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

6 months to
20 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,630 4,314 4,136
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.31% 13.11% 10.74%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.73% 39.81% 33.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,661 2,799 2,864
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £441 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.29% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £700
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £500 £507
% change year-on-year +1.00% -1.43% -3.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 140 84 103
10th Percentile £30.30 £28.20 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.19 £40.06
Median hourly rate £61.97 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +23.95% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £78.19 £57.81 £72.94
90th Percentile £90.21 £82.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -28.57% +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 14,171 10,836 12,345
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 25.96% 32.93% 32.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,194 7,161 8,316
10th Percentile £363 £345 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.47% -3.81% -4.55%
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 557 293 346
10th Percentile £26.51 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £46.25 £41.25 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £78.75 £78.13
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 20 September 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 September 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 September 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 -3 4,806 £550 +3.77% 10,163
London -4 2,842 £575 - 6,539
UK excluding London -8 2,147 £505 +1.00% 4,443
Work from Home -5 1,534 £528 -4.00% 3,643
North of England +1 737 £500 +4.17% 954
South East -7 456 £543 +8.50% 1,076
Yorkshire -2 378 £500 - 317
Scotland -4 292 £450 -10.00% 522
North West -2 282 £525 +10.53% 516
South West -2 280 £550 +4.76% 570
Midlands -22 220 £500 +5.26% 448
West Midlands -24 177 £500 - 262
East of England -9 152 £478 -9.05% 642
North East -2 87 £425 -5.56% 125
East Midlands -16 43 £475 +15.85% 186
Wales -9 26 £530 +29.27% 92
Northern Ireland +4 17 £363 -30.95% 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
1 292 (5.19%) Apache Airflow
2 273 (4.85%) Apache Spark
3 222 (3.94%) Apache
4 163 (2.90%) Confluence
5 58 (1.03%) Jupyter
6 55 (0.98%) SharePoint
7 36 (0.64%) SAS
8 30 (0.53%) OpenStack
9 25 (0.44%) nginx
10 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
11 21 (0.37%) IIS
11 21 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
12 8 (0.14%) CMS
12 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
14 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.089%) Camunda
15 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 106 (1.88%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 18 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
5 16 (0.28%) CPLEX
6 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
8 2 (0.036%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 20 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
2 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
2 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
4 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
5 7 (0.12%) Front Arena
5 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Summit
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Endur
9 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
10 2 (0.036%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 2,083 (37.00%) AWS
2 1,896 (33.68%) Azure
3 889 (15.79%) GCP
4 745 (13.23%) GitHub
5 490 (8.70%) Serverless
6 487 (8.65%) Power Platform
7 438 (7.78%) GitHub Actions
8 436 (7.74%) Azure DevOps
9 395 (7.02%) Amazon S3
10 365 (6.48%) AWS Lambda
11 335 (5.95%) Snowflake
12 238 (4.23%) dbt
13 211 (3.75%) Azure Data Factory
14 199 (3.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 186 (3.30%) AWS CloudFormation
16 180 (3.20%) Amazon EKS
