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

6 months to
24 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 93 108
Rank change year-on-year 0 +15 +92
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,587 926 807
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.89% 2.81% 2.12%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.42% 3.10% 2.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,008 598 546
10th Percentile £413 £400 £400
25th Percentile £488 £475 £493
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +3.45%
75th Percentile £685 £675 £731
90th Percentile £779 £775 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £540 £500
% change year-on-year +1.85% +8.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 20 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £24.94 £13.06
25th Percentile £42.58 £40.78 £25.93
Median hourly rate £77.00 £58.25 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +32.19% +26.14% -
75th Percentile £88.62 £80.00 £53.75
90th Percentile £89.25 £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 46,342 29,835 32,681
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.41% 90.50% 85.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,074 18,533 19,873
10th Percentile £325 £300 £309
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 £626 £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 3,192 1,836 1,405
10th Percentile £13.74 £14.31 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.25 £17.32 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% -
75th Percentile £67.25 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.25 £74.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +79.25% -48.10% +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 24 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 24 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 24 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 0 1,364 £575 +1.77% 5,417
London +21 902 £582 -3.00% 3,752
UK excluding London -19 521 £550 +1.85% 2,074
Work from Home -16 418 £593 +7.86% 2,016
North of England -13 146 £565 +18.95% 421
South East -8 141 £600 +4.35% 486
Scotland +8 98 £475 -9.52% 260
Yorkshire -1 65 £550 +7.00% 103
North West -36 63 £600 +26.32% 264
South West -22 49 £513 -10.87% 324
Midlands -40 48 £575 +9.52% 184
West Midlands -38 39 £575 +9.52% 110
East of England -32 37 £463 -17.78% 282
North East -33 19 £531 +32.81% 56
Wales -8 7 £530 -21.48% 47
East Midlands -19 6 £425 -8.11% 74
Northern Ireland +4 1 £334 -52.29% 88

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 92 (5.80%) Apache Spark
2 81 (5.10%) Apache Airflow
3 57 (3.59%) 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 28 (1.76%) Chatbot
2 8 (0.50%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.25%) 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 10 (0.63%) SAP IBP
2 8 (0.50%) 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
1 523 (32.96%) Azure
2 519 (32.70%) AWS
3 299 (18.84%) GCP
4 111 (6.99%) Power Platform
5 108 (6.81%) GitHub
6 103 (6.49%) Serverless
7 94 (5.92%) Snowflake
8 93 (5.86%) Amazon S3
9 83 (5.23%) AWS Lambda
10 72 (4.54%) Amazon SageMaker
11 64 (4.03%) dbt
12 63 (3.97%) 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
16 46 (2.90%) Vertex AI
17 44 (2.77%) SaaS
18 41 (2.58%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.32%) Network Security
2 19 (1.20%) Broadband
2 19 (1.20%) Internet
3 12 (0.76%) DNS
3 12 (0.76%) Firewall
3 12 (0.76%) HTTP
4 9 (0.57%) DHCP
4 9 (0.57%) VPN
5 5 (0.32%) SMTP
6 4 (0.25%) NAS
6 4 (0.25%) SAN
6 4 (0.25%) TCP/IP
6 4 (0.25%) VLAN
7 3 (0.19%) CTI
7 3 (0.19%) MQTT
7 3 (0.19%) SMS
8 2 (0.13%) FTP
8 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
8 2 (0.13%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 104 (6.55%) Power BI
2 96 (6.05%) Data Warehouse
3 92 (5.80%) Data Lake
4 88 (5.55%) Metadata
5 80 (5.04%) BigQuery
6 63 (3.97%) Big Data
7 53 (3.34%) Amazon Redshift
8 48 (3.02%) Delta Lake
9 45 (2.84%) NoSQL
10 43 (2.71%) Tableau
11 36 (2.27%) PostgreSQL
12 35 (2.21%) Amazon Athena
13 29 (1.83%) Relational Database
14 24 (1.51%) Neo4j
15 21 (1.32%) MongoDB
16 20 (1.26%) Hadoop
17 19 (1.20%) Data Mining
18 18 (1.13%) Elasticsearch
19 17 (1.07%) Looker
20 16 (1.01%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 103 (6.49%) Git
2 53 (3.34%) GitLab
3 46 (2.90%) JIRA
4 40 (2.52%) MLflow
5 16 (1.01%) Jenkins
6 12 (0.76%) 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 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
10 3 (0.19%) Postman
10 3 (0.19%) Pylint
10 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
11 2 (0.13%) Locust
11 2 (0.13%) Newman
11 2 (0.13%) Spinnaker
11 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 356 (22.43%) Social Skills
2 306 (19.28%) Finance
3 234 (14.74%) Analytical Skills
4 142 (8.95%) Public Sector
5 120 (7.56%) Banking
6 40 (2.52%) Marketing
7 37 (2.33%) Retail
8 33 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 29 (1.83%) Pharmaceutical
