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

6 months to
14 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,441 3,865 4,126
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.86% 13.07% 9.44%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.41% 38.48% 31.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,585 2,663 2,961
10th Percentile £363 £375 £375
25th Percentile £425 £444 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £537 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.23% -2.36% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £838
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £500 £507
% change year-on-year -1.00% -1.38% -6.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 122 58 117
10th Percentile £28.65 £25.18 £21.06
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £42.25 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +24.26% -31.85% -0.86%
75th Percentile £67.75 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £63.40 £76.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £47.50 £66.25
% change year-on-year +7.81% -28.30% +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 13,466 10,045 13,193
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.88% 33.96% 30.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,781 6,805 9,283
10th Percentile £358 £351 £350
25th Percentile £417 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £601 £625 £650
90th Percentile £716 £750 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +2.63% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 551 233 539
10th Percentile £35.25 £25.86 £32.05
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% +3.09%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £84.90 £76.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £64.50
% change year-on-year +4.84% -3.88% +3.20%

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 14 June 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 14 June 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 14 June 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 4,531 £525 -4.55% 1,955
London -3 2,608 £550 -4.35% 901
UK excluding London -1 2,119 £495 -1.00% 1,457
Work from Home -2 1,556 £525 -4.55% 849
North of England +10 768 £481 -0.77% 370
Yorkshire +2 427 £500 - 115
South East -4 400 £525 +3.19% 527
Scotland +3 317 £440 -7.37% 64
North West +5 265 £490 +3.16% 202
South West +1 263 £500 -9.09% 161
Midlands -17 230 £477 +6.00% 156
West Midlands -13 182 £476 +2.92% 88
East of England -14 125 £500 - 141
North East +10 88 £456 +4.29% 54
East Midlands -19 47 £495 +16.47% 67
Wales -11 28 £475 +2.15% 36
Northern Ireland +15 27 £408 -30.64% 32

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
1 280 (5.15%) Apache Spark
2 243 (4.47%) Apache Airflow
3 186 (3.42%) Apache
4 159 (2.92%) Confluence
5 53 (0.97%) Jupyter
6 47 (0.86%) SAS
7 46 (0.85%) SharePoint
8 21 (0.39%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.37%) nginx
10 18 (0.33%) Palantir Foundry
11 17 (0.31%) ArcGIS
12 15 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 11 (0.20%) IIS
14 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
15 9 (0.17%) Appian
16 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
17 7 (0.13%) CICS
18 6 (0.11%) Camunda
18 6 (0.11%) CMS
18 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 116 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.40%) Microsoft Office
3 22 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 22 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
4 19 (0.35%) MS Visio
5 11 (0.20%) CPLEX
6 3 (0.055%) LaTeX
6 3 (0.055%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
7 1 (0.018%) SPSS
7 1 (0.018%) Weka
7 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.40%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.17%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
7 5 (0.092%) BambooHR
8 4 (0.074%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.074%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.055%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.055%) Dynamics CRM
9 3 (0.055%) Sage X3
9 3 (0.055%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.055%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.037%) Endur
10 2 (0.037%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.037%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.037%) Odoo
10 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.037%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,044 (37.57%) AWS
2 1,802 (33.12%) Azure
3 791 (14.54%) GCP
