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 23 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
23 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,667 4,275 4,077
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.33% 13.07% 10.82%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.70% 39.74% 33.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,687 2,772 2,818
10th Percentile £374 £358 £375
25th Percentile £441 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.29% -8.70% -3.56%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £700
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £500 £506
% change year-on-year +1.00% -1.19% -3.62%
Number of hourly rates quoted 140 83 101
10th Percentile £30.30 £28.19 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.13 £40.06
Median hourly rate £61.97 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +23.95% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £78.19 £58.13 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.21 £83.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.27% -28.57% +7.69%

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 14,273 10,758 12,082
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.02% 32.90% 32.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,265 7,103 8,116
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £505 £526
Median % change year-on-year +3.47% -3.90% -4.45%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £497
% change year-on-year +5.26% -4.50% -0.53%
Number of hourly rates quoted 558 290 340
10th Percentile £26.25 £29.00 £26.93
25th Percentile £45.50 £40.31 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.59%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £78.88 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 23 September 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 23 September 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 23 September 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 4,840 £550 +3.77% 10,484
London -4 2,857 £575 - 6,544
UK excluding London -8 2,168 £505 +1.00% 4,800
Work from Home -4 1,535 £529 -3.91% 3,857
North of England 0 751 £500 +5.04% 1,066
South East -5 459 £543 +8.50% 1,132
Yorkshire -2 385 £500 - 352
Scotland -4 295 £458 -8.50% 555
North West +3 288 £525 +11.94% 576
South West -5 279 £550 +4.76% 638
Midlands -22 222 £500 +4.71% 507
West Midlands -19 179 £500 - 310
East of England -13 152 £480 -8.57% 655
North East 0 88 £425 -10.53% 143
East Midlands -20 43 £475 +15.85% 197
Wales -8 27 £510 +19.30% 106
Northern Ireland +3 17 £363 -30.95% 182

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
1 295 (5.21%) Apache Airflow
2 275 (4.85%) Apache Spark
3 223 (3.94%) Apache
4 163 (2.88%) Confluence
5 60 (1.06%) Jupyter
6 57 (1.01%) SharePoint
7 36 (0.64%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 26 (0.46%) nginx
10 24 (0.42%) ArcGIS
11 22 (0.39%) IIS
12 21 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
13 8 (0.14%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
15 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
16 5 (0.088%) Camunda
16 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 109 (1.92%) Microsoft Excel
2 36 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 18 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
5 16 (0.28%) CPLEX
6 15 (0.26%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
8 2 (0.035%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.035%) Navisworks
8 2 (0.035%) Revit
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
9 1 (0.018%) Houdini
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) Simulink
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 20 (0.35%) Remedy ITSM
2 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
2 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
4 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
5 7 (0.12%) Front Arena
5 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.12%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Summit
7 5 (0.088%) Sage X3
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Endur
9 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.035%) BambooHR
10 2 (0.035%) OneSumX
10 2 (0.035%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 2,093 (36.93%) AWS
2 1,900 (33.53%) Azure
3 899 (15.86%) GCP
4 744 (13.13%) GitHub
5 494 (8.72%) Power Platform
6 487 (8.59%) Serverless
