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 10 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,578 4,298 3,921
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.46% 12.96% 10.11%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.57% 39.47% 32.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,640 2,873 2,827
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £434 £428 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £528 £575
Median % change year-on-year -0.47% -8.26% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £713
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 131 72 123
10th Percentile £30.00 £26.26 £20.65
25th Percentile £43.16 £33.91 £30.50
Median hourly rate £55.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +11.00% -13.04% -9.72%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £82.53 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.50 £50.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +11.00% -23.08% +13.04%

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 14,096 10,888 12,128
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.43% 32.84% 31.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,150 7,308 8,531
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £504 £530
Median % change year-on-year +1.69% -4.91% -3.64%
75th Percentile £616 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 526 267 407
10th Percentile £29.98 £28.11 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.00 £45.61
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -12.69% +7.96%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.75 £84.70 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +5.65%

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 10 August 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 10 August 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 10 August 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 4,760 £538 -0.74% 5,250
London -4 2,766 £575 - 3,332
UK excluding London -8 2,174 £500 +2.04% 2,452
Work from Home -9 1,523 £525 -4.55% 1,899
North of England +2 751 £500 +4.17% 579
South East -10 444 £537 +7.40% 688
Yorkshire +1 384 £500 +0.70% 170
South West -3 290 £505 -6.05% 315
North West +2 285 £525 +10.53% 312
Scotland +1 285 £440 -12.00% 208
Midlands -15 246 £470 +4.44% 243
West Midlands -10 196 £469 +4.22% 139
East of England -12 138 £500 -0.25% 317
North East -2 93 £425 -18.27% 102
East Midlands -6 49 £488 +15.50% 104
Wales -9 27 £530 +30.86% 63
Northern Ireland +7 19 £363 -32.56% 67

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 (5.07%) Apache Airflow
2 279 (5.00%) Apache Spark
3 212 (3.80%) Apache
4 176 (3.16%) Confluence
5 58 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SAS
7 41 (0.74%) SharePoint
8 29 (0.52%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.41%) ArcGIS
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.32%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Apache Superset
13 9 (0.16%) CMS
14 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
15 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
17 5 (0.090%) JBoss
17 5 (0.090%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 113 (2.03%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
6 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
7 16 (0.29%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
9 2 (0.036%) Revit
10 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
10 1 (0.018%) Houdini
10 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.018%) Simulink
10 1 (0.018%) SPSS
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
10 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
3 14 (0.25%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
6 5 (0.090%) Remedy AR System
6 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
6 5 (0.090%) Salesforce CRM
7 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
7 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
8 3 (0.054%) Endur
8 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
8 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
9 2 (0.036%) IntelliMatch
9 2 (0.036%) Odoo
9 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
9 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,082 (37.33%) AWS
2 1,901 (34.08%) Azure
3 848 (15.20%) GCP
4 704 (12.62%) GitHub
5 498 (8.93%) Power Platform
6 459 (8.23%) Serverless
7 431 (7.73%) Azure DevOps
8 397 (7.12%) GitHub Actions
9 396 (7.10%) Amazon S3
