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

6 months to
18 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 11 15
Rank change year-on-year +1 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,232 3,894 4,013
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.91% 13.25% 9.42%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.71% 38.94% 31.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,474 2,719 2,872
10th Percentile £363 £385 £400
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -1.79% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £813 £813
UK excluding London median daily rate £491 £500 £510
% change year-on-year -1.80% -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 52 100
10th Percentile £30.44 £21.33 £21.20
25th Percentile £46.25 £26.46 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £39.66 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +38.68% -33.90% -4.06%
75th Percentile £72.43 £55.63 £70.31
90th Percentile £85.10 £74.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -30.77% +13.38%

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 12,851 10,000 12,716
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.80% 34.03% 29.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,445 6,789 9,043
10th Percentile £355 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £530
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -1.89% -3.64%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £710 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +1.32% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 557 241 493
10th Percentile £41.25 £24.66 £32.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £34.75 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% - -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.70 £85.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% -

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 -1 4,361 £525 -4.55% 3,115
London -3 2,480 £550 -7.56% 1,326
UK excluding London -1 2,028 £491 -1.80% 2,341
Work from Home -2 1,482 £525 -4.55% 2,042
North of England +9 703 £482 -1.13% 620
South East -2 405 £513 -0.39% 674
Yorkshire 0 395 £481 -3.80% 191
Scotland +2 292 £430 -10.23% 158
South West +2 256 £500 -9.09% 265
North West +2 249 £500 +5.26% 325
Midlands -11 240 £495 +10.00% 298
West Midlands -8 184 £491 -1.75% 149
East of England -3 126 £500 -0.25% 229
North East +7 68 £475 +5.56% 108
East Midlands -12 55 £495 +17.16% 149
Northern Ireland +16 23 £463 -18.68% 36
Wales -14 22 £463 -7.50% 83

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
1 283 (5.41%) Apache Spark
2 207 (3.96%) Apache Airflow
3 170 (3.25%) Apache
4 137 (2.62%) Confluence
5 49 (0.94%) SAS
6 44 (0.84%) SharePoint
7 36 (0.69%) Jupyter
8 21 (0.40%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.38%) nginx
10 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.31%) ArcGIS
12 15 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
13 11 (0.21%) Appian
14 10 (0.19%) IIS
15 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
15 8 (0.15%) CMS
16 7 (0.13%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
18 5 (0.096%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 124 (2.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 25 (0.48%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
5 18 (0.34%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 18 (0.34%) MS Visio
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.019%) SPSS
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
9 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 15 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Fidessa
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.057%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.038%) Actimize
8 2 (0.038%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle ERP
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,963 (37.52%) AWS
2 1,751 (33.47%) Azure
3 756 (14.45%) GCP
4 633 (12.10%) GitHub
5 516 (9.86%) Power Platform
6 452 (8.64%) Serverless
7 369 (7.05%) Azure DevOps
8 358 (6.84%) Amazon S3
9 334 (6.38%) GitHub Actions
10 320 (6.12%) AWS Lambda
11 263 (5.03%) Azure Data Factory
12 233 (4.45%) Snowflake
13 197 (3.77%) AWS CloudFormation
14 169 (3.23%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 165 (3.15%) OpenShift
16 160 (3.06%) dbt
