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 31 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 11 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Python 5,369 3,840 4,032
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.93% 13.19% 9.40%
As % of the Programming Languages category 40.52% 38.59% 31.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,554 2,676 2,898
10th Percentile £363 £380 £381
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £522 £540 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.29% -1.82% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £511
% change year-on-year -2.50% -2.06% -7.18%
Number of hourly rates quoted 134 49 111
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £43.81 £33.91 £31.25
Median hourly rate £53.25 £40.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +33.13% -33.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £67.96 £55.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.75 £65.60 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.00 £45.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +15.56% -30.77% +9.66%

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 13,251 9,952 12,894
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.97% 34.19% 30.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,666 6,765 9,149
10th Percentile £358 £358 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £514 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.72% -2.10% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £627 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £475 £487
% change year-on-year +1.32% -2.41% -2.65%
Number of hourly rates quoted 572 227 519
10th Percentile £36.25 £27.00 £32.05
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.20 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -7.26% -0.80%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.95 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +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 31 May 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 31 May 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 31 May 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 4,470 £525 -4.55% 2,395
London -3 2,569 £550 -5.98% 1,246
UK excluding London -1 2,078 £488 -2.50% 1,547
Work from Home -1 1,515 £525 -4.55% 919
North of England +11 752 £481 -1.28% 382
Yorkshire +2 420 £488 -2.50% 105
South East -7 395 £525 +5.00% 491
Scotland +2 306 £439 -7.63% 89
North West +4 261 £490 +3.16% 208
South West -1 249 £500 -13.04% 180
Midlands -16 238 £482 +7.03% 161
West Midlands -14 183 £479 +6.47% 75
East of England -11 128 £500 - 174
North East +7 81 £475 +5.56% 73
East Midlands -12 54 £495 +13.53% 85
Wales -8 27 £450 -10.00% 45
Northern Ireland +17 25 £446 -24.04% 43

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 (5.25%) Apache Spark
2 233 (4.34%) Apache Airflow
3 187 (3.48%) Apache
4 150 (2.79%) Confluence
5 45 (0.84%) Jupyter
5 45 (0.84%) SAS
5 45 (0.84%) SharePoint
6 23 (0.43%) nginx
7 21 (0.39%) OpenStack
8 16 (0.30%) ArcGIS
8 16 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
8 16 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
9 13 (0.24%) IIS
10 11 (0.20%) Appian
11 8 (0.15%) Apache Superset
11 8 (0.15%) Camunda
11 8 (0.15%) Tomcat
12 7 (0.13%) CICS
12 7 (0.13%) CMS
13 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 124 (2.31%) Microsoft Excel
2 28 (0.52%) Chatbot
3 25 (0.47%) Microsoft Office
4 23 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
6 21 (0.39%) MS Visio
7 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
8 4 (0.075%) Microsoft Project
9 3 (0.056%) LaTeX
10 1 (0.019%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.019%) SPSS
10 1 (0.019%) Weka
10 1 (0.019%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.43%) Aladdin
2 20 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
4 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
5 6 (0.11%) Fidessa
6 5 (0.093%) BambooHR
7 3 (0.056%) Bloomberg AIM
7 3 (0.056%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.056%) SimCorp Dimension
7 3 (0.056%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.037%) Front Arena
8 2 (0.037%) Global One
8 2 (0.037%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.037%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.037%) NetSuite
8 2 (0.037%) Odoo
8 2 (0.037%) Oracle Applications
8 2 (0.037%) Oracle Assets
8 2 (0.037%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,012 (37.47%) AWS
2 1,789 (33.32%) Azure
3 773 (14.40%) GCP
4 650 (12.11%) GitHub
5 521 (9.70%) Power Platform
