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 14 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,737 3,904 4,102
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.81% 12.35% 9.65%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.59% 37.64% 31.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,180 2,582 2,891
10th Percentile £359 £380 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £685 £688
90th Percentile £748 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 96 60 118
10th Percentile £28.75 £20.12 £30.20
25th Percentile £41.25 £22.38 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £46.84 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.29% -21.93% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.26 £67.14 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.38 £77.75 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £60.00
% change year-on-year +10.89% -23.03% -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 11,389 10,373 12,866
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.81% 32.82% 30.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,560 6,597 9,141
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £507 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.43% -4.55% -3.08%
75th Percentile £619 £640 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £489 £500
% change year-on-year -1.43% -2.20% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 393 239 415
10th Percentile £36.05 £21.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £52.00 £36.25 £47.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% - -0.79%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.00 £85.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% -

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 14 January 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 14 January 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 14 January 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 0 4,031 £525 -9.09% 3,432
London 0 2,322 £550 -8.33% 1,045
UK excluding London 0 1,808 £500 -2.44% 2,951
Work from Home 0 1,424 £525 -4.55% 1,579
North of England +6 582 £480 -4.00% 538
South East +2 399 £481 -12.50% 1,061
Yorkshire +8 293 £500 -6.98% 211
Midlands +7 280 £500 +5.26% 289
Scotland +3 261 £475 -1.04% 145
North West +7 245 £450 -5.26% 241
West Midlands +17 236 £515 +3.00% 114
South West -8 177 £550 -8.77% 369
East of England +6 126 £525 +7.14% 422
North East +6 48 £500 -8.26% 89
East Midlands -18 44 £414 +3.38% 170
Wales -13 27 £550 +10.00% 124
Northern Ireland -1 21 £588 +11.90% 60

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
1 214 (4.52%) Apache Spark
2 212 (4.48%) Apache Airflow
3 155 (3.27%) Apache
3 155 (3.27%) Confluence
4 60 (1.27%) SAS
5 57 (1.20%) SharePoint
6 34 (0.72%) nginx
7 33 (0.70%) OpenStack
8 23 (0.49%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 18 (0.38%) Appian
11 11 (0.23%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 8 (0.17%) IIS
14 6 (0.13%) Camunda
14 6 (0.13%) CMS
14 6 (0.13%) Luigi
14 6 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
15 4 (0.084%) Tomcat
16 3 (0.063%) JBoss
Applications
1 130 (2.74%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.72%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.30%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 9 (0.19%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 3 (0.063%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.063%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.042%) Maya
10 2 (0.042%) NUKE
11 1 (0.021%) SPSS
11 1 (0.021%) Stata
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.34%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 8 (0.17%) Fidessa
5 3 (0.063%) Actimize
5 3 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 3 (0.063%) Remedy ITSM
5 3 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.042%) Shopify
6 2 (0.042%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.021%) Cerner Millennium
7 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
7 1 (0.021%) ION MarketView
7 1 (0.021%) Maximo
7 1 (0.021%) NEC Housing
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
7 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,867 (39.41%) AWS
2 1,523 (32.15%) Azure
3 713 (15.05%) GCP
4 586 (12.37%) GitHub
5 512 (10.81%) Serverless
6 428 (9.04%) Power Platform
