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 8 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 297 486 -
Rank change year-on-year +189 - -
Contract jobs citing Generative AI 253 101 0
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.87% 0.23% -
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.96% 0.27% -
Number of daily rates quoted 160 71 0
10th Percentile £413 £400 -
25th Percentile £537 £500 -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £661 £600 -
Median % change year-on-year +10.08% - -
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 7 4 0
10th Percentile £23.65 - -
25th Percentile £25.25 - -
Median hourly rate £49.00 £35.00 -
Median % change year-on-year +40.00% - -
75th Percentile £76.25 £46.25 -
90th Percentile £78.00 £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 26,476 37,215 52,661
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.94% 86.29% 89.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,029 23,965 36,513
10th Percentile £306 £300 £325
25th Percentile £411 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% +3.77%
75th Percentile £630 £638 £650
90th Percentile £745 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £479 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -4.20% - +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,078 2,429 1,738
10th Percentile £14.20 £12.75 £11.00
25th Percentile £18.26 £16.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £28.68 £36.50 £36.00
Median % change year-on-year -21.44% +1.39% +44.00%
75th Percentile £60.09 £60.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.13 £37.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year -27.67% +7.14% +75.00%

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 8 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 8 May 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Generative AI in the UK

Generative AI
Top 17 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 8 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 +185 218 £700 +16.67% 1,765
London +125 153 £769 +33.70% 742
Work from Home +111 100 £831 +18.75% 1,127
UK excluding London +96 63 £600 -4.00% 1,173
East of England - 22 £650 - 37
North of England +29 18 £600 -4.00% 324
North West +19 14 £661 +5.68% 141
South East +45 8 £575 -4.17% 411
Midlands +20 6 £160 -77.14% 343
West Midlands +13 4 - - 149
Scotland - 4 £575 - 21
Yorkshire - 3 £356 - 149
South West +35 2 £413 -32.65% 44
East Midlands +11 2 £160 -78.67% 193
Wales - 2 £575 - 6
North East -3 1 - - 34
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 3

