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

6 months to
7 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 10 12
Rank change year-on-year -5 +2 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,672 4,408 4,145
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.33% 13.35% 11.01%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.49% 40.61% 34.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,691 2,842 2,822
10th Percentile £375 £358 £363
25th Percentile £442 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £640 £700
90th Percentile £750 £750 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £500 £510
% change year-on-year +1.00% -1.96% -2.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 129 89 97
10th Percentile £35.85 £28.25 £20.80
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.00 £40.06
Median hourly rate £62.40 £50.00 £67.02
Median % change year-on-year +24.80% -25.40% +3.11%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.42 £78.00 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.82 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +25.64% -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 14,363 10,855 12,072
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.16% 32.88% 32.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,331 7,129 7,950
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £647
90th Percentile £725 £731 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 553 300 330
10th Percentile £23.00 £29.00 £26.22
25th Percentile £45.20 £40.94 £46.05
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.60 £75.13 £77.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +0.78% -0.77% -

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 7 October 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 7 October 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 7 October 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 -5 4,821 £550 +4.76% 10,796
London -4 2,866 £575 - 6,872
UK excluding London -8 2,162 £505 +1.00% 4,715
Work from Home -6 1,564 £535 -1.47% 3,895
North of England 0 750 £500 +5.26% 1,028
South East -6 454 £544 +8.75% 1,209
Yorkshire -2 378 £500 - 308
Scotland -1 317 £467 -6.60% 544
North West 0 292 £525 +19.32% 571
South West -4 270 £550 - 522
Midlands -21 225 £500 - 490
West Midlands -22 187 £523 +4.50% 299
East of England -16 142 £480 -12.73% 666
North East -2 89 £425 -8.11% 153
East Midlands -21 38 £456 +11.28% 191
Wales -9 26 £530 +23.98% 119
Northern Ireland +2 17 £369 -37.23% 177

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
1 294 (5.18%) Apache Airflow
2 279 (4.92%) Apache Spark
3 234 (4.13%) Apache
4 155 (2.73%) Confluence
5 58 (1.02%) Jupyter
6 56 (0.99%) SharePoint
7 35 (0.62%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 29 (0.51%) nginx
10 23 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
11 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
11 22 (0.39%) IIS
12 9 (0.16%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
15 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.088%) Camunda
15 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 101 (1.78%) Microsoft Excel
2 37 (0.65%) Chatbot
3 21 (0.37%) Microsoft Office
4 15 (0.26%) CPLEX
4 15 (0.26%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
7 3 (0.053%) Revit
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.035%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) AutoCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Civil 3D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
2 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.28%) Aladdin
4 11 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.11%) Front Arena
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) SAP IBP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Actimize
10 3 (0.053%) Cloudability
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.035%) FIS Private Capital Suite
Cloud Services
1 2,070 (36.50%) AWS
2 1,944 (34.27%) Azure
3 922 (16.26%) GCP
4 757 (13.35%) GitHub
5 485 (8.55%) Power Platform
6 477 (8.41%) Serverless
7 448 (7.90%) Azure DevOps
8 441 (7.78%) GitHub Actions
9 396 (6.98%) Amazon S3
10 348 (6.14%) AWS Lambda
11 347 (6.12%) Snowflake
12 250 (4.41%) dbt
13 216 (3.81%) Azure Data Factory
14 205 (3.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 200 (3.53%) Amazon EKS
16 186 (3.28%) AWS CloudFormation
