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

6 months to
4 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 14
Rank change year-on-year -3 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,556 4,268 3,941
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.51% 12.97% 10.05%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.65% 39.39% 32.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,625 2,873 2,847
10th Percentile £375 £360 £375
25th Percentile £431 £433 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £530 £575
Median % change year-on-year -0.94% -7.83% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £710
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £502
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.36% -4.41%
Number of hourly rates quoted 134 69 121
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.00 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.83 £33.91 £30.37
Median hourly rate £55.25 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.50% -13.04% -10.68%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.25 £50.00 £66.25
% change year-on-year +10.50% -24.53% +15.22%

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 14,012 10,835 12,252
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.52% 32.93% 31.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,103 7,300 8,622
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £502 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.14% -4.43% -4.55%
75th Percentile £617 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £493 £475 £498
% change year-on-year +3.68% -4.52% -0.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 526 257 409
10th Percentile £30.25 £27.98 £27.00
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.25 £46.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.25 £81.18 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +4.00%

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 4 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 4 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 4 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 4,727 £538 -2.27% 5,045
London -4 2,742 £573 -1.19% 3,115
UK excluding London -6 2,171 £500 +2.04% 2,426
Work from Home -9 1,538 £530 -3.64% 1,944
North of England +2 747 £500 +4.17% 601
South East -10 442 £537 +7.40% 654
Yorkshire +1 383 £500 +1.44% 172
Scotland +3 294 £430 -14.00% 185
North West +5 288 £525 +10.53% 330
South West -2 288 £503 -7.59% 332
Midlands -15 246 £476 +5.78% 268
West Midlands -13 196 £469 +4.22% 158
East of England -15 133 £500 -0.25% 284
North East 0 87 £425 -12.37% 103
East Midlands -5 49 £488 +14.82% 109
Wales -6 29 £500 +17.65% 59
Northern Ireland +7 19 £363 -32.56% 70

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
1 280 (5.04%) Apache Airflow
2 279 (5.02%) Apache Spark
3 214 (3.85%) Apache
4 179 (3.22%) Confluence
5 56 (1.01%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SAS
7 39 (0.70%) SharePoint
8 25 (0.45%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.38%) ArcGIS
10 20 (0.36%) nginx
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 12 (0.22%) IIS
12 9 (0.16%) Apache Superset
12 9 (0.16%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.13%) CICS
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.090%) JBoss
16 5 (0.090%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 116 (2.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.58%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 19 (0.34%) Spreadsheet
5 18 (0.32%) MS Visio
6 17 (0.31%) CPLEX
7 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
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 23 (0.41%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.090%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.072%) Remedy AR System
8 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Endur
10 2 (0.036%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.036%) IBM Planning Analytics
10 2 (0.036%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 2,079 (37.42%) AWS
2 1,885 (33.93%) Azure
3 841 (15.14%) GCP
4 687 (12.37%) GitHub
5 509 (9.16%) Power Platform
6 457 (8.23%) Serverless
7 417 (7.51%) Azure DevOps
8 401 (7.22%) Amazon S3
9 387 (6.97%) GitHub Actions
10 350 (6.30%) AWS Lambda
11 304 (5.47%) Snowflake
12 237 (4.27%) Azure Data Factory
