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 7 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,189 4,078 4,176
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.15% 13.31% 9.30%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.07% 38.96% 31.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,516 2,753 2,940
10th Percentile £363 £380 £400
25th Percentile £415 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.95% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £749 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £503 £525
% change year-on-year -2.99% -4.29% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 54 116
10th Percentile £28.30 £20.46 £21.49
25th Percentile £41.94 £23.52 £37.50
Median hourly rate £54.00 £44.75 £54.25
Median % change year-on-year +20.67% -17.51% -16.54%
75th Percentile £69.38 £63.75 £69.62
90th Percentile £79.10 £75.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £51.25 £50.00
% change year-on-year -0.08% +2.50% -23.08%

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 12,634 10,468 13,136
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.58% 34.16% 29.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,417 6,809 9,275
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -6.25%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £719 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £490 £495
% change year-on-year -2.55% -1.01% -1.98%
Number of hourly rates quoted 483 249 511
10th Percentile £41.32 £21.25 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.75 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £68.75
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.37 £62.00
% change year-on-year +2.57% +2.21% -4.62%

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 7 March 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 7 March 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 7 March 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 4,332 £518 -10.00% 3,126
London -1 2,449 £550 -8.33% 1,367
UK excluding London -1 2,011 £488 -2.99% 2,424
Work from Home 0 1,586 £525 -4.55% 1,377
North of England +11 673 £481 -3.75% 507
South East -4 427 £500 -6.10% 783
Yorkshire +3 359 £488 -8.71% 200
Midlands -2 289 £500 +2.04% 269
Scotland +2 287 £425 -10.15% 169
North West +11 271 £475 -5.00% 226
West Midlands -1 237 £500 - 117
South West -4 215 £538 -6.52% 318
East of England -1 129 £500 +0.50% 318
East Midlands -14 51 £447 +5.18% 147
North East +7 49 £500 -4.76% 87
Wales -13 31 £473 -7.80% 90
Northern Ireland +6 29 £613 +16.67% 25

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
1 258 (4.97%) Apache Spark
2 203 (3.91%) Apache Airflow
3 166 (3.20%) Confluence
4 150 (2.89%) Apache
5 67 (1.29%) SAS
6 63 (1.21%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
8 26 (0.50%) OpenStack
9 25 (0.48%) nginx
10 24 (0.46%) Jupyter
11 21 (0.40%) Palantir Foundry
12 19 (0.37%) Appian
13 12 (0.23%) ArcGIS
14 9 (0.17%) Camunda
15 6 (0.12%) CMS
16 5 (0.096%) Apache Superset
16 5 (0.096%) Tomcat
17 4 (0.077%) Oracle Application Server
17 4 (0.077%) Traefik
18 3 (0.058%) Ethereum
Applications
1 126 (2.43%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.60%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.42%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.27%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.15%) Weka
8 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.058%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.039%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.019%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 8 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
4 4 (0.077%) Oracle EBS
5 3 (0.058%) Actimize
5 3 (0.058%) BambooHR
5 3 (0.058%) IntelliMatch
6 2 (0.039%) Cloudability
6 2 (0.039%) Loan IQ
6 2 (0.039%) NEC Housing
6 2 (0.039%) Payment Gateway
6 2 (0.039%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.039%) Shopify
7 1 (0.019%) Advent Geneva
7 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
7 1 (0.019%) ION MarketView
7 1 (0.019%) NetSuite
7 1 (0.019%) SAP BPC
Cloud Services
1 2,041 (39.33%) AWS
2 1,791 (34.52%) Azure
3 819 (15.78%) GCP
4 676 (13.03%) GitHub
5 547 (10.54%) Serverless
6 499 (9.62%) Power Platform
7 374 (7.21%) Azure DevOps
8 365 (7.03%) Amazon S3
9 361 (6.96%) AWS Lambda
10 341 (6.57%) GitHub Actions
11 263 (5.07%) Snowflake
12 259 (4.99%) Azure Data Factory
13 258 (4.97%) AWS CloudFormation
14 198 (3.82%) Amazon EKS
15 177 (3.41%) Amazon ECS
