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

6 months to
3 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 10 14
Rank change year-on-year -2 +4 -3
Contract jobs citing Python 5,632 4,300 3,926
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.60% 12.99% 10.06%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.92% 39.46% 32.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,672 2,886 2,847
10th Percentile £375 £360 £375
25th Percentile £431 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £532 £575
Median % change year-on-year -1.35% -7.45% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £710
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £502
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.36% -4.41%
Number of hourly rates quoted 134 69 121
10th Percentile £28.95 £26.00 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.83 £33.91 £30.37
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -13.04% -9.36%
75th Percentile £76.69 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.83 £50.00 £66.25
% change year-on-year +5.67% -24.53% +15.22%

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 14,109 10,898 12,197
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.55% 32.91% 31.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,165 7,338 8,619
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £503 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.99% -4.29% -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £498
% change year-on-year +3.61% -4.57% -0.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 527 257 407
10th Percentile £32.63 £27.98 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.38 £36.25 £45.94
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.70 £81.18 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +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 3 August 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 3 August 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 3 August 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 4,784 £538 -2.27% 3,870
London -4 2,765 £575 -0.26% 2,255
UK excluding London -6 2,206 £500 +2.04% 2,071
Work from Home -7 1,555 £535 -2.73% 1,599
North of England +2 769 £500 +4.71% 514
South East -11 446 £538 +7.50% 602
Yorkshire +1 399 £500 +1.44% 153
Scotland +2 297 £435 -12.65% 139
North West +6 294 £525 +10.53% 267
South West -1 287 £505 -8.18% 290
Midlands -18 252 £477 +6.00% 228
West Midlands -13 201 £469 +4.22% 137
East of England -14 135 £500 -0.25% 223
North East -1 87 £425 -10.53% 101
East Midlands -10 50 £488 +14.82% 90
Wales -4 31 £500 +17.65% 49
Northern Ireland +5 19 £363 -32.56% 52

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
1 284 (5.04%) Apache Spark
2 280 (4.97%) Apache Airflow
3 216 (3.84%) Apache
4 182 (3.23%) Confluence
5 56 (0.99%) Jupyter
6 48 (0.85%) SAS
7 41 (0.73%) SharePoint
8 25 (0.44%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 19 (0.34%) nginx
12 12 (0.21%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) CMS
14 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
14 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
15 7 (0.12%) CICS
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.089%) JBoss
17 5 (0.089%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 117 (2.08%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
5 18 (0.32%) MS Visio
6 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
7 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) 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
8 4 (0.071%) Remedy AR System
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Bloomberg AIM
10 2 (0.036%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,116 (37.57%) AWS
2 1,907 (33.86%) Azure
3 854 (15.16%) GCP
4 703 (12.48%) GitHub
5 510 (9.06%) Power Platform
6 463 (8.22%) Serverless
7 415 (7.37%) Azure DevOps
8 407 (7.23%) Amazon S3
9 396 (7.03%) GitHub Actions
10 354 (6.29%) AWS Lambda
11 307 (5.45%) Snowflake
12 236 (4.19%) Azure Data Factory
13 231 (4.10%) dbt
14 194 (3.44%) AWS CloudFormation
15 180 (3.20%) Amazon EKS
16 178 (3.16%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 151 (2.68%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 143 (2.54%) OpenShift
19 134 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
20 129 (2.29%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 266 (4.72%) Firewall
