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 12 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 16
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -3
Contract jobs citing Python 5,202 3,882 3,983
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.95% 13.30% 9.26%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.69% 39.01% 31.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,469 2,729 2,849
10th Percentile £363 £385 £388
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £553
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -0.45% -7.92%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -2.00% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 51 98
10th Percentile £30.44 £21.25 £21.59
25th Percentile £46.25 £26.41 £38.00
Median hourly rate £55.00 £39.32 £60.25
Median % change year-on-year +39.88% -34.74% -6.41%
75th Percentile £70.53 £56.25 £70.94
90th Percentile £85.10 £71.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £63.75
% change year-on-year +16.67% -29.41% +10.87%

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 12,783 9,951 12,734
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.91% 34.08% 29.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,403 6,777 9,061
10th Percentile £353 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £414 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £523 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.40% -1.32% -3.64%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £710 £775 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £489
% change year-on-year - -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 571 246 488
10th Percentile £41.25 £24.96 £32.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £35.00 £46.36
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.43
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +0.12% -0.12%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.88
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +0.78% +3.20% -

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 12 May 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 12 May 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 12 May 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 -2 4,336 £525 -4.55% 2,870
London -3 2,456 £550 -8.33% 1,311
UK excluding London -1 2,016 £490 -2.00% 2,084
Work from Home -1 1,488 £525 -4.55% 1,181
North of England +7 691 £478 -1.95% 490
South East -3 406 £513 -1.44% 692
Yorkshire 0 386 £475 -5.00% 136
Scotland +2 284 £434 -8.68% 115
South West -2 252 £500 -8.05% 243
Midlands -9 251 £500 +11.11% 245
North West 0 247 £500 +5.26% 262
West Midlands -11 192 £500 - 115
East of England -2 125 £500 - 248
North East +10 67 £475 +5.56% 94
East Midlands -14 58 £497 +17.51% 129
Northern Ireland +17 23 £463 -18.68% 23
Wales -13 22 £463 -7.50% 56

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
1 282 (5.42%) Apache Spark
2 206 (3.96%) Apache Airflow
3 167 (3.21%) Apache
4 135 (2.60%) Confluence
5 49 (0.94%) SAS
6 45 (0.87%) SharePoint
7 35 (0.67%) Jupyter
8 22 (0.42%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.38%) nginx
10 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
11 15 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
12 11 (0.21%) Appian
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) CMS
13 8 (0.15%) IIS
14 7 (0.13%) Camunda
15 6 (0.12%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.096%) CICS
16 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
Applications
1 125 (2.40%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
4 20 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.019%) SPSS
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 13 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Fidessa
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
5 5 (0.096%) Remedy ITSM
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.058%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.038%) 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%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle ERP
8 2 (0.038%) SimCorp Dimension
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 1,964 (37.75%) AWS
2 1,764 (33.91%) Azure
3 749 (14.40%) GCP
4 643 (12.36%) GitHub
5 515 (9.90%) Power Platform
6 462 (8.88%) Serverless
7 379 (7.29%) Azure DevOps
8 364 (7.00%) Amazon S3
9 340 (6.54%) GitHub Actions
10 330 (6.34%) AWS Lambda
11 263 (5.06%) Azure Data Factory
12 233 (4.48%) Snowflake
