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

6 months to
18 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,060 3,946 4,130
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.48% 12.86% 9.31%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.39% 38.26% 31.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,422 2,620 2,905
10th Percentile £358 £380 £400
25th Percentile £414 £460 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £486 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -5.17% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 106 55 114
10th Percentile £27.69 £20.12 £25.72
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.80 £43.42
Median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.80% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £79.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.61 £45.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +12.46% -28.00% -3.85%

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 12,225 10,313 13,082
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.14% 33.62% 29.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,132 6,584 9,223
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £534
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.69% -5.07%
75th Percentile £612 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £479 £484 £500
% change year-on-year -1.03% -3.20% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 468 231 509
10th Percentile £40.00 £21.25 £36.25
25th Percentile £52.50 £36.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +3.31% -6.92%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.50
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 18 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 18 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 18 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 4,233 £519 -9.83% 2,505
London 0 2,427 £550 -8.33% 1,042
UK excluding London -1 1,944 £486 -5.17% 2,026
Work from Home -1 1,536 £525 -4.55% 997
North of England +10 642 £475 -5.00% 446
South East 0 411 £492 -10.55% 632
Yorkshire +8 347 £482 -3.60% 150
Scotland +3 293 £450 -5.37% 174
Midlands +1 288 £500 +4.82% 242
North West +12 253 £450 -7.79% 227
West Midlands +3 245 £500 -1.19% 112
South West -7 193 £550 -8.33% 266
East of England -1 132 £525 +5.00% 225
North East +6 47 £475 -7.32% 70
East Midlands -19 42 £438 +10.22% 129
Wales -12 32 £473 -5.50% 59
Northern Ireland +3 28 £600 +14.29% 23

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
1 241 (4.76%) Apache Spark
2 196 (3.87%) Apache Airflow
3 157 (3.10%) Apache
4 151 (2.98%) Confluence
5 67 (1.32%) SAS
6 63 (1.25%) SharePoint
7 31 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
7 31 (0.61%) nginx
8 29 (0.57%) OpenStack
9 25 (0.49%) Jupyter
10 23 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
11 21 (0.42%) Appian
12 14 (0.28%) ArcGIS
13 8 (0.16%) Apache Pig
13 8 (0.16%) Camunda
14 7 (0.14%) IIS
15 6 (0.12%) CMS
16 5 (0.099%) Oracle Application Server
16 5 (0.099%) Tomcat
17 4 (0.079%) Apache Superset
Applications
1 130 (2.57%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.61%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
4 24 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 13 (0.26%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 4 (0.079%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 3 (0.059%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.040%) Maya
10 2 (0.040%) NUKE
11 1 (0.020%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.020%) Trello
Business Applications
1 17 (0.34%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.24%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
5 4 (0.079%) Bloomberg AIM
6 3 (0.059%) Actimize
6 3 (0.059%) IntelliMatch
6 3 (0.059%) 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 1,980 (39.13%) AWS
2 1,704 (33.68%) Azure
3 795 (15.71%) GCP
4 651 (12.87%) GitHub
5 543 (10.73%) Serverless
6 471 (9.31%) Power Platform
7 377 (7.45%) Amazon S3
8 361 (7.13%) AWS Lambda
9 352 (6.96%) Azure DevOps
10 334 (6.60%) GitHub Actions
11 254 (5.02%) AWS CloudFormation
12 249 (4.92%) Snowflake
13 248 (4.90%) Azure Data Factory
14 189 (3.74%) Amazon EKS
15 183 (3.62%) Amazon ECS
16 176 (3.48%) Amazon EC2
17 165 (3.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 160 (3.16%) OpenShift
