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

6 months to
19 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,716 3,927 4,167
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.76% 12.47% 9.65%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.66% 37.60% 31.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,178 2,597 2,905
10th Percentile £358 £380 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £570
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -3.51% -5.00%
75th Percentile £638 £680 £688
90th Percentile £748 £804 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £521 £528
% change year-on-year -4.03% -1.23% -3.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 98 62 119
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.23 £30.55
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.15 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.86 £45.59 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.74% -24.02% -7.69%
75th Percentile £73.37 £66.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.23 £77.25 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £60.00
% change year-on-year +10.89% -23.03% -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 11,321 10,443 13,046
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.62% 33.17% 30.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,520 6,621 9,228
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -3.17%
75th Percentile £615 £644 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £494 £500
% change year-on-year -2.23% -1.20% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 412 246 446
10th Percentile £36.03 £21.25 £35.25
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.19 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +3.31% -3.97%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -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 19 January 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 19 January 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 19 January 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 4,010 £525 -8.70% 4,447
London 0 2,323 £550 -8.33% 1,116
UK excluding London 0 1,789 £500 -4.03% 4,045
Work from Home 0 1,417 £525 -4.55% 1,941
North of England +10 582 £480 -4.48% 704
South East +2 393 £481 -12.50% 1,363
Yorkshire +7 294 £500 -6.98% 288
Midlands +5 275 £506 +6.53% 453
Scotland +3 254 £473 -2.38% 190
North West +4 245 £450 -7.41% 296
West Midlands +14 233 £515 +3.00% 170
South West -9 175 £550 -10.20% 521
East of England +6 124 £525 +9.38% 614
North East +4 47 £488 -10.55% 124
East Midlands -19 42 £429 +7.86% 273
Wales -15 28 £523 +4.50% 192
Northern Ireland -1 22 £588 +11.90% 101

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
1 209 (4.43%) Apache Spark
2 199 (4.22%) Apache Airflow
3 149 (3.16%) Apache
3 149 (3.16%) Confluence
4 61 (1.29%) SAS
5 56 (1.19%) SharePoint
6 34 (0.72%) nginx
7 33 (0.70%) OpenStack
8 22 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 22 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
9 18 (0.38%) Appian
10 11 (0.23%) ArcGIS
11 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
12 7 (0.15%) IIS
13 6 (0.13%) Camunda
13 6 (0.13%) CMS
13 6 (0.13%) Luigi
13 6 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
14 3 (0.064%) Apache Superset
14 3 (0.064%) Traefik
Applications
1 124 (2.63%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.72%) Chatbot
3 26 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 17 (0.36%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 9 (0.19%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 3 (0.064%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.064%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.042%) Maya
10 2 (0.042%) NUKE
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 16 (0.34%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
2 10 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 3 (0.064%) Actimize
4 3 (0.064%) NetSuite
4 3 (0.064%) Remedy ITSM
5 2 (0.042%) Bloomberg AIM
5 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
5 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
5 2 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.042%) Shopify
5 2 (0.042%) Teamcenter
6 1 (0.021%) Cloudability
6 1 (0.021%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
6 1 (0.021%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
6 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
6 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,851 (39.25%) AWS
