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 10 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,669 4,309 4,030
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.40% 13.06% 10.53%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.98% 39.81% 33.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,682 2,832 2,839
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £445 £428 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £649 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 140 84 102
10th Percentile £30.45 £28.20 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.19 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £62.25
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -19.68% -4.23%
75th Percentile £79.06 £58.81 £71.41
90th Percentile £90.21 £84.39 £78.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.48 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.96% -28.57% +10.34%

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 14,179 10,823 12,148
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.02% 32.81% 31.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,205 7,174 8,294
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 537 297 340
10th Percentile £27.75 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £47.50 £37.77 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.50 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £80.00 £78.75
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 10 September 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 10 September 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 10 September 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 -3 4,841 £550 +2.33% 4,650
London -3 2,876 £575 - 2,771
UK excluding London -7 2,140 £500 - 2,563
Work from Home -5 1,555 £530 -3.68% 1,781
North of England 0 732 £500 +5.26% 511
South East -6 455 £538 +7.50% 703
Yorkshire -1 378 £500 +1.46% 172
South West 0 282 £550 +4.76% 369
Scotland -5 280 £450 -10.00% 306
North West -2 276 £525 +11.94% 264
Midlands -19 228 £500 +5.26% 254
West Midlands -20 184 £500 +4.17% 122
East of England -10 150 £494 -5.95% 329
North East -3 90 £425 -2.86% 77
East Midlands -17 44 £475 +14.46% 131
Wales -6 29 £530 +24.71% 57
Northern Ireland +3 17 £363 -30.95% 68

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
1 294 (5.19%) Apache Airflow
2 275 (4.85%) Apache Spark
3 222 (3.92%) Apache
4 163 (2.88%) Confluence
5 57 (1.01%) Jupyter
6 53 (0.93%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.67%) SAS
8 30 (0.53%) OpenStack
9 25 (0.44%) ArcGIS
10 21 (0.37%) IIS
10 21 (0.37%) nginx
10 21 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
11 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
12 8 (0.14%) CMS
12 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) WebSphere
13 7 (0.12%) Apache Superset
14 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 114 (2.01%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.60%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
5 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
5 18 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.035%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
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 18 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
1 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
2 17 (0.30%) Aladdin
3 11 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) Front Arena
6 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
8 5 (0.088%) NetSuite
8 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.088%) Summit
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.035%) Global One
11 2 (0.035%) Odoo
11 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 2,099 (37.03%) AWS
2 1,920 (33.87%) Azure
3 867 (15.29%) GCP
4 753 (13.28%) GitHub
5 499 (8.80%) Power Platform
6 490 (8.64%) Serverless
7 452 (7.97%) Azure DevOps
8 440 (7.76%) GitHub Actions
9 395 (6.97%) Amazon S3
10 366 (6.46%) AWS Lambda
11 331 (5.84%) Snowflake
12 233 (4.11%) dbt
13 224 (3.95%) Azure Data Factory
14 193 (3.40%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 182 (3.21%) AWS CloudFormation
16 173 (3.05%) Amazon EKS
17 144 (2.54%) Entra ID
18 139 (2.45%) Amazon EC2
