LLM Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Large Language Model (LLM)
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring LLM skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 21 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 254 325 406
Rank change year-on-year +71 +81 -
Contract jobs citing LLM 133 33 6
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.73% 0.22% 0.031%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.85% 0.25% 0.035%
Number of daily rates quoted 88 30 4
10th Percentile £404 £410 £443
25th Percentile £424 £487 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £506 £550 £588
Median % change year-on-year -8.00% -6.38% -
75th Percentile £575 £625 £675
90th Percentile £638 £675 -
UK median daily rate £550 £625 £700
% change year-on-year -12.00% -10.71% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 1 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £63.98 £27.75 -
Median hourly rate £67.35 £28.50 £15.52
Median % change year-on-year +136.30% +83.63% -
75th Percentile £70.71 £29.25 -
90th Percentile - - -
UK median hourly rate £44.90 £25.00 £15.52
% change year-on-year +79.58% +61.08% -

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK excluding London

LLM 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 UK excluding London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 15,587 12,948 17,276
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 85.91% 87.17% 88.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,513 7,612 11,167
10th Percentile £220 £238 £250
25th Percentile £375 £381 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £575 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £688 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £530
% change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,768 749 1,201
10th Percentile £14.37 £15.50 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.30 £20.00 £17.72
Median hourly rate £23.00 £31.50 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -26.98% -29.21% +39.26%
75th Percentile £48.75 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.00 £71.38 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.84
% change year-on-year -22.62% -25.86% +25.25%

LLM
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing LLM relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

LLM job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

LLM
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing LLM.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing LLM

LLM
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing LLM in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 21 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for LLM in the UK excluding London

LLM
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing LLM.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing LLM

LLM
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 LLM within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 21 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
North of England -1 45 £463 -5.27% 452
East of England -1 30 £625 +4.17% 298
North West -7 30 £450 -7.83% 174
South East +2 28 £440 -25.11% 389
Scotland +25 22 £514 +31.39% 12
Yorkshire - 14 £531 - 223
East Midlands - 5 £375 - 121
Midlands - 5 £375 - 244
South West -9 4 £625 +13.64% 155
North East - 1 - - 59
LLM
UK