4 662 (12.17%) GitHub
5 521 (9.58%) Power Platform
6 485 (8.91%) Serverless
7 402 (7.39%) Amazon S3
8 393 (7.22%) Azure DevOps
9 362 (6.65%) GitHub Actions
10 356 (6.54%) AWS Lambda
11 264 (4.85%) Snowflake
12 249 (4.58%) Azure Data Factory
13 189 (3.47%) dbt
14 174 (3.20%) AWS CloudFormation
15 163 (3.00%) Amazon EKS
16 161 (2.96%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 158 (2.90%) OpenShift
18 157 (2.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 127 (2.33%) Amazon EC2
20 120 (2.21%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 216 (3.97%) Firewall
2 149 (2.74%) DNS
3 104 (1.91%) Network Security
4 101 (1.86%) WAN
5 99 (1.82%) BGP
6 91 (1.67%) TCP/IP
7 81 (1.49%) VPN
8 65 (1.19%) OSPF
9 58 (1.07%) HTTP
10 57 (1.05%) BIG-IP
10 57 (1.05%) SAN
11 50 (0.92%) SD-WAN
12 49 (0.90%) VXLAN
13 46 (0.85%) SSL
14 44 (0.81%) VLAN
15 38 (0.70%) Ethernet VPN
16 37 (0.68%) LAN
17 36 (0.66%) DHCP
17 36 (0.66%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 36 (0.66%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 454 (8.34%) Power BI
2 350 (6.43%) PostgreSQL
3 293 (5.39%) Data Warehouse
4 255 (4.69%) SQL Server
5 229 (4.21%) Data Lake
6 194 (3.57%) Tableau
7 186 (3.42%) Relational Database
8 169 (3.11%) Metadata
9 166 (3.05%) NoSQL
10 165 (3.03%) Big Data
11 140 (2.57%) Amazon Athena
12 136 (2.50%) BigQuery
13 132 (2.43%) Delta Lake
14 130 (2.39%) Amazon Redshift
15 122 (2.24%) MongoDB
16 98 (1.80%) DynamoDB
17 93 (1.71%) Amazon RDS
18 85 (1.56%) MySQL
19 73 (1.34%) Hadoop
19 73 (1.34%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 659 (12.11%) Git
2 492 (9.04%) Jenkins
3 384 (7.06%) GitLab
4 285 (5.24%) JIRA
5 75 (1.38%) MLflow
6 74 (1.36%) Selenium
7 58 (1.07%) Postman
8 36 (0.66%) JMeter
9 33 (0.61%) Cucumber
9 33 (0.61%) Cypress.io
10 32 (0.59%) Bitbucket
10 32 (0.59%) SonarQube
11 30 (0.55%) Artifactory
12 27 (0.50%) JUnit
12 27 (0.50%) REST Assured
13 26 (0.48%) Maven
13 26 (0.48%) Sonatype Nexus
14 21 (0.39%) Gatling
14 21 (0.39%) Robot Framework
15 19 (0.35%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,187 (21.82%) Social Skills
2 1,108 (20.36%) Finance
3 737 (13.55%) Analytical Skills
4 509 (9.35%) Public Sector
5 398 (7.31%) Banking
6 190 (3.49%) Front Office
7 138 (2.54%) Documentation Skills
8 122 (2.24%) Investment Banking
9 100 (1.84%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 74 (1.36%) Marketing
11 72 (1.32%) Retail
12 60 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
13 55 (1.01%) Legal
14 51 (0.94%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
15 44 (0.81%) Publishing
16 41 (0.75%) Financial Institution
17 37 (0.68%) Military
18 33 (0.61%) Manufacturing
19 30 (0.55%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 995 (18.29%) Developer
2 847 (15.57%) Data Engineer
3 817 (15.02%) Senior
4 516 (9.48%) Python Developer
5 351 (6.45%) Lead
6 342 (6.29%) Python Engineer
7 326 (5.99%) Architect
8 298 (5.48%) DevOps Engineer
9 282 (5.18%) Analyst
10 262 (4.82%) Software Engineer
11 249 (4.58%) AWS Engineer
12 237 (4.36%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 211 (3.88%) Data Scientist
14 178 (3.27%) Senior Developer
15 167 (3.07%) Senior Data Engineer
16 159 (2.92%) Platform Engineer
17 156 (2.87%) Full-Stack Developer
18 153 (2.81%) Azure Engineer
19 149 (2.74%) Cloud Engineer
20 146 (2.68%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 420 (7.72%) REST
2 381 (7.00%) React
3 365 (6.71%) PySpark
4 326 (5.99%) Kafka
5 247 (4.54%) .NET
6 218 (4.01%) Node.js
7 207 (3.80%) Pandas
8 202 (3.71%) RESTful
9 200 (3.68%) FastAPI
10 182 (3.34%) JSON
11 164 (3.01%) PyTorch
12 147 (2.70%) Django
13 128 (2.35%) Flask
14 125 (2.30%) NumPy
15 121 (2.22%) LangChain
16 114 (2.10%) TensorFlow
17 113 (2.08%) scikit-learn
18 112 (2.06%) AngularJS
19 109 (2.00%) OAuth
20 105 (1.93%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 669 (12.30%) Cloud Native
2 266 (4.89%) Distributed Systems
3 149 (2.74%) Algorithms
4 147 (2.70%) Data Centre
5 146 (2.68%) Onboarding
6 145 (2.66%) AI Agents
7 137 (2.52%) Product Ownership
8 127 (2.33%) Data Structures
9 116 (2.13%) Legacy Systems
10 115 (2.11%) Data Protection Act
11 112 (2.06%) Derivative
12 111 (2.04%) Management Information System
13 101 (1.86%) Equities
14 98 (1.80%) Fixed Income
14 98 (1.80%) Hybrid Cloud
15 93 (1.71%) Security Posture
16 88 (1.62%) Enterprise Software
17 70 (1.29%) Public Cloud
18 59 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
19 57 (1.05%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 624 (11.47%) Linux
2 299 (5.50%) Windows
3 223 (4.10%) Unix
