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

6 months to
3 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 12
Rank change year-on-year -4 +2 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,650 4,403 4,169
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.30% 13.29% 10.96%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.47% 40.36% 34.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,676 2,846 2,850
10th Percentile £375 £358 £363
25th Percentile £445 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -3.56%
75th Percentile £650 £644 £700
90th Percentile £750 £763 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £507 £500 £507
% change year-on-year +1.40% -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 133 87 97
10th Percentile £36.00 £28.25 £20.80
25th Percentile £44.50 £35.13 £40.06
Median hourly rate £62.50 £50.00 £67.02
Median % change year-on-year +25.00% -25.40% +3.11%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £71.88
90th Percentile £91.69 £79.75 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -28.57% +7.69%

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 14,313 10,910 12,231
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.09% 32.92% 32.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,293 7,179 8,104
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £507 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.65% -3.52% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £648
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £492
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.36% -1.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 548 298 331
10th Percentile £24.10 £29.00 £26.25
25th Percentile £46.66 £41.25 £46.09
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £75.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 3 October 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 October 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 October 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 -4 4,807 £550 +4.41% 11,371
London -4 2,852 £575 - 6,757
UK excluding London -8 2,159 £507 +1.40% 6,372
Work from Home -6 1,553 £535 -2.73% 5,477
North of England 0 751 £500 +5.26% 1,258
South East -5 453 £541 +8.25% 1,294
Yorkshire -2 379 £500 - 394
Scotland -1 309 £467 -6.60% 1,035
North West +1 293 £525 +18.64% 654
South West -3 271 £550 - 735
Midlands -23 223 £500 - 628
West Midlands -17 186 £520 +4.00% 366
East of England -16 146 £484 -12.05% 777
North East -2 88 £425 -10.53% 226
East Midlands -21 37 £456 +11.28% 262
Wales -10 28 £530 +23.98% 344
Northern Ireland 0 17 £369 -37.23% 368

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
1 295 (5.22%) Apache Airflow
2 278 (4.92%) Apache Spark
3 231 (4.09%) Apache
4 157 (2.78%) Confluence
5 59 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 56 (0.99%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.58%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 27 (0.48%) nginx
10 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) IIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 9 (0.16%) CMS
11 9 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
14 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.088%) Camunda
14 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 99 (1.75%) Microsoft Excel
2 37 (0.65%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
4 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.035%) Revit
7 2 (0.035%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
2 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
3 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
4 11 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.11%) Front Arena
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.088%) SAP IBP
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Actimize
10 3 (0.053%) Cloudability
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.035%) FIS Private Capital Suite
Cloud Services
1 2,064 (36.53%) AWS
2 1,926 (34.09%) Azure
3 915 (16.19%) GCP
4 753 (13.33%) GitHub
5 485 (8.58%) Power Platform
6 480 (8.50%) Serverless
7 442 (7.82%) Azure DevOps
8 440 (7.79%) GitHub Actions
9 399 (7.06%) Amazon S3
10 351 (6.21%) AWS Lambda
11 349 (6.18%) Snowflake
12 247 (4.37%) dbt
13 215 (3.81%) Azure Data Factory
14 206 (3.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 196 (3.47%) Amazon EKS
