Generative AI Contracts

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Generative AI skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Generative AI over the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 291 481 -
Rank change year-on-year +190 - -
Contract jobs citing Generative AI 252 101 0
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.86% 0.23% -
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.95% 0.27% -
Number of daily rates quoted 165 71 0
10th Percentile £429 £400 -
25th Percentile £550 £500 -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £671 £600 -
Median % change year-on-year +11.83% - -
75th Percentile £850 £750 -
90th Percentile £881 £875 -
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £625 -
% change year-on-year -4.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 4 0
10th Percentile £23.25 - -
25th Percentile £25.25 - -
Median hourly rate £50.25 £35.00 -
Median % change year-on-year +43.57% - -
75th Percentile £76.88 £46.25 -
90th Percentile £78.13 £66.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £75.00 £80.00 -
% change year-on-year -6.25% - -

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

Generative 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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 26,594 37,597 53,655
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.84% 86.31% 89.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,149 24,227 37,238
10th Percentile £308 £300 £325
25th Percentile £413 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% +4.76%
75th Percentile £630 £638 £650
90th Percentile £743 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.50% - +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,071 2,443 1,746
10th Percentile £14.41 £12.75 £11.00
25th Percentile £18.21 £16.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £29.00 £35.65 £37.30
Median % change year-on-year -18.65% -4.42% +49.20%
75th Percentile £60.38 £59.98 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £37.34 £36.00
% change year-on-year -26.35% +3.72% +80.00%

Generative AI
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Generative AI as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Generative AI in the UK

Generative AI
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Generative AI.

Daily rate trend for Generative AI in the UK

Generative AI
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Generative AI over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Generative AI in the UK

Generative AI
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Generative AI.

Hourly rate trend for Generative AI in the UK

Generative AI
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Generative AI over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Generative AI in the UK

Generative AI
Top 16 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Generative AI within the UK over the 6 months to 1 May 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 +168 216 £700 +16.67% 1,602
London +117 155 £750 +30.43% 575
Work from Home +110 99 £825 +17.86% 1,010
UK excluding London +101 59 £600 -4.00% 1,117
East of England - 21 £650 - 39
North of England +26 16 £600 -4.00% 327
North West +22 13 £661 +5.68% 144
South East +49 8 £575 -4.17% 356
Midlands +23 6 £160 -77.14% 345
West Midlands +14 4 - - 152
Scotland - 4 £575 - 26
Yorkshire - 3 £356 - 147
East Midlands +11 2 £160 -78.67% 192
Wales - 2 £575 - 6
South West +41 1 £413 -32.65% 37
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 2

