongoDB
12 117 (2.47%) MySQL
13 102 (2.15%) BigQuery
14 101 (2.13%) Amazon Athena
15 99 (2.09%) Hadoop
16 86 (1.81%) Metadata
17 84 (1.77%) Amazon Redshift
18 80 (1.69%) DynamoDB
19 74 (1.56%) Elasticsearch
20 62 (1.31%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 638 (13.45%) Git
2 603 (12.72%) Jenkins
3 406 (8.56%) GitLab
4 315 (6.64%) JIRA
5 75 (1.58%) Selenium
6 64 (1.35%) Bitbucket
7 63 (1.33%) SonarQube
8 62 (1.31%) MLflow
9 58 (1.22%) Sonatype Nexus
10 54 (1.14%) JUnit
11 44 (0.93%) Liquibase
12 36 (0.76%) Cucumber
13 34 (0.72%) JMeter
14 33 (0.70%) Artifactory
15 28 (0.59%) Eclipse
15 28 (0.59%) Postman
16 27 (0.57%) Gradle
16 27 (0.57%) Vagrant
17 26 (0.55%) Cypress.io
17 26 (0.55%) Maven
General
1 1,324 (27.92%) Social Skills
2 1,062 (22.40%) Finance
3 690 (14.55%) Analytical Skills
4 488 (10.29%) Banking
5 420 (8.86%) Public Sector
6 225 (4.74%) Front Office
7 185 (3.90%) Investment Banking
8 108 (2.28%) Documentation Skills
9 84 (1.77%) Financial Institution
10 80 (1.69%) Marketing
11 74 (1.56%) Telecoms
12 68 (1.43%) Pharmaceutical
12 68 (1.43%) Retail
13 62 (1.31%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 50 (1.05%) Legal
15 44 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
16 42 (0.89%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
18 26 (0.55%) Electronics
18 26 (0.55%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 868 (18.30%) Developer
2 648 (13.67%) Senior
3 544 (11.47%) Data Engineer
4 353 (7.44%) Python Engineer
5 339 (7.15%) Python Developer
6 335 (7.06%) DevOps Engineer
7 329 (6.94%) Analyst
8 297 (6.26%) AWS Engineer
9 262 (5.53%) Software Engineer
10 248 (5.23%) Architect
11 212 (4.47%) Lead
12 198 (4.18%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 186 (3.92%) Platform Engineer
14 176 (3.71%) Data Scientist
15 154 (3.25%) Data Analyst
16 136 (2.87%) Senior Developer
17 128 (2.70%) Consultant
18 118 (2.49%) Cloud Engineer
19 114 (2.40%) Automation Engineer
19 114 (2.40%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 391 (8.25%) REST
2 326 (6.87%) React
3 321 (6.77%) Kafka
4 245 (5.17%) Node.js
5 239 (5.04%) Pandas
5 239 (5.04%) RESTful
6 226 (4.77%) FastAPI
7 210 (4.43%) PySpark
8 190 (4.01%) NumPy
8 190 (4.01%) PyTorch
9 166 (3.50%) TensorFlow
10 155 (3.27%) AngularJS
11 145 (3.06%) .NET
12 133 (2.80%) Elastic Stack
13 118 (2.49%) scikit-learn
14 114 (2.40%) LangChain
15 103 (2.17%) Flask
16 102 (2.15%) GraphQL
17 101 (2.13%) JSON
17 101 (2.13%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 384 (8.10%) Cloud Native
2 205 (4.32%) Algorithms
3 198 (4.18%) Distributed Systems
4 142 (2.99%) Equities
5 140 (2.95%) Data Protection Act
6 137 (2.89%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 132 (2.78%) Fixed Income
8 121 (2.55%) Product Ownership
9 110 (2.32%) Data Structures
9 110 (2.32%) Derivative
10 106 (2.24%) Onboarding
11 104 (2.19%) Hedge funds
12 99 (2.09%) AI Agents
13 83 (1.75%) Public Cloud
14 77 (1.62%) Hybrid Cloud
15 76 (1.60%) Data Centre
16 73 (1.54%) Management Information System
17 66 (1.39%) Legacy Systems
17 66 (1.39%) Replication
18 54 (1.14%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 846 (17.84%) Linux
2 363 (7.65%) Windows
3 236 (4.98%) Unix
4 92 (1.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 65 (1.37%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.91%) Ubuntu
7 39 (0.82%) Android
8 38 (0.80%) VMS
9 35 (0.74%) CentOS
10 30 (0.63%) Mac OS
11 26 (0.55%) Amazon Linux
12 18 (0.38%) Apple iOS
12 18 (0.38%) Solaris
13 11 (0.23%) Debian
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
14 9 (0.19%) Windows 7
15 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
16 4 (0.084%) zOS
17 3 (0.063%) AIX
17 3 (0.063%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,584 (33.40%) CI/CD
2 1,322 (27.88%) DevOps
3 1,225 (25.83%) Agile
4 1,031 (21.74%) Problem-Solving
5 849 (17.90%) AI
