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

6 months to
14 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,583 4,265 3,961
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.46% 12.96% 10.18%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.62% 39.51% 32.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,650 2,833 2,848
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £437 £428 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.95% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £788 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £493 £509
% change year-on-year +1.44% -3.12% -3.10%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 73 122
10th Percentile £29.85 £26.69 £20.58
25th Percentile £42.83 £34.75 £30.63
Median hourly rate £56.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.00% -13.04% -10.68%
75th Percentile £77.50 £59.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £84.59 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £57.50 £52.50 £66.01
% change year-on-year +9.52% -20.47% +14.80%

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 14,093 10,795 12,196
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.40% 32.80% 31.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,163 7,218 8,538
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £505 £530
Median % change year-on-year +1.98% -4.76% -3.59%
75th Percentile £618 £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 523 277 406
10th Percentile £30.10 £28.22 £27.00
25th Percentile £51.25 £36.00 £46.05
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.04% -13.08% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.95 £83.58 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.96% -1.92% +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 14 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 14 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 14 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 4,781 £544 +1.16% 7,578
London -4 2,767 £575 - 5,125
UK excluding London -6 2,190 £500 +1.44% 3,195
Work from Home -9 1,517 £530 -3.73% 2,729
North of England +2 756 £500 +2.30% 734
South East -9 455 £537 +7.40% 832
Yorkshire +1 388 £500 - 195
South West -3 296 £505 -3.81% 395
North West +2 285 £525 +10.53% 409
Scotland 0 276 £450 -10.00% 331
Midlands -17 245 £473 +5.00% 291
West Midlands -13 196 £469 +1.41% 167
East of England -9 141 £500 -0.50% 437
North East -2 94 £425 -18.27% 135
East Midlands -14 48 £495 +16.47% 124
Wales -7 28 £530 +30.86% 85
Northern Ireland +7 19 £363 -32.56% 113

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
1 290 (5.19%) Apache Airflow
2 283 (5.07%) Apache Spark
3 220 (3.94%) Apache
4 173 (3.10%) Confluence
5 57 (1.02%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SAS
7 48 (0.86%) SharePoint
8 27 (0.48%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 19 (0.34%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.32%) nginx
12 13 (0.23%) IIS
13 8 (0.14%) CMS
13 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
14 7 (0.13%) Apache Superset
14 7 (0.13%) CICS
14 7 (0.13%) WebSphere
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
15 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 5 (0.090%) JBoss
Applications
1 107 (1.92%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 21 (0.38%) Microsoft Office
3 21 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 19 (0.34%) 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 22 (0.39%) 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 (0.090%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.090%) Sage X3
7 5 (0.090%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.072%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Endur
9 3 (0.054%) Front Arena
9 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
9 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.036%) Odoo
10 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
10 2 (0.036%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,093 (37.49%) AWS
2 1,906 (34.14%) Azure
3 856 (15.33%) GCP
4 701 (12.56%) GitHub
5 499 (8.94%) Power Platform
6 456 (8.17%) Serverless
7 434 (7.77%) Azure DevOps
8 401 (7.18%) GitHub Actions
9 392 (7.02%) Amazon S3
10 349 (6.25%) AWS Lambda
11 316 (5.66%) Snowflake
12 235 (4.21%) Azure Data Factory
13 222 (3.98%) dbt
