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 12 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,639 3,880 4,134
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.80% 12.31% 9.63%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.62% 37.59% 31.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,102 2,559 2,924
10th Percentile £360 £380 £400
25th Percentile £421 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £688 £688
90th Percentile £750 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 97 61 120
10th Percentile £29.00 £20.12 £30.90
25th Percentile £41.25 £22.50 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £47.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.68% -20.83% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.26 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.30 £77.50 £76.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £46.18 £58.00
% change year-on-year +10.89% -20.38% -10.77%

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 11,145 10,321 12,977
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.75% 32.75% 30.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,384 6,550 9,218
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -3.13%
75th Percentile £619 £640 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -1.28% -2.50% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 386 238 418
10th Percentile £35.63 £21.25 £34.20
25th Percentile £51.38 £36.00 £46.67
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% - -0.79%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.56 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.25 £85.00 £78.23
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% -

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 12 January 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 12 January 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 12 January 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 0 3,942 £525 -9.48% 4,596
London 0 2,269 £550 -8.33% 1,094
UK excluding London +2 1,777 £500 -2.44% 4,176
Work from Home 0 1,393 £525 -4.55% 2,115
North of England +7 567 £481 -4.83% 737
South East +3 390 £481 -12.50% 1,404
Yorkshire +8 283 £500 -6.98% 319
Midlands +9 278 £503 +5.89% 462
Scotland +4 260 £475 -0.94% 164
North West +4 240 £450 -5.26% 291
West Midlands +17 234 £517 +3.40% 150
South West -9 174 £550 -8.46% 557
East of England +6 126 £525 +8.25% 654
North East +10 48 £500 -11.50% 128
East Midlands -14 44 £414 +3.38% 304
Wales -12 26 £575 +15.00% 199
Northern Ireland 0 21 £588 +17.50% 100

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
1 210 (4.53%) Apache Airflow
1 210 (4.53%) Apache Spark
2 153 (3.30%) Apache
3 151 (3.26%) Confluence
4 60 (1.29%) SAS
5 57 (1.23%) SharePoint
6 34 (0.73%) nginx
7 33 (0.71%) OpenStack
8 22 (0.47%) Jupyter
9 21 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
10 17 (0.37%) Appian
11 10 (0.22%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 8 (0.17%) IIS
14 6 (0.13%) Camunda
14 6 (0.13%) CMS
14 6 (0.13%) Luigi
14 6 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
15 4 (0.086%) Tomcat
16 3 (0.065%) JBoss
Applications
1 129 (2.78%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.69%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.30%) MS Visio
6 9 (0.19%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 9 (0.19%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 3 (0.065%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.043%) LaTeX
9 2 (0.043%) Maya
9 2 (0.043%) NUKE
10 1 (0.022%) SPSS
10 1 (0.022%) Stata
10 1 (0.022%) Trello
Business Applications
1 15 (0.32%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.13%) Fidessa
5 3 (0.065%) Actimize
5 3 (0.065%) NetSuite
5 3 (0.065%) Remedy ITSM
5 3 (0.065%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.043%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.043%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.043%) Shopify
6 2 (0.043%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.022%) Bloomberg AIM
7 1 (0.022%) Exchequer
7 1 (0.022%) IntelliMatch
7 1 (0.022%) Maximo
7 1 (0.022%) NEC Housing
7 1 (0.022%) RMDS
7 1 (0.022%) TRIRIGA
7 1 (0.022%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,825 (39.34%) AWS
2 1,481 (31.92%) Azure
3 690 (14.87%) GCP
4 576 (12.42%) GitHub
5 506 (10.91%) Serverless
6 418 (9.01%) Power Platform
7 360 (7.76%) Amazon S3
