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

6 months to
11 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,680 4,315 4,071
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.40% 13.07% 10.56%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.96% 39.78% 33.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,690 2,833 2,867
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £440 £427 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.29% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £647 £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 139 85 102
10th Percentile £30.40 £28.18 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.00 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £62.25
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -19.68% -4.23%
75th Percentile £78.38 £58.75 £71.41
90th Percentile £90.42 £84.18 £78.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.31 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.62% -28.57% +8.74%

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 14,215 10,846 12,251
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.03% 32.85% 31.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,222 7,180 8,365
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £498
% change year-on-year +5.26% -4.62% -0.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 534 298 342
10th Percentile £27.75 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £46.76 £36.96 £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 £67.44 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £80.00 £78.75
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 11 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 11 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 11 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 4,850 £550 +2.33% 6,060
London -3 2,868 £575 - 3,812
UK excluding London -7 2,162 £500 - 3,047
Work from Home -5 1,544 £530 -3.64% 5,891
North of England 0 736 £500 +5.26% 598
South East -7 458 £538 +7.50% 822
Yorkshire -1 381 £500 +1.44% 208
South West -3 285 £550 +4.76% 404
Scotland -4 284 £450 -10.00% 391
North West -2 277 £525 +13.70% 303
Midlands -20 231 £500 +5.26% 299
West Midlands -19 186 £500 +4.17% 145
East of England -7 155 £494 -5.95% 406
North East -3 90 £425 -2.86% 90
East Midlands -13 45 £469 +12.95% 153
Wales -10 29 £530 +24.71% 69
Northern Ireland +1 17 £363 -30.95% 93

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
1 294 (5.18%) Apache Airflow
2 272 (4.79%) Apache Spark
3 222 (3.91%) Apache
4 168 (2.96%) Confluence
5 57 (1.00%) Jupyter
6 56 (0.99%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.67%) SAS
8 30 (0.53%) OpenStack
9 25 (0.44%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) nginx
11 21 (0.37%) IIS
12 20 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
14 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
15 7 (0.12%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
17 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 114 (2.01%) Microsoft Excel
2 36 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.40%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
5 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
5 18 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.035%) 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 19 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
2 18 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
3 17 (0.30%) Aladdin
4 11 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
6 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
7 7 (0.12%) Front Arena
7 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
8 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
9 5 (0.088%) NetSuite
9 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
9 5 (0.088%) Summit
10 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.070%) Teamcenter
11 3 (0.053%) Endur
11 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
11 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
12 2 (0.035%) Global One
12 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
12 2 (0.035%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,097 (36.92%) AWS
2 1,917 (33.75%) Azure
3 872 (15.35%) GCP
4 755 (13.29%) GitHub
5 502 (8.84%) Power Platform
6 492 (8.66%) Serverless
7 451 (7.94%) Azure DevOps
8 442 (7.78%) GitHub Actions
9 389 (6.85%) Amazon S3
10 365 (6.43%) AWS Lambda
11 333 (5.86%) Snowflake
12 234 (4.12%) dbt
