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

6 months to
26 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 78 98 158
Rank change year-on-year +20 +60 +70
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,373 760 665
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.12% 2.62% 1.50%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.64% 2.89% 1.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 845 499 488
10th Percentile £404 £375 £413
25th Percentile £492 £455 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £585 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.74% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £700 £731 £718
90th Percentile £788 £874 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £545 £525
% change year-on-year +0.92% +3.81% -10.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 21 21
10th Percentile £41.75 £25.25 £41.10
25th Percentile £50.00 £31.00 £42.50
Median hourly rate £56.63 £57.50 £48.50
Median % change year-on-year -1.51% +18.56% +38.57%
75th Percentile £79.90 £78.70 £66.25
90th Percentile £95.00 £81.01 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £77.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year -17.42% +29.17% +71.43%

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 37,733 26,318 38,291
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.81% 90.56% 86.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,910 17,091 24,889
10th Percentile £313 £308 £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 £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £746
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.89% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,221 949 2,344
10th Percentile £14.96 £15.19 £12.85
25th Percentile £18.50 £20.45 £16.00
Median hourly rate £34.50 £32.00 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +7.81% -1.54% -9.72%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £58.69
90th Percentile £76.00 £76.25 £71.89
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 £31.52 £31.80
% change year-on-year -4.82% -0.88% -12.28%

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 26 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 26 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 26 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 +10 1,162 £575 -4.17% 1,132
London +24 775 £600 -3.23% 588
Work from Home +16 428 £600 +10.09% 460
UK excluding London +26 417 £550 +0.92% 725
North of England -16 99 £534 +1.71% 168
South East -14 90 £600 +9.09% 249
East of England -1 66 £550 -8.33% 60
Scotland +49 63 £475 +8.57% 36
Midlands -12 63 £550 +29.41% 87
North West -4 62 £542 -0.55% 94
West Midlands -28 42 £550 +29.41% 38
South West -21 36 £550 -17.60% 97
Yorkshire -37 28 £516 -1.67% 46
Wales -5 20 £738 +31.11% 27
East Midlands -19 19 £600 +33.33% 49
North East -8 12 £575 +60.61% 29
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 13

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
1 121 (8.81%) Apache Spark
2 80 (5.83%) Apache Airflow
3 59 (4.30%) Apache
4 28 (2.04%) Jupyter
5 12 (0.87%) Confluence
6 10 (0.73%) SAS
7 9 (0.66%) Appian
8 6 (0.44%) CMS
8 6 (0.44%) GeoServer
8 6 (0.44%) Smallworld
9 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
10 4 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.22%) Headless CMS
12 2 (0.15%) Luigi
13 1 (0.073%) Apache Superset
13 1 (0.073%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.073%) ArcGIS
13 1 (0.073%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.073%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 34 (2.48%) Chatbot
2 16 (1.17%) Microsoft Excel
3 14 (1.02%) Microsoft Office
4 12 (0.87%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 12 (0.87%) Microsoft Project
5 4 (0.29%) Simulink
6 3 (0.22%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.15%) CPLEX
8 1 (0.073%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (0.22%) SAP IBP
3 2 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.15%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.073%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.073%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 615 (44.79%) Azure
2 486 (35.40%) AWS
3 264 (19.23%) GCP
