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

6 months to
17 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,447 3,887 4,109
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.82% 13.10% 9.43%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.34% 38.62% 31.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,584 2,681 2,947
10th Percentile £363 £375 £375
25th Percentile £425 £446 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -2.27% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £838
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -5.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 122 59 117
10th Percentile £28.65 £25.20 £20.77
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £44.50 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.98% -28.23% -0.86%
75th Percentile £67.84 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £63.35 £76.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £50.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +2.42% -23.08% +10.64%

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 13,503 10,066 13,166
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.83% 33.91% 30.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,798 6,822 9,246
10th Percentile £358 £350 £350
25th Percentile £417 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £715 £756 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £489 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +2.91% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 235 542
10th Percentile £35.25 £25.98 £31.35
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% +2.97%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.63 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.85 £84.80 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.84% -4.62% +4.00%

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 17 June 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 17 June 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 17 June 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 -2 4,534 £525 -4.55% 4,335
London -3 2,609 £550 -4.35% 1,379
UK excluding London -1 2,124 £500 - 4,127
Work from Home -2 1,551 £525 -4.55% 3,270
North of England +10 774 £481 -1.28% 865
Yorkshire 0 427 £500 - 300
South East -6 399 £525 +3.19% 1,049
Scotland +2 318 £440 -7.37% 386
North West +5 269 £490 +3.16% 405
South West -3 263 £500 -9.09% 376
Midlands -14 229 £484 +7.64% 463
West Midlands -12 181 £477 +3.14% 206
East of England -11 127 £500 - 554
North East +9 90 £450 +2.86% 163
East Midlands -14 47 £498 +17.18% 256
Wales -7 28 £475 +2.15% 233
Northern Ireland +13 26 £408 -30.64% 265

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
1 282 (5.18%) Apache Spark
2 246 (4.52%) Apache Airflow
3 189 (3.47%) Apache
4 163 (2.99%) Confluence
5 56 (1.03%) Jupyter
6 48 (0.88%) SAS
7 46 (0.84%) SharePoint
8 22 (0.40%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.37%) nginx
10 18 (0.33%) Palantir Foundry
11 17 (0.31%) ArcGIS
12 15 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 11 (0.20%) IIS
14 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
15 9 (0.17%) Appian
16 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
17 7 (0.13%) CICS
18 6 (0.11%) Camunda
18 6 (0.11%) CMS
18 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 117 (2.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.42%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 22 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
5 20 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.22%) CPLEX
7 3 (0.055%) LaTeX
7 3 (0.055%) Microsoft Project
8 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.40%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.17%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
7 5 (0.092%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.092%) Dynamics CRM
8 4 (0.073%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.055%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.055%) Sage X3
9 3 (0.055%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.055%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.037%) Endur
10 2 (0.037%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.037%) Odoo
10 2 (0.037%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.037%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,036 (37.38%) AWS
2 1,815 (33.32%) Azure
3 789 (14.49%) GCP
4 650 (11.93%) GitHub
5 525 (9.64%) Power Platform
6 483 (8.87%) Serverless
