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

6 months to
7 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,873 3,995 4,205
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.49% 12.85% 9.31%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.30% 38.23% 31.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,288 2,641 2,982
10th Percentile £358 £385 £400
25th Percentile £415 £463 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £550 £551
Median % change year-on-year -6.41% -0.09% -8.25%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £680
90th Percentile £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -6.29% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 100 56 115
10th Percentile £29.75 £20.68 £26.84
25th Percentile £41.25 £25.21 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.86 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.23% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £67.63 £66.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £83.75 £77.11
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £47.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +7.81% -24.00% -4.58%

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 11,800 10,449 13,364
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.23% 33.60% 29.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,831 6,624 9,470
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £536
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.05% -4.71%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -1.79% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 457 235 516
10th Percentile £40.75 £21.55 £35.94
25th Percentile £52.50 £36.25 £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 £68.38 £69.62
90th Percentile £77.00 £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 7 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 7 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 7 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 4,087 £520 -9.57% 2,547
London 0 2,314 £550 -8.33% 1,144
UK excluding London 0 1,900 £492 -6.29% 1,894
Work from Home -1 1,468 £525 -4.55% 1,098
North of England +9 621 £475 -5.94% 441
South East 0 411 £488 -11.36% 607
Yorkshire +8 325 £500 -6.98% 153
Midlands +3 289 £500 +2.04% 218
Scotland +1 277 £454 -4.42% 155
North West +6 253 £450 -10.00% 237
West Midlands +5 247 £509 +0.54% 109
South West -7 186 £550 -8.33% 249
East of England +2 132 £525 +5.00% 184
North East +5 48 £475 -9.52% 54
East Midlands -18 42 £444 +12.91% 109
Wales -9 32 £473 -5.50% 48
Northern Ireland +3 28 £600 +14.29% 19

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
1 234 (4.80%) Apache Spark
2 205 (4.21%) Apache Airflow
3 163 (3.34%) Apache
4 149 (3.06%) Confluence
5 64 (1.31%) SharePoint
6 62 (1.27%) SAS
7 32 (0.66%) Microsoft Exchange
8 31 (0.64%) OpenStack
9 30 (0.62%) nginx
10 22 (0.45%) Jupyter
11 21 (0.43%) Appian
11 21 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
12 13 (0.27%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.18%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.16%) Camunda
15 7 (0.14%) IIS
16 6 (0.12%) CMS
16 6 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
16 6 (0.12%) Tomcat
17 4 (0.082%) Luigi
Applications
1 123 (2.52%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 17 (0.35%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 6 (0.12%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 3 (0.062%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.062%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.041%) Maya
10 2 (0.041%) NUKE
11 1 (0.021%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.33%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.062%) Actimize
5 3 (0.062%) Bloomberg AIM
5 3 (0.062%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.041%) Cloudability
6 2 (0.041%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.041%) Shopify
6 2 (0.041%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.021%) Cerner Millennium
7 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
7 1 (0.021%) Loan IQ
7 1 (0.021%) NetSuite
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) Salesforce CRM
7 1 (0.021%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
7 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,906 (39.11%) AWS
2 1,617 (33.18%) Azure
3 753 (15.45%) GCP
4 617 (12.66%) GitHub
5 512 (10.51%) Serverless
6 452 (9.28%) Power Platform
7 368 (7.55%) Amazon S3
