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

6 months to
12 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 9 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +6 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,136 3,958 4,128
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.03% 13.45% 9.24%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.00% 39.38% 31.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,488 2,716 2,894
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 £750 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £517
% change year-on-year -3.75% -3.29% -6.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 105 52 114
10th Percentile £28.73 £20.23 £21.39
25th Percentile £41.94 £22.88 £36.56
Median hourly rate £54.00 £43.50 £51.50
Median % change year-on-year +24.14% -15.53% -20.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £64.06 £67.38
90th Percentile £79.80 £75.00 £74.83
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.75 £47.50
% change year-on-year +5.05% +2.63% -26.92%

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 12,527 10,051 12,993
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.34% 34.15% 29.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,337 6,631 9,157
10th Percentile £353 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £422 £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 £475 £488 £488
% change year-on-year -2.56% - -3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 489 242 507
10th Percentile £41.52 £21.33 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.00 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -5.51%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £67.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.37 £61.60
% change year-on-year +2.57% +2.88% -5.23%

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 12 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 12 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 12 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 4,298 £518 -9.52% 2,902
London -3 2,432 £550 -8.33% 1,300
UK excluding London -1 1,985 £481 -3.75% 2,167
Work from Home 0 1,550 £525 -4.55% 1,142
North of England +10 665 £480 -4.00% 500
South East -6 416 £500 -6.10% 682
Yorkshire +3 353 £482 -4.79% 197
Midlands -1 286 £500 +3.41% 261
Scotland +2 274 £425 -9.57% 147
North West +12 267 £478 -4.50% 225
West Midlands -5 235 £500 - 123
South West -3 222 £538 -6.52% 269
East of England -6 126 £500 - 243
North East +13 51 £475 -7.32% 83
East Midlands -16 50 £447 +5.18% 138
Wales -14 31 £450 -15.09% 80
Northern Ireland +8 29 £613 +16.67% 28

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
1 267 (5.20%) Apache Spark
2 189 (3.68%) Apache Airflow
3 163 (3.17%) Confluence
4 150 (2.92%) Apache
5 64 (1.25%) SAS
6 60 (1.17%) SharePoint
7 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
8 24 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.47%) nginx
8 24 (0.47%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
10 19 (0.37%) Appian
11 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
12 10 (0.19%) Camunda
13 7 (0.14%) CMS
14 6 (0.12%) Apache Superset
15 4 (0.078%) Oracle Application Server
16 3 (0.058%) CICS
16 3 (0.058%) Tomcat
16 3 (0.058%) WebSphere
Applications
1 126 (2.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.60%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 24 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.29%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 4 (0.078%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
10 2 (0.039%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 24 (0.47%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 7 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
5 5 (0.097%) Oracle EBS
6 4 (0.078%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.058%) Actimize
7 3 (0.058%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.058%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
8 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.039%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.039%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.039%) Shopify
9 1 (0.019%) Advent Geneva
9 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
9 1 (0.019%) ION MarketView
9 1 (0.019%) Salesforce CRM
9 1 (0.019%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,993 (38.80%) AWS
2 1,788 (34.81%) Azure
3 801 (15.60%) GCP
4 679 (13.22%) GitHub
5 528 (10.28%) Serverless
6 497 (9.68%) Power Platform
7 385 (7.50%) Azure DevOps
8 356 (6.93%) Amazon S3
