Python Contract Job Trends

Python
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Python skills. It covers vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 10 13 12
Rank change year-on-year +3 -1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 4,314 4,136 5,224
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 13.11% 10.74% 10.45%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.81% 33.50% 32.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,799 2,864 3,768
10th Percentile £358 £375 £413
25th Percentile £425 £463 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% -4.17% -
75th Percentile £650 £700 £711
90th Percentile £775 £850 £810
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £507 £525
% change year-on-year -1.43% -3.38% -1.13%
Number of hourly rates quoted 84 103 134
10th Percentile £28.20 £21.25 £46.18
25th Percentile £35.19 £40.06 £47.50
Median hourly rate £50.00 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.00% -3.85% +18.18%
75th Percentile £57.81 £72.94 £75.38
90th Percentile £82.00 £78.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -28.57% +7.69% +16.07%

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 10,836 12,345 16,001
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.93% 32.04% 32.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,161 8,316 11,332
10th Percentile £345 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -2.22%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £675
90th Percentile £738 £775 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 293 346 458
10th Percentile £29.00 £27.00 £34.78
25th Percentile £41.25 £46.18 £48.40
Median hourly rate £55.00 £65.00 £63.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.38% +3.17% +11.40%
75th Percentile £67.50 £70.00 £70.19
90th Percentile £78.75 £78.13 £82.33
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year - - +13.04%

Python
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Python as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Python 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 20 September 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 20 September 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 20 September 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 3,653 £530 -11.04% 3,636
London +1 2,289 £575 -8.00% 1,812
UK excluding London +8 1,539 £500 -1.43% 2,665
Work from Home -2 1,430 £550 -6.38% 1,511
North of England +7 449 £480 -6.34% 595
South East +7 300 £500 -0.99% 1,036
Scotland +16 274 £500 - 170
Yorkshire +7 244 £500 -6.98% 185
Midlands +10 211 £475 +5.56% 304
North West +6 178 £475 -2.31% 346
West Midlands +18 164 £500 +5.26% 189
East of England +19 147 £525 +5.00% 227
South West -3 147 £525 -12.50% 238
East Midlands -3 45 £410 +2.50% 113
North East 0 29 £450 -25.00% 71
Wales -2 24 £410 -18.00% 73
Northern Ireland -1 18 £525 +27.27% 49

Python
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 258 (5.98%) Apache Airflow
2 181 (4.20%) Apache Spark
3 173 (4.01%) Apache
4 134 (3.11%) Confluence
5 41 (0.95%) SAS
6 33 (0.76%) nginx
6 33 (0.76%) OpenStack
7 30 (0.70%) SharePoint
8 23 (0.53%) Jupyter
9 16 (0.37%) IIS
10 12 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
11 11 (0.25%) WebSphere
12 9 (0.21%) Apache Pig
12 9 (0.21%) JBoss
13 8 (0.19%) ArcGIS
14 7 (0.16%) Luigi
15 6 (0.14%) Tomcat
15 6 (0.14%) WebLogic
16 5 (0.12%) CMS
