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

6 months to
11 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,592 4,261 3,937
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.47% 12.94% 10.11%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.61% 39.40% 32.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,655 2,846 2,827
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £436 £428 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £528 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.57% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £505
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.97% -3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 133 71 123
10th Percentile £30.10 £26.32 £20.65
25th Percentile £42.50 £34.33 £30.50
Median hourly rate £55.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +11.00% -13.04% -8.73%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £82.96 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.50 £50.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +11.00% -23.08% +14.14%

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 14,116 10,814 12,179
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.43% 32.84% 31.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,182 7,261 8,531
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £503 £530
Median % change year-on-year +1.99% -5.19% -3.64%
75th Percentile £616 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 526 265 407
10th Percentile £30.25 £28.18 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.00 £45.61
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -12.69% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.25 £84.80 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +8.33%

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 11 August 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 11 August 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 11 August 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 4,776 £538 -0.46% 4,964
London -4 2,779 £573 -0.43% 3,094
UK excluding London -6 2,177 £500 +2.04% 2,394
Work from Home -9 1,531 £529 -3.82% 1,802
North of England +2 756 £500 +3.63% 580
South East -11 446 £537 +7.40% 672
Yorkshire +1 385 £500 - 163
North West +2 288 £525 +10.53% 319
South West -1 288 £505 -3.81% 335
Scotland +1 284 £445 -11.00% 189
Midlands -16 246 £473 +5.00% 232
West Midlands -11 197 £469 +4.22% 135
East of England -13 137 £500 -0.50% 287
North East -2 94 £425 -18.27% 103
East Midlands -9 48 £495 +17.16% 97
Wales -4 27 £530 +30.86% 60
Northern Ireland +7 19 £363 -32.56% 65

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
1 285 (5.10%) Apache Airflow
2 278 (4.97%) Apache Spark
3 213 (3.81%) Apache
4 177 (3.17%) Confluence
5 58 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SAS
7 44 (0.79%) SharePoint
8 28 (0.50%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.32%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) CMS
14 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
15 7 (0.13%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
15 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
17 5 (0.089%) JBoss
17 5 (0.089%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 112 (2.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
6 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
7 16 (0.29%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
9 2 (0.036%) Revit
10 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
10 1 (0.018%) Houdini
10 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.018%) Simulink
10 1 (0.018%) SPSS
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
10 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Remedy ITSM
4 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
7 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Endur
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,092 (37.41%) AWS
2 1,910 (34.16%) Azure
3 853 (15.25%) GCP
4 710 (12.70%) GitHub
5 501 (8.96%) Power Platform
6 465 (8.32%) Serverless
7 441 (7.89%) Azure DevOps
8 403 (7.21%) GitHub Actions
9 395 (7.06%) Amazon S3
10 353 (6.31%) AWS Lambda
11 318 (5.69%) Snowflake
12 236 (4.22%) Azure Data Factory
13 218 (3.90%) dbt
14 190 (3.40%) AWS CloudFormation
15 186 (3.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 179 (3.20%) Amazon EKS
