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

6 months to
1 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 10 14
Rank change year-on-year -2 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,679 4,266 3,925
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.65% 12.97% 9.95%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.02% 39.41% 31.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,705 2,861 2,850
10th Percentile £375 £360 £375
25th Percentile £431 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £535 £575
Median % change year-on-year -1.87% -6.96% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £709
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £505
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.97% -3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 134 69 119
10th Percentile £28.95 £26.00 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.83 £33.91 £30.63
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -13.04% -8.00%
75th Percentile £76.69 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.83 £50.00 £66.25
% change year-on-year +5.67% -24.53% +15.22%

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 14,192 10,825 12,288
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.62% 32.91% 31.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,222 7,296 8,681
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £503 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.99% -4.29% -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £499
% change year-on-year +3.16% -4.81% -0.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 532 256 417
10th Percentile £31.30 £27.97 £27.45
25th Percentile £50.56 £36.19 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.95 £81.48 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +7.35%

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 1 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 1 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 1 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 4,821 £538 -2.27% 3,766
London -4 2,783 £575 - 2,229
UK excluding London -6 2,226 £500 +2.04% 2,029
Work from Home -6 1,569 £530 -3.64% 1,531
North of England +3 778 £500 +4.17% 497
South East -9 450 £538 +7.50% 548
Yorkshire +1 405 £500 +1.44% 144
Scotland +2 301 £430 -13.31% 127
North West +6 296 £525 +10.53% 266
South West -1 288 £503 -8.64% 280
Midlands -16 253 £477 +6.00% 216
West Midlands -14 202 £469 +4.22% 131
East of England -13 136 £500 -0.25% 216
North East -2 88 £425 -10.53% 93
East Midlands -9 50 £488 +14.82% 85
Wales -1 31 £500 +17.65% 114
Northern Ireland +3 19 £363 -32.56% 57

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
1 285 (5.02%) Apache Spark
2 282 (4.97%) Apache Airflow
3 216 (3.80%) Apache
4 183 (3.22%) Confluence
5 56 (0.99%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.86%) SAS
7 42 (0.74%) SharePoint
8 25 (0.44%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 21 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
11 19 (0.33%) nginx
12 12 (0.21%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) CMS
14 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
14 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
15 7 (0.12%) CICS
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.088%) Camunda
17 5 (0.088%) JBoss
Applications
1 118 (2.08%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.56%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.42%) Microsoft Office
3 24 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 21 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
5 18 (0.32%) MS Visio
6 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
7 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) Navisworks
8 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.018%) Revit
8 1 (0.018%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.088%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.088%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.070%) Remedy AR System
8 4 (0.070%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.035%) Bloomberg AIM
10 2 (0.035%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,132 (37.54%) AWS
2 1,924 (33.88%) Azure
3 863 (15.20%) GCP
4 708 (12.47%) GitHub
5 517 (9.10%) Power Platform
6 468 (8.24%) Serverless
7 418 (7.36%) Azure DevOps
8 412 (7.25%) Amazon S3
9 397 (6.99%) GitHub Actions
10 357 (6.29%) AWS Lambda
11 308 (5.42%) Snowflake
12 238 (4.19%) Azure Data Factory
13 232 (4.09%) dbt
