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 7 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,743 3,936 4,099
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.81% 12.20% 9.62%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.60% 37.35% 31.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,168 2,604 2,919
10th Percentile £358 £380 £400
25th Percentile £421 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £688 £688
90th Percentile £750 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £505 £525
% change year-on-year -0.99% -3.81% -3.10%
Number of hourly rates quoted 101 62 115
10th Percentile £30.00 £20.23 £33.25
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.15 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £46.84 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.29% -21.93% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.26 £67.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £77.25 £77.11
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.61 £46.18 £56.00
% change year-on-year +13.91% -17.54% -13.85%

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 11,401 10,539 12,856
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.80% 32.68% 30.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,560 6,718 9,154
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £502 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.41% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £618 £640 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -1.54% -2.50% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 390 240 410
10th Percentile £34.75 £21.25 £34.73
25th Percentile £51.21 £38.44 £46.67
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.43
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +0.12% -0.91%
75th Percentile £69.40 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.33 £85.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% -

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 7 January 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 7 January 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 7 January 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 0 4,027 £525 -9.48% 3,166
London 0 2,313 £550 -8.33% 999
UK excluding London +3 1,826 £500 -0.99% 2,624
Work from Home +1 1,422 £525 -4.55% 1,398
North of England +9 582 £480 -4.95% 486
South East +1 391 £485 -9.98% 936
Yorkshire +7 296 £500 -6.98% 197
Midlands +9 285 £500 +5.26% 275
Scotland +5 271 £475 -0.99% 119
North West +4 243 £450 -6.25% 207
West Midlands +18 238 £511 +2.15% 113
South West -7 182 £550 -9.09% 330
East of England +8 133 £525 +9.38% 375
North East +8 48 £488 -13.72% 83
East Midlands -16 47 £414 +3.38% 159
Wales -12 27 £550 +10.00% 104
Northern Ireland -3 21 £588 +17.50% 53

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
1 219 (4.62%) Apache Airflow
1 219 (4.62%) Apache Spark
2 161 (3.39%) Apache
3 151 (3.18%) Confluence
4 60 (1.27%) SAS
5 56 (1.18%) SharePoint
6 36 (0.76%) nginx
7 33 (0.70%) OpenStack
8 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 21 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
10 16 (0.34%) Appian
11 10 (0.21%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
12 9 (0.19%) IIS
13 6 (0.13%) Camunda
13 6 (0.13%) CMS
13 6 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
14 5 (0.11%) Luigi
15 4 (0.084%) Tomcat
16 3 (0.063%) JBoss
Applications
1 132 (2.78%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.67%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.51%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 13 (0.27%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 9 (0.19%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 2 (0.042%) LaTeX
9 2 (0.042%) Maya
9 2 (0.042%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.042%) NUKE
10 1 (0.021%) CPLEX
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 15 (0.32%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.13%) Fidessa
5 3 (0.063%) Actimize
5 3 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 3 (0.063%) Remedy ITSM
5 3 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
5 3 (0.063%) Teamcenter
6 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.042%) Maximo
6 2 (0.042%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.042%) Shopify
7 1 (0.021%) Cerner Millennium
7 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
7 1 (0.021%) Finacle
7 1 (0.021%) ION MarketView
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) SAP BPC
