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

6 months to
4 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,278 3,915 4,043
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.69% 13.40% 9.16%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.01% 39.45% 31.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,591 2,748 2,868
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £420 £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 £750 £813 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -3.60% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 119 53 99
10th Percentile £27.80 £21.25 £20.81
25th Percentile £41.94 £25.09 £30.94
Median hourly rate £55.00 £42.50 £48.50
Median % change year-on-year +29.41% -12.37% -25.38%
75th Percentile £74.26 £60.75 £66.25
90th Percentile £83.15 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +16.67% -2.56% -28.68%

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 12,870 9,923 12,900
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.50% 33.95% 29.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,567 6,676 9,147
10th Percentile £355 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £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 £718 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £478 £488
% change year-on-year -0.42% -1.95% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 532 242 481
10th Percentile £41.62 £22.25 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £32.13 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.38 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.30
% change year-on-year +1.56% +4.40% -1.92%

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 4 April 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 4 April 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 4 April 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 4,441 £520 -7.14% 2,695
London -3 2,508 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London -1 2,019 £482 -3.60% 1,990
Work from Home +1 1,550 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +9 687 £481 -3.83% 475
South East -5 408 £500 -4.76% 576
Yorkshire +1 384 £479 -4.20% 164
Midlands -1 288 £496 +6.26% 255
North West +7 258 £490 -0.41% 230
South West +1 249 £525 -4.55% 280
Scotland +1 249 £425 -10.29% 104
West Midlands -2 229 £500 +2.04% 130
East of England +1 133 £500 - 219
East Midlands -12 58 £450 +3.21% 125
North East +11 54 £500 +1.27% 83
Wales -15 30 £475 -10.80% 78
Northern Ireland +9 25 £550 +10.00% 33

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
1 270 (5.12%) Apache Spark
2 210 (3.98%) Apache Airflow
3 166 (3.15%) Apache
4 163 (3.09%) Confluence
5 67 (1.27%) SAS
6 60 (1.14%) SharePoint
7 29 (0.55%) Jupyter
8 26 (0.49%) nginx
9 25 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
10 24 (0.45%) OpenStack
11 19 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.28%) Appian
13 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
14 11 (0.21%) Camunda
15 10 (0.19%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.13%) CMS
17 4 (0.076%) CICS
17 4 (0.076%) Tomcat
18 3 (0.057%) IIS
18 3 (0.057%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 136 (2.58%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.11%) Weka
7 5 (0.095%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 25 (0.47%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
5 4 (0.076%) SAP IBP
6 3 (0.057%) Actimize
6 3 (0.057%) BambooHR
6 3 (0.057%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.038%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
7 2 (0.038%) Global One
7 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.038%) Odoo
7 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 1 (0.019%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 2,035 (38.56%) AWS
2 1,817 (34.43%) Azure
3 800 (15.16%) GCP
4 698 (13.22%) GitHub
5 523 (9.91%) Power Platform
5 523 (9.91%) Serverless
6 398 (7.54%) Azure DevOps
7 369 (6.99%) Amazon S3
8 358 (6.78%) AWS Lambda
9 356 (6.74%) GitHub Actions
10 278 (5.27%) Azure Data Factory
11 248 (4.70%) AWS CloudFormation
12 247 (4.68%) Snowflake
13 187 (3.54%) Amazon EKS
14 182 (3.45%) OpenShift
15 166 (3.15%) Amazon ECS
16 164 (3.11%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 158 (2.99%) dbt