7 405 (7.44%) Amazon S3
8 397 (7.29%) Azure DevOps
9 355 (6.52%) AWS Lambda
10 349 (6.41%) GitHub Actions
11 266 (4.88%) Snowflake
12 247 (4.53%) Azure Data Factory
13 194 (3.56%) dbt
14 170 (3.12%) AWS CloudFormation
15 163 (2.99%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 161 (2.96%) Amazon EKS
17 157 (2.88%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 153 (2.81%) OpenShift
19 128 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
20 119 (2.18%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 216 (3.97%) Firewall
2 148 (2.72%) DNS
3 108 (1.98%) Network Security
4 105 (1.93%) WAN
5 104 (1.91%) BGP
6 89 (1.63%) TCP/IP
7 85 (1.56%) VPN
8 67 (1.23%) OSPF
9 58 (1.06%) HTTP
10 57 (1.05%) BIG-IP
10 57 (1.05%) SAN
11 51 (0.94%) SD-WAN
12 50 (0.92%) VXLAN
13 48 (0.88%) SSL
14 44 (0.81%) VLAN
15 39 (0.72%) Ethernet VPN
16 38 (0.70%) LAN
17 37 (0.68%) DHCP
18 36 (0.66%) MPLS
18 36 (0.66%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 460 (8.45%) Power BI
2 346 (6.35%) PostgreSQL
3 294 (5.40%) Data Warehouse
4 251 (4.61%) SQL Server
5 227 (4.17%) Data Lake
6 196 (3.60%) Tableau
7 187 (3.43%) Relational Database
8 169 (3.10%) Metadata
9 168 (3.08%) NoSQL
10 161 (2.96%) Big Data
11 142 (2.61%) Amazon Athena
12 136 (2.50%) BigQuery
13 133 (2.44%) Amazon Redshift
14 130 (2.39%) Delta Lake
15 121 (2.22%) MongoDB
16 99 (1.82%) DynamoDB
17 94 (1.73%) Amazon RDS
18 87 (1.60%) MySQL
19 73 (1.34%) Hadoop
20 72 (1.32%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 663 (12.17%) Git
2 491 (9.01%) Jenkins
3 383 (7.03%) GitLab
4 287 (5.27%) JIRA
5 74 (1.36%) MLflow
6 72 (1.32%) Selenium
7 57 (1.05%) Postman
8 36 (0.66%) JMeter
9 33 (0.61%) Cucumber
9 33 (0.61%) Cypress.io
10 32 (0.59%) SonarQube
11 31 (0.57%) Bitbucket
12 30 (0.55%) Artifactory
13 27 (0.50%) JUnit
13 27 (0.50%) REST Assured
14 26 (0.48%) Maven
15 24 (0.44%) Sonatype Nexus
16 21 (0.39%) Gatling
17 20 (0.37%) Robot Framework
17 20 (0.37%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,172 (21.52%) Social Skills
2 1,115 (20.47%) Finance
3 729 (13.38%) Analytical Skills
4 509 (9.34%) Public Sector
5 397 (7.29%) Banking
6 189 (3.47%) Front Office
7 138 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
8 124 (2.28%) Investment Banking
9 104 (1.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 75 (1.38%) Retail
11 74 (1.36%) Marketing
12 61 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.03%) Legal
14 52 (0.95%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.84%) Financial Institution
16 44 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
16 44 (0.81%) Publishing
17 37 (0.68%) Military
18 32 (0.59%) Manufacturing
19 31 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 993 (18.23%) Developer
2 853 (15.66%) Data Engineer
3 813 (14.93%) Senior
4 517 (9.49%) Python Developer
5 351 (6.44%) Lead
6 346 (6.35%) Python Engineer
7 323 (5.93%) Architect
8 293 (5.38%) DevOps Engineer
9 282 (5.18%) Analyst
10 262 (4.81%) Software Engineer
11 248 (4.55%) AWS Engineer
12 241 (4.42%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 210 (3.86%) Data Scientist
14 174 (3.19%) Senior Developer
15 169 (3.10%) Senior Data Engineer
16 162 (2.97%) Azure Engineer
17 161 (2.96%) Platform Engineer
18 156 (2.86%) Full-Stack Developer
19 151 (2.77%) Cloud Engineer
20 145 (2.66%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 421 (7.73%) REST
2 383 (7.03%) React
3 370 (6.79%) PySpark
4 324 (5.95%) Kafka
5 248 (4.55%) .NET
6 217 (3.98%) Node.js
7 207 (3.80%) RESTful
8 204 (3.75%) Pandas
9 203 (3.73%) FastAPI
10 182 (3.34%) JSON
11 164 (3.01%) PyTorch
12 147 (2.70%) Django
13 129 (2.37%) Flask
14 125 (2.29%) LangChain
15 124 (2.28%) NumPy
16 113 (2.07%) TensorFlow
17 111 (2.04%) AngularJS
17 111 (2.04%) OAuth
18 110 (2.02%) scikit-learn
19 105 (1.93%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 678 (12.45%) Cloud Native
2 269 (4.94%) Distributed Systems
3 151 (2.77%) Algorithms
4 150 (2.75%) AI Agents
5 148 (2.72%) Onboarding
6 147 (2.70%) Data Centre
7 137 (2.52%) Product Ownership
8 129 (2.37%) Data Structures
9 116 (2.13%) Data Protection Act
10 115 (2.11%) Legacy Systems
11 113 (2.07%) Management Information System
12 112 (2.06%) Derivative
13 100 (1.84%) Equities
14 99 (1.82%) Hybrid Cloud
15 97 (1.78%) Fixed Income
16 89 (1.63%) Security Posture
17 81 (1.49%) Enterprise Software
18 71 (1.30%) Public Cloud
19 60 (1.10%) Greenfield Project
20 57 (1.05%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 615 (11.29%) Linux
