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 20 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,757 3,904 4,173
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.76% 12.48% 9.63%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.63% 37.59% 31.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,209 2,584 2,914
10th Percentile £359 £380 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £570
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -3.42% -5.08%
75th Percentile £638 £681 £688
90th Percentile £739 £807 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £520 £525
% change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 98 62 118
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.23 £30.20
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.15 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.86 £45.59 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.74% -24.02% -7.69%
75th Percentile £73.37 £66.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.23 £77.25 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £60.00
% change year-on-year +10.89% -23.03% -7.69%

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 11,428 10,385 13,060
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.66% 33.20% 30.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,602 6,582 9,246
10th Percentile £350 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.90% -4.55% -3.08%
75th Percentile £614 £640 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £491 £500
% change year-on-year -1.99% -1.80% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 414 246 454
10th Percentile £36.08 £21.25 £35.50
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.19 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +3.31% -6.92%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -3.85%

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 20 January 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 20 January 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 20 January 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 0 4,042 £525 -8.70% 3,741
London 0 2,338 £550 -8.33% 1,111
UK excluding London 0 1,808 £500 -3.85% 3,285
Work from Home 0 1,430 £525 -4.55% 1,775
North of England +6 591 £481 -3.75% 580
South East +2 397 £481 -12.50% 1,182
Yorkshire +8 300 £500 -6.98% 222
Midlands +5 279 £507 +6.74% 330
Scotland +2 256 £470 -2.89% 174
North West +4 247 £450 -7.41% 260
West Midlands +15 237 £519 +3.80% 138
South West -8 176 £550 -10.20% 406
East of England +7 125 £525 +8.25% 459
North East +5 48 £500 -8.26% 103
East Midlands -20 42 £429 +7.19% 185
Wales -16 28 £523 +4.50% 144
Northern Ireland +1 23 £575 +9.52% 78

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
1 211 (4.44%) Apache Spark
2 199 (4.18%) Apache Airflow
3 151 (3.17%) Apache
4 150 (3.15%) Confluence
5 61 (1.28%) SAS
6 57 (1.20%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.71%) nginx
8 33 (0.69%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 19 (0.40%) Appian
11 11 (0.23%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 7 (0.15%) IIS
14 6 (0.13%) Camunda
14 6 (0.13%) CMS
14 6 (0.13%) Luigi
14 6 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
15 3 (0.063%) Apache Superset
15 3 (0.063%) Traefik
Applications
1 125 (2.63%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.71%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 9 (0.19%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 3 (0.063%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.063%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.042%) Maya
10 2 (0.042%) NUKE
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.34%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
2 10 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 3 (0.063%) Actimize
4 3 (0.063%) NetSuite
4 3 (0.063%) Remedy ITSM
5 2 (0.042%) Bloomberg AIM
5 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
5 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
5 2 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.042%) Shopify
5 2 (0.042%) Teamcenter
6 1 (0.021%) Cloudability
6 1 (0.021%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
6 1 (0.021%) Maximo
6 1 (0.021%) RMDS
6 1 (0.021%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,868 (39.27%) AWS
2 1,545 (32.48%) Azure
3 727 (15.28%) GCP
4 594 (12.49%) GitHub
5 510 (10.72%) Serverless
6 437 (9.19%) Power Platform
7 365 (7.67%) Amazon S3