8 338 (6.94%) AWS Lambda
9 331 (6.79%) Azure DevOps
10 322 (6.61%) GitHub Actions
11 247 (5.07%) Snowflake
12 246 (5.05%) AWS CloudFormation
13 230 (4.72%) Azure Data Factory
14 180 (3.69%) Amazon EKS
15 172 (3.53%) Amazon ECS
16 170 (3.49%) Amazon EC2
17 158 (3.24%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 147 (3.02%) OpenShift
19 146 (3.00%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 142 (2.91%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 224 (4.60%) Firewall
2 144 (2.96%) DNS
3 119 (2.44%) Network Security
4 113 (2.32%) TCP/IP
5 77 (1.58%) VPN
6 68 (1.40%) HTTP
7 67 (1.37%) BGP
8 54 (1.11%) WAN
9 51 (1.05%) SSL
10 41 (0.84%) LAN
10 41 (0.84%) Wireshark
11 38 (0.78%) MPLS
11 38 (0.78%) OSPF
12 32 (0.66%) DHCP
13 30 (0.62%) Wireless
14 27 (0.55%) VLAN
15 26 (0.53%) SD-WAN
16 24 (0.49%) SSH
17 23 (0.47%) BIG-IP
18 22 (0.45%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 376 (7.72%) Power BI
2 372 (7.63%) PostgreSQL
3 289 (5.93%) Data Warehouse
4 227 (4.66%) NoSQL
5 223 (4.58%) Data Lake
6 206 (4.23%) Relational Database
7 175 (3.59%) SQL Server
8 159 (3.26%) Big Data
9 150 (3.08%) Tableau
10 144 (2.96%) Amazon RDS
11 119 (2.44%) MySQL
12 117 (2.40%) Metadata
13 111 (2.28%) BigQuery
14 101 (2.07%) Amazon Redshift
15 88 (1.81%) Delta Lake
15 88 (1.81%) Hadoop
16 87 (1.79%) Amazon Athena
16 87 (1.79%) MongoDB
17 79 (1.62%) Elasticsearch
18 78 (1.60%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 594 (12.19%) Git
2 532 (10.92%) Jenkins
3 419 (8.60%) GitLab
4 279 (5.73%) JIRA
5 86 (1.76%) MLflow
6 84 (1.72%) Selenium
7 50 (1.03%) Cucumber
8 45 (0.92%) Postman
9 44 (0.90%) Sonatype Nexus
10 43 (0.88%) Bitbucket
11 38 (0.78%) JUnit
12 33 (0.68%) JMeter
13 28 (0.57%) SonarQube
14 27 (0.55%) Visual Studio
15 26 (0.53%) CircleCI
15 26 (0.53%) Liquibase
16 25 (0.51%) Artifactory
16 25 (0.51%) SpecFlow
17 24 (0.49%) Maven
18 22 (0.45%) Cypress.io
General
1 1,283 (26.33%) Social Skills
2 950 (19.50%) Finance
3 684 (14.04%) Analytical Skills
4 426 (8.74%) Banking
4 426 (8.74%) Public Sector
5 158 (3.24%) Front Office
6 122 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
7 117 (2.40%) Investment Banking
8 66 (1.35%) Financial Institution
9 62 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 62 (1.27%) Marketing
10 61 (1.25%) Retail
11 59 (1.21%) Pharmaceutical
12 54 (1.11%) Telecoms
13 45 (0.92%) Legal
14 42 (0.86%) Presentation Skills
15 40 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 39 (0.80%) Manufacturing
17 29 (0.60%) Military
18 23 (0.47%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 855 (17.55%) Developer
2 676 (13.87%) Senior
3 664 (13.63%) Data Engineer
4 364 (7.47%) Python Developer
5 308 (6.32%) Architect
6 307 (6.30%) DevOps Engineer
7 291 (5.97%) Python Engineer
8 278 (5.70%) Analyst
9 271 (5.56%) Lead
10 263 (5.40%) AWS Engineer
11 233 (4.78%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 222 (4.56%) Software Engineer
13 191 (3.92%) Data Scientist
14 175 (3.59%) Platform Engineer
15 146 (3.00%) Senior Developer
16 140 (2.87%) Data Analyst
17 134 (2.75%) Azure Engineer
18 131 (2.69%) Senior Data Engineer
19 121 (2.48%) Cloud Engineer
20 120 (2.46%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 417 (8.56%) REST
2 317 (6.51%) React
3 298 (6.12%) Kafka
4 289 (5.93%) PySpark
5 247 (5.07%) Node.js
6 222 (4.56%) Pandas
7 212 (4.35%) FastAPI
8 206 (4.23%) RESTful
9 205 (4.21%) PyTorch
10 193 (3.96%) .NET
11 169 (3.47%) NumPy
12 167 (3.43%) TensorFlow
13 135 (2.77%) AngularJS
14 126 (2.59%) LangChain
15 120 (2.46%) Flask
16 119 (2.44%) scikit-learn
17 113 (2.32%) pytest
18 107 (2.20%) Elastic Stack
19 105 (2.15%) Django
20 103 (2.11%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 431 (8.84%) Cloud Native
2 203 (4.17%) Algorithms
3 193 (3.96%) Distributed Systems
4 132 (2.71%) Product Ownership
5 124 (2.54%) Data Protection Act
6 121 (2.48%) Equities
7 103 (2.11%) Onboarding
8 101 (2.07%) Data Structures
9 96 (1.97%) AI Agents
9 96 (1.97%) Enterprise Software
10 95 (1.95%) Derivative
11 85 (1.74%) Security Posture
12 83 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
12 83 (1.70%) Legacy Systems
12 83 (1.70%) Public Cloud
13 82 (1.68%) Management Information System
14 80 (1.64%) Fixed Income
15 78 (1.60%) Data Centre
16 75 (1.54%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
17 68 (1.40%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 749 (15.37%) Linux
2 350 (7.18%) Windows
