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

6 months to
4 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,878 3,949 4,156
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.49% 12.76% 9.29%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.13% 37.93% 31.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,279 2,610 2,942
10th Percentile £358 £385 £400
25th Percentile £415 £463 £471
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £517 £550 £551
Median % change year-on-year -6.00% -0.09% -8.25%
75th Percentile £638 £676 £675
90th Percentile £738 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -6.29% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 100 56 115
10th Percentile £29.75 £20.68 £26.84
25th Percentile £41.25 £25.21 £46.18
Median hourly rate £51.21 £45.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.80% -25.00% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.18 £66.26 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.10 £83.75 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.09 £62.50
% change year-on-year +6.49% -23.06% -4.58%

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 11,859 10,410 13,199
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.36% 33.65% 29.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,851 6,593 9,361
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.33% -4.44%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £491 £500
% change year-on-year -1.89% -1.90% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 458 239 514
10th Percentile £39.58 £21.25 £35.55
25th Percentile £52.50 £36.25 £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 £69.47
90th Percentile £77.00 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -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 4 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 4 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 4 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 4,097 £523 -9.13% 2,833
London 0 2,327 £550 -8.33% 1,325
UK excluding London 0 1,897 £492 -6.29% 2,012
Work from Home -1 1,461 £525 -4.55% 1,271
North of England +9 622 £475 -7.59% 464
South East +2 411 £488 -11.36% 670
Yorkshire +7 321 £500 -6.98% 165
Midlands +4 283 £506 +4.65% 225
Scotland +1 277 £457 -4.24% 145
North West +8 257 £450 -10.00% 247
West Midlands +7 240 £515 +0.49% 111
South West -9 191 £550 -10.20% 272
East of England +1 128 £538 +7.50% 205
North East +5 49 £475 -12.84% 55
East Midlands -21 43 £444 +12.91% 114
Wales -11 30 £523 +4.50% 43
Northern Ireland +3 28 £600 +14.29% 21

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
1 231 (4.74%) Apache Spark
2 205 (4.20%) Apache Airflow
3 157 (3.22%) Apache
4 146 (2.99%) Confluence
5 63 (1.29%) SharePoint
6 62 (1.27%) SAS
7 33 (0.68%) nginx
7 33 (0.68%) OpenStack
8 32 (0.66%) Microsoft Exchange
9 22 (0.45%) Jupyter
10 21 (0.43%) Appian
10 21 (0.43%) Palantir Foundry
11 12 (0.25%) ArcGIS
12 9 (0.18%) Apache Pig
13 8 (0.16%) Camunda
14 7 (0.14%) IIS
15 6 (0.12%) CMS
15 6 (0.12%) Luigi
15 6 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
15 6 (0.12%) Tomcat
Applications
1 129 (2.64%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 28 (0.57%) Microsoft Office
4 22 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 18 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 11 (0.23%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 7 (0.14%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 3 (0.062%) LaTeX
