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

6 months to
13 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 76 99 165
Rank change year-on-year +23 +66 +68
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,303 781 647
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.26% 2.52% 1.45%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.74% 2.82% 1.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 798 495 475
10th Percentile £401 £361 £413
25th Percentile £467 £456 £464
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £566 £588 £575
Median % change year-on-year -3.70% +2.17% -8.00%
75th Percentile £698 £728 £700
90th Percentile £780 £850 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £525 £547
% change year-on-year - -3.93% -8.92%
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 14 26
10th Percentile £41.75 £22.45 £41.88
25th Percentile £50.00 £25.28 -
Median hourly rate £54.50 £35.75 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +52.45% -22.59% +31.94%
75th Percentile £73.93 £51.56 £53.44
90th Percentile £95.00 £63.13 £66.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +42.22% -2.56% -7.64%

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 34,804 27,718 38,790
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.01% 89.51% 87.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,033 16,994 25,434
10th Percentile £308 £306 £300
25th Percentile £408 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £496 £500
% change year-on-year -3.25% -0.77% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,100 850 2,118
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.27
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £33.53
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -3.06% +3.15%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £72.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £30.78 £35.00
% change year-on-year -18.29% -12.06% +9.38%

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 February 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 13 February 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 13 February 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 +15 1,092 £575 -4.17% 908
London +20 721 £603 -3.60% 456
UK excluding London +43 421 £525 - 687
Work from Home +23 414 £581 +10.71% 558
North of England -11 100 £514 +13.59% 138
South East +3 87 £550 +4.76% 270
Scotland +60 82 £510 +27.50% 40
East of England +12 70 £550 -8.33% 62
North West -2 59 £500 +11.11% 77
Midlands -10 57 £514 +34.38% 84
West Midlands -16 39 £514 +28.50% 30
South West -17 32 £550 -17.60% 88
Yorkshire -45 31 £520 -1.05% 43
East Midlands -17 18 £513 +43.96% 53
Wales -9 15 £738 +31.11% 18
North East -11 12 £575 +60.61% 18
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 4

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
1 118 (9.06%) Apache Spark
2 75 (5.76%) Apache Airflow
3 59 (4.53%) Apache
4 31 (2.38%) Jupyter
5 13 (1.00%) Appian
6 11 (0.84%) Confluence
7 9 (0.69%) SAS
8 8 (0.61%) Apache Pig
9 6 (0.46%) GeoServer
9 6 (0.46%) Palantir Foundry
9 6 (0.46%) SharePoint
9 6 (0.46%) Smallworld
10 4 (0.31%) CMS
10 4 (0.31%) IIS
11 2 (0.15%) Luigi
12 1 (0.077%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.077%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.077%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.077%) Headless CMS
12 1 (0.077%) nginx
Applications
1 41 (3.15%) Chatbot
2 15 (1.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 15 (1.15%) Microsoft Project
3 12 (0.92%) Microsoft Office
4 9 (0.69%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 5 (0.38%) Simulink
6 3 (0.23%) LaTeX
7 1 (0.077%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.077%) Sketch
7 1 (0.077%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (0.38%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (0.23%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.077%) Shopify
3 1 (0.077%) Teamcenter
3 1 (0.077%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 567 (43.51%) Azure
2 462 (35.46%) AWS
3 238 (18.27%) GCP
4 132 (10.13%) Power Platform
