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 20 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,503 3,896 4,149
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.87% 13.05% 9.45%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.36% 38.46% 31.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,621 2,679 2,978
10th Percentile £363 £375 £375
25th Percentile £425 £442 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -2.27% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £849
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -6.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 124 59 121
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.20 £20.77
25th Percentile £43.34 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £53.25 £44.50 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +19.66% -28.23% +2.14%
75th Percentile £68.50 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £63.35 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.00 £50.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -23.08% +10.64%

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 13,634 10,131 13,283
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.92% 33.93% 30.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,886 6,872 9,316
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £751 £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 554 235 553
10th Percentile £35.08 £25.45 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% +3.22%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.93 £84.80 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.84% -4.62% +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 20 June 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 20 June 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 20 June 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 4,586 £525 -4.55% 1,924
London -3 2,638 £550 -4.35% 852
UK excluding London -1 2,152 £500 - 1,634
Work from Home -2 1,569 £525 -4.55% 800
North of England +10 789 £488 +2.63% 372
Yorkshire +2 433 £500 - 117
South East -8 406 £525 +3.19% 562
Scotland +3 318 £440 -7.37% 71
North West +4 278 £490 +3.16% 200
South West -4 262 £500 -9.09% 168
Midlands -16 234 £481 +6.83% 159
West Midlands -14 187 £477 +0.42% 82
East of England -13 126 £500 - 172
North East +7 90 £450 +5.88% 58
East Midlands -16 46 £497 +13.88% 77
Wales -7 31 £475 +4.40% 43
Northern Ireland +12 26 £408 -30.64% 118

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
1 281 (5.11%) Apache Spark
2 251 (4.56%) Apache Airflow
3 189 (3.43%) Apache
4 165 (3.00%) Confluence
5 56 (1.02%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.89%) SAS
6 49 (0.89%) SharePoint
7 22 (0.40%) OpenStack
8 21 (0.38%) nginx
9 18 (0.33%) Palantir Foundry
10 17 (0.31%) ArcGIS
11 15 (0.27%) Microsoft Exchange
12 11 (0.20%) IIS
13 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) Appian
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
16 6 (0.11%) Camunda
16 6 (0.11%) CMS
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 118 (2.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 29 (0.53%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
6 20 (0.36%) MS Visio
7 14 (0.25%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.073%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.055%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.018%) SPSS
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
10 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.38%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
7 5 (0.091%) BambooHR
8 4 (0.073%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.055%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.055%) Sage X3
9 3 (0.055%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.055%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.036%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.036%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,061 (37.45%) AWS
2 1,830 (33.25%) Azure
3 800 (14.54%) GCP
4 651 (11.83%) GitHub
5 531 (9.65%) Power Platform
6 495 (9.00%) Serverless
7 414 (7.52%) Amazon S3
8 393 (7.14%) Azure DevOps
9 367 (6.67%) AWS Lambda
10 352 (6.40%) GitHub Actions
11 270 (4.91%) Snowflake
12 241 (4.38%) Azure Data Factory
13 197 (3.58%) dbt
14 172 (3.13%) AWS CloudFormation
15 164 (2.98%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 164 (2.98%) Amazon EKS
