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

6 months to
30 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 10 14
Rank change year-on-year -2 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,647 4,255 3,958
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.66% 12.97% 9.94%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.01% 39.41% 31.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,688 2,856 2,876
10th Percentile £375 £360 £375
25th Percentile £431 £432 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £531 £575
Median % change year-on-year -1.06% -7.72% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £707
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £505
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.97% -3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 133 69 120
10th Percentile £28.80 £26.00 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.50 £33.91 £30.63
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -13.04% -6.66%
75th Percentile £74.26 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.67 £50.00 £66.25
% change year-on-year +5.33% -24.53% +15.22%

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 14,113 10,796 12,393
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.64% 32.90% 31.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,177 7,277 8,754
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £493 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.68% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 524 254 421
10th Percentile £33.70 £27.96 £27.75
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.06 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.13 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.79% -12.12% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.85 £82.07 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +7.08%

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 30 July 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 30 July 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 30 July 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 4,785 £538 -2.27% 2,871
London -4 2,756 £575 - 1,660
UK excluding London -5 2,218 £500 +2.04% 1,616
Work from Home -6 1,564 £530 -3.68% 1,087
North of England +1 772 £500 +4.17% 414
South East -10 448 £538 +7.50% 468
Yorkshire +1 400 £500 +0.70% 118
Scotland +3 301 £430 -13.13% 105
North West +3 295 £525 +10.53% 215
South West -3 289 £500 -8.05% 221
Midlands -15 253 £477 +6.00% 184
West Midlands -13 202 £469 +4.22% 106
East of England -12 135 £500 -0.50% 171
North East -4 88 £425 -2.86% 87
East Midlands -6 50 £488 +11.93% 78
Wales -6 31 £500 +17.65% 45
Northern Ireland +2 19 £363 -34.09% 32

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 (5.01%) Apache Spark
2 270 (4.78%) Apache Airflow
3 211 (3.74%) Apache
4 181 (3.21%) Confluence
5 54 (0.96%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.87%) SAS
7 41 (0.73%) SharePoint
8 25 (0.44%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
9 22 (0.39%) nginx
10 21 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
11 12 (0.21%) IIS
12 9 (0.16%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.12%) CICS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.089%) JBoss
16 5 (0.089%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 118 (2.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.55%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
5 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
6 18 (0.32%) MS Visio
7 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Navisworks
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.43%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Remedy AR System
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.035%) Bloomberg AIM
10 2 (0.035%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,112 (37.40%) AWS
2 1,902 (33.68%) Azure
3 855 (15.14%) GCP
4 697 (12.34%) GitHub
5 514 (9.10%) Power Platform
6 470 (8.32%) Serverless
7 412 (7.30%) Amazon S3
8 411 (7.28%) Azure DevOps
9 390 (6.91%) GitHub Actions
10 357 (6.32%) AWS Lambda
11 300 (5.31%) Snowflake
12 231 (4.09%) Azure Data Factory
13 225 (3.98%) dbt
14 195 (3.45%) AWS CloudFormation
15 178 (3.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 178 (3.15%) Amazon EKS
16 150 (2.66%) OpenShift
17 148 (2.62%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 133 (2.36%) Amazon EC2
