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 13 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 79 103 179
Rank change year-on-year +24 +76 +24
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,143 849 642
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.15% 2.38% 1.41%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.54% 2.72% 1.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 760 569 468
10th Percentile £402 £382 £400
25th Percentile £474 £475 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £581
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +3.23% -7.00%
75th Percentile £688 £731 £701
90th Percentile £775 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £513 £500 £530
% change year-on-year +2.50% -5.66% -11.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 29 20 29
10th Percentile £31.00 £13.06 £42.50
25th Percentile £42.79 £20.31 -
Median hourly rate £51.44 £27.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +87.05% -40.45% -7.64%
75th Percentile £80.00 £48.07 £47.50
90th Percentile £114.60 £54.88 £65.35
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.11 £46.18 £46.18
% change year-on-year +36.67% - -7.64%

All Process and 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 32,247 31,236 40,271
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.88% 87.47% 88.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,285 18,990 26,947
10th Percentile £300 £308 £310
25th Percentile £405 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.50% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,090 1,084 1,559
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.25 £14.36
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.19 £18.94
Median hourly rate £25.13 £33.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -23.86% -22.35% +21.43%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £74.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.63 £32.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year -30.37% -23.53% +30.77%

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 13 December 2025.

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 13 December 2025.

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 13 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 +18 961 £575 -4.17% 2,959
London +13 628 £625 -3.85% 494
UK excluding London +51 370 £513 +2.50% 2,766
Work from Home +30 355 £550 +4.76% 5,653
North of England -14 94 £475 -2.86% 609
South East +23 83 £514 -2.10% 747
East of England +22 65 £523 -6.28% 431
Scotland +48 60 £503 +25.63% 140
North West 0 48 £465 -3.53% 320
Yorkshire -15 41 £514 -2.10% 243
Midlands -10 39 £514 +20.94% 491
West Midlands -5 29 £514 +11.14% 254
South West -28 24 £550 -15.38% 292
Wales +4 10 £700 +201.08% 64
East Midlands -16 10 £426 +19.66% 207
North East -13 6 £450 +4.05% 50
Northern Ireland -5 2 £675 - 41

