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 11 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,421 3,860 4,087
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.87% 13.14% 9.37%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.44% 38.55% 31.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,579 2,670 2,932
10th Percentile £363 £375 £377
25th Percentile £425 £443 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £537 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.23% -2.36% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £659 £688
90th Percentile £749 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £500 £509
% change year-on-year -1.00% -1.67% -5.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 55 115
10th Percentile £30.00 £25.25 £20.96
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £40.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +31.25% -35.48% -4.15%
75th Percentile £67.84 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £61.45 £76.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £47.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +7.81% -26.92% +10.64%

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 13,405 10,013 13,127
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.87% 34.09% 30.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,743 6,790 9,257
10th Percentile £358 £355 £350
25th Percentile £416 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £601 £625 £650
90th Percentile £716 £752 £764
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +2.63% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 554 234 531
10th Percentile £36.25 £26.52 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.05 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +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 11 June 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 11 June 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 11 June 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 -1 4,517 £525 -4.55% 2,250
London -3 2,602 £550 -4.35% 1,052
UK excluding London -1 2,107 £495 -1.00% 1,581
Work from Home -2 1,543 £525 -4.55% 1,015
North of England +11 763 £481 -1.03% 400
Yorkshire +2 428 £490 -2.00% 120
South East -4 406 £525 +4.48% 549
Scotland +2 313 £440 -7.37% 73
North West +4 261 £486 +2.24% 214
South West -1 258 £500 -11.11% 182
Midlands -16 229 £477 +6.00% 165
West Midlands -10 180 £476 +0.21% 88
East of England -9 124 £500 - 174
North East +11 86 £475 +8.57% 67
East Midlands -22 48 £495 +16.47% 76
Wales -6 27 £463 -7.50% 38
Northern Ireland +14 26 £408 -30.64% 29

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 (5.20%) Apache Spark
2 240 (4.43%) Apache Airflow
3 184 (3.39%) Apache
4 155 (2.86%) Confluence
5 51 (0.94%) Jupyter
6 47 (0.87%) SAS
7 45 (0.83%) SharePoint
8 22 (0.41%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.37%) nginx
10 17 (0.31%) ArcGIS
10 17 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
11 15 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
12 14 (0.26%) IIS
13 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
14 9 (0.17%) Appian
15 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.13%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) CMS
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 115 (2.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
3 22 (0.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 22 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
4 19 (0.35%) MS Visio
5 11 (0.20%) CPLEX
6 3 (0.055%) LaTeX
6 3 (0.055%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
7 1 (0.018%) SPSS
7 1 (0.018%) Weka
7 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.41%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
4 8 (0.15%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
7 5 (0.092%) BambooHR
8 4 (0.074%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.055%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.055%) NetSuite
9 3 (0.055%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.055%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.037%) Dynamics CRM
10 2 (0.037%) Endur
10 2 (0.037%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.037%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.037%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.037%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.037%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,029 (37.43%) AWS
2 1,792 (33.06%) Azure
3 787 (14.52%) GCP
4 653 (12.05%) GitHub
5 514 (9.48%) Power Platform
6 479 (8.84%) Serverless