17 156 (2.98%) Amazon EKS
18 130 (2.48%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 124 (2.37%) Amazon ECS
20 123 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 186 (3.56%) Firewall
2 135 (2.58%) DNS
3 110 (2.10%) Network Security
4 91 (1.74%) TCP/IP
5 85 (1.62%) BGP
6 80 (1.53%) WAN
7 76 (1.45%) VPN
8 60 (1.15%) HTTP
9 58 (1.11%) OSPF
10 50 (0.96%) SAN
11 41 (0.78%) VXLAN
12 39 (0.75%) BIG-IP
12 39 (0.75%) SD-WAN
12 39 (0.75%) SNMP
13 36 (0.69%) DHCP
14 34 (0.65%) VLAN
15 33 (0.63%) LAN
15 33 (0.63%) MPLS
16 32 (0.61%) SSL
16 32 (0.61%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 451 (8.62%) Power BI
2 340 (6.50%) PostgreSQL
3 278 (5.31%) Data Warehouse
4 247 (4.72%) SQL Server
5 234 (4.47%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.82%) Tableau
7 187 (3.57%) Relational Database
8 176 (3.36%) NoSQL
9 163 (3.12%) Big Data
10 157 (3.00%) Metadata
11 138 (2.64%) Delta Lake
12 136 (2.60%) BigQuery
13 121 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
14 112 (2.14%) Amazon Redshift
15 106 (2.03%) MongoDB
16 90 (1.72%) MySQL
17 86 (1.64%) Amazon RDS
17 86 (1.64%) DynamoDB
18 83 (1.59%) Azure SQL Database
19 77 (1.47%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 645 (12.33%) Git
2 470 (8.98%) Jenkins
3 353 (6.75%) GitLab
4 246 (4.70%) JIRA
5 92 (1.76%) MLflow
6 72 (1.38%) Selenium
7 60 (1.15%) Postman
8 39 (0.75%) Cucumber
9 32 (0.61%) Artifactory
9 32 (0.61%) JMeter
10 27 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
11 26 (0.50%) Bitbucket
11 26 (0.50%) Cypress.io
11 26 (0.50%) SonarQube
12 25 (0.48%) JUnit
13 24 (0.46%) Robot Framework
14 22 (0.42%) Maven
15 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
16 20 (0.38%) Gatling
17 18 (0.34%) SpecFlow
General
1 1,134 (21.67%) Social Skills
2 1,013 (19.36%) Finance
3 703 (13.44%) Analytical Skills
4 479 (9.16%) Public Sector
5 364 (6.96%) Banking
6 184 (3.52%) Front Office
7 135 (2.58%) Documentation Skills
8 108 (2.06%) Investment Banking
9 75 (1.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 68 (1.30%) Marketing
11 60 (1.15%) Retail
12 55 (1.05%) Pharmaceutical
13 52 (0.99%) Telecoms
14 50 (0.96%) Legal
15 46 (0.88%) Influencing Skills
16 38 (0.73%) Financial Institution
17 35 (0.67%) Military
18 34 (0.65%) Publishing
19 33 (0.63%) Manufacturing
20 29 (0.55%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 985 (18.83%) Developer
2 798 (15.25%) Data Engineer
3 762 (14.56%) Senior
4 498 (9.52%) Python Developer
5 328 (6.27%) Lead
6 327 (6.25%) Architect
7 320 (6.12%) Python Engineer
8 281 (5.37%) Analyst
9 273 (5.22%) DevOps Engineer
10 262 (5.01%) Software Engineer
11 224 (4.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 221 (4.22%) AWS Engineer
13 209 (3.99%) Data Scientist
14 171 (3.27%) Azure Engineer
15 165 (3.15%) Senior Developer
16 160 (3.06%) Senior Data Engineer
17 153 (2.92%) Platform Engineer
18 146 (2.79%) Data Analyst
19 145 (2.77%) Full-Stack Developer
20 127 (2.43%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 390 (7.45%) REST
2 364 (6.96%) React
3 353 (6.75%) PySpark
4 325 (6.21%) Kafka
5 235 (4.49%) .NET
6 229 (4.38%) Node.js
7 213 (4.07%) Pandas
8 187 (3.57%) FastAPI
9 182 (3.48%) RESTful
10 179 (3.42%) PyTorch
11 166 (3.17%) JSON
12 132 (2.52%) Django
13 130 (2.48%) Flask
14 127 (2.43%) NumPy
15 125 (2.39%) TensorFlow
16 118 (2.26%) scikit-learn
17 117 (2.24%) AngularJS
17 117 (2.24%) LangChain
18 105 (2.01%) LDAP
19 98 (1.87%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 541 (10.34%) Cloud Native
2 226 (4.32%) Distributed Systems
3 157 (3.00%) Algorithms
4 134 (2.56%) Product Ownership
5 123 (2.35%) Data Structures
6 122 (2.33%) Data Protection Act
7 120 (2.29%) Data Centre
7 120 (2.29%) Onboarding
8 119 (2.27%) AI Agents
9 114 (2.18%) Derivative
10 103 (1.97%) Fixed Income
11 102 (1.95%) Equities
12 101 (1.93%) Management Information System
13 97 (1.85%) Legacy Systems
14 90 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
15 88 (1.68%) Hybrid Cloud
16 82 (1.57%) Security Posture
17 69 (1.32%) Public Cloud
18 48 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
18 48 (0.92%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 628 (12.00%) Linux
2 294 (5.62%) Windows
3 220 (4.20%) Unix
4 93 (1.78%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.28%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.67%) Ubuntu