4 144 (10.49%) Power Platform
5 117 (8.52%) GitHub
6 107 (7.79%) Azure Machine Learning
7 101 (7.36%) Azure AI
8 95 (6.92%) Serverless
9 84 (6.12%) Azure DevOps
10 79 (5.75%) Snowflake
11 68 (4.95%) Amazon SageMaker
12 63 (4.59%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 60 (4.37%) Azure Data Factory
14 59 (4.30%) Vertex AI
15 58 (4.22%) GitHub Actions
16 57 (4.15%) Amazon S3
17 42 (3.06%) AWS CloudFormation
18 40 (2.91%) AWS Lambda
19 38 (2.77%) Amazon Bedrock
20 34 (2.48%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.17%) Network Security
2 11 (0.80%) Firewall
3 7 (0.51%) DNS
3 7 (0.51%) HTTP
4 6 (0.44%) Internet
5 5 (0.36%) FTP
5 5 (0.36%) SMTP
5 5 (0.36%) SSL
6 4 (0.29%) 5G
6 4 (0.29%) Ethernet
6 4 (0.29%) InfiniBand
7 3 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
7 3 (0.22%) LTE
7 3 (0.22%) VPN
8 2 (0.15%) 2G
8 2 (0.15%) 4G
8 2 (0.15%) Bluetooth
8 2 (0.15%) Hyperconnected
8 2 (0.15%) Mobile Backhaul
8 2 (0.15%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 110 (8.01%) Power BI
2 90 (6.55%) Data Lake
3 76 (5.54%) Data Warehouse
4 67 (4.88%) Big Data
5 60 (4.37%) NoSQL
6 52 (3.79%) BigQuery
7 51 (3.71%) Metadata
8 39 (2.84%) PostgreSQL
8 39 (2.84%) Tableau
9 36 (2.62%) Pinecone
10 35 (2.55%) Hadoop
11 33 (2.40%) Delta Lake
12 29 (2.11%) Relational Database
12 29 (2.11%) SQL Server
12 29 (2.11%) Weaviate
13 25 (1.82%) Mixpanel
14 24 (1.75%) Amazon Athena
15 19 (1.38%) MySQL
16 18 (1.31%) Amazon Redshift
17 17 (1.24%) OLAP
Development Applications
1 110 (8.01%) Git
2 95 (6.92%) MLflow
3 38 (2.77%) Jenkins
4 32 (2.33%) JIRA
5 26 (1.89%) GitLab
6 13 (0.95%) Visual Studio
7 10 (0.73%) PyCharm
8 9 (0.66%) JMeter
8 9 (0.66%) Selenium
9 7 (0.51%) Gradle
9 7 (0.51%) SonarQube
10 6 (0.44%) MSTest
11 5 (0.36%) Maven
12 4 (0.29%) Android Studio
12 4 (0.29%) Bitbucket
12 4 (0.29%) Cypress.io
12 4 (0.29%) Oracle APEX
12 4 (0.29%) RStudio
13 3 (0.22%) REST Assured
13 3 (0.22%) Spinnaker
General
1 350 (25.49%) Social Skills
2 281 (20.47%) Finance
3 169 (12.31%) Analytical Skills
4 147 (10.71%) Public Sector
5 85 (6.19%) Banking
6 38 (2.77%) Marketing
7 36 (2.62%) Pharmaceutical
8 31 (2.26%) Legal
9 28 (2.04%) Retail
10 26 (1.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 25 (1.82%) Influencing Skills
12 24 (1.75%) Investment Banking
13 23 (1.68%) Front Office
14 20 (1.46%) Documentation Skills
14 20 (1.46%) Presentation Skills
15 19 (1.38%) Manufacturing
16 16 (1.17%) Telecoms
17 13 (0.95%) Aviation
17 13 (0.95%) Electronics
18 12 (0.87%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 197 (14.35%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 196 (14.28%) Architect
3 189 (13.77%) Data Scientist
4 175 (12.75%) Senior
5 131 (9.54%) Data Engineer
6 122 (8.89%) Developer
7 116 (8.45%) Lead
8 66 (4.81%) Analyst
9 64 (4.66%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
10 61 (4.44%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 59 (4.30%) Data Architect
12 55 (4.01%) Python Engineer
13 48 (3.50%) Software Engineer
14 43 (3.13%) Solutions Architect
15 39 (2.84%) Gen AI Engineer
15 39 (2.84%) Senior Data Scientist
16 37 (2.69%) Azure Engineer
17 36 (2.62%) Consultant
18 31 (2.26%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
19 25 (1.82%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 223 (16.24%) PyTorch
2 186 (13.55%) TensorFlow
3 141 (10.27%) scikit-learn
4 108 (7.87%) Pandas
5 83 (6.05%) LangChain
6 80 (5.83%) React
7 79 (5.75%) NumPy
8 68 (4.95%) Kafka
9 58 (4.22%) PySpark
10 57 (4.15%) .NET
11 54 (3.93%) Model Context Protocol
11 54 (3.93%) Node.js
12 53 (3.86%) LangGraph
13 52 (3.79%) REST
14 49 (3.57%) FastAPI
15 48 (3.50%) Hugging Face
16 45 (3.28%) AngularJS
17 39 (2.84%) RESTful
18 29 (2.11%) Faiss
19 26 (1.89%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 191 (13.91%) Cloud Native
2 165 (12.02%) Algorithms
3 129 (9.40%) AI Agents
4 47 (3.42%) Product Ownership
5 43 (3.13%) Onboarding
6 36 (2.62%) Distributed Systems
7 29 (2.11%) Legacy Systems
8 28 (2.04%) Data Protection Act
9 24 (1.75%) Hybrid Cloud
10 21 (1.53%) Enterprise Software
11 19 (1.38%) Distributed Computing
11 19 (1.38%) Fixed Income
12 18 (1.31%) Analytical Mindset
13 17 (1.24%) Life Science
13 17 (1.24%) Management Information System
