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

6 months to
12 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,587 4,263 3,936
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.47% 12.93% 10.11%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.63% 39.42% 32.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,657 2,847 2,827
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £437 £428 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £528 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.57% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £505
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.97% -3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 132 71 123
10th Percentile £30.05 £26.32 £20.65
25th Percentile £42.50 £34.33 £30.50
Median hourly rate £55.25 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.50% -13.04% -8.73%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £82.96 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.25 £50.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +10.50% -23.08% +14.14%

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 14,097 10,814 12,180
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.41% 32.80% 31.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,179 7,253 8,533
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £530
Median % change year-on-year +1.49% -4.72% -3.64%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 523 269 408
10th Percentile £30.10 £28.18 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £35.00 £45.80
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.07% -13.85% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.95 £84.60 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.56% -1.54% +8.33%

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 12 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 12 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 12 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 4,782 £538 -0.46% 7,567
London -4 2,770 £570 -0.87% 5,079
UK excluding London -6 2,184 £500 +2.04% 3,258
Work from Home -9 1,530 £530 -3.64% 2,731
North of England +2 763 £500 +3.09% 754
South East -10 447 £537 +7.40% 851
Yorkshire 0 391 £500 - 207
South West -1 292 £505 -3.81% 407
North West +1 289 £525 +10.53% 412
Scotland 0 277 £450 -10.00% 336
Midlands -13 247 £473 +5.00% 297
West Midlands -10 198 £469 +4.22% 166
East of England -10 138 £500 -0.50% 443
North East -2 94 £425 -18.27% 140
East Midlands -7 48 £495 +17.16% 131
Wales -3 28 £530 +30.86% 85
Northern Ireland +8 19 £363 -32.56% 112

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
1 288 (5.15%) Apache Airflow
2 280 (5.01%) Apache Spark
3 218 (3.90%) Apache
4 177 (3.17%) Confluence
5 58 (1.04%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SAS
7 46 (0.82%) SharePoint
8 28 (0.50%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.32%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) CMS
14 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
15 7 (0.13%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.13%) CICS
15 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
17 5 (0.089%) JBoss
17 5 (0.089%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 111 (1.99%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Office
3 23 (0.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
5 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
5 17 (0.30%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.036%) Revit
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
8 1 (0.018%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
6 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
7 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Endur
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Front Arena
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,087 (37.35%) AWS
2 1,907 (34.13%) Azure
3 851 (15.23%) GCP
4 711 (12.73%) GitHub
5 497 (8.90%) Power Platform
6 458 (8.20%) Serverless
7 438 (7.84%) Azure DevOps
8 408 (7.30%) GitHub Actions
9 392 (7.02%) Amazon S3
10 349 (6.25%) AWS Lambda
11 317 (5.67%) Snowflake
12 235 (4.21%) Azure Data Factory
13 218 (3.90%) dbt
14 187 (3.35%) AWS CloudFormation
15 184 (3.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 178 (3.19%) Amazon EKS
17 143 (2.56%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 137 (2.45%) OpenShift
19 136 (2.43%) Amazon EC2