4 116 (2.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 78 (1.43%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.79%) Ubuntu
7 29 (0.53%) VMS
8 26 (0.48%) AIX
8 26 (0.48%) Solaris
9 24 (0.44%) Android
10 20 (0.37%) CentOS
11 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
12 16 (0.29%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.22%) zOS
14 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.13%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 5 (0.092%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.092%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.092%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,061 (37.88%) CI/CD
2 1,492 (27.42%) DevOps
3 1,323 (24.32%) AI
4 1,170 (21.50%) Agile
5 1,079 (19.83%) Analytics
6 980 (18.01%) Infrastructure as Code
7 959 (17.63%) Data Pipeline
8 941 (17.29%) Problem-Solving
9 848 (15.59%) Machine Learning
10 755 (13.88%) Data Engineering
11 728 (13.38%) Data Modelling
12 718 (13.20%) Containerisation
13 699 (12.85%) ETL
14 680 (12.50%) Software Engineering
15 602 (11.06%) Data Science
16 593 (10.90%) Observability
17 546 (10.03%) Test Automation
18 532 (9.78%) Business Intelligence
19 501 (9.21%) LLM
20 455 (8.36%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,785 (32.81%) SQL
2 776 (14.26%) Java
3 650 (11.95%) PowerShell
4 596 (10.95%) Bash
5 469 (8.62%) JavaScript
6 379 (6.97%) TypeScript
7 341 (6.27%) C#
8 199 (3.66%) Go
9 163 (3.00%) R
10 146 (2.68%) C++
11 124 (2.28%) Scala
12 107 (1.97%) Shell Script
13 81 (1.49%) Perl
14 80 (1.47%) Bicep
15 65 (1.19%) Ruby
16 62 (1.14%) PL/SQL
17 58 (1.07%) T-SQL
18 55 (1.01%) C
19 51 (0.94%) Groovy
20 48 (0.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,218 (22.39%) Security Cleared
2 982 (18.05%) SC Cleared
3 391 (7.19%) Degree
4 159 (2.92%) DV Cleared
5 153 (2.81%) Computer Science Degree
6 133 (2.44%) BPSS Clearance
7 112 (2.06%) AWS Certification
7 112 (2.06%) Azure Certification
8 86 (1.58%) CISSP
9 72 (1.32%) Cisco Certification
10 69 (1.27%) Master's Degree
11 54 (0.99%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 50 (0.92%) CCNP
13 40 (0.74%) CISM
14 34 (0.62%) Microsoft Certification
15 33 (0.61%) ISTQB
15 33 (0.61%) PhD
16 30 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 23 (0.42%) CCIE
17 23 (0.42%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 546 (10.03%) Data Quality
2 230 (4.23%) QA
3 135 (2.48%) GDPR
4 111 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 107 (1.97%) NIST
6 80 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.64%) SLA
8 27 (0.50%) PCI DSS
9 26 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.44%) HIPAA
11 22 (0.40%) WCAG
12 19 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.29%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.28%) NCSC
15 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
17 9 (0.17%) GRC
18 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
19 6 (0.11%) PSD2
System Software
1 823 (15.13%) Docker
2 146 (2.68%) Active Directory
3 106 (1.95%) VMware Infrastructure
4 71 (1.30%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.74%) vSphere
6 39 (0.72%) VMware NSX
7 34 (0.62%) Firmware
8 31 (0.57%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.33%) NFS
11 16 (0.29%) KVM
12 13 (0.24%) Squid
13 12 (0.22%) Oracle RAC
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.17%) Ceph
15 9 (0.17%) HDFS
16 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.13%) Postfix
18 4 (0.074%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
18 4 (0.074%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,143 (21.01%) Terraform
2 970 (17.83%) Kubernetes
3 558 (10.26%) Ansible
4 334 (6.14%) Grafana
5 279 (5.13%) Prometheus
6 75 (1.38%) Puppet
7 60 (1.10%) Argo
8 54 (0.99%) Istio
9 46 (0.85%) vRealize
10 38 (0.70%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.59%) vCenter Server
12 30 (0.55%) Kibana
13 28 (0.51%) Single Sign-On
14 26 (0.48%) Control-M
15 25 (0.46%) Nessus
15 25 (0.46%) ZABBIX
16 24 (0.44%) Nagios
17 23 (0.42%) NetBackup
18 22 (0.40%) Microsoft Intune
19 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 592 (10.88%) Microsoft
2 568 (10.44%) Databricks
3 291 (5.35%) Google
4 252 (4.63%) Oracle
5 218 (4.01%) Splunk
6 173 (3.18%) VMware
7 137 (2.52%) OpenAI
8 126 (2.32%) Red Hat
9 124 (2.28%) Cisco
10 99 (1.82%) ServiceNow
11 85 (1.56%) Dynatrace
11 85 (1.56%) F5
12 84 (1.54%) CyberArk
13 80 (1.47%) Palo Alto
14 75 (1.38%) Informatica
15 74 (1.36%) BeyondTrust
15 74 (1.36%) IBM
16 56 (1.03%) Foundry
17 50 (0.92%) Arista
18 49 (0.90%) SAP