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

6 months to
22 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,210 3,947 3,944
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.24% 13.40% 9.08%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.62% 39.34% 31.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,525 2,776 2,811
10th Percentile £363 £385 £400
25th Percentile £420 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £621 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £813 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -3.68% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 51 102
10th Percentile £30.00 £21.25 £21.30
25th Percentile £45.03 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £39.32 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +39.88% -25.10% -19.23%
75th Percentile £74.26 £58.75 £68.56
90th Percentile £83.75 £75.00 £77.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -25.00% -1.03%

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 12,825 10,032 12,701
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.66% 34.05% 29.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,511 6,794 9,022
10th Percentile £353 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £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 £713 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 242 475
10th Percentile £42.50 £22.48 £31.25
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -2.97%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £68.75
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 22 April 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 April 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 April 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 4,389 £522 -5.09% 2,872
London -3 2,513 £550 -8.33% 1,309
UK excluding London -3 1,969 £482 -3.68% 2,060
Work from Home 0 1,503 £525 -4.55% 1,161
North of England +8 681 £481 -2.18% 489
South East -4 404 £500 -4.76% 596
Yorkshire +1 387 £475 -5.00% 148
Midlands -9 256 £500 +8.93% 269
Scotland +1 253 £425 -10.53% 136
North West 0 249 £500 +5.26% 253
South West 0 236 £500 -9.09% 238
West Midlands -5 195 £500 +1.01% 133
East of England 0 130 £500 -0.50% 245
East Midlands -13 60 £463 +9.47% 134
North East +9 54 £475 -1.30% 90
Northern Ireland +14 24 £463 -7.50% 56
Wales -17 23 £463 -13.15% 57

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
1 289 (5.55%) Apache Spark
2 215 (4.13%) Apache Airflow
3 166 (3.19%) Apache
4 151 (2.90%) Confluence
5 56 (1.07%) SharePoint
6 48 (0.92%) SAS
7 28 (0.54%) Jupyter
7 28 (0.54%) nginx
8 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
9 22 (0.42%) OpenStack
10 15 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
11 14 (0.27%) Appian
12 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
13 10 (0.19%) Camunda
14 9 (0.17%) Apache Superset
15 8 (0.15%) CMS
16 6 (0.12%) CICS
16 6 (0.12%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
17 5 (0.096%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 139 (2.67%) Microsoft Excel
2 25 (0.48%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.12%) CPLEX
7 5 (0.096%) Weka
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 6 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
7 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
8 2 (0.038%) Actimize
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%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
9 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
Cloud Services
1 1,997 (38.33%) AWS
2 1,799 (34.53%) Azure
3 776 (14.89%) GCP
4 678 (13.01%) GitHub
5 520 (9.98%) Power Platform
6 499 (9.58%) Serverless
7 393 (7.54%) Azure DevOps
8 385 (7.39%) Amazon S3
9 362 (6.95%) AWS Lambda
10 354 (6.79%) GitHub Actions
11 282 (5.41%) Azure Data Factory
12 234 (4.49%) AWS CloudFormation
12 234 (4.49%) Snowflake
13 173 (3.32%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 171 (3.28%) Amazon EKS
15 159 (3.05%) OpenShift
16 154 (2.96%) Amazon ECS
16 154 (2.96%) dbt
17 140 (2.69%) Amazon EC2
18 136 (2.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 187 (3.59%) Firewall
2 135 (2.59%) DNS
3 114 (2.19%) Network Security
4 90 (1.73%) TCP/IP
5 79 (1.52%) BGP
6 74 (1.42%) VPN
7 65 (1.25%) WAN
8 60 (1.15%) HTTP
9 46 (0.88%) OSPF
