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

6 months to
8 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,136 4,021 4,109
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.12% 13.37% 9.21%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.00% 39.15% 31.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,487 2,728 2,883
10th Percentile £363 £380 £400
25th Percentile £415 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £749 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £520
% change year-on-year -2.50% -3.85% -5.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 52 115
10th Percentile £28.30 £20.23 £21.44
25th Percentile £41.94 £22.88 £36.88
Median hourly rate £54.00 £43.50 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +24.14% -17.14% -19.23%
75th Percentile £69.38 £64.06 £67.50
90th Percentile £79.10 £75.00 £74.78
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.75 £48.75
% change year-on-year +5.05% - -25.00%

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 12,528 10,270 12,998
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.56% 34.16% 29.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,358 6,708 9,165
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -5.41%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £719 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £488 £488
% change year-on-year -2.36% - -3.47%
Number of hourly rates quoted 483 245 510
10th Percentile £41.32 £21.25 £30.63
25th Percentile £53.75 £35.00 £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 £68.75
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.00
% change year-on-year +1.97% +2.81% -4.62%

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 March 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 March 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 March 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 -1 4,287 £520 -9.57% 2,703
London -2 2,423 £550 -8.33% 1,205
UK excluding London -1 1,989 £488 -2.50% 2,047
Work from Home 0 1,570 £525 -4.55% 1,037
North of England +10 666 £481 -3.75% 492
South East -6 419 £500 -6.10% 638
Yorkshire +3 355 £488 -4.88% 187
Scotland +2 285 £425 -9.57% 142
Midlands -5 285 £500 +3.41% 231
North West +13 267 £475 -5.00% 230
West Midlands -2 233 £500 - 112
South West -3 215 £538 -6.52% 261
East of England -3 127 £500 +0.50% 217
East Midlands -12 51 £447 +5.18% 119
North East +12 50 £488 -7.14% 81
Wales -15 31 £473 -7.80% 83
Northern Ireland +6 29 £613 +16.67% 25

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
1 257 (5.00%) Apache Spark
2 199 (3.87%) Apache Airflow
3 164 (3.19%) Confluence
4 148 (2.88%) Apache
5 67 (1.30%) SAS
6 63 (1.23%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
8 24 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.47%) nginx
8 24 (0.47%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
10 19 (0.37%) Appian
11 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.18%) Camunda
13 6 (0.12%) CMS
14 5 (0.097%) Apache Superset
14 5 (0.097%) Tomcat
15 4 (0.078%) Oracle Application Server
15 4 (0.078%) Traefik
16 3 (0.058%) Ethereum
Applications
1 126 (2.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.60%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.27%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.039%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 24 (0.47%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
4 7 (0.14%) SAP S/4HANA
5 4 (0.078%) Bloomberg AIM
5 4 (0.078%) Oracle EBS
6 3 (0.058%) Actimize
6 3 (0.058%) BambooHR
6 3 (0.058%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.039%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.039%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.039%) Shopify
8 1 (0.019%) Advent Geneva
8 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
8 1 (0.019%) ION MarketView
8 1 (0.019%) NetSuite
8 1 (0.019%) SAP BPC
Cloud Services
1 2,017 (39.27%) AWS
2 1,774 (34.54%) Azure
3 814 (15.85%) GCP
4 672 (13.08%) GitHub
5 545 (10.61%) Serverless
6 493 (9.60%) Power Platform
7 371 (7.22%) Azure DevOps
8 361 (7.03%) Amazon S3
9 360 (7.01%) AWS Lambda
10 336 (6.54%) GitHub Actions
11 260 (5.06%) Snowflake
12 258 (5.02%) Azure Data Factory
13 257 (5.00%) AWS CloudFormation
14 198 (3.86%) Amazon EKS
15 174 (3.39%) OpenShift
16 172 (3.35%) Amazon ECS
17 160 (3.12%) Amazon EC2
