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

6 months to
28 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 99 110
Rank change year-on-year +8 +11 +82
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,558 848 811
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.90% 2.59% 2.09%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.43% 2.87% 2.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,005 540 569
10th Percentile £413 £400 £404
25th Percentile £493 £475 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £561 £600
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -6.50% +4.35%
75th Percentile £700 £688 £738
90th Percentile £788 £788 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £500
% change year-on-year - +10.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 39 25 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £27.50 £13.06
25th Percentile £37.75 £45.00 £34.50
Median hourly rate £77.00 £65.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +18.46% +40.75% -
75th Percentile £84.38 £80.00 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £87.80 £58.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £49.34
% change year-on-year +2.67% +52.01% +6.84%

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 45,469 29,582 33,102
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.59% 90.43% 85.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,813 18,412 20,921
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,891 1,754 1,674
10th Percentile £14.10 £14.20 £13.86
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.30 £18.13
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £67.89 £47.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £22.92 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.80% -46.07% +6.25%

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 +6 1,340 £575 - 4,430
London +27 902 £588 -0.84% 3,099
UK excluding London -4 480 £550 - 1,851
Work from Home -5 405 £592 +7.55% 1,670
South East -7 138 £600 +4.35% 440
North of England -20 128 £550 +11.90% 382
Scotland +26 82 £450 -14.29% 269
North West -34 59 £600 +17.07% 230
Yorkshire -8 57 £550 +13.11% 107
Midlands -32 52 £550 +2.33% 153
South West -20 45 £525 -6.67% 280
West Midlands -36 44 £550 -4.35% 90
East of England -25 29 £488 -13.33% 250
North East -34 12 £463 +8.82% 49
Wales -13 9 £540 -20.00% 48
East Midlands -18 7 £438 -1.41% 63
Northern Ireland +4 1 £334 -52.29% 55

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 82 (5.26%) Apache Spark
2 74 (4.75%) Apache Airflow
3 49 (3.15%) Apache
4 33 (2.12%) Jupyter
5 19 (1.22%) Confluence
6 10 (0.64%) SAS
7 6 (0.39%) ArcGIS
8 5 (0.32%) Palantir Foundry
9 4 (0.26%) SharePoint
10 3 (0.19%) CMS
10 3 (0.19%) Headless CMS
10 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.13%) Appian
11 2 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.064%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.064%) Luigi
Applications
1 30 (1.93%) Chatbot
2 10 (0.64%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.26%) CPLEX
3 4 (0.26%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
5 2 (0.13%) Notion
5 2 (0.13%) NUKE
6 1 (0.064%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.064%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.064%) Simulink
6 1 (0.064%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 10 (0.64%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
3 4 (0.26%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
4 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.064%) Actimize
6 1 (0.064%) NetSuite
6 1 (0.064%) Oracle Cash Management
6 1 (0.064%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.064%) Oracle Payables
6 1 (0.064%) Oracle Receivables
6 1 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
6 1 (0.064%) SAP APO
6 1 (0.064%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 543 (34.85%) Azure
2 517 (33.18%) AWS
3 303 (19.45%) GCP
4 123 (7.89%) Power Platform
5 114 (7.32%) GitHub
6 106 (6.80%) Serverless
7 90 (5.78%) Amazon S3
8 85 (5.46%) Snowflake
9 80 (5.13%) AWS Lambda
10 69 (4.43%) Amazon SageMaker
11 62 (3.98%) Azure Machine Learning
12 57 (3.66%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 56 (3.59%) Amazon Bedrock
