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

6 months to
14 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,208 3,924 3,969
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.39% 13.40% 9.12%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.67% 39.31% 31.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,530 2,752 2,823
10th Percentile £363 £384 £400
25th Percentile £419 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £623 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £812 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -3.60% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 54 102
10th Percentile £28.73 £21.25 £20.87
25th Percentile £43.81 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £43.50 £50.25
Median % change year-on-year +26.44% -13.43% -22.69%
75th Percentile £74.26 £58.75 £66.94
90th Percentile £83.45 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £48.75 £51.25
% change year-on-year +7.69% -4.88% -21.15%

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 12,807 9,983 12,730
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.01% 34.09% 29.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,515 6,740 9,047
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 546 243 473
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.60 £30.75
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.25 £68.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.87 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.77% +2.20% -

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 April 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 April 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 April 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 4,390 £520 -5.89% 2,817
London -3 2,493 £550 -8.33% 1,284
UK excluding London -1 1,978 £482 -3.60% 1,949
Work from Home 0 1,522 £525 -4.55% 1,038
North of England +8 666 £481 -2.31% 471
South East -5 409 £500 -4.76% 561
Yorkshire +1 367 £475 -5.00% 176
Midlands -3 277 £495 +8.02% 260
North West +2 253 £500 +1.83% 223
Scotland 0 243 £425 -10.53% 107
South West -1 242 £500 -9.09% 246
West Midlands -5 216 £500 +1.01% 128
East of England +1 131 £500 - 229
East Midlands -10 60 £455 +7.06% 131
North East +8 55 £475 -2.56% 74
Wales -16 27 £475 -10.80% 63
Northern Ireland +11 24 £463 -7.50% 35

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
1 271 (5.20%) Apache Spark
2 205 (3.94%) Apache Airflow
3 160 (3.07%) Apache
4 157 (3.01%) Confluence
5 69 (1.32%) SAS
6 59 (1.13%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.54%) Jupyter
8 26 (0.50%) nginx
9 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
10 23 (0.44%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.29%) Appian
13 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
14 11 (0.21%) Camunda
15 9 (0.17%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.13%) CMS
17 4 (0.077%) CICS
17 4 (0.077%) Tomcat
18 3 (0.058%) IIS
18 3 (0.058%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 137 (2.63%) Microsoft Excel
2 25 (0.48%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 23 (0.44%) MS Visio
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 5 (0.096%) CPLEX
5 5 (0.096%) Weka
6 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 8 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
5 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
5 5 (0.096%) SAP IBP
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.058%) Actimize
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%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
9 1 (0.019%) IBM Planning Analytics
9 1 (0.019%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 2,010 (38.59%) AWS
2 1,802 (34.60%) Azure
3 776 (14.90%) GCP
4 678 (13.02%) GitHub
5 527 (10.12%) Power Platform
6 497 (9.54%) Serverless
7 399 (7.66%) Azure DevOps
8 373 (7.16%) Amazon S3
9 355 (6.82%) AWS Lambda
10 347 (6.66%) GitHub Actions
11 278 (5.34%) Azure Data Factory
12 241 (4.63%) AWS CloudFormation
13 238 (4.57%) Snowflake
14 180 (3.46%) Amazon EKS
15 174 (3.34%) OpenShift
16 168 (3.23%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 154 (2.96%) Amazon ECS
18 149 (2.86%) dbt
19 146 (2.80%) Amazon EC2
