Data Scientist Contracts

Data Scientist
UK

The median Data Scientist daily rate in the UK is £542 according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months to 26 April 2024.

The first table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics including a comparison to same period in the previous 2 years.

6 months to
26 Apr 2024
Same period 2023 Same period 2022
Rank 431 549 523
Rank change year-on-year +118 -26 -133
Contract jobs requiring a Data Scientist 148 151 360
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.34% 0.25% 0.41%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.37% 0.27% 0.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 102 95 242
10th Percentile £381 £293 £413
25th Percentile £459 £453 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £542 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +3.14% -8.70% +5.50%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £625
90th Percentile £680 £696 £674
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £521 £543
% change year-on-year +0.72% -3.92% +3.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 12 12
10th Percentile £15.63 - £20.40
25th Percentile £19.31 £19.00 £30.57
Median hourly rate £31.75 £19.50 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +62.86% -48.01% -15.06%
75th Percentile £44.69 £52.62 £52.16
90th Percentile £49.00 £56.06 £61.51
UK excluding London median hourly rate £15.81 £19.49 £19.91
% change year-on-year -18.88% -2.11% -54.04%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK

The following table is for comparison with the above and includes summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 40,413 56,730 84,732
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.78% 94.61% 95.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,320 39,605 59,435
10th Percentile £275 £313 £313
25th Percentile £408 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £540 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.78% +2.86% +10.53%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £638
90th Percentile £750 £750 £726
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £500 £475
% change year-on-year -2.00% +5.26% +11.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,653 1,602 2,109
10th Percentile £12.86 £14.25 £12.50
25th Percentile £16.30 £19.28 £15.50
Median hourly rate £35.96 £45.00 £23.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.09% +95.65% +0.24%
75th Percentile £60.25 £65.75 £48.75
90th Percentile £72.50 £75.50 £63.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.00 £42.37 £19.50
% change year-on-year -10.30% +117.26% +2.47%

Data Scientist
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings that featured Data Scientist in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Data Scientist in the UK

Data Scientist
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Data Scientist.

Daily rate trend for Data Scientist in the UK

Data Scientist
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Scientist over the 6 months to 26 April 2024.

Daily rate histogram for Data Scientist in the UK

Data Scientist
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Data Scientist.

Hourly rate trend for Data Scientist in the UK

Data Scientist
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Scientist over the 6 months to 26 April 2024.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Scientist in the UK

Data Scientist
Top 15 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Data Scientist within the UK over the 6 months to 26 April 2024. 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 +106 128 £550 +3.29% 151
London +140 96 £550 +4.76% 101
Work from Home +114 67 £552 +5.14% 106
UK excluding London +41 31 £525 +0.72% 56
North of England +21 8 £554 -16.38% 19
Wales +21 7 £396 - 5
Yorkshire +16 5 £560 -17.04% 6
East of England +11 5 £538 +10.26% 9
Scotland +33 3 £488 +34.48% 2
South East +15 3 £549 +272.03% 10
South West +14 3 £538 -1.60% 6
West Midlands +28 2 £590 +18.00% 2
Midlands +21 2 £590 -1.67% 5
North West +17 2 £520 +9.47% 11
North East - 1 - - 2

Data Scientist Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities

For the 6 months to 26 April 2024, Data Scientist contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Data Scientist in the job title.

1 147 (99.32%) Data Science
2 130 (87.84%) Python
3 79 (53.38%) Machine Learning
4 72 (48.65%) Visualisation
5 64 (43.24%) Data Analysis
6 62 (41.89%) SQL
7 55 (37.16%) Algorithms
8 51 (34.46%) Analytical Skills
9 47 (31.76%) R
10 44 (29.73%) Data Visualisation
11 41 (27.70%) Statistics
11 41 (27.70%) Mathematics
12 38 (25.68%) Analytics
13 36 (24.32%) Degree
13 36 (24.32%) Social Skills
14 34 (22.97%) Data Modelling
14 34 (22.97%) Business Intelligence
14 34 (22.97%) Power Platform
14 34 (22.97%) Power BI
15 33 (22.30%) Tableau
16 31 (20.95%) Predictive Modelling
17 27 (18.24%) Artificial Intelligence
18 26 (17.57%) Azure
18 26 (17.57%) Security Cleared
18 26 (17.57%) Computer Science
19 25 (16.89%) Decision-Making
20 22 (14.86%) Statistical Modelling
20 22 (14.86%) Finance
20 22 (14.86%) Data Pipeline
21 21 (14.19%) SC Cleared

