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

6 months to
24 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 10 15
Rank change year-on-year -2 +5 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,641 4,232 4,003
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.69% 12.95% 9.80%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.05% 39.22% 31.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,678 2,848 2,922
10th Percentile £368 £360 £375
25th Percentile £427 £434 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £530 £565
Median % change year-on-year -0.94% -6.19% -5.83%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £700
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £507
% change year-on-year +2.04% -3.35% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 132 69 119
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.06 £21.10
25th Percentile £42.50 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.75 £50.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +9.50% -16.67% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.00 £57.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +12.50%

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 14,085 10,791 12,640
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.69% 33.02% 30.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,140 7,272 8,934
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £423 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.40% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £496
% change year-on-year +3.16% -4.23% -0.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 521 257 451
10th Percentile £33.70 £27.98 £30.63
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.07% -13.85% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £81.18 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.96% -1.92% +4.00%

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 24 July 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 24 July 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 24 July 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 4,749 £537 -2.36% 3,204
London -4 2,726 £565 -1.74% 1,751
UK excluding London -5 2,230 £500 +2.04% 1,897
Work from Home -6 1,571 £525 -4.55% 1,193
North of England +4 777 £488 +2.63% 496
South East -10 436 £538 +7.50% 519
Yorkshire +2 415 £496 +0.99% 129
Scotland +4 317 £435 -8.42% 126
South West -2 289 £500 -5.88% 281
North West +6 287 £525 +10.53% 275
Midlands -17 257 £469 +4.22% 212
West Midlands -12 207 £463 +2.78% 121
East of England -12 138 £500 -0.50% 184
North East 0 86 £425 -2.86% 97
East Midlands -7 49 £488 +8.75% 90
Wales -7 31 £500 +17.65% 46
Northern Ireland +8 19 £363 -36.26% 58

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
1 290 (5.14%) Apache Spark
2 271 (4.80%) Apache Airflow
3 213 (3.78%) Apache
4 184 (3.26%) Confluence
5 54 (0.96%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.87%) SAS
7 47 (0.83%) SharePoint
8 26 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) nginx
10 21 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
11 20 (0.35%) ArcGIS
12 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.21%) IIS
14 9 (0.16%) CMS
14 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.089%) JBoss
Applications
1 122 (2.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 25 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
5 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
5 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.018%) Navisworks
7 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
7 1 (0.018%) Revit
7 1 (0.018%) Simulink
7 1 (0.018%) SPSS
7 1 (0.018%) Weka
7 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.43%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.20%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.035%) Bloomberg AIM
10 2 (0.035%) Distributed Ledger
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.035%) R3 Corda
10 2 (0.035%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,101 (37.25%) AWS
2 1,887 (33.45%) Azure
3 843 (14.94%) GCP
4 692 (12.27%) GitHub
5 522 (9.25%) Power Platform
6 478 (8.47%) Serverless
7 416 (7.37%) Amazon S3
8 404 (7.16%) Azure DevOps
9 385 (6.83%) GitHub Actions
10 360 (6.38%) AWS Lambda
11 293 (5.19%) Snowflake
12 235 (4.17%) Azure Data Factory
13 220 (3.90%) dbt
14 197 (3.49%) AWS CloudFormation