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 (10.28%) Apache Spark
2 9 (3.56%) Jupyter
3 6 (2.37%) Apache Airflow
4 5 (1.98%) Confluence
5 2 (0.79%) Apache
5 2 (0.79%) CMS
5 2 (0.79%) SharePoint
6 1 (0.40%) Adobe Experience Manager
6 1 (0.40%) Cloud Foundry
6 1 (0.40%) Headless CMS
6 1 (0.40%) IIS
6 1 (0.40%) Mattermost
Applications
1 4 (1.58%) 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 (1.58%) SAP PP
3 1 (0.40%) Distributed Ledger
3 1 (0.40%) SAP SCM
Cloud Services
1 79 (31.23%) AWS
2 77 (30.43%) Azure
3 34 (13.44%) GCP
4 23 (9.09%) GitHub
5 12 (4.74%) GitHub Actions
5 12 (4.74%) Snowflake
6 10 (3.95%) Amazon SageMaker
6 10 (3.95%) Azure AI
6 10 (3.95%) Azure DevOps
7 9 (3.56%) Amazon Bedrock
8 6 (2.37%) Anthropic Claude
8 6 (2.37%) Azure Machine Learning
8 6 (2.37%) Cloud Computing
8 6 (2.37%) Microsoft 365
8 6 (2.37%) Microsoft Copilot
8 6 (2.37%) Power Platform
9 5 (1.98%) dbt
9 5 (1.98%) Google Gemini
9 5 (1.98%) Microsoft Purview
9 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 (7.91%) Big Data
1 20 (7.91%) Hadoop
2 18 (7.11%) Tableau
3 10 (3.95%) PostgreSQL
4 9 (3.56%) MongoDB
4 9 (3.56%) MySQL
5 7 (2.77%) Data Warehouse
6 6 (2.37%) Apache Hive
6 6 (2.37%) Data Lake
7 5 (1.98%) Neo4j
7 5 (1.98%) NoSQL
7 5 (1.98%) Power BI
8 4 (1.58%) Data Vault
8 4 (1.58%) Snowflake Schema
9 2 (0.79%) BigQuery
9 2 (0.79%) Relational Database
9 2 (0.79%) SQL Server
10 1 (0.40%) Amazon Redshift
10 1 (0.40%) Oracle BI Publisher
10 1 (0.40%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 36 (14.23%) Jenkins
2 21 (8.30%) Git
3 10 (3.95%) MLflow
4 9 (3.56%) JIRA
5 4 (1.58%) Bitbucket
5 4 (1.58%) Terragrunt
6 3 (1.19%) GitLab
7 1 (0.40%) Artifactory
7 1 (0.40%) Code Climate
7 1 (0.40%) Hudson
7 1 (0.40%) Oracle APEX
7 1 (0.40%) Qt Creator
7 1 (0.40%) SonarQube
7 1 (0.40%) Subversion
General
1 79 (31.23%) Analytical Skills
2 65 (25.69%) Finance
3 63 (24.90%) Social Skills
4 47 (18.58%) Banking
5 32 (12.65%) Investment Banking
6 19 (7.51%) Organisational Skills
7 13 (5.14%) Financial Institution
7 13 (5.14%) Front Office
7 13 (5.14%) Public Sector
8 10 (3.95%) Legal
8 10 (3.95%) Marketing
9 8 (3.16%) Manufacturing
9 8 (3.16%) Pharmaceutical
10 7 (2.77%) Telecoms
11 5 (1.98%) Retail
12 4 (1.58%) Games
12 4 (1.58%) Polish Language
13 3 (1.19%) Corporate Banking
13 3 (1.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 3 (1.19%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 89 (35.18%) Developer
2 42 (16.60%) Python Developer
3 40 (15.81%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
4 36 (14.23%) Gen AI Developer
5 32 (12.65%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 30 (11.86%) Senior
7 23 (9.09%) Lead
8 20 (7.91%) Architect
8 20 (7.91%) Gen AI Engineer
8 20 (7.91%) Python Engineer
9 15 (5.93%) Data Science Developer
10 13 (5.14%) Data Engineer
10 13 (5.14%) Data Scientist
10 13 (5.14%) Full-Stack Developer
11 11 (4.35%) Designer
12 10 (3.95%) Consultant
12 10 (3.95%) Senior Developer
13 9 (3.56%) Solutions Architect
14 8 (3.16%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
14 8 (3.16%) Project Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 53 (20.95%) FastAPI
2 48 (18.97%) React
3 45 (17.79%) TensorFlow
4 35 (13.83%) PyTorch
5 33 (13.04%) Pandas
6 32 (12.65%) Django
7 30 (11.86%) .NET
8 29 (11.46%) NumPy
9 26 (10.28%) scikit-learn
10 23 (9.09%) LangChain
11 18 (7.11%) Matplotlib
12 16 (6.32%) Seaborn
13 15 (5.93%) PySpark
14 13 (5.14%) CSS
14 13 (5.14%) HTML
15 12 (4.74%) Hugging Face
16 11 (4.35%) AngularJS
17 10 (3.95%) REST
18 9 (3.56%) Flask
18 9 (3.56%) SQLAlchemy
Miscellaneous
1 44 (17.39%) Algorithms
2 12 (4.74%) Distributed Systems
3 11 (4.35%) Data Structures
4 8 (3.16%) Public Cloud
5 7 (2.77%) Credit Risk
6 6 (2.37%) Cloud Native
6 6 (2.37%) Greenfield Project
6 6 (2.37%) Virtual Team
7 5 (1.98%) FMCG
8 4 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
8 4 (1.58%) Life Science
8 4 (1.58%) Management Information System
8 4 (1.58%) Mobile Games
8 4 (1.58%) Product Ownership
8 4 (1.58%) Virtual Reality
9 3 (1.19%) AI Agents
9 3 (1.19%) Distributed Computing
9 3 (1.19%) Onboarding
10 2 (0.79%) Learning Management System
10 2 (0.79%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 4 (1.58%) 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
1 231 (91.30%) Artificial Intelligence
2 142 (56.13%) Machine Learning
3 128 (50.59%) LLM
4 76 (30.04%) Agile
5 75 (29.64%) Data Science
6 73 (28.85%) CI/CD
7 54 (21.34%) SDLC
8 53 (20.95%) Problem-Solving
9 48 (18.97%) Use Case
10 47 (18.58%) DevOps
11 45 (17.79%) Analytics
12 33 (13.04%) Continuous Improvement
13 32 (12.65%) Computer Science
14 29 (11.46%) Natural Language Processing
15 28 (11.07%) Data Engineering
15 28 (11.07%) Technical Analysis
16 26 (10.28%) Decision-Making
17 25 (9.88%) Visualisation
18 22 (8.70%) Software Engineering
19 21 (8.30%) MLOps
Programming Languages
1 172 (67.98%) Python
2 76 (30.04%) SQL
3 42 (16.60%) TypeScript
4 36 (14.23%) Java
5 23 (9.09%) C#
6 20 (7.91%) JavaScript
6 20 (7.91%) R
7 18 (7.11%) Scala
8 7 (2.77%) Clojure
8 7 (2.77%) Elixir
8 7 (2.77%) Rust
9 6 (2.37%) PHP
9 6 (2.37%) Ruby
10 2 (0.79%) Bash
10 2 (0.79%) Go
10 2 (0.79%) Perl
10 2 (0.79%) PowerShell
11 1 (0.40%) C++
11 1 (0.40%) Haskell
11 1 (0.40%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 46 (18.18%) Degree
2 33 (13.04%) Master's Degree
3 22 (8.70%) Security Cleared
4 18 (7.11%) PhD
5 16 (6.32%) Computer Science Degree
5 16 (6.32%) SC Cleared
6 9 (3.56%) AWS Certification
7 4 (1.58%) Azure Certification
8 2 (0.79%) BPSS Clearance
9 1 (0.40%) MCP
9 1 (0.40%) Microsoft Certification
9 1 (0.40%) PMI Certification
9 1 (0.40%) PMP
9 1 (0.40%) SAP Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 26 (10.28%) Data Quality
2 9 (3.56%) GDPR
3 7 (2.77%) QA
4 6 (2.37%) 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 51 (20.16%) Docker
2 1 (0.40%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 59 (23.32%) Kubernetes
2 30 (11.86%) Ansible
3 17 (6.72%) Terraform
4 2 (0.79%) Prometheus
5 1 (0.40%) Grafana
5 1 (0.40%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 25 (9.88%) Databricks
2 24 (9.49%) Microsoft
3 17 (6.72%) Google
4 13 (5.14%) OpenAI
5 11 (4.35%) Oracle
6 6 (2.37%) Dataiku
6 6 (2.37%) Foundry
7 5 (1.98%) SAP
8 4 (1.58%) DataRobot
8 4 (1.58%) MicroStrategy
8 4 (1.58%) Palantir
9 3 (1.19%) Adobe
9 3 (1.19%) Virgin Media
10 2 (0.79%) IBM
10 2 (0.79%) OutSystems
10 2 (0.79%) ServiceNow
11 1 (0.40%) Dynatrace
11 1 (0.40%) Screaming Frog
11 1 (0.40%) Splunk
11 1 (0.40%) Zscaler