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 12 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 82 104 133
Rank change year-on-year +22 +29 +80
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,630 829 769
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.08% 2.54% 1.79%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.61% 2.81% 2.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,010 518 540
10th Percentile £413 £393 £413
25th Percentile £493 £459 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £588
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -6.38% +0.21%
75th Percentile £675 £676 £750
90th Percentile £775 £825 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £520
% change year-on-year - +5.77% -5.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 51 24 19
10th Percentile £36.00 £35.20 £20.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £49.29 £43.72
Median hourly rate £70.00 £70.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year - +33.33% +21.14%
75th Percentile £83.75 £81.01 £66.25
90th Percentile £88.75 £88.00 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.22 £77.50 £52.50
% change year-on-year -10.68% +47.62% +29.63%

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 45,103 29,546 36,633
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.18% 90.46% 85.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,058 18,631 23,390
10th Percentile £325 £300 £303
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.40% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £624 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,673 1,507 2,455
10th Percentile £14.85 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.50 £16.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -4.70%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.63 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% -2.91%

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 12 July 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 12 July 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 12 July 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 +20 1,365 £575 +3.60% 1,632
London +37 905 £585 +1.65% 1,049
UK excluding London -4 521 £550 - 774
Work from Home +14 454 £600 +9.09% 606
North of England 0 148 £565 +14.95% 177
South East -28 122 £600 +6.67% 223
Scotland +43 102 £463 -0.96% 54
North West -4 83 £599 +8.89% 104
Midlands -11 65 £550 +10.00% 81
Yorkshire -17 51 £550 +12.19% 46
West Midlands -32 49 £525 -10.64% 48
South West -31 47 £530 -7.83% 132
East of England -20 37 £525 -8.70% 80
Wales -13 18 £565 -1.83% 17
North East -26 17 £469 +17.19% 29
East Midlands -9 14 £575 +35.29% 33
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 26

