Artificial Intelligence Specialist Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

AI Specialist
UK > UK excluding London

The median AI Specialist daily rate in the UK excluding London is £575, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 19 September 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 366 376 420
Rank change year-on-year +10 +44 -
Contract jobs requiring an Artificial Intelligence Specialist 2 2 6
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 0.013% 0.011% 0.028%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.014% 0.012% 0.030%
Number of daily rates quoted 1 1 4
10th Percentile - - £581
25th Percentile £538 £700 £581
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £701 £591
Median % change year-on-year -17.92% +18.57% -
75th Percentile £613 £701 £603
90th Percentile - - £608
UK median daily rate £525 £575 £606
% change year-on-year -8.74% -5.07% -

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK excluding London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the UK excluding London. 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 contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK excluding London with a recognized job title 13,903 16,545 20,253
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 89.87% 92.28% 94.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,544 9,582 13,501
10th Percentile £213 £220 £225
25th Percentile £361 £375 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £575 £600 £600
90th Percentile £662 £676 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £530
% change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,272 1,433 1,194
10th Percentile £13.50 £14.41 £14.06
25th Percentile £16.30 £19.50 £18.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £45.00 £43.75
Median % change year-on-year -44.11% +2.86% +98.86%
75th Percentile £52.50 £66.61 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.16 £75.00 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £43.00 £44.50
% change year-on-year -41.51% -3.37% +71.15%

Artificial Intelligence Specialist
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Job postings that featured Artificial Intelligence Specialist in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Job vacancy trend for Artificial Intelligence Specialist in the UK excluding London

Artificial Intelligence Specialist
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Artificial Intelligence Specialist job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Artificial Intelligence Specialist job vacancies in the UK excluding London

Artificial Intelligence Specialist
Contract Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Artificial Intelligence Specialist within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 19 September 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
Midlands -14 1 £575 - 3
North of England - 1 - - 2
Yorkshire - 1 - -
East Midlands - 1 £575 - 3
Artificial Intelligence Specialist
UK

Artificial Intelligence Specialist Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London

For the 6 months to 19 September 2025, Artificial Intelligence Specialist contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the UK excluding London region featuring Artificial Intelligence Specialist in the job title.

1 2 (100.00%) Artificial Intelligence
1 2 (100.00%) AWS
1 2 (100.00%) Data Science
1 2 (100.00%) GCP
1 2 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 1 (50.00%) React
2 1 (50.00%) scikit-learn
2 1 (50.00%) Data Engineering
2 1 (50.00%) TensorFlow
2 1 (50.00%) Cloud Native
2 1 (50.00%) Smart City
2 1 (50.00%) Amazon SageMaker
2 1 (50.00%) Problem-Solving
2 1 (50.00%) Value Proposition
2 1 (50.00%) Amazon Neptune
2 1 (50.00%) Digital Twin
2 1 (50.00%) Strategic Roadmap
2 1 (50.00%) Storytelling
2 1 (50.00%) Operational Stability
2 1 (50.00%) Public Sector
2 1 (50.00%) AIOps
2 1 (50.00%) PyTorch
2 1 (50.00%) Observability
2 1 (50.00%) Social Skills
2 1 (50.00%) Data Pipeline
2 1 (50.00%) MLOps
2 1 (50.00%) Full-Stack Development
2 1 (50.00%) CI/CD
2 1 (50.00%) Vertex AI
2 1 (50.00%) Amazon EventBridge

Artificial Intelligence Specialist Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 1 (50.00%) Apache Spark
Cloud Services
1 2 (100.00%) AWS
1 2 (100.00%) GCP
2 1 (50.00%) Amazon Bedrock
2 1 (50.00%) Amazon EventBridge
2 1 (50.00%) Amazon Neptune
2 1 (50.00%) Amazon SageMaker
2 1 (50.00%) Azure
2 1 (50.00%) Google Gemini
2 1 (50.00%) Vertex AI
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (50.00%) BigQuery
1 1 (50.00%) NoSQL
General
1 1 (50.00%) Public Sector
1 1 (50.00%) Social Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (50.00%) AngularJS
1 1 (50.00%) CrewAI
1 1 (50.00%) LangGraph
1 1 (50.00%) Node.js
1 1 (50.00%) PyTorch
1 1 (50.00%) React
1 1 (50.00%) RESTful
1 1 (50.00%) scikit-learn
1 1 (50.00%) Semantic Kernel
1 1 (50.00%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 1 (50.00%) AI Agents
1 1 (50.00%) Cloud Native
1 1 (50.00%) Enterprise Software
1 1 (50.00%) Smart City
Processes & Methodologies
1 2 (100.00%) Artificial Intelligence
1 2 (100.00%) Data Science
2 1 (50.00%) AIOps
2 1 (50.00%) CI/CD
2 1 (50.00%) Containerisation
2 1 (50.00%) Data Pipeline
2 1 (50.00%) Digital Twin
2 1 (50.00%) Full-Stack Development
2 1 (50.00%) LLM
2 1 (50.00%) MLOps
2 1 (50.00%) Observability
2 1 (50.00%) Operational Stability
2 1 (50.00%) Problem-Solving
2 1 (50.00%) Prompt Engineering
2 1 (50.00%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
2 1 (50.00%) Roadmaps
2 1 (50.00%) Storytelling
2 1 (50.00%) Strategic Roadmap
2 1 (50.00%) Use Case
2 1 (50.00%) Value Proposition
Programming Languages
1 1 (50.00%) Java
1 1 (50.00%) Python
1 1 (50.00%) SQL
Qualifications
1 1 (50.00%) MCP
1 1 (50.00%) Security Cleared
System Software
1 1 (50.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 2 (100.00%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 1 (50.00%) Google
1 1 (50.00%) SAP