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 27 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -4 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,565 4,261 4,004
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.36% 13.01% 10.31%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.69% 39.73% 32.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,645 2,821 2,855
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £437 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.90% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £644 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 132 82 111
10th Percentile £30.05 £26.51 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.38 £34.81 £31.25
Median hourly rate £57.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.00% -13.04% -11.11%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.44 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £82.53 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.00 £50.00 £68.75
% change year-on-year +24.00% -27.27% +14.58%

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 14,022 10,725 12,235
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.12% 32.74% 31.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,124 7,149 8,472
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £501 £530
Median % change year-on-year +3.70% -5.57% -3.64%
75th Percentile £620 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 519 299 376
10th Percentile £28.50 £28.25 £27.00
25th Percentile £49.50 £36.25 £46.14
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +5.11%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.15 £79.00 £75.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.84% -4.62% +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 27 August 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 27 August 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 27 August 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 4,748 £549 +2.14% 4,314
London -3 2,801 £575 - 2,725
UK excluding London -8 2,122 £500 - 2,062
Work from Home -8 1,514 £530 -3.64% 1,646
North of England +1 721 £500 +3.63% 466
South East -11 437 £540 +8.00% 434
Yorkshire -1 369 £500 - 114
South West -3 292 £525 - 400
Scotland -1 280 £450 -10.00% 220
North West -2 269 £500 +5.26% 264
Midlands -16 234 £476 +0.21% 189
West Midlands -18 186 £477 +0.42% 124
East of England -13 137 £500 -0.50% 278
North East -1 94 £425 -5.56% 90
East Midlands -9 48 £475 +13.10% 64
Wales -6 30 £530 +30.86% 39
Northern Ireland +1 18 £363 -30.95% 63

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
1 289 (5.19%) Apache Airflow
2 269 (4.83%) Apache Spark
3 217 (3.90%) Apache
4 166 (2.98%) Confluence
5 57 (1.02%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.68%) SAS
8 30 (0.54%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
10 21 (0.38%) nginx
10 21 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
11 14 (0.25%) IIS
12 9 (0.16%) CMS
12 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
12 9 (0.16%) WebSphere
13 7 (0.13%) Apache Superset
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
14 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 5 (0.090%) JBoss
15 5 (0.090%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 113 (2.03%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.34%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 16 (0.29%) CPLEX
7 15 (0.27%) MS Visio
8 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
9 2 (0.036%) Revit
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
10 1 (0.018%) Houdini
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.018%) Simulink
10 1 (0.018%) SPSS
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
10 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 21 (0.38%) Aladdin
2 18 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 13 (0.23%) Oracle EBS
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
6 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
8 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.090%) Salesforce CRM
9 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.054%) Endur
10 3 (0.054%) Front Arena
10 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
10 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) Odoo
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,067 (37.14%) AWS
2 1,894 (34.03%) Azure
3 847 (15.22%) GCP
4 704 (12.65%) GitHub
5 501 (9.00%) Power Platform
6 473 (8.50%) Serverless
7 441 (7.92%) Azure DevOps
8 410 (7.37%) GitHub Actions
9 393 (7.06%) Amazon S3
10 355 (6.38%) AWS Lambda