13 220 (3.87%) Azure Data Factory
14 193 (3.40%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 184 (3.24%) AWS CloudFormation
16 174 (3.06%) Amazon EKS
17 146 (2.57%) Entra ID
18 139 (2.45%) Amazon EC2
19 130 (2.29%) SaaS
20 129 (2.27%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 281 (4.95%) Firewall
2 212 (3.73%) DNS
3 149 (2.62%) Network Security
4 147 (2.59%) TCP/IP
5 125 (2.20%) BGP
6 123 (2.17%) VPN
7 113 (1.99%) WAN
8 86 (1.51%) DHCP
9 74 (1.30%) OSPF
10 69 (1.21%) SD-WAN
11 61 (1.07%) VLAN
12 58 (1.02%) BIG-IP
13 57 (1.00%) SSL
14 53 (0.93%) HTTP
15 52 (0.92%) VXLAN
16 49 (0.86%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 41 (0.72%) Ethernet VPN
18 40 (0.70%) SAN
19 39 (0.69%) SNMP
20 38 (0.67%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 448 (7.89%) Power BI
2 331 (5.83%) Data Warehouse
3 318 (5.60%) PostgreSQL
4 215 (3.79%) SQL Server
5 213 (3.75%) Metadata
6 210 (3.70%) Relational Database
7 193 (3.40%) Tableau
8 185 (3.26%) Data Lake
9 170 (2.99%) BigQuery
10 155 (2.73%) NoSQL
11 141 (2.48%) Big Data
12 131 (2.31%) Amazon Redshift
13 129 (2.27%) Amazon RDS
14 127 (2.24%) Amazon Athena
15 123 (2.17%) Delta Lake
16 122 (2.15%) MongoDB
17 109 (1.92%) DynamoDB
18 98 (1.73%) MySQL
19 71 (1.25%) Redis
20 63 (1.11%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 783 (13.79%) Git
2 500 (8.80%) Jenkins
3 462 (8.13%) GitLab
4 303 (5.33%) JIRA
5 116 (2.04%) Selenium
6 59 (1.04%) JMeter
6 59 (1.04%) Postman
7 58 (1.02%) SonarQube
8 55 (0.97%) MLflow
9 51 (0.90%) Claude Code
10 41 (0.72%) Bitbucket
11 35 (0.62%) Artifactory
11 35 (0.62%) Maven
12 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
13 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
13 33 (0.58%) REST Assured
14 31 (0.55%) Gatling
15 30 (0.53%) Sonatype Nexus
16 24 (0.42%) LoadRunner
17 21 (0.37%) JUnit
General
1 1,318 (23.20%) Social Skills
2 1,248 (21.97%) Finance
3 857 (15.09%) Analytical Skills
4 556 (9.79%) Public Sector
5 478 (8.42%) Banking
6 178 (3.13%) Front Office
7 145 (2.55%) Investment Banking
8 112 (1.97%) Documentation Skills
8 112 (1.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 111 (1.95%) Retail
10 94 (1.65%) Marketing
11 83 (1.46%) Telecoms
12 59 (1.04%) Military
13 57 (1.00%) Pharmaceutical
14 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
15 50 (0.88%) Legal
16 49 (0.86%) Law
17 48 (0.85%) Publishing
18 47 (0.83%) Financial Institution
19 43 (0.76%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 979 (17.24%) Senior
2 911 (16.04%) Developer
3 832 (14.65%) Data Engineer
4 482 (8.49%) Lead
5 481 (8.47%) Python Developer
6 422 (7.43%) Python Engineer
7 347 (6.11%) DevOps Engineer
8 296 (5.21%) Analyst
9 288 (5.07%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 283 (4.98%) Software Engineer
11 270 (4.75%) Architect
12 231 (4.07%) AWS Engineer
13 196 (3.45%) Platform Engineer
14 192 (3.38%) Cloud Engineer
14 192 (3.38%) Senior Developer
15 189 (3.33%) Data Scientist
16 188 (3.31%) Senior Data Engineer
17 180 (3.17%) Azure Engineer
18 147 (2.59%) Data Analyst
19 143 (2.52%) Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,355 (23.86%) Terraform
2 496 (8.73%) REST
3 377 (6.64%) PySpark
4 360 (6.34%) Kafka
5 308 (5.42%) React
6 253 (4.45%) .NET
7 215 (3.79%) JSON
8 206 (3.63%) FastAPI
9 205 (3.61%) Django
10 189 (3.33%) RESTful
11 172 (3.03%) Pandas
12 164 (2.89%) Node.js
13 147 (2.59%) pytest
14 142 (2.50%) LangChain
15 117 (2.06%) Flask
16 115 (2.02%) OAuth
17 114 (2.01%) PyTorch
18 112 (1.97%) HTML
19 109 (1.92%) YAML
20 102 (1.80%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 792 (13.94%) Cloud Native
2 311 (5.48%) Distributed Systems
3 260 (4.58%) AI Agents
4 228 (4.01%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.85%) Product Ownership
6 158 (2.78%) Data Centre
7 143 (2.52%) Data Structures
8 139 (2.45%) Algorithms
9 137 (2.41%) Legacy Systems
10 117 (2.06%) Hybrid Cloud
11 110 (1.94%) Data Protection Act
12 109 (1.92%) Management Information System
13 102 (1.80%) Derivative
14 97 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
15 86 (1.51%) Security Posture
16 81 (1.43%) Equities
17 75 (1.32%) Public Cloud
18 71 (1.25%) Linux Command Line
19 69 (1.21%) PKI
19 69 (1.21%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 760 (13.38%) Linux
2 334 (5.88%) Windows
3 250 (4.40%) Unix
4 156 (2.75%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.58%) Windows Server
6 45 (0.79%) Ubuntu
7 37 (0.65%) VMS
