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

6 months to
26 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,276 3,799 4,037
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.87% 13.28% 9.47%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.60% 38.99% 31.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,479 2,655 2,905
10th Percentile £363 £380 £388
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -4.91% -1.79% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £669 £688
90th Percentile £739 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -1.60% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 51 106
10th Percentile £30.00 £23.00 £21.01
25th Percentile £43.81 £28.18 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.00 £40.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.00% -33.33% -7.25%
75th Percentile £69.36 £54.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £65.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.25 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.11% -30.77% +13.04%

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 12,994 9,744 12,803
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.77% 34.07% 30.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,493 6,629 9,124
10th Percentile £356 £356 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £518 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.38% -1.43% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £630 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.32% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 563 215 504
10th Percentile £36.30 £26.39 £32.25
25th Percentile £53.75 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -8.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.59% +0.40% -

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 26 May 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 26 May 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 26 May 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 4,393 £525 -4.55% 2,838
London -3 2,523 £550 -5.98% 1,412
UK excluding London -1 2,029 £492 -1.60% 1,865
Work from Home -1 1,488 £530 -3.64% 1,056
North of England +7 713 £482 -1.63% 478
Yorkshire +2 404 £482 -3.60% 134
South East -7 395 £520 +3.48% 538
Scotland +2 296 £430 -9.47% 99
South West +1 251 £500 -9.09% 233
North West +2 246 £500 +5.26% 269
Midlands -15 237 £491 +9.17% 234
West Midlands -11 184 £482 +7.11% 106
East of England -9 130 £500 - 206
North East +5 73 £475 +5.56% 79
East Midlands -16 52 £497 +16.82% 127
Northern Ireland +15 25 £463 -21.28% 40
Wales -13 23 £450 -5.26% 56

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
1 279 (5.29%) Apache Spark
2 221 (4.19%) Apache Airflow
3 178 (3.37%) Apache
4 144 (2.73%) Confluence
5 47 (0.89%) SAS
6 45 (0.85%) SharePoint
7 40 (0.76%) Jupyter
8 23 (0.44%) nginx
9 21 (0.40%) OpenStack
10 16 (0.30%) ArcGIS
10 16 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
10 16 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
11 13 (0.25%) IIS
12 11 (0.21%) Appian
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.13%) Camunda
14 7 (0.13%) CICS
14 7 (0.13%) CMS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 121 (2.29%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
5 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.019%) SPSS
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
9 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 18 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.057%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.057%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.057%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.038%) Dynamics CRM
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%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 1,970 (37.34%) AWS
2 1,753 (33.23%) Azure
3 750 (14.22%) GCP
4 642 (12.17%) GitHub
5 517 (9.80%) Power Platform
6 449 (8.51%) Serverless
7 375 (7.11%) Azure DevOps
8 359 (6.80%) Amazon S3
9 338 (6.41%) GitHub Actions
10 317 (6.01%) AWS Lambda
11 261 (4.95%) Azure Data Factory
12 245 (4.64%) Snowflake
13 179 (3.39%) AWS CloudFormation
14 168 (3.18%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 167 (3.17%) OpenShift
16 164 (3.11%) dbt
17 153 (2.90%) Amazon EKS
18 132 (2.50%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 124 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
