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

6 months to
19 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,677 4,317 4,135
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.35% 13.10% 10.73%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.81% 39.84% 33.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,696 2,805 2,871
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £440 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.29% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £700
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 140 85 102
10th Percentile £30.30 £28.18 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.00 £40.06
Median hourly rate £61.97 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +23.95% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £78.19 £57.50 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.21 £81.00 £78.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -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 14,259 10,836 12,360
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 25.99% 32.89% 32.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,267 7,163 8,335
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £503 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.98% -4.29% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 294 347
10th Percentile £26.51 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £46.38 £41.25 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £79.63 £78.00
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 19 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 19 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 19 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 4,845 £550 +3.77% 10,210
London -4 2,863 £575 - 6,484
UK excluding London -8 2,168 £500 - 4,521
Work from Home -5 1,544 £527 -4.23% 3,633
North of England +1 746 £500 +5.04% 985
South East -5 458 £543 +8.50% 1,107
Yorkshire -1 384 £500 - 325
Scotland -5 297 £450 -10.00% 514
North West -1 284 £525 +11.94% 532
South West -2 282 £550 +4.76% 578
Midlands -23 222 £500 +5.26% 455
West Midlands -20 179 £500 - 263
East of England -8 153 £478 -9.05% 651
North East -7 88 £425 -5.56% 131
East Midlands -14 43 £475 +15.85% 192
Wales -9 26 £530 +29.27% 95
Northern Ireland +2 17 £363 -30.95% 170

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 (5.18%) Apache Airflow
2 274 (4.83%) Apache Spark
3 225 (3.96%) Apache
4 166 (2.92%) Confluence
5 58 (1.02%) Jupyter
6 57 (1.00%) SharePoint
7 36 (0.63%) SAS
8 30 (0.53%) OpenStack
9 25 (0.44%) nginx
10 24 (0.42%) ArcGIS
11 21 (0.37%) IIS
11 21 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
12 9 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
13 8 (0.14%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
15 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
16 5 (0.088%) CICS
16 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 108 (1.90%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 18 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
5 16 (0.28%) CPLEX
6 15 (0.26%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.035%) 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%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 20 (0.35%) Remedy ITSM
2 19 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
3 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Front Arena
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
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 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.070%) 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 2,106 (37.10%) AWS
2 1,913 (33.70%) Azure
3 897 (15.80%) GCP
4 753 (13.26%) GitHub
5 494 (8.70%) Serverless
6 493 (8.68%) Power Platform
7 442 (7.79%) GitHub Actions
8 437 (7.70%) Azure DevOps
9 397 (6.99%) Amazon S3
10 367 (6.46%) AWS Lambda
11 339 (5.97%) Snowflake
12 239 (4.21%) dbt
13 211 (3.72%) Azure Data Factory
14 199 (3.51%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 186 (3.28%) AWS CloudFormation
16 181 (3.19%) Amazon EKS
17 169 (2.98%) Entra ID
18 143 (2.52%) Amazon EC2
19 129 (2.27%) Amazon ECS
20 128 (2.25%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 289 (5.09%) Firewall
