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 13 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,685 3,861 4,132
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.80% 12.31% 9.64%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.59% 37.60% 31.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,139 2,546 2,920
10th Percentile £359 £380 £400
25th Percentile £421 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £688 £688
90th Percentile £750 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 96 60 118
10th Percentile £28.75 £20.12 £30.20
25th Percentile £41.25 £22.38 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £46.84 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.29% -21.93% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.26 £67.14 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.38 £77.75 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £60.00
% change year-on-year +10.89% -23.03% -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 11,265 10,268 12,969
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.78% 32.74% 30.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,468 6,519 9,222
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -3.08%
75th Percentile £619 £640 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -1.28% -2.50% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 389 237 416
10th Percentile £35.85 £21.25 £33.66
25th Percentile £52.00 £35.75 £47.22
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% - -0.79%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.25 £85.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% -

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 13 January 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 13 January 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 13 January 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 3,984 £525 -9.48% 3,397
London 0 2,295 £550 -8.33% 1,036
UK excluding London +2 1,791 £500 -2.44% 2,917
Work from Home 0 1,406 £525 -4.55% 1,730
North of England +7 575 £480 -4.48% 512
South East +3 392 £481 -12.50% 1,089
Yorkshire +8 286 £500 -6.98% 199
Midlands +8 280 £500 +5.26% 285
Scotland +4 261 £475 -0.94% 133
North West +8 245 £450 -5.26% 226
West Midlands +19 236 £515 +3.00% 113
South West -9 176 £550 -8.46% 354
East of England +5 125 £525 +7.14% 416
North East +8 48 £500 -11.50% 88
East Midlands -13 44 £414 +3.38% 168
Wales -14 26 £575 +15.00% 129
Northern Ireland 0 21 £588 +17.50% 62

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
1 212 (4.53%) Apache Spark
2 211 (4.50%) Apache Airflow
3 155 (3.31%) Apache
4 152 (3.24%) Confluence
5 60 (1.28%) SAS
6 57 (1.22%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.73%) nginx
8 33 (0.70%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.49%) Jupyter
10 22 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
11 17 (0.36%) Appian
12 10 (0.21%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.17%) IIS
15 6 (0.13%) Camunda
15 6 (0.13%) CMS
15 6 (0.13%) Luigi
15 6 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
16 4 (0.085%) Tomcat
17 3 (0.064%) JBoss
Applications
1 129 (2.75%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.68%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.30%) MS Visio
6 9 (0.19%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 9 (0.19%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 3 (0.064%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.064%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.043%) Maya
9 2 (0.043%) NUKE
10 1 (0.021%) SPSS
10 1 (0.021%) Stata
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.34%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 7 (0.15%) Fidessa
5 3 (0.064%) Actimize
5 3 (0.064%) NetSuite
5 3 (0.064%) Remedy ITSM
5 3 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.043%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.043%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.043%) Shopify
6 2 (0.043%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.021%) Bloomberg AIM
7 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
7 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
7 1 (0.021%) Maximo
7 1 (0.021%) NEC Housing
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
7 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,838 (39.23%) AWS
2 1,499 (32.00%) Azure
3 698 (14.90%) GCP
4 580 (12.38%) GitHub
5 508 (10.84%) Serverless
