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 11 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 13
Rank change year-on-year 0 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 4,718 4,112 4,713
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.52% 11.41% 10.03%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.85% 35.60% 32.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,105 2,724 3,394
10th Percentile £357 £374 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £750 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £511 £525
% change year-on-year -2.20% -2.62% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 87 91 136
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.00 £25.67 £46.18
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £60.25
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -12.86% -6.77%
75th Percentile £64.67 £70.00 £73.68
90th Percentile £80.50 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.00 £61.25 £62.50
% change year-on-year -15.10% -2.00% -3.85%

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 11,274 11,551 14,685
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.30% 32.06% 31.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,429 7,439 10,462
10th Percentile £345 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £433
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £625 £645 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -3.70% -1.35% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 318 274 447
10th Percentile £29.00 £22.00 £31.80
25th Percentile £44.01 £37.72 £47.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £61.72 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +1.27% +2.86% -
75th Percentile £67.50 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 11 November 2025.

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 11 November 2025.

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 11 November 2025. 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 0 4,023 £525 -10.64% 5,646
London +1 2,382 £550 -12.00% 3,237
UK excluding London +4 1,807 £500 -2.20% 2,988
Work from Home 0 1,443 £537 -2.36% 2,384
North of England +10 551 £480 -4.48% 753
South East +4 375 £500 -4.76% 920
Yorkshire +6 299 £500 -1.38% 216
Scotland +12 286 £500 +1.83% 194
Midlands +11 255 £500 +5.26% 386
North West +8 220 £436 -10.51% 469
West Midlands +13 213 £500 - 247
South West -9 176 £560 -10.40% 301
East of England +8 163 £525 +10.53% 328
East Midlands -12 41 £410 +2.50% 137
North East +4 36 £520 -12.97% 74
Wales -10 33 £455 -9.00% 85
Northern Ireland -3 21 £588 +11.90% 59

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
1 253 (5.36%) Apache Airflow
2 199 (4.22%) Apache Spark
3 187 (3.96%) Confluence
4 177 (3.75%) Apache
5 62 (1.31%) SAS
6 47 (1.00%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.81%) nginx
8 34 (0.72%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.49%) Jupyter
10 22 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.32%) IIS
12 12 (0.25%) WebSphere
13 11 (0.23%) Appian
14 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 9 (0.19%) JBoss
15 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
16 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
17 5 (0.11%) Luigi
18 4 (0.085%) Camunda
18 4 (0.085%) CMS
Applications
