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

6 months to
24 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,678 4,331 4,116
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.34% 13.14% 10.80%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.71% 39.86% 33.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,691 2,811 2,825
10th Percentile £375 £356 £375
25th Percentile £440 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.29% -8.70% -3.77%
75th Percentile £650 £649 £700
90th Percentile £750 £771 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £500 £507
% change year-on-year +1.00% -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 138 83 101
10th Percentile £29.90 £28.19 £21.25
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.13 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -20.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £78.56 £58.13 £71.88
90th Percentile £90.63 £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 14,300 10,866 12,199
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.05% 32.96% 32.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,286 7,175 8,156
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £505 £528
Median % change year-on-year +3.51% -4.27% -4.09%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 556 292 342
10th Percentile £26.25 £29.00 £26.33
25th Percentile £46.63 £40.00 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £78.75 £78.63
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 24 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 24 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 24 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 4,851 £550 +3.77% 10,051
London -4 2,859 £575 - 6,347
UK excluding London -7 2,181 £505 +1.00% 4,557
Work from Home -7 1,541 £530 -3.64% 3,667
North of England +2 752 £500 +5.04% 1,000
South East -6 459 £545 +9.00% 1,080
Yorkshire -2 385 £500 - 329
Scotland -4 298 £458 -8.50% 518
North West +3 289 £525 +11.94% 542
South West -1 285 £550 +4.76% 605
Midlands -20 227 £500 +3.31% 480
West Midlands -18 185 £505 +1.05% 295
East of England -12 152 £478 -9.05% 603
North East -4 88 £425 -5.56% 133
East Midlands -19 42 £469 +14.33% 185
Wales -7 27 £510 +19.30% 99
Northern Ireland +3 17 £363 -30.95% 210

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
1 297 (5.23%) Apache Airflow
2 275 (4.84%) Apache Spark
3 224 (3.95%) Apache
4 163 (2.87%) Confluence
5 60 (1.06%) Jupyter
6 57 (1.00%) SharePoint
7 37 (0.65%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 26 (0.46%) nginx
10 24 (0.42%) ArcGIS
11 22 (0.39%) IIS
11 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
12 8 (0.14%) CMS
12 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 7 (0.12%) WebSphere
14 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 5 (0.088%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.088%) Camunda
15 5 (0.088%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 109 (1.92%) Microsoft Excel
2 36 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 21 (0.37%) 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 21 (0.37%) 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 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.070%) 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 2,090 (36.81%) AWS
2 1,903 (33.52%) Azure
3 898 (15.82%) GCP
4 744 (13.10%) GitHub
5 498 (8.77%) Power Platform
6 486 (8.56%) Serverless
7 438 (7.71%) Azure DevOps
8 436 (7.68%) GitHub Actions
9 394 (6.94%) Amazon S3
10 359 (6.32%) AWS Lambda
11 343 (6.04%) Snowflake
12 245 (4.31%) dbt
13 209 (3.68%) Azure Data Factory
14 200 (3.52%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 188 (3.31%) AWS CloudFormation
16 182 (3.21%) Amazon EKS
17 172 (3.03%) Entra ID
18 142 (2.50%) Amazon EC2
19 127 (2.24%) SaaS
20 126 (2.22%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 288 (5.07%) Firewall
