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 5 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,848 4,250 4,459
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.28% 11.76% 9.91%
As % of the Programming Languages category 42.15% 36.30% 32.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,190 2,815 3,196
10th Percentile £358 £375 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £738 £825 £798
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £505 £525
% change year-on-year -0.99% -3.81% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 90 83 131
10th Percentile £26.48 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.06 £25.75 £46.18
Median hourly rate £53.25 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +1.43% -12.50% -7.69%
75th Percentile £68.38 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.00 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year -13.60% +4.17% -7.69%

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 11,501 11,708 13,887
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.51% 32.41% 30.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,590 7,500 9,878
10th Percentile £345 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £433
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £503 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.24% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -4.04% -1.00% -3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 346 286 430
10th Percentile £30.13 £22.00 £31.48
25th Percentile £48.75 £40.19 £47.50
Median hourly rate £63.75 £63.00 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year +1.19% +4.13% -3.20%
75th Percentile £68.00 £69.45 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £76.25 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 5 December 2025.

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 5 December 2025.

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 5 December 2025. 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 +1 4,121 £525 -12.50% 2,717
London +1 2,426 £550 -12.00% 913
UK excluding London +3 1,844 £500 -0.99% 2,399
Work from Home -1 1,452 £525 -4.55% 1,962
North of England +9 567 £476 -6.21% 510
South East +3 399 £500 -4.76% 833
Yorkshire +10 291 £500 -6.67% 177
Scotland +10 290 £473 -1.46% 121
Midlands +8 275 £500 +5.26% 345
North West +10 239 £450 -9.04% 272
West Midlands +16 226 £507 +1.30% 203
South West -10 174 £550 -8.33% 265
East of England +5 147 £525 +5.53% 294
East Midlands -8 49 £402 +0.50% 134
North East +8 42 £518 -8.41% 67
Wales -11 31 £495 -1.00% 64
Northern Ireland -1 20 £588 +11.90% 20

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
1 248 (5.12%) Apache Airflow
2 208 (4.29%) Apache Spark
3 175 (3.61%) Apache
4 172 (3.55%) Confluence
5 68 (1.40%) SAS
6 57 (1.18%) SharePoint
7 35 (0.72%) OpenStack
8 33 (0.68%) nginx
9 23 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
10 21 (0.43%) Jupyter
11 12 (0.25%) Appian
11 12 (0.25%) IIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
14 7 (0.14%) ArcGIS
15 6 (0.12%) JBoss
15 6 (0.12%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.10%) Camunda
16 5 (0.10%) CMS
16 5 (0.10%) Luigi
Applications
1 142 (2.93%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.72%) Chatbot
3 31 (0.64%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 29 (0.60%) Microsoft Office
