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

6 months to
5 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,327 3,803 4,045
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.85% 13.14% 9.43%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.39% 38.49% 31.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,526 2,641 2,912
10th Percentile £363 £375 £381
25th Percentile £425 £447 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £522 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.84% -2.27% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
90th Percentile £749 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £500 £510
% change year-on-year -1.60% -1.96% -7.23%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 51 111
10th Percentile £30.29 £25.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £45.03 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £40.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +37.50% -33.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.00 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £84.25 £63.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -30.77% +10.64%

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 13,188 9,880 12,901
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.85% 34.15% 30.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,621 6,689 9,138
10th Percentile £358 £356 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £713 £757 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £475 £485
% change year-on-year +1.39% -2.06% -3.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 561 229 521
10th Percentile £36.25 £27.00 £31.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £34.48 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -7.26% -0.80%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.59% +0.40% -

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 5 June 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 June 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 June 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 -2 4,431 £525 -4.55% 3,365
London -3 2,541 £550 -4.35% 1,768
UK excluding London -1 2,065 £492 -1.60% 2,005
Work from Home -1 1,515 £525 -4.55% 1,676
North of England +10 751 £481 -1.16% 473
Yorkshire +2 422 £488 -2.50% 128
South East -5 394 £525 +5.00% 621
Scotland +2 302 £439 -8.40% 110
North West +4 258 £486 +2.24% 261
South West +1 250 £500 -13.04% 259
Midlands -15 232 £484 +7.64% 208
West Midlands -14 182 £479 +6.47% 102
East of England -9 127 £500 - 229
North East +10 83 £475 +8.57% 86
East Midlands -17 49 £495 +16.47% 105
Wales -12 27 £463 -7.50% 49
Northern Ireland +14 23 £430 -26.81% 80

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
1 280 (5.26%) Apache Spark
2 235 (4.41%) Apache Airflow
3 186 (3.49%) Apache
4 154 (2.89%) Confluence
5 49 (0.92%) Jupyter
6 44 (0.83%) SAS
7 43 (0.81%) SharePoint
8 24 (0.45%) nginx
9 21 (0.39%) OpenStack
10 16 (0.30%) ArcGIS
10 16 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
11 15 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
12 14 (0.26%) IIS
13 10 (0.19%) Appian
13 10 (0.19%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) Camunda
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
15 7 (0.13%) CMS
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 116 (2.18%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
3 22 (0.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 22 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
4 19 (0.36%) MS Visio
5 8 (0.15%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.075%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.056%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.019%) SPSS
8 1 (0.019%) Weka
8 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.43%) Aladdin
2 18 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.094%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.056%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.056%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.056%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.056%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Orchestrade
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
9 1 (0.019%) OneSumX
Cloud Services
1 1,994 (37.43%) AWS
2 1,766 (33.15%) Azure
3 772 (14.49%) GCP
4 643 (12.07%) GitHub
5 509 (9.56%) Power Platform
6 454 (8.52%) Serverless
7 377 (7.08%) Azure DevOps
8 370 (6.95%) Amazon S3
9 346 (6.50%) GitHub Actions