7 437 (7.71%) GitHub Actions
8 436 (7.69%) Azure DevOps
9 396 (6.99%) Amazon S3
10 362 (6.39%) AWS Lambda
11 341 (6.02%) Snowflake
12 241 (4.25%) dbt
13 211 (3.72%) Azure Data Factory
14 201 (3.55%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 189 (3.34%) AWS CloudFormation
16 183 (3.23%) Amazon EKS
17 170 (3.00%) Entra ID
18 143 (2.52%) Amazon EC2
19 128 (2.26%) Amazon ECS
20 127 (2.24%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 288 (5.08%) Firewall
2 213 (3.76%) DNS
3 159 (2.81%) Network Security
4 154 (2.72%) TCP/IP
5 130 (2.29%) BGP
6 129 (2.28%) VPN
7 118 (2.08%) WAN
8 88 (1.55%) DHCP
9 77 (1.36%) OSPF
10 74 (1.31%) SD-WAN
11 63 (1.11%) BIG-IP
12 60 (1.06%) VLAN
13 58 (1.02%) SSL
14 56 (0.99%) VXLAN
15 53 (0.94%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 52 (0.92%) HTTP
17 47 (0.83%) Ethernet VPN
18 41 (0.72%) Wireless
19 39 (0.69%) Broadband
20 38 (0.67%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 442 (7.80%) Power BI
2 330 (5.82%) Data Warehouse
3 317 (5.59%) PostgreSQL
4 220 (3.88%) Metadata
5 206 (3.64%) Relational Database
6 200 (3.53%) SQL Server
7 189 (3.34%) Data Lake
8 183 (3.23%) BigQuery
9 178 (3.14%) Tableau
10 155 (2.74%) NoSQL
11 139 (2.45%) Big Data
12 132 (2.33%) Amazon RDS
13 131 (2.31%) Amazon Redshift
14 129 (2.28%) Amazon Athena
15 118 (2.08%) Delta Lake
16 116 (2.05%) MongoDB
17 110 (1.94%) DynamoDB
18 101 (1.78%) MySQL
19 73 (1.29%) Redis
20 63 (1.11%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 814 (14.36%) Git
2 512 (9.03%) Jenkins
3 480 (8.47%) GitLab
4 313 (5.52%) JIRA
5 122 (2.15%) Selenium
6 67 (1.18%) Postman
7 59 (1.04%) JMeter
8 58 (1.02%) SonarQube
9 57 (1.01%) Claude Code
10 50 (0.88%) MLflow
11 44 (0.78%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.62%) Cucumber
13 34 (0.60%) Maven
13 34 (0.60%) REST Assured
14 33 (0.58%) Artifactory
14 33 (0.58%) Cypress.io
14 33 (0.58%) Sonatype Nexus
15 29 (0.51%) Gatling
15 29 (0.51%) LoadRunner
16 24 (0.42%) JUnit
General
1 1,331 (23.49%) Social Skills
2 1,267 (22.36%) Finance
3 863 (15.23%) Analytical Skills
4 547 (9.65%) Public Sector
5 507 (8.95%) Banking
6 175 (3.09%) Front Office
7 146 (2.58%) Investment Banking
8 113 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 111 (1.96%) Retail
10 106 (1.87%) Documentation Skills
11 95 (1.68%) Marketing
12 87 (1.54%) Telecoms
13 61 (1.08%) Military
14 53 (0.94%) Aerospace
14 53 (0.94%) Law
14 53 (0.94%) Pharmaceutical
15 47 (0.83%) Legal
16 45 (0.79%) Publishing
17 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
18 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,001 (17.66%) Senior
2 890 (15.70%) Developer
3 827 (14.59%) Data Engineer
4 482 (8.51%) Lead
5 467 (8.24%) Python Developer
6 421 (7.43%) Python Engineer
7 355 (6.26%) DevOps Engineer
8 297 (5.24%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 293 (5.17%) Analyst
10 286 (5.05%) Software Engineer
11 261 (4.61%) Architect
12 229 (4.04%) AWS Engineer
13 196 (3.46%) Cloud Engineer
14 191 (3.37%) Senior Developer
15 190 (3.35%) Platform Engineer
16 189 (3.34%) Senior Data Engineer
17 188 (3.32%) Azure Engineer
18 186 (3.28%) Data Scientist
19 152 (2.68%) Network Engineer
20 143 (2.52%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,384 (24.42%) Terraform
2 525 (9.26%) REST
3 372 (6.56%) Kafka
4 370 (6.53%) PySpark
5 306 (5.40%) React
6 249 (4.39%) .NET
7 213 (3.76%) JSON
8 207 (3.65%) FastAPI
9 205 (3.62%) Django
10 189 (3.34%) RESTful
11 163 (2.88%) Node.js
12 158 (2.79%) Pandas
12 158 (2.79%) pytest
13 153 (2.70%) LangChain
14 128 (2.26%) OAuth
15 117 (2.06%) Flask
16 114 (2.01%) YAML
17 111 (1.96%) PyTorch
18 108 (1.91%) HTML
19 107 (1.89%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 795 (14.03%) Cloud Native
2 302 (5.33%) Distributed Systems
3 284 (5.01%) AI Agents
4 249 (4.39%) Onboarding
5 166 (2.93%) Data Centre
6 152 (2.68%) Product Ownership
7 146 (2.58%) Data Structures
8 133 (2.35%) Legacy Systems
9 127 (2.24%) Algorithms
10 109 (1.92%) Hybrid Cloud
11 107 (1.89%) Management Information System
12 105 (1.85%) Enterprise Software
13 104 (1.84%) Data Protection Act
14 99 (1.75%) Derivative
15 94 (1.66%) Security Posture
16 83 (1.46%) Public Cloud
17 81 (1.43%) Equities
18 72 (1.27%) PKI
19 70 (1.24%) Linux Command Line
20 69 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 767 (13.53%) Linux
2 341 (6.02%) Windows
3 250 (4.41%) Unix
