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

6 months to
8 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 77 104 167
Rank change year-on-year +27 +63 +67
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,379 761 642
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.25% 2.53% 1.44%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.77% 2.80% 1.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 856 494 474
10th Percentile £401 £364 £413
25th Percentile £475 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £575 £561
Median % change year-on-year - +2.45% -8.63%
75th Percentile £688 £734 £700
90th Percentile £775 £859 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £540 £525 £525
% change year-on-year +2.90% - -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 16 25
10th Percentile £41.85 £23.25 £41.16
25th Percentile £50.00 £26.19 £42.50
Median hourly rate £57.77 £48.75 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +18.49% +5.57% +31.94%
75th Percentile £79.50 £69.00 £66.25
90th Percentile £95.00 £84.51 £69.45
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £80.68 £46.18
% change year-on-year -20.67% +74.70% +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 36,580 27,136 38,678
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.31% 90.25% 86.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,208 17,123 25,158
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 £611 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £743 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -1.94% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,181 914 2,335
10th Percentile £14.64 £15.50 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.06
Median hourly rate £28.50 £32.50 £32.12
Median % change year-on-year -12.31% +1.20% -8.24%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.50 £57.50
90th Percentile £74.26 £76.25 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.46 £31.64 £31.50
% change year-on-year -19.54% +0.44% -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 8 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 8 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 8 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 +22 1,157 £575 -4.17% 1,237
London +29 765 £600 -3.23% 611
UK excluding London +32 448 £540 +2.90% 832
Work from Home +27 429 £575 +9.52% 555
North of England -3 106 £534 +6.80% 171
South East +4 95 £588 +9.30% 285
Scotland +59 85 £501 +14.57% 41
East of England +3 71 £550 -8.33% 109
North West +7 64 £550 +10.00% 86
Midlands -17 64 £550 +29.41% 104
West Midlands -21 44 £550 +33.33% 50
South West -17 34 £550 -17.60% 99
Yorkshire -41 32 £525 - 59
East Midlands -15 19 £525 +16.67% 54
Wales -9 17 £738 +31.11% 25
North East -4 13 £563 +57.12% 28
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
1 122 (8.85%) Apache Spark
2 83 (6.02%) Apache Airflow
3 57 (4.13%) Apache
4 29 (2.10%) Jupyter
5 13 (0.94%) Confluence
6 10 (0.73%) Appian
6 10 (0.73%) SAS
7 6 (0.44%) CMS
7 6 (0.44%) GeoServer
7 6 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
7 6 (0.44%) SharePoint
7 6 (0.44%) Smallworld
8 3 (0.22%) Headless CMS
9 2 (0.15%) Luigi
10 1 (0.073%) Apache Pig
10 1 (0.073%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.073%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.073%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.073%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.073%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 38 (2.76%) Chatbot
2 16 (1.16%) Microsoft Project
3 14 (1.02%) Microsoft Excel
4 12 (0.87%) Microsoft Office
5 9 (0.65%) 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
1 611 (44.31%) Azure
2 506 (36.69%) AWS
3 259 (18.78%) GCP
4 139 (10.08%) Power Platform
5 117 (8.48%) GitHub
6 112 (8.12%) Serverless
7 103 (7.47%) Azure Machine Learning
8 96 (6.96%) Azure AI
9 84 (6.09%) Azure DevOps
10 75 (5.44%) Amazon SageMaker
