Data Science Contract Job Trends

Data Science
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Data Science skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 14 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 126 115 185
Rank change year-on-year -11 +70 +10
Contract jobs citing Data Science 807 743 623
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.21% 2.15% 1.40%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.50% 2.44% 1.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 539 483 421
10th Percentile £366 £356 £400
25th Percentile £419 £443 £469
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -4.35% -
75th Percentile £638 £675 £675
90th Percentile £738 £775 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £600
% change year-on-year - -16.67% +14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 28 9
10th Percentile £21.20 £20.12 £16.70
25th Percentile £25.47 £21.25 £25.38
Median hourly rate £31.31 £25.40 £30.50
Median % change year-on-year +23.27% -16.74% +17.31%
75th Percentile £44.06 £27.29 £47.50
90th Percentile £64.16 £46.75 £48.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.06 £25.36 £19.00
% change year-on-year +18.51% +33.47% -14.26%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

Data Science 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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 32,261 30,399 39,447
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.54% 87.91% 88.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,301 18,546 26,335
10th Percentile £300 £306 £310
25th Percentile £406 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £531
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.13% -3.45%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,097 1,021 1,510
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.53 £14.36
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.30 £18.95
Median hourly rate £25.15 £33.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -23.79% -22.35% +21.43%
75th Percentile £48.75 £63.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.00 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.00 £32.50 £44.50
% change year-on-year -29.23% -26.97% +37.98%

Data Science
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Data Science relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Data Science job vacancy trend in the UK

Data Science
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Science.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Science

Data Science
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Science over the 6 months to 14 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Data Science in the UK

Data Science
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Science.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Science

Data Science
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Science over the 6 months to 14 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Science in the UK

Data Science
Top 17 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Data Science within the UK over the 6 months to 14 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
England -9 713 £525 -8.70% 917
London -5 459 £550 -8.33% 259
Work from Home +3 245 £550 +10.00% 555
UK excluding London -22 245 £500 - 862
North of England -30 69 £475 -2.26% 190
North West -8 45 £450 +1.41% 100
South East +17 44 £469 +17.19% 270
Midlands -23 42 £500 - 145
East of England -5 35 £625 +11.11% 93
South West -27 26 £538 -14.00% 102
Scotland +6 24 £449 -4.83% 50
East Midlands -7 22 £440 +3.47% 64
Yorkshire -39 22 £525 -25.00% 74
West Midlands -33 20 £508 -15.42% 76
Wales -14 7 £550 +158.67% 22
North East -20 2 £425 -12.37% 18
Northern Ireland - 2 £650 - 7