16 187 (3.31%) AWS CloudFormation
17 180 (3.19%) Entra ID
18 147 (2.60%) Amazon EC2
19 131 (2.32%) SaaS
20 129 (2.28%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 286 (5.06%) Firewall
2 206 (3.65%) DNS
3 168 (2.97%) Network Security
4 150 (2.65%) TCP/IP
5 128 (2.27%) VPN
6 125 (2.21%) BGP
7 114 (2.02%) WAN
8 82 (1.45%) DHCP
9 75 (1.33%) SD-WAN
10 74 (1.31%) OSPF
11 62 (1.10%) BIG-IP
12 59 (1.04%) SSL
13 55 (0.97%) VLAN
13 55 (0.97%) VXLAN
14 54 (0.96%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 51 (0.90%) HTTP
16 47 (0.83%) Ethernet VPN
17 42 (0.74%) Broadband
18 41 (0.73%) Wireless
19 40 (0.71%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 433 (7.66%) Power BI
2 334 (5.91%) Data Warehouse
3 321 (5.68%) PostgreSQL
4 231 (4.09%) Metadata
5 206 (3.65%) Relational Database
6 201 (3.56%) SQL Server
7 197 (3.49%) Data Lake
8 188 (3.33%) BigQuery
9 166 (2.94%) Tableau
10 157 (2.78%) NoSQL
11 138 (2.44%) Big Data
12 135 (2.39%) Amazon Redshift
13 133 (2.35%) Amazon RDS
14 122 (2.16%) MongoDB
15 121 (2.14%) Amazon Athena
15 121 (2.14%) Delta Lake
16 107 (1.89%) DynamoDB
17 101 (1.79%) MySQL
18 75 (1.33%) Redis
19 61 (1.08%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 833 (14.74%) Git
2 521 (9.22%) Jenkins
3 496 (8.78%) GitLab
4 313 (5.54%) JIRA
5 121 (2.14%) Selenium
6 73 (1.29%) Postman
7 61 (1.08%) JMeter
8 59 (1.04%) Claude Code
9 56 (0.99%) SonarQube
10 49 (0.87%) MLflow
11 46 (0.81%) Bitbucket
12 41 (0.73%) Cucumber
13 39 (0.69%) REST Assured
14 37 (0.65%) Sonatype Nexus
15 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
16 35 (0.62%) Maven
17 33 (0.58%) Cypress.io
18 31 (0.55%) LoadRunner
19 28 (0.50%) Gatling
20 24 (0.42%) Zephyr
General
1 1,325 (23.45%) Social Skills
2 1,309 (23.17%) Finance
3 842 (14.90%) Analytical Skills
4 545 (9.65%) Public Sector
5 530 (9.38%) Banking
6 173 (3.06%) Front Office
7 155 (2.74%) Investment Banking
8 115 (2.04%) Retail
9 112 (1.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 100 (1.77%) Documentation Skills
11 86 (1.52%) Marketing
11 86 (1.52%) Telecoms
12 64 (1.13%) Military
13 54 (0.96%) Law
14 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
15 49 (0.87%) Pharmaceutical
16 48 (0.85%) Financial Institution
16 48 (0.85%) Legal
17 41 (0.73%) Publishing
18 38 (0.67%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,021 (18.07%) Senior
2 897 (15.88%) Developer
3 839 (14.85%) Data Engineer
4 498 (8.81%) Lead
5 473 (8.37%) Python Developer
6 420 (7.43%) Python Engineer
7 368 (6.51%) DevOps Engineer
8 314 (5.56%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 281 (4.97%) Software Engineer
10 279 (4.94%) Analyst
11 235 (4.16%) Architect
12 222 (3.93%) AWS Engineer
13 193 (3.42%) Cloud Engineer
13 193 (3.42%) Senior Data Engineer
14 192 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
15 191 (3.38%) Senior Developer
16 190 (3.36%) Azure Engineer
17 182 (3.22%) Data Scientist
18 149 (2.64%) Network Engineer
19 141 (2.50%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,408 (24.92%) Terraform
2 551 (9.75%) REST
3 379 (6.71%) Kafka
4 366 (6.48%) PySpark
5 307 (5.43%) React
6 239 (4.23%) .NET
7 220 (3.89%) FastAPI
8 212 (3.75%) JSON
9 211 (3.73%) Django
10 193 (3.42%) RESTful
11 160 (2.83%) pytest
12 159 (2.81%) LangChain
13 151 (2.67%) Node.js
14 149 (2.64%) Pandas
15 130 (2.30%) OAuth
16 119 (2.11%) Flask
17 114 (2.02%) YAML
18 111 (1.96%) LangGraph
19 107 (1.89%) PyTorch
20 104 (1.84%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 810 (14.34%) Cloud Native
2 300 (5.31%) AI Agents
3 293 (5.19%) Distributed Systems
4 263 (4.65%) Onboarding
5 161 (2.85%) Data Centre
6 152 (2.69%) Data Structures
7 151 (2.67%) Product Ownership
8 137 (2.42%) Legacy Systems
9 125 (2.21%) Algorithms
10 112 (1.98%) Enterprise Software
11 111 (1.96%) Hybrid Cloud
12 107 (1.89%) Management Information System
13 105 (1.86%) Data Protection Act
14 102 (1.81%) Derivative
15 93 (1.65%) Security Posture
16 85 (1.50%) Public Cloud
17 82 (1.45%) PKI
18 80 (1.42%) Equities
19 67 (1.19%) Linux Command Line
20 66 (1.17%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 783 (13.86%) Linux
2 348 (6.16%) Windows
3 249 (4.41%) Unix
4 157 (2.78%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 93 (1.65%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.64%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 14 (0.25%) Android
