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

6 months to
16 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,619 4,291 3,981
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.46% 12.97% 10.27%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.63% 39.53% 32.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,677 2,848 2,875
10th Percentile £377 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £428 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.95% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £640 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £509
% change year-on-year - -1.72% -3.10%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 73 120
10th Percentile £29.85 £26.69 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.83 £34.75 £30.56
Median hourly rate £56.50 £50.00 £56.25
Median % change year-on-year +13.00% -11.11% -13.04%
75th Percentile £77.50 £59.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £84.59 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £57.50 £52.50 £67.02
% change year-on-year +9.52% -21.67% +16.56%

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 14,180 10,854 12,196
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.41% 32.80% 31.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,225 7,254 8,549
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £503 £533
Median % change year-on-year +2.49% -5.72% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 524 279 403
10th Percentile £29.97 £28.24 £27.00
25th Percentile £51.13 £36.13 £44.85
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.07% -13.85% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.93 £83.27 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.96% -1.92% +8.33%

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 16 August 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 16 August 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 16 August 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 4,810 £545 +1.49% 4,862
London -4 2,787 £575 - 3,066
UK excluding London -7 2,200 £500 - 2,366
Work from Home -8 1,526 £530 -3.73% 1,795
North of England +2 757 £500 +2.04% 549
South East -10 458 £537 +7.40% 668
Yorkshire +1 388 £500 - 155
South West -2 297 £505 -3.81% 304
North West 0 286 £525 +10.53% 302
Scotland 0 278 £450 -10.00% 191
Midlands -15 247 £475 +2.70% 243
West Midlands -14 198 £469 -1.26% 141
East of England -11 142 £500 -0.50% 272
North East -1 94 £425 -18.27% 96
East Midlands -13 48 £495 +16.47% 101
Wales -7 28 £530 +30.86% 59
Northern Ireland +7 19 £363 -32.56% 106

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 (5.20%) Apache Airflow
2 285 (5.07%) Apache Spark
3 220 (3.92%) Apache
4 174 (3.10%) Confluence
5 57 (1.01%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.87%) SAS
7 48 (0.85%) SharePoint
8 27 (0.48%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.32%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 8 (0.14%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.12%) Apache Superset
14 7 (0.12%) CICS
14 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
15 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 5 (0.089%) JBoss
Applications
1 107 (1.90%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 21 (0.37%) Microsoft Office
3 21 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 19 (0.34%) Spreadsheet
5 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
5 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.036%) Revit
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.018%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.28%) Remedy ITSM
4 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
7 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Endur
9 3 (0.053%) Front Arena
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Global One
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 2,112 (37.59%) AWS
2 1,916 (34.10%) Azure
3 863 (15.36%) GCP
4 707 (12.58%) GitHub
5 502 (8.93%) Power Platform
6 460 (8.19%) Serverless
7 436 (7.76%) Azure DevOps
8 403 (7.17%) GitHub Actions
9 395 (7.03%) Amazon S3
10 351 (6.25%) AWS Lambda
11 318 (5.66%) Snowflake
12 234 (4.16%) Azure Data Factory
13 223 (3.97%) dbt
14 188 (3.35%) AWS CloudFormation
15 183 (3.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 178 (3.17%) Amazon EKS
