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

6 months to
4 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 108 135
Rank change year-on-year +28 +27 +77
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,575 783 760
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.05% 2.48% 1.75%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.59% 2.74% 2.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 968 479 536
10th Percentile £413 £393 £411
25th Percentile £490 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £580
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -5.17% -1.28%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £738
90th Percentile £775 £840 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £525
% change year-on-year - +4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 49 21 19
10th Percentile £40.28 £31.00 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.00 £45.00 £46.18
Median hourly rate £72.50 £75.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% +42.86% +29.63%
75th Percentile £83.75 £81.01 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.00 £88.00 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.22 £78.10 £52.50
% change year-on-year -11.37% +48.76% +39.07%

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 43,890 28,628 37,028
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.04% 90.75% 85.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,271 18,064 23,618
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.98% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,636 1,406 2,527
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.46 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% +8.91%

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 4 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 4 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 4 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 +21 1,315 £575 +2.22% 1,634
London +39 875 £575 +0.88% 1,032
UK excluding London +4 500 £550 - 759
Work from Home +15 447 £588 +6.82% 720
North of England +1 144 £575 +9.52% 158
South East -22 108 £600 +4.35% 261
Scotland +47 100 £463 -0.96% 43
North West +3 80 £599 +8.89% 100
Midlands -17 66 £550 +10.00% 68
Yorkshire -18 50 £550 +7.32% 39
West Midlands -32 49 £525 -2.33% 34
South West -28 45 £530 -11.67% 120
East of England -22 37 £525 -8.70% 89
Wales -14 18 £565 -1.83% 20
North East -26 17 £513 +28.13% 21
East Midlands -8 15 £650 +52.94% 34
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 15

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
1 103 (6.54%) Apache Spark
2 75 (4.76%) Apache Airflow
3 53 (3.37%) Apache
4 35 (2.22%) Jupyter
5 22 (1.40%) Confluence
6 8 (0.51%) SAS
7 7 (0.44%) Appian
7 7 (0.44%) SharePoint
8 6 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
9 5 (0.32%) CMS
9 5 (0.32%) Headless CMS
10 3 (0.19%) ArcGIS
10 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.13%) Luigi
11 2 (0.13%) OpenStack
11 2 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.063%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.063%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.063%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.063%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 32 (2.03%) Chatbot
2 14 (0.89%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.57%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
4 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.19%) CPLEX
6 2 (0.13%) Simulink
7 1 (0.063%) LaTeX
7 1 (0.063%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.70%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.063%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.063%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.063%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.063%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.063%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 571 (36.25%) Azure
2 565 (35.87%) AWS
3 284 (18.03%) GCP
4 145 (9.21%) Power Platform
5 114 (7.24%) Serverless
6 104 (6.60%) Amazon S3
7 103 (6.54%) GitHub
8 90 (5.71%) Amazon SageMaker
