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

6 months to
28 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,130 4,017 4,160
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.32% 13.13% 9.35%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.22% 38.73% 31.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,482 2,700 2,928
10th Percentile £360 £377 £400
25th Percentile £415 £457 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £500 £525
% change year-on-year -2.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 104 55 112
10th Percentile £28.52 £20.12 £21.76
25th Percentile £41.94 £23.80 £37.88
Median hourly rate £54.25 £45.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +20.56% -21.74% -11.54%
75th Percentile £70.18 £65.50 £69.72
90th Percentile £79.85 £79.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £50.00
% change year-on-year +13.80% -10.00% -23.08%

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 12,446 10,373 13,080
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.88% 33.90% 29.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,302 6,704 9,236
10th Percentile £353 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -5.36%
75th Percentile £606 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £485 £500
% change year-on-year -0.93% -3.00% -1.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 481 241 503
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.25 £31.40
25th Percentile £53.75 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.76%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.31
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.31
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.37 £62.25
% change year-on-year +2.57% +1.80% -4.23%

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 28 February 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 28 February 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 28 February 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 4,287 £522 -9.17% 3,765
London 0 2,434 £550 -8.33% 1,074
UK excluding London -3 1,992 £490 -2.00% 3,347
Work from Home -1 1,574 £525 -4.55% 1,468
North of England +12 673 £481 -3.75% 660
South East -3 419 £500 -6.10% 1,113
Yorkshire +3 359 £488 -9.93% 261
Scotland +2 294 £440 -7.37% 191
Midlands 0 281 £500 +4.82% 392
North West +11 274 £475 -3.06% 290
West Midlands +1 232 £500 - 164
South West -7 200 £550 -8.33% 423
East of England +3 135 £525 +6.06% 444
East Midlands -12 48 £444 +10.94% 220
North East +5 46 £475 -9.52% 113
Wales -15 31 £450 -10.00% 142
Northern Ireland +4 28 £613 +16.67% 59

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
1 251 (4.89%) Apache Spark
2 196 (3.82%) Apache Airflow
3 158 (3.08%) Confluence
4 147 (2.87%) Apache
5 71 (1.38%) SAS
6 59 (1.15%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
8 27 (0.53%) OpenStack
9 26 (0.51%) nginx
10 23 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
11 22 (0.43%) Jupyter
12 20 (0.39%) Appian
13 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
14 9 (0.18%) Camunda
15 6 (0.12%) CMS
16 5 (0.097%) Apache Superset
16 5 (0.097%) Tomcat
17 4 (0.078%) Oracle Application Server
17 4 (0.078%) Traefik
18 3 (0.058%) CICS
Applications
1 125 (2.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 13 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.039%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.039%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 19 (0.37%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.078%) Bloomberg AIM
5 3 (0.058%) Actimize
5 3 (0.058%) IntelliMatch
5 3 (0.058%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
6 2 (0.039%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.039%) Oracle EBS
6 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
6 2 (0.039%) Shopify
7 1 (0.019%) NetSuite
7 1 (0.019%) Oracle Applications
7 1 (0.019%) RMDS
7 1 (0.019%) Salesforce CRM
7 1 (0.019%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.019%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,028 (39.53%) AWS
2 1,762 (34.35%) Azure
3 813 (15.85%) GCP
4 665 (12.96%) GitHub
5 543 (10.58%) Serverless
6 478 (9.32%) Power Platform
7 372 (7.25%) Amazon S3
8 365 (7.12%) Azure DevOps
9 356 (6.94%) AWS Lambda
10 335 (6.53%) GitHub Actions
11 259 (5.05%) AWS CloudFormation
12 254 (4.95%) Azure Data Factory
12 254 (4.95%) Snowflake
13 198 (3.86%) Amazon EKS
