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

6 months to
22 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 10 15
Rank change year-on-year -2 +5 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,649 4,215 3,995
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.71% 12.92% 9.67%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.07% 39.04% 31.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,683 2,828 2,915
10th Percentile £366 £363 £375
25th Percentile £425 £432 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £531 £565
Median % change year-on-year -1.06% -6.08% -5.83%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £700
90th Percentile £750 £798 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £492 £507
% change year-on-year +1.63% -2.96% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 128 68 120
10th Percentile £28.50 £27.62 £21.18
25th Percentile £43.48 £34.54 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -16.67% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.00 £57.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +12.50%

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 14,098 10,796 12,725
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.73% 33.09% 30.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,151 7,254 8,989
10th Percentile £360 £344 £350
25th Percentile £423 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £495
% change year-on-year +3.16% -4.04% -1.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 260 461
10th Percentile £33.74 £28.16 £30.63
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.38 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.30% -9.80% +3.09%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.96% -1.92% +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 22 July 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 22 July 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 22 July 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 4,731 £535 -2.73% 2,972
London -4 2,716 £563 -2.17% 1,680
UK excluding London -3 2,235 £500 +1.63% 1,725
Work from Home -5 1,580 £525 -4.55% 1,133
North of England +4 774 £488 +2.63% 429
South East -10 442 £538 +7.50% 540
Yorkshire +2 410 £500 +2.04% 129
Scotland +4 322 £440 -7.37% 113
North West +4 289 £525 +10.53% 227
South West -4 283 £500 -9.09% 215
Midlands -11 258 £470 +4.33% 195
West Midlands -13 208 £468 +4.00% 109
East of England -13 133 £500 -0.50% 169
North East +2 86 £425 -2.86% 77
East Midlands -9 49 £488 +8.75% 85
Wales -9 31 £500 +17.65% 39
Northern Ireland +14 26 £363 -36.26% 50

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
1 285 (5.05%) Apache Spark
2 269 (4.76%) Apache Airflow
3 211 (3.74%) Apache
4 184 (3.26%) Confluence
5 52 (0.92%) Jupyter
6 50 (0.89%) SAS
7 47 (0.83%) SharePoint
8 26 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.42%) nginx
10 20 (0.35%) ArcGIS
11 18 (0.32%) Palantir Foundry
12 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.21%) IIS
14 11 (0.19%) Tomcat
15 9 (0.16%) CMS
16 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
17 7 (0.12%) CICS
18 6 (0.11%) Camunda
18 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
19 5 (0.089%) JBoss
Applications
1 118 (2.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
4 24 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
6 18 (0.32%) MS Visio
7 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.035%) Endur
10 2 (0.035%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.035%) Global One
10 2 (0.035%) IBM Planning Analytics
10 2 (0.035%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,102 (37.21%) AWS
2 1,887 (33.40%) Azure
3 842 (14.91%) GCP
4 686 (12.14%) GitHub
5 518 (9.17%) Power Platform
6 478 (8.46%) Serverless
7 422 (7.47%) Amazon S3
8 401 (7.10%) Azure DevOps
9 380 (6.73%) GitHub Actions
10 362 (6.41%) AWS Lambda
11 299 (5.29%) Snowflake
12 236 (4.18%) Azure Data Factory
13 220 (3.89%) dbt
14 197 (3.49%) AWS CloudFormation
15 182 (3.22%) Amazon EKS
16 178 (3.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 157 (2.78%) OpenShift
18 150 (2.66%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 132 (2.34%) Amazon EC2
20 129 (2.28%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 260 (4.60%) Firewall
