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

6 months to
23 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,277 3,805 4,030
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.86% 13.30% 9.50%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.59% 38.97% 31.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,486 2,663 2,899
10th Percentile £363 £380 £399
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £550 £563
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -2.22% -6.25%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -1.08% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 51 101
10th Percentile £30.00 £23.00 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £28.18 £37.50
Median hourly rate £54.00 £40.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.00% -35.48% -4.15%
75th Percentile £67.92 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.25 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.11% -30.77% +13.04%

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 13,001 9,764 12,749
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.76% 34.13% 30.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,515 6,648 9,087
10th Percentile £356 £356 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £518 £530
Median % change year-on-year -3.45% -2.29% -3.64%
75th Percentile £600 £630 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.68% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 564 218 497
10th Percentile £36.33 £26.45 £32.25
25th Percentile £53.69 £34.81 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -8.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.30
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +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 23 May 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 23 May 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 23 May 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 -3 4,387 £525 -4.55% 2,940
London -3 2,514 £550 -5.98% 1,398
UK excluding London -1 2,031 £495 -1.08% 1,996
Work from Home -1 1,487 £526 -4.45% 1,128
North of England +7 714 £487 -0.10% 522
Yorkshire +3 404 £482 -3.60% 144
South East -7 392 £525 +2.44% 602
Scotland +2 297 £430 -9.47% 109
South West +2 253 £500 -9.09% 249
North West +2 246 £500 +5.26% 297
Midlands -15 237 £485 +7.72% 232
West Midlands -9 182 £481 +6.94% 118
East of England -9 129 £500 -0.50% 198
North East +6 73 £475 +5.56% 85
East Midlands -13 54 £497 +16.82% 113
Northern Ireland +14 26 £463 -21.28% 50
Wales -13 23 £450 -10.00% 56

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
1 281 (5.32%) Apache Spark
2 219 (4.15%) Apache Airflow
3 176 (3.34%) Apache
4 143 (2.71%) Confluence
5 47 (0.89%) SAS
6 45 (0.85%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.74%) Jupyter
8 21 (0.40%) nginx
9 20 (0.38%) OpenStack
10 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.30%) ArcGIS
12 14 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
13 11 (0.21%) Appian
13 11 (0.21%) IIS
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) Camunda
15 7 (0.13%) CMS
16 6 (0.11%) Tomcat
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.095%) CICS
Applications
1 123 (2.33%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.45%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
4 21 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
5 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.019%) SPSS
8 1 (0.019%) Weka
8 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.45%) Aladdin
2 17 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.057%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.057%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.057%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.038%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 1,969 (37.31%) AWS
2 1,754 (33.24%) Azure
3 746 (14.14%) GCP
4 647 (12.26%) GitHub
5 517 (9.80%) Power Platform
6 455 (8.62%) Serverless
7 376 (7.13%) Azure DevOps
8 359 (6.80%) Amazon S3
9 342 (6.48%) GitHub Actions
10 323 (6.12%) AWS Lambda
11 266 (5.04%) Azure Data Factory
12 242 (4.59%) Snowflake
13 185 (3.51%) AWS CloudFormation
14 170 (3.22%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 167 (3.16%) OpenShift
16 165 (3.13%) dbt
17 154 (2.92%) Amazon EKS
18 132 (2.50%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 124 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
