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

6 months to
5 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 14
Rank change year-on-year -3 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,600 4,268 3,941
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.53% 12.97% 10.05%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.70% 39.39% 32.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,658 2,873 2,847
10th Percentile £375 £360 £375
25th Percentile £431 £433 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £530 £575
Median % change year-on-year -0.94% -7.83% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £710
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £502
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.36% -4.41%
Number of hourly rates quoted 136 69 121
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.00 £20.50
25th Percentile £42.19 £33.91 £30.37
Median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -13.04% -10.68%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £66.25
% change year-on-year +10.00% -24.53% +15.22%

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 14,107 10,835 12,252
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.52% 32.93% 31.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,171 7,300 8,622
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £502 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.14% -4.43% -4.55%
75th Percentile £617 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £498
% change year-on-year +4.21% -4.52% -0.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 530 257 409
10th Percentile £30.00 £27.98 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.25 £46.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -11.54% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.05 £81.18 £77.50
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 5 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 5 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 5 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 4,765 £538 -2.27% 4,941
London -4 2,760 £573 -1.29% 3,008
UK excluding London -6 2,193 £500 +2.04% 2,448
Work from Home -9 1,547 £533 -3.18% 1,851
North of England +2 753 £500 +4.17% 588
South East -11 450 £538 +7.50% 678
Yorkshire +1 387 £500 +1.44% 172
Scotland +3 297 £430 -14.00% 181
North West +5 290 £525 +10.53% 312
South West -1 289 £503 -7.59% 322
Midlands -16 247 £477 +6.00% 270
West Midlands -10 197 £469 +4.22% 151
East of England -14 136 £500 -0.25% 311
North East +1 87 £425 -12.37% 108
East Midlands -6 49 £488 +14.82% 119
Wales -5 29 £500 +17.65% 65
Northern Ireland +7 19 £363 -32.56% 62

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
1 282 (5.04%) Apache Airflow
2 280 (5.00%) Apache Spark
3 215 (3.84%) Apache
4 181 (3.23%) Confluence
5 56 (1.00%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SAS
7 39 (0.70%) SharePoint
8 27 (0.48%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.38%) ArcGIS
10 20 (0.36%) nginx
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 12 (0.21%) IIS
12 9 (0.16%) Apache Superset
12 9 (0.16%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.13%) CICS
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
15 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 5 (0.089%) JBoss
16 5 (0.089%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 116 (2.07%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 19 (0.34%) MS Visio
4 19 (0.34%) Spreadsheet
5 17 (0.30%) CPLEX
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 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Remedy AR System
8 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Endur
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,094 (37.39%) AWS
2 1,901 (33.95%) Azure
3 850 (15.18%) GCP
4 692 (12.36%) GitHub
5 512 (9.14%) Power Platform
6 462 (8.25%) Serverless
7 420 (7.50%) Azure DevOps
8 402 (7.18%) Amazon S3
9 388 (6.93%) GitHub Actions
10 353 (6.30%) AWS Lambda
11 310 (5.54%) Snowflake
12 240 (4.29%) Azure Data Factory
13 226 (4.04%) dbt
14 192 (3.43%) AWS CloudFormation
15 179 (3.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 175 (3.13%) Amazon EKS
17 151 (2.70%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 143 (2.55%) OpenShift
19 133 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
