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 2 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 14
Rank change year-on-year -1 +3 -3
Contract jobs citing Python 5,570 4,070 4,149
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.82% 13.14% 9.56%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.24% 38.98% 31.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,655 2,766 2,971
10th Percentile £363 £367 £375
25th Percentile £425 £440 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £560
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -4.02% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £659 £700
90th Percentile £738 £800 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 64 123
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.87
25th Percentile £41.94 £33.91 £34.38
Median hourly rate £54.00 £45.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -28.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £70.00 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £63.03 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.25 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +4.50% -25.93% +11.20%

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 13,842 10,442 13,271
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.90% 33.72% 30.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,981 7,047 9,322
10th Percentile £358 £350 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £511 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.20% -2.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £753 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £491 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.37% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 547 253 538
10th Percentile £34.08 £26.46 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.75 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.70 £79.74 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.25 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.42% -4.23% +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 2 July 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 2 July 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 2 July 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 -3 4,655 £525 -4.55% 3,292
London -3 2,671 £550 -4.35% 1,735
UK excluding London -1 2,193 £500 - 1,974
Work from Home -2 1,574 £525 -4.55% 1,368
North of England +8 788 £488 +2.09% 455
South East -9 435 £525 +3.19% 650
Yorkshire +2 432 £500 - 134
Scotland +3 314 £440 -7.37% 104
North West +3 279 £500 +5.26% 246
South West -4 261 £500 -9.09% 279
Midlands -17 243 £477 +3.92% 208
West Midlands -17 195 £476 +0.21% 104
East of England -13 130 £500 -0.25% 224
North East +10 89 £438 +2.94% 79
East Midlands -14 47 £495 +10.31% 104
Wales -9 31 £483 +6.04% 41
Northern Ireland +11 28 £369 -37.23% 42

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 (5.04%) Apache Spark
2 257 (4.61%) Apache Airflow
3 194 (3.48%) Apache
4 173 (3.11%) Confluence
5 54 (0.97%) Jupyter
6 51 (0.92%) SAS
6 51 (0.92%) SharePoint
7 24 (0.43%) OpenStack
8 21 (0.38%) nginx
9 19 (0.34%) Palantir Foundry
10 18 (0.32%) ArcGIS
11 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Exchange
12 12 (0.22%) IIS
13 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) Appian
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
15 7 (0.13%) CMS
16 6 (0.11%) Camunda
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 118 (2.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.56%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 23 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
7 14 (0.25%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.018%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.38%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.20%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.072%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.054%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.036%) Endur
10 2 (0.036%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,069 (37.15%) AWS
2 1,858 (33.36%) Azure
3 827 (14.85%) GCP
4 663 (11.90%) GitHub
5 524 (9.41%) Power Platform
6 480 (8.62%) Serverless
7 412 (7.40%) Amazon S3
8 393 (7.06%) Azure DevOps
9 359 (6.45%) AWS Lambda
9 359 (6.45%) GitHub Actions
10 281 (5.04%) Snowflake
11 240 (4.31%) Azure Data Factory
12 205 (3.68%) dbt
13 181 (3.25%) AWS CloudFormation
