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 2 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,249 3,926 4,008
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.10% 13.39% 9.21%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.67% 39.22% 31.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,524 2,753 2,854
10th Percentile £363 £388 £392
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.91% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £679
90th Percentile £738 £814 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -2.50% -2.44% -5.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 132 51 101
10th Percentile £30.05 £21.25 £21.73
25th Percentile £45.64 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £35.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +57.14% -39.13% -5.64%
75th Percentile £70.18 £56.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £71.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +16.67% -28.00% +6.38%

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 12,905 10,011 12,860
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.28% 34.13% 29.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,540 6,791 9,134
10th Percentile £355 £360 £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 £713 £769 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 561 247 486
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.49 £31.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +3.31% +0.83%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £79.59
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% +2.17%

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 2 May 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 2 May 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 2 May 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 -2 4,384 £525 -4.55% 2,655
London -3 2,478 £550 -8.33% 1,239
UK excluding London -1 2,048 £488 -2.50% 1,803
Work from Home -1 1,497 £525 -4.55% 1,118
North of England +11 680 £479 -2.64% 462
South East 0 414 £510 -2.86% 578
Yorkshire +1 383 £475 -5.00% 135
Scotland +2 292 £425 -10.53% 109
Midlands -10 262 £500 +10.01% 221
South West +2 254 £500 -9.09% 202
North West +4 247 £500 +5.26% 249
West Midlands -7 199 £500 - 114
East of England -4 137 £500 -0.50% 195
East Midlands -13 62 £483 +14.20% 107
North East +8 59 £475 -1.30% 80
Northern Ireland +17 24 £463 -11.90% 15
Wales -13 23 £475 -9.52% 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
1 287 (5.47%) Apache Spark
2 208 (3.96%) Apache Airflow
3 167 (3.18%) Apache
4 143 (2.72%) Confluence
5 50 (0.95%) SAS
6 49 (0.93%) SharePoint
7 30 (0.57%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.44%) nginx
10 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
11 14 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
12 12 (0.23%) Appian
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) Camunda
13 8 (0.15%) CMS
14 7 (0.13%) IIS
15 6 (0.11%) CICS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.095%) Tomcat
Applications
1 134 (2.55%) Microsoft Excel
2 26 (0.50%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Spreadsheet
4 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
5 6 (0.11%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.076%) Weka
7 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 22 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 13 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 6 (0.11%) SAP IBP
6 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
7 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 4 (0.076%) Remedy ITSM
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%) Oracle ERP
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 1,981 (37.74%) AWS
2 1,794 (34.18%) Azure
3 776 (14.78%) GCP
4 658 (12.54%) GitHub
5 538 (10.25%) Power Platform
6 480 (9.14%) Serverless
7 376 (7.16%) Azure DevOps
8 372 (7.09%) Amazon S3
9 343 (6.53%) AWS Lambda
10 342 (6.52%) GitHub Actions
11 272 (5.18%) Azure Data Factory
12 235 (4.48%) Snowflake
13 231 (4.40%) AWS CloudFormation
14 173 (3.30%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 167 (3.18%) Amazon EKS
16 161 (3.07%) OpenShift
17 155 (2.95%) dbt
18 147 (2.80%) Amazon ECS
