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

6 months to
8 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 13
Rank change year-on-year 0 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 4,709 4,171 4,721
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.46% 11.40% 10.04%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.67% 35.49% 32.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,097 2,775 3,395
10th Percentile £358 £375 £400
25th Percentile £421 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £568 £575
Median % change year-on-year -7.49% -1.30% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £750 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £505 £525
% change year-on-year -0.99% -3.81% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 88 93 134
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.12 £37.51
25th Percentile £35.81 £26.25 £46.18
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £60.25
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -12.86% -6.77%
75th Percentile £64.50 £70.00 £73.73
90th Percentile £79.75 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £62.50 £61.25
% change year-on-year -20.00% +2.04% -5.77%

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 11,301 11,753 14,731
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.30% 32.12% 31.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,439 7,592 10,502
10th Percentile £345 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £625 £644 £660
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -2.96% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 318 282 442
10th Percentile £29.00 £22.00 £32.32
25th Percentile £42.81 £38.88 £47.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £62.50 £61.92
Median % change year-on-year - +0.94% +0.68%
75th Percentile £67.44 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £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 8 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 8 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 8 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 4,020 £525 -10.26% 9,972
London +1 2,378 £565 -9.64% 5,260
UK excluding London +4 1,804 £500 -0.99% 7,471
Work from Home 0 1,452 £540 -1.82% 4,348
North of England +8 551 £480 -4.00% 1,143
South East +4 377 £500 -4.76% 4,474
Yorkshire +9 302 £500 -1.91% 283
Scotland +11 282 £500 +2.56% 294
Midlands +11 253 £500 +5.26% 470
North West +5 217 £439 -9.54% 752
West Midlands +14 210 £500 - 271
South West -7 178 £560 -9.49% 414
East of England +10 162 £538 +13.16% 458
East Midlands -15 41 £410 +2.50% 183
North East +6 36 £520 -11.11% 113
Wales -8 33 £455 -9.00% 121
Northern Ireland -4 21 £588 +11.90% 99

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
1 255 (5.42%) Apache Airflow
2 194 (4.12%) Apache Spark
3 186 (3.95%) Confluence
4 177 (3.76%) Apache
5 62 (1.32%) SAS
6 44 (0.93%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.81%) nginx
8 34 (0.72%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.49%) Jupyter
10 22 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.32%) IIS
12 12 (0.25%) WebSphere
13 11 (0.23%) Appian
14 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 9 (0.19%) JBoss
15 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
16 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
17 5 (0.11%) CMS
17 5 (0.11%) Luigi
