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 26 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 9 10 15
Rank change year-on-year +1 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,207 3,894 4,084
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.84% 13.40% 9.22%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.20% 39.28% 31.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,544 2,738 2,883
10th Percentile £363 £380 £400
25th Percentile £417 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £500 £515
% change year-on-year -3.68% -2.95% -6.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 108 53 103
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.34 £20.91
25th Percentile £40.06 £23.00 £31.25
Median hourly rate £52.25 £42.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +22.94% -15.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile £69.06 £60.75 £66.50
90th Percentile £79.65 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +13.80% -2.56% -28.95%

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 12,638 9,914 12,919
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.74% 34.11% 29.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,394 6,649 9,142
10th Percentile £353 £356 £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 £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £483 £488
% change year-on-year -1.66% -0.92% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 509 243 485
10th Percentile £41.25 £22.04 £30.88
25th Percentile £53.75 £32.51 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.25 £67.50
90th Percentile £77.00 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.56% +3.90% -4.31%

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 26 March 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 26 March 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 26 March 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 -1 4,366 £518 -8.00% 2,695
London -3 2,478 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London -1 1,988 £482 -3.68% 1,990
Work from Home +1 1,564 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +13 668 £480 -4.00% 475
South East -6 407 £500 -5.44% 576
Yorkshire +2 361 £482 -3.60% 164
Midlands +3 287 £498 +4.79% 255
North West +11 261 £475 -5.00% 230
Scotland +1 255 £425 -9.57% 104
South West -3 231 £525 -8.70% 280
West Midlands -1 230 £500 - 130
East of England 0 136 £500 +2.04% 219
East Midlands -15 56 £450 +5.88% 125
North East +15 55 £488 -2.50% 83
Wales -15 30 £475 -10.38% 78
Northern Ireland +7 29 £613 +13.95% 33

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
1 258 (4.95%) Apache Spark
2 199 (3.82%) Apache Airflow
3 170 (3.26%) Confluence
4 159 (3.05%) Apache
5 64 (1.23%) SAS
6 59 (1.13%) SharePoint
7 26 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.48%) Jupyter
8 25 (0.48%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.46%) nginx
10 20 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
11 15 (0.29%) Appian
12 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
13 11 (0.21%) Camunda
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 4 (0.077%) CICS
15 4 (0.077%) Tomcat
15 4 (0.077%) WebSphere
16 3 (0.058%) IIS
Applications
1 136 (2.61%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.54%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
4 26 (0.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
5 21 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
6 8 (0.15%) Weka
7 5 (0.096%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.19%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.058%) Actimize
7 3 (0.058%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.058%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) Cloudability
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
9 1 (0.019%) Advent Geneva
9 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
9 1 (0.019%) SAP IBP
9 1 (0.019%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 2,023 (38.85%) AWS
2 1,828 (35.11%) Azure
3 810 (15.56%) GCP
4 699 (13.42%) GitHub
5 519 (9.97%) Serverless
6 497 (9.54%) Power Platform
7 401 (7.70%) Azure DevOps
8 362 (6.95%) Amazon S3
9 347 (6.66%) GitHub Actions
10 346 (6.64%) AWS Lambda
11 274 (5.26%) Azure Data Factory
12 250 (4.80%) Snowflake
13 247 (4.74%) AWS CloudFormation
14 187 (3.59%) Amazon EKS
15 175 (3.36%) OpenShift
