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

6 months to
24 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,213 3,908 4,078
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.90% 13.41% 9.21%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.23% 39.34% 31.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,548 2,739 2,873
10th Percentile £363 £380 £400
25th Percentile £416 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £749 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £517
% change year-on-year -3.75% -3.29% -6.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 105 53 105
10th Percentile £28.73 £20.34 £20.99
25th Percentile £41.94 £23.00 £31.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £42.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +23.53% -15.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile £70.00 £63.25 £66.25
90th Percentile £79.80 £77.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +13.80% -2.56% -28.95%

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 12,643 9,934 12,893
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.85% 34.10% 29.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,405 6,650 9,116
10th Percentile £354 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £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 £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £480 £485
% change year-on-year -1.04% -1.03% -3.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 501 243 486
10th Percentile £41.59 £22.04 £30.94
25th Percentile £54.00 £32.51 £46.20
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 £67.47
90th Percentile £77.00 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.97% +3.48% -5.05%

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 24 March 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 24 March 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 24 March 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 4,360 £520 -7.76% 2,649
London -3 2,481 £550 -8.33% 1,134
UK excluding London -1 1,988 £481 -3.75% 1,962
Work from Home +1 1,572 £525 -4.55% 969
North of England +12 670 £475 -5.00% 468
South East -7 405 £500 -6.10% 590
Yorkshire +2 357 £482 -3.60% 165
Midlands -1 284 £498 +4.74% 246
North West +10 268 £470 -5.19% 229
Scotland +2 268 £425 -9.57% 102
South West -3 231 £531 -7.61% 275
West Midlands -2 229 £500 - 127
East of England -4 128 £500 +1.52% 209
East Midlands -15 54 £447 +5.18% 119
North East +12 53 £488 -2.50% 76
Wales -13 30 £475 -10.38% 74
Northern Ireland +9 29 £613 +13.95% 29

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
1 264 (5.06%) Apache Spark
2 195 (3.74%) Apache Airflow
3 169 (3.24%) Confluence
4 157 (3.01%) Apache
5 64 (1.23%) SAS
6 61 (1.17%) SharePoint
7 26 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.48%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 24 (0.46%) nginx
10 21 (0.40%) Palantir Foundry
11 15 (0.29%) Appian
12 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
13 11 (0.21%) Camunda
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 4 (0.077%) Oracle Application Server
15 4 (0.077%) Tomcat
16 3 (0.058%) Ethereum
16 3 (0.058%) WebSphere
Applications
1 132 (2.53%) Microsoft Excel
2 29 (0.56%) Microsoft Office
3 28 (0.54%) Chatbot
4 26 (0.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.31%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.15%) Weka
8 4 (0.077%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 10 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
4 8 (0.15%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.058%) Actimize
7 3 (0.058%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.058%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) Cloudability
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
9 1 (0.019%) Advent Geneva
9 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
9 1 (0.019%) SAP BPC
9 1 (0.019%) SAP IBP
9 1 (0.019%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 2,021 (38.77%) AWS
2 1,825 (35.01%) Azure
3 807 (15.48%) GCP
4 706 (13.54%) GitHub
5 525 (10.07%) Serverless
6 499 (9.57%) Power Platform
7 401 (7.69%) Azure DevOps
8 364 (6.98%) Amazon S3
9 352 (6.75%) AWS Lambda
10 350 (6.71%) GitHub Actions
11 278 (5.33%) Azure Data Factory
12 256 (4.91%) Snowflake
13 251 (4.81%) AWS CloudFormation