Data Science
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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 75 (9.29%) Apache Airflow
2 64 (7.93%) Apache Spark
3 34 (4.21%) Apache
4 23 (2.85%) Jupyter
5 11 (1.36%) SAS
6 8 (0.99%) Apache Pig
6 8 (0.99%) SharePoint
7 7 (0.87%) Confluence
8 3 (0.37%) Luigi
9 2 (0.25%) IIS
10 1 (0.12%) Cloud Foundry
10 1 (0.12%) nginx
Applications
1 23 (2.85%) Microsoft Excel
2 21 (2.60%) Chatbot
3 14 (1.73%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 3 (0.37%) Adobe Premiere
5 3 (0.37%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.37%) Quicktime
6 2 (0.25%) Trello
7 1 (0.12%) Adobe After Effects
7 1 (0.12%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.12%) Blender
7 1 (0.12%) CINEMA 4D
7 1 (0.12%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 6 (0.74%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.25%) Teamcenter
3 1 (0.12%) Actimize
3 1 (0.12%) SAP GRC
Cloud Services
1 307 (38.04%) Azure
2 263 (32.59%) AWS
3 149 (18.46%) GCP
4 137 (16.98%) Power Platform
5 60 (7.43%) Azure Machine Learning
6 55 (6.82%) Serverless
7 54 (6.69%) GitHub
8 51 (6.32%) Azure DevOps
9 49 (6.07%) Snowflake
10 45 (5.58%) Amazon SageMaker
10 45 (5.58%) Azure Data Factory
11 43 (5.33%) dbt
12 38 (4.71%) Amazon S3
13 37 (4.58%) AWS Lambda
14 33 (4.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 29 (3.59%) GitHub Actions
16 27 (3.35%) Azure AI
16 27 (3.35%) Azure AKS
16 27 (3.35%) Vertex AI
17 20 (2.48%) Amazon Bedrock
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.99%) Network Security
2 4 (0.50%) Internet
3 3 (0.37%) TCP/IP
4 2 (0.25%) DNS
4 2 (0.25%) Firewall
4 2 (0.25%) tcpdump
4 2 (0.25%) Wireshark
5 1 (0.12%) HTTP
5 1 (0.12%) SSL
5 1 (0.12%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 127 (15.74%) Power BI
2 92 (11.40%) Data Warehouse
3 67 (8.30%) Tableau
4 57 (7.06%) Big Data
5 52 (6.44%) Data Lake
6 40 (4.96%) NoSQL
7 36 (4.46%) BigQuery
8 34 (4.21%) PostgreSQL
9 29 (3.59%) Hadoop
9 29 (3.59%) Metadata
10 28 (3.47%) Relational Database
11 25 (3.10%) Delta Lake
12 20 (2.48%) Amazon Redshift
13 16 (1.98%) Snowflake Schema
14 15 (1.86%) Amazon Athena
14 15 (1.86%) Apache Hive
14 15 (1.86%) Azure SQL Database
15 13 (1.61%) Elasticsearch
15 13 (1.61%) SQL Server
16 12 (1.49%) Data Mining
Development Applications
1 68 (8.43%) Git
2 41 (5.08%) MLflow
3 31 (3.84%) Jenkins
4 25 (3.10%) GitLab
5 17 (2.11%) JIRA
6 8 (0.99%) JMeter
7 7 (0.87%) SonarQube
8 6 (0.74%) Postman
8 6 (0.74%) PyCharm
9 5 (0.62%) Selenium
10 4 (0.50%) Gatling
10 4 (0.50%) JUnit
10 4 (0.50%) Mockito
10 4 (0.50%) RStudio
10 4 (0.50%) Snyk
11 2 (0.25%) Cypress.io
11 2 (0.25%) Maven
11 2 (0.25%) REST Assured
12 1 (0.12%) git-flow
12 1 (0.12%) Terragrunt
General
1 277 (34.32%) Social Skills
2 174 (21.56%) Analytical Skills
3 173 (21.44%) Finance
4 85 (10.53%) Public Sector
5 54 (6.69%) Banking
6 41 (5.08%) Marketing
7 27 (3.35%) Pharmaceutical
7 27 (3.35%) Retail
8 19 (2.35%) Influencing Skills
9 18 (2.23%) Manufacturing
10 17 (2.11%) Legal
11 14 (1.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 14 (1.73%) Investment Banking
11 14 (1.73%) Telecoms
12 12 (1.49%) Documentation Skills
13 10 (1.24%) Front Office
14 7 (0.87%) Military
14 7 (0.87%) Presentation Skills
14 7 (0.87%) Publishing
15 6 (0.74%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 219 (27.14%) Data Scientist
2 147 (18.22%) Data Engineer
3 99 (12.27%) Senior
4 81 (10.04%) Developer
5 67 (8.30%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 57 (7.06%) Architect
7 46 (5.70%) Lead
8 37 (4.58%) Python Engineer
9 36 (4.46%) Analyst
10 32 (3.97%) Senior Data Scientist
11 25 (3.10%) Machine Learning Engineer
12 22 (2.73%) Azure Engineer
12 22 (2.73%) Senior Data Engineer
13 21 (2.60%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 21 (2.60%) Product Manager
14 20 (2.48%) Data Analyst
15 19 (2.35%) AWS Engineer
16 17 (2.11%) Software Engineer
17 16 (1.98%) Senior Manager
18 15 (1.86%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 101 (12.52%) scikit-learn
2 100 (12.39%) PyTorch
3 98 (12.14%) TensorFlow
4 91 (11.28%) Pandas
5 63 (7.81%) NumPy
6 51 (6.32%) Kafka
7 50 (6.20%) PySpark
8 42 (5.20%) LangChain
9 33 (4.09%) REST
10 31 (3.84%) React
11 27 (3.35%) FastAPI
11 27 (3.35%) Hugging Face
12 24 (2.97%) AngularJS
