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

6 months to
16 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 106 162
Rank change year-on-year +26 +56 +66
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,378 752 657
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.20% 2.54% 1.48%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.72% 2.81% 1.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 846 495 488
10th Percentile £401 £375 £413
25th Percentile £475 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.17%
75th Percentile £698 £738 £712
90th Percentile £788 £874 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £525 £525
% change year-on-year +4.76% - -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 48 17 24
10th Percentile £41.95 £23.65 £41.15
25th Percentile £50.00 £26.50 £42.50
Median hourly rate £59.50 £52.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +13.32% +13.69% +31.94%
75th Percentile £80.05 £78.70 £66.25
90th Percentile £95.00 £83.81 £69.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £79.69 £46.18
% change year-on-year -19.69% +72.56% +31.94%

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 37,084 26,717 38,494
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.01% 90.37% 86.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,485 17,170 25,048
10th Percentile £313 £306 £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 £610 £638 £638
90th Percentile £723 £745 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -2.04% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,212 916 2,333
10th Percentile £14.83 £15.26 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.02
Median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.69% - -7.14%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.79 £57.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.50 £70.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.36 £31.76 £31.50
% change year-on-year -13.85% +0.83% -10.00%

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 +16 1,154 £575 -4.17% 1,027
London +25 761 £600 -4.00% 488
UK excluding London +38 440 £550 +4.76% 761
Work from Home +24 432 £600 +9.09% 384
North of England -6 102 £542 +8.40% 181
South East -1 95 £581 +5.68% 269
Scotland +52 75 £450 +2.86% 46
East of England +6 72 £550 -8.33% 63
Midlands -6 66 £550 +29.41% 97
North West -1 63 £550 +10.00% 90
West Midlands -27 44 £550 +29.41% 47
South West -25 34 £550 -17.60% 82
Yorkshire -40 29 £526 +0.21% 60
East Midlands -14 20 £600 +33.33% 50
Wales -3 19 £750 +33.33% 26
North East -6 13 £563 +57.12% 32
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 11

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
1 125 (9.07%) Apache Spark
2 82 (5.95%) Apache Airflow
3 58 (4.21%) Apache
4 30 (2.18%) Jupyter
5 12 (0.87%) Confluence
6 10 (0.73%) Appian
6 10 (0.73%) SAS
7 7 (0.51%) Palantir Foundry
8 6 (0.44%) CMS
8 6 (0.44%) GeoServer
8 6 (0.44%) Smallworld
9 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
10 3 (0.22%) Headless CMS
11 2 (0.15%) Luigi
12 1 (0.073%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.073%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.073%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.073%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.073%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 38 (2.76%) Chatbot
2 16 (1.16%) Microsoft Project
3 14 (1.02%) Microsoft Excel
4 13 (0.94%) Microsoft Office
5 10 (0.73%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 5 (0.36%) Simulink
7 3 (0.22%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.073%) CPLEX
8 1 (0.073%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 6 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.073%) OpenText VIM for SAP
3 1 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.073%) SAP IBP
3 1 (0.073%) Shopify
3 1 (0.073%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 1 (0.073%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 614 (44.56%) Azure
2 501 (36.36%) AWS
3 260 (18.87%) GCP
4 141 (10.23%) Power Platform