9 3 (0.062%) Microsoft Project
10 2 (0.041%) Maya
10 2 (0.041%) NUKE
11 1 (0.021%) Trello
Business Applications
1 17 (0.35%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
3 9 (0.18%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.062%) Actimize
4 3 (0.062%) Remedy ITSM
5 2 (0.041%) Bloomberg AIM
5 2 (0.041%) Cloudability
5 2 (0.041%) NEC Housing
5 2 (0.041%) Oracle Applications
5 2 (0.041%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.041%) Shopify
5 2 (0.041%) Teamcenter
6 1 (0.021%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.021%) IntelliMatch
6 1 (0.021%) Maximo
6 1 (0.021%) RMDS
6 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
6 1 (0.021%) TRIRIGA
6 1 (0.021%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,889 (38.72%) AWS
2 1,603 (32.86%) Azure
3 750 (15.38%) GCP
4 612 (12.55%) GitHub
5 520 (10.66%) Serverless
6 450 (9.23%) Power Platform
7 365 (7.48%) Amazon S3
8 343 (7.03%) AWS Lambda
9 329 (6.74%) Azure DevOps
10 320 (6.56%) GitHub Actions
11 246 (5.04%) AWS CloudFormation
12 242 (4.96%) Snowflake
13 226 (4.63%) Azure Data Factory
14 178 (3.65%) Amazon EC2
15 176 (3.61%) Amazon EKS
16 174 (3.57%) Amazon ECS
17 168 (3.44%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 148 (3.03%) OpenShift
19 142 (2.91%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 132 (2.71%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 226 (4.63%) Firewall
2 145 (2.97%) DNS
3 124 (2.54%) Network Security
4 117 (2.40%) TCP/IP
5 77 (1.58%) VPN
6 72 (1.48%) HTTP
7 69 (1.41%) BGP
8 56 (1.15%) WAN
9 52 (1.07%) SSL
10 43 (0.88%) LAN
10 43 (0.88%) Wireshark
11 42 (0.86%) MPLS
12 40 (0.82%) OSPF
13 32 (0.66%) DHCP
13 32 (0.66%) Wireless
14 27 (0.55%) SD-WAN
14 27 (0.55%) VLAN
15 26 (0.53%) SSH
16 23 (0.47%) BIG-IP
17 22 (0.45%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 374 (7.67%) Power BI
2 367 (7.52%) PostgreSQL
3 286 (5.86%) Data Warehouse
4 229 (4.69%) NoSQL
5 222 (4.55%) Data Lake
6 215 (4.41%) Relational Database
7 174 (3.57%) SQL Server
8 161 (3.30%) Big Data
9 152 (3.12%) Amazon RDS
9 152 (3.12%) Tableau
10 126 (2.58%) MySQL
11 115 (2.36%) Metadata
12 112 (2.30%) BigQuery
13 101 (2.07%) Amazon Redshift
14 88 (1.80%) Hadoop
15 87 (1.78%) Delta Lake
16 86 (1.76%) Amazon Athena
17 85 (1.74%) MongoDB
18 79 (1.62%) Elasticsearch
19 76 (1.56%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 601 (12.32%) Git
2 539 (11.05%) Jenkins
3 425 (8.71%) GitLab
4 279 (5.72%) JIRA
5 86 (1.76%) MLflow
6 81 (1.66%) Selenium
7 49 (1.00%) Cucumber
8 46 (0.94%) Sonatype Nexus
9 43 (0.88%) Bitbucket
9 43 (0.88%) Postman
10 37 (0.76%) JUnit
11 35 (0.72%) SonarQube
12 33 (0.68%) JMeter
13 29 (0.59%) Maven
14 27 (0.55%) CircleCI
14 27 (0.55%) Visual Studio
15 26 (0.53%) Liquibase
16 25 (0.51%) SpecFlow
17 24 (0.49%) Artifactory
18 23 (0.47%) Gradle
General
1 1,294 (26.53%) Social Skills
2 939 (19.25%) Finance
3 677 (13.88%) Analytical Skills
4 431 (8.84%) Public Sector
5 429 (8.79%) Banking
6 156 (3.20%) Front Office
7 124 (2.54%) Documentation Skills
8 122 (2.50%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.41%) Financial Institution
10 62 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 61 (1.25%) Marketing
12 60 (1.23%) Pharmaceutical
