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

6 months to
28 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,580 4,348 4,150
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.26% 13.25% 10.87%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.47% 40.20% 33.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,639 2,815 2,838
10th Percentile £375 £357 £366
25th Percentile £444 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £648 £700
90th Percentile £750 £763 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £501
% change year-on-year - -0.24% -4.54%
Number of hourly rates quoted 126 86 97
10th Percentile £32.88 £28.22 £20.80
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.06 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £67.02
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -25.40% +3.11%
75th Percentile £79.38 £58.75 £71.88
90th Percentile £92.11 £80.63 £80.00
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 14,136 10,815 12,233
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 25.99% 32.96% 32.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,194 7,136 8,127
10th Percentile £363 £342 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £507 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.65% -3.52% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £646
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 537 294 337
10th Percentile £24.05 £29.00 £26.14
25th Percentile £46.25 £41.25 £46.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.90 £75.00 £78.00
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 28 September 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 28 September 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 28 September 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 4,758 £550 +4.07% 8,475
London -4 2,810 £575 - 5,290
UK excluding London -8 2,139 £500 - 3,720
Work from Home -6 1,524 £529 -3.91% 3,253
North of England +1 745 £500 +5.26% 827
South East -6 446 £541 +8.25% 799
Yorkshire -2 376 £500 - 256
Scotland -4 298 £466 -6.80% 432
North West +1 291 £525 +16.67% 462
South West -4 271 £550 +4.76% 513
Midlands -21 226 £500 +1.63% 395
West Midlands -21 186 £520 +4.00% 249
East of England -15 145 £484 -7.86% 496
North East 0 87 £425 -10.53% 112
East Midlands -17 40 £463 +12.80% 146
Wales -11 27 £510 +19.30% 85
Northern Ireland +3 17 £363 -32.56% 208

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
1 291 (5.22%) Apache Airflow
2 273 (4.89%) Apache Spark
3 223 (4.00%) Apache
4 155 (2.78%) Confluence
5 58 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 55 (0.99%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.61%) SAS
8 31 (0.56%) OpenStack
9 27 (0.48%) nginx
10 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) IIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 8 (0.14%) CMS
11 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
11 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
12 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
13 5 (0.090%) Apache Solr
13 5 (0.090%) Camunda
13 5 (0.090%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 99 (1.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 37 (0.66%) Chatbot
3 20 (0.36%) Microsoft Office
4 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
4 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.22%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.036%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.036%) Revit
8 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 1 (0.018%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
2 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
3 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.13%) Front Arena
6 7 (0.13%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.090%) SAP IBP
9 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.054%) Endur
10 3 (0.054%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.036%) Orchestrade
11 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,046 (36.67%) AWS
2 1,878 (33.66%) Azure
3 887 (15.90%) GCP
4 735 (13.17%) GitHub
5 480 (8.60%) Power Platform
6 477 (8.55%) Serverless
7 433 (7.76%) Azure DevOps
8 432 (7.74%) GitHub Actions
9 392 (7.03%) Amazon S3
10 353 (6.33%) AWS Lambda
11 336 (6.02%) Snowflake
12 242 (4.34%) dbt
13 207 (3.71%) Azure Data Factory