10 328 (6.16%) AWS Lambda
11 253 (4.75%) Azure Data Factory
12 250 (4.69%) Snowflake
13 181 (3.40%) dbt
14 164 (3.08%) AWS CloudFormation
15 162 (3.04%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 161 (3.02%) OpenShift
17 157 (2.95%) Amazon EKS
18 148 (2.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 126 (2.37%) Amazon EC2
20 113 (2.12%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 206 (3.87%) Firewall
2 150 (2.82%) DNS
3 115 (2.16%) Network Security
4 98 (1.84%) WAN
5 94 (1.76%) BGP
6 90 (1.69%) TCP/IP
7 77 (1.45%) VPN
8 63 (1.18%) OSPF
9 62 (1.16%) HTTP
10 56 (1.05%) SAN
11 54 (1.01%) BIG-IP
12 48 (0.90%) SD-WAN
12 48 (0.90%) SSL
12 48 (0.90%) VXLAN
13 40 (0.75%) VLAN
14 36 (0.68%) DHCP
14 36 (0.68%) Ethernet VPN
14 36 (0.68%) LAN
14 36 (0.68%) SNMP
15 33 (0.62%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 444 (8.33%) Power BI
2 332 (6.23%) PostgreSQL
3 278 (5.22%) Data Warehouse
4 263 (4.94%) SQL Server
5 222 (4.17%) Data Lake
6 192 (3.60%) Tableau
7 181 (3.40%) Relational Database
8 170 (3.19%) NoSQL
9 161 (3.02%) Big Data
10 158 (2.97%) Metadata
11 134 (2.52%) Delta Lake
12 132 (2.48%) BigQuery
13 125 (2.35%) Amazon Athena
14 118 (2.22%) MongoDB
15 110 (2.06%) Amazon Redshift
16 94 (1.76%) DynamoDB
17 86 (1.61%) Amazon RDS
18 85 (1.60%) MySQL
19 73 (1.37%) Azure SQL Database
19 73 (1.37%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 628 (11.79%) Git
2 482 (9.05%) Jenkins
3 379 (7.11%) GitLab
4 280 (5.26%) JIRA
5 77 (1.45%) Selenium
6 76 (1.43%) MLflow
7 60 (1.13%) Postman
8 36 (0.68%) Cucumber
8 36 (0.68%) JMeter
9 34 (0.64%) Cypress.io
10 33 (0.62%) Artifactory
11 31 (0.58%) SonarQube
12 30 (0.56%) Bitbucket
13 26 (0.49%) Sonatype Nexus
14 25 (0.47%) JUnit
14 25 (0.47%) REST Assured
15 23 (0.43%) Maven
16 22 (0.41%) Robot Framework
17 20 (0.38%) Gatling
18 19 (0.36%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,163 (21.83%) Social Skills
2 1,078 (20.24%) Finance
3 720 (13.52%) Analytical Skills
4 484 (9.09%) Public Sector
5 383 (7.19%) Banking
6 191 (3.59%) Front Office
7 134 (2.52%) Documentation Skills
8 122 (2.29%) Investment Banking
9 86 (1.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 76 (1.43%) Marketing
11 62 (1.16%) Retail
12 60 (1.13%) Pharmaceutical
13 55 (1.03%) Legal
14 48 (0.90%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.83%) Influencing Skills
16 39 (0.73%) Financial Institution
16 39 (0.73%) Publishing
17 35 (0.66%) Manufacturing
18 34 (0.64%) Military
19 28 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 972 (18.25%) Developer
2 816 (15.32%) Data Engineer
3 786 (14.76%) Senior
4 500 (9.39%) Python Developer
5 339 (6.36%) Lead
6 332 (6.23%) Architect
7 330 (6.19%) Python Engineer
8 290 (5.44%) DevOps Engineer
9 275 (5.16%) Analyst
10 267 (5.01%) Software Engineer
11 240 (4.51%) AWS Engineer
12 221 (4.15%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 206 (3.87%) Data Scientist
14 172 (3.23%) Senior Developer
15 160 (3.00%) Senior Data Engineer
16 152 (2.85%) Azure Engineer
16 152 (2.85%) Full-Stack Developer
17 151 (2.83%) Platform Engineer
18 144 (2.70%) Data Analyst
19 138 (2.59%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 415 (7.79%) REST
2 371 (6.96%) React
3 361 (6.78%) PySpark
4 316 (5.93%) Kafka
5 243 (4.56%) .NET
6 221 (4.15%) Node.js
7 210 (3.94%) Pandas
8 191 (3.59%) FastAPI
9 188 (3.53%) RESTful
10 176 (3.30%) JSON
11 167 (3.13%) PyTorch
12 137 (2.57%) Django
13 126 (2.37%) Flask
14 124 (2.33%) NumPy
15 117 (2.20%) TensorFlow
16 115 (2.16%) LangChain
17 114 (2.14%) AngularJS
18 112 (2.10%) scikit-learn
19 103 (1.93%) OAuth
20 102 (1.91%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 621 (11.66%) Cloud Native
2 246 (4.62%) Distributed Systems
3 148 (2.78%) Algorithms
4 142 (2.67%) Data Centre
5 137 (2.57%) Product Ownership
6 133 (2.50%) AI Agents
7 132 (2.48%) Onboarding
8 119 (2.23%) Data Protection Act
9 118 (2.22%) Data Structures
10 113 (2.12%) Derivative
10 113 (2.12%) Management Information System
11 106 (1.99%) Legacy Systems
12 105 (1.97%) Equities
13 98 (1.84%) Fixed Income
14 94 (1.76%) Security Posture
15 90 (1.69%) Hybrid Cloud
16 88 (1.65%) Enterprise Software
17 71 (1.33%) Public Cloud
18 55 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
19 53 (0.99%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 625 (11.73%) Linux
2 304 (5.71%) Windows
3 219 (4.11%) Unix
4 116 (2.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 81 (1.52%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.56%) VMS