15 183 (3.24%) Amazon EKS
16 179 (3.17%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 156 (2.77%) OpenShift
18 151 (2.68%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 133 (2.36%) Amazon EC2
20 130 (2.30%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 259 (4.59%) Firewall
2 191 (3.39%) DNS
3 131 (2.32%) TCP/IP
4 121 (2.15%) BGP
5 112 (1.99%) Network Security
5 112 (1.99%) VPN
6 111 (1.97%) WAN
7 76 (1.35%) OSPF
8 67 (1.19%) DHCP
9 60 (1.06%) VLAN
10 54 (0.96%) BIG-IP
10 54 (0.96%) SAN
10 54 (0.96%) SD-WAN
11 53 (0.94%) HTTP
12 52 (0.92%) VXLAN
13 48 (0.85%) SSL
14 44 (0.78%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 43 (0.76%) SNMP
16 40 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
17 38 (0.67%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 464 (8.23%) Power BI
2 344 (6.10%) PostgreSQL
3 318 (5.64%) Data Warehouse
4 229 (4.06%) SQL Server
5 204 (3.62%) Data Lake
6 202 (3.58%) Tableau
7 194 (3.44%) Relational Database
8 183 (3.24%) Metadata
9 170 (3.01%) NoSQL
10 162 (2.87%) Big Data
11 154 (2.73%) BigQuery
12 137 (2.43%) Amazon Athena
12 137 (2.43%) Amazon Redshift
13 128 (2.27%) MongoDB
14 118 (2.09%) Delta Lake
15 110 (1.95%) DynamoDB
16 108 (1.91%) Amazon RDS
17 83 (1.47%) MySQL
18 72 (1.28%) Snowflake Schema
19 70 (1.24%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 686 (12.16%) Git
2 511 (9.06%) Jenkins
3 402 (7.13%) GitLab
4 310 (5.50%) JIRA
5 82 (1.45%) Selenium
6 70 (1.24%) MLflow
7 51 (0.90%) Postman
8 43 (0.76%) Bitbucket
9 39 (0.69%) JMeter
10 37 (0.66%) SonarQube
11 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
12 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
13 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
14 29 (0.51%) Claude Code
15 28 (0.50%) JUnit
16 26 (0.46%) Maven
16 26 (0.46%) Sonatype Nexus
17 24 (0.43%) Gatling
18 19 (0.34%) Zephyr
General
1 1,213 (21.50%) Social Skills
2 1,189 (21.08%) Finance
3 784 (13.90%) Analytical Skills
4 562 (9.96%) Public Sector
5 428 (7.59%) Banking
6 203 (3.60%) Front Office
7 129 (2.29%) Documentation Skills
8 124 (2.20%) Investment Banking
9 107 (1.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 96 (1.70%) Retail
11 83 (1.47%) Marketing
12 70 (1.24%) Telecoms
13 64 (1.13%) Pharmaceutical
14 60 (1.06%) Legal
15 51 (0.90%) Military
16 48 (0.85%) Publishing
17 47 (0.83%) Financial Institution
18 45 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
19 39 (0.69%) Manufacturing
20 33 (0.59%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 977 (17.32%) Developer
2 898 (15.92%) Senior
3 848 (15.03%) Data Engineer
4 519 (9.20%) Python Developer
5 442 (7.84%) Lead
6 401 (7.11%) Python Engineer
7 327 (5.80%) DevOps Engineer
8 315 (5.58%) Software Engineer
9 295 (5.23%) Architect
10 283 (5.02%) Analyst
11 256 (4.54%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 250 (4.43%) AWS Engineer
13 219 (3.88%) Data Scientist
14 195 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
15 182 (3.23%) Cloud Engineer
16 177 (3.14%) Senior Developer
17 171 (3.03%) Azure Engineer
17 171 (3.03%) Senior Data Engineer
18 147 (2.61%) Data Analyst
19 140 (2.48%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 418 (7.41%) REST
2 365 (6.47%) PySpark
3 361 (6.40%) React
4 352 (6.24%) Kafka
5 233 (4.13%) .NET
6 217 (3.85%) FastAPI
7 215 (3.81%) Node.js
8 208 (3.69%) JSON
9 207 (3.67%) RESTful
10 198 (3.51%) Pandas
11 174 (3.08%) Django
12 151 (2.68%) PyTorch
13 142 (2.52%) LangChain
14 122 (2.16%) NumPy
15 120 (2.13%) Flask
16 106 (1.88%) scikit-learn
17 104 (1.84%) OAuth
18 102 (1.81%) TensorFlow
19 100 (1.77%) Spring
20 98 (1.74%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 749 (13.28%) Cloud Native
2 320 (5.67%) Distributed Systems
3 198 (3.51%) Onboarding
4 194 (3.44%) AI Agents
5 159 (2.82%) Data Centre
6 151 (2.68%) Algorithms
6 151 (2.68%) Product Ownership
7 137 (2.43%) Data Structures
8 125 (2.22%) Legacy Systems
9 116 (2.06%) Data Protection Act
9 116 (2.06%) Hybrid Cloud
10 114 (2.02%) Derivative
11 105 (1.86%) Management Information System
12 104 (1.84%) Fixed Income
13 96 (1.70%) Equities
14 84 (1.49%) Security Posture
15 68 (1.21%) Public Cloud
16 65 (1.15%) Enterprise Software
16 65 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
17 64 (1.13%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 688 (12.20%) Linux
2 321 (5.69%) Windows
3 217 (3.85%) Unix
