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

6 months to
30 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,563 4,018 4,121
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.84% 13.13% 9.55%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.27% 38.90% 31.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,653 2,733 2,951
10th Percentile £363 £369 £375
25th Percentile £425 £440 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £560
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -4.02% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £656 £700
90th Percentile £738 £800 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 63 123
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.87
25th Percentile £42.88 £33.91 £34.38
Median hourly rate £54.00 £45.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -27.42% -4.62%
75th Percentile £69.00 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £63.10 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.25 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +4.50% -25.93% +11.48%

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 13,814 10,330 13,186
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.92% 33.76% 30.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,966 6,970 9,253
10th Percentile £359 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £511 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.10% -2.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 546 249 540
10th Percentile £34.07 £26.21 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.48 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% +1.46%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.75 £80.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.25 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.42% -4.23% +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 30 June 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 30 June 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 30 June 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 -2 4,645 £525 -4.55% 2,167
London -3 2,669 £550 -4.35% 1,016
UK excluding London -1 2,178 £500 - 1,622
Work from Home -2 1,580 £525 -4.55% 812
North of England +10 789 £488 +1.56% 357
Yorkshire +2 432 £500 - 112
South East -6 427 £525 +3.96% 570
Scotland +3 313 £440 -7.37% 98
North West +4 279 £491 +3.37% 183
South West -3 260 £500 -9.09% 195
Midlands -14 238 £476 +3.70% 195
West Midlands -16 190 £472 -0.63% 103
East of England -13 130 £500 -0.50% 173
North East +9 90 £450 +5.88% 65
East Midlands -13 47 £495 +10.31% 92
Wales -10 30 £483 +6.04% 44
Northern Ireland +12 29 £375 -36.17% 20

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
1 284 (5.11%) Apache Spark
2 258 (4.64%) Apache Airflow
3 194 (3.49%) Apache
4 168 (3.02%) Confluence
5 55 (0.99%) Jupyter
6 51 (0.92%) SAS
7 50 (0.90%) SharePoint
8 24 (0.43%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.38%) nginx
10 19 (0.34%) Palantir Foundry
11 17 (0.31%) ArcGIS
12 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.22%) IIS
14 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.13%) Appian
16 7 (0.13%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) CMS
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 117 (2.10%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.58%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 23 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 21 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
7 14 (0.25%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.072%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.036%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.018%) SPSS
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
10 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.40%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.38%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.20%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.054%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.036%) Endur
10 2 (0.036%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.036%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,078 (37.35%) AWS
2 1,863 (33.49%) Azure
3 825 (14.83%) GCP
4 659 (11.85%) GitHub
5 522 (9.38%) Power Platform
6 484 (8.70%) Serverless
7 408 (7.33%) Amazon S3
8 396 (7.12%) Azure DevOps
9 358 (6.44%) AWS Lambda
10 353 (6.35%) GitHub Actions
11 279 (5.02%) Snowflake
