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 2 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 87 112
Rank change year-on-year -6 +25 +79
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,590 967 802
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.90% 2.92% 2.11%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.43% 3.22% 2.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,008 626 537
10th Percentile £413 £402 £387
25th Percentile £487 £475 £490
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +4.35%
75th Percentile £688 £678 £731
90th Percentile £779 £775 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £525 £494
% change year-on-year +4.76% +6.28% -10.18%
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 23 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.14 £13.06
25th Percentile £43.92 £36.93 £25.93
Median hourly rate £77.00 £55.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +40.00% +19.10% -
75th Percentile £86.06 £77.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £87.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £61.36 £46.18
% change year-on-year +25.48% +32.88% -

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 46,382 30,011 32,696
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.49% 90.62% 85.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,976 18,637 19,780
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £734 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,269 1,869 1,352
10th Percentile £13.69 £14.32 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.17 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £38.72 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +53.96% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £65.60 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.00 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.02 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +74.86% -48.10% +1.18%

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 2 October 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 2 October 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 2 October 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 -5 1,367 £580 +2.02% 6,159
London +20 907 £600 - 4,211
UK excluding London -24 522 £550 +4.76% 2,427
Work from Home -17 424 £581 +5.68% 2,307
North of England -15 157 £550 +15.79% 481
South East -21 136 £600 +9.09% 581
Scotland -3 96 £463 -7.96% 288
Yorkshire +5 69 £525 +2.14% 116
North West -30 69 £650 +36.84% 305
South West -14 51 £528 -8.26% 364
Midlands -45 50 £575 +9.52% 211
West Midlands -33 40 £538 +2.38% 119
East of England -36 33 £475 -13.64% 336
North East -29 20 £550 +29.41% 62
Wales -11 7 £530 -21.48% 97
East Midlands -15 6 £425 -8.11% 92
Northern Ireland +7 1 £334 -52.29% 86

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
1 100 (6.29%) Apache Spark
2 82 (5.16%) Apache Airflow
3 67 (4.21%) Apache
4 36 (2.26%) Jupyter
5 25 (1.57%) Confluence
6 11 (0.69%) SAS
7 7 (0.44%) IIS
8 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
9 5 (0.31%) SharePoint
10 4 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 3 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
12 2 (0.13%) Appian
12 2 (0.13%) CMS
12 2 (0.13%) Headless CMS
13 1 (0.063%) Luigi
13 1 (0.063%) nginx
Applications
1 30 (1.89%) Chatbot
2 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Excel
3 3 (0.19%) CPLEX
4 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
4 2 (0.13%) Notion
4 2 (0.13%) NUKE
5 1 (0.063%) Adobe XD
5 1 (0.063%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.063%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.063%) Simulink
5 1 (0.063%) Sketch
5 1 (0.063%) Trello
Business Applications
1 8 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
2 5 (0.31%) SAP IBP
3 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
3 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
4 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 1 (0.063%) Actimize
5 1 (0.063%) Dynamics CRM
5 1 (0.063%) Endur
5 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.063%) OpenLink RightAngle
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 517 (32.52%) Azure
2 513 (32.26%) AWS
3 301 (18.93%) GCP
4 108 (6.79%) Power Platform
5 107 (6.73%) Serverless
6 103 (6.48%) GitHub