5 110 (8.44%) GitHub
6 107 (8.21%) Serverless
7 99 (7.60%) Azure Machine Learning
8 85 (6.52%) Azure AI
9 77 (5.91%) Azure DevOps
10 74 (5.68%) Amazon SageMaker
11 68 (5.22%) Snowflake
12 67 (5.14%) Amazon S3
13 61 (4.68%) Vertex AI
14 53 (4.07%) AWS Lambda
14 53 (4.07%) Azure Data Factory
14 53 (4.07%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 51 (3.91%) GitHub Actions
16 45 (3.45%) Azure AKS
17 42 (3.22%) AWS CloudFormation
18 40 (3.07%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.23%) Network Security
2 9 (0.69%) HTTP
3 6 (0.46%) DNS
3 6 (0.46%) Ethernet
4 5 (0.38%) FTP
4 5 (0.38%) Internet
4 5 (0.38%) SMTP
4 5 (0.38%) SSL
5 4 (0.31%) Firewall
5 4 (0.31%) InfiniBand
6 3 (0.23%) Cisco IPT
6 3 (0.23%) VPN
7 2 (0.15%) 2G
7 2 (0.15%) BGP
7 2 (0.15%) Bluetooth
7 2 (0.15%) Cisco Nexus
7 2 (0.15%) LTE
7 2 (0.15%) OSPF
7 2 (0.15%) VoIP
7 2 (0.15%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 105 (8.06%) Power BI
2 92 (7.06%) Data Lake
3 74 (5.68%) Data Warehouse
4 63 (4.83%) Big Data
5 56 (4.30%) NoSQL
6 50 (3.84%) Metadata
7 49 (3.76%) PostgreSQL
8 48 (3.68%) BigQuery
9 37 (2.84%) Hadoop
10 35 (2.69%) Pinecone
10 35 (2.69%) Tableau
11 27 (2.07%) SQL Server
12 26 (2.00%) Weaviate
13 25 (1.92%) Relational Database
14 21 (1.61%) Elasticsearch
15 20 (1.53%) Mixpanel
16 19 (1.46%) Delta Lake
17 18 (1.38%) Amazon Athena
18 17 (1.30%) Data Mining
18 17 (1.30%) OLTP
Development Applications
1 102 (7.83%) Git
2 93 (7.14%) MLflow
3 41 (3.15%) Jenkins
4 28 (2.15%) GitLab
5 24 (1.84%) JIRA
6 16 (1.23%) Selenium
7 13 (1.00%) JMeter
8 12 (0.92%) Visual Studio
9 10 (0.77%) SonarQube
10 7 (0.54%) Gradle
11 6 (0.46%) PyCharm
12 5 (0.38%) Maven
12 5 (0.38%) MSTest
13 4 (0.31%) Android Studio
13 4 (0.31%) Bitbucket
13 4 (0.31%) Cucumber
13 4 (0.31%) Cypress.io
13 4 (0.31%) Oracle APEX
13 4 (0.31%) Robot Framework
13 4 (0.31%) RStudio
General
1 336 (25.79%) Social Skills
2 286 (21.95%) Finance
3 144 (11.05%) Analytical Skills
4 131 (10.05%) Public Sector
5 90 (6.91%) Banking
6 43 (3.30%) Pharmaceutical
7 40 (3.07%) Marketing
8 35 (2.69%) Retail
9 30 (2.30%) Investment Banking
10 29 (2.23%) Legal
11 27 (2.07%) Influencing Skills
12 25 (1.92%) Front Office
13 24 (1.84%) Manufacturing
14 22 (1.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 19 (1.46%) Documentation Skills
15 19 (1.46%) Presentation Skills
16 18 (1.38%) Telecoms
17 14 (1.07%) Electronics
17 14 (1.07%) Financial Institution
18 11 (0.84%) Law
Job Titles
1 191 (14.66%) Data Scientist
2 186 (14.27%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
3 176 (13.51%) Architect
4 159 (12.20%) Senior
5 135 (10.36%) Data Engineer
6 115 (8.83%) Developer
7 108 (8.29%) Lead
8 67 (5.14%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 60 (4.60%) Machine Learning Engineer
10 59 (4.53%) Python Engineer
11 57 (4.37%) Software Engineer
12 55 (4.22%) Analyst
13 47 (3.61%) Data Architect
14 43 (3.30%) Solutions Architect
15 37 (2.84%) Gen AI Engineer
16 36 (2.76%) Senior Data Scientist
17 34 (2.61%) Azure Engineer
18 33 (2.53%) Consultant
19 27 (2.07%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
20 24 (1.84%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 227 (17.42%) PyTorch
2 187 (14.35%) TensorFlow
3 129 (9.90%) scikit-learn
4 116 (8.90%) Pandas
5 85 (6.52%) NumPy
6 83 (6.37%) LangChain
7 79 (6.06%) React
8 72 (5.53%) FastAPI
9 63 (4.83%) Hugging Face
10 61 (4.68%) Model Context Protocol
11 58 (4.45%) Kafka
11 58 (4.45%) PySpark
12 56 (4.30%) .NET
12 56 (4.30%) REST
13 53 (4.07%) LangGraph
14 47 (3.61%) Node.js
15 44 (3.38%) RESTful
16 34 (2.61%) AngularJS
17 32 (2.46%) Faiss
17 32 (2.46%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 186 (14.27%) Algorithms
2 173 (13.28%) Cloud Native
3 101 (7.75%) AI Agents
4 47 (3.61%) Onboarding
4 47 (3.61%) Product Ownership
5 41 (3.15%) Distributed Systems
6 34 (2.61%) Data Protection Act
7 32 (2.46%) Legacy Systems
8 27 (2.07%) Distributed Computing
9 24 (1.84%) Life Science
10 23 (1.77%) Data Structures
11 22 (1.69%) Genomics
12 20 (1.53%) Enterprise Software
12 20 (1.53%) Hybrid Cloud
13 19 (1.46%) Analytical Mindset
