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

6 months to
11 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,126 3,948 4,120
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.05% 13.39% 9.21%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.02% 39.16% 31.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,484 2,703 2,890
10th Percentile £363 £380 £400
25th Percentile £416 £456 £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 £750 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £500 £517
% change year-on-year -3.60% -3.29% -6.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 102 52 114
10th Percentile £30.00 £20.23 £21.39
25th Percentile £42.02 £22.88 £36.56
Median hourly rate £54.75 £43.50 £51.50
Median % change year-on-year +25.86% -15.53% -20.77%
75th Percentile £70.53 £64.06 £67.38
90th Percentile £79.95 £75.00 £74.83
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.75 £47.50
% change year-on-year +5.05% +2.63% -26.92%

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 12,497 10,082 13,016
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.37% 34.20% 29.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,321 6,644 9,165
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -5.70%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £490 £488
% change year-on-year -2.96% +0.51% -3.89%
Number of hourly rates quoted 486 242 512
10th Percentile £41.94 £21.33 £30.69
25th Percentile £54.55 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -5.51%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £67.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.00
% change year-on-year +1.97% +2.81% -4.62%

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 4,283 £520 -9.37% 3,030
London -2 2,426 £550 -8.33% 867
UK excluding London -1 1,976 £482 -3.60% 2,303
Work from Home 0 1,562 £525 -4.55% 1,254
North of England +12 665 £481 -3.75% 514
South East -6 414 £500 -6.10% 730
Yorkshire +3 355 £482 -7.08% 211
Midlands -4 284 £500 +2.04% 281
Scotland +2 275 £425 -9.57% 154
North West +14 265 £479 -4.13% 225
West Midlands -4 233 £500 - 136
South West -2 220 £538 -6.52% 288
East of England -3 124 £500 +1.01% 265
North East +15 51 £475 -7.32% 83
East Midlands -17 50 £447 +5.18% 143
Northern Ireland +9 29 £613 +16.67% 25
Wales -15 29 £438 -17.06% 84

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
1 263 (5.13%) Apache Spark
2 189 (3.69%) Apache Airflow
3 162 (3.16%) Confluence
4 148 (2.89%) Apache
5 67 (1.31%) SAS
6 62 (1.21%) SharePoint
7 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
8 24 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.47%) nginx
8 24 (0.47%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
10 19 (0.37%) Appian
11 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
12 10 (0.20%) Camunda
13 6 (0.12%) CMS
14 5 (0.098%) Apache Superset
15 4 (0.078%) Oracle Application Server
16 3 (0.059%) CICS
16 3 (0.059%) IIS
16 3 (0.059%) Tomcat
Applications
1 126 (2.46%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.60%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 24 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.27%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 3 (0.059%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.039%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 24 (0.47%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 7 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
5 4 (0.078%) Bloomberg AIM
5 4 (0.078%) Oracle EBS
6 3 (0.059%) Actimize
6 3 (0.059%) BambooHR
6 3 (0.059%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.039%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.039%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.039%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.039%) Shopify
8 1 (0.020%) Advent Geneva
8 1 (0.020%) Cerner Millennium
8 1 (0.020%) ION MarketView
8 1 (0.020%) SAP BPC
Cloud Services
1 1,999 (39.00%) AWS
2 1,778 (34.69%) Azure
3 801 (15.63%) GCP
4 670 (13.07%) GitHub
5 531 (10.36%) Serverless
6 497 (9.70%) Power Platform
7 380 (7.41%) Azure DevOps
8 359 (7.00%) Amazon S3
9 349 (6.81%) AWS Lambda
10 332 (6.48%) GitHub Actions
11 261 (5.09%) Azure Data Factory
12 257 (5.01%) Snowflake
13 253 (4.94%) AWS CloudFormation
14 192 (3.75%) Amazon EKS
15 176 (3.43%) OpenShift
16 170 (3.32%) Amazon ECS
17 162 (3.16%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 161 (3.14%) Amazon EC2
