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

6 months to
18 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +3 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,583 4,271 3,984
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.42% 12.99% 10.28%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.62% 39.57% 32.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,645 2,837 2,872
10th Percentile £379 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £428 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.90% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £644 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -2.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 132 73 119
10th Percentile £30.05 £26.69 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.50 £34.75 £30.50
Median hourly rate £56.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.00% -13.04% -8.37%
75th Percentile £77.50 £59.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £84.59 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £57.50 £52.50 £67.26
% change year-on-year +9.52% -21.94% +19.26%

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 14,093 10,793 12,173
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.31% 32.83% 31.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,171 7,209 8,531
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £505 £533
Median % change year-on-year +1.98% -5.25% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 523 281 395
10th Percentile £29.96 £28.25 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.25 £43.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.95 £82.96 £77.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% +8.56%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 4,771 £550 +2.42% 1,905
London -4 2,766 £575 - 784
UK excluding London -7 2,183 £500 - 1,525
Work from Home -9 1,512 £530 -3.64% 765
North of England +2 749 £500 +2.30% 358
South East -11 456 £537 +7.40% 520
Yorkshire 0 382 £500 - 106
South West -1 297 £510 -2.86% 216
North West -2 286 £525 +10.53% 177
Scotland +1 279 £450 -10.00% 70
Midlands -15 239 £477 +5.88% 179
West Midlands -11 192 £477 +0.42% 105
East of England -9 143 £500 -0.50% 152
North East -1 93 £425 -18.27% 77
East Midlands -14 47 £488 +16.19% 73
Wales -8 29 £530 +30.86% 34
Northern Ireland +7 19 £363 -32.56% 18

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
1 289 (5.18%) Apache Airflow
2 281 (5.03%) Apache Spark
3 218 (3.90%) Apache
4 173 (3.10%) Confluence
5 56 (1.00%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SharePoint
7 44 (0.79%) SAS
8 28 (0.50%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 21 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.32%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.13%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
15 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.090%) Apache Solr
Applications
1 107 (1.92%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.34%) Spreadsheet
6 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
6 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
7 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.090%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Endur
9 3 (0.054%) Front Arena
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,097 (37.56%) AWS
2 1,898 (34.00%) Azure
3 857 (15.35%) GCP
4 701 (12.56%) GitHub
5 497 (8.90%) Power Platform
6 453 (8.11%) Serverless
7 435 (7.79%) Azure DevOps
8 403 (7.22%) GitHub Actions
9 390 (6.99%) Amazon S3
10 347 (6.22%) AWS Lambda
11 317 (5.68%) Snowflake
12 225 (4.03%) Azure Data Factory
13 221 (3.96%) dbt
14 188 (3.37%) AWS CloudFormation
15 183 (3.28%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 178 (3.19%) Amazon EKS
17 137 (2.45%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 135 (2.42%) Amazon EC2
18 135 (2.42%) Entra ID
19 130 (2.33%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 284 (5.09%) Firewall
2 215 (3.85%) DNS
3 145 (2.60%) TCP/IP
4 126 (2.26%) Network Security
5 125 (2.24%) VPN
6 124 (2.22%) BGP
7 110 (1.97%) WAN
8 85 (1.52%) DHCP
