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

6 months to
28 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,238 3,948 3,961
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.15% 13.45% 9.15%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.63% 39.52% 31.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,522 2,779 2,818
10th Percentile £363 £388 £396
25th Percentile £424 £454 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £621 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £813 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.44% -5.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 52 101
10th Percentile £30.00 £21.25 £21.73
25th Percentile £45.03 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £37.16 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +48.01% -35.37% -11.54%
75th Percentile £70.36 £57.81 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £70.88 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +16.67% -28.00% +3.69%

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 12,891 9,990 12,747
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.44% 34.03% 29.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,530 6,768 9,054
10th Percentile £355 £359 £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 £766 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £478 £489
% change year-on-year -0.70% -2.17% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 559 247 480
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.49 £31.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.07
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.05% -1.04%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.88
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% -

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 -2 4,394 £523 -5.00% 2,572
London -3 2,497 £550 -8.33% 1,248
UK excluding London -2 2,023 £481 -3.75% 1,828
Work from Home 0 1,497 £525 -4.55% 1,233
North of England +8 679 £476 -2.81% 454
South East -1 413 £500 -4.76% 620
Yorkshire +1 388 £475 -5.00% 122
Scotland +1 280 £425 -10.53% 92
Midlands -10 263 £498 +8.62% 201
South West -1 245 £500 -9.09% 217
North West +5 244 £491 +3.37% 256
West Midlands -4 200 £500 - 112
East of England -2 135 £500 -0.50% 183
East Midlands -13 62 £466 +10.36% 87
North East +7 55 £475 -1.30% 78
Northern Ireland +15 24 £463 -11.90% 33
Wales -16 23 £463 -11.90% 54

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
1 286 (5.46%) Apache Spark
2 216 (4.12%) Apache Airflow
3 165 (3.15%) Apache
4 149 (2.84%) Confluence
5 52 (0.99%) SAS
6 50 (0.95%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.53%) nginx
8 27 (0.52%) Jupyter
9 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
10 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 14 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
12 13 (0.25%) Appian
12 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.17%) Camunda
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) CMS
15 6 (0.11%) CICS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.095%) IIS
16 5 (0.095%) Tomcat
Applications
1 139 (2.65%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.46%) Spreadsheet
4 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
5 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.11%) CPLEX
7 5 (0.095%) Weka
8 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 2 (0.038%) Actimize
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%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.038%) Oracle ERP
7 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,001 (38.20%) AWS
2 1,796 (34.29%) Azure
3 771 (14.72%) GCP
4 675 (12.89%) GitHub
5 526 (10.04%) Power Platform
6 495 (9.45%) Serverless
7 385 (7.35%) Azure DevOps
8 380 (7.25%) Amazon S3
9 359 (6.85%) AWS Lambda
10 349 (6.66%) GitHub Actions
11 273 (5.21%) Azure Data Factory
12 237 (4.52%) Snowflake
13 231 (4.41%) AWS CloudFormation
14 173 (3.30%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 169 (3.23%) Amazon EKS
16 162 (3.09%) OpenShift
17 155 (2.96%) dbt
18 153 (2.92%) Amazon ECS
19 148 (2.83%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 134 (2.56%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 183 (3.49%) Firewall
