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

6 months to
3 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,108 3,957 4,137
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.24% 13.25% 9.28%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.16% 38.95% 31.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,467 2,668 2,908
10th Percentile £362 £380 £400
25th Percentile £415 £459 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £503 £525
% change year-on-year -2.99% -4.29% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 51 115
10th Percentile £28.30 £20.12 £21.44
25th Percentile £41.94 £23.80 £37.75
Median hourly rate £54.00 £44.50 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +21.35% -22.61% -11.54%
75th Percentile £69.38 £64.38 £69.81
90th Percentile £79.10 £75.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £47.50 £52.50
% change year-on-year +7.81% -9.52% -19.23%

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 12,410 10,160 13,038
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.75% 34.03% 29.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,269 6,603 9,200
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -6.25%
75th Percentile £606 £638 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £479 £488 £498
% change year-on-year -1.74% -2.01% -1.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 482 236 510
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.25 £30.63
25th Percentile £53.81 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -6.98%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £68.94
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.97% +1.99% -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 3 March 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 3 March 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 3 March 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 4,274 £520 -9.57% 3,330
London 0 2,428 £550 -8.33% 1,218
UK excluding London -1 1,975 £488 -2.99% 2,685
Work from Home 0 1,571 £525 -4.55% 1,465
North of England +11 665 £481 -3.75% 561
South East -4 414 £492 -7.61% 833
Yorkshire +2 354 £488 -9.30% 217
Scotland +2 287 £425 -10.53% 164
Midlands -3 284 £500 +2.04% 313
North West +10 272 £475 -5.00% 257
West Midlands -1 234 £500 - 139
South West -6 203 £550 -8.33% 373
East of England +1 132 £506 +1.76% 350
East Midlands -15 49 £447 +2.17% 169
North East +5 45 £488 -7.14% 93
Wales -16 30 £473 -5.50% 114
Northern Ireland +6 29 £613 +16.67% 40

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
1 250 (4.89%) Apache Spark
2 199 (3.90%) Apache Airflow
3 157 (3.07%) Confluence
4 145 (2.84%) Apache
5 68 (1.33%) SAS
6 58 (1.14%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.49%) nginx
8 25 (0.49%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.45%) Jupyter
10 21 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
11 20 (0.39%) Appian
12 11 (0.22%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.18%) Camunda
14 6 (0.12%) CMS
15 5 (0.098%) Apache Superset
15 5 (0.098%) Tomcat
16 4 (0.078%) Oracle Application Server
16 4 (0.078%) Traefik
17 3 (0.059%) CICS
Applications
1 124 (2.43%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.61%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 13 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 3 (0.059%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.039%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.020%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 19 (0.37%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.078%) Bloomberg AIM
4 4 (0.078%) Oracle EBS
5 3 (0.059%) Actimize
5 3 (0.059%) IntelliMatch
5 3 (0.059%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
6 2 (0.039%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
6 2 (0.039%) Shopify
7 1 (0.020%) Advent Geneva
7 1 (0.020%) Cerner Millennium
7 1 (0.020%) ION MarketView
7 1 (0.020%) NetSuite
7 1 (0.020%) Salesforce CRM
7 1 (0.020%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 2,022 (39.58%) AWS
2 1,754 (34.34%) Azure
3 812 (15.90%) GCP
4 661 (12.94%) GitHub
5 539 (10.55%) Serverless
6 479 (9.38%) Power Platform
7 371 (7.26%) Amazon S3
8 365 (7.15%) Azure DevOps
9 358 (7.01%) AWS Lambda
10 332 (6.50%) GitHub Actions
11 257 (5.03%) Snowflake
12 255 (4.99%) AWS CloudFormation
12 255 (4.99%) Azure Data Factory
13 197 (3.86%) Amazon EKS
14 176 (3.45%) Amazon ECS