4 131 (2.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 73 (1.29%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.73%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.57%) VMS
8 29 (0.51%) AIX
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 16 (0.28%) Solaris
11 15 (0.27%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Debian
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 4 (0.071%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,143 (37.99%) CI/CD
2 1,565 (27.74%) DevOps
3 1,398 (24.78%) AI
4 1,271 (22.53%) Agile
5 1,149 (20.37%) Analytics
6 1,079 (19.13%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,012 (17.94%) Data Pipeline
8 916 (16.24%) Problem-Solving
9 900 (15.95%) Machine Learning
10 835 (14.80%) Software Engineering
11 813 (14.41%) Data Engineering
12 773 (13.70%) Containerisation
13 753 (13.35%) Data Modelling
14 685 (12.14%) ETL
15 665 (11.79%) Observability
16 633 (11.22%) Data Science
17 579 (10.26%) Test Automation
18 550 (9.75%) Business Intelligence
19 530 (9.40%) LLM
20 520 (9.22%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,814 (32.16%) SQL
2 795 (14.09%) Java
3 714 (12.66%) Bash
4 689 (12.21%) PowerShell
5 453 (8.03%) JavaScript
6 394 (6.98%) TypeScript
7 313 (5.55%) C#
8 215 (3.81%) Go
9 160 (2.84%) R
10 139 (2.46%) C++
11 129 (2.29%) Shell Script
12 123 (2.18%) Scala
13 106 (1.88%) Bicep
14 75 (1.33%) Perl
15 57 (1.01%) PL/SQL
15 57 (1.01%) Rust
16 56 (0.99%) Groovy
16 56 (0.99%) Ruby
17 54 (0.96%) C
18 49 (0.87%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,277 (22.64%) Security Cleared
2 1,019 (18.06%) SC Cleared
3 429 (7.61%) Degree
4 197 (3.49%) DV Cleared
5 148 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
6 137 (2.43%) AWS Certification
7 132 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
8 129 (2.29%) Azure Certification
9 90 (1.60%) CISSP
10 85 (1.51%) Cisco Certification
11 83 (1.47%) Master's Degree
12 55 (0.98%) CCNP
13 45 (0.80%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 41 (0.73%) Microsoft Certification
14 41 (0.73%) PhD
15 38 (0.67%) CISM
16 33 (0.59%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
18 30 (0.53%) CCIE
19 25 (0.44%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 571 (10.12%) Data Quality
2 255 (4.52%) QA
3 121 (2.15%) GDPR
4 107 (1.90%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 106 (1.88%) NIST
6 93 (1.65%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.60%) SLA
8 26 (0.46%) WCAG
9 24 (0.43%) NCSC
10 23 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
11 20 (0.35%) PCI DSS
11 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
15 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 9 (0.16%) GRC
17 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 891 (15.80%) Docker
2 145 (2.57%) Active Directory
3 128 (2.27%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.33%) Virtual Machines
5 49 (0.87%) vSphere
6 39 (0.69%) Hyper-V
7 37 (0.66%) VMware NSX
8 32 (0.57%) Firmware
9 24 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) NFS
11 15 (0.27%) KVM
12 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 11 (0.20%) Ceph
15 10 (0.18%) SRDF
16 9 (0.16%) HDFS
16 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.12%) Postfix
18 6 (0.11%) PowerHA
19 4 (0.071%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,248 (22.12%) Terraform
2 1,072 (19.00%) Kubernetes
3 595 (10.55%) Ansible
4 355 (6.29%) Grafana
5 276 (4.89%) Prometheus
6 79 (1.40%) Puppet
7 74 (1.31%) Argo
8 53 (0.94%) Progress Chef
9 39 (0.69%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) vCenter Server
11 33 (0.59%) vRealize
12 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
13 27 (0.48%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
14 25 (0.44%) Control-M
14 25 (0.44%) Nagios
14 25 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
15 23 (0.41%) Nessus
16 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
17 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 654 (11.59%) Microsoft
2 559 (9.91%) Databricks
3 328 (5.81%) Google
4 243 (4.31%) Oracle
5 211 (3.74%) Splunk
6 175 (3.10%) VMware
7 152 (2.69%) OpenAI
8 140 (2.48%) Cisco
9 114 (2.02%) ServiceNow
10 105 (1.86%) Red Hat
11 93 (1.65%) F5
12 92 (1.63%) Dynatrace
13 90 (1.60%) Palo Alto
14 83 (1.47%) IBM
14 83 (1.47%) Informatica
15 71 (1.26%) Fortinet
16 67 (1.19%) Foundry
17 65 (1.15%) CyberArk
18 60 (1.06%) SAP
19 57 (1.01%) Salesforce