Machine Learning Contract Job Trends in the City of London

Machine Learning (ML)
Central London > City of London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the City of London requiring Machine Learning skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 10 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 53 82 109
Rank change year-on-year +29 +27 +26
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 74 43 25
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.07% 2.24% 1.02%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.55% 2.43% 1.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 55 26 21
10th Percentile £439 £453 £376
25th Percentile £513 £513 £481
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £662 £625 £550
Median % change year-on-year +5.92% +13.64% -12.00%
75th Percentile £788 £772 £750
90th Percentile £940 £800 £825
Central London median daily rate £648 £619 £550
% change year-on-year +4.65% +12.50% -12.00%

All Process & Methodology Skills
City of London

Machine Learning falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in the City of London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 1,626 1,770 2,192
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 89.54% 92.04% 89.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,143 1,078 1,563
10th Percentile £350 £363 £363
25th Percentile £425 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -2.13%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £688
90th Percentile £764 £788 £800
Central London median daily rate £539 £575 £575
% change year-on-year -6.30% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 13 10
10th Percentile £19.94 £15.60 £17.00
25th Percentile £20.50 £22.00 £17.48
Median hourly rate £28.00 £42.50 £26.25
Median % change year-on-year -34.12% +61.90% -30.46%
75th Percentile £42.30 £112.00 £44.56
90th Percentile £45.56 £132.40 £74.13
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £35.00 £27.66
% change year-on-year -25.40% +26.56% -20.99%

Machine Learning
Job Vacancy Trend in the City of London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Machine Learning relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London.

Machine Learning job vacancy trend in the City of London

Machine Learning
Daily Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Machine Learning.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Machine Learning

Machine Learning
Daily Rate Histogram in the City of London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Machine Learning in the City of London over the 6 months to 10 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Machine Learning in the City of London

Machine Learning
Hourly Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Machine Learning.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Machine Learning

Machine Learning
Contract Job Locations in the City of London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Machine Learning within the City of London region over the 6 months to 10 January 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
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
London Bridge - 1 £800 -
Machine Learning
Central London

