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

6 months to
26 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 14
Rank change year-on-year -1 +3 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,527 3,965 4,139
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.86% 13.11% 9.52%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.28% 38.67% 31.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,636 2,707 2,967
10th Percentile £363 £374 £375
25th Percentile £425 £443 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £560
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -4.02% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £700
90th Percentile £738 £800 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -5.12%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 62 122
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.82
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £32.81
Median hourly rate £54.00 £44.75 £62.25
Median % change year-on-year +20.67% -28.11% -4.23%
75th Percentile £70.00 £54.94 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £62.80 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +11.99%

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 13,723 10,253 13,229
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.97% 33.90% 30.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,926 6,935 9,287
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £626 £650
90th Percentile £720 £751 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 550 242 547
10th Percentile £34.91 £25.81 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £54.94 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.32% -12.10% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.55 £82.66 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £61.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +5.69% -5.38% +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 26 June 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 26 June 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 26 June 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 4,612 £525 -4.55% 2,243
London -3 2,661 £550 -4.35% 1,107
UK excluding London -1 2,149 £500 - 1,617
Work from Home -2 1,572 £525 -4.55% 878
North of England +9 780 £488 +2.63% 346
Yorkshire +2 429 £500 - 100
South East -7 415 £525 +5.00% 577
Scotland +4 312 £440 -7.37% 84
North West +6 274 £500 +5.26% 188
South West -3 259 £500 -9.09% 216
Midlands -17 235 £477 +3.92% 162
West Midlands -17 188 £475 - 82
East of England -14 128 £500 -0.50% 177
North East +10 89 £450 +5.88% 62
East Midlands -8 46 £497 +10.64% 80
Wales -10 30 £483 +6.04% 38
Northern Ireland +13 28 £375 -36.17% 51

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
1 284 (5.14%) Apache Spark
2 255 (4.61%) Apache Airflow
3 192 (3.47%) Apache
4 165 (2.99%) Confluence
5 56 (1.01%) Jupyter
6 50 (0.90%) SAS
6 50 (0.90%) SharePoint
7 22 (0.40%) OpenStack
8 21 (0.38%) nginx
9 19 (0.34%) Palantir Foundry
10 17 (0.31%) ArcGIS
11 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Exchange
12 12 (0.22%) IIS
13 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) Appian
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
16 6 (0.11%) Camunda
16 6 (0.11%) CMS
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 117 (2.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.45%) Microsoft Office
4 24 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 21 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
7 14 (0.25%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.072%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.036%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.018%) SPSS
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
10 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.38%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
4 10 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
7 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.090%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.072%) Sage X3
9 3 (0.054%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.036%) Endur
10 2 (0.036%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.036%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.036%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,069 (37.43%) AWS
2 1,851 (33.49%) Azure
3 818 (14.80%) GCP
4 654 (11.83%) GitHub
5 524 (9.48%) Power Platform
6 483 (8.74%) Serverless
7 406 (7.35%) Amazon S3
8 394 (7.13%) Azure DevOps
