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

6 months to
6 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,897 3,991 4,149
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.51% 12.81% 9.27%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.35% 38.14% 31.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,302 2,639 2,936
10th Percentile £358 £385 £400
25th Percentile £415 £463 £469
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.41% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -6.29% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 101 55 116
10th Percentile £30.00 £20.57 £27.00
25th Percentile £41.25 £25.17 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.80% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £68.75 £66.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £84.50 £77.02
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £47.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +7.81% -24.00% -4.58%

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 11,842 10,464 13,210
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.24% 33.58% 29.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,856 6,636 9,369
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.33% -4.44%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -2.78% -1.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 458 235 517
10th Percentile £40.00 £21.55 £35.59
25th Percentile £52.50 £36.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.38 £69.62
90th Percentile £77.15 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.37 £62.50
% change year-on-year +2.57% +1.40% -3.85%

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 6 February 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 6 February 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 6 February 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 0 4,107 £520 -9.57% 2,621
London 0 2,328 £550 -8.33% 1,193
UK excluding London 0 1,905 £492 -6.29% 1,902
Work from Home -1 1,470 £525 -4.55% 1,146
North of England +8 618 £475 -7.45% 443
South East +1 414 £488 -11.36% 602
Yorkshire +8 325 £500 -6.98% 150
Midlands +5 290 £500 +2.04% 222
Scotland +1 278 £454 -4.87% 153
North West +8 251 £450 -10.00% 241
West Midlands +6 248 £509 +0.54% 107
South West -7 189 £550 -8.46% 255
East of England +2 132 £525 +5.00% 187
North East +5 47 £475 -12.84% 55
East Midlands -19 42 £444 +12.91% 115
Wales -11 32 £473 -5.50% 47
Northern Ireland +3 28 £600 +14.29% 19

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
1 235 (4.80%) Apache Spark
2 205 (4.19%) Apache Airflow
3 164 (3.35%) Apache
4 149 (3.04%) Confluence
5 63 (1.29%) SharePoint
6 62 (1.27%) SAS
7 33 (0.67%) OpenStack
8 32 (0.65%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.63%) nginx
10 22 (0.45%) Jupyter
11 21 (0.43%) Appian
11 21 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
12 13 (0.27%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.18%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.16%) Camunda
15 7 (0.14%) IIS
16 6 (0.12%) CMS
16 6 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
16 6 (0.12%) Tomcat
17 4 (0.082%) Luigi
Applications
1 126 (2.57%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.57%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 17 (0.35%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 7 (0.14%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 3 (0.061%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.061%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.041%) Maya
10 2 (0.041%) NUKE
11 1 (0.020%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.33%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.22%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
4 7 (0.14%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.061%) Actimize
5 3 (0.061%) Bloomberg AIM
5 3 (0.061%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.041%) Cloudability
6 2 (0.041%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.041%) Shopify
6 2 (0.041%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.020%) Cerner Millennium
7 1 (0.020%) Exchequer
7 1 (0.020%) IntelliMatch
7 1 (0.020%) Oracle Applications
7 1 (0.020%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.020%) RMDS
7 1 (0.020%) Salesforce CRM
7 1 (0.020%) SAP IBP
7 1 (0.020%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,908 (38.96%) AWS
2 1,617 (33.02%) Azure
3 758 (15.48%) GCP
4 619 (12.64%) GitHub
5 516 (10.54%) Serverless
6 452 (9.23%) Power Platform