8 26 (0.49%) AIX
8 26 (0.49%) Solaris
9 24 (0.45%) Android
10 20 (0.38%) CentOS
11 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
12 16 (0.30%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.23%) zOS
14 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.13%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
17 5 (0.094%) Amazon Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,991 (37.38%) CI/CD
2 1,449 (27.20%) DevOps
3 1,248 (23.43%) AI
4 1,144 (21.48%) Agile
5 1,044 (19.60%) Analytics
6 938 (17.61%) Infrastructure as Code
7 917 (17.21%) Problem-Solving
8 915 (17.18%) Data Pipeline
9 824 (15.47%) Machine Learning
10 713 (13.38%) Data Engineering
11 710 (13.33%) Data Modelling
12 698 (13.10%) Containerisation
13 692 (12.99%) ETL
14 656 (12.31%) Software Engineering
15 583 (10.94%) Data Science
16 561 (10.53%) Observability
17 542 (10.17%) Test Automation
18 510 (9.57%) Business Intelligence
19 473 (8.88%) LLM
20 438 (8.22%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,755 (32.95%) SQL
2 769 (14.44%) Java
3 662 (12.43%) PowerShell
4 587 (11.02%) Bash
5 472 (8.86%) JavaScript
6 360 (6.76%) TypeScript
7 340 (6.38%) C#
8 197 (3.70%) Go
9 157 (2.95%) R
10 149 (2.80%) C++
11 127 (2.38%) Scala
12 108 (2.03%) Shell Script
13 78 (1.46%) Bicep
13 78 (1.46%) Perl
14 64 (1.20%) Ruby
15 61 (1.15%) PL/SQL
16 57 (1.07%) C
17 56 (1.05%) T-SQL
18 49 (0.92%) Groovy
19 46 (0.86%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,204 (22.60%) Security Cleared
2 977 (18.34%) SC Cleared
3 393 (7.38%) Degree
4 160 (3.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 155 (2.91%) DV Cleared
6 125 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
7 110 (2.06%) Azure Certification
8 102 (1.91%) AWS Certification
9 92 (1.73%) CISSP
10 72 (1.35%) Cisco Certification
10 72 (1.35%) Master's Degree
11 54 (1.01%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 50 (0.94%) CCNP
13 40 (0.75%) CISM
14 34 (0.64%) ISTQB
14 34 (0.64%) PhD
15 27 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 26 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
17 22 (0.41%) CCIE
18 19 (0.36%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 522 (9.80%) Data Quality
2 237 (4.45%) QA
3 138 (2.59%) GDPR
4 102 (1.91%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 102 (1.91%) NIST
5 74 (1.39%) Accessibility
6 36 (0.68%) SLA
7 27 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 26 (0.49%) PCI DSS
9 24 (0.45%) HIPAA
10 20 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
11 16 (0.30%) WCAG
12 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
13 13 (0.24%) NCSC
14 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
15 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) GRC
17 7 (0.13%) Disclosure Scotland
18 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 800 (15.02%) Docker
2 151 (2.83%) Active Directory
3 102 (1.91%) VMware Infrastructure
4 73 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.75%) vSphere
6 38 (0.71%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.62%) Firmware
8 31 (0.58%) Hyper-V
9 21 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
10 17 (0.32%) KVM
10 17 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.24%) Squid
12 11 (0.21%) HDFS
13 10 (0.19%) Ceph
13 10 (0.19%) Oracle RAC
13 10 (0.19%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
16 4 (0.075%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
16 4 (0.075%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,096 (20.57%) Terraform
2 948 (17.80%) Kubernetes
3 546 (10.25%) Ansible
4 325 (6.10%) Grafana
5 274 (5.14%) Prometheus
6 69 (1.30%) Puppet
7 57 (1.07%) Argo
8 52 (0.98%) Istio
9 46 (0.86%) vRealize
10 35 (0.66%) Progress Chef
11 34 (0.64%) Kibana
12 33 (0.62%) vCenter Server
13 28 (0.53%) Single Sign-On
14 26 (0.49%) Control-M
14 26 (0.49%) Nessus
15 24 (0.45%) Nagios
15 24 (0.45%) ZABBIX
16 23 (0.43%) NetBackup
17 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
18 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 580 (10.89%) Microsoft
2 565 (10.61%) Databricks
3 282 (5.29%) Google
4 247 (4.64%) Oracle
5 217 (4.07%) Splunk
6 177 (3.32%) VMware
7 133 (2.50%) Red Hat
8 124 (2.33%) OpenAI
9 120 (2.25%) Cisco
10 95 (1.78%) ServiceNow
11 85 (1.60%) CyberArk
12 81 (1.52%) F5
13 77 (1.45%) Dynatrace
13 77 (1.45%) Palo Alto
14 76 (1.43%) BeyondTrust
15 73 (1.37%) IBM
16 68 (1.28%) Informatica
17 53 (0.99%) Foundry
18 48 (0.90%) Arista
18 48 (0.90%) SAP