7 394 (7.27%) Amazon S3
8 390 (7.19%) Azure DevOps
9 356 (6.57%) GitHub Actions
10 349 (6.44%) AWS Lambda
11 259 (4.78%) Snowflake
12 253 (4.67%) Azure Data Factory
13 186 (3.43%) dbt
14 173 (3.19%) AWS CloudFormation
15 162 (2.99%) Amazon EKS
16 160 (2.95%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 157 (2.90%) OpenShift
18 155 (2.86%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 122 (2.25%) Amazon EC2
20 120 (2.21%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 209 (3.86%) Firewall
2 148 (2.73%) DNS
3 102 (1.88%) Network Security
4 99 (1.83%) WAN
5 97 (1.79%) BGP
6 90 (1.66%) TCP/IP
7 79 (1.46%) VPN
8 64 (1.18%) OSPF
9 58 (1.07%) HTTP
10 57 (1.05%) SAN
11 56 (1.03%) BIG-IP
12 49 (0.90%) SD-WAN
12 49 (0.90%) VXLAN
13 46 (0.85%) SSL
14 44 (0.81%) VLAN
15 38 (0.70%) Ethernet VPN
16 36 (0.66%) DHCP
16 36 (0.66%) LAN
16 36 (0.66%) SNMP
17 35 (0.65%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 449 (8.28%) Power BI
2 343 (6.33%) PostgreSQL
3 288 (5.31%) Data Warehouse
4 263 (4.85%) SQL Server
5 232 (4.28%) Data Lake
6 192 (3.54%) Tableau
7 185 (3.41%) Relational Database
8 169 (3.12%) NoSQL
9 165 (3.04%) Big Data
10 164 (3.03%) Metadata
11 139 (2.56%) Amazon Athena
12 134 (2.47%) BigQuery
12 134 (2.47%) Delta Lake
13 123 (2.27%) Amazon Redshift
14 120 (2.21%) MongoDB
15 98 (1.81%) DynamoDB
16 91 (1.68%) Amazon RDS
17 88 (1.62%) MySQL
18 73 (1.35%) Hadoop
19 72 (1.33%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 648 (11.95%) Git
2 488 (9.00%) Jenkins
3 376 (6.94%) GitLab
4 286 (5.28%) JIRA
5 78 (1.44%) Selenium
6 75 (1.38%) MLflow
7 64 (1.18%) Postman
8 36 (0.66%) Cucumber
8 36 (0.66%) JMeter
9 33 (0.61%) Cypress.io
10 32 (0.59%) SonarQube
11 30 (0.55%) Bitbucket
11 30 (0.55%) REST Assured
12 29 (0.53%) Artifactory
13 25 (0.46%) JUnit
13 25 (0.46%) Sonatype Nexus
14 24 (0.44%) Maven
15 21 (0.39%) Robot Framework
16 20 (0.37%) Gatling
17 19 (0.35%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,186 (21.88%) Social Skills
2 1,097 (20.24%) Finance
3 731 (13.48%) Analytical Skills
4 508 (9.37%) Public Sector
5 393 (7.25%) Banking
6 194 (3.58%) Front Office
7 137 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
8 125 (2.31%) Investment Banking
9 97 (1.79%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 77 (1.42%) Marketing
11 66 (1.22%) Retail
12 60 (1.11%) Pharmaceutical
13 54 (1.00%) Legal
14 50 (0.92%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
16 43 (0.79%) Publishing
17 40 (0.74%) Financial Institution
18 37 (0.68%) Military
19 35 (0.65%) Manufacturing
20 29 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 989 (18.24%) Developer
2 841 (15.51%) Data Engineer
3 806 (14.87%) Senior
4 512 (9.44%) Python Developer
5 355 (6.55%) Lead
6 338 (6.24%) Python Engineer
7 328 (6.05%) Architect
8 295 (5.44%) DevOps Engineer
9 278 (5.13%) Analyst
10 267 (4.93%) Software Engineer
11 247 (4.56%) AWS Engineer
12 230 (4.24%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 210 (3.87%) Data Scientist
14 176 (3.25%) Senior Developer
15 165 (3.04%) Senior Data Engineer
16 156 (2.88%) Azure Engineer
16 156 (2.88%) Full-Stack Developer
17 155 (2.86%) Platform Engineer
18 146 (2.69%) Cloud Engineer
18 146 (2.69%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 423 (7.80%) REST
2 381 (7.03%) React
3 364 (6.71%) PySpark
4 326 (6.01%) Kafka
5 249 (4.59%) .NET
6 218 (4.02%) Node.js
7 209 (3.86%) Pandas
8 199 (3.67%) FastAPI
8 199 (3.67%) RESTful
9 177 (3.27%) JSON
10 165 (3.04%) PyTorch
11 144 (2.66%) Django
12 128 (2.36%) Flask
13 125 (2.31%) NumPy
14 119 (2.20%) LangChain
15 115 (2.12%) AngularJS
15 115 (2.12%) TensorFlow
16 111 (2.05%) scikit-learn
17 107 (1.97%) HTML
18 106 (1.96%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 657 (12.12%) Cloud Native
2 263 (4.85%) Distributed Systems
3 148 (2.73%) Algorithms
4 145 (2.67%) Data Centre
5 143 (2.64%) AI Agents
6 142 (2.62%) Onboarding
7 137 (2.53%) Product Ownership
8 124 (2.29%) Data Structures
9 118 (2.18%) Data Protection Act
10 114 (2.10%) Legacy Systems
11 112 (2.07%) Derivative
12 111 (2.05%) Management Information System
13 102 (1.88%) Equities
14 99 (1.83%) Fixed Income
15 95 (1.75%) Hybrid Cloud
16 93 (1.72%) Security Posture
17 87 (1.60%) Enterprise Software
18 70 (1.29%) Public Cloud
19 60 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
20 55 (1.01%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 619 (11.42%) Linux
2 302 (5.57%) Windows
3 221 (4.08%) Unix
4 114 (2.10%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 80 (1.48%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.74%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.55%) VMS
