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

6 months to
9 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,397 3,855 4,059
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.86% 13.17% 9.37%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.45% 38.61% 31.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,563 2,667 2,912
10th Percentile £363 £375 £380
25th Percentile £425 £444 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.70% -2.27% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
90th Percentile £749 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £500 £509
% change year-on-year -1.08% -1.67% -5.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 54 114
10th Percentile £30.29 £25.25 £20.91
25th Percentile £44.16 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £40.00 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year +37.50% -34.43% -5.70%
75th Percentile £71.86 £54.69 £70.00
90th Percentile £84.25 £61.90 £76.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -30.77% +10.64%

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 13,341 9,984 13,032
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.85% 34.11% 30.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,712 6,756 9,198
10th Percentile £358 £356 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £502 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.08% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £715 £760 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £484 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.95% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 559 231 528
10th Percentile £36.25 £27.00 £31.95
25th Percentile £54.28 £34.20 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.15 £85.00 £76.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +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 9 June 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 9 June 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 9 June 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 -2 4,493 £525 -4.55% 2,340
London -3 2,588 £550 -4.35% 1,101
UK excluding London -1 2,089 £495 -1.08% 1,638
Work from Home -2 1,537 £525 -4.55% 1,160
North of England +10 761 £481 -0.77% 396
Yorkshire +2 426 £491 -1.75% 111
South East -5 401 £525 +5.00% 564
Scotland +2 305 £439 -9.44% 76
North West +6 262 £481 +1.32% 222
South West 0 251 £500 -11.11% 203
Midlands -15 231 £481 +6.94% 168
West Midlands -15 181 £477 +6.00% 86
East of England -13 126 £500 - 188
North East +10 85 £475 +8.57% 64
East Midlands -21 49 £495 +16.47% 81
Wales -5 28 £463 -7.50% 39
Northern Ireland +15 26 £408 -30.64% 30

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
1 280 (5.19%) Apache Spark
2 239 (4.43%) Apache Airflow
3 187 (3.46%) Apache
4 154 (2.85%) Confluence
5 49 (0.91%) Jupyter
6 46 (0.85%) SAS
7 44 (0.82%) SharePoint
8 21 (0.39%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.37%) nginx
10 18 (0.33%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.30%) ArcGIS
12 15 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 14 (0.26%) IIS
14 10 (0.19%) Tomcat
15 9 (0.17%) Appian
16 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
17 7 (0.13%) CICS
18 6 (0.11%) Camunda
18 6 (0.11%) CMS
18 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 117 (2.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
3 22 (0.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 22 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
4 19 (0.35%) MS Visio
5 10 (0.19%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.074%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.056%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.019%) SPSS
8 1 (0.019%) Weka
8 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.43%) Aladdin
2 19 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.093%) BambooHR
7 4 (0.074%) Oracle ERP
8 3 (0.056%) Bloomberg AIM
8 3 (0.056%) NetSuite
8 3 (0.056%) SimCorp Dimension
8 3 (0.056%) Teamcenter
9 2 (0.037%) Front Arena
9 2 (0.037%) IntelliMatch
9 2 (0.037%) Odoo
9 2 (0.037%) Oracle Applications
9 2 (0.037%) Oracle Assets
9 2 (0.037%) Orchestrade
9 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
9 2 (0.037%) Sage X3
Cloud Services
1 2,024 (37.50%) AWS
2 1,779 (32.96%) Azure
3 782 (14.49%) GCP
4 648 (12.01%) GitHub
5 518 (9.60%) Power Platform
6 470 (8.71%) Serverless
7 388 (7.19%) Amazon S3
8 383 (7.10%) Azure DevOps
9 353 (6.54%) GitHub Actions
10 346 (6.41%) AWS Lambda
11 256 (4.74%) Snowflake
12 254 (4.71%) Azure Data Factory