13 226 (4.07%) dbt
14 191 (3.44%) AWS CloudFormation
15 176 (3.17%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 174 (3.13%) Amazon EKS
17 151 (2.72%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 142 (2.56%) OpenShift
19 132 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
20 130 (2.34%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 265 (4.77%) Firewall
2 196 (3.53%) DNS
3 134 (2.41%) TCP/IP
4 116 (2.09%) BGP
5 113 (2.03%) VPN
6 107 (1.93%) Network Security
7 104 (1.87%) WAN
8 75 (1.35%) DHCP
9 72 (1.30%) OSPF
10 58 (1.04%) VLAN
11 55 (0.99%) SD-WAN
12 52 (0.94%) SAN
13 51 (0.92%) SSL
14 50 (0.90%) BIG-IP
14 50 (0.90%) HTTP
14 50 (0.90%) VXLAN
15 44 (0.79%) SNMP
16 43 (0.77%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 38 (0.68%) Ethernet VPN
18 33 (0.59%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 464 (8.35%) Power BI
2 333 (5.99%) PostgreSQL
3 325 (5.85%) Data Warehouse
4 224 (4.03%) SQL Server
5 201 (3.62%) Relational Database
6 195 (3.51%) Data Lake
7 193 (3.47%) Tableau
8 185 (3.33%) Metadata
9 165 (2.97%) NoSQL
10 151 (2.72%) BigQuery
11 150 (2.70%) Big Data
12 136 (2.45%) Amazon Athena
13 133 (2.39%) Amazon Redshift
14 130 (2.34%) MongoDB
15 122 (2.20%) Delta Lake
16 110 (1.98%) Amazon RDS
17 109 (1.96%) DynamoDB
18 81 (1.46%) MySQL
19 72 (1.30%) Snowflake Schema
20 64 (1.15%) Redis
Development Applications
1 692 (12.46%) Git
2 494 (8.89%) Jenkins
3 410 (7.38%) GitLab
4 294 (5.29%) JIRA
5 81 (1.46%) Selenium
6 61 (1.10%) MLflow
7 47 (0.85%) Bitbucket
7 47 (0.85%) Postman
8 45 (0.81%) JMeter
9 41 (0.74%) SonarQube
10 33 (0.59%) Claude Code
10 33 (0.59%) Cypress.io
10 33 (0.59%) REST Assured
11 32 (0.58%) Artifactory
11 32 (0.58%) Cucumber
12 30 (0.54%) Gatling
13 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
14 26 (0.47%) Maven
15 25 (0.45%) JUnit
16 19 (0.34%) Zephyr
General
1 1,201 (21.62%) Finance
1 1,201 (21.62%) Social Skills
2 786 (14.15%) Analytical Skills
3 559 (10.06%) Public Sector
4 424 (7.63%) Banking
5 203 (3.65%) Front Office
6 125 (2.25%) Investment Banking
7 123 (2.21%) Documentation Skills
8 108 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 103 (1.85%) Retail
10 86 (1.55%) Marketing
11 68 (1.22%) Telecoms
12 59 (1.06%) Pharmaceutical
13 58 (1.04%) Legal
14 55 (0.99%) Military
15 50 (0.90%) Financial Institution
16 47 (0.85%) Publishing
17 41 (0.74%) Manufacturing
18 40 (0.72%) Aerospace
18 40 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 953 (17.15%) Developer
2 895 (16.11%) Senior
3 843 (15.17%) Data Engineer
4 505 (9.09%) Python Developer
5 453 (8.15%) Lead
6 405 (7.29%) Python Engineer
7 320 (5.76%) Software Engineer
8 314 (5.65%) DevOps Engineer
9 283 (5.09%) Analyst
10 280 (5.04%) Architect
11 248 (4.46%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 244 (4.39%) AWS Engineer
13 212 (3.82%) Data Scientist
14 189 (3.40%) Cloud Engineer
15 183 (3.29%) Platform Engineer
16 180 (3.24%) Senior Developer
17 171 (3.08%) Senior Data Engineer
18 170 (3.06%) Azure Engineer
19 142 (2.56%) Data Analyst
20 141 (2.54%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 415 (7.47%) REST
2 373 (6.71%) PySpark
3 353 (6.35%) Kafka
4 351 (6.32%) React
5 225 (4.05%) .NET
6 206 (3.71%) Node.js
7 204 (3.67%) FastAPI
8 202 (3.64%) RESTful
9 197 (3.55%) JSON
10 185 (3.33%) Pandas
11 178 (3.20%) Django
12 145 (2.61%) PyTorch
13 138 (2.48%) LangChain
14 114 (2.05%) Flask
15 113 (2.03%) NumPy
16 106 (1.91%) scikit-learn
17 104 (1.87%) OAuth
18 102 (1.84%) Spring
19 101 (1.82%) TensorFlow
20 98 (1.76%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 753 (13.55%) Cloud Native
2 317 (5.71%) Distributed Systems
3 206 (3.71%) AI Agents
4 201 (3.62%) Onboarding
5 158 (2.84%) Data Centre
6 144 (2.59%) Product Ownership
7 143 (2.57%) Algorithms
8 138 (2.48%) Data Structures
9 127 (2.29%) Legacy Systems
10 118 (2.12%) Hybrid Cloud
11 113 (2.03%) Derivative
12 109 (1.96%) Data Protection Act
13 105 (1.89%) Management Information System
14 99 (1.78%) Fixed Income
15 91 (1.64%) Equities
16 81 (1.46%) Security Posture
17 68 (1.22%) Public Cloud
18 64 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
19 63 (1.13%) Enterprise Software
19 63 (1.13%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 692 (12.46%) Linux
2 325 (5.85%) Windows
3 226 (4.07%) Unix
