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 27 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 10 14
Rank change year-on-year -2 +4 -3
Contract jobs citing Python 5,635 4,275 3,976
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.67% 12.97% 9.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.02% 39.34% 31.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,672 2,875 2,893
10th Percentile £368 £360 £375
25th Percentile £427 £434 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £530 £575
Median % change year-on-year -0.94% -7.83% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £706
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £507
% change year-on-year +2.04% -3.35% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 133 70 121
10th Percentile £28.80 £26.13 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.50 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -16.67% -5.42%
75th Percentile £74.00 £57.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £66.25
% change year-on-year +5.00% -24.53% +12.77%

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 14,079 10,868 12,475
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.67% 32.98% 31.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,151 7,328 8,818
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £424 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.40% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £498
% change year-on-year +3.16% -4.62% -0.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 522 258 431
10th Percentile £33.70 £27.98 £30.00
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.06 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.38 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.30% -13.27% +7.35%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.18 £80.89 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +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 27 July 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 27 July 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 27 July 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 4,756 £538 -2.27% 2,826
London -4 2,732 £570 -0.87% 1,577
UK excluding London -6 2,225 £500 +2.04% 1,659
Work from Home -5 1,560 £525 -4.55% 1,046
North of England +3 774 £492 +3.58% 420
South East -10 438 £538 +7.50% 485
Yorkshire +2 409 £500 +1.75% 117
Scotland +3 312 £430 -9.47% 104
South West 0 292 £500 -6.98% 222
North West +2 288 £525 +10.53% 218
Midlands -14 255 £470 +4.44% 196
West Midlands -11 204 £469 +4.11% 103
East of England -14 138 £500 -0.50% 180
North East 0 88 £425 -2.86% 90
East Midlands -9 50 £488 +9.17% 93
Wales -5 31 £500 +17.65% 47
Northern Ireland +6 19 £363 -36.26% 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
1 289 (5.13%) Apache Spark
2 270 (4.79%) Apache Airflow
3 213 (3.78%) Apache
4 186 (3.30%) Confluence
5 54 (0.96%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.87%) SAS
7 47 (0.83%) SharePoint
8 26 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.41%) nginx
10 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
11 20 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.27%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.21%) IIS
14 9 (0.16%) CMS
14 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.089%) JBoss
Applications
1 120 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
5 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
6 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
6 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
8 1 (0.018%) Navisworks
8 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.018%) Revit
8 1 (0.018%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 25 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.20%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
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%) SimCorp Dimension
10 2 (0.035%) Endur
10 2 (0.035%) Fidessa
10 2 (0.035%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.035%) Global One
10 2 (0.035%) IBM Planning Analytics
10 2 (0.035%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.035%) Remedy AR System
Cloud Services
1 2,097 (37.21%) AWS
2 1,892 (33.58%) Azure
3 843 (14.96%) GCP
4 690 (12.24%) GitHub
5 520 (9.23%) Power Platform
6 480 (8.52%) Serverless
7 414 (7.35%) Amazon S3
8 410 (7.28%) Azure DevOps
9 381 (6.76%) GitHub Actions
10 362 (6.42%) AWS Lambda
11 296 (5.25%) Snowflake
12 233 (4.13%) Azure Data Factory
