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

6 months to
29 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,345 3,788 4,068
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.93% 13.17% 9.50%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.60% 38.62% 31.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,538 2,646 2,930
10th Percentile £363 £380 £388
25th Percentile £425 £449 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £540 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.24% -1.82% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -2.00% -2.15% -7.01%
Number of hourly rates quoted 134 48 107
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £53.25 £42.25 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +26.04% -29.58% -7.25%
75th Percentile £67.96 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £68.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.00 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +15.56% -30.77% +13.04%

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 13,165 9,808 12,901
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.91% 34.11% 30.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,605 6,680 9,183
10th Percentile £358 £358 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.91% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £626 £650
90th Percentile £713 £757 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.32% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 570 218 513
10th Percentile £36.25 £27.00 £32.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.12 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.36
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -7.79% -0.23%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.37 £62.50
% change year-on-year +2.57% +1.40% -

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 29 May 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 29 May 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 29 May 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 -2 4,450 £525 -4.55% 2,401
London -3 2,558 £550 -4.60% 1,218
UK excluding London -1 2,064 £490 -2.00% 1,598
Work from Home -1 1,510 £525 -4.55% 942
North of England +11 745 £482 -1.21% 394
Yorkshire +2 420 £488 -2.50% 106
South East -7 393 £525 +3.19% 508
Scotland +2 302 £434 -8.68% 87
North West +2 257 £491 +3.37% 211
South West 0 250 £500 -9.09% 189
Midlands -15 237 £482 +7.11% 172
West Midlands -10 182 £481 +6.94% 82
East of England -10 128 £500 - 175
North East +7 78 £475 +5.56% 80
East Midlands -12 54 £495 +13.53% 89
Wales -10 26 £450 -10.00% 53
Northern Ireland +14 25 £446 -24.04% 38

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
1 279 (5.22%) Apache Spark
2 229 (4.28%) Apache Airflow
3 183 (3.42%) Apache
4 148 (2.77%) Confluence
5 46 (0.86%) SharePoint
6 45 (0.84%) SAS
7 42 (0.79%) Jupyter
8 23 (0.43%) nginx
9 21 (0.39%) OpenStack
10 16 (0.30%) ArcGIS
10 16 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
10 16 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
11 13 (0.24%) IIS
12 11 (0.21%) Appian
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) Camunda
13 8 (0.15%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.13%) CICS
14 7 (0.13%) CMS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 123 (2.30%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.45%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
6 21 (0.39%) MS Visio
7 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.075%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.056%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.019%) SPSS
10 1 (0.019%) Weka
10 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.43%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.094%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.056%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.056%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.056%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.056%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.037%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.037%) Global One
8 2 (0.037%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.037%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.037%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.037%) Odoo
8 2 (0.037%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.037%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,997 (37.36%) AWS
2 1,777 (33.25%) Azure
3 765 (14.31%) GCP
4 648 (12.12%) GitHub
