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

6 months to
31 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 10 14
Rank change year-on-year -2 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,652 4,251 3,932
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.64% 12.96% 9.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.04% 39.40% 31.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,692 2,862 2,853
10th Percentile £375 £360 £375
25th Percentile £431 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £531 £575
Median % change year-on-year -1.06% -7.72% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £710
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £506
% change year-on-year +2.04% -3.07% -3.71%
Number of hourly rates quoted 134 69 119
10th Percentile £28.95 £26.00 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.83 £33.91 £30.63
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -13.04% -8.00%
75th Percentile £76.69 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.83 £50.00 £66.25
% change year-on-year +5.67% -24.53% +15.22%

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 14,117 10,788 12,351
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.59% 32.89% 31.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,180 7,286 8,710
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.40% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £498
% change year-on-year +3.58% -4.52% -0.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 528 256 418
10th Percentile £30.87 £27.97 £27.53
25th Percentile £50.56 £36.19 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £81.48 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +0.78% -0.77% +7.84%

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 31 July 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 31 July 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 31 July 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 4,797 £538 -2.27% 3,105
London -4 2,767 £575 - 1,817
UK excluding London -6 2,216 £500 +2.04% 1,715
Work from Home -6 1,564 £530 -3.73% 1,172
North of England +2 773 £500 +5.26% 427
South East -11 447 £538 +7.50% 501
Yorkshire +1 400 £500 +1.44% 121
Scotland +2 299 £430 -13.31% 119
North West +4 296 £525 +10.53% 227
South West -1 288 £503 -8.64% 237
Midlands -14 253 £477 +6.00% 191
West Midlands -14 202 £469 +4.22% 112
East of England -14 136 £500 -0.50% 178
North East -1 88 £425 -2.86% 85
East Midlands -8 50 £488 +11.93% 79
Wales -6 31 £500 +17.65% 50
Northern Ireland +3 19 £363 -32.56% 38

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
1 283 (5.01%) Apache Spark
2 277 (4.90%) Apache Airflow
3 215 (3.80%) Apache
4 181 (3.20%) Confluence
5 56 (0.99%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.87%) SAS
7 41 (0.73%) SharePoint
8 25 (0.44%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 21 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
11 19 (0.34%) nginx
12 12 (0.21%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) CMS
14 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
14 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
15 7 (0.12%) CICS
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.088%) JBoss
17 5 (0.088%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 117 (2.07%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.42%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
6 18 (0.32%) MS Visio
7 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Navisworks
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.088%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.088%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Remedy AR System
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.035%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.035%) IBM Planning Analytics
10 2 (0.035%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 2,120 (37.51%) AWS
2 1,909 (33.78%) Azure
3 858 (15.18%) GCP
4 705 (12.47%) GitHub
5 513 (9.08%) Power Platform
6 467 (8.26%) Serverless
7 415 (7.34%) Azure DevOps
8 412 (7.29%) Amazon S3
9 395 (6.99%) GitHub Actions
10 357 (6.32%) AWS Lambda
11 304 (5.38%) Snowflake
12 234 (4.14%) Azure Data Factory
13 229 (4.05%) dbt
14 196 (3.47%) AWS CloudFormation
15 179 (3.17%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 179 (3.17%) Amazon EKS
16 151 (2.67%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 150 (2.65%) OpenShift
18 134 (2.37%) Amazon EC2
