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

6 months to
6 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,242 3,914 4,021
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.59% 13.38% 9.16%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.86% 39.44% 31.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,572 2,748 2,854
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £420 £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 £749 £813 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £486 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -2.80% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 119 53 99
10th Percentile £27.80 £21.25 £20.81
25th Percentile £41.94 £25.09 £30.94
Median hourly rate £55.00 £42.50 £48.50
Median % change year-on-year +29.41% -12.37% -25.38%
75th Percentile £74.26 £60.75 £66.25
90th Percentile £83.15 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +16.67% -2.56% -28.82%

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 12,830 9,923 12,821
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.37% 33.93% 29.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,549 6,676 9,095
10th Percentile £355 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £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 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £478 £488
% change year-on-year -0.42% -1.95% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 533 243 478
10th Percentile £41.66 £22.27 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £32.51 £46.18
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 £67.29
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.61
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +5.79% -3.20%

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 6 April 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 6 April 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 6 April 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 4,408 £520 -7.14% 2,695
London -3 2,494 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London -1 2,000 £486 -2.80% 1,990
Work from Home 0 1,539 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +9 675 £481 -3.70% 475
South East -5 402 £500 -4.76% 576
Yorkshire +1 376 £479 -4.20% 164
Midlands -1 286 £495 +6.00% 255
North West +7 254 £490 -0.41% 230
Scotland +1 249 £425 -10.29% 104
South West +2 248 £525 -4.55% 280
West Midlands -1 228 £500 +2.04% 130
East of England +4 135 £500 - 219
East Midlands -13 57 £450 +3.21% 125
North East +11 54 £500 +1.27% 83
Wales -14 30 £475 -10.80% 78
Northern Ireland +9 25 £550 +10.00% 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
1 268 (5.11%) Apache Spark
2 209 (3.99%) Apache Airflow
3 164 (3.13%) Apache
4 162 (3.09%) Confluence
5 67 (1.28%) SAS
6 59 (1.13%) SharePoint
7 29 (0.55%) Jupyter
8 26 (0.50%) nginx
9 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
10 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
11 19 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.29%) Appian
13 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
14 11 (0.21%) Camunda
15 9 (0.17%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.13%) CMS
17 4 (0.076%) CICS
17 4 (0.076%) Tomcat
18 3 (0.057%) IIS
18 3 (0.057%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 136 (2.59%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.11%) Weka
7 5 (0.095%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 4 (0.076%) BambooHR
5 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
5 4 (0.076%) SAP IBP
6 3 (0.057%) Actimize
6 3 (0.057%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.038%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
7 2 (0.038%) Global One
7 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.038%) Odoo
7 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 1 (0.019%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 2,022 (38.57%) AWS
2 1,809 (34.51%) Azure
3 784 (14.96%) GCP
4 688 (13.12%) GitHub
5 522 (9.96%) Power Platform
6 517 (9.86%) Serverless
7 397 (7.57%) Azure DevOps
8 367 (7.00%) Amazon S3
9 357 (6.81%) AWS Lambda
10 353 (6.73%) GitHub Actions
11 278 (5.30%) Azure Data Factory
12 247 (4.71%) AWS CloudFormation
12 247 (4.71%) Snowflake
13 185 (3.53%) Amazon EKS
14 179 (3.41%) OpenShift
15 165 (3.15%) Amazon ECS