7 98 (6.16%) Amazon S3
8 90 (5.66%) Snowflake
9 86 (5.41%) AWS Lambda
10 72 (4.53%) Amazon SageMaker
11 65 (4.09%) Amazon Bedrock
12 64 (4.03%) dbt
13 60 (3.77%) Azure Machine Learning
14 49 (3.08%) Azure DevOps
14 49 (3.08%) Vertex AI
15 48 (3.02%) Azure AI
16 47 (2.96%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 45 (2.83%) SaaS
18 44 (2.77%) Azure Data Factory
19 41 (2.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.32%) Network Security
2 19 (1.19%) Broadband
2 19 (1.19%) Internet
3 13 (0.82%) DNS
4 12 (0.75%) Firewall
4 12 (0.75%) HTTP
5 9 (0.57%) DHCP
5 9 (0.57%) VPN
6 5 (0.31%) SMTP
6 5 (0.31%) TCP/IP
7 4 (0.25%) NAS
7 4 (0.25%) SAN
7 4 (0.25%) SMS
7 4 (0.25%) VLAN
8 3 (0.19%) CTI
8 3 (0.19%) MQTT
9 2 (0.13%) FTP
9 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
9 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
9 2 (0.13%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 100 (6.29%) Data Warehouse
2 99 (6.23%) Power BI
3 96 (6.04%) Data Lake
4 89 (5.60%) Metadata
5 78 (4.91%) BigQuery
6 64 (4.03%) Big Data
7 53 (3.33%) Amazon Redshift
8 51 (3.21%) Delta Lake
9 46 (2.89%) NoSQL
10 40 (2.52%) Tableau
11 38 (2.39%) PostgreSQL
12 35 (2.20%) Amazon Athena
13 28 (1.76%) Relational Database
14 25 (1.57%) Hadoop
15 24 (1.51%) Neo4j
16 20 (1.26%) MongoDB
17 19 (1.19%) Elasticsearch
18 17 (1.07%) Amazon RDS
18 17 (1.07%) Data Mining
18 17 (1.07%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 104 (6.54%) Git
2 55 (3.46%) GitLab
3 47 (2.96%) JIRA
4 40 (2.52%) MLflow
5 13 (0.82%) Claude Code
6 12 (0.75%) Jenkins
7 7 (0.44%) Vite
8 6 (0.38%) JMeter
9 5 (0.31%) Cypress.io
9 5 (0.31%) ERwin
9 5 (0.31%) Postman
9 5 (0.31%) RStudio
10 4 (0.25%) REST Assured
10 4 (0.25%) Selenium
11 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
11 3 (0.19%) Newman
11 3 (0.19%) Pylint
12 2 (0.13%) Applitools
12 2 (0.13%) Locust
12 2 (0.13%) Spinnaker
General
1 362 (22.77%) Social Skills
2 313 (19.69%) Finance
3 237 (14.91%) Analytical Skills
4 146 (9.18%) Public Sector
5 125 (7.86%) Banking
6 39 (2.45%) Marketing
7 35 (2.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 32 (2.01%) Retail
9 28 (1.76%) Pharmaceutical
9 28 (1.76%) Telecoms
10 24 (1.51%) Manufacturing
11 23 (1.45%) Aerospace
12 22 (1.38%) Influencing Skills
12 22 (1.38%) Legal
13 21 (1.32%) Front Office
14 20 (1.26%) Financial Institution
15 17 (1.07%) Documentation Skills
15 17 (1.07%) Investment Banking
16 15 (0.94%) Billing
16 15 (0.94%) Law
Job Titles
1 286 (17.99%) Senior
2 257 (16.16%) Architect
3 195 (12.26%) Data Scientist
4 191 (12.01%) Data Engineer
5 176 (11.07%) Lead
6 147 (9.25%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 106 (6.67%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 71 (4.47%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
8 71 (4.47%) Solutions Architect
9 70 (4.40%) Python Engineer
10 69 (4.34%) Developer
11 68 (4.28%) Data Architect
12 62 (3.90%) Analyst
13 58 (3.65%) Senior Data Engineer
14 56 (3.52%) Platform Engineer
15 52 (3.27%) Senior Data Scientist
16 51 (3.21%) Software Engineer
17 47 (2.96%) Security Architect
18 40 (2.52%) DevOps Engineer
19 37 (2.33%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 205 (12.89%) Terraform
2 110 (6.92%) PyTorch
3 106 (6.67%) Kafka
4 95 (5.97%) PySpark
5 81 (5.09%) TensorFlow
6 73 (4.59%) REST
7 72 (4.53%) LangChain
8 65 (4.09%) scikit-learn
9 59 (3.71%) React
10 57 (3.58%) Pandas
11 51 (3.21%) pytest
12 44 (2.77%) NumPy
13 38 (2.39%) LangGraph
14 37 (2.33%) FastAPI
15 33 (2.08%) .NET
16 28 (1.76%) Hugging Face
17 27 (1.70%) JSON
17 27 (1.70%) Model Context Protocol
18 21 (1.32%) RESTful
19 20 (1.26%) vLLM
Miscellaneous
1 210 (13.21%) Cloud Native
2 173 (10.88%) AI Agents
3 107 (6.73%) Algorithms
4 75 (4.72%) Onboarding
5 68 (4.28%) Distributed Systems
6 66 (4.15%) Product Ownership
7 39 (2.45%) Data Structures
8 37 (2.33%) Enterprise Software
9 30 (1.89%) Life Science
10 27 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
11 22 (1.38%) Management Information System
12 21 (1.32%) Hybrid Cloud
13 18 (1.13%) CMDB
13 18 (1.13%) Social Media
14 17 (1.07%) Taxonomies
15 16 (1.01%) Clustering
15 16 (1.01%) Credit Risk
16 15 (0.94%) Analytical Mindset
16 15 (0.94%) Virtual Team
17 14 (0.88%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 46 (2.89%) Linux
