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

6 months to
29 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 10 11
Rank change year-on-year -4 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,625 4,324 4,130
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.30% 13.26% 10.90%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.51% 40.17% 34.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,668 2,794 2,821
10th Percentile £375 £356 £373
25th Percentile £443 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -8.70% -3.08%
75th Percentile £650 £647 £700
90th Percentile £750 £763 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £503 £500 £505
% change year-on-year +0.50% -0.99% -3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 85 97
10th Percentile £33.35 £28.25 £20.80
25th Percentile £43.81 £35.25 £40.06
Median hourly rate £63.14 £50.00 £67.02
Median % change year-on-year +26.27% -25.40% +3.11%
75th Percentile £78.75 £58.75 £71.88
90th Percentile £92.11 £81.50 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.31 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +26.62% -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 14,236 10,764 12,144
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.06% 33.02% 32.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,259 7,099 8,054
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £506 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.86% -3.71% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £648
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £492
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.36% -1.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 540 293 333
10th Percentile £24.20 £29.00 £26.40
25th Percentile £46.25 £41.25 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.23 £75.00 £78.50
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 29 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 29 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 29 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 -4 4,793 £550 +4.76% 8,557
London -4 2,828 £575 - 5,347
UK excluding London -7 2,160 £503 +0.50% 3,737
Work from Home -6 1,539 £527 -4.23% 3,302
North of England 0 754 £500 +5.26% 835
South East -6 450 £541 +8.25% 796
Yorkshire -2 381 £500 - 256
Scotland -3 303 £466 -6.80% 436
North West +2 294 £525 +16.67% 472
South West -2 272 £550 +2.33% 516
Midlands -18 227 £500 +0.81% 396
West Midlands -20 187 £520 +4.00% 252
East of England -15 146 £480 -8.57% 505
North East 0 88 £425 -10.53% 111
East Midlands -17 40 £463 +12.80% 144
Wales -9 28 £530 +23.98% 81
Northern Ireland +3 17 £363 -32.56% 206

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
1 293 (5.21%) Apache Airflow
2 274 (4.87%) Apache Spark
3 225 (4.00%) Apache
4 155 (2.76%) Confluence
5 58 (1.03%) Jupyter
6 56 (1.00%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.60%) SAS
8 31 (0.55%) OpenStack
9 27 (0.48%) nginx
10 22 (0.39%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) IIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 9 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
12 8 (0.14%) CMS
12 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
13 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 6 (0.11%) WebSphere
14 5 (0.089%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.089%) Camunda
14 5 (0.089%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 100 (1.78%) Microsoft Excel
2 37 (0.66%) Chatbot
3 20 (0.36%) Microsoft Office
4 15 (0.27%) CPLEX
4 15 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.036%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
7 2 (0.036%) Revit
7 2 (0.036%) Simulink
8 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
8 1 (0.018%) Houdini
8 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 1 (0.018%) SPSS
8 1 (0.018%) Weka
8 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 23 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
2 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
3 17 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
5 8 (0.14%) Remedy AR System
6 7 (0.12%) Front Arena
6 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Summit
8 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
8 5 (0.089%) SAP IBP
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.053%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.036%) Orchestrade
11 2 (0.036%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 2,062 (36.66%) AWS
2 1,895 (33.69%) Azure
