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

6 months to
9 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,680 4,262 4,004
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.43% 13.02% 10.51%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.04% 39.73% 33.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,698 2,804 2,821
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £445 £427 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 140 84 102
10th Percentile £30.45 £28.20 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.19 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £62.25
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -19.68% -4.23%
75th Percentile £79.06 £58.81 £71.41
90th Percentile £90.21 £84.39 £78.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.48 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.96% -28.57% +8.74%

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 14,186 10,727 12,091
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.04% 32.76% 31.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,216 7,109 8,253
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 535 295 341
10th Percentile £28.00 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £48.32 £37.23 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.25 £67.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £80.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +0.97%

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 9 September 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 9 September 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 9 September 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 -3 4,856 £550 +2.42% 7,464
London -3 2,889 £575 - 4,929
UK excluding London -7 2,141 £500 - 3,437
Work from Home -5 1,553 £530 -3.64% 2,686
North of England -1 734 £500 +5.26% 697
South East -7 454 £538 +7.50% 843
Yorkshire -1 378 £500 +1.75% 214
South West -2 283 £550 +4.76% 476
Scotland -5 279 £450 -10.00% 442
North West -1 277 £525 +11.94% 386
Midlands -20 230 £500 +5.26% 339
West Midlands -18 186 £500 +4.71% 178
East of England -9 148 £500 -4.76% 494
North East -3 91 £425 -2.86% 101
East Midlands -16 44 £478 +15.18% 160
Wales -9 29 £530 +30.86% 68
Northern Ireland +2 17 £363 -30.95% 113

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
1 293 (5.16%) Apache Airflow
2 277 (4.88%) Apache Spark
3 222 (3.91%) Apache
4 161 (2.83%) Confluence
5 57 (1.00%) Jupyter
6 53 (0.93%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.67%) SAS
8 30 (0.53%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.42%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 21 (0.37%) IIS
11 21 (0.37%) nginx
12 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
13 8 (0.14%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
13 8 (0.14%) WebSphere
14 7 (0.12%) Apache Superset
15 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
16 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 114 (2.01%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.60%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.40%) Microsoft Office
4 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
5 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
5 18 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.035%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
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 19 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
2 18 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
3 17 (0.30%) Aladdin
4 11 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
6 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
7 7 (0.12%) Front Arena
7 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
8 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
8 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
9 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
9 5 (0.088%) Summit
10 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.070%) Teamcenter
11 3 (0.053%) Endur
11 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
11 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
12 2 (0.035%) Odoo
12 2 (0.035%) Oracle Assets
12 2 (0.035%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,101 (36.99%) AWS
2 1,926 (33.91%) Azure
3 865 (15.23%) GCP
4 748 (13.17%) GitHub
5 501 (8.82%) Power Platform
6 494 (8.70%) Serverless
7 458 (8.06%) Azure DevOps
8 436 (7.68%) GitHub Actions
