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 19 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,226 3,945 3,976
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.32% 13.41% 9.10%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.66% 39.35% 31.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,548 2,774 2,836
10th Percentile £363 £384 £400
25th Percentile £420 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £619 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £813 £794
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 128 51 101
10th Percentile £29.36 £21.25 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £39.32 £50.50
Median % change year-on-year +39.88% -22.14% -22.31%
75th Percentile £74.26 £58.75 £67.50
90th Percentile £83.75 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £57.50
% change year-on-year +16.67% -21.74% -8.40%

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 12,852 10,026 12,787
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.83% 34.07% 29.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,547 6,795 9,088
10th Percentile £354 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £487
% change year-on-year - -2.46% -2.60%
Number of hourly rates quoted 548 240 478
10th Percentile £42.33 £22.45 £31.25
25th Percentile £55.00 £34.73 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -1.03%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.13 £68.75
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.23
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.97% +1.99% -

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 19 April 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 19 April 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 19 April 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 -1 4,404 £520 -5.45% 2,711
London -3 2,506 £550 -8.33% 1,178
UK excluding London -3 1,987 £481 -3.75% 1,968
Work from Home 0 1,511 £525 -4.55% 969
North of England +9 680 £478 -2.45% 453
South East -5 408 £500 -4.76% 566
Yorkshire +1 385 £475 -5.00% 163
Midlands -6 266 £498 +8.44% 270
Scotland -1 250 £425 -10.53% 128
North West +5 249 £500 +5.26% 216
South West +1 243 £500 -9.09% 254
West Midlands -7 206 £500 +1.01% 131
East of England +1 132 £500 - 243
East Midlands -11 59 £450 +5.88% 138
North East +11 55 £488 +1.30% 76
Northern Ireland +16 24 £463 -7.50% 28
Wales -17 23 £463 -11.90% 61

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
1 285 (5.45%) Apache Spark
2 212 (4.06%) Apache Airflow
3 162 (3.10%) Apache
4 159 (3.04%) Confluence
5 65 (1.24%) SAS
6 57 (1.09%) SharePoint
7 29 (0.55%) Jupyter
8 28 (0.54%) nginx
9 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 22 (0.42%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
12 14 (0.27%) Appian
13 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
14 10 (0.19%) Camunda
15 9 (0.17%) Apache Superset
16 8 (0.15%) CMS
17 6 (0.11%) CICS
18 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
18 5 (0.096%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.096%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 140 (2.68%) Microsoft Excel
2 25 (0.48%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 23 (0.44%) MS Visio
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 6 (0.11%) CPLEX
6 5 (0.096%) Weka
7 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 27 (0.52%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 8 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
5 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
5 5 (0.096%) SAP IBP
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Actimize
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
9 1 (0.019%) Salesforce CRM
9 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 1,991 (38.10%) AWS
2 1,794 (34.33%) Azure
3 772 (14.77%) GCP
4 673 (12.88%) GitHub
5 521 (9.97%) Power Platform
6 499 (9.55%) Serverless
7 392 (7.50%) Azure DevOps
8 384 (7.35%) Amazon S3
9 362 (6.93%) AWS Lambda
10 351 (6.72%) GitHub Actions
11 279 (5.34%) Azure Data Factory
12 237 (4.54%) Snowflake
13 230 (4.40%) AWS CloudFormation
14 172 (3.29%) Amazon EKS
15 171 (3.27%) OpenShift
16 170 (3.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 156 (2.99%) Amazon ECS
18 153 (2.93%) dbt
19 137 (2.62%) Amazon EC2
20 135 (2.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 185 (3.54%) Firewall