2 297 (5.45%) Windows
3 219 (4.02%) Unix
4 118 (2.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 78 (1.43%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.79%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.59%) VMS
8 26 (0.48%) AIX
9 24 (0.44%) Solaris
10 23 (0.42%) Android
11 20 (0.37%) CentOS
12 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
13 15 (0.28%) Mac OS
14 12 (0.22%) zOS
15 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
16 7 (0.13%) Debian
16 7 (0.13%) Rocky
17 5 (0.092%) Amazon Linux
17 5 (0.092%) Embedded Linux
17 5 (0.092%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,057 (37.76%) CI/CD
2 1,496 (27.46%) DevOps
3 1,333 (24.47%) AI
4 1,185 (21.76%) Agile
5 1,087 (19.96%) Analytics
6 986 (18.10%) Infrastructure as Code
7 962 (17.66%) Data Pipeline
8 933 (17.13%) Problem-Solving
9 852 (15.64%) Machine Learning
10 764 (14.03%) Data Engineering
11 727 (13.35%) Data Modelling
12 723 (13.27%) Containerisation
13 692 (12.70%) ETL
14 684 (12.56%) Software Engineering
15 607 (11.14%) Data Science
16 589 (10.81%) Observability
17 552 (10.13%) Test Automation
18 537 (9.86%) Business Intelligence
19 507 (9.31%) LLM
20 462 (8.48%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,784 (32.75%) SQL
2 775 (14.23%) Java
3 641 (11.77%) PowerShell
4 599 (11.00%) Bash
5 467 (8.57%) JavaScript
6 384 (7.05%) TypeScript
7 343 (6.30%) C#
8 200 (3.67%) Go
9 161 (2.96%) R
10 145 (2.66%) C++
11 123 (2.26%) Scala
12 105 (1.93%) Shell Script
13 83 (1.52%) Bicep
14 79 (1.45%) Perl
15 65 (1.19%) Ruby
16 58 (1.06%) PL/SQL
17 56 (1.03%) T-SQL
18 55 (1.01%) C
19 51 (0.94%) Groovy
20 47 (0.86%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,203 (22.09%) Security Cleared
2 972 (17.84%) SC Cleared
3 394 (7.23%) Degree
4 158 (2.90%) DV Cleared
5 152 (2.79%) Computer Science Degree
6 131 (2.40%) BPSS Clearance
7 113 (2.07%) AWS Certification
8 112 (2.06%) Azure Certification
9 88 (1.62%) CISSP
10 75 (1.38%) Cisco Certification
11 70 (1.29%) Master's Degree
12 53 (0.97%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 52 (0.95%) CCNP
14 39 (0.72%) CISM
15 33 (0.61%) ISTQB
15 33 (0.61%) Microsoft Certification
15 33 (0.61%) PhD
16 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 26 (0.48%) CCIE
18 22 (0.40%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 551 (10.12%) Data Quality
2 225 (4.13%) QA
3 133 (2.44%) GDPR
4 111 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 106 (1.95%) NIST
6 84 (1.54%) Accessibility
7 33 (0.61%) SLA
8 26 (0.48%) PCI DSS
9 25 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.44%) HIPAA
10 24 (0.44%) WCAG
11 20 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
12 16 (0.29%) SOC 2
13 15 (0.28%) NCSC
14 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
15 10 (0.18%) Disclosure Scotland
16 9 (0.17%) GRC
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.11%) PSD2
System Software
1 827 (15.18%) Docker
2 141 (2.59%) Active Directory
3 107 (1.96%) VMware Infrastructure
4 73 (1.34%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.73%) vSphere
6 38 (0.70%) VMware NSX
7 34 (0.62%) Firmware
8 31 (0.57%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.33%) NFS
11 16 (0.29%) KVM
12 13 (0.24%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.24%) Squid
13 10 (0.18%) SRDF
14 9 (0.17%) Ceph
15 8 (0.15%) HDFS
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
17 4 (0.073%) Slurm Workload Manager
17 4 (0.073%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,149 (21.09%) Terraform
2 969 (17.79%) Kubernetes
3 554 (10.17%) Ansible
4 326 (5.98%) Grafana
5 274 (5.03%) Prometheus
6 73 (1.34%) Puppet
7 56 (1.03%) Argo
8 51 (0.94%) Istio
9 45 (0.83%) vRealize
10 39 (0.72%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.59%) vCenter Server
12 29 (0.53%) Kibana
13 28 (0.51%) Single Sign-On
14 26 (0.48%) Control-M
15 25 (0.46%) Nessus
15 25 (0.46%) ZABBIX
16 24 (0.44%) Nagios
17 23 (0.42%) Microsoft Intune
18 22 (0.40%) NetBackup
19 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 592 (10.87%) Microsoft
2 576 (10.57%) Databricks
3 294 (5.40%) Google
4 246 (4.52%) Oracle
5 211 (3.87%) Splunk
6 169 (3.10%) VMware
7 141 (2.59%) OpenAI
8 126 (2.31%) Cisco
9 124 (2.28%) Red Hat
10 98 (1.80%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.54%) F5
12 82 (1.51%) Dynatrace
12 82 (1.51%) Palo Alto
13 78 (1.43%) CyberArk
14 76 (1.40%) Informatica
15 74 (1.36%) IBM
16 68 (1.25%) BeyondTrust
17 58 (1.06%) Foundry
18 53 (0.97%) Arista
19 52 (0.95%) Fortinet