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

6 months to
7 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,634 4,179 4,138
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.82% 13.13% 9.57%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.30% 39.10% 31.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,694 2,835 2,970
10th Percentile £363 £367 £375
25th Percentile £425 £440 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £555
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -3.15% -7.50%
75th Percentile £625 £651 £700
90th Percentile £738 £800 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £506
% change year-on-year - -1.19% -3.62%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 65 125
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £41.25 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.00 £45.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -27.42% -4.62%
75th Percentile £70.00 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £62.95 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +11.48%

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 13,981 10,688 13,281
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.85% 33.58% 30.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,074 7,205 9,329
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.14% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £721 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +3.58% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 537 255 536
10th Percentile £34.01 £27.00 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £78.22 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +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 7 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 7 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 7 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 -2 4,707 £525 -4.55% 2,979
London -3 2,707 £550 -4.35% 1,377
UK excluding London -1 2,214 £500 - 2,135
Work from Home -3 1,583 £525 -4.55% 2,701
North of England +8 787 £488 +2.63% 489
South East -6 443 £527 +5.45% 658
Yorkshire +2 430 £500 +1.44% 154
Scotland +4 316 £438 -7.89% 129
North West +5 280 £500 +5.26% 252
South West -3 265 £500 -9.09% 288
Midlands -13 251 £477 +3.92% 253
West Midlands -15 202 £475 - 124
East of England -17 130 £500 -0.25% 229
North East +6 89 £425 -2.86% 87
East Midlands -11 48 £497 +11.07% 128
Wales -12 32 £475 +4.40% 59
Northern Ireland +14 28 £369 -37.23% 62

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
1 284 (5.04%) Apache Spark
2 260 (4.61%) Apache Airflow
3 199 (3.53%) Apache
4 182 (3.23%) Confluence
5 54 (0.96%) Jupyter
6 51 (0.91%) SAS
7 49 (0.87%) SharePoint
8 25 (0.44%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) nginx
10 20 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.32%) ArcGIS
12 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.21%) IIS
14 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
15 8 (0.14%) CMS
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Appian
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 120 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.55%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 23 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
7 14 (0.25%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.018%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.43%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.20%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.053%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.035%) Endur
10 2 (0.035%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.035%) Global One
10 2 (0.035%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,088 (37.06%) AWS
2 1,883 (33.42%) Azure
3 833 (14.79%) GCP
4 677 (12.02%) GitHub
5 525 (9.32%) Power Platform
6 481 (8.54%) Serverless
7 423 (7.51%) Amazon S3
8 395 (7.01%) Azure DevOps
9 373 (6.62%) GitHub Actions
10 360 (6.39%) AWS Lambda
11 285 (5.06%) Snowflake
12 239 (4.24%) Azure Data Factory
13 208 (3.69%) dbt
14 182 (3.23%) AWS CloudFormation
15 174 (3.09%) Amazon EKS
16 169 (3.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 158 (2.80%) OpenShift
18 157 (2.79%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 134 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