14 188 (3.37%) AWS CloudFormation
15 182 (3.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 177 (3.17%) Amazon EKS
17 141 (2.53%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 134 (2.40%) Amazon EC2
19 133 (2.38%) Entra ID
20 132 (2.36%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 280 (5.02%) Firewall
2 213 (3.82%) DNS
3 143 (2.56%) TCP/IP
4 124 (2.22%) VPN
5 121 (2.17%) Network Security
6 120 (2.15%) BGP
7 109 (1.95%) WAN
8 84 (1.50%) DHCP
9 71 (1.27%) OSPF
10 59 (1.06%) SD-WAN
10 59 (1.06%) VLAN
11 54 (0.97%) SSL
11 54 (0.97%) VXLAN
12 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
12 52 (0.93%) HTTP
13 46 (0.82%) SAN
14 44 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 43 (0.77%) SNMP
16 42 (0.75%) Ethernet VPN
17 36 (0.64%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 456 (8.17%) Power BI
2 330 (5.91%) Data Warehouse
3 317 (5.68%) PostgreSQL
4 219 (3.92%) SQL Server
5 199 (3.56%) Relational Database
6 194 (3.47%) Metadata
6 194 (3.47%) Tableau
7 190 (3.40%) Data Lake
8 161 (2.88%) BigQuery
9 159 (2.85%) NoSQL
10 150 (2.69%) Big Data
11 137 (2.45%) Amazon Redshift
12 133 (2.38%) Amazon Athena
13 122 (2.19%) MongoDB
14 119 (2.13%) Delta Lake
15 117 (2.10%) Amazon RDS
16 99 (1.77%) DynamoDB
17 84 (1.50%) MySQL
18 68 (1.22%) Snowflake Schema
19 64 (1.15%) Redis
Development Applications
1 723 (12.95%) Git
2 505 (9.05%) Jenkins
3 436 (7.81%) GitLab
4 285 (5.10%) JIRA
5 98 (1.76%) Selenium
6 57 (1.02%) Postman
7 54 (0.97%) JMeter
8 53 (0.95%) MLflow
9 48 (0.86%) SonarQube
10 45 (0.81%) Bitbucket
11 43 (0.77%) Claude Code
12 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
13 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
14 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
14 32 (0.57%) Gatling
15 30 (0.54%) Maven
16 29 (0.52%) REST Assured
16 29 (0.52%) Sonatype Nexus
17 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
18 22 (0.39%) JUnit
General
1 1,222 (21.89%) Social Skills
2 1,208 (21.64%) Finance
3 809 (14.49%) Analytical Skills
4 552 (9.89%) Public Sector
5 442 (7.92%) Banking
6 192 (3.44%) Front Office
7 133 (2.38%) Investment Banking
8 116 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
9 111 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 107 (1.92%) Retail
11 86 (1.54%) Marketing
12 76 (1.36%) Telecoms
13 60 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
14 53 (0.95%) Legal
15 52 (0.93%) Military
16 48 (0.86%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.84%) Aerospace
18 45 (0.81%) Publishing
19 44 (0.79%) Manufacturing
20 37 (0.66%) Law
Job Titles
1 912 (16.34%) Developer
2 908 (16.26%) Senior
3 822 (14.72%) Data Engineer
4 493 (8.83%) Python Developer
5 468 (8.38%) Lead
6 412 (7.38%) Python Engineer
7 324 (5.80%) DevOps Engineer
8 306 (5.48%) Software Engineer
9 280 (5.02%) Analyst
10 276 (4.94%) Architect
11 259 (4.64%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 244 (4.37%) AWS Engineer
13 199 (3.56%) Data Scientist
14 195 (3.49%) Cloud Engineer
15 190 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
16 178 (3.19%) Senior Developer
17 176 (3.15%) Azure Engineer
18 166 (2.97%) Senior Data Engineer
19 139 (2.49%) Data Analyst
20 138 (2.47%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 438 (7.85%) REST
2 375 (6.72%) PySpark
3 355 (6.36%) Kafka
4 327 (5.86%) React
5 233 (4.17%) .NET
6 198 (3.55%) JSON
7 197 (3.53%) FastAPI
7 197 (3.53%) RESTful
8 187 (3.35%) Node.js
9 177 (3.17%) Django
10 175 (3.13%) Pandas
11 139 (2.49%) LangChain
12 136 (2.44%) PyTorch
13 111 (1.99%) pytest
14 107 (1.92%) Flask
15 106 (1.90%) YAML
16 105 (1.88%) NumPy
17 102 (1.83%) OAuth
18 101 (1.81%) HTML
19 95 (1.70%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 764 (13.68%) Cloud Native
2 313 (5.61%) Distributed Systems
3 222 (3.98%) AI Agents
4 209 (3.74%) Onboarding
5 157 (2.81%) Data Centre
6 152 (2.72%) Product Ownership
7 140 (2.51%) Algorithms
8 138 (2.47%) Data Structures
9 126 (2.26%) Legacy Systems
10 117 (2.10%) Hybrid Cloud
11 115 (2.06%) Derivative
12 113 (2.02%) Data Protection Act
13 106 (1.90%) Management Information System
14 92 (1.65%) Equities
15 86 (1.54%) Security Posture
16 83 (1.49%) Fixed Income
17 71 (1.27%) Enterprise Software
18 70 (1.25%) Public Cloud
19 64 (1.15%) Linux Command Line
20 63 (1.13%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 720 (12.90%) Linux
