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

6 months to
5 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 +2 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,594 4,391 4,179
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.29% 13.30% 10.99%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.51% 40.48% 34.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,642 2,837 2,850
10th Percentile £375 £358 £365
25th Percentile £445 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £640 £700
90th Percentile £750 £750 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £500 £510
% change year-on-year +1.00% -1.96% -2.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 89 97
10th Percentile £35.70 £28.25 £20.80
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.00 £40.06
Median hourly rate £62.40 £50.00 £67.02
Median % change year-on-year +24.80% -25.40% +3.11%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.84 £78.00 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.82 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +25.64% -28.57% +7.69%

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 14,159 10,847 12,204
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.03% 32.86% 32.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,191 7,133 8,059
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £645
90th Percentile £725 £734 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 543 303 333
10th Percentile £23.85 £29.00 £26.40
25th Percentile £45.75 £41.25 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.13 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £75.00 £77.25
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 5 October 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 5 October 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 5 October 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 4,757 £550 +4.76% 10,623
London -4 2,824 £575 - 6,617
UK excluding London -9 2,133 £505 +1.00% 5,041
Work from Home -6 1,541 £535 -2.73% 4,201
North of England +1 741 £500 +5.26% 1,106
South East -4 451 £543 +8.50% 1,176
Yorkshire -2 373 £500 - 344
Scotland -1 307 £467 -6.60% 676
North West -1 289 £525 +19.32% 598
South West -1 267 £550 - 547
Midlands -22 221 £500 - 508
West Midlands -19 184 £525 +5.00% 299
East of England -13 142 £484 -12.05% 652
North East -1 88 £425 -8.11% 171
East Midlands -14 37 £456 +11.28% 209
Wales -12 26 £530 +23.98% 177
Northern Ireland 0 17 £369 -37.23% 243

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
1 290 (5.18%) Apache Airflow
2 273 (4.88%) Apache Spark
3 228 (4.08%) Apache
4 155 (2.77%) Confluence
5 57 (1.02%) Jupyter
6 55 (0.98%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.59%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 26 (0.46%) nginx
10 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) IIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 9 (0.16%) CMS
12 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
14 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.089%) Camunda
14 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 99 (1.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 37 (0.66%) Chatbot
3 21 (0.38%) Microsoft Office
4 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
4 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.036%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.036%) Revit
7 2 (0.036%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
2 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Aladdin
4 11 (0.20%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.13%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.11%) Front Arena
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.072%) SAP IBP
9 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.054%) Actimize
10 3 (0.054%) Cloudability
10 3 (0.054%) Endur
10 3 (0.054%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 2,042 (36.50%) AWS
2 1,915 (34.23%) Azure
3 906 (16.20%) GCP
4 750 (13.41%) GitHub
5 480 (8.58%) Power Platform
6 472 (8.44%) Serverless
7 439 (7.85%) Azure DevOps
8 437 (7.81%) GitHub Actions
9 392 (7.01%) Amazon S3
10 344 (6.15%) AWS Lambda
11 341 (6.10%) Snowflake
12 245 (4.38%) dbt
13 212 (3.79%) Azure Data Factory
14 203 (3.63%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 195 (3.49%) Amazon EKS
