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 4 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 +2 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,619 4,424 4,169
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.28% 13.33% 10.97%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.47% 40.52% 34.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,659 2,863 2,847
10th Percentile £375 £358 £363
25th Percentile £445 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £643 £700
90th Percentile £750 £758 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 128 89 97
10th Percentile £35.78 £28.25 £20.80
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.00 £40.06
Median hourly rate £62.45 £50.00 £67.02
Median % change year-on-year +24.90% -25.40% +3.11%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.63 £78.00 £80.00
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 14,235 10,917 12,212
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.05% 32.89% 32.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,241 7,185 8,076
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £506 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.86% -3.71% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £645
90th Percentile £725 £735 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 545 302 333
10th Percentile £23.95 £29.00 £26.40
25th Percentile £46.25 £41.25 £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 £67.19 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £75.00 £78.50
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 4 October 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 4 October 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 4 October 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 -4 4,778 £550 +4.76% 11,550
London -4 2,838 £575 - 6,995
UK excluding London -9 2,143 £500 - 6,286
Work from Home -6 1,548 £535 -2.73% 5,426
North of England 0 745 £500 +5.26% 1,253
South East -5 452 £543 +8.50% 1,290
Yorkshire -2 376 £500 - 394
Scotland -2 308 £467 -6.60% 1,012
North West 0 290 £525 +18.64% 646
South West -2 268 £550 - 694
Midlands -23 221 £500 - 611
West Midlands -22 184 £525 +5.00% 359
East of England -16 143 £484 -12.05% 736
North East -1 88 £425 -8.11% 227
East Midlands -13 37 £456 +11.28% 252
Wales -10 28 £530 +23.98% 390
Northern Ireland 0 17 £369 -37.23% 357

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
1 292 (5.20%) Apache Airflow
2 275 (4.89%) Apache Spark
3 231 (4.11%) Apache
4 156 (2.78%) Confluence
5 58 (1.03%) Jupyter
6 55 (0.98%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.59%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 27 (0.48%) nginx
10 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) IIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 9 (0.16%) CMS
12 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
14 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.089%) Camunda
14 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 99 (1.76%) Microsoft Excel
2 37 (0.66%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
4 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.036%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.036%) Revit
7 2 (0.036%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
2 17 (0.30%) Aladdin
2 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.20%) Dynamics CRM
4 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
5 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
6 6 (0.11%) Front Arena
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Summit
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) SAP IBP
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Actimize
9 3 (0.053%) Cloudability
9 3 (0.053%) Endur
9 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 2,052 (36.52%) AWS
2 1,921 (34.19%) Azure
3 911 (16.21%) GCP
4 752 (13.38%) GitHub
5 482 (8.58%) Power Platform
6 476 (8.47%) Serverless
7 442 (7.87%) Azure DevOps
8 439 (7.81%) GitHub Actions
9 395 (7.03%) Amazon S3
10 347 (6.18%) AWS Lambda
11 344 (6.12%) Snowflake
12 247 (4.40%) dbt
13 213 (3.79%) Azure Data Factory
14 205 (3.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 196 (3.49%) Amazon EKS
16 185 (3.29%) AWS CloudFormation