8 342 (7.37%) AWS Lambda
9 311 (6.70%) GitHub Actions
10 298 (6.42%) Azure DevOps
11 233 (5.02%) Snowflake
12 231 (4.98%) AWS CloudFormation
13 203 (4.38%) Azure Data Factory
14 198 (4.27%) Amazon EC2
15 182 (3.92%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 173 (3.73%) Amazon ECS
17 168 (3.62%) Amazon EKS
18 137 (2.95%) OpenShift
19 133 (2.87%) dbt
20 130 (2.80%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 240 (5.17%) Firewall
2 158 (3.41%) DNS
3 124 (2.67%) TCP/IP
4 113 (2.44%) Network Security
5 81 (1.75%) HTTP
6 78 (1.68%) VPN
7 69 (1.49%) BGP
8 67 (1.44%) SSL
9 48 (1.03%) WAN
10 43 (0.93%) OSPF
11 37 (0.80%) MPLS
11 37 (0.80%) Wireshark
12 35 (0.75%) Wireless
13 33 (0.71%) SSH
14 32 (0.69%) LAN
14 32 (0.69%) SD-WAN
15 31 (0.67%) DHCP
15 31 (0.67%) SMTP
16 26 (0.56%) FTP
17 23 (0.50%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 362 (7.80%) PostgreSQL
2 358 (7.72%) Power BI
3 273 (5.88%) Data Warehouse
4 226 (4.87%) Relational Database
5 224 (4.83%) NoSQL
6 214 (4.61%) Data Lake
7 164 (3.54%) Big Data
8 161 (3.47%) Amazon RDS
9 157 (3.38%) SQL Server
10 146 (3.15%) Tableau
11 120 (2.59%) MySQL
12 98 (2.11%) Metadata
13 96 (2.07%) BigQuery
13 96 (2.07%) MongoDB
14 92 (1.98%) Hadoop
15 91 (1.96%) Amazon Athena
16 89 (1.92%) Amazon Redshift
17 79 (1.70%) DynamoDB
18 74 (1.60%) Azure SQL Database
18 74 (1.60%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 599 (12.91%) Git
2 548 (11.81%) Jenkins
3 420 (9.05%) GitLab
4 268 (5.78%) JIRA
5 81 (1.75%) Selenium
6 75 (1.62%) MLflow
7 48 (1.03%) Bitbucket
7 48 (1.03%) Cucumber
8 47 (1.01%) Sonatype Nexus
9 44 (0.95%) SonarQube
10 41 (0.88%) JUnit
11 37 (0.80%) Liquibase
12 34 (0.73%) Postman
13 32 (0.69%) JMeter
14 28 (0.60%) Cypress.io
15 27 (0.58%) Artifactory
16 26 (0.56%) CircleCI
16 26 (0.56%) Visual Studio
17 25 (0.54%) Maven
18 24 (0.52%) Gradle
General
1 1,268 (27.33%) Social Skills
2 940 (20.26%) Finance
3 649 (13.99%) Analytical Skills
4 427 (9.20%) Public Sector
5 419 (9.03%) Banking
6 164 (3.54%) Front Office
7 140 (3.02%) Investment Banking
8 118 (2.54%) Documentation Skills
9 73 (1.57%) Financial Institution
10 66 (1.42%) Marketing
11 65 (1.40%) Pharmaceutical
12 59 (1.27%) Telecoms
13 56 (1.21%) Retail
14 55 (1.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 41 (0.88%) Legal
16 40 (0.86%) Manufacturing
17 39 (0.84%) Presentation Skills
18 31 (0.67%) Influencing Skills
19 27 (0.58%) Military
20 23 (0.50%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 794 (17.12%) Developer
2 649 (13.99%) Senior
3 583 (12.57%) Data Engineer
4 330 (7.11%) Python Developer
5 321 (6.92%) DevOps Engineer
6 315 (6.79%) Python Engineer
7 290 (6.25%) Analyst
8 275 (5.93%) Architect
9 273 (5.88%) AWS Engineer
10 234 (5.04%) Software Engineer
11 229 (4.94%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 227 (4.89%) Lead
13 173 (3.73%) Data Scientist
14 172 (3.71%) Platform Engineer
15 147 (3.17%) Data Analyst
16 143 (3.08%) Senior Developer
17 123 (2.65%) Azure Engineer
18 118 (2.54%) Full-Stack Developer
19 115 (2.48%) Consultant
19 115 (2.48%) Senior Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 410 (8.84%) REST
2 295 (6.36%) React
3 287 (6.19%) Kafka
4 251 (5.41%) PySpark
5 231 (4.98%) Node.js
6 223 (4.81%) Pandas
7 219 (4.72%) FastAPI
8 215 (4.63%) RESTful
9 190 (4.10%) PyTorch
10 172 (3.71%) NumPy
11 163 (3.51%) TensorFlow
12 153 (3.30%) .NET
13 136 (2.93%) AngularJS
14 123 (2.65%) LangChain
15 118 (2.54%) Elastic Stack
16 117 (2.52%) scikit-learn
17 106 (2.28%) Flask
17 106 (2.28%) pytest
18 101 (2.18%) LDAP
19 97 (2.09%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 381 (8.21%) Cloud Native
2 191 (4.12%) Algorithms
3 182 (3.92%) Distributed Systems
4 121 (2.61%) Data Protection Act
4 121 (2.61%) Equities
5 120 (2.59%) Product Ownership
6 104 (2.24%) Data Structures
7 100 (2.16%) AI Agents
8 97 (2.09%) Derivative
9 94 (2.03%) Onboarding
10 92 (1.98%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
11 90 (1.94%) Enterprise Software
12 86 (1.85%) Fixed Income
13 79 (1.70%) Hedge funds
14 78 (1.68%) Security Posture
15 73 (1.57%) Data Centre
15 73 (1.57%) Hybrid Cloud
15 73 (1.57%) Public Cloud
16 69 (1.49%) Legacy Systems
17 66 (1.42%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 775 (16.71%) Linux
2 351 (7.57%) Windows
3 229 (4.94%) Unix
4 91 (1.96%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 60 (1.29%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.86%) Android