3 899 (15.98%) GCP
4 741 (13.17%) GitHub
5 483 (8.59%) Power Platform
6 477 (8.48%) Serverless
7 435 (7.73%) Azure DevOps
8 434 (7.72%) GitHub Actions
9 393 (6.99%) Amazon S3
10 353 (6.28%) AWS Lambda
11 340 (6.04%) Snowflake
12 246 (4.37%) dbt
13 207 (3.68%) Azure Data Factory
14 200 (3.56%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 184 (3.27%) Amazon EKS
15 184 (3.27%) AWS CloudFormation
16 172 (3.06%) Entra ID
17 142 (2.52%) Amazon EC2
18 129 (2.29%) SaaS
19 125 (2.22%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 282 (5.01%) Firewall
2 209 (3.72%) DNS
3 162 (2.88%) Network Security
4 151 (2.68%) TCP/IP
5 128 (2.28%) VPN
6 125 (2.22%) BGP
7 113 (2.01%) WAN
8 86 (1.53%) DHCP
9 74 (1.32%) OSPF
10 73 (1.30%) SD-WAN
11 64 (1.14%) BIG-IP
12 58 (1.03%) SSL
13 56 (1.00%) VXLAN
14 55 (0.98%) VLAN
15 53 (0.94%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 50 (0.89%) HTTP
17 48 (0.85%) Ethernet VPN
18 42 (0.75%) Broadband
19 41 (0.73%) Wireless
20 39 (0.69%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 430 (7.64%) Power BI
2 332 (5.90%) Data Warehouse
3 317 (5.64%) PostgreSQL
4 219 (3.89%) Metadata
5 202 (3.59%) Relational Database
5 202 (3.59%) SQL Server
6 195 (3.47%) Data Lake
7 188 (3.34%) BigQuery
8 172 (3.06%) Tableau
9 155 (2.76%) NoSQL
10 134 (2.38%) Big Data
11 132 (2.35%) Amazon Redshift
12 127 (2.26%) Amazon RDS
13 124 (2.20%) Amazon Athena
14 119 (2.12%) Delta Lake
14 119 (2.12%) MongoDB
15 106 (1.88%) DynamoDB
16 99 (1.76%) MySQL
17 74 (1.32%) Redis
18 62 (1.10%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 814 (14.47%) Git
2 510 (9.07%) Jenkins
3 483 (8.59%) GitLab
4 307 (5.46%) JIRA
5 116 (2.06%) Selenium
6 67 (1.19%) Postman
7 60 (1.07%) JMeter
8 59 (1.05%) Claude Code
9 55 (0.98%) SonarQube
10 49 (0.87%) MLflow
11 45 (0.80%) Bitbucket
12 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
13 35 (0.62%) Cucumber
13 35 (0.62%) REST Assured
13 35 (0.62%) Sonatype Nexus
14 34 (0.60%) Maven
15 33 (0.59%) Cypress.io
16 29 (0.52%) LoadRunner
17 28 (0.50%) Gatling
18 22 (0.39%) Zephyr
General
1 1,304 (23.18%) Social Skills
2 1,284 (22.83%) Finance
3 835 (14.84%) Analytical Skills
4 546 (9.71%) Public Sector
5 524 (9.32%) Banking
6 178 (3.16%) Front Office
7 154 (2.74%) Investment Banking
8 114 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 113 (2.01%) Retail
10 102 (1.81%) Documentation Skills
11 86 (1.53%) Marketing
11 86 (1.53%) Telecoms
12 64 (1.14%) Military
13 53 (0.94%) Law
14 50 (0.89%) Aerospace
14 50 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
15 46 (0.82%) Financial Institution
16 45 (0.80%) Legal
17 42 (0.75%) Publishing
18 37 (0.66%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,006 (17.88%) Senior
2 891 (15.84%) Developer
3 834 (14.83%) Data Engineer
4 489 (8.69%) Lead
5 468 (8.32%) Python Developer
6 416 (7.40%) Python Engineer
7 358 (6.36%) DevOps Engineer
8 311 (5.53%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 283 (5.03%) Analyst
10 273 (4.85%) Software Engineer
11 243 (4.32%) Architect
12 226 (4.02%) AWS Engineer
13 194 (3.45%) Senior Developer
14 193 (3.43%) Cloud Engineer
15 191 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
16 189 (3.36%) Azure Engineer
17 188 (3.34%) Senior Data Engineer
18 184 (3.27%) Data Scientist
19 150 (2.67%) Network Engineer
20 140 (2.49%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,387 (24.66%) Terraform
2 533 (9.48%) REST
3 374 (6.65%) PySpark
4 373 (6.63%) Kafka
5 304 (5.40%) React
6 236 (4.20%) .NET
7 214 (3.80%) FastAPI
8 208 (3.70%) Django
9 207 (3.68%) JSON
10 191 (3.40%) RESTful
11 158 (2.81%) LangChain
12 157 (2.79%) pytest
13 154 (2.74%) Node.js
14 152 (2.70%) Pandas
15 127 (2.26%) OAuth
16 116 (2.06%) Flask
17 111 (1.97%) YAML
18 109 (1.94%) LangGraph
18 109 (1.94%) PyTorch
19 104 (1.85%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 803 (14.28%) Cloud Native
2 297 (5.28%) Distributed Systems
3 292 (5.19%) AI Agents
4 257 (4.57%) Onboarding
5 163 (2.90%) Data Centre
6 150 (2.67%) Product Ownership
7 148 (2.63%) Data Structures
8 136 (2.42%) Legacy Systems
9 120 (2.13%) Algorithms
10 108 (1.92%) Hybrid Cloud
11 107 (1.90%) Enterprise Software
11 107 (1.90%) Management Information System
12 100 (1.78%) Derivative
13 99 (1.76%) Data Protection Act
14 95 (1.69%) Security Posture
15 84 (1.49%) Public Cloud
16 80 (1.42%) Equities
17 76 (1.35%) PKI
18 67 (1.19%) Linux Command Line
19 66 (1.17%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 775 (13.78%) Linux
2 345 (6.13%) Windows
3 251 (4.46%) Unix
