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

6 months to
26 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,660 4,382 4,152
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.32% 13.25% 10.84%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.55% 40.16% 33.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,685 2,841 2,840
10th Percentile £371 £358 £375
25th Percentile £440 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.29% -8.70% -4.12%
75th Percentile £650 £649 £700
90th Percentile £750 £768 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 133 85 102
10th Percentile £31.88 £28.21 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.25 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £64.76
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -22.79% -0.37%
75th Percentile £80.00 £58.75 £73.47
90th Percentile £91.69 £81.50 £79.88
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.48 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.96% -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 14,311 10,910 12,269
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.08% 32.98% 32.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,300 7,204 8,174
10th Percentile £363 £343 £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 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £495
% change year-on-year +5.26% -4.04% -1.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 550 295 344
10th Percentile £24.97 £29.00 £26.06
25th Percentile £46.39 £41.25 £44.87
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £77.75 £78.38
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 26 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 26 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 26 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 4,830 £550 +3.77% 10,559
London -4 2,845 £575 - 6,640
UK excluding London -8 2,174 £500 - 4,789
Work from Home -6 1,538 £530 -3.68% 3,887
North of England +1 751 £500 +5.26% 1,027
South East -5 457 £545 +9.00% 1,152
Yorkshire -2 382 £500 - 333
Scotland -5 300 £458 -8.50% 529
North West -1 291 £525 +16.67% 558
South West -4 282 £550 +4.76% 635
Midlands -21 227 £500 +2.46% 507
West Midlands -19 187 £515 +3.05% 305
East of England -18 149 £484 -7.86% 663
North East -4 87 £425 -5.56% 142
East Midlands -19 40 £463 +12.80% 202
Wales -8 27 £510 +19.30% 99
Northern Ireland 0 17 £363 -30.95% 215

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
1 294 (5.19%) Apache Airflow
2 279 (4.93%) Apache Spark
3 228 (4.03%) Apache
4 157 (2.77%) Confluence
5 59 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 56 (0.99%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.65%) 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 8 (0.14%) CMS
11 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
11 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
12 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
13 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
13 5 (0.088%) Camunda
13 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 104 (1.84%) 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 13 (0.23%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.035%) Revit
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%) Simulink
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
6 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
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%) Orchestrade
11 2 (0.035%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,074 (36.64%) AWS
2 1,895 (33.48%) Azure
3 893 (15.78%) GCP
4 747 (13.20%) GitHub
5 493 (8.71%) Power Platform
6 485 (8.57%) Serverless
7 440 (7.77%) GitHub Actions
8 439 (7.76%) Azure DevOps
9 395 (6.98%) Amazon S3
10 359 (6.34%) AWS Lambda
11 343 (6.06%) Snowflake
12 244 (4.31%) dbt
13 211 (3.73%) Azure Data Factory
14 199 (3.52%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 185 (3.27%) AWS CloudFormation
16 184 (3.25%) Amazon EKS
17 173 (3.06%) Entra ID
18 142 (2.51%) Amazon EC2
19 127 (2.24%) SaaS
20 126 (2.23%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 282 (4.98%) Firewall
