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

6 months to
14 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 9
Rank change year-on-year -4 -1 +3
Contract jobs citing Python 5,750 4,459 4,160
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.40% 13.44% 11.10%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.54% 41.13% 34.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,731 2,896 2,817
10th Percentile £375 £358 £363
25th Percentile £440 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -2.13%
75th Percentile £650 £638 £700
90th Percentile £750 £761 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 86 95
10th Percentile £35.70 £28.25 £20.12
25th Percentile £44.16 £35.06 £34.38
Median hourly rate £62.40 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +24.80% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £77.50 £61.44 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.84 £81.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +26.27% -25.93% +5.88%

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 14,543 10,842 12,000
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.31% 32.68% 32.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,442 7,124 7,845
10th Percentile £363 £345 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £733 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 569 298 321
10th Percentile £21.25 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £44.50 £41.25 £41.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.19 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £77.88 £75.00
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 14 October 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 October 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 October 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 -4 4,881 £550 +4.76% 7,294
London -4 2,900 £575 - 4,710
UK excluding London -7 2,202 £500 - 2,988
Work from Home -6 1,599 £530 -1.40% 3,421
North of England 0 764 £500 +5.26% 753
South East -9 447 £550 +10.00% 626
Yorkshire -2 383 £500 - 202
Scotland -1 328 £467 -6.60% 356
North West -2 303 £525 +20.34% 435
South West -4 274 £550 - 357
Midlands -22 239 £475 -5.00% 300
West Midlands -17 205 £485 -3.00% 199
East of England -17 143 £478 -9.05% 396
North East -2 87 £425 -14.14% 118
East Midlands -24 34 £425 +3.66% 101
Wales -12 29 £530 +23.98% 82
Northern Ireland +3 19 £375 -36.17% 141

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
1 292 (5.08%) Apache Airflow
2 282 (4.90%) Apache Spark
3 237 (4.12%) Apache
4 166 (2.89%) Confluence
5 62 (1.08%) SharePoint
6 57 (0.99%) Jupyter
7 54 (0.94%) SAS
8 31 (0.54%) OpenStack
9 29 (0.50%) nginx
10 23 (0.40%) ArcGIS
10 23 (0.40%) IIS
10 23 (0.40%) Palantir Foundry
11 11 (0.19%) CMS
12 10 (0.17%) Microsoft Exchange
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 6 (0.10%) WebSphere
15 5 (0.087%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.087%) Camunda
15 5 (0.087%) PowerExchange
16 4 (0.070%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 106 (1.84%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.61%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.38%) Microsoft Office
4 18 (0.31%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 15 (0.26%) CPLEX
6 14 (0.24%) MS Visio
7 12 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
8 3 (0.052%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.052%) Revit
9 2 (0.035%) LaTeX
9 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
9 2 (0.035%) Simulink
9 2 (0.035%) SPSS
10 1 (0.017%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.017%) AutoCAD
10 1 (0.017%) CINEMA 4D
10 1 (0.017%) Civil 3D
10 1 (0.017%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.017%) Weka
10 1 (0.017%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.40%) Remedy ITSM
2 17 (0.30%) Aladdin
2 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
5 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
6 6 (0.10%) Front Arena
6 6 (0.10%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.10%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.10%) Summit
7 5 (0.087%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.070%) Cloudability
8 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.070%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.052%) Actimize
9 3 (0.052%) Endur
9 3 (0.052%) SAP IBP
9 3 (0.052%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.035%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,106 (36.63%) AWS
