Python Contract Job Trends

Python
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Python skills. It covers vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 13 12
Rank change year-on-year +3 -1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 4,313 4,120 5,167
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 13.09% 10.70% 10.50%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.89% 33.40% 32.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,810 2,867 3,731
10th Percentile £357 £375 £413
25th Percentile £425 £463 £491
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% -4.17% -
75th Percentile £650 £700 £713
90th Percentile £775 £850 £810
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £507 £525
% change year-on-year -1.38% -3.43% -1.32%
Number of hourly rates quoted 85 102 132
10th Percentile £28.18 £21.25 £46.18
25th Percentile £35.00 £40.06 £47.50
Median hourly rate £50.00 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.00% -3.85% +18.18%
75th Percentile £57.50 £71.88 £75.13
90th Percentile £81.00 £78.63 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -28.57% +7.69% +16.07%

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 10,811 12,334 15,791
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.81% 32.02% 32.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,155 8,334 11,188
10th Percentile £344 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £503 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.29% -4.55% -2.22%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £675
90th Percentile £738 £775 £777
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 295 344 453
10th Percentile £29.00 £27.00 £35.00
25th Percentile £41.25 £46.18 £48.40
Median hourly rate £55.00 £65.00 £63.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.38% +3.17% +12.50%
75th Percentile £67.75 £70.00 £70.25
90th Percentile £80.00 £78.38 £82.45
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year - - +13.04%

Python
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Python as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Python 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 September 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 18 September 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 18 September 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 0 3,649 £535 -8.94% 3,980
London +1 2,291 £575 -8.00% 1,861
UK excluding London +8 1,535 £500 -1.38% 3,019
Work from Home -2 1,432 £550 -6.38% 1,597
North of England +7 448 £476 -7.12% 639
South East +4 297 £500 -0.50% 1,173
Scotland +15 277 £500 - 182
Yorkshire +6 242 £500 -6.98% 194
Midlands +14 211 £475 +9.07% 394
North West +7 180 £472 -2.93% 381
West Midlands +18 163 £500 +5.26% 222
South West 0 147 £525 -12.50% 254
East of England +18 145 £525 +5.00% 280
East Midlands -3 46 £415 +3.75% 164
North East +1 28 £438 -27.08% 71
Wales -5 23 £410 -18.00% 77
Northern Ireland 0 18 £525 +27.27% 50

Python
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 249 (5.77%) Apache Airflow
2 183 (4.24%) Apache Spark
3 174 (4.03%) Apache
4 136 (3.15%) Confluence
5 41 (0.95%) SAS
6 33 (0.77%) nginx
6 33 (0.77%) OpenStack
7 30 (0.70%) SharePoint
8 22 (0.51%) Jupyter
9 16 (0.37%) IIS
10 12 (0.28%) WebSphere
11 11 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
12 9 (0.21%) Apache Pig
12 9 (0.21%) JBoss
13 8 (0.19%) ArcGIS
14 6 (0.14%) Luigi
14 6 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 6 (0.14%) WebLogic
