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

6 months to
24 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,073 3,931 4,135
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.38% 13.01% 9.31%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.37% 38.59% 31.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,441 2,627 2,923
10th Percentile £358 £379 £400
25th Percentile £414 £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 £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £525
% change year-on-year -2.50% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 55 108
10th Percentile £28.30 £20.12 £25.37
25th Percentile £41.60 £23.80 £40.00
Median hourly rate £54.00 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.36 £65.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.90 £79.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +13.80% -25.00% -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 12,263 10,187 13,063
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.93% 33.72% 29.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,186 6,551 9,248
10th Percentile £352 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -5.36%
75th Percentile £606 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £480 £500
% change year-on-year - -4.00% -1.96%
Number of hourly rates quoted 464 235 497
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.55 £35.30
25th Percentile £53.53 £35.38 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.16%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.62
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 24 February 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 24 February 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 24 February 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 4,244 £518 -9.91% 2,390
London 0 2,416 £550 -8.33% 1,017
UK excluding London 0 1,962 £488 -2.50% 1,920
Work from Home 0 1,559 £525 -4.55% 864
North of England +12 665 £475 -5.00% 442
South East -4 417 £492 -8.68% 603
Yorkshire +8 355 £487 -2.55% 146
Scotland +3 289 £447 -5.89% 154
Midlands +2 277 £500 +4.82% 235
North West +11 268 £461 -2.89% 224
West Midlands -2 230 £500 - 117
South West -7 193 £550 -8.33% 239
East of England +1 131 £525 +6.06% 196
North East +3 47 £475 -7.32% 73
East Midlands -19 46 £444 +11.64% 117
Wales -14 32 £473 -7.80% 60
Northern Ireland +5 29 £600 +14.29% 25

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
1 247 (4.87%) Apache Spark
2 195 (3.84%) Apache Airflow
3 152 (3.00%) Confluence
4 148 (2.92%) Apache
5 70 (1.38%) SAS
6 61 (1.20%) SharePoint
7 29 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
8 27 (0.53%) nginx
8 27 (0.53%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.47%) Jupyter
10 23 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
11 20 (0.39%) Appian
12 14 (0.28%) ArcGIS
13 8 (0.16%) Camunda
14 6 (0.12%) CMS
15 5 (0.099%) Apache Superset
15 5 (0.099%) Tomcat
16 4 (0.079%) Oracle Application Server
16 4 (0.079%) Traefik
17 3 (0.059%) Ethereum
Applications
1 125 (2.46%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 13 (0.26%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 3 (0.059%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.059%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.020%) CPLEX
9 1 (0.020%) Maya
9 1 (0.020%) NUKE
9 1 (0.020%) Trello
Business Applications
1 18 (0.35%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.24%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
5 4 (0.079%) Bloomberg AIM
6 3 (0.059%) Actimize
6 3 (0.059%) IntelliMatch
6 3 (0.059%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.039%) Shopify
8 1 (0.020%) Advent Geneva
8 1 (0.020%) Cerner Millennium
8 1 (0.020%) ION MarketView
8 1 (0.020%) Loan IQ
8 1 (0.020%) NetSuite
8 1 (0.020%) Salesforce CRM
8 1 (0.020%) SAP BPC
8 1 (0.020%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 2,003 (39.48%) AWS
2 1,728 (34.06%) Azure
3 790 (15.57%) GCP
4 653 (12.87%) GitHub
5 540 (10.64%) Serverless
6 475 (9.36%) Power Platform
7 372 (7.33%) Amazon S3
8 357 (7.04%) Azure DevOps
9 355 (7.00%) AWS Lambda
10 331 (6.52%) GitHub Actions
11 255 (5.03%) AWS CloudFormation
12 252 (4.97%) Azure Data Factory
13 249 (4.91%) Snowflake
14 190 (3.75%) Amazon EKS
15 181 (3.57%) Amazon ECS
16 172 (3.39%) Amazon EC2
17 167 (3.29%) OpenShift
