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

6 months to
29 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,246 3,915 3,962
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.14% 13.42% 9.15%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.67% 39.47% 31.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,530 2,756 2,819
10th Percentile £363 £388 £396
25th Percentile £425 £453 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.68% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £623 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £819 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -3.60% -2.44% -5.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 132 52 101
10th Percentile £30.00 £21.25 £21.73
25th Percentile £45.64 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £37.16 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +48.01% -35.37% -10.68%
75th Percentile £70.18 £57.81 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £70.88 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +16.67% -28.00% +4.17%

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 12,899 9,918 12,750
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.40% 33.99% 29.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,537 6,718 9,057
10th Percentile £355 £359 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £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 £713 £769 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £478 £489
% change year-on-year -0.52% -2.35% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 562 245 480
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.49 £31.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.07
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.05% -1.04%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.88
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% -

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 -2 4,397 £525 -4.55% 2,118
London -3 2,495 £550 -8.33% 952
UK excluding London -2 2,033 £482 -3.60% 1,580
Work from Home 0 1,499 £525 -4.55% 825
North of England +8 685 £481 -1.79% 383
South East -3 409 £500 -4.76% 520
Yorkshire +1 389 £477 -4.70% 102
Scotland +2 284 £425 -10.53% 86
Midlands -10 264 £500 +9.11% 193
South West -1 248 £500 -9.09% 168
North West +6 247 £500 +5.26% 206
West Midlands -6 200 £500 - 102
East of England -5 135 £500 -0.50% 165
East Midlands -13 63 £470 +11.24% 90
North East +9 57 £475 -1.30% 77
Northern Ireland +15 24 £463 -11.90% 36
Wales -17 23 £463 -11.90% 49

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
1 288 (5.49%) Apache Spark
2 214 (4.08%) Apache Airflow
3 165 (3.15%) Apache
4 151 (2.88%) Confluence
5 52 (0.99%) SAS
6 50 (0.95%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.53%) nginx
8 27 (0.51%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.42%) OpenStack
10 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 14 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
12 13 (0.25%) Appian
12 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.17%) Camunda
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 7 (0.13%) IIS
16 6 (0.11%) CICS
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.095%) Tomcat
Applications
1 138 (2.63%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Spreadsheet
4 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
5 6 (0.11%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.076%) Weka
7 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.038%) Actimize
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle ERP
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,001 (38.14%) AWS
2 1,800 (34.31%) Azure
3 773 (14.74%) GCP
4 671 (12.79%) GitHub
5 535 (10.20%) Power Platform
6 489 (9.32%) Serverless
7 379 (7.22%) Amazon S3
7 379 (7.22%) Azure DevOps
8 355 (6.77%) AWS Lambda
9 346 (6.60%) GitHub Actions
10 276 (5.26%) Azure Data Factory
11 237 (4.52%) Snowflake
12 232 (4.42%) AWS CloudFormation
13 172 (3.28%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 168 (3.20%) Amazon EKS
15 162 (3.09%) OpenShift
16 157 (2.99%) dbt
17 150 (2.86%) Amazon ECS
18 146 (2.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 133 (2.54%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 182 (3.47%) Firewall
