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

6 months to
21 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,221 3,835 4,026
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.82% 13.18% 9.46%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.51% 38.77% 31.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,460 2,680 2,886
10th Percentile £363 £380 £393
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -4.95% -1.79% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £820
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £500 £510
% change year-on-year -1.00% -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 128 50 100
10th Percentile £30.34 £22.83 £21.20
25th Percentile £45.64 £28.18 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.75 £40.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +36.88% -33.33% -1.03%
75th Percentile £68.68 £56.88 £70.31
90th Percentile £83.75 £75.37 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +16.67% -30.77% +13.38%

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 12,888 9,891 12,728
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.71% 33.98% 29.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,457 6,717 9,055
10th Percentile £356 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £530
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -1.89% -3.64%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £711 £763 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.47% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 560 235 493
10th Percentile £38.15 £25.98 £32.25
25th Percentile £54.41 £35.50 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.36
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +0.23% +2.73%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +0.78% +3.20% -

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 -3 4,341 £525 -4.55% 3,429
London -3 2,475 £550 -5.98% 1,353
UK excluding London -1 2,018 £495 -1.00% 2,797
Work from Home -1 1,471 £530 -3.64% 2,003
North of England +10 706 £485 -0.62% 688
Yorkshire +1 398 £482 -3.60% 237
South East -3 390 £525 +2.44% 823
Scotland +2 294 £434 -8.68% 212
South West +2 255 £500 -9.09% 299
North West +5 245 £500 +5.26% 330
Midlands -12 239 £488 +8.33% 375
West Midlands -12 182 £482 +7.11% 190
East of England -4 127 £500 - 280
North East +7 72 £475 +5.56% 125
East Midlands -10 56 £495 +17.16% 185
Northern Ireland +13 24 £463 -18.68% 60
Wales -12 22 £463 -7.50% 95

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
1 285 (5.46%) Apache Spark
2 206 (3.95%) Apache Airflow
3 171 (3.28%) Apache
4 142 (2.72%) Confluence
5 47 (0.90%) SAS
6 44 (0.84%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.73%) Jupyter
8 21 (0.40%) nginx
9 20 (0.38%) OpenStack
10 17 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
11 15 (0.29%) ArcGIS
12 13 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
13 11 (0.21%) Appian
13 11 (0.21%) IIS
14 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) Camunda
15 7 (0.13%) CMS
16 6 (0.11%) Tomcat
16 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
17 5 (0.096%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 121 (2.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 25 (0.48%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.40%) MS Visio
4 21 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
5 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.077%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.057%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.019%) SPSS
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
9 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 24 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 16 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
3 9 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.096%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.057%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.057%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.057%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.038%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.038%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.038%) Global One
8 2 (0.038%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.038%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.038%) Odoo
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.038%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.038%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,944 (37.23%) AWS
2 1,741 (33.35%) Azure
3 746 (14.29%) GCP
4 634 (12.14%) GitHub
5 512 (9.81%) Power Platform
