Machine Learning Contract Job Trends

Machine Learning (ML)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Machine Learning skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 30 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 78 110 134
Rank change year-on-year +32 +24 +84
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,574 749 749
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.07% 2.45% 1.74%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.61% 2.69% 2.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 966 452 526
10th Percentile £413 £393 £408
25th Percentile £488 £458 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £584
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -5.78% +1.52%
75th Percentile £675 £676 £738
90th Percentile £775 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £550
Number of hourly rates quoted 49 21 20
10th Percentile £40.28 £31.00 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.00 £45.00 £46.18
Median hourly rate £70.00 £75.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -6.67% +42.86% +39.07%
75th Percentile £83.75 £81.01 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.00 £88.00 £75.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.00 £78.10 £52.50
% change year-on-year -14.21% +48.76% +50.00%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Machine Learning 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 43,613 27,816 36,814
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.98% 90.91% 85.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,139 17,565 23,448
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £414 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £504 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.18% -4.00% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,612 1,364 2,554
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.49 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +4.17%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.95 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.00% -34.42% +8.91%

Machine Learning
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Machine Learning job vacancy trend in the UK

Machine Learning
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Machine Learning.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Machine Learning

Machine Learning
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Machine Learning over the 6 months to 30 June 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Machine Learning in the UK

Machine Learning
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Machine Learning.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Machine Learning

Machine Learning
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Machine Learning over the 6 months to 30 June 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Machine Learning in the UK

Machine Learning
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 Machine Learning within the UK over the 6 months to 30 June 2026. 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 +28 1,310 £575 +3.60% 1,116
London +41 874 £575 +0.88% 661
UK excluding London +6 496 £550 - 638
Work from Home +21 456 £581 +5.68% 423
North of England +5 144 £575 +13.30% 128
Scotland +41 104 £483 +3.43% 34
South East -31 103 £600 +4.35% 230
North West -2 81 £590 +7.36% 78
Midlands -23 63 £550 +10.00% 64
Yorkshire -16 48 £550 -5.38% 35
South West -22 46 £530 -13.11% 85
West Midlands -25 46 £538 +7.50% 32
East of England -20 36 £525 -8.70% 75
Wales -11 18 £565 -1.83% 21
North East -24 18 £550 +37.50% 17
East Midlands -9 15 £650 +52.94% 32
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 15

