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

6 months to
26 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 95 88 107
Rank change year-on-year -7 +19 +93
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,587 940 815
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.89% 2.84% 2.13%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.43% 3.14% 2.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,005 609 550
10th Percentile £413 £400 £395
25th Percentile £475 £463 £489
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +2.56%
75th Percentile £685 £675 £731
90th Percentile £775 £775 £789
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £525 £495
% change year-on-year +4.76% +6.17% -10.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 48 20 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £24.94 £13.06
25th Percentile £39.91 £44.71 £25.93
Median hourly rate £77.00 £61.36 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +25.48% +32.88% -
75th Percentile £88.56 £80.00 £53.75
90th Percentile £89.13 £87.55 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £65.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +18.46% +40.75% -

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 46,293 29,942 32,892
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.37% 90.52% 85.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,017 18,609 19,950
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,198 1,849 1,396
10th Percentile £13.69 £14.32 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.23 £17.33 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £66.00 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.25 £74.22
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £22.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +77.78% -47.67% +1.18%

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 26 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 26 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 26 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 -4 1,362 £575 +1.77% 5,744
London +18 900 £580 -3.33% 3,935
UK excluding London -19 524 £550 +4.76% 2,241
Work from Home -13 417 £575 +4.55% 2,131
North of England -19 148 £558 +17.37% 449
South East -9 143 £600 +9.09% 526
Scotland +1 98 £475 -7.54% 277
Yorkshire -6 66 £538 +4.57% 108
North West -28 64 £600 +26.32% 284
South West -23 49 £513 -10.87% 347
Midlands -39 48 £575 +9.52% 201
West Midlands -39 39 £575 +9.52% 117
East of England -39 36 £463 -17.78% 316
North East -28 19 £531 +32.81% 59
Wales -7 7 £530 -21.48% 50
East Midlands -16 6 £425 -8.11% 84
Northern Ireland 0 1 £334 -52.29% 93

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 93 (5.86%) Apache Spark
2 82 (5.17%) Apache Airflow
3 58 (3.65%) Apache
4 35 (2.21%) Jupyter
5 24 (1.51%) Confluence
6 11 (0.69%) SAS
7 7 (0.44%) IIS
8 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
9 5 (0.32%) SharePoint
10 4 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 3 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
12 2 (0.13%) Appian
12 2 (0.13%) CMS
12 2 (0.13%) Headless CMS
13 1 (0.063%) Apache Pulsar
13 1 (0.063%) Luigi
13 1 (0.063%) nginx
Applications
1 29 (1.83%) Chatbot
2 8 (0.50%) Microsoft Excel
3 3 (0.19%) CPLEX
4 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
4 2 (0.13%) Notion
4 2 (0.13%) NUKE
5 1 (0.063%) Adobe XD
5 1 (0.063%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.063%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.063%) Simulink
5 1 (0.063%) Sketch
5 1 (0.063%) Trello
Business Applications
1 8 (0.50%) SAP IBP
1 8 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
2 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
3 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.063%) Actimize
4 1 (0.063%) Endur
4 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
4 1 (0.063%) OpenLink RightAngle
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle Cash Management
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle Payables
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle Receivables
4 1 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.063%) SAP APO
Cloud Services
1 522 (32.89%) Azure
2 517 (32.58%) AWS
3 296 (18.65%) GCP
4 112 (7.06%) Power Platform
5 109 (6.87%) GitHub
6 103 (6.49%) Serverless
7 93 (5.86%) Amazon S3
8 92 (5.80%) Snowflake
