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

6 months to
2 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -2 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,599 4,231 4,017
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.45% 13.01% 10.40%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.96% 39.61% 32.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,663 2,794 2,856
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £439 £432 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 135 83 106
10th Percentile £30.20 £28.18 £21.25
25th Percentile £42.50 £35.13 £32.81
Median hourly rate £58.50 £50.00 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.00% -18.03% -6.15%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £84.59 £78.13
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.57 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +25.14% -28.57% +16.67%

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 14,011 10,681 12,215
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.15% 32.84% 31.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,112 7,106 8,422
10th Percentile £363 £341 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £742 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 525 298 357
10th Percentile £28.00 £29.00 £30.00
25th Percentile £48.00 £36.69 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.44 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.45 £79.13 £78.00
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 2 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 2 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 2 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 -3 4,784 £550 +2.42% 8,168
London -3 2,840 £575 - 5,425
UK excluding London -8 2,118 £500 - 3,761
Work from Home -5 1,540 £527 -4.14% 3,150
North of England +2 725 £500 +5.26% 766
South East -11 448 £543 +8.50% 925
Yorkshire 0 367 £500 +2.56% 221
South West -3 285 £546 +1.58% 536
North West -1 277 £525 +10.53% 430
Scotland -4 272 £450 -10.00% 450
Midlands -18 233 £495 +4.21% 363
West Midlands -17 188 £500 +5.26% 212
East of England -9 141 £500 -4.76% 524
North East -2 93 £425 -2.86% 121
East Midlands -12 45 £478 +13.81% 149
Wales -8 30 £530 +30.86% 81
Northern Ireland +2 17 £363 -30.95% 150

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 (5.13%) Apache Airflow
2 272 (4.86%) Apache Spark
3 226 (4.04%) Apache
4 166 (2.96%) Confluence
5 56 (1.00%) Jupyter
6 54 (0.96%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.70%) SAS
8 30 (0.54%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 21 (0.38%) nginx
12 14 (0.25%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
13 9 (0.16%) WebSphere
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.13%) Apache Superset
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.089%) CICS
17 5 (0.089%) JBoss
Applications
1 111 (1.98%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
5 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
5 18 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 19 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
3 17 (0.30%) Remedy ITSM
4 11 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
6 7 (0.13%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
8 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.071%) Front Arena
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.054%) BambooHR
10 3 (0.054%) Endur
10 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
10 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) Distributed Ledger
11 2 (0.036%) R3 Corda
11 2 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 2,076 (37.08%) AWS
2 1,905 (34.02%) Azure
3 844 (15.07%) GCP
4 727 (12.98%) GitHub
5 499 (8.91%) Power Platform
6 488 (8.72%) Serverless
7 450 (8.04%) Azure DevOps
8 424 (7.57%) GitHub Actions
9 400 (7.14%) Amazon S3
10 365 (6.52%) AWS Lambda
11 331 (5.91%) Snowflake
12 226 (4.04%) dbt
13 220 (3.93%) Azure Data Factory
14 189 (3.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 180 (3.21%) AWS CloudFormation
16 174 (3.11%) Amazon EKS
17 137 (2.45%) Amazon EC2
17 137 (2.45%) Entra ID
