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

6 months to
10 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 11 15
Rank change year-on-year +1 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,271 3,918 3,994
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.03% 13.33% 9.28%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.81% 39.13% 31.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,515 2,753 2,865
10th Percentile £363 £385 £389
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £551
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -0.09% -8.25%
75th Percentile £623 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £512
% change year-on-year -2.50% -2.30% -6.95%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 51 96
10th Percentile £30.49 £21.25 £21.49
25th Percentile £46.25 £26.41 £36.31
Median hourly rate £55.00 £39.32 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +39.88% -34.47% -6.80%
75th Percentile £70.36 £56.25 £71.41
90th Percentile £85.00 £71.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +16.67% -28.00% +8.70%

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 12,915 10,014 12,736
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.03% 34.08% 29.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,501 6,812 9,069
10th Percentile £355 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £528
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.57% -4.00%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £711 £774 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £489
% change year-on-year - -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 567 249 486
10th Percentile £41.80 £25.13 £32.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.18
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +0.52% +2.03%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% +1.07%

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 10 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 10 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 10 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 4,389 £525 -4.55% 2,622
London -3 2,486 £550 -8.33% 1,236
UK excluding London -1 2,048 £488 -2.50% 1,820
Work from Home -2 1,505 £525 -4.55% 1,046
North of England +10 694 £478 -2.75% 472
South East -2 413 £513 -1.91% 596
Yorkshire 0 386 £475 -5.00% 137
Scotland +2 295 £425 -10.53% 106
Midlands -12 256 £500 +8.93% 210
South West -1 253 £500 -8.05% 204
North West +2 252 £500 +5.26% 250
West Midlands -12 194 £500 - 100
East of England -2 130 £500 - 174
North East +8 65 £475 +5.56% 85
East Midlands -10 61 £470 +10.59% 110
Northern Ireland +16 23 £463 -18.68% 21
Wales -13 22 £463 -7.50% 54

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
1 288 (5.46%) Apache Spark
2 209 (3.97%) Apache Airflow
3 171 (3.24%) Apache
4 136 (2.58%) Confluence
5 50 (0.95%) SharePoint
6 49 (0.93%) SAS
7 35 (0.66%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.40%) nginx
10 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.28%) ArcGIS
11 15 (0.28%) Palantir Foundry
12 11 (0.21%) Appian
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) CMS
14 7 (0.13%) Camunda
14 7 (0.13%) IIS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.095%) Tomcat
16 5 (0.095%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 125 (2.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.47%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
4 20 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.057%) Weka
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 13 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Fidessa
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
5 5 (0.095%) Remedy ITSM
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.038%) Actimize
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
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 Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle ERP
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 1,998 (37.91%) AWS
2 1,795 (34.05%) Azure
3 762 (14.46%) GCP
4 652 (12.37%) GitHub
5 525 (9.96%) Power Platform
6 474 (8.99%) Serverless
7 382 (7.25%) Azure DevOps
8 377 (7.15%) Amazon S3
9 343 (6.51%) GitHub Actions
10 341 (6.47%) AWS Lambda
11 268 (5.08%) Azure Data Factory
12 238 (4.52%) Snowflake
13 216 (4.10%) AWS CloudFormation
