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 15 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,809 4,117 4,374
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.20% 12.01% 9.85%
As % of the Programming Languages category 42.07% 37.00% 32.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,177 2,734 3,126
10th Percentile £358 £378 £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 £748 £825 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £510 £525
% change year-on-year -1.96% -2.86% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 94 74 125
10th Percentile £28.25 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £41.25 £25.13 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.60 £48.75 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.00% -18.75% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.82 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.60 £52.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -12.50% -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 11,432 11,127 13,657
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.37% 32.45% 30.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,549 7,154 9,724
10th Percentile £350 £350 £360
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £507 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.43% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £751 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -2.86% -2.00% -3.52%
Number of hourly rates quoted 367 264 417
10th Percentile £31.25 £21.48 £32.32
25th Percentile £50.00 £40.06 £47.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% - -
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.19 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £78.30
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.87 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.77% -1.73% -

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 15 December 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 15 December 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 15 December 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 +1 4,084 £525 -12.50% 2,586
London +1 2,368 £550 -12.00% 976
UK excluding London +3 1,844 £500 -1.96% 2,171
Work from Home -1 1,415 £525 -4.55% 1,104
North of England +8 567 £475 -7.99% 499
South East +3 406 £500 -7.19% 696
Yorkshire +9 291 £500 -6.98% 166
Midlands +8 280 £500 +5.26% 290
Scotland +8 277 £465 -5.10% 112
North West +6 238 £450 -8.16% 268
West Midlands +16 230 £507 +1.40% 177
South West -11 175 £550 -8.33% 273
East of England +6 151 £525 +5.53% 259
East Midlands -8 50 £410 +2.50% 111
North East +3 43 £475 -15.93% 72
Wales -9 30 £500 - 53
Northern Ireland -5 20 £588 +17.50% 37

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
1 240 (4.99%) Apache Airflow
2 210 (4.37%) Apache Spark
3 174 (3.62%) Apache
4 166 (3.45%) Confluence
5 65 (1.35%) SAS
6 55 (1.14%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.77%) nginx
8 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
10 20 (0.42%) Jupyter
11 15 (0.31%) IIS
12 13 (0.27%) Appian
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
15 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
16 6 (0.12%) Camunda
16 6 (0.12%) CMS
16 6 (0.12%) JBoss
16 6 (0.12%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.10%) Luigi
Applications
1 142 (2.95%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.69%) Chatbot
3 30 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 27 (0.56%) Microsoft Office
5 13 (0.27%) MS Visio
6 11 (0.23%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 3 (0.062%) Maya
8 3 (0.062%) NUKE
9 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
10 1 (0.021%) 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 12 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) Fidessa
5 5 (0.10%) Maximo
6 4 (0.083%) Remedy ITSM
7 3 (0.062%) Actimize
7 3 (0.062%) NetSuite
7 3 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
7 3 (0.062%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
8 2 (0.042%) Endur
8 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
8 2 (0.042%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.042%) Shopify
8 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
9 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
9 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
9 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,883 (39.16%) AWS
