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

6 months to
2 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,063 3,987 4,149
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.23% 13.21% 9.30%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.14% 38.84% 31.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,436 2,685 2,918
10th Percentile £360 £380 £400
25th Percentile £415 £459 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £741 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £505 £525
% change year-on-year -3.42% -3.81% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 53 115
10th Percentile £28.30 £20.34 £21.44
25th Percentile £41.94 £25.09 £37.75
Median hourly rate £54.00 £45.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -21.74% -11.54%
75th Percentile £69.38 £66.00 £69.81
90th Percentile £79.10 £79.50 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £47.50 £52.50
% change year-on-year +7.81% -9.52% -19.23%

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 12,306 10,265 13,088
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.73% 34.01% 29.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,199 6,656 9,243
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £423 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -6.25%
75th Percentile £604 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £488 £498
% change year-on-year -1.54% -2.01% -1.49%
Number of hourly rates quoted 481 238 510
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.25 £30.53
25th Percentile £53.75 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -6.25%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.25
% change year-on-year +1.97% +2.40% -4.23%

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 2 March 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 2 March 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 2 March 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 4,234 £520 -9.57% 3,057
London 0 2,403 £550 -8.33% 1,139
UK excluding London 0 1,963 £488 -3.42% 2,443
Work from Home -1 1,553 £525 -4.55% 1,153
North of England +11 664 £481 -3.75% 580
South East -3 414 £492 -8.42% 659
Yorkshire +3 354 £488 -9.30% 223
Scotland +2 286 £431 -9.21% 174
Midlands -3 276 £500 +2.04% 312
North West +11 271 £475 -5.00% 278
West Midlands -2 228 £500 - 159
South West -6 200 £550 -8.33% 331
East of England +1 132 £506 +1.76% 303
East Midlands -17 47 £445 +1.80% 151
North East +5 45 £488 -7.14% 84
Wales -15 30 £473 -5.50% 96
Northern Ireland +5 29 £613 +16.67% 32

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
1 250 (4.94%) Apache Spark
2 193 (3.81%) Apache Airflow
3 156 (3.08%) Confluence
4 145 (2.86%) Apache
5 67 (1.32%) SAS
6 58 (1.15%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.49%) nginx
8 25 (0.49%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.43%) Jupyter
10 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
11 20 (0.40%) Appian
12 11 (0.22%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.18%) Camunda
14 6 (0.12%) CMS
15 5 (0.099%) Apache Superset
15 5 (0.099%) Tomcat
16 4 (0.079%) Oracle Application Server
16 4 (0.079%) Traefik
17 3 (0.059%) CICS
Applications
1 122 (2.41%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.61%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 13 (0.26%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 3 (0.059%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.040%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.020%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 19 (0.38%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.24%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.079%) Bloomberg AIM
5 3 (0.059%) Actimize
5 3 (0.059%) IntelliMatch
5 3 (0.059%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.040%) Cloudability
6 2 (0.040%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.040%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.040%) Oracle EBS
6 2 (0.040%) Payment Gateway
6 2 (0.040%) Shopify
7 1 (0.020%) NetSuite
7 1 (0.020%) Oracle Applications
7 1 (0.020%) RMDS
7 1 (0.020%) Salesforce CRM
7 1 (0.020%) SAP IBP
7 1 (0.020%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 1,997 (39.44%) AWS
2 1,741 (34.39%) Azure
3 799 (15.78%) GCP
4 657 (12.98%) GitHub
5 532 (10.51%) Serverless
6 475 (9.38%) Power Platform
7 367 (7.25%) Amazon S3
8 362 (7.15%) Azure DevOps
9 352 (6.95%) AWS Lambda