13 219 (3.89%) dbt
14 194 (3.44%) AWS CloudFormation
15 184 (3.27%) Amazon EKS
16 180 (3.19%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 156 (2.77%) OpenShift
18 148 (2.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 134 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
20 132 (2.34%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 259 (4.60%) Firewall
2 192 (3.41%) DNS
3 129 (2.29%) TCP/IP
4 120 (2.13%) BGP
5 111 (1.97%) Network Security
5 111 (1.97%) VPN
5 111 (1.97%) WAN
6 75 (1.33%) OSPF
7 68 (1.21%) DHCP
8 59 (1.05%) VLAN
9 54 (0.96%) BIG-IP
9 54 (0.96%) SAN
9 54 (0.96%) SD-WAN
10 53 (0.94%) HTTP
11 52 (0.92%) VXLAN
12 50 (0.89%) SSL
13 43 (0.76%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 43 (0.76%) SNMP
14 40 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
15 37 (0.66%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 462 (8.20%) Power BI
2 340 (6.03%) PostgreSQL
3 318 (5.64%) Data Warehouse
4 227 (4.03%) SQL Server
5 201 (3.57%) Data Lake
6 198 (3.51%) Tableau
7 195 (3.46%) Relational Database
8 184 (3.27%) Metadata
9 170 (3.02%) NoSQL
10 160 (2.84%) Big Data
11 154 (2.73%) BigQuery
12 138 (2.45%) Amazon Redshift
13 137 (2.43%) Amazon Athena
14 128 (2.27%) MongoDB
15 120 (2.13%) Delta Lake
16 110 (1.95%) Amazon RDS
16 110 (1.95%) DynamoDB
17 84 (1.49%) MySQL
18 72 (1.28%) Snowflake Schema
19 70 (1.24%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 684 (12.14%) Git
2 508 (9.02%) Jenkins
3 406 (7.20%) GitLab
4 309 (5.48%) JIRA
5 83 (1.47%) Selenium
6 69 (1.22%) MLflow
7 51 (0.91%) Postman
8 44 (0.78%) Bitbucket
9 39 (0.69%) JMeter
10 37 (0.66%) SonarQube
11 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
12 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
13 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
14 29 (0.51%) Claude Code
15 27 (0.48%) JUnit
15 27 (0.48%) Maven
15 27 (0.48%) Sonatype Nexus
16 24 (0.43%) Gatling
17 19 (0.34%) Zephyr
General
1 1,223 (21.70%) Social Skills
2 1,198 (21.26%) Finance
3 784 (13.91%) Analytical Skills
4 562 (9.97%) Public Sector
5 433 (7.68%) Banking
6 205 (3.64%) Front Office
7 129 (2.29%) Documentation Skills
8 124 (2.20%) Investment Banking
9 109 (1.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 98 (1.74%) Retail
11 85 (1.51%) Marketing
12 70 (1.24%) Telecoms
13 65 (1.15%) Pharmaceutical
14 61 (1.08%) Legal
15 51 (0.91%) Military
16 49 (0.87%) Financial Institution
17 48 (0.85%) Publishing
18 45 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
19 39 (0.69%) Manufacturing
20 32 (0.57%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 962 (17.07%) Developer
2 895 (15.88%) Senior
3 849 (15.07%) Data Engineer
4 505 (8.96%) Python Developer
5 442 (7.84%) Lead
6 400 (7.10%) Python Engineer
7 327 (5.80%) DevOps Engineer
8 319 (5.66%) Software Engineer
9 295 (5.24%) Architect
10 285 (5.06%) Analyst
11 257 (4.56%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 247 (4.38%) AWS Engineer
13 220 (3.90%) Data Scientist
14 195 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
15 185 (3.28%) Cloud Engineer
16 177 (3.14%) Senior Developer
17 173 (3.07%) Azure Engineer
18 172 (3.05%) Senior Data Engineer
19 147 (2.61%) Data Analyst
20 139 (2.47%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 416 (7.38%) REST
2 365 (6.48%) PySpark
3 358 (6.35%) React
4 354 (6.28%) Kafka
5 236 (4.19%) .NET
6 215 (3.82%) Node.js
7 213 (3.78%) FastAPI
8 209 (3.71%) JSON
9 205 (3.64%) RESTful
10 193 (3.43%) Pandas
11 175 (3.11%) Django
12 151 (2.68%) PyTorch
13 143 (2.54%) LangChain
14 119 (2.11%) NumPy
15 114 (2.02%) Flask
16 105 (1.86%) scikit-learn
17 103 (1.83%) OAuth
18 102 (1.81%) Spring
18 102 (1.81%) TensorFlow
19 97 (1.72%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 754 (13.38%) Cloud Native
2 322 (5.71%) Distributed Systems
3 198 (3.51%) AI Agents
3 198 (3.51%) Onboarding
4 159 (2.82%) Data Centre
5 154 (2.73%) Product Ownership
6 148 (2.63%) Algorithms
7 136 (2.41%) Data Structures
8 124 (2.20%) Legacy Systems
9 116 (2.06%) Hybrid Cloud
10 114 (2.02%) Data Protection Act
10 114 (2.02%) Derivative
11 104 (1.85%) Fixed Income
12 102 (1.81%) Management Information System
13 95 (1.69%) Equities
14 82 (1.46%) Security Posture
15 67 (1.19%) Enterprise Software
15 67 (1.19%) Public Cloud
16 65 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
17 64 (1.14%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 691 (12.26%) Linux
2 323 (5.73%) Windows
3 216 (3.83%) Unix