13 23 (2.85%) LangGraph
14 21 (2.60%) .NET
15 18 (2.23%) Matplotlib
15 18 (2.23%) RESTful
16 17 (2.11%) Node.js
17 15 (1.86%) XGBoost
18 14 (1.73%) Semantic Kernel
Miscellaneous
1 103 (12.76%) Algorithms
2 57 (7.06%) Cloud Native
3 32 (3.97%) AI Agents
4 29 (3.59%) Product Ownership
5 22 (2.73%) Data Protection Act
6 18 (2.23%) Distributed Computing
7 17 (2.11%) Data Structures
7 17 (2.11%) Onboarding
8 16 (1.98%) Management Information System
9 15 (1.86%) Analytical Mindset
10 14 (1.73%) Distributed Systems
11 11 (1.36%) Clustering
11 11 (1.36%) Life Science
12 10 (1.24%) Legacy Systems
13 9 (1.12%) Fixed Income
13 9 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
14 8 (0.99%) Credit Risk
15 7 (0.87%) Enterprise Software
15 7 (0.87%) NHS
15 7 (0.87%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 20 (2.48%) Linux
2 5 (0.62%) Unix
3 4 (0.50%) Windows
4 2 (0.25%) Android
4 2 (0.25%) VMS
5 1 (0.12%) Apple iOS
5 1 (0.12%) CentOS
5 1 (0.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.12%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.12%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 460 (57.00%) Machine Learning
2 391 (48.45%) AI
3 315 (39.03%) Analytics
4 227 (28.13%) Data Pipeline
5 206 (25.53%) Problem-Solving
6 185 (22.92%) CI/CD
7 176 (21.81%) Agile
8 175 (21.69%) Data Engineering
9 156 (19.33%) LLM
10 154 (19.08%) Data Modelling
10 154 (19.08%) DevOps
11 151 (18.71%) Visualisation
12 144 (17.84%) Business Intelligence
13 132 (16.36%) Generative AI
14 131 (16.23%) Decision-Making
15 129 (15.99%) ETL
16 113 (14.00%) Computer Science
17 111 (13.75%) MLOps
18 110 (13.63%) Data Governance
19 101 (12.52%) Actionable Insight
Programming Languages
1 546 (67.66%) Python
2 317 (39.28%) SQL
3 91 (11.28%) R
4 67 (8.30%) Java
5 33 (4.09%) JavaScript
5 33 (4.09%) Scala
6 28 (3.47%) C++
7 19 (2.35%) TypeScript
8 16 (1.98%) C#
9 15 (1.86%) Bash
10 13 (1.61%) PowerShell
11 12 (1.49%) PL/SQL
12 10 (1.24%) Bicep
13 7 (0.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
13 7 (0.87%) MATLAB
14 6 (0.74%) C
15 5 (0.62%) Go
15 5 (0.62%) T-SQL
16 4 (0.50%) F#
17 3 (0.37%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 146 (18.09%) Security Cleared
2 145 (17.97%) Degree
3 99 (12.27%) SC Cleared
4 46 (5.70%) Master's Degree
5 43 (5.33%) Computer Science Degree
6 24 (2.97%) PhD
7 18 (2.23%) DV Cleared
8 15 (1.86%) AWS Certification
8 15 (1.86%) MCP
9 14 (1.73%) Azure Certification
10 13 (1.61%) BPSS Clearance
11 4 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
11 4 (0.50%) Postgraduate
12 3 (0.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.37%) CISSP
12 3 (0.37%) Tableau Certification
13 2 (0.25%) DBS Check
14 1 (0.12%) CBAP
14 1 (0.12%) CompTIA Security+
14 1 (0.12%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 99 (12.27%) Data Quality
2 33 (4.09%) QA
3 31 (3.84%) GDPR
4 16 (1.98%) Accessibility
4 16 (1.98%) EU AI Act
5 14 (1.73%) NIST
6 6 (0.74%) GxP
6 6 (0.74%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 6 (0.74%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 5 (0.62%) WCAG
8 4 (0.50%) HIPAA
8 4 (0.50%) SOC 2
9 3 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
10 2 (0.25%) GRC
10 2 (0.25%) PCI DSS
11 1 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.12%) IFRS
11 1 (0.12%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.12%) PMO
11 1 (0.12%) Solvency II
System Software
1 87 (10.78%) Docker
2 9 (1.12%) Active Directory
3 5 (0.62%) zsh
4 3 (0.37%) HDFS
5 2 (0.25%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 89 (11.03%) Kubernetes
2 73 (9.05%) Terraform
3 10 (1.24%) Kibana
3 10 (1.24%) Kubeflow
4 8 (0.99%) ITRS Geneos
4 8 (0.99%) logstash
5 4 (0.50%) Grafana
6 3 (0.37%) Argo
6 3 (0.37%) Hadoop YARN
6 3 (0.37%) Oozie
6 3 (0.37%) Progress Chef
7 2 (0.25%) Ansible
8 1 (0.12%) Podman
8 1 (0.12%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 124 (15.37%) Microsoft
2 123 (15.24%) Databricks
3 62 (7.68%) Google
4 39 (4.83%) Foundry
5 27 (3.35%) OpenAI
6 19 (2.35%) SAP
7 14 (1.73%) Palantir
8 12 (1.49%) Splunk
9 10 (1.24%) Oracle
9 10 (1.24%) Pega
10 8 (0.99%) Salesforce
10 8 (0.99%) Solace
10 8 (0.99%) TIBCO
11 7 (0.87%) Informatica
12 5 (0.62%) Alteryx
12 5 (0.62%) Dataiku
12 5 (0.62%) ForgeRock
12 5 (0.62%) Sage
13 4 (0.50%) ServiceNow
13 4 (0.50%) Talend