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

6 months to
21 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,209 3,948 3,945
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.26% 13.41% 9.08%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.61% 39.32% 31.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,523 2,777 2,812
10th Percentile £363 £384 £400
25th Percentile £420 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £620 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £813 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 51 102
10th Percentile £30.00 £21.25 £21.30
25th Percentile £45.03 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £39.32 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +39.88% -25.10% -19.23%
75th Percentile £74.26 £58.75 £68.56
90th Percentile £83.75 £75.00 £77.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -25.00% -1.15%

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 12,826 10,040 12,701
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.72% 34.09% 29.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,509 6,805 9,022
10th Percentile £353 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £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 £713 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 242 475
10th Percentile £42.11 £22.48 £31.25
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £68.75
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% -

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 April 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 April 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 April 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 4,388 £520 -5.45% 2,738
London -3 2,513 £550 -8.33% 1,216
UK excluding London -3 1,967 £481 -3.75% 2,013
Work from Home 0 1,504 £525 -4.55% 1,059
North of England +10 683 £478 -2.45% 453
South East -6 404 £500 -4.76% 577
Yorkshire 0 386 £475 -5.00% 156
Midlands -8 254 £500 +8.93% 269
North West +7 252 £500 +5.26% 226
Scotland -1 251 £425 -10.53% 133
South West -1 236 £500 -9.09% 238
West Midlands -8 194 £500 +1.01% 134
East of England -1 132 £500 -0.25% 258
East Midlands -13 59 £463 +8.82% 134
North East +10 54 £475 -1.30% 73
Northern Ireland +16 24 £463 -7.50% 55
Wales -19 22 £450 -15.49% 55

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
1 285 (5.47%) Apache Spark
2 214 (4.11%) Apache Airflow
3 163 (3.13%) Apache
4 156 (2.99%) Confluence
5 56 (1.08%) SharePoint
6 51 (0.98%) SAS
7 28 (0.54%) nginx
8 27 (0.52%) Jupyter
9 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 22 (0.42%) OpenStack
11 15 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
12 14 (0.27%) Appian
13 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
14 10 (0.19%) Camunda
15 9 (0.17%) Apache Superset
16 8 (0.15%) CMS
17 6 (0.12%) CICS
18 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
18 5 (0.096%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.096%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 138 (2.65%) Microsoft Excel
2 25 (0.48%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 21 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.12%) CPLEX
7 5 (0.096%) Weka
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 26 (0.50%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 6 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
7 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
8 3 (0.058%) Actimize
9 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
9 2 (0.038%) Global One
9 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
9 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
9 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
9 2 (0.038%) Odoo
9 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
9 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
9 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
9 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
10 1 (0.019%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,990 (38.20%) AWS
2 1,799 (34.54%) Azure
3 773 (14.84%) GCP
4 674 (12.94%) GitHub
5 521 (10.00%) Power Platform
6 497 (9.54%) Serverless
7 390 (7.49%) Azure DevOps
8 385 (7.39%) Amazon S3
9 361 (6.93%) AWS Lambda
10 351 (6.74%) GitHub Actions
11 281 (5.39%) Azure Data Factory
12 235 (4.51%) Snowflake
13 230 (4.42%) AWS CloudFormation
14 171 (3.28%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 169 (3.24%) Amazon EKS
