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

6 months to
18 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,690 4,207 4,019
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.75% 12.92% 9.54%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.05% 39.02% 31.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,724 2,833 2,941
10th Percentile £366 £363 £375
25th Percentile £425 £435 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £535 £560
Median % change year-on-year -1.87% -4.46% -6.67%
75th Percentile £631 £650 £700
90th Percentile £749 £796 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £492 £501
% change year-on-year +1.63% -1.80% -4.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 67 122
10th Percentile £28.50 £27.44 £20.82
25th Percentile £43.16 £34.33 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -18.03% -6.15%
75th Percentile £74.00 £58.13 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +12.50%

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 14,207 10,782 12,935
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.85% 33.12% 30.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,236 7,259 9,143
10th Percentile £360 £347 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 530 260 493
10th Percentile £34.01 £28.16 £30.75
25th Percentile £52.49 £36.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.13 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.79% -8.60% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.30 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +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 18 July 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 July 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 July 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 4,751 £530 -3.64% 2,051
London -4 2,722 £560 -2.61% 1,025
UK excluding London -2 2,258 £500 +1.63% 1,401
Work from Home -5 1,602 £525 -4.55% 722
North of England +5 784 £490 +3.16% 329
South East -9 445 £537 +7.40% 450
Yorkshire +2 420 £500 +2.04% 93
Scotland +4 330 £434 -8.68% 78
North West +2 289 £525 +10.53% 173
South West 0 288 £500 -9.09% 177
Midlands -14 258 £476 +5.78% 170
West Midlands -15 208 £475 +5.56% 89
East of England -13 134 £500 -0.50% 157
North East +4 88 £425 -2.86% 66
East Midlands -9 49 £485 +8.50% 80
Wales -8 31 £500 +12.36% 39
Northern Ireland +12 27 £369 -35.16% 26

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
1 289 (5.08%) Apache Spark
2 273 (4.80%) Apache Airflow
3 213 (3.74%) Apache
4 179 (3.15%) Confluence
5 52 (0.91%) Jupyter
5 52 (0.91%) SAS
6 48 (0.84%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.49%) OpenStack
8 25 (0.44%) nginx
9 20 (0.35%) ArcGIS
10 19 (0.33%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
12 12 (0.21%) IIS
13 11 (0.19%) Tomcat
14 9 (0.16%) CMS
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.088%) JBoss
Applications
1 123 (2.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.54%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.47%) Microsoft Office
4 26 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
7 15 (0.26%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.088%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.088%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.035%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.035%) Global One
10 2 (0.035%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.035%) Odoo
10 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.035%) Remedy AR System
Cloud Services
1 2,125 (37.35%) AWS
2 1,898 (33.36%) Azure
3 836 (14.69%) GCP
4 691 (12.14%) GitHub
5 524 (9.21%) Power Platform
6 488 (8.58%) Serverless
7 431 (7.57%) Amazon S3
8 400 (7.03%) Azure DevOps
9 382 (6.71%) GitHub Actions
10 369 (6.49%) AWS Lambda
11 295 (5.18%) Snowflake
12 235 (4.13%) Azure Data Factory
13 219 (3.85%) dbt
14 196 (3.44%) AWS CloudFormation
15 181 (3.18%) Amazon EKS
16 180 (3.16%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 160 (2.81%) OpenShift
18 152 (2.67%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 134 (2.36%) Amazon EC2
20 131 (2.30%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 259 (4.55%) Firewall
