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 13 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,711 4,251 4,098
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.84% 13.01% 9.59%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.29% 39.09% 31.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,741 2,876 2,958
10th Percentile £363 £363 £375
25th Percentile £425 £438 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £536 £555
Median % change year-on-year -1.96% -3.51% -7.50%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £700
90th Percentile £738 £799 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £504
% change year-on-year - -0.79% -4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 126 72 120
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.36 £20.74
25th Percentile £41.56 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £53.25 £47.50 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.11% -22.13% -6.15%
75th Percentile £72.25 £57.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.38 £75.00 £75.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +12.50%

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 14,174 10,875 13,174
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.90% 33.28% 30.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,205 7,329 9,262
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £610 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 540 267 519
10th Percentile £34.01 £27.76 £31.25
25th Percentile £52.50 £36.13 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.28 £79.22 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% +4.00%

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 13 July 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 13 July 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 13 July 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 4,766 £525 -4.55% 3,274
London -3 2,740 £550 -4.35% 1,900
UK excluding London -2 2,250 £500 - 1,967
Work from Home -5 1,604 £525 -4.55% 1,172
North of England +5 790 £490 +3.16% 433
South East -8 450 £532 +6.45% 545
Yorkshire +1 430 £500 +1.75% 118
Scotland +4 324 £434 -8.68% 93
North West +4 283 £500 +5.26% 234
South West -4 277 £500 -9.09% 442
Midlands -16 253 £477 +6.00% 208
West Midlands -17 202 £475 +2.70% 116
East of England -14 133 £500 -0.50% 170
North East +6 89 £425 -5.56% 84
East Midlands -8 50 £495 +10.74% 92
Wales -11 33 £490 +7.69% 39
Northern Ireland +12 28 £369 -37.23% 62

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 (5.03%) Apache Spark
2 264 (4.62%) Apache Airflow
3 204 (3.57%) Apache
4 182 (3.19%) Confluence
5 52 (0.91%) Jupyter
5 52 (0.91%) SAS
6 49 (0.86%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.49%) OpenStack
8 24 (0.42%) nginx
9 20 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
10 18 (0.32%) ArcGIS
11 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
12 12 (0.21%) IIS
13 11 (0.19%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.12%) CICS
16 6 (0.11%) Camunda
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.088%) Appian
Applications
1 122 (2.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.54%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
4 26 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 24 (0.42%) MS Visio
6 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
7 14 (0.25%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
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 24 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.088%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.088%) Fidessa
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.088%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.053%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.035%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.035%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,124 (37.19%) AWS
2 1,904 (33.34%) Azure
3 837 (14.66%) GCP
4 688 (12.05%) GitHub
5 531 (9.30%) Power Platform
6 485 (8.49%) Serverless
7 427 (7.48%) Amazon S3
8 404 (7.07%) Azure DevOps
9 380 (6.65%) GitHub Actions
10 364 (6.37%) AWS Lambda
11 287 (5.03%) Snowflake
12 240 (4.20%) Azure Data Factory
13 211 (3.69%) dbt
14 186 (3.26%) AWS CloudFormation
15 176 (3.08%) Amazon EKS
16 175 (3.06%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 160 (2.80%) OpenShift
