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

6 months to
19 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 11 15
Rank change year-on-year +1 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,227 3,867 4,014
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.88% 13.24% 9.43%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.65% 38.92% 31.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,468 2,700 2,873
10th Percentile £363 £385 £397
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -1.79% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £813
UK excluding London median daily rate £491 £500 £510
% change year-on-year -1.80% -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 128 52 100
10th Percentile £30.34 £21.33 £21.20
25th Percentile £45.64 £26.46 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.75 £39.66 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +38.05% -33.90% -1.03%
75th Percentile £68.68 £55.63 £70.31
90th Percentile £84.13 £74.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -30.77% +13.38%

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 12,859 9,937 12,717
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.77% 34.03% 29.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,451 6,748 9,044
10th Percentile £355 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £530
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -1.89% -3.64%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £710 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +1.32% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 556 240 493
10th Percentile £40.63 £24.49 £32.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £34.54 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.25 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.42% -0.40% +1.46%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.87 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.77% +2.20% -

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 May 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 May 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 May 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 4,352 £525 -4.55% 3,318
London -3 2,484 £550 -6.38% 1,291
UK excluding London -1 2,015 £491 -1.80% 2,706
Work from Home -1 1,482 £525 -4.55% 2,007
North of England +10 708 £482 -1.13% 731
Yorkshire 0 396 £481 -3.80% 236
South East -4 390 £515 - 709
Scotland +2 293 £434 -9.45% 240
South West +2 255 £500 -9.09% 287
North West +3 251 £500 +5.26% 347
Midlands -11 237 £488 +8.33% 362
West Midlands -11 181 £482 -3.60% 188
East of England -6 125 £500 -0.25% 238
North East +8 70 £475 +5.56% 152
East Midlands -13 55 £495 +17.16% 174
Northern Ireland +13 24 £463 -18.68% 59
Wales -14 22 £463 -7.50% 106

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
1 287 (5.49%) Apache Spark
2 209 (4.00%) Apache Airflow
3 172 (3.29%) Apache
4 139 (2.66%) Confluence
5 49 (0.94%) SAS
6 44 (0.84%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.71%) Jupyter
8 20 (0.38%) nginx
8 20 (0.38%) OpenStack
9 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
10 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
10 15 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
11 11 (0.21%) Appian
12 10 (0.19%) IIS
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) CMS
14 7 (0.13%) Camunda
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.096%) CICS
16 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
Applications
1 121 (2.31%) Microsoft Excel
2 25 (0.48%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.36%) MS Visio
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.019%) SPSS
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
9 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 15 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Fidessa
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.057%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.038%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
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%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle ERP
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,959 (37.48%) AWS
2 1,744 (33.37%) Azure
3 753 (14.41%) GCP
4 630 (12.05%) GitHub
5 513 (9.81%) Power Platform
6 450 (8.61%) Serverless
7 368 (7.04%) Azure DevOps
8 355 (6.79%) Amazon S3
9 330 (6.31%) GitHub Actions
10 318 (6.08%) AWS Lambda
11 263 (5.03%) Azure Data Factory