4 158 (2.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 93 (1.64%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.81%) Ubuntu
7 40 (0.71%) VMS
8 24 (0.42%) CentOS
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 18 (0.32%) AIX
11 17 (0.30%) Android
12 11 (0.19%) Apple iOS
13 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Debian
16 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,358 (41.61%) CI/CD
2 1,619 (28.57%) DevOps
3 1,560 (27.53%) AI
4 1,300 (22.94%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,279 (22.57%) Agile
6 1,104 (19.48%) Analytics
7 992 (17.50%) Data Pipeline
8 942 (16.62%) Software Engineering
9 904 (15.95%) Problem-Solving
10 853 (15.05%) Machine Learning
11 834 (14.72%) Data Engineering
12 797 (14.06%) Containerisation
13 765 (13.50%) Observability
14 749 (13.22%) Data Modelling
15 688 (12.14%) Test Automation
16 664 (11.72%) Validation
17 662 (11.68%) ETL
18 653 (11.52%) Continuous Improvement
19 576 (10.16%) Platform Engineering
20 569 (10.04%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,849 (32.63%) SQL
2 812 (14.33%) Java
3 770 (13.59%) Bash
4 751 (13.25%) PowerShell
5 449 (7.92%) JavaScript
6 343 (6.05%) TypeScript
7 315 (5.56%) C#
8 223 (3.94%) Go
9 152 (2.68%) Shell Script
10 144 (2.54%) R
11 136 (2.40%) C++
12 130 (2.29%) Bicep
13 124 (2.19%) Scala
14 104 (1.84%) Perl
15 61 (1.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 60 (1.06%) Groovy
17 57 (1.01%) C
18 52 (0.92%) Rust
19 50 (0.88%) PL/SQL
20 46 (0.81%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,378 (24.32%) Security Cleared
2 1,116 (19.69%) SC Cleared
3 416 (7.34%) Degree
4 244 (4.31%) DV Cleared
5 158 (2.79%) Azure Certification
6 152 (2.68%) Computer Science Degree
7 145 (2.56%) AWS Certification
8 127 (2.24%) BPSS Clearance
9 95 (1.68%) CISSP
10 83 (1.46%) Cisco Certification
11 67 (1.18%) Master's Degree
12 49 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
13 41 (0.72%) CCNP
14 35 (0.62%) PhD
15 32 (0.56%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
16 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 30 (0.53%) CCIE
17 30 (0.53%) CISM
17 30 (0.53%) ISTQB
18 29 (0.51%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 640 (11.29%) Data Quality
2 325 (5.73%) QA
3 115 (2.03%) NIST
4 103 (1.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 91 (1.61%) GDPR
6 83 (1.46%) Accessibility
7 40 (0.71%) SLA
8 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 30 (0.53%) NCSC
10 27 (0.48%) PCI DSS
11 22 (0.39%) SOC 2
11 22 (0.39%) WCAG
12 19 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
13 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
14 11 (0.19%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.12%) Basel III
16 7 (0.12%) MiFID
17 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 972 (17.15%) Docker
2 175 (3.09%) Active Directory
3 136 (2.40%) VMware Infrastructure
4 70 (1.24%) Virtual Machines
5 51 (0.90%) Hyper-V
6 37 (0.65%) vSphere
7 34 (0.60%) VMware NSX
8 28 (0.49%) VMware ESXi
9 26 (0.46%) NFS
10 23 (0.41%) Firmware
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
12 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
13 12 (0.21%) Squid
14 8 (0.14%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 7 (0.12%) HDFS
15 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 7 (0.12%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
17 5 (0.088%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,170 (20.65%) Kubernetes
2 643 (11.35%) Ansible
3 331 (5.84%) Grafana
4 241 (4.25%) Prometheus
5 79 (1.39%) Puppet
6 71 (1.25%) Progress Chef
7 63 (1.11%) Argo
8 46 (0.81%) Single Sign-On
9 38 (0.67%) Kibana
10 34 (0.60%) Istio
11 28 (0.49%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
13 22 (0.39%) FortiGate
14 21 (0.37%) Packer
15 20 (0.35%) ZABBIX
16 19 (0.34%) vCenter Server
17 18 (0.32%) Nagios
17 18 (0.32%) vRealize
18 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
18 16 (0.28%) QRadar
Vendors
1 745 (13.15%) Microsoft
2 579 (10.22%) Databricks
3 397 (7.01%) Google
4 241 (4.25%) Oracle
5 208 (3.67%) Splunk
6 174 (3.07%) VMware
7 160 (2.82%) OpenAI
8 147 (2.59%) Cisco
9 134 (2.36%) ServiceNow
10 102 (1.80%) Dynatrace
11 97 (1.71%) IBM
11 97 (1.71%) Red Hat
12 92 (1.62%) F5
13 90 (1.59%) Palo Alto
14 85 (1.50%) Foundry
15 73 (1.29%) Fortinet
16 71 (1.25%) Informatica
17 70 (1.24%) SAP
18 67 (1.18%) CyberArk
19 59 (1.04%) Salesforce