1 127 (2.69%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.72%) Chatbot
3 33 (0.70%) Microsoft Office
4 28 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 10 (0.21%) Maya
6 10 (0.21%) NUKE
7 9 (0.19%) MS Visio
8 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
9 7 (0.15%) Weka
10 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
10 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
10 2 (0.042%) Maple
10 2 (0.042%) Microsoft Project
11 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
11 1 (0.021%) SPSS
11 1 (0.021%) Stata
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
11 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 14 (0.30%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 8 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.17%) Maximo
4 5 (0.11%) Fidessa
5 4 (0.085%) Remedy ITSM
6 3 (0.064%) Payment Gateway
6 3 (0.064%) Teamcenter
7 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
7 2 (0.042%) Endur
7 2 (0.042%) Kondor
7 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.042%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
7 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
8 1 (0.021%) Cloudability
8 1 (0.021%) SAP ERP
8 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
8 1 (0.021%) thinkFolio
Cloud Services
1 1,846 (39.13%) AWS
2 1,379 (29.23%) Azure
3 720 (15.26%) GCP
4 532 (11.28%) GitHub
5 463 (9.81%) Serverless
6 391 (8.29%) Power Platform
7 372 (7.88%) Amazon S3
8 322 (6.82%) AWS Lambda
9 290 (6.15%) Azure DevOps
10 272 (5.77%) GitHub Actions
11 235 (4.98%) Snowflake
12 201 (4.26%) AWS CloudFormation
13 192 (4.07%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 190 (4.03%) Amazon EC2
15 181 (3.84%) dbt
16 153 (3.24%) Amazon ECS
17 150 (3.18%) Azure Data Factory
18 138 (2.92%) Amazon EKS
19 136 (2.88%) OpenShift
20 127 (2.69%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 282 (5.98%) Firewall
2 182 (3.86%) DNS
3 146 (3.09%) TCP/IP
4 110 (2.33%) Network Security
5 97 (2.06%) VPN
6 95 (2.01%) BGP
6 95 (2.01%) HTTP
7 69 (1.46%) SSL
8 60 (1.27%) OSPF
9 54 (1.14%) WAN
10 50 (1.06%) MPLS
11 41 (0.87%) LAN
12 39 (0.83%) SSH
13 38 (0.81%) Wireless
14 37 (0.78%) SMTP
15 33 (0.70%) SD-WAN
16 31 (0.66%) FTP
16 31 (0.66%) Wireshark
17 30 (0.64%) DHCP
17 30 (0.64%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 397 (8.41%) PostgreSQL
2 339 (7.19%) Power BI
3 269 (5.70%) Data Warehouse
4 259 (5.49%) Relational Database
5 249 (5.28%) NoSQL
6 181 (3.84%) Data Lake
7 175 (3.71%) Big Data
8 159 (3.37%) Amazon RDS
9 156 (3.31%) Tableau
10 149 (3.16%) SQL Server
11 130 (2.76%) MongoDB
12 118 (2.50%) MySQL
13 117 (2.48%) BigQuery
14 101 (2.14%) Amazon Athena
15 97 (2.06%) Hadoop
16 92 (1.95%) DynamoDB
17 84 (1.78%) Amazon Redshift
18 80 (1.70%) Metadata
19 70 (1.48%) Elasticsearch
20 62 (1.31%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 643 (13.63%) Git
2 613 (12.99%) Jenkins
3 374 (7.93%) GitLab
4 332 (7.04%) JIRA
5 75 (1.59%) Selenium
6 69 (1.46%) Bitbucket
6 69 (1.46%) SonarQube
7 66 (1.40%) JUnit
8 63 (1.34%) Sonatype Nexus
9 50 (1.06%) MLflow
10 47 (1.00%) Liquibase
11 41 (0.87%) Artifactory
12 40 (0.85%) Cucumber
13 36 (0.76%) Maven
14 33 (0.70%) Gradle
14 33 (0.70%) JMeter
14 33 (0.70%) Postman
15 30 (0.64%) Cypress.io
15 30 (0.64%) Eclipse
16 28 (0.59%) Metasploit
General
1 1,315 (27.87%) Social Skills
2 1,063 (22.53%) Finance
3 703 (14.90%) Analytical Skills