19 147 (2.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 142 (2.77%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 211 (4.12%) Firewall
2 139 (2.71%) DNS
3 109 (2.13%) TCP/IP
4 107 (2.09%) Network Security
5 76 (1.48%) VPN
6 64 (1.25%) HTTP
7 61 (1.19%) BGP
8 57 (1.11%) WAN
9 40 (0.78%) Wireshark
10 39 (0.76%) SAN
10 39 (0.76%) SSL
11 38 (0.74%) MPLS
12 34 (0.66%) DHCP
13 33 (0.64%) LAN
13 33 (0.64%) OSPF
14 31 (0.60%) SD-WAN
15 27 (0.53%) VLAN
16 23 (0.45%) VXLAN
17 22 (0.43%) BIG-IP
17 22 (0.43%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 415 (8.10%) Power BI
2 398 (7.76%) PostgreSQL
3 314 (6.13%) Data Warehouse
4 234 (4.56%) Data Lake
5 225 (4.39%) NoSQL
6 197 (3.84%) SQL Server
7 194 (3.78%) Relational Database
8 160 (3.12%) Tableau
9 159 (3.10%) Big Data
10 132 (2.58%) Metadata
11 124 (2.42%) Amazon RDS
12 123 (2.40%) BigQuery
13 118 (2.30%) MySQL
14 115 (2.24%) Delta Lake
15 105 (2.05%) Amazon Redshift
16 100 (1.95%) MongoDB
17 96 (1.87%) Amazon Athena
18 92 (1.79%) Azure SQL Database
19 86 (1.68%) Hadoop
20 81 (1.58%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 657 (12.82%) Git
2 545 (10.63%) Jenkins
3 420 (8.19%) GitLab
4 296 (5.77%) JIRA
5 92 (1.79%) MLflow
6 91 (1.78%) Selenium
7 51 (0.99%) Postman
8 49 (0.96%) Bitbucket
9 48 (0.94%) Cucumber
10 41 (0.80%) Sonatype Nexus
11 39 (0.76%) JUnit
12 38 (0.74%) JMeter
13 29 (0.57%) SpecFlow
14 26 (0.51%) Cypress.io
15 25 (0.49%) Visual Studio
16 24 (0.47%) CircleCI
17 22 (0.43%) Artifactory
18 20 (0.39%) Maven
19 19 (0.37%) Robot Framework
19 19 (0.37%) SonarQube
General
1 1,271 (24.80%) Social Skills
2 1,012 (19.74%) Finance
3 699 (13.64%) Analytical Skills
4 491 (9.58%) Public Sector
5 418 (8.15%) Banking
6 178 (3.47%) Front Office
7 128 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
8 99 (1.93%) Investment Banking
9 68 (1.33%) Retail
10 64 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 63 (1.23%) Marketing
12 61 (1.19%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.09%) Financial Institution
14 50 (0.98%) Legal
14 50 (0.98%) Telecoms
15 49 (0.96%) Influencing Skills
16 44 (0.86%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
18 31 (0.60%) Military
19 21 (0.41%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 962 (18.77%) Developer
2 714 (13.93%) Data Engineer
3 711 (13.87%) Senior
4 434 (8.47%) Python Developer
5 338 (6.59%) Lead
6 334 (6.52%) Architect
7 293 (5.72%) DevOps Engineer
8 291 (5.68%) Python Engineer
9 280 (5.46%) Analyst
10 260 (5.07%) Software Engineer
11 259 (5.05%) AWS Engineer
12 246 (4.80%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 200 (3.90%) Data Scientist
14 175 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
15 155 (3.02%) Azure Engineer
16 154 (3.00%) Senior Developer
17 143 (2.79%) Full-Stack Developer
18 137 (2.67%) Data Analyst
19 134 (2.61%) Senior Data Engineer
20 129 (2.52%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 448 (8.74%) REST
2 369 (7.20%) React
3 324 (6.32%) Kafka
4 322 (6.28%) PySpark
5 295 (5.75%) Node.js
6 222 (4.33%) PyTorch
7 221 (4.31%) Pandas
8 219 (4.27%) FastAPI
9 216 (4.21%) .NET
10 209 (4.08%) RESTful
11 183 (3.57%) TensorFlow
12 157 (3.06%) NumPy
13 145 (2.83%) scikit-learn
14 139 (2.71%) AngularJS
15 133 (2.59%) Flask
16 128 (2.50%) LangChain
17 125 (2.44%) JSON
18 117 (2.28%) pytest
19 116 (2.26%) Django
20 108 (2.11%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 499 (9.73%) Cloud Native
2 200 (3.90%) Algorithms
3 199 (3.88%) Distributed Systems
4 138 (2.69%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.48%) Equities
6 122 (2.38%) Data Protection Act
7 113 (2.20%) Fixed Income
8 109 (2.13%) AI Agents
9 107 (2.09%) Data Structures
10 106 (2.07%) Onboarding
11 104 (2.03%) Derivative
12 90 (1.76%) Hybrid Cloud
13 89 (1.74%) Legacy Systems
14 88 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
15 87 (1.70%) Security Posture
16 85 (1.66%) Data Centre
16 85 (1.66%) Public Cloud
17 81 (1.58%) Management Information System
18 58 (1.13%) Hedge funds
19 54 (1.05%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 679 (13.25%) Linux
2 325 (6.34%) Windows
3 182 (3.55%) Unix
4 96 (1.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 68 (1.33%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.64%) Android
6 33 (0.64%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.59%) VMS
8 22 (0.43%) CentOS
8 22 (0.43%) Mac OS
9 20 (0.39%) Apple iOS
10 19 (0.37%) Solaris
