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

6 months to
5 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,633 4,244 3,985
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.44% 13.05% 10.49%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.00% 39.83% 33.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,679 2,796 2,834
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £440 £432 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 136 83 101
10th Percentile £30.25 £28.19 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.48 £35.13 £40.06
Median hourly rate £60.81 £50.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +21.62% -19.35% -4.62%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.88 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.00 £84.59 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -28.57% +14.29%

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 14,083 10,655 12,041
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.10% 32.76% 31.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,158 7,073 8,289
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £528
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -5.12% -4.09%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £743 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 525 295 346
10th Percentile £28.00 £29.00 £28.88
25th Percentile £47.50 £37.23 £46.20
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.60 £80.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +3.17%

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 September 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 September 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 September 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 4,812 £550 +2.33% 6,478
London -3 2,865 £575 -1.71% 4,255
UK excluding London -7 2,121 £500 - 3,083
Work from Home -6 1,539 £530 -3.64% 2,346
North of England 0 731 £500 +5.26% 590
South East -11 442 £538 +7.50% 792
Yorkshire -1 374 £500 +2.30% 174
South West -3 283 £550 +4.76% 447
North West -3 277 £525 +10.53% 335
Scotland -4 277 £450 -10.00% 372
Midlands -21 228 £500 +5.26% 289
West Midlands -21 185 £500 +5.26% 154
East of England -10 146 £500 -4.76% 446
North East -3 92 £425 -2.86% 84
East Midlands -18 43 £478 +15.18% 132
Wales -9 29 £530 +30.86% 68
Northern Ireland +4 17 £363 -30.95% 117

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
1 291 (5.17%) Apache Airflow
2 273 (4.85%) Apache Spark
3 222 (3.94%) Apache
4 160 (2.84%) Confluence
5 56 (0.99%) Jupyter
6 51 (0.91%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.67%) SAS
8 30 (0.53%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 21 (0.37%) nginx
12 19 (0.34%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
14 8 (0.14%) WebSphere
15 7 (0.12%) Apache Superset
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
17 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 111 (1.97%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
5 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
5 18 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
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 19 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
2 17 (0.30%) Aladdin
2 17 (0.30%) Remedy ITSM
3 11 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) Front Arena
5 7 (0.12%) Remedy AR System
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.089%) Summit
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Endur
9 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) BambooHR
10 2 (0.036%) R3 Corda
10 2 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 2,080 (36.93%) AWS
2 1,912 (33.94%) Azure
3 855 (15.18%) GCP
4 742 (13.17%) GitHub
5 494 (8.77%) Power Platform
6 492 (8.73%) Serverless
7 456 (8.10%) Azure DevOps
8 430 (7.63%) GitHub Actions
9 398 (7.07%) Amazon S3
10 368 (6.53%) AWS Lambda
11 329 (5.84%) Snowflake
12 230 (4.08%) dbt
13 223 (3.96%) Azure Data Factory
14 192 (3.41%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 180 (3.20%) AWS CloudFormation
16 171 (3.04%) Amazon EKS
17 143 (2.54%) Entra ID
18 136 (2.41%) Amazon EC2
19 135 (2.40%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 130 (2.31%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 278 (4.94%) Firewall
