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

6 months to
13 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 9
Rank change year-on-year -4 -1 +3
Contract jobs citing Python 5,712 4,425 4,159
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.40% 13.44% 11.09%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.59% 41.14% 34.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,711 2,874 2,816
10th Percentile £378 £358 £363
25th Percentile £440 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -2.25%
75th Percentile £650 £638 £700
90th Percentile £750 £762 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 86 95
10th Percentile £35.55 £28.25 £20.12
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.06 £34.38
Median hourly rate £62.50 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +25.00% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £77.50 £61.44 £70.00
90th Percentile £91.27 £81.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +26.27% -25.93% +4.85%

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 14,429 10,756 12,002
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.27% 32.66% 32.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,366 7,069 7,849
10th Percentile £363 £345 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.91% -3.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £734 £774
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 559 298 321
10th Percentile £21.62 £29.00 £25.99
25th Percentile £44.75 £41.25 £41.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.19 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £77.88 £75.00
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 13 October 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 13 October 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 13 October 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 4,845 £550 +4.76% 7,151
London -4 2,884 £575 - 4,705
UK excluding London -8 2,180 £500 - 2,868
Work from Home -6 1,591 £530 -1.49% 2,914
North of England -1 752 £500 +5.26% 737
South East -9 442 £550 +10.00% 586
Yorkshire -3 376 £500 - 204
Scotland -1 325 £467 -6.60% 351
North West -3 298 £525 +20.34% 415
South West -1 274 £550 - 341
Midlands -20 237 £477 -4.60% 296
West Midlands -21 203 £488 -3.18% 190
East of England -18 142 £478 -9.05% 359
North East -3 87 £425 -14.14% 121
East Midlands -16 34 £425 +3.66% 106
Wales -12 29 £530 +19.10% 80
Northern Ireland +1 19 £375 -36.17% 142

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
1 295 (5.16%) Apache Airflow
2 284 (4.97%) Apache Spark
3 237 (4.15%) Apache
4 165 (2.89%) Confluence
5 60 (1.05%) SharePoint
6 56 (0.98%) Jupyter
7 52 (0.91%) SAS
8 31 (0.54%) OpenStack
9 29 (0.51%) nginx
10 23 (0.40%) Palantir Foundry
11 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
11 22 (0.39%) IIS
12 10 (0.18%) CMS
12 10 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
15 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.088%) Camunda
15 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
16 4 (0.070%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 104 (1.82%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.61%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 17 (0.30%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 15 (0.26%) CPLEX
6 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
7 10 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
8 3 (0.053%) Revit
9 2 (0.035%) LaTeX
9 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
9 2 (0.035%) Simulink
9 2 (0.035%) SPSS
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.018%) AutoCAD
10 1 (0.018%) Civil 3D
10 1 (0.018%) Houdini
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
10 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.40%) Remedy ITSM
2 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.28%) Aladdin
4 11 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.11%) Front Arena
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.070%) Cloudability
9 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.070%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Actimize
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) SAP IBP
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.035%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 2,090 (36.59%) AWS
2 1,947 (34.09%) Azure
3 924 (16.18%) GCP
4 763 (13.36%) GitHub
5 479 (8.39%) Serverless
6 472 (8.26%) Power Platform
