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

6 months to
17 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,667 4,210 4,019
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.76% 12.94% 9.52%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.07% 39.06% 31.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,712 2,834 2,943
10th Percentile £367 £363 £375
25th Percentile £425 £438 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £536 £560
Median % change year-on-year -1.96% -4.38% -6.67%
75th Percentile £631 £650 £700
90th Percentile £749 £798 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £494 £501
% change year-on-year +1.32% -1.50% -4.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 67 122
10th Percentile £28.50 £27.44 £20.82
25th Percentile £43.16 £34.33 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -18.03% -6.15%
75th Percentile £74.00 £58.13 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +12.50%

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 14,143 10,777 12,962
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.86% 33.13% 30.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,198 7,257 9,168
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £421 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £612 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £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 525 259 495
10th Percentile £34.01 £28.14 £30.88
25th Percentile £52.00 £36.37 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -8.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.59 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +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 17 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 17 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 17 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 -4 4,730 £530 -3.64% 2,610
London -4 2,712 £560 -2.61% 1,091
UK excluding London -2 2,245 £500 +1.32% 2,063
Work from Home -5 1,592 £525 -4.55% 1,370
North of England +5 780 £490 +3.16% 496
South East -10 445 £537 +7.40% 561
Yorkshire +2 419 £500 +2.04% 157
Scotland +4 328 £434 -8.68% 161
North West +2 286 £525 +10.53% 259
South West -2 283 £500 -8.05% 219
Midlands -14 258 £476 +5.78% 267
West Midlands -18 208 £475 +5.56% 133
East of England -13 132 £500 -0.50% 238
North East +4 88 £425 -2.86% 83
East Midlands -10 49 £485 +8.50% 132
Wales -8 31 £500 +11.11% 70
Northern Ireland +12 27 £369 -35.16% 84

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
1 286 (5.05%) Apache Spark
2 271 (4.78%) Apache Airflow
3 210 (3.71%) Apache
4 179 (3.16%) Confluence
5 52 (0.92%) Jupyter
5 52 (0.92%) SAS
6 48 (0.85%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.49%) OpenStack
8 25 (0.44%) nginx
9 20 (0.35%) ArcGIS
10 19 (0.34%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
12 12 (0.21%) IIS
13 11 (0.19%) Tomcat
14 9 (0.16%) CMS
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.088%) JBoss
Applications
1 123 (2.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 30 (0.53%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
4 26 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
7 15 (0.26%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
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 24 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.088%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.088%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.035%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.035%) Global One
10 2 (0.035%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.035%) Remedy AR System
Cloud Services
1 2,116 (37.34%) AWS
2 1,890 (33.35%) Azure
3 832 (14.68%) GCP
4 690 (12.18%) GitHub
5 523 (9.23%) Power Platform
6 487 (8.59%) Serverless
7 429 (7.57%) Amazon S3
8 398 (7.02%) Azure DevOps
9 380 (6.71%) GitHub Actions
10 367 (6.48%) AWS Lambda
11 293 (5.17%) Snowflake
12 234 (4.13%) Azure Data Factory
13 217 (3.83%) dbt
14 194 (3.42%) AWS CloudFormation
15 180 (3.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 180 (3.18%) Amazon EKS
16 159 (2.81%) OpenShift
17 151 (2.66%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 134 (2.36%) Amazon EC2