11 11 (0.21%) AIX
12 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
12 9 (0.18%) Windows 7
13 5 (0.098%) Debian
13 5 (0.098%) Embedded Linux
13 5 (0.098%) zOS
14 4 (0.078%) Amazon Linux
14 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,888 (36.83%) CI/CD
2 1,451 (28.31%) DevOps
3 1,220 (23.80%) Agile
4 1,115 (21.75%) AI
5 1,062 (20.72%) Problem-Solving
6 1,004 (19.59%) Analytics
7 898 (17.52%) Infrastructure as Code
8 858 (16.74%) Machine Learning
9 824 (16.07%) Data Pipeline
10 766 (14.94%) Containerisation
11 688 (13.42%) Data Engineering
12 678 (13.23%) ETL
13 667 (13.01%) Data Modelling
14 621 (12.11%) Data Science
15 596 (11.63%) Test Automation
16 586 (11.43%) Software Engineering
17 496 (9.68%) Observability
18 493 (9.62%) Business Intelligence
19 440 (8.58%) LLM
20 385 (7.51%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,613 (31.47%) SQL
2 725 (14.14%) Java
3 667 (13.01%) PowerShell
4 593 (11.57%) Bash
5 506 (9.87%) JavaScript
6 356 (6.94%) TypeScript
7 330 (6.44%) C#
8 229 (4.47%) Go
9 171 (3.34%) C++
10 148 (2.89%) R
11 116 (2.26%) Scala
12 113 (2.20%) Shell Script
13 109 (2.13%) Perl
14 94 (1.83%) Ruby
15 70 (1.37%) Bicep
16 60 (1.17%) Kusto Query Language
17 48 (0.94%) C
18 47 (0.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 45 (0.88%) VBA
20 41 (0.80%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,169 (22.81%) Security Cleared
2 933 (18.20%) SC Cleared
3 447 (8.72%) Degree
4 211 (4.12%) Computer Science Degree
5 145 (2.83%) DV Cleared
6 129 (2.52%) AWS Certification
7 124 (2.42%) Master's Degree
8 120 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
9 102 (1.99%) Azure Certification
10 94 (1.83%) CISSP
11 72 (1.40%) Cisco Certification
12 57 (1.11%) CCNP
13 51 (0.99%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 47 (0.92%) PhD
15 45 (0.88%) CISM
16 38 (0.74%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.62%) Microsoft Certified Professional
19 31 (0.60%) CEH
20 28 (0.55%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 481 (9.38%) Data Quality
2 212 (4.14%) QA
3 180 (3.51%) GDPR
4 105 (2.05%) NIST
5 104 (2.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 77 (1.50%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.66%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.64%) SLA
9 31 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 27 (0.53%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.45%) NCSC
12 20 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
13 17 (0.33%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.25%) WCAG
15 12 (0.23%) EU AI Act
16 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
17 10 (0.20%) MiFID
17 10 (0.20%) PMO
17 10 (0.20%) PSD2
18 9 (0.18%) EMIR
System Software
1 938 (18.30%) Docker
2 172 (3.36%) Active Directory
3 115 (2.24%) VMware Infrastructure
4 55 (1.07%) Virtual Machines
4 55 (1.07%) vSphere
5 47 (0.92%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.57%) Hyper-V
7 25 (0.49%) Firmware
8 15 (0.29%) KVM
8 15 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
9 12 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 11 (0.21%) HDFS
11 10 (0.20%) Lustre
12 9 (0.18%) GPFS
13 8 (0.16%) SRDF
13 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
14 6 (0.12%) NFS
15 5 (0.098%) NDS
15 5 (0.098%) NetIQ eDirectory
15 5 (0.098%) Postfix
Systems Management
1 1,108 (21.62%) Terraform
2 1,053 (20.54%) Kubernetes
3 545 (10.63%) Ansible
4 351 (6.85%) Grafana
5 309 (6.03%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.83%) Argo
7 78 (1.52%) Puppet
8 49 (0.96%) Istio
9 43 (0.84%) Kibana
9 43 (0.84%) vRealize
10 36 (0.70%) Nessus
11 35 (0.68%) Progress Chef
12 33 (0.64%) vCenter Server
13 29 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
14 26 (0.51%) Control-M
14 26 (0.51%) NetBackup
15 24 (0.47%) IBM Guardium
16 22 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
17 20 (0.39%) Rancher
18 16 (0.31%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 627 (12.23%) Microsoft
2 522 (10.18%) Databricks
3 304 (5.93%) Google
4 229 (4.47%) Splunk
5 212 (4.14%) Oracle
6 211 (4.12%) VMware
7 146 (2.85%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.36%) Cisco
8 121 (2.36%) OpenAI
9 102 (1.99%) ServiceNow
10 84 (1.64%) CyberArk
11 82 (1.60%) Foundry
12 67 (1.31%) BeyondTrust
13 62 (1.21%) F5
14 59 (1.15%) Informatica
15 58 (1.13%) Palo Alto
16 50 (0.98%) IBM
17 46 (0.90%) SAP
18 42 (0.82%) Dynatrace
19 40 (0.78%) Atlassian