20 125 (2.22%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 242 (4.30%) Firewall
2 166 (2.95%) DNS
3 122 (2.17%) Network Security
4 121 (2.15%) BGP
5 117 (2.08%) WAN
6 107 (1.90%) TCP/IP
7 102 (1.81%) VPN
8 77 (1.37%) OSPF
9 58 (1.03%) BIG-IP
10 57 (1.01%) SD-WAN
11 55 (0.98%) HTTP
11 55 (0.98%) SAN
12 52 (0.92%) VLAN
13 51 (0.91%) VXLAN
14 49 (0.87%) DHCP
15 47 (0.83%) SSL
16 44 (0.78%) LAN
17 42 (0.75%) MPLS
18 41 (0.73%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
19 40 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 465 (8.25%) Power BI
2 355 (6.30%) PostgreSQL
3 314 (5.57%) Data Warehouse
4 250 (4.44%) SQL Server
5 209 (3.71%) Data Lake
6 203 (3.60%) Tableau
7 192 (3.41%) Relational Database
8 171 (3.04%) Metadata
9 165 (2.93%) NoSQL
10 160 (2.84%) Big Data
11 143 (2.54%) BigQuery
12 140 (2.48%) Amazon Athena
12 140 (2.48%) Amazon Redshift
13 132 (2.34%) Delta Lake
14 126 (2.24%) MongoDB
15 104 (1.85%) Amazon RDS
15 104 (1.85%) DynamoDB
16 92 (1.63%) MySQL
17 76 (1.35%) Snowflake Schema
18 74 (1.31%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 682 (12.11%) Git
2 505 (8.96%) Jenkins
3 401 (7.12%) GitLab
4 320 (5.68%) JIRA
5 82 (1.46%) Selenium
6 75 (1.33%) MLflow
7 60 (1.06%) Postman
8 41 (0.73%) JMeter
9 39 (0.69%) Bitbucket
10 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
11 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
11 33 (0.59%) SonarQube
12 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
13 30 (0.53%) REST Assured
14 29 (0.51%) Sonatype Nexus
15 28 (0.50%) Maven
16 27 (0.48%) JUnit
17 26 (0.46%) Gatling
18 25 (0.44%) Claude Code
19 19 (0.34%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,221 (21.67%) Social Skills
2 1,181 (20.96%) Finance
3 754 (13.38%) Analytical Skills
4 540 (9.58%) Public Sector
5 425 (7.54%) Banking
6 202 (3.59%) Front Office
7 133 (2.36%) Documentation Skills
8 130 (2.31%) Investment Banking
9 108 (1.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 89 (1.58%) Retail
11 81 (1.44%) Marketing
12 61 (1.08%) Pharmaceutical
12 61 (1.08%) Telecoms
13 60 (1.06%) Legal
14 49 (0.87%) Financial Institution
15 46 (0.82%) Publishing
16 44 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
16 44 (0.78%) Military
17 36 (0.64%) Manufacturing
18 32 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,002 (17.78%) Developer
2 874 (15.51%) Data Engineer
3 855 (15.18%) Senior
4 534 (9.48%) Python Developer
5 405 (7.19%) Lead
6 374 (6.64%) Python Engineer
7 314 (5.57%) DevOps Engineer
8 309 (5.48%) Architect
9 297 (5.27%) Software Engineer
10 282 (5.01%) Analyst
11 252 (4.47%) AWS Engineer
12 243 (4.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 222 (3.94%) Data Scientist
14 177 (3.14%) Senior Data Engineer
15 176 (3.12%) Platform Engineer
16 174 (3.09%) Azure Engineer
17 172 (3.05%) Senior Developer
18 168 (2.98%) Cloud Engineer
19 142 (2.52%) Data Analyst
20 138 (2.45%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 408 (7.24%) REST
2 376 (6.67%) PySpark
3 367 (6.51%) React
4 342 (6.07%) Kafka
5 244 (4.33%) .NET
6 218 (3.87%) Node.js
7 210 (3.73%) RESTful
8 209 (3.71%) FastAPI
9 202 (3.59%) Pandas
10 192 (3.41%) JSON
11 170 (3.02%) Django
12 163 (2.89%) PyTorch
13 134 (2.38%) LangChain
14 125 (2.22%) NumPy
15 118 (2.09%) Flask
16 116 (2.06%) scikit-learn
17 111 (1.97%) TensorFlow
18 109 (1.93%) OAuth
19 102 (1.81%) pytest
20 99 (1.76%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 732 (12.99%) Cloud Native
2 300 (5.32%) Distributed Systems
3 171 (3.04%) Onboarding
4 166 (2.95%) AI Agents
5 152 (2.70%) Data Centre
6 147 (2.61%) Algorithms
7 146 (2.59%) Product Ownership
8 125 (2.22%) Data Structures
9 123 (2.18%) Legacy Systems
10 117 (2.08%) Data Protection Act
11 115 (2.04%) Management Information System
12 110 (1.95%) Derivative
13 108 (1.92%) Hybrid Cloud
14 100 (1.77%) Fixed Income
15 98 (1.74%) Equities
16 79 (1.40%) Security Posture
17 74 (1.31%) Public Cloud
18 62 (1.10%) Self-Motivation
19 61 (1.08%) Enterprise Software
20 58 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 660 (11.71%) Linux
2 311 (5.52%) Windows
3 223 (3.96%) Unix
4 122 (2.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 77 (1.37%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.71%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.57%) VMS