2 214 (3.80%) DNS
3 148 (2.63%) TCP/IP
4 143 (2.54%) Network Security
5 126 (2.24%) BGP
6 123 (2.18%) VPN
7 113 (2.01%) WAN
8 87 (1.54%) DHCP
9 74 (1.31%) OSPF
10 67 (1.19%) SD-WAN
11 61 (1.08%) VLAN
12 58 (1.03%) BIG-IP
13 57 (1.01%) SSL
14 53 (0.94%) HTTP
14 53 (0.94%) VXLAN
15 49 (0.87%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 40 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
16 40 (0.71%) SAN
16 40 (0.71%) SNMP
17 38 (0.67%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 444 (7.88%) Power BI
2 328 (5.82%) Data Warehouse
3 318 (5.65%) PostgreSQL
4 218 (3.87%) SQL Server
5 211 (3.75%) Metadata
6 206 (3.66%) Relational Database
7 190 (3.37%) Data Lake
8 189 (3.36%) Tableau
9 164 (2.91%) BigQuery
10 156 (2.77%) NoSQL
11 142 (2.52%) Big Data
12 133 (2.36%) Amazon Redshift
13 129 (2.29%) Amazon Athena
13 129 (2.29%) Amazon RDS
14 125 (2.22%) Delta Lake
15 121 (2.15%) MongoDB
16 110 (1.95%) DynamoDB
17 96 (1.70%) MySQL
18 73 (1.30%) Redis
19 66 (1.17%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 763 (13.55%) Git
2 495 (8.79%) Jenkins
3 452 (8.02%) GitLab
4 292 (5.18%) JIRA
5 111 (1.97%) Selenium
6 63 (1.12%) JMeter
7 56 (0.99%) Postman
8 55 (0.98%) MLflow
8 55 (0.98%) SonarQube
9 49 (0.87%) Claude Code
10 40 (0.71%) Bitbucket
11 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
11 35 (0.62%) Maven
12 33 (0.59%) Gatling
13 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
14 31 (0.55%) Sonatype Nexus
15 30 (0.53%) Artifactory
16 27 (0.48%) LoadRunner
17 19 (0.34%) JUnit
General
1 1,291 (22.92%) Social Skills
2 1,220 (21.66%) Finance
3 848 (15.05%) Analytical Skills
4 555 (9.85%) Public Sector
5 466 (8.27%) Banking
6 182 (3.23%) Front Office
7 142 (2.52%) Investment Banking
8 115 (2.04%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 111 (1.97%) Retail
11 93 (1.65%) Marketing
12 80 (1.42%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.05%) Military
14 58 (1.03%) Pharmaceutical
15 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
16 50 (0.89%) Legal
17 48 (0.85%) Law
18 45 (0.80%) Financial Institution
18 45 (0.80%) Publishing
19 42 (0.75%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 959 (17.02%) Senior
2 912 (16.19%) Developer
3 831 (14.75%) Data Engineer
4 481 (8.54%) Python Developer
5 480 (8.52%) Lead
6 417 (7.40%) Python Engineer
7 339 (6.02%) DevOps Engineer
8 292 (5.18%) Analyst
9 283 (5.02%) Software Engineer
10 276 (4.90%) Architect
11 274 (4.86%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 229 (4.07%) AWS Engineer
13 194 (3.44%) Platform Engineer
14 193 (3.43%) Data Scientist
15 191 (3.39%) Senior Developer
16 190 (3.37%) Cloud Engineer
17 183 (3.25%) Senior Data Engineer
18 180 (3.20%) Azure Engineer
19 144 (2.56%) Data Analyst
20 136 (2.41%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,337 (23.74%) Terraform
2 490 (8.70%) REST
3 381 (6.76%) PySpark
4 361 (6.41%) Kafka
5 311 (5.52%) React
6 252 (4.47%) .NET
7 213 (3.78%) JSON
8 206 (3.66%) Django
9 204 (3.62%) FastAPI
10 187 (3.32%) RESTful
11 171 (3.04%) Pandas
12 165 (2.93%) Node.js
13 147 (2.61%) pytest
14 140 (2.49%) LangChain
15 117 (2.08%) PyTorch
16 116 (2.06%) Flask
17 114 (2.02%) OAuth
17 114 (2.02%) YAML
18 110 (1.95%) HTML
19 103 (1.83%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 792 (14.06%) Cloud Native
2 311 (5.52%) Distributed Systems
3 250 (4.44%) AI Agents
4 226 (4.01%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.88%) Product Ownership
6 158 (2.80%) Data Centre
7 142 (2.52%) Data Structures
8 139 (2.47%) Algorithms
9 137 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
10 117 (2.08%) Hybrid Cloud
11 110 (1.95%) Management Information System
12 106 (1.88%) Data Protection Act
12 106 (1.88%) Derivative
13 92 (1.63%) Enterprise Software
14 84 (1.49%) Equities
15 82 (1.46%) Security Posture
16 73 (1.30%) Public Cloud
17 70 (1.24%) Linux Command Line
18 65 (1.15%) PKI
19 64 (1.14%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 748 (13.28%) Linux
2 332 (5.89%) Windows
3 251 (4.46%) Unix
4 151 (2.68%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.60%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.62%) VMS
8 24 (0.43%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 18 (0.32%) CentOS