14 189 (3.63%) Amazon EKS
15 183 (3.51%) OpenShift
16 169 (3.24%) Amazon ECS
17 168 (3.22%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 158 (3.03%) Amazon EC2
19 148 (2.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 144 (2.76%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 203 (3.89%) Firewall
2 143 (2.74%) DNS
3 113 (2.17%) Network Security
4 101 (1.94%) TCP/IP
5 80 (1.53%) VPN
6 68 (1.30%) BGP
7 61 (1.17%) WAN
8 59 (1.13%) HTTP
9 41 (0.79%) MPLS
10 40 (0.77%) SAN
11 39 (0.75%) OSPF
11 39 (0.75%) Wireshark
12 37 (0.71%) SSL
13 34 (0.65%) LAN
14 30 (0.58%) DHCP
14 30 (0.58%) SD-WAN
14 30 (0.58%) VLAN
15 27 (0.52%) SNMP
16 23 (0.44%) SSH
16 23 (0.44%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 416 (7.98%) Power BI
2 376 (7.21%) PostgreSQL
3 311 (5.97%) Data Warehouse
4 239 (4.58%) Data Lake
5 211 (4.05%) NoSQL
6 200 (3.84%) SQL Server
7 192 (3.68%) Relational Database
8 168 (3.22%) Tableau
9 153 (2.93%) Big Data
10 144 (2.76%) Metadata
11 127 (2.44%) Delta Lake
12 121 (2.32%) Amazon RDS
13 116 (2.23%) BigQuery
14 112 (2.15%) MySQL
15 104 (2.00%) Amazon Redshift
16 103 (1.98%) MongoDB
17 95 (1.82%) Amazon Athena
18 91 (1.75%) Azure SQL Database
19 83 (1.59%) Hadoop
20 81 (1.55%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 668 (12.81%) Git
2 552 (10.59%) Jenkins
3 420 (8.06%) GitLab
4 296 (5.68%) JIRA
5 97 (1.86%) MLflow
6 90 (1.73%) Selenium
7 52 (1.00%) Postman
8 50 (0.96%) Bitbucket
9 44 (0.84%) Cucumber
10 42 (0.81%) JUnit
11 39 (0.75%) JMeter
12 38 (0.73%) Sonatype Nexus
13 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
13 28 (0.54%) Visual Studio
14 27 (0.52%) Artifactory
15 26 (0.50%) Cypress.io
16 22 (0.42%) CircleCI
16 22 (0.42%) Gatling
17 21 (0.40%) Maven
18 20 (0.38%) REST Assured
General
1 1,259 (24.15%) Social Skills
2 1,023 (19.62%) Finance
3 711 (13.64%) Analytical Skills
4 501 (9.61%) Public Sector
5 415 (7.96%) Banking
6 178 (3.41%) Front Office
7 129 (2.47%) Documentation Skills
8 98 (1.88%) Investment Banking
9 66 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 64 (1.23%) Retail
11 63 (1.21%) Marketing
12 58 (1.11%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.07%) Legal
14 55 (1.06%) Financial Institution
14 55 (1.06%) Influencing Skills
15 52 (1.00%) Telecoms
16 44 (0.84%) Manufacturing
17 33 (0.63%) Presentation Skills
18 28 (0.54%) Military
19 25 (0.48%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 972 (18.65%) Developer
2 745 (14.29%) Data Engineer
3 731 (14.02%) Senior
4 442 (8.48%) Python Developer
5 351 (6.73%) Architect
6 347 (6.66%) Lead
7 292 (5.60%) DevOps Engineer
8 288 (5.52%) Python Engineer
9 280 (5.37%) Analyst
10 256 (4.91%) AWS Engineer
11 252 (4.83%) Software Engineer
12 245 (4.70%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 203 (3.89%) Data Scientist
14 193 (3.70%) Platform Engineer
15 160 (3.07%) Azure Engineer
16 157 (3.01%) Senior Developer
17 141 (2.70%) Data Analyst
18 138 (2.65%) Senior Data Engineer
19 137 (2.63%) Full-Stack Developer
20 133 (2.55%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 453 (8.69%) REST
2 355 (6.81%) React
3 335 (6.43%) PySpark
4 329 (6.31%) Kafka
5 287 (5.51%) Node.js
6 229 (4.39%) Pandas
7 222 (4.26%) .NET
8 209 (4.01%) PyTorch
9 198 (3.80%) RESTful
10 196 (3.76%) FastAPI
11 174 (3.34%) TensorFlow
12 157 (3.01%) NumPy
13 151 (2.90%) scikit-learn
14 142 (2.72%) AngularJS
15 138 (2.65%) Flask
16 136 (2.61%) JSON
17 121 (2.32%) Django
18 119 (2.28%) LangChain
19 111 (2.13%) pytest
20 107 (2.05%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 528 (10.13%) Cloud Native
2 218 (4.18%) Distributed Systems
3 200 (3.84%) Algorithms
4 146 (2.80%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.44%) Equities
6 117 (2.24%) Fixed Income
7 112 (2.15%) Data Protection Act
8 108 (2.07%) Data Structures
9 107 (2.05%) Derivative
10 106 (2.03%) AI Agents
11 99 (1.90%) Hybrid Cloud
12 98 (1.88%) Onboarding
13 96 (1.84%) Legacy Systems
14 90 (1.73%) Data Centre
15 89 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
16 87 (1.67%) Public Cloud
17 83 (1.59%) Security Posture
18 82 (1.57%) Management Information System
19 56 (1.07%) Hedge funds
20 54 (1.04%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 679 (13.03%) Linux
2 320 (6.14%) Windows
3 184 (3.53%) Unix
4 97 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.27%) Windows Server
