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 1 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,658 4,402 4,130
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.31% 13.32% 10.92%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.46% 40.26% 33.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,687 2,849 2,816
10th Percentile £375 £356 £368
25th Percentile £440 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -3.14%
75th Percentile £650 £644 £700
90th Percentile £750 £763 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £507 £500 £505
% change year-on-year +1.40% -0.99% -3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 87 97
10th Percentile £34.78 £28.25 £20.80
25th Percentile £43.98 £35.13 £40.06
Median hourly rate £62.77 £50.00 £67.02
Median % change year-on-year +25.54% -25.40% +3.11%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £71.88
90th Percentile £92.11 £79.75 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -28.57% +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 14,340 10,935 12,154
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.12% 33.08% 32.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,314 7,202 8,050
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.45% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 546 298 333
10th Percentile £24.00 £29.00 £26.40
25th Percentile £46.25 £40.31 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.59%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £78.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 1 October 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 1 October 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 1 October 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 -4 4,815 £550 +4.76% 9,494
London -4 2,846 £575 - 5,841
UK excluding London -9 2,168 £507 +1.40% 4,314
Work from Home -6 1,553 £530 -3.68% 3,665
North of England 0 752 £500 +5.26% 927
South East -5 453 £541 +8.25% 919
Yorkshire -2 380 £500 - 270
Scotland -2 308 £467 -6.60% 504
North West -3 293 £525 +16.67% 537
South West -4 275 £550 +2.33% 597
Midlands -23 228 £500 - 442
West Midlands -18 189 £520 +4.00% 282
East of England -16 146 £480 -8.57% 610
North East -1 88 £425 -10.53% 121
East Midlands -16 39 £463 +12.80% 160
Wales -12 28 £530 +23.98% 163
Northern Ireland +4 17 £363 -36.96% 186

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
1 297 (5.25%) Apache Airflow
2 279 (4.93%) Apache Spark
3 231 (4.08%) Apache
4 157 (2.77%) Confluence
5 59 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 57 (1.01%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.58%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 27 (0.48%) nginx
10 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) IIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 9 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) CMS
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
14 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.088%) Camunda
14 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 99 (1.75%) Microsoft Excel
2 37 (0.65%) Chatbot
3 21 (0.37%) Microsoft Office
4 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
4 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.035%) Revit
7 2 (0.035%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Remedy ITSM
2 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
3 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) Front Arena
6 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.088%) SAP IBP
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.035%) Distributed Ledger
11 2 (0.035%) FIS Private Capital Suite
11 2 (0.035%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 2,067 (36.53%) AWS
2 1,924 (34.00%) Azure
3 910 (16.08%) GCP
4 743 (13.13%) GitHub
5 486 (8.59%) Power Platform
6 481 (8.50%) Serverless
7 442 (7.81%) Azure DevOps
8 433 (7.65%) GitHub Actions
9 402 (7.10%) Amazon S3
10 355 (6.27%) AWS Lambda
11 348 (6.15%) Snowflake
12 253 (4.47%) dbt
13 217 (3.84%) Azure Data Factory
14 206 (3.64%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 189 (3.34%) Amazon EKS
16 184 (3.25%) AWS CloudFormation
17 179 (3.16%) Entra ID
18 146 (2.58%) Amazon EC2
19 130 (2.30%) SaaS
