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

6 months to
21 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,064 3,981 4,153
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.36% 12.95% 9.30%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.27% 38.51% 31.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,422 2,658 2,927
10th Percentile £358 £379 £400
25th Percentile £414 £459 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £629 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £503 £525
% change year-on-year -2.99% -4.29% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 107 55 112
10th Percentile £29.15 £20.12 £25.57
25th Percentile £41.25 £23.80 £42.50
Median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.67% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £69.38 £65.50 £70.16
90th Percentile £79.70 £79.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +13.80% -28.00% -3.85%

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 12,270 10,337 13,142
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.96% 33.63% 29.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,161 6,650 9,281
10th Percentile £352 £354 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £532
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.32% -5.42%
75th Percentile £608 £638 £650
90th Percentile £714 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £483 £500
% change year-on-year -0.62% -3.40% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 470 233 504
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.40 £36.25
25th Percentile £52.69 £36.75 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.07
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.05% -7.58%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.97% +1.99% -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 21 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 21 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 21 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 4,228 £518 -10.00% 2,474
London 0 2,414 £550 -8.33% 1,053
UK excluding London -1 1,955 £488 -2.99% 2,010
Work from Home -1 1,548 £525 -4.55% 1,000
North of England +11 654 £475 -5.00% 450
South East -3 413 £492 -10.55% 636
Yorkshire +7 349 £487 -2.60% 150
Scotland +3 296 £449 -5.47% 170
Midlands +1 277 £500 +5.04% 245
North West +10 263 £460 -4.27% 229
West Midlands -1 232 £500 - 116
South West -6 193 £550 -8.33% 251
East of England +1 132 £525 +5.00% 210
North East 0 47 £475 -7.32% 72
East Midlands -17 44 £441 +10.85% 128
Wales -13 32 £473 -7.80% 65
Northern Ireland +3 28 £600 +14.29% 25

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
1 245 (4.84%) Apache Spark
2 193 (3.81%) Apache Airflow
3 148 (2.92%) Apache
3 148 (2.92%) Confluence
4 69 (1.36%) SAS
5 61 (1.20%) SharePoint
6 29 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
6 29 (0.57%) OpenStack
7 28 (0.55%) nginx
8 23 (0.45%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
10 20 (0.39%) Appian
11 14 (0.28%) ArcGIS
12 8 (0.16%) Camunda
13 6 (0.12%) CMS
14 5 (0.099%) Apache Superset
14 5 (0.099%) Oracle Application Server
14 5 (0.099%) Tomcat
15 4 (0.079%) Apache Pig
15 4 (0.079%) Traefik
Applications
1 126 (2.49%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 13 (0.26%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 4 (0.079%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 3 (0.059%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.039%) Maya
10 2 (0.039%) NUKE
11 1 (0.020%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.020%) Trello
Business Applications
1 18 (0.36%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.24%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
5 4 (0.079%) Bloomberg AIM
6 3 (0.059%) Actimize
6 3 (0.059%) IntelliMatch
6 3 (0.059%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.039%) Shopify
8 1 (0.020%) Cerner Millennium
8 1 (0.020%) ION MarketView
8 1 (0.020%) Loan IQ
8 1 (0.020%) NetSuite
8 1 (0.020%) Salesforce CRM
8 1 (0.020%) SAP BPC
8 1 (0.020%) SAP ERP
8 1 (0.020%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,991 (39.32%) AWS
2 1,726 (34.08%) Azure
3 799 (15.78%) GCP
4 651 (12.86%) GitHub
5 544 (10.74%) Serverless
6 474 (9.36%) Power Platform
7 380 (7.50%) Amazon S3
8 358 (7.07%) AWS Lambda
9 355 (7.01%) Azure DevOps
10 332 (6.56%) GitHub Actions
11 257 (5.08%) AWS CloudFormation
12 250 (4.94%) Snowflake