2 136 (2.60%) DNS
3 114 (2.18%) Network Security
4 91 (1.74%) TCP/IP
5 78 (1.49%) BGP
6 75 (1.44%) VPN
7 65 (1.24%) WAN
8 60 (1.15%) HTTP
9 45 (0.86%) OSPF
10 44 (0.84%) SAN
11 41 (0.78%) MPLS
12 37 (0.71%) VLAN
13 34 (0.65%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) DHCP
15 30 (0.57%) VXLAN
16 29 (0.55%) SNMP
16 29 (0.55%) SSL
17 28 (0.54%) Wireshark
18 27 (0.52%) SD-WAN
19 23 (0.44%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 442 (8.46%) Power BI
2 354 (6.77%) PostgreSQL
3 291 (5.57%) Data Warehouse
4 240 (4.59%) Data Lake
5 231 (4.42%) SQL Server
6 196 (3.75%) NoSQL
7 193 (3.69%) Tableau
8 177 (3.39%) Relational Database
9 163 (3.12%) Metadata
10 155 (2.97%) Big Data
11 134 (2.56%) BigQuery
12 132 (2.53%) Delta Lake
13 121 (2.32%) Amazon Athena
14 119 (2.28%) Amazon Redshift
15 105 (2.01%) MongoDB
16 103 (1.97%) Amazon RDS
17 100 (1.91%) MySQL
18 93 (1.78%) DynamoDB
19 92 (1.76%) Azure SQL Database
20 80 (1.53%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 662 (12.67%) Git
2 500 (9.57%) Jenkins
3 377 (7.21%) GitLab
4 283 (5.42%) JIRA
5 90 (1.72%) Selenium
6 88 (1.68%) MLflow
7 58 (1.11%) Postman
8 44 (0.84%) Cucumber
9 42 (0.80%) Bitbucket
10 35 (0.67%) JUnit
11 32 (0.61%) Sonatype Nexus
12 30 (0.57%) SpecFlow
13 29 (0.55%) JMeter
14 28 (0.54%) Artifactory
14 28 (0.54%) Cypress.io
15 27 (0.52%) SonarQube
16 23 (0.44%) Gatling
16 23 (0.44%) Maven
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
18 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,184 (22.66%) Social Skills
2 991 (18.96%) Finance
3 716 (13.70%) Analytical Skills
4 496 (9.49%) Public Sector
5 367 (7.02%) Banking
6 171 (3.27%) Front Office
7 134 (2.56%) Documentation Skills
8 84 (1.61%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.32%) Marketing
10 62 (1.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 62 (1.19%) Retail
11 57 (1.09%) Legal
12 56 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
13 54 (1.03%) Telecoms
14 53 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
15 40 (0.77%) Manufacturing
16 38 (0.73%) Financial Institution
17 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
18 29 (0.55%) Publishing
19 27 (0.52%) Military
Job Titles
1 992 (18.98%) Developer
2 778 (14.89%) Data Engineer
3 741 (14.18%) Senior
4 484 (9.26%) Python Developer
5 351 (6.72%) Architect
6 335 (6.41%) Lead
7 289 (5.53%) Python Engineer
8 277 (5.30%) Analyst
9 275 (5.26%) DevOps Engineer
10 256 (4.90%) Software Engineer
11 241 (4.61%) AWS Engineer
12 223 (4.27%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 216 (4.13%) Data Scientist
14 187 (3.58%) Platform Engineer
15 165 (3.16%) Senior Developer
16 164 (3.14%) Azure Engineer
17 152 (2.91%) Senior Data Engineer
18 141 (2.70%) Data Analyst
19 140 (2.68%) Full-Stack Developer
20 117 (2.24%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 436 (8.34%) REST
2 366 (7.00%) React
3 342 (6.54%) PySpark
4 335 (6.41%) Kafka
5 277 (5.30%) Node.js
6 233 (4.46%) Pandas
7 229 (4.38%) .NET
8 194 (3.71%) PyTorch
9 182 (3.48%) RESTful
10 175 (3.35%) FastAPI
11 163 (3.12%) JSON
12 153 (2.93%) NumPy
13 147 (2.81%) TensorFlow
14 141 (2.70%) scikit-learn
15 126 (2.41%) Flask
16 125 (2.39%) LangChain
17 123 (2.35%) AngularJS
18 119 (2.28%) Django
19 113 (2.16%) OAuth
20 106 (2.03%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 501 (9.59%) Cloud Native
2 215 (4.11%) Distributed Systems
3 174 (3.33%) Algorithms
4 155 (2.97%) Product Ownership
5 122 (2.33%) AI Agents
6 115 (2.20%) Data Protection Act
7 113 (2.16%) Fixed Income
8 112 (2.14%) Equities
9 109 (2.09%) Data Structures
10 106 (2.03%) Derivative
11 101 (1.93%) Onboarding
12 96 (1.84%) Data Centre
13 91 (1.74%) Enterprise Software
14 87 (1.66%) Legacy Systems
14 87 (1.66%) Management Information System
15 86 (1.65%) Hybrid Cloud
16 82 (1.57%) Security Posture
17 76 (1.45%) Public Cloud
18 50 (0.96%) Virtual Team
19 48 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 644 (12.32%) Linux
2 294 (5.63%) Windows
3 194 (3.71%) Unix
4 103 (1.97%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 71 (1.36%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.75%) VMS
7 35 (0.67%) Ubuntu
8 29 (0.55%) Android
9 20 (0.38%) AIX
9 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
10 19 (0.36%) Solaris
11 18 (0.34%) CentOS