5 520 (9.73%) Power Platform
6 454 (8.49%) Serverless
7 381 (7.13%) Azure DevOps
8 368 (6.88%) Amazon S3
9 345 (6.45%) GitHub Actions
10 324 (6.06%) AWS Lambda
11 260 (4.86%) Azure Data Factory
12 251 (4.70%) Snowflake
13 178 (3.33%) AWS CloudFormation
14 172 (3.22%) dbt
15 171 (3.20%) OpenShift
16 166 (3.11%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 154 (2.88%) Amazon EKS
18 139 (2.60%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 125 (2.34%) Amazon EC2
20 117 (2.19%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 205 (3.84%) Firewall
2 153 (2.86%) DNS
3 117 (2.19%) Network Security
4 95 (1.78%) WAN
5 91 (1.70%) BGP
6 90 (1.68%) TCP/IP
7 78 (1.46%) VPN
8 63 (1.18%) HTTP
9 62 (1.16%) OSPF
10 56 (1.05%) SAN
11 54 (1.01%) BIG-IP
12 48 (0.90%) SSL
13 46 (0.86%) SD-WAN
14 45 (0.84%) VXLAN
15 37 (0.69%) VLAN
16 36 (0.67%) LAN
17 35 (0.65%) DHCP
17 35 (0.65%) SNMP
18 34 (0.64%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 34 (0.64%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 453 (8.48%) Power BI
2 336 (6.29%) PostgreSQL
3 275 (5.14%) Data Warehouse
4 261 (4.88%) SQL Server
5 233 (4.36%) Data Lake
6 201 (3.76%) Tableau
7 183 (3.42%) Relational Database
8 173 (3.24%) NoSQL
9 161 (3.01%) Big Data
10 160 (2.99%) Metadata
11 137 (2.56%) BigQuery
12 135 (2.53%) Delta Lake
13 121 (2.26%) Amazon Athena
14 114 (2.13%) MongoDB
15 109 (2.04%) Amazon Redshift
16 94 (1.76%) DynamoDB
17 89 (1.67%) MySQL
18 84 (1.57%) Amazon RDS
19 77 (1.44%) Azure SQL Database
20 75 (1.40%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 639 (11.96%) Git
2 487 (9.11%) Jenkins
3 375 (7.02%) GitLab
4 272 (5.09%) JIRA
5 78 (1.46%) MLflow
6 77 (1.44%) Selenium
7 63 (1.18%) Postman
8 40 (0.75%) Cucumber
9 36 (0.67%) JMeter
10 32 (0.60%) Artifactory
10 32 (0.60%) Cypress.io
11 30 (0.56%) Bitbucket
12 29 (0.54%) SonarQube
13 26 (0.49%) JUnit
13 26 (0.49%) Sonatype Nexus
14 24 (0.45%) REST Assured
15 23 (0.43%) Maven
16 22 (0.41%) Robot Framework
17 20 (0.37%) Gatling
18 19 (0.36%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,159 (21.68%) Social Skills
2 1,063 (19.89%) Finance
3 713 (13.34%) Analytical Skills
4 474 (8.87%) Public Sector
5 378 (7.07%) Banking
6 190 (3.55%) Front Office
7 130 (2.43%) Documentation Skills
8 120 (2.25%) Investment Banking
9 80 (1.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 75 (1.40%) Marketing
11 60 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
12 59 (1.10%) Retail
13 53 (0.99%) Legal
14 47 (0.88%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 37 (0.69%) Financial Institution
16 37 (0.69%) Publishing
17 35 (0.65%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.62%) Military
19 29 (0.54%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 975 (18.24%) Developer
2 815 (15.25%) Data Engineer
3 779 (14.57%) Senior
4 504 (9.43%) Python Developer
5 346 (6.47%) Lead
6 335 (6.27%) Architect
7 328 (6.14%) Python Engineer
8 289 (5.41%) DevOps Engineer
9 282 (5.28%) Analyst
10 271 (5.07%) Software Engineer
11 238 (4.45%) AWS Engineer
12 221 (4.13%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 210 (3.93%) Data Scientist
14 167 (3.12%) Senior Developer
15 158 (2.96%) Azure Engineer
16 156 (2.92%) Senior Data Engineer
17 155 (2.90%) Platform Engineer
18 152 (2.84%) Data Analyst
19 150 (2.81%) Full-Stack Developer
20 136 (2.54%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 406 (7.60%) REST
2 371 (6.94%) React
3 356 (6.66%) PySpark
4 316 (5.91%) Kafka
5 234 (4.38%) .NET
6 224 (4.19%) Node.js
7 218 (4.08%) Pandas
8 186 (3.48%) FastAPI
9 184 (3.44%) RESTful
10 179 (3.35%) JSON
11 171 (3.20%) PyTorch
12 134 (2.51%) Django
13 130 (2.43%) NumPy
14 127 (2.38%) Flask
15 121 (2.26%) TensorFlow
16 117 (2.19%) scikit-learn
17 116 (2.17%) LangChain
18 113 (2.11%) AngularJS
19 101 (1.89%) HTML
19 101 (1.89%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 599 (11.21%) Cloud Native
2 241 (4.51%) Distributed Systems
3 150 (2.81%) Algorithms
4 140 (2.62%) Product Ownership
5 139 (2.60%) Data Centre
6 129 (2.41%) AI Agents
6 129 (2.41%) Onboarding
7 122 (2.28%) Data Structures
8 119 (2.23%) Data Protection Act
9 116 (2.17%) Derivative
10 109 (2.04%) Management Information System
11 107 (2.00%) Equities
12 105 (1.96%) Legacy Systems
13 97 (1.81%) Fixed Income
14 90 (1.68%) Hybrid Cloud
14 90 (1.68%) Security Posture
15 88 (1.65%) Enterprise Software
16 69 (1.29%) Public Cloud
17 55 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
18 51 (0.95%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 635 (11.88%) Linux
