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

6 months to
6 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,186 4,039 4,134
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.16% 13.25% 9.31%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.00% 38.92% 31.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,515 2,726 2,911
10th Percentile £363 £380 £400
25th Percentile £415 £456 £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 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £486 £500 £525
% change year-on-year -2.80% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 52 114
10th Percentile £28.30 £20.23 £21.39
25th Percentile £41.94 £22.88 £37.63
Median hourly rate £54.00 £43.50 £56.75
Median % change year-on-year +24.14% -23.35% -12.69%
75th Percentile £69.38 £64.06 £69.62
90th Percentile £79.10 £75.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £50.00
% change year-on-year +13.80% -10.00% -23.08%

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 12,649 10,377 12,991
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.65% 34.04% 29.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,422 6,754 9,171
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £422 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -6.25%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £488 £495
% change year-on-year -2.51% -1.36% -1.98%
Number of hourly rates quoted 486 239 506
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.25 £30.94
25th Percentile £53.81 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £68.94
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% +1.61% -4.62%

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 6 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 6 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 6 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 0 4,336 £520 -9.57% 3,194
London 0 2,459 £550 -8.33% 1,422
UK excluding London 0 2,003 £486 -2.80% 2,443
Work from Home 0 1,587 £525 -4.55% 1,430
North of England +11 678 £481 -4.94% 519
South East -5 419 £500 -6.10% 772
Yorkshire +2 363 £487 -9.05% 200
Scotland +2 287 £425 -10.53% 180
Midlands -1 285 £500 +2.04% 260
North West +15 273 £475 -5.00% 237
West Midlands +1 235 £500 - 119
South West -5 213 £539 -10.25% 318
East of England +1 131 £500 +1.01% 333
East Midlands -7 49 £447 +2.17% 138
North East +6 48 £500 -4.76% 88
Wales -13 30 £473 -5.50% 92
Northern Ireland +6 29 £613 +16.67% 27

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
1 255 (4.92%) Apache Spark
2 203 (3.91%) Apache Airflow
3 160 (3.09%) Confluence
4 146 (2.82%) Apache
5 67 (1.29%) SAS
6 59 (1.14%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.48%) nginx
8 25 (0.48%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.46%) Jupyter
10 21 (0.40%) Palantir Foundry
11 20 (0.39%) Appian
12 11 (0.21%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.17%) Camunda
14 5 (0.096%) Apache Superset
14 5 (0.096%) CMS
14 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
15 4 (0.077%) Oracle Application Server
15 4 (0.077%) Traefik
16 3 (0.058%) Ethereum
Applications
1 127 (2.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
4 26 (0.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.42%) MS Visio
6 13 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.15%) Weka
8 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.039%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 20 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
4 4 (0.077%) Oracle EBS
5 3 (0.058%) Actimize
5 3 (0.058%) BambooHR
5 3 (0.058%) IntelliMatch
5 3 (0.058%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
6 2 (0.039%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
6 2 (0.039%) Shopify
7 1 (0.019%) Advent Geneva
7 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
7 1 (0.019%) NetSuite
7 1 (0.019%) Salesforce CRM
7 1 (0.019%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 2,039 (39.32%) AWS
2 1,780 (34.32%) Azure
3 818 (15.77%) GCP
4 674 (13.00%) GitHub
5 545 (10.51%) Serverless
6 492 (9.49%) Power Platform
7 374 (7.21%) Amazon S3
8 370 (7.13%) Azure DevOps
9 360 (6.94%) AWS Lambda
10 340 (6.56%) GitHub Actions
11 260 (5.01%) Snowflake
12 259 (4.99%) AWS CloudFormation
12 259 (4.99%) Azure Data Factory
13 195 (3.76%) Amazon EKS
14 177 (3.41%) Amazon ECS
15 175 (3.37%) OpenShift
