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

6 months to
16 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,680 4,202 4,026
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.79% 12.93% 9.44%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.15% 38.99% 30.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,722 2,830 2,954
10th Percentile £366 £363 £375
25th Percentile £425 £438 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £537 £560
Median % change year-on-year -2.23% -4.11% -6.67%
75th Percentile £630 £650 £700
90th Percentile £748 £798 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £503
% change year-on-year - -0.65% -4.14%
Number of hourly rates quoted 129 70 121
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £42.50 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.00 £50.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.00% -19.35% -4.62%
75th Percentile £74.00 £57.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £68.75
% change year-on-year +5.00% -27.27% +14.58%

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 14,148 10,777 13,056
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.88% 33.17% 30.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,193 7,253 9,236
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £421 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £610 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 538 265 514
10th Percentile £33.73 £27.44 £31.25
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +2.36% -2.31% +4.00%

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 16 July 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 16 July 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 16 July 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 4,745 £530 -3.64% 2,215
London -4 2,727 £560 -2.61% 1,081
UK excluding London -2 2,242 £500 - 1,525
Work from Home -5 1,595 £525 -4.55% 805
North of England +6 782 £492 +3.04% 344
South East -9 445 £537 +7.40% 481
Yorkshire +2 422 £500 +1.75% 98
Scotland +4 325 £439 -7.63% 79
North West +4 285 £525 +10.53% 185
South West -1 282 £500 -9.09% 204
Midlands -14 256 £476 +5.78% 179
West Midlands -15 206 £475 +5.56% 95
East of England -15 132 £500 -0.50% 172
North East +5 88 £425 -2.86% 64
East Midlands -7 49 £485 +8.08% 83
Wales -5 31 £500 +11.11% 42
Northern Ireland +13 28 £369 -35.16% 47

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
1 287 (5.05%) Apache Spark
2 269 (4.74%) Apache Airflow
3 209 (3.68%) Apache
4 178 (3.13%) Confluence
5 52 (0.92%) Jupyter
5 52 (0.92%) SAS
6 48 (0.85%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.49%) OpenStack
8 24 (0.42%) nginx
9 20 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
10 19 (0.33%) ArcGIS
11 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
12 12 (0.21%) IIS
13 11 (0.19%) Tomcat
14 9 (0.16%) CMS
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.088%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 121 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 30 (0.53%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
4 26 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 23 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 19 (0.33%) Spreadsheet
7 15 (0.26%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.088%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.088%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.035%) Bloomberg AIM
10 2 (0.035%) Distributed Ledger
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.035%) R3 Corda
10 2 (0.035%) Remedy AR System
Cloud Services
1 2,113 (37.20%) AWS
2 1,891 (33.29%) Azure
3 831 (14.63%) GCP
4 690 (12.15%) GitHub
5 521 (9.17%) Power Platform
6 488 (8.59%) Serverless
7 431 (7.59%) Amazon S3
8 401 (7.06%) Azure DevOps
9 380 (6.69%) GitHub Actions
10 367 (6.46%) AWS Lambda
11 292 (5.14%) Snowflake
12 234 (4.12%) Azure Data Factory
13 213 (3.75%) dbt
14 193 (3.40%) AWS CloudFormation
15 179 (3.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 178 (3.13%) Amazon EKS
17 159 (2.80%) OpenShift
18 153 (2.69%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 136 (2.39%) Amazon EC2
20 128 (2.25%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 258 (4.54%) Firewall
