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 26 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,806 4,196 4,527
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.33% 11.50% 9.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.70% 35.81% 32.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,162 2,779 3,248
10th Percentile £358 £375 £400
25th Percentile £419 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £738 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £505 £525
% change year-on-year -0.99% -3.81% -1.32%
Number of hourly rates quoted 87 83 133
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.25 £26.38 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £57.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -6.09% -4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £69.38 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.25 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year -13.20% +4.17% -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 11,525 11,717 14,140
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.98% 32.12% 30.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,604 7,488 10,072
10th Percentile £350 £350 £360
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £620 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £756 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 341 301 433
10th Percentile £30.00 £22.00 £32.06
25th Percentile £48.75 £40.58 £47.50
Median hourly rate £63.50 £63.00 £60.14
Median % change year-on-year +0.79% +4.76% +0.23%
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £78.00
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 26 November 2025.

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 26 November 2025.

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 26 November 2025. 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 0 4,094 £525 -12.50% 2,935
London +1 2,411 £550 -12.00% 1,172
UK excluding London +4 1,838 £500 -0.99% 2,511
Work from Home 0 1,462 £535 -2.73% 1,101
North of England +9 570 £475 -5.47% 460
South East +2 390 £500 -4.76% 959
Yorkshire +11 302 £500 -6.67% 139
Scotland +12 287 £475 -2.56% 162
Midlands +9 271 £500 +5.26% 348
North West +7 234 £445 -9.00% 269
West Midlands +14 224 £506 +1.20% 221
South West -8 178 £560 -6.67% 266
East of England +8 147 £525 +8.25% 247
East Midlands -10 47 £406 +1.50% 125
North East +9 39 £518 -11.54% 57
Wales -10 30 £495 -1.00% 73
Northern Ireland -2 21 £588 +11.90% 31

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
1 252 (5.24%) Apache Airflow
2 203 (4.22%) Apache Spark
3 183 (3.81%) Confluence
4 178 (3.70%) Apache
5 66 (1.37%) SAS
6 52 (1.08%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.79%) nginx
8 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
10 20 (0.42%) Jupyter
11 12 (0.25%) IIS
12 11 (0.23%) Appian
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 9 (0.19%) WebSphere
14 8 (0.17%) JBoss
14 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
15 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
16 5 (0.10%) CMS
16 5 (0.10%) Luigi
17 4 (0.083%) Tomcat
Applications
1 138 (2.87%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
3 34 (0.71%) Chatbot
4 30 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 11 (0.23%) MS Visio
7 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 7 (0.15%) Maya
8 7 (0.15%) NUKE
9 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.042%) Maple
10 1 (0.021%) Microsoft Project
10 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
10 1 (0.021%) SPSS
10 1 (0.021%) Stata
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
10 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 14 (0.29%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 8 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) Fidessa
5 5 (0.10%) Maximo
6 4 (0.083%) Remedy ITSM
7 3 (0.062%) Actimize
7 3 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
7 3 (0.062%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
8 2 (0.042%) Endur
8 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
8 2 (0.042%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.042%) Shopify
8 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
9 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
9 1 (0.021%) NEC Housing
9 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
9 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,899 (39.51%) AWS
2 1,433 (29.82%) Azure