16 164 (3.13%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 158 (3.01%) dbt
18 147 (2.80%) Amazon EC2
19 146 (2.79%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 198 (3.78%) Firewall
2 142 (2.71%) DNS
3 107 (2.04%) Network Security
4 92 (1.76%) TCP/IP
5 78 (1.49%) VPN
6 75 (1.43%) BGP
7 62 (1.18%) WAN
8 61 (1.16%) HTTP
9 44 (0.84%) OSPF
10 43 (0.82%) SAN
11 42 (0.80%) MPLS
12 35 (0.67%) VLAN
13 34 (0.65%) DHCP
13 34 (0.65%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) SNMP
15 30 (0.57%) Wireshark
16 29 (0.55%) SSL
17 26 (0.50%) SD-WAN
18 24 (0.46%) VXLAN
19 22 (0.42%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 434 (8.28%) Power BI
2 352 (6.71%) PostgreSQL
3 304 (5.80%) Data Warehouse
4 238 (4.54%) Data Lake
5 200 (3.82%) NoSQL
6 199 (3.80%) SQL Server
7 179 (3.41%) Relational Database
7 179 (3.41%) Tableau
8 153 (2.92%) Metadata
9 148 (2.82%) Big Data
10 130 (2.48%) Delta Lake
11 122 (2.33%) BigQuery
12 118 (2.25%) Amazon RDS
13 110 (2.10%) Amazon Redshift
14 109 (2.08%) Amazon Athena
15 108 (2.06%) MySQL
16 94 (1.79%) MongoDB
17 91 (1.74%) Azure SQL Database
18 87 (1.66%) DynamoDB
19 75 (1.43%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 665 (12.69%) Git
2 526 (10.03%) Jenkins
3 399 (7.61%) GitLab
4 286 (5.46%) JIRA
5 97 (1.85%) Selenium
6 90 (1.72%) MLflow
7 54 (1.03%) Postman
8 44 (0.84%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.82%) Cucumber
10 42 (0.80%) JUnit
11 37 (0.71%) JMeter
12 34 (0.65%) Sonatype Nexus
13 28 (0.53%) SpecFlow
14 26 (0.50%) Visual Studio
15 25 (0.48%) Artifactory
15 25 (0.48%) Cypress.io
16 23 (0.44%) SonarQube
17 22 (0.42%) Maven
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
18 20 (0.38%) Gatling
General
1 1,222 (23.31%) Social Skills
2 992 (18.92%) Finance
3 711 (13.56%) Analytical Skills
4 498 (9.50%) Public Sector
5 399 (7.61%) Banking
6 168 (3.20%) Front Office
7 129 (2.46%) Documentation Skills
8 88 (1.68%) Investment Banking
9 64 (1.22%) Marketing
10 63 (1.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 61 (1.16%) Retail
12 59 (1.13%) Legal
13 58 (1.11%) Telecoms
14 54 (1.03%) Pharmaceutical
15 53 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
16 48 (0.92%) Financial Institution
17 41 (0.78%) Manufacturing
18 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
19 28 (0.53%) Military
19 28 (0.53%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 979 (18.68%) Developer
2 764 (14.57%) Data Engineer
3 739 (14.10%) Senior
4 465 (8.87%) Python Developer
5 355 (6.77%) Architect
6 341 (6.51%) Lead
7 297 (5.67%) Python Engineer
8 281 (5.36%) DevOps Engineer
9 269 (5.13%) Analyst
10 258 (4.92%) Software Engineer
11 254 (4.85%) AWS Engineer
12 237 (4.52%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 209 (3.99%) Data Scientist
14 195 (3.72%) Platform Engineer
15 162 (3.09%) Azure Engineer
16 161 (3.07%) Senior Developer
17 147 (2.80%) Senior Data Engineer
18 140 (2.67%) Data Analyst
19 138 (2.63%) Full-Stack Developer
20 126 (2.40%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 452 (8.62%) REST
2 359 (6.85%) React
3 342 (6.52%) PySpark
4 340 (6.49%) Kafka
5 283 (5.40%) Node.js
6 242 (4.62%) Pandas
7 228 (4.35%) .NET
8 199 (3.80%) PyTorch
9 188 (3.59%) RESTful
10 185 (3.53%) FastAPI
11 163 (3.11%) NumPy
12 157 (3.00%) TensorFlow
13 153 (2.92%) JSON
14 148 (2.82%) scikit-learn
15 135 (2.58%) Flask
16 127 (2.42%) AngularJS
17 123 (2.35%) Django
18 121 (2.31%) LangChain
19 115 (2.19%) pytest
20 108 (2.06%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 514 (9.81%) Cloud Native
2 216 (4.12%) Distributed Systems
3 189 (3.61%) Algorithms
4 147 (2.80%) Product Ownership
5 117 (2.23%) Equities
6 115 (2.19%) Data Protection Act
6 115 (2.19%) Fixed Income
7 112 (2.14%) AI Agents
7 112 (2.14%) Data Structures
8 108 (2.06%) Derivative
9 96 (1.83%) Data Centre
10 93 (1.77%) Hybrid Cloud
11 92 (1.76%) Legacy Systems
12 91 (1.74%) Enterprise Software
13 89 (1.70%) Onboarding
14 84 (1.60%) Public Cloud
15 82 (1.56%) Security Posture
16 79 (1.51%) Management Information System
17 58 (1.11%) Virtual Team
18 55 (1.05%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 660 (12.59%) Linux
2 301 (5.74%) Windows
3 178 (3.40%) Unix
4 105 (2.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.26%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.72%) VMS
7 32 (0.61%) Ubuntu
8 29 (0.55%) Android
9 21 (0.40%) AIX
