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

6 months to
31 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,847 3,984 4,199
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.51% 12.67% 9.38%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.03% 37.86% 31.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,256 2,633 2,970
10th Percentile £358 £390 £400
25th Percentile £415 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -5.91% -1.83% -6.62%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -5.71% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 95 59 119
10th Percentile £28.50 £21.02 £27.45
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.80 £46.18
Median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.67% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £72.49 £66.51 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.60 £81.50 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £62.50
% change year-on-year +10.89% -26.11% -4.58%

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 11,812 10,524 13,284
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.49% 33.47% 29.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,813 6,655 9,423
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.67% -2.33% -4.87%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £719 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £492 £500
% change year-on-year -1.78% -1.65% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 441 243 509
10th Percentile £39.60 £21.25 £35.52
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.38 £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 £69.62
90th Percentile £76.25 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -3.85%

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 January 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 January 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 January 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 4,076 £523 -9.13% 2,519
London 0 2,333 £550 -8.33% 1,110
UK excluding London -1 1,867 £495 -5.71% 1,953
Work from Home 0 1,461 £525 -4.55% 1,110
North of England +8 604 £476 -7.22% 415
South East +2 407 £481 -12.50% 680
Yorkshire +8 307 £500 -6.98% 151
Midlands +5 283 £506 +3.27% 208
Scotland +1 274 £463 -2.63% 133
North West +4 252 £450 -9.95% 212
West Midlands +7 241 £517 -0.34% 94
South West -9 190 £550 -10.20% 258
East of England +4 127 £525 +5.00% 227
North East +5 50 £488 -10.55% 55
East Midlands -15 42 £444 +12.91% 114
Northern Ireland +4 28 £600 +14.29% 20
Wales -17 27 £523 +4.50% 48

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
1 227 (4.68%) Apache Spark
2 206 (4.25%) Apache Airflow
3 157 (3.24%) Apache
4 148 (3.05%) Confluence
5 61 (1.26%) SAS
6 60 (1.24%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.78%) nginx
8 36 (0.74%) OpenStack
9 30 (0.62%) Microsoft Exchange
10 22 (0.45%) Jupyter
11 20 (0.41%) Appian
11 20 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
12 11 (0.23%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.17%) Camunda
15 7 (0.14%) IIS
16 6 (0.12%) CMS
16 6 (0.12%) Luigi
16 6 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
16 6 (0.12%) Tomcat
Applications
1 129 (2.66%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 18 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 7 (0.14%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 3 (0.062%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.062%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.041%) Maya
10 2 (0.041%) NUKE
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.33%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 3 (0.062%) Actimize
5 3 (0.062%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.041%) Bloomberg AIM
6 2 (0.041%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.041%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.041%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.041%) Shopify
6 2 (0.041%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.021%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
7 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
7 1 (0.021%) Maximo
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
7 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
7 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,883 (38.85%) AWS
2 1,581 (32.62%) Azure
3 742 (15.31%) GCP
4 610 (12.59%) GitHub
5 522 (10.77%) Serverless
6 446 (9.20%) Power Platform
7 364 (7.51%) Amazon S3
8 348 (7.18%) AWS Lambda
9 329 (6.79%) Azure DevOps
