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

6 months to
23 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,228 3,947 4,077
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.95% 13.36% 9.21%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.30% 39.27% 31.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,558 2,746 2,872
10th Percentile £363 £380 £400
25th Percentile £415 £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 £749 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £517
% change year-on-year -3.75% -3.29% -6.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 53 105
10th Percentile £28.30 £20.34 £20.99
25th Percentile £41.94 £23.00 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.00 £42.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.06% -15.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile £70.36 £63.25 £66.25
90th Percentile £79.90 £77.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +13.80% -2.56% -28.95%

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 12,660 10,052 12,894
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.93% 34.01% 29.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,419 6,691 9,119
10th Percentile £353 £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 £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £484 £485
% change year-on-year -1.76% -0.31% -3.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 499 245 486
10th Percentile £41.87 £22.09 £30.94
25th Percentile £54.55 £31.76 £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 £68.00 £67.47
90th Percentile £77.00 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.97% +3.48% -5.23%

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 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 23 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 23 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 4,371 £520 -7.96% 2,689
London -3 2,480 £550 -8.33% 1,184
UK excluding London -1 2,005 £481 -3.75% 1,940
Work from Home +1 1,586 £525 -4.55% 1,019
North of England +13 672 £475 -5.00% 469
South East -6 412 £500 -6.50% 598
Yorkshire +2 357 £482 -3.60% 172
Midlands -1 285 £498 +4.79% 226
Scotland +2 273 £425 -9.57% 109
North West +13 269 £470 -5.91% 223
South West -1 231 £525 -8.70% 255
West Midlands -5 231 £500 - 116
East of England 0 131 £500 +1.52% 219
North East +14 54 £475 -5.00% 76
East Midlands -18 53 £447 +5.18% 110
Wales -12 30 £475 -10.38% 72
Northern Ireland +11 29 £613 +13.95% 26

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
1 264 (5.05%) Apache Spark
2 194 (3.71%) Apache Airflow
3 172 (3.29%) Confluence
4 158 (3.02%) Apache
5 64 (1.22%) SAS
6 62 (1.19%) SharePoint
7 27 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.48%) Jupyter
8 25 (0.48%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.46%) nginx
10 22 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.34%) Appian
12 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
13 11 (0.21%) Camunda
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 4 (0.077%) Oracle Application Server
15 4 (0.077%) Tomcat
16 3 (0.057%) CICS
16 3 (0.057%) IIS
Applications
1 132 (2.52%) Microsoft Excel
2 29 (0.55%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
4 26 (0.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.31%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.15%) Weka
8 4 (0.077%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 10 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
4 8 (0.15%) 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
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%) ION MarketView
9 1 (0.019%) Salesforce CRM
9 1 (0.019%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 2,026 (38.75%) AWS
2 1,824 (34.89%) Azure
3 803 (15.36%) GCP
4 710 (13.58%) GitHub
5 531 (10.16%) Serverless
6 503 (9.62%) Power Platform
7 403 (7.71%) Azure DevOps
8 364 (6.96%) Amazon S3
9 354 (6.77%) GitHub Actions
10 353 (6.75%) AWS Lambda
11 274 (5.24%) Azure Data Factory
12 258 (4.93%) Snowflake
13 254 (4.86%) AWS CloudFormation
14 190 (3.63%) Amazon EKS
15 183 (3.50%) OpenShift
16 169 (3.23%) Amazon ECS
17 164 (3.14%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 159 (3.04%) Amazon EC2
