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

6 months to
14 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,199 3,960 4,113
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 12.04% 13.42% 9.24%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.13% 39.25% 31.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,529 2,727 2,887
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £415 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -7.00% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £749 £804 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £515
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.95% -6.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 105 52 111
10th Percentile £28.73 £20.23 £21.25
25th Percentile £41.94 £22.88 £33.75
Median hourly rate £54.00 £43.50 £50.50
Median % change year-on-year +24.14% -13.86% -22.31%
75th Percentile £70.00 £65.25 £66.50
90th Percentile £79.80 £78.58 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.21 £48.75 £47.50
% change year-on-year +5.05% +2.63% -26.92%

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 12,639 10,089 12,959
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.28% 34.19% 29.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,396 6,659 9,150
10th Percentile £355 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -5.41%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £716 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £488 £487
% change year-on-year -2.56% +0.21% -3.66%
Number of hourly rates quoted 495 242 496
10th Percentile £41.73 £21.33 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.76%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.10
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.97% +3.48% -5.23%

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 14 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 14 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 14 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 -1 4,350 £515 -10.04% 2,696
London -2 2,463 £550 -8.33% 1,192
UK excluding London -2 2,005 £481 -3.75% 2,024
Work from Home 0 1,568 £525 -4.55% 1,022
North of England +12 669 £475 -5.00% 488
South East -6 418 £500 -6.50% 619
Yorkshire +2 354 £482 -3.60% 191
Midlands 0 291 £500 +2.04% 240
Scotland +2 276 £425 -9.57% 144
North West +12 269 £475 -3.46% 217
West Midlands -2 240 £500 - 109
South West -2 226 £538 -6.52% 257
East of England -5 128 £500 - 211
North East +14 52 £475 -7.32% 84
East Midlands -14 50 £447 +5.18% 131
Wales -17 31 £473 -10.85% 74
Northern Ireland +8 29 £613 +16.67% 27

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
1 273 (5.25%) Apache Spark
2 197 (3.79%) Apache Airflow
3 166 (3.19%) Confluence
4 155 (2.98%) Apache
5 64 (1.23%) SAS
6 60 (1.15%) SharePoint
7 27 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.48%) Jupyter
9 24 (0.46%) nginx
9 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
10 23 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.35%) Appian
12 13 (0.25%) ArcGIS
13 10 (0.19%) Camunda
14 7 (0.13%) Apache Superset
14 7 (0.13%) CMS
15 4 (0.077%) Oracle Application Server
15 4 (0.077%) Tomcat
16 3 (0.058%) CICS
16 3 (0.058%) IIS
Applications
1 130 (2.50%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.62%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
4 24 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.31%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.15%) Weka
8 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.058%) LaTeX
10 2 (0.038%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 12 (0.23%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 6 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
6 4 (0.077%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.058%) Actimize
7 3 (0.058%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.058%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) Cloudability
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
8 2 (0.038%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.038%) Shopify
9 1 (0.019%) Advent Geneva
9 1 (0.019%) Cerner Millennium
9 1 (0.019%) Salesforce CRM
9 1 (0.019%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 2,011 (38.68%) AWS
2 1,813 (34.87%) Azure
3 812 (15.62%) GCP
4 698 (13.43%) GitHub
5 531 (10.21%) Serverless
6 501 (9.64%) Power Platform
7 395 (7.60%) Azure DevOps
8 358 (6.89%) Amazon S3
9 346 (6.66%) AWS Lambda
10 345 (6.64%) GitHub Actions
