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

6 months to
9 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,803 4,200 4,515
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.24% 11.76% 9.93%
As % of the Programming Languages category 42.16% 36.34% 32.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,162 2,779 3,239
10th Percentile £358 £375 £400
25th Percentile £420 £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 £798
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £505 £525
% change year-on-year -0.99% -3.81% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 87 79 132
10th Percentile £27.10 £20.12 £36.38
25th Percentile £38.75 £25.17 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £50.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +6.93% -15.83% -7.69%
75th Percentile £69.38 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.00 £57.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year -9.57% -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 11,393 11,557 14,015
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.40% 32.36% 30.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,515 7,415 9,980
10th Percentile £349 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £435
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -3.08%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -3.94% -1.00% -3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 343 282 433
10th Percentile £31.02 £22.00 £31.30
25th Percentile £48.75 £40.19 £47.50
Median hourly rate £64.50 £62.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year +3.20% +3.31% -3.20%
75th Percentile £68.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 £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 9 December 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 9 December 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 9 December 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 +1 4,084 £525 -12.50% 2,811
London +1 2,396 £550 -12.00% 1,131
UK excluding London +4 1,832 £500 -0.99% 2,309
Work from Home -1 1,432 £525 -4.55% 1,208
North of England +9 565 £478 -7.41% 488
South East +4 398 £500 -4.76% 811
Yorkshire +9 291 £500 -6.98% 160
Scotland +10 284 £473 -1.46% 130
Midlands +10 274 £500 +5.26% 304
North West +9 238 £450 -9.04% 262
West Midlands +15 226 £507 +1.30% 192
South West -9 171 £550 -8.33% 265
East of England +8 147 £525 +5.00% 260
East Midlands -10 48 £410 +2.50% 110
North East +7 41 £515 -8.85% 73
Wales -8 31 £495 -1.00% 69
Northern Ireland -2 21 £588 +11.90% 27

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
1 245 (5.10%) Apache Airflow
2 208 (4.33%) Apache Spark
3 175 (3.64%) Apache
4 167 (3.48%) Confluence
5 68 (1.42%) SAS
6 56 (1.17%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.71%) OpenStack
8 33 (0.69%) nginx
9 23 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
10 21 (0.44%) Jupyter
11 12 (0.25%) Appian
11 12 (0.25%) IIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
14 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
15 6 (0.12%) JBoss
15 6 (0.12%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.10%) Camunda
16 5 (0.10%) CMS
16 5 (0.10%) Luigi
Applications
1 140 (2.91%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.73%) Chatbot
3 31 (0.65%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 28 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
5 13 (0.27%) MS Visio
6 11 (0.23%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 5 (0.10%) Maya
8 5 (0.10%) NUKE
9 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
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 11 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.19%) 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%) NetSuite
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%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.042%) Shopify
8 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
9 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
9 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
9 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,888 (39.31%) AWS
2 1,450 (30.19%) Azure
3 710 (14.78%) GCP
4 575 (11.97%) GitHub
5 496 (10.33%) Serverless
6 418 (8.70%) Power Platform
7 378 (7.87%) Amazon S3
8 344 (7.16%) AWS Lambda