14 55 (3.53%) dbt
15 54 (3.47%) Azure DevOps
16 51 (3.27%) Azure AI
17 49 (3.15%) GitHub Actions
18 46 (2.95%) Vertex AI
19 44 (2.82%) Azure Data Factory
19 44 (2.82%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 18 (1.16%) Internet
1 18 (1.16%) Network Security
2 17 (1.09%) Broadband
3 15 (0.96%) Firewall
4 11 (0.71%) DNS
5 10 (0.64%) VPN
6 9 (0.58%) DHCP
7 4 (0.26%) NAS
7 4 (0.26%) SAN
7 4 (0.26%) SMS
7 4 (0.26%) TCP/IP
7 4 (0.26%) VLAN
8 3 (0.19%) HTTP
8 3 (0.19%) MQTT
8 3 (0.19%) SMTP
9 2 (0.13%) CTI
9 2 (0.13%) Modbus
9 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
9 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
10 1 (0.064%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 113 (7.25%) Power BI
2 89 (5.71%) Data Lake
3 86 (5.52%) Data Warehouse
4 78 (5.01%) Metadata
5 76 (4.88%) BigQuery
6 65 (4.17%) Big Data
7 50 (3.21%) Amazon Redshift
8 48 (3.08%) Delta Lake
9 46 (2.95%) NoSQL
10 42 (2.70%) Tableau
11 36 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
12 31 (1.99%) Relational Database
13 29 (1.86%) PostgreSQL
14 22 (1.41%) MongoDB
15 21 (1.35%) Hadoop
16 18 (1.16%) Data Mining
16 18 (1.16%) Looker
16 18 (1.16%) Neo4j
17 16 (1.03%) Azure SQL Database
18 15 (0.96%) Redis
Development Applications
1 87 (5.58%) Git
2 51 (3.27%) MLflow
3 50 (3.21%) GitLab
4 43 (2.76%) JIRA
5 22 (1.41%) Jenkins
6 11 (0.71%) Claude Code
7 10 (0.64%) Vite
8 8 (0.51%) Selenium
9 6 (0.39%) ERwin
10 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
11 4 (0.26%) PyCharm
11 4 (0.26%) RStudio
11 4 (0.26%) Spinnaker
12 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
12 3 (0.19%) JMeter
12 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
13 2 (0.13%) JUnit
13 2 (0.13%) NUnit
13 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
13 2 (0.13%) Visual Studio
General
1 340 (21.82%) Social Skills
2 286 (18.36%) Finance
3 220 (14.12%) Analytical Skills
4 128 (8.22%) Public Sector
5 107 (6.87%) Banking
6 42 (2.70%) Marketing
7 35 (2.25%) Retail
8 31 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 29 (1.86%) Telecoms
10 28 (1.80%) Pharmaceutical
11 26 (1.67%) Legal
12 24 (1.54%) Documentation Skills
13 22 (1.41%) Front Office
14 20 (1.28%) Aerospace
14 20 (1.28%) Manufacturing
15 19 (1.22%) Financial Institution
15 19 (1.22%) Influencing Skills
16 16 (1.03%) Aviation
17 15 (0.96%) Law
18 14 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 255 (16.37%) Architect
2 248 (15.92%) Senior
3 199 (12.77%) Data Scientist
4 169 (10.85%) Lead
5 162 (10.40%) Data Engineer
6 131 (8.41%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 96 (6.16%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 84 (5.39%) Developer
9 75 (4.81%) Python Engineer
10 74 (4.75%) Solutions Architect
11 69 (4.43%) Data Architect
12 61 (3.92%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 60 (3.85%) Analyst
14 54 (3.47%) Software Engineer
15 53 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
16 49 (3.15%) Security Architect
17 46 (2.95%) Senior Data Engineer
18 44 (2.82%) Consultant
18 44 (2.82%) DevOps Engineer
19 39 (2.50%) Senior Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 189 (12.13%) Terraform
2 123 (7.89%) PyTorch
3 109 (7.00%) Kafka
4 89 (5.71%) TensorFlow
5 87 (5.58%) PySpark
6 75 (4.81%) scikit-learn
7 69 (4.43%) REST
8 67 (4.30%) LangChain
9 65 (4.17%) Pandas
10 64 (4.11%) React
11 48 (3.08%) NumPy
12 37 (2.37%) .NET
12 37 (2.37%) pytest
13 35 (2.25%) LangGraph
14 29 (1.86%) FastAPI
15 26 (1.67%) Hugging Face
15 26 (1.67%) RESTful
16 24 (1.54%) Model Context Protocol
17 23 (1.48%) Node.js
18 22 (1.41%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 191 (12.26%) Cloud Native
2 171 (10.98%) AI Agents
3 99 (6.35%) Algorithms
4 67 (4.30%) Product Ownership
5 62 (3.98%) Onboarding
6 61 (3.92%) Distributed Systems
7 32 (2.05%) Enterprise Software
8 29 (1.86%) Data Structures
9 25 (1.60%) Hybrid Cloud
9 25 (1.60%) Life Science
10 22 (1.41%) Data Protection Act
11 19 (1.22%) CMDB
12 16 (1.03%) Social Media
12 16 (1.03%) Virtual Team
13 15 (0.96%) IoT
14 14 (0.90%) Enterprise Cloud
14 14 (0.90%) Legacy Systems
14 14 (0.90%) Public Cloud
15 13 (0.83%) Augmented Reality
15 13 (0.83%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 47 (3.02%) Linux