16 5 (0.12%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 121 (2.80%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.76%) Microsoft Office
3 29 (0.67%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 28 (0.65%) Chatbot
5 15 (0.35%) Maya
5 15 (0.35%) NUKE
6 12 (0.28%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 9 (0.21%) MS Visio
8 3 (0.070%) Spreadsheet
8 3 (0.070%) Trello
9 2 (0.046%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.046%) GNU Octave
9 2 (0.046%) Maple
9 2 (0.046%) Microsoft Project
10 1 (0.023%) EViews
10 1 (0.023%) NASTRAN
10 1 (0.023%) Simulink
10 1 (0.023%) SPSS
10 1 (0.023%) Stata
10 1 (0.023%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 30 (0.70%) Aladdin
2 16 (0.37%) thinkFolio
3 12 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
4 8 (0.19%) Endur
4 8 (0.19%) Maximo
5 6 (0.14%) SAP PM
6 4 (0.093%) Dynamics CRM
6 4 (0.093%) Oracle BPM
7 3 (0.070%) Bankmaster
7 3 (0.070%) Kondor
7 3 (0.070%) NetSuite
7 3 (0.070%) Payment Gateway
7 3 (0.070%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.046%) Distributed Ledger
8 2 (0.046%) Loan IQ
8 2 (0.046%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.046%) Remedy ITSM
8 2 (0.046%) Salesforce CRM
8 2 (0.046%) Temenos T24
9 1 (0.023%) SAP HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,674 (38.80%) AWS
2 1,186 (27.49%) Azure
3 632 (14.65%) GCP
4 384 (8.90%) GitHub
5 353 (8.18%) Serverless
6 337 (7.81%) Power Platform
7 306 (7.09%) Amazon S3
8 255 (5.91%) AWS Lambda
9 224 (5.19%) Azure DevOps
10 212 (4.91%) GitHub Actions
11 206 (4.78%) dbt
12 192 (4.45%) Snowflake
13 147 (3.41%) AWS CloudFormation
14 146 (3.38%) Amazon EC2
15 145 (3.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 127 (2.94%) Azure Data Factory
17 100 (2.32%) Amazon EKS
17 100 (2.32%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 96 (2.23%) Amazon ECS
19 95 (2.20%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 243 (5.63%) Firewall
2 164 (3.80%) DNS
3 126 (2.92%) TCP/IP
4 107 (2.48%) Network Security
5 103 (2.39%) HTTP
6 100 (2.32%) BGP
7 93 (2.16%) VPN
8 71 (1.65%) OSPF
9 62 (1.44%) SSL
10 50 (1.16%) MPLS
11 46 (1.07%) WAN
12 40 (0.93%) LAN
13 36 (0.83%) SMTP
14 35 (0.81%) SSH
15 33 (0.76%) Wireless
16 32 (0.74%) FTP
17 28 (0.65%) IPsec
18 27 (0.63%) DHCP
18 27 (0.63%) VXLAN
19 26 (0.60%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 336 (7.79%) PostgreSQL
2 309 (7.16%) Power BI
3 225 (5.22%) Relational Database
4 209 (4.84%) Data Warehouse
5 194 (4.50%) NoSQL
6 173 (4.01%) Data Lake
7 168 (3.89%) Big Data
8 163 (3.78%) Tableau
9 161 (3.73%) SQL Server
10 137 (3.18%) MongoDB
11 122 (2.83%) Amazon RDS
12 112 (2.60%) Hadoop
13 109 (2.53%) Amazon Athena
14 106 (2.46%) BigQuery
15 84 (1.95%) DynamoDB
15 84 (1.95%) MySQL
16 74 (1.72%) Apache Iceberg
17 73 (1.69%) Dremio
18 72 (1.67%) Apache Arrow
19 71 (1.65%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 566 (13.12%) Git
2 508 (11.78%) Jenkins
3 293 (6.79%) GitLab
4 275 (6.37%) JIRA
5 73 (1.69%) SonarQube
6 65 (1.51%) JUnit
7 57 (1.32%) Bitbucket
8 55 (1.27%) Sonatype Nexus
9 54 (1.25%) Selenium
10 43 (1.00%) MLflow
11 42 (0.97%) Artifactory
12 36 (0.83%) Liquibase
13 33 (0.76%) Postman
14 30 (0.70%) Cypress.io
14 30 (0.70%) Maven
15 29 (0.67%) Cucumber
15 29 (0.67%) Vagrant
16 26 (0.60%) Robot Framework
17 25 (0.58%) Gradle
17 25 (0.58%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 1,160 (26.89%) Social Skills