2 1,534 (32.53%) Azure
3 721 (15.29%) GCP
4 590 (12.51%) GitHub
5 502 (10.64%) Serverless
6 430 (9.12%) Power Platform
7 358 (7.59%) Amazon S3
8 339 (7.19%) AWS Lambda
9 314 (6.66%) Azure DevOps
10 310 (6.57%) GitHub Actions
11 241 (5.11%) AWS CloudFormation
12 234 (4.96%) Snowflake
13 214 (4.54%) Azure Data Factory
14 191 (4.05%) Amazon EC2
15 174 (3.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 174 (3.69%) Amazon ECS
16 165 (3.50%) Amazon EKS
17 137 (2.91%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 134 (2.84%) dbt
18 134 (2.84%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 236 (5.00%) Firewall
2 156 (3.31%) DNS
3 122 (2.59%) TCP/IP
4 116 (2.46%) Network Security
5 80 (1.70%) VPN
6 78 (1.65%) HTTP
7 68 (1.44%) BGP
8 64 (1.36%) SSL
9 49 (1.04%) WAN
10 41 (0.87%) OSPF
11 37 (0.78%) MPLS
11 37 (0.78%) Wireshark
12 34 (0.72%) Wireless
13 33 (0.70%) DHCP
13 33 (0.70%) LAN
14 31 (0.66%) SSH
15 30 (0.64%) SD-WAN
16 28 (0.59%) SMTP
17 23 (0.49%) FTP
17 23 (0.49%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 368 (7.80%) Power BI
2 366 (7.76%) PostgreSQL
3 277 (5.87%) Data Warehouse
4 225 (4.77%) NoSQL
4 225 (4.77%) Relational Database
5 218 (4.62%) Data Lake
6 168 (3.56%) SQL Server
7 161 (3.41%) Amazon RDS
8 156 (3.31%) Big Data
9 145 (3.07%) Tableau
10 126 (2.67%) MySQL
11 105 (2.23%) Metadata
12 98 (2.08%) BigQuery
13 94 (1.99%) Amazon Redshift
14 93 (1.97%) MongoDB
15 91 (1.93%) Amazon Athena
16 83 (1.76%) Hadoop
17 79 (1.68%) Delta Lake
17 79 (1.68%) DynamoDB
18 75 (1.59%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 596 (12.64%) Git
2 549 (11.64%) Jenkins
3 425 (9.01%) GitLab
4 273 (5.79%) JIRA
5 83 (1.76%) Selenium
6 75 (1.59%) MLflow
7 48 (1.02%) Cucumber
7 48 (1.02%) Sonatype Nexus
8 45 (0.95%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.91%) Postman
10 40 (0.85%) SonarQube
11 39 (0.83%) JUnit
12 35 (0.74%) JMeter
13 32 (0.68%) Liquibase
14 29 (0.61%) Cypress.io
15 28 (0.59%) CircleCI
15 28 (0.59%) Maven
15 28 (0.59%) Visual Studio
16 27 (0.57%) Artifactory
17 24 (0.51%) Gradle
General
1 1,279 (27.12%) Social Skills
2 935 (19.83%) Finance
3 660 (13.99%) Analytical Skills
4 441 (9.35%) Public Sector
5 417 (8.84%) Banking
6 159 (3.37%) Front Office
7 131 (2.78%) Investment Banking
8 125 (2.65%) Documentation Skills
9 72 (1.53%) Financial Institution
10 67 (1.42%) Marketing
11 64 (1.36%) Pharmaceutical
12 61 (1.29%) Retail
13 57 (1.21%) Telecoms
14 56 (1.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 43 (0.91%) Legal
15 43 (0.91%) Presentation Skills
16 41 (0.87%) Manufacturing
17 32 (0.68%) Influencing Skills
18 28 (0.59%) Military
19 24 (0.51%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 814 (17.26%) Developer
2 661 (14.02%) Senior
3 618 (13.10%) Data Engineer
4 339 (7.19%) Python Developer
5 313 (6.64%) DevOps Engineer
6 302 (6.40%) Python Engineer
7 285 (6.04%) Analyst
8 283 (6.00%) Architect
9 266 (5.64%) AWS Engineer
10 236 (5.00%) Lead
11 229 (4.86%) Software Engineer
12 224 (4.75%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 176 (3.73%) Data Scientist
14 164 (3.48%) Platform Engineer
15 144 (3.05%) Data Analyst
16 143 (3.03%) Senior Developer
17 128 (2.71%) Azure Engineer
18 124 (2.63%) Senior Data Engineer
19 118 (2.50%) Consultant
19 118 (2.50%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 411 (8.72%) REST
2 293 (6.21%) React
3 287 (6.09%) Kafka
4 271 (5.75%) PySpark
5 234 (4.96%) Node.js
6 220 (4.66%) RESTful
7 216 (4.58%) Pandas
8 209 (4.43%) FastAPI
9 192 (4.07%) PyTorch
10 166 (3.52%) .NET
11 164 (3.48%) NumPy
11 164 (3.48%) TensorFlow
12 131 (2.78%) AngularJS
13 120 (2.54%) LangChain
14 116 (2.46%) scikit-learn
15 111 (2.35%) Elastic Stack
16 104 (2.21%) pytest
17 100 (2.12%) Flask
17 100 (2.12%) HTML
17 100 (2.12%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 403 (8.55%) Cloud Native
2 189 (4.01%) Algorithms
3 183 (3.88%) Distributed Systems
4 130 (2.76%) Product Ownership
5 126 (2.67%) Data Protection Act
6 120 (2.54%) Equities
7 104 (2.21%) Data Structures
8 95 (2.01%) Onboarding
9 94 (1.99%) AI Agents
10 93 (1.97%) Derivative
11 91 (1.93%) Enterprise Software
12 86 (1.82%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 84 (1.78%) Fixed Income
14 80 (1.70%) Public Cloud
15 77 (1.63%) Security Posture
16 75 (1.59%) Data Centre
16 75 (1.59%) Hedge funds
16 75 (1.59%) Hybrid Cloud
17 73 (1.55%) Management Information System
18 71 (1.51%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 773 (16.39%) Linux
2 354 (7.51%) Windows
3 232 (4.92%) Unix