12 242 (4.35%) Azure Data Factory
13 205 (3.69%) dbt
14 180 (3.24%) AWS CloudFormation
15 164 (2.95%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 163 (2.93%) Amazon EKS
17 158 (2.84%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 158 (2.84%) OpenShift
18 130 (2.34%) Amazon EC2
19 122 (2.19%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 239 (4.30%) Firewall
2 164 (2.95%) DNS
3 118 (2.12%) Network Security
4 117 (2.10%) BGP
5 114 (2.05%) WAN
6 106 (1.91%) TCP/IP
7 98 (1.76%) VPN
8 74 (1.33%) OSPF
9 59 (1.06%) BIG-IP
10 56 (1.01%) SD-WAN
11 55 (0.99%) HTTP
11 55 (0.99%) SAN
12 50 (0.90%) VXLAN
13 49 (0.88%) VLAN
14 48 (0.86%) DHCP
15 47 (0.84%) SSL
16 43 (0.77%) LAN
17 41 (0.74%) MPLS
18 40 (0.72%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
19 39 (0.70%) Ethernet VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 461 (8.29%) Power BI
2 356 (6.40%) PostgreSQL
3 312 (5.61%) Data Warehouse
4 252 (4.53%) SQL Server
5 216 (3.88%) Data Lake
6 199 (3.58%) Tableau
7 195 (3.51%) Relational Database
8 170 (3.06%) NoSQL
9 169 (3.04%) Metadata
10 158 (2.84%) Big Data
11 142 (2.55%) BigQuery
12 141 (2.53%) Amazon Athena
13 139 (2.50%) Amazon Redshift
14 132 (2.37%) Delta Lake
15 125 (2.25%) MongoDB
16 103 (1.85%) DynamoDB
17 98 (1.76%) Amazon RDS
18 91 (1.64%) MySQL
19 76 (1.37%) Snowflake Schema
20 73 (1.31%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 671 (12.06%) Git
2 500 (8.99%) Jenkins
3 398 (7.15%) GitLab
4 305 (5.48%) JIRA
5 78 (1.40%) Selenium
6 77 (1.38%) MLflow
7 60 (1.08%) Postman
8 38 (0.68%) JMeter
9 36 (0.65%) Cypress.io
10 34 (0.61%) Bitbucket
11 33 (0.59%) SonarQube
12 32 (0.58%) Artifactory
13 31 (0.56%) Cucumber
14 29 (0.52%) REST Assured
15 28 (0.50%) JUnit
15 28 (0.50%) Sonatype Nexus
16 27 (0.49%) Maven
17 23 (0.41%) Claude Code
17 23 (0.41%) Gatling
18 19 (0.34%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,207 (21.70%) Social Skills
2 1,158 (20.82%) Finance
3 746 (13.41%) Analytical Skills
4 525 (9.44%) Public Sector
5 416 (7.48%) Banking
6 199 (3.58%) Front Office
7 137 (2.46%) Documentation Skills
8 128 (2.30%) Investment Banking
9 109 (1.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 86 (1.55%) Retail
11 79 (1.42%) Marketing
12 61 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
13 60 (1.08%) Legal
13 60 (1.08%) Telecoms
14 49 (0.88%) Financial Institution
15 46 (0.83%) Influencing Skills
15 46 (0.83%) Publishing
16 39 (0.70%) Military
17 34 (0.61%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 996 (17.90%) Developer
2 865 (15.55%) Data Engineer
3 831 (14.94%) Senior
4 528 (9.49%) Python Developer
5 385 (6.92%) Lead
6 370 (6.65%) Python Engineer
7 318 (5.72%) Architect
8 306 (5.50%) DevOps Engineer
9 289 (5.20%) Software Engineer
10 280 (5.03%) Analyst
11 250 (4.49%) AWS Engineer
12 247 (4.44%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 219 (3.94%) Data Scientist
14 172 (3.09%) Azure Engineer
15 170 (3.06%) Platform Engineer
15 170 (3.06%) Senior Data Engineer
16 168 (3.02%) Senior Developer
17 161 (2.89%) Cloud Engineer
18 148 (2.66%) Full-Stack Developer
19 139 (2.50%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 409 (7.35%) REST
2 378 (6.79%) PySpark
3 376 (6.76%) React
4 337 (6.06%) Kafka
5 248 (4.46%) .NET
6 214 (3.85%) Node.js
7 208 (3.74%) FastAPI
7 208 (3.74%) RESTful
8 201 (3.61%) Pandas
9 188 (3.38%) JSON
10 167 (3.00%) Django
11 166 (2.98%) PyTorch
12 134 (2.41%) LangChain
13 125 (2.25%) Flask
14 124 (2.23%) NumPy
15 116 (2.09%) scikit-learn
16 113 (2.03%) TensorFlow
17 111 (2.00%) OAuth
18 99 (1.78%) AngularJS
18 99 (1.78%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 717 (12.89%) Cloud Native
2 287 (5.16%) Distributed Systems
3 160 (2.88%) Onboarding
4 158 (2.84%) AI Agents
5 153 (2.75%) Data Centre
6 150 (2.70%) Algorithms
7 145 (2.61%) Product Ownership
8 128 (2.30%) Data Structures
9 122 (2.19%) Legacy Systems
10 116 (2.09%) Management Information System
11 115 (2.07%) Data Protection Act
12 108 (1.94%) Derivative
13 106 (1.91%) Hybrid Cloud
14 99 (1.78%) Fixed Income
15 96 (1.73%) Equities
16 83 (1.49%) Security Posture
17 75 (1.35%) Public Cloud
18 64 (1.15%) Enterprise Software
19 60 (1.08%) Self-Motivation
20 58 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 646 (11.61%) Linux
2 307 (5.52%) Windows
3 223 (4.01%) Unix
4 122 (2.19%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 77 (1.38%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.58%) VMS