6 458 (8.53%) Serverless
7 381 (7.10%) Azure DevOps
8 371 (6.91%) Amazon S3
9 347 (6.46%) GitHub Actions
10 327 (6.09%) AWS Lambda
11 261 (4.86%) Azure Data Factory
12 255 (4.75%) Snowflake
13 180 (3.35%) AWS CloudFormation
14 174 (3.24%) dbt
15 172 (3.20%) OpenShift
16 167 (3.11%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 157 (2.92%) Amazon EKS
18 143 (2.66%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 127 (2.37%) Amazon EC2
20 119 (2.22%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 207 (3.86%) Firewall
2 153 (2.85%) DNS
3 118 (2.20%) Network Security
4 95 (1.77%) WAN
5 91 (1.69%) BGP
6 90 (1.68%) TCP/IP
7 78 (1.45%) VPN
8 62 (1.15%) HTTP
8 62 (1.15%) OSPF
9 56 (1.04%) SAN
10 54 (1.01%) BIG-IP
11 48 (0.89%) SSL
12 46 (0.86%) SD-WAN
13 45 (0.84%) VXLAN
14 37 (0.69%) VLAN
15 36 (0.67%) LAN
16 35 (0.65%) DHCP
16 35 (0.65%) SNMP
17 34 (0.63%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 34 (0.63%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 454 (8.46%) Power BI
2 339 (6.31%) PostgreSQL
3 278 (5.18%) Data Warehouse
4 262 (4.88%) SQL Server
5 233 (4.34%) Data Lake
6 201 (3.74%) Tableau
7 184 (3.43%) Relational Database
8 173 (3.22%) NoSQL
9 162 (3.02%) Big Data
10 160 (2.98%) Metadata
11 137 (2.55%) BigQuery
12 136 (2.53%) Delta Lake
13 123 (2.29%) Amazon Athena
14 114 (2.12%) MongoDB
15 109 (2.03%) Amazon Redshift
16 94 (1.75%) DynamoDB
17 90 (1.68%) MySQL
18 87 (1.62%) Amazon RDS
19 77 (1.43%) Azure SQL Database
20 75 (1.40%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 639 (11.90%) Git
2 488 (9.09%) Jenkins
3 379 (7.06%) GitLab
4 274 (5.10%) JIRA
5 79 (1.47%) MLflow
6 77 (1.43%) Selenium
7 63 (1.17%) Postman
8 39 (0.73%) Cucumber
9 36 (0.67%) JMeter
10 33 (0.61%) Cypress.io
11 32 (0.60%) Artifactory
12 30 (0.56%) Bitbucket
13 29 (0.54%) SonarQube
14 26 (0.48%) JUnit
14 26 (0.48%) Sonatype Nexus
15 25 (0.47%) REST Assured
16 23 (0.43%) Maven
17 22 (0.41%) Robot Framework
18 20 (0.37%) Gatling
19 19 (0.35%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,170 (21.79%) Social Skills
2 1,075 (20.02%) Finance
3 717 (13.35%) Analytical Skills
4 480 (8.94%) Public Sector
5 381 (7.10%) Banking
6 191 (3.56%) Front Office
7 130 (2.42%) Documentation Skills
8 120 (2.24%) Investment Banking
9 85 (1.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 76 (1.42%) Marketing
11 61 (1.14%) Retail
12 60 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
13 53 (0.99%) Legal
14 47 (0.88%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 37 (0.69%) Financial Institution
16 37 (0.69%) Publishing
17 35 (0.65%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.61%) Military
19 29 (0.54%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 972 (18.10%) Developer
2 821 (15.29%) Data Engineer
3 786 (14.64%) Senior
4 503 (9.37%) Python Developer
5 349 (6.50%) Lead
6 337 (6.28%) Architect
7 331 (6.17%) Python Engineer
8 291 (5.42%) DevOps Engineer
9 284 (5.29%) Analyst
10 272 (5.07%) Software Engineer
11 240 (4.47%) AWS Engineer
12 223 (4.15%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 212 (3.95%) Data Scientist
14 167 (3.11%) Senior Developer
15 158 (2.94%) Azure Engineer
15 158 (2.94%) Senior Data Engineer
16 156 (2.91%) Platform Engineer
17 154 (2.87%) Data Analyst
18 149 (2.78%) Full-Stack Developer
19 138 (2.57%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 406 (7.56%) REST
2 372 (6.93%) React
3 357 (6.65%) PySpark
4 318 (5.92%) Kafka
5 233 (4.34%) .NET
6 224 (4.17%) Node.js
7 218 (4.06%) Pandas
8 187 (3.48%) FastAPI
9 185 (3.45%) RESTful
10 178 (3.32%) JSON
11 171 (3.18%) PyTorch
12 137 (2.55%) Django
13 130 (2.42%) NumPy
14 127 (2.37%) Flask
15 121 (2.25%) TensorFlow
16 117 (2.18%) LangChain
16 117 (2.18%) scikit-learn
17 113 (2.10%) AngularJS
18 102 (1.90%) HTML
18 102 (1.90%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 608 (11.32%) Cloud Native
2 242 (4.51%) Distributed Systems
3 150 (2.79%) Algorithms
4 140 (2.61%) Product Ownership
5 139 (2.59%) Data Centre
6 130 (2.42%) AI Agents
6 130 (2.42%) Onboarding
7 124 (2.31%) Data Structures
8 119 (2.22%) Data Protection Act
9 116 (2.16%) Derivative
10 112 (2.09%) Management Information System
11 108 (2.01%) Equities
12 106 (1.97%) Legacy Systems
13 99 (1.84%) Fixed Income
14 94 (1.75%) Security Posture
15 90 (1.68%) Hybrid Cloud
16 89 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
17 70 (1.30%) Public Cloud
18 55 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
19 51 (0.95%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 639 (11.90%) Linux
2 304 (5.66%) Windows
3 220 (4.10%) Unix
