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

6 months to
28 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 9 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +6 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,272 3,888 4,075
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.86% 13.38% 9.21%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.28% 39.28% 31.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,585 2,732 2,867
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £417 £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 £813 £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 114 52 105
10th Percentile £27.61 £21.25 £20.99
25th Percentile £41.25 £24.57 £31.25
Median hourly rate £53.25 £43.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +22.41% -13.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile £73.37 £61.38 £66.75
90th Percentile £80.14 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.75 £46.84
% change year-on-year +5.05% +4.08% -25.61%

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 12,770 9,898 12,918
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.73% 34.06% 29.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,479 6,655 9,124
10th Percentile £352 £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 £488
% change year-on-year -1.04% -1.54% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 243 484
10th Percentile £41.13 £22.27 £30.81
25th Percentile £53.75 £34.13 £46.23
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.63 £67.41
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.56% +3.90% -3.75%

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 4,426 £520 -7.76% 2,695
London -3 2,506 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London -1 2,020 £481 -3.75% 1,990
Work from Home +1 1,573 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +13 674 £479 -4.25% 475
South East -6 418 £500 -6.10% 576
Yorkshire 0 368 £482 -3.60% 164
Midlands +1 286 £496 +4.47% 255
North West +8 260 £475 -4.90% 230
Scotland +2 257 £425 -9.57% 104
South West +3 242 £525 -8.70% 280
West Midlands -2 229 £500 - 130
East of England +2 140 £500 - 219
East Midlands -16 56 £450 +5.88% 125
North East +16 55 £488 -1.27% 83
Northern Ireland +10 29 £613 +16.67% 33
Wales -16 29 £475 -10.38% 78

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 (5.01%) Apache Spark
2 201 (3.81%) Apache Airflow
3 172 (3.26%) Confluence
4 163 (3.09%) Apache
5 67 (1.27%) SAS
6 60 (1.14%) SharePoint
7 26 (0.49%) Jupyter
8 25 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.47%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.46%) nginx
10 20 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
11 15 (0.28%) Appian
12 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
13 11 (0.21%) Camunda
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 4 (0.076%) CICS
15 4 (0.076%) Tomcat
15 4 (0.076%) WebSphere
16 3 (0.057%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 139 (2.64%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.53%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
6 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
7 8 (0.15%) Weka
8 5 (0.095%) CPLEX
9 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
10 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
11 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.19%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Actimize
7 3 (0.057%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.057%) IntelliMatch
7 3 (0.057%) SAP IBP
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%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 2,038 (38.66%) AWS
2 1,842 (34.94%) Azure
3 813 (15.42%) GCP
4 710 (13.47%) GitHub
5 524 (9.94%) Serverless
6 509 (9.65%) Power Platform
7 407 (7.72%) Azure DevOps
8 363 (6.89%) Amazon S3
9 355 (6.73%) GitHub Actions
10 350 (6.64%) AWS Lambda
11 277 (5.25%) Azure Data Factory
12 253 (4.80%) Snowflake
13 248 (4.70%) AWS CloudFormation
14 186 (3.53%) Amazon EKS
15 176 (3.34%) OpenShift
16 166 (3.15%) Amazon ECS
17 165 (3.13%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 154 (2.92%) Amazon EC2
19 151 (2.86%) dbt
20 149 (2.83%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 208 (3.95%) Firewall
