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 21 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,816 4,183 4,586
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.42% 11.46% 9.91%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.76% 35.71% 32.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,170 2,773 3,298
10th Percentile £358 £375 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £745 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 89 90 137
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.25 £23.15 £46.18
Median hourly rate £52.50 £52.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year - -13.22% -6.92%
75th Percentile £68.75 £70.00 £73.65
90th Percentile £85.00 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year -13.60% - -3.85%

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 11,533 11,713 14,332
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.15% 32.10% 30.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,604 7,523 10,206
10th Percentile £350 £350 £361
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £623 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £751 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 341 287 443
10th Percentile £29.33 £22.00 £32.06
25th Percentile £46.25 £37.52 £47.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £62.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year - +3.31% +0.83%
75th Percentile £67.50 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £78.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 21 November 2025.

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 21 November 2025.

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 21 November 2025. 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 0 4,108 £525 -12.50% 5,729
London +1 2,412 £550 -12.00% 3,340
UK excluding London +4 1,855 £500 -2.44% 3,071
Work from Home -1 1,472 £525 -6.67% 2,260
North of England +10 569 £475 -6.40% 708
South East +5 398 £500 -6.98% 1,035
Yorkshire +10 302 £500 -6.98% 190
Scotland +14 285 £499 +2.36% 197
Midlands +10 272 £500 +5.26% 403
North West +8 233 £439 -10.00% 447
West Midlands +17 225 £507 +1.30% 266
South West -6 177 £560 -6.79% 310
East of England +9 157 £525 +10.53% 330
East Midlands -5 47 £429 +7.19% 135
North East +5 38 £520 -12.97% 78
Wales -7 31 £475 -5.00% 78
Northern Ireland -4 21 £588 +11.90% 48

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
1 253 (5.25%) Apache Airflow
2 198 (4.11%) Apache Spark
3 186 (3.86%) Confluence
4 180 (3.74%) Apache
5 65 (1.35%) SAS
6 51 (1.06%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.81%) nginx
8 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 15 (0.31%) IIS
11 12 (0.25%) WebSphere
12 11 (0.23%) Appian
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.17%) JBoss
14 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
15 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
16 5 (0.10%) CMS
16 5 (0.10%) Luigi
17 4 (0.083%) Camunda
Applications
1 135 (2.80%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.73%) Chatbot
3 34 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
4 30 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 10 (0.21%) MS Visio
7 9 (0.19%) Maya
7 9 (0.19%) NUKE
8 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.042%) Maple
9 2 (0.042%) Microsoft Project
10 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
10 1 (0.021%) SPSS
10 1 (0.021%) Stata
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
10 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 13 (0.27%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 8 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.17%) Maximo
4 6 (0.12%) Fidessa
5 4 (0.083%) Remedy ITSM
6 3 (0.062%) Payment Gateway
6 3 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
6 3 (0.062%) Teamcenter
7 2 (0.042%) Actimize
7 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
7 2 (0.042%) Endur
7 2 (0.042%) Kondor
7 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.042%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.042%) Shopify
7 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
8 1 (0.021%) Cloudability
8 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,904 (39.53%) AWS
2 1,427 (29.63%) Azure
3 733 (15.22%) GCP
4 554 (11.50%) GitHub
5 481 (9.99%) Serverless
