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

6 months to
22 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,022 3,988 4,147
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.32% 12.97% 9.29%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.23% 38.50% 31.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,400 2,664 2,928
10th Percentile £358 £378 £400
25th Percentile £413 £459 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £486 £503 £525
% change year-on-year -3.28% -4.29% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 104 55 107
10th Percentile £28.52 £20.12 £25.45
25th Percentile £41.77 £23.80 £42.38
Median hourly rate £53.25 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.33% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.18 £65.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.85 £79.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +13.80% -25.00% -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 12,179 10,359 13,132
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.87% 33.70% 29.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,110 6,654 9,294
10th Percentile £352 £354 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -5.78%
75th Percentile £607 £638 £650
90th Percentile £714 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £480 £500
% change year-on-year - -4.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 467 235 501
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.55 £35.52
25th Percentile £53.51 £35.38 £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 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.97% +1.99% -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 22 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 22 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 22 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 4,192 £518 -10.00% 2,488
London 0 2,387 £550 -8.33% 1,084
UK excluding London -1 1,941 £486 -3.28% 1,985
Work from Home -1 1,541 £525 -4.55% 1,021
North of England +12 655 £475 -5.00% 451
South East -5 408 £492 -10.14% 638
Yorkshire +7 350 £487 -2.60% 147
Scotland +3 292 £448 -5.68% 157
Midlands -1 273 £500 +5.04% 240
North West +12 263 £460 -3.16% 230
West Midlands 0 228 £500 - 116
South West -6 192 £550 -8.33% 247
East of England +4 131 £525 +5.00% 206
North East +1 47 £475 -7.32% 75
East Midlands -21 44 £441 +10.85% 123
Wales -13 32 £473 -7.80% 61
Northern Ireland +3 28 £600 +14.29% 25

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
1 246 (4.90%) Apache Spark
2 191 (3.80%) Apache Airflow
3 148 (2.95%) Apache
4 147 (2.93%) Confluence
5 69 (1.37%) SAS
6 61 (1.21%) SharePoint
7 29 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
8 27 (0.54%) nginx
8 27 (0.54%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.46%) Jupyter
10 22 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
11 20 (0.40%) Appian
12 14 (0.28%) ArcGIS
13 8 (0.16%) Camunda
14 6 (0.12%) CMS
15 5 (0.100%) Apache Superset
15 5 (0.100%) Tomcat
16 4 (0.080%) Apache Pig
16 4 (0.080%) Oracle Application Server
16 4 (0.080%) Traefik
Applications
1 123 (2.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 13 (0.26%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 3 (0.060%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.060%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.060%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 2 (0.040%) Maya
9 2 (0.040%) NUKE
10 1 (0.020%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.020%) Trello
Business Applications
1 18 (0.36%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.24%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
5 4 (0.080%) Bloomberg AIM
6 3 (0.060%) Actimize
6 3 (0.060%) IntelliMatch
6 3 (0.060%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.040%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.040%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.040%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.040%) Shopify
8 1 (0.020%) Cerner Millennium
8 1 (0.020%) ION MarketView
8 1 (0.020%) Loan IQ
8 1 (0.020%) NetSuite
8 1 (0.020%) Salesforce CRM
8 1 (0.020%) SAP BPC
8 1 (0.020%) SAP ERP
8 1 (0.020%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,976 (39.35%) AWS
2 1,713 (34.11%) Azure
3 790 (15.73%) GCP
4 649 (12.92%) GitHub
5 536 (10.67%) Serverless
6 470 (9.36%) Power Platform
7 372 (7.41%) Amazon S3
8 353 (7.03%) AWS Lambda
9 352 (7.01%) Azure DevOps
10 329 (6.55%) GitHub Actions
