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

6 months to
21 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,578 4,286 3,998
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.41% 13.08% 10.27%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.66% 39.70% 32.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,656 2,844 2,861
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £431 £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 77 119
10th Percentile £29.85 £26.29 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.50 £33.91 £30.50
Median hourly rate £56.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.00% -13.04% -8.00%
75th Percentile £76.88 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £83.78 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £57.50 £53.25 £67.26
% change year-on-year +7.98% -20.83% +19.26%

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 14,066 10,796 12,242
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.26% 32.94% 31.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,157 7,202 8,517
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £503 £533
Median % change year-on-year +2.99% -5.72% -3.09%
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 522 290 394
10th Percentile £29.96 £28.24 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.88 £35.25 £43.00
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 £80.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +8.33%

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 4,774 £545 +1.49% 2,060
London -4 2,796 £573 -0.43% 852
UK excluding London -8 2,149 £500 - 1,621
Work from Home -8 1,516 £530 -3.64% 785
North of England +1 734 £500 +2.04% 380
South East -10 444 £537 +7.40% 551
Yorkshire -1 374 £500 - 115
South West -4 297 £515 -1.90% 214
North West -1 277 £525 +10.53% 189
Scotland -2 272 £450 -10.00% 71
Midlands -16 244 £476 +0.21% 190
West Midlands -18 193 £477 +0.42% 106
East of England -9 139 £500 -0.50% 187
North East +1 95 £425 -18.27% 79
East Midlands -10 51 £475 +13.10% 82
Wales -8 28 £530 +30.86% 34
Northern Ireland +4 19 £363 -32.56% 18

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 (5.25%) Apache Airflow
2 275 (4.93%) Apache Spark
3 217 (3.89%) Apache
4 173 (3.10%) Confluence
5 58 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SharePoint
7 43 (0.77%) SAS
8 28 (0.50%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.41%) ArcGIS
10 21 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
11 19 (0.34%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
15 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.11%) Apache Superset
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.090%) Camunda
Applications
1 109 (1.95%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.47%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
6 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
6 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.054%) 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 (0.38%) 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 (0.13%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
8 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.090%) Salesforce CRM
9 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.054%) Endur
10 3 (0.054%) Front Arena
10 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
10 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) IBM Planning Analytics
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,095 (37.56%) AWS
2 1,897 (34.01%) Azure
3 864 (15.49%) GCP
4 702 (12.59%) GitHub
5 497 (8.91%) Power Platform
6 465 (8.34%) Serverless
7 438 (7.85%) Azure DevOps
8 407 (7.30%) GitHub Actions
9 391 (7.01%) Amazon S3
10 355 (6.36%) AWS Lambda
11 323 (5.79%) Snowflake
12 225 (4.03%) Azure Data Factory
13 222 (3.98%) dbt
14 186 (3.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 185 (3.32%) AWS CloudFormation
16 179 (3.21%) Amazon EKS
17 138 (2.47%) Amazon EC2
18 137 (2.46%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 133 (2.38%) Entra ID
20 121 (2.17%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 278 (4.98%) Firewall
2 213 (3.82%) DNS