8 26 (0.48%) AIX
8 26 (0.48%) Solaris
9 23 (0.42%) Android
10 19 (0.35%) CentOS
11 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
12 16 (0.30%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.22%) zOS
14 8 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.13%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 5 (0.092%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.092%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.092%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,041 (37.65%) CI/CD
2 1,481 (27.32%) DevOps
3 1,309 (24.15%) AI
4 1,167 (21.53%) Agile
5 1,077 (19.87%) Analytics
6 963 (17.76%) Infrastructure as Code
7 955 (17.62%) Data Pipeline
8 937 (17.28%) Problem-Solving
9 844 (15.57%) Machine Learning
10 749 (13.82%) Data Engineering
11 725 (13.37%) Data Modelling
12 712 (13.13%) Containerisation
13 702 (12.95%) ETL
14 681 (12.56%) Software Engineering
15 603 (11.12%) Data Science
16 591 (10.90%) Observability
17 545 (10.05%) Test Automation
18 528 (9.74%) Business Intelligence
19 498 (9.19%) LLM
20 455 (8.39%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,789 (33.00%) SQL
2 784 (14.46%) Java
3 654 (12.06%) PowerShell
4 592 (10.92%) Bash
5 480 (8.85%) JavaScript
6 378 (6.97%) TypeScript
7 350 (6.46%) C#
8 198 (3.65%) Go
9 161 (2.97%) R
10 148 (2.73%) C++
11 127 (2.34%) Scala
12 107 (1.97%) Shell Script
13 80 (1.48%) Bicep
13 80 (1.48%) Perl
14 65 (1.20%) Ruby
15 62 (1.14%) PL/SQL
16 57 (1.05%) T-SQL
17 55 (1.01%) C
18 50 (0.92%) Groovy
19 48 (0.89%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,220 (22.51%) Security Cleared
2 986 (18.19%) SC Cleared
3 395 (7.29%) Degree
4 157 (2.90%) Computer Science Degree
5 155 (2.86%) DV Cleared
6 129 (2.38%) BPSS Clearance
7 110 (2.03%) Azure Certification
8 109 (2.01%) AWS Certification
9 87 (1.60%) CISSP
10 72 (1.33%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.31%) Master's Degree
12 55 (1.01%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.92%) CCNP
14 40 (0.74%) CISM
15 33 (0.61%) ISTQB
15 33 (0.61%) PhD
16 32 (0.59%) Microsoft Certification
17 30 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 23 (0.42%) CCIE
19 22 (0.41%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 541 (9.98%) Data Quality
2 237 (4.37%) QA
3 136 (2.51%) GDPR
4 109 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 108 (1.99%) NIST
6 81 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.65%) SLA
8 26 (0.48%) PCI DSS
8 26 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 24 (0.44%) HIPAA
10 22 (0.41%) WCAG
11 19 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
12 16 (0.30%) NCSC
13 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
14 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
16 9 (0.17%) GRC
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 813 (15.00%) Docker
2 150 (2.77%) Active Directory
3 106 (1.96%) VMware Infrastructure
4 72 (1.33%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.74%) vSphere
6 39 (0.72%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.61%) Firmware
8 31 (0.57%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.33%) NFS
11 17 (0.31%) KVM
12 13 (0.24%) Squid
13 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
14 10 (0.18%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.17%) HDFS
16 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.13%) Postfix
18 4 (0.074%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
18 4 (0.074%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,126 (20.77%) Terraform
2 958 (17.67%) Kubernetes
3 546 (10.07%) Ansible
4 328 (6.05%) Grafana
5 273 (5.04%) Prometheus
6 73 (1.35%) Puppet
7 60 (1.11%) Argo
8 52 (0.96%) Istio
9 47 (0.87%) vRealize
10 38 (0.70%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.59%) vCenter Server
12 31 (0.57%) Kibana
13 28 (0.52%) Single Sign-On
14 26 (0.48%) Control-M
15 25 (0.46%) Nessus
16 24 (0.44%) Nagios
16 24 (0.44%) ZABBIX
17 23 (0.42%) NetBackup
18 22 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
19 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 583 (10.75%) Microsoft
2 571 (10.53%) Databricks
3 284 (5.24%) Google
4 251 (4.63%) Oracle
5 213 (3.93%) Splunk
6 174 (3.21%) VMware
7 133 (2.45%) OpenAI
8 127 (2.34%) Red Hat
9 120 (2.21%) Cisco
10 99 (1.83%) ServiceNow
11 86 (1.59%) CyberArk
12 83 (1.53%) F5
13 80 (1.48%) Dynatrace
14 78 (1.44%) BeyondTrust
14 78 (1.44%) Palo Alto
15 74 (1.37%) IBM
16 71 (1.31%) Informatica
17 55 (1.01%) Foundry
18 50 (0.92%) Arista
18 50 (0.92%) SAP