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 10 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,264 3,901 4,027
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.48% 13.35% 9.15%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.73% 39.18% 31.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,575 2,747 2,858
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £419 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £623 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £808 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -3.10% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 51 100
10th Percentile £28.30 £21.25 £20.82
25th Percentile £42.88 £25.25 £31.09
Median hourly rate £55.00 £44.50 £49.25
Median % change year-on-year +23.60% -9.64% -24.23%
75th Percentile £74.26 £59.75 £66.38
90th Percentile £82.80 £75.00 £72.69
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £52.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year - +13.69% -28.95%

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 12,924 9,956 12,842
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.18% 34.08% 29.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,607 6,723 9,121
10th Percentile £354 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £418 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £476 £489
% change year-on-year - -2.66% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 545 240 479
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.50 £31.13
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.00 £46.22
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.56% +3.90% -1.44%

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 10 April 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 10 April 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 10 April 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 -1 4,436 £518 -6.50% 2,695
London -3 2,514 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London 0 2,004 £485 -3.10% 1,990
Work from Home 0 1,543 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +10 675 £481 -3.65% 475
South East -5 412 £500 -4.76% 576
Yorkshire +1 374 £480 -4.00% 164
Midlands -3 279 £495 +8.20% 255
North West +5 254 £500 +1.63% 230
South West -2 245 £500 -9.09% 280
Scotland +1 244 £425 -10.53% 104
West Midlands -7 218 £500 +2.04% 130
East of England 0 135 £500 - 219
East Midlands -10 60 £450 +5.88% 125
North East +10 56 £475 -3.80% 83
Wales -11 30 £475 -10.80% 78
Northern Ireland +11 25 £550 +10.00% 33

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
1 268 (5.09%) Apache Spark
2 206 (3.91%) Apache Airflow
3 162 (3.08%) Apache
4 159 (3.02%) Confluence
5 69 (1.31%) SAS
6 59 (1.12%) SharePoint
7 30 (0.57%) Jupyter
8 26 (0.49%) nginx
9 25 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
10 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.28%) Appian
13 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
14 11 (0.21%) Camunda
15 9 (0.17%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.13%) CMS
17 4 (0.076%) CICS
17 4 (0.076%) Tomcat
18 3 (0.057%) IIS
18 3 (0.057%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 137 (2.60%) Microsoft Excel
2 29 (0.55%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 23 (0.44%) MS Visio
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 6 (0.11%) Weka
6 5 (0.095%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 25 (0.47%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
6 4 (0.076%) Remedy ITSM
6 4 (0.076%) SAP IBP
7 3 (0.057%) Actimize
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
9 1 (0.019%) Loan IQ
9 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 2,035 (38.66%) AWS
2 1,831 (34.78%) Azure
3 787 (14.95%) GCP
4 692 (13.15%) GitHub
5 530 (10.07%) Power Platform
6 505 (9.59%) Serverless
7 408 (7.75%) Azure DevOps
8 376 (7.14%) Amazon S3
9 358 (6.80%) AWS Lambda
10 353 (6.71%) GitHub Actions
11 280 (5.32%) Azure Data Factory
12 246 (4.67%) Snowflake
13 244 (4.64%) AWS CloudFormation
14 185 (3.51%) Amazon EKS
15 176 (3.34%) OpenShift
16 171 (3.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 157 (2.98%) Amazon ECS
18 155 (2.94%) dbt
19 149 (2.83%) Amazon EC2
