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

6 months to
4 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,603 4,209 3,976
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.45% 13.03% 10.44%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.97% 39.75% 32.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,663 2,779 2,825
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £440 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -2.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 136 83 104
10th Percentile £30.25 £28.19 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.48 £35.13 £39.42
Median hourly rate £60.81 £50.00 £62.25
Median % change year-on-year +21.62% -19.68% -4.23%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.88 £70.47
90th Percentile £90.00 £84.59 £78.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -28.57% +14.29%

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 14,017 10,588 12,060
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.13% 32.77% 31.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,115 7,039 8,313
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £746 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 523 295 349
10th Percentile £28.00 £29.00 £29.55
25th Percentile £47.15 £37.23 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.80 £80.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +3.17%

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 4 September 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 4 September 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 4 September 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 -3 4,788 £550 +1.29% 8,074
London -3 2,850 £575 -1.88% 5,367
UK excluding London -7 2,112 £500 - 3,706
Work from Home -6 1,534 £530 -3.64% 2,969
North of England 0 727 £500 +5.26% 735
South East -7 440 £538 +7.50% 919
Yorkshire -1 371 £500 +2.56% 213
South West -3 283 £550 +4.76% 529
North West -1 276 £525 +10.53% 421
Scotland -4 274 £450 -10.00% 451
Midlands -17 228 £500 +5.26% 347
West Midlands -17 185 £500 +5.26% 197
East of England -9 146 £500 -4.76% 529
North East -2 92 £425 -2.86% 107
East Midlands -20 43 £478 +15.18% 148
Wales -7 29 £530 +30.86% 78
Northern Ireland +4 17 £363 -30.95% 158

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
1 291 (5.19%) Apache Airflow
2 272 (4.85%) Apache Spark
3 222 (3.96%) Apache
4 160 (2.86%) Confluence
5 56 (1.00%) Jupyter
6 51 (0.91%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.68%) SAS
8 30 (0.54%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 21 (0.37%) nginx
12 19 (0.34%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
14 8 (0.14%) WebSphere
15 7 (0.12%) Apache Superset
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
17 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 111 (1.98%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
5 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
5 18 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 19 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
2 17 (0.30%) Aladdin
2 17 (0.30%) Remedy ITSM
3 11 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) Remedy AR System
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 5 (0.089%) Front Arena
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Endur
9 3 (0.054%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.054%) Summit
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Global One
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 2,069 (36.93%) AWS
2 1,900 (33.91%) Azure
3 850 (15.17%) GCP
4 731 (13.05%) GitHub
5 494 (8.82%) Power Platform
6 489 (8.73%) Serverless
7 452 (8.07%) Azure DevOps
8 427 (7.62%) GitHub Actions
9 397 (7.09%) Amazon S3
10 366 (6.53%) AWS Lambda
11 329 (5.87%) Snowflake
12 230 (4.10%) dbt
13 222 (3.96%) Azure Data Factory
14 190 (3.39%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 180 (3.21%) AWS CloudFormation
16 171 (3.05%) Amazon EKS
17 142 (2.53%) Entra ID
18 136 (2.43%) Amazon EC2
19 134 (2.39%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 129 (2.30%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 274 (4.89%) Firewall
2 208 (3.71%) DNS
3 148 (2.64%) TCP/IP
4 138 (2.46%) Network Security
