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 3 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,605 4,234 3,982
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.45% 13.03% 10.40%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.01% 39.67% 32.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,666 2,797 2,832
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £439 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.29% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 134 84 105
10th Percentile £30.15 £28.18 £21.25
25th Percentile £42.83 £34.94 £31.25
Median hourly rate £58.62 £50.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.24% -19.35% -4.62%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £84.39 £78.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -28.57% +16.67%

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 14,008 10,674 12,103
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.12% 32.84% 31.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,115 7,100 8,347
10th Percentile £363 £342 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £503 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.48% -4.29% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £745 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 301 355
10th Percentile £27.98 £29.00 £30.00
25th Percentile £46.79 £36.69 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £80.00 £78.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +4.00%

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 3 September 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 3 September 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 3 September 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 4,788 £550 +2.33% 8,004
London -3 2,848 £575 -1.71% 5,315
UK excluding London -9 2,117 £500 - 3,684
Work from Home -5 1,535 £530 -3.73% 2,993
North of England 0 724 £500 +5.26% 728
South East -9 446 £539 +7.75% 914
Yorkshire 0 367 £500 +2.56% 211
South West -4 285 £550 +2.33% 534
Scotland -4 277 £450 -10.00% 448
North West -1 276 £525 +10.53% 413
Midlands -17 232 £498 +4.74% 342
West Midlands -18 187 £500 +5.26% 195
East of England -11 139 £500 -4.76% 525
North East -1 93 £425 -2.86% 110
East Midlands -18 45 £478 +13.81% 145
Wales -7 30 £530 +30.86% 77
Northern Ireland +2 17 £363 -30.95% 152

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
1 286 (5.10%) Apache Airflow
2 273 (4.87%) Apache Spark
3 225 (4.01%) Apache
4 166 (2.96%) Confluence
5 56 (1.00%) Jupyter
6 54 (0.96%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.68%) SAS
8 30 (0.54%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 21 (0.37%) nginx
12 14 (0.25%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) CMS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
13 9 (0.16%) WebSphere
14 7 (0.12%) Apache Superset
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
15 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 5 (0.089%) CICS
16 5 (0.089%) JBoss
Applications
1 112 (2.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
5 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
5 18 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 21 (0.37%) Aladdin
2 19 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
3 17 (0.30%) Remedy ITSM
4 11 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
6 7 (0.12%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
8 5 (0.089%) Front Arena
8 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.054%) Endur
10 3 (0.054%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
10 3 (0.054%) Summit
10 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) BambooHR
11 2 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 2,075 (37.02%) AWS
2 1,908 (34.04%) Azure
3 846 (15.09%) GCP
4 727 (12.97%) GitHub
5 501 (8.94%) Power Platform
6 491 (8.76%) Serverless
7 451 (8.05%) Azure DevOps
8 426 (7.60%) GitHub Actions
9 399 (7.12%) Amazon S3
10 368 (6.57%) AWS Lambda
11 331 (5.91%) Snowflake
12 225 (4.01%) dbt
13 220 (3.93%) Azure Data Factory
14 190 (3.39%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 180 (3.21%) AWS CloudFormation
16 175 (3.12%) Amazon EKS
17 139 (2.48%) Entra ID
18 138 (2.46%) Amazon EC2
19 132 (2.36%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 129 (2.30%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 277 (4.94%) Firewall
