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

6 months to
21 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,594 4,282 4,141
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.29% 13.11% 10.79%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.71% 39.83% 33.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,640 2,777 2,870
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £441 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.29% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £700
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £500 £507
% change year-on-year +1.00% -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 140 83 102
10th Percentile £30.30 £28.19 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.13 £40.06
Median hourly rate £61.97 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +23.95% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £78.19 £58.13 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.21 £83.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -28.57% +7.69%

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 14,087 10,751 12,316
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 25.92% 32.92% 32.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,146 7,102 8,292
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £505 £528
Median % change year-on-year +3.47% -4.27% -4.09%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 557 290 346
10th Percentile £26.51 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £46.75 £40.31 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £78.88 £78.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 4,778 £550 +3.77% 11,798
London -4 2,822 £575 - 7,720
UK excluding London -8 2,139 £505 +1.00% 5,066
Work from Home -5 1,520 £529 -3.91% 4,336
North of England 0 736 £500 +5.15% 1,086
South East -5 456 £543 +8.50% 1,166
Yorkshire -2 376 £500 - 338
Scotland -4 291 £450 -10.00% 630
North West 0 283 £525 +11.94% 616
South West -2 279 £550 +4.76% 648
Midlands -23 218 £500 +5.26% 513
West Midlands -24 176 £500 - 304
East of England -14 149 £484 -7.86% 741
North East -5 87 £425 -8.11% 136
East Midlands -16 42 £475 +15.85% 209
Wales -10 26 £530 +29.27% 108
Northern Ireland +4 17 £363 -30.95% 208

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
1 290 (5.18%) Apache Airflow
2 273 (4.88%) Apache Spark
3 221 (3.95%) Apache
4 161 (2.88%) Confluence
5 58 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 55 (0.98%) SharePoint
7 36 (0.64%) SAS
8 30 (0.54%) OpenStack
9 25 (0.45%) nginx
10 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
11 21 (0.38%) IIS
11 21 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
12 8 (0.14%) CMS
12 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
14 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.089%) CICS
15 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 107 (1.91%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 18 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
5 16 (0.29%) CPLEX
6 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
8 2 (0.036%) 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%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 20 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
2 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
2 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
4 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
5 7 (0.13%) Front Arena
5 7 (0.13%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Summit
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Endur
9 3 (0.054%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Actimize
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,067 (36.95%) AWS
2 1,882 (33.64%) Azure
3 883 (15.78%) GCP
4 734 (13.12%) GitHub
5 488 (8.72%) Power Platform
6 484 (8.65%) Serverless
7 430 (7.69%) Azure DevOps
8 429 (7.67%) GitHub Actions
9 391 (6.99%) Amazon S3
10 360 (6.44%) AWS Lambda
11 336 (6.01%) Snowflake
12 238 (4.25%) dbt
13 209 (3.74%) Azure Data Factory
14 199 (3.56%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 185 (3.31%) AWS CloudFormation
16 180 (3.22%) Amazon EKS
17 166 (2.97%) Entra ID
18 143 (2.56%) Amazon EC2
19 126 (2.25%) Amazon ECS
