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

6 months to
24 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -3
Contract jobs citing Python 5,524 3,925 4,114
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.85% 13.07% 9.47%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.33% 38.59% 31.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,636 2,687 2,949
10th Percentile £363 £375 £375
25th Percentile £425 £445 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £551
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -2.36% -8.25%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
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 123 61 120
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £42.88 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.00 £45.00 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -26.23% -6.15%
75th Percentile £69.00 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £63.25 £75.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.25 £50.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.50% -23.08% +7.35%

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 13,697 10,171 13,188
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.91% 33.87% 30.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,913 6,897 9,255
10th Percentile £358 £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 £608 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.58% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 555 239 553
10th Percentile £35.00 £25.65 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £83.27 £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 24 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 24 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 24 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 4,606 £525 -4.55% 1,743
London -3 2,650 £550 -4.35% 680
UK excluding London -1 2,155 £500 - 1,551
Work from Home -2 1,576 £525 -4.55% 699
North of England +9 786 £488 +2.63% 340
Yorkshire +2 431 £500 - 99
South East -5 414 £525 +4.48% 565
Scotland +4 315 £449 -5.47% 78
North West +4 276 £496 +4.42% 178
South West -5 258 £500 -9.09% 180
Midlands -14 237 £479 +3.99% 164
West Midlands -17 190 £477 +0.42% 79
East of England -14 129 £500 -0.25% 166
North East +9 91 £450 +5.88% 67
East Midlands -13 46 £497 +9.18% 85
Wales -8 30 £483 +6.04% 43
Northern Ireland +10 26 £385 -34.47% 46

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 (5.12%) Apache Spark
2 254 (4.60%) Apache Airflow
3 190 (3.44%) Apache
4 165 (2.99%) Confluence
5 56 (1.01%) Jupyter
6 50 (0.91%) SharePoint
7 49 (0.89%) SAS
8 22 (0.40%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.38%) nginx
10 19 (0.34%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.29%) ArcGIS
11 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Exchange
12 11 (0.20%) IIS
13 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.14%) Appian
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
16 6 (0.11%) Camunda
16 6 (0.11%) CMS
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 119 (2.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.49%) 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 22 (0.40%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.38%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
7 5 (0.091%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.091%) 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%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.036%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.036%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,070 (37.47%) AWS
2 1,856 (33.60%) Azure
3 809 (14.65%) GCP
4 658 (11.91%) GitHub
5 531 (9.61%) Power Platform
6 488 (8.83%) Serverless
7 407 (7.37%) Amazon S3
8 400 (7.24%) Azure DevOps
9 360 (6.52%) AWS Lambda
10 355 (6.43%) GitHub Actions
11 272 (4.92%) Snowflake
12 245 (4.44%) Azure Data Factory
13 196 (3.55%) dbt
14 175 (3.17%) AWS CloudFormation
15 164 (2.97%) Amazon EKS
16 163 (2.95%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 160 (2.90%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 159 (2.88%) OpenShift
19 130 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