18 149 (2.82%) Amazon EC2
19 148 (2.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 200 (3.79%) Firewall
2 144 (2.73%) DNS
3 107 (2.03%) Network Security
4 93 (1.76%) TCP/IP
5 79 (1.50%) VPN
6 75 (1.42%) BGP
7 62 (1.17%) WAN
8 61 (1.16%) HTTP
9 44 (0.83%) OSPF
10 43 (0.81%) SAN
11 42 (0.80%) MPLS
12 35 (0.66%) VLAN
13 34 (0.64%) DHCP
13 34 (0.64%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) SNMP
15 31 (0.59%) Wireshark
16 29 (0.55%) SSL
17 26 (0.49%) SD-WAN
18 24 (0.45%) VXLAN
19 22 (0.42%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 435 (8.24%) Power BI
2 359 (6.80%) PostgreSQL
3 305 (5.78%) Data Warehouse
4 237 (4.49%) Data Lake
5 205 (3.88%) NoSQL
6 199 (3.77%) SQL Server
7 181 (3.43%) Relational Database
8 178 (3.37%) Tableau
9 153 (2.90%) Metadata
10 149 (2.82%) Big Data
11 130 (2.46%) Delta Lake
12 126 (2.39%) BigQuery
13 119 (2.25%) Amazon RDS
14 112 (2.12%) MySQL
15 109 (2.07%) Amazon Redshift
16 108 (2.05%) Amazon Athena
17 94 (1.78%) MongoDB
18 91 (1.72%) Azure SQL Database
19 87 (1.65%) DynamoDB
20 76 (1.44%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 675 (12.79%) Git
2 534 (10.12%) Jenkins
3 409 (7.75%) GitLab
4 288 (5.46%) JIRA
5 97 (1.84%) Selenium
6 90 (1.71%) MLflow
7 54 (1.02%) Postman
8 45 (0.85%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.81%) Cucumber
10 42 (0.80%) JUnit
11 38 (0.72%) JMeter
12 34 (0.64%) Sonatype Nexus
13 28 (0.53%) Cypress.io
13 28 (0.53%) SpecFlow
14 26 (0.49%) Artifactory
14 26 (0.49%) Visual Studio
15 23 (0.44%) SonarQube
16 22 (0.42%) Maven
16 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
17 21 (0.40%) Gatling
General
1 1,236 (23.42%) Social Skills
2 1,001 (18.97%) Finance
3 715 (13.55%) Analytical Skills
4 501 (9.49%) Public Sector
5 406 (7.69%) Banking
6 169 (3.20%) Front Office
7 130 (2.46%) Documentation Skills
8 88 (1.67%) Investment Banking
9 67 (1.27%) Marketing
10 63 (1.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 63 (1.19%) Retail
11 60 (1.14%) Pharmaceutical
12 58 (1.10%) Legal
13 56 (1.06%) Telecoms
14 53 (1.00%) Financial Institution
14 53 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
15 42 (0.80%) Manufacturing
16 32 (0.61%) Presentation Skills
17 29 (0.55%) Publishing
18 28 (0.53%) Military
Job Titles
1 980 (18.57%) Developer
2 766 (14.51%) Data Engineer
3 745 (14.12%) Senior
4 463 (8.77%) Python Developer
5 357 (6.76%) Architect
6 341 (6.46%) Lead
7 297 (5.63%) Python Engineer
8 285 (5.40%) DevOps Engineer
9 274 (5.19%) Analyst
10 263 (4.98%) Software Engineer
11 256 (4.85%) AWS Engineer
12 241 (4.57%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 212 (4.02%) Data Scientist
14 195 (3.69%) Platform Engineer
15 164 (3.11%) Azure Engineer
16 161 (3.05%) Senior Developer
17 146 (2.77%) Senior Data Engineer
18 142 (2.69%) Data Analyst
19 138 (2.61%) Full-Stack Developer
20 127 (2.41%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 459 (8.70%) REST
2 365 (6.92%) React
3 342 (6.48%) PySpark
4 341 (6.46%) Kafka
5 284 (5.38%) Node.js
6 242 (4.59%) Pandas
7 228 (4.32%) .NET
8 198 (3.75%) PyTorch
9 193 (3.66%) RESTful
10 190 (3.60%) FastAPI
11 163 (3.09%) NumPy
12 157 (2.97%) TensorFlow
13 154 (2.92%) JSON
14 147 (2.79%) scikit-learn
15 136 (2.58%) Flask
16 128 (2.43%) AngularJS
17 123 (2.33%) Django
17 123 (2.33%) LangChain
18 118 (2.24%) pytest
19 108 (2.05%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 523 (9.91%) Cloud Native
2 221 (4.19%) Distributed Systems
3 190 (3.60%) Algorithms
4 147 (2.79%) Product Ownership
5 117 (2.22%) Equities
6 115 (2.18%) Data Protection Act
6 115 (2.18%) Fixed Income
7 113 (2.14%) AI Agents
8 112 (2.12%) Data Structures
9 108 (2.05%) Derivative
10 96 (1.82%) Data Centre
10 96 (1.82%) Hybrid Cloud
11 93 (1.76%) Legacy Systems
12 92 (1.74%) Enterprise Software
13 90 (1.71%) Onboarding
14 88 (1.67%) Public Cloud
15 82 (1.55%) Security Posture
16 79 (1.50%) Management Information System
17 58 (1.10%) Virtual Team
18 55 (1.04%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 671 (12.71%) Linux
2 306 (5.80%) Windows
3 182 (3.45%) Unix
4 105 (1.99%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.25%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.72%) VMS
7 33 (0.63%) Ubuntu
8 30 (0.57%) Android
9 21 (0.40%) AIX
10 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
