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

6 months to
11 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,239 3,903 4,015
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.45% 13.36% 9.14%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.68% 39.17% 31.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,550 2,736 2,851
10th Percentile £363 £384 £400
25th Percentile £419 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.88% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £623 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -3.60% -2.44% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 126 54 99
10th Percentile £28.94 £21.25 £20.81
25th Percentile £44.42 £25.25 £30.94
Median hourly rate £55.00 £43.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +26.44% -13.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile £74.26 £58.75 £66.50
90th Percentile £83.38 £75.00 £72.89
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £48.75 £47.50
% change year-on-year +7.69% +2.63% -26.92%

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 12,880 9,964 12,821
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.14% 34.10% 29.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,566 6,719 9,102
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £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 £475 £475 £489
% change year-on-year - -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 547 242 474
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.55 £30.81
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.38 £67.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.00
% change year-on-year +1.97% +2.81% -0.80%

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 4,416 £518 -5.91% 2,695
London -3 2,505 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London -2 1,992 £482 -3.60% 1,990
Work from Home 0 1,534 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +9 668 £481 -2.92% 475
South East -5 414 £500 -4.76% 576
Yorkshire +1 369 £477 -4.70% 164
Midlands -3 278 £495 +8.02% 255
North West +5 253 £500 +1.83% 230
Scotland +1 245 £425 -10.53% 104
South West -1 243 £500 -9.09% 280
West Midlands -5 217 £500 +1.01% 130
East of England +4 133 £500 - 219
East Midlands -16 60 £450 +5.88% 125
North East +11 55 £475 -3.80% 83
Wales -12 28 £463 -13.15% 78
Northern Ireland +10 24 £463 -7.50% 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 (5.12%) Apache Spark
2 203 (3.87%) Apache Airflow
3 160 (3.05%) Apache
4 158 (3.02%) Confluence
5 69 (1.32%) SAS
6 59 (1.13%) SharePoint
7 29 (0.55%) Jupyter
8 26 (0.50%) nginx
9 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
10 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.29%) 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%) IBM HTTP Server
18 3 (0.057%) IIS
Applications
1 137 (2.62%) Microsoft Excel
2 26 (0.50%) 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 (0.48%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 8 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
5 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
5 5 (0.095%) SAP IBP
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Actimize
7 3 (0.057%) Remedy ITSM
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%) OneSumX
9 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 2,021 (38.58%) AWS
2 1,818 (34.70%) Azure
3 783 (14.95%) GCP
4 683 (13.04%) GitHub
5 528 (10.08%) Power Platform
6 500 (9.54%) Serverless
7 403 (7.69%) Azure DevOps
8 373 (7.12%) Amazon S3
9 355 (6.78%) AWS Lambda
10 348 (6.64%) GitHub Actions
11 279 (5.33%) Azure Data Factory
12 241 (4.60%) AWS CloudFormation
13 240 (4.58%) Snowflake
14 184 (3.51%) Amazon EKS
15 174 (3.32%) OpenShift
16 169 (3.23%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 155 (2.96%) Amazon ECS
18 152 (2.90%) dbt
19 148 (2.82%) Amazon EC2
20 141 (2.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 201 (3.84%) Firewall
2 141 (2.69%) DNS
3 111 (2.12%) Network Security
4 94 (1.79%) TCP/IP