18 159 (3.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 151 (2.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 147 (2.86%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 215 (4.19%) Firewall
2 140 (2.73%) DNS
3 107 (2.08%) Network Security
3 107 (2.08%) TCP/IP
4 77 (1.50%) VPN
5 65 (1.27%) HTTP
6 61 (1.19%) BGP
7 55 (1.07%) WAN
8 40 (0.78%) SAN
8 40 (0.78%) SSL
9 39 (0.76%) Wireshark
10 38 (0.74%) MPLS
11 34 (0.66%) OSPF
12 33 (0.64%) DHCP
13 32 (0.62%) LAN
14 31 (0.60%) SD-WAN
15 29 (0.56%) VLAN
16 23 (0.45%) Wireless
17 22 (0.43%) BIG-IP
17 22 (0.43%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 410 (7.98%) Power BI
2 402 (7.83%) PostgreSQL
3 317 (6.17%) Data Warehouse
4 237 (4.61%) Data Lake
5 233 (4.54%) NoSQL
6 197 (3.84%) Relational Database
7 194 (3.78%) SQL Server
8 164 (3.19%) Tableau
9 158 (3.08%) Big Data
10 133 (2.59%) Metadata
11 125 (2.43%) Amazon RDS
12 124 (2.41%) BigQuery
13 119 (2.32%) MySQL
14 113 (2.20%) Delta Lake
15 109 (2.12%) Amazon Redshift
16 103 (2.01%) MongoDB
17 97 (1.89%) Amazon Athena
18 92 (1.79%) Azure SQL Database
19 85 (1.65%) Hadoop
20 83 (1.62%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 653 (12.71%) Git
2 547 (10.65%) Jenkins
3 425 (8.27%) GitLab
4 302 (5.88%) JIRA
5 92 (1.79%) MLflow
6 88 (1.71%) Selenium
7 51 (0.99%) Bitbucket
7 51 (0.99%) Postman
8 48 (0.93%) Cucumber
9 40 (0.78%) Sonatype Nexus
10 38 (0.74%) JUnit
11 34 (0.66%) JMeter
12 29 (0.56%) SpecFlow
13 25 (0.49%) Cypress.io
13 25 (0.49%) Visual Studio
14 24 (0.47%) CircleCI
15 22 (0.43%) Artifactory
16 20 (0.39%) Liquibase
16 20 (0.39%) Maven
17 19 (0.37%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,282 (24.96%) Social Skills
2 1,019 (19.84%) Finance
3 704 (13.71%) Analytical Skills
4 489 (9.52%) Public Sector
5 422 (8.22%) Banking
6 176 (3.43%) Front Office
7 126 (2.45%) Documentation Skills
8 101 (1.97%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.34%) Retail
10 66 (1.29%) Marketing
11 64 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 62 (1.21%) Pharmaceutical
13 60 (1.17%) Financial Institution
14 52 (1.01%) Telecoms
15 50 (0.97%) Legal
16 49 (0.95%) Influencing Skills
17 45 (0.88%) Manufacturing
18 31 (0.60%) Military
18 31 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
19 21 (0.41%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 951 (18.52%) Developer
2 714 (13.90%) Data Engineer
3 710 (13.82%) Senior
4 426 (8.29%) Python Developer
5 334 (6.50%) Lead
6 331 (6.44%) Architect
7 297 (5.78%) DevOps Engineer
8 295 (5.74%) Python Engineer
9 285 (5.55%) Analyst
10 264 (5.14%) Software Engineer
11 261 (5.08%) AWS Engineer
12 250 (4.87%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 202 (3.93%) Data Scientist
14 177 (3.45%) Platform Engineer
15 153 (2.98%) Senior Developer
16 151 (2.94%) Azure Engineer
17 139 (2.71%) Data Analyst
18 138 (2.69%) Full-Stack Developer
19 135 (2.63%) Senior Data Engineer
20 132 (2.57%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 445 (8.66%) REST
2 363 (7.07%) React
3 324 (6.31%) PySpark
4 319 (6.21%) Kafka
5 296 (5.76%) Node.js
6 229 (4.46%) Pandas
7 226 (4.40%) PyTorch
8 225 (4.38%) FastAPI
9 213 (4.15%) .NET
10 211 (4.11%) RESTful
11 182 (3.54%) TensorFlow
12 162 (3.15%) NumPy
13 145 (2.82%) scikit-learn
14 138 (2.69%) AngularJS
15 131 (2.55%) Flask
16 127 (2.47%) LangChain
17 121 (2.36%) JSON
18 117 (2.28%) pytest
19 116 (2.26%) Django
20 110 (2.14%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 499 (9.72%) Cloud Native
2 204 (3.97%) Algorithms
2 204 (3.97%) Distributed Systems
3 140 (2.73%) Product Ownership
4 127 (2.47%) Equities
5 124 (2.41%) Data Protection Act
6 114 (2.22%) Fixed Income
7 111 (2.16%) Data Structures
8 108 (2.10%) Onboarding
9 107 (2.08%) AI Agents
10 102 (1.99%) Derivative
11 93 (1.81%) Security Posture
12 88 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
12 88 (1.71%) Legacy Systems
13 87 (1.69%) Hybrid Cloud
13 87 (1.69%) Public Cloud
14 83 (1.62%) Data Centre
15 82 (1.60%) Management Information System
16 58 (1.13%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
17 57 (1.11%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 694 (13.51%) Linux
2 329 (6.41%) Windows
3 193 (3.76%) Unix
4 98 (1.91%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.30%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.68%) Android
6 35 (0.68%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.62%) VMS
