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

6 months to
8 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 +2 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,651 4,417 4,174
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.36% 13.36% 11.03%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.48% 40.70% 34.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,679 2,850 2,843
10th Percentile £375 £358 £367
25th Percentile £441 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £643 £700
90th Percentile £750 £751 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £500 £513
% change year-on-year +1.00% -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 128 89 97
10th Percentile £35.78 £28.25 £20.80
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.00 £40.06
Median hourly rate £61.61 £50.00 £67.02
Median % change year-on-year +23.21% -25.40% +3.11%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.63 £78.00 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.50 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +25.00% -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 14,313 10,852 12,150
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.24% 32.83% 32.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,297 7,126 8,002
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £647
90th Percentile £725 £733 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 300 330
10th Percentile £22.15 £29.00 £26.22
25th Percentile £45.00 £40.94 £46.05
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.28 £75.13 £77.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +0.78% -0.77% -

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 8 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 8 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 8 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 4,800 £550 +4.76% 10,352
London -4 2,847 £575 - 6,716
UK excluding London -8 2,162 £505 +1.00% 4,146
Work from Home -6 1,566 £535 -1.48% 3,801
North of England -1 750 £500 +5.26% 918
South East -5 456 £545 +9.00% 928
Yorkshire -2 376 £500 - 267
Scotland -1 317 £467 -6.60% 521
North West 0 294 £525 +19.66% 522
South West -3 272 £550 - 472
Midlands -24 220 £500 - 434
West Midlands -21 184 £525 +3.55% 274
East of England -17 142 £478 -13.18% 627
North East -3 89 £425 -8.11% 131
East Midlands -17 36 £438 +6.71% 160
Wales -6 26 £530 +23.98% 106
Northern Ireland +7 19 £375 -36.17% 173

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
1 295 (5.22%) Apache Airflow
2 278 (4.92%) Apache Spark
3 233 (4.12%) Apache
4 155 (2.74%) Confluence
5 57 (1.01%) Jupyter
5 57 (1.01%) SharePoint
6 34 (0.60%) SAS
7 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
8 29 (0.51%) nginx
9 23 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
10 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) IIS
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
1 100 (1.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 37 (0.65%) Chatbot
3 21 (0.37%) Microsoft Office
4 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
4 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
7 3 (0.053%) Revit
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.035%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) AutoCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Civil 3D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
2 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.28%) Aladdin
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
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) SAP IBP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Actimize
10 3 (0.053%) Cloudability
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.035%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 2,057 (36.40%) AWS
2 1,937 (34.28%) Azure
3 923 (16.33%) GCP
4 750 (13.27%) GitHub
5 478 (8.46%) Power Platform
6 474 (8.39%) Serverless
7 442 (7.82%) Azure DevOps
8 440 (7.79%) GitHub Actions
9 391 (6.92%) Amazon S3
10 348 (6.16%) AWS Lambda
11 346 (6.12%) Snowflake
12 252 (4.46%) dbt
13 215 (3.80%) Azure Data Factory
14 208 (3.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 199 (3.52%) Amazon EKS
16 186 (3.29%) AWS CloudFormation
17 185 (3.27%) Entra ID
18 147 (2.60%) Amazon EC2
19 131 (2.32%) Amazon ECS
