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

6 months to
6 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 14
Rank change year-on-year -4 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,596 4,265 3,942
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.50% 12.96% 10.08%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.64% 39.27% 32.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,646 2,862 2,847
10th Percentile £375 £359 £375
25th Percentile £434 £433 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £526 £530 £575
Median % change year-on-year -0.85% -7.83% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £491 £505
% change year-on-year +1.83% -2.77% -3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 137 69 122
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.00 £20.58
25th Percentile £42.50 £33.91 £30.43
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 £75.74 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £50.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +10.00% -23.08% +13.04%

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 14,117 10,862 12,229
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.48% 33.00% 31.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,165 7,304 8,594
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £501 £530
Median % change year-on-year +2.35% -5.52% -3.64%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £497
% change year-on-year +4.21% -4.50% -0.53%
Number of hourly rates quoted 532 260 409
10th Percentile £30.05 £27.99 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £35.75 £46.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.13 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.79% -12.12% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.45 £83.11 £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 6 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 6 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 6 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 £540 -1.86% 4,855
London -4 2,760 £574 -0.11% 2,992
UK excluding London -5 2,193 £500 +1.83% 2,353
Work from Home -8 1,544 £530 -3.64% 1,754
North of England +2 757 £500 +4.17% 574
South East -10 448 £538 +7.50% 652
Yorkshire +1 385 £500 +1.42% 170
Scotland +3 297 £430 -14.00% 180
South West -3 292 £505 -8.18% 310
North West +2 291 £525 +10.53% 305
Midlands -15 244 £473 +5.00% 251
West Midlands -11 194 £469 +4.22% 140
East of England -15 136 £500 - 294
North East -2 92 £425 -12.37% 103
East Midlands -7 49 £488 +15.50% 111
Wales -5 27 £530 +24.71% 59
Northern Ireland +6 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
1 281 (5.02%) Apache Airflow
2 278 (4.97%) Apache Spark
3 210 (3.75%) Apache
4 182 (3.25%) Confluence
5 57 (1.02%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SAS
7 39 (0.70%) SharePoint
8 28 (0.50%) 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
14 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
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 2,091 (37.37%) AWS
2 1,903 (34.01%) Azure
3 853 (15.24%) GCP
4 699 (12.49%) GitHub
5 506 (9.04%) Power Platform
6 460 (8.22%) Serverless
7 422 (7.54%) Azure DevOps
8 401 (7.17%) Amazon S3
9 391 (6.99%) GitHub Actions
10 353 (6.31%) AWS Lambda
11 305 (5.45%) Snowflake
12 237 (4.24%) Azure Data Factory
13 224 (4.00%) dbt
14 191 (3.41%) AWS CloudFormation
15 183 (3.27%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 175 (3.13%) Amazon EKS
17 147 (2.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 143 (2.56%) OpenShift
19 133 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
20 128 (2.29%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 272 (4.86%) Firewall
2 206 (3.68%) DNS
3 140 (2.50%) TCP/IP
4 117 (2.09%) BGP
5 115 (2.06%) VPN
6 111 (1.98%) Network Security
7 105 (1.88%) WAN
8 79 (1.41%) DHCP
