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 19 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,476 3,899 4,149
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.84% 13.07% 9.46%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.33% 38.52% 31.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,602 2,686 2,978
10th Percentile £363 £375 £375
25th Percentile £425 £442 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -2.27% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £849
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -6.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 59 119
10th Percentile £28.80 £25.20 £20.77
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.50 £44.50 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +22.47% -28.23% -0.86%
75th Percentile £69.00 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £63.35 £75.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +5.00% -23.08% +10.64%

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 13,578 10,121 13,285
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.87% 33.94% 30.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,847 6,867 9,316
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £418 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £507 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.59% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £716 £756 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +3.16% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 553 236 550
10th Percentile £35.25 £25.50 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.13 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £84.75 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.84% -4.62% +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 19 June 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 19 June 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 19 June 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 -2 4,561 £525 -4.55% 2,107
London -3 2,622 £550 -4.35% 934
UK excluding London -1 2,143 £500 - 1,677
Work from Home -2 1,558 £525 -4.55% 817
North of England +10 784 £488 +2.63% 403
Yorkshire +2 433 £500 - 122
South East -9 402 £525 +3.96% 581
Scotland +3 319 £440 -7.37% 73
North West +4 274 £490 +3.16% 223
South West -3 263 £500 -9.09% 207
Midlands -14 233 £479 +6.41% 172
West Midlands -15 185 £477 +0.42% 92
East of England -13 126 £500 - 180
North East +8 89 £450 +5.88% 61
East Midlands -16 47 £497 +16.82% 80
Wales -9 30 £475 +2.15% 43
Northern Ireland +13 26 £408 -30.64% 49

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
1 280 (5.11%) Apache Spark
2 247 (4.51%) Apache Airflow
3 186 (3.40%) Apache
4 165 (3.01%) Confluence
5 56 (1.02%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.89%) SAS
6 49 (0.89%) SharePoint
7 22 (0.40%) OpenStack
8 21 (0.38%) nginx
9 18 (0.33%) Palantir Foundry
10 17 (0.31%) ArcGIS
11 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Exchange
12 11 (0.20%) IIS
13 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
14 8 (0.15%) Appian
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
16 6 (0.11%) Camunda
16 6 (0.11%) CMS
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 116 (2.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 29 (0.53%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.42%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 22 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
5 20 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.26%) CPLEX
7 3 (0.055%) LaTeX
7 3 (0.055%) Microsoft Project
8 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.40%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
7 5 (0.091%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.091%) Dynamics CRM
8 4 (0.073%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.055%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.055%) Sage X3
9 3 (0.055%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.055%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.037%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.037%) Odoo
10 2 (0.037%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.037%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.037%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,052 (37.47%) AWS
2 1,822 (33.27%) Azure
3 798 (14.57%) GCP
4 647 (11.82%) GitHub
5 525 (9.59%) Power Platform
6 491 (8.97%) Serverless
7 411 (7.51%) Amazon S3
8 394 (7.20%) Azure DevOps
9 363 (6.63%) AWS Lambda
