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

6 months to
24 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,826 3,939 4,195
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.70% 12.46% 9.52%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.42% 37.44% 31.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,250 2,606 2,931
10th Percentile £359 £386 £400
25th Percentile £419 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £563
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -2.22% -6.25%
75th Percentile £638 £676 £688
90th Percentile £745 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £524 £525
% change year-on-year -4.49% -0.29% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 94 62 122
10th Percentile £28.25 £20.23 £28.10
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.15 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.86 £45.59 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.74% -24.02% -7.69%
75th Percentile £73.37 £66.77 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.70 £79.75 £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 11,650 10,521 13,200
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.66% 33.28% 29.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,728 6,673 9,337
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £503 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -4.14% -2.78% -4.42%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -1.02% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 431 248 483
10th Percentile £39.53 £21.25 £35.50
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.56 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -3.85%

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 24 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 24 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 24 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 4,080 £525 -8.70% 4,311
London 0 2,359 £550 -8.33% 1,114
UK excluding London -1 1,837 £500 -4.49% 3,925
Work from Home 0 1,439 £525 -4.55% 1,942
North of England +7 598 £481 -4.70% 685
South East +2 404 £480 -12.73% 1,341
Yorkshire +6 300 £500 -6.98% 282
Midlands +5 283 £508 +6.39% 441
Scotland +2 264 £465 -3.13% 206
North West +2 253 £450 -7.79% 289
West Midlands +7 241 £525 +2.44% 163
South West -7 180 £550 -10.57% 518
East of England +5 121 £525 +7.14% 575
North East +6 51 £488 -10.55% 118
East Midlands -20 42 £444 +13.49% 270
Northern Ireland +1 30 £575 +9.52% 79
Wales -17 27 £523 +4.50% 175

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
1 217 (4.50%) Apache Spark
2 200 (4.14%) Apache Airflow
3 153 (3.17%) Apache
4 147 (3.05%) Confluence
5 63 (1.31%) SAS
6 56 (1.16%) SharePoint
7 36 (0.75%) nginx
8 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 19 (0.39%) Appian
11 11 (0.23%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 7 (0.15%) Camunda
13 7 (0.15%) IIS
14 6 (0.12%) CMS
14 6 (0.12%) Luigi
14 6 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
15 5 (0.10%) Tomcat
16 3 (0.062%) WebLogic
Applications
1 125 (2.59%) Microsoft Excel
2 30 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.39%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 3 (0.062%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.062%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.041%) Maya
9 2 (0.041%) NUKE
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 15 (0.31%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 3 (0.062%) Actimize
5 3 (0.062%) NetSuite
5 3 (0.062%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.041%) Bloomberg AIM
6 2 (0.041%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.041%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.041%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.041%) Shopify
6 2 (0.041%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.021%) Cerner Millennium
7 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
7 1 (0.021%) ION MarketView
7 1 (0.021%) Loan IQ
7 1 (0.021%) Maximo
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) SAP BPC
Cloud Services
1 1,903 (39.43%) AWS
2 1,573 (32.59%) Azure
3 748 (15.50%) GCP
4 604 (12.52%) GitHub
5 516 (10.69%) Serverless
6 434 (8.99%) Power Platform
7 371 (7.69%) Amazon S3
8 347 (7.19%) AWS Lambda
9 326 (6.76%) Azure DevOps
10 318 (6.59%) GitHub Actions
11 247 (5.12%) AWS CloudFormation
12 241 (4.99%) Snowflake
13 220 (4.56%) Azure Data Factory