2 191 (3.38%) DNS
3 132 (2.34%) TCP/IP
4 124 (2.20%) BGP
5 117 (2.07%) Network Security
6 113 (2.00%) VPN
6 113 (2.00%) WAN
7 79 (1.40%) OSPF
8 65 (1.15%) DHCP
9 62 (1.10%) VLAN
10 56 (0.99%) SAN
11 55 (0.97%) HTTP
11 55 (0.97%) SD-WAN
12 54 (0.96%) BIG-IP
13 53 (0.94%) VXLAN
14 47 (0.83%) SSL
15 44 (0.78%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 43 (0.76%) SNMP
17 41 (0.73%) Ethernet VPN
18 40 (0.71%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 460 (8.14%) Power BI
2 352 (6.23%) PostgreSQL
3 320 (5.66%) Data Warehouse
4 231 (4.09%) SQL Server
5 203 (3.59%) Data Lake
6 202 (3.58%) Tableau
7 190 (3.36%) Relational Database
8 181 (3.20%) Metadata
9 167 (2.96%) NoSQL
10 163 (2.89%) Big Data
11 153 (2.71%) BigQuery
12 138 (2.44%) Amazon Athena
13 137 (2.43%) Amazon Redshift
14 128 (2.27%) MongoDB
15 117 (2.07%) Delta Lake
16 110 (1.95%) DynamoDB
17 107 (1.89%) Amazon RDS
18 84 (1.49%) MySQL
19 72 (1.27%) Hadoop
19 72 (1.27%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 695 (12.30%) Git
2 508 (8.99%) Jenkins
3 402 (7.12%) GitLab
4 310 (5.49%) JIRA
5 82 (1.45%) Selenium
6 68 (1.20%) MLflow
7 50 (0.89%) Postman
8 43 (0.76%) Bitbucket
9 39 (0.69%) JMeter
10 37 (0.65%) SonarQube
11 34 (0.60%) Cucumber
11 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
12 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
12 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
13 28 (0.50%) Claude Code
13 28 (0.50%) JUnit
13 28 (0.50%) Sonatype Nexus
14 26 (0.46%) Maven
15 24 (0.42%) Gatling
16 19 (0.34%) Zephyr
General
1 1,214 (21.49%) Social Skills
2 1,187 (21.01%) Finance
3 776 (13.74%) Analytical Skills
4 551 (9.75%) Public Sector
5 429 (7.59%) Banking
6 201 (3.56%) Front Office
7 129 (2.28%) Documentation Skills
8 123 (2.18%) Investment Banking
9 108 (1.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 96 (1.70%) Retail
11 83 (1.47%) Marketing
12 68 (1.20%) Telecoms
13 64 (1.13%) Pharmaceutical
14 60 (1.06%) Legal
15 50 (0.89%) Military
16 48 (0.85%) Publishing
17 47 (0.83%) Financial Institution
18 45 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
19 37 (0.65%) Manufacturing
20 31 (0.55%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 982 (17.38%) Developer
2 893 (15.81%) Senior
3 845 (14.96%) Data Engineer
4 522 (9.24%) Python Developer
5 431 (7.63%) Lead
6 396 (7.01%) Python Engineer
7 329 (5.82%) DevOps Engineer
8 310 (5.49%) Software Engineer
9 302 (5.35%) Architect
10 284 (5.03%) Analyst
11 252 (4.46%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 250 (4.43%) AWS Engineer
13 217 (3.84%) Data Scientist
14 188 (3.33%) Platform Engineer
15 180 (3.19%) Cloud Engineer
16 177 (3.13%) Senior Developer
17 172 (3.04%) Azure Engineer
18 171 (3.03%) Senior Data Engineer
19 147 (2.60%) Data Analyst
20 139 (2.46%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 410 (7.26%) REST
2 363 (6.43%) React
3 360 (6.37%) PySpark
4 351 (6.21%) Kafka
5 234 (4.14%) .NET
6 216 (3.82%) Node.js
7 215 (3.81%) FastAPI
8 206 (3.65%) JSON
9 204 (3.61%) RESTful
10 193 (3.42%) Pandas
11 173 (3.06%) Django
12 153 (2.71%) PyTorch
13 139 (2.46%) LangChain
14 120 (2.12%) NumPy
15 116 (2.05%) Flask
16 107 (1.89%) scikit-learn
17 103 (1.82%) OAuth
17 103 (1.82%) TensorFlow
18 99 (1.75%) Spring
19 98 (1.73%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 747 (13.22%) Cloud Native
2 312 (5.52%) Distributed Systems
3 197 (3.49%) Onboarding
4 189 (3.35%) AI Agents
5 158 (2.80%) Data Centre
6 151 (2.67%) Algorithms
7 150 (2.66%) Product Ownership
8 133 (2.35%) Data Structures
9 126 (2.23%) Legacy Systems
10 119 (2.11%) Data Protection Act
11 115 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
12 112 (1.98%) Derivative
13 107 (1.89%) Management Information System
14 104 (1.84%) Fixed Income
15 95 (1.68%) Equities
16 83 (1.47%) Security Posture
17 69 (1.22%) Public Cloud
18 65 (1.15%) Linux Command Line
18 65 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
19 61 (1.08%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 696 (12.32%) Linux
2 322 (5.70%) Windows
3 220 (3.89%) Unix
4 134 (2.37%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 75 (1.33%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.73%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.57%) VMS