5 78 (1.49%) BGP
5 78 (1.49%) VPN
6 62 (1.18%) WAN
7 61 (1.16%) HTTP
8 46 (0.88%) OSPF
9 43 (0.82%) SAN
10 42 (0.80%) MPLS
11 36 (0.69%) VLAN
12 35 (0.67%) LAN
13 33 (0.63%) DHCP
14 32 (0.61%) SNMP
15 30 (0.57%) SSL
16 29 (0.55%) VXLAN
17 28 (0.53%) Wireshark
18 25 (0.48%) SD-WAN
19 22 (0.42%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 439 (8.38%) Power BI
2 345 (6.59%) PostgreSQL
3 307 (5.86%) Data Warehouse
4 242 (4.62%) Data Lake
5 218 (4.16%) SQL Server
6 191 (3.65%) NoSQL
7 182 (3.47%) Tableau
8 181 (3.45%) Relational Database
9 159 (3.03%) Metadata
10 144 (2.75%) Big Data
11 132 (2.52%) Delta Lake
12 131 (2.50%) BigQuery
13 114 (2.18%) Amazon Redshift
14 112 (2.14%) Amazon Athena
15 110 (2.10%) Amazon RDS
16 103 (1.97%) MySQL
17 93 (1.78%) MongoDB
18 92 (1.76%) Azure SQL Database
19 87 (1.66%) DynamoDB
20 76 (1.45%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 666 (12.71%) Git
2 502 (9.58%) Jenkins
3 389 (7.43%) GitLab
4 283 (5.40%) JIRA
5 98 (1.87%) Selenium
6 89 (1.70%) MLflow
7 55 (1.05%) Postman
8 45 (0.86%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.82%) Cucumber
10 42 (0.80%) JUnit
11 38 (0.73%) JMeter
12 35 (0.67%) Sonatype Nexus
13 28 (0.53%) SpecFlow
14 27 (0.52%) Artifactory
15 25 (0.48%) SonarQube
16 24 (0.46%) Cypress.io
16 24 (0.46%) Visual Studio
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
18 21 (0.40%) Maven
18 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,213 (23.15%) Social Skills
2 986 (18.82%) Finance
3 713 (13.61%) Analytical Skills
4 501 (9.56%) Public Sector
5 376 (7.18%) Banking
6 162 (3.09%) Front Office
7 138 (2.63%) Documentation Skills
8 83 (1.58%) Investment Banking
9 66 (1.26%) Marketing
10 63 (1.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 62 (1.18%) Retail
12 59 (1.13%) Legal
13 58 (1.11%) Telecoms
14 53 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
14 53 (1.01%) Pharmaceutical
15 42 (0.80%) Manufacturing
16 40 (0.76%) Financial Institution
17 32 (0.61%) Presentation Skills
18 29 (0.55%) Publishing
19 28 (0.53%) Military
Job Titles
1 981 (18.72%) Developer
2 772 (14.74%) Data Engineer
3 742 (14.16%) Senior
4 472 (9.01%) Python Developer
5 355 (6.78%) Architect
6 333 (6.36%) Lead
7 290 (5.54%) Python Engineer
8 277 (5.29%) DevOps Engineer
9 275 (5.25%) Analyst
10 253 (4.83%) Software Engineer
11 245 (4.68%) AWS Engineer
12 232 (4.43%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 212 (4.05%) Data Scientist
14 192 (3.66%) Platform Engineer
15 167 (3.19%) Senior Developer
16 166 (3.17%) Azure Engineer
17 150 (2.86%) Senior Data Engineer
18 139 (2.65%) Data Analyst
19 136 (2.60%) Full-Stack Developer
20 121 (2.31%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 449 (8.57%) REST
2 360 (6.87%) React
3 345 (6.59%) PySpark
4 335 (6.39%) Kafka
5 285 (5.44%) Node.js
6 239 (4.56%) Pandas
7 232 (4.43%) .NET
8 195 (3.72%) PyTorch
9 183 (3.49%) FastAPI
10 182 (3.47%) RESTful
11 158 (3.02%) NumPy
12 156 (2.98%) JSON
13 149 (2.84%) TensorFlow
14 147 (2.81%) scikit-learn
15 130 (2.48%) Flask
16 126 (2.41%) AngularJS
17 122 (2.33%) Django
18 121 (2.31%) LangChain
19 114 (2.18%) pytest
20 110 (2.10%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 496 (9.47%) Cloud Native
2 213 (4.07%) Distributed Systems
3 182 (3.47%) Algorithms
4 144 (2.75%) Product Ownership
5 117 (2.23%) Data Protection Act
6 116 (2.21%) AI Agents
7 113 (2.16%) Equities
8 112 (2.14%) Data Structures
8 112 (2.14%) Fixed Income
9 101 (1.93%) Derivative
10 99 (1.89%) Data Centre
10 99 (1.89%) Onboarding
11 93 (1.78%) Enterprise Software
12 90 (1.72%) Hybrid Cloud
13 88 (1.68%) Legacy Systems
14 83 (1.58%) Management Information System
15 82 (1.57%) Security Posture
16 75 (1.43%) Public Cloud
17 53 (1.01%) Hedge funds
18 52 (0.99%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 659 (12.58%) Linux
2 306 (5.84%) Windows
3 183 (3.49%) Unix
4 101 (1.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 68 (1.30%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.73%) VMS