2 299 (5.59%) Windows
3 219 (4.10%) Unix
4 109 (2.04%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 74 (1.38%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.80%) Ubuntu
7 31 (0.58%) VMS
8 26 (0.49%) AIX
8 26 (0.49%) Android
9 23 (0.43%) Solaris
10 20 (0.37%) CentOS
11 18 (0.34%) Apple iOS
12 16 (0.30%) Mac OS
13 13 (0.24%) zOS
14 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
15 8 (0.15%) Debian
16 7 (0.13%) Rocky
17 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
18 5 (0.094%) Amazon Linux
19 4 (0.075%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,988 (37.19%) CI/CD
2 1,442 (26.98%) DevOps
3 1,233 (23.07%) AI
4 1,149 (21.50%) Agile
5 1,044 (19.53%) Analytics
6 941 (17.61%) Infrastructure as Code
7 932 (17.44%) Problem-Solving
8 903 (16.89%) Data Pipeline
9 820 (15.34%) Machine Learning
10 718 (13.43%) Data Modelling
11 711 (13.30%) Data Engineering
12 698 (13.06%) ETL
13 694 (12.98%) Containerisation
14 649 (12.14%) Software Engineering
15 583 (10.91%) Data Science
16 569 (10.65%) Observability
17 537 (10.05%) Test Automation
18 520 (9.73%) Business Intelligence
19 469 (8.77%) LLM
20 437 (8.18%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,769 (33.10%) SQL
2 773 (14.46%) Java
3 666 (12.46%) PowerShell
4 600 (11.23%) Bash
5 471 (8.81%) JavaScript
6 354 (6.62%) TypeScript
7 338 (6.32%) C#
8 203 (3.80%) Go
9 166 (3.11%) R
10 151 (2.83%) C++
11 129 (2.41%) Scala
12 107 (2.00%) Shell Script
13 80 (1.50%) Bicep
14 79 (1.48%) Perl
15 74 (1.38%) Ruby
16 58 (1.09%) PL/SQL
17 57 (1.07%) T-SQL
18 55 (1.03%) C
18 55 (1.03%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 52 (0.97%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,189 (22.25%) Security Cleared
2 960 (17.96%) SC Cleared
3 394 (7.37%) Degree
4 162 (3.03%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.77%) DV Cleared
6 124 (2.32%) BPSS Clearance
7 110 (2.06%) Azure Certification
8 95 (1.78%) AWS Certification
9 91 (1.70%) CISSP
10 75 (1.40%) Master's Degree
11 71 (1.33%) Cisco Certification
12 55 (1.03%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.94%) CCNP
14 41 (0.77%) CISM
15 37 (0.69%) PhD
16 32 (0.60%) ISTQB
16 32 (0.60%) Microsoft Certification
17 26 (0.49%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 22 (0.41%) CCIE
19 21 (0.39%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 522 (9.77%) Data Quality
2 237 (4.43%) QA
3 144 (2.69%) GDPR
4 99 (1.85%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 97 (1.81%) NIST
6 77 (1.44%) Accessibility
7 37 (0.69%) SLA
8 27 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.49%) PCI DSS
10 25 (0.47%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
12 16 (0.30%) WCAG
13 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.24%) NCSC
15 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
18 7 (0.13%) Disclosure Scotland
19 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 793 (14.84%) Docker
2 149 (2.79%) Active Directory
3 99 (1.85%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.73%) VMware NSX
5 39 (0.73%) vSphere
6 33 (0.62%) Firmware
7 31 (0.58%) Hyper-V
8 19 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
9 17 (0.32%) KVM
10 16 (0.30%) NFS
11 13 (0.24%) Squid
12 12 (0.22%) HDFS
13 10 (0.19%) Ceph
13 10 (0.19%) SRDF
14 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
17 4 (0.075%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
17 4 (0.075%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,111 (20.79%) Terraform
2 954 (17.85%) Kubernetes
3 562 (10.51%) Ansible
4 334 (6.25%) Grafana
5 279 (5.22%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.38%) Puppet
7 57 (1.07%) Argo
8 51 (0.95%) Istio
9 46 (0.86%) vRealize
10 38 (0.71%) Progress Chef
11 36 (0.67%) Kibana
12 33 (0.62%) vCenter Server
13 27 (0.51%) Nessus
13 27 (0.51%) Single Sign-On
14 25 (0.47%) Nagios
15 24 (0.45%) Control-M
15 24 (0.45%) ZABBIX
16 23 (0.43%) NetBackup
17 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
18 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 601 (11.24%) Microsoft
2 569 (10.65%) Databricks
3 283 (5.29%) Google
4 245 (4.58%) Oracle
5 221 (4.13%) Splunk
6 176 (3.29%) VMware
7 131 (2.45%) Red Hat
8 125 (2.34%) OpenAI
9 117 (2.19%) Cisco
10 97 (1.81%) ServiceNow
11 85 (1.59%) CyberArk
12 83 (1.55%) F5
13 76 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
13 76 (1.42%) Dynatrace
13 76 (1.42%) Palo Alto
14 70 (1.31%) IBM
15 68 (1.27%) Informatica
16 52 (0.97%) Foundry
17 51 (0.95%) SAP
18 46 (0.86%) Arista