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 10 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,105 3,968 4,118
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.03% 13.42% 9.21%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.91% 39.18% 31.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,474 2,712 2,888
10th Percentile £363 £380 £400
25th Percentile £415 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.88% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £500 £519
% change year-on-year -3.00% -3.57% -5.73%
Number of hourly rates quoted 102 52 114
10th Percentile £28.09 £20.23 £21.39
25th Percentile £41.94 £22.88 £36.56
Median hourly rate £54.25 £43.50 £51.50
Median % change year-on-year +24.71% -15.53% -20.77%
75th Percentile £69.69 £64.06 £67.38
90th Percentile £79.30 £75.00 £74.83
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.75 £47.50
% change year-on-year +5.05% +2.63% -26.92%

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 12,479 10,127 13,016
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.41% 34.25% 29.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,312 6,671 9,165
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -5.75%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £719 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £477 £488 £488
% change year-on-year -2.15% - -3.47%
Number of hourly rates quoted 482 244 512
10th Percentile £41.94 £21.25 £30.69
25th Percentile £54.14 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -6.80%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £67.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.00
% change year-on-year +1.97% +2.81% -4.62%

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 10 March 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 10 March 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 10 March 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 -1 4,257 £519 -9.83% 3,054
London -2 2,405 £550 -8.33% 976
UK excluding London -1 1,979 £485 -3.00% 2,270
Work from Home 0 1,557 £525 -4.55% 1,341
North of England +12 662 £481 -3.75% 484
South East -6 414 £500 -6.10% 736
Yorkshire +4 354 £482 -5.95% 189
Midlands -5 285 £500 +3.41% 258
Scotland +2 283 £425 -9.57% 143
North West +14 263 £479 -4.13% 221
West Midlands -3 233 £500 - 118
South West -3 219 £538 -6.52% 290
East of England -3 122 £500 - 292
North East +11 51 £475 -7.32% 78
East Midlands -15 51 £447 +5.18% 137
Northern Ireland +9 29 £613 +16.67% 31
Wales -13 29 £438 -16.67% 85

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
1 259 (5.07%) Apache Spark
2 191 (3.74%) Apache Airflow
3 162 (3.17%) Confluence
4 147 (2.88%) Apache
5 67 (1.31%) SAS
6 62 (1.21%) SharePoint
7 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
8 24 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.47%) nginx
8 24 (0.47%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
10 19 (0.37%) Appian
11 12 (0.24%) ArcGIS
12 10 (0.20%) Camunda
13 6 (0.12%) CMS
14 5 (0.098%) Apache Superset
15 4 (0.078%) Oracle Application Server
16 3 (0.059%) CICS
16 3 (0.059%) Ethereum
16 3 (0.059%) Luigi
Applications
1 126 (2.47%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.61%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 24 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.27%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 3 (0.059%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.039%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 24 (0.47%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.24%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 7 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
5 4 (0.078%) Bloomberg AIM
5 4 (0.078%) Oracle EBS
6 3 (0.059%) Actimize
6 3 (0.059%) BambooHR
6 3 (0.059%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.039%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.039%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.039%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.039%) Shopify
8 1 (0.020%) Advent Geneva
8 1 (0.020%) Cerner Millennium
8 1 (0.020%) ION MarketView
8 1 (0.020%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,996 (39.10%) AWS
2 1,766 (34.59%) Azure
3 797 (15.61%) GCP
4 664 (13.01%) GitHub
5 533 (10.44%) Serverless
6 495 (9.70%) Power Platform
7 376 (7.37%) Azure DevOps
8 357 (6.99%) Amazon S3
9 352 (6.90%) AWS Lambda
10 330 (6.46%) GitHub Actions
11 258 (5.05%) Azure Data Factory
