AI Contract Job Trends in Scotland

AI
UK > Scotland

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in Scotland requiring AI skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 13 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 35 103 116
Rank change year-on-year +68 +13 +46
Contract jobs citing AI 89 16 27
As % of all contract jobs in Scotland 5.67% 0.93% 1.12%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.42% 1.05% 1.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 51 8 11
10th Percentile £409 £381 £458
25th Percentile £425 £391 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £414 £525
Median % change year-on-year +20.70% -21.10% +11.82%
75th Percentile £544 £505 £550
90th Percentile £588 £638 £638
UK median daily rate £550 £600 £600
% change year-on-year -8.33% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 0
10th Percentile £50.81 - -
25th Percentile £52.03 - -
Median hourly rate £55.61 - -
75th Percentile £60.75 - -
90th Percentile £62.90 - -
UK median hourly rate £42.79 £35.27 £46.18
% change year-on-year +21.34% -23.64% -8.55%

All Process and Methodology Skills
Scotland

AI 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 Scotland.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 1,386 1,521 2,194
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in Scotland 88.22% 88.43% 91.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 792 901 1,374
10th Percentile £238 £213 £250
25th Percentile £381 £363 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £464 £450 £493
Median % change year-on-year +3.06% -8.63% +3.68%
75th Percentile £550 £538 £588
90th Percentile £625 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £533
% change year-on-year -4.76% -1.50% -3.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 98 46 57
10th Percentile £14.20 £15.11 £12.13
25th Percentile £17.90 £18.77 £16.50
Median hourly rate £20.00 £22.94 £19.18
Median % change year-on-year -12.81% +19.59% +3.68%
75th Percentile £25.15 £24.18 £55.00
90th Percentile £52.25 £31.44 £67.00
UK median hourly rate £25.13 £33.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year -23.86% -22.35% +21.43%

AI
Job Vacancy Trend in Scotland

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

AI job vacancy trend in Scotland

AI
Daily Rate Trend in Scotland

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in Scotland citing AI.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in Scotland citing AI

AI
Daily Rate Histogram in Scotland

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing AI in Scotland over the 6 months to 13 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for AI in Scotland

AI
Hourly Rate Trend in Scotland

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in Scotland citing AI.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in Scotland citing AI

AI
Contract Job Locations in Scotland

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing AI within the Scotland region over the 6 months to 13 December 2025. 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
Glasgow +32 44 £450 +15.09% 28
Edinburgh +37 41 £510 -16.12% 39
Perthshire +4 1 £575 -
AI
UK