20 119 (2.15%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 236 (4.27%) Firewall
2 160 (2.90%) DNS
3 113 (2.05%) BGP
4 111 (2.01%) Network Security
4 111 (2.01%) WAN
5 104 (1.88%) TCP/IP
6 92 (1.67%) VPN
7 71 (1.29%) OSPF
8 59 (1.07%) BIG-IP
9 58 (1.05%) HTTP
10 55 (1.00%) SAN
11 54 (0.98%) SD-WAN
12 50 (0.91%) VXLAN
13 48 (0.87%) VLAN
14 47 (0.85%) SSL
15 46 (0.83%) DHCP
16 41 (0.74%) LAN
17 39 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
17 39 (0.71%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 39 (0.71%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 467 (8.45%) Power BI
2 351 (6.35%) PostgreSQL
3 303 (5.49%) Data Warehouse
4 247 (4.47%) SQL Server
5 220 (3.98%) Data Lake
6 198 (3.58%) Tableau
7 196 (3.55%) Relational Database
8 169 (3.06%) NoSQL
9 167 (3.02%) Metadata
10 159 (2.88%) Big Data
11 142 (2.57%) Amazon Athena
12 137 (2.48%) Amazon Redshift
13 135 (2.44%) BigQuery
14 132 (2.39%) Delta Lake
15 123 (2.23%) MongoDB
16 102 (1.85%) DynamoDB
17 96 (1.74%) Amazon RDS
18 90 (1.63%) MySQL
19 74 (1.34%) Snowflake Schema
20 73 (1.32%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 658 (11.91%) Git
2 498 (9.02%) Jenkins
3 398 (7.20%) GitLab
4 297 (5.38%) JIRA
5 76 (1.38%) MLflow
6 75 (1.36%) Selenium
7 59 (1.07%) Postman
8 36 (0.65%) JMeter
9 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
10 33 (0.60%) Bitbucket
10 33 (0.60%) SonarQube
11 32 (0.58%) Cucumber
12 31 (0.56%) Artifactory
13 29 (0.52%) REST Assured
14 28 (0.51%) JUnit
15 27 (0.49%) Maven
16 24 (0.43%) Sonatype Nexus
17 21 (0.38%) Claude Code
17 21 (0.38%) Gatling
18 20 (0.36%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,206 (21.83%) Social Skills
2 1,143 (20.69%) Finance
3 743 (13.45%) Analytical Skills
4 527 (9.54%) Public Sector
5 401 (7.26%) Banking
6 194 (3.51%) Front Office
7 140 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
8 124 (2.24%) Investment Banking
9 107 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 81 (1.47%) Retail
11 77 (1.39%) Marketing
12 61 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
13 59 (1.07%) Legal
14 56 (1.01%) Telecoms
15 47 (0.85%) Financial Institution
16 46 (0.83%) Publishing
17 45 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
18 39 (0.71%) Military
19 34 (0.62%) Manufacturing
19 34 (0.62%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 988 (17.89%) Developer
2 860 (15.57%) Data Engineer
3 824 (14.92%) Senior
4 519 (9.40%) Python Developer
5 381 (6.90%) Lead
6 370 (6.70%) Python Engineer
7 326 (5.90%) Architect
8 296 (5.36%) DevOps Engineer
9 284 (5.14%) Software Engineer
10 282 (5.10%) Analyst
11 248 (4.49%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 248 (4.49%) AWS Engineer
12 212 (3.84%) Data Scientist
13 171 (3.10%) Azure Engineer
14 169 (3.06%) Senior Data Engineer
15 168 (3.04%) Senior Developer
16 165 (2.99%) Platform Engineer
17 158 (2.86%) Cloud Engineer
18 152 (2.75%) Full-Stack Developer
19 141 (2.55%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 414 (7.49%) REST
2 382 (6.92%) React
3 378 (6.84%) PySpark
4 327 (5.92%) Kafka
5 248 (4.49%) .NET
6 213 (3.86%) Node.js
7 212 (3.84%) RESTful
8 209 (3.78%) FastAPI
9 202 (3.66%) Pandas
10 183 (3.31%) JSON
11 166 (3.01%) PyTorch
12 162 (2.93%) Django
13 136 (2.46%) LangChain
14 131 (2.37%) Flask
15 124 (2.24%) NumPy
16 114 (2.06%) scikit-learn
17 113 (2.05%) OAuth
18 112 (2.03%) TensorFlow
19 103 (1.86%) AngularJS
20 101 (1.83%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 700 (12.67%) Cloud Native
2 282 (5.10%) Distributed Systems
3 157 (2.84%) AI Agents
4 154 (2.79%) Onboarding
5 152 (2.75%) Algorithms
6 151 (2.73%) Data Centre
7 145 (2.62%) Product Ownership
8 130 (2.35%) Data Structures
9 117 (2.12%) Legacy Systems
10 115 (2.08%) Management Information System
11 114 (2.06%) Data Protection Act
12 110 (1.99%) Derivative
13 103 (1.86%) Hybrid Cloud
14 99 (1.79%) Equities
15 96 (1.74%) Fixed Income
16 87 (1.57%) Security Posture
17 74 (1.34%) Public Cloud
18 69 (1.25%) Enterprise Software
19 58 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
19 58 (1.05%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 633 (11.46%) Linux
2 302 (5.47%) Windows
3 216 (3.91%) Unix
