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 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,813 4,224 4,540
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.35% 11.59% 9.89%
As % of the Programming Languages category 42.05% 36.03% 32.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,166 2,792 3,261
10th Percentile £358 £375 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £738 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £506 £525
% change year-on-year -1.23% -3.57% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 84 87 134
10th Percentile £27.73 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £40.00 £25.17 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.86% -12.50% -7.69%
75th Percentile £71.07 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.25 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year -13.20% +4.17% -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 11,446 11,723 14,187
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.75% 32.16% 30.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,551 7,479 10,108
10th Percentile £345 £350 £360
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -3.08%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £491 £500
% change year-on-year -3.16% -1.90% -3.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 341 297 433
10th Percentile £31.25 £22.00 £31.60
25th Percentile £50.00 £40.06 £47.50
Median hourly rate £64.63 £63.00 £60.14
Median % change year-on-year +2.59% +4.76% -0.60%
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £78.00
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 29 November 2025.

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 November 2025.

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 November 2025. 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 0 4,099 £525 -12.50% 2,684
London +1 2,419 £550 -12.00% 1,093
UK excluding London +4 1,829 £500 -1.23% 2,424
Work from Home -1 1,463 £537 -2.36% 817
North of England +9 559 £475 -5.94% 432
South East +4 396 £500 -4.76% 977
Yorkshire +9 291 £500 -6.67% 136
Scotland +12 285 £475 -3.55% 126
Midlands +9 272 £500 +5.26% 331
North West +7 231 £445 -10.06% 245
West Midlands +18 227 £507 +1.30% 208
South West -11 177 £550 -8.33% 264
East of England +5 148 £525 +7.14% 242
East Midlands -11 45 £402 +0.50% 122
North East +10 42 £518 -11.54% 57
Wales -6 30 £495 -1.00% 73
Northern Ireland -3 19 £594 +13.10% 18

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
1 252 (5.24%) Apache Airflow
2 212 (4.40%) Apache Spark
3 178 (3.70%) Apache
3 178 (3.70%) Confluence
4 68 (1.41%) SAS
5 51 (1.06%) SharePoint
6 37 (0.77%) nginx
7 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
8 23 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
9 21 (0.44%) Jupyter
10 12 (0.25%) IIS
11 11 (0.23%) Appian
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
14 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
14 7 (0.15%) JBoss
14 7 (0.15%) WebSphere
15 5 (0.10%) CMS
15 5 (0.10%) Luigi
16 4 (0.083%) Camunda
Applications
1 136 (2.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.71%) Chatbot
3 31 (0.64%) Microsoft Office
4 30 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 11 (0.23%) MS Visio
7 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 7 (0.15%) Maya
8 7 (0.15%) NUKE
9 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.042%) Maple
10 1 (0.021%) Microsoft Project
10 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
10 1 (0.021%) SPSS
10 1 (0.021%) Stata
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
10 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 15 (0.31%) Aladdin
2 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
2 9 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
3 6 (0.12%) Fidessa
4 5 (0.10%) Maximo
5 4 (0.083%) Remedy ITSM
6 3 (0.062%) Actimize
6 3 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
6 3 (0.062%) Teamcenter
7 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
7 2 (0.042%) Endur
7 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.042%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.042%) Shopify
7 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
8 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
8 1 (0.021%) SAP ERP
8 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
8 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,910 (39.68%) AWS
2 1,448 (30.09%) Azure