19 131 (2.32%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 287 (5.08%) Firewall
2 209 (3.70%) DNS
3 171 (3.03%) Network Security
4 149 (2.64%) TCP/IP
5 131 (2.32%) VPN
6 123 (2.18%) BGP
7 113 (2.00%) WAN
8 82 (1.45%) DHCP
9 75 (1.33%) SD-WAN
10 73 (1.29%) OSPF
11 63 (1.11%) BIG-IP
12 59 (1.04%) SSL
13 55 (0.97%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 55 (0.97%) VLAN
14 54 (0.96%) VXLAN
15 50 (0.88%) HTTP
16 46 (0.81%) Ethernet VPN
17 44 (0.78%) Broadband
18 42 (0.74%) Wireless
19 39 (0.69%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 427 (7.56%) Power BI
2 328 (5.80%) Data Warehouse
3 312 (5.52%) PostgreSQL
4 232 (4.11%) Metadata
5 200 (3.54%) Relational Database
6 198 (3.50%) Data Lake
7 194 (3.43%) SQL Server
8 180 (3.19%) BigQuery
9 162 (2.87%) Tableau
10 156 (2.76%) NoSQL
11 140 (2.48%) Amazon RDS
12 135 (2.39%) Amazon Redshift
12 135 (2.39%) Big Data
13 124 (2.19%) MongoDB
14 122 (2.16%) Delta Lake
15 119 (2.11%) Amazon Athena
16 106 (1.88%) DynamoDB
17 100 (1.77%) MySQL
18 76 (1.34%) Redis
19 63 (1.11%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 853 (15.09%) Git
2 534 (9.45%) Jenkins
3 504 (8.92%) GitLab
4 315 (5.57%) JIRA
5 122 (2.16%) Selenium
6 74 (1.31%) Postman
7 61 (1.08%) JMeter
8 60 (1.06%) Claude Code
9 54 (0.96%) SonarQube
10 51 (0.90%) MLflow
11 46 (0.81%) Bitbucket
12 42 (0.74%) Cucumber
13 39 (0.69%) REST Assured
14 37 (0.65%) Sonatype Nexus
15 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
16 35 (0.62%) Maven
17 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
18 31 (0.55%) LoadRunner
19 28 (0.50%) Gatling
20 25 (0.44%) Zephyr
General
1 1,332 (23.57%) Social Skills
2 1,311 (23.20%) Finance
3 844 (14.94%) Analytical Skills
4 549 (9.72%) Public Sector
5 536 (9.49%) Banking
6 171 (3.03%) Front Office
7 156 (2.76%) Investment Banking
8 116 (2.05%) Retail
9 111 (1.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 99 (1.75%) Documentation Skills
11 85 (1.50%) Marketing
12 84 (1.49%) Telecoms
13 64 (1.13%) Military
14 56 (0.99%) Law
15 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
16 50 (0.88%) Pharmaceutical
17 48 (0.85%) Financial Institution
18 46 (0.81%) Legal
19 40 (0.71%) Publishing
20 36 (0.64%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,012 (17.91%) Senior
2 903 (15.98%) Developer
3 841 (14.88%) Data Engineer
4 498 (8.81%) Lead
5 481 (8.51%) Python Developer
6 422 (7.47%) Python Engineer
7 377 (6.67%) DevOps Engineer
8 313 (5.54%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 281 (4.97%) Analyst
10 279 (4.94%) Software Engineer
11 232 (4.11%) Architect
12 221 (3.91%) AWS Engineer
13 196 (3.47%) Cloud Engineer
14 195 (3.45%) Azure Engineer
15 192 (3.40%) Senior Data Engineer
16 188 (3.33%) Senior Developer
17 187 (3.31%) Platform Engineer
18 179 (3.17%) Data Scientist
19 146 (2.58%) Network Engineer
20 142 (2.51%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,411 (24.97%) Terraform
2 557 (9.86%) REST
3 381 (6.74%) Kafka
4 371 (6.57%) PySpark
5 317 (5.61%) React
6 241 (4.26%) .NET
7 219 (3.88%) FastAPI
8 213 (3.77%) Django
9 209 (3.70%) JSON
10 191 (3.38%) RESTful
11 164 (2.90%) pytest
12 157 (2.78%) LangChain
13 144 (2.55%) Node.js
14 142 (2.51%) Pandas
15 134 (2.37%) OAuth
16 127 (2.25%) Flask
17 113 (2.00%) LangGraph
18 110 (1.95%) YAML
19 106 (1.88%) HTML
20 104 (1.84%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 817 (14.46%) Cloud Native
2 300 (5.31%) AI Agents
3 290 (5.13%) Distributed Systems
4 266 (4.71%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.87%) Data Centre
6 152 (2.69%) Product Ownership
7 151 (2.67%) Data Structures
8 134 (2.37%) Legacy Systems
9 123 (2.18%) Algorithms
10 116 (2.05%) Enterprise Software
11 113 (2.00%) Hybrid Cloud
12 108 (1.91%) Management Information System
13 102 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
14 101 (1.79%) Derivative
15 96 (1.70%) Security Posture
16 88 (1.56%) Public Cloud
17 85 (1.50%) PKI
18 79 (1.40%) Equities
19 68 (1.20%) Linux Command Line
20 67 (1.19%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 785 (13.89%) Linux
2 351 (6.21%) Windows
3 246 (4.35%) Unix
4 155 (2.74%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 92 (1.63%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.74%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.64%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 14 (0.25%) AIX
