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

6 months to
21 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,652 4,208 3,994
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.72% 12.91% 9.66%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.12% 39.01% 31.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,683 2,826 2,914
10th Percentile £366 £363 £375
25th Percentile £425 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £537 £564
Median % change year-on-year -2.23% -4.75% -6.04%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £700
90th Percentile £750 £798 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £492 £507
% change year-on-year +1.54% -2.78% -3.52%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 67 120
10th Percentile £28.50 £27.44 £21.18
25th Percentile £43.16 £34.33 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -16.67% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.00 £57.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +12.50%

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 14,088 10,788 12,726
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.72% 33.10% 30.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,132 7,246 8,989
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £421 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £494
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.89% -1.15%
Number of hourly rates quoted 525 260 462
10th Percentile £34.01 £28.16 £30.69
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% +3.09%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.96% -1.92% +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 21 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 21 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 21 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 -4 4,726 £534 -2.89% 2,878
London -4 2,710 £563 -2.17% 1,611
UK excluding London -3 2,240 £500 +1.54% 1,642
Work from Home -5 1,582 £525 -4.55% 1,101
North of England +4 779 £488 +1.56% 413
South East -10 437 £538 +7.50% 497
Yorkshire +2 414 £500 +2.04% 122
Scotland +4 326 £439 -7.63% 101
North West +5 290 £525 +10.53% 220
South West -1 285 £500 -9.09% 205
Midlands -11 259 £473 +5.00% 195
West Midlands -13 208 £469 +4.22% 100
East of England -14 133 £500 -0.50% 172
North East +2 88 £425 -2.86% 75
East Midlands -9 50 £481 +7.19% 94
Wales -9 31 £500 +17.65% 40
Northern Ireland +13 26 £363 -36.26% 47

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
1 284 (5.02%) Apache Spark
2 272 (4.81%) Apache Airflow
3 210 (3.72%) Apache
4 179 (3.17%) Confluence
5 52 (0.92%) Jupyter
5 52 (0.92%) SAS
6 47 (0.83%) SharePoint
7 26 (0.46%) OpenStack
8 24 (0.42%) nginx
9 20 (0.35%) ArcGIS
10 18 (0.32%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
12 12 (0.21%) IIS
13 11 (0.19%) Tomcat
14 9 (0.16%) CMS
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.088%) JBoss
Applications
1 120 (2.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
6 18 (0.32%) MS Visio
7 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
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 24 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.088%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.088%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.035%) Bloomberg AIM
10 2 (0.035%) Distributed Ledger
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.035%) R3 Corda
10 2 (0.035%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,112 (37.37%) AWS
2 1,884 (33.33%) Azure
3 841 (14.88%) GCP
4 686 (12.14%) GitHub
5 520 (9.20%) Power Platform
6 477 (8.44%) Serverless
7 423 (7.48%) Amazon S3
8 395 (6.99%) Azure DevOps
9 379 (6.71%) GitHub Actions
10 362 (6.40%) AWS Lambda
11 298 (5.27%) Snowflake
12 234 (4.14%) Azure Data Factory
13 219 (3.87%) dbt
14 197 (3.49%) AWS CloudFormation
15 181 (3.20%) Amazon EKS
16 178 (3.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 158 (2.80%) OpenShift
18 149 (2.64%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 133 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
20 129 (2.28%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 260 (4.60%) Firewall
