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

6 months to
13 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 9 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +6 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,166 3,959 4,117
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.06% 13.44% 9.24%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.17% 39.39% 31.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,509 2,720 2,889
10th Percentile £363 £380 £400
25th Percentile £416 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.95% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £749 £800 £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 53 112
10th Percentile £28.73 £20.34 £21.30
25th Percentile £41.94 £23.00 £35.00
Median hourly rate £54.00 £44.50 £50.25
Median % change year-on-year +21.35% -11.44% -22.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £66.00 £66.38
90th Percentile £79.80 £78.46 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £52.50 £46.84
% change year-on-year -2.46% +12.08% -27.94%

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 12,548 10,051 12,959
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.30% 34.11% 29.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,338 6,636 9,140
10th Percentile £354 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £423 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -5.75%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £719 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £488 £488
% change year-on-year -2.56% - -3.89%
Number of hourly rates quoted 490 240 501
10th Percentile £41.55 £21.25 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.14 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -6.80%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.97% +3.48% -5.23%

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 13 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 13 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 13 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 4,324 £517 -9.65% 2,795
London -2 2,450 £550 -8.33% 1,252
UK excluding London -2 1,990 £481 -3.75% 2,062
Work from Home 0 1,563 £525 -4.55% 1,095
North of England +12 666 £478 -4.50% 495
South East -6 417 £500 -6.10% 630
Yorkshire +4 354 £482 -3.60% 195
Midlands -1 287 £500 +2.04% 247
Scotland +2 273 £425 -9.57% 142
North West +11 266 £475 -4.90% 221
West Midlands -3 237 £500 -1.19% 115
South West -2 224 £538 -6.52% 265
East of England -6 126 £500 - 216
North East +13 52 £475 -7.32% 83
East Midlands -16 49 £447 +5.18% 132
Wales -16 31 £473 -10.85% 76
Northern Ireland +8 29 £613 +16.67% 28

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
1 273 (5.28%) Apache Spark
2 194 (3.76%) Apache Airflow
3 165 (3.19%) Confluence
4 155 (3.00%) Apache
5 64 (1.24%) SAS
6 60 (1.16%) SharePoint
7 27 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
8 24 (0.46%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.46%) nginx
8 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
10 18 (0.35%) Appian
11 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
12 10 (0.19%) Camunda
13 7 (0.14%) Apache Superset
13 7 (0.14%) CMS
14 4 (0.077%) Oracle Application Server
14 4 (0.077%) Tomcat
15 3 (0.058%) CICS
15 3 (0.058%) IIS
Applications
1 129 (2.50%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.60%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.50%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.31%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.15%) Weka
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
10 2 (0.039%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 7 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
5 6 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.058%) Actimize
7 3 (0.058%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.058%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
8 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.039%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.039%) Odoo
8 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.039%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.039%) Shopify
9 1 (0.019%) Advent Geneva
9 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
9 1 (0.019%) ION MarketView
9 1 (0.019%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 2,001 (38.73%) AWS
2 1,798 (34.80%) Azure
3 805 (15.58%) GCP
4 688 (13.32%) GitHub
5 529 (10.24%) Serverless
6 500 (9.68%) Power Platform
7 391 (7.57%) Azure DevOps