7 448 (7.84%) GitHub Actions
8 443 (7.76%) Azure DevOps
9 392 (6.86%) Amazon S3
10 352 (6.16%) Snowflake
11 348 (6.09%) AWS Lambda
12 251 (4.39%) dbt
13 215 (3.76%) Azure Data Factory
14 210 (3.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 201 (3.52%) Amazon EKS
16 191 (3.34%) Entra ID
17 189 (3.31%) AWS CloudFormation
18 148 (2.59%) Amazon EC2
19 138 (2.42%) SaaS
20 132 (2.31%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 287 (5.02%) Firewall
2 218 (3.82%) DNS
3 173 (3.03%) Network Security
4 154 (2.70%) TCP/IP
5 134 (2.35%) VPN
6 132 (2.31%) BGP
7 115 (2.01%) WAN
8 83 (1.45%) DHCP
9 81 (1.42%) OSPF
10 77 (1.35%) SD-WAN
11 63 (1.10%) BIG-IP
12 59 (1.03%) SSL
12 59 (1.03%) VLAN
13 55 (0.96%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 52 (0.91%) HTTP
15 50 (0.88%) VXLAN
16 47 (0.82%) Broadband
16 47 (0.82%) Ethernet VPN
17 43 (0.75%) Internet
17 43 (0.75%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 419 (7.34%) Power BI
2 331 (5.79%) Data Warehouse
3 318 (5.57%) PostgreSQL
4 234 (4.10%) Metadata
5 200 (3.50%) Data Lake
6 198 (3.47%) Relational Database
7 181 (3.17%) SQL Server
8 178 (3.12%) BigQuery
9 159 (2.78%) Tableau
10 153 (2.68%) NoSQL
11 140 (2.45%) Amazon RDS
12 135 (2.36%) Big Data
13 133 (2.33%) Amazon Redshift
14 128 (2.24%) MongoDB
15 125 (2.19%) Delta Lake
16 118 (2.07%) Amazon Athena
17 106 (1.86%) DynamoDB
18 100 (1.75%) MySQL
19 74 (1.30%) Redis
20 65 (1.14%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 871 (15.25%) Git
2 552 (9.66%) Jenkins
3 505 (8.84%) GitLab
4 330 (5.78%) JIRA
5 123 (2.15%) Selenium
6 74 (1.30%) Postman
7 64 (1.12%) Claude Code
8 60 (1.05%) JMeter
9 55 (0.96%) MLflow
9 55 (0.96%) SonarQube
10 48 (0.84%) Bitbucket
11 46 (0.81%) Cucumber
12 39 (0.68%) REST Assured
13 37 (0.65%) Sonatype Nexus
14 35 (0.61%) Artifactory
14 35 (0.61%) Cypress.io
14 35 (0.61%) Maven
15 31 (0.54%) LoadRunner
16 30 (0.53%) Gatling
17 26 (0.46%) JUnit
General
1 1,345 (23.55%) Social Skills
2 1,337 (23.41%) Finance
3 853 (14.93%) Analytical Skills
4 555 (9.72%) Banking
5 547 (9.58%) Public Sector
6 171 (2.99%) Front Office
7 157 (2.75%) Investment Banking
8 118 (2.07%) Retail
9 110 (1.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 93 (1.63%) Documentation Skills
11 91 (1.59%) Marketing
12 83 (1.45%) Telecoms
13 63 (1.10%) Military
14 55 (0.96%) Law
15 53 (0.93%) Aerospace
16 51 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
17 50 (0.88%) Financial Institution
18 48 (0.84%) Legal
19 41 (0.72%) Publishing
20 36 (0.63%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 1,017 (17.80%) Senior
2 897 (15.70%) Developer
3 848 (14.85%) Data Engineer
4 513 (8.98%) Lead
5 476 (8.33%) Python Developer
6 423 (7.41%) Python Engineer
7 381 (6.67%) DevOps Engineer
8 315 (5.51%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 293 (5.13%) Analyst
10 277 (4.85%) Software Engineer
11 235 (4.11%) Architect
12 223 (3.90%) AWS Engineer
13 197 (3.45%) Cloud Engineer
14 193 (3.38%) Azure Engineer
15 192 (3.36%) Senior Data Engineer
16 191 (3.34%) Platform Engineer
17 182 (3.19%) Senior Developer
18 177 (3.10%) Data Scientist
19 154 (2.70%) Data Analyst
20 147 (2.57%) Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,435 (25.12%) Terraform
2 565 (9.89%) REST
3 381 (6.67%) Kafka
4 376 (6.58%) PySpark
5 322 (5.64%) React
6 240 (4.20%) .NET
7 225 (3.94%) FastAPI
8 216 (3.78%) JSON
9 215 (3.76%) Django
10 187 (3.27%) RESTful
11 167 (2.92%) pytest
12 159 (2.78%) LangChain
13 144 (2.52%) Node.js
14 140 (2.45%) Pandas
15 134 (2.35%) OAuth
16 128 (2.24%) Flask
17 115 (2.01%) LangGraph
18 110 (1.93%) YAML
19 106 (1.86%) HTML
20 102 (1.79%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 829 (14.51%) Cloud Native
2 308 (5.39%) AI Agents
3 280 (4.90%) Distributed Systems
4 265 (4.64%) Onboarding
5 166 (2.91%) Data Centre
6 155 (2.71%) Data Structures
7 153 (2.68%) Product Ownership
8 136 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
9 120 (2.10%) Algorithms
10 116 (2.03%) Enterprise Software
11 114 (2.00%) Hybrid Cloud
12 104 (1.82%) Data Protection Act
12 104 (1.82%) Management Information System
13 99 (1.73%) Derivative
13 99 (1.73%) Security Posture
14 90 (1.58%) Public Cloud
15 85 (1.49%) PKI
16 78 (1.37%) Equities
17 69 (1.21%) Replication
18 68 (1.19%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 792 (13.87%) Linux
2 340 (5.95%) Windows
3 238 (4.17%) Unix