13 186 (3.45%) dbt
14 170 (3.15%) AWS CloudFormation
15 164 (3.04%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 160 (2.96%) OpenShift
17 158 (2.93%) Amazon EKS
18 151 (2.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 123 (2.28%) Amazon EC2
20 117 (2.17%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 209 (3.87%) Firewall
2 148 (2.74%) DNS
3 109 (2.02%) Network Security
4 99 (1.83%) WAN
5 95 (1.76%) BGP
6 89 (1.65%) TCP/IP
7 78 (1.45%) VPN
8 64 (1.19%) OSPF
9 59 (1.09%) HTTP
10 57 (1.06%) SAN
11 55 (1.02%) BIG-IP
12 49 (0.91%) SD-WAN
13 48 (0.89%) VXLAN
14 46 (0.85%) SSL
15 43 (0.80%) VLAN
16 37 (0.69%) Ethernet VPN
17 36 (0.67%) DHCP
17 36 (0.67%) LAN
17 36 (0.67%) SNMP
18 34 (0.63%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 453 (8.39%) Power BI
2 342 (6.34%) PostgreSQL
3 287 (5.32%) Data Warehouse
4 266 (4.93%) SQL Server
5 234 (4.34%) Data Lake
6 193 (3.58%) Tableau
7 189 (3.50%) Relational Database
8 169 (3.13%) NoSQL
9 163 (3.02%) Big Data
9 163 (3.02%) Metadata
10 137 (2.54%) Amazon Athena
11 135 (2.50%) Delta Lake
12 134 (2.48%) BigQuery
13 123 (2.28%) Amazon Redshift
14 121 (2.24%) MongoDB
15 98 (1.82%) DynamoDB
16 92 (1.70%) Amazon RDS
17 89 (1.65%) MySQL
18 73 (1.35%) Hadoop
19 72 (1.33%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 638 (11.82%) Git
2 484 (8.97%) Jenkins
3 376 (6.97%) GitLab
4 282 (5.23%) JIRA
5 79 (1.46%) Selenium
6 76 (1.41%) MLflow
7 63 (1.17%) Postman
8 36 (0.67%) Cucumber
8 36 (0.67%) JMeter
9 35 (0.65%) Cypress.io
10 33 (0.61%) Artifactory
11 32 (0.59%) SonarQube
12 30 (0.56%) Bitbucket
13 28 (0.52%) REST Assured
14 26 (0.48%) Sonatype Nexus
15 25 (0.46%) JUnit
16 24 (0.44%) Maven
17 22 (0.41%) Robot Framework
18 20 (0.37%) Gatling
19 19 (0.35%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,178 (21.83%) Social Skills
2 1,087 (20.14%) Finance
3 724 (13.41%) Analytical Skills
4 500 (9.26%) Public Sector
5 390 (7.23%) Banking
6 191 (3.54%) Front Office
7 138 (2.56%) Documentation Skills
8 123 (2.28%) Investment Banking
9 92 (1.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 75 (1.39%) Marketing
11 65 (1.20%) Retail
12 61 (1.13%) Pharmaceutical
13 55 (1.02%) Legal
14 49 (0.91%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 41 (0.76%) Publishing
17 39 (0.72%) Financial Institution
18 37 (0.69%) Military
19 35 (0.65%) Manufacturing
20 28 (0.52%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 980 (18.16%) Developer
2 838 (15.53%) Data Engineer
3 794 (14.71%) Senior
4 506 (9.38%) Python Developer
5 348 (6.45%) Lead
6 337 (6.24%) Python Engineer
7 332 (6.15%) Architect
8 293 (5.43%) DevOps Engineer
9 275 (5.10%) Analyst
10 270 (5.00%) Software Engineer
11 248 (4.60%) AWS Engineer
12 228 (4.22%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 210 (3.89%) Data Scientist
14 170 (3.15%) Senior Developer
15 164 (3.04%) Senior Data Engineer
16 155 (2.87%) Full-Stack Developer
17 153 (2.83%) Azure Engineer
18 152 (2.82%) Platform Engineer
19 144 (2.67%) Data Analyst
20 140 (2.59%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 421 (7.80%) REST
2 378 (7.00%) React
3 371 (6.87%) PySpark
4 322 (5.97%) Kafka
5 244 (4.52%) .NET
6 217 (4.02%) Node.js
7 210 (3.89%) Pandas
8 196 (3.63%) FastAPI
9 194 (3.59%) RESTful
10 177 (3.28%) JSON
11 166 (3.08%) PyTorch
12 140 (2.59%) Django
13 127 (2.35%) Flask
14 124 (2.30%) NumPy
15 117 (2.17%) LangChain
16 116 (2.15%) TensorFlow
17 115 (2.13%) AngularJS
18 111 (2.06%) scikit-learn
19 104 (1.93%) HTML
19 104 (1.93%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 635 (11.77%) Cloud Native
2 253 (4.69%) Distributed Systems
3 147 (2.72%) Algorithms
4 143 (2.65%) Data Centre
5 139 (2.58%) Product Ownership
6 137 (2.54%) AI Agents
7 136 (2.52%) Onboarding
8 121 (2.24%) Data Structures
9 119 (2.20%) Data Protection Act
10 113 (2.09%) Derivative
10 113 (2.09%) Legacy Systems
11 111 (2.06%) Management Information System
12 104 (1.93%) Equities
13 98 (1.82%) Fixed Income
14 95 (1.76%) Security Posture
15 92 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
16 88 (1.63%) Enterprise Software
17 71 (1.32%) Public Cloud
18 59 (1.09%) Greenfield Project
19 53 (0.98%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 623 (11.54%) Linux
2 304 (5.63%) Windows
3 221 (4.09%) Unix
4 116 (2.15%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 82 (1.52%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.76%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.56%) VMS
8 26 (0.48%) AIX
8 26 (0.48%) Solaris
9 24 (0.44%) Android
10 20 (0.37%) CentOS
