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

6 months to
7 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 14
Rank change year-on-year -3 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,605 4,274 3,914
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.49% 13.01% 10.03%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.66% 39.44% 32.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,662 2,863 2,819
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £431 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £530 £575
Median % change year-on-year -0.94% -7.83% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £712
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £505
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.97% -3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 135 71 122
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.25 £20.58
25th Percentile £41.88 £33.91 £30.43
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -13.04% -10.68%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £78.70 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +10.00% -23.08% +13.04%

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 14,132 10,838 12,172
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.46% 32.98% 31.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,185 7,283 8,549
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £503 £530
Median % change year-on-year +1.89% -5.09% -3.64%
75th Percentile £617 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 528 264 409
10th Percentile £30.35 £28.05 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £35.75 £46.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -12.69% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.15 £84.04 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +4.00%

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 7 August 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 August 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 August 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 4,779 £538 -2.27% 4,875
London -4 2,769 £575 -0.26% 3,004
UK excluding London -7 2,196 £500 +2.04% 2,374
Work from Home -9 1,540 £530 -3.64% 1,751
North of England +1 756 £500 +3.09% 573
South East -11 450 £537 +7.45% 655
Yorkshire +1 386 £500 +0.70% 172
Scotland +2 295 £430 -14.00% 191
South West -1 293 £505 -8.18% 314
North West +3 288 £525 +10.53% 305
Midlands -16 245 £470 +4.44% 253
West Midlands -11 195 £469 +4.22% 142
East of England -15 138 £500 -0.25% 291
North East 0 93 £425 -18.27% 101
East Midlands -9 49 £488 +15.50% 111
Wales -4 27 £530 +30.86% 64
Northern Ireland +7 19 £363 -32.56% 61

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
1 283 (5.05%) Apache Airflow
2 280 (5.00%) Apache Spark
3 211 (3.76%) Apache
4 179 (3.19%) Confluence
5 58 (1.03%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.87%) SAS
7 38 (0.68%) SharePoint
8 29 (0.52%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 19 (0.34%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Apache Superset
13 9 (0.16%) CMS
14 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
15 7 (0.12%) CICS
15 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
17 5 (0.089%) JBoss
17 5 (0.089%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 116 (2.07%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.34%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.29%) CPLEX
7 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.036%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Remedy AR System
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Endur
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,094 (37.36%) AWS
2 1,910 (34.08%) Azure
3 858 (15.31%) GCP
4 703 (12.54%) GitHub
5 505 (9.01%) Power Platform
6 462 (8.24%) Serverless
7 429 (7.65%) Azure DevOps
8 402 (7.17%) Amazon S3
9 395 (7.05%) GitHub Actions
10 355 (6.33%) AWS Lambda
11 307 (5.48%) Snowflake
12 237 (4.23%) Azure Data Factory
13 222 (3.96%) dbt
14 193 (3.44%) AWS CloudFormation
15 183 (3.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 174 (3.10%) Amazon EKS
17 147 (2.62%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 145 (2.59%) OpenShift
19 133 (2.37%) Amazon EC2
20 130 (2.32%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 276 (4.92%) Firewall
