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

6 months to
10 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,377 3,860 4,087
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.87% 13.14% 9.37%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.56% 38.55% 31.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,550 2,670 2,932
10th Percentile £363 £375 £377
25th Percentile £425 £443 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £537 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.23% -2.36% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £659 £688
90th Percentile £749 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £500 £509
% change year-on-year -1.00% -1.67% -5.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 120 55 115
10th Percentile £29.85 £25.25 £20.96
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £40.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +31.25% -35.48% -4.15%
75th Percentile £67.84 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.88 £61.45 £76.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £47.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +7.81% -26.92% +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 13,257 10,013 13,127
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.79% 34.09% 30.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,653 6,790 9,257
10th Percentile £358 £355 £350
25th Percentile £416 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £715 £752 £764
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +2.63% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 539 234 531
10th Percentile £36.25 £26.52 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.64 £34.05 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.60 £85.00 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +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 10 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 10 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 10 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 4,477 £525 -4.55% 2,253
London -3 2,580 £550 -4.35% 1,055
UK excluding London -1 2,089 £495 -1.00% 1,579
Work from Home -2 1,530 £525 -4.55% 1,051
North of England +11 759 £481 -1.03% 393
Yorkshire +2 426 £489 -2.25% 110
South East -5 401 £525 +4.48% 547
Scotland +2 312 £440 -7.37% 76
North West +5 259 £481 +1.32% 217
South West -1 255 £500 -11.11% 189
Midlands -16 225 £481 +6.94% 165
West Midlands -11 176 £477 +0.42% 86
East of England -11 124 £500 - 174
North East +12 86 £475 +8.57% 67
East Midlands -22 48 £495 +16.47% 78
Wales -7 27 £463 -7.50% 38
Northern Ireland +13 25 £408 -30.64% 27

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
1 279 (5.19%) Apache Spark
2 239 (4.44%) Apache Airflow
3 183 (3.40%) Apache
4 155 (2.88%) Confluence
5 50 (0.93%) Jupyter
6 47 (0.87%) SAS
7 45 (0.84%) SharePoint
8 22 (0.41%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.37%) nginx
10 17 (0.32%) ArcGIS
10 17 (0.32%) Palantir Foundry
11 15 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
12 14 (0.26%) IIS
13 10 (0.19%) Tomcat
14 9 (0.17%) Appian
15 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.13%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) CMS
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 114 (2.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
3 22 (0.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 22 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
4 19 (0.35%) MS Visio
5 10 (0.19%) CPLEX
6 3 (0.056%) LaTeX
6 3 (0.056%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
7 1 (0.019%) SPSS
7 1 (0.019%) Weka
7 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.41%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.093%) BambooHR
7 4 (0.074%) Oracle ERP
8 3 (0.056%) Bloomberg AIM
8 3 (0.056%) NetSuite
8 3 (0.056%) SimCorp Dimension
8 3 (0.056%) Teamcenter
9 2 (0.037%) Dynamics CRM
9 2 (0.037%) Front Arena
9 2 (0.037%) IntelliMatch
9 2 (0.037%) Odoo
9 2 (0.037%) Oracle Applications
9 2 (0.037%) Oracle Assets
9 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
9 2 (0.037%) Sage X3
Cloud Services
1 2,017 (37.51%) AWS
2 1,772 (32.96%) Azure
3 782 (14.54%) GCP
4 649 (12.07%) GitHub
5 512 (9.52%) Power Platform
6 473 (8.80%) Serverless
7 392 (7.29%) Amazon S3
8 388 (7.22%) Azure DevOps
9 353 (6.56%) GitHub Actions
10 348 (6.47%) AWS Lambda
11 256 (4.76%) Snowflake
12 249 (4.63%) Azure Data Factory
13 186 (3.46%) dbt
