AI Job Trends

AI
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring AI skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 21 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 4 34 53
Rank change year-on-year +30 +19 +65
Permanent jobs citing AI 10,155 2,656 3,741
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 13.37% 6.28% 4.36%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 17.22% 6.72% 5.01%
Number of salaries quoted 2,676 1,420 1,852
10th Percentile £33,750 £35,000 £41,250
25th Percentile £50,000 £56,250 £47,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £72,500 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year -3.45% +3.57% -
75th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £92,500
90th Percentile £111,250 £118,750 £115,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £57,500 £66,206 £60,000
% change year-on-year -13.15% +10.34% -7.69%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

AI falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 58,981 39,507 74,640
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 77.68% 93.49% 87.04%
Number of salaries quoted 35,808 22,230 56,250
10th Percentile £29,750 £31,750 £29,079
25th Percentile £40,000 £43,887 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +9.09% -11.29%
75th Percentile £77,500 £80,000 £73,750
90th Percentile £97,500 £102,410 £93,750
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £55,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year -9.09% +10.00% -8.90%

AI
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing AI relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

AI job vacancy trend in the UK

AI
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing AI.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing AI

AI
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing AI over the 6 months to 21 March 2026.

Salary histogram for AI in the UK

AI
Top 18 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing AI within the UK over the 6 months to 21 March 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +31 9,313 £70,000 -6.67% 2,957
UK excluding London +28 7,211 £57,500 -13.15% 1,830
North of England +38 2,664 £60,000 -6.07% 462
London +28 2,448 £82,500 -10.81% 1,555
Work from Home +31 2,429 £65,000 -1.85% 1,323
North West +35 1,977 £61,334 -12.38% 227
Midlands +71 1,582 £52,500 -19.23% 205
South East +31 1,432 £50,000 -31.03% 661
West Midlands +66 1,280 £52,500 -12.50% 106
East of England +18 743 £55,000 -16.95% 170
Yorkshire +32 571 £60,000 +33.33% 179
South West +9 385 £60,000 -2.04% 195
East Midlands +50 313 £50,000 -23.08% 98
Scotland +20 275 £70,000 +55.56% 93
Wales +32 121 £47,500 -25.05% 63
North East +41 116 £55,000 -24.14% 58
Northern Ireland -3 61 £90,000 -5.26% 21
Channel Islands - 8 - -