3 725 (15.06%) GCP
4 573 (11.91%) GitHub
5 483 (10.04%) Serverless
6 402 (8.35%) Power Platform
7 375 (7.79%) Amazon S3
8 337 (7.00%) AWS Lambda
9 305 (6.34%) Azure DevOps
10 304 (6.32%) GitHub Actions
11 254 (5.28%) Snowflake
12 226 (4.70%) AWS CloudFormation
13 198 (4.11%) Amazon EC2
14 192 (3.99%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 174 (3.62%) Amazon ECS
15 174 (3.62%) dbt
16 166 (3.45%) Azure Data Factory
17 161 (3.35%) Amazon EKS
18 137 (2.85%) OpenShift
19 135 (2.80%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 271 (5.63%) Firewall
2 183 (3.80%) DNS
3 145 (3.01%) TCP/IP
4 113 (2.35%) Network Security
5 93 (1.93%) VPN
6 90 (1.87%) HTTP
7 89 (1.85%) BGP
8 68 (1.41%) SSL
9 55 (1.14%) OSPF
10 54 (1.12%) WAN
11 48 (1.00%) MPLS
12 43 (0.89%) SSH
13 41 (0.85%) Wireless
14 40 (0.83%) LAN
14 40 (0.83%) SMTP
15 37 (0.77%) DHCP
16 36 (0.75%) Wireshark
17 35 (0.73%) SD-WAN
18 33 (0.69%) FTP
19 30 (0.62%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 400 (8.31%) PostgreSQL
2 349 (7.25%) Power BI
3 287 (5.96%) Data Warehouse
4 249 (5.17%) NoSQL
5 247 (5.13%) Relational Database
6 182 (3.78%) Data Lake
7 179 (3.72%) Big Data
8 172 (3.57%) Amazon RDS
9 156 (3.24%) Tableau
10 142 (2.95%) SQL Server
11 128 (2.66%) MongoDB
12 119 (2.47%) MySQL
13 108 (2.24%) BigQuery
14 102 (2.12%) Amazon Athena
15 101 (2.10%) Hadoop
16 88 (1.83%) Metadata
17 85 (1.77%) Amazon Redshift
18 84 (1.75%) DynamoDB
19 75 (1.56%) Elasticsearch
20 62 (1.29%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 650 (13.51%) Git
2 611 (12.69%) Jenkins
3 412 (8.56%) GitLab
4 321 (6.67%) JIRA
5 74 (1.54%) Selenium
6 66 (1.37%) Bitbucket
7 63 (1.31%) MLflow
7 63 (1.31%) SonarQube
8 60 (1.25%) Sonatype Nexus
9 56 (1.16%) JUnit
10 44 (0.91%) Liquibase
11 37 (0.77%) Artifactory
11 37 (0.77%) Cucumber
12 34 (0.71%) JMeter
13 29 (0.60%) Eclipse
13 29 (0.60%) Maven
14 28 (0.58%) Gradle
15 27 (0.56%) Postman
15 27 (0.56%) Vagrant
16 26 (0.54%) Cypress.io
General
1 1,342 (27.88%) Social Skills
2 1,077 (22.38%) Finance
3 704 (14.63%) Analytical Skills
4 495 (10.28%) Banking
5 423 (8.79%) Public Sector
6 234 (4.86%) Front Office
7 186 (3.86%) Investment Banking
8 109 (2.26%) Documentation Skills
9 87 (1.81%) Financial Institution
10 80 (1.66%) Marketing
11 75 (1.56%) Telecoms
12 70 (1.45%) Retail
13 69 (1.43%) Pharmaceutical
14 61 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 53 (1.10%) Legal
16 45 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
17 43 (0.89%) Manufacturing
18 34 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
19 26 (0.54%) Electronics
19 26 (0.54%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 893 (18.55%) Developer
2 654 (13.59%) Senior
3 548 (11.39%) Data Engineer
4 358 (7.44%) Python Engineer
5 355 (7.38%) Python Developer
6 340 (7.06%) DevOps Engineer
7 332 (6.90%) Analyst
8 301 (6.25%) AWS Engineer
9 269 (5.59%) Software Engineer
10 253 (5.26%) Architect
11 218 (4.53%) Lead
12 200 (4.16%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 187 (3.89%) Platform Engineer
14 176 (3.66%) Data Scientist
15 155 (3.22%) Data Analyst
16 137 (2.85%) Senior Developer
17 128 (2.66%) Consultant
18 119 (2.47%) Cloud Engineer
19 118 (2.45%) Network Engineer
20 117 (2.43%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 395 (8.21%) REST
2 334 (6.94%) React
3 327 (6.79%) Kafka
4 248 (5.15%) Node.js
5 242 (5.03%) RESTful
6 241 (5.01%) Pandas
7 227 (4.72%) FastAPI
8 210 (4.36%) PySpark
9 192 (3.99%) NumPy
10 190 (3.95%) PyTorch
11 166 (3.45%) TensorFlow
12 158 (3.28%) AngularJS
13 145 (3.01%) .NET
14 134 (2.78%) Elastic Stack
15 118 (2.45%) scikit-learn
16 115 (2.39%) LangChain
17 106 (2.20%) Flask
17 106 (2.20%) GraphQL
18 105 (2.18%) HTML
19 104 (2.16%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 387 (8.04%) Cloud Native
2 209 (4.34%) Algorithms
3 198 (4.11%) Distributed Systems
4 146 (3.03%) Equities
5 143 (2.97%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 142 (2.95%) Data Protection Act
7 140 (2.91%) Fixed Income
8 122 (2.53%) Product Ownership
9 113 (2.35%) Data Structures
9 113 (2.35%) Derivative
10 108 (2.24%) Onboarding
11 105 (2.18%) Hedge funds
12 101 (2.10%) AI Agents
13 87 (1.81%) Public Cloud
14 78 (1.62%) Data Centre
15 77 (1.60%) Hybrid Cloud
16 74 (1.54%) Management Information System
17 69 (1.43%) Legacy Systems
18 66 (1.37%) Replication
19 55 (1.14%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 856 (17.79%) Linux