20 130 (2.33%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 273 (4.89%) Firewall
2 207 (3.71%) DNS
3 139 (2.49%) TCP/IP
4 121 (2.17%) VPN
5 118 (2.11%) BGP
5 118 (2.11%) Network Security
6 109 (1.95%) WAN
7 83 (1.49%) DHCP
8 71 (1.27%) OSPF
9 59 (1.06%) SD-WAN
9 59 (1.06%) VLAN
10 54 (0.97%) VXLAN
11 53 (0.95%) SSL
12 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
12 52 (0.93%) HTTP
13 47 (0.84%) SAN
14 44 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 44 (0.79%) SNMP
15 41 (0.73%) Ethernet VPN
16 35 (0.63%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 454 (8.13%) Power BI
2 328 (5.87%) Data Warehouse
3 321 (5.75%) PostgreSQL
4 218 (3.90%) SQL Server
5 198 (3.54%) Relational Database
6 194 (3.47%) Metadata
7 192 (3.44%) Data Lake
8 191 (3.42%) Tableau
9 158 (2.83%) NoSQL
10 154 (2.76%) BigQuery
11 152 (2.72%) Big Data
12 133 (2.38%) Amazon Redshift
13 129 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
14 121 (2.17%) Delta Lake
15 120 (2.15%) MongoDB
16 115 (2.06%) Amazon RDS
17 100 (1.79%) DynamoDB
18 83 (1.49%) MySQL
19 70 (1.25%) Snowflake Schema
20 65 (1.16%) Redis
Development Applications
1 718 (12.85%) Git
2 513 (9.18%) Jenkins
3 436 (7.80%) GitLab
4 291 (5.21%) JIRA
5 97 (1.74%) Selenium
6 57 (1.02%) MLflow
7 55 (0.98%) Postman
8 52 (0.93%) JMeter
9 46 (0.82%) Bitbucket
9 46 (0.82%) SonarQube
10 42 (0.75%) Claude Code
11 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
12 34 (0.61%) Cucumber
13 32 (0.57%) Gatling
14 31 (0.55%) Artifactory
15 30 (0.54%) Maven
15 30 (0.54%) REST Assured
16 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
17 23 (0.41%) LoadRunner
18 22 (0.39%) JUnit
General
1 1,217 (21.78%) Social Skills
2 1,204 (21.55%) Finance
3 803 (14.37%) Analytical Skills
4 561 (10.04%) Public Sector
5 438 (7.84%) Banking
6 202 (3.62%) Front Office
7 130 (2.33%) Investment Banking
8 117 (2.09%) Documentation Skills
9 110 (1.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 107 (1.92%) Retail
11 88 (1.58%) Marketing
12 73 (1.31%) Telecoms
13 60 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
14 56 (1.00%) Legal
15 54 (0.97%) Military
16 48 (0.86%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.84%) Aerospace
18 46 (0.82%) Publishing
19 45 (0.81%) Manufacturing
20 38 (0.68%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 936 (16.75%) Developer
2 899 (16.09%) Senior
3 820 (14.68%) Data Engineer
4 500 (8.95%) Python Developer
5 471 (8.43%) Lead
6 408 (7.30%) Python Engineer
7 326 (5.83%) DevOps Engineer
8 313 (5.60%) Software Engineer
9 277 (4.96%) Analyst
10 276 (4.94%) Architect
11 254 (4.55%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 241 (4.31%) AWS Engineer
13 206 (3.69%) Data Scientist
14 194 (3.47%) Cloud Engineer
15 190 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
16 177 (3.17%) Azure Engineer
17 176 (3.15%) Senior Developer
18 165 (2.95%) Senior Data Engineer
19 138 (2.47%) Data Analyst
20 137 (2.45%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 432 (7.73%) REST
2 373 (6.68%) PySpark
3 355 (6.35%) Kafka
4 337 (6.03%) React
5 231 (4.13%) .NET
6 199 (3.56%) RESTful
7 197 (3.53%) JSON
8 196 (3.51%) FastAPI
9 195 (3.49%) Node.js
10 179 (3.20%) Pandas
11 177 (3.17%) Django
12 139 (2.49%) LangChain
13 134 (2.40%) PyTorch
14 108 (1.93%) Flask
14 108 (1.93%) NumPy
14 108 (1.93%) YAML
15 105 (1.88%) pytest
16 102 (1.83%) OAuth
17 100 (1.79%) HTML
18 97 (1.74%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 760 (13.60%) Cloud Native
2 315 (5.64%) Distributed Systems
3 217 (3.88%) AI Agents
4 204 (3.65%) Onboarding
5 156 (2.79%) Data Centre
6 153 (2.74%) Product Ownership
7 141 (2.52%) Algorithms
8 139 (2.49%) Data Structures
9 127 (2.27%) Legacy Systems
10 118 (2.11%) Derivative
10 118 (2.11%) Hybrid Cloud
11 111 (1.99%) Data Protection Act
12 104 (1.86%) Management Information System
13 97 (1.74%) Equities
14 93 (1.66%) Fixed Income
15 85 (1.52%) Security Posture
16 71 (1.27%) Enterprise Software
17 67 (1.20%) Public Cloud
18 65 (1.16%) Self-Motivation
19 64 (1.15%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 707 (12.65%) Linux
2 325 (5.82%) Windows
3 228 (4.08%) Unix
4 139 (2.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 76 (1.36%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.72%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.54%) AIX
7 30 (0.54%) VMS
8 16 (0.29%) Android
8 16 (0.29%) Solaris
9 14 (0.25%) CentOS