14 170 (3.16%) AWS CloudFormation
15 161 (2.99%) Amazon EKS
16 160 (2.98%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 157 (2.92%) OpenShift
18 153 (2.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 122 (2.27%) Amazon EC2
20 119 (2.21%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 207 (3.85%) Firewall
2 146 (2.72%) DNS
3 102 (1.90%) Network Security
4 99 (1.84%) WAN
5 97 (1.80%) BGP
6 89 (1.66%) TCP/IP
7 78 (1.45%) VPN
8 64 (1.19%) OSPF
9 57 (1.06%) HTTP
9 57 (1.06%) SAN
10 55 (1.02%) BIG-IP
11 49 (0.91%) SD-WAN
11 49 (0.91%) VXLAN
12 45 (0.84%) SSL
13 43 (0.80%) VLAN
14 38 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
15 36 (0.67%) DHCP
15 36 (0.67%) LAN
15 36 (0.67%) SNMP
16 34 (0.63%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 447 (8.31%) Power BI
2 340 (6.32%) PostgreSQL
3 285 (5.30%) Data Warehouse
4 263 (4.89%) SQL Server
5 229 (4.26%) Data Lake
6 190 (3.53%) Tableau
7 184 (3.42%) Relational Database
8 167 (3.11%) NoSQL
9 163 (3.03%) Big Data
9 163 (3.03%) Metadata
10 139 (2.59%) Amazon Athena
11 134 (2.49%) BigQuery
11 134 (2.49%) Delta Lake
12 123 (2.29%) Amazon Redshift
13 119 (2.21%) MongoDB
14 97 (1.80%) DynamoDB
15 91 (1.69%) Amazon RDS
16 88 (1.64%) MySQL
17 72 (1.34%) Hadoop
17 72 (1.34%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 643 (11.96%) Git
2 485 (9.02%) Jenkins
3 372 (6.92%) GitLab
4 283 (5.26%) JIRA
5 78 (1.45%) Selenium
6 75 (1.39%) MLflow
7 64 (1.19%) Postman
8 36 (0.67%) Cucumber
8 36 (0.67%) JMeter
9 33 (0.61%) Cypress.io
10 32 (0.60%) SonarQube
11 30 (0.56%) Bitbucket
11 30 (0.56%) REST Assured
12 29 (0.54%) Artifactory
13 25 (0.46%) JUnit
13 25 (0.46%) Sonatype Nexus
14 24 (0.45%) Maven
15 21 (0.39%) Robot Framework
16 20 (0.37%) Gatling
17 19 (0.35%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,177 (21.89%) Social Skills
2 1,085 (20.18%) Finance
3 722 (13.43%) Analytical Skills
4 502 (9.34%) Public Sector
5 388 (7.22%) Banking
6 193 (3.59%) Front Office
7 137 (2.55%) Documentation Skills
8 124 (2.31%) Investment Banking
9 97 (1.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 76 (1.41%) Marketing
11 65 (1.21%) Retail
12 60 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
13 54 (1.00%) Legal
14 50 (0.93%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 42 (0.78%) Publishing
17 38 (0.71%) Financial Institution
18 36 (0.67%) Military
19 35 (0.65%) Manufacturing
20 28 (0.52%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 983 (18.28%) Developer
2 835 (15.53%) Data Engineer
3 795 (14.79%) Senior
4 509 (9.47%) Python Developer
5 352 (6.55%) Lead
6 334 (6.21%) Python Engineer
7 326 (6.06%) Architect
8 291 (5.41%) DevOps Engineer
9 274 (5.10%) Analyst
10 267 (4.97%) Software Engineer
11 246 (4.58%) AWS Engineer
12 225 (4.18%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 207 (3.85%) Data Scientist
14 172 (3.20%) Senior Developer
15 162 (3.01%) Senior Data Engineer
16 155 (2.88%) Full-Stack Developer
17 154 (2.86%) Platform Engineer
18 152 (2.83%) Azure Engineer
19 144 (2.68%) Cloud Engineer
20 143 (2.66%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 422 (7.85%) REST
2 379 (7.05%) React
3 362 (6.73%) PySpark
4 322 (5.99%) Kafka
5 248 (4.61%) .NET
6 216 (4.02%) Node.js
7 208 (3.87%) Pandas
8 198 (3.68%) FastAPI
9 197 (3.66%) RESTful
10 176 (3.27%) JSON
11 163 (3.03%) PyTorch
12 141 (2.62%) Django
13 127 (2.36%) Flask
14 124 (2.31%) NumPy
15 118 (2.19%) LangChain
16 115 (2.14%) AngularJS
17 114 (2.12%) TensorFlow
18 110 (2.05%) scikit-learn
19 107 (1.99%) HTML
20 105 (1.95%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 649 (12.07%) Cloud Native
2 257 (4.78%) Distributed Systems
3 144 (2.68%) Algorithms
3 144 (2.68%) Data Centre
4 141 (2.62%) Onboarding
5 139 (2.59%) AI Agents
6 137 (2.55%) Product Ownership
7 120 (2.23%) Data Structures
8 118 (2.19%) Data Protection Act
9 113 (2.10%) Legacy Systems
10 111 (2.06%) Derivative
10 111 (2.06%) Management Information System
11 102 (1.90%) Equities
12 99 (1.84%) Fixed Income
13 94 (1.75%) Hybrid Cloud
14 93 (1.73%) Security Posture
15 87 (1.62%) Enterprise Software
16 70 (1.30%) Public Cloud
17 59 (1.10%) Greenfield Project
18 54 (1.00%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 616 (11.46%) Linux
2 302 (5.62%) Windows
3 220 (4.09%) Unix
4 113 (2.10%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 80 (1.49%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.74%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.56%) VMS