5 13 (0.27%) MS Visio
6 11 (0.23%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 9 (0.19%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.17%) Weka
9 5 (0.10%) Maya
9 5 (0.10%) NUKE
10 2 (0.041%) CPLEX
10 2 (0.041%) GNU Octave
11 1 (0.021%) Microsoft Project
11 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
11 1 (0.021%) SPSS
11 1 (0.021%) Stata
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
11 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 14 (0.29%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) Fidessa
5 5 (0.10%) Maximo
6 4 (0.083%) Remedy ITSM
7 3 (0.062%) Actimize
7 3 (0.062%) NetSuite
7 3 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
7 3 (0.062%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.041%) Distributed Ledger
8 2 (0.041%) Endur
8 2 (0.041%) Loan IQ
8 2 (0.041%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.041%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.041%) Shopify
8 2 (0.041%) Temenos T24
9 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
9 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
9 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,907 (39.34%) AWS
2 1,455 (30.01%) Azure
3 710 (14.65%) GCP
4 580 (11.96%) GitHub
5 494 (10.19%) Serverless
6 418 (8.62%) Power Platform
7 376 (7.76%) Amazon S3
8 342 (7.05%) AWS Lambda
9 310 (6.39%) GitHub Actions
10 298 (6.15%) Azure DevOps
11 257 (5.30%) Snowflake
12 238 (4.91%) AWS CloudFormation
13 200 (4.13%) Amazon EC2
14 190 (3.92%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 179 (3.69%) Amazon ECS
16 170 (3.51%) Azure Data Factory
17 168 (3.47%) dbt
18 162 (3.34%) Amazon EKS
19 146 (3.01%) OpenShift
20 136 (2.81%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 270 (5.57%) Firewall
2 182 (3.75%) DNS
3 141 (2.91%) TCP/IP
4 113 (2.33%) Network Security
5 91 (1.88%) HTTP
6 87 (1.79%) VPN
7 83 (1.71%) BGP
8 68 (1.40%) SSL
9 53 (1.09%) OSPF
10 52 (1.07%) WAN
11 44 (0.91%) MPLS
12 42 (0.87%) SSH
13 40 (0.83%) Wireless
14 39 (0.80%) SMTP
15 37 (0.76%) LAN
15 37 (0.76%) Wireshark
16 36 (0.74%) DHCP
16 36 (0.74%) SD-WAN
17 32 (0.66%) FTP
18 28 (0.58%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 400 (8.25%) PostgreSQL
2 362 (7.47%) Power BI
3 286 (5.90%) Data Warehouse
4 250 (5.16%) Relational Database
5 244 (5.03%) NoSQL
6 185 (3.82%) Data Lake
7 176 (3.63%) Big Data
8 172 (3.55%) Amazon RDS
9 161 (3.32%) Tableau
10 144 (2.97%) SQL Server
11 130 (2.68%) MongoDB
12 119 (2.45%) MySQL
13 103 (2.12%) BigQuery
14 102 (2.10%) Amazon Athena
15 97 (2.00%) Hadoop
16 90 (1.86%) Metadata
17 85 (1.75%) Amazon Redshift
18 83 (1.71%) DynamoDB
19 76 (1.57%) Elasticsearch
20 64 (1.32%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 655 (13.51%) Git
2 618 (12.75%) Jenkins
3 421 (8.68%) GitLab
4 317 (6.54%) JIRA
5 76 (1.57%) Selenium
6 66 (1.36%) Bitbucket
7 65 (1.34%) MLflow
8 63 (1.30%) SonarQube
9 58 (1.20%) Sonatype Nexus
10 55 (1.13%) JUnit
11 44 (0.91%) Liquibase
12 41 (0.85%) Cucumber
13 34 (0.70%) JMeter
14 33 (0.68%) Artifactory
15 32 (0.66%) Postman
16 29 (0.60%) Eclipse
17 26 (0.54%) Cypress.io
17 26 (0.54%) Gradle
17 26 (0.54%) Maven
17 26 (0.54%) Vagrant
General
1 1,340 (27.64%) Social Skills
2 1,079 (22.26%) Finance
3 694 (14.32%) Analytical Skills
4 487 (10.05%) Banking
5 433 (8.93%) Public Sector
