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 23 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
23 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,006 3,968 4,133
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.31% 13.00% 9.29%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.23% 38.55% 31.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,389 2,650 2,922
10th Percentile £358 £380 £400
25th Percentile £413 £459 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £502 £525
% change year-on-year -3.34% -4.43% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 55 107
10th Percentile £28.30 £20.12 £24.32
25th Percentile £41.60 £23.80 £40.63
Median hourly rate £54.00 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.36 £65.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.90 £79.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +13.80% -25.00% -7.69%

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 12,142 10,294 13,075
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.87% 33.73% 29.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,090 6,608 9,261
10th Percentile £352 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -5.78%
75th Percentile £606 £638 £650
90th Percentile £714 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £480 £500
% change year-on-year - -4.00% -1.96%
Number of hourly rates quoted 464 235 496
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.55 £35.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £35.38 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.16%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.62
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.97% +1.99% -3.85%

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 23 February 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 23 February 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 23 February 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 4,181 £518 -10.00% 2,543
London 0 2,382 £550 -8.33% 1,123
UK excluding London -1 1,931 £485 -3.34% 1,994
Work from Home -1 1,536 £525 -4.55% 1,060
North of England +12 654 £475 -5.00% 454
South East -4 406 £492 -9.72% 640
Yorkshire +7 349 £487 -2.60% 151
Scotland +3 288 £447 -5.89% 154
Midlands -2 271 £500 +5.04% 242
North West +11 263 £460 -3.16% 232
West Midlands -2 226 £500 - 117
South West -6 191 £550 -8.33% 247
East of England +1 131 £525 +5.00% 209
North East +2 47 £475 -7.32% 72
East Midlands -20 44 £441 +10.85% 124
Wales -13 32 £473 -7.80% 62
Northern Ireland +5 28 £600 +14.29% 24

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
1 245 (4.89%) Apache Spark
2 191 (3.82%) Apache Airflow
3 147 (2.94%) Apache
3 147 (2.94%) Confluence
4 69 (1.38%) SAS
5 61 (1.22%) SharePoint
6 29 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
7 27 (0.54%) nginx
7 27 (0.54%) OpenStack
8 23 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 22 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
10 20 (0.40%) Appian
11 14 (0.28%) ArcGIS
12 8 (0.16%) Camunda
13 6 (0.12%) CMS
14 5 (0.100%) Apache Superset
14 5 (0.100%) Tomcat
15 4 (0.080%) Oracle Application Server
15 4 (0.080%) Traefik
16 3 (0.060%) Ethereum
Applications