20 141 (2.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 203 (3.86%) Firewall
2 143 (2.72%) DNS
3 111 (2.11%) Network Security
4 95 (1.80%) TCP/IP
5 80 (1.52%) VPN
6 78 (1.48%) BGP
7 63 (1.20%) WAN
8 60 (1.14%) HTTP
9 46 (0.87%) OSPF
10 44 (0.84%) SAN
11 42 (0.80%) MPLS
12 36 (0.68%) VLAN
13 35 (0.66%) LAN
14 34 (0.65%) DHCP
15 32 (0.61%) SNMP
16 30 (0.57%) SSL
17 29 (0.55%) VXLAN
18 28 (0.53%) Wireshark
19 26 (0.49%) SD-WAN
20 23 (0.44%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 441 (8.38%) Power BI
2 349 (6.63%) PostgreSQL
3 310 (5.89%) Data Warehouse
4 245 (4.65%) Data Lake
5 217 (4.12%) SQL Server
6 195 (3.70%) NoSQL
7 183 (3.48%) Relational Database
7 183 (3.48%) Tableau
8 158 (3.00%) Metadata
9 144 (2.74%) Big Data
10 132 (2.51%) Delta Lake
11 131 (2.49%) BigQuery
12 114 (2.17%) Amazon Athena
12 114 (2.17%) Amazon Redshift
13 112 (2.13%) Amazon RDS
14 106 (2.01%) MySQL
15 94 (1.79%) Azure SQL Database
16 93 (1.77%) MongoDB
17 87 (1.65%) DynamoDB
18 76 (1.44%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 671 (12.75%) Git
2 510 (9.69%) Jenkins
3 392 (7.45%) GitLab
4 284 (5.40%) JIRA
5 98 (1.86%) Selenium
6 89 (1.69%) MLflow
7 55 (1.04%) Postman
8 45 (0.85%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.82%) Cucumber
10 42 (0.80%) JUnit
11 38 (0.72%) JMeter
12 35 (0.66%) Sonatype Nexus
13 28 (0.53%) SpecFlow
14 27 (0.51%) Artifactory
15 25 (0.47%) SonarQube
16 24 (0.46%) Cypress.io
16 24 (0.46%) Visual Studio
17 22 (0.42%) Maven
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
18 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,220 (23.18%) Social Skills
2 989 (18.79%) Finance
3 717 (13.62%) Analytical Skills
4 503 (9.56%) Public Sector
5 380 (7.22%) Banking
6 162 (3.08%) Front Office
7 138 (2.62%) Documentation Skills
8 84 (1.60%) Investment Banking
9 66 (1.25%) Marketing
10 65 (1.23%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 62 (1.18%) Retail
12 60 (1.14%) Legal
13 59 (1.12%) Telecoms
14 53 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
14 53 (1.01%) Pharmaceutical
15 42 (0.80%) Manufacturing
16 41 (0.78%) Financial Institution
17 32 (0.61%) Presentation Skills
18 30 (0.57%) Military
18 30 (0.57%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 979 (18.60%) Developer
2 776 (14.74%) Data Engineer
3 745 (14.15%) Senior
4 469 (8.91%) Python Developer
5 358 (6.80%) Architect
6 334 (6.34%) Lead
7 295 (5.60%) Python Engineer
8 284 (5.40%) DevOps Engineer
9 276 (5.24%) Analyst
10 254 (4.83%) Software Engineer
11 247 (4.69%) AWS Engineer
12 237 (4.50%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 213 (4.05%) Data Scientist
14 192 (3.65%) Platform Engineer
15 166 (3.15%) Azure Engineer
15 166 (3.15%) Senior Developer
16 151 (2.87%) Senior Data Engineer
17 140 (2.66%) Data Analyst
18 137 (2.60%) Full-Stack Developer
19 121 (2.30%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 450 (8.55%) REST
2 363 (6.90%) React
3 346 (6.57%) PySpark
4 337 (6.40%) Kafka
5 286 (5.43%) Node.js
6 244 (4.64%) Pandas
7 234 (4.45%) .NET
8 197 (3.74%) PyTorch
9 183 (3.48%) FastAPI
9 183 (3.48%) RESTful
10 163 (3.10%) NumPy
11 156 (2.96%) JSON
12 154 (2.93%) TensorFlow
13 147 (2.79%) scikit-learn
14 131 (2.49%) Flask
15 126 (2.39%) AngularJS
16 124 (2.36%) Django
17 123 (2.34%) LangChain
18 115 (2.18%) pytest
19 110 (2.09%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 498 (9.46%) Cloud Native
2 211 (4.01%) Distributed Systems
3 184 (3.50%) Algorithms
4 144 (2.74%) Product Ownership
5 117 (2.22%) Data Protection Act
6 115 (2.18%) AI Agents
6 115 (2.18%) Equities
7 114 (2.17%) Fixed Income
8 112 (2.13%) Data Structures
9 102 (1.94%) Derivative
10 99 (1.88%) Data Centre
11 97 (1.84%) Onboarding
12 93 (1.77%) Enterprise Software
13 90 (1.71%) Hybrid Cloud
14 89 (1.69%) Legacy Systems
15 83 (1.58%) Management Information System
16 82 (1.56%) Security Posture
17 75 (1.42%) Public Cloud
18 55 (1.04%) Hedge funds
19 52 (0.99%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 661 (12.56%) Linux
2 310 (5.89%) Windows
3 183 (3.48%) Unix
4 102 (1.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 69 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.72%) VMS
7 34 (0.65%) Ubuntu