13 249 (4.92%) Azure Data Factory
14 190 (3.75%) Amazon EKS
15 180 (3.55%) Amazon ECS
16 174 (3.44%) Amazon EC2
17 166 (3.28%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 166 (3.28%) OpenShift
18 156 (3.08%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 142 (2.80%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 221 (4.36%) Firewall
2 147 (2.90%) DNS
3 113 (2.23%) Network Security
3 113 (2.23%) TCP/IP
4 79 (1.56%) VPN
5 66 (1.30%) BGP
6 63 (1.24%) HTTP
7 51 (1.01%) WAN
8 50 (0.99%) SSL
9 41 (0.81%) Wireshark
10 38 (0.75%) OSPF
11 37 (0.73%) LAN
11 37 (0.73%) MPLS
12 31 (0.61%) DHCP
13 29 (0.57%) SAN
13 29 (0.57%) Wireless
14 28 (0.55%) VLAN
15 26 (0.51%) SD-WAN
16 23 (0.45%) BIG-IP
16 23 (0.45%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 392 (7.74%) Power BI
2 383 (7.56%) PostgreSQL
3 312 (6.16%) Data Warehouse
4 239 (4.72%) Data Lake
4 239 (4.72%) NoSQL
5 203 (4.01%) Relational Database
6 183 (3.61%) SQL Server
7 161 (3.18%) Big Data
8 155 (3.06%) Tableau
9 140 (2.76%) Amazon RDS
10 127 (2.51%) Metadata
11 122 (2.41%) BigQuery
12 120 (2.37%) MySQL
13 106 (2.09%) Delta Lake
14 103 (2.03%) Amazon Redshift
15 98 (1.94%) Amazon Athena
16 95 (1.88%) MongoDB
17 85 (1.68%) Azure SQL Database
18 84 (1.66%) Hadoop
19 76 (1.50%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 620 (12.24%) Git
2 542 (10.70%) Jenkins
3 430 (8.49%) GitLab
4 285 (5.63%) JIRA
5 95 (1.88%) MLflow
6 82 (1.62%) Selenium
7 47 (0.93%) Postman
8 45 (0.89%) Cucumber
9 43 (0.85%) Bitbucket
10 42 (0.83%) Sonatype Nexus
11 36 (0.71%) JUnit
12 35 (0.69%) JMeter
13 28 (0.55%) Liquibase
13 28 (0.55%) SpecFlow
14 26 (0.51%) Visual Studio
15 25 (0.49%) Cypress.io
15 25 (0.49%) Maven
16 24 (0.47%) CircleCI
16 24 (0.47%) SonarQube
17 22 (0.43%) Artifactory
General
1 1,313 (25.93%) Social Skills
2 1,004 (19.83%) Finance
3 702 (13.86%) Analytical Skills
4 473 (9.34%) Public Sector
5 420 (8.29%) Banking
6 166 (3.28%) Front Office
7 132 (2.61%) Documentation Skills
8 109 (2.15%) Investment Banking
9 68 (1.34%) Financial Institution
9 68 (1.34%) Retail
10 67 (1.32%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 65 (1.28%) Marketing
12 61 (1.20%) Pharmaceutical
13 53 (1.05%) Telecoms
14 48 (0.95%) Legal
15 44 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
15 44 (0.87%) Manufacturing
16 43 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
17 32 (0.63%) Military
18 24 (0.47%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 915 (18.07%) Developer
2 710 (14.02%) Data Engineer
3 709 (14.00%) Senior
4 396 (7.82%) Python Developer
5 325 (6.42%) Architect
6 312 (6.16%) DevOps Engineer
7 305 (6.02%) Lead
8 299 (5.90%) Analyst
9 291 (5.75%) Python Engineer
10 266 (5.25%) AWS Engineer
11 243 (4.80%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 240 (4.74%) Software Engineer
13 203 (4.01%) Data Scientist
14 176 (3.48%) Platform Engineer
15 157 (3.10%) Senior Developer
16 151 (2.98%) Data Analyst
17 143 (2.82%) Azure Engineer
18 137 (2.71%) Senior Data Engineer
19 132 (2.61%) Cloud Engineer
19 132 (2.61%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 434 (8.57%) REST
2 349 (6.89%) React
3 322 (6.36%) Kafka
4 320 (6.32%) PySpark
5 272 (5.37%) Node.js
6 230 (4.54%) Pandas
7 223 (4.40%) PyTorch
8 219 (4.32%) FastAPI
9 210 (4.15%) RESTful
10 206 (4.07%) .NET
11 179 (3.53%) TensorFlow
12 169 (3.34%) NumPy
13 143 (2.82%) scikit-learn
14 137 (2.71%) AngularJS
15 132 (2.61%) LangChain
16 130 (2.57%) Flask
17 118 (2.33%) pytest
18 116 (2.29%) JSON
19 112 (2.21%) Django
20 107 (2.11%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 475 (9.38%) Cloud Native
2 205 (4.05%) Distributed Systems
3 204 (4.03%) Algorithms
4 138 (2.73%) Product Ownership
5 125 (2.47%) Data Protection Act
6 119 (2.35%) Equities
7 111 (2.19%) Data Structures
8 106 (2.09%) Onboarding
9 99 (1.95%) AI Agents
10 95 (1.88%) Enterprise Software
11 94 (1.86%) Derivative
11 94 (1.86%) Fixed Income
12 88 (1.74%) Hybrid Cloud
12 88 (1.74%) Public Cloud
12 88 (1.74%) Security Posture
13 87 (1.72%) Legacy Systems
14 85 (1.68%) Management Information System
15 77 (1.52%) Data Centre
16 66 (1.30%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
17 60 (1.18%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 716 (14.14%) Linux
2 325 (6.42%) Windows
3 205 (4.05%) Unix
4 96 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.24%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.75%) Android
