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

6 months to
15 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,642 4,227 4,052
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.37% 13.02% 10.62%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.87% 39.78% 33.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,664 2,765 2,834
10th Percentile £370 £356 £375
25th Percentile £440 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.29% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £706
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.43% -3.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 138 83 102
10th Percentile £30.87 £28.18 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £34.88 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £78.56 £58.13 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.63 £83.00 £78.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.31 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.62% -28.57% +7.69%

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 14,150 10,627 12,177
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.00% 32.74% 31.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,188 7,032 8,268
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 535 292 343
10th Percentile £27.75 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £47.75 £37.50 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.06 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £78.75 £78.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.96% -1.92% -

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 15 September 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 15 September 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 15 September 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 -3 4,818 £550 +2.33% 11,430
London -3 2,846 £575 - 7,460
UK excluding London -8 2,151 £500 - 5,028
Work from Home -5 1,548 £530 -3.73% 4,158
North of England 0 744 £500 +5.04% 1,066
South East -6 456 £540 +8.00% 1,162
Yorkshire -1 386 £500 - 337
Scotland -4 287 £450 -10.00% 637
South West -5 282 £550 +4.76% 629
North West -1 281 £525 +10.53% 601
Midlands -20 221 £500 +5.26% 494
West Midlands -23 177 £500 - 281
East of England -11 150 £484 -7.86% 724
North East -2 89 £425 -2.86% 132
East Midlands -11 44 £469 +12.95% 212
Wales -9 27 £530 +29.27% 113
Northern Ireland +3 17 £363 -30.95% 240

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
1 294 (5.21%) Apache Airflow
2 267 (4.73%) Apache Spark
3 219 (3.88%) Apache
4 164 (2.91%) Confluence
5 57 (1.01%) Jupyter
5 57 (1.01%) SharePoint
6 36 (0.64%) SAS
7 30 (0.53%) OpenStack
8 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
8 24 (0.43%) nginx
9 21 (0.37%) IIS
10 20 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
11 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
11 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
12 7 (0.12%) CMS
12 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
13 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.089%) Camunda
14 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 111 (1.97%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
4 18 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
5 17 (0.30%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
7 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.035%) Revit
8 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.018%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 18 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
1 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
2 17 (0.30%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
5 8 (0.14%) Front Arena
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.035%) Actimize
11 2 (0.035%) SAP ERP
11 2 (0.035%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 2,092 (37.08%) AWS
2 1,897 (33.62%) Azure
3 878 (15.56%) GCP
4 744 (13.19%) GitHub
5 496 (8.79%) Power Platform
6 492 (8.72%) Serverless
7 437 (7.75%) Azure DevOps
7 437 (7.75%) GitHub Actions
8 394 (6.98%) Amazon S3
9 367 (6.50%) AWS Lambda
10 334 (5.92%) Snowflake
11 236 (4.18%) dbt
12 213 (3.78%) Azure Data Factory
13 193 (3.42%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 183 (3.24%) AWS CloudFormation
15 176 (3.12%) Amazon EKS
16 150 (2.66%) Entra ID
17 139 (2.46%) Amazon EC2
18 129 (2.29%) Amazon ECS
19 128 (2.27%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 284 (5.03%) Firewall