4 132 (2.34%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 73 (1.30%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.57%) VMS
8 29 (0.51%) AIX
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 16 (0.28%) Solaris
11 15 (0.27%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Debian
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 5 (0.089%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,139 (37.96%) CI/CD
2 1,569 (27.84%) DevOps
3 1,403 (24.90%) AI
4 1,272 (22.57%) Agile
5 1,154 (20.48%) Analytics
6 1,082 (19.20%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,015 (18.01%) Data Pipeline
8 917 (16.27%) Problem-Solving
9 904 (16.04%) Machine Learning
10 841 (14.92%) Software Engineering
11 816 (14.48%) Data Engineering
12 775 (13.75%) Containerisation
13 750 (13.31%) Data Modelling
14 683 (12.12%) ETL
15 661 (11.73%) Observability
16 635 (11.27%) Data Science
17 576 (10.22%) Test Automation
18 548 (9.72%) Business Intelligence
19 529 (9.39%) Continuous Improvement
19 529 (9.39%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,813 (32.17%) SQL
2 803 (14.25%) Java
3 718 (12.74%) Bash
4 692 (12.28%) PowerShell
5 451 (8.00%) JavaScript
6 395 (7.01%) TypeScript
7 313 (5.55%) C#
8 214 (3.80%) Go
9 160 (2.84%) R
10 139 (2.47%) C++
11 129 (2.29%) Shell Script
12 122 (2.17%) Scala
13 109 (1.93%) Bicep
14 74 (1.31%) Perl
15 57 (1.01%) PL/SQL
15 57 (1.01%) Rust
16 56 (0.99%) Groovy
16 56 (0.99%) Ruby
17 54 (0.96%) C
18 49 (0.87%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,272 (22.57%) Security Cleared
2 1,015 (18.01%) SC Cleared
3 429 (7.61%) Degree
4 197 (3.50%) DV Cleared
5 148 (2.63%) Computer Science Degree
6 138 (2.45%) AWS Certification
7 133 (2.36%) BPSS Clearance
8 129 (2.29%) Azure Certification
9 90 (1.60%) CISSP
10 84 (1.49%) Cisco Certification
11 82 (1.46%) Master's Degree
12 54 (0.96%) CCNP
13 45 (0.80%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 41 (0.73%) Microsoft Certification
14 41 (0.73%) PhD
15 38 (0.67%) CISM
16 34 (0.60%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 30 (0.53%) ISTQB
18 29 (0.51%) CCIE
19 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 575 (10.20%) Data Quality
2 254 (4.51%) QA
3 117 (2.08%) GDPR
4 106 (1.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 105 (1.86%) NIST
6 94 (1.67%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.60%) SLA
8 26 (0.46%) WCAG
9 23 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
9 23 (0.41%) NCSC
10 20 (0.35%) PCI DSS
10 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
12 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
13 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
14 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
15 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
15 8 (0.14%) GRC
16 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 891 (15.81%) Docker
2 145 (2.57%) Active Directory
3 128 (2.27%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.33%) Virtual Machines
5 49 (0.87%) vSphere
6 39 (0.69%) Hyper-V
7 37 (0.66%) VMware NSX
8 32 (0.57%) Firmware
9 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) NFS
11 15 (0.27%) KVM
12 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 11 (0.20%) Ceph
15 10 (0.18%) SRDF
16 9 (0.16%) HDFS
16 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.12%) Postfix
18 6 (0.11%) PowerHA
19 4 (0.071%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 1,249 (22.17%) Terraform
2 1,075 (19.08%) Kubernetes
3 595 (10.56%) Ansible
4 352 (6.25%) Grafana
5 273 (4.84%) Prometheus
6 81 (1.44%) Puppet
7 76 (1.35%) Argo
8 55 (0.98%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Istio
10 39 (0.69%) vCenter Server
11 33 (0.59%) vRealize
12 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
13 27 (0.48%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
14 25 (0.44%) Nagios
14 25 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
15 22 (0.39%) Control-M
16 19 (0.34%) Nessus
16 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
17 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 650 (11.54%) Microsoft
2 561 (9.96%) Databricks
3 327 (5.80%) Google
4 243 (4.31%) Oracle
5 209 (3.71%) Splunk
6 177 (3.14%) VMware
7 151 (2.68%) OpenAI
8 139 (2.47%) Cisco
9 114 (2.02%) ServiceNow
10 105 (1.86%) Red Hat
11 92 (1.63%) Dynatrace
11 92 (1.63%) F5
12 88 (1.56%) Palo Alto
13 83 (1.47%) IBM
14 81 (1.44%) Informatica
15 70 (1.24%) Fortinet
16 67 (1.19%) Foundry
17 65 (1.15%) CyberArk
18 59 (1.05%) Salesforce
19 58 (1.03%) SAP