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

6 months to
30 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,657 4,359 4,100
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.31% 13.28% 10.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.49% 40.15% 34.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,688 2,820 2,798
10th Percentile £375 £355 £368
25th Percentile £443 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -3.77%
75th Percentile £650 £644 £700
90th Percentile £750 £763 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £500 £505
% change year-on-year +1.00% -0.99% -3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 86 97
10th Percentile £33.35 £28.25 £20.80
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.06 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £67.02
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -25.40% +3.11%
75th Percentile £78.75 £58.75 £71.88
90th Percentile £92.11 £80.63 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.31 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.62% -28.57% +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 14,326 10,858 12,053
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.10% 33.07% 32.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,317 7,158 7,983
10th Percentile £363 £342 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £507 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.65% -3.52% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £648
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £491
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.31% -1.75%
Number of hourly rates quoted 540 296 332
10th Percentile £23.72 £29.00 £26.33
25th Percentile £46.00 £40.94 £46.14
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.23 £75.00 £78.63
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 30 September 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 September 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 September 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 4,815 £550 +4.76% 8,709
London -4 2,844 £575 - 5,415
UK excluding London -8 2,168 £505 +1.00% 3,830
Work from Home -6 1,552 £530 -3.64% 3,402
North of England +1 757 £500 +5.26% 856
South East -5 452 £544 +8.75% 818
Yorkshire -2 384 £500 - 265
Scotland -3 306 £466 -6.80% 450
North West +1 294 £525 +16.67% 477
South West -4 272 £550 +2.33% 526
Midlands -20 227 £500 +0.81% 399
West Midlands -18 187 £520 +4.00% 254
East of England -16 146 £480 -8.57% 522
North East -1 88 £425 -10.53% 117
East Midlands -16 40 £463 +12.80% 145
Wales -10 28 £530 +23.98% 89
Northern Ireland +3 17 £363 -32.56% 203

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
1 293 (5.18%) Apache Airflow
2 274 (4.84%) Apache Spark
3 225 (3.98%) Apache
4 156 (2.76%) Confluence
5 59 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 57 (1.01%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.60%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 27 (0.48%) nginx
10 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) IIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 9 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) CMS
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
14 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.088%) Camunda
14 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 100 (1.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 37 (0.65%) Chatbot
3 20 (0.35%) Microsoft Office
4 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
4 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.035%) Revit
7 2 (0.035%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
2 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
3 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) Front Arena
6 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.088%) SAP IBP
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.035%) R3 Corda
11 2 (0.035%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,078 (36.73%) AWS
2 1,908 (33.73%) Azure
3 907 (16.03%) GCP
4 745 (13.17%) GitHub
5 485 (8.57%) Power Platform
6 483 (8.54%) Serverless
7 437 (7.72%) Azure DevOps
8 436 (7.71%) GitHub Actions
9 397 (7.02%) Amazon S3
10 357 (6.31%) AWS Lambda
11 342 (6.05%) Snowflake
12 247 (4.37%) dbt
13 210 (3.71%) Azure Data Factory
14 206 (3.64%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 186 (3.29%) Amazon EKS