4 113 (2.10%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 76 (1.42%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.80%) Ubuntu
7 31 (0.58%) VMS
8 26 (0.48%) AIX
8 26 (0.48%) Android
9 23 (0.43%) Solaris
10 20 (0.37%) CentOS
11 18 (0.34%) Apple iOS
12 16 (0.30%) Mac OS
13 13 (0.24%) zOS
14 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
15 8 (0.15%) Debian
16 7 (0.13%) Rocky
17 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
18 5 (0.093%) Amazon Linux
19 4 (0.075%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,999 (37.23%) CI/CD
2 1,453 (27.06%) DevOps
3 1,243 (23.15%) AI
4 1,154 (21.49%) Agile
5 1,056 (19.67%) Analytics
6 948 (17.66%) Infrastructure as Code
7 937 (17.45%) Problem-Solving
8 912 (16.99%) Data Pipeline
9 829 (15.44%) Machine Learning
10 719 (13.39%) Data Engineering
10 719 (13.39%) Data Modelling
11 703 (13.09%) Containerisation
12 701 (13.06%) ETL
13 654 (12.18%) Software Engineering
14 587 (10.93%) Data Science
15 573 (10.67%) Observability
16 539 (10.04%) Test Automation
17 522 (9.72%) Business Intelligence
18 473 (8.81%) LLM
19 444 (8.27%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 1,775 (33.06%) SQL
2 776 (14.45%) Java
3 672 (12.52%) PowerShell
4 606 (11.29%) Bash
5 474 (8.83%) JavaScript
6 357 (6.65%) TypeScript
7 337 (6.28%) C#
8 203 (3.78%) Go
9 165 (3.07%) R
10 151 (2.81%) C++
11 128 (2.38%) Scala
12 107 (1.99%) Shell Script
13 81 (1.51%) Bicep
14 79 (1.47%) Perl
15 74 (1.38%) Ruby
16 58 (1.08%) PL/SQL
16 58 (1.08%) T-SQL
17 55 (1.02%) C
18 53 (0.99%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 52 (0.97%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,197 (22.29%) Security Cleared
2 967 (18.01%) SC Cleared
3 400 (7.45%) Degree
4 165 (3.07%) Computer Science Degree
5 149 (2.78%) DV Cleared
6 124 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
7 112 (2.09%) Azure Certification
8 98 (1.83%) AWS Certification
9 94 (1.75%) CISSP
10 76 (1.42%) Master's Degree
11 71 (1.32%) Cisco Certification
12 55 (1.02%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 50 (0.93%) CCNP
14 42 (0.78%) CISM
15 37 (0.69%) PhD
16 33 (0.61%) ISTQB
17 30 (0.56%) Microsoft Certification
18 27 (0.50%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 22 (0.41%) CCIE
20 21 (0.39%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 525 (9.78%) Data Quality
2 240 (4.47%) QA
3 144 (2.68%) GDPR
4 100 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 98 (1.83%) NIST
6 78 (1.45%) Accessibility
7 37 (0.69%) SLA
8 27 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 26 (0.48%) PCI DSS
10 25 (0.47%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
12 16 (0.30%) WCAG
13 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.24%) NCSC
15 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.20%) Cyber Essentials
17 8 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 8 (0.15%) GRC
18 7 (0.13%) Disclosure Scotland
19 6 (0.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 802 (14.94%) Docker
2 149 (2.78%) Active Directory
3 99 (1.84%) VMware Infrastructure
4 76 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.73%) VMware NSX
5 39 (0.73%) vSphere
6 33 (0.61%) Firmware
7 31 (0.58%) Hyper-V
8 19 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
9 17 (0.32%) KVM
10 16 (0.30%) NFS
11 13 (0.24%) Squid
12 12 (0.22%) HDFS
13 10 (0.19%) Ceph
13 10 (0.19%) SRDF
14 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
15 8 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
16 7 (0.13%) Postfix
17 4 (0.075%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
17 4 (0.075%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,120 (20.86%) Terraform
2 961 (17.90%) Kubernetes
3 563 (10.49%) Ansible
4 335 (6.24%) Grafana
5 281 (5.23%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.38%) Puppet
7 57 (1.06%) Argo
8 51 (0.95%) Istio
9 46 (0.86%) vRealize
10 40 (0.75%) Progress Chef
11 36 (0.67%) Kibana
12 33 (0.61%) vCenter Server
13 27 (0.50%) Nessus
13 27 (0.50%) Single Sign-On
14 25 (0.47%) Nagios
15 24 (0.45%) Control-M
15 24 (0.45%) ZABBIX
16 23 (0.43%) NetBackup
17 21 (0.39%) HAProxy
18 19 (0.35%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 601 (11.19%) Microsoft
2 572 (10.65%) Databricks
3 286 (5.33%) Google
4 247 (4.60%) Oracle
5 222 (4.13%) Splunk
6 176 (3.28%) VMware
7 134 (2.50%) Red Hat
8 126 (2.35%) OpenAI
9 118 (2.20%) Cisco
10 99 (1.84%) ServiceNow
11 85 (1.58%) CyberArk
12 83 (1.55%) F5
13 76 (1.42%) BeyondTrust
13 76 (1.42%) Dynatrace
13 76 (1.42%) Palo Alto
14 71 (1.32%) IBM
15 69 (1.29%) Informatica
16 52 (0.97%) Foundry
17 51 (0.95%) SAP
18 46 (0.86%) Arista