15 171 (3.35%) Amazon EC2
15 171 (3.35%) OpenShift
16 164 (3.21%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 158 (3.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 145 (2.84%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 225 (4.40%) Firewall
2 149 (2.92%) DNS
3 115 (2.25%) Network Security
3 115 (2.25%) TCP/IP
4 82 (1.61%) VPN
5 64 (1.25%) HTTP
6 61 (1.19%) BGP
7 52 (1.02%) WAN
8 50 (0.98%) SSL
9 40 (0.78%) Wireshark
10 38 (0.74%) SAN
11 36 (0.70%) MPLS
12 35 (0.69%) OSPF
13 33 (0.65%) LAN
14 31 (0.61%) DHCP
15 29 (0.57%) SD-WAN
16 28 (0.55%) VLAN
17 26 (0.51%) Wireless
18 22 (0.43%) BIG-IP
19 20 (0.39%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 398 (7.79%) PostgreSQL
2 397 (7.77%) Power BI
3 313 (6.13%) Data Warehouse
4 235 (4.60%) NoSQL
5 230 (4.50%) Data Lake
6 198 (3.88%) Relational Database
7 190 (3.72%) SQL Server
8 161 (3.15%) Big Data
9 158 (3.09%) Tableau
10 129 (2.53%) Amazon RDS
11 127 (2.49%) Metadata
12 122 (2.39%) BigQuery
13 121 (2.37%) MySQL
14 108 (2.11%) Delta Lake
15 105 (2.06%) Amazon Redshift
16 99 (1.94%) MongoDB
17 96 (1.88%) Amazon Athena
18 89 (1.74%) Azure SQL Database
19 87 (1.70%) Hadoop
20 81 (1.59%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 647 (12.67%) Git
2 550 (10.77%) Jenkins
3 436 (8.54%) GitLab
4 297 (5.81%) JIRA
5 93 (1.82%) MLflow
6 87 (1.70%) Selenium
7 51 (1.00%) Bitbucket
8 49 (0.96%) Postman
9 47 (0.92%) Cucumber
10 41 (0.80%) Sonatype Nexus
11 36 (0.70%) JUnit
12 34 (0.67%) JMeter
13 29 (0.57%) SpecFlow
14 25 (0.49%) Cypress.io
14 25 (0.49%) Visual Studio
15 24 (0.47%) CircleCI
15 24 (0.47%) Maven
16 22 (0.43%) Artifactory
16 22 (0.43%) Liquibase
16 22 (0.43%) SonarQube
General
1 1,289 (25.23%) Social Skills
2 1,010 (19.77%) Finance
3 704 (13.78%) Analytical Skills
4 476 (9.32%) Public Sector
5 423 (8.28%) Banking
6 180 (3.52%) Front Office
7 126 (2.47%) Documentation Skills
8 104 (2.04%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.35%) Retail
10 64 (1.25%) Financial Institution
10 64 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 64 (1.25%) Marketing
11 61 (1.19%) Pharmaceutical
12 50 (0.98%) Telecoms
13 44 (0.86%) Influencing Skills
13 44 (0.86%) Legal
14 42 (0.82%) Manufacturing
15 35 (0.69%) Presentation Skills
16 33 (0.65%) Military
17 23 (0.45%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 935 (18.30%) Developer
2 714 (13.98%) Senior
3 713 (13.96%) Data Engineer
4 409 (8.01%) Python Developer
5 330 (6.46%) Lead
6 325 (6.36%) Architect
7 312 (6.11%) DevOps Engineer
8 290 (5.68%) Analyst
8 290 (5.68%) Python Engineer
9 261 (5.11%) AWS Engineer
10 257 (5.03%) Software Engineer
11 247 (4.84%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 201 (3.94%) Data Scientist
13 174 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
14 153 (3.00%) Senior Developer
15 148 (2.90%) Azure Engineer
16 146 (2.86%) Data Analyst
17 139 (2.72%) Full-Stack Developer
18 137 (2.68%) Senior Data Engineer
19 133 (2.60%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 437 (8.56%) REST
2 370 (7.24%) React
3 319 (6.25%) PySpark
4 318 (6.23%) Kafka
5 292 (5.72%) Node.js
6 230 (4.50%) Pandas
7 225 (4.40%) PyTorch
8 223 (4.37%) FastAPI
9 215 (4.21%) RESTful
10 212 (4.15%) .NET
11 180 (3.52%) TensorFlow
12 165 (3.23%) NumPy
13 146 (2.86%) scikit-learn
14 141 (2.76%) AngularJS
15 133 (2.60%) Flask
16 127 (2.49%) LangChain
17 118 (2.31%) JSON
18 117 (2.29%) pytest
19 115 (2.25%) Django
20 108 (2.11%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 494 (9.67%) Cloud Native
2 208 (4.07%) Algorithms
3 204 (3.99%) Distributed Systems
4 141 (2.76%) Product Ownership
5 126 (2.47%) Data Protection Act
6 124 (2.43%) Equities
7 114 (2.23%) Fixed Income
8 109 (2.13%) Data Structures
9 105 (2.06%) Onboarding
10 102 (2.00%) Derivative
11 100 (1.96%) AI Agents
12 94 (1.84%) Security Posture
13 93 (1.82%) Enterprise Software
14 90 (1.76%) Legacy Systems
15 88 (1.72%) Hybrid Cloud
15 88 (1.72%) Public Cloud
16 82 (1.61%) Management Information System
17 79 (1.55%) Data Centre
18 62 (1.21%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
19 56 (1.10%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 694 (13.59%) Linux
2 326 (6.38%) Windows
3 203 (3.97%) Unix
4 98 (1.92%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 65 (1.27%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.70%) Android
7 35 (0.69%) Ubuntu
8 32 (0.63%) VMS
9 26 (0.51%) CentOS