18 165 (3.25%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 157 (3.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 142 (2.80%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 222 (4.38%) Firewall
2 145 (2.86%) DNS
3 113 (2.23%) Network Security
3 113 (2.23%) TCP/IP
4 79 (1.56%) VPN
5 61 (1.20%) BGP
5 61 (1.20%) HTTP
6 50 (0.99%) SSL
7 49 (0.97%) WAN
8 41 (0.81%) Wireshark
9 35 (0.69%) LAN
9 35 (0.69%) MPLS
9 35 (0.69%) OSPF
9 35 (0.69%) SAN
10 31 (0.61%) DHCP
11 28 (0.55%) Wireless
12 27 (0.53%) VLAN
13 26 (0.51%) SD-WAN
14 23 (0.45%) BIG-IP
15 21 (0.41%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 394 (7.77%) Power BI
2 382 (7.53%) PostgreSQL
3 315 (6.21%) Data Warehouse
4 239 (4.71%) Data Lake
5 237 (4.67%) NoSQL
6 199 (3.92%) Relational Database
7 187 (3.69%) SQL Server
8 163 (3.21%) Big Data
9 157 (3.09%) Tableau
10 136 (2.68%) Amazon RDS
11 124 (2.44%) Metadata
12 123 (2.42%) BigQuery
13 117 (2.31%) MySQL
14 108 (2.13%) Delta Lake
15 101 (1.99%) Amazon Redshift
16 97 (1.91%) Amazon Athena
17 96 (1.89%) MongoDB
18 87 (1.71%) Azure SQL Database
19 86 (1.70%) Hadoop
20 77 (1.52%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 624 (12.30%) Git
2 541 (10.66%) Jenkins
3 432 (8.52%) GitLab
4 292 (5.76%) JIRA
5 95 (1.87%) MLflow
6 83 (1.64%) Selenium
7 47 (0.93%) Postman
8 46 (0.91%) Bitbucket
9 45 (0.89%) Cucumber
10 40 (0.79%) Sonatype Nexus
11 36 (0.71%) JUnit
12 34 (0.67%) JMeter
13 28 (0.55%) Liquibase
13 28 (0.55%) SpecFlow
14 25 (0.49%) Cypress.io
14 25 (0.49%) Visual Studio
15 24 (0.47%) CircleCI
15 24 (0.47%) Maven
16 23 (0.45%) Artifactory
17 22 (0.43%) SonarQube
General
1 1,306 (25.74%) Social Skills
2 1,015 (20.01%) Finance
3 700 (13.80%) Analytical Skills
4 471 (9.28%) Public Sector
5 427 (8.42%) Banking
6 175 (3.45%) Front Office
7 131 (2.58%) Documentation Skills
8 109 (2.15%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.36%) Retail
10 68 (1.34%) Financial Institution
10 68 (1.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 65 (1.28%) Marketing
12 61 (1.20%) Pharmaceutical
13 53 (1.04%) Telecoms
14 47 (0.93%) Legal
15 43 (0.85%) Influencing Skills
15 43 (0.85%) Manufacturing
16 40 (0.79%) Presentation Skills
17 32 (0.63%) Military
18 24 (0.47%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 925 (18.23%) Developer
2 717 (14.13%) Senior
3 712 (14.04%) Data Engineer
4 403 (7.94%) Python Developer
5 321 (6.33%) Architect
6 313 (6.17%) Lead
7 310 (6.11%) DevOps Engineer
8 301 (5.93%) Analyst
9 291 (5.74%) Python Engineer
10 269 (5.30%) AWS Engineer
11 250 (4.93%) Software Engineer
12 245 (4.83%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 201 (3.96%) Data Scientist
14 175 (3.45%) Platform Engineer
15 157 (3.09%) Senior Developer
16 152 (3.00%) Data Analyst
17 145 (2.86%) Azure Engineer
18 137 (2.70%) Senior Data Engineer
19 135 (2.66%) Full-Stack Developer
20 134 (2.64%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 433 (8.54%) REST
2 359 (7.08%) React
3 321 (6.33%) PySpark
4 320 (6.31%) Kafka
5 277 (5.46%) Node.js
6 231 (4.55%) Pandas
7 221 (4.36%) PyTorch
8 218 (4.30%) FastAPI
9 210 (4.14%) RESTful
10 209 (4.12%) .NET
11 178 (3.51%) TensorFlow
12 169 (3.33%) NumPy
13 144 (2.84%) scikit-learn
14 139 (2.74%) AngularJS
15 132 (2.60%) Flask
16 131 (2.58%) LangChain
17 116 (2.29%) pytest
18 113 (2.23%) JSON
19 111 (2.19%) Django
20 106 (2.09%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 478 (9.42%) Cloud Native
2 205 (4.04%) Distributed Systems
3 203 (4.00%) Algorithms
4 136 (2.68%) Product Ownership
5 124 (2.44%) Data Protection Act
5 124 (2.44%) Equities
6 114 (2.25%) Data Structures
7 105 (2.07%) Fixed Income
7 105 (2.07%) Onboarding
8 97 (1.91%) AI Agents
8 97 (1.91%) Derivative
9 92 (1.81%) Enterprise Software
10 91 (1.79%) Security Posture
11 89 (1.75%) Hybrid Cloud
11 89 (1.75%) Legacy Systems
12 88 (1.73%) Public Cloud
13 86 (1.70%) Management Information System
14 75 (1.48%) Data Centre
15 66 (1.30%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 59 (1.16%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 716 (14.11%) Linux
2 324 (6.39%) Windows
3 206 (4.06%) Unix
4 99 (1.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.26%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.75%) Android
7 37 (0.73%) Ubuntu
8 34 (0.67%) VMS
9 27 (0.53%) CentOS
10 25 (0.49%) Mac OS
11 24 (0.47%) Solaris
