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 16 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,740 4,176 4,719
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.42% 11.42% 10.01%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.66% 35.66% 32.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,121 2,770 3,391
10th Percentile £358 £372 £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 £750 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 87 89 139
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.00 £26.50 £46.18
Median hourly rate £50.00 £57.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -13.04% -4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £64.67 £70.00 £73.08
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.00 £62.50 £61.25
% change year-on-year -13.60% +2.04% -6.49%

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 11,378 11,710 14,701
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.22% 32.02% 31.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,494 7,532 10,485
10th Percentile £350 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 337 283 448
10th Percentile £29.20 £22.36 £31.43
25th Percentile £46.00 £40.03 £47.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year - +4.17% -
75th Percentile £67.84 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £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 16 November 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 16 November 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 16 November 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 4,038 £525 -12.50% 5,408
London +1 2,378 £550 -12.00% 3,067
UK excluding London +3 1,825 £500 -2.44% 2,917
Work from Home 0 1,457 £537 -2.36% 2,289
North of England +11 554 £478 -4.40% 711
South East +4 382 £500 -4.76% 902
Yorkshire +11 298 £500 -6.98% 198
Scotland +15 288 £487 +1.04% 191
Midlands +12 267 £500 +5.26% 390
North West +8 222 £436 -10.37% 444
West Midlands +15 219 £500 +1.01% 257
South West -6 175 £560 -8.01% 305
East of England +7 160 £525 +10.53% 337
East Midlands -6 47 £429 +7.19% 132
North East +5 38 £520 -12.97% 75
Wales -5 31 £475 -5.00% 78
Northern Ireland -4 22 £588 +11.90% 44

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
1 251 (5.30%) Apache Airflow
2 199 (4.20%) Apache Spark
3 187 (3.95%) Confluence
4 178 (3.76%) Apache
5 64 (1.35%) SAS
6 49 (1.03%) SharePoint
7 39 (0.82%) nginx
8 35 (0.74%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 15 (0.32%) IIS
11 12 (0.25%) WebSphere
12 11 (0.23%) Appian
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.17%) JBoss
14 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
15 6 (0.13%) ArcGIS
16 5 (0.11%) Luigi
17 4 (0.084%) Camunda
17 4 (0.084%) CMS
Applications
1 127 (2.68%) Microsoft Excel
2 35 (0.74%) Chatbot
3 34 (0.72%) Microsoft Office
4 29 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 9 (0.19%) Maya
6 9 (0.19%) MS Visio
6 9 (0.19%) NUKE
7 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
8 2 (0.042%) Maple
8 2 (0.042%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
9 1 (0.021%) SPSS
9 1 (0.021%) Stata
9 1 (0.021%) Trello
9 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 13 (0.27%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 8 (0.17%) Maximo
4 7 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
5 5 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 4 (0.084%) Remedy ITSM
7 3 (0.063%) Payment Gateway
7 3 (0.063%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
8 2 (0.042%) Endur
8 2 (0.042%) Kondor
8 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
8 2 (0.042%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
8 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
9 1 (0.021%) Cerner Millennium
9 1 (0.021%) ION MarketView
9 1 (0.021%) Oracle BPM
9 1 (0.021%) SAP GRC
Cloud Services
1 1,860 (39.24%) AWS
2 1,394 (29.41%) Azure
3 727 (15.34%) GCP
4 543 (11.46%) GitHub
5 463 (9.77%) Serverless
6 395 (8.33%) Power Platform
7 370 (7.81%) Amazon S3
8 327 (6.90%) AWS Lambda
9 293 (6.18%) Azure DevOps
10 275 (5.80%) GitHub Actions
11 244 (5.15%) Snowflake
12 207 (4.37%) AWS CloudFormation
13 194 (4.09%) Amazon EC2