16 185 (3.27%) AWS CloudFormation
17 175 (3.09%) Entra ID
18 145 (2.56%) Amazon EC2
19 129 (2.28%) SaaS
20 127 (2.25%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 283 (5.00%) Firewall
2 209 (3.69%) DNS
3 166 (2.93%) Network Security
4 151 (2.67%) TCP/IP
5 128 (2.26%) VPN
6 125 (2.21%) BGP
7 113 (2.00%) WAN
8 86 (1.52%) DHCP
9 74 (1.31%) OSPF
10 73 (1.29%) SD-WAN
11 64 (1.13%) BIG-IP
12 58 (1.03%) SSL
13 56 (0.99%) VXLAN
14 55 (0.97%) VLAN
15 53 (0.94%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 50 (0.88%) HTTP
17 48 (0.85%) Ethernet VPN
18 42 (0.74%) Broadband
19 41 (0.72%) Wireless
20 39 (0.69%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 431 (7.62%) Power BI
2 334 (5.90%) Data Warehouse
3 319 (5.64%) PostgreSQL
4 219 (3.87%) Metadata
5 205 (3.62%) Relational Database
6 203 (3.59%) SQL Server
7 198 (3.50%) Data Lake
8 188 (3.32%) BigQuery
9 172 (3.04%) Tableau
10 155 (2.74%) NoSQL
11 135 (2.39%) Big Data
12 132 (2.33%) Amazon Redshift
13 129 (2.28%) Amazon RDS
14 124 (2.19%) Amazon Athena
15 122 (2.16%) Delta Lake
16 119 (2.10%) MongoDB
17 107 (1.89%) DynamoDB
18 100 (1.77%) MySQL
19 74 (1.31%) Redis
20 62 (1.10%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 819 (14.48%) Git
2 514 (9.09%) Jenkins
3 486 (8.59%) GitLab
4 308 (5.44%) JIRA
5 116 (2.05%) Selenium
6 67 (1.18%) Postman
7 60 (1.06%) JMeter
8 59 (1.04%) Claude Code
9 56 (0.99%) SonarQube
10 49 (0.87%) MLflow
11 45 (0.80%) Bitbucket
12 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
12 36 (0.64%) Sonatype Nexus
13 35 (0.62%) Cucumber
13 35 (0.62%) Maven
13 35 (0.62%) REST Assured
14 33 (0.58%) Cypress.io
15 29 (0.51%) LoadRunner
16 28 (0.49%) Gatling
17 22 (0.39%) Zephyr
General
1 1,313 (23.21%) Social Skills
2 1,294 (22.87%) Finance
3 837 (14.80%) Analytical Skills
4 548 (9.69%) Public Sector
5 528 (9.33%) Banking
6 179 (3.16%) Front Office
7 155 (2.74%) Investment Banking
8 114 (2.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 114 (2.02%) Retail
9 102 (1.80%) Documentation Skills
10 86 (1.52%) Telecoms
11 85 (1.50%) Marketing
12 64 (1.13%) Military
13 52 (0.92%) Law
14 51 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
15 50 (0.88%) Aerospace
16 48 (0.85%) Legal
17 46 (0.81%) Financial Institution
18 42 (0.74%) Publishing
19 37 (0.65%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,014 (17.92%) Senior
2 895 (15.82%) Developer
3 839 (14.83%) Data Engineer
4 490 (8.66%) Lead
5 472 (8.34%) Python Developer
6 419 (7.41%) Python Engineer
7 362 (6.40%) DevOps Engineer
8 314 (5.55%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 282 (4.98%) Analyst
10 276 (4.88%) Software Engineer
11 243 (4.30%) Architect
12 227 (4.01%) AWS Engineer
13 194 (3.43%) Cloud Engineer
13 194 (3.43%) Senior Developer
14 191 (3.38%) Azure Engineer
14 191 (3.38%) Platform Engineer
15 189 (3.34%) Senior Data Engineer
16 185 (3.27%) Data Scientist
17 150 (2.65%) Network Engineer
18 141 (2.49%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,399 (24.73%) Terraform
2 536 (9.47%) REST
3 375 (6.63%) Kafka
3 375 (6.63%) PySpark
4 306 (5.41%) React
5 238 (4.21%) .NET
6 216 (3.82%) FastAPI
7 208 (3.68%) Django
7 208 (3.68%) JSON
8 192 (3.39%) RESTful
9 158 (2.79%) LangChain
9 158 (2.79%) pytest
10 154 (2.72%) Node.js
11 152 (2.69%) Pandas
12 129 (2.28%) OAuth
13 117 (2.07%) Flask
14 111 (1.96%) YAML
15 110 (1.94%) PyTorch
16 109 (1.93%) LangGraph
17 105 (1.86%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 808 (14.28%) Cloud Native
2 299 (5.29%) AI Agents
2 299 (5.29%) Distributed Systems
3 262 (4.63%) Onboarding
4 163 (2.88%) Data Centre
5 151 (2.67%) Product Ownership
6 149 (2.63%) Data Structures
7 136 (2.40%) Legacy Systems
8 120 (2.12%) Algorithms
9 109 (1.93%) Hybrid Cloud
10 108 (1.91%) Management Information System
11 107 (1.89%) Enterprise Software
12 101 (1.79%) Data Protection Act
13 100 (1.77%) Derivative
14 96 (1.70%) Security Posture
15 86 (1.52%) Public Cloud
16 80 (1.41%) Equities
17 78 (1.38%) PKI
18 67 (1.18%) Linux Command Line
19 66 (1.17%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 778 (13.75%) Linux
2 345 (6.10%) Windows
3 251 (4.44%) Unix
4 155 (2.74%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 92 (1.63%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 38 (0.67%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 15 (0.27%) AIX
11 14 (0.25%) Android