18 159 (2.78%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 136 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
20 129 (2.26%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 251 (4.40%) Firewall
2 182 (3.19%) DNS
3 124 (2.17%) Network Security
4 123 (2.15%) BGP
5 120 (2.10%) TCP/IP
6 119 (2.08%) WAN
7 104 (1.82%) VPN
8 77 (1.35%) OSPF
9 59 (1.03%) DHCP
10 57 (1.00%) BIG-IP
11 56 (0.98%) HTTP
11 56 (0.98%) SAN
11 56 (0.98%) SD-WAN
12 53 (0.93%) VLAN
13 51 (0.89%) VXLAN
14 47 (0.82%) SSL
15 46 (0.81%) LAN
16 44 (0.77%) MPLS
17 43 (0.75%) SNMP
18 40 (0.70%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 467 (8.18%) Power BI
2 359 (6.29%) PostgreSQL
3 317 (5.55%) Data Warehouse
4 249 (4.36%) SQL Server
5 208 (3.64%) Data Lake
6 204 (3.57%) Tableau
7 193 (3.38%) Relational Database
8 177 (3.10%) Metadata
9 164 (2.87%) Big Data
10 161 (2.82%) NoSQL
11 146 (2.56%) BigQuery
12 141 (2.47%) Amazon Redshift
13 140 (2.45%) Amazon Athena
14 131 (2.29%) Delta Lake
15 126 (2.21%) MongoDB
16 108 (1.89%) Amazon RDS
17 107 (1.87%) DynamoDB
18 92 (1.61%) MySQL
19 76 (1.33%) Snowflake Schema
20 75 (1.31%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 698 (12.22%) Git
2 512 (8.97%) Jenkins
3 406 (7.11%) GitLab
4 323 (5.66%) JIRA
5 84 (1.47%) Selenium
6 72 (1.26%) MLflow
7 58 (1.02%) Postman
8 43 (0.75%) JMeter
9 41 (0.72%) Bitbucket
10 36 (0.63%) Cypress.io
11 35 (0.61%) SonarQube
12 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.56%) Artifactory
13 32 (0.56%) REST Assured
14 29 (0.51%) JUnit
14 29 (0.51%) Sonatype Nexus
15 28 (0.49%) Gatling
15 28 (0.49%) Maven
16 26 (0.46%) Claude Code
17 18 (0.32%) Zephyr
General
1 1,242 (21.75%) Social Skills
2 1,182 (20.70%) Finance
3 772 (13.52%) Analytical Skills
4 561 (9.82%) Public Sector
5 428 (7.49%) Banking
6 204 (3.57%) Front Office
7 134 (2.35%) Documentation Skills
8 130 (2.28%) Investment Banking
9 113 (1.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 93 (1.63%) Retail
11 82 (1.44%) Marketing
12 63 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
12 63 (1.10%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.03%) Legal
14 49 (0.86%) Financial Institution
15 48 (0.84%) Military
16 46 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
16 46 (0.81%) Publishing
17 35 (0.61%) Manufacturing
18 31 (0.54%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,008 (17.65%) Developer
2 888 (15.55%) Senior
3 871 (15.25%) Data Engineer
4 532 (9.32%) Python Developer
5 422 (7.39%) Lead
6 389 (6.81%) Python Engineer
7 331 (5.80%) DevOps Engineer
8 310 (5.43%) Architect
9 303 (5.31%) Software Engineer
10 286 (5.01%) Analyst
11 257 (4.50%) AWS Engineer
12 245 (4.29%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 221 (3.87%) Data Scientist
14 186 (3.26%) Platform Engineer
15 178 (3.12%) Senior Developer
16 175 (3.06%) Azure Engineer
16 175 (3.06%) Cloud Engineer
16 175 (3.06%) Senior Data Engineer
17 145 (2.54%) Data Analyst
18 138 (2.42%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 416 (7.28%) REST
2 374 (6.55%) PySpark
3 370 (6.48%) React
4 352 (6.16%) Kafka
5 246 (4.31%) .NET
6 221 (3.87%) Node.js
7 216 (3.78%) RESTful
8 213 (3.73%) FastAPI
9 200 (3.50%) Pandas
10 194 (3.40%) JSON
11 175 (3.06%) Django
12 158 (2.77%) PyTorch
13 137 (2.40%) LangChain
14 123 (2.15%) NumPy
15 118 (2.07%) Flask
16 111 (1.94%) scikit-learn
17 108 (1.89%) OAuth
18 107 (1.87%) TensorFlow
19 100 (1.75%) pytest
20 98 (1.72%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 753 (13.19%) Cloud Native
2 308 (5.39%) Distributed Systems
3 184 (3.22%) Onboarding
4 172 (3.01%) AI Agents
5 158 (2.77%) Data Centre
6 146 (2.56%) Product Ownership
7 145 (2.54%) Algorithms
8 130 (2.28%) Legacy Systems
9 124 (2.17%) Data Structures
10 118 (2.07%) Data Protection Act
11 115 (2.01%) Management Information System
12 112 (1.96%) Derivative
13 111 (1.94%) Hybrid Cloud
14 104 (1.82%) Fixed Income
15 97 (1.70%) Equities
16 79 (1.38%) Security Posture
17 78 (1.37%) Public Cloud
18 63 (1.10%) Self-Motivation
19 61 (1.07%) Enterprise Software
19 61 (1.07%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 675 (11.82%) Linux
2 318 (5.57%) Windows
3 220 (3.85%) Unix
4 124 (2.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 75 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.56%) VMS
8 26 (0.46%) AIX
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 18 (0.32%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) Apple iOS
