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

6 months to
6 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,359 3,829 4,064
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.85% 13.19% 9.44%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.38% 38.60% 31.31%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,543 2,654 2,922
10th Percentile £363 £375 £380
25th Percentile £425 £443 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.79% -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% -5.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 129 53 114
10th Percentile £30.39 £25.25 £20.91
25th Percentile £46.25 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £40.00 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year +37.50% -34.43% -6.15%
75th Percentile £74.00 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £84.00 £62.35 £76.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -30.77% +9.66%

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 13,273 9,919 12,980
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.87% 34.16% 30.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,674 6,720 9,174
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 £715 £757 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £475 £485
% change year-on-year +1.68% -2.06% -3.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 562 228 524
10th Percentile £36.25 £26.80 £31.55
25th Percentile £54.55 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.25
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -8.84% -0.40%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.98 £85.00 £77.13
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 6 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 6 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 6 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 4,458 £525 -4.55% 3,372
London -3 2,556 £550 -4.35% 1,762
UK excluding London -1 2,077 £492 -1.60% 2,031
Work from Home -2 1,526 £525 -4.55% 1,442
North of England +10 759 £480 -1.03% 490
Yorkshire +2 427 £489 -2.25% 138
South East -6 397 £525 +5.00% 628
Scotland +2 303 £440 -9.18% 115
North West +6 260 £481 +1.32% 269
South West 0 250 £500 -11.11% 252
Midlands -14 231 £488 +8.33% 213
West Midlands -15 181 £481 +6.94% 112
East of England -9 127 £500 - 232
North East +11 84 £475 +8.57% 85
East Midlands -17 49 £495 +16.47% 100
Wales -11 28 £463 -7.50% 52
Northern Ireland +14 23 £430 -26.81% 75

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 (5.22%) Apache Spark
2 236 (4.40%) Apache Airflow
3 186 (3.47%) Apache
4 154 (2.87%) Confluence
5 49 (0.91%) Jupyter
6 45 (0.84%) SAS
7 43 (0.80%) 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
1 117 (2.18%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
3 22 (0.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 22 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
4 19 (0.35%) MS Visio
5 10 (0.19%) 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 19 (0.35%) 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 (0.093%) BambooHR
7 4 (0.075%) Oracle ERP
8 3 (0.056%) Bloomberg AIM
8 3 (0.056%) SimCorp Dimension
8 3 (0.056%) Teamcenter
9 2 (0.037%) Front Arena
9 2 (0.037%) Global One
9 2 (0.037%) IntelliMatch
9 2 (0.037%) Odoo
9 2 (0.037%) Oracle Applications
9 2 (0.037%) Oracle Assets
9 2 (0.037%) Orchestrade
9 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
10 1 (0.019%) OneSumX
Cloud Services
1 2,008 (37.47%) AWS
2 1,776 (33.14%) Azure
3 779 (14.54%) GCP
4 646 (12.05%) GitHub
5 511 (9.54%) Power Platform
6 460 (8.58%) Serverless
7 382 (7.13%) Azure DevOps
8 374 (6.98%) Amazon S3
9 349 (6.51%) GitHub Actions
10 333 (6.21%) AWS Lambda
11 253 (4.72%) Azure Data Factory
12 250 (4.67%) Snowflake
13 183 (3.41%) dbt
14 166 (3.10%) AWS CloudFormation
15 163 (3.04%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 162 (3.02%) OpenShift
17 159 (2.97%) Amazon EKS
18 150 (2.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 127 (2.37%) Amazon EC2
20 116 (2.16%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 208 (3.88%) Firewall