15 5 (0.12%) CMS
15 5 (0.12%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 119 (2.76%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.77%) Microsoft Office
3 29 (0.67%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 24 (0.56%) Chatbot
5 15 (0.35%) Maya
5 15 (0.35%) NUKE
6 12 (0.28%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 9 (0.21%) MS Visio
8 3 (0.070%) Spreadsheet
8 3 (0.070%) Trello
9 2 (0.046%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.046%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.046%) Maple
9 2 (0.046%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.046%) Sketch
10 1 (0.023%) Notion
10 1 (0.023%) Simulink
10 1 (0.023%) SPSS
10 1 (0.023%) Stata
10 1 (0.023%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 31 (0.72%) Aladdin
2 16 (0.37%) thinkFolio
3 13 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
4 8 (0.19%) Endur
4 8 (0.19%) Maximo
5 6 (0.14%) SAP PM
6 4 (0.093%) Dynamics CRM
6 4 (0.093%) Oracle BPM
7 3 (0.070%) Bankmaster
7 3 (0.070%) Kondor
7 3 (0.070%) NetSuite
7 3 (0.070%) Payment Gateway
7 3 (0.070%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.046%) Distributed Ledger
8 2 (0.046%) Loan IQ
8 2 (0.046%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.046%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.046%) Salesforce CRM
8 2 (0.046%) Temenos T24
9 1 (0.023%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,676 (38.86%) AWS
2 1,184 (27.45%) Azure
3 625 (14.49%) GCP
4 374 (8.67%) GitHub
5 347 (8.05%) Serverless
6 335 (7.77%) Power Platform
7 306 (7.09%) Amazon S3
8 253 (5.87%) AWS Lambda
9 223 (5.17%) Azure DevOps
10 209 (4.85%) GitHub Actions
11 202 (4.68%) dbt
12 193 (4.47%) Snowflake
13 147 (3.41%) Amazon EC2
14 146 (3.39%) AWS CloudFormation
15 144 (3.34%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 131 (3.04%) Azure Data Factory
17 99 (2.30%) Amazon EKS
17 99 (2.30%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 99 (2.30%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 95 (2.20%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 243 (5.63%) Firewall
2 163 (3.78%) DNS
3 126 (2.92%) TCP/IP
4 107 (2.48%) Network Security
5 103 (2.39%) HTTP
6 101 (2.34%) BGP
7 93 (2.16%) VPN
8 72 (1.67%) OSPF
9 63 (1.46%) SSL
10 51 (1.18%) MPLS
11 46 (1.07%) WAN
12 40 (0.93%) LAN
13 36 (0.83%) SMTP
14 35 (0.81%) SSH
14 35 (0.81%) Wireless
15 32 (0.74%) FTP
16 28 (0.65%) IPsec
17 27 (0.63%) VXLAN
18 26 (0.60%) DHCP
18 26 (0.60%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 324 (7.51%) PostgreSQL
2 307 (7.12%) Power BI
3 223 (5.17%) Relational Database
4 204 (4.73%) Data Warehouse
5 194 (4.50%) NoSQL
6 173 (4.01%) Data Lake
7 166 (3.85%) Big Data
8 162 (3.76%) Tableau
9 161 (3.73%) SQL Server
10 137 (3.18%) MongoDB
11 121 (2.81%) Amazon RDS
12 112 (2.60%) Hadoop
13 107 (2.48%) Amazon Athena
14 100 (2.32%) BigQuery
15 84 (1.95%) DynamoDB
16 83 (1.92%) MySQL
17 74 (1.72%) Apache Iceberg
18 73 (1.69%) DB2
18 73 (1.69%) Dremio
19 72 (1.67%) Apache Arrow
Development Applications
1 566 (13.12%) Git
2 510 (11.82%) Jenkins
3 289 (6.70%) GitLab
4 271 (6.28%) JIRA
5 73 (1.69%) SonarQube
6 66 (1.53%) JUnit
7 60 (1.39%) Bitbucket
8 55 (1.28%) Selenium
8 55 (1.28%) Sonatype Nexus
9 42 (0.97%) Artifactory
10 40 (0.93%) MLflow
11 36 (0.83%) Liquibase
12 33 (0.77%) Postman
13 30 (0.70%) Maven
14 29 (0.67%) Vagrant
15 28 (0.65%) Cucumber
15 28 (0.65%) Cypress.io
16 26 (0.60%) Robot Framework
