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

6 months to
10 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,730 4,218 4,135
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.89% 13.03% 9.58%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.31% 39.07% 31.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,764 2,863 2,987
10th Percentile £363 £363 £375
25th Percentile £425 £440 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £537 £560
Median % change year-on-year -2.23% -4.11% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £700
90th Percentile £738 £800 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £506
% change year-on-year - -1.09% -3.71%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 67 122
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.82
25th Percentile £41.88 £33.91 £32.81
Median hourly rate £54.00 £45.00 £62.25
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -27.71% -4.23%
75th Percentile £71.50 £55.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.30 £63.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +11.48%

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 14,214 10,796 13,278
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.01% 33.36% 30.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,243 7,282 9,344
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £610 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 544 263 528
10th Percentile £34.01 £27.59 £31.25
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £77.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +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 10 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 10 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 10 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 -2 4,784 £525 -4.55% 2,980
London -3 2,746 £550 -4.35% 1,509
UK excluding London 0 2,258 £500 - 2,063
Work from Home -5 1,612 £525 -4.55% 1,047
North of England +6 794 £488 +2.63% 425
South East -6 452 £525 +5.00% 564
Yorkshire +1 432 £500 +1.46% 110
Scotland +4 323 £438 -8.28% 98
North West +4 286 £500 +5.26% 241
South West -2 278 £500 -9.09% 528
Midlands -15 255 £477 +5.88% 201
West Midlands -18 204 £476 +0.21% 104
East of England -16 133 £500 -0.25% 187
North East +6 88 £425 -2.86% 77
East Midlands -10 50 £495 +13.53% 96
Wales -9 33 £490 +7.69% 40
Northern Ireland +13 28 £369 -37.23% 49

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 (5.01%) Apache Spark
2 262 (4.57%) Apache Airflow
3 205 (3.58%) Apache
4 182 (3.18%) Confluence
5 53 (0.92%) Jupyter
6 52 (0.91%) SAS
7 48 (0.84%) SharePoint
8 27 (0.47%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.42%) nginx
10 20 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.31%) ArcGIS
12 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.21%) IIS
14 11 (0.19%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
15 8 (0.14%) CMS
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.10%) Camunda
17 6 (0.10%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.087%) Appian
Applications
1 121 (2.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.54%) Chatbot
3 29 (0.51%) Microsoft Office
4 26 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 24 (0.42%) MS Visio
6 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
7 14 (0.24%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.017%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.017%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.017%) Simulink
9 1 (0.017%) SPSS
9 1 (0.017%) Weka
9 1 (0.017%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.10%) Fidessa
6 6 (0.10%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.087%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.087%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.087%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.052%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.052%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.052%) Teamcenter
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
Cloud Services
1 2,126 (37.10%) AWS
2 1,915 (33.42%) Azure
3 843 (14.71%) GCP
4 690 (12.04%) GitHub
5 532 (9.28%) Power Platform
6 485 (8.46%) Serverless
7 427 (7.45%) Amazon S3
8 405 (7.07%) Azure DevOps
9 379 (6.61%) GitHub Actions
10 363 (6.34%) AWS Lambda
11 288 (5.03%) Snowflake
12 243 (4.24%) Azure Data Factory
13 211 (3.68%) dbt
