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

6 months to
15 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,207 3,926 3,974
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.36% 13.40% 9.13%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.61% 39.29% 31.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,530 2,755 2,827
10th Percentile £363 £384 £400
25th Percentile £419 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £623 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £812 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 54 102
10th Percentile £29.15 £21.25 £20.87
25th Percentile £45.03 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £43.50 £50.25
Median % change year-on-year +26.44% -13.43% -22.69%
75th Percentile £74.26 £58.75 £66.94
90th Percentile £83.75 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £48.75 £51.25
% change year-on-year +7.69% -4.88% -21.15%

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 12,822 9,993 12,735
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.96% 34.11% 29.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,525 6,745 9,051
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £418 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £477 £488
% change year-on-year -0.42% -2.15% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 550 242 473
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.55 £30.75
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.38 £68.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% -

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 April 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 April 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 April 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 4,391 £520 -6.31% 2,491
London -3 2,492 £550 -8.33% 1,008
UK excluding London -3 1,983 £481 -3.75% 1,937
Work from Home 0 1,519 £525 -4.55% 860
North of England +9 666 £481 -1.99% 465
South East -5 410 £500 -4.76% 573
Yorkshire 0 369 £475 -5.00% 171
Midlands -1 275 £492 +7.36% 260
North West +2 252 £500 +2.88% 222
Scotland +1 247 £425 -10.53% 101
South West -1 241 £500 -9.09% 239
West Midlands -6 213 £498 +0.51% 134
East of England +1 132 £500 -0.25% 235
East Midlands -10 61 £450 +5.88% 125
North East +6 54 £475 -2.56% 74
Wales -15 27 £475 -10.80% 62
Northern Ireland +11 24 £463 -7.50% 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
1 281 (5.40%) Apache Spark
2 210 (4.03%) Apache Airflow
3 159 (3.05%) Apache
4 158 (3.03%) Confluence
5 70 (1.34%) SAS
6 58 (1.11%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.54%) Jupyter
8 27 (0.52%) nginx
9 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
10 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.29%) Appian
13 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
14 11 (0.21%) Camunda
15 9 (0.17%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.13%) CMS
17 4 (0.077%) CICS
17 4 (0.077%) Tomcat
18 3 (0.058%) IBM HTTP Server
18 3 (0.058%) IIS
Applications
1 137 (2.63%) Microsoft Excel
2 25 (0.48%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 23 (0.44%) MS Visio
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 6 (0.12%) CPLEX
5 6 (0.12%) Weka
6 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 8 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
5 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
5 5 (0.096%) SAP IBP
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.058%) Actimize
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
9 1 (0.019%) Salesforce CRM
9 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 2,013 (38.66%) AWS
2 1,795 (34.47%) Azure
3 776 (14.90%) GCP
4 680 (13.06%) GitHub
5 529 (10.16%) Power Platform
6 499 (9.58%) Serverless
7 398 (7.64%) Azure DevOps
8 382 (7.34%) Amazon S3
9 362 (6.95%) AWS Lambda
10 346 (6.64%) GitHub Actions
11 275 (5.28%) Azure Data Factory
12 240 (4.61%) AWS CloudFormation
13 230 (4.42%) Snowflake
14 180 (3.46%) Amazon EKS
15 173 (3.32%) OpenShift
16 167 (3.21%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 159 (3.05%) Amazon ECS
18 149 (2.86%) dbt
19 145 (2.78%) Amazon EC2
20 137 (2.63%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 198 (3.80%) Firewall
2 138 (2.65%) DNS
