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 9 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,269 3,891 3,992
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.04% 13.34% 9.26%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.81% 39.16% 31.31%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,515 2,736 2,859
10th Percentile £363 £385 £390
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £551
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -0.09% -8.25%
75th Percentile £623 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -2.50% -2.44% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 51 97
10th Percentile £30.49 £21.25 £21.54
25th Percentile £46.25 £26.41 £38.00
Median hourly rate £55.00 £39.32 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +39.88% -34.47% -6.80%
75th Percentile £70.36 £56.25 £71.25
90th Percentile £85.00 £71.25 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +16.67% -28.00% +8.70%

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 12,910 9,936 12,750
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.05% 34.06% 29.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,503 6,761 9,074
10th Percentile £355 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £712 £769 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £489
% change year-on-year - -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 565 248 490
10th Percentile £41.94 £25.07 £32.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +0.81% +2.27%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £79.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% +2.56%

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 9 May 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 9 May 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 9 May 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 4,386 £525 -4.55% 2,604
London -3 2,484 £550 -8.33% 1,224
UK excluding London -1 2,047 £488 -2.50% 1,813
Work from Home -1 1,506 £525 -4.55% 1,034
North of England +9 691 £478 -2.75% 463
South East -3 414 £513 -2.38% 600
Yorkshire 0 385 £475 -5.00% 129
Scotland +2 295 £425 -10.53% 103
Midlands -11 257 £500 +10.01% 209
South West +2 253 £500 -6.98% 203
North West +3 251 £500 +5.26% 250
West Midlands -9 195 £500 - 101
East of England -5 130 £500 - 177
North East +7 64 £475 +5.56% 84
East Midlands -10 61 £470 +10.59% 108
Northern Ireland +17 23 £463 -18.68% 21
Wales -14 22 £463 -7.50% 54

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
1 289 (5.48%) Apache Spark
2 210 (3.99%) Apache Airflow
3 171 (3.25%) Apache
4 137 (2.60%) Confluence
5 50 (0.95%) SharePoint
6 49 (0.93%) SAS
7 35 (0.66%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.40%) nginx
10 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.28%) ArcGIS
11 15 (0.28%) Palantir Foundry
12 11 (0.21%) Appian
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) CMS
14 7 (0.13%) Camunda
14 7 (0.13%) IIS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.095%) CICS
16 5 (0.095%) Tomcat
Applications
1 125 (2.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.47%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
4 20 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
8 3 (0.057%) Weka
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 13 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Fidessa
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
5 5 (0.095%) Remedy ITSM
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.038%) Actimize
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle ERP
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) SimCorp Dimension
8 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 1,995 (37.86%) AWS
2 1,792 (34.01%) Azure
3 763 (14.48%) GCP
4 653 (12.39%) GitHub
5 525 (9.96%) Power Platform
6 473 (8.98%) Serverless
7 381 (7.23%) Azure DevOps
8 377 (7.16%) Amazon S3
9 343 (6.51%) GitHub Actions
10 341 (6.47%) AWS Lambda
11 267 (5.07%) Azure Data Factory
12 239 (4.54%) Snowflake
13 217 (4.12%) AWS CloudFormation
14 172 (3.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 166 (3.15%) OpenShift
16 164 (3.11%) Amazon EKS
17 158 (3.00%) dbt
18 138 (2.62%) Amazon ECS