1 124 (2.48%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 19 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 13 (0.26%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 3 (0.060%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.060%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.060%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.020%) CPLEX
9 1 (0.020%) Maya
9 1 (0.020%) NUKE
9 1 (0.020%) Trello
Business Applications
1 18 (0.36%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.24%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
5 4 (0.080%) Bloomberg AIM
6 3 (0.060%) Actimize
6 3 (0.060%) IntelliMatch
6 3 (0.060%) Remedy ITSM
7 2 (0.040%) Cloudability
7 2 (0.040%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.040%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.040%) Shopify
8 1 (0.020%) Advent Geneva
8 1 (0.020%) Cerner Millennium
8 1 (0.020%) ION MarketView
8 1 (0.020%) Loan IQ
8 1 (0.020%) NetSuite
8 1 (0.020%) Salesforce CRM
8 1 (0.020%) SAP BPC
8 1 (0.020%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,969 (39.33%) AWS
2 1,709 (34.14%) Azure
3 783 (15.64%) GCP
4 648 (12.94%) GitHub
5 535 (10.69%) Serverless
6 471 (9.41%) Power Platform
7 369 (7.37%) Amazon S3
8 353 (7.05%) Azure DevOps
9 352 (7.03%) AWS Lambda
10 329 (6.57%) GitHub Actions
11 253 (5.05%) AWS CloudFormation
12 248 (4.95%) Azure Data Factory
13 246 (4.91%) Snowflake
14 190 (3.80%) Amazon EKS
15 179 (3.58%) Amazon ECS
16 171 (3.42%) Amazon EC2
17 162 (3.24%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 161 (3.22%) OpenShift
19 154 (3.08%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 141 (2.82%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 217 (4.33%) Firewall
2 145 (2.90%) DNS
3 113 (2.26%) Network Security
3 113 (2.26%) TCP/IP
4 79 (1.58%) VPN
5 61 (1.22%) BGP
5 61 (1.22%) HTTP
6 50 (1.00%) SSL
7 49 (0.98%) WAN
8 41 (0.82%) Wireshark
9 35 (0.70%) LAN
9 35 (0.70%) MPLS
9 35 (0.70%) OSPF
10 31 (0.62%) DHCP
11 29 (0.58%) SAN
12 28 (0.56%) Wireless
13 27 (0.54%) VLAN
14 26 (0.52%) SD-WAN
15 23 (0.46%) BIG-IP
16 21 (0.42%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 390 (7.79%) Power BI
2 373 (7.45%) PostgreSQL
3 312 (6.23%) Data Warehouse
4 238 (4.75%) Data Lake
5 235 (4.69%) NoSQL
6 198 (3.96%) Relational Database
7 184 (3.68%) SQL Server
8 161 (3.22%) Big Data
9 156 (3.12%) Tableau
10 136 (2.72%) Amazon RDS
11 124 (2.48%) Metadata
12 122 (2.44%) BigQuery
13 116 (2.32%) MySQL
14 107 (2.14%) Delta Lake
15 99 (1.98%) Amazon Redshift
16 96 (1.92%) Amazon Athena
17 95 (1.90%) MongoDB
18 85 (1.70%) Azure SQL Database
19 84 (1.68%) Hadoop
20 75 (1.50%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 613 (12.25%) Git
2 535 (10.69%) Jenkins
3 429 (8.57%) GitLab
4 283 (5.65%) JIRA
5 95 (1.90%) MLflow
6 81 (1.62%) Selenium
7 47 (0.94%) Postman
8 45 (0.90%) Cucumber
9 43 (0.86%) Bitbucket
10 40 (0.80%) Sonatype Nexus
11 36 (0.72%) JUnit
12 34 (0.68%) JMeter
13 28 (0.56%) Liquibase
13 28 (0.56%) SpecFlow
14 25 (0.50%) Cypress.io
14 25 (0.50%) Visual Studio
15 24 (0.48%) CircleCI
15 24 (0.48%) Maven
16 22 (0.44%) Artifactory
16 22 (0.44%) SonarQube
General
1 1,298 (25.93%) Social Skills
2 997 (19.92%) Finance
3 696 (13.90%) Analytical Skills
4 466 (9.31%) Public Sector
5 417 (8.33%) Banking
6 164 (3.28%) Front Office
7 130 (2.60%) Documentation Skills
8 106 (2.12%) Investment Banking
9 68 (1.36%) Retail
10 67 (1.34%) Financial Institution
10 67 (1.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 65 (1.30%) Marketing