12 255 (5.00%) Snowflake
13 254 (4.98%) AWS CloudFormation
14 197 (3.86%) Amazon EKS
15 175 (3.43%) OpenShift
16 174 (3.41%) Amazon ECS
17 160 (3.13%) Amazon EC2
18 158 (3.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 151 (2.96%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 142 (2.78%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 209 (4.09%) Firewall
2 136 (2.66%) DNS
3 107 (2.10%) Network Security
3 107 (2.10%) TCP/IP
4 74 (1.45%) VPN
5 64 (1.25%) HTTP
6 60 (1.18%) BGP
7 55 (1.08%) WAN
8 40 (0.78%) SAN
9 39 (0.76%) Wireshark
10 38 (0.74%) MPLS
10 38 (0.74%) SSL
11 33 (0.65%) DHCP
11 33 (0.65%) OSPF
12 32 (0.63%) LAN
13 31 (0.61%) SD-WAN
14 27 (0.53%) VLAN
15 23 (0.45%) Wireless
16 22 (0.43%) BIG-IP
16 22 (0.43%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 413 (8.09%) Power BI
2 398 (7.80%) PostgreSQL
3 313 (6.13%) Data Warehouse
4 232 (4.54%) Data Lake
5 223 (4.37%) NoSQL
6 195 (3.82%) SQL Server
7 194 (3.80%) Relational Database
8 161 (3.15%) Tableau
9 156 (3.06%) Big Data
10 132 (2.59%) Metadata
11 123 (2.41%) Amazon RDS
11 123 (2.41%) BigQuery
12 118 (2.31%) MySQL
13 114 (2.23%) Delta Lake
14 104 (2.04%) Amazon Redshift
15 100 (1.96%) MongoDB
16 96 (1.88%) Amazon Athena
17 90 (1.76%) Azure SQL Database
18 84 (1.65%) Hadoop
19 80 (1.57%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 657 (12.87%) Git
2 542 (10.62%) Jenkins
3 419 (8.21%) GitLab
4 295 (5.78%) JIRA
5 94 (1.84%) MLflow
6 88 (1.72%) Selenium
7 51 (1.00%) Postman
8 50 (0.98%) Bitbucket
9 48 (0.94%) Cucumber
10 41 (0.80%) Sonatype Nexus
11 38 (0.74%) JUnit
12 36 (0.71%) JMeter
13 29 (0.57%) SpecFlow
14 26 (0.51%) Cypress.io
15 25 (0.49%) Visual Studio
16 24 (0.47%) CircleCI
17 22 (0.43%) Artifactory
18 20 (0.39%) Maven
19 19 (0.37%) Robot Framework
19 19 (0.37%) SonarQube
General
1 1,267 (24.82%) Social Skills
2 1,014 (19.86%) Finance
3 696 (13.63%) Analytical Skills
4 489 (9.58%) Public Sector
5 418 (8.19%) Banking
6 176 (3.45%) Front Office
7 127 (2.49%) Documentation Skills
8 100 (1.96%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.35%) Retail
10 64 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 63 (1.23%) Marketing
12 62 (1.21%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.10%) Financial Institution
14 51 (1.00%) Telecoms
15 50 (0.98%) Legal
16 49 (0.96%) Influencing Skills
17 44 (0.86%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.65%) Presentation Skills
19 31 (0.61%) Military
20 21 (0.41%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 953 (18.67%) Developer
2 706 (13.83%) Senior
3 705 (13.81%) Data Engineer
4 429 (8.40%) Python Developer
5 337 (6.60%) Lead
6 328 (6.43%) Architect
7 294 (5.76%) DevOps Engineer
8 291 (5.70%) Python Engineer
9 283 (5.54%) Analyst
10 259 (5.07%) Software Engineer
11 257 (5.03%) AWS Engineer
12 249 (4.88%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 203 (3.98%) Data Scientist
14 175 (3.43%) Platform Engineer
15 153 (3.00%) Azure Engineer
16 152 (2.98%) Senior Developer
17 141 (2.76%) Full-Stack Developer
18 139 (2.72%) Data Analyst
19 133 (2.61%) Senior Data Engineer
20 128 (2.51%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 446 (8.74%) REST
2 365 (7.15%) React
3 319 (6.25%) PySpark
4 318 (6.23%) Kafka
5 293 (5.74%) Node.js
6 228 (4.47%) PyTorch
7 227 (4.45%) Pandas
8 224 (4.39%) FastAPI
9 215 (4.21%) .NET
10 208 (4.07%) RESTful
11 183 (3.58%) TensorFlow
12 161 (3.15%) NumPy
13 146 (2.86%) scikit-learn
14 138 (2.70%) AngularJS
15 132 (2.59%) Flask
16 126 (2.47%) LangChain
17 123 (2.41%) JSON
18 117 (2.29%) pytest
19 116 (2.27%) Django
20 110 (2.15%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 492 (9.64%) Cloud Native
2 201 (3.94%) Algorithms
3 199 (3.90%) Distributed Systems
4 139 (2.72%) Product Ownership
5 125 (2.45%) Equities
6 121 (2.37%) Data Protection Act
7 112 (2.19%) Fixed Income
8 110 (2.15%) Data Structures
9 108 (2.12%) AI Agents
10 105 (2.06%) Onboarding
11 103 (2.02%) Derivative
12 89 (1.74%) Legacy Systems
13 87 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
14 86 (1.68%) Enterprise Software
14 86 (1.68%) Security Posture
15 85 (1.67%) Public Cloud
16 83 (1.63%) Data Centre
17 80 (1.57%) Management Information System
18 55 (1.08%) Hedge funds
19 54 (1.06%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 678 (13.28%) Linux
2 323 (6.33%) Windows
3 184 (3.60%) Unix
4 96 (1.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.67%) Android
7 33 (0.65%) Ubuntu
