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 20 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,660 4,242 4,012
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.72% 12.93% 9.61%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.07% 39.03% 31.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,698 2,851 2,928
10th Percentile £366 £363 £375
25th Percentile £425 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £537 £563
Median % change year-on-year -2.23% -4.53% -6.25%
75th Percentile £634 £650 £700
90th Percentile £749 £798 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £492 £507
% change year-on-year +1.54% -2.78% -3.52%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 67 123
10th Percentile £28.50 £27.44 £20.87
25th Percentile £43.16 £34.33 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -16.67% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.00 £58.13 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +12.50%

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 14,125 10,868 12,837
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.76% 33.14% 30.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,162 7,308 9,068
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £421 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £494
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.85% -1.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 531 260 478
10th Percentile £34.01 £28.16 £30.55
25th Percentile £52.25 £36.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.13 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.79% -8.60% +2.97%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.30 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +4.00%

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 20 July 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 20 July 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 20 July 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 -4 4,728 £530 -3.64% 2,041
London -4 2,710 £560 -2.61% 1,025
UK excluding London -3 2,245 £500 +1.54% 1,378
Work from Home -5 1,592 £525 -4.55% 739
North of England +5 778 £488 +2.63% 331
South East -11 442 £538 +7.50% 449
Yorkshire +2 414 £500 +2.04% 99
Scotland +4 328 £438 -7.89% 74
North West +6 289 £525 +10.53% 168
South West -1 288 £500 -9.09% 171
Midlands -12 255 £473 +5.00% 167
West Midlands -14 205 £469 +4.22% 90
East of England -14 133 £500 -0.50% 149
North East +3 88 £425 -2.86% 65
East Midlands -10 49 £485 +8.50% 76
Wales -9 31 £500 +12.36% 37
Northern Ireland +13 26 £363 -36.26% 26

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
1 287 (5.07%) Apache Spark
2 273 (4.82%) Apache Airflow
3 211 (3.73%) Apache
4 178 (3.14%) Confluence
5 52 (0.92%) Jupyter
5 52 (0.92%) SAS
6 47 (0.83%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.49%) OpenStack
8 25 (0.44%) nginx
9 20 (0.35%) ArcGIS
10 18 (0.32%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
12 12 (0.21%) IIS
13 11 (0.19%) Tomcat
14 9 (0.16%) CMS
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.088%) JBoss
Applications
1 122 (2.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
6 19 (0.34%) MS Visio
7 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.088%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.088%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.035%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.035%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.035%) Remedy AR System
10 2 (0.035%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,114 (37.35%) AWS
2 1,890 (33.39%) Azure
3 834 (14.73%) GCP
4 688 (12.16%) GitHub
5 520 (9.19%) Power Platform
6 481 (8.50%) Serverless
7 425 (7.51%) Amazon S3
8 399 (7.05%) Azure DevOps
9 381 (6.73%) GitHub Actions
10 363 (6.41%) AWS Lambda
11 296 (5.23%) Snowflake
12 234 (4.13%) Azure Data Factory
13 218 (3.85%) dbt
14 192 (3.39%) AWS CloudFormation
15 178 (3.14%) Amazon EKS
16 177 (3.13%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 159 (2.81%) OpenShift
18 150 (2.65%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 133 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
20 128 (2.26%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 257 (4.54%) Firewall