11 254 (5.06%) AWS CloudFormation
12 249 (4.96%) Azure Data Factory
13 247 (4.92%) Snowflake
14 190 (3.78%) Amazon EKS
15 179 (3.56%) Amazon ECS
16 172 (3.42%) Amazon EC2
17 163 (3.25%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 163 (3.25%) OpenShift
18 155 (3.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 141 (2.81%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 218 (4.34%) Firewall
2 146 (2.91%) DNS
3 113 (2.25%) Network Security
3 113 (2.25%) TCP/IP
4 79 (1.57%) VPN
5 62 (1.23%) HTTP
6 61 (1.21%) BGP
7 50 (1.00%) SSL
8 49 (0.98%) WAN
9 41 (0.82%) Wireshark
10 35 (0.70%) LAN
10 35 (0.70%) MPLS
10 35 (0.70%) OSPF
11 31 (0.62%) DHCP
12 29 (0.58%) SAN
13 28 (0.56%) Wireless
14 27 (0.54%) VLAN
15 26 (0.52%) SD-WAN
16 23 (0.46%) BIG-IP
17 22 (0.44%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 389 (7.75%) Power BI
2 374 (7.45%) PostgreSQL
3 311 (6.19%) Data Warehouse
4 238 (4.74%) Data Lake
5 236 (4.70%) NoSQL
6 198 (3.94%) Relational Database
7 183 (3.64%) SQL Server
8 161 (3.21%) Big Data
9 154 (3.07%) Tableau
10 137 (2.73%) Amazon RDS
11 124 (2.47%) Metadata
12 122 (2.43%) BigQuery
13 116 (2.31%) MySQL
14 107 (2.13%) Delta Lake
15 100 (1.99%) Amazon Redshift
16 96 (1.91%) Amazon Athena
17 95 (1.89%) MongoDB
18 85 (1.69%) Azure SQL Database
18 85 (1.69%) Hadoop
19 75 (1.49%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 616 (12.27%) Git
2 539 (10.73%) Jenkins
3 429 (8.54%) GitLab
4 284 (5.66%) JIRA
5 95 (1.89%) MLflow
6 81 (1.61%) Selenium
7 47 (0.94%) Postman
8 45 (0.90%) Cucumber
9 43 (0.86%) Bitbucket
10 40 (0.80%) Sonatype Nexus
11 36 (0.72%) JUnit
12 34 (0.68%) JMeter
13 28 (0.56%) Liquibase
13 28 (0.56%) SpecFlow
14 26 (0.52%) Visual Studio
15 25 (0.50%) Cypress.io
15 25 (0.50%) Maven
16 24 (0.48%) CircleCI
17 22 (0.44%) Artifactory
17 22 (0.44%) SonarQube
General
1 1,300 (25.89%) Social Skills
2 998 (19.87%) Finance
3 697 (13.88%) Analytical Skills
4 469 (9.34%) Public Sector
5 418 (8.32%) Banking
6 164 (3.27%) Front Office
7 130 (2.59%) Documentation Skills
8 107 (2.13%) Investment Banking
9 68 (1.35%) Retail
10 67 (1.33%) Financial Institution
11 66 (1.31%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 65 (1.29%) Marketing
13 61 (1.21%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (1.06%) Telecoms
15 48 (0.96%) Legal
16 44 (0.88%) Manufacturing
17 43 (0.86%) Influencing Skills
18 42 (0.84%) Presentation Skills
19 32 (0.64%) Military
20 24 (0.48%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 908 (18.08%) Developer
2 707 (14.08%) Senior
3 705 (14.04%) Data Engineer
4 395 (7.87%) Python Developer
5 321 (6.39%) Architect
6 308 (6.13%) DevOps Engineer
7 304 (6.05%) Lead
8 297 (5.91%) Analyst
9 287 (5.71%) Python Engineer
10 262 (5.22%) AWS Engineer
11 241 (4.80%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 238 (4.74%) Software Engineer
13 203 (4.04%) Data Scientist
14 174 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
15 157 (3.13%) Senior Developer
16 150 (2.99%) Data Analyst
17 143 (2.85%) Azure Engineer
18 136 (2.71%) Senior Data Engineer
19 132 (2.63%) Full-Stack Developer
20 131 (2.61%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 432 (8.60%) REST
2 346 (6.89%) React
3 318 (6.33%) PySpark
4 316 (6.29%) Kafka
5 267 (5.32%) Node.js
6 229 (4.56%) Pandas
7 220 (4.38%) PyTorch
8 215 (4.28%) FastAPI
9 208 (4.14%) RESTful
10 205 (4.08%) .NET
11 178 (3.54%) TensorFlow
12 169 (3.37%) NumPy
13 142 (2.83%) scikit-learn
14 136 (2.71%) AngularJS
15 130 (2.59%) Flask
16 129 (2.57%) LangChain
17 116 (2.31%) pytest
18 113 (2.25%) JSON
19 112 (2.23%) Django
20 107 (2.13%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 470 (9.36%) Cloud Native
2 204 (4.06%) Algorithms
3 202 (4.02%) Distributed Systems
4 137 (2.73%) Product Ownership
5 123 (2.45%) Data Protection Act
6 119 (2.37%) Equities
7 111 (2.21%) Data Structures
8 104 (2.07%) Onboarding
9 96 (1.91%) AI Agents
10 94 (1.87%) Fixed Income
11 93 (1.85%) Derivative
12 92 (1.83%) Enterprise Software
13 88 (1.75%) Public Cloud
13 88 (1.75%) Security Posture
14 87 (1.73%) Legacy Systems
15 86 (1.71%) Hybrid Cloud
16 85 (1.69%) Management Information System
17 74 (1.47%) Data Centre
18 66 (1.31%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
19 59 (1.17%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 708 (14.10%) Linux
2 321 (6.39%) Windows
3 202 (4.02%) Unix
4 95 (1.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.25%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.76%) Android
7 37 (0.74%) Ubuntu
