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 19 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,778 4,144 4,601
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.38% 11.43% 9.94%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.61% 35.66% 31.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,150 2,751 3,311
10th Percentile £358 £369 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £750 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £511 £525
% change year-on-year -2.20% -2.62% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 89 87 137
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.00 £26.38 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.44 £52.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year -2.02% -13.22% -6.92%
75th Percentile £67.25 £70.00 £73.65
90th Percentile £81.00 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year -13.60% - -3.85%

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 11,482 11,621 14,388
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.16% 32.06% 31.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,577 7,462 10,246
10th Percentile £350 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £623 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £751 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -2.56% -2.50% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 342 281 443
10th Percentile £29.40 £22.00 £32.06
25th Percentile £46.25 £40.00 £47.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £62.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year - +3.31% +0.83%
75th Percentile £67.75 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £78.00
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 19 November 2025.

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 19 November 2025.

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 19 November 2025. 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 0 4,072 £525 -12.50% 5,557
London +1 2,389 £550 -12.00% 3,183
UK excluding London +4 1,846 £500 -2.20% 2,922
Work from Home -1 1,458 £537 -2.45% 2,296
North of England +8 558 £475 -5.94% 698
South East +4 398 £500 -4.76% 891
Yorkshire +11 300 £500 -6.98% 193
Scotland +14 286 £475 -1.86% 200
Midlands +10 272 £500 +5.26% 397
West Midlands +16 225 £503 +0.60% 263
North West +8 224 £439 -9.86% 434
South West -9 174 £560 -7.44% 315
East of England +8 159 £525 +10.53% 333
East Midlands -13 47 £429 +7.19% 133
North East +7 38 £520 -12.97% 77
Wales -7 31 £475 -5.00% 80
Northern Ireland -4 22 £588 +11.90% 48

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
1 250 (5.23%) Apache Airflow
2 196 (4.10%) Apache Spark
3 188 (3.93%) Confluence
4 178 (3.73%) Apache
5 63 (1.32%) SAS
6 50 (1.05%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.82%) nginx
8 37 (0.77%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 15 (0.31%) IIS
11 12 (0.25%) WebSphere
12 11 (0.23%) Appian
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.17%) JBoss
14 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
15 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
16 5 (0.10%) Luigi
17 4 (0.084%) Camunda
17 4 (0.084%) CMS
Applications
1 133 (2.78%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.73%) Chatbot
3 34 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
4 30 (0.63%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 10 (0.21%) MS Visio
7 9 (0.19%) Maya
7 9 (0.19%) NUKE
8 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.042%) Maple
9 2 (0.042%) Microsoft Project
10 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
10 1 (0.021%) SPSS
10 1 (0.021%) Stata
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
10 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 14 (0.29%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 8 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.17%) Maximo
4 5 (0.10%) Fidessa
5 4 (0.084%) Remedy ITSM
6 3 (0.063%) Payment Gateway
6 3 (0.063%) Teamcenter
7 2 (0.042%) Actimize
7 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
7 2 (0.042%) Endur
7 2 (0.042%) Kondor
7 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
7 2 (0.042%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
7 2 (0.042%) Shopify
7 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
8 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
8 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,880 (39.35%) AWS