16 184 (3.29%) AWS CloudFormation
17 179 (3.20%) Entra ID
18 147 (2.63%) Amazon EC2
19 130 (2.32%) SaaS
20 127 (2.27%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 287 (5.13%) Firewall
2 207 (3.70%) DNS
3 169 (3.02%) Network Security
4 150 (2.68%) TCP/IP
5 128 (2.29%) VPN
6 125 (2.23%) BGP
7 113 (2.02%) WAN
8 82 (1.47%) DHCP
9 75 (1.34%) SD-WAN
10 74 (1.32%) OSPF
11 62 (1.11%) BIG-IP
12 59 (1.05%) SSL
13 55 (0.98%) VLAN
13 55 (0.98%) VXLAN
14 54 (0.97%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 50 (0.89%) HTTP
16 47 (0.84%) Ethernet VPN
17 42 (0.75%) Broadband
18 41 (0.73%) Wireless
19 40 (0.72%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 429 (7.67%) Power BI
2 323 (5.77%) Data Warehouse
3 316 (5.65%) PostgreSQL
4 229 (4.09%) Metadata
5 201 (3.59%) Relational Database
6 198 (3.54%) SQL Server
7 195 (3.49%) Data Lake
8 183 (3.27%) BigQuery
9 162 (2.90%) Tableau
10 155 (2.77%) NoSQL
11 134 (2.40%) Amazon Redshift
12 133 (2.38%) Big Data
13 132 (2.36%) Amazon RDS
14 122 (2.18%) MongoDB
15 121 (2.16%) Delta Lake
16 119 (2.13%) Amazon Athena
17 104 (1.86%) DynamoDB
18 100 (1.79%) MySQL
19 74 (1.32%) Redis
20 61 (1.09%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 830 (14.84%) Git
2 519 (9.28%) Jenkins
3 493 (8.81%) GitLab
4 306 (5.47%) JIRA
5 119 (2.13%) Selenium
6 73 (1.30%) Postman
7 61 (1.09%) JMeter
8 59 (1.05%) Claude Code
9 55 (0.98%) SonarQube
10 49 (0.88%) MLflow
11 46 (0.82%) Bitbucket
12 41 (0.73%) Cucumber
13 39 (0.70%) REST Assured
14 37 (0.66%) Sonatype Nexus
15 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
16 34 (0.61%) Maven
17 32 (0.57%) Cypress.io
18 31 (0.55%) LoadRunner
19 28 (0.50%) Gatling
20 24 (0.43%) Zephyr
General
1 1,314 (23.49%) Social Skills
2 1,295 (23.15%) Finance
3 830 (14.84%) Analytical Skills
4 543 (9.71%) Public Sector
5 522 (9.33%) Banking
6 170 (3.04%) Front Office
7 152 (2.72%) Investment Banking
8 115 (2.06%) Retail
9 110 (1.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 100 (1.79%) Documentation Skills
11 86 (1.54%) Marketing
11 86 (1.54%) Telecoms
12 64 (1.14%) Military
13 54 (0.97%) Law
14 51 (0.91%) Aerospace
15 49 (0.88%) Pharmaceutical
16 48 (0.86%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.84%) Legal
18 41 (0.73%) Publishing
19 37 (0.66%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,010 (18.06%) Senior
2 893 (15.96%) Developer
3 824 (14.73%) Data Engineer
4 493 (8.81%) Lead
5 472 (8.44%) Python Developer
6 419 (7.49%) Python Engineer
7 368 (6.58%) DevOps Engineer
8 310 (5.54%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 278 (4.97%) Software Engineer
10 275 (4.92%) Analyst
11 233 (4.17%) Architect
12 217 (3.88%) AWS Engineer
13 194 (3.47%) Cloud Engineer
14 190 (3.40%) Azure Engineer
14 190 (3.40%) Senior Data Engineer
15 189 (3.38%) Platform Engineer
15 189 (3.38%) Senior Developer
16 176 (3.15%) Data Scientist
17 149 (2.66%) Network Engineer
18 140 (2.50%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,401 (25.04%) Terraform
2 546 (9.76%) REST
3 376 (6.72%) Kafka
4 361 (6.45%) PySpark
5 304 (5.43%) React
6 237 (4.24%) .NET
7 218 (3.90%) FastAPI
8 210 (3.75%) Django
9 208 (3.72%) JSON
10 191 (3.41%) RESTful
11 160 (2.86%) pytest
12 157 (2.81%) LangChain
13 147 (2.63%) Node.js
14 142 (2.54%) Pandas
15 129 (2.31%) OAuth
16 118 (2.11%) Flask
17 111 (1.98%) YAML
18 110 (1.97%) LangGraph
19 104 (1.86%) HTML
19 104 (1.86%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 807 (14.43%) Cloud Native
2 298 (5.33%) AI Agents
3 291 (5.20%) Distributed Systems
4 262 (4.68%) Onboarding
5 161 (2.88%) Data Centre
6 149 (2.66%) Data Structures
7 148 (2.65%) Product Ownership
8 136 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
9 122 (2.18%) Algorithms
10 111 (1.98%) Enterprise Software
10 111 (1.98%) Hybrid Cloud
11 107 (1.91%) Management Information System
12 101 (1.81%) Data Protection Act
13 100 (1.79%) Derivative
14 93 (1.66%) Security Posture
15 85 (1.52%) Public Cloud
16 84 (1.50%) PKI
17 79 (1.41%) Equities
18 67 (1.20%) Linux Command Line
19 66 (1.18%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 777 (13.89%) Linux
2 345 (6.17%) Windows
3 245 (4.38%) Unix
4 156 (2.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 93 (1.66%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.79%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.63%) VMS
