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

6 months to
21 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,246 3,916 4,087
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.97% 13.35% 9.23%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.27% 39.21% 31.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,573 2,721 2,873
10th Percentile £363 £380 £400
25th Percentile £415 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £749 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £515
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.91% -6.36%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 53 107
10th Percentile £28.30 £20.34 £21.08
25th Percentile £41.94 £23.00 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.00 £42.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.06% -15.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile £70.36 £63.25 £66.50
90th Percentile £79.90 £77.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +13.80% -2.56% -28.95%

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 12,710 9,986 12,883
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.99% 34.05% 29.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,460 6,640 9,108
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £483 £480
% change year-on-year -1.66% +0.63% -4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 493 245 487
10th Percentile £41.66 £22.09 £31.00
25th Percentile £54.55 £31.76 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.00 £85.00 £74.66
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.97% +3.48% -4.86%

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 21 March 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 21 March 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 21 March 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 4,385 £520 -7.35% 2,793
London -3 2,489 £550 -8.33% 1,217
UK excluding London 0 2,012 £481 -3.75% 2,062
Work from Home +1 1,591 £525 -4.55% 1,064
North of England +14 676 £475 -5.00% 484
South East -7 413 £500 -6.10% 637
Yorkshire +3 360 £485 -3.10% 173
Midlands -1 286 £498 +4.84% 249
Scotland +2 274 £425 -9.57% 122
North West +13 270 £465 -6.91% 228
West Midlands -4 232 £500 - 125
South West -1 230 £525 -8.70% 271
East of England -2 131 £500 +1.52% 237
North East +12 54 £475 -7.32% 85
East Midlands -17 53 £447 +5.18% 124
Wales -12 31 £495 -6.60% 75
Northern Ireland +11 29 £613 +13.95% 30

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
1 266 (5.07%) Apache Spark
2 195 (3.72%) Apache Airflow
3 172 (3.28%) Confluence
4 158 (3.01%) Apache
5 64 (1.22%) SAS
6 62 (1.18%) SharePoint
7 27 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.48%) Jupyter
8 25 (0.48%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.46%) nginx
10 22 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.34%) Appian
12 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
13 11 (0.21%) Camunda
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 4 (0.076%) Oracle Application Server
15 4 (0.076%) Tomcat
16 3 (0.057%) CICS
16 3 (0.057%) IIS
Applications
1 132 (2.52%) Microsoft Excel
2 29 (0.55%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 26 (0.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.30%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.15%) Weka
8 4 (0.076%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 10 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
4 8 (0.15%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Actimize
7 3 (0.057%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.057%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) Cloudability
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
9 1 (0.019%) Advent Geneva
9 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
9 1 (0.019%) ION MarketView
9 1 (0.019%) SAP BPC
9 1 (0.019%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 2,032 (38.73%) AWS
2 1,833 (34.94%) Azure
3 806 (15.36%) GCP
4 712 (13.57%) GitHub
5 530 (10.10%) Serverless
6 504 (9.61%) Power Platform
7 405 (7.72%) Azure DevOps
8 364 (6.94%) Amazon S3
9 355 (6.77%) GitHub Actions
10 352 (6.71%) AWS Lambda
11 275 (5.24%) Azure Data Factory
12 260 (4.96%) Snowflake
13 256 (4.88%) AWS CloudFormation
14 191 (3.64%) Amazon EKS
15 183 (3.49%) OpenShift
16 169 (3.22%) Amazon ECS