2 1,066 (24.71%) Finance
3 646 (14.97%) Analytical Skills
4 473 (10.96%) Banking
5 324 (7.51%) Public Sector
6 312 (7.23%) Front Office
7 226 (5.24%) Investment Banking
8 81 (1.88%) Telecoms
9 80 (1.85%) Financial Institution
10 72 (1.67%) Marketing
11 67 (1.55%) Retail
12 66 (1.53%) Documentation Skills
12 66 (1.53%) Pharmaceutical
13 54 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 48 (1.11%) Legal
15 45 (1.04%) Presentation Skills
16 36 (0.83%) Manufacturing
17 28 (0.65%) Games
18 27 (0.63%) Aerospace
19 25 (0.58%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 903 (20.93%) Developer
2 552 (12.80%) Senior
3 462 (10.71%) Data Engineer
4 392 (9.09%) Analyst
5 376 (8.72%) Python Engineer
6 346 (8.02%) Python Developer
7 302 (7.00%) Software Engineer
8 287 (6.65%) DevOps Engineer
9 277 (6.42%) AWS Engineer
10 224 (5.19%) Architect
11 173 (4.01%) Data Analyst
12 158 (3.66%) Lead
13 153 (3.55%) Data Scientist
14 135 (3.13%) Platform Engineer
15 122 (2.83%) Network Engineer
16 121 (2.80%) Python Software Engineer
17 120 (2.78%) Full-Stack Developer
18 117 (2.71%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
19 116 (2.69%) Java Developer
20 108 (2.50%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 357 (8.28%) React
2 285 (6.61%) Kafka
3 277 (6.42%) REST
4 233 (5.40%) Pandas
5 206 (4.78%) Node.js
6 200 (4.64%) FastAPI
7 187 (4.33%) NumPy
8 185 (4.29%) RESTful
9 164 (3.80%) AngularJS
10 160 (3.71%) PySpark
11 135 (3.13%) PyTorch
12 130 (3.01%) HTML
13 119 (2.76%) TensorFlow
14 118 (2.74%) .NET
15 112 (2.60%) CSS
16 106 (2.46%) Django
16 106 (2.46%) GraphQL
17 103 (2.39%) Elastic Stack
18 102 (2.36%) Spring
19 95 (2.20%) SciPy
Miscellaneous
1 288 (6.68%) Cloud Native
2 199 (4.61%) Fixed Income
3 173 (4.01%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 172 (3.99%) Equities
5 166 (3.85%) Distributed Systems
6 161 (3.73%) Algorithms
7 148 (3.43%) Hedge funds
8 143 (3.31%) Derivative
9 136 (3.15%) Data Protection Act
10 119 (2.76%) Data Structures
11 117 (2.71%) Onboarding
12 87 (2.02%) Management Information System
13 79 (1.83%) Product Ownership
14 73 (1.69%) Data Centre
15 64 (1.48%) Enterprise Software
16 63 (1.46%) Public Cloud
17 61 (1.41%) Legacy Systems
18 60 (1.39%) AI Agents
19 58 (1.34%) Virtual Team
20 57 (1.32%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 766 (17.76%) Linux
2 305 (7.07%) Windows
3 239 (5.54%) Unix
4 81 (1.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.48%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.93%) Ubuntu
7 38 (0.88%) Android
8 35 (0.81%) CentOS
9 31 (0.72%) VMS
10 26 (0.60%) Amazon Linux
11 25 (0.58%) Apple iOS
11 25 (0.58%) Mac OS
12 19 (0.44%) Solaris
13 9 (0.21%) Debian
14 8 (0.19%) SUSE
15 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.12%) AIX
17 4 (0.093%) Windows Server 2019
17 4 (0.093%) zOS
18 3 (0.070%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,297 (30.06%) CI/CD
2 1,128 (26.15%) Agile
3 1,086 (25.17%) DevOps
4 889 (20.61%) Problem-Solving
5 638 (14.79%) Infrastructure as Code
6 637 (14.77%) Artificial Intelligence
7 574 (13.31%) Software Engineering
8 561 (13.00%) Analytics
9 555 (12.87%) Machine Learning
10 475 (11.01%) Data Pipeline
11 469 (10.87%) Containerisation
12 451 (10.45%) Data Science
13 417 (9.67%) Data Modelling
14 416 (9.64%) ETL
15 372 (8.62%) Data Engineering
15 372 (8.62%) Test Automation
16 354 (8.21%) Business Intelligence
