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

6 months to
28 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,325 3,791 4,059
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.90% 13.23% 9.50%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.52% 38.79% 31.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,520 2,651 2,923
10th Percentile £363 £381 £388
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £521 £545 £551
Median % change year-on-year -4.40% -1.00% -8.25%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -2.00% -2.15% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 133 47 105
10th Percentile £28.80 £25.25 £20.96
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.00 £40.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.00% -33.33% -7.25%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £69.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.00 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +15.56% -30.77% +13.04%

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 13,141 9,774 12,842
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.91% 34.12% 30.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,582 6,655 9,153
10th Percentile £358 £358 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £518 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.38% -1.43% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £630 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.47% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 571 215 505
10th Percentile £36.25 £27.00 £32.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.33 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -8.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.37 £62.50
% change year-on-year +2.57% +1.40% -

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 28 May 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 28 May 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 28 May 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 -3 4,432 £525 -4.55% 2,407
London -3 2,545 £550 -5.17% 1,225
UK excluding London -1 2,059 £490 -2.00% 1,608
Work from Home -1 1,499 £525 -4.55% 983
North of England +9 736 £482 -1.13% 398
Yorkshire +1 415 £487 -2.55% 106
South East -7 395 £520 +2.97% 513
Scotland +2 302 £438 -8.28% 88
North West +2 254 £492 +3.58% 219
South West +1 251 £500 -9.09% 192
Midlands -15 238 £485 +7.72% 177
West Midlands -11 183 £482 +7.03% 83
East of England -9 129 £500 - 167
North East +6 77 £475 +5.56% 76
East Midlands -11 54 £495 +13.53% 93
Northern Ireland +17 26 £463 -21.28% 38
Wales -14 25 £450 -10.00% 53

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
1 276 (5.18%) Apache Spark
2 224 (4.21%) Apache Airflow
3 179 (3.36%) Apache
4 145 (2.72%) Confluence
5 46 (0.86%) SAS
5 46 (0.86%) SharePoint
6 40 (0.75%) Jupyter
7 23 (0.43%) nginx
8 21 (0.39%) OpenStack
9 16 (0.30%) ArcGIS
9 16 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
9 16 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
10 13 (0.24%) IIS
11 11 (0.21%) Appian
12 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
12 8 (0.15%) Camunda
12 8 (0.15%) Tomcat
13 7 (0.13%) CICS
13 7 (0.13%) CMS
14 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 122 (2.29%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.53%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 22 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
5 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.075%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.056%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.019%) SPSS
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
9 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.45%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.38%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.094%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.056%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.056%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.056%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.056%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.038%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Orchestrade
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,984 (37.26%) AWS
2 1,775 (33.33%) Azure
3 759 (14.25%) GCP
4 646 (12.13%) GitHub
5 522 (9.80%) Power Platform
6 453 (8.51%) Serverless
7 380 (7.14%) Azure DevOps
8 363 (6.82%) Amazon S3
9 342 (6.42%) GitHub Actions
10 323 (6.07%) AWS Lambda