4 123 (2.23%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 76 (1.38%) Windows Server
6 45 (0.81%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.54%) VMS
8 26 (0.47%) AIX
9 23 (0.42%) Android
10 21 (0.38%) Solaris
11 20 (0.36%) CentOS
12 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
13 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
14 12 (0.22%) zOS
15 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
16 7 (0.13%) Debian
16 7 (0.13%) Rocky
17 5 (0.091%) Amazon Linux
17 5 (0.091%) Embedded Linux
17 5 (0.091%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,088 (37.80%) CI/CD
2 1,527 (27.64%) DevOps
3 1,355 (24.53%) AI
4 1,220 (22.09%) Agile
5 1,103 (19.97%) Analytics
6 999 (18.08%) Infrastructure as Code
7 988 (17.89%) Data Pipeline
8 938 (16.98%) Problem-Solving
9 870 (15.75%) Machine Learning
10 789 (14.28%) Data Engineering
11 737 (13.34%) Containerisation
12 732 (13.25%) Data Modelling
13 726 (13.14%) Software Engineering
14 692 (12.53%) ETL
15 622 (11.26%) Data Science
16 593 (10.73%) Observability
17 558 (10.10%) Test Automation
18 549 (9.94%) Business Intelligence
19 519 (9.40%) LLM
20 465 (8.42%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,793 (32.46%) SQL
2 775 (14.03%) Java
3 645 (11.68%) PowerShell
4 620 (11.22%) Bash
5 467 (8.45%) JavaScript
6 390 (7.06%) TypeScript
7 341 (6.17%) C#
8 206 (3.73%) Go
9 157 (2.84%) R
10 144 (2.61%) C++
11 123 (2.23%) Scala
12 107 (1.94%) Shell Script
13 84 (1.52%) Bicep
14 76 (1.38%) Perl
15 62 (1.12%) Ruby
16 54 (0.98%) Groovy
16 54 (0.98%) PL/SQL
16 54 (0.98%) T-SQL
17 53 (0.96%) C
18 49 (0.89%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,235 (22.36%) Security Cleared
2 999 (18.08%) SC Cleared
3 412 (7.46%) Degree
4 167 (3.02%) DV Cleared
5 157 (2.84%) Computer Science Degree
6 132 (2.39%) BPSS Clearance
7 117 (2.12%) AWS Certification
8 114 (2.06%) Azure Certification
9 96 (1.74%) CISSP
10 79 (1.43%) Cisco Certification
11 72 (1.30%) Master's Degree
12 54 (0.98%) CCNP
13 53 (0.96%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 40 (0.72%) CISM
15 35 (0.63%) PhD
16 33 (0.60%) ISTQB
16 33 (0.60%) Microsoft Certification
17 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 29 (0.52%) CCIE
18 21 (0.38%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 551 (9.97%) Data Quality
2 227 (4.11%) QA
3 131 (2.37%) GDPR
4 114 (2.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 108 (1.96%) NIST
6 79 (1.43%) Accessibility
7 32 (0.58%) SLA
8 26 (0.47%) PCI DSS
9 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.43%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.42%) WCAG
12 19 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
13 15 (0.27%) NCSC
13 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
14 11 (0.20%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 9 (0.16%) GRC
17 8 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 844 (15.28%) Docker
2 133 (2.41%) Active Directory
3 108 (1.96%) VMware Infrastructure
4 74 (1.34%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.72%) vSphere
6 39 (0.71%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.60%) 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 (0.091%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
19 4 (0.072%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,174 (21.25%) Terraform
2 996 (18.03%) Kubernetes
3 564 (10.21%) Ansible
4 324 (5.87%) Grafana
5 270 (4.89%) Prometheus
6 75 (1.36%) Puppet
7 54 (0.98%) Argo
8 47 (0.85%) Istio
9 44 (0.80%) vRealize
10 40 (0.72%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.60%) Kibana
12 32 (0.58%) vCenter Server
13 26 (0.47%) Control-M
13 26 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
14 25 (0.45%) Nessus
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
1 617 (11.17%) Microsoft
2 573 (10.37%) Databricks
3 309 (5.59%) Google
4 242 (4.38%) Oracle
5 212 (3.84%) Splunk
6 168 (3.04%) VMware
7 152 (2.75%) OpenAI
8 131 (2.37%) Cisco
9 123 (2.23%) Red Hat
10 102 (1.85%) ServiceNow
11 88 (1.59%) F5
12 86 (1.56%) Palo Alto
13 84 (1.52%) Dynatrace
14 79 (1.43%) Informatica
15 77 (1.39%) IBM
16 73 (1.32%) CyberArk
17 60 (1.09%) Foundry
18 59 (1.07%) BeyondTrust
18 59 (1.07%) Fortinet
19 53 (0.96%) Arista