2 19 (1.19%) Windows
3 16 (1.01%) Unix
4 4 (0.25%) Android
4 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.19%) Apple iOS
6 1 (0.063%) Mac OS
6 1 (0.063%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
6 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,312 (82.52%) AI
2 583 (36.67%) Data Science
3 510 (32.08%) CI/CD
4 480 (30.19%) Analytics
5 434 (27.30%) LLM
6 396 (24.91%) Generative AI
7 365 (22.96%) Data Pipeline
8 331 (20.82%) Agile
9 330 (20.75%) DevOps
10 305 (19.18%) MLOps
11 288 (18.11%) Data Engineering
12 262 (16.48%) Software Engineering
13 247 (15.53%) Stakeholder Management
14 244 (15.35%) Decision-Making
15 239 (15.03%) Roadmaps
15 239 (15.03%) Use Case
16 220 (13.84%) Infrastructure as Code
17 210 (13.21%) Problem-Solving
18 208 (13.08%) Data Modelling
19 203 (12.77%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 844 (53.08%) Python
2 405 (25.47%) SQL
3 109 (6.86%) Java
4 76 (4.78%) JavaScript
5 63 (3.96%) TypeScript
6 41 (2.58%) Bash
7 35 (2.20%) R
8 34 (2.14%) C#
9 29 (1.82%) PowerShell
10 27 (1.70%) Scala
11 19 (1.19%) C++
11 19 (1.19%) Go
12 17 (1.07%) Bicep
13 14 (0.88%) Shell Script
14 11 (0.69%) Cypher
14 11 (0.69%) PL/SQL
15 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
15 7 (0.44%) SPARQL
16 6 (0.38%) Kotlin
17 5 (0.31%) Perl
Qualifications
1 313 (19.69%) Security Cleared
2 244 (15.35%) SC Cleared
3 129 (8.11%) Degree
4 57 (3.58%) Computer Science Degree
5 56 (3.52%) DV Cleared
6 50 (3.14%) AWS Certification
7 41 (2.58%) BPSS Clearance
8 40 (2.52%) Master's Degree
9 31 (1.95%) CISSP
10 29 (1.82%) Azure Certification
11 26 (1.64%) PhD
12 18 (1.13%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 15 (0.94%) TOGAF Certification
14 14 (0.88%) CISM
15 10 (0.63%) Cisco Certification
15 10 (0.63%) ITIL Certification
16 9 (0.57%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 9 (0.57%) Microsoft Certified Professional
17 7 (0.44%) DBS Check
18 6 (0.38%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 227 (14.28%) Data Quality
2 55 (3.46%) QA
3 54 (3.40%) GDPR
4 30 (1.89%) NIST
5 19 (1.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 18 (1.13%) Accessibility
7 15 (0.94%) EU AI Act
8 10 (0.63%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 10 (0.63%) SLA
9 9 (0.57%) GRC
9 9 (0.57%) NCSC
10 8 (0.50%) GxP
11 7 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 6 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
12 6 (0.38%) HIPAA
12 6 (0.38%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.31%) Basel III
13 5 (0.31%) Solvency II
14 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
14 4 (0.25%) SOC 2
System Software
1 213 (13.40%) Docker
2 15 (0.94%) Active Directory
3 13 (0.82%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (0.63%) Hyper-V
4 10 (0.63%) IAG
5 8 (0.50%) Virtual Machines
6 7 (0.44%) NFS
7 5 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
8 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
8 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
8 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
9 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 2 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
9 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
10 1 (0.063%) Firmware
10 1 (0.063%) zsh
Systems Management
1 287 (18.05%) Kubernetes
2 46 (2.89%) Ansible
3 28 (1.76%) Kubeflow
4 26 (1.64%) Grafana
5 20 (1.26%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.38%) Istio
6 6 (0.38%) systemd
7 5 (0.31%) Podman
8 3 (0.19%) Argo
8 3 (0.19%) Kibana
8 3 (0.19%) Nagios
8 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
8 3 (0.19%) Puppet
8 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
8 3 (0.19%) vMotion
9 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 2 (0.13%) Packer
9 2 (0.13%) SCCM
9 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.063%) Cilium
Vendors
1 203 (12.77%) Databricks
2 152 (9.56%) Microsoft
3 105 (6.60%) Google
4 62 (3.90%) OpenAI
5 37 (2.33%) SAP
6 34 (2.14%) ServiceNow
7 31 (1.95%) Oracle
8 26 (1.64%) Foundry
9 22 (1.38%) Informatica
10 17 (1.07%) Dynatrace
11 14 (0.88%) VMware
12 11 (0.69%) Salesforce
13 10 (0.63%) IBM
13 10 (0.63%) Nexthink
13 10 (0.63%) Splunk
14 9 (0.57%) UiPath
15 7 (0.44%) Cisco
16 6 (0.38%) Pega
17 5 (0.31%) HP
17 5 (0.31%) MicroStrategy