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

6 months to
17 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 4,781 3,943 4,195
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.82% 12.40% 9.69%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.66% 37.56% 32.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,218 2,607 2,922
10th Percentile £358 £380 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £574
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -4.14% -4.38%
75th Percentile £638 £685 £688
90th Percentile £749 £804 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £518 £525
% change year-on-year -3.38% -1.43% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 98 63 119
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.34 £30.55
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.80 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.86 £46.18 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.29% -23.03% -7.69%
75th Percentile £73.37 £66.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.23 £77.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £60.00
% change year-on-year +10.89% -23.03% -7.69%

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 11,476 10,497 13,085
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.76% 33.00% 30.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,619 6,661 9,247
10th Percentile £350 £353 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -3.13%
75th Percentile £617 £640 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -1.63% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 409 247 443
10th Percentile £35.20 £21.25 £35.50
25th Percentile £52.00 £35.38 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £61.84
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +1.07% -1.84%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% -

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 17 January 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 17 January 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 17 January 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 0 4,065 £525 -8.70% 4,109
London 0 2,358 £550 -8.33% 1,023
UK excluding London 0 1,811 £500 -3.38% 3,729
Work from Home 0 1,441 £525 -4.55% 1,696
North of England +8 593 £480 -4.48% 666
South East +3 394 £481 -12.50% 1,277
Yorkshire +8 299 £500 -6.98% 268
Midlands +7 276 £506 +6.53% 404
Scotland +3 258 £470 -2.89% 173
North West +6 250 £450 -7.79% 288
West Midlands +15 234 £517 +3.40% 142
South West -8 178 £550 -10.20% 490
East of England +5 126 £525 +9.38% 536
North East +6 48 £488 -10.55% 114
East Midlands -20 42 £429 +7.86% 251
Wales -12 28 £523 +4.50% 177
Northern Ireland +1 22 £588 +11.90% 92

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
1 210 (4.39%) Apache Spark
2 207 (4.33%) Apache Airflow
3 156 (3.26%) Apache
4 155 (3.24%) Confluence
5 62 (1.30%) SAS
6 56 (1.17%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.71%) nginx
8 33 (0.69%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 18 (0.38%) Appian
11 11 (0.23%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 7 (0.15%) IIS
14 6 (0.13%) Camunda
14 6 (0.13%) CMS
14 6 (0.13%) Luigi
14 6 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
15 4 (0.084%) Tomcat
16 3 (0.063%) Apache Superset
Applications
1 127 (2.66%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.71%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 17 (0.36%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 9 (0.19%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 3 (0.063%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.063%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.042%) Maya
10 2 (0.042%) NUKE
11 1 (0.021%) SPSS
11 1 (0.021%) Stata
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.33%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 3 (0.063%) Actimize
5 3 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 3 (0.063%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.042%) Bloomberg AIM
6 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.042%) Shopify
6 2 (0.042%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.021%) Cloudability
7 1 (0.021%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
7 1 (0.021%) Maximo
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,877 (39.26%) AWS
2 1,547 (32.36%) Azure
3 726 (15.19%) GCP
4 595 (12.45%) GitHub
5 510 (10.67%) Serverless
6 436 (9.12%) Power Platform
7 365 (7.63%) Amazon S3
