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

6 months to
17 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,577 4,295 3,984
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.42% 12.98% 10.28%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.60% 39.53% 32.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,651 2,851 2,873
10th Percentile £378 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £428 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.83% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £644 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £511
% change year-on-year - -2.15% -2.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 73 119
10th Percentile £30.00 £26.69 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.50 £34.75 £30.50
Median hourly rate £55.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +11.00% -13.04% -10.68%
75th Percentile £77.50 £59.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £84.59 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £56.50 £52.50 £67.26
% change year-on-year +7.62% -21.94% +16.97%

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 14,083 10,864 12,175
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.32% 32.82% 31.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,161 7,261 8,533
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £503 £534
Median % change year-on-year +2.49% -5.81% -3.00%
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 523 280 397
10th Percentile £29.97 £28.24 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.38 £36.19 £44.49
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.12% -14.62% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.95 £83.11 £77.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +2.36% -2.31% +8.33%

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 17 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 17 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 17 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 4,771 £550 +2.42% 1,944
London -4 2,760 £575 - 813
UK excluding London -7 2,186 £500 - 1,534
Work from Home -8 1,513 £530 -3.68% 778
North of England +2 750 £500 +2.04% 371
South East -8 457 £537 +7.40% 519
Yorkshire 0 383 £500 - 113
South West -1 298 £505 -3.81% 219
North West +2 284 £525 +10.53% 184
Scotland 0 276 £450 -10.00% 68
Midlands -16 242 £476 +2.92% 176
West Midlands -15 194 £470 -1.05% 102
East of England -9 142 £500 -0.50% 151
North East -1 94 £425 -18.27% 78
East Midlands -13 48 £495 +16.47% 73
Wales -7 28 £530 +30.86% 34
Northern Ireland +7 19 £363 -32.56% 20

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
1 291 (5.22%) Apache Airflow
2 282 (5.06%) Apache Spark
3 219 (3.93%) Apache
4 174 (3.12%) Confluence
5 56 (1.00%) Jupyter
6 48 (0.86%) SharePoint
7 45 (0.81%) SAS
8 27 (0.48%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 17 (0.30%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 8 (0.14%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.13%) Apache Superset
14 7 (0.13%) CICS
14 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
15 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 5 (0.090%) Apache Solr
Applications
1 107 (1.92%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 21 (0.38%) Microsoft Office
3 21 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 19 (0.34%) Spreadsheet
5 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
5 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.036%) Revit
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.018%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
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%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Endur
9 3 (0.054%) Front Arena
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Global One
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 2,095 (37.56%) AWS
2 1,899 (34.05%) Azure
3 856 (15.35%) GCP
4 701 (12.57%) GitHub
5 500 (8.97%) Power Platform
6 456 (8.18%) Serverless
7 431 (7.73%) Azure DevOps
8 401 (7.19%) GitHub Actions
9 390 (6.99%) Amazon S3
10 349 (6.26%) AWS Lambda
11 317 (5.68%) Snowflake
12 229 (4.11%) Azure Data Factory
13 222 (3.98%) dbt
14 186 (3.34%) AWS CloudFormation
15 182 (3.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 177 (3.17%) Amazon EKS
17 137 (2.46%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 135 (2.42%) Amazon EC2
