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 1 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 14
Rank change year-on-year -1 +3 -3
Contract jobs citing Python 5,567 4,038 4,119
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.83% 13.13% 9.54%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.23% 38.90% 31.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,655 2,743 2,949
10th Percentile £363 £368 £375
25th Percentile £425 £441 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £560
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -4.02% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £660 £700
90th Percentile £738 £800 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 122 63 123
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.87
25th Percentile £42.41 £33.91 £34.38
Median hourly rate £53.25 £45.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.33% -27.42% -4.62%
75th Percentile £69.50 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £63.10 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.00 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +4.00% -25.93% +11.20%

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 13,838 10,381 13,183
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.92% 33.75% 30.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,976 7,005 9,251
10th Percentile £358 £350 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 548 251 540
10th Percentile £34.09 £26.32 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.62 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.65 £80.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.84% -4.62% +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 1 July 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 1 July 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 1 July 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 4,650 £525 -4.55% 3,456
London -3 2,670 £550 -4.35% 1,852
UK excluding London -2 2,187 £500 - 2,119
Work from Home -2 1,569 £525 -4.55% 1,422
North of England +7 792 £488 +1.56% 451
Yorkshire +2 434 £500 - 132
South East -6 431 £525 +4.48% 659
Scotland +3 315 £440 -7.37% 111
North West +6 281 £500 +5.26% 241
South West -4 260 £500 -9.09% 290
Midlands -15 239 £476 +3.70% 237
West Midlands -15 191 £472 -0.63% 119
East of England -13 130 £500 -0.25% 243
North East +8 89 £438 +2.94% 81
East Midlands -9 47 £495 +10.31% 118
Wales -11 30 £483 +6.04% 114
Northern Ireland +11 28 £369 -37.23% 43

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
1 282 (5.07%) Apache Spark
2 257 (4.62%) Apache Airflow
3 194 (3.48%) Apache
4 170 (3.05%) Confluence
5 54 (0.97%) Jupyter
6 51 (0.92%) SAS
7 50 (0.90%) SharePoint
8 24 (0.43%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.38%) nginx
10 19 (0.34%) Palantir Foundry
11 17 (0.31%) ArcGIS
12 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.22%) IIS
14 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.13%) Appian
16 7 (0.13%) CICS
16 7 (0.13%) CMS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 117 (2.10%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.56%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 23 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 21 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
7 14 (0.25%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.018%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.40%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.38%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.20%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.054%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.036%) Endur
10 2 (0.036%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.036%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,073 (37.24%) AWS
2 1,858 (33.38%) Azure
3 823 (14.78%) GCP
4 660 (11.86%) GitHub
5 523 (9.39%) Power Platform
6 483 (8.68%) Serverless
7 408 (7.33%) Amazon S3
8 397 (7.13%) Azure DevOps
9 358 (6.43%) AWS Lambda
10 355 (6.38%) GitHub Actions
11 280 (5.03%) Snowflake
12 241 (4.33%) Azure Data Factory
13 205 (3.68%) dbt
14 179 (3.22%) AWS CloudFormation
15 166 (2.98%) Amazon EKS
16 165 (2.96%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 156 (2.80%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 156 (2.80%) OpenShift
18 131 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