2 190 (3.36%) DNS
3 130 (2.30%) TCP/IP
4 126 (2.23%) BGP
5 118 (2.09%) Network Security
6 113 (2.00%) WAN
7 111 (1.96%) VPN
8 81 (1.43%) OSPF
9 63 (1.11%) DHCP
10 61 (1.08%) VLAN
11 58 (1.03%) SAN
12 57 (1.01%) HTTP
13 55 (0.97%) BIG-IP
14 53 (0.94%) SD-WAN
15 52 (0.92%) VXLAN
16 48 (0.85%) SSL
17 44 (0.78%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 43 (0.76%) SNMP
19 41 (0.73%) LAN
20 40 (0.71%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 461 (8.16%) Power BI
2 354 (6.26%) PostgreSQL
3 321 (5.68%) Data Warehouse
4 233 (4.12%) SQL Server
5 204 (3.61%) Tableau
6 203 (3.59%) Data Lake
7 190 (3.36%) Relational Database
8 184 (3.26%) Metadata
9 163 (2.88%) Big Data
9 163 (2.88%) NoSQL
10 150 (2.65%) BigQuery
11 137 (2.42%) Amazon Athena
11 137 (2.42%) Amazon Redshift
12 127 (2.25%) MongoDB
13 119 (2.11%) Delta Lake
14 110 (1.95%) DynamoDB
15 107 (1.89%) Amazon RDS
16 84 (1.49%) MySQL
17 74 (1.31%) Snowflake Schema
18 72 (1.27%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 691 (12.23%) Git
2 503 (8.90%) Jenkins
3 399 (7.06%) GitLab
4 310 (5.48%) JIRA
5 82 (1.45%) Selenium
6 69 (1.22%) MLflow
7 50 (0.88%) Postman
8 42 (0.74%) Bitbucket
9 39 (0.69%) JMeter
10 36 (0.64%) SonarQube
11 34 (0.60%) Cucumber
11 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
12 33 (0.58%) REST Assured
13 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
14 28 (0.50%) Claude Code
14 28 (0.50%) JUnit
15 27 (0.48%) Sonatype Nexus
16 26 (0.46%) Maven
17 24 (0.42%) Gatling
18 18 (0.32%) Zephyr
General
1 1,211 (21.43%) Social Skills
2 1,186 (20.98%) Finance
3 773 (13.68%) Analytical Skills
4 550 (9.73%) Public Sector
5 426 (7.54%) Banking
6 203 (3.59%) Front Office
7 129 (2.28%) Documentation Skills
8 126 (2.23%) Investment Banking
9 109 (1.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 97 (1.72%) Retail
11 84 (1.49%) Marketing
12 66 (1.17%) Telecoms
13 64 (1.13%) Pharmaceutical
14 60 (1.06%) Legal
15 50 (0.88%) Military
16 48 (0.85%) Financial Institution
16 48 (0.85%) Publishing
17 45 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
18 36 (0.64%) Manufacturing
19 30 (0.53%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 982 (17.37%) Developer
2 890 (15.75%) Senior
3 844 (14.93%) Data Engineer
4 524 (9.27%) Python Developer
5 429 (7.59%) Lead
6 395 (6.99%) Python Engineer
7 332 (5.87%) DevOps Engineer
8 308 (5.45%) Software Engineer
9 304 (5.38%) Architect
10 286 (5.06%) Analyst
11 253 (4.48%) AWS Engineer
12 249 (4.41%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 218 (3.86%) Data Scientist
14 189 (3.34%) Platform Engineer
15 180 (3.18%) Cloud Engineer
16 178 (3.15%) Senior Developer
17 171 (3.03%) Azure Engineer
18 170 (3.01%) Senior Data Engineer
19 147 (2.60%) Data Analyst
20 136 (2.41%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 404 (7.15%) REST
2 363 (6.42%) React
3 359 (6.35%) PySpark
4 352 (6.23%) Kafka
5 233 (4.12%) .NET
6 217 (3.84%) FastAPI
7 216 (3.82%) Node.js
8 203 (3.59%) RESTful
9 202 (3.57%) JSON
10 194 (3.43%) Pandas
11 175 (3.10%) Django
12 154 (2.72%) PyTorch
13 138 (2.44%) LangChain
14 120 (2.12%) NumPy
15 117 (2.07%) Flask
16 108 (1.91%) scikit-learn
17 103 (1.82%) TensorFlow
18 101 (1.79%) OAuth
19 98 (1.73%) Spring
20 97 (1.72%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 746 (13.20%) Cloud Native
2 308 (5.45%) Distributed Systems
3 193 (3.41%) Onboarding
4 189 (3.34%) AI Agents
5 163 (2.88%) Data Centre
6 150 (2.65%) Algorithms
7 147 (2.60%) Product Ownership
8 128 (2.26%) Data Structures
9 127 (2.25%) Legacy Systems
10 120 (2.12%) Data Protection Act
11 113 (2.00%) Hybrid Cloud
12 112 (1.98%) Derivative
13 106 (1.88%) Management Information System
14 105 (1.86%) Fixed Income
15 94 (1.66%) Equities
16 84 (1.49%) Security Posture
17 68 (1.20%) Public Cloud
18 65 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
19 64 (1.13%) Linux Command Line
20 59 (1.04%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 691 (12.23%) Linux
2 321 (5.68%) Windows
3 219 (3.87%) Unix
4 135 (2.39%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 74 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.57%) VMS