14 193 (4.07%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 179 (3.78%) dbt
16 158 (3.33%) Amazon ECS
17 154 (3.25%) Azure Data Factory
18 142 (3.00%) Amazon EKS
19 136 (2.87%) OpenShift
20 128 (2.70%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 283 (5.97%) Firewall
2 181 (3.82%) DNS
3 147 (3.10%) TCP/IP
4 108 (2.28%) Network Security
5 96 (2.03%) VPN
6 94 (1.98%) HTTP
7 93 (1.96%) BGP
8 68 (1.43%) SSL
9 57 (1.20%) OSPF
10 53 (1.12%) WAN
11 50 (1.05%) MPLS
12 41 (0.86%) LAN
13 40 (0.84%) SMTP
14 39 (0.82%) SSH
15 38 (0.80%) Wireless
16 32 (0.68%) SD-WAN
17 31 (0.65%) FTP
17 31 (0.65%) Wireshark
18 30 (0.63%) DHCP
19 29 (0.61%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 400 (8.44%) PostgreSQL
2 344 (7.26%) Power BI
3 278 (5.86%) Data Warehouse
4 257 (5.42%) Relational Database
5 249 (5.25%) NoSQL
6 179 (3.78%) Data Lake
7 174 (3.67%) Big Data
8 165 (3.48%) Amazon RDS
9 154 (3.25%) Tableau
10 147 (3.10%) SQL Server
11 134 (2.83%) MongoDB
12 120 (2.53%) MySQL
13 113 (2.38%) BigQuery
14 101 (2.13%) Amazon Athena
15 97 (2.05%) Hadoop
16 90 (1.90%) DynamoDB
17 85 (1.79%) Amazon Redshift
17 85 (1.79%) Metadata
18 73 (1.54%) Elasticsearch
19 58 (1.22%) DB2
Development Applications
1 645 (13.61%) Git
2 611 (12.89%) Jenkins
3 387 (8.16%) GitLab
4 330 (6.96%) JIRA
5 75 (1.58%) Selenium
6 71 (1.50%) SonarQube
7 70 (1.48%) Bitbucket
8 65 (1.37%) JUnit
9 64 (1.35%) Sonatype Nexus
10 49 (1.03%) MLflow
11 46 (0.97%) Liquibase
12 42 (0.89%) Artifactory
13 40 (0.84%) Cucumber
14 36 (0.76%) Maven
15 34 (0.72%) Gradle
16 33 (0.70%) JMeter
16 33 (0.70%) Postman
17 29 (0.61%) Cypress.io
17 29 (0.61%) Eclipse
18 28 (0.59%) Metasploit
General
1 1,339 (28.25%) Social Skills
2 1,070 (22.57%) Finance
3 706 (14.89%) Analytical Skills
4 504 (10.63%) Banking
5 401 (8.46%) Public Sector
6 246 (5.19%) Front Office
7 203 (4.28%) Investment Banking
8 99 (2.09%) Documentation Skills
9 87 (1.84%) Financial Institution
10 82 (1.73%) Marketing
11 74 (1.56%) Telecoms
12 71 (1.50%) Pharmaceutical
12 71 (1.50%) Retail
13 59 (1.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 52 (1.10%) Legal
15 47 (0.99%) Presentation Skills
16 42 (0.89%) Manufacturing
17 30 (0.63%) Influencing Skills
18 29 (0.61%) Organisational Skills
19 27 (0.57%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 891 (18.80%) Developer
2 640 (13.50%) Senior
3 527 (11.12%) Data Engineer
4 356 (7.51%) Python Engineer
5 353 (7.45%) Analyst
6 348 (7.34%) Python Developer
7 336 (7.09%) DevOps Engineer
8 306 (6.46%) AWS Engineer
9 279 (5.89%) Software Engineer
10 257 (5.42%) Architect
11 206 (4.35%) Lead
12 184 (3.88%) Platform Engineer
13 183 (3.86%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 176 (3.71%) Data Analyst
15 163 (3.44%) Data Scientist
16 132 (2.78%) Senior Developer
17 130 (2.74%) Consultant
18 125 (2.64%) Network Engineer
19 122 (2.57%) Full-Stack Developer
20 121 (2.55%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 384 (8.10%) REST
2 346 (7.30%) React
3 315 (6.65%) Kafka
4 245 (5.17%) Node.js
5 241 (5.08%) Pandas
6 238 (5.02%) RESTful
7 224 (4.73%) FastAPI
8 189 (3.99%) NumPy
9 182 (3.84%) PySpark
10 176 (3.71%) PyTorch
11 158 (3.33%) AngularJS
12 155 (3.27%) TensorFlow
13 137 (2.89%) .NET
14 129 (2.72%) Elastic Stack
15 114 (2.41%) HTML
16 112 (2.36%) scikit-learn
17 109 (2.30%) CSS
17 109 (2.30%) GraphQL
18 105 (2.22%) Flask
19 104 (2.19%) LangChain
Miscellaneous
1 370 (7.81%) Cloud Native
2 209 (4.41%) Algorithms
3 188 (3.97%) Distributed Systems
4 157 (3.31%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 155 (3.27%) Equities
6 145 (3.06%) Fixed Income
7 141 (2.97%) Data Protection Act
8 123 (2.59%) Product Ownership
9 118 (2.49%) Data Structures
10 114 (2.41%) Derivative
10 114 (2.41%) Hedge funds
11 107 (2.26%) Onboarding
12 91 (1.92%) AI Agents
13 82 (1.73%) Public Cloud
14 78 (1.65%) Management Information System
15 77 (1.62%) Data Centre
16 69 (1.46%) Hybrid Cloud
17 67 (1.41%) Legacy Systems
18 65 (1.37%) Replication
19 56 (1.18%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 854 (18.02%) Linux
2 367 (7.74%) Windows
3 251 (5.30%) Unix
4 95 (2.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.41%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.97%) Android
7 45 (0.95%) Ubuntu
