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 23 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
23 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,224 3,957 3,985
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.25% 13.40% 9.11%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.65% 39.37% 31.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,528 2,782 2,845
10th Percentile £363 £388 £400
25th Percentile £420 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £620 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £812 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.44% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 132 51 102
10th Percentile £30.00 £21.25 £21.30
25th Percentile £45.64 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £39.32 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +39.88% -25.10% -19.23%
75th Percentile £74.26 £58.75 £68.56
90th Percentile £83.75 £75.00 £77.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -25.00% -1.03%

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 12,852 10,050 12,810
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.69% 34.03% 29.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,520 6,806 9,111
10th Percentile £352 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 242 479
10th Percentile £42.50 £22.48 £31.25
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -1.54%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £68.75
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% -

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 23 April 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 23 April 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 23 April 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 4,402 £520 -5.45% 2,559
London -3 2,513 £550 -8.33% 1,115
UK excluding London -3 1,983 £481 -3.75% 1,983
Work from Home 0 1,508 £525 -4.55% 1,062
North of England +9 688 £481 -1.79% 440
South East -1 411 £500 -4.76% 628
Yorkshire +1 391 £475 -5.00% 135
Scotland 0 254 £425 -10.53% 121
Midlands -8 252 £500 +8.93% 238
North West +6 250 £500 +5.26% 223
South West 0 237 £500 -9.09% 229
West Midlands -6 191 £500 +1.01% 116
East of England +3 132 £500 -0.50% 258
East Midlands -11 60 £463 +9.47% 120
North East +8 56 £475 -1.30% 84
Northern Ireland +15 24 £463 -11.90% 48
Wales -15 23 £463 -14.35% 49

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
1 286 (5.47%) Apache Spark
2 216 (4.13%) Apache Airflow
3 164 (3.14%) Apache
4 148 (2.83%) Confluence
5 55 (1.05%) SharePoint
6 48 (0.92%) SAS
7 28 (0.54%) nginx
8 27 (0.52%) Jupyter
9 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 23 (0.44%) OpenStack
11 15 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
12 13 (0.25%) Appian
13 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
14 9 (0.17%) Apache Superset
14 9 (0.17%) Camunda
15 8 (0.15%) CMS
16 6 (0.11%) CICS
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
17 5 (0.096%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 138 (2.64%) Microsoft Excel
2 25 (0.48%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.11%) CPLEX
7 5 (0.096%) Weka
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 6 (0.11%) SAP IBP
6 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
7 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
8 2 (0.038%) Actimize
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
9 1 (0.019%) IBM Planning Analytics
Cloud Services
1 1,995 (38.19%) AWS
2 1,798 (34.42%) Azure
3 771 (14.76%) GCP
4 676 (12.94%) GitHub
5 518 (9.92%) Power Platform
6 499 (9.55%) Serverless
7 391 (7.48%) Azure DevOps
8 383 (7.33%) Amazon S3
9 361 (6.91%) AWS Lambda
10 352 (6.74%) GitHub Actions
11 277 (5.30%) Azure Data Factory
12 234 (4.48%) AWS CloudFormation
12 234 (4.48%) Snowflake
13 172 (3.29%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 170 (3.25%) Amazon EKS
15 159 (3.04%) OpenShift
16 155 (2.97%) Amazon ECS
16 155 (2.97%) dbt
17 141 (2.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 139 (2.66%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 182 (3.48%) Firewall
2 136 (2.60%) DNS
3 111 (2.12%) Network Security
4 91 (1.74%) TCP/IP
5 76 (1.45%) BGP
6 73 (1.40%) VPN
7 62 (1.19%) WAN
8 60 (1.15%) HTTP
