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

6 months to
25 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,679 4,352 4,151
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.35% 13.19% 10.81%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.66% 40.00% 33.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,695 2,821 2,846
10th Percentile £371 £356 £375
25th Percentile £440 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.29% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £649 £700
90th Percentile £750 £770 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 135 84 101
10th Percentile £30.71 £28.20 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.19 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £79.38 £58.81 £71.88
90th Percentile £91.27 £82.38 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.31 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.62% -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 14,321 10,880 12,295
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.10% 32.97% 32.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,304 7,189 8,215
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £505 £526
Median % change year-on-year +3.47% -3.90% -4.45%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £496
% change year-on-year +5.26% -4.23% -0.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 549 295 344
10th Percentile £26.15 £29.00 £26.06
25th Percentile £46.80 £41.25 £45.62
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.07% -13.85% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £78.75 £78.38
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 25 September 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 25 September 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 25 September 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 -3 4,850 £550 +3.77% 10,381
London -4 2,859 £575 - 6,510
UK excluding London -7 2,180 £500 - 4,750
Work from Home -6 1,537 £530 -3.68% 3,801
North of England +1 754 £500 +4.60% 1,027
South East -6 456 £545 +9.00% 1,138
Yorkshire -2 386 £500 - 338
Scotland -5 300 £465 -7.00% 541
North West 0 289 £525 +11.94% 555
South West -3 284 £550 +4.76% 615
Midlands -21 225 £500 +3.31% 496
West Midlands -21 185 £500 - 304
East of England -14 153 £475 -9.52% 653
North East -3 89 £425 -5.56% 140
East Midlands -14 40 £463 +12.80% 192
Wales -10 27 £510 +19.30% 100
Northern Ireland +2 17 £363 -30.95% 218

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
1 297 (5.23%) Apache Airflow
2 278 (4.90%) Apache Spark
3 229 (4.03%) Apache
4 162 (2.85%) Confluence
5 59 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 57 (1.00%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.65%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 27 (0.48%) nginx
10 23 (0.41%) ArcGIS
11 22 (0.39%) IIS
11 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
12 8 (0.14%) 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 (0.088%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.088%) CICS
14 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 106 (1.87%) Microsoft Excel
2 36 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 21 (0.37%) Microsoft Office
4 16 (0.28%) CPLEX
5 15 (0.26%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.035%) Revit
8 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 1 (0.018%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Remedy ITSM
2 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
2 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
4 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
5 7 (0.12%) Front Arena
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
6 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Summit
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.070%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Endur
9 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.035%) Distributed Ledger
10 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.035%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 2,089 (36.78%) AWS
2 1,893 (33.33%) Azure
3 894 (15.74%) GCP
4 748 (13.17%) GitHub
5 494 (8.70%) Power Platform
6 489 (8.61%) Serverless
7 438 (7.71%) GitHub Actions
8 436 (7.68%) Azure DevOps
9 398 (7.01%) Amazon S3
10 362 (6.37%) AWS Lambda
11 345 (6.08%) Snowflake
12 243 (4.28%) dbt
13 209 (3.68%) Azure Data Factory
