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 2 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 10 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 +2 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,656 4,406 4,165
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.30% 13.30% 10.94%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.44% 40.33% 34.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,678 2,848 2,847
10th Percentile £375 £358 £368
25th Percentile £445 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -3.77%
75th Percentile £650 £644 £700
90th Percentile £750 £763 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £507 £500 £505
% change year-on-year +1.40% -0.99% -3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 87 97
10th Percentile £35.93 £28.25 £20.80
25th Percentile £44.50 £35.13 £40.06
Median hourly rate £62.82 £50.00 £67.02
Median % change year-on-year +25.64% -25.40% +3.11%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £71.88
90th Percentile £92.11 £79.75 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -28.57% +7.69%

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 14,341 10,925 12,242
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.12% 32.99% 32.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,306 7,187 8,115
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.45% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £492
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.36% -1.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 546 299 333
10th Percentile £24.00 £29.00 £26.40
25th Percentile £46.39 £41.25 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.38 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £75.00 £78.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 2 October 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 2 October 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 2 October 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 4,815 £550 +3.77% 10,778
London -4 2,850 £575 - 6,774
UK excluding London -10 2,168 £507 +1.40% 5,003
Work from Home -6 1,553 £530 -3.64% 3,963
North of England +1 754 £500 +5.26% 1,040
South East -8 453 £540 +8.00% 1,187
Yorkshire -2 382 £500 - 318
Scotland -2 310 £467 -6.60% 613
North West -2 293 £525 +16.67% 572
South West -2 278 £550 - 655
Midlands -24 224 £500 - 506
West Midlands -20 186 £520 +4.00% 303
East of England -14 144 £480 -12.73% 688
North East -1 88 £425 -10.53% 157
East Midlands -17 38 £456 +11.28% 203
Wales -10 28 £530 +23.98% 169
Northern Ireland +2 16 £363 -37.63% 185

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
1 298 (5.27%) Apache Airflow
2 279 (4.93%) Apache Spark
3 232 (4.10%) Apache
4 157 (2.78%) Confluence
5 60 (1.06%) Jupyter
6 56 (0.99%) SharePoint
7 32 (0.57%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 27 (0.48%) nginx
10 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) IIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 9 (0.16%) CMS
11 9 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
14 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.088%) Camunda
14 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 98 (1.73%) Microsoft Excel
2 37 (0.65%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
4 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 11 (0.19%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.035%) Revit
7 2 (0.035%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Remedy ITSM
2 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
3 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
4 11 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.11%) Front Arena
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.088%) SAP IBP
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.035%) Actimize
11 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.035%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 2,069 (36.58%) AWS
2 1,924 (34.02%) Azure
3 914 (16.16%) GCP
4 752 (13.30%) GitHub
5 482 (8.52%) Power Platform
6 481 (8.50%) Serverless
7 444 (7.85%) Azure DevOps
8 439 (7.76%) GitHub Actions
9 401 (7.09%) Amazon S3
10 355 (6.28%) AWS Lambda
11 347 (6.14%) Snowflake
12 250 (4.42%) dbt
13 214 (3.78%) Azure Data Factory
14 207 (3.66%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 195 (3.45%) Amazon EKS
