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

6 months to
11 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,659 3,906 4,131
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.80% 12.29% 9.61%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.63% 37.55% 31.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,114 2,580 2,922
10th Percentile £360 £380 £400
25th Percentile £423 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £685 £688
90th Percentile £750 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £511 £525
% change year-on-year -2.20% -2.62% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 98 61 119
10th Percentile £29.25 £20.12 £30.55
25th Percentile £41.42 £22.50 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £47.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.68% -20.83% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.26 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £84.13 £77.50 £76.72
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £56.00
% change year-on-year +10.89% -17.54% -13.85%

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 11,191 10,401 12,971
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.75% 32.72% 30.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,416 6,613 9,220
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £619 £641 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -1.28% -2.50% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 384 238 418
10th Percentile £35.48 £21.25 £32.22
25th Percentile £51.24 £36.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +0.81% -1.59%
75th Percentile £68.88 £68.56 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.25 £85.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% -

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 January 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 January 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 January 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 3,958 £525 -8.70% 3,214
London 0 2,278 £550 -8.33% 952
UK excluding London +2 1,783 £500 -2.20% 2,760
Work from Home 0 1,400 £525 -4.55% 1,436
North of England +9 568 £481 -4.70% 517
South East +5 389 £481 -12.10% 981
Yorkshire +5 285 £500 -6.98% 205
Midlands +10 279 £500 +5.26% 281
Scotland +4 262 £475 -0.94% 126
North West +8 239 £450 -5.26% 226
West Midlands +17 235 £515 +3.00% 114
South West -8 174 £550 -8.46% 350
East of England +5 129 £525 +8.25% 387
North East +10 49 £508 -10.18% 87
East Midlands -16 44 £414 +3.38% 164
Wales -12 26 £575 +15.00% 119
Northern Ireland -1 21 £588 +17.50% 58

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
1 213 (4.57%) Apache Airflow
2 210 (4.51%) Apache Spark
3 154 (3.31%) Apache
4 152 (3.26%) Confluence
5 60 (1.29%) SAS
6 57 (1.22%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.73%) nginx
8 33 (0.71%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.49%) Jupyter
10 21 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
11 17 (0.36%) Appian
12 10 (0.21%) ArcGIS
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.17%) IIS
15 6 (0.13%) Camunda
15 6 (0.13%) CMS
15 6 (0.13%) Luigi
15 6 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
16 4 (0.086%) Tomcat
17 3 (0.064%) JBoss
Applications
1 130 (2.79%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.69%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.30%) MS Visio
6 9 (0.19%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 9 (0.19%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 3 (0.064%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.043%) LaTeX
9 2 (0.043%) Maya
9 2 (0.043%) NUKE
10 1 (0.021%) SPSS
10 1 (0.021%) Stata
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 15 (0.32%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.13%) Fidessa
5 3 (0.064%) Actimize
5 3 (0.064%) NetSuite
5 3 (0.064%) Remedy ITSM
5 3 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.043%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.043%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.043%) Shopify
6 2 (0.043%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
7 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
7 1 (0.021%) Maximo
7 1 (0.021%) NEC Housing
7 1 (0.021%) RMDS
7 1 (0.021%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
7 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,837 (39.43%) AWS
2 1,487 (31.92%) Azure
3 695 (14.92%) GCP
