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

6 months to
5 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,892 3,978 4,124
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.50% 12.77% 9.27%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.23% 37.98% 31.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,292 2,623 2,918
10th Percentile £358 £385 £400
25th Percentile £415 £463 £471
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £516 £550 £551
Median % change year-on-year -6.18% -0.09% -8.25%
75th Percentile £638 £676 £675
90th Percentile £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -6.29% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 102 56 115
10th Percentile £30.00 £20.68 £26.84
25th Percentile £41.25 £25.21 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.86 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.23% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £69.69 £66.26 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.80 £83.75 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.09 £62.50
% change year-on-year +6.49% -23.06% -4.58%

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 11,865 10,473 13,104
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.31% 33.63% 29.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,864 6,624 9,291
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.33% -4.44%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -2.36% -1.35% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 462 238 513
10th Percentile £39.64 £21.25 £35.54
25th Percentile £52.50 £36.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.00
90th Percentile £77.45 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -3.85%

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 5 February 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 5 February 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 5 February 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 0 4,105 £523 -9.13% 2,722
London 0 2,329 £550 -8.33% 1,262
UK excluding London 0 1,901 £492 -6.29% 1,972
Work from Home -1 1,464 £525 -4.55% 1,192
North of England +11 622 £475 -7.59% 454
South East +1 412 £488 -11.36% 648
Yorkshire +5 323 £500 -6.98% 157
Midlands +1 287 £506 +4.65% 219
Scotland +1 277 £457 -4.24% 152
North West +10 257 £450 -10.00% 245
West Midlands +6 244 £515 +0.49% 105
South West -5 191 £550 -10.20% 268
East of England +2 130 £525 +5.00% 200
North East +5 47 £475 -12.84% 55
East Midlands -15 43 £444 +12.91% 114
Wales -12 30 £523 +4.50% 44
Northern Ireland +4 28 £600 +14.29% 21

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
1 233 (4.76%) Apache Spark
2 204 (4.17%) Apache Airflow
3 159 (3.25%) Apache
4 149 (3.05%) Confluence
5 63 (1.29%) SharePoint
6 62 (1.27%) SAS
7 33 (0.67%) OpenStack
8 32 (0.65%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.63%) nginx
10 22 (0.45%) Jupyter
11 21 (0.43%) Appian
11 21 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
12 13 (0.27%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.18%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.16%) Camunda
15 7 (0.14%) IIS
16 6 (0.12%) CMS
16 6 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
16 6 (0.12%) Tomcat
17 5 (0.10%) Luigi
Applications
1 128 (2.62%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.57%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 17 (0.35%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 7 (0.14%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 3 (0.061%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.061%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.041%) Maya
10 2 (0.041%) NUKE
11 1 (0.020%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.33%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.20%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
4 8 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.061%) Actimize
5 3 (0.061%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.041%) Bloomberg AIM
6 2 (0.041%) Cloudability
6 2 (0.041%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.041%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.041%) Shopify
6 2 (0.041%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.020%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.020%) Exchequer
7 1 (0.020%) IntelliMatch
7 1 (0.020%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.020%) RMDS
7 1 (0.020%) SAP IBP
7 1 (0.020%) TRIRIGA
7 1 (0.020%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,906 (38.96%) AWS