14 199 (3.57%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 184 (3.30%) Amazon EKS
16 183 (3.28%) AWS CloudFormation
17 170 (3.05%) Entra ID
18 142 (2.54%) Amazon EC2
19 127 (2.28%) SaaS
20 125 (2.24%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 280 (5.02%) Firewall
2 207 (3.71%) DNS
3 160 (2.87%) Network Security
4 150 (2.69%) TCP/IP
5 127 (2.28%) VPN
6 125 (2.24%) BGP
7 113 (2.03%) WAN
8 86 (1.54%) DHCP
9 74 (1.33%) OSPF
10 73 (1.31%) SD-WAN
11 63 (1.13%) BIG-IP
12 57 (1.02%) SSL
13 56 (1.00%) VXLAN
14 55 (0.99%) VLAN
15 52 (0.93%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 50 (0.90%) HTTP
17 48 (0.86%) Ethernet VPN
18 41 (0.73%) Broadband
18 41 (0.73%) Wireless
19 38 (0.68%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 427 (7.65%) Power BI
2 330 (5.91%) Data Warehouse
3 315 (5.65%) PostgreSQL
4 217 (3.89%) Metadata
5 202 (3.62%) Relational Database
6 199 (3.57%) SQL Server
7 195 (3.49%) Data Lake
8 187 (3.35%) BigQuery
9 171 (3.06%) Tableau
10 155 (2.78%) NoSQL
11 132 (2.37%) Big Data
12 130 (2.33%) Amazon Redshift
13 127 (2.28%) Amazon RDS
14 124 (2.22%) Amazon Athena
15 119 (2.13%) Delta Lake
15 119 (2.13%) MongoDB
16 106 (1.90%) DynamoDB
17 99 (1.77%) MySQL
18 74 (1.33%) Redis
19 61 (1.09%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 809 (14.50%) Git
2 504 (9.03%) Jenkins
3 479 (8.58%) GitLab
4 306 (5.48%) JIRA
5 116 (2.08%) Selenium
6 67 (1.20%) Postman
7 60 (1.08%) JMeter
8 56 (1.00%) Claude Code
9 55 (0.99%) SonarQube
10 49 (0.88%) MLflow
11 45 (0.81%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.63%) Cucumber
12 35 (0.63%) REST Assured
13 34 (0.61%) Artifactory
13 34 (0.61%) Sonatype Nexus
14 33 (0.59%) Cypress.io
14 33 (0.59%) Maven
15 29 (0.52%) LoadRunner
16 28 (0.50%) Gatling
17 21 (0.38%) Zephyr
General
1 1,295 (23.21%) Social Skills
2 1,273 (22.81%) Finance
3 830 (14.87%) Analytical Skills
4 542 (9.71%) Public Sector
5 515 (9.23%) Banking
6 176 (3.15%) Front Office
7 149 (2.67%) Investment Banking
8 113 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 113 (2.03%) Retail
9 101 (1.81%) Documentation Skills
10 86 (1.54%) Marketing
11 84 (1.51%) Telecoms
12 63 (1.13%) Military
13 53 (0.95%) Law
14 50 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
15 49 (0.88%) Aerospace
16 45 (0.81%) Financial Institution
16 45 (0.81%) Legal
17 42 (0.75%) Publishing
18 37 (0.66%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 997 (17.87%) Senior
2 884 (15.84%) Developer
3 827 (14.82%) Data Engineer
4 484 (8.67%) Lead
5 465 (8.33%) Python Developer
6 415 (7.44%) Python Engineer
7 356 (6.38%) DevOps Engineer
8 302 (5.41%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 282 (5.05%) Analyst
10 272 (4.87%) Software Engineer
11 242 (4.34%) Architect
12 225 (4.03%) AWS Engineer
13 192 (3.44%) Cloud Engineer
13 192 (3.44%) Senior Developer
14 191 (3.42%) Platform Engineer
15 187 (3.35%) Azure Engineer
15 187 (3.35%) Senior Data Engineer
16 182 (3.26%) Data Scientist
17 150 (2.69%) Network Engineer
18 139 (2.49%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,381 (24.75%) Terraform
2 529 (9.48%) REST
3 370 (6.63%) Kafka
4 368 (6.59%) PySpark
5 301 (5.39%) React
6 236 (4.23%) .NET
7 209 (3.75%) FastAPI
8 207 (3.71%) Django
8 207 (3.71%) JSON
9 191 (3.42%) RESTful
10 155 (2.78%) pytest
11 154 (2.76%) LangChain
12 153 (2.74%) Node.js
13 150 (2.69%) Pandas
14 126 (2.26%) OAuth
15 115 (2.06%) Flask
16 111 (1.99%) YAML
17 108 (1.94%) LangGraph
18 107 (1.92%) PyTorch
19 104 (1.86%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 799 (14.32%) Cloud Native
2 295 (5.29%) Distributed Systems
3 290 (5.20%) AI Agents
4 253 (4.53%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.90%) Data Centre
6 150 (2.69%) Product Ownership
7 143 (2.56%) Data Structures
8 135 (2.42%) Legacy Systems
9 118 (2.11%) Algorithms
10 108 (1.94%) Hybrid Cloud
11 107 (1.92%) Enterprise Software
11 107 (1.92%) Management Information System
12 99 (1.77%) Derivative
13 98 (1.76%) Data Protection Act
14 95 (1.70%) Security Posture
15 82 (1.47%) Public Cloud
16 80 (1.43%) Equities
17 75 (1.34%) PKI
18 67 (1.20%) Linux Command Line
19 65 (1.16%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 765 (13.71%) Linux
2 343 (6.15%) Windows
3 250 (4.48%) Unix
4 153 (2.74%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 91 (1.63%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.79%) Ubuntu
7 37 (0.66%) VMS
