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

6 months to
22 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,610 4,296 4,000
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.42% 13.09% 10.30%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.67% 39.76% 32.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,679 2,847 2,857
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.95% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £644 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 80 117
10th Percentile £29.85 £26.31 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.50 £34.54 £30.37
Median hourly rate £56.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.00% -13.04% -9.72%
75th Percentile £76.88 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £83.16 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £57.50 £52.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year +9.52% -22.22% +16.13%

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 10,804 12,221
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.28% 32.93% 31.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,213 7,211 8,497
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £503 £530
Median % change year-on-year +2.88% -5.09% -3.64%
75th Percentile £619 £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 526 292 388
10th Percentile £29.96 £28.25 £27.00
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.00 £45.03
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £79.88 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +7.84%

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 22 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 22 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 22 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 4,799 £545 +1.44% 5,027
London -4 2,814 £573 -0.43% 3,007
UK excluding London -8 2,158 £500 - 2,698
Work from Home -8 1,527 £530 -3.68% 1,846
North of England +1 735 £500 +2.04% 609
South East -10 447 £537 +7.40% 771
Yorkshire -1 374 £500 - 173
South West -3 298 £515 -1.90% 365
North West -2 278 £525 +10.53% 326
Scotland -2 275 £450 -10.00% 228
Midlands -18 245 £476 +0.21% 266
West Midlands -18 194 £477 +0.42% 155
East of England -10 139 £500 -0.50% 362
North East -2 95 £425 -18.27% 115
East Midlands -10 51 £475 +13.10% 110
Wales -11 28 £530 +30.86% 55
Northern Ireland +4 19 £363 -32.56% 73

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
1 293 (5.22%) Apache Airflow
2 274 (4.88%) Apache Spark
3 217 (3.87%) Apache
4 175 (3.12%) Confluence
5 58 (1.03%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.87%) SharePoint
7 43 (0.77%) SAS
8 28 (0.50%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.41%) ArcGIS
10 21 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
11 19 (0.34%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.12%) CICS
15 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.11%) Apache Superset
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.089%) Camunda
Applications
1 110 (1.96%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
6 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
6 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
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 21 (0.37%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
6 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
8 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Front Arena
10 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) IBM Planning Analytics
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,103 (37.49%) AWS
2 1,907 (33.99%) Azure
3 868 (15.47%) GCP
4 704 (12.55%) GitHub
5 505 (9.00%) Power Platform
6 470 (8.38%) Serverless
7 443 (7.90%) Azure DevOps
8 410 (7.31%) GitHub Actions
9 392 (6.99%) Amazon S3
10 358 (6.38%) AWS Lambda
11 323 (5.76%) Snowflake
12 226 (4.03%) Azure Data Factory
13 222 (3.96%) dbt
14 186 (3.32%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 185 (3.30%) AWS CloudFormation
16 180 (3.21%) Amazon EKS
17 138 (2.46%) Amazon EC2
18 137 (2.44%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 133 (2.37%) Entra ID
20 123 (2.19%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 278 (4.96%) Firewall
2 215 (3.83%) DNS
3 148 (2.64%) TCP/IP
4 130 (2.32%) Network Security
