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

6 months to
1 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,601 4,259 4,015
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.44% 13.01% 10.40%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.92% 39.59% 32.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,662 2,810 2,854
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £439 £429 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.29% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £646 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 135 84 106
10th Percentile £30.20 £26.88 £21.25
25th Percentile £42.50 £34.94 £32.81
Median hourly rate £58.50 £50.00 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.00% -18.03% -6.15%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £84.39 £78.13
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.57 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +25.14% -28.57% +16.67%

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 14,032 10,758 12,213
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.15% 32.85% 31.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,117 7,162 8,420
10th Percentile £363 £343 £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 £745 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 524 299 357
10th Percentile £28.15 £29.00 £30.00
25th Percentile £48.75 £36.69 £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 £67.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.53 £79.00 £78.00
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 1 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 1 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 1 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 -4 4,787 £550 +2.42% 7,969
London -3 2,836 £575 - 5,249
UK excluding London -8 2,126 £500 - 3,746
Work from Home -5 1,530 £525 -4.50% 2,946
North of England +1 724 £500 +5.26% 777
South East -10 448 £543 +8.50% 908
Yorkshire 0 370 £500 +2.56% 223
South West -3 289 £528 +0.48% 517
Scotland -4 274 £450 -10.00% 438
North West -1 272 £500 +5.26% 439
Midlands -18 234 £495 +4.21% 373
West Midlands -18 189 £500 +5.26% 220
East of England -11 140 £500 -4.76% 520
North East -2 94 £425 -2.86% 121
East Midlands -12 45 £478 +13.81% 151
Wales -7 30 £530 +30.86% 79
Northern Ireland +3 17 £363 -30.95% 171

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
1 285 (5.09%) Apache Airflow
2 268 (4.78%) Apache Spark
3 222 (3.96%) Apache
4 163 (2.91%) Confluence
5 57 (1.02%) Jupyter
6 54 (0.96%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.70%) SAS
8 30 (0.54%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 21 (0.37%) nginx
12 14 (0.25%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
13 9 (0.16%) WebSphere
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.12%) Apache Superset
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.089%) CICS
17 5 (0.089%) JBoss
Applications
1 112 (2.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.34%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
7 15 (0.27%) MS Visio
8 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
9 2 (0.036%) Revit
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
10 1 (0.018%) Houdini
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.018%) Simulink
10 1 (0.018%) SPSS
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
10 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 19 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 11 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
6 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
8 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.071%) Front Arena
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.054%) Endur
10 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
10 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) IBM Planning Analytics
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,068 (36.92%) AWS
2 1,907 (34.05%) Azure
3 841 (15.02%) GCP
4 725 (12.94%) GitHub
5 503 (8.98%) Power Platform
6 485 (8.66%) Serverless
7 448 (8.00%) Azure DevOps
8 422 (7.53%) GitHub Actions
9 399 (7.12%) Amazon S3
10 361 (6.45%) AWS Lambda
11 330 (5.89%) Snowflake
12 227 (4.05%) dbt
13 220 (3.93%) Azure Data Factory
14 188 (3.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 180 (3.21%) AWS CloudFormation
16 173 (3.09%) Amazon EKS