19 129 (2.28%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 268 (4.74%) Firewall
2 201 (3.56%) DNS
3 136 (2.41%) TCP/IP
4 117 (2.07%) BGP
5 114 (2.02%) VPN
6 111 (1.96%) Network Security
7 107 (1.89%) WAN
8 75 (1.33%) DHCP
9 74 (1.31%) OSPF
10 59 (1.04%) VLAN
11 55 (0.97%) BIG-IP
11 55 (0.97%) SD-WAN
12 53 (0.94%) SAN
13 51 (0.90%) HTTP
13 51 (0.90%) VXLAN
14 50 (0.88%) SSL
15 44 (0.78%) SNMP
16 43 (0.76%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 39 (0.69%) Ethernet VPN
18 34 (0.60%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 463 (8.19%) Power BI
2 340 (6.02%) PostgreSQL
3 324 (5.73%) Data Warehouse
4 229 (4.05%) SQL Server
5 201 (3.56%) Data Lake
6 199 (3.52%) Tableau
7 198 (3.50%) Relational Database
8 186 (3.29%) Metadata
9 169 (2.99%) NoSQL
10 156 (2.76%) BigQuery
11 152 (2.69%) Big Data
12 137 (2.42%) Amazon Athena
13 136 (2.41%) Amazon Redshift
14 129 (2.28%) MongoDB
15 120 (2.12%) Delta Lake
16 111 (1.96%) DynamoDB
17 110 (1.95%) Amazon RDS
18 85 (1.50%) MySQL
19 74 (1.31%) Snowflake Schema
20 67 (1.19%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 692 (12.24%) Git
2 515 (9.11%) Jenkins
3 416 (7.36%) GitLab
4 302 (5.34%) JIRA
5 84 (1.49%) Selenium
6 66 (1.17%) MLflow
7 51 (0.90%) Postman
8 45 (0.80%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.76%) JMeter
10 39 (0.69%) SonarQube
11 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
12 34 (0.60%) REST Assured
13 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
14 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
15 31 (0.55%) Claude Code
16 29 (0.51%) Sonatype Nexus
17 28 (0.50%) Gatling
18 27 (0.48%) JUnit
19 26 (0.46%) Maven
20 20 (0.35%) Zephyr
General
1 1,218 (21.55%) Finance
2 1,217 (21.53%) Social Skills
3 795 (14.07%) Analytical Skills
4 568 (10.05%) Public Sector
5 435 (7.70%) Banking
6 208 (3.68%) Front Office
7 128 (2.26%) Investment Banking
8 126 (2.23%) Documentation Skills
9 107 (1.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 102 (1.80%) Retail
11 85 (1.50%) Marketing
12 71 (1.26%) Telecoms
13 66 (1.17%) Pharmaceutical
14 59 (1.04%) Legal
15 56 (0.99%) Military
16 49 (0.87%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.83%) Publishing
18 44 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
19 41 (0.73%) Manufacturing
20 35 (0.62%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 968 (17.13%) Developer
2 910 (16.10%) Senior
3 848 (15.00%) Data Engineer
4 510 (9.02%) Python Developer
5 454 (8.03%) Lead
6 406 (7.18%) Python Engineer
7 326 (5.77%) Software Engineer
8 321 (5.68%) DevOps Engineer
9 291 (5.15%) Architect
10 287 (5.08%) Analyst
11 252 (4.46%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 245 (4.33%) AWS Engineer
13 220 (3.89%) Data Scientist
14 193 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
15 192 (3.40%) Cloud Engineer
16 180 (3.18%) Senior Developer
17 175 (3.10%) Senior Data Engineer
18 173 (3.06%) Azure Engineer
19 146 (2.58%) Data Analyst
20 143 (2.53%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 422 (7.47%) REST
2 375 (6.63%) PySpark
3 364 (6.44%) React
4 357 (6.32%) Kafka
5 232 (4.10%) .NET
6 216 (3.82%) Node.js
7 209 (3.70%) FastAPI
8 204 (3.61%) JSON
8 204 (3.61%) RESTful
9 188 (3.33%) Pandas
10 178 (3.15%) Django
11 151 (2.67%) PyTorch
12 142 (2.51%) LangChain
13 118 (2.09%) Flask
14 117 (2.07%) NumPy
15 109 (1.93%) scikit-learn
16 105 (1.86%) TensorFlow
17 104 (1.84%) OAuth
17 104 (1.84%) Spring
18 103 (1.82%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 766 (13.55%) Cloud Native
2 322 (5.70%) Distributed Systems
3 207 (3.66%) AI Agents
4 201 (3.56%) Onboarding
5 161 (2.85%) Data Centre
6 147 (2.60%) Product Ownership
7 146 (2.58%) Algorithms
8 138 (2.44%) Data Structures
9 128 (2.26%) Legacy Systems
10 117 (2.07%) Derivative
10 117 (2.07%) Hybrid Cloud
11 110 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
12 105 (1.86%) Management Information System
13 104 (1.84%) Fixed Income
14 97 (1.72%) Equities
15 83 (1.47%) Security Posture
16 69 (1.22%) Public Cloud
17 66 (1.17%) Enterprise Software
18 65 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
19 64 (1.13%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 695 (12.30%) Linux
2 323 (5.71%) Windows
3 226 (4.00%) Unix
4 132 (2.34%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 75 (1.33%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.73%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.53%) AIX
8 29 (0.51%) VMS
