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

6 months to
8 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,241 3,887 3,994
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.04% 13.36% 9.26%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.85% 39.23% 31.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,498 2,724 2,860
10th Percentile £363 £384 £388
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £623 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £822 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -2.50% -2.44% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 51 97
10th Percentile £30.49 £21.25 £21.54
25th Percentile £46.25 £26.41 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £40.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +37.50% -33.33% -6.80%
75th Percentile £70.36 £56.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £71.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +16.67% -28.00% +8.70%

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 12,831 9,909 12,749
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.04% 34.05% 29.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,448 6,729 9,065
10th Percentile £353 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £774 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.71% -2.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 563 247 489
10th Percentile £41.94 £25.01 £32.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £61.60
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +1.46% +2.20%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £79.34
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% +2.97%

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 8 May 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 8 May 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 8 May 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 4,368 £525 -4.55% 2,542
London -3 2,472 £550 -8.33% 1,175
UK excluding London -1 2,038 £488 -2.50% 1,807
Work from Home -2 1,496 £525 -4.55% 1,033
North of England +10 683 £475 -3.46% 464
South East -3 412 £513 -2.38% 588
Yorkshire 0 383 £475 -5.00% 132
Scotland +1 292 £425 -10.53% 113
Midlands -13 259 £500 +11.11% 210
South West +1 254 £500 -5.88% 200
North West 0 247 £500 +4.17% 247
West Midlands -7 197 £500 - 101
East of England -3 131 £500 - 176
North East +7 62 £475 +2.70% 85
East Midlands -5 61 £470 +10.59% 109
Northern Ireland +16 23 £463 -18.68% 20
Wales -12 22 £463 -7.50% 54

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
1 287 (5.48%) Apache Spark
2 207 (3.95%) Apache Airflow
3 169 (3.22%) Apache
4 134 (2.56%) Confluence
5 49 (0.93%) SAS
6 48 (0.92%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.63%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.40%) nginx
10 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
12 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
13 11 (0.21%) Appian
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 7 (0.13%) Camunda
15 7 (0.13%) IIS
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.095%) CICS
17 5 (0.095%) Tomcat
Applications
1 125 (2.39%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
5 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 19 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.057%) Weka
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 22 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 13 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Fidessa
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
5 5 (0.095%) Remedy ITSM
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Dynamics CRM
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%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle ERP
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 1,984 (37.86%) AWS
2 1,789 (34.13%) Azure
3 763 (14.56%) GCP
4 654 (12.48%) GitHub
5 524 (10.00%) Power Platform
6 472 (9.01%) Serverless
7 381 (7.27%) Azure DevOps
8 374 (7.14%) Amazon S3
9 343 (6.54%) GitHub Actions
10 339 (6.47%) AWS Lambda
11 268 (5.11%) Azure Data Factory
12 235 (4.48%) Snowflake
13 217 (4.14%) AWS CloudFormation
14 173 (3.30%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 166 (3.17%) OpenShift
16 161 (3.07%) Amazon EKS
17 156 (2.98%) dbt
18 137 (2.61%) Amazon ECS