9 306 (6.37%) GitHub Actions
10 295 (6.14%) Azure DevOps
11 255 (5.31%) Snowflake
12 235 (4.89%) AWS CloudFormation
13 200 (4.16%) Amazon EC2
14 192 (4.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 181 (3.77%) Amazon ECS
16 172 (3.58%) Azure Data Factory
17 166 (3.46%) dbt
18 162 (3.37%) Amazon EKS
19 145 (3.02%) OpenShift
20 136 (2.83%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 267 (5.56%) Firewall
2 181 (3.77%) DNS
3 141 (2.94%) TCP/IP
4 112 (2.33%) Network Security
5 91 (1.89%) HTTP
6 87 (1.81%) VPN
7 84 (1.75%) BGP
8 68 (1.42%) SSL
9 52 (1.08%) OSPF
9 52 (1.08%) WAN
10 46 (0.96%) MPLS
11 41 (0.85%) SSH
12 40 (0.83%) Wireless
13 38 (0.79%) SMTP
14 37 (0.77%) LAN
14 37 (0.77%) Wireshark
15 36 (0.75%) SD-WAN
16 35 (0.73%) DHCP
17 31 (0.65%) FTP
18 27 (0.56%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 397 (8.27%) PostgreSQL
2 362 (7.54%) Power BI
3 285 (5.93%) Data Warehouse
4 249 (5.18%) Relational Database
5 240 (5.00%) NoSQL
6 185 (3.85%) Data Lake
7 176 (3.66%) Big Data
8 171 (3.56%) Amazon RDS
9 161 (3.35%) Tableau
10 144 (3.00%) SQL Server
11 125 (2.60%) MongoDB
12 118 (2.46%) MySQL
13 103 (2.14%) Amazon Athena
14 102 (2.12%) BigQuery
15 94 (1.96%) Hadoop
16 88 (1.83%) Metadata
17 86 (1.79%) Amazon Redshift
18 83 (1.73%) DynamoDB
19 77 (1.60%) Elasticsearch
20 66 (1.37%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 653 (13.60%) Git
2 614 (12.78%) Jenkins
3 423 (8.81%) GitLab
4 311 (6.48%) JIRA
5 76 (1.58%) Selenium
6 65 (1.35%) Bitbucket
6 65 (1.35%) MLflow
7 63 (1.31%) SonarQube
8 58 (1.21%) Sonatype Nexus
9 53 (1.10%) JUnit
10 44 (0.92%) Liquibase
11 41 (0.85%) Cucumber
12 34 (0.71%) JMeter
13 31 (0.65%) Artifactory
13 31 (0.65%) Postman
14 28 (0.58%) Eclipse
15 26 (0.54%) CircleCI
15 26 (0.54%) Cypress.io
15 26 (0.54%) Gradle
15 26 (0.54%) Maven
General
1 1,318 (27.44%) Social Skills
2 1,065 (22.17%) Finance
3 687 (14.30%) Analytical Skills
4 482 (10.04%) Banking
5 431 (8.97%) Public Sector
6 223 (4.64%) Front Office
7 178 (3.71%) Investment Banking
8 107 (2.23%) Documentation Skills
9 82 (1.71%) Financial Institution
10 78 (1.62%) Marketing
11 73 (1.52%) Telecoms
12 69 (1.44%) Retail
13 68 (1.42%) Pharmaceutical
14 60 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 45 (0.94%) Legal
15 45 (0.94%) Presentation Skills
16 43 (0.90%) Manufacturing
17 33 (0.69%) Influencing Skills
18 27 (0.56%) Electronics
18 27 (0.56%) Military
Job Titles
1 874 (18.20%) Developer
2 666 (13.87%) Senior
3 553 (11.51%) Data Engineer
4 352 (7.33%) Python Engineer
5 349 (7.27%) Python Developer
6 343 (7.14%) DevOps Engineer
7 333 (6.93%) Analyst
8 297 (6.18%) AWS Engineer
9 261 (5.43%) Software Engineer
10 248 (5.16%) Architect
11 223 (4.64%) Lead
12 206 (4.29%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 189 (3.94%) Platform Engineer
14 186 (3.87%) Data Scientist
15 162 (3.37%) Data Analyst
16 140 (2.91%) Senior Developer
17 126 (2.62%) Consultant
18 118 (2.46%) Automation Engineer
19 115 (2.39%) Cloud Engineer
20 114 (2.37%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 377 (7.85%) REST
2 328 (6.83%) Kafka
3 325 (6.77%) React
4 248 (5.16%) Node.js
5 243 (5.06%) Pandas
6 240 (5.00%) RESTful
7 226 (4.71%) FastAPI
8 211 (4.39%) PySpark
9 194 (4.04%) NumPy
10 193 (4.02%) PyTorch
11 169 (3.52%) TensorFlow
12 149 (3.10%) AngularJS
13 139 (2.89%) .NET
14 137 (2.85%) Elastic Stack
15 122 (2.54%) scikit-learn
16 118 (2.46%) LangChain
17 107 (2.23%) pytest
18 104 (2.17%) Flask
18 104 (2.17%) JSON
19 99 (2.06%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 387 (8.06%) Cloud Native
2 203 (4.23%) Algorithms
3 197 (4.10%) Distributed Systems
4 143 (2.98%) Equities
5 137 (2.85%) Data Protection Act
6 132 (2.75%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 130 (2.71%) Fixed Income
8 122 (2.54%) Product Ownership
9 111 (2.31%) Derivative
10 110 (2.29%) Data Structures
11 109 (2.27%) Onboarding
12 101 (2.10%) AI Agents
12 101 (2.10%) Hedge funds
13 81 (1.69%) Public Cloud
14 78 (1.62%) Data Centre
15 77 (1.60%) Hybrid Cloud
16 73 (1.52%) Management Information System
17 67 (1.39%) Replication
18 65 (1.35%) Legacy Systems
19 54 (1.12%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 854 (17.78%) Linux
2 364 (7.58%) Windows
3 240 (5.00%) Unix