14 196 (3.45%) AWS CloudFormation
15 179 (3.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 179 (3.15%) Amazon EKS
16 153 (2.69%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 151 (2.66%) OpenShift
18 134 (2.36%) Amazon EC2
19 129 (2.27%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 268 (4.72%) Firewall
2 202 (3.56%) DNS
3 136 (2.39%) TCP/IP
4 117 (2.06%) BGP
5 115 (2.03%) VPN
6 111 (1.95%) Network Security
7 107 (1.88%) WAN
8 75 (1.32%) DHCP
9 74 (1.30%) OSPF
10 59 (1.04%) VLAN
11 55 (0.97%) BIG-IP
11 55 (0.97%) SD-WAN
12 53 (0.93%) SAN
13 51 (0.90%) HTTP
13 51 (0.90%) SSL
13 51 (0.90%) VXLAN
14 44 (0.77%) SNMP
15 43 (0.76%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 39 (0.69%) Ethernet VPN
17 34 (0.60%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 467 (8.22%) Power BI
2 344 (6.06%) PostgreSQL
3 327 (5.76%) Data Warehouse
4 228 (4.01%) SQL Server
5 202 (3.56%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.52%) Relational Database
6 200 (3.52%) Tableau
7 187 (3.29%) Metadata
8 170 (2.99%) NoSQL
9 157 (2.76%) BigQuery
10 153 (2.69%) Big Data
11 140 (2.47%) Amazon Redshift
12 138 (2.43%) Amazon Athena
13 132 (2.32%) MongoDB
14 122 (2.15%) Delta Lake
15 111 (1.95%) DynamoDB
16 110 (1.94%) Amazon RDS
17 86 (1.51%) MySQL
18 74 (1.30%) Snowflake Schema
19 68 (1.20%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 697 (12.27%) Git
2 516 (9.09%) Jenkins
3 416 (7.33%) GitLab
4 304 (5.35%) JIRA
5 85 (1.50%) Selenium
6 66 (1.16%) MLflow
7 51 (0.90%) Postman
8 45 (0.79%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.76%) JMeter
10 41 (0.72%) SonarQube
11 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
12 34 (0.60%) REST Assured
13 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
14 32 (0.56%) Artifactory
15 31 (0.55%) Claude Code
16 29 (0.51%) Sonatype Nexus
17 28 (0.49%) Gatling
18 27 (0.48%) JUnit
18 27 (0.48%) Maven
19 20 (0.35%) Zephyr
General
1 1,226 (21.59%) Finance
2 1,225 (21.57%) Social Skills
3 801 (14.10%) Analytical Skills
4 571 (10.05%) Public Sector
5 438 (7.71%) Banking
6 209 (3.68%) Front Office
7 128 (2.25%) Investment Banking
8 127 (2.24%) Documentation Skills
9 108 (1.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 104 (1.83%) Retail
11 86 (1.51%) Marketing
12 71 (1.25%) Telecoms
13 66 (1.16%) Pharmaceutical
14 59 (1.04%) Legal
15 56 (0.99%) Military
16 49 (0.86%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.83%) Publishing
18 44 (0.77%) Influencing Skills
19 42 (0.74%) Manufacturing
20 37 (0.65%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 971 (17.10%) Developer
2 916 (16.13%) Senior
3 855 (15.06%) Data Engineer
4 513 (9.03%) Python Developer
5 461 (8.12%) Lead
6 409 (7.20%) Python Engineer
7 329 (5.79%) Software Engineer
8 321 (5.65%) DevOps Engineer
9 291 (5.12%) Architect
10 290 (5.11%) Analyst
11 252 (4.44%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 246 (4.33%) AWS Engineer
13 221 (3.89%) Data Scientist
14 193 (3.40%) Cloud Engineer
14 193 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
15 181 (3.19%) Senior Developer
16 176 (3.10%) Senior Data Engineer
17 173 (3.05%) Azure Engineer
18 147 (2.59%) Data Analyst
19 143 (2.52%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 424 (7.47%) REST
2 379 (6.67%) PySpark
3 365 (6.43%) React
4 360 (6.34%) Kafka
5 231 (4.07%) .NET
6 217 (3.82%) Node.js
7 210 (3.70%) FastAPI
8 205 (3.61%) JSON
8 205 (3.61%) RESTful
9 188 (3.31%) Pandas
10 180 (3.17%) Django
11 151 (2.66%) PyTorch
12 142 (2.50%) LangChain
13 119 (2.10%) Flask
14 117 (2.06%) NumPy
15 109 (1.92%) scikit-learn
16 105 (1.85%) OAuth
16 105 (1.85%) pytest
16 105 (1.85%) TensorFlow
17 104 (1.83%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 769 (13.54%) Cloud Native
2 322 (5.67%) Distributed Systems
3 207 (3.65%) AI Agents
4 202 (3.56%) Onboarding
5 161 (2.84%) Data Centre
6 149 (2.62%) Product Ownership
7 148 (2.61%) Algorithms
8 138 (2.43%) Data Structures
9 128 (2.25%) Legacy Systems
10 118 (2.08%) Hybrid Cloud
11 117 (2.06%) Derivative
12 111 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
13 106 (1.87%) Management Information System
14 104 (1.83%) Fixed Income
15 97 (1.71%) Equities
16 83 (1.46%) Security Posture
17 70 (1.23%) Public Cloud
18 66 (1.16%) Enterprise Software
19 65 (1.14%) Self-Motivation
20 64 (1.13%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 698 (12.29%) Linux
2 324 (5.71%) Windows
3 226 (3.98%) Unix