19 134 (2.40%) Entra ID
20 132 (2.37%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 282 (5.06%) Firewall
2 214 (3.84%) DNS
3 144 (2.58%) TCP/IP
4 125 (2.24%) Network Security
5 124 (2.22%) VPN
6 123 (2.21%) BGP
7 109 (1.95%) WAN
8 85 (1.52%) DHCP
9 71 (1.27%) OSPF
10 59 (1.06%) SD-WAN
10 59 (1.06%) VLAN
11 57 (1.02%) VXLAN
12 54 (0.97%) SSL
13 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
13 52 (0.93%) HTTP
14 45 (0.81%) Ethernet VPN
14 45 (0.81%) SAN
15 44 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 43 (0.77%) SNMP
17 36 (0.65%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 459 (8.23%) Power BI
2 326 (5.85%) Data Warehouse
3 319 (5.72%) PostgreSQL
4 218 (3.91%) SQL Server
5 201 (3.60%) Relational Database
6 196 (3.51%) Tableau
7 193 (3.46%) Metadata
8 186 (3.34%) Data Lake
9 159 (2.85%) NoSQL
10 158 (2.83%) BigQuery
11 150 (2.69%) Big Data
12 136 (2.44%) Amazon Redshift
13 129 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
14 120 (2.15%) MongoDB
15 118 (2.12%) Amazon RDS
16 117 (2.10%) Delta Lake
17 101 (1.81%) DynamoDB
18 86 (1.54%) MySQL
19 67 (1.20%) Snowflake Schema
20 64 (1.15%) Redis
Development Applications
1 726 (13.02%) Git
2 504 (9.04%) Jenkins
3 443 (7.94%) GitLab
4 286 (5.13%) JIRA
5 99 (1.78%) Selenium
6 57 (1.02%) Postman
7 54 (0.97%) JMeter
7 54 (0.97%) MLflow
8 48 (0.86%) SonarQube
9 45 (0.81%) Bitbucket
9 45 (0.81%) Claude Code
10 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
11 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
12 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
12 32 (0.57%) Gatling
13 30 (0.54%) Maven
14 29 (0.52%) REST Assured
14 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
15 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
16 22 (0.39%) JUnit
General
1 1,225 (21.97%) Social Skills
2 1,199 (21.50%) Finance
3 812 (14.56%) Analytical Skills
4 554 (9.93%) Public Sector
5 440 (7.89%) Banking
6 192 (3.44%) Front Office
7 133 (2.38%) Investment Banking
8 116 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
9 115 (2.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 107 (1.92%) Retail
11 88 (1.58%) Marketing
12 75 (1.34%) Telecoms
13 60 (1.08%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (0.95%) Legal
15 52 (0.93%) Military
16 48 (0.86%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.84%) Aerospace
18 45 (0.81%) Publishing
19 43 (0.77%) Manufacturing
20 38 (0.68%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 915 (16.41%) Developer
2 913 (16.37%) Senior
3 813 (14.58%) Data Engineer
4 493 (8.84%) Python Developer
5 476 (8.54%) Lead
6 411 (7.37%) Python Engineer
7 323 (5.79%) DevOps Engineer
8 309 (5.54%) Software Engineer
9 275 (4.93%) Analyst
10 274 (4.91%) Architect
11 263 (4.72%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 240 (4.30%) AWS Engineer
13 199 (3.57%) Data Scientist
14 195 (3.50%) Cloud Engineer
15 187 (3.35%) Platform Engineer
16 178 (3.19%) Senior Developer
17 173 (3.10%) Azure Engineer
18 166 (2.98%) Senior Data Engineer
19 139 (2.49%) Infrastructure Engineer
20 134 (2.40%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 447 (8.02%) REST
2 371 (6.65%) PySpark
3 355 (6.37%) Kafka
4 326 (5.85%) React
5 231 (4.14%) .NET
6 201 (3.60%) JSON
7 200 (3.59%) RESTful
8 199 (3.57%) FastAPI
9 185 (3.32%) Node.js
10 181 (3.25%) Django
11 172 (3.08%) Pandas
12 140 (2.51%) LangChain
13 136 (2.44%) PyTorch
14 117 (2.10%) pytest
15 109 (1.95%) YAML
16 107 (1.92%) Flask
17 104 (1.86%) HTML
17 104 (1.86%) OAuth
18 103 (1.85%) NumPy
19 96 (1.72%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 769 (13.79%) Cloud Native
2 313 (5.61%) Distributed Systems
3 224 (4.02%) AI Agents
4 210 (3.77%) Onboarding
5 160 (2.87%) Data Centre
6 153 (2.74%) Product Ownership
7 141 (2.53%) Algorithms
8 136 (2.44%) Data Structures
9 128 (2.30%) Legacy Systems
10 117 (2.10%) Hybrid Cloud
11 113 (2.03%) Derivative
12 109 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
13 107 (1.92%) Management Information System
14 93 (1.67%) Equities
15 86 (1.54%) Security Posture
16 83 (1.49%) Fixed Income
17 71 (1.27%) Enterprise Software
18 70 (1.26%) Public Cloud
19 65 (1.17%) Linux Command Line
20 63 (1.13%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 720 (12.91%) Linux
2 334 (5.99%) Windows
3 234 (4.20%) Unix