12 60 (1.23%) Retail
13 54 (1.11%) Telecoms
14 44 (0.90%) Legal
15 42 (0.86%) Presentation Skills
16 40 (0.82%) Manufacturing
17 37 (0.76%) Influencing Skills
18 28 (0.57%) Military
19 24 (0.49%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 860 (17.63%) Developer
2 665 (13.63%) Senior
3 649 (13.30%) Data Engineer
4 365 (7.48%) Python Developer
5 310 (6.36%) Architect
6 309 (6.33%) DevOps Engineer
7 297 (6.09%) Python Engineer
8 277 (5.68%) Analyst
9 263 (5.39%) AWS Engineer
10 259 (5.31%) Lead
11 236 (4.84%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 214 (4.39%) Software Engineer
13 187 (3.83%) Data Scientist
14 175 (3.59%) Platform Engineer
15 147 (3.01%) Senior Developer
16 138 (2.83%) Data Analyst
17 137 (2.81%) Azure Engineer
18 127 (2.60%) Senior Data Engineer
19 123 (2.52%) Cloud Engineer
19 123 (2.52%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 419 (8.59%) REST
2 313 (6.42%) React
3 290 (5.95%) Kafka
4 279 (5.72%) PySpark
5 245 (5.02%) Node.js
6 218 (4.47%) Pandas
7 214 (4.39%) RESTful
8 213 (4.37%) FastAPI
9 203 (4.16%) PyTorch
10 196 (4.02%) .NET
11 167 (3.42%) TensorFlow
12 165 (3.38%) NumPy
13 134 (2.75%) AngularJS
14 126 (2.58%) LangChain
15 118 (2.42%) scikit-learn
16 116 (2.38%) Flask
17 113 (2.32%) pytest
18 109 (2.23%) Elastic Stack
19 106 (2.17%) OAuth
20 103 (2.11%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 430 (8.82%) Cloud Native
2 199 (4.08%) Algorithms
3 186 (3.81%) Distributed Systems
4 138 (2.83%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.60%) Data Protection Act
6 115 (2.36%) Equities
7 105 (2.15%) Onboarding
8 101 (2.07%) Data Structures
9 100 (2.05%) AI Agents
10 97 (1.99%) Enterprise Software
11 90 (1.85%) Derivative
12 85 (1.74%) Legacy Systems
13 84 (1.72%) Public Cloud
14 83 (1.70%) Management Information System
15 82 (1.68%) Security Posture
16 80 (1.64%) Hybrid Cloud
17 78 (1.60%) Fixed Income
18 77 (1.58%) Data Centre
18 77 (1.58%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
19 67 (1.37%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 761 (15.60%) Linux
2 354 (7.26%) Windows
3 221 (4.53%) Unix
4 93 (1.91%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.27%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.78%) Android
6 38 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 36 (0.74%) VMS
8 28 (0.57%) CentOS
9 27 (0.55%) Solaris
10 25 (0.51%) Mac OS
11 22 (0.45%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.27%) Amazon Linux
13 11 (0.23%) Windows 7
14 10 (0.21%) Kali Linux
15 5 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
15 5 (0.10%) Windows 10
16 4 (0.082%) Robot Operating System
16 4 (0.082%) Windows Server 2016
16 4 (0.082%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,735 (35.57%) CI/CD
2 1,349 (27.65%) DevOps
3 1,144 (23.45%) Agile
4 1,063 (21.79%) Problem-Solving
5 1,026 (21.03%) AI
6 870 (17.84%) Infrastructure as Code
7 863 (17.69%) Analytics
8 783 (16.05%) Machine Learning
9 734 (15.05%) Containerisation
10 732 (15.01%) Data Pipeline
11 613 (12.57%) ETL
12 593 (12.16%) Data Engineering
13 583 (11.95%) Data Science
14 571 (11.71%) Data Modelling
15 544 (11.15%) Test Automation
16 524 (10.74%) Software Engineering
17 427 (8.75%) Observability
18 426 (8.73%) Business Intelligence
19 411 (8.43%) LLM
20 361 (7.40%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,487 (30.48%) SQL