10 14 (0.25%) Android
11 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
11 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
12 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
12 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) zOS
13 5 (0.088%) FreeRTOS
13 5 (0.088%) Rocky
14 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,420 (42.82%) CI/CD
2 1,673 (29.61%) DevOps
3 1,607 (28.44%) AI
4 1,320 (23.36%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,274 (22.54%) Agile
6 1,090 (19.29%) Analytics
7 990 (17.52%) Data Pipeline
8 959 (16.97%) Software Engineering
9 887 (15.70%) Problem-Solving
10 862 (15.25%) Data Engineering
11 839 (14.85%) Machine Learning
12 779 (13.79%) Containerisation
13 774 (13.70%) Observability
14 770 (13.63%) Data Modelling
15 721 (12.76%) Test Automation
16 687 (12.16%) Validation
17 674 (11.93%) Continuous Improvement
18 669 (11.84%) ETL
19 604 (10.69%) Platform Engineering
20 590 (10.44%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,838 (32.53%) SQL
2 789 (13.96%) Java
3 787 (13.93%) Bash
4 765 (13.54%) PowerShell
5 449 (7.95%) JavaScript
6 347 (6.14%) TypeScript
7 308 (5.45%) C#
8 227 (4.02%) Go
9 156 (2.76%) Shell Script
10 137 (2.42%) Bicep
11 132 (2.34%) R
12 130 (2.30%) C++
13 120 (2.12%) Scala
14 106 (1.88%) Perl
15 60 (1.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 59 (1.04%) Groovy
17 51 (0.90%) C
18 50 (0.88%) Rust
19 49 (0.87%) T-SQL
20 47 (0.83%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,396 (24.70%) Security Cleared
2 1,120 (19.82%) SC Cleared
3 402 (7.11%) Degree
4 256 (4.53%) DV Cleared
5 154 (2.73%) AWS Certification
6 151 (2.67%) Azure Certification
7 146 (2.58%) Computer Science Degree
8 133 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
9 98 (1.73%) CISSP
10 77 (1.36%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.26%) Master's Degree
12 47 (0.83%) Microsoft Certification
13 37 (0.65%) CCNP
14 34 (0.60%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 31 (0.55%) CCIE
15 31 (0.55%) CISM
16 30 (0.53%) DBS Check
16 30 (0.53%) ISTQB
17 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 665 (11.77%) Data Quality
2 329 (5.82%) QA
3 114 (2.02%) NIST
4 100 (1.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 85 (1.50%) GDPR
6 82 (1.45%) Accessibility
7 41 (0.73%) SLA
8 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 31 (0.55%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 24 (0.42%) SOC 2
12 22 (0.39%) WCAG
13 17 (0.30%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
15 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
16 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
17 7 (0.12%) Basel III
17 7 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 991 (17.54%) Docker
2 190 (3.36%) Active Directory
3 130 (2.30%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.19%) Virtual Machines
5 48 (0.85%) Hyper-V
6 33 (0.58%) vSphere
7 31 (0.55%) VMware NSX
8 27 (0.48%) NFS
9 24 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
10 20 (0.35%) Firmware
11 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
12 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 8 (0.14%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 8 (0.14%) Virtual Servers
14 8 (0.14%) zsh
15 7 (0.12%) HDFS
16 6 (0.11%) Postfix
17 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,208 (21.38%) Kubernetes
2 653 (11.56%) Ansible
3 335 (5.93%) Grafana
4 248 (4.39%) Prometheus
5 84 (1.49%) Puppet
6 74 (1.31%) Progress Chef
7 69 (1.22%) Argo
8 50 (0.88%) Single Sign-On
9 42 (0.74%) Kibana
10 37 (0.65%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) Packer
14 21 (0.37%) FortiGate
15 18 (0.32%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) Podman
16 16 (0.28%) QRadar
16 16 (0.28%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.27%) ZABBIX
18 14 (0.25%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 769 (13.61%) Microsoft
2 588 (10.41%) Databricks
3 413 (7.31%) Google
4 244 (4.32%) Oracle
5 208 (3.68%) Splunk
6 172 (3.04%) OpenAI
7 166 (2.94%) VMware
8 141 (2.50%) ServiceNow
9 137 (2.42%) Cisco
10 102 (1.80%) Dynatrace
11 96 (1.70%) Red Hat
12 93 (1.65%) IBM
13 90 (1.59%) F5
14 89 (1.57%) Foundry
14 89 (1.57%) Palo Alto
15 73 (1.29%) CyberArk
16 68 (1.20%) Fortinet
16 68 (1.20%) Informatica
17 67 (1.19%) SAP
18 54 (0.96%) Salesforce