16 158 (3.03%) OpenShift
17 154 (2.96%) Amazon ECS
18 153 (2.94%) dbt
19 139 (2.67%) Amazon EC2
20 136 (2.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 187 (3.59%) Firewall
2 136 (2.61%) DNS
3 115 (2.21%) Network Security
4 91 (1.75%) TCP/IP
5 79 (1.52%) BGP
6 75 (1.44%) VPN
7 65 (1.25%) WAN
8 60 (1.15%) HTTP
9 46 (0.88%) OSPF
10 44 (0.84%) SAN
11 41 (0.79%) MPLS
12 37 (0.71%) VLAN
13 34 (0.65%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) DHCP
15 31 (0.60%) VXLAN
16 29 (0.56%) SNMP
16 29 (0.56%) SSL
17 28 (0.54%) Wireshark
18 27 (0.52%) SD-WAN
19 23 (0.44%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 443 (8.50%) Power BI
2 353 (6.78%) PostgreSQL
3 292 (5.61%) Data Warehouse
4 244 (4.68%) Data Lake
5 232 (4.45%) SQL Server
6 197 (3.78%) Tableau
7 196 (3.76%) NoSQL
8 172 (3.30%) Relational Database
9 163 (3.13%) Metadata
10 154 (2.96%) Big Data
11 135 (2.59%) BigQuery
11 135 (2.59%) Delta Lake
12 120 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
13 117 (2.25%) Amazon Redshift
14 105 (2.02%) Amazon RDS
14 105 (2.02%) MongoDB
15 98 (1.88%) MySQL
16 93 (1.79%) Azure SQL Database
16 93 (1.79%) DynamoDB
17 81 (1.56%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 648 (12.44%) Git
2 488 (9.37%) Jenkins
3 363 (6.97%) GitLab
4 280 (5.38%) JIRA
5 89 (1.71%) MLflow
6 79 (1.52%) Selenium
7 58 (1.11%) Postman
8 44 (0.84%) Cucumber
9 42 (0.81%) Bitbucket
10 32 (0.61%) Sonatype Nexus
11 29 (0.56%) JMeter
11 29 (0.56%) SpecFlow
12 27 (0.52%) Artifactory
12 27 (0.52%) Cypress.io
12 27 (0.52%) SonarQube
13 26 (0.50%) JUnit
14 23 (0.44%) Gatling
14 23 (0.44%) Maven
15 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
16 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,175 (22.56%) Social Skills
2 996 (19.12%) Finance
3 717 (13.76%) Analytical Skills
4 492 (9.45%) Public Sector
5 366 (7.03%) Banking
6 172 (3.30%) Front Office
7 133 (2.55%) Documentation Skills
8 84 (1.61%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.32%) Marketing
10 62 (1.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 61 (1.17%) Retail
12 58 (1.11%) Legal
13 56 (1.08%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (1.02%) Influencing Skills
14 53 (1.02%) Telecoms
15 39 (0.75%) Manufacturing
16 38 (0.73%) Financial Institution
17 31 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
18 30 (0.58%) Publishing
19 27 (0.52%) Military
Job Titles
1 987 (18.95%) Developer
2 778 (14.94%) Data Engineer
3 742 (14.24%) Senior
4 481 (9.23%) Python Developer
5 354 (6.80%) Architect
6 336 (6.45%) Lead
7 289 (5.55%) Python Engineer
8 277 (5.32%) Analyst
9 276 (5.30%) DevOps Engineer
10 256 (4.91%) Software Engineer
11 236 (4.53%) AWS Engineer
12 226 (4.34%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 215 (4.13%) Data Scientist
14 183 (3.51%) Platform Engineer
15 164 (3.15%) Azure Engineer
15 164 (3.15%) Senior Developer
16 154 (2.96%) Senior Data Engineer
17 142 (2.73%) Data Analyst
18 139 (2.67%) Full-Stack Developer
19 117 (2.25%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 417 (8.01%) REST
2 362 (6.95%) React
3 345 (6.62%) PySpark
4 334 (6.41%) Kafka
5 273 (5.24%) Node.js
6 230 (4.42%) .NET
7 229 (4.40%) Pandas
8 195 (3.74%) PyTorch
9 182 (3.49%) RESTful
10 174 (3.34%) FastAPI
11 166 (3.19%) JSON
12 148 (2.84%) NumPy
12 148 (2.84%) TensorFlow
13 138 (2.65%) scikit-learn
14 127 (2.44%) LangChain
15 125 (2.40%) Flask
16 121 (2.32%) AngularJS
17 118 (2.27%) Django
18 115 (2.21%) OAuth
19 102 (1.96%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 501 (9.62%) Cloud Native
2 216 (4.15%) Distributed Systems
3 172 (3.30%) Algorithms
4 155 (2.98%) Product Ownership
5 123 (2.36%) AI Agents
6 116 (2.23%) Data Protection Act
7 113 (2.17%) Fixed Income
8 111 (2.13%) Equities
9 106 (2.03%) Data Structures
9 106 (2.03%) Derivative
10 101 (1.94%) Onboarding
11 97 (1.86%) Data Centre
12 92 (1.77%) Enterprise Software
13 88 (1.69%) Legacy Systems
13 88 (1.69%) Management Information System
14 86 (1.65%) Hybrid Cloud
15 82 (1.57%) Security Posture
16 76 (1.46%) Public Cloud
17 50 (0.96%) Virtual Team
18 48 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 646 (12.40%) Linux
2 292 (5.61%) Windows
3 194 (3.72%) Unix
4 104 (2.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 71 (1.36%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.75%) VMS
7 35 (0.67%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.54%) Android
