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

6 months to
5 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,260 3,926 3,985
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.06% 13.40% 9.24%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.77% 39.22% 31.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,522 2,757 2,847
10th Percentile £363 £385 £388
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.68% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £681
90th Percentile £738 £818 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -2.00% -2.44% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 132 53 99
10th Percentile £30.05 £21.25 £21.63
25th Percentile £45.64 £25.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £37.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +46.67% -37.50% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.18 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £84.88 £70.50 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +16.67% -28.00% +6.38%

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 12,903 10,009 12,769
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.14% 34.17% 29.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,518 6,797 9,080
10th Percentile £355 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £416 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £774 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +0.21% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 562 250 487
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.50 £31.70
25th Percentile £54.55 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £61.60
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +1.46% +1.73%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £79.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% +1.07%

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 5 May 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 5 May 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 5 May 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 -2 4,383 £525 -4.55% 2,699
London -3 2,476 £550 -8.33% 1,290
UK excluding London 0 2,056 £490 -2.00% 1,837
Work from Home 0 1,504 £525 -4.55% 1,192
North of England +10 684 £481 -1.99% 440
South East 0 415 £513 -2.38% 613
Yorkshire 0 385 £475 -5.00% 121
Scotland +3 297 £425 -10.53% 97
Midlands -11 260 £500 +10.01% 223
South West -1 254 £500 -9.09% 217
North West +1 248 £500 +5.26% 239
West Midlands -7 198 £500 - 112
East of England -3 137 £500 -0.50% 214
East Midlands -13 61 £470 +10.59% 111
North East +8 60 £475 +2.70% 82
Northern Ireland +15 25 £463 -11.90% 13
Wales -13 23 £475 -9.52% 44

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
1 289 (5.49%) Apache Spark
2 207 (3.94%) Apache Airflow
3 167 (3.17%) Apache
4 140 (2.66%) Confluence
5 50 (0.95%) SAS
6 49 (0.93%) SharePoint
7 30 (0.57%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.40%) nginx
10 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
11 14 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
12 12 (0.23%) Appian
13 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
13 8 (0.15%) Camunda
13 8 (0.15%) CMS
14 7 (0.13%) IIS
15 6 (0.11%) CICS
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.095%) Tomcat
Applications
1 134 (2.55%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.44%) Spreadsheet
4 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 20 (0.38%) MS Visio
5 6 (0.11%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.076%) Weka
7 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.019%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 22 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 13 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Fidessa
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 5 (0.095%) BambooHR
5 5 (0.095%) Remedy ITSM
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 2 (0.038%) Actimize
7 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
7 2 (0.038%) Global One
7 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
7 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
7 2 (0.038%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.038%) Odoo
7 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.038%) Oracle ERP
7 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.038%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 1,990 (37.83%) AWS
2 1,800 (34.22%) Azure
3 781 (14.85%) GCP
4 655 (12.45%) GitHub