2 208 (3.67%) DNS
3 160 (2.83%) Network Security
4 151 (2.67%) TCP/IP
5 128 (2.26%) BGP
6 127 (2.24%) VPN
7 115 (2.03%) WAN
8 86 (1.52%) DHCP
9 76 (1.34%) OSPF
10 73 (1.29%) SD-WAN
11 63 (1.11%) BIG-IP
12 57 (1.01%) SSL
13 56 (0.99%) VLAN
13 56 (0.99%) VXLAN
14 52 (0.92%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 51 (0.90%) HTTP
16 48 (0.85%) Ethernet VPN
17 41 (0.72%) Broadband
17 41 (0.72%) Wireless
18 39 (0.69%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 440 (7.77%) Power BI
2 334 (5.90%) Data Warehouse
3 319 (5.64%) PostgreSQL
4 218 (3.85%) Metadata
5 207 (3.66%) Relational Database
6 202 (3.57%) SQL Server
7 197 (3.48%) Data Lake
8 188 (3.32%) BigQuery
9 171 (3.02%) Tableau
10 156 (2.76%) NoSQL
11 138 (2.44%) Big Data
12 132 (2.33%) Amazon Redshift
13 128 (2.26%) Amazon Athena
13 128 (2.26%) Amazon RDS
14 121 (2.14%) Delta Lake
15 118 (2.08%) MongoDB
16 110 (1.94%) DynamoDB
17 105 (1.86%) MySQL
18 74 (1.31%) Redis
19 61 (1.08%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 822 (14.52%) Git
2 507 (8.96%) Jenkins
3 485 (8.57%) GitLab
4 309 (5.46%) JIRA
5 118 (2.08%) Selenium
6 67 (1.18%) Postman
7 60 (1.06%) JMeter
8 56 (0.99%) Claude Code
9 55 (0.97%) SonarQube
10 50 (0.88%) MLflow
11 44 (0.78%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.62%) Cucumber
12 35 (0.62%) REST Assured
13 34 (0.60%) Artifactory
13 34 (0.60%) Sonatype Nexus
14 33 (0.58%) Cypress.io
15 32 (0.57%) Maven
16 29 (0.51%) LoadRunner
17 28 (0.49%) Gatling
18 23 (0.41%) JUnit
General
1 1,312 (23.18%) Social Skills
2 1,284 (22.69%) Finance
3 847 (14.96%) Analytical Skills
4 544 (9.61%) Public Sector
5 519 (9.17%) Banking
6 176 (3.11%) Front Office
7 149 (2.63%) Investment Banking
8 113 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 113 (2.00%) Retail
9 105 (1.86%) Documentation Skills
10 89 (1.57%) Telecoms
11 87 (1.54%) Marketing
12 63 (1.11%) Military
13 53 (0.94%) Law
14 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
14 52 (0.92%) Pharmaceutical
15 45 (0.80%) Legal
16 44 (0.78%) Financial Institution
17 42 (0.74%) Publishing
18 39 (0.69%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,010 (17.84%) Senior
2 895 (15.81%) Developer
3 841 (14.86%) Data Engineer
4 489 (8.64%) Lead
5 469 (8.29%) Python Developer
6 422 (7.46%) Python Engineer
7 358 (6.33%) DevOps Engineer
8 306 (5.41%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 288 (5.09%) Analyst
10 284 (5.02%) Software Engineer
11 247 (4.36%) Architect
12 228 (4.03%) AWS Engineer
13 193 (3.41%) Cloud Engineer
13 193 (3.41%) Senior Developer
14 192 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
15 190 (3.36%) Azure Engineer
16 189 (3.34%) Senior Data Engineer
17 183 (3.23%) Data Scientist
18 152 (2.69%) Network Engineer
19 140 (2.47%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,392 (24.59%) Terraform
2 532 (9.40%) REST
3 374 (6.61%) Kafka
4 372 (6.57%) PySpark
5 307 (5.42%) React
6 244 (4.31%) .NET
7 211 (3.73%) FastAPI
8 210 (3.71%) JSON
9 207 (3.66%) Django
10 193 (3.41%) RESTful
11 158 (2.79%) pytest
12 155 (2.74%) LangChain
12 155 (2.74%) Node.js
13 154 (2.72%) Pandas
14 128 (2.26%) OAuth
15 118 (2.08%) Flask
16 114 (2.01%) YAML
17 110 (1.94%) PyTorch
18 109 (1.93%) LangGraph
19 106 (1.87%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 803 (14.19%) Cloud Native
2 298 (5.27%) Distributed Systems
3 291 (5.14%) AI Agents
4 255 (4.51%) Onboarding
5 165 (2.92%) Data Centre
6 153 (2.70%) Product Ownership
7 145 (2.56%) Data Structures
8 136 (2.40%) Legacy Systems
9 123 (2.17%) Algorithms
10 108 (1.91%) Enterprise Software
10 108 (1.91%) Hybrid Cloud
10 108 (1.91%) Management Information System
11 99 (1.75%) Data Protection Act
11 99 (1.75%) Derivative
12 95 (1.68%) Security Posture
13 84 (1.48%) Public Cloud
14 80 (1.41%) Equities
15 75 (1.33%) PKI
16 68 (1.20%) Linux Command Line
16 68 (1.20%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 771 (13.62%) Linux
2 345 (6.10%) Windows
3 252 (4.45%) Unix
4 156 (2.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 91 (1.61%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 38 (0.67%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 17 (0.30%) 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%) Rocky
