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

6 months to
16 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,451 3,865 4,106
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.86% 13.05% 9.42%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.43% 38.47% 31.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,586 2,661 2,944
10th Percentile £363 £375 £375
25th Percentile £425 £444 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £537 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.23% -2.36% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £838
UK excluding London median daily rate £498 £500 £507
% change year-on-year -0.45% -1.38% -5.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 59 117
10th Percentile £28.80 £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% -3.69%
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% +9.66%

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 13,481 10,047 13,164
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.85% 33.91% 30.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,783 6,803 9,244
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 £750 £764
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +2.63% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 236 542
10th Percentile £35.25 £26.04 £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% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.56 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £84.75 £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 16 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 16 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 16 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 -1 4,539 £525 -4.55% 2,983
London -3 2,612 £550 -4.35% 1,550
UK excluding London -1 2,124 £498 -0.45% 1,921
Work from Home -2 1,555 £525 -4.55% 1,174
North of England +10 774 £481 -0.77% 438
Yorkshire +2 428 £500 - 134
South East -6 399 £525 +3.19% 617
Scotland +3 317 £440 -7.37% 107
North West +5 269 £486 +2.24% 236
South West -3 263 £500 -9.09% 214
Midlands -16 230 £481 +6.94% 206
West Midlands -13 183 £477 +3.14% 102
East of England -14 126 £500 - 237
North East +10 89 £450 +2.86% 71
East Midlands -18 46 £497 +16.82% 103
Wales -10 28 £475 +2.15% 55
Northern Ireland +14 27 £408 -30.64% 76

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
1 280 (5.14%) Apache Spark
2 244 (4.48%) Apache Airflow
3 186 (3.41%) Apache
4 160 (2.94%) Confluence
5 54 (0.99%) Jupyter
6 48 (0.88%) SAS
7 46 (0.84%) SharePoint
8 21 (0.39%) 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
1 116 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.40%) Microsoft Office
3 22 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 22 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
4 19 (0.35%) MS Visio
5 12 (0.22%) CPLEX
6 3 (0.055%) LaTeX
6 3 (0.055%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
7 1 (0.018%) SPSS
7 1 (0.018%) Weka
7 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%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.037%) Odoo
10 2 (0.037%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.037%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,040 (37.42%) AWS
2 1,809 (33.19%) Azure
3 790 (14.49%) GCP
4 656 (12.03%) GitHub
5 527 (9.67%) Power Platform
6 483 (8.86%) Serverless
7 404 (7.41%) Amazon S3
8 397 (7.28%) Azure DevOps
9 356 (6.53%) GitHub Actions
10 354 (6.49%) AWS Lambda
11 268 (4.92%) Snowflake
12 251 (4.60%) Azure Data Factory
13 191 (3.50%) dbt
14 171 (3.14%) AWS CloudFormation
15 162 (2.97%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 162 (2.97%) Amazon EKS
16 157 (2.88%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 157 (2.88%) OpenShift
17 126 (2.31%) Amazon EC2
18 119 (2.18%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 215 (3.94%) Firewall
2 148 (2.72%) DNS
3 105 (1.93%) Network Security
4 102 (1.87%) WAN
5 100 (1.83%) BGP
6 91 (1.67%) TCP/IP
7 82 (1.50%) VPN
8 65 (1.19%) OSPF
9 58 (1.06%) HTTP
10 57 (1.05%) BIG-IP
10 57 (1.05%) SAN
11 51 (0.94%) SD-WAN