12 17 (0.33%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.17%) Debian
14 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
14 8 (0.15%) zOS
15 5 (0.096%) Rocky
15 5 (0.096%) Windows 7
15 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2019
16 4 (0.077%) Amazon Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,913 (36.61%) CI/CD
2 1,413 (27.04%) DevOps
3 1,177 (22.52%) Agile
4 1,133 (21.68%) AI
5 1,061 (20.30%) Analytics
6 1,004 (19.21%) Problem-Solving
7 909 (17.39%) Infrastructure as Code
8 863 (16.51%) Data Pipeline
9 808 (15.46%) Machine Learning
10 731 (13.99%) Containerisation
11 711 (13.61%) Data Engineering
12 698 (13.36%) Data Modelling
13 688 (13.16%) ETL
14 608 (11.63%) Data Science
15 593 (11.35%) Software Engineering
16 572 (10.95%) Test Automation
17 524 (10.03%) Business Intelligence
18 516 (9.87%) Observability
19 429 (8.21%) LLM
20 407 (7.79%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,709 (32.70%) SQL
2 768 (14.70%) Java
3 656 (12.55%) PowerShell
4 562 (10.75%) Bash
5 499 (9.55%) JavaScript
6 356 (6.81%) TypeScript
7 355 (6.79%) C#
8 206 (3.94%) Go
9 171 (3.27%) R
10 155 (2.97%) C++
11 145 (2.77%) Scala
12 105 (2.01%) Shell Script
13 97 (1.86%) Ruby
14 89 (1.70%) Perl
15 78 (1.49%) Bicep
16 54 (1.03%) Kusto Query Language
17 52 (1.00%) C
17 52 (1.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 49 (0.94%) T-SQL
19 45 (0.86%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,237 (23.67%) Security Cleared
2 1,017 (19.46%) SC Cleared
3 397 (7.60%) Degree
4 180 (3.44%) Computer Science Degree
5 141 (2.70%) DV Cleared
6 140 (2.68%) BPSS Clearance
7 107 (2.05%) Azure Certification
8 104 (1.99%) AWS Certification
9 94 (1.80%) CISSP
10 93 (1.78%) Master's Degree
11 79 (1.51%) Cisco Certification
12 61 (1.17%) CCNP
13 58 (1.11%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 46 (0.88%) CISM
15 43 (0.82%) PhD
16 34 (0.65%) Microsoft Certification
17 30 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 28 (0.54%) ISTQB
19 26 (0.50%) CCIE
19 26 (0.50%) CCNA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 515 (9.85%) Data Quality
2 220 (4.21%) QA
3 171 (3.27%) GDPR
4 109 (2.09%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 103 (1.97%) NIST
6 81 (1.55%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.63%) SLA
9 27 (0.52%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 25 (0.48%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
13 17 (0.33%) WCAG
14 13 (0.25%) SOC 2
15 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.21%) PMO
17 10 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
18 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 8 (0.15%) GRC
19 6 (0.11%) PSD2
System Software
1 850 (16.26%) Docker
2 163 (3.12%) Active Directory
3 105 (2.01%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.28%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.88%) VMware NSX
6 43 (0.82%) vSphere
7 31 (0.59%) Firmware
7 31 (0.59%) Hyper-V
8 18 (0.34%) VMware ESXi
9 13 (0.25%) HDFS
9 13 (0.25%) KVM
10 9 (0.17%) Ceph
10 9 (0.17%) SRDF
11 7 (0.13%) Lustre
11 7 (0.13%) NFS
11 7 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.11%) GPFS
12 6 (0.11%) Postfix
12 6 (0.11%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 6 (0.11%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,107 (21.18%) Terraform
2 973 (18.62%) Kubernetes
3 500 (9.57%) Ansible
4 328 (6.28%) Grafana
5 275 (5.26%) Prometheus
6 79 (1.51%) Argo
7 71 (1.36%) Puppet
8 53 (1.01%) Istio
9 48 (0.92%) vRealize
10 45 (0.86%) Kibana
11 36 (0.69%) vCenter Server
12 32 (0.61%) Progress Chef
13 27 (0.52%) Nessus
14 23 (0.44%) Control-M
15 22 (0.42%) Nagios
15 22 (0.42%) Rancher
16 21 (0.40%) Single Sign-On
17 20 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
17 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
18 19 (0.36%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 633 (12.11%) Microsoft
2 580 (11.10%) Databricks
3 280 (5.36%) Google
4 221 (4.23%) Splunk
5 219 (4.19%) Oracle
6 195 (3.73%) VMware
7 136 (2.60%) Red Hat
8 129 (2.47%) Cisco
9 123 (2.35%) OpenAI
10 98 (1.88%) ServiceNow
11 89 (1.70%) CyberArk
12 74 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
13 65 (1.24%) Foundry
14 64 (1.22%) Informatica
15 62 (1.19%) IBM
16 55 (1.05%) F5
17 53 (1.01%) Palo Alto
18 51 (0.98%) Dynatrace
19 46 (0.88%) SAP
20 43 (0.82%) Atlassian