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

6 months to
3 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,819 3,922 4,191
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.44% 12.70% 9.29%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.99% 37.83% 31.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,249 2,584 2,964
10th Percentile £358 £385 £400
25th Percentile £415 £463 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £550 £551
Median % change year-on-year -5.91% -0.09% -8.25%
75th Percentile £638 £676 £675
90th Percentile £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -6.29% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 95 56 115
10th Percentile £28.50 £20.68 £26.84
25th Percentile £41.25 £25.21 £46.18
Median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.67% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £72.49 £66.26 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.60 £83.75 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.09 £62.50
% change year-on-year +6.49% -23.06% -4.58%

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 11,756 10,367 13,325
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.36% 33.58% 29.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,794 6,524 9,448
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.33% -4.87%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £716 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -2.63% -1.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 449 240 516
10th Percentile £39.58 £21.25 £35.58
25th Percentile £52.50 £36.50 £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 £69.62
90th Percentile £77.00 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -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 3 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 3 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 3 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 4,049 £523 -9.13% 2,685
London 0 2,308 £550 -8.33% 1,217
UK excluding London -1 1,863 £492 -6.29% 1,977
Work from Home 0 1,446 £525 -4.55% 1,208
North of England +10 604 £475 -8.57% 444
South East +2 404 £481 -12.50% 656
Yorkshire +8 308 £500 -6.98% 161
Midlands +4 282 £506 +4.65% 215
Scotland +1 274 £461 -3.81% 148
North West +6 252 £450 -10.00% 229
West Midlands +8 240 £515 +0.49% 106
South West -7 189 £550 -10.20% 268
East of England 0 128 £538 +7.50% 210
North East +7 49 £475 -15.93% 57
East Midlands -20 42 £444 +12.91% 109
Northern Ireland +3 28 £600 +14.29% 19
Wales -14 27 £523 +4.50% 46

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
1 229 (4.75%) Apache Spark
2 204 (4.23%) Apache Airflow
3 155 (3.22%) Apache
4 144 (2.99%) Confluence
5 62 (1.29%) SAS
6 61 (1.27%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.68%) nginx
7 33 (0.68%) OpenStack
8 30 (0.62%) Microsoft Exchange
9 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
10 21 (0.44%) Appian
10 21 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
11 12 (0.25%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 8 (0.17%) Camunda
14 7 (0.15%) IIS
15 6 (0.12%) CMS
15 6 (0.12%) Luigi
15 6 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
15 6 (0.12%) Tomcat
Applications
1 128 (2.66%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 18 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 11 (0.23%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 7 (0.15%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 3 (0.062%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.062%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.042%) Maya
10 2 (0.042%) NUKE
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 17 (0.35%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
3 9 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.062%) Actimize
4 3 (0.062%) Remedy ITSM
5 2 (0.042%) Bloomberg AIM
5 2 (0.042%) NEC Housing
5 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
5 2 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.042%) Shopify
5 2 (0.042%) Teamcenter
6 1 (0.021%) Cloudability
6 1 (0.021%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
6 1 (0.021%) Maximo
6 1 (0.021%) RMDS
6 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
6 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
6 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,864 (38.68%) AWS
2 1,586 (32.91%) Azure
3 744 (15.44%) GCP
4 603 (12.51%) GitHub
5 516 (10.71%) Serverless
6 448 (9.30%) Power Platform
7 362 (7.51%) Amazon S3
8 340 (7.06%) AWS Lambda