7 366 (7.73%) Amazon S3
8 347 (7.33%) AWS Lambda
9 316 (6.67%) GitHub Actions
10 305 (6.44%) Azure DevOps
11 236 (4.98%) Snowflake
12 235 (4.96%) AWS CloudFormation
13 210 (4.43%) Azure Data Factory
14 199 (4.20%) Amazon EC2
15 183 (3.86%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 173 (3.65%) Amazon ECS
17 168 (3.55%) Amazon EKS
18 138 (2.91%) OpenShift
19 137 (2.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 137 (2.89%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 241 (5.09%) Firewall
2 157 (3.31%) DNS
3 124 (2.62%) TCP/IP
4 113 (2.39%) Network Security
5 81 (1.71%) HTTP
6 78 (1.65%) VPN
7 69 (1.46%) BGP
8 66 (1.39%) SSL
9 48 (1.01%) WAN
10 43 (0.91%) OSPF
11 38 (0.80%) Wireshark
12 37 (0.78%) MPLS
13 35 (0.74%) Wireless
14 33 (0.70%) SSH
15 32 (0.68%) LAN
15 32 (0.68%) SD-WAN
16 31 (0.65%) DHCP
17 30 (0.63%) SMTP
18 25 (0.53%) FTP
19 23 (0.49%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 368 (7.77%) PostgreSQL
2 366 (7.73%) Power BI
3 276 (5.83%) Data Warehouse
4 231 (4.88%) NoSQL
4 231 (4.88%) Relational Database
5 219 (4.62%) Data Lake
6 166 (3.50%) Big Data
7 163 (3.44%) SQL Server
8 161 (3.40%) Amazon RDS
9 149 (3.15%) Tableau
10 123 (2.60%) MySQL
11 101 (2.13%) Metadata
12 98 (2.07%) MongoDB
13 97 (2.05%) BigQuery
14 93 (1.96%) Amazon Athena
15 92 (1.94%) Hadoop
16 91 (1.92%) Amazon Redshift
17 79 (1.67%) DynamoDB
18 76 (1.60%) Azure SQL Database
19 75 (1.58%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 607 (12.81%) Git
2 556 (11.74%) Jenkins
3 428 (9.04%) GitLab
4 276 (5.83%) JIRA
5 82 (1.73%) Selenium
6 76 (1.60%) MLflow
7 49 (1.03%) Cucumber
7 49 (1.03%) Sonatype Nexus
8 48 (1.01%) Bitbucket
9 44 (0.93%) SonarQube
10 41 (0.87%) JUnit
11 38 (0.80%) Postman
12 37 (0.78%) Liquibase
13 34 (0.72%) JMeter
14 28 (0.59%) Cypress.io
15 27 (0.57%) Artifactory
15 27 (0.57%) CircleCI
15 27 (0.57%) Maven
15 27 (0.57%) Visual Studio
16 24 (0.51%) Gradle
General
1 1,291 (27.25%) Social Skills
2 958 (20.22%) Finance
3 657 (13.87%) Analytical Skills
4 437 (9.23%) Public Sector
5 430 (9.08%) Banking
6 165 (3.48%) Front Office
7 142 (3.00%) Investment Banking
8 123 (2.60%) Documentation Skills
9 73 (1.54%) Financial Institution
10 66 (1.39%) Marketing
11 65 (1.37%) Pharmaceutical
12 60 (1.27%) Telecoms
13 56 (1.18%) Retail
14 55 (1.16%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 43 (0.91%) Legal
16 40 (0.84%) Manufacturing
16 40 (0.84%) Presentation Skills
17 31 (0.65%) Influencing Skills
18 27 (0.57%) Military
19 24 (0.51%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 813 (17.16%) Developer
2 659 (13.91%) Senior
3 608 (12.84%) Data Engineer
4 338 (7.14%) Python Developer
5 325 (6.86%) DevOps Engineer
6 321 (6.78%) Python Engineer
7 292 (6.16%) Analyst
8 279 (5.89%) Architect
9 277 (5.85%) AWS Engineer
10 237 (5.00%) Software Engineer
11 235 (4.96%) Lead
12 232 (4.90%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 179 (3.78%) Data Scientist
14 172 (3.63%) Platform Engineer
15 148 (3.12%) Data Analyst
16 144 (3.04%) Senior Developer
17 125 (2.64%) Azure Engineer
18 120 (2.53%) Senior Data Engineer
19 118 (2.49%) Consultant
19 118 (2.49%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 416 (8.78%) REST
2 298 (6.29%) React
3 294 (6.21%) Kafka
4 264 (5.57%) PySpark
5 235 (4.96%) Node.js
6 223 (4.71%) Pandas
7 220 (4.64%) RESTful
8 219 (4.62%) FastAPI
9 194 (4.10%) PyTorch
10 172 (3.63%) NumPy
11 167 (3.53%) TensorFlow
12 157 (3.31%) .NET
13 136 (2.87%) AngularJS
14 123 (2.60%) LangChain
15 120 (2.53%) scikit-learn
16 118 (2.49%) Elastic Stack
17 108 (2.28%) pytest
18 107 (2.26%) Flask
19 104 (2.20%) LDAP
20 100 (2.11%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 394 (8.32%) Cloud Native
2 195 (4.12%) Algorithms
3 186 (3.93%) Distributed Systems
4 126 (2.66%) Product Ownership
5 123 (2.60%) Equities
6 122 (2.58%) Data Protection Act
7 107 (2.26%) Data Structures
8 100 (2.11%) AI Agents
9 98 (2.07%) Derivative
10 96 (2.03%) Onboarding
11 92 (1.94%) Enterprise Software
11 92 (1.94%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 86 (1.82%) Fixed Income
13 80 (1.69%) Hedge funds
14 78 (1.65%) Security Posture
15 76 (1.60%) Public Cloud
16 74 (1.56%) Data Centre
16 74 (1.56%) Hybrid Cloud
17 71 (1.50%) Legacy Systems
18 67 (1.41%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 785 (16.57%) Linux
2 354 (7.47%) Windows
3 232 (4.90%) Unix
