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

6 months to
12 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,433 3,856 4,103
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.87% 13.10% 9.40%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.45% 38.49% 31.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,582 2,659 2,955
10th Percentile £363 £375 £377
25th Percentile £425 £445 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £524 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.51% -2.27% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £661 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £838
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £500 £509
% change year-on-year -1.00% -1.67% -5.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 55 114
10th Percentile £30.00 £25.25 £20.91
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £40.00 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year +31.25% -34.43% -5.24%
75th Percentile £67.84 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £61.45 £76.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £47.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +7.81% -26.92% +11.83%

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 13,433 10,018 13,163
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.88% 34.04% 30.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,762 6,782 9,286
10th Percentile £358 £355 £350
25th Percentile £417 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £601 £625 £650
90th Percentile £717 £751 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +2.63% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 551 231 531
10th Percentile £36.25 £26.32 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% +2.97%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +4.00% - -

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 12 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 12 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 12 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 -1 4,529 £525 -4.55% 2,118
London -3 2,612 £550 -4.35% 952
UK excluding London -1 2,109 £495 -1.00% 1,595
Work from Home -2 1,548 £525 -4.55% 964
North of England +10 764 £481 +0.26% 401
Yorkshire +1 427 £490 -2.00% 117
South East -6 400 £525 +2.44% 542
Scotland +2 315 £440 -7.37% 75
North West +6 261 £486 +2.24% 226
South West 0 260 £500 -9.09% 206
Midlands -16 230 £477 +6.00% 170
West Midlands -12 182 £476 +0.21% 92
East of England -13 125 £500 - 163
North East +8 88 £469 +7.14% 59
East Midlands -19 47 £495 +16.47% 77
Wales -8 28 £475 -5.00% 40
Northern Ireland +14 26 £408 -30.64% 29

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
1 282 (5.19%) Apache Spark
2 242 (4.45%) Apache Airflow
3 185 (3.41%) Apache
4 158 (2.91%) Confluence
5 52 (0.96%) Jupyter
6 47 (0.87%) SAS
7 45 (0.83%) SharePoint
8 21 (0.39%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.37%) nginx
10 18 (0.33%) Palantir Foundry
11 17 (0.31%) ArcGIS
12 15 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 13 (0.24%) IIS
14 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
15 9 (0.17%) Appian
16 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
17 7 (0.13%) CICS
18 6 (0.11%) Camunda
18 6 (0.11%) CMS
18 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 115 (2.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.40%) Microsoft Office
3 22 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 22 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
4 19 (0.35%) MS Visio
5 11 (0.20%) CPLEX
6 3 (0.055%) LaTeX
6 3 (0.055%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
7 1 (0.018%) SPSS
7 1 (0.018%) Weka
7 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.40%) Aladdin
2 19 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
4 8 (0.15%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
7 5 (0.092%) BambooHR
8 4 (0.074%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.074%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.055%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.055%) Dynamics CRM
9 3 (0.055%) Sage X3
9 3 (0.055%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.055%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.037%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.037%) Odoo
10 2 (0.037%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.037%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.037%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,041 (37.57%) AWS