19 130 (2.48%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 124 (2.37%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 182 (3.47%) Firewall
2 132 (2.52%) DNS
3 110 (2.10%) Network Security
4 90 (1.72%) TCP/IP
5 83 (1.58%) BGP
6 77 (1.47%) VPN
6 77 (1.47%) WAN
7 58 (1.11%) HTTP
8 55 (1.05%) OSPF
9 44 (0.84%) SAN
10 40 (0.76%) SNMP
11 36 (0.69%) VXLAN
12 35 (0.67%) BIG-IP
12 35 (0.67%) MPLS
12 35 (0.67%) SD-WAN
13 33 (0.63%) DHCP
13 33 (0.63%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) SSL
15 31 (0.59%) Wireshark
16 30 (0.57%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 453 (8.64%) Power BI
2 345 (6.58%) PostgreSQL
3 285 (5.44%) Data Warehouse
4 243 (4.64%) SQL Server
5 236 (4.50%) Data Lake
6 194 (3.70%) Tableau
7 184 (3.51%) Relational Database
8 177 (3.38%) NoSQL
9 166 (3.17%) Big Data
10 164 (3.13%) Metadata
11 140 (2.67%) Delta Lake
12 132 (2.52%) BigQuery
13 123 (2.35%) Amazon Athena
14 117 (2.23%) Amazon Redshift
15 108 (2.06%) MongoDB
16 98 (1.87%) Amazon RDS
17 92 (1.76%) MySQL
18 90 (1.72%) Azure SQL Database
18 90 (1.72%) DynamoDB
19 80 (1.53%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 648 (12.36%) Git
2 471 (8.99%) Jenkins
3 361 (6.89%) GitLab
4 247 (4.71%) JIRA
5 94 (1.79%) MLflow
6 72 (1.37%) Selenium
7 58 (1.11%) Postman
8 38 (0.73%) Cucumber
9 32 (0.61%) Bitbucket
10 30 (0.57%) Sonatype Nexus
11 29 (0.55%) JMeter
11 29 (0.55%) SonarQube
12 28 (0.53%) Artifactory
13 25 (0.48%) Cypress.io
13 25 (0.48%) JUnit
14 23 (0.44%) Robot Framework
15 22 (0.42%) Maven
16 21 (0.40%) SpecFlow
17 20 (0.38%) REST Assured
18 18 (0.34%) Gatling
General
1 1,156 (22.06%) Social Skills
2 1,021 (19.48%) Finance
3 699 (13.34%) Analytical Skills
4 477 (9.10%) Public Sector
5 362 (6.91%) Banking
6 181 (3.45%) Front Office
7 133 (2.54%) Documentation Skills
8 94 (1.79%) Investment Banking
9 75 (1.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 70 (1.34%) Marketing
11 60 (1.14%) Retail
12 53 (1.01%) Telecoms
13 52 (0.99%) Legal
14 51 (0.97%) Pharmaceutical
15 46 (0.88%) Influencing Skills
16 36 (0.69%) Financial Institution
17 35 (0.67%) Manufacturing
18 34 (0.65%) Publishing
19 31 (0.59%) Military
19 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 994 (18.97%) Developer
2 793 (15.13%) Data Engineer
3 749 (14.29%) Senior
4 489 (9.33%) Python Developer
5 348 (6.64%) Architect
6 342 (6.53%) Lead
7 297 (5.67%) Python Engineer
8 274 (5.23%) Analyst
9 268 (5.11%) DevOps Engineer
10 252 (4.81%) Software Engineer
11 224 (4.27%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 218 (4.16%) AWS Engineer
13 211 (4.03%) Data Scientist
14 163 (3.11%) Azure Engineer
15 159 (3.03%) Senior Developer
16 157 (3.00%) Senior Data Engineer
17 154 (2.94%) Platform Engineer
18 144 (2.75%) Data Analyst
19 143 (2.73%) Full-Stack Developer
20 131 (2.50%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 390 (7.44%) REST
2 360 (6.87%) React
3 357 (6.81%) PySpark
4 335 (6.39%) Kafka
5 244 (4.66%) Node.js
6 238 (4.54%) .NET
7 218 (4.16%) Pandas
8 191 (3.64%) PyTorch
9 186 (3.55%) FastAPI
10 180 (3.43%) RESTful
11 163 (3.11%) JSON
12 136 (2.59%) TensorFlow
13 133 (2.54%) NumPy
14 127 (2.42%) Flask
15 126 (2.40%) Django
16 125 (2.39%) scikit-learn
17 124 (2.37%) LangChain
18 120 (2.29%) AngularJS
19 110 (2.10%) LDAP
20 102 (1.95%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 542 (10.34%) Cloud Native
2 224 (4.27%) Distributed Systems
3 160 (3.05%) Algorithms
4 140 (2.67%) Product Ownership
5 125 (2.39%) AI Agents
6 121 (2.31%) Data Protection Act
7 117 (2.23%) Onboarding
8 113 (2.16%) Data Centre
8 113 (2.16%) Data Structures
9 109 (2.08%) Derivative
10 106 (2.02%) Fixed Income
11 105 (2.00%) Equities
12 99 (1.89%) Management Information System
13 94 (1.79%) Legacy Systems
14 92 (1.76%) Enterprise Software
15 89 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
16 84 (1.60%) Security Posture
17 72 (1.37%) Public Cloud
18 47 (0.90%) Self-Motivation
19 46 (0.88%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 644 (12.29%) Linux
2 293 (5.59%) Windows
3 209 (3.99%) Unix
4 97 (1.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 65 (1.24%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.71%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.67%) VMS
8 25 (0.48%) AIX
8 25 (0.48%) Android
9 22 (0.42%) Solaris
10 20 (0.38%) CentOS
