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

6 months to
8 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,660 4,194 4,135
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.85% 13.13% 9.59%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.29% 39.13% 31.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,712 2,842 2,967
10th Percentile £363 £364 £375
25th Percentile £425 £440 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £555
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -3.15% -7.50%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £700
90th Percentile £738 £800 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £506
% change year-on-year - -1.19% -3.62%
Number of hourly rates quoted 122 65 125
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £41.56 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £53.25 £45.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.33% -27.42% -4.62%
75th Percentile £69.50 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £62.95 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +11.48%

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 14,047 10,718 13,269
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.92% 33.55% 30.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,125 7,225 9,322
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.04% -2.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.58% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 536 254 532
10th Percentile £34.01 £27.12 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.46 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £78.34 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +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 8 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 8 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 8 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 -2 4,729 £525 -4.55% 2,785
London -3 2,717 £550 -4.35% 1,358
UK excluding London -3 2,228 £500 - 1,890
Work from Home -4 1,589 £525 -4.55% 1,619
North of England +7 790 £488 +1.04% 433
South East -9 447 £530 +5.90% 600
Yorkshire +2 433 £500 +1.42% 137
Scotland +3 318 £438 -7.89% 91
North West +3 280 £500 +5.26% 230
South West -4 268 £500 -9.09% 270
Midlands -15 252 £477 +3.92% 219
West Midlands -15 203 £475 - 111
East of England -13 131 £500 -0.25% 206
North East +6 89 £425 -2.86% 70
East Midlands -9 48 £497 +11.07% 107
Wales -12 32 £483 +6.04% 42
Northern Ireland +14 28 £369 -37.23% 56

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
1 286 (5.05%) Apache Spark
2 260 (4.59%) Apache Airflow
3 201 (3.55%) Apache
4 183 (3.23%) Confluence
5 53 (0.94%) Jupyter
6 51 (0.90%) SAS
7 49 (0.87%) SharePoint
8 25 (0.44%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) nginx
10 20 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.32%) ArcGIS
12 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.21%) IIS
14 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
15 8 (0.14%) CMS
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Appian
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 120 (2.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.55%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 23 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
7 14 (0.25%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.018%) LaTeX
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 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.088%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.088%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) 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%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.035%) Remedy AR System
Cloud Services
1 2,100 (37.10%) AWS
2 1,892 (33.43%) Azure
3 836 (14.77%) GCP
4 683 (12.07%) GitHub
5 527 (9.31%) Power Platform
6 482 (8.52%) Serverless
7 425 (7.51%) Amazon S3
8 398 (7.03%) Azure DevOps
9 376 (6.64%) GitHub Actions
10 361 (6.38%) AWS Lambda
11 285 (5.04%) Snowflake
12 242 (4.28%) Azure Data Factory
13 209 (3.69%) dbt
14 183 (3.23%) AWS CloudFormation
15 175 (3.09%) Amazon EKS
16 171 (3.02%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 160 (2.83%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 158 (2.79%) OpenShift
19 136 (2.40%) Amazon EC2