4 500 (10.60%) Banking
5 397 (8.41%) Public Sector
6 245 (5.19%) Front Office
7 204 (4.32%) Investment Banking
8 95 (2.01%) Documentation Skills
9 90 (1.91%) Financial Institution
10 79 (1.67%) Marketing
11 77 (1.63%) Telecoms
12 74 (1.57%) Pharmaceutical
13 70 (1.48%) Retail
14 57 (1.21%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 53 (1.12%) Legal
16 47 (1.00%) Presentation Skills
17 41 (0.87%) Manufacturing
18 31 (0.66%) Organisational Skills
19 30 (0.64%) Influencing Skills
20 28 (0.59%) Military
Job Titles
1 895 (18.97%) Developer
2 633 (13.42%) Senior
3 526 (11.15%) Data Engineer
4 359 (7.61%) Python Engineer
5 358 (7.59%) Analyst
6 348 (7.38%) Python Developer
7 334 (7.08%) DevOps Engineer
8 305 (6.46%) AWS Engineer
9 281 (5.96%) Software Engineer
10 248 (5.26%) Architect
11 200 (4.24%) Lead
12 184 (3.90%) Platform Engineer
13 179 (3.79%) Data Analyst
14 175 (3.71%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 159 (3.37%) Data Scientist
16 132 (2.80%) Senior Developer
17 130 (2.76%) Consultant
18 128 (2.71%) Network Engineer
19 126 (2.67%) Cloud Engineer
20 121 (2.56%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 380 (8.05%) REST
2 345 (7.31%) React
3 309 (6.55%) Kafka
4 239 (5.07%) Pandas
5 236 (5.00%) RESTful
6 233 (4.94%) Node.js
7 220 (4.66%) FastAPI
8 188 (3.98%) NumPy
9 180 (3.82%) PySpark
10 173 (3.67%) PyTorch
11 155 (3.29%) AngularJS
12 151 (3.20%) TensorFlow
13 138 (2.92%) .NET
14 128 (2.71%) Elastic Stack
15 117 (2.48%) HTML
16 112 (2.37%) CSS
17 109 (2.31%) scikit-learn
18 108 (2.29%) GraphQL
19 104 (2.20%) Flask
19 104 (2.20%) LangChain
Miscellaneous
1 362 (7.67%) Cloud Native
2 206 (4.37%) Algorithms
3 186 (3.94%) Distributed Systems
4 157 (3.33%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 155 (3.29%) Equities
6 145 (3.07%) Data Protection Act
7 144 (3.05%) Fixed Income
8 120 (2.54%) Product Ownership
9 117 (2.48%) Data Structures
10 115 (2.44%) Derivative
11 112 (2.37%) Hedge funds
12 106 (2.25%) Onboarding
13 87 (1.84%) AI Agents
14 80 (1.70%) Public Cloud
15 77 (1.63%) Data Centre
15 77 (1.63%) Management Information System
16 69 (1.46%) Hybrid Cloud
17 67 (1.42%) Legacy Systems
18 64 (1.36%) Replication
19 59 (1.25%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 847 (17.95%) Linux
2 358 (7.59%) Windows
3 256 (5.43%) Unix
4 89 (1.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.42%) Windows Server
6 45 (0.95%) Android
7 43 (0.91%) Ubuntu
8 37 (0.78%) VMS
9 35 (0.74%) CentOS
10 29 (0.61%) Amazon Linux
11 27 (0.57%) Mac OS
12 26 (0.55%) Apple iOS
13 22 (0.47%) Solaris
14 9 (0.19%) Debian
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
15 7 (0.15%) Windows 7
16 6 (0.13%) AIX
17 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
18 4 (0.085%) Windows Server 2019
18 4 (0.085%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,534 (32.51%) CI/CD
2 1,313 (27.83%) DevOps
3 1,247 (26.43%) Agile
4 1,007 (21.34%) Problem-Solving
5 796 (16.87%) Infrastructure as Code
6 793 (16.81%) AI
7 689 (14.60%) Analytics
8 686 (14.54%) Machine Learning
9 615 (13.04%) Containerisation
10 605 (12.82%) Software Engineering
11 595 (12.61%) Data Pipeline
12 504 (10.68%) Data Modelling
13 498 (10.56%) ETL
14 493 (10.45%) Data Science
15 472 (10.00%) Test Automation
16 471 (9.98%) Data Engineering
17 408 (8.65%) Computer Science
18 387 (8.20%) Business Intelligence