3 724 (15.06%) GCP
4 559 (11.63%) GitHub
5 479 (9.97%) Serverless
6 401 (8.34%) Power Platform
7 377 (7.84%) Amazon S3
8 338 (7.03%) AWS Lambda
9 306 (6.37%) Azure DevOps
10 297 (6.18%) GitHub Actions
11 251 (5.22%) Snowflake
12 222 (4.62%) AWS CloudFormation
13 198 (4.12%) Amazon EC2
14 194 (4.04%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 176 (3.66%) dbt
16 171 (3.56%) Amazon ECS
17 162 (3.37%) Azure Data Factory
18 153 (3.18%) Amazon EKS
19 137 (2.85%) OpenShift
20 133 (2.77%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 285 (5.93%) Firewall
2 187 (3.89%) DNS
3 154 (3.20%) TCP/IP
4 111 (2.31%) Network Security
5 97 (2.02%) VPN
6 95 (1.98%) BGP
7 92 (1.91%) HTTP
8 68 (1.41%) SSL
9 58 (1.21%) OSPF
10 56 (1.17%) WAN
11 51 (1.06%) MPLS
12 45 (0.94%) SSH
13 42 (0.87%) LAN
14 41 (0.85%) SMTP
15 40 (0.83%) Wireless
16 37 (0.77%) DHCP
17 36 (0.75%) SD-WAN
18 35 (0.73%) Wireshark
19 34 (0.71%) FTP
20 31 (0.65%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 398 (8.28%) PostgreSQL
2 349 (7.26%) Power BI
3 283 (5.89%) Data Warehouse
4 251 (5.22%) Relational Database
5 246 (5.12%) NoSQL
6 179 (3.72%) Data Lake
7 176 (3.66%) Big Data
8 172 (3.58%) Amazon RDS
9 153 (3.18%) Tableau
10 141 (2.93%) SQL Server
11 130 (2.70%) MongoDB
12 118 (2.46%) MySQL
13 108 (2.25%) BigQuery
14 103 (2.14%) Amazon Athena
15 99 (2.06%) Hadoop
16 86 (1.79%) DynamoDB
16 86 (1.79%) Metadata
17 85 (1.77%) Amazon Redshift
18 75 (1.56%) Elasticsearch
19 60 (1.25%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 659 (13.71%) Git
2 628 (13.07%) Jenkins
3 407 (8.47%) GitLab
4 324 (6.74%) JIRA
5 72 (1.50%) Selenium
6 70 (1.46%) Bitbucket
7 64 (1.33%) SonarQube
8 62 (1.29%) Sonatype Nexus
9 60 (1.25%) JUnit
10 56 (1.17%) MLflow
11 46 (0.96%) Liquibase
12 41 (0.85%) Artifactory
13 39 (0.81%) Cucumber
14 35 (0.73%) Maven
14 35 (0.73%) Postman
15 33 (0.69%) JMeter
16 30 (0.62%) Gradle
17 29 (0.60%) Eclipse
18 28 (0.58%) Vagrant
19 26 (0.54%) Cypress.io
General
1 1,355 (28.19%) Social Skills
2 1,098 (22.85%) Finance
3 714 (14.86%) Analytical Skills
4 503 (10.47%) Banking
5 415 (8.64%) Public Sector
6 237 (4.93%) Front Office
7 192 (4.00%) Investment Banking
8 110 (2.29%) Documentation Skills
9 86 (1.79%) Financial Institution
10 83 (1.73%) Marketing
11 77 (1.60%) Telecoms
12 74 (1.54%) Retail
13 69 (1.44%) Pharmaceutical
14 60 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 52 (1.08%) Legal
16 45 (0.94%) Presentation Skills
17 42 (0.87%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.69%) Influencing Skills
19 28 (0.58%) Retail Banking
20 27 (0.56%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 896 (18.64%) Developer
2 650 (13.52%) Senior
3 538 (11.19%) Data Engineer
4 358 (7.45%) Python Engineer
5 356 (7.41%) Python Developer
6 343 (7.14%) Analyst
7 341 (7.10%) DevOps Engineer
8 301 (6.26%) AWS Engineer
9 270 (5.62%) Software Engineer
10 251 (5.22%) Architect
11 211 (4.39%) Lead
12 189 (3.93%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 188 (3.91%) Platform Engineer
14 169 (3.52%) Data Scientist
15 163 (3.39%) Data Analyst
16 136 (2.83%) Senior Developer
17 127 (2.64%) Consultant
18 126 (2.62%) Network Engineer
19 122 (2.54%) Cloud Engineer
20 118 (2.46%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 394 (8.20%) REST
2 336 (6.99%) React
3 322 (6.70%) Kafka
4 246 (5.12%) Node.js
5 243 (5.06%) RESTful
6 241 (5.01%) Pandas
7 223 (4.64%) FastAPI
8 199 (4.14%) PySpark
9 192 (4.00%) NumPy
10 182 (3.79%) PyTorch
11 160 (3.33%) TensorFlow
12 157 (3.27%) AngularJS
13 144 (3.00%) .NET
14 135 (2.81%) Elastic Stack
15 113 (2.35%) scikit-learn
16 109 (2.27%) GraphQL
16 109 (2.27%) LangChain
17 107 (2.23%) HTML
17 107 (2.23%) Spring
18 106 (2.21%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 378 (7.87%) Cloud Native
2 208 (4.33%) Algorithms
3 198 (4.12%) Distributed Systems
4 149 (3.10%) Equities
5 145 (3.02%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 140 (2.91%) Data Protection Act
6 140 (2.91%) Fixed Income
7 120 (2.50%) Product Ownership
8 113 (2.35%) Data Structures
8 113 (2.35%) Derivative
9 109 (2.27%) Hedge funds
9 109 (2.27%) Onboarding
10 97 (2.02%) AI Agents
11 86 (1.79%) Public Cloud
12 78 (1.62%) Data Centre
13 77 (1.60%) Management Information System
14 74 (1.54%) Hybrid Cloud
15 69 (1.44%) Legacy Systems
16 67 (1.39%) Replication
17 56 (1.17%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 866 (18.02%) Linux
2 372 (7.74%) Windows
