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

6 months to
23 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,823 3,948 4,157
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.72% 12.46% 9.55%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.50% 37.46% 31.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,259 2,616 2,905
10th Percentile £360 £385 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £563
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -2.22% -6.25%
75th Percentile £638 £685 £688
90th Percentile £739 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £520 £525
% change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 95 62 121
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.23 £27.75
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.15 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.89% -23.03% -7.69%
75th Percentile £72.49 £66.77 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.60 £79.75 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £60.00
% change year-on-year +10.89% -23.03% -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 11,622 10,538 13,056
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.65% 33.26% 29.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,724 6,696 9,240
10th Percentile £350 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -4.62% -2.78% -4.42%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -1.79% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 431 244 475
10th Percentile £37.77 £21.25 £35.50
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.56 £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 £68.19 £69.31
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £77.80
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 23 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 23 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 23 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 4,083 £525 -8.70% 4,287
London 0 2,354 £550 -8.33% 1,129
UK excluding London 0 1,848 £500 -3.85% 3,880
Work from Home 0 1,437 £525 -4.55% 1,898
North of England +9 604 £481 -4.23% 677
South East +3 404 £478 -13.18% 1,325
Yorkshire +8 305 £500 -6.98% 284
Midlands +5 287 £507 +6.29% 439
Scotland +2 264 £465 -3.13% 201
North West +4 254 £450 -7.41% 283
West Midlands +10 244 £523 +1.95% 165
South West -5 179 £550 -10.57% 519
East of England +3 122 £525 +8.25% 565
North East +6 51 £488 -10.55% 114
East Midlands -21 43 £438 +10.92% 266
Northern Ireland +2 30 £575 +9.52% 77
Wales -13 28 £523 +4.50% 171

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
1 216 (4.48%) Apache Spark
2 199 (4.13%) Apache Airflow
3 153 (3.17%) Apache
4 149 (3.09%) Confluence
5 63 (1.31%) SAS
6 57 (1.18%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.77%) nginx
8 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 19 (0.39%) Appian
11 11 (0.23%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 7 (0.15%) IIS
14 6 (0.12%) Camunda
14 6 (0.12%) CMS
14 6 (0.12%) Luigi
14 6 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
15 5 (0.10%) Tomcat
16 3 (0.062%) WebLogic
Applications
1 126 (2.61%) Microsoft Excel
2 30 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.39%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 9 (0.19%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 3 (0.062%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.062%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.041%) Maya
10 2 (0.041%) NUKE
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 15 (0.31%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 3 (0.062%) Actimize
5 3 (0.062%) NetSuite
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%) IntelliMatch
7 1 (0.021%) Loan IQ
7 1 (0.021%) Maximo
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
7 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,895 (39.29%) AWS
2 1,572 (32.59%) Azure
3 745 (15.45%) GCP
4 604 (12.52%) GitHub
5 512 (10.62%) Serverless
6 436 (9.04%) Power Platform
7 367 (7.61%) Amazon S3
8 343 (7.11%) AWS Lambda
9 326 (6.76%) Azure DevOps
10 316 (6.55%) GitHub Actions
11 247 (5.12%) AWS CloudFormation
12 241 (5.00%) Snowflake
13 220 (4.56%) Azure Data Factory
14 193 (4.00%) Amazon EC2
15 178 (3.69%) Amazon ECS
16 174 (3.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 168 (3.48%) Amazon EKS