19 129 (2.28%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 259 (4.57%) Firewall
2 187 (3.30%) DNS
3 127 (2.24%) BGP
3 127 (2.24%) TCP/IP
4 121 (2.14%) Network Security
5 117 (2.06%) WAN
6 107 (1.89%) VPN
7 80 (1.41%) OSPF
8 62 (1.09%) DHCP
9 58 (1.02%) VLAN
10 56 (0.99%) BIG-IP
10 56 (0.99%) HTTP
10 56 (0.99%) SAN
11 55 (0.97%) SD-WAN
12 51 (0.90%) VXLAN
13 47 (0.83%) SSL
14 45 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 45 (0.79%) LAN
15 43 (0.76%) MPLS
15 43 (0.76%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 463 (8.17%) Power BI
2 356 (6.28%) PostgreSQL
3 319 (5.63%) Data Warehouse
4 236 (4.16%) SQL Server
5 206 (3.64%) Data Lake
6 201 (3.55%) Tableau
7 190 (3.35%) Relational Database
8 183 (3.23%) Metadata
9 165 (2.91%) Big Data
10 162 (2.86%) NoSQL
11 150 (2.65%) BigQuery
12 139 (2.45%) Amazon Athena
13 137 (2.42%) Amazon Redshift
14 127 (2.24%) MongoDB
15 118 (2.08%) Delta Lake
16 109 (1.92%) DynamoDB
17 107 (1.89%) Amazon RDS
18 85 (1.50%) MySQL
19 75 (1.32%) Hadoop
20 74 (1.31%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 699 (12.33%) Git
2 508 (8.96%) Jenkins
3 402 (7.09%) GitLab
4 309 (5.45%) JIRA
5 82 (1.45%) Selenium
6 71 (1.25%) MLflow
7 50 (0.88%) Postman
8 42 (0.74%) Bitbucket
9 39 (0.69%) JMeter
10 35 (0.62%) SonarQube
11 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
12 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.56%) REST Assured
14 31 (0.55%) Artifactory
15 28 (0.49%) JUnit
16 27 (0.48%) Claude Code
17 26 (0.46%) Maven
17 26 (0.46%) Sonatype Nexus
18 24 (0.42%) Gatling
19 18 (0.32%) Zephyr
General
1 1,223 (21.58%) Social Skills
2 1,187 (20.95%) Finance
3 776 (13.69%) Analytical Skills
4 555 (9.79%) Public Sector
5 427 (7.53%) Banking
6 203 (3.58%) Front Office
7 131 (2.31%) Documentation Skills
8 127 (2.24%) Investment Banking
9 112 (1.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 94 (1.66%) Retail
11 82 (1.45%) Marketing
12 65 (1.15%) Telecoms
13 63 (1.11%) Pharmaceutical
14 60 (1.06%) Legal
15 48 (0.85%) Financial Institution
16 47 (0.83%) Military
17 46 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
17 46 (0.81%) Publishing
18 36 (0.64%) Manufacturing
19 30 (0.53%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 991 (17.49%) Developer
2 883 (15.58%) Senior
3 848 (14.96%) Data Engineer
4 523 (9.23%) Python Developer
5 427 (7.53%) Lead
6 393 (6.93%) Python Engineer
7 334 (5.89%) DevOps Engineer
8 309 (5.45%) Architect
8 309 (5.45%) Software Engineer
9 285 (5.03%) Analyst
10 254 (4.48%) AWS Engineer
11 249 (4.39%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 223 (3.94%) Data Scientist
13 188 (3.32%) Platform Engineer
14 179 (3.16%) Cloud Engineer
15 178 (3.14%) Senior Developer
16 173 (3.05%) Azure Engineer
17 169 (2.98%) Senior Data Engineer
18 145 (2.56%) Data Analyst
19 137 (2.42%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 413 (7.29%) REST
2 368 (6.49%) React
3 360 (6.35%) PySpark
4 352 (6.21%) Kafka
5 240 (4.24%) .NET
6 218 (3.85%) FastAPI
6 218 (3.85%) Node.js
7 205 (3.62%) RESTful
8 196 (3.46%) Pandas
9 195 (3.44%) JSON
10 175 (3.09%) Django
11 157 (2.77%) PyTorch
12 138 (2.44%) LangChain
13 122 (2.15%) Flask
13 122 (2.15%) NumPy
14 109 (1.92%) scikit-learn
15 106 (1.87%) OAuth
16 105 (1.85%) TensorFlow
17 98 (1.73%) Spring
18 97 (1.71%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 752 (13.27%) Cloud Native
2 310 (5.47%) Distributed Systems
3 192 (3.39%) Onboarding
4 182 (3.21%) AI Agents
5 162 (2.86%) Data Centre
6 147 (2.59%) Algorithms
7 143 (2.52%) Product Ownership
8 129 (2.28%) Data Structures
9 127 (2.24%) Legacy Systems
10 119 (2.10%) Data Protection Act
11 115 (2.03%) Hybrid Cloud
12 112 (1.98%) Derivative
13 106 (1.87%) Management Information System
14 105 (1.85%) Fixed Income
15 94 (1.66%) Equities
16 82 (1.45%) Security Posture
17 71 (1.25%) Public Cloud
18 65 (1.15%) Linux Command Line
19 64 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
20 60 (1.06%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 686 (12.11%) Linux
2 318 (5.61%) Windows
3 218 (3.85%) Unix
4 133 (2.35%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 74 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.69%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.56%) VMS