9 84 (5.29%) AWS Lambda
10 71 (4.47%) Amazon SageMaker
11 64 (4.03%) dbt
12 61 (3.84%) Amazon Bedrock
13 58 (3.65%) Azure Machine Learning
14 51 (3.21%) Azure DevOps
15 47 (2.96%) Azure AI
16 46 (2.90%) Azure Data Factory
16 46 (2.90%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 45 (2.84%) SaaS
17 45 (2.84%) Vertex AI
18 43 (2.71%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.32%) Network Security
2 19 (1.20%) Broadband
2 19 (1.20%) Internet
3 13 (0.82%) DNS
4 12 (0.76%) Firewall
4 12 (0.76%) HTTP
5 9 (0.57%) DHCP
5 9 (0.57%) VPN
6 5 (0.32%) SMTP
6 5 (0.32%) TCP/IP
7 4 (0.25%) NAS
7 4 (0.25%) SAN
7 4 (0.25%) SMS
7 4 (0.25%) VLAN
8 3 (0.19%) CTI
8 3 (0.19%) MQTT
9 2 (0.13%) FTP
9 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
9 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
9 2 (0.13%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 104 (6.55%) Power BI
2 99 (6.24%) Data Warehouse
3 94 (5.92%) Data Lake
4 88 (5.55%) Metadata
5 79 (4.98%) BigQuery
6 63 (3.97%) Big Data
7 54 (3.40%) Amazon Redshift
8 50 (3.15%) Delta Lake
9 44 (2.77%) NoSQL
10 43 (2.71%) Tableau
11 36 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
11 36 (2.27%) PostgreSQL
12 30 (1.89%) Relational Database
13 24 (1.51%) Neo4j
14 20 (1.26%) Hadoop
14 20 (1.26%) MongoDB
15 19 (1.20%) Data Mining
16 18 (1.13%) Elasticsearch
17 17 (1.07%) Looker
18 16 (1.01%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 106 (6.68%) Git
2 53 (3.34%) GitLab
3 46 (2.90%) JIRA
4 41 (2.58%) MLflow
5 15 (0.95%) Jenkins
6 13 (0.82%) Claude Code
7 7 (0.44%) Vite
8 6 (0.38%) Selenium
9 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
9 5 (0.32%) ERwin
9 5 (0.32%) JMeter
9 5 (0.32%) RStudio
10 4 (0.25%) Postman
11 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
11 3 (0.19%) Pylint
11 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
12 2 (0.13%) Locust
12 2 (0.13%) Newman
12 2 (0.13%) Spinnaker
12 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 357 (22.50%) Social Skills
2 305 (19.22%) Finance
3 237 (14.93%) Analytical Skills
4 143 (9.01%) Public Sector
5 120 (7.56%) Banking
6 39 (2.46%) Marketing
7 34 (2.14%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 32 (2.02%) Retail
9 29 (1.83%) Pharmaceutical
10 27 (1.70%) Telecoms
11 24 (1.51%) Legal
11 24 (1.51%) Manufacturing
12 23 (1.45%) Aerospace
13 22 (1.39%) Front Office
13 22 (1.39%) Influencing Skills
14 21 (1.32%) Documentation Skills
15 18 (1.13%) Financial Institution
16 17 (1.07%) Investment Banking
17 16 (1.01%) Law
18 15 (0.95%) Billing
Job Titles
1 285 (17.96%) Senior
2 255 (16.07%) Architect
3 193 (12.16%) Data Scientist
4 187 (11.78%) Data Engineer
5 179 (11.28%) Lead
6 144 (9.07%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 97 (6.11%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 72 (4.54%) Developer
8 72 (4.54%) Python Engineer
9 71 (4.47%) Solutions Architect
10 68 (4.28%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
11 67 (4.22%) Data Architect
12 63 (3.97%) Analyst
13 57 (3.59%) Software Engineer
14 56 (3.53%) Platform Engineer
15 52 (3.28%) Senior Data Engineer
16 49 (3.09%) Security Architect
17 48 (3.02%) Senior Data Scientist
18 43 (2.71%) DevOps Engineer
19 37 (2.33%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 204 (12.85%) Terraform
2 110 (6.93%) PyTorch
3 107 (6.74%) Kafka
4 92 (5.80%) PySpark
5 79 (4.98%) TensorFlow
6 70 (4.41%) REST
7 68 (4.28%) LangChain
8 63 (3.97%) scikit-learn
9 61 (3.84%) Pandas
10 58 (3.65%) React
11 49 (3.09%) pytest
12 48 (3.02%) NumPy
13 37 (2.33%) .NET
13 37 (2.33%) FastAPI
13 37 (2.33%) LangGraph
14 28 (1.76%) Hugging Face
15 27 (1.70%) JSON
16 26 (1.64%) Model Context Protocol
17 22 (1.39%) RESTful
18 20 (1.26%) vLLM
Miscellaneous
1 202 (12.73%) Cloud Native
2 171 (10.78%) AI Agents
3 92 (5.80%) Algorithms
4 73 (4.60%) Onboarding
5 67 (4.22%) Distributed Systems
5 67 (4.22%) Product Ownership
6 39 (2.46%) Data Structures
7 36 (2.27%) Enterprise Software
8 28 (1.76%) Life Science
9 26 (1.64%) Data Protection Act
10 21 (1.32%) Hybrid Cloud
10 21 (1.32%) Management Information System
11 18 (1.13%) CMDB
11 18 (1.13%) Social Media
12 17 (1.07%) Taxonomies
13 16 (1.01%) Analytical Mindset
13 16 (1.01%) Clustering
13 16 (1.01%) Credit Risk
14 15 (0.95%) Virtual Team
15 14 (0.88%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 48 (3.02%) Linux