20 138 (2.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 200 (3.84%) Firewall
2 139 (2.67%) DNS
3 112 (2.15%) Network Security
4 93 (1.79%) TCP/IP
5 79 (1.52%) BGP
6 77 (1.48%) VPN
7 62 (1.19%) WAN
8 61 (1.17%) HTTP
9 47 (0.90%) OSPF
10 43 (0.83%) SAN
11 42 (0.81%) MPLS
12 36 (0.69%) VLAN
13 35 (0.67%) LAN
14 33 (0.63%) DHCP
15 32 (0.61%) SNMP
16 30 (0.58%) SSL
16 30 (0.58%) VXLAN
17 28 (0.54%) Wireshark
18 25 (0.48%) SD-WAN
19 23 (0.44%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 439 (8.43%) Power BI
2 343 (6.59%) PostgreSQL
3 304 (5.84%) Data Warehouse
4 241 (4.63%) Data Lake
5 217 (4.17%) SQL Server
6 192 (3.69%) NoSQL
7 182 (3.49%) Tableau
8 178 (3.42%) Relational Database
9 159 (3.05%) Metadata
10 145 (2.78%) Big Data
11 132 (2.53%) Delta Lake
12 131 (2.52%) BigQuery
13 115 (2.21%) Amazon Redshift
14 113 (2.17%) Amazon Athena
15 107 (2.05%) Amazon RDS
16 101 (1.94%) MySQL
17 93 (1.79%) MongoDB
18 91 (1.75%) Azure SQL Database
19 86 (1.65%) DynamoDB
20 76 (1.46%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 663 (12.73%) Git
2 500 (9.60%) Jenkins
3 385 (7.39%) GitLab
4 282 (5.41%) JIRA
5 98 (1.88%) Selenium
6 89 (1.71%) MLflow
7 55 (1.06%) Postman
8 44 (0.84%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.83%) Cucumber
10 40 (0.77%) JUnit
11 37 (0.71%) JMeter
12 35 (0.67%) Sonatype Nexus
13 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
14 26 (0.50%) Artifactory
15 25 (0.48%) SonarQube
16 24 (0.46%) Cypress.io
16 24 (0.46%) Visual Studio
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
18 21 (0.40%) Maven
18 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,205 (23.14%) Social Skills
2 976 (18.74%) Finance
3 711 (13.65%) Analytical Skills
4 498 (9.56%) Public Sector
5 367 (7.05%) Banking
6 160 (3.07%) Front Office
7 137 (2.63%) Documentation Skills
8 81 (1.56%) Investment Banking
9 66 (1.27%) Marketing
10 62 (1.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 61 (1.17%) Retail
12 59 (1.13%) Legal
13 57 (1.09%) Telecoms
14 53 (1.02%) Influencing Skills
14 53 (1.02%) Pharmaceutical
15 41 (0.79%) Manufacturing
16 40 (0.77%) Financial Institution
17 32 (0.61%) Presentation Skills
18 29 (0.56%) Publishing
19 28 (0.54%) Military
Job Titles
1 972 (18.66%) Developer
2 770 (14.78%) Data Engineer
3 741 (14.23%) Senior
4 470 (9.02%) Python Developer
5 354 (6.80%) Architect
6 333 (6.39%) Lead
7 287 (5.51%) Python Engineer
8 275 (5.28%) DevOps Engineer
9 274 (5.26%) Analyst
10 253 (4.86%) Software Engineer
11 241 (4.63%) AWS Engineer
12 232 (4.45%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 212 (4.07%) Data Scientist
14 190 (3.65%) Platform Engineer
15 164 (3.15%) Azure Engineer
15 164 (3.15%) Senior Developer
16 150 (2.88%) Senior Data Engineer
17 138 (2.65%) Data Analyst
18 136 (2.61%) Full-Stack Developer
19 120 (2.30%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 444 (8.53%) REST
2 358 (6.87%) React
3 343 (6.59%) PySpark
4 330 (6.34%) Kafka
5 285 (5.47%) Node.js
6 237 (4.55%) Pandas
7 231 (4.44%) .NET
8 192 (3.69%) PyTorch
9 180 (3.46%) RESTful
10 179 (3.44%) FastAPI
11 156 (3.00%) JSON
12 155 (2.98%) NumPy
13 147 (2.82%) TensorFlow
14 146 (2.80%) scikit-learn
15 128 (2.46%) Flask
16 124 (2.38%) AngularJS
17 122 (2.34%) Django
18 121 (2.32%) LangChain
19 113 (2.17%) pytest
20 110 (2.11%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 494 (9.49%) Cloud Native
2 213 (4.09%) Distributed Systems
3 180 (3.46%) Algorithms
4 144 (2.76%) Product Ownership
5 117 (2.25%) AI Agents
6 115 (2.21%) Data Protection Act
7 112 (2.15%) Fixed Income
8 110 (2.11%) Data Structures
8 110 (2.11%) Equities
9 101 (1.94%) Derivative
10 100 (1.92%) Data Centre
11 99 (1.90%) Onboarding
12 92 (1.77%) Enterprise Software
13 89 (1.71%) Hybrid Cloud
14 88 (1.69%) Legacy Systems
15 83 (1.59%) Management Information System
16 82 (1.57%) Security Posture
17 73 (1.40%) Public Cloud
18 52 (1.00%) Virtual Team
19 49 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 653 (12.54%) Linux
2 303 (5.82%) Windows
3 182 (3.49%) Unix
4 101 (1.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 68 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.73%) VMS
7 34 (0.65%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.54%) Android
9 21 (0.40%) AIX
9 21 (0.40%) Mac OS
10 17 (0.33%) CentOS
