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

6 months to
20 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,801 4,181 4,563
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.41% 11.46% 9.92%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.70% 35.73% 32.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,161 2,777 3,281
10th Percentile £358 £373 £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 £748 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 88 89 137
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.19 £25.09 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.97 £52.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year -1.01% -13.22% -6.92%
75th Percentile £67.63 £70.00 £73.65
90th Percentile £81.50 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year -13.60% - -3.85%

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 11,514 11,703 14,259
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.17% 32.07% 31.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,586 7,524 10,151
10th Percentile £350 £350 £360
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £507 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.38% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £623 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £751 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £489 £500
% change year-on-year -2.86% -2.20% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 341 283 440
10th Percentile £29.33 £22.00 £31.95
25th Percentile £46.25 £37.90 £47.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £62.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year - +3.31% +0.83%
75th Percentile £67.50 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £78.08
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 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 20 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 20 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% 5,464
London +1 2,408 £550 -12.00% 3,106
UK excluding London +4 1,849 £500 -2.44% 2,924
Work from Home -1 1,469 £535 -2.73% 2,189
North of England +10 564 £475 -6.17% 685
South East +5 400 £500 -4.76% 913
Yorkshire +9 301 £500 -6.98% 189
Scotland +15 282 £500 +3.63% 194
Midlands +12 272 £500 +5.26% 398
North West +8 229 £435 -10.77% 422
West Midlands +13 225 £506 +1.20% 260
South West -6 175 £560 -7.12% 320
East of England +7 157 £525 +10.53% 330
East Midlands -10 47 £429 +7.19% 137
North East +4 38 £520 -12.97% 81
Wales -8 31 £475 -5.00% 81
Northern Ireland -4 22 £588 +11.90% 45

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 (5.25%) Apache Airflow
2 195 (4.06%) Apache Spark
3 186 (3.87%) Confluence
4 179 (3.73%) Apache
5 65 (1.35%) SAS
6 51 (1.06%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.81%) nginx
8 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 15 (0.31%) IIS
11 12 (0.25%) WebSphere
12 11 (0.23%) Appian
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.17%) JBoss
14 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
15 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
16 5 (0.10%) CMS
16 5 (0.10%) Luigi
17 4 (0.083%) Camunda
Applications
1 135 (2.81%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.73%) Chatbot
3 34 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
4 30 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 10 (0.21%) MS Visio
7 9 (0.19%) Maya
7 9 (0.19%) NUKE
8 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.042%) Maple
9 2 (0.042%) 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 14 (0.29%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 8 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.17%) Maximo
4 5 (0.10%) Fidessa
5 4 (0.083%) Remedy ITSM
6 3 (0.062%) Payment Gateway
6 3 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
6 3 (0.062%) Teamcenter
7 2 (0.042%) Actimize
7 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
7 2 (0.042%) Endur
7 2 (0.042%) Kondor
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
Cloud Services
1 1,893 (39.43%) AWS
2 1,424 (29.66%) Azure
3 730 (15.21%) GCP
4 553 (11.52%) GitHub
5 475 (9.89%) Serverless
6 402 (8.37%) Power Platform
7 381 (7.94%) Amazon S3
8 338 (7.04%) AWS Lambda
9 300 (6.25%) Azure DevOps
10 283 (5.89%) GitHub Actions
11 250 (5.21%) Snowflake