9 359 (6.50%) AWS Lambda
10 350 (6.33%) GitHub Actions
11 273 (4.94%) Snowflake
12 243 (4.40%) Azure Data Factory
13 200 (3.62%) dbt
14 180 (3.26%) AWS CloudFormation
15 163 (2.95%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 163 (2.95%) Amazon EKS
16 159 (2.88%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 158 (2.86%) OpenShift
18 128 (2.32%) Amazon EC2
19 121 (2.19%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 236 (4.27%) Firewall
2 162 (2.93%) DNS
3 115 (2.08%) BGP
4 113 (2.04%) Network Security
5 112 (2.03%) WAN
6 103 (1.86%) TCP/IP
7 94 (1.70%) VPN
8 73 (1.32%) OSPF
9 59 (1.07%) BIG-IP
10 57 (1.03%) HTTP
11 55 (1.00%) SAN
11 55 (1.00%) SD-WAN
12 50 (0.90%) VXLAN
13 49 (0.89%) VLAN
14 48 (0.87%) DHCP
15 46 (0.83%) SSL
16 42 (0.76%) LAN
17 40 (0.72%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 40 (0.72%) MPLS
18 39 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 462 (8.36%) Power BI
2 352 (6.37%) PostgreSQL
3 306 (5.54%) Data Warehouse
4 249 (4.51%) SQL Server
5 213 (3.85%) Data Lake
6 198 (3.58%) Tableau
7 193 (3.49%) Relational Database
8 168 (3.04%) Metadata
8 168 (3.04%) NoSQL
9 159 (2.88%) Big Data
10 141 (2.55%) Amazon Athena
11 137 (2.48%) BigQuery
12 136 (2.46%) Amazon Redshift
13 132 (2.39%) Delta Lake
14 123 (2.23%) MongoDB
15 102 (1.85%) DynamoDB
16 97 (1.76%) Amazon RDS
17 91 (1.65%) MySQL
18 76 (1.38%) Snowflake Schema
19 72 (1.30%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 665 (12.03%) Git
2 499 (9.03%) Jenkins
3 397 (7.18%) GitLab
4 301 (5.45%) JIRA
5 77 (1.39%) Selenium
6 76 (1.38%) MLflow
7 60 (1.09%) Postman
8 38 (0.69%) JMeter
9 36 (0.65%) Cypress.io
10 34 (0.62%) Bitbucket
11 33 (0.60%) SonarQube
12 32 (0.58%) Artifactory
13 31 (0.56%) Cucumber
14 29 (0.52%) REST Assured
15 28 (0.51%) JUnit
16 27 (0.49%) Maven
16 27 (0.49%) Sonatype Nexus
17 23 (0.42%) Claude Code
17 23 (0.42%) Gatling
18 19 (0.34%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,205 (21.80%) Social Skills
2 1,151 (20.83%) Finance
3 743 (13.44%) Analytical Skills
4 524 (9.48%) Public Sector
5 411 (7.44%) Banking
6 195 (3.53%) Front Office
7 136 (2.46%) Documentation Skills
8 127 (2.30%) Investment Banking
9 107 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 84 (1.52%) Retail
11 78 (1.41%) Marketing
12 61 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
13 58 (1.05%) Legal
13 58 (1.05%) Telecoms
14 47 (0.85%) Financial Institution
15 46 (0.83%) Influencing Skills
15 46 (0.83%) Publishing
16 38 (0.69%) Military
17 34 (0.62%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 987 (17.86%) Developer
2 864 (15.63%) Data Engineer
3 826 (14.94%) Senior
4 521 (9.43%) Python Developer
5 381 (6.89%) Lead
6 371 (6.71%) Python Engineer
7 321 (5.81%) Architect
8 302 (5.46%) DevOps Engineer
9 284 (5.14%) Software Engineer
10 278 (5.03%) Analyst
11 249 (4.51%) AWS Engineer
12 248 (4.49%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 213 (3.85%) Data Scientist
14 170 (3.08%) Azure Engineer
14 170 (3.08%) Senior Data Engineer
15 167 (3.02%) Senior Developer
16 166 (3.00%) Platform Engineer
17 158 (2.86%) Cloud Engineer
18 145 (2.62%) Full-Stack Developer
19 140 (2.53%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 412 (7.45%) REST
2 378 (6.84%) PySpark
3 375 (6.78%) React
4 328 (5.93%) Kafka
5 248 (4.49%) .NET
6 212 (3.84%) Node.js
7 210 (3.80%) RESTful
8 207 (3.75%) FastAPI
9 200 (3.62%) Pandas
10 186 (3.37%) JSON
11 165 (2.99%) PyTorch
12 163 (2.95%) Django
13 134 (2.42%) LangChain
14 125 (2.26%) Flask
15 123 (2.23%) NumPy
16 114 (2.06%) scikit-learn
17 113 (2.04%) OAuth
18 111 (2.01%) TensorFlow
19 99 (1.79%) AngularJS
19 99 (1.79%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 710 (12.85%) Cloud Native
2 282 (5.10%) Distributed Systems
3 159 (2.88%) AI Agents
3 159 (2.88%) Onboarding
4 151 (2.73%) Data Centre
5 149 (2.70%) Algorithms
6 146 (2.64%) Product Ownership
7 128 (2.32%) Data Structures
8 121 (2.19%) Legacy Systems
9 115 (2.08%) Data Protection Act
9 115 (2.08%) Management Information System
10 109 (1.97%) Derivative
11 104 (1.88%) Hybrid Cloud
12 97 (1.76%) Equities
13 96 (1.74%) Fixed Income
14 85 (1.54%) Security Posture
15 74 (1.34%) Public Cloud
16 66 (1.19%) Enterprise Software
17 60 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
18 59 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 634 (11.47%) Linux
2 302 (5.46%) Windows
3 217 (3.93%) Unix