16 176 (3.39%) OpenShift
17 162 (3.12%) Amazon EC2
18 161 (3.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 155 (2.99%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 148 (2.85%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 220 (4.24%) Firewall
2 143 (2.76%) DNS
3 110 (2.12%) Network Security
3 110 (2.12%) TCP/IP
4 81 (1.56%) VPN
5 66 (1.27%) HTTP
6 65 (1.25%) BGP
7 57 (1.10%) WAN
8 42 (0.81%) SSL
9 41 (0.79%) MPLS
9 41 (0.79%) Wireshark
10 40 (0.77%) SAN
11 37 (0.71%) OSPF
12 34 (0.66%) LAN
13 33 (0.64%) DHCP
14 31 (0.60%) SD-WAN
15 30 (0.58%) VLAN
16 24 (0.46%) Wireless
17 22 (0.42%) BIG-IP
17 22 (0.42%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 416 (8.02%) Power BI
2 404 (7.79%) PostgreSQL
3 319 (6.15%) Data Warehouse
4 238 (4.59%) Data Lake
5 237 (4.57%) NoSQL
6 199 (3.84%) Relational Database
7 195 (3.76%) SQL Server
8 164 (3.16%) Tableau
9 159 (3.06%) Big Data
10 134 (2.58%) Metadata
11 129 (2.49%) Amazon RDS
12 125 (2.41%) BigQuery
13 119 (2.29%) MySQL
14 112 (2.16%) Delta Lake
15 110 (2.12%) Amazon Redshift
16 104 (2.00%) MongoDB
17 98 (1.89%) Amazon Athena
18 91 (1.75%) Azure SQL Database
19 87 (1.68%) Hadoop
20 84 (1.62%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 659 (12.70%) Git
2 557 (10.73%) Jenkins
3 433 (8.34%) GitLab
4 303 (5.84%) JIRA
5 93 (1.79%) MLflow
6 89 (1.72%) Selenium
7 51 (0.98%) Bitbucket
7 51 (0.98%) Postman
8 48 (0.93%) Cucumber
9 41 (0.79%) Sonatype Nexus
10 38 (0.73%) JUnit
11 34 (0.66%) JMeter
12 29 (0.56%) SpecFlow
13 25 (0.48%) Cypress.io
13 25 (0.48%) Visual Studio
14 24 (0.46%) Artifactory
14 24 (0.46%) CircleCI
15 23 (0.44%) Maven
16 21 (0.40%) Liquibase
16 21 (0.40%) SonarQube
General
1 1,302 (25.09%) Social Skills
2 1,027 (19.79%) Finance
3 711 (13.70%) Analytical Skills
4 492 (9.48%) Public Sector
5 425 (8.19%) Banking
6 178 (3.43%) Front Office
7 128 (2.47%) Documentation Skills
8 102 (1.97%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.33%) Retail
10 68 (1.31%) Marketing
11 64 (1.23%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 61 (1.18%) Financial Institution
12 61 (1.18%) Pharmaceutical
13 53 (1.02%) Telecoms
14 50 (0.96%) Legal
15 49 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
16 44 (0.85%) Manufacturing
17 33 (0.64%) Presentation Skills
18 31 (0.60%) Military
19 21 (0.40%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 958 (18.46%) Developer
2 722 (13.91%) Data Engineer
3 715 (13.78%) Senior
4 426 (8.21%) Python Developer
5 335 (6.46%) Lead
6 334 (6.44%) Architect
7 304 (5.86%) DevOps Engineer
8 296 (5.70%) Python Engineer
9 288 (5.55%) Analyst
10 266 (5.13%) Software Engineer
11 265 (5.11%) AWS Engineer
12 251 (4.84%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 205 (3.95%) Data Scientist
14 177 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
15 154 (2.97%) Senior Developer
16 153 (2.95%) Azure Engineer
17 142 (2.74%) Data Analyst
18 139 (2.68%) Full-Stack Developer
19 136 (2.62%) Cloud Engineer
19 136 (2.62%) Senior Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 447 (8.61%) REST
2 368 (7.09%) React
3 328 (6.32%) PySpark
4 324 (6.24%) Kafka
5 297 (5.72%) Node.js
6 230 (4.43%) Pandas
7 228 (4.39%) FastAPI
8 227 (4.37%) PyTorch
9 217 (4.18%) RESTful
10 214 (4.12%) .NET
11 183 (3.53%) TensorFlow
12 162 (3.12%) NumPy
13 146 (2.81%) scikit-learn
14 139 (2.68%) AngularJS
15 132 (2.54%) Flask
16 128 (2.47%) LangChain
17 122 (2.35%) JSON
18 118 (2.27%) Django
18 118 (2.27%) pytest
19 111 (2.14%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 507 (9.77%) Cloud Native
2 210 (4.05%) Distributed Systems
3 207 (3.99%) Algorithms
4 141 (2.72%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.45%) Equities
6 125 (2.41%) Data Protection Act
7 114 (2.20%) Fixed Income
8 112 (2.16%) Data Structures
9 109 (2.10%) Onboarding
10 106 (2.04%) AI Agents
11 104 (2.00%) Derivative
12 94 (1.81%) Security Posture
13 90 (1.73%) Enterprise Software
13 90 (1.73%) Legacy Systems
14 89 (1.72%) Hybrid Cloud
15 88 (1.70%) Public Cloud
16 85 (1.64%) Data Centre
17 83 (1.60%) Management Information System
18 60 (1.16%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
19 57 (1.10%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 703 (13.55%) Linux
2 333 (6.42%) Windows
3 197 (3.80%) Unix
4 100 (1.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.29%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.69%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.67%) Android
8 33 (0.64%) VMS
