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

6 months to
7 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 104 120
Rank change year-on-year +19 +16 +83
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,601 837 762
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.00% 2.55% 1.95%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.53% 2.82% 2.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,039 527 541
10th Percentile £413 £400 £405
25th Percentile £492 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +2.35%
75th Percentile £700 £675 £750
90th Percentile £788 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £500
% change year-on-year - +10.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 39 23 20
10th Percentile £28.50 £33.80 £13.06
25th Percentile £40.54 £52.86 £26.25
Median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +2.67% +62.41% -
75th Percentile £84.38 £81.01 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £88.00 £75.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £77.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year -0.65% +67.82% -

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 45,370 29,720 33,385
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.93% 90.44% 85.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,958 18,627 21,372
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.11%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £729 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,804 1,656 1,869
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.25 £17.33 £18.13
Median hourly rate £42.68 £25.15 £40.33
Median % change year-on-year +69.69% -37.63% -5.12%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £64.25
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.51
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.30 £40.94
% change year-on-year +88.67% -43.09% +2.35%

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 7 August 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 7 August 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 7 August 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 +15 1,374 £580 +2.88% 2,771
London +32 922 £593 +3.04% 1,849
UK excluding London +3 498 £550 - 1,144
Work from Home +7 426 £600 +9.09% 1,004
North of England -14 137 £558 +14.07% 241
South East -16 132 £618 +9.87% 310
Scotland +31 85 £440 -12.00% 126
North West -21 67 £608 +19.70% 143
Midlands -27 62 £550 +7.32% 112
Yorkshire -2 57 £550 +12.19% 65
West Midlands -36 49 £550 -6.38% 63
South West -29 44 £528 -4.09% 141
East of England -29 30 £500 -13.04% 165
North East -36 13 £463 +8.82% 34
Wales -2 11 £540 -20.00% 41
East Midlands -10 11 £700 +64.71% 49
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 26

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 85 (5.31%) Apache Spark
2 75 (4.68%) Apache Airflow
3 45 (2.81%) Apache
4 33 (2.06%) Jupyter
5 21 (1.31%) Confluence
6 8 (0.50%) SAS
7 6 (0.37%) ArcGIS
8 5 (0.31%) CMS
8 5 (0.31%) Headless CMS
8 5 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.31%) SharePoint
9 3 (0.19%) Appian
9 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
10 2 (0.12%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.062%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.062%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.062%) Luigi
11 1 (0.062%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 29 (1.81%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.75%) Microsoft Excel
3 6 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 5 (0.31%) CPLEX
4 5 (0.31%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
5 2 (0.12%) Notion
6 1 (0.062%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.062%) DaVinci Resolve
6 1 (0.062%) NUKE
6 1 (0.062%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 11 (0.69%) SAP IBP
2 8 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.12%) Oracle ERP
4 2 (0.12%) SAP ERP
4 2 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 1 (0.062%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.062%) OpenText VIM for SAP
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.062%) SAP APO
5 1 (0.062%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 557 (34.79%) Azure
2 549 (34.29%) AWS
3 313 (19.55%) GCP