7 370 (7.56%) Amazon S3
8 341 (6.96%) AWS Lambda
9 332 (6.78%) Azure DevOps
10 325 (6.64%) GitHub Actions
11 248 (5.06%) AWS CloudFormation
12 247 (5.04%) Snowflake
13 227 (4.64%) Azure Data Factory
14 179 (3.66%) Amazon EKS
15 174 (3.55%) Amazon EC2
16 173 (3.53%) Amazon ECS
17 163 (3.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 149 (3.04%) OpenShift
19 145 (2.96%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 140 (2.86%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 225 (4.59%) Firewall
2 147 (3.00%) DNS
3 125 (2.55%) Network Security
4 115 (2.35%) TCP/IP
5 77 (1.57%) VPN
6 71 (1.45%) HTTP
7 68 (1.39%) BGP
8 56 (1.14%) WAN
9 52 (1.06%) SSL
10 43 (0.88%) LAN
11 41 (0.84%) Wireshark
12 40 (0.82%) MPLS
13 39 (0.80%) OSPF
14 32 (0.65%) DHCP
15 31 (0.63%) Wireless
16 26 (0.53%) SD-WAN
16 26 (0.53%) SSH
16 26 (0.53%) VLAN
17 23 (0.47%) BIG-IP
18 22 (0.45%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 376 (7.68%) Power BI
2 371 (7.58%) PostgreSQL
3 288 (5.88%) Data Warehouse
4 226 (4.62%) NoSQL
5 223 (4.55%) Data Lake
6 209 (4.27%) Relational Database
7 177 (3.61%) SQL Server
8 159 (3.25%) Big Data
9 153 (3.12%) Tableau
10 147 (3.00%) Amazon RDS
11 121 (2.47%) MySQL
12 116 (2.37%) Metadata
13 112 (2.29%) BigQuery
14 102 (2.08%) Amazon Redshift
15 89 (1.82%) Hadoop
16 88 (1.80%) Delta Lake
17 87 (1.78%) Amazon Athena
18 84 (1.72%) MongoDB
19 78 (1.59%) Azure SQL Database
19 78 (1.59%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 595 (12.15%) Git
2 537 (10.97%) Jenkins
3 421 (8.60%) GitLab
4 281 (5.74%) JIRA
5 84 (1.72%) MLflow
5 84 (1.72%) Selenium
6 49 (1.00%) Cucumber
7 45 (0.92%) Postman
8 44 (0.90%) Sonatype Nexus
9 43 (0.88%) Bitbucket
10 37 (0.76%) JUnit
11 33 (0.67%) JMeter
12 29 (0.59%) SonarQube
13 27 (0.55%) Visual Studio
14 26 (0.53%) CircleCI
14 26 (0.53%) Liquibase
15 25 (0.51%) Cypress.io
15 25 (0.51%) Maven
15 25 (0.51%) SpecFlow
16 24 (0.49%) Artifactory
General
1 1,294 (26.42%) Social Skills
2 953 (19.46%) Finance
3 692 (14.13%) Analytical Skills
4 428 (8.74%) Public Sector
5 425 (8.68%) Banking
6 162 (3.31%) Front Office
7 124 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
8 119 (2.43%) Investment Banking
9 67 (1.37%) Financial Institution
10 62 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 61 (1.25%) Marketing
11 61 (1.25%) Retail
12 60 (1.23%) Pharmaceutical
13 54 (1.10%) Telecoms
14 43 (0.88%) Legal
14 43 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
15 39 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
15 39 (0.80%) Manufacturing
16 30 (0.61%) Military
17 23 (0.47%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 860 (17.56%) Developer
2 677 (13.82%) Senior
3 661 (13.50%) Data Engineer
4 366 (7.47%) Python Developer
5 311 (6.35%) DevOps Engineer
6 308 (6.29%) Architect
7 297 (6.06%) Python Engineer
8 278 (5.68%) Analyst
9 271 (5.53%) Lead
10 265 (5.41%) AWS Engineer
11 232 (4.74%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 221 (4.51%) Software Engineer
13 193 (3.94%) Data Scientist
14 175 (3.57%) Platform Engineer
15 148 (3.02%) Senior Developer
16 140 (2.86%) Data Analyst
17 135 (2.76%) Azure Engineer
18 132 (2.70%) Senior Data Engineer
19 123 (2.51%) Cloud Engineer
20 122 (2.49%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 422 (8.62%) REST
2 319 (6.51%) React
3 296 (6.04%) Kafka
4 284 (5.80%) PySpark
5 249 (5.08%) Node.js
6 222 (4.53%) Pandas
7 213 (4.35%) FastAPI
8 211 (4.31%) RESTful
9 204 (4.17%) PyTorch
10 198 (4.04%) .NET
11 168 (3.43%) NumPy
11 168 (3.43%) TensorFlow
12 134 (2.74%) AngularJS
13 126 (2.57%) LangChain
14 119 (2.43%) Flask
14 119 (2.43%) scikit-learn
15 116 (2.37%) pytest
16 108 (2.21%) Elastic Stack
17 106 (2.16%) OAuth
18 104 (2.12%) Django
Miscellaneous
1 434 (8.86%) Cloud Native
2 203 (4.15%) Algorithms
3 190 (3.88%) Distributed Systems
4 131 (2.68%) Product Ownership
5 128 (2.61%) Data Protection Act
6 122 (2.49%) Equities
7 104 (2.12%) Onboarding
8 100 (2.04%) Data Structures
9 97 (1.98%) AI Agents
10 96 (1.96%) Enterprise Software
11 95 (1.94%) Derivative
12 84 (1.72%) Hybrid Cloud
12 84 (1.72%) Public Cloud
13 83 (1.69%) Legacy Systems
13 83 (1.69%) Management Information System
13 83 (1.69%) Security Posture
14 82 (1.67%) Fixed Income
15 77 (1.57%) Data Centre
16 76 (1.55%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
17 68 (1.39%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 755 (15.42%) Linux
2 351 (7.17%) Windows
3 218 (4.45%) Unix
