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 14 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 80 107 198
Rank change year-on-year +27 +91 +15
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,112 822 616
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.13% 2.24% 1.32%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.48% 2.60% 1.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 734 538 453
10th Percentile £402 £394 £381
25th Percentile £473 £475 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +4.35% -8.00%
75th Percentile £688 £725 £713
90th Percentile £775 £800 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £514 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +2.80% -4.76% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 31 15 29
10th Percentile £30.00 £13.06 £42.50
25th Percentile £42.52 £15.28 -
Median hourly rate £55.00 £28.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +92.98% -38.28% -11.19%
75th Percentile £84.75 £46.18 -
90th Percentile £113.50 £51.75 £65.35
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £46.18 £46.18
% change year-on-year +40.75% - -12.04%

All Process and 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 31,960 31,635 41,181
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.93% 86.21% 88.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,027 19,055 27,781
10th Percentile £295 £310 £308
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.41% -3.18%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,098 1,126 1,593
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.10 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.12 £18.95
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £43.50
Median % change year-on-year -28.14% -19.54% +24.29%
75th Percentile £44.40 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.00 £73.53 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.63 £33.00 £43.90
% change year-on-year -31.42% -24.83% +48.81%

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 14 November 2025.

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 14 November 2025.

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 14 November 2025. 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 +26 939 £575 -4.17% 2,242
London +19 613 £625 -3.47% 1,447
UK excluding London +49 370 £514 +2.80% 868
Work from Home +42 364 £550 +6.64% 1,225
North of England -12 92 £480 -2.44% 227
South East +35 87 £525 - 277
Scotland +30 63 £503 +11.67% 48
East of England +21 61 £550 +10.00% 68
North West -6 49 £458 -3.99% 157
Yorkshire -14 38 £525 - 53
Midlands -6 37 £511 +20.18% 138
West Midlands -9 28 £520 +15.44% 98
South West -20 25 £550 -15.38% 73
Wales +4 10 £700 +185.71% 19
East Midlands -13 8 £410 +15.17% 37
North East -17 6 £450 -9.09% 19
Northern Ireland -6 1 £700 - 19