4 133 (8.31%) Power Platform
5 113 (7.06%) GitHub
6 106 (6.62%) Serverless
7 93 (5.81%) Amazon S3
8 84 (5.25%) Snowflake
9 82 (5.12%) AWS Lambda
10 79 (4.93%) Amazon SageMaker
11 75 (4.68%) Azure Machine Learning
12 60 (3.75%) Azure AI
13 59 (3.69%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 58 (3.62%) Amazon Bedrock
15 53 (3.31%) Vertex AI
16 52 (3.25%) Azure DevOps
17 51 (3.19%) dbt
18 48 (3.00%) GitHub Actions
19 44 (2.75%) Azure Data Factory
20 39 (2.44%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.31%) Firewall
2 17 (1.06%) Internet
3 16 (1.00%) Network Security
4 12 (0.75%) Broadband
5 11 (0.69%) DNS
6 10 (0.62%) VPN
7 9 (0.56%) DHCP
8 4 (0.25%) NAS
8 4 (0.25%) SAN
8 4 (0.25%) TCP/IP
8 4 (0.25%) VLAN
9 3 (0.19%) HTTP
9 3 (0.19%) MQTT
9 3 (0.19%) SMTP
10 2 (0.12%) 4G
10 2 (0.12%) 5G
10 2 (0.12%) CTI
10 2 (0.12%) PCoIP
10 2 (0.12%) Radio Access Network
10 2 (0.12%) Remote Desktop
Database & Business Intelligence
1 117 (7.31%) Power BI
2 87 (5.43%) Data Lake
3 78 (4.87%) BigQuery
4 74 (4.62%) Data Warehouse
5 71 (4.43%) Metadata
6 70 (4.37%) Big Data
7 53 (3.31%) NoSQL
8 47 (2.94%) Amazon Redshift
8 47 (2.94%) Tableau
9 42 (2.62%) Delta Lake
10 37 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
11 34 (2.12%) Relational Database
12 30 (1.87%) PostgreSQL
13 26 (1.62%) Hadoop
14 24 (1.50%) MongoDB
15 23 (1.44%) Looker
16 21 (1.31%) Neo4j
17 19 (1.19%) Data Mining
18 16 (1.00%) Elasticsearch
18 16 (1.00%) Redis
Development Applications
1 100 (6.25%) Git
2 62 (3.87%) MLflow
3 50 (3.12%) GitLab
4 45 (2.81%) JIRA
5 26 (1.62%) Jenkins
6 10 (0.62%) Claude Code
6 10 (0.62%) Vite
7 8 (0.50%) Selenium
8 5 (0.31%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.25%) ERwin
9 4 (0.25%) PyCharm
9 4 (0.25%) REST Assured
9 4 (0.25%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
11 2 (0.12%) JUnit
11 2 (0.12%) NUnit
11 2 (0.12%) Oracle APEX
11 2 (0.12%) Pylint
11 2 (0.12%) Visual Studio
General
1 339 (21.17%) Social Skills
2 303 (18.93%) Finance
3 218 (13.62%) Analytical Skills
4 138 (8.62%) Public Sector
5 114 (7.12%) Banking
6 41 (2.56%) Marketing
7 39 (2.44%) Retail
8 33 (2.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 32 (2.00%) Telecoms
10 29 (1.81%) Pharmaceutical
11 24 (1.50%) Legal
12 22 (1.37%) Front Office
13 21 (1.31%) Documentation Skills
14 20 (1.25%) Financial Institution
14 20 (1.25%) Manufacturing
15 19 (1.19%) Aerospace
16 17 (1.06%) Aviation
17 16 (1.00%) Investment Banking
17 16 (1.00%) Presentation Skills
18 15 (0.94%) Law
Job Titles
1 247 (15.43%) Architect
2 238 (14.87%) Senior
3 220 (13.74%) Data Scientist
4 169 (10.56%) Lead
5 161 (10.06%) Data Engineer
6 136 (8.49%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 99 (6.18%) Developer
8 83 (5.18%) Machine Learning Engineer
9 80 (5.00%) Solutions Architect
10 77 (4.81%) Python Engineer
11 69 (4.31%) Data Architect
12 67 (4.18%) Analyst
13 60 (3.75%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 60 (3.75%) Software Engineer
14 54 (3.37%) Platform Engineer
15 47 (2.94%) Security Architect
16 46 (2.87%) DevOps Engineer
17 44 (2.75%) Senior Data Scientist
18 41 (2.56%) Consultant
19 40 (2.50%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 148 (9.24%) PyTorch
2 107 (6.68%) Kafka
2 107 (6.68%) TensorFlow
3 98 (6.12%) scikit-learn
4 80 (5.00%) LangChain
5 79 (4.93%) PySpark
6 75 (4.68%) React
7 74 (4.62%) Pandas
8 65 (4.06%) REST
9 56 (3.50%) NumPy
10 41 (2.56%) .NET
11 35 (2.19%) LangGraph
12 31 (1.94%) Hugging Face
13 30 (1.87%) FastAPI
14 29 (1.81%) AngularJS
15 28 (1.75%) pytest
16 26 (1.62%) RESTful
17 25 (1.56%) Node.js
18 24 (1.50%) Model Context Protocol
19 21 (1.31%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 190 (11.87%) Cloud Native
2 168 (10.49%) AI Agents
3 110 (6.87%) Algorithms
4 65 (4.06%) Product Ownership
5 58 (3.62%) Distributed Systems
6 56 (3.50%) Onboarding
7 30 (1.87%) Data Structures
8 28 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
9 24 (1.50%) Life Science
10 23 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
11 21 (1.31%) Hybrid Cloud
12 16 (1.00%) Legacy Systems
12 16 (1.00%) Taxonomies
13 14 (0.87%) Enterprise Cloud
13 14 (0.87%) Fixed Income
13 14 (0.87%) Public Cloud
13 14 (0.87%) Security Posture
14 13 (0.81%) CMDB
14 13 (0.81%) Virtual Team