20 116 (2.20%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 191 (3.62%) Firewall
2 139 (2.63%) DNS
3 114 (2.16%) Network Security
4 89 (1.69%) BGP
5 87 (1.65%) WAN
6 85 (1.61%) TCP/IP
7 75 (1.42%) VPN
8 61 (1.16%) HTTP
8 61 (1.16%) OSPF
9 55 (1.04%) SAN
10 48 (0.91%) BIG-IP
11 46 (0.87%) VXLAN
12 41 (0.78%) SD-WAN
13 39 (0.74%) SSL
14 36 (0.68%) LAN
14 36 (0.68%) SNMP
14 36 (0.68%) VLAN
15 35 (0.66%) Ethernet VPN
16 33 (0.63%) MPLS
17 32 (0.61%) DHCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 450 (8.53%) Power BI
2 338 (6.41%) PostgreSQL
3 276 (5.23%) Data Warehouse
4 257 (4.87%) SQL Server
5 233 (4.42%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.79%) Tableau
7 187 (3.54%) Relational Database
8 172 (3.26%) NoSQL
9 162 (3.07%) Metadata
10 160 (3.03%) Big Data
11 140 (2.65%) Delta Lake
12 134 (2.54%) BigQuery
13 120 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
14 113 (2.14%) MongoDB
15 109 (2.07%) Amazon Redshift
16 91 (1.72%) MySQL
17 89 (1.69%) DynamoDB
18 81 (1.54%) Amazon RDS
19 78 (1.48%) Azure SQL Database
20 76 (1.44%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 635 (12.04%) Git
2 477 (9.04%) Jenkins
3 365 (6.92%) GitLab
4 261 (4.95%) JIRA
5 82 (1.55%) MLflow
6 78 (1.48%) Selenium
7 63 (1.19%) Postman
8 39 (0.74%) Cucumber
9 36 (0.68%) JMeter
10 32 (0.61%) Cypress.io
11 30 (0.57%) Artifactory
12 29 (0.55%) SonarQube
13 28 (0.53%) Bitbucket
14 26 (0.49%) JUnit
14 26 (0.49%) Sonatype Nexus
15 25 (0.47%) REST Assured
16 24 (0.45%) Robot Framework
17 23 (0.44%) Maven
18 21 (0.40%) Gatling
19 18 (0.34%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,128 (21.38%) Social Skills
2 1,037 (19.66%) Finance
3 695 (13.17%) Analytical Skills
4 471 (8.93%) Public Sector
5 377 (7.15%) Banking
6 187 (3.54%) Front Office
7 126 (2.39%) Documentation Skills
8 122 (2.31%) Investment Banking
9 79 (1.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 69 (1.31%) Marketing
11 58 (1.10%) Retail
12 57 (1.08%) Pharmaceutical
13 55 (1.04%) Legal
14 47 (0.89%) Telecoms
15 43 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 37 (0.70%) Financial Institution
16 37 (0.70%) Publishing
17 34 (0.64%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.64%) Military
18 28 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 976 (18.50%) Developer
2 812 (15.39%) Data Engineer
3 776 (14.71%) Senior
4 502 (9.51%) Python Developer
5 342 (6.48%) Lead
6 327 (6.20%) Python Engineer
7 324 (6.14%) Architect
8 281 (5.33%) DevOps Engineer
9 277 (5.25%) Analyst
10 269 (5.10%) Software Engineer
11 231 (4.38%) AWS Engineer
12 228 (4.32%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 211 (4.00%) Data Scientist
14 168 (3.18%) Senior Developer
15 161 (3.05%) Azure Engineer
16 159 (3.01%) Senior Data Engineer
17 153 (2.90%) Platform Engineer
18 148 (2.81%) Full-Stack Developer
19 147 (2.79%) Data Analyst
20 131 (2.48%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 404 (7.66%) REST
2 371 (7.03%) React
3 360 (6.82%) PySpark
4 322 (6.10%) Kafka
5 232 (4.40%) .NET
6 227 (4.30%) Node.js
7 216 (4.09%) Pandas
8 189 (3.58%) FastAPI
9 182 (3.45%) RESTful
10 177 (3.35%) JSON
11 176 (3.34%) PyTorch
12 133 (2.52%) Django
13 128 (2.43%) Flask
13 128 (2.43%) NumPy
14 123 (2.33%) TensorFlow
15 118 (2.24%) LangChain
15 118 (2.24%) scikit-learn
16 114 (2.16%) AngularJS
17 102 (1.93%) YAML
18 101 (1.91%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 563 (10.67%) Cloud Native
2 236 (4.47%) Distributed Systems
3 153 (2.90%) Algorithms
4 139 (2.63%) Product Ownership
5 130 (2.46%) Data Centre
6 126 (2.39%) AI Agents
7 123 (2.33%) Onboarding
8 121 (2.29%) Data Protection Act
8 121 (2.29%) Data Structures
9 116 (2.20%) Derivative
10 106 (2.01%) Equities
11 104 (1.97%) Legacy Systems
12 101 (1.91%) Management Information System
13 100 (1.90%) Fixed Income
14 92 (1.74%) Hybrid Cloud
15 90 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
16 83 (1.57%) Security Posture
17 65 (1.23%) Public Cloud
18 53 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
19 47 (0.89%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 624 (11.83%) Linux
2 296 (5.61%) Windows
3 221 (4.19%) Unix
4 98 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 73 (1.38%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.74%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.61%) VMS
8 26 (0.49%) AIX
9 23 (0.44%) Android
9 23 (0.44%) Solaris
10 19 (0.36%) CentOS
10 19 (0.36%) Mac OS