18 4 (0.085%) Tomcat
Applications
1 129 (2.74%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.72%) Microsoft Office
3 33 (0.70%) Chatbot
4 28 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 10 (0.21%) Maya
6 10 (0.21%) NUKE
7 9 (0.19%) MS Visio
8 7 (0.15%) Spreadsheet
9 6 (0.13%) Weka
10 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
10 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
10 2 (0.042%) Maple
10 2 (0.042%) Microsoft Project
11 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
11 1 (0.021%) SPSS
11 1 (0.021%) Stata
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
11 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 16 (0.34%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 8 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.17%) Maximo
4 5 (0.11%) Fidessa
5 4 (0.085%) Remedy ITSM
6 3 (0.064%) Payment Gateway
6 3 (0.064%) Teamcenter
6 3 (0.064%) thinkFolio
7 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
7 2 (0.042%) Endur
7 2 (0.042%) Kondor
7 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.042%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
7 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
8 1 (0.021%) Cerner Millennium
8 1 (0.021%) ION MarketView
8 1 (0.021%) SAP GRC
Cloud Services
1 1,843 (39.14%) AWS
2 1,371 (29.11%) Azure
3 726 (15.42%) GCP
4 527 (11.19%) GitHub
5 458 (9.73%) Serverless
6 386 (8.20%) Power Platform
7 362 (7.69%) Amazon S3
8 318 (6.75%) AWS Lambda
9 291 (6.18%) Azure DevOps
10 270 (5.73%) GitHub Actions
11 237 (5.03%) Snowflake
12 194 (4.12%) AWS CloudFormation
13 190 (4.03%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 186 (3.95%) dbt
15 185 (3.93%) Amazon EC2
16 147 (3.12%) Azure Data Factory
17 146 (3.10%) Amazon ECS
18 136 (2.89%) Amazon EKS
18 136 (2.89%) OpenShift
19 122 (2.59%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 281 (5.97%) Firewall
2 182 (3.86%) DNS
3 146 (3.10%) TCP/IP
4 109 (2.31%) Network Security
5 96 (2.04%) VPN
6 95 (2.02%) BGP
7 94 (2.00%) HTTP
8 69 (1.47%) SSL
9 60 (1.27%) OSPF
10 54 (1.15%) WAN
11 49 (1.04%) MPLS
12 41 (0.87%) LAN
13 39 (0.83%) SSH
14 38 (0.81%) Wireless
15 37 (0.79%) SMTP
16 33 (0.70%) SD-WAN
17 31 (0.66%) FTP
17 31 (0.66%) Wireshark
18 30 (0.64%) DHCP
18 30 (0.64%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 395 (8.39%) PostgreSQL
2 340 (7.22%) Power BI
3 270 (5.73%) Data Warehouse
4 259 (5.50%) Relational Database
5 248 (5.27%) NoSQL
6 184 (3.91%) Data Lake
7 177 (3.76%) Big Data
8 160 (3.40%) Tableau
9 153 (3.25%) Amazon RDS
10 144 (3.06%) SQL Server
11 131 (2.78%) MongoDB
12 119 (2.53%) MySQL
13 117 (2.48%) BigQuery
14 101 (2.14%) Amazon Athena
15 96 (2.04%) Hadoop
16 91 (1.93%) DynamoDB
17 82 (1.74%) Amazon Redshift
18 81 (1.72%) Metadata
19 71 (1.51%) Elasticsearch
20 61 (1.30%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 637 (13.53%) Git
2 617 (13.10%) Jenkins
3 371 (7.88%) GitLab
4 328 (6.97%) JIRA
5 75 (1.59%) Selenium
6 71 (1.51%) SonarQube
7 67 (1.42%) Bitbucket
8 66 (1.40%) JUnit
9 62 (1.32%) Sonatype Nexus
10 49 (1.04%) MLflow
11 47 (1.00%) Liquibase
12 41 (0.87%) Artifactory
13 38 (0.81%) Cucumber
14 36 (0.76%) Maven
15 33 (0.70%) Gradle
15 33 (0.70%) JMeter
15 33 (0.70%) Postman
16 31 (0.66%) Cypress.io
17 30 (0.64%) Eclipse
18 28 (0.59%) Metasploit
General
1 1,312 (27.86%) Social Skills
2 1,066 (22.64%) Finance
