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

6 months to
14 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 13
Rank change year-on-year 0 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 4,775 4,211 4,664
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.44% 11.48% 10.03%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.68% 35.74% 32.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,139 2,798 3,357
10th Percentile £358 £375 £400
25th Percentile £420 £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 £750 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 90 91 137
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.06 £25.67 £46.18
Median hourly rate £50.72 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -3.39% -12.50% -7.51%
75th Percentile £66.69 £70.00 £73.65
90th Percentile £78.25 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.00 £61.25 £61.25
% change year-on-year -11.84% - -5.77%

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 11,456 11,781 14,546
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.24% 32.11% 31.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,545 7,594 10,368
10th Percentile £348 £350 £363
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 £623 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 337 285 446
10th Percentile £29.00 £22.00 £31.75
25th Percentile £45.75 £37.55 £47.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £61.50 £60.11
Median % change year-on-year +1.63% +2.32% +0.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.25 £75.00 £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 14 November 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 14 November 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 14 November 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 4,069 £525 -11.76% 5,692
London +1 2,405 £550 -12.00% 3,278
UK excluding London +3 1,831 £500 -2.44% 2,976
Work from Home 0 1,458 £537 -3.68% 2,289
North of England +7 554 £480 -4.95% 715
South East +4 382 £500 -6.98% 922
Yorkshire +9 299 £500 -2.44% 201
Scotland +12 290 £500 +2.46% 194
Midlands +11 260 £500 +5.26% 410
North West +11 221 £438 -9.98% 442
West Midlands +10 214 £500 - 267
South West -8 179 £560 -8.01% 304
East of England +10 165 £525 +10.53% 346
East Midlands -10 45 £429 +7.19% 141
North East +3 38 £520 -12.97% 78
Wales -9 32 £455 -9.00% 80
Northern Ireland -2 22 £588 +11.90% 47

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
1 252 (5.28%) Apache Airflow
2 203 (4.25%) Apache Spark
3 187 (3.92%) Confluence
4 181 (3.79%) Apache
5 63 (1.32%) SAS
6 48 (1.01%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.82%) nginx
8 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.48%) Jupyter
10 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.31%) IIS
12 12 (0.25%) WebSphere
13 11 (0.23%) Appian
14 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 9 (0.19%) JBoss
15 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
16 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
17 5 (0.10%) Luigi
18 4 (0.084%) CMS
18 4 (0.084%) Tomcat
Applications
1 127 (2.66%) Microsoft Excel
2 38 (0.80%) Chatbot
3 34 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
4 29 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 10 (0.21%) Maya
6 10 (0.21%) NUKE
7 9 (0.19%) MS Visio
8 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.042%) Maple
9 2 (0.042%) 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 14 (0.29%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 8 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.17%) Maximo
4 5 (0.10%) Fidessa
5 4 (0.084%) Remedy ITSM
6 3 (0.063%) Payment Gateway
6 3 (0.063%) Teamcenter
7 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
7 2 (0.042%) Endur
7 2 (0.042%) Kondor
7 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.042%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
7 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
8 1 (0.021%) Cerner Millennium
8 1 (0.021%) ION MarketView
8 1 (0.021%) Oracle BPM
8 1 (0.021%) SAP GRC
Cloud Services
1 1,874 (39.25%) AWS
2 1,406 (29.45%) Azure
3 729 (15.27%) GCP
4 547 (11.46%) GitHub
5 468 (9.80%) Serverless
6 400 (8.38%) Power Platform
7 372 (7.79%) Amazon S3
8 328 (6.87%) AWS Lambda
9 298 (6.24%) Azure DevOps
10 279 (5.84%) GitHub Actions
11 242 (5.07%) Snowflake