14 188 (3.28%) AWS CloudFormation
15 176 (3.07%) Amazon EKS
16 174 (3.04%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 162 (2.83%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 160 (2.79%) OpenShift
19 136 (2.37%) Amazon EC2
20 128 (2.23%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 249 (4.35%) Firewall
2 180 (3.14%) DNS
3 123 (2.15%) Network Security
4 122 (2.13%) BGP
5 118 (2.06%) TCP/IP
5 118 (2.06%) WAN
6 101 (1.76%) VPN
7 76 (1.33%) OSPF
8 58 (1.01%) DHCP
9 57 (0.99%) BIG-IP
10 56 (0.98%) HTTP
10 56 (0.98%) SD-WAN
11 55 (0.96%) SAN
12 52 (0.91%) VLAN
13 51 (0.89%) VXLAN
14 47 (0.82%) SSL
15 45 (0.79%) LAN
16 44 (0.77%) MPLS
17 43 (0.75%) SNMP
18 40 (0.70%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 468 (8.17%) Power BI
2 363 (6.34%) PostgreSQL
3 317 (5.53%) Data Warehouse
4 251 (4.38%) SQL Server
5 209 (3.65%) Data Lake
6 204 (3.56%) Tableau
7 197 (3.44%) Relational Database
8 176 (3.07%) Metadata
9 165 (2.88%) NoSQL
10 164 (2.86%) Big Data
11 145 (2.53%) BigQuery
12 140 (2.44%) Amazon Athena
12 140 (2.44%) Amazon Redshift
13 130 (2.27%) Delta Lake
14 127 (2.22%) MongoDB
15 107 (1.87%) Amazon RDS
15 107 (1.87%) DynamoDB
16 94 (1.64%) MySQL
17 77 (1.34%) Snowflake Schema
18 74 (1.29%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 698 (12.18%) Git
2 512 (8.94%) Jenkins
3 407 (7.10%) GitLab
4 324 (5.65%) JIRA
5 84 (1.47%) Selenium
6 72 (1.26%) MLflow
7 60 (1.05%) Postman
8 43 (0.75%) JMeter
9 41 (0.72%) Bitbucket
10 36 (0.63%) Cypress.io
11 34 (0.59%) SonarQube
12 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.56%) Artifactory
14 31 (0.54%) REST Assured
15 30 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
16 29 (0.51%) JUnit
16 29 (0.51%) Maven
17 28 (0.49%) Gatling
18 26 (0.45%) Claude Code
19 18 (0.31%) Zephyr
General
1 1,244 (21.71%) Social Skills
2 1,188 (20.73%) Finance
3 771 (13.46%) Analytical Skills
4 559 (9.76%) Public Sector
5 428 (7.47%) Banking
6 203 (3.54%) Front Office
7 136 (2.37%) Documentation Skills
8 131 (2.29%) Investment Banking
9 112 (1.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 90 (1.57%) Retail
11 82 (1.43%) Marketing
12 63 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
13 62 (1.08%) Telecoms
14 59 (1.03%) Legal
15 49 (0.86%) Financial Institution
16 46 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
16 46 (0.80%) Military
16 46 (0.80%) Publishing
17 36 (0.63%) Manufacturing
18 32 (0.56%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,015 (17.71%) Developer
2 883 (15.41%) Senior
3 877 (15.31%) Data Engineer
4 535 (9.34%) Python Developer
5 423 (7.38%) Lead
6 388 (6.77%) Python Engineer
7 330 (5.76%) DevOps Engineer
8 311 (5.43%) Architect
9 306 (5.34%) Software Engineer
10 285 (4.97%) Analyst
11 257 (4.49%) AWS Engineer
12 246 (4.29%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 226 (3.94%) Data Scientist
14 182 (3.18%) Platform Engineer
15 178 (3.11%) Senior Data Engineer
16 177 (3.09%) Azure Engineer
17 176 (3.07%) Senior Developer
18 174 (3.04%) Cloud Engineer
19 143 (2.50%) Data Analyst
20 139 (2.43%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 416 (7.26%) REST
2 376 (6.56%) PySpark
3 372 (6.49%) React
4 351 (6.13%) Kafka
5 249 (4.35%) .NET
6 221 (3.86%) Node.js
7 217 (3.79%) RESTful
8 213 (3.72%) FastAPI
9 200 (3.49%) Pandas
10 195 (3.40%) JSON
11 176 (3.07%) Django
12 161 (2.81%) PyTorch
13 137 (2.39%) LangChain
14 123 (2.15%) NumPy
15 120 (2.09%) Flask
16 113 (1.97%) scikit-learn
17 109 (1.90%) TensorFlow
18 108 (1.88%) OAuth
19 102 (1.78%) pytest
20 101 (1.76%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 756 (13.19%) Cloud Native
2 308 (5.38%) Distributed Systems
3 179 (3.12%) Onboarding
4 171 (2.98%) AI Agents
5 158 (2.76%) Data Centre
6 150 (2.62%) Product Ownership
7 148 (2.58%) Algorithms
8 126 (2.20%) Legacy Systems
9 125 (2.18%) Data Structures
10 119 (2.08%) Data Protection Act
11 114 (1.99%) Management Information System
12 112 (1.95%) Derivative
13 110 (1.92%) Hybrid Cloud
14 103 (1.80%) Fixed Income
15 98 (1.71%) Equities
16 79 (1.38%) Public Cloud
16 79 (1.38%) Security Posture
17 63 (1.10%) Self-Motivation
18 62 (1.08%) Enterprise Software
19 61 (1.06%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 679 (11.85%) Linux
2 319 (5.57%) Windows
3 223 (3.89%) Unix
4 125 (2.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 77 (1.34%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.70%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.56%) VMS