2 1,798 (33.09%) Azure
3 793 (14.60%) GCP
4 659 (12.13%) GitHub
5 518 (9.53%) Power Platform
6 483 (8.89%) Serverless
7 399 (7.34%) Amazon S3
8 390 (7.18%) Azure DevOps
9 362 (6.66%) GitHub Actions
10 354 (6.52%) AWS Lambda
11 260 (4.79%) Snowflake
12 252 (4.64%) Azure Data Factory
13 188 (3.46%) dbt
14 174 (3.20%) AWS CloudFormation
15 163 (3.00%) Amazon EKS
16 160 (2.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 157 (2.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 157 (2.89%) OpenShift
18 126 (2.32%) Amazon EC2
19 120 (2.21%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 211 (3.88%) Firewall
2 149 (2.74%) DNS
3 102 (1.88%) Network Security
4 100 (1.84%) WAN
5 98 (1.80%) BGP
6 90 (1.66%) TCP/IP
7 79 (1.45%) VPN
8 64 (1.18%) OSPF
9 58 (1.07%) HTTP
10 57 (1.05%) SAN
11 56 (1.03%) BIG-IP
12 49 (0.90%) SD-WAN
12 49 (0.90%) VXLAN
13 46 (0.85%) SSL
14 43 (0.79%) VLAN
15 38 (0.70%) Ethernet VPN
16 36 (0.66%) DHCP
16 36 (0.66%) LAN
16 36 (0.66%) SNMP
17 35 (0.64%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 451 (8.30%) Power BI
2 347 (6.39%) PostgreSQL
3 292 (5.37%) Data Warehouse
4 260 (4.79%) SQL Server
5 228 (4.20%) Data Lake
6 193 (3.55%) Tableau
7 185 (3.41%) Relational Database
8 169 (3.11%) NoSQL
9 167 (3.07%) Metadata
10 165 (3.04%) Big Data
11 141 (2.60%) Amazon Athena
12 136 (2.50%) BigQuery
13 133 (2.45%) Delta Lake
14 128 (2.36%) Amazon Redshift
15 121 (2.23%) MongoDB
16 98 (1.80%) DynamoDB
17 91 (1.67%) Amazon RDS
18 87 (1.60%) MySQL
19 73 (1.34%) Hadoop
20 71 (1.31%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 658 (12.11%) Git
2 493 (9.07%) Jenkins
3 386 (7.10%) GitLab
4 288 (5.30%) JIRA
5 78 (1.44%) Selenium
6 75 (1.38%) MLflow
7 62 (1.14%) Postman
8 36 (0.66%) Cucumber
8 36 (0.66%) JMeter
9 33 (0.61%) Cypress.io
10 32 (0.59%) Bitbucket
11 31 (0.57%) SonarQube
12 30 (0.55%) REST Assured
13 29 (0.53%) Artifactory
14 27 (0.50%) JUnit
15 26 (0.48%) Maven
16 25 (0.46%) Sonatype Nexus
17 21 (0.39%) Robot Framework
18 20 (0.37%) Gatling
19 19 (0.35%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,183 (21.77%) Social Skills
2 1,102 (20.28%) Finance
3 731 (13.45%) Analytical Skills
4 509 (9.37%) Public Sector
5 393 (7.23%) Banking
6 192 (3.53%) Front Office
7 138 (2.54%) Documentation Skills
8 122 (2.25%) Investment Banking
9 99 (1.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 75 (1.38%) Marketing
11 70 (1.29%) Retail
12 60 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
13 55 (1.01%) Legal
14 51 (0.94%) Telecoms
15 43 (0.79%) Influencing Skills
15 43 (0.79%) Publishing
16 41 (0.75%) Financial Institution
17 37 (0.68%) Military
18 34 (0.63%) Manufacturing
19 29 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 992 (18.26%) Developer
2 845 (15.55%) Data Engineer
3 813 (14.96%) Senior
4 512 (9.42%) Python Developer
5 353 (6.50%) Lead
6 338 (6.22%) Python Engineer
7 327 (6.02%) Architect
8 297 (5.47%) DevOps Engineer
9 278 (5.12%) Analyst
10 264 (4.86%) Software Engineer
11 247 (4.55%) AWS Engineer
12 234 (4.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 210 (3.87%) Data Scientist
14 178 (3.28%) Senior Developer
15 168 (3.09%) Senior Data Engineer
16 158 (2.91%) Platform Engineer
17 157 (2.89%) Full-Stack Developer
18 154 (2.83%) Azure Engineer
19 148 (2.72%) Cloud Engineer
20 146 (2.69%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 427 (7.86%) REST
2 383 (7.05%) React
3 366 (6.74%) PySpark
4 327 (6.02%) Kafka
5 249 (4.58%) .NET
6 216 (3.98%) Node.js
7 209 (3.85%) Pandas
8 201 (3.70%) RESTful
9 199 (3.66%) FastAPI
10 182 (3.35%) JSON
11 163 (3.00%) PyTorch
12 146 (2.69%) Django
13 128 (2.36%) Flask
14 125 (2.30%) NumPy
15 118 (2.17%) LangChain
16 114 (2.10%) AngularJS
17 113 (2.08%) TensorFlow
18 112 (2.06%) scikit-learn
19 109 (2.01%) OAuth
20 107 (1.97%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 666 (12.26%) Cloud Native
2 265 (4.88%) Distributed Systems
3 149 (2.74%) Algorithms
4 146 (2.69%) Data Centre
4 146 (2.69%) Onboarding
5 143 (2.63%) AI Agents
6 136 (2.50%) Product Ownership
7 125 (2.30%) Data Structures
8 117 (2.15%) Data Protection Act
9 114 (2.10%) Legacy Systems
10 112 (2.06%) Derivative
11 111 (2.04%) Management Information System
12 101 (1.86%) Equities
13 98 (1.80%) Fixed Income
14 96 (1.77%) Hybrid Cloud
15 94 (1.73%) Security Posture
16 89 (1.64%) Enterprise Software
17 70 (1.29%) Public Cloud
18 59 (1.09%) Greenfield Project
19 56 (1.03%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 619 (11.39%) Linux
2 299 (5.50%) Windows