17 179 (3.19%) Entra ID
18 147 (2.62%) Amazon EC2
19 130 (2.31%) SaaS
20 127 (2.26%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 287 (5.11%) Firewall
2 207 (3.68%) DNS
3 169 (3.01%) Network Security
4 150 (2.67%) TCP/IP
5 128 (2.28%) VPN
6 125 (2.22%) BGP
7 113 (2.01%) WAN
8 82 (1.46%) DHCP
9 75 (1.33%) SD-WAN
10 74 (1.32%) OSPF
11 62 (1.10%) BIG-IP
12 59 (1.05%) SSL
13 55 (0.98%) VLAN
13 55 (0.98%) VXLAN
14 54 (0.96%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 50 (0.89%) HTTP
16 47 (0.84%) Ethernet VPN
17 42 (0.75%) Broadband
18 41 (0.73%) Wireless
19 40 (0.71%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 431 (7.67%) Power BI
2 330 (5.87%) Data Warehouse
3 318 (5.66%) PostgreSQL
4 230 (4.09%) Metadata
5 204 (3.63%) Relational Database
6 198 (3.52%) SQL Server
7 197 (3.51%) Data Lake
8 186 (3.31%) BigQuery
9 166 (2.95%) Tableau
10 155 (2.76%) NoSQL
11 136 (2.42%) Big Data
12 135 (2.40%) Amazon Redshift
13 132 (2.35%) Amazon RDS
14 122 (2.17%) MongoDB
15 121 (2.15%) Amazon Athena
15 121 (2.15%) Delta Lake
16 105 (1.87%) DynamoDB
17 101 (1.80%) MySQL
18 75 (1.33%) Redis
19 61 (1.09%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 832 (14.81%) Git
2 520 (9.25%) Jenkins
3 496 (8.83%) GitLab
4 311 (5.53%) JIRA
5 120 (2.14%) Selenium
6 73 (1.30%) Postman
7 61 (1.09%) JMeter
8 59 (1.05%) Claude Code
9 55 (0.98%) SonarQube
10 49 (0.87%) MLflow
11 46 (0.82%) Bitbucket
12 41 (0.73%) Cucumber
13 39 (0.69%) REST Assured
14 37 (0.66%) Sonatype Nexus
15 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
16 34 (0.61%) Maven
17 32 (0.57%) Cypress.io
18 31 (0.55%) LoadRunner
19 28 (0.50%) Gatling
20 24 (0.43%) Zephyr
General
1 1,322 (23.53%) Social Skills
2 1,301 (23.15%) Finance
3 835 (14.86%) Analytical Skills
4 544 (9.68%) Public Sector
5 524 (9.33%) Banking
6 172 (3.06%) Front Office
7 153 (2.72%) Investment Banking
8 115 (2.05%) Retail
9 112 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 101 (1.80%) Documentation Skills
11 86 (1.53%) Marketing
11 86 (1.53%) Telecoms
12 64 (1.14%) Military
13 54 (0.96%) Law
14 51 (0.91%) Aerospace
15 50 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
16 48 (0.85%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.84%) Legal
18 41 (0.73%) Publishing
19 38 (0.68%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,013 (18.03%) Senior
2 893 (15.89%) Developer
3 831 (14.79%) Data Engineer
4 495 (8.81%) Lead
5 472 (8.40%) Python Developer
6 418 (7.44%) Python Engineer
7 368 (6.55%) DevOps Engineer
8 312 (5.55%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 279 (4.97%) Software Engineer
10 278 (4.95%) Analyst
11 234 (4.16%) Architect
12 219 (3.90%) AWS Engineer
13 193 (3.43%) Cloud Engineer
14 191 (3.40%) Azure Engineer
14 191 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
14 191 (3.40%) Senior Data Engineer
15 189 (3.36%) Senior Developer
16 181 (3.22%) Data Scientist
17 149 (2.65%) Network Engineer
18 140 (2.49%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,406 (25.02%) Terraform
2 549 (9.77%) REST
3 376 (6.69%) Kafka
4 364 (6.48%) PySpark
5 304 (5.41%) React
6 237 (4.22%) .NET
7 219 (3.90%) FastAPI
8 211 (3.76%) Django
9 210 (3.74%) JSON
10 193 (3.43%) RESTful
11 160 (2.85%) pytest
12 158 (2.81%) LangChain
13 148 (2.63%) Node.js
14 147 (2.62%) Pandas
15 130 (2.31%) OAuth
16 119 (2.12%) Flask
17 113 (2.01%) YAML
18 110 (1.96%) LangGraph
19 107 (1.90%) PyTorch
20 104 (1.85%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 809 (14.40%) Cloud Native
2 299 (5.32%) AI Agents
3 292 (5.20%) Distributed Systems
4 262 (4.66%) Onboarding
5 161 (2.87%) Data Centre
6 150 (2.67%) Data Structures
6 150 (2.67%) Product Ownership
7 137 (2.44%) Legacy Systems
8 123 (2.19%) Algorithms
9 112 (1.99%) Enterprise Software
10 111 (1.98%) Hybrid Cloud
11 107 (1.90%) Management Information System
12 104 (1.85%) Data Protection Act
13 101 (1.80%) Derivative
14 93 (1.66%) Security Posture
15 85 (1.51%) Public Cloud
16 83 (1.48%) PKI
17 80 (1.42%) Equities
18 67 (1.19%) Linux Command Line
19 66 (1.17%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 780 (13.88%) Linux
2 345 (6.14%) Windows
3 246 (4.38%) Unix
4 156 (2.78%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 93 (1.66%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.62%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 14 (0.25%) Android