8 26 (0.45%) AIX
9 23 (0.40%) Android
10 18 (0.31%) Solaris
11 17 (0.30%) Apple iOS
12 14 (0.24%) CentOS
12 14 (0.24%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 10 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
15 8 (0.14%) Embedded Linux
16 7 (0.12%) Debian
16 7 (0.12%) Rocky
17 6 (0.10%) Amazon Linux
18 5 (0.087%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,187 (38.17%) CI/CD
2 1,581 (27.59%) DevOps
3 1,387 (24.21%) AI
4 1,277 (22.29%) Agile
5 1,149 (20.05%) Analytics
6 1,069 (18.66%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,018 (17.77%) Data Pipeline
8 945 (16.49%) Problem-Solving
9 900 (15.71%) Machine Learning
10 812 (14.17%) Data Engineering
11 791 (13.80%) Software Engineering
12 784 (13.68%) Containerisation
13 752 (13.12%) Data Modelling
14 704 (12.29%) ETL
15 648 (11.31%) Observability
16 640 (11.17%) Data Science
17 595 (10.38%) Test Automation
18 549 (9.58%) Business Intelligence
19 531 (9.27%) LLM
20 498 (8.69%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,841 (32.13%) SQL
2 823 (14.36%) Java
3 685 (11.95%) Bash
4 670 (11.69%) PowerShell
5 465 (8.12%) JavaScript
6 406 (7.09%) TypeScript
7 338 (5.90%) C#
8 223 (3.89%) Go
9 165 (2.88%) R
10 140 (2.44%) C++
11 136 (2.37%) Scala
12 124 (2.16%) Shell Script
13 90 (1.57%) Bicep
14 73 (1.27%) Perl
15 59 (1.03%) Ruby
16 57 (0.99%) PL/SQL
17 56 (0.98%) Groovy
18 55 (0.96%) C
19 52 (0.91%) Rust
19 52 (0.91%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,287 (22.46%) Security Cleared
2 1,033 (18.03%) SC Cleared
3 434 (7.57%) Degree
4 186 (3.25%) DV Cleared
5 164 (2.86%) Computer Science Degree
6 142 (2.48%) BPSS Clearance
7 124 (2.16%) AWS Certification
8 116 (2.02%) Azure Certification
9 95 (1.66%) CISSP
10 89 (1.55%) Cisco Certification
11 85 (1.48%) Master's Degree
12 57 (0.99%) CCNP
13 50 (0.87%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 38 (0.66%) CISM
15 37 (0.65%) PhD
16 34 (0.59%) Microsoft Certification
17 33 (0.58%) ISTQB
18 32 (0.56%) CCIE
19 31 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
20 22 (0.38%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 559 (9.76%) Data Quality
2 253 (4.42%) QA
3 130 (2.27%) GDPR
4 114 (1.99%) NIST
5 113 (1.97%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 92 (1.61%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.61%) SLA
8 25 (0.44%) PCI DSS
8 25 (0.44%) WCAG
9 24 (0.42%) HIPAA
10 22 (0.38%) NCSC
11 21 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.33%) Actionable Recommendations
13 15 (0.26%) SOC 2
14 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.17%) GRC
15 10 (0.17%) ISO 20022
16 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 891 (15.55%) Docker
2 129 (2.25%) Active Directory
3 118 (2.06%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 43 (0.75%) vSphere
6 40 (0.70%) VMware NSX
7 36 (0.63%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.52%) Firmware
9 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.33%) NFS
11 15 (0.26%) KVM
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 10 (0.17%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) Ceph
15 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
16 8 (0.14%) HDFS
17 7 (0.12%) Postfix
18 5 (0.087%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
19 4 (0.070%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,243 (21.69%) Terraform
2 1,061 (18.52%) Kubernetes
3 598 (10.44%) Ansible
4 354 (6.18%) Grafana
5 282 (4.92%) Prometheus
6 75 (1.31%) Puppet
7 69 (1.20%) Argo
8 45 (0.79%) Progress Chef
9 44 (0.77%) Istio
10 40 (0.70%) vRealize
11 38 (0.66%) vCenter Server
12 31 (0.54%) Kibana
13 27 (0.47%) Control-M
13 27 (0.47%) ZABBIX
14 26 (0.45%) Nagios
14 26 (0.45%) Nessus
15 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
16 22 (0.38%) Single Sign-On
17 21 (0.37%) HAProxy
18 20 (0.35%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 655 (11.43%) Microsoft
2 583 (10.17%) Databricks
3 327 (5.71%) Google
4 259 (4.52%) Oracle
5 217 (3.79%) Splunk
6 174 (3.04%) VMware
7 146 (2.55%) OpenAI
8 142 (2.48%) Cisco
9 118 (2.06%) ServiceNow
10 108 (1.88%) Red Hat
11 93 (1.62%) F5
12 90 (1.57%) Palo Alto
13 85 (1.48%) Dynatrace
14 83 (1.45%) Informatica
15 80 (1.40%) IBM
16 68 (1.19%) Fortinet
17 66 (1.15%) CyberArk
18 64 (1.12%) Foundry
19 55 (0.96%) SAP
20 54 (0.94%) Arista