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 31 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 86 105 125
Rank change year-on-year +19 +20 +83
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,622 829 761
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.05% 2.53% 1.92%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.60% 2.79% 2.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,030 518 541
10th Percentile £413 £400 £405
25th Percentile £488 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £593
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -7.17% +0.85%
75th Percentile £700 £675 £750
90th Percentile £788 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £504
% change year-on-year - +9.05% -8.30%
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 23 19
10th Percentile £33.52 £33.80 £13.06
25th Percentile £47.19 £52.86 £24.74
Median hourly rate £71.25 £75.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% +62.41% -
75th Percentile £82.86 £81.01 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £88.00 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.44 £77.50 £49.34
% change year-on-year -10.40% +57.07% +6.84%

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 45,107 29,668 33,959
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.95% 90.46% 85.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,893 18,635 21,816
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £736 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,744 1,629 1,969
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £13.69
25th Percentile £19.66 £17.35 £17.72
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.75 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £24.00 £40.33
% change year-on-year +83.17% -40.48% +0.81%

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 31 July 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 31 July 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 31 July 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 +17 1,379 £580 +2.65% 1,809
London +35 918 £595 +3.39% 1,224
UK excluding London +2 510 £550 - 771
Work from Home +4 436 £600 +9.09% 672
North of England -7 141 £558 +14.36% 170
South East -16 132 £600 +6.67% 250
Scotland +32 86 £430 -14.00% 67
North West -29 72 £599 +22.34% 99
Midlands -20 64 £550 +10.00% 70
Yorkshire -14 54 £550 +12.19% 46
West Midlands -32 51 £550 -4.35% 41
South West -37 45 £528 -4.09% 85
East of England -24 32 £500 -20.00% 96
Wales -5 16 £540 -20.00% 27
North East -35 15 £463 +8.82% 27
East Midlands -9 11 £700 +64.71% 29
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 20

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 87 (5.36%) Apache Spark
2 75 (4.62%) Apache Airflow
3 46 (2.84%) Apache
4 34 (2.10%) Jupyter
5 21 (1.29%) Confluence
6 8 (0.49%) SAS
7 7 (0.43%) ArcGIS
8 5 (0.31%) CMS
8 5 (0.31%) Headless CMS
8 5 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.31%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.25%) Appian
10 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.12%) OpenStack
11 2 (0.12%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.062%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.062%) Luigi
12 1 (0.062%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 28 (1.73%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.74%) Microsoft Excel
3 6 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.37%) Microsoft Project
4 5 (0.31%) CPLEX
4 5 (0.31%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.12%) Notion
6 1 (0.062%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.062%) DaVinci Resolve
6 1 (0.062%) NUKE
6 1 (0.062%) Simulink
6 1 (0.062%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 11 (0.68%) SAP IBP
2 8 (0.49%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.18%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 1 (0.062%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.062%) OpenText VIM for SAP
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.062%) SAP APO
5 1 (0.062%) SAP ERP
5 1 (0.062%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 569 (35.08%) AWS
2 566 (34.90%) Azure
3 312 (19.24%) GCP
4 134 (8.26%) Power Platform
5 112 (6.91%) GitHub
6 111 (6.84%) Serverless