9 72 (1.29%) OSPF
10 58 (1.04%) VLAN
11 56 (1.00%) SD-WAN
12 55 (0.98%) HTTP
13 54 (0.96%) SSL
14 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
14 52 (0.93%) SAN
15 51 (0.91%) VXLAN
16 44 (0.79%) SNMP
17 43 (0.77%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 40 (0.71%) Ethernet VPN
19 35 (0.63%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 461 (8.24%) Power BI
2 332 (5.93%) PostgreSQL
3 323 (5.77%) Data Warehouse
4 223 (3.98%) SQL Server
5 202 (3.61%) Relational Database
6 196 (3.50%) Data Lake
7 192 (3.43%) Tableau
8 190 (3.40%) Metadata
9 169 (3.02%) NoSQL
10 151 (2.70%) BigQuery
11 149 (2.66%) Big Data
12 136 (2.43%) Amazon Athena
13 133 (2.38%) Amazon Redshift
13 133 (2.38%) MongoDB
14 123 (2.20%) Delta Lake
15 112 (2.00%) Amazon RDS
16 111 (1.98%) DynamoDB
17 84 (1.50%) MySQL
18 70 (1.25%) Snowflake Schema
19 66 (1.18%) Redis
Development Applications
1 706 (12.62%) Git
2 503 (8.99%) Jenkins
3 426 (7.61%) GitLab
4 299 (5.34%) JIRA
5 85 (1.52%) Selenium
6 63 (1.13%) MLflow
7 49 (0.88%) Postman
8 48 (0.86%) Bitbucket
9 45 (0.80%) JMeter
10 44 (0.79%) SonarQube
11 36 (0.64%) Claude Code
12 34 (0.61%) Cypress.io
13 33 (0.59%) REST Assured
14 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
14 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
15 30 (0.54%) Gatling
15 30 (0.54%) Sonatype Nexus
16 28 (0.50%) Maven
17 25 (0.45%) JUnit
18 19 (0.34%) Zephyr
General
1 1,211 (21.64%) Finance
1 1,211 (21.64%) Social Skills
2 793 (14.17%) Analytical Skills
3 567 (10.13%) Public Sector
4 430 (7.68%) Banking
5 204 (3.65%) Front Office
6 127 (2.27%) Investment Banking
7 124 (2.22%) Documentation Skills
8 109 (1.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 106 (1.89%) Retail
10 87 (1.55%) Marketing
11 74 (1.32%) Telecoms
12 59 (1.05%) Legal
12 59 (1.05%) Pharmaceutical
13 55 (0.98%) Military
14 50 (0.89%) Financial Institution
15 48 (0.86%) Publishing
16 45 (0.80%) Aerospace
16 45 (0.80%) Manufacturing
17 41 (0.73%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 960 (17.16%) Developer
2 893 (15.96%) Senior
3 834 (14.90%) Data Engineer
4 510 (9.11%) Python Developer
5 452 (8.08%) Lead
6 404 (7.22%) Python Engineer
7 324 (5.79%) Software Engineer
8 320 (5.72%) DevOps Engineer
9 285 (5.09%) Analyst
9 285 (5.09%) Architect
10 254 (4.54%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 246 (4.40%) AWS Engineer
12 209 (3.73%) Data Scientist
13 192 (3.43%) Cloud Engineer
14 185 (3.31%) Platform Engineer
15 179 (3.20%) Senior Developer
16 174 (3.11%) Azure Engineer
17 167 (2.98%) Senior Data Engineer
18 141 (2.52%) Data Analyst
18 141 (2.52%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 424 (7.58%) REST
2 370 (6.61%) PySpark
3 352 (6.29%) React
4 346 (6.18%) Kafka
5 227 (4.06%) .NET
6 208 (3.72%) Node.js
7 207 (3.70%) FastAPI
8 204 (3.65%) RESTful
9 197 (3.52%) JSON
10 186 (3.32%) Pandas
11 178 (3.18%) Django
12 147 (2.63%) PyTorch
13 140 (2.50%) LangChain
14 117 (2.09%) Flask
15 112 (2.00%) NumPy
16 107 (1.91%) scikit-learn
17 104 (1.86%) OAuth
18 103 (1.84%) pytest
19 102 (1.82%) TensorFlow
20 99 (1.77%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 755 (13.49%) Cloud Native
2 317 (5.66%) Distributed Systems
3 213 (3.81%) AI Agents
4 204 (3.65%) Onboarding
5 159 (2.84%) Data Centre
6 149 (2.66%) Product Ownership
7 143 (2.56%) Data Structures
8 142 (2.54%) Algorithms
9 127 (2.27%) Legacy Systems
10 118 (2.11%) Hybrid Cloud
11 116 (2.07%) Derivative
12 110 (1.97%) Data Protection Act
13 105 (1.88%) Management Information System
14 99 (1.77%) Fixed Income
15 93 (1.66%) Equities
16 82 (1.47%) Security Posture
17 68 (1.22%) Enterprise Software
17 68 (1.22%) Public Cloud
18 65 (1.16%) Linux Command Line
19 64 (1.14%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 708 (12.65%) Linux
2 329 (5.88%) Windows
3 230 (4.11%) Unix
