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

6 months to
18 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 4,752 3,950 4,187
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.80% 12.44% 9.68%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.70% 37.60% 32.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,197 2,611 2,920
10th Percentile £360 £380 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £574
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -4.14% -4.38%
75th Percentile £638 £680 £688
90th Percentile £748 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £520 £530
% change year-on-year -3.85% -1.89% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 98 63 119
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.34 £30.55
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.80 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.86 £46.18 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.29% -23.03% -7.69%
75th Percentile £73.37 £66.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.23 £77.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £60.00
% change year-on-year +10.89% -23.03% -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 11,397 10,504 13,066
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.69% 33.09% 30.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,562 6,662 9,241
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -3.17%
75th Percentile £615 £640 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £491 £500
% change year-on-year -1.47% -1.90% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 410 247 444
10th Percentile £35.93 £21.25 £35.15
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.38 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £61.72
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +1.26% -2.03%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £63.75
% change year-on-year +3.17% -1.18% -1.92%

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 18 January 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 18 January 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 18 January 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 0 4,039 £525 -8.70% 3,468
London 0 2,340 £550 -8.33% 1,042
UK excluding London 0 1,804 £500 -3.85% 3,007
Work from Home 0 1,431 £525 -4.55% 1,516
North of England +9 587 £480 -4.48% 545
South East +2 393 £481 -12.50% 1,086
Yorkshire +7 296 £500 -6.98% 205
Midlands +7 276 £506 +6.53% 311
Scotland +3 258 £470 -2.89% 156
North West +6 247 £450 -7.41% 252
West Midlands +16 234 £517 +3.40% 129
South West -6 178 £550 -10.20% 375
East of England +6 126 £525 +9.38% 398
North East +4 48 £488 -10.55% 92
East Midlands -16 42 £429 +7.86% 176
Wales -12 28 £523 +4.50% 128
Northern Ireland -1 22 £588 +11.90% 70

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
1 210 (4.42%) Apache Spark
2 203 (4.27%) Apache Airflow
3 155 (3.26%) Confluence
4 152 (3.20%) Apache
5 61 (1.28%) SAS
6 56 (1.18%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.72%) nginx
8 33 (0.69%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 18 (0.38%) Appian
11 11 (0.23%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 7 (0.15%) IIS
14 6 (0.13%) Camunda
14 6 (0.13%) CMS
14 6 (0.13%) Luigi
14 6 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
15 3 (0.063%) Ethereum
15 3 (0.063%) Traefik
Applications
1 125 (2.63%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.72%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 17 (0.36%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 9 (0.19%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 3 (0.063%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.063%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.042%) Maya
10 2 (0.042%) NUKE
11 1 (0.021%) SPSS
11 1 (0.021%) Stata
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.34%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 3 (0.063%) Actimize
5 3 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 3 (0.063%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.042%) Bloomberg AIM
6 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.042%) Shopify
6 2 (0.042%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.021%) Cloudability
7 1 (0.021%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
7 1 (0.021%) Maximo
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,869 (39.33%) AWS
2 1,539 (32.39%) Azure
3 725 (15.26%) GCP
4 595 (12.52%) GitHub
5 508 (10.69%) Serverless