12 61 (1.22%) Pharmaceutical
13 53 (1.06%) Telecoms
14 47 (0.94%) Legal
15 43 (0.86%) Influencing Skills
15 43 (0.86%) Manufacturing
16 40 (0.80%) Presentation Skills
17 32 (0.64%) Military
18 24 (0.48%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 904 (18.06%) Developer
2 707 (14.12%) Senior
3 705 (14.08%) Data Engineer
4 394 (7.87%) Python Developer
5 321 (6.41%) Architect
6 305 (6.09%) DevOps Engineer
7 302 (6.03%) Lead
8 299 (5.97%) Analyst
9 289 (5.77%) Python Engineer
10 262 (5.23%) AWS Engineer
11 241 (4.81%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 237 (4.73%) Software Engineer
13 200 (4.00%) Data Scientist
14 173 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
15 157 (3.14%) Senior Developer
16 151 (3.02%) Data Analyst
17 144 (2.88%) Azure Engineer
18 136 (2.72%) Senior Data Engineer
19 132 (2.64%) Full-Stack Developer
20 131 (2.62%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 432 (8.63%) REST
2 346 (6.91%) React
3 319 (6.37%) PySpark
4 314 (6.27%) Kafka
5 267 (5.33%) Node.js
6 229 (4.57%) Pandas
7 219 (4.37%) PyTorch
8 214 (4.27%) FastAPI
9 208 (4.16%) RESTful
10 205 (4.10%) .NET
11 178 (3.56%) TensorFlow
12 168 (3.36%) NumPy
13 141 (2.82%) scikit-learn
14 136 (2.72%) AngularJS
15 130 (2.60%) Flask
16 128 (2.56%) LangChain
17 116 (2.32%) pytest
18 112 (2.24%) JSON
19 111 (2.22%) Django
20 106 (2.12%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 469 (9.37%) Cloud Native
2 202 (4.04%) Algorithms
2 202 (4.04%) Distributed Systems
3 136 (2.72%) Product Ownership
4 123 (2.46%) Data Protection Act
5 120 (2.40%) Equities
6 111 (2.22%) Data Structures
7 104 (2.08%) Onboarding
8 96 (1.92%) AI Agents
9 95 (1.90%) Fixed Income
10 93 (1.86%) Derivative
11 91 (1.82%) Enterprise Software
12 88 (1.76%) Public Cloud
12 88 (1.76%) Security Posture
13 87 (1.74%) Legacy Systems
14 86 (1.72%) Hybrid Cloud
15 85 (1.70%) Management Information System
16 74 (1.48%) Data Centre
17 66 (1.32%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
18 59 (1.18%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 705 (14.08%) Linux
2 319 (6.37%) Windows
3 201 (4.02%) Unix
4 94 (1.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.26%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.76%) Android
7 37 (0.74%) Ubuntu
8 33 (0.66%) VMS
9 26 (0.52%) CentOS
10 25 (0.50%) Mac OS
11 24 (0.48%) Solaris
12 21 (0.42%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.20%) Windows 7
14 9 (0.18%) Kali Linux
15 8 (0.16%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.100%) Debian
16 5 (0.100%) Embedded Linux
17 4 (0.080%) Windows Server 2008
17 4 (0.080%) Windows Server 2016
17 4 (0.080%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,811 (36.18%) CI/CD
2 1,406 (28.09%) DevOps
3 1,197 (23.91%) Agile
4 1,071 (21.39%) Problem-Solving
5 1,062 (21.21%) AI
6 955 (19.08%) Analytics
7 901 (18.00%) Infrastructure as Code
8 822 (16.42%) Machine Learning
9 797 (15.92%) Data Pipeline
10 760 (15.18%) Containerisation
11 663 (13.24%) Data Engineering
12 650 (12.98%) ETL
13 631 (12.60%) Data Modelling
14 611 (12.21%) Data Science
15 562 (11.23%) Test Automation
16 557 (11.13%) Software Engineering
17 464 (9.27%) Observability
18 457 (9.13%) Business Intelligence
19 430 (8.59%) LLM
20 366 (7.31%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,569 (31.34%) SQL