9 44 (0.84%) SAN
10 43 (0.82%) OSPF
11 36 (0.69%) MPLS
12 35 (0.67%) VLAN
13 32 (0.61%) SNMP
14 30 (0.57%) DHCP
14 30 (0.57%) LAN
14 30 (0.57%) SSL
15 29 (0.56%) Wireshark
16 27 (0.52%) VXLAN
17 23 (0.44%) NAS
17 23 (0.44%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 439 (8.40%) Power BI
2 349 (6.68%) PostgreSQL
3 289 (5.53%) Data Warehouse
4 240 (4.59%) Data Lake
5 231 (4.42%) SQL Server
6 200 (3.83%) Tableau
7 193 (3.69%) NoSQL
8 175 (3.35%) Relational Database
9 160 (3.06%) Metadata
10 158 (3.02%) Big Data
11 135 (2.58%) Delta Lake
12 134 (2.57%) BigQuery
13 119 (2.28%) Amazon Athena
14 117 (2.24%) Amazon Redshift
15 106 (2.03%) MongoDB
16 104 (1.99%) Amazon RDS
17 100 (1.91%) MySQL
18 93 (1.78%) DynamoDB
19 92 (1.76%) Azure SQL Database
20 84 (1.61%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 655 (12.54%) Git
2 487 (9.32%) Jenkins
3 362 (6.93%) GitLab
4 272 (5.21%) JIRA
5 89 (1.70%) MLflow
6 79 (1.51%) Selenium
7 60 (1.15%) Postman
8 44 (0.84%) Cucumber
9 43 (0.82%) Bitbucket
10 34 (0.65%) Sonatype Nexus
11 32 (0.61%) JMeter
12 28 (0.54%) Artifactory
12 28 (0.54%) SonarQube
12 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
13 27 (0.52%) Cypress.io
14 26 (0.50%) JUnit
15 24 (0.46%) Maven
16 23 (0.44%) Gatling
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
18 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,182 (22.63%) Social Skills
2 1,001 (19.16%) Finance
3 721 (13.80%) Analytical Skills
4 495 (9.48%) Public Sector
5 366 (7.01%) Banking
6 174 (3.33%) Front Office
7 132 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
8 87 (1.67%) Investment Banking
9 71 (1.36%) Marketing
10 67 (1.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 64 (1.23%) Retail
12 60 (1.15%) Legal
13 56 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (1.01%) Telecoms
15 49 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
16 38 (0.73%) Financial Institution
16 38 (0.73%) Manufacturing
17 32 (0.61%) Publishing
18 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
19 28 (0.54%) Military
Job Titles
1 993 (19.01%) Developer
2 770 (14.74%) Data Engineer
3 737 (14.11%) Senior
4 487 (9.32%) Python Developer
5 353 (6.76%) Architect
6 338 (6.47%) Lead
7 286 (5.47%) Python Engineer
8 282 (5.40%) Analyst
8 282 (5.40%) DevOps Engineer
9 255 (4.88%) Software Engineer
10 235 (4.50%) AWS Engineer
11 228 (4.36%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 216 (4.13%) Data Scientist
13 181 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
14 163 (3.12%) Azure Engineer
15 160 (3.06%) Senior Developer
16 152 (2.91%) Senior Data Engineer
17 143 (2.74%) Data Analyst
18 139 (2.66%) Full-Stack Developer
19 117 (2.24%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 410 (7.85%) REST
2 359 (6.87%) React
3 346 (6.62%) PySpark
4 331 (6.34%) Kafka
5 270 (5.17%) Node.js
6 231 (4.42%) .NET
7 229 (4.38%) Pandas
8 195 (3.73%) PyTorch
9 186 (3.56%) RESTful
10 176 (3.37%) FastAPI
11 168 (3.22%) JSON
12 148 (2.83%) TensorFlow
13 147 (2.81%) NumPy
14 137 (2.62%) scikit-learn
15 129 (2.47%) LangChain
16 127 (2.43%) Flask
17 122 (2.34%) AngularJS
18 118 (2.26%) Django
19 114 (2.18%) OAuth
20 105 (2.01%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 508 (9.72%) Cloud Native
2 223 (4.27%) Distributed Systems
3 169 (3.24%) Algorithms
4 157 (3.01%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.43%) AI Agents
6 118 (2.26%) Data Protection Act
7 112 (2.14%) Equities
8 111 (2.12%) Fixed Income
9 108 (2.07%) Derivative
10 107 (2.05%) Data Structures
11 103 (1.97%) Onboarding
12 94 (1.80%) Management Information System
13 93 (1.78%) Data Centre
14 92 (1.76%) Enterprise Software
15 90 (1.72%) Legacy Systems
16 86 (1.65%) Hybrid Cloud
17 85 (1.63%) Security Posture
18 74 (1.42%) Public Cloud
19 49 (0.94%) Virtual Team
20 48 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 654 (12.52%) Linux
2 290 (5.55%) Windows
3 201 (3.85%) Unix
4 104 (1.99%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 69 (1.32%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.73%) VMS
7 35 (0.67%) Ubuntu
8 27 (0.52%) Android
9 20 (0.38%) AIX
9 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
10 19 (0.36%) Solaris
11 18 (0.34%) CentOS
12 15 (0.29%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.17%) Debian
