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

6 months to
10 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,656 4,453 4,196
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.36% 13.44% 11.06%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.50% 41.07% 34.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,679 2,880 2,845
10th Percentile £378 £358 £363
25th Percentile £445 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -3.77%
75th Percentile £650 £638 £700
90th Percentile £750 £763 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 88 100
10th Percentile £35.70 £28.25 £20.12
25th Percentile £44.16 £34.94 £39.42
Median hourly rate £62.50 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +25.00% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.81 £70.47
90th Percentile £90.84 £79.75 £78.88
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 14,320 10,843 12,172
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.23% 32.73% 32.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,296 7,113 7,980
10th Percentile £363 £345 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £645
90th Percentile £725 £734 £774
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 299 334
10th Percentile £21.55 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £45.00 £40.00 £45.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.28 £76.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 10 October 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 10 October 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 10 October 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 4,801 £550 +4.76% 10,229
London -4 2,859 £575 - 6,784
UK excluding London -8 2,158 £500 - 3,970
Work from Home -6 1,572 £535 -0.93% 3,754
North of England 0 746 £500 +5.26% 909
South East -8 443 £550 +10.00% 875
Yorkshire -2 371 £500 - 268
Scotland -1 322 £467 -6.60% 519
North West -1 297 £525 +20.34% 507
South West -3 272 £550 - 440
Midlands -24 226 £488 -2.50% 406
West Midlands -21 191 £500 -0.70% 253
East of England -16 142 £478 -9.05% 582
North East -4 87 £425 -8.11% 136
East Midlands -18 35 £425 +3.66% 153
Wales -8 28 £530 +23.98% 104
Northern Ireland +4 19 £375 -36.17% 165

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 (5.20%) Apache Airflow
2 281 (4.97%) Apache Spark
3 236 (4.17%) Apache
4 158 (2.79%) Confluence
5 58 (1.03%) SharePoint
6 56 (0.99%) Jupyter
7 36 (0.64%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 29 (0.51%) nginx
10 23 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
11 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
11 22 (0.39%) IIS
12 10 (0.18%) CMS
12 10 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
15 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.088%) Camunda
15 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
16 4 (0.071%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 103 (1.82%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 16 (0.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
6 13 (0.23%) MS Visio
7 10 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
8 3 (0.053%) Revit
9 2 (0.035%) LaTeX
9 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
9 2 (0.035%) Simulink
9 2 (0.035%) SPSS
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.018%) AutoCAD
10 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
10 1 (0.018%) Civil 3D
10 1 (0.018%) Houdini
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
2 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.28%) Aladdin
4 12 (0.21%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.11%) Front Arena
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.071%) Cloudability
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Payment Gateway
9 4 (0.071%) SAP IBP
10 3 (0.053%) Actimize
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.035%) FLEXCUBE
11 2 (0.035%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 2,061 (36.44%) AWS
2 1,937 (34.25%) Azure
3 918 (16.23%) GCP
4 755 (13.35%) GitHub
5 473 (8.36%) Serverless
6 471 (8.33%) Power Platform
7 443 (7.83%) GitHub Actions
8 440 (7.78%) Azure DevOps
9 388 (6.86%) Amazon S3
10 347 (6.14%) Snowflake
11 345 (6.10%) AWS Lambda
12 251 (4.44%) dbt
13 214 (3.78%) Azure Data Factory
14 208 (3.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 199 (3.52%) Amazon EKS