12 11 (0.19%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) zOS
15 5 (0.088%) Embedded Linux
15 5 (0.088%) Rocky
16 4 (0.071%) FreeRTOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,378 (42.04%) CI/CD
2 1,630 (28.81%) DevOps
3 1,597 (28.23%) AI
4 1,314 (23.23%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,260 (22.27%) Agile
6 1,097 (19.39%) Analytics
7 982 (17.36%) Data Pipeline
8 951 (16.81%) Software Engineering
9 876 (15.49%) Problem-Solving
10 843 (14.90%) Data Engineering
11 838 (14.81%) Machine Learning
12 786 (13.89%) Containerisation
13 766 (13.54%) Observability
14 752 (13.29%) Data Modelling
15 694 (12.27%) Test Automation
16 664 (11.74%) ETL
17 663 (11.72%) Validation
18 658 (11.63%) Continuous Improvement
19 597 (10.55%) Platform Engineering
20 591 (10.45%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,847 (32.65%) SQL
2 804 (14.21%) Java
3 775 (13.70%) Bash
4 756 (13.36%) PowerShell
5 445 (7.87%) JavaScript
6 346 (6.12%) TypeScript
7 304 (5.37%) C#
8 227 (4.01%) Go
9 153 (2.70%) Shell Script
10 136 (2.40%) R
11 133 (2.35%) Bicep
12 131 (2.32%) C++
13 126 (2.23%) Scala
14 106 (1.87%) Perl
15 62 (1.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 56 (0.99%) Groovy
17 52 (0.92%) C
18 51 (0.90%) Rust
18 51 (0.90%) T-SQL
19 48 (0.85%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,374 (24.29%) Security Cleared
2 1,109 (19.60%) SC Cleared
3 402 (7.11%) Degree
4 246 (4.35%) DV Cleared
5 154 (2.72%) Azure Certification
6 148 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
7 146 (2.58%) AWS Certification
8 132 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
9 98 (1.73%) CISSP
10 79 (1.40%) Cisco Certification
11 69 (1.22%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
13 38 (0.67%) CCNP
14 33 (0.58%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) CCIE
16 30 (0.53%) CISM
16 30 (0.53%) DBS Check
17 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 29 (0.51%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.49%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 642 (11.35%) Data Quality
2 329 (5.82%) QA
3 117 (2.07%) NIST
4 101 (1.79%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 89 (1.57%) GDPR
6 82 (1.45%) Accessibility
7 44 (0.78%) SLA
8 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 30 (0.53%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 23 (0.41%) SOC 2
11 23 (0.41%) WCAG
12 19 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
13 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
14 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
15 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) Basel III
16 7 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 7 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 976 (17.25%) Docker
2 182 (3.22%) Active Directory
3 135 (2.39%) VMware Infrastructure
4 72 (1.27%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.88%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.62%) vSphere
7 32 (0.57%) VMware NSX
8 28 (0.49%) NFS
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) Firmware
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 8 (0.14%) Ceph
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 8 (0.14%) zsh
14 7 (0.12%) HDFS
14 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
16 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,178 (20.82%) Kubernetes
2 642 (11.35%) Ansible
3 339 (5.99%) Grafana
4 249 (4.40%) Prometheus
5 80 (1.41%) Puppet
6 72 (1.27%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.18%) Argo
8 48 (0.85%) Single Sign-On
9 40 (0.71%) Kibana
10 35 (0.62%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
11 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
12 23 (0.41%) Packer
13 22 (0.39%) FortiGate
14 17 (0.30%) QRadar
14 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
14 17 (0.30%) ZABBIX
15 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
15 16 (0.28%) Podman
16 15 (0.27%) vRealize
Vendors
1 753 (13.31%) Microsoft
2 587 (10.38%) Databricks
3 407 (7.19%) Google
4 243 (4.30%) Oracle
5 207 (3.66%) Splunk
6 173 (3.06%) VMware
7 170 (3.01%) OpenAI
8 144 (2.55%) Cisco
9 135 (2.39%) ServiceNow
10 101 (1.79%) Dynatrace
11 97 (1.71%) Red Hat
12 94 (1.66%) IBM
13 91 (1.61%) F5
14 88 (1.56%) Palo Alto
15 83 (1.47%) Foundry
16 72 (1.27%) CyberArk
17 71 (1.26%) Fortinet
18 70 (1.24%) Informatica
19 67 (1.18%) SAP
20 56 (0.99%) Salesforce