7 37 (0.80%) VMS
8 34 (0.73%) Ubuntu
9 28 (0.60%) CentOS
10 25 (0.54%) Solaris
11 22 (0.47%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.39%) Amazon Linux
13 17 (0.37%) Apple iOS
14 11 (0.24%) Windows 7
15 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
16 4 (0.086%) Robot Operating System
17 3 (0.065%) AIX
17 3 (0.065%) Debian
17 3 (0.065%) Embedded Linux
17 3 (0.065%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,591 (34.30%) CI/CD
2 1,310 (28.24%) DevOps
3 1,123 (24.21%) Agile
4 1,011 (21.79%) Problem-Solving
5 923 (19.90%) AI
6 830 (17.89%) Infrastructure as Code
7 791 (17.05%) Analytics
8 734 (15.82%) Machine Learning
9 696 (15.00%) Containerisation
10 667 (14.38%) Data Pipeline
11 546 (11.77%) Software Engineering
12 541 (11.66%) Data Science
13 540 (11.64%) ETL
14 539 (11.62%) Data Engineering
15 533 (11.49%) Data Modelling
16 497 (10.71%) Test Automation
17 412 (8.88%) Business Intelligence
18 386 (8.32%) Observability
19 360 (7.76%) Computer Science
20 357 (7.70%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,406 (30.31%) SQL
2 731 (15.76%) Java
3 640 (13.80%) PowerShell
4 615 (13.26%) Bash
5 479 (10.33%) JavaScript
6 279 (6.01%) TypeScript
7 276 (5.95%) C#
8 252 (5.43%) Go
9 214 (4.61%) C++
10 169 (3.64%) Perl
11 161 (3.47%) R
12 153 (3.30%) Shell Script
13 101 (2.18%) Scala
14 94 (2.03%) Ruby
15 59 (1.27%) Bicep
16 58 (1.25%) C
17 55 (1.19%) Kusto Query Language
18 53 (1.14%) VBA
19 45 (0.97%) PHP
20 37 (0.80%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,021 (22.01%) Security Cleared
2 827 (17.83%) SC Cleared
3 428 (9.23%) Degree
4 229 (4.94%) Computer Science Degree
5 144 (3.10%) DV Cleared
6 133 (2.87%) AWS Certification
7 118 (2.54%) Master's Degree
8 87 (1.88%) BPSS Clearance
9 83 (1.79%) Azure Certification
10 79 (1.70%) CISSP
11 76 (1.64%) Cisco Certification
12 70 (1.51%) MCP
13 49 (1.06%) CCNP
14 45 (0.97%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 40 (0.86%) PhD
16 36 (0.78%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 36 (0.78%) CCIE
17 34 (0.73%) CEH
18 33 (0.71%) CISM
18 33 (0.71%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 359 (7.74%) Data Quality
2 174 (3.75%) QA
3 153 (3.30%) GDPR
4 83 (1.79%) NIST
5 82 (1.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 58 (1.25%) Accessibility
7 31 (0.67%) PCI DSS
8 29 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.56%) HIPAA
10 23 (0.50%) SLA
11 22 (0.47%) NCSC
12 16 (0.34%) SOC 2
13 15 (0.32%) EU AI Act
14 9 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
14 9 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
14 9 (0.19%) EMIR
14 9 (0.19%) MiFID
15 8 (0.17%) PMO
15 8 (0.17%) WCAG
16 6 (0.13%) PSD2
System Software
1 935 (20.16%) Docker
2 190 (4.10%) Active Directory
3 107 (2.31%) VMware Infrastructure
4 36 (0.78%) VMware NSX
5 35 (0.75%) vSphere
6 31 (0.67%) Virtual Machines
7 24 (0.52%) Firmware
8 20 (0.43%) HDFS
8 20 (0.43%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.37%) KVM
10 15 (0.32%) DFS Replication
10 15 (0.32%) Squid
11 14 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.28%) Postfix
13 12 (0.26%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 10 (0.22%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) Dovecot
15 9 (0.19%) GPFS
16 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
16 8 (0.17%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,040 (22.42%) Terraform
2 989 (21.32%) Kubernetes
3 589 (12.70%) Ansible
4 353 (7.61%) Grafana
5 296 (6.38%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.88%) Argo
7 79 (1.70%) Puppet
8 54 (1.16%) Kibana
9 43 (0.93%) vRealize
10 40 (0.86%) Istio
11 35 (0.75%) Single Sign-On
12 33 (0.71%) Progress Chef
13 32 (0.69%) Nessus
14 28 (0.60%) NetBackup
15 20 (0.43%) ITRS Geneos
16 18 (0.39%) logstash
17 16 (0.34%) Nmap
17 16 (0.34%) QRadar
18 15 (0.32%) Packer
18 15 (0.32%) Proxmox
Vendors
1 546 (11.77%) Microsoft
2 415 (8.95%) Databricks
3 264 (5.69%) Google
4 245 (5.28%) Splunk
5 226 (4.87%) Oracle
6 208 (4.48%) VMware
7 140 (3.02%) Red Hat
8 119 (2.57%) ServiceNow
9 116 (2.50%) Cisco
10 99 (2.13%) OpenAI
11 91 (1.96%) CyberArk
12 83 (1.79%) F5
13 76 (1.64%) Palo Alto
14 68 (1.47%) Foundry
15 66 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
16 52 (1.12%) SAP
17 44 (0.95%) Atlassian
18 43 (0.93%) Dynatrace
19 39 (0.84%) Salesforce
20 38 (0.82%) CheckPoint