17 138 (2.46%) Entra ID
18 137 (2.45%) Amazon EC2
19 133 (2.37%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 129 (2.30%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 278 (4.96%) Firewall
2 212 (3.79%) DNS
3 152 (2.71%) TCP/IP
4 136 (2.43%) Network Security
5 129 (2.30%) BGP
6 126 (2.25%) VPN
7 115 (2.05%) WAN
8 88 (1.57%) DHCP
9 76 (1.36%) OSPF
10 67 (1.20%) SD-WAN
11 62 (1.11%) VLAN
12 57 (1.02%) SSL
13 55 (0.98%) BIG-IP
13 55 (0.98%) VXLAN
14 51 (0.91%) HTTP
15 46 (0.82%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 44 (0.79%) SNMP
17 42 (0.75%) Ethernet VPN
18 41 (0.73%) SAN
19 39 (0.70%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 455 (8.12%) Power BI
2 329 (5.87%) Data Warehouse
3 312 (5.57%) PostgreSQL
4 218 (3.89%) SQL Server
5 205 (3.66%) Metadata
6 204 (3.64%) Relational Database
7 195 (3.48%) Tableau
8 187 (3.34%) Data Lake
9 161 (2.87%) BigQuery
10 153 (2.73%) NoSQL
11 139 (2.48%) Big Data
12 136 (2.43%) Amazon Redshift
13 131 (2.34%) Amazon Athena
14 126 (2.25%) Amazon RDS
15 124 (2.21%) Delta Lake
16 115 (2.05%) MongoDB
17 106 (1.89%) DynamoDB
18 92 (1.64%) MySQL
19 74 (1.32%) Redis
20 68 (1.21%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 737 (13.16%) Git
2 501 (8.94%) Jenkins
3 445 (7.95%) GitLab
4 284 (5.07%) JIRA
5 107 (1.91%) Selenium
6 61 (1.09%) JMeter
7 57 (1.02%) Postman
8 54 (0.96%) MLflow
9 53 (0.95%) SonarQube
10 49 (0.87%) Claude Code
11 40 (0.71%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
13 34 (0.61%) Maven
14 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
14 33 (0.59%) Gatling
15 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
16 31 (0.55%) REST Assured
16 31 (0.55%) Sonatype Nexus
17 27 (0.48%) LoadRunner
18 20 (0.36%) JUnit
General
1 1,284 (22.92%) Social Skills
2 1,214 (21.67%) Finance
3 848 (15.14%) Analytical Skills
4 560 (10.00%) Public Sector
5 452 (8.07%) Banking
6 182 (3.25%) Front Office
7 141 (2.52%) Investment Banking
8 118 (2.11%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 110 (1.96%) Retail
11 94 (1.68%) Marketing
12 82 (1.46%) Telecoms
13 60 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
14 59 (1.05%) Military
15 54 (0.96%) Legal
16 50 (0.89%) Aerospace
17 46 (0.82%) Financial Institution
17 46 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
18 45 (0.80%) Law
18 45 (0.80%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 940 (16.78%) Senior
2 899 (16.05%) Developer
3 814 (14.53%) Data Engineer
4 479 (8.55%) Lead
5 476 (8.50%) Python Developer
6 413 (7.37%) Python Engineer
7 340 (6.07%) DevOps Engineer
8 291 (5.20%) Analyst
9 287 (5.12%) Software Engineer
10 282 (5.03%) Architect
11 272 (4.86%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 232 (4.14%) AWS Engineer
13 193 (3.45%) Platform Engineer
14 191 (3.41%) Cloud Engineer
14 191 (3.41%) Data Scientist
15 184 (3.29%) Senior Developer
16 180 (3.21%) Senior Data Engineer
17 176 (3.14%) Azure Engineer
18 143 (2.55%) Data Analyst
19 139 (2.48%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,330 (23.75%) Terraform
2 472 (8.43%) REST
3 382 (6.82%) PySpark
4 356 (6.36%) Kafka
5 307 (5.48%) React
6 249 (4.45%) .NET
7 205 (3.66%) JSON
8 203 (3.62%) FastAPI
9 198 (3.54%) Django
10 187 (3.34%) RESTful
11 170 (3.04%) Node.js
11 170 (3.04%) Pandas
12 139 (2.48%) LangChain
13 137 (2.45%) pytest
14 118 (2.11%) PyTorch
15 114 (2.04%) YAML
16 112 (2.00%) Flask
16 112 (2.00%) OAuth
17 111 (1.98%) HTML
18 102 (1.82%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 780 (13.93%) Cloud Native
2 307 (5.48%) Distributed Systems
3 248 (4.43%) AI Agents
4 223 (3.98%) Onboarding
5 161 (2.87%) Data Centre
6 158 (2.82%) Product Ownership
7 138 (2.46%) Legacy Systems
8 137 (2.45%) Data Structures
9 134 (2.39%) Algorithms
10 117 (2.09%) Hybrid Cloud
11 108 (1.93%) Data Protection Act
11 108 (1.93%) Derivative
12 107 (1.91%) Management Information System
13 88 (1.57%) Equities
14 84 (1.50%) Enterprise Software
15 79 (1.41%) Security Posture
16 70 (1.25%) Linux Command Line
17 69 (1.23%) Public Cloud
18 63 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
19 62 (1.11%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 742 (13.25%) Linux
2 330 (5.89%) Windows
3 241 (4.30%) Unix
4 149 (2.66%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 89 (1.59%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.62%) VMS
8 27 (0.48%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 16 (0.29%) Android
