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

6 months to
28 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 10 14
Rank change year-on-year -2 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,641 4,243 3,975
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.67% 12.96% 9.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.04% 39.29% 31.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,669 2,846 2,891
10th Percentile £372 £360 £375
25th Percentile £430 £432 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £530 £575
Median % change year-on-year -0.94% -7.83% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £707
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £507
% change year-on-year +2.04% -3.35% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 135 70 121
10th Percentile £29.10 £26.13 £20.50
25th Percentile £43.16 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -16.67% -4.00%
75th Percentile £74.13 £57.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.67 £50.00 £66.25
% change year-on-year +5.33% -24.53% +13.98%

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 14,090 10,800 12,470
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.65% 32.98% 31.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,142 7,275 8,813
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £498
% change year-on-year +3.58% -4.52% -0.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 523 257 431
10th Percentile £33.70 £27.98 £30.00
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -12.69% +7.35%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.90 £81.18 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +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 28 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 28 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 28 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 -4 4,767 £538 -1.35% 2,813
London -4 2,741 £573 -0.43% 1,589
UK excluding London -7 2,226 £500 +2.04% 1,633
Work from Home -5 1,559 £526 -4.45% 1,050
North of England +3 778 £500 +5.26% 412
South East -11 438 £541 +8.25% 489
Yorkshire +2 412 £500 +1.46% 120
Scotland +4 310 £430 -9.47% 99
South West +1 291 £500 -6.98% 221
North West +4 289 £525 +10.53% 214
Midlands -14 254 £473 +5.00% 186
West Midlands -13 203 £469 +4.22% 105
East of England -14 139 £500 -0.50% 173
North East 0 88 £425 -2.86% 84
East Midlands -10 50 £488 +11.93% 81
Wales -6 31 £500 +17.65% 46
Northern Ireland +4 19 £363 -36.26% 32

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
1 288 (5.11%) Apache Spark
2 271 (4.80%) Apache Airflow
3 212 (3.76%) Apache
4 185 (3.28%) Confluence
5 54 (0.96%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.87%) SAS
7 47 (0.83%) SharePoint
8 25 (0.44%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.41%) nginx
10 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
11 20 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.27%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.21%) IIS
14 9 (0.16%) CMS
14 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.089%) JBoss
Applications
1 120 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.55%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
5 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
6 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
6 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
8 1 (0.018%) Navisworks
8 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.018%) Revit
8 1 (0.018%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.43%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.20%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
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
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.035%) Bloomberg AIM
10 2 (0.035%) Distributed Ledger
10 2 (0.035%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.035%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.035%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 2,103 (37.28%) AWS
2 1,895 (33.59%) Azure
3 846 (15.00%) GCP
4 692 (12.27%) GitHub
5 518 (9.18%) Power Platform
6 481 (8.53%) Serverless
7 414 (7.34%) Amazon S3
8 409 (7.25%) Azure DevOps
9 384 (6.81%) GitHub Actions
10 362 (6.42%) AWS Lambda
11 299 (5.30%) Snowflake
12 232 (4.11%) Azure Data Factory
13 221 (3.92%) dbt
14 193 (3.42%) AWS CloudFormation
15 183 (3.24%) Amazon EKS