6 449 (8.60%) Serverless
7 370 (7.09%) Azure DevOps
8 353 (6.76%) Amazon S3
9 334 (6.40%) GitHub Actions
10 317 (6.07%) AWS Lambda
11 263 (5.04%) Azure Data Factory
12 236 (4.52%) Snowflake
13 184 (3.52%) AWS CloudFormation
14 168 (3.22%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 164 (3.14%) OpenShift
16 160 (3.06%) dbt
17 151 (2.89%) Amazon EKS
18 128 (2.45%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 122 (2.34%) Amazon EC2
20 118 (2.26%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 189 (3.62%) Firewall
2 135 (2.59%) DNS
3 111 (2.13%) Network Security
4 89 (1.70%) TCP/IP
5 88 (1.69%) BGP
6 87 (1.67%) WAN
7 77 (1.47%) VPN
8 62 (1.19%) HTTP
9 61 (1.17%) OSPF
10 52 (1.00%) SAN
11 45 (0.86%) VXLAN
12 43 (0.82%) BIG-IP
13 41 (0.79%) SD-WAN
14 39 (0.75%) SNMP
15 37 (0.71%) LAN
16 36 (0.69%) SSL
16 36 (0.69%) VLAN
17 35 (0.67%) Ethernet VPN
18 34 (0.65%) DHCP
19 33 (0.63%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 446 (8.54%) Power BI
2 337 (6.45%) PostgreSQL
3 276 (5.29%) Data Warehouse
4 251 (4.81%) SQL Server
5 232 (4.44%) Data Lake
6 199 (3.81%) Tableau
7 184 (3.52%) Relational Database
8 178 (3.41%) NoSQL
9 162 (3.10%) Big Data
10 159 (3.05%) Metadata
11 137 (2.62%) BigQuery
11 137 (2.62%) Delta Lake
12 118 (2.26%) Amazon Athena
13 111 (2.13%) Amazon Redshift
14 107 (2.05%) MongoDB
15 90 (1.72%) MySQL
16 85 (1.63%) DynamoDB
17 84 (1.61%) Amazon RDS
18 83 (1.59%) Azure SQL Database
19 76 (1.46%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 646 (12.37%) Git
2 472 (9.04%) Jenkins
3 353 (6.76%) GitLab
4 252 (4.83%) JIRA
5 85 (1.63%) MLflow
6 77 (1.47%) Selenium
7 59 (1.13%) Postman
8 39 (0.75%) Cucumber
9 35 (0.67%) JMeter
10 31 (0.59%) Cypress.io
11 30 (0.57%) Artifactory
12 28 (0.54%) SonarQube
13 27 (0.52%) Bitbucket
14 26 (0.50%) JUnit
14 26 (0.50%) Sonatype Nexus
15 24 (0.46%) REST Assured
15 24 (0.46%) Robot Framework
16 23 (0.44%) Maven
17 20 (0.38%) Gatling
18 18 (0.34%) SpecFlow
General
1 1,114 (21.34%) Social Skills
2 1,013 (19.40%) Finance
3 694 (13.29%) Analytical Skills
4 475 (9.10%) Public Sector
5 361 (6.91%) Banking
6 182 (3.49%) Front Office
7 126 (2.41%) Documentation Skills
8 112 (2.15%) Investment Banking
9 76 (1.46%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 68 (1.30%) Marketing
11 58 (1.11%) Retail
12 56 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
13 52 (1.00%) Legal
14 49 (0.94%) Telecoms
15 43 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 36 (0.69%) Financial Institution
17 35 (0.67%) Publishing
18 34 (0.65%) Manufacturing
18 34 (0.65%) Military
19 28 (0.54%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 977 (18.71%) Developer
2 798 (15.28%) Data Engineer
3 769 (14.73%) Senior
4 497 (9.52%) Python Developer
5 332 (6.36%) Lead
6 328 (6.28%) Architect
7 323 (6.19%) Python Engineer
8 277 (5.31%) DevOps Engineer
9 275 (5.27%) Analyst
10 262 (5.02%) Software Engineer
11 224 (4.29%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 223 (4.27%) AWS Engineer
13 211 (4.04%) Data Scientist
14 169 (3.24%) Azure Engineer
14 169 (3.24%) Senior Developer
15 161 (3.08%) Senior Data Engineer
16 150 (2.87%) Platform Engineer
17 146 (2.80%) Data Analyst
17 146 (2.80%) Full-Stack Developer
18 131 (2.51%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 391 (7.49%) REST
2 365 (6.99%) React
3 354 (6.78%) PySpark
4 324 (6.21%) Kafka
5 233 (4.46%) .NET
6 228 (4.37%) Node.js
7 213 (4.08%) Pandas
8 188 (3.60%) FastAPI
9 179 (3.43%) RESTful
10 177 (3.39%) PyTorch
11 170 (3.26%) JSON
12 132 (2.53%) Django
13 129 (2.47%) Flask
14 127 (2.43%) NumPy
15 123 (2.36%) TensorFlow
16 119 (2.28%) LangChain
17 116 (2.22%) scikit-learn
18 114 (2.18%) AngularJS
19 100 (1.92%) YAML
20 99 (1.90%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 544 (10.42%) Cloud Native
2 230 (4.41%) Distributed Systems
3 152 (2.91%) Algorithms
4 137 (2.62%) Product Ownership
5 127 (2.43%) Data Centre
6 122 (2.34%) Data Protection Act
6 122 (2.34%) Data Structures
7 121 (2.32%) AI Agents
8 119 (2.28%) Onboarding
9 114 (2.18%) Derivative
10 104 (1.99%) Equities
11 102 (1.95%) Management Information System
12 101 (1.93%) Legacy Systems
13 100 (1.92%) Fixed Income
14 90 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
15 89 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
16 83 (1.59%) Security Posture
17 66 (1.26%) Public Cloud
18 49 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
19 47 (0.90%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 621 (11.89%) Linux
2 291 (5.57%) Windows
3 220 (4.21%) Unix