17 165 (3.15%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 159 (3.03%) Amazon EC2
19 147 (2.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 143 (2.73%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 208 (3.96%) Firewall
2 146 (2.78%) DNS
3 114 (2.17%) Network Security
4 101 (1.93%) TCP/IP
5 81 (1.54%) VPN
6 68 (1.30%) BGP
7 62 (1.18%) WAN
8 60 (1.14%) HTTP
9 41 (0.78%) MPLS
9 41 (0.78%) Wireshark
10 40 (0.76%) SAN
11 39 (0.74%) OSPF
12 37 (0.71%) SSL
13 35 (0.67%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) SD-WAN
14 32 (0.61%) VLAN
15 31 (0.59%) DHCP
16 26 (0.50%) SNMP
17 23 (0.44%) SSH
17 23 (0.44%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 420 (8.01%) Power BI
2 384 (7.32%) PostgreSQL
3 314 (5.99%) Data Warehouse
4 240 (4.57%) Data Lake
5 218 (4.16%) NoSQL
6 204 (3.89%) SQL Server
7 195 (3.72%) Relational Database
8 168 (3.20%) Tableau
9 159 (3.03%) Big Data
10 142 (2.71%) Metadata
11 126 (2.40%) Delta Lake
12 123 (2.34%) Amazon RDS
13 115 (2.19%) BigQuery
14 114 (2.17%) MySQL
15 107 (2.04%) Amazon Redshift
16 106 (2.02%) MongoDB
17 98 (1.87%) Amazon Athena
18 90 (1.72%) Azure SQL Database
19 83 (1.58%) Hadoop
20 82 (1.56%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 669 (12.75%) Git
2 558 (10.64%) Jenkins
3 426 (8.12%) GitLab
4 300 (5.72%) JIRA
5 95 (1.81%) MLflow
6 91 (1.73%) Selenium
7 52 (0.99%) Postman
8 50 (0.95%) Bitbucket
9 48 (0.91%) Cucumber
10 41 (0.78%) JUnit
11 40 (0.76%) JMeter
12 39 (0.74%) Sonatype Nexus
13 28 (0.53%) SpecFlow
13 28 (0.53%) Visual Studio
14 27 (0.51%) Artifactory
15 26 (0.50%) Cypress.io
16 23 (0.44%) CircleCI
17 22 (0.42%) Gatling
18 21 (0.40%) Maven
18 21 (0.40%) SonarQube
General
1 1,269 (24.19%) Social Skills
2 1,029 (19.61%) Finance
3 716 (13.65%) Analytical Skills
4 500 (9.53%) Public Sector
5 419 (7.99%) Banking
6 178 (3.39%) Front Office
7 129 (2.46%) Documentation Skills
8 99 (1.89%) Investment Banking
9 66 (1.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 65 (1.24%) Retail
11 62 (1.18%) Marketing
12 59 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
13 55 (1.05%) Financial Institution
14 54 (1.03%) Legal
15 53 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
15 53 (1.01%) Telecoms
16 43 (0.82%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.65%) Presentation Skills
18 29 (0.55%) Military
19 25 (0.48%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 983 (18.74%) Developer
2 749 (14.28%) Data Engineer
3 738 (14.07%) Senior
4 449 (8.56%) Python Developer
5 353 (6.73%) Architect
6 349 (6.65%) Lead
7 297 (5.66%) DevOps Engineer
8 290 (5.53%) Python Engineer
9 280 (5.34%) Analyst
10 261 (4.98%) AWS Engineer
11 254 (4.84%) Software Engineer
12 245 (4.67%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 204 (3.89%) Data Scientist
14 190 (3.62%) Platform Engineer
15 160 (3.05%) Azure Engineer
16 158 (3.01%) Senior Developer
17 141 (2.69%) Senior Data Engineer
18 140 (2.67%) Data Analyst
19 139 (2.65%) Full-Stack Developer
20 133 (2.54%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 454 (8.65%) REST
2 362 (6.90%) React
3 338 (6.44%) PySpark
4 332 (6.33%) Kafka
5 287 (5.47%) Node.js
6 230 (4.38%) Pandas
7 220 (4.19%) .NET
8 209 (3.98%) PyTorch
9 204 (3.89%) FastAPI
9 204 (3.89%) RESTful
10 173 (3.30%) TensorFlow
11 160 (3.05%) NumPy
12 151 (2.88%) scikit-learn
13 144 (2.74%) AngularJS
14 141 (2.69%) Flask
14 141 (2.69%) JSON
15 123 (2.34%) Django
16 121 (2.31%) LangChain
17 115 (2.19%) pytest
18 109 (2.08%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 529 (10.08%) Cloud Native
2 216 (4.12%) Distributed Systems
3 204 (3.89%) Algorithms
4 146 (2.78%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.42%) Equities
6 116 (2.21%) Fixed Income
7 115 (2.19%) Data Protection Act
8 108 (2.06%) Data Structures
9 107 (2.04%) Derivative
10 106 (2.02%) AI Agents
11 101 (1.93%) Hybrid Cloud
11 101 (1.93%) Onboarding
12 99 (1.89%) Legacy Systems
13 90 (1.72%) Data Centre
14 89 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
15 87 (1.66%) Public Cloud
16 84 (1.60%) Security Posture
17 83 (1.58%) Management Information System
18 56 (1.07%) Hedge funds
19 55 (1.05%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 685 (13.06%) Linux
2 323 (6.16%) Windows
3 184 (3.51%) Unix
4 98 (1.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.28%) Windows Server