6 38 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.69%) VMS
8 26 (0.51%) CentOS
9 25 (0.49%) Mac OS
9 25 (0.49%) Solaris
10 21 (0.41%) Apple iOS
11 10 (0.20%) Amazon Linux
11 10 (0.20%) Windows 7
12 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
13 5 (0.099%) Debian
13 5 (0.099%) Embedded Linux
14 4 (0.079%) Windows 10
14 4 (0.079%) Windows Server 2008
14 4 (0.079%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,831 (36.16%) CI/CD
2 1,419 (28.02%) DevOps
3 1,211 (23.91%) Agile
4 1,079 (21.31%) Problem-Solving
5 1,076 (21.25%) AI
6 960 (18.96%) Analytics
7 910 (17.97%) Infrastructure as Code
8 837 (16.53%) Machine Learning
9 805 (15.90%) Data Pipeline
10 765 (15.11%) Containerisation
11 671 (13.25%) Data Engineering
12 660 (13.03%) ETL
13 631 (12.46%) Data Modelling
14 616 (12.16%) Data Science
15 565 (11.16%) Test Automation
16 564 (11.14%) Software Engineering
17 468 (9.24%) Observability
18 459 (9.06%) Business Intelligence
19 435 (8.59%) LLM
20 367 (7.25%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,589 (31.38%) SQL
2 733 (14.47%) Java
3 660 (13.03%) PowerShell
4 605 (11.95%) Bash
5 521 (10.29%) JavaScript
6 328 (6.48%) TypeScript
7 326 (6.44%) C#
8 235 (4.64%) Go
9 187 (3.69%) C++
10 156 (3.08%) R
11 126 (2.49%) Shell Script
12 124 (2.45%) Perl
13 112 (2.21%) Scala
14 92 (1.82%) Ruby
15 63 (1.24%) Bicep
16 62 (1.22%) Kusto Query Language
17 52 (1.03%) VBA
18 50 (0.99%) C
19 43 (0.85%) T-SQL
20 38 (0.75%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,140 (22.51%) Security Cleared
2 914 (18.05%) SC Cleared
3 462 (9.12%) Degree
4 224 (4.42%) Computer Science Degree
5 141 (2.78%) DV Cleared
6 138 (2.73%) AWS Certification
7 129 (2.55%) Master's Degree
8 113 (2.23%) BPSS Clearance
9 96 (1.90%) Azure Certification
10 90 (1.78%) CISSP
11 71 (1.40%) Cisco Certification
12 60 (1.18%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 53 (1.05%) CCNP
14 46 (0.91%) PhD
15 43 (0.85%) CISM
16 39 (0.77%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.71%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.63%) CEH
19 31 (0.61%) Microsoft Certified Professional
20 30 (0.59%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 451 (8.91%) Data Quality
2 198 (3.91%) QA
3 174 (3.44%) GDPR
4 105 (2.07%) NIST
5 103 (2.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 75 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 31 (0.61%) PCI DSS
8 29 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 28 (0.55%) HIPAA
9 28 (0.55%) SLA
10 23 (0.45%) NCSC
11 17 (0.34%) SOC 2
12 14 (0.28%) Actionable Recommendations
13 13 (0.26%) EU AI Act
14 12 (0.24%) WCAG
15 11 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.20%) MiFID
16 10 (0.20%) PMO
16 10 (0.20%) PSD2
17 9 (0.18%) EMIR
System Software
1 963 (19.02%) Docker
2 177 (3.50%) Active Directory
3 117 (2.31%) VMware Infrastructure
4 52 (1.03%) Virtual Machines
5 51 (1.01%) VMware NSX
6 50 (0.99%) vSphere
7 30 (0.59%) Hyper-V
8 21 (0.41%) Firmware
9 18 (0.36%) KVM
10 15 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
11 12 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 11 (0.22%) HDFS
13 10 (0.20%) Lustre
14 9 (0.18%) GPFS
14 9 (0.18%) Squid
15 8 (0.16%) Postfix
15 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
16 6 (0.12%) DFS Replication
16 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
17 5 (0.099%) NetIQ eDirectory
Systems Management
1 1,134 (22.39%) Terraform
2 1,068 (21.09%) Kubernetes
3 546 (10.78%) Ansible
4 352 (6.95%) Grafana
5 311 (6.14%) Prometheus
6 92 (1.82%) Argo
7 71 (1.40%) Puppet
8 53 (1.05%) vRealize
9 50 (0.99%) Kibana
10 44 (0.87%) Istio
11 40 (0.79%) Nessus
12 32 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
13 29 (0.57%) vCenter Server
14 27 (0.53%) Progress Chef
15 26 (0.51%) Control-M
16 25 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
17 24 (0.47%) NetBackup
18 22 (0.43%) IBM Guardium
19 18 (0.36%) ITRS Geneos
19 18 (0.36%) Nmap
Vendors
1 618 (12.20%) Microsoft
2 514 (10.15%) Databricks
3 311 (6.14%) Google
4 238 (4.70%) Splunk
5 224 (4.42%) VMware
6 222 (4.38%) Oracle
7 146 (2.88%) Red Hat
8 118 (2.33%) OpenAI
9 116 (2.29%) Cisco
10 111 (2.19%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.66%) CyberArk
12 78 (1.54%) Foundry
13 70 (1.38%) F5
13 70 (1.38%) Palo Alto
14 66 (1.30%) BeyondTrust
15 55 (1.09%) Informatica
16 46 (0.91%) IBM
17 45 (0.89%) SAP
18 40 (0.79%) Atlassian
19 39 (0.77%) Dynatrace