6 421 (8.99%) Power Platform
7 363 (7.75%) Amazon S3
8 344 (7.34%) AWS Lambda
9 312 (6.66%) GitHub Actions
10 301 (6.42%) Azure DevOps
11 236 (5.04%) Snowflake
12 234 (4.99%) AWS CloudFormation
13 207 (4.42%) Azure Data Factory
14 198 (4.23%) Amazon EC2
15 182 (3.88%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 173 (3.69%) Amazon ECS
17 169 (3.61%) Amazon EKS
18 138 (2.95%) OpenShift
19 136 (2.90%) dbt
20 134 (2.86%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 241 (5.14%) Firewall
2 157 (3.35%) DNS
3 124 (2.65%) TCP/IP
4 112 (2.39%) Network Security
5 80 (1.71%) HTTP
6 78 (1.66%) VPN
7 69 (1.47%) BGP
8 66 (1.41%) SSL
9 48 (1.02%) WAN
10 43 (0.92%) OSPF
11 38 (0.81%) Wireshark
12 37 (0.79%) MPLS
13 35 (0.75%) Wireless
14 33 (0.70%) SSH
15 32 (0.68%) LAN
15 32 (0.68%) SD-WAN
16 31 (0.66%) DHCP
17 30 (0.64%) SMTP
18 25 (0.53%) FTP
19 23 (0.49%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 366 (7.81%) PostgreSQL
2 361 (7.71%) Power BI
3 274 (5.85%) Data Warehouse
4 230 (4.91%) Relational Database
5 228 (4.87%) NoSQL
6 217 (4.63%) Data Lake
7 165 (3.52%) Big Data
8 161 (3.44%) Amazon RDS
9 159 (3.39%) SQL Server
10 146 (3.12%) Tableau
11 122 (2.60%) MySQL
12 100 (2.13%) Metadata
13 97 (2.07%) BigQuery
13 97 (2.07%) MongoDB
14 92 (1.96%) Amazon Athena
14 92 (1.96%) Hadoop
15 89 (1.90%) Amazon Redshift
16 79 (1.69%) DynamoDB
17 75 (1.60%) Azure SQL Database
17 75 (1.60%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 603 (12.87%) Git
2 552 (11.78%) Jenkins
3 423 (9.03%) GitLab
4 270 (5.76%) JIRA
5 82 (1.75%) Selenium
6 75 (1.60%) MLflow
7 49 (1.05%) Cucumber
8 48 (1.02%) Bitbucket
8 48 (1.02%) Sonatype Nexus
9 44 (0.94%) SonarQube
10 41 (0.88%) JUnit
11 37 (0.79%) Liquibase
12 36 (0.77%) Postman
13 32 (0.68%) JMeter
14 28 (0.60%) Cypress.io
15 27 (0.58%) Artifactory
15 27 (0.58%) Visual Studio
16 26 (0.55%) CircleCI
16 26 (0.55%) Maven
17 24 (0.51%) Gradle
General
1 1,275 (27.21%) Social Skills
2 952 (20.32%) Finance
3 651 (13.90%) Analytical Skills
4 430 (9.18%) Public Sector
5 422 (9.01%) Banking
6 164 (3.50%) Front Office
7 141 (3.01%) Investment Banking
8 120 (2.56%) Documentation Skills
9 73 (1.56%) Financial Institution
10 66 (1.41%) Marketing
11 65 (1.39%) Pharmaceutical
12 59 (1.26%) Telecoms
13 56 (1.20%) Retail
14 55 (1.17%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 41 (0.88%) Legal
16 40 (0.85%) Manufacturing
16 40 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
17 31 (0.66%) Influencing Skills
18 27 (0.58%) Military
19 24 (0.51%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 805 (17.18%) Developer
2 653 (13.94%) Senior
3 594 (12.68%) Data Engineer
4 334 (7.13%) Python Developer
5 322 (6.87%) DevOps Engineer
6 320 (6.83%) Python Engineer
7 290 (6.19%) Analyst
8 276 (5.89%) Architect
8 276 (5.89%) AWS Engineer
9 237 (5.06%) Software Engineer
10 231 (4.93%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 230 (4.91%) Lead
12 177 (3.78%) Data Scientist
13 172 (3.67%) Platform Engineer
14 147 (3.14%) Data Analyst
15 143 (3.05%) Senior Developer
16 124 (2.65%) Azure Engineer
17 118 (2.52%) Full-Stack Developer
17 118 (2.52%) Senior Data Engineer
18 116 (2.48%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 411 (8.77%) REST
2 297 (6.34%) React
3 290 (6.19%) Kafka
4 255 (5.44%) PySpark
5 232 (4.95%) Node.js
6 223 (4.76%) Pandas
7 219 (4.67%) FastAPI
8 217 (4.63%) RESTful
9 192 (4.10%) PyTorch
10 172 (3.67%) NumPy
11 165 (3.52%) TensorFlow
12 156 (3.33%) .NET
13 136 (2.90%) AngularJS
14 123 (2.63%) LangChain
15 118 (2.52%) Elastic Stack
15 118 (2.52%) scikit-learn
16 108 (2.31%) pytest
17 107 (2.28%) Flask
18 100 (2.13%) LDAP
19 98 (2.09%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 386 (8.24%) Cloud Native
2 194 (4.14%) Algorithms
3 182 (3.88%) Distributed Systems
4 124 (2.65%) Product Ownership
5 123 (2.63%) Equities
6 122 (2.60%) Data Protection Act
7 105 (2.24%) Data Structures
8 100 (2.13%) AI Agents
9 98 (2.09%) Derivative
10 96 (2.05%) Onboarding
11 92 (1.96%) Enterprise Software
11 92 (1.96%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 86 (1.84%) Fixed Income
13 80 (1.71%) Hedge funds
14 78 (1.66%) Security Posture
15 75 (1.60%) Public Cloud
16 73 (1.56%) Data Centre
16 73 (1.56%) Hybrid Cloud
17 69 (1.47%) Legacy Systems
18 65 (1.39%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 784 (16.73%) Linux
2 354 (7.56%) Windows
3 232 (4.95%) Unix