8 346 (7.27%) AWS Lambda
9 315 (6.62%) Azure DevOps
10 311 (6.54%) GitHub Actions
11 246 (5.17%) AWS CloudFormation
12 235 (4.94%) Snowflake
13 215 (4.52%) Azure Data Factory
14 193 (4.06%) Amazon EC2
15 177 (3.72%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 177 (3.72%) Amazon ECS
16 168 (3.53%) Amazon EKS
17 139 (2.92%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 135 (2.84%) dbt
18 135 (2.84%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 238 (5.00%) Firewall
2 156 (3.28%) DNS
3 122 (2.56%) TCP/IP
4 120 (2.52%) Network Security
5 80 (1.68%) VPN
6 78 (1.64%) HTTP
7 69 (1.45%) BGP
8 64 (1.35%) SSL
9 51 (1.07%) WAN
10 42 (0.88%) OSPF
11 38 (0.80%) MPLS
12 37 (0.78%) Wireshark
13 35 (0.74%) LAN
13 35 (0.74%) Wireless
14 33 (0.69%) DHCP
15 32 (0.67%) SD-WAN
16 31 (0.65%) SSH
17 28 (0.59%) SMTP
18 23 (0.48%) FTP
18 23 (0.48%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 375 (7.88%) Power BI
2 367 (7.71%) PostgreSQL
3 279 (5.87%) Data Warehouse
4 225 (4.73%) NoSQL
4 225 (4.73%) Relational Database
5 220 (4.62%) Data Lake
6 171 (3.59%) SQL Server
7 163 (3.43%) Amazon RDS
8 156 (3.28%) Big Data
9 146 (3.07%) Tableau
10 126 (2.65%) MySQL
11 107 (2.25%) Metadata
12 99 (2.08%) BigQuery
13 95 (2.00%) MongoDB
14 94 (1.98%) Amazon Redshift
15 93 (1.96%) Amazon Athena
16 83 (1.74%) Hadoop
17 79 (1.66%) Delta Lake
17 79 (1.66%) DynamoDB
18 75 (1.58%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 603 (12.68%) Git
2 556 (11.69%) Jenkins
3 427 (8.98%) GitLab
4 273 (5.74%) JIRA
5 84 (1.77%) Selenium
6 76 (1.60%) MLflow
7 48 (1.01%) Cucumber
7 48 (1.01%) Sonatype Nexus
8 45 (0.95%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.90%) Postman
10 41 (0.86%) SonarQube
11 39 (0.82%) JUnit
12 35 (0.74%) JMeter
13 32 (0.67%) Liquibase
14 29 (0.61%) CircleCI
14 29 (0.61%) Cypress.io
14 29 (0.61%) Maven
15 28 (0.59%) Visual Studio
16 27 (0.57%) Artifactory
17 24 (0.50%) Gradle
General
1 1,290 (27.12%) Social Skills
2 942 (19.80%) Finance
3 664 (13.96%) Analytical Skills
4 445 (9.35%) Public Sector
5 419 (8.81%) Banking
6 160 (3.36%) Front Office
7 132 (2.77%) Investment Banking
8 126 (2.65%) Documentation Skills
9 72 (1.51%) Financial Institution
10 67 (1.41%) Marketing
11 64 (1.35%) Pharmaceutical
12 61 (1.28%) Retail
13 57 (1.20%) Telecoms
14 56 (1.18%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 43 (0.90%) Legal
15 43 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
16 41 (0.86%) Manufacturing
17 33 (0.69%) Influencing Skills
18 28 (0.59%) Military
19 24 (0.50%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 821 (17.26%) Developer
2 663 (13.94%) Senior
3 622 (13.08%) Data Engineer
4 342 (7.19%) Python Developer
5 318 (6.68%) DevOps Engineer
6 307 (6.45%) Python Engineer
7 286 (6.01%) Architect
8 285 (5.99%) Analyst
9 269 (5.65%) AWS Engineer
10 239 (5.02%) Lead
11 232 (4.88%) Software Engineer
12 229 (4.81%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 177 (3.72%) Data Scientist
14 165 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
15 145 (3.05%) Data Analyst
16 143 (3.01%) Senior Developer
17 129 (2.71%) Azure Engineer
18 124 (2.61%) Senior Data Engineer
19 120 (2.52%) Full-Stack Developer
20 118 (2.48%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 417 (8.77%) REST
2 300 (6.31%) React
3 289 (6.08%) Kafka
4 273 (5.74%) PySpark
5 239 (5.02%) Node.js
6 223 (4.69%) RESTful
7 218 (4.58%) Pandas
8 212 (4.46%) FastAPI
9 194 (4.08%) PyTorch
10 170 (3.57%) .NET
11 166 (3.49%) NumPy
11 166 (3.49%) TensorFlow
12 133 (2.80%) AngularJS
13 122 (2.56%) LangChain
14 118 (2.48%) scikit-learn
15 112 (2.35%) Elastic Stack
16 105 (2.21%) pytest
17 104 (2.19%) Flask
18 102 (2.14%) OAuth
19 101 (2.12%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 409 (8.60%) Cloud Native
2 190 (3.99%) Algorithms
3 183 (3.85%) Distributed Systems
4 130 (2.73%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.67%) Data Protection Act
6 121 (2.54%) Equities
7 104 (2.19%) Data Structures
8 95 (2.00%) Onboarding
9 94 (1.98%) AI Agents
9 94 (1.98%) Derivative
10 91 (1.91%) Enterprise Software
11 86 (1.81%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 84 (1.77%) Fixed Income
13 83 (1.74%) Public Cloud
14 77 (1.62%) Security Posture
15 76 (1.60%) Data Centre
16 75 (1.58%) Hedge funds
16 75 (1.58%) Hybrid Cloud
17 74 (1.56%) Management Information System
18 73 (1.53%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 777 (16.33%) Linux
