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 4 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 11 15
Rank change year-on-year -1 +4 -3
Contract jobs citing Python 5,586 4,147 4,127
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.82% 13.15% 9.50%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.24% 39.03% 31.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,668 2,816 2,966
10th Percentile £363 £367 £375
25th Percentile £425 £441 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £552
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -2.54% -8.08%
75th Percentile £625 £656 £700
90th Percentile £738 £800 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £506
% change year-on-year - -1.19% -4.53%
Number of hourly rates quoted 120 64 124
10th Percentile £28.45 £25.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £43.17 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £54.25 £45.00 £62.25
Median % change year-on-year +20.56% -27.71% -4.23%
75th Percentile £70.75 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £63.03 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +5.00% -25.93% +11.34%

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 13,883 10,624 13,270
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.90% 33.68% 30.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,009 7,164 9,321
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £511 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.29% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 539 254 537
10th Percentile £34.01 £26.52 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.55 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.15 £79.61 £75.00
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 4 July 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 4 July 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 4 July 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 -2 4,667 £525 -4.55% 3,241
London -3 2,681 £550 -4.35% 1,708
UK excluding London -2 2,197 £500 - 1,947
Work from Home -2 1,580 £525 -4.55% 1,326
North of England +7 782 £488 +2.63% 448
South East -7 441 £525 +3.96% 641
Yorkshire +2 427 £500 +1.46% 133
Scotland +3 313 £438 -7.89% 103
North West +5 279 £500 +5.26% 241
South West -4 265 £500 -9.09% 274
Midlands -15 244 £477 +3.92% 208
West Midlands -16 196 £475 - 104
East of England -13 130 £500 -0.25% 220
North East +8 88 £425 -2.86% 78
East Midlands -11 47 £495 +10.74% 104
Wales -11 31 £483 +6.04% 41
Northern Ireland +12 28 £369 -37.23% 41

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 (5.05%) Apache Spark
2 259 (4.64%) Apache Airflow
3 197 (3.53%) Apache
4 181 (3.24%) Confluence
5 54 (0.97%) Jupyter
6 51 (0.91%) SAS
7 50 (0.90%) SharePoint
8 25 (0.45%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) nginx
10 20 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.32%) ArcGIS
12 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Exchange
13 12 (0.21%) IIS
14 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
15 8 (0.14%) Apache Superset
15 8 (0.14%) CMS
16 7 (0.13%) CICS
17 6 (0.11%) Appian
17 6 (0.11%) Camunda
17 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 118 (2.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (0.55%) Chatbot
3 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
4 25 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 23 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 20 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
7 14 (0.25%) CPLEX
8 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.018%) LaTeX
9 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
9 1 (0.018%) SPSS
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
9 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 21 (0.38%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.20%) Remedy ITSM
5 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
6 6 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
6 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 5 (0.090%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.090%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.054%) Bloomberg AIM
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Teamcenter
10 2 (0.036%) IntelliMatch
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Orchestrade
10 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.036%) Remedy AR System
Cloud Services
1 2,076 (37.16%) AWS
2 1,866 (33.40%) Azure
3 828 (14.82%) GCP
4 671 (12.01%) GitHub