2 133 (2.54%) DNS
3 112 (2.13%) Network Security
4 88 (1.68%) TCP/IP
5 80 (1.52%) BGP
6 75 (1.43%) VPN
7 72 (1.37%) WAN
8 57 (1.09%) HTTP
9 53 (1.01%) OSPF
10 44 (0.84%) SAN
11 36 (0.69%) VXLAN
12 34 (0.65%) MPLS
13 33 (0.63%) SNMP
14 32 (0.61%) LAN
15 31 (0.59%) BIG-IP
15 31 (0.59%) SD-WAN
16 30 (0.57%) VLAN
17 29 (0.55%) DHCP
17 29 (0.55%) SSL
17 29 (0.55%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 458 (8.73%) Power BI
2 350 (6.67%) PostgreSQL
3 289 (5.51%) Data Warehouse
4 244 (4.65%) Data Lake
5 237 (4.52%) SQL Server
6 200 (3.81%) Tableau
7 187 (3.56%) NoSQL
8 177 (3.37%) Relational Database
9 163 (3.11%) Big Data
10 160 (3.05%) Metadata
11 137 (2.61%) Delta Lake
12 132 (2.52%) BigQuery
13 119 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
14 118 (2.25%) Amazon Redshift
15 107 (2.04%) Amazon RDS
16 104 (1.98%) MongoDB
17 96 (1.83%) DynamoDB
17 96 (1.83%) MySQL
18 94 (1.79%) Azure SQL Database
19 80 (1.52%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 660 (12.58%) Git
2 478 (9.11%) Jenkins
3 367 (7.00%) GitLab
4 271 (5.17%) JIRA
5 92 (1.75%) MLflow
6 74 (1.41%) Selenium
7 55 (1.05%) Postman
8 43 (0.82%) Bitbucket
9 40 (0.76%) Cucumber
10 33 (0.63%) Sonatype Nexus
11 31 (0.59%) JMeter
12 29 (0.55%) SonarQube
13 27 (0.51%) Artifactory
13 27 (0.51%) Cypress.io
14 25 (0.48%) JUnit
15 24 (0.46%) Maven
16 23 (0.44%) Gatling
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
17 22 (0.42%) SpecFlow
18 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,180 (22.49%) Social Skills
2 1,017 (19.39%) Finance
3 718 (13.69%) Analytical Skills
4 502 (9.57%) Public Sector
5 364 (6.94%) Banking
6 174 (3.32%) Front Office
7 134 (2.55%) Documentation Skills
8 88 (1.68%) Investment Banking
9 73 (1.39%) Marketing
10 70 (1.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 63 (1.20%) Retail
12 54 (1.03%) Telecoms
13 53 (1.01%) Pharmaceutical
14 50 (0.95%) Influencing Skills
15 49 (0.93%) Legal
16 37 (0.71%) Financial Institution
16 37 (0.71%) Manufacturing
17 32 (0.61%) Publishing
18 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
19 30 (0.57%) Military
Job Titles
1 1,001 (19.08%) Developer
2 790 (15.06%) Data Engineer
3 758 (14.45%) Senior
4 491 (9.36%) Python Developer
5 350 (6.67%) Architect
6 342 (6.52%) Lead
7 297 (5.66%) Python Engineer
8 284 (5.41%) Analyst
9 272 (5.18%) DevOps Engineer
10 252 (4.80%) Software Engineer
11 240 (4.57%) AWS Engineer
12 226 (4.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 215 (4.10%) Data Scientist
14 172 (3.28%) Platform Engineer
15 168 (3.20%) Senior Developer
16 158 (3.01%) Azure Engineer
17 157 (2.99%) Senior Data Engineer
18 146 (2.78%) Data Analyst
19 141 (2.69%) Full-Stack Developer
20 121 (2.31%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 397 (7.57%) REST
2 354 (6.75%) React
3 347 (6.61%) PySpark
4 337 (6.42%) Kafka
5 261 (4.98%) Node.js
6 234 (4.46%) .NET
7 230 (4.38%) Pandas
8 198 (3.77%) PyTorch
9 184 (3.51%) FastAPI
10 180 (3.43%) RESTful
11 162 (3.09%) JSON
12 146 (2.78%) TensorFlow
13 144 (2.74%) NumPy
14 135 (2.57%) scikit-learn
15 129 (2.46%) Flask
16 127 (2.42%) LangChain
17 123 (2.34%) Django
18 120 (2.29%) AngularJS
19 108 (2.06%) LDAP
20 106 (2.02%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 522 (9.95%) Cloud Native
2 220 (4.19%) Distributed Systems
3 164 (3.13%) Algorithms
4 147 (2.80%) Product Ownership
5 128 (2.44%) AI Agents
6 120 (2.29%) Data Protection Act
7 111 (2.12%) Data Structures
8 110 (2.10%) Fixed Income
9 109 (2.08%) Onboarding
10 108 (2.06%) Equities
11 107 (2.04%) Derivative
12 103 (1.96%) Data Centre
13 95 (1.81%) Management Information System
14 93 (1.77%) Legacy Systems
15 92 (1.75%) Hybrid Cloud
16 90 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
17 85 (1.62%) Security Posture
18 71 (1.35%) Public Cloud
19 48 (0.91%) Virtual Team
20 47 (0.90%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 639 (12.18%) Linux
2 278 (5.30%) Windows
3 204 (3.89%) Unix
4 94 (1.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 60 (1.14%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.72%) VMS
7 36 (0.69%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.50%) Android
9 20 (0.38%) AIX
10 19 (0.36%) Mac OS
10 19 (0.36%) Solaris
11 18 (0.34%) CentOS