6 401 (8.33%) Power Platform
7 383 (7.95%) Amazon S3
8 342 (7.10%) AWS Lambda
9 302 (6.27%) Azure DevOps
10 284 (5.90%) GitHub Actions
11 248 (5.15%) Snowflake
12 219 (4.55%) AWS CloudFormation
13 199 (4.13%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 199 (4.13%) Amazon EC2
14 177 (3.68%) dbt
15 169 (3.51%) Amazon ECS
16 154 (3.20%) Azure Data Factory
17 152 (3.16%) Amazon EKS
18 138 (2.87%) OpenShift
19 134 (2.78%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 285 (5.92%) Firewall
2 183 (3.80%) DNS
3 148 (3.07%) TCP/IP
4 109 (2.26%) Network Security
5 95 (1.97%) VPN
6 93 (1.93%) HTTP
7 92 (1.91%) BGP
8 67 (1.39%) SSL
9 56 (1.16%) OSPF
10 53 (1.10%) WAN
11 50 (1.04%) MPLS
12 42 (0.87%) SSH
13 41 (0.85%) SMTP
14 40 (0.83%) LAN
15 38 (0.79%) Wireless
16 34 (0.71%) DHCP
17 33 (0.69%) SD-WAN
18 32 (0.66%) FTP
18 32 (0.66%) Wireshark
19 29 (0.60%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 401 (8.33%) PostgreSQL
2 350 (7.27%) Power BI
3 280 (5.81%) Data Warehouse
4 255 (5.29%) Relational Database
5 248 (5.15%) NoSQL
6 178 (3.70%) Data Lake
7 176 (3.65%) Big Data
8 172 (3.57%) Amazon RDS
9 153 (3.18%) Tableau
10 146 (3.03%) SQL Server
11 133 (2.76%) MongoDB
12 118 (2.45%) MySQL
13 106 (2.20%) BigQuery
14 101 (2.10%) Amazon Athena
15 100 (2.08%) Hadoop
16 94 (1.95%) DynamoDB
17 86 (1.79%) Amazon Redshift
18 83 (1.72%) Metadata
19 72 (1.50%) Elasticsearch
20 59 (1.23%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 653 (13.56%) Git
2 628 (13.04%) Jenkins
3 400 (8.31%) GitLab
4 333 (6.91%) JIRA
5 75 (1.56%) Selenium
6 72 (1.50%) SonarQube
7 71 (1.47%) Bitbucket
8 65 (1.35%) Sonatype Nexus
9 63 (1.31%) JUnit
10 55 (1.14%) MLflow
11 46 (0.96%) Liquibase
12 42 (0.87%) Artifactory
13 39 (0.81%) Cucumber
14 36 (0.75%) Maven
14 36 (0.75%) Postman
15 33 (0.69%) Gradle
15 33 (0.69%) JMeter
16 29 (0.60%) Eclipse
17 28 (0.58%) Metasploit
17 28 (0.58%) Vagrant
General
1 1,362 (28.28%) Social Skills
2 1,092 (22.67%) Finance
3 721 (14.97%) Analytical Skills
4 509 (10.57%) Banking
5 414 (8.60%) Public Sector
6 241 (5.00%) Front Office
7 196 (4.07%) Investment Banking
8 111 (2.30%) Documentation Skills
9 90 (1.87%) Financial Institution
10 82 (1.70%) Marketing
11 78 (1.62%) Telecoms
12 73 (1.52%) Retail
13 70 (1.45%) Pharmaceutical
14 61 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 52 (1.08%) Legal
16 49 (1.02%) Presentation Skills
17 42 (0.87%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.69%) Influencing Skills
19 28 (0.58%) Aerospace
19 28 (0.58%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 897 (18.63%) Developer
2 645 (13.39%) Senior
3 538 (11.17%) Data Engineer
4 358 (7.43%) Python Engineer
5 355 (7.37%) Python Developer
6 350 (7.27%) Analyst
7 338 (7.02%) DevOps Engineer
8 301 (6.25%) AWS Engineer
9 276 (5.73%) Software Engineer
10 259 (5.38%) Architect
11 212 (4.40%) Lead
12 190 (3.95%) Platform Engineer
13 185 (3.84%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 167 (3.47%) Data Analyst
15 165 (3.43%) Data Scientist
16 134 (2.78%) Senior Developer
17 131 (2.72%) Consultant
18 125 (2.60%) Cloud Engineer
19 123 (2.55%) Network Engineer
20 119 (2.47%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 395 (8.20%) REST
2 343 (7.12%) React
3 317 (6.58%) Kafka
4 250 (5.19%) Node.js
5 243 (5.05%) RESTful
6 240 (4.98%) Pandas
7 223 (4.63%) FastAPI
8 191 (3.97%) NumPy
9 187 (3.88%) PySpark
10 180 (3.74%) PyTorch
11 161 (3.34%) AngularJS
12 159 (3.30%) TensorFlow
13 142 (2.95%) .NET
14 132 (2.74%) Elastic Stack
15 115 (2.39%) scikit-learn
16 112 (2.33%) HTML
17 109 (2.26%) GraphQL
18 108 (2.24%) CSS
19 106 (2.20%) Flask
19 106 (2.20%) LangChain
Miscellaneous
1 378 (7.85%) Cloud Native
2 214 (4.44%) Algorithms
3 194 (4.03%) Distributed Systems
4 153 (3.18%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 152 (3.16%) Equities
6 142 (2.95%) Fixed Income
7 141 (2.93%) Data Protection Act
8 126 (2.62%) Product Ownership
9 114 (2.37%) Data Structures
9 114 (2.37%) Derivative
10 110 (2.28%) Hedge funds
10 110 (2.28%) Onboarding
11 96 (1.99%) AI Agents
12 85 (1.76%) Public Cloud
13 76 (1.58%) Data Centre
13 76 (1.58%) Management Information System
14 72 (1.50%) Hybrid Cloud
15 69 (1.43%) Legacy Systems
16 67 (1.39%) Replication
17 56 (1.16%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 863 (17.92%) Linux
2 377 (7.83%) Windows