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 85 (7.44%) Apache Spark
2 62 (5.42%) Apache Airflow
3 33 (2.89%) Apache
4 24 (2.10%) Jupyter
5 9 (0.79%) Confluence
6 8 (0.70%) Apache Pig
6 8 (0.70%) SAS
7 6 (0.52%) GeoServer
7 6 (0.52%) Smallworld
8 4 (0.35%) Appian
8 4 (0.35%) IIS
9 3 (0.26%) CMS
9 3 (0.26%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.087%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.087%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.087%) nginx
10 1 (0.087%) Red Hat Fuse
Applications
1 43 (3.76%) Chatbot
2 16 (1.40%) Microsoft Excel
3 12 (1.05%) Microsoft Office
4 8 (0.70%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.70%) Microsoft Project
5 5 (0.44%) Simulink
6 1 (0.087%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.087%) GNU Octave
6 1 (0.087%) Sketch
6 1 (0.087%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.087%) Trello
Business Applications
1 9 (0.79%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (0.26%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.17%) Distributed Ledger
3 2 (0.17%) SAP ERP
3 2 (0.17%) Teamcenter
4 1 (0.087%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.087%) SAP GRC
4 1 (0.087%) Shopify
4 1 (0.087%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 485 (42.43%) Azure
2 393 (34.38%) AWS
3 218 (19.07%) GCP
4 111 (9.71%) Power Platform
5 101 (8.84%) GitHub
6 100 (8.75%) Azure Machine Learning
6 100 (8.75%) Serverless
7 69 (6.04%) Azure DevOps
8 67 (5.86%) Snowflake
9 65 (5.69%) Amazon S3
10 64 (5.60%) Amazon SageMaker
11 56 (4.90%) Vertex AI
12 54 (4.72%) Azure AI
13 52 (4.55%) AWS Lambda
14 50 (4.37%) Azure AKS
15 48 (4.20%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 48 (4.20%) GitHub Actions
16 47 (4.11%) Azure Data Factory
17 37 (3.24%) Amazon Bedrock
17 37 (3.24%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 15 (1.31%) Network Security
2 14 (1.22%) HTTP
3 13 (1.14%) DNS
4 9 (0.79%) SSL
5 8 (0.70%) FTP
5 8 (0.70%) SMTP
6 6 (0.52%) Ethernet
6 6 (0.52%) Firewall
6 6 (0.52%) Internet
7 4 (0.35%) VPN
8 3 (0.26%) InfiniBand
9 2 (0.17%) 2G
9 2 (0.17%) 5G
9 2 (0.17%) Cisco IPT
9 2 (0.17%) Cisco Nexus
9 2 (0.17%) Hyperconnected
9 2 (0.17%) LTE
9 2 (0.17%) Modbus
9 2 (0.17%) OSPF
9 2 (0.17%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 98 (8.57%) Power BI
2 75 (6.56%) Data Warehouse
3 66 (5.77%) Big Data
4 64 (5.60%) Data Lake
5 56 (4.90%) PostgreSQL
6 52 (4.55%) NoSQL
7 41 (3.59%) BigQuery
7 41 (3.59%) Tableau
8 31 (2.71%) Metadata
9 28 (2.45%) Hadoop
10 25 (2.19%) Pinecone
11 23 (2.01%) MongoDB
12 21 (1.84%) Amazon Athena
13 20 (1.75%) Delta Lake
14 19 (1.66%) Elasticsearch
15 18 (1.57%) Data Mining
16 16 (1.40%) Relational Database
17 15 (1.31%) Amazon Redshift
18 13 (1.14%) Azure SQL Database
18 13 (1.14%) Geospatial Data
Development Applications
1 96 (8.40%) Git
2 69 (6.04%) MLflow
3 59 (5.16%) Jenkins
4 38 (3.32%) GitLab
5 24 (2.10%) JIRA
6 18 (1.57%) Selenium
7 16 (1.40%) JMeter
8 13 (1.14%) SonarQube
9 9 (0.79%) JUnit
10 8 (0.70%) Cypress.io
11 7 (0.61%) Visual Studio
12 6 (0.52%) Mockito
12 6 (0.52%) Postman
12 6 (0.52%) PyCharm
13 5 (0.44%) Cucumber
13 5 (0.44%) Gradle
13 5 (0.44%) MSTest
14 4 (0.35%) Artifactory
14 4 (0.35%) Oracle APEX
14 4 (0.35%) RStudio
General
1 324 (28.35%) Social Skills
2 216 (18.90%) Finance
3 132 (11.55%) Analytical Skills
4 100 (8.75%) Public Sector
5 73 (6.39%) Banking
6 45 (3.94%) Marketing
7 43 (3.76%) Pharmaceutical
8 37 (3.24%) Retail
9 27 (2.36%) Manufacturing
9 27 (2.36%) Telecoms
10 26 (2.27%) Investment Banking
10 26 (2.27%) Legal
11 21 (1.84%) Front Office
12 19 (1.66%) Documentation Skills
13 17 (1.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 17 (1.49%) Influencing Skills
14 14 (1.22%) Presentation Skills
15 12 (1.05%) Electronics
16 11 (0.96%) Financial Institution
17 10 (0.87%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 182 (15.92%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 169 (14.79%) Data Scientist
3 151 (13.21%) Architect
4 120 (10.50%) Senior
5 117 (10.24%) Data Engineer
6 113 (9.89%) Developer
7 73 (6.39%) Lead
8 58 (5.07%) Python Engineer
9 55 (4.81%) Machine Learning Engineer
10 51 (4.46%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
11 48 (4.20%) Analyst
12 42 (3.67%) Software Engineer
13 38 (3.32%) Data Architect
14 36 (3.15%) Gen AI Engineer
15 32 (2.80%) Solutions Architect
16 31 (2.71%) Azure Engineer
17 28 (2.45%) Senior Data Scientist
18 26 (2.27%) Consultant
18 26 (2.27%) Python Developer
19 25 (2.19%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 199 (17.41%) PyTorch
2 175 (15.31%) TensorFlow
3 117 (10.24%) scikit-learn
4 107 (9.36%) Pandas
5 90 (7.87%) LangChain
6 84 (7.35%) FastAPI
7 74 (6.47%) NumPy
8 64 (5.60%) Hugging Face
9 61 (5.34%) React