5 522 (9.34%) Power Platform
6 478 (8.56%) Serverless
7 418 (7.48%) Amazon S3
8 395 (7.07%) Azure DevOps
9 367 (6.57%) GitHub Actions
10 356 (6.37%) AWS Lambda
11 282 (5.05%) Snowflake
12 236 (4.22%) Azure Data Factory
13 206 (3.69%) dbt
14 182 (3.26%) AWS CloudFormation
15 172 (3.08%) Amazon EKS
16 168 (3.01%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 158 (2.83%) OpenShift
18 153 (2.74%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 132 (2.36%) Amazon EC2
20 125 (2.24%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 241 (4.31%) Firewall
2 165 (2.95%) DNS
3 121 (2.17%) Network Security
4 119 (2.13%) BGP
5 117 (2.09%) WAN
6 106 (1.90%) TCP/IP
7 101 (1.81%) VPN
8 75 (1.34%) OSPF
9 58 (1.04%) BIG-IP
10 57 (1.02%) SD-WAN
11 55 (0.98%) SAN
12 54 (0.97%) HTTP
13 50 (0.90%) VLAN
13 50 (0.90%) VXLAN
14 49 (0.88%) DHCP
15 47 (0.84%) SSL
16 44 (0.79%) LAN
17 41 (0.73%) MPLS
18 40 (0.72%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
19 39 (0.70%) Ethernet VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 462 (8.27%) Power BI
2 356 (6.37%) PostgreSQL
3 311 (5.57%) Data Warehouse
4 250 (4.48%) SQL Server
5 208 (3.72%) Data Lake
6 202 (3.62%) Tableau
7 192 (3.44%) Relational Database
8 168 (3.01%) Metadata
9 166 (2.97%) NoSQL
10 159 (2.85%) Big Data
11 143 (2.56%) BigQuery
12 140 (2.51%) Amazon Redshift
13 139 (2.49%) Amazon Athena
14 132 (2.36%) Delta Lake
15 126 (2.26%) MongoDB
16 104 (1.86%) DynamoDB
17 100 (1.79%) Amazon RDS
18 91 (1.63%) MySQL
19 76 (1.36%) Snowflake Schema
20 74 (1.32%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 680 (12.17%) Git
2 504 (9.02%) Jenkins
3 400 (7.16%) GitLab
4 319 (5.71%) JIRA
5 81 (1.45%) Selenium
6 75 (1.34%) MLflow
7 60 (1.07%) Postman
8 41 (0.73%) JMeter
9 38 (0.68%) Bitbucket
10 36 (0.64%) Cypress.io
11 33 (0.59%) SonarQube
12 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
12 32 (0.57%) Cucumber
13 29 (0.52%) REST Assured
14 28 (0.50%) Maven
14 28 (0.50%) Sonatype Nexus
15 27 (0.48%) JUnit
16 26 (0.47%) Gatling
17 25 (0.45%) Claude Code
18 19 (0.34%) Robot Framework
General
1 1,212 (21.70%) Social Skills
2 1,169 (20.93%) Finance
3 750 (13.43%) Analytical Skills
4 531 (9.51%) Public Sector
5 424 (7.59%) Banking
6 199 (3.56%) Front Office
7 133 (2.38%) Documentation Skills
8 130 (2.33%) Investment Banking
9 108 (1.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 87 (1.56%) Retail
11 81 (1.45%) Marketing
12 61 (1.09%) Pharmaceutical
13 60 (1.07%) Legal
13 60 (1.07%) Telecoms
14 49 (0.88%) Financial Institution
15 46 (0.82%) Publishing
16 44 (0.79%) Influencing Skills
17 43 (0.77%) Military
18 35 (0.63%) Manufacturing
19 32 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 992 (17.76%) Developer
2 861 (15.41%) Data Engineer
3 844 (15.11%) Senior
4 526 (9.42%) Python Developer
5 397 (7.11%) Lead
6 372 (6.66%) Python Engineer
7 312 (5.59%) DevOps Engineer
8 310 (5.55%) Architect
9 292 (5.23%) Software Engineer
10 279 (4.99%) Analyst
11 251 (4.49%) AWS Engineer
12 241 (4.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 221 (3.96%) Data Scientist
14 176 (3.15%) Platform Engineer
15 173 (3.10%) Senior Data Engineer
16 171 (3.06%) Azure Engineer
17 168 (3.01%) Senior Developer
18 167 (2.99%) Cloud Engineer
19 140 (2.51%) Data Analyst
20 139 (2.49%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 409 (7.32%) REST
2 375 (6.71%) PySpark
3 367 (6.57%) React
4 340 (6.09%) Kafka
5 246 (4.40%) .NET
6 217 (3.88%) Node.js
7 211 (3.78%) RESTful
8 209 (3.74%) FastAPI
9 201 (3.60%) Pandas
10 190 (3.40%) JSON
11 166 (2.97%) Django
12 160 (2.86%) PyTorch
13 134 (2.40%) LangChain
14 124 (2.22%) NumPy
15 118 (2.11%) Flask
16 115 (2.06%) scikit-learn
17 110 (1.97%) OAuth
18 109 (1.95%) TensorFlow
19 102 (1.83%) pytest
20 99 (1.77%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 726 (13.00%) Cloud Native
2 296 (5.30%) Distributed Systems
3 170 (3.04%) Onboarding
4 164 (2.94%) AI Agents
5 151 (2.70%) Data Centre
6 148 (2.65%) Algorithms
7 146 (2.61%) Product Ownership
8 126 (2.26%) Data Structures
9 123 (2.20%) Legacy Systems
10 117 (2.09%) Data Protection Act
11 115 (2.06%) Management Information System
12 108 (1.93%) Derivative
13 107 (1.92%) Hybrid Cloud
14 98 (1.75%) Fixed Income
15 96 (1.72%) Equities
16 80 (1.43%) Security Posture
17 74 (1.32%) Public Cloud
18 62 (1.11%) Self-Motivation
19 61 (1.09%) Enterprise Software
20 58 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 659 (11.80%) Linux
2 310 (5.55%) Windows
3 223 (3.99%) Unix