2 149 (2.83%) DNS
3 110 (2.09%) Network Security
4 104 (1.97%) TCP/IP
5 84 (1.59%) VPN
6 74 (1.40%) BGP
7 66 (1.25%) WAN
8 60 (1.14%) HTTP
9 43 (0.82%) OSPF
10 42 (0.80%) MPLS
10 42 (0.80%) SAN
11 37 (0.70%) Wireshark
12 35 (0.66%) VLAN
13 34 (0.64%) LAN
14 33 (0.63%) SSL
15 32 (0.61%) SD-WAN
16 31 (0.59%) DHCP
17 30 (0.57%) SNMP
18 24 (0.46%) Multicast
18 24 (0.46%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 425 (8.06%) Power BI
2 369 (7.00%) PostgreSQL
3 306 (5.80%) Data Warehouse
4 236 (4.48%) Data Lake
5 214 (4.06%) NoSQL
6 200 (3.79%) SQL Server
7 193 (3.66%) Relational Database
8 173 (3.28%) Tableau
9 150 (2.85%) Big Data
10 148 (2.81%) Metadata
11 129 (2.45%) Delta Lake
12 121 (2.30%) Amazon RDS
13 117 (2.22%) BigQuery
13 117 (2.22%) MySQL
14 106 (2.01%) Amazon Redshift
15 100 (1.90%) Amazon Athena
16 98 (1.86%) MongoDB
17 90 (1.71%) Azure SQL Database
18 85 (1.61%) DynamoDB
19 79 (1.50%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 673 (12.77%) Git
2 555 (10.53%) Jenkins
3 424 (8.04%) GitLab
4 296 (5.61%) JIRA
5 94 (1.78%) MLflow
5 94 (1.78%) Selenium
6 54 (1.02%) Postman
7 47 (0.89%) Bitbucket
8 44 (0.83%) Cucumber
9 42 (0.80%) JUnit
10 40 (0.76%) JMeter
11 35 (0.66%) Sonatype Nexus
12 28 (0.53%) SpecFlow
13 27 (0.51%) Artifactory
13 27 (0.51%) Cypress.io
13 27 (0.51%) Visual Studio
14 23 (0.44%) Gatling
15 22 (0.42%) Maven
16 21 (0.40%) CircleCI
16 21 (0.40%) SonarQube
General
1 1,262 (23.94%) Social Skills
2 1,017 (19.29%) Finance
3 721 (13.68%) Analytical Skills
4 503 (9.54%) Public Sector
5 403 (7.64%) Banking
6 170 (3.22%) Front Office
7 133 (2.52%) Documentation Skills
8 88 (1.67%) Investment Banking
9 67 (1.27%) Marketing
10 65 (1.23%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 64 (1.21%) Retail
12 60 (1.14%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.06%) Legal
13 56 (1.06%) Telecoms
14 55 (1.04%) Financial Institution
14 55 (1.04%) Influencing Skills
15 42 (0.80%) Manufacturing
16 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
17 28 (0.53%) Military
17 28 (0.53%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 977 (18.53%) Developer
2 749 (14.21%) Data Engineer
3 745 (14.13%) Senior
4 454 (8.61%) Python Developer
5 357 (6.77%) Architect
6 342 (6.49%) Lead
7 294 (5.58%) Python Engineer
8 293 (5.56%) DevOps Engineer
9 284 (5.39%) Analyst
10 261 (4.95%) Software Engineer
11 252 (4.78%) AWS Engineer
12 246 (4.67%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 205 (3.89%) Data Scientist
14 196 (3.72%) Platform Engineer
15 162 (3.07%) Azure Engineer
16 160 (3.03%) Senior Developer
17 146 (2.77%) Data Analyst
18 140 (2.66%) Senior Data Engineer
19 136 (2.58%) Full-Stack Developer
20 129 (2.45%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 463 (8.78%) REST
2 360 (6.83%) React
3 337 (6.39%) PySpark
4 336 (6.37%) Kafka
5 281 (5.33%) Node.js
6 235 (4.46%) Pandas
7 231 (4.38%) .NET
8 207 (3.93%) PyTorch
9 199 (3.77%) RESTful
10 193 (3.66%) FastAPI
11 168 (3.19%) TensorFlow
12 160 (3.03%) NumPy
13 150 (2.85%) JSON
13 150 (2.85%) scikit-learn
14 137 (2.60%) Flask
15 135 (2.56%) AngularJS
16 122 (2.31%) Django
17 120 (2.28%) LangChain
18 116 (2.20%) pytest
19 106 (2.01%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 523 (9.92%) Cloud Native
2 223 (4.23%) Distributed Systems
3 200 (3.79%) Algorithms
4 150 (2.85%) Product Ownership
5 121 (2.30%) Equities
6 116 (2.20%) Data Protection Act
7 115 (2.18%) Fixed Income
8 111 (2.11%) Data Structures
9 108 (2.05%) AI Agents
10 104 (1.97%) Derivative
11 103 (1.95%) Hybrid Cloud
12 96 (1.82%) Legacy Systems
13 94 (1.78%) Data Centre
14 93 (1.76%) Onboarding
15 91 (1.73%) Enterprise Software
16 90 (1.71%) Public Cloud
17 82 (1.56%) Security Posture
18 80 (1.52%) Management Information System
19 56 (1.06%) Virtual Team
20 54 (1.02%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 685 (12.99%) Linux
2 316 (5.99%) Windows
3 183 (3.47%) Unix
4 103 (1.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 69 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.66%) VMS
7 33 (0.63%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.59%) Android
9 19 (0.36%) AIX
9 19 (0.36%) Mac OS
10 18 (0.34%) Solaris
11 17 (0.32%) CentOS
12 15 (0.28%) Apple iOS
13 8 (0.15%) Windows 7