8 348 (7.28%) AWS Lambda
9 316 (6.61%) Azure DevOps
9 316 (6.61%) GitHub Actions
10 242 (5.06%) AWS CloudFormation
11 240 (5.02%) Snowflake
12 215 (4.50%) Azure Data Factory
13 198 (4.14%) Amazon EC2
14 180 (3.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 175 (3.66%) Amazon ECS
16 166 (3.47%) Amazon EKS
17 141 (2.95%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 138 (2.89%) dbt
19 135 (2.82%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 237 (4.96%) Firewall
2 157 (3.28%) DNS
3 124 (2.59%) TCP/IP
4 118 (2.47%) Network Security
5 81 (1.69%) HTTP
6 80 (1.67%) VPN
7 68 (1.42%) BGP
8 66 (1.38%) SSL
9 49 (1.02%) WAN
10 41 (0.86%) OSPF
11 39 (0.82%) Wireshark
12 37 (0.77%) MPLS
13 34 (0.71%) Wireless
14 33 (0.69%) DHCP
14 33 (0.69%) LAN
15 32 (0.67%) SD-WAN
16 31 (0.65%) SSH
17 29 (0.61%) SMTP
18 24 (0.50%) FTP
19 23 (0.48%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 372 (7.78%) Power BI
2 371 (7.76%) PostgreSQL
3 282 (5.90%) Data Warehouse
4 230 (4.81%) Relational Database
5 226 (4.73%) NoSQL
6 222 (4.64%) Data Lake
7 171 (3.58%) SQL Server
8 161 (3.37%) Amazon RDS
9 157 (3.28%) Big Data
10 147 (3.07%) Tableau
11 128 (2.68%) MySQL
12 107 (2.24%) Metadata
13 98 (2.05%) BigQuery
14 96 (2.01%) Amazon Athena
14 96 (2.01%) Amazon Redshift
15 95 (1.99%) MongoDB
16 84 (1.76%) Hadoop
17 79 (1.65%) Delta Lake
17 79 (1.65%) DynamoDB
18 76 (1.59%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 608 (12.72%) Git
2 555 (11.61%) Jenkins
3 431 (9.01%) GitLab
4 281 (5.88%) JIRA
5 83 (1.74%) Selenium
6 75 (1.57%) MLflow
7 48 (1.00%) Cucumber
7 48 (1.00%) Sonatype Nexus
8 45 (0.94%) Bitbucket
9 44 (0.92%) Postman
10 41 (0.86%) JUnit
11 40 (0.84%) SonarQube
12 35 (0.73%) JMeter
13 33 (0.69%) Liquibase
14 29 (0.61%) Cypress.io
15 28 (0.59%) CircleCI
15 28 (0.59%) Maven
15 28 (0.59%) Visual Studio
16 27 (0.56%) Artifactory
17 24 (0.50%) Gradle
General
1 1,301 (27.21%) Social Skills
2 955 (19.97%) Finance
3 666 (13.93%) Analytical Skills
4 447 (9.35%) Public Sector
5 425 (8.89%) Banking
6 166 (3.47%) Front Office
7 139 (2.91%) Investment Banking
8 126 (2.64%) Documentation Skills
9 73 (1.53%) Financial Institution
10 68 (1.42%) Marketing
11 66 (1.38%) Pharmaceutical
12 62 (1.30%) Retail
13 57 (1.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 57 (1.19%) Telecoms
14 43 (0.90%) Legal
14 43 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
15 41 (0.86%) Manufacturing
16 32 (0.67%) Influencing Skills
17 29 (0.61%) Military
18 24 (0.50%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 823 (17.21%) Developer
2 675 (14.12%) Senior
3 626 (13.09%) Data Engineer
4 343 (7.17%) Python Developer
5 318 (6.65%) DevOps Engineer
6 316 (6.61%) Python Engineer
7 291 (6.09%) Analyst
8 284 (5.94%) Architect
9 277 (5.79%) AWS Engineer
10 237 (4.96%) Lead
10 237 (4.96%) Software Engineer
11 227 (4.75%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 176 (3.68%) Data Scientist
13 168 (3.51%) Platform Engineer
14 145 (3.03%) Data Analyst
14 145 (3.03%) Senior Developer
15 128 (2.68%) Azure Engineer
16 125 (2.61%) Senior Data Engineer
17 119 (2.49%) Consultant
17 119 (2.49%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 417 (8.72%) REST
2 299 (6.25%) React
3 290 (6.07%) Kafka
4 272 (5.69%) PySpark
5 236 (4.94%) Node.js
6 222 (4.64%) RESTful
7 221 (4.62%) Pandas
8 213 (4.46%) FastAPI
9 192 (4.02%) PyTorch
10 169 (3.53%) NumPy
11 165 (3.45%) .NET
12 164 (3.43%) TensorFlow
13 133 (2.78%) AngularJS
14 121 (2.53%) LangChain
15 116 (2.43%) scikit-learn
16 111 (2.32%) Elastic Stack
16 111 (2.32%) pytest
17 107 (2.24%) LDAP
18 101 (2.11%) Flask
19 100 (2.09%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 404 (8.45%) Cloud Native
2 189 (3.95%) Algorithms
3 184 (3.85%) Distributed Systems
4 130 (2.72%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.66%) Equities
6 126 (2.64%) Data Protection Act
7 107 (2.24%) Data Structures
8 98 (2.05%) Derivative
9 96 (2.01%) Onboarding
10 95 (1.99%) AI Agents
11 92 (1.92%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 91 (1.90%) Enterprise Software
13 88 (1.84%) Fixed Income
14 81 (1.69%) Public Cloud
15 80 (1.67%) Hedge funds
16 78 (1.63%) Security Posture
17 75 (1.57%) Data Centre
17 75 (1.57%) Hybrid Cloud
17 75 (1.57%) Management Information System
18 73 (1.53%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 787 (16.46%) Linux
2 359 (7.51%) Windows
3 237 (4.96%) Unix
4 91 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.32%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.84%) Android
