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 18 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,178 3,930 4,104
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.97% 13.41% 9.22%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.12% 39.25% 31.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,522 2,721 2,887
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £415 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -7.00% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £749 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £515
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.91% -6.36%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 52 108
10th Percentile £28.30 £20.23 £21.12
25th Percentile £41.94 £22.88 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.00 £43.50 £50.25
Median % change year-on-year +24.14% -13.43% -22.69%
75th Percentile £70.36 £65.25 £66.81
90th Percentile £79.90 £78.58 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.75 £46.18
% change year-on-year +5.05% +5.57% -28.95%

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 12,591 10,012 12,939
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.10% 34.15% 29.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,359 6,642 9,151
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £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 £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £485 £480
% change year-on-year -2.06% +1.04% -4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 494 244 490
10th Percentile £41.69 £21.48 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £31.64 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £67.29
90th Percentile £77.00 £85.00 £73.82
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +3.17% +2.27% -5.23%

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 18 March 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 18 March 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 18 March 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 -1 4,331 £518 -9.61% 2,907
London -3 2,458 £550 -8.33% 1,261
UK excluding London -1 1,989 £481 -3.75% 2,202
Work from Home 0 1,564 £525 -4.55% 1,100
North of England +12 664 £475 -5.00% 528
South East -5 411 £500 -6.50% 673
Yorkshire +2 347 £482 -3.60% 203
Midlands 0 282 £498 +1.63% 259
North West +12 270 £475 -4.90% 233
Scotland +2 269 £425 -9.57% 151
West Midlands -5 231 £500 - 122
South West -3 229 £531 -7.61% 274
East of England -2 130 £500 - 243
North East +16 55 £488 -4.88% 96
East Midlands -21 50 £447 +5.18% 137
Wales -11 32 £495 -6.60% 84
Northern Ireland +11 29 £613 +16.67% 31

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
1 268 (5.18%) Apache Spark
2 200 (3.86%) Apache Airflow
3 167 (3.23%) Confluence
4 155 (2.99%) Apache
5 64 (1.24%) SAS
6 60 (1.16%) SharePoint
7 27 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.48%) Jupyter
8 25 (0.48%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.46%) nginx
10 23 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.35%) Appian
12 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
13 10 (0.19%) Camunda
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 7 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 4 (0.077%) Oracle Application Server
16 4 (0.077%) Tomcat
17 3 (0.058%) CICS
17 3 (0.058%) IIS
Applications
1 131 (2.53%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
4 26 (0.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.31%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.15%) Weka
8 4 (0.077%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 7 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
4 7 (0.14%) Oracle EBS
5 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
6 3 (0.058%) Actimize
6 3 (0.058%) BambooHR
6 3 (0.058%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.039%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.039%) Odoo
7 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.039%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.039%) Shopify
8 1 (0.019%) Advent Geneva
8 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
8 1 (0.019%) ION MarketView
8 1 (0.019%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,993 (38.49%) AWS
2 1,801 (34.78%) Azure
3 800 (15.45%) GCP
4 698 (13.48%) GitHub
5 528 (10.20%) Serverless
6 496 (9.58%) Power Platform
7 392 (7.57%) Azure DevOps
8 359 (6.93%) Amazon S3
9 346 (6.68%) AWS Lambda
10 343 (6.62%) GitHub Actions