2 135 (2.58%) DNS
3 111 (2.12%) Network Security
4 90 (1.72%) TCP/IP
5 77 (1.47%) BGP
6 76 (1.45%) VPN
7 68 (1.30%) WAN
8 58 (1.11%) HTTP
9 50 (0.95%) OSPF
10 44 (0.84%) SAN
11 35 (0.67%) MPLS
12 33 (0.63%) SNMP
12 33 (0.63%) VXLAN
13 32 (0.61%) LAN
14 31 (0.59%) SSL
14 31 (0.59%) VLAN
15 30 (0.57%) DHCP
16 29 (0.55%) Wireshark
17 27 (0.52%) BIG-IP
17 27 (0.52%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 449 (8.57%) Power BI
2 350 (6.68%) PostgreSQL
3 289 (5.52%) Data Warehouse
4 239 (4.56%) Data Lake
5 236 (4.51%) SQL Server
6 201 (3.84%) Tableau
7 187 (3.57%) NoSQL
8 175 (3.34%) Relational Database
9 162 (3.09%) Metadata
10 161 (3.07%) Big Data
11 136 (2.60%) Delta Lake
12 132 (2.52%) BigQuery
13 119 (2.27%) Amazon Redshift
14 118 (2.25%) Amazon Athena
15 106 (2.02%) Amazon RDS
16 102 (1.95%) MongoDB
17 97 (1.85%) MySQL
18 96 (1.83%) DynamoDB
19 91 (1.74%) Azure SQL Database
20 81 (1.55%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 654 (12.49%) Git
2 484 (9.24%) Jenkins
3 363 (6.93%) GitLab
4 270 (5.15%) JIRA
5 91 (1.74%) MLflow
6 77 (1.47%) Selenium
7 57 (1.09%) Postman
8 42 (0.80%) Bitbucket
8 42 (0.80%) Cucumber
9 33 (0.63%) Sonatype Nexus
10 31 (0.59%) JMeter
11 29 (0.55%) SonarQube
12 28 (0.53%) Artifactory
13 27 (0.52%) Cypress.io
14 26 (0.50%) JUnit
15 24 (0.46%) Maven
15 24 (0.46%) SpecFlow
16 23 (0.44%) Gatling
17 22 (0.42%) Robot Framework
18 21 (0.40%) REST Assured
General
1 1,179 (22.51%) Social Skills
2 1,008 (19.24%) Finance
3 724 (13.82%) Analytical Skills
4 500 (9.55%) Public Sector
5 366 (6.99%) Banking
6 174 (3.32%) Front Office
7 135 (2.58%) Documentation Skills
8 89 (1.70%) Investment Banking
9 71 (1.36%) Marketing
10 69 (1.32%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 65 (1.24%) Retail
12 54 (1.03%) Pharmaceutical
12 54 (1.03%) Telecoms
13 50 (0.95%) Influencing Skills
13 50 (0.95%) Legal
14 37 (0.71%) Manufacturing
15 36 (0.69%) Financial Institution
16 32 (0.61%) Publishing
17 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
18 29 (0.55%) Military
Job Titles
1 995 (19.00%) Developer
2 780 (14.89%) Data Engineer
3 748 (14.28%) Senior
4 486 (9.28%) Python Developer
5 353 (6.74%) Architect
6 336 (6.41%) Lead
7 298 (5.69%) Python Engineer
8 282 (5.38%) Analyst
9 277 (5.29%) DevOps Engineer
10 253 (4.83%) Software Engineer
11 239 (4.56%) AWS Engineer
12 226 (4.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 217 (4.14%) Data Scientist
14 172 (3.28%) Platform Engineer
15 163 (3.11%) Senior Developer
16 160 (3.05%) Azure Engineer
17 153 (2.92%) Senior Data Engineer
18 144 (2.75%) Data Analyst
19 137 (2.62%) Full-Stack Developer
20 119 (2.27%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 406 (7.75%) REST
2 353 (6.74%) React
3 346 (6.61%) PySpark
4 333 (6.36%) Kafka
5 264 (5.04%) Node.js
6 237 (4.52%) .NET
7 231 (4.41%) Pandas
8 197 (3.76%) PyTorch
9 181 (3.46%) FastAPI
10 175 (3.34%) RESTful
11 164 (3.13%) JSON
12 146 (2.79%) NumPy
13 145 (2.77%) TensorFlow
14 136 (2.60%) scikit-learn
15 128 (2.44%) LangChain
16 127 (2.42%) Flask
17 120 (2.29%) Django
18 119 (2.27%) AngularJS
19 109 (2.08%) OAuth
20 108 (2.06%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 518 (9.89%) Cloud Native
2 223 (4.26%) Distributed Systems
3 164 (3.13%) Algorithms
4 147 (2.81%) Product Ownership
5 128 (2.44%) AI Agents
6 118 (2.25%) Data Protection Act
7 111 (2.12%) Data Structures
7 111 (2.12%) Fixed Income
8 109 (2.08%) Onboarding
9 108 (2.06%) Derivative
9 108 (2.06%) Equities
10 96 (1.83%) Data Centre
10 96 (1.83%) Management Information System
11 92 (1.76%) Enterprise Software
12 91 (1.74%) Legacy Systems
13 90 (1.72%) Hybrid Cloud
14 85 (1.62%) Security Posture
15 73 (1.39%) Public Cloud
16 48 (0.92%) Virtual Team
17 47 (0.90%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 643 (12.28%) Linux
2 279 (5.33%) Windows
3 203 (3.88%) Unix
4 96 (1.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 61 (1.16%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.74%) VMS
7 37 (0.71%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.50%) Android
9 20 (0.38%) AIX
9 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
10 19 (0.36%) CentOS
10 19 (0.36%) Solaris
