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 31 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,588 4,280 4,015
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.40% 12.99% 10.40%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.88% 39.57% 32.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,654 2,824 2,856
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £430 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.90% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £644 £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 14,011 10,817 12,208
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.07% 32.82% 31.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,110 7,198 8,422
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £739 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 523 300 357
10th Percentile £28.50 £29.00 £30.00
25th Percentile £49.50 £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 £67.31 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.90 £78.88 £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 31 August 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 31 August 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 31 August 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 4,770 £550 +2.42% 4,746
London -3 2,819 £572 -0.48% 2,874
UK excluding London -7 2,128 £500 - 2,606
Work from Home -6 1,519 £525 -4.50% 1,727
North of England +2 724 £500 +5.26% 559
South East -9 446 £543 +8.50% 696
Yorkshire 0 370 £500 +2.56% 179
South West -3 291 £528 +0.48% 393
Scotland -2 278 £450 -10.00% 248
North West -2 270 £500 +5.26% 294
Midlands -18 232 £491 +3.42% 282
West Midlands -18 187 £498 +4.74% 158
East of England -9 140 £500 -2.91% 332
North East +1 96 £425 -2.86% 90
East Midlands -12 45 £478 +13.81% 121
Wales -7 30 £530 +30.86% 67
Northern Ireland +2 17 £363 -30.95% 64

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 (5.10%) Apache Airflow
2 269 (4.81%) Apache Spark
3 220 (3.94%) Apache
4 164 (2.93%) Confluence
5 57 (1.02%) Jupyter
6 51 (0.91%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.68%) SAS
8 30 (0.54%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 21 (0.38%) nginx
12 14 (0.25%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
13 9 (0.16%) WebSphere
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.13%) 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 (0.38%) 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 (0.13%) 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 (0.072%) Front Arena
9 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.072%) 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 2,064 (36.94%) AWS
2 1,899 (33.98%) Azure
3 839 (15.01%) GCP
4 716 (12.81%) GitHub
5 506 (9.06%) Power Platform
6 478 (8.55%) Serverless
7 446 (7.98%) Azure DevOps
8 418 (7.48%) GitHub Actions
9 395 (7.07%) Amazon S3
10 357 (6.39%) AWS Lambda
11 326 (5.83%) Snowflake
12 225 (4.03%) dbt
13 220 (3.94%) Azure Data Factory
14 186 (3.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 181 (3.24%) AWS CloudFormation
16 172 (3.08%) Amazon EKS
17 137 (2.45%) Entra ID
18 135 (2.42%) Amazon EC2
19 134 (2.40%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 126 (2.25%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 276 (4.94%) Firewall
2 212 (3.79%) DNS
3 152 (2.72%) TCP/IP
4 135 (2.42%) Network Security
5 129 (2.31%) VPN
6 128 (2.29%) BGP
7 115 (2.06%) WAN
8 88 (1.57%) DHCP
9 74 (1.32%) OSPF
10 66 (1.18%) SD-WAN
11 61 (1.09%) VLAN
12 56 (1.00%) SSL
13 55 (0.98%) VXLAN
14 54 (0.97%) BIG-IP
15 51 (0.91%) HTTP
16 45 (0.81%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 45 (0.81%) SNMP
17 42 (0.75%) Ethernet VPN
18 41 (0.73%) SAN