2 209 (3.73%) DNS
3 148 (2.64%) TCP/IP
4 138 (2.46%) Network Security
5 127 (2.27%) BGP
6 125 (2.23%) VPN
7 113 (2.02%) WAN
8 88 (1.57%) DHCP
9 75 (1.34%) OSPF
10 66 (1.18%) SD-WAN
11 62 (1.11%) VLAN
12 57 (1.02%) SSL
13 55 (0.98%) BIG-IP
14 54 (0.96%) VXLAN
15 48 (0.86%) HTTP
16 46 (0.82%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 41 (0.73%) Ethernet VPN
17 41 (0.73%) SNMP
18 40 (0.71%) SAN
19 39 (0.70%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 451 (8.05%) Power BI
2 324 (5.78%) Data Warehouse
3 314 (5.60%) PostgreSQL
4 219 (3.91%) SQL Server
5 208 (3.71%) Metadata
6 203 (3.62%) Relational Database
7 191 (3.41%) Tableau
8 184 (3.28%) Data Lake
9 162 (2.89%) BigQuery
10 153 (2.73%) NoSQL
11 141 (2.52%) Big Data
12 132 (2.36%) Amazon Redshift
13 129 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
14 126 (2.25%) Amazon RDS
15 123 (2.19%) Delta Lake
16 118 (2.11%) MongoDB
17 107 (1.91%) DynamoDB
18 94 (1.68%) MySQL
19 74 (1.32%) Redis
20 68 (1.21%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 753 (13.43%) Git
2 494 (8.81%) Jenkins
3 447 (7.98%) GitLab
4 291 (5.19%) JIRA
5 109 (1.94%) Selenium
6 62 (1.11%) JMeter
7 56 (1.00%) MLflow
7 56 (1.00%) Postman
8 53 (0.95%) SonarQube
9 49 (0.87%) Claude Code
10 40 (0.71%) Bitbucket
11 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
11 35 (0.62%) Maven
12 33 (0.59%) Gatling
13 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
14 31 (0.55%) Artifactory
14 31 (0.55%) Sonatype Nexus
15 27 (0.48%) LoadRunner
16 19 (0.34%) JUnit
General
1 1,284 (22.91%) Social Skills
2 1,215 (21.68%) Finance
3 848 (15.13%) Analytical Skills
4 563 (10.04%) Public Sector
5 459 (8.19%) Banking
6 184 (3.28%) Front Office
7 144 (2.57%) Investment Banking
8 117 (2.09%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 109 (1.94%) Retail
11 93 (1.66%) Marketing
12 80 (1.43%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.05%) Military
14 57 (1.02%) Pharmaceutical
15 50 (0.89%) Aerospace
15 50 (0.89%) Legal
16 47 (0.84%) Law
17 45 (0.80%) Financial Institution
17 45 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
17 45 (0.80%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 953 (17.00%) Senior
2 902 (16.09%) Developer
3 823 (14.68%) Data Engineer
4 479 (8.55%) Lead
5 472 (8.42%) Python Developer
6 418 (7.46%) Python Engineer
7 340 (6.07%) DevOps Engineer
8 290 (5.17%) Analyst
9 285 (5.08%) Software Engineer
10 281 (5.01%) Architect
11 273 (4.87%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 229 (4.09%) AWS Engineer
13 195 (3.48%) Platform Engineer
14 194 (3.46%) Data Scientist
15 190 (3.39%) Cloud Engineer
15 190 (3.39%) Senior Developer
16 181 (3.23%) Senior Data Engineer
17 175 (3.12%) Azure Engineer
18 144 (2.57%) Data Analyst
19 136 (2.43%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,329 (23.71%) Terraform
2 481 (8.58%) REST
3 381 (6.80%) PySpark
4 360 (6.42%) Kafka
5 308 (5.50%) React
6 251 (4.48%) .NET
7 207 (3.69%) JSON
8 205 (3.66%) Django
9 200 (3.57%) FastAPI
10 185 (3.30%) RESTful
11 172 (3.07%) Pandas
12 170 (3.03%) Node.js
13 144 (2.57%) pytest
14 141 (2.52%) LangChain
15 119 (2.12%) PyTorch
16 113 (2.02%) Flask
17 112 (2.00%) YAML
18 111 (1.98%) HTML
19 110 (1.96%) OAuth
20 102 (1.82%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 787 (14.04%) Cloud Native
2 312 (5.57%) Distributed Systems
3 250 (4.46%) AI Agents
4 226 (4.03%) Onboarding
5 159 (2.84%) Product Ownership
6 155 (2.77%) Data Centre
7 141 (2.52%) Data Structures
8 139 (2.48%) Algorithms
9 136 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
10 118 (2.11%) Hybrid Cloud
11 109 (1.94%) Management Information System
12 107 (1.91%) Derivative
13 106 (1.89%) Data Protection Act
14 86 (1.53%) Enterprise Software
14 86 (1.53%) Equities
15 82 (1.46%) Security Posture
16 70 (1.25%) Linux Command Line
17 69 (1.23%) Public Cloud
18 63 (1.12%) PKI
19 62 (1.11%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 750 (13.38%) Linux
2 329 (5.87%) Windows
3 249 (4.44%) Unix
4 153 (2.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 91 (1.62%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.64%) VMS
8 26 (0.46%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 18 (0.32%) CentOS
11 16 (0.29%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.089%) Debian
