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 3 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 100 110
Rank change year-on-year +7 +10 +83
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,560 850 824
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.91% 2.61% 2.15%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.44% 2.89% 2.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,007 540 573
10th Percentile £413 £400 £400
25th Percentile £493 £475 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £565 £600
Median % change year-on-year +1.77% -5.83% +2.13%
75th Percentile £688 £688 £731
90th Percentile £788 £788 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £498
% change year-on-year - +10.55% -9.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 39 24 17
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.92 £13.06
25th Percentile £37.75 £44.71 £27.75
Median hourly rate £77.00 £63.75 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +20.78% +38.05% -
75th Percentile £84.38 £79.06 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £86.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £49.34
% change year-on-year +2.67% +52.01% +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 45,377 29,398 32,720
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.63% 90.44% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,769 18,279 20,543
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.49%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,906 1,760 1,592
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.73 £17.30 £18.69
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +2.41%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.03 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.58 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +88.14% -47.37% +14.67%

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 3 September 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 3 September 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 3 September 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 +7 1,338 £575 - 4,838
London +32 904 £589 -1.92% 3,391
UK excluding London -1 481 £550 - 2,017
Work from Home +2 413 £600 +9.09% 1,898
South East -9 134 £600 +4.35% 445
North of England -10 131 £550 +13.40% 395
Scotland +18 86 £450 -14.29% 313
North West -34 61 £600 +22.45% 250
Yorkshire -5 58 £550 +13.11% 107
Midlands -32 52 £500 -6.98% 165
South West -29 44 £525 -4.55% 289
West Midlands -31 44 £525 -8.70% 98
East of England -26 29 £488 -13.33% 302
North East -36 13 £463 +8.82% 39
Wales -10 9 £540 -20.00% 52
East Midlands -19 7 £438 -1.41% 67
Northern Ireland +3 1 £334 -52.29% 78

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 86 (5.51%) Apache Spark
2 75 (4.81%) Apache Airflow
3 51 (3.27%) Apache
4 32 (2.05%) Jupyter
5 21 (1.35%) Confluence
6 11 (0.71%) SAS
7 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
8 5 (0.32%) Palantir Foundry
9 4 (0.26%) SharePoint
10 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.13%) Appian
11 2 (0.13%) CMS
11 2 (0.13%) Headless CMS
11 2 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.064%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.064%) Luigi
Applications
1 29 (1.86%) Chatbot
2 10 (0.64%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.26%) CPLEX
3 4 (0.26%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
5 2 (0.13%) Notion
5 2 (0.13%) NUKE
6 1 (0.064%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.064%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.064%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.064%) Simulink
6 1 (0.064%) Sketch
6 1 (0.064%) Trello
Business Applications
1 10 (0.64%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
3 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
3 3 (0.19%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
5 1 (0.064%) Actimize
5 1 (0.064%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.064%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.064%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.064%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.064%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.064%) SAP APO
5 1 (0.064%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 543 (34.81%) Azure
2 514 (32.95%) AWS
3 303 (19.42%) GCP
