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

6 months to
18 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,464 3,891 4,132
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.84% 13.07% 9.42%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.39% 38.57% 31.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,595 2,680 2,967
10th Percentile £363 £375 £375
25th Percentile £425 £444 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £540 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.78% -1.82% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £838
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £509
% change year-on-year - -1.67% -5.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 59 118
10th Percentile £28.80 £25.20 £20.77
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £44.50 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.98% -27.05% -2.46%
75th Percentile £67.84 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £63.35 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.61 £50.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.21% -23.08% +10.64%

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 13,529 10,089 13,246
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.84% 33.90% 30.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,814 6,837 9,299
10th Percentile £358 £350 £350
25th Percentile £417 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £603 £626 £650
90th Percentile £716 £758 £769
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +2.75% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 553 237 546
10th Percentile £35.25 £25.55 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.60 £84.70 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £63.25
% change year-on-year +4.84% -1.98% +1.20%

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 18 June 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 18 June 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 18 June 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 -2 4,550 £525 -4.55% 1,953
London -2 2,618 £550 -4.35% 822
UK excluding London -1 2,132 £500 - 1,689
Work from Home -2 1,553 £525 -4.55% 782
North of England +10 779 £481 +0.26% 380
Yorkshire +2 432 £500 - 118
South East -7 401 £525 +3.96% 568
Scotland +3 317 £440 -7.37% 73
North West +6 270 £481 +1.32% 206
South West 0 264 £500 -9.09% 185
Midlands -12 230 £484 +7.64% 177
West Midlands -12 183 £477 +0.42% 89
East of England -13 126 £500 - 182
North East +7 89 £450 +5.88% 59
East Midlands -16 46 £498 +17.18% 87
Wales -9 29 £483 +3.76% 46
Northern Ireland +13 26 £408 -30.64% 109

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
1 281 (5.14%) Apache Spark
2 247 (4.52%) Apache Airflow
3 187 (3.42%) Apache
4 164 (3.00%) Confluence
5 56 (1.02%) Jupyter
6 48 (0.88%) SAS
6 48 (0.88%) SharePoint
7 22 (0.40%) OpenStack
8 20 (0.37%) nginx
9 18 (0.33%) Palantir Foundry
10 17 (0.31%) ArcGIS
11 15 (0.27%) Microsoft Exchange
12 11 (0.20%) IIS
13 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
14 9 (0.16%) Appian
15 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.13%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) CMS
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 116 (2.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 29 (0.53%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.42%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 22 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
5 20 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.26%) CPLEX
7 3 (0.055%) LaTeX
7 3 (0.055%) Microsoft Project
8 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.40%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
7 5 (0.092%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.092%) Dynamics CRM
8 4 (0.073%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.055%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.055%) Sage X3
9 3 (0.055%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.055%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.037%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.037%) Odoo
10 2 (0.037%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.037%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.037%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,039 (37.32%) AWS
2 1,820 (33.31%) Azure
3 794 (14.53%) GCP
4 648 (11.86%) GitHub
5 526 (9.63%) Power Platform
6 487 (8.91%) Serverless
7 408 (7.47%) Amazon S3
8 397 (7.27%) Azure DevOps