10 60 (5.25%) Kafka
11 52 (4.55%) LangGraph
11 52 (4.55%) RESTful
12 50 (4.37%) PySpark
13 47 (4.11%) REST
14 37 (3.24%) Node.js
15 34 (2.97%) .NET
15 34 (2.97%) Flask
16 31 (2.71%) pytest
17 23 (2.01%) AngularJS
18 22 (1.92%) Faiss
Miscellaneous
1 179 (15.66%) Algorithms
2 142 (12.42%) Cloud Native
3 100 (8.75%) AI Agents
4 43 (3.76%) Product Ownership
5 39 (3.41%) Distributed Systems
5 39 (3.41%) Onboarding
6 36 (3.15%) Data Protection Act
7 29 (2.54%) Distributed Computing
8 28 (2.45%) Legacy Systems
9 25 (2.19%) Genomics
10 24 (2.10%) Life Science
11 23 (2.01%) Analytical Mindset
12 22 (1.92%) Data Structures
13 21 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
14 18 (1.57%) Enterprise Software
15 16 (1.40%) Management Information System
16 13 (1.14%) Greenfield Project
17 11 (0.96%) IoT
18 10 (0.87%) Cyber Threat
18 10 (0.87%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 31 (2.71%) Linux
2 11 (0.96%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 11 (0.96%) VMS
3 9 (0.79%) Ubuntu
4 8 (0.70%) Unix
4 8 (0.70%) Windows
5 6 (0.52%) Android
5 6 (0.52%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.17%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.087%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 840 (73.49%) AI
2 458 (40.07%) Data Science
3 338 (29.57%) LLM
4 307 (26.86%) CI/CD
5 302 (26.42%) Analytics
6 279 (24.41%) Agile
7 261 (22.83%) DevOps
8 223 (19.51%) Generative AI
9 216 (18.90%) Data Pipeline
10 197 (17.24%) MLOps
11 196 (17.15%) Problem-Solving
12 189 (16.54%) Data Engineering
13 168 (14.70%) Natural Language Processing
14 159 (13.91%) Software Engineering
15 151 (13.21%) Containerisation
16 135 (11.81%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 135 (11.81%) Visualisation
17 134 (11.72%) Data Modelling
18 132 (11.55%) Use Case
19 128 (11.20%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 733 (64.13%) Python
2 275 (24.06%) SQL
3 81 (7.09%) R
4 70 (6.12%) Java
5 57 (4.99%) JavaScript
6 53 (4.64%) TypeScript
7 41 (3.59%) C#
8 38 (3.32%) PowerShell
9 32 (2.80%) C++
10 29 (2.54%) Scala
11 22 (1.92%) Bash
12 20 (1.75%) Bicep
13 14 (1.22%) MATLAB
14 12 (1.05%) Go
15 10 (0.87%) C
16 5 (0.44%) SystemVerilog
16 5 (0.44%) Tcl
17 3 (0.26%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 3 (0.26%) PL/SQL
17 3 (0.26%) Rust
Qualifications
1 176 (15.40%) Degree
2 164 (14.35%) Security Cleared
3 120 (10.50%) SC Cleared
4 70 (6.12%) Master's Degree
5 51 (4.46%) MCP
6 45 (3.94%) Computer Science Degree
7 38 (3.32%) PhD
8 29 (2.54%) DV Cleared
9 24 (2.10%) Azure Certification
10 14 (1.22%) AWS Certification
11 12 (1.05%) BPSS Clearance
12 8 (0.70%) CISSP
13 5 (0.44%) HNC
13 5 (0.44%) HND
13 5 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
13 5 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
14 4 (0.35%) Cisco Certification
14 4 (0.35%) CISM
14 4 (0.35%) ISTQB
14 4 (0.35%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 71 (6.21%) Data Quality
2 58 (5.07%) GDPR
3 40 (3.50%) QA
4 39 (3.41%) NIST
5 32 (2.80%) EU AI Act
6 23 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 17 (1.49%) Accessibility
8 8 (0.70%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 5 (0.44%) DO-254
9 5 (0.44%) HIPAA
9 5 (0.44%) HMG Security Policy Framework
9 5 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 5 (0.44%) SOC 2
10 4 (0.35%) Disclosure Scotland
10 4 (0.35%) NCSC
10 4 (0.35%) PCI DSS
11 3 (0.26%) GRC
12 2 (0.17%) EMIR
12 2 (0.17%) JSP 440
12 2 (0.17%) NIST 800
System Software
1 196 (17.15%) Docker
2 12 (1.05%) Active Directory
3 11 (0.96%) Virtual Machines
4 6 (0.52%) Firmware
5 3 (0.26%) Lustre
5 3 (0.26%) VMware Infrastructure
6 2 (0.17%) GPFS
6 2 (0.17%) Hyper-V
6 2 (0.17%) KVM
6 2 (0.17%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 2 (0.17%) VMware NSX
7 1 (0.087%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 192 (16.80%) Kubernetes
2 129 (11.29%) Terraform
3 32 (2.80%) Grafana
4 27 (2.36%) Ansible
5 17 (1.49%) Kubeflow
6 16 (1.40%) Prometheus
7 13 (1.14%) Kibana
8 11 (0.96%) SCOM
9 10 (0.87%) logstash
10 9 (0.79%) ITRS Geneos
11 8 (0.70%) Argo
12 4 (0.35%) Cilium
12 4 (0.35%) Kustomize
12 4 (0.35%) Progress Chef
12 4 (0.35%) Rsyslog
13 3 (0.26%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
14 2 (0.17%) Knative
14 2 (0.17%) Podman
14 2 (0.17%) Single Sign-On
15 1 (0.087%) Opsgenie
Vendors
1 164 (14.35%) Microsoft
2 162 (14.17%) Databricks
3 106 (9.27%) Google
4 70 (6.12%) OpenAI
5 44 (3.85%) Foundry
6 38 (3.32%) SAP
7 20 (1.75%) Splunk
8 16 (1.40%) ServiceNow
9 14 (1.22%) Salesforce
10 13 (1.14%) NVIDIA
11 10 (0.87%) Oracle
12 9 (0.79%) Greenplum
12 9 (0.79%) Solace
12 9 (0.79%) TIBCO
13 7 (0.61%) Cisco
13 7 (0.61%) Pega
13 7 (0.61%) Sage
14 6 (0.52%) ESRI
14 6 (0.52%) Intel
14 6 (0.52%) Intergraph