2 185 (3.26%) DNS
3 127 (2.24%) BGP
3 127 (2.24%) TCP/IP
4 123 (2.17%) Network Security
5 119 (2.10%) WAN
6 108 (1.90%) VPN
7 80 (1.41%) OSPF
8 59 (1.04%) DHCP
9 58 (1.02%) VLAN
10 57 (1.00%) SAN
11 56 (0.99%) BIG-IP
11 56 (0.99%) HTTP
11 56 (0.99%) SD-WAN
12 51 (0.90%) VXLAN
13 48 (0.85%) SSL
14 46 (0.81%) LAN
15 45 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 43 (0.76%) MPLS
16 43 (0.76%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 461 (8.12%) Power BI
2 359 (6.32%) PostgreSQL
3 320 (5.63%) Data Warehouse
4 239 (4.21%) SQL Server
5 208 (3.66%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.52%) Tableau
7 192 (3.38%) Relational Database
8 182 (3.20%) Metadata
9 166 (2.92%) Big Data
10 161 (2.83%) NoSQL
11 148 (2.61%) BigQuery
12 140 (2.46%) Amazon Redshift
13 139 (2.45%) Amazon Athena
14 125 (2.20%) MongoDB
15 121 (2.13%) Delta Lake
16 109 (1.92%) DynamoDB
17 108 (1.90%) Amazon RDS
18 89 (1.57%) MySQL
19 76 (1.34%) Hadoop
20 75 (1.32%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 702 (12.36%) Git
2 509 (8.96%) Jenkins
3 406 (7.15%) GitLab
4 313 (5.51%) JIRA
5 83 (1.46%) Selenium
6 71 (1.25%) MLflow
7 52 (0.92%) Postman
8 41 (0.72%) Bitbucket
9 39 (0.69%) JMeter
10 36 (0.63%) Cypress.io
11 35 (0.62%) SonarQube
12 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.56%) REST Assured
14 31 (0.55%) Artifactory
15 29 (0.51%) JUnit
16 27 (0.48%) Sonatype Nexus
17 26 (0.46%) Claude Code
17 26 (0.46%) Maven
18 24 (0.42%) Gatling
19 18 (0.32%) Zephyr
General
1 1,223 (21.53%) Social Skills
2 1,182 (20.81%) Finance
3 774 (13.63%) Analytical Skills
4 559 (9.84%) Public Sector
5 427 (7.52%) Banking
6 203 (3.57%) Front Office
7 131 (2.31%) Documentation Skills
8 127 (2.24%) Investment Banking
9 111 (1.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 95 (1.67%) Retail
11 82 (1.44%) Marketing
12 64 (1.13%) Telecoms
13 63 (1.11%) Pharmaceutical
14 59 (1.04%) Legal
15 49 (0.86%) Financial Institution
16 47 (0.83%) Military
17 46 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
17 46 (0.81%) Publishing
18 37 (0.65%) Manufacturing
19 31 (0.55%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 995 (17.52%) Developer
2 889 (15.65%) Senior
3 854 (15.04%) Data Engineer
4 526 (9.26%) Python Developer
5 425 (7.48%) Lead
6 391 (6.88%) Python Engineer
7 334 (5.88%) DevOps Engineer
8 311 (5.48%) Architect
9 310 (5.46%) Software Engineer
10 283 (4.98%) Analyst
11 254 (4.47%) AWS Engineer
12 249 (4.38%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 221 (3.89%) Data Scientist
14 186 (3.27%) Platform Engineer
15 178 (3.13%) Cloud Engineer
15 178 (3.13%) Senior Developer
16 174 (3.06%) Azure Engineer
17 170 (2.99%) Senior Data Engineer
18 144 (2.54%) Data Analyst
19 136 (2.39%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 416 (7.32%) REST
2 371 (6.53%) React
3 363 (6.39%) PySpark
4 352 (6.20%) Kafka
5 240 (4.23%) .NET
6 219 (3.86%) Node.js
7 216 (3.80%) FastAPI
8 209 (3.68%) RESTful
9 198 (3.49%) Pandas
10 195 (3.43%) JSON
11 175 (3.08%) Django
12 159 (2.80%) PyTorch
13 141 (2.48%) LangChain
14 123 (2.17%) NumPy
15 122 (2.15%) Flask
16 110 (1.94%) scikit-learn
17 107 (1.88%) TensorFlow
18 105 (1.85%) OAuth
19 100 (1.76%) pytest
20 99 (1.74%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 750 (13.20%) Cloud Native
2 311 (5.48%) Distributed Systems
3 191 (3.36%) Onboarding
4 181 (3.19%) AI Agents
5 159 (2.80%) Data Centre
6 148 (2.61%) Algorithms
7 143 (2.52%) Product Ownership
8 129 (2.27%) Data Structures
9 127 (2.24%) Legacy Systems
10 120 (2.11%) Data Protection Act
11 114 (2.01%) Hybrid Cloud
12 113 (1.99%) Derivative
13 108 (1.90%) Management Information System
14 103 (1.81%) Fixed Income
15 95 (1.67%) Equities
16 80 (1.41%) Security Posture
17 74 (1.30%) Public Cloud
18 64 (1.13%) Linux Command Line
18 64 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
19 60 (1.06%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 681 (11.99%) Linux
2 317 (5.58%) Windows
3 219 (3.86%) Unix
4 131 (2.31%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 74 (1.30%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.69%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.56%) VMS
8 26 (0.46%) AIX