11 264 (4.96%) Azure Data Factory
12 252 (4.73%) Snowflake
13 177 (3.32%) AWS CloudFormation
14 171 (3.21%) dbt
14 171 (3.21%) OpenShift
15 167 (3.14%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 152 (2.85%) Amazon EKS
17 137 (2.57%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 122 (2.29%) Amazon EC2
19 115 (2.16%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 201 (3.77%) Firewall
2 151 (2.84%) DNS
3 116 (2.18%) Network Security
4 93 (1.75%) WAN
5 89 (1.67%) BGP
5 89 (1.67%) TCP/IP
6 75 (1.41%) VPN
7 63 (1.18%) HTTP
8 61 (1.15%) OSPF
9 56 (1.05%) SAN
10 54 (1.01%) BIG-IP
11 46 (0.86%) SSL
12 45 (0.85%) SD-WAN
12 45 (0.85%) VXLAN
13 37 (0.69%) VLAN
14 36 (0.68%) LAN
15 35 (0.66%) DHCP
15 35 (0.66%) SNMP
16 34 (0.64%) Ethernet VPN
16 34 (0.64%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 455 (8.54%) Power BI
2 337 (6.33%) PostgreSQL
3 277 (5.20%) Data Warehouse
4 260 (4.88%) SQL Server
5 233 (4.38%) Data Lake
6 202 (3.79%) Tableau
7 184 (3.46%) Relational Database
8 174 (3.27%) NoSQL
9 161 (3.02%) Metadata
10 159 (2.99%) Big Data
11 136 (2.55%) BigQuery
12 133 (2.50%) Delta Lake
13 118 (2.22%) Amazon Athena
14 113 (2.12%) MongoDB
15 108 (2.03%) Amazon Redshift
16 93 (1.75%) DynamoDB
17 90 (1.69%) MySQL
18 82 (1.54%) Amazon RDS
19 79 (1.48%) Azure SQL Database
20 75 (1.41%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 639 (12.00%) Git
2 486 (9.13%) Jenkins
3 370 (6.95%) GitLab
4 268 (5.03%) JIRA
5 79 (1.48%) MLflow
6 78 (1.46%) Selenium
7 64 (1.20%) Postman
8 40 (0.75%) Cucumber
9 37 (0.69%) JMeter
10 32 (0.60%) Cypress.io
11 30 (0.56%) Artifactory
12 29 (0.54%) Bitbucket
12 29 (0.54%) SonarQube
13 26 (0.49%) JUnit
14 25 (0.47%) REST Assured
14 25 (0.47%) Sonatype Nexus
15 23 (0.43%) Maven
15 23 (0.43%) Robot Framework
16 21 (0.39%) Gatling
17 18 (0.34%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,153 (21.65%) Social Skills
2 1,054 (19.79%) Finance
3 711 (13.35%) Analytical Skills
4 473 (8.88%) Public Sector
5 379 (7.12%) Banking
6 189 (3.55%) Front Office
7 129 (2.42%) Documentation Skills
8 120 (2.25%) Investment Banking
9 78 (1.46%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 74 (1.39%) Marketing
11 59 (1.11%) Pharmaceutical
12 58 (1.09%) Retail
13 54 (1.01%) Legal
14 47 (0.88%) Telecoms
15 43 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
16 36 (0.68%) Financial Institution
16 36 (0.68%) Publishing
17 34 (0.64%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.64%) Military
18 29 (0.54%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 972 (18.25%) Developer
2 812 (15.25%) Data Engineer
3 776 (14.57%) Senior
4 498 (9.35%) Python Developer
5 346 (6.50%) Lead
6 329 (6.18%) Architect
7 327 (6.14%) Python Engineer
8 288 (5.41%) DevOps Engineer
9 281 (5.28%) Analyst
10 268 (5.03%) Software Engineer
11 234 (4.39%) AWS Engineer
12 224 (4.21%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 210 (3.94%) Data Scientist
14 166 (3.12%) Senior Developer
15 159 (2.99%) Azure Engineer
16 157 (2.95%) Senior Data Engineer
17 151 (2.84%) Data Analyst
17 151 (2.84%) Platform Engineer
18 150 (2.82%) Full-Stack Developer
19 135 (2.54%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 403 (7.57%) REST
2 371 (6.97%) React
3 357 (6.70%) PySpark
4 321 (6.03%) Kafka
5 233 (4.38%) .NET
6 224 (4.21%) Node.js
7 219 (4.11%) Pandas
8 184 (3.46%) FastAPI
9 183 (3.44%) RESTful
10 179 (3.36%) JSON
11 173 (3.25%) PyTorch
12 131 (2.46%) Django
13 130 (2.44%) NumPy
14 127 (2.38%) Flask
15 121 (2.27%) TensorFlow
16 118 (2.22%) LangChain
17 117 (2.20%) scikit-learn
18 113 (2.12%) AngularJS
19 101 (1.90%) HTML
19 101 (1.90%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 587 (11.02%) Cloud Native
2 236 (4.43%) Distributed Systems
3 150 (2.82%) Algorithms
4 140 (2.63%) Product Ownership
5 138 (2.59%) Data Centre
6 131 (2.46%) Onboarding
7 129 (2.42%) AI Agents
8 125 (2.35%) Data Structures
9 121 (2.27%) Data Protection Act
10 116 (2.18%) Derivative
11 106 (1.99%) Equities
12 105 (1.97%) Management Information System
13 104 (1.95%) Legacy Systems
14 98 (1.84%) Fixed Income
15 90 (1.69%) Hybrid Cloud
16 89 (1.67%) Enterprise Software
17 88 (1.65%) Security Posture
18 68 (1.28%) Public Cloud
19 55 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
20 51 (0.96%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 632 (11.87%) Linux
2 298 (5.60%) Windows
3 221 (4.15%) Unix
4 104 (1.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 73 (1.37%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.60%) VMS