11 267 (5.14%) Azure Data Factory
12 258 (4.96%) Snowflake
13 251 (4.83%) AWS CloudFormation
14 191 (3.67%) Amazon EKS
15 177 (3.40%) OpenShift
16 168 (3.23%) Amazon ECS
17 161 (3.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 160 (3.08%) Amazon EC2
19 147 (2.83%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 143 (2.75%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 214 (4.12%) Firewall
2 139 (2.67%) DNS
3 109 (2.10%) Network Security
4 108 (2.08%) TCP/IP
5 76 (1.46%) VPN
6 63 (1.21%) BGP
6 63 (1.21%) HTTP
7 59 (1.13%) WAN
8 41 (0.79%) Wireshark
9 40 (0.77%) MPLS
9 40 (0.77%) SAN
10 39 (0.75%) SSL
11 35 (0.67%) OSPF
12 34 (0.65%) DHCP
13 33 (0.63%) LAN
14 32 (0.62%) SD-WAN
15 28 (0.54%) VLAN
16 23 (0.44%) SNMP
16 23 (0.44%) VXLAN
17 22 (0.42%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 418 (8.04%) Power BI
2 396 (7.62%) PostgreSQL
3 316 (6.08%) Data Warehouse
4 240 (4.62%) Data Lake
5 226 (4.35%) NoSQL
6 199 (3.83%) SQL Server
7 197 (3.79%) Relational Database
8 167 (3.21%) Tableau
9 162 (3.12%) Big Data
10 138 (2.65%) Metadata
11 124 (2.39%) Amazon RDS
11 124 (2.39%) BigQuery
12 121 (2.33%) Delta Lake
13 119 (2.29%) MySQL
14 108 (2.08%) Amazon Redshift
15 103 (1.98%) MongoDB
16 98 (1.88%) Amazon Athena
17 92 (1.77%) Azure SQL Database
18 85 (1.63%) Hadoop
19 80 (1.54%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 663 (12.75%) Git
2 546 (10.50%) Jenkins
3 421 (8.10%) GitLab
4 301 (5.79%) JIRA
5 94 (1.81%) MLflow
6 91 (1.75%) Selenium
7 52 (1.00%) Postman
8 49 (0.94%) Bitbucket
9 47 (0.90%) Cucumber
10 42 (0.81%) JUnit
10 42 (0.81%) Sonatype Nexus
11 41 (0.79%) JMeter
12 28 (0.54%) SpecFlow
12 28 (0.54%) Visual Studio
13 26 (0.50%) Cypress.io
14 24 (0.46%) CircleCI
15 23 (0.44%) Artifactory
16 21 (0.40%) SonarQube
17 20 (0.38%) Maven
18 19 (0.37%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,279 (24.60%) Social Skills
2 1,027 (19.75%) Finance
3 720 (13.85%) Analytical Skills
4 494 (9.50%) Public Sector
5 419 (8.06%) Banking
6 179 (3.44%) Front Office
7 129 (2.48%) Documentation Skills
8 102 (1.96%) Investment Banking
9 70 (1.35%) Retail
10 66 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 65 (1.25%) Marketing
12 62 (1.19%) Pharmaceutical
13 58 (1.12%) Financial Institution
14 53 (1.02%) Legal
15 52 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
16 51 (0.98%) Telecoms
17 46 (0.88%) Manufacturing
18 34 (0.65%) Presentation Skills
19 33 (0.63%) Military
20 24 (0.46%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 977 (18.79%) Developer
2 732 (14.08%) Data Engineer
3 718 (13.81%) Senior
4 443 (8.52%) Python Developer
5 345 (6.64%) Lead
6 341 (6.56%) Architect
7 293 (5.64%) DevOps Engineer
8 291 (5.60%) Python Engineer
9 280 (5.39%) Analyst
10 262 (5.04%) Software Engineer
11 259 (4.98%) AWS Engineer
12 244 (4.69%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 204 (3.92%) Data Scientist
14 179 (3.44%) Platform Engineer
15 161 (3.10%) Azure Engineer
16 153 (2.94%) Senior Developer
17 140 (2.69%) Full-Stack Developer
18 138 (2.65%) Data Analyst
19 136 (2.62%) Senior Data Engineer
20 130 (2.50%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 448 (8.62%) REST
2 367 (7.06%) React
3 334 (6.42%) PySpark
4 329 (6.33%) Kafka
5 290 (5.58%) Node.js
6 231 (4.44%) Pandas
7 224 (4.31%) PyTorch
8 218 (4.19%) .NET
8 218 (4.19%) FastAPI
9 205 (3.94%) RESTful
10 187 (3.60%) TensorFlow
11 162 (3.12%) NumPy
12 154 (2.96%) scikit-learn
13 141 (2.71%) AngularJS
14 135 (2.60%) Flask
15 128 (2.46%) JSON
16 125 (2.40%) LangChain
17 119 (2.29%) Django
18 114 (2.19%) pytest
19 104 (2.00%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 519 (9.98%) Cloud Native
2 207 (3.98%) Algorithms
3 203 (3.90%) Distributed Systems
4 140 (2.69%) Product Ownership
5 130 (2.50%) Equities
6 122 (2.35%) Data Protection Act
7 115 (2.21%) Fixed Income
8 107 (2.06%) Data Structures
8 107 (2.06%) Onboarding
9 106 (2.04%) AI Agents
10 105 (2.02%) Derivative
11 95 (1.83%) Legacy Systems
12 92 (1.77%) Hybrid Cloud
13 88 (1.69%) Data Centre
13 88 (1.69%) Enterprise Software
14 87 (1.67%) Security Posture
15 85 (1.63%) Public Cloud
16 82 (1.58%) Management Information System
17 58 (1.12%) Hedge funds
18 54 (1.04%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 686 (13.19%) Linux
2 326 (6.27%) Windows
3 184 (3.54%) Unix
4 94 (1.81%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 69 (1.33%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.63%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.62%) Android