9 86 (5.46%) AWS Lambda
10 84 (5.33%) Azure AI
11 83 (5.27%) Azure Machine Learning
12 80 (5.08%) Snowflake
13 62 (3.94%) Azure DevOps
14 58 (3.68%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 58 (3.68%) Vertex AI
15 55 (3.49%) Amazon Bedrock
16 51 (3.24%) GitHub Actions
17 45 (2.86%) Azure Data Factory
18 43 (2.73%) dbt
19 40 (2.54%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 17 (1.08%) Firewall
2 12 (0.76%) Network Security
3 11 (0.70%) Internet
4 7 (0.44%) DNS
5 6 (0.38%) VPN
6 5 (0.32%) DHCP
7 4 (0.25%) HTTP
7 4 (0.25%) NAS
7 4 (0.25%) SAN
8 3 (0.19%) MQTT
8 3 (0.19%) SMTP
9 2 (0.13%) 4G
9 2 (0.13%) 5G
9 2 (0.13%) Cisco IPT
9 2 (0.13%) Ethernet
9 2 (0.13%) Modbus
9 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
9 2 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
9 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
10 1 (0.063%) InfiniBand
Database & Business Intelligence
1 118 (7.49%) Power BI
2 101 (6.41%) Data Lake
3 80 (5.08%) Big Data
4 73 (4.63%) Metadata
5 72 (4.57%) Data Warehouse
6 68 (4.32%) BigQuery
7 50 (3.17%) Tableau
8 47 (2.98%) NoSQL
9 42 (2.67%) Amazon Athena
9 42 (2.67%) Amazon Redshift
10 41 (2.60%) PostgreSQL
11 37 (2.35%) Hadoop
12 34 (2.16%) Delta Lake
13 33 (2.10%) Relational Database
14 29 (1.84%) SQL Server
15 25 (1.59%) MongoDB
15 25 (1.59%) Pinecone
16 20 (1.27%) MySQL
17 18 (1.14%) Neo4j
17 18 (1.14%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 100 (6.35%) Git
2 79 (5.02%) MLflow
3 49 (3.11%) GitLab
3 49 (3.11%) JIRA
4 27 (1.71%) Jenkins
5 9 (0.57%) Claude Code
6 8 (0.51%) Selenium
6 8 (0.51%) Vite
7 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
8 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
8 4 (0.25%) ERwin
8 4 (0.25%) Maven
8 4 (0.25%) PyCharm
9 3 (0.19%) Gradle
9 3 (0.19%) JUnit
9 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
9 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.19%) Spinnaker
9 3 (0.19%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.13%) NUnit
General
1 328 (20.83%) Social Skills
2 305 (19.37%) Finance
3 204 (12.95%) Analytical Skills
4 147 (9.33%) Public Sector
5 109 (6.92%) Banking
6 43 (2.73%) Marketing
7 38 (2.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 32 (2.03%) Pharmaceutical
8 32 (2.03%) Retail
9 24 (1.52%) Documentation Skills
9 24 (1.52%) Legal
10 22 (1.40%) Front Office
11 21 (1.33%) Influencing Skills
12 20 (1.27%) Aviation
12 20 (1.27%) Telecoms
13 17 (1.08%) Financial Institution
13 17 (1.08%) Law
14 16 (1.02%) Investment Banking
15 14 (0.89%) Presentation Skills
16 13 (0.83%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 227 (14.41%) Architect
2 226 (14.35%) Data Scientist
3 219 (13.90%) Senior
4 150 (9.52%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 144 (9.14%) Data Engineer
6 136 (8.63%) Lead
7 104 (6.60%) Developer
8 75 (4.76%) Data Architect
9 74 (4.70%) Solutions Architect
10 73 (4.63%) Python Engineer
11 69 (4.38%) Analyst
12 66 (4.19%) Software Engineer
13 64 (4.06%) Machine Learning Engineer
14 56 (3.56%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 44 (2.79%) Consultant
16 42 (2.67%) Platform Engineer
16 42 (2.67%) Senior Data Scientist
17 36 (2.29%) Full-Stack Engineer
17 36 (2.29%) Python Developer
18 32 (2.03%) Senior Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 167 (10.60%) PyTorch
2 116 (7.37%) TensorFlow
3 106 (6.73%) scikit-learn
4 101 (6.41%) Kafka
5 91 (5.78%) Pandas
6 85 (5.40%) LangChain
7 71 (4.51%) PySpark
7 71 (4.51%) React
8 70 (4.44%) NumPy
9 63 (4.00%) REST
10 46 (2.92%) .NET
11 45 (2.86%) Hugging Face
12 32 (2.03%) FastAPI
12 32 (2.03%) LangGraph
13 27 (1.71%) AngularJS
13 27 (1.71%) Node.js
13 27 (1.71%) RESTful
14 26 (1.65%) Model Context Protocol
15 22 (1.40%) pytest
16 21 (1.33%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 191 (12.13%) Cloud Native
2 149 (9.46%) AI Agents
3 117 (7.43%) Algorithms
4 59 (3.75%) Product Ownership
5 53 (3.37%) Onboarding
6 50 (3.17%) Distributed Systems
7 28 (1.78%) Data Protection Act
8 26 (1.65%) Enterprise Software
9 23 (1.46%) Data Structures
9 23 (1.46%) Life Science
10 19 (1.21%) Fixed Income
