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

6 months to
20 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 11 15
Rank change year-on-year +1 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,223 3,854 4,014
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.85% 13.21% 9.43%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.53% 38.86% 31.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,467 2,693 2,872
10th Percentile £363 £381 £396
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -1.79% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £813
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £500 £510
% change year-on-year -1.55% -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 129 51 100
10th Percentile £30.39 £22.50 £21.20
25th Percentile £46.25 £27.84 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £40.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +37.50% -33.33% -1.03%
75th Percentile £70.71 £56.25 £70.31
90th Percentile £84.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -30.77% +13.38%

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 12,886 9,917 12,722
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.76% 34.00% 29.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,472 6,737 9,047
10th Percentile £356 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £530
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -1.89% -3.64%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £710 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +1.39% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 561 239 494
10th Percentile £39.25 £25.25 £32.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.43
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +0.12% +2.85%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.75
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 20 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 20 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 20 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 4,339 £525 -4.55% 3,525
London -3 2,480 £550 -5.98% 1,412
UK excluding London 0 2,013 £492 -1.55% 2,896
Work from Home -1 1,478 £530 -3.64% 2,724
North of England +9 705 £485 -0.62% 708
Yorkshire -1 397 £482 -3.60% 238
South East -5 387 £515 +0.34% 826
Scotland +2 297 £438 -7.89% 239
South West 0 256 £500 -9.09% 309
North West +3 247 £513 +7.89% 332
Midlands -12 236 £485 +7.72% 364
West Midlands -7 180 £482 +1.39% 185
East of England -3 126 £500 - 303
North East +6 70 £475 +5.56% 142
East Midlands -13 55 £495 +17.16% 178
Northern Ireland +14 24 £463 -18.68% 67
Wales -14 22 £463 -7.50% 121

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 (5.51%) Apache Spark
2 208 (3.98%) Apache Airflow
3 173 (3.31%) Apache
4 140 (2.68%) Confluence
5 47 (0.90%) SAS
6 43 (0.82%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.73%) Jupyter
8 20 (0.38%) nginx
8 20 (0.38%) OpenStack
9 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
10 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
10 15 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
11 11 (0.21%) Appian
12 10 (0.19%) IIS
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 7 (0.13%) Camunda
14 7 (0.13%) CMS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
16 5 (0.096%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 118 (2.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 25 (0.48%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.36%) MS Visio
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.019%) SPSS
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
9 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 15 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Fidessa
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.057%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.057%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.038%) Dynamics CRM
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 Assets
Cloud Services
1 1,955 (37.43%) AWS
2 1,740 (33.31%) Azure
3 746 (14.28%) GCP
4 633 (12.12%) GitHub
5 510 (9.76%) Power Platform
6 454 (8.69%) Serverless
7 370 (7.08%) Azure DevOps
8 356 (6.82%) Amazon S3
9 334 (6.39%) GitHub Actions
10 322 (6.17%) AWS Lambda
11 263 (5.04%) Azure Data Factory
12 236 (4.52%) Snowflake
13 189 (3.62%) AWS CloudFormation
14 168 (3.22%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 164 (3.14%) OpenShift
16 161 (3.08%) dbt
17 151 (2.89%) Amazon EKS