7 34 (0.65%) Ubuntu
8 29 (0.55%) Android
9 21 (0.40%) AIX
9 21 (0.40%) Mac OS
10 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
10 17 (0.32%) CentOS
10 17 (0.32%) Solaris
11 8 (0.15%) Debian
11 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
12 6 (0.11%) Windows 7
12 6 (0.11%) zOS
13 5 (0.095%) Rocky
14 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2016
14 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,924 (36.72%) CI/CD
2 1,446 (27.60%) DevOps
3 1,191 (22.73%) Agile
4 1,143 (21.82%) AI
5 1,076 (20.54%) Analytics
6 1,030 (19.66%) Problem-Solving
7 902 (17.22%) Infrastructure as Code
8 870 (16.61%) Data Pipeline
9 812 (15.50%) Machine Learning
10 746 (14.24%) Containerisation
11 715 (13.65%) Data Engineering
12 707 (13.49%) Data Modelling
13 700 (13.36%) ETL
14 624 (11.91%) Data Science
15 593 (11.32%) Software Engineering
16 578 (11.03%) Test Automation
17 523 (9.98%) Business Intelligence
18 517 (9.87%) Observability
19 430 (8.21%) LLM
20 407 (7.77%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,696 (32.37%) SQL
2 753 (14.37%) Java
3 675 (12.88%) PowerShell
4 580 (11.07%) Bash
5 489 (9.33%) JavaScript
6 359 (6.85%) C#
7 348 (6.64%) TypeScript
8 209 (3.99%) Go
9 166 (3.17%) R
10 158 (3.02%) C++
11 129 (2.46%) Scala
12 104 (1.99%) Shell Script
13 103 (1.97%) Ruby
14 93 (1.78%) Perl
15 81 (1.55%) Bicep
16 55 (1.05%) C
17 53 (1.01%) Kusto Query Language
18 51 (0.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 47 (0.90%) T-SQL
20 42 (0.80%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,237 (23.61%) Security Cleared
2 1,007 (19.22%) SC Cleared
3 402 (7.67%) Degree
4 182 (3.47%) Computer Science Degree
5 142 (2.71%) DV Cleared
6 131 (2.50%) BPSS Clearance
7 109 (2.08%) AWS Certification
8 108 (2.06%) Azure Certification
9 96 (1.83%) CISSP
10 94 (1.79%) Master's Degree
11 77 (1.47%) Cisco Certification
12 60 (1.15%) CCNP
12 60 (1.15%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.94%) CISM
14 43 (0.82%) PhD
15 36 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
16 35 (0.67%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 35 (0.67%) ISTQB
17 27 (0.52%) CCNA
18 26 (0.50%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 521 (9.94%) Data Quality
2 221 (4.22%) QA
3 176 (3.36%) GDPR
4 119 (2.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 109 (2.08%) NIST
6 81 (1.55%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 31 (0.59%) SLA
9 28 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 25 (0.48%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.38%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
13 17 (0.32%) WCAG
14 14 (0.27%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
18 7 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 871 (16.63%) Docker
2 172 (3.28%) Active Directory
3 114 (2.18%) VMware Infrastructure
4 63 (1.20%) Virtual Machines
5 52 (0.99%) vSphere
6 51 (0.97%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.63%) 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 1,108 (21.15%) Terraform
2 991 (18.92%) Kubernetes
3 509 (9.72%) Ansible
4 320 (6.11%) Grafana
5 275 (5.25%) Prometheus
6 83 (1.58%) Argo
7 70 (1.34%) Puppet
8 53 (1.01%) Istio
9 49 (0.94%) vRealize
10 39 (0.74%) vCenter Server
11 37 (0.71%) Kibana
12 33 (0.63%) Progress Chef
13 25 (0.48%) Nessus
14 22 (0.42%) Rancher
15 21 (0.40%) Nagios
15 21 (0.40%) NetBackup
15 21 (0.40%) Single Sign-On
16 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
16 20 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
17 19 (0.36%) Control-M
Vendors
1 629 (12.01%) Microsoft
2 580 (11.07%) Databricks
3 283 (5.40%) Google
4 217 (4.14%) Oracle
5 213 (4.07%) Splunk
6 208 (3.97%) VMware
7 137 (2.62%) Red Hat
8 132 (2.52%) Cisco
9 122 (2.33%) OpenAI
10 98 (1.87%) ServiceNow
11 93 (1.78%) CyberArk
12 80 (1.53%) BeyondTrust
13 65 (1.24%) Foundry
14 64 (1.22%) Informatica
15 60 (1.15%) F5
16 59 (1.13%) IBM
17 55 (1.05%) Palo Alto
18 50 (0.95%) Dynatrace
19 45 (0.86%) SAP
20 42 (0.80%) Atlassian