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

6 months to
8 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 14
Rank change year-on-year -3 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,646 4,269 3,921
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.53% 12.98% 10.07%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.71% 39.40% 32.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,686 2,856 2,823
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £431 £430 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £530 £575
Median % change year-on-year -0.94% -7.83% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £505
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.97% -3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 135 71 122
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.25 £20.58
25th Percentile £41.88 £33.91 £30.43
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -13.04% -9.36%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £82.96 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +10.00% -23.08% +14.14%

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 14,218 10,836 12,152
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.53% 32.94% 31.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,232 7,276 8,539
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £503 £530
Median % change year-on-year +1.99% -5.19% -3.64%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 531 265 408
10th Percentile £29.96 £28.07 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.00 £45.80
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -12.69% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.50 £84.80 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +0.78% -0.77% +7.35%

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 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 8 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 8 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 4,810 £538 -1.81% 4,870
London -4 2,796 £574 -0.11% 3,013
UK excluding London -6 2,202 £500 +2.04% 2,362
Work from Home -7 1,549 £526 -4.45% 1,740
North of England +2 759 £500 +3.63% 565
South East -10 451 £537 +7.45% 637
Yorkshire +1 389 £500 +1.42% 167
Scotland +3 297 £435 -13.00% 191
South West 0 293 £505 -6.05% 320
North West +3 288 £525 +10.53% 305
Midlands -14 245 £470 +4.44% 247
West Midlands -9 195 £469 +4.22% 137
East of England -13 138 £500 -0.25% 302
North East 0 93 £425 -18.27% 98
East Midlands -6 49 £488 +15.50% 110
Wales -7 27 £530 +30.86% 64
Northern Ireland +6 19 £363 -32.56% 64

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 (5.03%) Apache Airflow
2 282 (4.99%) Apache Spark
3 213 (3.77%) Apache
4 180 (3.19%) Confluence
5 58 (1.03%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.87%) SAS
7 41 (0.73%) SharePoint
8 29 (0.51%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 20 (0.35%) nginx
10 20 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
11 13 (0.23%) IIS
12 9 (0.16%) Apache Superset
12 9 (0.16%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.12%) CICS
14 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 5 (0.089%) JBoss
16 5 (0.089%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 117 (2.07%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.58%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.34%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.28%) CPLEX
7 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.035%) 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 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
3 14 (0.25%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
4 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
6 5 (0.089%) Remedy AR System
6 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
6 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
7 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
7 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
8 3 (0.053%) Endur
8 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
8 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
9 2 (0.035%) IntelliMatch
9 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
9 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
9 2 (0.035%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,105 (37.28%) AWS
2 1,931 (34.20%) Azure
3 865 (15.32%) GCP
4 719 (12.73%) GitHub
5 510 (9.03%) Power Platform
6 465 (8.24%) Serverless
7 437 (7.74%) Azure DevOps
8 405 (7.17%) GitHub Actions