3 112 (2.15%) Network Security
4 93 (1.79%) TCP/IP
5 79 (1.52%) BGP
6 76 (1.46%) VPN
7 62 (1.19%) WAN
8 60 (1.15%) HTTP
9 47 (0.90%) OSPF
10 43 (0.83%) SAN
11 42 (0.81%) MPLS
12 36 (0.69%) VLAN
13 35 (0.67%) LAN
14 33 (0.63%) DHCP
15 32 (0.61%) SNMP
16 30 (0.58%) VXLAN
17 29 (0.56%) SSL
18 26 (0.50%) Wireshark
19 25 (0.48%) SD-WAN
20 22 (0.42%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 441 (8.47%) Power BI
2 347 (6.66%) PostgreSQL
3 297 (5.70%) Data Warehouse
4 239 (4.59%) Data Lake
5 220 (4.23%) SQL Server
6 200 (3.84%) NoSQL
7 188 (3.61%) Tableau
8 182 (3.50%) Relational Database
9 161 (3.09%) Metadata
10 153 (2.94%) Big Data
11 131 (2.52%) BigQuery
11 131 (2.52%) Delta Lake
12 118 (2.27%) Amazon Redshift
13 116 (2.23%) Amazon Athena
14 110 (2.11%) Amazon RDS
15 101 (1.94%) MongoDB
16 100 (1.92%) MySQL
17 92 (1.77%) Azure SQL Database
18 89 (1.71%) DynamoDB
19 80 (1.54%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 658 (12.64%) Git
2 504 (9.68%) Jenkins
3 386 (7.41%) GitLab
4 283 (5.43%) JIRA
5 98 (1.88%) Selenium
6 89 (1.71%) MLflow
7 55 (1.06%) Postman
8 43 (0.83%) Bitbucket
8 43 (0.83%) Cucumber
9 40 (0.77%) JUnit
10 36 (0.69%) JMeter
11 35 (0.67%) Sonatype Nexus
12 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
13 27 (0.52%) Cypress.io
14 26 (0.50%) SonarQube
15 25 (0.48%) Artifactory
16 24 (0.46%) Visual Studio
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
18 21 (0.40%) Maven
18 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,192 (22.89%) Social Skills
2 979 (18.80%) Finance
3 715 (13.73%) Analytical Skills
4 495 (9.51%) Public Sector
5 369 (7.09%) Banking
6 163 (3.13%) Front Office
7 131 (2.52%) Documentation Skills
8 81 (1.56%) Investment Banking
9 67 (1.29%) Marketing
10 61 (1.17%) Retail
11 60 (1.15%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 59 (1.13%) Legal
13 56 (1.08%) Telecoms
14 55 (1.06%) Pharmaceutical
15 53 (1.02%) Influencing Skills
16 41 (0.79%) Manufacturing
17 39 (0.75%) Financial Institution
18 31 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
19 29 (0.56%) Publishing
20 27 (0.52%) Military
Job Titles
1 973 (18.69%) Developer
2 774 (14.86%) Data Engineer
3 742 (14.25%) Senior
4 470 (9.03%) Python Developer
5 352 (6.76%) Architect
6 336 (6.45%) Lead
7 284 (5.45%) Python Engineer
8 275 (5.28%) DevOps Engineer
9 274 (5.26%) Analyst
10 254 (4.88%) Software Engineer
11 242 (4.65%) AWS Engineer
12 232 (4.46%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 212 (4.07%) Data Scientist
14 188 (3.61%) Platform Engineer
15 164 (3.15%) Senior Developer
16 162 (3.11%) Azure Engineer
17 150 (2.88%) Senior Data Engineer
18 138 (2.65%) Data Analyst
19 134 (2.57%) Full-Stack Developer
20 119 (2.29%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 442 (8.49%) REST
2 360 (6.91%) React
3 344 (6.61%) PySpark
4 330 (6.34%) Kafka
5 284 (5.45%) Node.js
6 235 (4.51%) Pandas
7 228 (4.38%) .NET
8 193 (3.71%) PyTorch
9 184 (3.53%) RESTful
10 180 (3.46%) FastAPI
11 156 (3.00%) JSON
12 154 (2.96%) NumPy
13 148 (2.84%) TensorFlow
14 146 (2.80%) scikit-learn
15 127 (2.44%) Flask
16 124 (2.38%) AngularJS
17 121 (2.32%) Django
17 121 (2.32%) LangChain
18 112 (2.15%) pytest
19 110 (2.11%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 496 (9.53%) Cloud Native
2 213 (4.09%) Distributed Systems
3 179 (3.44%) Algorithms
4 151 (2.90%) Product Ownership
5 117 (2.25%) AI Agents
6 116 (2.23%) Data Protection Act
7 111 (2.13%) Fixed Income
8 110 (2.11%) Data Structures
9 109 (2.09%) Equities
10 103 (1.98%) Derivative
11 100 (1.92%) Data Centre
12 98 (1.88%) Onboarding
13 92 (1.77%) Enterprise Software
14 88 (1.69%) Legacy Systems
15 87 (1.67%) Hybrid Cloud
16 83 (1.59%) Management Information System
17 82 (1.57%) Security Posture
18 76 (1.46%) Public Cloud
19 51 (0.98%) Virtual Team
20 49 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 657 (12.62%) Linux
2 302 (5.80%) Windows
3 186 (3.57%) Unix
4 101 (1.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 68 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.73%) VMS
7 34 (0.65%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.54%) Android
9 21 (0.40%) AIX
9 21 (0.40%) Mac OS
10 17 (0.33%) CentOS
10 17 (0.33%) Solaris
11 16 (0.31%) Apple iOS