2 215 (3.79%) DNS
3 158 (2.78%) Network Security
4 153 (2.70%) TCP/IP
5 131 (2.31%) BGP
6 129 (2.27%) VPN
7 118 (2.08%) WAN
8 87 (1.53%) DHCP
9 78 (1.37%) OSPF
10 72 (1.27%) SD-WAN
11 62 (1.09%) BIG-IP
12 60 (1.06%) SSL
12 60 (1.06%) VLAN
13 56 (0.99%) VXLAN
14 54 (0.95%) HTTP
15 52 (0.92%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 47 (0.83%) Ethernet VPN
17 40 (0.70%) SSH
17 40 (0.70%) Wireless
18 38 (0.67%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 441 (7.77%) Power BI
2 329 (5.80%) Data Warehouse
3 321 (5.65%) PostgreSQL
4 223 (3.93%) Metadata
5 209 (3.68%) SQL Server
6 204 (3.59%) Relational Database
7 187 (3.29%) Data Lake
8 180 (3.17%) BigQuery
9 179 (3.15%) Tableau
10 154 (2.71%) NoSQL
11 138 (2.43%) Big Data
12 133 (2.34%) Amazon RDS
13 130 (2.29%) Amazon Athena
14 129 (2.27%) Amazon Redshift
15 120 (2.11%) Delta Lake
16 118 (2.08%) MongoDB
17 113 (1.99%) DynamoDB
18 98 (1.73%) MySQL
19 74 (1.30%) Redis
20 64 (1.13%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 810 (14.27%) Git
2 510 (8.98%) Jenkins
3 482 (8.49%) GitLab
4 312 (5.50%) JIRA
5 119 (2.10%) Selenium
6 60 (1.06%) Postman
7 57 (1.00%) SonarQube
8 56 (0.99%) Claude Code
8 56 (0.99%) JMeter
9 51 (0.90%) MLflow
10 44 (0.78%) Bitbucket
11 37 (0.65%) Maven
12 36 (0.63%) Artifactory
13 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
14 34 (0.60%) Cucumber
15 33 (0.58%) REST Assured
16 32 (0.56%) Gatling
16 32 (0.56%) Sonatype Nexus
17 25 (0.44%) LoadRunner
18 21 (0.37%) JUnit
General
1 1,325 (23.34%) Social Skills
2 1,273 (22.42%) Finance
3 862 (15.18%) Analytical Skills
4 544 (9.58%) Public Sector
5 507 (8.93%) Banking
6 175 (3.08%) Front Office
7 151 (2.66%) Investment Banking
8 113 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 111 (1.96%) Retail
10 106 (1.87%) Documentation Skills
11 95 (1.67%) Marketing
12 87 (1.53%) Telecoms
13 61 (1.07%) Military
14 56 (0.99%) Pharmaceutical
15 53 (0.93%) Aerospace
16 51 (0.90%) Law
17 47 (0.83%) Legal
18 44 (0.78%) Financial Institution
19 43 (0.76%) Publishing
20 40 (0.70%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 1,004 (17.69%) Senior
2 894 (15.75%) Developer
3 827 (14.57%) Data Engineer
4 479 (8.44%) Lead
5 472 (8.31%) Python Developer
6 420 (7.40%) Python Engineer
7 358 (6.31%) DevOps Engineer
8 300 (5.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 293 (5.16%) Analyst
10 284 (5.00%) Software Engineer
11 263 (4.63%) Architect
12 232 (4.09%) AWS Engineer
13 196 (3.45%) Cloud Engineer
13 196 (3.45%) Platform Engineer
13 196 (3.45%) Senior Developer
14 192 (3.38%) Senior Data Engineer
15 186 (3.28%) Azure Engineer
16 183 (3.22%) Data Scientist
17 155 (2.73%) Network Engineer
18 142 (2.50%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,392 (24.52%) Terraform
2 520 (9.16%) REST
3 374 (6.59%) PySpark
4 364 (6.41%) Kafka
5 306 (5.39%) React
6 253 (4.46%) .NET
7 215 (3.79%) JSON
8 205 (3.61%) FastAPI
9 203 (3.58%) Django
10 189 (3.33%) RESTful
11 163 (2.87%) Node.js
12 159 (2.80%) Pandas
13 156 (2.75%) pytest
14 151 (2.66%) LangChain
15 127 (2.24%) OAuth
16 116 (2.04%) Flask
17 115 (2.03%) YAML
18 111 (1.96%) PyTorch
19 107 (1.88%) HTML
20 106 (1.87%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 796 (14.02%) Cloud Native
2 304 (5.35%) Distributed Systems
3 283 (4.99%) AI Agents
4 244 (4.30%) Onboarding
5 166 (2.92%) Data Centre
6 156 (2.75%) Product Ownership
7 147 (2.59%) Data Structures
8 135 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
9 128 (2.25%) Algorithms
10 111 (1.96%) Hybrid Cloud
11 109 (1.92%) Management Information System
12 104 (1.83%) Enterprise Software
13 103 (1.81%) Data Protection Act
14 100 (1.76%) Derivative
15 94 (1.66%) Security Posture
16 82 (1.44%) Public Cloud
17 79 (1.39%) Equities
18 71 (1.25%) Linux Command Line
18 71 (1.25%) PKI
19 68 (1.20%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 766 (13.49%) Linux
2 342 (6.02%) Windows
3 251 (4.42%) Unix
4 159 (2.80%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 93 (1.64%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.81%) Ubuntu
7 40 (0.70%) VMS
8 23 (0.41%) CentOS
9 19 (0.33%) AIX