8 34 (0.68%) VMS
9 26 (0.52%) CentOS
10 25 (0.50%) Mac OS
11 24 (0.48%) Solaris
12 21 (0.42%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.20%) Windows 7
14 9 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
14 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
15 5 (0.100%) Debian
15 5 (0.100%) Embedded Linux
16 4 (0.080%) Windows 10
16 4 (0.080%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.080%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,818 (36.20%) CI/CD
2 1,409 (28.06%) DevOps
3 1,203 (23.95%) Agile
4 1,071 (21.33%) Problem-Solving
5 1,066 (21.23%) AI
6 954 (19.00%) Analytics
7 902 (17.96%) Infrastructure as Code
8 827 (16.47%) Machine Learning
9 797 (15.87%) Data Pipeline
10 761 (15.15%) Containerisation
11 665 (13.24%) Data Engineering
12 652 (12.98%) ETL
13 629 (12.52%) Data Modelling
14 615 (12.25%) Data Science
15 564 (11.23%) Test Automation
16 558 (11.11%) Software Engineering
17 465 (9.26%) Observability
18 456 (9.08%) Business Intelligence
19 432 (8.60%) LLM
20 365 (7.27%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,572 (31.30%) SQL
2 725 (14.44%) Java
3 658 (13.10%) PowerShell
4 602 (11.99%) Bash
5 518 (10.31%) JavaScript
6 326 (6.49%) C#
7 323 (6.43%) TypeScript
8 235 (4.68%) Go
9 185 (3.68%) C++
10 155 (3.09%) R
11 123 (2.45%) Perl
12 122 (2.43%) Shell Script
13 112 (2.23%) Scala
14 92 (1.83%) Ruby
15 62 (1.23%) Bicep
16 61 (1.21%) Kusto Query Language
17 49 (0.98%) C
18 48 (0.96%) VBA
19 42 (0.84%) T-SQL
20 38 (0.76%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,138 (22.66%) Security Cleared
2 912 (18.16%) SC Cleared
3 460 (9.16%) Degree
4 223 (4.44%) Computer Science Degree
5 141 (2.81%) DV Cleared
6 136 (2.71%) AWS Certification
7 129 (2.57%) Master's Degree
8 113 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
9 95 (1.89%) Azure Certification
10 90 (1.79%) CISSP
11 68 (1.35%) Cisco Certification
12 60 (1.19%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 52 (1.04%) CCNP
14 46 (0.92%) PhD
15 43 (0.86%) CISM
16 39 (0.78%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.72%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.64%) CEH
19 31 (0.62%) Microsoft Certified Professional
20 27 (0.54%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 451 (8.98%) Data Quality
2 197 (3.92%) QA
3 172 (3.42%) GDPR
4 104 (2.07%) NIST
5 102 (2.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 75 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 30 (0.60%) PCI DSS
8 29 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 28 (0.56%) HIPAA
10 27 (0.54%) SLA
11 23 (0.46%) NCSC
12 16 (0.32%) SOC 2
13 14 (0.28%) Actionable Recommendations
14 12 (0.24%) EU AI Act
14 12 (0.24%) WCAG
15 11 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.20%) MiFID
16 10 (0.20%) PMO
16 10 (0.20%) PSD2
17 9 (0.18%) EMIR
System Software
1 954 (19.00%) Docker
2 177 (3.52%) Active Directory
3 113 (2.25%) VMware Infrastructure
4 52 (1.04%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (1.00%) vSphere
6 48 (0.96%) VMware NSX
7 28 (0.56%) Hyper-V
8 21 (0.42%) Firmware
9 15 (0.30%) KVM
9 15 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 12 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 11 (0.22%) HDFS
12 10 (0.20%) Lustre
13 9 (0.18%) GPFS
14 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
15 7 (0.14%) Postfix
15 7 (0.14%) Squid
16 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
17 5 (0.100%) Ceph
17 5 (0.100%) NetIQ eDirectory
Systems Management
1 1,123 (22.36%) Terraform
2 1,056 (21.03%) Kubernetes
3 540 (10.75%) Ansible
4 346 (6.89%) Grafana
5 307 (6.11%) Prometheus
6 92 (1.83%) Argo
7 71 (1.41%) Puppet
8 53 (1.06%) vRealize
9 49 (0.98%) Kibana
10 44 (0.88%) Istio
11 39 (0.78%) Nessus
12 32 (0.64%) Single Sign-On
13 29 (0.58%) vCenter Server
14 27 (0.54%) Progress Chef
15 26 (0.52%) Control-M
16 25 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
17 24 (0.48%) NetBackup
18 22 (0.44%) IBM Guardium
19 18 (0.36%) ITRS Geneos
19 18 (0.36%) Nmap
Vendors
1 614 (12.23%) Microsoft
2 510 (10.16%) Databricks
3 303 (6.03%) Google
4 239 (4.76%) Splunk
5 220 (4.38%) VMware
6 219 (4.36%) Oracle
7 145 (2.89%) Red Hat
8 117 (2.33%) OpenAI
9 113 (2.25%) Cisco
10 110 (2.19%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.67%) CyberArk
12 78 (1.55%) Foundry
13 69 (1.37%) F5
13 69 (1.37%) Palo Alto
14 66 (1.31%) BeyondTrust
15 55 (1.10%) Informatica
16 46 (0.92%) IBM
17 45 (0.90%) SAP
18 40 (0.80%) Atlassian
19 39 (0.78%) Dynatrace