19 123 (2.21%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 240 (4.31%) Firewall
2 165 (2.96%) DNS
3 120 (2.16%) Network Security
4 117 (2.10%) BGP
5 116 (2.08%) WAN
6 107 (1.92%) TCP/IP
7 99 (1.78%) VPN
8 74 (1.33%) OSPF
9 59 (1.06%) BIG-IP
10 57 (1.02%) SD-WAN
11 56 (1.01%) HTTP
12 55 (0.99%) SAN
13 50 (0.90%) VXLAN
14 49 (0.88%) VLAN
15 48 (0.86%) DHCP
15 48 (0.86%) SSL
16 43 (0.77%) LAN
17 41 (0.74%) MPLS
18 40 (0.72%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
19 39 (0.70%) Ethernet VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 462 (8.30%) Power BI
2 357 (6.41%) PostgreSQL
3 310 (5.57%) Data Warehouse
4 252 (4.53%) SQL Server
5 213 (3.83%) Data Lake
6 198 (3.56%) Tableau
7 194 (3.48%) Relational Database
8 167 (3.00%) NoSQL
9 165 (2.96%) Metadata
10 158 (2.84%) Big Data
11 141 (2.53%) BigQuery
12 140 (2.51%) Amazon Athena
13 139 (2.50%) Amazon Redshift
14 133 (2.39%) Delta Lake
15 126 (2.26%) MongoDB
16 103 (1.85%) DynamoDB
17 98 (1.76%) Amazon RDS
18 91 (1.63%) MySQL
19 75 (1.35%) Snowflake Schema
20 73 (1.31%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 676 (12.14%) Git
2 501 (9.00%) Jenkins
3 400 (7.19%) GitLab
4 309 (5.55%) JIRA
5 76 (1.37%) Selenium
6 75 (1.35%) MLflow
7 60 (1.08%) Postman
8 38 (0.68%) JMeter
9 36 (0.65%) Cypress.io
10 34 (0.61%) Bitbucket
11 33 (0.59%) SonarQube
12 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
13 29 (0.52%) Cucumber
13 29 (0.52%) REST Assured
14 28 (0.50%) Maven
14 28 (0.50%) Sonatype Nexus
15 27 (0.49%) JUnit
16 23 (0.41%) Claude Code
16 23 (0.41%) Gatling
17 19 (0.34%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,204 (21.63%) Social Skills
2 1,161 (20.86%) Finance
3 745 (13.38%) Analytical Skills
4 526 (9.45%) Public Sector
5 419 (7.53%) Banking
6 199 (3.57%) Front Office
7 137 (2.46%) Documentation Skills
8 129 (2.32%) Investment Banking
9 108 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 86 (1.54%) Retail
11 80 (1.44%) Marketing
12 61 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
13 59 (1.06%) Telecoms
14 58 (1.04%) Legal
15 49 (0.88%) Financial Institution
16 46 (0.83%) Influencing Skills
16 46 (0.83%) Publishing
17 40 (0.72%) Military
18 35 (0.63%) Manufacturing
19 33 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 993 (17.84%) Developer
2 864 (15.52%) Data Engineer
3 838 (15.05%) Senior
4 528 (9.48%) Python Developer
5 388 (6.97%) Lead
6 372 (6.68%) Python Engineer
7 319 (5.73%) Architect
8 308 (5.53%) DevOps Engineer
9 292 (5.25%) Software Engineer
10 279 (5.01%) Analyst
11 250 (4.49%) AWS Engineer
12 244 (4.38%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 218 (3.92%) Data Scientist
14 172 (3.09%) Platform Engineer
15 171 (3.07%) Azure Engineer
16 170 (3.05%) Senior Data Engineer
17 169 (3.04%) Senior Developer
18 161 (2.89%) Cloud Engineer
19 145 (2.60%) Full-Stack Developer
20 139 (2.50%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 411 (7.38%) REST
2 379 (6.81%) PySpark
3 372 (6.68%) React
4 341 (6.13%) Kafka
5 249 (4.47%) .NET
6 212 (3.81%) Node.js
7 210 (3.77%) FastAPI
7 210 (3.77%) RESTful
8 199 (3.57%) Pandas
9 188 (3.38%) JSON
10 170 (3.05%) Django
11 163 (2.93%) PyTorch
12 133 (2.39%) LangChain
13 125 (2.25%) Flask
14 123 (2.21%) NumPy
15 114 (2.05%) scikit-learn
16 111 (1.99%) TensorFlow
17 110 (1.98%) OAuth
18 102 (1.83%) pytest
19 99 (1.78%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 722 (12.97%) Cloud Native
2 291 (5.23%) Distributed Systems
3 164 (2.95%) Onboarding
4 159 (2.86%) AI Agents
5 152 (2.73%) Data Centre
6 149 (2.68%) Algorithms
7 145 (2.60%) Product Ownership
8 129 (2.32%) Data Structures
9 122 (2.19%) Legacy Systems
10 115 (2.07%) Data Protection Act
10 115 (2.07%) Management Information System
11 108 (1.94%) Derivative
12 106 (1.90%) Hybrid Cloud
13 100 (1.80%) Fixed Income
14 96 (1.72%) Equities
15 83 (1.49%) Security Posture
16 75 (1.35%) Public Cloud
17 64 (1.15%) Enterprise Software
18 59 (1.06%) Self-Motivation
19 58 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 652 (11.71%) Linux
2 308 (5.53%) Windows
3 223 (4.01%) Unix
4 122 (2.19%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 77 (1.38%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 31 (0.56%) VMS
8 26 (0.47%) AIX
9 23 (0.41%) Android
10 20 (0.36%) Solaris
11 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
