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

6 months to
13 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 9 13
Rank change year-on-year -5 +4 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,629 4,285 4,089
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.35% 13.02% 10.61%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.83% 39.66% 33.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,653 2,809 2,867
10th Percentile £371 £358 £375
25th Percentile £440 £427 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £712
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 137 83 102
10th Percentile £30.82 £28.18 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £34.88 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £78.75 £58.13 £71.41
90th Percentile £90.84 £83.00 £78.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.48 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.96% -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 14,132 10,803 12,309
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.00% 32.82% 31.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,166 7,151 8,379
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 538 295 347
10th Percentile £27.75 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £48.16 £36.69 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £79.50 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +2.36% -2.31% -

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 13 September 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 13 September 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 13 September 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 -3 4,802 £550 +2.33% 6,849
London -3 2,835 £575 - 4,397
UK excluding London -7 2,148 £500 - 3,254
Work from Home -5 1,542 £530 -3.68% 6,319
North of England +2 736 £500 +5.26% 657
South East -7 455 £539 +7.75% 848
Yorkshire -1 378 £500 - 236
Scotland -4 288 £450 -10.00% 417
South West 0 282 £550 +4.76% 417
North West -4 281 £525 +10.53% 332
Midlands -18 226 £500 +5.26% 324
West Midlands -20 180 £500 - 169
East of England -8 151 £494 -5.95% 446
North East -2 89 £425 -2.86% 92
East Midlands -15 46 £469 +12.95% 154
Wales -12 26 £530 +29.27% 77
Northern Ireland +2 17 £363 -30.95% 102

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
1 293 (5.21%) Apache Airflow
2 264 (4.69%) Apache Spark
3 217 (3.86%) Apache
4 165 (2.93%) Confluence
5 58 (1.03%) Jupyter
6 57 (1.01%) SharePoint
7 36 (0.64%) SAS
8 30 (0.53%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
9 24 (0.43%) nginx
10 21 (0.37%) IIS
11 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
12 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 7 (0.12%) CMS
13 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
14 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.089%) CICS
15 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 111 (1.97%) Microsoft Excel
2 36 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
4 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
4 18 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 18 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
5 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 2 (0.036%) Microsoft Project
6 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
6 2 (0.036%) Revit
7 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
7 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
7 1 (0.018%) Houdini
7 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
7 1 (0.018%) Simulink
7 1 (0.018%) SPSS
7 1 (0.018%) Weka
7 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 18 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
1 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
2 17 (0.30%) Aladdin
3 9 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
3 9 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
4 8 (0.14%) Front Arena
4 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Summit
7 5 (0.089%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Endur
9 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Distributed Ledger
10 2 (0.036%) R3 Corda
10 2 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 2,082 (36.99%) AWS
2 1,896 (33.68%) Azure
3 871 (15.47%) GCP
4 740 (13.15%) GitHub
5 497 (8.83%) Power Platform
6 489 (8.69%) Serverless
7 439 (7.80%) Azure DevOps
8 438 (7.78%) GitHub Actions
