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

6 months to
8 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,267 3,911 4,020
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.51% 13.38% 9.16%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.79% 39.40% 31.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,583 2,745 2,854
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £420 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £749 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -3.60% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 120 53 99
10th Percentile £27.84 £21.25 £20.81
25th Percentile £41.94 £25.09 £30.94
Median hourly rate £55.00 £42.50 £48.50
Median % change year-on-year +29.41% -12.37% -25.38%
75th Percentile £74.26 £60.75 £66.25
90th Percentile £83.08 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £53.25 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +18.33% -2.56% -28.95%

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 12,912 9,927 12,821
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.22% 33.97% 29.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,597 6,679 9,098
10th Percentile £355 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £478 £488
% change year-on-year -0.58% -1.95% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 539 243 478
10th Percentile £41.87 £22.27 £30.63
25th Percentile £55.00 £32.51 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.25 £67.29
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.61
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +5.79% -3.20%

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 8 April 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 8 April 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 8 April 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 -1 4,435 £520 -5.45% 2,695
London -3 2,519 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London -1 2,001 £482 -3.60% 1,990
Work from Home 0 1,540 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +11 672 £481 -3.88% 475
South East -4 403 £500 -4.76% 576
Yorkshire +2 372 £475 -5.00% 164
Midlands -2 285 £492 +5.35% 255
North West +7 255 £492 - 230
Scotland +1 248 £425 -10.29% 104
South West 0 246 £500 -9.09% 280
West Midlands -2 225 £498 +1.53% 130
East of England +4 136 £500 -0.25% 219
East Midlands -9 59 £450 +3.21% 125
North East +10 54 £500 +1.27% 83
Wales -13 30 £475 -10.80% 78
Northern Ireland +11 25 £550 +10.00% 33

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
1 272 (5.16%) Apache Spark
2 209 (3.97%) Apache Airflow
3 164 (3.11%) Apache
4 162 (3.08%) Confluence
5 68 (1.29%) SAS
6 59 (1.12%) SharePoint
7 30 (0.57%) Jupyter
8 26 (0.49%) nginx
9 25 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
10 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
11 19 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.28%) Appian
13 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
14 11 (0.21%) Camunda
15 9 (0.17%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.13%) CMS
17 4 (0.076%) CICS
17 4 (0.076%) Tomcat
18 3 (0.057%) IIS
18 3 (0.057%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 137 (2.60%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.11%) Weka
7 5 (0.095%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 25 (0.47%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 4 (0.076%) BambooHR
5 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
5 4 (0.076%) SAP IBP
6 3 (0.057%) Actimize
6 3 (0.057%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
7 2 (0.038%) Global One
7 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.038%) Odoo
7 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 1 (0.019%) OneSumX
8 1 (0.019%) Salesforce CRM
8 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 2,036 (38.66%) AWS
2 1,819 (34.54%) Azure
3 782 (14.85%) GCP
4 695 (13.20%) GitHub
5 526 (9.99%) Power Platform
6 516 (9.80%) Serverless
7 402 (7.63%) Azure DevOps
8 375 (7.12%) Amazon S3
9 360 (6.84%) AWS Lambda
10 355 (6.74%) GitHub Actions
11 277 (5.26%) Azure Data Factory
12 247 (4.69%) AWS CloudFormation
13 246 (4.67%) Snowflake
14 187 (3.55%) Amazon EKS
15 181 (3.44%) OpenShift
16 165 (3.13%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 164 (3.11%) Amazon ECS
18 158 (3.00%) dbt
19 151 (2.87%) Amazon EC2
