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

6 months to
19 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +3 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,590 4,269 3,998
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.44% 13.01% 10.29%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.66% 39.58% 32.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,655 2,835 2,872
10th Percentile £376 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £430 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.90% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £644 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £509
% change year-on-year - -1.72% -3.10%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 73 119
10th Percentile £30.00 £26.69 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.50 £34.75 £30.50
Median hourly rate £55.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +11.00% -13.04% -8.00%
75th Percentile £77.50 £59.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £84.59 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £56.50 £52.50 £67.26
% change year-on-year +7.62% -21.94% +20.75%

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 14,096 10,787 12,221
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.32% 32.87% 31.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,173 7,200 8,532
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £503 £533
Median % change year-on-year +2.93% -5.68% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £496 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.32% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 521 284 395
10th Percentile £29.96 £28.25 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.25 £43.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.12% -14.62% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £82.07 £77.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +2.36% -2.31% +8.56%

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 19 August 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 19 August 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 19 August 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 4,781 £550 +2.42% 4,692
London -4 2,776 £575 - 2,872
UK excluding London -8 2,181 £500 - 2,491
Work from Home -9 1,514 £535 -2.73% 1,721
North of England +2 751 £500 +2.04% 565
South East -9 453 £537 +7.40% 710
Yorkshire 0 381 £500 - 159
South West -2 299 £510 -2.86% 303
North West -1 287 £525 +10.53% 300
Scotland 0 278 £450 -10.00% 226
Midlands -16 241 £477 +3.14% 247
West Midlands -17 192 £477 +0.42% 143
East of England -12 140 £500 -0.50% 334
North East -2 95 £425 -18.27% 110
East Midlands -12 49 £481 +14.52% 103
Wales -6 28 £530 +30.86% 55
Northern Ireland +9 19 £363 -32.56% 74

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
1 293 (5.24%) Apache Airflow
2 280 (5.01%) Apache Spark
3 216 (3.86%) Apache
4 174 (3.11%) Confluence
5 58 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SharePoint
7 42 (0.75%) SAS
8 28 (0.50%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.41%) ArcGIS
10 21 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.32%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.13%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
15 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.089%) JBoss
Applications
1 108 (1.93%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.47%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
6 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
6 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
7 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Endur
9 3 (0.054%) Front Arena
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) IBM Planning Analytics
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,100 (37.57%) AWS
2 1,898 (33.95%) Azure
3 861 (15.40%) GCP
4 705 (12.61%) GitHub
5 495 (8.86%) Power Platform
6 457 (8.18%) Serverless
7 438 (7.84%) Azure DevOps
8 407 (7.28%) GitHub Actions
9 392 (7.01%) Amazon S3
10 350 (6.26%) AWS Lambda
11 324 (5.80%) Snowflake
12 226 (4.04%) Azure Data Factory
13 220 (3.94%) dbt
14 189 (3.38%) AWS CloudFormation
15 187 (3.35%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 181 (3.24%) Amazon EKS
17 138 (2.47%) Amazon EC2