16 188 (3.32%) Entra ID
17 187 (3.31%) AWS CloudFormation
18 147 (2.60%) Amazon EC2
19 138 (2.44%) SaaS
20 132 (2.33%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 285 (5.04%) Firewall
2 215 (3.80%) DNS
3 170 (3.01%) Network Security
4 152 (2.69%) TCP/IP
5 133 (2.35%) VPN
6 131 (2.32%) BGP
7 114 (2.02%) WAN
8 83 (1.47%) DHCP
9 81 (1.43%) OSPF
10 76 (1.34%) SD-WAN
11 62 (1.10%) BIG-IP
12 58 (1.03%) SSL
12 58 (1.03%) VLAN
13 54 (0.95%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 52 (0.92%) HTTP
15 50 (0.88%) VXLAN
16 47 (0.83%) Ethernet VPN
17 45 (0.80%) Broadband
18 43 (0.76%) MPLS
19 42 (0.74%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 419 (7.41%) Power BI
2 329 (5.82%) Data Warehouse
3 315 (5.57%) PostgreSQL
4 233 (4.12%) Metadata
5 199 (3.52%) Data Lake
5 199 (3.52%) Relational Database
6 182 (3.22%) SQL Server
7 176 (3.11%) BigQuery
8 158 (2.79%) Tableau
9 154 (2.72%) NoSQL
10 140 (2.48%) Amazon RDS
11 135 (2.39%) Big Data
12 132 (2.33%) Amazon Redshift
13 127 (2.25%) MongoDB
14 123 (2.17%) Delta Lake
15 117 (2.07%) Amazon Athena
16 105 (1.86%) DynamoDB
17 100 (1.77%) MySQL
18 74 (1.31%) Redis
19 64 (1.13%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 857 (15.15%) Git
2 537 (9.49%) Jenkins
3 501 (8.86%) GitLab
4 319 (5.64%) JIRA
5 123 (2.17%) Selenium
6 74 (1.31%) Postman
7 63 (1.11%) Claude Code
8 60 (1.06%) JMeter
9 55 (0.97%) SonarQube
10 52 (0.92%) MLflow
11 48 (0.85%) Bitbucket
12 44 (0.78%) Cucumber
13 38 (0.67%) REST Assured
14 36 (0.64%) Sonatype Nexus
15 35 (0.62%) Artifactory
15 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
16 34 (0.60%) Maven
17 31 (0.55%) LoadRunner
18 30 (0.53%) Gatling
19 25 (0.44%) JUnit
General
1 1,333 (23.57%) Social Skills
2 1,325 (23.43%) Finance
3 842 (14.89%) Analytical Skills
4 555 (9.81%) Banking
5 542 (9.58%) Public Sector
6 172 (3.04%) Front Office
7 158 (2.79%) Investment Banking
8 118 (2.09%) Retail
9 109 (1.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 92 (1.63%) Documentation Skills
11 88 (1.56%) Marketing
12 83 (1.47%) Telecoms
13 63 (1.11%) Military
14 54 (0.95%) Law
15 53 (0.94%) Aerospace
16 51 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
17 50 (0.88%) Financial Institution
18 47 (0.83%) Legal
19 40 (0.71%) Publishing
20 35 (0.62%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 1,016 (17.96%) Senior
2 897 (15.86%) Developer
3 837 (14.80%) Data Engineer
4 508 (8.98%) Lead
5 476 (8.42%) Python Developer
6 422 (7.46%) Python Engineer
7 376 (6.65%) DevOps Engineer
8 311 (5.50%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 283 (5.00%) Analyst
10 279 (4.93%) Software Engineer
11 233 (4.12%) Architect
12 222 (3.93%) AWS Engineer
13 195 (3.45%) Cloud Engineer
14 193 (3.41%) Senior Data Engineer
15 191 (3.38%) Azure Engineer
16 188 (3.32%) Platform Engineer
17 183 (3.24%) Senior Developer
18 176 (3.11%) Data Scientist
19 146 (2.58%) Network Engineer
20 145 (2.56%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,416 (25.04%) Terraform
2 558 (9.87%) REST
3 380 (6.72%) Kafka
4 374 (6.61%) PySpark
5 321 (5.68%) React
6 237 (4.19%) .NET
7 221 (3.91%) FastAPI
8 214 (3.78%) JSON
9 213 (3.77%) Django
10 188 (3.32%) RESTful
11 163 (2.88%) pytest
12 159 (2.81%) LangChain
13 145 (2.56%) Node.js
14 140 (2.48%) Pandas
15 132 (2.33%) OAuth
16 127 (2.25%) Flask
17 115 (2.03%) LangGraph
18 110 (1.94%) YAML
19 106 (1.87%) HTML
20 102 (1.80%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 820 (14.50%) Cloud Native
2 304 (5.37%) AI Agents
3 282 (4.99%) Distributed Systems
4 265 (4.69%) Onboarding
5 165 (2.92%) Data Centre
6 154 (2.72%) Product Ownership
7 153 (2.71%) Data Structures
8 135 (2.39%) Legacy Systems
9 121 (2.14%) Algorithms
10 116 (2.05%) Enterprise Software
11 113 (2.00%) Hybrid Cloud
12 104 (1.84%) Management Information System
13 102 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
14 100 (1.77%) Derivative
15 98 (1.73%) Security Posture
16 89 (1.57%) Public Cloud
17 85 (1.50%) PKI
18 78 (1.38%) Equities
19 68 (1.20%) Linux Command Line
19 68 (1.20%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 780 (13.79%) Linux
2 341 (6.03%) Windows
3 238 (4.21%) Unix
4 156 (2.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 89 (1.57%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.76%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.64%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 16 (0.28%) Android
