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

6 months to
3 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,248 3,888 4,050
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.70% 13.37% 9.17%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.04% 39.38% 31.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,572 2,723 2,857
10th Percentile £363 £384 £400
25th Percentile £420 £450 £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 £750 £812 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £484 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -3.30% -2.44% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 118 53 102
10th Percentile £27.77 £21.25 £20.87
25th Percentile £41.94 £25.09 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £42.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +29.41% -15.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile £74.26 £60.75 £66.63
90th Percentile £83.23 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £46.84
% change year-on-year +16.67% -3.93% -27.80%

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 12,786 9,872 12,895
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.50% 33.95% 29.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,513 6,627 9,117
10th Percentile £353 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £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 £719 £758 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £477 £479 £488
% change year-on-year -0.42% -1.74% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 529 244 480
10th Percentile £41.52 £22.30 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £32.88 £46.23
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.56 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £73.82
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.56% +3.90% -1.44%

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 3 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 3 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 3 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 4,416 £520 -7.56% 2,695
London -3 2,491 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London -1 2,008 £484 -3.30% 1,990
Work from Home +1 1,542 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +10 684 £481 -3.75% 475
South East -4 406 £500 -5.44% 576
Yorkshire -1 382 £480 -4.00% 164
Midlands +1 288 £496 +6.26% 255
North West +5 257 £490 -1.16% 230
Scotland +1 248 £425 -10.05% 104
South West -2 247 £525 -4.55% 280
West Midlands -1 229 £500 +2.04% 130
East of England -2 132 £500 - 219
East Midlands -12 58 £450 +3.21% 125
North East +12 54 £500 +1.27% 83
Wales -14 28 £475 -10.80% 78
Northern Ireland +9 25 £550 +10.00% 33

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
1 268 (5.11%) Apache Spark
2 208 (3.96%) Apache Airflow
3 163 (3.11%) Apache
4 162 (3.09%) Confluence
5 67 (1.28%) SAS
6 60 (1.14%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.53%) Jupyter
8 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.48%) nginx
9 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
10 19 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 15 (0.29%) Appian
12 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
13 11 (0.21%) Camunda
14 10 (0.19%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) CMS
16 4 (0.076%) CICS
16 4 (0.076%) Tomcat
17 3 (0.057%) IIS
17 3 (0.057%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 136 (2.59%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 22 (0.42%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.11%) Weka
7 5 (0.095%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
5 4 (0.076%) SAP IBP
6 3 (0.057%) Actimize
6 3 (0.057%) BambooHR
6 3 (0.057%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.038%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
7 2 (0.038%) Global One
7 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.038%) Odoo
7 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 1 (0.019%) Loan IQ
8 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 2,025 (38.59%) AWS
2 1,809 (34.47%) Azure
3 795 (15.15%) GCP
4 696 (13.26%) GitHub
5 521 (9.93%) Power Platform
6 519 (9.89%) Serverless
7 395 (7.53%) Azure DevOps
8 366 (6.97%) Amazon S3
9 355 (6.76%) AWS Lambda
10 354 (6.75%) GitHub Actions
11 277 (5.28%) Azure Data Factory
12 247 (4.71%) AWS CloudFormation
13 244 (4.65%) Snowflake
14 186 (3.54%) Amazon EKS
15 182 (3.47%) OpenShift