4 158 (2.77%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 88 (1.54%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.63%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 16 (0.28%) Android
11 14 (0.25%) AIX
12 11 (0.19%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.18%) macOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) zOS
15 6 (0.11%) FreeRTOS
16 5 (0.088%) Rocky
17 4 (0.070%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,468 (43.21%) CI/CD
2 1,697 (29.71%) DevOps
3 1,628 (28.50%) AI
4 1,346 (23.56%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,297 (22.71%) Agile
6 1,094 (19.15%) Analytics
7 1,006 (17.61%) Data Pipeline
8 970 (16.98%) Software Engineering
9 887 (15.53%) Problem-Solving
10 881 (15.42%) Data Engineering
11 839 (14.69%) Machine Learning
12 792 (13.87%) Containerisation
13 783 (13.71%) Data Modelling
14 779 (13.64%) Observability
15 745 (13.04%) Test Automation
16 713 (12.48%) Validation
17 692 (12.11%) ETL
18 688 (12.04%) Continuous Improvement
19 620 (10.85%) Platform Engineering
20 596 (10.43%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,865 (32.65%) SQL
2 799 (13.99%) Bash
3 779 (13.64%) Java
4 763 (13.36%) PowerShell
5 454 (7.95%) JavaScript
6 354 (6.20%) TypeScript
7 305 (5.34%) C#
8 220 (3.85%) Go
9 161 (2.82%) Shell Script
10 142 (2.49%) Bicep
11 133 (2.33%) R
12 124 (2.17%) C++
13 120 (2.10%) Scala
14 108 (1.89%) Perl
15 62 (1.09%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 60 (1.05%) Groovy
17 49 (0.86%) T-SQL
18 48 (0.84%) Rust
19 47 (0.82%) PL/SQL
20 45 (0.79%) C
Qualifications
1 1,410 (24.68%) Security Cleared
2 1,132 (19.82%) SC Cleared
3 395 (6.92%) Degree
4 259 (4.53%) DV Cleared
5 163 (2.85%) AWS Certification
6 151 (2.64%) Azure Certification
7 144 (2.52%) Computer Science Degree
8 132 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
9 97 (1.70%) CISSP
10 75 (1.31%) Cisco Certification
11 72 (1.26%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.84%) Microsoft Certification
13 39 (0.68%) ISTQB
14 35 (0.61%) CCNP
15 33 (0.58%) PhD
16 31 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 31 (0.54%) CISM
17 30 (0.53%) CCIE
17 30 (0.53%) Microsoft Certified Professional
18 29 (0.51%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 674 (11.80%) Data Quality
2 330 (5.78%) QA
3 105 (1.84%) NIST
4 102 (1.79%) GDPR
5 90 (1.58%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 84 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 43 (0.75%) SLA
8 37 (0.65%) Actionable Recommendations
9 31 (0.54%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) SOC 2
11 25 (0.44%) PCI DSS
12 24 (0.42%) WCAG
13 16 (0.28%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 15 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
15 13 (0.23%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) GRC
17 7 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 1,017 (17.80%) Docker
2 180 (3.15%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.31%) VMware Infrastructure
4 67 (1.17%) Virtual Machines
5 47 (0.82%) Hyper-V
6 34 (0.60%) vSphere
7 31 (0.54%) VMware NSX
8 29 (0.51%) NFS
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) Firmware
11 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 10 (0.18%) Virtual Servers
15 9 (0.16%) KVM
16 8 (0.14%) Ceph
16 8 (0.14%) zsh
17 7 (0.12%) HDFS
18 6 (0.11%) Postfix
19 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,227 (21.48%) Kubernetes
2 664 (11.62%) Ansible
3 335 (5.86%) Grafana
4 244 (4.27%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.44%) Puppet
6 74 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 69 (1.21%) Argo
8 52 (0.91%) Single Sign-On
9 41 (0.72%) Kibana
10 35 (0.61%) Istio
11 27 (0.47%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.40%) Packer
14 20 (0.35%) FortiGate
15 18 (0.32%) Kustomize
16 17 (0.30%) Podman
16 17 (0.30%) QRadar
16 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.26%) ITRS Geneos
17 15 (0.26%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 786 (13.76%) Microsoft
2 599 (10.49%) Databricks
3 420 (7.35%) Google
4 251 (4.39%) Oracle
5 213 (3.73%) Splunk
6 176 (3.08%) OpenAI
7 167 (2.92%) VMware
8 147 (2.57%) ServiceNow
9 136 (2.38%) Cisco
10 101 (1.77%) Dynatrace
11 100 (1.75%) Red Hat
12 94 (1.65%) Foundry
13 93 (1.63%) F5
13 93 (1.63%) IBM
14 91 (1.59%) Palo Alto
15 71 (1.24%) Informatica
16 67 (1.17%) Fortinet
17 66 (1.16%) SAP
18 64 (1.12%) CyberArk
19 56 (0.98%) Salesforce