20 145 (2.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 200 (3.80%) Firewall
2 143 (2.72%) DNS
3 109 (2.07%) Network Security
4 94 (1.78%) TCP/IP
5 78 (1.48%) VPN
6 77 (1.46%) BGP
7 62 (1.18%) WAN
8 60 (1.14%) HTTP
9 45 (0.85%) OSPF
10 44 (0.84%) SAN
11 42 (0.80%) MPLS
12 35 (0.66%) VLAN
13 34 (0.65%) DHCP
13 34 (0.65%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) SNMP
15 30 (0.57%) Wireshark
16 29 (0.55%) SSL
17 26 (0.49%) SD-WAN
18 25 (0.47%) VXLAN
19 23 (0.44%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 437 (8.30%) Power BI
2 355 (6.74%) PostgreSQL
3 306 (5.81%) Data Warehouse
4 243 (4.61%) Data Lake
5 204 (3.87%) SQL Server
6 201 (3.82%) NoSQL
7 183 (3.47%) Relational Database
8 182 (3.46%) Tableau
9 156 (2.96%) Metadata
10 149 (2.83%) Big Data
11 131 (2.49%) Delta Lake
12 124 (2.35%) BigQuery
13 117 (2.22%) Amazon RDS
14 112 (2.13%) Amazon Redshift
15 111 (2.11%) Amazon Athena
16 109 (2.07%) MySQL
17 94 (1.78%) MongoDB
18 92 (1.75%) Azure SQL Database
19 88 (1.67%) DynamoDB
20 76 (1.44%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 664 (12.61%) Git
2 522 (9.91%) Jenkins
3 397 (7.54%) GitLab
4 286 (5.43%) JIRA
5 96 (1.82%) Selenium
6 90 (1.71%) MLflow
7 54 (1.03%) Postman
8 45 (0.85%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.82%) Cucumber
10 42 (0.80%) JUnit
11 37 (0.70%) JMeter
12 34 (0.65%) Sonatype Nexus
13 28 (0.53%) SpecFlow
14 25 (0.47%) Artifactory
14 25 (0.47%) Visual Studio
15 24 (0.46%) Cypress.io
15 24 (0.46%) SonarQube
16 22 (0.42%) Maven
16 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
17 20 (0.38%) Gatling
General
1 1,226 (23.28%) Social Skills
2 996 (18.91%) Finance
3 716 (13.59%) Analytical Skills
4 498 (9.46%) Public Sector
5 393 (7.46%) Banking
6 169 (3.21%) Front Office
7 130 (2.47%) Documentation Skills
8 88 (1.67%) Investment Banking
9 64 (1.22%) Marketing
10 63 (1.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 62 (1.18%) Retail
12 59 (1.12%) Legal
12 59 (1.12%) Telecoms
13 54 (1.03%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
15 44 (0.84%) Financial Institution
16 41 (0.78%) Manufacturing
17 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
18 29 (0.55%) Publishing
19 28 (0.53%) Military
Job Titles
1 982 (18.64%) Developer
2 764 (14.51%) Data Engineer
3 745 (14.14%) Senior
4 465 (8.83%) Python Developer
5 357 (6.78%) Architect
6 341 (6.47%) Lead
7 300 (5.70%) Python Engineer
8 283 (5.37%) DevOps Engineer
9 271 (5.15%) Analyst
10 258 (4.90%) Software Engineer
11 252 (4.78%) AWS Engineer
12 236 (4.48%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 209 (3.97%) Data Scientist
14 197 (3.74%) Platform Engineer
15 162 (3.08%) Azure Engineer
15 162 (3.08%) Senior Developer
16 149 (2.83%) Senior Data Engineer
17 140 (2.66%) Data Analyst
18 138 (2.62%) Full-Stack Developer
19 124 (2.35%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 451 (8.56%) REST
2 360 (6.84%) React
3 342 (6.49%) Kafka
3 342 (6.49%) PySpark
4 286 (5.43%) Node.js
5 243 (4.61%) Pandas
6 231 (4.39%) .NET
7 196 (3.72%) PyTorch
8 187 (3.55%) RESTful
9 184 (3.49%) FastAPI
10 163 (3.09%) NumPy
11 155 (2.94%) JSON
12 154 (2.92%) TensorFlow
13 148 (2.81%) scikit-learn
14 133 (2.53%) Flask
15 127 (2.41%) AngularJS
16 123 (2.34%) Django
16 123 (2.34%) LangChain
17 114 (2.16%) pytest
18 108 (2.05%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 512 (9.72%) Cloud Native
2 212 (4.03%) Distributed Systems
3 187 (3.55%) Algorithms
4 147 (2.79%) Product Ownership
5 118 (2.24%) Data Protection Act
6 117 (2.22%) Equities
7 115 (2.18%) Fixed Income
8 113 (2.15%) AI Agents
8 113 (2.15%) Data Structures
9 108 (2.05%) Derivative
10 98 (1.86%) Data Centre
11 92 (1.75%) Hybrid Cloud
12 91 (1.73%) Enterprise Software
12 91 (1.73%) Legacy Systems
12 91 (1.73%) Onboarding
13 82 (1.56%) Security Posture
14 80 (1.52%) Management Information System
14 80 (1.52%) Public Cloud
15 57 (1.08%) Virtual Team
16 55 (1.04%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 668 (12.68%) Linux
2 301 (5.71%) Windows
3 179 (3.40%) Unix
4 106 (2.01%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.25%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.72%) VMS
7 34 (0.65%) Ubuntu
8 29 (0.55%) Android
9 21 (0.40%) AIX
10 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
11 18 (0.34%) Solaris
12 17 (0.32%) CentOS
13 16 (0.30%) Apple iOS
14 8 (0.15%) Debian