8 30 (0.59%) VMS
9 22 (0.43%) CentOS
9 22 (0.43%) Mac OS
10 20 (0.39%) Apple iOS
10 20 (0.39%) Solaris
11 11 (0.22%) AIX
12 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
12 9 (0.18%) Windows 7
13 5 (0.098%) Debian
13 5 (0.098%) Embedded Linux
13 5 (0.098%) zOS
14 4 (0.078%) Amazon Linux
14 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,871 (36.65%) CI/CD
2 1,439 (28.19%) DevOps
3 1,225 (24.00%) Agile
4 1,117 (21.88%) AI
5 1,058 (20.72%) Problem-Solving
6 998 (19.55%) Analytics
7 899 (17.61%) Infrastructure as Code
8 859 (16.83%) Machine Learning
9 818 (16.02%) Data Pipeline
10 760 (14.89%) Containerisation
11 683 (13.38%) Data Engineering
12 675 (13.22%) ETL
13 660 (12.93%) Data Modelling
14 621 (12.16%) Data Science
15 591 (11.58%) Test Automation
16 587 (11.50%) Software Engineering
17 493 (9.66%) Business Intelligence
17 493 (9.66%) Observability
18 447 (8.76%) LLM
19 381 (7.46%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,605 (31.44%) SQL
2 722 (14.14%) Java
3 665 (13.03%) PowerShell
4 590 (11.56%) Bash
5 502 (9.83%) JavaScript
6 353 (6.91%) TypeScript
7 330 (6.46%) C#
8 229 (4.49%) Go
9 172 (3.37%) C++
10 149 (2.92%) R
11 115 (2.25%) Scala
12 113 (2.21%) Shell Script
13 109 (2.14%) Perl
14 94 (1.84%) Ruby
15 69 (1.35%) Bicep
16 60 (1.18%) Kusto Query Language
17 48 (0.94%) C
18 46 (0.90%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 45 (0.88%) VBA
20 41 (0.80%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,160 (22.72%) Security Cleared
2 929 (18.20%) SC Cleared
3 445 (8.72%) Degree
4 209 (4.09%) Computer Science Degree
5 142 (2.78%) DV Cleared
6 129 (2.53%) AWS Certification
7 123 (2.41%) Master's Degree
8 121 (2.37%) BPSS Clearance
9 102 (2.00%) Azure Certification
10 94 (1.84%) CISSP
11 71 (1.39%) Cisco Certification
12 56 (1.10%) CCNP
13 51 (1.00%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 47 (0.92%) PhD
15 45 (0.88%) CISM
16 38 (0.74%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.71%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.63%) Microsoft Certified Professional
19 31 (0.61%) CEH
20 27 (0.53%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 478 (9.36%) Data Quality
2 210 (4.11%) QA
3 179 (3.51%) GDPR
4 104 (2.04%) NIST
5 102 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 80 (1.57%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.65%) SLA
9 31 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 27 (0.53%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.45%) NCSC
12 19 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.25%) WCAG
15 12 (0.24%) EU AI Act
16 11 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials
17 10 (0.20%) MiFID
17 10 (0.20%) PMO
17 10 (0.20%) PSD2
18 9 (0.18%) EMIR
System Software
1 931 (18.24%) Docker
2 172 (3.37%) Active Directory
3 114 (2.23%) VMware Infrastructure
4 55 (1.08%) Virtual Machines
5 54 (1.06%) vSphere
6 46 (0.90%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.57%) Hyper-V
8 25 (0.49%) Firmware
9 15 (0.29%) KVM
9 15 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
10 12 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 11 (0.22%) HDFS
12 10 (0.20%) Lustre
13 9 (0.18%) GPFS
14 8 (0.16%) SRDF
14 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
15 6 (0.12%) NFS
16 5 (0.098%) Ceph
16 5 (0.098%) NDS
16 5 (0.098%) NetIQ eDirectory
Systems Management
1 1,103 (21.61%) Terraform
2 1,048 (20.53%) Kubernetes
3 543 (10.64%) Ansible
4 352 (6.90%) Grafana
5 309 (6.05%) Prometheus
6 93 (1.82%) Argo
7 78 (1.53%) Puppet
8 49 (0.96%) Istio
9 43 (0.84%) Kibana
9 43 (0.84%) vRealize
10 36 (0.71%) Nessus
11 35 (0.69%) Progress Chef
12 32 (0.63%) vCenter Server
13 29 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
14 26 (0.51%) Control-M
14 26 (0.51%) NetBackup
15 24 (0.47%) IBM Guardium
16 22 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
17 20 (0.39%) Rancher
18 16 (0.31%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 627 (12.28%) Microsoft
2 520 (10.19%) Databricks
3 300 (5.88%) Google
4 229 (4.49%) Splunk
5 213 (4.17%) Oracle
6 211 (4.13%) VMware
7 144 (2.82%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.37%) Cisco
9 120 (2.35%) OpenAI
10 103 (2.02%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.65%) CyberArk
12 81 (1.59%) Foundry
13 67 (1.31%) BeyondTrust
14 61 (1.19%) F5
15 58 (1.14%) Informatica
16 57 (1.12%) Palo Alto
17 49 (0.96%) IBM
18 46 (0.90%) SAP
19 41 (0.80%) Dynatrace
20 40 (0.78%) Tenable