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

6 months to
16 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,624 4,304 4,077
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.36% 13.07% 10.66%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.83% 39.89% 33.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,648 2,811 2,841
10th Percentile £371 £356 £375
25th Percentile £444 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £701
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £503 £500 £507
% change year-on-year +0.50% -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 139 83 102
10th Percentile £30.93 £28.18 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £34.88 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £78.38 £58.13 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.42 £83.00 £78.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -28.57% +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 14,121 10,791 12,230
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.02% 32.76% 31.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,165 7,144 8,276
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 536 293 341
10th Percentile £27.75 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £47.88 £37.77 £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 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £80.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +0.78% -0.77% -

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 September 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 September 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 September 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 -3 4,804 £550 +2.61% 11,797
London -3 2,841 £575 - 7,722
UK excluding London -8 2,144 £503 +0.50% 5,116
Work from Home -5 1,543 £529 -3.91% 4,270
North of England +1 740 £500 +5.04% 1,095
South East -4 457 £543 +8.50% 1,166
Yorkshire -2 387 £500 - 346
Scotland -5 289 £450 -10.00% 639
South West -3 280 £550 +4.76% 646
North West -3 277 £525 +10.53% 616
Midlands -19 220 £500 +5.26% 521
West Midlands -21 176 £500 - 309
East of England -11 147 £480 -8.57% 734
North East -4 88 £425 -2.86% 136
East Midlands -13 44 £469 +12.95% 211
Wales -7 27 £530 +29.27% 108
Northern Ireland +3 17 £363 -30.95% 246

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
1 293 (5.21%) Apache Airflow
2 268 (4.77%) Apache Spark
3 223 (3.97%) Apache
4 162 (2.88%) Confluence
5 57 (1.01%) Jupyter
5 57 (1.01%) SharePoint
6 36 (0.64%) SAS
7 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
8 25 (0.44%) nginx
9 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
10 21 (0.37%) IIS
11 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
12 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 7 (0.12%) CMS
13 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
14 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.089%) Apache Superset
15 5 (0.089%) Camunda
Applications
1 109 (1.94%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.60%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 18 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
5 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
6 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
8 2 (0.036%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 18 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
1 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
2 17 (0.30%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
5 8 (0.14%) Front Arena
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
11 2 (0.036%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 2,086 (37.09%) AWS
2 1,889 (33.59%) Azure
3 877 (15.59%) GCP
4 746 (13.26%) GitHub
5 493 (8.77%) Power Platform
6 489 (8.69%) Serverless
7 437 (7.77%) GitHub Actions
8 436 (7.75%) Azure DevOps
9 393 (6.99%) Amazon S3
10 365 (6.49%) AWS Lambda
11 332 (5.90%) Snowflake
12 237 (4.21%) dbt
13 211 (3.75%) Azure Data Factory
14 194 (3.45%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 182 (3.24%) AWS CloudFormation
16 175 (3.11%) Amazon EKS
17 153 (2.72%) Entra ID
18 140 (2.49%) Amazon EC2
19 128 (2.28%) Amazon ECS
20 127 (2.26%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 283 (5.03%) Firewall
2 216 (3.84%) DNS