2 717 (14.32%) Java
3 657 (13.12%) PowerShell
4 598 (11.95%) Bash
5 517 (10.33%) JavaScript
6 325 (6.49%) C#
7 322 (6.43%) TypeScript
8 235 (4.69%) Go
9 181 (3.62%) C++
10 155 (3.10%) R
11 121 (2.42%) Perl
11 121 (2.42%) Shell Script
12 111 (2.22%) Scala
13 92 (1.84%) Ruby
14 62 (1.24%) Bicep
15 61 (1.22%) Kusto Query Language
16 49 (0.98%) C
16 49 (0.98%) VBA
17 42 (0.84%) T-SQL
18 38 (0.76%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,136 (22.69%) Security Cleared
2 911 (18.20%) SC Cleared
3 458 (9.15%) Degree
4 222 (4.43%) Computer Science Degree
5 140 (2.80%) DV Cleared
6 136 (2.72%) AWS Certification
7 129 (2.58%) Master's Degree
8 112 (2.24%) BPSS Clearance
9 95 (1.90%) Azure Certification
10 90 (1.80%) CISSP
11 68 (1.36%) Cisco Certification
12 60 (1.20%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 52 (1.04%) CCNP
14 46 (0.92%) PhD
15 43 (0.86%) CISM
16 39 (0.78%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 36 (0.72%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.64%) CEH
19 31 (0.62%) Microsoft Certified Professional
20 27 (0.54%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 453 (9.05%) Data Quality
2 198 (3.96%) QA
3 173 (3.46%) GDPR
4 104 (2.08%) NIST
5 102 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 75 (1.50%) Accessibility
7 30 (0.60%) PCI DSS
8 29 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 28 (0.56%) HIPAA
10 27 (0.54%) SLA
11 23 (0.46%) NCSC
12 16 (0.32%) SOC 2
13 14 (0.28%) Actionable Recommendations
14 12 (0.24%) EU AI Act
14 12 (0.24%) WCAG
15 11 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.20%) MiFID
16 10 (0.20%) PMO
16 10 (0.20%) PSD2
17 9 (0.18%) EMIR
System Software
1 950 (18.98%) Docker
2 175 (3.50%) Active Directory
3 113 (2.26%) VMware Infrastructure
4 52 (1.04%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (1.00%) vSphere
6 48 (0.96%) VMware NSX
7 28 (0.56%) Hyper-V
8 21 (0.42%) Firmware
9 15 (0.30%) KVM
9 15 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 12 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 11 (0.22%) HDFS
12 10 (0.20%) Lustre
13 9 (0.18%) GPFS
14 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
15 7 (0.14%) Postfix
15 7 (0.14%) Squid
16 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
17 5 (0.100%) NetIQ eDirectory
17 5 (0.100%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,118 (22.33%) Terraform
2 1,051 (20.99%) Kubernetes
3 539 (10.77%) Ansible
4 344 (6.87%) Grafana
5 306 (6.11%) Prometheus
6 92 (1.84%) Argo
7 71 (1.42%) Puppet
8 53 (1.06%) vRealize
9 49 (0.98%) Kibana
10 44 (0.88%) Istio
11 39 (0.78%) Nessus
12 32 (0.64%) Single Sign-On
13 29 (0.58%) vCenter Server
14 27 (0.54%) Progress Chef
15 26 (0.52%) Control-M
16 25 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
17 24 (0.48%) NetBackup
18 22 (0.44%) IBM Guardium
19 18 (0.36%) ITRS Geneos
19 18 (0.36%) Nmap
Vendors
1 614 (12.27%) Microsoft
2 509 (10.17%) Databricks
3 301 (6.01%) Google
4 238 (4.75%) Splunk
5 219 (4.37%) Oracle
5 219 (4.37%) VMware
6 145 (2.90%) Red Hat
7 116 (2.32%) OpenAI
8 113 (2.26%) Cisco
9 108 (2.16%) ServiceNow
10 83 (1.66%) CyberArk
11 78 (1.56%) Foundry
12 69 (1.38%) F5
12 69 (1.38%) Palo Alto
13 66 (1.32%) BeyondTrust
14 55 (1.10%) Informatica
15 46 (0.92%) IBM
16 45 (0.90%) SAP
17 40 (0.80%) Atlassian
18 39 (0.78%) Dynatrace