Machine Learning
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
1 105 (6.67%) Apache Spark
2 74 (4.70%) Apache Airflow
3 52 (3.30%) Apache
4 36 (2.29%) Jupyter
5 23 (1.46%) Confluence
6 8 (0.51%) Appian
6 8 (0.51%) SharePoint
7 6 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
7 6 (0.38%) SAS
8 5 (0.32%) CMS
8 5 (0.32%) Headless CMS
9 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.13%) Luigi
10 2 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.064%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.064%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.064%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.064%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.064%) NetWeaver
11 1 (0.064%) OpenStack
Applications
1 32 (2.03%) Chatbot
2 13 (0.83%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.57%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Project
5 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
6 3 (0.19%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.13%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.13%) Simulink
8 1 (0.064%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.70%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.064%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.064%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.064%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.064%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.064%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 576 (36.59%) Azure
2 565 (35.90%) AWS
3 286 (18.17%) GCP
4 141 (8.96%) Power Platform
5 113 (7.18%) Serverless
6 103 (6.54%) Amazon S3
7 100 (6.35%) GitHub
8 88 (5.59%) Azure AI
9 87 (5.53%) Amazon SageMaker
10 86 (5.46%) AWS Lambda
11 79 (5.02%) Azure Machine Learning
12 78 (4.96%) Snowflake
13 66 (4.19%) Azure DevOps
14 60 (3.81%) Vertex AI
15 57 (3.62%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 54 (3.43%) Amazon Bedrock
17 51 (3.24%) GitHub Actions
18 46 (2.92%) Azure Data Factory
19 42 (2.67%) dbt
20 40 (2.54%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.02%) Firewall
2 12 (0.76%) Network Security
3 10 (0.64%) Internet
4 7 (0.44%) DNS
5 5 (0.32%) DHCP
5 5 (0.32%) VPN
6 4 (0.25%) HTTP
6 4 (0.25%) NAS
6 4 (0.25%) SAN
7 3 (0.19%) SMTP
8 2 (0.13%) 4G
8 2 (0.13%) 5G
8 2 (0.13%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.13%) MQTT
8 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.064%) InfiniBand
9 1 (0.064%) LTE
9 1 (0.064%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 114 (7.24%) Power BI
2 103 (6.54%) Data Lake
3 79 (5.02%) Big Data
4 74 (4.70%) Metadata
5 72 (4.57%) Data Warehouse
6 69 (4.38%) BigQuery
7 48 (3.05%) NoSQL
7 48 (3.05%) Tableau
8 42 (2.67%) Amazon Athena
9 41 (2.60%) Amazon Redshift
10 40 (2.54%) PostgreSQL
11 36 (2.29%) Hadoop
12 32 (2.03%) Delta Lake
12 32 (2.03%) Relational Database
13 30 (1.91%) SQL Server
14 26 (1.65%) Pinecone
15 25 (1.59%) MongoDB
16 20 (1.27%) MySQL
17 18 (1.14%) Weaviate
18 17 (1.08%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 97 (6.16%) Git
2 80 (5.08%) MLflow
3 51 (3.24%) JIRA
4 48 (3.05%) GitLab
5 27 (1.72%) Jenkins
6 8 (0.51%) Claude Code
6 8 (0.51%) Vite
7 7 (0.44%) Selenium
8 6 (0.38%) Visual Studio
9 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
10 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
10 4 (0.25%) ERwin
10 4 (0.25%) Maven
10 4 (0.25%) PyCharm
11 3 (0.19%) Gradle
11 3 (0.19%) JUnit
11 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
11 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
11 3 (0.19%) Spinnaker
12 2 (0.13%) Oracle APEX
General
1 328 (20.84%) Social Skills
2 308 (19.57%) Finance
3 199 (12.64%) Analytical Skills
4 152 (9.66%) Public Sector
5 107 (6.80%) Banking
6 42 (2.67%) Marketing
7 38 (2.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 32 (2.03%) Pharmaceutical
9 31 (1.97%) Retail
10 26 (1.65%) Legal
11 25 (1.59%) Documentation Skills
12 22 (1.40%) Front Office
13 21 (1.33%) Influencing Skills
14 20 (1.27%) Aviation
15 19 (1.21%) Telecoms
16 17 (1.08%) Financial Institution
16 17 (1.08%) Law
17 16 (1.02%) Investment Banking
18 13 (0.83%) Manufacturing
18 13 (0.83%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 225 (14.29%) Data Scientist
2 222 (14.10%) Architect
3 218 (13.85%) Senior
4 153 (9.72%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 145 (9.21%) Data Engineer
6 135 (8.58%) Lead
7 103 (6.54%) Developer
8 74 (4.70%) Analyst
9 73 (4.64%) Python Engineer
10 72 (4.57%) Data Architect
11 68 (4.32%) Solutions Architect
12 67 (4.26%) Software Engineer
13 65 (4.13%) Machine Learning Engineer
14 58 (3.68%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 45 (2.86%) Consultant
16 42 (2.67%) Senior Data Scientist
17 39 (2.48%) Platform Engineer
18 36 (2.29%) Full-Stack Engineer
18 36 (2.29%) Python Developer
19 33 (2.10%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 175 (11.12%) PyTorch
2 122 (7.75%) TensorFlow
3 110 (6.99%) scikit-learn
