Data Scientist Job Trends

Data Scientist
UK

The median Data Scientist salary in the UK is £75,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 3 August 2026.

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

6 months to
3 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 354 497 562
Rank change year-on-year +143 +65 -26
Permanent jobs requiring a Data Scientist 552 201 277
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.53% 0.40% 0.33%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.57% 0.45% 0.35%
Number of salaries quoted 359 95 152
10th Percentile £50,000 £42,500 £40,250
25th Percentile £60,000 £51,375 £50,090
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £75,000 £70,000 £64,000
Median % change year-on-year +7.14% +9.38% +2.40%
75th Percentile £90,000 £90,000 £82,188
90th Percentile £100,000 £97,500 £111,250
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £55,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year +36.36% -8.33% -4.00%

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 97,698 44,800 78,990
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 94.23% 90.07% 94.90%
Number of salaries quoted 66,827 26,689 53,699
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,500 £30,000
25th Percentile £40,000 £37,500 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year - - -8.33%
75th Percentile £75,000 £75,000 £71,915
90th Percentile £96,250 £95,000 £90,844
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,500 £50,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +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 3 August 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 3 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +163 515 £75,000 +7.14% 290
UK excluding London +81 306 £75,000 +36.36% 106
London +83 225 £80,000 +1.59% 196
Work from Home +42 169 £66,720 +2.65% 140
North of England +45 105 £75,000 +36.36% 19
Midlands +39 83 £62,500 +4.82% 13
North West +55 70 £75,000 +39.53% 9
East Midlands +43 68 £60,000 +0.07% 2
South West -59 58 £60,000 -29.41% 13
South East +1 26 £60,000 +41.18% 40
Yorkshire -17 23 £75,026 +26.09% 10
West Midlands -26 15 £66,720 +11.90% 11
East of England -15 13 £75,863 +59.71% 9
North East -43 12 £80,000 +53.85%
Wales -47 12 £87,500 +2.94%
Northern Ireland - 5 £55,000 - 6
Scotland +5 4 £75,013 +7.16% 6

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

For the 6 months to 3 August 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.

1 550 (99.64%) Data Science
2 288 (52.17%) Machine Learning
3 227 (41.12%) AI
4 221 (40.04%) Python
5 177 (32.07%) Analytics
6 120 (21.74%) SQL
7 81 (14.67%) Degree
8 79 (14.31%) Actionable Insight
9 78 (14.13%) MLOps
10 75 (13.59%) Mentoring
11 72 (13.04%) Statistics
12 65 (11.78%) AWS
12 65 (11.78%) Decision-Making
13 64 (11.59%) Azure
13 64 (11.59%) Generative AI
14 59 (10.69%) Mathematics
14 59 (10.69%) Natural Language Processing
15 56 (10.14%) LLM
15 56 (10.14%) Roadmaps
16 52 (9.42%) Deep Learning
17 48 (8.70%) CI/CD
17 48 (8.70%) GCP
17 48 (8.70%) PyTorch
17 48 (8.70%) Security Cleared
17 48 (8.70%) Visualisation
18 45 (8.15%) Predictive Modelling
19 43 (7.79%) Agile
20 42 (7.61%) Feature Engineering
21 41 (7.43%) Validation
22 40 (7.25%) Software Engineering