4 92 (1.92%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 65 (1.35%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.90%) Ubuntu
7 40 (0.83%) Android
8 38 (0.79%) VMS
9 34 (0.71%) CentOS
10 29 (0.60%) Mac OS
11 24 (0.50%) Amazon Linux
12 18 (0.37%) Apple iOS
12 18 (0.37%) Solaris
13 12 (0.25%) Debian
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
14 9 (0.19%) Windows 7
15 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
15 5 (0.10%) zOS
16 3 (0.062%) AIX
16 3 (0.062%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,615 (33.62%) CI/CD
2 1,340 (27.90%) DevOps
3 1,231 (25.63%) Agile
4 1,032 (21.49%) Problem-Solving
5 870 (18.11%) AI
6 863 (17.97%) Infrastructure as Code
7 777 (16.18%) Analytics
8 733 (15.26%) Machine Learning
9 693 (14.43%) Containerisation
10 644 (13.41%) Data Pipeline
11 591 (12.30%) Software Engineering
12 538 (11.20%) Data Science
13 527 (10.97%) Data Modelling
14 523 (10.89%) ETL
15 520 (10.83%) Data Engineering
16 490 (10.20%) Test Automation
17 415 (8.64%) Business Intelligence
18 394 (8.20%) Computer Science
19 379 (7.89%) Observability
20 366 (7.62%) Microservices
Programming Languages
1 1,476 (30.73%) SQL
2 830 (17.28%) Java
3 671 (13.97%) Bash
4 625 (13.01%) PowerShell
5 507 (10.56%) JavaScript
6 322 (6.70%) TypeScript
7 307 (6.39%) Go
8 274 (5.70%) C#
9 240 (5.00%) C++
10 184 (3.83%) Perl
11 176 (3.66%) R
12 166 (3.46%) Shell Script
13 104 (2.17%) Scala
14 90 (1.87%) Ruby
15 70 (1.46%) C
16 61 (1.27%) VBA
17 57 (1.19%) PHP
18 49 (1.02%) Bicep
19 48 (1.00%) Groovy
20 46 (0.96%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 946 (19.70%) Security Cleared
2 750 (15.62%) SC Cleared
3 470 (9.79%) Degree
4 239 (4.98%) Computer Science Degree
5 150 (3.12%) AWS Certification
6 147 (3.06%) Master's Degree
7 145 (3.02%) DV Cleared
8 95 (1.98%) Cisco Certification
9 88 (1.83%) CISSP
10 83 (1.73%) Azure Certification
11 82 (1.71%) BPSS Clearance
12 58 (1.21%) CCNP
13 55 (1.15%) MCP
14 53 (1.10%) PhD
15 42 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 40 (0.83%) CCIE
17 35 (0.73%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
18 33 (0.69%) CEH
18 33 (0.69%) CISM
19 31 (0.65%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 340 (7.08%) Data Quality
2 180 (3.75%) QA
3 162 (3.37%) GDPR
4 97 (2.02%) NIST
5 96 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 57 (1.19%) Accessibility
7 46 (0.96%) PCI DSS
8 38 (0.79%) HIPAA
9 24 (0.50%) NCSC
9 24 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 23 (0.48%) SLA
11 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
11 19 (0.40%) SOC 2
12 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
13 10 (0.21%) EMIR
13 10 (0.21%) MiFID
13 10 (0.21%) PMO
14 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
15 7 (0.15%) WCAG
System Software
1 954 (19.86%) Docker
2 165 (3.44%) Active Directory
3 127 (2.64%) VMware Infrastructure
4 37 (0.77%) Virtual Machines
4 37 (0.77%) vSphere
5 33 (0.69%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.60%) Firmware
7 20 (0.42%) DFS Replication
8 19 (0.40%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.35%) Squid
10 15 (0.31%) HDFS
10 15 (0.31%) KVM
10 15 (0.31%) Postfix
10 15 (0.31%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
12 11 (0.23%) Dovecot
12 11 (0.23%) VMware ESXi
13 10 (0.21%) GPFS
13 10 (0.21%) Lustre
14 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,072 (22.32%) Terraform
2 1,056 (21.99%) Kubernetes
3 622 (12.95%) Ansible
4 385 (8.02%) Grafana
5 323 (6.72%) Prometheus
6 88 (1.83%) Argo
7 84 (1.75%) Puppet
8 56 (1.17%) Kibana
9 49 (1.02%) Progress Chef
10 38 (0.79%) Istio
11 37 (0.77%) vRealize
12 36 (0.75%) Nessus
13 29 (0.60%) NetBackup
14 28 (0.58%) Single Sign-On
15 27 (0.56%) ITRS Geneos
16 25 (0.52%) logstash
17 24 (0.50%) vCenter Server
18 21 (0.44%) Nmap
19 20 (0.42%) Microsoft Intune
19 20 (0.42%) Packer
Vendors
1 562 (11.70%) Microsoft
2 378 (7.87%) Databricks
3 277 (5.77%) Google
4 259 (5.39%) Splunk
5 221 (4.60%) Oracle
6 214 (4.46%) VMware
7 140 (2.91%) ServiceNow
8 129 (2.69%) Cisco
9 128 (2.67%) Red Hat
10 87 (1.81%) F5
10 87 (1.81%) OpenAI
11 85 (1.77%) Palo Alto
12 70 (1.46%) Foundry
13 63 (1.31%) SAP
14 58 (1.21%) CyberArk
15 47 (0.98%) IBM
16 44 (0.92%) CrowdStrike
17 43 (0.90%) Atlassian
18 42 (0.87%) Juniper
18 42 (0.87%) Salesforce