2 1,487 (30.92%) Azure
3 721 (14.99%) GCP
4 576 (11.98%) GitHub
5 494 (10.27%) Serverless
6 426 (8.86%) Power Platform
7 366 (7.61%) Amazon S3
8 339 (7.05%) AWS Lambda
9 308 (6.40%) GitHub Actions
10 295 (6.13%) Azure DevOps
11 255 (5.30%) Snowflake
12 234 (4.87%) AWS CloudFormation
13 201 (4.18%) Amazon EC2
14 189 (3.93%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 181 (3.76%) Amazon ECS
15 181 (3.76%) Azure Data Factory
16 167 (3.47%) Amazon EKS
17 161 (3.35%) dbt
18 144 (2.99%) OpenShift
19 133 (2.77%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 266 (5.53%) Firewall
2 186 (3.87%) DNS
3 134 (2.79%) TCP/IP
4 125 (2.60%) Network Security
5 94 (1.95%) HTTP
6 85 (1.77%) VPN
7 78 (1.62%) BGP
8 73 (1.52%) SSL
9 51 (1.06%) WAN
10 49 (1.02%) OSPF
11 42 (0.87%) MPLS
11 42 (0.87%) SMTP
12 40 (0.83%) SSH
13 39 (0.81%) Wireless
14 37 (0.77%) LAN
15 36 (0.75%) DHCP
16 35 (0.73%) FTP
16 35 (0.73%) SD-WAN
16 35 (0.73%) Wireshark
17 27 (0.56%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 394 (8.19%) PostgreSQL
2 370 (7.69%) Power BI
3 288 (5.99%) Data Warehouse
4 246 (5.12%) Relational Database
5 240 (4.99%) NoSQL
6 190 (3.95%) Data Lake
7 172 (3.58%) Big Data
8 170 (3.54%) Amazon RDS
9 164 (3.41%) Tableau
10 152 (3.16%) SQL Server
11 125 (2.60%) MySQL
12 118 (2.45%) MongoDB
13 102 (2.12%) Amazon Athena
13 102 (2.12%) BigQuery
14 93 (1.93%) Hadoop
15 88 (1.83%) Metadata
16 87 (1.81%) Amazon Redshift
17 83 (1.73%) DynamoDB
18 80 (1.66%) Elasticsearch
19 68 (1.41%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 647 (13.45%) Git
2 612 (12.73%) Jenkins
3 437 (9.09%) GitLab
4 313 (6.51%) JIRA
5 85 (1.77%) Selenium
6 65 (1.35%) MLflow
7 62 (1.29%) SonarQube
8 61 (1.27%) Bitbucket
9 57 (1.19%) Sonatype Nexus
10 50 (1.04%) JUnit
11 49 (1.02%) Cucumber
12 44 (0.91%) Liquibase
13 35 (0.73%) Postman
14 34 (0.71%) JMeter
15 31 (0.64%) Artifactory
15 31 (0.64%) Cypress.io
16 27 (0.56%) Eclipse
17 26 (0.54%) CircleCI
18 25 (0.52%) Gradle
18 25 (0.52%) Maven
General
1 1,328 (27.61%) Social Skills
2 1,046 (21.75%) Finance
3 688 (14.31%) Analytical Skills
4 480 (9.98%) Banking
5 432 (8.98%) Public Sector
6 208 (4.33%) Front Office
7 177 (3.68%) Investment Banking
8 108 (2.25%) Documentation Skills
9 81 (1.68%) Financial Institution
10 77 (1.60%) Marketing
11 73 (1.52%) Telecoms
12 69 (1.43%) Pharmaceutical
13 66 (1.37%) Retail
14 56 (1.16%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 46 (0.96%) Manufacturing
16 44 (0.91%) Legal
16 44 (0.91%) Presentation Skills
17 32 (0.67%) Influencing Skills
18 29 (0.60%) Electronics
19 28 (0.58%) Military
Job Titles
1 850 (17.68%) Developer
2 660 (13.72%) Senior
3 560 (11.64%) Data Engineer
4 350 (7.28%) DevOps Engineer
5 346 (7.19%) Python Developer
5 346 (7.19%) Python Engineer
6 335 (6.97%) Analyst
7 293 (6.09%) AWS Engineer
8 260 (5.41%) Architect
9 259 (5.39%) Software Engineer
10 227 (4.72%) Lead
11 207 (4.30%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 186 (3.87%) Platform Engineer
13 182 (3.78%) Data Scientist
14 160 (3.33%) Data Analyst
15 140 (2.91%) Senior Developer
16 123 (2.56%) Consultant
17 118 (2.45%) Azure Engineer
18 116 (2.41%) Automation Engineer
18 116 (2.41%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 388 (8.07%) REST
2 323 (6.72%) Kafka
3 316 (6.57%) React
4 243 (5.05%) Node.js
5 241 (5.01%) Pandas
5 241 (5.01%) RESTful
6 225 (4.68%) FastAPI
7 224 (4.66%) PySpark
8 194 (4.03%) PyTorch
9 189 (3.93%) NumPy
10 169 (3.51%) TensorFlow
11 142 (2.95%) Elastic Stack
12 141 (2.93%) AngularJS
13 138 (2.87%) .NET
14 122 (2.54%) scikit-learn
15 120 (2.50%) LangChain
16 108 (2.25%) pytest
17 103 (2.14%) JSON
18 102 (2.12%) Flask
19 95 (1.98%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 386 (8.03%) Cloud Native
2 201 (4.18%) Algorithms
3 194 (4.03%) Distributed Systems
4 139 (2.89%) Equities
5 137 (2.85%) Data Protection Act
6 125 (2.60%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 124 (2.58%) Product Ownership
8 120 (2.50%) Fixed Income
9 110 (2.29%) Data Structures
10 108 (2.25%) Onboarding
11 106 (2.20%) Derivative
12 99 (2.06%) AI Agents
13 96 (2.00%) Hedge funds
14 81 (1.68%) Public Cloud
15 78 (1.62%) Data Centre
16 77 (1.60%) Hybrid Cloud
17 76 (1.58%) Management Information System
18 65 (1.35%) Legacy Systems
18 65 (1.35%) Replication
19 62 (1.29%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 856 (17.80%) Linux