4 121 (2.19%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 76 (1.38%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.76%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.54%) VMS
8 26 (0.47%) AIX
9 23 (0.42%) Android
10 20 (0.36%) Solaris
11 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
11 17 (0.31%) CentOS
12 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.22%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.13%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 5 (0.090%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.090%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.090%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,079 (37.62%) CI/CD
2 1,520 (27.50%) DevOps
3 1,358 (24.57%) AI
4 1,222 (22.11%) Agile
5 1,107 (20.03%) Analytics
6 1,005 (18.18%) Infrastructure as Code
7 989 (17.89%) Data Pipeline
8 930 (16.83%) Problem-Solving
9 870 (15.74%) Machine Learning
10 791 (14.31%) Data Engineering
11 740 (13.39%) Containerisation
12 733 (13.26%) Data Modelling
13 731 (13.23%) Software Engineering
14 693 (12.54%) ETL
15 620 (11.22%) Data Science
16 593 (10.73%) Observability
17 566 (10.24%) Test Automation
18 545 (9.86%) Business Intelligence
19 518 (9.37%) LLM
20 467 (8.45%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,793 (32.44%) SQL
2 778 (14.08%) Java
3 643 (11.63%) PowerShell
4 626 (11.33%) Bash
5 463 (8.38%) JavaScript
6 390 (7.06%) TypeScript
7 340 (6.15%) C#
8 208 (3.76%) Go
9 157 (2.84%) R
10 140 (2.53%) C++
11 126 (2.28%) Scala
12 110 (1.99%) Shell Script
13 84 (1.52%) Bicep
14 73 (1.32%) Perl
15 59 (1.07%) Ruby
16 56 (1.01%) PL/SQL
17 54 (0.98%) C
17 54 (0.98%) Groovy
17 54 (0.98%) T-SQL
18 50 (0.90%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,233 (22.31%) Security Cleared
2 996 (18.02%) SC Cleared
3 416 (7.53%) Degree
4 168 (3.04%) DV Cleared
5 157 (2.84%) Computer Science Degree
6 129 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
7 118 (2.13%) AWS Certification
8 112 (2.03%) Azure Certification
9 95 (1.72%) CISSP
10 80 (1.45%) Cisco Certification
11 72 (1.30%) Master's Degree
12 55 (1.00%) CCNP
13 52 (0.94%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 39 (0.71%) CISM
15 35 (0.63%) PhD
16 33 (0.60%) ISTQB
17 32 (0.58%) Microsoft Certification
18 30 (0.54%) CCIE
19 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
20 21 (0.38%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 551 (9.97%) Data Quality
2 236 (4.27%) QA
3 129 (2.33%) GDPR
4 114 (2.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 108 (1.95%) NIST
6 78 (1.41%) Accessibility
7 32 (0.58%) SLA
8 25 (0.45%) PCI DSS
9 24 (0.43%) HIPAA
10 23 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 22 (0.40%) WCAG
12 19 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.29%) NCSC
13 16 (0.29%) SOC 2
14 11 (0.20%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.18%) GRC
15 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 843 (15.25%) Docker
2 129 (2.33%) Active Directory
3 107 (1.94%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.72%) vSphere
6 38 (0.69%) VMware NSX
7 32 (0.58%) Firmware
8 30 (0.54%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.33%) NFS
11 16 (0.29%) KVM
12 13 (0.24%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.22%) Squid
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) Ceph
16 8 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.13%) HDFS
17 7 (0.13%) Postfix
18 5 (0.090%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
19 4 (0.072%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,178 (21.31%) Terraform
2 1,001 (18.11%) Kubernetes
3 562 (10.17%) Ansible
4 326 (5.90%) Grafana
5 270 (4.89%) Prometheus
6 73 (1.32%) Puppet
7 54 (0.98%) Argo
8 46 (0.83%) Istio
9 43 (0.78%) vRealize
10 41 (0.74%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.60%) Kibana
12 32 (0.58%) vCenter Server
13 26 (0.47%) Control-M
14 25 (0.45%) Nessus
14 25 (0.45%) Single Sign-On
14 25 (0.45%) ZABBIX
15 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
15 24 (0.43%) Nagios
16 21 (0.38%) HAProxy
17 20 (0.36%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 619 (11.20%) Microsoft
2 576 (10.42%) Databricks
3 312 (5.65%) Google
4 246 (4.45%) Oracle
5 212 (3.84%) Splunk
6 166 (3.00%) VMware
7 146 (2.64%) OpenAI
8 132 (2.39%) Cisco
9 115 (2.08%) Red Hat
10 104 (1.88%) ServiceNow
11 88 (1.59%) F5
12 87 (1.57%) Palo Alto
13 82 (1.48%) Dynatrace
14 80 (1.45%) Informatica
15 77 (1.39%) IBM
16 70 (1.27%) CyberArk
17 59 (1.07%) Fortinet
17 59 (1.07%) Foundry
18 56 (1.01%) BeyondTrust
19 53 (0.96%) Arista