3 152 (2.70%) Network Security
4 150 (2.67%) TCP/IP
5 126 (2.24%) BGP
6 124 (2.20%) VPN
7 114 (2.03%) WAN
8 86 (1.53%) DHCP
9 75 (1.33%) OSPF
10 68 (1.21%) SD-WAN
11 62 (1.10%) BIG-IP
12 59 (1.05%) VLAN
13 58 (1.03%) SSL
14 54 (0.96%) HTTP
15 52 (0.92%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 52 (0.92%) VXLAN
16 43 (0.76%) Ethernet VPN
17 39 (0.69%) SAN
18 38 (0.68%) SSH
19 37 (0.66%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 442 (7.86%) Power BI
2 331 (5.89%) Data Warehouse
3 318 (5.65%) PostgreSQL
4 214 (3.81%) Metadata
5 213 (3.79%) SQL Server
6 207 (3.68%) Relational Database
7 186 (3.31%) Data Lake
8 180 (3.20%) Tableau
9 176 (3.13%) BigQuery
10 154 (2.74%) NoSQL
11 136 (2.42%) Big Data
12 131 (2.33%) Amazon RDS
13 129 (2.29%) Amazon Redshift
14 128 (2.28%) Amazon Athena
15 120 (2.13%) MongoDB
16 119 (2.12%) Delta Lake
17 111 (1.97%) DynamoDB
18 97 (1.72%) MySQL
19 72 (1.28%) Redis
20 62 (1.10%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 787 (13.99%) Git
2 506 (9.00%) Jenkins
3 469 (8.34%) GitLab
4 300 (5.33%) JIRA
5 116 (2.06%) Selenium
6 58 (1.03%) Postman
7 57 (1.01%) SonarQube
8 56 (1.00%) Claude Code
9 55 (0.98%) JMeter
10 50 (0.89%) MLflow
11 41 (0.73%) Bitbucket
12 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
12 36 (0.64%) Maven
13 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
14 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
14 32 (0.57%) Gatling
14 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
15 30 (0.53%) Sonatype Nexus
16 25 (0.44%) LoadRunner
17 18 (0.32%) JUnit
General
1 1,310 (23.29%) Social Skills
2 1,257 (22.35%) Finance
3 838 (14.90%) Analytical Skills
4 547 (9.73%) Public Sector
5 487 (8.66%) Banking
6 177 (3.15%) Front Office
7 147 (2.61%) Investment Banking
8 110 (1.96%) Retail
9 109 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 107 (1.90%) Documentation Skills
11 95 (1.69%) Marketing
12 81 (1.44%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.05%) Military
14 55 (0.98%) Pharmaceutical
15 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
16 50 (0.89%) Law
17 47 (0.84%) Legal
18 45 (0.80%) Financial Institution
19 44 (0.78%) Publishing
20 42 (0.75%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 982 (17.46%) Senior
2 886 (15.75%) Developer
3 825 (14.67%) Data Engineer
4 482 (8.57%) Lead
5 469 (8.34%) Python Developer
6 419 (7.45%) Python Engineer
7 353 (6.28%) DevOps Engineer
8 294 (5.23%) Analyst
8 294 (5.23%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 281 (5.00%) Software Engineer
10 262 (4.66%) Architect
11 228 (4.05%) AWS Engineer
12 194 (3.45%) Cloud Engineer
13 193 (3.43%) Platform Engineer
14 192 (3.41%) Senior Developer
15 188 (3.34%) Senior Data Engineer
16 181 (3.22%) Data Scientist
17 179 (3.18%) Azure Engineer
18 148 (2.63%) Network Engineer
19 143 (2.54%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,369 (24.34%) Terraform
2 502 (8.93%) REST
3 371 (6.60%) PySpark
4 362 (6.44%) Kafka
5 305 (5.42%) React
6 254 (4.52%) .NET
7 212 (3.77%) JSON
8 203 (3.61%) FastAPI
9 201 (3.57%) Django
10 187 (3.33%) RESTful
11 162 (2.88%) Node.js
11 162 (2.88%) Pandas
12 147 (2.61%) pytest
13 146 (2.60%) LangChain
14 121 (2.15%) OAuth
15 115 (2.04%) Flask
16 109 (1.94%) PyTorch
16 109 (1.94%) YAML
17 106 (1.88%) HTML
18 103 (1.83%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 786 (13.98%) Cloud Native
2 310 (5.51%) Distributed Systems
3 270 (4.80%) AI Agents
4 234 (4.16%) Onboarding
5 160 (2.84%) Data Centre
5 160 (2.84%) Product Ownership
6 146 (2.60%) Data Structures
7 133 (2.36%) Legacy Systems
8 129 (2.29%) Algorithms
9 115 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
10 108 (1.92%) Management Information System
11 107 (1.90%) Data Protection Act
12 103 (1.83%) Derivative
13 102 (1.81%) Enterprise Software
14 89 (1.58%) Security Posture
15 79 (1.40%) Equities
16 77 (1.37%) Public Cloud
17 70 (1.24%) Linux Command Line
17 70 (1.24%) PKI
18 67 (1.19%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 758 (13.48%) Linux
2 334 (5.94%) Windows
3 249 (4.43%) Unix
4 158 (2.81%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.60%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.82%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.64%) VMS