Data Scientist Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 7 (4.73%) Apache Spark
2 6 (4.05%) Jupyter
2 6 (4.05%) SAS
3 4 (2.70%) Apache Airflow
4 2 (1.35%) Apache
5 1 (0.68%) Confluence
Applications
1 4 (2.70%) SPSS
2 1 (0.68%) Microsoft Excel
Cloud Services
1 34 (22.97%) Power Platform
2 26 (17.57%) Azure
3 16 (10.81%) GCP
4 9 (6.08%) AWS
5 6 (4.05%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 5 (3.38%) Azure Machine Learning
7 3 (2.03%) Azure Data Factory
7 3 (2.03%) Google Analytics
8 2 (1.35%) Amazon S3
8 2 (1.35%) Amazon SageMaker
8 2 (1.35%) AWS Lambda
8 2 (1.35%) Azure Cognitive Search
8 2 (1.35%) Azure Cognitive Services
8 2 (1.35%) Dagster
8 2 (1.35%) Serverless
8 2 (1.35%) Snowflake
8 2 (1.35%) Vertex AI
9 1 (0.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 1 (0.68%) Azure DevOps
9 1 (0.68%) GitHub
Database & Business Intelligence
1 34 (22.97%) Power BI
2 33 (22.30%) Tableau
3 19 (12.84%) Big Data
4 15 (10.14%) Hadoop
5 13 (8.78%) Data Mining
6 12 (8.11%) BusinessObjects
7 9 (6.08%) BigQuery
8 6 (4.05%) Looker
9 4 (2.70%) Data Warehouse
10 2 (1.35%) MongoDB
10 2 (1.35%) PostgreSQL
11 1 (0.68%) Amazon QuickSight
11 1 (0.68%) Amazon RDS
11 1 (0.68%) DynamoDB
11 1 (0.68%) NoSQL
11 1 (0.68%) Oracle Reports
11 1 (0.68%) Relational Database
11 1 (0.68%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 14 (9.46%) Git
2 3 (2.03%) JIRA
3 2 (1.35%) Visual Studio
4 1 (0.68%) Jenkins
4 1 (0.68%) MLflow
General
1 51 (34.46%) Analytical Skills
2 36 (24.32%) Social Skills
3 22 (14.86%) Finance
4 14 (9.46%) Marketing
5 13 (8.78%) Public Sector
6 9 (6.08%) Presentation Skills
7 5 (3.38%) Police
8 4 (2.70%) Retail
9 2 (1.35%) Banking
9 2 (1.35%) Law
9 2 (1.35%) Legal
9 2 (1.35%) Telecoms
10 1 (0.68%) Games
10 1 (0.68%) Hungarian Language
10 1 (0.68%) Manufacturing
10 1 (0.68%) Pharmaceutical
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 19 (12.84%) Pandas
2 18 (12.16%) scikit-learn
3 14 (9.46%) PySpark
4 12 (8.11%) TensorFlow
5 7 (4.73%) NumPy
6 6 (4.05%) Plotly
6 6 (4.05%) PyTorch
7 5 (3.38%) Matplotlib
8 4 (2.70%) Shiny
9 3 (2.03%) Flask
9 3 (2.03%) ggplot2
9 3 (2.03%) XGBoost
10 2 (1.35%) JSON
10 2 (1.35%) REST
10 2 (1.35%) SciPy
10 2 (1.35%) Swagger
10 2 (1.35%) YAML
11 1 (0.68%) D3.js
11 1 (0.68%) LightGBM
11 1 (0.68%) Statsmodels
Miscellaneous
1 55 (37.16%) Algorithms
2 8 (5.41%) Analytical Mindset
3 7 (4.73%) Data Structures
4 4 (2.70%) Management Information System
4 4 (2.70%) Multi-touch
4 4 (2.70%) Self-Motivation
5 3 (2.03%) Credit Risk
5 3 (2.03%) Social Media
6 2 (1.35%) Cloud Native
6 2 (1.35%) Data Protection Act
6 2 (1.35%) Greenfield Project
7 1 (0.68%) FMCG
7 1 (0.68%) Life Science
7 1 (0.68%) Marketing Technology
7 1 (0.68%) Onboarding
7 1 (0.68%) Reinsurance
Processes & Methodologies
1 147 (99.32%) Data Science
2 79 (53.38%) Machine Learning
3 72 (48.65%) Visualisation
4 64 (43.24%) Data Analysis
5 44 (29.73%) Data Visualisation
6 41 (27.70%) Mathematics
6 41 (27.70%) Statistics
7 38 (25.68%) Analytics
8 34 (22.97%) Business Intelligence
8 34 (22.97%) Data Modelling
9 31 (20.95%) Predictive Modelling
10 27 (18.24%) Artificial Intelligence
11 26 (17.57%) Computer Science
12 25 (16.89%) Decision-Making
13 22 (14.86%) Data Pipeline
13 22 (14.86%) Statistical Modelling
14 20 (13.51%) Actionable Insight
15 19 (12.84%) Agile
16 15 (10.14%) Prototyping
16 15 (10.14%) Statistical Analysis
Programming Languages
1 130 (87.84%) Python
2 62 (41.89%) SQL
3 47 (31.76%) R
4 3 (2.03%) MATLAB
5 2 (1.35%) Bash
5 2 (1.35%) C#
6 1 (0.68%) C++
6 1 (0.68%) Scala
6 1 (0.68%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 36 (24.32%) Degree
2 26 (17.57%) Security Cleared
3 21 (14.19%) SC Cleared
4 15 (10.14%) Computer Science Degree
5 9 (6.08%) PhD
6 8 (5.41%) Master's Degree
7 4 (2.70%) Numerate Degree
8 3 (2.03%) BPSS Clearance
9 2 (1.35%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 8 (5.41%) Data Quality
2 1 (0.68%) Accessibility
2 1 (0.68%) QA
System Software
1 7 (4.73%) Docker
Systems Management
1 1 (0.68%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 9 (6.08%) Google
2 8 (5.41%) Databricks
2 8 (5.41%) Microsoft
3 6 (4.05%) Alteryx
4 5 (3.38%) ServiceNow
5 3 (2.03%) OpenAI
6 2 (1.35%) Oracle
6 2 (1.35%) Salesforce
7 1 (0.68%) Cloudera
7 1 (0.68%) SAP