16 185 (3.27%) AWS CloudFormation
17 180 (3.18%) Entra ID
18 146 (2.58%) Amazon EC2
19 131 (2.32%) SaaS
20 128 (2.26%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 285 (5.04%) Firewall
2 205 (3.62%) DNS
3 166 (2.93%) Network Security
4 149 (2.63%) TCP/IP
5 127 (2.25%) VPN
6 123 (2.17%) BGP
7 112 (1.98%) WAN
8 82 (1.45%) DHCP
9 73 (1.29%) OSPF
9 73 (1.29%) SD-WAN
10 62 (1.10%) BIG-IP
11 59 (1.04%) SSL
12 55 (0.97%) VLAN
12 55 (0.97%) VXLAN
13 54 (0.95%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 52 (0.92%) HTTP
15 47 (0.83%) Ethernet VPN
16 42 (0.74%) Broadband
17 41 (0.72%) Wireless
18 40 (0.71%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 428 (7.57%) Power BI
2 331 (5.85%) Data Warehouse
3 321 (5.68%) PostgreSQL
4 229 (4.05%) Metadata
5 207 (3.66%) Relational Database
6 202 (3.57%) SQL Server
7 196 (3.47%) Data Lake
8 187 (3.31%) BigQuery
9 165 (2.92%) Tableau
10 157 (2.78%) NoSQL
11 139 (2.46%) Big Data
12 132 (2.33%) Amazon RDS
12 132 (2.33%) Amazon Redshift
13 122 (2.16%) Delta Lake
14 121 (2.14%) MongoDB
15 120 (2.12%) Amazon Athena
16 107 (1.89%) DynamoDB
17 100 (1.77%) MySQL
18 74 (1.31%) Redis
19 62 (1.10%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 833 (14.73%) Git
2 518 (9.16%) Jenkins
3 498 (8.80%) GitLab
4 311 (5.50%) JIRA
5 121 (2.14%) Selenium
6 73 (1.29%) Postman
7 61 (1.08%) JMeter
8 58 (1.03%) Claude Code
9 56 (0.99%) SonarQube
10 50 (0.88%) MLflow
11 46 (0.81%) Bitbucket
12 40 (0.71%) Cucumber
13 39 (0.69%) REST Assured
14 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
14 36 (0.64%) Sonatype Nexus
15 35 (0.62%) Maven
16 33 (0.58%) Cypress.io
17 31 (0.55%) LoadRunner
18 28 (0.50%) Gatling
19 24 (0.42%) Zephyr
General
1 1,325 (23.43%) Social Skills
2 1,303 (23.04%) Finance
3 837 (14.80%) Analytical Skills
4 548 (9.69%) Public Sector
5 527 (9.32%) Banking
6 173 (3.06%) Front Office
7 155 (2.74%) Investment Banking
8 116 (2.05%) Retail
9 113 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 101 (1.79%) Documentation Skills
11 86 (1.52%) Marketing
11 86 (1.52%) Telecoms
12 64 (1.13%) Military
13 53 (0.94%) Law
14 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
15 49 (0.87%) Legal
15 49 (0.87%) Pharmaceutical
16 46 (0.81%) Financial Institution
17 42 (0.74%) Publishing
18 38 (0.67%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,024 (18.10%) Senior
2 900 (15.91%) Developer
3 842 (14.89%) Data Engineer
4 496 (8.77%) Lead
5 474 (8.38%) Python Developer
6 423 (7.48%) Python Engineer
7 367 (6.49%) DevOps Engineer
8 312 (5.52%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 279 (4.93%) Analyst
9 279 (4.93%) Software Engineer
10 237 (4.19%) Architect
11 223 (3.94%) AWS Engineer
12 196 (3.47%) Senior Data Engineer
13 194 (3.43%) Cloud Engineer
14 192 (3.39%) Azure Engineer
14 192 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
14 192 (3.39%) Senior Developer
15 184 (3.25%) Data Scientist
16 148 (2.62%) Network Engineer
17 140 (2.48%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,409 (24.91%) Terraform
2 553 (9.78%) REST
3 378 (6.68%) Kafka
4 372 (6.58%) PySpark
5 308 (5.45%) React
6 238 (4.21%) .NET
7 222 (3.93%) FastAPI
8 211 (3.73%) JSON
9 210 (3.71%) Django
10 193 (3.41%) RESTful
11 158 (2.79%) LangChain
12 157 (2.78%) pytest
13 151 (2.67%) Node.js
13 151 (2.67%) Pandas
14 131 (2.32%) OAuth
15 121 (2.14%) Flask
16 114 (2.02%) YAML
17 110 (1.94%) LangGraph
18 109 (1.93%) PyTorch
19 104 (1.84%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 811 (14.34%) Cloud Native
2 300 (5.30%) AI Agents
3 292 (5.16%) Distributed Systems
4 263 (4.65%) Onboarding
5 160 (2.83%) Data Centre
6 153 (2.71%) Product Ownership
7 151 (2.67%) Data Structures
8 137 (2.42%) Legacy Systems
9 126 (2.23%) Algorithms
10 110 (1.94%) Hybrid Cloud
11 108 (1.91%) Enterprise Software
11 108 (1.91%) Management Information System
12 104 (1.84%) Data Protection Act
13 102 (1.80%) Derivative
14 95 (1.68%) Security Posture
15 83 (1.47%) Public Cloud
16 81 (1.43%) Equities
17 80 (1.41%) PKI
18 66 (1.17%) Linux Command Line
18 66 (1.17%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 780 (13.79%) Linux
2 346 (6.12%) Windows
3 248 (4.38%) Unix
4 157 (2.78%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 93 (1.64%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.64%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 15 (0.27%) AIX