2 355 (7.46%) Windows
3 233 (4.90%) Unix
4 92 (1.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.30%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.84%) Android
7 38 (0.80%) Ubuntu
8 36 (0.76%) VMS
9 30 (0.63%) CentOS
10 25 (0.53%) Solaris
11 24 (0.50%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.38%) Apple iOS
13 17 (0.36%) Amazon Linux
14 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
15 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
16 4 (0.084%) Debian
16 4 (0.084%) Robot Operating System
16 4 (0.084%) Windows 10
17 3 (0.063%) AIX
17 3 (0.063%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,658 (34.85%) CI/CD
2 1,343 (28.23%) DevOps
3 1,128 (23.71%) Agile
4 1,042 (21.90%) Problem-Solving
5 954 (20.05%) AI
6 858 (18.04%) Infrastructure as Code
7 822 (17.28%) Analytics
8 742 (15.60%) Machine Learning
9 719 (15.11%) Containerisation
10 690 (14.50%) Data Pipeline
11 567 (11.92%) ETL
12 555 (11.67%) Data Engineering
13 553 (11.62%) Data Science
14 549 (11.54%) Data Modelling
15 543 (11.41%) Software Engineering
16 519 (10.91%) Test Automation
17 426 (8.96%) Business Intelligence
18 394 (8.28%) Observability
19 371 (7.80%) LLM
20 362 (7.61%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,454 (30.57%) SQL
2 752 (15.81%) Java
3 651 (13.69%) PowerShell
4 610 (12.82%) Bash
5 486 (10.22%) JavaScript
6 292 (6.14%) C#
7 287 (6.03%) TypeScript
8 246 (5.17%) Go
9 208 (4.37%) C++
10 163 (3.43%) Perl
11 161 (3.38%) R
12 154 (3.24%) Shell Script
13 112 (2.35%) Scala
14 96 (2.02%) Ruby
15 60 (1.26%) Bicep
15 60 (1.26%) Kusto Query Language
16 55 (1.16%) C
17 51 (1.07%) VBA
18 45 (0.95%) PHP
19 37 (0.78%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,040 (21.86%) Security Cleared
2 846 (17.78%) SC Cleared
3 435 (9.14%) Degree
4 234 (4.92%) Computer Science Degree
5 137 (2.88%) DV Cleared
6 131 (2.75%) AWS Certification
7 116 (2.44%) Master's Degree
8 87 (1.83%) BPSS Clearance
9 86 (1.81%) Azure Certification
10 83 (1.74%) CISSP
11 77 (1.62%) Cisco Certification
12 71 (1.49%) MCP
13 51 (1.07%) CCNP
14 48 (1.01%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 43 (0.90%) PhD
16 37 (0.78%) CEH
17 36 (0.76%) CCIE
18 33 (0.69%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 33 (0.69%) CISM
18 33 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 390 (8.20%) Data Quality
2 172 (3.62%) QA
3 162 (3.41%) GDPR
4 89 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 89 (1.87%) NIST
5 58 (1.22%) Accessibility
6 33 (0.69%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 26 (0.55%) HIPAA
9 23 (0.48%) SLA
10 22 (0.46%) NCSC
11 18 (0.38%) SOC 2
12 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
13 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
13 9 (0.19%) MiFID
14 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
14 8 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
14 8 (0.17%) EMIR
14 8 (0.17%) PMO
14 8 (0.17%) WCAG
System Software
1 950 (19.97%) Docker
2 184 (3.87%) Active Directory
3 109 (2.29%) VMware Infrastructure
4 36 (0.76%) VMware NSX
5 35 (0.74%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.74%) vSphere
6 23 (0.48%) Firmware
7 21 (0.44%) Hyper-V
8 20 (0.42%) HDFS
9 17 (0.36%) KVM
10 15 (0.32%) Squid
11 14 (0.29%) DFS Replication
11 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.27%) Postfix
13 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) Dovecot
15 9 (0.19%) GPFS
16 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
16 8 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,077 (22.64%) Terraform
2 998 (20.98%) Kubernetes
3 593 (12.47%) Ansible
4 343 (7.21%) Grafana
5 291 (6.12%) Prometheus
6 84 (1.77%) Argo
7 82 (1.72%) Puppet
8 55 (1.16%) Kibana
9 46 (0.97%) vRealize
10 42 (0.88%) Istio
11 35 (0.74%) Single Sign-On
12 33 (0.69%) Nessus
13 31 (0.65%) Progress Chef
14 29 (0.61%) NetBackup
15 19 (0.40%) ITRS Geneos
16 18 (0.38%) logstash
17 17 (0.36%) Nmap
18 16 (0.34%) QRadar
18 16 (0.34%) Rancher
19 15 (0.32%) Proxmox
Vendors
1 568 (11.94%) Microsoft
2 447 (9.40%) Databricks
3 284 (5.97%) Google
4 244 (5.13%) Splunk
5 236 (4.96%) Oracle
6 209 (4.39%) VMware
7 139 (2.92%) Red Hat
8 122 (2.56%) ServiceNow
9 118 (2.48%) Cisco
10 104 (2.19%) OpenAI
11 93 (1.96%) CyberArk
12 85 (1.79%) F5
13 79 (1.66%) Palo Alto
14 70 (1.47%) Foundry
15 68 (1.43%) BeyondTrust
16 49 (1.03%) SAP
17 42 (0.88%) Dynatrace
18 40 (0.84%) Informatica
19 39 (0.82%) CheckPoint
20 38 (0.80%) Salesforce