Cloud Services
1 1,871 (39.45%) AWS
2 1,518 (32.01%) Azure
3 713 (15.03%) GCP
4 588 (12.40%) GitHub
5 513 (10.82%) Serverless
6 434 (9.15%) Power Platform
7 366 (7.72%) Amazon S3
8 347 (7.32%) AWS Lambda
9 320 (6.75%) GitHub Actions
10 311 (6.56%) Azure DevOps
11 241 (5.08%) Snowflake
12 236 (4.98%) AWS CloudFormation
13 206 (4.34%) Azure Data Factory
14 201 (4.24%) Amazon EC2
15 186 (3.92%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 177 (3.73%) Amazon ECS
17 169 (3.56%) Amazon EKS
18 141 (2.97%) OpenShift
19 140 (2.95%) dbt
20 132 (2.78%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 245 (5.17%) Firewall
2 171 (3.61%) DNS
3 126 (2.66%) TCP/IP
4 118 (2.49%) Network Security
5 88 (1.86%) HTTP
6 79 (1.67%) VPN
7 74 (1.56%) SSL
8 70 (1.48%) BGP
9 49 (1.03%) WAN
10 44 (0.93%) OSPF
11 38 (0.80%) MPLS
11 38 (0.80%) SMTP
11 38 (0.80%) Wireshark
12 37 (0.78%) SSH
12 37 (0.78%) Wireless
13 33 (0.70%) LAN
13 33 (0.70%) SD-WAN
14 32 (0.67%) DHCP
14 32 (0.67%) FTP
15 24 (0.51%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 380 (8.01%) PostgreSQL
2 372 (7.84%) Power BI
3 278 (5.86%) Data Warehouse
4 236 (4.98%) NoSQL
5 230 (4.85%) Relational Database
6 218 (4.60%) Data Lake
7 170 (3.58%) Big Data
8 166 (3.50%) Amazon RDS
9 158 (3.33%) SQL Server
10 152 (3.20%) Tableau
11 121 (2.55%) MySQL
12 103 (2.17%) MongoDB
13 101 (2.13%) Metadata
14 100 (2.11%) BigQuery
15 95 (2.00%) Amazon Athena
16 94 (1.98%) Hadoop
17 92 (1.94%) Amazon Redshift
18 82 (1.73%) DynamoDB
19 75 (1.58%) Azure SQL Database
19 75 (1.58%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 620 (13.07%) Git
2 574 (12.10%) Jenkins
3 436 (9.19%) GitLab
4 271 (5.71%) JIRA
5 85 (1.79%) Selenium
6 74 (1.56%) MLflow
7 50 (1.05%) Bitbucket
7 50 (1.05%) SonarQube
8 49 (1.03%) Cucumber
8 49 (1.03%) Sonatype Nexus
9 44 (0.93%) JUnit
10 39 (0.82%) Liquibase
11 35 (0.74%) Postman
12 34 (0.72%) JMeter
13 30 (0.63%) Cypress.io
14 29 (0.61%) Artifactory
15 27 (0.57%) CircleCI
15 27 (0.57%) Visual Studio
16 25 (0.53%) Eclipse
16 25 (0.53%) Maven
General
1 1,307 (27.56%) Social Skills
2 983 (20.73%) Finance
3 663 (13.98%) Analytical Skills
4 438 (9.23%) Public Sector
5 436 (9.19%) Banking
6 173 (3.65%) Front Office
7 151 (3.18%) Investment Banking
8 120 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
9 75 (1.58%) Financial Institution
10 70 (1.48%) Marketing
11 66 (1.39%) Pharmaceutical
12 60 (1.27%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.24%) Retail
14 56 (1.18%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 45 (0.95%) Legal
16 40 (0.84%) Manufacturing
16 40 (0.84%) Presentation Skills
17 31 (0.65%) Influencing Skills
18 27 (0.57%) Military
19 23 (0.48%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 810 (17.08%) Developer
2 666 (14.04%) Senior
3 585 (12.33%) Data Engineer
4 336 (7.08%) Python Developer
5 331 (6.98%) Python Engineer
6 329 (6.94%) DevOps Engineer
7 309 (6.51%) Analyst
8 282 (5.95%) AWS Engineer
9 277 (5.84%) Architect
10 244 (5.14%) Software Engineer
11 230 (4.85%) Lead
12 229 (4.83%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 182 (3.84%) Data Scientist
14 175 (3.69%) Platform Engineer
15 154 (3.25%) Data Analyst
16 147 (3.10%) Senior Developer
17 121 (2.55%) Azure Engineer
17 121 (2.55%) Full-Stack Developer
18 120 (2.53%) Consultant
19 114 (2.40%) Senior Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 419 (8.83%) REST
2 301 (6.35%) React
3 297 (6.26%) Kafka
4 250 (5.27%) PySpark
5 236 (4.98%) Node.js
6 235 (4.95%) Pandas
7 225 (4.74%) FastAPI
8 223 (4.70%) RESTful
9 190 (4.01%) PyTorch
10 180 (3.80%) NumPy
11 167 (3.52%) TensorFlow
12 155 (3.27%) .NET
13 144 (3.04%) AngularJS
14 127 (2.68%) Elastic Stack
15 124 (2.61%) LangChain
16 120 (2.53%) scikit-learn
17 111 (2.34%) Flask
18 110 (2.32%) pytest
19 107 (2.26%) LDAP
20 102 (2.15%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 388 (8.18%) Cloud Native
2 193 (4.07%) Algorithms
3 187 (3.94%) Distributed Systems
4 129 (2.72%) Equities
5 123 (2.59%) Data Protection Act
6 120 (2.53%) Product Ownership
7 107 (2.26%) Data Structures
8 101 (2.13%) AI Agents
8 101 (2.13%) Derivative
9 99 (2.09%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 96 (2.02%) Onboarding
11 92 (1.94%) Enterprise Software
11 92 (1.94%) Fixed Income
12 84 (1.77%) Hedge funds
13 79 (1.67%) Security Posture
14 77 (1.62%) Public Cloud
15 75 (1.58%) Management Information System
16 73 (1.54%) Data Centre
16 73 (1.54%) Hybrid Cloud
17 70 (1.48%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 801 (16.89%) Linux