10 11 (0.20%) Apple iOS
10 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
10 11 (0.20%) zOS
11 7 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
11 7 (0.13%) Windows 10
11 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
12 6 (0.11%) Debian
12 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
12 6 (0.11%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,184 (39.09%) CI/CD
2 1,617 (28.94%) DevOps
3 1,436 (25.70%) AI
4 1,266 (22.66%) Agile
5 1,137 (20.35%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,119 (20.03%) Analytics
7 1,002 (17.93%) Data Pipeline
8 904 (16.18%) Problem-Solving
9 880 (15.75%) Software Engineering
10 871 (15.59%) Machine Learning
11 786 (14.07%) Data Engineering
12 755 (13.51%) Containerisation
13 749 (13.41%) Data Modelling
14 674 (12.06%) Observability
15 657 (11.76%) ETL
16 608 (10.88%) Test Automation
17 593 (10.61%) Data Science
18 565 (10.11%) Continuous Improvement
19 534 (9.56%) Validation
20 530 (9.49%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,804 (32.29%) SQL
2 832 (14.89%) Java
3 748 (13.39%) Bash
4 726 (12.99%) PowerShell
5 462 (8.27%) JavaScript
6 373 (6.68%) TypeScript
7 303 (5.42%) C#
8 207 (3.71%) Go
9 148 (2.65%) C++
10 143 (2.56%) R
11 133 (2.38%) Shell Script
12 131 (2.34%) Scala
13 125 (2.24%) Bicep
14 84 (1.50%) Perl
15 59 (1.06%) C
16 58 (1.04%) Groovy
17 57 (1.02%) PL/SQL
18 56 (1.00%) Rust
19 53 (0.95%) Ruby
20 51 (0.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,309 (23.43%) Security Cleared
2 1,069 (19.13%) SC Cleared
3 423 (7.57%) Degree
4 197 (3.53%) DV Cleared
5 162 (2.90%) Computer Science Degree
6 138 (2.47%) AWS Certification
6 138 (2.47%) Azure Certification
7 119 (2.13%) BPSS Clearance
8 89 (1.59%) CISSP
9 85 (1.52%) Cisco Certification
10 72 (1.29%) Master's Degree
11 50 (0.89%) CCNP
12 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
13 41 (0.73%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 35 (0.63%) PhD
15 32 (0.57%) ISTQB
16 31 (0.55%) CISM
17 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 28 (0.50%) CCIE
19 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 579 (10.36%) Data Quality
2 268 (4.80%) QA
3 115 (2.06%) GDPR
4 100 (1.79%) NIST
5 98 (1.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.49%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.61%) SLA
8 28 (0.50%) WCAG
9 27 (0.48%) Actionable Recommendations
9 27 (0.48%) NCSC
10 26 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 25 (0.45%) PCI DSS
12 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
13 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
15 7 (0.13%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.13%) GRC
15 7 (0.13%) HL7
System Software
1 916 (16.40%) Docker
2 154 (2.76%) Active Directory
3 129 (2.31%) VMware Infrastructure
4 62 (1.11%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.82%) vSphere
6 42 (0.75%) Hyper-V
7 37 (0.66%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 21 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 13 (0.23%) Squid
11 13 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
12 10 (0.18%) Ceph
12 10 (0.18%) KVM
13 9 (0.16%) HDFS
14 7 (0.13%) Postfix
14 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
14 7 (0.13%) SRDF
14 7 (0.13%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,293 (23.14%) Terraform
2 1,089 (19.49%) Kubernetes
3 608 (10.88%) Ansible
4 341 (6.10%) Grafana
5 249 (4.46%) Prometheus
6 91 (1.63%) Puppet
7 71 (1.27%) Progress Chef
8 70 (1.25%) Argo
9 43 (0.77%) Istio
10 32 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
11 29 (0.52%) vCenter Server
12 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
13 27 (0.48%) vRealize
14 25 (0.45%) Kibana
15 24 (0.43%) Nagios
16 23 (0.41%) Control-M
17 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
18 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
19 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
19 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 684 (12.24%) Microsoft
2 552 (9.88%) Databricks
3 349 (6.25%) Google
4 245 (4.39%) Oracle
5 210 (3.76%) Splunk
6 171 (3.06%) VMware
7 141 (2.52%) OpenAI
8 136 (2.43%) Cisco
9 125 (2.24%) ServiceNow
10 103 (1.84%) Dynatrace
10 103 (1.84%) Red Hat
11 93 (1.66%) IBM
12 91 (1.63%) F5
13 84 (1.50%) Palo Alto
14 82 (1.47%) Informatica
15 68 (1.22%) Fortinet
16 67 (1.20%) Foundry
17 65 (1.16%) SAP
18 61 (1.09%) CyberArk
19 60 (1.07%) Salesforce