16 166 (3.16%) Amazon ECS
17 164 (3.13%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 156 (2.97%) dbt
19 149 (2.84%) Amazon EC2
20 146 (2.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 200 (3.81%) Firewall
2 144 (2.74%) DNS
3 107 (2.04%) Network Security
4 93 (1.77%) TCP/IP
5 79 (1.51%) VPN
6 75 (1.43%) BGP
7 62 (1.18%) WAN
8 61 (1.16%) HTTP
9 44 (0.84%) OSPF
10 43 (0.82%) SAN
11 42 (0.80%) MPLS
12 35 (0.67%) VLAN
13 34 (0.65%) DHCP
13 34 (0.65%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) SNMP
15 31 (0.59%) Wireshark
16 29 (0.55%) SSL
17 26 (0.50%) SD-WAN
18 24 (0.46%) VXLAN
19 22 (0.42%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 433 (8.25%) Power BI
2 358 (6.82%) PostgreSQL
3 298 (5.68%) Data Warehouse
4 235 (4.48%) Data Lake
5 205 (3.91%) NoSQL
6 199 (3.79%) SQL Server
7 178 (3.39%) Relational Database
8 174 (3.32%) Tableau
9 152 (2.90%) Metadata
10 146 (2.78%) Big Data
11 130 (2.48%) Delta Lake
12 123 (2.34%) BigQuery
13 119 (2.27%) Amazon RDS
14 111 (2.12%) MySQL
15 108 (2.06%) Amazon Redshift
16 106 (2.02%) Amazon Athena
17 94 (1.79%) MongoDB
18 91 (1.73%) Azure SQL Database
19 86 (1.64%) DynamoDB
20 75 (1.43%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 672 (12.80%) Git
2 533 (10.16%) Jenkins
3 407 (7.76%) GitLab
4 283 (5.39%) JIRA
5 96 (1.83%) Selenium
6 90 (1.71%) MLflow
7 54 (1.03%) Postman
8 45 (0.86%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.82%) Cucumber
10 41 (0.78%) JUnit
11 38 (0.72%) JMeter
12 34 (0.65%) Sonatype Nexus
13 28 (0.53%) Cypress.io
13 28 (0.53%) SpecFlow
14 26 (0.50%) Artifactory
14 26 (0.50%) Visual Studio
15 23 (0.44%) SonarQube
16 22 (0.42%) Maven
16 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
17 21 (0.40%) Gatling
General
1 1,227 (23.38%) Social Skills
2 995 (18.96%) Finance
3 710 (13.53%) Analytical Skills
4 500 (9.53%) Public Sector
5 405 (7.72%) Banking
6 167 (3.18%) Front Office
7 129 (2.46%) Documentation Skills
8 87 (1.66%) Investment Banking
9 67 (1.28%) Marketing
10 63 (1.20%) Retail
11 61 (1.16%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 59 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
13 58 (1.11%) Legal
14 56 (1.07%) Telecoms
15 53 (1.01%) Financial Institution
16 52 (0.99%) Influencing Skills
17 41 (0.78%) Manufacturing
18 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
19 29 (0.55%) Publishing
20 28 (0.53%) Military
Job Titles
1 979 (18.65%) Developer
2 757 (14.42%) Data Engineer
3 742 (14.14%) Senior
4 462 (8.80%) Python Developer
5 356 (6.78%) Architect
6 338 (6.44%) Lead
7 297 (5.66%) Python Engineer
8 284 (5.41%) DevOps Engineer
9 271 (5.16%) Analyst
10 262 (4.99%) Software Engineer
11 254 (4.84%) AWS Engineer
12 239 (4.55%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 207 (3.94%) Data Scientist
14 193 (3.68%) Platform Engineer
15 163 (3.11%) Azure Engineer
16 161 (3.07%) Senior Developer
17 145 (2.76%) Senior Data Engineer
18 140 (2.67%) Data Analyst
19 138 (2.63%) Full-Stack Developer
20 127 (2.42%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 456 (8.69%) REST
2 364 (6.94%) React
3 340 (6.48%) Kafka
4 339 (6.46%) PySpark
5 283 (5.39%) Node.js
6 237 (4.52%) Pandas
7 227 (4.33%) .NET
8 195 (3.72%) PyTorch
9 191 (3.64%) RESTful
10 189 (3.60%) FastAPI
11 161 (3.07%) NumPy
12 156 (2.97%) TensorFlow
13 151 (2.88%) JSON
14 145 (2.76%) scikit-learn
15 135 (2.57%) Flask
16 128 (2.44%) AngularJS
17 122 (2.32%) Django
17 122 (2.32%) LangChain
18 118 (2.25%) pytest
19 107 (2.04%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 521 (9.93%) Cloud Native
2 221 (4.21%) Distributed Systems
3 189 (3.60%) Algorithms
4 145 (2.76%) Product Ownership
5 116 (2.21%) Equities
6 115 (2.19%) Fixed Income
7 112 (2.13%) AI Agents
7 112 (2.13%) Data Protection Act
8 111 (2.12%) Data Structures
9 107 (2.04%) Derivative
10 96 (1.83%) Data Centre
10 96 (1.83%) Hybrid Cloud
11 92 (1.75%) Legacy Systems
12 91 (1.73%) Enterprise Software
13 90 (1.71%) Onboarding
14 88 (1.68%) Public Cloud
15 82 (1.56%) Security Posture
16 79 (1.51%) Management Information System
17 57 (1.09%) Virtual Team
18 55 (1.05%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 668 (12.73%) Linux
2 306 (5.83%) Windows
3 181 (3.45%) Unix
4 105 (2.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.26%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.72%) VMS
7 33 (0.63%) Ubuntu
8 30 (0.57%) Android
9 21 (0.40%) AIX
10 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