15 12 (0.75%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 52 (3.25%) Linux
2 15 (0.94%) Windows
3 13 (0.81%) Unix
4 5 (0.31%) Apple iOS
5 4 (0.25%) Android
5 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
5 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
6 3 (0.19%) VMS
7 2 (0.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.062%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,283 (80.14%) AI
2 591 (36.91%) Data Science
3 511 (31.92%) CI/CD
4 462 (28.86%) Analytics
5 429 (26.80%) LLM
6 373 (23.30%) Generative AI
7 360 (22.49%) Data Pipeline
8 339 (21.17%) DevOps
9 334 (20.86%) Agile
10 300 (18.74%) MLOps
11 281 (17.55%) Data Engineering
12 250 (15.62%) Use Case
13 248 (15.49%) Software Engineering
14 232 (14.49%) Decision-Making
15 210 (13.12%) Problem-Solving
15 210 (13.12%) Roadmaps
16 197 (12.30%) Infrastructure as Code
17 191 (11.93%) Stakeholder Management
18 190 (11.87%) Data Governance
19 183 (11.43%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 887 (55.40%) Python
2 397 (24.80%) SQL
3 117 (7.31%) Java
4 76 (4.75%) JavaScript
5 64 (4.00%) TypeScript
6 49 (3.06%) C#
7 48 (3.00%) R
8 40 (2.50%) Bash
9 25 (1.56%) PowerShell
10 19 (1.19%) Bicep
11 18 (1.12%) C++
12 15 (0.94%) Go
12 15 (0.94%) Scala
13 10 (0.62%) PL/SQL
14 8 (0.50%) Cypher
14 8 (0.50%) Kotlin
14 8 (0.50%) SPARQL
15 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
15 7 (0.44%) Rust
16 6 (0.37%) Perl
Qualifications
1 277 (17.30%) Security Cleared
2 201 (12.55%) SC Cleared
3 125 (7.81%) Degree
4 56 (3.50%) Computer Science Degree
5 51 (3.19%) DV Cleared
6 45 (2.81%) AWS Certification
7 44 (2.75%) Master's Degree
8 36 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
9 32 (2.00%) CISSP
10 30 (1.87%) PhD
11 22 (1.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 20 (1.25%) Azure Certification
13 14 (0.87%) CISM
13 14 (0.87%) TOGAF Certification
14 8 (0.50%) Cisco Certification
15 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
15 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 5 (0.31%) AWS Certified Developer
16 5 (0.31%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 191 (11.93%) Data Quality
2 65 (4.06%) GDPR
3 49 (3.06%) QA
4 31 (1.94%) NIST
5 21 (1.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.94%) EU AI Act
7 14 (0.87%) Accessibility
8 12 (0.75%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 9 (0.56%) GxP
10 8 (0.50%) GRC
10 8 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 7 (0.44%) Actionable Recommendations
12 6 (0.37%) SLA
12 6 (0.37%) WCAG
13 5 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 5 (0.31%) Solvency II
14 4 (0.25%) COBIT
14 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
14 4 (0.25%) NCSC
15 3 (0.19%) IFRS
System Software
1 221 (13.80%) Docker
2 12 (0.75%) Active Directory
3 7 (0.44%) IAG
4 6 (0.37%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 5 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
5 5 (0.31%) VMware Infrastructure
6 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.19%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
6 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 2 (0.12%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
7 2 (0.12%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.062%) Embedded Firmware
8 1 (0.062%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 270 (16.86%) Kubernetes
2 187 (11.68%) Terraform
3 35 (2.19%) Ansible
4 27 (1.69%) Kubeflow
5 25 (1.56%) Grafana
6 18 (1.12%) Prometheus
7 8 (0.50%) Podman
8 6 (0.37%) Istio
9 4 (0.25%) systemd
10 3 (0.19%) Kibana
10 3 (0.19%) Nagios
10 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
10 3 (0.19%) Puppet
10 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
10 3 (0.19%) vMotion
11 2 (0.12%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 2 (0.12%) Argo
11 2 (0.12%) Docker Swarm
11 2 (0.12%) Rancher
11 2 (0.12%) SCCM
Vendors
1 203 (12.68%) Databricks
2 165 (10.31%) Microsoft
3 103 (6.43%) Google
4 80 (5.00%) OpenAI
5 48 (3.00%) SAP
6 39 (2.44%) Foundry
7 34 (2.12%) ServiceNow
8 25 (1.56%) Oracle
9 20 (1.25%) Informatica
10 17 (1.06%) Dynatrace
11 14 (0.87%) IBM
12 13 (0.81%) Splunk
13 12 (0.75%) UiPath
14 7 (0.44%) Nexthink
14 7 (0.44%) Sybase
15 6 (0.37%) Amplitude
15 6 (0.37%) Pega
15 6 (0.37%) Salesforce
15 6 (0.37%) Workday
16 5 (0.31%) VMware