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

6 months to
24 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 10 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 4,742 4,183 4,587
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 13.34% 11.43% 9.91%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.72% 35.69% 32.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,117 2,769 3,292
10th Percentile £358 £375 £400
25th Percentile £419 £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 £746 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £505 £525
% change year-on-year -0.99% -3.81% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 86 82 136
10th Percentile £27.50 £20.12 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.25 £26.31 £46.18
Median hourly rate £53.25 £55.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -3.18% -8.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £69.69 £70.00 £70.16
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 11,366 11,719 14,318
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.97% 32.03% 30.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,490 7,491 10,199
10th Percentile £350 £350 £360
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.76% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £622 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £756 £761
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 337 297 441
10th Percentile £29.73 £22.00 £32.00
25th Percentile £48.75 £40.06 £47.50
Median hourly rate £63.50 £63.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.79% +5.00% -
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.50 £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 24 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 24 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 24 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 4,042 £525 -12.50% 2,846
London +1 2,379 £550 -12.00% 1,052
UK excluding London +5 1,819 £500 -0.99% 2,431
Work from Home 0 1,448 £535 -2.73% 1,081
North of England +10 563 £475 -5.94% 463
South East +2 389 £500 -4.76% 872
Yorkshire +12 301 £500 -6.98% 141
Scotland +13 285 £475 -2.56% 158
Midlands +10 267 £500 +5.26% 352
North West +7 229 £438 -10.53% 269
West Midlands +16 222 £507 +1.30% 227
South West -7 174 £550 -8.33% 267
East of England +8 147 £525 +9.38% 255
East Midlands -9 45 £406 +1.50% 123
North East +7 38 £520 -11.11% 60
Wales -8 30 £495 -1.00% 72
Northern Ireland -3 20 £588 +11.90% 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
1 249 (5.25%) Apache Airflow
2 199 (4.20%) Apache Spark
3 183 (3.86%) Confluence
4 176 (3.71%) Apache
5 65 (1.37%) SAS
6 50 (1.05%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.80%) nginx
8 35 (0.74%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 20 (0.42%) Jupyter
11 12 (0.25%) IIS
12 11 (0.23%) Appian
13 9 (0.19%) Apache Pig
13 9 (0.19%) WebSphere
14 8 (0.17%) JBoss
14 8 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
15 7 (0.15%) ArcGIS
16 5 (0.11%) CMS
16 5 (0.11%) Luigi
17 4 (0.084%) Camunda
Applications
1 134 (2.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (0.72%) Chatbot
2 34 (0.72%) Microsoft Office
3 29 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 12 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
5 10 (0.21%) MS Visio
6 8 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
6 8 (0.17%) Weka
7 7 (0.15%) Maya
7 7 (0.15%) NUKE
8 2 (0.042%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.042%) GNU Octave
8 2 (0.042%) Maple
9 1 (0.021%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.021%) NASTRAN
9 1 (0.021%) SPSS
9 1 (0.021%) Stata
9 1 (0.021%) Trello
9 1 (0.021%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 13 (0.27%) Aladdin
2 10 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 8 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
4 6 (0.13%) Fidessa
5 5 (0.11%) Maximo
6 4 (0.084%) Remedy ITSM
7 3 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
7 3 (0.063%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.042%) Actimize
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%) Bloomberg AIM
9 1 (0.021%) Cloudability
9 1 (0.021%) Exchequer
9 1 (0.021%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 1,874 (39.52%) AWS
2 1,412 (29.78%) Azure
3 717 (15.12%) GCP
4 548 (11.56%) GitHub
5 469 (9.89%) Serverless
6 397 (8.37%) Power Platform