16 179 (3.17%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 152 (2.69%) OpenShift
18 148 (2.62%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 133 (2.36%) Amazon EC2
20 131 (2.32%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 259 (4.59%) Firewall
2 192 (3.40%) DNS
3 128 (2.27%) TCP/IP
4 120 (2.13%) BGP
5 111 (1.97%) Network Security
5 111 (1.97%) VPN
5 111 (1.97%) WAN
6 75 (1.33%) OSPF
7 68 (1.21%) DHCP
8 59 (1.05%) VLAN
9 54 (0.96%) BIG-IP
9 54 (0.96%) SAN
9 54 (0.96%) SD-WAN
10 53 (0.94%) HTTP
11 52 (0.92%) VXLAN
12 50 (0.89%) SSL
13 43 (0.76%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 43 (0.76%) SNMP
14 40 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
15 37 (0.66%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 460 (8.15%) Power BI
2 341 (6.05%) PostgreSQL
3 319 (5.66%) Data Warehouse
4 228 (4.04%) SQL Server
5 201 (3.56%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.55%) Tableau
7 197 (3.49%) Relational Database
8 183 (3.24%) Metadata
9 171 (3.03%) NoSQL
10 159 (2.82%) Big Data
11 151 (2.68%) BigQuery
12 137 (2.43%) Amazon Athena
12 137 (2.43%) Amazon Redshift
13 130 (2.30%) MongoDB
14 121 (2.15%) Delta Lake
15 110 (1.95%) DynamoDB
16 109 (1.93%) Amazon RDS
17 85 (1.51%) MySQL
18 73 (1.29%) Snowflake Schema
19 70 (1.24%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 685 (12.14%) Git
2 504 (8.93%) Jenkins
3 406 (7.20%) GitLab
4 308 (5.46%) JIRA
5 83 (1.47%) Selenium
6 69 (1.22%) MLflow
7 51 (0.90%) Postman
8 44 (0.78%) Bitbucket
9 42 (0.74%) JMeter
10 36 (0.64%) SonarQube
11 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
12 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
13 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
14 29 (0.51%) Claude Code
15 27 (0.48%) Gatling
15 27 (0.48%) JUnit
15 27 (0.48%) Sonatype Nexus
16 26 (0.46%) Maven
17 19 (0.34%) Zephyr
General
1 1,223 (21.68%) Social Skills
2 1,204 (21.34%) Finance
3 784 (13.90%) Analytical Skills
4 564 (10.00%) Public Sector
5 436 (7.73%) Banking
6 207 (3.67%) Front Office
7 127 (2.25%) Documentation Skills
8 125 (2.22%) Investment Banking
9 109 (1.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 99 (1.76%) Retail
11 85 (1.51%) Marketing
12 70 (1.24%) Telecoms
13 66 (1.17%) Pharmaceutical
14 60 (1.06%) Legal
15 55 (0.98%) Military
16 49 (0.87%) Financial Institution
17 48 (0.85%) Publishing
18 45 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
19 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
20 33 (0.59%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 967 (17.14%) Developer
2 899 (15.94%) Senior
3 849 (15.05%) Data Engineer
4 509 (9.02%) Python Developer
5 445 (7.89%) Lead
6 402 (7.13%) Python Engineer
7 324 (5.74%) DevOps Engineer
8 321 (5.69%) Software Engineer
9 291 (5.16%) Architect
10 285 (5.05%) Analyst
11 258 (4.57%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 245 (4.34%) AWS Engineer
13 222 (3.94%) Data Scientist
14 195 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
15 187 (3.32%) Cloud Engineer
16 179 (3.17%) Senior Developer
17 173 (3.07%) Azure Engineer
18 172 (3.05%) Senior Data Engineer
19 147 (2.61%) Data Analyst
20 141 (2.50%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 419 (7.43%) REST
2 368 (6.52%) PySpark
3 363 (6.44%) React
4 354 (6.28%) Kafka
5 234 (4.15%) .NET
6 214 (3.79%) Node.js
7 213 (3.78%) FastAPI
8 208 (3.69%) JSON
9 205 (3.63%) RESTful
10 193 (3.42%) Pandas
11 174 (3.08%) Django
12 153 (2.71%) PyTorch
13 143 (2.54%) LangChain
14 120 (2.13%) NumPy
15 117 (2.07%) Flask
16 107 (1.90%) scikit-learn
17 104 (1.84%) OAuth
17 104 (1.84%) TensorFlow
18 102 (1.81%) Spring
19 96 (1.70%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 760 (13.47%) Cloud Native
2 322 (5.71%) Distributed Systems
3 200 (3.55%) Onboarding
4 199 (3.53%) AI Agents
5 160 (2.84%) Data Centre
6 153 (2.71%) Product Ownership
7 149 (2.64%) Algorithms
8 138 (2.45%) Data Structures
9 124 (2.20%) Legacy Systems
10 116 (2.06%) Derivative
10 116 (2.06%) Hybrid Cloud
11 113 (2.00%) Data Protection Act
12 104 (1.84%) Fixed Income
12 104 (1.84%) Management Information System
13 98 (1.74%) Equities
14 82 (1.45%) Security Posture
15 69 (1.22%) Public Cloud
16 68 (1.21%) Enterprise Software
17 65 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
18 64 (1.13%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 691 (12.25%) Linux
2 324 (5.74%) Windows
3 218 (3.86%) Unix