18 130 (2.49%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 123 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
20 122 (2.34%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 183 (3.50%) Firewall
2 133 (2.55%) DNS
3 109 (2.09%) Network Security
4 88 (1.68%) TCP/IP
5 86 (1.65%) BGP
6 83 (1.59%) WAN
7 75 (1.44%) VPN
8 62 (1.19%) HTTP
9 59 (1.13%) OSPF
10 51 (0.98%) SAN
11 43 (0.82%) VXLAN
12 41 (0.78%) SD-WAN
13 40 (0.77%) BIG-IP
14 39 (0.75%) SNMP
15 35 (0.67%) VLAN
16 34 (0.65%) LAN
16 34 (0.65%) SSL
17 33 (0.63%) DHCP
17 33 (0.63%) Ethernet VPN
17 33 (0.63%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 445 (8.52%) Power BI
2 337 (6.45%) PostgreSQL
3 278 (5.32%) Data Warehouse
4 249 (4.77%) SQL Server
5 234 (4.48%) Data Lake
6 199 (3.81%) Tableau
7 185 (3.54%) Relational Database
8 180 (3.45%) NoSQL
9 164 (3.14%) Big Data
10 159 (3.04%) Metadata
11 140 (2.68%) Delta Lake
12 136 (2.60%) BigQuery
13 120 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
14 111 (2.13%) Amazon Redshift
15 107 (2.05%) MongoDB
16 89 (1.70%) MySQL
17 87 (1.67%) DynamoDB
18 85 (1.63%) Amazon RDS
19 82 (1.57%) Azure SQL Database
20 77 (1.47%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 645 (12.35%) Git
2 468 (8.96%) Jenkins
3 355 (6.80%) GitLab
4 248 (4.75%) JIRA
5 89 (1.70%) MLflow
6 76 (1.46%) Selenium
7 59 (1.13%) Postman
8 39 (0.75%) Cucumber
9 33 (0.63%) JMeter
10 31 (0.59%) Artifactory
11 30 (0.57%) Cypress.io
12 27 (0.52%) Bitbucket
12 27 (0.52%) SonarQube
13 26 (0.50%) JUnit
13 26 (0.50%) Sonatype Nexus
14 24 (0.46%) Robot Framework
15 23 (0.44%) Maven
15 23 (0.44%) REST Assured
16 20 (0.38%) Gatling
17 18 (0.34%) SpecFlow
General
1 1,119 (21.42%) Social Skills
2 1,011 (19.36%) Finance
3 693 (13.27%) Analytical Skills
4 475 (9.09%) Public Sector
5 361 (6.91%) Banking
6 183 (3.50%) Front Office
7 127 (2.43%) Documentation Skills
8 112 (2.14%) Investment Banking
9 77 (1.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 68 (1.30%) Marketing
11 60 (1.15%) Retail
12 56 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
13 51 (0.98%) Legal
14 50 (0.96%) Telecoms
15 43 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 35 (0.67%) Financial Institution
16 35 (0.67%) Military
17 34 (0.65%) Publishing
18 33 (0.63%) Manufacturing
19 28 (0.54%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 983 (18.82%) Developer
2 799 (15.30%) Data Engineer
3 771 (14.76%) Senior
4 501 (9.59%) Python Developer
5 331 (6.34%) Lead
6 327 (6.26%) Architect
7 322 (6.17%) Python Engineer
8 277 (5.30%) DevOps Engineer
9 273 (5.23%) Analyst
10 263 (5.04%) Software Engineer
11 224 (4.29%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 223 (4.27%) AWS Engineer
13 211 (4.04%) Data Scientist
14 170 (3.25%) Azure Engineer
14 170 (3.25%) Senior Developer
15 161 (3.08%) Senior Data Engineer
16 152 (2.91%) Platform Engineer
17 146 (2.80%) Full-Stack Developer
18 144 (2.76%) Data Analyst
19 129 (2.47%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 394 (7.54%) REST
2 366 (7.01%) React
3 359 (6.87%) PySpark
4 327 (6.26%) Kafka
5 234 (4.48%) .NET
6 229 (4.38%) Node.js
7 216 (4.14%) Pandas
8 189 (3.62%) FastAPI
9 180 (3.45%) RESTful
10 177 (3.39%) PyTorch
11 169 (3.24%) JSON
12 133 (2.55%) Django
13 130 (2.49%) Flask
13 130 (2.49%) NumPy
14 123 (2.35%) TensorFlow
15 118 (2.26%) LangChain
16 117 (2.24%) scikit-learn
17 114 (2.18%) AngularJS
18 99 (1.90%) HTML
18 99 (1.90%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 544 (10.42%) Cloud Native
2 230 (4.40%) Distributed Systems
3 156 (2.99%) Algorithms
4 135 (2.58%) Product Ownership
5 123 (2.35%) Data Centre
6 121 (2.32%) AI Agents
6 121 (2.32%) Data Protection Act
6 121 (2.32%) Data Structures
7 119 (2.28%) Onboarding
8 114 (2.18%) Derivative
9 106 (2.03%) Equities
10 102 (1.95%) Management Information System
11 101 (1.93%) Fixed Income
11 101 (1.93%) Legacy Systems
12 90 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
13 89 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
14 83 (1.59%) Security Posture
15 66 (1.26%) Public Cloud
16 48 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
17 47 (0.90%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 621 (11.89%) Linux
2 290 (5.55%) Windows
3 221 (4.23%) Unix
4 91 (1.74%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 70 (1.34%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.67%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.63%) VMS