10 27 (1.70%) Telecoms
11 24 (1.51%) Manufacturing
12 23 (1.45%) Aerospace
12 23 (1.45%) Documentation Skills
12 23 (1.45%) Legal
13 21 (1.32%) Front Office
13 21 (1.32%) Influencing Skills
14 18 (1.13%) Financial Institution
15 17 (1.07%) Investment Banking
15 17 (1.07%) Law
16 15 (0.95%) Billing
Job Titles
1 286 (18.02%) Senior
2 260 (16.38%) Architect
3 196 (12.35%) Data Scientist
4 182 (11.47%) Data Engineer
5 178 (11.22%) Lead
6 145 (9.14%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 98 (6.18%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 72 (4.54%) Data Architect
8 72 (4.54%) Python Engineer
9 71 (4.47%) Developer
9 71 (4.47%) Solutions Architect
10 69 (4.35%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
11 64 (4.03%) Analyst
12 57 (3.59%) Software Engineer
13 54 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
14 52 (3.28%) Senior Data Engineer
15 49 (3.09%) Security Architect
16 48 (3.02%) Senior Data Scientist
17 44 (2.77%) DevOps Engineer
18 39 (2.46%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 197 (12.41%) Terraform
2 109 (6.87%) PyTorch
3 108 (6.81%) Kafka
4 89 (5.61%) PySpark
5 78 (4.91%) TensorFlow
6 69 (4.35%) LangChain
6 69 (4.35%) REST
7 64 (4.03%) scikit-learn
8 62 (3.91%) Pandas
9 57 (3.59%) React
10 49 (3.09%) pytest
11 48 (3.02%) NumPy
12 37 (2.33%) .NET
12 37 (2.33%) LangGraph
13 36 (2.27%) FastAPI
14 28 (1.76%) Hugging Face
15 27 (1.70%) JSON
16 26 (1.64%) Model Context Protocol
17 23 (1.45%) RESTful
18 18 (1.13%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 199 (12.54%) Cloud Native
2 170 (10.71%) AI Agents
3 96 (6.05%) Algorithms
4 70 (4.41%) Onboarding
5 67 (4.22%) Product Ownership
6 65 (4.10%) Distributed Systems
7 38 (2.39%) Data Structures
8 36 (2.27%) Enterprise Software
9 27 (1.70%) Life Science
10 25 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
11 21 (1.32%) Hybrid Cloud
12 20 (1.26%) Management Information System
13 18 (1.13%) CMDB
13 18 (1.13%) Social Media
14 17 (1.07%) Taxonomies
15 16 (1.01%) Analytical Mindset
16 15 (0.95%) Credit Risk
17 14 (0.88%) Clustering
17 14 (0.88%) Public Cloud
17 14 (0.88%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 47 (2.96%) 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%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.063%) VMS
7 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,305 (82.23%) AI
2 576 (36.29%) Data Science
3 497 (31.32%) CI/CD
4 485 (30.56%) Analytics
5 433 (27.28%) LLM
6 389 (24.51%) Generative AI
7 349 (21.99%) Data Pipeline
8 332 (20.92%) Agile
9 321 (20.23%) DevOps
10 289 (18.21%) MLOps
11 280 (17.64%) Data Engineering
12 260 (16.38%) Software Engineering
13 250 (15.75%) Decision-Making
14 238 (15.00%) Stakeholder Management
14 238 (15.00%) Use Case
15 236 (14.87%) Roadmaps
16 216 (13.61%) Infrastructure as Code
17 201 (12.67%) Data Modelling
18 198 (12.48%) Problem-Solving
19 197 (12.41%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 848 (53.43%) Python
2 395 (24.89%) SQL
3 111 (6.99%) Java
4 75 (4.73%) JavaScript
5 59 (3.72%) TypeScript
6 39 (2.46%) Bash
6 39 (2.46%) R
7 37 (2.33%) C#
8 28 (1.76%) PowerShell
9 24 (1.51%) Scala
10 20 (1.26%) C++
11 18 (1.13%) Go
12 15 (0.95%) Bicep
13 13 (0.82%) Shell Script
14 11 (0.69%) Cypher
14 11 (0.69%) PL/SQL
15 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
15 7 (0.44%) SPARQL
16 6 (0.38%) Kotlin
17 5 (0.32%) Perl
Qualifications
1 322 (20.29%) Security Cleared
2 250 (15.75%) SC Cleared
3 123 (7.75%) Degree
4 58 (3.65%) DV Cleared
5 54 (3.40%) Computer Science Degree
6 47 (2.96%) AWS Certification
7 39 (2.46%) BPSS Clearance
7 39 (2.46%) Master's Degree
8 32 (2.02%) 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 6 (0.38%) DBS Check
17 6 (0.38%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 223 (14.05%) Data Quality
2 57 (3.59%) GDPR
2 57 (3.59%) QA
3 31 (1.95%) NIST
4 19 (1.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 18 (1.13%) Accessibility
6 15 (0.95%) EU AI Act
7 10 (0.63%) SLA
8 9 (0.57%) GRC
8 9 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 8 (0.50%) GxP
10 7 (0.44%) HIPAA
10 7 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 6 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
11 6 (0.38%) NCSC
12 5 (0.32%) Basel III
12 5 (0.32%) PCI DSS
12 5 (0.32%) Solvency II
13 4 (0.25%) COBIT
13 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 211 (13.30%) 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
Systems Management
1 276 (17.39%) Kubernetes
2 40 (2.52%) Ansible
3 27 (1.70%) Kubeflow
4 26 (1.64%) Grafana
5 19 (1.20%) 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
10 1 (0.063%) Cilium
10 1 (0.063%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 209 (13.17%) Databricks
2 153 (9.64%) Microsoft
3 99 (6.24%) Google
4 60 (3.78%) OpenAI
5 42 (2.65%) SAP
6 33 (2.08%) ServiceNow
7 30 (1.89%) Oracle
8 26 (1.64%) Foundry
9 22 (1.39%) Informatica
10 17 (1.07%) Dynatrace
11 14 (0.88%) VMware
12 13 (0.82%) 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