14 180 (3.51%) Amazon ECS
15 172 (3.35%) Amazon EC2
16 171 (3.33%) OpenShift
17 165 (3.22%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 157 (3.06%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 141 (2.75%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 225 (4.39%) Firewall
2 151 (2.94%) DNS
3 116 (2.26%) TCP/IP
4 114 (2.22%) Network Security
5 82 (1.60%) VPN
6 65 (1.27%) HTTP
7 62 (1.21%) BGP
8 53 (1.03%) WAN
9 49 (0.96%) SSL
10 40 (0.78%) Wireshark
11 38 (0.74%) MPLS
12 35 (0.68%) LAN
12 35 (0.68%) OSPF
12 35 (0.68%) SAN
13 31 (0.60%) DHCP
14 28 (0.55%) SD-WAN
15 27 (0.53%) VLAN
15 27 (0.53%) Wireless
16 22 (0.43%) BIG-IP
17 21 (0.41%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 396 (7.72%) Power BI
2 395 (7.70%) PostgreSQL
3 314 (6.12%) Data Warehouse
4 244 (4.76%) NoSQL
5 233 (4.54%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.90%) Relational Database
7 191 (3.72%) SQL Server
8 165 (3.22%) Big Data
9 155 (3.02%) Tableau
10 133 (2.59%) Amazon RDS
11 127 (2.48%) Metadata
12 123 (2.40%) BigQuery
13 122 (2.38%) MySQL
14 108 (2.11%) Delta Lake
15 104 (2.03%) Amazon Redshift
16 101 (1.97%) MongoDB
17 97 (1.89%) Amazon Athena
18 89 (1.73%) Hadoop
19 87 (1.70%) Azure SQL Database
20 83 (1.62%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 647 (12.61%) Git
2 554 (10.80%) Jenkins
3 441 (8.60%) GitLab
4 299 (5.83%) JIRA
5 94 (1.83%) MLflow
6 86 (1.68%) Selenium
7 51 (0.99%) Bitbucket
8 49 (0.96%) Postman
9 46 (0.90%) Cucumber
10 40 (0.78%) Sonatype Nexus
11 36 (0.70%) JUnit
12 34 (0.66%) JMeter
13 30 (0.58%) SpecFlow
14 27 (0.53%) Liquibase
15 25 (0.49%) CircleCI
15 25 (0.49%) Cypress.io
15 25 (0.49%) Visual Studio
16 24 (0.47%) Maven
17 22 (0.43%) Artifactory
17 22 (0.43%) SonarQube
General
1 1,302 (25.38%) Social Skills
2 1,012 (19.73%) Finance
3 710 (13.84%) Analytical Skills
4 479 (9.34%) Public Sector
5 426 (8.30%) Banking
6 171 (3.33%) Front Office
7 128 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
8 104 (2.03%) Investment Banking
9 70 (1.36%) Retail
10 68 (1.33%) Financial Institution
11 66 (1.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 65 (1.27%) Marketing
13 61 (1.19%) Pharmaceutical
14 52 (1.01%) Telecoms
15 47 (0.92%) Legal
16 43 (0.84%) Manufacturing
17 42 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
18 36 (0.70%) Presentation Skills
19 33 (0.64%) Military
20 25 (0.49%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 934 (18.21%) Developer
2 720 (14.04%) Senior
3 718 (14.00%) Data Engineer
4 407 (7.93%) Python Developer
5 326 (6.35%) Architect
6 324 (6.32%) Lead
7 315 (6.14%) DevOps Engineer
8 293 (5.71%) Analyst
9 292 (5.69%) Python Engineer
10 263 (5.13%) AWS Engineer
11 254 (4.95%) Software Engineer
12 247 (4.81%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 205 (4.00%) Data Scientist
14 175 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
15 154 (3.00%) Senior Developer
16 148 (2.88%) Azure Engineer
17 147 (2.87%) Data Analyst
18 140 (2.73%) Full-Stack Developer
19 138 (2.69%) Senior Data Engineer
20 134 (2.61%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 445 (8.67%) REST
2 361 (7.04%) React
3 322 (6.28%) PySpark
4 319 (6.22%) Kafka
5 286 (5.58%) Node.js
6 230 (4.48%) Pandas
7 224 (4.37%) FastAPI
8 223 (4.35%) PyTorch
9 218 (4.25%) RESTful
10 212 (4.13%) .NET
11 180 (3.51%) TensorFlow
12 167 (3.26%) NumPy
13 146 (2.85%) scikit-learn
14 140 (2.73%) AngularJS
15 135 (2.63%) Flask
16 132 (2.57%) LangChain
17 119 (2.32%) JSON
18 117 (2.28%) pytest
19 115 (2.24%) Django
20 108 (2.11%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 497 (9.69%) Cloud Native
2 206 (4.02%) Algorithms
3 205 (4.00%) Distributed Systems
4 139 (2.71%) Product Ownership
5 125 (2.44%) Data Protection Act
6 120 (2.34%) Equities
7 110 (2.14%) Data Structures
8 104 (2.03%) Onboarding
9 103 (2.01%) Fixed Income
10 97 (1.89%) AI Agents
10 97 (1.89%) Derivative
11 94 (1.83%) Security Posture
12 93 (1.81%) Enterprise Software
13 92 (1.79%) Public Cloud
14 91 (1.77%) Legacy Systems
15 89 (1.73%) Hybrid Cloud
16 83 (1.62%) Management Information System
17 76 (1.48%) Data Centre
18 62 (1.21%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
19 57 (1.11%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 706 (13.76%) Linux
2 326 (6.35%) Windows
3 205 (4.00%) Unix
4 99 (1.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 65 (1.27%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.70%) Android