19 128 (2.27%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 263 (4.66%) Firewall
2 197 (3.49%) DNS
3 134 (2.37%) TCP/IP
4 117 (2.07%) BGP
5 113 (2.00%) VPN
6 109 (1.93%) Network Security
7 107 (1.89%) WAN
8 74 (1.31%) OSPF
9 72 (1.28%) DHCP
10 58 (1.03%) VLAN
11 55 (0.97%) BIG-IP
11 55 (0.97%) SD-WAN
12 53 (0.94%) SAN
13 51 (0.90%) HTTP
13 51 (0.90%) VXLAN
14 50 (0.89%) SSL
15 44 (0.78%) SNMP
16 43 (0.76%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 39 (0.69%) Ethernet VPN
18 34 (0.60%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 463 (8.20%) Power BI
2 344 (6.09%) PostgreSQL
3 319 (5.65%) Data Warehouse
4 228 (4.04%) SQL Server
5 199 (3.52%) Data Lake
5 199 (3.52%) Relational Database
5 199 (3.52%) Tableau
6 185 (3.28%) Metadata
7 169 (2.99%) NoSQL
8 154 (2.73%) BigQuery
9 153 (2.71%) Big Data
10 137 (2.43%) Amazon Athena
11 136 (2.41%) Amazon Redshift
12 131 (2.32%) MongoDB
13 120 (2.13%) Delta Lake
14 111 (1.97%) DynamoDB
15 109 (1.93%) Amazon RDS
16 85 (1.51%) MySQL
17 73 (1.29%) Snowflake Schema
18 67 (1.19%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 691 (12.24%) Git
2 512 (9.07%) Jenkins
3 416 (7.37%) GitLab
4 301 (5.33%) JIRA
5 84 (1.49%) Selenium
6 67 (1.19%) MLflow
7 51 (0.90%) Postman
8 45 (0.80%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.76%) JMeter
10 38 (0.67%) SonarQube
11 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
11 35 (0.62%) REST Assured
12 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
14 29 (0.51%) Claude Code
14 29 (0.51%) Sonatype Nexus
15 28 (0.50%) Gatling
16 27 (0.48%) JUnit
17 26 (0.46%) Maven
18 20 (0.35%) Zephyr
General
1 1,216 (21.53%) Social Skills
2 1,215 (21.52%) Finance
3 790 (13.99%) Analytical Skills
4 563 (9.97%) Public Sector
5 436 (7.72%) Banking
6 208 (3.68%) Front Office
7 128 (2.27%) Investment Banking
8 126 (2.23%) Documentation Skills
9 108 (1.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 101 (1.79%) Retail
11 85 (1.51%) Marketing
12 71 (1.26%) Telecoms
13 66 (1.17%) Pharmaceutical
14 61 (1.08%) Legal
15 56 (0.99%) Military
16 49 (0.87%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.83%) Publishing
18 44 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
19 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
20 35 (0.62%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 971 (17.19%) Developer
2 904 (16.01%) Senior
3 843 (14.93%) Data Engineer
4 511 (9.05%) Python Developer
5 454 (8.04%) Lead
6 401 (7.10%) Python Engineer
7 325 (5.76%) Software Engineer
8 322 (5.70%) DevOps Engineer
9 290 (5.14%) Architect
10 288 (5.10%) Analyst
11 255 (4.52%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 242 (4.29%) AWS Engineer
13 218 (3.86%) Data Scientist
14 190 (3.36%) Platform Engineer
15 188 (3.33%) Cloud Engineer
16 181 (3.21%) Senior Developer
17 172 (3.05%) Azure Engineer
17 172 (3.05%) Senior Data Engineer
18 146 (2.59%) Data Analyst
19 142 (2.51%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 420 (7.44%) REST
2 370 (6.55%) PySpark
3 366 (6.48%) React
4 357 (6.32%) Kafka
5 233 (4.13%) .NET
6 216 (3.83%) Node.js
7 210 (3.72%) FastAPI
8 205 (3.63%) RESTful
9 204 (3.61%) JSON
10 188 (3.33%) Pandas
11 177 (3.13%) Django
12 151 (2.67%) PyTorch
13 142 (2.51%) LangChain
14 118 (2.09%) Flask
15 117 (2.07%) NumPy
16 108 (1.91%) scikit-learn
17 105 (1.86%) TensorFlow
18 104 (1.84%) OAuth
19 102 (1.81%) Spring
20 101 (1.79%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 762 (13.49%) Cloud Native
2 322 (5.70%) Distributed Systems
3 202 (3.58%) Onboarding
4 201 (3.56%) AI Agents
5 160 (2.83%) Data Centre
6 151 (2.67%) Product Ownership
7 146 (2.59%) Algorithms
8 136 (2.41%) Data Structures
9 124 (2.20%) Legacy Systems
10 118 (2.09%) Derivative
11 116 (2.05%) Hybrid Cloud
12 111 (1.97%) Data Protection Act
13 105 (1.86%) Fixed Income
14 104 (1.84%) Management Information System
15 98 (1.74%) Equities
16 83 (1.47%) Security Posture
17 67 (1.19%) Public Cloud
18 66 (1.17%) Enterprise Software
19 65 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
20 64 (1.13%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 695 (12.31%) Linux
2 322 (5.70%) Windows
3 225 (3.98%) Unix
4 134 (2.37%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 75 (1.33%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.73%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.57%) VMS
8 30 (0.53%) AIX
