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 12 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,997 4,002 4,133
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.55% 12.92% 9.33%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.40% 38.37% 31.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,367 2,660 2,918
10th Percentile £358 £380 £400
25th Percentile £415 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £522 £525
% change year-on-year -6.13% -0.57% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 104 56 113
10th Percentile £27.61 £20.12 £26.54
25th Percentile £41.25 £24.44 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.86 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.23% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £66.31 £66.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £83.75 £77.31
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +13.80% -28.00% -3.85%

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 12,070 10,429 13,100
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.31% 33.67% 29.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,002 6,651 9,272
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.87% -4.89%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £719 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -2.04% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 469 234 502
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.48 £35.53
25th Percentile £52.50 £36.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.97% +1.99% -3.85%

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 12 February 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 12 February 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 12 February 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 4,176 £523 -9.13% 2,364
London 0 2,379 £550 -8.33% 1,042
UK excluding London -1 1,935 £490 -6.13% 1,821
Work from Home -1 1,508 £525 -4.55% 1,026
North of England +9 623 £475 -5.00% 418
South East +2 422 £492 -10.55% 590
Yorkshire +6 333 £488 -9.30% 142
Scotland +1 292 £450 -5.26% 153
Midlands +2 290 £500 +3.41% 210
North West +7 248 £450 -9.95% 226
West Midlands +5 248 £509 +1.75% 108
South West -8 191 £550 -8.33% 233
East of England +1 132 £525 +5.00% 179
North East +2 47 £475 -9.52% 51
East Midlands -16 42 £438 +11.48% 103
Wales -12 32 £473 -5.50% 47
Northern Ireland +4 28 £600 +14.29% 22

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
1 240 (4.80%) Apache Spark
2 207 (4.14%) Apache Airflow
3 165 (3.30%) Apache
4 150 (3.00%) Confluence
5 64 (1.28%) SharePoint
6 61 (1.22%) SAS
7 32 (0.64%) Microsoft Exchange
7 32 (0.64%) nginx
7 32 (0.64%) OpenStack
8 22 (0.44%) Appian
8 22 (0.44%) Jupyter
9 21 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
10 14 (0.28%) ArcGIS
11 9 (0.18%) Apache Pig
12 8 (0.16%) Camunda
13 7 (0.14%) IIS
14 6 (0.12%) CMS
14 6 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
14 6 (0.12%) Tomcat
15 4 (0.080%) Apache Superset
Applications
1 129 (2.58%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 6 (0.12%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 3 (0.060%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.060%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.040%) Maya
10 2 (0.040%) NUKE
11 1 (0.020%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.020%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.32%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.22%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.060%) Actimize
5 3 (0.060%) Bloomberg AIM
5 3 (0.060%) IntelliMatch
5 3 (0.060%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.040%) Cloudability
6 2 (0.040%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.040%) Payment Gateway
6 2 (0.040%) Shopify
7 1 (0.020%) Cerner Millennium
7 1 (0.020%) Finacle
7 1 (0.020%) ION MarketView
7 1 (0.020%) Loan IQ
7 1 (0.020%) Salesforce CRM
7 1 (0.020%) SAP BPC
7 1 (0.020%) SAP IBP
7 1 (0.020%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,951 (39.04%) AWS
2 1,664 (33.30%) Azure
3 779 (15.59%) GCP
4 637 (12.75%) GitHub
5 529 (10.59%) Serverless
6 471 (9.43%) Power Platform
7 382 (7.64%) Amazon S3
8 351 (7.02%) AWS Lambda
9 339 (6.78%) Azure DevOps
10 328 (6.56%) GitHub Actions
11 254 (5.08%) AWS CloudFormation
12 250 (5.00%) Snowflake
13 242 (4.84%) Azure Data Factory
14 186 (3.72%) Amazon EKS