4 92 (1.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.29%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.80%) Android
7 38 (0.78%) Ubuntu
8 36 (0.74%) VMS
9 28 (0.57%) CentOS
10 26 (0.53%) Solaris
11 24 (0.49%) Mac OS
12 22 (0.45%) Apple iOS
13 13 (0.27%) Amazon Linux
14 11 (0.22%) Windows 7
15 10 (0.20%) Kali Linux
16 5 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.10%) Windows 10
17 4 (0.082%) Robot Operating System
17 4 (0.082%) Windows Server 2008
17 4 (0.082%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,747 (35.67%) CI/CD
2 1,354 (27.65%) DevOps
3 1,145 (23.38%) Agile
4 1,062 (21.69%) Problem-Solving
5 1,028 (20.99%) AI
6 894 (18.26%) Analytics
7 879 (17.95%) Infrastructure as Code
8 781 (15.95%) Machine Learning
9 743 (15.17%) Data Pipeline
10 736 (15.03%) Containerisation
11 619 (12.64%) ETL
12 608 (12.42%) Data Engineering
13 592 (12.09%) Data Science
14 574 (11.72%) Data Modelling
15 545 (11.13%) Test Automation
16 529 (10.80%) Software Engineering
17 440 (8.99%) Observability
18 431 (8.80%) Business Intelligence
19 411 (8.39%) LLM
20 358 (7.31%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,505 (30.73%) SQL
2 725 (14.80%) Java
3 672 (13.72%) PowerShell
4 611 (12.48%) Bash
5 495 (10.11%) JavaScript
6 315 (6.43%) C#
7 303 (6.19%) TypeScript
8 229 (4.68%) Go
9 197 (4.02%) C++
10 156 (3.19%) R
11 140 (2.86%) Perl
12 139 (2.84%) Shell Script
13 123 (2.51%) Scala
14 94 (1.92%) Ruby
15 62 (1.27%) Bicep
16 60 (1.23%) Kusto Query Language
17 55 (1.12%) C
18 53 (1.08%) VBA
19 43 (0.88%) PHP
20 39 (0.80%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,075 (21.95%) Security Cleared
2 871 (17.79%) SC Cleared
3 449 (9.17%) Degree
4 227 (4.64%) Computer Science Degree
5 137 (2.80%) DV Cleared
6 134 (2.74%) AWS Certification
7 128 (2.61%) Master's Degree
8 96 (1.96%) BPSS Clearance
9 93 (1.90%) Azure Certification
10 91 (1.86%) CISSP
11 74 (1.51%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (1.10%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (1.02%) CCNP
14 46 (0.94%) PhD
15 40 (0.82%) CISM
16 37 (0.76%) CEH
17 34 (0.69%) CCIE
18 33 (0.67%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 33 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
19 32 (0.65%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 412 (8.41%) Data Quality
2 186 (3.80%) QA
3 170 (3.47%) GDPR
4 98 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 97 (1.98%) NIST
6 65 (1.33%) Accessibility
7 33 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.61%) HIPAA
9 29 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 25 (0.51%) SLA
11 23 (0.47%) NCSC
12 20 (0.41%) SOC 2
13 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
14 13 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
15 10 (0.20%) Cyber Essentials
15 10 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.20%) PMO
15 10 (0.20%) WCAG
16 9 (0.18%) MiFID
17 8 (0.16%) EMIR
System Software
1 945 (19.30%) Docker
2 183 (3.74%) Active Directory
3 122 (2.49%) VMware Infrastructure
4 49 (1.00%) VMware NSX
5 46 (0.94%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.94%) vSphere
6 26 (0.53%) Hyper-V
7 23 (0.47%) Firmware
8 20 (0.41%) HDFS
9 17 (0.35%) KVM
10 14 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
11 13 (0.27%) Squid
12 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 11 (0.22%) Postfix
14 10 (0.20%) DFS Replication
14 10 (0.20%) Lustre
15 9 (0.18%) GPFS
16 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
17 7 (0.14%) Dovecot
18 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 1,089 (22.24%) Terraform
2 1,027 (20.97%) Kubernetes
3 556 (11.35%) Ansible
4 354 (7.23%) Grafana
5 305 (6.23%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.82%) Argo
7 74 (1.51%) Puppet
8 57 (1.16%) Kibana
9 50 (1.02%) vRealize
10 40 (0.82%) Istio
11 39 (0.80%) Nessus
12 34 (0.69%) Single Sign-On
13 27 (0.55%) NetBackup
13 27 (0.55%) Progress Chef
14 24 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
15 22 (0.45%) vCenter Server
16 21 (0.43%) Control-M
17 20 (0.41%) ITRS Geneos
18 19 (0.39%) logstash
19 18 (0.37%) Nmap
Vendors
1 609 (12.44%) Microsoft
2 467 (9.54%) Databricks
3 298 (6.09%) Google
4 248 (5.06%) Splunk
5 228 (4.66%) Oracle
6 225 (4.59%) VMware
7 138 (2.82%) Red Hat
8 120 (2.45%) Cisco
9 116 (2.37%) OpenAI
10 114 (2.33%) ServiceNow
11 93 (1.90%) CyberArk
12 77 (1.57%) Foundry
13 74 (1.51%) F5
13 74 (1.51%) Palo Alto
14 69 (1.41%) BeyondTrust
15 44 (0.90%) Informatica
15 44 (0.90%) SAP
16 43 (0.88%) IBM
17 42 (0.86%) Atlassian
18 39 (0.80%) Dynatrace