11 272 (5.25%) Azure Data Factory
12 260 (5.02%) Snowflake
13 255 (4.92%) AWS CloudFormation
14 192 (3.71%) Amazon EKS
15 179 (3.46%) OpenShift
16 168 (3.24%) Amazon ECS
17 165 (3.19%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 159 (3.07%) Amazon EC2
19 147 (2.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 146 (2.82%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 203 (3.92%) Firewall
2 138 (2.67%) DNS
3 111 (2.14%) Network Security
4 100 (1.93%) TCP/IP
5 78 (1.51%) VPN
6 64 (1.24%) BGP
7 59 (1.14%) WAN
8 58 (1.12%) HTTP
9 41 (0.79%) Wireshark
10 40 (0.77%) MPLS
10 40 (0.77%) SAN
11 36 (0.70%) OSPF
12 34 (0.66%) LAN
12 34 (0.66%) SSL
13 32 (0.62%) DHCP
13 32 (0.62%) SD-WAN
14 30 (0.58%) VLAN
15 25 (0.48%) SNMP
16 23 (0.44%) VXLAN
17 22 (0.42%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 413 (7.98%) Power BI
2 384 (7.42%) PostgreSQL
3 317 (6.12%) Data Warehouse
4 241 (4.65%) Data Lake
5 220 (4.25%) NoSQL
6 194 (3.75%) Relational Database
7 191 (3.69%) SQL Server
8 165 (3.19%) Tableau
9 160 (3.09%) Big Data
10 137 (2.65%) Metadata
11 124 (2.39%) Amazon RDS
11 124 (2.39%) Delta Lake
12 122 (2.36%) BigQuery
13 115 (2.22%) MySQL
14 108 (2.09%) Amazon Redshift
15 102 (1.97%) MongoDB
16 97 (1.87%) Amazon Athena
17 91 (1.76%) Azure SQL Database
18 84 (1.62%) Hadoop
19 80 (1.54%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 661 (12.77%) Git
2 543 (10.49%) Jenkins
3 417 (8.05%) GitLab
4 299 (5.77%) JIRA
5 97 (1.87%) MLflow
6 89 (1.72%) Selenium
7 52 (1.00%) Postman
8 50 (0.97%) Bitbucket
9 47 (0.91%) Cucumber
10 41 (0.79%) JMeter
11 40 (0.77%) JUnit
12 39 (0.75%) Sonatype Nexus
13 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
13 28 (0.54%) Visual Studio
14 26 (0.50%) Cypress.io
15 23 (0.44%) Artifactory
15 23 (0.44%) CircleCI
16 21 (0.41%) SonarQube
17 19 (0.37%) REST Assured
17 19 (0.37%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,258 (24.30%) Social Skills
2 1,012 (19.54%) Finance
3 716 (13.83%) Analytical Skills
4 499 (9.64%) Public Sector
5 414 (8.00%) Banking
6 175 (3.38%) Front Office
7 131 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
8 96 (1.85%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.33%) Retail
10 65 (1.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 62 (1.20%) Marketing
12 60 (1.16%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.08%) Financial Institution
14 53 (1.02%) Influencing Skills
14 53 (1.02%) Legal
15 51 (0.98%) Telecoms
16 46 (0.89%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
18 31 (0.60%) Military
19 24 (0.46%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 974 (18.81%) Developer
2 736 (14.21%) Data Engineer
3 720 (13.90%) Senior
4 444 (8.57%) Python Developer
5 351 (6.78%) Lead
6 343 (6.62%) Architect
7 286 (5.52%) DevOps Engineer
7 286 (5.52%) Python Engineer
8 275 (5.31%) Analyst
9 259 (5.00%) Software Engineer
10 255 (4.92%) AWS Engineer
11 241 (4.65%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 206 (3.98%) Data Scientist
13 180 (3.48%) Platform Engineer
14 159 (3.07%) Azure Engineer
15 152 (2.94%) Senior Developer
16 138 (2.67%) Data Analyst
16 138 (2.67%) Full-Stack Developer
16 138 (2.67%) Senior Data Engineer
17 131 (2.53%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 445 (8.59%) REST
2 362 (6.99%) React
3 338 (6.53%) PySpark
4 332 (6.41%) Kafka
5 286 (5.52%) Node.js
6 230 (4.44%) Pandas
7 218 (4.21%) .NET
7 218 (4.21%) PyTorch
8 212 (4.09%) FastAPI
9 205 (3.96%) RESTful
10 180 (3.48%) TensorFlow
11 160 (3.09%) NumPy
12 151 (2.92%) scikit-learn
13 136 (2.63%) AngularJS
14 135 (2.61%) Flask
15 134 (2.59%) JSON
16 125 (2.41%) LangChain
17 123 (2.38%) Django
18 114 (2.20%) pytest
19 105 (2.03%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 519 (10.02%) Cloud Native
2 205 (3.96%) Algorithms
3 203 (3.92%) Distributed Systems
4 144 (2.78%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.45%) Equities
6 115 (2.22%) Data Protection Act
6 115 (2.22%) Fixed Income
7 105 (2.03%) AI Agents
7 105 (2.03%) Data Structures
8 103 (1.99%) Derivative
9 100 (1.93%) Onboarding
10 97 (1.87%) Legacy Systems
11 96 (1.85%) Hybrid Cloud
12 89 (1.72%) Data Centre
13 86 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
14 85 (1.64%) Public Cloud
15 84 (1.62%) Security Posture
16 80 (1.54%) Management Information System
17 55 (1.06%) Hedge funds
18 53 (1.02%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 671 (12.96%) Linux
2 319 (6.16%) Windows
3 180 (3.48%) Unix