16 154 (2.80%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 152 (2.76%) OpenShift
18 132 (2.40%) Amazon EC2
19 122 (2.22%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 226 (4.11%) Firewall
2 150 (2.73%) DNS
3 111 (2.02%) Network Security
4 108 (1.96%) BGP
5 107 (1.94%) WAN
6 94 (1.71%) TCP/IP
7 88 (1.60%) VPN
8 68 (1.24%) OSPF
9 58 (1.05%) BIG-IP
9 58 (1.05%) HTTP
10 56 (1.02%) SAN
11 51 (0.93%) SD-WAN
12 50 (0.91%) VXLAN
13 47 (0.85%) SSL
14 46 (0.84%) VLAN
15 39 (0.71%) DHCP
15 39 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
16 38 (0.69%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 38 (0.69%) LAN
17 36 (0.65%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 467 (8.49%) Power BI
2 350 (6.36%) PostgreSQL
3 298 (5.42%) Data Warehouse
4 250 (4.54%) SQL Server
5 222 (4.03%) Data Lake
6 202 (3.67%) Tableau
7 193 (3.51%) Relational Database
8 172 (3.13%) NoSQL
9 171 (3.11%) Metadata
10 159 (2.89%) Big Data
11 145 (2.63%) Amazon Athena
12 136 (2.47%) Amazon Redshift
12 136 (2.47%) BigQuery
13 129 (2.34%) Delta Lake
14 123 (2.24%) MongoDB
15 102 (1.85%) DynamoDB
16 96 (1.74%) Amazon RDS
17 86 (1.56%) MySQL
18 75 (1.36%) Snowflake Schema
19 72 (1.31%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 660 (11.99%) Git
2 494 (8.98%) Jenkins
3 393 (7.14%) GitLab
4 295 (5.36%) JIRA
5 75 (1.36%) MLflow
6 73 (1.33%) Selenium
7 57 (1.04%) Postman
8 36 (0.65%) JMeter
9 34 (0.62%) Cypress.io
10 33 (0.60%) Bitbucket
10 33 (0.60%) Cucumber
10 33 (0.60%) SonarQube
11 31 (0.56%) Artifactory
12 27 (0.49%) Maven
12 27 (0.49%) REST Assured
13 26 (0.47%) JUnit
14 24 (0.44%) Sonatype Nexus
15 21 (0.38%) Gatling
16 20 (0.36%) Robot Framework
16 20 (0.36%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,192 (21.66%) Social Skills
2 1,144 (20.79%) Finance
3 740 (13.45%) Analytical Skills
4 524 (9.52%) Public Sector
5 400 (7.27%) Banking
6 192 (3.49%) Front Office
7 137 (2.49%) Documentation Skills
8 123 (2.24%) Investment Banking
9 104 (1.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 79 (1.44%) Retail
11 76 (1.38%) Marketing
12 61 (1.11%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.02%) Legal
14 53 (0.96%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.84%) Financial Institution
16 45 (0.82%) Publishing
17 44 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
18 39 (0.71%) Military
19 34 (0.62%) Presentation Skills
20 33 (0.60%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,002 (18.21%) Developer
2 856 (15.56%) Data Engineer
3 819 (14.88%) Senior
4 527 (9.58%) Python Developer
5 364 (6.61%) Lead
6 355 (6.45%) Python Engineer
7 323 (5.87%) Architect
8 293 (5.32%) DevOps Engineer
9 282 (5.12%) Analyst
10 275 (5.00%) Software Engineer
11 250 (4.54%) AWS Engineer
12 244 (4.43%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 212 (3.85%) Data Scientist
14 172 (3.13%) Senior Developer
15 168 (3.05%) Senior Data Engineer
16 165 (3.00%) Azure Engineer
17 163 (2.96%) Platform Engineer
18 157 (2.85%) Full-Stack Developer
19 156 (2.83%) Cloud Engineer
20 145 (2.63%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 419 (7.61%) REST
2 389 (7.07%) React
3 373 (6.78%) PySpark
4 325 (5.91%) Kafka
5 244 (4.43%) .NET
6 217 (3.94%) Node.js
7 211 (3.83%) RESTful
8 210 (3.82%) FastAPI
9 204 (3.71%) Pandas
10 182 (3.31%) JSON
11 168 (3.05%) PyTorch
12 156 (2.83%) Django
13 135 (2.45%) Flask
14 131 (2.38%) LangChain
15 126 (2.29%) NumPy
16 115 (2.09%) scikit-learn
17 113 (2.05%) TensorFlow
18 111 (2.02%) AngularJS
18 111 (2.02%) OAuth
19 102 (1.85%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 692 (12.57%) Cloud Native
2 273 (4.96%) Distributed Systems
3 153 (2.78%) AI Agents
3 153 (2.78%) Onboarding
4 152 (2.76%) Algorithms
5 150 (2.73%) Data Centre
6 144 (2.62%) Product Ownership
7 132 (2.40%) Data Structures
8 117 (2.13%) Legacy Systems
8 117 (2.13%) Management Information System
9 115 (2.09%) Data Protection Act
10 110 (2.00%) Derivative
11 101 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
12 99 (1.80%) Equities
13 97 (1.76%) Fixed Income
14 88 (1.60%) Security Posture
15 74 (1.34%) Enterprise Software
16 70 (1.27%) Public Cloud
17 59 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
18 58 (1.05%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 625 (11.36%) Linux
2 302 (5.49%) Windows
3 220 (4.00%) Unix