19 126 (2.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 283 (5.06%) Firewall
2 209 (3.74%) DNS
3 156 (2.79%) Network Security
4 153 (2.74%) TCP/IP
5 127 (2.27%) BGP
6 126 (2.25%) VPN
7 115 (2.06%) WAN
8 87 (1.56%) DHCP
9 75 (1.34%) OSPF
10 72 (1.29%) SD-WAN
11 62 (1.11%) BIG-IP
12 59 (1.05%) VLAN
13 57 (1.02%) SSL
14 56 (1.00%) VXLAN
15 52 (0.93%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 52 (0.93%) HTTP
16 47 (0.84%) Ethernet VPN
17 40 (0.72%) Wireless
18 38 (0.68%) Broadband
18 38 (0.68%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 437 (7.81%) Power BI
2 327 (5.85%) Data Warehouse
3 310 (5.54%) PostgreSQL
4 219 (3.91%) Metadata
5 203 (3.63%) Relational Database
6 200 (3.58%) SQL Server
7 187 (3.34%) Data Lake
8 180 (3.22%) BigQuery
9 176 (3.15%) Tableau
10 152 (2.72%) NoSQL
11 137 (2.45%) Big Data
12 131 (2.34%) Amazon RDS
13 129 (2.31%) Amazon Redshift
14 127 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
15 118 (2.11%) Delta Lake
16 112 (2.00%) MongoDB
17 110 (1.97%) DynamoDB
18 97 (1.73%) MySQL
19 72 (1.29%) Redis
20 63 (1.13%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 800 (14.30%) Git
2 498 (8.90%) Jenkins
3 469 (8.38%) GitLab
4 305 (5.45%) JIRA
5 117 (2.09%) Selenium
6 60 (1.07%) Postman
7 57 (1.02%) SonarQube
8 56 (1.00%) Claude Code
8 56 (1.00%) JMeter
9 50 (0.89%) MLflow
10 44 (0.79%) Bitbucket
11 34 (0.61%) Maven
12 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
12 33 (0.59%) Cypress.io
13 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
13 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
13 32 (0.57%) Sonatype Nexus
14 28 (0.50%) Gatling
15 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
16 20 (0.36%) JUnit
General
1 1,311 (23.44%) Social Skills
2 1,251 (22.36%) Finance
3 853 (15.25%) Analytical Skills
4 540 (9.65%) Public Sector
5 496 (8.87%) Banking
6 173 (3.09%) Front Office
7 146 (2.61%) Investment Banking
8 112 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 111 (1.98%) Retail
10 106 (1.89%) Documentation Skills
11 95 (1.70%) Marketing
12 85 (1.52%) Telecoms
13 61 (1.09%) Military
14 53 (0.95%) Aerospace
14 53 (0.95%) Pharmaceutical
15 51 (0.91%) Law
16 47 (0.84%) Legal
17 43 (0.77%) Financial Institution
17 43 (0.77%) Publishing
18 40 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 987 (17.64%) Senior
2 882 (15.77%) Developer
3 817 (14.60%) Data Engineer
4 476 (8.51%) Lead
5 464 (8.29%) Python Developer
6 415 (7.42%) Python Engineer
7 349 (6.24%) DevOps Engineer
8 297 (5.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 289 (5.17%) Analyst
10 280 (5.01%) Software Engineer
11 258 (4.61%) Architect
12 227 (4.06%) AWS Engineer
13 195 (3.49%) Cloud Engineer
14 190 (3.40%) Senior Developer
15 189 (3.38%) Platform Engineer
15 189 (3.38%) Senior Data Engineer
16 186 (3.32%) Azure Engineer
17 181 (3.24%) Data Scientist
18 150 (2.68%) Network Engineer
19 140 (2.50%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,367 (24.44%) Terraform
2 513 (9.17%) REST
3 368 (6.58%) PySpark
4 361 (6.45%) Kafka
5 301 (5.38%) React
6 248 (4.43%) .NET
7 210 (3.75%) JSON
8 203 (3.63%) FastAPI
9 199 (3.56%) Django
10 186 (3.32%) RESTful
11 160 (2.86%) Node.js
12 157 (2.81%) Pandas
13 154 (2.75%) pytest
14 151 (2.70%) LangChain
15 124 (2.22%) OAuth
16 112 (2.00%) Flask
16 112 (2.00%) YAML
17 111 (1.98%) PyTorch
18 107 (1.91%) HTML
19 106 (1.89%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 784 (14.02%) Cloud Native
2 297 (5.31%) Distributed Systems
3 282 (5.04%) AI Agents
4 242 (4.33%) Onboarding
5 163 (2.91%) Data Centre
6 151 (2.70%) Product Ownership
7 145 (2.59%) Data Structures
8 133 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
9 126 (2.25%) Algorithms
10 108 (1.93%) Hybrid Cloud
11 106 (1.89%) Management Information System
12 103 (1.84%) Data Protection Act
12 103 (1.84%) Enterprise Software
13 97 (1.73%) Derivative
14 94 (1.68%) Security Posture
15 80 (1.43%) Public Cloud
16 79 (1.41%) Equities
17 71 (1.27%) PKI
18 70 (1.25%) Linux Command Line
19 68 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 755 (13.50%) Linux
2 339 (6.06%) Windows
3 246 (4.40%) Unix
4 157 (2.81%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 93 (1.66%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.82%) Ubuntu
