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

6 months to
15 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,693 4,203 4,062
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.82% 12.95% 9.50%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.22% 39.04% 30.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,733 2,839 2,961
10th Percentile £366 £363 £375
25th Percentile £425 £437 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £531 £555
Median % change year-on-year -1.18% -4.28% -7.50%
75th Percentile £626 £650 £700
90th Percentile £738 £798 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £503
% change year-on-year - -0.65% -4.14%
Number of hourly rates quoted 128 71 120
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.74
25th Percentile £42.19 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £53.50 £50.00 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year +7.00% -18.03% -6.15%
75th Percentile £73.25 £57.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.25
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 14,155 10,767 13,141
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.90% 33.18% 30.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,201 7,257 9,267
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £511 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.14% -3.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.05% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 539 266 519
10th Percentile £34.01 £27.45 £31.25
25th Percentile £52.25 £35.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.25 £65.00
% change year-on-year +2.77% -2.69% +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 15 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 15 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 15 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 -3 4,752 £526 -4.45% 3,629
London -4 2,734 £550 -4.35% 1,343
UK excluding London -3 2,244 £500 - 3,097
Work from Home -5 1,602 £525 -4.55% 2,441
North of England +6 785 £491 +2.29% 677
South East -7 445 £537 +7.40% 749
Yorkshire +1 424 £500 +1.46% 216
Scotland +4 326 £438 -7.89% 299
North West +6 285 £525 +10.53% 348
South West 0 280 £500 -9.09% 378
Midlands -13 255 £476 +5.78% 367
West Midlands -16 205 £475 +5.56% 193
East of England -14 133 £500 -0.50% 390
North East +5 89 £425 -2.86% 116
East Midlands -7 49 £485 +8.50% 173
Wales -7 31 £500 +11.11% 148
Northern Ireland +14 28 £369 -35.16% 126

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
1 287 (5.04%) Apache Spark
2 269 (4.73%) Apache Airflow
3 210 (3.69%) Apache
4 179 (3.14%) Confluence
5 53 (0.93%) SAS
6 52 (0.91%) Jupyter
7 49 (0.86%) SharePoint
8 28 (0.49%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.42%) nginx
10 20 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
11 19 (0.33%) ArcGIS
12 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.21%) IIS
14 11 (0.19%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
15 8 (0.14%) CMS
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.088%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 122 (2.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 30 (0.53%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
4 26 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 23 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 19 (0.33%) Spreadsheet
7 14 (0.25%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
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 24 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.088%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.088%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.035%) Endur
10 2 (0.035%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.035%) Global One
10 2 (0.035%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.035%) Remedy AR System
Cloud Services
1 2,113 (37.12%) AWS
2 1,893 (33.25%) Azure
3 833 (14.63%) GCP
4 689 (12.10%) GitHub
5 527 (9.26%) Power Platform
6 487 (8.55%) Serverless
7 430 (7.55%) Amazon S3
8 405 (7.11%) Azure DevOps
9 383 (6.73%) GitHub Actions
10 365 (6.41%) AWS Lambda
11 293 (5.15%) Snowflake
12 237 (4.16%) Azure Data Factory
13 217 (3.81%) dbt
14 194 (3.41%) AWS CloudFormation
15 178 (3.13%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 177 (3.11%) Amazon EKS