2 213 (3.75%) DNS
3 159 (2.80%) Network Security
4 153 (2.69%) TCP/IP
5 131 (2.31%) BGP
6 130 (2.29%) VPN
7 118 (2.08%) WAN
8 88 (1.55%) DHCP
9 78 (1.37%) OSPF
10 75 (1.32%) SD-WAN
11 63 (1.11%) BIG-IP
12 60 (1.06%) VLAN
13 58 (1.02%) SSL
14 57 (1.00%) VXLAN
15 53 (0.93%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 52 (0.92%) HTTP
17 48 (0.85%) Ethernet VPN
18 41 (0.72%) Wireless
19 39 (0.69%) Broadband
19 39 (0.69%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 444 (7.82%) Power BI
2 330 (5.81%) Data Warehouse
3 320 (5.64%) PostgreSQL
4 219 (3.86%) Metadata
5 207 (3.65%) Relational Database
6 200 (3.52%) SQL Server
7 192 (3.38%) Data Lake
8 180 (3.17%) BigQuery
9 178 (3.13%) Tableau
10 157 (2.77%) NoSQL
11 137 (2.41%) Big Data
12 132 (2.32%) Amazon Redshift
13 131 (2.31%) Amazon RDS
14 129 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
15 118 (2.08%) Delta Lake
16 116 (2.04%) MongoDB
17 110 (1.94%) DynamoDB
18 103 (1.81%) MySQL
19 73 (1.29%) Redis
20 63 (1.11%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 816 (14.37%) Git
2 510 (8.98%) Jenkins
3 479 (8.44%) GitLab
4 314 (5.53%) JIRA
5 120 (2.11%) Selenium
6 67 (1.18%) Postman
7 59 (1.04%) JMeter
8 56 (0.99%) Claude Code
8 56 (0.99%) SonarQube
9 48 (0.85%) MLflow
10 44 (0.77%) Bitbucket
11 35 (0.62%) Cucumber
12 34 (0.60%) Maven
12 34 (0.60%) REST Assured
12 34 (0.60%) Sonatype Nexus
13 33 (0.58%) Artifactory
13 33 (0.58%) Cypress.io
14 29 (0.51%) Gatling
14 29 (0.51%) LoadRunner
15 23 (0.41%) JUnit
General
1 1,331 (23.44%) Social Skills
2 1,280 (22.54%) Finance
3 855 (15.06%) Analytical Skills
4 547 (9.63%) Public Sector
5 515 (9.07%) Banking
6 174 (3.06%) Front Office
7 148 (2.61%) Investment Banking
8 113 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 113 (1.99%) Retail
9 104 (1.83%) Documentation Skills
10 92 (1.62%) Marketing
11 85 (1.50%) Telecoms
12 61 (1.07%) Military
13 53 (0.93%) Aerospace
13 53 (0.93%) Law
14 52 (0.92%) Pharmaceutical
15 45 (0.79%) Legal
15 45 (0.79%) Publishing
16 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
17 39 (0.69%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,009 (17.77%) Senior
2 898 (15.82%) Developer
3 832 (14.65%) Data Engineer
4 486 (8.56%) Lead
5 470 (8.28%) Python Developer
6 425 (7.49%) Python Engineer
7 357 (6.29%) DevOps Engineer
8 302 (5.32%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 292 (5.14%) Analyst
10 284 (5.00%) Software Engineer
11 258 (4.54%) Architect
12 229 (4.03%) AWS Engineer
13 194 (3.42%) Cloud Engineer
14 193 (3.40%) Senior Developer
15 190 (3.35%) Senior Data Engineer
16 189 (3.33%) Azure Engineer
16 189 (3.33%) Platform Engineer
17 185 (3.26%) Data Scientist
18 152 (2.68%) Network Engineer
19 142 (2.50%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,387 (24.43%) Terraform
2 531 (9.35%) REST
3 375 (6.60%) Kafka
4 368 (6.48%) PySpark
5 307 (5.41%) React
6 246 (4.33%) .NET
7 214 (3.77%) JSON
8 209 (3.68%) FastAPI
9 206 (3.63%) Django
10 192 (3.38%) RESTful
11 161 (2.84%) Node.js
12 159 (2.80%) pytest
13 157 (2.77%) Pandas
14 154 (2.71%) LangChain
15 129 (2.27%) OAuth
16 116 (2.04%) Flask
17 114 (2.01%) YAML
18 109 (1.92%) PyTorch
19 108 (1.90%) LangGraph
20 107 (1.88%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 797 (14.04%) Cloud Native
2 300 (5.28%) Distributed Systems
3 289 (5.09%) AI Agents
4 253 (4.46%) Onboarding
5 167 (2.94%) Data Centre
6 154 (2.71%) Product Ownership
7 145 (2.55%) Data Structures
8 134 (2.36%) Legacy Systems
9 127 (2.24%) Algorithms
10 110 (1.94%) Hybrid Cloud
11 109 (1.92%) Management Information System
12 107 (1.88%) Enterprise Software
13 104 (1.83%) Data Protection Act
14 99 (1.74%) Derivative
15 94 (1.66%) Security Posture
16 83 (1.46%) Public Cloud
17 81 (1.43%) Equities
18 73 (1.29%) PKI
19 70 (1.23%) Linux Command Line