9 403 (7.14%) Amazon S3
10 356 (6.31%) AWS Lambda
11 311 (5.51%) Snowflake
12 240 (4.25%) Azure Data Factory
13 222 (3.93%) dbt
14 193 (3.42%) AWS CloudFormation
15 186 (3.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 178 (3.15%) Amazon EKS
17 148 (2.62%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 145 (2.57%) OpenShift
19 138 (2.44%) Amazon EC2
20 133 (2.36%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 276 (4.89%) Firewall
2 212 (3.75%) DNS
3 143 (2.53%) TCP/IP
4 120 (2.13%) VPN
5 118 (2.09%) BGP
6 113 (2.00%) Network Security
7 108 (1.91%) WAN
8 82 (1.45%) DHCP
9 72 (1.28%) OSPF
10 59 (1.04%) SD-WAN
11 58 (1.03%) VLAN
12 55 (0.97%) HTTP
13 54 (0.96%) SSL
14 53 (0.94%) VXLAN
15 52 (0.92%) BIG-IP
15 52 (0.92%) SAN
16 44 (0.78%) SNMP
17 43 (0.76%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 42 (0.74%) Ethernet VPN
19 35 (0.62%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 466 (8.25%) Power BI
2 333 (5.90%) PostgreSQL
3 329 (5.83%) Data Warehouse
4 225 (3.99%) SQL Server
5 203 (3.60%) Relational Database
6 198 (3.51%) Data Lake
7 195 (3.45%) Tableau
8 191 (3.38%) Metadata
9 169 (2.99%) NoSQL
10 151 (2.67%) Big Data
10 151 (2.67%) BigQuery
11 136 (2.41%) Amazon Athena
12 135 (2.39%) Amazon Redshift
13 131 (2.32%) MongoDB
14 123 (2.18%) Delta Lake
15 115 (2.04%) Amazon RDS
16 111 (1.97%) DynamoDB
17 86 (1.52%) MySQL
18 69 (1.22%) Snowflake Schema
19 66 (1.17%) Redis
Development Applications
1 720 (12.75%) Git
2 516 (9.14%) Jenkins
3 440 (7.79%) GitLab
4 302 (5.35%) JIRA
5 96 (1.70%) Selenium
6 60 (1.06%) MLflow
7 51 (0.90%) Postman
8 48 (0.85%) Bitbucket
9 46 (0.81%) JMeter
10 45 (0.80%) SonarQube
11 40 (0.71%) Claude Code
12 36 (0.64%) Cypress.io
13 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) Gatling
13 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
14 31 (0.55%) Artifactory
15 30 (0.53%) Maven
15 30 (0.53%) Sonatype Nexus
16 24 (0.43%) JUnit
17 19 (0.34%) Zephyr
General
1 1,228 (21.75%) Social Skills
2 1,220 (21.61%) Finance
3 809 (14.33%) Analytical Skills
4 573 (10.15%) Public Sector
5 440 (7.79%) Banking
6 200 (3.54%) Front Office
7 129 (2.28%) Investment Banking
8 124 (2.20%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (1.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 108 (1.91%) Retail
11 87 (1.54%) Marketing
12 74 (1.31%) Telecoms
13 60 (1.06%) Pharmaceutical
14 57 (1.01%) Legal
15 55 (0.97%) Military
16 50 (0.89%) Financial Institution
17 49 (0.87%) Publishing
18 46 (0.81%) Aerospace
19 45 (0.80%) Manufacturing
20 40 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 961 (17.02%) Developer
2 901 (15.96%) Senior
3 832 (14.74%) Data Engineer
4 513 (9.09%) Python Developer
5 461 (8.17%) Lead
6 405 (7.17%) Python Engineer
7 329 (5.83%) DevOps Engineer
8 317 (5.61%) Software Engineer
9 288 (5.10%) Architect
10 284 (5.03%) Analyst
11 257 (4.55%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 247 (4.37%) AWS Engineer
13 208 (3.68%) Data Scientist
14 194 (3.44%) Cloud Engineer
15 191 (3.38%) Platform Engineer
16 180 (3.19%) Senior Developer
17 177 (3.13%) Azure Engineer
18 167 (2.96%) Senior Data Engineer
19 140 (2.48%) Data Analyst
19 140 (2.48%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 437 (7.74%) REST
2 370 (6.55%) PySpark
3 354 (6.27%) Kafka
4 351 (6.22%) React
5 233 (4.13%) .NET
6 208 (3.68%) FastAPI
7 207 (3.67%) RESTful
8 206 (3.65%) Node.js
9 200 (3.54%) JSON
10 185 (3.28%) Pandas
11 182 (3.22%) Django
12 144 (2.55%) LangChain
12 144 (2.55%) PyTorch
13 116 (2.05%) Flask
14 111 (1.97%) NumPy
15 110 (1.95%) OAuth
16 108 (1.91%) pytest
17 107 (1.90%) scikit-learn
18 103 (1.82%) HTML
18 103 (1.82%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 769 (13.62%) Cloud Native
2 315 (5.58%) Distributed Systems
3 217 (3.84%) AI Agents
4 206 (3.65%) Onboarding
5 160 (2.83%) Data Centre
6 155 (2.75%) Product Ownership
7 141 (2.50%) Data Structures
8 140 (2.48%) Algorithms
9 128 (2.27%) Legacy Systems
10 120 (2.13%) Hybrid Cloud
11 117 (2.07%) Derivative
12 110 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
13 107 (1.90%) Management Information System
14 95 (1.68%) Equities
15 93 (1.65%) Fixed Income
16 80 (1.42%) Security Posture
17 70 (1.24%) Enterprise Software
18 69 (1.22%) Public Cloud
19 66 (1.17%) Linux Command Line
20 65 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 717 (12.70%) Linux
2 334 (5.92%) Windows
3 234 (4.14%) Unix
4 137 (2.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 81 (1.43%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.73%) Ubuntu