2 726 (14.88%) Java
3 670 (13.74%) PowerShell
4 609 (12.48%) Bash
5 489 (10.02%) JavaScript
6 314 (6.44%) C#
7 300 (6.15%) TypeScript
8 228 (4.67%) Go
9 198 (4.06%) C++
10 153 (3.14%) R
11 143 (2.93%) Shell Script
12 142 (2.91%) Perl
13 123 (2.52%) Scala
14 94 (1.93%) Ruby
15 62 (1.27%) Kusto Query Language
16 59 (1.21%) Bicep
17 56 (1.15%) C
18 53 (1.09%) VBA
19 43 (0.88%) PHP
20 39 (0.80%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,085 (22.24%) Security Cleared
2 878 (18.00%) SC Cleared
3 449 (9.20%) Degree
4 230 (4.72%) Computer Science Degree
5 137 (2.81%) DV Cleared
6 131 (2.69%) AWS Certification
7 128 (2.62%) Master's Degree
8 94 (1.93%) BPSS Clearance
9 90 (1.85%) Azure Certification
9 90 (1.85%) CISSP
10 76 (1.56%) Cisco Certification
11 53 (1.09%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 51 (1.05%) CCNP
13 46 (0.94%) PhD
14 39 (0.80%) CISM
15 37 (0.76%) CEH
16 35 (0.72%) CCIE
17 33 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 33 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
18 32 (0.66%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 406 (8.32%) Data Quality
2 181 (3.71%) QA
3 170 (3.49%) GDPR
4 98 (2.01%) NIST
5 97 (1.99%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 62 (1.27%) Accessibility
7 33 (0.68%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.62%) HIPAA
9 29 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.49%) SLA
11 23 (0.47%) NCSC
12 19 (0.39%) SOC 2
13 14 (0.29%) EU AI Act
14 10 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 10 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.21%) WCAG
15 9 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
15 9 (0.18%) MiFID
15 9 (0.18%) PMO
16 8 (0.16%) EMIR
System Software
1 949 (19.45%) Docker
2 183 (3.75%) Active Directory
3 119 (2.44%) VMware Infrastructure
4 47 (0.96%) VMware NSX
5 45 (0.92%) Virtual Machines
6 43 (0.88%) vSphere
7 25 (0.51%) Hyper-V
8 23 (0.47%) Firmware
9 20 (0.41%) HDFS
10 16 (0.33%) KVM
11 13 (0.27%) Squid
11 13 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
12 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 11 (0.23%) Postfix
14 10 (0.21%) DFS Replication
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.18%) GPFS
16 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
17 7 (0.14%) Dovecot
17 7 (0.14%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 1,079 (22.12%) Terraform
2 1,027 (21.05%) Kubernetes
3 562 (11.52%) Ansible
4 347 (7.11%) Grafana
5 302 (6.19%) Prometheus
6 88 (1.80%) Argo
7 74 (1.52%) Puppet
8 55 (1.13%) Kibana
9 51 (1.05%) vRealize
10 42 (0.86%) Istio
11 39 (0.80%) Nessus
12 34 (0.70%) Single Sign-On
13 27 (0.55%) NetBackup
13 27 (0.55%) Progress Chef
14 24 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
15 21 (0.43%) Control-M
16 20 (0.41%) ITRS Geneos
17 19 (0.39%) Nmap
17 19 (0.39%) vCenter Server
18 18 (0.37%) logstash
Vendors
1 603 (12.36%) Microsoft
2 461 (9.45%) Databricks
3 297 (6.09%) Google
4 246 (5.04%) Splunk
5 236 (4.84%) Oracle
6 224 (4.59%) VMware
7 139 (2.85%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.52%) Cisco
9 115 (2.36%) ServiceNow
10 114 (2.34%) OpenAI
11 93 (1.91%) CyberArk
12 77 (1.58%) Foundry
13 76 (1.56%) Palo Alto
14 75 (1.54%) F5
15 69 (1.41%) BeyondTrust
16 46 (0.94%) SAP
17 45 (0.92%) IBM
17 45 (0.92%) Informatica
18 43 (0.88%) Dynatrace
19 39 (0.80%) Atlassian