11 14 (0.25%) AIX
12 11 (0.19%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) zOS
15 6 (0.11%) FreeRTOS
16 5 (0.088%) Rocky
17 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,431 (42.98%) CI/CD
2 1,676 (29.63%) DevOps
3 1,614 (28.54%) AI
4 1,329 (23.50%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,275 (22.54%) Agile
6 1,087 (19.22%) Analytics
7 987 (17.45%) Data Pipeline
8 964 (17.04%) Software Engineering
9 875 (15.47%) Problem-Solving
10 870 (15.38%) Data Engineering
11 836 (14.78%) Machine Learning
12 776 (13.72%) Observability
13 774 (13.68%) Containerisation
14 771 (13.63%) Data Modelling
15 733 (12.96%) Test Automation
16 695 (12.29%) Validation
17 680 (12.02%) Continuous Improvement
18 673 (11.90%) ETL
19 609 (10.77%) Platform Engineering
20 593 (10.48%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,842 (32.57%) SQL
2 790 (13.97%) Bash
3 778 (13.76%) Java
4 761 (13.45%) PowerShell
5 455 (8.04%) JavaScript
6 349 (6.17%) TypeScript
7 305 (5.39%) C#
8 217 (3.84%) Go
9 156 (2.76%) Shell Script
10 140 (2.48%) Bicep
11 132 (2.33%) R
12 126 (2.23%) C++
13 119 (2.10%) Scala
14 108 (1.91%) Perl
15 62 (1.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 59 (1.04%) Groovy
17 50 (0.88%) Rust
18 49 (0.87%) T-SQL
19 47 (0.83%) PL/SQL
20 46 (0.81%) C
Qualifications
1 1,388 (24.54%) Security Cleared
2 1,113 (19.68%) SC Cleared
3 396 (7.00%) Degree
4 257 (4.54%) DV Cleared
5 156 (2.76%) AWS Certification
6 151 (2.67%) Azure Certification
7 145 (2.56%) Computer Science Degree
8 131 (2.32%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.71%) CISSP
10 75 (1.33%) Cisco Certification
11 72 (1.27%) Master's Degree
12 47 (0.83%) Microsoft Certification
13 35 (0.62%) CCNP
14 33 (0.58%) ISTQB
14 33 (0.58%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 31 (0.55%) CISM
16 30 (0.53%) CCIE
17 29 (0.51%) DBS Check
18 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 665 (11.76%) Data Quality
2 328 (5.80%) QA
3 105 (1.86%) NIST
4 91 (1.61%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 89 (1.57%) GDPR
6 84 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 43 (0.76%) SLA
8 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 31 (0.55%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) SOC 2
11 25 (0.44%) PCI DSS
12 24 (0.42%) WCAG
13 16 (0.28%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
15 13 (0.23%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) GRC
17 7 (0.12%) Basel III
17 7 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 7 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 998 (17.64%) Docker
2 181 (3.20%) Active Directory
3 131 (2.32%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.18%) Virtual Machines
5 47 (0.83%) Hyper-V
6 33 (0.58%) vSphere
7 31 (0.55%) VMware NSX
8 28 (0.50%) NFS
9 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) Firmware
11 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 9 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
15 8 (0.14%) Ceph
15 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 8 (0.14%) zsh
16 7 (0.12%) HDFS
17 6 (0.11%) Postfix
18 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,208 (21.36%) Kubernetes
2 658 (11.63%) Ansible
3 332 (5.87%) Grafana
4 241 (4.26%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.45%) Puppet
6 74 (1.31%) Progress Chef
7 69 (1.22%) Argo
8 51 (0.90%) Single Sign-On
9 41 (0.72%) Kibana
10 35 (0.62%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) Packer
14 20 (0.35%) FortiGate
15 18 (0.32%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) Podman
16 16 (0.28%) QRadar
16 16 (0.28%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.27%) ITRS Geneos
17 15 (0.27%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 781 (13.81%) Microsoft
2 588 (10.40%) Databricks
3 418 (7.39%) Google
4 248 (4.38%) Oracle
5 211 (3.73%) Splunk
6 174 (3.08%) OpenAI
7 166 (2.93%) VMware
8 147 (2.60%) ServiceNow
9 136 (2.40%) Cisco
10 101 (1.79%) Dynatrace
11 96 (1.70%) Red Hat
12 95 (1.68%) IBM
13 93 (1.64%) Foundry
14 92 (1.63%) F5
15 91 (1.61%) Palo Alto
16 70 (1.24%) Informatica
17 67 (1.18%) Fortinet
17 67 (1.18%) SAP
18 65 (1.15%) CyberArk
19 56 (0.99%) Salesforce