2 188 (3.30%) DNS
3 128 (2.25%) TCP/IP
4 127 (2.23%) BGP
5 121 (2.13%) Network Security
6 117 (2.06%) WAN
7 108 (1.90%) VPN
8 80 (1.41%) OSPF
9 62 (1.09%) DHCP
10 59 (1.04%) VLAN
11 56 (0.98%) BIG-IP
11 56 (0.98%) HTTP
11 56 (0.98%) SAN
12 55 (0.97%) SD-WAN
13 51 (0.90%) VXLAN
14 47 (0.83%) SSL
15 45 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 45 (0.79%) LAN
16 43 (0.76%) MPLS
16 43 (0.76%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 464 (8.15%) Power BI
2 357 (6.27%) PostgreSQL
3 321 (5.64%) Data Warehouse
4 237 (4.17%) SQL Server
5 206 (3.62%) Data Lake
6 202 (3.55%) Tableau
7 192 (3.37%) Relational Database
8 185 (3.25%) Metadata
9 165 (2.90%) Big Data
10 163 (2.86%) NoSQL
11 151 (2.65%) BigQuery
12 139 (2.44%) Amazon Athena
13 137 (2.41%) Amazon Redshift
14 129 (2.27%) MongoDB
15 118 (2.07%) Delta Lake
16 110 (1.93%) DynamoDB
17 108 (1.90%) Amazon RDS
18 86 (1.51%) MySQL
19 75 (1.32%) Hadoop
20 74 (1.30%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 703 (12.36%) Git
2 509 (8.95%) Jenkins
3 403 (7.08%) GitLab
4 310 (5.45%) JIRA
5 82 (1.44%) Selenium
6 71 (1.25%) MLflow
7 50 (0.88%) Postman
8 43 (0.76%) Bitbucket
9 39 (0.69%) JMeter
10 35 (0.62%) SonarQube
11 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
12 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.56%) Artifactory
13 32 (0.56%) REST Assured
14 28 (0.49%) Claude Code
14 28 (0.49%) JUnit
15 26 (0.46%) Maven
15 26 (0.46%) Sonatype Nexus
16 24 (0.42%) Gatling
17 18 (0.32%) Zephyr
General
1 1,229 (21.60%) Social Skills
2 1,193 (20.97%) Finance
3 780 (13.71%) Analytical Skills
4 555 (9.75%) Public Sector
5 428 (7.52%) Banking
6 203 (3.57%) Front Office
7 131 (2.30%) Documentation Skills
8 127 (2.23%) Investment Banking
9 112 (1.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 94 (1.65%) Retail
11 82 (1.44%) Marketing
12 65 (1.14%) Telecoms
13 64 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
14 61 (1.07%) Legal
15 48 (0.84%) Financial Institution
16 47 (0.83%) Military
17 46 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
17 46 (0.81%) Publishing
18 36 (0.63%) Manufacturing
19 30 (0.53%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 997 (17.52%) Developer
2 883 (15.52%) Senior
3 848 (14.90%) Data Engineer
4 528 (9.28%) Python Developer
5 428 (7.52%) Lead
6 394 (6.92%) Python Engineer
7 335 (5.89%) DevOps Engineer
8 311 (5.47%) Architect
9 310 (5.45%) Software Engineer
10 287 (5.04%) Analyst
11 255 (4.48%) AWS Engineer
12 250 (4.39%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 223 (3.92%) Data Scientist
14 189 (3.32%) Platform Engineer
15 180 (3.16%) Cloud Engineer
16 178 (3.13%) Senior Developer
17 173 (3.04%) Azure Engineer
18 169 (2.97%) Senior Data Engineer
19 147 (2.58%) Data Analyst
20 139 (2.44%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 414 (7.28%) REST
2 372 (6.54%) React
3 361 (6.34%) PySpark
4 355 (6.24%) Kafka
5 241 (4.24%) .NET
6 221 (3.88%) FastAPI
7 219 (3.85%) Node.js
8 207 (3.64%) RESTful
9 198 (3.48%) JSON
10 196 (3.44%) Pandas
11 175 (3.08%) Django
12 157 (2.76%) PyTorch
13 138 (2.43%) LangChain
14 122 (2.14%) Flask
14 122 (2.14%) NumPy
15 109 (1.92%) scikit-learn
16 106 (1.86%) OAuth
17 105 (1.85%) TensorFlow
18 98 (1.72%) pytest
18 98 (1.72%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 754 (13.25%) Cloud Native
2 310 (5.45%) Distributed Systems
3 192 (3.37%) Onboarding
4 184 (3.23%) AI Agents
5 162 (2.85%) Data Centre
6 148 (2.60%) Algorithms
7 143 (2.51%) Product Ownership
8 130 (2.28%) Data Structures
9 127 (2.23%) Legacy Systems
10 120 (2.11%) Data Protection Act
11 115 (2.02%) Hybrid Cloud
12 112 (1.97%) Derivative
13 107 (1.88%) Management Information System
14 105 (1.85%) Fixed Income
15 94 (1.65%) Equities
16 83 (1.46%) Security Posture
17 71 (1.25%) Public Cloud
18 65 (1.14%) Linux Command Line
18 65 (1.14%) Self-Motivation
19 60 (1.05%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 692 (12.16%) Linux
2 321 (5.64%) Windows
3 218 (3.83%) Unix
4 135 (2.37%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 75 (1.32%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.69%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.58%) VMS
8 26 (0.46%) AIX
