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

6 months to
28 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 10 13
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 -1
Contract jobs citing Python 5,595 4,249 4,001
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.41% 12.99% 10.32%
As % of the Programming Languages category 39.80% 39.65% 32.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,665 2,801 2,855
10th Percentile £375 £358 £375
25th Percentile £438 £430 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.90% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £645 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £775 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £507
% change year-on-year - -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 135 83 106
10th Percentile £30.20 £26.69 £21.25
25th Percentile £42.50 £34.88 £32.81
Median hourly rate £58.50 £50.00 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.00% -18.03% -6.15%
75th Percentile £77.50 £58.13 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.75 £82.11 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.57 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +25.14% -28.57% +16.67%

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 14,057 10,715 12,221
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.15% 32.76% 31.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,142 7,134 8,465
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £530
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -5.57% -3.64%
75th Percentile £623 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 525 296 368
10th Percentile £28.50 £29.00 £29.33
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.64 £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 £67.31 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.80 £79.38 £75.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.25 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.42% -4.23% +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 28 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 28 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 28 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 -5 4,779 £550 +2.80% 7,576
London -3 2,823 £575 - 4,987
UK excluding London -8 2,129 £500 - 3,513
Work from Home -8 1,520 £530 -3.64% 2,712
North of England +1 724 £500 +5.26% 746
South East -11 440 £540 +8.00% 915
Yorkshire 0 369 £500 +2.04% 206
South West -1 293 £530 +0.95% 505
Scotland -4 277 £450 -10.00% 377
North West -1 270 £500 +5.26% 418
Midlands -17 238 £479 +0.84% 342
West Midlands -16 191 £488 +2.63% 197
East of England -13 139 £500 -0.50% 473
North East 0 96 £425 -5.56% 128
East Midlands -11 47 £475 +13.10% 144
Wales -9 30 £530 +24.71% 80
Northern Ireland +4 18 £363 -30.95% 110

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 (5.18%) Apache Airflow
2 268 (4.79%) Apache Spark
3 219 (3.91%) Apache
4 165 (2.95%) Confluence
5 57 (1.02%) Jupyter
6 49 (0.88%) SharePoint
7 38 (0.68%) SAS
8 30 (0.54%) OpenStack
9 24 (0.43%) ArcGIS
10 22 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
11 21 (0.38%) nginx
12 14 (0.25%) IIS
13 9 (0.16%) Tomcat
13 9 (0.16%) WebSphere
14 8 (0.14%) CMS
15 7 (0.13%) Apache Superset
16 6 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 5 (0.089%) JBoss
17 5 (0.089%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 114 (2.04%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 21 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
5 19 (0.34%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 18 (0.32%) CPLEX
7 15 (0.27%) MS Visio
8 3 (0.054%) Microsoft Project
9 2 (0.036%) Navisworks
9 2 (0.036%) Revit
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.018%) CINEMA 4D
10 1 (0.018%) Houdini
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) OrCAD
10 1 (0.018%) Simulink
10 1 (0.018%) SPSS
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
10 1 (0.018%) Zemax
Business Applications
1 22 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 19 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
3 16 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 13 (0.23%) Oracle EBS
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
6 7 (0.13%) SAP IBP
7 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy AR System
7 6 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
8 5 (0.089%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.089%) Sage X3
9 4 (0.071%) Front Arena
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.054%) Endur
10 3 (0.054%) SimCorp Dimension
10 3 (0.054%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.036%) Odoo
11 2 (0.036%) Oracle Assets