19 140 (2.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 128 (2.44%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 180 (3.43%) Firewall
2 130 (2.48%) DNS
3 107 (2.04%) Network Security
4 89 (1.70%) TCP/IP
5 82 (1.56%) BGP
6 76 (1.45%) VPN
7 73 (1.39%) WAN
8 57 (1.09%) HTTP
9 54 (1.03%) OSPF
10 44 (0.84%) SAN
11 40 (0.76%) SNMP
12 35 (0.67%) MPLS
12 35 (0.67%) VXLAN
13 33 (0.63%) BIG-IP
13 33 (0.63%) LAN
14 31 (0.59%) SD-WAN
15 30 (0.57%) VLAN
15 30 (0.57%) Wireshark
16 29 (0.55%) DHCP
16 29 (0.55%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 460 (8.76%) Power BI
2 345 (6.57%) PostgreSQL
3 284 (5.41%) Data Warehouse
4 243 (4.63%) SQL Server
5 240 (4.57%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.81%) Tableau
7 182 (3.47%) NoSQL
8 181 (3.45%) Relational Database
9 164 (3.12%) Big Data
10 159 (3.03%) Metadata
11 137 (2.61%) Delta Lake
12 135 (2.57%) BigQuery
13 122 (2.32%) Amazon Athena
14 118 (2.25%) Amazon Redshift
15 106 (2.02%) MongoDB
16 102 (1.94%) Amazon RDS
17 98 (1.87%) MySQL
18 93 (1.77%) DynamoDB
19 92 (1.75%) Azure SQL Database
20 81 (1.54%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 656 (12.50%) Git
2 472 (8.99%) Jenkins
3 362 (6.90%) GitLab
4 258 (4.92%) JIRA
5 94 (1.79%) MLflow
6 73 (1.39%) Selenium
7 56 (1.07%) Postman
8 38 (0.72%) Cucumber
9 36 (0.69%) Bitbucket
10 33 (0.63%) Sonatype Nexus
11 29 (0.55%) Artifactory
11 29 (0.55%) JMeter
11 29 (0.55%) SonarQube
12 27 (0.51%) Cypress.io
13 25 (0.48%) JUnit
14 24 (0.46%) Maven
15 23 (0.44%) Robot Framework
16 21 (0.40%) SpecFlow
17 20 (0.38%) Gatling
17 20 (0.38%) REST Assured
General
1 1,174 (22.37%) Social Skills
2 1,014 (19.32%) Finance
3 710 (13.53%) Analytical Skills
4 498 (9.49%) Public Sector
5 366 (6.97%) Banking
6 174 (3.31%) Front Office
7 135 (2.57%) Documentation Skills
8 90 (1.71%) Investment Banking
9 76 (1.45%) Marketing
10 72 (1.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 60 (1.14%) Retail
12 54 (1.03%) Pharmaceutical
12 54 (1.03%) Telecoms
13 50 (0.95%) Legal
14 49 (0.93%) Influencing Skills
15 37 (0.70%) Financial Institution
16 36 (0.69%) Manufacturing
17 33 (0.63%) Publishing
18 31 (0.59%) Military
18 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,010 (19.24%) Developer
2 784 (14.94%) Data Engineer
3 758 (14.44%) Senior
4 496 (9.45%) Python Developer
5 352 (6.71%) Architect
6 344 (6.55%) Lead
7 296 (5.64%) Python Engineer
8 280 (5.33%) Analyst
9 269 (5.12%) DevOps Engineer
10 254 (4.84%) Software Engineer
11 224 (4.27%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 223 (4.25%) AWS Engineer
13 217 (4.13%) Data Scientist
14 171 (3.26%) Senior Developer
15 157 (2.99%) Platform Engineer
15 157 (2.99%) Senior Data Engineer
16 156 (2.97%) Azure Engineer
17 145 (2.76%) Data Analyst
17 145 (2.76%) Full-Stack Developer
18 122 (2.32%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 400 (7.62%) REST
2 357 (6.80%) React
3 347 (6.61%) PySpark
4 334 (6.36%) Kafka
5 261 (4.97%) Node.js
6 238 (4.53%) .NET
7 227 (4.32%) Pandas
8 197 (3.75%) PyTorch
9 185 (3.52%) FastAPI
10 180 (3.43%) RESTful
11 165 (3.14%) JSON
12 144 (2.74%) TensorFlow
13 141 (2.69%) NumPy
14 133 (2.53%) scikit-learn
15 131 (2.50%) Flask
16 124 (2.36%) LangChain
17 121 (2.31%) AngularJS
17 121 (2.31%) Django
18 110 (2.10%) LDAP
19 103 (1.96%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 533 (10.15%) Cloud Native
2 220 (4.19%) Distributed Systems
3 162 (3.09%) Algorithms
4 144 (2.74%) Product Ownership
5 124 (2.36%) AI Agents
6 122 (2.32%) Data Protection Act
7 114 (2.17%) Onboarding
8 113 (2.15%) Data Structures
9 109 (2.08%) Fixed Income
10 108 (2.06%) Equities
11 107 (2.04%) Derivative
12 105 (2.00%) Data Centre
13 97 (1.85%) Management Information System
14 91 (1.73%) Enterprise Software
14 91 (1.73%) Legacy Systems
15 90 (1.71%) Hybrid Cloud
16 82 (1.56%) Security Posture
17 71 (1.35%) Public Cloud
18 46 (0.88%) Virtual Team
19 45 (0.86%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 644 (12.27%) Linux
2 287 (5.47%) Windows
3 206 (3.92%) Unix
4 93 (1.77%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 61 (1.16%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.72%) VMS
7 36 (0.69%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.53%) Android
