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

6 months to
26 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +3 0
Contract jobs citing Python 5,540 4,265 3,996
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.33% 13.04% 10.29%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.60% 39.70% 32.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,626 2,822 2,845
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.90% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £644 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.43% -3.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 81 113
10th Percentile £29.85 £26.32 £20.65
25th Percentile £42.50 £34.75 £31.25
Median hourly rate £57.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.00% -13.04% -11.54%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £82.96 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £60.37 £51.25 £68.75
% change year-on-year +17.79% -25.45% +14.58%

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 13,990 10,743 12,235
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.08% 32.84% 31.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,106 7,166 8,475
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £505 £530
Median % change year-on-year +2.77% -4.72% -3.64%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £498 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.93% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 518 297 383
10th Percentile £28.50 £28.25 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.25 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.55%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.23 £79.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.25 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.42% -4.23% +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 26 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 26 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 26 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 4,727 £549 +1.67% 1,935
London -4 2,781 £575 - 997
UK excluding London -7 2,120 £500 - 1,207
Work from Home -9 1,504 £530 -3.64% 815
North of England +1 723 £500 +2.56% 270
South East -10 438 £538 +7.50% 270
Yorkshire -1 369 £500 - 77
South West -3 290 £525 - 296
Scotland -2 278 £450 -10.00% 95
North West -2 271 £513 +7.89% 137
Midlands -18 231 £475 - 125
West Midlands -20 184 £477 +0.42% 79
East of England -12 140 £500 -0.50% 137
North East -1 94 £425 -18.27% 56
East Midlands -10 47 £469 +11.61% 45
Wales -7 29 £530 +30.86% 24
Northern Ireland +2 18 £363 -32.56% 14

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
1 291 (5.25%) Apache Airflow
2 270 (4.87%) Apache Spark
3 217 (3.92%) Apache
4 164 (2.96%) Confluence
5 57 (1.03%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.69%) SAS
8 30 (0.54%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.42%) ArcGIS
10 21 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
11 20 (0.36%) nginx
12 14 (0.25%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
13 9 (0.16%) WebSphere
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.13%) Apache Superset
16 6 (0.11%) CICS
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.090%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 111 (2.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.60%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.34%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 16 (0.29%) CPLEX
7 15 (0.27%) MS Visio
8 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
9 2 (0.036%) Revit
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
10 1 (0.018%) Houdini
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
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 21 (0.38%) Aladdin
2 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 13 (0.23%) Oracle EBS
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
6 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
8 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.090%) Salesforce CRM
9 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.054%) Endur
10 3 (0.054%) Front Arena
10 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
10 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) IBM Planning Analytics
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,064 (37.26%) AWS
2 1,887 (34.06%) Azure
3 851 (15.36%) GCP
4 699 (12.62%) GitHub
5 502 (9.06%) Power Platform
6 466 (8.41%) Serverless
7 435 (7.85%) Azure DevOps
8 408 (7.36%) GitHub Actions
