Machine Learning Contract Job Trends in the North of England

Machine Learning (ML)
England > North of England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North of England requiring Machine Learning skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 141 117 116
Rank change year-on-year -24 -1 +25
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 134 72 55
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 1.79% 1.81% 1.33%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.15% 2.03% 1.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 72 44 33
10th Percentile £413 £365 £400
25th Percentile £461 £420 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £561 £497 £500
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -0.70% -13.04%
75th Percentile £612 £641 £606
90th Percentile £712 £688 £675
England median daily rate £575 £565 £600
% change year-on-year +1.77% -5.83% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 3 4
10th Percentile £28.50 £73.00 -
25th Percentile £45.25 £73.75 -
Median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +2.67% +62.41% -
75th Percentile - £78.13 -
90th Percentile £87.40 £78.50 -
England median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £52.50
% change year-on-year +2.67% +42.86% +13.69%

All Process & Methodology Skills
North of England

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 North of England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 6,230 3,550 3,464
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 83.23% 89.04% 83.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,684 2,257 2,085
10th Percentile £310 £268 £313
25th Percentile £402 £375 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £470 £500
Median % change year-on-year +6.38% -6.00% -
75th Percentile £588 £563 £588
90th Percentile £675 £650 £675
England median daily rate £525 £513 £525
% change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 511 210 240
10th Percentile £16.01 £12.82 £11.07
25th Percentile £21.33 £17.48 £14.41
Median hourly rate £43.96 £22.63 £26.76
Median % change year-on-year +94.26% -15.43% -3.53%
75th Percentile £70.00 £43.91 £48.75
90th Percentile £77.50 £72.50 £69.78
England median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +5.94%

Machine Learning
Job Vacancy Trend in the North of England

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

Machine Learning job vacancy trend in the North of England

Machine Learning
Daily Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Machine Learning.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Machine Learning

Machine Learning
Daily Rate Histogram in the North of England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Machine Learning in the North of England over the 6 months to 18 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Machine Learning in the North of England

Machine Learning
Hourly Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Machine Learning.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Machine Learning

Machine Learning
Hourly Rate Histogram in the North of England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Machine Learning in the North of England over the 6 months to 18 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Machine Learning in the North of England

Machine Learning
Contract Job Locations in the North of England

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 North of England region over the 6 months to 18 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
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
North West -29 66 £600 +11.63% 79
Yorkshire -7 57 £550 +12.19% 53
North East -34 12 £463 +8.82% 27
Machine Learning
England

