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 6 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
6 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 10 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 +2 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,625 4,362 4,147
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.29% 13.29% 11.01%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.47% 40.45% 34.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,660 2,815 2,823
10th Percentile £375 £358 £363
25th Percentile £444 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £638 £700
90th Percentile £750 £750 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £500 £510
% change year-on-year +1.00% -1.96% -2.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 128 89 97
10th Percentile £35.78 £28.25 £20.80
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.00 £40.06
Median hourly rate £62.45 £50.00 £67.02
Median % change year-on-year +24.90% -25.40% +3.11%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.63 £78.00 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -28.57% +7.69%

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 14,253 10,783 12,084
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.08% 32.86% 32.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,255 7,085 7,960
10th Percentile £363 £341 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £623 £648
90th Percentile £725 £730 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 548 301 330
10th Percentile £23.67 £29.00 £26.22
25th Percentile £46.00 £41.25 £46.05
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.98 £75.00 £77.63
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 6 October 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 6 October 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 6 October 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 -5 4,782 £550 +4.76% 11,546
London -4 2,841 £575 - 6,960
UK excluding London -9 2,145 £505 +1.00% 5,621
Work from Home -6 1,550 £535 -1.48% 4,868
North of England 0 744 £500 +5.26% 1,217
South East -4 451 £544 +8.75% 1,352
Yorkshire -2 374 £500 - 380
Scotland -1 312 £467 -6.60% 713
North West -1 290 £525 +19.32% 651
South West -4 268 £550 - 640
Midlands -22 224 £500 - 599
West Midlands -20 187 £523 +4.50% 348
East of England -15 142 £484 -12.05% 787
North East 0 89 £425 -8.11% 194
East Midlands -11 37 £456 +11.28% 251
Wales -13 26 £530 +23.98% 185
Northern Ireland +2 17 £369 -37.23% 182

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
1 290 (5.16%) Apache Airflow
2 275 (4.89%) Apache Spark
3 229 (4.07%) Apache
4 155 (2.76%) Confluence
5 57 (1.01%) Jupyter
6 55 (0.98%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.59%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 26 (0.46%) nginx
10 23 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
11 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
11 22 (0.39%) IIS
12 9 (0.16%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
15 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.089%) Camunda
15 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 100 (1.78%) Microsoft Excel
2 37 (0.66%) Chatbot
3 21 (0.37%) Microsoft Office
4 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
4 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
7 3 (0.053%) Revit
8 2 (0.036%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) AutoCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Civil 3D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
2 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.28%) Aladdin
4 11 (0.20%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.11%) Front Arena
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) SAP IBP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Actimize
10 3 (0.053%) Cloudability
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 2,052 (36.48%) AWS
2 1,929 (34.29%) Azure
3 916 (16.28%) GCP
4 752 (13.37%) GitHub
5 482 (8.57%) Power Platform
6 471 (8.37%) Serverless
7 443 (7.88%) Azure DevOps
8 438 (7.79%) GitHub Actions
9 391 (6.95%) Amazon S3
10 343 (6.10%) AWS Lambda
10 343 (6.10%) Snowflake
11 245 (4.36%) dbt
12 214 (3.80%) Azure Data Factory
13 203 (3.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 195 (3.47%) Amazon EKS
15 184 (3.27%) AWS CloudFormation
16 180 (3.20%) Entra ID
