In October we analysed 58,429 active UK tech job postings. Python appears in 35.6% of them. More than one in three. Nothing else close. AWS follows at 26.1%, CI/CD at 25.6%. Of the postings that state a seniority level, 86% ask for a senior profile. And the vocabulary of AI agents has already landed at scale: 1,320 UK postings mention Claude Code by name, the highest absolute count of any market we track. This is the first UK edition of our monthly market report. Every number carries its sample size and its cut-off date. From November, the report compares month against month. First baseline. Hold us to it. No excuses.
Our market analysis tracks 58,429 active UK tech job postings (cut-off 5 November 2026). Python leads demand with 20,819 mentions, 35.6% of the index, followed by AWS (26.1%), CI/CD (25.6%) and Azure (22.1%). Of the postings that declare a level, 86% ask for senior. Agent tooling is already measurable vocabulary: 1,320 postings mention Claude Code and 735 LangGraph. By publisher type, the UK top 15 is dominated by job platforms and recruitment agencies, with IT consultancies absent from the ranking entirely, a fact that will surprise anyone who has watched the Spanish, French or Portuguese markets where services firms publish more volume than anyone else. Next edition: November.
The October picture: 58,429 active postings
Our market index for the UK registered its widest picture to date at the 5 November 2026 cut-off (n=58,429 active postings), with 87% of them enriched with skill tags over title and description, and 72% carrying role classification as well. This is the first UK edition, so there is no previous UK snapshot to compare against: the reading below is a photograph of the market as it stands, and month-on-month comparisons start with the November report. The postings come from job boards, career sites and aggregators that our crawler ingests daily, and the enrichment layer that tags skills and classifies roles runs over title and description, which is why the shares below are computed over the full 58,429 rather than over the enriched subset alone.
The seniority detail deserves a careful read. Only 30.3% of UK postings state a level: 17,707 of the 58,429. Within that tagged subset, 15,185 postings ask for a senior profile, 86%. The signal is blunt. Who declares a level, buys experience. End of story. It cannot be extrapolated to the whole market, but it says something about the subset that does declare: UK employers who name a level are almost always buying experience. Junior roles make up 1,106, mid-level 450 and lead-level 966 of the declared postings, which means that for every junior opening with a stated level there are almost fourteen senior ones, a ratio that no training pipeline in the country can absorb without a deliberate change in how employers describe and scope entry-level work.
October 2026 in five numbers, with sources
- Active UK tech job postings: 58,429 (our market analysis, cut-off 5 November 2026, n=58,429).
- Most in-demand skill: Python, 20,819 mentions, 35.6% of the index (same source and cut-off).
- Seniority: 86% of the 17,707 postings that state a level ask for a senior profile (same source and cut-off).
- Agent tooling: 1,320 postings mention Claude Code and 735 mention LangGraph in title or description (text search over the same index).
- Publisher mix: 12 of the 15 largest UK publishers are job platforms or recruitment agencies (our publisher ranking, same cut-off).
Source: Shakers market analysis over our own index of UK tech job postings. Every figure in this report states its n and its cut-off.
The most in-demand skills: Python is in a league of its own
The UK skills ranking has a clear leader. Python wins. It sits at 20,819 mentions, 35.6% of the index, a full ten points ahead of AWS (26.1%). CI/CD (25.6%) and Azure (22.1%) complete a platform-heavy top four, and one entry stands out against other European markets: Go, at 11,353 mentions and 19.4%, ranks fifth in the UK, well above the position it holds in Spain or France. TypeScript and React close the top ten. They are the only product-side entries in a ranking otherwise built on languages, platforms and delivery practice. If you want a reference for the AI-era profiles riding on top of that base, our guide to what an AI builder is describes the role family that keeps pulling on Python demand.
| # | Skill | Mentions | Share of index |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Python | 20,819 | 35.6% |
| 2 | AWS | 15,266 | 26.1% |
| 3 | CI/CD | 14,943 | 25.6% |
| 4 | Azure | 12,910 | 22.1% |
| 5 | Go | 11,353 | 19.4% |
| 6 | SQL | 10,766 | 18.4% |
| 7 | Agile | 10,699 | 18.3% |
| 8 | Kubernetes | 8,978 | 15.4% |
| 9 | TypeScript | 7,804 | 13.4% |
| 10 | React | 7,421 | 12.7% |
Share = skill mentions over the 58,429 active postings in the index, cut-off 5 November 2026. A posting can list several skills.
Where the UK differs most from the markets we cover is the reach of agent tooling. Claude Code appears by name in 1,320 active postings and LangGraph in 735, over the same index. These are text searches, not counts of dedicated roles, and a posting can mention both tools, so the overlap is undeclared; even so, the UK holds the highest absolute mention count of any market we track, and the direction is unmistakable when you consider that these two tools barely existed in job descriptions eighteen months ago. The clock matters here. For the profile that turns those tools into production systems, our analysis of what a forward deployed engineer is remains the reference.