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 18 (0.32%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 8 (0.14%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Debian
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,162 (38.06%) CI/CD
2 1,571 (27.66%) DevOps
3 1,387 (24.42%) AI
4 1,278 (22.50%) Agile
5 1,138 (20.04%) Analytics
6 1,068 (18.80%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,014 (17.85%) Data Pipeline
8 925 (16.29%) Problem-Solving
9 908 (15.99%) Machine Learning
10 812 (14.30%) Software Engineering
11 806 (14.19%) Data Engineering
12 772 (13.59%) Containerisation
13 755 (13.29%) Data Modelling
14 696 (12.25%) ETL
15 649 (11.43%) Observability
16 639 (11.25%) Data Science
17 582 (10.25%) Test Automation
18 541 (9.52%) Business Intelligence
19 526 (9.26%) LLM
20 509 (8.96%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,817 (31.99%) SQL
2 802 (14.12%) Java
3 701 (12.34%) Bash
4 680 (11.97%) PowerShell
5 465 (8.19%) JavaScript
6 405 (7.13%) TypeScript
7 326 (5.74%) C#
8 220 (3.87%) Go
9 163 (2.87%) R
10 138 (2.43%) C++
11 130 (2.29%) Scala
12 125 (2.20%) Shell Script
13 92 (1.62%) Bicep
14 75 (1.32%) Perl
15 58 (1.02%) PL/SQL
16 57 (1.00%) Ruby
17 56 (0.99%) C
18 55 (0.97%) Groovy
19 54 (0.95%) Rust
20 51 (0.90%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,284 (22.61%) Security Cleared
2 1,028 (18.10%) SC Cleared
3 424 (7.46%) Degree
4 190 (3.35%) DV Cleared
5 156 (2.75%) Computer Science Degree
6 141 (2.48%) BPSS Clearance
7 131 (2.31%) AWS Certification
8 121 (2.13%) Azure Certification
9 92 (1.62%) CISSP
10 89 (1.57%) Cisco Certification
11 81 (1.43%) Master's Degree
12 59 (1.04%) CCNP
13 48 (0.85%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 38 (0.67%) CISM
15 36 (0.63%) Microsoft Certification
16 32 (0.56%) CCIE
16 32 (0.56%) ISTQB
16 32 (0.56%) PhD
17 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 24 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 555 (9.77%) Data Quality
2 251 (4.42%) QA
3 123 (2.17%) GDPR
4 109 (1.92%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 108 (1.90%) NIST
6 95 (1.67%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.60%) SLA
8 26 (0.46%) WCAG
9 23 (0.40%) HIPAA
9 23 (0.40%) NCSC
10 22 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
10 22 (0.39%) PCI DSS
11 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
12 13 (0.23%) SOC 2
13 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
14 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 9 (0.16%) GRC
15 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 889 (15.65%) Docker
2 132 (2.32%) Active Directory
3 121 (2.13%) VMware Infrastructure
4 77 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.81%) vSphere
6 40 (0.70%) VMware NSX
7 37 (0.65%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.53%) Firmware
9 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.33%) NFS
11 15 (0.26%) KVM
11 15 (0.26%) Oracle RAC
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 11 (0.19%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
17 4 (0.070%) OpenSSH
17 4 (0.070%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,233 (21.71%) Terraform
2 1,057 (18.61%) Kubernetes
3 603 (10.62%) Ansible
4 360 (6.34%) Grafana
5 286 (5.04%) Prometheus
6 79 (1.39%) Puppet
7 71 (1.25%) Argo
8 50 (0.88%) Progress Chef
9 41 (0.72%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) vRealize
11 37 (0.65%) vCenter Server
12 31 (0.55%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
13 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
14 26 (0.46%) Control-M
14 26 (0.46%) Nagios
15 25 (0.44%) Nessus
16 24 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
17 20 (0.35%) FortiGate
18 19 (0.33%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 651 (11.46%) Microsoft
2 559 (9.84%) Databricks
3 322 (5.67%) Google
4 255 (4.49%) Oracle
5 211 (3.71%) Splunk
6 175 (3.08%) VMware
7 146 (2.57%) Cisco
8 144 (2.54%) OpenAI
9 112 (1.97%) ServiceNow
10 108 (1.90%) Red Hat
11 97 (1.71%) F5
12 90 (1.58%) Palo Alto
13 87 (1.53%) Dynatrace
14 84 (1.48%) Informatica
15 82 (1.44%) IBM
16 69 (1.21%) Fortinet
17 64 (1.13%) CyberArk
17 64 (1.13%) Foundry
18 56 (0.99%) Arista
18 56 (0.99%) SAP