13 203 (3.90%) AWS CloudFormation
14 171 (3.29%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 163 (3.13%) OpenShift
16 159 (3.06%) Amazon EKS
17 158 (3.04%) dbt
18 133 (2.56%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 128 (2.46%) Amazon ECS
20 122 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 184 (3.54%) Firewall
2 131 (2.52%) DNS
3 109 (2.10%) Network Security
4 90 (1.73%) TCP/IP
5 85 (1.63%) BGP
6 80 (1.54%) WAN
7 75 (1.44%) VPN
8 58 (1.11%) HTTP
9 57 (1.10%) OSPF
10 45 (0.87%) SAN
11 40 (0.77%) SNMP
12 39 (0.75%) VXLAN
13 38 (0.73%) BIG-IP
13 38 (0.73%) SD-WAN
14 34 (0.65%) MPLS
15 33 (0.63%) DHCP
15 33 (0.63%) LAN
16 32 (0.62%) SSL
17 31 (0.60%) Ethernet VPN
17 31 (0.60%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 452 (8.69%) Power BI
2 341 (6.56%) PostgreSQL
3 279 (5.36%) Data Warehouse
4 239 (4.59%) SQL Server
5 233 (4.48%) Data Lake
6 196 (3.77%) Tableau
7 189 (3.63%) Relational Database
8 172 (3.31%) NoSQL
9 164 (3.15%) Big Data
10 161 (3.09%) Metadata
11 138 (2.65%) Delta Lake
12 133 (2.56%) BigQuery
13 119 (2.29%) Amazon Athena
14 113 (2.17%) Amazon Redshift
15 108 (2.08%) MongoDB
16 92 (1.77%) MySQL
17 90 (1.73%) Amazon RDS
18 87 (1.67%) DynamoDB
19 86 (1.65%) Azure SQL Database
20 78 (1.50%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 643 (12.36%) Git
2 470 (9.03%) Jenkins
3 359 (6.90%) GitLab
4 244 (4.69%) JIRA
5 92 (1.77%) MLflow
6 71 (1.36%) Selenium
7 58 (1.11%) Postman
8 36 (0.69%) Cucumber
9 30 (0.58%) Artifactory
9 30 (0.58%) JMeter
10 28 (0.54%) Bitbucket
10 28 (0.54%) SonarQube
10 28 (0.54%) Sonatype Nexus
11 25 (0.48%) Cypress.io
11 25 (0.48%) JUnit
12 23 (0.44%) Robot Framework
13 22 (0.42%) Maven
14 20 (0.38%) REST Assured
15 19 (0.37%) SpecFlow
16 18 (0.35%) Gatling
General
1 1,141 (21.93%) Social Skills
2 1,011 (19.43%) Finance
3 697 (13.40%) Analytical Skills
4 472 (9.07%) Public Sector
5 365 (7.02%) Banking
6 181 (3.48%) Front Office
7 130 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
8 99 (1.90%) Investment Banking
9 75 (1.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 68 (1.31%) Marketing
11 58 (1.11%) Retail
12 53 (1.02%) Telecoms
13 52 (1.00%) Pharmaceutical
14 51 (0.98%) Legal
15 46 (0.88%) Influencing Skills
16 35 (0.67%) Financial Institution
16 35 (0.67%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.65%) Publishing
18 32 (0.62%) Military
19 29 (0.56%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 981 (18.86%) Developer
2 789 (15.17%) Data Engineer
3 750 (14.42%) Senior
4 487 (9.36%) Python Developer
5 339 (6.52%) Architect
6 330 (6.34%) Lead
7 304 (5.84%) Python Engineer
8 275 (5.29%) Analyst
9 271 (5.21%) DevOps Engineer
10 252 (4.84%) Software Engineer
11 224 (4.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 216 (4.15%) AWS Engineer
13 210 (4.04%) Data Scientist
14 163 (3.13%) Azure Engineer
15 159 (3.06%) Senior Developer
16 158 (3.04%) Senior Data Engineer
17 156 (3.00%) Platform Engineer
18 145 (2.79%) Full-Stack Developer
19 143 (2.75%) Data Analyst
20 127 (2.44%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 383 (7.36%) REST
2 359 (6.90%) React
3 351 (6.75%) PySpark
4 328 (6.31%) Kafka
5 239 (4.59%) .NET
6 236 (4.54%) Node.js
7 215 (4.13%) Pandas
8 187 (3.59%) PyTorch
9 184 (3.54%) FastAPI
10 180 (3.46%) RESTful
11 163 (3.13%) JSON
12 133 (2.56%) TensorFlow
13 131 (2.52%) NumPy
14 127 (2.44%) Django
15 125 (2.40%) Flask
16 124 (2.38%) scikit-learn
17 116 (2.23%) LangChain
18 114 (2.19%) AngularJS
19 107 (2.06%) LDAP
20 103 (1.98%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 535 (10.28%) Cloud Native
2 228 (4.38%) Distributed Systems
3 156 (3.00%) Algorithms
4 132 (2.54%) Product Ownership
5 120 (2.31%) AI Agents
5 120 (2.31%) Data Protection Act
6 118 (2.27%) Data Centre
7 116 (2.23%) Onboarding
8 115 (2.21%) Data Structures
9 109 (2.10%) Derivative
10 104 (2.00%) Fixed Income
11 103 (1.98%) Equities
12 98 (1.88%) Management Information System
13 95 (1.83%) Legacy Systems
14 92 (1.77%) Enterprise Software
15 90 (1.73%) Hybrid Cloud
16 85 (1.63%) Security Posture
17 69 (1.33%) Public Cloud
18 47 (0.90%) Self-Motivation
19 46 (0.88%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 629 (12.09%) Linux
2 291 (5.59%) Windows
3 210 (4.04%) Unix
4 97 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.23%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.71%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.67%) VMS
8 25 (0.48%) AIX
9 24 (0.46%) Android
10 23 (0.44%) Solaris