12 21 (0.41%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.20%) Windows 7
14 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
15 8 (0.16%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.099%) Debian
16 5 (0.099%) Embedded Linux
17 4 (0.079%) Windows Server 2008
17 4 (0.079%) Windows Server 2016
17 4 (0.079%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,841 (36.29%) CI/CD
2 1,430 (28.19%) DevOps
3 1,220 (24.05%) Agile
4 1,077 (21.23%) Problem-Solving
5 1,076 (21.21%) AI
6 968 (19.08%) Analytics
7 912 (17.98%) Infrastructure as Code
8 831 (16.38%) Machine Learning
9 807 (15.91%) Data Pipeline
10 769 (15.16%) Containerisation
11 674 (13.29%) Data Engineering
12 657 (12.95%) ETL
13 640 (12.62%) Data Modelling
14 622 (12.26%) Data Science
15 576 (11.35%) Software Engineering
16 571 (11.26%) Test Automation
17 470 (9.26%) Observability
18 463 (9.13%) Business Intelligence
19 434 (8.56%) LLM
20 368 (7.25%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,589 (31.32%) SQL
2 726 (14.31%) Java
3 666 (13.13%) PowerShell
4 607 (11.97%) Bash
5 530 (10.45%) JavaScript
6 336 (6.62%) TypeScript
7 328 (6.47%) C#
8 246 (4.85%) Go
9 183 (3.61%) C++
10 156 (3.08%) R
11 124 (2.44%) Shell Script
12 121 (2.39%) Perl
13 113 (2.23%) Scala
14 92 (1.81%) Ruby
15 63 (1.24%) Kusto Query Language
16 62 (1.22%) Bicep
17 49 (0.97%) C
17 49 (0.97%) VBA
18 42 (0.83%) T-SQL
19 39 (0.77%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,149 (22.65%) Security Cleared
2 922 (18.17%) SC Cleared
3 459 (9.05%) Degree
4 223 (4.40%) Computer Science Degree
5 142 (2.80%) DV Cleared
6 140 (2.76%) AWS Certification
7 129 (2.54%) Master's Degree
8 115 (2.27%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.91%) Azure Certification
10 94 (1.85%) CISSP
11 70 (1.38%) Cisco Certification
12 60 (1.18%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 54 (1.06%) CCNP
14 46 (0.91%) PhD
15 44 (0.87%) CISM
16 39 (0.77%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.71%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.63%) CEH
19 31 (0.61%) Microsoft Certified Professional
20 27 (0.53%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 460 (9.07%) Data Quality
2 200 (3.94%) QA
3 177 (3.49%) GDPR
4 105 (2.07%) NIST
5 102 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 75 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 32 (0.63%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.59%) HIPAA
9 29 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.51%) SLA
11 23 (0.45%) NCSC
12 16 (0.32%) SOC 2
13 14 (0.28%) Actionable Recommendations
14 12 (0.24%) EU AI Act
14 12 (0.24%) 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
1 959 (18.90%) Docker
2 177 (3.49%) Active Directory
3 116 (2.29%) VMware Infrastructure
4 52 (1.03%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.99%) vSphere
6 48 (0.95%) VMware NSX
7 28 (0.55%) Hyper-V
8 22 (0.43%) Firmware
9 15 (0.30%) KVM
9 15 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 12 (0.24%) HDFS
10 12 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 10 (0.20%) Lustre
12 9 (0.18%) GPFS
13 8 (0.16%) SRDF
13 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
14 7 (0.14%) Postfix
14 7 (0.14%) Squid
15 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
16 5 (0.099%) NetIQ eDirectory
Systems Management
1 1,129 (22.26%) Terraform
2 1,063 (20.95%) Kubernetes
3 548 (10.80%) Ansible
4 350 (6.90%) Grafana
5 311 (6.13%) Prometheus
6 92 (1.81%) Argo
7 75 (1.48%) Puppet
8 53 (1.04%) vRealize
9 49 (0.97%) Kibana
10 45 (0.89%) Istio
11 40 (0.79%) Nessus
12 32 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
13 29 (0.57%) Progress Chef
13 29 (0.57%) vCenter Server
14 27 (0.53%) Control-M
15 25 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
15 25 (0.49%) NetBackup
16 23 (0.45%) IBM Guardium
17 18 (0.35%) ITRS Geneos
17 18 (0.35%) Nmap
Vendors
1 621 (12.24%) Microsoft
2 514 (10.13%) Databricks
3 302 (5.95%) Google
4 239 (4.71%) Splunk
5 224 (4.42%) Oracle
6 223 (4.40%) VMware
7 150 (2.96%) Red Hat
8 118 (2.33%) Cisco
9 117 (2.31%) OpenAI
10 110 (2.17%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.66%) CyberArk
12 80 (1.58%) Foundry
13 71 (1.40%) F5
14 69 (1.36%) Palo Alto
15 66 (1.30%) BeyondTrust
16 57 (1.12%) Informatica
17 48 (0.95%) IBM
18 45 (0.89%) SAP
19 40 (0.79%) Atlassian
20 39 (0.77%) Dynatrace