9 24 (0.46%) AIX
10 21 (0.40%) Solaris
11 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.34%) CentOS
13 16 (0.30%) Apple iOS
14 10 (0.19%) Debian
14 10 (0.19%) zOS
15 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
17 5 (0.095%) Amazon Linux
17 5 (0.095%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,919 (36.56%) CI/CD
2 1,396 (26.60%) DevOps
3 1,185 (22.58%) AI
4 1,156 (22.02%) Agile
5 1,067 (20.33%) Analytics
6 966 (18.40%) Problem-Solving
7 911 (17.36%) Infrastructure as Code
8 872 (16.61%) Data Pipeline
9 824 (15.70%) Machine Learning
10 730 (13.91%) Containerisation
11 705 (13.43%) Data Modelling
12 698 (13.30%) Data Engineering
13 685 (13.05%) ETL
14 607 (11.56%) Software Engineering
15 595 (11.34%) Data Science
16 545 (10.38%) Test Automation
17 537 (10.23%) Observability
18 536 (10.21%) Business Intelligence
19 440 (8.38%) LLM
20 412 (7.85%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,728 (32.92%) SQL
2 773 (14.73%) Java
3 638 (12.15%) PowerShell
4 557 (10.61%) Bash
5 484 (9.22%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.71%) C#
7 349 (6.65%) TypeScript
8 204 (3.89%) Go
9 181 (3.45%) R
10 158 (3.01%) C++
11 142 (2.71%) Scala
12 107 (2.04%) Shell Script
13 96 (1.83%) Ruby
14 79 (1.51%) Bicep
14 79 (1.51%) Perl
15 56 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 55 (1.05%) C
17 53 (1.01%) PL/SQL
18 50 (0.95%) Kusto Query Language
19 49 (0.93%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,212 (23.09%) Security Cleared
2 985 (18.77%) SC Cleared
3 387 (7.37%) Degree
4 175 (3.33%) Computer Science Degree
5 144 (2.74%) BPSS Clearance
6 141 (2.69%) DV Cleared
7 103 (1.96%) Azure Certification
8 99 (1.89%) AWS Certification
9 89 (1.70%) CISSP
10 87 (1.66%) Master's Degree
11 70 (1.33%) Cisco Certification
12 59 (1.12%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 51 (0.97%) CISM
14 50 (0.95%) CCNP
15 38 (0.72%) PhD
16 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
17 30 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 27 (0.51%) ISTQB
19 23 (0.44%) CCIE
20 22 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 508 (9.68%) Data Quality
2 226 (4.31%) QA
3 166 (3.16%) GDPR
4 111 (2.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 105 (2.00%) NIST
6 81 (1.54%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) SLA
8 34 (0.65%) PCI DSS
9 31 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.34%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) WCAG
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
14 11 (0.21%) SOC 2
15 9 (0.17%) GRC
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) MiFID
System Software
1 824 (15.70%) Docker
2 154 (2.93%) Active Directory
3 95 (1.81%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.31%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.80%) VMware NSX
6 38 (0.72%) vSphere
7 34 (0.65%) Firmware
8 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) HDFS
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.17%) SRDF
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
12 8 (0.15%) NFS
13 6 (0.11%) Lustre
13 6 (0.11%) Postfix
13 6 (0.11%) Squid
14 5 (0.095%) GPFS
14 5 (0.095%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,091 (20.78%) Terraform
2 958 (18.25%) Kubernetes
3 523 (9.96%) Ansible
4 340 (6.48%) Grafana
5 277 (5.28%) Prometheus
6 76 (1.45%) Puppet
7 70 (1.33%) Argo
8 51 (0.97%) Istio
9 48 (0.91%) vRealize
10 42 (0.80%) Kibana
11 33 (0.63%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.63%) vCenter Server
12 27 (0.51%) Nagios
12 27 (0.51%) Nessus
13 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 23 (0.44%) Control-M
14 23 (0.44%) ZABBIX
15 21 (0.40%) Rancher
16 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
17 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 614 (11.70%) Microsoft
2 566 (10.78%) Databricks
3 274 (5.22%) Google
4 229 (4.36%) Oracle
5 218 (4.15%) Splunk
6 179 (3.41%) VMware
7 120 (2.29%) OpenAI
8 119 (2.27%) Cisco
8 119 (2.27%) Red Hat
9 96 (1.83%) ServiceNow
10 92 (1.75%) CyberArk
11 79 (1.51%) BeyondTrust
12 68 (1.30%) IBM
13 67 (1.28%) Informatica
14 65 (1.24%) Dynatrace
15 62 (1.18%) F5
15 62 (1.18%) Foundry
16 60 (1.14%) Palo Alto
17 48 (0.91%) SAP
18 41 (0.78%) Salesforce