19 149 (2.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 142 (2.72%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 207 (3.96%) Firewall
2 145 (2.77%) DNS
3 113 (2.16%) Network Security
4 100 (1.91%) TCP/IP
5 81 (1.55%) VPN
6 68 (1.30%) BGP
7 62 (1.19%) WAN
8 59 (1.13%) HTTP
9 41 (0.78%) MPLS
9 41 (0.78%) Wireshark
10 40 (0.77%) SAN
11 39 (0.75%) OSPF
12 37 (0.71%) SSL
13 35 (0.67%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) SD-WAN
14 32 (0.61%) VLAN
15 31 (0.59%) DHCP
16 26 (0.50%) SNMP
17 23 (0.44%) SSH
17 23 (0.44%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 420 (8.03%) Power BI
2 383 (7.33%) PostgreSQL
3 312 (5.97%) Data Warehouse
4 240 (4.59%) Data Lake
5 218 (4.17%) NoSQL
6 201 (3.84%) SQL Server
7 192 (3.67%) Relational Database
8 168 (3.21%) Tableau
9 155 (2.96%) Big Data
10 142 (2.72%) Metadata
11 126 (2.41%) Delta Lake
12 122 (2.33%) Amazon RDS
13 113 (2.16%) BigQuery
13 113 (2.16%) MySQL
14 107 (2.05%) Amazon Redshift
15 105 (2.01%) MongoDB
16 98 (1.87%) Amazon Athena
17 90 (1.72%) Azure SQL Database
18 83 (1.59%) Hadoop
19 81 (1.55%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 670 (12.82%) Git
2 556 (10.64%) Jenkins
3 425 (8.13%) GitLab
4 299 (5.72%) JIRA
5 95 (1.82%) MLflow
6 91 (1.74%) Selenium
7 52 (0.99%) Postman
8 50 (0.96%) Bitbucket
9 47 (0.90%) Cucumber
10 41 (0.78%) JUnit
11 39 (0.75%) JMeter
11 39 (0.75%) Sonatype Nexus
12 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
12 28 (0.54%) Visual Studio
13 27 (0.52%) Artifactory
14 26 (0.50%) Cypress.io
15 22 (0.42%) CircleCI
15 22 (0.42%) Gatling
16 21 (0.40%) Maven
16 21 (0.40%) SonarQube
General
1 1,263 (24.16%) Social Skills
2 1,027 (19.64%) Finance
3 714 (13.66%) Analytical Skills
4 499 (9.54%) Public Sector
5 419 (8.01%) Banking
6 176 (3.37%) Front Office
7 128 (2.45%) Documentation Skills
8 99 (1.89%) Investment Banking
9 66 (1.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 65 (1.24%) Retail
11 61 (1.17%) Marketing
12 58 (1.11%) Pharmaceutical
13 55 (1.05%) Financial Institution
14 54 (1.03%) Legal
15 53 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
15 53 (1.01%) Telecoms
16 43 (0.82%) Manufacturing
17 33 (0.63%) Presentation Skills
18 29 (0.55%) Military
19 25 (0.48%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 982 (18.78%) Developer
2 741 (14.17%) Data Engineer
3 734 (14.04%) Senior
4 448 (8.57%) Python Developer
5 352 (6.73%) Architect
6 347 (6.64%) Lead
7 296 (5.66%) DevOps Engineer
8 287 (5.49%) Python Engineer
9 280 (5.36%) Analyst
10 258 (4.93%) AWS Engineer
11 253 (4.84%) Software Engineer
12 244 (4.67%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 203 (3.88%) Data Scientist
14 192 (3.67%) Platform Engineer
15 160 (3.06%) Azure Engineer
16 158 (3.02%) Senior Developer
17 140 (2.68%) Data Analyst
18 139 (2.66%) Full-Stack Developer
19 137 (2.62%) Senior Data Engineer
20 133 (2.54%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 454 (8.68%) REST
2 360 (6.89%) React
3 336 (6.43%) PySpark
4 332 (6.35%) Kafka
5 287 (5.49%) Node.js
6 229 (4.38%) Pandas
7 220 (4.21%) .NET
8 209 (4.00%) PyTorch
9 203 (3.88%) RESTful
10 202 (3.86%) FastAPI
11 173 (3.31%) TensorFlow
12 158 (3.02%) NumPy
13 151 (2.89%) scikit-learn
14 143 (2.74%) AngularJS
15 141 (2.70%) JSON
16 140 (2.68%) Flask
17 122 (2.33%) Django
18 119 (2.28%) LangChain
19 115 (2.20%) pytest
20 108 (2.07%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 527 (10.08%) Cloud Native
2 216 (4.13%) Distributed Systems
3 203 (3.88%) Algorithms
4 146 (2.79%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.43%) Equities
6 116 (2.22%) Fixed Income
7 114 (2.18%) Data Protection Act
8 108 (2.07%) Data Structures
9 107 (2.05%) Derivative
10 105 (2.01%) AI Agents
11 101 (1.93%) Hybrid Cloud
11 101 (1.93%) Onboarding
12 98 (1.87%) Legacy Systems
13 90 (1.72%) Data Centre
14 89 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
15 87 (1.66%) Public Cloud
16 84 (1.61%) Security Posture
17 83 (1.59%) Management Information System
18 56 (1.07%) Hedge funds
19 55 (1.05%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 683 (13.06%) Linux
2 322 (6.16%) Windows
3 184 (3.52%) Unix
4 97 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.28%) Windows Server