17 145 (2.59%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 140 (2.50%) OpenShift
19 137 (2.45%) Amazon EC2
20 130 (2.32%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 276 (4.94%) Firewall
2 209 (3.74%) DNS
3 142 (2.54%) TCP/IP
4 121 (2.16%) VPN
5 118 (2.11%) BGP
6 116 (2.07%) Network Security
7 109 (1.95%) WAN
8 83 (1.48%) DHCP
9 72 (1.29%) OSPF
10 59 (1.06%) SD-WAN
10 59 (1.06%) VLAN
11 54 (0.97%) HTTP
12 53 (0.95%) SSL
12 53 (0.95%) VXLAN
13 51 (0.91%) BIG-IP
14 47 (0.84%) SAN
15 44 (0.79%) SNMP
16 43 (0.77%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 40 (0.72%) Ethernet VPN
18 35 (0.63%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 458 (8.19%) Power BI
2 328 (5.87%) Data Warehouse
3 324 (5.79%) PostgreSQL
4 221 (3.95%) SQL Server
5 199 (3.56%) Relational Database
6 192 (3.43%) Data Lake
6 192 (3.43%) Metadata
7 191 (3.42%) Tableau
8 161 (2.88%) NoSQL
9 153 (2.74%) BigQuery
10 152 (2.72%) Big Data
11 134 (2.40%) Amazon Redshift
12 130 (2.32%) Amazon Athena
13 123 (2.20%) Delta Lake
14 121 (2.16%) MongoDB
15 117 (2.09%) Amazon RDS
16 104 (1.86%) DynamoDB
17 83 (1.48%) MySQL
18 69 (1.23%) Snowflake Schema
19 66 (1.18%) Redis
Development Applications
1 719 (12.86%) Git
2 510 (9.12%) Jenkins
3 437 (7.81%) GitLab
4 292 (5.22%) JIRA
5 96 (1.72%) Selenium
6 56 (1.00%) MLflow
7 52 (0.93%) Postman
8 47 (0.84%) Bitbucket
8 47 (0.84%) JMeter
9 45 (0.80%) SonarQube
10 42 (0.75%) Claude Code
11 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
12 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) Gatling
14 31 (0.55%) Artifactory
14 31 (0.55%) REST Assured
15 29 (0.52%) Maven
15 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
16 23 (0.41%) JUnit
17 18 (0.32%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,217 (21.76%) Social Skills
2 1,207 (21.58%) Finance
3 802 (14.34%) Analytical Skills
4 566 (10.12%) Public Sector
5 437 (7.81%) Banking
6 203 (3.63%) Front Office
7 132 (2.36%) Investment Banking
8 118 (2.11%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 106 (1.90%) Retail
11 87 (1.56%) Marketing
12 74 (1.32%) Telecoms
13 60 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
14 56 (1.00%) Legal
15 54 (0.97%) Military
16 47 (0.84%) Aerospace
16 47 (0.84%) Financial Institution
17 46 (0.82%) Publishing
18 45 (0.80%) Manufacturing
19 39 (0.70%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 942 (16.85%) Developer
2 903 (16.15%) Senior
3 822 (14.70%) Data Engineer
4 503 (8.99%) Python Developer
5 466 (8.33%) Lead
6 406 (7.26%) Python Engineer
7 326 (5.83%) DevOps Engineer
8 317 (5.67%) Software Engineer
9 278 (4.97%) Analyst
10 275 (4.92%) Architect
11 256 (4.58%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 244 (4.36%) AWS Engineer
13 204 (3.65%) Data Scientist
14 193 (3.45%) Cloud Engineer
15 192 (3.43%) Platform Engineer
16 180 (3.22%) Azure Engineer
17 177 (3.17%) Senior Developer
18 168 (3.00%) Senior Data Engineer
19 139 (2.49%) Infrastructure Engineer
20 137 (2.45%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 429 (7.67%) REST
2 369 (6.60%) PySpark
3 353 (6.31%) Kafka
4 341 (6.10%) React
5 235 (4.20%) .NET
6 199 (3.56%) RESTful
7 198 (3.54%) Node.js
8 197 (3.52%) FastAPI
9 194 (3.47%) JSON
10 181 (3.24%) Pandas
11 178 (3.18%) Django
12 141 (2.52%) LangChain
13 135 (2.41%) PyTorch
14 109 (1.95%) Flask
14 109 (1.95%) NumPy
15 105 (1.88%) pytest
15 105 (1.88%) YAML
16 103 (1.84%) HTML
16 103 (1.84%) OAuth
17 99 (1.77%) scikit-learn
Miscellaneous
1 763 (13.64%) Cloud Native
2 316 (5.65%) Distributed Systems
3 219 (3.92%) AI Agents
4 204 (3.65%) Onboarding
5 156 (2.79%) Data Centre
6 154 (2.75%) Product Ownership
7 141 (2.52%) Algorithms
8 139 (2.49%) Data Structures
9 127 (2.27%) Legacy Systems
10 120 (2.15%) Derivative
11 118 (2.11%) Hybrid Cloud
12 109 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
13 103 (1.84%) Management Information System
14 97 (1.73%) Equities
15 95 (1.70%) Fixed Income
16 84 (1.50%) Security Posture
17 72 (1.29%) Enterprise Software
18 67 (1.20%) Public Cloud
19 65 (1.16%) Linux Command Line
19 65 (1.16%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 706 (12.63%) Linux
2 325 (5.81%) Windows
3 231 (4.13%) Unix
4 138 (2.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 76 (1.36%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.72%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.54%) AIX
7 30 (0.54%) VMS
8 16 (0.29%) Solaris