17 168 (2.98%) Entra ID
18 143 (2.54%) Amazon EC2
19 129 (2.29%) Amazon ECS
20 127 (2.26%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 287 (5.10%) Firewall
2 209 (3.71%) DNS
3 158 (2.81%) Network Security
4 153 (2.72%) TCP/IP
5 129 (2.29%) BGP
6 128 (2.27%) VPN
7 117 (2.08%) WAN
8 87 (1.55%) DHCP
9 76 (1.35%) OSPF
10 72 (1.28%) SD-WAN
11 62 (1.10%) BIG-IP
12 60 (1.07%) VLAN
13 57 (1.01%) SSL
14 56 (0.99%) VXLAN
15 52 (0.92%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 52 (0.92%) HTTP
16 47 (0.83%) Ethernet VPN
17 40 (0.71%) Wireless
18 38 (0.67%) Broadband
18 38 (0.67%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 436 (7.74%) Power BI
2 328 (5.83%) Data Warehouse
3 311 (5.52%) PostgreSQL
4 222 (3.94%) Metadata
5 204 (3.62%) Relational Database
6 202 (3.59%) SQL Server
7 187 (3.32%) Data Lake
8 180 (3.20%) BigQuery
9 176 (3.13%) Tableau
10 154 (2.74%) NoSQL
11 138 (2.45%) Big Data
12 131 (2.33%) Amazon RDS
13 130 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
14 129 (2.29%) Amazon Redshift
15 118 (2.10%) Delta Lake
16 114 (2.02%) MongoDB
17 113 (2.01%) DynamoDB
18 97 (1.72%) MySQL
19 73 (1.30%) Redis
20 63 (1.12%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 807 (14.33%) Git
2 505 (8.97%) Jenkins
3 479 (8.51%) GitLab
4 307 (5.45%) JIRA
5 119 (2.11%) Selenium
6 60 (1.07%) Postman
7 57 (1.01%) SonarQube
8 56 (0.99%) Claude Code
8 56 (0.99%) JMeter
9 50 (0.89%) MLflow
10 44 (0.78%) Bitbucket
11 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
12 34 (0.60%) Cucumber
12 34 (0.60%) Maven
13 33 (0.59%) REST Assured
14 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
14 32 (0.57%) Sonatype Nexus
15 28 (0.50%) Gatling
16 25 (0.44%) LoadRunner
17 21 (0.37%) JUnit
General
1 1,317 (23.39%) Social Skills
2 1,262 (22.42%) Finance
3 859 (15.26%) Analytical Skills
4 542 (9.63%) Public Sector
5 501 (8.90%) Banking
6 174 (3.09%) Front Office
7 148 (2.63%) Investment Banking
8 112 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 111 (1.97%) Retail
10 106 (1.88%) Documentation Skills
11 95 (1.69%) Marketing
12 85 (1.51%) Telecoms
13 61 (1.08%) Military
14 55 (0.98%) Pharmaceutical
15 53 (0.94%) Aerospace
16 51 (0.91%) Law
17 47 (0.83%) Legal
18 44 (0.78%) Financial Institution
19 43 (0.76%) Publishing
20 40 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 997 (17.71%) Senior
2 893 (15.86%) Developer
3 820 (14.56%) Data Engineer
4 476 (8.45%) Lead
5 471 (8.37%) Python Developer
6 416 (7.39%) Python Engineer
7 355 (6.31%) DevOps Engineer
8 297 (5.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 289 (5.13%) Analyst
10 283 (5.03%) Software Engineer
11 260 (4.62%) Architect
12 229 (4.07%) AWS Engineer
13 196 (3.48%) Cloud Engineer
14 195 (3.46%) Senior Developer
15 192 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
16 191 (3.39%) Senior Data Engineer
17 186 (3.30%) Azure Engineer
18 181 (3.21%) Data Scientist
19 154 (2.74%) Network Engineer
20 140 (2.49%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,380 (24.51%) Terraform
2 515 (9.15%) REST
3 370 (6.57%) PySpark
4 361 (6.41%) Kafka
5 306 (5.44%) React
6 252 (4.48%) .NET
7 213 (3.78%) JSON
8 205 (3.64%) FastAPI
9 201 (3.57%) Django
10 189 (3.36%) RESTful
11 162 (2.88%) Node.js
12 159 (2.82%) Pandas
13 156 (2.77%) pytest
14 151 (2.68%) LangChain
15 127 (2.26%) OAuth
16 116 (2.06%) Flask
17 115 (2.04%) YAML
18 111 (1.97%) PyTorch
19 107 (1.90%) HTML
20 106 (1.88%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 789 (14.01%) Cloud Native
2 299 (5.31%) Distributed Systems
3 282 (5.01%) AI Agents
4 244 (4.33%) Onboarding
5 165 (2.93%) Data Centre
6 153 (2.72%) Product Ownership
7 145 (2.58%) Data Structures
8 135 (2.40%) Legacy Systems
9 126 (2.24%) Algorithms
10 108 (1.92%) Hybrid Cloud
11 107 (1.90%) Management Information System
12 104 (1.85%) Enterprise Software
13 103 (1.83%) Data Protection Act
14 98 (1.74%) Derivative
15 94 (1.67%) Security Posture
16 81 (1.44%) Public Cloud
17 79 (1.40%) Equities
18 71 (1.26%) PKI
19 70 (1.24%) Linux Command Line
20 68 (1.21%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 757 (13.45%) Linux
2 339 (6.02%) Windows
3 247 (4.39%) Unix
4 157 (2.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 93 (1.65%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.82%) Ubuntu