8 31 (0.60%) VMS
9 22 (0.42%) Mac OS
10 21 (0.40%) CentOS
11 18 (0.35%) Apple iOS
11 18 (0.35%) Solaris
12 13 (0.25%) AIX
13 9 (0.17%) Kali Linux
13 9 (0.17%) Windows 7
14 5 (0.096%) Debian
14 5 (0.096%) Embedded Linux
14 5 (0.096%) zOS
15 4 (0.077%) Amazon Linux
15 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,910 (36.74%) CI/CD
2 1,475 (28.37%) DevOps
3 1,231 (23.68%) Agile
4 1,121 (21.56%) AI
5 1,068 (20.54%) Problem-Solving
6 1,026 (19.73%) Analytics
7 908 (17.46%) Infrastructure as Code
8 859 (16.52%) Machine Learning
9 842 (16.20%) Data Pipeline
10 772 (14.85%) Containerisation
11 707 (13.60%) Data Engineering
12 683 (13.14%) Data Modelling
13 682 (13.12%) ETL
14 629 (12.10%) Data Science
15 610 (11.73%) Test Automation
16 598 (11.50%) Software Engineering
17 510 (9.81%) Observability
18 496 (9.54%) Business Intelligence
19 435 (8.37%) LLM
20 392 (7.54%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,653 (31.79%) SQL
2 738 (14.20%) Java
3 677 (13.02%) PowerShell
4 596 (11.46%) Bash
5 507 (9.75%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.77%) TypeScript
7 334 (6.42%) C#
8 227 (4.37%) Go
9 173 (3.33%) C++
10 153 (2.94%) R
11 121 (2.33%) Scala
12 116 (2.23%) Shell Script
13 109 (2.10%) Perl
14 97 (1.87%) Ruby
15 74 (1.42%) Bicep
16 60 (1.15%) Kusto Query Language
17 48 (0.92%) C
18 47 (0.90%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 44 (0.85%) VBA
20 40 (0.77%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,186 (22.81%) Security Cleared
2 945 (18.18%) SC Cleared
3 456 (8.77%) Degree
4 215 (4.14%) Computer Science Degree
5 148 (2.85%) DV Cleared
6 130 (2.50%) AWS Certification
7 126 (2.42%) Master's Degree
8 122 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
9 103 (1.98%) Azure Certification
10 95 (1.83%) CISSP
11 73 (1.40%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.12%) CCNP
13 50 (0.96%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 46 (0.88%) CISM
14 46 (0.88%) PhD
15 39 (0.75%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 36 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
17 32 (0.62%) ISTQB
18 31 (0.60%) CEH
18 31 (0.60%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 498 (9.58%) Data Quality
2 217 (4.17%) QA
3 177 (3.40%) GDPR
4 109 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 107 (2.06%) NIST
6 78 (1.50%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.63%) SLA
9 30 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 23 (0.44%) NCSC
12 19 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
14 14 (0.27%) WCAG
15 12 (0.23%) EU AI Act
16 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 10 (0.19%) MiFID
17 10 (0.19%) PMO
17 10 (0.19%) PSD2
System Software
1 948 (18.23%) Docker
2 174 (3.35%) Active Directory
3 114 (2.19%) VMware Infrastructure
4 56 (1.08%) Virtual Machines
5 55 (1.06%) vSphere
6 47 (0.90%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.56%) Hyper-V
8 26 (0.50%) Firmware
9 15 (0.29%) KVM
10 14 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
11 12 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 11 (0.21%) HDFS
13 10 (0.19%) Lustre
14 9 (0.17%) GPFS
15 8 (0.15%) SRDF
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
16 5 (0.096%) Ceph
16 5 (0.096%) NetIQ eDirectory
16 5 (0.096%) NFS
16 5 (0.096%) Postfix
Systems Management
1 1,115 (21.45%) Terraform
2 1,055 (20.29%) Kubernetes
3 541 (10.41%) Ansible
4 355 (6.83%) Grafana
5 316 (6.08%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.81%) Argo
7 75 (1.44%) Puppet
8 50 (0.96%) Istio
9 42 (0.81%) vRealize
10 41 (0.79%) Kibana
11 37 (0.71%) Nessus
12 33 (0.63%) Progress Chef
12 33 (0.63%) vCenter Server
13 29 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
14 27 (0.52%) Control-M
15 26 (0.50%) NetBackup
16 25 (0.48%) IBM Guardium
17 22 (0.42%) Microsoft Intune
18 21 (0.40%) Rancher
19 16 (0.31%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 633 (12.18%) Microsoft
2 537 (10.33%) Databricks
3 312 (6.00%) Google
4 229 (4.40%) Splunk
5 219 (4.21%) Oracle
6 208 (4.00%) VMware
7 147 (2.83%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.33%) Cisco
8 121 (2.33%) OpenAI
9 104 (2.00%) ServiceNow
10 85 (1.63%) CyberArk
11 82 (1.58%) Foundry
12 68 (1.31%) BeyondTrust
13 62 (1.19%) F5
14 61 (1.17%) Informatica
15 59 (1.13%) Palo Alto
16 53 (1.02%) IBM
17 47 (0.90%) SAP
18 45 (0.87%) Dynatrace
19 41 (0.79%) Atlassian