8 29 (0.51%) AIX
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 18 (0.32%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 8 (0.14%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Debian
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,147 (38.01%) CI/CD
2 1,564 (27.69%) DevOps
3 1,395 (24.69%) AI
4 1,271 (22.50%) Agile
5 1,140 (20.18%) Analytics
6 1,074 (19.01%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,014 (17.95%) Data Pipeline
8 905 (16.02%) Problem-Solving
9 893 (15.81%) Machine Learning
10 825 (14.60%) Software Engineering
11 809 (14.32%) Data Engineering
12 766 (13.56%) Containerisation
13 751 (13.29%) Data Modelling
14 687 (12.16%) ETL
15 656 (11.61%) Observability
16 630 (11.15%) Data Science
17 575 (10.18%) Test Automation
18 544 (9.63%) Business Intelligence
19 528 (9.35%) LLM
20 516 (9.13%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,804 (31.93%) SQL
2 794 (14.06%) Java
3 717 (12.69%) Bash
4 689 (12.20%) PowerShell
5 451 (7.98%) JavaScript
6 396 (7.01%) TypeScript
7 315 (5.58%) C#
8 215 (3.81%) Go
9 160 (2.83%) R
10 140 (2.48%) C++
11 129 (2.28%) Shell Script
12 122 (2.16%) Scala
13 103 (1.82%) Bicep
14 75 (1.33%) Perl
15 58 (1.03%) PL/SQL
16 56 (0.99%) C
16 56 (0.99%) Groovy
16 56 (0.99%) Rust
17 55 (0.97%) Ruby
18 49 (0.87%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,262 (22.34%) Security Cleared
2 1,006 (17.81%) SC Cleared
3 427 (7.56%) Degree
4 193 (3.42%) DV Cleared
5 148 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
6 135 (2.39%) AWS Certification
7 132 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
8 126 (2.23%) Azure Certification
9 91 (1.61%) CISSP
10 87 (1.54%) Cisco Certification
11 79 (1.40%) Master's Degree
12 57 (1.01%) CCNP
13 46 (0.81%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 39 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
15 38 (0.67%) CISM
16 37 (0.65%) PhD
17 32 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 31 (0.55%) CCIE
18 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
19 25 (0.44%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 563 (9.97%) Data Quality
2 251 (4.44%) QA
3 119 (2.11%) GDPR
4 109 (1.93%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 109 (1.93%) NIST
5 93 (1.65%) Accessibility
6 34 (0.60%) SLA
7 26 (0.46%) WCAG
8 23 (0.41%) NCSC
9 22 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
10 21 (0.37%) PCI DSS
11 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.19%) SOC 2
15 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 9 (0.16%) GRC
17 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 891 (15.77%) Docker
2 142 (2.51%) Active Directory
3 127 (2.25%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.33%) Virtual Machines
5 47 (0.83%) vSphere
6 38 (0.67%) Hyper-V
7 37 (0.65%) VMware NSX
8 32 (0.57%) Firmware
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) NFS
11 15 (0.27%) KVM
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 11 (0.19%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
17 6 (0.11%) PowerHA
18 4 (0.071%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,241 (21.97%) Terraform
2 1,068 (18.91%) Kubernetes
3 596 (10.55%) Ansible
4 358 (6.34%) Grafana
5 281 (4.97%) Prometheus
6 79 (1.40%) Puppet
7 72 (1.27%) Argo
8 53 (0.94%) Progress Chef
9 39 (0.69%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) vCenter Server
11 34 (0.60%) vRealize
12 27 (0.48%) Kibana
12 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
12 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
13 25 (0.44%) Control-M
13 25 (0.44%) Nagios
13 25 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.42%) Nessus
15 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
16 18 (0.32%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 657 (11.63%) Microsoft
2 555 (9.82%) Databricks
3 330 (5.84%) Google
4 245 (4.34%) Oracle
5 210 (3.72%) Splunk
6 176 (3.12%) VMware
7 148 (2.62%) OpenAI
8 142 (2.51%) Cisco
9 113 (2.00%) ServiceNow
10 107 (1.89%) Red Hat
11 94 (1.66%) F5
12 91 (1.61%) Dynatrace
12 91 (1.61%) Palo Alto
13 85 (1.50%) IBM
14 81 (1.43%) Informatica
15 72 (1.27%) Fortinet
16 65 (1.15%) CyberArk
17 64 (1.13%) Foundry
18 58 (1.03%) SAP
19 56 (0.99%) Salesforce