11 327 (5.88%) Snowflake
12 227 (4.08%) dbt
13 222 (3.99%) Azure Data Factory
14 186 (3.34%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 181 (3.25%) AWS CloudFormation
16 176 (3.16%) Amazon EKS
17 138 (2.48%) Amazon EC2
18 136 (2.44%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 133 (2.39%) Entra ID
20 123 (2.21%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 270 (4.85%) Firewall
2 213 (3.83%) DNS
3 151 (2.71%) TCP/IP
4 132 (2.37%) Network Security
5 127 (2.28%) BGP
6 123 (2.21%) VPN
7 111 (1.99%) WAN
8 86 (1.55%) DHCP
9 73 (1.31%) OSPF
10 62 (1.11%) SD-WAN
11 60 (1.08%) VLAN
12 56 (1.01%) VXLAN
13 55 (0.99%) HTTP
13 55 (0.99%) SSL
14 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
15 44 (0.79%) Ethernet VPN
15 44 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 44 (0.79%) SAN
16 43 (0.77%) SNMP
17 39 (0.70%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 454 (8.16%) Power BI
2 324 (5.82%) Data Warehouse
3 320 (5.75%) PostgreSQL
4 218 (3.92%) SQL Server
5 201 (3.61%) Metadata
6 197 (3.54%) Relational Database
6 197 (3.54%) Tableau
7 180 (3.23%) Data Lake
8 159 (2.86%) BigQuery
9 152 (2.73%) NoSQL
10 137 (2.46%) Amazon Redshift
10 137 (2.46%) Big Data
11 128 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
12 122 (2.19%) Amazon RDS
13 120 (2.16%) MongoDB
14 119 (2.14%) Delta Lake
15 102 (1.83%) DynamoDB
16 88 (1.58%) MySQL
17 73 (1.31%) Redis
18 65 (1.17%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 727 (13.06%) Git
2 502 (9.02%) Jenkins
3 442 (7.94%) GitLab
4 278 (5.00%) JIRA
5 100 (1.80%) Selenium
6 57 (1.02%) JMeter
7 54 (0.97%) Postman
8 53 (0.95%) MLflow
9 49 (0.88%) SonarQube
10 47 (0.84%) Claude Code
11 39 (0.70%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
13 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
13 33 (0.59%) Gatling
14 32 (0.58%) Maven
15 31 (0.56%) Artifactory
15 31 (0.56%) REST Assured
16 30 (0.54%) Sonatype Nexus
17 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
18 20 (0.36%) JUnit
General
1 1,257 (22.59%) Social Skills
2 1,199 (21.55%) Finance
3 838 (15.06%) Analytical Skills
4 554 (9.96%) Public Sector
5 449 (8.07%) Banking
6 188 (3.38%) Front Office
7 138 (2.48%) Investment Banking
8 117 (2.10%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (2.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 107 (1.92%) Retail
11 88 (1.58%) Marketing
12 80 (1.44%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.06%) Pharmaceutical
14 54 (0.97%) Legal
14 54 (0.97%) Military
15 48 (0.86%) Aerospace
16 47 (0.84%) Financial Institution
17 45 (0.81%) Publishing
18 41 (0.74%) Law
19 40 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 930 (16.71%) Senior
2 908 (16.32%) Developer
3 799 (14.36%) Data Engineer
4 485 (8.72%) Python Developer
5 474 (8.52%) Lead
6 413 (7.42%) Python Engineer
7 333 (5.98%) DevOps Engineer
8 299 (5.37%) Software Engineer
9 282 (5.07%) Analyst
9 282 (5.07%) Architect
10 258 (4.64%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 233 (4.19%) AWS Engineer
12 191 (3.43%) Data Scientist
13 190 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
14 189 (3.40%) Cloud Engineer
15 180 (3.23%) Senior Developer
16 174 (3.13%) Azure Engineer
17 173 (3.11%) Senior Data Engineer
18 139 (2.50%) Infrastructure Engineer
19 138 (2.48%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,308 (23.50%) Terraform
2 470 (8.45%) REST
3 376 (6.76%) PySpark
4 363 (6.52%) Kafka
5 318 (5.71%) React
6 246 (4.42%) .NET
7 203 (3.65%) JSON
8 200 (3.59%) FastAPI
9 197 (3.54%) Django
10 188 (3.38%) RESTful
11 181 (3.25%) Node.js
12 174 (3.13%) Pandas
13 134 (2.41%) pytest
14 133 (2.39%) LangChain
15 120 (2.16%) PyTorch
16 115 (2.07%) YAML
17 111 (1.99%) Flask
17 111 (1.99%) HTML
18 108 (1.94%) OAuth
19 102 (1.83%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 769 (13.82%) Cloud Native
2 312 (5.61%) Distributed Systems
3 237 (4.26%) AI Agents
4 220 (3.95%) Onboarding
5 163 (2.93%) Data Centre
6 160 (2.88%) Product Ownership
7 138 (2.48%) Algorithms
8 134 (2.41%) Data Structures
8 134 (2.41%) Legacy Systems
9 115 (2.07%) Hybrid Cloud
10 113 (2.03%) Derivative
11 111 (1.99%) Data Protection Act
12 103 (1.85%) Management Information System
13 91 (1.64%) Equities
14 77 (1.38%) Enterprise Software
14 77 (1.38%) Security Posture
15 71 (1.28%) Fixed Income
16 67 (1.20%) Linux Command Line
16 67 (1.20%) Public Cloud
17 63 (1.13%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 736 (13.23%) Linux
2 332 (5.97%) Windows
3 240 (4.31%) Unix