3 221 (4.07%) Unix
4 116 (2.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 80 (1.47%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.79%) Ubuntu
7 29 (0.53%) VMS
8 26 (0.48%) AIX
8 26 (0.48%) Solaris
9 24 (0.44%) Android
10 20 (0.37%) CentOS
11 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
12 16 (0.29%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.22%) zOS
14 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.13%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 5 (0.092%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.092%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.092%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,060 (37.92%) CI/CD
2 1,489 (27.41%) DevOps
3 1,319 (24.28%) AI
4 1,174 (21.61%) Agile
5 1,078 (19.84%) Analytics
6 978 (18.00%) Infrastructure as Code
7 957 (17.61%) Data Pipeline
8 938 (17.26%) Problem-Solving
9 847 (15.59%) Machine Learning
10 754 (13.88%) Data Engineering
11 729 (13.42%) Data Modelling
12 717 (13.20%) Containerisation
13 704 (12.96%) ETL
14 680 (12.52%) Software Engineering
15 602 (11.08%) Data Science
16 592 (10.90%) Observability
17 550 (10.12%) Test Automation
18 529 (9.74%) Business Intelligence
19 499 (9.18%) LLM
20 454 (8.36%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,788 (32.91%) SQL
2 780 (14.36%) Java
3 648 (11.93%) PowerShell
4 594 (10.93%) Bash
5 476 (8.76%) JavaScript
6 378 (6.96%) TypeScript
7 344 (6.33%) C#
8 199 (3.66%) Go
9 162 (2.98%) R
10 146 (2.69%) C++
11 126 (2.32%) Scala
12 108 (1.99%) Shell Script
13 80 (1.47%) Bicep
14 79 (1.45%) Perl
15 65 (1.20%) Ruby
16 62 (1.14%) PL/SQL
17 58 (1.07%) T-SQL
18 55 (1.01%) C
19 51 (0.94%) Groovy
20 48 (0.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,219 (22.44%) Security Cleared
2 986 (18.15%) SC Cleared
3 393 (7.23%) Degree
4 157 (2.89%) DV Cleared
5 154 (2.83%) Computer Science Degree
6 132 (2.43%) BPSS Clearance
7 113 (2.08%) AWS Certification
8 112 (2.06%) Azure Certification
9 86 (1.58%) CISSP
10 72 (1.33%) Cisco Certification
11 70 (1.29%) Master's Degree
12 54 (0.99%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.92%) CCNP
14 40 (0.74%) CISM
15 33 (0.61%) ISTQB
15 33 (0.61%) Microsoft Certification
15 33 (0.61%) PhD
16 30 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 23 (0.42%) CCIE
18 22 (0.40%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 544 (10.01%) Data Quality
2 233 (4.29%) QA
3 135 (2.48%) GDPR
4 109 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 108 (1.99%) NIST
6 81 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.64%) SLA
8 27 (0.50%) PCI DSS
9 26 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.44%) HIPAA
11 22 (0.40%) WCAG
12 19 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.29%) NCSC
13 16 (0.29%) SOC 2
14 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
16 9 (0.17%) GRC
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.11%) PSD2
System Software
1 821 (15.11%) Docker
2 148 (2.72%) Active Directory
3 106 (1.95%) VMware Infrastructure
4 71 (1.31%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.74%) vSphere
6 39 (0.72%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.61%) Firmware
8 31 (0.57%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.33%) NFS
11 16 (0.29%) KVM
12 13 (0.24%) Squid
13 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.17%) Ceph
15 9 (0.17%) HDFS
16 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.13%) Postfix
18 4 (0.074%) Slurm Workload Manager
18 4 (0.074%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,139 (20.96%) Terraform
2 969 (17.84%) Kubernetes
3 551 (10.14%) Ansible
4 332 (6.11%) Grafana
5 277 (5.10%) Prometheus
6 75 (1.38%) Puppet
7 61 (1.12%) Argo
8 53 (0.98%) Istio
9 46 (0.85%) vRealize
10 38 (0.70%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.59%) vCenter Server
12 30 (0.55%) Kibana
13 28 (0.52%) Single Sign-On
14 26 (0.48%) Control-M
15 25 (0.46%) Nessus
16 24 (0.44%) Nagios
16 24 (0.44%) ZABBIX
17 23 (0.42%) NetBackup
18 22 (0.40%) Microsoft Intune
19 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 588 (10.82%) Microsoft
2 569 (10.47%) Databricks
3 289 (5.32%) Google
4 251 (4.62%) Oracle
5 215 (3.96%) Splunk
6 173 (3.18%) VMware
7 135 (2.48%) OpenAI
8 127 (2.34%) Red Hat
9 121 (2.23%) Cisco
10 101 (1.86%) ServiceNow
11 85 (1.56%) CyberArk
12 83 (1.53%) F5
13 82 (1.51%) Dynatrace
14 78 (1.44%) Palo Alto
15 76 (1.40%) BeyondTrust
16 74 (1.36%) IBM
16 74 (1.36%) Informatica
17 56 (1.03%) Foundry
18 50 (0.92%) Arista
19 48 (0.88%) SAP