LLM
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding 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 7 (5.26%) Apache
2 6 (4.51%) Apache Airflow
2 6 (4.51%) Apache Spark
Applications
1 16 (12.03%) Chatbot
2 2 (1.50%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (1.50%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 60 (45.11%) Azure
2 53 (39.85%) AWS
3 29 (21.80%) Serverless
4 21 (15.79%) Amazon S3
5 19 (14.29%) AWS Lambda
6 18 (13.53%) GCP
7 14 (10.53%) Amazon Bedrock
7 14 (10.53%) Amazon EKS
8 13 (9.77%) Azure AKS
8 13 (9.77%) Azure DevOps
8 13 (9.77%) GitHub
9 10 (7.52%) Amazon ECS
9 10 (7.52%) Azure AI
9 10 (7.52%) GitHub Copilot
10 9 (6.77%) PaaS
10 9 (6.77%) Power Platform
11 8 (6.02%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 8 (6.02%) Amazon SageMaker
11 8 (6.02%) Azure Functions
11 8 (6.02%) Microsoft Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 3 (2.26%) HTTP
1 3 (2.26%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 16 (12.03%) NoSQL
2 12 (9.02%) Big Data
3 10 (7.52%) PostgreSQL
3 10 (7.52%) Relational Database
4 9 (6.77%) Power BI
5 7 (5.26%) Pinecone
6 6 (4.51%) Hadoop
7 5 (3.76%) Amazon Athena
8 4 (3.01%) Amazon RDS
8 4 (3.01%) DynamoDB
8 4 (3.01%) Redis
9 3 (2.26%) Delta Lake
9 3 (2.26%) Metadata
9 3 (2.26%) MongoDB
9 3 (2.26%) MySQL
9 3 (2.26%) RDBMS
10 2 (1.50%) Amazon Aurora
10 2 (1.50%) Data Warehouse
10 2 (1.50%) Tableau
10 2 (1.50%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 9 (6.77%) Git
1 9 (6.77%) JIRA
2 7 (5.26%) Jenkins
3 6 (4.51%) MLflow
4 3 (2.26%) PyCharm
5 2 (1.50%) Artifactory
5 2 (1.50%) JMeter
5 2 (1.50%) Postman
5 2 (1.50%) Pylint
5 2 (1.50%) Selenium
General
1 41 (30.83%) Social Skills
2 18 (13.53%) Finance
3 13 (9.77%) Analytical Skills
4 11 (8.27%) Banking
5 10 (7.52%) Public Sector
6 7 (5.26%) Documentation Skills
7 4 (3.01%) Aerospace
8 3 (2.26%) Legal
9 2 (1.50%) Law
9 2 (1.50%) Marketing
9 2 (1.50%) Pharmaceutical
9 2 (1.50%) Telecoms
10 1 (0.75%) Advertising
10 1 (0.75%) Automotive
10 1 (0.75%) Electronics
10 1 (0.75%) Financial Institution
10 1 (0.75%) Organisational Skills
10 1 (0.75%) Polish Language
10 1 (0.75%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (0.75%) Retail
Job Titles
1 43 (32.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 19 (14.29%) Data Scientist
3 14 (10.53%) Architect
3 14 (10.53%) Senior
4 12 (9.02%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
4 12 (9.02%) Developer
5 11 (8.27%) Lead
6 10 (7.52%) Python Engineer
7 7 (5.26%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
7 7 (5.26%) Technical Leader
8 6 (4.51%) Analyst
8 6 (4.51%) Data Engineer
9 5 (3.76%) Business Analyst
9 5 (3.76%) Security Architect
10 4 (3.01%) Gen AI Engineer
11 3 (2.26%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 3 (2.26%) Senior Developer
11 3 (2.26%) Senior Technical Architect
11 3 (2.26%) Solutions Architect
11 3 (2.26%) Technical Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 50 (37.59%) PyTorch
2 37 (27.82%) TensorFlow
3 28 (21.05%) Pandas
4 27 (20.30%) scikit-learn
5 25 (18.80%) NumPy
6 22 (16.54%) Hugging Face
7 20 (15.04%) LangChain
8 18 (13.53%) REST
9 17 (12.78%) FastAPI
10 15 (11.28%) RESTful
11 14 (10.53%) .NET
12 13 (9.77%) OpenCV
13 11 (8.27%) Semantic Kernel
13 11 (8.27%) SQLAlchemy
14 10 (7.52%) LangGraph
15 9 (6.77%) AWS CDK
15 9 (6.77%) OAuth
16 8 (6.02%) boto
17 7 (5.26%) Flask
18 6 (4.51%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 32 (24.06%) Algorithms
2 21 (15.79%) Cloud Native
3 19 (14.29%) Data Protection Act
4 12 (9.02%) AI Agents
5 7 (5.26%) Data Structures
6 6 (4.51%) Distributed Computing
7 4 (3.01%) Autonomous Agent
7 4 (3.01%) Onboarding
8 3 (2.26%) Clustering
8 3 (2.26%) Online Banking
9 2 (1.50%) Enterprise Software
9 2 (1.50%) Life Science
9 2 (1.50%) Mobile Banking
9 2 (1.50%) Private Cloud
9 2 (1.50%) Product Ownership
9 2 (1.50%) Security Posture
10 1 (0.75%) Distributed Systems
10 1 (0.75%) Low-Code
10 1 (0.75%) Renewable Energy
10 1 (0.75%) Smart City
Processes & Methodologies
1 119 (89.47%) AI
2 95 (71.43%) Machine Learning
3 62 (46.62%) Data Science
4 61 (45.86%) Agile
5 51 (38.35%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
6 46 (34.59%) Prompt Engineering
7 44 (33.08%) Generative AI
8 43 (32.33%) DevOps
9 36 (27.07%) CI/CD
10 33 (24.81%) Deep Learning
10 33 (24.81%) Use Case
11 28 (21.05%) Scrum
12 27 (20.30%) Problem-Solving
13 26 (19.55%) Data Pipeline
13 26 (19.55%) MLOps
13 26 (19.55%) Software Engineering
14 23 (17.29%) Data Protection
15 22 (16.54%) Natural Language Processing
16 21 (15.79%) Data Engineering
16 21 (15.79%) Data Privacy
Programming Languages
1 91 (68.42%) Python
2 30 (22.56%) SQL
3 8 (6.02%) Java
4 7 (5.26%) C++
5 6 (4.51%) C
5 6 (4.51%) R
6 5 (3.76%) TypeScript
7 2 (1.50%) C#
7 2 (1.50%) JavaScript
8 1 (0.75%) Go
Qualifications
1 19 (14.29%) Degree
2 16 (12.03%) MCP
3 9 (6.77%) Master's Degree
3 9 (6.77%) Security Cleared
4 4 (3.01%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (2.26%) PhD
6 2 (1.50%) SC Cleared
7 1 (0.75%) Azure Certification
7 1 (0.75%) CBAP
7 1 (0.75%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 20 (15.04%) EU AI Act
2 16 (12.03%) NIST
3 10 (7.52%) GDPR
4 7 (5.26%) Accessibility
4 7 (5.26%) QA
5 4 (3.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (2.26%) Data Quality
6 3 (2.26%) Disclosure Scotland
7 1 (0.75%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.75%) SOC 2
System Software
1 13 (9.77%) Docker
Systems Management
1 30 (22.56%) Kubernetes
2 10 (7.52%) Grafana
3 4 (3.01%) Prometheus
4 3 (2.26%) Kustomize
5 1 (0.75%) Argo
5 1 (0.75%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 36 (27.07%) Microsoft
2 16 (12.03%) Foundry
2 16 (12.03%) Google
3 13 (9.77%) OpenAI
4 4 (3.01%) Databricks
5 3 (2.26%) Sage
5 3 (2.26%) ServiceNow
6 2 (1.50%) Siemens
7 1 (0.75%) CA Agile Central
7 1 (0.75%) CrowdStrike
7 1 (0.75%) Netlify
7 1 (0.75%) Oracle
7 1 (0.75%) Salesforce
7 1 (0.75%) SnapLogic