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

6 months to
11 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 16
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -3
Contract jobs citing Python 5,226 3,917 3,984
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.97% 13.32% 9.27%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.72% 39.12% 31.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,487 2,752 2,849
10th Percentile £363 £385 £388
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £553
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -0.45% -7.92%
75th Percentile £624 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £489 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -2.25% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 51 98
10th Percentile £30.49 £21.25 £21.59
25th Percentile £46.25 £26.41 £38.00
Median hourly rate £55.00 £39.32 £60.25
Median % change year-on-year +39.88% -34.74% -6.41%
75th Percentile £70.36 £56.25 £70.94
90th Percentile £85.00 £71.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £63.75
% change year-on-year +16.67% -29.41% +10.87%

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 12,834 10,014 12,732
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.95% 34.06% 29.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,444 6,812 9,059
10th Percentile £355 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £711 £774 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.71% -2.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 569 249 488
10th Percentile £41.87 £25.13 £32.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £35.00 £46.36
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.43
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +0.12% +0.95%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.88
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 11 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 11 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 11 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 4,352 £525 -4.55% 2,762
London -3 2,463 £550 -8.33% 1,318
UK excluding London -1 2,030 £489 -2.25% 1,921
Work from Home -1 1,494 £525 -4.55% 1,199
North of England +10 691 £480 -2.24% 474
South East -2 409 £513 -1.91% 639
Yorkshire 0 386 £475 -5.00% 137
Scotland +2 290 £434 -8.68% 109
Midlands -10 253 £499 +8.71% 219
South West 0 252 £500 -8.05% 220
North West +1 248 £500 +5.26% 251
West Midlands -10 191 £500 - 101
East of England -4 128 £500 - 211
North East +10 66 £475 +5.56% 86
East Midlands -9 61 £470 +10.59% 118
Northern Ireland +16 23 £463 -18.68% 21
Wales -14 22 £463 -7.50% 52

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
1 283 (5.42%) Apache Spark
2 207 (3.96%) Apache Airflow
3 169 (3.23%) Apache
4 136 (2.60%) Confluence
5 49 (0.94%) SAS
6 46 (0.88%) SharePoint
7 35 (0.67%) Jupyter
8 23 (0.44%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.40%) nginx
10 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
11 15 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
12 11 (0.21%) Appian
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) CMS
14 7 (0.13%) Camunda
14 7 (0.13%) IIS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
16 5 (0.096%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 125 (2.39%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
4 20 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
9 2 (0.038%) Weka
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 13 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Fidessa
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
5 5 (0.096%) Remedy ITSM
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.038%) Actimize
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 Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle ERP
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 1,979 (37.87%) AWS
2 1,779 (34.04%) Azure
3 758 (14.50%) GCP
4 647 (12.38%) GitHub
5 517 (9.89%) Power Platform
6 466 (8.92%) Serverless
7 379 (7.25%) Azure DevOps
8 366 (7.00%) Amazon S3
9 340 (6.51%) GitHub Actions
10 334 (6.39%) AWS Lambda
11 266 (5.09%) Azure Data Factory
12 237 (4.54%) Snowflake
13 207 (3.96%) AWS CloudFormation
14 171 (3.27%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 164 (3.14%) OpenShift
16 160 (3.06%) Amazon EKS
17 158 (3.02%) dbt