8 26 (0.49%) AIX
9 25 (0.47%) Android
10 23 (0.43%) Solaris
11 19 (0.36%) CentOS
12 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
12 17 (0.32%) Mac OS
13 13 (0.24%) zOS
14 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
15 8 (0.15%) Debian
16 7 (0.13%) Rocky
17 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
18 5 (0.094%) Amazon Linux
19 4 (0.075%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,970 (37.00%) CI/CD
2 1,429 (26.84%) DevOps
3 1,228 (23.06%) AI
4 1,145 (21.50%) Agile
5 1,042 (19.57%) Analytics
6 935 (17.56%) Problem-Solving
7 925 (17.37%) Infrastructure as Code
8 903 (16.96%) Data Pipeline
9 819 (15.38%) Machine Learning
10 718 (13.48%) Data Modelling
11 708 (13.30%) Data Engineering
12 698 (13.11%) ETL
13 690 (12.96%) Containerisation
14 641 (12.04%) Software Engineering
15 581 (10.91%) Data Science
16 561 (10.54%) Observability
17 535 (10.05%) Test Automation
18 521 (9.78%) Business Intelligence
19 472 (8.86%) LLM
20 429 (8.06%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,767 (33.18%) SQL
2 771 (14.48%) Java
3 658 (12.36%) PowerShell
4 591 (11.10%) Bash
5 471 (8.85%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.61%) TypeScript
7 338 (6.35%) C#
8 204 (3.83%) Go
9 167 (3.14%) R
10 151 (2.84%) C++
11 130 (2.44%) Scala
12 107 (2.01%) Shell Script
13 79 (1.48%) Bicep
13 79 (1.48%) Perl
14 74 (1.39%) Ruby
15 58 (1.09%) PL/SQL
16 57 (1.07%) T-SQL
17 56 (1.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 55 (1.03%) C
19 52 (0.98%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,185 (22.25%) Security Cleared
2 957 (17.97%) SC Cleared
3 390 (7.32%) Degree
4 162 (3.04%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.78%) DV Cleared
6 123 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
7 111 (2.08%) Azure Certification
8 90 (1.69%) AWS Certification
9 88 (1.65%) CISSP
10 77 (1.45%) Master's Degree
11 70 (1.31%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (1.01%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.94%) CCNP
14 42 (0.79%) CISM
15 38 (0.71%) PhD
16 32 (0.60%) ISTQB
16 32 (0.60%) Microsoft Certification
17 25 (0.47%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 22 (0.41%) CompTIA Security+
19 21 (0.39%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 526 (9.88%) Data Quality
2 236 (4.43%) QA
3 145 (2.72%) GDPR
4 99 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 98 (1.84%) NIST
6 77 (1.45%) Accessibility
7 37 (0.69%) SLA
8 27 (0.51%) PCI DSS
8 27 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.49%) HIPAA
10 20 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
11 16 (0.30%) NCSC
11 16 (0.30%) WCAG
12 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
15 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 8 (0.15%) GRC
16 7 (0.13%) Disclosure Scotland
17 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 787 (14.78%) Docker
2 149 (2.80%) Active Directory
3 99 (1.86%) VMware Infrastructure
4 73 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.71%) VMware NSX
5 38 (0.71%) vSphere
6 34 (0.64%) Firmware
7 31 (0.58%) Hyper-V
8 18 (0.34%) VMware ESXi
9 17 (0.32%) KVM
10 16 (0.30%) NFS
11 13 (0.24%) Squid
12 12 (0.23%) HDFS
13 10 (0.19%) Ceph
13 10 (0.19%) SRDF
14 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
17 4 (0.075%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
17 4 (0.075%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,093 (20.53%) Terraform
2 951 (17.86%) Kubernetes
3 556 (10.44%) Ansible
4 332 (6.23%) Grafana
5 277 (5.20%) Prometheus
6 72 (1.35%) Puppet
7 59 (1.11%) Argo
8 51 (0.96%) Istio
9 46 (0.86%) vRealize
10 36 (0.68%) Kibana
11 35 (0.66%) Progress Chef
12 32 (0.60%) vCenter Server
13 28 (0.53%) Single Sign-On
14 27 (0.51%) Nessus
15 25 (0.47%) Nagios
16 24 (0.45%) Control-M
16 24 (0.45%) ZABBIX
17 23 (0.43%) NetBackup
18 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
19 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 598 (11.23%) Microsoft
2 566 (10.63%) Databricks
3 281 (5.28%) Google
4 244 (4.58%) Oracle
5 220 (4.13%) Splunk
6 177 (3.32%) VMware
7 130 (2.44%) Red Hat
8 125 (2.35%) OpenAI
9 116 (2.18%) Cisco
10 97 (1.82%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.58%) CyberArk
12 83 (1.56%) F5
13 76 (1.43%) BeyondTrust
13 76 (1.43%) Dynatrace
14 74 (1.39%) Palo Alto
15 70 (1.31%) IBM
16 69 (1.30%) Informatica
17 52 (0.98%) Foundry
17 52 (0.98%) SAP
18 45 (0.85%) Arista