4 136 (2.43%) 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 14 (0.25%) CentOS
12 13 (0.23%) Apple iOS
13 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
13 11 (0.20%) zOS
14 7 (0.13%) 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
15 6 (0.11%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,147 (38.37%) CI/CD
2 1,588 (28.38%) DevOps
3 1,414 (25.27%) AI
4 1,265 (22.61%) Agile
5 1,134 (20.26%) Analytics
6 1,111 (19.85%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,013 (18.10%) Data Pipeline
8 908 (16.23%) Problem-Solving
9 890 (15.90%) Machine Learning
10 866 (15.48%) Software Engineering
11 799 (14.28%) Data Engineering
12 766 (13.69%) Containerisation
13 764 (13.65%) Data Modelling
14 669 (11.95%) ETL
15 661 (11.81%) Observability
16 607 (10.85%) Data Science
17 578 (10.33%) Test Automation
18 542 (9.69%) Business Intelligence
19 539 (9.63%) Continuous Improvement
20 518 (9.26%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,808 (32.31%) SQL
2 804 (14.37%) Java
3 736 (13.15%) Bash
4 713 (12.74%) PowerShell
5 454 (8.11%) JavaScript
6 385 (6.88%) TypeScript
7 301 (5.38%) C#
8 207 (3.70%) Go
9 150 (2.68%) R
10 143 (2.56%) C++
11 134 (2.39%) Shell Script
12 125 (2.23%) Scala
13 122 (2.18%) Bicep
14 81 (1.45%) Perl
15 58 (1.04%) C
16 57 (1.02%) Groovy
16 57 (1.02%) Rust
17 54 (0.96%) PL/SQL
18 53 (0.95%) Ruby
19 47 (0.84%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,292 (23.09%) Security Cleared
2 1,048 (18.73%) SC Cleared
3 430 (7.68%) Degree
4 197 (3.52%) DV Cleared
5 159 (2.84%) Computer Science Degree
6 137 (2.45%) AWS Certification
7 135 (2.41%) Azure Certification
8 128 (2.29%) BPSS Clearance
9 90 (1.61%) CISSP
10 88 (1.57%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.27%) 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 32 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 32 (0.57%) CISM
17 30 (0.54%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.50%) CCIE
19 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 585 (10.45%) Data Quality
2 265 (4.74%) QA
3 114 (2.04%) GDPR
4 105 (1.88%) NIST
5 104 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 88 (1.57%) Accessibility
7 32 (0.57%) SLA
8 28 (0.50%) WCAG
9 26 (0.46%) NCSC
10 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 23 (0.41%) PCI DSS
12 21 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
13 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
17 7 (0.13%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.13%) GRC
17 7 (0.13%) HL7
System Software
1 907 (16.21%) Docker
2 156 (2.79%) Active Directory
3 127 (2.27%) VMware Infrastructure
4 66 (1.18%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.80%) vSphere
6 43 (0.77%) 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 1,268 (22.66%) Terraform
2 1,075 (19.21%) Kubernetes
3 607 (10.85%) Ansible
4 344 (6.15%) Grafana
5 264 (4.72%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.55%) Puppet
7 71 (1.27%) Argo
8 66 (1.18%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Istio
10 31 (0.55%) vCenter Server
10 31 (0.55%) vRealize
11 30 (0.54%) Single Sign-On
12 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
13 26 (0.46%) Kibana
14 24 (0.43%) Nagios
15 23 (0.41%) Control-M
16 20 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
17 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
18 18 (0.32%) Nessus
18 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 663 (11.85%) Microsoft
2 557 (9.95%) Databricks
3 340 (6.08%) Google
4 242 (4.32%) Oracle
5 209 (3.73%) Splunk
6 174 (3.11%) VMware
7 143 (2.56%) OpenAI
8 137 (2.45%) Cisco
9 122 (2.18%) ServiceNow
10 100 (1.79%) Red Hat
11 97 (1.73%) Dynatrace
12 91 (1.63%) F5
13 86 (1.54%) Palo Alto
14 83 (1.48%) Informatica
15 79 (1.41%) IBM
16 70 (1.25%) Fortinet
17 65 (1.16%) CyberArk
18 63 (1.13%) Foundry
19 62 (1.11%) SAP
20 61 (1.09%) Salesforce