8 25 (0.49%) CentOS
9 23 (0.45%) Mac OS
10 21 (0.41%) Apple iOS
11 20 (0.39%) Solaris
12 10 (0.19%) AIX
13 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
13 9 (0.18%) Windows 7
14 5 (0.097%) Debian
14 5 (0.097%) Embedded Linux
14 5 (0.097%) zOS
15 4 (0.078%) Amazon Linux
15 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,881 (36.62%) CI/CD
2 1,444 (28.12%) DevOps
3 1,231 (23.97%) Agile
4 1,115 (21.71%) AI
5 1,068 (20.79%) Problem-Solving
6 1,002 (19.51%) Analytics
7 914 (17.80%) Infrastructure as Code
8 857 (16.69%) Machine Learning
9 826 (16.08%) Data Pipeline
10 767 (14.93%) Containerisation
11 685 (13.34%) Data Engineering
12 684 (13.32%) ETL
13 669 (13.03%) Data Modelling
14 623 (12.13%) Data Science
15 598 (11.64%) Test Automation
16 594 (11.57%) Software Engineering
17 496 (9.66%) Observability
18 490 (9.54%) Business Intelligence
19 447 (8.70%) LLM
20 381 (7.42%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,612 (31.39%) SQL
2 726 (14.14%) Java
3 669 (13.03%) PowerShell
4 604 (11.76%) Bash
5 511 (9.95%) JavaScript
6 357 (6.95%) TypeScript
7 330 (6.43%) C#
8 237 (4.61%) Go
9 174 (3.39%) C++
10 151 (2.94%) R
11 114 (2.22%) Perl
11 114 (2.22%) Scala
11 114 (2.22%) Shell Script
12 94 (1.83%) Ruby
13 69 (1.34%) Bicep
14 61 (1.19%) Kusto Query Language
15 51 (0.99%) C
16 47 (0.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 46 (0.90%) VBA
18 44 (0.86%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,163 (22.64%) Security Cleared
2 930 (18.11%) SC Cleared
3 452 (8.80%) Degree
4 212 (4.13%) Computer Science Degree
5 143 (2.78%) DV Cleared
6 135 (2.63%) AWS Certification
7 126 (2.45%) Master's Degree
8 119 (2.32%) BPSS Clearance
9 102 (1.99%) Azure Certification
10 95 (1.85%) CISSP
11 72 (1.40%) Cisco Certification
12 57 (1.11%) CCNP
13 52 (1.01%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 47 (0.92%) PhD
15 45 (0.88%) CISM
16 39 (0.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.62%) Microsoft Certified Professional
19 31 (0.60%) CEH
20 27 (0.53%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 473 (9.21%) Data Quality
2 213 (4.15%) QA
3 183 (3.56%) GDPR
4 105 (2.04%) NIST
5 102 (1.99%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 80 (1.56%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.66%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.64%) SLA
9 30 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 28 (0.55%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.45%) NCSC
12 18 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.25%) WCAG
15 12 (0.23%) EU AI Act
16 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
17 10 (0.19%) MiFID
17 10 (0.19%) PMO
17 10 (0.19%) PSD2
18 9 (0.18%) EMIR
System Software
1 944 (18.38%) Docker
2 176 (3.43%) Active Directory
3 116 (2.26%) VMware Infrastructure
4 56 (1.09%) Virtual Machines
5 54 (1.05%) vSphere
6 46 (0.90%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.56%) Hyper-V
8 26 (0.51%) Firmware
9 15 (0.29%) KVM
9 15 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
10 12 (0.23%) HDFS
10 12 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 10 (0.19%) Lustre
12 9 (0.18%) GPFS
13 8 (0.16%) SRDF
13 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
14 6 (0.12%) NFS
15 5 (0.097%) Ceph
15 5 (0.097%) NDS
15 5 (0.097%) NetIQ eDirectory
Systems Management
1 1,111 (21.63%) Terraform
2 1,061 (20.66%) Kubernetes
3 549 (10.69%) Ansible
4 354 (6.89%) Grafana
5 313 (6.09%) Prometheus
6 95 (1.85%) Argo
7 78 (1.52%) Puppet
8 53 (1.03%) Istio
9 44 (0.86%) Kibana
9 44 (0.86%) vRealize
10 40 (0.78%) Nessus
11 35 (0.68%) Progress Chef
12 32 (0.62%) vCenter Server
13 30 (0.58%) Single Sign-On
14 28 (0.55%) Control-M
15 27 (0.53%) NetBackup
16 24 (0.47%) IBM Guardium
17 23 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
18 20 (0.39%) Rancher
19 17 (0.33%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 627 (12.21%) Microsoft
2 518 (10.09%) Databricks
3 302 (5.88%) Google
4 232 (4.52%) Splunk
5 222 (4.32%) Oracle
6 214 (4.17%) VMware
7 146 (2.84%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.39%) Cisco
9 120 (2.34%) OpenAI
10 107 (2.08%) ServiceNow
11 83 (1.62%) CyberArk
12 80 (1.56%) Foundry
13 67 (1.30%) BeyondTrust
14 61 (1.19%) F5
15 58 (1.13%) Informatica
15 58 (1.13%) Palo Alto
16 50 (0.97%) IBM
17 45 (0.88%) SAP
18 40 (0.78%) Atlassian
19 39 (0.76%) Dynatrace