3 148 (2.65%) TCP/IP
4 130 (2.33%) Network Security
5 126 (2.26%) BGP
5 126 (2.26%) VPN
6 111 (1.99%) WAN
7 85 (1.52%) DHCP
8 73 (1.31%) OSPF
9 61 (1.09%) SD-WAN
10 60 (1.08%) VLAN
11 57 (1.02%) VXLAN
12 54 (0.97%) SSL
13 53 (0.95%) HTTP
14 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
15 46 (0.82%) SAN
16 45 (0.81%) Ethernet VPN
17 44 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 43 (0.77%) SNMP
19 38 (0.68%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 454 (8.14%) Power BI
2 331 (5.93%) PostgreSQL
3 322 (5.77%) Data Warehouse
4 220 (3.94%) SQL Server
5 202 (3.62%) Relational Database
6 197 (3.53%) Metadata
7 192 (3.44%) Tableau
8 178 (3.19%) Data Lake
9 161 (2.89%) BigQuery
10 157 (2.81%) NoSQL
11 144 (2.58%) Big Data
12 141 (2.53%) Amazon Redshift
13 129 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
14 122 (2.19%) MongoDB
15 121 (2.17%) Amazon RDS
16 117 (2.10%) Delta Lake
17 103 (1.85%) DynamoDB
18 89 (1.60%) MySQL
19 71 (1.27%) Redis
20 66 (1.18%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 738 (13.23%) Git
2 505 (9.05%) Jenkins
3 445 (7.98%) GitLab
4 293 (5.25%) JIRA
5 101 (1.81%) Selenium
6 56 (1.00%) JMeter
6 56 (1.00%) Postman
7 52 (0.93%) MLflow
8 49 (0.88%) SonarQube
9 47 (0.84%) Bitbucket
9 47 (0.84%) Claude Code
10 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
11 34 (0.61%) Cucumber
12 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
12 32 (0.57%) Gatling
13 31 (0.56%) REST Assured
14 30 (0.54%) Maven
15 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
16 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
17 22 (0.39%) JUnit
General
1 1,237 (22.18%) Social Skills
2 1,207 (21.64%) Finance
3 823 (14.75%) Analytical Skills
4 553 (9.91%) Public Sector
5 453 (8.12%) Banking
6 197 (3.53%) Front Office
7 139 (2.49%) Investment Banking
8 116 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
9 114 (2.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 106 (1.90%) Retail
11 89 (1.60%) Marketing
12 77 (1.38%) Telecoms
13 58 (1.04%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (0.95%) Legal
14 53 (0.95%) Military
15 48 (0.86%) Financial Institution
16 47 (0.84%) Aerospace
17 45 (0.81%) Publishing
18 40 (0.72%) Manufacturing
19 39 (0.70%) Law
Job Titles
1 926 (16.60%) Senior
2 912 (16.35%) Developer
3 806 (14.45%) Data Engineer
4 490 (8.78%) Python Developer
5 486 (8.71%) Lead
6 411 (7.37%) Python Engineer
7 333 (5.97%) DevOps Engineer
8 308 (5.52%) Software Engineer
9 280 (5.02%) Architect
10 271 (4.86%) Analyst
11 256 (4.59%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 236 (4.23%) AWS Engineer
13 196 (3.51%) Data Scientist
14 191 (3.42%) Cloud Engineer
15 190 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
16 177 (3.17%) Senior Developer
17 173 (3.10%) Senior Data Engineer
18 172 (3.08%) Azure Engineer
19 138 (2.47%) Infrastructure Engineer
20 130 (2.33%) Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,298 (23.27%) Terraform
2 461 (8.26%) REST
3 379 (6.79%) PySpark
4 359 (6.44%) Kafka
5 323 (5.79%) React
6 235 (4.21%) .NET
7 204 (3.66%) FastAPI
8 203 (3.64%) JSON
9 198 (3.55%) RESTful
10 193 (3.46%) Django
11 185 (3.32%) Node.js
12 175 (3.14%) Pandas
13 133 (2.38%) LangChain
14 127 (2.28%) pytest
15 125 (2.24%) PyTorch
16 110 (1.97%) Flask
16 110 (1.97%) YAML
17 106 (1.90%) HTML
18 105 (1.88%) OAuth
19 103 (1.85%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 765 (13.71%) Cloud Native
2 307 (5.50%) Distributed Systems
3 224 (4.02%) AI Agents
4 212 (3.80%) Onboarding
5 163 (2.92%) Data Centre
6 158 (2.83%) Product Ownership
7 140 (2.51%) Algorithms
8 133 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
9 132 (2.37%) Data Structures
10 117 (2.10%) Derivative
11 116 (2.08%) Hybrid Cloud
12 109 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
13 105 (1.88%) Management Information System
14 95 (1.70%) Equities
15 83 (1.49%) Fixed Income
16 80 (1.43%) Security Posture
17 76 (1.36%) Enterprise Software
18 69 (1.24%) Public Cloud
19 67 (1.20%) Linux Command Line
20 63 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 731 (13.11%) Linux
2 340 (6.10%) Windows
3 241 (4.32%) Unix