10 351 (6.29%) AWS Lambda
11 309 (5.54%) Snowflake
12 230 (4.12%) Azure Data Factory
13 218 (3.91%) dbt
14 189 (3.39%) AWS CloudFormation
15 183 (3.28%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 177 (3.17%) Amazon EKS
17 144 (2.58%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 143 (2.56%) OpenShift
19 134 (2.40%) Amazon EC2
20 130 (2.33%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 274 (4.91%) Firewall
2 209 (3.75%) DNS
3 142 (2.55%) TCP/IP
4 119 (2.13%) VPN
5 117 (2.10%) BGP
6 112 (2.01%) Network Security
7 108 (1.94%) WAN
8 82 (1.47%) DHCP
9 72 (1.29%) OSPF
10 59 (1.06%) SD-WAN
11 58 (1.04%) VLAN
12 54 (0.97%) HTTP
13 53 (0.95%) SSL
13 53 (0.95%) VXLAN
14 51 (0.91%) BIG-IP
14 51 (0.91%) SAN
15 44 (0.79%) SNMP
16 43 (0.77%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 42 (0.75%) Ethernet VPN
18 34 (0.61%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 457 (8.19%) Power BI
2 326 (5.84%) Data Warehouse
2 326 (5.84%) PostgreSQL
3 221 (3.96%) SQL Server
4 200 (3.59%) Relational Database
5 191 (3.42%) Data Lake
5 191 (3.42%) Tableau
6 189 (3.39%) Metadata
7 163 (2.92%) NoSQL
8 151 (2.71%) Big Data
9 150 (2.69%) BigQuery
10 134 (2.40%) Amazon Redshift
11 131 (2.35%) Amazon Athena
12 125 (2.24%) MongoDB
13 122 (2.19%) Delta Lake
14 114 (2.04%) Amazon RDS
15 105 (1.88%) DynamoDB
16 83 (1.49%) MySQL
17 68 (1.22%) Snowflake Schema
18 65 (1.17%) Redis
Development Applications
1 717 (12.85%) Git
2 502 (9.00%) Jenkins
3 438 (7.85%) GitLab
4 296 (5.31%) JIRA
5 95 (1.70%) Selenium
6 56 (1.00%) MLflow
7 51 (0.91%) Postman
8 47 (0.84%) Bitbucket
9 46 (0.82%) JMeter
10 44 (0.79%) SonarQube
11 40 (0.72%) Claude Code
12 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
13 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) Gatling
14 31 (0.56%) Artifactory
14 31 (0.56%) REST Assured
15 30 (0.54%) Sonatype Nexus
16 29 (0.52%) Maven
17 24 (0.43%) JUnit
18 19 (0.34%) Zephyr
General
1 1,208 (21.66%) Social Skills
2 1,203 (21.57%) Finance
3 800 (14.34%) Analytical Skills
4 562 (10.08%) Public Sector
5 437 (7.83%) Banking
6 200 (3.59%) Front Office
7 130 (2.33%) Investment Banking
8 120 (2.15%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (2.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 107 (1.92%) Retail
11 88 (1.58%) Marketing
12 73 (1.31%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.06%) Pharmaceutical
14 56 (1.00%) Legal
15 54 (0.97%) Military
16 47 (0.84%) Financial Institution
17 46 (0.82%) Aerospace
18 45 (0.81%) Manufacturing
18 45 (0.81%) Publishing
19 40 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 952 (17.07%) Developer
2 898 (16.10%) Senior
3 820 (14.70%) Data Engineer
4 509 (9.13%) Python Developer
5 460 (8.25%) Lead
6 404 (7.24%) Python Engineer
7 323 (5.79%) DevOps Engineer
8 316 (5.67%) Software Engineer
9 279 (5.00%) Architect
10 278 (4.98%) Analyst
11 255 (4.57%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 243 (4.36%) AWS Engineer
13 204 (3.66%) Data Scientist
14 190 (3.41%) Cloud Engineer
14 190 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
15 179 (3.21%) Senior Developer
16 176 (3.16%) Azure Engineer
17 167 (2.99%) Senior Data Engineer
18 138 (2.47%) Data Analyst
18 138 (2.47%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 428 (7.67%) REST
2 363 (6.51%) PySpark
3 352 (6.31%) Kafka
4 344 (6.17%) React
5 231 (4.14%) .NET
6 202 (3.62%) RESTful
7 201 (3.60%) FastAPI
7 201 (3.60%) Node.js
8 198 (3.55%) JSON
9 181 (3.24%) Pandas
10 177 (3.17%) Django
11 141 (2.53%) LangChain
12 138 (2.47%) PyTorch
13 110 (1.97%) NumPy
14 109 (1.95%) Flask
15 106 (1.90%) pytest
16 105 (1.88%) OAuth
17 103 (1.85%) HTML
18 102 (1.83%) YAML
19 101 (1.81%) scikit-learn
Miscellaneous
1 757 (13.57%) Cloud Native
2 313 (5.61%) Distributed Systems
3 215 (3.85%) AI Agents
4 202 (3.62%) Onboarding
5 159 (2.85%) Data Centre
6 151 (2.71%) Product Ownership
7 141 (2.53%) Algorithms
8 140 (2.51%) Data Structures
9 126 (2.26%) Legacy Systems
10 119 (2.13%) Hybrid Cloud
11 117 (2.10%) Derivative
12 110 (1.97%) Data Protection Act
13 104 (1.86%) Management Information System
14 95 (1.70%) Equities
15 92 (1.65%) Fixed Income
16 80 (1.43%) Security Posture
17 70 (1.25%) Enterprise Software
18 67 (1.20%) Public Cloud
19 66 (1.18%) Linux Command Line
20 65 (1.17%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 703 (12.60%) Linux
2 326 (5.84%) Windows
3 229 (4.11%) Unix
4 135 (2.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 77 (1.38%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.72%) Ubuntu