11 2 (0.036%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 2,077 (37.12%) AWS
2 1,896 (33.89%) Azure
3 845 (15.10%) GCP
4 713 (12.74%) GitHub
5 504 (9.01%) Power Platform
6 481 (8.60%) Serverless
7 446 (7.97%) Azure DevOps
8 416 (7.44%) GitHub Actions
9 397 (7.10%) Amazon S3
10 362 (6.47%) AWS Lambda
11 328 (5.86%) Snowflake
12 231 (4.13%) dbt
13 224 (4.00%) Azure Data Factory
14 188 (3.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 181 (3.24%) AWS CloudFormation
16 174 (3.11%) Amazon EKS
17 136 (2.43%) Amazon EC2
17 136 (2.43%) Entra ID
18 135 (2.41%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 124 (2.22%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 273 (4.88%) Firewall
2 211 (3.77%) DNS
3 151 (2.70%) TCP/IP
4 133 (2.38%) Network Security
5 126 (2.25%) BGP
5 126 (2.25%) VPN
6 114 (2.04%) WAN
7 88 (1.57%) DHCP
8 72 (1.29%) OSPF
9 65 (1.16%) SD-WAN
10 60 (1.07%) VLAN
11 55 (0.98%) SSL
11 55 (0.98%) VXLAN
12 52 (0.93%) BIG-IP
13 51 (0.91%) HTTP
14 45 (0.80%) SNMP
15 44 (0.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 44 (0.79%) SAN
16 43 (0.77%) Ethernet VPN
17 39 (0.70%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 457 (8.17%) Power BI
2 327 (5.84%) Data Warehouse
3 314 (5.61%) PostgreSQL
4 216 (3.86%) SQL Server
5 204 (3.65%) Metadata
6 198 (3.54%) Relational Database
7 197 (3.52%) Tableau
8 185 (3.31%) Data Lake
9 159 (2.84%) BigQuery
10 151 (2.70%) NoSQL
11 137 (2.45%) Amazon Redshift
11 137 (2.45%) Big Data
12 130 (2.32%) Amazon Athena
13 125 (2.23%) Amazon RDS
13 125 (2.23%) Delta Lake
14 118 (2.11%) MongoDB
15 104 (1.86%) DynamoDB
16 87 (1.55%) MySQL
17 74 (1.32%) Redis
18 67 (1.20%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 736 (13.15%) Git
2 503 (8.99%) Jenkins
3 446 (7.97%) GitLab
4 282 (5.04%) JIRA
5 102 (1.82%) Selenium
6 58 (1.04%) JMeter
7 54 (0.97%) Postman
8 53 (0.95%) MLflow
9 50 (0.89%) SonarQube
10 47 (0.84%) Claude Code
11 40 (0.71%) Bitbucket
12 35 (0.63%) Cypress.io
13 33 (0.59%) Cucumber
13 33 (0.59%) Gatling
14 32 (0.57%) Artifactory
14 32 (0.57%) Maven
15 31 (0.55%) REST Assured
16 30 (0.54%) Sonatype Nexus
17 25 (0.45%) LoadRunner
18 20 (0.36%) JUnit
General
1 1,273 (22.75%) Social Skills
2 1,209 (21.61%) Finance
3 843 (15.07%) Analytical Skills
4 557 (9.96%) Public Sector
5 451 (8.06%) Banking
6 189 (3.38%) Front Office
7 139 (2.48%) Investment Banking
8 117 (2.09%) Documentation Skills
9 112 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 110 (1.97%) Retail
11 91 (1.63%) Marketing
12 80 (1.43%) Telecoms
13 59 (1.05%) Pharmaceutical
14 56 (1.00%) Military
15 54 (0.97%) Legal
16 50 (0.89%) Aerospace
17 46 (0.82%) Financial Institution
18 45 (0.80%) Publishing
19 43 (0.77%) Influencing Skills
19 43 (0.77%) Law
Job Titles
1 936 (16.73%) Senior
2 906 (16.19%) Developer
3 815 (14.57%) Data Engineer
4 485 (8.67%) Python Developer
5 481 (8.60%) Lead
6 415 (7.42%) Python Engineer
7 337 (6.02%) DevOps Engineer
8 297 (5.31%) Software Engineer
9 284 (5.08%) Analyst
10 282 (5.04%) Architect
11 264 (4.72%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 235 (4.20%) AWS Engineer
13 192 (3.43%) Data Scientist
14 190 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
15 189 (3.38%) Cloud Engineer
16 183 (3.27%) Senior Developer
17 177 (3.16%) Senior Data Engineer
18 175 (3.13%) Azure Engineer
19 142 (2.54%) Infrastructure Engineer
20 140 (2.50%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,320 (23.59%) Terraform
2 468 (8.36%) REST
3 381 (6.81%) PySpark
4 363 (6.49%) Kafka
5 316 (5.65%) React
6 245 (4.38%) .NET
7 204 (3.65%) JSON
8 200 (3.57%) FastAPI
9 198 (3.54%) Django
10 187 (3.34%) RESTful
11 178 (3.18%) Node.js
12 172 (3.07%) Pandas
13 135 (2.41%) pytest
14 133 (2.38%) LangChain
15 120 (2.14%) PyTorch
16 114 (2.04%) YAML
17 112 (2.00%) Flask
18 109 (1.95%) HTML
19 106 (1.89%) OAuth
20 100 (1.79%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 771 (13.78%) Cloud Native
2 311 (5.56%) Distributed Systems
3 239 (4.27%) AI Agents
4 220 (3.93%) Onboarding
5 163 (2.91%) Data Centre
6 158 (2.82%) Product Ownership
7 138 (2.47%) Algorithms
8 136 (2.43%) Data Structures
8 136 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
9 116 (2.07%) Hybrid Cloud
10 112 (2.00%) Derivative
11 108 (1.93%) Data Protection Act
12 106 (1.89%) Management Information System
13 91 (1.63%) Equities
14 79 (1.41%) Security Posture
15 77 (1.38%) Enterprise Software
16 71 (1.27%) Fixed Income
17 69 (1.23%) Linux Command Line
18 67 (1.20%) Public Cloud
19 63 (1.13%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 745 (13.32%) Linux
2 336 (6.01%) Windows
3 240 (4.29%) Unix
