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 29 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,627 4,282 4,009
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.44% 13.00% 10.40%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.93% 39.58% 32.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,685 2,825 2,854
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £430 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.90% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £645 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.43% -3.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 135 84 104
10th Percentile £30.20 £26.88 £21.25
25th Percentile £42.50 £34.94 £31.25
Median hourly rate £58.50 £50.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.00% -16.67% -7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £84.39 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.57 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +25.14% -28.57% +16.67%

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 14,092 10,818 12,175
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.15% 32.83% 31.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,172 7,199 8,411
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £530
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -5.57% -3.64%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 522 299 358
10th Percentile £28.50 £29.00 £30.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.69 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.95 £79.00 £76.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £61.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% +4.00%

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 29 August 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 29 August 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 29 August 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 -4 4,807 £550 +2.42% 7,840
London -3 2,844 £575 - 5,213
UK excluding London -8 2,137 £500 - 3,626
Work from Home -5 1,536 £530 -3.64% 2,831
North of England +2 725 £500 +5.26% 757
South East -12 444 £543 +8.50% 919
Yorkshire 0 370 £500 +2.56% 216
South West -2 294 £534 +1.67% 516
Scotland -4 279 £450 -10.00% 417
North West -3 271 £500 +5.26% 428
Midlands -18 240 £481 +1.26% 344
West Midlands -17 193 £491 +3.42% 197
East of England -12 139 £500 -2.91% 497
North East +1 96 £425 -2.86% 119
East Midlands -9 47 £475 +13.10% 145
Wales -7 30 £530 +30.86% 79
Northern Ireland +2 17 £363 -30.95% 129

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
1 291 (5.17%) Apache Airflow
2 269 (4.78%) Apache Spark
3 220 (3.91%) Apache
4 165 (2.93%) Confluence
5 58 (1.03%) Jupyter
6 51 (0.91%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.69%) SAS
8 30 (0.53%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 21 (0.37%) nginx
12 14 (0.25%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
13 9 (0.16%) WebSphere
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.12%) Apache Superset
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.089%) CICS
17 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 114 (2.03%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.34%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
7 15 (0.27%) MS Visio
8 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
9 2 (0.036%) Revit
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
10 1 (0.018%) Houdini
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.018%) Simulink
10 1 (0.018%) SPSS
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
10 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 19 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.28%) Remedy ITSM
4 13 (0.23%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
6 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
8 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.071%) Front Arena
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) Odoo
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,088 (37.11%) AWS
2 1,911 (33.96%) Azure
3 851 (15.12%) GCP
4 721 (12.81%) GitHub
5 510 (9.06%) Power Platform
6 485 (8.62%) Serverless
7 449 (7.98%) Azure DevOps
8 421 (7.48%) GitHub Actions
9 400 (7.11%) Amazon S3
10 363 (6.45%) AWS Lambda
11 330 (5.86%) Snowflake
12 231 (4.11%) dbt
13 222 (3.95%) Azure Data Factory