9 15 (0.27%) Android
10 14 (0.25%) CentOS
11 12 (0.21%) Mac OS
12 11 (0.20%) Apple iOS
12 11 (0.20%) zOS
13 7 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
13 7 (0.13%) Windows 10
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.11%) Debian
14 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,186 (39.09%) CI/CD
2 1,618 (28.93%) DevOps
3 1,432 (25.61%) AI
4 1,278 (22.85%) Agile
5 1,145 (20.48%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,121 (20.05%) Analytics
7 1,007 (18.01%) Data Pipeline
8 906 (16.20%) Problem-Solving
9 881 (15.75%) Software Engineering
10 872 (15.59%) Machine Learning
11 791 (14.15%) Data Engineering
12 762 (13.63%) Containerisation
13 751 (13.43%) Data Modelling
14 675 (12.07%) Observability
15 663 (11.86%) ETL
16 614 (10.98%) Test Automation
17 592 (10.59%) Data Science
18 565 (10.10%) Continuous Improvement
19 534 (9.55%) Business Intelligence
20 533 (9.53%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,803 (32.24%) SQL
2 828 (14.81%) Java
3 753 (13.47%) Bash
4 728 (13.02%) PowerShell
5 462 (8.26%) JavaScript
6 374 (6.69%) TypeScript
7 308 (5.51%) C#
8 205 (3.67%) Go
9 146 (2.61%) C++
10 143 (2.56%) R
11 133 (2.38%) Shell Script
12 131 (2.34%) Scala
13 126 (2.25%) Bicep
14 83 (1.48%) Perl
15 59 (1.06%) C
16 57 (1.02%) Groovy
16 57 (1.02%) PL/SQL
17 56 (1.00%) Rust
18 54 (0.97%) Ruby
19 51 (0.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,305 (23.34%) Security Cleared
2 1,061 (18.97%) SC Cleared
3 422 (7.55%) Degree
4 197 (3.52%) DV Cleared
5 162 (2.90%) Computer Science Degree
6 138 (2.47%) AWS Certification
7 137 (2.45%) Azure Certification
8 120 (2.15%) BPSS Clearance
9 92 (1.65%) CISSP
10 86 (1.54%) Cisco Certification
11 72 (1.29%) Master's Degree
12 51 (0.91%) CCNP
13 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
14 41 (0.73%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 35 (0.63%) PhD
16 33 (0.59%) ISTQB
17 31 (0.55%) CISM
18 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 28 (0.50%) CCIE
20 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 579 (10.35%) Data Quality
2 268 (4.79%) QA
3 115 (2.06%) GDPR
4 102 (1.82%) NIST
5 100 (1.79%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 86 (1.54%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.63%) SLA
8 28 (0.50%) WCAG
9 27 (0.48%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 25 (0.45%) Actionable Recommendations
11 25 (0.45%) PCI DSS
12 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 15 (0.27%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
16 7 (0.13%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.13%) GRC
16 7 (0.13%) HL7
System Software
1 917 (16.40%) Docker
2 154 (2.75%) Active Directory
3 126 (2.25%) VMware Infrastructure
4 65 (1.16%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.80%) vSphere
6 41 (0.73%) Hyper-V
7 35 (0.63%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 21 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 13 (0.23%) Squid
11 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
12 10 (0.18%) Ceph
12 10 (0.18%) KVM
13 9 (0.16%) HDFS
14 7 (0.13%) Postfix
14 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
14 7 (0.13%) SRDF
14 7 (0.13%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,299 (23.23%) Terraform
2 1,092 (19.53%) Kubernetes
3 607 (10.85%) Ansible
4 340 (6.08%) Grafana
5 254 (4.54%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.61%) Puppet
7 71 (1.27%) Progress Chef
8 70 (1.25%) Argo
9 43 (0.77%) Istio
10 32 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
11 29 (0.52%) vCenter Server
12 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
13 27 (0.48%) vRealize
14 25 (0.45%) Kibana
15 24 (0.43%) Nagios
16 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
17 21 (0.38%) Control-M
18 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
19 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
19 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 687 (12.29%) Microsoft
2 545 (9.75%) Databricks
3 346 (6.19%) Google
4 246 (4.40%) Oracle
5 211 (3.77%) Splunk
6 168 (3.00%) VMware
7 142 (2.54%) OpenAI
8 134 (2.40%) Cisco
9 125 (2.24%) ServiceNow
10 101 (1.81%) Red Hat
11 100 (1.79%) Dynatrace
12 89 (1.59%) F5
13 88 (1.57%) IBM
14 85 (1.52%) Palo Alto
15 82 (1.47%) Informatica
16 68 (1.22%) Fortinet
17 67 (1.20%) Foundry
18 64 (1.14%) SAP
19 61 (1.09%) CyberArk
20 60 (1.07%) Salesforce