19 133 (2.35%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 131 (2.31%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 282 (4.97%) Firewall
2 215 (3.79%) DNS
3 148 (2.61%) Network Security
3 148 (2.61%) TCP/IP
4 126 (2.22%) BGP
5 124 (2.19%) VPN
6 114 (2.01%) WAN
7 87 (1.53%) DHCP
8 74 (1.31%) OSPF
9 68 (1.20%) SD-WAN
10 61 (1.08%) VLAN
11 58 (1.02%) BIG-IP
12 57 (1.01%) SSL
13 54 (0.95%) HTTP
14 53 (0.93%) VXLAN
15 49 (0.86%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 41 (0.72%) Ethernet VPN
17 40 (0.71%) SAN
18 39 (0.69%) SNMP
19 38 (0.67%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 448 (7.90%) Power BI
2 330 (5.82%) Data Warehouse
3 317 (5.59%) PostgreSQL
4 218 (3.85%) SQL Server
5 212 (3.74%) Metadata
6 210 (3.70%) Relational Database
7 191 (3.37%) Tableau
8 187 (3.30%) Data Lake
9 164 (2.89%) BigQuery
10 157 (2.77%) NoSQL
11 144 (2.54%) Big Data
12 132 (2.33%) Amazon Redshift
13 129 (2.28%) Amazon RDS
14 127 (2.24%) Amazon Athena
15 123 (2.17%) Delta Lake
16 122 (2.15%) MongoDB
17 110 (1.94%) DynamoDB
18 98 (1.73%) MySQL
19 71 (1.25%) Redis
20 66 (1.16%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 772 (13.62%) Git
2 497 (8.77%) Jenkins
3 458 (8.08%) GitLab
4 295 (5.20%) JIRA
5 118 (2.08%) Selenium
6 61 (1.08%) JMeter
7 59 (1.04%) Postman
8 56 (0.99%) SonarQube
9 54 (0.95%) MLflow
10 51 (0.90%) Claude Code
11 41 (0.72%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.62%) Maven
13 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
14 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
14 33 (0.58%) REST Assured
15 32 (0.56%) Gatling
16 31 (0.55%) Artifactory
17 30 (0.53%) Sonatype Nexus
18 25 (0.44%) LoadRunner
19 22 (0.39%) JUnit
General
1 1,308 (23.07%) Social Skills
2 1,238 (21.84%) Finance
3 857 (15.12%) Analytical Skills
4 560 (9.88%) Public Sector
5 472 (8.33%) Banking
6 179 (3.16%) Front Office
7 142 (2.50%) Investment Banking
8 113 (1.99%) Documentation Skills
9 111 (1.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 111 (1.96%) Retail
10 95 (1.68%) Marketing
11 80 (1.41%) Telecoms
12 59 (1.04%) Military
13 57 (1.01%) Pharmaceutical
14 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
15 49 (0.86%) Law
15 49 (0.86%) Legal
16 47 (0.83%) Publishing
17 45 (0.79%) Financial Institution
18 43 (0.76%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 972 (17.15%) Senior
2 914 (16.12%) Developer
3 835 (14.73%) Data Engineer
4 483 (8.52%) Python Developer
5 479 (8.45%) Lead
6 422 (7.44%) Python Engineer
7 341 (6.02%) DevOps Engineer
8 291 (5.13%) Analyst
9 283 (4.99%) Software Engineer
10 281 (4.96%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 274 (4.83%) Architect
12 232 (4.09%) AWS Engineer
13 194 (3.42%) Platform Engineer
14 193 (3.40%) Cloud Engineer
15 192 (3.39%) Data Scientist
15 192 (3.39%) Senior Developer
16 186 (3.28%) Senior Data Engineer
17 181 (3.19%) Azure Engineer
18 144 (2.54%) Data Analyst
19 141 (2.49%) Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,346 (23.74%) Terraform
2 493 (8.70%) REST
3 381 (6.72%) PySpark
4 365 (6.44%) Kafka
5 309 (5.45%) React
6 253 (4.46%) .NET
7 212 (3.74%) JSON
8 205 (3.62%) Django
9 203 (3.58%) FastAPI
10 189 (3.33%) RESTful
11 173 (3.05%) Pandas
12 165 (2.91%) Node.js
13 147 (2.59%) pytest
14 141 (2.49%) LangChain
15 117 (2.06%) Flask
16 116 (2.05%) PyTorch
17 113 (1.99%) OAuth
18 112 (1.98%) HTML
18 112 (1.98%) YAML
19 104 (1.83%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 800 (14.11%) Cloud Native
2 313 (5.52%) Distributed Systems
3 255 (4.50%) AI Agents
4 229 (4.04%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.86%) Product Ownership
6 158 (2.79%) Data Centre
7 141 (2.49%) Algorithms
7 141 (2.49%) Data Structures
8 138 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
9 120 (2.12%) Hybrid Cloud
10 110 (1.94%) Management Information System
11 108 (1.91%) Data Protection Act
12 103 (1.82%) Derivative
13 94 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
14 86 (1.52%) Security Posture
15 83 (1.46%) Equities
16 74 (1.31%) Public Cloud
17 71 (1.25%) Linux Command Line
18 68 (1.20%) PKI
19 67 (1.18%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 750 (13.23%) Linux
2 335 (5.91%) Windows
3 251 (4.43%) Unix
4 153 (2.70%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 91 (1.61%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.74%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.62%) VMS