14 172 (3.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 166 (3.15%) OpenShift
16 165 (3.13%) Amazon EKS
17 158 (3.00%) dbt
18 138 (2.62%) Amazon ECS
19 135 (2.56%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 129 (2.45%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 186 (3.53%) Firewall
2 132 (2.50%) DNS
3 112 (2.12%) Network Security
4 92 (1.75%) TCP/IP
5 84 (1.59%) BGP
6 78 (1.48%) WAN
7 77 (1.46%) VPN
8 58 (1.10%) HTTP
9 56 (1.06%) OSPF
10 44 (0.83%) SAN
11 40 (0.76%) SNMP
12 37 (0.70%) VXLAN
13 36 (0.68%) BIG-IP
13 36 (0.68%) SD-WAN
14 35 (0.66%) MPLS
15 33 (0.63%) DHCP
15 33 (0.63%) LAN
16 32 (0.61%) SSL
17 31 (0.59%) Wireshark
18 30 (0.57%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 455 (8.63%) Power BI
2 348 (6.60%) PostgreSQL
3 286 (5.43%) Data Warehouse
4 244 (4.63%) SQL Server
5 235 (4.46%) Data Lake
6 196 (3.72%) Tableau
7 189 (3.59%) Relational Database
8 177 (3.36%) NoSQL
9 167 (3.17%) Big Data
10 166 (3.15%) Metadata
11 140 (2.66%) Delta Lake
12 132 (2.50%) BigQuery
13 123 (2.33%) Amazon Athena
14 117 (2.22%) Amazon Redshift
15 108 (2.05%) MongoDB
16 99 (1.88%) Amazon RDS
17 93 (1.76%) MySQL
18 90 (1.71%) Azure SQL Database
18 90 (1.71%) DynamoDB
19 80 (1.52%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 651 (12.35%) Git
2 473 (8.97%) Jenkins
3 368 (6.98%) GitLab
4 247 (4.69%) JIRA
5 94 (1.78%) MLflow
6 71 (1.35%) Selenium
7 58 (1.10%) Postman
8 36 (0.68%) Cucumber
9 31 (0.59%) Artifactory
9 31 (0.59%) Bitbucket
10 30 (0.57%) JMeter
10 30 (0.57%) Sonatype Nexus
11 29 (0.55%) SonarQube
12 25 (0.47%) Cypress.io
12 25 (0.47%) JUnit
13 23 (0.44%) Robot Framework
14 22 (0.42%) Maven
15 20 (0.38%) REST Assured
16 19 (0.36%) SpecFlow
17 18 (0.34%) Gatling
General
1 1,163 (22.06%) Social Skills
2 1,029 (19.52%) Finance
3 707 (13.41%) Analytical Skills
4 478 (9.07%) Public Sector
5 367 (6.96%) Banking
6 181 (3.43%) Front Office
7 133 (2.52%) Documentation Skills
8 98 (1.86%) Investment Banking
9 76 (1.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 70 (1.33%) Marketing
11 60 (1.14%) Retail
12 53 (1.01%) Legal
12 53 (1.01%) Telecoms
13 51 (0.97%) Pharmaceutical
14 46 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
15 36 (0.68%) Financial Institution
16 35 (0.66%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.65%) Publishing
18 32 (0.61%) Military
19 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 994 (18.86%) Developer
2 794 (15.06%) Data Engineer
3 753 (14.29%) Senior
4 489 (9.28%) Python Developer
5 348 (6.60%) Architect
6 340 (6.45%) Lead
7 303 (5.75%) Python Engineer
8 278 (5.27%) Analyst
9 273 (5.18%) DevOps Engineer
10 255 (4.84%) Software Engineer
11 225 (4.27%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 221 (4.19%) AWS Engineer
13 211 (4.00%) Data Scientist
14 166 (3.15%) Azure Engineer
15 159 (3.02%) Senior Developer
16 157 (2.98%) Senior Data Engineer
17 156 (2.96%) Platform Engineer
18 146 (2.77%) Data Analyst
19 145 (2.75%) Full-Stack Developer
20 131 (2.49%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 389 (7.38%) REST
2 363 (6.89%) React
3 357 (6.77%) PySpark
4 337 (6.39%) Kafka
5 244 (4.63%) Node.js
6 240 (4.55%) .NET
7 218 (4.14%) Pandas
8 190 (3.60%) PyTorch
9 187 (3.55%) FastAPI
10 181 (3.43%) RESTful
11 164 (3.11%) JSON
12 136 (2.58%) TensorFlow
13 133 (2.52%) NumPy
14 127 (2.41%) Django
14 127 (2.41%) Flask
15 125 (2.37%) scikit-learn
16 123 (2.33%) LangChain
17 120 (2.28%) AngularJS
18 110 (2.09%) LDAP
19 103 (1.95%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 545 (10.34%) Cloud Native
2 228 (4.33%) Distributed Systems
3 160 (3.04%) Algorithms
4 138 (2.62%) Product Ownership
5 125 (2.37%) AI Agents
6 122 (2.31%) Data Protection Act
7 118 (2.24%) Onboarding
8 116 (2.20%) Data Centre
8 116 (2.20%) Data Structures
9 110 (2.09%) Derivative
10 107 (2.03%) Fixed Income
11 105 (1.99%) Equities
12 101 (1.92%) Management Information System
13 96 (1.82%) Legacy Systems
14 92 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
15 90 (1.71%) Hybrid Cloud
16 85 (1.61%) Security Posture
17 72 (1.37%) Public Cloud
18 49 (0.93%) Self-Motivation
19 46 (0.87%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 645 (12.24%) Linux
2 295 (5.60%) Windows
3 213 (4.04%) Unix
4 97 (1.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.21%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.70%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.66%) VMS
