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

6 months to
27 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 79 102 159
Rank change year-on-year +23 +57 +69
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,379 756 671
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.13% 2.60% 1.52%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.65% 2.88% 1.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 848 498 492
10th Percentile £410 £375 £413
25th Percentile £494 £454 £473
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £591 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.83% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £700 £725 £722
90th Percentile £788 £874 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £545 £525
% change year-on-year +0.92% +3.81% -10.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 49 21 21
10th Percentile £41.11 £25.25 £41.10
25th Percentile £50.00 £31.00 £42.50
Median hourly rate £57.77 £57.50 £48.50
Median % change year-on-year +0.46% +18.56% +38.57%
75th Percentile £83.75 £78.70 £66.25
90th Percentile £95.00 £81.01 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.50 £77.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year -16.77% +29.17% +71.43%

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 37,825 26,281 38,283
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.77% 90.55% 86.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,952 17,099 24,858
10th Percentile £313 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £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 £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.51% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,225 950 2,347
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.20 £12.83
25th Percentile £18.75 £20.49 £16.00
Median hourly rate £35.00 £32.00 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +9.38% -1.54% -9.72%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.50 £57.91
90th Percentile £76.40 £77.22 £71.45
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.50 £31.64 £31.50
% change year-on-year -3.60% +0.44% -13.10%

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 27 March 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 27 March 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 27 March 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 +11 1,169 £575 -4.17% 1,132
London +24 784 £600 -2.83% 588
Work from Home +21 432 £600 +12.15% 460
UK excluding London +19 412 £550 +0.92% 725
North of England -18 99 £534 +1.71% 168
South East -17 88 £600 +9.09% 249
East of England -2 66 £550 -8.33% 60
Scotland +42 62 £496 +13.43% 36
North West +3 62 £542 -0.55% 94
Midlands -17 62 £550 +29.41% 87
West Midlands -25 41 £550 +29.41% 38
South West -17 36 £550 -16.51% 97
Yorkshire -38 28 £516 -1.67% 46
Wales -4 19 £738 +31.11% 27
East Midlands -17 19 £600 +33.33% 49
North East -8 12 £575 +60.61% 29
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 13

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
1 122 (8.85%) Apache Spark
2 80 (5.80%) Apache Airflow
3 59 (4.28%) Apache
4 28 (2.03%) Jupyter
5 12 (0.87%) Confluence
6 10 (0.73%) SAS
7 9 (0.65%) Appian
8 6 (0.44%) CMS
9 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
10 4 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.22%) Headless CMS
12 2 (0.15%) Luigi
13 1 (0.073%) Apache Superset
13 1 (0.073%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.073%) ArcGIS
13 1 (0.073%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.073%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 34 (2.47%) Chatbot
2 15 (1.09%) Microsoft Excel
3 13 (0.94%) Microsoft Office
4 12 (0.87%) Microsoft Project
5 11 (0.80%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 4 (0.29%) Simulink
7 3 (0.22%) LaTeX
8 2 (0.15%) CPLEX
9 1 (0.073%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (0.36%) SAP IBP
1 5 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.15%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 1 (0.073%) OpenText VIM for SAP
3 1 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.073%) SAP APO
3 1 (0.073%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 616 (44.67%) Azure
2 490 (35.53%) AWS