3 245 (5.10%) Unix
4 97 (2.02%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.92%) Ubuntu
7 43 (0.89%) Android
8 38 (0.79%) VMS
9 36 (0.75%) CentOS
10 29 (0.60%) Amazon Linux
11 28 (0.58%) Mac OS
12 22 (0.46%) Apple iOS
12 22 (0.46%) Solaris
13 11 (0.23%) Debian
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
14 9 (0.19%) Windows 7
15 6 (0.12%) AIX
16 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
17 4 (0.083%) zOS
18 3 (0.062%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,592 (33.13%) CI/CD
2 1,348 (28.05%) DevOps
3 1,253 (26.07%) Agile
4 1,048 (21.81%) Problem-Solving
5 840 (17.48%) Infrastructure as Code
6 824 (17.15%) AI
7 744 (15.48%) Analytics
8 710 (14.77%) Machine Learning
9 671 (13.96%) Containerisation
10 629 (13.09%) Data Pipeline
11 609 (12.67%) Software Engineering
12 519 (10.80%) ETL
13 516 (10.74%) Data Science
14 512 (10.65%) Data Modelling
15 499 (10.38%) Data Engineering
16 491 (10.22%) Test Automation
17 410 (8.53%) Computer Science
18 399 (8.30%) Business Intelligence
19 363 (7.55%) Microservices
20 352 (7.32%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 1,462 (30.42%) SQL
2 864 (17.98%) Java
3 667 (13.88%) Bash
4 631 (13.13%) PowerShell
5 524 (10.90%) JavaScript
6 342 (7.12%) TypeScript
7 300 (6.24%) Go
8 284 (5.91%) C#
9 264 (5.49%) C++
10 193 (4.02%) Perl
11 176 (3.66%) Shell Script
12 159 (3.31%) R
13 97 (2.02%) Scala
14 84 (1.75%) Ruby
15 80 (1.66%) C
16 62 (1.29%) PHP
17 61 (1.27%) VBA
18 53 (1.10%) Groovy
19 51 (1.06%) Bicep
20 46 (0.96%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 920 (19.14%) Security Cleared
2 733 (15.25%) SC Cleared
3 483 (10.05%) Degree
4 239 (4.97%) Computer Science Degree
5 152 (3.16%) AWS Certification
6 145 (3.02%) DV Cleared
6 145 (3.02%) Master's Degree
7 101 (2.10%) Cisco Certification
8 88 (1.83%) CISSP
9 82 (1.71%) BPSS Clearance
10 78 (1.62%) Azure Certification
11 64 (1.33%) CCNP
12 54 (1.12%) PhD
13 49 (1.02%) MCP
14 42 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 40 (0.83%) CCIE
16 36 (0.75%) CEH
17 35 (0.73%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
18 30 (0.62%) OSCP
19 29 (0.60%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 327 (6.80%) Data Quality
2 186 (3.87%) QA
3 157 (3.27%) GDPR
4 97 (2.02%) NIST
5 96 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 60 (1.25%) Accessibility
7 47 (0.98%) PCI DSS
8 39 (0.81%) HIPAA
9 23 (0.48%) SLA
10 22 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 21 (0.44%) NCSC
12 20 (0.42%) SOC 2
13 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
14 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.21%) EMIR
15 10 (0.21%) MiFID
15 10 (0.21%) PMO
16 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
16 8 (0.17%) WCAG
17 7 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 943 (19.62%) Docker
2 164 (3.41%) Active Directory
3 148 (3.08%) VMware Infrastructure
4 41 (0.85%) vSphere
5 37 (0.77%) Virtual Machines
6 35 (0.73%) VMware NSX
7 31 (0.65%) Firmware
8 22 (0.46%) DFS Replication
9 19 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.37%) Hyper-V
10 18 (0.37%) Squid
11 16 (0.33%) Postfix
12 15 (0.31%) KVM
12 15 (0.31%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 14 (0.29%) HDFS
13 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
14 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
15 10 (0.21%) GPFS
15 10 (0.21%) Lustre
16 9 (0.19%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,058 (22.01%) Kubernetes
2 1,035 (21.54%) Terraform
3 628 (13.07%) Ansible
4 366 (7.62%) Grafana
5 308 (6.41%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.87%) Puppet
7 85 (1.77%) Argo
8 57 (1.19%) Kibana
9 46 (0.96%) Progress Chef
10 41 (0.85%) Istio
11 37 (0.77%) Nessus
12 36 (0.75%) vRealize
13 29 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
14 28 (0.58%) NetBackup
15 26 (0.54%) ITRS Geneos
16 25 (0.52%) vCenter Server
17 24 (0.50%) logstash
18 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
18 22 (0.46%) Packer
19 20 (0.42%) Nmap
Vendors
1 547 (11.38%) Microsoft
2 347 (7.22%) Databricks
3 272 (5.66%) Google
4 258 (5.37%) Splunk
5 234 (4.87%) VMware
6 218 (4.54%) Oracle
7 146 (3.04%) ServiceNow
8 143 (2.98%) Cisco
9 130 (2.70%) Red Hat
10 90 (1.87%) Palo Alto
11 86 (1.79%) F5
12 80 (1.66%) OpenAI
13 71 (1.48%) Foundry
14 64 (1.33%) SAP
15 57 (1.19%) CyberArk
16 50 (1.04%) Atlassian
17 48 (1.00%) IBM
18 45 (0.94%) Salesforce
19 44 (0.92%) CrowdStrike
19 44 (0.92%) Juniper