4 121 (2.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 77 (1.38%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.72%) Ubuntu
7 32 (0.57%) VMS
8 26 (0.47%) AIX
9 23 (0.41%) Android
10 19 (0.34%) Solaris
11 17 (0.30%) Apple iOS
12 14 (0.25%) CentOS
12 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
13 12 (0.21%) zOS
14 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.13%) Debian
15 7 (0.13%) Rocky
16 5 (0.090%) Amazon Linux
16 5 (0.090%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.090%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,121 (37.97%) CI/CD
2 1,534 (27.46%) DevOps
3 1,363 (24.40%) AI
4 1,237 (22.14%) Agile
5 1,123 (20.10%) Analytics
6 1,029 (18.42%) Infrastructure as Code
7 989 (17.70%) Data Pipeline
8 918 (16.43%) Problem-Solving
9 877 (15.70%) Machine Learning
10 790 (14.14%) Data Engineering
11 758 (13.57%) Containerisation
12 749 (13.41%) Software Engineering
13 731 (13.09%) Data Modelling
14 691 (12.37%) ETL
15 624 (11.17%) Observability
16 622 (11.13%) Data Science
17 576 (10.31%) Test Automation
18 543 (9.72%) Business Intelligence
19 519 (9.29%) LLM
20 480 (8.59%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,808 (32.37%) SQL
2 799 (14.30%) Java
3 662 (11.85%) Bash
4 652 (11.67%) PowerShell
5 462 (8.27%) JavaScript
6 398 (7.12%) TypeScript
7 337 (6.03%) C#
8 216 (3.87%) Go
9 163 (2.92%) R
10 138 (2.47%) C++
11 130 (2.33%) Scala
12 118 (2.11%) Shell Script
13 89 (1.59%) Bicep
14 72 (1.29%) Perl
15 57 (1.02%) Ruby
16 56 (1.00%) PL/SQL
17 55 (0.98%) Groovy
18 54 (0.97%) C
19 50 (0.90%) Rust
19 50 (0.90%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,247 (22.32%) Security Cleared
2 1,002 (17.94%) SC Cleared
3 423 (7.57%) Degree
4 173 (3.10%) DV Cleared
5 157 (2.81%) Computer Science Degree
6 135 (2.42%) BPSS Clearance
7 119 (2.13%) AWS Certification
8 114 (2.04%) Azure Certification
9 96 (1.72%) CISSP
10 86 (1.54%) Cisco Certification
11 77 (1.38%) Master's Degree
12 57 (1.02%) CCNP
13 50 (0.90%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 38 (0.68%) CISM
15 34 (0.61%) PhD
16 33 (0.59%) Microsoft Certification
17 32 (0.57%) ISTQB
18 31 (0.55%) CCIE
19 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
20 21 (0.38%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 545 (9.76%) Data Quality
2 239 (4.28%) QA
3 129 (2.31%) GDPR
4 114 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 113 (2.02%) NIST
6 86 (1.54%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.61%) SLA
8 25 (0.45%) PCI DSS
8 25 (0.45%) WCAG
9 24 (0.43%) HIPAA
10 21 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 18 (0.32%) Actionable Recommendations
11 18 (0.32%) NCSC
12 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
13 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
14 10 (0.18%) GRC
14 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 870 (15.57%) Docker
2 121 (2.17%) Active Directory
3 109 (1.95%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.70%) vSphere
6 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
7 29 (0.52%) Firmware
7 29 (0.52%) Hyper-V
8 24 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
9 19 (0.34%) NFS
10 15 (0.27%) KVM
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 10 (0.18%) SRDF
14 9 (0.16%) Ceph
15 8 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.13%) HDFS
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
17 5 (0.090%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
18 4 (0.072%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,204 (21.55%) Terraform
2 1,030 (18.44%) Kubernetes
3 583 (10.44%) Ansible
4 347 (6.21%) Grafana
5 275 (4.92%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.32%) Puppet
7 65 (1.16%) Argo
8 44 (0.79%) Istio
9 43 (0.77%) Progress Chef
10 42 (0.75%) vRealize
11 36 (0.64%) vCenter Server
12 32 (0.57%) Kibana
13 27 (0.48%) Control-M
14 26 (0.47%) Nagios
14 26 (0.47%) Nessus
14 26 (0.47%) ZABBIX
15 25 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
16 22 (0.39%) Single Sign-On
17 21 (0.38%) HAProxy
18 20 (0.36%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 636 (11.39%) Microsoft
2 576 (10.31%) Databricks
3 322 (5.76%) Google
4 254 (4.55%) Oracle
5 215 (3.85%) Splunk
6 166 (2.97%) VMware
7 142 (2.54%) OpenAI
8 139 (2.49%) Cisco
9 115 (2.06%) ServiceNow
10 106 (1.90%) Red Hat
11 90 (1.61%) F5
12 89 (1.59%) Palo Alto
13 85 (1.52%) Dynatrace
14 82 (1.47%) Informatica
15 80 (1.43%) IBM
16 65 (1.16%) Fortinet
17 62 (1.11%) CyberArk
18 59 (1.06%) Foundry
19 54 (0.97%) Arista
19 54 (0.97%) Salesforce