4 133 (2.34%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 76 (1.34%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.72%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.53%) AIX
8 29 (0.51%) VMS
9 20 (0.35%) Android
10 16 (0.28%) Solaris
11 13 (0.23%) Apple iOS
11 13 (0.23%) CentOS
12 12 (0.21%) zOS
13 11 (0.19%) Mac OS
14 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Debian
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 5 (0.088%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,173 (38.26%) CI/CD
2 1,594 (28.07%) DevOps
3 1,425 (25.09%) AI
4 1,283 (22.59%) Agile
5 1,176 (20.71%) Analytics
6 1,106 (19.48%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,026 (18.07%) Data Pipeline
8 916 (16.13%) Problem-Solving
9 910 (16.02%) Machine Learning
10 863 (15.20%) Software Engineering
11 819 (14.42%) Data Engineering
12 774 (13.63%) Data Modelling
13 766 (13.49%) Containerisation
14 681 (11.99%) ETL
15 677 (11.92%) Observability
16 635 (11.18%) Data Science
17 592 (10.42%) Test Automation
18 552 (9.72%) Business Intelligence
19 543 (9.56%) Continuous Improvement
20 525 (9.24%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,839 (32.38%) SQL
2 816 (14.37%) Java
3 730 (12.85%) Bash
4 700 (12.33%) PowerShell
5 467 (8.22%) JavaScript
6 395 (6.96%) TypeScript
7 303 (5.34%) C#
8 213 (3.75%) Go
9 160 (2.82%) R
10 145 (2.55%) C++
11 128 (2.25%) Shell Script
12 126 (2.22%) Scala
13 118 (2.08%) Bicep
14 79 (1.39%) Perl
15 59 (1.04%) C
15 59 (1.04%) Rust
16 56 (0.99%) Groovy
17 55 (0.97%) Ruby
18 54 (0.95%) PL/SQL
19 50 (0.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,295 (22.80%) Security Cleared
2 1,045 (18.40%) SC Cleared
3 435 (7.66%) Degree
4 200 (3.52%) DV Cleared
5 154 (2.71%) Computer Science Degree
6 141 (2.48%) AWS Certification
7 133 (2.34%) Azure Certification
7 133 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
8 88 (1.55%) CISSP
9 87 (1.53%) Cisco Certification
10 77 (1.36%) Master's Degree
11 56 (0.99%) CCNP
12 45 (0.79%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 42 (0.74%) Microsoft Certification
13 42 (0.74%) PhD
14 33 (0.58%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 33 (0.58%) CISM
15 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
16 29 (0.51%) CCIE
17 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 593 (10.44%) Data Quality
2 267 (4.70%) QA
3 113 (1.99%) GDPR
4 105 (1.85%) NIST
5 104 (1.83%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 93 (1.64%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.62%) SLA
8 26 (0.46%) WCAG
9 25 (0.44%) Actionable Recommendations
10 24 (0.42%) NCSC
11 21 (0.37%) PCI DSS
11 21 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.33%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.19%) SOC 2
15 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) GRC
17 7 (0.12%) HL7
18 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 908 (15.99%) Docker
2 150 (2.64%) Active Directory
3 126 (2.22%) VMware Infrastructure
4 70 (1.23%) Virtual Machines
5 49 (0.86%) vSphere
6 40 (0.70%) Hyper-V
7 39 (0.69%) VMware NSX
8 31 (0.55%) Firmware
9 21 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 13 (0.23%) Squid
12 12 (0.21%) KVM
13 11 (0.19%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
14 10 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
15 9 (0.16%) HDFS
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
16 7 (0.12%) PowerHA
17 4 (0.070%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 1,275 (22.45%) Terraform
2 1,086 (19.12%) Kubernetes
3 604 (10.64%) Ansible
4 349 (6.15%) Grafana
5 268 (4.72%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.50%) Puppet
7 74 (1.30%) Argo
8 60 (1.06%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.70%) Istio
10 34 (0.60%) vCenter Server
11 31 (0.55%) vRealize
12 29 (0.51%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
14 26 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
15 24 (0.42%) Nagios
16 23 (0.41%) Control-M
17 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
18 19 (0.33%) Tivoli
19 18 (0.32%) NetBackup
19 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 660 (11.62%) Microsoft
2 570 (10.04%) Databricks
3 338 (5.95%) Google
4 246 (4.33%) Oracle
5 210 (3.70%) Splunk
6 173 (3.05%) VMware
7 147 (2.59%) OpenAI
8 137 (2.41%) Cisco
9 119 (2.10%) ServiceNow
10 105 (1.85%) Red Hat
11 95 (1.67%) Dynatrace
12 93 (1.64%) F5
13 87 (1.53%) Palo Alto
14 83 (1.46%) Informatica
15 81 (1.43%) IBM
16 70 (1.23%) Fortinet
17 64 (1.13%) CyberArk
18 63 (1.11%) Foundry
19 61 (1.07%) Salesforce
20 59 (1.04%) SAP