8 38 (0.80%) CentOS
9 35 (0.74%) VMS
10 29 (0.61%) Amazon Linux
11 28 (0.59%) Mac OS
12 26 (0.55%) Apple iOS
13 22 (0.46%) Solaris
14 10 (0.21%) Debian
15 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
16 8 (0.17%) Windows 7
17 6 (0.13%) AIX
18 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
19 4 (0.084%) Windows Server 2019
19 4 (0.084%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,557 (32.85%) CI/CD
2 1,326 (27.97%) DevOps
3 1,252 (26.41%) Agile
4 1,019 (21.50%) Problem-Solving
5 814 (17.17%) Infrastructure as Code
6 803 (16.94%) AI
7 715 (15.08%) Analytics
8 697 (14.70%) Machine Learning
9 632 (13.33%) Containerisation
10 604 (12.74%) Software Engineering
11 602 (12.70%) Data Pipeline
12 506 (10.68%) Data Science
13 505 (10.65%) ETL
14 504 (10.63%) Data Modelling
15 480 (10.13%) Test Automation
16 477 (10.06%) Data Engineering
17 406 (8.57%) Computer Science
18 393 (8.29%) Business Intelligence
19 340 (7.17%) Microservices
20 332 (7.00%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,465 (30.91%) SQL
2 864 (18.23%) Java
3 659 (13.90%) Bash
4 605 (12.76%) PowerShell
5 538 (11.35%) JavaScript
6 342 (7.22%) TypeScript
7 291 (6.14%) Go
8 272 (5.74%) C#
9 265 (5.59%) C++
10 197 (4.16%) Perl
11 194 (4.09%) Shell Script
12 160 (3.38%) R
13 100 (2.11%) Scala
14 86 (1.81%) C
15 77 (1.62%) Ruby
16 59 (1.24%) PHP
17 56 (1.18%) VBA
18 54 (1.14%) Groovy
19 46 (0.97%) Bicep
20 45 (0.95%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 884 (18.65%) Security Cleared
2 708 (14.94%) SC Cleared
3 482 (10.17%) Degree
4 233 (4.92%) Computer Science Degree
5 151 (3.19%) AWS Certification
6 144 (3.04%) Master's Degree
7 139 (2.93%) DV Cleared
8 99 (2.09%) Cisco Certification
9 82 (1.73%) CISSP
10 76 (1.60%) BPSS Clearance
11 73 (1.54%) Azure Certification
12 64 (1.35%) CCNP
13 58 (1.22%) PhD
14 47 (0.99%) MCP
15 40 (0.84%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 39 (0.82%) CCIE
17 38 (0.80%) OSCP
18 36 (0.76%) CEH
19 31 (0.65%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
20 28 (0.59%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 321 (6.77%) Data Quality
2 188 (3.97%) QA
3 149 (3.14%) GDPR
4 95 (2.00%) NIST
5 88 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 62 (1.31%) Accessibility
7 48 (1.01%) PCI DSS
8 40 (0.84%) HIPAA
9 27 (0.57%) NCSC
9 27 (0.57%) SLA
10 22 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 21 (0.44%) SOC 2
12 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
13 13 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 9 (0.19%) EMIR
16 9 (0.19%) MiFID
16 9 (0.19%) PMO
17 7 (0.15%) WCAG
System Software
1 903 (19.05%) Docker
2 154 (3.25%) Active Directory
3 143 (3.02%) VMware Infrastructure
4 45 (0.95%) vSphere
5 36 (0.76%) VMware NSX
6 34 (0.72%) Virtual Machines
7 31 (0.65%) Firmware
8 22 (0.46%) DFS Replication
9 21 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 17 (0.36%) Squid
11 15 (0.32%) Postfix
11 15 (0.32%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 14 (0.30%) Hyper-V
12 14 (0.30%) KVM
12 14 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
13 13 (0.27%) HDFS
14 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
15 10 (0.21%) zsh
16 9 (0.19%) GPFS
17 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,014 (21.39%) Kubernetes
2 994 (20.97%) Terraform
3 623 (13.14%) Ansible
4 352 (7.43%) Grafana
5 303 (6.39%) Prometheus
6 88 (1.86%) Puppet
7 80 (1.69%) Argo
8 52 (1.10%) Kibana
9 41 (0.86%) Progress Chef
10 37 (0.78%) Istio
11 36 (0.76%) Nessus
12 34 (0.72%) vRealize
13 29 (0.61%) Nmap
13 29 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
14 28 (0.59%) NetBackup
15 26 (0.55%) vCenter Server
16 24 (0.51%) ITRS Geneos
17 23 (0.49%) logstash
17 23 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
18 22 (0.46%) Packer
Vendors
1 538 (11.35%) Microsoft
2 323 (6.81%) Databricks
3 273 (5.76%) Google
4 254 (5.36%) Splunk
5 229 (4.83%) VMware
6 226 (4.77%) Oracle
7 146 (3.08%) ServiceNow
8 137 (2.89%) Cisco
9 129 (2.72%) Red Hat
10 87 (1.84%) Palo Alto
11 85 (1.79%) F5
12 72 (1.52%) OpenAI
13 63 (1.33%) SAP
14 62 (1.31%) Foundry
15 51 (1.08%) Atlassian
16 50 (1.05%) CyberArk
17 48 (1.01%) IBM
18 44 (0.93%) Juniper
18 44 (0.93%) Salesforce
19 43 (0.91%) CrowdStrike