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 26 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 10 15
Rank change year-on-year -2 +5 -4
Contract jobs citing Python 5,673 4,275 3,990
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.69% 12.98% 9.88%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.01% 39.35% 31.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,699 2,875 2,909
10th Percentile £368 £360 £375
25th Percentile £427 £434 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £530 £573
Median % change year-on-year -0.94% -7.42% -4.58%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £705
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £507
% change year-on-year +2.04% -3.35% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 133 70 120
10th Percentile £28.80 £26.13 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.50 £33.91 £31.09
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -16.67% -7.69%
75th Percentile £74.00 £57.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +12.88%

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 14,178 10,865 12,539
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.72% 33.00% 31.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,208 7,323 8,862
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £423 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.40% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £498
% change year-on-year +3.16% -4.62% -0.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 523 258 438
10th Percentile £33.71 £27.98 £30.00
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.06 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.38 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.30% -13.27% +7.22%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.89 £75.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +4.00%

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 26 July 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 26 July 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 26 July 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 -4 4,784 £537 -2.36% 2,723
London -4 2,752 £566 -1.65% 1,534
UK excluding London -7 2,237 £500 +2.04% 1,569
Work from Home -6 1,583 £525 -4.55% 1,009
North of England +3 777 £490 +3.16% 394
South East -10 439 £538 +7.50% 471
Yorkshire +2 413 £500 +1.75% 107
Scotland +3 316 £430 -9.47% 94
South West 0 292 £500 -6.98% 208
North West +3 287 £525 +10.53% 208
Midlands -13 259 £469 +4.22% 181
West Midlands -11 208 £465 +3.33% 104
East of England -14 138 £500 -0.50% 171
North East 0 88 £425 -2.86% 84
East Midlands -10 50 £488 +9.17% 77
Wales -7 31 £500 +17.65% 43
Northern Ireland +6 19 £363 -36.26% 32

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
1 291 (5.13%) Apache Spark
2 272 (4.79%) Apache Airflow
3 215 (3.79%) Apache
4 186 (3.28%) Confluence
5 54 (0.95%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.86%) SAS
7 47 (0.83%) SharePoint
8 26 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 23 (0.41%) nginx
10 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
11 21 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
12 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.21%) IIS
14 9 (0.16%) CMS
14 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
16 7 (0.12%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
18 5 (0.088%) JBoss
Applications
1 122 (2.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.56%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
3 25 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 20 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
5 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
5 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.053%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.018%) Navisworks
7 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
7 1 (0.018%) Revit
7 1 (0.018%) Simulink
7 1 (0.018%) SPSS
7 1 (0.018%) Weka
7 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 25 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.088%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.088%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) SimCorp Dimension
10 2 (0.035%) Bloomberg AIM
10 2 (0.035%) Endur
10 2 (0.035%) Fidessa
10 2 (0.035%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.035%) Global One
10 2 (0.035%) IBM Planning Analytics
10 2 (0.035%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,112 (37.23%) AWS
2 1,902 (33.53%) Azure
3 849 (14.97%) GCP
4 693 (12.22%) GitHub
5 525 (9.25%) Power Platform