4 147 (2.64%) 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 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.090%) Debian
16 5 (0.090%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,207 (39.57%) CI/CD
2 1,604 (28.76%) DevOps
3 1,452 (26.03%) AI
4 1,248 (22.37%) Agile
5 1,173 (21.03%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,102 (19.76%) Analytics
7 984 (17.64%) Data Pipeline
8 908 (16.28%) Problem-Solving
9 897 (16.08%) Software Engineering
10 852 (15.27%) Machine Learning
11 789 (14.14%) Data Engineering
12 760 (13.62%) Containerisation
13 733 (13.14%) Data Modelling
14 690 (12.37%) Observability
15 655 (11.74%) ETL
16 626 (11.22%) Test Automation
17 588 (10.54%) Continuous Improvement
18 578 (10.36%) Data Science
19 561 (10.06%) Validation
20 535 (9.59%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,807 (32.40%) SQL
2 825 (14.79%) Java
3 753 (13.50%) Bash
4 736 (13.19%) PowerShell
5 452 (8.10%) JavaScript
6 357 (6.40%) TypeScript
7 306 (5.49%) C#
8 200 (3.59%) Go
9 145 (2.60%) C++
9 145 (2.60%) R
10 140 (2.51%) Shell Script
11 131 (2.35%) Bicep
11 131 (2.35%) Scala
12 87 (1.56%) Perl
13 61 (1.09%) PL/SQL
14 59 (1.06%) C
15 58 (1.04%) Groovy
16 54 (0.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 54 (0.97%) Rust
17 51 (0.91%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,302 (23.34%) Security Cleared
2 1,060 (19.00%) SC Cleared
3 419 (7.51%) Degree
4 205 (3.68%) DV Cleared
5 163 (2.92%) Computer Science Degree
6 145 (2.60%) AWS Certification
7 144 (2.58%) Azure Certification
8 115 (2.06%) BPSS Clearance
9 94 (1.69%) CISSP
10 91 (1.63%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.27%) Master's Degree
12 52 (0.93%) CCNP
13 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
14 37 (0.66%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 35 (0.63%) PhD
16 33 (0.59%) ISTQB
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 31 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 30 (0.54%) CCIE
20 26 (0.47%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 593 (10.63%) Data Quality
2 281 (5.04%) QA
3 109 (1.95%) GDPR
4 108 (1.94%) NIST
5 104 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 82 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 39 (0.70%) SLA
8 30 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
9 27 (0.48%) NCSC
10 26 (0.47%) PCI DSS
10 26 (0.47%) WCAG
11 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 16 (0.29%) HIPAA
13 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
14 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
15 12 (0.22%) SOC 2
16 8 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.13%) HL7
18 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 928 (16.64%) Docker
2 157 (2.81%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.37%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.09%) Virtual Machines
5 43 (0.77%) Hyper-V
5 43 (0.77%) vSphere
6 35 (0.63%) VMware NSX
7 31 (0.56%) Firmware
8 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
9 18 (0.32%) NFS
10 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
11 13 (0.23%) Squid
11 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
12 10 (0.18%) Ceph
13 9 (0.16%) HDFS
13 9 (0.16%) KVM
14 7 (0.13%) Postfix
14 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
14 7 (0.13%) zsh
15 6 (0.11%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,099 (19.70%) Kubernetes
2 627 (11.24%) Ansible
3 343 (6.15%) Grafana
4 248 (4.45%) Prometheus
5 89 (1.60%) Puppet
6 76 (1.36%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.20%) Argo
8 41 (0.74%) 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
13 24 (0.43%) 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
1 692 (12.41%) Microsoft
2 554 (9.93%) Databricks
3 357 (6.40%) Google
4 258 (4.63%) Oracle
5 212 (3.80%) Splunk
6 175 (3.14%) VMware
7 146 (2.62%) Cisco
8 140 (2.51%) OpenAI
9 128 (2.29%) ServiceNow
10 106 (1.90%) Dynatrace
11 103 (1.85%) Red Hat
12 94 (1.69%) IBM
13 89 (1.60%) F5
14 85 (1.52%) Palo Alto
15 82 (1.47%) Informatica
16 70 (1.25%) Fortinet
16 70 (1.25%) SAP
17 68 (1.22%) CyberArk
18 67 (1.20%) Foundry
19 59 (1.06%) Salesforce