4 119 (2.16%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 78 (1.42%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.76%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.58%) VMS
8 26 (0.47%) AIX
9 24 (0.44%) Solaris
10 23 (0.42%) Android
11 20 (0.36%) CentOS
12 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
13 15 (0.27%) Mac OS
14 12 (0.22%) zOS
15 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
16 7 (0.13%) Debian
16 7 (0.13%) Rocky
17 5 (0.091%) Amazon Linux
17 5 (0.091%) Embedded Linux
17 5 (0.091%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,076 (37.72%) CI/CD
2 1,504 (27.33%) DevOps
3 1,349 (24.51%) AI
4 1,214 (22.06%) Agile
5 1,104 (20.06%) Analytics
6 986 (17.92%) Infrastructure as Code
7 976 (17.74%) Data Pipeline
8 940 (17.08%) Problem-Solving
9 870 (15.81%) Machine Learning
10 776 (14.10%) Data Engineering
11 731 (13.28%) Data Modelling
12 729 (13.25%) Containerisation
13 708 (12.87%) Software Engineering
14 691 (12.56%) ETL
15 621 (11.28%) Data Science
16 588 (10.69%) Observability
17 554 (10.07%) Test Automation
18 550 (9.99%) Business Intelligence
19 524 (9.52%) LLM
20 466 (8.47%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,791 (32.55%) SQL
2 774 (14.07%) Java
3 637 (11.58%) PowerShell
4 602 (10.94%) Bash
5 473 (8.60%) JavaScript
6 392 (7.12%) TypeScript
7 341 (6.20%) C#
8 202 (3.67%) Go
9 159 (2.89%) R
10 144 (2.62%) C++
11 123 (2.24%) Scala
12 106 (1.93%) Shell Script
13 79 (1.44%) Bicep
14 78 (1.42%) Perl
15 63 (1.14%) Ruby
16 56 (1.02%) C
17 54 (0.98%) PL/SQL
17 54 (0.98%) T-SQL
18 51 (0.93%) Groovy
19 48 (0.87%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,214 (22.06%) Security Cleared
2 979 (17.79%) SC Cleared
3 407 (7.40%) Degree
4 165 (3.00%) DV Cleared
5 157 (2.85%) Computer Science Degree
6 129 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
7 116 (2.11%) AWS Certification
8 111 (2.02%) Azure Certification
9 95 (1.73%) CISSP
10 76 (1.38%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.29%) Master's Degree
12 53 (0.96%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 52 (0.94%) CCNP
14 40 (0.73%) CISM
15 33 (0.60%) ISTQB
15 33 (0.60%) PhD
16 32 (0.58%) Microsoft Certification
17 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 26 (0.47%) CCIE
19 21 (0.38%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 553 (10.05%) Data Quality
2 228 (4.14%) QA
3 131 (2.38%) GDPR
4 113 (2.05%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 108 (1.96%) NIST
6 83 (1.51%) Accessibility
7 32 (0.58%) SLA
8 26 (0.47%) PCI DSS
9 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.44%) HIPAA
10 24 (0.44%) WCAG
11 20 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
13 14 (0.25%) NCSC
14 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.16%) GRC
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 837 (15.21%) Docker
2 138 (2.51%) Active Directory
3 108 (1.96%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.73%) vSphere
6 38 (0.69%) VMware NSX
7 34 (0.62%) Firmware
8 31 (0.56%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.33%) NFS
11 16 (0.29%) KVM
12 13 (0.24%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.22%) Squid
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) Ceph
16 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.13%) HDFS
17 7 (0.13%) Postfix
18 5 (0.091%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
19 4 (0.073%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,159 (21.06%) Terraform
2 981 (17.83%) Kubernetes
3 563 (10.23%) Ansible
4 324 (5.89%) Grafana
5 272 (4.94%) Prometheus
6 76 (1.38%) Puppet
7 55 (1.00%) Argo
8 48 (0.87%) Istio
9 45 (0.82%) vRealize
10 39 (0.71%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.58%) vCenter Server
12 29 (0.53%) Kibana
13 27 (0.49%) Single Sign-On
14 26 (0.47%) Control-M
15 25 (0.45%) Nessus
15 25 (0.45%) ZABBIX
16 24 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
16 24 (0.44%) Nagios
17 22 (0.40%) NetBackup
18 21 (0.38%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 605 (10.99%) Microsoft
2 569 (10.34%) Databricks
3 300 (5.45%) Google
4 244 (4.43%) Oracle
5 209 (3.80%) Splunk
6 169 (3.07%) VMware
7 146 (2.65%) OpenAI
8 129 (2.34%) Cisco
9 123 (2.24%) Red Hat
10 100 (1.82%) ServiceNow
11 86 (1.56%) F5
12 84 (1.53%) Palo Alto
13 80 (1.45%) Dynatrace
14 79 (1.44%) Informatica
15 78 (1.42%) CyberArk
16 77 (1.40%) IBM
17 64 (1.16%) BeyondTrust
18 58 (1.05%) Foundry
19 56 (1.02%) Fortinet
20 53 (0.96%) Arista