2 198 (3.52%) DNS
3 133 (2.36%) TCP/IP
4 116 (2.06%) BGP
5 114 (2.02%) VPN
6 110 (1.95%) Network Security
7 107 (1.90%) WAN
8 74 (1.31%) DHCP
9 73 (1.30%) OSPF
10 58 (1.03%) VLAN
11 55 (0.98%) SD-WAN
12 53 (0.94%) BIG-IP
13 52 (0.92%) SAN
14 51 (0.91%) VXLAN
15 50 (0.89%) SSL
16 49 (0.87%) HTTP
17 44 (0.78%) SNMP
18 43 (0.76%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
19 39 (0.69%) Ethernet VPN
20 33 (0.59%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 463 (8.22%) Power BI
2 341 (6.05%) PostgreSQL
3 325 (5.77%) Data Warehouse
4 226 (4.01%) SQL Server
5 200 (3.55%) Relational Database
5 200 (3.55%) Tableau
6 197 (3.50%) Data Lake
7 186 (3.30%) Metadata
8 169 (3.00%) NoSQL
9 152 (2.70%) Big Data
9 152 (2.70%) BigQuery
10 137 (2.43%) Amazon Athena
11 136 (2.41%) Amazon Redshift
12 132 (2.34%) MongoDB
13 122 (2.17%) Delta Lake
14 111 (1.97%) Amazon RDS
15 110 (1.95%) DynamoDB
16 85 (1.51%) MySQL
17 74 (1.31%) Snowflake Schema
18 68 (1.21%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 692 (12.29%) Git
2 507 (9.00%) Jenkins
3 410 (7.28%) GitLab
4 301 (5.34%) JIRA
5 83 (1.47%) Selenium
6 63 (1.12%) MLflow
7 50 (0.89%) Postman
8 46 (0.82%) Bitbucket
9 42 (0.75%) JMeter
10 41 (0.73%) SonarQube
11 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
12 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
12 33 (0.59%) REST Assured
13 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
14 31 (0.55%) Claude Code
15 29 (0.51%) Sonatype Nexus
16 28 (0.50%) Gatling
17 26 (0.46%) Maven
18 25 (0.44%) JUnit
19 19 (0.34%) Zephyr
General
1 1,218 (21.63%) Finance
2 1,217 (21.61%) Social Skills
3 799 (14.19%) Analytical Skills
4 568 (10.09%) Public Sector
5 435 (7.72%) Banking
6 209 (3.71%) Front Office
7 127 (2.25%) Investment Banking
8 125 (2.22%) Documentation Skills
9 108 (1.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 104 (1.85%) Retail
11 86 (1.53%) Marketing
12 69 (1.23%) Telecoms
13 64 (1.14%) Pharmaceutical
14 59 (1.05%) Legal
15 56 (0.99%) Military
16 50 (0.89%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.83%) Publishing
18 43 (0.76%) Influencing Skills
19 41 (0.73%) Manufacturing
20 37 (0.66%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 964 (17.12%) Developer
2 910 (16.16%) Senior
3 850 (15.09%) Data Engineer
4 509 (9.04%) Python Developer
5 461 (8.19%) Lead
6 408 (7.24%) Python Engineer
7 328 (5.82%) Software Engineer
8 321 (5.70%) DevOps Engineer
9 289 (5.13%) Analyst
10 287 (5.10%) Architect
11 248 (4.40%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 248 (4.40%) AWS Engineer
12 217 (3.85%) Data Scientist
13 193 (3.43%) Cloud Engineer
14 191 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
15 179 (3.18%) Senior Developer
16 176 (3.13%) Senior Data Engineer
17 172 (3.05%) Azure Engineer
18 146 (2.59%) Data Analyst
19 142 (2.52%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 417 (7.40%) REST
2 377 (6.69%) PySpark
3 361 (6.41%) React
4 357 (6.34%) Kafka
5 226 (4.01%) .NET
6 213 (3.78%) Node.js
7 208 (3.69%) FastAPI
8 202 (3.59%) RESTful
9 201 (3.57%) JSON
10 186 (3.30%) Pandas
11 180 (3.20%) Django
12 148 (2.63%) PyTorch
13 139 (2.47%) LangChain
14 117 (2.08%) Flask
15 115 (2.04%) NumPy
16 108 (1.92%) scikit-learn
17 104 (1.85%) Spring
18 103 (1.83%) TensorFlow
19 102 (1.81%) OAuth
20 101 (1.79%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 759 (13.48%) Cloud Native
2 319 (5.66%) Distributed Systems
3 206 (3.66%) AI Agents
4 203 (3.60%) Onboarding
5 161 (2.86%) Data Centre
6 147 (2.61%) Algorithms
7 146 (2.59%) Product Ownership
8 138 (2.45%) Data Structures
9 125 (2.22%) Legacy Systems
10 118 (2.10%) Derivative
11 115 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
12 109 (1.94%) Data Protection Act
13 105 (1.86%) Fixed Income
13 105 (1.86%) Management Information System
14 96 (1.70%) Equities
15 83 (1.47%) Security Posture
16 69 (1.23%) Public Cloud
17 65 (1.15%) Enterprise Software
17 65 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
18 63 (1.12%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 694 (12.32%) Linux
2 321 (5.70%) Windows
3 226 (4.01%) Unix
4 133 (2.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 76 (1.35%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.73%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.53%) AIX
8 29 (0.51%) VMS