7 96 (5.92%) Amazon S3
8 86 (5.30%) AWS Lambda
9 85 (5.24%) Amazon SageMaker
10 80 (4.93%) Snowflake
11 79 (4.87%) Azure Machine Learning
12 67 (4.13%) Azure AI
13 58 (3.58%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 57 (3.51%) Amazon Bedrock
15 55 (3.39%) Vertex AI
16 50 (3.08%) dbt
17 49 (3.02%) Azure DevOps
18 48 (2.96%) GitHub Actions
19 44 (2.71%) Azure Data Factory
20 41 (2.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.29%) Firewall
2 16 (0.99%) Network Security
3 15 (0.92%) Internet
4 11 (0.68%) DNS
5 10 (0.62%) VPN
6 9 (0.55%) DHCP
7 8 (0.49%) Broadband
8 4 (0.25%) NAS
8 4 (0.25%) SAN
8 4 (0.25%) TCP/IP
8 4 (0.25%) VLAN
9 3 (0.18%) HTTP
9 3 (0.18%) MQTT
9 3 (0.18%) SMTP
10 2 (0.12%) 4G
10 2 (0.12%) 5G
10 2 (0.12%) CTI
10 2 (0.12%) PCoIP
10 2 (0.12%) Radio Access Network
10 2 (0.12%) Remote Desktop
Database & Business Intelligence
1 116 (7.15%) Power BI
2 89 (5.49%) Data Lake
3 77 (4.75%) BigQuery
4 76 (4.69%) Data Warehouse
5 74 (4.56%) Big Data
6 72 (4.44%) Metadata
7 52 (3.21%) NoSQL
8 46 (2.84%) Amazon Redshift
8 46 (2.84%) Tableau
9 38 (2.34%) Amazon Athena
10 37 (2.28%) Delta Lake
11 36 (2.22%) PostgreSQL
12 34 (2.10%) Relational Database
13 29 (1.79%) Hadoop
14 24 (1.48%) MongoDB
15 23 (1.42%) Looker
16 22 (1.36%) Neo4j
17 20 (1.23%) SQL Server
18 19 (1.17%) Elasticsearch
19 18 (1.11%) Pinecone
Development Applications
1 98 (6.04%) Git
2 69 (4.25%) MLflow
3 51 (3.14%) GitLab
4 45 (2.77%) JIRA
5 27 (1.66%) Jenkins
6 10 (0.62%) Claude Code
6 10 (0.62%) Vite
7 8 (0.49%) Selenium
8 5 (0.31%) Cypress.io
8 5 (0.31%) REST Assured
9 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.25%) ERwin
9 4 (0.25%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.18%) JUnit
10 3 (0.18%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.18%) Spinnaker
11 2 (0.12%) NUnit
11 2 (0.12%) Oracle APEX
11 2 (0.12%) Visual Studio
12 1 (0.062%) TeamCity
General
1 338 (20.84%) Social Skills
2 307 (18.93%) Finance
3 216 (13.32%) Analytical Skills
4 143 (8.82%) Public Sector
5 115 (7.09%) Banking
6 41 (2.53%) Marketing
7 35 (2.16%) Retail
8 33 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 33 (2.03%) Pharmaceutical
9 31 (1.91%) Telecoms
10 25 (1.54%) Legal
11 22 (1.36%) Documentation Skills
11 22 (1.36%) Front Office
12 19 (1.17%) Financial Institution
13 18 (1.11%) Aviation
13 18 (1.11%) Manufacturing
14 17 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
15 16 (0.99%) Aerospace
15 16 (0.99%) Influencing Skills
15 16 (0.99%) Law
Job Titles
1 248 (15.29%) Senior
2 245 (15.10%) Architect
3 228 (14.06%) Data Scientist
4 165 (10.17%) Lead
5 158 (9.74%) Data Engineer
6 143 (8.82%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 102 (6.29%) Developer
8 79 (4.87%) Machine Learning Engineer
9 77 (4.75%) Solutions Architect
10 76 (4.69%) Python Engineer
11 69 (4.25%) Data Architect
12 66 (4.07%) Analyst
13 65 (4.01%) Software Engineer
14 59 (3.64%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 54 (3.33%) Platform Engineer
16 47 (2.90%) Security Architect
16 47 (2.90%) Senior Data Scientist
17 46 (2.84%) DevOps Engineer
18 41 (2.53%) Consultant
19 39 (2.40%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 155 (9.56%) PyTorch
2 111 (6.84%) TensorFlow
3 110 (6.78%) Kafka
4 100 (6.17%) scikit-learn
5 83 (5.12%) LangChain
6 78 (4.81%) Pandas
7 77 (4.75%) PySpark
8 73 (4.50%) React
9 64 (3.95%) REST
10 60 (3.70%) NumPy
11 42 (2.59%) .NET
12 37 (2.28%) LangGraph
13 36 (2.22%) Hugging Face
14 30 (1.85%) AngularJS
14 30 (1.85%) FastAPI
15 27 (1.66%) Node.js
16 26 (1.60%) Model Context Protocol
16 26 (1.60%) pytest
16 26 (1.60%) RESTful
17 22 (1.36%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 189 (11.65%) Cloud Native
2 171 (10.54%) AI Agents
3 118 (7.27%) Algorithms
4 61 (3.76%) Distributed Systems
5 59 (3.64%) Onboarding
5 59 (3.64%) Product Ownership
6 27 (1.66%) Data Structures
6 27 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
6 27 (1.66%) Life Science
7 23 (1.42%) Data Protection Act
8 22 (1.36%) Hybrid Cloud
9 15 (0.92%) Fixed Income
9 15 (0.92%) Legacy Systems
9 15 (0.92%) Public Cloud
9 15 (0.92%) Security Posture
9 15 (0.92%) Taxonomies
10 13 (0.80%) Enterprise Cloud
10 13 (0.80%) Management Information System