10 317 (6.54%) GitHub Actions
11 247 (5.10%) AWS CloudFormation
12 241 (4.97%) Snowflake
13 222 (4.58%) Azure Data Factory
14 180 (3.71%) Amazon EC2
15 176 (3.63%) Amazon ECS
16 173 (3.57%) Amazon EKS
17 168 (3.47%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 141 (2.91%) OpenShift
19 140 (2.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 136 (2.81%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 228 (4.70%) Firewall
2 143 (2.95%) DNS
3 124 (2.56%) Network Security
4 119 (2.46%) TCP/IP
5 77 (1.59%) VPN
6 73 (1.51%) HTTP
7 71 (1.46%) BGP
8 57 (1.18%) SSL
9 56 (1.16%) WAN
10 43 (0.89%) LAN
10 43 (0.89%) MPLS
11 41 (0.85%) OSPF
11 41 (0.85%) Wireshark
12 33 (0.68%) Wireless
13 29 (0.60%) DHCP
14 27 (0.56%) SD-WAN
15 26 (0.54%) SSH
15 26 (0.54%) VLAN
16 22 (0.45%) SMTP
16 22 (0.45%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 375 (7.74%) PostgreSQL
2 374 (7.72%) Power BI
3 287 (5.92%) Data Warehouse
4 227 (4.68%) NoSQL
5 224 (4.62%) Relational Database
6 219 (4.52%) Data Lake
7 171 (3.53%) SQL Server
8 162 (3.34%) Big Data
9 152 (3.14%) Amazon RDS
9 152 (3.14%) Tableau
10 123 (2.54%) MySQL
11 114 (2.35%) Metadata
12 108 (2.23%) BigQuery
13 97 (2.00%) Amazon Redshift
14 89 (1.84%) Amazon Athena
15 88 (1.82%) MongoDB
16 86 (1.77%) Delta Lake
17 83 (1.71%) Hadoop
18 77 (1.59%) Elasticsearch
19 75 (1.55%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 603 (12.44%) Git
2 535 (11.04%) Jenkins
3 423 (8.73%) GitLab
4 280 (5.78%) JIRA
5 81 (1.67%) MLflow
6 80 (1.65%) Selenium
7 49 (1.01%) Cucumber
8 47 (0.97%) Sonatype Nexus
9 45 (0.93%) Bitbucket
10 43 (0.89%) Postman
11 38 (0.78%) JUnit
12 37 (0.76%) SonarQube
13 32 (0.66%) JMeter
14 30 (0.62%) Maven
15 28 (0.58%) CircleCI
16 27 (0.56%) Visual Studio
17 26 (0.54%) Liquibase
18 25 (0.52%) Artifactory
18 25 (0.52%) SpecFlow
19 24 (0.50%) Gradle
General
1 1,291 (26.64%) Social Skills
2 942 (19.43%) Finance
3 681 (14.05%) Analytical Skills
4 436 (9.00%) Public Sector
5 427 (8.81%) Banking
6 160 (3.30%) Front Office
7 129 (2.66%) Investment Banking
8 123 (2.54%) Documentation Skills
9 69 (1.42%) Financial Institution
10 64 (1.32%) Marketing
11 62 (1.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 62 (1.28%) Retail
12 55 (1.13%) Pharmaceutical
13 52 (1.07%) Telecoms
14 43 (0.89%) Legal
15 41 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
16 39 (0.80%) Manufacturing
17 35 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
18 28 (0.58%) Military
19 24 (0.50%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 859 (17.72%) Developer
2 660 (13.62%) Senior
3 644 (13.29%) Data Engineer
4 364 (7.51%) Python Developer
5 309 (6.38%) DevOps Engineer
6 305 (6.29%) Python Engineer
7 304 (6.27%) Architect
8 276 (5.69%) Analyst
9 267 (5.51%) AWS Engineer
10 254 (5.24%) Lead
11 234 (4.83%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 218 (4.50%) Software Engineer
13 184 (3.80%) Data Scientist
14 168 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
15 146 (3.01%) Senior Developer
16 137 (2.83%) Data Analyst
17 133 (2.74%) Azure Engineer
18 127 (2.62%) Senior Data Engineer
19 123 (2.54%) Full-Stack Developer
20 119 (2.46%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 424 (8.75%) REST
2 311 (6.42%) React
3 288 (5.94%) Kafka
4 276 (5.69%) PySpark
5 243 (5.01%) Node.js
6 222 (4.58%) Pandas
7 220 (4.54%) RESTful
8 214 (4.42%) FastAPI
9 199 (4.11%) PyTorch
10 189 (3.90%) .NET
11 169 (3.49%) NumPy
12 164 (3.38%) TensorFlow
13 135 (2.79%) AngularJS
14 124 (2.56%) LangChain
15 118 (2.43%) scikit-learn
16 116 (2.39%) Flask
17 109 (2.25%) Elastic Stack
18 108 (2.23%) OAuth
18 108 (2.23%) pytest
19 103 (2.13%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 424 (8.75%) Cloud Native
2 195 (4.02%) Algorithms
3 181 (3.73%) Distributed Systems
4 138 (2.85%) Product Ownership
5 132 (2.72%) Data Protection Act
6 120 (2.48%) Equities
7 103 (2.13%) Data Structures
8 100 (2.06%) AI Agents
8 100 (2.06%) Onboarding
9 96 (1.98%) Enterprise Software
10 93 (1.92%) Derivative
11 83 (1.71%) Public Cloud
12 82 (1.69%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 82 (1.69%) Legacy Systems
12 82 (1.69%) Management Information System
13 81 (1.67%) Fixed Income
14 80 (1.65%) Security Posture
15 79 (1.63%) Hybrid Cloud
16 78 (1.61%) Data Centre
17 72 (1.49%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 767 (15.82%) Linux
2 354 (7.30%) Windows
3 227 (4.68%) Unix
4 94 (1.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.30%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 37 (0.76%) Android
