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

6 months to
12 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 94 108
Rank change year-on-year +6 +14 +86
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,591 889 831
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.92% 2.69% 2.15%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.45% 2.98% 2.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,013 567 568
10th Percentile £413 £403 £400
25th Percentile £490 £475 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £555 £600
Median % change year-on-year +3.60% -7.50% +2.56%
75th Percentile £688 £688 £731
90th Percentile £788 £775 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £545 £500
% change year-on-year +0.92% +9.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 23 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.34 £13.06
25th Percentile £45.50 £44.42 £25.93
Median hourly rate £77.00 £62.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +23.20% +35.34% -
75th Percentile £88.68 £78.73 £53.75
90th Percentile £89.38 £87.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +2.67% +62.41% -

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 46,152 29,871 33,024
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.59% 90.49% 85.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,085 18,553 20,430
10th Percentile £325 £300 £311
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,056 1,793 1,507
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.23 £14.70
25th Percentile £17.44 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +1.92%
75th Percentile £67.50 £44.78 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.50 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.03 £22.58 £43.00
% change year-on-year +77.32% -47.50% +7.50%

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 12 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 12 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 12 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 -1 1,365 £575 - 3,750
London +23 914 £589 -1.79% 2,644
UK excluding London -14 505 £550 +0.92% 1,532
Work from Home -4 421 £600 +9.09% 3,132
North of England -27 138 £550 +15.79% 282
South East -5 136 £600 +4.35% 361
Scotland +16 94 £450 -14.29% 240
Yorkshire -8 61 £538 +10.26% 83
North West -39 61 £600 +26.32% 160
South West -27 49 £513 -10.87% 207
Midlands -38 47 £500 -6.98% 125
West Midlands -36 40 £525 -4.55% 62
East of England -19 36 £463 -19.57% 216
North East -35 17 £488 +14.71% 42
Wales -11 9 £550 -18.52% 44
East Midlands -17 6 £425 -8.11% 63
Northern Ireland +3 1 £334 -52.29% 74

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 89 (5.59%) Apache Spark
2 83 (5.22%) Apache Airflow
3 55 (3.46%) Apache
4 33 (2.07%) Jupyter
5 24 (1.51%) Confluence
6 11 (0.69%) SAS
7 7 (0.44%) IIS
8 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
9 5 (0.31%) 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 (1.82%) Chatbot
2 11 (0.69%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.25%) CPLEX
3 4 (0.25%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
5 2 (0.13%) Notion
5 2 (0.13%) NUKE
6 1 (0.063%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.063%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.063%) Simulink
6 1 (0.063%) Sketch
6 1 (0.063%) Trello
Business Applications
1 10 (0.63%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
3 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
3 3 (0.19%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
5 1 (0.063%) Actimize
5 1 (0.063%) Endur
5 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.063%) OpenLink RightAngle
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.063%) SAP APO
5 1 (0.063%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 540 (33.94%) Azure
2 520 (32.68%) AWS
3 304 (19.11%) GCP
4 118 (7.42%) Power Platform
5 114 (7.17%) GitHub
6 105 (6.60%) Serverless
7 92 (5.78%) Snowflake
8 91 (5.72%) Amazon S3