14 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Debian
15 6 (0.11%) Kali Linux
15 6 (0.11%) zOS
16 5 (0.095%) Rocky
17 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,950 (36.99%) CI/CD
2 1,503 (28.51%) DevOps
3 1,229 (23.31%) Agile
4 1,150 (21.81%) AI
5 1,054 (19.99%) Analytics
6 1,051 (19.94%) Problem-Solving
7 940 (17.83%) Infrastructure as Code
8 863 (16.37%) Data Pipeline
9 853 (16.18%) Machine Learning
10 774 (14.68%) Containerisation
11 723 (13.71%) Data Engineering
12 706 (13.39%) Data Modelling
13 682 (12.94%) ETL
14 623 (11.82%) Data Science
15 607 (11.51%) Test Automation
16 605 (11.48%) Software Engineering
17 515 (9.77%) Observability
18 512 (9.71%) Business Intelligence
19 431 (8.18%) LLM
20 401 (7.61%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,675 (31.77%) SQL
2 741 (14.06%) Java
3 687 (13.03%) PowerShell
4 611 (11.59%) Bash
5 493 (9.35%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.68%) TypeScript
7 351 (6.66%) C#
8 228 (4.32%) Go
9 168 (3.19%) C++
10 166 (3.15%) R
11 125 (2.37%) Scala
12 106 (2.01%) Shell Script
13 102 (1.93%) Ruby
14 97 (1.84%) Perl
15 79 (1.50%) Bicep
16 56 (1.06%) Kusto Query Language
17 50 (0.95%) C
18 48 (0.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 44 (0.83%) T-SQL
20 42 (0.80%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,232 (23.37%) Security Cleared
2 988 (18.74%) SC Cleared
3 439 (8.33%) Degree
4 202 (3.83%) Computer Science Degree
5 151 (2.86%) DV Cleared
6 127 (2.41%) BPSS Clearance
7 121 (2.30%) Master's Degree
8 119 (2.26%) AWS Certification
9 106 (2.01%) Azure Certification
10 94 (1.78%) CISSP
11 74 (1.40%) Cisco Certification
12 59 (1.12%) CCNP
13 58 (1.10%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 49 (0.93%) PhD
15 48 (0.91%) CISM
16 36 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 36 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
17 35 (0.66%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.53%) CEH
19 27 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 511 (9.69%) Data Quality
2 217 (4.12%) QA
3 178 (3.38%) GDPR
4 110 (2.09%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 104 (1.97%) NIST
6 78 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.64%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.57%) SLA
9 27 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.44%) NCSC
12 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.30%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.30%) WCAG
14 12 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.19%) MiFID
17 8 (0.15%) PSD2
System Software
1 925 (17.55%) Docker
2 167 (3.17%) Active Directory
3 120 (2.28%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.16%) vSphere
5 57 (1.08%) Virtual Machines
6 54 (1.02%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.63%) Hyper-V
8 31 (0.59%) Firmware
9 16 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 10 (0.19%) HDFS
11 10 (0.19%) Lustre
12 9 (0.17%) GPFS
12 9 (0.17%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 8 (0.15%) Ceph
13 8 (0.15%) SRDF
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.095%) NFS
15 5 (0.095%) Oracle RAC
15 5 (0.095%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,139 (21.60%) Terraform
2 1,033 (19.59%) Kubernetes
3 548 (10.39%) Ansible
4 351 (6.66%) Grafana
5 306 (5.80%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.71%) Argo
7 77 (1.46%) Puppet
8 50 (0.95%) Istio
8 50 (0.95%) vRealize
9 39 (0.74%) vCenter Server
10 38 (0.72%) Kibana
11 35 (0.66%) Progress Chef
12 27 (0.51%) Nessus
13 24 (0.46%) NetBackup
13 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 22 (0.42%) Rancher
15 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
16 19 (0.36%) Control-M
16 19 (0.36%) Nagios
17 18 (0.34%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 639 (12.12%) Microsoft
2 566 (10.74%) Databricks
3 298 (5.65%) Google
4 228 (4.32%) Splunk
5 220 (4.17%) VMware
6 218 (4.14%) Oracle
7 146 (2.77%) Red Hat
8 127 (2.41%) Cisco
9 120 (2.28%) OpenAI
10 104 (1.97%) ServiceNow
11 82 (1.56%) CyberArk
12 75 (1.42%) Foundry
13 69 (1.31%) BeyondTrust
14 62 (1.18%) Informatica
15 61 (1.16%) F5
16 59 (1.12%) Palo Alto
17 58 (1.10%) IBM
18 48 (0.91%) Dynatrace
19 44 (0.83%) Atlassian
20 43 (0.82%) SAP