3 248 (5.15%) Unix
4 98 (2.03%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 68 (1.41%) Windows Server
6 45 (0.93%) Android
7 44 (0.91%) Ubuntu
8 37 (0.77%) CentOS
8 37 (0.77%) VMS
9 29 (0.60%) Amazon Linux
10 28 (0.58%) Mac OS
11 25 (0.52%) Apple iOS
12 22 (0.46%) Solaris
13 10 (0.21%) Debian
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
15 8 (0.17%) Windows 7
16 6 (0.12%) AIX
17 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
18 4 (0.083%) Windows Server 2019
18 4 (0.083%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,602 (33.26%) CI/CD
2 1,358 (28.20%) DevOps
3 1,252 (26.00%) Agile
4 1,051 (21.82%) Problem-Solving
5 841 (17.46%) Infrastructure as Code
6 817 (16.96%) AI
7 735 (15.26%) Analytics
8 706 (14.66%) Machine Learning
9 659 (13.68%) Containerisation
10 615 (12.77%) Data Pipeline
11 613 (12.73%) Software Engineering
12 514 (10.67%) Data Science
13 513 (10.65%) ETL
14 504 (10.47%) Data Modelling
15 496 (10.30%) Test Automation
16 489 (10.15%) Data Engineering
17 407 (8.45%) Computer Science
18 401 (8.33%) Business Intelligence
19 361 (7.50%) Microservices
20 347 (7.21%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 1,477 (30.67%) SQL
2 880 (18.27%) Java
3 670 (13.91%) Bash
4 628 (13.04%) PowerShell
5 542 (11.25%) JavaScript
6 344 (7.14%) TypeScript
7 303 (6.29%) Go
8 283 (5.88%) C#
9 268 (5.56%) C++
10 195 (4.05%) Perl
11 181 (3.76%) Shell Script
12 160 (3.32%) R
13 100 (2.08%) Scala
14 84 (1.74%) C
15 81 (1.68%) Ruby
16 61 (1.27%) PHP
17 60 (1.25%) VBA
18 54 (1.12%) Groovy
19 51 (1.06%) Bicep
20 46 (0.96%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 920 (19.10%) Security Cleared
2 736 (15.28%) SC Cleared
3 479 (9.95%) Degree
4 237 (4.92%) Computer Science Degree
5 157 (3.26%) AWS Certification
6 147 (3.05%) DV Cleared
7 145 (3.01%) Master's Degree
8 100 (2.08%) Cisco Certification
9 89 (1.85%) CISSP
10 79 (1.64%) BPSS Clearance
11 76 (1.58%) Azure Certification
12 64 (1.33%) CCNP
13 54 (1.12%) PhD
14 49 (1.02%) MCP
15 45 (0.93%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 39 (0.81%) CCIE
16 39 (0.81%) OSCP
17 36 (0.75%) CEH
18 35 (0.73%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
19 29 (0.60%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 323 (6.71%) Data Quality
2 198 (4.11%) QA
3 158 (3.28%) GDPR
4 101 (2.10%) NIST
5 96 (1.99%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 60 (1.25%) Accessibility
7 48 (1.00%) PCI DSS
8 40 (0.83%) HIPAA
9 28 (0.58%) NCSC
10 25 (0.52%) SLA
11 22 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 20 (0.42%) SOC 2
13 19 (0.39%) EU AI Act
14 13 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.23%) MiFID
16 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 10 (0.21%) EMIR
16 10 (0.21%) PMO
17 8 (0.17%) WCAG
System Software
1 935 (19.41%) Docker
2 163 (3.38%) Active Directory
3 148 (3.07%) VMware Infrastructure
4 44 (0.91%) vSphere
5 35 (0.73%) VMware NSX
6 34 (0.71%) Virtual Machines
7 30 (0.62%) Firmware
8 22 (0.46%) DFS Replication
9 20 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
10 17 (0.35%) Squid
11 16 (0.33%) Hyper-V
11 16 (0.33%) Postfix
12 14 (0.29%) HDFS
12 14 (0.29%) KVM
12 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
14 10 (0.21%) GPFS
14 10 (0.21%) zsh
15 9 (0.19%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 1,045 (21.70%) Kubernetes
2 1,031 (21.41%) Terraform
3 628 (13.04%) Ansible
4 363 (7.54%) Grafana
5 307 (6.37%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.85%) Puppet
7 84 (1.74%) Argo
8 54 (1.12%) Kibana
9 45 (0.93%) Progress Chef
10 40 (0.83%) Istio
11 36 (0.75%) Nessus
12 35 (0.73%) vRealize
13 29 (0.60%) Nmap
13 29 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
14 28 (0.58%) NetBackup
15 27 (0.56%) ITRS Geneos
16 25 (0.52%) vCenter Server
17 23 (0.48%) logstash
18 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
18 22 (0.46%) Packer
Vendors
1 546 (11.34%) Microsoft
2 336 (6.98%) Databricks
3 268 (5.56%) Google
4 255 (5.29%) Splunk
5 232 (4.82%) VMware
6 223 (4.63%) Oracle
7 148 (3.07%) ServiceNow
8 138 (2.87%) Cisco
9 132 (2.74%) Red Hat
10 89 (1.85%) Palo Alto
11 84 (1.74%) F5
12 76 (1.58%) OpenAI
13 66 (1.37%) Foundry
14 64 (1.33%) SAP
15 57 (1.18%) CyberArk
16 51 (1.06%) Atlassian
16 51 (1.06%) IBM
17 46 (0.96%) Salesforce
18 43 (0.89%) CrowdStrike
18 43 (0.89%) Juniper