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

6 months to
19 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 76 105 160
Rank change year-on-year +29 +55 +69
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,375 748 659
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.17% 2.55% 1.48%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.69% 2.82% 1.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 852 492 487
10th Percentile £400 £375 £413
25th Percentile £480 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year - - -6.39%
75th Percentile £700 £738 £712
90th Percentile £788 £874 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £525 £525
% change year-on-year +4.76% - -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 17 24
10th Percentile £41.85 £23.65 £41.15
25th Percentile £50.00 £26.50 £42.50
Median hourly rate £57.77 £52.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +10.03% +13.69% +31.94%
75th Percentile £79.60 £78.70 £66.25
90th Percentile £95.00 £83.81 £69.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £79.69 £46.18
% change year-on-year -19.69% +72.56% +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 37,265 26,485 38,452
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.97% 90.43% 86.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,631 17,037 25,025
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 £610 £638 £638
90th Percentile £723 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -2.04% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,203 922 2,327
10th Percentile £14.97 £15.25 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £32.12
Median % change year-on-year -7.69% +1.20% -8.24%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.52 £57.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.50 £70.20
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £31.76 £30.91
% change year-on-year -13.41% +2.74% -11.68%

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 19 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 19 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 19 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 +18 1,154 £575 -4.17% 1,180
London +24 768 £600 -4.00% 610
Work from Home +23 434 £600 +9.09% 478
UK excluding London +30 428 £550 +4.76% 765
North of England -20 101 £534 +6.80% 179
South East -5 91 £600 +9.09% 276
Scotland +51 71 £450 +2.86% 40
East of England +6 68 £550 -8.33% 72
North West +7 64 £542 +8.40% 95
Midlands -17 62 £575 +35.29% 87
West Midlands -24 41 £550 +34.97% 37
South West -19 35 £550 -17.60% 86
Yorkshire -42 27 £525 - 53
Wales -4 20 £738 +31.11% 26
East Midlands -21 19 £600 +33.33% 50
North East -3 13 £563 +57.12% 32
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 14

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
1 124 (9.02%) Apache Spark
2 85 (6.18%) Apache Airflow
3 59 (4.29%) Apache
4 29 (2.11%) Jupyter
5 13 (0.95%) Confluence
6 10 (0.73%) Appian
6 10 (0.73%) SAS
7 7 (0.51%) Palantir Foundry
8 6 (0.44%) CMS
8 6 (0.44%) GeoServer
8 6 (0.44%) Smallworld
9 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
10 3 (0.22%) Headless CMS
11 2 (0.15%) Luigi
12 1 (0.073%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.073%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.073%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.073%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.073%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 36 (2.62%) Chatbot
2 16 (1.16%) 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 1 (0.073%) CPLEX
7 1 (0.073%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (0.36%) 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%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 613 (44.58%) Azure
2 499 (36.29%) AWS
3 259 (18.84%) GCP