5 123 (8.93%) GitHub
6 109 (7.91%) Serverless
7 104 (7.55%) Azure Machine Learning
8 97 (7.04%) Azure AI
9 87 (6.31%) Azure DevOps
10 78 (5.66%) Snowflake
11 74 (5.37%) Amazon SageMaker
12 63 (4.57%) Amazon S3
13 61 (4.43%) Vertex AI
14 60 (4.35%) GitHub Actions
15 59 (4.28%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 57 (4.14%) Azure Data Factory
17 47 (3.41%) AWS CloudFormation
17 47 (3.41%) AWS Lambda
18 41 (2.98%) Azure AKS
19 38 (2.76%) Amazon Bedrock
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.16%) Network Security
2 10 (0.73%) Firewall
3 7 (0.51%) DNS
3 7 (0.51%) HTTP
4 6 (0.44%) Internet
5 5 (0.36%) Ethernet
5 5 (0.36%) FTP
5 5 (0.36%) SMTP
5 5 (0.36%) SSL
6 4 (0.29%) 5G
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%) Hyperconnected
8 2 (0.15%) Mobile Backhaul
8 2 (0.15%) Modbus
8 2 (0.15%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 108 (7.84%) Power BI
2 92 (6.68%) Data Lake
3 81 (5.88%) Data Warehouse
4 66 (4.79%) Big Data
5 60 (4.35%) NoSQL
6 52 (3.77%) Metadata
7 50 (3.63%) BigQuery
8 43 (3.12%) PostgreSQL
9 40 (2.90%) Tableau
10 38 (2.76%) Pinecone
11 34 (2.47%) Hadoop
12 32 (2.32%) Delta Lake
13 29 (2.10%) SQL Server
14 28 (2.03%) Weaviate
15 26 (1.89%) Relational Database
16 24 (1.74%) Mixpanel
17 23 (1.67%) Amazon Athena
18 20 (1.45%) Elasticsearch
19 19 (1.38%) Amazon Redshift
19 19 (1.38%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 116 (8.42%) Git
2 95 (6.89%) MLflow
3 40 (2.90%) Jenkins
4 28 (2.03%) JIRA
5 26 (1.89%) GitLab
6 13 (0.94%) Selenium
6 13 (0.94%) Visual Studio
7 12 (0.87%) JMeter
8 9 (0.65%) PyCharm
9 7 (0.51%) Gradle
9 7 (0.51%) SonarQube
10 6 (0.44%) MSTest
11 5 (0.36%) Cypress.io
11 5 (0.36%) Maven
12 4 (0.29%) Android Studio
12 4 (0.29%) Bitbucket
12 4 (0.29%) Oracle APEX
12 4 (0.29%) RStudio
13 3 (0.22%) Postman
13 3 (0.22%) Vite
General
1 355 (25.76%) Social Skills
2 283 (20.54%) Finance
3 162 (11.76%) Analytical Skills
4 142 (10.30%) Public Sector
5 91 (6.60%) Banking
6 38 (2.76%) Marketing
6 38 (2.76%) Pharmaceutical
7 31 (2.25%) Retail
8 30 (2.18%) Legal
9 28 (2.03%) Influencing Skills
9 28 (2.03%) Investment Banking
10 26 (1.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 24 (1.74%) Front Office
12 20 (1.45%) Presentation Skills
13 19 (1.38%) Manufacturing
14 18 (1.31%) Documentation Skills
15 16 (1.16%) Telecoms
16 14 (1.02%) Financial Institution
17 13 (0.94%) Electronics
18 12 (0.87%) Aviation
Job Titles
1 198 (14.37%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 191 (13.86%) Data Scientist
3 186 (13.50%) Architect
4 184 (13.35%) Senior
5 137 (9.94%) Data Engineer
6 124 (9.00%) Developer
7 119 (8.64%) Lead
8 67 (4.86%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 64 (4.64%) Analyst
10 61 (4.43%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 57 (4.14%) Python Engineer
12 52 (3.77%) Data Architect
12 52 (3.77%) Software Engineer
13 42 (3.05%) Senior Data Scientist
14 41 (2.98%) Gen AI Engineer
15 38 (2.76%) Solutions Architect
16 36 (2.61%) Azure Engineer
17 34 (2.47%) Consultant
18 31 (2.25%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
19 26 (1.89%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 238 (17.27%) PyTorch
2 200 (14.51%) TensorFlow
3 144 (10.45%) scikit-learn
4 112 (8.13%) Pandas
5 88 (6.39%) LangChain
6 84 (6.10%) React
7 79 (5.73%) NumPy
8 63 (4.57%) Kafka
9 62 (4.50%) .NET
10 61 (4.43%) Model Context Protocol
11 60 (4.35%) PySpark
12 59 (4.28%) FastAPI
13 56 (4.06%) LangGraph
14 54 (3.92%) REST
15 53 (3.85%) Node.js
16 50 (3.63%) Hugging Face
17 44 (3.19%) AngularJS
17 44 (3.19%) RESTful
18 32 (2.32%) Faiss
19 28 (2.03%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 200 (14.51%) Cloud Native
2 177 (12.84%) Algorithms
3 127 (9.22%) AI Agents
4 49 (3.56%) Product Ownership
5 46 (3.34%) Onboarding
6 37 (2.69%) Distributed Systems
7 31 (2.25%) Data Protection Act
8 29 (2.10%) Legacy Systems
9 24 (1.74%) Hybrid Cloud
10 23 (1.67%) Distributed Computing
11 20 (1.45%) Life Science
12 18 (1.31%) Analytical Mindset
12 18 (1.31%) Data Structures
12 18 (1.31%) Fixed Income