7 372 (7.84%) Amazon S3
8 329 (6.94%) AWS Lambda
9 301 (6.35%) Azure DevOps
10 287 (6.05%) GitHub Actions
11 248 (5.23%) Snowflake
12 216 (4.56%) AWS CloudFormation
13 196 (4.13%) Amazon EC2
14 190 (4.01%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 172 (3.63%) dbt
16 167 (3.52%) Amazon ECS
17 157 (3.31%) Azure Data Factory
18 151 (3.18%) Amazon EKS
19 136 (2.87%) OpenShift
20 133 (2.80%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 281 (5.93%) Firewall
2 183 (3.86%) DNS
3 149 (3.14%) TCP/IP
4 109 (2.30%) Network Security
5 96 (2.02%) VPN
6 92 (1.94%) BGP
7 91 (1.92%) HTTP
8 67 (1.41%) SSL
9 56 (1.18%) OSPF
10 54 (1.14%) WAN
11 50 (1.05%) MPLS
12 44 (0.93%) SSH
13 41 (0.86%) LAN
13 41 (0.86%) SMTP
14 39 (0.82%) Wireless
15 36 (0.76%) SD-WAN
16 35 (0.74%) DHCP
17 34 (0.72%) FTP
17 34 (0.72%) Wireshark
18 29 (0.61%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 395 (8.33%) PostgreSQL
2 346 (7.30%) Power BI
3 277 (5.84%) Data Warehouse
4 249 (5.25%) Relational Database
5 243 (5.12%) NoSQL
6 177 (3.73%) Data Lake
7 174 (3.67%) Big Data
8 169 (3.56%) Amazon RDS
9 151 (3.18%) Tableau
10 139 (2.93%) SQL Server
11 130 (2.74%) MongoDB
12 117 (2.47%) MySQL
13 105 (2.21%) BigQuery
14 101 (2.13%) Amazon Athena
15 99 (2.09%) Hadoop
16 85 (1.79%) DynamoDB
17 83 (1.75%) Amazon Redshift
17 83 (1.75%) Metadata
18 74 (1.56%) Elasticsearch
19 59 (1.24%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 646 (13.62%) Git
2 623 (13.14%) Jenkins
3 402 (8.48%) GitLab
4 324 (6.83%) JIRA
5 72 (1.52%) Selenium
6 70 (1.48%) Bitbucket
7 65 (1.37%) SonarQube
8 62 (1.31%) Sonatype Nexus
9 60 (1.27%) JUnit
10 53 (1.12%) MLflow
11 46 (0.97%) Liquibase
12 41 (0.86%) Artifactory
13 39 (0.82%) Cucumber
14 35 (0.74%) Maven
14 35 (0.74%) Postman
15 33 (0.70%) JMeter
16 30 (0.63%) Gradle
17 29 (0.61%) Eclipse
18 28 (0.59%) Vagrant
19 26 (0.55%) Cypress.io
General
1 1,338 (28.22%) Social Skills
2 1,083 (22.84%) Finance
3 701 (14.78%) Analytical Skills
4 499 (10.52%) Banking
5 408 (8.60%) Public Sector
6 237 (5.00%) Front Office
7 192 (4.05%) Investment Banking
8 110 (2.32%) Documentation Skills
9 86 (1.81%) Financial Institution
10 82 (1.73%) Marketing
11 77 (1.62%) Telecoms
12 71 (1.50%) Retail
13 69 (1.46%) Pharmaceutical
14 59 (1.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 52 (1.10%) Legal
16 45 (0.95%) Presentation Skills
17 40 (0.84%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.70%) Influencing Skills
19 27 (0.57%) Organisational Skills
20 26 (0.55%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 881 (18.58%) Developer
2 638 (13.45%) Senior
3 530 (11.18%) Data Engineer
4 357 (7.53%) Python Engineer
5 351 (7.40%) Python Developer
6 338 (7.13%) Analyst
6 338 (7.13%) DevOps Engineer
7 299 (6.31%) AWS Engineer
8 270 (5.69%) Software Engineer
9 246 (5.19%) Architect
10 209 (4.41%) Lead
11 187 (3.94%) Platform Engineer
12 185 (3.90%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 166 (3.50%) Data Scientist
14 160 (3.37%) Data Analyst
15 132 (2.78%) Senior Developer
16 126 (2.66%) Consultant
17 124 (2.61%) Network Engineer
18 122 (2.57%) Cloud Engineer
19 118 (2.49%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 392 (8.27%) REST
2 334 (7.04%) React
3 316 (6.66%) Kafka
4 244 (5.15%) Node.js
5 242 (5.10%) RESTful
6 239 (5.04%) Pandas
7 222 (4.68%) FastAPI
8 192 (4.05%) PySpark
9 191 (4.03%) NumPy
10 180 (3.80%) PyTorch
11 159 (3.35%) TensorFlow
12 156 (3.29%) AngularJS
13 142 (2.99%) .NET
14 132 (2.78%) Elastic Stack
15 113 (2.38%) scikit-learn
16 109 (2.30%) GraphQL
17 106 (2.24%) HTML
17 106 (2.24%) LangChain
17 106 (2.24%) Spring
18 105 (2.21%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 377 (7.95%) Cloud Native
2 207 (4.37%) Algorithms
3 196 (4.13%) Distributed Systems
4 148 (3.12%) Equities
5 145 (3.06%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 139 (2.93%) Data Protection Act
6 139 (2.93%) Fixed Income
7 119 (2.51%) Product Ownership
8 113 (2.38%) Derivative
9 111 (2.34%) Data Structures
10 109 (2.30%) Hedge funds
11 108 (2.28%) Onboarding
12 97 (2.05%) AI Agents
13 84 (1.77%) Public Cloud
14 76 (1.60%) Management Information System
15 75 (1.58%) Data Centre
16 73 (1.54%) Hybrid Cloud
17 68 (1.43%) Legacy Systems
18 67 (1.41%) Replication
19 56 (1.18%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 854 (18.01%) Linux
2 370 (7.80%) Windows
3 243 (5.12%) Unix