10 330 (6.52%) GitHub Actions
11 255 (5.04%) AWS CloudFormation
12 253 (5.00%) Azure Data Factory
12 253 (5.00%) Snowflake
13 195 (3.85%) Amazon EKS
14 175 (3.46%) Amazon ECS
15 170 (3.36%) OpenShift
16 169 (3.34%) Amazon EC2
17 162 (3.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 157 (3.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 139 (2.75%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 224 (4.42%) Firewall
2 149 (2.94%) DNS
3 115 (2.27%) TCP/IP
4 114 (2.25%) Network Security
5 82 (1.62%) VPN
6 64 (1.26%) HTTP
7 60 (1.19%) BGP
8 51 (1.01%) WAN
9 49 (0.97%) SSL
10 40 (0.79%) Wireshark
11 36 (0.71%) MPLS
12 35 (0.69%) SAN
13 34 (0.67%) OSPF
14 33 (0.65%) LAN
15 31 (0.61%) DHCP
16 28 (0.55%) SD-WAN
17 27 (0.53%) VLAN
18 26 (0.51%) Wireless
19 22 (0.43%) BIG-IP
20 20 (0.40%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 393 (7.76%) PostgreSQL
1 393 (7.76%) Power BI
2 311 (6.14%) Data Warehouse
3 235 (4.64%) NoSQL
4 230 (4.54%) Data Lake
5 197 (3.89%) Relational Database
6 189 (3.73%) SQL Server
7 161 (3.18%) Big Data
8 152 (3.00%) Tableau
9 129 (2.55%) Amazon RDS
10 126 (2.49%) Metadata
11 122 (2.41%) BigQuery
12 121 (2.39%) MySQL
13 107 (2.11%) Delta Lake
14 103 (2.03%) Amazon Redshift
15 99 (1.96%) MongoDB
16 96 (1.90%) Amazon Athena
17 89 (1.76%) Azure SQL Database
18 87 (1.72%) Hadoop
19 80 (1.58%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 643 (12.70%) Git
2 546 (10.78%) Jenkins
3 433 (8.55%) GitLab
4 296 (5.85%) JIRA
5 93 (1.84%) MLflow
6 86 (1.70%) Selenium
7 51 (1.01%) Bitbucket
8 49 (0.97%) Postman
9 46 (0.91%) Cucumber
10 40 (0.79%) Sonatype Nexus
11 36 (0.71%) JUnit
12 34 (0.67%) JMeter
13 29 (0.57%) SpecFlow
14 25 (0.49%) Cypress.io
14 25 (0.49%) Visual Studio
15 24 (0.47%) CircleCI
15 24 (0.47%) Maven
16 22 (0.43%) Artifactory
16 22 (0.43%) Liquibase
16 22 (0.43%) SonarQube
General
1 1,280 (25.28%) Social Skills
2 996 (19.67%) Finance
3 699 (13.81%) Analytical Skills
4 474 (9.36%) Public Sector
5 419 (8.28%) Banking
6 170 (3.36%) Front Office
7 126 (2.49%) Documentation Skills
8 104 (2.05%) Investment Banking
9 68 (1.34%) Retail
10 64 (1.26%) Financial Institution
10 64 (1.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 64 (1.26%) Marketing
11 61 (1.20%) Pharmaceutical
12 50 (0.99%) Telecoms
13 44 (0.87%) Legal
14 42 (0.83%) Influencing Skills
14 42 (0.83%) Manufacturing
15 34 (0.67%) Presentation Skills
16 33 (0.65%) Military
17 23 (0.45%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 920 (18.17%) Developer
2 708 (13.98%) Data Engineer
2 708 (13.98%) Senior
3 403 (7.96%) Python Developer
4 322 (6.36%) Architect
4 322 (6.36%) Lead
5 312 (6.16%) DevOps Engineer
6 289 (5.71%) Analyst
7 285 (5.63%) Python Engineer
8 258 (5.10%) AWS Engineer
9 247 (4.88%) Software Engineer
10 244 (4.82%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 200 (3.95%) Data Scientist
12 173 (3.42%) Platform Engineer
13 152 (3.00%) Senior Developer
14 148 (2.92%) Azure Engineer
15 145 (2.86%) Data Analyst
16 136 (2.69%) Full-Stack Developer
16 136 (2.69%) Senior Data Engineer
17 133 (2.63%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 434 (8.57%) REST
2 357 (7.05%) React
3 316 (6.24%) PySpark
4 311 (6.14%) Kafka
5 282 (5.57%) Node.js
6 229 (4.52%) Pandas
7 223 (4.40%) PyTorch
8 222 (4.38%) FastAPI
9 213 (4.21%) RESTful
10 211 (4.17%) .NET
11 178 (3.52%) TensorFlow
12 165 (3.26%) NumPy
13 144 (2.84%) scikit-learn
14 139 (2.75%) AngularJS
15 132 (2.61%) Flask
16 127 (2.51%) LangChain
17 117 (2.31%) JSON
17 117 (2.31%) pytest
18 114 (2.25%) Django
19 108 (2.13%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 489 (9.66%) Cloud Native
2 205 (4.05%) Algorithms
3 200 (3.95%) Distributed Systems
4 139 (2.75%) Product Ownership
5 125 (2.47%) Data Protection Act
6 120 (2.37%) Equities
7 109 (2.15%) Data Structures
8 104 (2.05%) Onboarding
9 103 (2.03%) Fixed Income
10 98 (1.94%) AI Agents
11 97 (1.92%) Derivative
12 94 (1.86%) Security Posture
13 93 (1.84%) Enterprise Software
14 90 (1.78%) Legacy Systems
15 88 (1.74%) Public Cloud
16 87 (1.72%) Hybrid Cloud
17 82 (1.62%) Management Information System
18 75 (1.48%) Data Centre
19 62 (1.22%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
20 56 (1.11%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 691 (13.65%) Linux
2 324 (6.40%) Windows
3 201 (3.97%) Unix
4 98 (1.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 65 (1.28%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.71%) Android