8 25 (0.47%) AIX
8 25 (0.47%) Android
9 23 (0.44%) Solaris
10 21 (0.40%) Mac OS
11 20 (0.38%) CentOS
12 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.19%) Debian
13 10 (0.19%) zOS
14 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
17 5 (0.095%) Amazon Linux
18 4 (0.076%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,944 (36.88%) CI/CD
2 1,401 (26.58%) DevOps
3 1,192 (22.61%) AI
4 1,137 (21.57%) Agile
5 1,053 (19.98%) Analytics
6 961 (18.23%) Problem-Solving
7 923 (17.51%) Infrastructure as Code
8 886 (16.81%) Data Pipeline
9 816 (15.48%) Machine Learning
10 733 (13.91%) Containerisation
11 711 (13.49%) Data Modelling
12 709 (13.45%) Data Engineering
13 696 (13.20%) ETL
14 610 (11.57%) Software Engineering
15 587 (11.14%) Data Science
16 543 (10.30%) Observability
17 538 (10.21%) Test Automation
18 530 (10.06%) Business Intelligence
19 444 (8.42%) LLM
20 418 (7.93%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,742 (33.05%) SQL
2 773 (14.67%) Java
3 654 (12.41%) PowerShell
4 568 (10.78%) Bash
5 483 (9.16%) JavaScript
6 355 (6.73%) TypeScript
7 352 (6.68%) C#
8 206 (3.91%) Go
9 178 (3.38%) R
10 157 (2.98%) C++
11 144 (2.73%) Scala
12 107 (2.03%) Shell Script
13 87 (1.65%) Ruby
14 80 (1.52%) Bicep
14 80 (1.52%) Perl
15 56 (1.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 56 (1.06%) PL/SQL
16 54 (1.02%) C
17 53 (1.01%) T-SQL
18 48 (0.91%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,203 (22.82%) Security Cleared
2 972 (18.44%) SC Cleared
3 380 (7.21%) Degree
4 173 (3.28%) Computer Science Degree
5 146 (2.77%) DV Cleared
6 134 (2.54%) BPSS Clearance
7 106 (2.01%) Azure Certification
8 100 (1.90%) AWS Certification
9 92 (1.75%) CISSP
10 84 (1.59%) Master's Degree
11 72 (1.37%) Cisco Certification
12 59 (1.12%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.95%) CCNP
13 50 (0.95%) CISM
14 37 (0.70%) PhD
15 32 (0.61%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 32 (0.61%) Microsoft Certification
16 27 (0.51%) ISTQB
17 23 (0.44%) CCIE
18 22 (0.42%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 517 (9.81%) Data Quality
2 232 (4.40%) QA
3 162 (3.07%) GDPR
4 110 (2.09%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 107 (2.03%) NIST
6 78 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) SLA
8 32 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 30 (0.57%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.34%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) WCAG
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) SOC 2
15 9 (0.17%) GRC
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) MiFID
16 8 (0.15%) PMO
System Software
1 811 (15.39%) Docker
2 159 (3.02%) Active Directory
3 98 (1.86%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.31%) Virtual Machines
5 41 (0.78%) VMware NSX
6 37 (0.70%) vSphere
7 34 (0.65%) Firmware
8 33 (0.63%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) KVM
11 13 (0.25%) HDFS
12 10 (0.19%) NFS
13 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
13 9 (0.17%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Ceph
14 8 (0.15%) Squid
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
16 5 (0.095%) Lustre
17 4 (0.076%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
Systems Management
1 1,090 (20.68%) Terraform
2 954 (18.10%) Kubernetes
3 541 (10.26%) Ansible
4 347 (6.58%) Grafana
5 280 (5.31%) Prometheus
6 77 (1.46%) Puppet
7 67 (1.27%) Argo
8 53 (1.01%) Istio
9 48 (0.91%) vRealize
10 42 (0.80%) Kibana
11 35 (0.66%) Progress Chef
12 32 (0.61%) vCenter Server
13 27 (0.51%) Nagios
13 27 (0.51%) Nessus
14 24 (0.46%) Control-M
14 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.46%) ZABBIX
15 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
16 19 (0.36%) Rancher
16 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 604 (11.46%) Microsoft
2 568 (10.78%) Databricks
3 261 (4.95%) Google
4 231 (4.38%) Oracle
5 226 (4.29%) Splunk
6 181 (3.43%) VMware
7 120 (2.28%) Red Hat
8 118 (2.24%) OpenAI
9 117 (2.22%) Cisco
10 94 (1.78%) CyberArk
11 90 (1.71%) ServiceNow
12 83 (1.57%) BeyondTrust
13 70 (1.33%) Dynatrace
14 68 (1.29%) IBM
15 67 (1.27%) F5
15 67 (1.27%) Informatica
15 67 (1.27%) Palo Alto
16 61 (1.16%) Foundry
17 48 (0.91%) SAP
18 42 (0.80%) Fortinet