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 9 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,647 4,459 4,200
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.36% 13.44% 11.06%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.48% 41.02% 34.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,678 2,887 2,853
10th Percentile £375 £358 £363
25th Percentile £445 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £640 £700
90th Percentile £750 £761 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -2.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 126 87 100
10th Percentile £35.63 £28.25 £20.12
25th Percentile £43.81 £34.88 £39.42
Median hourly rate £62.50 £50.00 £63.25
Median % change year-on-year +25.00% -20.95% -2.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.13 £71.88
90th Percentile £91.06 £79.75 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -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 14,302 10,869 12,198
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.24% 32.77% 32.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,290 7,140 8,017
10th Percentile £363 £342 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £645
90th Percentile £725 £734 £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 551 298 333
10th Percentile £21.65 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £44.75 £40.00 £44.49
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £75.38 £76.00
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 9 October 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 9 October 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 9 October 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 4,798 £550 +4.76% 10,636
London -4 2,851 £575 - 7,049
UK excluding London -8 2,157 £500 - 4,106
Work from Home -7 1,562 £535 -0.37% 3,871
North of England -1 747 £500 +5.26% 943
South East -6 450 £550 +9.90% 920
Yorkshire -2 377 £500 - 289
Scotland -1 319 £467 -6.60% 532
North West -1 292 £525 +19.66% 516
South West -3 273 £550 - 454
Midlands -23 221 £498 -0.50% 418
West Midlands -22 186 £520 +3.28% 266
East of England -17 142 £478 -11.16% 593
North East -4 87 £425 -8.11% 140
East Midlands -24 35 £425 +3.66% 151
Wales -9 26 £530 +23.98% 105
Northern Ireland +5 19 £375 -36.17% 171

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
1 295 (5.22%) Apache Airflow
2 279 (4.94%) Apache Spark
3 234 (4.14%) Apache
4 156 (2.76%) Confluence
5 57 (1.01%) SharePoint
6 56 (0.99%) Jupyter
7 33 (0.58%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 29 (0.51%) nginx
10 23 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
11 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
11 22 (0.39%) IIS
12 10 (0.18%) CMS
13 9 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
14 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
16 5 (0.089%) Camunda
16 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
17 4 (0.071%) CICS
Applications
1 101 (1.79%) Microsoft Excel
2 36 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
4 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.21%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
7 3 (0.053%) Revit
8 2 (0.035%) LaTeX
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.035%) Simulink
8 2 (0.035%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) AutoCAD
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Civil 3D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Remedy ITSM
2 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.28%) Aladdin
4 12 (0.21%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.11%) Front Arena
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) SAP IBP
10 3 (0.053%) Actimize
10 3 (0.053%) Cloudability
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.035%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,053 (36.36%) AWS
2 1,932 (34.21%) Azure
3 919 (16.27%) GCP
4 753 (13.33%) GitHub
5 474 (8.39%) Serverless
6 473 (8.38%) Power Platform
7 441 (7.81%) GitHub Actions
8 439 (7.77%) Azure DevOps
9 390 (6.91%) Amazon S3
10 346 (6.13%) AWS Lambda
11 344 (6.09%) Snowflake
12 252 (4.46%) dbt
13 212 (3.75%) Azure Data Factory
14 209 (3.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 200 (3.54%) Amazon EKS
16 188 (3.33%) AWS CloudFormation
17 184 (3.26%) Entra ID
18 146 (2.59%) Amazon EC2