6 31 (0.59%) Android
6 31 (0.59%) Ubuntu
6 31 (0.59%) VMS
7 21 (0.40%) Mac OS
8 18 (0.34%) CentOS
8 18 (0.34%) Solaris
9 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
10 16 (0.30%) AIX
11 9 (0.17%) Kali Linux
11 9 (0.17%) Windows 7
12 6 (0.11%) Debian
13 5 (0.095%) Embedded Linux
13 5 (0.095%) Rocky
13 5 (0.095%) zOS
14 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,938 (36.94%) CI/CD
2 1,509 (28.76%) DevOps
3 1,222 (23.29%) Agile
4 1,134 (21.62%) AI
5 1,061 (20.22%) Problem-Solving
6 1,039 (19.81%) Analytics
7 931 (17.75%) Infrastructure as Code
8 850 (16.20%) Data Pipeline
8 850 (16.20%) Machine Learning
9 780 (14.87%) Containerisation
10 722 (13.76%) Data Engineering
11 696 (13.27%) Data Modelling
12 684 (13.04%) ETL
13 624 (11.89%) Data Science
14 612 (11.67%) Test Automation
15 589 (11.23%) Software Engineering
16 504 (9.61%) Business Intelligence
17 502 (9.57%) Observability
18 429 (8.18%) LLM
19 398 (7.59%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,669 (31.81%) SQL
2 751 (14.32%) Java
3 692 (13.19%) PowerShell
4 607 (11.57%) Bash
5 497 (9.47%) JavaScript
6 355 (6.77%) TypeScript
7 339 (6.46%) C#
8 231 (4.40%) Go
9 167 (3.18%) C++
10 158 (3.01%) R
11 126 (2.40%) Scala
12 114 (2.17%) Shell Script
13 104 (1.98%) Ruby
14 103 (1.96%) Perl
15 79 (1.51%) Bicep
16 59 (1.12%) Kusto Query Language
17 50 (0.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 45 (0.86%) C
19 44 (0.84%) T-SQL
20 40 (0.76%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,218 (23.22%) Security Cleared
2 973 (18.55%) SC Cleared
3 445 (8.48%) Degree
4 214 (4.08%) Computer Science Degree
5 153 (2.92%) DV Cleared
6 126 (2.40%) AWS Certification
6 126 (2.40%) BPSS Clearance
7 125 (2.38%) Master's Degree
8 104 (1.98%) Azure Certification
9 96 (1.83%) CISSP
10 75 (1.43%) Cisco Certification
11 59 (1.12%) CCNP
12 52 (0.99%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 48 (0.91%) CISM
14 47 (0.90%) PhD
15 37 (0.71%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
17 33 (0.63%) ISTQB
18 31 (0.59%) CEH
19 27 (0.51%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 506 (9.65%) Data Quality
2 214 (4.08%) QA
3 180 (3.43%) GDPR
4 111 (2.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 106 (2.02%) NIST
6 78 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.63%) SLA
9 30 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 25 (0.48%) NCSC
12 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.30%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.30%) WCAG
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
14 11 (0.21%) PSD2
15 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.19%) MiFID
System Software
1 944 (17.99%) Docker
2 169 (3.22%) Active Directory
3 118 (2.25%) VMware Infrastructure
4 59 (1.12%) vSphere
5 55 (1.05%) Virtual Machines
6 51 (0.97%) VMware NSX
7 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
8 27 (0.51%) Firmware
9 14 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 11 (0.21%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.19%) HDFS
12 10 (0.19%) Lustre
13 9 (0.17%) GPFS
14 8 (0.15%) Ceph
14 8 (0.15%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.095%) NFS
15 5 (0.095%) Postfix
15 5 (0.095%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,137 (21.67%) Terraform
2 1,055 (20.11%) Kubernetes
3 551 (10.50%) Ansible
4 354 (6.75%) Grafana
5 311 (5.93%) Prometheus
6 99 (1.89%) Argo
7 77 (1.47%) Puppet
8 51 (0.97%) Istio
9 45 (0.86%) vRealize
10 38 (0.72%) Kibana
11 37 (0.71%) vCenter Server
12 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
13 29 (0.55%) Nessus
13 29 (0.55%) Single Sign-On
14 25 (0.48%) NetBackup
15 22 (0.42%) Microsoft Intune
15 22 (0.42%) Rancher
16 20 (0.38%) Control-M
17 17 (0.32%) IBM Guardium
18 16 (0.30%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 640 (12.20%) Microsoft
2 553 (10.54%) Databricks
3 301 (5.74%) Google
4 229 (4.37%) Splunk
5 217 (4.14%) Oracle
6 216 (4.12%) VMware
7 153 (2.92%) Red Hat
8 128 (2.44%) Cisco
9 119 (2.27%) OpenAI
10 104 (1.98%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.60%) CyberArk
12 75 (1.43%) Foundry
13 69 (1.32%) BeyondTrust
14 65 (1.24%) Informatica
15 61 (1.16%) F5
16 60 (1.14%) Palo Alto
17 57 (1.09%) IBM
18 47 (0.90%) Dynatrace
19 44 (0.84%) SAP
20 42 (0.80%) Atlassian