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 24 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
24 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,216 3,964 3,995
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.22% 13.42% 9.15%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.59% 39.45% 31.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,519 2,787 2,852
10th Percentile £363 £388 £396
25th Percentile £420 £453 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £620 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £813 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.44% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 51 101
10th Percentile £27.84 £21.25 £21.73
25th Percentile £43.81 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.25 £39.32 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +37.97% -25.10% -19.23%
75th Percentile £69.69 £58.13 £68.75
90th Percentile £83.75 £71.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £61.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -26.23% +0.62%

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 12,852 10,048 12,818
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.66% 34.02% 29.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,516 6,802 9,113
10th Percentile £352 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £418 £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 £713 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 556 244 481
10th Percentile £41.76 £22.49 £31.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £34.73 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -1.54%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £68.75
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% -

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 24 April 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 24 April 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 24 April 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 4,385 £520 -5.45% 2,248
London -3 2,505 £550 -8.33% 986
UK excluding London -3 1,986 £481 -3.75% 1,745
Work from Home 0 1,503 £525 -4.55% 1,544
North of England +9 673 £478 -2.50% 406
South East -4 414 £500 -4.76% 592
Yorkshire 0 387 £475 -5.00% 117
Scotland +2 264 £425 -10.53% 79
Midlands -6 254 £500 +7.07% 191
North West +2 239 £490 +3.16% 206
South West -2 237 £500 -9.09% 195
West Midlands -4 192 £500 - 97
East of England -2 135 £500 -0.50% 222
East Midlands -13 61 £463 +9.47% 92
North East +8 53 £475 -1.30% 85
Northern Ireland +14 24 £463 -11.90% 40
Wales -18 23 £463 -13.15% 44

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 (5.46%) Apache Spark
2 219 (4.20%) Apache Airflow
3 166 (3.18%) Apache
4 146 (2.80%) Confluence
5 50 (0.96%) SharePoint
6 48 (0.92%) SAS
7 28 (0.54%) nginx
8 27 (0.52%) Jupyter
9 23 (0.44%) OpenStack
10 18 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
12 13 (0.25%) Appian
12 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.17%) Camunda
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 6 (0.12%) CICS
15 6 (0.12%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
16 5 (0.096%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 139 (2.66%) Microsoft Excel
2 25 (0.48%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.46%) Spreadsheet
4 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
5 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.12%) CPLEX
7 5 (0.096%) Weka
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 6 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
7 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
8 2 (0.038%) Actimize
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
9 1 (0.019%) IBM Planning Analytics
Cloud Services
1 1,994 (38.23%) AWS
2 1,796 (34.43%) Azure
3 769 (14.74%) GCP
4 672 (12.88%) GitHub
5 520 (9.97%) Power Platform
6 497 (9.53%) Serverless
7 387 (7.42%) Azure DevOps
8 381 (7.30%) Amazon S3
9 359 (6.88%) AWS Lambda
10 350 (6.71%) GitHub Actions
11 275 (5.27%) Azure Data Factory
12 240 (4.60%) Snowflake
13 233 (4.47%) AWS CloudFormation
14 172 (3.30%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 169 (3.24%) Amazon EKS
16 161 (3.09%) OpenShift
17 156 (2.99%) dbt
18 153 (2.93%) Amazon ECS
19 141 (2.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 137 (2.63%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 176 (3.37%) Firewall
