Data Scientist Job Trends

Data Scientist
UK

The median Data Scientist salary in the UK is £70,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 11 May 2026.

The table below compares current salary benchmarking and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
11 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 388 425 439
Rank change year-on-year +37 +14 +91
Permanent jobs requiring a Data Scientist 381 240 514
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.42% 0.55% 0.53%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.45% 0.61% 0.56%
Number of salaries quoted 257 113 260
10th Percentile £46,250 £42,500 £42,500
25th Percentile £55,000 £51,250 £51,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £65,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year +7.69% -7.14% +7.69%
75th Percentile £90,000 £85,000 £85,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £93,250 £99,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £60,000 £58,000 £65,000
% change year-on-year +3.45% -10.77% +13.04%

All Permanent IT Job Roles
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent 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 permanent jobs in our overall sample.

Permanent vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 84,208 39,316 91,343
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 93.15% 89.55% 94.56%
Number of salaries quoted 55,431 23,382 67,108
10th Percentile £30,000 £30,000 £28,500
25th Percentile £40,000 £41,250 £38,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £58,000 £52,550
Median % change year-on-year -5.17% +10.37% -12.42%
75th Percentile £75,000 £77,500 £71,250
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £90,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £52,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year -4.76% +5.00% -5.66%

Data Scientist
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings featuring 'Data Scientist' in the job title relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Data Scientist job vacancy trend in the UK

Data Scientist
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for Data Scientist job vacancies in the UK.

Salary distribution trend for Data Scientist job vacancies in the UK

Data Scientist
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Data Scientist over the 6 months to 11 May 2026.

Salary histogram for Data Scientist in the UK

Data Scientist
Top 17 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Data Scientist within the UK over the 6 months to 11 May 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 +74 363 £70,000 +9.38% 144
UK excluding London -9 192 £60,000 +3.45% 76
London +74 176 £80,000 -5.88% 89
Work from Home +31 123 £65,000 +1.56% 70
North of England -12 60 £70,000 +27.27% 20
North West +28 51 £70,000 +55.56% 13
Midlands -10 47 £66,720 +48.27% 12
South West -63 42 £60,000 -16.66% 14
East Midlands +3 31 £70,000 +20.69% 9
South East -15 23 £40,000 -31.03% 26
West Midlands -29 16 £60,860 +35.24% 3
East of England -3 14 £86,725 +49.53% 1
Yorkshire -49 7 £66,720 +4.25% 1
Northern Ireland - 3 - -
Wales -27 2 £40,000 -52.94% 1
North East -42 2 £66,720 +28.31% 6
Scotland -16 1 £100,000 +42.86% 2

Data Scientist Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 11 May 2026, Data Scientist job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all permanent job ads featuring Data Scientist in the job title.

1 367 (96.33%) Data Science
2 176 (46.19%) Machine Learning
3 146 (38.32%) Python
4 139 (36.48%) AI
5 109 (28.61%) Analytics
6 79 (20.73%) SQL
7 61 (16.01%) Degree
8 53 (13.91%) Visualisation
9 46 (12.07%) Security Cleared
10 44 (11.55%) Actionable Insight
10 44 (11.55%) Decision-Making
11 42 (11.02%) Azure
11 42 (11.02%) Statistics
12 41 (10.76%) Mathematics
12 41 (10.76%) Power BI
12 41 (10.76%) Power Platform
13 39 (10.24%) Mentoring
14 37 (9.71%) Business Intelligence
15 36 (9.45%) AWS
16 35 (9.19%) Data Visualisation
17 33 (8.66%) DV Cleared
17 33 (8.66%) Predictive Modelling
17 33 (8.66%) PyTorch
17 33 (8.66%) R
18 32 (8.40%) LLM
19 29 (7.61%) MLOps
20 28 (7.35%) Problem-Solving
21 27 (7.09%) Data Analysis
22 25 (6.56%) PhD
22 25 (6.56%) Storytelling