19 39 (0.70%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 458 (8.20%) Power BI
2 329 (5.89%) Data Warehouse
3 312 (5.58%) PostgreSQL
4 217 (3.88%) SQL Server
5 204 (3.65%) Metadata
6 203 (3.63%) Relational Database
7 193 (3.45%) Tableau
8 187 (3.35%) Data Lake
9 161 (2.88%) BigQuery
10 153 (2.74%) NoSQL
11 138 (2.47%) Big Data
12 136 (2.43%) Amazon Redshift
13 131 (2.34%) Amazon Athena
14 125 (2.24%) Amazon RDS
15 123 (2.20%) Delta Lake
16 118 (2.11%) MongoDB
17 104 (1.86%) DynamoDB
18 89 (1.59%) MySQL
19 73 (1.31%) Redis
20 68 (1.22%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 737 (13.19%) Git
2 500 (8.95%) Jenkins
3 445 (7.96%) GitLab
4 284 (5.08%) JIRA
5 107 (1.91%) Selenium
6 61 (1.09%) JMeter
7 57 (1.02%) Postman
8 53 (0.95%) MLflow
9 52 (0.93%) SonarQube
10 47 (0.84%) Claude Code
11 40 (0.72%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
13 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
13 33 (0.59%) Gatling
13 33 (0.59%) Maven
14 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
15 31 (0.55%) REST Assured
16 30 (0.54%) Sonatype Nexus
17 27 (0.48%) LoadRunner
18 20 (0.36%) JUnit
General
1 1,274 (22.80%) Social Skills
2 1,204 (21.55%) Finance
3 843 (15.09%) Analytical Skills
4 562 (10.06%) Public Sector
5 451 (8.07%) Banking
6 179 (3.20%) Front Office
7 139 (2.49%) Investment Banking
8 118 (2.11%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 109 (1.95%) Retail
11 92 (1.65%) Marketing
12 81 (1.45%) Telecoms
13 60 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
14 57 (1.02%) Military
15 54 (0.97%) Legal
16 50 (0.89%) Aerospace
17 46 (0.82%) Financial Institution
18 45 (0.81%) Publishing
19 43 (0.77%) Law
20 42 (0.75%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 934 (16.71%) Senior
2 899 (16.09%) Developer
3 812 (14.53%) Data Engineer
4 481 (8.61%) Python Developer
5 479 (8.57%) Lead
6 411 (7.36%) Python Engineer
7 338 (6.05%) DevOps Engineer
8 289 (5.17%) Software Engineer
9 286 (5.12%) Analyst
10 282 (5.05%) Architect
11 267 (4.78%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 234 (4.19%) AWS Engineer
13 191 (3.42%) Data Scientist
14 190 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
15 189 (3.38%) Cloud Engineer
16 182 (3.26%) Senior Developer
17 179 (3.20%) Senior Data Engineer
18 175 (3.13%) Azure Engineer
19 142 (2.54%) Infrastructure Engineer
20 141 (2.52%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,323 (23.68%) Terraform
2 468 (8.38%) REST
3 378 (6.76%) PySpark
4 357 (6.39%) Kafka
5 304 (5.44%) React
6 247 (4.42%) .NET
7 204 (3.65%) JSON
8 202 (3.61%) FastAPI
9 199 (3.56%) Django
10 186 (3.33%) RESTful
11 170 (3.04%) Pandas
12 169 (3.02%) Node.js
13 137 (2.45%) pytest
14 136 (2.43%) LangChain
15 120 (2.15%) PyTorch
16 114 (2.04%) YAML
17 111 (1.99%) Flask
18 110 (1.97%) HTML
19 108 (1.93%) OAuth
20 101 (1.81%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 772 (13.82%) Cloud Native
2 307 (5.49%) Distributed Systems
3 244 (4.37%) AI Agents
4 220 (3.94%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.90%) Data Centre
6 156 (2.79%) Product Ownership
7 138 (2.47%) Data Structures
8 137 (2.45%) Legacy Systems
9 134 (2.40%) Algorithms
10 116 (2.08%) Hybrid Cloud
11 108 (1.93%) Data Protection Act
12 107 (1.91%) Derivative
13 106 (1.90%) Management Information System
14 87 (1.56%) Equities
15 79 (1.41%) Enterprise Software
15 79 (1.41%) Security Posture
16 69 (1.23%) Linux Command Line
17 68 (1.22%) Public Cloud
18 63 (1.13%) PKI
18 63 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 746 (13.35%) Linux
2 334 (5.98%) Windows
3 239 (4.28%) Unix
4 150 (2.68%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.61%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 34 (0.61%) VMS