2 150 (2.80%) DNS
3 115 (2.15%) Network Security
4 98 (1.83%) WAN
5 94 (1.75%) BGP
6 90 (1.68%) TCP/IP
7 77 (1.44%) VPN
8 63 (1.18%) OSPF
9 62 (1.16%) HTTP
10 56 (1.04%) SAN
11 54 (1.01%) BIG-IP
12 48 (0.90%) SD-WAN
12 48 (0.90%) SSL
12 48 (0.90%) VXLAN
13 41 (0.77%) VLAN
14 36 (0.67%) DHCP
14 36 (0.67%) Ethernet VPN
14 36 (0.67%) LAN
14 36 (0.67%) SNMP
15 33 (0.62%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 446 (8.32%) Power BI
2 336 (6.27%) PostgreSQL
3 279 (5.21%) Data Warehouse
4 266 (4.96%) SQL Server
5 222 (4.14%) Data Lake
6 193 (3.60%) Tableau
7 183 (3.41%) Relational Database
8 170 (3.17%) NoSQL
9 162 (3.02%) Big Data
10 160 (2.99%) Metadata
11 134 (2.50%) Delta Lake
12 132 (2.46%) BigQuery
13 126 (2.35%) Amazon Athena
14 118 (2.20%) MongoDB
15 110 (2.05%) Amazon Redshift
16 97 (1.81%) DynamoDB
17 89 (1.66%) Amazon RDS
18 87 (1.62%) MySQL
19 73 (1.36%) Azure SQL Database
19 73 (1.36%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 632 (11.79%) Git
2 486 (9.07%) Jenkins
3 381 (7.11%) GitLab
4 281 (5.24%) JIRA
5 79 (1.47%) Selenium
6 76 (1.42%) MLflow
7 62 (1.16%) Postman
8 36 (0.67%) Cucumber
8 36 (0.67%) Cypress.io
8 36 (0.67%) JMeter
9 33 (0.62%) Artifactory
10 32 (0.60%) SonarQube
11 30 (0.56%) Bitbucket
12 27 (0.50%) REST Assured
13 26 (0.49%) Sonatype Nexus
14 25 (0.47%) JUnit
15 24 (0.45%) Maven
16 22 (0.41%) Robot Framework
17 20 (0.37%) Gatling
18 19 (0.35%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,173 (21.89%) Social Skills
2 1,087 (20.28%) Finance
3 725 (13.53%) Analytical Skills
4 490 (9.14%) Public Sector
5 385 (7.18%) Banking
6 191 (3.56%) Front Office
7 134 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
8 122 (2.28%) Investment Banking
9 89 (1.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 76 (1.42%) Marketing
11 63 (1.18%) Retail
12 61 (1.14%) Pharmaceutical
13 55 (1.03%) Legal
14 48 (0.90%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 40 (0.75%) Publishing
17 39 (0.73%) Financial Institution
18 36 (0.67%) Military
19 35 (0.65%) Manufacturing
20 28 (0.52%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 981 (18.31%) Developer
2 818 (15.26%) Data Engineer
3 792 (14.78%) Senior
4 503 (9.39%) Python Developer
5 344 (6.42%) Lead
6 332 (6.20%) Architect
7 331 (6.18%) Python Engineer
8 292 (5.45%) DevOps Engineer
9 275 (5.13%) Analyst
10 268 (5.00%) Software Engineer
11 241 (4.50%) AWS Engineer
12 223 (4.16%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 208 (3.88%) Data Scientist
14 175 (3.27%) Senior Developer
15 160 (2.99%) Senior Data Engineer
16 153 (2.86%) Full-Stack Developer
16 153 (2.86%) Platform Engineer
17 152 (2.84%) Azure Engineer
18 144 (2.69%) Data Analyst
19 138 (2.58%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 420 (7.84%) REST
2 375 (7.00%) React
3 363 (6.77%) PySpark
4 320 (5.97%) Kafka
5 245 (4.57%) .NET
6 223 (4.16%) Node.js
7 210 (3.92%) Pandas
8 195 (3.64%) FastAPI
9 191 (3.56%) RESTful
10 177 (3.30%) JSON
11 167 (3.12%) PyTorch
12 139 (2.59%) Django
13 127 (2.37%) Flask
14 124 (2.31%) NumPy
15 117 (2.18%) TensorFlow
16 116 (2.16%) LangChain
17 115 (2.15%) AngularJS
18 112 (2.09%) scikit-learn
19 104 (1.94%) HTML
20 103 (1.92%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 628 (11.72%) Cloud Native
2 249 (4.65%) Distributed Systems
3 149 (2.78%) Algorithms
4 142 (2.65%) Data Centre
5 137 (2.56%) Product Ownership
6 134 (2.50%) AI Agents
7 133 (2.48%) Onboarding
8 120 (2.24%) Data Protection Act
9 119 (2.22%) Data Structures
10 113 (2.11%) Derivative
10 113 (2.11%) Management Information System
11 107 (2.00%) Legacy Systems
12 105 (1.96%) Equities
13 99 (1.85%) Fixed Income
14 96 (1.79%) Security Posture
15 90 (1.68%) Hybrid Cloud
16 89 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
17 71 (1.32%) Public Cloud
18 56 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
19 53 (0.99%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 628 (11.72%) Linux
2 306 (5.71%) Windows
3 220 (4.11%) Unix
4 117 (2.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 82 (1.53%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 31 (0.58%) VMS