10 351 (6.41%) GitHub Actions
11 267 (4.88%) Snowflake
12 243 (4.44%) Azure Data Factory
13 194 (3.54%) dbt
14 170 (3.10%) AWS CloudFormation
15 164 (2.99%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 163 (2.98%) Amazon EKS
17 154 (2.81%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 152 (2.78%) OpenShift
19 131 (2.39%) Amazon EC2
20 122 (2.23%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 221 (4.04%) Firewall
2 149 (2.72%) DNS
3 111 (2.03%) Network Security
4 107 (1.95%) BGP
4 107 (1.95%) WAN
5 92 (1.68%) TCP/IP
6 87 (1.59%) VPN
7 67 (1.22%) OSPF
8 58 (1.06%) BIG-IP
8 58 (1.06%) HTTP
9 56 (1.02%) SAN
10 51 (0.93%) SD-WAN
11 50 (0.91%) VXLAN
12 47 (0.86%) SSL
13 45 (0.82%) VLAN
14 39 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
15 38 (0.69%) LAN
16 37 (0.68%) DHCP
16 37 (0.68%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 36 (0.66%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 461 (8.42%) Power BI
2 348 (6.36%) PostgreSQL
3 294 (5.37%) Data Warehouse
4 250 (4.57%) SQL Server
5 224 (4.09%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.65%) Tableau
7 189 (3.45%) Relational Database
8 171 (3.12%) NoSQL
9 168 (3.07%) Metadata
10 160 (2.92%) Big Data
11 142 (2.59%) Amazon Athena
12 135 (2.47%) Amazon Redshift
13 134 (2.45%) BigQuery
14 128 (2.34%) Delta Lake
15 122 (2.23%) MongoDB
16 101 (1.84%) DynamoDB
17 95 (1.73%) Amazon RDS
18 86 (1.57%) MySQL
19 73 (1.33%) Hadoop
19 73 (1.33%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 661 (12.07%) Git
2 495 (9.04%) Jenkins
3 390 (7.12%) GitLab
4 292 (5.33%) JIRA
5 73 (1.33%) MLflow
5 73 (1.33%) Selenium
6 57 (1.04%) Postman
7 36 (0.66%) JMeter
8 34 (0.62%) Cypress.io
9 33 (0.60%) Cucumber
9 33 (0.60%) SonarQube
10 32 (0.58%) Bitbucket
11 31 (0.57%) Artifactory
12 27 (0.49%) REST Assured
13 26 (0.47%) JUnit
13 26 (0.47%) Maven
14 24 (0.44%) Sonatype Nexus
15 21 (0.38%) Gatling
16 20 (0.37%) Robot Framework
16 20 (0.37%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,183 (21.60%) Social Skills
2 1,136 (20.75%) Finance
3 732 (13.37%) Analytical Skills
4 517 (9.44%) Public Sector
5 399 (7.29%) Banking
6 190 (3.47%) Front Office
7 136 (2.48%) Documentation Skills
8 123 (2.25%) Investment Banking
9 104 (1.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 76 (1.39%) Retail
11 74 (1.35%) Marketing
12 61 (1.11%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.02%) Legal
14 53 (0.97%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.84%) Financial Institution
16 44 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
16 44 (0.80%) Publishing
17 38 (0.69%) Military
18 33 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
19 32 (0.58%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 997 (18.21%) Developer
2 853 (15.58%) Data Engineer
3 815 (14.88%) Senior
4 524 (9.57%) Python Developer
5 355 (6.48%) Lead
6 350 (6.39%) Python Engineer
7 319 (5.83%) Architect
8 293 (5.35%) DevOps Engineer
9 282 (5.15%) Analyst
10 266 (4.86%) Software Engineer
11 249 (4.55%) AWS Engineer
12 242 (4.42%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 210 (3.83%) Data Scientist
14 171 (3.12%) Senior Developer
15 167 (3.05%) Senior Data Engineer
16 166 (3.03%) Azure Engineer
17 162 (2.96%) Platform Engineer
18 156 (2.85%) Full-Stack Developer
19 154 (2.81%) Cloud Engineer
20 145 (2.65%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 422 (7.71%) REST
2 389 (7.10%) React
3 371 (6.78%) PySpark
4 323 (5.90%) Kafka
5 247 (4.51%) .NET
6 217 (3.96%) Node.js
7 210 (3.83%) RESTful
8 207 (3.78%) FastAPI
9 204 (3.73%) Pandas
10 181 (3.31%) JSON
11 167 (3.05%) PyTorch
12 147 (2.68%) Django
13 132 (2.41%) Flask
14 127 (2.32%) LangChain
15 126 (2.30%) NumPy
16 114 (2.08%) TensorFlow
17 113 (2.06%) scikit-learn
18 111 (2.03%) AngularJS
19 110 (2.01%) OAuth
20 104 (1.90%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 687 (12.55%) Cloud Native
2 274 (5.00%) Distributed Systems
3 153 (2.79%) AI Agents
3 153 (2.79%) Onboarding
4 151 (2.76%) Algorithms
5 149 (2.72%) Data Centre
6 143 (2.61%) Product Ownership
7 131 (2.39%) Data Structures
8 117 (2.14%) Legacy Systems
9 116 (2.12%) Management Information System
10 115 (2.10%) Data Protection Act
11 110 (2.01%) Derivative
12 100 (1.83%) Hybrid Cloud
13 99 (1.81%) Equities
14 97 (1.77%) Fixed Income
15 88 (1.61%) Security Posture
16 78 (1.42%) Enterprise Software
17 71 (1.30%) Public Cloud
18 59 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