14 192 (3.98%) Amazon EC2
15 176 (3.65%) Amazon ECS
16 173 (3.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 169 (3.50%) Amazon EKS
18 138 (2.86%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 138 (2.86%) dbt
19 137 (2.84%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 236 (4.89%) Firewall
2 153 (3.17%) DNS
3 126 (2.61%) Network Security
4 125 (2.59%) TCP/IP
5 81 (1.68%) VPN
6 76 (1.57%) HTTP
7 71 (1.47%) BGP
8 63 (1.31%) SSL
9 52 (1.08%) WAN
10 42 (0.87%) OSPF
11 41 (0.85%) MPLS
12 40 (0.83%) Wireshark
13 38 (0.79%) LAN
14 33 (0.68%) Wireless
15 31 (0.64%) DHCP
16 29 (0.60%) SSH
17 28 (0.58%) SD-WAN
18 25 (0.52%) SMTP
18 25 (0.52%) VLAN
19 21 (0.44%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 369 (7.65%) PostgreSQL
1 369 (7.65%) Power BI
2 289 (5.99%) Data Warehouse
3 227 (4.70%) NoSQL
4 223 (4.62%) Relational Database
5 222 (4.60%) Data Lake
6 171 (3.54%) SQL Server
7 157 (3.25%) Amazon RDS
8 155 (3.21%) Big Data
9 144 (2.98%) Tableau
10 126 (2.61%) MySQL
11 112 (2.32%) Metadata
12 102 (2.11%) BigQuery
13 97 (2.01%) Amazon Redshift
14 93 (1.93%) Amazon Athena
15 91 (1.89%) MongoDB
16 82 (1.70%) Delta Lake
16 82 (1.70%) Hadoop
17 78 (1.62%) DynamoDB
18 77 (1.60%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 613 (12.70%) Git
2 548 (11.36%) Jenkins
3 426 (8.83%) GitLab
4 273 (5.66%) JIRA
5 82 (1.70%) Selenium
6 75 (1.55%) MLflow
7 51 (1.06%) Sonatype Nexus
8 49 (1.02%) Cucumber
9 46 (0.95%) Bitbucket
10 43 (0.89%) Postman
11 40 (0.83%) SonarQube
12 38 (0.79%) JUnit
13 34 (0.70%) JMeter
14 31 (0.64%) Liquibase
15 30 (0.62%) Maven
16 29 (0.60%) CircleCI
17 28 (0.58%) Visual Studio
18 27 (0.56%) Cypress.io
19 25 (0.52%) Artifactory
20 24 (0.50%) Gradle
General
1 1,303 (27.00%) Social Skills
2 950 (19.69%) Finance
3 676 (14.01%) Analytical Skills
4 444 (9.20%) Public Sector
5 430 (8.91%) Banking
6 163 (3.38%) Front Office
7 134 (2.78%) Investment Banking
8 127 (2.63%) Documentation Skills
9 73 (1.51%) Financial Institution
10 66 (1.37%) Marketing
11 63 (1.31%) Retail
12 61 (1.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 59 (1.22%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (1.10%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.91%) Legal
16 43 (0.89%) Presentation Skills
17 40 (0.83%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.68%) Influencing Skills
19 29 (0.60%) Military
20 24 (0.50%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 849 (17.59%) Developer
2 660 (13.68%) Senior
3 628 (13.01%) Data Engineer
4 358 (7.42%) Python Developer
5 318 (6.59%) DevOps Engineer
6 305 (6.32%) Python Engineer
7 302 (6.26%) Architect
8 281 (5.82%) Analyst
9 269 (5.57%) AWS Engineer
10 246 (5.10%) Lead
11 231 (4.79%) Software Engineer
12 228 (4.72%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 183 (3.79%) Data Scientist
14 168 (3.48%) Platform Engineer
15 145 (3.00%) Senior Developer
16 138 (2.86%) Data Analyst
17 132 (2.74%) Azure Engineer
18 124 (2.57%) Full-Stack Developer
19 121 (2.51%) Senior Data Engineer
20 117 (2.42%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 417 (8.64%) REST
2 305 (6.32%) React
3 285 (5.91%) Kafka
4 275 (5.70%) PySpark
5 241 (4.99%) Node.js
6 220 (4.56%) Pandas
6 220 (4.56%) RESTful
7 211 (4.37%) FastAPI
8 196 (4.06%) PyTorch
9 180 (3.73%) .NET
10 168 (3.48%) NumPy
11 167 (3.46%) TensorFlow
12 135 (2.80%) AngularJS
13 123 (2.55%) LangChain
14 121 (2.51%) scikit-learn
15 112 (2.32%) Elastic Stack
16 107 (2.22%) Flask
17 106 (2.20%) OAuth
18 104 (2.15%) pytest
19 100 (2.07%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 423 (8.77%) Cloud Native
2 191 (3.96%) Algorithms
3 186 (3.85%) Distributed Systems
4 128 (2.65%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.63%) Data Protection Act
6 122 (2.53%) Equities
7 104 (2.15%) Data Structures
8 99 (2.05%) AI Agents
9 98 (2.03%) Onboarding
10 95 (1.97%) Derivative
11 94 (1.95%) Enterprise Software
12 85 (1.76%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 85 (1.76%) Public Cloud
13 84 (1.74%) Fixed Income
14 80 (1.66%) Data Centre
15 79 (1.64%) Legacy Systems
15 79 (1.64%) Security Posture
16 78 (1.62%) Hybrid Cloud
16 78 (1.62%) Management Information System
17 75 (1.55%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 783 (16.22%) Linux
2 356 (7.38%) Windows
3 237 (4.91%) Unix
4 97 (2.01%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.37%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.83%) Android