5 125 (2.23%) BGP
6 122 (2.18%) VPN
7 113 (2.02%) WAN
8 87 (1.55%) DHCP
9 73 (1.30%) OSPF
10 67 (1.20%) SD-WAN
11 60 (1.07%) VLAN
12 56 (1.00%) SSL
13 55 (0.98%) BIG-IP
14 53 (0.95%) HTTP
14 53 (0.95%) VXLAN
15 46 (0.82%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 40 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
16 40 (0.71%) SNMP
17 39 (0.70%) SAN
18 38 (0.68%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 444 (7.92%) Power BI
2 328 (5.85%) Data Warehouse
3 314 (5.60%) PostgreSQL
4 216 (3.86%) SQL Server
5 210 (3.75%) Metadata
6 205 (3.66%) Relational Database
7 189 (3.37%) Tableau
8 188 (3.36%) Data Lake
9 164 (2.93%) BigQuery
10 155 (2.77%) NoSQL
11 141 (2.52%) Big Data
12 133 (2.37%) Amazon Redshift
13 129 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
14 126 (2.25%) Amazon RDS
15 125 (2.23%) Delta Lake
16 118 (2.11%) MongoDB
17 108 (1.93%) DynamoDB
18 94 (1.68%) MySQL
19 73 (1.30%) Redis
20 66 (1.18%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 755 (13.47%) Git
2 491 (8.76%) Jenkins
3 450 (8.03%) GitLab
4 289 (5.16%) JIRA
5 110 (1.96%) Selenium
6 62 (1.11%) JMeter
7 56 (1.00%) Postman
8 55 (0.98%) MLflow
8 55 (0.98%) SonarQube
9 49 (0.87%) Claude Code
10 40 (0.71%) Bitbucket
11 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
11 35 (0.62%) Maven
12 33 (0.59%) Gatling
13 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
14 30 (0.54%) Artifactory
14 30 (0.54%) Sonatype Nexus
15 27 (0.48%) LoadRunner
16 19 (0.34%) JUnit
General
1 1,287 (22.97%) Social Skills
2 1,212 (21.63%) Finance
3 845 (15.08%) Analytical Skills
4 555 (9.91%) Public Sector
5 460 (8.21%) Banking
6 182 (3.25%) Front Office
7 142 (2.53%) Investment Banking
8 115 (2.05%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 111 (1.98%) Retail
11 93 (1.66%) Marketing
12 80 (1.43%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.05%) Military
14 58 (1.04%) Pharmaceutical
15 52 (0.93%) Aerospace
16 50 (0.89%) Legal
17 48 (0.86%) Law
18 45 (0.80%) Financial Institution
18 45 (0.80%) Publishing
19 42 (0.75%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 955 (17.04%) Senior
2 905 (16.15%) Developer
3 829 (14.80%) Data Engineer
4 479 (8.55%) Lead
5 476 (8.50%) Python Developer
6 415 (7.41%) Python Engineer
7 337 (6.01%) DevOps Engineer
8 289 (5.16%) Analyst
9 281 (5.02%) Software Engineer
10 276 (4.93%) Architect
11 272 (4.85%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 228 (4.07%) AWS Engineer
13 193 (3.44%) Data Scientist
13 193 (3.44%) Platform Engineer
14 190 (3.39%) Senior Developer
15 189 (3.37%) Cloud Engineer
16 183 (3.27%) Senior Data Engineer
17 178 (3.18%) Azure Engineer
18 144 (2.57%) Data Analyst
19 136 (2.43%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,326 (23.67%) Terraform
2 484 (8.64%) REST
3 381 (6.80%) PySpark
4 359 (6.41%) Kafka
5 308 (5.50%) React
6 250 (4.46%) .NET
7 210 (3.75%) JSON
8 204 (3.64%) Django
9 200 (3.57%) FastAPI
10 186 (3.32%) RESTful
11 171 (3.05%) Pandas
12 165 (2.94%) Node.js
13 145 (2.59%) pytest
14 140 (2.50%) LangChain
15 117 (2.09%) PyTorch
16 114 (2.03%) Flask
17 113 (2.02%) OAuth
18 111 (1.98%) YAML
19 109 (1.95%) HTML
20 103 (1.84%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 788 (14.06%) Cloud Native
2 311 (5.55%) Distributed Systems
3 250 (4.46%) AI Agents
4 225 (4.02%) Onboarding
5 158 (2.82%) Product Ownership
6 155 (2.77%) Data Centre
7 140 (2.50%) Data Structures
8 139 (2.48%) Algorithms
9 136 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
10 116 (2.07%) Hybrid Cloud
11 109 (1.95%) Management Information System
12 105 (1.87%) Data Protection Act
12 105 (1.87%) Derivative
13 87 (1.55%) Enterprise Software
14 84 (1.50%) Equities
15 81 (1.45%) Security Posture
16 70 (1.25%) Linux Command Line
17 69 (1.23%) Public Cloud
18 65 (1.16%) PKI
19 63 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 746 (13.31%) Linux
2 332 (5.93%) Windows
3 251 (4.48%) Unix
4 150 (2.68%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.61%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.62%) VMS
8 24 (0.43%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 18 (0.32%) CentOS
11 16 (0.29%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.089%) Debian