5 126 (2.25%) BGP
5 126 (2.25%) VPN
6 111 (1.98%) WAN
7 85 (1.52%) DHCP
8 73 (1.30%) OSPF
9 61 (1.09%) SD-WAN
10 60 (1.07%) VLAN
11 57 (1.02%) VXLAN
12 55 (0.98%) SSL
13 54 (0.96%) HTTP
14 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
15 46 (0.82%) SAN
16 45 (0.80%) Ethernet VPN
17 44 (0.78%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 43 (0.77%) SNMP
19 38 (0.68%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 459 (8.18%) Power BI
2 332 (5.92%) PostgreSQL
3 323 (5.76%) Data Warehouse
4 221 (3.94%) SQL Server
5 204 (3.64%) Relational Database
6 198 (3.53%) Metadata
7 194 (3.46%) Tableau
8 179 (3.19%) Data Lake
9 162 (2.89%) BigQuery
10 159 (2.83%) NoSQL
11 144 (2.57%) Big Data
12 141 (2.51%) Amazon Redshift
13 129 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
14 124 (2.21%) MongoDB
15 121 (2.16%) Amazon RDS
16 117 (2.09%) Delta Lake
17 104 (1.85%) DynamoDB
18 90 (1.60%) MySQL
19 71 (1.27%) Redis
20 66 (1.18%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 743 (13.24%) Git
2 507 (9.04%) Jenkins
3 446 (7.95%) GitLab
4 295 (5.26%) JIRA
5 102 (1.82%) Selenium
6 56 (1.00%) JMeter
6 56 (1.00%) Postman
7 53 (0.94%) MLflow
8 49 (0.87%) SonarQube
9 47 (0.84%) Bitbucket
9 47 (0.84%) Claude Code
10 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
11 34 (0.61%) Cucumber
12 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
12 32 (0.57%) Gatling
13 31 (0.55%) Maven
13 31 (0.55%) REST Assured
14 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
15 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
16 22 (0.39%) JUnit
General
1 1,246 (22.21%) Social Skills
2 1,211 (21.59%) Finance
3 829 (14.78%) Analytical Skills
4 555 (9.89%) Public Sector
5 455 (8.11%) Banking
6 198 (3.53%) Front Office
7 139 (2.48%) Investment Banking
8 117 (2.09%) Documentation Skills
9 114 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 107 (1.91%) Retail
11 91 (1.62%) Marketing
12 77 (1.37%) Telecoms
13 58 (1.03%) Pharmaceutical
14 54 (0.96%) Military
15 53 (0.94%) Legal
16 48 (0.86%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.84%) Aerospace
18 45 (0.80%) Publishing
19 40 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
19 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 930 (16.58%) Senior
2 920 (16.40%) Developer
3 804 (14.33%) Data Engineer
4 492 (8.77%) Python Developer
5 485 (8.65%) Lead
6 413 (7.36%) Python Engineer
7 338 (6.02%) DevOps Engineer
8 310 (5.53%) Software Engineer
9 283 (5.04%) Architect
10 275 (4.90%) Analyst
11 257 (4.58%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 236 (4.21%) AWS Engineer
13 197 (3.51%) Data Scientist
14 192 (3.42%) Cloud Engineer
15 190 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
16 177 (3.16%) Senior Developer
17 174 (3.10%) Azure Engineer
18 173 (3.08%) Senior Data Engineer
19 139 (2.48%) Infrastructure Engineer
20 131 (2.34%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,307 (23.30%) Terraform
2 467 (8.32%) REST
3 381 (6.79%) PySpark
4 361 (6.43%) Kafka
5 325 (5.79%) React
6 238 (4.24%) .NET
7 204 (3.64%) FastAPI
7 204 (3.64%) JSON
8 199 (3.55%) RESTful
9 193 (3.44%) Django
10 188 (3.35%) Node.js
11 176 (3.14%) Pandas
12 133 (2.37%) LangChain
13 129 (2.30%) pytest
14 126 (2.25%) PyTorch
15 110 (1.96%) Flask
15 110 (1.96%) YAML
16 107 (1.91%) HTML
17 106 (1.89%) OAuth
18 103 (1.84%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 772 (13.76%) Cloud Native
2 309 (5.51%) Distributed Systems
3 225 (4.01%) AI Agents
4 213 (3.80%) Onboarding
5 163 (2.91%) Data Centre
6 159 (2.83%) Product Ownership
7 140 (2.50%) Algorithms
8 134 (2.39%) Legacy Systems
9 133 (2.37%) Data Structures
10 118 (2.10%) Derivative
11 116 (2.07%) Hybrid Cloud
12 109 (1.94%) Data Protection Act
13 105 (1.87%) Management Information System
14 96 (1.71%) Equities
15 83 (1.48%) Fixed Income
16 81 (1.44%) Security Posture
17 76 (1.35%) Enterprise Software
18 70 (1.25%) Public Cloud
19 67 (1.19%) Linux Command Line
20 63 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 735 (13.10%) Linux
2 341 (6.08%) Windows
3 241 (4.30%) Unix
4 147 (2.62%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 85 (1.52%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.59%) VMS
8 32 (0.57%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 17 (0.30%) CentOS
