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 28 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
28 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,819 4,217 4,517
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.35% 11.52% 9.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.94% 35.87% 31.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,164 2,794 3,242
10th Percentile £358 £375 £400
25th Percentile £420 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £738 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £505 £525
% change year-on-year -0.99% -3.81% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 85 89 134
10th Percentile £27.80 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £41.25 £25.09 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.86% -12.50% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.25 £62.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year -13.20% +4.17% -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 11,490 11,757 14,123
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.83% 32.12% 30.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,573 7,508 10,060
10th Percentile £348 £350 £360
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -3.08%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £761 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 340 305 433
10th Percentile £30.89 £22.00 £31.60
25th Percentile £49.13 £40.06 £47.50
Median hourly rate £63.75 £62.50 £60.14
Median % change year-on-year +2.00% +3.92% -0.60%
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.13 £75.00 £78.00
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 28 November 2025.

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 28 November 2025.

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 28 November 2025. 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 4,104 £525 -12.50% 2,869
London +1 2,423 £550 -12.00% 1,215
UK excluding London +4 1,831 £500 -0.99% 2,491
Work from Home -1 1,468 £536 -2.55% 892
North of England +8 563 £475 -5.94% 459
South East +3 394 £500 -4.76% 988
Yorkshire +9 294 £500 -6.37% 137
Scotland +12 285 £475 -1.86% 137
Midlands +8 270 £500 +5.26% 338
North West +9 233 £445 -9.18% 269
West Midlands +14 225 £507 +1.30% 214
South West -10 176 £555 -7.50% 258
East of England +7 149 £525 +8.25% 257
East Midlands -8 45 £402 +0.50% 123
North East +11 41 £518 -11.54% 59
Wales -8 30 £495 -1.00% 75
Northern Ireland -2 20 £581 +10.71% 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
1 252 (5.23%) Apache Airflow
2 211 (4.38%) Apache Spark
3 179 (3.71%) Apache
4 178 (3.69%) Confluence
5 67 (1.39%) SAS
6 51 (1.06%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.77%) nginx
8 35 (0.73%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
10 21 (0.44%) Jupyter
11 12 (0.25%) IIS
12 11 (0.23%) Appian
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
14 8 (0.17%) JBoss
14 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
15 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
15 7 (0.15%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.10%) CMS
16 5 (0.10%) Luigi
17 4 (0.083%) Camunda
Applications
1 136 (2.82%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.71%) Chatbot
3 31 (0.64%) Microsoft Office
4 30 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 11 (0.23%) MS Visio
7 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 7 (0.15%) Maya
8 7 (0.15%) NUKE
9 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.042%) Maple
10 1 (0.021%) Microsoft Project
10 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
10 1 (0.021%) SPSS
10 1 (0.021%) Stata
10 1 (0.021%) Trello
10 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 14 (0.29%) Aladdin
2 9 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
3 8 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.12%) Fidessa
5 5 (0.10%) Maximo
6 4 (0.083%) Remedy ITSM
7 3 (0.062%) Actimize
7 3 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
7 3 (0.062%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.042%) Distributed Ledger
8 2 (0.042%) Endur
8 2 (0.042%) Loan IQ
8 2 (0.042%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.042%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.042%) Shopify
8 2 (0.042%) Temenos T24
9 1 (0.021%) Cerner Millennium
9 1 (0.021%) ION MarketView
9 1 (0.021%) SAP ERP
9 1 (0.021%) SAP GRC
Cloud Services
1 1,910 (39.63%) AWS
2 1,440 (29.88%) Azure