17 138 (2.47%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 135 (2.42%) Entra ID
19 128 (2.29%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 286 (5.12%) Firewall
2 216 (3.86%) DNS
3 145 (2.59%) TCP/IP
4 128 (2.29%) Network Security
5 126 (2.25%) VPN
6 125 (2.24%) BGP
7 110 (1.97%) WAN
8 85 (1.52%) DHCP
9 72 (1.29%) OSPF
10 60 (1.07%) SD-WAN
11 59 (1.06%) VLAN
12 57 (1.02%) VXLAN
13 54 (0.97%) SSL
14 53 (0.95%) HTTP
15 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
16 45 (0.81%) Ethernet VPN
17 44 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 44 (0.79%) SAN
18 43 (0.77%) SNMP
19 37 (0.66%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 455 (8.14%) Power BI
2 323 (5.78%) Data Warehouse
3 322 (5.76%) PostgreSQL
4 222 (3.97%) SQL Server
5 203 (3.63%) Relational Database
6 197 (3.52%) Metadata
7 193 (3.45%) Tableau
8 184 (3.29%) Data Lake
9 162 (2.90%) NoSQL
10 161 (2.88%) BigQuery
11 144 (2.58%) Big Data
12 140 (2.50%) Amazon Redshift
13 128 (2.29%) Amazon Athena
14 122 (2.18%) MongoDB
15 120 (2.15%) Amazon RDS
16 114 (2.04%) Delta Lake
17 101 (1.81%) DynamoDB
18 87 (1.56%) MySQL
19 66 (1.18%) Snowflake Schema
20 65 (1.16%) Redis
Development Applications
1 732 (13.09%) Git
2 508 (9.09%) Jenkins
3 444 (7.94%) GitLab
4 293 (5.24%) JIRA
5 100 (1.79%) Selenium
6 57 (1.02%) Postman
7 55 (0.98%) JMeter
8 53 (0.95%) MLflow
9 49 (0.88%) SonarQube
10 48 (0.86%) Bitbucket
11 45 (0.81%) Claude Code
12 36 (0.64%) Cypress.io
13 34 (0.61%) Cucumber
14 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
14 32 (0.57%) Gatling
15 31 (0.55%) REST Assured
16 30 (0.54%) Maven
17 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
18 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
19 22 (0.39%) JUnit
General
1 1,234 (22.08%) Social Skills
2 1,211 (21.66%) Finance
3 820 (14.67%) Analytical Skills
4 551 (9.86%) Public Sector
5 450 (8.05%) Banking
6 196 (3.51%) Front Office
7 137 (2.45%) Investment Banking
8 116 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
9 115 (2.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 107 (1.91%) Retail
11 87 (1.56%) Marketing
12 76 (1.36%) Telecoms
13 60 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (0.95%) Legal
14 53 (0.95%) Military
15 48 (0.86%) Financial Institution
16 47 (0.84%) Aerospace
17 45 (0.81%) Publishing
18 41 (0.73%) Manufacturing
19 38 (0.68%) Law
Job Titles
1 922 (16.49%) Senior
2 915 (16.37%) Developer
3 805 (14.40%) Data Engineer
4 489 (8.75%) Python Developer
5 485 (8.68%) Lead
6 412 (7.37%) Python Engineer
7 328 (5.87%) DevOps Engineer
8 307 (5.49%) Software Engineer
9 277 (4.96%) Architect
10 276 (4.94%) Analyst
11 262 (4.69%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 240 (4.29%) AWS Engineer
13 197 (3.52%) Cloud Engineer
13 197 (3.52%) Data Scientist
14 188 (3.36%) Platform Engineer
15 178 (3.18%) Senior Developer
16 171 (3.06%) Azure Engineer
17 169 (3.02%) Senior Data Engineer
18 139 (2.49%) Infrastructure Engineer
19 133 (2.38%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 457 (8.18%) REST
2 370 (6.62%) PySpark
3 358 (6.40%) Kafka
4 326 (5.83%) React
5 235 (4.20%) .NET
6 201 (3.60%) JSON
7 200 (3.58%) RESTful
8 199 (3.56%) FastAPI
9 186 (3.33%) Node.js
10 185 (3.31%) Django
11 173 (3.09%) Pandas
12 139 (2.49%) LangChain
13 133 (2.38%) PyTorch
14 119 (2.13%) pytest
15 110 (1.97%) Flask
15 110 (1.97%) YAML
16 104 (1.86%) HTML
16 104 (1.86%) NumPy
16 104 (1.86%) OAuth
17 95 (1.70%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 781 (13.97%) Cloud Native
2 315 (5.64%) Distributed Systems
3 226 (4.04%) AI Agents
4 210 (3.76%) Onboarding
5 161 (2.88%) Data Centre
6 155 (2.77%) Product Ownership
7 141 (2.52%) Algorithms
8 133 (2.38%) Data Structures
9 129 (2.31%) Legacy Systems
10 117 (2.09%) Derivative
10 117 (2.09%) Hybrid Cloud
11 111 (1.99%) Management Information System
12 109 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
13 95 (1.70%) Equities
14 88 (1.57%) Security Posture
15 84 (1.50%) Fixed Income
16 75 (1.34%) Enterprise Software
17 69 (1.23%) Public Cloud
18 68 (1.22%) Linux Command Line
19 63 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 735 (13.15%) Linux
2 339 (6.06%) Windows
3 239 (4.28%) Unix
4 147 (2.63%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 83 (1.48%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 31 (0.55%) AIX