18 132 (2.36%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 129 (2.30%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 277 (4.95%) Firewall
2 209 (3.73%) DNS
3 148 (2.64%) TCP/IP
4 137 (2.45%) Network Security
5 127 (2.27%) BGP
6 125 (2.23%) VPN
7 113 (2.02%) WAN
8 88 (1.57%) DHCP
9 75 (1.34%) OSPF
10 66 (1.18%) SD-WAN
11 62 (1.11%) VLAN
12 57 (1.02%) SSL
13 55 (0.98%) BIG-IP
14 54 (0.96%) VXLAN
15 48 (0.86%) HTTP
16 46 (0.82%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 43 (0.77%) SNMP
18 41 (0.73%) Ethernet VPN
18 41 (0.73%) SAN
19 39 (0.70%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 451 (8.06%) Power BI
2 327 (5.84%) Data Warehouse
3 314 (5.61%) PostgreSQL
4 220 (3.93%) SQL Server
5 207 (3.70%) Metadata
6 205 (3.66%) Relational Database
7 192 (3.43%) Tableau
8 188 (3.36%) Data Lake
9 162 (2.89%) BigQuery
10 154 (2.75%) NoSQL
11 141 (2.52%) Big Data
12 136 (2.43%) Amazon Redshift
13 130 (2.32%) Amazon Athena
14 126 (2.25%) Amazon RDS
15 124 (2.21%) Delta Lake
16 118 (2.11%) MongoDB
17 109 (1.95%) DynamoDB
18 93 (1.66%) MySQL
19 75 (1.34%) Redis
20 68 (1.21%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 747 (13.34%) Git
2 497 (8.88%) Jenkins
3 443 (7.91%) GitLab
4 287 (5.13%) JIRA
5 108 (1.93%) Selenium
6 61 (1.09%) JMeter
7 56 (1.00%) MLflow
8 55 (0.98%) Postman
9 52 (0.93%) SonarQube
10 49 (0.88%) Claude Code
11 40 (0.71%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
13 33 (0.59%) Gatling
13 33 (0.59%) Maven
14 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
15 31 (0.55%) Artifactory
15 31 (0.55%) REST Assured
16 30 (0.54%) Sonatype Nexus
17 27 (0.48%) LoadRunner
18 19 (0.34%) JUnit
General
1 1,282 (22.90%) Social Skills
2 1,214 (21.68%) Finance
3 847 (15.13%) Analytical Skills
4 564 (10.07%) Public Sector
5 458 (8.18%) Banking
6 184 (3.29%) Front Office
7 143 (2.55%) Investment Banking
8 118 (2.11%) Documentation Skills
9 110 (1.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 108 (1.93%) Retail
11 93 (1.66%) Marketing
12 80 (1.43%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.05%) Military
14 58 (1.04%) Pharmaceutical
15 51 (0.91%) Legal
16 50 (0.89%) Aerospace
17 46 (0.82%) Financial Institution
17 46 (0.82%) Law
18 45 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
19 44 (0.79%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 949 (16.95%) Senior
2 900 (16.07%) Developer
3 822 (14.68%) Data Engineer
4 478 (8.54%) Lead
5 473 (8.45%) Python Developer
6 412 (7.36%) Python Engineer
7 337 (6.02%) DevOps Engineer
8 290 (5.18%) Analyst
9 287 (5.13%) Software Engineer
10 281 (5.02%) Architect
11 273 (4.88%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 230 (4.11%) AWS Engineer
13 194 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
14 193 (3.45%) Cloud Engineer
14 193 (3.45%) Data Scientist
15 190 (3.39%) Senior Developer
16 181 (3.23%) Senior Data Engineer
17 175 (3.13%) Azure Engineer
18 144 (2.57%) Data Analyst
19 136 (2.43%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,328 (23.72%) Terraform
2 479 (8.56%) REST
3 383 (6.84%) PySpark
4 358 (6.39%) Kafka
5 310 (5.54%) React
6 250 (4.47%) .NET
7 205 (3.66%) Django
8 204 (3.64%) JSON
9 201 (3.59%) FastAPI
10 186 (3.32%) RESTful
11 172 (3.07%) Pandas
12 169 (3.02%) Node.js
13 141 (2.52%) LangChain
14 137 (2.45%) pytest
15 119 (2.13%) PyTorch
16 113 (2.02%) Flask
17 112 (2.00%) YAML
18 111 (1.98%) HTML
19 109 (1.95%) OAuth
20 102 (1.82%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 783 (13.98%) Cloud Native
2 311 (5.55%) Distributed Systems
3 248 (4.43%) AI Agents
4 226 (4.04%) Onboarding
5 160 (2.86%) Product Ownership
6 156 (2.79%) Data Centre
7 141 (2.52%) Data Structures
8 139 (2.48%) Algorithms
9 138 (2.46%) Legacy Systems
10 117 (2.09%) Hybrid Cloud
11 109 (1.95%) Management Information System
12 108 (1.93%) Data Protection Act
13 107 (1.91%) Derivative
14 86 (1.54%) Equities
15 85 (1.52%) Enterprise Software
16 80 (1.43%) Security Posture
17 70 (1.25%) Linux Command Line
18 69 (1.23%) Public Cloud
19 63 (1.13%) PKI
20 62 (1.11%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 746 (13.32%) Linux
2 334 (5.97%) Windows
3 246 (4.39%) Unix
4 152 (2.71%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.61%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.63%) VMS