12 15 (0.29%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.19%) Debian
14 9 (0.17%) zOS
15 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
16 7 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
17 6 (0.11%) Rocky
18 5 (0.095%) Windows 7
18 5 (0.095%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,922 (36.64%) CI/CD
2 1,400 (26.69%) DevOps
3 1,172 (22.34%) AI
4 1,169 (22.28%) Agile
5 1,065 (20.30%) Analytics
6 976 (18.60%) Problem-Solving
7 916 (17.46%) Infrastructure as Code
8 865 (16.49%) Data Pipeline
9 825 (15.73%) Machine Learning
10 723 (13.78%) Containerisation
11 706 (13.46%) Data Modelling
12 700 (13.34%) Data Engineering
13 688 (13.11%) ETL
14 605 (11.53%) Software Engineering
15 599 (11.42%) Data Science
16 542 (10.33%) Test Automation
17 536 (10.22%) Business Intelligence
18 534 (10.18%) Observability
19 443 (8.44%) LLM
20 407 (7.76%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,727 (32.92%) SQL
2 763 (14.54%) Java
3 634 (12.09%) PowerShell
4 554 (10.56%) Bash
5 477 (9.09%) JavaScript
6 347 (6.61%) C#
7 343 (6.54%) TypeScript
8 202 (3.85%) Go
9 177 (3.37%) R
10 156 (2.97%) C++
11 142 (2.71%) Scala
12 108 (2.06%) Shell Script
13 98 (1.87%) Ruby
14 81 (1.54%) Bicep
15 79 (1.51%) Perl
16 57 (1.09%) C
17 55 (1.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 52 (0.99%) Kusto Query Language
19 51 (0.97%) PL/SQL
20 49 (0.93%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,221 (23.27%) Security Cleared
2 1,002 (19.10%) SC Cleared
3 389 (7.42%) Degree
4 175 (3.34%) Computer Science Degree
5 144 (2.74%) BPSS Clearance
6 138 (2.63%) DV Cleared
7 105 (2.00%) Azure Certification
8 102 (1.94%) AWS Certification
9 90 (1.72%) CISSP
10 89 (1.70%) Master's Degree
11 69 (1.32%) Cisco Certification
12 59 (1.12%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.95%) CCNP
14 49 (0.93%) CISM
15 40 (0.76%) PhD
16 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
17 31 (0.59%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 27 (0.51%) ISTQB
19 24 (0.46%) CEH
20 23 (0.44%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 510 (9.72%) Data Quality
2 224 (4.27%) QA
3 169 (3.22%) GDPR
4 110 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 104 (1.98%) NIST
6 80 (1.52%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) SLA
8 33 (0.63%) PCI DSS
9 30 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.34%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) WCAG
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
13 12 (0.23%) SOC 2
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
15 9 (0.17%) GRC
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 7 (0.13%) MiFID
System Software
1 831 (15.84%) Docker
2 156 (2.97%) Active Directory
3 96 (1.83%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.32%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.80%) VMware NSX
6 40 (0.76%) vSphere
7 33 (0.63%) Firmware
8 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.34%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) HDFS
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.17%) SRDF
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
13 7 (0.13%) NFS
14 6 (0.11%) Lustre
14 6 (0.11%) Postfix
14 6 (0.11%) Squid
15 5 (0.095%) GPFS
15 5 (0.095%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,115 (21.25%) Terraform
2 962 (18.34%) Kubernetes
3 517 (9.86%) Ansible
4 345 (6.58%) Grafana
5 281 (5.36%) Prometheus
6 73 (1.39%) Argo
6 73 (1.39%) Puppet
7 52 (0.99%) Istio
8 48 (0.91%) vRealize
9 46 (0.88%) Kibana
10 33 (0.63%) Progress Chef
10 33 (0.63%) vCenter Server
11 27 (0.51%) Nessus
12 26 (0.50%) Single Sign-On
13 23 (0.44%) Control-M
13 23 (0.44%) Nagios
14 22 (0.42%) Rancher
15 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
16 19 (0.36%) Kubeflow
17 18 (0.34%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 615 (11.72%) Microsoft
2 570 (10.87%) Databricks
3 274 (5.22%) Google
4 222 (4.23%) Oracle
5 217 (4.14%) Splunk
6 180 (3.43%) VMware
7 121 (2.31%) OpenAI
8 120 (2.29%) Red Hat
9 118 (2.25%) Cisco
10 98 (1.87%) ServiceNow
11 90 (1.72%) CyberArk
12 76 (1.45%) BeyondTrust
13 67 (1.28%) Informatica
14 64 (1.22%) Dynatrace
15 63 (1.20%) IBM
16 62 (1.18%) Foundry
17 60 (1.14%) F5
17 60 (1.14%) Palo Alto
18 50 (0.95%) SAP
19 41 (0.78%) Salesforce