9 345 (6.72%) AWS Lambda
10 334 (6.50%) GitHub Actions
11 264 (5.14%) Azure Data Factory
12 258 (5.02%) Snowflake
13 250 (4.87%) AWS CloudFormation
14 192 (3.74%) Amazon EKS
15 176 (3.43%) OpenShift
16 169 (3.29%) Amazon ECS
17 161 (3.13%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 158 (3.08%) Amazon EC2
19 146 (2.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 141 (2.75%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 212 (4.13%) Firewall
2 139 (2.71%) DNS
3 108 (2.10%) Network Security
3 108 (2.10%) TCP/IP
4 76 (1.48%) VPN
5 64 (1.25%) HTTP
6 62 (1.21%) BGP
7 58 (1.13%) WAN
8 41 (0.80%) Wireshark
9 39 (0.76%) MPLS
9 39 (0.76%) SAN
9 39 (0.76%) SSL
10 34 (0.66%) DHCP
10 34 (0.66%) OSPF
11 33 (0.64%) LAN
12 32 (0.62%) SD-WAN
13 28 (0.55%) VLAN
14 23 (0.45%) VXLAN
15 22 (0.43%) BIG-IP
15 22 (0.43%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 416 (8.10%) Power BI
2 390 (7.59%) PostgreSQL
3 316 (6.15%) Data Warehouse
4 236 (4.60%) Data Lake
5 223 (4.34%) NoSQL
6 197 (3.84%) SQL Server
7 196 (3.82%) Relational Database
8 163 (3.17%) Tableau
9 159 (3.10%) Big Data
10 134 (2.61%) Metadata
11 123 (2.39%) BigQuery
12 122 (2.38%) Amazon RDS
13 118 (2.30%) MySQL
14 116 (2.26%) Delta Lake
15 106 (2.06%) Amazon Redshift
16 101 (1.97%) MongoDB
17 97 (1.89%) Amazon Athena
18 92 (1.79%) Azure SQL Database
19 87 (1.69%) Hadoop
20 79 (1.54%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 651 (12.68%) Git
2 540 (10.51%) Jenkins
3 419 (8.16%) GitLab
4 298 (5.80%) JIRA
5 92 (1.79%) MLflow
6 91 (1.77%) Selenium
7 50 (0.97%) Postman
8 49 (0.95%) Bitbucket
9 47 (0.92%) Cucumber
10 41 (0.80%) Sonatype Nexus
11 40 (0.78%) JMeter
12 39 (0.76%) JUnit
13 28 (0.55%) SpecFlow
14 27 (0.53%) Visual Studio
15 25 (0.49%) Cypress.io
16 24 (0.47%) CircleCI
17 22 (0.43%) Artifactory
18 20 (0.39%) Maven
19 19 (0.37%) Robot Framework
19 19 (0.37%) SonarQube
General
1 1,268 (24.69%) Social Skills
2 1,016 (19.78%) Finance
3 708 (13.79%) Analytical Skills
4 488 (9.50%) Public Sector
5 418 (8.14%) Banking
6 176 (3.43%) Front Office
7 130 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
8 101 (1.97%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.34%) Retail
10 64 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 63 (1.23%) Marketing
12 60 (1.17%) Pharmaceutical
13 59 (1.15%) Financial Institution
14 52 (1.01%) Legal
15 50 (0.97%) Influencing Skills
15 50 (0.97%) Telecoms
16 44 (0.86%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
18 33 (0.64%) Military
19 23 (0.45%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 958 (18.65%) Developer
2 722 (14.06%) Data Engineer
3 715 (13.92%) Senior
4 432 (8.41%) Python Developer
5 339 (6.60%) Lead
6 336 (6.54%) Architect
7 291 (5.67%) DevOps Engineer
8 289 (5.63%) Python Engineer
9 280 (5.45%) Analyst
10 259 (5.04%) AWS Engineer
10 259 (5.04%) Software Engineer
11 243 (4.73%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 202 (3.93%) Data Scientist
13 178 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
14 157 (3.06%) Azure Engineer
15 153 (2.98%) Senior Developer
16 138 (2.69%) Data Analyst
16 138 (2.69%) Full-Stack Developer
17 135 (2.63%) Senior Data Engineer
18 129 (2.51%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 443 (8.63%) REST
2 362 (7.05%) React
3 325 (6.33%) Kafka
3 325 (6.33%) PySpark
4 287 (5.59%) Node.js
5 226 (4.40%) Pandas
6 223 (4.34%) PyTorch
7 217 (4.23%) FastAPI
8 216 (4.21%) .NET
9 204 (3.97%) RESTful
10 185 (3.60%) TensorFlow
11 158 (3.08%) NumPy
12 149 (2.90%) scikit-learn
13 140 (2.73%) AngularJS
14 134 (2.61%) Flask
15 126 (2.45%) JSON
16 124 (2.41%) LangChain
17 116 (2.26%) Django
18 111 (2.16%) pytest
19 106 (2.06%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 506 (9.85%) Cloud Native
2 205 (3.99%) Algorithms
3 200 (3.89%) Distributed Systems
4 138 (2.69%) Product Ownership
5 128 (2.49%) Equities
6 122 (2.38%) Data Protection Act
7 114 (2.22%) Fixed Income
8 107 (2.08%) AI Agents
8 107 (2.08%) Data Structures
9 106 (2.06%) Onboarding
10 104 (2.02%) Derivative
11 91 (1.77%) Hybrid Cloud
11 91 (1.77%) Legacy Systems
12 88 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
13 87 (1.69%) Security Posture
14 85 (1.65%) Data Centre
15 84 (1.64%) Public Cloud
16 81 (1.58%) Management Information System
17 58 (1.13%) Hedge funds
18 54 (1.05%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 677 (13.18%) Linux
2 324 (6.31%) Windows
3 182 (3.54%) Unix
4 94 (1.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 69 (1.34%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.64%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.62%) Android