17 181 (3.19%) Entra ID
18 152 (2.68%) Amazon EC2
19 132 (2.33%) SaaS
20 130 (2.29%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 288 (5.08%) Firewall
2 208 (3.67%) DNS
3 171 (3.01%) Network Security
4 151 (2.66%) TCP/IP
5 131 (2.31%) VPN
6 125 (2.20%) BGP
7 113 (1.99%) WAN
8 82 (1.45%) DHCP
9 75 (1.32%) SD-WAN
10 74 (1.30%) OSPF
11 63 (1.11%) BIG-IP
12 59 (1.04%) SSL
13 55 (0.97%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 55 (0.97%) VLAN
13 55 (0.97%) VXLAN
14 50 (0.88%) HTTP
15 47 (0.83%) Ethernet VPN
16 44 (0.78%) Broadband
17 42 (0.74%) Wireless
18 40 (0.71%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 433 (7.63%) Power BI
2 328 (5.78%) Data Warehouse
3 321 (5.66%) PostgreSQL
4 233 (4.11%) Metadata
5 203 (3.58%) Relational Database
6 200 (3.53%) Data Lake
7 198 (3.49%) SQL Server
8 183 (3.23%) BigQuery
9 162 (2.86%) Tableau
10 158 (2.79%) NoSQL
11 137 (2.42%) Amazon RDS
12 135 (2.38%) Amazon Redshift
12 135 (2.38%) Big Data
13 124 (2.19%) MongoDB
14 123 (2.17%) Delta Lake
15 119 (2.10%) Amazon Athena
16 105 (1.85%) DynamoDB
17 102 (1.80%) MySQL
18 76 (1.34%) Redis
19 63 (1.11%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 849 (14.97%) Git
2 535 (9.43%) Jenkins
3 505 (8.90%) GitLab
4 313 (5.52%) JIRA
5 121 (2.13%) Selenium
6 74 (1.30%) Postman
7 61 (1.08%) JMeter
8 60 (1.06%) Claude Code
9 55 (0.97%) SonarQube
10 49 (0.86%) MLflow
11 47 (0.83%) Bitbucket
12 42 (0.74%) Cucumber
13 39 (0.69%) REST Assured
14 37 (0.65%) Sonatype Nexus
15 36 (0.63%) Artifactory
16 34 (0.60%) Maven
17 33 (0.58%) Cypress.io
18 31 (0.55%) LoadRunner
19 28 (0.49%) Gatling
20 25 (0.44%) Zephyr
General
1 1,334 (23.52%) Social Skills
2 1,317 (23.22%) Finance
3 847 (14.93%) Analytical Skills
4 551 (9.71%) Public Sector
5 534 (9.41%) Banking
6 172 (3.03%) Front Office
7 156 (2.75%) Investment Banking
8 117 (2.06%) Retail
9 111 (1.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 100 (1.76%) Documentation Skills
11 86 (1.52%) Marketing
11 86 (1.52%) Telecoms
12 64 (1.13%) Military
13 56 (0.99%) Law
14 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
15 50 (0.88%) Pharmaceutical
16 48 (0.85%) Financial Institution
17 46 (0.81%) Legal
18 41 (0.72%) Publishing
19 37 (0.65%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,019 (17.97%) Senior
2 905 (15.96%) Developer
3 838 (14.77%) Data Engineer
4 498 (8.78%) Lead
5 480 (8.46%) Python Developer
6 423 (7.46%) Python Engineer
7 377 (6.65%) DevOps Engineer
8 315 (5.55%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 281 (4.95%) Software Engineer
10 280 (4.94%) Analyst
11 234 (4.13%) Architect
12 220 (3.88%) AWS Engineer
13 195 (3.44%) Cloud Engineer
14 194 (3.42%) Azure Engineer
15 193 (3.40%) Senior Data Engineer
16 190 (3.35%) Platform Engineer
17 189 (3.33%) Senior Developer
18 180 (3.17%) Data Scientist
19 149 (2.63%) Network Engineer
20 142 (2.50%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,416 (24.96%) Terraform
2 558 (9.84%) REST
3 380 (6.70%) Kafka
4 369 (6.51%) PySpark
5 315 (5.55%) React
6 245 (4.32%) .NET
7 220 (3.88%) FastAPI
8 213 (3.76%) Django
9 211 (3.72%) JSON
10 194 (3.42%) RESTful
11 162 (2.86%) pytest
12 161 (2.84%) LangChain
13 147 (2.59%) Node.js
14 143 (2.52%) Pandas
15 131 (2.31%) OAuth
16 127 (2.24%) Flask
17 113 (1.99%) LangGraph
18 112 (1.97%) YAML
19 106 (1.87%) HTML
20 104 (1.83%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 815 (14.37%) Cloud Native
2 303 (5.34%) AI Agents
3 292 (5.15%) Distributed Systems
4 267 (4.71%) Onboarding
5 163 (2.87%) Data Centre
6 152 (2.68%) Data Structures
6 152 (2.68%) Product Ownership
7 135 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
8 123 (2.17%) Algorithms
9 115 (2.03%) Enterprise Software
10 113 (1.99%) Hybrid Cloud
11 109 (1.92%) Management Information System
12 104 (1.83%) Data Protection Act
13 101 (1.78%) Derivative
14 95 (1.67%) Security Posture
15 88 (1.55%) PKI
15 88 (1.55%) Public Cloud
16 79 (1.39%) Equities
17 67 (1.18%) Linux Command Line
17 67 (1.18%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 796 (14.03%) Linux
2 351 (6.19%) Windows
3 246 (4.34%) Unix
4 156 (2.75%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 93 (1.64%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.63%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 14 (0.25%) Android
11 13 (0.23%) AIX
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