3 723 (15.00%) GCP
4 566 (11.75%) GitHub
5 484 (10.04%) Serverless
6 400 (8.30%) Power Platform
7 377 (7.82%) Amazon S3
8 338 (7.01%) AWS Lambda
9 304 (6.31%) Azure DevOps
10 299 (6.20%) GitHub Actions
11 249 (5.17%) Snowflake
12 227 (4.71%) AWS CloudFormation
13 201 (4.17%) Amazon EC2
14 194 (4.03%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 175 (3.63%) Amazon ECS
16 174 (3.61%) dbt
17 162 (3.36%) Azure Data Factory
18 159 (3.30%) Amazon EKS
19 137 (2.84%) OpenShift
20 136 (2.82%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 275 (5.71%) Firewall
2 183 (3.80%) DNS
3 148 (3.07%) TCP/IP
4 111 (2.30%) Network Security
5 94 (1.95%) VPN
6 91 (1.89%) BGP
6 91 (1.89%) HTTP
7 68 (1.41%) SSL
8 57 (1.18%) OSPF
9 56 (1.16%) WAN
10 48 (1.00%) MPLS
11 43 (0.89%) SSH
12 41 (0.85%) LAN
13 40 (0.83%) SMTP
13 40 (0.83%) Wireless
14 37 (0.77%) DHCP
15 36 (0.75%) SD-WAN
16 35 (0.73%) Wireshark
17 33 (0.68%) FTP
18 30 (0.62%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 400 (8.30%) PostgreSQL
2 347 (7.20%) Power BI
3 285 (5.91%) Data Warehouse
4 250 (5.19%) Relational Database
5 247 (5.13%) NoSQL
6 181 (3.76%) Data Lake
7 178 (3.69%) Big Data
8 174 (3.61%) Amazon RDS
9 155 (3.22%) Tableau
10 143 (2.97%) SQL Server
11 130 (2.70%) MongoDB
12 119 (2.47%) MySQL
13 108 (2.24%) BigQuery
14 103 (2.14%) Amazon Athena
15 101 (2.10%) Hadoop
16 87 (1.81%) Metadata
17 86 (1.78%) DynamoDB
18 85 (1.76%) Amazon Redshift
19 75 (1.56%) Elasticsearch
20 60 (1.25%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 654 (13.57%) Git
2 617 (12.80%) Jenkins
3 411 (8.53%) GitLab
4 322 (6.68%) JIRA
5 73 (1.51%) Selenium
6 69 (1.43%) Bitbucket
7 63 (1.31%) SonarQube
7 63 (1.31%) Sonatype Nexus
8 62 (1.29%) MLflow
9 60 (1.25%) JUnit
10 45 (0.93%) Liquibase
11 41 (0.85%) Artifactory
12 39 (0.81%) Cucumber
13 33 (0.68%) JMeter
13 33 (0.68%) Maven
14 30 (0.62%) Gradle
15 29 (0.60%) Eclipse
16 28 (0.58%) Postman
17 27 (0.56%) Vagrant
18 26 (0.54%) Cypress.io
General
1 1,344 (27.89%) Social Skills
2 1,087 (22.56%) Finance
3 706 (14.65%) Analytical Skills
4 498 (10.33%) Banking
5 420 (8.72%) Public Sector
6 234 (4.86%) Front Office
7 191 (3.96%) Investment Banking
8 109 (2.26%) Documentation Skills
9 87 (1.81%) Financial Institution
10 80 (1.66%) Marketing
11 76 (1.58%) Retail
12 75 (1.56%) Telecoms
13 69 (1.43%) Pharmaceutical
14 61 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 52 (1.08%) Legal
16 45 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
17 42 (0.87%) Manufacturing
18 34 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
19 28 (0.58%) Retail Banking
20 26 (0.54%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 899 (18.66%) Developer
2 655 (13.59%) Senior
3 545 (11.31%) Data Engineer
4 358 (7.43%) Python Engineer
5 357 (7.41%) Python Developer
6 341 (7.08%) DevOps Engineer
7 338 (7.01%) Analyst
8 300 (6.23%) AWS Engineer
9 270 (5.60%) Software Engineer
10 252 (5.23%) Architect
11 217 (4.50%) Lead
12 197 (4.09%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 187 (3.88%) Platform Engineer
14 175 (3.63%) Data Scientist
15 160 (3.32%) Data Analyst
16 137 (2.84%) Senior Developer
17 129 (2.68%) Consultant
18 122 (2.53%) Network Engineer
19 119 (2.47%) Cloud Engineer
20 118 (2.45%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 395 (8.20%) REST
2 337 (6.99%) React
3 327 (6.79%) Kafka
4 248 (5.15%) Node.js
5 243 (5.04%) RESTful
6 240 (4.98%) Pandas
7 228 (4.73%) FastAPI
8 208 (4.32%) PySpark
9 192 (3.98%) NumPy
10 188 (3.90%) PyTorch
11 166 (3.44%) TensorFlow
12 159 (3.30%) AngularJS
13 144 (2.99%) .NET
14 135 (2.80%) Elastic Stack
15 118 (2.45%) scikit-learn
16 113 (2.34%) LangChain
17 108 (2.24%) GraphQL
18 107 (2.22%) Flask
19 105 (2.18%) HTML
19 105 (2.18%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 385 (7.99%) Cloud Native
2 210 (4.36%) Algorithms
3 198 (4.11%) Distributed Systems
4 147 (3.05%) Equities
5 144 (2.99%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 140 (2.91%) Data Protection Act
7 139 (2.88%) Fixed Income
8 122 (2.53%) Product Ownership
9 112 (2.32%) Data Structures
9 112 (2.32%) Derivative
10 107 (2.22%) Hedge funds
10 107 (2.22%) Onboarding
11 100 (2.08%) AI Agents
12 87 (1.81%) Public Cloud
13 78 (1.62%) Data Centre
14 76 (1.58%) Hybrid Cloud
14 76 (1.58%) Management Information System
15 70 (1.45%) Legacy Systems
16 66 (1.37%) Replication
17 55 (1.14%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 862 (17.89%) Linux