6 223 (4.60%) Front Office
7 182 (3.75%) Investment Banking
8 106 (2.19%) Documentation Skills
9 84 (1.73%) Financial Institution
10 81 (1.67%) Marketing
11 74 (1.53%) Telecoms
12 70 (1.44%) Retail
13 68 (1.40%) Pharmaceutical
14 61 (1.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 50 (1.03%) Legal
16 45 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
17 43 (0.89%) Manufacturing
18 34 (0.70%) Influencing Skills
19 27 (0.56%) Electronics
19 27 (0.56%) Military
Job Titles
1 882 (18.19%) Developer
2 669 (13.80%) Senior
3 556 (11.47%) Data Engineer
4 357 (7.36%) Python Engineer
5 348 (7.18%) Python Developer
6 344 (7.10%) DevOps Engineer
7 339 (6.99%) Analyst
8 299 (6.17%) AWS Engineer
9 263 (5.42%) Software Engineer
10 253 (5.22%) Architect
11 224 (4.62%) Lead
12 206 (4.25%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 192 (3.96%) Platform Engineer
14 186 (3.84%) Data Scientist
15 164 (3.38%) Data Analyst
16 138 (2.85%) Senior Developer
17 129 (2.66%) Consultant
18 118 (2.43%) Automation Engineer
18 118 (2.43%) Cloud Engineer
19 113 (2.33%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 389 (8.02%) REST
2 331 (6.83%) React
3 327 (6.75%) Kafka
4 249 (5.14%) Node.js
5 244 (5.03%) Pandas
6 241 (4.97%) RESTful
7 226 (4.66%) FastAPI
8 212 (4.37%) PySpark
9 194 (4.00%) NumPy
9 194 (4.00%) PyTorch
10 169 (3.49%) TensorFlow
11 157 (3.24%) AngularJS
12 146 (3.01%) .NET
13 136 (2.81%) Elastic Stack
14 121 (2.50%) scikit-learn
15 119 (2.45%) LangChain
16 105 (2.17%) pytest
17 104 (2.15%) Flask
17 104 (2.15%) JSON
18 103 (2.12%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 391 (8.07%) Cloud Native
2 208 (4.29%) Algorithms
3 199 (4.10%) Distributed Systems
4 144 (2.97%) Equities
5 139 (2.87%) Data Protection Act
6 133 (2.74%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 130 (2.68%) Fixed Income
8 125 (2.58%) Product Ownership
9 115 (2.37%) Data Structures
10 111 (2.29%) Derivative
11 108 (2.23%) Onboarding
12 104 (2.15%) Hedge funds
13 102 (2.10%) AI Agents
14 83 (1.71%) Public Cloud
15 79 (1.63%) Data Centre
16 78 (1.61%) Hybrid Cloud
17 74 (1.53%) Management Information System
18 68 (1.40%) Replication
19 66 (1.36%) Legacy Systems
20 54 (1.11%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 866 (17.86%) Linux
2 365 (7.53%) Windows
3 240 (4.95%) Unix
4 92 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 65 (1.34%) Windows Server
6 45 (0.93%) Ubuntu
7 40 (0.83%) Android
8 39 (0.80%) VMS
9 35 (0.72%) CentOS
10 29 (0.60%) Mac OS
11 25 (0.52%) Amazon Linux
12 18 (0.37%) Apple iOS
12 18 (0.37%) Solaris
13 12 (0.25%) Debian
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
14 9 (0.19%) Windows 7
15 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
16 4 (0.083%) zOS
17 3 (0.062%) AIX
17 3 (0.062%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,627 (33.56%) CI/CD
2 1,351 (27.87%) DevOps
3 1,243 (25.64%) Agile
4 1,040 (21.45%) Problem-Solving
5 875 (18.05%) AI
6 866 (17.86%) Infrastructure as Code
7 779 (16.07%) Analytics
8 738 (15.22%) Machine Learning
9 696 (14.36%) Containerisation
10 646 (13.33%) Data Pipeline
11 599 (12.36%) Software Engineering
12 539 (11.12%) Data Science
13 528 (10.89%) Data Modelling
14 527 (10.87%) ETL
15 522 (10.77%) Data Engineering
16 493 (10.17%) Test Automation
17 414 (8.54%) Business Intelligence
18 405 (8.35%) Computer Science