19 336 (7.12%) Microservices
20 335 (7.10%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,472 (31.20%) SQL
2 859 (18.21%) Java
3 653 (13.84%) Bash
4 591 (12.53%) PowerShell
5 547 (11.59%) JavaScript
6 336 (7.12%) TypeScript
7 286 (6.06%) Go
8 273 (5.79%) C#
9 269 (5.70%) C++
10 198 (4.20%) Perl
11 197 (4.18%) Shell Script
12 156 (3.31%) R
13 100 (2.12%) Scala
14 86 (1.82%) C
15 73 (1.55%) Ruby
16 59 (1.25%) PHP
17 56 (1.19%) Groovy
18 53 (1.12%) VBA
19 47 (1.00%) Kusto Query Language
20 44 (0.93%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 873 (18.50%) Security Cleared
2 700 (14.84%) SC Cleared
3 487 (10.32%) Degree
4 235 (4.98%) Computer Science Degree
5 150 (3.18%) AWS Certification
6 142 (3.01%) Master's Degree
7 135 (2.86%) DV Cleared
8 100 (2.12%) Cisco Certification
9 81 (1.72%) CISSP
10 75 (1.59%) BPSS Clearance
11 70 (1.48%) Azure Certification
12 66 (1.40%) CCNP
13 59 (1.25%) PhD
14 46 (0.97%) MCP
15 41 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 39 (0.83%) CCIE
16 39 (0.83%) OSCP
17 37 (0.78%) CEH
18 31 (0.66%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
19 29 (0.61%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 321 (6.80%) Data Quality
2 192 (4.07%) QA
3 148 (3.14%) GDPR
4 96 (2.03%) NIST
5 88 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 61 (1.29%) Accessibility
7 49 (1.04%) PCI DSS
8 41 (0.87%) HIPAA
9 27 (0.57%) NCSC
9 27 (0.57%) SLA
10 25 (0.53%) SOC 2
11 21 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
13 13 (0.28%) Cyber Essentials
14 12 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 9 (0.19%) EMIR
16 9 (0.19%) MiFID
17 8 (0.17%) Actionable Recommendations
17 8 (0.17%) PMO
System Software
1 887 (18.80%) Docker
2 148 (3.14%) Active Directory
3 141 (2.99%) VMware Infrastructure
4 44 (0.93%) vSphere
5 35 (0.74%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.74%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.61%) Firmware
7 22 (0.47%) DFS Replication
8 21 (0.45%) VMware ESXi
9 17 (0.36%) Squid
10 14 (0.30%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.30%) KVM
10 14 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
10 14 (0.30%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 13 (0.28%) HDFS
12 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
12 12 (0.25%) Postfix
13 10 (0.21%) zsh
14 8 (0.17%) GPFS
15 7 (0.15%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 1,001 (21.22%) Kubernetes
2 976 (20.69%) Terraform
3 626 (13.27%) Ansible
4 343 (7.27%) Grafana
5 296 (6.27%) Prometheus
6 88 (1.87%) Puppet
7 75 (1.59%) Argo
8 51 (1.08%) Kibana
9 41 (0.87%) Progress Chef
10 36 (0.76%) Istio
10 36 (0.76%) Nessus
11 34 (0.72%) vRealize
12 29 (0.61%) Nmap
12 29 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
13 28 (0.59%) NetBackup
14 25 (0.53%) vCenter Server
15 24 (0.51%) ITRS Geneos
16 22 (0.47%) logstash
16 22 (0.47%) Microsoft Intune
16 22 (0.47%) Packer
Vendors
1 527 (11.17%) Microsoft
2 324 (6.87%) Databricks
3 274 (5.81%) Google
4 247 (5.24%) Splunk
5 226 (4.79%) Oracle
5 226 (4.79%) VMware
6 149 (3.16%) ServiceNow
7 137 (2.90%) Cisco
8 129 (2.73%) Red Hat
9 87 (1.84%) Palo Alto
10 84 (1.78%) F5
11 72 (1.53%) OpenAI
12 64 (1.36%) SAP
13 60 (1.27%) Foundry
14 50 (1.06%) Atlassian
15 47 (1.00%) CyberArk
15 47 (1.00%) IBM
16 45 (0.95%) Salesforce
17 44 (0.93%) Juniper
18 43 (0.91%) CrowdStrike