10 44 (0.84%) SAN
11 41 (0.79%) MPLS
12 37 (0.71%) VLAN
13 34 (0.65%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) DHCP
15 31 (0.60%) VXLAN
16 29 (0.56%) SNMP
16 29 (0.56%) SSL
17 28 (0.54%) Wireshark
18 27 (0.52%) SD-WAN
19 23 (0.44%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 440 (8.45%) Power BI
2 350 (6.72%) PostgreSQL
3 289 (5.55%) Data Warehouse
4 243 (4.66%) Data Lake
5 231 (4.43%) SQL Server
6 200 (3.84%) Tableau
7 195 (3.74%) NoSQL
8 172 (3.30%) Relational Database
9 162 (3.11%) Metadata
10 155 (2.98%) Big Data
11 136 (2.61%) Delta Lake
12 134 (2.57%) BigQuery
13 120 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
14 118 (2.26%) Amazon Redshift
15 105 (2.02%) MongoDB
16 104 (2.00%) Amazon RDS
17 98 (1.88%) MySQL
18 93 (1.79%) Azure SQL Database
18 93 (1.79%) DynamoDB
19 82 (1.57%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 652 (12.51%) Git
2 488 (9.37%) Jenkins
3 362 (6.95%) GitLab
4 276 (5.30%) JIRA
5 89 (1.71%) MLflow
6 78 (1.50%) Selenium
7 60 (1.15%) Postman
8 44 (0.84%) Cucumber
9 43 (0.83%) Bitbucket
10 33 (0.63%) Sonatype Nexus
11 31 (0.60%) JMeter
12 28 (0.54%) Artifactory
12 28 (0.54%) SonarQube
12 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
13 27 (0.52%) Cypress.io
14 26 (0.50%) JUnit
15 24 (0.46%) Maven
16 23 (0.44%) Gatling
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
18 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,177 (22.59%) Social Skills
2 1,000 (19.19%) Finance
3 719 (13.80%) Analytical Skills
4 492 (9.44%) Public Sector
5 366 (7.02%) Banking
6 173 (3.32%) Front Office
7 132 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
8 85 (1.63%) Investment Banking
9 70 (1.34%) Marketing
10 64 (1.23%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 63 (1.21%) Retail
12 59 (1.13%) Legal
13 56 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (1.02%) Influencing Skills
14 53 (1.02%) Telecoms
15 38 (0.73%) Financial Institution
15 38 (0.73%) Manufacturing
16 31 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
16 31 (0.60%) Publishing
17 27 (0.52%) Military
Job Titles
1 986 (18.93%) Developer
2 774 (14.86%) Data Engineer
3 744 (14.28%) Senior
4 480 (9.21%) Python Developer
5 355 (6.81%) Architect
6 337 (6.47%) Lead
7 289 (5.55%) Python Engineer
8 282 (5.41%) Analyst
9 280 (5.37%) DevOps Engineer
10 257 (4.93%) Software Engineer
11 236 (4.53%) AWS Engineer
12 226 (4.34%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 213 (4.09%) Data Scientist
14 181 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
15 165 (3.17%) Azure Engineer
16 163 (3.13%) Senior Developer
17 154 (2.96%) Senior Data Engineer
18 144 (2.76%) Data Analyst
19 139 (2.67%) Full-Stack Developer
20 118 (2.26%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 412 (7.91%) REST
2 357 (6.85%) React
3 348 (6.68%) PySpark
4 334 (6.41%) Kafka
5 270 (5.18%) Node.js
6 231 (4.43%) .NET
7 229 (4.40%) Pandas
8 194 (3.72%) PyTorch
9 184 (3.53%) RESTful
10 175 (3.36%) FastAPI
11 167 (3.21%) JSON
12 147 (2.82%) NumPy
12 147 (2.82%) TensorFlow
13 136 (2.61%) scikit-learn
14 129 (2.48%) LangChain
15 126 (2.42%) Flask
16 121 (2.32%) AngularJS
17 118 (2.26%) Django
18 111 (2.13%) OAuth
19 104 (2.00%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 506 (9.71%) Cloud Native
2 220 (4.22%) Distributed Systems
3 170 (3.26%) Algorithms
4 156 (2.99%) Product Ownership
5 124 (2.38%) AI Agents
6 118 (2.26%) Data Protection Act
7 112 (2.15%) Fixed Income
8 111 (2.13%) Equities
9 107 (2.05%) Derivative
10 106 (2.03%) Data Structures
11 102 (1.96%) Onboarding
12 95 (1.82%) Data Centre
13 92 (1.77%) Enterprise Software
14 91 (1.75%) Management Information System
15 88 (1.69%) Legacy Systems
16 85 (1.63%) Hybrid Cloud
17 84 (1.61%) Security Posture
18 76 (1.46%) Public Cloud
19 49 (0.94%) Virtual Team
20 48 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 649 (12.46%) Linux
2 290 (5.57%) Windows
3 197 (3.78%) Unix
4 104 (2.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 69 (1.32%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.73%) VMS
7 35 (0.67%) Ubuntu
8 27 (0.52%) Android
9 20 (0.38%) AIX
9 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
10 19 (0.36%) Solaris
11 18 (0.35%) CentOS
12 16 (0.31%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.17%) Debian
13 9 (0.17%) zOS