6 36 (0.70%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.64%) VMS
8 27 (0.53%) CentOS
9 25 (0.49%) Mac OS
10 24 (0.47%) Solaris
11 21 (0.41%) Apple iOS
12 10 (0.19%) Windows 7
13 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
14 7 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
15 5 (0.097%) Debian
15 5 (0.097%) Embedded Linux
15 5 (0.097%) zOS
16 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.078%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,877 (36.59%) CI/CD
2 1,456 (28.38%) DevOps
3 1,235 (24.07%) Agile
4 1,103 (21.50%) AI
5 1,083 (21.11%) Problem-Solving
6 983 (19.16%) Analytics
7 923 (17.99%) Infrastructure as Code
8 848 (16.53%) Machine Learning
9 825 (16.08%) Data Pipeline
10 775 (15.11%) Containerisation
11 685 (13.35%) Data Engineering
12 672 (13.10%) ETL
13 654 (12.75%) Data Modelling
14 630 (12.28%) Data Science
15 588 (11.46%) Software Engineering
16 584 (11.38%) Test Automation
17 487 (9.49%) Observability
18 469 (9.14%) Business Intelligence
19 445 (8.67%) LLM
20 374 (7.29%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,607 (31.33%) SQL
2 727 (14.17%) Java
3 677 (13.20%) PowerShell
4 620 (12.09%) Bash
5 527 (10.27%) JavaScript
6 346 (6.74%) TypeScript
7 329 (6.41%) C#
8 243 (4.74%) Go
9 180 (3.51%) C++
10 157 (3.06%) R
11 121 (2.36%) Shell Script
12 117 (2.28%) Perl
13 114 (2.22%) Scala
14 92 (1.79%) Ruby
15 65 (1.27%) Bicep
16 62 (1.21%) Kusto Query Language
17 50 (0.97%) C
18 48 (0.94%) VBA
19 42 (0.82%) T-SQL
20 41 (0.80%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,166 (22.73%) Security Cleared
2 934 (18.21%) SC Cleared
3 457 (8.91%) Degree
4 220 (4.29%) Computer Science Degree
5 144 (2.81%) DV Cleared
6 143 (2.79%) AWS Certification
7 128 (2.50%) Master's Degree
8 113 (2.20%) BPSS Clearance
9 101 (1.97%) Azure Certification
10 93 (1.81%) CISSP
11 75 (1.46%) Cisco Certification
12 63 (1.23%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 58 (1.13%) CCNP
14 47 (0.92%) PhD
15 44 (0.86%) CISM
16 40 (0.78%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
18 31 (0.60%) CEH
18 31 (0.60%) Microsoft Certified Professional
19 29 (0.57%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 470 (9.16%) Data Quality
2 206 (4.02%) QA
3 179 (3.49%) GDPR
4 105 (2.05%) NIST
5 103 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 77 (1.50%) Accessibility
7 32 (0.62%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.58%) HIPAA
9 28 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 28 (0.55%) SLA
10 23 (0.45%) NCSC
11 17 (0.33%) SOC 2
12 15 (0.29%) Actionable Recommendations
13 12 (0.23%) EU AI Act
13 12 (0.23%) WCAG
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
15 10 (0.19%) MiFID
15 10 (0.19%) PMO
15 10 (0.19%) PSD2
16 9 (0.18%) EMIR
System Software
1 968 (18.87%) Docker
2 177 (3.45%) Active Directory
3 117 (2.28%) VMware Infrastructure
4 51 (0.99%) Virtual Machines
4 51 (0.99%) vSphere
5 48 (0.94%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.57%) Hyper-V
7 21 (0.41%) Firmware
8 16 (0.31%) KVM
8 16 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
9 13 (0.25%) HDFS
10 12 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 10 (0.19%) Lustre
12 9 (0.18%) GPFS
13 8 (0.16%) SRDF
13 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
14 7 (0.14%) Postfix
15 6 (0.12%) NFS
15 6 (0.12%) Squid
16 5 (0.097%) NDS
Systems Management
1 1,136 (22.14%) Terraform
2 1,076 (20.97%) Kubernetes
3 558 (10.88%) Ansible
4 360 (7.02%) Grafana
5 317 (6.18%) Prometheus
6 95 (1.85%) Argo
7 78 (1.52%) Puppet
8 53 (1.03%) vRealize
9 49 (0.96%) Istio
10 47 (0.92%) Kibana
11 39 (0.76%) Nessus
12 34 (0.66%) Progress Chef
13 31 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
14 29 (0.57%) vCenter Server
15 27 (0.53%) Control-M
16 25 (0.49%) NetBackup
17 24 (0.47%) Microsoft Intune
18 23 (0.45%) IBM Guardium
19 18 (0.35%) ITRS Geneos
19 18 (0.35%) Rancher
Vendors
1 625 (12.18%) Microsoft
2 515 (10.04%) Databricks
3 305 (5.95%) Google
4 243 (4.74%) Splunk
5 229 (4.46%) Oracle
6 226 (4.41%) VMware
7 151 (2.94%) Red Hat
8 120 (2.34%) Cisco
9 116 (2.26%) OpenAI
10 112 (2.18%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.64%) Foundry
12 83 (1.62%) CyberArk
13 73 (1.42%) F5
14 72 (1.40%) Palo Alto
15 66 (1.29%) BeyondTrust
16 59 (1.15%) Informatica
17 47 (0.92%) SAP
18 45 (0.88%) IBM
19 43 (0.84%) Dynatrace
20 40 (0.78%) Atlassian