17 159 (2.79%) OpenShift
18 153 (2.69%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 134 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
20 128 (2.25%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 257 (4.51%) Firewall
2 185 (3.25%) DNS
3 128 (2.25%) BGP
4 125 (2.20%) TCP/IP
5 124 (2.18%) Network Security
6 119 (2.09%) WAN
7 108 (1.90%) VPN
8 80 (1.41%) OSPF
9 59 (1.04%) DHCP
10 57 (1.00%) VLAN
11 56 (0.98%) BIG-IP
11 56 (0.98%) HTTP
11 56 (0.98%) SAN
11 56 (0.98%) SD-WAN
12 51 (0.90%) VXLAN
13 48 (0.84%) SSL
14 46 (0.81%) LAN
15 45 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 44 (0.77%) MPLS
17 43 (0.76%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 465 (8.17%) Power BI
2 360 (6.32%) PostgreSQL
3 322 (5.66%) Data Warehouse
4 244 (4.29%) SQL Server
5 207 (3.64%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.51%) Tableau
7 193 (3.39%) Relational Database
8 181 (3.18%) Metadata
9 165 (2.90%) Big Data
10 160 (2.81%) NoSQL
11 151 (2.65%) BigQuery
12 140 (2.46%) Amazon Athena
12 140 (2.46%) Amazon Redshift
13 126 (2.21%) MongoDB
14 124 (2.18%) Delta Lake
15 109 (1.91%) Amazon RDS
15 109 (1.91%) DynamoDB
16 90 (1.58%) MySQL
17 76 (1.33%) Hadoop
17 76 (1.33%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 698 (12.26%) Git
2 511 (8.98%) Jenkins
3 406 (7.13%) GitLab
4 315 (5.53%) JIRA
5 84 (1.48%) Selenium
6 70 (1.23%) MLflow
7 54 (0.95%) Postman
8 41 (0.72%) Bitbucket
9 39 (0.69%) JMeter
10 36 (0.63%) Cypress.io
11 35 (0.61%) SonarQube
12 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.56%) REST Assured
14 31 (0.54%) Artifactory
15 29 (0.51%) JUnit
16 27 (0.47%) Sonatype Nexus
17 26 (0.46%) Claude Code
17 26 (0.46%) Maven
18 24 (0.42%) Gatling
19 18 (0.32%) Zephyr
General
1 1,223 (21.48%) Social Skills
2 1,179 (20.71%) Finance
3 775 (13.61%) Analytical Skills
4 556 (9.77%) Public Sector
5 426 (7.48%) Banking
6 203 (3.57%) Front Office
7 129 (2.27%) Documentation Skills
7 129 (2.27%) Investment Banking
8 112 (1.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 94 (1.65%) Retail
10 84 (1.48%) Marketing
11 64 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
12 63 (1.11%) Telecoms
13 58 (1.02%) Legal
14 49 (0.86%) Financial Institution
15 46 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
15 46 (0.81%) Military
15 46 (0.81%) Publishing
16 35 (0.61%) Manufacturing
17 29 (0.51%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,002 (17.60%) Developer
2 887 (15.58%) Senior
3 858 (15.07%) Data Engineer
4 529 (9.29%) Python Developer
5 424 (7.45%) Lead
6 391 (6.87%) Python Engineer
7 333 (5.85%) DevOps Engineer
8 312 (5.48%) Architect
9 307 (5.39%) Software Engineer
10 286 (5.02%) Analyst
11 256 (4.50%) AWS Engineer
12 244 (4.29%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 221 (3.88%) Data Scientist
14 186 (3.27%) Platform Engineer
15 179 (3.14%) Cloud Engineer
16 177 (3.11%) Senior Developer
17 173 (3.04%) Azure Engineer
18 172 (3.02%) Senior Data Engineer
19 144 (2.53%) Data Analyst
20 138 (2.42%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 411 (7.22%) REST
2 371 (6.52%) React
3 364 (6.39%) PySpark
4 349 (6.13%) Kafka
5 245 (4.30%) .NET
6 219 (3.85%) Node.js
7 215 (3.78%) FastAPI
8 213 (3.74%) RESTful
9 201 (3.53%) Pandas
10 195 (3.43%) JSON
11 172 (3.02%) Django
12 157 (2.76%) PyTorch
13 138 (2.42%) LangChain
14 124 (2.18%) NumPy
15 121 (2.13%) Flask
16 109 (1.91%) scikit-learn
17 106 (1.86%) TensorFlow
18 105 (1.84%) OAuth
19 100 (1.76%) pytest
20 99 (1.74%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 754 (13.24%) Cloud Native
2 309 (5.43%) Distributed Systems
3 186 (3.27%) Onboarding
4 176 (3.09%) AI Agents
5 158 (2.78%) Data Centre
6 146 (2.56%) Algorithms
7 145 (2.55%) Product Ownership
8 128 (2.25%) Legacy Systems
9 127 (2.23%) Data Structures
10 119 (2.09%) Data Protection Act
11 113 (1.98%) Derivative
12 112 (1.97%) Hybrid Cloud
13 110 (1.93%) Management Information System
14 104 (1.83%) Fixed Income
15 96 (1.69%) Equities
16 80 (1.41%) Security Posture
17 76 (1.33%) Public Cloud
18 64 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
19 63 (1.11%) Linux Command Line
20 61 (1.07%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 682 (11.98%) Linux
2 318 (5.59%) Windows
3 219 (3.85%) Unix