10 13 (0.80%) Virtual Team
11 12 (0.74%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 53 (3.27%) Linux
2 15 (0.92%) Windows
3 12 (0.74%) Unix
4 6 (0.37%) Apple iOS
5 5 (0.31%) Android
6 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
6 4 (0.25%) VMS
6 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.062%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,299 (80.09%) AI
2 609 (37.55%) Data Science
3 514 (31.69%) CI/CD
4 467 (28.79%) Analytics
5 444 (27.37%) LLM
6 376 (23.18%) Generative AI
7 367 (22.63%) Data Pipeline
8 334 (20.59%) DevOps
9 327 (20.16%) Agile
10 312 (19.24%) MLOps
11 286 (17.63%) Data Engineering
12 255 (15.72%) Use Case
13 249 (15.35%) Software Engineering
14 231 (14.24%) Decision-Making
15 211 (13.01%) Problem-Solving
16 208 (12.82%) Roadmaps
17 193 (11.90%) Infrastructure as Code
18 190 (11.71%) Data Governance
19 186 (11.47%) Stakeholder Management
20 184 (11.34%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 902 (55.61%) Python
2 399 (24.60%) SQL
3 122 (7.52%) Java
4 74 (4.56%) JavaScript
5 66 (4.07%) TypeScript
6 51 (3.14%) R
7 48 (2.96%) C#
8 40 (2.47%) Bash
9 20 (1.23%) PowerShell
10 18 (1.11%) C++
11 17 (1.05%) Go
12 16 (0.99%) Bicep
13 13 (0.80%) Scala
14 12 (0.74%) Kotlin
15 9 (0.55%) PL/SQL
15 9 (0.55%) Rust
15 9 (0.55%) SPARQL
16 8 (0.49%) Cypher
17 7 (0.43%) Gremlin
18 5 (0.31%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 290 (17.88%) Security Cleared
2 205 (12.64%) SC Cleared
3 132 (8.14%) Degree
4 56 (3.45%) DV Cleared
5 55 (3.39%) Computer Science Degree
6 52 (3.21%) Master's Degree
7 48 (2.96%) AWS Certification
8 41 (2.53%) BPSS Clearance
9 35 (2.16%) PhD
10 31 (1.91%) CISSP
11 24 (1.48%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 21 (1.29%) Azure Certification
13 14 (0.86%) CISM
14 13 (0.80%) TOGAF Certification
15 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
15 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 7 (0.43%) Cisco Certification
15 7 (0.43%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 5 (0.31%) DBS Check
16 5 (0.31%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 192 (11.84%) Data Quality
2 64 (3.95%) GDPR
3 53 (3.27%) QA
4 34 (2.10%) NIST
5 19 (1.17%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (0.99%) Accessibility
7 15 (0.92%) EU AI Act
8 12 (0.74%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 9 (0.55%) GxP
10 8 (0.49%) Actionable Recommendations
10 8 (0.49%) GRC
10 8 (0.49%) HIPAA
11 6 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 42001
11 6 (0.37%) SLA
11 6 (0.37%) WCAG
12 5 (0.31%) Solvency II
13 4 (0.25%) COBIT
13 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
13 4 (0.25%) NCSC
14 3 (0.18%) IFRS
System Software
1 221 (13.63%) Docker
2 12 (0.74%) Active Directory
3 7 (0.43%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 6 (0.37%) IAG
5 5 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
5 5 (0.31%) VMware Infrastructure
6 3 (0.18%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.18%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.18%) Terminal Services
6 3 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 2 (0.12%) Firmware
7 2 (0.12%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
7 2 (0.12%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.062%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 274 (16.89%) Kubernetes
2 183 (11.28%) Terraform
3 30 (1.85%) Ansible
4 25 (1.54%) Kubeflow
5 24 (1.48%) Grafana
6 18 (1.11%) Prometheus
7 9 (0.55%) Podman
8 6 (0.37%) Istio
9 4 (0.25%) systemd
10 3 (0.18%) Kibana
10 3 (0.18%) Nagios
10 3 (0.18%) NetBackup
10 3 (0.18%) Puppet
10 3 (0.18%) Rancher
10 3 (0.18%) vCenter Server
10 3 (0.18%) vMotion
11 2 (0.12%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 2 (0.12%) Docker Swarm
11 2 (0.12%) Packer
11 2 (0.12%) SCCM
Vendors
1 202 (12.45%) Databricks
2 169 (10.42%) Microsoft
3 105 (6.47%) Google
4 85 (5.24%) OpenAI
5 50 (3.08%) SAP
6 41 (2.53%) Foundry
7 35 (2.16%) ServiceNow
8 26 (1.60%) Oracle
9 21 (1.29%) Informatica
10 16 (0.99%) Dynatrace
10 16 (0.99%) IBM
11 13 (0.80%) UiPath
12 12 (0.74%) Splunk
13 7 (0.43%) Amplitude
13 7 (0.43%) Sybase
14 6 (0.37%) Nexthink
14 6 (0.37%) Pega
14 6 (0.37%) Salesforce
14 6 (0.37%) Workday
15 5 (0.31%) New Relic