9 391 (7.06%) Amazon S3
10 353 (6.37%) AWS Lambda
11 323 (5.83%) Snowflake
12 226 (4.08%) dbt
13 220 (3.97%) Azure Data Factory
14 186 (3.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 182 (3.29%) AWS CloudFormation
16 178 (3.21%) Amazon EKS
17 138 (2.49%) Amazon EC2
18 135 (2.44%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 132 (2.38%) Entra ID
20 122 (2.20%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 272 (4.91%) Firewall
2 217 (3.92%) DNS
3 150 (2.71%) TCP/IP
4 132 (2.38%) Network Security
5 127 (2.29%) BGP
6 125 (2.26%) VPN
7 112 (2.02%) WAN
8 86 (1.55%) DHCP
9 73 (1.32%) OSPF
10 62 (1.12%) SD-WAN
11 61 (1.10%) VLAN
12 57 (1.03%) HTTP
13 56 (1.01%) VXLAN
14 55 (0.99%) SSL
15 52 (0.94%) BIG-IP
16 44 (0.79%) Ethernet VPN
16 44 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 43 (0.78%) SNMP
18 41 (0.74%) SAN
19 39 (0.70%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 455 (8.21%) Power BI
2 320 (5.78%) PostgreSQL
3 319 (5.76%) Data Warehouse
4 217 (3.92%) SQL Server
5 201 (3.63%) Metadata
6 199 (3.59%) Relational Database
7 195 (3.52%) Tableau
8 180 (3.25%) Data Lake
9 161 (2.91%) BigQuery
10 154 (2.78%) NoSQL
11 139 (2.51%) Big Data
12 138 (2.49%) Amazon Redshift
13 128 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
14 124 (2.24%) MongoDB
15 122 (2.20%) Amazon RDS
16 118 (2.13%) Delta Lake
17 102 (1.84%) DynamoDB
18 90 (1.62%) MySQL
19 73 (1.32%) Redis
20 64 (1.16%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 725 (13.09%) Git
2 498 (8.99%) Jenkins
3 441 (7.96%) GitLab
4 280 (5.05%) JIRA
5 101 (1.82%) Selenium
6 56 (1.01%) JMeter
7 54 (0.97%) MLflow
7 54 (0.97%) Postman
8 49 (0.88%) SonarQube
9 47 (0.85%) Claude Code
10 39 (0.70%) Bitbucket
11 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
12 34 (0.61%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.58%) Gatling
13 32 (0.58%) Maven
14 31 (0.56%) Artifactory
14 31 (0.56%) REST Assured
15 30 (0.54%) Sonatype Nexus
16 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
17 22 (0.40%) JUnit
General
1 1,247 (22.51%) Social Skills
2 1,191 (21.50%) Finance
3 832 (15.02%) Analytical Skills
4 553 (9.98%) Public Sector
5 450 (8.12%) Banking
6 186 (3.36%) Front Office
7 137 (2.47%) Investment Banking
8 117 (2.11%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (2.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 105 (1.90%) Retail
11 89 (1.61%) Marketing
12 81 (1.46%) Telecoms
13 57 (1.03%) Pharmaceutical
14 54 (0.97%) Legal
14 54 (0.97%) Military
15 48 (0.87%) Aerospace
16 46 (0.83%) Financial Institution
17 45 (0.81%) Publishing
18 40 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
19 39 (0.70%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 923 (16.66%) Senior
2 900 (16.25%) Developer
3 796 (14.37%) Data Engineer
4 482 (8.70%) Python Developer
5 474 (8.56%) Lead
6 412 (7.44%) Python Engineer
7 333 (6.01%) DevOps Engineer
8 296 (5.34%) Software Engineer
9 284 (5.13%) Architect
10 278 (5.02%) Analyst
11 259 (4.68%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 231 (4.17%) AWS Engineer
13 191 (3.45%) Data Scientist
14 189 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
15 188 (3.39%) Cloud Engineer
16 178 (3.21%) Senior Developer
17 172 (3.10%) Senior Data Engineer
18 171 (3.09%) Azure Engineer
19 137 (2.47%) Infrastructure Engineer
20 135 (2.44%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,298 (23.43%) Terraform
2 469 (8.47%) REST
3 375 (6.77%) PySpark
4 359 (6.48%) Kafka
5 313 (5.65%) React
6 239 (4.31%) .NET
7 204 (3.68%) JSON
8 202 (3.65%) FastAPI
9 195 (3.52%) Django
10 192 (3.47%) RESTful
11 178 (3.21%) Node.js
12 175 (3.16%) Pandas
13 131 (2.36%) LangChain
13 131 (2.36%) pytest
14 121 (2.18%) PyTorch
15 111 (2.00%) HTML
16 110 (1.99%) YAML
17 109 (1.97%) OAuth
18 108 (1.95%) Flask
19 102 (1.84%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 761 (13.74%) Cloud Native
2 311 (5.61%) Distributed Systems
3 232 (4.19%) AI Agents
4 218 (3.94%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.92%) Data Centre
6 159 (2.87%) Product Ownership
7 136 (2.45%) Algorithms
8 134 (2.42%) Legacy Systems
9 133 (2.40%) Data Structures
10 113 (2.04%) Derivative
10 113 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
11 110 (1.99%) Data Protection Act
12 103 (1.86%) Management Information System
13 91 (1.64%) Equities
14 77 (1.39%) Enterprise Software
14 77 (1.39%) Security Posture
15 71 (1.28%) Fixed Income
16 69 (1.25%) Public Cloud
17 65 (1.17%) Linux Command Line