3 217 (4.45%) Unix
4 93 (1.91%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.82%) Android
7 37 (0.76%) Ubuntu
8 35 (0.72%) VMS
9 28 (0.57%) CentOS
10 25 (0.51%) Solaris
11 24 (0.49%) Mac OS
12 23 (0.47%) Apple iOS
13 11 (0.23%) Amazon Linux
13 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
14 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
15 5 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
15 5 (0.10%) Windows 10
16 4 (0.082%) Robot Operating System
16 4 (0.082%) Windows Server 2016
16 4 (0.082%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,738 (35.67%) CI/CD
2 1,344 (27.58%) DevOps
3 1,139 (23.37%) Agile
4 1,057 (21.69%) Problem-Solving
5 1,024 (21.01%) AI
6 896 (18.39%) Analytics
7 874 (17.94%) Infrastructure as Code
8 786 (16.13%) Machine Learning
9 742 (15.23%) Data Pipeline
10 728 (14.94%) Containerisation
11 619 (12.70%) ETL
12 608 (12.48%) Data Engineering
13 591 (12.13%) Data Science
14 576 (11.82%) Data Modelling
15 539 (11.06%) Test Automation
16 527 (10.81%) Software Engineering
17 439 (9.01%) Observability
18 433 (8.89%) Business Intelligence
19 412 (8.45%) LLM
20 354 (7.26%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,506 (30.90%) SQL
2 721 (14.80%) Java
3 666 (13.67%) PowerShell
4 607 (12.46%) Bash
5 497 (10.20%) JavaScript
6 310 (6.36%) C#
7 299 (6.14%) TypeScript
8 227 (4.66%) Go
9 193 (3.96%) C++
10 153 (3.14%) R
11 139 (2.85%) Shell Script
12 137 (2.81%) Perl
13 121 (2.48%) Scala
14 94 (1.93%) Ruby
15 63 (1.29%) Bicep
16 60 (1.23%) Kusto Query Language
17 55 (1.13%) C
18 53 (1.09%) VBA
19 42 (0.86%) PHP
20 40 (0.82%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,075 (22.06%) Security Cleared
2 867 (17.79%) SC Cleared
3 443 (9.09%) Degree
4 226 (4.64%) Computer Science Degree
5 140 (2.87%) DV Cleared
6 134 (2.75%) AWS Certification
7 126 (2.59%) Master's Degree
8 97 (1.99%) BPSS Clearance
9 91 (1.87%) Azure Certification
10 86 (1.76%) CISSP
11 73 (1.50%) Cisco Certification
12 57 (1.17%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 51 (1.05%) CCNP
14 44 (0.90%) PhD
15 40 (0.82%) CISM
16 35 (0.72%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 33 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.66%) CCIE
18 32 (0.66%) CEH
19 29 (0.60%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 410 (8.41%) Data Quality
2 188 (3.86%) QA
3 169 (3.47%) GDPR
4 97 (1.99%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 97 (1.99%) NIST
5 64 (1.31%) Accessibility
6 32 (0.66%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.62%) HIPAA
8 28 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 24 (0.49%) SLA
10 23 (0.47%) NCSC
11 20 (0.41%) SOC 2
12 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
13 13 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
14 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 10 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.21%) PMO
15 9 (0.18%) MiFID
16 8 (0.16%) EMIR
16 8 (0.16%) WCAG
System Software
1 936 (19.21%) Docker
2 180 (3.69%) Active Directory
3 122 (2.50%) VMware Infrastructure
4 48 (0.99%) Virtual Machines
4 48 (0.99%) VMware NSX
5 46 (0.94%) vSphere
6 27 (0.55%) Hyper-V
7 23 (0.47%) Firmware
8 20 (0.41%) HDFS
9 17 (0.35%) KVM
10 13 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
11 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 12 (0.25%) Squid
12 10 (0.21%) Lustre
12 10 (0.21%) 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 1,080 (22.16%) Terraform
2 1,026 (21.05%) Kubernetes
3 552 (11.33%) Ansible
4 349 (7.16%) Grafana
5 301 (6.18%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.83%) Argo
7 74 (1.52%) Puppet
8 57 (1.17%) Kibana
9 53 (1.09%) vRealize
10 39 (0.80%) Istio
11 37 (0.76%) Nessus
12 34 (0.70%) Single Sign-On
13 27 (0.55%) NetBackup
13 27 (0.55%) Progress Chef
14 24 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
15 22 (0.45%) vCenter Server
16 21 (0.43%) Control-M
17 20 (0.41%) ITRS Geneos
18 19 (0.39%) logstash
19 18 (0.37%) Nmap
Vendors
1 605 (12.42%) Microsoft
2 473 (9.71%) Databricks
3 296 (6.07%) Google
4 241 (4.95%) Splunk
5 227 (4.66%) VMware
6 224 (4.60%) Oracle
7 139 (2.85%) Red Hat
8 119 (2.44%) Cisco
9 114 (2.34%) OpenAI
10 113 (2.32%) ServiceNow
11 92 (1.89%) CyberArk
12 76 (1.56%) Foundry
13 74 (1.52%) Palo Alto
14 72 (1.48%) F5
15 69 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
16 48 (0.99%) Informatica
17 44 (0.90%) IBM
18 42 (0.86%) Atlassian
18 42 (0.86%) SAP
19 38 (0.78%) Dynatrace