AI
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in Scotland 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 6 (6.74%) Apache Airflow
2 4 (4.49%) Apache
3 3 (3.37%) Apache Spark
4 1 (1.12%) Cloud Foundry
4 1 (1.12%) CMS
4 1 (1.12%) Confluence
Applications
1 5 (5.62%) Chatbot
2 1 (1.12%) Adobe XD
2 1 (1.12%) Sketch
Cloud Services
1 40 (44.94%) AWS
2 28 (31.46%) Serverless
3 22 (24.72%) Azure
4 18 (20.22%) AWS Lambda
5 15 (16.85%) Amazon S3
6 12 (13.48%) Amazon ECS
7 10 (11.24%) Amazon EKS
8 9 (10.11%) AWS CloudFormation
8 9 (10.11%) Snowflake
9 8 (8.99%) OpenShift
10 7 (7.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 7 (7.87%) Amazon SQS
11 6 (6.74%) Amazon SageMaker
12 4 (4.49%) Amazon Bedrock
13 3 (3.37%) AWS Step Functions
13 3 (3.37%) BlazeMeter
13 3 (3.37%) IaaS
13 3 (3.37%) SaaS
13 3 (3.37%) Textract
13 3 (3.37%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 3 (3.37%) HTTP
2 2 (2.25%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 13 (14.61%) PostgreSQL
2 10 (11.24%) Data Warehouse
3 7 (7.87%) NoSQL
3 7 (7.87%) Redis
4 4 (4.49%) Amazon RDS
5 3 (3.37%) Apache Cassandra
5 3 (3.37%) Big Data
5 3 (3.37%) MongoDB
6 2 (2.25%) Amazon Athena
6 2 (2.25%) Amazon Aurora
6 2 (2.25%) Data Lake
6 2 (2.25%) Delta Lake
7 1 (1.12%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (1.12%) Hadoop
7 1 (1.12%) HBase
7 1 (1.12%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 12 (13.48%) Jenkins
2 6 (6.74%) GitLab
2 6 (6.74%) JIRA
3 5 (5.62%) JUnit
4 4 (4.49%) MLflow
5 3 (3.37%) Artifactory
6 2 (2.25%) Bitbucket
6 2 (2.25%) Git
6 2 (2.25%) MSTest
6 2 (2.25%) NUnit
6 2 (2.25%) Postman
6 2 (2.25%) Ranorex
6 2 (2.25%) Selenium
6 2 (2.25%) Sonatype Nexus
7 1 (1.12%) Cypress.io
7 1 (1.12%) Mockito
General
1 27 (30.34%) Finance
1 27 (30.34%) Social Skills
2 16 (17.98%) Banking
3 10 (11.24%) Public Sector
4 6 (6.74%) Investment Banking
5 5 (5.62%) Analytical Skills
6 4 (4.49%) Retail Banking
7 3 (3.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 3 (3.37%) Retail
8 2 (2.25%) Corporate Banking
8 2 (2.25%) Financial Institution
9 1 (1.12%) Influencing Skills
9 1 (1.12%) Legal
9 1 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 20 (22.47%) Python Engineer
2 17 (19.10%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
3 14 (15.73%) Developer
4 13 (14.61%) Architect
5 9 (10.11%) Platform Engineer
6 8 (8.99%) Software Engineer
7 7 (7.87%) Lead
8 6 (6.74%) Data Engineer
9 5 (5.62%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 5 (5.62%) Azure Engineer
9 5 (5.62%) Data Architect
9 5 (5.62%) Snowflake Architect
10 4 (4.49%) Azure Platform Engineer
10 4 (4.49%) Cloud Platform Engineer
10 4 (4.49%) Full-Stack Developer
10 4 (4.49%) Project Manager
10 4 (4.49%) Python Software Engineer
11 3 (3.37%) Database Engineer
11 3 (3.37%) Python Data Engineer
11 3 (3.37%) Senior
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 27 (30.34%) FastAPI
2 18 (20.22%) PyTorch
3 15 (16.85%) Hugging Face
4 12 (13.48%) AWS CDK
4 12 (13.48%) Pandas
5 11 (12.36%) NumPy
5 11 (12.36%) SQLAlchemy
6 10 (11.24%) OAuth
6 10 (11.24%) OpenCV
6 10 (11.24%) React
7 8 (8.99%) boto
7 8 (8.99%) Flask
7 8 (8.99%) Kafka
7 8 (8.99%) LangGraph
7 8 (8.99%) REST
8 7 (7.87%) LangChain
9 6 (6.74%) AngularJS
9 6 (6.74%) Node.js
9 6 (6.74%) RESTful
10 5 (5.62%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 18 (20.22%) Cloud Native
2 12 (13.48%) Distributed Systems
3 10 (11.24%) Algorithms
4 9 (10.11%) Hybrid Cloud
5 7 (7.87%) AI Agents
6 6 (6.74%) Data Structures
7 5 (5.62%) Product Ownership
8 4 (4.49%) Data Protection Act
9 3 (3.37%) Private Cloud
10 2 (2.25%) Low-Code
11 1 (1.12%) Cyber Threat
11 1 (1.12%) Derivative
11 1 (1.12%) Digital Signage
11 1 (1.12%) Graphic Design
11 1 (1.12%) Legacy Systems
11 1 (1.12%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 4 (4.49%) Linux
2 1 (1.12%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 49 (55.06%) Machine Learning
2 39 (43.82%) CI/CD
3 36 (40.45%) Agile
4 28 (31.46%) Problem-Solving
5 26 (29.21%) Generative AI
6 24 (26.97%) LLM
7 20 (22.47%) Infrastructure as Code
7 20 (22.47%) Software Engineering
8 19 (21.35%) DevOps
9 18 (20.22%) Scrum
10 17 (19.10%) Data Engineering
11 15 (16.85%) OCR
12 14 (15.73%) Computer Science
12 14 (15.73%) Containerisation
12 14 (15.73%) Design Patterns
12 14 (15.73%) Migration
13 13 (14.61%) Data Security
13 13 (14.61%) Natural Language Processing
14 12 (13.48%) Community of Practice
14 12 (13.48%) Kanban
Programming Languages
1 59 (66.29%) Python
2 23 (25.84%) TypeScript
3 12 (13.48%) Java
3 12 (13.48%) JavaScript
4 9 (10.11%) SQL
5 2 (2.25%) Perl
5 2 (2.25%) PowerShell
5 2 (2.25%) Ruby
6 1 (1.12%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 10 (11.24%) Degree
2 5 (5.62%) AWS Certification
2 5 (5.62%) Computer Science Degree
2 5 (5.62%) Master's Degree
3 3 (3.37%) MCP
3 3 (3.37%) Security Cleared
4 1 (1.12%) AAT
4 1 (1.12%) ACCA
4 1 (1.12%) BPSS Clearance
4 1 (1.12%) CIMA
4 1 (1.12%) CISA
4 1 (1.12%) CISM
4 1 (1.12%) CISSP
4 1 (1.12%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
4 1 (1.12%) SC Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (7.87%) Disclosure Scotland
2 6 (6.74%) Accessibility
3 4 (4.49%) QA
4 1 (1.12%) COBIT
4 1 (1.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (1.12%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
4 1 (1.12%) NIST
4 1 (1.12%) NIST 800
System Software
1 13 (14.61%) Docker
2 2 (2.25%) Virtual Servers
3 1 (1.12%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 20 (22.47%) Kubernetes
2 18 (20.22%) Grafana
3 10 (11.24%) Terraform
4 9 (10.11%) Ansible
5 5 (5.62%) Prometheus
6 4 (4.49%) Kustomize
7 1 (1.12%) BMC PATROL
Vendors
1 9 (10.11%) Greenplum
2 7 (7.87%) Microsoft
3 3 (3.37%) Dynatrace
3 3 (3.37%) Splunk
4 2 (2.25%) Databricks
4 2 (2.25%) OpenAI
4 2 (2.25%) Oracle
5 1 (1.12%) Adobe
5 1 (1.12%) BMC
5 1 (1.12%) CA Agile Central
5 1 (1.12%) Foundry
5 1 (1.12%) NetScout
5 1 (1.12%) Rapid7
5 1 (1.12%) Sage
5 1 (1.12%) ServiceNow
5 1 (1.12%) Xero