Generative AI
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities 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 26 (10.32%) Apache Spark
2 6 (2.38%) Apache Airflow
2 6 (2.38%) Jupyter
3 5 (1.98%) Confluence
4 4 (1.59%) Cloud Foundry
5 2 (0.79%) Apache
5 2 (0.79%) SharePoint
6 1 (0.40%) CMS
6 1 (0.40%) IIS
6 1 (0.40%) Mattermost
Applications
1 4 (1.59%) Chatbot
2 3 (1.19%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.40%) Camtasia
3 1 (0.40%) Final Cut Pro
3 1 (0.40%) Photoshop
3 1 (0.40%) Siemens NX
3 1 (0.40%) SOLIDWORKS
3 1 (0.40%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (1.98%) SAP S/4HANA
2 4 (1.59%) SAP PP
3 1 (0.40%) Distributed Ledger
3 1 (0.40%) SAP SCM
Cloud Services
1 74 (29.37%) Azure
2 71 (28.17%) AWS
3 30 (11.90%) GCP
4 22 (8.73%) GitHub
5 12 (4.76%) Snowflake
6 11 (4.37%) GitHub Actions
7 10 (3.97%) Amazon SageMaker
7 10 (3.97%) Azure AI
7 10 (3.97%) Azure DevOps
8 9 (3.57%) Amazon Bedrock
9 8 (3.17%) Microsoft 365
9 8 (3.17%) Microsoft Copilot
10 7 (2.78%) Microsoft Purview
11 6 (2.38%) Azure Machine Learning
11 6 (2.38%) Cloud Computing
11 6 (2.38%) OpenShift
11 6 (2.38%) Power Platform
12 5 (1.98%) dbt
12 5 (1.98%) Google Gemini
12 5 (1.98%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.40%) DNS
1 1 (0.40%) HTTP
1 1 (0.40%) HTTPS
1 1 (0.40%) LAN
1 1 (0.40%) Modbus
1 1 (0.40%) SMTP
1 1 (0.40%) SNMP
1 1 (0.40%) SSH
1 1 (0.40%) WAN
1 1 (0.40%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 20 (7.94%) Hadoop
2 18 (7.14%) Big Data
2 18 (7.14%) Tableau
3 9 (3.57%) MongoDB
3 9 (3.57%) MySQL
4 8 (3.17%) PostgreSQL
5 7 (2.78%) Data Warehouse
6 6 (2.38%) Apache Hive
7 5 (1.98%) Neo4j
7 5 (1.98%) NoSQL
7 5 (1.98%) Power BI
8 4 (1.59%) Data Vault
8 4 (1.59%) Snowflake Schema
9 3 (1.19%) Data Lake
10 2 (0.79%) BigQuery
10 2 (0.79%) Relational Database
10 2 (0.79%) SQL Server
11 1 (0.40%) Amazon Redshift
11 1 (0.40%) DTS
11 1 (0.40%) Oracle BI Publisher
Development Applications
1 32 (12.70%) Jenkins
2 20 (7.94%) Git
3 9 (3.57%) JIRA
4 8 (3.17%) MLflow
5 4 (1.59%) Bitbucket
5 4 (1.59%) Terragrunt
6 2 (0.79%) GitLab
7 1 (0.40%) Artifactory
7 1 (0.40%) Hudson
7 1 (0.40%) Oracle APEX
7 1 (0.40%) Qt Creator
7 1 (0.40%) Subversion
General
1 77 (30.56%) Analytical Skills
2 69 (27.38%) Finance
3 57 (22.62%) Social Skills
4 50 (19.84%) Banking
5 30 (11.90%) Investment Banking
6 19 (7.54%) Organisational Skills
7 15 (5.95%) Front Office
8 13 (5.16%) Financial Institution
8 13 (5.16%) Public Sector
9 10 (3.97%) Legal
10 8 (3.17%) Manufacturing
10 8 (3.17%) Pharmaceutical
11 7 (2.78%) Marketing
11 7 (2.78%) Telecoms
12 5 (1.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 4 (1.59%) Billing
13 4 (1.59%) Games
13 4 (1.59%) Polish Language
14 3 (1.19%) Retail
15 2 (0.79%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 87 (34.52%) Developer
2 40 (15.87%) Python Developer
3 39 (15.48%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
4 35 (13.89%) Senior
5 34 (13.49%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 34 (13.49%) Gen AI Developer
6 24 (9.52%) Lead
6 24 (9.52%) Python Engineer
7 23 (9.13%) Gen AI Engineer
8 16 (6.35%) Architect
9 15 (5.95%) Data Engineer
9 15 (5.95%) Data Science Developer
10 14 (5.56%) Data Scientist
11 11 (4.37%) Full-Stack Developer
11 11 (4.37%) Senior Developer
12 10 (3.97%) Consultant
12 10 (3.97%) Designer
13 8 (3.17%) Software Engineer
14 7 (2.78%) Project Manager
14 7 (2.78%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 51 (20.24%) FastAPI
2 45 (17.86%) React