9 360 (6.59%) AWS Lambda
10 350 (6.41%) GitHub Actions
11 268 (4.90%) Snowflake
12 246 (4.50%) Azure Data Factory
13 195 (3.57%) dbt
14 168 (3.07%) AWS CloudFormation
15 164 (3.00%) Amazon EKS
16 163 (2.98%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 156 (2.86%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 153 (2.80%) OpenShift
19 130 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
20 122 (2.23%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 216 (3.95%) Firewall
2 148 (2.71%) DNS
3 110 (2.01%) Network Security
4 106 (1.94%) WAN
5 105 (1.92%) BGP
6 89 (1.63%) TCP/IP
7 86 (1.57%) VPN
8 67 (1.23%) OSPF
9 58 (1.06%) BIG-IP
9 58 (1.06%) HTTP
10 56 (1.02%) SAN
11 51 (0.93%) SD-WAN
12 50 (0.92%) VXLAN
13 48 (0.88%) SSL
14 45 (0.82%) VLAN
15 39 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
16 38 (0.70%) LAN
17 37 (0.68%) DHCP
17 37 (0.68%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 36 (0.66%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 462 (8.46%) Power BI
2 350 (6.41%) PostgreSQL
3 295 (5.40%) Data Warehouse
4 252 (4.61%) SQL Server
5 226 (4.14%) Data Lake
6 199 (3.64%) Tableau
7 187 (3.42%) Relational Database
8 170 (3.11%) NoSQL
9 169 (3.09%) Metadata
10 161 (2.95%) Big Data
11 142 (2.60%) Amazon Athena
12 136 (2.49%) BigQuery
13 135 (2.47%) Amazon Redshift
14 131 (2.40%) Delta Lake
15 122 (2.23%) MongoDB
16 100 (1.83%) DynamoDB
17 95 (1.74%) Amazon RDS
18 87 (1.59%) MySQL
19 74 (1.35%) Hadoop
20 73 (1.34%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 663 (12.13%) Git
2 493 (9.02%) Jenkins
3 386 (7.06%) GitLab
4 288 (5.27%) JIRA
5 73 (1.34%) MLflow
6 72 (1.32%) Selenium
7 57 (1.04%) Postman
8 36 (0.66%) JMeter
9 33 (0.60%) Cucumber
9 33 (0.60%) Cypress.io
9 33 (0.60%) SonarQube
10 32 (0.59%) Bitbucket
11 31 (0.57%) Artifactory
12 27 (0.49%) JUnit
12 27 (0.49%) REST Assured
13 26 (0.48%) Maven
14 24 (0.44%) Sonatype Nexus
15 21 (0.38%) Gatling
16 20 (0.37%) Robot Framework
16 20 (0.37%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,178 (21.56%) Social Skills
2 1,130 (20.68%) Finance
3 732 (13.40%) Analytical Skills
4 512 (9.37%) Public Sector
5 396 (7.25%) Banking
6 190 (3.48%) Front Office
7 136 (2.49%) Documentation Skills
8 123 (2.25%) Investment Banking
9 103 (1.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 76 (1.39%) Retail
11 74 (1.35%) Marketing
12 61 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.02%) Legal
14 53 (0.97%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.84%) Financial Institution
16 45 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
17 44 (0.81%) Publishing
18 37 (0.68%) Military
19 32 (0.59%) Manufacturing
19 32 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 995 (18.21%) Developer
2 855 (15.65%) Data Engineer
3 816 (14.93%) Senior
4 521 (9.54%) Python Developer
5 354 (6.48%) Lead
6 352 (6.44%) Python Engineer
7 320 (5.86%) Architect
8 295 (5.40%) DevOps Engineer
9 281 (5.14%) Analyst
10 264 (4.83%) Software Engineer
11 249 (4.56%) AWS Engineer
12 243 (4.45%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 208 (3.81%) Data Scientist
14 171 (3.13%) Senior Developer
15 169 (3.09%) Senior Data Engineer
16 165 (3.02%) Azure Engineer
17 161 (2.95%) Platform Engineer
18 156 (2.86%) Full-Stack Developer
19 153 (2.80%) Cloud Engineer
20 144 (2.64%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 424 (7.76%) REST
2 386 (7.06%) React
3 371 (6.79%) PySpark
4 323 (5.91%) Kafka
5 247 (4.52%) .NET
6 218 (3.99%) Node.js
7 209 (3.83%) RESTful
8 208 (3.81%) FastAPI
9 206 (3.77%) Pandas
10 182 (3.33%) JSON
11 167 (3.06%) PyTorch
12 148 (2.71%) Django
13 132 (2.42%) Flask
14 127 (2.32%) LangChain
14 127 (2.32%) NumPy
15 115 (2.10%) TensorFlow
16 113 (2.07%) scikit-learn
17 111 (2.03%) AngularJS
17 111 (2.03%) OAuth
18 105 (1.92%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 684 (12.52%) Cloud Native
2 273 (5.00%) Distributed Systems
3 152 (2.78%) AI Agents
3 152 (2.78%) Algorithms
3 152 (2.78%) Onboarding
4 148 (2.71%) Data Centre
5 139 (2.54%) Product Ownership
6 130 (2.38%) Data Structures
7 116 (2.12%) Data Protection Act
7 116 (2.12%) Legacy Systems
8 114 (2.09%) Management Information System
9 111 (2.03%) Derivative
10 99 (1.81%) Equities
10 99 (1.81%) Hybrid Cloud
11 97 (1.78%) Fixed Income
12 87 (1.59%) Security Posture
13 79 (1.45%) Enterprise Software
14 71 (1.30%) Public Cloud
15 59 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
16 57 (1.04%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 617 (11.29%) Linux