6 481 (8.48%) Serverless
7 418 (7.37%) Amazon S3
8 411 (7.24%) Azure DevOps
9 382 (6.73%) GitHub Actions
10 363 (6.40%) AWS Lambda
11 296 (5.22%) Snowflake
12 235 (4.14%) Azure Data Factory
13 220 (3.88%) dbt
14 198 (3.49%) AWS CloudFormation
15 185 (3.26%) Amazon EKS
16 181 (3.19%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 156 (2.75%) OpenShift
18 151 (2.66%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 134 (2.36%) Amazon EC2
20 133 (2.34%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 261 (4.60%) Firewall
2 192 (3.38%) DNS
3 131 (2.31%) TCP/IP
4 121 (2.13%) BGP
5 112 (1.97%) Network Security
5 112 (1.97%) VPN
6 111 (1.96%) WAN
7 76 (1.34%) OSPF
8 68 (1.20%) DHCP
9 60 (1.06%) VLAN
10 54 (0.95%) BIG-IP
10 54 (0.95%) SAN
10 54 (0.95%) SD-WAN
11 53 (0.93%) HTTP
12 52 (0.92%) VXLAN
13 50 (0.88%) SSL
14 44 (0.78%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 43 (0.76%) SNMP
16 40 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
17 38 (0.67%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 467 (8.23%) Power BI
2 345 (6.08%) PostgreSQL
3 319 (5.62%) Data Warehouse
4 231 (4.07%) SQL Server
5 204 (3.60%) Data Lake
6 202 (3.56%) Tableau
7 196 (3.45%) Relational Database
8 185 (3.26%) Metadata
9 170 (3.00%) NoSQL
10 161 (2.84%) Big Data
11 157 (2.77%) BigQuery
12 139 (2.45%) Amazon Athena
13 138 (2.43%) Amazon Redshift
14 129 (2.27%) MongoDB
15 121 (2.13%) Delta Lake
16 110 (1.94%) Amazon RDS
16 110 (1.94%) DynamoDB
17 84 (1.48%) MySQL
18 72 (1.27%) Snowflake Schema
19 70 (1.23%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 691 (12.18%) Git
2 510 (8.99%) Jenkins
3 407 (7.17%) GitLab
4 312 (5.50%) JIRA
5 83 (1.46%) Selenium
6 71 (1.25%) MLflow
7 51 (0.90%) Postman
8 44 (0.78%) Bitbucket
9 39 (0.69%) JMeter
10 37 (0.65%) SonarQube
11 34 (0.60%) Cypress.io
12 33 (0.58%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.56%) Artifactory
13 32 (0.56%) REST Assured
14 29 (0.51%) Claude Code
15 27 (0.48%) JUnit
15 27 (0.48%) Maven
15 27 (0.48%) Sonatype Nexus
16 24 (0.42%) Gatling
17 19 (0.33%) Zephyr
General
1 1,227 (21.63%) Social Skills
2 1,204 (21.22%) Finance
3 792 (13.96%) Analytical Skills
4 566 (9.98%) Public Sector
5 434 (7.65%) Banking
6 206 (3.63%) Front Office
7 129 (2.27%) Documentation Skills
8 124 (2.19%) Investment Banking
9 109 (1.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 97 (1.71%) Retail
11 85 (1.50%) Marketing
12 71 (1.25%) Telecoms
13 65 (1.15%) Pharmaceutical
14 61 (1.08%) Legal
15 51 (0.90%) Military
16 49 (0.86%) Financial Institution
17 48 (0.85%) Publishing
18 45 (0.79%) Influencing Skills
19 39 (0.69%) Manufacturing
20 33 (0.58%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 976 (17.20%) Developer
2 899 (15.85%) Senior
3 856 (15.09%) Data Engineer
4 516 (9.10%) Python Developer
5 445 (7.84%) Lead
6 403 (7.10%) Python Engineer
7 330 (5.82%) DevOps Engineer
8 319 (5.62%) Software Engineer
9 296 (5.22%) Architect
10 287 (5.06%) Analyst
11 258 (4.55%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 251 (4.42%) AWS Engineer
13 222 (3.91%) Data Scientist
14 196 (3.45%) Platform Engineer
15 186 (3.28%) Cloud Engineer
16 178 (3.14%) Senior Developer
17 173 (3.05%) Azure Engineer
17 173 (3.05%) Senior Data Engineer
18 149 (2.63%) Data Analyst
19 140 (2.47%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 421 (7.42%) REST
2 367 (6.47%) PySpark
3 363 (6.40%) React
4 356 (6.28%) Kafka
5 237 (4.18%) .NET
6 219 (3.86%) FastAPI
7 217 (3.83%) Node.js
8 209 (3.68%) JSON
9 208 (3.67%) RESTful
10 198 (3.49%) Pandas
11 177 (3.12%) Django
12 153 (2.70%) PyTorch
13 143 (2.52%) LangChain
14 122 (2.15%) NumPy
15 118 (2.08%) Flask
16 107 (1.89%) scikit-learn
17 106 (1.87%) OAuth
18 103 (1.82%) TensorFlow
19 102 (1.80%) Spring
20 98 (1.73%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 759 (13.38%) Cloud Native
2 322 (5.68%) Distributed Systems
3 199 (3.51%) Onboarding
4 198 (3.49%) AI Agents
5 159 (2.80%) Data Centre
6 155 (2.73%) Product Ownership
7 151 (2.66%) Algorithms
8 137 (2.41%) Data Structures
9 125 (2.20%) Legacy Systems
10 116 (2.04%) Data Protection Act
10 116 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
11 114 (2.01%) Derivative
12 104 (1.83%) Fixed Income
12 104 (1.83%) Management Information System
13 96 (1.69%) Equities
14 84 (1.48%) Security Posture
15 68 (1.20%) Public Cloud
16 67 (1.18%) Enterprise Software
17 65 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
18 64 (1.13%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 692 (12.20%) Linux
2 323 (5.69%) Windows
3 217 (3.83%) Unix
