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

6 months to
31 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 10 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +5 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,245 3,881 4,073
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.78% 13.35% 9.20%
As % of the Programming Languages category 41.23% 39.39% 31.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,566 2,736 2,874
10th Percentile £363 £381 £400
25th Percentile £417 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £810 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £514
% change year-on-year -3.75% -2.68% -6.59%
Number of hourly rates quoted 112 53 104
10th Percentile £27.54 £21.25 £20.95
25th Percentile £41.25 £25.09 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.25 £42.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.65% -15.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile £74.26 £60.75 £66.38
90th Percentile £80.18 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.00 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +15.56% -2.56% -28.68%

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 12,722 9,854 12,934
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.57% 33.89% 29.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,463 6,634 9,141
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £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 £716 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £480 £488
% change year-on-year -1.04% -1.54% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 519 243 486
10th Percentile £41.25 £22.27 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £32.51 £46.20
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.63 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.72
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.56% +3.90% -1.44%

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 31 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 31 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 31 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 4,404 £520 -7.35% 2,695
London -3 2,494 £550 -8.33% 1,152
UK excluding London -1 2,003 £481 -3.75% 1,990
Work from Home +1 1,560 £525 -4.55% 974
North of England +13 678 £475 -5.00% 475
South East -5 411 £500 -4.76% 576
Yorkshire +1 377 £478 -4.40% 164
Midlands +1 283 £495 +8.02% 255
North West +9 255 £481 -3.65% 230
Scotland +1 254 £425 -9.57% 104
South West -2 239 £519 -9.78% 280
West Midlands -4 226 £500 +2.04% 130
East of England +2 136 £500 -0.25% 219
East Midlands -15 56 £450 +5.88% 125
North East +14 55 £488 -1.27% 83
Wales -14 28 £475 -10.38% 78
Northern Ireland +10 26 £638 +21.43% 33

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
1 260 (4.96%) Apache Spark
2 201 (3.83%) Apache Airflow
3 167 (3.18%) Confluence
4 157 (2.99%) Apache
5 67 (1.28%) SAS
6 59 (1.12%) SharePoint
7 26 (0.50%) Jupyter
8 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
9 24 (0.46%) nginx
9 24 (0.46%) OpenStack
10 19 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 15 (0.29%) Appian
12 14 (0.27%) ArcGIS
13 11 (0.21%) Camunda
14 10 (0.19%) Apache Superset
15 8 (0.15%) CMS
16 4 (0.076%) CICS
16 4 (0.076%) Tomcat
16 4 (0.076%) WebSphere
17 3 (0.057%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 137 (2.61%) Microsoft Excel
2 27 (0.51%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
3 24 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
4 21 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
5 6 (0.11%) Weka
6 5 (0.095%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.076%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 23 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.19%) Fidessa
4 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
6 4 (0.076%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Actimize
7 3 (0.057%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.057%) IntelliMatch
7 3 (0.057%) Remedy ITSM
7 3 (0.057%) SAP IBP
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
9 1 (0.019%) OneSumX
9 1 (0.019%) Salesforce CRM
9 1 (0.019%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 1 (0.019%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 2,035 (38.80%) AWS
2 1,823 (34.76%) Azure
3 799 (15.23%) GCP
4 706 (13.46%) GitHub
5 521 (9.93%) Serverless
6 512 (9.76%) Power Platform
7 402 (7.66%) Azure DevOps
8 362 (6.90%) Amazon S3
