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

6 months to
27 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 9 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +6 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,224 3,885 4,087
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.85% 13.39% 9.23%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.24% 39.23% 31.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,551 2,737 2,880
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £417 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £500 £515
% change year-on-year -3.60% -2.91% -6.36%
Number of hourly rates quoted 111 52 103
10th Percentile £27.50 £21.25 £20.91
25th Percentile £40.25 £24.57 £31.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £43.50 £48.50
Median % change year-on-year +20.69% -10.31% -25.38%
75th Percentile £70.36 £61.38 £66.25
90th Percentile £80.20 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.75 £46.18
% change year-on-year +5.05% +5.57% -28.82%

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 12,666 9,904 12,925
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.72% 34.12% 29.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,400 6,663 9,134
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £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 £716 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £480 £488
% change year-on-year -1.04% -1.54% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 516 243 482
10th Percentile £40.63 £22.27 £30.69
25th Percentile £53.69 £34.13 £46.20
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.25 £85.00 £74.94
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.56% +3.90% -3.75%

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 27 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 27 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 27 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 4,384 £518 -8.20% 2,695
London -3 2,487 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London -1 1,997 £482 -3.60% 1,990
Work from Home +1 1,568 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +13 669 £479 -4.25% 475
South East -7 413 £500 -6.10% 576
Yorkshire 0 363 £482 -3.60% 164
Midlands 0 285 £498 +4.74% 255
North West +14 260 £475 -4.95% 230
Scotland +1 254 £425 -9.57% 104
South West -1 234 £525 -8.70% 280
West Midlands -1 228 £500 - 130
East of England +1 139 £500 +1.01% 219
East Midlands -14 56 £450 +5.88% 125
North East +14 55 £488 -1.27% 83
Northern Ireland +9 29 £613 +13.95% 33
Wales -14 29 £475 -10.38% 78

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
1 261 (5.00%) Apache Spark
2 199 (3.81%) Apache Airflow
3 172 (3.29%) Confluence
4 160 (3.06%) Apache
5 67 (1.28%) SAS
6 60 (1.15%) SharePoint
7 25 (0.48%) Jupyter
7 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
7 25 (0.48%) OpenStack
8 24 (0.46%) nginx
9 20 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
10 15 (0.29%) Appian
11 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
12 11 (0.21%) Camunda
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) CMS
14 4 (0.077%) CICS
14 4 (0.077%) Tomcat
14 4 (0.077%) WebSphere
15 3 (0.057%) IIS
Applications
1 137 (2.62%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.54%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.50%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
6 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
7 8 (0.15%) Weka
8 5 (0.096%) CPLEX
9 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
10 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
11 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.19%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Actimize
7 3 (0.057%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.057%) IntelliMatch
7 3 (0.057%) SAP IBP
8 2 (0.038%) Cloudability
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
9 1 (0.019%) Advent Geneva
9 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
9 1 (0.019%) SAP BPC
9 1 (0.019%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 2,023 (38.73%) AWS
2 1,832 (35.07%) Azure
3 808 (15.47%) GCP
4 705 (13.50%) GitHub
5 519 (9.93%) Serverless
6 501 (9.59%) Power Platform
7 406 (7.77%) Azure DevOps
8 361 (6.91%) Amazon S3
9 352 (6.74%) GitHub Actions
10 346 (6.62%) AWS Lambda
11 276 (5.28%) Azure Data Factory