10 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
11 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
12 10 (0.19%) Debian
12 10 (0.19%) zOS
13 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
14 7 (0.13%) Rocky
15 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
16 5 (0.095%) Windows 7
17 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,932 (36.86%) CI/CD
2 1,390 (26.52%) DevOps
3 1,184 (22.59%) AI
4 1,139 (21.73%) Agile
5 1,047 (19.98%) Analytics
6 955 (18.22%) Problem-Solving
7 917 (17.50%) Infrastructure as Code
8 880 (16.79%) Data Pipeline
9 817 (15.59%) Machine Learning
10 731 (13.95%) Containerisation
11 708 (13.51%) Data Engineering
12 707 (13.49%) Data Modelling
13 695 (13.26%) ETL
14 608 (11.60%) Software Engineering
15 587 (11.20%) Data Science
16 537 (10.25%) Observability
16 537 (10.25%) Test Automation
17 527 (10.06%) Business Intelligence
18 443 (8.45%) LLM
19 416 (7.94%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,731 (33.03%) SQL
2 770 (14.69%) Java
3 650 (12.40%) PowerShell
4 562 (10.72%) Bash
5 481 (9.18%) JavaScript
6 353 (6.74%) TypeScript
7 352 (6.72%) C#
8 204 (3.89%) Go
9 178 (3.40%) R
10 155 (2.96%) C++
11 144 (2.75%) Scala
12 106 (2.02%) Shell Script
13 87 (1.66%) Ruby
14 80 (1.53%) Bicep
15 79 (1.51%) Perl
16 57 (1.09%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 56 (1.07%) PL/SQL
18 54 (1.03%) C
19 53 (1.01%) T-SQL
20 48 (0.92%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,199 (22.88%) Security Cleared
2 968 (18.47%) SC Cleared
3 378 (7.21%) Degree
4 171 (3.26%) Computer Science Degree
5 146 (2.79%) DV Cleared
6 135 (2.58%) BPSS Clearance
7 106 (2.02%) Azure Certification
8 100 (1.91%) AWS Certification
9 91 (1.74%) CISSP
10 85 (1.62%) Master's Degree
11 71 (1.35%) Cisco Certification
12 60 (1.14%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.95%) CCNP
13 50 (0.95%) CISM
14 37 (0.71%) PhD
15 33 (0.63%) Microsoft Certification
16 32 (0.61%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 27 (0.52%) ISTQB
18 23 (0.44%) CCIE
19 22 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 513 (9.79%) Data Quality
2 231 (4.41%) QA
3 161 (3.07%) GDPR
4 110 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 107 (2.04%) NIST
6 78 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) SLA
8 32 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 29 (0.55%) PCI DSS
10 23 (0.44%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.34%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) WCAG
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) SOC 2
15 9 (0.17%) GRC
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) MiFID
16 8 (0.15%) PMO
System Software
1 807 (15.40%) Docker
2 159 (3.03%) Active Directory
3 99 (1.89%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.32%) Virtual Machines
5 41 (0.78%) VMware NSX
6 37 (0.71%) vSphere
7 34 (0.65%) Firmware
8 33 (0.63%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) KVM
11 13 (0.25%) HDFS
12 10 (0.19%) NFS
13 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
13 9 (0.17%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Ceph
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
16 6 (0.11%) Squid
17 5 (0.095%) Lustre
18 4 (0.076%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
Systems Management
1 1,083 (20.66%) Terraform
2 951 (18.15%) Kubernetes
3 536 (10.23%) Ansible
4 339 (6.47%) Grafana
5 278 (5.30%) Prometheus
6 77 (1.47%) Puppet
7 67 (1.28%) Argo
8 53 (1.01%) Istio
9 48 (0.92%) vRealize
10 42 (0.80%) Kibana
11 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
12 32 (0.61%) vCenter Server
13 27 (0.52%) Nagios
13 27 (0.52%) Nessus
14 24 (0.46%) Control-M
14 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.46%) ZABBIX
15 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
16 19 (0.36%) Rancher
16 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 604 (11.52%) Microsoft
2 566 (10.80%) Databricks
3 262 (5.00%) Google
4 230 (4.39%) Oracle
5 225 (4.29%) Splunk
6 183 (3.49%) VMware
7 120 (2.29%) Red Hat
8 118 (2.25%) OpenAI
9 117 (2.23%) Cisco
10 94 (1.79%) CyberArk
11 89 (1.70%) ServiceNow
12 83 (1.58%) BeyondTrust
13 70 (1.34%) Dynatrace
14 67 (1.28%) IBM
14 67 (1.28%) Informatica
15 66 (1.26%) F5
16 65 (1.24%) Palo Alto
17 61 (1.16%) Foundry
18 48 (0.92%) SAP
19 42 (0.80%) Fortinet