4 93 (1.99%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.32%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.88%) Android
7 37 (0.79%) VMS
8 36 (0.77%) Ubuntu
9 29 (0.62%) CentOS
10 25 (0.53%) Solaris
11 22 (0.47%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.38%) Amazon Linux
12 18 (0.38%) Apple iOS
13 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
14 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
15 4 (0.085%) Debian
15 4 (0.085%) Robot Operating System
15 4 (0.085%) Windows 10
16 3 (0.064%) AIX
16 3 (0.064%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,606 (34.28%) CI/CD
2 1,321 (28.20%) DevOps
3 1,129 (24.10%) Agile
4 1,017 (21.71%) Problem-Solving
5 935 (19.96%) AI
6 837 (17.87%) Infrastructure as Code
7 800 (17.08%) Analytics
8 741 (15.82%) Machine Learning
9 702 (14.98%) Containerisation
10 674 (14.39%) Data Pipeline
11 550 (11.74%) Software Engineering
12 549 (11.72%) Data Engineering
13 548 (11.70%) ETL
14 547 (11.68%) Data Science
15 536 (11.44%) Data Modelling
16 504 (10.76%) Test Automation
17 415 (8.86%) Business Intelligence
18 389 (8.30%) Observability
19 363 (7.75%) Computer Science
19 363 (7.75%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,421 (30.33%) SQL
2 739 (15.77%) Java
3 642 (13.70%) PowerShell
4 617 (13.17%) Bash
5 484 (10.33%) JavaScript
6 282 (6.02%) C#
7 281 (6.00%) TypeScript
8 253 (5.40%) Go
9 217 (4.63%) C++
10 170 (3.63%) Perl
11 161 (3.44%) R
12 155 (3.31%) Shell Script
13 102 (2.18%) Scala
14 95 (2.03%) Ruby
15 59 (1.26%) Bicep
16 58 (1.24%) C
17 56 (1.20%) Kusto Query Language
18 53 (1.13%) VBA
19 45 (0.96%) PHP
20 38 (0.81%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,026 (21.90%) Security Cleared
2 832 (17.76%) SC Cleared
3 433 (9.24%) Degree
4 231 (4.93%) Computer Science Degree
5 143 (3.05%) DV Cleared
6 134 (2.86%) AWS Certification
7 119 (2.54%) Master's Degree
8 87 (1.86%) BPSS Clearance
9 83 (1.77%) Azure Certification
10 79 (1.69%) CISSP
11 76 (1.62%) Cisco Certification
12 71 (1.52%) MCP
13 49 (1.05%) CCNP
14 45 (0.96%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 42 (0.90%) PhD
16 37 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.77%) CCIE
18 35 (0.75%) CEH
19 33 (0.70%) CISM
19 33 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 366 (7.81%) Data Quality
2 176 (3.76%) QA
3 157 (3.35%) GDPR
4 83 (1.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 83 (1.77%) NIST
5 58 (1.24%) Accessibility
6 31 (0.66%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.64%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 26 (0.55%) HIPAA
9 24 (0.51%) SLA
10 22 (0.47%) NCSC
11 16 (0.34%) SOC 2
12 15 (0.32%) EU AI Act
13 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
13 9 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
13 9 (0.19%) EMIR
13 9 (0.19%) MiFID
14 8 (0.17%) PMO
14 8 (0.17%) WCAG
15 7 (0.15%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 941 (20.09%) Docker
2 190 (4.06%) Active Directory
3 107 (2.28%) VMware Infrastructure
4 36 (0.77%) VMware NSX
5 35 (0.75%) vSphere
6 32 (0.68%) Virtual Machines
7 24 (0.51%) Firmware
8 20 (0.43%) HDFS
8 20 (0.43%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.36%) KVM
10 15 (0.32%) DFS Replication
10 15 (0.32%) Squid
11 14 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.28%) Postfix
13 12 (0.26%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) Dovecot
15 9 (0.19%) GPFS
16 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
16 8 (0.17%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,053 (22.48%) Terraform
2 994 (21.22%) Kubernetes
3 593 (12.66%) Ansible
4 354 (7.56%) Grafana
5 297 (6.34%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.86%) Argo
7 81 (1.73%) Puppet
8 54 (1.15%) Kibana
9 43 (0.92%) vRealize
10 41 (0.88%) Istio
11 35 (0.75%) Single Sign-On
12 33 (0.70%) Progress Chef
13 32 (0.68%) Nessus
14 28 (0.60%) NetBackup
15 20 (0.43%) ITRS Geneos
16 18 (0.38%) logstash
17 17 (0.36%) Nmap
18 16 (0.34%) QRadar
19 15 (0.32%) Packer
19 15 (0.32%) Rancher
Vendors
1 554 (11.82%) Microsoft
2 425 (9.07%) Databricks
3 266 (5.68%) Google
4 246 (5.25%) Splunk
5 227 (4.85%) Oracle
6 208 (4.44%) VMware
7 142 (3.03%) Red Hat
8 119 (2.54%) ServiceNow
9 116 (2.48%) Cisco
10 100 (2.13%) OpenAI
11 91 (1.94%) CyberArk
12 83 (1.77%) F5
13 76 (1.62%) Palo Alto
14 68 (1.45%) Foundry
15 66 (1.41%) BeyondTrust
16 52 (1.11%) SAP
17 44 (0.94%) Atlassian
18 43 (0.92%) Dynatrace
19 40 (0.85%) Salesforce
20 38 (0.81%) CheckPoint