3 266 (19.29%) GCP
4 145 (10.51%) Power Platform
5 123 (8.92%) GitHub
6 107 (7.76%) Azure Machine Learning
7 101 (7.32%) Azure AI
8 95 (6.89%) Serverless
9 87 (6.31%) Azure DevOps
10 81 (5.87%) Snowflake
11 68 (4.93%) Amazon SageMaker
12 63 (4.57%) Azure Data Factory
12 63 (4.57%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 62 (4.50%) GitHub Actions
14 59 (4.28%) Vertex AI
15 57 (4.13%) Amazon S3
16 42 (3.05%) AWS CloudFormation
17 40 (2.90%) AWS Lambda
18 38 (2.76%) Amazon Bedrock
19 34 (2.47%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.16%) Network Security
2 11 (0.80%) Firewall
3 7 (0.51%) DNS
3 7 (0.51%) HTTP
4 6 (0.44%) Internet
5 5 (0.36%) FTP
5 5 (0.36%) SMTP
5 5 (0.36%) SSL
6 4 (0.29%) 5G
6 4 (0.29%) Ethernet
6 4 (0.29%) InfiniBand
7 3 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
7 3 (0.22%) LTE
7 3 (0.22%) VPN
8 2 (0.15%) 2G
8 2 (0.15%) 4G
8 2 (0.15%) Bluetooth
8 2 (0.15%) Hyperconnected
8 2 (0.15%) Mobile Backhaul
8 2 (0.15%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 111 (8.05%) Power BI
2 89 (6.45%) Data Lake
3 76 (5.51%) Data Warehouse
4 70 (5.08%) Big Data
5 59 (4.28%) NoSQL
6 53 (3.84%) BigQuery
7 48 (3.48%) Metadata
8 39 (2.83%) PostgreSQL
9 38 (2.76%) Tableau
10 36 (2.61%) Pinecone
11 35 (2.54%) Hadoop
12 33 (2.39%) Delta Lake
13 30 (2.18%) Relational Database
13 30 (2.18%) SQL Server
14 29 (2.10%) Weaviate
15 25 (1.81%) Mixpanel
16 24 (1.74%) Amazon Athena
17 20 (1.45%) MySQL
18 18 (1.31%) Amazon Redshift
19 17 (1.23%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 110 (7.98%) Git
2 96 (6.96%) MLflow
3 38 (2.76%) Jenkins
4 33 (2.39%) JIRA
5 26 (1.89%) GitLab
6 13 (0.94%) Visual Studio
7 10 (0.73%) PyCharm
8 9 (0.65%) JMeter
8 9 (0.65%) Selenium
9 7 (0.51%) Gradle
9 7 (0.51%) SonarQube
10 6 (0.44%) MSTest
11 5 (0.36%) Maven
12 4 (0.29%) Android Studio
12 4 (0.29%) Bitbucket
12 4 (0.29%) Cypress.io
12 4 (0.29%) Oracle APEX
12 4 (0.29%) RStudio
13 3 (0.22%) Spinnaker
13 3 (0.22%) Vite
General
1 352 (25.53%) Social Skills
2 280 (20.30%) Finance
3 168 (12.18%) Analytical Skills
4 144 (10.44%) Public Sector
5 83 (6.02%) Banking
6 37 (2.68%) Marketing
7 36 (2.61%) Pharmaceutical
8 31 (2.25%) Legal
9 28 (2.03%) Retail
10 26 (1.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 24 (1.74%) Influencing Skills
12 23 (1.67%) Front Office
12 23 (1.67%) Investment Banking
13 22 (1.60%) Documentation Skills
14 20 (1.45%) Presentation Skills
15 18 (1.31%) Manufacturing
16 16 (1.16%) Telecoms
17 13 (0.94%) Aviation
18 12 (0.87%) Electronics
18 12 (0.87%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 199 (14.43%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 194 (14.07%) Architect
3 190 (13.78%) Data Scientist
4 177 (12.84%) Senior
5 133 (9.64%) Data Engineer
6 121 (8.77%) Developer
7 115 (8.34%) Lead
8 63 (4.57%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 62 (4.50%) Analyst
10 61 (4.42%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 60 (4.35%) Data Architect
12 57 (4.13%) Python Engineer
13 50 (3.63%) Software Engineer
14 44 (3.19%) Solutions Architect
15 39 (2.83%) Gen AI Engineer
15 39 (2.83%) Senior Data Scientist
16 38 (2.76%) Azure Engineer
16 38 (2.76%) Consultant
17 30 (2.18%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
18 25 (1.81%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 224 (16.24%) PyTorch
2 185 (13.42%) TensorFlow
3 141 (10.22%) scikit-learn
4 109 (7.90%) Pandas
5 83 (6.02%) LangChain
6 80 (5.80%) NumPy
6 80 (5.80%) React
7 70 (5.08%) Kafka
8 60 (4.35%) .NET
8 60 (4.35%) PySpark
9 54 (3.92%) Model Context Protocol
9 54 (3.92%) Node.js
10 53 (3.84%) LangGraph
11 52 (3.77%) REST
12 49 (3.55%) FastAPI
13 48 (3.48%) Hugging Face
14 45 (3.26%) AngularJS
15 39 (2.83%) RESTful
16 29 (2.10%) Faiss
17 26 (1.89%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 192 (13.92%) Cloud Native
2 166 (12.04%) Algorithms
3 129 (9.35%) AI Agents
4 48 (3.48%) Product Ownership
5 43 (3.12%) Onboarding
6 36 (2.61%) Distributed Systems
7 27 (1.96%) Data Protection Act
8 24 (1.74%) Hybrid Cloud
9 23 (1.67%) Legacy Systems
10 21 (1.52%) Enterprise Software
11 19 (1.38%) Analytical Mindset
11 19 (1.38%) Distributed Computing
11 19 (1.38%) Fixed Income
12 17 (1.23%) Life Science