18 133 (2.54%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 131 (2.51%) Amazon ECS
20 123 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 184 (3.52%) Firewall
2 132 (2.53%) DNS
3 109 (2.09%) Network Security
4 91 (1.74%) TCP/IP
5 84 (1.61%) BGP
6 79 (1.51%) WAN
7 75 (1.44%) VPN
8 58 (1.11%) HTTP
9 56 (1.07%) OSPF
10 44 (0.84%) SAN
11 40 (0.77%) SNMP
12 38 (0.73%) VXLAN
13 37 (0.71%) BIG-IP
13 37 (0.71%) SD-WAN
14 34 (0.65%) MPLS
15 33 (0.63%) DHCP
15 33 (0.63%) LAN
16 32 (0.61%) SSL
17 31 (0.59%) Wireshark
18 30 (0.57%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 452 (8.65%) Power BI
2 342 (6.54%) PostgreSQL
3 285 (5.45%) Data Warehouse
4 239 (4.57%) SQL Server
5 234 (4.48%) Data Lake
6 196 (3.75%) Tableau
7 189 (3.62%) Relational Database
8 173 (3.31%) NoSQL
9 165 (3.16%) Big Data
9 165 (3.16%) Metadata
10 139 (2.66%) Delta Lake
11 133 (2.54%) BigQuery
12 120 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
13 114 (2.18%) Amazon Redshift
14 108 (2.07%) MongoDB
15 92 (1.76%) Amazon RDS
15 92 (1.76%) MySQL
16 89 (1.70%) Azure SQL Database
17 88 (1.68%) DynamoDB
18 79 (1.51%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 648 (12.40%) Git
2 471 (9.01%) Jenkins
3 363 (6.95%) GitLab
4 246 (4.71%) JIRA
5 93 (1.78%) MLflow
6 71 (1.36%) Selenium
7 58 (1.11%) Postman
8 36 (0.69%) Cucumber
9 31 (0.59%) Artifactory
10 30 (0.57%) Bitbucket
10 30 (0.57%) JMeter
11 29 (0.55%) Sonatype Nexus
12 28 (0.54%) SonarQube
13 25 (0.48%) Cypress.io
13 25 (0.48%) JUnit
14 23 (0.44%) Robot Framework
15 22 (0.42%) Maven
16 20 (0.38%) REST Assured
17 19 (0.36%) SpecFlow
18 18 (0.34%) Gatling
General
1 1,153 (22.06%) Social Skills
2 1,017 (19.46%) Finance
3 699 (13.38%) Analytical Skills
4 476 (9.11%) Public Sector
5 365 (6.98%) Banking
6 181 (3.46%) Front Office
7 132 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
8 98 (1.88%) Investment Banking
9 75 (1.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 69 (1.32%) Marketing
11 59 (1.13%) Retail
12 53 (1.01%) Telecoms
13 52 (1.00%) Pharmaceutical
14 51 (0.98%) Legal
15 46 (0.88%) Influencing Skills
16 35 (0.67%) Financial Institution
16 35 (0.67%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.65%) Publishing
18 32 (0.61%) Military
19 29 (0.55%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 983 (18.81%) Developer
2 789 (15.10%) Data Engineer
3 751 (14.37%) Senior
4 488 (9.34%) Python Developer
5 346 (6.62%) Architect
6 336 (6.43%) Lead
7 303 (5.80%) Python Engineer
8 276 (5.28%) Analyst
9 271 (5.19%) DevOps Engineer
10 253 (4.84%) Software Engineer
11 225 (4.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 217 (4.15%) AWS Engineer
13 210 (4.02%) Data Scientist
14 164 (3.14%) Azure Engineer
15 159 (3.04%) Senior Developer
16 157 (3.00%) Senior Data Engineer
17 156 (2.99%) Platform Engineer
18 145 (2.77%) Full-Stack Developer
19 144 (2.76%) Data Analyst
20 129 (2.47%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 387 (7.41%) REST
2 359 (6.87%) React
3 354 (6.77%) PySpark
4 332 (6.35%) Kafka
5 238 (4.55%) .NET
5 238 (4.55%) Node.js
6 217 (4.15%) Pandas
7 187 (3.58%) PyTorch
8 186 (3.56%) FastAPI
9 180 (3.44%) RESTful
10 163 (3.12%) JSON
11 133 (2.54%) NumPy
11 133 (2.54%) TensorFlow
12 127 (2.43%) Django
12 127 (2.43%) Flask
13 124 (2.37%) scikit-learn
14 117 (2.24%) AngularJS
14 117 (2.24%) LangChain
15 109 (2.09%) LDAP
16 102 (1.95%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 540 (10.33%) Cloud Native
2 228 (4.36%) Distributed Systems
3 157 (3.00%) Algorithms
4 134 (2.56%) Product Ownership
5 122 (2.33%) AI Agents
6 120 (2.30%) Data Protection Act
7 117 (2.24%) Data Centre
8 116 (2.22%) Onboarding
9 115 (2.20%) Data Structures
10 109 (2.09%) Derivative
11 104 (1.99%) Fixed Income
12 103 (1.97%) Equities
13 101 (1.93%) Management Information System
14 95 (1.82%) Legacy Systems
15 92 (1.76%) Enterprise Software
16 90 (1.72%) Hybrid Cloud
17 85 (1.63%) Security Posture
18 72 (1.38%) Public Cloud
19 47 (0.90%) Self-Motivation
20 46 (0.88%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 634 (12.13%) Linux
2 294 (5.63%) Windows
3 210 (4.02%) Unix
4 97 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.22%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.71%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.67%) VMS
8 25 (0.48%) AIX
8 25 (0.48%) Android
9 23 (0.44%) Solaris
10 20 (0.38%) CentOS
10 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