19 157 (3.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 139 (2.75%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 217 (4.29%) Firewall
2 150 (2.96%) DNS
3 117 (2.31%) Network Security
3 117 (2.31%) TCP/IP
4 79 (1.56%) VPN
5 67 (1.32%) BGP
5 67 (1.32%) HTTP
6 51 (1.01%) SSL
6 51 (1.01%) WAN
7 41 (0.81%) Wireshark
8 39 (0.77%) OSPF
9 38 (0.75%) MPLS
10 37 (0.73%) LAN
11 31 (0.61%) DHCP
11 31 (0.61%) Wireless
12 28 (0.55%) SAN
12 28 (0.55%) VLAN
13 26 (0.51%) SD-WAN
14 23 (0.45%) BIG-IP
14 23 (0.45%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 389 (7.69%) PostgreSQL
1 389 (7.69%) Power BI
2 306 (6.05%) Data Warehouse
3 238 (4.70%) NoSQL
4 237 (4.68%) Data Lake
5 208 (4.11%) Relational Database
6 184 (3.64%) SQL Server
7 160 (3.16%) Big Data
8 151 (2.98%) Tableau
9 141 (2.79%) Amazon RDS
10 126 (2.49%) Metadata
11 120 (2.37%) BigQuery
12 119 (2.35%) MySQL
13 103 (2.04%) Amazon Redshift
14 101 (2.00%) Delta Lake
15 98 (1.94%) MongoDB
16 97 (1.92%) Amazon Athena
17 85 (1.68%) Hadoop
18 82 (1.62%) Azure SQL Database
19 80 (1.58%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 611 (12.08%) Git
2 542 (10.71%) Jenkins
3 427 (8.44%) GitLab
4 288 (5.69%) JIRA
5 94 (1.86%) MLflow
6 83 (1.64%) Selenium
7 47 (0.93%) Cucumber
8 46 (0.91%) Postman
9 44 (0.87%) Bitbucket
10 42 (0.83%) Sonatype Nexus
11 38 (0.75%) JUnit
12 35 (0.69%) JMeter
13 27 (0.53%) Liquibase
13 27 (0.53%) SpecFlow
14 26 (0.51%) Visual Studio
15 25 (0.49%) CircleCI
15 25 (0.49%) Maven
15 25 (0.49%) SonarQube
16 24 (0.47%) Artifactory
16 24 (0.47%) Cypress.io
General
1 1,316 (26.01%) Social Skills
2 1,005 (19.86%) Finance
3 703 (13.89%) Analytical Skills
4 463 (9.15%) Public Sector
5 428 (8.46%) Banking
6 172 (3.40%) Front Office
7 132 (2.61%) Documentation Skills
8 112 (2.21%) Investment Banking
9 70 (1.38%) Financial Institution
10 66 (1.30%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 65 (1.28%) Marketing
11 65 (1.28%) Retail
12 59 (1.17%) Pharmaceutical
13 54 (1.07%) Telecoms
14 49 (0.97%) Legal
15 44 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
15 44 (0.87%) Manufacturing
16 43 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
17 31 (0.61%) Military
18 24 (0.47%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 919 (18.16%) Developer
2 704 (13.91%) Data Engineer
3 700 (13.83%) Senior
4 394 (7.79%) Python Developer
5 324 (6.40%) Architect
6 313 (6.19%) DevOps Engineer
7 298 (5.89%) Lead
8 297 (5.87%) Python Engineer
9 292 (5.77%) Analyst
10 267 (5.28%) AWS Engineer
11 246 (4.86%) Software Engineer
12 237 (4.68%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 206 (4.07%) Data Scientist
14 177 (3.50%) Platform Engineer
15 153 (3.02%) Senior Developer
16 148 (2.92%) Data Analyst
17 142 (2.81%) Azure Engineer
18 136 (2.69%) Senior Data Engineer
19 131 (2.59%) Full-Stack Developer
20 126 (2.49%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 433 (8.56%) REST
2 352 (6.96%) React
3 323 (6.38%) Kafka
4 314 (6.21%) PySpark
5 272 (5.38%) Node.js
6 236 (4.66%) Pandas
7 226 (4.47%) FastAPI
8 217 (4.29%) PyTorch
9 212 (4.19%) RESTful
10 203 (4.01%) .NET
11 178 (3.52%) TensorFlow
12 175 (3.46%) NumPy
13 145 (2.87%) AngularJS
14 137 (2.71%) scikit-learn
15 132 (2.61%) Flask
16 129 (2.55%) LangChain
17 118 (2.33%) pytest
18 116 (2.29%) JSON
19 115 (2.27%) Django
20 110 (2.17%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 453 (8.95%) Cloud Native
2 209 (4.13%) Algorithms
3 195 (3.85%) Distributed Systems
4 135 (2.67%) Product Ownership
5 124 (2.45%) Equities
6 122 (2.41%) Data Protection Act
7 108 (2.13%) Data Structures
8 107 (2.11%) Onboarding
9 98 (1.94%) AI Agents
10 96 (1.90%) Fixed Income
11 95 (1.88%) Derivative
11 95 (1.88%) Enterprise Software
12 90 (1.78%) Hybrid Cloud
13 87 (1.72%) Legacy Systems
14 86 (1.70%) Public Cloud
15 82 (1.62%) Data Centre
16 81 (1.60%) Management Information System
16 81 (1.60%) Security Posture
17 72 (1.42%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
18 64 (1.26%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 741 (14.64%) Linux
2 333 (6.58%) Windows
3 216 (4.27%) Unix
4 93 (1.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.26%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.79%) Android
7 36 (0.71%) Ubuntu
8 35 (0.69%) VMS
9 28 (0.55%) CentOS
10 25 (0.49%) Mac OS