6 838 (17.67%) Infrastructure as Code
7 754 (15.90%) Analytics
8 718 (15.14%) Machine Learning
9 675 (14.23%) Containerisation
10 635 (13.39%) Data Pipeline
11 597 (12.59%) Software Engineering
12 526 (11.09%) Data Science
13 512 (10.80%) ETL
14 511 (10.78%) Data Modelling
15 504 (10.63%) Data Engineering
16 488 (10.29%) Test Automation
17 399 (8.41%) Computer Science
18 394 (8.31%) Business Intelligence
19 362 (7.63%) Microservices
20 355 (7.49%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 1,450 (30.58%) SQL
2 845 (17.82%) Java
3 655 (13.81%) Bash
4 618 (13.03%) PowerShell
5 516 (10.88%) JavaScript
6 333 (7.02%) TypeScript
7 299 (6.31%) Go
8 276 (5.82%) C#
9 245 (5.17%) C++
10 188 (3.96%) Perl
11 170 (3.58%) Shell Script
12 167 (3.52%) R
13 101 (2.13%) Scala
14 85 (1.79%) Ruby
15 74 (1.56%) C
16 61 (1.29%) PHP
17 60 (1.27%) VBA
18 50 (1.05%) Bicep
19 48 (1.01%) Groovy
20 44 (0.93%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 921 (19.42%) Security Cleared
2 732 (15.44%) SC Cleared
3 468 (9.87%) Degree
4 235 (4.96%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (3.12%) AWS Certification
6 145 (3.06%) Master's Degree
7 142 (2.99%) DV Cleared
8 95 (2.00%) Cisco Certification
9 86 (1.81%) CISSP
10 79 (1.67%) Azure Certification
10 79 (1.67%) BPSS Clearance
11 58 (1.22%) CCNP
12 53 (1.12%) PhD
13 50 (1.05%) MCP
14 42 (0.89%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 40 (0.84%) CCIE
16 34 (0.72%) CEH
16 34 (0.72%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
17 30 (0.63%) CISM
17 30 (0.63%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 330 (6.96%) Data Quality
2 181 (3.82%) QA
3 158 (3.33%) GDPR
4 99 (2.09%) NIST
5 98 (2.07%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 56 (1.18%) Accessibility
7 46 (0.97%) PCI DSS
8 37 (0.78%) HIPAA
9 24 (0.51%) NCSC
10 23 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 22 (0.46%) SLA
12 20 (0.42%) SOC 2
13 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
14 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.21%) EMIR
15 10 (0.21%) MiFID
15 10 (0.21%) PMO
16 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
16 8 (0.17%) WCAG
17 7 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 934 (19.70%) Docker
2 166 (3.50%) Active Directory
3 128 (2.70%) VMware Infrastructure
4 39 (0.82%) vSphere
5 37 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
6 32 (0.67%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.61%) Firmware
8 21 (0.44%) DFS Replication
9 18 (0.38%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.38%) Squid
10 16 (0.34%) Postfix
11 15 (0.32%) KVM
11 15 (0.32%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 14 (0.30%) HDFS
12 14 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
14 11 (0.23%) VMware ESXi
15 10 (0.21%) GPFS
15 10 (0.21%) Lustre
16 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,039 (21.91%) Kubernetes
2 1,029 (21.70%) Terraform
3 600 (12.65%) Ansible
4 373 (7.87%) Grafana
5 313 (6.60%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.83%) Argo
7 80 (1.69%) Puppet
8 54 (1.14%) Kibana
9 45 (0.95%) Progress Chef
10 38 (0.80%) Istio
11 36 (0.76%) Nessus
11 36 (0.76%) vRealize
12 29 (0.61%) NetBackup
12 29 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
13 27 (0.57%) ITRS Geneos
14 24 (0.51%) logstash
14 24 (0.51%) vCenter Server
15 21 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
15 21 (0.44%) Nmap
16 20 (0.42%) Packer
Vendors
1 537 (11.32%) Microsoft
2 362 (7.63%) Databricks
3 270 (5.69%) Google
4 256 (5.40%) Splunk
5 217 (4.58%) Oracle
6 213 (4.49%) VMware
7 141 (2.97%) ServiceNow
8 129 (2.72%) Cisco
9 126 (2.66%) Red Hat
10 87 (1.83%) Palo Alto
11 84 (1.77%) OpenAI
12 83 (1.75%) F5
13 72 (1.52%) Foundry
14 61 (1.29%) SAP
15 59 (1.24%) CyberArk
16 45 (0.95%) CrowdStrike
16 45 (0.95%) IBM
17 44 (0.93%) Atlassian
18 43 (0.91%) Salesforce
19 41 (0.86%) Juniper