6 433 (9.11%) Power Platform
7 364 (7.66%) Amazon S3
8 345 (7.26%) AWS Lambda
9 315 (6.63%) GitHub Actions
10 314 (6.61%) Azure DevOps
11 242 (5.09%) AWS CloudFormation
12 237 (4.99%) Snowflake
13 216 (4.55%) Azure Data Factory
14 198 (4.17%) Amazon EC2
15 180 (3.79%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 175 (3.68%) Amazon ECS
17 166 (3.49%) Amazon EKS
18 139 (2.93%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 136 (2.86%) dbt
20 135 (2.84%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 237 (4.99%) Firewall
2 157 (3.30%) DNS
3 123 (2.59%) TCP/IP
4 117 (2.46%) Network Security
5 80 (1.68%) VPN
6 79 (1.66%) HTTP
7 68 (1.43%) BGP
8 65 (1.37%) SSL
9 49 (1.03%) WAN
10 41 (0.86%) OSPF
11 37 (0.78%) MPLS
11 37 (0.78%) Wireshark
12 34 (0.72%) Wireless
13 33 (0.69%) DHCP
13 33 (0.69%) LAN
14 31 (0.65%) SSH
15 30 (0.63%) SD-WAN
16 29 (0.61%) SMTP
17 24 (0.51%) FTP
18 23 (0.48%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 371 (7.81%) Power BI
2 368 (7.74%) PostgreSQL
3 281 (5.91%) Data Warehouse
4 227 (4.78%) Relational Database
5 225 (4.73%) NoSQL
6 220 (4.63%) Data Lake
7 170 (3.58%) SQL Server
8 161 (3.39%) Amazon RDS
9 157 (3.30%) Big Data
10 145 (3.05%) Tableau
11 127 (2.67%) MySQL
12 105 (2.21%) Metadata
13 98 (2.06%) BigQuery
14 95 (2.00%) MongoDB
15 94 (1.98%) Amazon Redshift
16 93 (1.96%) Amazon Athena
17 84 (1.77%) Hadoop
18 79 (1.66%) Delta Lake
18 79 (1.66%) DynamoDB
19 77 (1.62%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 606 (12.75%) Git
2 552 (11.62%) Jenkins
3 430 (9.05%) GitLab
4 279 (5.87%) JIRA
5 83 (1.75%) Selenium
6 75 (1.58%) MLflow
7 48 (1.01%) Cucumber
7 48 (1.01%) Sonatype Nexus
8 45 (0.95%) Bitbucket
9 44 (0.93%) Postman
10 41 (0.86%) JUnit
11 40 (0.84%) SonarQube
12 35 (0.74%) JMeter
13 33 (0.69%) Liquibase
14 29 (0.61%) Cypress.io
15 28 (0.59%) CircleCI
15 28 (0.59%) Maven
15 28 (0.59%) Visual Studio
16 27 (0.57%) Artifactory
17 24 (0.51%) Gradle
General
1 1,287 (27.08%) Social Skills
2 947 (19.93%) Finance
3 664 (13.97%) Analytical Skills
4 445 (9.36%) Public Sector
5 421 (8.86%) Banking
6 162 (3.41%) Front Office
7 135 (2.84%) Investment Banking
8 126 (2.65%) Documentation Skills
9 72 (1.52%) Financial Institution
10 68 (1.43%) Marketing
11 65 (1.37%) Pharmaceutical
12 61 (1.28%) Retail
13 57 (1.20%) Telecoms
14 56 (1.18%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 43 (0.90%) Legal
15 43 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
16 41 (0.86%) Manufacturing
17 32 (0.67%) Influencing Skills
18 28 (0.59%) Military
19 24 (0.51%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 820 (17.26%) Developer
2 669 (14.08%) Senior
3 625 (13.15%) Data Engineer
4 341 (7.18%) Python Developer
5 316 (6.65%) DevOps Engineer
6 312 (6.57%) Python Engineer
7 287 (6.04%) Analyst
8 283 (5.96%) Architect
9 272 (5.72%) AWS Engineer
10 237 (4.99%) Lead
11 233 (4.90%) Software Engineer
12 226 (4.76%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 176 (3.70%) Data Scientist
14 167 (3.51%) Platform Engineer
15 144 (3.03%) Data Analyst
15 144 (3.03%) Senior Developer
16 129 (2.71%) Azure Engineer
17 125 (2.63%) Senior Data Engineer
18 119 (2.50%) Consultant
19 118 (2.48%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 417 (8.78%) REST
2 297 (6.25%) React
3 289 (6.08%) Kafka
4 271 (5.70%) PySpark
5 236 (4.97%) Node.js
6 222 (4.67%) RESTful
7 219 (4.61%) Pandas
8 212 (4.46%) FastAPI
9 192 (4.04%) PyTorch
10 167 (3.51%) NumPy
11 166 (3.49%) .NET
12 164 (3.45%) TensorFlow
13 133 (2.80%) AngularJS
14 121 (2.55%) LangChain
15 116 (2.44%) scikit-learn
16 111 (2.34%) Elastic Stack
17 110 (2.31%) pytest
18 107 (2.25%) LDAP
19 101 (2.13%) Flask
20 100 (2.10%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 405 (8.52%) Cloud Native
2 189 (3.98%) Algorithms
3 183 (3.85%) Distributed Systems
4 130 (2.74%) Product Ownership
5 126 (2.65%) Data Protection Act
6 124 (2.61%) Equities
7 107 (2.25%) Data Structures
8 96 (2.02%) Onboarding
9 95 (2.00%) AI Agents
10 94 (1.98%) Derivative
11 91 (1.91%) Enterprise Software
12 89 (1.87%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 86 (1.81%) Fixed Income
14 81 (1.70%) Public Cloud
15 78 (1.64%) Hedge funds
15 78 (1.64%) Security Posture
16 75 (1.58%) Data Centre
16 75 (1.58%) Hybrid Cloud
16 75 (1.58%) Management Information System
17 73 (1.54%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 780 (16.41%) Linux
2 356 (7.49%) Windows
3 235 (4.95%) Unix