10 16 (0.29%) CentOS
11 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
12 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.16%) zOS
13 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
13 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 5 (0.089%) Debian
15 5 (0.089%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,240 (39.99%) CI/CD
2 1,612 (28.78%) DevOps
3 1,482 (26.46%) AI
4 1,240 (22.14%) Agile
5 1,216 (21.71%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,108 (19.78%) Analytics
7 982 (17.53%) Data Pipeline
8 908 (16.21%) Problem-Solving
9 898 (16.03%) Software Engineering
10 842 (15.03%) Machine Learning
11 801 (14.30%) Data Engineering
12 777 (13.87%) Containerisation
13 733 (13.09%) Data Modelling
14 713 (12.73%) Observability
15 647 (11.55%) ETL
16 636 (11.36%) Test Automation
17 609 (10.87%) Continuous Improvement
18 586 (10.46%) Validation
19 563 (10.05%) Data Science
20 557 (9.94%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,835 (32.76%) SQL
2 819 (14.62%) Java
3 763 (13.62%) Bash
4 736 (13.14%) PowerShell
5 440 (7.86%) JavaScript
6 337 (6.02%) TypeScript
7 315 (5.62%) C#
8 191 (3.41%) Go
9 151 (2.70%) R
10 144 (2.57%) Shell Script
11 142 (2.54%) C++
12 136 (2.43%) Bicep
13 131 (2.34%) Scala
14 95 (1.70%) Perl
15 61 (1.09%) Groovy
16 59 (1.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 57 (1.02%) C
18 56 (1.00%) PL/SQL
19 53 (0.95%) Ruby
19 53 (0.95%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,333 (23.80%) Security Cleared
2 1,081 (19.30%) SC Cleared
3 417 (7.45%) Degree
4 217 (3.87%) DV Cleared
5 161 (2.87%) Computer Science Degree
6 146 (2.61%) Azure Certification
7 141 (2.52%) AWS Certification
8 124 (2.21%) BPSS Clearance
9 93 (1.66%) CISSP
10 87 (1.55%) Cisco Certification
11 66 (1.18%) Master's Degree
12 45 (0.80%) Microsoft Certification
13 44 (0.79%) CCNP
14 36 (0.64%) ISTQB
14 36 (0.64%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 34 (0.61%) CISM
15 34 (0.61%) PhD
16 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 30 (0.54%) CCIE
18 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 606 (10.82%) Data Quality
2 289 (5.16%) QA
3 115 (2.05%) NIST
4 107 (1.91%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 100 (1.79%) GDPR
6 81 (1.45%) Accessibility
7 36 (0.64%) SLA
8 34 (0.61%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.52%) NCSC
10 27 (0.48%) WCAG
11 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 24 (0.43%) PCI DSS
13 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
14 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.23%) SOC 2
16 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 6 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 6 (0.11%) GRC
17 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 944 (16.85%) Docker
2 158 (2.82%) Active Directory
3 130 (2.32%) VMware Infrastructure
4 62 (1.11%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.82%) Hyper-V
6 40 (0.71%) vSphere
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 26 (0.46%) Firmware
9 23 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Squid
12 12 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) HDFS
17 5 (0.089%) PowerHA
17 5 (0.089%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,125 (20.09%) Kubernetes
2 629 (11.23%) Ansible
3 336 (6.00%) Grafana
4 244 (4.36%) Prometheus
5 83 (1.48%) Puppet
6 73 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 68 (1.21%) Argo
8 38 (0.68%) Istio
9 34 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
10 30 (0.54%) Kibana
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
11 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
12 25 (0.45%) Nagios
13 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
14 22 (0.39%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.39%) vRealize
15 20 (0.36%) FortiGate
16 19 (0.34%) Packer
17 18 (0.32%) Tivoli
18 17 (0.30%) Netcool
Vendors
1 714 (12.75%) Microsoft
2 575 (10.27%) Databricks
3 363 (6.48%) Google
4 248 (4.43%) Oracle
5 216 (3.86%) Splunk
6 173 (3.09%) VMware
7 150 (2.68%) OpenAI
8 141 (2.52%) Cisco
9 122 (2.18%) ServiceNow
10 102 (1.82%) Dynatrace
10 102 (1.82%) Red Hat
11 94 (1.68%) IBM
12 87 (1.55%) F5
13 82 (1.46%) Palo Alto
14 79 (1.41%) Informatica
15 72 (1.29%) Fortinet
16 71 (1.27%) Foundry
17 69 (1.23%) SAP
18 67 (1.20%) CyberArk
19 60 (1.07%) Salesforce