12 249 (4.77%) Snowflake
13 248 (4.75%) AWS CloudFormation
14 186 (3.56%) Amazon EKS
15 175 (3.35%) OpenShift
16 166 (3.18%) Amazon ECS
17 164 (3.14%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 154 (2.95%) Amazon EC2
19 150 (2.87%) dbt
20 149 (2.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 207 (3.96%) Firewall
2 149 (2.85%) DNS
3 110 (2.11%) Network Security
4 104 (1.99%) TCP/IP
5 84 (1.61%) VPN
6 72 (1.38%) BGP
7 64 (1.23%) WAN
8 60 (1.15%) HTTP
9 42 (0.80%) MPLS
9 42 (0.80%) OSPF
9 42 (0.80%) SAN
10 37 (0.71%) Wireshark
11 34 (0.65%) LAN
11 34 (0.65%) VLAN
12 33 (0.63%) SSL
13 32 (0.61%) SD-WAN
14 31 (0.59%) DHCP
15 29 (0.56%) SNMP
16 24 (0.46%) VXLAN
17 23 (0.44%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 417 (7.98%) Power BI
2 366 (7.01%) PostgreSQL
3 303 (5.80%) Data Warehouse
4 234 (4.48%) Data Lake
5 212 (4.06%) NoSQL
6 197 (3.77%) SQL Server
7 190 (3.64%) Relational Database
8 172 (3.29%) Tableau
9 147 (2.81%) Big Data
9 147 (2.81%) Metadata
10 129 (2.47%) Delta Lake
11 121 (2.32%) Amazon RDS
12 116 (2.22%) BigQuery
13 113 (2.16%) MySQL
14 105 (2.01%) Amazon Redshift
15 98 (1.88%) MongoDB
16 97 (1.86%) Amazon Athena
17 90 (1.72%) Azure SQL Database
18 81 (1.55%) DynamoDB
19 79 (1.51%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 664 (12.71%) Git
2 551 (10.55%) Jenkins
3 418 (8.00%) GitLab
4 296 (5.67%) JIRA
5 94 (1.80%) MLflow
6 92 (1.76%) Selenium
7 54 (1.03%) Postman
8 47 (0.90%) Bitbucket
9 44 (0.84%) Cucumber
10 40 (0.77%) JMeter
10 40 (0.77%) JUnit
11 35 (0.67%) Sonatype Nexus
12 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
13 27 (0.52%) Artifactory
13 27 (0.52%) Cypress.io
13 27 (0.52%) Visual Studio
14 23 (0.44%) Gatling
15 22 (0.42%) Maven
16 21 (0.40%) CircleCI
16 21 (0.40%) SonarQube
General
1 1,256 (24.04%) Social Skills
2 1,009 (19.31%) Finance
3 714 (13.67%) Analytical Skills
4 501 (9.59%) Public Sector
5 402 (7.70%) Banking
6 170 (3.25%) Front Office
7 130 (2.49%) Documentation Skills
8 88 (1.68%) Investment Banking
9 66 (1.26%) Marketing
10 65 (1.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 64 (1.23%) Retail
12 58 (1.11%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.07%) Legal
14 55 (1.05%) Financial Institution
15 54 (1.03%) Influencing Skills
15 54 (1.03%) Telecoms
16 41 (0.78%) Manufacturing
17 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
18 28 (0.54%) Military
18 28 (0.54%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 968 (18.53%) Developer
2 741 (14.18%) Data Engineer
3 735 (14.07%) Senior
4 451 (8.63%) Python Developer
5 355 (6.80%) Architect
6 337 (6.45%) Lead
7 292 (5.59%) DevOps Engineer
8 291 (5.57%) Python Engineer
9 281 (5.38%) Analyst
10 253 (4.84%) Software Engineer
11 251 (4.80%) AWS Engineer
12 244 (4.67%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 204 (3.91%) Data Scientist
14 194 (3.71%) Platform Engineer
15 160 (3.06%) Azure Engineer
16 158 (3.02%) Senior Developer
17 144 (2.76%) Data Analyst
18 139 (2.66%) Senior Data Engineer
19 134 (2.57%) Full-Stack Developer
20 129 (2.47%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 461 (8.82%) REST
2 353 (6.76%) React
3 337 (6.45%) PySpark
4 333 (6.37%) Kafka
5 280 (5.36%) Node.js
6 233 (4.46%) Pandas
7 227 (4.35%) .NET
8 206 (3.94%) PyTorch
9 196 (3.75%) RESTful
10 191 (3.66%) FastAPI
11 167 (3.20%) TensorFlow
12 158 (3.02%) NumPy
13 149 (2.85%) scikit-learn
14 147 (2.81%) JSON
15 135 (2.58%) AngularJS
16 133 (2.55%) Flask
17 122 (2.34%) Django
18 118 (2.26%) LangChain
19 113 (2.16%) pytest
20 105 (2.01%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 521 (9.97%) Cloud Native
2 221 (4.23%) Distributed Systems
3 199 (3.81%) Algorithms
4 149 (2.85%) Product Ownership
5 121 (2.32%) Equities
6 116 (2.22%) Data Protection Act
7 115 (2.20%) Fixed Income
8 109 (2.09%) Data Structures
9 106 (2.03%) AI Agents
10 104 (1.99%) Derivative
11 103 (1.97%) Hybrid Cloud
12 96 (1.84%) Legacy Systems
13 92 (1.76%) Data Centre
13 92 (1.76%) Onboarding
14 89 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
14 89 (1.70%) Public Cloud
15 82 (1.57%) Security Posture
16 79 (1.51%) Management Information System
17 56 (1.07%) Virtual Team
18 54 (1.03%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 679 (13.00%) Linux
2 316 (6.05%) Windows
3 181 (3.46%) Unix
4 100 (1.91%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 69 (1.32%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.67%) VMS