20 131 (2.34%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 268 (4.79%) Firewall
2 200 (3.57%) DNS
3 137 (2.45%) TCP/IP
4 116 (2.07%) BGP
5 114 (2.04%) VPN
6 110 (1.96%) Network Security
7 105 (1.88%) WAN
8 76 (1.36%) DHCP
9 72 (1.29%) OSPF
10 58 (1.04%) VLAN
11 56 (1.00%) SD-WAN
12 53 (0.95%) HTTP
13 52 (0.93%) SAN
14 51 (0.91%) BIG-IP
14 51 (0.91%) SSL
15 50 (0.89%) VXLAN
16 44 (0.79%) SNMP
17 43 (0.77%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 39 (0.70%) Ethernet VPN
19 34 (0.61%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 467 (8.34%) Power BI
2 336 (6.00%) PostgreSQL
3 327 (5.84%) Data Warehouse
4 225 (4.02%) SQL Server
5 203 (3.63%) Relational Database
6 196 (3.50%) Data Lake
7 194 (3.46%) Tableau
8 189 (3.38%) Metadata
9 170 (3.04%) NoSQL
10 153 (2.73%) BigQuery
11 150 (2.68%) Big Data
12 136 (2.43%) Amazon Athena
13 134 (2.39%) MongoDB
14 133 (2.38%) Amazon Redshift
15 123 (2.20%) Delta Lake
16 110 (1.96%) Amazon RDS
16 110 (1.96%) DynamoDB
17 84 (1.50%) MySQL
18 73 (1.30%) Snowflake Schema
19 67 (1.20%) Redis
Development Applications
1 707 (12.63%) Git
2 502 (8.96%) Jenkins
3 416 (7.43%) GitLab
4 298 (5.32%) JIRA
5 85 (1.52%) Selenium
6 62 (1.11%) MLflow
7 48 (0.86%) Postman
8 47 (0.84%) Bitbucket
9 45 (0.80%) JMeter
10 43 (0.77%) SonarQube
11 36 (0.64%) Claude Code
12 33 (0.59%) Cypress.io
12 33 (0.59%) REST Assured
13 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
13 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
14 30 (0.54%) Gatling
15 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
16 28 (0.50%) Maven
17 25 (0.45%) JUnit
18 19 (0.34%) Zephyr
General
1 1,217 (21.73%) Social Skills
2 1,213 (21.66%) Finance
3 794 (14.18%) Analytical Skills
4 564 (10.07%) Public Sector
5 429 (7.66%) Banking
6 204 (3.64%) Front Office
7 128 (2.29%) Investment Banking
8 125 (2.23%) Documentation Skills
9 108 (1.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 105 (1.88%) Retail
11 87 (1.55%) Marketing
12 73 (1.30%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.05%) Pharmaceutical
14 58 (1.04%) Legal
15 55 (0.98%) Military
16 50 (0.89%) Financial Institution
17 48 (0.86%) Publishing
18 44 (0.79%) Aerospace
18 44 (0.79%) Manufacturing
19 40 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 958 (17.11%) Developer
2 899 (16.05%) Senior
3 849 (15.16%) Data Engineer
4 509 (9.09%) Python Developer
5 458 (8.18%) Lead
6 409 (7.30%) Python Engineer
7 324 (5.79%) Software Engineer
8 316 (5.64%) DevOps Engineer
9 287 (5.13%) Analyst
10 283 (5.05%) Architect
11 250 (4.46%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 247 (4.41%) AWS Engineer
13 212 (3.79%) Data Scientist
14 191 (3.41%) Cloud Engineer
15 184 (3.29%) Platform Engineer
16 180 (3.21%) Senior Developer
17 172 (3.07%) Azure Engineer
18 171 (3.05%) Senior Data Engineer
19 143 (2.55%) Data Analyst
20 141 (2.52%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 423 (7.55%) REST
2 374 (6.68%) PySpark
3 356 (6.36%) Kafka
4 354 (6.32%) React
5 226 (4.04%) .NET
6 207 (3.70%) FastAPI
6 207 (3.70%) Node.js
6 207 (3.70%) RESTful
7 199 (3.55%) JSON
8 188 (3.36%) Pandas
9 178 (3.18%) Django
10 146 (2.61%) PyTorch
11 138 (2.46%) LangChain
12 117 (2.09%) Flask
13 113 (2.02%) NumPy
14 107 (1.91%) scikit-learn
15 104 (1.86%) OAuth
16 102 (1.82%) Spring
16 102 (1.82%) TensorFlow
17 101 (1.80%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 759 (13.55%) Cloud Native
2 319 (5.70%) Distributed Systems
3 211 (3.77%) AI Agents
4 202 (3.61%) Onboarding
5 158 (2.82%) Data Centre
6 147 (2.63%) Product Ownership
7 145 (2.59%) Algorithms
8 142 (2.54%) Data Structures
9 128 (2.29%) Legacy Systems
10 119 (2.13%) Hybrid Cloud
11 114 (2.04%) Derivative
12 110 (1.96%) Data Protection Act
13 106 (1.89%) Management Information System
14 99 (1.77%) Fixed Income
15 92 (1.64%) Equities
16 83 (1.48%) Security Posture
17 68 (1.21%) Public Cloud
18 67 (1.20%) Enterprise Software
19 65 (1.16%) Linux Command Line
20 64 (1.14%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 699 (12.48%) Linux
2 326 (5.82%) Windows
3 226 (4.04%) Unix
4 135 (2.41%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 80 (1.43%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.73%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.54%) AIX