8 26 (0.50%) AIX
9 24 (0.46%) Android
10 23 (0.44%) Solaris
11 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.34%) Apple iOS
13 16 (0.31%) CentOS
14 10 (0.19%) zOS
15 9 (0.17%) Debian
16 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
16 7 (0.13%) Rocky
17 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
18 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
19 4 (0.077%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,913 (36.63%) CI/CD
2 1,388 (26.57%) DevOps
3 1,197 (22.92%) AI
4 1,119 (21.42%) Agile
5 1,018 (19.49%) Analytics
6 925 (17.71%) Problem-Solving
7 891 (17.06%) Infrastructure as Code
8 879 (16.83%) Data Pipeline
9 809 (15.49%) Machine Learning
10 713 (13.65%) Data Modelling
11 701 (13.42%) Data Engineering
12 694 (13.29%) ETL
13 693 (13.27%) Containerisation
14 619 (11.85%) Software Engineering
15 576 (11.03%) Data Science
16 547 (10.47%) Observability
17 514 (9.84%) Test Automation
18 513 (9.82%) Business Intelligence
19 457 (8.75%) LLM
20 424 (8.12%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,731 (33.14%) SQL
2 757 (14.49%) Java
3 630 (12.06%) PowerShell
4 569 (10.89%) Bash
5 480 (9.19%) JavaScript
6 347 (6.64%) TypeScript
7 346 (6.62%) C#
8 194 (3.71%) Go
9 170 (3.25%) R
10 153 (2.93%) C++
11 141 (2.70%) Scala
12 107 (2.05%) Shell Script
13 82 (1.57%) Ruby
14 77 (1.47%) Perl
15 73 (1.40%) Bicep
16 57 (1.09%) PL/SQL
16 57 (1.09%) T-SQL
17 56 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 54 (1.03%) C
19 50 (0.96%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,185 (22.69%) Security Cleared
2 954 (18.27%) SC Cleared
3 378 (7.24%) Degree
4 160 (3.06%) Computer Science Degree
5 150 (2.87%) DV Cleared
6 129 (2.47%) BPSS Clearance
7 104 (1.99%) Azure Certification
8 87 (1.67%) AWS Certification
9 80 (1.53%) CISSP
10 79 (1.51%) Master's Degree
11 69 (1.32%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (1.03%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.94%) CCNP
14 39 (0.75%) CISM
14 39 (0.75%) PhD
15 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
16 28 (0.54%) ISTQB
17 26 (0.50%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 21 (0.40%) CCIE
18 21 (0.40%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 513 (9.82%) Data Quality
2 225 (4.31%) QA
3 147 (2.81%) GDPR
4 96 (1.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 93 (1.78%) NIST
6 78 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) SLA
8 29 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.50%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 17 (0.33%) WCAG
13 16 (0.31%) NCSC
14 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.23%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) GRC
17 6 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
17 6 (0.11%) PSD2
System Software
1 776 (14.86%) Docker
2 146 (2.80%) Active Directory
3 93 (1.78%) VMware Infrastructure
4 71 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.75%) VMware NSX
6 36 (0.69%) vSphere
7 34 (0.65%) Firmware
8 30 (0.57%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.33%) KVM
9 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) NFS
11 12 (0.23%) HDFS
11 12 (0.23%) Squid
12 10 (0.19%) Ceph
13 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
13 9 (0.17%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
15 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
16 3 (0.057%) iptables
16 3 (0.057%) PowerHA
Systems Management
1 1,056 (20.22%) Terraform
2 936 (17.92%) Kubernetes
3 532 (10.19%) Ansible
4 331 (6.34%) Grafana
5 271 (5.19%) Prometheus
6 71 (1.36%) Puppet
7 58 (1.11%) Argo
8 52 (1.00%) Istio
9 47 (0.90%) vRealize
10 39 (0.75%) Kibana
11 31 (0.59%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.59%) vCenter Server
12 28 (0.54%) Nessus
13 27 (0.52%) Nagios
14 24 (0.46%) Control-M
14 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.46%) ZABBIX
15 22 (0.42%) NetBackup
16 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
17 18 (0.34%) Netcool
Vendors
1 587 (11.24%) Microsoft
2 563 (10.78%) Databricks
3 263 (5.04%) Google
4 235 (4.50%) Oracle
5 219 (4.19%) Splunk
6 175 (3.35%) VMware
7 120 (2.30%) Red Hat
8 119 (2.28%) OpenAI
9 113 (2.16%) Cisco
10 97 (1.86%) ServiceNow
11 82 (1.57%) CyberArk
12 75 (1.44%) Dynatrace
13 74 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
14 68 (1.30%) F5
14 68 (1.30%) Palo Alto
15 66 (1.26%) IBM
16 64 (1.23%) Informatica
17 55 (1.05%) Foundry
18 49 (0.94%) SAP
19 44 (0.84%) Arista