20 129 (2.28%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 284 (5.02%) Firewall
2 208 (3.68%) DNS
3 166 (2.93%) Network Security
4 149 (2.63%) TCP/IP
5 129 (2.28%) VPN
6 124 (2.19%) BGP
7 113 (2.00%) WAN
8 84 (1.48%) DHCP
9 73 (1.29%) OSPF
9 73 (1.29%) SD-WAN
10 62 (1.10%) BIG-IP
11 58 (1.03%) SSL
12 55 (0.97%) VLAN
12 55 (0.97%) VXLAN
13 53 (0.94%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 51 (0.90%) HTTP
15 47 (0.83%) Ethernet VPN
16 42 (0.74%) Broadband
17 41 (0.72%) Wireless
18 40 (0.71%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 432 (7.64%) Power BI
2 334 (5.90%) Data Warehouse
3 321 (5.67%) PostgreSQL
4 227 (4.01%) Metadata
5 205 (3.62%) Relational Database
6 204 (3.61%) SQL Server
7 198 (3.50%) Data Lake
8 189 (3.34%) BigQuery
9 167 (2.95%) Tableau
10 156 (2.76%) NoSQL
11 140 (2.47%) Big Data
12 132 (2.33%) Amazon RDS
12 132 (2.33%) Amazon Redshift
13 122 (2.16%) Amazon Athena
14 121 (2.14%) Delta Lake
14 121 (2.14%) MongoDB
15 107 (1.89%) DynamoDB
16 100 (1.77%) MySQL
17 75 (1.33%) Redis
18 62 (1.10%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 826 (14.60%) Git
2 516 (9.12%) Jenkins
3 496 (8.77%) GitLab
4 307 (5.43%) JIRA
5 120 (2.12%) Selenium
6 71 (1.25%) Postman
7 60 (1.06%) JMeter
8 59 (1.04%) Claude Code
9 56 (0.99%) SonarQube
10 49 (0.87%) MLflow
11 46 (0.81%) Bitbucket
12 39 (0.69%) Cucumber
13 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
13 36 (0.64%) Sonatype Nexus
14 35 (0.62%) Maven
14 35 (0.62%) REST Assured
15 33 (0.58%) Cypress.io
16 29 (0.51%) LoadRunner
17 28 (0.49%) Gatling
18 22 (0.39%) Zephyr
General
1 1,323 (23.38%) Social Skills
2 1,303 (23.03%) Finance
3 838 (14.81%) Analytical Skills
4 547 (9.67%) Public Sector
5 527 (9.31%) Banking
6 175 (3.09%) Front Office
7 156 (2.76%) Investment Banking
8 115 (2.03%) Retail
9 113 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 101 (1.79%) Documentation Skills
11 86 (1.52%) Marketing
11 86 (1.52%) Telecoms
12 64 (1.13%) Military
13 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
13 52 (0.92%) Law
14 50 (0.88%) Pharmaceutical
15 48 (0.85%) Legal
16 46 (0.81%) Financial Institution
17 42 (0.74%) Publishing
18 37 (0.65%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,018 (17.99%) Senior
2 893 (15.78%) Developer
3 845 (14.93%) Data Engineer
4 492 (8.70%) Lead
5 469 (8.29%) Python Developer
6 422 (7.46%) Python Engineer
7 365 (6.45%) DevOps Engineer
8 314 (5.55%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 280 (4.95%) Analyst
10 276 (4.88%) Software Engineer
11 239 (4.22%) Architect
12 224 (3.96%) AWS Engineer
13 194 (3.43%) Cloud Engineer
13 194 (3.43%) Senior Data Engineer
14 193 (3.41%) Azure Engineer
15 190 (3.36%) Platform Engineer
15 190 (3.36%) Senior Developer
16 185 (3.27%) Data Scientist
17 149 (2.63%) Network Engineer
18 142 (2.51%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,404 (24.81%) Terraform
2 547 (9.67%) REST
3 380 (6.72%) Kafka
4 374 (6.61%) PySpark
5 307 (5.43%) React
6 236 (4.17%) .NET
7 215 (3.80%) FastAPI
8 211 (3.73%) JSON
9 207 (3.66%) Django
10 193 (3.41%) RESTful
11 158 (2.79%) LangChain
12 155 (2.74%) pytest
13 153 (2.70%) Node.js
14 151 (2.67%) Pandas
15 131 (2.32%) OAuth
16 117 (2.07%) Flask
17 113 (2.00%) YAML
18 110 (1.94%) LangGraph
19 109 (1.93%) PyTorch
20 104 (1.84%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 807 (14.26%) Cloud Native
2 300 (5.30%) AI Agents
3 294 (5.20%) Distributed Systems
4 261 (4.61%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.86%) Data Centre
6 152 (2.69%) Product Ownership
7 150 (2.65%) Data Structures
8 137 (2.42%) Legacy Systems
9 126 (2.23%) Algorithms
10 110 (1.94%) Hybrid Cloud
11 108 (1.91%) Management Information System
12 107 (1.89%) Enterprise Software
13 103 (1.82%) Derivative
14 102 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
15 96 (1.70%) Security Posture
16 84 (1.48%) Public Cloud
17 81 (1.43%) Equities
18 79 (1.40%) PKI
19 66 (1.17%) Linux Command Line
19 66 (1.17%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 779 (13.77%) Linux
2 346 (6.12%) Windows
3 249 (4.40%) Unix
4 156 (2.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 93 (1.64%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.81%) Ubuntu
7 37 (0.65%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 15 (0.27%) AIX