16 5 (0.089%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,262 (40.36%) CI/CD
2 1,614 (28.80%) DevOps
3 1,499 (26.74%) AI
4 1,252 (22.34%) Agile
5 1,226 (21.87%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,105 (19.71%) Analytics
7 983 (17.54%) Data Pipeline
8 904 (16.13%) Problem-Solving
9 903 (16.11%) Software Engineering
10 850 (15.17%) Machine Learning
11 804 (14.34%) Data Engineering
12 784 (13.99%) Containerisation
13 739 (13.18%) Data Modelling
14 719 (12.83%) Observability
15 648 (11.56%) ETL
16 642 (11.45%) Test Automation
17 613 (10.94%) Continuous Improvement
18 593 (10.58%) Validation
19 568 (10.13%) Data Science
20 563 (10.04%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,838 (32.79%) SQL
2 827 (14.75%) Java
3 764 (13.63%) Bash
4 732 (13.06%) PowerShell
5 442 (7.89%) JavaScript
6 339 (6.05%) TypeScript
7 319 (5.69%) C#
8 194 (3.46%) Go
9 152 (2.71%) Shell Script
10 150 (2.68%) R
11 141 (2.52%) C++
12 134 (2.39%) Bicep
13 133 (2.37%) Scala
14 98 (1.75%) Perl
15 60 (1.07%) Groovy
16 59 (1.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 55 (0.98%) C
17 55 (0.98%) PL/SQL
18 53 (0.95%) Ruby
18 53 (0.95%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,347 (24.03%) Security Cleared
2 1,092 (19.48%) SC Cleared
3 419 (7.48%) Degree
4 224 (4.00%) DV Cleared
5 162 (2.89%) Computer Science Degree
6 146 (2.60%) Azure Certification
7 138 (2.46%) AWS Certification
8 124 (2.21%) BPSS Clearance
9 94 (1.68%) CISSP
10 84 (1.50%) Cisco Certification
11 67 (1.20%) Master's Degree
12 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
13 43 (0.77%) CCNP
14 36 (0.64%) ISTQB
14 36 (0.64%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 34 (0.61%) CISM
15 34 (0.61%) PhD
16 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 28 (0.50%) CCIE
18 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 616 (10.99%) Data Quality
2 290 (5.17%) QA
3 114 (2.03%) NIST
4 107 (1.91%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 100 (1.78%) GDPR
6 80 (1.43%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.62%) SLA
8 32 (0.57%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.52%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) WCAG
11 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 24 (0.43%) PCI DSS
13 16 (0.29%) Disclosure Scotland
14 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
15 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
16 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.12%) GRC
19 6 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
19 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 955 (17.04%) Docker
2 159 (2.84%) Active Directory
3 133 (2.37%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.09%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.82%) Hyper-V
6 40 (0.71%) vSphere
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 25 (0.45%) Firmware
8 25 (0.45%) VMware ESXi
9 18 (0.32%) NFS
10 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
10 14 (0.25%) Squid
11 11 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
12 10 (0.18%) Ceph
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 7 (0.12%) Postfix
14 7 (0.12%) zsh
15 6 (0.11%) HDFS
15 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
16 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,131 (20.18%) Kubernetes
2 627 (11.19%) Ansible
3 335 (5.98%) Grafana
4 242 (4.32%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.46%) Puppet
6 74 (1.32%) Progress Chef
7 69 (1.23%) Argo
8 36 (0.64%) Istio
9 31 (0.55%) Kibana
9 31 (0.55%) Single Sign-On
10 26 (0.46%) Control-M
10 26 (0.46%) ZABBIX
11 24 (0.43%) Nagios
12 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
12 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
13 22 (0.39%) vRealize
14 20 (0.36%) FortiGate
15 19 (0.34%) Packer
16 17 (0.30%) Tivoli
17 16 (0.29%) Netcool
Vendors
1 717 (12.79%) Microsoft
2 572 (10.21%) Databricks
3 367 (6.55%) Google
4 247 (4.41%) Oracle
5 215 (3.84%) Splunk
6 177 (3.16%) VMware
7 150 (2.68%) OpenAI
8 139 (2.48%) Cisco
9 120 (2.14%) ServiceNow
10 103 (1.84%) Red Hat
11 102 (1.82%) Dynatrace
12 94 (1.68%) IBM
13 86 (1.53%) F5
14 83 (1.48%) Palo Alto
15 78 (1.39%) Informatica
16 74 (1.32%) Foundry
17 72 (1.28%) Fortinet
18 69 (1.23%) SAP
19 67 (1.20%) CyberArk
20 62 (1.11%) Salesforce