17 141 (2.51%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 136 (2.42%) Amazon EC2
19 134 (2.38%) Entra ID
20 133 (2.37%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 281 (5.00%) Firewall
2 215 (3.83%) DNS
3 145 (2.58%) TCP/IP
4 125 (2.22%) VPN
5 124 (2.21%) Network Security
6 122 (2.17%) BGP
7 109 (1.94%) WAN
8 85 (1.51%) DHCP
9 71 (1.26%) OSPF
10 59 (1.05%) SD-WAN
10 59 (1.05%) VLAN
11 56 (1.00%) VXLAN
12 54 (0.96%) SSL
13 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
13 52 (0.93%) HTTP
14 46 (0.82%) SAN
15 44 (0.78%) Ethernet VPN
15 44 (0.78%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 43 (0.77%) SNMP
17 36 (0.64%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 459 (8.17%) Power BI
2 331 (5.89%) Data Warehouse
3 321 (5.71%) PostgreSQL
4 220 (3.92%) SQL Server
5 201 (3.58%) Relational Database
6 196 (3.49%) Tableau
7 195 (3.47%) Metadata
8 190 (3.38%) Data Lake
9 162 (2.88%) BigQuery
10 159 (2.83%) NoSQL
11 150 (2.67%) Big Data
12 137 (2.44%) Amazon Redshift
13 134 (2.38%) Amazon Athena
14 122 (2.17%) MongoDB
15 119 (2.12%) Delta Lake
16 118 (2.10%) Amazon RDS
17 101 (1.80%) DynamoDB
18 85 (1.51%) MySQL
19 68 (1.21%) Snowflake Schema
20 64 (1.14%) Redis
Development Applications
1 733 (13.05%) Git
2 508 (9.04%) Jenkins
3 444 (7.90%) GitLab
4 286 (5.09%) JIRA
5 99 (1.76%) Selenium
6 57 (1.01%) Postman
7 54 (0.96%) JMeter
7 54 (0.96%) MLflow
8 48 (0.85%) SonarQube
9 46 (0.82%) Bitbucket
10 45 (0.80%) Claude Code
11 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
12 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
13 32 (0.57%) Gatling
14 30 (0.53%) Maven
15 29 (0.52%) REST Assured
15 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
16 25 (0.44%) LoadRunner
17 22 (0.39%) JUnit
General
1 1,235 (21.98%) Social Skills
2 1,213 (21.59%) Finance
3 817 (14.54%) Analytical Skills
4 560 (9.97%) Public Sector
5 445 (7.92%) Banking
6 194 (3.45%) Front Office
7 134 (2.38%) Investment Banking
8 116 (2.06%) Documentation Skills
9 114 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 107 (1.90%) Retail
11 87 (1.55%) Marketing
12 76 (1.35%) Telecoms
13 60 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (0.94%) Legal
15 52 (0.93%) Military
16 48 (0.85%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.84%) Aerospace
18 46 (0.82%) Publishing
19 44 (0.78%) Manufacturing
20 38 (0.68%) Law
Job Titles
1 921 (16.39%) Developer
2 914 (16.27%) Senior
3 825 (14.68%) Data Engineer
4 497 (8.84%) Python Developer
5 477 (8.49%) Lead
6 414 (7.37%) Python Engineer
7 326 (5.80%) DevOps Engineer
8 309 (5.50%) Software Engineer
9 281 (5.00%) Analyst
10 277 (4.93%) Architect
11 264 (4.70%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 245 (4.36%) AWS Engineer
13 199 (3.54%) Data Scientist
14 196 (3.49%) Cloud Engineer
15 191 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
16 178 (3.17%) Senior Developer
17 176 (3.13%) Azure Engineer
18 167 (2.97%) Senior Data Engineer
19 139 (2.47%) Data Analyst
20 138 (2.46%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 447 (7.96%) REST
2 377 (6.71%) PySpark
3 358 (6.37%) Kafka
4 329 (5.86%) React
5 234 (4.16%) .NET
6 201 (3.58%) JSON
6 201 (3.58%) RESTful
7 199 (3.54%) FastAPI
8 187 (3.33%) Node.js
9 181 (3.22%) Django
10 175 (3.11%) Pandas
11 140 (2.49%) LangChain
12 135 (2.40%) PyTorch
13 116 (2.06%) pytest
14 109 (1.94%) Flask
14 109 (1.94%) YAML
15 105 (1.87%) NumPy
16 104 (1.85%) HTML
16 104 (1.85%) OAuth
17 96 (1.71%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 769 (13.69%) Cloud Native
2 314 (5.59%) Distributed Systems
3 225 (4.00%) AI Agents
4 209 (3.72%) Onboarding
5 159 (2.83%) Data Centre
6 153 (2.72%) Product Ownership
7 140 (2.49%) Algorithms
8 138 (2.46%) Data Structures
9 128 (2.28%) Legacy Systems
10 118 (2.10%) Hybrid Cloud
11 115 (2.05%) Derivative
12 113 (2.01%) Data Protection Act
13 107 (1.90%) Management Information System
14 93 (1.66%) Equities
15 86 (1.53%) Security Posture
16 83 (1.48%) Fixed Income
17 71 (1.26%) Enterprise Software
18 70 (1.25%) Public Cloud
19 65 (1.16%) Linux Command Line
20 63 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 721 (12.83%) Linux
2 333 (5.93%) Windows
3 234 (4.16%) Unix
4 143 (2.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 79 (1.41%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.53%) AIX