4 92 (1.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 70 (1.34%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.71%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.63%) VMS
8 26 (0.50%) AIX
9 24 (0.46%) Android
10 23 (0.44%) Solaris
11 19 (0.36%) Mac OS
12 18 (0.34%) Apple iOS
13 17 (0.33%) CentOS
14 10 (0.19%) zOS
15 9 (0.17%) Debian
16 7 (0.13%) Embedded Linux
16 7 (0.13%) Rocky
17 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
18 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
19 4 (0.077%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,916 (36.70%) CI/CD
2 1,386 (26.55%) DevOps
3 1,198 (22.95%) AI
4 1,122 (21.49%) Agile
5 1,016 (19.46%) Analytics
6 917 (17.56%) Problem-Solving
7 894 (17.12%) Infrastructure as Code
8 875 (16.76%) Data Pipeline
9 805 (15.42%) Machine Learning
10 712 (13.64%) Data Modelling
11 697 (13.35%) Data Engineering
12 691 (13.24%) ETL
13 687 (13.16%) Containerisation
14 616 (11.80%) Software Engineering
15 573 (10.97%) Data Science
16 548 (10.50%) Observability
17 518 (9.92%) Test Automation
18 513 (9.83%) Business Intelligence
19 459 (8.79%) LLM
20 424 (8.12%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,727 (33.08%) SQL
2 753 (14.42%) Java
3 632 (12.10%) PowerShell
4 570 (10.92%) Bash
5 479 (9.17%) JavaScript
6 347 (6.65%) TypeScript
7 342 (6.55%) C#
8 197 (3.77%) Go
9 170 (3.26%) R
10 152 (2.91%) C++
11 141 (2.70%) Scala
12 104 (1.99%) Shell Script
13 80 (1.53%) Ruby
14 77 (1.47%) Perl
15 71 (1.36%) Bicep
16 57 (1.09%) PL/SQL
16 57 (1.09%) T-SQL
17 56 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 54 (1.03%) C
19 50 (0.96%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,181 (22.62%) Security Cleared
2 954 (18.27%) SC Cleared
3 379 (7.26%) Degree
4 160 (3.06%) Computer Science Degree
5 147 (2.82%) DV Cleared
6 128 (2.45%) BPSS Clearance
7 102 (1.95%) Azure Certification
8 87 (1.67%) AWS Certification
9 80 (1.53%) CISSP
10 78 (1.49%) Master's Degree
11 69 (1.32%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (1.03%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 49 (0.94%) CCNP
14 39 (0.75%) CISM
14 39 (0.75%) PhD
15 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
16 28 (0.54%) ISTQB
17 26 (0.50%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 21 (0.40%) CCIE
18 21 (0.40%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 514 (9.84%) Data Quality
2 225 (4.31%) QA
3 147 (2.82%) GDPR
4 96 (1.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 93 (1.78%) NIST
6 78 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 35 (0.67%) SLA
8 29 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.50%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.46%) HIPAA
11 19 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 17 (0.33%) WCAG
13 16 (0.31%) NCSC
14 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.23%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 8 (0.15%) GRC
17 6 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
17 6 (0.11%) PSD2
System Software
1 770 (14.75%) Docker
2 148 (2.83%) Active Directory
3 94 (1.80%) VMware Infrastructure
4 73 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.75%) VMware NSX
6 37 (0.71%) vSphere
7 34 (0.65%) Firmware
8 30 (0.57%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.33%) KVM
9 17 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) NFS
11 12 (0.23%) HDFS
11 12 (0.23%) Squid
12 10 (0.19%) Ceph
13 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
13 9 (0.17%) SRDF
14 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
15 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
15 4 (0.077%) Postfix
16 3 (0.057%) Sendmail
Systems Management
1 1,058 (20.26%) Terraform
2 931 (17.83%) Kubernetes
3 537 (10.29%) Ansible
4 331 (6.34%) Grafana
5 273 (5.23%) Prometheus
6 73 (1.40%) Puppet
7 58 (1.11%) Argo
8 50 (0.96%) Istio
9 47 (0.90%) vRealize
10 39 (0.75%) Kibana
11 31 (0.59%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.59%) vCenter Server
12 28 (0.54%) Nessus
13 26 (0.50%) Nagios
14 24 (0.46%) Control-M
14 24 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
14 24 (0.46%) ZABBIX
15 22 (0.42%) NetBackup
16 19 (0.36%) HAProxy
16 19 (0.36%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 589 (11.28%) Microsoft
2 559 (10.71%) Databricks
3 265 (5.08%) Google
4 237 (4.54%) Oracle
5 219 (4.19%) Splunk
6 176 (3.37%) VMware
7 120 (2.30%) Red Hat
8 119 (2.28%) OpenAI
9 114 (2.18%) Cisco
10 98 (1.88%) ServiceNow
11 84 (1.61%) CyberArk
12 75 (1.44%) BeyondTrust
13 73 (1.40%) Dynatrace
14 72 (1.38%) F5
15 70 (1.34%) Palo Alto
16 66 (1.26%) IBM
17 65 (1.24%) Informatica
18 53 (1.02%) Foundry
19 50 (0.96%) SAP
20 45 (0.86%) Arista