4 121 (7.76%) Power Platform
5 114 (7.31%) GitHub
6 106 (6.79%) Serverless
7 89 (5.71%) Amazon S3
8 88 (5.64%) Snowflake
9 81 (5.19%) AWS Lambda
10 70 (4.49%) Amazon SageMaker
11 64 (4.10%) Azure Machine Learning
12 57 (3.65%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 56 (3.59%) Amazon Bedrock
13 56 (3.59%) dbt
14 53 (3.40%) Azure DevOps
15 49 (3.14%) Azure AI
16 47 (3.01%) GitHub Actions
17 46 (2.95%) Azure Data Factory
18 44 (2.82%) SaaS
18 44 (2.82%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 18 (1.15%) Broadband
1 18 (1.15%) Internet
1 18 (1.15%) Network Security
2 14 (0.90%) Firewall
3 11 (0.71%) DNS
4 9 (0.58%) DHCP
4 9 (0.58%) VPN
5 4 (0.26%) NAS
5 4 (0.26%) SAN
5 4 (0.26%) SMS
5 4 (0.26%) TCP/IP
5 4 (0.26%) VLAN
6 3 (0.19%) HTTP
6 3 (0.19%) MQTT
6 3 (0.19%) SMTP
7 2 (0.13%) CTI
7 2 (0.13%) Modbus
7 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
7 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
8 1 (0.064%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 112 (7.18%) Power BI
2 90 (5.77%) Data Warehouse
3 89 (5.71%) Data Lake
4 81 (5.19%) Metadata
5 78 (5.00%) BigQuery
6 67 (4.29%) Big Data
7 52 (3.33%) Amazon Redshift
8 49 (3.14%) NoSQL
9 47 (3.01%) Delta Lake
10 42 (2.69%) Tableau
11 35 (2.24%) Amazon Athena
12 31 (1.99%) PostgreSQL
13 29 (1.86%) Relational Database
14 24 (1.54%) MongoDB
15 22 (1.41%) Hadoop
16 21 (1.35%) Neo4j
17 19 (1.22%) Data Mining
18 18 (1.15%) Looker
19 16 (1.03%) Semantic Layer
20 15 (0.96%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 90 (5.77%) Git
2 52 (3.33%) GitLab
3 51 (3.27%) MLflow
4 47 (3.01%) JIRA
5 21 (1.35%) Jenkins
6 11 (0.71%) Claude Code
7 9 (0.58%) Vite
8 8 (0.51%) Selenium
9 6 (0.38%) ERwin
10 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
10 5 (0.32%) RStudio
11 4 (0.26%) JMeter
11 4 (0.26%) Spinnaker
12 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
12 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
13 2 (0.13%) Locust
13 2 (0.13%) PyCharm
13 2 (0.13%) Pylint
13 2 (0.13%) SonarQube
13 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 336 (21.54%) Social Skills
2 287 (18.40%) Finance
3 225 (14.42%) Analytical Skills
4 131 (8.40%) Public Sector
5 110 (7.05%) Banking
6 41 (2.63%) Marketing
7 36 (2.31%) Retail
8 31 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 28 (1.79%) Pharmaceutical
9 28 (1.79%) Telecoms
10 25 (1.60%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.60%) Legal
11 21 (1.35%) Front Office
12 20 (1.28%) Aerospace
12 20 (1.28%) Influencing Skills
12 20 (1.28%) Manufacturing
13 19 (1.22%) Financial Institution
14 16 (1.03%) Investment Banking
15 15 (0.96%) Law
16 14 (0.90%) Billing
Job Titles
1 260 (16.67%) Architect
2 254 (16.28%) Senior
3 203 (13.01%) Data Scientist
4 168 (10.77%) Data Engineer
5 167 (10.71%) Lead
6 136 (8.72%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 97 (6.22%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 81 (5.19%) Developer
9 74 (4.74%) Data Architect
9 74 (4.74%) Solutions Architect
10 71 (4.55%) Python Engineer
11 64 (4.10%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
12 59 (3.78%) Analyst
13 56 (3.59%) Software Engineer
14 52 (3.33%) Platform Engineer
15 49 (3.14%) Security Architect
16 46 (2.95%) Senior Data Engineer
17 44 (2.82%) DevOps Engineer
18 43 (2.76%) Consultant
18 43 (2.76%) Senior Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 189 (12.12%) Terraform
2 120 (7.69%) PyTorch
3 109 (6.99%) Kafka
4 88 (5.64%) PySpark
5 87 (5.58%) TensorFlow
6 72 (4.62%) scikit-learn
7 71 (4.55%) REST
8 67 (4.29%) LangChain
9 65 (4.17%) Pandas
10 62 (3.97%) React
11 50 (3.21%) NumPy
12 41 (2.63%) pytest
13 38 (2.44%) .NET
14 34 (2.18%) LangGraph
15 32 (2.05%) FastAPI
16 26 (1.67%) Hugging Face
16 26 (1.67%) RESTful
17 23 (1.47%) Model Context Protocol
18 22 (1.41%) JSON
18 22 (1.41%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 195 (12.50%) Cloud Native
2 164 (10.51%) AI Agents
3 100 (6.41%) Algorithms
4 66 (4.23%) Onboarding
4 66 (4.23%) Product Ownership
5 63 (4.04%) Distributed Systems
6 35 (2.24%) Enterprise Software
7 33 (2.12%) Data Structures
8 25 (1.60%) Life Science
9 23 (1.47%) Hybrid Cloud
10 21 (1.35%) Data Protection Act
11 19 (1.22%) CMDB
12 17 (1.09%) Social Media
13 16 (1.03%) IoT
14 15 (0.96%) Management Information System
14 15 (0.96%) Taxonomies
14 15 (0.96%) Virtual Team