11 16 (0.29%) Android
12 11 (0.20%) Apple iOS
12 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 11 (0.20%) zOS
13 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.089%) Debian
16 5 (0.089%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,226 (39.68%) CI/CD
2 1,614 (28.77%) DevOps
3 1,461 (26.04%) AI
4 1,261 (22.48%) Agile
5 1,180 (21.03%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,109 (19.77%) Analytics
7 986 (17.58%) Data Pipeline
8 912 (16.26%) Problem-Solving
9 903 (16.10%) Software Engineering
10 857 (15.28%) Machine Learning
11 789 (14.06%) Data Engineering
12 770 (13.73%) Containerisation
13 733 (13.07%) Data Modelling
14 693 (12.35%) Observability
15 655 (11.68%) ETL
16 632 (11.27%) Test Automation
17 593 (10.57%) Continuous Improvement
18 580 (10.34%) Data Science
19 565 (10.07%) Validation
20 541 (9.64%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,819 (32.42%) SQL
2 827 (14.74%) Java
3 762 (13.58%) Bash
4 743 (13.24%) PowerShell
5 454 (8.09%) JavaScript
6 362 (6.45%) TypeScript
7 308 (5.49%) C#
8 201 (3.58%) Go
9 148 (2.64%) R
10 146 (2.60%) C++
11 140 (2.50%) Shell Script
12 135 (2.41%) Bicep
13 130 (2.32%) Scala
14 88 (1.57%) Perl
15 61 (1.09%) PL/SQL
16 59 (1.05%) C
17 58 (1.03%) Groovy
18 56 (1.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 54 (0.96%) Rust
20 51 (0.91%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,314 (23.42%) Security Cleared
2 1,070 (19.07%) SC Cleared
3 423 (7.54%) Degree
4 207 (3.69%) DV Cleared
5 163 (2.91%) Computer Science Degree
6 149 (2.66%) Azure Certification
7 145 (2.58%) AWS Certification
8 115 (2.05%) BPSS Clearance
9 94 (1.68%) CISSP
10 91 (1.62%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.27%) Master's Degree
12 52 (0.93%) CCNP
13 44 (0.78%) Microsoft Certification
14 37 (0.66%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 35 (0.62%) PhD
16 33 (0.59%) ISTQB
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 30 (0.53%) CCIE
20 26 (0.46%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 595 (10.61%) Data Quality
2 286 (5.10%) QA
3 109 (1.94%) GDPR
3 109 (1.94%) NIST
4 104 (1.85%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 82 (1.46%) Accessibility
6 41 (0.73%) SLA
7 30 (0.53%) Actionable Recommendations
8 27 (0.48%) NCSC
9 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
9 26 (0.46%) WCAG
10 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 16 (0.29%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
13 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.21%) SOC 2
15 8 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) HL7
17 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 938 (16.72%) Docker
2 157 (2.80%) Active Directory
3 134 (2.39%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.09%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.80%) Hyper-V
6 43 (0.77%) vSphere
7 35 (0.62%) VMware NSX
8 31 (0.55%) Firmware
9 23 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.23%) Squid
12 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
14 9 (0.16%) HDFS
14 9 (0.16%) KVM
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) PowerHA
15 7 (0.12%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,111 (19.80%) Kubernetes
2 630 (11.23%) Ansible
3 345 (6.15%) Grafana
4 249 (4.44%) Prometheus
5 89 (1.59%) Puppet
6 76 (1.35%) Progress Chef
7 68 (1.21%) Argo
8 41 (0.73%) Istio
9 34 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
10 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
11 27 (0.48%) Kibana
12 25 (0.45%) Nagios
12 25 (0.45%) vCenter Server
13 24 (0.43%) vRealize
14 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
15 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
16 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
16 18 (0.32%) Netcool
16 18 (0.32%) Packer
Vendors
1 701 (12.50%) Microsoft
2 559 (9.96%) Databricks
3 359 (6.40%) Google
4 258 (4.60%) Oracle
5 213 (3.80%) Splunk
6 178 (3.17%) VMware
7 146 (2.60%) Cisco
8 141 (2.51%) OpenAI
9 128 (2.28%) ServiceNow
10 106 (1.89%) Dynatrace
11 103 (1.84%) Red Hat
12 94 (1.68%) IBM
13 89 (1.59%) F5
14 85 (1.52%) Palo Alto
15 82 (1.46%) Informatica
16 70 (1.25%) Fortinet
16 70 (1.25%) SAP
17 68 (1.21%) CyberArk
18 67 (1.19%) Foundry
19 60 (1.07%) Salesforce