8 26 (0.46%) AIX
9 23 (0.41%) Android
10 19 (0.34%) Solaris
11 17 (0.30%) Apple iOS
12 14 (0.25%) CentOS
12 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.12%) Debian
15 7 (0.12%) Rocky
16 5 (0.089%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.089%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,134 (37.88%) CI/CD
2 1,538 (27.30%) DevOps
3 1,374 (24.39%) AI
4 1,248 (22.15%) Agile
5 1,134 (20.13%) Analytics
6 1,033 (18.34%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,003 (17.80%) Data Pipeline
8 922 (16.36%) Problem-Solving
9 888 (15.76%) Machine Learning
10 800 (14.20%) Data Engineering
11 761 (13.51%) Containerisation
11 761 (13.51%) Software Engineering
12 742 (13.17%) Data Modelling
13 700 (12.42%) ETL
14 629 (11.16%) Observability
15 627 (11.13%) Data Science
16 581 (10.31%) Test Automation
17 546 (9.69%) Business Intelligence
18 525 (9.32%) LLM
19 487 (8.64%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,824 (32.37%) SQL
2 803 (14.25%) Java
3 664 (11.79%) Bash
4 654 (11.61%) PowerShell
5 461 (8.18%) JavaScript
6 400 (7.10%) TypeScript
7 336 (5.96%) C#
8 219 (3.89%) Go
9 164 (2.91%) R
10 139 (2.47%) C++
11 133 (2.36%) Scala
12 119 (2.11%) Shell Script
13 89 (1.58%) Bicep
14 72 (1.28%) Perl
15 57 (1.01%) Ruby
16 56 (0.99%) C
16 56 (0.99%) PL/SQL
17 55 (0.98%) Groovy
18 51 (0.91%) T-SQL
19 50 (0.89%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,257 (22.31%) Security Cleared
2 1,010 (17.93%) SC Cleared
3 427 (7.58%) Degree
4 175 (3.11%) DV Cleared
5 161 (2.86%) Computer Science Degree
6 137 (2.43%) BPSS Clearance
7 119 (2.11%) AWS Certification
8 114 (2.02%) Azure Certification
9 96 (1.70%) CISSP
10 86 (1.53%) Cisco Certification
11 81 (1.44%) Master's Degree
12 57 (1.01%) CCNP
13 50 (0.89%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 38 (0.67%) CISM
15 35 (0.62%) PhD
16 33 (0.59%) Microsoft Certification
17 32 (0.57%) ISTQB
18 31 (0.55%) CCIE
19 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
20 21 (0.37%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 552 (9.80%) Data Quality
2 243 (4.31%) QA
3 129 (2.29%) GDPR
4 114 (2.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 114 (2.02%) NIST
5 88 (1.56%) Accessibility
6 34 (0.60%) SLA
7 25 (0.44%) PCI DSS
7 25 (0.44%) WCAG
8 24 (0.43%) HIPAA
9 21 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 20 (0.35%) NCSC
11 18 (0.32%) Actionable Recommendations
12 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
13 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.18%) GRC
14 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 873 (15.50%) Docker
2 121 (2.15%) Active Directory
3 109 (1.93%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.69%) vSphere
6 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.51%) Firmware
7 29 (0.51%) Hyper-V
8 24 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
9 19 (0.34%) NFS
10 15 (0.27%) KVM
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 10 (0.18%) SRDF
14 9 (0.16%) Ceph
15 8 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.12%) HDFS
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
17 5 (0.089%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
18 4 (0.071%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,210 (21.48%) Terraform
2 1,035 (18.37%) Kubernetes
3 586 (10.40%) Ansible
4 349 (6.19%) Grafana
5 276 (4.90%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.31%) Puppet
7 67 (1.19%) Argo
8 44 (0.78%) Istio
9 43 (0.76%) Progress Chef
10 42 (0.75%) vRealize
11 36 (0.64%) vCenter Server
12 32 (0.57%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) Control-M
14 26 (0.46%) Nagios
14 26 (0.46%) Nessus
14 26 (0.46%) ZABBIX
15 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
16 22 (0.39%) Single Sign-On
17 21 (0.37%) HAProxy
18 20 (0.35%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 639 (11.34%) Microsoft
2 578 (10.26%) Databricks
3 323 (5.73%) Google
4 256 (4.54%) Oracle
5 217 (3.85%) Splunk
6 166 (2.95%) VMware
7 143 (2.54%) OpenAI
8 141 (2.50%) Cisco
9 115 (2.04%) ServiceNow
10 106 (1.88%) Red Hat
11 92 (1.63%) F5
12 90 (1.60%) Palo Alto
13 85 (1.51%) Dynatrace
14 82 (1.46%) Informatica
15 80 (1.42%) IBM
16 66 (1.17%) Fortinet
17 61 (1.08%) CyberArk
18 60 (1.06%) Foundry
19 54 (0.96%) Arista
19 54 (0.96%) Salesforce