12 8 (0.15%) Debian
12 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
13 6 (0.12%) Windows 7
13 6 (0.12%) zOS
14 5 (0.096%) Rocky
15 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2016
15 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,909 (36.66%) CI/CD
2 1,431 (27.48%) DevOps
3 1,192 (22.89%) Agile
4 1,141 (21.91%) AI
5 1,063 (20.41%) Analytics
6 1,017 (19.53%) Problem-Solving
7 905 (17.38%) Infrastructure as Code
8 864 (16.59%) Data Pipeline
9 809 (15.54%) Machine Learning
10 742 (14.25%) Containerisation
11 707 (13.58%) Data Engineering
12 703 (13.50%) Data Modelling
13 692 (13.29%) ETL
14 625 (12.00%) Data Science
15 597 (11.47%) Software Engineering
16 583 (11.20%) Test Automation
17 522 (10.02%) Business Intelligence
18 516 (9.91%) Observability
19 432 (8.30%) LLM
20 404 (7.76%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,697 (32.59%) SQL
2 760 (14.60%) Java
3 658 (12.64%) PowerShell
4 574 (11.02%) Bash
5 496 (9.53%) JavaScript
6 358 (6.88%) C#
7 351 (6.74%) TypeScript
8 206 (3.96%) Go
9 169 (3.25%) R
10 156 (3.00%) C++
11 140 (2.69%) Scala
12 102 (1.96%) Shell Script
13 101 (1.94%) Ruby
14 95 (1.82%) Perl
15 80 (1.54%) Bicep
16 53 (1.02%) Kusto Query Language
17 52 (1.00%) C
17 52 (1.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 48 (0.92%) T-SQL
19 42 (0.81%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,237 (23.76%) Security Cleared
2 1,009 (19.38%) SC Cleared
3 402 (7.72%) Degree
4 181 (3.48%) Computer Science Degree
5 140 (2.69%) DV Cleared
6 138 (2.65%) BPSS Clearance
7 108 (2.07%) AWS Certification
8 104 (2.00%) Azure Certification
9 93 (1.79%) Master's Degree
10 91 (1.75%) CISSP
11 77 (1.48%) Cisco Certification
12 60 (1.15%) CCNP
13 58 (1.11%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 44 (0.85%) CISM
15 43 (0.83%) PhD
16 35 (0.67%) ISTQB
17 34 (0.65%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 34 (0.65%) Microsoft Certification
18 27 (0.52%) CCNA
19 26 (0.50%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 516 (9.91%) Data Quality
2 216 (4.15%) QA
3 171 (3.28%) GDPR
4 113 (2.17%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 102 (1.96%) NIST
6 80 (1.54%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 31 (0.60%) SLA
9 28 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 25 (0.48%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) NCSC
12 18 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) WCAG
14 14 (0.27%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.21%) ISO 20022
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
18 7 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 870 (16.71%) Docker
2 165 (3.17%) Active Directory
3 114 (2.19%) VMware Infrastructure
4 63 (1.21%) Virtual Machines
5 52 (1.00%) vSphere
6 50 (0.96%) VMware NSX
7 31 (0.60%) Firmware
7 31 (0.60%) Hyper-V
8 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
9 13 (0.25%) HDFS
10 12 (0.23%) KVM
11 9 (0.17%) SRDF
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
12 8 (0.15%) Lustre
13 7 (0.13%) GPFS
13 7 (0.13%) NFS
13 7 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
13 7 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 7 (0.13%) Virtual Servers
14 6 (0.12%) Postfix
Systems Management
1 1,109 (21.30%) Terraform
2 980 (18.82%) Kubernetes
3 504 (9.68%) Ansible
4 327 (6.28%) Grafana
5 274 (5.26%) Prometheus
6 83 (1.59%) Argo
7 71 (1.36%) Puppet
8 53 (1.02%) Istio
9 47 (0.90%) vRealize
10 45 (0.86%) Kibana
11 39 (0.75%) vCenter Server
12 32 (0.61%) Progress Chef
13 25 (0.48%) Nessus
14 21 (0.40%) Nagios
14 21 (0.40%) Rancher
14 21 (0.40%) Single Sign-On
15 20 (0.38%) Control-M
15 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
15 20 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
15 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 620 (11.91%) Microsoft
2 575 (11.04%) Databricks
3 282 (5.42%) Google
4 219 (4.21%) Splunk
5 214 (4.11%) Oracle
6 205 (3.94%) VMware
7 135 (2.59%) Red Hat
8 132 (2.54%) Cisco
9 123 (2.36%) OpenAI
10 96 (1.84%) ServiceNow
11 88 (1.69%) CyberArk
12 75 (1.44%) BeyondTrust
13 65 (1.25%) Foundry
14 64 (1.23%) Informatica
15 59 (1.13%) F5
15 59 (1.13%) IBM
16 55 (1.06%) Palo Alto
17 49 (0.94%) Dynatrace
18 45 (0.86%) SAP
19 42 (0.81%) Atlassian