13 17 (1.23%) Enterprise Software
14 15 (1.09%) Genomics
14 15 (1.09%) Management Information System
15 12 (0.87%) Credit Risk
16 11 (0.80%) Robotics
16 11 (0.80%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 37 (2.69%) Linux
2 12 (0.87%) Windows
3 10 (0.73%) VMS
4 8 (0.58%) Android
4 8 (0.58%) Apple iOS
4 8 (0.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 8 (0.58%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.15%) Unix
6 1 (0.073%) CentOS
6 1 (0.073%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,073 (77.87%) AI
2 519 (37.66%) Data Science
3 416 (30.19%) CI/CD
4 381 (27.65%) Analytics
5 380 (27.58%) LLM
6 316 (22.93%) DevOps
7 299 (21.70%) Data Pipeline
8 284 (20.61%) Agile
9 282 (20.46%) Generative AI
10 271 (19.67%) MLOps
11 261 (18.94%) Data Engineering
12 232 (16.84%) Problem-Solving
13 199 (14.44%) Natural Language Processing
14 187 (13.57%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
15 184 (13.35%) Use Case
16 178 (12.92%) Containerisation
16 178 (12.92%) Software Engineering
17 166 (12.05%) Prompt Engineering
18 161 (11.68%) Data Governance
19 160 (11.61%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 854 (61.97%) Python
2 356 (25.83%) SQL
3 95 (6.89%) Java
4 82 (5.95%) C#
5 73 (5.30%) R
6 60 (4.35%) JavaScript
7 59 (4.28%) TypeScript
8 27 (1.96%) PowerShell
9 26 (1.89%) C++
10 21 (1.52%) Bash
11 18 (1.31%) Scala
12 17 (1.23%) Bicep
13 12 (0.87%) Go
14 11 (0.80%) MATLAB
15 10 (0.73%) Rust
16 7 (0.51%) Kotlin
16 7 (0.51%) SPARQL
17 5 (0.36%) C
17 5 (0.36%) SystemVerilog
17 5 (0.36%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 228 (16.55%) Security Cleared
2 187 (13.57%) Degree
3 155 (11.25%) SC Cleared
4 83 (6.02%) Master's Degree
5 48 (3.48%) PhD
6 46 (3.34%) Computer Science Degree
7 37 (2.69%) DV Cleared
8 31 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
9 25 (1.81%) AWS Certification
10 23 (1.67%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 19 (1.38%) Azure Certification
12 11 (0.80%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 9 (0.65%) CISSP
14 8 (0.58%) ISTQB
15 6 (0.44%) CISM
15 6 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
16 5 (0.36%) HNC
16 5 (0.36%) HND
16 5 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 5 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 131 (9.51%) Data Quality
2 57 (4.14%) GDPR
3 54 (3.92%) QA
4 36 (2.61%) NIST
5 24 (1.74%) EU AI Act
6 19 (1.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 18 (1.31%) Accessibility
8 8 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
9 7 (0.51%) GRC
9 7 (0.51%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 6 (0.44%) NCSC
11 5 (0.36%) DO-254
11 5 (0.36%) HIPAA
12 4 (0.29%) PCI DSS
12 4 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 3 (0.22%) SOC 2
14 2 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 2 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
14 2 (0.15%) ISO/IEC 42001
14 2 (0.15%) NIST 800
System Software
1 224 (16.26%) Docker
2 12 (0.87%) Active Directory
2 12 (0.87%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 8 (0.58%) 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
1 215 (15.60%) Kubernetes
2 146 (10.60%) Terraform
3 18 (1.31%) Ansible
3 18 (1.31%) Grafana
3 18 (1.31%) Kubeflow
4 13 (0.94%) Prometheus
5 10 (0.73%) Podman
6 7 (0.51%) SCOM
7 5 (0.36%) Kibana
8 4 (0.29%) Argo
9 3 (0.22%) logstash
9 3 (0.22%) Rancher
10 2 (0.15%) Istio
10 2 (0.15%) ITRS Geneos
10 2 (0.15%) Knative
10 2 (0.15%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (0.073%) Cilium
11 1 (0.073%) Docker Swarm
11 1 (0.073%) HP Fortify
11 1 (0.073%) Opsgenie
Vendors
1 208 (15.09%) Databricks
2 186 (13.50%) Microsoft
3 120 (8.71%) Google
4 110 (7.98%) OpenAI
5 77 (5.59%) Foundry
6 37 (2.69%) SAP
7 27 (1.96%) Oracle
8 22 (1.60%) ServiceNow
9 14 (1.02%) Informatica
10 13 (0.94%) UiPath
11 11 (0.80%) Automation Anywhere
11 11 (0.80%) NVIDIA
12 10 (0.73%) Salesforce
13 9 (0.65%) IBM
14 8 (0.58%) Dynatrace
14 8 (0.58%) Greenplum
14 8 (0.58%) Palantir
15 7 (0.51%) Amplitude
15 7 (0.51%) Pega
16 6 (0.44%) Talend