9 26 (0.50%) CentOS
10 24 (0.46%) Mac OS
11 21 (0.40%) Apple iOS
11 21 (0.40%) Solaris
12 10 (0.19%) AIX
13 9 (0.17%) Kali Linux
13 9 (0.17%) Windows 7
14 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.096%) Debian
14 5 (0.096%) Embedded Linux
14 5 (0.096%) zOS
15 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,904 (36.69%) CI/CD
2 1,465 (28.23%) DevOps
3 1,246 (24.01%) Agile
4 1,121 (21.60%) AI
5 1,080 (20.81%) Problem-Solving
6 1,004 (19.35%) Analytics
7 926 (17.85%) Infrastructure as Code
8 861 (16.59%) Machine Learning
9 831 (16.01%) Data Pipeline
10 777 (14.97%) Containerisation
11 693 (13.36%) Data Engineering
12 688 (13.26%) ETL
13 676 (13.03%) Data Modelling
14 627 (12.08%) Data Science
15 599 (11.54%) Test Automation
16 597 (11.51%) Software Engineering
17 501 (9.66%) Observability
18 495 (9.54%) Business Intelligence
19 449 (8.65%) LLM
20 385 (7.42%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,626 (31.34%) SQL
2 734 (14.15%) Java
3 685 (13.20%) PowerShell
4 616 (11.87%) Bash
5 520 (10.02%) JavaScript
6 361 (6.96%) TypeScript
7 334 (6.44%) C#
8 241 (4.64%) Go
9 175 (3.37%) C++
10 152 (2.93%) R
11 116 (2.24%) Shell Script
12 115 (2.22%) Perl
12 115 (2.22%) Scala
13 95 (1.83%) Ruby
14 70 (1.35%) Bicep
15 62 (1.19%) Kusto Query Language
16 51 (0.98%) C
17 47 (0.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 46 (0.89%) VBA
19 44 (0.85%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,182 (22.78%) Security Cleared
2 944 (18.19%) SC Cleared
3 457 (8.81%) Degree
4 215 (4.14%) Computer Science Degree
5 144 (2.78%) DV Cleared
6 140 (2.70%) AWS Certification
7 127 (2.45%) Master's Degree
8 120 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
9 107 (2.06%) Azure Certification
10 95 (1.83%) CISSP
11 76 (1.46%) Cisco Certification
12 59 (1.14%) CCNP
13 57 (1.10%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 47 (0.91%) PhD
15 45 (0.87%) CISM
16 41 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 38 (0.73%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.62%) Microsoft Certified Professional
19 31 (0.60%) CEH
20 30 (0.58%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 474 (9.13%) Data Quality
2 213 (4.10%) QA
3 186 (3.58%) GDPR
4 107 (2.06%) NIST
5 104 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 79 (1.52%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.66%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.64%) SLA
9 30 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 28 (0.54%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.44%) NCSC
12 18 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
13 17 (0.33%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.25%) WCAG
15 12 (0.23%) EU AI Act
16 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
17 10 (0.19%) MiFID
17 10 (0.19%) PMO
17 10 (0.19%) PSD2
18 9 (0.17%) EMIR
System Software
1 961 (18.52%) Docker
2 179 (3.45%) Active Directory
3 118 (2.27%) VMware Infrastructure
4 56 (1.08%) Virtual Machines
5 54 (1.04%) vSphere
6 47 (0.91%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.56%) Hyper-V
8 26 (0.50%) Firmware
9 15 (0.29%) KVM
9 15 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) HDFS
11 12 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.19%) Lustre
13 9 (0.17%) GPFS
14 8 (0.15%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
15 6 (0.12%) NFS
15 6 (0.12%) Postfix
16 5 (0.096%) NDS
16 5 (0.096%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,133 (21.83%) Terraform
2 1,079 (20.79%) Kubernetes
3 560 (10.79%) Ansible
4 356 (6.86%) Grafana
5 316 (6.09%) Prometheus
6 97 (1.87%) Argo
7 80 (1.54%) Puppet
8 53 (1.02%) Istio
9 49 (0.94%) vRealize
10 46 (0.89%) Kibana
11 41 (0.79%) Nessus
12 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
13 33 (0.64%) Single Sign-On
14 32 (0.62%) vCenter Server
15 28 (0.54%) Control-M
16 27 (0.52%) NetBackup
17 24 (0.46%) IBM Guardium
18 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
19 20 (0.39%) Rancher
20 17 (0.33%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 632 (12.18%) Microsoft
2 519 (10.00%) Databricks
3 304 (5.86%) Google
4 239 (4.61%) Splunk
5 223 (4.30%) Oracle
6 222 (4.28%) VMware
7 148 (2.85%) Red Hat
8 125 (2.41%) Cisco
9 120 (2.31%) OpenAI
10 110 (2.12%) ServiceNow
11 83 (1.60%) CyberArk
12 80 (1.54%) Foundry
13 67 (1.29%) BeyondTrust
14 64 (1.23%) F5
15 62 (1.19%) Palo Alto
16 59 (1.14%) Informatica
17 50 (0.96%) IBM
18 46 (0.89%) SAP
19 40 (0.77%) Atlassian
19 40 (0.77%) Dynatrace