18 138 (2.86%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 138 (2.86%) dbt
19 137 (2.84%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 238 (4.93%) Firewall
2 156 (3.23%) DNS
3 125 (2.59%) Network Security
4 123 (2.55%) TCP/IP
5 81 (1.68%) VPN
6 79 (1.64%) HTTP
7 71 (1.47%) BGP
8 64 (1.33%) SSL
9 51 (1.06%) WAN
10 42 (0.87%) OSPF
11 40 (0.83%) MPLS
11 40 (0.83%) Wireshark
12 37 (0.77%) LAN
13 33 (0.68%) Wireless
14 32 (0.66%) DHCP
15 31 (0.64%) SSH
16 28 (0.58%) SD-WAN
17 27 (0.56%) SMTP
18 24 (0.50%) VLAN
19 22 (0.46%) FTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 371 (7.69%) Power BI
2 369 (7.65%) PostgreSQL
3 289 (5.99%) Data Warehouse
4 227 (4.71%) NoSQL
5 223 (4.62%) Data Lake
5 223 (4.62%) Relational Database
6 173 (3.59%) SQL Server
7 160 (3.32%) Amazon RDS
8 154 (3.19%) Big Data
9 146 (3.03%) Tableau
10 127 (2.63%) MySQL
11 112 (2.32%) Metadata
12 102 (2.11%) BigQuery
13 96 (1.99%) Amazon Redshift
14 93 (1.93%) Amazon Athena
14 93 (1.93%) MongoDB
15 82 (1.70%) Delta Lake
15 82 (1.70%) Hadoop
16 79 (1.64%) DynamoDB
17 76 (1.58%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 616 (12.77%) Git
2 550 (11.40%) Jenkins
3 424 (8.79%) GitLab
4 274 (5.68%) JIRA
5 83 (1.72%) Selenium
6 76 (1.58%) MLflow
7 50 (1.04%) Sonatype Nexus
8 48 (1.00%) Cucumber
9 46 (0.95%) Bitbucket
10 43 (0.89%) Postman
11 40 (0.83%) SonarQube
12 38 (0.79%) JUnit
13 34 (0.70%) JMeter
14 31 (0.64%) Liquibase
15 30 (0.62%) Maven
16 29 (0.60%) CircleCI
16 29 (0.60%) Cypress.io
17 28 (0.58%) Visual Studio
18 25 (0.52%) Artifactory
19 24 (0.50%) Gradle
General
1 1,309 (27.14%) Social Skills
2 950 (19.70%) Finance
3 679 (14.08%) Analytical Skills
4 448 (9.29%) Public Sector
5 430 (8.92%) Banking
6 163 (3.38%) Front Office
7 134 (2.78%) Investment Banking
8 127 (2.63%) Documentation Skills
9 73 (1.51%) Financial Institution
10 67 (1.39%) Marketing
11 63 (1.31%) Retail
12 60 (1.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 60 (1.24%) Pharmaceutical
13 55 (1.14%) Telecoms
14 45 (0.93%) Legal
15 44 (0.91%) Presentation Skills
16 41 (0.85%) Manufacturing
17 33 (0.68%) Influencing Skills
18 28 (0.58%) Military
19 24 (0.50%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 845 (17.52%) Developer
2 661 (13.71%) Senior
3 624 (12.94%) Data Engineer
4 356 (7.38%) Python Developer
5 318 (6.59%) DevOps Engineer
6 305 (6.32%) Python Engineer
7 301 (6.24%) Architect
8 284 (5.89%) Analyst
9 269 (5.58%) AWS Engineer
10 247 (5.12%) Lead
11 230 (4.77%) Software Engineer
12 228 (4.73%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 182 (3.77%) Data Scientist
14 170 (3.52%) Platform Engineer
15 144 (2.99%) Senior Developer
16 141 (2.92%) Data Analyst
17 131 (2.72%) Azure Engineer
18 123 (2.55%) Full-Stack Developer
19 121 (2.51%) Senior Data Engineer
20 117 (2.43%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 417 (8.65%) REST
2 304 (6.30%) React
3 284 (5.89%) Kafka
4 275 (5.70%) PySpark
5 241 (5.00%) Node.js
6 223 (4.62%) RESTful
7 219 (4.54%) Pandas
8 215 (4.46%) FastAPI
9 196 (4.06%) PyTorch
10 180 (3.73%) .NET
11 167 (3.46%) NumPy
11 167 (3.46%) TensorFlow
12 133 (2.76%) AngularJS
13 122 (2.53%) LangChain
14 120 (2.49%) scikit-learn
15 112 (2.32%) Elastic Stack
16 107 (2.22%) OAuth
17 106 (2.20%) Flask
17 106 (2.20%) pytest
18 100 (2.07%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 418 (8.67%) Cloud Native
2 192 (3.98%) Algorithms
3 188 (3.90%) Distributed Systems
4 127 (2.63%) Product Ownership
5 126 (2.61%) Data Protection Act
6 122 (2.53%) Equities
7 105 (2.18%) Data Structures
8 98 (2.03%) AI Agents
9 97 (2.01%) Onboarding
10 96 (1.99%) Derivative
11 94 (1.95%) Enterprise Software
12 86 (1.78%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 85 (1.76%) Fixed Income
14 83 (1.72%) Public Cloud
15 80 (1.66%) Data Centre
16 79 (1.64%) Security Posture
17 78 (1.62%) Hybrid Cloud
17 78 (1.62%) Legacy Systems
18 77 (1.60%) Management Information System
19 75 (1.56%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 789 (16.36%) Linux
2 357 (7.40%) Windows
3 237 (4.91%) Unix
4 98 (2.03%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.37%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.83%) Android
7 37 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 37 (0.77%) VMS
8 30 (0.62%) CentOS
9 27 (0.56%) Solaris