11 18 (0.34%) Solaris
12 17 (0.32%) CentOS
13 16 (0.30%) Apple iOS
14 8 (0.15%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.13%) Windows 7
16 6 (0.11%) zOS
17 5 (0.095%) Kali Linux
17 5 (0.095%) Rocky
18 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,930 (36.78%) CI/CD
2 1,473 (28.07%) DevOps
3 1,218 (23.21%) Agile
4 1,150 (21.91%) AI
5 1,054 (20.08%) Analytics
6 1,025 (19.53%) Problem-Solving
7 921 (17.55%) Infrastructure as Code
8 864 (16.46%) Data Pipeline
9 834 (15.89%) Machine Learning
10 773 (14.73%) Containerisation
11 719 (13.70%) Data Engineering
12 694 (13.22%) Data Modelling
13 688 (13.11%) ETL
14 616 (11.74%) Data Science
15 602 (11.47%) Software Engineering
16 590 (11.24%) Test Automation
17 514 (9.79%) Observability
18 511 (9.74%) Business Intelligence
19 427 (8.14%) LLM
20 402 (7.66%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,678 (31.97%) SQL
2 747 (14.23%) Java
3 674 (12.84%) PowerShell
4 594 (11.32%) Bash
5 495 (9.43%) JavaScript
6 353 (6.73%) C#
7 352 (6.71%) TypeScript
8 222 (4.23%) Go
9 165 (3.14%) R
10 157 (2.99%) C++
11 125 (2.38%) Scala
12 108 (2.06%) Shell Script
13 103 (1.96%) Ruby
14 95 (1.81%) Perl
15 80 (1.52%) Bicep
16 54 (1.03%) Kusto Query Language
17 49 (0.93%) C
17 49 (0.93%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 46 (0.88%) T-SQL
19 43 (0.82%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,228 (23.40%) Security Cleared
2 988 (18.83%) SC Cleared
3 425 (8.10%) Degree
4 198 (3.77%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.82%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.48%) BPSS Clearance
7 113 (2.15%) Master's Degree
8 112 (2.13%) AWS Certification
9 106 (2.02%) Azure Certification
10 95 (1.81%) CISSP
11 74 (1.41%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.11%) CCNP
13 57 (1.09%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 49 (0.93%) CISM
15 47 (0.90%) PhD
16 36 (0.69%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 35 (0.67%) ISTQB
17 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
18 28 (0.53%) CEH
19 26 (0.50%) CCNA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 511 (9.74%) Data Quality
2 215 (4.10%) QA
3 177 (3.37%) GDPR
4 110 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 100 (1.91%) NIST
6 80 (1.52%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 34 (0.65%) SLA
9 26 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 25 (0.48%) HIPAA
11 22 (0.42%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
13 17 (0.32%) WCAG
14 16 (0.30%) SOC 2
15 12 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
16 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 11 (0.21%) PMO
17 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
17 10 (0.19%) MiFID
18 8 (0.15%) GRC
System Software
1 908 (17.30%) Docker
2 162 (3.09%) Active Directory
3 116 (2.21%) VMware Infrastructure
4 59 (1.12%) Virtual Machines
5 58 (1.11%) vSphere
6 53 (1.01%) VMware NSX
7 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.57%) Firmware
9 16 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 10 (0.19%) HDFS
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
12 8 (0.15%) Lustre
12 8 (0.15%) SRDF
13 7 (0.13%) GPFS
13 7 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
14 6 (0.11%) Postfix
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.095%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 1,127 (21.47%) Terraform
2 1,016 (19.36%) Kubernetes
3 520 (9.91%) Ansible
4 341 (6.50%) Grafana
5 292 (5.56%) Prometheus
6 91 (1.73%) Argo
7 73 (1.39%) Puppet
8 51 (0.97%) Istio
9 50 (0.95%) vRealize
10 39 (0.74%) vCenter Server
11 37 (0.71%) Kibana
12 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
13 26 (0.50%) Nessus
14 23 (0.44%) NetBackup
15 22 (0.42%) Nagios
15 22 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
16 21 (0.40%) Rancher
17 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
18 19 (0.36%) Control-M
18 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 627 (11.95%) Microsoft
2 574 (10.94%) Databricks
3 294 (5.60%) Google
4 228 (4.34%) Splunk
5 217 (4.13%) Oracle
6 213 (4.06%) VMware
7 145 (2.76%) Red Hat
8 124 (2.36%) Cisco
9 120 (2.29%) OpenAI
10 99 (1.89%) ServiceNow
11 83 (1.58%) CyberArk
12 70 (1.33%) BeyondTrust
13 69 (1.31%) Foundry
14 65 (1.24%) Informatica
15 60 (1.14%) F5
16 58 (1.11%) IBM
17 55 (1.05%) Palo Alto
18 48 (0.91%) Dynatrace
19 46 (0.88%) SAP
20 41 (0.78%) Atlassian