20 120 (2.27%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 190 (3.60%) Firewall
2 140 (2.65%) DNS
3 114 (2.16%) Network Security
4 89 (1.69%) TCP/IP
5 88 (1.67%) BGP
6 85 (1.61%) WAN
7 76 (1.44%) VPN
8 62 (1.17%) HTTP
9 61 (1.16%) OSPF
10 52 (0.99%) SAN
11 46 (0.87%) BIG-IP
12 45 (0.85%) VXLAN
13 40 (0.76%) SSL
14 38 (0.72%) SD-WAN
15 37 (0.70%) SNMP
16 36 (0.68%) LAN
17 35 (0.66%) Ethernet VPN
17 35 (0.66%) VLAN
18 33 (0.63%) DHCP
18 33 (0.63%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 449 (8.51%) Power BI
2 340 (6.44%) PostgreSQL
3 280 (5.31%) Data Warehouse
4 257 (4.87%) SQL Server
5 235 (4.45%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.79%) Tableau
7 187 (3.54%) Relational Database
8 175 (3.32%) NoSQL
9 162 (3.07%) Big Data
9 162 (3.07%) Metadata
10 140 (2.65%) Delta Lake
11 136 (2.58%) BigQuery
12 121 (2.29%) Amazon Athena
13 113 (2.14%) MongoDB
14 111 (2.10%) Amazon Redshift
15 90 (1.71%) MySQL
16 87 (1.65%) DynamoDB
17 84 (1.59%) Amazon RDS
18 81 (1.53%) Azure SQL Database
19 76 (1.44%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 645 (12.22%) Git
2 476 (9.02%) Jenkins
3 359 (6.80%) GitLab
4 258 (4.89%) JIRA
5 84 (1.59%) MLflow
6 77 (1.46%) Selenium
7 62 (1.17%) Postman
8 39 (0.74%) Cucumber
9 35 (0.66%) JMeter
10 31 (0.59%) Cypress.io
11 30 (0.57%) Artifactory
12 28 (0.53%) Bitbucket
12 28 (0.53%) SonarQube
13 26 (0.49%) JUnit
13 26 (0.49%) Sonatype Nexus
14 24 (0.45%) REST Assured
14 24 (0.45%) Robot Framework
15 23 (0.44%) Maven
16 20 (0.38%) Gatling
17 18 (0.34%) SpecFlow
General
1 1,127 (21.36%) Social Skills
2 1,033 (19.58%) Finance
3 701 (13.28%) Analytical Skills
4 477 (9.04%) Public Sector
5 373 (7.07%) Banking
6 184 (3.49%) Front Office
7 125 (2.37%) Documentation Skills
8 120 (2.27%) Investment Banking
9 78 (1.48%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 68 (1.29%) Marketing
11 60 (1.14%) Retail
12 56 (1.06%) Pharmaceutical
13 54 (1.02%) Legal
14 47 (0.89%) Telecoms
15 43 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
16 36 (0.68%) Financial Institution
16 36 (0.68%) Publishing
17 35 (0.66%) Manufacturing
18 34 (0.64%) Military
19 28 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 985 (18.67%) Developer
2 813 (15.41%) Data Engineer
3 776 (14.71%) Senior
4 504 (9.55%) Python Developer
5 338 (6.41%) Lead
6 326 (6.18%) Architect
7 324 (6.14%) Python Engineer
8 279 (5.29%) DevOps Engineer
9 277 (5.25%) Analyst
10 267 (5.06%) Software Engineer
11 229 (4.34%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 228 (4.32%) AWS Engineer
13 211 (4.00%) Data Scientist
14 171 (3.24%) Senior Developer
15 164 (3.11%) Azure Engineer
16 160 (3.03%) Senior Data Engineer
17 151 (2.86%) Platform Engineer
18 147 (2.79%) Data Analyst
18 147 (2.79%) Full-Stack Developer
19 130 (2.46%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 397 (7.52%) REST
2 371 (7.03%) React
3 359 (6.80%) PySpark
4 324 (6.14%) Kafka
5 233 (4.42%) .NET
6 228 (4.32%) Node.js
7 214 (4.06%) Pandas
8 189 (3.58%) FastAPI
9 179 (3.39%) RESTful
10 175 (3.32%) PyTorch
11 173 (3.28%) JSON
12 132 (2.50%) Django
13 130 (2.46%) Flask
14 125 (2.37%) NumPy
15 121 (2.29%) LangChain
15 121 (2.29%) TensorFlow
16 115 (2.18%) scikit-learn
17 114 (2.16%) AngularJS
18 102 (1.93%) HTML
19 99 (1.88%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 554 (10.50%) Cloud Native
2 230 (4.36%) Distributed Systems
3 152 (2.88%) Algorithms
4 137 (2.60%) Product Ownership
5 130 (2.46%) Data Centre
6 123 (2.33%) AI Agents
6 123 (2.33%) Data Structures
7 121 (2.29%) Data Protection Act
7 121 (2.29%) Onboarding
8 115 (2.18%) Derivative
9 106 (2.01%) Equities
10 104 (1.97%) Legacy Systems
11 102 (1.93%) Management Information System
12 100 (1.90%) Fixed Income
13 90 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
14 89 (1.69%) Hybrid Cloud
15 83 (1.57%) Security Posture
16 65 (1.23%) Public Cloud
17 52 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
18 47 (0.89%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 628 (11.90%) Linux
2 293 (5.55%) Windows
3 222 (4.21%) Unix
4 96 (1.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 71 (1.35%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.70%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.63%) VMS
8 26 (0.49%) AIX
9 23 (0.44%) Android
