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 30 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,849 3,962 4,156
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.54% 12.60% 9.37%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.10% 37.67% 31.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,260 2,626 2,931
10th Percentile £358 £389 £400
25th Percentile £415 £463 £471
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -5.91% -1.79% -6.67%
75th Percentile £638 £676 £675
90th Percentile £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £494 £522 £525
% change year-on-year -5.46% -0.57% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 95 59 118
10th Percentile £28.50 £21.02 £27.30
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.80 £46.18
Median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.67% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £72.49 £66.51 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.60 £81.50 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £62.50
% change year-on-year +10.89% -26.11% -4.58%

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 11,798 10,518 13,164
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.52% 33.44% 29.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,813 6,655 9,327
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.57% -2.33% -4.87%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £721 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -1.63% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 442 245 504
10th Percentile £39.64 £21.25 £35.51
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.75 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.62
90th Percentile £76.25 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -3.85%

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 30 January 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 30 January 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 30 January 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 0 4,084 £523 -9.04% 3,252
London 0 2,339 £550 -8.33% 1,158
UK excluding London -1 1,868 £494 -5.46% 2,727
Work from Home 0 1,456 £525 -4.55% 1,482
North of England +9 604 £475 -5.94% 516
South East +2 408 £481 -12.50% 962
Yorkshire +4 309 £500 -6.98% 198
Midlands +4 285 £506 +4.65% 296
Scotland +1 273 £463 -3.09% 171
North West +7 251 £450 -9.91% 246
West Midlands +7 243 £517 +0.88% 121
South West -10 188 £550 -10.20% 344
East of England +3 127 £525 +5.53% 358
North East +7 50 £488 -10.55% 76
East Midlands -19 42 £444 +12.91% 171
Northern Ireland +3 29 £588 +11.90% 41
Wales -16 27 £523 +4.50% 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
1 227 (4.68%) Apache Spark
2 206 (4.25%) Apache Airflow
3 157 (3.24%) Apache
4 151 (3.11%) Confluence
5 61 (1.26%) SAS
6 60 (1.24%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.76%) nginx
8 36 (0.74%) OpenStack
9 30 (0.62%) Microsoft Exchange
10 22 (0.45%) Jupyter
11 20 (0.41%) Appian
11 20 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
12 11 (0.23%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.16%) Camunda
15 7 (0.14%) IIS
16 6 (0.12%) CMS
16 6 (0.12%) Luigi
16 6 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
16 6 (0.12%) Tomcat
Applications
1 128 (2.64%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 18 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 3 (0.062%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.062%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.041%) Maya
9 2 (0.041%) NUKE
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.33%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 3 (0.062%) Actimize
5 3 (0.062%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.041%) Bloomberg AIM
6 2 (0.041%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.041%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.041%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.041%) Shopify
6 2 (0.041%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.021%) Cerner Millennium
7 1 (0.021%) Cloudability
7 1 (0.021%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
7 1 (0.021%) ION MarketView
7 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
7 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
7 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,899 (39.16%) AWS
2 1,583 (32.65%) Azure
3 747 (15.41%) GCP
4 609 (12.56%) GitHub
5 519 (10.70%) Serverless
6 444 (9.16%) Power Platform
7 369 (7.61%) Amazon S3
8 347 (7.16%) AWS Lambda