9 72 (1.29%) OSPF
10 60 (1.07%) SD-WAN
11 59 (1.06%) VLAN
12 57 (1.02%) VXLAN
13 54 (0.97%) SSL
14 53 (0.95%) HTTP
15 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
16 45 (0.81%) Ethernet VPN
16 45 (0.81%) SAN
17 44 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 43 (0.77%) SNMP
19 36 (0.64%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 457 (8.19%) Power BI
2 324 (5.80%) Data Warehouse
3 321 (5.75%) PostgreSQL
4 222 (3.98%) SQL Server
5 203 (3.64%) Relational Database
6 196 (3.51%) Metadata
7 195 (3.49%) Tableau
8 185 (3.31%) Data Lake
9 161 (2.88%) NoSQL
10 158 (2.83%) BigQuery
11 148 (2.65%) Big Data
12 137 (2.45%) Amazon Redshift
13 129 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
14 121 (2.17%) MongoDB
15 117 (2.10%) Amazon RDS
16 113 (2.02%) Delta Lake
17 100 (1.79%) DynamoDB
18 86 (1.54%) MySQL
19 66 (1.18%) Snowflake Schema
20 64 (1.15%) Redis
Development Applications
1 732 (13.11%) Git
2 506 (9.06%) Jenkins
3 444 (7.95%) GitLab
4 287 (5.14%) JIRA
5 99 (1.77%) Selenium
6 56 (1.00%) Postman
7 54 (0.97%) JMeter
8 53 (0.95%) MLflow
9 48 (0.86%) SonarQube
10 47 (0.84%) Bitbucket
11 45 (0.81%) Claude Code
12 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
13 33 (0.59%) Artifactory
13 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
14 32 (0.57%) Gatling
15 30 (0.54%) Maven
15 30 (0.54%) REST Assured
16 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
17 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
18 22 (0.39%) JUnit
General
1 1,229 (22.01%) Social Skills
2 1,211 (21.69%) Finance
3 818 (14.65%) Analytical Skills
4 552 (9.89%) Public Sector
5 452 (8.10%) Banking
6 194 (3.47%) Front Office
7 137 (2.45%) Investment Banking
8 115 (2.06%) Documentation Skills
8 115 (2.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 107 (1.92%) Retail
10 88 (1.58%) Marketing
11 75 (1.34%) Telecoms
12 61 (1.09%) Pharmaceutical
13 53 (0.95%) Legal
13 53 (0.95%) Military
14 49 (0.88%) Aerospace
14 49 (0.88%) Financial Institution
15 45 (0.81%) Publishing
16 41 (0.73%) Manufacturing
17 38 (0.68%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 918 (16.44%) Developer
1 918 (16.44%) Senior
2 806 (14.44%) Data Engineer
3 493 (8.83%) Python Developer
4 481 (8.62%) Lead
5 409 (7.33%) Python Engineer
6 325 (5.82%) DevOps Engineer
7 307 (5.50%) Software Engineer
8 276 (4.94%) Architect
9 275 (4.93%) Analyst
10 263 (4.71%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 239 (4.28%) AWS Engineer
12 198 (3.55%) Data Scientist
13 196 (3.51%) Cloud Engineer
14 189 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
15 179 (3.21%) Senior Developer
16 172 (3.08%) Azure Engineer
17 167 (2.99%) Senior Data Engineer
18 139 (2.49%) Infrastructure Engineer
19 133 (2.38%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 451 (8.08%) REST
2 371 (6.65%) PySpark
3 354 (6.34%) Kafka
4 327 (5.86%) React
5 233 (4.17%) .NET
6 201 (3.60%) JSON
7 199 (3.56%) RESTful
8 198 (3.55%) FastAPI
9 185 (3.31%) Node.js
10 183 (3.28%) Django
11 172 (3.08%) Pandas
12 140 (2.51%) LangChain
13 135 (2.42%) PyTorch
14 117 (2.10%) pytest
15 109 (1.95%) YAML
16 108 (1.93%) Flask
17 104 (1.86%) HTML
17 104 (1.86%) OAuth
18 103 (1.84%) NumPy
19 96 (1.72%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 773 (13.85%) Cloud Native
2 315 (5.64%) Distributed Systems
3 225 (4.03%) AI Agents
4 211 (3.78%) Onboarding
5 160 (2.87%) Data Centre
6 154 (2.76%) Product Ownership
7 140 (2.51%) Algorithms
8 135 (2.42%) Data Structures
9 131 (2.35%) Legacy Systems
10 116 (2.08%) Derivative
10 116 (2.08%) Hybrid Cloud
11 111 (1.99%) Management Information System
12 109 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
13 95 (1.70%) Equities
14 87 (1.56%) Security Posture
15 84 (1.50%) Fixed Income
16 73 (1.31%) Enterprise Software
17 69 (1.24%) Public Cloud
18 67 (1.20%) Linux Command Line
19 63 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 728 (13.04%) Linux
2 339 (6.07%) Windows
3 239 (4.28%) Unix
4 147 (2.63%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 83 (1.49%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 31 (0.56%) AIX