14 168 (3.02%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 165 (2.96%) Amazon EKS
16 156 (2.80%) OpenShift
17 155 (2.78%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 134 (2.41%) Amazon EC2
19 124 (2.23%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 239 (4.29%) Firewall
2 164 (2.94%) DNS
3 120 (2.15%) Network Security
4 117 (2.10%) BGP
5 116 (2.08%) WAN
6 106 (1.90%) TCP/IP
7 99 (1.78%) VPN
8 74 (1.33%) OSPF
9 58 (1.04%) BIG-IP
10 57 (1.02%) SD-WAN
11 55 (0.99%) HTTP
11 55 (0.99%) SAN
12 50 (0.90%) VXLAN
13 49 (0.88%) VLAN
14 48 (0.86%) DHCP
15 47 (0.84%) SSL
16 43 (0.77%) LAN
17 41 (0.74%) MPLS
18 40 (0.72%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
19 39 (0.70%) Ethernet VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 465 (8.35%) Power BI
2 355 (6.37%) PostgreSQL
3 311 (5.58%) Data Warehouse
4 252 (4.52%) SQL Server
5 210 (3.77%) Data Lake
6 199 (3.57%) Tableau
7 192 (3.45%) Relational Database
8 167 (3.00%) NoSQL
9 165 (2.96%) Metadata
10 158 (2.84%) Big Data
11 142 (2.55%) BigQuery
12 140 (2.51%) Amazon Athena
13 139 (2.50%) Amazon Redshift
14 133 (2.39%) Delta Lake
15 126 (2.26%) MongoDB
16 104 (1.87%) DynamoDB
17 101 (1.81%) Amazon RDS
18 91 (1.63%) MySQL
19 75 (1.35%) Snowflake Schema
20 72 (1.29%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 677 (12.15%) Git
2 501 (8.99%) Jenkins
3 396 (7.11%) GitLab
4 314 (5.64%) JIRA
5 79 (1.42%) Selenium
6 75 (1.35%) MLflow
7 60 (1.08%) Postman
8 39 (0.70%) JMeter
9 36 (0.65%) Bitbucket
9 36 (0.65%) Cypress.io
10 33 (0.59%) SonarQube
11 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
11 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
12 29 (0.52%) REST Assured
13 28 (0.50%) Maven
13 28 (0.50%) Sonatype Nexus
14 27 (0.48%) JUnit
15 24 (0.43%) Gatling
16 23 (0.41%) Claude Code
17 19 (0.34%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,211 (21.74%) Social Skills
2 1,167 (20.95%) Finance
3 748 (13.43%) Analytical Skills
4 528 (9.48%) Public Sector
5 419 (7.52%) Banking
6 198 (3.55%) Front Office
7 135 (2.42%) Documentation Skills
8 130 (2.33%) Investment Banking
9 108 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 86 (1.54%) Retail
11 80 (1.44%) Marketing
12 61 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
13 60 (1.08%) Telecoms
14 58 (1.04%) Legal
15 50 (0.90%) Financial Institution
16 46 (0.83%) Influencing Skills
16 46 (0.83%) Publishing
17 40 (0.72%) Military
18 35 (0.63%) Manufacturing
19 33 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 989 (17.76%) Developer
2 862 (15.48%) Data Engineer
3 839 (15.06%) Senior
4 524 (9.41%) Python Developer
5 390 (7.00%) Lead
6 373 (6.70%) Python Engineer
7 318 (5.71%) Architect
8 310 (5.57%) DevOps Engineer
9 292 (5.24%) Software Engineer
10 278 (4.99%) Analyst
11 252 (4.52%) AWS Engineer
12 243 (4.36%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 219 (3.93%) Data Scientist
14 172 (3.09%) Platform Engineer
15 171 (3.07%) Senior Data Engineer
16 170 (3.05%) Azure Engineer
17 167 (3.00%) Senior Developer
18 165 (2.96%) Cloud Engineer
19 142 (2.55%) Full-Stack Developer
20 139 (2.50%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 411 (7.38%) REST
2 377 (6.77%) PySpark
3 370 (6.64%) React
4 340 (6.10%) Kafka
5 248 (4.45%) .NET
6 216 (3.88%) Node.js
7 212 (3.81%) RESTful
8 210 (3.77%) FastAPI
9 201 (3.61%) Pandas
10 190 (3.41%) JSON
11 168 (3.02%) Django
12 163 (2.93%) PyTorch
13 132 (2.37%) LangChain
14 125 (2.24%) NumPy
15 122 (2.19%) Flask
16 116 (2.08%) scikit-learn
17 111 (1.99%) TensorFlow
18 109 (1.96%) OAuth
19 102 (1.83%) pytest
20 98 (1.76%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 724 (13.00%) Cloud Native
2 292 (5.24%) Distributed Systems
3 164 (2.94%) Onboarding
4 161 (2.89%) AI Agents
5 152 (2.73%) Data Centre
6 148 (2.66%) Algorithms
7 146 (2.62%) Product Ownership
8 128 (2.30%) Data Structures
9 122 (2.19%) Legacy Systems
10 116 (2.08%) Management Information System
11 115 (2.06%) Data Protection Act
12 109 (1.96%) Derivative
13 107 (1.92%) Hybrid Cloud
14 98 (1.76%) Fixed Income
15 95 (1.71%) Equities
16 82 (1.47%) Security Posture
17 75 (1.35%) Public Cloud
18 63 (1.13%) Enterprise Software
19 60 (1.08%) Self-Motivation
20 58 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 654 (11.74%) Linux
2 311 (5.58%) Windows
3 222 (3.99%) Unix
4 122 (2.19%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 78 (1.40%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 31 (0.56%) VMS