Machine Learning
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the City of London 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 (13.51%) Apache Spark
2 6 (8.11%) Apache Airflow
3 2 (2.70%) Apache
4 1 (1.35%) Confluence
4 1 (1.35%) Jupyter
Business Applications
1 1 (1.35%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 34 (45.95%) Azure
2 29 (39.19%) AWS
3 18 (24.32%) GCP
4 17 (22.97%) Power Platform
5 9 (12.16%) Azure Machine Learning
6 8 (10.81%) Snowflake
7 7 (9.46%) GitHub
8 6 (8.11%) Amazon SageMaker
8 6 (8.11%) Azure AI
9 5 (6.76%) Copilot Studio
9 5 (6.76%) dbt
9 5 (6.76%) Microsoft Copilot
10 4 (5.41%) Cloud Run
10 4 (5.41%) Google Gemini
10 4 (5.41%) Power Automate
10 4 (5.41%) PowerApps
10 4 (5.41%) SaaS
10 4 (5.41%) Vertex AI
11 3 (4.05%) Cloud Computing
12 2 (2.70%) Amazon S3
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.35%) DNS
1 1 (1.35%) Firewall
1 1 (1.35%) Hyperconnected
Database & Business Intelligence
1 13 (17.57%) Power BI
2 6 (8.11%) Data Warehouse
3 5 (6.76%) Big Data
3 5 (6.76%) NoSQL
3 5 (6.76%) Tableau
4 3 (4.05%) BigQuery
4 3 (4.05%) Data Lake
4 3 (4.05%) Metadata
4 3 (4.05%) Pinecone
4 3 (4.05%) PostgreSQL
5 2 (2.70%) Data Vault
5 2 (2.70%) Geospatial Data
5 2 (2.70%) Redis
5 2 (2.70%) Spatial Data
6 1 (1.35%) Amazon Redshift
6 1 (1.35%) Azure SQL Database
6 1 (1.35%) Delta Lake
6 1 (1.35%) DynamoDB
6 1 (1.35%) Elasticsearch
6 1 (1.35%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 12 (16.22%) Git
2 4 (5.41%) Jenkins
3 2 (2.70%) MLflow
3 2 (2.70%) SonarQube
4 1 (1.35%) Cypress.io
4 1 (1.35%) GitLab
4 1 (1.35%) JIRA
General
1 28 (37.84%) Finance
2 18 (24.32%) Social Skills
3 15 (20.27%) Analytical Skills
4 11 (14.86%) Banking
5 10 (13.51%) Public Sector
6 6 (8.11%) Legal
6 6 (8.11%) Pharmaceutical
7 5 (6.76%) Retail
8 3 (4.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 3 (4.05%) Influencing Skills
9 2 (2.70%) Investment Banking
9 2 (2.70%) Law
9 2 (2.70%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (1.35%) Documentation Skills
10 1 (1.35%) Front Office
10 1 (1.35%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 15 (20.27%) Senior
2 14 (18.92%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
3 12 (16.22%) Architect
4 10 (13.51%) Data Scientist
5 9 (12.16%) Lead
6 8 (10.81%) Developer
7 6 (8.11%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 5 (6.76%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
8 5 (6.76%) Data Engineer
9 4 (5.41%) Data Architect
9 4 (5.41%) Gen AI Engineer
9 4 (5.41%) Python Developer
9 4 (5.41%) Senior Data Scientist
10 3 (4.05%) Backend Developer
10 3 (4.05%) Enterprise Architect
10 3 (4.05%) Lead Data Engineer
10 3 (4.05%) Senior Backend Developer
10 3 (4.05%) Senior Developer
10 3 (4.05%) Senior Python Developer
10 3 (4.05%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 15 (20.27%) scikit-learn
2 14 (18.92%) PyTorch
3 13 (17.57%) TensorFlow
4 9 (12.16%) NumPy
4 9 (12.16%) Pandas
5 7 (9.46%) LangChain
5 7 (9.46%) LangGraph
6 6 (8.11%) FastAPI
7 5 (6.76%) Kafka
8 3 (4.05%) Dask
8 3 (4.05%) Faiss
8 3 (4.05%) Google JAX
8 3 (4.05%) Hugging Face
8 3 (4.05%) JAX
8 3 (4.05%) LightGBM
8 3 (4.05%) Matplotlib
8 3 (4.05%) PySpark
8 3 (4.05%) Seaborn
8 3 (4.05%) XGBoost
9 2 (2.70%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 16 (21.62%) Cloud Native
2 13 (17.57%) AI Agents
3 12 (16.22%) Algorithms
4 7 (9.46%) Product Ownership
5 5 (6.76%) Onboarding
6 4 (5.41%) Derivative
6 4 (5.41%) Life Science
7 3 (4.05%) Analytical Mindset
7 3 (4.05%) Greenfield Project
7 3 (4.05%) Hybrid Cloud
7 3 (4.05%) Legacy Systems
7 3 (4.05%) Taxonomies
8 2 (2.70%) Distributed Computing
8 2 (2.70%) Distributed Systems
8 2 (2.70%) Replication
8 2 (2.70%) Security Posture
9 1 (1.35%) Blog
9 1 (1.35%) Clustering
9 1 (1.35%) Equities
9 1 (1.35%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.35%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 59 (79.73%) AI
2 34 (45.95%) Data Science
3 30 (40.54%) Generative AI
4 27 (36.49%) Analytics
5 25 (33.78%) LLM
6 21 (28.38%) CI/CD
7 16 (21.62%) Data Engineering
7 16 (21.62%) Data Governance
7 16 (21.62%) Visualisation
8 14 (18.92%) Data Pipeline
8 14 (18.92%) MLOps
8 14 (18.92%) Natural Language Processing
9 13 (17.57%) Business Intelligence
9 13 (17.57%) Containerisation
10 12 (16.22%) Agile
10 12 (16.22%) Data Modelling
10 12 (16.22%) DevOps
10 12 (16.22%) Roadmaps
11 11 (14.86%) Observability
11 11 (14.86%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 49 (66.22%) Python
2 22 (29.73%) SQL
3 5 (6.76%) C++
4 4 (5.41%) C#
5 3 (4.05%) Java
5 3 (4.05%) JavaScript
5 3 (4.05%) TypeScript
6 2 (2.70%) Go
6 2 (2.70%) R
7 1 (1.35%) PowerShell
7 1 (1.35%) Rust
7 1 (1.35%) Scala
Qualifications
1 11 (14.86%) Security Cleared
2 8 (10.81%) Degree
3 6 (8.11%) SC Cleared
4 4 (5.41%) MCP
5 3 (4.05%) Master's Degree
6 2 (2.70%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (2.70%) TOGAF Certification
7 1 (1.35%) CISSP
7 1 (1.35%) DBS Check
7 1 (1.35%) MBA
7 1 (1.35%) Microsoft Certification
7 1 (1.35%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (9.46%) Data Quality
2 6 (8.11%) GDPR
3 4 (5.41%) EU AI Act
4 2 (2.70%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 2 (2.70%) NIST
5 1 (1.35%) EMIR
5 1 (1.35%) ISO/IEC 42001
5 1 (1.35%) MiFID
5 1 (1.35%) SOC 2
System Software
1 10 (13.51%) Docker
Systems Management
1 7 (9.46%) Kubernetes
1 7 (9.46%) Terraform
2 3 (4.05%) Prometheus
3 2 (2.70%) Argo
3 2 (2.70%) Istio
4 1 (1.35%) Grafana
4 1 (1.35%) ITRS Geneos
4 1 (1.35%) Kibana
4 1 (1.35%) logstash
4 1 (1.35%) Progress Chef
4 1 (1.35%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 18 (24.32%) Microsoft
2 13 (17.57%) Databricks
3 10 (13.51%) Google
4 6 (8.11%) OpenAI
5 4 (5.41%) Foundry
6 2 (2.70%) Cognos
6 2 (2.70%) Dynatrace
6 2 (2.70%) Guidewire
6 2 (2.70%) IBM
6 2 (2.70%) MicroStrategy
6 2 (2.70%) Sage
6 2 (2.70%) Salesforce
6 2 (2.70%) SAP
7 1 (1.35%) Blue Prism
7 1 (1.35%) Informatica
7 1 (1.35%) SimCorp
7 1 (1.35%) Solace
7 1 (1.35%) TIBCO
7 1 (1.35%) Vermilion
7 1 (1.35%) Workday