AI
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
1 107 (1.05%) Apache Airflow
2 99 (0.97%) Apache Spark
3 91 (0.90%) SharePoint
4 65 (0.64%) Jupyter
5 54 (0.53%) CMS
5 54 (0.53%) Confluence
6 41 (0.40%) Apache
7 30 (0.30%) ArcGIS
7 30 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
8 23 (0.23%) WordPress
9 19 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
10 17 (0.17%) Appian
11 13 (0.13%) JBoss
11 13 (0.13%) WebSphere
12 11 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 9 (0.089%) SAS
14 5 (0.049%) Apache Pulsar
14 5 (0.049%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.049%) IIS
14 5 (0.049%) Umbraco
Applications
1 899 (8.85%) Microsoft Excel
2 833 (8.20%) Chatbot
3 87 (0.86%) Microsoft Office
4 52 (0.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 22 (0.22%) MS Visio
5 22 (0.22%) Spreadsheet
5 22 (0.22%) UserZoom
6 11 (0.11%) Maya
7 7 (0.069%) Adobe Premiere
8 6 (0.059%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 6 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
8 6 (0.059%) Photoshop
9 5 (0.049%) Adobe Illustrator
9 5 (0.049%) Camtasia
10 4 (0.039%) Adobe After Effects
10 4 (0.039%) CapCut
10 4 (0.039%) Weka
11 3 (0.030%) Final Cut Pro
11 3 (0.030%) Sketch
12 1 (0.010%) Notion
Business Applications
1 38 (0.37%) Dynamics CRM
2 18 (0.18%) NetSuite
3 17 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 14 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
5 12 (0.12%) Oracle Payables
6 10 (0.098%) Workday HCM
7 8 (0.079%) Distributed Ledger
7 8 (0.079%) Shopify
8 7 (0.069%) Oracle EBS
8 7 (0.069%) Salesforce CRM
9 6 (0.059%) Endur
10 4 (0.039%) Dynamics AX
10 4 (0.039%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 4 (0.039%) Oracle Receivables
10 4 (0.039%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 3 (0.030%) Oracle Assets
11 3 (0.030%) Oracle General Ledger
12 2 (0.020%) Dynamics GP
12 2 (0.020%) Oracle Cash Management
12 2 (0.020%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 4,156 (40.93%) Cloud Computing
2 1,869 (18.40%) Azure
3 1,186 (11.68%) Power Platform
4 901 (8.87%) Azure AI
5 812 (8.00%) AWS
6 467 (4.60%) SaaS
7 346 (3.41%) GCP
8 213 (2.10%) GitHub
9 197 (1.94%) Microsoft 365
10 176 (1.73%) Azure DevOps
11 161 (1.59%) Snowflake
12 138 (1.36%) Adobe Analytics
13 119 (1.17%) Microsoft Copilot
14 116 (1.14%) Azure Data Factory
15 109 (1.07%) GitHub Copilot
15 109 (1.07%) Serverless
16 101 (0.99%) Entra ID
17 99 (0.97%) Power Automate
18 93 (0.92%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 88 (0.87%) Figma
Communications & Networking
1 4,053 (39.91%) Internet
2 220 (2.17%) Broadband
3 52 (0.51%) Firewall
4 32 (0.32%) Unified Communications
5 28 (0.28%) Network Security
6 26 (0.26%) VPN
7 20 (0.20%) VoIP
8 19 (0.19%) WAN
9 18 (0.18%) HTTP
9 18 (0.18%) TCP/IP
10 17 (0.17%) DNS
11 14 (0.14%) DHCP
11 14 (0.14%) Telepresence
11 14 (0.14%) WebEx
12 9 (0.089%) VLAN
12 9 (0.089%) Wi-Fi
13 8 (0.079%) SD-WAN
14 6 (0.059%) DMZ
14 6 (0.059%) Intranet
14 6 (0.059%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1,044 (10.28%) Power BI
2 930 (9.16%) Tableau
3 179 (1.76%) Data Warehouse
4 131 (1.29%) Data Lake
5 119 (1.17%) SQL Server
6 92 (0.91%) Metadata
7 91 (0.90%) PostgreSQL
8 82 (0.81%) MongoDB
8 82 (0.81%) NoSQL
9 68 (0.67%) Big Data
10 60 (0.59%) BigQuery
11 50 (0.49%) Elasticsearch
11 50 (0.49%) Looker
12 39 (0.38%) MySQL
13 38 (0.37%) Amazon Redshift
14 37 (0.36%) Pinecone
15 34 (0.33%) Relational Database
16 33 (0.32%) Azure SQL Database
17 32 (0.32%) Apache Hive
18 31 (0.31%) GIS
Development Applications