8 355 (6.87%) Amazon S3
9 344 (6.66%) AWS Lambda
10 339 (6.56%) GitHub Actions
11 266 (5.15%) Azure Data Factory
12 257 (4.97%) Snowflake
13 248 (4.80%) AWS CloudFormation
14 190 (3.68%) Amazon EKS
15 176 (3.41%) OpenShift
16 167 (3.23%) Amazon ECS
17 160 (3.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 158 (3.06%) Amazon EC2
19 145 (2.81%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 143 (2.77%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 213 (4.12%) Firewall
2 139 (2.69%) DNS
3 108 (2.09%) Network Security
3 108 (2.09%) TCP/IP
4 76 (1.47%) VPN
5 63 (1.22%) BGP
5 63 (1.22%) HTTP
6 59 (1.14%) WAN
7 41 (0.79%) Wireshark
8 40 (0.77%) MPLS
9 39 (0.75%) SAN
9 39 (0.75%) SSL
10 35 (0.68%) OSPF
11 34 (0.66%) DHCP
12 33 (0.64%) LAN
13 32 (0.62%) SD-WAN
14 28 (0.54%) VLAN
15 23 (0.45%) SNMP
15 23 (0.45%) VXLAN
16 22 (0.43%) BIG-IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 418 (8.09%) Power BI
2 394 (7.63%) PostgreSQL
3 316 (6.12%) Data Warehouse
4 240 (4.65%) Data Lake
5 226 (4.37%) NoSQL
6 199 (3.85%) SQL Server
7 197 (3.81%) Relational Database
8 167 (3.23%) Tableau
9 161 (3.12%) Big Data
10 138 (2.67%) Metadata
11 123 (2.38%) BigQuery
12 121 (2.34%) Amazon RDS
13 120 (2.32%) Delta Lake
14 119 (2.30%) MySQL
15 108 (2.09%) Amazon Redshift
16 102 (1.97%) MongoDB
17 98 (1.90%) Amazon Athena
18 91 (1.76%) Azure SQL Database
19 85 (1.65%) Hadoop
20 80 (1.55%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 656 (12.70%) Git
2 541 (10.47%) Jenkins
3 418 (8.09%) GitLab
4 299 (5.79%) JIRA
5 92 (1.78%) MLflow
6 91 (1.76%) Selenium
7 50 (0.97%) Postman
8 49 (0.95%) Bitbucket
9 46 (0.89%) Cucumber
10 41 (0.79%) JMeter
10 41 (0.79%) Sonatype Nexus
11 40 (0.77%) JUnit
12 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
12 28 (0.54%) Visual Studio
13 26 (0.50%) Cypress.io
14 24 (0.46%) CircleCI
15 22 (0.43%) Artifactory
16 20 (0.39%) Maven
17 19 (0.37%) Robot Framework
17 19 (0.37%) SonarQube
General
1 1,272 (24.62%) Social Skills
2 1,021 (19.76%) Finance
3 716 (13.86%) Analytical Skills
4 493 (9.54%) Public Sector
5 416 (8.05%) Banking
6 177 (3.43%) Front Office
7 128 (2.48%) Documentation Skills
8 101 (1.96%) Investment Banking
9 70 (1.36%) Retail
10 65 (1.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 64 (1.24%) Marketing
12 62 (1.20%) Pharmaceutical
13 58 (1.12%) Financial Institution
14 53 (1.03%) Legal
15 51 (0.99%) Influencing Skills
15 51 (0.99%) Telecoms
16 44 (0.85%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
18 33 (0.64%) Military
19 23 (0.45%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 970 (18.78%) Developer
2 729 (14.11%) Data Engineer
3 718 (13.90%) Senior
4 440 (8.52%) Python Developer
5 341 (6.60%) Lead
6 340 (6.58%) Architect
7 292 (5.65%) DevOps Engineer
8 289 (5.59%) Python Engineer
9 279 (5.40%) Analyst
10 261 (5.05%) Software Engineer
11 257 (4.97%) AWS Engineer
12 242 (4.68%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 202 (3.91%) Data Scientist
14 178 (3.45%) Platform Engineer
15 159 (3.08%) Azure Engineer
16 153 (2.96%) Senior Developer
17 140 (2.71%) Full-Stack Developer
18 138 (2.67%) Data Analyst
19 136 (2.63%) Senior Data Engineer
20 127 (2.46%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 446 (8.63%) REST
2 365 (7.07%) React
3 332 (6.43%) PySpark
4 329 (6.37%) Kafka
5 287 (5.56%) Node.js
6 226 (4.37%) Pandas
7 222 (4.30%) PyTorch
8 218 (4.22%) FastAPI
9 217 (4.20%) .NET
10 205 (3.97%) RESTful
11 186 (3.60%) TensorFlow
12 159 (3.08%) NumPy
13 150 (2.90%) scikit-learn
14 141 (2.73%) AngularJS
15 135 (2.61%) Flask
16 126 (2.44%) JSON
17 124 (2.40%) LangChain
18 118 (2.28%) Django
19 112 (2.17%) pytest
20 104 (2.01%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 516 (9.99%) Cloud Native
2 205 (3.97%) Algorithms
3 202 (3.91%) Distributed Systems
4 138 (2.67%) Product Ownership
5 129 (2.50%) Equities
6 121 (2.34%) Data Protection Act
7 114 (2.21%) Fixed Income
8 107 (2.07%) Data Structures
9 106 (2.05%) Onboarding
10 105 (2.03%) AI Agents
10 105 (2.03%) Derivative
11 95 (1.84%) Legacy Systems
12 91 (1.76%) Hybrid Cloud
13 88 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
14 87 (1.68%) Security Posture
15 86 (1.66%) Data Centre
16 84 (1.63%) Public Cloud
17 82 (1.59%) Management Information System
18 58 (1.12%) Hedge funds
19 54 (1.05%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 682 (13.20%) Linux
2 326 (6.31%) Windows
3 183 (3.54%) Unix
