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

6 months to
16 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 77 112 135
Rank change year-on-year +35 +23 +84
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,509 729 741
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.01% 2.46% 1.70%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.54% 2.70% 2.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 919 441 524
10th Percentile £413 £393 £411
25th Percentile £486 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £578
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -4.76% -1.70%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £738
90th Percentile £765 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £575 £525
% change year-on-year -4.35% +9.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 21 19
10th Percentile £40.54 £31.00 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.30 £45.00 £46.22
Median hourly rate £69.22 £75.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.71% +42.86% +50.00%
75th Percentile £84.69 £81.01 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.38 £88.00 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £78.10 £56.25
% change year-on-year -18.05% +38.84% +60.71%

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 42,574 26,968 37,058
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.80% 91.03% 85.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,549 17,103 23,600
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £506 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.28% -3.62% -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,556 1,231 2,598
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.01
Median hourly rate £43.96 £26.32 £37.18
Median % change year-on-year +67.02% -29.21% +6.23%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.25 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +76.94% -34.02% +17.29%

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 June 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 June 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 June 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 +25 1,250 £575 - 2,580
London +33 842 £575 +1.77% 974
UK excluding London +2 467 £550 -4.35% 2,133
Work from Home +28 436 £575 +4.55% 1,990
North of England +4 132 £558 +1.36% 446
Scotland +45 105 £515 +10.28% 210
South East -31 89 £630 +9.57% 501
North West 0 72 £588 +6.82% 239
Midlands -24 58 £550 +10.00% 239
South West -19 48 £500 -19.35% 215
Yorkshire -18 45 £550 -18.52% 138
West Midlands -31 43 £550 +10.00% 115
East of England -26 37 £550 -10.20% 308
North East -23 18 £550 +37.50% 70
Wales -12 16 £565 -1.83% 122
East Midlands -17 13 £700 +64.71% 123
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 123

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
1 109 (7.22%) Apache Spark
2 66 (4.37%) Apache Airflow
3 51 (3.38%) Apache
4 36 (2.39%) Jupyter
5 23 (1.52%) Confluence
6 10 (0.66%) Appian
7 7 (0.46%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.33%) CMS
8 5 (0.33%) Headless CMS
8 5 (0.33%) SAS
9 4 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.20%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.13%) Luigi
12 1 (0.066%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.066%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.066%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.066%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.066%) NetWeaver
12 1 (0.066%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 30 (1.99%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.80%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.60%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.53%) Microsoft Project
5 7 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
6 3 (0.20%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.13%) Simulink
8 1 (0.066%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.73%) SAP IBP
2 6 (0.40%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.066%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.066%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.066%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.066%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.066%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.066%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.066%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 550 (36.45%) Azure