11 20 (0.38%) CentOS
12 19 (0.37%) Mac OS
13 17 (0.33%) Apple iOS
14 10 (0.19%) Debian
14 10 (0.19%) zOS
15 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
16 7 (0.13%) Rocky
17 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
18 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
19 4 (0.077%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,917 (36.85%) CI/CD
2 1,384 (26.61%) DevOps
3 1,175 (22.59%) AI
4 1,119 (21.51%) Agile
5 1,029 (19.78%) Analytics
6 936 (17.99%) Problem-Solving
7 911 (17.51%) Infrastructure as Code
8 871 (16.74%) Data Pipeline
9 802 (15.42%) Machine Learning
10 716 (13.76%) Containerisation
11 707 (13.59%) Data Modelling
12 698 (13.42%) Data Engineering
13 685 (13.17%) ETL
14 603 (11.59%) Software Engineering
15 571 (10.98%) Data Science
16 542 (10.42%) Observability
17 525 (10.09%) Test Automation
18 522 (10.03%) Business Intelligence
19 442 (8.50%) LLM
20 410 (7.88%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,721 (33.08%) SQL
2 760 (14.61%) Java
3 644 (12.38%) PowerShell
4 561 (10.78%) Bash
5 477 (9.17%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.77%) C#
7 351 (6.75%) TypeScript
8 208 (4.00%) Go
9 172 (3.31%) R
10 154 (2.96%) C++
11 142 (2.73%) Scala
12 107 (2.06%) Shell Script
13 85 (1.63%) Ruby
14 78 (1.50%) Bicep
14 78 (1.50%) Perl
15 56 (1.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 54 (1.04%) PL/SQL
17 53 (1.02%) C
17 53 (1.02%) T-SQL
18 48 (0.92%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,190 (22.88%) Security Cleared
2 961 (18.47%) SC Cleared
3 369 (7.09%) Degree
4 165 (3.17%) Computer Science Degree
5 144 (2.77%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.50%) BPSS Clearance
7 106 (2.04%) Azure Certification
8 93 (1.79%) AWS Certification
9 85 (1.63%) CISSP
10 80 (1.54%) Master's Degree
11 71 (1.36%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.11%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.94%) CCNP
14 44 (0.85%) CISM
15 36 (0.69%) PhD
16 32 (0.62%) Microsoft Certification
17 31 (0.60%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 27 (0.52%) ISTQB
19 22 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 22 (0.42%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 509 (9.78%) Data Quality
2 230 (4.42%) QA
3 156 (3.00%) GDPR
4 104 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 101 (1.94%) NIST
6 76 (1.46%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) SLA
8 29 (0.56%) PCI DSS
8 29 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
10 20 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
11 18 (0.35%) WCAG
12 17 (0.33%) NCSC
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) SOC 2
15 9 (0.17%) GRC
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) MiFID
17 7 (0.13%) PMO
System Software
1 790 (15.19%) Docker
2 155 (2.98%) Active Directory
3 97 (1.86%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.33%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.75%) VMware NSX
6 35 (0.67%) vSphere
7 33 (0.63%) Firmware
7 33 (0.63%) Hyper-V
8 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
9 14 (0.27%) KVM
10 13 (0.25%) HDFS
11 10 (0.19%) NFS
12 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.17%) SRDF
13 8 (0.15%) Ceph
13 8 (0.15%) Squid
14 7 (0.13%) Postfix
14 7 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
15 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
16 3 (0.058%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 1,076 (20.68%) Terraform
2 934 (17.95%) Kubernetes
3 534 (10.27%) Ansible
4 339 (6.52%) Grafana
5 279 (5.36%) Prometheus
6 73 (1.40%) Puppet
7 64 (1.23%) Argo
8 52 (1.00%) Istio
9 48 (0.92%) vRealize
10 41 (0.79%) Kibana
11 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
12 31 (0.60%) vCenter Server
13 27 (0.52%) Nagios
13 27 (0.52%) Nessus
14 24 (0.46%) Control-M
14 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.46%) ZABBIX
15 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
16 19 (0.37%) Rancher
16 19 (0.37%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 589 (11.32%) Microsoft
2 561 (10.78%) Databricks
3 263 (5.06%) Google
4 229 (4.40%) Oracle
5 223 (4.29%) Splunk
6 179 (3.44%) VMware
7 118 (2.27%) Red Hat
8 116 (2.23%) OpenAI
9 115 (2.21%) Cisco
10 90 (1.73%) ServiceNow
11 88 (1.69%) CyberArk
12 79 (1.52%) BeyondTrust
13 71 (1.36%) Dynatrace
14 68 (1.31%) F5
14 68 (1.31%) IBM
15 66 (1.27%) Palo Alto
16 65 (1.25%) Informatica
17 56 (1.08%) Foundry
18 48 (0.92%) SAP
19 42 (0.81%) Fortinet