11 13 (0.23%) AIX
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) zOS
15 6 (0.11%) FreeRTOS
16 5 (0.088%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.088%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,407 (42.60%) CI/CD
2 1,659 (29.36%) DevOps
3 1,603 (28.37%) AI
4 1,314 (23.26%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,276 (22.58%) Agile
6 1,099 (19.45%) Analytics
7 985 (17.43%) Data Pipeline
8 962 (17.03%) Software Engineering
9 882 (15.61%) Problem-Solving
10 855 (15.13%) Data Engineering
11 842 (14.90%) Machine Learning
12 778 (13.77%) Containerisation
13 771 (13.65%) Observability
14 770 (13.63%) Data Modelling
15 706 (12.50%) Test Automation
16 679 (12.02%) Validation
17 671 (11.88%) ETL
18 666 (11.79%) Continuous Improvement
19 603 (10.67%) Platform Engineering
20 589 (10.42%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,847 (32.69%) SQL
2 793 (14.04%) Java
3 787 (13.93%) Bash
4 759 (13.43%) PowerShell
5 443 (7.84%) JavaScript
6 350 (6.19%) TypeScript
7 309 (5.47%) C#
8 228 (4.04%) Go
9 155 (2.74%) Shell Script
10 136 (2.41%) R
11 135 (2.39%) Bicep
12 132 (2.34%) C++
13 124 (2.19%) Scala
14 106 (1.88%) Perl
15 62 (1.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 57 (1.01%) Groovy
17 53 (0.94%) C
18 51 (0.90%) Rust
18 51 (0.90%) T-SQL
19 48 (0.85%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,378 (24.39%) Security Cleared
2 1,106 (19.58%) SC Cleared
3 403 (7.13%) Degree
4 253 (4.48%) DV Cleared
5 153 (2.71%) Azure Certification
6 151 (2.67%) AWS Certification
7 147 (2.60%) Computer Science Degree
8 132 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.72%) CISSP
10 78 (1.38%) Cisco Certification
11 70 (1.24%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
13 37 (0.65%) CCNP
14 33 (0.58%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) CCIE
16 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 30 (0.53%) CISM
17 29 (0.51%) DBS Check
17 29 (0.51%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.50%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 655 (11.59%) Data Quality
2 326 (5.77%) QA
3 117 (2.07%) NIST
4 103 (1.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 87 (1.54%) GDPR
6 83 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 42 (0.74%) SLA
8 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 30 (0.53%) NCSC
10 27 (0.48%) PCI DSS
11 24 (0.42%) SOC 2
12 23 (0.41%) WCAG
13 19 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
16 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
17 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.12%) Basel III
18 7 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 7 (0.12%) GRC
System Software
1 980 (17.35%) Docker
2 186 (3.29%) Active Directory
3 134 (2.37%) VMware Infrastructure
4 70 (1.24%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.88%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.62%) vSphere
7 31 (0.55%) VMware NSX
8 27 (0.48%) NFS
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) Firmware
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 8 (0.14%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 8 (0.14%) zsh
15 7 (0.12%) HDFS
16 6 (0.11%) Postfix
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,200 (21.24%) Kubernetes
2 652 (11.54%) Ansible
3 339 (6.00%) Grafana
4 252 (4.46%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.45%) Puppet
6 73 (1.29%) Progress Chef
7 69 (1.22%) Argo
8 48 (0.85%) Single Sign-On
9 38 (0.67%) Kibana
10 35 (0.62%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
11 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
12 23 (0.41%) Packer
13 21 (0.37%) FortiGate
14 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
15 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
15 16 (0.28%) Podman
15 16 (0.28%) QRadar
16 15 (0.27%) vRealize
16 15 (0.27%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 758 (13.42%) Microsoft
2 585 (10.35%) Databricks
3 410 (7.26%) Google
4 244 (4.32%) Oracle
5 207 (3.66%) Splunk
6 172 (3.04%) VMware
7 171 (3.03%) OpenAI
8 141 (2.50%) Cisco
9 135 (2.39%) ServiceNow
10 100 (1.77%) Dynatrace
11 96 (1.70%) Red Hat
12 92 (1.63%) IBM
13 90 (1.59%) Palo Alto
14 89 (1.58%) F5
15 85 (1.50%) Foundry
16 72 (1.27%) CyberArk
17 70 (1.24%) Fortinet
17 70 (1.24%) Informatica
18 68 (1.20%) SAP
19 54 (0.96%) Salesforce