19 58 (1.06%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 620 (11.32%) Linux
2 300 (5.48%) Windows
3 220 (4.02%) Unix
4 119 (2.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 78 (1.42%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.58%) VMS
8 26 (0.47%) AIX
9 24 (0.44%) Solaris
10 23 (0.42%) Android
11 20 (0.37%) CentOS
12 17 (0.31%) Apple iOS
13 15 (0.27%) Mac OS
14 12 (0.22%) zOS
15 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
16 7 (0.13%) Debian
16 7 (0.13%) Rocky
17 5 (0.091%) Amazon Linux
17 5 (0.091%) Embedded Linux
17 5 (0.091%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,065 (37.71%) CI/CD
2 1,501 (27.41%) DevOps
3 1,340 (24.47%) AI
4 1,199 (21.90%) Agile
5 1,093 (19.96%) Analytics
6 984 (17.97%) Infrastructure as Code
7 969 (17.70%) Data Pipeline
8 936 (17.09%) Problem-Solving
9 862 (15.74%) Machine Learning
10 771 (14.08%) Data Engineering
11 725 (13.24%) Data Modelling
12 724 (13.22%) Containerisation
13 696 (12.71%) Software Engineering
14 689 (12.58%) ETL
15 615 (11.23%) Data Science
16 588 (10.74%) Observability
17 554 (10.12%) Test Automation
18 541 (9.88%) Business Intelligence
19 520 (9.50%) LLM
20 462 (8.44%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,785 (32.60%) SQL
2 772 (14.10%) Java
3 640 (11.69%) PowerShell
4 599 (10.94%) Bash
5 472 (8.62%) JavaScript
6 390 (7.12%) TypeScript
7 344 (6.28%) C#
8 199 (3.63%) Go
9 161 (2.94%) R
10 144 (2.63%) C++
11 124 (2.26%) Scala
12 105 (1.92%) Shell Script
13 80 (1.46%) Bicep
14 79 (1.44%) Perl
15 64 (1.17%) Ruby
16 56 (1.02%) C
17 55 (1.00%) PL/SQL
18 54 (0.99%) T-SQL
19 51 (0.93%) Groovy
20 48 (0.88%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,208 (22.06%) Security Cleared
2 973 (17.77%) SC Cleared
3 400 (7.30%) Degree
4 164 (2.99%) DV Cleared
5 152 (2.78%) Computer Science Degree
6 129 (2.36%) BPSS Clearance
7 115 (2.10%) AWS Certification
8 112 (2.05%) Azure Certification
9 93 (1.70%) CISSP
10 75 (1.37%) Cisco Certification
11 70 (1.28%) Master's Degree
12 52 (0.95%) CCNP
12 52 (0.95%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 39 (0.71%) CISM
14 33 (0.60%) ISTQB
14 33 (0.60%) PhD
15 32 (0.58%) Microsoft Certification
16 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 26 (0.47%) CCIE
18 21 (0.38%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 548 (10.01%) Data Quality
2 228 (4.16%) QA
3 131 (2.39%) GDPR
4 113 (2.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 107 (1.95%) NIST
6 84 (1.53%) Accessibility
7 32 (0.58%) SLA
8 26 (0.47%) PCI DSS
9 25 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.44%) HIPAA
10 24 (0.44%) WCAG
11 20 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
12 16 (0.29%) SOC 2
13 14 (0.26%) NCSC
14 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.16%) GRC
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
18 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 833 (15.21%) Docker
2 141 (2.57%) Active Directory
3 107 (1.95%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (0.73%) vSphere
6 38 (0.69%) VMware NSX
7 34 (0.62%) Firmware
8 31 (0.57%) Hyper-V
9 20 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.33%) NFS
11 16 (0.29%) KVM
12 13 (0.24%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.22%) Squid
14 10 (0.18%) SRDF
15 9 (0.16%) Ceph
16 8 (0.15%) HDFS
16 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.13%) Postfix
18 5 (0.091%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
19 4 (0.073%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,154 (21.07%) Terraform
2 974 (17.79%) Kubernetes
3 559 (10.21%) Ansible
4 324 (5.92%) Grafana
5 273 (4.99%) Prometheus
6 76 (1.39%) Puppet
7 55 (1.00%) Argo
8 49 (0.89%) Istio
9 44 (0.80%) vRealize
10 39 (0.71%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.58%) vCenter Server
12 29 (0.53%) Kibana
12 29 (0.53%) Single Sign-On
13 26 (0.47%) Control-M
14 25 (0.46%) Nessus
14 25 (0.46%) ZABBIX
15 24 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
15 24 (0.44%) Nagios
16 22 (0.40%) NetBackup
17 21 (0.38%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 601 (10.98%) Microsoft
2 571 (10.43%) Databricks
3 297 (5.42%) Google
4 245 (4.47%) Oracle
5 210 (3.83%) Splunk
6 167 (3.05%) VMware
7 145 (2.65%) OpenAI
8 128 (2.34%) Cisco
9 123 (2.25%) Red Hat
10 100 (1.83%) ServiceNow
11 85 (1.55%) F5
12 83 (1.52%) Palo Alto
13 81 (1.48%) Dynatrace
14 80 (1.46%) CyberArk
15 77 (1.41%) IBM
15 77 (1.41%) Informatica
16 66 (1.21%) BeyondTrust
17 58 (1.06%) Foundry
18 55 (1.00%) Fortinet
19 53 (0.97%) Arista