2 528 (34.99%) AWS
3 260 (17.23%) GCP
4 135 (8.95%) Power Platform
5 112 (7.42%) Serverless
6 100 (6.63%) Amazon S3
7 95 (6.30%) GitHub
8 90 (5.96%) Azure AI
9 84 (5.57%) AWS Lambda
10 80 (5.30%) Amazon SageMaker
11 74 (4.90%) Snowflake
12 72 (4.77%) Azure Machine Learning
13 69 (4.57%) Azure DevOps
14 54 (3.58%) Amazon Bedrock
14 54 (3.58%) GitHub Actions
15 53 (3.51%) Vertex AI
16 51 (3.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 48 (3.18%) Azure Data Factory
18 39 (2.58%) AWS CloudFormation
19 38 (2.52%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 13 (0.86%) Firewall
2 8 (0.53%) Internet
3 7 (0.46%) Network Security
4 6 (0.40%) DNS
5 5 (0.33%) DHCP
6 4 (0.27%) HTTP
6 4 (0.27%) NAS
6 4 (0.27%) SAN
6 4 (0.27%) VPN
7 3 (0.20%) SMTP
8 2 (0.13%) 4G
8 2 (0.13%) 5G
8 2 (0.13%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.13%) MQTT
8 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.066%) InfiniBand
9 1 (0.066%) LTE
9 1 (0.066%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 108 (7.16%) Power BI
2 104 (6.89%) Data Lake
3 80 (5.30%) Big Data
4 72 (4.77%) Metadata
5 65 (4.31%) BigQuery
5 65 (4.31%) Data Warehouse
6 48 (3.18%) NoSQL
7 44 (2.92%) Tableau
8 43 (2.85%) Amazon Athena
9 38 (2.52%) Amazon Redshift
10 36 (2.39%) PostgreSQL
11 35 (2.32%) Hadoop
12 32 (2.12%) SQL Server
13 31 (2.05%) Relational Database
14 29 (1.92%) Delta Lake
15 28 (1.86%) Pinecone
16 22 (1.46%) MongoDB
17 20 (1.33%) Weaviate
18 19 (1.26%) Mixpanel
19 18 (1.19%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 92 (6.10%) Git
2 78 (5.17%) MLflow
3 48 (3.18%) JIRA
4 42 (2.78%) GitLab
5 28 (1.86%) Jenkins
6 9 (0.60%) Visual Studio
7 7 (0.46%) Selenium
8 5 (0.33%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.27%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.27%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.27%) ERwin
9 4 (0.27%) JMeter
9 4 (0.27%) Maven
9 4 (0.27%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.20%) Gradle
10 3 (0.20%) JUnit
10 3 (0.20%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.20%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.20%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.20%) Vite
General
1 312 (20.68%) Social Skills
2 298 (19.75%) Finance
3 187 (12.39%) Analytical Skills
4 154 (10.21%) Public Sector
5 93 (6.16%) Banking
6 37 (2.45%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 37 (2.45%) Marketing
7 28 (1.86%) Pharmaceutical
8 27 (1.79%) Legal
9 25 (1.66%) Retail
10 24 (1.59%) Documentation Skills
11 22 (1.46%) Front Office
12 21 (1.39%) Aviation
13 20 (1.33%) Influencing Skills
14 18 (1.19%) Telecoms
15 17 (1.13%) Law
16 16 (1.06%) Investment Banking
17 14 (0.93%) Financial Institution
18 12 (0.80%) Manufacturing
19 11 (0.73%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 217 (14.38%) Data Scientist
2 214 (14.18%) Senior
3 196 (12.99%) Architect
4 152 (10.07%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 144 (9.54%) Data Engineer
6 131 (8.68%) Lead
7 101 (6.69%) Developer
8 76 (5.04%) Analyst
9 73 (4.84%) Python Engineer
10 66 (4.37%) Software Engineer
11 65 (4.31%) Machine Learning Engineer
12 63 (4.17%) Data Architect
13 57 (3.78%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
14 55 (3.64%) Solutions Architect
15 42 (2.78%) Consultant
16 40 (2.65%) Senior Data Scientist
17 35 (2.32%) Platform Engineer
18 34 (2.25%) Python Developer
19 32 (2.12%) Senior Data Engineer
20 31 (2.05%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 173 (11.46%) PyTorch
2 123 (8.15%) TensorFlow
3 106 (7.02%) scikit-learn
4 89 (5.90%) Pandas
5 84 (5.57%) Kafka
6 72 (4.77%) LangChain
7 68 (4.51%) PySpark
7 68 (4.51%) React
8 67 (4.44%) NumPy
9 59 (3.91%) REST
10 54 (3.58%) .NET
11 45 (2.98%) Hugging Face
12 34 (2.25%) LangGraph
13 32 (2.12%) AngularJS
13 32 (2.12%) FastAPI
13 32 (2.12%) Model Context Protocol
14 30 (1.99%) Node.js
14 30 (1.99%) RESTful
15 22 (1.46%) pytest
16 19 (1.26%) Faiss
Miscellaneous
1 175 (11.60%) Cloud Native
2 146 (9.68%) AI Agents
3 115 (7.62%) Algorithms
4 55 (3.64%) Product Ownership
5 45 (2.98%) Distributed Systems
5 45 (2.98%) Onboarding
6 26 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
7 22 (1.46%) Data Structures
8 21 (1.39%) Enterprise Software
9 20 (1.33%) Fixed Income
10 18 (1.19%) Legacy Systems
10 18 (1.19%) Life Science
11 14 (0.93%) Low-Code