6 35 (0.67%) VMS
7 26 (0.50%) AIX
8 24 (0.46%) Android
9 23 (0.44%) Solaris
10 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
11 18 (0.34%) Apple iOS
12 17 (0.32%) CentOS
13 10 (0.19%) zOS
14 9 (0.17%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
17 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
18 4 (0.076%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,915 (36.60%) CI/CD
2 1,387 (26.51%) DevOps
3 1,177 (22.50%) AI
4 1,117 (21.35%) Agile
5 1,024 (19.57%) Analytics
6 937 (17.91%) Problem-Solving
7 902 (17.24%) Infrastructure as Code
8 880 (16.82%) Data Pipeline
9 800 (15.29%) Machine Learning
10 711 (13.59%) Data Modelling
11 704 (13.46%) Containerisation
12 697 (13.32%) Data Engineering
13 693 (13.25%) ETL
14 616 (11.77%) Software Engineering
15 568 (10.86%) Data Science
16 543 (10.38%) Observability
17 519 (9.92%) Business Intelligence
18 517 (9.88%) Test Automation
19 446 (8.52%) LLM
20 417 (7.97%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,731 (33.08%) SQL
2 752 (14.37%) Java
3 646 (12.35%) PowerShell
4 570 (10.89%) Bash
5 481 (9.19%) JavaScript
6 350 (6.69%) TypeScript
7 346 (6.61%) C#
8 201 (3.84%) Go
9 175 (3.34%) R
10 155 (2.96%) C++
11 141 (2.69%) Scala
12 108 (2.06%) Shell Script
13 81 (1.55%) Ruby
14 79 (1.51%) Perl
15 75 (1.43%) Bicep
16 57 (1.09%) T-SQL
17 56 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 56 (1.07%) PL/SQL
18 53 (1.01%) C
19 49 (0.94%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,203 (22.99%) Security Cleared
2 968 (18.50%) SC Cleared
3 379 (7.24%) Degree
4 164 (3.13%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.83%) DV Cleared
6 128 (2.45%) BPSS Clearance
7 103 (1.97%) Azure Certification
8 90 (1.72%) AWS Certification
9 85 (1.62%) CISSP
10 79 (1.51%) Master's Degree
11 69 (1.32%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.11%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.94%) CCNP
14 44 (0.84%) CISM
15 37 (0.71%) PhD
16 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
17 28 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 28 (0.54%) ISTQB
18 21 (0.40%) CEH
18 21 (0.40%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 517 (9.88%) Data Quality
2 230 (4.40%) QA
3 155 (2.96%) GDPR
4 103 (1.97%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 100 (1.91%) NIST
6 77 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) SLA
8 29 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 27 (0.52%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.34%) WCAG
13 16 (0.31%) NCSC
14 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.23%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) GRC
16 8 (0.15%) MiFID
17 6 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 778 (14.87%) Docker
2 155 (2.96%) Active Directory
3 96 (1.83%) VMware Infrastructure
4 71 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.75%) VMware NSX
6 36 (0.69%) vSphere
7 34 (0.65%) Hyper-V
8 33 (0.63%) Firmware
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 15 (0.29%) KVM
11 14 (0.27%) NFS
12 13 (0.25%) HDFS
13 11 (0.21%) Squid
14 9 (0.17%) Ceph
14 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
14 9 (0.17%) SRDF
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
16 4 (0.076%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
16 4 (0.076%) Postfix
17 3 (0.057%) Sendmail
Systems Management
1 1,066 (20.37%) Terraform
2 937 (17.91%) Kubernetes
3 537 (10.26%) Ansible
4 337 (6.44%) Grafana
5 274 (5.24%) Prometheus
6 73 (1.40%) Puppet
7 59 (1.13%) Argo
8 53 (1.01%) Istio
9 48 (0.92%) vRealize
10 39 (0.75%) Kibana
11 34 (0.65%) Progress Chef
12 31 (0.59%) vCenter Server
13 28 (0.54%) Nessus
14 27 (0.52%) Nagios
15 24 (0.46%) Control-M
15 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
15 24 (0.46%) ZABBIX
16 21 (0.40%) NetBackup
17 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
18 18 (0.34%) Netcool
Vendors
1 588 (11.24%) Microsoft
2 565 (10.80%) Databricks
3 263 (5.03%) Google
4 232 (4.43%) Oracle
5 220 (4.20%) Splunk
6 178 (3.40%) VMware
7 121 (2.31%) Red Hat
8 118 (2.26%) OpenAI
9 113 (2.16%) Cisco
10 98 (1.87%) ServiceNow
11 88 (1.68%) CyberArk
12 81 (1.55%) BeyondTrust
13 74 (1.41%) Dynatrace
14 68 (1.30%) IBM
14 68 (1.30%) Palo Alto
15 67 (1.28%) F5
16 65 (1.24%) Informatica
17 56 (1.07%) Foundry
18 50 (0.96%) SAP
19 43 (0.82%) Arista