8 27 (0.48%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 17 (0.30%) CentOS
11 16 (0.29%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.089%) Debian
16 5 (0.089%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,250 (40.19%) CI/CD
2 1,610 (28.76%) DevOps
3 1,487 (26.56%) AI
4 1,245 (22.24%) Agile
5 1,218 (21.75%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,106 (19.75%) Analytics
7 985 (17.59%) Data Pipeline
8 904 (16.15%) Software Engineering
9 902 (16.11%) Problem-Solving
10 846 (15.11%) Machine Learning
11 805 (14.38%) Data Engineering
12 780 (13.93%) Containerisation
13 741 (13.23%) Data Modelling
14 714 (12.75%) Observability
15 652 (11.64%) ETL
16 639 (11.41%) Test Automation
17 613 (10.95%) Continuous Improvement
18 590 (10.54%) Validation
19 565 (10.09%) Data Science
20 559 (9.98%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,833 (32.74%) SQL
2 822 (14.68%) Java
3 762 (13.61%) Bash
4 737 (13.16%) PowerShell
5 441 (7.88%) JavaScript
6 338 (6.04%) TypeScript
7 316 (5.64%) C#
8 193 (3.45%) Go
9 151 (2.70%) R
10 149 (2.66%) Shell Script
11 142 (2.54%) C++
12 135 (2.41%) Bicep
13 133 (2.38%) Scala
14 95 (1.70%) Perl
15 58 (1.04%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 58 (1.04%) Groovy
16 56 (1.00%) C
17 55 (0.98%) PL/SQL
18 54 (0.96%) Ruby
18 54 (0.96%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,345 (24.02%) Security Cleared
2 1,091 (19.49%) SC Cleared
3 420 (7.50%) Degree
4 223 (3.98%) DV Cleared
5 163 (2.91%) Computer Science Degree
6 147 (2.63%) Azure Certification
7 142 (2.54%) AWS Certification
8 125 (2.23%) BPSS Clearance
9 95 (1.70%) CISSP
10 85 (1.52%) Cisco Certification
11 67 (1.20%) Master's Degree
12 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
13 43 (0.77%) CCNP
14 36 (0.64%) ISTQB
14 36 (0.64%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 34 (0.61%) CISM
15 34 (0.61%) PhD
16 30 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 28 (0.50%) CCIE
18 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 614 (10.97%) Data Quality
2 288 (5.14%) QA
3 115 (2.05%) NIST
4 107 (1.91%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 100 (1.79%) GDPR
6 79 (1.41%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.63%) SLA
8 34 (0.61%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.52%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) WCAG
11 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 24 (0.43%) PCI DSS
13 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
14 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
14 14 (0.25%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.13%) GRC
18 6 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 951 (16.99%) Docker
2 158 (2.82%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.36%) VMware Infrastructure
4 60 (1.07%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.82%) Hyper-V
6 40 (0.71%) vSphere
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 26 (0.46%) Firmware
9 23 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Squid
12 12 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) HDFS
17 5 (0.089%) PowerHA
17 5 (0.089%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,123 (20.06%) Kubernetes
2 625 (11.16%) Ansible
3 334 (5.97%) Grafana
4 243 (4.34%) Prometheus
5 83 (1.48%) Puppet
6 74 (1.32%) Progress Chef
7 68 (1.21%) Argo
8 38 (0.68%) Istio
9 31 (0.55%) Single Sign-On
10 30 (0.54%) Kibana
11 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
12 26 (0.46%) Control-M
13 25 (0.45%) Nagios
14 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
14 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
15 22 (0.39%) vRealize
16 20 (0.36%) FortiGate
17 19 (0.34%) Packer
18 18 (0.32%) Tivoli
19 17 (0.30%) Netcool
Vendors
1 714 (12.75%) Microsoft
2 574 (10.25%) Databricks
3 365 (6.52%) Google
4 249 (4.45%) Oracle
5 215 (3.84%) Splunk
6 176 (3.14%) VMware
7 149 (2.66%) OpenAI
8 139 (2.48%) Cisco
9 120 (2.14%) ServiceNow
10 104 (1.86%) Red Hat
11 101 (1.80%) Dynatrace
12 94 (1.68%) IBM
13 86 (1.54%) F5
14 82 (1.46%) Palo Alto
15 79 (1.41%) Informatica
16 72 (1.29%) Foundry
17 71 (1.27%) Fortinet
18 69 (1.23%) SAP
19 67 (1.20%) CyberArk
20 62 (1.11%) Salesforce