17 147 (2.61%) Amazon EC2
18 130 (2.31%) SaaS
19 127 (2.26%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 288 (5.12%) Firewall
2 208 (3.70%) DNS
3 171 (3.04%) Network Security
4 151 (2.68%) TCP/IP
5 128 (2.28%) VPN
6 125 (2.22%) BGP
7 113 (2.01%) WAN
8 82 (1.46%) DHCP
9 75 (1.33%) SD-WAN
10 74 (1.32%) OSPF
11 63 (1.12%) BIG-IP
12 59 (1.05%) SSL
13 55 (0.98%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 55 (0.98%) VLAN
13 55 (0.98%) VXLAN
14 50 (0.89%) HTTP
15 47 (0.84%) Ethernet VPN
16 44 (0.78%) Broadband
17 42 (0.75%) Wireless
18 40 (0.71%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 431 (7.66%) Power BI
2 324 (5.76%) Data Warehouse
3 317 (5.64%) PostgreSQL
4 231 (4.11%) Metadata
5 202 (3.59%) Relational Database
6 198 (3.52%) Data Lake
6 198 (3.52%) SQL Server
7 182 (3.24%) BigQuery
8 162 (2.88%) Tableau
9 156 (2.77%) NoSQL
10 134 (2.38%) Big Data
11 132 (2.35%) Amazon RDS
11 132 (2.35%) Amazon Redshift
12 123 (2.19%) MongoDB
13 122 (2.17%) Delta Lake
14 118 (2.10%) Amazon Athena
15 104 (1.85%) DynamoDB
16 101 (1.80%) MySQL
17 74 (1.32%) Redis
18 61 (1.08%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 844 (15.00%) Git
2 527 (9.37%) Jenkins
3 497 (8.84%) GitLab
4 310 (5.51%) JIRA
5 119 (2.12%) Selenium
6 73 (1.30%) Postman
7 61 (1.08%) JMeter
8 60 (1.07%) Claude Code
9 55 (0.98%) SonarQube
10 49 (0.87%) MLflow
11 46 (0.82%) Bitbucket
12 41 (0.73%) Cucumber
13 39 (0.69%) REST Assured
14 37 (0.66%) Sonatype Nexus
15 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
16 34 (0.60%) Maven
17 32 (0.57%) Cypress.io
18 31 (0.55%) LoadRunner
19 28 (0.50%) Gatling
20 24 (0.43%) Zephyr
General
1 1,322 (23.50%) Social Skills
2 1,304 (23.18%) Finance
3 838 (14.90%) Analytical Skills
4 546 (9.71%) Public Sector
5 526 (9.35%) Banking
6 172 (3.06%) Front Office
7 154 (2.74%) Investment Banking
8 116 (2.06%) Retail
9 111 (1.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 100 (1.78%) Documentation Skills
11 86 (1.53%) Marketing
11 86 (1.53%) Telecoms
12 64 (1.14%) Military
13 54 (0.96%) Law
14 51 (0.91%) Aerospace
15 49 (0.87%) Pharmaceutical
16 48 (0.85%) Financial Institution
17 46 (0.82%) Legal
18 41 (0.73%) Publishing
19 37 (0.66%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,010 (17.96%) Senior
2 897 (15.95%) Developer
3 826 (14.68%) Data Engineer
4 496 (8.82%) Lead
5 475 (8.44%) Python Developer
6 419 (7.45%) Python Engineer
7 372 (6.61%) DevOps Engineer
8 315 (5.60%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 279 (4.96%) Software Engineer
10 276 (4.91%) Analyst
11 234 (4.16%) Architect
12 217 (3.86%) AWS Engineer
13 194 (3.45%) Cloud Engineer
14 193 (3.43%) Azure Engineer
15 190 (3.38%) Platform Engineer
16 189 (3.36%) Senior Data Engineer
16 189 (3.36%) Senior Developer
17 178 (3.16%) Data Scientist
18 149 (2.65%) Network Engineer
19 142 (2.52%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,407 (25.01%) Terraform
2 551 (9.80%) REST
3 377 (6.70%) Kafka
4 365 (6.49%) PySpark
5 307 (5.46%) React
6 237 (4.21%) .NET
7 219 (3.89%) FastAPI
8 211 (3.75%) Django
9 210 (3.73%) JSON
10 193 (3.43%) RESTful
11 161 (2.86%) LangChain
11 161 (2.86%) pytest
12 147 (2.61%) Node.js
13 143 (2.54%) Pandas
14 130 (2.31%) OAuth
15 123 (2.19%) Flask
16 113 (2.01%) LangGraph
17 111 (1.97%) YAML
18 106 (1.88%) HTML
19 104 (1.85%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 811 (14.42%) Cloud Native
2 302 (5.37%) AI Agents
3 291 (5.17%) Distributed Systems
4 265 (4.71%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.88%) Data Centre
6 151 (2.68%) Data Structures
7 149 (2.65%) Product Ownership
8 135 (2.40%) Legacy Systems
9 123 (2.19%) Algorithms
10 114 (2.03%) Enterprise Software
11 111 (1.97%) Hybrid Cloud
12 108 (1.92%) Management Information System
13 103 (1.83%) Data Protection Act
14 101 (1.80%) Derivative
15 93 (1.65%) Security Posture
16 87 (1.55%) PKI
16 87 (1.55%) Public Cloud
17 79 (1.40%) Equities
18 67 (1.19%) Linux Command Line
18 67 (1.19%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 789 (14.03%) Linux
2 347 (6.17%) Windows
3 246 (4.37%) Unix
4 156 (2.77%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 93 (1.65%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.64%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 14 (0.25%) Android
11 13 (0.23%) AIX
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
12 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