15 14 (0.90%) Public Cloud
16 13 (0.83%) Augmented Reality
16 13 (0.83%) Enterprise Cloud
Operating Systems
1 47 (3.01%) Linux
2 14 (0.90%) Unix
3 12 (0.77%) Windows
4 4 (0.26%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.26%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.19%) Android
6 2 (0.13%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.13%) VMS
7 1 (0.064%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.064%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,268 (81.28%) AI
2 573 (36.73%) Data Science
3 499 (31.99%) CI/CD
4 459 (29.42%) Analytics
5 419 (26.86%) LLM
6 376 (24.10%) Generative AI
7 346 (22.18%) Data Pipeline
8 333 (21.35%) Agile
9 325 (20.83%) DevOps
10 283 (18.14%) MLOps
11 271 (17.37%) Data Engineering
12 248 (15.90%) Software Engineering
13 230 (14.74%) Decision-Making
14 228 (14.62%) Use Case
15 218 (13.97%) Stakeholder Management
16 213 (13.65%) Roadmaps
17 205 (13.14%) Problem-Solving
18 202 (12.95%) Infrastructure as Code
19 188 (12.05%) Data Modelling
20 187 (11.99%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 850 (54.49%) Python
2 392 (25.13%) SQL
3 110 (7.05%) Java
4 72 (4.62%) JavaScript
5 55 (3.53%) TypeScript
6 44 (2.82%) R
7 43 (2.76%) C#
8 41 (2.63%) Bash
9 24 (1.54%) PowerShell
10 21 (1.35%) C++
11 20 (1.28%) Scala
12 18 (1.15%) Bicep
13 15 (0.96%) Go
14 11 (0.71%) PL/SQL
15 9 (0.58%) Cypher
15 9 (0.58%) Shell Script
16 6 (0.38%) Gremlin
16 6 (0.38%) Kotlin
16 6 (0.38%) Perl
16 6 (0.38%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 290 (18.59%) Security Cleared
2 215 (13.78%) SC Cleared
3 120 (7.69%) Degree
4 54 (3.46%) Computer Science Degree
5 53 (3.40%) DV Cleared
6 43 (2.76%) Master's Degree
7 42 (2.69%) AWS Certification
8 35 (2.24%) BPSS Clearance
8 35 (2.24%) CISSP
9 28 (1.79%) PhD
10 22 (1.41%) Azure Certification
11 17 (1.09%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 16 (1.03%) CISM
13 14 (0.90%) TOGAF Certification
14 11 (0.71%) Cisco Certification
15 10 (0.64%) ITIL Certification
16 9 (0.58%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
17 7 (0.45%) PMP
18 6 (0.38%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 5 (0.32%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 210 (13.46%) Data Quality
2 63 (4.04%) GDPR
3 58 (3.72%) QA
4 31 (1.99%) NIST
5 21 (1.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.96%) Accessibility
6 15 (0.96%) EU AI Act
7 10 (0.64%) SLA
8 9 (0.58%) GRC
8 9 (0.58%) GxP
8 9 (0.58%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 9 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 8 (0.51%) HIPAA
10 6 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
10 6 (0.38%) WCAG
11 5 (0.32%) NCSC
11 5 (0.32%) Solvency II
12 4 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 4 (0.26%) COBIT
12 4 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 215 (13.78%) Docker
2 10 (0.64%) Active Directory
2 10 (0.64%) IAG
3 6 (0.38%) VMware Infrastructure
4 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
5 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
5 3 (0.19%) Hyper-V
5 3 (0.19%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
5 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 2 (0.13%) Firmware
6 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
6 2 (0.13%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
7 1 (0.064%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 279 (17.88%) Kubernetes
2 39 (2.50%) Ansible
3 26 (1.67%) Grafana
4 25 (1.60%) Kubeflow
5 18 (1.15%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.38%) Istio
7 5 (0.32%) Podman
8 4 (0.26%) systemd
9 3 (0.19%) Argo
9 3 (0.19%) Kibana
9 3 (0.19%) Nagios
9 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.19%) Puppet
9 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.19%) vMotion
10 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.13%) Packer
10 2 (0.13%) SCCM
11 1 (0.064%) QRadar
Vendors
1 209 (13.40%) Databricks
2 162 (10.38%) Microsoft
3 102 (6.54%) Google
4 66 (4.23%) OpenAI
5 45 (2.88%) SAP
6 36 (2.31%) ServiceNow
7 31 (1.99%) Foundry
8 29 (1.86%) Oracle
9 24 (1.54%) Informatica
10 18 (1.15%) Dynatrace
11 13 (0.83%) Splunk
12 11 (0.71%) IBM
13 10 (0.64%) Nexthink
13 10 (0.64%) UiPath
14 9 (0.58%) Salesforce
15 7 (0.45%) Cisco
15 7 (0.45%) Sybase
15 7 (0.45%) VMware
16 6 (0.38%) Pega
17 5 (0.32%) Palantir