7 33 (0.63%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.59%) Android
9 19 (0.36%) Mac OS
10 18 (0.34%) AIX
10 18 (0.34%) Solaris
11 17 (0.33%) CentOS
12 15 (0.29%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.17%) Windows 7
14 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Debian
15 6 (0.11%) Kali Linux
15 6 (0.11%) zOS
16 5 (0.096%) Rocky
17 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,931 (36.96%) CI/CD
2 1,493 (28.58%) DevOps
3 1,218 (23.32%) Agile
4 1,139 (21.80%) AI
5 1,045 (20.00%) Analytics
6 1,044 (19.98%) Problem-Solving
7 934 (17.88%) Infrastructure as Code
8 852 (16.31%) Data Pipeline
9 841 (16.10%) Machine Learning
10 766 (14.66%) Containerisation
11 717 (13.73%) Data Engineering
12 697 (13.34%) Data Modelling
13 677 (12.96%) ETL
14 619 (11.85%) Data Science
15 603 (11.54%) Test Automation
16 591 (11.31%) Software Engineering
17 510 (9.76%) Observability
18 503 (9.63%) Business Intelligence
19 429 (8.21%) LLM
20 400 (7.66%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,657 (31.72%) SQL
2 735 (14.07%) Java
3 686 (13.13%) PowerShell
4 611 (11.70%) Bash
5 488 (9.34%) JavaScript
6 345 (6.60%) C#
6 345 (6.60%) TypeScript
7 227 (4.35%) Go
8 168 (3.22%) C++
9 162 (3.10%) R
10 125 (2.39%) Scala
11 105 (2.01%) Shell Script
12 101 (1.93%) Ruby
13 97 (1.86%) Perl
14 79 (1.51%) Bicep
15 56 (1.07%) Kusto Query Language
16 49 (0.94%) C
17 48 (0.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 44 (0.84%) T-SQL
19 40 (0.77%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,220 (23.35%) Security Cleared
2 975 (18.66%) SC Cleared
3 437 (8.37%) Degree
4 200 (3.83%) Computer Science Degree
5 151 (2.89%) DV Cleared
6 127 (2.43%) BPSS Clearance
7 121 (2.32%) Master's Degree
8 118 (2.26%) AWS Certification
9 105 (2.01%) Azure Certification
10 94 (1.80%) CISSP
11 73 (1.40%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.11%) CCNP
12 58 (1.11%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.94%) PhD
14 48 (0.92%) CISM
15 36 (0.69%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 36 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
16 33 (0.63%) ISTQB
17 28 (0.54%) CEH
18 27 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 506 (9.69%) Data Quality
2 215 (4.12%) QA
3 178 (3.41%) GDPR
4 110 (2.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 104 (1.99%) NIST
6 77 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.57%) SLA
9 27 (0.52%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.44%) NCSC
12 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.31%) WCAG
14 12 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.19%) MiFID
17 8 (0.15%) PSD2
System Software
1 918 (17.57%) Docker
2 168 (3.22%) Active Directory
3 120 (2.30%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.17%) vSphere
5 57 (1.09%) Virtual Machines
6 54 (1.03%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.63%) Hyper-V
8 31 (0.59%) Firmware
9 16 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 10 (0.19%) HDFS
11 10 (0.19%) Lustre
12 9 (0.17%) GPFS
12 9 (0.17%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 8 (0.15%) Ceph
13 8 (0.15%) SRDF
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.096%) NFS
15 5 (0.096%) Postfix
15 5 (0.096%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,131 (21.65%) Terraform
2 1,027 (19.66%) Kubernetes
3 545 (10.43%) Ansible
4 350 (6.70%) Grafana
5 306 (5.86%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.72%) Argo
7 77 (1.47%) Puppet
8 50 (0.96%) Istio
8 50 (0.96%) vRealize
9 39 (0.75%) vCenter Server
10 38 (0.73%) Kibana
11 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
12 27 (0.52%) Nessus
13 24 (0.46%) NetBackup
13 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 22 (0.42%) Rancher
15 19 (0.36%) Control-M
15 19 (0.36%) Kubeflow
16 18 (0.34%) Microsoft Intune
16 18 (0.34%) Nagios
Vendors
1 636 (12.17%) Microsoft
2 559 (10.70%) Databricks
3 297 (5.69%) Google
4 227 (4.35%) Splunk
5 221 (4.23%) VMware
6 215 (4.12%) Oracle
7 146 (2.79%) Red Hat
8 125 (2.39%) Cisco
9 119 (2.28%) OpenAI
10 104 (1.99%) ServiceNow
11 82 (1.57%) CyberArk
12 75 (1.44%) Foundry
13 69 (1.32%) BeyondTrust
14 62 (1.19%) Informatica
15 61 (1.17%) F5
16 58 (1.11%) Palo Alto
17 57 (1.09%) IBM
18 48 (0.92%) Dynatrace
19 44 (0.84%) Atlassian
20 43 (0.82%) SAP