13 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
13 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 8 (0.14%) zOS
14 5 (0.089%) Embedded Linux
14 5 (0.089%) FreeRTOS
14 5 (0.089%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,406 (42.77%) CI/CD
2 1,662 (29.55%) DevOps
3 1,596 (28.37%) AI
4 1,314 (23.36%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,271 (22.60%) Agile
6 1,084 (19.27%) Analytics
7 979 (17.40%) Data Pipeline
8 957 (17.01%) Software Engineering
9 883 (15.70%) Problem-Solving
10 852 (15.15%) Data Engineering
11 837 (14.88%) Machine Learning
12 782 (13.90%) Containerisation
13 771 (13.71%) Observability
14 767 (13.64%) Data Modelling
15 707 (12.57%) Test Automation
16 674 (11.98%) Validation
17 664 (11.80%) ETL
18 663 (11.79%) Continuous Improvement
19 599 (10.65%) Platform Engineering
20 588 (10.45%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,834 (32.60%) SQL
2 792 (14.08%) Bash
3 782 (13.90%) Java
4 759 (13.49%) PowerShell
5 440 (7.82%) JavaScript
6 348 (6.19%) TypeScript
7 308 (5.48%) C#
8 228 (4.05%) Go
9 157 (2.79%) Shell Script
10 136 (2.42%) Bicep
11 135 (2.40%) R
12 131 (2.33%) C++
13 120 (2.13%) Scala
14 106 (1.88%) Perl
15 61 (1.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 56 (1.00%) Groovy
17 51 (0.91%) C
18 50 (0.89%) Rust
18 50 (0.89%) T-SQL
19 48 (0.85%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,383 (24.59%) Security Cleared
2 1,111 (19.75%) SC Cleared
3 402 (7.15%) Degree
4 254 (4.52%) DV Cleared
5 154 (2.74%) Azure Certification
6 152 (2.70%) AWS Certification
7 146 (2.60%) Computer Science Degree
8 132 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.72%) CISSP
10 78 (1.39%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.26%) Master's Degree
12 49 (0.87%) Microsoft Certification
13 37 (0.66%) CCNP
14 34 (0.60%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) CCIE
16 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 30 (0.53%) CISM
16 30 (0.53%) DBS Check
17 29 (0.52%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 654 (11.63%) Data Quality
2 327 (5.81%) QA
3 116 (2.06%) NIST
4 102 (1.81%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 86 (1.53%) GDPR
6 82 (1.46%) Accessibility
7 41 (0.73%) SLA
8 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 31 (0.55%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 24 (0.43%) SOC 2
12 22 (0.39%) WCAG
13 18 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
14 15 (0.27%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.12%) Basel III
17 7 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 7 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 985 (17.51%) Docker
2 187 (3.32%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.35%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.19%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.89%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.62%) vSphere
7 31 (0.55%) VMware NSX
8 27 (0.48%) NFS
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 20 (0.36%) Firmware
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 8 (0.14%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) HDFS
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 8 (0.14%) zsh
15 6 (0.11%) Postfix
15 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
16 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,202 (21.37%) Kubernetes
2 656 (11.66%) Ansible
3 338 (6.01%) Grafana
4 252 (4.48%) Prometheus
5 83 (1.48%) Puppet
6 73 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 70 (1.24%) Argo
8 48 (0.85%) Single Sign-On
9 39 (0.69%) Kibana
10 35 (0.62%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) Packer
14 21 (0.37%) FortiGate
15 17 (0.30%) Podman
15 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
16 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) QRadar
17 15 (0.27%) ZABBIX
18 14 (0.25%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 759 (13.49%) Microsoft
2 585 (10.40%) Databricks
3 409 (7.27%) Google
4 244 (4.34%) Oracle
5 208 (3.70%) Splunk
6 172 (3.06%) OpenAI
7 169 (3.00%) VMware
8 141 (2.51%) Cisco
9 134 (2.38%) ServiceNow
10 101 (1.80%) Dynatrace
11 96 (1.71%) Red Hat
12 92 (1.64%) IBM
13 90 (1.60%) F5
13 90 (1.60%) Palo Alto
14 87 (1.55%) Foundry
15 72 (1.28%) CyberArk
16 70 (1.24%) Fortinet
17 69 (1.23%) Informatica
18 66 (1.17%) SAP
19 54 (0.96%) Salesforce