3 43 (17.06%) TensorFlow
4 35 (13.89%) Pandas
5 33 (13.10%) PyTorch
6 32 (12.70%) Django
7 31 (12.30%) NumPy
8 30 (11.90%) .NET
9 26 (10.32%) scikit-learn
10 25 (9.92%) LangChain
11 18 (7.14%) Matplotlib
12 16 (6.35%) Seaborn
13 15 (5.95%) PySpark
14 13 (5.16%) CSS
15 12 (4.76%) AngularJS
16 11 (4.37%) HTML
16 11 (4.37%) REST
17 9 (3.57%) Hugging Face
18 8 (3.17%) Flask
18 8 (3.17%) Kafka
Miscellaneous
1 44 (17.46%) Algorithms
2 13 (5.16%) Distributed Systems
3 11 (4.37%) Data Structures
4 9 (3.57%) Public Cloud
5 8 (3.17%) Cloud Native
6 7 (2.78%) Credit Risk
7 6 (2.38%) Greenfield Project
8 5 (1.98%) FMCG
9 4 (1.59%) Life Science
9 4 (1.59%) Management Information System
9 4 (1.59%) Mobile Games
9 4 (1.59%) Product Ownership
9 4 (1.59%) Virtual Reality
9 4 (1.59%) Virtual Team
10 3 (1.19%) Data Protection Act
10 3 (1.19%) Distributed Computing
10 3 (1.19%) Low-Code
10 3 (1.19%) Onboarding
11 2 (0.79%) CMDB
11 2 (0.79%) Cyber Threat
Operating Systems
1 4 (1.59%) Linux
2 3 (1.19%) Windows
3 1 (0.40%) Mac OS
3 1 (0.40%) Ubuntu
3 1 (0.40%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 228 (90.48%) Artificial Intelligence
2 140 (55.56%) Machine Learning
3 131 (51.98%) LLM
4 74 (29.37%) Agile
5 72 (28.57%) CI/CD
5 72 (28.57%) Data Science
6 52 (20.63%) SDLC
7 50 (19.84%) Problem-Solving
8 49 (19.44%) Use Case
9 43 (17.06%) DevOps
10 42 (16.67%) Analytics
11 34 (13.49%) Computer Science
12 33 (13.10%) Continuous Improvement
13 32 (12.70%) Data Engineering
14 28 (11.11%) Technical Analysis
15 26 (10.32%) Decision-Making
16 25 (9.92%) Visualisation
17 23 (9.13%) Natural Language Processing
17 23 (9.13%) Software Engineering
18 21 (8.33%) Project Management
Programming Languages
1 171 (67.86%) Python
2 75 (29.76%) SQL
3 42 (16.67%) TypeScript
4 41 (16.27%) Java
5 24 (9.52%) C#
6 21 (8.33%) Scala
7 19 (7.54%) JavaScript
8 18 (7.14%) R
9 8 (3.17%) Clojure
9 8 (3.17%) Rust
10 7 (2.78%) Elixir
11 6 (2.38%) PHP
11 6 (2.38%) Ruby
12 2 (0.79%) Bash
12 2 (0.79%) C++
12 2 (0.79%) Go
12 2 (0.79%) Haskell
12 2 (0.79%) Perl
12 2 (0.79%) PowerShell
13 1 (0.40%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 43 (17.06%) Degree
2 30 (11.90%) Master's Degree
3 22 (8.73%) Security Cleared
4 18 (7.14%) PhD
5 16 (6.35%) Computer Science Degree
5 16 (6.35%) SC Cleared
6 9 (3.57%) AWS Certification
7 6 (2.38%) Azure Certification
8 2 (0.79%) BPSS Clearance
8 2 (0.79%) PMI Certification
8 2 (0.79%) PMP
9 1 (0.40%) Microsoft Certification
9 1 (0.40%) SAP Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 26 (10.32%) Data Quality
2 9 (3.57%) GDPR
3 7 (2.78%) QA
4 6 (2.38%) EU AI Act
5 3 (1.19%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 2 (0.79%) Accessibility
7 1 (0.40%) GRC
7 1 (0.40%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 1 (0.40%) NIST
System Software
1 53 (21.03%) Docker
2 2 (0.79%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.40%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 62 (24.60%) Kubernetes
2 30 (11.90%) Ansible
3 17 (6.75%) Terraform
4 2 (0.79%) Prometheus
5 1 (0.40%) Grafana
5 1 (0.40%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 20 (7.94%) Databricks
1 20 (7.94%) Microsoft
2 13 (5.16%) Google
3 10 (3.97%) Oracle
4 8 (3.17%) OpenAI
5 6 (2.38%) Dataiku
5 6 (2.38%) Foundry
6 5 (1.98%) SAP
7 4 (1.59%) DataRobot
7 4 (1.59%) MicroStrategy
7 4 (1.59%) Palantir
7 4 (1.59%) Red Hat
8 3 (1.19%) ServiceNow
8 3 (1.19%) Virgin Media
9 2 (0.79%) Adobe
9 2 (0.79%) IBM
9 2 (0.79%) OutSystems
10 1 (0.40%) Ariba
10 1 (0.40%) Citrix
10 1 (0.40%) Sage