12 49 (0.90%) VXLAN
13 47 (0.86%) SSL
14 43 (0.79%) VLAN
15 38 (0.70%) Ethernet VPN
16 37 (0.68%) DHCP
16 37 (0.68%) LAN
17 36 (0.66%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 36 (0.66%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 460 (8.44%) Power BI
2 350 (6.42%) PostgreSQL
3 296 (5.43%) Data Warehouse
4 255 (4.68%) SQL Server
5 232 (4.26%) Data Lake
6 195 (3.58%) Tableau
7 187 (3.43%) Relational Database
8 171 (3.14%) Metadata
9 167 (3.06%) NoSQL
10 164 (3.01%) Big Data
11 141 (2.59%) Amazon Athena
12 136 (2.49%) BigQuery
13 132 (2.42%) Delta Lake
14 131 (2.40%) Amazon Redshift
15 121 (2.22%) MongoDB
16 99 (1.82%) DynamoDB
17 94 (1.72%) Amazon RDS
18 87 (1.60%) MySQL
19 73 (1.34%) Hadoop
19 73 (1.34%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 660 (12.11%) Git
2 491 (9.01%) Jenkins
3 382 (7.01%) GitLab
4 283 (5.19%) JIRA
5 75 (1.38%) 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
18 19 (0.35%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,178 (21.61%) Social Skills
2 1,115 (20.45%) Finance
3 734 (13.47%) Analytical Skills
4 504 (9.25%) Public Sector
5 397 (7.28%) Banking
6 191 (3.50%) Front Office
7 139 (2.55%) Documentation Skills
8 124 (2.27%) Investment Banking
9 101 (1.85%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 74 (1.36%) Marketing
10 74 (1.36%) Retail
11 61 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
12 56 (1.03%) Legal
13 51 (0.94%) Telecoms
14 45 (0.83%) Financial Institution
15 44 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
15 44 (0.81%) Publishing
16 37 (0.68%) Military
17 32 (0.59%) Manufacturing
18 30 (0.55%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 996 (18.27%) Developer
2 856 (15.70%) Data Engineer
3 815 (14.95%) Senior
4 517 (9.48%) Python Developer
5 350 (6.42%) Lead
6 344 (6.31%) Python Engineer
7 323 (5.93%) Architect
8 296 (5.43%) DevOps Engineer
9 281 (5.16%) Analyst
10 263 (4.82%) Software Engineer
11 248 (4.55%) AWS Engineer
12 240 (4.40%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 209 (3.83%) Data Scientist
14 176 (3.23%) Senior Developer
15 169 (3.10%) Senior Data Engineer
16 160 (2.94%) Platform Engineer
17 157 (2.88%) Azure Engineer
18 156 (2.86%) Full-Stack Developer
19 151 (2.77%) Cloud Engineer
20 145 (2.66%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 420 (7.71%) REST
2 382 (7.01%) React
3 368 (6.75%) PySpark
4 327 (6.00%) Kafka
5 248 (4.55%) .NET
6 219 (4.02%) Node.js
7 205 (3.76%) Pandas
7 205 (3.76%) RESTful
8 202 (3.71%) FastAPI
9 181 (3.32%) JSON
10 163 (2.99%) PyTorch
11 147 (2.70%) Django
12 129 (2.37%) Flask
13 125 (2.29%) NumPy
14 124 (2.27%) LangChain
15 113 (2.07%) TensorFlow
16 112 (2.05%) AngularJS
17 111 (2.04%) scikit-learn
18 110 (2.02%) OAuth
19 104 (1.91%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 676 (12.40%) Cloud Native
2 268 (4.92%) Distributed Systems
3 153 (2.81%) Algorithms
4 148 (2.72%) AI Agents
5 146 (2.68%) Data Centre
5 146 (2.68%) Onboarding
6 137 (2.51%) Product Ownership
7 130 (2.38%) Data Structures
8 116 (2.13%) Data Protection Act
8 116 (2.13%) Legacy Systems
9 113 (2.07%) Management Information System
10 112 (2.05%) Derivative
11 101 (1.85%) Equities
12 98 (1.80%) Fixed Income
12 98 (1.80%) Hybrid Cloud
13 92 (1.69%) Security Posture
14 82 (1.50%) Enterprise Software
15 71 (1.30%) Public Cloud
16 59 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
17 57 (1.05%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 621 (11.39%) Linux
2 298 (5.47%) Windows
3 221 (4.05%) Unix
4 118 (2.16%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 78 (1.43%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.79%) Ubuntu
7 29 (0.53%) VMS
8 26 (0.48%) AIX
8 26 (0.48%) Solaris
9 24 (0.44%) Android
10 20 (0.37%) CentOS
11 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
12 16 (0.29%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.22%) zOS
14 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.13%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 5 (0.092%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.092%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.092%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,060 (37.79%) CI/CD