8 26 (0.49%) AIX
8 26 (0.49%) Solaris
9 24 (0.45%) Android
10 20 (0.37%) CentOS
11 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
12 16 (0.30%) 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 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
17 5 (0.093%) Amazon Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,008 (37.47%) CI/CD
2 1,462 (27.28%) DevOps
3 1,258 (23.47%) AI
4 1,152 (21.50%) Agile
5 1,050 (19.59%) Analytics
6 944 (17.62%) Infrastructure as Code
7 925 (17.26%) Data Pipeline
8 923 (17.22%) Problem-Solving
9 831 (15.51%) Machine Learning
10 717 (13.38%) Data Engineering
11 712 (13.29%) Data Modelling
12 703 (13.12%) Containerisation
13 694 (12.95%) ETL
14 663 (12.37%) Software Engineering
15 585 (10.92%) Data Science
16 568 (10.60%) Observability
17 546 (10.19%) Test Automation
18 512 (9.55%) Business Intelligence
19 476 (8.88%) LLM
20 441 (8.23%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,764 (32.92%) SQL
2 776 (14.48%) Java
3 665 (12.41%) PowerShell
4 589 (10.99%) Bash
5 478 (8.92%) JavaScript
6 365 (6.81%) TypeScript
7 340 (6.34%) C#
8 199 (3.71%) Go
9 158 (2.95%) R
10 149 (2.78%) C++
11 127 (2.37%) Scala
12 108 (2.02%) Shell Script
13 78 (1.46%) Bicep
13 78 (1.46%) Perl
14 65 (1.21%) Ruby
15 62 (1.16%) PL/SQL
16 57 (1.06%) C
17 56 (1.04%) T-SQL
18 50 (0.93%) Groovy
19 46 (0.86%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,212 (22.62%) Security Cleared
2 983 (18.34%) SC Cleared
3 398 (7.43%) Degree
4 162 (3.02%) Computer Science Degree
5 155 (2.89%) DV Cleared
6 127 (2.37%) BPSS Clearance
7 110 (2.05%) Azure Certification
8 103 (1.92%) AWS Certification
9 92 (1.72%) CISSP
10 73 (1.36%) Master's Degree
11 72 (1.34%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (1.01%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.93%) CCNP
14 40 (0.75%) CISM
15 34 (0.63%) ISTQB
15 34 (0.63%) PhD
16 28 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 26 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
18 22 (0.41%) CCIE
19 20 (0.37%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 524 (9.78%) Data Quality
2 240 (4.48%) QA
3 138 (2.58%) GDPR
4 104 (1.94%) NIST
5 103 (1.92%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 77 (1.44%) Accessibility
7 36 (0.67%) SLA
8 27 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.49%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.45%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
12 17 (0.32%) WCAG
13 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.24%) NCSC
15 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.17%) GRC
18 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
19 7 (0.13%) Disclosure Scotland
20 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 807 (15.06%) Docker
2 152 (2.84%) Active Directory
3 103 (1.92%) VMware Infrastructure
4 74 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.75%) vSphere
6 39 (0.73%) 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%) Slurm Workload Manager
16 4 (0.075%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,103 (20.58%) Terraform
2 956 (17.84%) Kubernetes
3 549 (10.24%) Ansible
4 329 (6.14%) Grafana
5 277 (5.17%) Prometheus
6 69 (1.29%) Puppet
7 58 (1.08%) Argo
8 52 (0.97%) Istio
9 46 (0.86%) vRealize
10 35 (0.65%) Kibana
10 35 (0.65%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.62%) vCenter Server
12 28 (0.52%) Single Sign-On
13 26 (0.49%) Control-M
13 26 (0.49%) Nessus
14 24 (0.45%) Nagios
14 24 (0.45%) ZABBIX
15 23 (0.43%) NetBackup
16 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
17 19 (0.35%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 581 (10.84%) Microsoft
2 566 (10.56%) Databricks
3 283 (5.28%) Google
4 249 (4.65%) Oracle
5 219 (4.09%) Splunk
6 178 (3.32%) VMware
7 134 (2.50%) Red Hat
8 125 (2.33%) OpenAI
9 121 (2.26%) Cisco
10 95 (1.77%) ServiceNow
11 86 (1.60%) CyberArk
12 81 (1.51%) F5
13 77 (1.44%) BeyondTrust
13 77 (1.44%) Dynatrace
13 77 (1.44%) Palo Alto
14 73 (1.36%) IBM
15 69 (1.29%) Informatica
16 53 (0.99%) Foundry
17 50 (0.93%) SAP
18 48 (0.90%) Arista