12 234 (4.48%) Snowflake
13 190 (3.63%) AWS CloudFormation
14 169 (3.23%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 165 (3.16%) OpenShift
16 161 (3.08%) dbt
17 153 (2.93%) Amazon EKS
18 130 (2.49%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 123 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
20 122 (2.33%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 183 (3.50%) Firewall
2 131 (2.51%) DNS
3 111 (2.12%) Network Security
4 88 (1.68%) TCP/IP
5 86 (1.65%) BGP
6 81 (1.55%) WAN
7 75 (1.43%) VPN
8 61 (1.17%) HTTP
9 59 (1.13%) OSPF
10 51 (0.98%) SAN
11 42 (0.80%) VXLAN
12 40 (0.77%) BIG-IP
12 40 (0.77%) SD-WAN
13 39 (0.75%) SNMP
14 34 (0.65%) VLAN
15 33 (0.63%) Ethernet VPN
15 33 (0.63%) LAN
15 33 (0.63%) MPLS
15 33 (0.63%) SSL
16 32 (0.61%) DHCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 448 (8.57%) Power BI
2 337 (6.45%) PostgreSQL
3 280 (5.36%) Data Warehouse
4 249 (4.76%) SQL Server
5 232 (4.44%) Data Lake
6 199 (3.81%) Tableau
7 187 (3.58%) Relational Database
8 177 (3.39%) NoSQL
9 163 (3.12%) Big Data
10 156 (2.98%) Metadata
11 139 (2.66%) Delta Lake
12 137 (2.62%) BigQuery
13 121 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
14 112 (2.14%) Amazon Redshift
15 106 (2.03%) MongoDB
16 89 (1.70%) MySQL
17 86 (1.65%) Amazon RDS
17 86 (1.65%) DynamoDB
18 83 (1.59%) Azure SQL Database
19 76 (1.45%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 645 (12.34%) Git
2 469 (8.97%) Jenkins
3 354 (6.77%) GitLab
4 246 (4.71%) JIRA
5 92 (1.76%) MLflow
6 73 (1.40%) Selenium
7 60 (1.15%) Postman
8 39 (0.75%) Cucumber
9 33 (0.63%) JMeter
10 31 (0.59%) Artifactory
11 27 (0.52%) Bitbucket
11 27 (0.52%) Cypress.io
11 27 (0.52%) SonarQube
12 26 (0.50%) JUnit
12 26 (0.50%) Sonatype Nexus
13 24 (0.46%) Robot Framework
14 23 (0.44%) Maven
15 22 (0.42%) REST Assured
16 20 (0.38%) Gatling
17 18 (0.34%) SpecFlow
General
1 1,127 (21.56%) Social Skills
2 1,016 (19.44%) Finance
3 701 (13.41%) Analytical Skills
4 477 (9.13%) Public Sector
5 363 (6.94%) Banking
6 184 (3.52%) Front Office
7 130 (2.49%) Documentation Skills
8 109 (2.09%) Investment Banking
9 75 (1.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 68 (1.30%) Marketing
11 59 (1.13%) Retail
12 55 (1.05%) Pharmaceutical
13 51 (0.98%) Legal
14 50 (0.96%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.84%) Influencing Skills
16 37 (0.71%) Financial Institution
17 35 (0.67%) Military
18 34 (0.65%) Publishing
19 33 (0.63%) Manufacturing
20 29 (0.55%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 990 (18.94%) Developer
2 802 (15.34%) Data Engineer
3 765 (14.64%) Senior
4 501 (9.58%) Python Developer
5 328 (6.28%) Lead
6 326 (6.24%) Architect
7 321 (6.14%) Python Engineer
8 278 (5.32%) Analyst
9 276 (5.28%) DevOps Engineer
10 262 (5.01%) Software Engineer
11 224 (4.29%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 221 (4.23%) AWS Engineer
13 210 (4.02%) Data Scientist
14 171 (3.27%) Azure Engineer
14 171 (3.27%) Senior Developer
15 161 (3.08%) Senior Data Engineer
16 152 (2.91%) Platform Engineer
17 146 (2.79%) Data Analyst
17 146 (2.79%) Full-Stack Developer
18 128 (2.45%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 391 (7.48%) REST
2 362 (6.93%) React
3 357 (6.83%) PySpark
4 326 (6.24%) Kafka
5 234 (4.48%) .NET
6 226 (4.32%) Node.js
7 216 (4.13%) Pandas
8 185 (3.54%) FastAPI
9 182 (3.48%) RESTful
10 178 (3.41%) PyTorch
11 168 (3.21%) JSON
12 132 (2.53%) Django
13 130 (2.49%) NumPy
14 129 (2.47%) Flask
15 124 (2.37%) TensorFlow
16 118 (2.26%) AngularJS
16 118 (2.26%) LangChain
16 118 (2.26%) scikit-learn
17 99 (1.89%) HTML
17 99 (1.89%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 542 (10.37%) Cloud Native
2 228 (4.36%) Distributed Systems
3 159 (3.04%) Algorithms
4 134 (2.56%) Product Ownership
5 123 (2.35%) Data Structures
6 122 (2.33%) Data Protection Act
7 121 (2.31%) Data Centre
8 120 (2.30%) AI Agents
9 118 (2.26%) Onboarding
10 116 (2.22%) Derivative
11 104 (1.99%) Equities
12 103 (1.97%) Fixed Income
13 101 (1.93%) Management Information System
14 98 (1.87%) Legacy Systems
15 90 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
16 89 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
17 81 (1.55%) Security Posture
18 69 (1.32%) Public Cloud
19 48 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
20 47 (0.90%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 621 (11.88%) Linux
2 288 (5.51%) Windows
3 222 (4.25%) Unix