7 40 (0.72%) VMS
8 23 (0.41%) CentOS
9 18 (0.32%) AIX
10 17 (0.30%) Solaris
11 16 (0.29%) 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 4 (0.072%) Debian
16 4 (0.072%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,324 (41.54%) CI/CD
2 1,604 (28.67%) DevOps
3 1,548 (27.67%) AI
4 1,284 (22.95%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,261 (22.54%) Agile
6 1,092 (19.52%) Analytics
7 981 (17.54%) Data Pipeline
8 930 (16.62%) Software Engineering
9 893 (15.96%) Problem-Solving
10 844 (15.09%) Machine Learning
11 827 (14.78%) Data Engineering
12 785 (14.03%) Containerisation
13 753 (13.46%) Observability
14 743 (13.28%) Data Modelling
15 664 (11.87%) Test Automation
16 651 (11.64%) ETL
17 645 (11.53%) Continuous Improvement
17 645 (11.53%) Validation
18 570 (10.19%) Platform Engineering
19 563 (10.06%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,822 (32.57%) SQL
2 804 (14.37%) Java
3 762 (13.62%) Bash
4 744 (13.30%) PowerShell
5 441 (7.88%) JavaScript
6 343 (6.13%) TypeScript
7 313 (5.60%) C#
8 220 (3.93%) Go
9 150 (2.68%) Shell Script
10 139 (2.48%) R
11 134 (2.40%) C++
12 130 (2.32%) Bicep
13 124 (2.22%) Scala
14 101 (1.81%) Perl
15 60 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 60 (1.07%) Groovy
16 57 (1.02%) C
17 52 (0.93%) Rust
18 50 (0.89%) PL/SQL
19 46 (0.82%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,356 (24.24%) Security Cleared
2 1,095 (19.57%) SC Cleared
3 412 (7.37%) Degree
4 239 (4.27%) DV Cleared
5 157 (2.81%) Azure Certification
6 149 (2.66%) Computer Science Degree
7 143 (2.56%) AWS Certification
8 121 (2.16%) BPSS Clearance
9 94 (1.68%) CISSP
10 82 (1.47%) Cisco Certification
11 66 (1.18%) Master's Degree
12 49 (0.88%) Microsoft Certification
13 40 (0.72%) CCNP
14 35 (0.63%) PhD
15 34 (0.61%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
16 30 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 30 (0.54%) CISM
16 30 (0.54%) ISTQB
17 29 (0.52%) CCIE
18 28 (0.50%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 631 (11.28%) Data Quality
2 317 (5.67%) QA
3 113 (2.02%) NIST
4 99 (1.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 90 (1.61%) GDPR
6 82 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 39 (0.70%) SLA
8 35 (0.63%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.52%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 22 (0.39%) WCAG
12 20 (0.36%) SOC 2
13 18 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 16 (0.29%) Disclosure Scotland
15 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
16 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.13%) MiFID
19 6 (0.11%) Basel III
19 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 957 (17.11%) Docker
2 173 (3.09%) Active Directory
3 134 (2.40%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.23%) Virtual Machines
5 51 (0.91%) Hyper-V
6 37 (0.66%) vSphere
7 34 (0.61%) VMware NSX
8 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
9 25 (0.45%) NFS
10 23 (0.41%) Firmware
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 8 (0.14%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) HDFS
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,149 (20.54%) Kubernetes
2 631 (11.28%) Ansible
3 325 (5.81%) Grafana
4 237 (4.24%) Prometheus
5 77 (1.38%) Puppet
6 70 (1.25%) Progress Chef
7 61 (1.09%) Argo
8 45 (0.80%) Single Sign-On
9 36 (0.64%) Kibana
10 33 (0.59%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 25 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
13 22 (0.39%) FortiGate
14 21 (0.38%) Packer
15 20 (0.36%) vRealize
15 20 (0.36%) ZABBIX
16 19 (0.34%) vCenter Server
17 18 (0.32%) Nagios
18 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
18 16 (0.29%) QRadar
Vendors
1 734 (13.12%) Microsoft
2 570 (10.19%) Databricks
3 388 (6.94%) Google
4 236 (4.22%) Oracle
5 205 (3.66%) Splunk
6 174 (3.11%) VMware
7 159 (2.84%) OpenAI
8 145 (2.59%) Cisco
9 129 (2.31%) ServiceNow
10 100 (1.79%) Dynatrace
11 97 (1.73%) Red Hat
12 93 (1.66%) IBM
13 91 (1.63%) F5
14 90 (1.61%) Palo Alto
15 84 (1.50%) Foundry
16 73 (1.30%) Fortinet
17 71 (1.27%) Informatica
18 70 (1.25%) SAP
19 66 (1.18%) CyberArk
20 59 (1.05%) Salesforce