11 74 (5.37%) Snowflake
12 68 (4.93%) Amazon S3
13 62 (4.50%) Vertex AI
14 55 (3.99%) Azure Data Factory
14 55 (3.99%) GitHub Actions
15 54 (3.92%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 52 (3.77%) AWS Lambda
17 46 (3.34%) AWS CloudFormation
18 43 (3.12%) Azure AKS
19 38 (2.76%) Amazon Bedrock
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.16%) Network Security
2 9 (0.65%) Firewall
2 9 (0.65%) HTTP
3 6 (0.44%) DNS
3 6 (0.44%) Ethernet
4 5 (0.36%) FTP
4 5 (0.36%) Internet
4 5 (0.36%) SMTP
4 5 (0.36%) SSL
5 4 (0.29%) 5G
5 4 (0.29%) InfiniBand
6 3 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
6 3 (0.22%) LTE
6 3 (0.22%) VPN
7 2 (0.15%) 2G
7 2 (0.15%) 4G
7 2 (0.15%) Hyperconnected
7 2 (0.15%) Mobile Backhaul
7 2 (0.15%) Modbus
7 2 (0.15%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 106 (7.69%) Power BI
2 91 (6.60%) Data Lake
3 80 (5.80%) Data Warehouse
4 63 (4.57%) Big Data
5 57 (4.13%) NoSQL
6 56 (4.06%) Metadata
7 50 (3.63%) BigQuery
8 47 (3.41%) PostgreSQL
9 40 (2.90%) Tableau
10 37 (2.68%) Pinecone
11 34 (2.47%) Hadoop
12 29 (2.10%) Delta Lake
12 29 (2.10%) SQL Server
13 27 (1.96%) Relational Database
14 26 (1.89%) Weaviate
15 23 (1.67%) Mixpanel
16 22 (1.60%) Amazon Athena
16 22 (1.60%) Elasticsearch
17 18 (1.31%) Amazon Redshift
18 17 (1.23%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 117 (8.48%) Git
2 95 (6.89%) MLflow
3 40 (2.90%) Jenkins
4 28 (2.03%) JIRA
5 25 (1.81%) GitLab
6 14 (1.02%) Selenium
7 12 (0.87%) JMeter
7 12 (0.87%) Visual Studio
8 9 (0.65%) PyCharm
9 7 (0.51%) Gradle
10 6 (0.44%) SonarQube
11 5 (0.36%) Cypress.io
11 5 (0.36%) Maven
11 5 (0.36%) MSTest
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
14 2 (0.15%) Vite
General
1 355 (25.74%) Social Skills
2 291 (21.10%) Finance
3 156 (11.31%) Analytical Skills
4 144 (10.44%) Public Sector
5 93 (6.74%) Banking
6 41 (2.97%) Marketing
6 41 (2.97%) Pharmaceutical
7 31 (2.25%) Retail
8 29 (2.10%) Investment Banking
8 29 (2.10%) Legal
9 28 (2.03%) Influencing Skills
10 24 (1.74%) Front Office
11 23 (1.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 21 (1.52%) Manufacturing
13 19 (1.38%) Presentation Skills
14 17 (1.23%) Documentation Skills
15 16 (1.16%) Telecoms
16 13 (0.94%) Electronics
16 13 (0.94%) Financial Institution
17 11 (0.80%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 203 (14.72%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 191 (13.85%) Data Scientist
3 180 (13.05%) Architect
4 176 (12.76%) Senior
5 134 (9.72%) Data Engineer
6 124 (8.99%) Developer
7 117 (8.48%) Lead
8 67 (4.86%) Python Engineer
9 64 (4.64%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
10 63 (4.57%) Analyst
11 59 (4.28%) Machine Learning Engineer
12 57 (4.13%) Software Engineer
13 49 (3.55%) Data Architect
14 41 (2.97%) Gen AI Engineer
15 40 (2.90%) Senior Data Scientist
16 38 (2.76%) Solutions Architect
17 35 (2.54%) Azure Engineer
18 33 (2.39%) Consultant
19 32 (2.32%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
20 25 (1.81%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 240 (17.40%) PyTorch
2 196 (14.21%) TensorFlow
3 140 (10.15%) scikit-learn
4 117 (8.48%) Pandas
5 89 (6.45%) LangChain
6 84 (6.09%) NumPy
7 83 (6.02%) React
8 70 (5.08%) FastAPI
9 62 (4.50%) .NET
10 61 (4.42%) Model Context Protocol
11 60 (4.35%) Hugging Face
12 58 (4.21%) Kafka
12 58 (4.21%) PySpark
12 58 (4.21%) REST
13 55 (3.99%) LangGraph
14 52 (3.77%) Node.js
15 43 (3.12%) RESTful
16 40 (2.90%) AngularJS
17 33 (2.39%) Faiss
18 29 (2.10%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 192 (13.92%) Cloud Native
2 181 (13.13%) Algorithms
3 124 (8.99%) AI Agents
4 49 (3.55%) Onboarding
4 49 (3.55%) Product Ownership
5 39 (2.83%) Distributed Systems
6 36 (2.61%) Data Protection Act
7 31 (2.25%) Legacy Systems
8 25 (1.81%) Hybrid Cloud
9 23 (1.67%) Data Structures
9 23 (1.67%) Distributed Computing
10 21 (1.52%) Life Science
11 18 (1.31%) Analytical Mindset
11 18 (1.31%) Genomics