2 13 (0.83%) Unix
3 12 (0.77%) Windows
4 4 (0.26%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.26%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.19%) Android
6 2 (0.13%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.13%) VMS
7 1 (0.064%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.064%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,262 (81.00%) AI
2 574 (36.84%) Data Science
3 493 (31.64%) CI/CD
4 450 (28.88%) Analytics
5 420 (26.96%) LLM
6 370 (23.75%) Generative AI
7 346 (22.21%) Data Pipeline
8 335 (21.50%) Agile
9 326 (20.92%) DevOps
10 287 (18.42%) MLOps
11 268 (17.20%) Data Engineering
12 244 (15.66%) Software Engineering
13 233 (14.96%) Use Case
14 220 (14.12%) Decision-Making
15 217 (13.93%) Stakeholder Management
16 212 (13.61%) Roadmaps
17 208 (13.35%) Problem-Solving
18 202 (12.97%) Infrastructure as Code
19 183 (11.75%) Data Governance
20 178 (11.42%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 842 (54.04%) Python
2 385 (24.71%) SQL
3 111 (7.12%) Java
4 72 (4.62%) JavaScript
5 55 (3.53%) TypeScript
6 44 (2.82%) C#
7 43 (2.76%) R
8 42 (2.70%) Bash
9 26 (1.67%) PowerShell
10 21 (1.35%) C++
11 20 (1.28%) Bicep
12 17 (1.09%) Scala
13 15 (0.96%) Go
14 11 (0.71%) PL/SQL
15 8 (0.51%) Cypher
16 7 (0.45%) Kotlin
16 7 (0.45%) Shell Script
16 7 (0.45%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.39%) Gremlin
17 6 (0.39%) Perl
Qualifications
1 278 (17.84%) Security Cleared
2 202 (12.97%) SC Cleared
3 117 (7.51%) Degree
4 54 (3.47%) Computer Science Degree
5 53 (3.40%) DV Cleared
6 43 (2.76%) AWS Certification
7 42 (2.70%) Master's Degree
8 35 (2.25%) CISSP
9 31 (1.99%) BPSS Clearance
10 28 (1.80%) PhD
11 22 (1.41%) Azure Certification
12 18 (1.16%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 16 (1.03%) CISM
14 14 (0.90%) TOGAF Certification
15 11 (0.71%) Cisco Certification
16 10 (0.64%) ITIL Certification
17 9 (0.58%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
18 7 (0.45%) PMP
19 6 (0.39%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 6 (0.39%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 202 (12.97%) Data Quality
2 61 (3.92%) GDPR
3 55 (3.53%) QA
4 31 (1.99%) NIST
5 21 (1.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (1.03%) Accessibility
7 15 (0.96%) EU AI Act
8 9 (0.58%) GxP
8 9 (0.58%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 9 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 9 (0.58%) SLA
9 8 (0.51%) GRC
9 8 (0.51%) HIPAA
10 7 (0.45%) Actionable Recommendations
11 6 (0.39%) WCAG
12 5 (0.32%) NCSC
12 5 (0.32%) Solvency II
13 4 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 4 (0.26%) COBIT
13 4 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 212 (13.61%) Docker
2 11 (0.71%) Active Directory
3 10 (0.64%) IAG
4 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.32%) VMware Infrastructure
5 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
5 3 (0.19%) Hyper-V
5 3 (0.19%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
5 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 2 (0.13%) Firmware
6 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
6 2 (0.13%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
7 1 (0.064%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 273 (17.52%) Kubernetes
2 38 (2.44%) Ansible
3 28 (1.80%) Kubeflow
4 26 (1.67%) Grafana
5 18 (1.16%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.39%) Istio
7 5 (0.32%) Podman
8 4 (0.26%) systemd
9 3 (0.19%) Kibana
9 3 (0.19%) Nagios
9 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.19%) Puppet
9 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.19%) vMotion
10 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.13%) Argo
10 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.13%) Packer
10 2 (0.13%) SCCM
11 1 (0.064%) logstash
Vendors
1 204 (13.09%) Databricks
2 164 (10.53%) Microsoft
3 102 (6.55%) Google
4 73 (4.69%) OpenAI
5 45 (2.89%) SAP
6 36 (2.31%) ServiceNow
7 32 (2.05%) Foundry
8 29 (1.86%) Oracle
9 24 (1.54%) Informatica
10 18 (1.16%) Dynatrace
11 13 (0.83%) Splunk
12 12 (0.77%) UiPath
13 11 (0.71%) IBM
14 10 (0.64%) Nexthink
15 7 (0.45%) Cisco
15 7 (0.45%) Salesforce
15 7 (0.45%) Sybase
16 6 (0.39%) Pega
16 6 (0.39%) VMware
17 5 (0.32%) New Relic