7 30 (0.53%) VMS
8 17 (0.30%) Android
9 16 (0.28%) CentOS
9 16 (0.28%) Solaris
10 12 (0.21%) Apple iOS
11 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
11 11 (0.20%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Debian
14 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,213 (39.38%) CI/CD
2 1,619 (28.81%) DevOps
3 1,458 (25.95%) AI
4 1,266 (22.53%) Agile
5 1,159 (20.63%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,118 (19.90%) Analytics
7 1,005 (17.89%) Data Pipeline
8 919 (16.36%) Problem-Solving
9 886 (15.77%) Software Engineering
10 870 (15.48%) Machine Learning
11 801 (14.26%) Data Engineering
12 761 (13.54%) Containerisation
13 755 (13.44%) Data Modelling
14 685 (12.19%) Observability
15 665 (11.83%) ETL
16 619 (11.02%) Test Automation
17 595 (10.59%) Data Science
18 574 (10.22%) Continuous Improvement
19 551 (9.81%) Validation
20 538 (9.57%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,829 (32.55%) SQL
2 830 (14.77%) Java
3 755 (13.44%) Bash
4 736 (13.10%) PowerShell
5 461 (8.20%) JavaScript
6 367 (6.53%) TypeScript
7 302 (5.37%) C#
8 205 (3.65%) Go
9 146 (2.60%) C++
10 142 (2.53%) R
11 138 (2.46%) Shell Script
12 133 (2.37%) Scala
13 125 (2.22%) Bicep
14 85 (1.51%) Perl
15 61 (1.09%) PL/SQL
16 58 (1.03%) C
17 56 (1.00%) Groovy
17 56 (1.00%) Rust
18 53 (0.94%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 53 (0.94%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,319 (23.47%) Security Cleared
2 1,068 (19.01%) SC Cleared
3 424 (7.55%) Degree
4 205 (3.65%) DV Cleared
5 164 (2.92%) Computer Science Degree
6 142 (2.53%) AWS Certification
7 140 (2.49%) Azure Certification
8 117 (2.08%) BPSS Clearance
9 93 (1.66%) CISSP
10 87 (1.55%) Cisco Certification
11 72 (1.28%) Master's Degree
12 50 (0.89%) CCNP
13 43 (0.77%) Microsoft Certification
14 40 (0.71%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 35 (0.62%) PhD
16 34 (0.61%) ISTQB
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 29 (0.52%) CCIE
20 26 (0.46%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 590 (10.50%) Data Quality
2 276 (4.91%) QA
3 114 (2.03%) GDPR
4 106 (1.89%) NIST
5 101 (1.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 84 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.61%) SLA
8 29 (0.52%) Actionable Recommendations
9 27 (0.48%) NCSC
9 27 (0.48%) PCI DSS
9 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.46%) WCAG
11 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
13 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
15 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.12%) GRC
15 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 922 (16.41%) Docker
2 158 (2.81%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.35%) VMware Infrastructure
4 63 (1.12%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.80%) vSphere
6 43 (0.77%) Hyper-V
7 37 (0.66%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.53%) Firmware
9 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.23%) Squid
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
13 10 (0.18%) KVM
14 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) PowerHA
15 7 (0.12%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,308 (23.28%) Terraform
2 1,100 (19.58%) Kubernetes
3 625 (11.12%) Ansible
4 340 (6.05%) Grafana
5 247 (4.40%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.58%) Puppet
7 73 (1.30%) Progress Chef
8 68 (1.21%) Argo
9 43 (0.77%) Istio
10 33 (0.59%) Single Sign-On
11 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
12 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
13 26 (0.46%) Control-M
13 26 (0.46%) vRealize
14 25 (0.44%) Kibana
15 24 (0.43%) Nagios
16 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
17 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
18 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
18 18 (0.32%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 688 (12.24%) Microsoft
2 558 (9.93%) Databricks
3 359 (6.39%) Google
4 254 (4.52%) Oracle
5 215 (3.83%) Splunk
6 176 (3.13%) VMware
7 142 (2.53%) Cisco
8 141 (2.51%) OpenAI
9 128 (2.28%) ServiceNow
10 105 (1.87%) Dynatrace
11 103 (1.83%) Red Hat
12 95 (1.69%) IBM
13 91 (1.62%) F5
14 86 (1.53%) Informatica
15 84 (1.49%) Palo Alto
16 69 (1.23%) Fortinet
17 68 (1.21%) CyberArk
17 68 (1.21%) SAP
18 67 (1.19%) Foundry
19 62 (1.10%) Salesforce