2 1,618 (33.07%) Azure
3 765 (15.64%) GCP
4 622 (12.71%) GitHub
5 520 (10.63%) Serverless
6 448 (9.16%) Power Platform
7 366 (7.48%) Amazon S3
8 342 (6.99%) AWS Lambda
9 329 (6.73%) Azure DevOps
10 324 (6.62%) GitHub Actions
11 246 (5.03%) AWS CloudFormation
12 243 (4.97%) Snowflake
13 226 (4.62%) Azure Data Factory
14 177 (3.62%) Amazon EC2
15 176 (3.60%) Amazon EKS
16 173 (3.54%) Amazon ECS
17 167 (3.41%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 149 (3.05%) OpenShift
19 142 (2.90%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 139 (2.84%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 227 (4.64%) Firewall
2 147 (3.00%) DNS
3 126 (2.58%) Network Security
4 116 (2.37%) TCP/IP
5 77 (1.57%) VPN
6 72 (1.47%) HTTP
7 68 (1.39%) BGP
8 57 (1.17%) WAN
9 52 (1.06%) SSL
10 44 (0.90%) LAN
11 41 (0.84%) Wireshark
12 40 (0.82%) MPLS
13 39 (0.80%) OSPF
14 32 (0.65%) DHCP
15 31 (0.63%) Wireless
16 26 (0.53%) SD-WAN
16 26 (0.53%) SSH
16 26 (0.53%) VLAN
17 23 (0.47%) BIG-IP
18 22 (0.45%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 373 (7.62%) PostgreSQL
2 372 (7.60%) Power BI
3 285 (5.83%) Data Warehouse
4 229 (4.68%) NoSQL
5 222 (4.54%) Data Lake
6 211 (4.31%) Relational Database
7 175 (3.58%) SQL Server
8 163 (3.33%) Big Data
9 153 (3.13%) Tableau
10 151 (3.09%) Amazon RDS
11 125 (2.56%) MySQL
12 116 (2.37%) Metadata
13 113 (2.31%) BigQuery
14 102 (2.09%) Amazon Redshift
15 88 (1.80%) Hadoop
16 87 (1.78%) Amazon Athena
16 87 (1.78%) Delta Lake
17 84 (1.72%) MongoDB
18 79 (1.61%) Elasticsearch
19 76 (1.55%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 598 (12.22%) Git
2 542 (11.08%) Jenkins
3 421 (8.61%) GitLab
4 281 (5.74%) JIRA
5 84 (1.72%) MLflow
6 83 (1.70%) Selenium
7 50 (1.02%) Cucumber
8 46 (0.94%) Sonatype Nexus
9 45 (0.92%) Postman
10 43 (0.88%) Bitbucket
11 37 (0.76%) JUnit
12 35 (0.72%) SonarQube
13 33 (0.67%) JMeter
14 29 (0.59%) Maven
15 27 (0.55%) CircleCI
15 27 (0.55%) Visual Studio
16 26 (0.53%) Liquibase
17 25 (0.51%) Cypress.io
17 25 (0.51%) SpecFlow
18 24 (0.49%) Artifactory
General
1 1,294 (26.45%) Social Skills
2 946 (19.34%) Finance
3 686 (14.02%) Analytical Skills
4 433 (8.85%) Public Sector
5 426 (8.71%) Banking
6 162 (3.31%) Front Office
7 123 (2.51%) Documentation Skills
8 118 (2.41%) Investment Banking
9 68 (1.39%) Financial Institution
10 61 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 61 (1.25%) Marketing
10 61 (1.25%) Pharmaceutical
10 61 (1.25%) Retail
11 54 (1.10%) Telecoms
12 43 (0.88%) Legal
13 42 (0.86%) Presentation Skills
14 40 (0.82%) Manufacturing
15 39 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
16 30 (0.61%) Military
17 23 (0.47%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 863 (17.64%) Developer
2 671 (13.72%) Senior
3 650 (13.29%) Data Engineer
4 368 (7.52%) Python Developer
5 314 (6.42%) Architect
6 310 (6.34%) DevOps Engineer
7 297 (6.07%) Python Engineer
8 279 (5.70%) Analyst
9 265 (5.42%) Lead
10 261 (5.34%) AWS Engineer
11 233 (4.76%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 221 (4.52%) Software Engineer
13 190 (3.88%) Data Scientist
14 176 (3.60%) Platform Engineer
15 147 (3.00%) Senior Developer
16 140 (2.86%) Data Analyst
17 137 (2.80%) Azure Engineer
18 131 (2.68%) Senior Data Engineer
19 123 (2.51%) Cloud Engineer
19 123 (2.51%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 420 (8.59%) REST
2 319 (6.52%) React
3 288 (5.89%) Kafka
4 281 (5.74%) PySpark
5 249 (5.09%) Node.js
6 220 (4.50%) Pandas
7 214 (4.37%) RESTful
8 213 (4.35%) FastAPI
9 204 (4.17%) PyTorch
10 197 (4.03%) .NET
11 167 (3.41%) NumPy
11 167 (3.41%) TensorFlow
12 134 (2.74%) AngularJS
13 126 (2.58%) LangChain
14 119 (2.43%) Flask
14 119 (2.43%) scikit-learn
15 116 (2.37%) pytest
16 108 (2.21%) Elastic Stack
17 105 (2.15%) OAuth
18 104 (2.13%) Django
Miscellaneous
1 433 (8.85%) Cloud Native
2 199 (4.07%) Algorithms
3 187 (3.82%) Distributed Systems
4 136 (2.78%) Product Ownership
5 128 (2.62%) Data Protection Act
6 121 (2.47%) Equities
7 104 (2.13%) Onboarding
8 101 (2.06%) Data Structures
9 99 (2.02%) AI Agents
10 97 (1.98%) Enterprise Software
11 95 (1.94%) Derivative
12 85 (1.74%) Legacy Systems
13 84 (1.72%) Public Cloud
14 83 (1.70%) Fixed Income
15 82 (1.68%) Hybrid Cloud
15 82 (1.68%) Management Information System
15 82 (1.68%) Security Posture
16 78 (1.59%) Data Centre
17 77 (1.57%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
18 68 (1.39%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 756 (15.45%) Linux
2 350 (7.15%) Windows
3 218 (4.46%) Unix