12 209 (4.38%) AWS CloudFormation
13 195 (4.08%) Amazon EC2
14 194 (4.06%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 180 (3.77%) dbt
16 158 (3.31%) Amazon ECS
17 154 (3.23%) Azure Data Factory
18 146 (3.06%) Amazon EKS
19 137 (2.87%) OpenShift
20 130 (2.72%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 284 (5.95%) Firewall
2 183 (3.83%) DNS
3 148 (3.10%) TCP/IP
4 111 (2.32%) Network Security
5 97 (2.03%) VPN
6 95 (1.99%) BGP
6 95 (1.99%) HTTP
7 69 (1.45%) SSL
8 59 (1.24%) OSPF
9 54 (1.13%) WAN
10 51 (1.07%) MPLS
11 41 (0.86%) LAN
12 39 (0.82%) SSH
13 37 (0.77%) SMTP
13 37 (0.77%) Wireless
14 33 (0.69%) SD-WAN
15 31 (0.65%) FTP
15 31 (0.65%) Wireshark
16 30 (0.63%) DHCP
17 29 (0.61%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 400 (8.38%) PostgreSQL
2 348 (7.29%) Power BI
3 275 (5.76%) Data Warehouse
4 262 (5.49%) Relational Database
5 250 (5.24%) NoSQL
6 179 (3.75%) Data Lake
7 174 (3.64%) Big Data
8 166 (3.48%) Amazon RDS
9 161 (3.37%) Tableau
10 149 (3.12%) SQL Server
11 133 (2.79%) MongoDB
12 121 (2.53%) MySQL
13 114 (2.39%) BigQuery
14 101 (2.12%) Amazon Athena
15 98 (2.05%) Hadoop
16 89 (1.86%) DynamoDB
17 86 (1.80%) Metadata
18 84 (1.76%) Amazon Redshift
19 72 (1.51%) Elasticsearch
20 61 (1.28%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 654 (13.70%) Git
2 617 (12.92%) Jenkins
3 385 (8.06%) GitLab
4 335 (7.02%) JIRA
5 75 (1.57%) Selenium
6 72 (1.51%) Bitbucket
7 69 (1.45%) SonarQube
8 65 (1.36%) JUnit
9 64 (1.34%) Sonatype Nexus
10 51 (1.07%) MLflow
11 46 (0.96%) Liquibase
12 42 (0.88%) Artifactory
13 40 (0.84%) Cucumber
14 36 (0.75%) Maven
15 34 (0.71%) Gradle
16 33 (0.69%) JMeter
17 32 (0.67%) Postman
18 30 (0.63%) Eclipse
19 29 (0.61%) Cypress.io
20 28 (0.59%) Metasploit
General
1 1,337 (28.00%) Social Skills
2 1,076 (22.53%) Finance
3 707 (14.81%) Analytical Skills
4 507 (10.62%) Banking
5 409 (8.57%) Public Sector
6 247 (5.17%) Front Office
7 204 (4.27%) Investment Banking
8 99 (2.07%) Documentation Skills
9 88 (1.84%) Financial Institution
10 81 (1.70%) Marketing
11 76 (1.59%) Pharmaceutical
11 76 (1.59%) Telecoms
12 71 (1.49%) Retail
13 58 (1.21%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 54 (1.13%) Legal
15 47 (0.98%) Presentation Skills
16 42 (0.88%) Manufacturing
17 32 (0.67%) Organisational Skills
18 30 (0.63%) Influencing Skills
19 29 (0.61%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 903 (18.91%) Developer
2 640 (13.40%) Senior
3 530 (11.10%) Data Engineer
4 360 (7.54%) Python Engineer
5 359 (7.52%) Analyst
6 354 (7.41%) Python Developer
7 338 (7.08%) DevOps Engineer
8 306 (6.41%) AWS Engineer
9 283 (5.93%) Software Engineer
10 254 (5.32%) Architect
11 209 (4.38%) Lead
12 185 (3.87%) Platform Engineer
13 183 (3.83%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 181 (3.79%) Data Analyst
15 164 (3.43%) Data Scientist
16 132 (2.76%) Senior Developer
17 131 (2.74%) Consultant
18 127 (2.66%) Network Engineer
19 122 (2.55%) Full-Stack Developer
20 121 (2.53%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 387 (8.10%) REST
2 345 (7.23%) React
3 317 (6.64%) Kafka
4 245 (5.13%) Pandas
5 244 (5.11%) Node.js
6 236 (4.94%) RESTful
7 225 (4.71%) FastAPI
8 193 (4.04%) NumPy
9 185 (3.87%) PySpark
10 178 (3.73%) PyTorch
11 158 (3.31%) AngularJS
12 157 (3.29%) TensorFlow
13 139 (2.91%) .NET
14 130 (2.72%) Elastic Stack
15 116 (2.43%) HTML
16 113 (2.37%) scikit-learn
17 111 (2.32%) CSS
18 110 (2.30%) GraphQL
19 107 (2.24%) Flask
20 106 (2.22%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 369 (7.73%) Cloud Native
2 211 (4.42%) Algorithms
3 191 (4.00%) Distributed Systems
4 157 (3.29%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 155 (3.25%) Equities
6 146 (3.06%) Fixed Income
7 141 (2.95%) Data Protection Act
8 123 (2.58%) Product Ownership
9 118 (2.47%) Data Structures
10 114 (2.39%) Derivative
10 114 (2.39%) Hedge funds
11 105 (2.20%) Onboarding
12 91 (1.91%) AI Agents
13 83 (1.74%) Public Cloud
14 80 (1.68%) Management Information System
15 77 (1.61%) Data Centre
16 71 (1.49%) Hybrid Cloud
17 67 (1.40%) Legacy Systems
18 64 (1.34%) Replication
19 59 (1.24%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 853 (17.86%) Linux
2 361 (7.56%) Windows
3 255 (5.34%) Unix
4 89 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.40%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.96%) Android