8 29 (0.51%) AIX
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 18 (0.32%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 8 (0.14%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Debian
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,146 (37.97%) CI/CD
2 1,554 (27.49%) DevOps
3 1,389 (24.58%) AI
4 1,279 (22.63%) Agile
5 1,133 (20.05%) Analytics
6 1,074 (19.00%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,013 (17.92%) Data Pipeline
8 906 (16.03%) Problem-Solving
9 895 (15.84%) Machine Learning
10 815 (14.42%) Software Engineering
11 810 (14.33%) Data Engineering
12 767 (13.57%) Containerisation
13 749 (13.25%) Data Modelling
14 687 (12.15%) ETL
15 657 (11.62%) Observability
16 633 (11.20%) Data Science
17 575 (10.17%) Test Automation
18 543 (9.61%) Business Intelligence
19 527 (9.32%) LLM
20 515 (9.11%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,800 (31.85%) SQL
2 795 (14.07%) Java
3 711 (12.58%) Bash
4 684 (12.10%) PowerShell
5 452 (8.00%) JavaScript
6 397 (7.02%) TypeScript
7 315 (5.57%) C#
8 214 (3.79%) Go
9 161 (2.85%) R
10 140 (2.48%) C++
11 128 (2.26%) Shell Script
12 125 (2.21%) Scala
13 99 (1.75%) Bicep
14 75 (1.33%) Perl
15 57 (1.01%) C
15 57 (1.01%) PL/SQL
16 56 (0.99%) Groovy
16 56 (0.99%) Ruby
17 55 (0.97%) Rust
18 49 (0.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,266 (22.40%) Security Cleared
2 1,010 (17.87%) SC Cleared
3 426 (7.54%) Degree
4 192 (3.40%) DV Cleared
5 150 (2.65%) Computer Science Degree
6 137 (2.42%) AWS Certification
7 134 (2.37%) BPSS Clearance
8 125 (2.21%) Azure Certification
9 93 (1.65%) CISSP
10 87 (1.54%) Cisco Certification
11 80 (1.42%) Master's Degree
12 58 (1.03%) CCNP
13 46 (0.81%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 39 (0.69%) CISM
15 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
16 35 (0.62%) PhD
17 32 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
19 30 (0.53%) CCIE
20 25 (0.44%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 557 (9.85%) Data Quality
2 250 (4.42%) QA
3 120 (2.12%) GDPR
4 109 (1.93%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 109 (1.93%) NIST
5 94 (1.66%) Accessibility
6 34 (0.60%) SLA
7 26 (0.46%) WCAG
8 23 (0.41%) NCSC
9 22 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
9 22 (0.39%) PCI DSS
10 20 (0.35%) HIPAA
10 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
12 12 (0.21%) SOC 2
13 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
14 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 9 (0.16%) GRC
15 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 891 (15.76%) Docker
2 138 (2.44%) Active Directory
3 125 (2.21%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.33%) Virtual Machines
5 48 (0.85%) vSphere
6 42 (0.74%) VMware NSX
7 37 (0.65%) Hyper-V
8 32 (0.57%) Firmware
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) NFS
11 15 (0.27%) KVM
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 11 (0.19%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
17 6 (0.11%) PowerHA
18 4 (0.071%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,238 (21.90%) Terraform
2 1,066 (18.86%) Kubernetes
3 598 (10.58%) Ansible
4 359 (6.35%) Grafana
5 280 (4.95%) Prometheus
6 78 (1.38%) Puppet
7 73 (1.29%) Argo
8 52 (0.92%) Progress Chef
9 39 (0.69%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) vCenter Server
11 36 (0.64%) vRealize
12 27 (0.48%) Kibana
12 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
12 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
13 26 (0.46%) Control-M
13 26 (0.46%) Nagios
14 25 (0.44%) Nessus
14 25 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
15 19 (0.34%) FortiGate
15 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 646 (11.43%) Microsoft
2 557 (9.85%) Databricks
3 327 (5.79%) Google
4 246 (4.35%) Oracle
5 211 (3.73%) Splunk
6 178 (3.15%) VMware
7 147 (2.60%) OpenAI
8 146 (2.58%) Cisco
9 114 (2.02%) ServiceNow
10 107 (1.89%) Red Hat
11 95 (1.68%) F5
12 92 (1.63%) Palo Alto
13 90 (1.59%) Dynatrace
14 86 (1.52%) IBM
15 81 (1.43%) Informatica
16 72 (1.27%) Fortinet
17 65 (1.15%) CyberArk
18 64 (1.13%) Foundry
19 58 (1.03%) SAP
20 57 (1.01%) Arista