4 579 (12.43%) GitHub
5 510 (10.95%) Serverless
6 422 (9.06%) Power Platform
7 362 (7.77%) Amazon S3
8 345 (7.41%) AWS Lambda
9 313 (6.72%) GitHub Actions
10 298 (6.40%) Azure DevOps
11 234 (5.02%) Snowflake
12 231 (4.96%) AWS CloudFormation
13 204 (4.38%) Azure Data Factory
14 200 (4.29%) Amazon EC2
15 183 (3.93%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 174 (3.73%) Amazon ECS
17 169 (3.63%) Amazon EKS
18 137 (2.94%) OpenShift
19 135 (2.90%) dbt
20 130 (2.79%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 240 (5.15%) Firewall
2 160 (3.43%) DNS
3 124 (2.66%) TCP/IP
4 115 (2.47%) Network Security
5 84 (1.80%) HTTP
6 78 (1.67%) VPN
7 69 (1.48%) BGP
7 69 (1.48%) SSL
8 48 (1.03%) WAN
9 43 (0.92%) OSPF
10 37 (0.79%) MPLS
10 37 (0.79%) Wireshark
11 35 (0.75%) Wireless
12 34 (0.73%) SSH
13 33 (0.71%) SMTP
14 32 (0.69%) LAN
14 32 (0.69%) SD-WAN
15 31 (0.67%) DHCP
16 28 (0.60%) FTP
17 23 (0.49%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 364 (7.81%) PostgreSQL
2 362 (7.77%) Power BI
3 274 (5.88%) Data Warehouse
4 227 (4.87%) Relational Database
5 226 (4.85%) NoSQL
6 216 (4.64%) Data Lake
7 164 (3.52%) Big Data
8 162 (3.48%) Amazon RDS
9 158 (3.39%) SQL Server
10 148 (3.18%) Tableau
11 121 (2.60%) MySQL
12 98 (2.10%) Metadata
13 97 (2.08%) MongoDB
14 96 (2.06%) BigQuery
15 93 (2.00%) Amazon Athena
16 92 (1.97%) Hadoop
17 89 (1.91%) Amazon Redshift
18 79 (1.70%) DynamoDB
19 74 (1.59%) Azure SQL Database
19 74 (1.59%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 603 (12.94%) Git
2 549 (11.78%) Jenkins
3 421 (9.04%) GitLab
4 270 (5.80%) JIRA
5 81 (1.74%) Selenium
6 74 (1.59%) MLflow
7 49 (1.05%) Bitbucket
8 48 (1.03%) Cucumber
9 47 (1.01%) Sonatype Nexus
10 44 (0.94%) SonarQube
11 41 (0.88%) JUnit
12 37 (0.79%) Liquibase
13 35 (0.75%) Postman
14 32 (0.69%) JMeter
15 28 (0.60%) Cypress.io
16 27 (0.58%) Artifactory
17 26 (0.56%) CircleCI
17 26 (0.56%) Visual Studio
18 25 (0.54%) Maven
19 24 (0.52%) Gradle
General
1 1,276 (27.39%) Social Skills
2 946 (20.30%) Finance
3 653 (14.02%) Analytical Skills
4 430 (9.23%) Public Sector
5 420 (9.01%) Banking
6 166 (3.56%) Front Office
7 141 (3.03%) Investment Banking
8 120 (2.58%) Documentation Skills
9 73 (1.57%) Financial Institution
10 68 (1.46%) Marketing
11 65 (1.40%) Pharmaceutical
12 60 (1.29%) Telecoms
13 56 (1.20%) Retail
14 55 (1.18%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 42 (0.90%) Legal
16 40 (0.86%) Manufacturing
17 39 (0.84%) Presentation Skills
18 31 (0.67%) Influencing Skills
19 27 (0.58%) Military
20 23 (0.49%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 798 (17.13%) Developer
2 654 (14.04%) Senior
3 584 (12.53%) Data Engineer
4 331 (7.10%) Python Developer
5 321 (6.89%) DevOps Engineer
6 319 (6.85%) Python Engineer
7 295 (6.33%) Analyst
8 276 (5.92%) Architect
8 276 (5.92%) AWS Engineer
9 239 (5.13%) Software Engineer
10 230 (4.94%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 229 (4.92%) Lead
12 172 (3.69%) Data Scientist
12 172 (3.69%) Platform Engineer
13 149 (3.20%) Data Analyst
14 144 (3.09%) Senior Developer
15 123 (2.64%) Azure Engineer
16 118 (2.53%) Full-Stack Developer
17 116 (2.49%) Consultant
17 116 (2.49%) Senior Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 412 (8.84%) REST
2 297 (6.37%) React
3 288 (6.18%) Kafka
4 250 (5.37%) PySpark
5 233 (5.00%) Node.js
6 226 (4.85%) Pandas
7 220 (4.72%) FastAPI
8 216 (4.64%) RESTful
9 190 (4.08%) PyTorch
10 176 (3.78%) NumPy
11 164 (3.52%) TensorFlow
12 155 (3.33%) .NET
13 139 (2.98%) AngularJS
14 123 (2.64%) LangChain
15 119 (2.55%) Elastic Stack
16 117 (2.51%) scikit-learn
17 107 (2.30%) pytest
18 106 (2.28%) Flask
19 103 (2.21%) LDAP
20 99 (2.12%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 381 (8.18%) Cloud Native
2 191 (4.10%) Algorithms
3 183 (3.93%) Distributed Systems
4 123 (2.64%) Equities
5 121 (2.60%) Data Protection Act
5 121 (2.60%) Product Ownership
6 105 (2.25%) Data Structures
7 100 (2.15%) AI Agents
8 98 (2.10%) Derivative
9 94 (2.02%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 94 (2.02%) Onboarding
10 90 (1.93%) Enterprise Software
11 88 (1.89%) Fixed Income
12 80 (1.72%) Hedge funds
13 78 (1.67%) Security Posture
14 73 (1.57%) Data Centre
14 73 (1.57%) Hybrid Cloud
14 73 (1.57%) Public Cloud
15 69 (1.48%) Legacy Systems
15 69 (1.48%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 779 (16.72%) Linux
2 352 (7.56%) Windows
3 230 (4.94%) Unix