2 1,494 (27.41%) DevOps
3 1,333 (24.45%) AI
4 1,177 (21.59%) Agile
5 1,084 (19.89%) Analytics
6 982 (18.02%) Infrastructure as Code
7 966 (17.72%) Data Pipeline
8 938 (17.21%) Problem-Solving
9 852 (15.63%) Machine Learning
10 759 (13.92%) Data Engineering
11 731 (13.41%) Data Modelling
12 720 (13.21%) Containerisation
13 700 (12.84%) ETL
14 682 (12.51%) Software Engineering
15 603 (11.06%) Data Science
16 595 (10.92%) Observability
17 551 (10.11%) Test Automation
18 538 (9.87%) Business Intelligence
19 507 (9.30%) LLM
20 461 (8.46%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,788 (32.80%) SQL
2 777 (14.25%) Java
3 642 (11.78%) PowerShell
4 596 (10.93%) Bash
5 465 (8.53%) JavaScript
6 381 (6.99%) TypeScript
7 341 (6.26%) C#
8 200 (3.67%) Go
9 161 (2.95%) R
10 145 (2.66%) C++
11 124 (2.27%) Scala
12 103 (1.89%) Shell Script
13 80 (1.47%) Bicep
13 80 (1.47%) Perl
14 65 (1.19%) Ruby
15 61 (1.12%) PL/SQL
16 58 (1.06%) T-SQL
17 55 (1.01%) C
18 51 (0.94%) Groovy
19 48 (0.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,207 (22.14%) Security Cleared
2 975 (17.89%) SC Cleared
3 394 (7.23%) Degree
4 159 (2.92%) DV Cleared
5 154 (2.83%) Computer Science Degree
6 132 (2.42%) BPSS Clearance
7 113 (2.07%) AWS Certification
7 113 (2.07%) Azure Certification
8 89 (1.63%) CISSP
9 73 (1.34%) Cisco Certification
10 70 (1.28%) Master's Degree
11 53 (0.97%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 51 (0.94%) CCNP
13 40 (0.73%) CISM
14 34 (0.62%) Microsoft Certification
15 33 (0.61%) ISTQB
15 33 (0.61%) PhD
16 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 24 (0.44%) CCIE
18 23 (0.42%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 548 (10.05%) Data Quality
2 230 (4.22%) QA
3 133 (2.44%) GDPR
4 111 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 106 (1.94%) NIST
6 80 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 33 (0.61%) SLA
8 26 (0.48%) PCI DSS
9 25 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.44%) HIPAA
11 22 (0.40%) WCAG
12 19 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.29%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.28%) NCSC
15 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
17 9 (0.17%) GRC
18 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
19 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 823 (15.10%) Docker
2 142 (2.61%) Active Directory
3 106 (1.94%) VMware Infrastructure
4 71 (1.30%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.73%) vSphere
6 39 (0.72%) VMware NSX
7 34 (0.62%) Firmware
8 30 (0.55%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.33%) NFS
11 16 (0.29%) KVM
12 13 (0.24%) Squid
13 12 (0.22%) Oracle RAC
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.17%) Ceph
16 8 (0.15%) HDFS
16 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.13%) Postfix
18 4 (0.073%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
18 4 (0.073%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,145 (21.01%) Terraform
2 971 (17.81%) Kubernetes
3 556 (10.20%) Ansible
4 330 (6.05%) Grafana
5 277 (5.08%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.36%) Puppet
7 60 (1.10%) Argo
8 54 (0.99%) Istio
9 45 (0.83%) vRealize
10 39 (0.72%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.59%) vCenter Server
12 30 (0.55%) 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%) NetBackup
18 22 (0.40%) Microsoft Intune
19 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 591 (10.84%) Microsoft
2 572 (10.49%) Databricks
3 295 (5.41%) Google
4 249 (4.57%) Oracle
5 214 (3.93%) Splunk
6 172 (3.16%) VMware
7 141 (2.59%) OpenAI
8 127 (2.33%) Red Hat
9 124 (2.27%) Cisco
10 97 (1.78%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.54%) F5
12 82 (1.50%) Dynatrace
13 80 (1.47%) CyberArk
13 80 (1.47%) Palo Alto
14 76 (1.39%) Informatica
15 74 (1.36%) IBM
16 70 (1.28%) BeyondTrust
17 59 (1.08%) Foundry
18 50 (0.92%) Fortinet
18 50 (0.92%) SAP