11 13 (0.23%) AIX
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) zOS
15 6 (0.11%) FreeRTOS
16 5 (0.089%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.089%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,400 (42.71%) CI/CD
2 1,654 (29.44%) DevOps
3 1,598 (28.44%) AI
4 1,314 (23.38%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,271 (22.62%) Agile
6 1,092 (19.43%) Analytics
7 982 (17.48%) Data Pipeline
8 957 (17.03%) Software Engineering
9 878 (15.63%) Problem-Solving
10 853 (15.18%) Data Engineering
11 840 (14.95%) Machine Learning
12 774 (13.77%) Containerisation
13 769 (13.69%) Observability
14 767 (13.65%) Data Modelling
15 706 (12.56%) Test Automation
16 678 (12.07%) Validation
17 665 (11.83%) ETL
18 663 (11.80%) Continuous Improvement
19 600 (10.68%) Platform Engineering
20 586 (10.43%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,836 (32.67%) SQL
2 786 (13.99%) Bash
2 786 (13.99%) Java
3 755 (13.44%) PowerShell
4 439 (7.81%) JavaScript
5 347 (6.18%) TypeScript
6 306 (5.45%) C#
7 228 (4.06%) Go
8 154 (2.74%) Shell Script
9 136 (2.42%) R
10 135 (2.40%) Bicep
11 131 (2.33%) C++
12 123 (2.19%) Scala
13 106 (1.89%) Perl
14 62 (1.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 56 (1.00%) Groovy
16 52 (0.93%) C
17 50 (0.89%) Rust
17 50 (0.89%) T-SQL
18 47 (0.84%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,375 (24.47%) Security Cleared
2 1,104 (19.65%) SC Cleared
3 402 (7.15%) Degree
4 253 (4.50%) DV Cleared
5 153 (2.72%) Azure Certification
6 151 (2.69%) AWS Certification
7 146 (2.60%) Computer Science Degree
8 131 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.73%) CISSP
10 78 (1.39%) Cisco Certification
11 70 (1.25%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
13 37 (0.66%) CCNP
14 34 (0.61%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) CCIE
16 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 30 (0.53%) CISM
16 30 (0.53%) DBS Check
17 29 (0.52%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 651 (11.59%) Data Quality
2 326 (5.80%) QA
3 116 (2.06%) NIST
4 102 (1.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 87 (1.55%) GDPR
6 82 (1.46%) Accessibility
7 42 (0.75%) SLA
8 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 30 (0.53%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 24 (0.43%) SOC 2
12 22 (0.39%) WCAG
13 18 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
14 15 (0.27%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.12%) Basel III
17 7 (0.12%) GRC
17 7 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 979 (17.42%) Docker
2 185 (3.29%) Active Directory
3 133 (2.37%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.23%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.89%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.62%) vSphere
7 31 (0.55%) VMware NSX
8 27 (0.48%) NFS
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) Firmware
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 8 (0.14%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 8 (0.14%) zsh
15 7 (0.12%) HDFS
16 6 (0.11%) Postfix
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,198 (21.32%) Kubernetes
2 650 (11.57%) Ansible
3 339 (6.03%) Grafana
4 252 (4.48%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.46%) Puppet
6 73 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 69 (1.23%) Argo
8 48 (0.85%) Single Sign-On
9 38 (0.68%) Kibana
10 35 (0.62%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) Packer
14 21 (0.37%) FortiGate
15 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
16 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) Podman
16 16 (0.28%) QRadar
17 15 (0.27%) ZABBIX
18 14 (0.25%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 756 (13.45%) Microsoft
2 584 (10.39%) Databricks
3 409 (7.28%) Google
4 243 (4.32%) Oracle
5 207 (3.68%) Splunk
6 171 (3.04%) OpenAI
7 170 (3.03%) VMware
8 141 (2.51%) Cisco
9 134 (2.38%) ServiceNow
10 100 (1.78%) Dynatrace
11 96 (1.71%) Red Hat
12 92 (1.64%) IBM
13 90 (1.60%) Palo Alto
14 89 (1.58%) F5
15 85 (1.51%) Foundry
16 71 (1.26%) CyberArk
17 70 (1.25%) Fortinet
18 69 (1.23%) Informatica
19 66 (1.17%) SAP
20 54 (0.96%) Salesforce