19 136 (2.41%) SaaS
20 132 (2.34%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 286 (5.06%) Firewall
2 213 (3.77%) DNS
3 171 (3.03%) Network Security
4 153 (2.71%) TCP/IP
5 134 (2.37%) VPN
6 131 (2.32%) BGP
7 115 (2.04%) WAN
8 83 (1.47%) DHCP
9 81 (1.43%) OSPF
10 76 (1.35%) SD-WAN
11 63 (1.12%) BIG-IP
12 59 (1.04%) SSL
12 59 (1.04%) VLAN
13 55 (0.97%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 51 (0.90%) VXLAN
15 50 (0.89%) HTTP
16 47 (0.83%) Ethernet VPN
17 45 (0.80%) Broadband
18 43 (0.76%) MPLS
19 42 (0.74%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 422 (7.47%) Power BI
2 330 (5.84%) Data Warehouse
3 312 (5.53%) PostgreSQL
4 233 (4.13%) Metadata
5 198 (3.51%) Relational Database
6 197 (3.49%) Data Lake
7 184 (3.26%) SQL Server
8 176 (3.12%) BigQuery
9 161 (2.85%) Tableau
10 156 (2.76%) NoSQL
11 140 (2.48%) Amazon RDS
12 136 (2.41%) Big Data
13 132 (2.34%) Amazon Redshift
14 127 (2.25%) MongoDB
15 121 (2.14%) Delta Lake
16 118 (2.09%) Amazon Athena
17 105 (1.86%) DynamoDB
18 99 (1.75%) MySQL
19 76 (1.35%) Redis
20 63 (1.12%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 859 (15.21%) Git
2 534 (9.46%) Jenkins
3 502 (8.89%) GitLab
4 317 (5.61%) JIRA
5 124 (2.20%) Selenium
6 74 (1.31%) Postman
7 61 (1.08%) Claude Code
8 60 (1.06%) JMeter
9 55 (0.97%) SonarQube
10 52 (0.92%) MLflow
11 48 (0.85%) Bitbucket
12 44 (0.78%) Cucumber
13 38 (0.67%) REST Assured
14 37 (0.66%) Sonatype Nexus
15 35 (0.62%) Artifactory
15 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
16 34 (0.60%) Maven
17 31 (0.55%) LoadRunner
18 30 (0.53%) Gatling
19 25 (0.44%) Zephyr
General
1 1,334 (23.62%) Social Skills
2 1,316 (23.30%) Finance
3 841 (14.89%) Analytical Skills
4 547 (9.69%) Banking
5 544 (9.63%) Public Sector
6 171 (3.03%) Front Office
7 157 (2.78%) Investment Banking
8 117 (2.07%) Retail
9 110 (1.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 96 (1.70%) Documentation Skills
11 86 (1.52%) Marketing
12 84 (1.49%) Telecoms
13 62 (1.10%) Military
14 54 (0.96%) Law
15 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
16 51 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
17 48 (0.85%) Financial Institution
18 45 (0.80%) Legal
19 39 (0.69%) Publishing
20 36 (0.64%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,013 (17.94%) Senior
2 900 (15.94%) Developer
3 839 (14.86%) Data Engineer
4 504 (8.93%) Lead
5 478 (8.46%) Python Developer
6 422 (7.47%) Python Engineer
7 376 (6.66%) DevOps Engineer
8 313 (5.54%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 279 (4.94%) Software Engineer
10 277 (4.91%) Analyst
11 231 (4.09%) Architect
12 222 (3.93%) AWS Engineer
13 197 (3.49%) Cloud Engineer
14 193 (3.42%) Azure Engineer
15 192 (3.40%) Senior Data Engineer
16 186 (3.29%) Platform Engineer
16 186 (3.29%) Senior Developer
17 177 (3.13%) Data Scientist
18 148 (2.62%) Network Engineer
19 142 (2.51%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,409 (24.95%) Terraform
2 556 (9.85%) REST
3 380 (6.73%) Kafka
4 373 (6.61%) PySpark
5 323 (5.72%) React
6 244 (4.32%) .NET
7 220 (3.90%) FastAPI
8 214 (3.79%) JSON
9 213 (3.77%) Django
10 192 (3.40%) RESTful
11 163 (2.89%) pytest
12 158 (2.80%) LangChain
13 145 (2.57%) Node.js
14 140 (2.48%) Pandas
15 134 (2.37%) OAuth
16 127 (2.25%) Flask
17 114 (2.02%) LangGraph
18 109 (1.93%) YAML
19 106 (1.88%) HTML
20 104 (1.84%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 817 (14.47%) Cloud Native
2 300 (5.31%) AI Agents
3 286 (5.06%) Distributed Systems
4 266 (4.71%) Onboarding
5 165 (2.92%) Data Centre
6 153 (2.71%) Product Ownership
7 151 (2.67%) Data Structures
8 134 (2.37%) Legacy Systems
9 122 (2.16%) Algorithms
10 115 (2.04%) Enterprise Software
11 113 (2.00%) Hybrid Cloud
12 104 (1.84%) Management Information System
13 102 (1.81%) Data Protection Act
13 102 (1.81%) Derivative
14 97 (1.72%) Security Posture
15 88 (1.56%) Public Cloud
16 85 (1.51%) PKI
17 78 (1.38%) Equities
18 68 (1.20%) Linux Command Line
19 66 (1.17%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 778 (13.78%) Linux
2 343 (6.07%) Windows
3 239 (4.23%) Unix
4 154 (2.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.59%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.74%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.64%) VMS
8 24 (0.43%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 14 (0.25%) AIX