4 150 (2.68%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 90 (1.61%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.77%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.59%) VMS
8 31 (0.55%) AIX
9 19 (0.34%) Solaris
10 17 (0.30%) CentOS
11 16 (0.29%) Android
12 10 (0.18%) Apple iOS
12 10 (0.18%) Mac OS
13 9 (0.16%) zOS
14 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.14%) Windows 10
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.11%) Embedded Linux
16 5 (0.089%) Debian
16 5 (0.089%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,223 (39.73%) CI/CD
2 1,606 (28.70%) DevOps
3 1,463 (26.15%) AI
4 1,236 (22.09%) Agile
5 1,200 (21.45%) Infrastructure as Code
6 1,104 (19.73%) Analytics
7 987 (17.64%) Data Pipeline
8 909 (16.25%) Problem-Solving
9 897 (16.03%) Software Engineering
10 842 (15.05%) Machine Learning
11 798 (14.26%) Data Engineering
12 767 (13.71%) Containerisation
13 730 (13.05%) Data Modelling
14 704 (12.58%) Observability
15 653 (11.67%) ETL
16 626 (11.19%) Test Automation
17 601 (10.74%) Continuous Improvement
18 571 (10.21%) Validation
19 565 (10.10%) Data Science
20 552 (9.87%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,822 (32.56%) SQL
2 825 (14.75%) Java
3 765 (13.67%) Bash
4 740 (13.23%) PowerShell
5 444 (7.94%) JavaScript
6 345 (6.17%) TypeScript
7 314 (5.61%) C#
8 196 (3.50%) Go
9 150 (2.68%) R
10 142 (2.54%) C++
11 139 (2.48%) Shell Script
12 135 (2.41%) Bicep
13 129 (2.31%) Scala
14 98 (1.75%) Perl
15 59 (1.05%) Groovy
16 58 (1.04%) C
16 58 (1.04%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 56 (1.00%) PL/SQL
18 54 (0.97%) Ruby
19 53 (0.95%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,323 (23.65%) Security Cleared
2 1,075 (19.21%) SC Cleared
3 423 (7.56%) Degree
4 212 (3.79%) DV Cleared
5 164 (2.93%) Computer Science Degree
6 148 (2.65%) Azure Certification
7 140 (2.50%) AWS Certification
8 118 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
9 93 (1.66%) CISSP
10 85 (1.52%) Cisco Certification
11 69 (1.23%) Master's Degree
12 46 (0.82%) Microsoft Certification
13 44 (0.79%) CCNP
14 37 (0.66%) ISTQB
15 36 (0.64%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
16 34 (0.61%) CISM
16 34 (0.61%) PhD
17 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 28 (0.50%) CCIE
19 27 (0.48%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 602 (10.76%) Data Quality
2 288 (5.15%) QA
3 113 (2.02%) NIST
4 105 (1.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 102 (1.82%) GDPR
6 82 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 39 (0.70%) SLA
8 33 (0.59%) Actionable Recommendations
9 29 (0.52%) NCSC
10 27 (0.48%) WCAG
11 25 (0.45%) PCI DSS
11 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 15 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
13 14 (0.25%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
15 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
16 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 6 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
17 6 (0.11%) GRC
17 6 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 936 (16.73%) Docker
2 158 (2.82%) Active Directory
3 134 (2.39%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.09%) Virtual Machines
5 46 (0.82%) Hyper-V
6 43 (0.77%) vSphere
7 36 (0.64%) VMware NSX
8 30 (0.54%) Firmware
9 23 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
10 18 (0.32%) NFS
11 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
11 14 (0.25%) Squid
12 12 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
13 10 (0.18%) Ceph
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
15 7 (0.13%) Postfix
15 7 (0.13%) PowerHA
15 7 (0.13%) zsh
16 6 (0.11%) HDFS
17 5 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,109 (19.82%) Kubernetes
2 632 (11.30%) Ansible
3 339 (6.06%) Grafana
4 249 (4.45%) Prometheus
5 83 (1.48%) Puppet
6 73 (1.30%) Progress Chef
7 69 (1.23%) Argo
8 38 (0.68%) Istio
9 34 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
10 30 (0.54%) Kibana
11 28 (0.50%) ZABBIX
12 26 (0.46%) Control-M
12 26 (0.46%) Nagios
13 25 (0.45%) vCenter Server
13 25 (0.45%) vRealize
14 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
15 19 (0.34%) Packer
15 19 (0.34%) Tivoli
16 18 (0.32%) FortiGate
16 18 (0.32%) Netcool
Vendors
1 711 (12.71%) Microsoft
2 564 (10.08%) Databricks
3 356 (6.36%) Google
4 251 (4.49%) Oracle
5 217 (3.88%) Splunk
6 177 (3.16%) VMware
7 143 (2.56%) OpenAI
8 139 (2.48%) Cisco
9 122 (2.18%) ServiceNow
10 103 (1.84%) Red Hat
11 102 (1.82%) Dynatrace
12 97 (1.73%) IBM
13 85 (1.52%) F5
14 81 (1.45%) Palo Alto
15 80 (1.43%) Informatica
16 69 (1.23%) SAP
17 68 (1.22%) Fortinet
18 67 (1.20%) CyberArk
19 66 (1.18%) Foundry
20 59 (1.05%) Salesforce