4 135 (2.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 80 (1.44%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.74%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.54%) AIX
8 29 (0.52%) VMS
9 17 (0.31%) Android
10 16 (0.29%) Solaris
11 13 (0.23%) CentOS
12 12 (0.22%) Apple iOS
13 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
13 11 (0.20%) zOS
14 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Debian
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
15 6 (0.11%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,117 (38.10%) CI/CD
2 1,563 (28.13%) DevOps
3 1,392 (25.05%) AI
4 1,249 (22.48%) Agile
5 1,142 (20.55%) Analytics
6 1,084 (19.51%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,012 (18.21%) Data Pipeline
8 908 (16.34%) Problem-Solving
9 880 (15.84%) Machine Learning
10 850 (15.30%) Software Engineering
11 797 (14.34%) Data Engineering
12 760 (13.68%) Data Modelling
13 755 (13.59%) Containerisation
14 667 (12.01%) ETL
15 657 (11.83%) Observability
16 607 (10.93%) Data Science
17 565 (10.17%) Test Automation
18 548 (9.86%) Business Intelligence
19 531 (9.56%) Continuous Improvement
20 512 (9.22%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,801 (32.42%) SQL
2 804 (14.47%) Java
3 719 (12.94%) Bash
4 700 (12.60%) PowerShell
5 447 (8.05%) JavaScript
6 384 (6.91%) TypeScript
7 298 (5.36%) C#
8 205 (3.69%) Go
9 151 (2.72%) R
10 142 (2.56%) C++
11 128 (2.30%) Shell Script
12 123 (2.21%) Scala
13 121 (2.18%) Bicep
14 77 (1.39%) Perl
15 58 (1.04%) C
16 57 (1.03%) Rust
17 55 (0.99%) Groovy
18 54 (0.97%) Ruby
19 53 (0.95%) PL/SQL
20 51 (0.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,273 (22.91%) Security Cleared
2 1,036 (18.65%) SC Cleared
3 426 (7.67%) Degree
4 196 (3.53%) DV Cleared
5 153 (2.75%) Computer Science Degree
6 137 (2.47%) AWS Certification
7 130 (2.34%) Azure Certification
8 127 (2.29%) BPSS Clearance
9 88 (1.58%) CISSP
10 86 (1.55%) Cisco Certification
11 72 (1.30%) Master's Degree
12 54 (0.97%) CCNP
13 45 (0.81%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
15 38 (0.68%) PhD
16 33 (0.59%) CISM
17 32 (0.58%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 29 (0.52%) ISTQB
19 27 (0.49%) CCIE
19 27 (0.49%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 583 (10.49%) Data Quality
2 259 (4.66%) QA
3 110 (1.98%) GDPR
4 105 (1.89%) NIST
5 104 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 88 (1.58%) Accessibility
7 33 (0.59%) SLA
8 28 (0.50%) WCAG
9 26 (0.47%) NCSC
10 22 (0.40%) Actionable Recommendations
11 21 (0.38%) PCI DSS
11 21 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
14 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
15 7 (0.13%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.13%) GRC
16 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 896 (16.13%) Docker
2 151 (2.72%) Active Directory
3 124 (2.23%) VMware Infrastructure
4 66 (1.19%) Virtual Machines
5 44 (0.79%) vSphere
6 41 (0.74%) Hyper-V
7 35 (0.63%) VMware NSX
8 31 (0.56%) Firmware
9 21 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 13 (0.23%) Squid
12 11 (0.20%) Ceph
12 11 (0.20%) KVM
13 10 (0.18%) SRDF
13 10 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
14 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
16 5 (0.090%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,250 (22.50%) Terraform
2 1,058 (19.04%) Kubernetes
3 593 (10.67%) Ansible
4 339 (6.10%) Grafana
5 261 (4.70%) Prometheus
6 86 (1.55%) Puppet
7 70 (1.26%) Argo
8 62 (1.12%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.72%) Istio
10 31 (0.56%) vCenter Server
10 31 (0.56%) vRealize
11 27 (0.49%) ZABBIX
12 26 (0.47%) Kibana
12 26 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
13 24 (0.43%) Nagios
14 23 (0.41%) Control-M
15 20 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
16 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
17 18 (0.32%) HAProxy
17 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 656 (11.81%) Microsoft
2 561 (10.10%) Databricks
3 334 (6.01%) Google
4 238 (4.28%) Oracle
5 206 (3.71%) Splunk
6 171 (3.08%) VMware
7 141 (2.54%) OpenAI
8 135 (2.43%) Cisco
9 121 (2.18%) ServiceNow
10 100 (1.80%) Red Hat
11 95 (1.71%) Dynatrace
12 88 (1.58%) F5
13 85 (1.53%) Palo Alto
14 82 (1.48%) Informatica
15 79 (1.42%) IBM
16 69 (1.24%) Fortinet
17 64 (1.15%) CyberArk
18 62 (1.12%) Foundry
19 61 (1.10%) Salesforce
20 59 (1.06%) SAP