2 1,416 (29.64%) Azure
3 726 (15.19%) GCP
4 552 (11.55%) GitHub
5 471 (9.86%) Serverless
6 401 (8.39%) Power Platform
7 377 (7.89%) Amazon S3
8 334 (6.99%) AWS Lambda
9 301 (6.30%) Azure DevOps
10 283 (5.92%) GitHub Actions
11 248 (5.19%) Snowflake
12 214 (4.48%) AWS CloudFormation
13 198 (4.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 197 (4.12%) Amazon EC2
15 179 (3.75%) dbt
16 165 (3.45%) Amazon ECS
17 156 (3.26%) Azure Data Factory
18 150 (3.14%) Amazon EKS
19 136 (2.85%) OpenShift
20 133 (2.78%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 287 (6.01%) Firewall
2 185 (3.87%) DNS
3 151 (3.16%) TCP/IP
4 108 (2.26%) Network Security
5 97 (2.03%) VPN
6 94 (1.97%) HTTP
7 93 (1.95%) BGP
8 68 (1.42%) SSL
9 57 (1.19%) OSPF
10 53 (1.11%) WAN
11 50 (1.05%) MPLS
12 41 (0.86%) LAN
12 41 (0.86%) SMTP
13 39 (0.82%) SSH
14 38 (0.80%) Wireless
15 34 (0.71%) DHCP
16 32 (0.67%) SD-WAN
17 31 (0.65%) FTP
17 31 (0.65%) Wireshark
18 29 (0.61%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 403 (8.43%) PostgreSQL
2 350 (7.33%) Power BI
3 278 (5.82%) Data Warehouse
4 254 (5.32%) Relational Database
5 246 (5.15%) NoSQL
6 181 (3.79%) Data Lake
7 175 (3.66%) Big Data
8 170 (3.56%) Amazon RDS
9 154 (3.22%) Tableau
10 146 (3.06%) SQL Server
11 133 (2.78%) MongoDB
12 119 (2.49%) MySQL
13 109 (2.28%) BigQuery
14 100 (2.09%) Amazon Athena
15 99 (2.07%) Hadoop
16 92 (1.93%) DynamoDB
17 86 (1.80%) Metadata
18 85 (1.78%) Amazon Redshift
19 72 (1.51%) Elasticsearch
20 59 (1.23%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 649 (13.58%) Git
2 622 (13.02%) Jenkins
3 395 (8.27%) GitLab
4 336 (7.03%) JIRA
5 75 (1.57%) Selenium
6 72 (1.51%) SonarQube
7 71 (1.49%) Bitbucket
8 65 (1.36%) Sonatype Nexus
9 63 (1.32%) JUnit
10 48 (1.00%) MLflow
11 46 (0.96%) Liquibase
12 41 (0.86%) Artifactory
13 39 (0.82%) Cucumber
14 36 (0.75%) Maven
15 34 (0.71%) Postman
16 33 (0.69%) Gradle
16 33 (0.69%) JMeter
17 29 (0.61%) Eclipse
18 28 (0.59%) Metasploit
18 28 (0.59%) Vagrant
General
1 1,351 (28.28%) Social Skills
2 1,080 (22.60%) Finance
3 713 (14.92%) Analytical Skills
4 506 (10.59%) Banking
5 405 (8.48%) Public Sector
6 244 (5.11%) Front Office
7 200 (4.19%) Investment Banking
8 107 (2.24%) Documentation Skills
9 87 (1.82%) Financial Institution
10 82 (1.72%) Marketing
11 78 (1.63%) Telecoms
12 71 (1.49%) Pharmaceutical
12 71 (1.49%) Retail
13 60 (1.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 52 (1.09%) Legal
15 48 (1.00%) Presentation Skills
16 42 (0.88%) Manufacturing
17 32 (0.67%) Influencing Skills
18 29 (0.61%) Organisational Skills
19 28 (0.59%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 886 (18.54%) Developer
2 643 (13.46%) Senior
3 530 (11.09%) Data Engineer
4 354 (7.41%) Python Engineer
5 353 (7.39%) Analyst
6 348 (7.28%) Python Developer
7 339 (7.10%) DevOps Engineer
8 305 (6.38%) AWS Engineer
9 278 (5.82%) Software Engineer
10 258 (5.40%) Architect
11 209 (4.37%) Lead
12 185 (3.87%) Platform Engineer
13 184 (3.85%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 173 (3.62%) Data Analyst
15 162 (3.39%) Data Scientist
16 131 (2.74%) Consultant
17 130 (2.72%) Senior Developer
18 124 (2.60%) Network Engineer
19 121 (2.53%) Cloud Engineer
20 119 (2.49%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 391 (8.18%) REST
2 344 (7.20%) React
3 314 (6.57%) Kafka
4 248 (5.19%) Node.js
5 239 (5.00%) Pandas
5 239 (5.00%) RESTful
6 223 (4.67%) FastAPI
7 189 (3.96%) NumPy
8 182 (3.81%) PySpark
9 179 (3.75%) PyTorch
10 158 (3.31%) TensorFlow
11 157 (3.29%) AngularJS
12 140 (2.93%) .NET
13 133 (2.78%) Elastic Stack
14 113 (2.37%) HTML
14 113 (2.37%) scikit-learn
15 110 (2.30%) GraphQL
16 108 (2.26%) CSS
17 106 (2.22%) LangChain
18 105 (2.20%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 374 (7.83%) Cloud Native
2 207 (4.33%) Algorithms
3 192 (4.02%) Distributed Systems
4 154 (3.22%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 152 (3.18%) Equities
6 143 (2.99%) Fixed Income
7 142 (2.97%) Data Protection Act
8 126 (2.64%) Product Ownership
9 114 (2.39%) Derivative
10 113 (2.37%) Data Structures
10 113 (2.37%) Hedge funds
11 112 (2.34%) Onboarding
12 96 (2.01%) AI Agents
13 81 (1.70%) Public Cloud
14 78 (1.63%) Data Centre
15 76 (1.59%) Management Information System
16 72 (1.51%) Hybrid Cloud
17 69 (1.44%) Legacy Systems
18 67 (1.40%) Replication
19 56 (1.17%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 860 (18.00%) Linux
2 376 (7.87%) Windows