2 209 (3.73%) DNS
3 142 (2.53%) TCP/IP
4 119 (2.12%) VPN
5 116 (2.07%) BGP
6 112 (2.00%) Network Security
7 108 (1.93%) WAN
8 81 (1.45%) DHCP
9 72 (1.28%) OSPF
10 59 (1.05%) SD-WAN
11 58 (1.03%) VLAN
12 55 (0.98%) HTTP
13 54 (0.96%) SSL
14 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
14 52 (0.93%) SAN
15 51 (0.91%) VXLAN
16 44 (0.79%) SNMP
17 43 (0.77%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 40 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
19 35 (0.62%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 461 (8.22%) Power BI
2 331 (5.91%) PostgreSQL
3 325 (5.80%) Data Warehouse
4 225 (4.01%) SQL Server
5 203 (3.62%) Relational Database
6 196 (3.50%) Data Lake
7 192 (3.43%) Tableau
8 191 (3.41%) Metadata
9 167 (2.98%) NoSQL
10 151 (2.69%) Big Data
10 151 (2.69%) BigQuery
11 136 (2.43%) Amazon Athena
12 135 (2.41%) Amazon Redshift
13 130 (2.32%) MongoDB
14 123 (2.19%) Delta Lake
15 112 (2.00%) Amazon RDS
16 111 (1.98%) DynamoDB
17 85 (1.52%) MySQL
18 69 (1.23%) Snowflake Schema
19 66 (1.18%) Redis
Development Applications
1 711 (12.69%) Git
2 506 (9.03%) Jenkins
3 432 (7.71%) GitLab
4 299 (5.33%) JIRA
5 91 (1.62%) Selenium
6 60 (1.07%) MLflow
7 48 (0.86%) Bitbucket
7 48 (0.86%) Postman
8 44 (0.79%) SonarQube
9 43 (0.77%) JMeter
10 38 (0.68%) Claude Code
11 34 (0.61%) Cypress.io
12 32 (0.57%) REST Assured
13 31 (0.55%) Artifactory
13 31 (0.55%) Cucumber
14 30 (0.54%) Gatling
14 30 (0.54%) Maven
14 30 (0.54%) Sonatype Nexus
15 24 (0.43%) JUnit
16 19 (0.34%) Zephyr
General
1 1,214 (21.66%) Finance
2 1,212 (21.62%) Social Skills
3 802 (14.31%) Analytical Skills
4 567 (10.12%) Public Sector
5 435 (7.76%) Banking
6 204 (3.64%) Front Office
7 128 (2.28%) Investment Banking
8 124 (2.21%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 108 (1.93%) Retail
11 86 (1.53%) Marketing
12 74 (1.32%) Telecoms
13 57 (1.02%) Legal
13 57 (1.02%) Pharmaceutical
14 55 (0.98%) Military
15 50 (0.89%) Financial Institution
16 49 (0.87%) Publishing
17 46 (0.82%) Aerospace
18 45 (0.80%) Manufacturing
19 40 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 960 (17.13%) Developer
2 893 (15.93%) Senior
3 830 (14.81%) Data Engineer
4 511 (9.12%) Python Developer
5 460 (8.21%) Lead
6 404 (7.21%) Python Engineer
7 322 (5.74%) DevOps Engineer
8 321 (5.73%) Software Engineer
9 285 (5.08%) Architect
10 282 (5.03%) Analyst
11 251 (4.48%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 244 (4.35%) AWS Engineer
13 208 (3.71%) Data Scientist
14 192 (3.43%) Cloud Engineer
15 188 (3.35%) Platform Engineer
16 180 (3.21%) Senior Developer
17 175 (3.12%) Azure Engineer
18 167 (2.98%) Senior Data Engineer
19 142 (2.53%) Full-Stack Developer
20 140 (2.50%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 429 (7.65%) REST
2 369 (6.58%) PySpark
3 356 (6.35%) React
4 351 (6.26%) Kafka
5 228 (4.07%) .NET
6 209 (3.73%) Node.js
7 207 (3.69%) FastAPI
8 206 (3.68%) RESTful
9 199 (3.55%) JSON
10 185 (3.30%) Pandas
11 179 (3.19%) Django
12 144 (2.57%) PyTorch
13 140 (2.50%) LangChain
14 115 (2.05%) Flask
15 111 (1.98%) NumPy
16 107 (1.91%) OAuth
16 107 (1.91%) scikit-learn
17 106 (1.89%) pytest
18 101 (1.80%) TensorFlow
19 100 (1.78%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 760 (13.56%) Cloud Native
2 315 (5.62%) Distributed Systems
3 213 (3.80%) AI Agents
4 205 (3.66%) Onboarding
5 158 (2.82%) Data Centre
6 152 (2.71%) Product Ownership
7 142 (2.53%) Data Structures
8 141 (2.52%) Algorithms
9 128 (2.28%) Legacy Systems
10 120 (2.14%) Hybrid Cloud
11 116 (2.07%) Derivative
12 109 (1.94%) Data Protection Act
13 106 (1.89%) Management Information System
14 99 (1.77%) Fixed Income
15 94 (1.68%) Equities
16 80 (1.43%) Security Posture
17 69 (1.23%) Public Cloud
18 67 (1.20%) Enterprise Software
19 66 (1.18%) Linux Command Line
20 64 (1.14%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 709 (12.65%) Linux
2 332 (5.92%) Windows
3 230 (4.10%) Unix
4 135 (2.41%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 81 (1.45%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.73%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.54%) AIX
8 29 (0.52%) VMS
9 16 (0.29%) Android
9 16 (0.29%) Solaris
10 14 (0.25%) CentOS
11 13 (0.23%) Mac OS
12 12 (0.21%) Apple iOS
13 11 (0.20%) zOS