17 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,260 (40.34%) CI/CD
2 1,604 (28.63%) DevOps
3 1,506 (26.88%) AI
4 1,247 (22.26%) Agile
5 1,225 (21.86%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,102 (19.67%) Analytics
7 991 (17.69%) Data Pipeline
8 905 (16.15%) Software Engineering
9 899 (16.04%) Problem-Solving
10 854 (15.24%) Machine Learning
11 809 (14.44%) Data Engineering
12 784 (13.99%) Containerisation
13 746 (13.31%) Data Modelling
14 726 (12.96%) Observability
15 647 (11.55%) Test Automation
16 646 (11.53%) ETL
17 611 (10.90%) Continuous Improvement
18 597 (10.66%) Validation
19 569 (10.16%) Data Science
20 561 (10.01%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,837 (32.79%) SQL
2 820 (14.64%) Java
3 762 (13.60%) Bash
4 735 (13.12%) PowerShell
5 443 (7.91%) JavaScript
6 334 (5.96%) TypeScript
7 318 (5.68%) C#
8 194 (3.46%) Go
9 151 (2.69%) Shell Script
10 150 (2.68%) R
11 140 (2.50%) C++
12 137 (2.45%) Bicep
13 133 (2.37%) Scala
14 98 (1.75%) Perl
15 60 (1.07%) Groovy
16 58 (1.04%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 55 (0.98%) C
17 55 (0.98%) PL/SQL
18 54 (0.96%) Ruby
19 53 (0.95%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,344 (23.99%) Security Cleared
2 1,091 (19.47%) SC Cleared
3 412 (7.35%) Degree
4 227 (4.05%) DV Cleared
5 157 (2.80%) Computer Science Degree
6 145 (2.59%) Azure Certification
7 136 (2.43%) AWS Certification
8 121 (2.16%) BPSS Clearance
9 94 (1.68%) CISSP
10 84 (1.50%) Cisco Certification
11 64 (1.14%) Master's Degree
12 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
13 42 (0.75%) CCNP
14 36 (0.64%) ISTQB
14 36 (0.64%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 34 (0.61%) CISM
16 33 (0.59%) PhD
17 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 28 (0.50%) DBS Check
19 27 (0.48%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 619 (11.05%) Data Quality
2 290 (5.18%) QA
3 113 (2.02%) NIST
4 106 (1.89%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 96 (1.71%) GDPR
6 80 (1.43%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.62%) SLA
8 32 (0.57%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.52%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) WCAG
11 23 (0.41%) PCI DSS
12 22 (0.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.29%) Disclosure Scotland
14 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
15 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
16 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
18 6 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.11%) GRC
18 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 948 (16.92%) Docker
2 166 (2.96%) Active Directory
3 137 (2.45%) VMware Infrastructure
4 63 (1.12%) Virtual Machines
5 51 (0.91%) Hyper-V
6 40 (0.71%) vSphere
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 25 (0.45%) VMware ESXi
9 24 (0.43%) Firmware
10 22 (0.39%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Squid
12 11 (0.20%) Ceph
12 11 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 7 (0.12%) Postfix
14 7 (0.12%) zsh
15 6 (0.11%) HDFS
15 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
16 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,128 (20.13%) Kubernetes
2 620 (11.07%) Ansible
3 334 (5.96%) Grafana
4 240 (4.28%) Prometheus
5 79 (1.41%) Puppet
6 72 (1.29%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.20%) Argo
8 34 (0.61%) Istio
9 33 (0.59%) Single Sign-On
10 31 (0.55%) Kibana
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 24 (0.43%) ZABBIX
13 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) Nagios
13 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.39%) vRealize
15 20 (0.36%) FortiGate
16 19 (0.34%) Packer
17 16 (0.29%) HAProxy
17 16 (0.29%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 717 (12.80%) Microsoft
2 576 (10.28%) Databricks
3 371 (6.62%) Google
4 247 (4.41%) Oracle
5 214 (3.82%) Splunk
6 180 (3.21%) VMware
7 148 (2.64%) OpenAI
8 137 (2.45%) Cisco
9 119 (2.12%) ServiceNow
10 102 (1.82%) Red Hat
11 101 (1.80%) Dynatrace
12 93 (1.66%) IBM
13 86 (1.53%) F5
14 83 (1.48%) Palo Alto
15 78 (1.39%) Informatica
16 74 (1.32%) Foundry
17 72 (1.29%) Fortinet
18 68 (1.21%) SAP
19 66 (1.18%) CyberArk
20 62 (1.11%) Salesforce