11 16 (0.28%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.089%) Debian
17 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,278 (40.44%) CI/CD
2 1,618 (28.72%) DevOps
3 1,512 (26.84%) AI
4 1,257 (22.31%) Agile
5 1,234 (21.91%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,102 (19.56%) Analytics
7 993 (17.63%) Data Pipeline
8 911 (16.17%) Software Engineering
9 904 (16.05%) Problem-Solving
10 856 (15.20%) Machine Learning
11 813 (14.43%) Data Engineering
12 788 (13.99%) Containerisation
13 749 (13.30%) Data Modelling
14 729 (12.94%) Observability
15 650 (11.54%) Test Automation
16 648 (11.50%) ETL
17 615 (10.92%) Continuous Improvement
18 599 (10.63%) Validation
19 569 (10.10%) Data Science
20 563 (9.99%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,847 (32.79%) SQL
2 824 (14.63%) Java
3 767 (13.62%) Bash
4 737 (13.08%) PowerShell
5 446 (7.92%) JavaScript
6 338 (6.00%) TypeScript
7 322 (5.72%) C#
8 194 (3.44%) Go
9 153 (2.72%) Shell Script
10 150 (2.66%) R
11 140 (2.49%) C++
12 137 (2.43%) Bicep
13 133 (2.36%) Scala
14 98 (1.74%) Perl
15 60 (1.07%) Groovy
16 58 (1.03%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 55 (0.98%) C
17 55 (0.98%) PL/SQL
17 55 (0.98%) Ruby
18 53 (0.94%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,352 (24.00%) Security Cleared
2 1,096 (19.46%) SC Cleared
3 413 (7.33%) Degree
4 229 (4.07%) DV Cleared
5 158 (2.80%) Computer Science Degree
6 147 (2.61%) Azure Certification
7 136 (2.41%) AWS Certification
8 121 (2.15%) BPSS Clearance
9 94 (1.67%) CISSP
10 84 (1.49%) Cisco Certification
11 64 (1.14%) Master's Degree
12 44 (0.78%) Microsoft Certification
13 42 (0.75%) CCNP
14 36 (0.64%) ISTQB
14 36 (0.64%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 34 (0.60%) CISM
16 33 (0.59%) PhD
17 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 28 (0.50%) DBS Check
19 27 (0.48%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 621 (11.02%) Data Quality
2 293 (5.20%) QA
3 113 (2.01%) NIST
4 106 (1.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 97 (1.72%) GDPR
6 81 (1.44%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.62%) SLA
8 32 (0.57%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.51%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) WCAG
11 23 (0.41%) PCI DSS
12 22 (0.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
14 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
15 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
16 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
18 6 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.11%) GRC
18 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 954 (16.94%) Docker
2 166 (2.95%) Active Directory
3 137 (2.43%) VMware Infrastructure
4 64 (1.14%) Virtual Machines
5 51 (0.91%) Hyper-V
6 40 (0.71%) vSphere
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
9 24 (0.43%) Firmware
10 23 (0.41%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Squid
12 11 (0.20%) Ceph
12 11 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 7 (0.12%) Postfix
14 7 (0.12%) zsh
15 6 (0.11%) HDFS
15 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
16 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,131 (20.08%) Kubernetes
2 621 (11.02%) Ansible
3 335 (5.95%) Grafana
4 240 (4.26%) Prometheus
5 79 (1.40%) Puppet
6 72 (1.28%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.19%) Argo
8 34 (0.60%) Istio
9 33 (0.59%) Single Sign-On
10 31 (0.55%) Kibana
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 24 (0.43%) ZABBIX
13 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) Nagios
13 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.39%) vRealize
15 20 (0.36%) FortiGate
16 19 (0.34%) Packer
17 16 (0.28%) HAProxy
17 16 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 720 (12.78%) Microsoft
2 580 (10.30%) Databricks
3 373 (6.62%) Google
4 249 (4.42%) Oracle
5 214 (3.80%) Splunk
6 180 (3.20%) VMware
7 148 (2.63%) OpenAI
8 139 (2.47%) Cisco
9 119 (2.11%) ServiceNow
10 102 (1.81%) Red Hat
11 101 (1.79%) Dynatrace
12 94 (1.67%) IBM
13 89 (1.58%) F5
14 84 (1.49%) Palo Alto
15 78 (1.38%) Informatica
16 75 (1.33%) Foundry
17 72 (1.28%) Fortinet
18 68 (1.21%) SAP
19 66 (1.17%) CyberArk
20 62 (1.10%) Salesforce