2 369 (7.67%) Windows
3 239 (4.97%) Unix
4 94 (1.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.37%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.91%) Ubuntu
7 40 (0.83%) Android
8 38 (0.79%) VMS
9 36 (0.75%) CentOS
10 30 (0.62%) Mac OS
11 27 (0.56%) Amazon Linux
12 19 (0.39%) Apple iOS
13 18 (0.37%) Solaris
14 11 (0.23%) Debian
15 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
15 9 (0.19%) Windows 7
16 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
17 4 (0.083%) zOS
18 3 (0.062%) AIX
18 3 (0.062%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,605 (33.35%) CI/CD
2 1,344 (27.92%) DevOps
3 1,253 (26.03%) Agile
4 1,046 (21.73%) Problem-Solving
5 860 (17.87%) AI
6 849 (17.64%) Infrastructure as Code
7 763 (15.85%) Analytics
8 728 (15.13%) Machine Learning
9 682 (14.17%) Containerisation
10 641 (13.32%) Data Pipeline
11 611 (12.69%) Software Engineering
12 533 (11.07%) Data Science
13 521 (10.82%) ETL
14 516 (10.72%) Data Modelling
15 512 (10.64%) Data Engineering
16 494 (10.26%) Test Automation
17 407 (8.46%) Computer Science
18 400 (8.31%) Business Intelligence
19 365 (7.58%) Microservices
20 356 (7.40%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 1,469 (30.52%) SQL
2 862 (17.91%) Java
3 662 (13.75%) Bash
4 627 (13.03%) PowerShell
5 529 (10.99%) JavaScript
6 341 (7.08%) TypeScript
7 303 (6.30%) Go
8 285 (5.92%) C#
9 258 (5.36%) C++
10 188 (3.91%) Perl
11 173 (3.59%) Shell Script
12 166 (3.45%) R
13 104 (2.16%) Scala
14 86 (1.79%) Ruby
15 78 (1.62%) C
16 62 (1.29%) PHP
17 60 (1.25%) VBA
18 52 (1.08%) Groovy
19 51 (1.06%) Bicep
20 44 (0.91%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 936 (19.45%) Security Cleared
2 744 (15.46%) SC Cleared
3 478 (9.93%) Degree
4 239 (4.97%) Computer Science Degree
5 150 (3.12%) AWS Certification
6 147 (3.05%) DV Cleared
6 147 (3.05%) Master's Degree
7 101 (2.10%) Cisco Certification
8 87 (1.81%) CISSP
9 82 (1.70%) BPSS Clearance
10 80 (1.66%) Azure Certification
11 63 (1.31%) CCNP
12 54 (1.12%) PhD
13 50 (1.04%) MCP
14 42 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 41 (0.85%) CCIE
16 34 (0.71%) CEH
16 34 (0.71%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
17 30 (0.62%) CISM
17 30 (0.62%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 334 (6.94%) Data Quality
2 184 (3.82%) QA
3 159 (3.30%) GDPR
4 100 (2.08%) NIST
5 98 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 59 (1.23%) Accessibility
7 47 (0.98%) PCI DSS
8 38 (0.79%) HIPAA
9 24 (0.50%) NCSC
10 23 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 23 (0.48%) SLA
11 20 (0.42%) SOC 2
12 19 (0.39%) EU AI Act
13 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.21%) EMIR
14 10 (0.21%) MiFID
14 10 (0.21%) PMO
15 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
15 8 (0.17%) WCAG
16 7 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 942 (19.57%) Docker
2 167 (3.47%) Active Directory
3 136 (2.83%) VMware Infrastructure
4 40 (0.83%) vSphere
5 37 (0.77%) Virtual Machines
6 34 (0.71%) VMware NSX
7 31 (0.64%) Firmware
8 21 (0.44%) DFS Replication
9 18 (0.37%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.37%) Squid
10 16 (0.33%) Postfix
10 16 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
11 15 (0.31%) KVM
11 15 (0.31%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 14 (0.29%) HDFS
12 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
14 10 (0.21%) GPFS
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,053 (21.88%) Kubernetes
2 1,045 (21.71%) Terraform
3 619 (12.86%) Ansible
4 374 (7.77%) Grafana
5 315 (6.54%) Prometheus
6 88 (1.83%) Argo
7 84 (1.75%) Puppet
8 55 (1.14%) Kibana
9 45 (0.93%) Progress Chef
10 39 (0.81%) Istio
11 36 (0.75%) Nessus
11 36 (0.75%) vRealize
12 29 (0.60%) NetBackup
12 29 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
13 27 (0.56%) ITRS Geneos
14 24 (0.50%) logstash
14 24 (0.50%) vCenter Server
15 21 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
15 21 (0.44%) Nmap
15 21 (0.44%) Packer
Vendors
1 545 (11.32%) Microsoft
2 365 (7.58%) Databricks
3 275 (5.71%) Google
4 256 (5.32%) Splunk
5 221 (4.59%) VMware
6 220 (4.57%) Oracle
7 144 (2.99%) ServiceNow
8 140 (2.91%) Cisco
9 127 (2.64%) Red Hat
10 90 (1.87%) Palo Alto
11 86 (1.79%) F5
12 85 (1.77%) OpenAI
13 72 (1.50%) Foundry
14 62 (1.29%) SAP
15 59 (1.23%) CyberArk
16 48 (1.00%) Atlassian
17 45 (0.93%) CrowdStrike
17 45 (0.93%) IBM
18 44 (0.91%) Juniper
18 44 (0.91%) Salesforce