8 29 (0.55%) Android
9 21 (0.40%) AIX
9 21 (0.40%) Mac OS
10 18 (0.34%) Solaris
11 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
11 17 (0.32%) CentOS
12 8 (0.15%) Debian
12 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
13 7 (0.13%) Windows 7
14 6 (0.11%) zOS
15 5 (0.095%) Rocky
16 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2016
16 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,939 (36.84%) CI/CD
2 1,460 (27.74%) DevOps
3 1,205 (22.89%) Agile
4 1,152 (21.88%) AI
5 1,082 (20.55%) Analytics
6 1,037 (19.70%) Problem-Solving
7 909 (17.27%) Infrastructure as Code
8 876 (16.64%) Data Pipeline
9 821 (15.60%) Machine Learning
10 751 (14.27%) Containerisation
11 717 (13.62%) Data Engineering
12 713 (13.54%) Data Modelling
13 705 (13.39%) ETL
14 629 (11.95%) Data Science
15 595 (11.30%) Software Engineering
16 583 (11.08%) Test Automation
17 525 (9.97%) Business Intelligence
18 519 (9.86%) Observability
19 435 (8.26%) LLM
20 407 (7.73%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,703 (32.35%) SQL
2 753 (14.30%) Java
3 679 (12.90%) PowerShell
4 587 (11.15%) Bash
5 490 (9.31%) JavaScript
6 358 (6.80%) C#
7 350 (6.65%) TypeScript
8 210 (3.99%) Go
9 166 (3.15%) R
10 155 (2.94%) C++
11 130 (2.47%) Scala
12 104 (1.98%) Ruby
12 104 (1.98%) Shell Script
13 93 (1.77%) Perl
14 82 (1.56%) Bicep
15 54 (1.03%) C
16 53 (1.01%) Kusto Query Language
17 51 (0.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 47 (0.89%) T-SQL
19 42 (0.80%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,241 (23.58%) Security Cleared
2 1,007 (19.13%) SC Cleared
3 405 (7.69%) Degree
4 183 (3.48%) Computer Science Degree
5 143 (2.72%) DV Cleared
6 129 (2.45%) BPSS Clearance
7 111 (2.11%) AWS Certification
8 108 (2.05%) Azure Certification
9 96 (1.82%) CISSP
10 94 (1.79%) Master's Degree
11 77 (1.46%) Cisco Certification
12 60 (1.14%) CCNP
12 60 (1.14%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.93%) CISM
14 43 (0.82%) PhD
15 37 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
16 36 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 35 (0.66%) ISTQB
18 27 (0.51%) CCNA
19 26 (0.49%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 523 (9.94%) Data Quality
2 221 (4.20%) QA
3 179 (3.40%) GDPR
4 119 (2.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 109 (2.07%) NIST
6 81 (1.54%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.66%) PCI DSS
8 31 (0.59%) SLA
9 28 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.49%) HIPAA
11 21 (0.40%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
13 17 (0.32%) WCAG
14 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
System Software
1 879 (16.70%) Docker
2 175 (3.32%) Active Directory
3 115 (2.18%) VMware Infrastructure
4 63 (1.20%) Virtual Machines
5 53 (1.01%) vSphere
6 51 (0.97%) VMware NSX
7 34 (0.65%) Hyper-V
8 31 (0.59%) Firmware
9 18 (0.34%) VMware ESXi
10 12 (0.23%) KVM
11 11 (0.21%) HDFS
12 9 (0.17%) SRDF
13 8 (0.15%) Ceph
13 8 (0.15%) Lustre
14 7 (0.13%) GPFS
14 7 (0.13%) NFS
14 7 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
14 7 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 7 (0.13%) Virtual Servers
15 6 (0.11%) Postfix
Systems Management
1 1,119 (21.26%) Terraform
2 995 (18.90%) Kubernetes
3 514 (9.76%) Ansible
4 323 (6.14%) Grafana
5 278 (5.28%) Prometheus
6 86 (1.63%) Argo
7 72 (1.37%) Puppet
8 53 (1.01%) Istio
9 49 (0.93%) vRealize
10 39 (0.74%) vCenter Server
11 37 (0.70%) Kibana
12 34 (0.65%) Progress Chef
13 25 (0.47%) Nessus
14 22 (0.42%) Nagios
14 22 (0.42%) NetBackup
14 22 (0.42%) Rancher
14 22 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
15 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
15 20 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
16 19 (0.36%) Control-M
Vendors
1 633 (12.03%) Microsoft
2 583 (11.08%) Databricks
3 284 (5.40%) Google
4 217 (4.12%) Oracle
5 215 (4.08%) Splunk
6 212 (4.03%) VMware
7 138 (2.62%) Red Hat
8 132 (2.51%) Cisco
9 123 (2.34%) OpenAI
10 98 (1.86%) ServiceNow
11 92 (1.75%) CyberArk
12 79 (1.50%) BeyondTrust
13 66 (1.25%) Foundry
14 64 (1.22%) Informatica
15 60 (1.14%) F5
16 57 (1.08%) IBM
17 55 (1.04%) Palo Alto
18 50 (0.95%) Dynatrace
19 44 (0.84%) SAP
20 42 (0.80%) Atlassian