4 91 (1.74%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 68 (1.30%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.65%) Ubuntu
6 34 (0.65%) VMS
7 26 (0.50%) AIX
8 24 (0.46%) Android
9 23 (0.44%) Solaris
10 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
11 18 (0.34%) Apple iOS
12 16 (0.31%) CentOS
13 10 (0.19%) zOS
14 9 (0.17%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
17 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
18 4 (0.077%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,911 (36.56%) CI/CD
2 1,384 (26.48%) DevOps
3 1,183 (22.63%) AI
4 1,111 (21.26%) Agile
5 1,026 (19.63%) Analytics
6 928 (17.75%) Problem-Solving
7 898 (17.18%) Infrastructure as Code
8 882 (16.87%) Data Pipeline
9 801 (15.32%) Machine Learning
10 715 (13.68%) Data Modelling
11 700 (13.39%) Containerisation
12 698 (13.35%) Data Engineering
13 693 (13.26%) ETL
14 616 (11.78%) Software Engineering
15 569 (10.89%) Data Science
16 545 (10.43%) Observability
17 516 (9.87%) Business Intelligence
17 516 (9.87%) Test Automation
18 449 (8.59%) LLM
19 418 (8.00%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,737 (33.23%) SQL
2 759 (14.52%) Java
3 630 (12.05%) PowerShell
4 567 (10.85%) Bash
5 479 (9.16%) JavaScript
6 351 (6.72%) TypeScript
7 345 (6.60%) C#
8 200 (3.83%) Go
9 174 (3.33%) R
10 157 (3.00%) C++
11 141 (2.70%) Scala
12 108 (2.07%) Shell Script
13 81 (1.55%) Ruby
14 79 (1.51%) Perl
15 75 (1.43%) Bicep
16 57 (1.09%) T-SQL
17 56 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 56 (1.07%) PL/SQL
18 54 (1.03%) C
19 49 (0.94%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,189 (22.75%) Security Cleared
2 957 (18.31%) SC Cleared
3 379 (7.25%) Degree
4 162 (3.10%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.83%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.49%) BPSS Clearance
7 103 (1.97%) Azure Certification
8 86 (1.65%) AWS Certification
9 81 (1.55%) CISSP
9 81 (1.55%) Master's Degree
10 69 (1.32%) Cisco Certification
11 54 (1.03%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 49 (0.94%) CCNP
13 40 (0.77%) CISM
14 39 (0.75%) PhD
15 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
16 28 (0.54%) ISTQB
17 25 (0.48%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 21 (0.40%) CCIE
18 21 (0.40%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 518 (9.91%) Data Quality
2 227 (4.34%) QA
3 149 (2.85%) GDPR
4 98 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 95 (1.82%) NIST
6 77 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) SLA
8 29 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 27 (0.52%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.34%) WCAG
13 16 (0.31%) NCSC
14 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.23%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) GRC
17 7 (0.13%) MiFID
18 6 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 774 (14.81%) Docker
2 146 (2.79%) Active Directory
3 92 (1.76%) VMware Infrastructure
4 71 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.75%) VMware NSX
6 36 (0.69%) vSphere
7 34 (0.65%) Firmware
8 30 (0.57%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
10 16 (0.31%) KVM
11 13 (0.25%) NFS
12 12 (0.23%) HDFS
13 11 (0.21%) Squid
14 9 (0.17%) Ceph
14 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
14 9 (0.17%) SRDF
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
16 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
17 3 (0.057%) iptables
17 3 (0.057%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,060 (20.28%) Terraform
2 934 (17.87%) Kubernetes
3 530 (10.14%) Ansible
4 333 (6.37%) Grafana
5 273 (5.22%) Prometheus
6 71 (1.36%) Puppet
7 58 (1.11%) Argo
8 53 (1.01%) Istio
9 47 (0.90%) vRealize
10 38 (0.73%) Kibana
11 32 (0.61%) Progress Chef
12 31 (0.59%) vCenter Server
13 28 (0.54%) Nessus
14 27 (0.52%) Nagios
15 24 (0.46%) Control-M
15 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
15 24 (0.46%) ZABBIX
16 22 (0.42%) NetBackup
17 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
18 18 (0.34%) Netcool
Vendors
1 585 (11.19%) Microsoft
2 567 (10.85%) Databricks
3 265 (5.07%) Google
4 233 (4.46%) Oracle
5 220 (4.21%) Splunk
6 174 (3.33%) VMware
7 120 (2.30%) Red Hat
8 118 (2.26%) OpenAI
9 113 (2.16%) Cisco
10 98 (1.87%) ServiceNow
11 83 (1.59%) CyberArk
12 76 (1.45%) BeyondTrust
13 75 (1.43%) Dynatrace
14 69 (1.32%) Palo Alto
15 68 (1.30%) F5
15 68 (1.30%) IBM
16 64 (1.22%) Informatica
17 55 (1.05%) Foundry
18 49 (0.94%) SAP
19 44 (0.84%) Arista