11 14 (0.25%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) zOS
15 5 (0.088%) Embedded Linux
15 5 (0.088%) FreeRTOS
15 5 (0.088%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,394 (42.31%) CI/CD
2 1,645 (29.07%) DevOps
3 1,601 (28.30%) AI
4 1,317 (23.28%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,271 (22.46%) Agile
6 1,098 (19.41%) Analytics
7 993 (17.55%) Data Pipeline
8 950 (16.79%) Software Engineering
9 881 (15.57%) Problem-Solving
10 852 (15.06%) Data Engineering
11 841 (14.86%) Machine Learning
12 789 (13.94%) Containerisation
13 762 (13.47%) Observability
14 761 (13.45%) Data Modelling
15 705 (12.46%) Test Automation
16 670 (11.84%) ETL
17 669 (11.82%) Validation
18 662 (11.70%) Continuous Improvement
19 597 (10.55%) Platform Engineering
20 592 (10.46%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,851 (32.71%) SQL
2 802 (14.17%) Java
3 782 (13.82%) Bash
4 759 (13.41%) PowerShell
5 442 (7.81%) JavaScript
6 345 (6.10%) TypeScript
7 303 (5.36%) C#
8 229 (4.05%) Go
9 153 (2.70%) Shell Script
10 136 (2.40%) Bicep
11 135 (2.39%) R
12 132 (2.33%) C++
13 126 (2.23%) Scala
14 107 (1.89%) Perl
15 62 (1.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 57 (1.01%) Groovy
17 52 (0.92%) C
18 51 (0.90%) T-SQL
19 50 (0.88%) Rust
20 48 (0.85%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,379 (24.37%) Security Cleared
2 1,109 (19.60%) SC Cleared
3 405 (7.16%) Degree
4 250 (4.42%) DV Cleared
5 156 (2.76%) Azure Certification
6 149 (2.63%) Computer Science Degree
7 146 (2.58%) AWS Certification
8 132 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
9 96 (1.70%) CISSP
10 79 (1.40%) Cisco Certification
11 70 (1.24%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
13 38 (0.67%) CCNP
14 33 (0.58%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) CCIE
16 30 (0.53%) DBS Check
17 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 29 (0.51%) CISM
17 29 (0.51%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.49%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 648 (11.45%) Data Quality
2 327 (5.78%) QA
3 117 (2.07%) NIST
4 102 (1.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 88 (1.56%) GDPR
6 82 (1.45%) Accessibility
7 44 (0.78%) SLA
8 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 30 (0.53%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 24 (0.42%) SOC 2
12 23 (0.41%) WCAG
13 19 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
14 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.12%) Basel III
17 7 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 7 (0.12%) GRC
System Software
1 980 (17.32%) Docker
2 183 (3.23%) Active Directory
3 134 (2.37%) VMware Infrastructure
4 70 (1.24%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.88%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.62%) vSphere
7 32 (0.57%) VMware NSX
8 28 (0.49%) NFS
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) Firmware
11 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
12 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 8 (0.14%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 8 (0.14%) zsh
15 7 (0.12%) HDFS
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,192 (21.07%) Kubernetes
2 648 (11.45%) Ansible
3 340 (6.01%) Grafana
4 250 (4.42%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.45%) Puppet
6 72 (1.27%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.18%) Argo
8 48 (0.85%) Single Sign-On
9 40 (0.71%) Kibana
10 35 (0.62%) Istio
11 28 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
12 27 (0.48%) Control-M
13 23 (0.41%) Packer
14 22 (0.39%) FortiGate
15 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
15 17 (0.30%) ZABBIX
16 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) Podman
16 16 (0.28%) QRadar
17 15 (0.27%) vRealize
Vendors
1 754 (13.33%) Microsoft
2 590 (10.43%) Databricks
3 409 (7.23%) Google
4 240 (4.24%) Oracle
5 208 (3.68%) Splunk
6 172 (3.04%) VMware
7 170 (3.00%) OpenAI
8 143 (2.53%) Cisco
9 136 (2.40%) ServiceNow
10 100 (1.77%) Dynatrace
11 96 (1.70%) Red Hat
12 95 (1.68%) IBM
13 89 (1.57%) F5
13 89 (1.57%) Palo Alto
14 84 (1.48%) Foundry
15 72 (1.27%) CyberArk
16 71 (1.25%) Fortinet
17 70 (1.24%) Informatica
18 66 (1.17%) SAP
19 54 (0.95%) Salesforce