8 23 (0.41%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 18 (0.32%) CentOS
11 16 (0.28%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.088%) Debian
17 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,311 (40.77%) CI/CD
2 1,626 (28.68%) DevOps
3 1,525 (26.90%) AI
4 1,265 (22.31%) Agile
5 1,245 (21.96%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,108 (19.54%) Analytics
7 996 (17.57%) Data Pipeline
8 927 (16.35%) Software Engineering
9 906 (15.98%) Problem-Solving
10 860 (15.17%) Machine Learning
11 822 (14.50%) Data Engineering
12 799 (14.09%) Containerisation
13 756 (13.34%) Data Modelling
14 738 (13.02%) Observability
15 665 (11.73%) Test Automation
16 651 (11.48%) ETL
17 630 (11.11%) Continuous Improvement
18 609 (10.74%) Validation
19 569 (10.04%) Platform Engineering
20 568 (10.02%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 1,864 (32.88%) SQL
2 826 (14.57%) Java
3 768 (13.55%) Bash
4 746 (13.16%) PowerShell
5 452 (7.97%) JavaScript
6 342 (6.03%) TypeScript
7 325 (5.73%) C#
8 201 (3.55%) Go
9 154 (2.72%) Shell Script
10 153 (2.70%) R
11 140 (2.47%) C++
12 137 (2.42%) Bicep
13 133 (2.35%) Scala
14 98 (1.73%) Perl
15 60 (1.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 56 (0.99%) C
16 56 (0.99%) Groovy
17 55 (0.97%) PL/SQL
17 55 (0.97%) Ruby
18 53 (0.93%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,378 (24.31%) Security Cleared
2 1,116 (19.69%) SC Cleared
3 419 (7.39%) Degree
4 236 (4.16%) DV Cleared
5 156 (2.75%) Computer Science Degree
6 150 (2.65%) Azure Certification
7 135 (2.38%) AWS Certification
8 120 (2.12%) BPSS Clearance
9 96 (1.69%) CISSP
10 84 (1.48%) Cisco Certification
11 66 (1.16%) Master's Degree
12 44 (0.78%) Microsoft Certification
13 42 (0.74%) CCNP
14 36 (0.64%) ISTQB
14 36 (0.64%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 34 (0.60%) CISM
15 34 (0.60%) PhD
16 29 (0.51%) DBS Check
17 28 (0.49%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 27 (0.48%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 624 (11.01%) Data Quality
2 300 (5.29%) QA
3 113 (1.99%) NIST
4 105 (1.85%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 98 (1.73%) GDPR
6 82 (1.45%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.62%) SLA
8 33 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.51%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) WCAG
11 23 (0.41%) PCI DSS
12 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 17 (0.30%) SOC 2
14 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
15 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
16 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.12%) HMG Security Policy Framework
18 7 (0.12%) MiFID
19 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 960 (16.93%) Docker
2 167 (2.95%) Active Directory
3 139 (2.45%) VMware Infrastructure
4 65 (1.15%) Virtual Machines
5 53 (0.93%) Hyper-V
6 40 (0.71%) vSphere
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 25 (0.44%) NFS
8 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
9 24 (0.42%) Firmware
10 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
10 14 (0.25%) Squid
11 11 (0.19%) Ceph
11 11 (0.19%) Virtual Desktop
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) Postfix
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,148 (20.25%) Kubernetes
2 625 (11.02%) Ansible
3 333 (5.87%) Grafana
4 240 (4.23%) Prometheus
5 79 (1.39%) Puppet
6 72 (1.27%) Progress Chef
7 68 (1.20%) Argo
8 35 (0.62%) Single Sign-On
9 33 (0.58%) Istio
10 31 (0.55%) Kibana
11 28 (0.49%) Control-M
12 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
12 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
12 23 (0.41%) ZABBIX
13 22 (0.39%) Nagios
13 22 (0.39%) vRealize
14 21 (0.37%) FortiGate
15 19 (0.34%) Packer
16 16 (0.28%) HAProxy
16 16 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 728 (12.84%) Microsoft
2 581 (10.25%) Databricks
3 377 (6.65%) Google
4 250 (4.41%) Oracle
5 215 (3.79%) Splunk
6 182 (3.21%) VMware
7 151 (2.66%) OpenAI
8 141 (2.49%) Cisco
9 118 (2.08%) ServiceNow
10 104 (1.83%) Red Hat
11 99 (1.75%) Dynatrace
12 93 (1.64%) IBM
13 89 (1.57%) F5
14 87 (1.53%) Palo Alto
15 77 (1.36%) Informatica
16 75 (1.32%) Foundry
17 73 (1.29%) Fortinet
18 68 (1.20%) SAP
19 67 (1.18%) CyberArk
20 63 (1.11%) Salesforce