9 399 (7.02%) Amazon S3
10 369 (6.50%) AWS Lambda
11 330 (5.81%) Snowflake
12 232 (4.08%) dbt
13 224 (3.94%) Azure Data Factory
14 193 (3.40%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 181 (3.19%) AWS CloudFormation
16 173 (3.05%) Amazon EKS
17 145 (2.55%) Entra ID
18 138 (2.43%) Amazon EC2
19 135 (2.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 132 (2.32%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 281 (4.95%) Firewall
2 215 (3.79%) DNS
3 148 (2.61%) TCP/IP
4 146 (2.57%) Network Security
5 126 (2.22%) BGP
6 123 (2.17%) VPN
7 113 (1.99%) WAN
8 87 (1.53%) DHCP
9 74 (1.30%) OSPF
10 67 (1.18%) SD-WAN
11 61 (1.07%) VLAN
12 58 (1.02%) BIG-IP
13 57 (1.00%) SSL
14 55 (0.97%) HTTP
15 53 (0.93%) VXLAN
16 49 (0.86%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 40 (0.70%) Ethernet VPN
17 40 (0.70%) SAN
17 40 (0.70%) SNMP
18 38 (0.67%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 450 (7.92%) Power BI
2 330 (5.81%) Data Warehouse
3 318 (5.60%) PostgreSQL
4 220 (3.87%) SQL Server
5 212 (3.73%) Metadata
6 210 (3.70%) Relational Database
7 191 (3.36%) Tableau
8 189 (3.33%) Data Lake
9 164 (2.89%) BigQuery
10 157 (2.76%) NoSQL
11 145 (2.55%) Big Data
12 133 (2.34%) Amazon Redshift
13 130 (2.29%) Amazon Athena
13 130 (2.29%) Amazon RDS
14 124 (2.18%) Delta Lake
15 121 (2.13%) MongoDB
16 110 (1.94%) DynamoDB
17 97 (1.71%) MySQL
18 73 (1.29%) Redis
19 66 (1.16%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 773 (13.61%) Git
2 498 (8.77%) Jenkins
3 454 (7.99%) GitLab
4 294 (5.18%) JIRA
5 117 (2.06%) Selenium
6 63 (1.11%) JMeter
7 60 (1.06%) Postman
8 56 (0.99%) MLflow
9 55 (0.97%) SonarQube
10 51 (0.90%) Claude Code
11 41 (0.72%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.62%) Cypress.io
12 35 (0.62%) Maven
13 34 (0.60%) Cucumber
13 34 (0.60%) REST Assured
14 33 (0.58%) Gatling
15 31 (0.55%) Sonatype Nexus
16 30 (0.53%) Artifactory
17 27 (0.48%) LoadRunner
18 22 (0.39%) JUnit
General
1 1,313 (23.12%) Social Skills
2 1,238 (21.80%) Finance
3 859 (15.12%) Analytical Skills
4 560 (9.86%) Public Sector
5 471 (8.29%) Banking
6 184 (3.24%) Front Office
7 143 (2.52%) Investment Banking
8 115 (2.02%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (1.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 111 (1.95%) Retail
11 94 (1.65%) Marketing
12 80 (1.41%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.04%) Military
14 57 (1.00%) Pharmaceutical
15 52 (0.92%) Aerospace
16 50 (0.88%) Legal
17 49 (0.86%) Law
18 45 (0.79%) Financial Institution
18 45 (0.79%) Publishing
19 43 (0.76%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 968 (17.04%) Senior
2 919 (16.18%) Developer
3 836 (14.72%) Data Engineer
4 484 (8.52%) Python Developer
5 483 (8.50%) Lead
6 419 (7.38%) Python Engineer
7 341 (6.00%) DevOps Engineer
8 294 (5.18%) Analyst
9 283 (4.98%) Software Engineer
10 279 (4.91%) Architect
11 277 (4.88%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 232 (4.08%) AWS Engineer
13 195 (3.43%) Data Scientist
14 193 (3.40%) Cloud Engineer
14 193 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
15 191 (3.36%) Senior Developer
16 185 (3.26%) Senior Data Engineer
17 182 (3.20%) Azure Engineer
18 145 (2.55%) Data Analyst
19 138 (2.43%) Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,344 (23.66%) Terraform
2 497 (8.75%) REST
3 384 (6.76%) PySpark
4 363 (6.39%) Kafka
5 312 (5.49%) React
6 255 (4.49%) .NET
7 215 (3.79%) JSON
8 205 (3.61%) Django
9 204 (3.59%) FastAPI
10 187 (3.29%) RESTful
11 172 (3.03%) Pandas
12 167 (2.94%) Node.js
13 147 (2.59%) pytest
14 141 (2.48%) LangChain
15 117 (2.06%) PyTorch
16 116 (2.04%) Flask
17 115 (2.02%) OAuth
18 114 (2.01%) YAML
19 111 (1.95%) HTML
20 103 (1.81%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 801 (14.10%) Cloud Native
2 313 (5.51%) Distributed Systems
3 253 (4.45%) AI Agents
4 228 (4.01%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.85%) Product Ownership
6 158 (2.78%) Data Centre
7 142 (2.50%) Data Structures
8 140 (2.46%) Algorithms
9 138 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
10 118 (2.08%) Hybrid Cloud
11 110 (1.94%) Management Information System
12 109 (1.92%) Data Protection Act
13 106 (1.87%) Derivative
14 94 (1.65%) Enterprise Software
15 85 (1.50%) Security Posture
16 84 (1.48%) Equities
17 74 (1.30%) Public Cloud
18 71 (1.25%) Linux Command Line
19 67 (1.18%) PKI
20 65 (1.14%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 751 (13.22%) Linux
