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 27 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,315 3,791 4,037
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.91% 13.27% 9.46%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.63% 38.96% 31.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,511 2,653 2,906
10th Percentile £363 £380 £388
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £547 £560
Median % change year-on-year -4.48% -2.32% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £669 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -2.00% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 132 48 105
10th Percentile £28.65 £24.58 £20.96
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £53.25 £42.25 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +26.04% -29.58% -7.25%
75th Percentile £68.68 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £68.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.00 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +15.56% -30.77% +13.04%

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 13,083 9,730 12,802
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.84% 34.05% 30.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,548 6,631 9,124
10th Percentile £357 £357 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £518 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.38% -1.43% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £630 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.47% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 565 212 503
10th Percentile £36.25 £27.04 £32.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.94 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -8.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.59% +0.40% -

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 27 May 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 27 May 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 27 May 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 4,423 £525 -4.55% 2,684
London -3 2,541 £550 -5.98% 1,378
UK excluding London -1 2,051 £490 -2.00% 1,705
Work from Home -1 1,500 £525 -4.55% 1,107
North of England +8 726 £482 -1.13% 443
Yorkshire +3 408 £485 -3.10% 125
South East -6 397 £515 +3.00% 516
Scotland +2 300 £439 -7.63% 92
South West +2 253 £500 -9.09% 213
North West +2 253 £500 +5.26% 243
Midlands -16 237 £488 +8.33% 186
West Midlands -13 182 £482 +7.11% 85
East of England -6 129 £500 - 182
North East +6 75 £475 +5.56% 78
East Midlands -14 54 £495 +16.47% 100
Northern Ireland +16 26 £463 -21.28% 40
Wales -16 25 £450 -10.00% 52

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
1 279 (5.25%) Apache Spark
2 223 (4.20%) Apache Airflow
3 179 (3.37%) Apache
4 145 (2.73%) Confluence
5 47 (0.88%) SAS
6 46 (0.87%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.73%) Jupyter
8 23 (0.43%) nginx
9 21 (0.40%) OpenStack
10 16 (0.30%) ArcGIS
10 16 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
10 16 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
11 13 (0.24%) IIS
12 11 (0.21%) Appian
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) Camunda
13 8 (0.15%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.13%) CICS
14 7 (0.13%) CMS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 123 (2.31%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.53%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
5 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.075%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.056%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.019%) SPSS
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
9 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.45%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.38%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.094%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.056%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.056%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.056%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.056%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.038%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 1,974 (37.14%) AWS
2 1,776 (33.41%) Azure
3 756 (14.22%) GCP
4 642 (12.08%) GitHub
5 522 (9.82%) Power Platform
6 449 (8.45%) Serverless
7 376 (7.07%) Azure DevOps
8 361 (6.79%) Amazon S3
9 338 (6.36%) GitHub Actions
10 320 (6.02%) AWS Lambda
11 265 (4.99%) Azure Data Factory
12 251 (4.72%) Snowflake
13 177 (3.33%) AWS CloudFormation