11 15 (0.29%) Apple iOS
12 10 (0.19%) Debian
13 9 (0.17%) zOS
14 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 5 (0.095%) Windows 7
17 5 (0.095%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,919 (36.64%) CI/CD
2 1,405 (26.82%) DevOps
3 1,171 (22.36%) Agile
4 1,167 (22.28%) AI
5 1,066 (20.35%) Analytics
6 983 (18.77%) Problem-Solving
7 917 (17.51%) Infrastructure as Code
8 862 (16.46%) Data Pipeline
9 822 (15.69%) Machine Learning
10 724 (13.82%) Containerisation
11 700 (13.36%) Data Modelling
12 698 (13.33%) Data Engineering
13 683 (13.04%) ETL
14 604 (11.53%) Software Engineering
15 600 (11.45%) Data Science
16 543 (10.37%) Test Automation
17 531 (10.14%) Observability
18 527 (10.06%) Business Intelligence
19 443 (8.46%) LLM
20 406 (7.75%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,715 (32.74%) SQL
2 765 (14.60%) Java
3 639 (12.20%) PowerShell
4 558 (10.65%) Bash
5 482 (9.20%) JavaScript
6 347 (6.62%) C#
7 342 (6.53%) TypeScript
8 201 (3.84%) Go
9 177 (3.38%) R
10 154 (2.94%) C++
11 142 (2.71%) Scala
12 108 (2.06%) Shell Script
13 98 (1.87%) Ruby
14 79 (1.51%) Bicep
14 79 (1.51%) Perl
15 54 (1.03%) C
16 53 (1.01%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 53 (1.01%) Kusto Query Language
17 51 (0.97%) PL/SQL
18 49 (0.94%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,218 (23.25%) Security Cleared
2 1,000 (19.09%) SC Cleared
3 390 (7.45%) Degree
4 177 (3.38%) Computer Science Degree
5 144 (2.75%) BPSS Clearance
6 138 (2.63%) DV Cleared
7 103 (1.97%) Azure Certification
8 102 (1.95%) AWS Certification
9 90 (1.72%) CISSP
9 90 (1.72%) Master's Degree
10 69 (1.32%) Cisco Certification
11 59 (1.13%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 50 (0.95%) CCNP
13 49 (0.94%) CISM
14 41 (0.78%) PhD
15 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
16 31 (0.59%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 27 (0.52%) ISTQB
18 24 (0.46%) CEH
19 23 (0.44%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 512 (9.77%) Data Quality
2 220 (4.20%) QA
3 168 (3.21%) GDPR
4 110 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 103 (1.97%) NIST
6 80 (1.53%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) SLA
8 32 (0.61%) PCI DSS
9 30 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.34%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) WCAG
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
13 12 (0.23%) SOC 2
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
15 9 (0.17%) GRC
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 7 (0.13%) MiFID
System Software
1 838 (16.00%) Docker
2 159 (3.04%) Active Directory
3 97 (1.85%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.32%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.80%) VMware NSX
6 40 (0.76%) vSphere
7 32 (0.61%) Firmware
7 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
8 18 (0.34%) VMware ESXi
9 14 (0.27%) KVM
10 13 (0.25%) HDFS
11 9 (0.17%) Ceph
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.17%) SRDF
12 7 (0.13%) Lustre
12 7 (0.13%) NFS
13 6 (0.11%) GPFS
13 6 (0.11%) Postfix
13 6 (0.11%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 6 (0.11%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,118 (21.34%) Terraform
2 962 (18.37%) Kubernetes
3 518 (9.89%) Ansible
4 343 (6.55%) Grafana
5 282 (5.38%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.41%) Argo
7 73 (1.39%) Puppet
8 52 (0.99%) Istio
9 48 (0.92%) vRealize
10 46 (0.88%) Kibana
11 34 (0.65%) vCenter Server
12 33 (0.63%) Progress Chef
13 27 (0.52%) Nessus
14 26 (0.50%) Single Sign-On
15 23 (0.44%) Control-M
15 23 (0.44%) Nagios
16 22 (0.42%) Rancher
17 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
18 19 (0.36%) Kubeflow
18 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 622 (11.87%) Microsoft
2 567 (10.82%) Databricks
3 275 (5.25%) Google
4 220 (4.20%) Oracle
5 216 (4.12%) Splunk
6 181 (3.46%) VMware
7 121 (2.31%) Red Hat
8 120 (2.29%) OpenAI
9 119 (2.27%) Cisco
10 97 (1.85%) ServiceNow
11 90 (1.72%) CyberArk
12 75 (1.43%) BeyondTrust
13 66 (1.26%) Informatica
14 63 (1.20%) Foundry
14 63 (1.20%) IBM
15 62 (1.18%) Dynatrace
16 56 (1.07%) F5
16 56 (1.07%) Palo Alto
17 49 (0.94%) SAP
18 41 (0.78%) Salesforce