16 4 (0.071%) FreeRTOS
16 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,373 (41.93%) CI/CD
2 1,628 (28.76%) DevOps
3 1,590 (28.09%) AI
4 1,302 (23.00%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,274 (22.51%) Agile
6 1,104 (19.51%) Analytics
7 992 (17.53%) Data Pipeline
8 946 (16.71%) Software Engineering
9 890 (15.72%) Problem-Solving
10 853 (15.07%) Machine Learning
11 840 (14.84%) Data Engineering
12 788 (13.92%) Containerisation
13 766 (13.53%) Observability
14 761 (13.45%) Data Modelling
15 691 (12.21%) Test Automation
16 667 (11.78%) ETL
17 664 (11.73%) Validation
18 659 (11.64%) Continuous Improvement
19 586 (10.35%) Platform Engineering
20 580 (10.25%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,857 (32.81%) SQL
2 798 (14.10%) Java
3 767 (13.55%) Bash
4 753 (13.30%) PowerShell
5 449 (7.93%) JavaScript
6 346 (6.11%) TypeScript
7 308 (5.44%) C#
8 226 (3.99%) Go
9 151 (2.67%) Shell Script
10 140 (2.47%) R
11 132 (2.33%) Bicep
12 127 (2.24%) C++
13 125 (2.21%) Scala
14 104 (1.84%) Perl
15 61 (1.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 56 (0.99%) Groovy
17 52 (0.92%) C
18 51 (0.90%) Rust
19 50 (0.88%) PL/SQL
19 50 (0.88%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,376 (24.31%) Security Cleared
2 1,114 (19.68%) SC Cleared
3 404 (7.14%) Degree
4 246 (4.35%) DV Cleared
5 154 (2.72%) Azure Certification
6 151 (2.67%) Computer Science Degree
7 144 (2.54%) AWS Certification
8 132 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.71%) CISSP
10 80 (1.41%) Cisco Certification
11 68 (1.20%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
13 39 (0.69%) CCNP
14 35 (0.62%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) CCIE
15 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
16 30 (0.53%) CISM
16 30 (0.53%) DBS Check
17 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 29 (0.51%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 647 (11.43%) Data Quality
2 328 (5.80%) QA
3 116 (2.05%) NIST
4 102 (1.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 88 (1.55%) GDPR
6 82 (1.45%) Accessibility
7 44 (0.78%) SLA
8 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.51%) NCSC
10 27 (0.48%) PCI DSS
11 22 (0.39%) SOC 2
11 22 (0.39%) WCAG
12 19 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
13 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
14 11 (0.19%) ISO 20022
15 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) Basel III
16 7 (0.12%) GRC
16 7 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 968 (17.10%) Docker
2 177 (3.13%) Active Directory
3 135 (2.39%) VMware Infrastructure
4 70 (1.24%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.88%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.62%) vSphere
7 32 (0.57%) VMware NSX
8 27 (0.48%) NFS
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) Firmware
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 8 (0.14%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 8 (0.14%) zsh
15 7 (0.12%) HDFS
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,164 (20.57%) Kubernetes
2 640 (11.31%) Ansible
3 332 (5.87%) Grafana
4 242 (4.28%) Prometheus
5 79 (1.40%) Puppet
6 71 (1.25%) Progress Chef
7 64 (1.13%) Argo
8 47 (0.83%) Single Sign-On
9 39 (0.69%) Kibana
10 34 (0.60%) Istio
11 28 (0.49%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 22 (0.39%) FortiGate
13 22 (0.39%) Packer
14 19 (0.34%) ZABBIX
15 17 (0.30%) Nagios
15 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
16 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) QRadar
16 16 (0.28%) vRealize
Vendors
1 751 (13.27%) Microsoft
2 585 (10.34%) Databricks
3 401 (7.08%) Google
4 244 (4.31%) Oracle
5 210 (3.71%) Splunk
6 173 (3.06%) VMware
7 164 (2.90%) OpenAI
8 146 (2.58%) Cisco
9 136 (2.40%) ServiceNow
10 102 (1.80%) Dynatrace
11 97 (1.71%) Red Hat
12 95 (1.68%) IBM
13 90 (1.59%) F5
14 89 (1.57%) Palo Alto
15 83 (1.47%) Foundry
16 73 (1.29%) Fortinet
17 70 (1.24%) CyberArk
17 70 (1.24%) Informatica
18 69 (1.22%) SAP
19 55 (0.97%) Salesforce