14 169 (3.18%) dbt
14 169 (3.18%) OpenShift
15 167 (3.14%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 153 (2.88%) Amazon EKS
17 135 (2.54%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 121 (2.28%) Amazon EC2
19 114 (2.14%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 197 (3.71%) Firewall
2 145 (2.73%) DNS
3 115 (2.16%) Network Security
4 93 (1.75%) WAN
5 90 (1.69%) BGP
6 85 (1.60%) TCP/IP
7 75 (1.41%) VPN
8 62 (1.17%) HTTP
9 61 (1.15%) OSPF
10 55 (1.03%) SAN
11 50 (0.94%) BIG-IP
12 46 (0.87%) VXLAN
13 45 (0.85%) SD-WAN
13 45 (0.85%) SSL
14 36 (0.68%) LAN
14 36 (0.68%) SNMP
14 36 (0.68%) VLAN
15 35 (0.66%) Ethernet VPN
16 33 (0.62%) MPLS
17 32 (0.60%) DHCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 455 (8.56%) Power BI
2 338 (6.36%) PostgreSQL
3 277 (5.21%) Data Warehouse
4 261 (4.91%) SQL Server
5 234 (4.40%) Data Lake
6 202 (3.80%) Tableau
7 186 (3.50%) Relational Database
8 173 (3.25%) NoSQL
9 163 (3.07%) Metadata
10 160 (3.01%) Big Data
11 139 (2.62%) Delta Lake
12 136 (2.56%) BigQuery
13 119 (2.24%) Amazon Athena
14 113 (2.13%) MongoDB
15 109 (2.05%) Amazon Redshift
16 91 (1.71%) DynamoDB
16 91 (1.71%) MySQL
17 80 (1.51%) Azure SQL Database
18 79 (1.49%) Amazon RDS
19 75 (1.41%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 640 (12.04%) Git
2 481 (9.05%) Jenkins
3 367 (6.90%) GitLab
4 263 (4.95%) JIRA
5 81 (1.52%) MLflow
6 78 (1.47%) Selenium
7 64 (1.20%) Postman
8 40 (0.75%) Cucumber
9 37 (0.70%) JMeter
10 32 (0.60%) Cypress.io
11 30 (0.56%) Artifactory
12 29 (0.55%) Bitbucket
12 29 (0.55%) SonarQube
13 27 (0.51%) Sonatype Nexus
14 26 (0.49%) JUnit
15 25 (0.47%) REST Assured
16 24 (0.45%) Robot Framework
17 23 (0.43%) Maven
18 21 (0.40%) Gatling
19 18 (0.34%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,144 (21.52%) Social Skills
2 1,047 (19.70%) Finance
3 707 (13.30%) Analytical Skills
4 471 (8.86%) Public Sector
5 379 (7.13%) Banking
6 188 (3.54%) Front Office
7 129 (2.43%) Documentation Skills
8 121 (2.28%) Investment Banking
9 78 (1.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 73 (1.37%) Marketing
11 60 (1.13%) Retail
12 57 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
13 55 (1.03%) Legal
14 47 (0.88%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.83%) Influencing Skills
16 37 (0.70%) Financial Institution
16 37 (0.70%) Publishing
17 34 (0.64%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.64%) Military
18 28 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 972 (18.29%) Developer
2 815 (15.33%) Data Engineer
3 778 (14.64%) Senior
4 499 (9.39%) Python Developer
5 345 (6.49%) Lead
6 327 (6.15%) Architect
7 326 (6.13%) Python Engineer
8 283 (5.32%) DevOps Engineer
9 281 (5.29%) Analyst
10 270 (5.08%) Software Engineer
11 233 (4.38%) AWS Engineer
12 229 (4.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 210 (3.95%) Data Scientist
14 166 (3.12%) Senior Developer
15 162 (3.05%) Azure Engineer
16 158 (2.97%) Senior Data Engineer
17 152 (2.86%) Platform Engineer
18 151 (2.84%) Data Analyst
19 149 (2.80%) Full-Stack Developer
20 131 (2.46%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 403 (7.58%) REST
2 371 (6.98%) React
3 365 (6.87%) PySpark
4 320 (6.02%) Kafka
5 232 (4.37%) .NET
6 225 (4.23%) Node.js
7 219 (4.12%) Pandas
8 188 (3.54%) FastAPI
9 183 (3.44%) RESTful
10 178 (3.35%) JSON
11 175 (3.29%) PyTorch
12 133 (2.50%) Django
13 131 (2.46%) NumPy
14 128 (2.41%) Flask
15 123 (2.31%) TensorFlow
16 120 (2.26%) LangChain
16 120 (2.26%) scikit-learn
17 113 (2.13%) AngularJS
18 102 (1.92%) YAML
19 101 (1.90%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 573 (10.78%) Cloud Native
2 236 (4.44%) Distributed Systems
3 152 (2.86%) Algorithms
4 141 (2.65%) Product Ownership
5 135 (2.54%) Data Centre
6 129 (2.43%) AI Agents
6 129 (2.43%) Onboarding
7 125 (2.35%) Data Structures
8 122 (2.30%) Data Protection Act
9 115 (2.16%) Derivative
10 105 (1.98%) Equities
11 104 (1.96%) Legacy Systems
12 101 (1.90%) Management Information System
13 100 (1.88%) Fixed Income
14 91 (1.71%) Hybrid Cloud
15 89 (1.67%) Enterprise Software
16 83 (1.56%) Security Posture
17 69 (1.30%) Public Cloud
18 54 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
19 50 (0.94%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 626 (11.78%) Linux
2 297 (5.59%) Windows
3 221 (4.16%) Unix
4 99 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 73 (1.37%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.73%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.60%) VMS