16 166 (3.19%) Amazon ECS
17 164 (3.15%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 154 (2.96%) Amazon EC2
19 149 (2.86%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 148 (2.84%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 207 (3.98%) Firewall
2 148 (2.84%) DNS
3 113 (2.17%) Network Security
4 103 (1.98%) TCP/IP
5 84 (1.61%) VPN
6 71 (1.36%) BGP
7 64 (1.23%) WAN
8 59 (1.13%) HTTP
9 42 (0.81%) SAN
10 41 (0.79%) MPLS
10 41 (0.79%) OSPF
11 37 (0.71%) Wireshark
12 35 (0.67%) SSL
13 34 (0.65%) LAN
13 34 (0.65%) VLAN
14 32 (0.61%) SD-WAN
15 31 (0.60%) DHCP
16 28 (0.54%) SNMP
17 24 (0.46%) VXLAN
18 23 (0.44%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 413 (7.93%) Power BI
2 366 (7.03%) PostgreSQL
3 302 (5.80%) Data Warehouse
4 234 (4.49%) Data Lake
5 212 (4.07%) NoSQL
6 197 (3.78%) SQL Server
7 189 (3.63%) Relational Database
8 173 (3.32%) Tableau
9 146 (2.80%) Big Data
9 146 (2.80%) Metadata
10 128 (2.46%) Delta Lake
11 121 (2.32%) Amazon RDS
12 115 (2.21%) BigQuery
13 111 (2.13%) MySQL
14 104 (2.00%) Amazon Redshift
15 101 (1.94%) MongoDB
16 96 (1.84%) Amazon Athena
17 90 (1.73%) Azure SQL Database
18 81 (1.56%) DynamoDB
19 79 (1.52%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 659 (12.66%) Git
2 550 (10.56%) Jenkins
3 419 (8.05%) GitLab
4 293 (5.63%) JIRA
5 93 (1.79%) MLflow
6 92 (1.77%) Selenium
7 54 (1.04%) Postman
8 47 (0.90%) Bitbucket
9 44 (0.85%) Cucumber
10 40 (0.77%) JMeter
10 40 (0.77%) JUnit
11 35 (0.67%) Sonatype Nexus
12 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
13 27 (0.52%) Artifactory
13 27 (0.52%) Cypress.io
13 27 (0.52%) Visual Studio
14 23 (0.44%) Gatling
15 22 (0.42%) Maven
16 21 (0.40%) CircleCI
16 21 (0.40%) SonarQube
General
1 1,252 (24.04%) Social Skills
2 1,011 (19.42%) Finance
3 709 (13.62%) Analytical Skills
4 502 (9.64%) Public Sector
5 402 (7.72%) Banking
6 174 (3.34%) Front Office
7 129 (2.48%) Documentation Skills
8 91 (1.75%) Investment Banking
9 67 (1.29%) Marketing
10 65 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 64 (1.23%) Retail
12 59 (1.13%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.08%) Legal
14 55 (1.06%) Financial Institution
15 54 (1.04%) Influencing Skills
16 52 (1.00%) Telecoms
17 42 (0.81%) Manufacturing
18 31 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
19 28 (0.54%) Military
19 28 (0.54%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 965 (18.53%) Developer
2 738 (14.17%) Data Engineer
3 731 (14.04%) Senior
4 447 (8.58%) Python Developer
5 356 (6.84%) Architect
6 341 (6.55%) Lead
7 292 (5.61%) DevOps Engineer
8 286 (5.49%) Python Engineer
9 280 (5.38%) Analyst
10 250 (4.80%) AWS Engineer
10 250 (4.80%) Software Engineer
11 243 (4.67%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 204 (3.92%) Data Scientist
13 194 (3.73%) Platform Engineer
14 159 (3.05%) Azure Engineer
15 157 (3.02%) Senior Developer
16 145 (2.78%) Data Analyst
17 139 (2.67%) Senior Data Engineer
18 133 (2.55%) Full-Stack Developer
19 128 (2.46%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 460 (8.83%) REST
2 352 (6.76%) React
3 334 (6.41%) PySpark
4 330 (6.34%) Kafka
5 279 (5.36%) Node.js
6 231 (4.44%) Pandas
7 224 (4.30%) .NET
8 205 (3.94%) PyTorch
9 197 (3.78%) RESTful
10 193 (3.71%) FastAPI
11 168 (3.23%) TensorFlow
12 157 (3.02%) NumPy
13 149 (2.86%) scikit-learn
14 147 (2.82%) JSON
15 136 (2.61%) Flask
16 134 (2.57%) AngularJS
17 122 (2.34%) Django
18 119 (2.29%) LangChain
19 113 (2.17%) pytest
20 107 (2.05%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 522 (10.02%) Cloud Native
2 221 (4.24%) Distributed Systems
3 198 (3.80%) Algorithms
4 148 (2.84%) Product Ownership
5 123 (2.36%) Equities
6 117 (2.25%) Fixed Income
7 116 (2.23%) Data Protection Act
8 108 (2.07%) Data Structures
9 107 (2.05%) AI Agents
10 106 (2.04%) Derivative
11 102 (1.96%) Hybrid Cloud
12 95 (1.82%) Legacy Systems
13 93 (1.79%) Onboarding
14 91 (1.75%) Data Centre
15 90 (1.73%) Enterprise Software
16 89 (1.71%) Public Cloud
17 82 (1.57%) Security Posture
18 81 (1.56%) Management Information System
19 54 (1.04%) Hedge funds
19 54 (1.04%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 679 (13.04%) Linux
2 315 (6.05%) Windows
3 180 (3.46%) Unix
4 100 (1.92%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 69 (1.33%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.65%) VMS