14 17 (1.30%) Management Information System
15 16 (1.23%) Fixed Income
16 12 (0.92%) Derivative
16 12 (0.92%) Taxonomies
17 11 (0.84%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 36 (2.76%) Linux
2 12 (0.92%) Windows
3 9 (0.69%) Apple iOS
3 9 (0.69%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 9 (0.69%) VMS
4 8 (0.61%) Android
4 8 (0.61%) Ubuntu
5 4 (0.31%) Unix
6 1 (0.077%) CentOS
6 1 (0.077%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,000 (76.75%) AI
2 518 (39.75%) Data Science
3 359 (27.55%) LLM
4 358 (27.48%) CI/CD
5 352 (27.01%) Analytics
6 286 (21.95%) DevOps
7 280 (21.49%) Agile
8 274 (21.03%) Data Pipeline
9 262 (20.11%) Generative AI
10 251 (19.26%) MLOps
11 240 (18.42%) Data Engineering
12 223 (17.11%) Problem-Solving
13 197 (15.12%) Natural Language Processing
14 180 (13.81%) Software Engineering
15 173 (13.28%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 168 (12.89%) Use Case
17 165 (12.66%) Containerisation
18 160 (12.28%) Prompt Engineering
19 158 (12.13%) ETL
20 146 (11.20%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 820 (62.93%) Python
2 329 (25.25%) SQL
3 88 (6.75%) Java
4 73 (5.60%) R
5 70 (5.37%) C#
6 60 (4.60%) JavaScript
7 52 (3.99%) TypeScript
8 32 (2.46%) C++
9 31 (2.38%) Scala
10 27 (2.07%) PowerShell
11 18 (1.38%) Bash
12 15 (1.15%) Bicep
13 12 (0.92%) MATLAB
14 11 (0.84%) Go
15 7 (0.54%) Rust
16 6 (0.46%) Kotlin
17 5 (0.38%) C
17 5 (0.38%) SystemVerilog
17 5 (0.38%) Tcl
18 4 (0.31%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 205 (15.73%) Security Cleared
2 177 (13.58%) Degree
3 148 (11.36%) SC Cleared
4 77 (5.91%) Master's Degree
5 45 (3.45%) PhD
6 44 (3.38%) Computer Science Degree
7 33 (2.53%) DV Cleared
8 27 (2.07%) BPSS Clearance
9 23 (1.77%) Azure Certification
9 23 (1.77%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 17 (1.30%) AWS Certification
11 7 (0.54%) ISTQB
11 7 (0.54%) Microsoft Certification
12 6 (0.46%) CISSP
13 5 (0.38%) HNC
13 5 (0.38%) HND
13 5 (0.38%) TOGAF Certification
14 4 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 4 (0.31%) CISM
14 4 (0.31%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 109 (8.37%) Data Quality
2 54 (4.14%) GDPR
3 51 (3.91%) QA
4 36 (2.76%) NIST
5 28 (2.15%) EU AI Act
6 18 (1.38%) Accessibility
7 15 (1.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 7 (0.54%) GRC
9 6 (0.46%) HIPAA
9 6 (0.46%) NCSC
10 5 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
10 5 (0.38%) DO-254
10 5 (0.38%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 5 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 42001
11 4 (0.31%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 4 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
11 4 (0.31%) PCI DSS
11 4 (0.31%) SOC 2
12 2 (0.15%) EMIR
12 2 (0.15%) JSP 440
System Software
1 212 (16.27%) Docker
2 11 (0.84%) Active Directory
3 10 (0.77%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 8 (0.61%) Virtual Machines
5 7 (0.54%) Firmware
6 3 (0.23%) Lustre
7 2 (0.15%) Ceph
7 2 (0.15%) HDFS
7 2 (0.15%) Hyper-V
7 2 (0.15%) KVM
7 2 (0.15%) VMware Infrastructure
7 2 (0.15%) VMware NSX
8 1 (0.077%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 215 (16.50%) Kubernetes
2 129 (9.90%) Terraform
3 25 (1.92%) Grafana
4 23 (1.77%) Ansible
5 14 (1.07%) Kubeflow
6 13 (1.00%) Prometheus
7 9 (0.69%) Kibana
7 9 (0.69%) Podman
8 7 (0.54%) SCOM
9 6 (0.46%) logstash
10 5 (0.38%) Argo
10 5 (0.38%) ITRS Geneos
11 2 (0.15%) Istio
11 2 (0.15%) Knative
11 2 (0.15%) Single Sign-On
11 2 (0.15%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
12 1 (0.077%) Microsoft Intune
12 1 (0.077%) Progress Chef
12 1 (0.077%) SCCM
12 1 (0.077%) SELinux
Vendors
1 189 (14.50%) Databricks
2 187 (14.35%) Microsoft
3 110 (8.44%) Google
4 97 (7.44%) OpenAI
5 67 (5.14%) Foundry
6 37 (2.84%) SAP
7 24 (1.84%) Oracle
8 19 (1.46%) ServiceNow
9 16 (1.23%) Splunk
10 15 (1.15%) Salesforce
11 12 (0.92%) Informatica
12 11 (0.84%) Automation Anywhere
12 11 (0.84%) NVIDIA
12 11 (0.84%) UiPath
13 9 (0.69%) Greenplum
14 7 (0.54%) Cisco
14 7 (0.54%) Palantir
14 7 (0.54%) Pega
14 7 (0.54%) TIBCO
15 6 (0.46%) ESRI