11 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
12 16 (0.30%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.22%) zOS
14 8 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.13%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 5 (0.093%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.093%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.093%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,025 (37.52%) CI/CD
2 1,471 (27.26%) DevOps
3 1,285 (23.81%) AI
4 1,158 (21.46%) Agile
5 1,069 (19.81%) Analytics
6 948 (17.57%) Data Pipeline
7 946 (17.53%) Infrastructure as Code
8 928 (17.19%) Problem-Solving
9 839 (15.55%) Machine Learning
10 748 (13.86%) Data Engineering
11 720 (13.34%) Data Modelling
12 703 (13.03%) ETL
13 700 (12.97%) Containerisation
14 674 (12.49%) Software Engineering
15 598 (11.08%) Data Science
16 575 (10.65%) Observability
17 543 (10.06%) Test Automation
18 528 (9.78%) Business Intelligence
19 482 (8.93%) LLM
20 445 (8.25%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,785 (33.07%) SQL
2 784 (14.53%) Java
3 656 (12.15%) PowerShell
4 582 (10.78%) Bash
5 477 (8.84%) JavaScript
6 369 (6.84%) TypeScript
7 342 (6.34%) C#
8 197 (3.65%) Go
9 160 (2.96%) R
10 148 (2.74%) C++
11 127 (2.35%) Scala
12 108 (2.00%) Shell Script
13 78 (1.45%) Perl
14 77 (1.43%) Bicep
15 66 (1.22%) Ruby
16 64 (1.19%) PL/SQL
17 57 (1.06%) T-SQL
18 56 (1.04%) C
19 50 (0.93%) Groovy
20 47 (0.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,215 (22.51%) Security Cleared
2 984 (18.23%) SC Cleared
3 399 (7.39%) Degree
4 162 (3.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 154 (2.85%) DV Cleared
6 128 (2.37%) BPSS Clearance
7 111 (2.06%) Azure Certification
8 104 (1.93%) AWS Certification
9 92 (1.70%) CISSP
10 72 (1.33%) Cisco Certification
10 72 (1.33%) Master's Degree
11 55 (1.02%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 50 (0.93%) CCNP
13 40 (0.74%) CISM
14 34 (0.63%) ISTQB
15 33 (0.61%) PhD
16 28 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 27 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
18 22 (0.41%) CCIE
19 20 (0.37%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 540 (10.01%) Data Quality
2 242 (4.48%) QA
3 137 (2.54%) GDPR
4 105 (1.95%) NIST
5 104 (1.93%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 79 (1.46%) Accessibility
7 36 (0.67%) SLA
8 27 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.48%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.44%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
12 19 (0.35%) WCAG
13 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.24%) NCSC
15 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.20%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.17%) GRC
18 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
19 7 (0.13%) Disclosure Scotland
20 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 806 (14.93%) Docker
2 153 (2.83%) Active Directory
3 104 (1.93%) VMware Infrastructure
4 74 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.74%) vSphere
6 39 (0.72%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.61%) Firmware
8 31 (0.57%) Hyper-V
9 21 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.33%) NFS
11 17 (0.31%) KVM
12 13 (0.24%) Squid
13 11 (0.20%) HDFS
13 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
14 10 (0.19%) Ceph
14 10 (0.19%) SRDF
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
17 4 (0.074%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
17 4 (0.074%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,115 (20.66%) Terraform
2 954 (17.68%) Kubernetes
3 544 (10.08%) Ansible
4 324 (6.00%) Grafana
5 272 (5.04%) Prometheus
6 70 (1.30%) Puppet
7 58 (1.07%) Argo
8 52 (0.96%) Istio
9 47 (0.87%) vRealize
10 35 (0.65%) Kibana
10 35 (0.65%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.61%) vCenter Server
12 28 (0.52%) Single Sign-On
13 26 (0.48%) Control-M
13 26 (0.48%) Nessus
14 24 (0.44%) Nagios
14 24 (0.44%) ZABBIX
15 23 (0.43%) NetBackup
16 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
17 19 (0.35%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 580 (10.75%) Microsoft
2 577 (10.69%) Databricks
3 283 (5.24%) Google
4 252 (4.67%) Oracle
5 217 (4.02%) Splunk
6 176 (3.26%) VMware
7 133 (2.46%) Red Hat
8 127 (2.35%) OpenAI
9 121 (2.24%) Cisco
10 94 (1.74%) ServiceNow
11 87 (1.61%) CyberArk
12 82 (1.52%) F5
13 79 (1.46%) Palo Alto
14 78 (1.45%) BeyondTrust
15 77 (1.43%) Dynatrace
16 74 (1.37%) IBM
17 69 (1.28%) Informatica
18 55 (1.02%) Foundry
19 49 (0.91%) Arista
19 49 (0.91%) SAP