8 25 (0.45%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 15 (0.27%) AIX
11 14 (0.25%) Android
12 11 (0.20%) 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 5 (0.090%) Rocky
16 4 (0.072%) Debian
16 4 (0.072%) FreeRTOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,343 (41.99%) CI/CD
2 1,608 (28.82%) DevOps
3 1,571 (28.15%) AI
4 1,292 (23.15%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,250 (22.40%) Agile
6 1,084 (19.43%) Analytics
7 966 (17.31%) Data Pipeline
8 926 (16.59%) Software Engineering
9 869 (15.57%) Problem-Solving
10 828 (14.84%) Machine Learning
11 827 (14.82%) Data Engineering
12 776 (13.91%) Containerisation
13 757 (13.57%) Observability
14 745 (13.35%) Data Modelling
15 685 (12.28%) Test Automation
16 657 (11.77%) Validation
17 655 (11.74%) ETL
18 646 (11.58%) Continuous Improvement
19 585 (10.48%) Platform Engineering
20 576 (10.32%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,824 (32.69%) SQL
2 790 (14.16%) Java
3 766 (13.73%) Bash
4 749 (13.42%) PowerShell
5 441 (7.90%) JavaScript
6 339 (6.08%) TypeScript
7 299 (5.36%) C#
8 225 (4.03%) Go
9 151 (2.71%) Shell Script
10 133 (2.38%) R
11 132 (2.37%) Bicep
12 127 (2.28%) C++
13 125 (2.24%) Scala
14 105 (1.88%) Perl
15 61 (1.09%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 55 (0.99%) Groovy
17 51 (0.91%) C
17 51 (0.91%) Rust
18 50 (0.90%) T-SQL
19 48 (0.86%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,357 (24.32%) Security Cleared
2 1,097 (19.66%) SC Cleared
3 399 (7.15%) Degree
4 245 (4.39%) DV Cleared
5 153 (2.74%) Azure Certification
6 146 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
7 143 (2.56%) AWS Certification
8 130 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.74%) CISSP
10 79 (1.42%) Cisco Certification
11 67 (1.20%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
13 38 (0.68%) CCNP
14 33 (0.59%) PhD
15 31 (0.56%) CCIE
16 30 (0.54%) CISM
16 30 (0.54%) DBS Check
17 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 29 (0.52%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.50%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 636 (11.40%) Data Quality
2 325 (5.82%) QA
3 116 (2.08%) NIST
4 101 (1.81%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 86 (1.54%) GDPR
6 81 (1.45%) Accessibility
7 44 (0.79%) SLA
8 36 (0.65%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.52%) NCSC
10 26 (0.47%) PCI DSS
11 22 (0.39%) SOC 2
11 22 (0.39%) WCAG
12 19 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.29%) Disclosure Scotland
13 16 (0.29%) HIPAA
14 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
15 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.13%) Basel III
16 7 (0.13%) GRC
16 7 (0.13%) MiFID
System Software
1 960 (17.20%) Docker
2 177 (3.17%) Active Directory
3 135 (2.42%) VMware Infrastructure
4 70 (1.25%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.90%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.63%) vSphere
7 32 (0.57%) VMware NSX
8 27 (0.48%) NFS
9 26 (0.47%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) Firmware
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
12 12 (0.22%) Squid
13 8 (0.14%) Ceph
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 8 (0.14%) zsh
14 7 (0.13%) HDFS
14 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
16 5 (0.090%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,159 (20.77%) Kubernetes
2 636 (11.40%) Ansible
3 332 (5.95%) Grafana
4 243 (4.35%) Prometheus
5 79 (1.42%) Puppet
6 71 (1.27%) Progress Chef
7 65 (1.16%) Argo
8 46 (0.82%) Single Sign-On
9 39 (0.70%) Kibana
10 34 (0.61%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 26 (0.47%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) Packer
14 22 (0.39%) FortiGate
15 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
15 17 (0.30%) ZABBIX
16 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.29%) QRadar
17 15 (0.27%) Podman
17 15 (0.27%) vRealize
Vendors
1 741 (13.28%) Microsoft
2 574 (10.29%) Databricks
3 399 (7.15%) Google
4 240 (4.30%) Oracle
5 206 (3.69%) Splunk
6 172 (3.08%) VMware
7 164 (2.94%) OpenAI
8 144 (2.58%) Cisco
9 135 (2.42%) ServiceNow
10 101 (1.81%) Dynatrace
11 97 (1.74%) Red Hat
12 93 (1.67%) IBM
13 90 (1.61%) F5
14 88 (1.58%) Palo Alto
15 83 (1.49%) Foundry
16 71 (1.27%) CyberArk
16 71 (1.27%) Fortinet
17 70 (1.25%) Informatica
18 67 (1.20%) SAP
19 55 (0.99%) Salesforce