2 370 (7.68%) Windows
3 241 (5.00%) Unix
4 97 (2.01%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.37%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.91%) Ubuntu
7 40 (0.83%) Android
8 37 (0.77%) VMS
9 36 (0.75%) CentOS
10 29 (0.60%) Mac OS
11 27 (0.56%) Amazon Linux
12 20 (0.42%) Solaris
13 19 (0.39%) Apple iOS
14 11 (0.23%) Debian
15 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
15 9 (0.19%) Windows 7
16 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
17 4 (0.083%) AIX
17 4 (0.083%) zOS
18 3 (0.062%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,608 (33.37%) CI/CD
2 1,345 (27.91%) DevOps
3 1,257 (26.08%) Agile
4 1,045 (21.68%) Problem-Solving
5 853 (17.70%) AI
6 849 (17.62%) Infrastructure as Code
7 759 (15.75%) Analytics
8 725 (15.04%) Machine Learning
9 679 (14.09%) Containerisation
10 636 (13.20%) Data Pipeline
11 612 (12.70%) Software Engineering
12 532 (11.04%) Data Science
13 519 (10.77%) ETL
14 512 (10.62%) Data Modelling
15 507 (10.52%) Data Engineering
16 496 (10.29%) Test Automation
17 406 (8.42%) Computer Science
18 396 (8.22%) Business Intelligence
19 365 (7.57%) Microservices
20 358 (7.43%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 1,471 (30.53%) SQL
2 864 (17.93%) Java
3 663 (13.76%) Bash
4 627 (13.01%) PowerShell
5 528 (10.96%) JavaScript
6 343 (7.12%) TypeScript
7 303 (6.29%) Go
8 284 (5.89%) C#
9 261 (5.42%) C++
10 190 (3.94%) Perl
11 174 (3.61%) Shell Script
12 164 (3.40%) R
13 102 (2.12%) Scala
14 85 (1.76%) Ruby
15 78 (1.62%) C
16 62 (1.29%) PHP
17 60 (1.25%) VBA
18 52 (1.08%) Groovy
19 51 (1.06%) Bicep
20 45 (0.93%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 930 (19.30%) Security Cleared
2 738 (15.31%) SC Cleared
3 476 (9.88%) Degree
4 238 (4.94%) Computer Science Degree
5 152 (3.15%) AWS Certification
6 147 (3.05%) DV Cleared
7 145 (3.01%) Master's Degree
8 100 (2.08%) Cisco Certification
9 87 (1.81%) CISSP
10 83 (1.72%) BPSS Clearance
11 77 (1.60%) Azure Certification
12 62 (1.29%) CCNP
13 53 (1.10%) PhD
14 50 (1.04%) MCP
15 42 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 41 (0.85%) CCIE
17 35 (0.73%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
18 34 (0.71%) CEH
19 30 (0.62%) OSCP
20 29 (0.60%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 329 (6.83%) Data Quality
2 187 (3.88%) QA
3 158 (3.28%) GDPR
4 98 (2.03%) NIST
5 97 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 59 (1.22%) Accessibility
7 46 (0.95%) PCI DSS
8 37 (0.77%) HIPAA
9 23 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 23 (0.48%) SLA
10 21 (0.44%) NCSC
11 20 (0.42%) SOC 2
12 19 (0.39%) EU AI Act
13 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.21%) EMIR
14 10 (0.21%) MiFID
14 10 (0.21%) PMO
15 8 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
15 8 (0.17%) WCAG
16 7 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 943 (19.57%) Docker
2 167 (3.47%) Active Directory
3 137 (2.84%) VMware Infrastructure
4 41 (0.85%) vSphere
5 37 (0.77%) Virtual Machines
6 35 (0.73%) VMware NSX
7 30 (0.62%) Firmware
8 21 (0.44%) DFS Replication
9 18 (0.37%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.37%) Squid
10 16 (0.33%) Postfix
10 16 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
11 15 (0.31%) KVM
11 15 (0.31%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 14 (0.29%) HDFS
12 14 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
14 10 (0.21%) GPFS
14 10 (0.21%) Lustre
15 9 (0.19%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,055 (21.89%) Kubernetes
2 1,047 (21.73%) Terraform
3 625 (12.97%) Ansible
4 372 (7.72%) Grafana
5 313 (6.50%) Prometheus
6 86 (1.78%) Puppet
7 85 (1.76%) Argo
8 56 (1.16%) Kibana
9 46 (0.95%) Progress Chef
10 38 (0.79%) Istio
11 36 (0.75%) Nessus
11 36 (0.75%) vRealize
12 29 (0.60%) NetBackup
13 28 (0.58%) Single Sign-On
14 27 (0.56%) ITRS Geneos
15 24 (0.50%) logstash
15 24 (0.50%) vCenter Server
16 21 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
16 21 (0.44%) Packer
17 20 (0.42%) Nmap
Vendors
1 544 (11.29%) Microsoft
2 360 (7.47%) Databricks
3 274 (5.69%) Google
4 258 (5.35%) Splunk
5 222 (4.61%) VMware
6 220 (4.57%) Oracle
7 144 (2.99%) ServiceNow
8 140 (2.91%) Cisco
9 129 (2.68%) Red Hat
10 91 (1.89%) Palo Alto
11 86 (1.78%) F5
12 85 (1.76%) OpenAI
13 72 (1.49%) Foundry
14 61 (1.27%) SAP
15 59 (1.22%) CyberArk
16 48 (1.00%) Atlassian
17 45 (0.93%) CrowdStrike
17 45 (0.93%) IBM
18 44 (0.91%) Juniper
18 44 (0.91%) Salesforce