7 31 (0.55%) VMS
8 18 (0.32%) Solaris
9 17 (0.30%) CentOS
10 16 (0.29%) Android
11 11 (0.20%) Apple iOS
11 11 (0.20%) zOS
12 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
13 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 5 (0.089%) Debian
15 5 (0.089%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,210 (39.53%) CI/CD
2 1,607 (28.75%) DevOps
3 1,452 (25.97%) AI
4 1,253 (22.42%) Agile
5 1,174 (21.00%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,109 (19.84%) Analytics
7 991 (17.73%) Data Pipeline
8 912 (16.31%) Problem-Solving
9 889 (15.90%) Software Engineering
10 856 (15.31%) Machine Learning
11 789 (14.11%) Data Engineering
12 763 (13.65%) Containerisation
13 741 (13.26%) Data Modelling
14 694 (12.42%) Observability
15 656 (11.74%) ETL
16 626 (11.20%) Test Automation
17 583 (10.43%) Data Science
18 580 (10.38%) Continuous Improvement
19 551 (9.86%) Validation
20 535 (9.57%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,809 (32.36%) SQL
2 828 (14.81%) Java
3 759 (13.58%) Bash
4 738 (13.20%) PowerShell
5 453 (8.10%) JavaScript
6 360 (6.44%) TypeScript
7 309 (5.53%) C#
8 205 (3.67%) Go
9 147 (2.63%) C++
10 140 (2.50%) R
11 138 (2.47%) Shell Script
12 131 (2.34%) Scala
13 129 (2.31%) Bicep
14 84 (1.50%) Perl
15 63 (1.13%) PL/SQL
16 59 (1.06%) C
17 56 (1.00%) Groovy
18 54 (0.97%) Rust
19 53 (0.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 53 (0.95%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,302 (23.29%) Security Cleared
2 1,059 (18.94%) SC Cleared
3 422 (7.55%) Degree
4 205 (3.67%) DV Cleared
5 162 (2.90%) Computer Science Degree
6 145 (2.59%) AWS Certification
7 142 (2.54%) Azure Certification
8 116 (2.08%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.74%) CISSP
10 91 (1.63%) Cisco Certification
11 72 (1.29%) Master's Degree
12 52 (0.93%) CCNP
13 43 (0.77%) Microsoft Certification
14 38 (0.68%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 35 (0.63%) PhD
16 33 (0.59%) CISM
16 33 (0.59%) ISTQB
17 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 30 (0.54%) CCIE
19 26 (0.47%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 585 (10.47%) Data Quality
2 277 (4.96%) QA
3 112 (2.00%) GDPR
4 110 (1.97%) NIST
5 103 (1.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 84 (1.50%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.63%) SLA
8 31 (0.55%) Actionable Recommendations
9 27 (0.48%) NCSC
9 27 (0.48%) PCI DSS
9 27 (0.48%) WCAG
10 26 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
13 11 (0.20%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
13 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
14 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.13%) GRC
15 7 (0.13%) HL7
System Software
1 928 (16.60%) Docker
2 158 (2.83%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.36%) VMware Infrastructure
4 62 (1.11%) Virtual Machines
5 44 (0.79%) vSphere
6 42 (0.75%) Hyper-V
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.23%) Squid
12 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
14 9 (0.16%) HDFS
14 9 (0.16%) KVM
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
15 7 (0.13%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,306 (23.36%) Terraform
2 1,107 (19.80%) Kubernetes
3 627 (11.22%) Ansible
4 342 (6.12%) Grafana
5 249 (4.45%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.59%) Puppet
7 78 (1.40%) Progress Chef
8 68 (1.22%) Argo
9 43 (0.77%) Istio
10 34 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
11 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
12 26 (0.47%) Control-M
12 26 (0.47%) Kibana
13 25 (0.45%) Nagios
13 25 (0.45%) vCenter Server
13 25 (0.45%) vRealize
14 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
15 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
16 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
16 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 689 (12.33%) Microsoft
2 549 (9.82%) Databricks
3 363 (6.49%) Google
4 253 (4.53%) Oracle
5 216 (3.86%) Splunk
6 177 (3.17%) VMware
7 144 (2.58%) Cisco
8 139 (2.49%) OpenAI
9 128 (2.29%) ServiceNow
10 105 (1.88%) Dynatrace
10 105 (1.88%) Red Hat
11 96 (1.72%) IBM
12 91 (1.63%) F5
13 84 (1.50%) Palo Alto
14 81 (1.45%) Informatica
15 69 (1.23%) CyberArk
15 69 (1.23%) Fortinet
16 68 (1.22%) Foundry
16 68 (1.22%) SAP
17 61 (1.09%) Salesforce