20 126 (2.23%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 246 (4.35%) Firewall
2 171 (3.02%) DNS
3 124 (2.19%) Network Security
4 121 (2.14%) BGP
5 117 (2.07%) WAN
6 110 (1.94%) TCP/IP
7 102 (1.80%) VPN
8 77 (1.36%) OSPF
9 58 (1.02%) BIG-IP
10 57 (1.01%) SD-WAN
11 55 (0.97%) HTTP
11 55 (0.97%) SAN
12 52 (0.92%) DHCP
12 52 (0.92%) VLAN
13 51 (0.90%) VXLAN
14 47 (0.83%) SSL
15 44 (0.78%) LAN
16 42 (0.74%) MPLS
17 41 (0.72%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 40 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 466 (8.23%) Power BI
2 359 (6.34%) PostgreSQL
3 315 (5.57%) Data Warehouse
4 251 (4.43%) SQL Server
5 208 (3.67%) Data Lake
6 203 (3.59%) Tableau
7 193 (3.41%) Relational Database
8 172 (3.04%) Metadata
9 165 (2.92%) NoSQL
10 162 (2.86%) Big Data
11 143 (2.53%) BigQuery
12 141 (2.49%) Amazon Athena
13 140 (2.47%) Amazon Redshift
14 133 (2.35%) Delta Lake
15 127 (2.24%) MongoDB
16 106 (1.87%) Amazon RDS
17 104 (1.84%) DynamoDB
18 94 (1.66%) MySQL
19 76 (1.34%) Snowflake Schema
20 74 (1.31%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 686 (12.12%) Git
2 507 (8.96%) Jenkins
3 402 (7.10%) GitLab
4 322 (5.69%) JIRA
5 82 (1.45%) Selenium
6 73 (1.29%) MLflow
7 60 (1.06%) Postman
8 41 (0.72%) JMeter
9 40 (0.71%) Bitbucket
10 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
11 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
11 33 (0.58%) SonarQube
12 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
13 30 (0.53%) REST Assured
13 30 (0.53%) Sonatype Nexus
14 28 (0.49%) Maven
15 27 (0.48%) JUnit
16 26 (0.46%) Claude Code
16 26 (0.46%) Gatling
17 19 (0.34%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,231 (21.75%) Social Skills
2 1,180 (20.85%) Finance
3 755 (13.34%) Analytical Skills
4 543 (9.59%) Public Sector
5 426 (7.53%) Banking
6 202 (3.57%) Front Office
7 135 (2.39%) Documentation Skills
8 130 (2.30%) Investment Banking
9 109 (1.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 89 (1.57%) Retail
11 81 (1.43%) Marketing
12 62 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
13 61 (1.08%) Telecoms
14 60 (1.06%) Legal
15 49 (0.87%) Financial Institution
16 46 (0.81%) Publishing
17 45 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
17 45 (0.80%) Military
18 36 (0.64%) Manufacturing
19 32 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,004 (17.74%) Developer
2 875 (15.46%) Data Engineer
3 862 (15.23%) Senior
4 535 (9.45%) Python Developer
5 407 (7.19%) Lead
6 378 (6.68%) Python Engineer
7 317 (5.60%) DevOps Engineer
8 310 (5.48%) Architect
9 299 (5.28%) Software Engineer
10 282 (4.98%) Analyst
11 255 (4.51%) AWS Engineer
12 244 (4.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 222 (3.92%) Data Scientist
14 181 (3.20%) Platform Engineer
15 177 (3.13%) Senior Data Engineer
16 176 (3.11%) Azure Engineer
17 173 (3.06%) Senior Developer
18 170 (3.00%) Cloud Engineer
19 142 (2.51%) Data Analyst
20 138 (2.44%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 410 (7.24%) REST
2 377 (6.66%) PySpark
3 368 (6.50%) React
4 345 (6.10%) Kafka
5 245 (4.33%) .NET
6 218 (3.85%) Node.js
7 212 (3.75%) RESTful
8 210 (3.71%) FastAPI
9 201 (3.55%) Pandas
10 194 (3.43%) JSON
11 170 (3.00%) Django
12 162 (2.86%) PyTorch
13 136 (2.40%) LangChain
14 124 (2.19%) NumPy
15 119 (2.10%) Flask
16 114 (2.01%) scikit-learn
17 110 (1.94%) TensorFlow
18 109 (1.93%) OAuth
19 103 (1.82%) pytest
20 100 (1.77%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 742 (13.11%) Cloud Native
2 303 (5.35%) Distributed Systems
3 172 (3.04%) Onboarding
4 168 (2.97%) AI Agents
5 154 (2.72%) Data Centre
6 148 (2.61%) Product Ownership
7 147 (2.60%) Algorithms
8 125 (2.21%) Data Structures
9 124 (2.19%) Legacy Systems
10 119 (2.10%) Data Protection Act
11 115 (2.03%) Management Information System
12 110 (1.94%) Derivative
13 108 (1.91%) Hybrid Cloud
14 100 (1.77%) Fixed Income
15 98 (1.73%) Equities
16 79 (1.40%) Security Posture
17 74 (1.31%) Public Cloud
18 63 (1.11%) Self-Motivation
19 61 (1.08%) Enterprise Software
20 59 (1.04%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 667 (11.78%) Linux
2 314 (5.55%) Windows
3 223 (3.94%) Unix
4 122 (2.16%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 77 (1.36%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.71%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.57%) VMS