16 171 (3.30%) Amazon EC2
17 165 (3.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 160 (3.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 148 (2.85%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 227 (4.38%) Firewall
2 152 (2.93%) DNS
3 119 (2.29%) TCP/IP
4 115 (2.22%) Network Security
5 88 (1.70%) VPN
6 66 (1.27%) HTTP
7 64 (1.23%) BGP
8 55 (1.06%) WAN
9 50 (0.96%) SSL
10 41 (0.79%) Wireshark
11 39 (0.75%) MPLS
11 39 (0.75%) SAN
12 36 (0.69%) OSPF
13 33 (0.64%) LAN
14 32 (0.62%) DHCP
15 30 (0.58%) SD-WAN
16 28 (0.54%) VLAN
17 26 (0.50%) Wireless
18 22 (0.42%) BIG-IP
19 21 (0.40%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 409 (7.89%) Power BI
2 405 (7.81%) PostgreSQL
3 320 (6.17%) Data Warehouse
4 239 (4.61%) Data Lake
5 238 (4.59%) NoSQL
6 200 (3.86%) Relational Database
7 194 (3.74%) SQL Server
8 163 (3.14%) Tableau
9 160 (3.09%) Big Data
10 133 (2.56%) Metadata
11 128 (2.47%) Amazon RDS
12 124 (2.39%) BigQuery
13 120 (2.31%) MySQL
14 112 (2.16%) Delta Lake
15 110 (2.12%) Amazon Redshift
16 104 (2.01%) MongoDB
17 98 (1.89%) Amazon Athena
18 91 (1.75%) Azure SQL Database
19 87 (1.68%) Hadoop
20 84 (1.62%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 663 (12.78%) Git
2 562 (10.84%) Jenkins
3 440 (8.48%) GitLab
4 300 (5.78%) JIRA
5 92 (1.77%) MLflow
6 90 (1.74%) Selenium
7 51 (0.98%) Bitbucket
7 51 (0.98%) Postman
8 49 (0.94%) Cucumber
9 41 (0.79%) Sonatype Nexus
10 38 (0.73%) JUnit
11 34 (0.66%) JMeter
12 29 (0.56%) SpecFlow
13 26 (0.50%) Visual Studio
14 25 (0.48%) Cypress.io
15 24 (0.46%) CircleCI
15 24 (0.46%) Maven
16 23 (0.44%) Artifactory
16 23 (0.44%) SonarQube
17 21 (0.40%) Liquibase
General
1 1,298 (25.03%) Social Skills
2 1,022 (19.71%) Finance
3 710 (13.69%) Analytical Skills
4 486 (9.37%) Public Sector
5 425 (8.20%) Banking
6 178 (3.43%) Front Office
7 128 (2.47%) Documentation Skills
8 104 (2.01%) Investment Banking
9 70 (1.35%) Retail
10 67 (1.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 66 (1.27%) Marketing
12 62 (1.20%) Financial Institution
12 62 (1.20%) Pharmaceutical
13 54 (1.04%) Telecoms
14 48 (0.93%) Legal
15 46 (0.89%) Influencing Skills
16 43 (0.83%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.66%) Military
17 34 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
18 21 (0.40%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 953 (18.38%) Developer
2 723 (13.94%) Senior
3 719 (13.86%) Data Engineer
4 423 (8.16%) Python Developer
5 336 (6.48%) Lead
6 331 (6.38%) Architect
7 313 (6.04%) DevOps Engineer
8 293 (5.65%) Python Engineer
9 291 (5.61%) Analyst
10 265 (5.11%) AWS Engineer
11 263 (5.07%) Software Engineer
12 250 (4.82%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 204 (3.93%) Data Scientist
14 175 (3.37%) Platform Engineer
15 154 (2.97%) Senior Developer
16 153 (2.95%) Azure Engineer
17 145 (2.80%) Data Analyst
18 139 (2.68%) Full-Stack Developer
19 137 (2.64%) Senior Data Engineer
20 135 (2.60%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 447 (8.62%) REST
2 370 (7.13%) React
3 323 (6.23%) PySpark
4 322 (6.21%) Kafka
5 293 (5.65%) Node.js
6 229 (4.42%) Pandas
7 228 (4.40%) FastAPI
8 226 (4.36%) PyTorch
9 217 (4.18%) RESTful
10 215 (4.15%) .NET
11 182 (3.51%) TensorFlow
12 163 (3.14%) NumPy
13 147 (2.83%) scikit-learn
14 141 (2.72%) AngularJS
15 132 (2.55%) Flask
16 127 (2.45%) LangChain
17 120 (2.31%) JSON
18 119 (2.29%) pytest
19 116 (2.24%) Django
20 111 (2.14%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 503 (9.70%) Cloud Native
2 208 (4.01%) Algorithms
3 207 (3.99%) Distributed Systems
4 141 (2.72%) Product Ownership
5 128 (2.47%) Data Protection Act
6 125 (2.41%) Equities
7 113 (2.18%) Fixed Income
8 112 (2.16%) Data Structures
9 107 (2.06%) Onboarding
10 105 (2.02%) AI Agents
11 103 (1.99%) Derivative
12 93 (1.79%) Security Posture
13 92 (1.77%) Legacy Systems
14 90 (1.74%) Enterprise Software
15 89 (1.72%) Hybrid Cloud
16 88 (1.70%) Public Cloud
17 86 (1.66%) Data Centre
18 83 (1.60%) Management Information System
19 60 (1.16%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
20 57 (1.10%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 698 (13.46%) Linux
2 332 (6.40%) Windows
3 197 (3.80%) Unix
4 98 (1.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.27%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.69%) Android
7 35 (0.67%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.60%) VMS