8 29 (0.52%) VMS
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 16 (0.29%) Solaris
11 13 (0.23%) Apple iOS
11 13 (0.23%) CentOS
12 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 11 (0.20%) zOS
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Debian
14 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Rocky
14 6 (0.11%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,138 (38.18%) CI/CD
2 1,581 (28.23%) DevOps
3 1,412 (25.21%) AI
4 1,260 (22.50%) Agile
5 1,150 (20.54%) Analytics
6 1,101 (19.66%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,022 (18.25%) Data Pipeline
8 912 (16.29%) Problem-Solving
9 889 (15.88%) Machine Learning
10 859 (15.34%) Software Engineering
11 805 (14.38%) Data Engineering
12 770 (13.75%) Data Modelling
13 761 (13.59%) Containerisation
14 673 (12.02%) ETL
15 662 (11.82%) Observability
16 610 (10.89%) Data Science
17 571 (10.20%) Test Automation
18 553 (9.88%) Business Intelligence
19 537 (9.59%) Continuous Improvement
20 523 (9.34%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,825 (32.59%) SQL
2 810 (14.46%) Java
3 728 (13.00%) Bash
4 707 (12.63%) PowerShell
5 452 (8.07%) JavaScript
6 385 (6.88%) TypeScript
7 299 (5.34%) C#
8 206 (3.68%) Go
9 152 (2.71%) R
10 142 (2.54%) C++
11 132 (2.36%) Shell Script
12 124 (2.21%) Scala
13 123 (2.20%) Bicep
14 78 (1.39%) Perl
15 58 (1.04%) C
15 58 (1.04%) Rust
16 56 (1.00%) Groovy
17 54 (0.96%) PL/SQL
17 54 (0.96%) Ruby
18 51 (0.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,284 (22.93%) Security Cleared
2 1,045 (18.66%) SC Cleared
3 435 (7.77%) Degree
4 196 (3.50%) DV Cleared
5 159 (2.84%) Computer Science Degree
6 137 (2.45%) AWS Certification
7 130 (2.32%) Azure Certification
8 128 (2.29%) BPSS Clearance
9 91 (1.63%) CISSP
10 87 (1.55%) Cisco Certification
11 72 (1.29%) Master's Degree
12 54 (0.96%) CCNP
13 45 (0.80%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Certification
15 38 (0.68%) PhD
16 33 (0.59%) CISM
17 32 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 30 (0.54%) ISTQB
19 27 (0.48%) CCIE
19 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 590 (10.54%) Data Quality
2 264 (4.71%) QA
3 113 (2.02%) GDPR
4 105 (1.88%) NIST
5 104 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 88 (1.57%) Accessibility
7 33 (0.59%) SLA
8 28 (0.50%) WCAG
9 26 (0.46%) NCSC
10 23 (0.41%) PCI DSS
10 23 (0.41%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 22 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
12 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
13 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
15 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
16 7 (0.13%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.13%) GRC
16 7 (0.13%) HL7
System Software
1 904 (16.14%) Docker
2 154 (2.75%) Active Directory
3 124 (2.21%) VMware Infrastructure
4 66 (1.18%) Virtual Machines
5 44 (0.79%) vSphere
6 41 (0.73%) Hyper-V
7 35 (0.63%) VMware NSX
8 31 (0.55%) Firmware
9 21 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 13 (0.23%) Squid
12 11 (0.20%) Ceph
12 11 (0.20%) KVM
13 10 (0.18%) SRDF
13 10 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
14 9 (0.16%) HDFS
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
16 6 (0.11%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,263 (22.55%) Terraform
2 1,068 (19.07%) Kubernetes
3 599 (10.70%) Ansible
4 342 (6.11%) Grafana
5 263 (4.70%) Prometheus
6 86 (1.54%) Puppet
7 71 (1.27%) Argo
8 64 (1.14%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Istio
10 31 (0.55%) vCenter Server
10 31 (0.55%) vRealize
11 27 (0.48%) Single Sign-On
11 27 (0.48%) ZABBIX
12 26 (0.46%) Kibana
13 24 (0.43%) Nagios
14 23 (0.41%) Control-M
15 20 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
16 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
17 18 (0.32%) Nessus
17 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 664 (11.86%) Microsoft
2 566 (10.11%) Databricks
3 339 (6.05%) Google
4 241 (4.30%) Oracle
5 208 (3.71%) Splunk
6 171 (3.05%) VMware
7 142 (2.54%) OpenAI
8 136 (2.43%) Cisco
9 121 (2.16%) ServiceNow
10 100 (1.79%) Red Hat
11 96 (1.71%) Dynatrace
12 89 (1.59%) F5
13 86 (1.54%) Palo Alto
14 83 (1.48%) Informatica
15 79 (1.41%) IBM
16 70 (1.25%) Fortinet
17 64 (1.14%) CyberArk
18 62 (1.11%) Foundry
19 61 (1.09%) Salesforce
19 61 (1.09%) SAP