14 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Debian
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
15 6 (0.11%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,168 (38.68%) CI/CD
2 1,608 (28.69%) DevOps
3 1,418 (25.30%) AI
4 1,269 (22.64%) Agile
5 1,135 (20.25%) Analytics
6 1,123 (20.04%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,015 (18.11%) Data Pipeline
8 913 (16.29%) Problem-Solving
9 887 (15.83%) Machine Learning
10 868 (15.49%) Software Engineering
11 803 (14.33%) Data Engineering
12 768 (13.70%) Containerisation
13 764 (13.63%) Data Modelling
14 671 (11.97%) Observability
15 668 (11.92%) ETL
16 605 (10.79%) Data Science
17 590 (10.53%) Test Automation
18 546 (9.74%) Continuous Improvement
19 541 (9.65%) Business Intelligence
20 526 (9.38%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,808 (32.26%) SQL
2 814 (14.52%) Java
3 745 (13.29%) Bash
4 718 (12.81%) PowerShell
5 463 (8.26%) JavaScript
6 386 (6.89%) TypeScript
7 303 (5.41%) C#
8 208 (3.71%) Go
9 150 (2.68%) R
10 143 (2.55%) C++
11 133 (2.37%) Shell Script
12 126 (2.25%) Scala
13 121 (2.16%) Bicep
14 80 (1.43%) Perl
15 58 (1.03%) C
16 57 (1.02%) Groovy
17 56 (1.00%) Rust
18 55 (0.98%) PL/SQL
19 53 (0.95%) Ruby
20 48 (0.86%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,299 (23.18%) Security Cleared
2 1,058 (18.88%) SC Cleared
3 431 (7.69%) Degree
4 197 (3.51%) DV Cleared
5 160 (2.85%) Computer Science Degree
6 137 (2.44%) AWS Certification
7 136 (2.43%) Azure Certification
8 129 (2.30%) BPSS Clearance
9 91 (1.62%) CISSP
10 87 (1.55%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.27%) Master's Degree
12 53 (0.95%) CCNP
13 45 (0.80%) Microsoft Certification
14 42 (0.75%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 37 (0.66%) PhD
16 32 (0.57%) CISM
16 32 (0.57%) ISTQB
17 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 28 (0.50%) CCIE
19 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 586 (10.45%) Data Quality
2 264 (4.71%) QA
3 115 (2.05%) GDPR
4 105 (1.87%) NIST
5 104 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 88 (1.57%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.61%) SLA
8 28 (0.50%) WCAG
9 26 (0.46%) NCSC
9 26 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 25 (0.45%) PCI DSS
11 21 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
12 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 15 (0.27%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
16 7 (0.12%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) GRC
16 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 916 (16.34%) Docker
2 157 (2.80%) Active Directory
3 128 (2.28%) VMware Infrastructure
4 65 (1.16%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.82%) vSphere
6 43 (0.77%) Hyper-V
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 31 (0.55%) Firmware
9 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 13 (0.23%) Squid
12 11 (0.20%) Ceph
12 11 (0.20%) KVM
13 10 (0.18%) SRDF
13 10 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
14 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) PowerHA
15 7 (0.12%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,284 (22.91%) Terraform
2 1,080 (19.27%) Kubernetes
3 612 (10.92%) Ansible
4 345 (6.16%) Grafana
5 265 (4.73%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.55%) Puppet
7 72 (1.28%) Argo
8 67 (1.20%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Istio
10 32 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
11 31 (0.55%) vCenter Server
12 28 (0.50%) vRealize
12 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
13 26 (0.46%) Kibana
14 24 (0.43%) Nagios
15 23 (0.41%) Control-M
16 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
17 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
18 18 (0.32%) Nessus
18 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 673 (12.01%) Microsoft
2 549 (9.79%) Databricks
3 344 (6.14%) Google
4 246 (4.39%) Oracle
5 210 (3.75%) Splunk
6 173 (3.09%) VMware
7 143 (2.55%) OpenAI
8 138 (2.46%) Cisco
9 122 (2.18%) ServiceNow
10 99 (1.77%) Red Hat
11 97 (1.73%) Dynatrace
12 91 (1.62%) F5
13 86 (1.53%) Palo Alto
14 80 (1.43%) IBM
14 80 (1.43%) Informatica
15 70 (1.25%) Fortinet
16 65 (1.16%) CyberArk
17 64 (1.14%) Foundry
18 63 (1.12%) SAP
19 60 (1.07%) Salesforce