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

6 months to
30 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,242 3,910 4,074
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.81% 13.35% 9.21%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.28% 39.31% 31.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,562 2,753 2,874
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £418 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £812 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £514
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.68% -6.59%
Number of hourly rates quoted 113 53 104
10th Percentile £27.58 £21.25 £20.95
25th Percentile £41.25 £25.09 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.00 £42.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.06% -15.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile £74.26 £60.75 £66.38
90th Percentile £80.16 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.61 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +14.68% -2.56% -28.82%

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 12,700 9,946 12,935
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.60% 33.96% 29.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,431 6,695 9,141
10th Percentile £355 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £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 £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £480 £488
% change year-on-year -1.04% -1.54% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 521 244 486
10th Percentile £41.25 £22.30 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £32.88 £46.20
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.56 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.72
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.56% +3.90% -1.44%

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 March 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 30 March 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 30 March 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 4,401 £520 -7.96% 2,695
London -3 2,495 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London -1 2,004 £481 -3.75% 1,990
Work from Home +1 1,561 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +13 671 £480 -4.00% 475
South East -6 415 £500 -6.10% 576
Yorkshire +1 368 £482 -3.60% 164
Midlands -1 286 £496 +6.26% 255
North West +9 257 £479 -4.03% 230
Scotland +1 255 £425 -9.57% 104
South West 0 238 £525 -8.70% 280
West Midlands -1 229 £500 - 130
East of England -2 137 £500 - 219
East Midlands -16 56 £450 +5.88% 125
North East +14 55 £488 -1.27% 83
Northern Ireland +12 29 £613 +16.67% 33
Wales -15 28 £475 -10.38% 78

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
1 262 (5.00%) Apache Spark
2 201 (3.83%) Apache Airflow
3 170 (3.24%) Confluence
4 159 (3.03%) Apache
5 67 (1.28%) SAS
6 59 (1.13%) SharePoint
7 26 (0.50%) Jupyter
8 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
9 24 (0.46%) nginx
9 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
10 19 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 15 (0.29%) Appian
12 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
13 11 (0.21%) Camunda
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 4 (0.076%) CICS
15 4 (0.076%) Tomcat
15 4 (0.076%) WebSphere
16 3 (0.057%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 137 (2.61%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
4 24 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
6 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
7 6 (0.11%) Weka
8 5 (0.095%) CPLEX
9 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
10 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
11 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.19%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Actimize
7 3 (0.057%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.057%) IntelliMatch
7 3 (0.057%) SAP IBP
8 2 (0.038%) Cloudability
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
9 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
9 1 (0.019%) OneSumX
9 1 (0.019%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 2,026 (38.65%) AWS
2 1,829 (34.89%) Azure
3 806 (15.38%) GCP
4 706 (13.47%) GitHub
5 522 (9.96%) Serverless
6 507 (9.67%) Power Platform
7 403 (7.69%) Azure DevOps
8 362 (6.91%) Amazon S3
9 353 (6.73%) GitHub Actions