14 201 (3.54%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 188 (3.31%) AWS CloudFormation
16 183 (3.22%) Amazon EKS
17 172 (3.03%) Entra ID
18 142 (2.50%) Amazon EC2
19 128 (2.25%) SaaS
20 126 (2.22%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 286 (5.04%) Firewall
2 212 (3.73%) DNS
3 159 (2.80%) Network Security
4 154 (2.71%) TCP/IP
5 130 (2.29%) BGP
5 130 (2.29%) VPN
6 117 (2.06%) WAN
7 87 (1.53%) DHCP
8 78 (1.37%) OSPF
9 75 (1.32%) SD-WAN
10 63 (1.11%) BIG-IP
11 60 (1.06%) VLAN
12 57 (1.00%) SSL
13 56 (0.99%) VXLAN
14 53 (0.93%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 51 (0.90%) HTTP
16 48 (0.85%) Ethernet VPN
17 42 (0.74%) Wireless
18 41 (0.72%) Broadband
19 39 (0.69%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 440 (7.75%) Power BI
2 334 (5.88%) Data Warehouse
3 316 (5.56%) PostgreSQL
4 220 (3.87%) Metadata
5 204 (3.59%) Relational Database
6 199 (3.50%) SQL Server
7 195 (3.43%) Data Lake
8 184 (3.24%) BigQuery
9 174 (3.06%) Tableau
10 156 (2.75%) NoSQL
11 138 (2.43%) Big Data
12 134 (2.36%) Amazon Redshift
13 131 (2.31%) Amazon RDS
14 130 (2.29%) Amazon Athena
15 118 (2.08%) Delta Lake
16 116 (2.04%) MongoDB
17 111 (1.95%) DynamoDB
18 104 (1.83%) MySQL
19 73 (1.29%) Redis
20 62 (1.09%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 820 (14.44%) Git
2 510 (8.98%) Jenkins
3 481 (8.47%) GitLab
4 316 (5.56%) JIRA
5 118 (2.08%) Selenium
6 67 (1.18%) Postman
7 60 (1.06%) JMeter
8 57 (1.00%) SonarQube
9 56 (0.99%) Claude Code
10 50 (0.88%) MLflow
11 44 (0.77%) Bitbucket
12 34 (0.60%) Cucumber
12 34 (0.60%) Maven
12 34 (0.60%) REST Assured
12 34 (0.60%) Sonatype Nexus
13 33 (0.58%) Artifactory
13 33 (0.58%) Cypress.io
14 29 (0.51%) Gatling
14 29 (0.51%) LoadRunner
15 23 (0.41%) JUnit
General
1 1,322 (23.28%) Social Skills
2 1,285 (22.63%) Finance
3 854 (15.04%) Analytical Skills
4 545 (9.60%) Public Sector
5 518 (9.12%) Banking
6 175 (3.08%) Front Office
7 148 (2.61%) Investment Banking
8 113 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 112 (1.97%) Retail
10 104 (1.83%) Documentation Skills
11 88 (1.55%) Marketing
11 88 (1.55%) Telecoms
12 61 (1.07%) Military
13 53 (0.93%) Aerospace
13 53 (0.93%) Law
14 51 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
15 45 (0.79%) Legal
15 45 (0.79%) Publishing
16 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
17 39 (0.69%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,009 (17.77%) Senior
2 900 (15.85%) Developer
3 839 (14.77%) Data Engineer
4 489 (8.61%) Lead
5 470 (8.28%) Python Developer
6 425 (7.48%) Python Engineer
7 358 (6.30%) DevOps Engineer
8 303 (5.34%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 291 (5.12%) Analyst
10 285 (5.02%) Software Engineer
11 255 (4.49%) Architect
12 228 (4.01%) AWS Engineer
13 193 (3.40%) Cloud Engineer
13 193 (3.40%) Senior Developer
14 191 (3.36%) Platform Engineer
14 191 (3.36%) Senior Data Engineer
15 190 (3.35%) Azure Engineer
16 185 (3.26%) Data Scientist
17 151 (2.66%) Network Engineer
18 142 (2.50%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,395 (24.56%) Terraform
2 536 (9.44%) REST
3 375 (6.60%) Kafka
4 373 (6.57%) PySpark
5 309 (5.44%) React
6 245 (4.31%) .NET
7 213 (3.75%) JSON
8 209 (3.68%) FastAPI
9 207 (3.65%) Django
10 191 (3.36%) RESTful
11 161 (2.84%) Node.js
12 159 (2.80%) pytest
13 156 (2.75%) LangChain
13 156 (2.75%) Pandas
14 130 (2.29%) OAuth
15 117 (2.06%) Flask
16 114 (2.01%) YAML
17 110 (1.94%) PyTorch
18 109 (1.92%) LangGraph
19 106 (1.87%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 801 (14.10%) Cloud Native
2 298 (5.25%) Distributed Systems
3 290 (5.11%) AI Agents
4 256 (4.51%) Onboarding
5 166 (2.92%) Data Centre
6 154 (2.71%) Product Ownership
7 146 (2.57%) Data Structures
8 134 (2.36%) Legacy Systems
9 126 (2.22%) Algorithms
10 109 (1.92%) Management Information System
11 108 (1.90%) Enterprise Software
11 108 (1.90%) Hybrid Cloud
12 102 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
13 99 (1.74%) Derivative
14 94 (1.66%) Security Posture
15 84 (1.48%) Public Cloud
16 81 (1.43%) Equities
17 75 (1.32%) PKI
18 70 (1.23%) Self-Motivation
19 69 (1.22%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 771 (13.58%) Linux
2 345 (6.08%) Windows
3 252 (4.44%) Unix
4 155 (2.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 91 (1.60%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 38 (0.67%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 21 (0.37%) Solaris