18 62 (1.12%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 730 (13.18%) Linux
2 331 (5.97%) Windows
3 236 (4.26%) Unix
4 143 (2.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 83 (1.50%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.60%) VMS
8 31 (0.56%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 17 (0.31%) CentOS
11 16 (0.29%) Android
12 11 (0.20%) Apple iOS
12 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
13 10 (0.18%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.090%) Debian
16 5 (0.090%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,196 (39.64%) CI/CD
2 1,584 (28.59%) DevOps
3 1,446 (26.10%) AI
4 1,228 (22.17%) Agile
5 1,179 (21.28%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,096 (19.78%) Analytics
7 978 (17.65%) Data Pipeline
8 901 (16.26%) Problem-Solving
9 884 (15.96%) Software Engineering
10 838 (15.13%) Machine Learning
11 776 (14.01%) Data Engineering
12 761 (13.74%) Containerisation
13 725 (13.09%) Data Modelling
14 693 (12.51%) Observability
15 643 (11.61%) ETL
16 624 (11.26%) Test Automation
17 596 (10.76%) Continuous Improvement
18 566 (10.22%) Validation
19 563 (10.16%) Data Science
20 538 (9.71%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,802 (32.53%) SQL
2 821 (14.82%) Java
3 751 (13.56%) Bash
4 732 (13.21%) PowerShell
5 439 (7.92%) JavaScript
6 342 (6.17%) TypeScript
7 306 (5.52%) C#
8 192 (3.47%) Go
9 150 (2.71%) R
10 144 (2.60%) C++
11 139 (2.51%) Shell Script
12 135 (2.44%) Bicep
13 129 (2.33%) Scala
14 91 (1.64%) Perl
15 59 (1.06%) Groovy
15 59 (1.06%) PL/SQL
16 57 (1.03%) C
17 55 (0.99%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 53 (0.96%) Rust
19 52 (0.94%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,295 (23.38%) Security Cleared
2 1,053 (19.01%) SC Cleared
3 418 (7.55%) Degree
4 205 (3.70%) DV Cleared
5 161 (2.91%) Computer Science Degree
6 147 (2.65%) Azure Certification
7 139 (2.51%) AWS Certification
8 112 (2.02%) BPSS Clearance
9 91 (1.64%) CISSP
10 85 (1.53%) Cisco Certification
11 70 (1.26%) Master's Degree
12 46 (0.83%) CCNP
13 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
14 34 (0.61%) PhD
14 34 (0.61%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 33 (0.60%) ISTQB
16 32 (0.58%) CISM
17 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 29 (0.52%) CCIE
18 26 (0.47%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 594 (10.72%) Data Quality
2 288 (5.20%) QA
3 110 (1.99%) NIST
4 104 (1.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 103 (1.86%) GDPR
6 83 (1.50%) Accessibility
7 41 (0.74%) SLA
8 30 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
9 27 (0.49%) NCSC
9 27 (0.49%) WCAG
10 25 (0.45%) PCI DSS
10 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
12 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
15 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.13%) HL7
17 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 930 (16.79%) Docker
2 155 (2.80%) Active Directory
3 131 (2.36%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.10%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.81%) Hyper-V
6 43 (0.78%) vSphere
7 35 (0.63%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 24 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.25%) Squid
13 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
14 10 (0.18%) Ceph
15 9 (0.16%) KVM
16 8 (0.14%) Postfix
17 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
17 7 (0.13%) zsh
18 6 (0.11%) HDFS
19 5 (0.090%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,097 (19.80%) Kubernetes
2 617 (11.14%) Ansible
3 335 (6.05%) Grafana
4 244 (4.40%) Prometheus
5 83 (1.50%) Puppet
6 71 (1.28%) Progress Chef
7 68 (1.23%) Argo
8 40 (0.72%) Istio
9 34 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
10 28 (0.51%) Kibana
10 28 (0.51%) ZABBIX
11 26 (0.47%) Control-M
12 25 (0.45%) Nagios
12 25 (0.45%) vCenter Server
13 24 (0.43%) vRealize
14 23 (0.42%) Microsoft Intune
15 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
16 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
16 18 (0.32%) Netcool
16 18 (0.32%) Packer
Vendors
1 698 (12.60%) Microsoft
2 559 (10.09%) Databricks
3 350 (6.32%) Google
4 251 (4.53%) Oracle
5 216 (3.90%) Splunk
6 172 (3.10%) VMware
7 143 (2.58%) OpenAI
8 140 (2.53%) Cisco
9 127 (2.29%) ServiceNow
10 105 (1.90%) Dynatrace
11 97 (1.75%) Red Hat
12 93 (1.68%) IBM
13 85 (1.53%) F5
14 81 (1.46%) Palo Alto
15 79 (1.43%) Informatica
16 68 (1.23%) Fortinet
16 68 (1.23%) SAP
17 67 (1.21%) CyberArk
18 65 (1.17%) Foundry
19 60 (1.08%) Salesforce