9 391 (6.95%) Amazon S3
10 366 (6.50%) AWS Lambda
11 332 (5.90%) Snowflake
12 234 (4.16%) dbt
13 213 (3.78%) Azure Data Factory
14 192 (3.41%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 186 (3.30%) AWS CloudFormation
16 175 (3.11%) Amazon EKS
17 150 (2.66%) Entra ID
18 139 (2.47%) Amazon EC2
19 129 (2.29%) Amazon ECS
19 129 (2.29%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 281 (4.99%) Firewall
2 211 (3.75%) DNS
3 148 (2.63%) Network Security
3 148 (2.63%) TCP/IP
4 126 (2.24%) BGP
5 123 (2.19%) VPN
6 114 (2.03%) WAN
7 86 (1.53%) DHCP
8 75 (1.33%) OSPF
9 69 (1.23%) SD-WAN
10 60 (1.07%) VLAN
11 58 (1.03%) BIG-IP
12 57 (1.01%) SSL
13 53 (0.94%) HTTP
14 52 (0.92%) VXLAN
15 49 (0.87%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 43 (0.76%) Ethernet VPN
17 40 (0.71%) SAN
18 37 (0.66%) SNMP
18 37 (0.66%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 445 (7.91%) Power BI
2 327 (5.81%) Data Warehouse
3 316 (5.61%) PostgreSQL
4 212 (3.77%) Metadata
4 212 (3.77%) SQL Server
5 210 (3.73%) Relational Database
6 185 (3.29%) Tableau
7 181 (3.22%) Data Lake
8 172 (3.06%) BigQuery
9 152 (2.70%) NoSQL
10 136 (2.42%) Big Data
11 131 (2.33%) Amazon RDS
12 127 (2.26%) Amazon Athena
12 127 (2.26%) Amazon Redshift
13 121 (2.15%) Delta Lake
14 120 (2.13%) MongoDB
15 109 (1.94%) DynamoDB
16 96 (1.71%) MySQL
17 71 (1.26%) Redis
18 62 (1.10%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 782 (13.89%) Git
2 501 (8.90%) Jenkins
3 462 (8.21%) GitLab
4 300 (5.33%) JIRA
5 114 (2.03%) Selenium
6 59 (1.05%) Postman
7 58 (1.03%) SonarQube
8 55 (0.98%) MLflow
9 54 (0.96%) JMeter
10 53 (0.94%) Claude Code
11 41 (0.73%) Bitbucket
12 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
13 35 (0.62%) Maven
14 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
15 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
15 33 (0.59%) REST Assured
16 31 (0.55%) Gatling
17 30 (0.53%) Sonatype Nexus
18 24 (0.43%) LoadRunner
19 20 (0.36%) JUnit
General
1 1,309 (23.25%) Social Skills
2 1,244 (22.10%) Finance
3 842 (14.96%) Analytical Skills
4 553 (9.82%) Public Sector
5 481 (8.55%) Banking
6 178 (3.16%) Front Office
7 145 (2.58%) Investment Banking
8 110 (1.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 110 (1.95%) Retail
9 109 (1.94%) Documentation Skills
10 92 (1.63%) Marketing
11 81 (1.44%) Telecoms
12 59 (1.05%) Military
13 54 (0.96%) Pharmaceutical
14 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
15 50 (0.89%) Law
16 47 (0.83%) Legal
17 45 (0.80%) Financial Institution
17 45 (0.80%) Publishing
18 42 (0.75%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 980 (17.41%) Senior
2 897 (15.94%) Developer
3 817 (14.51%) Data Engineer
4 480 (8.53%) Lead
5 475 (8.44%) Python Developer
6 421 (7.48%) Python Engineer
7 349 (6.20%) DevOps Engineer
8 294 (5.22%) Analyst
9 289 (5.13%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 283 (5.03%) Software Engineer
11 263 (4.67%) Architect
12 230 (4.09%) AWS Engineer
13 195 (3.46%) Cloud Engineer
14 193 (3.43%) Senior Developer
15 191 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
16 186 (3.30%) Data Scientist
16 186 (3.30%) Senior Data Engineer
17 180 (3.20%) Azure Engineer
18 145 (2.58%) Data Analyst
18 145 (2.58%) Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,360 (24.16%) Terraform
2 500 (8.88%) REST
3 371 (6.59%) PySpark
4 360 (6.40%) Kafka
5 306 (5.44%) React
6 254 (4.51%) .NET
7 212 (3.77%) JSON
8 204 (3.62%) Django
9 202 (3.59%) FastAPI
10 189 (3.36%) RESTful
11 166 (2.95%) Node.js
11 166 (2.95%) Pandas
12 148 (2.63%) pytest
13 145 (2.58%) LangChain
14 118 (2.10%) OAuth
15 116 (2.06%) Flask
16 112 (1.99%) PyTorch
17 108 (1.92%) HTML
17 108 (1.92%) YAML
18 101 (1.79%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 780 (13.86%) Cloud Native
2 310 (5.51%) Distributed Systems
3 267 (4.74%) AI Agents
4 228 (4.05%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.88%) Product Ownership
6 158 (2.81%) Data Centre
7 144 (2.56%) Data Structures
8 132 (2.34%) Algorithms
9 130 (2.31%) Legacy Systems
10 115 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
11 109 (1.94%) Data Protection Act
12 108 (1.92%) Management Information System
13 101 (1.79%) Derivative
13 101 (1.79%) Enterprise Software
14 88 (1.56%) Security Posture
15 79 (1.40%) Equities
16 76 (1.35%) Public Cloud
17 71 (1.26%) Linux Command Line
18 69 (1.23%) PKI