2 188 (3.32%) DNS
3 128 (2.26%) TCP/IP
4 126 (2.23%) BGP
5 117 (2.07%) Network Security
6 115 (2.03%) WAN
7 108 (1.91%) VPN
8 79 (1.40%) OSPF
9 62 (1.10%) DHCP
10 59 (1.04%) VLAN
11 56 (0.99%) HTTP
11 56 (0.99%) SAN
12 55 (0.97%) BIG-IP
13 53 (0.94%) SD-WAN
14 51 (0.90%) VXLAN
15 47 (0.83%) SSL
16 44 (0.78%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 43 (0.76%) LAN
17 43 (0.76%) SNMP
18 42 (0.74%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 460 (8.13%) Power BI
2 356 (6.29%) PostgreSQL
3 321 (5.67%) Data Warehouse
4 234 (4.13%) SQL Server
5 204 (3.60%) Data Lake
5 204 (3.60%) Tableau
6 191 (3.37%) Relational Database
7 183 (3.23%) Metadata
8 165 (2.92%) Big Data
9 163 (2.88%) NoSQL
10 150 (2.65%) BigQuery
11 137 (2.42%) Amazon Athena
11 137 (2.42%) Amazon Redshift
12 127 (2.24%) MongoDB
13 118 (2.08%) Delta Lake
14 110 (1.94%) DynamoDB
15 107 (1.89%) Amazon RDS
16 86 (1.52%) MySQL
17 75 (1.33%) Hadoop
18 74 (1.31%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 697 (12.31%) Git
2 502 (8.87%) Jenkins
3 401 (7.08%) GitLab
4 311 (5.49%) JIRA
5 82 (1.45%) Selenium
6 70 (1.24%) MLflow
7 50 (0.88%) Postman
8 43 (0.76%) Bitbucket
9 39 (0.69%) JMeter
10 34 (0.60%) Cucumber
10 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
10 34 (0.60%) SonarQube
11 33 (0.58%) REST Assured
12 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
13 28 (0.49%) Claude Code
13 28 (0.49%) JUnit
14 26 (0.46%) Sonatype Nexus
15 25 (0.44%) Maven
16 24 (0.42%) Gatling
17 18 (0.32%) Zephyr
General
1 1,221 (21.57%) Social Skills
2 1,187 (20.97%) Finance
3 776 (13.71%) Analytical Skills
4 551 (9.73%) Public Sector
5 427 (7.54%) Banking
6 203 (3.59%) Front Office
7 130 (2.30%) Documentation Skills
8 126 (2.23%) Investment Banking
9 112 (1.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 94 (1.66%) Retail
11 83 (1.47%) Marketing
12 65 (1.15%) Telecoms
13 64 (1.13%) Pharmaceutical
14 61 (1.08%) Legal
15 48 (0.85%) Financial Institution
15 48 (0.85%) Military
16 45 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
16 45 (0.80%) Publishing
17 36 (0.64%) Manufacturing
18 30 (0.53%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 990 (17.49%) Developer
2 882 (15.58%) Senior
3 845 (14.93%) Data Engineer
4 525 (9.28%) Python Developer
5 429 (7.58%) Lead
6 390 (6.89%) Python Engineer
7 330 (5.83%) DevOps Engineer
8 309 (5.46%) Software Engineer
9 308 (5.44%) Architect
10 287 (5.07%) Analyst
11 253 (4.47%) AWS Engineer
12 246 (4.35%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 222 (3.92%) Data Scientist
14 188 (3.32%) Platform Engineer
15 179 (3.16%) Cloud Engineer
16 178 (3.14%) Senior Developer
17 172 (3.04%) Azure Engineer
18 169 (2.99%) Senior Data Engineer
19 146 (2.58%) Data Analyst
20 137 (2.42%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 408 (7.21%) REST
2 366 (6.47%) React
3 359 (6.34%) PySpark
4 353 (6.24%) Kafka
5 237 (4.19%) .NET
6 218 (3.85%) FastAPI
7 215 (3.80%) Node.js
8 204 (3.60%) RESTful
9 197 (3.48%) JSON
10 194 (3.43%) Pandas
11 174 (3.07%) Django
12 155 (2.74%) PyTorch
13 136 (2.40%) LangChain
14 120 (2.12%) NumPy
15 118 (2.08%) Flask
16 108 (1.91%) scikit-learn
17 103 (1.82%) TensorFlow
18 102 (1.80%) OAuth
19 98 (1.73%) Spring
20 97 (1.71%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 748 (13.22%) Cloud Native
2 310 (5.48%) Distributed Systems
3 193 (3.41%) Onboarding
4 185 (3.27%) AI Agents
5 161 (2.84%) Data Centre
6 147 (2.60%) Algorithms
7 145 (2.56%) Product Ownership
8 130 (2.30%) Data Structures
9 127 (2.24%) Legacy Systems
10 119 (2.10%) Data Protection Act
11 115 (2.03%) Hybrid Cloud
12 112 (1.98%) Derivative
13 106 (1.87%) Management Information System
14 105 (1.86%) Fixed Income
15 94 (1.66%) Equities
16 83 (1.47%) Security Posture
17 68 (1.20%) Public Cloud
18 65 (1.15%) Linux Command Line
18 65 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
19 60 (1.06%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 690 (12.19%) Linux
2 320 (5.65%) Windows
3 218 (3.85%) Unix
4 134 (2.37%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 74 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.58%) VMS
8 26 (0.46%) AIX