7 36 (0.75%) Ubuntu
8 35 (0.73%) VMS
9 29 (0.60%) CentOS
10 27 (0.56%) Solaris
11 24 (0.50%) Mac OS
12 19 (0.39%) Apple iOS
13 15 (0.31%) Amazon Linux
14 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
15 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
16 5 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
17 4 (0.083%) Debian
17 4 (0.083%) Robot Operating System
17 4 (0.083%) Windows 10
18 3 (0.062%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,707 (35.37%) CI/CD
2 1,361 (28.20%) DevOps
3 1,140 (23.62%) Agile
4 1,058 (21.92%) Problem-Solving
5 978 (20.27%) AI
6 864 (17.90%) Infrastructure as Code
7 829 (17.18%) Analytics
8 752 (15.58%) Machine Learning
9 724 (15.00%) Containerisation
10 705 (14.61%) Data Pipeline
11 581 (12.04%) ETL
12 565 (11.71%) Data Engineering
13 563 (11.67%) Data Science
14 562 (11.65%) Data Modelling
15 537 (11.13%) Software Engineering
16 519 (10.75%) Test Automation
17 419 (8.68%) Business Intelligence
18 403 (8.35%) Observability
19 380 (7.87%) LLM
20 362 (7.50%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,471 (30.48%) SQL
2 760 (15.75%) Java
3 657 (13.61%) PowerShell
4 620 (12.85%) Bash
5 490 (10.15%) JavaScript
6 303 (6.28%) C#
7 293 (6.07%) TypeScript
8 249 (5.16%) Go
9 204 (4.23%) C++
10 163 (3.38%) Perl
11 154 (3.19%) R
12 150 (3.11%) Shell Script
13 118 (2.45%) Scala
14 95 (1.97%) Ruby
15 61 (1.26%) Bicep
16 60 (1.24%) Kusto Query Language
17 55 (1.14%) C
18 50 (1.04%) VBA
19 45 (0.93%) PHP
20 37 (0.77%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,057 (21.90%) Security Cleared
2 862 (17.86%) SC Cleared
3 438 (9.08%) Degree
4 235 (4.87%) Computer Science Degree
5 135 (2.80%) DV Cleared
6 134 (2.78%) AWS Certification
7 117 (2.42%) Master's Degree
8 91 (1.89%) BPSS Clearance
9 87 (1.80%) Azure Certification
10 86 (1.78%) CISSP
11 81 (1.68%) Cisco Certification
12 71 (1.47%) MCP
13 53 (1.10%) CCNP
14 51 (1.06%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 43 (0.89%) PhD
16 37 (0.77%) CCIE
16 37 (0.77%) CEH
17 34 (0.70%) CISM
18 33 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 33 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 389 (8.06%) Data Quality
2 176 (3.65%) QA
3 160 (3.32%) GDPR
4 92 (1.91%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 92 (1.91%) NIST
5 58 (1.20%) Accessibility
6 35 (0.73%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.62%) HIPAA
7 30 (0.62%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 22 (0.46%) SLA
9 21 (0.44%) NCSC
10 20 (0.41%) SOC 2
11 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
12 9 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
12 9 (0.19%) MiFID
12 9 (0.19%) WCAG
13 8 (0.17%) Actionable Recommendations
13 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
13 8 (0.17%) EMIR
13 8 (0.17%) PMO
System Software
1 965 (20.00%) Docker
2 183 (3.79%) Active Directory
3 113 (2.34%) VMware Infrastructure
4 44 (0.91%) VMware NSX
5 37 (0.77%) vSphere
6 36 (0.75%) Virtual Machines
7 22 (0.46%) Firmware
8 21 (0.44%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.41%) HDFS
10 17 (0.35%) KVM
11 14 (0.29%) Squid
12 12 (0.25%) DFS Replication
12 12 (0.25%) Postfix
12 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 11 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
14 10 (0.21%) VMware ESXi
15 9 (0.19%) GPFS
16 8 (0.17%) Dovecot
16 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,084 (22.46%) Terraform
2 1,012 (20.97%) Kubernetes
3 595 (12.33%) Ansible
4 346 (7.17%) Grafana
5 298 (6.17%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.80%) Argo
7 80 (1.66%) Puppet
8 55 (1.14%) Kibana
9 50 (1.04%) vRealize
10 43 (0.89%) Istio
11 35 (0.73%) Single Sign-On
12 34 (0.70%) Nessus
13 30 (0.62%) NetBackup
14 29 (0.60%) Progress Chef
15 19 (0.39%) ITRS Geneos
16 18 (0.37%) logstash
17 17 (0.35%) Nmap
18 16 (0.33%) QRadar
18 16 (0.33%) Rancher
19 15 (0.31%) SCCM
Vendors
1 581 (12.04%) Microsoft
2 448 (9.28%) Databricks
3 295 (6.11%) Google
4 247 (5.12%) Splunk
5 237 (4.91%) Oracle
6 220 (4.56%) VMware
7 139 (2.88%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.55%) Cisco
9 118 (2.45%) ServiceNow
10 106 (2.20%) OpenAI
11 93 (1.93%) CyberArk
12 86 (1.78%) F5
13 82 (1.70%) Palo Alto
14 71 (1.47%) Foundry
15 68 (1.41%) BeyondTrust
16 50 (1.04%) SAP
17 41 (0.85%) Dynatrace
17 41 (0.85%) Informatica
18 39 (0.81%) Atlassian
18 39 (0.81%) IBM