12 215 (4.48%) AWS CloudFormation
13 198 (4.12%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 198 (4.12%) Amazon EC2
14 179 (3.73%) dbt
15 166 (3.46%) Amazon ECS
16 157 (3.27%) Azure Data Factory
17 152 (3.17%) Amazon EKS
18 137 (2.85%) OpenShift
19 133 (2.77%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 287 (5.98%) Firewall
2 183 (3.81%) DNS
3 150 (3.12%) TCP/IP
4 109 (2.27%) Network Security
5 96 (2.00%) VPN
6 94 (1.96%) HTTP
7 92 (1.92%) BGP
8 68 (1.42%) SSL
9 56 (1.17%) OSPF
10 53 (1.10%) WAN
11 50 (1.04%) MPLS
12 41 (0.85%) SMTP
12 41 (0.85%) SSH
13 40 (0.83%) LAN
14 38 (0.79%) Wireless
15 34 (0.71%) DHCP
16 32 (0.67%) SD-WAN
17 31 (0.65%) FTP
17 31 (0.65%) Wireshark
18 29 (0.60%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 404 (8.41%) PostgreSQL
2 351 (7.31%) Power BI
3 280 (5.83%) Data Warehouse
4 257 (5.35%) Relational Database
5 246 (5.12%) NoSQL
6 182 (3.79%) Data Lake
7 174 (3.62%) Big Data
8 172 (3.58%) Amazon RDS
9 153 (3.19%) Tableau
10 147 (3.06%) SQL Server
11 133 (2.77%) MongoDB
12 119 (2.48%) MySQL
13 106 (2.21%) BigQuery
14 101 (2.10%) Amazon Athena
15 99 (2.06%) Hadoop
16 93 (1.94%) DynamoDB
17 86 (1.79%) Amazon Redshift
18 84 (1.75%) Metadata
19 72 (1.50%) Elasticsearch
20 59 (1.23%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 653 (13.60%) Git
2 627 (13.06%) Jenkins
3 395 (8.23%) GitLab
4 333 (6.94%) JIRA
5 75 (1.56%) Selenium
6 72 (1.50%) SonarQube
7 71 (1.48%) Bitbucket
8 65 (1.35%) Sonatype Nexus
9 63 (1.31%) JUnit
10 51 (1.06%) MLflow
11 47 (0.98%) Liquibase
12 41 (0.85%) Artifactory
13 39 (0.81%) Cucumber
14 36 (0.75%) Maven
14 36 (0.75%) Postman
15 33 (0.69%) Gradle
15 33 (0.69%) JMeter
16 29 (0.60%) Eclipse
17 28 (0.58%) Metasploit
17 28 (0.58%) Vagrant
General
1 1,356 (28.24%) Social Skills
2 1,092 (22.75%) Finance
3 717 (14.93%) Analytical Skills
4 511 (10.64%) Banking
5 411 (8.56%) Public Sector
6 246 (5.12%) Front Office
7 199 (4.14%) Investment Banking
8 110 (2.29%) Documentation Skills
9 90 (1.87%) Financial Institution
10 82 (1.71%) Marketing
11 77 (1.60%) Telecoms
12 70 (1.46%) Pharmaceutical
12 70 (1.46%) Retail
13 60 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 52 (1.08%) Legal
15 49 (1.02%) Presentation Skills
16 42 (0.87%) Manufacturing
17 33 (0.69%) Influencing Skills
18 28 (0.58%) Aerospace
18 28 (0.58%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 893 (18.60%) Developer
2 644 (13.41%) Senior
3 537 (11.19%) Data Engineer
4 358 (7.46%) Python Engineer
5 356 (7.42%) Analyst
6 351 (7.31%) Python Developer
7 339 (7.06%) DevOps Engineer
8 304 (6.33%) AWS Engineer
9 278 (5.79%) Software Engineer
10 258 (5.37%) Architect
11 210 (4.37%) Lead
12 187 (3.90%) Platform Engineer
13 185 (3.85%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 172 (3.58%) Data Analyst
15 163 (3.40%) Data Scientist
16 133 (2.77%) Senior Developer
17 131 (2.73%) Consultant
18 123 (2.56%) Cloud Engineer
19 122 (2.54%) Network Engineer
20 119 (2.48%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 392 (8.16%) REST
2 344 (7.17%) React
3 314 (6.54%) Kafka
4 249 (5.19%) Node.js
5 241 (5.02%) RESTful
6 239 (4.98%) Pandas
7 222 (4.62%) FastAPI
8 190 (3.96%) NumPy
9 182 (3.79%) PySpark
10 179 (3.73%) PyTorch
11 161 (3.35%) AngularJS
12 158 (3.29%) TensorFlow
13 141 (2.94%) .NET
14 133 (2.77%) Elastic Stack
15 114 (2.37%) scikit-learn
16 113 (2.35%) HTML
17 110 (2.29%) GraphQL
18 109 (2.27%) CSS
19 106 (2.21%) LangChain
20 105 (2.19%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 376 (7.83%) Cloud Native
2 210 (4.37%) Algorithms
3 192 (4.00%) Distributed Systems
4 155 (3.23%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 152 (3.17%) Equities
6 145 (3.02%) Fixed Income
7 142 (2.96%) Data Protection Act
8 126 (2.62%) Product Ownership
9 117 (2.44%) Derivative
10 113 (2.35%) Data Structures
10 113 (2.35%) Hedge funds
11 112 (2.33%) Onboarding
12 96 (2.00%) AI Agents
13 84 (1.75%) Public Cloud
14 77 (1.60%) Management Information System
15 76 (1.58%) Data Centre
16 71 (1.48%) Hybrid Cloud
17 69 (1.44%) Legacy Systems
18 67 (1.40%) Replication
19 56 (1.17%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 860 (17.91%) Linux
2 375 (7.81%) Windows
3 250 (5.21%) Unix
4 98 (2.04%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.40%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.96%) Android