10 17 (0.30%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) 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 4 (0.070%) Debian
16 4 (0.070%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,353 (41.45%) CI/CD
2 1,636 (28.82%) DevOps
3 1,568 (27.62%) AI
4 1,305 (22.99%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,281 (22.56%) Agile
6 1,102 (19.41%) Analytics
7 996 (17.54%) Data Pipeline
8 938 (16.52%) Software Engineering
9 912 (16.06%) Problem-Solving
10 855 (15.06%) Machine Learning
11 834 (14.69%) Data Engineering
12 801 (14.11%) Containerisation
13 761 (13.40%) Observability
14 752 (13.25%) Data Modelling
15 680 (11.98%) Test Automation
16 660 (11.63%) ETL
17 655 (11.54%) Continuous Improvement
18 647 (11.40%) Validation
19 582 (10.25%) Platform Engineering
20 567 (9.99%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,854 (32.66%) SQL
2 817 (14.39%) Java
3 779 (13.72%) Bash
4 757 (13.33%) PowerShell
5 446 (7.86%) JavaScript
6 349 (6.15%) TypeScript
7 322 (5.67%) C#
8 221 (3.89%) Go
9 153 (2.70%) Shell Script
10 143 (2.52%) R
11 136 (2.40%) C++
12 134 (2.36%) Bicep
13 128 (2.25%) Scala
14 103 (1.81%) Perl
15 61 (1.07%) Groovy
16 59 (1.04%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 58 (1.02%) C
18 54 (0.95%) Rust
19 52 (0.92%) PL/SQL
20 47 (0.83%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,381 (24.33%) Security Cleared
2 1,116 (19.66%) SC Cleared
3 415 (7.31%) Degree
4 244 (4.30%) DV Cleared
5 161 (2.84%) Azure Certification
6 152 (2.68%) Computer Science Degree
7 145 (2.55%) AWS Certification
8 123 (2.17%) BPSS Clearance
9 96 (1.69%) CISSP
10 83 (1.46%) Cisco Certification
11 66 (1.16%) Master's Degree
12 49 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
13 41 (0.72%) CCNP
14 35 (0.62%) PhD
14 35 (0.62%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 32 (0.56%) CISM
16 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
17 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 29 (0.51%) CCIE
19 28 (0.49%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 636 (11.20%) Data Quality
2 320 (5.64%) QA
3 113 (1.99%) NIST
4 100 (1.76%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 95 (1.67%) GDPR
6 82 (1.44%) Accessibility
7 39 (0.69%) SLA
8 35 (0.62%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.51%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 22 (0.39%) WCAG
12 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 20 (0.35%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
13 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
14 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) MiFID
17 6 (0.11%) Basel III
17 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 977 (17.21%) Docker
2 174 (3.06%) Active Directory
3 137 (2.41%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.22%) Virtual Machines
5 54 (0.95%) Hyper-V
6 37 (0.65%) vSphere
7 34 (0.60%) VMware NSX
8 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
9 25 (0.44%) NFS
10 23 (0.41%) Firmware
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Squid
12 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
13 11 (0.19%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) HDFS
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,172 (20.64%) Kubernetes
2 647 (11.40%) Ansible
3 333 (5.87%) Grafana
4 243 (4.28%) Prometheus
5 81 (1.43%) Puppet
6 74 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 62 (1.09%) Argo
8 45 (0.79%) Single Sign-On
9 36 (0.63%) Kibana
10 33 (0.58%) Istio
11 28 (0.49%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 22 (0.39%) FortiGate
14 21 (0.37%) Packer
14 21 (0.37%) vRealize
14 21 (0.37%) ZABBIX
15 19 (0.33%) Nagios
15 19 (0.33%) vCenter Server
16 18 (0.32%) HAProxy
17 16 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 744 (13.11%) Microsoft
2 585 (10.30%) Databricks
3 392 (6.91%) Google
4 239 (4.21%) Oracle
5 210 (3.70%) Splunk
6 178 (3.14%) VMware
7 159 (2.80%) OpenAI
8 148 (2.61%) Cisco
9 132 (2.33%) ServiceNow
10 101 (1.78%) Dynatrace
11 99 (1.74%) Red Hat
12 95 (1.67%) IBM
13 92 (1.62%) F5
13 92 (1.62%) Palo Alto
14 84 (1.48%) Foundry
15 75 (1.32%) Fortinet
15 75 (1.32%) Informatica
16 73 (1.29%) SAP
17 66 (1.16%) CyberArk
18 59 (1.04%) Salesforce