2 215 (3.81%) DNS
3 151 (2.68%) Network Security
4 149 (2.64%) TCP/IP
5 127 (2.25%) BGP
6 125 (2.22%) VPN
7 114 (2.02%) WAN
8 86 (1.52%) DHCP
9 76 (1.35%) OSPF
10 69 (1.22%) SD-WAN
11 61 (1.08%) BIG-IP
11 61 (1.08%) VLAN
12 58 (1.03%) SSL
13 53 (0.94%) HTTP
14 52 (0.92%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 52 (0.92%) VXLAN
15 43 (0.76%) Ethernet VPN
16 39 (0.69%) SAN
17 38 (0.67%) Wireless
18 37 (0.66%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 445 (7.89%) Power BI
2 331 (5.87%) Data Warehouse
3 317 (5.62%) PostgreSQL
4 214 (3.79%) Metadata
5 213 (3.78%) SQL Server
6 211 (3.74%) Relational Database
7 185 (3.28%) Tableau
8 183 (3.24%) Data Lake
9 175 (3.10%) BigQuery
10 154 (2.73%) NoSQL
11 138 (2.45%) Big Data
12 131 (2.32%) Amazon RDS
13 128 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
13 128 (2.27%) Amazon Redshift
14 120 (2.13%) Delta Lake
14 120 (2.13%) MongoDB
15 111 (1.97%) DynamoDB
16 96 (1.70%) MySQL
17 71 (1.26%) Redis
18 63 (1.12%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 790 (14.00%) Git
2 502 (8.90%) Jenkins
3 463 (8.21%) GitLab
4 302 (5.35%) JIRA
5 114 (2.02%) Selenium
6 58 (1.03%) Postman
7 57 (1.01%) SonarQube
8 55 (0.97%) Claude Code
8 55 (0.97%) JMeter
9 53 (0.94%) MLflow
10 42 (0.74%) Bitbucket
11 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
12 35 (0.62%) Maven
13 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
14 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
14 32 (0.57%) Gatling
14 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
15 30 (0.53%) Sonatype Nexus
16 25 (0.44%) LoadRunner
17 18 (0.32%) JUnit
General
1 1,307 (23.17%) Social Skills
2 1,254 (22.23%) Finance
3 844 (14.96%) Analytical Skills
4 552 (9.78%) Public Sector
5 487 (8.63%) Banking
6 177 (3.14%) Front Office
7 146 (2.59%) Investment Banking
8 110 (1.95%) Retail
9 109 (1.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 108 (1.91%) Documentation Skills
11 94 (1.67%) Marketing
12 80 (1.42%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.05%) Military
14 55 (0.97%) Pharmaceutical
15 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
16 50 (0.89%) Law
17 47 (0.83%) Legal
18 45 (0.80%) Financial Institution
19 44 (0.78%) Publishing
20 41 (0.73%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 984 (17.44%) Senior
2 892 (15.81%) Developer
3 824 (14.60%) Data Engineer
4 483 (8.56%) Lead
5 473 (8.38%) Python Developer
6 422 (7.48%) Python Engineer
7 349 (6.19%) DevOps Engineer
8 294 (5.21%) Analyst
9 291 (5.16%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 286 (5.07%) Software Engineer
11 262 (4.64%) Architect
12 229 (4.06%) AWS Engineer
13 196 (3.47%) Cloud Engineer
14 194 (3.44%) Platform Engineer
15 193 (3.42%) Senior Developer
16 188 (3.33%) Senior Data Engineer
17 185 (3.28%) Data Scientist
18 179 (3.17%) Azure Engineer
19 148 (2.62%) Network Engineer
20 144 (2.55%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,366 (24.21%) Terraform
2 503 (8.92%) REST
3 369 (6.54%) PySpark
4 364 (6.45%) Kafka
5 308 (5.46%) React
6 255 (4.52%) .NET
7 215 (3.81%) JSON
8 205 (3.63%) FastAPI
9 203 (3.60%) Django
10 189 (3.35%) RESTful
11 165 (2.92%) Node.js
12 162 (2.87%) Pandas
13 147 (2.61%) pytest
14 146 (2.59%) LangChain
15 121 (2.14%) OAuth
16 117 (2.07%) Flask
17 110 (1.95%) YAML
18 109 (1.93%) PyTorch
19 106 (1.88%) HTML
20 103 (1.83%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 790 (14.00%) Cloud Native
2 310 (5.49%) Distributed Systems
3 269 (4.77%) AI Agents
4 232 (4.11%) Onboarding
5 160 (2.84%) Data Centre
5 160 (2.84%) Product Ownership
6 146 (2.59%) Data Structures
7 132 (2.34%) Algorithms
8 131 (2.32%) Legacy Systems
9 115 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
10 109 (1.93%) Data Protection Act
11 108 (1.91%) Management Information System
12 103 (1.83%) Enterprise Software
13 102 (1.81%) Derivative
14 88 (1.56%) Security Posture
15 79 (1.40%) Equities
16 78 (1.38%) Public Cloud
17 72 (1.28%) PKI
18 69 (1.22%) Linux Command Line
19 68 (1.21%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 761 (13.49%) Linux
2 335 (5.94%) Windows
3 249 (4.41%) Unix
4 157 (2.78%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.60%) Windows Server
6 45 (0.80%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.64%) VMS
8 21 (0.37%) AIX
8 21 (0.37%) CentOS
9 18 (0.32%) Solaris
10 16 (0.28%) Android