14 189 (3.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 181 (3.22%) AWS CloudFormation
16 175 (3.11%) Amazon EKS
17 138 (2.45%) Amazon EC2
17 138 (2.45%) Entra ID
18 135 (2.40%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 126 (2.24%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 277 (4.92%) Firewall
2 212 (3.77%) DNS
3 151 (2.68%) TCP/IP
4 136 (2.42%) Network Security
5 129 (2.29%) BGP
5 129 (2.29%) VPN
6 116 (2.06%) WAN
7 88 (1.56%) DHCP
8 75 (1.33%) OSPF
9 67 (1.19%) SD-WAN
10 62 (1.10%) VLAN
11 57 (1.01%) SSL
12 56 (1.00%) VXLAN
13 54 (0.96%) BIG-IP
14 51 (0.91%) HTTP
15 45 (0.80%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 45 (0.80%) SNMP
16 44 (0.78%) SAN
17 43 (0.76%) Ethernet VPN
18 39 (0.69%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 462 (8.21%) Power BI
2 331 (5.88%) Data Warehouse
3 316 (5.62%) PostgreSQL
4 218 (3.87%) SQL Server
5 205 (3.64%) Metadata
6 202 (3.59%) Relational Database
7 199 (3.54%) Tableau
8 187 (3.32%) Data Lake
9 160 (2.84%) BigQuery
10 153 (2.72%) NoSQL
11 138 (2.45%) Amazon Redshift
11 138 (2.45%) Big Data
12 131 (2.33%) Amazon Athena
13 126 (2.24%) Amazon RDS
14 124 (2.20%) Delta Lake
15 118 (2.10%) MongoDB
16 105 (1.87%) DynamoDB
17 89 (1.58%) MySQL
18 74 (1.32%) Redis
19 69 (1.23%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 738 (13.12%) Git
2 505 (8.97%) Jenkins
3 448 (7.96%) GitLab
4 284 (5.05%) JIRA
5 106 (1.88%) Selenium
6 61 (1.08%) JMeter
7 57 (1.01%) Postman
8 53 (0.94%) MLflow
9 52 (0.92%) SonarQube
10 47 (0.84%) Claude Code
11 40 (0.71%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
13 34 (0.60%) Cucumber
14 33 (0.59%) Gatling
14 33 (0.59%) Maven
15 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
16 31 (0.55%) REST Assured
16 31 (0.55%) Sonatype Nexus
17 27 (0.48%) LoadRunner
18 20 (0.36%) JUnit
General
1 1,282 (22.78%) Social Skills
2 1,217 (21.63%) Finance
3 848 (15.07%) Analytical Skills
4 562 (9.99%) Public Sector
5 455 (8.09%) Banking
6 189 (3.36%) Front Office
7 139 (2.47%) Investment Banking
8 118 (2.10%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 110 (1.95%) Retail
11 92 (1.63%) Marketing
12 80 (1.42%) Telecoms
13 60 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
14 57 (1.01%) Military
15 54 (0.96%) Legal
16 50 (0.89%) Aerospace
17 46 (0.82%) Financial Institution
18 45 (0.80%) Publishing
19 44 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
20 43 (0.76%) Law
Job Titles
1 940 (16.71%) Senior
2 912 (16.21%) Developer
3 817 (14.52%) Data Engineer
4 486 (8.64%) Lead
4 486 (8.64%) Python Developer
5 415 (7.38%) Python Engineer
6 339 (6.02%) DevOps Engineer
7 299 (5.31%) Software Engineer
8 287 (5.10%) Analyst
9 285 (5.06%) Architect
10 270 (4.80%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 237 (4.21%) AWS Engineer
12 192 (3.41%) Data Scientist
13 191 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
14 189 (3.36%) Cloud Engineer
15 183 (3.25%) Senior Developer
16 180 (3.20%) Senior Data Engineer
17 175 (3.11%) Azure Engineer
18 142 (2.52%) Data Analyst
18 142 (2.52%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,330 (23.64%) Terraform
2 471 (8.37%) REST
3 381 (6.77%) PySpark
4 364 (6.47%) Kafka
5 317 (5.63%) React
6 248 (4.41%) .NET
7 205 (3.64%) JSON
8 203 (3.61%) FastAPI
9 199 (3.54%) Django
10 188 (3.34%) RESTful
11 179 (3.18%) Node.js
12 171 (3.04%) Pandas
13 137 (2.43%) pytest
14 136 (2.42%) LangChain
15 122 (2.17%) PyTorch
16 114 (2.03%) YAML
17 112 (1.99%) Flask
18 110 (1.95%) HTML
19 108 (1.92%) OAuth
20 101 (1.79%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 777 (13.81%) Cloud Native
2 311 (5.53%) Distributed Systems
3 246 (4.37%) AI Agents
4 221 (3.93%) Onboarding
5 166 (2.95%) Data Centre
6 158 (2.81%) Product Ownership
7 138 (2.45%) Data Structures
8 137 (2.43%) Algorithms
8 137 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
9 117 (2.08%) Hybrid Cloud
10 112 (1.99%) Derivative
11 109 (1.94%) Data Protection Act
12 106 (1.88%) Management Information System
13 91 (1.62%) Equities
14 79 (1.40%) Enterprise Software
14 79 (1.40%) Security Posture
15 71 (1.26%) Fixed Income
16 69 (1.23%) Linux Command Line
17 68 (1.21%) Public Cloud
18 63 (1.12%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 748 (13.29%) Linux
2 336 (5.97%) Windows
3 241 (4.28%) Unix
4 150 (2.67%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.60%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.76%) Ubuntu