12 17 (1.23%) Enterprise Software
12 17 (1.23%) Fixed Income
13 15 (1.09%) Management Information System
14 13 (0.94%) Credit Risk
15 12 (0.87%) Taxonomies
16 11 (0.80%) Derivative
Operating Systems
1 38 (2.76%) Linux
2 12 (0.87%) Windows
3 10 (0.73%) Apple iOS
3 10 (0.73%) VMS
4 9 (0.65%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 8 (0.58%) Android
5 8 (0.58%) Ubuntu
6 2 (0.15%) Unix
7 1 (0.073%) CentOS
7 1 (0.073%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,079 (78.25%) AI
2 524 (38.00%) Data Science
3 400 (29.01%) CI/CD
4 391 (28.35%) LLM
5 377 (27.34%) Analytics
6 313 (22.70%) DevOps
7 297 (21.54%) Data Pipeline
8 296 (21.46%) Agile
9 284 (20.59%) Generative AI
10 264 (19.14%) MLOps
11 256 (18.56%) Data Engineering
12 231 (16.75%) Problem-Solving
13 199 (14.43%) Natural Language Processing
14 189 (13.71%) Software Engineering
15 188 (13.63%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 183 (13.27%) Use Case
17 172 (12.47%) Containerisation
18 164 (11.89%) Prompt Engineering
19 159 (11.53%) Data Modelling
20 154 (11.17%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 857 (62.15%) Python
2 340 (24.66%) SQL
3 90 (6.53%) Java
4 79 (5.73%) C#
5 72 (5.22%) R
6 60 (4.35%) JavaScript
7 57 (4.13%) TypeScript
8 28 (2.03%) PowerShell
9 26 (1.89%) C++
10 21 (1.52%) Bash
11 20 (1.45%) Scala
12 15 (1.09%) 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 (16.53%) Security Cleared
2 183 (13.27%) Degree
3 162 (11.75%) SC Cleared
4 80 (5.80%) Master's Degree
5 48 (3.48%) PhD
6 43 (3.12%) Computer Science Degree
7 37 (2.68%) DV Cleared
8 31 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
9 24 (1.74%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 23 (1.67%) AWS Certification
11 19 (1.38%) Azure Certification
12 9 (0.65%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 8 (0.58%) CISSP
14 7 (0.51%) ISTQB
15 6 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
16 5 (0.36%) HNC
16 5 (0.36%) HND
16 5 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
17 4 (0.29%) CISM
17 4 (0.29%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 125 (9.06%) Data Quality
2 54 (3.92%) GDPR
2 54 (3.92%) QA
3 37 (2.68%) NIST
4 26 (1.89%) EU AI Act
5 20 (1.45%) Accessibility
6 14 (1.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 7 (0.51%) Actionable Recommendations
7 7 (0.51%) GRC
8 5 (0.36%) DO-254
8 5 (0.36%) HIPAA
8 5 (0.36%) HMG Security Policy Framework
8 5 (0.36%) NCSC
9 4 (0.29%) Disclosure Scotland
9 4 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 4 (0.29%) PCI DSS
9 4 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 3 (0.22%) SOC 2
11 2 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 2 (0.15%) NIST 800
System Software
1 216 (15.66%) Docker
2 11 (0.80%) Active Directory
2 11 (0.80%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 7 (0.51%) Firmware
4 3 (0.22%) Lustre
5 2 (0.15%) Ceph
5 2 (0.15%) HDFS
5 2 (0.15%) Virtual Machines
6 1 (0.073%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 216 (15.66%) Kubernetes
2 145 (10.51%) Terraform
3 22 (1.60%) Grafana
4 20 (1.45%) Ansible
5 19 (1.38%) Kubeflow
6 13 (0.94%) Prometheus
7 9 (0.65%) Podman
8 7 (0.51%) Kibana
8 7 (0.51%) SCOM
9 4 (0.29%) Argo
9 4 (0.29%) logstash
10 3 (0.22%) ITRS Geneos
10 3 (0.22%) Rancher
11 2 (0.15%) Istio
11 2 (0.15%) Knative
11 2 (0.15%) Single Sign-On
12 1 (0.073%) Cilium
12 1 (0.073%) HP Fortify
12 1 (0.073%) Microsoft Intune
12 1 (0.073%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 201 (14.58%) Databricks
2 185 (13.42%) Microsoft
3 116 (8.41%) Google
4 105 (7.61%) OpenAI
5 74 (5.37%) Foundry
6 37 (2.68%) SAP
7 25 (1.81%) Oracle
8 21 (1.52%) ServiceNow
9 13 (0.94%) UiPath
10 12 (0.87%) Informatica
11 11 (0.80%) Automation Anywhere
12 10 (0.73%) NVIDIA
12 10 (0.73%) Salesforce
13 9 (0.65%) Greenplum
13 9 (0.65%) IBM
14 8 (0.58%) Dynatrace
15 7 (0.51%) Amplitude
15 7 (0.51%) Palantir
15 7 (0.51%) Pega
15 7 (0.51%) Splunk