14 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.13%) Windows 7
16 6 (0.11%) zOS
17 5 (0.095%) Rocky
18 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2016
18 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,933 (36.70%) CI/CD
2 1,465 (27.81%) DevOps
3 1,222 (23.20%) Agile
4 1,156 (21.95%) AI
5 1,069 (20.30%) Analytics
6 1,031 (19.57%) Problem-Solving
7 920 (17.47%) Infrastructure as Code
8 870 (16.52%) Data Pipeline
9 829 (15.74%) Machine Learning
10 755 (14.33%) Containerisation
11 723 (13.73%) Data Engineering
12 704 (13.37%) Data Modelling
13 697 (13.23%) ETL
14 627 (11.90%) Data Science
15 604 (11.47%) Software Engineering
16 583 (11.07%) Test Automation
17 523 (9.93%) Observability
18 519 (9.85%) Business Intelligence
19 432 (8.20%) LLM
20 404 (7.67%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,700 (32.28%) SQL
2 746 (14.16%) Java
3 679 (12.89%) PowerShell
4 597 (11.33%) Bash
5 490 (9.30%) JavaScript
6 358 (6.80%) C#
7 351 (6.66%) TypeScript
8 212 (4.03%) Go
9 167 (3.17%) R
10 157 (2.98%) C++
11 128 (2.43%) Scala
12 107 (2.03%) Shell Script
13 104 (1.97%) Ruby
14 94 (1.78%) Perl
15 81 (1.54%) Bicep
16 53 (1.01%) Kusto Query Language
17 51 (0.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 50 (0.95%) C
19 47 (0.89%) T-SQL
20 42 (0.80%) VBA
Qualifications
1 1,232 (23.39%) Security Cleared
2 994 (18.87%) SC Cleared
3 410 (7.78%) Degree
4 188 (3.57%) Computer Science Degree
5 147 (2.79%) DV Cleared
6 129 (2.45%) BPSS Clearance
7 110 (2.09%) AWS Certification
8 107 (2.03%) Azure Certification
9 103 (1.96%) Master's Degree
10 95 (1.80%) CISSP
11 75 (1.42%) Cisco Certification
12 59 (1.12%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 58 (1.10%) CCNP
14 49 (0.93%) CISM
15 46 (0.87%) PhD
16 37 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
17 36 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 35 (0.66%) ISTQB
19 27 (0.51%) CCNA
19 27 (0.51%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 517 (9.82%) Data Quality
2 216 (4.10%) QA
3 180 (3.42%) GDPR
4 112 (2.13%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 102 (1.94%) NIST
6 81 (1.54%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.66%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.63%) SLA
9 27 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.49%) HIPAA
11 22 (0.42%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
13 17 (0.32%) WCAG
14 16 (0.30%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.25%) Cyber Essentials
16 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 11 (0.21%) PMO
17 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
18 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 8 (0.15%) GRC
System Software
1 887 (16.84%) Docker
2 164 (3.11%) Active Directory
3 119 (2.26%) VMware Infrastructure
4 63 (1.20%) Virtual Machines
5 59 (1.12%) vSphere
6 52 (0.99%) VMware NSX
7 34 (0.65%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.57%) Firmware
9 19 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
10 12 (0.23%) KVM
11 11 (0.21%) HDFS
12 9 (0.17%) SRDF
13 8 (0.15%) Ceph
13 8 (0.15%) Lustre
14 7 (0.13%) GPFS
14 7 (0.13%) NFS
14 7 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
15 6 (0.11%) Postfix
15 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
16 5 (0.095%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 1,125 (21.36%) Terraform
2 1,005 (19.08%) Kubernetes
3 518 (9.83%) Ansible
4 334 (6.34%) Grafana
5 285 (5.41%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.71%) Argo
7 72 (1.37%) Puppet
8 51 (0.97%) Istio
9 49 (0.93%) vRealize
10 39 (0.74%) vCenter Server
11 37 (0.70%) Kibana
12 35 (0.66%) Progress Chef
13 25 (0.47%) Nessus
14 23 (0.44%) NetBackup
15 22 (0.42%) Nagios
15 22 (0.42%) Rancher
15 22 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
16 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
16 20 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
17 19 (0.36%) Control-M
Vendors
1 629 (11.94%) Microsoft
2 577 (10.96%) Databricks
3 287 (5.45%) Google
4 221 (4.20%) Splunk
5 217 (4.12%) VMware
6 213 (4.04%) Oracle
7 143 (2.72%) Red Hat
8 127 (2.41%) Cisco
9 122 (2.32%) OpenAI
10 97 (1.84%) ServiceNow
11 83 (1.58%) CyberArk
12 70 (1.33%) BeyondTrust
13 69 (1.31%) Foundry
14 65 (1.23%) Informatica
15 59 (1.12%) F5
16 57 (1.08%) IBM
17 54 (1.03%) Palo Alto
18 47 (0.89%) Dynatrace
19 45 (0.85%) SAP
20 42 (0.80%) Atlassian