2 1,963 (34.14%) Azure
3 934 (16.24%) GCP
4 771 (13.41%) GitHub
5 483 (8.40%) Serverless
6 476 (8.28%) Power Platform
7 454 (7.90%) GitHub Actions
8 451 (7.84%) Azure DevOps
9 390 (6.78%) Amazon S3
10 354 (6.16%) Snowflake
11 348 (6.05%) AWS Lambda
12 252 (4.38%) dbt
13 217 (3.77%) Azure Data Factory
14 213 (3.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 203 (3.53%) Amazon EKS
16 193 (3.36%) Entra ID
17 190 (3.30%) AWS CloudFormation
18 148 (2.57%) Amazon EC2
19 139 (2.42%) SaaS
20 130 (2.26%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 288 (5.01%) Firewall
2 218 (3.79%) DNS
3 172 (2.99%) Network Security
4 155 (2.70%) TCP/IP
5 134 (2.33%) VPN
6 131 (2.28%) BGP
7 115 (2.00%) WAN
8 83 (1.44%) DHCP
9 80 (1.39%) OSPF
10 77 (1.34%) SD-WAN
11 63 (1.10%) BIG-IP
12 59 (1.03%) SSL
12 59 (1.03%) VLAN
13 55 (0.96%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 52 (0.90%) HTTP
15 49 (0.85%) Broadband
15 49 (0.85%) VXLAN
16 46 (0.80%) Ethernet VPN
17 44 (0.77%) Internet
18 43 (0.75%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 421 (7.32%) Power BI
2 335 (5.83%) Data Warehouse
3 318 (5.53%) PostgreSQL
4 235 (4.09%) Metadata
5 203 (3.53%) Data Lake
6 199 (3.46%) Relational Database
7 183 (3.18%) SQL Server
8 179 (3.11%) BigQuery
9 159 (2.77%) Tableau
10 152 (2.64%) NoSQL
11 141 (2.45%) Amazon RDS
12 134 (2.33%) Big Data
13 133 (2.31%) Amazon Redshift
14 126 (2.19%) Delta Lake
14 126 (2.19%) MongoDB
15 118 (2.05%) Amazon Athena
16 106 (1.84%) DynamoDB
17 101 (1.76%) MySQL
18 74 (1.29%) Redis
19 65 (1.13%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 882 (15.34%) Git
2 556 (9.67%) Jenkins
3 510 (8.87%) GitLab
4 334 (5.81%) JIRA
5 124 (2.16%) Selenium
6 75 (1.30%) Postman
7 65 (1.13%) Claude Code
8 60 (1.04%) JMeter
9 56 (0.97%) MLflow
10 55 (0.96%) SonarQube
11 48 (0.83%) Bitbucket
12 47 (0.82%) Cucumber
13 40 (0.70%) REST Assured
14 38 (0.66%) Sonatype Nexus
15 37 (0.64%) Artifactory
16 36 (0.63%) Cypress.io
16 36 (0.63%) Maven
17 31 (0.54%) LoadRunner
18 30 (0.52%) Gatling
19 26 (0.45%) JUnit
General
1 1,352 (23.51%) Social Skills
2 1,345 (23.39%) Finance
3 858 (14.92%) Analytical Skills
4 556 (9.67%) Banking
5 550 (9.57%) Public Sector
6 170 (2.96%) Front Office
7 156 (2.71%) Investment Banking
8 119 (2.07%) Retail
9 110 (1.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 93 (1.62%) Documentation Skills
11 91 (1.58%) Marketing
12 85 (1.48%) Telecoms
13 63 (1.10%) Military
14 56 (0.97%) Law
15 53 (0.92%) Aerospace
16 52 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
17 50 (0.87%) Financial Institution
18 48 (0.83%) Legal
19 41 (0.71%) Publishing
20 36 (0.63%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 1,020 (17.74%) Senior
2 899 (15.63%) Developer
3 856 (14.89%) Data Engineer
4 513 (8.92%) Lead
5 477 (8.30%) Python Developer
6 425 (7.39%) Python Engineer
7 383 (6.66%) DevOps Engineer
8 315 (5.48%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 297 (5.17%) Analyst
10 278 (4.83%) Software Engineer
11 236 (4.10%) Architect
12 224 (3.90%) AWS Engineer
13 200 (3.48%) Cloud Engineer
14 195 (3.39%) Azure Engineer
15 194 (3.37%) Platform Engineer
15 194 (3.37%) Senior Data Engineer
16 182 (3.17%) Senior Developer
17 180 (3.13%) Data Scientist
18 157 (2.73%) Data Analyst
19 147 (2.56%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,443 (25.10%) Terraform
2 567 (9.86%) REST
3 381 (6.63%) Kafka
4 380 (6.61%) PySpark
5 323 (5.62%) React
6 242 (4.21%) .NET
7 227 (3.95%) FastAPI
8 216 (3.76%) Django
8 216 (3.76%) JSON
9 187 (3.25%) RESTful
10 168 (2.92%) pytest
11 159 (2.77%) LangChain
12 146 (2.54%) Node.js
13 141 (2.45%) Pandas
14 134 (2.33%) OAuth
15 129 (2.24%) Flask
16 115 (2.00%) LangGraph
17 110 (1.91%) YAML
18 104 (1.81%) HTML
19 103 (1.79%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 838 (14.57%) Cloud Native
2 309 (5.37%) AI Agents
3 280 (4.87%) Distributed Systems
4 265 (4.61%) Onboarding
5 166 (2.89%) Data Centre
6 155 (2.70%) Data Structures
7 154 (2.68%) Product Ownership
8 136 (2.37%) Legacy Systems
9 120 (2.09%) Algorithms
10 117 (2.03%) Enterprise Software
11 114 (1.98%) Hybrid Cloud
12 106 (1.84%) Data Protection Act
13 105 (1.83%) Management Information System
14 100 (1.74%) Security Posture
15 99 (1.72%) Derivative
16 91 (1.58%) Public Cloud
17 85 (1.48%) PKI
18 78 (1.36%) Equities
19 70 (1.22%) Replication
20 68 (1.18%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 796 (13.84%) Linux