10 25 (0.49%) Solaris
11 23 (0.45%) Apple iOS
12 11 (0.22%) Windows 7
13 10 (0.20%) Amazon Linux
14 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
15 5 (0.099%) Embedded Linux
16 4 (0.079%) Debian
16 4 (0.079%) Windows 10
16 4 (0.079%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.079%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,811 (35.79%) CI/CD
2 1,404 (27.75%) DevOps
3 1,190 (23.52%) Agile
4 1,074 (21.23%) Problem-Solving
5 1,067 (21.09%) AI
6 950 (18.77%) Analytics
7 901 (17.81%) Infrastructure as Code
8 836 (16.52%) Machine Learning
9 795 (15.71%) Data Pipeline
10 763 (15.08%) Containerisation
11 659 (13.02%) ETL
12 655 (12.94%) Data Engineering
13 618 (12.21%) Data Modelling
14 613 (12.11%) Data Science
15 573 (11.32%) Software Engineering
16 552 (10.91%) Test Automation
17 462 (9.13%) Observability
18 450 (8.89%) Business Intelligence
19 436 (8.62%) LLM
20 364 (7.19%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,572 (31.07%) SQL
2 739 (14.60%) Java
3 659 (13.02%) PowerShell
4 610 (12.06%) Bash
5 530 (10.47%) JavaScript
6 333 (6.58%) TypeScript
7 325 (6.42%) C#
8 234 (4.62%) Go
9 189 (3.74%) C++
10 157 (3.10%) R
11 142 (2.81%) Shell Script
12 130 (2.57%) Perl
13 118 (2.33%) Scala
14 91 (1.80%) Ruby
15 63 (1.25%) Kusto Query Language
16 62 (1.23%) Bicep
17 52 (1.03%) C
17 52 (1.03%) VBA
18 41 (0.81%) Rust
18 41 (0.81%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,123 (22.19%) Security Cleared
2 898 (17.75%) SC Cleared
3 456 (9.01%) Degree
4 224 (4.43%) Computer Science Degree
5 146 (2.89%) DV Cleared
6 137 (2.71%) AWS Certification
7 128 (2.53%) Master's Degree
8 114 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
9 94 (1.86%) Azure Certification
10 88 (1.74%) CISSP
11 72 (1.42%) Cisco Certification
12 59 (1.17%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 54 (1.07%) CCNP
14 46 (0.91%) PhD
15 42 (0.83%) CISM
16 39 (0.77%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.71%) Microsoft Certification
18 33 (0.65%) CEH
19 31 (0.61%) Microsoft Certified Professional
20 30 (0.59%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 445 (8.79%) Data Quality
2 194 (3.83%) QA
3 175 (3.46%) GDPR
4 105 (2.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 105 (2.08%) NIST
5 74 (1.46%) Accessibility
6 32 (0.63%) PCI DSS
7 29 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 28 (0.55%) HIPAA
8 28 (0.55%) SLA
9 23 (0.45%) NCSC
10 19 (0.38%) SOC 2
11 14 (0.28%) EU AI Act
12 13 (0.26%) Actionable Recommendations
13 11 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials
13 11 (0.22%) WCAG
14 10 (0.20%) MiFID
14 10 (0.20%) PMO
14 10 (0.20%) PSD2
15 9 (0.18%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 964 (19.05%) Docker
2 180 (3.56%) Active Directory
3 122 (2.41%) VMware Infrastructure
4 55 (1.09%) Virtual Machines
5 51 (1.01%) VMware NSX
5 51 (1.01%) vSphere
6 31 (0.61%) Hyper-V
7 22 (0.43%) Firmware
8 18 (0.36%) KVM
9 17 (0.34%) HDFS
10 15 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
11 12 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.20%) Lustre
13 9 (0.18%) GPFS
13 9 (0.18%) Squid
14 8 (0.16%) Postfix
14 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
15 6 (0.12%) DFS Replication
15 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
15 6 (0.12%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,124 (22.21%) Terraform
2 1,064 (21.03%) Kubernetes
3 552 (10.91%) Ansible
4 353 (6.98%) Grafana
5 312 (6.17%) Prometheus
6 92 (1.82%) Argo
7 78 (1.54%) Puppet
8 54 (1.07%) Kibana
9 52 (1.03%) vRealize
10 42 (0.83%) Istio
11 40 (0.79%) Nessus
12 35 (0.69%) Single Sign-On
13 28 (0.55%) vCenter Server
14 27 (0.53%) NetBackup
15 26 (0.51%) Control-M
15 26 (0.51%) Progress Chef
16 25 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
17 22 (0.43%) IBM Guardium
18 18 (0.36%) ITRS Geneos
18 18 (0.36%) Nmap
Vendors
1 624 (12.33%) Microsoft
2 507 (10.02%) Databricks
3 303 (5.99%) Google
4 247 (4.88%) Splunk
5 230 (4.55%) VMware
6 224 (4.43%) Oracle
7 143 (2.83%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.39%) OpenAI
9 120 (2.37%) Cisco
10 117 (2.31%) ServiceNow
11 87 (1.72%) CyberArk
12 80 (1.58%) Foundry
13 72 (1.42%) Palo Alto
14 71 (1.40%) F5
15 66 (1.30%) BeyondTrust
16 53 (1.05%) Informatica
17 45 (0.89%) SAP
18 43 (0.85%) IBM
19 42 (0.83%) Atlassian
20 39 (0.77%) Dynatrace