9 354 (6.75%) GitHub Actions
10 349 (6.65%) AWS Lambda
11 276 (5.26%) Azure Data Factory
12 252 (4.80%) Snowflake
13 245 (4.67%) AWS CloudFormation
14 184 (3.51%) Amazon EKS
15 178 (3.39%) OpenShift
16 164 (3.13%) Amazon ECS
17 162 (3.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 153 (2.92%) Amazon EC2
19 151 (2.88%) dbt
20 146 (2.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 207 (3.95%) Firewall
2 149 (2.84%) DNS
3 110 (2.10%) Network Security
4 102 (1.94%) TCP/IP
5 84 (1.60%) VPN
6 74 (1.41%) BGP
7 66 (1.26%) WAN
8 59 (1.12%) HTTP
9 44 (0.84%) OSPF
10 43 (0.82%) SAN
11 42 (0.80%) MPLS
12 35 (0.67%) VLAN
13 34 (0.65%) LAN
14 33 (0.63%) DHCP
14 33 (0.63%) Wireshark
15 32 (0.61%) SD-WAN
15 32 (0.61%) SSL
16 30 (0.57%) SNMP
17 24 (0.46%) VXLAN
18 22 (0.42%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 428 (8.16%) Power BI
2 364 (6.94%) PostgreSQL
3 303 (5.78%) Data Warehouse
4 234 (4.46%) Data Lake
5 209 (3.98%) NoSQL
6 200 (3.81%) SQL Server
7 189 (3.60%) Relational Database
8 173 (3.30%) Tableau
9 149 (2.84%) Metadata
10 145 (2.76%) Big Data
11 130 (2.48%) Delta Lake
12 119 (2.27%) Amazon RDS
13 116 (2.21%) BigQuery
14 114 (2.17%) MySQL
15 107 (2.04%) Amazon Redshift
16 102 (1.94%) Amazon Athena
17 98 (1.87%) MongoDB
18 90 (1.72%) Azure SQL Database
19 83 (1.58%) DynamoDB
20 75 (1.43%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 669 (12.76%) Git
2 546 (10.41%) Jenkins
3 413 (7.87%) GitLab
4 294 (5.61%) JIRA
5 94 (1.79%) Selenium
6 93 (1.77%) MLflow
7 54 (1.03%) Postman
8 45 (0.86%) Bitbucket
9 44 (0.84%) Cucumber
10 42 (0.80%) JUnit
11 40 (0.76%) JMeter
12 35 (0.67%) Sonatype Nexus
13 28 (0.53%) SpecFlow
14 27 (0.51%) Cypress.io
14 27 (0.51%) Visual Studio
15 26 (0.50%) Artifactory
16 23 (0.44%) Gatling
17 22 (0.42%) Maven
18 21 (0.40%) SonarQube
19 20 (0.38%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,240 (23.64%) Social Skills
2 999 (19.05%) Finance
3 715 (13.63%) Analytical Skills
4 502 (9.57%) Public Sector
5 401 (7.65%) Banking
6 171 (3.26%) Front Office
7 131 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
8 89 (1.70%) Investment Banking
9 67 (1.28%) Marketing
10 65 (1.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 64 (1.22%) Retail
12 59 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
13 56 (1.07%) Legal
13 56 (1.07%) Telecoms
14 53 (1.01%) Financial Institution
14 53 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
15 41 (0.78%) Manufacturing
16 31 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
17 28 (0.53%) Military
17 28 (0.53%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 977 (18.63%) Developer
2 748 (14.26%) Data Engineer
3 740 (14.11%) Senior
4 458 (8.73%) Python Developer
5 358 (6.83%) Architect
6 340 (6.48%) Lead
7 291 (5.55%) Python Engineer
8 282 (5.38%) Analyst
9 280 (5.34%) DevOps Engineer
10 259 (4.94%) Software Engineer
11 252 (4.80%) AWS Engineer
12 244 (4.65%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 205 (3.91%) Data Scientist
14 196 (3.74%) Platform Engineer
15 162 (3.09%) Azure Engineer
15 162 (3.09%) Senior Developer
16 144 (2.75%) Data Analyst
17 138 (2.63%) Senior Data Engineer
18 136 (2.59%) Full-Stack Developer
19 127 (2.42%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 455 (8.67%) REST
2 356 (6.79%) React
3 336 (6.41%) Kafka
4 333 (6.35%) PySpark
5 280 (5.34%) Node.js
6 231 (4.40%) .NET
6 231 (4.40%) Pandas
7 205 (3.91%) PyTorch
8 195 (3.72%) RESTful
9 190 (3.62%) FastAPI
10 165 (3.15%) TensorFlow
11 158 (3.01%) NumPy
12 149 (2.84%) JSON
12 149 (2.84%) scikit-learn
13 135 (2.57%) Flask
14 132 (2.52%) AngularJS
15 123 (2.35%) Django
16 121 (2.31%) LangChain
17 119 (2.27%) pytest
18 105 (2.00%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 527 (10.05%) Cloud Native
2 225 (4.29%) Distributed Systems
3 194 (3.70%) Algorithms
4 149 (2.84%) Product Ownership
5 117 (2.23%) Equities
6 115 (2.19%) Fixed Income
7 114 (2.17%) Data Protection Act
8 108 (2.06%) AI Agents
8 108 (2.06%) Data Structures
9 104 (1.98%) Derivative
10 100 (1.91%) Hybrid Cloud
11 94 (1.79%) Data Centre
12 92 (1.75%) Legacy Systems
13 91 (1.73%) Enterprise Software
14 90 (1.72%) Public Cloud
15 89 (1.70%) Onboarding
16 81 (1.54%) Security Posture
17 80 (1.53%) Management Information System
18 57 (1.09%) Virtual Team
19 55 (1.05%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 676 (12.89%) Linux
2 310 (5.91%) Windows
3 185 (3.53%) Unix
