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

6 months to
24 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,548 4,311 3,997
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.34% 13.07% 10.29%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.56% 39.73% 32.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,629 2,857 2,847
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.95% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £644 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -2.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 81 113
10th Percentile £30.00 £26.32 £20.65
25th Percentile £42.50 £34.75 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +11.00% -13.04% -8.37%
75th Percentile £76.25 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £82.96 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £57.50 £51.25 £68.75
% change year-on-year +12.20% -25.45% +19.57%

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 14,026 10,851 12,238
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.15% 32.89% 31.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,116 7,238 8,479
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £516 £505 £530
Median % change year-on-year +2.16% -4.72% -3.64%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 531 296 383
10th Percentile £29.96 £28.25 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.38 £36.19 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +8.14%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.63 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £79.38 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +7.35%

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 24 August 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 24 August 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 24 August 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 4,739 £545 +1.40% 2,088
London -4 2,783 £573 -0.43% 839
UK excluding London -7 2,128 £500 - 1,679
Work from Home -8 1,507 £527 -4.14% 808
North of England +2 724 £500 +2.04% 390
South East -11 437 £538 +7.50% 564
Yorkshire -1 368 £500 - 124
South West -4 296 £515 -1.90% 250
Scotland -4 274 £450 -10.00% 74
North West 0 273 £525 +10.53% 191
Midlands -18 239 £477 +0.42% 193
West Midlands -18 190 £477 +0.42% 105
East of England -11 139 £500 -0.50% 186
North East -1 95 £425 -18.27% 79
East Midlands -6 49 £469 +11.61% 87
Wales -8 28 £530 +30.86% 35
Northern Ireland +4 18 £363 -32.56% 16

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 (5.21%) Apache Airflow
2 272 (4.90%) Apache Spark
3 216 (3.89%) Apache
4 169 (3.05%) Confluence
5 57 (1.03%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SharePoint
7 42 (0.76%) SAS
8 28 (0.50%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.41%) ArcGIS
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 19 (0.34%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
15 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.11%) Apache Superset
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.090%) Camunda
Applications
1 108 (1.95%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.58%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.47%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
6 17 (0.31%) CPLEX
6 17 (0.31%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
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 21 (0.38%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
6 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
8 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.090%) Salesforce CRM
9 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.054%) Endur
10 3 (0.054%) Front Arena
10 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
10 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) Odoo
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,068 (37.27%) AWS
2 1,888 (34.03%) Azure
3 860 (15.50%) GCP
4 700 (12.62%) GitHub
5 499 (8.99%) Power Platform
6 466 (8.40%) Serverless
7 439 (7.91%) Azure DevOps
8 409 (7.37%) GitHub Actions
9 389 (7.01%) Amazon S3
10 355 (6.40%) AWS Lambda
11 320 (5.77%) Snowflake
12 222 (4.00%) Azure Data Factory
13 221 (3.98%) dbt
14 183 (3.30%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 183 (3.30%) AWS CloudFormation
15 180 (3.24%) Amazon EKS
16 137 (2.47%) Amazon EC2
17 134 (2.42%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 132 (2.38%) Entra ID
19 123 (2.22%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 273 (4.92%) Firewall