8 26 (0.46%) AIX
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 18 (0.32%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 8 (0.14%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Debian
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,163 (38.17%) CI/CD
2 1,564 (27.60%) DevOps
3 1,387 (24.48%) AI
4 1,275 (22.50%) Agile
5 1,135 (20.03%) Analytics
6 1,069 (18.86%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,012 (17.86%) Data Pipeline
8 918 (16.20%) Problem-Solving
9 907 (16.00%) Machine Learning
10 812 (14.33%) Software Engineering
11 805 (14.21%) Data Engineering
12 771 (13.61%) Containerisation
13 748 (13.20%) Data Modelling
14 691 (12.19%) ETL
15 654 (11.54%) Observability
16 636 (11.22%) Data Science
17 580 (10.23%) Test Automation
18 543 (9.58%) Business Intelligence
19 525 (9.26%) LLM
20 517 (9.12%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,806 (31.87%) SQL
2 795 (14.03%) Java
3 704 (12.42%) Bash
4 682 (12.03%) PowerShell
5 462 (8.15%) JavaScript
6 401 (7.08%) TypeScript
7 323 (5.70%) C#
8 218 (3.85%) Go
9 162 (2.86%) R
10 138 (2.44%) C++
11 129 (2.28%) Scala
12 128 (2.26%) Shell Script
13 92 (1.62%) Bicep
14 74 (1.31%) Perl
15 58 (1.02%) PL/SQL
16 57 (1.01%) Ruby
17 56 (0.99%) C
18 55 (0.97%) Groovy
19 54 (0.95%) Rust
20 50 (0.88%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,280 (22.59%) Security Cleared
2 1,025 (18.09%) SC Cleared
3 421 (7.43%) Degree
4 193 (3.41%) DV Cleared
5 151 (2.66%) Computer Science Degree
6 138 (2.44%) BPSS Clearance
7 133 (2.35%) AWS Certification
8 120 (2.12%) Azure Certification
9 92 (1.62%) CISSP
10 88 (1.55%) Cisco Certification
11 81 (1.43%) Master's Degree
12 58 (1.02%) CCNP
13 47 (0.83%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 38 (0.67%) CISM
15 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Certification
16 32 (0.56%) CCIE
16 32 (0.56%) PhD
17 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
18 24 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 553 (9.76%) Data Quality
2 247 (4.36%) QA
3 123 (2.17%) GDPR
4 110 (1.94%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 109 (1.92%) NIST
6 94 (1.66%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.60%) SLA
8 26 (0.46%) WCAG
9 23 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
9 23 (0.41%) HIPAA
9 23 (0.41%) NCSC
10 22 (0.39%) PCI DSS
11 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
12 13 (0.23%) SOC 2
13 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
14 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 9 (0.16%) GRC
15 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 891 (15.72%) Docker
2 135 (2.38%) Active Directory
3 124 (2.19%) VMware Infrastructure
4 76 (1.34%) Virtual Machines
5 48 (0.85%) vSphere
6 42 (0.74%) VMware NSX
7 37 (0.65%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.53%) Firmware
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) NFS
11 15 (0.26%) KVM
11 15 (0.26%) Oracle RAC
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 11 (0.19%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
17 4 (0.071%) OpenSSH
17 4 (0.071%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,237 (21.83%) Terraform
2 1,062 (18.74%) Kubernetes
3 605 (10.68%) Ansible
4 361 (6.37%) Grafana
5 287 (5.06%) Prometheus
6 79 (1.39%) Puppet
7 72 (1.27%) Argo
8 50 (0.88%) Progress Chef
9 39 (0.69%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) vCenter Server
11 37 (0.65%) vRealize
12 30 (0.53%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
13 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
14 26 (0.46%) Control-M
14 26 (0.46%) Nagios
15 25 (0.44%) Nessus
15 25 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
16 20 (0.35%) FortiGate
17 19 (0.34%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 650 (11.47%) Microsoft
2 557 (9.83%) Databricks
3 324 (5.72%) Google
4 249 (4.39%) Oracle
5 211 (3.72%) Splunk
6 178 (3.14%) VMware
7 147 (2.59%) Cisco
8 143 (2.52%) OpenAI
9 114 (2.01%) ServiceNow
10 108 (1.91%) Red Hat
11 96 (1.69%) F5
12 90 (1.59%) Palo Alto
13 88 (1.55%) Dynatrace
14 83 (1.46%) IBM
15 82 (1.45%) Informatica
16 70 (1.24%) Fortinet
17 65 (1.15%) CyberArk
18 64 (1.13%) Foundry
19 56 (0.99%) SAP
20 55 (0.97%) Arista