7 31 (0.55%) VMS
8 30 (0.53%) AIX
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 16 (0.28%) Solaris
11 14 (0.25%) CentOS
12 13 (0.23%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) Mac OS
13 11 (0.19%) zOS
14 7 (0.12%) Windows 10
14 7 (0.12%) 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
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,196 (38.89%) CI/CD
2 1,628 (28.83%) DevOps
3 1,433 (25.38%) AI
4 1,280 (22.67%) Agile
5 1,144 (20.26%) Analytics
6 1,137 (20.14%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,016 (18.00%) Data Pipeline
8 922 (16.33%) Problem-Solving
9 892 (15.80%) Machine Learning
10 873 (15.46%) Software Engineering
11 806 (14.28%) Data Engineering
12 775 (13.73%) Containerisation
13 770 (13.64%) Data Modelling
14 681 (12.06%) Observability
15 671 (11.88%) ETL
16 606 (10.73%) Test Automation
17 605 (10.72%) Data Science
18 557 (9.87%) Continuous Improvement
19 545 (9.65%) Business Intelligence
20 531 (9.40%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,825 (32.32%) SQL
2 819 (14.51%) Java
3 750 (13.28%) Bash
4 726 (12.86%) PowerShell
5 468 (8.29%) JavaScript
6 382 (6.77%) TypeScript
7 312 (5.53%) C#
8 201 (3.56%) Go
9 150 (2.66%) R
10 144 (2.55%) C++
11 134 (2.37%) Shell Script
12 130 (2.30%) Scala
13 121 (2.14%) Bicep
14 81 (1.43%) Perl
15 59 (1.04%) C
16 57 (1.01%) Groovy
16 57 (1.01%) PL/SQL
17 56 (0.99%) Rust
18 53 (0.94%) Ruby
19 50 (0.89%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,310 (23.20%) Security Cleared
2 1,062 (18.81%) SC Cleared
3 434 (7.69%) Degree
4 197 (3.49%) DV Cleared
5 162 (2.87%) Computer Science Degree
6 137 (2.43%) AWS Certification
7 136 (2.41%) Azure Certification
8 129 (2.28%) BPSS Clearance
9 91 (1.61%) CISSP
10 87 (1.54%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.26%) Master's Degree
12 53 (0.94%) CCNP
13 45 (0.80%) Microsoft Certification
14 42 (0.74%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 37 (0.66%) PhD
16 34 (0.60%) ISTQB
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 28 (0.50%) CCIE
20 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 587 (10.40%) Data Quality
2 268 (4.75%) QA
3 116 (2.05%) GDPR
4 107 (1.90%) NIST
5 106 (1.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 88 (1.56%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.60%) SLA
8 28 (0.50%) WCAG
9 26 (0.46%) NCSC
9 26 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 25 (0.44%) PCI DSS
11 23 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
12 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 15 (0.27%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
16 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) GRC
16 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 927 (16.42%) Docker
2 159 (2.82%) Active Directory
3 129 (2.28%) VMware Infrastructure
4 66 (1.17%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.81%) vSphere
6 43 (0.76%) Hyper-V
7 37 (0.66%) VMware NSX
8 31 (0.55%) Firmware
9 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 13 (0.23%) Squid
12 12 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
13 11 (0.19%) Ceph
13 11 (0.19%) KVM
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) HDFS
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
16 7 (0.12%) PowerHA
16 7 (0.12%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,296 (22.95%) Terraform
2 1,095 (19.39%) Kubernetes
3 614 (10.87%) Ansible
4 349 (6.18%) Grafana
5 267 (4.73%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.58%) Puppet
7 72 (1.28%) Argo
8 68 (1.20%) Progress Chef
9 42 (0.74%) Istio
10 32 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
11 31 (0.55%) vCenter Server
12 28 (0.50%) vRealize
12 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
13 26 (0.46%) Kibana
14 24 (0.43%) Control-M
14 24 (0.43%) Nagios
15 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
16 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
17 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
17 18 (0.32%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 685 (12.13%) Microsoft
2 555 (9.83%) Databricks
3 348 (6.16%) Google
4 247 (4.37%) Oracle
5 214 (3.79%) Splunk
6 174 (3.08%) VMware
7 148 (2.62%) OpenAI
8 140 (2.48%) Cisco
9 125 (2.21%) ServiceNow
10 103 (1.82%) Red Hat
11 99 (1.75%) Dynatrace
12 91 (1.61%) F5
13 86 (1.52%) Palo Alto
14 84 (1.49%) IBM
15 81 (1.43%) Informatica
16 70 (1.24%) Fortinet
17 67 (1.19%) Foundry
18 65 (1.15%) CyberArk
19 64 (1.13%) SAP
20 61 (1.08%) Salesforce