4 91 (1.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 61 (1.29%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.85%) Android
7 37 (0.78%) Ubuntu
8 36 (0.76%) VMS
9 29 (0.61%) CentOS
10 25 (0.53%) Solaris
11 24 (0.51%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.38%) Apple iOS
13 17 (0.36%) Amazon Linux
14 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
15 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
16 4 (0.085%) Debian
16 4 (0.085%) Robot Operating System
16 4 (0.085%) Windows 10
17 3 (0.064%) AIX
17 3 (0.064%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,635 (34.67%) CI/CD
2 1,328 (28.16%) DevOps
3 1,127 (23.90%) Agile
4 1,034 (21.93%) Problem-Solving
5 943 (20.00%) AI
6 850 (18.02%) Infrastructure as Code
7 814 (17.26%) Analytics
8 735 (15.59%) Machine Learning
9 711 (15.08%) Containerisation
10 688 (14.59%) Data Pipeline
11 563 (11.94%) ETL
12 551 (11.68%) Data Engineering
12 551 (11.68%) Data Science
13 546 (11.58%) Data Modelling
14 538 (11.41%) Software Engineering
15 512 (10.86%) Test Automation
16 419 (8.88%) Business Intelligence
17 389 (8.25%) Observability
18 366 (7.76%) LLM
19 360 (7.63%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,446 (30.66%) SQL
2 749 (15.88%) Java
3 644 (13.66%) PowerShell
4 609 (12.91%) Bash
5 481 (10.20%) JavaScript
6 288 (6.11%) C#
7 282 (5.98%) TypeScript
8 245 (5.20%) Go
9 208 (4.41%) C++
10 162 (3.44%) Perl
11 161 (3.41%) R
12 153 (3.24%) Shell Script
13 110 (2.33%) Scala
14 95 (2.01%) Ruby
15 60 (1.27%) Bicep
16 57 (1.21%) Kusto Query Language
17 55 (1.17%) C
18 51 (1.08%) VBA
19 44 (0.93%) PHP
20 37 (0.78%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,032 (21.88%) Security Cleared
2 838 (17.77%) SC Cleared
3 433 (9.18%) Degree
4 232 (4.92%) Computer Science Degree
5 137 (2.91%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.76%) AWS Certification
7 115 (2.44%) Master's Degree
8 86 (1.82%) Azure Certification
8 86 (1.82%) BPSS Clearance
9 80 (1.70%) CISSP
10 76 (1.61%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.51%) MCP
12 50 (1.06%) CCNP
13 48 (1.02%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 43 (0.91%) PhD
15 36 (0.76%) CCIE
16 34 (0.72%) CEH
17 33 (0.70%) CISM
17 33 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 386 (8.18%) Data Quality
2 172 (3.65%) QA
3 161 (3.41%) GDPR
4 89 (1.89%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 89 (1.89%) NIST
5 57 (1.21%) Accessibility
6 33 (0.70%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.64%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 26 (0.55%) HIPAA
9 23 (0.49%) SLA
10 22 (0.47%) NCSC
11 18 (0.38%) SOC 2
12 14 (0.30%) EU AI Act
13 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
13 9 (0.19%) MiFID
14 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
14 8 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
14 8 (0.17%) EMIR
14 8 (0.17%) PMO
14 8 (0.17%) WCAG
System Software
1 941 (19.95%) Docker
2 184 (3.90%) Active Directory
3 109 (2.31%) VMware Infrastructure
4 36 (0.76%) VMware NSX
5 35 (0.74%) vSphere
6 34 (0.72%) Virtual Machines
7 22 (0.47%) Firmware
8 21 (0.45%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.42%) HDFS
10 17 (0.36%) KVM
11 15 (0.32%) Squid
12 14 (0.30%) DFS Replication
12 14 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
13 13 (0.28%) Postfix
14 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
15 10 (0.21%) Lustre
16 9 (0.19%) Dovecot
16 9 (0.19%) GPFS
17 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
17 8 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,065 (22.58%) Terraform
2 991 (21.01%) Kubernetes
3 586 (12.43%) Ansible
4 340 (7.21%) Grafana
5 286 (6.06%) Prometheus
6 84 (1.78%) Argo
7 81 (1.72%) Puppet
8 52 (1.10%) Kibana
9 46 (0.98%) vRealize
10 42 (0.89%) Istio
11 35 (0.74%) Single Sign-On
12 33 (0.70%) Nessus
13 31 (0.66%) Progress Chef
14 29 (0.61%) NetBackup
15 19 (0.40%) ITRS Geneos
16 18 (0.38%) logstash
17 17 (0.36%) Nmap
18 16 (0.34%) QRadar
18 16 (0.34%) Rancher
19 15 (0.32%) Proxmox
Vendors
1 564 (11.96%) Microsoft
2 444 (9.41%) Databricks
3 281 (5.96%) Google
4 244 (5.17%) Splunk
5 234 (4.96%) Oracle
6 209 (4.43%) VMware
7 136 (2.88%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.57%) ServiceNow
9 116 (2.46%) Cisco
10 103 (2.18%) OpenAI
11 93 (1.97%) CyberArk
12 84 (1.78%) F5
13 79 (1.68%) Palo Alto
14 69 (1.46%) Foundry
15 68 (1.44%) BeyondTrust
16 49 (1.04%) SAP
17 42 (0.89%) Dynatrace
18 40 (0.85%) Informatica
19 38 (0.81%) CheckPoint
19 38 (0.81%) Salesforce