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 94 (8.45%) Apache Spark
2 66 (5.94%) Apache Airflow
3 29 (2.61%) Apache
4 26 (2.34%) Jupyter
5 10 (0.90%) Confluence
6 8 (0.72%) Apache Pig
6 8 (0.72%) SAS
7 6 (0.54%) GeoServer
7 6 (0.54%) Smallworld
8 4 (0.36%) Appian
8 4 (0.36%) IIS
8 4 (0.36%) SharePoint
9 3 (0.27%) CMS
10 2 (0.18%) Camunda
11 1 (0.090%) Apache Solr
11 1 (0.090%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.090%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.090%) Microsoft Exchange
11 1 (0.090%) nginx
11 1 (0.090%) Red Hat Fuse
Applications
1 46 (4.14%) Chatbot
2 17 (1.53%) Microsoft Excel
3 12 (1.08%) Microsoft Office
4 8 (0.72%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 7 (0.63%) Simulink
6 6 (0.54%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.090%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.090%) GNU Octave
7 1 (0.090%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.090%) Sketch
7 1 (0.090%) Spreadsheet
7 1 (0.090%) Trello
Business Applications
1 11 (0.99%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (0.27%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.18%) Distributed Ledger
3 2 (0.18%) SAP ERP
3 2 (0.18%) Teamcenter
4 1 (0.090%) IBM Planning Analytics
4 1 (0.090%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.090%) SAP GRC
4 1 (0.090%) Shopify
4 1 (0.090%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 463 (41.64%) Azure
2 378 (33.99%) AWS
3 218 (19.60%) GCP
4 107 (9.62%) Power Platform
5 91 (8.18%) GitHub
5 91 (8.18%) Serverless
6 84 (7.55%) Azure Machine Learning
7 70 (6.29%) Azure DevOps
8 61 (5.49%) Amazon SageMaker
9 57 (5.13%) Amazon S3
9 57 (5.13%) Snowflake
10 53 (4.77%) Vertex AI
11 51 (4.59%) Azure AI
12 49 (4.41%) Azure AKS
13 47 (4.23%) AWS Lambda
13 47 (4.23%) Azure Data Factory
14 44 (3.96%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 40 (3.60%) GitHub Actions
16 36 (3.24%) Amazon Bedrock
17 34 (3.06%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.44%) Network Security
2 14 (1.26%) HTTP
3 13 (1.17%) DNS
4 9 (0.81%) SSL
5 8 (0.72%) Ethernet
5 8 (0.72%) FTP
5 8 (0.72%) SMTP
6 7 (0.63%) Internet
7 6 (0.54%) Firewall
8 5 (0.45%) 5G
8 5 (0.45%) LTE
8 5 (0.45%) VoIP
9 4 (0.36%) Radio Access Network
9 4 (0.36%) VPN
10 3 (0.27%) 4G
10 3 (0.27%) DOCSIS
10 3 (0.27%) GPON
10 3 (0.27%) MPLS
10 3 (0.27%) xDSL
11 2 (0.18%) Hyperconnected
Database & Business Intelligence
1 96 (8.63%) Power BI
2 75 (6.74%) Data Warehouse
3 67 (6.03%) Big Data
4 58 (5.22%) Data Lake
5 56 (5.04%) PostgreSQL
6 55 (4.95%) NoSQL
7 44 (3.96%) BigQuery
8 42 (3.78%) Tableau
9 33 (2.97%) Metadata
10 30 (2.70%) Hadoop
11 25 (2.25%) MongoDB
12 21 (1.89%) Data Mining
12 21 (1.89%) Elasticsearch
13 19 (1.71%) Pinecone
14 17 (1.53%) Relational Database
15 16 (1.44%) Amazon Athena
16 15 (1.35%) Geospatial Data
17 14 (1.26%) Amazon Redshift
17 14 (1.26%) DynamoDB
18 13 (1.17%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 95 (8.54%) Git
2 63 (5.67%) MLflow
3 55 (4.95%) Jenkins
4 34 (3.06%) GitLab
5 24 (2.16%) JIRA
6 18 (1.62%) Selenium
7 16 (1.44%) JMeter
8 12 (1.08%) SonarQube
9 10 (0.90%) JUnit
10 8 (0.72%) Cypress.io
11 7 (0.63%) Visual Studio
12 6 (0.54%) Mockito
12 6 (0.54%) Postman
12 6 (0.54%) PyCharm
13 5 (0.45%) Artifactory
13 5 (0.45%) Cucumber
13 5 (0.45%) Gradle
13 5 (0.45%) MSTest
14 4 (0.36%) Robot Framework
14 4 (0.36%) RStudio
General
1 324 (29.14%) Social Skills
2 208 (18.71%) Finance
3 129 (11.60%) Analytical Skills
4 95 (8.54%) Public Sector
5 73 (6.56%) Banking
6 51 (4.59%) Marketing
7 44 (3.96%) Pharmaceutical
8 39 (3.51%) Retail
9 32 (2.88%) Telecoms
10 31 (2.79%) Legal
11 27 (2.43%) Investment Banking
12 24 (2.16%) Manufacturing
13 21 (1.89%) Front Office
14 19 (1.71%) Documentation Skills
15 16 (1.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 16 (1.44%) Influencing Skills
16 13 (1.17%) Electronics
17 11 (0.99%) Financial Institution
18 10 (0.90%) Aerospace
18 10 (0.90%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 160 (14.39%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 151 (13.58%) Data Scientist
3 146 (13.13%) Architect
4 119 (10.70%) Developer
5 113 (10.16%) Senior
6 112 (10.07%) Data Engineer
7 67 (6.03%) Lead
8 56 (5.04%) Machine Learning Engineer
9 52 (4.68%) Analyst
9 52 (4.68%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 52 (4.68%) Python Engineer
10 42 (3.78%) Software Engineer
11 35 (3.15%) Data Architect
12 32 (2.88%) Azure Engineer
12 32 (2.88%) Gen AI Engineer
12 32 (2.88%) Solutions Architect
13 30 (2.70%) Consultant
14 28 (2.52%) Python Developer
15 24 (2.16%) Data Analyst
15 24 (2.16%) Product Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 180 (16.19%) PyTorch
2 159 (14.30%) TensorFlow
3 107 (9.62%) scikit-learn
4 102 (9.17%) Pandas
5 82 (7.37%) FastAPI