10 349 (6.66%) AWS Lambda
11 276 (5.27%) Azure Data Factory
12 252 (4.81%) Snowflake
13 247 (4.71%) AWS CloudFormation
14 186 (3.55%) Amazon EKS
15 176 (3.36%) OpenShift
16 166 (3.17%) Amazon ECS
17 163 (3.11%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 154 (2.94%) Amazon EC2
19 151 (2.88%) dbt
20 148 (2.82%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 208 (3.97%) Firewall
2 149 (2.84%) DNS
3 110 (2.10%) Network Security
4 103 (1.96%) TCP/IP
5 84 (1.60%) VPN
6 74 (1.41%) BGP
7 66 (1.26%) WAN
8 60 (1.14%) HTTP
9 43 (0.82%) OSPF
10 42 (0.80%) MPLS
10 42 (0.80%) SAN
11 36 (0.69%) Wireshark
12 35 (0.67%) VLAN
13 34 (0.65%) LAN
14 33 (0.63%) SSL
15 32 (0.61%) SD-WAN
16 31 (0.59%) DHCP
17 30 (0.57%) SNMP
18 24 (0.46%) Multicast
18 24 (0.46%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 423 (8.07%) Power BI
2 369 (7.04%) PostgreSQL
3 305 (5.82%) Data Warehouse
4 235 (4.48%) Data Lake
5 214 (4.08%) NoSQL
6 200 (3.82%) SQL Server
7 191 (3.64%) Relational Database
8 171 (3.26%) Tableau
9 148 (2.82%) Big Data
9 148 (2.82%) Metadata
10 129 (2.46%) Delta Lake
11 120 (2.29%) Amazon RDS
12 117 (2.23%) BigQuery
13 115 (2.19%) MySQL
14 106 (2.02%) Amazon Redshift
15 100 (1.91%) Amazon Athena
16 98 (1.87%) MongoDB
17 90 (1.72%) Azure SQL Database
18 85 (1.62%) DynamoDB
19 77 (1.47%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 669 (12.76%) Git
2 550 (10.49%) Jenkins
3 419 (7.99%) GitLab
4 293 (5.59%) JIRA
5 94 (1.79%) MLflow
5 94 (1.79%) Selenium
6 54 (1.03%) Postman
7 46 (0.88%) Bitbucket
8 44 (0.84%) Cucumber
9 42 (0.80%) JUnit
10 40 (0.76%) JMeter
11 35 (0.67%) Sonatype Nexus
12 28 (0.53%) SpecFlow
13 27 (0.52%) Cypress.io
13 27 (0.52%) Visual Studio
14 26 (0.50%) Artifactory
15 23 (0.44%) Gatling
16 22 (0.42%) Maven
17 21 (0.40%) CircleCI
17 21 (0.40%) SonarQube
General
1 1,249 (23.83%) Social Skills
2 1,007 (19.21%) Finance
3 717 (13.68%) Analytical Skills
4 501 (9.56%) Public Sector
5 398 (7.59%) Banking
6 170 (3.24%) Front Office
7 132 (2.52%) Documentation Skills
8 87 (1.66%) Investment Banking
9 67 (1.28%) Marketing
10 65 (1.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 63 (1.20%) Retail
12 58 (1.11%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.07%) Legal
13 56 (1.07%) Telecoms
14 54 (1.03%) Financial Institution
15 53 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
16 41 (0.78%) Manufacturing
17 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
18 28 (0.53%) Military
18 28 (0.53%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 978 (18.66%) Developer
2 745 (14.21%) Data Engineer
3 741 (14.14%) Senior
4 456 (8.70%) Python Developer
5 356 (6.79%) Architect
6 340 (6.49%) Lead
7 293 (5.59%) Python Engineer
8 282 (5.38%) Analyst
8 282 (5.38%) DevOps Engineer
9 260 (4.96%) Software Engineer
10 251 (4.79%) AWS Engineer
11 242 (4.62%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 204 (3.89%) Data Scientist
13 195 (3.72%) Platform Engineer
14 162 (3.09%) Azure Engineer
15 161 (3.07%) Senior Developer
16 146 (2.79%) Data Analyst
17 139 (2.65%) Senior Data Engineer
18 135 (2.58%) Full-Stack Developer
19 129 (2.46%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 460 (8.78%) REST
2 358 (6.83%) React
3 337 (6.43%) Kafka
4 333 (6.35%) PySpark
5 281 (5.36%) Node.js
6 233 (4.44%) Pandas
7 227 (4.33%) .NET
8 205 (3.91%) PyTorch
9 198 (3.78%) RESTful
10 191 (3.64%) FastAPI
11 165 (3.15%) TensorFlow
12 159 (3.03%) NumPy
13 150 (2.86%) JSON
13 150 (2.86%) scikit-learn
14 137 (2.61%) Flask
15 134 (2.56%) AngularJS
16 123 (2.35%) Django
17 121 (2.31%) LangChain
18 115 (2.19%) pytest
19 105 (2.00%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 523 (9.98%) Cloud Native
2 223 (4.25%) Distributed Systems
3 198 (3.78%) Algorithms
4 148 (2.82%) Product Ownership
5 121 (2.31%) Equities
6 116 (2.21%) Data Protection Act
7 115 (2.19%) Fixed Income
8 110 (2.10%) Data Structures
9 108 (2.06%) AI Agents
10 104 (1.98%) Derivative
11 101 (1.93%) Hybrid Cloud
12 94 (1.79%) Data Centre
13 93 (1.77%) Legacy Systems
14 91 (1.74%) Enterprise Software
15 90 (1.72%) Onboarding
16 89 (1.70%) Public Cloud
17 82 (1.56%) Security Posture
18 80 (1.53%) Management Information System
19 56 (1.07%) Virtual Team
20 54 (1.03%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 679 (12.95%) Linux
2 312 (5.95%) Windows
3 182 (3.47%) Unix