10 25 (0.49%) Mac OS
11 23 (0.45%) Solaris
12 21 (0.41%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.20%) Windows 7
14 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
15 6 (0.12%) AIX
15 6 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.098%) Debian
16 5 (0.098%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.098%) zOS
17 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,874 (36.69%) CI/CD
2 1,443 (28.25%) DevOps
3 1,235 (24.18%) Agile
4 1,099 (21.52%) AI
5 1,072 (20.99%) Problem-Solving
6 979 (19.17%) Analytics
7 918 (17.97%) Infrastructure as Code
8 845 (16.54%) Machine Learning
9 819 (16.03%) Data Pipeline
10 767 (15.02%) Containerisation
11 680 (13.31%) Data Engineering
12 673 (13.18%) ETL
13 656 (12.84%) Data Modelling
14 623 (12.20%) Data Science
15 588 (11.51%) Test Automation
16 586 (11.47%) Software Engineering
17 490 (9.59%) Observability
18 472 (9.24%) Business Intelligence
19 438 (8.57%) LLM
20 375 (7.34%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,597 (31.26%) SQL
2 725 (14.19%) Java
3 674 (13.19%) PowerShell
4 616 (12.06%) Bash
5 529 (10.36%) JavaScript
6 356 (6.97%) TypeScript
7 328 (6.42%) C#
8 243 (4.76%) Go
9 174 (3.41%) C++
10 154 (3.01%) R
11 120 (2.35%) Shell Script
12 117 (2.29%) Perl
13 113 (2.21%) Scala
14 94 (1.84%) Ruby
15 66 (1.29%) Bicep
16 61 (1.19%) Kusto Query Language
17 49 (0.96%) C
18 47 (0.92%) VBA
19 43 (0.84%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 42 (0.82%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,164 (22.79%) Security Cleared
2 933 (18.27%) SC Cleared
3 447 (8.75%) Degree
4 212 (4.15%) Computer Science Degree
5 141 (2.76%) DV Cleared
6 139 (2.72%) AWS Certification
7 124 (2.43%) Master's Degree
8 112 (2.19%) BPSS Clearance
9 99 (1.94%) Azure Certification
10 93 (1.82%) CISSP
11 73 (1.43%) Cisco Certification
12 63 (1.23%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 58 (1.14%) CCNP
14 46 (0.90%) PhD
15 44 (0.86%) CISM
16 40 (0.78%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 37 (0.72%) Microsoft Certification
18 31 (0.61%) CEH
18 31 (0.61%) Microsoft Certified Professional
19 27 (0.53%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 464 (9.08%) Data Quality
2 205 (4.01%) QA
3 177 (3.47%) GDPR
4 105 (2.06%) NIST
5 103 (2.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 77 (1.51%) Accessibility
7 33 (0.65%) PCI DSS
8 32 (0.63%) SLA
9 30 (0.59%) HIPAA
10 27 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 23 (0.45%) NCSC
12 17 (0.33%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.31%) Actionable Recommendations
14 12 (0.23%) EU AI Act
14 12 (0.23%) WCAG
15 11 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.20%) MiFID
16 10 (0.20%) PMO
16 10 (0.20%) PSD2
17 9 (0.18%) EMIR
System Software
1 960 (18.79%) Docker
2 177 (3.47%) Active Directory
3 116 (2.27%) VMware Infrastructure
4 52 (1.02%) vSphere
5 51 (1.00%) Virtual Machines
6 47 (0.92%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.57%) Hyper-V
8 25 (0.49%) Firmware
9 16 (0.31%) KVM
10 15 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
11 13 (0.25%) HDFS
12 12 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 10 (0.20%) Lustre
14 9 (0.18%) GPFS
15 8 (0.16%) SRDF
15 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
16 6 (0.12%) Postfix
17 5 (0.098%) NDS
17 5 (0.098%) NFS
17 5 (0.098%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,129 (22.10%) Terraform
2 1,063 (20.81%) Kubernetes
3 552 (10.81%) Ansible
4 353 (6.91%) Grafana
5 312 (6.11%) Prometheus
6 96 (1.88%) Argo
7 77 (1.51%) Puppet
8 54 (1.06%) vRealize
9 49 (0.96%) Istio
10 46 (0.90%) Kibana
11 38 (0.74%) Nessus
12 34 (0.67%) Progress Chef
13 31 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
14 30 (0.59%) vCenter Server
15 27 (0.53%) Control-M
16 25 (0.49%) NetBackup
17 24 (0.47%) Microsoft Intune
18 23 (0.45%) IBM Guardium
19 18 (0.35%) ITRS Geneos
19 18 (0.35%) Rancher
Vendors
1 624 (12.22%) Microsoft
2 508 (9.95%) Databricks
3 301 (5.89%) Google
4 238 (4.66%) Splunk
5 228 (4.46%) Oracle
6 226 (4.42%) VMware
7 149 (2.92%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.37%) Cisco
9 115 (2.25%) OpenAI
10 111 (2.17%) ServiceNow
11 82 (1.61%) CyberArk
12 81 (1.59%) Foundry
13 72 (1.41%) F5
14 71 (1.39%) Palo Alto
15 66 (1.29%) BeyondTrust
16 59 (1.16%) Informatica
17 48 (0.94%) IBM
18 46 (0.90%) SAP
19 43 (0.84%) Dynatrace
20 40 (0.78%) Atlassian