11 18 (1.14%) Legacy Systems
12 17 (1.08%) Management Information System
13 16 (1.02%) Hybrid Cloud
13 16 (1.02%) Security Posture
14 14 (0.89%) Taxonomies
15 13 (0.83%) Distributed Computing
16 12 (0.76%) Enterprise Cloud
16 12 (0.76%) Public Cloud
16 12 (0.76%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 49 (3.11%) Linux
2 17 (1.08%) Windows
3 11 (0.70%) Unix
4 6 (0.38%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.38%) VMS
5 5 (0.32%) Android
6 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,268 (80.51%) AI
2 584 (37.08%) Data Science
3 497 (31.56%) CI/CD
4 461 (29.27%) Analytics
5 443 (28.13%) LLM
6 367 (23.30%) Data Pipeline
7 365 (23.17%) Generative AI
8 319 (20.25%) DevOps
9 309 (19.62%) MLOps
10 301 (19.11%) Agile
11 289 (18.35%) Data Engineering
12 262 (16.63%) Use Case
13 220 (13.97%) Decision-Making
14 214 (13.59%) Software Engineering
15 211 (13.40%) Problem-Solving
16 197 (12.51%) Data Governance
17 188 (11.94%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 181 (11.49%) Roadmaps
19 178 (11.30%) Data Modelling
20 176 (11.17%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 877 (55.68%) Python
2 397 (25.21%) SQL
3 114 (7.24%) Java
4 64 (4.06%) R
5 60 (3.81%) TypeScript
6 59 (3.75%) C#
7 56 (3.56%) JavaScript
8 34 (2.16%) Bash
9 19 (1.21%) C++
10 17 (1.08%) PowerShell
11 16 (1.02%) Bicep
12 15 (0.95%) Scala
13 14 (0.89%) Go
14 11 (0.70%) Kotlin
15 9 (0.57%) PL/SQL
15 9 (0.57%) SPARQL
16 7 (0.44%) Cypher
16 7 (0.44%) Rust
17 6 (0.38%) Gremlin
18 5 (0.32%) MATLAB
Qualifications
1 278 (17.65%) Security Cleared
2 191 (12.13%) SC Cleared
3 130 (8.25%) Degree
4 51 (3.24%) Master's Degree
5 47 (2.98%) BPSS Clearance
5 47 (2.98%) DV Cleared
6 45 (2.86%) AWS Certification
6 45 (2.86%) Computer Science Degree
7 31 (1.97%) PhD
8 24 (1.52%) Azure Certification
9 21 (1.33%) CISSP
10 20 (1.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 15 (0.95%) CISM
12 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 5 (0.32%) CEH
13 5 (0.32%) CompTIA Security+
13 5 (0.32%) DBS Check
13 5 (0.32%) GIAC
13 5 (0.32%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 189 (12.00%) Data Quality
2 68 (4.32%) GDPR
3 53 (3.37%) QA
4 28 (1.78%) NIST
5 18 (1.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 17 (1.08%) Accessibility
7 13 (0.83%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.70%) HIPAA
8 11 (0.70%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 9 (0.57%) Actionable Recommendations
9 9 (0.57%) GRC
9 9 (0.57%) GxP
10 7 (0.44%) NCSC
11 5 (0.32%) Disclosure Scotland
11 5 (0.32%) WCAG
12 4 (0.25%) COBIT
12 4 (0.25%) SLA
12 4 (0.25%) Solvency II
13 3 (0.19%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 216 (13.71%) Docker
2 12 (0.76%) Active Directory
3 11 (0.70%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.32%) VMware Infrastructure
5 4 (0.25%) IAG
5 4 (0.25%) Virtual Machines
6 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.19%) Firmware
6 3 (0.19%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
6 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.063%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 268 (17.02%) Kubernetes
2 172 (10.92%) Terraform
3 24 (1.52%) Grafana
4 23 (1.46%) Kubeflow
5 22 (1.40%) Ansible
6 14 (0.89%) Prometheus
7 13 (0.83%) Podman
8 6 (0.38%) Istio
9 3 (0.19%) Kibana
9 3 (0.19%) Nagios
9 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.19%) Puppet
9 3 (0.19%) Rancher
9 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.19%) vMotion
10 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.13%) Argo
10 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.13%) Packer
10 2 (0.13%) SCCM
Vendors
1 205 (13.02%) Databricks
2 168 (10.67%) Microsoft
3 97 (6.16%) Google
4 96 (6.10%) OpenAI
5 53 (3.37%) Foundry
6 45 (2.86%) SAP
7 36 (2.29%) Oracle
8 30 (1.90%) ServiceNow
9 24 (1.52%) Informatica
10 17 (1.08%) IBM
11 15 (0.95%) UiPath
12 13 (0.83%) Dynatrace
13 8 (0.51%) Automation Anywhere
13 8 (0.51%) Salesforce
14 7 (0.44%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.44%) Sybase
14 7 (0.44%) Talend
15 6 (0.38%) Palantir
15 6 (0.38%) Pega
15 6 (0.38%) Workday