4 92 (1.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.27%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.80%) Android
7 38 (0.78%) Ubuntu
8 36 (0.74%) VMS
9 28 (0.57%) CentOS
10 26 (0.53%) Solaris
11 24 (0.49%) Mac OS
12 22 (0.45%) Apple iOS
13 13 (0.27%) Amazon Linux
14 11 (0.22%) Windows 7
15 10 (0.20%) Kali Linux
16 5 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.10%) Windows 10
17 4 (0.082%) Debian
17 4 (0.082%) Robot Operating System
17 4 (0.082%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,746 (35.69%) CI/CD
2 1,352 (27.64%) DevOps
3 1,154 (23.59%) Agile
4 1,061 (21.69%) Problem-Solving
5 1,028 (21.01%) AI
6 877 (17.93%) Analytics
7 876 (17.91%) Infrastructure as Code
8 781 (15.96%) Machine Learning
9 739 (15.11%) Containerisation
10 737 (15.07%) Data Pipeline
11 613 (12.53%) ETL
12 601 (12.29%) Data Engineering
13 588 (12.02%) Data Science
14 572 (11.69%) Data Modelling
15 547 (11.18%) Test Automation
16 531 (10.85%) Software Engineering
17 432 (8.83%) Observability
18 422 (8.63%) Business Intelligence
19 412 (8.42%) LLM
20 357 (7.30%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,491 (30.48%) SQL
2 725 (14.82%) Java
3 671 (13.72%) PowerShell
4 609 (12.45%) Bash
5 499 (10.20%) JavaScript
6 315 (6.44%) C#
7 304 (6.21%) TypeScript
8 229 (4.68%) Go
9 199 (4.07%) C++
10 155 (3.17%) R
11 140 (2.86%) Perl
11 140 (2.86%) Shell Script
12 124 (2.53%) Scala
13 94 (1.92%) Ruby
14 60 (1.23%) Bicep
14 60 (1.23%) Kusto Query Language
15 56 (1.14%) C
16 53 (1.08%) VBA
17 43 (0.88%) PHP
18 38 (0.78%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,083 (22.14%) Security Cleared
2 875 (17.89%) SC Cleared
3 444 (9.08%) Degree
4 228 (4.66%) Computer Science Degree
5 137 (2.80%) DV Cleared
6 132 (2.70%) AWS Certification
7 127 (2.60%) Master's Degree
8 96 (1.96%) BPSS Clearance
9 93 (1.90%) Azure Certification
10 90 (1.84%) CISSP
11 74 (1.51%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (1.10%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (1.02%) CCNP
14 46 (0.94%) PhD
15 39 (0.80%) CISM
16 37 (0.76%) CEH
17 34 (0.70%) CCIE
18 33 (0.67%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 33 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
19 32 (0.65%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 408 (8.34%) Data Quality
2 184 (3.76%) QA
3 171 (3.50%) GDPR
4 98 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 97 (1.98%) NIST
6 65 (1.33%) Accessibility
7 33 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.61%) HIPAA
9 29 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.49%) SLA
11 23 (0.47%) NCSC
12 20 (0.41%) SOC 2
13 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
14 12 (0.25%) Actionable Recommendations
15 10 (0.20%) Cyber Essentials
15 10 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.20%) WCAG
16 9 (0.18%) MiFID
16 9 (0.18%) PMO
17 8 (0.16%) EMIR
System Software
1 949 (19.40%) Docker
2 183 (3.74%) Active Directory
3 122 (2.49%) VMware Infrastructure
4 49 (1.00%) VMware NSX
5 46 (0.94%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.94%) vSphere
6 26 (0.53%) Hyper-V
7 23 (0.47%) Firmware
8 20 (0.41%) HDFS
9 17 (0.35%) KVM
10 14 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
11 13 (0.27%) Squid
12 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 11 (0.22%) Postfix
14 10 (0.20%) DFS Replication
14 10 (0.20%) Lustre
15 9 (0.18%) GPFS
16 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
17 7 (0.14%) Dovecot
18 6 (0.12%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,087 (22.22%) Terraform
2 1,029 (21.03%) Kubernetes
3 557 (11.39%) Ansible
4 352 (7.20%) Grafana
5 302 (6.17%) Prometheus
6 88 (1.80%) Argo
7 74 (1.51%) Puppet
8 57 (1.17%) Kibana
9 51 (1.04%) vRealize
10 40 (0.82%) Istio
11 39 (0.80%) Nessus
12 34 (0.70%) Single Sign-On
13 27 (0.55%) NetBackup
13 27 (0.55%) Progress Chef
14 24 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
15 22 (0.45%) vCenter Server
16 21 (0.43%) Control-M
17 20 (0.41%) ITRS Geneos
18 19 (0.39%) logstash
19 18 (0.37%) Nmap
Vendors
1 602 (12.31%) Microsoft
2 460 (9.40%) Databricks
3 298 (6.09%) Google
4 246 (5.03%) Splunk
5 231 (4.72%) Oracle
6 226 (4.62%) VMware
7 138 (2.82%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.47%) Cisco
9 115 (2.35%) OpenAI
10 114 (2.33%) ServiceNow
11 93 (1.90%) CyberArk
12 77 (1.57%) Foundry
13 75 (1.53%) F5
13 75 (1.53%) Palo Alto
14 69 (1.41%) BeyondTrust
15 45 (0.92%) SAP
16 44 (0.90%) IBM
16 44 (0.90%) Informatica
17 42 (0.86%) Atlassian
18 41 (0.84%) Dynatrace