1 158 (1.56%) Git
2 100 (0.98%) JIRA
3 69 (0.68%) MLflow
4 58 (0.57%) Visual Studio Code
5 47 (0.46%) Jenkins
6 34 (0.33%) GitLab
7 25 (0.25%) Claude Code
7 25 (0.25%) IBM UrbanCode
8 24 (0.24%) Cypress.io
9 23 (0.23%) Selenium
10 16 (0.16%) Postman
11 14 (0.14%) TeamCity
12 13 (0.13%) Octopus Deploy
13 12 (0.12%) SpecFlow
13 12 (0.12%) Visual Studio
14 11 (0.11%) Bitbucket
14 11 (0.11%) Oracle Forms
15 9 (0.089%) Storybook
16 8 (0.079%) Gradle
16 8 (0.079%) Vite
General
1 5,971 (58.80%) Social Skills
2 4,478 (44.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 4,259 (41.94%) Banking
4 1,212 (11.94%) Finance
5 898 (8.84%) Analytical Skills
6 411 (4.05%) Marketing
7 320 (3.15%) Legal
8 314 (3.09%) Public Sector
9 277 (2.73%) Law
10 269 (2.65%) Retail
11 268 (2.64%) Games
12 173 (1.70%) Manufacturing
13 118 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
14 104 (1.02%) Telecoms
15 102 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
16 90 (0.89%) Organisational Skills
17 84 (0.83%) Financial Institution
18 79 (0.78%) Pharmaceutical
19 49 (0.48%) Advertising
20 48 (0.47%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 3,160 (31.12%) Lecturer
2 996 (9.81%) Analyst
3 843 (8.30%) Data Analyst
4 797 (7.85%) Junior
5 772 (7.60%) Junior Analyst
5 772 (7.60%) Junior Data Analyst
6 766 (7.54%) Senior
7 751 (7.40%) Trainer
8 541 (5.33%) Lead
9 430 (4.23%) Developer
10 322 (3.17%) Architect
11 273 (2.69%) Consultant
12 197 (1.94%) Software Engineer
13 170 (1.67%) Data Engineer
14 145 (1.43%) Solutions Architect
15 144 (1.42%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 105 (1.03%) Data Scientist
17 102 (1.00%) Content Editor
18 89 (0.88%) Senior Developer
18 89 (0.88%) Senior Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 255 (2.51%) React
2 183 (1.80%) PyTorch
3 164 (1.61%) .NET
4 163 (1.61%) REST
5 142 (1.40%) TensorFlow
6 131 (1.29%) HTML
7 129 (1.27%) Node.js
8 126 (1.24%) RESTful
9 123 (1.21%) scikit-learn
10 106 (1.04%) LangChain
11 104 (1.02%) Pandas
12 103 (1.01%) CSS
13 100 (0.98%) Kafka
14 91 (0.90%) Hugging Face
15 87 (0.86%) FastAPI
16 81 (0.80%) Django
17 78 (0.77%) NumPy
18 66 (0.65%) AngularJS
19 64 (0.63%) PySpark
20 63 (0.62%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 4,077 (40.15%) IoT
2 305 (3.00%) Cloud Native
3 210 (2.07%) Onboarding
4 193 (1.90%) Social Media
5 182 (1.79%) Algorithms
6 175 (1.72%) Product Ownership
7 166 (1.63%) AI Agents
8 141 (1.39%) Robotics
9 137 (1.35%) Self-Motivation
10 130 (1.28%) Blog
11 107 (1.05%) Distributed Systems
12 101 (0.99%) Management Information System
13 97 (0.96%) Enterprise Software
14 94 (0.93%) Low-Code
15 87 (0.86%) Life Science
16 82 (0.81%) Mobile App
17 73 (0.72%) Molecular Biology
18 71 (0.70%) Public Cloud
19 67 (0.66%) Virtual Team
20 62 (0.61%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 95 (0.94%) Linux
1 95 (0.94%) Windows
2 85 (0.84%) Android
3 60 (0.59%) Unix
4 59 (0.58%) Apple iOS
5 31 (0.31%) Windows Server
6 15 (0.15%) Ubuntu
7 9 (0.089%) Mac OS
8 5 (0.049%) VMS
8 5 (0.049%) Windows Server 2016
9 4 (0.039%) Robot Operating System
10 3 (0.030%) OpenWrt
11 2 (0.020%) Kali Linux
11 2 (0.020%) Mac OS X
11 2 (0.020%) Windows Server 2019
11 2 (0.020%) zOS
12 1 (0.010%) FreeRTOS
12 1 (0.010%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 5,166 (50.87%) Machine Learning
2 4,325 (42.59%) User Experience
3 4,321 (42.55%) Cybersecurity
4 4,073 (40.11%) Web Development
5 1,246 (12.27%) Analytics
6 1,196 (11.78%) Business Intelligence
7 998 (9.83%) Agile
8 899 (8.85%) Conversational UI