8 30 (0.58%) VMS
9 22 (0.43%) CentOS
9 22 (0.43%) Mac OS
10 18 (0.35%) Apple iOS
10 18 (0.35%) Solaris
11 11 (0.21%) AIX
12 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
12 9 (0.18%) Windows 7
13 5 (0.097%) Debian
13 5 (0.097%) Embedded Linux
13 5 (0.097%) zOS
14 4 (0.078%) Amazon Linux
14 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,885 (36.70%) CI/CD
2 1,450 (28.23%) DevOps
3 1,221 (23.77%) Agile
4 1,116 (21.73%) AI
5 1,058 (20.60%) Problem-Solving
6 1,015 (19.76%) Analytics
7 898 (17.48%) Infrastructure as Code
8 860 (16.74%) Machine Learning
9 830 (16.16%) Data Pipeline
10 767 (14.93%) Containerisation
11 696 (13.55%) Data Engineering
12 676 (13.16%) ETL
13 674 (13.12%) Data Modelling
14 624 (12.15%) Data Science
15 600 (11.68%) Test Automation
16 590 (11.49%) Software Engineering
17 501 (9.75%) Observability
18 493 (9.60%) Business Intelligence
19 437 (8.51%) LLM
20 387 (7.54%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,630 (31.74%) SQL
2 721 (14.04%) Java
3 668 (13.01%) PowerShell
4 592 (11.53%) Bash
5 501 (9.75%) JavaScript
6 349 (6.80%) TypeScript
7 333 (6.48%) C#
8 227 (4.42%) Go
9 173 (3.37%) C++
10 151 (2.94%) R
11 116 (2.26%) Scala
12 114 (2.22%) Shell Script
13 109 (2.12%) Perl
14 94 (1.83%) Ruby
15 70 (1.36%) Bicep
16 60 (1.17%) Kusto Query Language
17 49 (0.95%) C
18 47 (0.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 44 (0.86%) VBA
20 41 (0.80%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,168 (22.74%) Security Cleared
2 930 (18.11%) SC Cleared
3 449 (8.74%) Degree
4 211 (4.11%) Computer Science Degree
5 146 (2.84%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.53%) AWS Certification
7 123 (2.39%) Master's Degree
8 121 (2.36%) BPSS Clearance
9 101 (1.97%) Azure Certification
10 94 (1.83%) CISSP
11 73 (1.42%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.13%) CCNP
13 50 (0.97%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 46 (0.90%) PhD
15 45 (0.88%) CISM
16 39 (0.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
18 31 (0.60%) CEH
18 31 (0.60%) ISTQB
18 31 (0.60%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 488 (9.50%) Data Quality
2 213 (4.15%) QA
3 176 (3.43%) GDPR
4 106 (2.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 105 (2.04%) NIST
6 76 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.66%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.64%) SLA
9 30 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 27 (0.53%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.45%) NCSC
12 19 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
13 17 (0.33%) SOC 2
14 12 (0.23%) EU AI Act
14 12 (0.23%) WCAG
15 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.19%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 10 (0.19%) MiFID
16 10 (0.19%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) PSD2
System Software
1 935 (18.20%) Docker
2 172 (3.35%) Active Directory
3 114 (2.22%) VMware Infrastructure
4 55 (1.07%) Virtual Machines
4 55 (1.07%) vSphere
5 47 (0.92%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.56%) Hyper-V
7 26 (0.51%) Firmware
8 15 (0.29%) KVM
9 14 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
10 12 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 11 (0.21%) HDFS
12 10 (0.19%) Lustre
13 9 (0.18%) GPFS
14 8 (0.16%) SRDF
14 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.097%) NDS
15 5 (0.097%) NetIQ eDirectory
15 5 (0.097%) NFS
15 5 (0.097%) Postfix
Systems Management
1 1,102 (21.46%) Terraform
2 1,048 (20.40%) Kubernetes
3 542 (10.55%) Ansible
4 351 (6.83%) Grafana
5 310 (6.04%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.83%) Argo
7 75 (1.46%) Puppet
8 49 (0.95%) Istio
9 42 (0.82%) vRealize
10 41 (0.80%) Kibana
11 37 (0.72%) Nessus
12 33 (0.64%) Progress Chef
12 33 (0.64%) vCenter Server
13 29 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
14 27 (0.53%) Control-M
15 26 (0.51%) NetBackup
16 25 (0.49%) IBM Guardium
17 22 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
18 20 (0.39%) Rancher
19 16 (0.31%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 628 (12.23%) Microsoft
2 527 (10.26%) Databricks
3 304 (5.92%) Google
4 226 (4.40%) Splunk
5 215 (4.19%) Oracle
6 208 (4.05%) VMware
7 145 (2.82%) Red Hat
8 122 (2.38%) Cisco
9 119 (2.32%) OpenAI
10 101 (1.97%) ServiceNow
11 83 (1.62%) CyberArk
12 82 (1.60%) Foundry
13 67 (1.30%) BeyondTrust
14 62 (1.21%) F5
15 60 (1.17%) Informatica
16 59 (1.15%) Palo Alto
17 51 (0.99%) IBM
18 46 (0.90%) SAP
19 42 (0.82%) Dynatrace
20 40 (0.78%) Tenable