4 93 (1.80%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 69 (1.34%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.64%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.62%) Android
8 30 (0.58%) VMS
9 22 (0.43%) Mac OS
10 21 (0.41%) CentOS
11 18 (0.35%) Apple iOS
11 18 (0.35%) Solaris
12 12 (0.23%) AIX
13 9 (0.17%) Kali Linux
13 9 (0.17%) Windows 7
14 5 (0.097%) Debian
14 5 (0.097%) Embedded Linux
14 5 (0.097%) zOS
15 4 (0.077%) Amazon Linux
15 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,893 (36.64%) CI/CD
2 1,460 (28.26%) DevOps
3 1,228 (23.77%) Agile
4 1,117 (21.62%) AI
5 1,064 (20.60%) Problem-Solving
6 1,021 (19.76%) Analytics
7 897 (17.36%) Infrastructure as Code
8 854 (16.53%) Machine Learning
9 838 (16.22%) Data Pipeline
10 768 (14.87%) Containerisation
11 704 (13.63%) Data Engineering
12 681 (13.18%) Data Modelling
12 681 (13.18%) ETL
13 627 (12.14%) Data Science
14 606 (11.73%) Test Automation
15 596 (11.54%) Software Engineering
16 506 (9.79%) Observability
17 496 (9.60%) Business Intelligence
18 433 (8.38%) LLM
19 390 (7.55%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,646 (31.86%) SQL
2 731 (14.15%) Java
3 672 (13.01%) PowerShell
4 593 (11.48%) Bash
5 503 (9.74%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.81%) TypeScript
7 334 (6.47%) C#
8 226 (4.37%) Go
9 173 (3.35%) C++
10 152 (2.94%) R
11 121 (2.34%) Scala
12 116 (2.25%) Shell Script
13 108 (2.09%) Perl
14 97 (1.88%) Ruby
15 72 (1.39%) Bicep
16 60 (1.16%) Kusto Query Language
17 48 (0.93%) C
18 47 (0.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 44 (0.85%) VBA
20 40 (0.77%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,179 (22.82%) Security Cleared
2 940 (18.20%) SC Cleared
3 453 (8.77%) Degree
4 214 (4.14%) Computer Science Degree
5 146 (2.83%) DV Cleared
6 129 (2.50%) AWS Certification
7 124 (2.40%) Master's Degree
8 122 (2.36%) BPSS Clearance
9 103 (1.99%) Azure Certification
10 94 (1.82%) CISSP
11 73 (1.41%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.12%) CCNP
13 50 (0.97%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 46 (0.89%) PhD
15 45 (0.87%) CISM
16 38 (0.74%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.62%) ISTQB
19 31 (0.60%) CEH
19 31 (0.60%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 495 (9.58%) Data Quality
2 215 (4.16%) QA
3 176 (3.41%) GDPR
4 107 (2.07%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 105 (2.03%) NIST
6 78 (1.51%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.66%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.64%) SLA
9 30 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 22 (0.43%) NCSC
12 19 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
14 14 (0.27%) WCAG
15 12 (0.23%) EU AI Act
16 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 10 (0.19%) MiFID
17 10 (0.19%) PMO
17 10 (0.19%) PSD2
System Software
1 940 (18.20%) Docker
2 173 (3.35%) Active Directory
3 114 (2.21%) VMware Infrastructure
4 55 (1.06%) Virtual Machines
4 55 (1.06%) vSphere
5 47 (0.91%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.56%) Hyper-V
7 25 (0.48%) Firmware
8 15 (0.29%) KVM
9 14 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
10 12 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 11 (0.21%) HDFS
12 10 (0.19%) Lustre
13 9 (0.17%) GPFS
14 8 (0.15%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.097%) Ceph
15 5 (0.097%) NetIQ eDirectory
15 5 (0.097%) NFS
15 5 (0.097%) Postfix
Systems Management
1 1,106 (21.41%) Terraform
2 1,048 (20.29%) Kubernetes
3 539 (10.43%) Ansible
4 352 (6.81%) Grafana
5 313 (6.06%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.82%) Argo
7 75 (1.45%) Puppet
8 49 (0.95%) Istio
9 42 (0.81%) vRealize
10 41 (0.79%) Kibana
11 37 (0.72%) Nessus
12 33 (0.64%) Progress Chef
12 33 (0.64%) vCenter Server
13 29 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
14 27 (0.52%) Control-M
15 26 (0.50%) NetBackup
16 25 (0.48%) IBM Guardium
17 22 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
18 20 (0.39%) Rancher
19 16 (0.31%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 628 (12.16%) Microsoft
2 535 (10.36%) Databricks
3 308 (5.96%) Google
4 227 (4.39%) Splunk
5 219 (4.24%) Oracle
6 208 (4.03%) VMware
7 145 (2.81%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.34%) Cisco
9 119 (2.30%) OpenAI
10 102 (1.97%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.63%) CyberArk
12 82 (1.59%) Foundry
13 67 (1.30%) BeyondTrust
14 62 (1.20%) F5
15 61 (1.18%) Informatica
16 59 (1.14%) Palo Alto
17 51 (0.99%) IBM
18 47 (0.91%) SAP
19 44 (0.85%) Dynatrace
20 40 (0.77%) Tenable