17 25 (0.58%) Gradle
17 25 (0.58%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 1,154 (26.76%) Social Skills
2 1,072 (24.86%) Finance
3 639 (14.82%) Analytical Skills
4 473 (10.97%) Banking
5 320 (7.42%) Public Sector
6 313 (7.26%) Front Office
7 227 (5.26%) Investment Banking
8 85 (1.97%) Telecoms
9 78 (1.81%) Financial Institution
10 72 (1.67%) Marketing
11 65 (1.51%) Documentation Skills
12 64 (1.48%) Pharmaceutical
13 63 (1.46%) Retail
14 54 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 52 (1.21%) Legal
16 46 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
17 36 (0.83%) Manufacturing
18 26 (0.60%) Aerospace
18 26 (0.60%) Games
19 24 (0.56%) Automotive
Job Titles
1 902 (20.91%) Developer
2 556 (12.89%) Senior
3 467 (10.83%) Data Engineer
4 394 (9.14%) Analyst
5 378 (8.76%) Python Engineer
6 341 (7.91%) Python Developer
7 298 (6.91%) Software Engineer
8 285 (6.61%) DevOps Engineer
9 278 (6.45%) AWS Engineer
10 226 (5.24%) Architect
11 174 (4.03%) Data Analyst
12 151 (3.50%) Lead
13 150 (3.48%) Data Scientist
14 137 (3.18%) Platform Engineer
15 123 (2.85%) Network Engineer
16 120 (2.78%) Full-Stack Developer
16 120 (2.78%) Java Developer
17 119 (2.76%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 119 (2.76%) Python Software Engineer
18 110 (2.55%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 355 (8.23%) React
2 283 (6.56%) Kafka
3 277 (6.42%) REST
4 231 (5.36%) Pandas
5 202 (4.68%) Node.js
6 190 (4.41%) FastAPI
7 184 (4.27%) NumPy
8 183 (4.24%) RESTful
9 165 (3.83%) AngularJS
10 155 (3.59%) PySpark
11 129 (2.99%) HTML
12 128 (2.97%) PyTorch
13 115 (2.67%) TensorFlow
14 111 (2.57%) .NET
14 111 (2.57%) CSS
15 105 (2.43%) GraphQL
16 104 (2.41%) Spring
17 103 (2.39%) Django
18 101 (2.34%) Elastic Stack
19 97 (2.25%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 281 (6.52%) Cloud Native
2 199 (4.61%) Fixed Income
3 173 (4.01%) Equities
4 172 (3.99%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 169 (3.92%) Distributed Systems
6 161 (3.73%) Algorithms
7 151 (3.50%) Hedge funds
8 142 (3.29%) Derivative
9 134 (3.11%) Data Protection Act
10 118 (2.74%) Data Structures
11 115 (2.67%) Onboarding
12 88 (2.04%) Management Information System
13 79 (1.83%) Product Ownership
14 71 (1.65%) Data Centre
15 64 (1.48%) Enterprise Software
15 64 (1.48%) Public Cloud
16 61 (1.41%) AI Agents
17 60 (1.39%) Legacy Systems
18 57 (1.32%) Virtual Team
19 56 (1.30%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 772 (17.90%) Linux
2 310 (7.19%) Windows
3 239 (5.54%) Unix
4 82 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.48%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.93%) Ubuntu
7 39 (0.90%) Android
8 36 (0.83%) CentOS
9 31 (0.72%) VMS
10 26 (0.60%) Amazon Linux
10 26 (0.60%) Apple iOS
11 25 (0.58%) Mac OS
12 19 (0.44%) Solaris
13 9 (0.21%) Debian
14 8 (0.19%) SUSE
15 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.12%) AIX
17 4 (0.093%) Windows Server 2019
17 4 (0.093%) zOS
18 3 (0.070%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,295 (30.03%) CI/CD
2 1,115 (25.85%) Agile
3 1,083 (25.11%) DevOps
4 883 (20.47%) Problem-Solving
5 639 (14.82%) Infrastructure as Code
6 628 (14.56%) Artificial Intelligence
7 562 (13.03%) Software Engineering
8 558 (12.94%) Analytics
9 542 (12.57%) Machine Learning
10 467 (10.83%) Data Pipeline
11 462 (10.71%) Containerisation
12 438 (10.16%) Data Science
13 412 (9.55%) ETL
14 411 (9.53%) Data Modelling
15 372 (8.63%) Data Engineering