15 179 (3.58%) Amazon ECS
16 175 (3.50%) Amazon EC2
17 163 (3.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 153 (3.06%) OpenShift
19 151 (3.02%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 147 (2.94%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 228 (4.56%) Firewall
2 149 (2.98%) DNS
3 120 (2.40%) Network Security
4 118 (2.36%) TCP/IP
5 80 (1.60%) VPN
6 70 (1.40%) HTTP
7 69 (1.38%) BGP
8 54 (1.08%) WAN
9 52 (1.04%) SSL
10 42 (0.84%) Wireshark
11 40 (0.80%) LAN
11 40 (0.80%) MPLS
11 40 (0.80%) OSPF
12 32 (0.64%) Wireless
13 29 (0.58%) DHCP
14 27 (0.54%) SD-WAN
14 27 (0.54%) VLAN
15 26 (0.52%) SAN
16 25 (0.50%) SSH
17 24 (0.48%) BIG-IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 391 (7.82%) Power BI
2 387 (7.74%) PostgreSQL
3 293 (5.86%) Data Warehouse
4 240 (4.80%) NoSQL
5 232 (4.64%) Data Lake
6 207 (4.14%) Relational Database
7 182 (3.64%) SQL Server
8 159 (3.18%) Big Data
9 153 (3.06%) Tableau
10 146 (2.92%) Amazon RDS
11 121 (2.42%) MySQL
12 120 (2.40%) Metadata
13 116 (2.32%) BigQuery
14 103 (2.06%) Amazon Redshift
15 96 (1.92%) MongoDB
16 93 (1.86%) Amazon Athena
16 93 (1.86%) Delta Lake
17 85 (1.70%) Hadoop
18 81 (1.62%) Azure SQL Database
19 77 (1.54%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 606 (12.13%) Git
2 539 (10.79%) Jenkins
3 426 (8.53%) GitLab
4 287 (5.74%) JIRA
5 90 (1.80%) MLflow
6 84 (1.68%) Selenium
7 50 (1.00%) Cucumber
8 46 (0.92%) Postman
9 45 (0.90%) Sonatype Nexus
10 44 (0.88%) Bitbucket
11 38 (0.76%) JUnit
12 34 (0.68%) JMeter
13 28 (0.56%) SonarQube
14 27 (0.54%) Liquibase
15 26 (0.52%) Visual Studio
16 25 (0.50%) Artifactory
16 25 (0.50%) CircleCI
16 25 (0.50%) Maven
16 25 (0.50%) SpecFlow
17 22 (0.44%) Cypress.io
General
1 1,314 (26.30%) Social Skills
2 987 (19.75%) Finance
3 701 (14.03%) Analytical Skills
4 445 (8.91%) Public Sector
5 431 (8.63%) Banking
6 162 (3.24%) Front Office
7 130 (2.60%) Documentation Skills
8 115 (2.30%) Investment Banking
9 71 (1.42%) Financial Institution
10 64 (1.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 64 (1.28%) Retail
11 63 (1.26%) Marketing
12 60 (1.20%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.12%) Telecoms
14 46 (0.92%) Legal
15 43 (0.86%) Influencing Skills
15 43 (0.86%) Presentation Skills
16 40 (0.80%) Manufacturing
17 30 (0.60%) Military
18 22 (0.44%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 885 (17.71%) Developer
2 696 (13.93%) Senior
3 692 (13.85%) Data Engineer
4 379 (7.58%) Python Developer
5 320 (6.40%) Architect
6 311 (6.22%) DevOps Engineer
7 294 (5.88%) Python Engineer
8 287 (5.74%) Analyst
9 278 (5.56%) Lead
10 268 (5.36%) AWS Engineer
11 238 (4.76%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 232 (4.64%) Software Engineer
13 199 (3.98%) Data Scientist
14 176 (3.52%) Platform Engineer
15 151 (3.02%) Senior Developer
16 142 (2.84%) Data Analyst
17 139 (2.78%) Senior Data Engineer
18 136 (2.72%) Azure Engineer
19 126 (2.52%) Cloud Engineer
19 126 (2.52%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 432 (8.65%) REST
2 336 (6.72%) React
3 314 (6.28%) Kafka
4 300 (6.00%) PySpark
5 262 (5.24%) Node.js
6 228 (4.56%) Pandas
7 224 (4.48%) FastAPI
8 215 (4.30%) PyTorch
8 215 (4.30%) RESTful
9 201 (4.02%) .NET
10 175 (3.50%) TensorFlow
11 171 (3.42%) NumPy
12 137 (2.74%) AngularJS
13 130 (2.60%) scikit-learn
14 129 (2.58%) Flask
14 129 (2.58%) LangChain
15 115 (2.30%) pytest
16 112 (2.24%) Django
17 110 (2.20%) JSON
17 110 (2.20%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 449 (8.99%) Cloud Native
2 208 (4.16%) Algorithms
3 197 (3.94%) Distributed Systems
4 137 (2.74%) Product Ownership
5 121 (2.42%) Data Protection Act
6 119 (2.38%) Equities
7 108 (2.16%) Onboarding
8 104 (2.08%) Data Structures
9 99 (1.98%) AI Agents
10 97 (1.94%) Enterprise Software
11 95 (1.90%) Derivative
12 89 (1.78%) Fixed Income
13 88 (1.76%) Legacy Systems
14 87 (1.74%) Hybrid Cloud
15 86 (1.72%) Public Cloud
16 84 (1.68%) Management Information System
16 84 (1.68%) Security Posture
17 83 (1.66%) Data Centre
18 74 (1.48%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
19 65 (1.30%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 759 (15.19%) Linux
2 350 (7.00%) Windows
3 226 (4.52%) Unix
4 95 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.28%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.78%) Android
7 38 (0.76%) Ubuntu
8 36 (0.72%) VMS
9 28 (0.56%) CentOS