4 130 (2.28%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 75 (1.32%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.69%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.56%) VMS
8 26 (0.46%) AIX
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 18 (0.32%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 8 (0.14%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Debian
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,169 (38.10%) CI/CD
2 1,576 (27.68%) DevOps
3 1,384 (24.31%) AI
4 1,273 (22.36%) Agile
5 1,140 (20.02%) Analytics
6 1,072 (18.83%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,013 (17.79%) Data Pipeline
8 929 (16.32%) Problem-Solving
9 909 (15.97%) Machine Learning
10 807 (14.18%) Data Engineering
11 806 (14.16%) Software Engineering
12 776 (13.63%) Containerisation
13 756 (13.28%) Data Modelling
14 694 (12.19%) ETL
15 649 (11.40%) Observability
16 638 (11.21%) Data Science
17 587 (10.31%) Test Automation
18 543 (9.54%) Business Intelligence
19 523 (9.19%) LLM
20 507 (8.91%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,823 (32.02%) SQL
2 808 (14.19%) Java
3 699 (12.28%) Bash
4 682 (11.98%) PowerShell
5 467 (8.20%) JavaScript
6 402 (7.06%) TypeScript
7 332 (5.83%) C#
8 219 (3.85%) Go
9 164 (2.88%) R
10 138 (2.42%) C++
11 131 (2.30%) Scala
12 126 (2.21%) Shell Script
13 92 (1.62%) Bicep
14 74 (1.30%) Perl
15 58 (1.02%) PL/SQL
16 57 (1.00%) Ruby
17 56 (0.98%) C
18 55 (0.97%) Groovy
19 54 (0.95%) Rust
20 51 (0.90%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,277 (22.43%) Security Cleared
2 1,021 (17.93%) SC Cleared
3 426 (7.48%) Degree
4 190 (3.34%) DV Cleared
5 157 (2.76%) Computer Science Degree
6 141 (2.48%) BPSS Clearance
7 131 (2.30%) AWS Certification
8 121 (2.13%) Azure Certification
9 93 (1.63%) CISSP
10 88 (1.55%) Cisco Certification
11 83 (1.46%) Master's Degree
12 58 (1.02%) CCNP
13 50 (0.88%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 38 (0.67%) CISM
15 35 (0.61%) Microsoft Certification
15 35 (0.61%) PhD
16 32 (0.56%) CCIE
16 32 (0.56%) ISTQB
17 31 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 24 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 555 (9.75%) Data Quality
2 251 (4.41%) QA
3 124 (2.18%) GDPR
4 109 (1.91%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 109 (1.91%) NIST
5 93 (1.63%) Accessibility
6 33 (0.58%) SLA
7 26 (0.46%) WCAG
8 23 (0.40%) HIPAA
8 23 (0.40%) NCSC
8 23 (0.40%) PCI DSS
9 21 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
10 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
11 13 (0.23%) SOC 2
12 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
13 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 9 (0.16%) GRC
14 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 894 (15.70%) Docker
2 130 (2.28%) Active Directory
3 122 (2.14%) VMware Infrastructure
4 77 (1.35%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.79%) vSphere
6 40 (0.70%) VMware NSX
7 37 (0.65%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.53%) Firmware
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.33%) NFS
11 15 (0.26%) KVM
11 15 (0.26%) Oracle RAC
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 11 (0.19%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
17 4 (0.070%) OpenSSH
17 4 (0.070%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,236 (21.71%) Terraform
2 1,061 (18.64%) Kubernetes
3 603 (10.59%) Ansible
4 359 (6.31%) Grafana
5 285 (5.01%) Prometheus
6 79 (1.39%) Puppet
7 71 (1.25%) Argo
8 51 (0.90%) Progress Chef
9 42 (0.74%) Istio
10 40 (0.70%) vRealize
11 38 (0.67%) vCenter Server
12 31 (0.54%) Kibana
13 27 (0.47%) Control-M
13 27 (0.47%) ZABBIX
14 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
14 26 (0.46%) Nagios
14 26 (0.46%) Nessus
15 23 (0.40%) Single Sign-On
16 20 (0.35%) FortiGate
17 19 (0.33%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 647 (11.36%) Microsoft
2 561 (9.85%) Databricks
3 327 (5.74%) Google
4 257 (4.51%) Oracle
5 213 (3.74%) Splunk
6 177 (3.11%) VMware
7 146 (2.56%) Cisco
8 145 (2.55%) OpenAI
9 112 (1.97%) ServiceNow
10 108 (1.90%) Red Hat
11 97 (1.70%) F5
12 90 (1.58%) Palo Alto
13 87 (1.53%) Dynatrace
14 83 (1.46%) Informatica
15 82 (1.44%) IBM
16 69 (1.21%) Fortinet
17 64 (1.12%) CyberArk
18 63 (1.11%) Foundry
19 56 (0.98%) Arista
19 56 (0.98%) SAP