17 346 (8.02%) Computer Science
18 313 (7.26%) Migration
19 304 (7.05%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 1,379 (31.97%) SQL
2 830 (19.24%) Java
3 562 (13.03%) Bash
4 561 (13.00%) JavaScript
5 481 (11.15%) PowerShell
6 349 (8.09%) TypeScript
7 263 (6.10%) C#
8 255 (5.91%) C++
9 239 (5.54%) Go
10 217 (5.03%) Shell Script
11 178 (4.13%) Perl
12 170 (3.94%) R
13 104 (2.41%) Scala
14 77 (1.78%) C
15 60 (1.39%) Groovy
16 59 (1.37%) Ruby
17 54 (1.25%) PHP
18 49 (1.14%) VBA
19 39 (0.90%) Rust
20 38 (0.88%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 666 (15.44%) Security Cleared
2 535 (12.40%) SC Cleared
3 429 (9.94%) Degree
4 207 (4.80%) Computer Science Degree
5 136 (3.15%) AWS Certification
6 116 (2.69%) Master's Degree
7 103 (2.39%) DV Cleared
8 91 (2.11%) Cisco Certification
9 73 (1.69%) CISSP
10 59 (1.37%) BPSS Clearance
11 57 (1.32%) CCNP
12 52 (1.21%) PhD
13 50 (1.16%) Azure Certification
14 39 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 34 (0.79%) CCIE
16 32 (0.74%) GIAC
17 31 (0.72%) CEH
18 29 (0.67%) OSCP
19 24 (0.56%) GCIH
19 24 (0.56%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 267 (6.19%) Data Quality
2 181 (4.20%) QA
3 125 (2.90%) GDPR
4 78 (1.81%) NIST
5 68 (1.58%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 62 (1.44%) Accessibility
7 52 (1.21%) PCI DSS
8 49 (1.14%) HIPAA
9 23 (0.53%) SOC 2
10 21 (0.49%) NCSC
10 21 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 20 (0.46%) SLA
12 12 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
12 12 (0.28%) EU AI Act
13 10 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
13 10 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
14 8 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
14 8 (0.19%) WCAG
15 7 (0.16%) Basel III
16 5 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 679 (15.74%) Docker
2 112 (2.60%) Active Directory
3 111 (2.57%) VMware Infrastructure
4 40 (0.93%) Virtual Machines
5 30 (0.70%) Firmware
6 26 (0.60%) VMware NSX
7 22 (0.51%) DFS Replication
8 21 (0.49%) vSphere
9 19 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 16 (0.37%) Squid
11 14 (0.32%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.30%) HDFS
13 12 (0.28%) Dovecot
13 12 (0.28%) Hyper-V
13 12 (0.28%) KVM
13 12 (0.28%) Postfix
14 9 (0.21%) zsh
15 7 (0.16%) Veritas Cluster Server
16 6 (0.14%) Apache ZooKeeper
17 5 (0.12%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 850 (19.70%) Kubernetes
2 822 (19.05%) Terraform
3 584 (13.54%) Ansible
4 254 (5.89%) Grafana
5 223 (5.17%) Prometheus
6 92 (2.13%) Puppet
7 60 (1.39%) Progress Chef
8 47 (1.09%) Kibana
9 45 (1.04%) Argo
10 37 (0.86%) Nessus
11 32 (0.74%) Istio
12 30 (0.70%) vRealize
13 27 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
14 25 (0.58%) logstash
15 24 (0.56%) NetBackup
16 21 (0.49%) ITRS Geneos
16 21 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
16 21 (0.49%) Nmap
17 20 (0.46%) vCenter Server
18 18 (0.42%) QRadar
Vendors
1 437 (10.13%) Microsoft
2 284 (6.58%) Databricks
3 235 (5.45%) Google
4 215 (4.98%) Splunk
5 208 (4.82%) Oracle
6 177 (4.10%) VMware
7 125 (2.90%) ServiceNow
8 123 (2.85%) Cisco
9 94 (2.18%) Red Hat
10 81 (1.88%) SAP
11 78 (1.81%) Palo Alto
12 71 (1.65%) F5
13 57 (1.32%) OpenAI
14 51 (1.18%) IBM
15 47 (1.09%) Sybase
16 45 (1.04%) Arista
17 44 (1.02%) CheckPoint
18 42 (0.97%) Juniper
19 39 (0.90%) Dynatrace
20 38 (0.88%) Foundry