4 144 (10.47%) Power Platform
5 121 (8.80%) GitHub
6 107 (7.78%) Azure Machine Learning
6 107 (7.78%) Serverless
7 97 (7.05%) Azure AI
8 87 (6.33%) Azure DevOps
9 78 (5.67%) Snowflake
10 74 (5.38%) Amazon SageMaker
11 64 (4.65%) Amazon S3
12 62 (4.51%) GitHub Actions
13 61 (4.44%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 60 (4.36%) Vertex AI
15 58 (4.22%) Azure Data Factory
16 48 (3.49%) AWS CloudFormation
16 48 (3.49%) AWS Lambda
17 39 (2.84%) Amazon Bedrock
18 38 (2.76%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.16%) 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%) Hyperconnected
8 2 (0.15%) Mobile Backhaul
8 2 (0.15%) Modbus
8 2 (0.15%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 111 (8.07%) Power BI
2 92 (6.69%) Data Lake
3 80 (5.82%) Data Warehouse
4 67 (4.87%) Big Data
5 61 (4.44%) NoSQL
6 52 (3.78%) Metadata
7 51 (3.71%) BigQuery
8 40 (2.91%) PostgreSQL
8 40 (2.91%) Tableau
9 38 (2.76%) Pinecone
10 35 (2.55%) Hadoop
11 33 (2.40%) Delta Lake
12 29 (2.11%) SQL Server
13 28 (2.04%) Relational Database
13 28 (2.04%) Weaviate
14 25 (1.82%) Mixpanel
15 24 (1.75%) Amazon Athena
16 19 (1.38%) Amazon Redshift
16 19 (1.38%) Elasticsearch
16 19 (1.38%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 114 (8.29%) Git
2 98 (7.13%) MLflow
3 38 (2.76%) Jenkins
4 30 (2.18%) JIRA
5 26 (1.89%) GitLab
6 13 (0.95%) Visual Studio
7 11 (0.80%) JMeter
7 11 (0.80%) Selenium
8 9 (0.65%) PyCharm
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%) Spinnaker
13 3 (0.22%) Vite
General
1 355 (25.82%) Social Skills
2 280 (20.36%) Finance
3 166 (12.07%) Analytical Skills
4 147 (10.69%) Public Sector
5 91 (6.62%) Banking
6 38 (2.76%) Marketing
7 36 (2.62%) Pharmaceutical
8 31 (2.25%) Legal
9 30 (2.18%) Retail
10 27 (1.96%) Influencing Skills
10 27 (1.96%) Investment Banking
11 26 (1.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 24 (1.75%) Front Office
13 20 (1.45%) Presentation Skills
14 19 (1.38%) Documentation Skills
14 19 (1.38%) Manufacturing
15 16 (1.16%) Telecoms
16 13 (0.95%) Electronics
16 13 (0.95%) Financial Institution
17 12 (0.87%) Aviation
Job Titles
1 198 (14.40%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 192 (13.96%) Data Scientist
3 187 (13.60%) Architect
4 180 (13.09%) Senior
5 138 (10.04%) Data Engineer
6 124 (9.02%) Developer
7 119 (8.65%) Lead
8 66 (4.80%) Analyst
9 65 (4.73%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
10 62 (4.51%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 55 (4.00%) Python Engineer
12 54 (3.93%) Data Architect
13 51 (3.71%) Software Engineer
14 42 (3.05%) Senior Data Scientist
15 41 (2.98%) Gen AI Engineer
16 40 (2.91%) Solutions Architect
17 37 (2.69%) Azure Engineer
18 35 (2.55%) Consultant
19 32 (2.33%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
20 27 (1.96%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 231 (16.80%) PyTorch
2 193 (14.04%) TensorFlow
3 144 (10.47%) scikit-learn
4 110 (8.00%) Pandas
5 86 (6.25%) LangChain
6 83 (6.04%) React
7 79 (5.75%) NumPy
8 66 (4.80%) Kafka
9 59 (4.29%) .NET
9 59 (4.29%) PySpark
10 57 (4.15%) Model Context Protocol
11 54 (3.93%) FastAPI
11 54 (3.93%) LangGraph
12 53 (3.85%) Node.js
13 52 (3.78%) REST
14 49 (3.56%) Hugging Face
15 45 (3.27%) AngularJS
16 43 (3.13%) RESTful
17 32 (2.33%) Faiss
18 28 (2.04%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 197 (14.33%) Cloud Native
2 174 (12.65%) Algorithms
3 127 (9.24%) AI Agents
4 47 (3.42%) Product Ownership
5 42 (3.05%) Onboarding
6 39 (2.84%) Distributed Systems
7 30 (2.18%) Data Protection Act
8 29 (2.11%) Legacy Systems
9 25 (1.82%) Hybrid Cloud
10 22 (1.60%) Distributed Computing
11 19 (1.38%) Fixed Income
12 18 (1.31%) Analytical Mindset
12 18 (1.31%) Enterprise Software
12 18 (1.31%) Life Science
13 17 (1.24%) Data Structures