9 83 (5.22%) AWS Lambda
10 76 (4.78%) Amazon SageMaker
11 61 (3.83%) Amazon Bedrock
11 61 (3.83%) Azure Machine Learning
11 61 (3.83%) dbt
12 51 (3.21%) Azure AI
12 51 (3.21%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 48 (3.02%) Azure DevOps
14 47 (2.95%) Vertex AI
15 46 (2.89%) GitHub Actions
16 44 (2.77%) Azure Data Factory
17 43 (2.70%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 20 (1.26%) Network Security
2 19 (1.19%) Internet
3 18 (1.13%) Broadband
4 12 (0.75%) DNS
4 12 (0.75%) Firewall
4 12 (0.75%) HTTP
5 9 (0.57%) DHCP
5 9 (0.57%) VPN
6 5 (0.31%) SMTP
7 4 (0.25%) NAS
7 4 (0.25%) SAN
7 4 (0.25%) TCP/IP
7 4 (0.25%) VLAN
8 3 (0.19%) MQTT
8 3 (0.19%) SMS
9 2 (0.13%) CTI
9 2 (0.13%) FTP
9 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
9 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
9 2 (0.13%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 110 (6.91%) Power BI
2 95 (5.97%) Data Warehouse
3 92 (5.78%) Data Lake
4 81 (5.09%) Metadata
5 78 (4.90%) BigQuery
6 66 (4.15%) Big Data
7 52 (3.27%) Amazon Redshift
8 47 (2.95%) Delta Lake
8 47 (2.95%) NoSQL
9 46 (2.89%) Tableau
10 36 (2.26%) Amazon Athena
11 35 (2.20%) PostgreSQL
12 30 (1.89%) Relational Database
13 24 (1.51%) MongoDB
14 23 (1.45%) Neo4j
15 21 (1.32%) Hadoop
16 19 (1.19%) Data Mining
17 18 (1.13%) Looker
18 17 (1.07%) Elasticsearch
19 16 (1.01%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 96 (6.03%) Git
2 54 (3.39%) GitLab
3 49 (3.08%) JIRA
4 48 (3.02%) MLflow
5 17 (1.07%) Jenkins
6 12 (0.75%) Claude Code
7 7 (0.44%) Selenium
7 7 (0.44%) Vite
8 6 (0.38%) ERwin
9 5 (0.31%) Cypress.io
9 5 (0.31%) RStudio
10 4 (0.25%) JMeter
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%) Postman
12 2 (0.13%) SonarQube
12 2 (0.13%) Spinnaker
12 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 341 (21.43%) Social Skills
2 298 (18.73%) Finance
3 231 (14.52%) Analytical Skills
4 140 (8.80%) Public Sector
5 112 (7.04%) Banking
6 40 (2.51%) Marketing
7 38 (2.39%) Retail
8 32 (2.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 28 (1.76%) Pharmaceutical
9 28 (1.76%) Telecoms
10 24 (1.51%) Documentation Skills
10 24 (1.51%) Legal
11 22 (1.38%) Aerospace
11 22 (1.38%) Front Office
11 22 (1.38%) Manufacturing
12 20 (1.26%) Influencing Skills
13 18 (1.13%) Financial Institution
14 17 (1.07%) Investment Banking
14 17 (1.07%) Law
15 14 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 275 (17.28%) Senior
2 261 (16.40%) Architect
3 203 (12.76%) Data Scientist
4 175 (11.00%) Data Engineer
5 170 (10.69%) Lead
6 142 (8.93%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 97 (6.10%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 78 (4.90%) Developer
9 75 (4.71%) Python Engineer
10 74 (4.65%) Solutions Architect
11 73 (4.59%) Data Architect
12 66 (4.15%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 63 (3.96%) Analyst
14 58 (3.65%) Software Engineer
15 52 (3.27%) Platform Engineer
16 51 (3.21%) Security Architect
17 49 (3.08%) Senior Data Engineer
18 48 (3.02%) Senior Data Scientist
19 45 (2.83%) DevOps Engineer
20 41 (2.58%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 192 (12.07%) Terraform
2 114 (7.17%) PyTorch
3 109 (6.85%) Kafka
4 91 (5.72%) PySpark
5 82 (5.15%) TensorFlow
6 72 (4.53%) scikit-learn
7 71 (4.46%) REST
8 67 (4.21%) Pandas
9 65 (4.09%) LangChain
10 62 (3.90%) React
11 51 (3.21%) NumPy
12 44 (2.77%) pytest
13 39 (2.45%) .NET
14 36 (2.26%) LangGraph
15 34 (2.14%) FastAPI
16 29 (1.82%) JSON
17 27 (1.70%) Hugging Face
18 25 (1.57%) RESTful
19 23 (1.45%) Model Context Protocol
20 19 (1.19%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 192 (12.07%) Cloud Native
2 164 (10.31%) AI Agents
3 98 (6.16%) Algorithms
4 69 (4.34%) Product Ownership
5 68 (4.27%) Onboarding
6 65 (4.09%) Distributed Systems
7 38 (2.39%) Enterprise Software
8 35 (2.20%) Data Structures
9 27 (1.70%) Life Science
10 23 (1.45%) Hybrid Cloud
11 22 (1.38%) Data Protection Act
12 20 (1.26%) Management Information System