11 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
12 12 (0.23%) zOS
13 8 (0.15%) Debian
13 8 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.13%) Rocky
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.095%) Amazon Linux
17 4 (0.076%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,945 (36.87%) CI/CD
2 1,406 (26.65%) DevOps
3 1,221 (23.14%) AI
4 1,133 (21.47%) Agile
5 1,032 (19.56%) Analytics
6 916 (17.36%) Problem-Solving
7 911 (17.27%) Infrastructure as Code
8 894 (16.94%) Data Pipeline
9 815 (15.45%) Machine Learning
10 713 (13.51%) Data Modelling
11 701 (13.29%) Data Engineering
12 698 (13.23%) ETL
13 679 (12.87%) Containerisation
14 636 (12.05%) Software Engineering
15 578 (10.96%) Data Science
16 550 (10.42%) Observability
17 530 (10.05%) Test Automation
18 517 (9.80%) Business Intelligence
19 465 (8.81%) LLM
20 424 (8.04%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,752 (33.21%) SQL
2 760 (14.40%) Java
3 637 (12.07%) PowerShell
4 574 (10.88%) Bash
5 474 (8.98%) JavaScript
6 353 (6.69%) TypeScript
7 338 (6.41%) C#
8 204 (3.87%) Go
9 171 (3.24%) R
10 152 (2.88%) C++
11 134 (2.54%) Scala
12 108 (2.05%) Shell Script
13 79 (1.50%) Perl
14 75 (1.42%) Ruby
15 74 (1.40%) Bicep
16 57 (1.08%) PL/SQL
17 56 (1.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 56 (1.06%) T-SQL
18 54 (1.02%) C
19 50 (0.95%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,185 (22.46%) Security Cleared
2 960 (18.20%) SC Cleared
3 382 (7.24%) Degree
4 158 (2.99%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.81%) DV Cleared
6 122 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
7 102 (1.93%) Azure Certification
8 84 (1.59%) AWS Certification
9 82 (1.55%) CISSP
10 78 (1.48%) Master's Degree
11 71 (1.35%) Cisco Certification
12 53 (1.00%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.95%) CCNP
14 40 (0.76%) CISM
15 38 (0.72%) PhD
16 32 (0.61%) ISTQB
17 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
18 25 (0.47%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 22 (0.42%) CCIE
19 22 (0.42%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 521 (9.87%) Data Quality
2 236 (4.47%) QA
3 148 (2.81%) GDPR
4 99 (1.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 96 (1.82%) NIST
6 77 (1.46%) Accessibility
7 38 (0.72%) SLA
8 29 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 27 (0.51%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.45%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 16 (0.30%) NCSC
12 16 (0.30%) WCAG
13 13 (0.25%) SOC 2
14 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
15 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) GRC
17 6 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
17 6 (0.11%) PSD2
System Software
1 765 (14.50%) Docker
2 151 (2.86%) Active Directory
3 96 (1.82%) VMware Infrastructure
4 72 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.72%) VMware NSX
6 37 (0.70%) vSphere
7 33 (0.63%) Firmware
8 30 (0.57%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 16 (0.30%) KVM
11 14 (0.27%) NFS
12 12 (0.23%) HDFS
12 12 (0.23%) Squid
13 10 (0.19%) Ceph
14 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
14 9 (0.17%) SRDF
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
17 4 (0.076%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
17 4 (0.076%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,084 (20.55%) Terraform
2 926 (17.55%) Kubernetes
3 550 (10.42%) Ansible
4 333 (6.31%) Grafana
5 277 (5.25%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.40%) Puppet
7 57 (1.08%) Argo
8 49 (0.93%) Istio
9 46 (0.87%) vRealize
10 36 (0.68%) Kibana
11 31 (0.59%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.59%) vCenter Server
12 27 (0.51%) Nessus
13 25 (0.47%) Nagios
14 24 (0.45%) Control-M
14 24 (0.45%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.45%) ZABBIX
15 23 (0.44%) NetBackup
16 21 (0.40%) HAProxy
17 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 591 (11.20%) Microsoft
2 567 (10.75%) Databricks
3 270 (5.12%) Google
4 246 (4.66%) Oracle
5 218 (4.13%) Splunk
6 175 (3.32%) VMware
7 126 (2.39%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.33%) OpenAI
9 114 (2.16%) Cisco
10 98 (1.86%) ServiceNow
11 85 (1.61%) CyberArk
12 77 (1.46%) F5
13 76 (1.44%) BeyondTrust
14 74 (1.40%) Dynatrace
15 71 (1.35%) Palo Alto
16 69 (1.31%) IBM
17 68 (1.29%) Informatica
18 52 (0.99%) Foundry
19 50 (0.95%) SAP
20 44 (0.83%) Arista