13 9 (0.17%) zOS
14 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.096%) Rocky
16 5 (0.096%) Windows 7
16 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,907 (36.50%) CI/CD
2 1,410 (26.99%) DevOps
3 1,161 (22.22%) Agile
4 1,152 (22.05%) AI
5 1,060 (20.29%) Analytics
6 995 (19.05%) Problem-Solving
7 916 (17.53%) Infrastructure as Code
8 857 (16.41%) Data Pipeline
9 820 (15.70%) Machine Learning
10 731 (13.99%) Containerisation
11 700 (13.40%) Data Engineering
12 691 (13.23%) Data Modelling
13 679 (13.00%) ETL
14 605 (11.58%) Data Science
15 602 (11.52%) Software Engineering
16 553 (10.59%) Test Automation
17 523 (10.01%) Observability
18 518 (9.92%) Business Intelligence
19 435 (8.33%) LLM
20 409 (7.83%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,715 (32.83%) SQL
2 771 (14.76%) Java
3 654 (12.52%) PowerShell
4 575 (11.01%) Bash
5 482 (9.23%) JavaScript
6 354 (6.78%) C#
7 349 (6.68%) TypeScript
8 206 (3.94%) Go
9 175 (3.35%) R
10 154 (2.95%) C++
11 143 (2.74%) Scala
12 109 (2.09%) Shell Script
13 97 (1.86%) Ruby
14 91 (1.74%) Perl
15 79 (1.51%) Bicep
16 54 (1.03%) C
16 54 (1.03%) Kusto Query Language
17 53 (1.01%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 49 (0.94%) T-SQL
19 48 (0.92%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,220 (23.35%) Security Cleared
2 1,003 (19.20%) SC Cleared
3 398 (7.62%) Degree
4 180 (3.45%) Computer Science Degree
5 142 (2.72%) BPSS Clearance
6 138 (2.64%) DV Cleared
7 104 (1.99%) Azure Certification
8 103 (1.97%) AWS Certification
9 94 (1.80%) Master's Degree
10 93 (1.78%) CISSP
11 76 (1.45%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.11%) CCNP
13 57 (1.09%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 49 (0.94%) CISM
15 44 (0.84%) PhD
16 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
17 31 (0.59%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 28 (0.54%) ISTQB
19 26 (0.50%) CCNA
20 25 (0.48%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 516 (9.88%) Data Quality
2 220 (4.21%) QA
3 168 (3.22%) GDPR
4 109 (2.09%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 104 (1.99%) NIST
6 80 (1.53%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) SLA
8 33 (0.63%) PCI DSS
9 29 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 27 (0.52%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
13 17 (0.33%) WCAG
14 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.23%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.17%) GRC
18 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
19 6 (0.11%) PSD2
System Software
1 840 (16.08%) Docker
2 168 (3.22%) Active Directory
3 100 (1.91%) VMware Infrastructure
4 68 (1.30%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.80%) VMware NSX
6 40 (0.77%) vSphere
7 32 (0.61%) Firmware
8 31 (0.59%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.34%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) KVM
11 13 (0.25%) HDFS
12 9 (0.17%) Ceph
12 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.17%) SRDF
13 7 (0.13%) Lustre
13 7 (0.13%) NFS
14 6 (0.11%) GPFS
14 6 (0.11%) Postfix
14 6 (0.11%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 6 (0.11%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,118 (21.40%) Terraform
2 956 (18.30%) Kubernetes
3 511 (9.78%) Ansible
4 337 (6.45%) Grafana
5 286 (5.47%) Prometheus
6 75 (1.44%) Argo
7 73 (1.40%) Puppet
8 52 (1.00%) Istio
9 47 (0.90%) vRealize
10 46 (0.88%) Kibana
11 34 (0.65%) vCenter Server
12 33 (0.63%) Progress Chef
13 27 (0.52%) Nessus
14 25 (0.48%) Single Sign-On
15 23 (0.44%) Control-M
15 23 (0.44%) Nagios
15 23 (0.44%) Rancher
16 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
17 19 (0.36%) Kubeflow
17 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 635 (12.16%) Microsoft
2 570 (10.91%) Databricks
3 275 (5.26%) Google
4 221 (4.23%) Splunk
5 216 (4.13%) Oracle
6 188 (3.60%) VMware
7 131 (2.51%) Red Hat
8 126 (2.41%) Cisco
9 123 (2.35%) OpenAI
10 99 (1.90%) ServiceNow
11 89 (1.70%) CyberArk
12 74 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
13 64 (1.23%) Foundry
13 64 (1.23%) IBM
13 64 (1.23%) Informatica
14 56 (1.07%) Dynatrace
15 52 (1.00%) F5
16 51 (0.98%) Palo Alto
17 48 (0.92%) SAP
18 42 (0.80%) Salesforce