Machine Learning
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North of England 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 11 (8.21%) Apache Spark
2 6 (4.48%) Confluence
2 6 (4.48%) SAS
3 4 (2.99%) Apache Airflow
3 4 (2.99%) SharePoint
4 3 (2.24%) Apache
4 3 (2.24%) Jupyter
Applications
1 4 (2.99%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 5 (3.73%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.75%) Cloudability
2 1 (0.75%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 51 (38.06%) AWS
2 47 (35.07%) Azure
3 35 (26.12%) GCP
4 20 (14.93%) Vertex AI
5 13 (9.70%) Serverless
6 12 (8.96%) AWS Lambda
7 11 (8.21%) Azure AKS
8 10 (7.46%) Amazon S3
8 10 (7.46%) Azure AI
8 10 (7.46%) Power Platform
9 8 (5.97%) Amazon SageMaker
9 8 (5.97%) Azure Machine Learning
10 6 (4.48%) IBM Watson
10 6 (4.48%) Snowflake
11 5 (3.73%) Amazon OpenSearch
11 5 (3.73%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 4 (2.99%) Amazon ECR
12 4 (2.99%) Google Tag Manager
12 4 (2.99%) Power Automate
12 4 (2.99%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 9 (6.72%) Firewall
2 2 (1.49%) Network Security
3 1 (0.75%) DNS
3 1 (0.75%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (15.67%) BigQuery
2 11 (8.21%) Data Warehouse
2 11 (8.21%) Metadata
3 10 (7.46%) Big Data
3 10 (7.46%) Power BI
4 8 (5.97%) Data Lake
5 7 (5.22%) Amazon Redshift
5 7 (5.22%) NoSQL
6 5 (3.73%) Data Vault
7 4 (2.99%) Elasticsearch
7 4 (2.99%) Looker
7 4 (2.99%) MySQL
8 3 (2.24%) PostgreSQL
9 2 (1.49%) Amazon Athena
9 2 (1.49%) Azure SQL Database
9 2 (1.49%) Hadoop
9 2 (1.49%) Relational Database
9 2 (1.49%) SQL Server
9 2 (1.49%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 2 (1.49%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 9 (6.72%) JIRA
2 8 (5.97%) GitLab
3 4 (2.99%) Git
4 2 (1.49%) Claude Code
4 2 (1.49%) Pylint
5 1 (0.75%) SonarQube
General
1 33 (24.63%) Finance
2 23 (17.16%) Social Skills
3 20 (14.93%) Analytical Skills
4 16 (11.94%) Banking
5 13 (9.70%) Public Sector
6 4 (2.99%) Manufacturing
7 3 (2.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 3 (2.24%) Marketing
8 2 (1.49%) Retail
9 1 (0.75%) Billing
9 1 (0.75%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (0.75%) Financial Institution
9 1 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
9 1 (0.75%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 21 (15.67%) Architect
2 20 (14.93%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
3 15 (11.19%) Lead
4 13 (9.70%) Senior
5 12 (8.96%) Cloud Engineer
6 10 (7.46%) DevOps Engineer
6 10 (7.46%) Security Engineer
7 8 (5.97%) Analyst
7 8 (5.97%) Security Architect
7 8 (5.97%) Software Engineer
8 7 (5.22%) Data Engineer
8 7 (5.22%) Data Scientist
8 7 (5.22%) Python Engineer
9 6 (4.48%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 6 (4.48%) Developer
10 5 (3.73%) Python Developer
11 4 (2.99%) C++ Software Engineer
11 4 (2.99%) Data Analyst
11 4 (2.99%) Enterprise Architect
11 4 (2.99%) Senior C++ Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 16 (11.94%) PyTorch
2 12 (8.96%) LangChain
3 11 (8.21%) scikit-learn
4 10 (7.46%) PySpark
5 6 (4.48%) Kafka
5 6 (4.48%) TensorFlow
6 5 (3.73%) Langfuse
6 5 (3.73%) REST
7 4 (2.99%) Hugging Face
7 4 (2.99%) LangGraph
8 2 (1.49%) Faiss
8 2 (1.49%) Model Context Protocol
8 2 (1.49%) NumPy
8 2 (1.49%) ONNX
8 2 (1.49%) Pandas
8 2 (1.49%) Plotly
8 2 (1.49%) React
8 2 (1.49%) SailPoint
8 2 (1.49%) TFX
8 2 (1.49%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 24 (17.91%) AI Agents
2 19 (14.18%) Cloud Native
3 8 (5.97%) Onboarding
4 6 (4.48%) Security Posture
5 5 (3.73%) Cyber Threat
6 4 (2.99%) Algorithms
6 4 (2.99%) Blockchain
6 4 (2.99%) Data Protection Act
6 4 (2.99%) Data Structures
6 4 (2.99%) Hybrid Cloud
7 3 (2.24%) Credit Risk
7 3 (2.24%) Management Information System
7 3 (2.24%) Self-Motivation
8 2 (1.49%) Autonomous Agent
8 2 (1.49%) Cyber Defence
8 2 (1.49%) Product Ownership
9 1 (0.75%) Distributed Computing
9 1 (0.75%) Distributed Systems
9 1 (0.75%) Legacy Systems
9 1 (0.75%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 9 (6.72%) Linux
2 1 (0.75%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 118 (88.06%) AI
2 50 (37.31%) CI/CD
3 48 (35.82%) LLM
4 40 (29.85%) Generative AI
5 36 (26.87%) DevOps
6 35 (26.12%) Analytics
7 33 (24.63%) Data Pipeline
8 30 (22.39%) Data Science
8 30 (22.39%) Roadmaps
9 29 (21.64%) Agile
10 28 (20.90%) Observability
11 23 (17.16%) Cybersecurity
11 23 (17.16%) Data Engineering
12 22 (16.42%) MLOps
13 21 (15.67%) Continuous Improvement
13 21 (15.67%) Infrastructure as Code
14 20 (14.93%) Data Modelling
14 20 (14.93%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
15 19 (14.18%) Stakeholder Management
15 19 (14.18%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 71 (52.99%) Python
2 38 (28.36%) SQL
3 8 (5.97%) Java
4 5 (3.73%) JavaScript
5 4 (2.99%) C++
5 4 (2.99%) Rust
5 4 (2.99%) TypeScript
6 3 (2.24%) Scala
7 2 (1.49%) Bash
7 2 (1.49%) Bicep
7 2 (1.49%) PowerShell
8 1 (0.75%) C#
8 1 (0.75%) Go
8 1 (0.75%) Korn
8 1 (0.75%) MATLAB
8 1 (0.75%) R
Qualifications
1 16 (11.94%) Security Cleared
2 13 (9.70%) Degree
3 12 (8.96%) SC Cleared
4 11 (8.21%) AWS Certification
5 7 (5.22%) CISSP
5 7 (5.22%) Computer Science Degree
5 7 (5.22%) DV Cleared
6 4 (2.99%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 4 (2.99%) BPSS Clearance
7 2 (1.49%) (ISC)2 CCSP
7 2 (1.49%) CCSP
7 2 (1.49%) Cisco Certification
8 1 (0.75%) Azure Certification
8 1 (0.75%) Master's Degree
8 1 (0.75%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 21 (15.67%) Data Quality
2 7 (5.22%) GDPR
3 4 (2.99%) QA
4 3 (2.24%) NIST
5 2 (1.49%) Accessibility
5 2 (1.49%) WCAG
6 1 (0.75%) EU AI Act
6 1 (0.75%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 15 (11.19%) Docker
2 1 (0.75%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 20 (14.93%) Kubernetes
1 20 (14.93%) Terraform
2 6 (4.48%) Prometheus
3 2 (1.49%) Grafana
3 2 (1.49%) Kubeflow
4 1 (0.75%) Ansible
4 1 (0.75%) Podman
Vendors
1 25 (18.66%) Google
2 20 (14.93%) Databricks
3 14 (10.45%) Microsoft
4 8 (5.97%) ServiceNow
5 6 (4.48%) IBM
5 6 (4.48%) OpenAI
6 5 (3.73%) SAP
7 4 (2.99%) Dynatrace
7 4 (2.99%) UiPath
8 3 (2.24%) Foundry
8 3 (2.24%) Teradata
9 2 (1.49%) Cisco
9 2 (1.49%) Informatica
10 1 (0.75%) Ariba
10 1 (0.75%) BiZZdesign
10 1 (0.75%) Genesys
10 1 (0.75%) Infor
10 1 (0.75%) Oracle
10 1 (0.75%) Red Hat