14 15 (1.09%) Data Structures
15 13 (0.95%) Security Posture
16 12 (0.87%) Credit Risk
16 12 (0.87%) IoT
17 11 (0.80%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 35 (2.55%) Linux
2 12 (0.87%) Windows
3 11 (0.80%) VMS
4 8 (0.58%) Android
4 8 (0.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 8 (0.58%) Ubuntu
5 7 (0.51%) Apple iOS
6 3 (0.22%) Unix
7 1 (0.073%) CentOS
7 1 (0.073%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,079 (78.59%) AI
2 507 (36.93%) Data Science
3 409 (29.79%) CI/CD
4 394 (28.70%) Analytics
5 377 (27.46%) LLM
6 306 (22.29%) DevOps
7 297 (21.63%) Data Pipeline
8 291 (21.19%) Generative AI
9 270 (19.66%) Agile
10 269 (19.59%) MLOps
11 266 (19.37%) Data Engineering
12 221 (16.10%) Problem-Solving
13 191 (13.91%) Natural Language Processing
14 188 (13.69%) Use Case
15 177 (12.89%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 171 (12.45%) Software Engineering
17 169 (12.31%) Containerisation
18 166 (12.09%) Data Governance
19 162 (11.80%) Data Modelling
20 154 (11.22%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 831 (60.52%) Python
2 355 (25.86%) SQL
3 96 (6.99%) Java
4 81 (5.90%) C#
5 71 (5.17%) R
6 58 (4.22%) JavaScript
7 54 (3.93%) TypeScript
8 28 (2.04%) PowerShell
9 23 (1.68%) C++
10 21 (1.53%) Bash
11 18 (1.31%) Scala
12 17 (1.24%) Bicep
13 10 (0.73%) Go
13 10 (0.73%) MATLAB
13 10 (0.73%) Rust
14 7 (0.51%) Kotlin
14 7 (0.51%) SPARQL
15 4 (0.29%) SystemVerilog
15 4 (0.29%) Tcl
15 4 (0.29%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 233 (16.97%) Security Cleared
2 183 (13.33%) Degree
3 154 (11.22%) SC Cleared
4 84 (6.12%) Master's Degree
5 48 (3.50%) PhD
6 46 (3.35%) Computer Science Degree
7 40 (2.91%) DV Cleared
8 33 (2.40%) BPSS Clearance
9 23 (1.68%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.38%) Azure Certification
11 18 (1.31%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 14 (1.02%) CISSP
13 11 (0.80%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 9 (0.66%) CISM
15 8 (0.58%) ISTQB
16 6 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
17 5 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
17 5 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
18 4 (0.29%) OSCP
18 4 (0.29%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 139 (10.12%) Data Quality
2 65 (4.73%) GDPR
3 50 (3.64%) QA
4 31 (2.26%) NIST
5 20 (1.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 19 (1.38%) EU AI Act
7 18 (1.31%) Accessibility
8 8 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
8 8 (0.58%) HIPAA
9 7 (0.51%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 6 (0.44%) NCSC
10 6 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 5 (0.36%) GRC
12 4 (0.29%) DO-254
12 4 (0.29%) PCI DSS
12 4 (0.29%) WCAG
13 3 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 3 (0.22%) SOC 2
14 2 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 215 (15.66%) Docker
2 12 (0.87%) Active Directory
2 12 (0.87%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 7 (0.51%) Firmware
4 3 (0.22%) Lustre
4 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.15%) Ceph
5 2 (0.15%) HDFS
6 1 (0.073%) Embedded Firmware
6 1 (0.073%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 213 (15.51%) Kubernetes
2 136 (9.91%) Terraform
3 20 (1.46%) Kubeflow
4 18 (1.31%) Grafana
5 16 (1.17%) Ansible
6 12 (0.87%) Prometheus
7 10 (0.73%) Podman
8 7 (0.51%) SCOM
9 3 (0.22%) Argo
9 3 (0.22%) Kibana
9 3 (0.22%) Rancher
10 2 (0.15%) Istio
10 2 (0.15%) Knative
10 2 (0.15%) logstash
10 2 (0.15%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (0.073%) HP Fortify
11 1 (0.073%) Microsoft Intune
11 1 (0.073%) SCCM
11 1 (0.073%) SELinux
11 1 (0.073%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 215 (15.66%) Databricks
2 188 (13.69%) Microsoft
3 121 (8.81%) Google
4 111 (8.08%) OpenAI
5 72 (5.24%) Foundry
6 33 (2.40%) SAP
7 29 (2.11%) Oracle
8 18 (1.31%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.09%) Informatica
10 13 (0.95%) UiPath
11 11 (0.80%) Automation Anywhere
11 11 (0.80%) NVIDIA
12 10 (0.73%) IBM
13 8 (0.58%) Dynatrace
14 7 (0.51%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.51%) Greenplum
14 7 (0.51%) Pega
14 7 (0.51%) Salesforce
15 6 (0.44%) ESRI
15 6 (0.44%) Siemens