4 104 (1.98%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.28%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.69%) VMS
7 31 (0.59%) Ubuntu
8 30 (0.57%) Android
9 20 (0.38%) Mac OS
10 19 (0.36%) AIX
11 18 (0.34%) Solaris
12 17 (0.32%) CentOS
13 16 (0.31%) Apple iOS
14 8 (0.15%) Windows 7
15 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
16 6 (0.11%) Debian
16 6 (0.11%) zOS
17 5 (0.095%) Kali Linux
17 5 (0.095%) Rocky
18 4 (0.076%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,938 (36.95%) CI/CD
2 1,484 (28.29%) DevOps
3 1,227 (23.39%) Agile
4 1,148 (21.89%) AI
5 1,052 (20.06%) Analytics
6 1,040 (19.83%) Problem-Solving
7 929 (17.71%) Infrastructure as Code
8 855 (16.30%) Data Pipeline
9 843 (16.07%) Machine Learning
10 763 (14.55%) Containerisation
11 719 (13.71%) Data Engineering
12 703 (13.40%) Data Modelling
13 680 (12.96%) ETL
14 619 (11.80%) Data Science
15 605 (11.53%) Test Automation
16 602 (11.48%) Software Engineering
17 518 (9.88%) Observability
18 513 (9.78%) Business Intelligence
19 429 (8.18%) LLM
20 401 (7.65%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 1,668 (31.80%) SQL
2 740 (14.11%) Java
3 675 (12.87%) PowerShell
4 594 (11.33%) Bash
5 493 (9.40%) JavaScript
6 352 (6.71%) C#
7 348 (6.63%) TypeScript
8 222 (4.23%) Go
9 165 (3.15%) R
10 163 (3.11%) C++
11 124 (2.36%) Scala
12 110 (2.10%) Shell Script
13 100 (1.91%) Ruby
14 94 (1.79%) Perl
15 78 (1.49%) Bicep
16 56 (1.07%) Kusto Query Language
17 50 (0.95%) C
18 48 (0.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 44 (0.84%) T-SQL
20 42 (0.80%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,230 (23.45%) Security Cleared
2 987 (18.82%) SC Cleared
3 430 (8.20%) Degree
4 197 (3.76%) Computer Science Degree
5 150 (2.86%) DV Cleared
6 127 (2.42%) BPSS Clearance
7 117 (2.23%) Master's Degree
8 114 (2.17%) AWS Certification
9 103 (1.96%) Azure Certification
10 95 (1.81%) CISSP
11 73 (1.39%) Cisco Certification
12 58 (1.11%) CCNP
13 56 (1.07%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 49 (0.93%) CISM
14 49 (0.93%) PhD
15 36 (0.69%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 35 (0.67%) ISTQB
16 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
17 28 (0.53%) CEH
18 26 (0.50%) CCNA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 506 (9.65%) Data Quality
2 217 (4.14%) QA
3 177 (3.37%) GDPR
4 110 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 103 (1.96%) NIST
6 79 (1.51%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.65%) PCI DSS
8 30 (0.57%) SLA
9 25 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 22 (0.42%) NCSC
12 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
13 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.31%) WCAG
14 12 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.21%) PMO
16 10 (0.19%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.19%) MiFID
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
System Software
1 915 (17.45%) Docker
2 163 (3.11%) Active Directory
3 118 (2.25%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.16%) vSphere
5 58 (1.11%) Virtual Machines
6 52 (0.99%) VMware NSX
7 33 (0.63%) Hyper-V
8 31 (0.59%) Firmware
9 16 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) KVM
11 10 (0.19%) HDFS
12 8 (0.15%) Ceph
12 8 (0.15%) Lustre
12 8 (0.15%) SRDF
13 7 (0.13%) GPFS
13 7 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.095%) Oracle RAC
15 5 (0.095%) Postfix
15 5 (0.095%) Squid
Systems Management
1 1,132 (21.58%) Terraform
2 1,018 (19.41%) Kubernetes
3 536 (10.22%) Ansible
4 343 (6.54%) Grafana
5 297 (5.66%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.72%) Argo
7 75 (1.43%) Puppet
8 50 (0.95%) Istio
9 49 (0.93%) vRealize
10 39 (0.74%) vCenter Server
11 37 (0.71%) Kibana
12 35 (0.67%) Progress Chef
13 27 (0.51%) Nessus
14 25 (0.48%) NetBackup
15 22 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
16 21 (0.40%) Rancher
17 20 (0.38%) Kubeflow
18 19 (0.36%) Control-M
18 19 (0.36%) Nagios
19 18 (0.34%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 631 (12.03%) Microsoft
2 565 (10.77%) Databricks
3 290 (5.53%) Google
4 226 (4.31%) Splunk
5 217 (4.14%) Oracle
6 216 (4.12%) VMware
7 146 (2.78%) Red Hat
8 127 (2.42%) Cisco
9 120 (2.29%) OpenAI
10 102 (1.94%) ServiceNow
11 82 (1.56%) CyberArk
12 74 (1.41%) Foundry
13 70 (1.33%) BeyondTrust
14 63 (1.20%) Informatica
15 62 (1.18%) F5
16 58 (1.11%) Palo Alto
17 57 (1.09%) IBM
18 48 (0.92%) Dynatrace
19 44 (0.84%) SAP
20 41 (0.78%) Atlassian