2 298 (5.45%) Windows
3 219 (4.01%) Unix
4 119 (2.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 78 (1.43%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.79%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.59%) VMS
8 26 (0.48%) AIX
9 24 (0.44%) Solaris
10 23 (0.42%) Android
11 20 (0.37%) CentOS
12 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
13 15 (0.27%) Mac OS
14 12 (0.22%) zOS
15 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
16 7 (0.13%) Debian
16 7 (0.13%) Rocky
17 5 (0.092%) Amazon Linux
17 5 (0.092%) Embedded Linux
17 5 (0.092%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,059 (37.68%) CI/CD
2 1,499 (27.43%) DevOps
3 1,340 (24.52%) AI
4 1,193 (21.83%) Agile
5 1,094 (20.02%) Analytics
6 983 (17.99%) Infrastructure as Code
7 970 (17.75%) Data Pipeline
8 934 (17.09%) Problem-Solving
9 860 (15.74%) Machine Learning
10 774 (14.17%) Data Engineering
11 727 (13.31%) Data Modelling
12 725 (13.27%) Containerisation
13 692 (12.66%) ETL
14 691 (12.65%) Software Engineering
15 611 (11.18%) Data Science
16 588 (10.76%) Observability
17 551 (10.08%) Test Automation
18 541 (9.90%) Business Intelligence
19 517 (9.46%) LLM
20 463 (8.47%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,791 (32.78%) SQL
2 771 (14.11%) Java
3 640 (11.71%) PowerShell
4 597 (10.93%) Bash
5 467 (8.55%) JavaScript
6 386 (7.06%) TypeScript
7 343 (6.28%) C#
8 200 (3.66%) Go
9 161 (2.95%) R
10 145 (2.65%) C++
11 124 (2.27%) Scala
12 104 (1.90%) Shell Script
13 83 (1.52%) Bicep
14 80 (1.46%) Perl
15 64 (1.17%) Ruby
16 57 (1.04%) PL/SQL
17 56 (1.02%) C
17 56 (1.02%) T-SQL
18 51 (0.93%) Groovy
19 48 (0.88%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,201 (21.98%) Security Cleared
2 970 (17.75%) SC Cleared
3 392 (7.17%) Degree
4 161 (2.95%) DV Cleared
5 152 (2.78%) Computer Science Degree
6 130 (2.38%) BPSS Clearance
7 113 (2.07%) AWS Certification
7 113 (2.07%) Azure Certification
8 90 (1.65%) CISSP
9 75 (1.37%) Cisco Certification
10 70 (1.28%) Master's Degree
11 52 (0.95%) CCNP
11 52 (0.95%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 39 (0.71%) CISM
13 33 (0.60%) ISTQB
13 33 (0.60%) Microsoft Certification
13 33 (0.60%) PhD
14 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 26 (0.48%) CCIE
16 21 (0.38%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 550 (10.07%) Data Quality
2 225 (4.12%) QA
3 131 (2.40%) GDPR
4 112 (2.05%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 105 (1.92%) NIST
6 85 (1.56%) Accessibility
7 32 (0.59%) SLA
8 26 (0.48%) PCI DSS
9 25 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.44%) HIPAA
10 24 (0.44%) WCAG
11 20 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
12 16 (0.29%) SOC 2
13 14 (0.26%) NCSC
14 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
15 10 (0.18%) Disclosure Scotland
16 9 (0.16%) GRC
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 831 (15.21%) Docker
2 140 (2.56%) Active Directory
3 107 (1.96%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.73%) vSphere
6 38 (0.70%) VMware NSX
7 34 (0.62%) Firmware
8 31 (0.57%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.33%) NFS
11 16 (0.29%) KVM
12 13 (0.24%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.24%) Squid
13 10 (0.18%) SRDF
14 9 (0.16%) Ceph
15 8 (0.15%) HDFS
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
17 4 (0.073%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
17 4 (0.073%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,152 (21.08%) Terraform
2 971 (17.77%) Kubernetes
3 554 (10.14%) Ansible
4 325 (5.95%) Grafana
5 274 (5.01%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.35%) Puppet
7 55 (1.01%) Argo
8 50 (0.92%) Istio
9 44 (0.81%) vRealize
10 39 (0.71%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.59%) vCenter Server
12 29 (0.53%) Kibana
13 28 (0.51%) Single Sign-On
14 26 (0.48%) Control-M
15 25 (0.46%) Nessus
15 25 (0.46%) ZABBIX
16 24 (0.44%) Nagios
17 23 (0.42%) Microsoft Intune
18 22 (0.40%) NetBackup
19 21 (0.38%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 598 (10.94%) Microsoft
2 578 (10.58%) Databricks
3 294 (5.38%) Google
4 246 (4.50%) Oracle
5 210 (3.84%) Splunk
6 167 (3.06%) VMware
7 146 (2.67%) OpenAI
8 126 (2.31%) Cisco
9 123 (2.25%) Red Hat
10 100 (1.83%) ServiceNow
11 85 (1.56%) F5
12 83 (1.52%) Palo Alto
13 82 (1.50%) Dynatrace
14 80 (1.46%) CyberArk
15 76 (1.39%) Informatica
16 75 (1.37%) IBM
17 66 (1.21%) BeyondTrust
18 58 (1.06%) Foundry
19 53 (0.97%) Arista
19 53 (0.97%) Fortinet