5 539 (10.25%) Power Platform
6 478 (9.09%) Serverless
7 374 (7.11%) Azure DevOps
8 372 (7.07%) Amazon S3
9 343 (6.52%) AWS Lambda
10 342 (6.50%) GitHub Actions
11 270 (5.13%) Azure Data Factory
12 236 (4.49%) Snowflake
13 226 (4.30%) AWS CloudFormation
14 172 (3.27%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 166 (3.16%) OpenShift
16 165 (3.14%) Amazon EKS
17 157 (2.98%) dbt
18 142 (2.70%) Amazon ECS
19 138 (2.62%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 125 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 183 (3.48%) Firewall
2 128 (2.43%) DNS
3 110 (2.09%) Network Security
4 89 (1.69%) TCP/IP
5 83 (1.58%) BGP
6 78 (1.48%) VPN
7 77 (1.46%) WAN
8 57 (1.08%) HTTP
9 55 (1.05%) OSPF
10 44 (0.84%) SAN
11 40 (0.76%) SNMP
12 36 (0.68%) VXLAN
13 35 (0.67%) MPLS
13 35 (0.67%) SD-WAN
14 34 (0.65%) BIG-IP
15 33 (0.63%) LAN
16 31 (0.59%) SSL
17 30 (0.57%) VLAN
17 30 (0.57%) Wireshark
18 29 (0.55%) DHCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 461 (8.76%) Power BI
2 343 (6.52%) PostgreSQL
3 285 (5.42%) Data Warehouse
4 244 (4.64%) SQL Server
5 238 (4.52%) Data Lake
6 200 (3.80%) Tableau
7 182 (3.46%) Relational Database
8 180 (3.42%) NoSQL
9 165 (3.14%) Big Data
10 162 (3.08%) Metadata
11 139 (2.64%) Delta Lake
12 134 (2.55%) BigQuery
13 126 (2.40%) Amazon Athena
14 120 (2.28%) Amazon Redshift
15 106 (2.02%) MongoDB
16 99 (1.88%) Amazon RDS
17 95 (1.81%) MySQL
18 93 (1.77%) DynamoDB
19 92 (1.75%) Azure SQL Database
20 80 (1.52%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 654 (12.43%) Git
2 472 (8.97%) Jenkins
3 363 (6.90%) GitLab
4 254 (4.83%) JIRA
5 94 (1.79%) MLflow
6 72 (1.37%) Selenium
7 56 (1.06%) Postman
8 39 (0.74%) Cucumber
9 33 (0.63%) Bitbucket
10 32 (0.61%) Sonatype Nexus
11 29 (0.55%) Artifactory
11 29 (0.55%) SonarQube
12 27 (0.51%) JMeter
13 26 (0.49%) Cypress.io
14 25 (0.48%) JUnit
15 24 (0.46%) Maven
16 23 (0.44%) Robot Framework
17 21 (0.40%) SpecFlow
18 20 (0.38%) REST Assured
19 18 (0.34%) Gatling
General
1 1,171 (22.26%) Social Skills
2 1,020 (19.39%) Finance
3 713 (13.56%) Analytical Skills
4 493 (9.37%) Public Sector
5 369 (7.02%) Banking
6 175 (3.33%) Front Office
7 136 (2.59%) Documentation Skills
8 92 (1.75%) Investment Banking
9 75 (1.43%) Marketing
10 72 (1.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 59 (1.12%) Retail
12 54 (1.03%) Pharmaceutical
13 53 (1.01%) Telecoms
14 52 (0.99%) Legal
15 47 (0.89%) Influencing Skills
16 37 (0.70%) Financial Institution
17 35 (0.67%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.63%) Publishing
19 31 (0.59%) Military
19 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,011 (19.22%) Developer
2 785 (14.92%) Data Engineer
3 763 (14.51%) Senior
4 497 (9.45%) Python Developer
5 352 (6.69%) Architect
6 340 (6.46%) Lead
7 297 (5.65%) Python Engineer
8 277 (5.27%) Analyst
9 272 (5.17%) DevOps Engineer
10 254 (4.83%) Software Engineer
11 225 (4.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 223 (4.24%) AWS Engineer
13 218 (4.14%) Data Scientist
14 172 (3.27%) Senior Developer
15 157 (2.98%) Platform Engineer
15 157 (2.98%) Senior Data Engineer
16 156 (2.97%) Azure Engineer
17 144 (2.74%) Data Analyst
17 144 (2.74%) Full-Stack Developer
18 129 (2.45%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 397 (7.55%) REST
2 356 (6.77%) React
3 351 (6.67%) PySpark
4 335 (6.37%) Kafka
5 259 (4.92%) Node.js
6 236 (4.49%) .NET
7 227 (4.32%) Pandas
8 196 (3.73%) PyTorch
9 185 (3.52%) FastAPI
10 181 (3.44%) RESTful
11 163 (3.10%) JSON
12 143 (2.72%) TensorFlow
13 141 (2.68%) NumPy
14 133 (2.53%) scikit-learn
15 131 (2.49%) Flask
16 125 (2.38%) LangChain
17 121 (2.30%) AngularJS
17 121 (2.30%) Django
18 111 (2.11%) LDAP
19 102 (1.94%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 536 (10.19%) Cloud Native
2 220 (4.18%) Distributed Systems
3 162 (3.08%) Algorithms
4 143 (2.72%) Product Ownership
5 124 (2.36%) AI Agents
6 122 (2.32%) Data Protection Act
7 115 (2.19%) Onboarding
8 112 (2.13%) Data Structures
9 109 (2.07%) Fixed Income
10 107 (2.03%) Data Centre
10 107 (2.03%) Derivative
10 107 (2.03%) Equities
11 99 (1.88%) Management Information System
12 93 (1.77%) Legacy Systems
13 91 (1.73%) Enterprise Software
13 91 (1.73%) Hybrid Cloud
14 83 (1.58%) Security Posture
15 72 (1.37%) Public Cloud
16 46 (0.87%) Virtual Team
17 45 (0.86%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 643 (12.22%) Linux
2 290 (5.51%) Windows
3 204 (3.88%) Unix