7 33 (0.63%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.60%) Android
9 19 (0.36%) Mac OS
10 18 (0.35%) Solaris
11 17 (0.33%) AIX
11 17 (0.33%) CentOS
12 15 (0.29%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.17%) Windows 7
14 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.12%) Debian
15 6 (0.12%) Kali Linux
15 6 (0.12%) zOS
16 5 (0.096%) Rocky
17 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,923 (36.93%) CI/CD
2 1,489 (28.60%) DevOps
3 1,208 (23.20%) Agile
4 1,132 (21.74%) AI
5 1,038 (19.93%) Problem-Solving
6 1,035 (19.88%) Analytics
7 930 (17.86%) Infrastructure as Code
8 842 (16.17%) Data Pipeline
9 831 (15.96%) Machine Learning
10 765 (14.69%) Containerisation
11 713 (13.69%) Data Engineering
12 692 (13.29%) Data Modelling
13 672 (12.91%) ETL
14 617 (11.85%) Data Science
15 604 (11.60%) Test Automation
16 584 (11.22%) Software Engineering
17 506 (9.72%) Observability
18 500 (9.60%) Business Intelligence
19 428 (8.22%) LLM
20 395 (7.59%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,651 (31.71%) SQL
2 738 (14.17%) Java
3 685 (13.16%) PowerShell
4 610 (11.71%) Bash
5 486 (9.33%) JavaScript
6 345 (6.63%) TypeScript
7 342 (6.57%) C#
8 227 (4.36%) Go
9 168 (3.23%) C++
10 159 (3.05%) R
11 126 (2.42%) Scala
12 105 (2.02%) Shell Script
13 100 (1.92%) Ruby
14 97 (1.86%) Perl
15 79 (1.52%) Bicep
16 56 (1.08%) Kusto Query Language
17 49 (0.94%) C
18 48 (0.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 44 (0.85%) T-SQL
20 40 (0.77%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,216 (23.35%) Security Cleared
2 973 (18.69%) SC Cleared
3 437 (8.39%) Degree
4 199 (3.82%) Computer Science Degree
5 152 (2.92%) DV Cleared
6 125 (2.40%) BPSS Clearance
7 123 (2.36%) Master's Degree
8 120 (2.30%) AWS Certification
9 105 (2.02%) Azure Certification
10 96 (1.84%) CISSP
11 75 (1.44%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.11%) CCNP
13 57 (1.09%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 48 (0.92%) CISM
15 47 (0.90%) PhD
16 36 (0.69%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 36 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
17 33 (0.63%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.54%) CEH
19 27 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 502 (9.64%) Data Quality
2 215 (4.13%) QA
3 180 (3.46%) GDPR
4 112 (2.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 105 (2.02%) NIST
6 77 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 32 (0.61%) SLA
9 28 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 24 (0.46%) NCSC
12 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.31%) WCAG
14 12 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.19%) MiFID
17 9 (0.17%) PSD2
System Software
1 920 (17.67%) Docker
2 169 (3.25%) Active Directory
3 120 (2.30%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.17%) vSphere
5 57 (1.09%) Virtual Machines
6 54 (1.04%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.63%) Hyper-V
8 31 (0.60%) Firmware
9 16 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 10 (0.19%) HDFS
11 10 (0.19%) Lustre
11 10 (0.19%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 9 (0.17%) GPFS
13 8 (0.15%) Ceph
13 8 (0.15%) SRDF
14 6 (0.12%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.096%) NFS
15 5 (0.096%) Postfix
15 5 (0.096%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,128 (21.66%) Terraform
2 1,031 (19.80%) Kubernetes
3 547 (10.51%) Ansible
4 350 (6.72%) Grafana
5 307 (5.90%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.73%) Argo
7 77 (1.48%) Puppet
8 50 (0.96%) Istio
9 49 (0.94%) vRealize
10 39 (0.75%) vCenter Server
11 38 (0.73%) Kibana
12 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
13 27 (0.52%) Nessus
14 26 (0.50%) Single Sign-On
15 24 (0.46%) NetBackup
16 22 (0.42%) Rancher
17 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
18 18 (0.35%) Control-M
18 18 (0.35%) Kubeflow
19 17 (0.33%) Nagios
Vendors
1 632 (12.14%) Microsoft
2 555 (10.66%) Databricks
3 296 (5.68%) Google
4 223 (4.28%) Splunk
5 220 (4.23%) VMware
6 214 (4.11%) Oracle
7 146 (2.80%) Red Hat
8 125 (2.40%) Cisco
9 119 (2.29%) OpenAI
10 105 (2.02%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.61%) CyberArk
12 75 (1.44%) Foundry
13 69 (1.33%) BeyondTrust
14 62 (1.19%) Informatica
15 61 (1.17%) F5
16 59 (1.13%) Palo Alto
17 56 (1.08%) IBM
18 47 (0.90%) Dynatrace
19 43 (0.83%) Atlassian
19 43 (0.83%) SAP