2 343 (5.97%) Windows
3 237 (4.12%) Unix
4 159 (2.77%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 89 (1.55%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 37 (0.64%) VMS
8 25 (0.43%) CentOS
9 22 (0.38%) Solaris
10 17 (0.30%) Android
11 14 (0.24%) AIX
12 12 (0.21%) Apple iOS
13 11 (0.19%) macOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) zOS
15 6 (0.10%) FreeRTOS
16 5 (0.087%) Rocky
17 4 (0.070%) Alpine Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,483 (43.18%) CI/CD
2 1,713 (29.79%) DevOps
3 1,641 (28.54%) AI
4 1,354 (23.55%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,304 (22.68%) Agile
6 1,102 (19.17%) Analytics
7 1,014 (17.63%) Data Pipeline
8 973 (16.92%) Software Engineering
9 890 (15.48%) Problem-Solving
10 889 (15.46%) Data Engineering
11 845 (14.70%) Machine Learning
12 800 (13.91%) Containerisation
13 788 (13.70%) Data Modelling
14 786 (13.67%) Observability
15 755 (13.13%) Test Automation
16 721 (12.54%) Validation
17 700 (12.17%) ETL
18 691 (12.02%) Continuous Improvement
19 626 (10.89%) Platform Engineering
20 599 (10.42%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,880 (32.70%) SQL
2 803 (13.97%) Bash
3 781 (13.58%) Java
4 770 (13.39%) PowerShell
5 458 (7.97%) JavaScript
6 359 (6.24%) TypeScript
7 308 (5.36%) C#
8 222 (3.86%) Go
9 164 (2.85%) Shell Script
10 146 (2.54%) Bicep
11 133 (2.31%) R
12 125 (2.17%) C++
13 118 (2.05%) Scala
14 109 (1.90%) Perl
15 63 (1.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 60 (1.04%) Groovy
17 49 (0.85%) T-SQL
18 48 (0.83%) Rust
19 47 (0.82%) PL/SQL
20 45 (0.78%) C
Qualifications
1 1,415 (24.61%) Security Cleared
2 1,137 (19.77%) SC Cleared
3 395 (6.87%) Degree
4 259 (4.50%) DV Cleared
5 167 (2.90%) AWS Certification
6 154 (2.68%) Azure Certification
7 143 (2.49%) Computer Science Degree
8 130 (2.26%) BPSS Clearance
9 98 (1.70%) CISSP
10 75 (1.30%) Cisco Certification
11 72 (1.25%) Master's Degree
12 49 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
13 39 (0.68%) ISTQB
14 35 (0.61%) CCNP
15 33 (0.57%) PhD
16 32 (0.56%) CISM
17 31 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 30 (0.52%) CCIE
18 30 (0.52%) Microsoft Certified Professional
19 29 (0.50%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 684 (11.90%) Data Quality
2 332 (5.77%) QA
3 106 (1.84%) NIST
4 104 (1.81%) GDPR
5 91 (1.58%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 85 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 43 (0.75%) SLA
8 37 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 31 (0.54%) NCSC
10 27 (0.47%) SOC 2
11 25 (0.43%) PCI DSS
11 25 (0.43%) WCAG
12 16 (0.28%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 15 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
14 14 (0.24%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) GRC
17 7 (0.12%) Basel III
17 7 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 1,024 (17.81%) Docker
2 181 (3.15%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.30%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.17%) Virtual Machines
5 47 (0.82%) Hyper-V
6 34 (0.59%) vSphere
7 31 (0.54%) VMware NSX
8 29 (0.50%) NFS
9 26 (0.45%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.33%) Firmware
11 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 10 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
15 9 (0.16%) KVM
16 8 (0.14%) Ceph
16 8 (0.14%) zsh
17 7 (0.12%) HDFS
18 6 (0.10%) Postfix
19 5 (0.087%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,238 (21.53%) Kubernetes
2 664 (11.55%) Ansible
3 337 (5.86%) Grafana
4 245 (4.26%) Prometheus
5 81 (1.41%) Puppet
6 74 (1.29%) Progress Chef
7 69 (1.20%) Argo
8 52 (0.90%) Single Sign-On
9 39 (0.68%) Kibana
10 35 (0.61%) Istio
11 27 (0.47%) Control-M
12 26 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.40%) Packer
14 20 (0.35%) FortiGate
15 18 (0.31%) Kustomize
16 17 (0.30%) Podman
16 17 (0.30%) QRadar
16 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.26%) ITRS Geneos
17 15 (0.26%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 790 (13.74%) Microsoft
2 606 (10.54%) Databricks
3 428 (7.44%) Google
4 251 (4.37%) Oracle
5 213 (3.70%) Splunk
6 176 (3.06%) OpenAI
7 167 (2.90%) VMware
8 151 (2.63%) ServiceNow
9 136 (2.37%) Cisco
10 103 (1.79%) Dynatrace
11 100 (1.74%) Red Hat
12 95 (1.65%) Foundry
13 93 (1.62%) F5
13 93 (1.62%) IBM
14 91 (1.58%) Palo Alto
15 72 (1.25%) Informatica
16 67 (1.17%) Fortinet
17 66 (1.15%) SAP
18 64 (1.11%) CyberArk
19 57 (0.99%) Salesforce