4 97 (2.05%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.31%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.93%) Ubuntu
7 43 (0.91%) Android
8 37 (0.78%) VMS
9 36 (0.76%) CentOS
10 29 (0.61%) Amazon Linux
11 28 (0.59%) Mac OS
12 22 (0.46%) Apple iOS
12 22 (0.46%) Solaris
13 10 (0.21%) Debian
14 9 (0.19%) Kali Linux
14 9 (0.19%) Windows 7
15 6 (0.13%) AIX
16 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
17 4 (0.084%) zOS
18 3 (0.063%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,575 (33.21%) CI/CD
2 1,337 (28.19%) DevOps
3 1,244 (26.23%) Agile
4 1,033 (21.78%) Problem-Solving
5 828 (17.46%) Infrastructure as Code
6 813 (17.14%) AI
7 733 (15.46%) Analytics
8 703 (14.82%) Machine Learning
9 658 (13.88%) Containerisation
10 616 (12.99%) Data Pipeline
11 604 (12.74%) Software Engineering
12 509 (10.73%) Data Science
13 508 (10.71%) ETL
14 499 (10.52%) Data Modelling
15 489 (10.31%) Data Engineering
15 489 (10.31%) Test Automation
16 403 (8.50%) Computer Science
17 394 (8.31%) Business Intelligence
18 358 (7.55%) Microservices
19 347 (7.32%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 1,441 (30.39%) SQL
2 860 (18.14%) Java
3 659 (13.90%) Bash
4 620 (13.07%) PowerShell
5 519 (10.94%) JavaScript
6 340 (7.17%) TypeScript
7 300 (6.33%) Go
8 280 (5.90%) C#
9 263 (5.55%) C++
10 192 (4.05%) Perl
11 176 (3.71%) Shell Script
12 159 (3.35%) R
13 95 (2.00%) Scala
14 79 (1.67%) C
14 79 (1.67%) Ruby
15 62 (1.31%) PHP
16 59 (1.24%) VBA
17 52 (1.10%) Groovy
18 51 (1.08%) Bicep
19 45 (0.95%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 906 (19.11%) Security Cleared
2 723 (15.25%) SC Cleared
3 477 (10.06%) Degree
4 235 (4.96%) Computer Science Degree
5 151 (3.18%) AWS Certification
6 145 (3.06%) Master's Degree
7 141 (2.97%) DV Cleared
8 100 (2.11%) Cisco Certification
9 88 (1.86%) CISSP
10 78 (1.64%) Azure Certification
11 77 (1.62%) BPSS Clearance
12 64 (1.35%) CCNP
13 54 (1.14%) PhD
14 49 (1.03%) MCP
15 42 (0.89%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 39 (0.82%) CCIE
17 36 (0.76%) CEH
18 34 (0.72%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
19 31 (0.65%) OSCP
20 29 (0.61%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 315 (6.64%) Data Quality
2 185 (3.90%) QA
3 156 (3.29%) GDPR
4 97 (2.05%) NIST
5 96 (2.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 59 (1.24%) Accessibility
7 47 (0.99%) PCI DSS
8 39 (0.82%) HIPAA
9 23 (0.49%) SLA
10 22 (0.46%) NCSC
10 22 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 20 (0.42%) SOC 2
12 19 (0.40%) EU AI Act
13 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.21%) EMIR
14 10 (0.21%) PMO
15 9 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
15 9 (0.19%) MiFID
16 7 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
16 7 (0.15%) WCAG
System Software
1 930 (19.61%) Docker
2 163 (3.44%) Active Directory
3 147 (3.10%) VMware Infrastructure
4 42 (0.89%) vSphere
5 34 (0.72%) Virtual Machines
5 34 (0.72%) VMware NSX
6 30 (0.63%) Firmware
7 22 (0.46%) DFS Replication
8 19 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
9 17 (0.36%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.36%) Squid
10 16 (0.34%) Postfix
11 14 (0.30%) HDFS
11 14 (0.30%) KVM
11 14 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.30%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 12 (0.25%) Dovecot
13 10 (0.21%) GPFS
14 9 (0.19%) Lustre
14 9 (0.19%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,040 (21.93%) Kubernetes
2 1,021 (21.53%) Terraform
3 620 (13.07%) Ansible
4 363 (7.65%) Grafana
5 306 (6.45%) Prometheus
6 88 (1.86%) Puppet
7 85 (1.79%) Argo
8 55 (1.16%) Kibana
9 45 (0.95%) Progress Chef
10 41 (0.86%) Istio
11 36 (0.76%) Nessus
12 35 (0.74%) vRealize
13 29 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
14 28 (0.59%) NetBackup
15 26 (0.55%) ITRS Geneos
16 25 (0.53%) vCenter Server
17 24 (0.51%) logstash
18 22 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
18 22 (0.46%) Packer
19 21 (0.44%) Nmap
Vendors
1 539 (11.37%) Microsoft
2 338 (7.13%) Databricks
3 268 (5.65%) Google
4 255 (5.38%) Splunk
5 231 (4.87%) VMware
6 217 (4.58%) Oracle
7 146 (3.08%) ServiceNow
8 140 (2.95%) Cisco
9 130 (2.74%) Red Hat
10 89 (1.88%) Palo Alto
11 84 (1.77%) F5
12 77 (1.62%) OpenAI
13 69 (1.46%) Foundry
14 62 (1.31%) SAP
15 57 (1.20%) CyberArk
16 50 (1.05%) Atlassian
17 47 (0.99%) IBM
18 45 (0.95%) Salesforce
19 43 (0.91%) CrowdStrike
19 43 (0.91%) Juniper