7 35 (0.69%) Ubuntu
8 32 (0.63%) VMS
9 26 (0.51%) CentOS
10 24 (0.47%) Mac OS
11 23 (0.45%) Solaris
12 21 (0.41%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.20%) Windows 7
14 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
15 6 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.099%) Debian
16 5 (0.099%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.099%) zOS
17 4 (0.079%) Windows Server 2008
17 4 (0.079%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,859 (36.72%) CI/CD
2 1,439 (28.42%) DevOps
3 1,220 (24.10%) Agile
4 1,090 (21.53%) AI
5 1,065 (21.03%) Problem-Solving
6 972 (19.20%) Analytics
7 913 (18.03%) Infrastructure as Code
8 840 (16.59%) Machine Learning
9 815 (16.10%) Data Pipeline
10 764 (15.09%) Containerisation
11 678 (13.39%) Data Engineering
12 666 (13.15%) ETL
13 649 (12.82%) Data Modelling
14 618 (12.21%) Data Science
15 583 (11.51%) Test Automation
16 572 (11.30%) Software Engineering
17 483 (9.54%) Observability
18 466 (9.20%) Business Intelligence
19 436 (8.61%) LLM
20 375 (7.41%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,583 (31.27%) SQL
2 716 (14.14%) Java
3 672 (13.27%) PowerShell
4 612 (12.09%) Bash
5 518 (10.23%) JavaScript
6 343 (6.77%) TypeScript
7 326 (6.44%) C#
8 236 (4.66%) Go
9 174 (3.44%) C++
10 153 (3.02%) R
11 120 (2.37%) Shell Script
12 114 (2.25%) Perl
13 113 (2.23%) Scala
14 92 (1.82%) Ruby
15 65 (1.28%) Bicep
16 60 (1.19%) Kusto Query Language
17 49 (0.97%) C
18 47 (0.93%) VBA
19 42 (0.83%) T-SQL
20 41 (0.81%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,158 (22.87%) Security Cleared
2 927 (18.31%) SC Cleared
3 443 (8.75%) Degree
4 210 (4.15%) Computer Science Degree
5 140 (2.77%) DV Cleared
6 139 (2.75%) AWS Certification
7 123 (2.43%) Master's Degree
8 112 (2.21%) BPSS Clearance
9 99 (1.96%) Azure Certification
10 93 (1.84%) CISSP
11 73 (1.44%) Cisco Certification
12 63 (1.24%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 58 (1.15%) CCNP
14 46 (0.91%) PhD
15 44 (0.87%) CISM
16 40 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.71%) Microsoft Certification
18 31 (0.61%) CEH
18 31 (0.61%) Microsoft Certified Professional
19 27 (0.53%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 463 (9.14%) Data Quality
2 203 (4.01%) QA
3 177 (3.50%) GDPR
4 105 (2.07%) NIST
5 103 (2.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 76 (1.50%) Accessibility
7 32 (0.63%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.59%) HIPAA
9 28 (0.55%) SLA
10 27 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 23 (0.45%) NCSC
12 17 (0.34%) SOC 2
13 15 (0.30%) Actionable Recommendations
14 12 (0.24%) EU AI Act
14 12 (0.24%) WCAG
15 11 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.20%) MiFID
16 10 (0.20%) PMO
16 10 (0.20%) PSD2
17 9 (0.18%) EMIR
System Software
1 954 (18.84%) Docker
2 177 (3.50%) Active Directory
3 115 (2.27%) VMware Infrastructure
4 51 (1.01%) Virtual Machines
4 51 (1.01%) vSphere
5 47 (0.93%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.57%) Hyper-V
7 21 (0.41%) Firmware
8 16 (0.32%) KVM
9 15 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.26%) HDFS
11 12 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.20%) Lustre
13 9 (0.18%) GPFS
14 8 (0.16%) SRDF
14 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
15 6 (0.12%) Postfix
16 5 (0.099%) NetIQ eDirectory
16 5 (0.099%) Oracle RAC
16 5 (0.099%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,122 (22.16%) Terraform
2 1,062 (20.98%) Kubernetes
3 549 (10.84%) Ansible
4 348 (6.87%) Grafana
5 308 (6.08%) Prometheus
6 95 (1.88%) Argo
7 77 (1.52%) Puppet
8 53 (1.05%) vRealize
9 49 (0.97%) Istio
10 46 (0.91%) Kibana
11 38 (0.75%) Nessus
12 34 (0.67%) Progress Chef
13 31 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
14 29 (0.57%) vCenter Server
15 27 (0.53%) Control-M
16 25 (0.49%) NetBackup
17 24 (0.47%) Microsoft Intune
18 23 (0.45%) IBM Guardium
19 18 (0.36%) ITRS Geneos
19 18 (0.36%) Rancher
Vendors
1 617 (12.19%) Microsoft
2 506 (9.99%) Databricks
3 301 (5.95%) Google
4 233 (4.60%) Splunk
5 225 (4.44%) Oracle
6 224 (4.42%) VMware
7 149 (2.94%) Red Hat
8 119 (2.35%) Cisco
9 115 (2.27%) OpenAI
10 111 (2.19%) ServiceNow
11 82 (1.62%) CyberArk
12 80 (1.58%) Foundry
13 72 (1.42%) F5
14 71 (1.40%) Palo Alto
15 66 (1.30%) BeyondTrust
16 58 (1.15%) Informatica
17 46 (0.91%) SAP
18 45 (0.89%) IBM
19 42 (0.83%) Dynatrace
20 40 (0.79%) Atlassian