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 17 (0.30%) Solaris
11 14 (0.25%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 11 (0.19%) Mac OS
15 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
16 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Debian
16 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 5 (0.089%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,155 (38.16%) CI/CD
2 1,579 (27.96%) DevOps
3 1,413 (25.02%) AI
4 1,277 (22.61%) Agile
5 1,158 (20.51%) Analytics
6 1,095 (19.39%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,016 (17.99%) Data Pipeline
8 913 (16.17%) Problem-Solving
9 903 (15.99%) Machine Learning
10 850 (15.05%) Software Engineering
11 816 (14.45%) Data Engineering
12 767 (13.58%) Containerisation
13 760 (13.46%) Data Modelling
14 675 (11.95%) ETL
15 669 (11.85%) Observability
16 629 (11.14%) Data Science
17 586 (10.38%) Test Automation
18 548 (9.70%) Business Intelligence
19 537 (9.51%) Continuous Improvement
20 529 (9.37%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,817 (32.18%) SQL
2 812 (14.38%) Java
3 723 (12.80%) Bash
4 695 (12.31%) PowerShell
5 468 (8.29%) JavaScript
6 399 (7.07%) TypeScript
7 307 (5.44%) C#
8 214 (3.79%) Go
9 159 (2.82%) R
10 144 (2.55%) C++
11 129 (2.28%) Shell Script
12 124 (2.20%) Scala
13 113 (2.00%) Bicep
14 79 (1.40%) Perl
15 58 (1.03%) C
15 58 (1.03%) Rust
16 56 (0.99%) Groovy
17 55 (0.97%) Ruby
18 54 (0.96%) PL/SQL
19 49 (0.87%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,288 (22.81%) Security Cleared
2 1,038 (18.38%) SC Cleared
3 432 (7.65%) Degree
4 198 (3.51%) DV Cleared
5 152 (2.69%) Computer Science Degree
6 138 (2.44%) AWS Certification
7 132 (2.34%) Azure Certification
7 132 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
8 88 (1.56%) CISSP
9 86 (1.52%) Cisco Certification
10 77 (1.36%) Master's Degree
11 55 (0.97%) CCNP
12 47 (0.83%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 42 (0.74%) Microsoft Certification
14 41 (0.73%) PhD
15 34 (0.60%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 33 (0.58%) CISM
17 30 (0.53%) ISTQB
18 29 (0.51%) CCIE
19 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 583 (10.32%) Data Quality
2 267 (4.73%) QA
3 114 (2.02%) GDPR
4 104 (1.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 104 (1.84%) NIST
5 92 (1.63%) Accessibility
6 35 (0.62%) SLA
7 26 (0.46%) WCAG
8 24 (0.43%) Actionable Recommendations
8 24 (0.43%) NCSC
9 21 (0.37%) PCI DSS
9 21 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
11 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
12 11 (0.19%) SOC 2
13 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
14 8 (0.14%) GRC
15 7 (0.12%) HL7
16 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 902 (15.97%) Docker
2 147 (2.60%) Active Directory
3 125 (2.21%) VMware Infrastructure
4 73 (1.29%) Virtual Machines
5 48 (0.85%) vSphere
6 40 (0.71%) Hyper-V
7 37 (0.66%) VMware NSX
8 31 (0.55%) Firmware
9 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.23%) KVM
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
13 10 (0.18%) SRDF
13 10 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
14 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) PowerHA
16 4 (0.071%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 1,265 (22.40%) Terraform
2 1,075 (19.04%) Kubernetes
3 599 (10.61%) Ansible
4 347 (6.14%) Grafana
5 266 (4.71%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.51%) Puppet
7 75 (1.33%) Argo
8 60 (1.06%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Istio
10 35 (0.62%) vCenter Server
11 33 (0.58%) vRealize
12 29 (0.51%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
14 26 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
15 25 (0.44%) Nagios
16 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
17 20 (0.35%) Control-M
18 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
19 18 (0.32%) NetBackup
19 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 650 (11.51%) Microsoft
2 564 (9.99%) Databricks
3 334 (5.91%) Google
4 244 (4.32%) Oracle
5 209 (3.70%) Splunk
6 174 (3.08%) VMware
7 146 (2.59%) OpenAI
8 136 (2.41%) Cisco
9 116 (2.05%) ServiceNow
10 105 (1.86%) Red Hat
11 95 (1.68%) Dynatrace
12 93 (1.65%) F5
13 87 (1.54%) Palo Alto
14 81 (1.43%) Informatica
15 80 (1.42%) IBM
16 70 (1.24%) Fortinet
17 64 (1.13%) CyberArk
17 64 (1.13%) Foundry
18 61 (1.08%) Salesforce
19 59 (1.04%) SAP