4 95 (1.81%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.18%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.70%) VMS
7 36 (0.68%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.53%) Android
9 24 (0.46%) AIX
10 21 (0.40%) Mac OS
10 21 (0.40%) Solaris
11 18 (0.34%) CentOS
12 17 (0.32%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.19%) Debian
13 10 (0.19%) zOS
14 8 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
15 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
16 5 (0.095%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.095%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,925 (36.60%) CI/CD
2 1,399 (26.60%) DevOps
3 1,187 (22.57%) AI
4 1,155 (21.96%) Agile
5 1,068 (20.30%) Analytics
6 970 (18.44%) Problem-Solving
7 916 (17.41%) Infrastructure as Code
8 873 (16.60%) Data Pipeline
9 826 (15.70%) Machine Learning
10 729 (13.86%) Containerisation
11 709 (13.48%) Data Modelling
12 700 (13.31%) Data Engineering
13 686 (13.04%) ETL
14 610 (11.60%) Software Engineering
15 596 (11.33%) Data Science
16 542 (10.30%) Observability
17 541 (10.29%) Test Automation
18 536 (10.19%) Business Intelligence
19 442 (8.40%) LLM
20 413 (7.85%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,725 (32.79%) SQL
2 776 (14.75%) Java
3 648 (12.32%) PowerShell
4 564 (10.72%) Bash
5 482 (9.16%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.69%) TypeScript
7 350 (6.65%) C#
8 206 (3.92%) Go
9 182 (3.46%) R
10 156 (2.97%) C++
11 143 (2.72%) Scala
12 105 (2.00%) Shell Script
13 92 (1.75%) Ruby
14 78 (1.48%) Bicep
14 78 (1.48%) Perl
15 56 (1.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 54 (1.03%) C
17 53 (1.01%) PL/SQL
18 50 (0.95%) Kusto Query Language
18 50 (0.95%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,209 (22.98%) Security Cleared
2 981 (18.65%) SC Cleared
3 386 (7.34%) Degree
4 176 (3.35%) Computer Science Degree
5 142 (2.70%) BPSS Clearance
5 142 (2.70%) DV Cleared
6 104 (1.98%) Azure Certification
7 99 (1.88%) AWS Certification
8 92 (1.75%) CISSP
9 86 (1.63%) Master's Degree
10 71 (1.35%) Cisco Certification
11 58 (1.10%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 52 (0.99%) CISM
13 50 (0.95%) CCNP
14 38 (0.72%) PhD
15 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
16 30 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 26 (0.49%) ISTQB
18 23 (0.44%) CCIE
19 22 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 510 (9.70%) Data Quality
2 226 (4.30%) QA
3 167 (3.17%) GDPR
4 113 (2.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 107 (2.03%) NIST
6 81 (1.54%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.63%) SLA
9 31 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.49%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 18 (0.34%) NCSC
12 18 (0.34%) WCAG
13 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.21%) PMO
14 11 (0.21%) SOC 2
15 9 (0.17%) GRC
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) MiFID
System Software
1 819 (15.57%) Docker
2 155 (2.95%) Active Directory
3 96 (1.83%) VMware Infrastructure
4 70 (1.33%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.80%) VMware NSX
6 38 (0.72%) vSphere
7 33 (0.63%) Firmware
8 32 (0.61%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) HDFS
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.17%) SRDF
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
12 8 (0.15%) NFS
13 6 (0.11%) Lustre
13 6 (0.11%) Postfix
13 6 (0.11%) Squid
14 5 (0.095%) GPFS
14 5 (0.095%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 1,093 (20.78%) Terraform
2 958 (18.21%) Kubernetes
3 523 (9.94%) Ansible
4 340 (6.46%) Grafana
5 277 (5.27%) Prometheus
6 77 (1.46%) Puppet
7 71 (1.35%) Argo
8 52 (0.99%) Istio
9 47 (0.89%) vRealize
10 42 (0.80%) Kibana
11 34 (0.65%) Progress Chef
12 33 (0.63%) vCenter Server
13 27 (0.51%) Nagios
13 27 (0.51%) Nessus
14 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
15 23 (0.44%) Control-M
15 23 (0.44%) ZABBIX
16 21 (0.40%) Rancher
17 20 (0.38%) NetBackup
18 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 613 (11.65%) Microsoft
2 567 (10.78%) Databricks
3 274 (5.21%) Google
4 226 (4.30%) Oracle
5 224 (4.26%) Splunk
6 179 (3.40%) VMware
7 120 (2.28%) OpenAI
7 120 (2.28%) Red Hat
8 119 (2.26%) Cisco
9 97 (1.84%) ServiceNow
10 93 (1.77%) CyberArk
11 82 (1.56%) BeyondTrust
12 69 (1.31%) IBM
13 67 (1.27%) Informatica
14 65 (1.24%) Dynatrace
15 64 (1.22%) Palo Alto
16 63 (1.20%) F5
17 62 (1.18%) Foundry
18 48 (0.91%) SAP
19 41 (0.78%) Salesforce