2 135 (2.59%) DNS
3 110 (2.11%) Network Security
4 90 (1.73%) TCP/IP
5 74 (1.42%) VPN
6 70 (1.34%) BGP
7 62 (1.19%) WAN
8 59 (1.13%) HTTP
9 44 (0.84%) SAN
10 43 (0.82%) OSPF
11 35 (0.67%) MPLS
12 34 (0.65%) SNMP
13 30 (0.58%) DHCP
13 30 (0.58%) LAN
13 30 (0.58%) SSL
13 30 (0.58%) VLAN
14 29 (0.56%) Wireshark
15 27 (0.52%) VXLAN
16 23 (0.44%) NAS
16 23 (0.44%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 443 (8.49%) Power BI
2 349 (6.69%) PostgreSQL
3 287 (5.50%) Data Warehouse
4 238 (4.56%) Data Lake
5 232 (4.45%) SQL Server
6 200 (3.83%) Tableau
7 189 (3.62%) NoSQL
8 174 (3.34%) Relational Database
9 161 (3.09%) Big Data
10 158 (3.03%) Metadata
11 135 (2.59%) Delta Lake
12 133 (2.55%) BigQuery
13 118 (2.26%) Amazon Athena
14 117 (2.24%) Amazon Redshift
15 105 (2.01%) MongoDB
16 103 (1.97%) Amazon RDS
17 100 (1.92%) MySQL
18 93 (1.78%) DynamoDB
19 92 (1.76%) Azure SQL Database
20 81 (1.55%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 655 (12.56%) Git
2 484 (9.28%) Jenkins
3 361 (6.92%) GitLab
4 270 (5.18%) JIRA
5 89 (1.71%) MLflow
6 78 (1.50%) Selenium
7 60 (1.15%) Postman
8 44 (0.84%) Cucumber
9 42 (0.81%) Bitbucket
10 34 (0.65%) Sonatype Nexus
11 31 (0.59%) JMeter
12 28 (0.54%) Artifactory
12 28 (0.54%) SonarQube
12 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
13 27 (0.52%) Cypress.io
14 26 (0.50%) JUnit
15 24 (0.46%) Maven
16 23 (0.44%) Gatling
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
18 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,177 (22.57%) Social Skills
2 1,002 (19.21%) Finance
3 717 (13.75%) Analytical Skills
4 496 (9.51%) Public Sector
5 364 (6.98%) Banking
6 172 (3.30%) Front Office
7 134 (2.57%) Documentation Skills
8 87 (1.67%) Investment Banking
9 71 (1.36%) Marketing
10 68 (1.30%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 64 (1.23%) Retail
12 54 (1.04%) Pharmaceutical
13 53 (1.02%) Telecoms
14 51 (0.98%) Legal
15 49 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
16 38 (0.73%) Manufacturing
17 37 (0.71%) Financial Institution
18 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
18 31 (0.59%) Publishing
19 29 (0.56%) Military
Job Titles
1 988 (18.94%) Developer
2 778 (14.92%) Data Engineer
3 730 (14.00%) Senior
4 484 (9.28%) Python Developer
5 352 (6.75%) Architect
6 338 (6.48%) Lead
7 287 (5.50%) Python Engineer
8 286 (5.48%) Analyst
9 280 (5.37%) DevOps Engineer
10 255 (4.89%) Software Engineer
11 236 (4.52%) AWS Engineer
12 226 (4.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 215 (4.12%) Data Scientist
14 171 (3.28%) Platform Engineer
15 161 (3.09%) Azure Engineer
16 158 (3.03%) Senior Developer
17 151 (2.89%) Senior Data Engineer
18 146 (2.80%) Data Analyst
19 138 (2.65%) Full-Stack Developer
20 117 (2.24%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 412 (7.90%) REST
2 357 (6.84%) React
3 344 (6.60%) PySpark
4 334 (6.40%) Kafka
5 268 (5.14%) Node.js
6 231 (4.43%) .NET
7 230 (4.41%) Pandas
8 195 (3.74%) PyTorch
9 179 (3.43%) RESTful
10 176 (3.37%) FastAPI
11 169 (3.24%) JSON
12 147 (2.82%) NumPy
12 147 (2.82%) TensorFlow
13 137 (2.63%) scikit-learn
14 128 (2.45%) LangChain
15 127 (2.43%) Flask
16 122 (2.34%) AngularJS
17 118 (2.26%) Django
18 111 (2.13%) OAuth
19 106 (2.03%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 508 (9.74%) Cloud Native
2 221 (4.24%) Distributed Systems
3 167 (3.20%) Algorithms
4 146 (2.80%) Product Ownership
5 126 (2.42%) AI Agents
6 119 (2.28%) Data Protection Act
7 111 (2.13%) Equities
7 111 (2.13%) Fixed Income
8 110 (2.11%) Data Structures
9 108 (2.07%) Derivative
10 104 (1.99%) Onboarding
11 96 (1.84%) Management Information System
12 92 (1.76%) Enterprise Software
13 91 (1.74%) Legacy Systems
14 89 (1.71%) Data Centre
15 86 (1.65%) Hybrid Cloud
16 85 (1.63%) Security Posture
17 74 (1.42%) Public Cloud
18 48 (0.92%) Virtual Team
19 46 (0.88%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 649 (12.44%) Linux
2 283 (5.43%) Windows
3 204 (3.91%) Unix
4 96 (1.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 60 (1.15%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.75%) VMS
7 36 (0.69%) Ubuntu
8 27 (0.52%) Android
9 20 (0.38%) AIX
9 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
10 19 (0.36%) CentOS
10 19 (0.36%) Solaris
11 15 (0.29%) Apple iOS