9 26 (0.50%) CentOS
10 24 (0.46%) Mac OS
11 21 (0.40%) Apple iOS
11 21 (0.40%) Solaris
12 9 (0.17%) Kali Linux
12 9 (0.17%) Windows 7
13 8 (0.15%) AIX
14 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.096%) Debian
14 5 (0.096%) Embedded Linux
14 5 (0.096%) zOS
15 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,894 (36.52%) CI/CD
2 1,460 (28.15%) DevOps
3 1,242 (23.95%) Agile
4 1,117 (21.54%) AI
5 1,078 (20.79%) Problem-Solving
6 997 (19.22%) Analytics
7 928 (17.89%) Infrastructure as Code
8 857 (16.53%) Machine Learning
9 830 (16.00%) Data Pipeline
10 775 (14.94%) Containerisation
11 687 (13.25%) Data Engineering
12 683 (13.17%) ETL
13 668 (12.88%) Data Modelling
14 629 (12.13%) Data Science
15 600 (11.57%) Test Automation
16 596 (11.49%) Software Engineering
17 497 (9.58%) Observability
18 486 (9.37%) Business Intelligence
19 447 (8.62%) LLM
20 384 (7.40%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,618 (31.20%) SQL
2 732 (14.11%) Java
3 686 (13.23%) PowerShell
4 627 (12.09%) Bash
5 530 (10.22%) JavaScript
6 358 (6.90%) TypeScript
7 334 (6.44%) C#
8 241 (4.65%) Go
9 174 (3.36%) C++
10 152 (2.93%) R
11 116 (2.24%) Perl
12 115 (2.22%) Scala
12 115 (2.22%) Shell Script
13 95 (1.83%) Ruby
14 70 (1.35%) Bicep
15 62 (1.20%) Kusto Query Language
16 52 (1.00%) C
17 47 (0.91%) VBA
18 45 (0.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 43 (0.83%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,179 (22.73%) Security Cleared
2 944 (18.20%) SC Cleared
3 453 (8.74%) Degree
4 213 (4.11%) Computer Science Degree
5 142 (2.74%) DV Cleared
6 139 (2.68%) AWS Certification
7 125 (2.41%) Master's Degree
8 116 (2.24%) BPSS Clearance
9 106 (2.04%) Azure Certification
10 94 (1.81%) CISSP
11 76 (1.47%) Cisco Certification
12 63 (1.21%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 59 (1.14%) CCNP
14 46 (0.89%) PhD
15 44 (0.85%) CISM
16 42 (0.81%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 39 (0.75%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.62%) Microsoft Certified Professional
19 31 (0.60%) CEH
20 29 (0.56%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 472 (9.10%) Data Quality
2 211 (4.07%) QA
3 184 (3.55%) GDPR
4 106 (2.04%) NIST
5 103 (1.99%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 79 (1.52%) Accessibility
7 33 (0.64%) PCI DSS
7 33 (0.64%) SLA
8 30 (0.58%) HIPAA
9 27 (0.52%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 23 (0.44%) NCSC
11 18 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
12 17 (0.33%) SOC 2
13 13 (0.25%) WCAG
14 12 (0.23%) EU AI Act
15 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.19%) MiFID
16 10 (0.19%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) PSD2
17 9 (0.17%) EMIR
System Software
1 963 (18.57%) Docker
2 178 (3.43%) Active Directory
3 118 (2.28%) VMware Infrastructure
4 54 (1.04%) vSphere
5 53 (1.02%) Virtual Machines
6 47 (0.91%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.56%) Hyper-V
8 26 (0.50%) Firmware
9 15 (0.29%) KVM
9 15 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) HDFS
11 12 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.19%) Lustre
13 9 (0.17%) GPFS
14 8 (0.15%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
15 6 (0.12%) Postfix
16 5 (0.096%) NetIQ eDirectory
16 5 (0.096%) Oracle RAC
16 5 (0.096%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,138 (21.94%) Terraform
2 1,070 (20.63%) Kubernetes
3 564 (10.88%) Ansible
4 354 (6.83%) Grafana
5 314 (6.05%) Prometheus
6 95 (1.83%) Argo
7 77 (1.48%) Puppet
8 56 (1.08%) vRealize
9 51 (0.98%) Istio
10 46 (0.89%) Kibana
11 41 (0.79%) Nessus
12 33 (0.64%) Progress Chef
12 33 (0.64%) Single Sign-On
13 32 (0.62%) vCenter Server
14 28 (0.54%) Control-M
15 26 (0.50%) NetBackup
16 24 (0.46%) IBM Guardium
17 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
18 18 (0.35%) Rancher
19 17 (0.33%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 634 (12.23%) Microsoft
2 516 (9.95%) Databricks
3 305 (5.88%) Google
4 238 (4.59%) Splunk
5 228 (4.40%) Oracle
6 227 (4.38%) VMware
7 148 (2.85%) Red Hat
8 125 (2.41%) Cisco
9 118 (2.28%) OpenAI
10 112 (2.16%) ServiceNow
11 82 (1.58%) CyberArk
12 80 (1.54%) Foundry
13 74 (1.43%) F5
14 72 (1.39%) Palo Alto
15 66 (1.27%) BeyondTrust
16 60 (1.16%) Informatica
17 49 (0.94%) IBM
18 46 (0.89%) SAP
19 40 (0.77%) Atlassian
19 40 (0.77%) Dynatrace