3 706 (14.99%) Analytical Skills
4 507 (10.77%) Banking
5 396 (8.41%) Public Sector
6 252 (5.35%) Front Office
7 207 (4.40%) Investment Banking
8 94 (2.00%) Documentation Skills
9 89 (1.89%) Financial Institution
10 79 (1.68%) Telecoms
11 78 (1.66%) Marketing
12 73 (1.55%) Pharmaceutical
13 69 (1.47%) Retail
14 57 (1.21%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 51 (1.08%) Legal
16 47 (1.00%) Presentation Skills
17 42 (0.89%) Manufacturing
18 31 (0.66%) Organisational Skills
19 30 (0.64%) Influencing Skills
20 28 (0.59%) Military
Job Titles
1 885 (18.79%) Developer
2 634 (13.46%) Senior
3 524 (11.13%) Data Engineer
4 365 (7.75%) Analyst
4 365 (7.75%) Python Engineer
5 345 (7.33%) Python Developer
6 337 (7.16%) DevOps Engineer
7 305 (6.48%) AWS Engineer
8 286 (6.07%) Software Engineer
9 247 (5.25%) Architect
10 194 (4.12%) Lead
11 186 (3.95%) Platform Engineer
12 180 (3.82%) Data Analyst
13 175 (3.72%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 158 (3.36%) Data Scientist
15 131 (2.78%) Senior Developer
16 130 (2.76%) Cloud Engineer
16 130 (2.76%) Consultant
17 127 (2.70%) Network Engineer
18 122 (2.59%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 375 (7.96%) REST
2 349 (7.41%) React
3 306 (6.50%) Kafka
4 241 (5.12%) Pandas
5 235 (4.99%) RESTful
6 232 (4.93%) Node.js
7 218 (4.63%) FastAPI
8 190 (4.03%) NumPy
9 179 (3.80%) PySpark
10 168 (3.57%) PyTorch
11 153 (3.25%) AngularJS
12 149 (3.16%) TensorFlow
13 140 (2.97%) .NET
14 130 (2.76%) Elastic Stack
15 117 (2.48%) HTML
16 112 (2.38%) CSS
17 109 (2.31%) scikit-learn
18 107 (2.27%) GraphQL
19 103 (2.19%) Flask
20 101 (2.14%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 360 (7.64%) Cloud Native
2 203 (4.31%) Algorithms
3 186 (3.95%) Distributed Systems
4 162 (3.44%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 157 (3.33%) Equities
6 149 (3.16%) Fixed Income
7 143 (3.04%) Data Protection Act
8 119 (2.53%) Derivative
9 116 (2.46%) Data Structures
9 116 (2.46%) Hedge funds
10 114 (2.42%) Product Ownership
11 107 (2.27%) Onboarding
12 84 (1.78%) AI Agents
13 80 (1.70%) Public Cloud
14 78 (1.66%) Management Information System
15 77 (1.64%) Data Centre
16 68 (1.44%) Hybrid Cloud
17 65 (1.38%) Legacy Systems
18 64 (1.36%) Replication
19 59 (1.25%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 838 (17.80%) Linux
2 358 (7.60%) Windows
3 253 (5.37%) Unix
4 89 (1.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 68 (1.44%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.98%) Android
7 43 (0.91%) Ubuntu
8 37 (0.79%) VMS
9 35 (0.74%) CentOS
10 29 (0.62%) Amazon Linux
11 27 (0.57%) Apple iOS
12 26 (0.55%) Mac OS
13 22 (0.47%) Solaris
14 9 (0.19%) Debian
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
15 6 (0.13%) AIX
15 6 (0.13%) Windows 7
16 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
17 4 (0.085%) Windows Server 2019
17 4 (0.085%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,525 (32.38%) CI/CD
2 1,310 (27.82%) DevOps
3 1,245 (26.44%) Agile
4 1,002 (21.28%) Problem-Solving
5 797 (16.93%) Infrastructure as Code
6 787 (16.71%) AI
7 682 (14.48%) Analytics
8 681 (14.46%) Machine Learning
9 608 (12.91%) Containerisation
10 606 (12.87%) Software Engineering
11 589 (12.51%) Data Pipeline
12 508 (10.79%) Data Modelling
13 494 (10.49%) ETL
14 491 (10.43%) Data Science
15 466 (9.90%) Data Engineering
15 466 (9.90%) Test Automation