4 131 (2.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 74 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.74%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.57%) VMS
8 30 (0.53%) AIX
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 16 (0.28%) Solaris
11 15 (0.27%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Debian
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 5 (0.089%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,139 (37.92%) CI/CD
2 1,570 (27.83%) DevOps
3 1,403 (24.87%) AI
4 1,276 (22.62%) Agile
5 1,157 (20.51%) Analytics
6 1,085 (19.23%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,019 (18.06%) Data Pipeline
8 914 (16.20%) Problem-Solving
9 906 (16.06%) Machine Learning
10 847 (15.02%) Software Engineering
11 823 (14.59%) Data Engineering
12 775 (13.74%) Containerisation
13 755 (13.38%) Data Modelling
14 686 (12.16%) ETL
15 662 (11.74%) Observability
16 635 (11.26%) Data Science
17 572 (10.14%) Test Automation
18 546 (9.68%) Business Intelligence
19 531 (9.41%) Continuous Improvement
20 529 (9.38%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,818 (32.23%) SQL
2 807 (14.31%) Java
3 717 (12.71%) Bash
4 692 (12.27%) PowerShell
5 457 (8.10%) JavaScript
6 396 (7.02%) TypeScript
7 310 (5.50%) C#
8 214 (3.79%) Go
9 160 (2.84%) R
10 137 (2.43%) C++
11 129 (2.29%) Shell Script
12 124 (2.20%) Scala
13 110 (1.95%) Bicep
14 75 (1.33%) Perl
15 57 (1.01%) PL/SQL
15 57 (1.01%) Rust
16 56 (0.99%) Ruby
17 55 (0.98%) Groovy
18 54 (0.96%) C
19 49 (0.87%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,277 (22.64%) Security Cleared
2 1,024 (18.15%) SC Cleared
3 434 (7.69%) Degree
4 198 (3.51%) DV Cleared
5 149 (2.64%) Computer Science Degree
6 138 (2.45%) AWS Certification
7 131 (2.32%) BPSS Clearance
8 130 (2.30%) Azure Certification
9 87 (1.54%) CISSP
10 84 (1.49%) Cisco Certification
11 81 (1.44%) Master's Degree
12 54 (0.96%) CCNP
13 45 (0.80%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 42 (0.74%) Microsoft Certification
14 42 (0.74%) PhD
15 35 (0.62%) CISM
16 34 (0.60%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 30 (0.53%) ISTQB
18 29 (0.51%) CCIE
19 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 579 (10.26%) Data Quality
2 256 (4.54%) QA
3 113 (2.00%) GDPR
4 104 (1.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 104 (1.84%) NIST
5 94 (1.67%) Accessibility
6 34 (0.60%) SLA
7 26 (0.46%) WCAG
8 23 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
8 23 (0.41%) NCSC
9 20 (0.35%) PCI DSS
9 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
11 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
12 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
13 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
14 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
14 8 (0.14%) GRC
15 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 894 (15.85%) Docker
2 145 (2.57%) Active Directory
3 128 (2.27%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.33%) Virtual Machines
5 49 (0.87%) vSphere
6 39 (0.69%) Hyper-V
7 37 (0.66%) VMware NSX
8 33 (0.59%) Firmware
9 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 15 (0.27%) KVM
12 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 10 (0.18%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
16 7 (0.12%) PowerHA
17 4 (0.071%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 1,253 (22.21%) Terraform
2 1,071 (18.99%) Kubernetes
3 594 (10.53%) Ansible
4 348 (6.17%) Grafana
5 268 (4.75%) Prometheus
6 81 (1.44%) Puppet
7 75 (1.33%) Argo
8 55 (0.98%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Istio
10 39 (0.69%) vCenter Server
11 33 (0.59%) vRealize
12 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
13 27 (0.48%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
14 26 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
15 25 (0.44%) Nagios
16 21 (0.37%) Control-M
17 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
18 18 (0.32%) NetBackup
18 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 649 (11.51%) Microsoft
2 564 (10.00%) Databricks
3 329 (5.83%) Google
4 244 (4.33%) Oracle
5 209 (3.71%) Splunk
6 177 (3.14%) VMware
7 150 (2.66%) OpenAI
8 138 (2.45%) Cisco
9 115 (2.04%) ServiceNow
10 104 (1.84%) Red Hat
11 92 (1.63%) Dynatrace
11 92 (1.63%) F5
12 88 (1.56%) Palo Alto
13 84 (1.49%) IBM
14 81 (1.44%) Informatica
15 70 (1.24%) Fortinet
16 67 (1.19%) Foundry
17 63 (1.12%) CyberArk
18 60 (1.06%) Salesforce
19 59 (1.05%) SAP