2 336 (5.92%) Windows
3 251 (4.42%) Unix
4 153 (2.69%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 91 (1.60%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.74%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.62%) VMS
8 24 (0.42%) AIX
9 19 (0.33%) Solaris
10 18 (0.32%) CentOS
11 16 (0.28%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.088%) Debian
17 4 (0.070%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,306 (40.60%) CI/CD
2 1,631 (28.71%) DevOps
3 1,523 (26.81%) AI
4 1,270 (22.36%) Agile
5 1,246 (21.94%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,108 (19.51%) Analytics
7 999 (17.59%) Data Pipeline
8 922 (16.23%) Software Engineering
9 912 (16.06%) Problem-Solving
10 861 (15.16%) Machine Learning
11 820 (14.44%) Data Engineering
12 796 (14.01%) Containerisation
13 758 (13.35%) Data Modelling
14 735 (12.94%) Observability
15 665 (11.71%) Test Automation
16 651 (11.46%) ETL
17 628 (11.06%) Continuous Improvement
18 608 (10.70%) Validation
19 572 (10.07%) Data Science
20 568 (10.00%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,873 (32.98%) SQL
2 830 (14.61%) Java
3 767 (13.50%) Bash
4 747 (13.15%) PowerShell
5 452 (7.96%) JavaScript
6 341 (6.00%) TypeScript
7 325 (5.72%) C#
8 200 (3.52%) Go
9 154 (2.71%) Shell Script
10 152 (2.68%) R
11 141 (2.48%) C++
12 137 (2.41%) Bicep
13 133 (2.34%) Scala
14 98 (1.73%) Perl
15 60 (1.06%) Groovy
16 59 (1.04%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 55 (0.97%) C
17 55 (0.97%) PL/SQL
17 55 (0.97%) Ruby
18 53 (0.93%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,374 (24.19%) Security Cleared
2 1,113 (19.60%) SC Cleared
3 419 (7.38%) Degree
4 234 (4.12%) DV Cleared
5 158 (2.78%) Computer Science Degree
6 149 (2.62%) Azure Certification
7 136 (2.39%) AWS Certification
8 121 (2.13%) BPSS Clearance
9 96 (1.69%) CISSP
10 84 (1.48%) Cisco Certification
11 65 (1.14%) Master's Degree
12 44 (0.77%) Microsoft Certification
13 42 (0.74%) CCNP
14 36 (0.63%) ISTQB
14 36 (0.63%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 34 (0.60%) CISM
15 34 (0.60%) PhD
16 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 28 (0.49%) DBS Check
18 27 (0.48%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 628 (11.06%) Data Quality
2 298 (5.25%) QA
3 113 (1.99%) NIST
4 106 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 99 (1.74%) GDPR
6 82 (1.44%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.62%) SLA
8 33 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.51%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) WCAG
11 23 (0.40%) PCI DSS
12 22 (0.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 17 (0.30%) SOC 2
14 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
15 15 (0.26%) HIPAA
16 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.12%) HMG Security Policy Framework
18 7 (0.12%) MiFID
19 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 957 (16.85%) Docker
2 168 (2.96%) Active Directory
3 139 (2.45%) VMware Infrastructure
4 66 (1.16%) Virtual Machines
5 53 (0.93%) Hyper-V
6 40 (0.70%) vSphere
7 36 (0.63%) VMware NSX
8 25 (0.44%) NFS
8 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
9 24 (0.42%) Firmware
10 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
10 14 (0.25%) Squid
11 11 (0.19%) Ceph
11 11 (0.19%) Virtual Desktop
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) Postfix
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,141 (20.09%) Kubernetes
2 620 (10.92%) Ansible
3 335 (5.90%) Grafana
4 240 (4.23%) Prometheus
5 79 (1.39%) Puppet
6 72 (1.27%) Progress Chef
7 68 (1.20%) Argo
8 35 (0.62%) Single Sign-On
9 34 (0.60%) Istio
10 31 (0.55%) Kibana
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
12 24 (0.42%) ZABBIX
13 23 (0.40%) Microsoft Intune
13 23 (0.40%) Nagios
13 23 (0.40%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.39%) vRealize
15 20 (0.35%) FortiGate
16 19 (0.33%) Packer
17 16 (0.28%) HAProxy
17 16 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 731 (12.87%) Microsoft
2 585 (10.30%) Databricks
3 377 (6.64%) Google
4 251 (4.42%) Oracle
5 218 (3.84%) Splunk
6 182 (3.20%) VMware
7 151 (2.66%) OpenAI
8 140 (2.46%) Cisco
9 119 (2.10%) ServiceNow
10 104 (1.83%) Red Hat
11 101 (1.78%) Dynatrace
12 94 (1.65%) IBM
13 89 (1.57%) F5
14 86 (1.51%) Palo Alto
15 78 (1.37%) Informatica
16 75 (1.32%) Foundry
17 72 (1.27%) Fortinet
18 69 (1.21%) SAP
19 68 (1.20%) CyberArk
20 64 (1.13%) Salesforce