3 250 (5.23%) Unix
4 97 (2.03%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.40%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.96%) Android
6 46 (0.96%) Ubuntu
7 39 (0.82%) CentOS
8 35 (0.73%) VMS
9 29 (0.61%) Amazon Linux
10 28 (0.59%) Mac OS
11 26 (0.54%) Apple iOS
12 22 (0.46%) Solaris
13 10 (0.21%) Debian
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
15 8 (0.17%) Windows 7
16 6 (0.13%) AIX
17 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
18 4 (0.084%) Windows Server 2019
18 4 (0.084%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,583 (33.13%) CI/CD
2 1,344 (28.13%) DevOps
3 1,257 (26.31%) Agile
4 1,036 (21.68%) Problem-Solving
5 828 (17.33%) Infrastructure as Code
6 810 (16.95%) AI
7 725 (15.17%) Analytics
8 700 (14.65%) Machine Learning
9 645 (13.50%) Containerisation
10 608 (12.72%) Software Engineering
11 607 (12.70%) Data Pipeline
12 507 (10.61%) ETL
13 504 (10.55%) Data Modelling
13 504 (10.55%) Data Science
14 489 (10.23%) Test Automation
15 482 (10.09%) Data Engineering
16 407 (8.52%) Computer Science
17 400 (8.37%) Business Intelligence
18 349 (7.30%) Microservices
19 341 (7.14%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 1,472 (30.81%) SQL
2 867 (18.15%) Java
3 669 (14.00%) Bash
4 623 (13.04%) PowerShell
5 542 (11.34%) JavaScript
6 340 (7.12%) TypeScript
7 297 (6.22%) Go
8 278 (5.82%) C#
9 265 (5.55%) C++
10 196 (4.10%) Perl
11 186 (3.89%) Shell Script
12 160 (3.35%) R
13 100 (2.09%) Scala
14 85 (1.78%) C
15 79 (1.65%) Ruby
16 62 (1.30%) PHP
17 59 (1.23%) VBA
18 54 (1.13%) Groovy
19 47 (0.98%) Bicep
20 45 (0.94%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 901 (18.86%) Security Cleared
2 724 (15.15%) SC Cleared
3 484 (10.13%) Degree
4 235 (4.92%) Computer Science Degree
5 158 (3.31%) AWS Certification
6 145 (3.03%) Master's Degree
7 139 (2.91%) DV Cleared
8 100 (2.09%) Cisco Certification
9 88 (1.84%) CISSP
10 76 (1.59%) BPSS Clearance
11 73 (1.53%) Azure Certification
12 64 (1.34%) CCNP
13 57 (1.19%) PhD
14 48 (1.00%) MCP
15 46 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 39 (0.82%) CCIE
16 39 (0.82%) OSCP
17 37 (0.77%) CEH
18 35 (0.73%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
19 29 (0.61%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 321 (6.72%) Data Quality
2 195 (4.08%) QA
3 156 (3.26%) GDPR
4 100 (2.09%) NIST
5 95 (1.99%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 62 (1.30%) Accessibility
7 49 (1.03%) PCI DSS
8 40 (0.84%) HIPAA
9 28 (0.59%) NCSC
10 26 (0.54%) SLA
11 22 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 21 (0.44%) SOC 2
13 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
14 13 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
16 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 10 (0.21%) MiFID
16 10 (0.21%) PMO
17 9 (0.19%) EMIR
18 7 (0.15%) WCAG
System Software
1 920 (19.25%) Docker
2 163 (3.41%) Active Directory
3 148 (3.10%) VMware Infrastructure
4 44 (0.92%) vSphere
5 36 (0.75%) VMware NSX
6 34 (0.71%) Virtual Machines
7 31 (0.65%) Firmware
8 22 (0.46%) DFS Replication
9 21 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.38%) Hyper-V
11 17 (0.36%) Squid
12 16 (0.33%) Postfix
13 14 (0.29%) HDFS
13 14 (0.29%) KVM
13 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
13 14 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
15 10 (0.21%) zsh
16 9 (0.19%) GPFS
16 9 (0.19%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 1,026 (21.47%) Kubernetes
2 1,012 (21.18%) Terraform
3 627 (13.12%) Ansible
4 358 (7.49%) Grafana
5 304 (6.36%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.86%) Puppet
7 83 (1.74%) Argo
8 54 (1.13%) Kibana
9 43 (0.90%) Progress Chef
10 37 (0.77%) Istio
11 36 (0.75%) Nessus
12 35 (0.73%) vRealize
13 29 (0.61%) Nmap
13 29 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
14 28 (0.59%) NetBackup
15 27 (0.57%) ITRS Geneos
16 26 (0.54%) vCenter Server
17 23 (0.48%) logstash
17 23 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
18 22 (0.46%) Packer
Vendors
1 546 (11.43%) Microsoft
2 326 (6.82%) Databricks
3 270 (5.65%) Google
4 255 (5.34%) Splunk
5 234 (4.90%) VMware
6 224 (4.69%) Oracle
7 148 (3.10%) ServiceNow
8 138 (2.89%) Cisco
9 130 (2.72%) Red Hat
10 87 (1.82%) Palo Alto
11 85 (1.78%) F5
12 74 (1.55%) OpenAI
13 64 (1.34%) Foundry
13 64 (1.34%) SAP
14 55 (1.15%) CyberArk
15 51 (1.07%) Atlassian
16 48 (1.00%) IBM
17 45 (0.94%) Salesforce
18 44 (0.92%) Juniper
19 43 (0.90%) CrowdStrike