12 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
13 13 (0.23%) CentOS
14 12 (0.21%) zOS
15 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
16 8 (0.14%) Embedded Linux
17 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
17 6 (0.11%) Debian
17 6 (0.11%) Rocky
18 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,180 (38.17%) CI/CD
2 1,579 (27.65%) DevOps
3 1,384 (24.23%) AI
4 1,275 (22.33%) Agile
5 1,145 (20.05%) Analytics
6 1,068 (18.70%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,015 (17.77%) Data Pipeline
8 943 (16.51%) Problem-Solving
9 898 (15.72%) Machine Learning
10 809 (14.17%) Data Engineering
11 792 (13.87%) Software Engineering
12 781 (13.68%) Containerisation
13 755 (13.22%) Data Modelling
14 699 (12.24%) ETL
15 647 (11.33%) Observability
16 638 (11.17%) Data Science
17 589 (10.31%) Test Automation
18 549 (9.61%) Business Intelligence
19 525 (9.19%) LLM
20 499 (8.74%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,835 (32.13%) SQL
2 817 (14.31%) Java
3 687 (12.03%) Bash
4 671 (11.75%) PowerShell
5 463 (8.11%) JavaScript
6 407 (7.13%) TypeScript
7 332 (5.81%) C#
8 223 (3.90%) Go
9 165 (2.89%) R
10 138 (2.42%) C++
11 136 (2.38%) Scala
12 122 (2.14%) Shell Script
13 91 (1.59%) Bicep
14 72 (1.26%) Perl
15 58 (1.02%) Ruby
16 56 (0.98%) C
16 56 (0.98%) PL/SQL
17 55 (0.96%) Groovy
18 52 (0.91%) Rust
19 51 (0.89%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,288 (22.55%) Security Cleared
2 1,033 (18.09%) SC Cleared
3 432 (7.56%) Degree
4 187 (3.27%) DV Cleared
5 162 (2.84%) Computer Science Degree
6 143 (2.50%) BPSS Clearance
7 124 (2.17%) AWS Certification
8 117 (2.05%) Azure Certification
9 96 (1.68%) CISSP
10 89 (1.56%) Cisco Certification
11 84 (1.47%) Master's Degree
12 57 (1.00%) CCNP
13 50 (0.88%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 39 (0.68%) CISM
15 35 (0.61%) Microsoft Certification
15 35 (0.61%) PhD
16 32 (0.56%) CCIE
16 32 (0.56%) ISTQB
17 31 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 23 (0.40%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 557 (9.75%) Data Quality
2 250 (4.38%) QA
3 128 (2.24%) GDPR
4 114 (2.00%) NIST
5 112 (1.96%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 93 (1.63%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.60%) SLA
8 26 (0.46%) WCAG
9 25 (0.44%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.42%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.40%) NCSC
12 20 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
12 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 15 (0.26%) SOC 2
14 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.18%) GRC
15 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 888 (15.55%) Docker
2 131 (2.29%) Active Directory
3 121 (2.12%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
5 44 (0.77%) vSphere
6 40 (0.70%) VMware NSX
7 36 (0.63%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.53%) Firmware
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.33%) NFS
11 15 (0.26%) KVM
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 11 (0.19%) Ceph
15 10 (0.18%) SRDF
16 9 (0.16%) HDFS
16 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.12%) Postfix
18 5 (0.088%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
19 4 (0.070%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,237 (21.66%) Terraform
2 1,064 (18.63%) Kubernetes
3 597 (10.45%) Ansible
4 354 (6.20%) Grafana
5 282 (4.94%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.30%) Puppet
7 71 (1.24%) Argo
8 45 (0.79%) Progress Chef
9 43 (0.75%) Istio
10 40 (0.70%) vRealize
11 38 (0.67%) vCenter Server
12 31 (0.54%) Kibana
13 27 (0.47%) Control-M
13 27 (0.47%) ZABBIX
14 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
14 26 (0.46%) Nagios
14 26 (0.46%) Nessus
15 23 (0.40%) Single Sign-On
16 21 (0.37%) HAProxy
17 20 (0.35%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 650 (11.38%) Microsoft
2 575 (10.07%) Databricks
3 327 (5.73%) Google
4 258 (4.52%) Oracle
5 215 (3.76%) Splunk
6 177 (3.10%) VMware
7 145 (2.54%) OpenAI
8 143 (2.50%) Cisco
9 117 (2.05%) ServiceNow
10 107 (1.87%) Red Hat
11 93 (1.63%) F5
12 90 (1.58%) Palo Alto
13 85 (1.49%) Dynatrace
14 82 (1.44%) Informatica
15 81 (1.42%) IBM
16 68 (1.19%) Fortinet
17 66 (1.16%) CyberArk
18 64 (1.12%) Foundry
19 55 (0.96%) SAP
20 54 (0.95%) Arista