8 26 (0.49%) AIX
9 24 (0.45%) Android
10 23 (0.43%) Solaris
11 19 (0.36%) CentOS
12 18 (0.34%) Mac OS
13 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
14 12 (0.23%) zOS
15 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
16 8 (0.15%) Debian
17 7 (0.13%) Rocky
18 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
19 5 (0.094%) Amazon Linux
20 4 (0.075%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,960 (36.88%) CI/CD
2 1,417 (26.66%) DevOps
3 1,237 (23.27%) AI
4 1,143 (21.51%) Agile
5 1,043 (19.62%) Analytics
6 934 (17.57%) Problem-Solving
7 917 (17.25%) Infrastructure as Code
8 903 (16.99%) Data Pipeline
9 820 (15.43%) Machine Learning
10 719 (13.53%) Data Modelling
11 710 (13.36%) Data Engineering
12 698 (13.13%) ETL
13 683 (12.85%) Containerisation
14 642 (12.08%) Software Engineering
15 589 (11.08%) Data Science
16 557 (10.48%) Observability
17 534 (10.05%) Test Automation
18 521 (9.80%) Business Intelligence
19 479 (9.01%) LLM
20 427 (8.03%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,768 (33.26%) SQL
2 762 (14.34%) Java
3 647 (12.17%) PowerShell
4 581 (10.93%) Bash
5 470 (8.84%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.62%) TypeScript
7 337 (6.34%) C#
8 204 (3.84%) Go
9 171 (3.22%) R
10 151 (2.84%) C++
11 133 (2.50%) Scala
12 106 (1.99%) Shell Script
13 79 (1.49%) Perl
14 75 (1.41%) Bicep
15 74 (1.39%) Ruby
16 57 (1.07%) PL/SQL
17 56 (1.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 56 (1.05%) T-SQL
18 55 (1.03%) C
19 52 (0.98%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,187 (22.33%) Security Cleared
2 960 (18.06%) SC Cleared
3 387 (7.28%) Degree
4 161 (3.03%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.78%) DV Cleared
6 123 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
7 105 (1.98%) Azure Certification
8 84 (1.58%) AWS Certification
9 82 (1.54%) CISSP
10 78 (1.47%) Master's Degree
11 71 (1.34%) Cisco Certification
12 53 (1.00%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 51 (0.96%) CCNP
14 40 (0.75%) CISM
15 39 (0.73%) PhD
16 32 (0.60%) ISTQB
17 30 (0.56%) Microsoft Certification
18 25 (0.47%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 22 (0.41%) CompTIA Security+
20 21 (0.40%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 527 (9.92%) Data Quality
2 237 (4.46%) QA
3 146 (2.75%) GDPR
4 98 (1.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 96 (1.81%) NIST
6 77 (1.45%) Accessibility
7 37 (0.70%) SLA
8 27 (0.51%) PCI DSS
8 27 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 24 (0.45%) HIPAA
10 20 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
11 16 (0.30%) NCSC
11 16 (0.30%) WCAG
12 13 (0.24%) SOC 2
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
15 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 8 (0.15%) GRC
16 7 (0.13%) Disclosure Scotland
17 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 777 (14.62%) Docker
2 150 (2.82%) Active Directory
3 97 (1.83%) VMware Infrastructure
4 73 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.71%) VMware NSX
6 37 (0.70%) vSphere
7 34 (0.64%) Firmware
8 30 (0.56%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.32%) KVM
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.26%) NFS
11 13 (0.24%) Squid
12 12 (0.23%) HDFS
13 10 (0.19%) Ceph
14 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
14 9 (0.17%) SRDF
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
17 4 (0.075%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
17 4 (0.075%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,084 (20.40%) Terraform
2 942 (17.72%) Kubernetes
3 550 (10.35%) Ansible
4 330 (6.21%) Grafana
5 275 (5.17%) Prometheus
6 73 (1.37%) Puppet
7 58 (1.09%) Argo
8 50 (0.94%) Istio
9 46 (0.87%) vRealize
10 36 (0.68%) Kibana
11 31 (0.58%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.58%) vCenter Server
12 28 (0.53%) Single Sign-On
13 27 (0.51%) Nessus
14 25 (0.47%) Nagios
15 24 (0.45%) Control-M
15 24 (0.45%) ZABBIX
16 23 (0.43%) NetBackup
17 21 (0.40%) HAProxy
18 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 597 (11.23%) Microsoft
2 575 (10.82%) Databricks
3 274 (5.16%) Google
4 245 (4.61%) Oracle
5 221 (4.16%) Splunk
6 176 (3.31%) VMware
7 127 (2.39%) OpenAI
7 127 (2.39%) Red Hat
8 116 (2.18%) Cisco
9 97 (1.83%) ServiceNow
10 85 (1.60%) CyberArk
11 79 (1.49%) F5
12 76 (1.43%) BeyondTrust
12 76 (1.43%) Dynatrace
13 75 (1.41%) Palo Alto
14 69 (1.30%) IBM
14 69 (1.30%) Informatica
15 53 (1.00%) Foundry
16 52 (0.98%) SAP
17 45 (0.85%) Arista