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 26 (4.71%) Apache Spark
2 6 (1.09%) SAS
3 3 (0.54%) Jupyter
4 2 (0.36%) Apache
5 1 (0.18%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.18%) R Markdown
Applications
1 6 (1.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.72%) Chatbot
3 2 (0.36%) SPSS
4 1 (0.18%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 65 (11.78%) AWS
2 64 (11.59%) Azure
3 48 (8.70%) GCP
4 26 (4.71%) Power Platform
5 17 (3.08%) SaaS
6 12 (2.17%) Azure Machine Learning
7 9 (1.63%) dbt
8 6 (1.09%) Dataform
8 6 (1.09%) Dynamics 365
9 5 (0.91%) Amazon S3
9 5 (0.91%) Amazon SageMaker
9 5 (0.91%) AWS Lambda
9 5 (0.91%) Serverless
9 5 (0.91%) Snowflake
10 4 (0.72%) Smartsheet
11 3 (0.54%) Azure Data Factory
11 3 (0.54%) Cloud Computing
12 2 (0.36%) Salesforce Service Cloud
12 2 (0.36%) Vertex AI
13 1 (0.18%) Prefect
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.91%) Broadband
2 4 (0.72%) Software-Defined Radio
3 3 (0.54%) 5G
4 2 (0.36%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (4.71%) Power BI
2 18 (3.26%) Amazon Redshift
3 16 (2.90%) Data Warehouse
4 15 (2.72%) Tableau
5 10 (1.81%) Looker
6 6 (1.09%) Big Data
6 6 (1.09%) Metabase
7 5 (0.91%) Data Lake
7 5 (0.91%) Data Mining
8 4 (0.72%) Delta Lake
9 3 (0.54%) Amazon Athena
9 3 (0.54%) Relational Database
10 2 (0.36%) Apache Iceberg
10 2 (0.36%) Flink
10 2 (0.36%) Geospatial Data
10 2 (0.36%) NoSQL
10 2 (0.36%) Redis
11 1 (0.18%) BigQuery
11 1 (0.18%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
11 1 (0.18%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 23 (4.17%) Git
2 12 (2.17%) MLflow
3 2 (0.36%) Visual Studio Code
4 1 (0.18%) JIRA
General
1 128 (23.19%) Finance
2 71 (12.86%) Analytical Skills
3 52 (9.42%) Banking
4 50 (9.06%) Social Skills
5 36 (6.52%) Retail
6 33 (5.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 32 (5.80%) Public Sector
8 27 (4.89%) Marketing
9 19 (3.44%) Financial Institution
10 17 (3.08%) Games
11 15 (2.72%) Legal
12 12 (2.17%) Law
13 11 (1.99%) Advertising
14 10 (1.81%) Manufacturing
15 9 (1.63%) Pharmaceutical
16 6 (1.09%) Automotive
16 6 (1.09%) Wearables
17 5 (0.91%) Influencing Skills
17 5 (0.91%) Presentation Skills
17 5 (0.91%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 48 (8.70%) PyTorch
2 40 (7.25%) TensorFlow
3 28 (5.07%) scikit-learn
4 25 (4.53%) Pandas
5 24 (4.35%) Hugging Face
6 16 (2.90%) SpaCy
7 14 (2.54%) NumPy
8 11 (1.99%) XGBoost
9 10 (1.81%) LangChain
10 6 (1.09%) PySpark
11 5 (0.91%) LlamaIndex
11 5 (0.91%) SciPy
12 4 (0.72%) Seaborn
12 4 (0.72%) Streamlit
13 3 (0.54%) LangGraph
14 2 (0.36%) Flash
14 2 (0.36%) Google JAX
14 2 (0.36%) JAX
14 2 (0.36%) LightGBM
14 2 (0.36%) Plotly
Miscellaneous
1 34 (6.16%) Algorithms
2 16 (2.90%) e-Learning
3 10 (1.81%) AI Agents
4 9 (1.63%) Credit Risk
5 7 (1.27%) Cloud Native
5 7 (1.27%) Hedge funds
5 7 (1.27%) Social Media
6 6 (1.09%) Life Science
7 5 (0.91%) Pricing Data
8 4 (0.72%) Data Structures
9 3 (0.54%) Clustering
9 3 (0.54%) Cyber Threat
9 3 (0.54%) Legacy Systems
10 2 (0.36%) Distributed Computing
10 2 (0.36%) FMCG
10 2 (0.36%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 2 (0.36%) Insider Threat
10 2 (0.36%) Self-Motivation
11 1 (0.18%) Distributed Systems
11 1 (0.18%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 3 (0.54%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 550 (99.64%) Data Science
2 288 (52.17%) Machine Learning
3 227 (41.12%) AI
4 177 (32.07%) Analytics
5 79 (14.31%) Actionable Insight
6 78 (14.13%) MLOps
7 75 (13.59%) Mentoring
8 72 (13.04%) Statistics
9 65 (11.78%) Decision-Making
10 64 (11.59%) Generative AI
11 59 (10.69%) Mathematics
11 59 (10.69%) Natural Language Processing
12 56 (10.14%) LLM
12 56 (10.14%) Roadmaps
13 52 (9.42%) Deep Learning
14 48 (8.70%) CI/CD
14 48 (8.70%) Visualisation
15 45 (8.15%) Predictive Modelling
16 43 (7.79%) Agile
17 42 (7.61%) Feature Engineering
Programming Languages
1 221 (40.04%) Python
2 120 (21.74%) SQL
3 32 (5.80%) R
4 6 (1.09%) Julia
5 4 (0.72%) C
5 4 (0.72%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 4 (0.72%) T-SQL
6 3 (0.54%) C++
7 2 (0.36%) Bash
7 2 (0.36%) Java
7 2 (0.36%) VBA
8 1 (0.18%) C#
8 1 (0.18%) LookML
Qualifications
1 81 (14.67%) Degree
2 48 (8.70%) Security Cleared
3 35 (6.34%) DV Cleared
4 28 (5.07%) Master's Degree
5 27 (4.89%) PhD
6 15 (2.72%) DBS Check
7 7 (1.27%) SC Cleared
8 3 (0.54%) CISSP
8 3 (0.54%) Numerate Degree
9 2 (0.36%) Azure Certification
9 2 (0.36%) CompTIA Security+
9 2 (0.36%) Computer Science Degree
9 2 (0.36%) GIAC
9 2 (0.36%) SANS
10 1 (0.18%) CEH
10 1 (0.18%) CISM
10 1 (0.18%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (5.25%) Data Quality
2 6 (1.09%) GDPR
3 5 (0.91%) EU AI Act
4 4 (0.72%) Actionable Recommendations
4 4 (0.72%) QA
System Software
1 19 (3.44%) Docker
Systems Management
1 16 (2.90%) Kubernetes
2 6 (1.09%) Terraform
3 3 (0.54%) Kubeflow
4 2 (0.36%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
4 2 (0.36%) Computer Incident Response Team
Vendors
1 30 (5.43%) Databricks
2 14 (2.54%) Google
3 10 (1.81%) Microsoft
4 6 (1.09%) ServiceNow
5 5 (0.91%) LexisNexis
6 4 (0.72%) OpenAI
7 3 (0.54%) Revolut
8 2 (0.36%) Oracle
8 2 (0.36%) PeopleSoft
8 2 (0.36%) Salesforce
8 2 (0.36%) SYSPRO
8 2 (0.36%) Workday
9 1 (0.18%) Civica
9 1 (0.18%) Cognizant
9 1 (0.18%) Dataiku
9 1 (0.18%) Northgate
9 1 (0.18%) Orchard