19 67 (1.19%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 758 (13.47%) Linux
2 332 (5.90%) Windows
3 247 (4.39%) Unix
4 157 (2.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 89 (1.58%) Windows Server
6 45 (0.80%) Ubuntu
7 37 (0.66%) VMS
8 22 (0.39%) AIX
9 20 (0.36%) CentOS
10 18 (0.32%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 5 (0.089%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,305 (40.95%) CI/CD
2 1,619 (28.76%) DevOps
3 1,538 (27.32%) AI
4 1,265 (22.47%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,259 (22.37%) Agile
6 1,095 (19.45%) Analytics
7 983 (17.46%) Data Pipeline
8 927 (16.47%) Software Engineering
9 904 (16.06%) Problem-Solving
10 853 (15.15%) Machine Learning
11 813 (14.44%) Data Engineering
12 796 (14.14%) Containerisation
13 738 (13.11%) Data Modelling
14 730 (12.97%) Observability
15 658 (11.69%) Test Automation
16 644 (11.44%) ETL
17 633 (11.25%) Continuous Improvement
18 615 (10.93%) Validation
19 571 (10.14%) Platform Engineering
20 562 (9.98%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 1,842 (32.72%) SQL
2 823 (14.62%) Java
3 774 (13.75%) Bash
4 751 (13.34%) PowerShell
5 450 (7.99%) JavaScript
6 340 (6.04%) TypeScript
7 318 (5.65%) C#
8 210 (3.73%) Go
9 150 (2.66%) Shell Script
10 147 (2.61%) R
11 137 (2.43%) C++
12 134 (2.38%) Bicep
13 127 (2.26%) Scala
14 99 (1.76%) Perl
15 60 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 58 (1.03%) Groovy
17 56 (0.99%) C
18 55 (0.98%) PL/SQL
19 53 (0.94%) Rust
20 51 (0.91%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,371 (24.36%) Security Cleared
2 1,109 (19.70%) SC Cleared
3 411 (7.30%) Degree
4 240 (4.26%) DV Cleared
5 153 (2.72%) Computer Science Degree
6 152 (2.70%) Azure Certification
7 139 (2.47%) AWS Certification
8 118 (2.10%) BPSS Clearance
9 96 (1.71%) CISSP
10 84 (1.49%) Cisco Certification
11 63 (1.12%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
13 42 (0.75%) CCNP
14 37 (0.66%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 34 (0.60%) CISM
15 34 (0.60%) PhD
16 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
17 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 28 (0.50%) CCIE
19 26 (0.46%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 617 (10.96%) Data Quality
2 307 (5.45%) QA
3 113 (2.01%) NIST
4 99 (1.76%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 96 (1.71%) GDPR
6 83 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.62%) SLA
8 34 (0.60%) Actionable Recommendations
9 30 (0.53%) NCSC
10 24 (0.43%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.43%) WCAG
11 20 (0.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 17 (0.30%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
14 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
16 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.12%) MiFID
18 6 (0.11%) GRC
18 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 959 (17.04%) Docker
2 170 (3.02%) Active Directory
3 138 (2.45%) VMware Infrastructure
4 68 (1.21%) Virtual Machines
5 53 (0.94%) Hyper-V
6 39 (0.69%) vSphere
7 35 (0.62%) VMware NSX
8 25 (0.44%) NFS
8 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
9 24 (0.43%) Firmware
10 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Squid
12 11 (0.20%) Ceph
13 10 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) HDFS
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,153 (20.48%) Kubernetes
2 636 (11.30%) Ansible
3 332 (5.90%) Grafana
4 241 (4.28%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.46%) Puppet
6 73 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.19%) Argo
8 42 (0.75%) Single Sign-On
9 34 (0.60%) Istio
10 31 (0.55%) Kibana
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.41%) vRealize
13 23 (0.41%) ZABBIX
14 22 (0.39%) vCenter Server
15 21 (0.37%) Nagios
16 20 (0.36%) FortiGate
16 20 (0.36%) Packer
17 18 (0.32%) HAProxy
18 16 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 732 (13.00%) Microsoft
2 571 (10.14%) Databricks
3 379 (6.73%) Google
4 243 (4.32%) Oracle
5 213 (3.78%) Splunk
6 182 (3.23%) VMware
7 156 (2.77%) OpenAI
8 143 (2.54%) Cisco
9 121 (2.15%) ServiceNow
10 104 (1.85%) Red Hat
11 98 (1.74%) Dynatrace
12 93 (1.65%) IBM
13 88 (1.56%) F5
14 86 (1.53%) Palo Alto
15 79 (1.40%) Foundry
16 74 (1.31%) Informatica
17 73 (1.30%) Fortinet
18 71 (1.26%) SAP
19 66 (1.17%) CyberArk
20 60 (1.07%) Salesforce