4 91 (1.91%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 61 (1.28%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.84%) Android
7 37 (0.78%) Ubuntu
8 36 (0.76%) VMS
9 29 (0.61%) CentOS
10 25 (0.53%) Solaris
11 24 (0.51%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.38%) Apple iOS
13 17 (0.36%) Amazon Linux
14 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
15 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
16 4 (0.084%) Debian
16 4 (0.084%) Robot Operating System
16 4 (0.084%) Windows 10
17 3 (0.063%) AIX
17 3 (0.063%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,645 (34.62%) CI/CD
2 1,335 (28.09%) DevOps
3 1,136 (23.91%) Agile
4 1,041 (21.91%) Problem-Solving
5 947 (19.93%) AI
6 852 (17.93%) Infrastructure as Code
7 820 (17.26%) Analytics
8 737 (15.51%) Machine Learning
9 712 (14.98%) Containerisation
10 691 (14.54%) Data Pipeline
11 568 (11.95%) ETL
12 557 (11.72%) Data Engineering
13 551 (11.60%) Data Science
14 550 (11.57%) Data Modelling
15 544 (11.45%) Software Engineering
16 513 (10.80%) Test Automation
17 422 (8.88%) Business Intelligence
18 390 (8.21%) Observability
19 367 (7.72%) LLM
20 362 (7.62%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,456 (30.64%) SQL
2 755 (15.89%) Java
3 646 (13.59%) PowerShell
4 611 (12.86%) Bash
5 486 (10.23%) JavaScript
6 289 (6.08%) C#
7 287 (6.04%) TypeScript
8 254 (5.35%) Go
9 210 (4.42%) C++
10 164 (3.45%) Perl
11 161 (3.39%) R
12 156 (3.28%) Shell Script
13 110 (2.31%) Scala
14 95 (2.00%) Ruby
15 60 (1.26%) Bicep
16 57 (1.20%) Kusto Query Language
17 56 (1.18%) C
18 52 (1.09%) VBA
19 45 (0.95%) PHP
20 38 (0.80%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,042 (21.93%) Security Cleared
2 845 (17.78%) SC Cleared
3 434 (9.13%) Degree
4 233 (4.90%) Computer Science Degree
5 138 (2.90%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.74%) AWS Certification
7 115 (2.42%) Master's Degree
8 90 (1.89%) BPSS Clearance
9 86 (1.81%) Azure Certification
10 80 (1.68%) CISSP
11 76 (1.60%) Cisco Certification
12 72 (1.52%) MCP
13 50 (1.05%) CCNP
14 48 (1.01%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 43 (0.90%) PhD
16 36 (0.76%) CCIE
17 34 (0.72%) CEH
18 33 (0.69%) CISM
18 33 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
19 32 (0.67%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 387 (8.14%) Data Quality
2 178 (3.75%) QA
3 163 (3.43%) GDPR
4 89 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 89 (1.87%) NIST
5 58 (1.22%) Accessibility
6 33 (0.69%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 27 (0.57%) HIPAA
9 23 (0.48%) SLA
10 22 (0.46%) NCSC
11 18 (0.38%) SOC 2
12 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
13 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
13 9 (0.19%) MiFID
14 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
14 8 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
14 8 (0.17%) EMIR
14 8 (0.17%) PMO
14 8 (0.17%) WCAG
System Software
1 945 (19.89%) Docker
2 189 (3.98%) Active Directory
3 110 (2.31%) VMware Infrastructure
4 36 (0.76%) VMware NSX
5 35 (0.74%) vSphere
6 34 (0.72%) Virtual Machines
7 22 (0.46%) Firmware
8 21 (0.44%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.42%) HDFS
10 17 (0.36%) KVM
11 15 (0.32%) Squid
12 14 (0.29%) DFS Replication
12 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
13 13 (0.27%) Postfix
14 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
15 10 (0.21%) Lustre
16 9 (0.19%) Dovecot
16 9 (0.19%) GPFS
17 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
17 8 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,069 (22.50%) Terraform
2 1,004 (21.13%) Kubernetes
3 590 (12.42%) Ansible
4 341 (7.18%) Grafana
5 286 (6.02%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.79%) Argo
7 82 (1.73%) Puppet
8 52 (1.09%) Kibana
9 46 (0.97%) vRealize
10 43 (0.90%) Istio
11 35 (0.74%) Single Sign-On
12 33 (0.69%) Nessus
13 31 (0.65%) Progress Chef
14 29 (0.61%) NetBackup
15 19 (0.40%) ITRS Geneos
16 18 (0.38%) logstash
17 17 (0.36%) Nmap
18 16 (0.34%) QRadar
18 16 (0.34%) Rancher
18 16 (0.34%) SCCM
Vendors
1 568 (11.95%) Microsoft
2 446 (9.39%) Databricks
3 281 (5.91%) Google
4 245 (5.16%) Splunk
5 234 (4.92%) Oracle
6 211 (4.44%) VMware
7 137 (2.88%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.59%) ServiceNow
9 116 (2.44%) Cisco
10 103 (2.17%) OpenAI
11 93 (1.96%) CyberArk
12 84 (1.77%) F5
13 79 (1.66%) Palo Alto
14 69 (1.45%) Foundry
15 68 (1.43%) BeyondTrust
16 51 (1.07%) SAP
17 44 (0.93%) Atlassian
18 42 (0.88%) Dynatrace
19 40 (0.84%) Informatica
20 39 (0.82%) Salesforce