4 155 (2.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 92 (1.64%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.78%) Ubuntu
7 37 (0.66%) VMS
8 25 (0.44%) CentOS
9 22 (0.39%) Solaris
10 15 (0.27%) AIX
11 14 (0.25%) Android
12 11 (0.20%) Apple iOS
13 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) zOS
15 5 (0.089%) Embedded Linux
15 5 (0.089%) Rocky
16 4 (0.071%) FreeRTOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,365 (42.04%) CI/CD
2 1,618 (28.76%) DevOps
3 1,588 (28.23%) AI
4 1,301 (23.13%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,256 (22.33%) Agile
6 1,092 (19.41%) Analytics
7 977 (17.37%) Data Pipeline
8 942 (16.75%) Software Engineering
9 874 (15.54%) Problem-Solving
10 837 (14.88%) Data Engineering
11 835 (14.84%) Machine Learning
12 782 (13.90%) Containerisation
13 761 (13.53%) Observability
14 751 (13.35%) Data Modelling
15 690 (12.27%) Test Automation
16 662 (11.77%) ETL
17 661 (11.75%) Validation
18 653 (11.61%) Continuous Improvement
19 589 (10.47%) Platform Engineering
20 585 (10.40%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 1,837 (32.66%) SQL
2 798 (14.19%) Java
3 770 (13.69%) Bash
4 753 (13.39%) PowerShell
5 444 (7.89%) JavaScript
6 345 (6.13%) TypeScript
7 302 (5.37%) C#
8 225 (4.00%) Go
9 152 (2.70%) Shell Script
10 135 (2.40%) R
11 133 (2.36%) Bicep
12 130 (2.31%) C++
13 126 (2.24%) Scala
14 105 (1.87%) Perl
15 62 (1.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 55 (0.98%) Groovy
17 52 (0.92%) C
18 51 (0.91%) Rust
19 50 (0.89%) T-SQL
20 48 (0.85%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,367 (24.30%) Security Cleared
2 1,105 (19.64%) SC Cleared
3 401 (7.13%) Degree
4 246 (4.37%) DV Cleared
5 154 (2.74%) Azure Certification
6 147 (2.61%) Computer Science Degree
7 146 (2.60%) AWS Certification
8 132 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
9 98 (1.74%) CISSP
10 79 (1.40%) Cisco Certification
11 68 (1.21%) Master's Degree
12 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
13 38 (0.68%) CCNP
14 33 (0.59%) PhD
15 31 (0.55%) CCIE
16 30 (0.53%) CISM
16 30 (0.53%) DBS Check
17 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 29 (0.52%) ISTQB
18 28 (0.50%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 641 (11.40%) Data Quality
2 328 (5.83%) QA
3 117 (2.08%) NIST
4 101 (1.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 87 (1.55%) GDPR
6 82 (1.46%) Accessibility
7 44 (0.78%) SLA
8 36 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 30 (0.53%) NCSC
10 26 (0.46%) PCI DSS
11 23 (0.41%) WCAG
12 22 (0.39%) SOC 2
13 19 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 16 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
14 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
16 8 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.12%) Basel III
17 7 (0.12%) GRC
17 7 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 970 (17.24%) Docker
2 179 (3.18%) Active Directory
3 135 (2.40%) VMware Infrastructure
4 71 (1.26%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (0.89%) Hyper-V
6 35 (0.62%) vSphere
7 32 (0.57%) VMware NSX
8 28 (0.50%) NFS
9 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
10 19 (0.34%) Firmware
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
12 12 (0.21%) Squid
13 8 (0.14%) Ceph
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 8 (0.14%) zsh
14 7 (0.12%) HDFS
14 7 (0.12%) Postfix
15 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
16 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,169 (20.78%) Kubernetes
2 640 (11.38%) Ansible
3 334 (5.94%) Grafana
4 245 (4.36%) Prometheus
5 80 (1.42%) Puppet
6 72 (1.28%) Progress Chef
7 67 (1.19%) Argo
8 46 (0.82%) Single Sign-On
9 40 (0.71%) Kibana
10 35 (0.62%) Istio
11 27 (0.48%) Control-M
11 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
12 23 (0.41%) Packer
13 22 (0.39%) FortiGate
14 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
14 17 (0.30%) ZABBIX
15 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
15 16 (0.28%) Podman
15 16 (0.28%) QRadar
16 15 (0.27%) vRealize
Vendors
1 746 (13.26%) Microsoft
2 580 (10.31%) Databricks
3 402 (7.15%) Google
4 243 (4.32%) Oracle
5 206 (3.66%) Splunk
6 172 (3.06%) VMware
7 168 (2.99%) OpenAI
8 144 (2.56%) Cisco
9 135 (2.40%) ServiceNow
10 101 (1.80%) Dynatrace
11 97 (1.72%) Red Hat
12 94 (1.67%) IBM
13 91 (1.62%) F5
14 88 (1.56%) Palo Alto
15 83 (1.48%) Foundry
16 72 (1.28%) CyberArk
17 71 (1.26%) Fortinet
18 70 (1.24%) Informatica
19 67 (1.19%) SAP
20 56 (1.00%) Salesforce