11 18 (0.34%) Solaris
12 17 (0.32%) CentOS
13 16 (0.30%) Apple iOS
14 8 (0.15%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.13%) Windows 7
16 6 (0.11%) zOS
17 5 (0.095%) Kali Linux
17 5 (0.095%) Rocky
18 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,940 (36.76%) CI/CD
2 1,477 (27.98%) DevOps
3 1,226 (23.23%) Agile
4 1,160 (21.98%) AI
5 1,064 (20.16%) Analytics
6 1,029 (19.50%) Problem-Solving
7 926 (17.54%) Infrastructure as Code
8 872 (16.52%) Data Pipeline
9 842 (15.95%) Machine Learning
10 774 (14.66%) Containerisation
11 725 (13.74%) Data Engineering
12 699 (13.24%) Data Modelling
13 693 (13.13%) ETL
14 624 (11.82%) Data Science
15 605 (11.46%) Software Engineering
16 593 (11.24%) Test Automation
17 516 (9.78%) Observability
18 515 (9.76%) Business Intelligence
19 431 (8.17%) LLM
20 403 (7.64%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,690 (32.02%) SQL
2 752 (14.25%) Java
3 677 (12.83%) PowerShell
4 597 (11.31%) Bash
5 497 (9.42%) JavaScript
6 353 (6.69%) C#
7 352 (6.67%) TypeScript
8 223 (4.23%) Go
9 166 (3.15%) R
10 158 (2.99%) C++
11 128 (2.43%) Scala
12 108 (2.05%) Shell Script
13 103 (1.95%) Ruby
14 95 (1.80%) Perl
15 80 (1.52%) Bicep
16 54 (1.02%) Kusto Query Language
17 50 (0.95%) C
17 50 (0.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 46 (0.87%) T-SQL
19 43 (0.81%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,233 (23.36%) Security Cleared
2 992 (18.79%) SC Cleared
3 427 (8.09%) Degree
4 199 (3.77%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.80%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.46%) BPSS Clearance
7 113 (2.14%) Master's Degree
8 112 (2.12%) AWS Certification
9 106 (2.01%) Azure Certification
10 95 (1.80%) CISSP
11 74 (1.40%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.10%) CCNP
13 57 (1.08%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 49 (0.93%) CISM
15 47 (0.89%) PhD
16 36 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 35 (0.66%) ISTQB
17 35 (0.66%) Microsoft Certification
18 28 (0.53%) CEH
19 26 (0.49%) CCNA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 515 (9.76%) Data Quality
2 216 (4.09%) QA
3 178 (3.37%) GDPR
4 110 (2.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 100 (1.89%) NIST
6 80 (1.52%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.66%) PCI DSS
7 35 (0.66%) SLA
8 26 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 25 (0.47%) HIPAA
10 22 (0.42%) NCSC
11 18 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
12 17 (0.32%) WCAG
13 16 (0.30%) SOC 2
14 12 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.19%) MiFID
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
System Software
1 912 (17.28%) Docker
2 162 (3.07%) Active Directory
3 117 (2.22%) VMware Infrastructure
4 62 (1.17%) Virtual Machines
5 58 (1.10%) vSphere
6 53 (1.00%) VMware NSX
7 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.57%) Firmware
9 16 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 10 (0.19%) HDFS
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
12 8 (0.15%) Lustre
12 8 (0.15%) SRDF
13 7 (0.13%) GPFS
13 7 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
14 6 (0.11%) Postfix
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.095%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,131 (21.43%) Terraform
2 1,021 (19.34%) Kubernetes
3 522 (9.89%) Ansible
4 343 (6.50%) Grafana
5 293 (5.55%) Prometheus
6 91 (1.72%) Argo
7 73 (1.38%) Puppet
8 51 (0.97%) Istio
9 50 (0.95%) vRealize
10 39 (0.74%) vCenter Server
11 37 (0.70%) Kibana
12 35 (0.66%) Progress Chef
13 26 (0.49%) Nessus
14 23 (0.44%) NetBackup
15 22 (0.42%) Nagios
15 22 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
16 21 (0.40%) Rancher
17 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
18 19 (0.36%) Control-M
18 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 628 (11.90%) Microsoft
2 576 (10.91%) Databricks
3 298 (5.65%) Google
4 229 (4.34%) Splunk
5 217 (4.11%) Oracle
6 214 (4.05%) VMware
7 145 (2.75%) Red Hat
8 124 (2.35%) Cisco
9 122 (2.31%) OpenAI
10 99 (1.88%) ServiceNow
11 83 (1.57%) CyberArk
12 70 (1.33%) BeyondTrust
13 69 (1.31%) Foundry
14 65 (1.23%) Informatica
15 60 (1.14%) F5
16 58 (1.10%) IBM
17 55 (1.04%) Palo Alto
18 48 (0.91%) Dynatrace
19 46 (0.87%) SAP
20 41 (0.78%) Atlassian