16 358 (8.30%) Test Automation
17 349 (8.09%) Business Intelligence
18 347 (8.05%) Computer Science
19 310 (7.19%) Migration
20 305 (7.07%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 1,372 (31.81%) SQL
2 839 (19.45%) Java
3 560 (12.98%) Bash
4 557 (12.91%) JavaScript
5 486 (11.27%) PowerShell
6 347 (8.05%) TypeScript
7 260 (6.03%) C#
8 253 (5.87%) C++
9 240 (5.56%) Go
10 217 (5.03%) Shell Script
11 178 (4.13%) Perl
12 170 (3.94%) R
13 106 (2.46%) Scala
14 75 (1.74%) C
15 60 (1.39%) Groovy
15 60 (1.39%) Ruby
16 54 (1.25%) PHP
17 46 (1.07%) VBA
18 41 (0.95%) Rust
19 38 (0.88%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 662 (15.35%) Security Cleared
2 529 (12.27%) SC Cleared
3 423 (9.81%) Degree
4 210 (4.87%) Computer Science Degree
5 136 (3.15%) AWS Certification
6 116 (2.69%) Master's Degree
7 102 (2.36%) DV Cleared
8 90 (2.09%) Cisco Certification
9 73 (1.69%) CISSP
10 59 (1.37%) BPSS Clearance
11 56 (1.30%) CCNP
12 51 (1.18%) PhD
13 49 (1.14%) Azure Certification
14 39 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 34 (0.79%) CCIE
16 32 (0.74%) GIAC
17 31 (0.72%) CEH
18 29 (0.67%) OSCP
19 24 (0.56%) GCIH
20 23 (0.53%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 265 (6.14%) Data Quality
2 177 (4.10%) QA
3 124 (2.88%) GDPR
4 76 (1.76%) NIST
5 69 (1.60%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 64 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 52 (1.21%) PCI DSS
8 49 (1.14%) HIPAA
9 23 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 23 (0.53%) SOC 2
10 21 (0.49%) NCSC
11 20 (0.46%) SLA
12 13 (0.30%) Disclosure Scotland
13 11 (0.26%) Cyber Essentials
13 11 (0.26%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
14 8 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
14 8 (0.19%) EU AI Act
14 8 (0.19%) WCAG
15 7 (0.16%) Basel III
16 5 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
System Software
1 673 (15.60%) Docker
2 111 (2.57%) Active Directory
3 109 (2.53%) VMware Infrastructure
4 41 (0.95%) Virtual Machines
5 30 (0.70%) Firmware
6 26 (0.60%) VMware NSX
7 22 (0.51%) DFS Replication
8 21 (0.49%) vSphere
9 19 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 16 (0.37%) Squid
11 14 (0.32%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.30%) HDFS
12 13 (0.30%) KVM
13 12 (0.28%) Dovecot
13 12 (0.28%) Hyper-V
13 12 (0.28%) Postfix
14 9 (0.21%) zsh
15 7 (0.16%) Veritas Cluster Server
16 6 (0.14%) Apache ZooKeeper
17 5 (0.12%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 841 (19.50%) Kubernetes
2 819 (18.99%) Terraform
3 588 (13.63%) Ansible
4 247 (5.73%) Grafana
5 215 (4.98%) Prometheus
6 91 (2.11%) Puppet
7 60 (1.39%) Progress Chef
8 45 (1.04%) Argo
8 45 (1.04%) Kibana
9 32 (0.74%) Istio
10 31 (0.72%) Nessus
11 29 (0.67%) vRealize
12 27 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
13 24 (0.56%) logstash
13 24 (0.56%) NetBackup
14 21 (0.49%) Nmap
15 20 (0.46%) ITRS Geneos
15 20 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
15 20 (0.46%) vCenter Server
16 18 (0.42%) QRadar
Vendors
1 435 (10.09%) Microsoft
2 283 (6.56%) Databricks
3 232 (5.38%) Google
4 216 (5.01%) Splunk
5 212 (4.92%) Oracle
6 176 (4.08%) VMware
7 131 (3.04%) ServiceNow
8 123 (2.85%) Cisco
9 96 (2.23%) Red Hat
10 81 (1.88%) SAP
11 79 (1.83%) Palo Alto
12 72 (1.67%) F5
13 54 (1.25%) OpenAI
14 52 (1.21%) IBM
15 48 (1.11%) Sybase
16 45 (1.04%) Arista
17 44 (1.02%) CheckPoint
18 42 (0.97%) Juniper
19 39 (0.90%) Dynatrace
20 36 (0.83%) CrowdStrike