9 326 (6.72%) Azure DevOps
10 317 (6.54%) GitHub Actions
11 251 (5.18%) AWS CloudFormation
12 241 (4.97%) Snowflake
13 222 (4.58%) Azure Data Factory
14 186 (3.84%) Amazon EC2
15 177 (3.65%) Amazon ECS
16 175 (3.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 174 (3.59%) Amazon EKS
18 141 (2.91%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 140 (2.89%) OpenShift
20 136 (2.80%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 236 (4.87%) Firewall
2 149 (3.07%) DNS
3 128 (2.64%) Network Security
4 122 (2.52%) TCP/IP
5 81 (1.67%) VPN
6 75 (1.55%) HTTP
7 71 (1.46%) BGP
8 61 (1.26%) SSL
9 56 (1.15%) WAN
10 43 (0.89%) LAN
10 43 (0.89%) MPLS
11 41 (0.85%) OSPF
11 41 (0.85%) Wireshark
12 33 (0.68%) Wireless
13 29 (0.60%) DHCP
14 28 (0.58%) SSH
15 27 (0.56%) SD-WAN
16 26 (0.54%) VLAN
17 24 (0.49%) SMTP
18 21 (0.43%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 373 (7.69%) Power BI
2 372 (7.67%) PostgreSQL
3 286 (5.90%) Data Warehouse
4 228 (4.70%) NoSQL
5 222 (4.58%) Relational Database
6 221 (4.56%) Data Lake
7 173 (3.57%) SQL Server
8 161 (3.32%) Big Data
9 154 (3.18%) Amazon RDS
10 150 (3.09%) Tableau
11 124 (2.56%) MySQL
12 113 (2.33%) Metadata
13 107 (2.21%) BigQuery
14 98 (2.02%) Amazon Redshift
15 89 (1.84%) Amazon Athena
16 87 (1.79%) MongoDB
17 85 (1.75%) Delta Lake
18 83 (1.71%) Hadoop
19 76 (1.57%) Elasticsearch
20 75 (1.55%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 610 (12.58%) Git
2 546 (11.26%) Jenkins
3 422 (8.70%) GitLab
4 283 (5.84%) JIRA
5 81 (1.67%) MLflow
6 80 (1.65%) Selenium
7 49 (1.01%) Cucumber
8 47 (0.97%) Sonatype Nexus
9 45 (0.93%) Bitbucket
10 43 (0.89%) Postman
11 38 (0.78%) JUnit
12 37 (0.76%) SonarQube
13 32 (0.66%) JMeter
14 30 (0.62%) Maven
15 28 (0.58%) CircleCI
16 27 (0.56%) Visual Studio
17 26 (0.54%) Liquibase
18 25 (0.52%) Artifactory
18 25 (0.52%) SpecFlow
19 24 (0.49%) Cypress.io
General
1 1,294 (26.69%) Social Skills
2 937 (19.32%) Finance
3 684 (14.11%) Analytical Skills
4 446 (9.20%) Public Sector
5 423 (8.72%) Banking
6 161 (3.32%) Front Office
7 129 (2.66%) Investment Banking
8 123 (2.54%) Documentation Skills
9 69 (1.42%) Financial Institution
10 64 (1.32%) Marketing
11 62 (1.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 62 (1.28%) Retail
12 57 (1.18%) Pharmaceutical
13 52 (1.07%) Telecoms
14 42 (0.87%) Legal
14 42 (0.87%) Presentation Skills
15 39 (0.80%) Manufacturing
16 35 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
17 29 (0.60%) Military
18 24 (0.49%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 857 (17.67%) Developer
2 665 (13.71%) Senior
3 641 (13.22%) Data Engineer
4 364 (7.51%) Python Developer
5 314 (6.48%) DevOps Engineer
6 305 (6.29%) Python Engineer
7 303 (6.25%) Architect
8 277 (5.71%) Analyst
9 271 (5.59%) AWS Engineer
10 251 (5.18%) Lead
11 231 (4.76%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 219 (4.52%) Software Engineer
13 185 (3.82%) Data Scientist
14 170 (3.51%) Platform Engineer
15 146 (3.01%) Senior Developer
16 138 (2.85%) Data Analyst
17 132 (2.72%) Azure Engineer
18 126 (2.60%) Senior Data Engineer
19 124 (2.56%) Full-Stack Developer
20 120 (2.47%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 423 (8.72%) REST
2 311 (6.41%) React
3 288 (5.94%) Kafka
4 276 (5.69%) PySpark
5 244 (5.03%) Node.js
6 222 (4.58%) Pandas
6 222 (4.58%) RESTful
7 215 (4.43%) FastAPI
8 200 (4.12%) PyTorch
9 187 (3.86%) .NET
10 169 (3.49%) NumPy
11 167 (3.44%) TensorFlow
12 136 (2.80%) AngularJS
13 122 (2.52%) LangChain
14 119 (2.45%) scikit-learn
15 116 (2.39%) Flask
16 109 (2.25%) Elastic Stack
17 108 (2.23%) OAuth
17 108 (2.23%) pytest
18 104 (2.14%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 425 (8.76%) Cloud Native
2 196 (4.04%) Algorithms
3 182 (3.75%) Distributed Systems
4 135 (2.78%) Product Ownership
5 132 (2.72%) Data Protection Act
6 119 (2.45%) Equities
7 107 (2.21%) Data Structures
8 98 (2.02%) AI Agents
8 98 (2.02%) Onboarding
9 95 (1.96%) Enterprise Software
10 92 (1.90%) Derivative
11 83 (1.71%) Legacy Systems
11 83 (1.71%) Public Cloud
12 82 (1.69%) Management Information System
13 80 (1.65%) Fixed Income
13 80 (1.65%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 80 (1.65%) Security Posture
14 79 (1.63%) Hybrid Cloud
15 78 (1.61%) Data Centre
16 72 (1.48%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 767 (15.82%) Linux
2 354 (7.30%) Windows
3 227 (4.68%) Unix
4 92 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.30%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.74%) Android