2 19 (1.20%) Windows
3 17 (1.07%) Unix
4 4 (0.25%) Android
4 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.19%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 1 (0.063%) Mac OS
7 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.063%) VMS
7 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,306 (82.29%) AI
2 577 (36.36%) Data Science
3 505 (31.82%) CI/CD
4 485 (30.56%) Analytics
5 433 (27.28%) LLM
6 388 (24.45%) Generative AI
7 352 (22.18%) Data Pipeline
8 329 (20.73%) Agile
9 325 (20.48%) DevOps
10 293 (18.46%) MLOps
11 280 (17.64%) Data Engineering
12 264 (16.64%) Software Engineering
13 248 (15.63%) Decision-Making
14 245 (15.44%) Stakeholder Management
15 238 (15.00%) Use Case
16 237 (14.93%) Roadmaps
17 221 (13.93%) Infrastructure as Code
18 206 (12.98%) Data Modelling
19 202 (12.73%) Problem-Solving
20 197 (12.41%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 853 (53.75%) Python
2 397 (25.02%) SQL
3 110 (6.93%) Java
4 76 (4.79%) JavaScript
5 59 (3.72%) TypeScript
6 40 (2.52%) Bash
7 38 (2.39%) R
8 37 (2.33%) C#
9 28 (1.76%) PowerShell
10 25 (1.58%) Scala
11 20 (1.26%) C++
12 19 (1.20%) Go
13 17 (1.07%) Bicep
14 14 (0.88%) Shell Script
15 11 (0.69%) Cypher
15 11 (0.69%) PL/SQL
16 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
16 7 (0.44%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.38%) Kotlin
18 5 (0.32%) Perl
Qualifications
1 315 (19.85%) Security Cleared
2 248 (15.63%) SC Cleared
3 124 (7.81%) Degree
4 56 (3.53%) Computer Science Degree
4 56 (3.53%) DV Cleared
5 47 (2.96%) AWS Certification
6 40 (2.52%) Master's Degree
7 38 (2.39%) BPSS Clearance
8 31 (1.95%) CISSP
9 28 (1.76%) PhD
10 27 (1.70%) Azure Certification
11 18 (1.13%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 15 (0.95%) TOGAF Certification
13 14 (0.88%) CISM
14 10 (0.63%) Cisco Certification
14 10 (0.63%) ITIL Certification
15 9 (0.57%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 8 (0.50%) Microsoft Certified Professional
17 7 (0.44%) DBS Check
18 6 (0.38%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 228 (14.37%) Data Quality
2 57 (3.59%) QA
3 56 (3.53%) GDPR
4 30 (1.89%) NIST
5 19 (1.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (1.01%) Accessibility
7 15 (0.95%) EU AI Act
8 10 (0.63%) SLA
9 9 (0.57%) GRC
9 9 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 42001
10 8 (0.50%) GxP
11 7 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 6 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
12 6 (0.38%) HIPAA
12 6 (0.38%) NCSC
13 5 (0.32%) Basel III
13 5 (0.32%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.32%) Solvency II
14 4 (0.25%) COBIT
14 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 212 (13.36%) Docker
2 16 (1.01%) Active Directory
3 13 (0.82%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (0.63%) Hyper-V
4 10 (0.63%) IAG
5 8 (0.50%) Virtual Machines
6 7 (0.44%) NFS
7 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
8 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
8 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
8 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
9 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 2 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
9 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
10 1 (0.063%) Firmware
10 1 (0.063%) zsh
Systems Management
1 279 (17.58%) Kubernetes
2 41 (2.58%) Ansible
3 28 (1.76%) Kubeflow
4 27 (1.70%) Grafana
5 20 (1.26%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.38%) Istio
6 6 (0.38%) systemd
7 5 (0.32%) Podman
8 3 (0.19%) Argo
8 3 (0.19%) Kibana
8 3 (0.19%) Nagios
8 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
8 3 (0.19%) Puppet
8 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
8 3 (0.19%) vMotion
9 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 2 (0.13%) Packer
9 2 (0.13%) SCCM
9 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.063%) QRadar
Vendors
1 205 (12.92%) Databricks
2 154 (9.70%) Microsoft
3 102 (6.43%) Google
4 59 (3.72%) OpenAI
5 40 (2.52%) SAP
6 33 (2.08%) ServiceNow
7 29 (1.83%) Oracle
8 26 (1.64%) Foundry
9 22 (1.39%) Informatica
10 17 (1.07%) Dynatrace
11 14 (0.88%) VMware
12 12 (0.76%) Splunk
13 11 (0.69%) Salesforce
14 10 (0.63%) IBM
14 10 (0.63%) Nexthink
14 10 (0.63%) UiPath
15 7 (0.44%) Cisco
16 6 (0.38%) Pega
16 6 (0.38%) Sybase
17 5 (0.32%) New Relic