4 147 (2.64%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 86 (1.55%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.59%) VMS
8 31 (0.56%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 17 (0.31%) CentOS
11 16 (0.29%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
12 10 (0.18%) 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 5 (0.090%) Debian
16 5 (0.090%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,211 (39.73%) CI/CD
2 1,595 (28.66%) DevOps
3 1,455 (26.15%) AI
4 1,230 (22.10%) Agile
5 1,189 (21.37%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,094 (19.66%) Analytics
7 977 (17.56%) Data Pipeline
8 905 (16.26%) Problem-Solving
9 892 (16.03%) Software Engineering
10 838 (15.06%) Machine Learning
11 786 (14.12%) Data Engineering
12 764 (13.73%) Containerisation
13 727 (13.06%) Data Modelling
14 697 (12.52%) Observability
15 646 (11.61%) ETL
16 625 (11.23%) Test Automation
17 602 (10.82%) Continuous Improvement
18 564 (10.13%) Validation
19 561 (10.08%) Data Science
20 547 (9.83%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,807 (32.47%) SQL
2 825 (14.82%) Java
3 759 (13.64%) Bash
4 733 (13.17%) PowerShell
5 444 (7.98%) JavaScript
6 344 (6.18%) TypeScript
7 313 (5.62%) C#
8 196 (3.52%) Go
9 152 (2.73%) R
10 143 (2.57%) C++
11 137 (2.46%) Shell Script
12 134 (2.41%) Bicep
13 129 (2.32%) Scala
14 96 (1.73%) Perl
15 59 (1.06%) Groovy
16 58 (1.04%) PL/SQL
17 57 (1.02%) C
18 54 (0.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 54 (0.97%) Ruby
19 53 (0.95%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,303 (23.41%) Security Cleared
2 1,059 (19.03%) SC Cleared
3 420 (7.55%) Degree
4 208 (3.74%) DV Cleared
5 162 (2.91%) Computer Science Degree
6 147 (2.64%) Azure Certification
7 139 (2.50%) AWS Certification
8 114 (2.05%) BPSS Clearance
9 91 (1.64%) CISSP
10 84 (1.51%) Cisco Certification
11 69 (1.24%) Master's Degree
12 45 (0.81%) CCNP
13 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
14 34 (0.61%) ISTQB
14 34 (0.61%) PhD
14 34 (0.61%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 32 (0.58%) CISM
16 30 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 29 (0.52%) CCIE
18 27 (0.49%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 591 (10.62%) Data Quality
2 287 (5.16%) QA
3 111 (1.99%) NIST
4 104 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 103 (1.85%) GDPR
6 83 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 41 (0.74%) SLA
8 30 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
9 27 (0.49%) NCSC
9 27 (0.49%) WCAG
10 25 (0.45%) PCI DSS
10 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
12 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
15 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.13%) HL7
17 6 (0.11%) GRC
17 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 932 (16.75%) Docker
2 156 (2.80%) Active Directory
3 132 (2.37%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.10%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.81%) Hyper-V
6 43 (0.77%) vSphere
7 35 (0.63%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 24 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
10 17 (0.31%) NFS
11 15 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
12 14 (0.25%) Squid
13 12 (0.22%) Virtual Desktop
14 10 (0.18%) Ceph
15 9 (0.16%) KVM
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
16 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
16 7 (0.13%) zsh
17 6 (0.11%) HDFS
18 5 (0.090%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,104 (19.84%) Kubernetes
2 626 (11.25%) Ansible
3 336 (6.04%) Grafana
4 246 (4.42%) Prometheus
5 84 (1.51%) Puppet
6 73 (1.31%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.20%) Argo
8 38 (0.68%) Istio
9 34 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
10 30 (0.54%) Kibana
11 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
12 26 (0.47%) Control-M
12 26 (0.47%) Nagios
13 25 (0.45%) vCenter Server
14 24 (0.43%) vRealize
15 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
16 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
17 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
17 18 (0.32%) Netcool
17 18 (0.32%) Packer
Vendors
1 704 (12.65%) Microsoft
2 558 (10.03%) Databricks
3 350 (6.29%) Google
4 253 (4.55%) Oracle
5 214 (3.85%) Splunk
6 175 (3.14%) VMware
7 144 (2.59%) OpenAI
8 140 (2.52%) Cisco
9 125 (2.25%) ServiceNow
10 103 (1.85%) Dynatrace
11 99 (1.78%) Red Hat
12 94 (1.69%) IBM
13 86 (1.55%) F5
14 81 (1.46%) Palo Alto
15 79 (1.42%) Informatica
16 68 (1.22%) Fortinet
16 68 (1.22%) SAP
17 67 (1.20%) CyberArk
18 66 (1.19%) Foundry
19 59 (1.06%) Salesforce