7 40 (0.71%) VMS
8 23 (0.41%) CentOS
9 18 (0.32%) AIX
10 17 (0.30%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) 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 4 (0.071%) Debian
16 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,338 (41.53%) CI/CD
2 1,619 (28.76%) DevOps
3 1,557 (27.66%) AI
4 1,296 (23.02%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,272 (22.59%) Agile
6 1,092 (19.40%) Analytics
7 987 (17.53%) Data Pipeline
8 932 (16.55%) Software Engineering
9 904 (16.06%) Problem-Solving
10 848 (15.06%) Machine Learning
11 829 (14.72%) Data Engineering
12 793 (14.09%) Containerisation
13 756 (13.43%) Observability
14 746 (13.25%) Data Modelling
15 676 (12.01%) Test Automation
16 655 (11.63%) ETL
17 650 (11.55%) Continuous Improvement
18 645 (11.46%) Validation
19 576 (10.23%) Platform Engineering
20 565 (10.04%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,836 (32.61%) SQL
2 809 (14.37%) Java
3 771 (13.69%) Bash
4 751 (13.34%) PowerShell
5 445 (7.90%) JavaScript
6 347 (6.16%) TypeScript
7 320 (5.68%) C#
8 220 (3.91%) Go
9 151 (2.68%) Shell Script
10 142 (2.52%) R
11 135 (2.40%) C++
12 134 (2.38%) Bicep
13 124 (2.20%) Scala
14 101 (1.79%) Perl
15 60 (1.07%) Groovy
16 59 (1.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 57 (1.01%) C
18 53 (0.94%) Rust
19 50 (0.89%) PL/SQL
20 46 (0.82%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,365 (24.25%) Security Cleared
2 1,104 (19.61%) SC Cleared
3 412 (7.32%) Degree
4 239 (4.25%) DV Cleared
5 161 (2.86%) Azure Certification
6 149 (2.65%) Computer Science Degree
7 145 (2.58%) AWS Certification
8 122 (2.17%) BPSS Clearance
9 96 (1.71%) CISSP
10 83 (1.47%) Cisco Certification
11 66 (1.17%) Master's Degree
12 49 (0.87%) Microsoft Certification
13 41 (0.73%) CCNP
14 35 (0.62%) PhD
15 34 (0.60%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
16 32 (0.57%) CISM
17 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
18 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 29 (0.52%) CCIE
20 28 (0.50%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 633 (11.24%) Data Quality
2 320 (5.68%) QA
3 113 (2.01%) NIST
4 100 (1.78%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 92 (1.63%) GDPR
6 82 (1.46%) Accessibility
7 39 (0.69%) SLA
8 35 (0.62%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.52%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 22 (0.39%) WCAG
12 20 (0.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 20 (0.36%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
13 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
14 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) MiFID
17 6 (0.11%) Basel III
17 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 967 (17.18%) Docker
2 174 (3.09%) Active Directory
3 134 (2.38%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.23%) Virtual Machines
5 51 (0.91%) Hyper-V
6 37 (0.66%) vSphere
7 34 (0.60%) VMware NSX
8 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
9 25 (0.44%) NFS
10 23 (0.41%) Firmware
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 8 (0.14%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) HDFS
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,159 (20.59%) Kubernetes
2 639 (11.35%) Ansible
3 329 (5.84%) Grafana
4 240 (4.26%) Prometheus
5 81 (1.44%) Puppet
6 74 (1.31%) Progress Chef
7 61 (1.08%) Argo
8 45 (0.80%) Single Sign-On
9 36 (0.64%) Kibana
10 33 (0.59%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
13 22 (0.39%) FortiGate
14 21 (0.37%) Packer
15 20 (0.36%) vRealize
15 20 (0.36%) ZABBIX
16 19 (0.34%) vCenter Server
17 18 (0.32%) Nagios
18 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
18 16 (0.28%) QRadar
Vendors
1 734 (13.04%) Microsoft
2 579 (10.28%) Databricks
3 391 (6.94%) Google
4 237 (4.21%) Oracle
5 208 (3.69%) Splunk
6 174 (3.09%) VMware
7 159 (2.82%) OpenAI
8 147 (2.61%) Cisco
9 131 (2.33%) ServiceNow
10 100 (1.78%) Dynatrace
11 97 (1.72%) Red Hat
12 94 (1.67%) IBM
13 91 (1.62%) F5
13 91 (1.62%) Palo Alto
14 84 (1.49%) Foundry
15 75 (1.33%) Fortinet
16 73 (1.30%) Informatica
17 72 (1.28%) SAP
18 66 (1.17%) CyberArk
19 59 (1.05%) Salesforce