8 28 (0.50%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 17 (0.30%) CentOS
11 16 (0.29%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.089%) Debian
16 5 (0.089%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,223 (39.78%) CI/CD
2 1,609 (28.79%) DevOps
3 1,468 (26.27%) AI
4 1,233 (22.07%) Agile
5 1,208 (21.62%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,101 (19.70%) Analytics
7 982 (17.57%) Data Pipeline
8 907 (16.23%) Problem-Solving
9 890 (15.93%) Software Engineering
10 843 (15.09%) Machine Learning
11 798 (14.28%) Data Engineering
12 772 (13.82%) Containerisation
13 728 (13.03%) Data Modelling
14 703 (12.58%) Observability
15 647 (11.58%) ETL
16 635 (11.36%) Test Automation
17 602 (10.77%) Continuous Improvement
18 580 (10.38%) Validation
19 559 (10.00%) Data Science
20 553 (9.90%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,819 (32.55%) SQL
2 820 (14.67%) Java
3 762 (13.64%) Bash
4 741 (13.26%) PowerShell
5 439 (7.86%) JavaScript
6 336 (6.01%) TypeScript
7 317 (5.67%) C#
8 191 (3.42%) Go
9 150 (2.68%) R
10 142 (2.54%) C++
11 141 (2.52%) Shell Script
12 136 (2.43%) Bicep
13 128 (2.29%) Scala
14 95 (1.70%) Perl
15 60 (1.07%) Groovy
16 59 (1.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 58 (1.04%) C
18 56 (1.00%) PL/SQL
19 53 (0.95%) Rust
20 52 (0.93%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,334 (23.87%) Security Cleared
2 1,081 (19.35%) SC Cleared
3 421 (7.53%) Degree
4 215 (3.85%) DV Cleared
5 163 (2.92%) Computer Science Degree
6 150 (2.68%) Azure Certification
7 141 (2.52%) AWS Certification
8 119 (2.13%) BPSS Clearance
9 93 (1.66%) CISSP
10 86 (1.54%) Cisco Certification
11 68 (1.22%) Master's Degree
12 45 (0.81%) 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 29 (0.52%) CCIE
18 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 602 (10.77%) Data Quality
2 288 (5.15%) QA
3 115 (2.06%) NIST
4 107 (1.91%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 103 (1.84%) GDPR
6 82 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.63%) SLA
8 32 (0.57%) 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%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 939 (16.80%) Docker
2 159 (2.85%) Active Directory
3 133 (2.38%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.09%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.82%) Hyper-V
6 42 (0.75%) vSphere
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 26 (0.47%) 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 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) HDFS
17 5 (0.089%) PowerHA
17 5 (0.089%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,119 (20.03%) Kubernetes
2 633 (11.33%) Ansible
3 336 (6.01%) Grafana
4 245 (4.38%) Prometheus
5 83 (1.49%) Puppet
6 73 (1.31%) Progress Chef
7 68 (1.22%) Argo
8 38 (0.68%) Istio
9 34 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
10 30 (0.54%) Kibana
11 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
12 26 (0.47%) Control-M
12 26 (0.47%) Nagios
13 24 (0.43%) vCenter Server
13 24 (0.43%) vRealize
14 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
15 19 (0.34%) FortiGate
15 19 (0.34%) Packer
15 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
16 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 710 (12.71%) Microsoft
2 563 (10.08%) Databricks
3 361 (6.46%) Google
4 248 (4.44%) Oracle
5 216 (3.87%) Splunk
6 175 (3.13%) VMware
7 146 (2.61%) OpenAI
8 140 (2.51%) Cisco
9 122 (2.18%) ServiceNow
10 103 (1.84%) Red Hat
11 102 (1.83%) Dynatrace
12 95 (1.70%) IBM
13 87 (1.56%) F5
14 82 (1.47%) Palo Alto
15 79 (1.41%) Informatica
16 71 (1.27%) Fortinet
17 69 (1.23%) SAP
18 68 (1.22%) Foundry
19 67 (1.20%) CyberArk
20 59 (1.06%) Salesforce