13 18 (1.13%) CMDB
14 17 (1.07%) Taxonomies
15 16 (1.01%) Social Media
15 16 (1.01%) Virtual Team
16 15 (0.94%) Analytical Mindset
17 14 (0.88%) Clustering
17 14 (0.88%) Cyber Threat
17 14 (0.88%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 47 (2.95%) Linux
2 19 (1.19%) Windows
3 14 (0.88%) Unix
4 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.19%) Android
6 2 (0.13%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.13%) VMS
7 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,305 (82.02%) AI
2 578 (36.33%) Data Science
3 498 (31.30%) CI/CD
4 476 (29.92%) Analytics
5 428 (26.90%) LLM
6 386 (24.26%) Generative AI
7 352 (22.12%) Data Pipeline
8 333 (20.93%) Agile
9 325 (20.43%) DevOps
10 285 (17.91%) MLOps
11 278 (17.47%) Data Engineering
12 260 (16.34%) Software Engineering
13 248 (15.59%) Decision-Making
14 239 (15.02%) Use Case
15 232 (14.58%) Stakeholder Management
16 228 (14.33%) Roadmaps
17 210 (13.20%) Infrastructure as Code
18 205 (12.88%) Problem-Solving
19 200 (12.57%) Data Modelling
20 187 (11.75%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 855 (53.74%) Python
2 396 (24.89%) SQL
3 112 (7.04%) Java
4 77 (4.84%) JavaScript
5 57 (3.58%) TypeScript
6 43 (2.70%) R
7 40 (2.51%) Bash
7 40 (2.51%) C#
8 30 (1.89%) PowerShell
9 21 (1.32%) C++
9 21 (1.32%) Scala
10 17 (1.07%) Go
11 15 (0.94%) Bicep
12 11 (0.69%) Cypher
12 11 (0.69%) PL/SQL
13 9 (0.57%) Shell Script
14 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
14 7 (0.44%) SPARQL
15 6 (0.38%) Kotlin
16 5 (0.31%) Perl
Qualifications
1 314 (19.74%) Security Cleared
2 238 (14.96%) SC Cleared
3 123 (7.73%) Degree
4 59 (3.71%) DV Cleared
5 56 (3.52%) Computer Science Degree
6 44 (2.77%) AWS Certification
7 40 (2.51%) Master's Degree
8 35 (2.20%) CISSP
9 34 (2.14%) BPSS Clearance
10 28 (1.76%) PhD
11 25 (1.57%) Azure Certification
12 17 (1.07%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 16 (1.01%) CISM
14 15 (0.94%) TOGAF Certification
15 11 (0.69%) Cisco Certification
16 10 (0.63%) ITIL Certification
17 9 (0.57%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
18 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Certified Professional
18 7 (0.44%) PMP
19 6 (0.38%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 216 (13.58%) Data Quality
2 62 (3.90%) GDPR
3 61 (3.83%) QA
4 30 (1.89%) NIST
5 18 (1.13%) Accessibility
5 18 (1.13%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (1.01%) EU AI Act
7 10 (0.63%) SLA
8 9 (0.57%) GRC
8 9 (0.57%) GxP
8 9 (0.57%) HIPAA
8 9 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 9 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 6 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
9 6 (0.38%) NCSC
9 6 (0.38%) WCAG
10 5 (0.31%) COBIT
10 5 (0.31%) Solvency II
11 4 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 4 (0.25%) SOC 2
System Software
1 211 (13.26%) 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 (0.31%) 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
Systems Management
1 275 (17.28%) Kubernetes
2 40 (2.51%) Ansible
3 26 (1.63%) Grafana
3 26 (1.63%) Kubeflow
4 19 (1.19%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.38%) Istio
6 5 (0.31%) Podman
6 5 (0.31%) systemd
7 3 (0.19%) Argo
7 3 (0.19%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Nagios
7 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
7 3 (0.19%) Puppet
7 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
7 3 (0.19%) vMotion
8 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
8 2 (0.13%) Packer
8 2 (0.13%) SCCM
9 1 (0.063%) QRadar
Vendors
1 208 (13.07%) Databricks
2 164 (10.31%) Microsoft
3 102 (6.41%) Google
4 65 (4.09%) OpenAI
5 44 (2.77%) SAP
6 34 (2.14%) ServiceNow
7 31 (1.95%) Foundry
7 31 (1.95%) Oracle
8 23 (1.45%) Informatica
9 17 (1.07%) Dynatrace
10 14 (0.88%) VMware
11 13 (0.82%) Splunk
12 11 (0.69%) IBM
13 10 (0.63%) Nexthink
13 10 (0.63%) UiPath
14 9 (0.57%) Salesforce
15 7 (0.44%) Cisco
15 7 (0.44%) Sybase
16 6 (0.38%) Pega
17 5 (0.31%) New Relic