5 82 (7.37%) LangChain
6 66 (5.94%) Kafka
6 66 (5.94%) NumPy
7 64 (5.76%) React
8 58 (5.22%) Hugging Face
9 57 (5.13%) RESTful
10 48 (4.32%) LangGraph
11 45 (4.05%) REST
12 44 (3.96%) PySpark
13 35 (3.15%) Flask
14 34 (3.06%) .NET
14 34 (3.06%) Node.js
15 31 (2.79%) pytest
16 21 (1.89%) AngularJS
17 20 (1.80%) OpenCV
Miscellaneous
1 175 (15.74%) Algorithms
2 139 (12.50%) Cloud Native
3 89 (8.00%) AI Agents
4 45 (4.05%) Product Ownership
5 39 (3.51%) Distributed Systems
6 36 (3.24%) Data Protection Act
6 36 (3.24%) Distributed Computing
7 34 (3.06%) Onboarding
8 26 (2.34%) Genomics
8 26 (2.34%) Legacy Systems
9 24 (2.16%) Data Structures
10 23 (2.07%) Life Science
11 21 (1.89%) Analytical Mindset
12 17 (1.53%) Enterprise Software
12 17 (1.53%) Hybrid Cloud
12 17 (1.53%) Management Information System
13 16 (1.44%) Greenfield Project
14 12 (1.08%) IoT
15 10 (0.90%) Cyber Threat
15 10 (0.90%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.61%) Linux
2 11 (0.99%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 9 (0.81%) Ubuntu
3 9 (0.81%) VMS
4 8 (0.72%) Unix
4 8 (0.72%) Windows
5 5 (0.45%) Android
5 5 (0.45%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.18%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.090%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 817 (73.47%) AI
2 442 (39.75%) Data Science
3 316 (28.42%) LLM
4 297 (26.71%) CI/CD
5 291 (26.17%) Analytics
6 284 (25.54%) Agile
7 264 (23.74%) DevOps
8 207 (18.62%) Data Pipeline
9 203 (18.26%) Generative AI
10 192 (17.27%) Problem-Solving
11 189 (17.00%) MLOps
12 177 (15.92%) Data Engineering
13 169 (15.20%) Natural Language Processing
14 160 (14.39%) Software Engineering
15 139 (12.50%) Containerisation
16 136 (12.23%) Visualisation
17 135 (12.14%) Computer Science
18 129 (11.60%) Data Modelling
18 129 (11.60%) Use Case
19 120 (10.79%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 702 (63.13%) Python
2 267 (24.01%) SQL
3 80 (7.19%) R
4 76 (6.83%) Java
5 56 (5.04%) JavaScript
6 53 (4.77%) TypeScript
7 40 (3.60%) C#
8 37 (3.33%) C++
9 35 (3.15%) PowerShell
10 31 (2.79%) Scala
11 19 (1.71%) Bash
12 18 (1.62%) Bicep
13 16 (1.44%) C
14 15 (1.35%) MATLAB
15 10 (0.90%) Go
16 7 (0.63%) Shell Script
16 7 (0.63%) SystemVerilog
16 7 (0.63%) Tcl
17 5 (0.45%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 3 (0.27%) Rust
Qualifications
1 184 (16.55%) Degree
2 149 (13.40%) Security Cleared
3 108 (9.71%) SC Cleared
4 73 (6.56%) Master's Degree
5 46 (4.14%) Computer Science Degree
5 46 (4.14%) PhD
6 44 (3.96%) MCP
7 26 (2.34%) DV Cleared
8 24 (2.16%) Azure Certification
9 18 (1.62%) AWS Certification
10 13 (1.17%) BPSS Clearance
11 9 (0.81%) CISSP
12 7 (0.63%) HNC
12 7 (0.63%) HND
13 4 (0.36%) Cisco Certification
13 4 (0.36%) ISTQB
13 4 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 4 (0.36%) Microsoft Certification
13 4 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
14 3 (0.27%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 67 (6.03%) Data Quality
2 56 (5.04%) GDPR
3 40 (3.60%) NIST
4 39 (3.51%) QA
5 31 (2.79%) EU AI Act
6 25 (2.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 21 (1.89%) Accessibility
8 8 (0.72%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 7 (0.63%) DO-254
10 6 (0.54%) SOC 2
11 5 (0.45%) HIPAA
11 5 (0.45%) HMG Security Policy Framework
11 5 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 42001
12 4 (0.36%) Disclosure Scotland
12 4 (0.36%) GRC
13 3 (0.27%) NCSC
13 3 (0.27%) PCI DSS
14 2 (0.18%) EMIR
14 2 (0.18%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
14 2 (0.18%) OASIS TOSCA
System Software
1 186 (16.73%) Docker
2 11 (0.99%) Active Directory
2 11 (0.99%) Virtual Machines
3 7 (0.63%) Firmware
4 3 (0.27%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.18%) Hyper-V
5 2 (0.18%) KVM
5 2 (0.18%) VMware NSX
6 1 (0.090%) GPFS
6 1 (0.090%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 185 (16.64%) Kubernetes
2 112 (10.07%) Terraform
3 33 (2.97%) Grafana
4 25 (2.25%) Ansible
5 22 (1.98%) Kubeflow
6 16 (1.44%) Prometheus
7 15 (1.35%) Kibana
8 11 (0.99%) SCOM
9 10 (0.90%) logstash
10 9 (0.81%) ITRS Geneos
11 8 (0.72%) Argo
12 5 (0.45%) Kustomize
13 4 (0.36%) Cilium
13 4 (0.36%) Progress Chef
13 4 (0.36%) Rsyslog
14 3 (0.27%) Single Sign-On
14 3 (0.27%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
15 2 (0.18%) Amdocs OSS
15 2 (0.18%) Podman
16 1 (0.090%) Opsgenie
Vendors
1 162 (14.57%) Microsoft
2 131 (11.78%) Databricks
3 97 (8.72%) Google
4 58 (5.22%) OpenAI
5 37 (3.33%) Foundry
6 34 (3.06%) SAP
7 20 (1.80%) Splunk
8 13 (1.17%) Salesforce
9 12 (1.08%) ServiceNow
10 11 (0.99%) Oracle
11 10 (0.90%) NVIDIA
12 9 (0.81%) Solace
12 9 (0.81%) TIBCO
13 8 (0.72%) Intel
13 8 (0.72%) Palantir
14 7 (0.63%) Actel
14 7 (0.63%) Altera
14 7 (0.63%) Cisco
14 7 (0.63%) Informatica
14 7 (0.63%) Xilinx