8 26 (0.47%) AIX
9 23 (0.41%) Android
10 20 (0.36%) Solaris
11 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
11 17 (0.31%) CentOS
12 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.22%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.13%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 5 (0.090%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.090%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.090%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,097 (37.70%) CI/CD
2 1,530 (27.50%) DevOps
3 1,371 (24.64%) AI
4 1,231 (22.13%) Agile
5 1,115 (20.04%) Analytics
6 1,014 (18.23%) Infrastructure as Code
7 993 (17.85%) Data Pipeline
8 927 (16.66%) Problem-Solving
9 879 (15.80%) Machine Learning
10 795 (14.29%) Data Engineering
11 752 (13.52%) Containerisation
12 740 (13.30%) Software Engineering
13 734 (13.19%) Data Modelling
14 700 (12.58%) ETL
15 630 (11.32%) Data Science
16 602 (10.82%) Observability
17 568 (10.21%) Test Automation
18 544 (9.78%) Business Intelligence
19 523 (9.40%) LLM
20 470 (8.45%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,805 (32.45%) SQL
2 781 (14.04%) Java
3 647 (11.63%) PowerShell
4 641 (11.52%) Bash
5 464 (8.34%) JavaScript
6 393 (7.06%) TypeScript
7 338 (6.08%) C#
8 210 (3.77%) Go
9 160 (2.88%) R
10 139 (2.50%) C++
11 128 (2.30%) Scala
12 112 (2.01%) Shell Script
13 86 (1.55%) Bicep
14 73 (1.31%) Perl
15 61 (1.10%) Ruby
16 57 (1.02%) PL/SQL
17 54 (0.97%) C
17 54 (0.97%) Groovy
18 52 (0.93%) T-SQL
19 50 (0.90%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,238 (22.25%) Security Cleared
2 999 (17.96%) SC Cleared
3 417 (7.50%) Degree
4 168 (3.02%) DV Cleared
5 157 (2.82%) Computer Science Degree
6 131 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
7 119 (2.14%) AWS Certification
8 113 (2.03%) Azure Certification
9 97 (1.74%) CISSP
10 84 (1.51%) Cisco Certification
11 72 (1.29%) Master's Degree
12 56 (1.01%) CCNP
13 52 (0.93%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 39 (0.70%) CISM
15 34 (0.61%) PhD
16 33 (0.59%) ISTQB
16 33 (0.59%) Microsoft Certification
17 31 (0.56%) CCIE
18 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 21 (0.38%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 548 (9.85%) Data Quality
2 235 (4.22%) QA
3 131 (2.35%) GDPR
4 114 (2.05%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 112 (2.01%) NIST
6 82 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 32 (0.58%) SLA
8 25 (0.45%) PCI DSS
9 24 (0.43%) HIPAA
10 23 (0.41%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 22 (0.40%) WCAG
12 18 (0.32%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.29%) NCSC
14 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
16 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.18%) GRC
16 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 854 (15.35%) Docker
2 125 (2.25%) Active Directory
3 107 (1.92%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.72%) vSphere
6 38 (0.68%) VMware NSX
7 32 (0.58%) Firmware
8 30 (0.54%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 16 (0.29%) KVM
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.22%) Squid
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) Ceph
16 8 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.13%) HDFS
17 7 (0.13%) Postfix
18 5 (0.090%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
19 4 (0.072%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,188 (21.36%) Terraform
2 1,013 (18.21%) Kubernetes
3 574 (10.32%) Ansible
4 327 (5.88%) Grafana
5 272 (4.89%) Prometheus
6 73 (1.31%) Puppet
7 54 (0.97%) Argo
8 46 (0.83%) Istio
9 43 (0.77%) vRealize
10 41 (0.74%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.59%) Kibana
12 32 (0.58%) vCenter Server
13 26 (0.47%) Control-M
14 25 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
14 25 (0.45%) Nessus
14 25 (0.45%) ZABBIX
15 24 (0.43%) Nagios
15 24 (0.43%) Single Sign-On
16 21 (0.38%) HAProxy
17 20 (0.36%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 624 (11.22%) Microsoft
2 578 (10.39%) Databricks
3 315 (5.66%) Google
4 246 (4.42%) Oracle
5 214 (3.85%) Splunk
6 166 (2.98%) VMware
7 146 (2.62%) OpenAI
8 134 (2.41%) Cisco
9 115 (2.07%) Red Hat
10 108 (1.94%) ServiceNow
11 89 (1.60%) F5
12 88 (1.58%) Palo Alto
13 85 (1.53%) Dynatrace
14 84 (1.51%) Informatica
15 78 (1.40%) IBM
16 66 (1.19%) CyberArk
17 61 (1.10%) Fortinet
18 58 (1.04%) Foundry
19 54 (0.97%) Arista
20 52 (0.93%) BeyondTrust