16 401 (8.52%) Computer Science
17 387 (8.22%) Business Intelligence
18 332 (7.05%) Microservices
18 332 (7.05%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,480 (31.43%) SQL
2 854 (18.14%) Java
3 653 (13.87%) Bash
4 589 (12.51%) PowerShell
5 551 (11.70%) JavaScript
6 341 (7.24%) TypeScript
7 287 (6.09%) Go
8 272 (5.78%) C#
9 270 (5.73%) C++
10 199 (4.23%) Shell Script
11 197 (4.18%) Perl
12 158 (3.36%) R
13 100 (2.12%) Scala
14 85 (1.81%) C
15 73 (1.55%) Ruby
16 57 (1.21%) Groovy
17 56 (1.19%) PHP
18 54 (1.15%) VBA
19 46 (0.98%) Kusto Query Language
20 44 (0.93%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 863 (18.33%) Security Cleared
2 693 (14.72%) SC Cleared
3 476 (10.11%) Degree
4 230 (4.88%) Computer Science Degree
5 145 (3.08%) AWS Certification
6 140 (2.97%) Master's Degree
7 133 (2.82%) DV Cleared
8 100 (2.12%) Cisco Certification
9 77 (1.64%) CISSP
10 71 (1.51%) BPSS Clearance
11 70 (1.49%) Azure Certification
12 66 (1.40%) CCNP
13 58 (1.23%) PhD
14 46 (0.98%) MCP
15 40 (0.85%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 39 (0.83%) OSCP
17 38 (0.81%) CCIE
18 37 (0.79%) CEH
19 29 (0.62%) GIAC
19 29 (0.62%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 321 (6.82%) Data Quality
2 191 (4.06%) QA
3 146 (3.10%) GDPR
4 93 (1.97%) NIST
5 85 (1.81%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 60 (1.27%) Accessibility
7 50 (1.06%) PCI DSS
8 43 (0.91%) HIPAA
9 27 (0.57%) SLA
10 26 (0.55%) NCSC
11 25 (0.53%) SOC 2
12 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
13 18 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 13 (0.28%) Cyber Essentials
15 12 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
16 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
17 9 (0.19%) EMIR
17 9 (0.19%) MiFID
18 8 (0.17%) Actionable Recommendations
19 7 (0.15%) PMO
System Software
1 878 (18.65%) Docker
2 146 (3.10%) Active Directory
3 138 (2.93%) VMware Infrastructure
4 44 (0.93%) vSphere
5 35 (0.74%) Virtual Machines
6 34 (0.72%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.62%) Firmware
8 22 (0.47%) DFS Replication
9 21 (0.45%) VMware ESXi
10 17 (0.36%) Squid
11 15 (0.32%) Hyper-V
12 14 (0.30%) KVM
12 14 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
13 13 (0.28%) HDFS
13 13 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
14 12 (0.25%) Postfix
15 10 (0.21%) zsh
16 7 (0.15%) GPFS
17 6 (0.13%) Veritas Cluster Server
Systems Management
1 1,002 (21.28%) Kubernetes
2 974 (20.68%) Terraform
3 626 (13.29%) Ansible
4 339 (7.20%) Grafana
5 298 (6.33%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.81%) Puppet
7 73 (1.55%) Argo
8 51 (1.08%) Kibana
9 41 (0.87%) Progress Chef
10 37 (0.79%) Nessus
11 35 (0.74%) Istio
12 34 (0.72%) vRealize
13 30 (0.64%) Single Sign-On
14 29 (0.62%) Nmap
15 28 (0.59%) NetBackup
16 25 (0.53%) ITRS Geneos
16 25 (0.53%) vCenter Server
17 23 (0.49%) logstash
18 22 (0.47%) Microsoft Intune
18 22 (0.47%) Packer
Vendors
1 521 (11.06%) Microsoft
2 322 (6.84%) Databricks
3 276 (5.86%) Google
4 248 (5.27%) Splunk
5 226 (4.80%) Oracle
6 222 (4.71%) VMware
7 150 (3.19%) ServiceNow
8 136 (2.89%) Cisco
9 129 (2.74%) Red Hat
10 88 (1.87%) Palo Alto
11 83 (1.76%) F5
12 70 (1.49%) OpenAI
13 67 (1.42%) SAP
14 56 (1.19%) Foundry
15 49 (1.04%) Atlassian
16 46 (0.98%) IBM
16 46 (0.98%) Salesforce
17 44 (0.93%) CyberArk
18 43 (0.91%) CrowdStrike
18 43 (0.91%) Juniper