9 20 (0.36%) Android
10 16 (0.28%) Solaris
11 13 (0.23%) Apple iOS
11 13 (0.23%) CentOS
12 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 11 (0.20%) zOS
13 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Debian
14 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Rocky
15 5 (0.089%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,146 (38.10%) CI/CD
2 1,580 (28.05%) DevOps
3 1,410 (25.04%) AI
4 1,274 (22.62%) Agile
5 1,158 (20.56%) Analytics
6 1,097 (19.48%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,016 (18.04%) Data Pipeline
8 911 (16.18%) Problem-Solving
9 900 (15.98%) Machine Learning
10 861 (15.29%) Software Engineering
11 809 (14.36%) Data Engineering
12 764 (13.57%) Data Modelling
13 759 (13.48%) Containerisation
14 669 (11.88%) ETL
15 666 (11.83%) Observability
16 625 (11.10%) Data Science
17 576 (10.23%) Test Automation
18 546 (9.69%) Business Intelligence
19 541 (9.61%) Continuous Improvement
20 517 (9.18%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,827 (32.44%) SQL
2 812 (14.42%) Java
3 726 (12.89%) Bash
4 699 (12.41%) PowerShell
5 462 (8.20%) JavaScript
6 392 (6.96%) TypeScript
7 300 (5.33%) C#
8 210 (3.73%) Go
9 160 (2.84%) R
10 144 (2.56%) C++
11 126 (2.24%) Shell Script
12 123 (2.18%) Scala
13 118 (2.10%) Bicep
14 79 (1.40%) Perl
15 59 (1.05%) Rust
16 58 (1.03%) C
17 56 (0.99%) Groovy
18 54 (0.96%) PL/SQL
18 54 (0.96%) Ruby
19 49 (0.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,284 (22.80%) Security Cleared
2 1,039 (18.45%) SC Cleared
3 433 (7.69%) Degree
4 198 (3.52%) DV Cleared
5 154 (2.73%) Computer Science Degree
6 140 (2.49%) AWS Certification
7 132 (2.34%) Azure Certification
7 132 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
8 88 (1.56%) CISSP
9 86 (1.53%) Cisco Certification
10 77 (1.37%) Master's Degree
11 55 (0.98%) CCNP
12 45 (0.80%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 42 (0.75%) Microsoft Certification
13 42 (0.75%) PhD
14 33 (0.59%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 33 (0.59%) CISM
15 29 (0.51%) ISTQB
16 28 (0.50%) CCIE
17 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 584 (10.37%) Data Quality
2 264 (4.69%) QA
3 109 (1.94%) GDPR
4 105 (1.86%) NIST
5 104 (1.85%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 91 (1.62%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.60%) SLA
8 26 (0.46%) WCAG
9 25 (0.44%) Actionable Recommendations
10 23 (0.41%) NCSC
11 21 (0.37%) PCI DSS
11 21 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
15 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) GRC
17 6 (0.11%) Cyber Essentials
17 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 901 (16.00%) Docker
2 150 (2.66%) Active Directory
3 125 (2.22%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.19%) Virtual Machines
5 47 (0.83%) vSphere
6 40 (0.71%) Hyper-V
7 37 (0.66%) VMware NSX
8 31 (0.55%) Firmware
9 21 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 13 (0.23%) Squid
12 12 (0.21%) KVM
13 11 (0.20%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
14 10 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
15 9 (0.16%) HDFS
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
16 7 (0.12%) PowerHA
17 4 (0.071%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,262 (22.41%) Terraform
2 1,070 (19.00%) Kubernetes
3 597 (10.60%) Ansible
4 345 (6.13%) Grafana
5 265 (4.71%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.51%) Puppet
7 73 (1.30%) Argo
8 60 (1.07%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Istio
10 33 (0.59%) vCenter Server
11 31 (0.55%) vRealize
12 29 (0.51%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
14 26 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
15 24 (0.43%) Nagios
16 23 (0.41%) Control-M
17 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
18 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
19 18 (0.32%) NetBackup
19 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 653 (11.59%) Microsoft
2 566 (10.05%) Databricks
3 332 (5.89%) Google
4 243 (4.31%) Oracle
5 207 (3.68%) Splunk
6 171 (3.04%) VMware
7 141 (2.50%) OpenAI
8 136 (2.41%) Cisco
9 119 (2.11%) ServiceNow
10 101 (1.79%) Red Hat
11 95 (1.69%) Dynatrace
12 91 (1.62%) F5
13 86 (1.53%) Palo Alto
14 82 (1.46%) Informatica
15 79 (1.40%) IBM
16 69 (1.23%) Fortinet
17 64 (1.14%) CyberArk
18 62 (1.10%) Foundry
19 61 (1.08%) Salesforce
20 59 (1.05%) SAP