4 93 (1.96%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.87%) Android
7 37 (0.78%) VMS
8 36 (0.76%) Ubuntu
9 29 (0.61%) CentOS
10 25 (0.53%) Solaris
11 22 (0.46%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.38%) Amazon Linux
12 18 (0.38%) Apple iOS
13 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
14 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
15 4 (0.084%) Debian
15 4 (0.084%) Robot Operating System
15 4 (0.084%) Windows 10
16 3 (0.063%) AIX
16 3 (0.063%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,631 (34.43%) CI/CD
2 1,339 (28.27%) DevOps
3 1,143 (24.13%) Agile
4 1,030 (21.74%) Problem-Solving
5 947 (19.99%) AI
6 847 (17.88%) Infrastructure as Code
7 815 (17.20%) Analytics
8 746 (15.75%) Machine Learning
9 707 (14.93%) Containerisation
10 687 (14.50%) Data Pipeline
11 559 (11.80%) ETL
12 558 (11.78%) Data Engineering
13 553 (11.67%) Data Science
14 551 (11.63%) Software Engineering
15 545 (11.51%) Data Modelling
16 510 (10.77%) Test Automation
17 421 (8.89%) Business Intelligence
18 394 (8.32%) Observability
19 369 (7.79%) LLM
20 364 (7.68%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,442 (30.44%) SQL
2 750 (15.83%) Java
3 646 (13.64%) PowerShell
4 620 (13.09%) Bash
5 485 (10.24%) JavaScript
6 286 (6.04%) TypeScript
7 282 (5.95%) C#
8 259 (5.47%) Go
9 217 (4.58%) C++
10 170 (3.59%) Perl
11 162 (3.42%) R
12 155 (3.27%) Shell Script
13 105 (2.22%) Scala
14 96 (2.03%) Ruby
15 61 (1.29%) Bicep
16 58 (1.22%) C
17 57 (1.20%) Kusto Query Language
18 53 (1.12%) VBA
19 45 (0.95%) PHP
20 38 (0.80%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,039 (21.93%) Security Cleared
2 845 (17.84%) SC Cleared
3 434 (9.16%) Degree
4 232 (4.90%) Computer Science Degree
5 143 (3.02%) DV Cleared
6 134 (2.83%) AWS Certification
7 119 (2.51%) Master's Degree
8 87 (1.84%) BPSS Clearance
9 83 (1.75%) Azure Certification
10 81 (1.71%) CISSP
11 76 (1.60%) Cisco Certification
12 71 (1.50%) MCP
13 49 (1.03%) CCNP
14 45 (0.95%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 42 (0.89%) PhD
16 37 (0.78%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.76%) CCIE
18 35 (0.74%) CEH
18 35 (0.74%) CISM
19 33 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 374 (7.90%) Data Quality
2 178 (3.76%) QA
3 159 (3.36%) GDPR
4 86 (1.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 85 (1.79%) NIST
6 59 (1.25%) Accessibility
7 31 (0.65%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 27 (0.57%) HIPAA
10 24 (0.51%) SLA
11 22 (0.46%) NCSC
12 18 (0.38%) SOC 2
13 15 (0.32%) EU AI Act
14 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
14 9 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
14 9 (0.19%) EMIR
14 9 (0.19%) MiFID
15 8 (0.17%) PMO
15 8 (0.17%) WCAG
16 7 (0.15%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 947 (19.99%) Docker
2 192 (4.05%) Active Directory
3 108 (2.28%) VMware Infrastructure
4 36 (0.76%) VMware NSX
5 35 (0.74%) vSphere
6 34 (0.72%) Virtual Machines
7 24 (0.51%) Firmware
8 20 (0.42%) HDFS
8 20 (0.42%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.36%) KVM
10 15 (0.32%) DFS Replication
10 15 (0.32%) Squid
11 14 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.27%) Postfix
13 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) Dovecot
15 9 (0.19%) GPFS
16 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
16 8 (0.17%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,066 (22.50%) Terraform
2 1,007 (21.26%) Kubernetes
3 595 (12.56%) Ansible
4 354 (7.47%) Grafana
5 298 (6.29%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.84%) Argo
7 81 (1.71%) Puppet
8 54 (1.14%) Kibana
9 43 (0.91%) vRealize
10 41 (0.87%) Istio
11 35 (0.74%) Single Sign-On
12 33 (0.70%) Progress Chef
13 32 (0.68%) Nessus
14 28 (0.59%) NetBackup
15 20 (0.42%) ITRS Geneos
16 18 (0.38%) logstash
17 17 (0.36%) Nmap
18 16 (0.34%) QRadar
18 16 (0.34%) Rancher
19 15 (0.32%) Proxmox
Vendors
1 560 (11.82%) Microsoft
2 436 (9.20%) Databricks
3 271 (5.72%) Google
4 247 (5.21%) Splunk
5 229 (4.83%) Oracle
6 209 (4.41%) VMware
7 141 (2.98%) Red Hat
8 122 (2.58%) ServiceNow
9 116 (2.45%) Cisco
10 102 (2.15%) OpenAI
11 93 (1.96%) CyberArk
12 83 (1.75%) F5
13 76 (1.60%) Palo Alto
14 69 (1.46%) Foundry
15 68 (1.44%) BeyondTrust
16 51 (1.08%) SAP
17 44 (0.93%) Atlassian
18 43 (0.91%) Dynatrace
19 40 (0.84%) Salesforce
20 38 (0.80%) CheckPoint