11 14 (0.93%) Management Information System
12 13 (0.86%) Distributed Computing
12 13 (0.86%) Hybrid Cloud
13 12 (0.80%) Public Cloud
13 12 (0.80%) Taxonomies
14 11 (0.73%) Augmented Reality
14 11 (0.73%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 30 (1.99%) Linux
2 17 (1.13%) Windows
3 11 (0.73%) Unix
4 6 (0.40%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.40%) VMS
5 5 (0.33%) Android
6 4 (0.27%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.066%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,218 (80.72%) AI
2 564 (37.38%) Data Science
3 477 (31.61%) CI/CD
4 438 (29.03%) LLM
5 421 (27.90%) Analytics
6 347 (23.00%) Data Pipeline
7 341 (22.60%) Generative AI
8 316 (20.94%) DevOps
9 296 (19.62%) MLOps
10 281 (18.62%) Agile
11 280 (18.56%) Data Engineering
12 237 (15.71%) Use Case
13 207 (13.72%) Problem-Solving
14 201 (13.32%) Software Engineering
15 196 (12.99%) Decision-Making
16 181 (11.99%) Data Governance
16 181 (11.99%) ETL
17 179 (11.86%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 168 (11.13%) Infrastructure as Code
19 161 (10.67%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 852 (56.46%) Python
2 386 (25.58%) SQL
3 109 (7.22%) Java
4 68 (4.51%) C#
5 65 (4.31%) R
6 50 (3.31%) TypeScript
7 48 (3.18%) JavaScript
8 24 (1.59%) C++
9 20 (1.33%) Bash
10 14 (0.93%) Bicep
11 13 (0.86%) PowerShell
11 13 (0.86%) Scala
12 10 (0.66%) Kotlin
13 8 (0.53%) SPARQL
14 7 (0.46%) Go
14 7 (0.46%) MATLAB
14 7 (0.46%) PL/SQL
14 7 (0.46%) Rust
15 5 (0.33%) Perl
16 3 (0.20%) Korn
Qualifications
1 260 (17.23%) Security Cleared
2 180 (11.93%) SC Cleared
3 116 (7.69%) Degree
4 47 (3.11%) BPSS Clearance
4 47 (3.11%) Master's Degree
5 41 (2.72%) DV Cleared
6 38 (2.52%) AWS Certification
6 38 (2.52%) Computer Science Degree
7 31 (2.05%) PhD
8 20 (1.33%) Azure Certification
9 19 (1.26%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 19 (1.26%) CISSP
10 15 (0.99%) CISM
11 7 (0.46%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 7 (0.46%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 7 (0.46%) ISTQB
12 5 (0.33%) CEH
12 5 (0.33%) CompTIA Security+
12 5 (0.33%) DBS Check
12 5 (0.33%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 184 (12.19%) Data Quality
2 63 (4.17%) GDPR
3 50 (3.31%) QA
4 31 (2.05%) NIST
5 18 (1.19%) Accessibility
6 17 (1.13%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 13 (0.86%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.73%) Actionable Recommendations
8 11 (0.73%) HIPAA
8 11 (0.73%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 7 (0.46%) GRC
9 7 (0.46%) GxP
9 7 (0.46%) NCSC
10 5 (0.33%) WCAG
11 4 (0.27%) COBIT
11 4 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
12 3 (0.20%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 3 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 42001
12 3 (0.20%) SLA
12 3 (0.20%) Solvency II
System Software
1 200 (13.25%) Docker
2 12 (0.80%) Active Directory
3 11 (0.73%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 5 (0.33%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.33%) VMware Infrastructure
5 3 (0.20%) BitLocker
5 3 (0.20%) Firmware
5 3 (0.20%) Hyper-V
5 3 (0.20%) Terminal Services
5 3 (0.20%) Virtual Machines
5 3 (0.20%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 2 (0.13%) HDFS
6 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
6 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
7 1 (0.066%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 240 (15.90%) Kubernetes
2 166 (11.00%) Terraform
3 23 (1.52%) Kubeflow
4 20 (1.33%) Grafana
5 14 (0.93%) Ansible
5 14 (0.93%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.60%) Podman
7 6 (0.40%) Istio
8 3 (0.20%) Nagios
8 3 (0.20%) NetBackup
8 3 (0.20%) Puppet
8 3 (0.20%) Rancher
8 3 (0.20%) vCenter Server
8 3 (0.20%) vMotion
9 2 (0.13%) Argo
9 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.13%) Kibana
9 2 (0.13%) Packer
9 2 (0.13%) SCCM
10 1 (0.066%) Active Directory Federation Services
Vendors
1 189 (12.52%) Databricks
2 170 (11.27%) Microsoft
3 103 (6.83%) OpenAI
4 90 (5.96%) Google
5 57 (3.78%) Foundry
6 40 (2.65%) SAP
7 34 (2.25%) Oracle
8 22 (1.46%) ServiceNow
9 20 (1.33%) Informatica
10 15 (0.99%) IBM
10 15 (0.99%) UiPath
11 11 (0.73%) Automation Anywhere
11 11 (0.73%) Dynatrace
12 7 (0.46%) Amplitude
12 7 (0.46%) Salesforce
12 7 (0.46%) Sybase
13 6 (0.40%) Ariba
13 6 (0.40%) Pega
13 6 (0.40%) Talend
13 6 (0.40%) Workday