8 36 (0.74%) VMS
9 28 (0.58%) CentOS
10 27 (0.56%) Solaris
11 25 (0.52%) Mac OS
12 21 (0.43%) Apple iOS
13 13 (0.27%) Amazon Linux
14 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
15 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
16 5 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.10%) Windows 10
17 4 (0.083%) Debian
17 4 (0.083%) Robot Operating System
17 4 (0.083%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,718 (35.44%) CI/CD
2 1,349 (27.83%) DevOps
3 1,149 (23.71%) Agile
4 1,063 (21.93%) Problem-Solving
5 1,003 (20.69%) AI
6 857 (17.68%) Infrastructure as Code
7 845 (17.43%) Analytics
8 762 (15.72%) Machine Learning
9 737 (15.21%) Containerisation
10 724 (14.94%) Data Pipeline
11 604 (12.46%) ETL
12 580 (11.97%) Data Engineering
13 571 (11.78%) Data Science
14 567 (11.70%) Data Modelling
15 530 (10.93%) Software Engineering
16 525 (10.83%) Test Automation
17 424 (8.75%) Business Intelligence
18 413 (8.52%) Observability
19 400 (8.25%) LLM
20 364 (7.51%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,474 (30.41%) SQL
2 736 (15.18%) Java
3 666 (13.74%) PowerShell
4 611 (12.61%) Bash
5 486 (10.03%) JavaScript
6 313 (6.46%) C#
7 300 (6.19%) TypeScript
8 231 (4.77%) Go
9 198 (4.09%) C++
10 154 (3.18%) R
11 148 (3.05%) Perl
12 145 (2.99%) Shell Script
13 120 (2.48%) Scala
14 95 (1.96%) Ruby
15 60 (1.24%) Bicep
15 60 (1.24%) Kusto Query Language
16 54 (1.11%) C
17 50 (1.03%) VBA
18 41 (0.85%) PHP
19 38 (0.78%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,069 (22.05%) Security Cleared
2 866 (17.87%) SC Cleared
3 447 (9.22%) Degree
4 235 (4.85%) Computer Science Degree
5 138 (2.85%) DV Cleared
6 128 (2.64%) AWS Certification
7 124 (2.56%) Master's Degree
8 90 (1.86%) BPSS Clearance
8 90 (1.86%) CISSP
9 88 (1.82%) Azure Certification
10 78 (1.61%) Cisco Certification
11 53 (1.09%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 51 (1.05%) CCNP
13 43 (0.89%) PhD
14 39 (0.80%) CISM
15 37 (0.76%) CEH
16 36 (0.74%) CCIE
17 33 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.66%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 32 (0.66%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 399 (8.23%) Data Quality
2 177 (3.65%) QA
3 166 (3.42%) GDPR
4 97 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 97 (2.00%) NIST
5 58 (1.20%) Accessibility
6 33 (0.68%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.62%) HIPAA
8 29 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 22 (0.45%) NCSC
9 22 (0.45%) SLA
10 19 (0.39%) SOC 2
11 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
12 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
12 10 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
13 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
13 9 (0.19%) MiFID
13 9 (0.19%) PMO
13 9 (0.19%) WCAG
14 8 (0.17%) EMIR
System Software
1 950 (19.60%) Docker
2 183 (3.78%) Active Directory
3 120 (2.48%) VMware Infrastructure
4 46 (0.95%) VMware NSX
5 42 (0.87%) Virtual Machines
6 41 (0.85%) vSphere
7 25 (0.52%) Hyper-V
8 24 (0.50%) Firmware
9 20 (0.41%) HDFS
10 16 (0.33%) KVM
11 13 (0.27%) Squid
11 13 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
12 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 11 (0.23%) Postfix
14 10 (0.21%) DFS Replication
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) GPFS
16 8 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
16 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
17 7 (0.14%) Dovecot
Systems Management
1 1,071 (22.10%) Terraform
2 1,008 (20.80%) Kubernetes
3 573 (11.82%) Ansible
4 347 (7.16%) Grafana
5 300 (6.19%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.84%) Argo
7 77 (1.59%) Puppet
8 54 (1.11%) Kibana
9 52 (1.07%) vRealize
10 41 (0.85%) Istio
11 39 (0.80%) Nessus
12 35 (0.72%) Single Sign-On
13 29 (0.60%) NetBackup
14 28 (0.58%) Progress Chef
15 22 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
16 21 (0.43%) Control-M
17 20 (0.41%) ITRS Geneos
18 18 (0.37%) logstash
18 18 (0.37%) Nmap
18 18 (0.37%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 596 (12.30%) Microsoft
2 454 (9.37%) Databricks
3 291 (6.00%) Google
4 246 (5.08%) Splunk
5 230 (4.75%) Oracle
6 227 (4.68%) VMware
7 137 (2.83%) Red Hat
8 124 (2.56%) Cisco
9 115 (2.37%) ServiceNow
10 110 (2.27%) OpenAI
11 93 (1.92%) CyberArk
12 78 (1.61%) F5
12 78 (1.61%) Palo Alto
13 76 (1.57%) Foundry
14 69 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
15 51 (1.05%) SAP
16 44 (0.91%) Informatica
17 43 (0.89%) IBM
18 41 (0.85%) Dynatrace
19 39 (0.80%) Atlassian