12 17 (1.23%) Management Information System
13 15 (1.09%) Data Structures
14 13 (0.94%) Security Posture
15 12 (0.87%) Credit Risk
15 12 (0.87%) IoT
16 11 (0.80%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 35 (2.54%) Linux
2 12 (0.87%) VMS
2 12 (0.87%) Windows
3 8 (0.58%) Android
3 8 (0.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 8 (0.58%) Ubuntu
4 7 (0.51%) Apple iOS
5 3 (0.22%) Unix
6 1 (0.073%) CentOS
6 1 (0.073%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,079 (78.25%) AI
2 509 (36.91%) Data Science
3 416 (30.17%) CI/CD
4 396 (28.72%) Analytics
5 378 (27.41%) LLM
6 305 (22.12%) DevOps
7 303 (21.97%) Data Pipeline
8 293 (21.25%) Generative AI
9 271 (19.65%) Data Engineering
10 269 (19.51%) MLOps
11 267 (19.36%) Agile
12 220 (15.95%) Problem-Solving
13 190 (13.78%) Natural Language Processing
14 188 (13.63%) Use Case
15 177 (12.84%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 174 (12.62%) Software Engineering
17 170 (12.33%) Containerisation
18 167 (12.11%) Data Governance
19 165 (11.97%) Data Modelling
20 155 (11.24%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 841 (60.99%) Python
2 358 (25.96%) SQL
3 94 (6.82%) Java
4 84 (6.09%) C#
5 73 (5.29%) R
6 57 (4.13%) JavaScript
7 53 (3.84%) TypeScript
8 28 (2.03%) PowerShell
9 23 (1.67%) C++
10 21 (1.52%) Bash
11 17 (1.23%) Bicep
11 17 (1.23%) Scala
12 10 (0.73%) Go
12 10 (0.73%) MATLAB
12 10 (0.73%) Rust
13 7 (0.51%) Kotlin
13 7 (0.51%) SPARQL
14 4 (0.29%) SystemVerilog
14 4 (0.29%) Tcl
14 4 (0.29%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 231 (16.75%) Security Cleared
2 180 (13.05%) Degree
3 154 (11.17%) SC Cleared
4 80 (5.80%) Master's Degree
5 50 (3.63%) PhD
6 44 (3.19%) Computer Science Degree
7 40 (2.90%) DV Cleared
8 35 (2.54%) BPSS Clearance
9 22 (1.60%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.38%) Azure Certification
11 18 (1.31%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 14 (1.02%) CISSP
13 11 (0.80%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 9 (0.65%) CISM
15 8 (0.58%) ISTQB
16 6 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
17 5 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
17 5 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
18 4 (0.29%) OSCP
18 4 (0.29%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 135 (9.79%) Data Quality
2 66 (4.79%) GDPR
3 49 (3.55%) QA
4 31 (2.25%) NIST
5 20 (1.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 19 (1.38%) EU AI Act
7 18 (1.31%) Accessibility
8 8 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
8 8 (0.58%) HIPAA
9 7 (0.51%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 6 (0.44%) NCSC
10 6 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 5 (0.36%) GRC
12 4 (0.29%) DO-254
12 4 (0.29%) PCI DSS
12 4 (0.29%) WCAG
13 3 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 3 (0.22%) SOC 2
14 2 (0.15%) NIST 800
System Software
1 217 (15.74%) Docker
2 12 (0.87%) Active Directory
2 12 (0.87%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 7 (0.51%) Firmware
4 3 (0.22%) Lustre
4 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.15%) Ceph
5 2 (0.15%) HDFS
6 1 (0.073%) Embedded Firmware
6 1 (0.073%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 213 (15.45%) Kubernetes
2 140 (10.15%) Terraform
3 21 (1.52%) Kubeflow
4 18 (1.31%) Grafana
5 16 (1.16%) Ansible
6 12 (0.87%) Prometheus
7 10 (0.73%) Podman
8 7 (0.51%) SCOM
9 3 (0.22%) Argo
9 3 (0.22%) Kibana
9 3 (0.22%) Rancher
10 2 (0.15%) Istio
10 2 (0.15%) Knative
10 2 (0.15%) logstash
10 2 (0.15%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (0.073%) ITRS Geneos
11 1 (0.073%) Microsoft Intune
11 1 (0.073%) Progress Chef
11 1 (0.073%) SELinux
11 1 (0.073%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 220 (15.95%) Databricks
2 191 (13.85%) Microsoft
3 122 (8.85%) Google
4 111 (8.05%) OpenAI
5 72 (5.22%) Foundry
6 34 (2.47%) SAP
7 29 (2.10%) Oracle
8 18 (1.31%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.09%) Informatica
10 13 (0.94%) UiPath
11 11 (0.80%) Automation Anywhere
11 11 (0.80%) NVIDIA
12 10 (0.73%) IBM
13 8 (0.58%) Dynatrace
13 8 (0.58%) Salesforce
14 7 (0.51%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.51%) Greenplum
14 7 (0.51%) Pega
15 6 (0.44%) Splunk
15 6 (0.44%) Talend