19 134 (2.54%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 128 (2.43%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 184 (3.49%) Firewall
2 132 (2.51%) DNS
3 111 (2.11%) Network Security
4 91 (1.73%) TCP/IP
5 83 (1.58%) BGP
6 77 (1.46%) VPN
6 77 (1.46%) WAN
7 57 (1.08%) HTTP
8 55 (1.04%) OSPF
9 44 (0.84%) SAN
10 40 (0.76%) SNMP
11 36 (0.68%) VXLAN
12 35 (0.66%) BIG-IP
12 35 (0.66%) MPLS
12 35 (0.66%) SD-WAN
13 33 (0.63%) DHCP
13 33 (0.63%) LAN
14 32 (0.61%) SSL
15 31 (0.59%) Wireshark
16 30 (0.57%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 455 (8.64%) Power BI
2 348 (6.60%) PostgreSQL
3 287 (5.45%) Data Warehouse
4 244 (4.63%) SQL Server
5 235 (4.46%) Data Lake
6 196 (3.72%) Tableau
7 189 (3.59%) Relational Database
8 177 (3.36%) NoSQL
9 167 (3.17%) Big Data
10 166 (3.15%) Metadata
11 140 (2.66%) Delta Lake
12 133 (2.52%) BigQuery
13 123 (2.33%) Amazon Athena
14 117 (2.22%) Amazon Redshift
15 108 (2.05%) MongoDB
16 99 (1.88%) Amazon RDS
17 93 (1.77%) MySQL
18 90 (1.71%) Azure SQL Database
18 90 (1.71%) DynamoDB
19 80 (1.52%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 651 (12.36%) Git
2 474 (9.00%) Jenkins
3 366 (6.95%) GitLab
4 248 (4.71%) JIRA
5 94 (1.78%) MLflow
6 71 (1.35%) Selenium
7 58 (1.10%) Postman
8 36 (0.68%) Cucumber
9 32 (0.61%) Bitbucket
10 31 (0.59%) Artifactory
11 30 (0.57%) JMeter
11 30 (0.57%) Sonatype Nexus
12 29 (0.55%) SonarQube
13 25 (0.47%) Cypress.io
13 25 (0.47%) JUnit
14 23 (0.44%) Robot Framework
15 22 (0.42%) Maven
16 20 (0.38%) REST Assured
17 19 (0.36%) SpecFlow
18 18 (0.34%) Gatling
General
1 1,163 (22.07%) Social Skills
2 1,027 (19.49%) Finance
3 705 (13.38%) Analytical Skills
4 478 (9.07%) Public Sector
5 366 (6.95%) Banking
6 181 (3.44%) Front Office
7 133 (2.52%) Documentation Skills
8 97 (1.84%) Investment Banking
9 76 (1.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 70 (1.33%) Marketing
11 60 (1.14%) Retail
12 53 (1.01%) Legal
12 53 (1.01%) Telecoms
13 52 (0.99%) Pharmaceutical
14 46 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
15 36 (0.68%) Financial Institution
16 35 (0.66%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.65%) Publishing
18 32 (0.61%) Military
19 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 996 (18.90%) Developer
2 796 (15.11%) Data Engineer
3 750 (14.23%) Senior
4 491 (9.32%) Python Developer
5 349 (6.62%) Architect
6 341 (6.47%) Lead
7 301 (5.71%) Python Engineer
8 278 (5.28%) Analyst
9 272 (5.16%) DevOps Engineer
10 253 (4.80%) Software Engineer
11 224 (4.25%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 220 (4.18%) AWS Engineer
13 211 (4.00%) Data Scientist
14 165 (3.13%) Azure Engineer
15 160 (3.04%) Senior Developer
16 158 (3.00%) Senior Data Engineer
17 156 (2.96%) Platform Engineer
18 146 (2.77%) Data Analyst
19 145 (2.75%) Full-Stack Developer
20 131 (2.49%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 388 (7.36%) REST
2 362 (6.87%) React
3 357 (6.78%) PySpark
4 337 (6.40%) Kafka
5 244 (4.63%) Node.js
6 239 (4.54%) .NET
7 218 (4.14%) Pandas
8 190 (3.61%) PyTorch
9 186 (3.53%) FastAPI
10 180 (3.42%) RESTful
11 163 (3.09%) JSON
12 136 (2.58%) TensorFlow
13 133 (2.52%) NumPy
14 126 (2.39%) Django
14 126 (2.39%) Flask
15 125 (2.37%) scikit-learn
16 123 (2.33%) LangChain
17 120 (2.28%) AngularJS
18 110 (2.09%) LDAP
19 103 (1.95%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 545 (10.34%) Cloud Native
2 227 (4.31%) Distributed Systems
3 159 (3.02%) Algorithms
4 139 (2.64%) Product Ownership
5 125 (2.37%) AI Agents
6 122 (2.32%) Data Protection Act
7 118 (2.24%) Onboarding
8 115 (2.18%) Data Structures
9 114 (2.16%) Data Centre
10 109 (2.07%) Derivative
11 107 (2.03%) Fixed Income
12 105 (1.99%) Equities
13 101 (1.92%) Management Information System
14 96 (1.82%) Legacy Systems
15 92 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
16 89 (1.69%) Hybrid Cloud
17 85 (1.61%) Security Posture
18 72 (1.37%) Public Cloud
19 48 (0.91%) Self-Motivation
20 46 (0.87%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 646 (12.26%) Linux
2 297 (5.64%) Windows
3 213 (4.04%) Unix
4 97 (1.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 65 (1.23%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.70%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.66%) VMS
8 25 (0.47%) AIX
8 25 (0.47%) Android