2 370 (7.69%) Windows
3 239 (4.97%) Unix
4 97 (2.02%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.85%) Android
7 39 (0.81%) VMS
8 37 (0.77%) Ubuntu
9 32 (0.67%) CentOS
10 23 (0.48%) Amazon Linux
10 23 (0.48%) Mac OS
11 18 (0.37%) Solaris
12 17 (0.35%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.21%) Windows 7
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
15 7 (0.15%) Debian
16 5 (0.10%) zOS
17 3 (0.062%) AIX
17 3 (0.062%) Embedded Linux
17 3 (0.062%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,626 (33.81%) CI/CD
2 1,354 (28.16%) DevOps
3 1,208 (25.12%) Agile
4 1,041 (21.65%) Problem-Solving
5 876 (18.22%) AI
6 856 (17.80%) Infrastructure as Code
7 787 (16.37%) Analytics
8 740 (15.39%) Machine Learning
9 699 (14.54%) Containerisation
10 651 (13.54%) Data Pipeline
11 588 (12.23%) Software Engineering
12 546 (11.35%) Data Science
13 538 (11.19%) Data Engineering
14 527 (10.96%) ETL
15 525 (10.92%) Data Modelling
16 506 (10.52%) Test Automation
17 425 (8.84%) Business Intelligence
18 394 (8.19%) Computer Science
19 377 (7.84%) Observability
20 363 (7.55%) Microservices
Programming Languages
1 1,487 (30.92%) SQL
2 818 (17.01%) Java
3 671 (13.95%) Bash
4 656 (13.64%) PowerShell
5 505 (10.50%) JavaScript
6 314 (6.53%) TypeScript
7 306 (6.36%) Go
8 273 (5.68%) C#
9 231 (4.80%) C++
10 180 (3.74%) Perl
11 173 (3.60%) R
12 168 (3.49%) Shell Script
13 101 (2.10%) Scala
14 89 (1.85%) Ruby
15 68 (1.41%) C
16 62 (1.29%) VBA
17 57 (1.19%) PHP
18 54 (1.12%) Kusto Query Language
19 50 (1.04%) Bicep
20 46 (0.96%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 983 (20.44%) Security Cleared
2 788 (16.39%) SC Cleared
3 466 (9.69%) Degree
4 245 (5.09%) Computer Science Degree
5 151 (3.14%) AWS Certification
6 149 (3.10%) DV Cleared
7 137 (2.85%) Master's Degree
8 95 (1.98%) Cisco Certification
9 94 (1.95%) CISSP
10 84 (1.75%) Azure Certification
10 84 (1.75%) BPSS Clearance
11 57 (1.19%) CCNP
11 57 (1.19%) MCP
12 46 (0.96%) PhD
13 42 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 40 (0.83%) CCIE
15 37 (0.77%) CEH
15 37 (0.77%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
16 34 (0.71%) CISM
17 32 (0.67%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 342 (7.11%) Data Quality
2 191 (3.97%) QA
3 164 (3.41%) GDPR
4 99 (2.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 99 (2.06%) NIST
5 59 (1.23%) Accessibility
6 44 (0.91%) PCI DSS
7 36 (0.75%) HIPAA
8 25 (0.52%) NCSC
8 25 (0.52%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 24 (0.50%) SLA
10 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
10 19 (0.40%) SOC 2
11 10 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
11 10 (0.21%) EMIR
11 10 (0.21%) MiFID
11 10 (0.21%) PMO
12 9 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
13 8 (0.17%) Actionable Recommendations
14 7 (0.15%) WCAG
System Software
1 958 (19.92%) Docker
2 174 (3.62%) Active Directory
3 122 (2.54%) VMware Infrastructure
4 40 (0.83%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.77%) vSphere
6 33 (0.69%) VMware NSX
7 28 (0.58%) Firmware
8 19 (0.40%) DFS Replication
9 18 (0.37%) Hyper-V
10 17 (0.35%) HDFS
10 17 (0.35%) Squid
11 16 (0.33%) KVM
12 15 (0.31%) Postfix
13 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
13 14 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 12 (0.25%) VMware ESXi
15 11 (0.23%) Dovecot
16 10 (0.21%) Lustre
17 9 (0.19%) GPFS
18 8 (0.17%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,078 (22.42%) Terraform
2 1,053 (21.90%) Kubernetes
3 624 (12.98%) Ansible
4 381 (7.92%) Grafana
5 320 (6.65%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.85%) Argo
7 83 (1.73%) Puppet
8 62 (1.29%) Kibana
9 50 (1.04%) Progress Chef
10 39 (0.81%) vRealize
11 38 (0.79%) Istio
12 37 (0.77%) Nessus
13 29 (0.60%) NetBackup
14 28 (0.58%) Single Sign-On
15 27 (0.56%) ITRS Geneos
16 25 (0.52%) logstash
16 25 (0.52%) vCenter Server
17 21 (0.44%) Nmap
18 20 (0.42%) Packer
19 17 (0.35%) Control-M
Vendors
1 570 (11.85%) Microsoft
2 398 (8.28%) Databricks
3 277 (5.76%) Google
4 262 (5.45%) Splunk
5 220 (4.57%) Oracle
6 212 (4.41%) VMware
7 143 (2.97%) ServiceNow
8 132 (2.74%) Red Hat
9 127 (2.64%) Cisco
10 87 (1.81%) F5
10 87 (1.81%) OpenAI
11 85 (1.77%) Palo Alto
12 71 (1.48%) Foundry
13 66 (1.37%) CyberArk
14 65 (1.35%) SAP
15 46 (0.96%) CrowdStrike
16 45 (0.94%) IBM
17 43 (0.89%) Atlassian
18 41 (0.85%) Salesforce
19 40 (0.83%) Juniper