14 15 (1.09%) Management Information System
15 13 (0.95%) Genomics
16 12 (0.87%) Credit Risk
16 12 (0.87%) IoT
17 11 (0.80%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 36 (2.62%) Linux
2 12 (0.87%) Windows
3 10 (0.73%) 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 2 (0.15%) Unix
7 1 (0.073%) CentOS
7 1 (0.073%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,070 (77.82%) AI
2 519 (37.75%) Data Science
3 416 (30.25%) CI/CD
4 388 (28.22%) Analytics
5 376 (27.35%) LLM
6 311 (22.62%) DevOps
7 299 (21.75%) Data Pipeline
8 284 (20.65%) Generative AI
9 275 (20.00%) Agile
10 270 (19.64%) MLOps
11 267 (19.42%) Data Engineering
12 227 (16.51%) Problem-Solving
13 196 (14.25%) Natural Language Processing
14 184 (13.38%) Use Case
15 182 (13.24%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 180 (13.09%) Software Engineering
17 173 (12.58%) Containerisation
18 161 (11.71%) Data Governance
18 161 (11.71%) Data Modelling
18 161 (11.71%) Prompt Engineering
Programming Languages
1 848 (61.67%) Python
2 360 (26.18%) SQL
3 96 (6.98%) Java
4 81 (5.89%) C#
5 72 (5.24%) R
6 60 (4.36%) JavaScript
7 57 (4.15%) TypeScript
8 27 (1.96%) PowerShell
9 23 (1.67%) C++
10 21 (1.53%) Bash
11 18 (1.31%) Bicep
11 18 (1.31%) Scala
12 11 (0.80%) 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
1 226 (16.44%) Security Cleared
2 185 (13.45%) Degree
3 151 (10.98%) SC Cleared
4 84 (6.11%) Master's Degree
5 48 (3.49%) PhD
6 46 (3.35%) Computer Science Degree
7 38 (2.76%) DV Cleared
8 32 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
9 24 (1.75%) AWS Certification
10 21 (1.53%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 19 (1.38%) Azure Certification
12 11 (0.80%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 9 (0.65%) CISSP
14 8 (0.58%) ISTQB
15 6 (0.44%) CISM
15 6 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
16 5 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 5 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
17 4 (0.29%) HNC
17 4 (0.29%) HND
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 135 (9.82%) Data Quality
2 59 (4.29%) GDPR
3 49 (3.56%) QA
4 33 (2.40%) NIST
5 21 (1.53%) EU AI Act
6 20 (1.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 19 (1.38%) Accessibility
8 8 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
9 7 (0.51%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 6 (0.44%) GRC
10 6 (0.44%) NCSC
11 5 (0.36%) HIPAA
12 4 (0.29%) DO-254
12 4 (0.29%) PCI DSS
12 4 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 3 (0.22%) SOC 2
14 2 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 2 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
14 2 (0.15%) ISO/IEC 42001
14 2 (0.15%) NIST 800
System Software
1 223 (16.22%) 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
1 214 (15.56%) Kubernetes
2 146 (10.62%) Terraform
3 18 (1.31%) Ansible
3 18 (1.31%) Grafana
3 18 (1.31%) Kubeflow
4 13 (0.95%) Prometheus
5 10 (0.73%) Podman
6 7 (0.51%) SCOM
7 4 (0.29%) Argo
7 4 (0.29%) Kibana
8 3 (0.22%) Rancher
9 2 (0.15%) Istio
9 2 (0.15%) Knative
9 2 (0.15%) logstash
9 2 (0.15%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.073%) Docker Swarm
10 1 (0.073%) ITRS Geneos
10 1 (0.073%) Microsoft Intune
10 1 (0.073%) Progress Chef
10 1 (0.073%) SELinux
Vendors
1 212 (15.42%) Databricks
2 185 (13.45%) Microsoft
3 119 (8.65%) Google
4 111 (8.07%) OpenAI
5 75 (5.45%) Foundry
6 30 (2.18%) SAP
7 28 (2.04%) Oracle
8 17 (1.24%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.09%) Informatica
10 13 (0.95%) UiPath
11 11 (0.80%) Automation Anywhere
11 11 (0.80%) NVIDIA
12 9 (0.65%) IBM
13 8 (0.58%) Dynatrace
13 8 (0.58%) Greenplum
13 8 (0.58%) Salesforce
14 7 (0.51%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.51%) Palantir
14 7 (0.51%) Pega
15 6 (0.44%) Talend