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 30 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,803 4,040 4,200
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.98% 12.13% 9.71%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.85% 37.28% 31.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,205 2,678 3,011
10th Percentile £358 £378 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £688 £688
90th Percentile £750 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £505 £525
% change year-on-year -0.99% -3.81% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 99 65 120
10th Percentile £29.50 £20.12 £35.75
25th Percentile £41.25 £22.50 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £46.18 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.93% -23.03% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.26 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £76.50 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.00 £46.18 £52.50
% change year-on-year +16.93% -12.04% -19.23%

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 11,476 10,836 13,143
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.02% 32.55% 30.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,604 6,935 9,366
10th Percentile £350 £350 £355
25th Percentile £413 £425 £426
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £618 £645 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £477 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -2.26% -2.50% -3.66%
Number of hourly rates quoted 381 247 414
10th Percentile £32.50 £21.25 £35.15
25th Percentile £51.00 £38.38 £47.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% - -0.13%
75th Percentile £69.45 £68.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.25 £85.00 £78.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% -

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 30 December 2025.

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 30 December 2025.

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 30 December 2025. 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 4,078 £525 -8.70% 11,257
London +1 2,347 £550 -8.33% 2,482
UK excluding London +3 1,849 £500 -0.99% 9,799
Work from Home 0 1,436 £530 -3.64% 5,961
North of England +8 582 £476 -5.84% 2,193
South East +5 410 £492 -7.61% 2,657
Yorkshire +8 297 £500 -6.98% 913
Midlands +10 282 £500 +5.26% 1,654
Scotland +7 272 £468 -4.69% 487
North West +6 242 £450 -7.31% 1,095
West Midlands +17 234 £507 +1.45% 861
South West -5 182 £550 -8.77% 1,094
East of England +7 137 £525 +9.38% 1,454
North East +9 48 £475 -15.93% 192
East Midlands -13 48 £402 +0.50% 697
Wales -10 28 £525 +5.00% 251
Northern Ireland -4 21 £550 +10.00% 157