Data Scientist Skill Set
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 10 (2.62%) Apache Spark
2 3 (0.79%) SAS
3 2 (0.52%) ArcGIS
4 1 (0.26%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (0.26%) Jupyter
Applications
1 6 (1.57%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (1.05%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.26%) Trello
Business Applications
1 10 (2.62%) NetSuite
Cloud Services
1 42 (11.02%) Azure
2 41 (10.76%) Power Platform
3 36 (9.45%) AWS
4 21 (5.51%) GCP
5 11 (2.89%) dbt
6 7 (1.84%) Azure Machine Learning
6 7 (1.84%) SaaS
7 6 (1.57%) Dataform
8 5 (1.31%) Snowflake
9 4 (1.05%) Amazon SageMaker
9 4 (1.05%) AWS Lambda
9 4 (1.05%) Dynamics 365
9 4 (1.05%) Serverless
9 4 (1.05%) Smartsheet
10 3 (0.79%) Amazon S3
11 2 (0.52%) Azure Data Factory
11 2 (0.52%) Cloud Computing
12 1 (0.26%) Azure DevOps
Communications & Networking
1 6 (1.57%) Broadband
2 5 (1.31%) Software-Defined Radio
3 3 (0.79%) 5G
4 2 (0.52%) Firewall
5 1 (0.26%) Internet
5 1 (0.26%) LTE
5 1 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
5 1 (0.26%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 41 (10.76%) Power BI
2 24 (6.30%) Tableau
3 8 (2.10%) Data Warehouse
3 8 (2.10%) Looker
3 8 (2.10%) SQL Server
4 6 (1.57%) Amazon Redshift
4 6 (1.57%) Metabase
5 5 (1.31%) Big Data
6 4 (1.05%) Data Mining
7 3 (0.79%) Amazon Athena
7 3 (0.79%) NoSQL
7 3 (0.79%) QGIS
8 2 (0.52%) Delta Lake
8 2 (0.52%) GIS
8 2 (0.52%) Hadoop
8 2 (0.52%) Spatial Data
9 1 (0.26%) Data Lake
9 1 (0.26%) Geospatial Data
Development Applications
1 9 (2.36%) Git
2 7 (1.84%) MLflow
3 1 (0.26%) JIRA
3 1 (0.26%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 62 (16.27%) Finance
2 59 (15.49%) Analytical Skills
3 48 (12.60%) Retail
4 42 (11.02%) Social Skills
5 26 (6.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 24 (6.30%) Marketing
7 18 (4.72%) Public Sector
8 13 (3.41%) Banking
9 10 (2.62%) Publishing
10 9 (2.36%) Games
11 8 (2.10%) Manufacturing
12 6 (1.57%) Financial Institution
12 6 (1.57%) Legal
12 6 (1.57%) Pharmaceutical
13 5 (1.31%) Automotive
13 5 (1.31%) Law
14 4 (1.05%) Influencing Skills
15 3 (0.79%) Presentation Skills
15 3 (0.79%) Telecoms
16 2 (0.52%) Advertising
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 33 (8.66%) PyTorch
2 23 (6.04%) TensorFlow
3 18 (4.72%) scikit-learn
4 12 (3.15%) Pandas
5 9 (2.36%) EDI
5 9 (2.36%) Hugging Face
6 7 (1.84%) PySpark
7 6 (1.57%) NumPy
7 6 (1.57%) XGBoost
8 5 (1.31%) LangChain
8 5 (1.31%) SpaCy
9 4 (1.05%) Google JAX
9 4 (1.05%) JAX
9 4 (1.05%) Streamlit
10 3 (0.79%) LlamaIndex
11 2 (0.52%) NetworkX
12 1 (0.26%) Kafka
12 1 (0.26%) PostGIS
12 1 (0.26%) Shiny
12 1 (0.26%) ZeroMQ
Miscellaneous
1 17 (4.46%) Algorithms
2 13 (3.41%) Data Structures
3 10 (2.62%) FMCG
3 10 (2.62%) Greenfield Project
4 6 (1.57%) Product Ownership
5 5 (1.31%) e-Learning
6 4 (1.05%) Cloud Native
7 3 (0.79%) AI Agents
7 3 (0.79%) Clustering
7 3 (0.79%) Cyber Threat
8 2 (0.52%) Contract for Difference
8 2 (0.52%) Credit Risk
8 2 (0.52%) Insider Threat
8 2 (0.52%) Self-Motivation
9 1 (0.26%) Distributed Computing
9 1 (0.26%) FPGA
9 1 (0.26%) Life Science
9 1 (0.26%) Social Media
9 1 (0.26%) Social Network
9 1 (0.26%) Tandem
Processes & Methodologies
1 367 (96.33%) Data Science
2 176 (46.19%) Machine Learning
3 139 (36.48%) AI
4 109 (28.61%) Analytics
5 53 (13.91%) Visualisation
6 44 (11.55%) Actionable Insight
6 44 (11.55%) Decision-Making
7 42 (11.02%) Statistics
8 41 (10.76%) Mathematics
9 39 (10.24%) Mentoring
10 37 (9.71%) Business Intelligence
11 35 (9.19%) Data Visualisation
12 33 (8.66%) Predictive Modelling
13 32 (8.40%) LLM
14 29 (7.61%) MLOps
15 28 (7.35%) Problem-Solving
16 27 (7.09%) Data Analysis
17 25 (6.56%) Storytelling
18 23 (6.04%) Computer Science
19 22 (5.77%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 146 (38.32%) Python
2 79 (20.73%) SQL
3 33 (8.66%) R
4 6 (1.57%) Julia
5 4 (1.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 4 (1.05%) T-SQL
6 1 (0.26%) C
6 1 (0.26%) C++
6 1 (0.26%) Scala
6 1 (0.26%) VBA
Qualifications
1 61 (16.01%) Degree
2 46 (12.07%) Security Cleared
3 33 (8.66%) DV Cleared
4 25 (6.56%) PhD
5 19 (4.99%) DBS Check
6 13 (3.41%) SC Cleared
7 10 (2.62%) ACCA
7 10 (2.62%) CIMA
8 8 (2.10%) Master's Degree
9 3 (0.79%) Azure Certification
9 3 (0.79%) CISSP
9 3 (0.79%) Computer Science Degree
10 2 (0.52%) CompTIA Security+
10 2 (0.52%) GIAC
10 2 (0.52%) Microsoft Certification
10 2 (0.52%) SANS
11 1 (0.26%) CEH
11 1 (0.26%) CISM
11 1 (0.26%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 19 (4.99%) Data Quality
2 4 (1.05%) QA
3 2 (0.52%) GDPR
4 1 (0.26%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 10 (2.62%) Docker
Systems Management
1 10 (2.62%) Kubernetes
2 2 (0.52%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
2 2 (0.52%) Computer Incident Response Team
2 2 (0.52%) Kubeflow
2 2 (0.52%) Terraform
3 1 (0.26%) Argo
Vendors
1 18 (4.72%) Databricks
2 12 (3.15%) Google
2 12 (3.15%) Microsoft
3 10 (2.62%) Salesforce
4 6 (1.57%) ServiceNow
5 2 (0.52%) Civica
5 2 (0.52%) Northgate
5 2 (0.52%) Orchard
6 1 (0.26%) Cognizant
6 1 (0.26%) Mapbox
6 1 (0.26%) OpenAI