6 31 (0.59%) Android
6 31 (0.59%) Ubuntu
6 31 (0.59%) VMS
7 21 (0.40%) Mac OS
8 18 (0.34%) CentOS
8 18 (0.34%) Solaris
9 17 (0.33%) Apple iOS
10 16 (0.31%) AIX
11 9 (0.17%) Kali Linux
11 9 (0.17%) Windows 7
12 6 (0.11%) Debian
13 5 (0.096%) Embedded Linux
13 5 (0.096%) Rocky
13 5 (0.096%) zOS
14 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,935 (37.01%) CI/CD
2 1,506 (28.81%) DevOps
3 1,220 (23.34%) Agile
4 1,132 (21.65%) AI
5 1,057 (20.22%) Problem-Solving
6 1,038 (19.85%) Analytics
7 927 (17.73%) Infrastructure as Code
8 847 (16.20%) Data Pipeline
9 846 (16.18%) Machine Learning
10 777 (14.86%) Containerisation
11 717 (13.71%) Data Engineering
12 693 (13.26%) Data Modelling
13 677 (12.95%) ETL
14 622 (11.90%) Data Science
15 611 (11.69%) Test Automation
16 585 (11.19%) Software Engineering
17 503 (9.62%) Business Intelligence
18 501 (9.58%) Observability
19 428 (8.19%) LLM
20 397 (7.59%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,661 (31.77%) SQL
2 749 (14.33%) Java
3 692 (13.24%) PowerShell
4 605 (11.57%) Bash
5 497 (9.51%) JavaScript
6 356 (6.81%) TypeScript
7 339 (6.48%) C#
8 230 (4.40%) Go
9 167 (3.19%) C++
10 157 (3.00%) R
11 124 (2.37%) Scala
12 114 (2.18%) Shell Script
13 104 (1.99%) Ruby
14 103 (1.97%) Perl
15 78 (1.49%) Bicep
16 58 (1.11%) Kusto Query Language
17 49 (0.94%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 45 (0.86%) C
19 44 (0.84%) T-SQL
20 40 (0.77%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,216 (23.26%) Security Cleared
2 971 (18.57%) SC Cleared
3 445 (8.51%) Degree
4 214 (4.09%) Computer Science Degree
5 152 (2.91%) DV Cleared
6 126 (2.41%) AWS Certification
6 126 (2.41%) BPSS Clearance
7 125 (2.39%) Master's Degree
8 104 (1.99%) Azure Certification
9 96 (1.84%) CISSP
10 74 (1.42%) Cisco Certification
11 58 (1.11%) CCNP
12 54 (1.03%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 48 (0.92%) CISM
14 47 (0.90%) PhD
15 37 (0.71%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
17 33 (0.63%) ISTQB
18 31 (0.59%) CEH
19 27 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 503 (9.62%) Data Quality
2 213 (4.07%) QA
3 179 (3.42%) GDPR
4 111 (2.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 106 (2.03%) NIST
6 78 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.63%) SLA
9 30 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 24 (0.46%) NCSC
12 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.31%) WCAG
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
14 11 (0.21%) PSD2
15 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.19%) MiFID
System Software
1 943 (18.04%) Docker
2 168 (3.21%) Active Directory
3 118 (2.26%) VMware Infrastructure
4 59 (1.13%) vSphere
5 55 (1.05%) Virtual Machines
6 51 (0.98%) VMware NSX
7 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
8 27 (0.52%) Firmware
9 14 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 11 (0.21%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.19%) HDFS
12 10 (0.19%) Lustre
13 9 (0.17%) GPFS
14 8 (0.15%) Ceph
14 8 (0.15%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.096%) NFS
15 5 (0.096%) Postfix
15 5 (0.096%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,134 (21.69%) Terraform
2 1,049 (20.07%) Kubernetes
3 549 (10.50%) Ansible
4 353 (6.75%) Grafana
5 309 (5.91%) Prometheus
6 99 (1.89%) Argo
7 76 (1.45%) Puppet
8 51 (0.98%) Istio
9 47 (0.90%) vRealize
10 38 (0.73%) Kibana
11 37 (0.71%) vCenter Server
12 34 (0.65%) Progress Chef
13 29 (0.55%) Nessus
13 29 (0.55%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.46%) NetBackup
15 22 (0.42%) Rancher
16 21 (0.40%) Microsoft Intune
17 20 (0.38%) Control-M
18 17 (0.33%) IBM Guardium
19 16 (0.31%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 637 (12.18%) Microsoft
2 549 (10.50%) Databricks
3 301 (5.76%) Google
4 229 (4.38%) Splunk
5 218 (4.17%) VMware
6 216 (4.13%) Oracle
7 153 (2.93%) Red Hat
8 127 (2.43%) Cisco
9 119 (2.28%) OpenAI
10 104 (1.99%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.61%) CyberArk
12 75 (1.43%) Foundry
13 69 (1.32%) BeyondTrust
14 64 (1.22%) Informatica
15 61 (1.17%) F5
16 60 (1.15%) Palo Alto
17 57 (1.09%) IBM
18 47 (0.90%) Dynatrace
19 43 (0.82%) SAP
20 42 (0.80%) Atlassian