2 332 (5.95%) Windows
3 232 (4.16%) Unix
4 143 (2.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 79 (1.42%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.75%) Ubuntu
7 30 (0.54%) AIX
8 29 (0.52%) VMS
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 16 (0.29%) CentOS
10 16 (0.29%) Solaris
11 12 (0.21%) Apple iOS
12 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 11 (0.20%) zOS
13 7 (0.13%) Windows 10
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
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,187 (39.17%) CI/CD
2 1,608 (28.80%) DevOps
3 1,442 (25.83%) AI
4 1,254 (22.46%) Agile
5 1,148 (20.56%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,113 (19.94%) Analytics
7 999 (17.89%) Data Pipeline
8 909 (16.28%) Problem-Solving
9 878 (15.73%) Software Engineering
10 867 (15.53%) Machine Learning
11 796 (14.26%) Data Engineering
12 755 (13.52%) Containerisation
13 749 (13.42%) Data Modelling
14 681 (12.20%) Observability
15 663 (11.88%) ETL
16 613 (10.98%) Test Automation
17 591 (10.59%) Data Science
18 565 (10.12%) Continuous Improvement
19 544 (9.74%) Validation
20 535 (9.58%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,814 (32.49%) SQL
2 828 (14.83%) Java
3 752 (13.47%) Bash
4 733 (13.13%) PowerShell
5 456 (8.17%) JavaScript
6 366 (6.56%) TypeScript
7 301 (5.39%) C#
8 203 (3.64%) Go
9 146 (2.62%) C++
10 141 (2.53%) R
11 136 (2.44%) Shell Script
12 133 (2.38%) Scala
13 125 (2.24%) Bicep
14 85 (1.52%) Perl
15 61 (1.09%) PL/SQL
16 58 (1.04%) C
17 56 (1.00%) Groovy
17 56 (1.00%) Rust
18 53 (0.95%) Ruby
19 52 (0.93%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,310 (23.46%) Security Cleared
2 1,062 (19.02%) SC Cleared
3 422 (7.56%) Degree
4 203 (3.64%) DV Cleared
5 162 (2.90%) Computer Science Degree
6 142 (2.54%) AWS Certification
7 140 (2.51%) Azure Certification
8 115 (2.06%) BPSS Clearance
9 92 (1.65%) CISSP
10 87 (1.56%) Cisco Certification
11 71 (1.27%) Master's Degree
12 50 (0.90%) CCNP
13 43 (0.77%) Microsoft Certification
14 40 (0.72%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 35 (0.63%) PhD
16 34 (0.61%) ISTQB
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 31 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 29 (0.52%) CCIE
20 26 (0.47%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 585 (10.48%) Data Quality
2 271 (4.85%) QA
3 113 (2.02%) GDPR
4 104 (1.86%) NIST
5 100 (1.79%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 81 (1.45%) Accessibility
7 34 (0.61%) SLA
8 28 (0.50%) Actionable Recommendations
9 27 (0.48%) NCSC
10 26 (0.47%) PCI DSS
10 26 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 26 (0.47%) WCAG
11 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
12 14 (0.25%) 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
1 914 (16.37%) Docker
2 157 (2.81%) Active Directory
3 131 (2.35%) VMware Infrastructure
4 62 (1.11%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.81%) vSphere
6 43 (0.77%) Hyper-V
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 22 (0.39%) 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%) zsh
15 6 (0.11%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,300 (23.28%) Terraform
2 1,094 (19.60%) Kubernetes
3 620 (11.11%) Ansible
4 338 (6.05%) Grafana
5 246 (4.41%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.59%) Puppet
7 72 (1.29%) Progress Chef
8 67 (1.20%) Argo
9 43 (0.77%) Istio
10 32 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
11 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
12 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
13 26 (0.47%) Control-M
13 26 (0.47%) vRealize
14 25 (0.45%) Kibana
15 24 (0.43%) Nagios
16 22 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
17 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
18 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
18 18 (0.32%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 681 (12.20%) Microsoft
2 556 (9.96%) Databricks
3 356 (6.38%) Google
4 253 (4.53%) Oracle
5 211 (3.78%) Splunk
6 175 (3.13%) VMware
7 140 (2.51%) Cisco
8 139 (2.49%) OpenAI
9 124 (2.22%) ServiceNow
10 104 (1.86%) Dynatrace
11 101 (1.81%) Red Hat
12 95 (1.70%) IBM
13 91 (1.63%) F5
14 86 (1.54%) Informatica
15 84 (1.50%) Palo Alto
16 69 (1.24%) Fortinet
17 68 (1.22%) CyberArk
17 68 (1.22%) SAP
18 66 (1.18%) Foundry
19 60 (1.07%) Salesforce