8 22 (0.39%) CentOS
9 20 (0.36%) AIX
10 18 (0.32%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) 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
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 5 (0.089%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,313 (41.13%) CI/CD
2 1,621 (28.82%) DevOps
3 1,542 (27.42%) AI
4 1,273 (22.64%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,261 (22.42%) Agile
6 1,099 (19.54%) Analytics
7 988 (17.57%) Data Pipeline
8 931 (16.55%) Software Engineering
9 902 (16.04%) Problem-Solving
10 847 (15.06%) Machine Learning
11 822 (14.62%) Data Engineering
12 793 (14.10%) Containerisation
13 745 (13.25%) Data Modelling
14 737 (13.10%) Observability
15 656 (11.66%) Test Automation
16 650 (11.56%) ETL
17 643 (11.43%) Continuous Improvement
18 623 (11.08%) Validation
19 576 (10.24%) Platform Engineering
20 559 (9.94%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 1,843 (32.77%) SQL
2 822 (14.62%) Java
3 775 (13.78%) Bash
4 746 (13.26%) PowerShell
5 450 (8.00%) JavaScript
6 345 (6.13%) TypeScript
7 320 (5.69%) C#
8 208 (3.70%) Go
9 152 (2.70%) Shell Script
10 143 (2.54%) R
11 136 (2.42%) C++
12 133 (2.36%) Bicep
13 126 (2.24%) Scala
14 100 (1.78%) Perl
15 59 (1.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 58 (1.03%) Groovy
17 57 (1.01%) C
18 53 (0.94%) PL/SQL
18 53 (0.94%) Rust
19 50 (0.89%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,365 (24.27%) Security Cleared
2 1,105 (19.65%) SC Cleared
3 411 (7.31%) Degree
4 239 (4.25%) DV Cleared
5 153 (2.72%) Azure Certification
6 151 (2.68%) Computer Science Degree
7 139 (2.47%) AWS Certification
8 118 (2.10%) BPSS Clearance
9 94 (1.67%) CISSP
10 83 (1.48%) Cisco Certification
11 60 (1.07%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
13 41 (0.73%) CCNP
14 37 (0.66%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 34 (0.60%) PhD
16 32 (0.57%) CISM
17 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.50%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 28 (0.50%) CCIE
19 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 626 (11.13%) Data Quality
2 307 (5.46%) QA
3 111 (1.97%) NIST
4 95 (1.69%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 94 (1.67%) GDPR
6 81 (1.44%) Accessibility
7 36 (0.64%) SLA
8 34 (0.60%) Actionable Recommendations
9 27 (0.48%) NCSC
10 24 (0.43%) PCI DSS
11 23 (0.41%) WCAG
12 20 (0.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 17 (0.30%) SOC 2
14 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
15 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
16 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.12%) MiFID
19 6 (0.11%) GRC
19 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 958 (17.03%) Docker
2 169 (3.00%) Active Directory
3 138 (2.45%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.19%) Virtual Machines
5 53 (0.94%) Hyper-V
6 39 (0.69%) vSphere
7 35 (0.62%) VMware NSX
8 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
9 25 (0.44%) NFS
10 22 (0.39%) Firmware
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.25%) Squid
13 11 (0.20%) Ceph
13 11 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) HDFS
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,157 (20.57%) Kubernetes
2 642 (11.42%) Ansible
3 332 (5.90%) Grafana
4 239 (4.25%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.46%) Puppet
6 74 (1.32%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.19%) Argo
8 43 (0.76%) Single Sign-On
9 33 (0.59%) Istio
9 33 (0.59%) Kibana
10 27 (0.48%) Control-M
11 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
12 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
12 23 (0.41%) vRealize
13 22 (0.39%) ZABBIX
14 21 (0.37%) FortiGate
15 20 (0.36%) Nagios
15 20 (0.36%) Packer
16 18 (0.32%) HAProxy
17 16 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 730 (12.98%) Microsoft
2 571 (10.15%) Databricks
3 378 (6.72%) Google
4 242 (4.30%) Oracle
5 211 (3.75%) Splunk
6 182 (3.24%) VMware
7 155 (2.76%) OpenAI
8 143 (2.54%) Cisco
9 119 (2.12%) ServiceNow
10 101 (1.80%) Red Hat
11 97 (1.72%) Dynatrace
12 92 (1.64%) F5
13 91 (1.62%) IBM
14 88 (1.56%) Palo Alto
15 79 (1.40%) Foundry
16 73 (1.30%) Informatica
17 72 (1.28%) Fortinet
17 72 (1.28%) SAP
18 64 (1.14%) CyberArk
19 61 (1.08%) Salesforce