7 43 (0.90%) Ubuntu
8 36 (0.75%) VMS
9 35 (0.73%) CentOS
10 29 (0.61%) Amazon Linux
11 28 (0.59%) Mac OS
12 26 (0.54%) Apple iOS
13 22 (0.46%) Solaris
14 9 (0.19%) Debian
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
15 7 (0.15%) Windows 7
16 6 (0.13%) AIX
17 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
18 4 (0.084%) Windows Server 2019
18 4 (0.084%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,561 (32.69%) CI/CD
2 1,335 (27.96%) DevOps
3 1,260 (26.39%) Agile
4 1,018 (21.32%) Problem-Solving
5 812 (17.01%) Infrastructure as Code
6 811 (16.98%) AI
7 716 (14.99%) Analytics
8 702 (14.70%) Machine Learning
9 632 (13.24%) Containerisation
10 610 (12.77%) Software Engineering
11 605 (12.67%) Data Pipeline
12 510 (10.68%) Data Science
13 505 (10.58%) ETL
14 504 (10.55%) Data Modelling
15 484 (10.14%) Test Automation
16 477 (9.99%) Data Engineering
17 409 (8.57%) Computer Science
18 398 (8.34%) Business Intelligence
19 342 (7.16%) Microservices
20 333 (6.97%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,483 (31.06%) SQL
2 875 (18.32%) Java
3 661 (13.84%) Bash
4 600 (12.57%) PowerShell
5 547 (11.46%) JavaScript
6 343 (7.18%) TypeScript
7 292 (6.12%) Go
8 276 (5.78%) C#
9 270 (5.65%) C++
10 199 (4.17%) Perl
11 196 (4.10%) Shell Script
12 161 (3.37%) R
13 102 (2.14%) Scala
14 87 (1.82%) C
15 77 (1.61%) Ruby
16 59 (1.24%) PHP
17 56 (1.17%) Groovy
18 55 (1.15%) VBA
19 47 (0.98%) Kusto Query Language
20 46 (0.96%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 889 (18.62%) Security Cleared
2 714 (14.95%) SC Cleared
3 487 (10.20%) Degree
4 235 (4.92%) Computer Science Degree
5 155 (3.25%) AWS Certification
6 146 (3.06%) Master's Degree
7 138 (2.89%) DV Cleared
8 101 (2.12%) Cisco Certification
9 84 (1.76%) CISSP
10 74 (1.55%) BPSS Clearance
11 73 (1.53%) Azure Certification
12 66 (1.38%) CCNP
13 59 (1.24%) PhD
14 47 (0.98%) MCP
15 41 (0.86%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 40 (0.84%) CCIE
17 39 (0.82%) OSCP
18 37 (0.77%) CEH
19 31 (0.65%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
20 29 (0.61%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 322 (6.74%) Data Quality
2 190 (3.98%) QA
3 151 (3.16%) GDPR
4 99 (2.07%) NIST
5 91 (1.91%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 62 (1.30%) Accessibility
7 49 (1.03%) PCI DSS
8 41 (0.86%) HIPAA
9 27 (0.57%) NCSC
9 27 (0.57%) SLA
10 25 (0.52%) SOC 2
11 22 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
13 13 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
14 12 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 9 (0.19%) EMIR
16 9 (0.19%) MiFID
17 8 (0.17%) Actionable Recommendations
17 8 (0.17%) PMO
System Software
1 906 (18.97%) Docker
2 152 (3.18%) Active Directory
3 142 (2.97%) VMware Infrastructure
4 45 (0.94%) vSphere
5 36 (0.75%) VMware NSX
6 34 (0.71%) Virtual Machines
7 30 (0.63%) Firmware
8 22 (0.46%) DFS Replication
9 21 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 17 (0.36%) Squid
11 15 (0.31%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 14 (0.29%) Hyper-V
12 14 (0.29%) KVM
12 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
13 13 (0.27%) HDFS
14 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
14 12 (0.25%) Postfix
15 10 (0.21%) zsh
16 9 (0.19%) GPFS
17 8 (0.17%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 1,021 (21.38%) Kubernetes
2 997 (20.88%) Terraform
3 629 (13.17%) Ansible
4 352 (7.37%) Grafana
5 304 (6.37%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.86%) Puppet
7 80 (1.68%) Argo
8 52 (1.09%) Kibana
9 42 (0.88%) Progress Chef
10 36 (0.75%) Istio
10 36 (0.75%) Nessus
11 34 (0.71%) vRealize
12 29 (0.61%) Nmap
12 29 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
13 28 (0.59%) NetBackup
14 26 (0.54%) vCenter Server
15 24 (0.50%) ITRS Geneos
16 23 (0.48%) logstash
16 23 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
17 22 (0.46%) Packer
Vendors
1 540 (11.31%) Microsoft
2 328 (6.87%) Databricks
3 276 (5.78%) Google
4 251 (5.26%) Splunk
5 227 (4.75%) Oracle
5 227 (4.75%) VMware
6 149 (3.12%) ServiceNow
7 137 (2.87%) Cisco
8 129 (2.70%) Red Hat
9 88 (1.84%) Palo Alto
10 86 (1.80%) F5
11 72 (1.51%) OpenAI
12 64 (1.34%) SAP
13 61 (1.28%) Foundry
14 51 (1.07%) Atlassian
15 49 (1.03%) CyberArk
16 47 (0.98%) IBM
17 45 (0.94%) Salesforce
18 44 (0.92%) Juniper
19 43 (0.90%) CrowdStrike