9 763 (7.51%) Roadmaps
10 762 (7.50%) Problem-Solving
11 671 (6.61%) CI/CD
12 630 (6.20%) Decision-Making
13 615 (6.06%) Continuous Improvement
14 590 (5.81%) Software Engineering
15 558 (5.49%) DevOps
16 548 (5.40%) Generative AI
17 544 (5.36%) Data Science
18 536 (5.28%) LLM
19 490 (4.83%) Mentoring
20 403 (3.97%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 2,021 (19.90%) Python
2 1,405 (13.84%) SQL
3 250 (2.46%) Java
3 250 (2.46%) JavaScript
4 222 (2.19%) TypeScript
5 178 (1.75%) C#
6 83 (0.82%) C++
7 72 (0.71%) Go
8 70 (0.69%) PowerShell
9 66 (0.65%) Bash
10 55 (0.54%) R
11 40 (0.39%) Kotlin
12 37 (0.36%) PHP
13 29 (0.29%) Rust
14 26 (0.26%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 26 (0.26%) Scala
15 21 (0.21%) Apex Code
16 18 (0.18%) Bicep
16 18 (0.18%) C
17 17 (0.17%) Swift
Qualifications
1 5,618 (55.32%) Degree
2 4,582 (45.12%) Master's Degree
3 4,525 (44.56%) PhD
4 4,051 (39.89%) Postgraduate
5 829 (8.16%) Azure Certification
6 295 (2.90%) Security Cleared
7 196 (1.93%) SC Cleared
8 182 (1.79%) Computer Science Degree
9 118 (1.16%) AWS Certification
10 97 (0.96%) DV Cleared
11 70 (0.69%) DBS Check
12 56 (0.55%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 50 (0.49%) PMP
14 47 (0.46%) CISSP
15 45 (0.44%) ACCA
16 42 (0.41%) Microsoft Certification
17 35 (0.34%) PMI Certification
18 31 (0.31%) Cisco Certification
18 31 (0.31%) Numerate Degree
19 22 (0.22%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 318 (3.13%) Accessibility
2 261 (2.57%) Data Quality
3 162 (1.60%) QA
4 157 (1.55%) GDPR
5 71 (0.70%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 58 (0.57%) WCAG
7 48 (0.47%) EU AI Act
8 40 (0.39%) GRC
8 40 (0.39%) HIPAA
9 38 (0.37%) NIST
10 37 (0.36%) IFRS
11 31 (0.31%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 30 (0.30%) GxP
13 25 (0.25%) Actionable Recommendations
13 25 (0.25%) PMO
13 25 (0.25%) Solvency II
14 21 (0.21%) PSD2
14 21 (0.21%) SLA
15 20 (0.20%) Cyber Essentials
16 17 (0.17%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 269 (2.65%) Docker
2 82 (0.81%) Active Directory
3 33 (0.32%) Virtual Machines
4 14 (0.14%) VMware Infrastructure
5 13 (0.13%) Firmware
6 10 (0.098%) vSphere
7 9 (0.089%) Virtual Desktop
8 4 (0.039%) Lustre
8 4 (0.039%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 3 (0.030%) Kamailio
9 3 (0.030%) VMware ESXi
10 2 (0.020%) Ceph
10 2 (0.020%) GPFS
10 2 (0.020%) Hyper-V
10 2 (0.020%) RACF
11 1 (0.010%) Apache Flume
11 1 (0.010%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 253 (2.49%) Kubernetes
2 219 (2.16%) Terraform
3 61 (0.60%) Ansible
4 41 (0.40%) Single Sign-On
5 39 (0.38%) Prometheus
6 37 (0.36%) Grafana
7 35 (0.34%) Microsoft Intune
8 14 (0.14%) Cisco CUCM
9 7 (0.069%) Argo
9 7 (0.069%) Proxmox
9 7 (0.069%) vCenter Server
10 6 (0.059%) Kubeflow
11 4 (0.039%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 4 (0.039%) Control-M
11 4 (0.039%) RSA Archer
11 4 (0.039%) SolarWinds Orion
12 3 (0.030%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
12 3 (0.030%) HP Fortify
13 2 (0.020%) Microsoft Data Protection Manager
13 2 (0.020%) SCCM
Vendors
1 1,595 (15.71%) Microsoft
2 740 (7.29%) PayPal
3 233 (2.29%) Databricks
4 199 (1.96%) Google
5 193 (1.90%) Adobe
6 126 (1.24%) Dell
7 112 (1.10%) OpenAI
8 108 (1.06%) Oracle
9 96 (0.95%) Salesforce
10 78 (0.77%) Cisco
11 72 (0.71%) SAP
12 61 (0.60%) Foundry
13 56 (0.55%) Palantir
14 47 (0.46%) Alteryx
15 43 (0.42%) ServiceNow
16 34 (0.33%) Bloomberg
16 34 (0.33%) Informatica
17 31 (0.31%) Apple
18 30 (0.30%) HubSpot
18 30 (0.30%) Red Hat