19 70 (1.23%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 770 (13.56%) Linux
2 345 (6.08%) Windows
3 251 (4.42%) Unix
4 157 (2.77%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 93 (1.64%) Windows Server
6 46 (0.81%) Ubuntu
7 39 (0.69%) VMS
8 24 (0.42%) CentOS
9 19 (0.33%) Solaris
10 17 (0.30%) AIX
10 17 (0.30%) Android
11 11 (0.19%) Apple iOS
12 9 (0.16%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.16%) zOS
13 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
13 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
15 4 (0.070%) Debian
15 4 (0.070%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,357 (41.51%) CI/CD
2 1,627 (28.65%) DevOps
3 1,569 (27.63%) AI
4 1,301 (22.91%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,281 (22.56%) Agile
6 1,098 (19.34%) Analytics
7 990 (17.44%) Data Pipeline
8 941 (16.57%) Software Engineering
9 901 (15.87%) Problem-Solving
10 848 (14.93%) Machine Learning
11 834 (14.69%) Data Engineering
12 789 (13.90%) Containerisation
13 762 (13.42%) Observability
14 755 (13.30%) Data Modelling
15 688 (12.12%) Test Automation
16 670 (11.80%) Validation
17 669 (11.78%) ETL
18 654 (11.52%) Continuous Improvement
19 578 (10.18%) Platform Engineering
20 576 (10.14%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,855 (32.67%) SQL
2 811 (14.28%) Java
3 772 (13.60%) Bash
4 756 (13.31%) PowerShell
5 451 (7.94%) JavaScript
6 345 (6.08%) TypeScript
7 311 (5.48%) C#
8 223 (3.93%) Go
9 151 (2.66%) Shell Script
10 144 (2.54%) R
11 133 (2.34%) C++
12 131 (2.31%) Bicep
13 126 (2.22%) Scala
14 105 (1.85%) Perl
15 61 (1.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 60 (1.06%) Groovy
17 56 (0.99%) C
18 51 (0.90%) Rust
19 50 (0.88%) PL/SQL
20 47 (0.83%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,378 (24.27%) Security Cleared
2 1,115 (19.64%) SC Cleared
3 414 (7.29%) Degree
4 246 (4.33%) DV Cleared
5 157 (2.77%) Azure Certification
6 152 (2.68%) Computer Science Degree
7 143 (2.52%) AWS Certification
8 128 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
9 96 (1.69%) 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%) CCIE
17 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 30 (0.53%) CISM
17 30 (0.53%) ISTQB
18 29 (0.51%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 642 (11.31%) Data Quality
2 327 (5.76%) QA
3 116 (2.04%) NIST
4 103 (1.81%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 92 (1.62%) GDPR
6 83 (1.46%) Accessibility
7 42 (0.74%) SLA
8 36 (0.63%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.51%) NCSC
10 27 (0.48%) PCI DSS
11 22 (0.39%) SOC 2
11 22 (0.39%) WCAG
12 19 (0.33%) 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%) GRC
16 7 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 967 (17.03%) Docker
2 176 (3.10%) Active Directory
3 138 (2.43%) VMware Infrastructure
4 72 (1.27%) Virtual Machines
5 51 (0.90%) Hyper-V
6 37 (0.65%) vSphere
7 35 (0.62%) VMware NSX
8 28 (0.49%) VMware ESXi
9 27 (0.48%) 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 1,163 (20.48%) Kubernetes
2 645 (11.36%) Ansible
3 331 (5.83%) Grafana
4 241 (4.24%) Prometheus
5 78 (1.37%) Puppet
6 70 (1.23%) 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 23 (0.41%) FortiGate
14 21 (0.37%) Packer
15 19 (0.33%) vCenter Server
15 19 (0.33%) ZABBIX
16 18 (0.32%) vRealize
17 17 (0.30%) Nagios
18 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
18 16 (0.28%) QRadar
Vendors
1 747 (13.16%) Microsoft
2 580 (10.21%) Databricks
3 395 (6.96%) Google
4 241 (4.24%) Oracle
5 207 (3.65%) Splunk
6 176 (3.10%) VMware
7 162 (2.85%) OpenAI
8 149 (2.62%) Cisco
9 136 (2.40%) ServiceNow
10 101 (1.78%) Dynatrace
11 97 (1.71%) Red Hat
12 96 (1.69%) IBM
13 92 (1.62%) F5
14 91 (1.60%) Palo Alto
15 83 (1.46%) Foundry
16 74 (1.30%) Fortinet
17 70 (1.23%) Informatica
17 70 (1.23%) SAP
18 69 (1.22%) CyberArk
19 58 (1.02%) Salesforce