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 18 (0.32%) Solaris
11 16 (0.28%) Apple iOS
12 14 (0.25%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 8 (0.14%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Debian
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,172 (38.17%) CI/CD
2 1,575 (27.68%) DevOps
3 1,393 (24.48%) AI
4 1,282 (22.53%) Agile
5 1,141 (20.05%) Analytics
6 1,075 (18.89%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,014 (17.82%) Data Pipeline
8 924 (16.24%) Problem-Solving
9 908 (15.96%) Machine Learning
10 814 (14.31%) Software Engineering
11 810 (14.24%) Data Engineering
12 774 (13.60%) Containerisation
13 751 (13.20%) Data Modelling
14 693 (12.18%) ETL
15 661 (11.62%) Observability
16 636 (11.18%) Data Science
17 581 (10.21%) Test Automation
18 546 (9.60%) Business Intelligence
19 528 (9.28%) LLM
20 517 (9.09%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,813 (31.86%) SQL
2 800 (14.06%) Java
3 709 (12.46%) Bash
4 687 (12.07%) PowerShell
5 462 (8.12%) JavaScript
6 403 (7.08%) TypeScript
7 322 (5.66%) C#
8 218 (3.83%) Go
9 164 (2.88%) R
10 140 (2.46%) C++
11 130 (2.28%) Scala
12 129 (2.27%) Shell Script
13 95 (1.67%) Bicep
14 74 (1.30%) Perl
15 58 (1.02%) PL/SQL
16 57 (1.00%) Ruby
17 56 (0.98%) C
18 55 (0.97%) Groovy
19 54 (0.95%) Rust
20 50 (0.88%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,281 (22.51%) Security Cleared
2 1,025 (18.01%) SC Cleared
3 425 (7.47%) Degree
4 193 (3.39%) DV Cleared
5 152 (2.67%) Computer Science Degree
6 138 (2.43%) BPSS Clearance
7 134 (2.36%) AWS Certification
8 123 (2.16%) Azure Certification
9 93 (1.63%) CISSP
10 88 (1.55%) Cisco Certification
11 81 (1.42%) Master's Degree
12 58 (1.02%) CCNP
13 47 (0.83%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 38 (0.67%) CISM
15 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Certification
16 32 (0.56%) CCIE
16 32 (0.56%) PhD
17 31 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 31 (0.54%) ISTQB
18 25 (0.44%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 557 (9.79%) Data Quality
2 249 (4.38%) QA
3 123 (2.16%) GDPR
4 110 (1.93%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 109 (1.92%) NIST
6 95 (1.67%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.60%) SLA
8 26 (0.46%) WCAG
9 23 (0.40%) Actionable Recommendations
9 23 (0.40%) HIPAA
9 23 (0.40%) NCSC
10 22 (0.39%) PCI DSS
11 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
12 13 (0.23%) SOC 2
13 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
14 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 9 (0.16%) GRC
15 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 895 (15.73%) Docker
2 135 (2.37%) Active Directory
3 124 (2.18%) VMware Infrastructure
4 77 (1.35%) Virtual Machines
5 48 (0.84%) vSphere
6 42 (0.74%) VMware NSX
7 37 (0.65%) Hyper-V
8 30 (0.53%) Firmware
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.33%) NFS
11 15 (0.26%) KVM
11 15 (0.26%) Oracle RAC
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 11 (0.19%) Ceph
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.12%) Postfix
17 4 (0.070%) OpenSSH
17 4 (0.070%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,242 (21.83%) Terraform
2 1,067 (18.75%) Kubernetes
3 606 (10.65%) Ansible
4 363 (6.38%) Grafana
5 287 (5.04%) Prometheus
6 79 (1.39%) Puppet
7 73 (1.28%) Argo
8 51 (0.90%) Progress Chef
9 39 (0.69%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) vCenter Server
11 37 (0.65%) vRealize
12 30 (0.53%) Kibana
13 27 (0.47%) Microsoft Intune
13 27 (0.47%) ZABBIX
14 26 (0.46%) Control-M
14 26 (0.46%) Nagios
15 25 (0.44%) Nessus
15 25 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
16 20 (0.35%) FortiGate
17 19 (0.33%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 653 (11.48%) Microsoft
2 559 (9.82%) Databricks
3 326 (5.73%) Google
4 250 (4.39%) Oracle
5 213 (3.74%) Splunk
6 178 (3.13%) VMware
7 147 (2.58%) Cisco
8 143 (2.51%) OpenAI
9 115 (2.02%) ServiceNow
10 109 (1.92%) Red Hat
11 96 (1.69%) F5
12 90 (1.58%) Palo Alto
13 89 (1.56%) Dynatrace
14 83 (1.46%) IBM
15 82 (1.44%) Informatica
16 70 (1.23%) Fortinet
17 65 (1.14%) CyberArk
17 65 (1.14%) Foundry
18 57 (1.00%) SAP
19 55 (0.97%) Arista