8 25 (0.45%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 14 (0.25%) Android
11 13 (0.23%) AIX
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) zOS
15 5 (0.089%) Embedded Linux
15 5 (0.089%) FreeRTOS
15 5 (0.089%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,390 (42.72%) CI/CD
2 1,650 (29.50%) DevOps
3 1,589 (28.41%) AI
4 1,308 (23.38%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,263 (22.58%) Agile
6 1,082 (19.34%) Analytics
7 974 (17.41%) Data Pipeline
8 955 (17.07%) Software Engineering
9 874 (15.62%) Problem-Solving
10 847 (15.14%) Data Engineering
11 832 (14.87%) Machine Learning
12 773 (13.82%) Containerisation
13 767 (13.71%) Observability
14 762 (13.62%) Data Modelling
15 703 (12.57%) Test Automation
16 671 (11.99%) Validation
17 662 (11.83%) Continuous Improvement
18 660 (11.80%) ETL
19 597 (10.67%) Platform Engineering
20 582 (10.40%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,825 (32.62%) SQL
2 784 (14.02%) Bash
3 782 (13.98%) Java
4 753 (13.46%) PowerShell
5 438 (7.83%) JavaScript
6 347 (6.20%) TypeScript
7 307 (5.49%) C#
8 227 (4.06%) Go
9 154 (2.75%) Shell Script
10 135 (2.41%) Bicep
10 135 (2.41%) R
11 130 (2.32%) C++
12 120 (2.15%) Scala
13 106 (1.89%) Perl
14 61 (1.09%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 56 (1.00%) Groovy
16 51 (0.91%) C
17 50 (0.89%) Rust
17 50 (0.89%) T-SQL
18 47 (0.84%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,371 (24.51%) Security Cleared
2 1,101 (19.68%) SC Cleared
3 400 (7.15%) Degree
4 253 (4.52%) DV Cleared
5 153 (2.74%) Azure Certification
6 151 (2.70%) AWS Certification
7 145 (2.59%) Computer Science Degree
8 131 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.73%) CISSP
10 78 (1.39%) Cisco Certification
11 70 (1.25%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
13 37 (0.66%) CCNP
14 34 (0.61%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) CCIE
16 30 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 30 (0.54%) CISM
16 30 (0.54%) DBS Check
17 29 (0.52%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 647 (11.57%) Data Quality
2 325 (5.81%) QA
3 116 (2.07%) NIST
4 102 (1.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 86 (1.54%) GDPR
6 82 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 41 (0.73%) SLA
8 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 30 (0.54%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 24 (0.43%) SOC 2
12 22 (0.39%) WCAG
13 18 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
14 15 (0.27%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.13%) Basel III
17 7 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 7 (0.13%) MiFID
System Software
1 976 (17.45%) Docker
2 185 (3.31%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.36%) VMware Infrastructure
4 66 (1.18%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.89%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.63%) vSphere
7 31 (0.55%) VMware NSX
8 27 (0.48%) NFS
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) Firmware
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 8 (0.14%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 8 (0.14%) zsh
15 7 (0.13%) HDFS
16 6 (0.11%) Postfix
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,194 (21.34%) Kubernetes
2 649 (11.60%) Ansible
3 337 (6.02%) Grafana
4 251 (4.49%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.47%) Puppet
6 73 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 69 (1.23%) Argo
8 48 (0.86%) Single Sign-On
9 38 (0.68%) Kibana
10 35 (0.63%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) Packer
14 21 (0.38%) FortiGate
15 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
16 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.29%) Podman
16 16 (0.29%) QRadar
17 15 (0.27%) ZABBIX
18 14 (0.25%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 755 (13.50%) Microsoft
2 582 (10.40%) Databricks
3 405 (7.24%) Google
4 243 (4.34%) Oracle
5 206 (3.68%) Splunk
6 169 (3.02%) OpenAI
6 169 (3.02%) VMware
7 141 (2.52%) Cisco
8 134 (2.40%) ServiceNow
9 100 (1.79%) Dynatrace
10 96 (1.72%) Red Hat
11 92 (1.64%) IBM
12 90 (1.61%) Palo Alto
13 89 (1.59%) F5
14 85 (1.52%) Foundry
15 71 (1.27%) CyberArk
16 70 (1.25%) Fortinet
17 69 (1.23%) Informatica
18 66 (1.18%) SAP
19 54 (0.97%) Salesforce