14 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.096%) Rocky
16 5 (0.096%) Windows 7
16 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,902 (36.51%) CI/CD
2 1,409 (27.04%) DevOps
3 1,162 (22.30%) Agile
4 1,145 (21.98%) AI
5 1,054 (20.23%) Analytics
6 992 (19.04%) Problem-Solving
7 914 (17.54%) Infrastructure as Code
8 854 (16.39%) Data Pipeline
9 812 (15.59%) Machine Learning
10 723 (13.88%) Containerisation
11 706 (13.55%) Data Engineering
12 693 (13.30%) Data Modelling
13 680 (13.05%) ETL
14 603 (11.57%) Data Science
15 599 (11.50%) Software Engineering
16 552 (10.60%) Test Automation
17 520 (9.98%) Observability
18 519 (9.96%) Business Intelligence
19 432 (8.29%) LLM
20 410 (7.87%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,713 (32.88%) SQL
2 764 (14.66%) Java
3 655 (12.57%) PowerShell
4 568 (10.90%) Bash
5 480 (9.21%) JavaScript
6 355 (6.81%) C#
7 350 (6.72%) TypeScript
8 203 (3.90%) Go
9 176 (3.38%) R
10 154 (2.96%) C++
11 144 (2.76%) Scala
12 108 (2.07%) Shell Script
13 97 (1.86%) Ruby
14 89 (1.71%) Perl
15 80 (1.54%) Bicep
16 54 (1.04%) C
16 54 (1.04%) Kusto Query Language
17 52 (1.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 49 (0.94%) T-SQL
19 48 (0.92%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,215 (23.32%) Security Cleared
2 996 (19.12%) SC Cleared
3 395 (7.58%) Degree
4 178 (3.42%) Computer Science Degree
5 140 (2.69%) BPSS Clearance
6 137 (2.63%) DV Cleared
7 109 (2.09%) Azure Certification
8 107 (2.05%) AWS Certification
9 97 (1.86%) CISSP
10 93 (1.79%) Master's Degree
11 79 (1.52%) Cisco Certification
12 61 (1.17%) CCNP
13 57 (1.09%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 49 (0.94%) CISM
15 43 (0.83%) PhD
16 34 (0.65%) Microsoft Certification
17 31 (0.60%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 28 (0.54%) ISTQB
19 26 (0.50%) CCIE
19 26 (0.50%) CCNA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 517 (9.92%) Data Quality
2 217 (4.17%) QA
3 174 (3.34%) GDPR
4 109 (2.09%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 104 (2.00%) NIST
6 81 (1.55%) Accessibility
7 36 (0.69%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.63%) SLA
9 30 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 28 (0.54%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) NCSC
12 18 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
13 17 (0.33%) WCAG
14 13 (0.25%) SOC 2
15 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.21%) PMO
17 10 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
18 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 8 (0.15%) GRC
19 6 (0.12%) PSD2
System Software
1 837 (16.07%) Docker
2 164 (3.15%) Active Directory
3 102 (1.96%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.29%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.86%) VMware NSX
6 40 (0.77%) vSphere
7 32 (0.61%) Firmware
8 30 (0.58%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) HDFS
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 9 (0.17%) Ceph
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.17%) SRDF
12 7 (0.13%) Lustre
12 7 (0.13%) NFS
13 6 (0.12%) GPFS
13 6 (0.12%) Postfix
13 6 (0.12%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 6 (0.12%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,115 (21.40%) Terraform
2 951 (18.25%) Kubernetes
3 507 (9.73%) Ansible
4 332 (6.37%) Grafana
5 281 (5.39%) Prometheus
6 77 (1.48%) Argo
7 73 (1.40%) Puppet
8 53 (1.02%) Istio
9 47 (0.90%) vRealize
10 46 (0.88%) Kibana
11 34 (0.65%) vCenter Server
12 33 (0.63%) Progress Chef
13 27 (0.52%) Nessus
14 23 (0.44%) Control-M
14 23 (0.44%) Nagios
15 22 (0.42%) Rancher
15 22 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
16 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
17 19 (0.36%) Kubeflow
17 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 631 (12.11%) Microsoft
2 580 (11.13%) Databricks
3 278 (5.34%) Google
4 216 (4.15%) Splunk
5 215 (4.13%) Oracle
6 191 (3.67%) VMware
7 132 (2.53%) Red Hat
8 128 (2.46%) Cisco
9 124 (2.38%) OpenAI
10 102 (1.96%) ServiceNow
11 89 (1.71%) CyberArk
12 74 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
13 64 (1.23%) Informatica
14 63 (1.21%) Foundry
14 63 (1.21%) IBM
15 55 (1.06%) F5
16 54 (1.04%) Palo Alto
17 52 (1.00%) Dynatrace
18 47 (0.90%) SAP
19 43 (0.83%) Fortinet