2 216 (3.89%) DNS
3 148 (2.67%) TCP/IP
4 130 (2.34%) Network Security
5 128 (2.31%) BGP
6 127 (2.29%) VPN
7 112 (2.02%) WAN
8 86 (1.55%) DHCP
9 73 (1.32%) OSPF
10 61 (1.10%) SD-WAN
11 60 (1.08%) VLAN
12 57 (1.03%) VXLAN
13 55 (0.99%) SSL
14 54 (0.97%) HTTP
15 52 (0.94%) BIG-IP
16 45 (0.81%) Ethernet VPN
17 44 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 43 (0.78%) SNMP
19 40 (0.72%) MPLS
19 40 (0.72%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 453 (8.17%) Power BI
2 324 (5.84%) PostgreSQL
3 319 (5.75%) Data Warehouse
4 218 (3.93%) SQL Server
5 203 (3.66%) Relational Database
6 199 (3.59%) Metadata
7 191 (3.44%) Tableau
8 177 (3.19%) Data Lake
9 161 (2.90%) BigQuery
10 158 (2.85%) NoSQL
11 142 (2.56%) Big Data
12 139 (2.51%) Amazon Redshift
13 128 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
14 124 (2.24%) MongoDB
15 121 (2.18%) Amazon RDS
16 116 (2.09%) Delta Lake
17 103 (1.86%) DynamoDB
18 90 (1.62%) MySQL
19 70 (1.26%) Redis
20 65 (1.17%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 733 (13.21%) Git
2 502 (9.05%) Jenkins
3 443 (7.98%) GitLab
4 285 (5.14%) JIRA
5 100 (1.80%) Selenium
6 56 (1.01%) JMeter
6 56 (1.01%) Postman
7 53 (0.96%) MLflow
8 49 (0.88%) SonarQube
9 47 (0.85%) Claude Code
10 44 (0.79%) Bitbucket
11 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
12 34 (0.61%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.58%) Gatling
14 31 (0.56%) Artifactory
14 31 (0.56%) Maven
14 31 (0.56%) REST Assured
15 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
16 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
17 22 (0.40%) JUnit
General
1 1,237 (22.30%) Social Skills
2 1,189 (21.43%) Finance
3 827 (14.91%) Analytical Skills
4 551 (9.93%) Public Sector
5 445 (8.02%) Banking
6 186 (3.35%) Front Office
7 136 (2.45%) Investment Banking
8 116 (2.09%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (2.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 106 (1.91%) Retail
11 91 (1.64%) Marketing
12 78 (1.41%) Telecoms
13 58 (1.05%) Pharmaceutical
14 54 (0.97%) Military
15 53 (0.96%) Legal
16 47 (0.85%) Aerospace
16 47 (0.85%) Financial Institution
17 45 (0.81%) Publishing
18 40 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
18 40 (0.72%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 920 (16.58%) Senior
2 901 (16.24%) Developer
3 796 (14.35%) Data Engineer
4 484 (8.72%) Python Developer
5 476 (8.58%) Lead
6 412 (7.43%) Python Engineer
7 333 (6.00%) DevOps Engineer
8 298 (5.37%) Software Engineer
9 283 (5.10%) Architect
10 271 (4.88%) Analyst
11 254 (4.58%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 228 (4.11%) AWS Engineer
13 196 (3.53%) Data Scientist
14 189 (3.41%) Cloud Engineer
14 189 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
15 177 (3.19%) Senior Developer
16 173 (3.12%) Azure Engineer
17 172 (3.10%) Senior Data Engineer
18 138 (2.49%) Infrastructure Engineer
19 132 (2.38%) Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,296 (23.36%) Terraform
2 467 (8.42%) REST
3 378 (6.81%) PySpark
4 355 (6.40%) Kafka
5 313 (5.64%) React
6 235 (4.24%) .NET
7 203 (3.66%) JSON
8 200 (3.60%) FastAPI
9 196 (3.53%) RESTful
10 195 (3.51%) Django
11 179 (3.23%) Node.js
12 173 (3.12%) Pandas
13 130 (2.34%) LangChain
13 130 (2.34%) pytest
14 125 (2.25%) PyTorch
15 108 (1.95%) Flask
15 108 (1.95%) HTML
15 108 (1.95%) YAML
16 107 (1.93%) OAuth
17 102 (1.84%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 765 (13.79%) Cloud Native
2 307 (5.53%) Distributed Systems
3 224 (4.04%) AI Agents
4 212 (3.82%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.92%) Data Centre
6 160 (2.88%) Product Ownership
7 139 (2.51%) Algorithms
8 132 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
9 130 (2.34%) Data Structures
10 113 (2.04%) Derivative
10 113 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
11 108 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
12 104 (1.87%) Management Information System
13 91 (1.64%) Equities
14 78 (1.41%) Security Posture
15 76 (1.37%) Enterprise Software
16 72 (1.30%) Fixed Income
17 70 (1.26%) Public Cloud
18 66 (1.19%) Linux Command Line
19 63 (1.14%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 727 (13.10%) Linux
2 336 (6.06%) Windows
3 236 (4.25%) Unix
4 142 (2.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 84 (1.51%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.76%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.58%) VMS