4 95 (6.04%) Kafka
5 92 (5.84%) Pandas
6 84 (5.34%) LangChain
7 73 (4.64%) React
8 71 (4.51%) PySpark
9 70 (4.45%) NumPy
10 64 (4.07%) REST
11 51 (3.24%) .NET
12 45 (2.86%) Hugging Face
13 33 (2.10%) FastAPI
13 33 (2.10%) LangGraph
14 30 (1.91%) AngularJS
15 28 (1.78%) Model Context Protocol
15 28 (1.78%) RESTful
16 27 (1.72%) Node.js
17 22 (1.40%) pytest
18 21 (1.33%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 188 (11.94%) Cloud Native
2 149 (9.47%) AI Agents
3 114 (7.24%) Algorithms
4 60 (3.81%) Product Ownership
5 51 (3.24%) Distributed Systems
6 49 (3.11%) Onboarding
7 27 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
8 25 (1.59%) Enterprise Software
9 23 (1.46%) Data Structures
9 23 (1.46%) Life Science
10 19 (1.21%) Fixed Income
11 18 (1.14%) Legacy Systems
12 16 (1.02%) Management Information System
12 16 (1.02%) Security Posture
13 14 (0.89%) Hybrid Cloud
14 13 (0.83%) Distributed Computing
14 13 (0.83%) Taxonomies
15 12 (0.76%) Autonomous Agent
15 12 (0.76%) Low-Code
15 12 (0.76%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 45 (2.86%) Linux
2 17 (1.08%) Windows
3 11 (0.70%) Unix
4 6 (0.38%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.38%) VMS
5 5 (0.32%) Android
6 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.064%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,267 (80.50%) AI
2 586 (37.23%) Data Science
3 497 (31.58%) CI/CD
4 449 (28.53%) Analytics
5 447 (28.40%) LLM
6 367 (23.32%) Data Pipeline
7 361 (22.94%) Generative AI
8 326 (20.71%) DevOps
9 310 (19.70%) MLOps
10 303 (19.25%) Agile
11 291 (18.49%) Data Engineering
12 260 (16.52%) Use Case
13 216 (13.72%) Decision-Making
14 214 (13.60%) Software Engineering
15 213 (13.53%) Problem-Solving
16 192 (12.20%) Data Governance
17 190 (12.07%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 180 (11.44%) ETL
19 177 (11.25%) Roadmaps
20 174 (11.05%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 879 (55.84%) Python
2 398 (25.29%) SQL
3 111 (7.05%) Java
4 63 (4.00%) C#
4 63 (4.00%) R
5 60 (3.81%) TypeScript
6 56 (3.56%) JavaScript
7 32 (2.03%) Bash
8 22 (1.40%) C++
9 16 (1.02%) PowerShell
10 15 (0.95%) Bicep
10 15 (0.95%) Scala
11 14 (0.89%) Go
12 10 (0.64%) Kotlin
13 9 (0.57%) PL/SQL
13 9 (0.57%) SPARQL
14 7 (0.44%) Rust
15 6 (0.38%) MATLAB
16 5 (0.32%) Cypher
16 5 (0.32%) Perl
Qualifications
1 277 (17.60%) Security Cleared
2 192 (12.20%) SC Cleared
3 126 (8.01%) Degree
4 48 (3.05%) Master's Degree
5 46 (2.92%) BPSS Clearance
6 45 (2.86%) AWS Certification
6 45 (2.86%) DV Cleared
7 43 (2.73%) Computer Science Degree
8 31 (1.97%) PhD
9 23 (1.46%) Azure Certification
10 21 (1.33%) CISSP
11 20 (1.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 15 (0.95%) CISM
13 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 5 (0.32%) CEH
14 5 (0.32%) CompTIA Security+
14 5 (0.32%) DBS Check
14 5 (0.32%) GIAC
14 5 (0.32%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 187 (11.88%) Data Quality
2 66 (4.19%) GDPR
3 53 (3.37%) QA
4 29 (1.84%) NIST
5 18 (1.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (1.02%) Accessibility
7 14 (0.89%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.70%) HIPAA
8 11 (0.70%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 9 (0.57%) Actionable Recommendations
9 9 (0.57%) GRC
9 9 (0.57%) GxP
10 7 (0.44%) NCSC
11 5 (0.32%) WCAG
12 4 (0.25%) COBIT
12 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
12 4 (0.25%) Solvency II
13 3 (0.19%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 3 (0.19%) SLA
System Software
1 214 (13.60%) Docker
2 12 (0.76%) Active Directory
3 11 (0.70%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.32%) VMware Infrastructure
5 4 (0.25%) Virtual Machines
6 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.19%) Firmware
6 3 (0.19%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.19%) IAG
6 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
6 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.064%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 265 (16.84%) Kubernetes
2 171 (10.86%) Terraform
3 23 (1.46%) Kubeflow
4 22 (1.40%) Grafana
5 19 (1.21%) Ansible
6 14 (0.89%) Prometheus
7 12 (0.76%) Podman
8 7 (0.44%) Istio
9 3 (0.19%) Nagios
9 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.19%) Puppet
9 3 (0.19%) Rancher
9 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.19%) vMotion
10 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.13%) Argo
10 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.13%) Kibana
10 2 (0.13%) Packer
10 2 (0.13%) SCCM
Vendors
1 198 (12.58%) Databricks
2 170 (10.80%) Microsoft
3 101 (6.42%) OpenAI
4 97 (6.16%) Google
5 55 (3.49%) Foundry
6 43 (2.73%) SAP
7 35 (2.22%) Oracle
8 29 (1.84%) ServiceNow
9 23 (1.46%) Informatica
10 17 (1.08%) IBM
11 15 (0.95%) UiPath
12 13 (0.83%) Dynatrace
13 9 (0.57%) Automation Anywhere
14 8 (0.51%) Salesforce
15 7 (0.44%) Amplitude
15 7 (0.44%) Sybase
15 7 (0.44%) Talend
16 6 (0.38%) Palantir
16 6 (0.38%) Pega
16 6 (0.38%) Workday