9 326 (6.76%) Azure DevOps
10 313 (6.50%) GitHub Actions
11 244 (5.06%) AWS CloudFormation
12 239 (4.96%) Snowflake
13 224 (4.65%) Azure Data Factory
14 176 (3.65%) Amazon EC2
15 173 (3.59%) Amazon ECS
16 170 (3.53%) Amazon EKS
17 166 (3.44%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 147 (3.05%) OpenShift
19 142 (2.95%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 132 (2.74%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 225 (4.67%) Firewall
2 142 (2.95%) DNS
3 123 (2.55%) Network Security
4 115 (2.39%) TCP/IP
5 75 (1.56%) VPN
6 72 (1.49%) HTTP
7 69 (1.43%) BGP
8 54 (1.12%) WAN
9 52 (1.08%) SSL
10 43 (0.89%) Wireshark
11 42 (0.87%) MPLS
12 41 (0.85%) LAN
13 40 (0.83%) OSPF
14 32 (0.66%) Wireless
15 30 (0.62%) DHCP
16 27 (0.56%) SD-WAN
16 27 (0.56%) VLAN
17 26 (0.54%) SSH
18 22 (0.46%) SMTP
18 22 (0.46%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 374 (7.76%) Power BI
2 367 (7.62%) PostgreSQL
3 285 (5.91%) Data Warehouse
4 228 (4.73%) NoSQL
5 221 (4.59%) Data Lake
6 215 (4.46%) Relational Database
7 173 (3.59%) SQL Server
8 161 (3.34%) Big Data
9 151 (3.13%) Amazon RDS
10 149 (3.09%) Tableau
11 124 (2.57%) MySQL
12 113 (2.34%) Metadata
13 112 (2.32%) BigQuery
14 99 (2.05%) Amazon Redshift
15 87 (1.81%) Delta Lake
16 86 (1.78%) Amazon Athena
17 85 (1.76%) MongoDB
18 83 (1.72%) Hadoop
19 77 (1.60%) Elasticsearch
20 76 (1.58%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 597 (12.39%) Git
2 531 (11.02%) Jenkins
3 422 (8.76%) GitLab
4 273 (5.67%) JIRA
5 84 (1.74%) MLflow
6 81 (1.68%) Selenium
7 49 (1.02%) Cucumber
8 46 (0.95%) Sonatype Nexus
9 43 (0.89%) Bitbucket
10 42 (0.87%) Postman
11 37 (0.77%) JUnit
12 35 (0.73%) SonarQube
13 33 (0.68%) JMeter
14 29 (0.60%) Maven
15 27 (0.56%) Visual Studio
16 26 (0.54%) CircleCI
16 26 (0.54%) Liquibase
17 25 (0.52%) SpecFlow
18 24 (0.50%) Artifactory
19 23 (0.48%) Gradle
General
1 1,281 (26.58%) Social Skills
2 932 (19.34%) Finance
3 669 (13.88%) Analytical Skills
4 424 (8.80%) Public Sector
5 422 (8.76%) Banking
6 155 (3.22%) Front Office
7 123 (2.55%) Documentation Skills
8 121 (2.51%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.43%) Financial Institution
10 62 (1.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 60 (1.25%) Marketing
11 60 (1.25%) Retail
12 57 (1.18%) Pharmaceutical
13 54 (1.12%) Telecoms
14 43 (0.89%) Legal
15 41 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
16 40 (0.83%) Manufacturing
17 36 (0.75%) Influencing Skills
18 28 (0.58%) Military
19 24 (0.50%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 854 (17.72%) Developer
2 652 (13.53%) Senior
3 644 (13.36%) Data Engineer
4 364 (7.55%) Python Developer
5 306 (6.35%) Architect
6 303 (6.29%) DevOps Engineer
7 295 (6.12%) Python Engineer
8 272 (5.64%) Analyst
9 259 (5.37%) AWS Engineer
10 254 (5.27%) Lead
11 234 (4.86%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 212 (4.40%) Software Engineer
13 185 (3.84%) Data Scientist
14 169 (3.51%) Platform Engineer
15 146 (3.03%) Senior Developer
16 135 (2.80%) Data Analyst
17 134 (2.78%) Azure Engineer
18 126 (2.61%) Senior Data Engineer
19 123 (2.55%) Full-Stack Developer
20 119 (2.47%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 418 (8.67%) REST
2 311 (6.45%) React
3 286 (5.93%) Kafka
4 276 (5.73%) PySpark
5 243 (5.04%) Node.js
6 218 (4.52%) Pandas
7 213 (4.42%) FastAPI
7 213 (4.42%) RESTful
8 202 (4.19%) PyTorch
9 194 (4.03%) .NET
10 166 (3.44%) TensorFlow
11 165 (3.42%) NumPy
12 134 (2.78%) AngularJS
13 126 (2.61%) LangChain
14 118 (2.45%) scikit-learn
15 116 (2.41%) Flask
16 112 (2.32%) pytest
17 107 (2.22%) Elastic Stack
18 106 (2.20%) OAuth
19 103 (2.14%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 424 (8.80%) Cloud Native
2 195 (4.05%) Algorithms
3 184 (3.82%) Distributed Systems
4 137 (2.84%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.64%) Data Protection Act
6 115 (2.39%) Equities
7 100 (2.08%) Data Structures
7 100 (2.08%) Onboarding
8 99 (2.05%) AI Agents
9 96 (1.99%) Enterprise Software
10 90 (1.87%) Derivative
11 85 (1.76%) Legacy Systems
12 84 (1.74%) Public Cloud
13 82 (1.70%) Management Information System
14 80 (1.66%) Hybrid Cloud
14 80 (1.66%) Security Posture
15 77 (1.60%) Data Centre
15 77 (1.60%) Fixed Income
15 77 (1.60%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 67 (1.39%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 754 (15.65%) Linux
2 352 (7.30%) Windows
3 221 (4.59%) Unix
4 93 (1.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.29%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.79%) Ubuntu