8 26 (0.48%) AIX
8 26 (0.48%) Solaris
9 23 (0.43%) Android
10 19 (0.35%) CentOS
11 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
12 16 (0.30%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.22%) zOS
14 8 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.13%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 5 (0.093%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.093%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.093%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,025 (37.66%) CI/CD
2 1,467 (27.28%) DevOps
3 1,294 (24.07%) AI
4 1,160 (21.57%) Agile
5 1,068 (19.86%) Analytics
6 955 (17.76%) Infrastructure as Code
7 945 (17.57%) Data Pipeline
8 927 (17.24%) Problem-Solving
9 836 (15.55%) Machine Learning
10 742 (13.80%) Data Engineering
11 719 (13.37%) Data Modelling
12 706 (13.13%) Containerisation
13 694 (12.91%) ETL
14 676 (12.57%) Software Engineering
15 595 (11.07%) Data Science
16 581 (10.81%) Observability
17 541 (10.06%) Test Automation
18 525 (9.76%) Business Intelligence
19 490 (9.11%) LLM
20 451 (8.39%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,770 (32.92%) SQL
2 782 (14.54%) Java
3 647 (12.03%) PowerShell
4 589 (10.95%) Bash
5 477 (8.87%) JavaScript
6 374 (6.96%) TypeScript
7 347 (6.45%) C#
8 196 (3.65%) Go
9 158 (2.94%) R
10 146 (2.72%) C++
11 127 (2.36%) Scala
12 106 (1.97%) Shell Script
13 80 (1.49%) Bicep
13 80 (1.49%) Perl
14 65 (1.21%) Ruby
15 62 (1.15%) PL/SQL
16 57 (1.06%) T-SQL
17 55 (1.02%) C
18 50 (0.93%) Groovy
19 47 (0.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,215 (22.60%) Security Cleared
2 983 (18.28%) SC Cleared
3 393 (7.31%) Degree
4 157 (2.92%) Computer Science Degree
5 155 (2.88%) DV Cleared
6 129 (2.40%) BPSS Clearance
7 110 (2.05%) Azure Certification
8 108 (2.01%) AWS Certification
9 87 (1.62%) CISSP
10 72 (1.34%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.32%) Master's Degree
12 55 (1.02%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.93%) CCNP
14 40 (0.74%) CISM
15 33 (0.61%) ISTQB
15 33 (0.61%) PhD
16 31 (0.58%) Microsoft Certification
17 30 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 23 (0.43%) CCIE
19 22 (0.41%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 538 (10.01%) Data Quality
2 236 (4.39%) QA
3 136 (2.53%) GDPR
4 109 (2.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 108 (2.01%) NIST
6 81 (1.51%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.65%) SLA
8 26 (0.48%) PCI DSS
8 26 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 24 (0.45%) HIPAA
10 22 (0.41%) WCAG
11 19 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
12 16 (0.30%) NCSC
13 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
14 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
16 9 (0.17%) GRC
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 811 (15.08%) Docker
2 150 (2.79%) Active Directory
3 105 (1.95%) VMware Infrastructure
4 72 (1.34%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.74%) vSphere
6 39 (0.73%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.61%) Firmware
8 31 (0.58%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.33%) NFS
11 17 (0.32%) KVM
12 13 (0.24%) Squid
13 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
14 10 (0.19%) Ceph
14 10 (0.19%) SRDF
15 9 (0.17%) HDFS
16 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.13%) Postfix
18 4 (0.074%) Slurm Workload Manager
18 4 (0.074%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,115 (20.74%) Terraform
2 953 (17.72%) Kubernetes
3 542 (10.08%) Ansible
4 326 (6.06%) Grafana
5 271 (5.04%) Prometheus
6 72 (1.34%) Puppet
7 59 (1.10%) Argo
8 52 (0.97%) Istio
9 47 (0.87%) vRealize
10 38 (0.71%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.60%) vCenter Server
12 30 (0.56%) Kibana
13 28 (0.52%) Single Sign-On
14 26 (0.48%) Control-M
15 25 (0.46%) Nessus
16 24 (0.45%) Nagios
16 24 (0.45%) ZABBIX
17 23 (0.43%) NetBackup
18 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
19 19 (0.35%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 578 (10.75%) Microsoft
2 563 (10.47%) Databricks
3 282 (5.24%) Google
4 250 (4.65%) Oracle
5 213 (3.96%) Splunk
6 173 (3.22%) VMware
7 129 (2.40%) OpenAI
8 127 (2.36%) Red Hat
9 120 (2.23%) Cisco
10 95 (1.77%) ServiceNow
11 86 (1.60%) CyberArk
12 82 (1.53%) F5
13 79 (1.47%) Dynatrace
14 78 (1.45%) BeyondTrust
14 78 (1.45%) Palo Alto
15 74 (1.38%) IBM
16 70 (1.30%) Informatica
17 53 (0.99%) Foundry
18 50 (0.93%) Arista
18 50 (0.93%) SAP