8 30 (0.54%) VMS
9 18 (0.32%) Solaris
10 17 (0.30%) CentOS
11 16 (0.29%) Android
12 11 (0.20%) Apple iOS
12 11 (0.20%) zOS
13 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) 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
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,205 (39.49%) CI/CD
2 1,606 (28.77%) DevOps
3 1,448 (25.94%) AI
4 1,258 (22.53%) Agile
5 1,163 (20.83%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,110 (19.88%) Analytics
7 991 (17.75%) Data Pipeline
8 917 (16.42%) Problem-Solving
9 884 (15.83%) Software Engineering
10 857 (15.35%) Machine Learning
11 792 (14.19%) Data Engineering
12 759 (13.59%) Containerisation
13 741 (13.27%) Data Modelling
14 689 (12.34%) Observability
15 654 (11.71%) ETL
16 625 (11.19%) Test Automation
17 586 (10.50%) Data Science
18 572 (10.25%) Continuous Improvement
19 553 (9.91%) Validation
20 537 (9.62%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,805 (32.33%) SQL
2 828 (14.83%) Java
3 753 (13.49%) Bash
4 736 (13.18%) PowerShell
5 453 (8.11%) JavaScript
6 362 (6.48%) TypeScript
7 305 (5.46%) C#
8 205 (3.67%) Go
9 147 (2.63%) C++
10 140 (2.51%) R
11 137 (2.45%) Shell Script
12 130 (2.33%) Scala
13 127 (2.27%) Bicep
14 85 (1.52%) Perl
15 63 (1.13%) PL/SQL
16 58 (1.04%) C
17 56 (1.00%) Groovy
18 54 (0.97%) Rust
19 53 (0.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 53 (0.95%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,305 (23.37%) Security Cleared
2 1,061 (19.00%) SC Cleared
3 423 (7.58%) Degree
4 203 (3.64%) DV Cleared
5 161 (2.88%) Computer Science Degree
6 141 (2.53%) AWS Certification
7 140 (2.51%) Azure Certification
8 116 (2.08%) BPSS Clearance
9 95 (1.70%) CISSP
10 90 (1.61%) Cisco Certification
11 73 (1.31%) Master's Degree
12 51 (0.91%) CCNP
13 43 (0.77%) Microsoft Certification
14 39 (0.70%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 35 (0.63%) ISTQB
15 35 (0.63%) PhD
16 32 (0.57%) CISM
17 30 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 30 (0.54%) CCIE
18 26 (0.47%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 580 (10.39%) Data Quality
2 277 (4.96%) QA
3 112 (2.01%) GDPR
4 109 (1.95%) NIST
5 103 (1.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 36 (0.64%) SLA
8 31 (0.56%) Actionable Recommendations
9 28 (0.50%) NCSC
10 27 (0.48%) PCI DSS
10 27 (0.48%) WCAG
11 26 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.20%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
15 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.13%) GRC
16 7 (0.13%) HL7
System Software
1 920 (16.48%) Docker
2 158 (2.83%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.36%) VMware Infrastructure
4 62 (1.11%) Virtual Machines
5 44 (0.79%) vSphere
6 42 (0.75%) Hyper-V
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.23%) Squid
12 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
14 9 (0.16%) HDFS
14 9 (0.16%) KVM
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
15 7 (0.13%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,299 (23.27%) Terraform
2 1,100 (19.70%) Kubernetes
3 627 (11.23%) Ansible
4 341 (6.11%) Grafana
5 249 (4.46%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.59%) Puppet
7 75 (1.34%) Progress Chef
8 68 (1.22%) Argo
9 42 (0.75%) Istio
10 33 (0.59%) Single Sign-On
11 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
12 26 (0.47%) Control-M
12 26 (0.47%) vRealize
13 25 (0.45%) Kibana
13 25 (0.45%) vCenter Server
14 24 (0.43%) Nagios
15 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
16 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
17 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
17 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 683 (12.23%) Microsoft
2 544 (9.74%) Databricks
3 360 (6.45%) Google
4 255 (4.57%) Oracle
5 214 (3.83%) Splunk
6 177 (3.17%) VMware
7 144 (2.58%) Cisco
8 138 (2.47%) OpenAI
9 128 (2.29%) ServiceNow
10 105 (1.88%) Dynatrace
10 105 (1.88%) Red Hat
11 96 (1.72%) IBM
12 91 (1.63%) F5
13 84 (1.50%) Palo Alto
14 82 (1.47%) Informatica
15 69 (1.24%) CyberArk
15 69 (1.24%) Fortinet
16 68 (1.22%) Foundry
17 67 (1.20%) SAP
18 62 (1.11%) Salesforce