11 17 (0.31%) CentOS
12 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.22%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.13%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 5 (0.090%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.090%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.090%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,105 (37.81%) CI/CD
2 1,536 (27.59%) DevOps
3 1,366 (24.54%) AI
4 1,231 (22.11%) Agile
5 1,115 (20.03%) Analytics
6 1,015 (18.23%) Infrastructure as Code
7 990 (17.78%) Data Pipeline
8 922 (16.56%) Problem-Solving
9 872 (15.66%) Machine Learning
10 793 (14.24%) Data Engineering
11 750 (13.47%) Containerisation
12 746 (13.40%) Software Engineering
13 734 (13.18%) Data Modelling
14 696 (12.50%) ETL
15 621 (11.16%) Data Science
16 612 (10.99%) Observability
17 568 (10.20%) Test Automation
18 544 (9.77%) Business Intelligence
19 523 (9.39%) LLM
20 468 (8.41%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,802 (32.37%) SQL
2 784 (14.08%) Java
3 648 (11.64%) PowerShell
4 644 (11.57%) Bash
5 464 (8.33%) JavaScript
6 394 (7.08%) TypeScript
7 336 (6.04%) C#
8 211 (3.79%) Go
9 160 (2.87%) R
10 141 (2.53%) C++
11 128 (2.30%) Scala
12 112 (2.01%) Shell Script
13 89 (1.60%) Bicep
14 73 (1.31%) Perl
15 61 (1.10%) Ruby
16 56 (1.01%) PL/SQL
17 55 (0.99%) Groovy
18 52 (0.93%) C
18 52 (0.93%) T-SQL
19 51 (0.92%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,239 (22.26%) Security Cleared
2 997 (17.91%) SC Cleared
3 416 (7.47%) Degree
4 169 (3.04%) DV Cleared
5 154 (2.77%) Computer Science Degree
6 131 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
7 119 (2.14%) AWS Certification
8 113 (2.03%) Azure Certification
9 97 (1.74%) CISSP
10 84 (1.51%) Cisco Certification
11 72 (1.29%) Master's Degree
12 56 (1.01%) CCNP
13 52 (0.93%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 39 (0.70%) CISM
15 34 (0.61%) PhD
16 33 (0.59%) Microsoft Certification
17 32 (0.57%) ISTQB
18 31 (0.56%) CCIE
19 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
20 21 (0.38%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 544 (9.77%) Data Quality
2 233 (4.19%) QA
3 130 (2.34%) GDPR
4 113 (2.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 112 (2.01%) NIST
6 84 (1.51%) Accessibility
7 32 (0.57%) SLA
8 25 (0.45%) PCI DSS
9 24 (0.43%) HIPAA
9 24 (0.43%) WCAG
10 23 (0.41%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 18 (0.32%) Actionable Recommendations
11 18 (0.32%) NCSC
12 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
13 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
14 10 (0.18%) GRC
14 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 857 (15.39%) Docker
2 124 (2.23%) Active Directory
3 108 (1.94%) VMware Infrastructure
4 77 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.70%) vSphere
6 38 (0.68%) VMware NSX
7 30 (0.54%) Firmware
8 29 (0.52%) Hyper-V
9 22 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) NFS
11 15 (0.27%) KVM
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.22%) Squid
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) Ceph
16 8 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.13%) HDFS
17 7 (0.13%) Postfix
18 5 (0.090%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
19 4 (0.072%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 1,190 (21.38%) Terraform
2 1,020 (18.32%) Kubernetes
3 580 (10.42%) Ansible
4 333 (5.98%) Grafana
5 275 (4.94%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.33%) Puppet
7 56 (1.01%) Argo
8 45 (0.81%) Istio
9 43 (0.77%) vRealize
10 41 (0.74%) Progress Chef
11 34 (0.61%) vCenter Server
12 32 (0.57%) Kibana
13 27 (0.49%) Control-M
14 26 (0.47%) Nessus
14 26 (0.47%) ZABBIX
15 25 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
15 25 (0.45%) Nagios
16 23 (0.41%) Single Sign-On
17 21 (0.38%) HAProxy
18 20 (0.36%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 630 (11.32%) Microsoft
2 576 (10.35%) Databricks
3 315 (5.66%) Google
4 246 (4.42%) Oracle
5 213 (3.83%) Splunk
6 166 (2.98%) VMware
7 147 (2.64%) OpenAI
8 136 (2.44%) Cisco
9 113 (2.03%) Red Hat
10 110 (1.98%) ServiceNow
11 90 (1.62%) F5
12 88 (1.58%) Palo Alto
13 85 (1.53%) Dynatrace
14 83 (1.49%) Informatica
15 78 (1.40%) IBM
16 65 (1.17%) CyberArk
17 62 (1.11%) Fortinet
18 58 (1.04%) Foundry
19 54 (0.97%) Arista
20 51 (0.92%) BeyondTrust