10 24 (0.50%) Mac OS
11 19 (0.39%) Apple iOS
12 17 (0.35%) Amazon Linux
13 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
14 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
15 5 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
16 4 (0.083%) Debian
16 4 (0.083%) Robot Operating System
16 4 (0.083%) Windows 10
17 3 (0.062%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,702 (35.29%) CI/CD
2 1,363 (28.26%) DevOps
3 1,144 (23.72%) Agile
4 1,065 (22.08%) Problem-Solving
5 975 (20.22%) AI
6 865 (17.93%) Infrastructure as Code
7 828 (17.17%) Analytics
8 753 (15.61%) Machine Learning
9 726 (15.05%) Containerisation
10 702 (14.56%) Data Pipeline
11 581 (12.05%) ETL
12 562 (11.65%) Data Engineering
13 559 (11.59%) Data Modelling
14 558 (11.57%) Data Science
15 540 (11.20%) Software Engineering
16 525 (10.89%) Test Automation
17 422 (8.75%) Business Intelligence
18 404 (8.38%) Observability
19 377 (7.82%) LLM
20 365 (7.57%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,473 (30.54%) SQL
2 760 (15.76%) Java
3 654 (13.56%) PowerShell
4 617 (12.79%) Bash
5 489 (10.14%) JavaScript
6 301 (6.24%) C#
7 290 (6.01%) TypeScript
8 250 (5.18%) Go
9 204 (4.23%) C++
10 165 (3.42%) Perl
11 155 (3.21%) R
11 155 (3.21%) Shell Script
12 118 (2.45%) Scala
13 95 (1.97%) Ruby
14 61 (1.26%) Bicep
15 60 (1.24%) Kusto Query Language
16 55 (1.14%) C
17 50 (1.04%) VBA
18 45 (0.93%) PHP
19 38 (0.79%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,055 (21.87%) Security Cleared
2 860 (17.83%) SC Cleared
3 441 (9.14%) Degree
4 237 (4.91%) Computer Science Degree
5 135 (2.80%) AWS Certification
5 135 (2.80%) DV Cleared
6 118 (2.45%) Master's Degree
7 91 (1.89%) BPSS Clearance
8 88 (1.82%) Azure Certification
9 85 (1.76%) CISSP
10 81 (1.68%) Cisco Certification
11 70 (1.45%) MCP
12 53 (1.10%) CCNP
13 51 (1.06%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 43 (0.89%) PhD
15 38 (0.79%) CCIE
16 37 (0.77%) CEH
17 34 (0.70%) CISM
18 33 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 33 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 389 (8.07%) Data Quality
2 175 (3.63%) QA
3 161 (3.34%) GDPR
4 90 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 90 (1.87%) NIST
5 58 (1.20%) Accessibility
6 35 (0.73%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.62%) HIPAA
7 30 (0.62%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 22 (0.46%) NCSC
8 22 (0.46%) SLA
9 20 (0.41%) SOC 2
10 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
11 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
11 9 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
11 9 (0.19%) MiFID
12 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
12 8 (0.17%) EMIR
12 8 (0.17%) PMO
12 8 (0.17%) WCAG
System Software
1 964 (19.99%) Docker
2 184 (3.82%) Active Directory
3 113 (2.34%) VMware Infrastructure
4 44 (0.91%) VMware NSX
5 37 (0.77%) vSphere
6 36 (0.75%) Virtual Machines
7 22 (0.46%) Firmware
8 21 (0.44%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.41%) HDFS
10 17 (0.35%) KVM
11 15 (0.31%) Oracle RAC
11 15 (0.31%) Squid
12 14 (0.29%) DFS Replication
13 13 (0.27%) Postfix
14 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
15 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 10 (0.21%) VMware ESXi
16 9 (0.19%) Dovecot
16 9 (0.19%) GPFS
17 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,086 (22.52%) Terraform
2 1,013 (21.00%) Kubernetes
3 600 (12.44%) Ansible
4 347 (7.19%) Grafana
5 297 (6.16%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.80%) Argo
7 81 (1.68%) Puppet
8 55 (1.14%) Kibana
9 50 (1.04%) vRealize
10 42 (0.87%) Istio
11 35 (0.73%) Single Sign-On
12 34 (0.70%) Nessus
13 30 (0.62%) NetBackup
14 29 (0.60%) Progress Chef
15 19 (0.39%) ITRS Geneos
16 18 (0.37%) logstash
17 17 (0.35%) Nmap
18 16 (0.33%) QRadar
18 16 (0.33%) Rancher
19 15 (0.31%) Control-M
Vendors
1 579 (12.00%) Microsoft
2 450 (9.33%) Databricks
3 294 (6.10%) Google
4 249 (5.16%) Splunk
5 240 (4.98%) Oracle
6 220 (4.56%) VMware
7 138 (2.86%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.55%) Cisco
8 123 (2.55%) ServiceNow
9 105 (2.18%) OpenAI
10 93 (1.93%) CyberArk
11 87 (1.80%) F5
12 82 (1.70%) Palo Alto
13 71 (1.47%) Foundry
14 68 (1.41%) BeyondTrust
15 50 (1.04%) SAP
16 41 (0.85%) Dynatrace
16 41 (0.85%) Informatica
17 39 (0.81%) Atlassian
17 39 (0.81%) IBM