7 34 (0.60%) VMS
8 31 (0.55%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 17 (0.30%) CentOS
11 16 (0.28%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
12 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.089%) Debian
16 5 (0.089%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,237 (39.75%) CI/CD
2 1,614 (28.68%) DevOps
3 1,477 (26.25%) AI
4 1,247 (22.16%) Agile
5 1,212 (21.54%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,108 (19.69%) Analytics
7 986 (17.52%) Data Pipeline
8 913 (16.23%) Problem-Solving
9 903 (16.05%) Software Engineering
10 848 (15.07%) Machine Learning
11 800 (14.22%) Data Engineering
12 774 (13.76%) Containerisation
13 734 (13.04%) Data Modelling
14 710 (12.62%) Observability
15 654 (11.62%) ETL
16 637 (11.32%) Test Automation
17 605 (10.75%) Continuous Improvement
18 578 (10.27%) Validation
19 564 (10.02%) Data Science
20 557 (9.90%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,831 (32.54%) SQL
2 829 (14.73%) Java
3 767 (13.63%) Bash
4 744 (13.22%) PowerShell
5 450 (8.00%) JavaScript
6 349 (6.20%) TypeScript
7 319 (5.67%) C#
8 197 (3.50%) Go
9 151 (2.68%) R
10 142 (2.52%) C++
11 141 (2.51%) Shell Script
12 137 (2.43%) Bicep
13 128 (2.27%) Scala
14 98 (1.74%) Perl
15 61 (1.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 60 (1.07%) Groovy
17 58 (1.03%) C
18 56 (1.00%) PL/SQL
19 54 (0.96%) Ruby
20 53 (0.94%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,338 (23.78%) Security Cleared
2 1,087 (19.32%) SC Cleared
3 425 (7.55%) Degree
4 214 (3.80%) DV Cleared
5 165 (2.93%) Computer Science Degree
6 150 (2.67%) Azure Certification
7 141 (2.51%) AWS Certification
8 119 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
9 93 (1.65%) CISSP
10 86 (1.53%) Cisco Certification
11 69 (1.23%) Master's Degree
12 46 (0.82%) Microsoft Certification
13 44 (0.78%) CCNP
14 37 (0.66%) ISTQB
15 36 (0.64%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
16 34 (0.60%) CISM
16 34 (0.60%) PhD
17 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 29 (0.52%) CCIE
19 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 603 (10.72%) Data Quality
2 290 (5.15%) QA
3 115 (2.04%) NIST
4 107 (1.90%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 103 (1.83%) GDPR
6 83 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 39 (0.69%) SLA
8 33 (0.59%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.52%) NCSC
10 27 (0.48%) WCAG
11 25 (0.44%) PCI DSS
11 25 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
13 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.23%) SOC 2
15 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
16 6 (0.11%) GRC
16 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 945 (16.79%) Docker
2 159 (2.83%) Active Directory
3 134 (2.38%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.08%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.82%) Hyper-V
6 43 (0.76%) vSphere
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.53%) Firmware
9 23 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Squid
12 12 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) PowerHA
15 7 (0.12%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) HDFS
17 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,120 (19.90%) Kubernetes
2 636 (11.30%) Ansible
3 342 (6.08%) Grafana
4 250 (4.44%) Prometheus
5 83 (1.48%) Puppet
6 73 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 69 (1.23%) Argo
8 38 (0.68%) Istio
9 34 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
10 30 (0.53%) Kibana
11 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
12 26 (0.46%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Nagios
13 25 (0.44%) vCenter Server
13 25 (0.44%) vRealize
14 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
15 19 (0.34%) FortiGate
15 19 (0.34%) Packer
15 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
16 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 717 (12.74%) Microsoft
2 565 (10.04%) Databricks
3 360 (6.40%) Google
4 251 (4.46%) Oracle
5 221 (3.93%) Splunk
6 177 (3.15%) VMware
7 146 (2.59%) OpenAI
8 142 (2.52%) Cisco
9 122 (2.17%) ServiceNow
10 103 (1.83%) Dynatrace
10 103 (1.83%) Red Hat
11 98 (1.74%) IBM
12 87 (1.55%) F5
13 82 (1.46%) Palo Alto
14 80 (1.42%) Informatica
15 71 (1.26%) Fortinet
16 69 (1.23%) Foundry
16 69 (1.23%) SAP
17 67 (1.19%) CyberArk
18 59 (1.05%) Salesforce