4 132 (2.33%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 73 (1.29%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.74%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.56%) VMS
8 29 (0.51%) AIX
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 16 (0.28%) Solaris
11 15 (0.26%) Apple iOS
12 13 (0.23%) CentOS
13 12 (0.21%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Debian
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 5 (0.088%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,158 (38.04%) CI/CD
2 1,577 (27.80%) DevOps
3 1,409 (24.84%) AI
4 1,283 (22.62%) Agile
5 1,162 (20.48%) Analytics
6 1,091 (19.23%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,021 (18.00%) Data Pipeline
8 924 (16.29%) Problem-Solving
9 909 (16.02%) Machine Learning
10 843 (14.86%) Software Engineering
11 821 (14.47%) Data Engineering
12 783 (13.80%) Containerisation
13 757 (13.34%) Data Modelling
14 689 (12.15%) ETL
15 669 (11.79%) Observability
16 639 (11.26%) Data Science
17 583 (10.28%) Test Automation
18 552 (9.73%) Business Intelligence
19 532 (9.38%) LLM
20 530 (9.34%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 1,828 (32.22%) SQL
2 802 (14.14%) Java
3 720 (12.69%) Bash
4 695 (12.25%) PowerShell
5 454 (8.00%) JavaScript
6 399 (7.03%) TypeScript
7 316 (5.57%) C#
8 215 (3.79%) Go
9 161 (2.84%) R
10 141 (2.49%) C++
11 129 (2.27%) Shell Script
12 124 (2.19%) Scala
13 109 (1.92%) Bicep
14 75 (1.32%) Perl
15 57 (1.00%) PL/SQL
15 57 (1.00%) Ruby
15 57 (1.00%) Rust
16 56 (0.99%) Groovy
17 54 (0.95%) C
18 49 (0.86%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,281 (22.58%) Security Cleared
2 1,022 (18.02%) SC Cleared
3 430 (7.58%) Degree
4 198 (3.49%) DV Cleared
5 149 (2.63%) Computer Science Degree
6 138 (2.43%) AWS Certification
7 133 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
8 129 (2.27%) Azure Certification
9 90 (1.59%) CISSP
10 85 (1.50%) Cisco Certification
11 83 (1.46%) Master's Degree
12 55 (0.97%) CCNP
13 45 (0.79%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 41 (0.72%) Microsoft Certification
14 41 (0.72%) PhD
15 38 (0.67%) CISM
16 34 (0.60%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 31 (0.55%) ISTQB
18 30 (0.53%) CCIE
19 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 579 (10.21%) Data Quality
2 257 (4.53%) QA
3 119 (2.10%) GDPR
4 107 (1.89%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 106 (1.87%) NIST
6 94 (1.66%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.60%) SLA
8 26 (0.46%) WCAG
9 24 (0.42%) NCSC
10 23 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
11 20 (0.35%) PCI DSS
11 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.33%) HIPAA
13 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.19%) SOC 2
15 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 9 (0.16%) GRC
17 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
18 7 (0.12%) HL7
System Software
1 898 (15.83%) Docker
2 146 (2.57%) Active Directory
3 128 (2.26%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.32%) Virtual Machines
5 49 (0.86%) vSphere
6 39 (0.69%) Hyper-V
7 37 (0.65%) VMware NSX
8 32 (0.56%) Firmware
9 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.33%) NFS
11 15 (0.26%) KVM
12 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 11 (0.19%) Ceph
15 10 (0.18%) SRDF
16 9 (0.16%) HDFS
16 9 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
17 7 (0.12%) Postfix
18 6 (0.11%) PowerHA
19 4 (0.071%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 1,258 (22.18%) Terraform
2 1,084 (19.11%) Kubernetes
3 599 (10.56%) Ansible
4 357 (6.29%) Grafana
5 278 (4.90%) Prometheus
6 81 (1.43%) Puppet
7 76 (1.34%) Argo
8 55 (0.97%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Istio
10 39 (0.69%) vCenter Server
11 33 (0.58%) vRealize
12 28 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
13 27 (0.48%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
14 25 (0.44%) Control-M
14 25 (0.44%) Nagios
14 25 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
15 23 (0.41%) Nessus
16 19 (0.33%) Tivoli
17 18 (0.32%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 655 (11.55%) Microsoft
2 565 (9.96%) Databricks
3 330 (5.82%) Google
4 243 (4.28%) Oracle
5 211 (3.72%) Splunk
6 177 (3.12%) VMware
7 152 (2.68%) OpenAI
8 140 (2.47%) Cisco
9 115 (2.03%) ServiceNow
10 105 (1.85%) Red Hat
11 93 (1.64%) F5
12 92 (1.62%) Dynatrace
13 90 (1.59%) Palo Alto
14 83 (1.46%) IBM
15 82 (1.45%) Informatica
16 71 (1.25%) Fortinet
17 68 (1.20%) Foundry
18 65 (1.15%) CyberArk
19 60 (1.06%) SAP
20 59 (1.04%) Salesforce