12 9 (0.17%) Debian
12 9 (0.17%) zOS
13 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
14 7 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
15 5 (0.096%) Rocky
15 5 (0.096%) Windows 7
15 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,903 (36.48%) CI/CD
2 1,403 (26.90%) DevOps
3 1,157 (22.18%) Agile
4 1,150 (22.05%) AI
5 1,063 (20.38%) Analytics
6 982 (18.83%) Problem-Solving
7 914 (17.52%) Infrastructure as Code
8 859 (16.47%) Data Pipeline
9 815 (15.63%) Machine Learning
10 724 (13.88%) Containerisation
11 700 (13.42%) Data Engineering
12 691 (13.25%) Data Modelling
13 684 (13.11%) ETL
14 603 (11.56%) Data Science
15 595 (11.41%) Software Engineering
16 547 (10.49%) Test Automation
17 522 (10.01%) Business Intelligence
17 522 (10.01%) Observability
18 434 (8.32%) LLM
19 405 (7.76%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,717 (32.92%) SQL
2 768 (14.72%) Java
3 646 (12.38%) PowerShell
4 563 (10.79%) Bash
5 482 (9.24%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.75%) C#
7 346 (6.63%) TypeScript
8 204 (3.91%) Go
9 177 (3.39%) R
10 154 (2.95%) C++
11 143 (2.74%) Scala
12 110 (2.11%) Shell Script
13 96 (1.84%) Ruby
14 81 (1.55%) Perl
15 79 (1.51%) Bicep
16 54 (1.04%) C
17 53 (1.02%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 53 (1.02%) Kusto Query Language
18 49 (0.94%) T-SQL
19 48 (0.92%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,211 (23.22%) Security Cleared
2 994 (19.06%) SC Cleared
3 394 (7.55%) Degree
4 179 (3.43%) Computer Science Degree
5 142 (2.72%) BPSS Clearance
6 138 (2.65%) DV Cleared
7 104 (1.99%) Azure Certification
8 103 (1.97%) AWS Certification
9 93 (1.78%) Master's Degree
10 92 (1.76%) CISSP
11 67 (1.28%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.11%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.96%) CCNP
14 49 (0.94%) CISM
15 43 (0.82%) PhD
16 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
17 31 (0.59%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 27 (0.52%) ISTQB
19 24 (0.46%) CEH
20 23 (0.44%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 514 (9.85%) Data Quality
2 220 (4.22%) QA
3 169 (3.24%) GDPR
4 111 (2.13%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 105 (2.01%) NIST
6 78 (1.50%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) SLA
8 33 (0.63%) PCI DSS
9 29 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 27 (0.52%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
11 19 (0.36%) NCSC
12 17 (0.33%) WCAG
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
13 12 (0.23%) SOC 2
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
15 10 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.17%) GRC
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.12%) PSD2
System Software
1 837 (16.05%) Docker
2 162 (3.11%) Active Directory
3 96 (1.84%) VMware Infrastructure
4 68 (1.30%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.81%) VMware NSX
6 40 (0.77%) vSphere
7 32 (0.61%) Firmware
8 31 (0.59%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) KVM
11 13 (0.25%) HDFS
12 9 (0.17%) Ceph
12 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.17%) SRDF
13 7 (0.13%) Lustre
13 7 (0.13%) NFS
14 6 (0.12%) GPFS
14 6 (0.12%) Postfix
14 6 (0.12%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 6 (0.12%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,117 (21.41%) Terraform
2 956 (18.33%) Kubernetes
3 515 (9.87%) Ansible
4 339 (6.50%) Grafana
5 285 (5.46%) Prometheus
6 75 (1.44%) Argo
7 73 (1.40%) Puppet
8 52 (1.00%) Istio
9 48 (0.92%) vRealize
10 46 (0.88%) Kibana
11 34 (0.65%) vCenter Server
12 33 (0.63%) Progress Chef
13 27 (0.52%) Nessus
14 26 (0.50%) Single Sign-On
15 23 (0.44%) Control-M
15 23 (0.44%) Nagios
15 23 (0.44%) Rancher
16 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
17 19 (0.36%) Kubeflow
17 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 628 (12.04%) Microsoft
2 571 (10.95%) Databricks
3 273 (5.23%) Google
4 222 (4.26%) Splunk
5 215 (4.12%) Oracle
6 180 (3.45%) VMware
7 122 (2.34%) OpenAI
7 122 (2.34%) Red Hat
8 118 (2.26%) Cisco
9 99 (1.90%) ServiceNow
10 90 (1.73%) CyberArk
11 75 (1.44%) BeyondTrust
12 63 (1.21%) Foundry
12 63 (1.21%) IBM
12 63 (1.21%) Informatica
13 58 (1.11%) Dynatrace
14 51 (0.98%) F5
15 49 (0.94%) Palo Alto
16 48 (0.92%) SAP
17 41 (0.79%) Salesforce