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
1 225 (4.68%) Apache Airflow
2 219 (4.56%) Apache Spark
3 166 (3.46%) Apache
4 155 (3.23%) Confluence
5 60 (1.25%) SAS
6 54 (1.12%) SharePoint
7 36 (0.75%) nginx
8 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.44%) Jupyter
9 21 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
10 15 (0.31%) Appian
11 10 (0.21%) IIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
12 9 (0.19%) ArcGIS
13 6 (0.12%) Camunda
13 6 (0.12%) CMS
13 6 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
14 5 (0.10%) JBoss
14 5 (0.10%) Luigi
15 4 (0.083%) Tomcat
Applications
1 136 (2.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.67%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
4 24 (0.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 13 (0.27%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 2 (0.042%) Maya
8 2 (0.042%) NUKE
9 1 (0.021%) CPLEX
9 1 (0.021%) GNU Octave
9 1 (0.021%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.021%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
9 1 (0.021%) SPSS
9 1 (0.021%) Stata
9 1 (0.021%) Trello
9 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 15 (0.31%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) Fidessa
5 4 (0.083%) Remedy ITSM
6 3 (0.062%) Actimize
6 3 (0.062%) NetSuite
6 3 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
6 3 (0.062%) Teamcenter
7 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
7 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.042%) Maximo
7 2 (0.042%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.042%) Shopify
8 1 (0.021%) Cerner Millennium
8 1 (0.021%) Finacle
8 1 (0.021%) ION MarketView
8 1 (0.021%) SAP BPC
8 1 (0.021%) SAP GRC
8 1 (0.021%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 1,889 (39.33%) AWS
2 1,517 (31.58%) Azure
3 725 (15.09%) GCP
4 584 (12.16%) GitHub
5 513 (10.68%) Serverless
6 436 (9.08%) Power Platform
7 370 (7.70%) Amazon S3
8 350 (7.29%) AWS Lambda
9 319 (6.64%) GitHub Actions
10 308 (6.41%) Azure DevOps
11 248 (5.16%) Snowflake
12 237 (4.93%) AWS CloudFormation
13 201 (4.18%) Amazon EC2
14 198 (4.12%) Azure Data Factory
15 188 (3.91%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 178 (3.71%) Amazon ECS
17 171 (3.56%) Amazon EKS
18 152 (3.16%) dbt
19 147 (3.06%) OpenShift
20 131 (2.73%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 254 (5.29%) Firewall
2 180 (3.75%) DNS
3 130 (2.71%) TCP/IP
4 121 (2.52%) Network Security
5 89 (1.85%) HTTP
6 83 (1.73%) VPN
7 74 (1.54%) BGP
7 74 (1.54%) SSL
8 51 (1.06%) WAN
9 46 (0.96%) OSPF
10 40 (0.83%) MPLS
10 40 (0.83%) Wireless
11 39 (0.81%) SMTP
12 38 (0.79%) SSH
12 38 (0.79%) Wireshark
13 36 (0.75%) LAN
14 35 (0.73%) SD-WAN
15 34 (0.71%) DHCP
16 33 (0.69%) FTP
17 26 (0.54%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 385 (8.02%) PostgreSQL
2 377 (7.85%) Power BI
3 281 (5.85%) Data Warehouse
4 235 (4.89%) NoSQL
4 235 (4.89%) Relational Database
5 212 (4.41%) Data Lake
6 177 (3.69%) Big Data
7 167 (3.48%) Amazon RDS
8 158 (3.29%) SQL Server
9 156 (3.25%) Tableau
10 122 (2.54%) MySQL
11 108 (2.25%) MongoDB
12 104 (2.17%) BigQuery
13 102 (2.12%) Amazon Athena
14 97 (2.02%) Metadata
15 93 (1.94%) Hadoop
16 91 (1.89%) Amazon Redshift
17 83 (1.73%) DynamoDB
18 77 (1.60%) Elasticsearch
19 71 (1.48%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 637 (13.26%) Git
2 587 (12.22%) Jenkins
3 435 (9.06%) GitLab
4 288 (6.00%) JIRA
5 84 (1.75%) Selenium
6 71 (1.48%) MLflow
7 53 (1.10%) Bitbucket
7 53 (1.10%) Sonatype Nexus
8 52 (1.08%) SonarQube
9 47 (0.98%) Cucumber
10 45 (0.94%) JUnit
11 42 (0.87%) Liquibase
12 35 (0.73%) Postman
13 34 (0.71%) JMeter
14 30 (0.62%) Cypress.io
15 29 (0.60%) Artifactory
16 27 (0.56%) CircleCI
17 26 (0.54%) Eclipse
18 25 (0.52%) Android Studio
18 25 (0.52%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,331 (27.71%) Social Skills
2 1,009 (21.01%) Finance
3 681 (14.18%) Analytical Skills
4 456 (9.49%) Banking
5 438 (9.12%) Public Sector
6 183 (3.81%) Front Office
7 162 (3.37%) Investment Banking
8 117 (2.44%) Documentation Skills
9 78 (1.62%) Financial Institution
10 73 (1.52%) Marketing
11 68 (1.42%) Pharmaceutical
12 63 (1.31%) Telecoms
13 61 (1.27%) Retail
14 55 (1.15%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 44 (0.92%) Legal
16 41 (0.85%) Manufacturing
16 41 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
17 30 (0.62%) Influencing Skills
18 27 (0.56%) Military
19 25 (0.52%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 824 (17.16%) Developer
2 671 (13.97%) Senior
3 576 (11.99%) Data Engineer
4 343 (7.14%) Python Engineer
5 342 (7.12%) DevOps Engineer
6 338 (7.04%) Python Developer
7 320 (6.66%) Analyst
8 287 (5.98%) AWS Engineer
9 278 (5.79%) Architect
10 251 (5.23%) Software Engineer
11 231 (4.81%) Lead
12 220 (4.58%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 188 (3.91%) Data Scientist
14 181 (3.77%) Platform Engineer
15 160 (3.33%) Data Analyst
16 146 (3.04%) Senior Developer
17 120 (2.50%) Consultant
18 118 (2.46%) Automation Engineer
19 117 (2.44%) Full-Stack Developer
20 116 (2.42%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 414 (8.62%) REST
2 311 (6.48%) Kafka
3 308 (6.41%) React
4 244 (5.08%) PySpark
5 241 (5.02%) Node.js
5 241 (5.02%) Pandas
6 229 (4.77%) RESTful
7 225 (4.68%) FastAPI
8 196 (4.08%) PyTorch
9 188 (3.91%) NumPy
10 171 (3.56%) TensorFlow
11 149 (3.10%) .NET
12 143 (2.98%) AngularJS