10 17 (0.30%) AIX
11 15 (0.26%) Android
12 11 (0.19%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
14 9 (0.16%) zOS
15 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
15 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
15 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
16 5 (0.088%) Embedded Linux
17 4 (0.070%) Debian
17 4 (0.070%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,373 (41.79%) CI/CD
2 1,629 (28.68%) DevOps
3 1,582 (27.86%) AI
4 1,305 (22.98%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,277 (22.49%) Agile
6 1,102 (19.40%) Analytics
7 995 (17.52%) Data Pipeline
8 943 (16.61%) Software Engineering
9 902 (15.88%) Problem-Solving
10 852 (15.00%) Machine Learning
11 836 (14.72%) Data Engineering
12 790 (13.91%) Containerisation
13 765 (13.47%) Observability
14 758 (13.35%) Data Modelling
15 690 (12.15%) Test Automation
16 672 (11.83%) ETL
17 665 (11.71%) Validation
18 655 (11.53%) Continuous Improvement
19 580 (10.21%) LLM
20 579 (10.20%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,855 (32.66%) SQL
2 808 (14.23%) Java
3 770 (13.56%) Bash
4 756 (13.31%) PowerShell
5 452 (7.96%) JavaScript
6 346 (6.09%) TypeScript
7 310 (5.46%) C#
8 225 (3.96%) Go
9 153 (2.69%) Shell Script
10 141 (2.48%) R
11 133 (2.34%) Bicep
12 132 (2.32%) C++
13 125 (2.20%) Scala
14 104 (1.83%) Perl
15 61 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 60 (1.06%) Groovy
17 55 (0.97%) C
18 51 (0.90%) Rust
19 50 (0.88%) PL/SQL
20 48 (0.85%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,380 (24.30%) Security Cleared
2 1,118 (19.69%) SC Cleared
3 410 (7.22%) Degree
4 245 (4.31%) DV Cleared
5 156 (2.75%) Azure Certification
6 153 (2.69%) Computer Science Degree
7 143 (2.52%) AWS Certification
8 128 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.71%) CISSP
10 83 (1.46%) Cisco Certification
11 69 (1.22%) Master's Degree
12 49 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
13 41 (0.72%) CCNP
14 35 (0.62%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) CCIE
16 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 30 (0.53%) CISM
16 30 (0.53%) ISTQB
16 30 (0.53%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
17 29 (0.51%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 646 (11.38%) Data Quality
2 326 (5.74%) QA
3 116 (2.04%) NIST
4 103 (1.81%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 90 (1.58%) GDPR
6 82 (1.44%) Accessibility
7 43 (0.76%) SLA
8 36 (0.63%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.51%) NCSC
10 27 (0.48%) PCI DSS
11 22 (0.39%) SOC 2
11 22 (0.39%) WCAG
12 19 (0.33%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
13 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
14 11 (0.19%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) Basel III
16 7 (0.12%) GRC
16 7 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 971 (17.10%) Docker
2 177 (3.12%) Active Directory
3 136 (2.39%) VMware Infrastructure
4 71 (1.25%) Virtual Machines
5 51 (0.90%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.62%) vSphere
7 33 (0.58%) VMware NSX
8 27 (0.48%) NFS
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 21 (0.37%) Firmware
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 8 (0.14%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 8 (0.14%) zsh
15 7 (0.12%) HDFS
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,166 (20.53%) Kubernetes
2 642 (11.30%) Ansible
3 330 (5.81%) Grafana
4 239 (4.21%) Prometheus
5 78 (1.37%) Puppet
6 70 (1.23%) Progress Chef
7 63 (1.11%) Argo
8 47 (0.83%) Single Sign-On
9 39 (0.69%) Kibana
10 35 (0.62%) Istio
11 28 (0.49%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) FortiGate
14 21 (0.37%) Packer
15 19 (0.33%) ZABBIX
16 17 (0.30%) Nagios
16 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
17 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
17 16 (0.28%) QRadar
17 16 (0.28%) vRealize
Vendors
1 749 (13.19%) Microsoft
2 583 (10.27%) Databricks
3 398 (7.01%) Google
4 240 (4.23%) Oracle
5 207 (3.65%) Splunk
6 174 (3.06%) VMware
7 163 (2.87%) OpenAI
8 148 (2.61%) Cisco
9 137 (2.41%) ServiceNow
10 101 (1.78%) Dynatrace
11 96 (1.69%) Red Hat
12 95 (1.67%) IBM
13 91 (1.60%) F5
14 90 (1.58%) Palo Alto
15 83 (1.46%) Foundry
16 74 (1.30%) Fortinet
17 70 (1.23%) CyberArk
17 70 (1.23%) Informatica
17 70 (1.23%) SAP
18 55 (0.97%) Salesforce