9 23 (0.44%) Solaris
10 19 (0.36%) Mac OS
11 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
11 17 (0.32%) CentOS
12 10 (0.19%) zOS
13 9 (0.17%) Debian
14 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
14 7 (0.13%) Rocky
15 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
16 5 (0.095%) Amazon Linux
17 4 (0.076%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,940 (36.76%) CI/CD
2 1,403 (26.59%) DevOps
3 1,214 (23.01%) AI
4 1,128 (21.38%) Agile
5 1,026 (19.44%) Analytics
6 923 (17.49%) Problem-Solving
7 907 (17.19%) Infrastructure as Code
8 891 (16.88%) Data Pipeline
9 810 (15.35%) Machine Learning
10 716 (13.57%) Data Modelling
11 704 (13.34%) ETL
12 702 (13.30%) Data Engineering
13 685 (12.98%) Containerisation
14 634 (12.01%) Software Engineering
15 575 (10.90%) Data Science
16 550 (10.42%) Observability
17 525 (9.95%) Test Automation
18 518 (9.82%) Business Intelligence
19 466 (8.83%) LLM
20 432 (8.19%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,753 (33.22%) SQL
2 759 (14.38%) Java
3 639 (12.11%) PowerShell
4 574 (10.88%) Bash
5 477 (9.04%) JavaScript
6 354 (6.71%) TypeScript
7 341 (6.46%) C#
8 198 (3.75%) Go
9 169 (3.20%) R
10 152 (2.88%) C++
11 137 (2.60%) Scala
12 105 (1.99%) Shell Script
13 80 (1.52%) Ruby
14 79 (1.50%) Perl
15 73 (1.38%) Bicep
16 58 (1.10%) T-SQL
17 57 (1.08%) PL/SQL
18 56 (1.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 54 (1.02%) C
20 50 (0.95%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,188 (22.51%) Security Cleared
2 962 (18.23%) SC Cleared
3 384 (7.28%) Degree
4 161 (3.05%) Computer Science Degree
5 149 (2.82%) DV Cleared
6 126 (2.39%) BPSS Clearance
7 101 (1.91%) Azure Certification
8 85 (1.61%) AWS Certification
9 82 (1.55%) CISSP
10 78 (1.48%) Master's Degree
11 70 (1.33%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (1.02%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.95%) CCNP
14 40 (0.76%) CISM
15 38 (0.72%) PhD
16 31 (0.59%) ISTQB
17 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
18 25 (0.47%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 22 (0.42%) CCIE
19 22 (0.42%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 525 (9.95%) Data Quality
2 234 (4.43%) QA
3 148 (2.80%) GDPR
4 99 (1.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 95 (1.80%) NIST
6 78 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 36 (0.68%) SLA
8 29 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.49%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.45%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 17 (0.32%) WCAG
13 16 (0.30%) NCSC
14 13 (0.25%) SOC 2
15 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
18 6 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
18 6 (0.11%) PSD2
System Software
1 768 (14.55%) Docker
2 149 (2.82%) Active Directory
3 94 (1.78%) VMware Infrastructure
4 74 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.74%) VMware NSX
6 37 (0.70%) vSphere
7 34 (0.64%) Firmware
8 30 (0.57%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.32%) KVM
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) NFS
11 13 (0.25%) Squid
12 12 (0.23%) HDFS
13 11 (0.21%) Ceph
14 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
14 9 (0.17%) SRDF
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
16 5 (0.095%) Postfix
17 4 (0.076%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
17 4 (0.076%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,077 (20.41%) Terraform
2 932 (17.66%) Kubernetes
3 545 (10.33%) Ansible
4 334 (6.33%) Grafana
5 276 (5.23%) Prometheus
6 75 (1.42%) Puppet
7 57 (1.08%) Argo
8 49 (0.93%) Istio
9 47 (0.89%) vRealize
10 38 (0.72%) Kibana
11 32 (0.61%) Progress Chef
12 31 (0.59%) vCenter Server
13 28 (0.53%) Nessus
14 26 (0.49%) Nagios
15 24 (0.45%) Control-M
15 24 (0.45%) Single Sign-On
15 24 (0.45%) ZABBIX
16 22 (0.42%) NetBackup
17 20 (0.38%) HAProxy
18 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 593 (11.24%) Microsoft
2 565 (10.71%) Databricks
3 269 (5.10%) Google
4 244 (4.62%) Oracle
5 219 (4.15%) Splunk
6 175 (3.32%) VMware
7 123 (2.33%) OpenAI
8 122 (2.31%) Red Hat
9 112 (2.12%) Cisco
10 98 (1.86%) ServiceNow
11 85 (1.61%) CyberArk
12 76 (1.44%) BeyondTrust
13 75 (1.42%) F5
14 73 (1.38%) Dynatrace
15 70 (1.33%) IBM
16 69 (1.31%) Palo Alto
17 67 (1.27%) Informatica
18 52 (0.99%) Foundry
19 51 (0.97%) SAP
20 44 (0.83%) Arista