9 20 (0.38%) AIX
9 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
10 19 (0.36%) Solaris
11 18 (0.35%) CentOS
12 17 (0.33%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.17%) Debian
14 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
14 8 (0.15%) zOS
15 7 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.096%) Rocky
16 5 (0.096%) Windows 7
16 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,895 (36.38%) CI/CD
2 1,402 (26.91%) DevOps
3 1,161 (22.29%) Agile
4 1,141 (21.90%) AI
5 1,054 (20.23%) Analytics
6 989 (18.99%) Problem-Solving
7 909 (17.45%) Infrastructure as Code
8 853 (16.38%) Data Pipeline
9 810 (15.55%) Machine Learning
10 719 (13.80%) Containerisation
11 710 (13.63%) Data Engineering
12 699 (13.42%) Data Modelling
13 686 (13.17%) ETL
14 606 (11.63%) Data Science
15 595 (11.42%) Software Engineering
16 556 (10.67%) Test Automation
17 522 (10.02%) Business Intelligence
18 514 (9.87%) Observability
19 431 (8.27%) LLM
20 408 (7.83%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,709 (32.81%) SQL
2 763 (14.65%) Java
3 652 (12.52%) PowerShell
4 561 (10.77%) Bash
5 489 (9.39%) JavaScript
6 353 (6.78%) C#
6 353 (6.78%) TypeScript
7 204 (3.92%) Go
8 172 (3.30%) R
9 154 (2.96%) C++
10 144 (2.76%) Scala
11 105 (2.02%) Shell Script
12 97 (1.86%) Ruby
13 89 (1.71%) Perl
14 78 (1.50%) Bicep
15 54 (1.04%) C
15 54 (1.04%) Kusto Query Language
16 52 (1.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 49 (0.94%) T-SQL
18 45 (0.86%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,217 (23.36%) Security Cleared
2 999 (19.18%) SC Cleared
3 395 (7.58%) Degree
4 178 (3.42%) Computer Science Degree
5 139 (2.67%) BPSS Clearance
6 136 (2.61%) DV Cleared
7 110 (2.11%) Azure Certification
8 107 (2.05%) AWS Certification
9 96 (1.84%) CISSP
10 93 (1.79%) Master's Degree
11 79 (1.52%) Cisco Certification
12 61 (1.17%) CCNP
13 58 (1.11%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 48 (0.92%) CISM
15 43 (0.83%) PhD
16 34 (0.65%) Microsoft Certification
17 31 (0.60%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 28 (0.54%) ISTQB
19 26 (0.50%) CCIE
19 26 (0.50%) CCNA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 517 (9.93%) Data Quality
2 215 (4.13%) QA
3 172 (3.30%) GDPR
4 109 (2.09%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 103 (1.98%) NIST
6 81 (1.56%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.63%) SLA
9 29 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 27 (0.52%) HIPAA
11 18 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
11 18 (0.35%) NCSC
12 17 (0.33%) WCAG
13 13 (0.25%) SOC 2
14 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
18 6 (0.12%) PSD2
System Software
1 840 (16.13%) Docker
2 164 (3.15%) Active Directory
3 105 (2.02%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.29%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.88%) VMware NSX
6 42 (0.81%) vSphere
7 32 (0.61%) Firmware
8 31 (0.60%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) HDFS
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 9 (0.17%) Ceph
11 9 (0.17%) SRDF
12 7 (0.13%) Lustre
12 7 (0.13%) NFS
12 7 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
13 6 (0.12%) GPFS
13 6 (0.12%) Postfix
13 6 (0.12%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 6 (0.12%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,109 (21.29%) Terraform
2 954 (18.31%) Kubernetes
3 502 (9.64%) Ansible
4 329 (6.32%) Grafana
5 278 (5.34%) Prometheus
6 79 (1.52%) Argo
7 71 (1.36%) Puppet
8 53 (1.02%) Istio
9 48 (0.92%) vRealize
10 45 (0.86%) Kibana
11 36 (0.69%) vCenter Server
12 32 (0.61%) Progress Chef
13 27 (0.52%) Nessus
14 23 (0.44%) Control-M
15 22 (0.42%) Nagios
15 22 (0.42%) Rancher
15 22 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
16 20 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
16 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
17 19 (0.36%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 630 (12.09%) Microsoft
2 580 (11.13%) Databricks
3 279 (5.36%) Google
4 219 (4.20%) Splunk
5 212 (4.07%) Oracle
6 195 (3.74%) VMware
7 134 (2.57%) Red Hat
8 129 (2.48%) Cisco
9 123 (2.36%) OpenAI
10 101 (1.94%) ServiceNow
11 89 (1.71%) CyberArk
12 74 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
13 64 (1.23%) Foundry
13 64 (1.23%) Informatica
14 62 (1.19%) IBM
15 55 (1.06%) F5
16 54 (1.04%) Palo Alto
17 51 (0.98%) Dynatrace
18 46 (0.88%) SAP
19 43 (0.83%) Fortinet