4 103 (1.96%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 68 (1.30%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.67%) VMS
7 33 (0.63%) Ubuntu
8 30 (0.57%) Android
9 19 (0.36%) AIX
9 19 (0.36%) Mac OS
10 18 (0.34%) Solaris
11 17 (0.32%) CentOS
12 15 (0.29%) Apple iOS
13 8 (0.15%) Windows 7
14 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Debian
15 6 (0.11%) zOS
16 5 (0.095%) Kali Linux
16 5 (0.095%) Rocky
17 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,938 (36.97%) CI/CD
2 1,488 (28.39%) DevOps
3 1,226 (23.39%) Agile
4 1,145 (21.84%) AI
5 1,052 (20.07%) Analytics
6 1,045 (19.94%) Problem-Solving
7 933 (17.80%) Infrastructure as Code
8 858 (16.37%) Data Pipeline
9 848 (16.18%) Machine Learning
10 768 (14.65%) Containerisation
11 718 (13.70%) Data Engineering
12 705 (13.45%) Data Modelling
13 680 (12.97%) ETL
14 620 (11.83%) Data Science
15 604 (11.52%) Test Automation
16 600 (11.45%) Software Engineering
17 515 (9.82%) Observability
18 512 (9.77%) Business Intelligence
19 430 (8.20%) LLM
20 401 (7.65%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,665 (31.76%) SQL
2 736 (14.04%) Java
3 683 (13.03%) PowerShell
4 602 (11.48%) Bash
5 492 (9.39%) JavaScript
6 349 (6.66%) C#
7 348 (6.64%) TypeScript
8 228 (4.35%) Go
9 165 (3.15%) R
10 164 (3.13%) C++
11 125 (2.38%) Scala
12 107 (2.04%) Shell Script
13 100 (1.91%) Ruby
14 94 (1.79%) Perl
15 79 (1.51%) Bicep
16 56 (1.07%) Kusto Query Language
17 50 (0.95%) C
18 48 (0.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 44 (0.84%) T-SQL
20 42 (0.80%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,224 (23.35%) Security Cleared
2 982 (18.73%) SC Cleared
3 434 (8.28%) Degree
4 200 (3.82%) Computer Science Degree
5 149 (2.84%) DV Cleared
6 126 (2.40%) BPSS Clearance
7 119 (2.27%) Master's Degree
8 116 (2.21%) AWS Certification
9 106 (2.02%) Azure Certification
10 94 (1.79%) CISSP
11 74 (1.41%) Cisco Certification
12 59 (1.13%) CCNP
13 57 (1.09%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 49 (0.93%) PhD
15 48 (0.92%) CISM
16 36 (0.69%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 35 (0.67%) ISTQB
17 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
18 27 (0.52%) CEH
19 26 (0.50%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 509 (9.71%) Data Quality
2 216 (4.12%) QA
3 178 (3.40%) GDPR
4 110 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 104 (1.98%) NIST
6 78 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.57%) SLA
9 26 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.44%) NCSC
12 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.31%) WCAG
14 12 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.19%) MiFID
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
System Software
1 918 (17.51%) Docker
2 165 (3.15%) Active Directory
3 119 (2.27%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.16%) vSphere
5 56 (1.07%) Virtual Machines
6 54 (1.03%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.63%) Hyper-V
8 31 (0.59%) Firmware
9 16 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 10 (0.19%) HDFS
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
12 8 (0.15%) Lustre
12 8 (0.15%) SRDF
13 7 (0.13%) GPFS
13 7 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.095%) NFS
15 5 (0.095%) Postfix
15 5 (0.095%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,129 (21.54%) Terraform
2 1,022 (19.50%) Kubernetes
3 538 (10.26%) Ansible
4 349 (6.66%) Grafana
5 304 (5.80%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.72%) Argo
7 75 (1.43%) Puppet
8 50 (0.95%) Istio
8 50 (0.95%) vRealize
9 39 (0.74%) vCenter Server
10 38 (0.72%) Kibana
11 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
12 27 (0.52%) Nessus
13 24 (0.46%) NetBackup
14 23 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
15 21 (0.40%) Rancher
16 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
17 19 (0.36%) Control-M
17 19 (0.36%) Nagios
18 18 (0.34%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 633 (12.08%) Microsoft
2 563 (10.74%) Databricks
3 295 (5.63%) Google
4 227 (4.33%) Splunk
5 218 (4.16%) VMware
6 216 (4.12%) Oracle
7 145 (2.77%) Red Hat
8 127 (2.42%) Cisco
9 120 (2.29%) OpenAI
10 103 (1.96%) ServiceNow
11 82 (1.56%) CyberArk
12 74 (1.41%) Foundry
13 69 (1.32%) BeyondTrust
14 62 (1.18%) Informatica
15 61 (1.16%) F5
16 59 (1.13%) Palo Alto
17 57 (1.09%) IBM
18 48 (0.92%) Dynatrace
19 43 (0.82%) Atlassian
19 43 (0.82%) SAP