10 14 (0.25%) Android
11 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.16%) Apple iOS
13 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
13 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 8 (0.14%) zOS
14 6 (0.11%) FreeRTOS
15 5 (0.089%) Rocky
16 4 (0.071%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,423 (42.91%) CI/CD
2 1,674 (29.64%) DevOps
3 1,611 (28.53%) AI
4 1,324 (23.45%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,273 (22.54%) Agile
6 1,082 (19.16%) Analytics
7 987 (17.48%) Data Pipeline
8 960 (17.00%) Software Engineering
9 875 (15.49%) Problem-Solving
10 867 (15.35%) Data Engineering
11 836 (14.80%) Machine Learning
12 776 (13.74%) Containerisation
13 775 (13.72%) Observability
14 769 (13.62%) Data Modelling
15 730 (12.93%) Test Automation
16 694 (12.29%) Validation
17 674 (11.94%) Continuous Improvement
18 669 (11.85%) ETL
19 603 (10.68%) Platform Engineering
20 591 (10.47%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,833 (32.46%) SQL
2 786 (13.92%) Bash
3 782 (13.85%) Java
4 761 (13.48%) PowerShell
5 455 (8.06%) JavaScript
6 349 (6.18%) TypeScript
7 312 (5.53%) C#
8 223 (3.95%) Go
9 155 (2.74%) Shell Script
10 139 (2.46%) Bicep
11 132 (2.34%) R
12 126 (2.23%) C++
13 120 (2.13%) Scala
14 107 (1.89%) Perl
15 61 (1.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 58 (1.03%) Groovy
17 50 (0.89%) Rust
18 49 (0.87%) T-SQL
19 47 (0.83%) PL/SQL
20 46 (0.81%) C
Qualifications
1 1,388 (24.58%) Security Cleared
2 1,115 (19.74%) SC Cleared
3 397 (7.03%) Degree
4 256 (4.53%) DV Cleared
5 154 (2.73%) AWS Certification
6 151 (2.67%) Azure Certification
7 145 (2.57%) Computer Science Degree
8 131 (2.32%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.72%) CISSP
10 77 (1.36%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.26%) Master's Degree
12 47 (0.83%) Microsoft Certification
13 37 (0.66%) CCNP
14 33 (0.58%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 31 (0.55%) CCIE
15 31 (0.55%) CISM
15 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
16 29 (0.51%) DBS Check
17 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 664 (11.76%) Data Quality
2 326 (5.77%) QA
3 108 (1.91%) NIST
4 94 (1.66%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 84 (1.49%) Accessibility
5 84 (1.49%) GDPR
6 41 (0.73%) SLA
7 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
8 31 (0.55%) NCSC
9 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.43%) SOC 2
10 24 (0.43%) WCAG
11 17 (0.30%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
13 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
15 7 (0.12%) Basel III
15 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.12%) GRC
15 7 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 991 (17.55%) Docker
2 183 (3.24%) Active Directory
3 130 (2.30%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.19%) Virtual Machines
5 47 (0.83%) Hyper-V
6 33 (0.58%) vSphere
7 31 (0.55%) VMware NSX
8 27 (0.48%) NFS
9 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) Firmware
11 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 9 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
15 8 (0.14%) Ceph
15 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 8 (0.14%) zsh
16 7 (0.12%) HDFS
17 6 (0.11%) Postfix
18 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,205 (21.34%) Kubernetes
2 656 (11.62%) Ansible
3 333 (5.90%) Grafana
4 245 (4.34%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.45%) Puppet
6 74 (1.31%) Progress Chef
7 69 (1.22%) Argo
8 51 (0.90%) Single Sign-On
9 41 (0.73%) Kibana
10 37 (0.66%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) Packer
14 21 (0.37%) FortiGate
15 18 (0.32%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) Podman
16 16 (0.28%) QRadar
16 16 (0.28%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.27%) ITRS Geneos
17 15 (0.27%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 775 (13.72%) Microsoft
2 585 (10.36%) Databricks
3 415 (7.35%) Google
4 246 (4.36%) Oracle
5 212 (3.75%) Splunk
6 172 (3.05%) OpenAI
7 166 (2.94%) VMware
8 145 (2.57%) ServiceNow
9 138 (2.44%) Cisco
10 103 (1.82%) Dynatrace
11 96 (1.70%) Red Hat
12 94 (1.66%) IBM
13 93 (1.65%) F5
14 92 (1.63%) Palo Alto
15 91 (1.61%) Foundry
16 69 (1.22%) Fortinet
16 69 (1.22%) Informatica
17 67 (1.19%) CyberArk
17 67 (1.19%) SAP
18 56 (0.99%) Salesforce