4 94 (1.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.29%) Windows Server
6 31 (0.60%) Android
6 31 (0.60%) Ubuntu
6 31 (0.60%) VMS
7 21 (0.41%) Mac OS
8 18 (0.35%) CentOS
8 18 (0.35%) Solaris
9 17 (0.33%) Apple iOS
10 15 (0.29%) AIX
11 9 (0.17%) Kali Linux
11 9 (0.17%) Windows 7
12 6 (0.12%) Debian
13 5 (0.097%) Embedded Linux
13 5 (0.097%) Rocky
13 5 (0.097%) zOS
14 4 (0.077%) Amazon Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,904 (36.77%) CI/CD
2 1,467 (28.33%) DevOps
3 1,220 (23.56%) Agile
4 1,123 (21.69%) AI
5 1,056 (20.39%) Problem-Solving
6 1,029 (19.87%) Analytics
7 908 (17.54%) Infrastructure as Code
8 853 (16.47%) Machine Learning
9 844 (16.30%) Data Pipeline
10 769 (14.85%) Containerisation
11 712 (13.75%) Data Engineering
12 690 (13.33%) Data Modelling
13 682 (13.17%) ETL
14 626 (12.09%) Data Science
15 608 (11.74%) Test Automation
16 592 (11.43%) Software Engineering
17 507 (9.79%) Observability
18 499 (9.64%) Business Intelligence
19 432 (8.34%) LLM
20 393 (7.59%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,645 (31.77%) SQL
2 728 (14.06%) Java
3 676 (13.06%) PowerShell
4 592 (11.43%) Bash
5 497 (9.60%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.80%) TypeScript
7 330 (6.37%) C#
8 229 (4.42%) Go
9 169 (3.26%) C++
10 155 (2.99%) R
11 122 (2.36%) Scala
12 111 (2.14%) Shell Script
13 102 (1.97%) Perl
14 100 (1.93%) Ruby
15 75 (1.45%) Bicep
16 59 (1.14%) Kusto Query Language
17 49 (0.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 46 (0.89%) C
19 42 (0.81%) T-SQL
19 42 (0.81%) VBA
Qualifications
1 1,196 (23.10%) Security Cleared
2 956 (18.46%) SC Cleared
3 451 (8.71%) Degree
4 213 (4.11%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.86%) DV Cleared
6 127 (2.45%) AWS Certification
6 127 (2.45%) Master's Degree
7 122 (2.36%) BPSS Clearance
8 101 (1.95%) Azure Certification
9 94 (1.82%) CISSP
10 74 (1.43%) Cisco Certification
11 58 (1.12%) CCNP
12 50 (0.97%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 48 (0.93%) PhD
14 46 (0.89%) CISM
15 38 (0.73%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 36 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
17 32 (0.62%) ISTQB
18 31 (0.60%) CEH
18 31 (0.60%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 503 (9.71%) Data Quality
2 217 (4.19%) QA
3 175 (3.38%) GDPR
4 111 (2.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 110 (2.12%) NIST
6 81 (1.56%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.66%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.64%) SLA
9 28 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 25 (0.48%) NCSC
11 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
12 19 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.31%) WCAG
14 12 (0.23%) EU AI Act
15 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) MiFID
16 10 (0.19%) PSD2
System Software
1 936 (18.08%) Docker
2 169 (3.26%) Active Directory
3 114 (2.20%) VMware Infrastructure
4 57 (1.10%) vSphere
5 54 (1.04%) Virtual Machines
6 49 (0.95%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.56%) Hyper-V
8 27 (0.52%) Firmware
9 14 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 11 (0.21%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.19%) HDFS
12 10 (0.19%) Lustre
13 9 (0.17%) GPFS
14 8 (0.15%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.097%) Ceph
15 5 (0.097%) NFS
15 5 (0.097%) Postfix
16 4 (0.077%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 1,115 (21.53%) Terraform
2 1,044 (20.16%) Kubernetes
3 534 (10.31%) Ansible
4 351 (6.78%) Grafana
5 313 (6.04%) Prometheus
6 95 (1.83%) Argo
7 73 (1.41%) Puppet
8 51 (0.98%) Istio
9 42 (0.81%) vRealize
10 40 (0.77%) Kibana
11 35 (0.68%) Nessus
11 35 (0.68%) vCenter Server
12 31 (0.60%) Progress Chef
13 29 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
14 25 (0.48%) Control-M
15 24 (0.46%) NetBackup
16 23 (0.44%) IBM Guardium
17 22 (0.42%) Microsoft Intune
18 21 (0.41%) Rancher
19 16 (0.31%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 632 (12.21%) Microsoft
2 539 (10.41%) Databricks
3 302 (5.83%) Google
4 224 (4.33%) Splunk
5 214 (4.13%) Oracle
6 208 (4.02%) VMware
7 147 (2.84%) Red Hat
8 124 (2.39%) Cisco
9 122 (2.36%) OpenAI
10 101 (1.95%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.62%) CyberArk
12 81 (1.56%) Foundry
13 69 (1.33%) BeyondTrust
14 62 (1.20%) Informatica
15 60 (1.16%) F5
16 58 (1.12%) Palo Alto
17 55 (1.06%) IBM
18 46 (0.89%) Dynatrace
19 42 (0.81%) Atlassian
19 42 (0.81%) SAP