9 20 (0.35%) Android
10 16 (0.28%) Solaris
11 13 (0.23%) Apple iOS
11 13 (0.23%) CentOS
12 12 (0.21%) zOS
13 11 (0.19%) Mac OS
14 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Debian
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 5 (0.088%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,159 (38.20%) CI/CD
2 1,583 (28.01%) DevOps
3 1,417 (25.07%) AI
4 1,277 (22.59%) Agile
5 1,163 (20.58%) Analytics
6 1,103 (19.52%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,020 (18.05%) Data Pipeline
8 910 (16.10%) Problem-Solving
9 902 (15.96%) Machine Learning
10 856 (15.15%) Software Engineering
11 813 (14.38%) Data Engineering
12 767 (13.57%) Data Modelling
13 763 (13.50%) Containerisation
14 678 (12.00%) ETL
15 675 (11.94%) Observability
16 632 (11.18%) Data Science
17 587 (10.39%) Test Automation
18 548 (9.70%) Business Intelligence
19 540 (9.55%) Continuous Improvement
20 525 (9.29%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,826 (32.31%) SQL
2 813 (14.38%) Java
3 729 (12.90%) Bash
4 695 (12.30%) PowerShell
5 464 (8.21%) JavaScript
6 395 (6.99%) TypeScript
7 303 (5.36%) C#
8 213 (3.77%) Go
9 159 (2.81%) R
10 145 (2.57%) C++
11 128 (2.26%) Shell Script
12 124 (2.19%) Scala
13 116 (2.05%) Bicep
14 79 (1.40%) Perl
15 59 (1.04%) Rust
16 58 (1.03%) C
17 56 (0.99%) Groovy
18 55 (0.97%) Ruby
19 54 (0.96%) PL/SQL
20 49 (0.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,289 (22.81%) Security Cleared
2 1,039 (18.38%) SC Cleared
3 431 (7.63%) Degree
4 199 (3.52%) DV Cleared
5 151 (2.67%) Computer Science Degree
6 139 (2.46%) AWS Certification
7 132 (2.34%) Azure Certification
7 132 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
8 88 (1.56%) CISSP
9 87 (1.54%) Cisco Certification
10 77 (1.36%) Master's Degree
11 56 (0.99%) CCNP
12 45 (0.80%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 42 (0.74%) Microsoft Certification
13 42 (0.74%) PhD
14 33 (0.58%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 33 (0.58%) CISM
15 30 (0.53%) ISTQB
16 29 (0.51%) CCIE
17 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 587 (10.39%) Data Quality
2 266 (4.71%) QA
3 113 (2.00%) GDPR
4 105 (1.86%) NIST
5 104 (1.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 92 (1.63%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.62%) SLA
8 26 (0.46%) WCAG
9 24 (0.42%) Actionable Recommendations
9 24 (0.42%) NCSC
10 21 (0.37%) PCI DSS
10 21 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
12 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
13 11 (0.19%) SOC 2
14 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 9 (0.16%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) GRC
17 7 (0.12%) HL7
18 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 903 (15.98%) Docker
2 150 (2.65%) Active Directory
3 125 (2.21%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.22%) Virtual Machines
5 49 (0.87%) vSphere
6 39 (0.69%) Hyper-V
6 39 (0.69%) VMware NSX
7 31 (0.55%) Firmware
8 21 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
9 18 (0.32%) NFS
10 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 12 (0.21%) KVM
11 12 (0.21%) Squid
12 10 (0.18%) Ceph
12 10 (0.18%) SRDF
12 10 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
13 9 (0.16%) HDFS
14 7 (0.12%) Postfix
14 7 (0.12%) PowerHA
15 4 (0.071%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 1,271 (22.49%) Terraform
2 1,081 (19.13%) Kubernetes
3 602 (10.65%) Ansible
4 348 (6.16%) Grafana
5 267 (4.72%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.50%) Puppet
7 74 (1.31%) Argo
8 60 (1.06%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Istio
10 34 (0.60%) vCenter Server
11 31 (0.55%) vRealize
12 29 (0.51%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
14 26 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
15 24 (0.42%) Nagios
16 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
17 21 (0.37%) Control-M
18 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
19 18 (0.32%) NetBackup
19 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 657 (11.62%) Microsoft
2 563 (9.96%) Databricks
3 336 (5.94%) Google
4 245 (4.33%) Oracle
5 209 (3.70%) Splunk
6 172 (3.04%) VMware
7 147 (2.60%) OpenAI
8 137 (2.42%) Cisco
9 118 (2.09%) ServiceNow
10 105 (1.86%) Red Hat
11 95 (1.68%) Dynatrace
12 93 (1.65%) F5
13 87 (1.54%) Palo Alto
14 83 (1.47%) Informatica
15 81 (1.43%) IBM
16 70 (1.24%) Fortinet
17 64 (1.13%) CyberArk
18 63 (1.11%) Foundry
19 61 (1.08%) Salesforce
20 59 (1.04%) SAP