4 91 (1.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 60 (1.29%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.86%) Android
7 37 (0.79%) VMS
8 34 (0.73%) Ubuntu
9 28 (0.60%) CentOS
10 25 (0.54%) Solaris
11 23 (0.49%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.39%) Amazon Linux
13 17 (0.36%) Apple iOS
14 11 (0.24%) Windows 7
15 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
16 4 (0.086%) Robot Operating System
17 3 (0.064%) AIX
17 3 (0.064%) Debian
17 3 (0.064%) Embedded Linux
17 3 (0.064%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,595 (34.23%) CI/CD
2 1,314 (28.20%) DevOps
3 1,129 (24.23%) Agile
4 1,017 (21.83%) Problem-Solving
5 925 (19.85%) AI
6 832 (17.86%) Infrastructure as Code
7 796 (17.09%) Analytics
8 736 (15.80%) Machine Learning
9 697 (14.96%) Containerisation
10 670 (14.38%) Data Pipeline
11 553 (11.87%) Software Engineering
12 543 (11.65%) ETL
13 542 (11.63%) Data Engineering
14 541 (11.61%) Data Science
15 533 (11.44%) Data Modelling
16 500 (10.73%) Test Automation
17 417 (8.95%) Business Intelligence
18 388 (8.33%) Observability
19 362 (7.77%) Computer Science
20 356 (7.64%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,414 (30.35%) SQL
2 735 (15.78%) Java
3 643 (13.80%) PowerShell
4 620 (13.31%) Bash
5 483 (10.37%) JavaScript
6 285 (6.12%) TypeScript
7 278 (5.97%) C#
8 252 (5.41%) Go
9 215 (4.61%) C++
10 171 (3.67%) Perl
11 162 (3.48%) R
12 153 (3.28%) Shell Script
13 101 (2.17%) Scala
14 94 (2.02%) Ruby
15 60 (1.29%) Bicep
16 59 (1.27%) C
17 55 (1.18%) Kusto Query Language
18 54 (1.16%) VBA
19 45 (0.97%) PHP
20 37 (0.79%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,024 (21.98%) Security Cleared
2 830 (17.81%) SC Cleared
3 429 (9.21%) Degree
4 229 (4.92%) Computer Science Degree
5 145 (3.11%) DV Cleared
6 135 (2.90%) AWS Certification
7 119 (2.55%) Master's Degree
8 87 (1.87%) BPSS Clearance
9 83 (1.78%) Azure Certification
10 79 (1.70%) CISSP
11 76 (1.63%) Cisco Certification
12 70 (1.50%) MCP
13 49 (1.05%) CCNP
14 45 (0.97%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 40 (0.86%) PhD
16 37 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.77%) CCIE
18 34 (0.73%) CEH
19 33 (0.71%) CISM
19 33 (0.71%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 362 (7.77%) Data Quality
2 177 (3.80%) QA
3 153 (3.28%) GDPR
4 83 (1.78%) NIST
5 82 (1.76%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 58 (1.24%) Accessibility
7 31 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 29 (0.62%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.56%) HIPAA
10 23 (0.49%) SLA
11 22 (0.47%) NCSC
12 16 (0.34%) SOC 2
13 15 (0.32%) EU AI Act
14 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
14 9 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
14 9 (0.19%) EMIR
14 9 (0.19%) MiFID
15 8 (0.17%) PMO
15 8 (0.17%) WCAG
16 6 (0.13%) PSD2
System Software
1 936 (20.09%) Docker
2 190 (4.08%) Active Directory
3 107 (2.30%) VMware Infrastructure
4 36 (0.77%) VMware NSX
5 35 (0.75%) vSphere
6 31 (0.67%) Virtual Machines
7 24 (0.52%) Firmware
8 20 (0.43%) HDFS
8 20 (0.43%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.36%) KVM
10 15 (0.32%) DFS Replication
10 15 (0.32%) Squid
11 14 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.28%) Postfix
13 12 (0.26%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) Dovecot
15 9 (0.19%) GPFS
16 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
16 8 (0.17%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,046 (22.45%) Terraform
2 994 (21.34%) Kubernetes
3 590 (12.66%) Ansible
4 354 (7.60%) Grafana
5 298 (6.40%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.87%) Argo
7 79 (1.70%) Puppet
8 54 (1.16%) Kibana
9 43 (0.92%) vRealize
10 40 (0.86%) Istio
11 35 (0.75%) Single Sign-On
12 33 (0.71%) Progress Chef
13 32 (0.69%) Nessus
14 28 (0.60%) NetBackup
15 20 (0.43%) ITRS Geneos
16 18 (0.39%) logstash
17 16 (0.34%) Nmap
17 16 (0.34%) Packer
17 16 (0.34%) QRadar
18 15 (0.32%) SCCM
Vendors
1 547 (11.74%) Microsoft
2 414 (8.89%) Databricks
3 265 (5.69%) Google
4 245 (5.26%) Splunk
5 226 (4.85%) Oracle
6 209 (4.49%) VMware
7 140 (3.00%) Red Hat
8 119 (2.55%) ServiceNow
9 116 (2.49%) Cisco
10 99 (2.12%) OpenAI
11 91 (1.95%) CyberArk
12 83 (1.78%) F5
13 76 (1.63%) Palo Alto
14 68 (1.46%) Foundry
15 66 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
16 53 (1.14%) SAP
17 44 (0.94%) Atlassian
18 43 (0.92%) Dynatrace
19 39 (0.84%) Salesforce
20 38 (0.82%) CheckPoint