11 14 (0.25%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) zOS
15 6 (0.11%) FreeRTOS
16 5 (0.088%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.088%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,408 (42.57%) CI/CD
2 1,657 (29.30%) DevOps
3 1,601 (28.31%) AI
4 1,318 (23.30%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,281 (22.65%) Agile
6 1,098 (19.41%) Analytics
7 988 (17.47%) Data Pipeline
8 957 (16.92%) Software Engineering
9 883 (15.61%) Problem-Solving
10 853 (15.08%) Data Engineering
11 844 (14.92%) Machine Learning
12 786 (13.90%) Containerisation
13 767 (13.56%) Observability
14 765 (13.53%) Data Modelling
15 706 (12.48%) Test Automation
16 674 (11.92%) Validation
17 671 (11.86%) ETL
18 666 (11.78%) Continuous Improvement
19 602 (10.64%) Platform Engineering
20 591 (10.45%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,852 (32.74%) SQL
2 800 (14.14%) Java
3 784 (13.86%) Bash
4 760 (13.44%) PowerShell
5 444 (7.85%) JavaScript
6 347 (6.14%) TypeScript
7 306 (5.41%) C#
8 227 (4.01%) Go
9 154 (2.72%) Shell Script
10 137 (2.42%) Bicep
11 133 (2.35%) R
12 132 (2.33%) C++
13 125 (2.21%) Scala
14 106 (1.87%) Perl
15 61 (1.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 57 (1.01%) Groovy
17 52 (0.92%) C
18 51 (0.90%) T-SQL
19 50 (0.88%) Rust
20 47 (0.83%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,384 (24.47%) Security Cleared
2 1,111 (19.64%) SC Cleared
3 405 (7.16%) Degree
4 254 (4.49%) DV Cleared
5 155 (2.74%) Azure Certification
6 149 (2.63%) Computer Science Degree
7 146 (2.58%) AWS Certification
8 133 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.71%) CISSP
10 79 (1.40%) Cisco Certification
11 70 (1.24%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
13 37 (0.65%) CCNP
14 33 (0.58%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) CCIE
16 30 (0.53%) CISM
17 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 29 (0.51%) DBS Check
17 29 (0.51%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.50%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 651 (11.51%) Data Quality
2 327 (5.78%) QA
3 116 (2.05%) NIST
4 103 (1.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 88 (1.56%) GDPR
6 84 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 40 (0.71%) SLA
8 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 30 (0.53%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 24 (0.42%) SOC 2
12 23 (0.41%) WCAG
13 19 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
14 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.12%) Basel III
17 7 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 7 (0.12%) GRC
System Software
1 983 (17.38%) Docker
2 184 (3.25%) Active Directory
3 134 (2.37%) VMware Infrastructure
4 70 (1.24%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.88%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.62%) vSphere
7 32 (0.57%) VMware NSX
8 27 (0.48%) NFS
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) Firmware
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 8 (0.14%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 8 (0.14%) zsh
15 7 (0.12%) HDFS
16 6 (0.11%) Postfix
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,200 (21.22%) Kubernetes
2 647 (11.44%) Ansible
3 339 (5.99%) Grafana
4 250 (4.42%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.45%) Puppet
6 72 (1.27%) Progress Chef
7 70 (1.24%) Argo
8 48 (0.85%) Single Sign-On
9 38 (0.67%) Kibana
10 35 (0.62%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
12 26 (0.46%) Control-M
13 23 (0.41%) Packer
14 21 (0.37%) FortiGate
15 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
15 17 (0.30%) ZABBIX
16 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) Podman
16 16 (0.28%) QRadar
17 15 (0.27%) vRealize
Vendors
1 757 (13.38%) Microsoft
2 587 (10.38%) Databricks
3 410 (7.25%) Google
4 243 (4.30%) Oracle
5 209 (3.70%) Splunk
6 172 (3.04%) VMware
7 170 (3.01%) OpenAI
8 141 (2.49%) Cisco
9 135 (2.39%) ServiceNow
10 100 (1.77%) Dynatrace
11 95 (1.68%) Red Hat
12 94 (1.66%) IBM
13 89 (1.57%) F5
13 89 (1.57%) Palo Alto
14 85 (1.50%) Foundry
15 72 (1.27%) CyberArk
16 70 (1.24%) Fortinet
17 69 (1.22%) Informatica
18 67 (1.18%) SAP
19 54 (0.95%) Salesforce