13 136 (2.83%) Elastic Stack
14 126 (2.62%) scikit-learn
15 120 (2.50%) LangChain
16 110 (2.29%) pytest
17 107 (2.23%) Flask
18 103 (2.14%) JSON
19 101 (2.10%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 393 (8.18%) Cloud Native
2 197 (4.10%) Algorithms
3 195 (4.06%) Distributed Systems
4 133 (2.77%) Equities
5 132 (2.75%) Data Protection Act
6 121 (2.52%) Product Ownership
7 110 (2.29%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
8 108 (2.25%) Data Structures
9 104 (2.17%) Fixed Income
10 102 (2.12%) Derivative
11 101 (2.10%) Onboarding
12 100 (2.08%) AI Agents
13 89 (1.85%) Hedge funds
14 84 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
15 80 (1.67%) Public Cloud
16 78 (1.62%) Data Centre
17 77 (1.60%) Management Information System
18 76 (1.58%) Security Posture
19 72 (1.50%) Hybrid Cloud
20 69 (1.44%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 832 (17.32%) Linux
2 368 (7.66%) Windows
3 239 (4.98%) Unix
4 93 (1.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.33%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.87%) Android
7 39 (0.81%) VMS
8 35 (0.73%) Ubuntu
9 28 (0.58%) CentOS
10 24 (0.50%) Mac OS
11 23 (0.48%) Solaris
12 20 (0.42%) Amazon Linux
13 17 (0.35%) Apple iOS
14 10 (0.21%) Windows 7
15 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
16 4 (0.083%) Debian
16 4 (0.083%) Robot Operating System
17 3 (0.062%) AIX
17 3 (0.062%) Embedded Linux
17 3 (0.062%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,637 (34.08%) CI/CD
2 1,365 (28.42%) DevOps
3 1,173 (24.42%) Agile
4 1,053 (21.92%) Problem-Solving
5 917 (19.09%) AI
6 872 (18.16%) Infrastructure as Code
7 806 (16.78%) Analytics
8 758 (15.78%) Machine Learning
9 708 (14.74%) Containerisation
10 666 (13.87%) Data Pipeline
11 579 (12.05%) Software Engineering
12 558 (11.62%) Data Science
13 542 (11.28%) Data Engineering
14 541 (11.26%) ETL
15 538 (11.20%) Data Modelling
16 511 (10.64%) Test Automation
17 430 (8.95%) Business Intelligence
18 399 (8.31%) Observability
19 386 (8.04%) Computer Science
20 360 (7.50%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,468 (30.56%) SQL
2 784 (16.32%) Java
3 670 (13.95%) PowerShell
4 652 (13.57%) Bash
5 491 (10.22%) JavaScript
6 303 (6.31%) TypeScript
7 282 (5.87%) Go
8 276 (5.75%) C#
9 219 (4.56%) C++
10 178 (3.71%) Perl
11 170 (3.54%) R
12 163 (3.39%) Shell Script
13 103 (2.14%) Scala
14 94 (1.96%) Ruby
15 66 (1.37%) C
16 59 (1.23%) VBA
17 58 (1.21%) Bicep
18 54 (1.12%) Kusto Query Language
19 46 (0.96%) PHP
20 41 (0.85%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,028 (21.40%) Security Cleared
2 830 (17.28%) SC Cleared
3 460 (9.58%) Degree
4 245 (5.10%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (3.08%) DV Cleared
6 145 (3.02%) AWS Certification
7 129 (2.69%) Master's Degree
8 91 (1.89%) CISSP
9 88 (1.83%) BPSS Clearance
10 86 (1.79%) Azure Certification
11 83 (1.73%) Cisco Certification
12 65 (1.35%) MCP
13 51 (1.06%) CCNP
14 44 (0.92%) PhD
15 42 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 42 (0.87%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
16 39 (0.81%) CCIE
17 35 (0.73%) CEH
18 33 (0.69%) CISM
19 31 (0.65%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 357 (7.43%) Data Quality
2 185 (3.85%) QA
3 164 (3.41%) GDPR
4 96 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 94 (1.96%) NIST
6 61 (1.27%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.71%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.62%) HIPAA
9 28 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.54%) SLA
11 24 (0.50%) NCSC
12 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
13 17 (0.35%) SOC 2
14 10 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
14 10 (0.21%) EMIR
14 10 (0.21%) MiFID
14 10 (0.21%) PMO
15 9 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
16 8 (0.17%) WCAG
17 7 (0.15%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 958 (19.95%) Docker
2 192 (4.00%) Active Directory
3 110 (2.29%) VMware Infrastructure
4 39 (0.81%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.77%) vSphere
6 36 (0.75%) VMware NSX
7 26 (0.54%) Firmware
8 20 (0.42%) HDFS
9 19 (0.40%) Hyper-V
10 17 (0.35%) DFS Replication
11 16 (0.33%) KVM
11 16 (0.33%) Squid
12 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.29%) Postfix
13 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 10 (0.21%) Dovecot
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) GPFS
16 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
16 8 (0.17%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,086 (22.61%) Terraform
2 1,052 (21.90%) Kubernetes
3 623 (12.97%) Ansible
4 381 (7.93%) Grafana
5 325 (6.77%) Prometheus
6 95 (1.98%) Argo
7 77 (1.60%) Puppet
8 59 (1.23%) Kibana
9 46 (0.96%) Istio
10 43 (0.90%) vRealize
11 41 (0.85%) Progress Chef
12 34 (0.71%) Nessus
12 34 (0.71%) Single Sign-On
13 28 (0.58%) NetBackup
14 25 (0.52%) ITRS Geneos
15 22 (0.46%) logstash
16 19 (0.40%) vCenter Server
17 18 (0.37%) Packer
18 16 (0.33%) Proxmox
18 16 (0.33%) SCCM
Vendors
1 561 (11.68%) Microsoft
2 420 (8.74%) Databricks
3 278 (5.79%) Google
4 263 (5.48%) Splunk
5 226 (4.71%) Oracle
6 208 (4.33%) VMware
7 141 (2.94%) Red Hat
8 131 (2.73%) ServiceNow
9 122 (2.54%) Cisco
10 96 (2.00%) OpenAI
11 86 (1.79%) F5
12 84 (1.75%) CyberArk
13 81 (1.69%) Palo Alto
14 70 (1.46%) Foundry
15 60 (1.25%) BeyondTrust
16 59 (1.23%) SAP
17 44 (0.92%) Atlassian
17 44 (0.92%) CrowdStrike
18 42 (0.87%) Dynatrace
19 39 (0.81%) IBM