6 32 (0.61%) VMS
7 31 (0.59%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.54%) Android
9 21 (0.40%) Mac OS
10 18 (0.35%) Solaris
11 17 (0.33%) AIX
11 17 (0.33%) CentOS
12 15 (0.29%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.17%) Windows 7
14 7 (0.13%) Kali Linux
15 6 (0.12%) Debian
16 5 (0.096%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.096%) Rocky
16 5 (0.096%) zOS
17 4 (0.077%) Amazon Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,931 (37.04%) CI/CD
2 1,499 (28.76%) DevOps
3 1,213 (23.27%) Agile
4 1,134 (21.75%) AI
5 1,044 (20.03%) Problem-Solving
6 1,043 (20.01%) Analytics
7 930 (17.84%) Infrastructure as Code
8 849 (16.29%) Data Pipeline
9 845 (16.21%) Machine Learning
10 773 (14.83%) Containerisation
11 720 (13.81%) Data Engineering
12 694 (13.31%) Data Modelling
13 677 (12.99%) ETL
14 624 (11.97%) Data Science
15 602 (11.55%) Test Automation
16 585 (11.22%) Software Engineering
17 504 (9.67%) Observability
18 503 (9.65%) Business Intelligence
19 427 (8.19%) LLM
20 398 (7.63%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,655 (31.75%) SQL
2 749 (14.37%) Java
3 686 (13.16%) PowerShell
4 603 (11.57%) Bash
5 492 (9.44%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.75%) TypeScript
7 342 (6.56%) C#
8 227 (4.35%) Go
9 169 (3.24%) C++
10 157 (3.01%) R
11 125 (2.40%) Scala
12 107 (2.05%) Ruby
12 107 (2.05%) Shell Script
13 99 (1.90%) Perl
14 79 (1.52%) Bicep
15 56 (1.07%) Kusto Query Language
16 48 (0.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 47 (0.90%) C
18 44 (0.84%) T-SQL
19 40 (0.77%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,216 (23.33%) Security Cleared
2 971 (18.63%) SC Cleared
3 442 (8.48%) Degree
4 209 (4.01%) Computer Science Degree
5 150 (2.88%) DV Cleared
6 126 (2.42%) BPSS Clearance
7 125 (2.40%) Master's Degree
8 124 (2.38%) AWS Certification
9 105 (2.01%) Azure Certification
10 96 (1.84%) CISSP
11 72 (1.38%) Cisco Certification
12 56 (1.07%) CCNP
13 54 (1.04%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 48 (0.92%) CISM
15 47 (0.90%) PhD
16 36 (0.69%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
18 33 (0.63%) ISTQB
19 29 (0.56%) CEH
20 27 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 504 (9.67%) Data Quality
2 212 (4.07%) QA
3 179 (3.43%) GDPR
4 111 (2.13%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 105 (2.01%) NIST
6 77 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.63%) SLA
9 30 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 24 (0.46%) NCSC
12 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.31%) WCAG
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
14 11 (0.21%) PSD2
15 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.19%) MiFID
System Software
1 933 (17.90%) Docker
2 168 (3.22%) Active Directory
3 117 (2.24%) VMware Infrastructure
4 59 (1.13%) vSphere
5 55 (1.06%) Virtual Machines
6 51 (0.98%) VMware NSX
7 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
8 27 (0.52%) Firmware
9 14 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 11 (0.21%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.19%) HDFS
12 10 (0.19%) Lustre
13 9 (0.17%) GPFS
14 8 (0.15%) Ceph
14 8 (0.15%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.096%) NFS
15 5 (0.096%) Postfix
15 5 (0.096%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,126 (21.60%) Terraform
2 1,044 (20.03%) Kubernetes
3 542 (10.40%) Ansible
4 352 (6.75%) Grafana
5 308 (5.91%) Prometheus
6 99 (1.90%) Argo
7 77 (1.48%) Puppet
8 51 (0.98%) Istio
9 47 (0.90%) vRealize
10 38 (0.73%) Kibana
11 37 (0.71%) vCenter Server
12 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
13 29 (0.56%) Nessus
13 29 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.46%) NetBackup
15 22 (0.42%) Rancher
16 20 (0.38%) Control-M
16 20 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
17 17 (0.33%) Kubeflow
17 17 (0.33%) Nagios
Vendors
1 637 (12.22%) Microsoft
2 554 (10.63%) Databricks
3 305 (5.85%) Google
4 227 (4.35%) Splunk
5 217 (4.16%) Oracle
5 217 (4.16%) VMware
6 153 (2.93%) Red Hat
7 122 (2.34%) Cisco
8 118 (2.26%) OpenAI
9 102 (1.96%) ServiceNow
10 84 (1.61%) CyberArk
11 76 (1.46%) Foundry
12 69 (1.32%) BeyondTrust
13 63 (1.21%) Informatica
14 61 (1.17%) F5
15 58 (1.11%) IBM
15 58 (1.11%) Palo Alto
16 48 (0.92%) Dynatrace
17 43 (0.82%) SAP
18 40 (0.77%) Atlassian