8 26 (0.46%) AIX
9 23 (0.41%) Android
10 19 (0.34%) Solaris
11 17 (0.30%) Apple iOS
12 14 (0.25%) CentOS
12 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.12%) Debian
15 7 (0.12%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.12%) Rocky
16 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
17 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,153 (38.04%) CI/CD
2 1,550 (27.39%) DevOps
3 1,377 (24.33%) AI
4 1,256 (22.19%) Agile
5 1,137 (20.09%) Analytics
6 1,046 (18.48%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,006 (17.77%) Data Pipeline
8 927 (16.38%) Problem-Solving
9 891 (15.74%) Machine Learning
10 805 (14.22%) Data Engineering
11 772 (13.64%) Software Engineering
12 769 (13.59%) Containerisation
13 747 (13.20%) Data Modelling
14 702 (12.40%) ETL
15 634 (11.20%) Observability
16 633 (11.18%) Data Science
17 585 (10.34%) Test Automation
18 546 (9.65%) Business Intelligence
19 527 (9.31%) LLM
20 491 (8.67%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,832 (32.37%) SQL
2 808 (14.28%) Java
3 670 (11.84%) Bash
4 661 (11.68%) PowerShell
5 460 (8.13%) JavaScript
6 403 (7.12%) TypeScript
7 336 (5.94%) C#
8 221 (3.90%) Go
9 164 (2.90%) R
10 142 (2.51%) C++
11 134 (2.37%) Scala
12 120 (2.12%) Shell Script
13 90 (1.59%) Bicep
14 73 (1.29%) Perl
15 57 (1.01%) C
15 57 (1.01%) Ruby
16 56 (0.99%) Groovy
16 56 (0.99%) PL/SQL
17 51 (0.90%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 51 (0.90%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,267 (22.39%) Security Cleared
2 1,016 (17.95%) SC Cleared
3 430 (7.60%) Degree
4 178 (3.14%) DV Cleared
5 163 (2.88%) Computer Science Degree
6 138 (2.44%) BPSS Clearance
7 121 (2.14%) AWS Certification
8 117 (2.07%) Azure Certification
9 96 (1.70%) CISSP
10 86 (1.52%) Cisco Certification
11 83 (1.47%) Master's Degree
12 57 (1.01%) CCNP
13 51 (0.90%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 38 (0.67%) CISM
15 36 (0.64%) PhD
16 34 (0.60%) Microsoft Certification
17 32 (0.57%) ISTQB
18 31 (0.55%) CCIE
19 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
20 21 (0.37%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 554 (9.79%) Data Quality
2 243 (4.29%) QA
3 130 (2.30%) GDPR
4 114 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 114 (2.01%) NIST
5 89 (1.57%) Accessibility
6 34 (0.60%) SLA
7 25 (0.44%) PCI DSS
7 25 (0.44%) WCAG
8 24 (0.42%) HIPAA
9 21 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 20 (0.35%) NCSC
11 18 (0.32%) Actionable Recommendations
12 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
13 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.18%) GRC
14 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 882 (15.58%) Docker
2 123 (2.17%) Active Directory
3 112 (1.98%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 41 (0.72%) vSphere
6 38 (0.67%) VMware NSX
7 32 (0.57%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.53%) Firmware
9 24 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) NFS
11 15 (0.27%) KVM
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) Ceph
16 8 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.12%) HDFS
17 7 (0.12%) Postfix
18 5 (0.088%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
19 4 (0.071%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,222 (21.59%) Terraform
2 1,045 (18.46%) Kubernetes
3 590 (10.42%) Ansible
4 351 (6.20%) Grafana
5 278 (4.91%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.31%) Puppet
7 68 (1.20%) Argo
8 44 (0.78%) Istio
9 43 (0.76%) Progress Chef
10 42 (0.74%) vRealize
11 36 (0.64%) vCenter Server
12 32 (0.57%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) Control-M
14 26 (0.46%) Nagios
14 26 (0.46%) Nessus
14 26 (0.46%) ZABBIX
15 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
16 22 (0.39%) Single Sign-On
17 21 (0.37%) HAProxy
18 20 (0.35%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 644 (11.38%) Microsoft
2 579 (10.23%) Databricks
3 325 (5.74%) Google
4 256 (4.52%) Oracle
5 217 (3.83%) Splunk
6 169 (2.99%) VMware
7 143 (2.53%) OpenAI
8 141 (2.49%) Cisco
9 116 (2.05%) ServiceNow
10 106 (1.87%) Red Hat
11 92 (1.63%) F5
12 90 (1.59%) Palo Alto
13 85 (1.50%) Dynatrace
14 82 (1.45%) Informatica
15 80 (1.41%) IBM
16 66 (1.17%) Fortinet
17 62 (1.10%) CyberArk
18 61 (1.08%) Foundry
19 54 (0.95%) Salesforce
19 54 (0.95%) SAP