19 378 (7.80%) Observability
20 370 (7.63%) Microservices
Programming Languages
1 1,483 (30.59%) SQL
2 853 (17.59%) Java
3 674 (13.90%) Bash
4 627 (12.93%) PowerShell
5 513 (10.58%) JavaScript
6 334 (6.89%) TypeScript
7 307 (6.33%) Go
8 279 (5.75%) C#
9 244 (5.03%) C++
10 188 (3.88%) Perl
11 177 (3.65%) R
12 168 (3.47%) Shell Script
13 103 (2.12%) Scala
14 92 (1.90%) Ruby
15 71 (1.46%) C
16 62 (1.28%) VBA
17 60 (1.24%) PHP
18 50 (1.03%) Bicep
19 49 (1.01%) Groovy
20 46 (0.95%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 946 (19.51%) Security Cleared
2 750 (15.47%) SC Cleared
3 478 (9.86%) Degree
4 241 (4.97%) Computer Science Degree
5 150 (3.09%) AWS Certification
6 147 (3.03%) Master's Degree
7 145 (2.99%) DV Cleared
8 95 (1.96%) Cisco Certification
9 89 (1.84%) CISSP
10 83 (1.71%) Azure Certification
11 82 (1.69%) BPSS Clearance
12 58 (1.20%) CCNP
13 55 (1.13%) MCP
14 54 (1.11%) PhD
15 42 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 41 (0.85%) CCIE
17 35 (0.72%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
18 34 (0.70%) CEH
19 33 (0.68%) CISM
20 32 (0.66%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 341 (7.03%) Data Quality
2 184 (3.80%) QA
3 162 (3.34%) GDPR
4 98 (2.02%) NIST
5 97 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 59 (1.22%) Accessibility
7 45 (0.93%) PCI DSS
8 38 (0.78%) HIPAA
9 24 (0.50%) NCSC
9 24 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 23 (0.47%) SLA
11 19 (0.39%) EU AI Act
11 19 (0.39%) SOC 2
12 12 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
13 10 (0.21%) EMIR
13 10 (0.21%) MiFID
13 10 (0.21%) PMO
14 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
14 8 (0.17%) WCAG
15 7 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 952 (19.64%) Docker
2 166 (3.42%) Active Directory
3 128 (2.64%) VMware Infrastructure
4 38 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
4 38 (0.78%) vSphere
5 33 (0.68%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.60%) Firmware
7 21 (0.43%) DFS Replication
8 19 (0.39%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.35%) Squid
10 15 (0.31%) HDFS
10 15 (0.31%) KVM
10 15 (0.31%) Postfix
10 15 (0.31%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
12 11 (0.23%) Dovecot
12 11 (0.23%) VMware ESXi
13 10 (0.21%) GPFS
13 10 (0.21%) Lustre
14 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,073 (22.13%) Terraform
2 1,070 (22.07%) Kubernetes
3 627 (12.93%) Ansible
4 384 (7.92%) Grafana
5 324 (6.68%) Prometheus
6 88 (1.82%) Argo
7 84 (1.73%) Puppet
8 55 (1.13%) Kibana
9 48 (0.99%) Progress Chef
10 38 (0.78%) Istio
11 37 (0.76%) vRealize
12 36 (0.74%) Nessus
13 29 (0.60%) NetBackup
13 29 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
14 27 (0.56%) ITRS Geneos
15 24 (0.50%) logstash
15 24 (0.50%) vCenter Server
16 21 (0.43%) Nmap
17 20 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
17 20 (0.41%) Packer
Vendors
1 566 (11.67%) Microsoft
2 375 (7.74%) Databricks
3 278 (5.73%) Google
4 260 (5.36%) Splunk
5 221 (4.56%) Oracle
6 215 (4.43%) VMware
7 144 (2.97%) ServiceNow
8 129 (2.66%) Cisco
9 128 (2.64%) Red Hat
10 88 (1.82%) OpenAI
11 86 (1.77%) Palo Alto
12 85 (1.75%) F5
13 71 (1.46%) Foundry
14 63 (1.30%) SAP
15 58 (1.20%) CyberArk
16 46 (0.95%) IBM
17 45 (0.93%) CrowdStrike
18 43 (0.89%) Atlassian
19 42 (0.87%) Juniper
19 42 (0.87%) Salesforce