7 37 (0.77%) Ubuntu
8 36 (0.75%) VMS
9 29 (0.61%) CentOS
10 25 (0.52%) Solaris
11 24 (0.50%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.38%) Apple iOS
13 17 (0.36%) Amazon Linux
14 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
15 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
16 4 (0.084%) Debian
16 4 (0.084%) Robot Operating System
16 4 (0.084%) Windows 10
17 3 (0.063%) AIX
17 3 (0.063%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,652 (34.55%) CI/CD
2 1,343 (28.09%) DevOps
3 1,144 (23.93%) Agile
4 1,046 (21.88%) Problem-Solving
5 952 (19.91%) AI
6 860 (17.99%) Infrastructure as Code
7 825 (17.26%) Analytics
8 738 (15.44%) Machine Learning
9 716 (14.98%) Containerisation
10 694 (14.52%) Data Pipeline
11 570 (11.92%) ETL
12 560 (11.71%) Data Engineering
13 554 (11.59%) Data Modelling
14 551 (11.52%) Data Science
15 549 (11.48%) Software Engineering
16 517 (10.81%) Test Automation
17 425 (8.89%) Business Intelligence
18 392 (8.20%) Observability
19 368 (7.70%) LLM
20 363 (7.59%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,469 (30.73%) SQL
2 762 (15.94%) Java
3 650 (13.60%) PowerShell
4 617 (12.91%) Bash
5 488 (10.21%) JavaScript
6 290 (6.07%) C#
6 290 (6.07%) TypeScript
7 254 (5.31%) Go
8 213 (4.46%) C++
9 166 (3.47%) Perl
10 163 (3.41%) R
11 156 (3.26%) Shell Script
12 110 (2.30%) Scala
13 95 (1.99%) Ruby
14 60 (1.25%) Bicep
15 57 (1.19%) Kusto Query Language
16 56 (1.17%) C
17 52 (1.09%) VBA
18 45 (0.94%) PHP
19 38 (0.79%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,047 (21.90%) Security Cleared
2 850 (17.78%) SC Cleared
3 436 (9.12%) Degree
4 234 (4.89%) Computer Science Degree
5 138 (2.89%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.72%) AWS Certification
7 117 (2.45%) Master's Degree
8 90 (1.88%) BPSS Clearance
9 86 (1.80%) Azure Certification
10 80 (1.67%) CISSP
11 76 (1.59%) Cisco Certification
12 72 (1.51%) MCP
13 50 (1.05%) CCNP
14 48 (1.00%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 43 (0.90%) PhD
16 36 (0.75%) CCIE
17 34 (0.71%) CEH
18 33 (0.69%) CISM
18 33 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
19 32 (0.67%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 390 (8.16%) Data Quality
2 181 (3.79%) QA
3 163 (3.41%) GDPR
4 89 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 89 (1.86%) NIST
5 59 (1.23%) Accessibility
6 33 (0.69%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 27 (0.56%) HIPAA
9 24 (0.50%) SLA
10 22 (0.46%) NCSC
11 18 (0.38%) SOC 2
12 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
13 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
13 9 (0.19%) MiFID
14 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
14 8 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
14 8 (0.17%) EMIR
14 8 (0.17%) PMO
14 8 (0.17%) WCAG
System Software
1 952 (19.91%) Docker
2 189 (3.95%) Active Directory
3 110 (2.30%) VMware Infrastructure
4 36 (0.75%) VMware NSX
5 35 (0.73%) vSphere
6 34 (0.71%) Virtual Machines
7 22 (0.46%) Firmware
8 21 (0.44%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.42%) HDFS
10 17 (0.36%) KVM
11 15 (0.31%) Squid
12 14 (0.29%) DFS Replication
12 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
13 13 (0.27%) Postfix
14 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
15 10 (0.21%) Lustre
16 9 (0.19%) Dovecot
16 9 (0.19%) GPFS
17 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
17 8 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,075 (22.48%) Terraform
2 1,009 (21.10%) Kubernetes
3 597 (12.49%) Ansible
4 344 (7.20%) Grafana
5 288 (6.02%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.78%) Argo
7 82 (1.72%) Puppet
8 54 (1.13%) Kibana
9 46 (0.96%) vRealize
10 43 (0.90%) Istio
11 35 (0.73%) Single Sign-On
12 33 (0.69%) Nessus
13 31 (0.65%) Progress Chef
14 29 (0.61%) NetBackup
15 19 (0.40%) ITRS Geneos
16 18 (0.38%) logstash
17 17 (0.36%) Nmap
18 16 (0.33%) QRadar
18 16 (0.33%) Rancher
18 16 (0.33%) SCCM
Vendors
1 571 (11.94%) Microsoft
2 447 (9.35%) Databricks
3 282 (5.90%) Google
4 246 (5.15%) Splunk
5 237 (4.96%) Oracle
6 212 (4.43%) VMware
7 137 (2.87%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.57%) ServiceNow
9 118 (2.47%) Cisco
10 104 (2.18%) OpenAI
11 93 (1.95%) CyberArk
12 85 (1.78%) F5
13 79 (1.65%) Palo Alto
14 69 (1.44%) Foundry
15 68 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
16 51 (1.07%) SAP
17 44 (0.92%) Atlassian
18 43 (0.90%) Dynatrace
19 40 (0.84%) Informatica
20 39 (0.82%) Salesforce