12 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
13 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
13 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 8 (0.14%) zOS
14 5 (0.088%) Embedded Linux
14 5 (0.088%) FreeRTOS
14 5 (0.088%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,427 (42.79%) CI/CD
2 1,679 (29.60%) DevOps
3 1,613 (28.44%) AI
4 1,322 (23.31%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,285 (22.66%) Agile
6 1,093 (19.27%) Analytics
7 990 (17.45%) Data Pipeline
8 964 (17.00%) Software Engineering
9 890 (15.69%) Problem-Solving
10 862 (15.20%) Data Engineering
11 840 (14.81%) Machine Learning
12 786 (13.86%) Containerisation
13 779 (13.73%) Observability
14 777 (13.70%) Data Modelling
15 719 (12.68%) Test Automation
16 684 (12.06%) Validation
17 672 (11.85%) ETL
18 671 (11.83%) Continuous Improvement
19 604 (10.65%) Platform Engineering
20 593 (10.45%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,850 (32.62%) SQL
2 795 (14.02%) Bash
3 786 (13.86%) Java
4 767 (13.52%) PowerShell
5 448 (7.90%) JavaScript
6 349 (6.15%) TypeScript
7 316 (5.57%) C#
8 229 (4.04%) Go
9 158 (2.79%) Shell Script
10 137 (2.42%) Bicep
11 136 (2.40%) R
12 131 (2.31%) C++
13 121 (2.13%) Scala
14 107 (1.89%) Perl
15 62 (1.09%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 59 (1.04%) Groovy
17 51 (0.90%) C
17 51 (0.90%) Rust
18 50 (0.88%) T-SQL
19 48 (0.85%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,398 (24.65%) Security Cleared
2 1,124 (19.82%) SC Cleared
3 402 (7.09%) Degree
4 256 (4.51%) DV Cleared
5 154 (2.72%) AWS Certification
5 154 (2.72%) Azure Certification
6 146 (2.57%) Computer Science Degree
7 132 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
8 97 (1.71%) CISSP
9 78 (1.38%) Cisco Certification
10 71 (1.25%) Master's Degree
11 49 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
12 37 (0.65%) CCNP
13 34 (0.60%) PhD
14 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 31 (0.55%) CCIE
15 30 (0.53%) CISM
15 30 (0.53%) DBS Check
15 30 (0.53%) ISTQB
16 28 (0.49%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 663 (11.69%) Data Quality
2 329 (5.80%) QA
3 116 (2.05%) NIST
4 102 (1.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 86 (1.52%) GDPR
6 83 (1.46%) Accessibility
7 41 (0.72%) SLA
8 36 (0.63%) Actionable Recommendations
9 31 (0.55%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 24 (0.42%) SOC 2
12 22 (0.39%) WCAG
13 18 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 15 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
14 15 (0.26%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.12%) Basel III
17 7 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 7 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 993 (17.51%) Docker
2 189 (3.33%) Active Directory
3 133 (2.34%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.18%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.88%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.62%) vSphere
7 31 (0.55%) VMware NSX
8 27 (0.48%) NFS
8 27 (0.48%) VMware ESXi
9 20 (0.35%) Firmware
10 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
11 15 (0.26%) Oracle RAC
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 8 (0.14%) Ceph
13 8 (0.14%) HDFS
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 8 (0.14%) zsh
14 7 (0.12%) Virtual Servers
15 6 (0.11%) Postfix
16 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,211 (21.35%) Kubernetes
2 660 (11.64%) Ansible
3 339 (5.98%) Grafana
4 253 (4.46%) Prometheus
5 84 (1.48%) Puppet
6 74 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 70 (1.23%) Argo
8 49 (0.86%) Single Sign-On
9 42 (0.74%) Kibana
10 35 (0.62%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) Packer
14 21 (0.37%) FortiGate
15 17 (0.30%) Podman
15 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
16 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) QRadar
17 15 (0.26%) ZABBIX
18 14 (0.25%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 766 (13.50%) Microsoft
2 589 (10.38%) Databricks
3 412 (7.26%) Google
4 246 (4.34%) Oracle
5 209 (3.68%) Splunk
6 172 (3.03%) OpenAI
7 170 (3.00%) VMware
8 141 (2.49%) Cisco
9 137 (2.42%) ServiceNow
10 101 (1.78%) Dynatrace
11 96 (1.69%) Red Hat
12 92 (1.62%) IBM
13 90 (1.59%) F5
13 90 (1.59%) Palo Alto
14 88 (1.55%) Foundry
15 72 (1.27%) CyberArk
16 70 (1.23%) Fortinet
17 69 (1.22%) Informatica
18 67 (1.18%) SAP
19 54 (0.95%) Salesforce