8 31 (0.56%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 16 (0.29%) Android
10 16 (0.29%) CentOS
11 11 (0.20%) Apple iOS
11 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
11 11 (0.20%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 7 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 5 (0.090%) Debian
15 5 (0.090%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,199 (39.64%) CI/CD
2 1,590 (28.66%) DevOps
3 1,451 (26.15%) AI
4 1,239 (22.33%) Agile
5 1,171 (21.11%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,095 (19.74%) Analytics
7 975 (17.57%) Data Pipeline
8 906 (16.33%) Problem-Solving
9 886 (15.97%) Software Engineering
10 850 (15.32%) Machine Learning
11 778 (14.02%) Data Engineering
12 761 (13.72%) Containerisation
13 722 (13.01%) Data Modelling
14 688 (12.40%) Observability
15 648 (11.68%) ETL
16 624 (11.25%) Test Automation
17 589 (10.62%) Continuous Improvement
18 570 (10.27%) Data Science
19 565 (10.18%) Validation
20 537 (9.68%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,798 (32.41%) SQL
2 820 (14.78%) Java
3 753 (13.57%) Bash
4 734 (13.23%) PowerShell
5 442 (7.97%) JavaScript
6 349 (6.29%) TypeScript
7 305 (5.50%) C#
8 191 (3.44%) Go
9 147 (2.65%) R
10 145 (2.61%) C++
11 137 (2.47%) Shell Script
12 135 (2.43%) Bicep
13 128 (2.31%) Scala
14 89 (1.60%) Perl
15 60 (1.08%) PL/SQL
16 59 (1.06%) C
17 58 (1.05%) Groovy
18 55 (0.99%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 54 (0.97%) Rust
20 51 (0.92%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,303 (23.49%) Security Cleared
2 1,060 (19.11%) SC Cleared
3 423 (7.62%) Degree
4 206 (3.71%) DV Cleared
5 163 (2.94%) Computer Science Degree
6 147 (2.65%) Azure Certification
7 141 (2.54%) AWS Certification
8 112 (2.02%) BPSS Clearance
9 90 (1.62%) CISSP
10 89 (1.60%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.28%) Master's Degree
12 50 (0.90%) CCNP
13 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
14 37 (0.67%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 35 (0.63%) PhD
16 33 (0.59%) ISTQB
17 31 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 31 (0.56%) CISM
18 30 (0.54%) CCIE
19 26 (0.47%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 587 (10.58%) Data Quality
2 284 (5.12%) QA
3 108 (1.95%) NIST
4 104 (1.87%) GDPR
4 104 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 82 (1.48%) Accessibility
6 41 (0.74%) SLA
7 30 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
8 27 (0.49%) NCSC
9 26 (0.47%) WCAG
10 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 24 (0.43%) PCI DSS
12 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
12 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.22%) SOC 2
15 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.13%) HL7
17 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 930 (16.76%) Docker
2 155 (2.79%) Active Directory
3 131 (2.36%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.10%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.81%) Hyper-V
6 43 (0.78%) vSphere
7 35 (0.63%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 23 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.23%) Squid
12 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
14 9 (0.16%) KVM
15 8 (0.14%) HDFS
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
16 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
16 7 (0.13%) zsh
17 4 (0.072%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,099 (19.81%) Kubernetes
2 622 (11.21%) Ansible
3 339 (6.11%) Grafana
4 244 (4.40%) Prometheus
5 86 (1.55%) Puppet
6 74 (1.33%) Progress Chef
7 68 (1.23%) Argo
8 41 (0.74%) Istio
9 34 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
10 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
11 27 (0.49%) Kibana
12 26 (0.47%) Control-M
13 25 (0.45%) Nagios
13 25 (0.45%) vCenter Server
14 24 (0.43%) vRealize
15 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
16 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
17 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
17 18 (0.32%) Netcool
17 18 (0.32%) Packer
Vendors
1 694 (12.51%) Microsoft
2 555 (10.00%) Databricks
3 356 (6.42%) Google
4 253 (4.56%) Oracle
5 212 (3.82%) Splunk
6 174 (3.14%) VMware
7 142 (2.56%) Cisco
8 140 (2.52%) OpenAI
9 126 (2.27%) ServiceNow
10 106 (1.91%) Dynatrace
11 98 (1.77%) Red Hat
12 92 (1.66%) IBM
13 87 (1.57%) F5
14 85 (1.53%) Palo Alto
15 80 (1.44%) Informatica
16 70 (1.26%) SAP
17 69 (1.24%) Fortinet
18 67 (1.21%) CyberArk
19 65 (1.17%) Foundry
20 60 (1.08%) Salesforce