7 31 (0.56%) VMS
8 30 (0.54%) AIX
9 16 (0.29%) Solaris
10 15 (0.27%) Android
11 14 (0.25%) CentOS
12 13 (0.23%) Mac OS
13 11 (0.20%) Apple iOS
13 11 (0.20%) zOS
14 7 (0.13%) Windows 10
14 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Debian
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,170 (38.90%) CI/CD
2 1,607 (28.81%) DevOps
3 1,422 (25.49%) AI
4 1,269 (22.75%) Agile
5 1,124 (20.15%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,123 (20.13%) Analytics
7 1,006 (18.04%) Data Pipeline
8 906 (16.24%) Problem-Solving
9 877 (15.72%) Machine Learning
10 869 (15.58%) Software Engineering
11 795 (14.25%) Data Engineering
12 765 (13.71%) Containerisation
13 750 (13.45%) Data Modelling
14 673 (12.07%) Observability
15 662 (11.87%) ETL
16 603 (10.81%) Test Automation
17 593 (10.63%) Data Science
18 556 (9.97%) Continuous Improvement
19 535 (9.59%) Business Intelligence
20 531 (9.52%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,798 (32.23%) SQL
2 816 (14.63%) Java
3 744 (13.34%) Bash
4 720 (12.91%) PowerShell
5 460 (8.25%) JavaScript
6 375 (6.72%) TypeScript
7 307 (5.50%) C#
8 200 (3.59%) Go
9 146 (2.62%) R
10 143 (2.56%) C++
11 133 (2.38%) Shell Script
12 129 (2.31%) Scala
13 121 (2.17%) Bicep
14 80 (1.43%) Perl
15 58 (1.04%) C
16 57 (1.02%) PL/SQL
17 56 (1.00%) Groovy
18 55 (0.99%) Rust
19 53 (0.95%) Ruby
20 49 (0.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,294 (23.20%) Security Cleared
2 1,051 (18.84%) SC Cleared
3 422 (7.57%) Degree
4 195 (3.50%) DV Cleared
5 160 (2.87%) Computer Science Degree
6 135 (2.42%) AWS Certification
6 135 (2.42%) Azure Certification
7 121 (2.17%) BPSS Clearance
8 89 (1.60%) CISSP
9 87 (1.56%) Cisco Certification
10 71 (1.27%) Master's Degree
11 53 (0.95%) CCNP
12 45 (0.81%) Microsoft Certification
13 41 (0.74%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 35 (0.63%) PhD
15 34 (0.61%) ISTQB
16 30 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 30 (0.54%) CISM
17 28 (0.50%) CCIE
18 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 576 (10.33%) Data Quality
2 267 (4.79%) QA
3 114 (2.04%) GDPR
4 102 (1.83%) NIST
5 101 (1.81%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 86 (1.54%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.63%) SLA
8 27 (0.48%) WCAG
9 26 (0.47%) NCSC
9 26 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 25 (0.45%) PCI DSS
11 24 (0.43%) Actionable Recommendations
12 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 15 (0.27%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
16 7 (0.13%) GRC
16 7 (0.13%) HL7
17 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 919 (16.48%) Docker
2 156 (2.80%) Active Directory
3 127 (2.28%) VMware Infrastructure
4 65 (1.17%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.81%) vSphere
6 42 (0.75%) Hyper-V
7 35 (0.63%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 21 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 13 (0.23%) Squid
12 12 (0.22%) Virtual Desktop
13 11 (0.20%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) KVM
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) HDFS
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
16 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
16 7 (0.13%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,284 (23.02%) Terraform
2 1,084 (19.43%) Kubernetes
3 609 (10.92%) Ansible
4 345 (6.19%) Grafana
5 263 (4.71%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.60%) Puppet
7 69 (1.24%) Argo
8 68 (1.22%) Progress Chef
9 41 (0.74%) Istio
10 32 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
11 29 (0.52%) vCenter Server
12 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
13 27 (0.48%) vRealize
14 26 (0.47%) Kibana
15 24 (0.43%) Control-M
15 24 (0.43%) Nagios
16 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
17 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
18 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
18 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 677 (12.14%) Microsoft
2 544 (9.75%) Databricks
3 342 (6.13%) Google
4 244 (4.37%) Oracle
5 211 (3.78%) Splunk
6 169 (3.03%) VMware
7 145 (2.60%) OpenAI
8 139 (2.49%) Cisco
9 125 (2.24%) ServiceNow
10 100 (1.79%) Red Hat
11 99 (1.77%) Dynatrace
12 90 (1.61%) F5
13 86 (1.54%) Palo Alto
14 84 (1.51%) IBM
15 81 (1.45%) Informatica
16 68 (1.22%) Fortinet
17 67 (1.20%) Foundry
18 64 (1.15%) SAP
19 62 (1.11%) CyberArk
20 60 (1.08%) Salesforce