Who is hiring: agencies and platforms, not consultancies
The UK publisher mix is the mirror image of Spain's. The 15 largest publishers concentrate 7,349 active postings, 12.6% of the index, and their composition is striking: 12 of the 15 are job platforms or recruitment agencies, the channel that British tech hiring has always run through. IT consultancies, which dominate publishing in Spain, France and Portugal, do not make the UK top 15 at all. Only one large corporate (JPMorganChase, 373) and one product company (Bending Spoons, 337) break the pattern. No consultancies. None.
| Publisher type | Presence in the top 15 | Active postings combined |
|---|---|---|
| Job platforms and aggregators | 7 | 3,638 |
| Recruitment agencies | 5 | 3,001 |
| Corporate (banking) | 1 | 373 |
| Product company | 1 | 337 |
| IT consultancies | 0 | 0 |
Aggregated by publisher type from the 15 largest UK publishers in our index, cut-off 5 November 2026 (7,349 postings, 12.6% of the 58,429 active). Type classification is editorial; this report publishes no company names because the useful reading is structural.
The practical reading for a hiring company is simple, and it is the one structural difference that any employer moving between the UK and the Continent will notice within a week of opening a role: in the UK, the competition for attention is against the agency channel. Employers posting directly are competing for the same candidates that platforms and recruiters surface at volume, which makes the offer itself (level, band, speed) the differentiator. In Spain the fight is against consultancies for capacity. In the UK it is against intermediaries for visibility.
The UK in context: the US, Germany and Spain
The same index tracks other markets, and the close-of-October picture orders the sizes like this: the United States with 62,920 active postings, the UK with 58,429, Germany with 53,851 and Spain with 45,166. Each market is crawled with its own mix of sources and ingestion pace. These figures compare index sizes, not growth rates. The UK sits second by tracked volume. Wide base. The numbers hold up for monthly reporting with a declared n.
| Market | Active tracked postings |
|---|---|
| United States | 62,920 |
| United Kingdom | 58,429 |
| Germany | 53,851 |
| Spain | 45,166 |
Active tech job postings tracked by Shakers market analysis per market, cut-off 5 November 2026. Ingestion paces differ across markets: compare sizes, not growth.
Our read of the month: four signals for your plan
First: Python is not just first. It is dominant, and that dominance spans data, automation and AI work. One hire covering Python plus one cloud platform covers more than a third of the index's demand. Second: the senior bias is brutal. It is the strongest of the four markets we publish. With 86% of level-declared postings asking for senior, UK hiring plans built on junior-heavy pipelines are swimming against the clearest current in this data. Third: the agent-tooling vocabulary has crossed a threshold, and it has done so in the least glamorous place possible, the standard job description that every employer writes when they need someone who can ship software against a live system rather than demo a prototype. When Claude Code appears in 1,320 postings and LangGraph in 735, familiarity with agent frameworks is part of the working vocabulary UK employers assume. The signal has moved past early adopters and into the standard job description that a mid-market employer writes for any backend or platform role with an AI component, the same shift we documented for agentic commerce reaching real transactions. Fourth: Go in fifth place is a UK signature. Watch it. It aligns with platform engineering and high-scale backend demand, and it is the one skill whose UK position clearly outranks its Continental standing, which matters for any team that has struggled to hire Go engineers in Madrid or Paris and has wondered whether the talent simply is not there: in London and the wider UK market, the supply side of that equation looks different.
Frequently asked questions about the UK tech market
- How many active tech job postings are there in the UK?
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According to Shakers market analysis with a cut-off of 5 November 2026, there are 58,429 active tech job postings in our UK index, 87% of them enriched with skill tags, 72% with role classification as well.
- What are the most in-demand tech skills in the UK?
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The top five skills at the close of October 2026 are Python (35.6% of the index, with 20,819 mentions), AWS (26.1%), CI/CD (25.6%), Azure (22.1%) and Go (19.4%), according to Shakers market analysis over 58,429 active postings.
- Who is hiring in the UK tech market?
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By publisher type, the UK top 15 is dominated by intermediaries: 12 of the 15 largest publishers are job platforms or recruitment agencies, with one banking corporate and one product company. IT consultancies, dominant in Spain, France and Portugal, do not appear in the UK top 15, according to Shakers market analysis with a cut-off of 5 November 2026.
- How does the UK tech market compare with the US, Germany and Spain?
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By tracked volume in our index, the United States leads with 62,920 active postings, followed by the UK with 58,429, Germany with 53,851 and Spain with 45,166 (cut-off 5 November 2026). These compare index sizes, not growth rates, because each market is crawled with its own source mix.
- How is this report produced?
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With Shakers' own index of active tech job postings (58,429 in the UK at the 5 November 2026 cut-off). Every figure is frozen in a dated snapshot with its sample size, and because this is the first UK edition, month-on-month comparisons start with the November report.
Sources and method
We analyse our own index of active tech job postings. Every figure in this report is frozen in a dated snapshot on the day of its cut-off, so it can be re-verified. The rules, in four lines:
- What we count: 58,429 active UK tech postings at the 5 November 2026 cut-off, enriched with skill tags and role classification.
- How we compare: this is the first UK edition; month-on-month comparisons, in share and rank position, start with the November report.
- What we declare and do not extrapolate: the seniority breakdown describes only the 30.3% of postings that state a level; tool mentions are text searches; the publisher-type classification is editorial, with no company names.
- Verticals: the vertical-family breakdown of our catalogue is currently computed for Spain only, so UK editions do not carry that section yet.
The next edition will cover November 2026 and compare month against month with this same method.