4 143 (2.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 80 (1.43%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.54%) AIX
7 30 (0.54%) VMS
8 17 (0.30%) Android
9 16 (0.29%) CentOS
9 16 (0.29%) Solaris
10 12 (0.22%) Apple iOS
11 11 (0.20%) zOS
12 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
13 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
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
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,193 (39.32%) CI/CD
2 1,598 (28.65%) DevOps
3 1,449 (25.98%) AI
4 1,257 (22.54%) Agile
5 1,151 (20.64%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,110 (19.90%) Analytics
7 996 (17.86%) Data Pipeline
8 913 (16.37%) Problem-Solving
9 879 (15.76%) Software Engineering
10 864 (15.49%) Machine Learning
11 794 (14.24%) Data Engineering
12 755 (13.54%) Containerisation
13 747 (13.39%) Data Modelling
14 683 (12.25%) Observability
15 655 (11.74%) ETL
16 617 (11.06%) Test Automation
17 590 (10.58%) Data Science
18 568 (10.18%) Continuous Improvement
19 547 (9.81%) Validation
20 538 (9.65%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,809 (32.44%) SQL
2 822 (14.74%) Java
3 750 (13.45%) Bash
4 734 (13.16%) PowerShell
5 454 (8.14%) JavaScript
6 364 (6.53%) TypeScript
7 300 (5.38%) C#
8 204 (3.66%) Go
9 147 (2.64%) C++
10 142 (2.55%) R
11 136 (2.44%) Shell Script
12 131 (2.35%) Scala
13 125 (2.24%) Bicep
14 85 (1.52%) Perl
15 61 (1.09%) PL/SQL
16 58 (1.04%) C
17 56 (1.00%) Groovy
18 55 (0.99%) Rust
19 53 (0.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 53 (0.95%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,311 (23.51%) Security Cleared
2 1,063 (19.06%) SC Cleared
3 421 (7.55%) Degree
4 204 (3.66%) DV Cleared
5 161 (2.89%) Computer Science Degree
6 140 (2.51%) AWS Certification
7 139 (2.49%) Azure Certification
8 116 (2.08%) BPSS Clearance
9 92 (1.65%) CISSP
10 88 (1.58%) Cisco Certification
11 73 (1.31%) Master's Degree
12 50 (0.90%) CCNP
13 42 (0.75%) Microsoft Certification
14 40 (0.72%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 35 (0.63%) PhD
16 34 (0.61%) ISTQB
17 31 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 31 (0.56%) CISM
18 29 (0.52%) CCIE
19 26 (0.47%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 580 (10.40%) Data Quality
2 273 (4.90%) QA
3 112 (2.01%) GDPR
4 107 (1.92%) NIST
5 102 (1.83%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.61%) SLA
8 30 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
9 27 (0.48%) NCSC
9 27 (0.48%) PCI DSS
9 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.47%) WCAG
11 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
13 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
14 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
15 7 (0.13%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.13%) GRC
15 7 (0.13%) HL7
System Software
1 913 (16.37%) Docker
2 158 (2.83%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.37%) VMware Infrastructure
4 63 (1.13%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.81%) vSphere
6 44 (0.79%) Hyper-V
7 36 (0.65%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.23%) Squid
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
13 10 (0.18%) KVM
14 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
15 7 (0.13%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,294 (23.20%) Terraform
2 1,088 (19.51%) Kubernetes
3 624 (11.19%) Ansible
4 339 (6.08%) Grafana
5 247 (4.43%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.60%) Puppet
7 74 (1.33%) Progress Chef
8 67 (1.20%) Argo
9 42 (0.75%) Istio
10 33 (0.59%) Single Sign-On
11 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
12 26 (0.47%) Control-M
12 26 (0.47%) vCenter Server
12 26 (0.47%) vRealize
13 25 (0.45%) Kibana
14 24 (0.43%) Nagios
15 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
16 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
17 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
17 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 681 (12.21%) Microsoft
2 549 (9.84%) Databricks
3 359 (6.44%) Google
4 253 (4.54%) Oracle
5 213 (3.82%) Splunk
6 176 (3.16%) VMware
7 143 (2.56%) Cisco
8 138 (2.47%) OpenAI
9 129 (2.31%) ServiceNow
10 104 (1.86%) Dynatrace
11 103 (1.85%) Red Hat
12 95 (1.70%) IBM
13 91 (1.63%) F5
14 84 (1.51%) Informatica
14 84 (1.51%) Palo Alto
15 69 (1.24%) Fortinet
16 68 (1.22%) CyberArk
16 68 (1.22%) SAP
17 67 (1.20%) Foundry
18 62 (1.11%) Salesforce