10 25 (0.50%) Mac OS
10 25 (0.50%) Solaris
11 22 (0.44%) Apple iOS
12 11 (0.22%) Amazon Linux
12 11 (0.22%) Windows 7
13 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
14 5 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
15 4 (0.080%) Debian
15 4 (0.080%) Robot Operating System
15 4 (0.080%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.080%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,785 (35.72%) CI/CD
2 1,372 (27.46%) DevOps
3 1,171 (23.43%) Agile
4 1,085 (21.71%) Problem-Solving
5 1,045 (20.91%) AI
6 932 (18.65%) Analytics
7 888 (17.77%) Infrastructure as Code
8 814 (16.29%) Machine Learning
9 776 (15.53%) Data Pipeline
10 748 (14.97%) Containerisation
11 641 (12.83%) ETL
12 638 (12.77%) Data Engineering
13 608 (12.17%) Data Science
14 606 (12.13%) Data Modelling
15 553 (11.07%) Test Automation
16 546 (10.93%) Software Engineering
17 460 (9.21%) Observability
18 450 (9.01%) Business Intelligence
19 425 (8.51%) LLM
20 365 (7.30%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,549 (31.00%) SQL
2 728 (14.57%) Java
3 670 (13.41%) PowerShell
4 611 (12.23%) Bash
5 520 (10.41%) JavaScript
6 321 (6.42%) C#
7 316 (6.32%) TypeScript
8 233 (4.66%) Go
9 190 (3.80%) C++
10 157 (3.14%) R
11 139 (2.78%) Shell Script
12 135 (2.70%) Perl
13 118 (2.36%) Scala
14 92 (1.84%) Ruby
15 61 (1.22%) Kusto Query Language
16 60 (1.20%) Bicep
17 53 (1.06%) C
17 53 (1.06%) VBA
18 40 (0.80%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 40 (0.80%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,109 (22.19%) Security Cleared
2 891 (17.83%) SC Cleared
3 457 (9.15%) Degree
4 227 (4.54%) Computer Science Degree
5 144 (2.88%) DV Cleared
6 137 (2.74%) AWS Certification
7 127 (2.54%) Master's Degree
8 108 (2.16%) BPSS Clearance
9 91 (1.82%) Azure Certification
10 90 (1.80%) CISSP
11 76 (1.52%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.16%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 54 (1.08%) CCNP
14 47 (0.94%) PhD
15 42 (0.84%) CISM
16 37 (0.74%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 34 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
18 33 (0.66%) CCIE
18 33 (0.66%) CEH
19 31 (0.62%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 430 (8.61%) Data Quality
2 189 (3.78%) QA
3 171 (3.42%) GDPR
4 105 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 105 (2.10%) NIST
5 69 (1.38%) Accessibility
6 32 (0.64%) PCI DSS
7 29 (0.58%) HIPAA
8 28 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 27 (0.54%) SLA
10 23 (0.46%) NCSC
11 19 (0.38%) SOC 2
12 14 (0.28%) EU AI Act
13 13 (0.26%) Actionable Recommendations
14 11 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials
15 10 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.20%) MiFID
15 10 (0.20%) PMO
16 9 (0.18%) EMIR
16 9 (0.18%) WCAG
System Software
1 957 (19.15%) Docker
2 182 (3.64%) Active Directory
3 125 (2.50%) VMware Infrastructure
4 53 (1.06%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (1.00%) VMware NSX
6 47 (0.94%) vSphere
7 29 (0.58%) Hyper-V
8 23 (0.46%) Firmware
9 18 (0.36%) HDFS
9 18 (0.36%) KVM
10 14 (0.28%) VMware ESXi
11 12 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 12 (0.24%) Squid
12 10 (0.20%) Lustre
12 10 (0.20%) Postfix
13 9 (0.18%) GPFS
14 8 (0.16%) DFS Replication
14 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
15 6 (0.12%) Dovecot
15 6 (0.12%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,099 (21.99%) Terraform
2 1,048 (20.97%) Kubernetes
3 555 (11.11%) Ansible
4 356 (7.12%) Grafana
5 317 (6.34%) Prometheus
6 91 (1.82%) Argo
7 74 (1.48%) Puppet
8 56 (1.12%) Kibana
9 54 (1.08%) vRealize
10 42 (0.84%) Nessus
11 38 (0.76%) Istio
12 35 (0.70%) Single Sign-On
13 26 (0.52%) NetBackup
14 25 (0.50%) Control-M
14 25 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
14 25 (0.50%) Progress Chef
15 24 (0.48%) vCenter Server
16 21 (0.42%) IBM Guardium
17 20 (0.40%) ITRS Geneos
18 19 (0.38%) logstash
Vendors
1 614 (12.29%) Microsoft
2 492 (9.85%) Databricks
3 301 (6.02%) Google
4 249 (4.98%) Splunk
5 232 (4.64%) VMware
6 225 (4.50%) Oracle
7 142 (2.84%) Red Hat
8 124 (2.48%) Cisco
9 119 (2.38%) OpenAI
10 116 (2.32%) ServiceNow
11 95 (1.90%) CyberArk
12 77 (1.54%) Foundry
13 74 (1.48%) Palo Alto
14 73 (1.46%) BeyondTrust
14 73 (1.46%) F5
15 49 (0.98%) Informatica
16 44 (0.88%) IBM
16 44 (0.88%) SAP
17 42 (0.84%) Atlassian
18 38 (0.76%) Dynatrace