10 17 (0.33%) Solaris
11 16 (0.31%) Apple iOS
12 8 (0.15%) Debian
12 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
13 6 (0.12%) Windows 7
13 6 (0.12%) zOS
14 5 (0.096%) Rocky
15 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2016
15 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,909 (36.66%) CI/CD
2 1,435 (27.55%) DevOps
3 1,189 (22.83%) Agile
4 1,136 (21.81%) AI
5 1,067 (20.49%) Analytics
6 1,021 (19.60%) Problem-Solving
7 900 (17.28%) Infrastructure as Code
8 865 (16.61%) Data Pipeline
9 807 (15.50%) Machine Learning
10 743 (14.27%) Containerisation
11 713 (13.69%) Data Engineering
12 704 (13.52%) Data Modelling
13 694 (13.33%) ETL
14 620 (11.90%) Data Science
15 591 (11.35%) Software Engineering
16 578 (11.10%) Test Automation
17 522 (10.02%) Business Intelligence
18 512 (9.83%) Observability
19 428 (8.22%) LLM
20 404 (7.76%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,684 (32.33%) SQL
2 749 (14.38%) Java
3 668 (12.83%) PowerShell
4 577 (11.08%) Bash
5 488 (9.37%) JavaScript
6 357 (6.85%) C#
7 347 (6.66%) TypeScript
8 207 (3.97%) Go
9 166 (3.19%) R
10 156 (3.00%) C++
11 132 (2.53%) Scala
12 102 (1.96%) Ruby
12 102 (1.96%) Shell Script
13 91 (1.75%) Perl
14 81 (1.56%) Bicep
15 53 (1.02%) C
15 53 (1.02%) Kusto Query Language
16 51 (0.98%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 46 (0.88%) T-SQL
18 42 (0.81%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,233 (23.68%) Security Cleared
2 1,008 (19.35%) SC Cleared
3 402 (7.72%) Degree
4 183 (3.51%) Computer Science Degree
5 138 (2.65%) DV Cleared
6 133 (2.55%) BPSS Clearance
7 108 (2.07%) AWS Certification
8 107 (2.05%) Azure Certification
9 96 (1.84%) CISSP
10 94 (1.80%) Master's Degree
11 77 (1.48%) Cisco Certification
12 60 (1.15%) CCNP
12 60 (1.15%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.94%) CISM
14 43 (0.83%) PhD
15 35 (0.67%) ISTQB
15 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
16 34 (0.65%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 27 (0.52%) CCNA
18 26 (0.50%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 518 (9.95%) Data Quality
2 218 (4.19%) QA
3 176 (3.38%) GDPR
4 118 (2.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 108 (2.07%) NIST
6 81 (1.56%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 31 (0.60%) SLA
9 28 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 25 (0.48%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) NCSC
12 18 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
13 17 (0.33%) WCAG
14 14 (0.27%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
18 7 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 866 (16.63%) Docker
2 171 (3.28%) Active Directory
3 114 (2.19%) VMware Infrastructure
4 63 (1.21%) Virtual Machines
5 52 (1.00%) vSphere
6 51 (0.98%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.63%) Hyper-V
8 31 (0.60%) Firmware
9 18 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
10 12 (0.23%) KVM
11 11 (0.21%) HDFS
12 9 (0.17%) SRDF
13 8 (0.15%) Ceph
14 7 (0.13%) Lustre
14 7 (0.13%) NFS
14 7 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
14 7 (0.13%) Virtual Servers
15 6 (0.12%) GPFS
15 6 (0.12%) Postfix
15 6 (0.12%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,107 (21.26%) Terraform
2 983 (18.87%) Kubernetes
3 505 (9.70%) Ansible
4 320 (6.14%) Grafana
5 273 (5.24%) Prometheus
6 83 (1.59%) Argo
7 71 (1.36%) Puppet
8 53 (1.02%) Istio
9 49 (0.94%) vRealize
10 39 (0.75%) Kibana
10 39 (0.75%) vCenter Server
11 33 (0.63%) Progress Chef
12 25 (0.48%) Nessus
13 22 (0.42%) Rancher
14 21 (0.40%) Nagios
14 21 (0.40%) Single Sign-On
15 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
15 20 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
15 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
16 19 (0.36%) Control-M
Vendors
1 621 (11.92%) Microsoft
2 578 (11.10%) Databricks
3 281 (5.40%) Google
4 215 (4.13%) Oracle
5 213 (4.09%) Splunk
6 208 (3.99%) VMware
7 135 (2.59%) Red Hat
8 132 (2.53%) Cisco
9 123 (2.36%) OpenAI
10 97 (1.86%) ServiceNow
11 93 (1.79%) CyberArk
12 80 (1.54%) BeyondTrust
13 65 (1.25%) Foundry
14 64 (1.23%) Informatica
15 60 (1.15%) F5
16 59 (1.13%) IBM
17 55 (1.06%) Palo Alto
18 49 (0.94%) Dynatrace
19 45 (0.86%) SAP
20 42 (0.81%) Atlassian