9 23 (0.44%) Solaris
10 21 (0.40%) Mac OS
11 20 (0.38%) CentOS
12 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.19%) Debian
13 10 (0.19%) zOS
14 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
17 5 (0.095%) Amazon Linux
17 5 (0.095%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,941 (36.84%) CI/CD
2 1,397 (26.51%) DevOps
3 1,192 (22.62%) AI
4 1,139 (21.62%) Agile
5 1,052 (19.97%) Analytics
6 959 (18.20%) Problem-Solving
7 921 (17.48%) Infrastructure as Code
8 888 (16.85%) Data Pipeline
9 817 (15.51%) Machine Learning
10 733 (13.91%) Containerisation
11 712 (13.51%) Data Modelling
12 711 (13.49%) Data Engineering
13 697 (13.23%) ETL
14 608 (11.54%) Software Engineering
15 587 (11.14%) Data Science
16 543 (10.31%) Observability
17 538 (10.21%) Test Automation
18 530 (10.06%) Business Intelligence
19 443 (8.41%) LLM
20 418 (7.93%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,741 (33.04%) SQL
2 774 (14.69%) Java
3 654 (12.41%) PowerShell
4 567 (10.76%) Bash
5 482 (9.15%) JavaScript
6 353 (6.70%) TypeScript
7 350 (6.64%) C#
8 207 (3.93%) Go
9 178 (3.38%) R
10 156 (2.96%) C++
11 145 (2.75%) Scala
12 107 (2.03%) Shell Script
13 87 (1.65%) Ruby
14 80 (1.52%) Bicep
14 80 (1.52%) Perl
15 56 (1.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 56 (1.06%) PL/SQL
16 54 (1.02%) C
17 53 (1.01%) T-SQL
18 48 (0.91%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,204 (22.85%) Security Cleared
2 974 (18.49%) SC Cleared
3 381 (7.23%) Degree
4 173 (3.28%) Computer Science Degree
5 146 (2.77%) DV Cleared
6 134 (2.54%) BPSS Clearance
7 107 (2.03%) Azure Certification
8 101 (1.92%) AWS Certification
9 92 (1.75%) CISSP
10 84 (1.59%) Master's Degree
11 72 (1.37%) Cisco Certification
12 60 (1.14%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.95%) CCNP
13 50 (0.95%) CISM
14 37 (0.70%) PhD
15 33 (0.63%) Microsoft Certification
16 32 (0.61%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 27 (0.51%) ISTQB
18 23 (0.44%) CCIE
19 22 (0.42%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 517 (9.81%) Data Quality
2 232 (4.40%) QA
3 162 (3.07%) GDPR
4 110 (2.09%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 107 (2.03%) NIST
6 78 (1.48%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) SLA
8 32 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 30 (0.57%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.34%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) WCAG
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) SOC 2
15 9 (0.17%) GRC
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) MiFID
16 8 (0.15%) PMO
System Software
1 810 (15.37%) Docker
2 160 (3.04%) Active Directory
3 99 (1.88%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.31%) Virtual Machines
5 41 (0.78%) VMware NSX
6 37 (0.70%) vSphere
7 34 (0.65%) Firmware
8 33 (0.63%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) KVM
11 13 (0.25%) HDFS
12 10 (0.19%) NFS
13 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
13 9 (0.17%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Ceph
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) Squid
15 7 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
16 5 (0.095%) Lustre
17 4 (0.076%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,088 (20.65%) Terraform
2 953 (18.09%) Kubernetes
3 539 (10.23%) Ansible
4 346 (6.57%) Grafana
5 280 (5.31%) Prometheus
6 77 (1.46%) Puppet
7 67 (1.27%) Argo
8 53 (1.01%) Istio
9 48 (0.91%) vRealize
10 42 (0.80%) Kibana
11 35 (0.66%) Progress Chef
12 32 (0.61%) vCenter Server
13 27 (0.51%) Nagios
13 27 (0.51%) Nessus
14 24 (0.46%) Control-M
14 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.46%) ZABBIX
15 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
16 19 (0.36%) Rancher
16 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 606 (11.50%) Microsoft
2 569 (10.80%) Databricks
3 262 (4.97%) Google
4 232 (4.40%) Oracle
5 226 (4.29%) Splunk
6 183 (3.47%) VMware
7 120 (2.28%) Red Hat
8 118 (2.24%) OpenAI
9 117 (2.22%) Cisco
10 94 (1.78%) CyberArk
11 90 (1.71%) ServiceNow
12 83 (1.58%) BeyondTrust
13 70 (1.33%) Dynatrace
14 69 (1.31%) IBM
15 67 (1.27%) Informatica
16 66 (1.25%) F5
17 65 (1.23%) Palo Alto
18 61 (1.16%) Foundry
19 48 (0.91%) SAP
20 42 (0.80%) Fortinet