10 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
11 18 (0.34%) Solaris
12 17 (0.32%) CentOS
13 16 (0.31%) Apple iOS
14 8 (0.15%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.13%) Windows 7
16 6 (0.11%) zOS
17 5 (0.095%) Rocky
18 4 (0.076%) Amazon Linux
18 4 (0.076%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,923 (36.68%) CI/CD
2 1,459 (27.83%) DevOps
3 1,212 (23.12%) Agile
4 1,151 (21.96%) AI
5 1,063 (20.28%) Analytics
6 1,023 (19.52%) Problem-Solving
7 915 (17.46%) Infrastructure as Code
8 868 (16.56%) Data Pipeline
9 831 (15.85%) Machine Learning
10 756 (14.42%) Containerisation
11 722 (13.77%) Data Engineering
12 695 (13.26%) Data Modelling
13 691 (13.18%) ETL
14 623 (11.88%) Data Science
15 601 (11.47%) Software Engineering
16 584 (11.14%) Test Automation
17 514 (9.81%) Business Intelligence
17 514 (9.81%) Observability
18 429 (8.18%) LLM
19 403 (7.69%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,685 (32.14%) SQL
2 749 (14.29%) Java
3 673 (12.84%) PowerShell
4 588 (11.22%) Bash
5 491 (9.37%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.71%) C#
7 348 (6.64%) TypeScript
8 217 (4.14%) Go
9 163 (3.11%) R
10 157 (3.00%) C++
11 127 (2.42%) Scala
12 106 (2.02%) Shell Script
13 103 (1.96%) Ruby
14 93 (1.77%) Perl
15 80 (1.53%) Bicep
16 53 (1.01%) Kusto Query Language
17 50 (0.95%) C
18 49 (0.93%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 46 (0.88%) T-SQL
20 42 (0.80%) VBA
Qualifications
1 1,227 (23.41%) Security Cleared
2 989 (18.87%) SC Cleared
3 416 (7.94%) Degree
4 192 (3.66%) Computer Science Degree
5 146 (2.79%) DV Cleared
6 129 (2.46%) BPSS Clearance
7 111 (2.12%) AWS Certification
8 108 (2.06%) Master's Degree
9 105 (2.00%) Azure Certification
10 95 (1.81%) CISSP
11 74 (1.41%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.11%) CCNP
13 57 (1.09%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 49 (0.93%) CISM
15 47 (0.90%) PhD
16 36 (0.69%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 35 (0.67%) ISTQB
17 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
18 27 (0.52%) CEH
19 26 (0.50%) CCNA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 514 (9.81%) Data Quality
2 214 (4.08%) QA
3 179 (3.41%) GDPR
4 110 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 100 (1.91%) NIST
6 80 (1.53%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) PCI DSS
7 35 (0.67%) SLA
8 26 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 25 (0.48%) HIPAA
10 22 (0.42%) NCSC
11 18 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
12 17 (0.32%) WCAG
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
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
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
System Software
1 891 (17.00%) Docker
2 162 (3.09%) Active Directory
3 116 (2.21%) VMware Infrastructure
4 62 (1.18%) Virtual Machines
5 56 (1.07%) vSphere
6 52 (0.99%) VMware NSX
7 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.57%) Firmware
9 16 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
10 12 (0.23%) KVM
11 10 (0.19%) HDFS
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
12 8 (0.15%) Lustre
12 8 (0.15%) SRDF
13 7 (0.13%) GPFS
13 7 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
14 6 (0.11%) Postfix
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.095%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 1,118 (21.33%) Terraform
2 1,006 (19.19%) Kubernetes
3 514 (9.81%) Ansible
4 335 (6.39%) Grafana
5 286 (5.46%) Prometheus
6 88 (1.68%) Argo
7 73 (1.39%) Puppet
8 51 (0.97%) Istio
9 50 (0.95%) vRealize
10 38 (0.72%) vCenter Server
11 37 (0.71%) Kibana
12 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
13 25 (0.48%) Nessus
14 23 (0.44%) NetBackup
15 22 (0.42%) Nagios
16 21 (0.40%) Rancher
16 21 (0.40%) Single Sign-On
17 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
18 19 (0.36%) Control-M
18 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 624 (11.90%) Microsoft
2 577 (11.01%) Databricks
3 288 (5.49%) Google
4 222 (4.24%) Splunk
5 212 (4.04%) Oracle
5 212 (4.04%) VMware
6 143 (2.73%) Red Hat
7 123 (2.35%) Cisco
8 121 (2.31%) OpenAI
9 98 (1.87%) ServiceNow
10 83 (1.58%) CyberArk
11 70 (1.34%) BeyondTrust
12 69 (1.32%) Foundry
13 64 (1.22%) Informatica
14 59 (1.13%) F5
15 57 (1.09%) IBM
16 54 (1.03%) Palo Alto
17 47 (0.90%) Dynatrace
18 46 (0.88%) SAP
19 41 (0.78%) Atlassian