11 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
12 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.16%) zOS
13 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
13 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Rocky
15 5 (0.089%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,315 (41.03%) CI/CD
2 1,619 (28.70%) DevOps
3 1,547 (27.42%) AI
4 1,268 (22.47%) Agile
4 1,268 (22.47%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,101 (19.51%) Analytics
6 988 (17.51%) Data Pipeline
7 934 (16.55%) Software Engineering
8 907 (16.08%) Problem-Solving
9 853 (15.12%) Machine Learning
10 821 (14.55%) Data Engineering
11 797 (14.13%) Containerisation
12 742 (13.15%) Data Modelling
13 735 (13.03%) Observability
14 658 (11.66%) Test Automation
15 651 (11.54%) ETL
16 636 (11.27%) Continuous Improvement
17 621 (11.01%) Validation
18 576 (10.21%) Platform Engineering
19 564 (10.00%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 1,851 (32.81%) SQL
2 823 (14.59%) Java
3 775 (13.74%) Bash
4 751 (13.31%) PowerShell
5 448 (7.94%) JavaScript
6 344 (6.10%) TypeScript
7 322 (5.71%) C#
8 211 (3.74%) Go
9 152 (2.69%) Shell Script
10 147 (2.61%) R
11 137 (2.43%) C++
12 133 (2.36%) Bicep
13 129 (2.29%) Scala
14 100 (1.77%) Perl
15 60 (1.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 57 (1.01%) Groovy
17 56 (0.99%) C
18 55 (0.97%) PL/SQL
19 53 (0.94%) Rust
20 51 (0.90%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,370 (24.28%) Security Cleared
2 1,110 (19.67%) SC Cleared
3 409 (7.25%) Degree
4 238 (4.22%) DV Cleared
5 152 (2.69%) Azure Certification
6 151 (2.68%) Computer Science Degree
7 139 (2.46%) AWS Certification
8 118 (2.09%) BPSS Clearance
9 95 (1.68%) CISSP
10 84 (1.49%) Cisco Certification
11 62 (1.10%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
13 42 (0.74%) CCNP
14 37 (0.66%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 33 (0.58%) CISM
15 33 (0.58%) PhD
16 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
17 28 (0.50%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 28 (0.50%) CCIE
18 26 (0.46%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 625 (11.08%) Data Quality
2 305 (5.41%) QA
3 112 (1.99%) NIST
4 98 (1.74%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 95 (1.68%) GDPR
6 83 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 36 (0.64%) SLA
8 34 (0.60%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.51%) NCSC
10 24 (0.43%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.43%) WCAG
11 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 17 (0.30%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
14 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
16 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.12%) MiFID
18 6 (0.11%) GRC
18 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 962 (17.05%) Docker
2 170 (3.01%) Active Directory
3 140 (2.48%) VMware Infrastructure
4 68 (1.21%) Virtual Machines
5 53 (0.94%) Hyper-V
6 39 (0.69%) vSphere
7 35 (0.62%) VMware NSX
8 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
9 25 (0.44%) NFS
10 23 (0.41%) Firmware
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.25%) Squid
13 11 (0.19%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
15 8 (0.14%) KVM
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
16 7 (0.12%) zsh
17 6 (0.11%) HDFS
17 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
18 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,157 (20.51%) Kubernetes
2 641 (11.36%) Ansible
3 331 (5.87%) Grafana
4 239 (4.24%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.45%) Puppet
6 73 (1.29%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.19%) Argo
8 43 (0.76%) Single Sign-On
9 34 (0.60%) Istio
10 32 (0.57%) Kibana
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
13 23 (0.41%) vRealize
13 23 (0.41%) ZABBIX
14 21 (0.37%) Nagios
15 20 (0.35%) FortiGate
15 20 (0.35%) Packer
16 18 (0.32%) HAProxy
17 16 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 732 (12.97%) Microsoft
2 573 (10.16%) Databricks
3 378 (6.70%) Google
4 245 (4.34%) Oracle
5 212 (3.76%) Splunk
6 184 (3.26%) VMware
7 154 (2.73%) OpenAI
8 145 (2.57%) Cisco
9 119 (2.11%) ServiceNow
10 102 (1.81%) Red Hat
11 98 (1.74%) Dynatrace
12 92 (1.63%) IBM
13 91 (1.61%) F5
14 87 (1.54%) Palo Alto
15 79 (1.40%) Foundry
16 74 (1.31%) Informatica
17 73 (1.29%) Fortinet
18 72 (1.28%) SAP
19 65 (1.15%) CyberArk
20 60 (1.06%) Salesforce