8 23 (0.40%) AIX
9 19 (0.33%) CentOS
9 19 (0.33%) Solaris
10 16 (0.28%) Android
11 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
12 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.16%) zOS
13 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
13 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Rocky
15 5 (0.088%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,312 (40.70%) CI/CD
2 1,631 (28.71%) DevOps
3 1,537 (27.06%) AI
4 1,274 (22.43%) Agile
5 1,255 (22.10%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,110 (19.54%) Analytics
7 993 (17.48%) Data Pipeline
8 933 (16.43%) Software Engineering
9 913 (16.07%) Problem-Solving
10 855 (15.05%) Machine Learning
11 823 (14.49%) Data Engineering
12 797 (14.03%) Containerisation
13 756 (13.31%) Data Modelling
14 738 (12.99%) Observability
15 665 (11.71%) Test Automation
16 649 (11.43%) ETL
17 637 (11.21%) Continuous Improvement
18 614 (10.81%) Validation
19 574 (10.11%) Platform Engineering
20 564 (9.93%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 1,870 (32.92%) SQL
2 828 (14.58%) Java
3 776 (13.66%) Bash
4 753 (13.26%) PowerShell
5 455 (8.01%) JavaScript
6 345 (6.07%) TypeScript
7 324 (5.70%) C#
8 209 (3.68%) Go
9 154 (2.71%) Shell Script
10 153 (2.69%) R
11 140 (2.46%) C++
12 137 (2.41%) Bicep
13 132 (2.32%) Scala
14 99 (1.74%) Perl
15 60 (1.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 59 (1.04%) Groovy
17 56 (0.99%) C
18 55 (0.97%) PL/SQL
18 55 (0.97%) Ruby
19 53 (0.93%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,381 (24.31%) Security Cleared
2 1,117 (19.67%) SC Cleared
3 421 (7.41%) Degree
4 239 (4.21%) DV Cleared
5 158 (2.78%) Computer Science Degree
6 151 (2.66%) Azure Certification
7 137 (2.41%) AWS Certification
8 120 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
9 96 (1.69%) CISSP
10 83 (1.46%) Cisco Certification
11 65 (1.14%) Master's Degree
12 45 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
13 41 (0.72%) CCNP
14 37 (0.65%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 35 (0.62%) ISTQB
16 34 (0.60%) CISM
16 34 (0.60%) PhD
17 30 (0.53%) DBS Check
18 28 (0.49%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 27 (0.48%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 627 (11.04%) Data Quality
2 304 (5.35%) QA
3 113 (1.99%) NIST
4 103 (1.81%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 96 (1.69%) GDPR
6 82 (1.44%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.62%) SLA
8 33 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.51%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) WCAG
11 24 (0.42%) PCI DSS
12 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 17 (0.30%) SOC 2
14 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
15 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
16 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.12%) MiFID
19 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
19 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 962 (16.94%) Docker
2 168 (2.96%) Active Directory
3 137 (2.41%) VMware Infrastructure
4 66 (1.16%) Virtual Machines
5 53 (0.93%) Hyper-V
6 39 (0.69%) vSphere
7 35 (0.62%) VMware NSX
8 25 (0.44%) Firmware
8 25 (0.44%) NFS
8 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
9 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
10 11 (0.19%) Ceph
11 10 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) Postfix
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,150 (20.25%) Kubernetes
2 633 (11.14%) Ansible
3 334 (5.88%) Grafana
4 243 (4.28%) Prometheus
5 81 (1.43%) Puppet
6 72 (1.27%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.18%) Argo
8 36 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
9 33 (0.58%) Istio
10 31 (0.55%) Kibana
11 28 (0.49%) Control-M
12 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.40%) vRealize
13 23 (0.40%) ZABBIX
14 22 (0.39%) Nagios
14 22 (0.39%) vCenter Server
15 20 (0.35%) FortiGate
16 19 (0.33%) Packer
17 17 (0.30%) HAProxy
18 16 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 732 (12.89%) Microsoft
2 580 (10.21%) Databricks
3 381 (6.71%) Google
4 249 (4.38%) Oracle
5 213 (3.75%) Splunk
6 181 (3.19%) VMware
7 156 (2.75%) OpenAI
8 141 (2.48%) Cisco
9 121 (2.13%) ServiceNow
10 104 (1.83%) Red Hat
11 99 (1.74%) Dynatrace
12 93 (1.64%) IBM
13 88 (1.55%) F5
14 87 (1.53%) Palo Alto
15 79 (1.39%) Foundry
16 77 (1.36%) Informatica
17 74 (1.30%) Fortinet
18 71 (1.25%) SAP
19 67 (1.18%) CyberArk
20 63 (1.11%) Salesforce