7 37 (0.77%) Android
8 36 (0.75%) VMS
9 28 (0.58%) CentOS
10 27 (0.56%) Solaris
11 25 (0.52%) Mac OS
12 21 (0.44%) Apple iOS
13 13 (0.27%) Amazon Linux
14 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
15 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
16 5 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.10%) Windows 10
17 4 (0.083%) Debian
17 4 (0.083%) Robot Operating System
17 4 (0.083%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,712 (35.53%) CI/CD
2 1,332 (27.64%) DevOps
3 1,130 (23.45%) Agile
4 1,056 (21.91%) Problem-Solving
5 1,008 (20.92%) AI
6 855 (17.74%) Infrastructure as Code
7 854 (17.72%) Analytics
8 766 (15.90%) Machine Learning
9 729 (15.13%) Containerisation
10 726 (15.07%) Data Pipeline
11 610 (12.66%) ETL
12 587 (12.18%) Data Engineering
13 574 (11.91%) Data Science
14 568 (11.79%) Data Modelling
15 535 (11.10%) Test Automation
16 519 (10.77%) Software Engineering
17 425 (8.82%) Business Intelligence
18 418 (8.67%) Observability
19 405 (8.40%) LLM
20 357 (7.41%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,470 (30.50%) SQL
2 722 (14.98%) Java
3 663 (13.76%) PowerShell
4 601 (12.47%) Bash
5 483 (10.02%) JavaScript
6 312 (6.47%) C#
7 296 (6.14%) TypeScript
8 225 (4.67%) Go
9 196 (4.07%) C++
10 149 (3.09%) R
11 142 (2.95%) Shell Script
12 140 (2.91%) Perl
13 123 (2.55%) Scala
14 94 (1.95%) Ruby
15 59 (1.22%) Bicep
15 59 (1.22%) Kusto Query Language
16 55 (1.14%) C
17 52 (1.08%) VBA
18 41 (0.85%) PHP
19 38 (0.79%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,070 (22.20%) Security Cleared
2 867 (17.99%) SC Cleared
3 441 (9.15%) Degree
4 229 (4.75%) Computer Science Degree
5 135 (2.80%) DV Cleared
6 128 (2.66%) AWS Certification
7 123 (2.55%) Master's Degree
8 91 (1.89%) BPSS Clearance
9 90 (1.87%) CISSP
10 89 (1.85%) Azure Certification
11 76 (1.58%) Cisco Certification
12 53 (1.10%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 51 (1.06%) CCNP
14 42 (0.87%) PhD
15 39 (0.81%) CISM
16 37 (0.77%) CEH
17 35 (0.73%) CCIE
18 33 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
19 32 (0.66%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 32 (0.66%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 404 (8.38%) Data Quality
2 178 (3.69%) QA
3 169 (3.51%) GDPR
4 97 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 97 (2.01%) NIST
5 59 (1.22%) Accessibility
6 33 (0.68%) PCI DSS
7 30 (0.62%) HIPAA
8 29 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 23 (0.48%) NCSC
9 23 (0.48%) SLA
10 19 (0.39%) SOC 2
11 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
12 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
12 10 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
13 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
13 9 (0.19%) MiFID
13 9 (0.19%) PMO
13 9 (0.19%) WCAG
14 8 (0.17%) EMIR
System Software
1 943 (19.57%) Docker
2 183 (3.80%) Active Directory
3 119 (2.47%) VMware Infrastructure
4 47 (0.98%) VMware NSX
5 45 (0.93%) Virtual Machines
6 43 (0.89%) vSphere
7 25 (0.52%) Hyper-V
8 23 (0.48%) Firmware
9 20 (0.42%) HDFS
10 16 (0.33%) KVM
11 13 (0.27%) Squid
11 13 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
12 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 11 (0.23%) Postfix
14 10 (0.21%) DFS Replication
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) GPFS
16 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
17 7 (0.15%) Dovecot
17 7 (0.15%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 1,065 (22.10%) Terraform
2 1,012 (21.00%) Kubernetes
3 558 (11.58%) Ansible
4 344 (7.14%) Grafana
5 297 (6.16%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.81%) Argo
7 74 (1.54%) Puppet
8 54 (1.12%) Kibana
9 51 (1.06%) vRealize
10 40 (0.83%) Istio
11 39 (0.81%) Nessus
12 34 (0.71%) Single Sign-On
13 27 (0.56%) NetBackup
13 27 (0.56%) Progress Chef
14 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
15 21 (0.44%) Control-M
16 20 (0.42%) ITRS Geneos
17 19 (0.39%) Nmap
17 19 (0.39%) vCenter Server
18 18 (0.37%) logstash
Vendors
1 599 (12.43%) Microsoft
2 457 (9.48%) Databricks
3 293 (6.08%) Google
4 246 (5.10%) Splunk
5 233 (4.84%) Oracle
6 224 (4.65%) VMware
7 139 (2.88%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.55%) Cisco
9 115 (2.39%) ServiceNow
10 114 (2.37%) OpenAI
11 93 (1.93%) CyberArk
12 77 (1.60%) Foundry
13 76 (1.58%) Palo Alto
14 72 (1.49%) F5
15 69 (1.43%) BeyondTrust
16 46 (0.95%) SAP
17 45 (0.93%) IBM
17 45 (0.93%) Informatica
18 41 (0.85%) Dynatrace
19 39 (0.81%) Atlassian