8 35 (0.72%) VMS
9 28 (0.58%) CentOS
10 26 (0.54%) Solaris
11 25 (0.52%) Mac OS
12 20 (0.41%) Apple iOS
13 15 (0.31%) Amazon Linux
14 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
15 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
16 5 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.10%) Windows 10
17 4 (0.082%) Debian
17 4 (0.082%) Robot Operating System
17 4 (0.082%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,718 (35.43%) CI/CD
2 1,355 (27.94%) DevOps
3 1,145 (23.61%) Agile
4 1,064 (21.94%) Problem-Solving
5 995 (20.52%) AI
6 863 (17.80%) Infrastructure as Code
7 841 (17.34%) Analytics
8 762 (15.71%) Machine Learning
9 738 (15.22%) Containerisation
10 721 (14.87%) Data Pipeline
11 600 (12.37%) ETL
12 574 (11.84%) Data Engineering
13 572 (11.80%) Data Science
14 568 (11.71%) Data Modelling
15 531 (10.95%) Software Engineering
16 526 (10.85%) Test Automation
17 423 (8.72%) Business Intelligence
18 413 (8.52%) Observability
19 393 (8.10%) LLM
20 363 (7.49%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,477 (30.46%) SQL
2 740 (15.26%) Java
3 664 (13.69%) PowerShell
4 614 (12.66%) Bash
5 483 (9.96%) JavaScript
6 308 (6.35%) C#
7 297 (6.12%) TypeScript
8 237 (4.89%) Go
9 198 (4.08%) C++
10 156 (3.22%) R
11 149 (3.07%) Perl
12 145 (2.99%) Shell Script
13 119 (2.45%) Scala
14 96 (1.98%) Ruby
15 60 (1.24%) Bicep
15 60 (1.24%) Kusto Query Language
16 54 (1.11%) C
17 50 (1.03%) VBA
18 41 (0.85%) PHP
19 38 (0.78%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,072 (22.11%) Security Cleared
2 869 (17.92%) SC Cleared
3 447 (9.22%) Degree
4 235 (4.85%) Computer Science Degree
5 137 (2.83%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.68%) AWS Certification
7 123 (2.54%) Master's Degree
8 91 (1.88%) BPSS Clearance
9 90 (1.86%) CISSP
10 88 (1.81%) Azure Certification
11 78 (1.61%) Cisco Certification
12 51 (1.05%) CCNP
12 51 (1.05%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 43 (0.89%) PhD
14 39 (0.80%) CISM
15 37 (0.76%) CEH
16 36 (0.74%) CCIE
17 33 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.66%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 32 (0.66%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 397 (8.19%) Data Quality
2 176 (3.63%) QA
3 165 (3.40%) GDPR
4 97 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 97 (2.00%) NIST
5 59 (1.22%) Accessibility
6 33 (0.68%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.62%) HIPAA
8 29 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 22 (0.45%) NCSC
9 22 (0.45%) SLA
10 19 (0.39%) SOC 2
11 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
12 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
12 10 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
13 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
13 9 (0.19%) MiFID
13 9 (0.19%) PMO
13 9 (0.19%) WCAG
14 8 (0.16%) EMIR
System Software
1 956 (19.72%) Docker
2 184 (3.79%) Active Directory
3 118 (2.43%) VMware Infrastructure
4 46 (0.95%) VMware NSX
5 40 (0.82%) vSphere
6 38 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
7 24 (0.49%) Firmware
8 23 (0.47%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.41%) HDFS
10 15 (0.31%) KVM
11 14 (0.29%) Squid
12 12 (0.25%) DFS Replication
12 12 (0.25%) Postfix
12 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 12 (0.25%) VMware ESXi
13 10 (0.21%) Lustre
14 9 (0.19%) GPFS
14 9 (0.19%) Oracle RAC
15 8 (0.16%) Dovecot
15 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,078 (22.23%) Terraform
2 1,012 (20.87%) Kubernetes
3 584 (12.04%) Ansible
4 349 (7.20%) Grafana
5 302 (6.23%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.86%) Argo
7 77 (1.59%) Puppet
8 54 (1.11%) Kibana
9 50 (1.03%) vRealize
10 42 (0.87%) Istio
11 40 (0.82%) Nessus
12 35 (0.72%) Single Sign-On
13 29 (0.60%) NetBackup
14 28 (0.58%) Progress Chef
15 22 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
16 20 (0.41%) Control-M
17 19 (0.39%) ITRS Geneos
18 18 (0.37%) logstash
18 18 (0.37%) Nmap
19 17 (0.35%) IBM Guardium
Vendors
1 593 (12.23%) Microsoft
2 451 (9.30%) Databricks
3 293 (6.04%) Google
4 246 (5.07%) Splunk
5 232 (4.78%) Oracle
6 223 (4.60%) VMware
7 137 (2.83%) Red Hat
8 124 (2.56%) Cisco
9 117 (2.41%) ServiceNow
10 111 (2.29%) OpenAI
11 93 (1.92%) CyberArk
12 83 (1.71%) F5
12 83 (1.71%) Palo Alto
13 75 (1.55%) Foundry
14 69 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
15 51 (1.05%) SAP
16 43 (0.89%) IBM
16 43 (0.89%) Informatica
17 42 (0.87%) Dynatrace
18 39 (0.80%) Atlassian