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 18 (0.32%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 8 (0.14%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Debian
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,151 (38.00%) CI/CD
2 1,563 (27.61%) DevOps
3 1,384 (24.45%) AI
4 1,284 (22.69%) Agile
5 1,135 (20.05%) Analytics
6 1,069 (18.89%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,014 (17.92%) Data Pipeline
8 918 (16.22%) Problem-Solving
9 903 (15.95%) Machine Learning
10 812 (14.35%) Software Engineering
11 808 (14.28%) Data Engineering
12 767 (13.55%) Containerisation
13 750 (13.25%) Data Modelling
14 691 (12.21%) ETL
15 656 (11.59%) Observability
16 637 (11.25%) Data Science
17 575 (10.16%) Test Automation
18 542 (9.58%) Business Intelligence
19 524 (9.26%) LLM
20 513 (9.06%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,809 (31.96%) SQL
2 799 (14.12%) Java
3 711 (12.56%) Bash
4 682 (12.05%) PowerShell
5 459 (8.11%) JavaScript
6 400 (7.07%) TypeScript
7 318 (5.62%) C#
8 217 (3.83%) Go
9 164 (2.90%) R
10 140 (2.47%) C++
11 128 (2.26%) Scala
11 128 (2.26%) Shell Script
12 95 (1.68%) Bicep
13 73 (1.29%) Perl
14 58 (1.02%) PL/SQL
15 57 (1.01%) C
16 56 (0.99%) Ruby
17 55 (0.97%) Rust
18 54 (0.95%) Groovy
19 49 (0.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,275 (22.53%) Security Cleared
2 1,019 (18.00%) SC Cleared
3 426 (7.53%) Degree
4 193 (3.41%) DV Cleared
5 152 (2.69%) Computer Science Degree
6 137 (2.42%) BPSS Clearance
7 135 (2.39%) AWS Certification
8 123 (2.17%) Azure Certification
9 90 (1.59%) CISSP
10 87 (1.54%) Cisco Certification
11 80 (1.41%) Master's Degree
12 57 (1.01%) CCNP
13 47 (0.83%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 38 (0.67%) CISM
15 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Certification
16 32 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 32 (0.57%) CCIE
16 32 (0.57%) PhD
17 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
18 25 (0.44%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 555 (9.81%) Data Quality
2 251 (4.43%) QA
3 122 (2.16%) GDPR
4 110 (1.94%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 109 (1.93%) NIST
6 94 (1.66%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.60%) SLA
8 26 (0.46%) WCAG
9 23 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
9 23 (0.41%) HIPAA
9 23 (0.41%) NCSC
10 22 (0.39%) PCI DSS
11 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
12 13 (0.23%) SOC 2
13 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
14 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 9 (0.16%) GRC
15 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 888 (15.69%) Docker
2 135 (2.39%) Active Directory
3 125 (2.21%) VMware Infrastructure
4 76 (1.34%) Virtual Machines
5 48 (0.85%) vSphere
6 42 (0.74%) VMware NSX
7 37 (0.65%) Hyper-V
8 29 (0.51%) Firmware
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) NFS
11 15 (0.27%) KVM
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 11 (0.19%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
17 4 (0.071%) OpenSSH
17 4 (0.071%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,232 (21.77%) Terraform
2 1,062 (18.76%) Kubernetes
3 599 (10.58%) Ansible
4 360 (6.36%) Grafana
5 282 (4.98%) Prometheus
6 78 (1.38%) Puppet
7 73 (1.29%) Argo
8 51 (0.90%) Progress Chef
9 39 (0.69%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) vCenter Server
11 37 (0.65%) vRealize
12 27 (0.48%) Kibana
12 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
12 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
13 26 (0.46%) Control-M
13 26 (0.46%) Nagios
14 25 (0.44%) Nessus
14 25 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
15 19 (0.34%) FortiGate
15 19 (0.34%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 649 (11.47%) Microsoft
2 556 (9.82%) Databricks
3 324 (5.72%) Google
4 250 (4.42%) Oracle
5 214 (3.78%) Splunk
6 179 (3.16%) VMware
7 145 (2.56%) Cisco
8 142 (2.51%) OpenAI
9 114 (2.01%) ServiceNow
10 106 (1.87%) Red Hat
11 95 (1.68%) F5
12 90 (1.59%) Dynatrace
12 90 (1.59%) Palo Alto
13 83 (1.47%) IBM
14 82 (1.45%) Informatica
15 69 (1.22%) Fortinet
16 65 (1.15%) CyberArk
17 64 (1.13%) Foundry
18 59 (1.04%) SAP
19 55 (0.97%) Arista