7 44 (0.92%) Ubuntu
8 37 (0.77%) CentOS
9 36 (0.75%) VMS
10 29 (0.60%) Amazon Linux
11 28 (0.58%) Mac OS
12 26 (0.54%) Apple iOS
13 22 (0.46%) Solaris
14 10 (0.21%) Debian
15 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
16 8 (0.17%) Windows 7
17 6 (0.12%) AIX
18 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
19 4 (0.083%) Windows Server 2019
19 4 (0.083%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,595 (33.22%) CI/CD
2 1,353 (28.18%) DevOps
3 1,255 (26.14%) Agile
4 1,041 (21.68%) Problem-Solving
5 838 (17.45%) Infrastructure as Code
6 811 (16.89%) AI
7 736 (15.33%) Analytics
8 701 (14.60%) Machine Learning
9 651 (13.56%) Containerisation
10 614 (12.79%) Software Engineering
11 609 (12.68%) Data Pipeline
12 512 (10.66%) ETL
13 506 (10.54%) Data Science
14 505 (10.52%) Data Modelling
15 495 (10.31%) Test Automation
16 484 (10.08%) Data Engineering
17 405 (8.44%) Computer Science
18 403 (8.39%) Business Intelligence
19 357 (7.44%) Microservices
20 344 (7.17%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 1,478 (30.79%) SQL
2 876 (18.25%) Java
3 668 (13.91%) Bash
4 624 (13.00%) PowerShell
5 543 (11.31%) JavaScript
6 347 (7.23%) TypeScript
7 303 (6.31%) Go
8 279 (5.81%) C#
9 266 (5.54%) C++
10 198 (4.12%) Perl
11 180 (3.75%) Shell Script
12 163 (3.40%) R
13 100 (2.08%) Scala
14 83 (1.73%) C
15 79 (1.65%) Ruby
16 62 (1.29%) PHP
17 60 (1.25%) VBA
18 54 (1.12%) Groovy
19 49 (1.02%) Bicep
20 45 (0.94%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 911 (18.98%) Security Cleared
2 733 (15.27%) SC Cleared
3 480 (10.00%) Degree
4 237 (4.94%) Computer Science Degree
5 158 (3.29%) AWS Certification
6 144 (3.00%) Master's Degree
7 139 (2.90%) DV Cleared
8 100 (2.08%) Cisco Certification
9 89 (1.85%) CISSP
10 78 (1.62%) BPSS Clearance
11 74 (1.54%) Azure Certification
12 64 (1.33%) CCNP
13 54 (1.12%) PhD
14 49 (1.02%) MCP
15 46 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 39 (0.81%) CCIE
16 39 (0.81%) OSCP
17 36 (0.75%) CEH
18 35 (0.73%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
19 29 (0.60%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 327 (6.81%) Data Quality
2 200 (4.17%) QA
3 159 (3.31%) GDPR
4 102 (2.12%) NIST
5 97 (2.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 63 (1.31%) Accessibility
7 48 (1.00%) PCI DSS
8 40 (0.83%) HIPAA
9 28 (0.58%) NCSC
10 25 (0.52%) SLA
11 22 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 21 (0.44%) SOC 2
13 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
14 13 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.23%) MiFID
16 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 10 (0.21%) EMIR
16 10 (0.21%) PMO
17 8 (0.17%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 928 (19.33%) Docker
2 163 (3.40%) Active Directory
3 147 (3.06%) VMware Infrastructure
4 44 (0.92%) vSphere
5 35 (0.73%) VMware NSX
6 34 (0.71%) Virtual Machines
7 30 (0.62%) Firmware
8 22 (0.46%) DFS Replication
9 20 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
10 17 (0.35%) Squid
11 16 (0.33%) Hyper-V
11 16 (0.33%) Postfix
12 14 (0.29%) HDFS
12 14 (0.29%) KVM
12 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
14 10 (0.21%) GPFS
14 10 (0.21%) zsh
15 9 (0.19%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 1,035 (21.56%) Kubernetes
2 1,024 (21.33%) Terraform
3 625 (13.02%) Ansible
4 361 (7.52%) Grafana
5 306 (6.37%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.87%) Puppet
7 83 (1.73%) Argo
8 54 (1.12%) Kibana
9 44 (0.92%) Progress Chef
10 38 (0.79%) Istio
11 36 (0.75%) Nessus
12 35 (0.73%) vRealize
13 29 (0.60%) Nmap
13 29 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
14 28 (0.58%) NetBackup
15 27 (0.56%) ITRS Geneos
16 25 (0.52%) vCenter Server
17 23 (0.48%) logstash
17 23 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
18 22 (0.46%) Packer
Vendors
1 545 (11.35%) Microsoft
2 332 (6.92%) Databricks
3 268 (5.58%) Google
4 255 (5.31%) Splunk
5 231 (4.81%) VMware
6 225 (4.69%) Oracle
7 148 (3.08%) ServiceNow
8 137 (2.85%) Cisco
9 131 (2.73%) Red Hat
10 88 (1.83%) Palo Alto
11 84 (1.75%) F5
12 75 (1.56%) OpenAI
13 64 (1.33%) Foundry
13 64 (1.33%) SAP
14 57 (1.19%) CyberArk
15 51 (1.06%) Atlassian
16 49 (1.02%) IBM
17 46 (0.96%) Salesforce
18 43 (0.90%) CrowdStrike
18 43 (0.90%) Juniper