2 359 (7.57%) Windows
3 232 (4.89%) Unix
4 92 (1.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.33%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.86%) Android
7 40 (0.84%) VMS
8 35 (0.74%) Ubuntu
9 29 (0.61%) CentOS
10 24 (0.51%) Solaris
11 23 (0.48%) Mac OS
12 19 (0.40%) Amazon Linux
13 17 (0.36%) Apple iOS
14 10 (0.21%) Windows 7
15 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
16 4 (0.084%) Robot Operating System
17 3 (0.063%) AIX
17 3 (0.063%) Debian
17 3 (0.063%) Embedded Linux
17 3 (0.063%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,631 (34.39%) CI/CD
2 1,354 (28.55%) DevOps
3 1,154 (24.33%) Agile
4 1,036 (21.84%) Problem-Solving
5 935 (19.71%) AI
6 857 (18.07%) Infrastructure as Code
7 811 (17.10%) Analytics
8 747 (15.75%) Machine Learning
9 716 (15.10%) Containerisation
10 679 (14.32%) Data Pipeline
11 563 (11.87%) Software Engineering
12 554 (11.68%) Data Science
13 549 (11.57%) ETL
14 547 (11.53%) Data Engineering
15 539 (11.36%) Data Modelling
16 507 (10.69%) Test Automation
17 426 (8.98%) Business Intelligence
18 396 (8.35%) Observability
19 371 (7.82%) Computer Science
20 355 (7.48%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,449 (30.55%) SQL
2 752 (15.85%) Java
3 662 (13.96%) PowerShell
4 638 (13.45%) Bash
5 487 (10.27%) JavaScript
6 289 (6.09%) TypeScript
7 278 (5.86%) C#
8 264 (5.57%) Go
9 214 (4.51%) C++
10 172 (3.63%) Perl
11 167 (3.52%) R
12 158 (3.33%) Shell Script
13 102 (2.15%) Scala
14 95 (2.00%) Ruby
15 59 (1.24%) Bicep
16 57 (1.20%) C
17 56 (1.18%) Kusto Query Language
17 56 (1.18%) VBA
18 45 (0.95%) PHP
19 40 (0.84%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,035 (21.82%) Security Cleared
2 839 (17.69%) SC Cleared
3 445 (9.38%) Degree
4 235 (4.95%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (3.12%) DV Cleared
6 140 (2.95%) AWS Certification
7 123 (2.59%) Master's Degree
8 87 (1.83%) BPSS Clearance
9 86 (1.81%) Azure Certification
10 84 (1.77%) CISSP
11 78 (1.64%) Cisco Certification
12 70 (1.48%) MCP
13 50 (1.05%) CCNP
14 44 (0.93%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 43 (0.91%) PhD
16 39 (0.82%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 35 (0.74%) CCIE
17 35 (0.74%) CEH
18 34 (0.72%) CISM
19 32 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 367 (7.74%) Data Quality
2 182 (3.84%) QA
3 157 (3.31%) GDPR
4 88 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 87 (1.83%) NIST
6 60 (1.27%) Accessibility
7 31 (0.65%) PCI DSS
8 29 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 28 (0.59%) HIPAA
10 24 (0.51%) NCSC
10 24 (0.51%) SLA
11 16 (0.34%) SOC 2
12 15 (0.32%) EU AI Act
13 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
13 9 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
13 9 (0.19%) EMIR
13 9 (0.19%) MiFID
13 9 (0.19%) PMO
14 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
14 8 (0.17%) WCAG
System Software
1 955 (20.13%) Docker
2 193 (4.07%) Active Directory
3 110 (2.32%) VMware Infrastructure
4 39 (0.82%) VMware NSX
5 38 (0.80%) vSphere
6 35 (0.74%) Virtual Machines
7 25 (0.53%) Firmware
8 20 (0.42%) HDFS
9 19 (0.40%) Hyper-V
10 17 (0.36%) KVM
11 16 (0.34%) DFS Replication
11 16 (0.34%) Squid
12 14 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.30%) Postfix
13 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 10 (0.21%) Dovecot
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) GPFS
16 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
16 8 (0.17%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,068 (22.52%) Terraform
2 1,028 (21.67%) Kubernetes
3 606 (12.78%) Ansible
4 367 (7.74%) Grafana
5 312 (6.58%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.90%) Argo
7 79 (1.67%) Puppet
8 55 (1.16%) Kibana
9 44 (0.93%) vRealize
10 43 (0.91%) Istio
11 35 (0.74%) Single Sign-On
12 34 (0.72%) Progress Chef
13 33 (0.70%) Nessus
14 28 (0.59%) NetBackup
15 23 (0.48%) ITRS Geneos
16 20 (0.42%) logstash
17 17 (0.36%) Packer
17 17 (0.36%) vCenter Server
18 16 (0.34%) Nmap
18 16 (0.34%) Proxmox
Vendors
1 562 (11.85%) Microsoft
2 422 (8.90%) Databricks
3 269 (5.67%) Google
4 253 (5.33%) Splunk
5 225 (4.74%) Oracle
6 210 (4.43%) VMware
7 142 (2.99%) Red Hat
8 122 (2.57%) ServiceNow
9 117 (2.47%) Cisco
10 99 (2.09%) OpenAI
11 91 (1.92%) CyberArk
12 85 (1.79%) F5
13 79 (1.67%) Palo Alto
14 68 (1.43%) Foundry
15 66 (1.39%) BeyondTrust
16 54 (1.14%) SAP
17 44 (0.93%) Atlassian
17 44 (0.93%) Dynatrace
18 38 (0.80%) CrowdStrike
18 38 (0.80%) Salesforce