11 17 (0.33%) Apple iOS
12 10 (0.19%) Debian
12 10 (0.19%) zOS
13 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
14 7 (0.13%) Rocky
15 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
16 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
17 4 (0.077%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,927 (36.87%) CI/CD
2 1,392 (26.64%) DevOps
3 1,182 (22.62%) AI
4 1,124 (21.51%) Agile
5 1,041 (19.92%) Analytics
6 946 (18.10%) Problem-Solving
7 914 (17.49%) Infrastructure as Code
8 878 (16.80%) Data Pipeline
9 808 (15.46%) Machine Learning
10 720 (13.78%) Containerisation
11 708 (13.55%) Data Modelling
12 702 (13.43%) Data Engineering
13 690 (13.20%) ETL
14 604 (11.56%) Software Engineering
15 580 (11.10%) Data Science
16 542 (10.37%) Observability
17 533 (10.20%) Test Automation
18 524 (10.03%) Business Intelligence
19 443 (8.48%) LLM
20 412 (7.88%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,728 (33.07%) SQL
2 766 (14.66%) Java
3 647 (12.38%) PowerShell
4 561 (10.73%) Bash
5 480 (9.18%) JavaScript
6 354 (6.77%) TypeScript
7 350 (6.70%) C#
8 206 (3.94%) Go
9 175 (3.35%) R
10 155 (2.97%) C++
11 143 (2.74%) Scala
12 107 (2.05%) Shell Script
13 86 (1.65%) Ruby
14 79 (1.51%) Perl
15 78 (1.49%) Bicep
16 56 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 54 (1.03%) C
17 54 (1.03%) PL/SQL
18 53 (1.01%) T-SQL
19 48 (0.92%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,194 (22.85%) Security Cleared
2 965 (18.47%) SC Cleared
3 371 (7.10%) Degree
4 168 (3.21%) Computer Science Degree
5 144 (2.76%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.49%) BPSS Clearance
7 106 (2.03%) Azure Certification
8 95 (1.82%) AWS Certification
9 87 (1.66%) CISSP
10 83 (1.59%) Master's Degree
11 71 (1.36%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.11%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.94%) CCNP
14 46 (0.88%) CISM
15 36 (0.69%) PhD
16 32 (0.61%) Microsoft Certification
17 31 (0.59%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 27 (0.52%) ISTQB
19 22 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 22 (0.42%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 513 (9.82%) Data Quality
2 231 (4.42%) QA
3 158 (3.02%) GDPR
4 106 (2.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 103 (1.97%) NIST
6 77 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) SLA
8 29 (0.55%) PCI DSS
8 29 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
10 20 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
11 18 (0.34%) WCAG
12 17 (0.33%) NCSC
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) SOC 2
15 9 (0.17%) GRC
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) MiFID
17 7 (0.13%) PMO
System Software
1 797 (15.25%) Docker
2 157 (3.00%) Active Directory
3 97 (1.86%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.32%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.77%) VMware NSX
6 36 (0.69%) vSphere
7 34 (0.65%) Firmware
8 33 (0.63%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) KVM
11 13 (0.25%) HDFS
12 10 (0.19%) NFS
13 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
13 9 (0.17%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Ceph
14 8 (0.15%) Squid
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
16 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
16 4 (0.077%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 1,080 (20.67%) Terraform
2 943 (18.04%) Kubernetes
3 534 (10.22%) Ansible
4 340 (6.51%) Grafana
5 279 (5.34%) Prometheus
6 73 (1.40%) Puppet
7 65 (1.24%) Argo
8 52 (1.00%) Istio
9 48 (0.92%) vRealize
10 41 (0.78%) Kibana
11 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
12 32 (0.61%) vCenter Server
13 27 (0.52%) Nagios
13 27 (0.52%) Nessus
14 24 (0.46%) Control-M
14 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.46%) ZABBIX
15 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
16 19 (0.36%) Rancher
16 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 594 (11.37%) Microsoft
2 564 (10.79%) Databricks
3 262 (5.01%) Google
4 229 (4.38%) Oracle
5 225 (4.31%) Splunk
6 179 (3.43%) VMware
7 119 (2.28%) Red Hat
8 116 (2.22%) OpenAI
9 115 (2.20%) Cisco
10 90 (1.72%) CyberArk
10 90 (1.72%) ServiceNow
11 81 (1.55%) BeyondTrust
12 70 (1.34%) Dynatrace
13 68 (1.30%) IBM
14 67 (1.28%) F5
14 67 (1.28%) Informatica
14 67 (1.28%) Palo Alto
15 57 (1.09%) Foundry
16 48 (0.92%) SAP
17 42 (0.80%) Fortinet