8 26 (0.47%) AIX
9 23 (0.41%) Android
10 19 (0.34%) Solaris
11 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
12 16 (0.29%) CentOS
13 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
14 12 (0.22%) zOS
15 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
16 7 (0.13%) Debian
16 7 (0.13%) Rocky
17 5 (0.090%) Amazon Linux
17 5 (0.090%) Embedded Linux
17 5 (0.090%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,107 (37.83%) CI/CD
2 1,532 (27.50%) DevOps
3 1,362 (24.45%) AI
4 1,234 (22.15%) Agile
5 1,117 (20.05%) Analytics
6 1,017 (18.26%) Infrastructure as Code
7 987 (17.72%) Data Pipeline
8 921 (16.54%) Problem-Solving
9 876 (15.73%) Machine Learning
10 792 (14.22%) Data Engineering
11 755 (13.55%) Containerisation
12 748 (13.43%) Software Engineering
13 733 (13.16%) Data Modelling
14 693 (12.44%) ETL
15 619 (11.11%) Data Science
16 612 (10.99%) Observability
17 571 (10.25%) Test Automation
18 545 (9.78%) Business Intelligence
19 522 (9.37%) LLM
20 470 (8.44%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,801 (32.33%) SQL
2 791 (14.20%) Java
3 651 (11.69%) PowerShell
4 647 (11.62%) Bash
5 461 (8.28%) JavaScript
6 395 (7.09%) TypeScript
7 337 (6.05%) C#
8 213 (3.82%) Go
9 160 (2.87%) R
10 138 (2.48%) C++
11 130 (2.33%) Scala
12 114 (2.05%) Shell Script
13 87 (1.56%) Bicep
14 72 (1.29%) Perl
15 60 (1.08%) Ruby
16 56 (1.01%) PL/SQL
17 55 (0.99%) Groovy
18 52 (0.93%) C
18 52 (0.93%) T-SQL
19 51 (0.92%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,240 (22.26%) Security Cleared
2 997 (17.90%) SC Cleared
3 420 (7.54%) Degree
4 171 (3.07%) DV Cleared
5 155 (2.78%) Computer Science Degree
6 134 (2.41%) BPSS Clearance
7 119 (2.14%) AWS Certification
8 113 (2.03%) Azure Certification
9 96 (1.72%) CISSP
10 85 (1.53%) Cisco Certification
11 76 (1.36%) Master's Degree
12 56 (1.01%) CCNP
13 51 (0.92%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 39 (0.70%) CISM
15 35 (0.63%) PhD
16 34 (0.61%) Microsoft Certification
17 32 (0.57%) ISTQB
18 31 (0.56%) CCIE
19 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
20 21 (0.38%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 542 (9.73%) Data Quality
2 236 (4.24%) QA
3 129 (2.32%) GDPR
4 113 (2.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 112 (2.01%) NIST
6 84 (1.51%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.61%) SLA
8 26 (0.47%) PCI DSS
9 24 (0.43%) HIPAA
9 24 (0.43%) WCAG
10 22 (0.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 18 (0.32%) Actionable Recommendations
11 18 (0.32%) NCSC
12 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
13 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
14 10 (0.18%) GRC
14 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 858 (15.40%) Docker
2 124 (2.23%) Active Directory
3 108 (1.94%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.70%) vSphere
6 36 (0.65%) VMware NSX
7 30 (0.54%) Firmware
8 29 (0.52%) Hyper-V
9 23 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) NFS
11 15 (0.27%) KVM
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.22%) Squid
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) Ceph
16 8 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.13%) HDFS
17 7 (0.13%) Postfix
18 5 (0.090%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
19 4 (0.072%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 1,191 (21.38%) Terraform
2 1,024 (18.38%) Kubernetes
3 582 (10.45%) Ansible
4 335 (6.01%) Grafana
5 274 (4.92%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.33%) Puppet
7 57 (1.02%) Argo
8 45 (0.81%) Istio
9 43 (0.77%) vRealize
10 41 (0.74%) Progress Chef
11 35 (0.63%) vCenter Server
12 32 (0.57%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) Control-M
14 26 (0.47%) Nessus
14 26 (0.47%) ZABBIX
15 25 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
15 25 (0.45%) Nagios
16 23 (0.41%) Single Sign-On
17 21 (0.38%) HAProxy
18 20 (0.36%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 632 (11.35%) Microsoft
2 574 (10.31%) Databricks
3 319 (5.73%) Google
4 246 (4.42%) Oracle
5 212 (3.81%) Splunk
6 165 (2.96%) VMware
7 144 (2.59%) OpenAI
8 137 (2.46%) Cisco
9 112 (2.01%) ServiceNow
10 111 (1.99%) Red Hat
11 90 (1.62%) F5
12 88 (1.58%) Palo Alto
13 84 (1.51%) Dynatrace
14 83 (1.49%) Informatica
15 78 (1.40%) IBM
16 64 (1.15%) CyberArk
17 63 (1.13%) Fortinet
18 58 (1.04%) Foundry
19 54 (0.97%) Arista
20 53 (0.95%) Salesforce