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
1 105 (6.44%) Apache Spark
2 74 (4.54%) Apache Airflow
3 55 (3.37%) Apache
4 35 (2.15%) Jupyter
5 21 (1.29%) Confluence
6 9 (0.55%) SAS
7 6 (0.37%) Appian
7 6 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
7 6 (0.37%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.31%) CMS
8 5 (0.31%) Headless CMS
9 3 (0.18%) ArcGIS
9 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.12%) OpenStack
10 2 (0.12%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.061%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.061%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.061%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.061%) Luigi
11 1 (0.061%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 32 (1.96%) Chatbot
2 14 (0.86%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.55%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
5 6 (0.37%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.12%) Simulink
8 1 (0.061%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.061%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.67%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.12%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.061%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.061%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.061%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.061%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.061%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.061%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.061%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 585 (35.89%) Azure
2 581 (35.64%) AWS
3 293 (17.98%) GCP
4 147 (9.02%) Power Platform
5 119 (7.30%) Serverless
6 108 (6.63%) Amazon S3
7 103 (6.32%) GitHub
8 90 (5.52%) Amazon SageMaker
9 89 (5.46%) AWS Lambda
10 88 (5.40%) Azure Machine Learning
11 85 (5.21%) Azure AI
12 80 (4.91%) Snowflake
13 66 (4.05%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 63 (3.87%) Azure DevOps
15 58 (3.56%) Vertex AI
16 57 (3.50%) Amazon Bedrock
17 51 (3.13%) Azure Data Factory
18 50 (3.07%) GitHub Actions
19 43 (2.64%) dbt
20 40 (2.45%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 17 (1.04%) Firewall
2 12 (0.74%) Internet
3 11 (0.67%) Network Security
4 7 (0.43%) DNS
5 6 (0.37%) VPN
6 5 (0.31%) DHCP
7 4 (0.25%) HTTP
7 4 (0.25%) NAS
7 4 (0.25%) SAN
8 3 (0.18%) MQTT
8 3 (0.18%) SMTP
9 2 (0.12%) 4G
9 2 (0.12%) 5G
9 2 (0.12%) Broadband
9 2 (0.12%) CTI
9 2 (0.12%) Ethernet
9 2 (0.12%) Modbus
9 2 (0.12%) PCoIP
9 2 (0.12%) Radio Access Network
9 2 (0.12%) Remote Desktop
Database & Business Intelligence
1 120 (7.36%) Power BI
2 101 (6.20%) Data Lake
3 83 (5.09%) Big Data
4 73 (4.48%) Data Warehouse
4 73 (4.48%) Metadata
5 69 (4.23%) BigQuery
6 50 (3.07%) Tableau
7 49 (3.01%) NoSQL
8 44 (2.70%) Amazon Redshift
9 42 (2.58%) Amazon Athena
9 42 (2.58%) PostgreSQL
10 37 (2.27%) Hadoop
11 35 (2.15%) Delta Lake
12 34 (2.09%) Relational Database
13 28 (1.72%) SQL Server
14 25 (1.53%) MongoDB
15 24 (1.47%) Pinecone
16 20 (1.23%) MySQL
16 20 (1.23%) Neo4j
17 18 (1.10%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 101 (6.20%) Git
2 76 (4.66%) MLflow
3 49 (3.01%) GitLab
4 48 (2.94%) JIRA
5 27 (1.66%) Jenkins
6 9 (0.55%) Claude Code
6 9 (0.55%) Vite
7 8 (0.49%) Selenium
8 5 (0.31%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.25%) ERwin
9 4 (0.25%) Maven
9 4 (0.25%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.18%) Gradle
10 3 (0.18%) JUnit
10 3 (0.18%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.18%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.18%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.18%) Visual Studio
11 2 (0.12%) NUnit
General
1 339 (20.80%) Social Skills
2 307 (18.83%) Finance
3 208 (12.76%) Analytical Skills
4 155 (9.51%) Public Sector
5 111 (6.81%) Banking
6 46 (2.82%) Marketing
7 38 (2.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 33 (2.02%) Retail
9 32 (1.96%) Pharmaceutical
10 25 (1.53%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.53%) Legal
11 22 (1.35%) Front Office
12 20 (1.23%) Aviation
12 20 (1.23%) Influencing Skills
12 20 (1.23%) Telecoms
13 17 (1.04%) Financial Institution
13 17 (1.04%) Law
14 16 (0.98%) Investment Banking
15 15 (0.92%) Presentation Skills
16 12 (0.74%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 244 (14.97%) Architect
2 229 (14.05%) Data Scientist
3 227 (13.93%) Senior
4 152 (9.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
4 152 (9.33%) Lead
5 148 (9.08%) Data Engineer
6 110 (6.75%) Developer
7 75 (4.60%) Data Architect
7 75 (4.60%) Solutions Architect
8 73 (4.48%) Python Engineer
9 70 (4.29%) Software Engineer
10 68 (4.17%) Analyst
10 68 (4.17%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 58 (3.56%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
12 50 (3.07%) Platform Engineer
13 44 (2.70%) Consultant
14 43 (2.64%) Senior Data Scientist
15 39 (2.39%) Azure Engineer
15 39 (2.39%) Python Developer
16 38 (2.33%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 167 (10.25%) PyTorch
2 117 (7.18%) TensorFlow
3 107 (6.56%) Kafka
4 103 (6.32%) scikit-learn
5 89 (5.46%) Pandas
6 86 (5.28%) LangChain
7 72 (4.42%) React
8 71 (4.36%) PySpark
9 69 (4.23%) NumPy
10 66 (4.05%) REST
11 47 (2.88%) .NET
12 44 (2.70%) Hugging Face
13 32 (1.96%) LangGraph
14 31 (1.90%) FastAPI
15 30 (1.84%) Node.js
16 27 (1.66%) Model Context Protocol
17 26 (1.60%) AngularJS
17 26 (1.60%) RESTful
18 22 (1.35%) pytest
19 21 (1.29%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 197 (12.09%) Cloud Native
2 155 (9.51%) AI Agents
3 118 (7.24%) Algorithms
4 62 (3.80%) Onboarding
5 60 (3.68%) Product Ownership
6 54 (3.31%) Distributed Systems
7 28 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
8 27 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
9 23 (1.41%) Data Structures
9 23 (1.41%) Life Science
10 18 (1.10%) Fixed Income
10 18 (1.10%) Legacy Systems
11 17 (1.04%) Management Information System
12 16 (0.98%) Hybrid Cloud
13 15 (0.92%) Security Posture
14 14 (0.86%) Taxonomies
14 14 (0.86%) Virtual Team
15 13 (0.80%) Distributed Computing
16 12 (0.74%) Enterprise Cloud
16 12 (0.74%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 51 (3.13%) Linux
2 17 (1.04%) Windows
3 11 (0.67%) Unix
4 6 (0.37%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.37%) VMS
5 5 (0.31%) Android
6 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.061%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,307 (80.18%) AI
2 601 (36.87%) Data Science
3 517 (31.72%) CI/CD
4 479 (29.39%) Analytics
5 456 (27.98%) LLM
6 376 (23.07%) Data Pipeline
6 376 (23.07%) Generative AI
7 338 (20.74%) DevOps
8 317 (19.45%) MLOps
9 314 (19.26%) Agile
10 298 (18.28%) Data Engineering
11 271 (16.63%) Use Case
12 233 (14.29%) Software Engineering
13 225 (13.80%) Decision-Making
14 217 (13.31%) Problem-Solving
15 200 (12.27%) Roadmaps
16 196 (12.02%) Data Governance
17 193 (11.84%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 181 (11.10%) Data Modelling
18 181 (11.10%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 906 (55.58%) Python
2 408 (25.03%) SQL
3 118 (7.24%) Java
4 64 (3.93%) R
4 64 (3.93%) TypeScript
5 61 (3.74%) C#
6 60 (3.68%) JavaScript
7 35 (2.15%) Bash
8 19 (1.17%) C++
9 18 (1.10%) PowerShell
10 16 (0.98%) Bicep
10 16 (0.98%) Go
10 16 (0.98%) Scala
11 11 (0.67%) Kotlin
12 9 (0.55%) PL/SQL
12 9 (0.55%) SPARQL
13 8 (0.49%) Cypher
13 8 (0.49%) Rust
14 7 (0.43%) Gremlin
15 5 (0.31%) MATLAB
Qualifications
1 297 (18.22%) Security Cleared
2 202 (12.39%) SC Cleared
3 140 (8.59%) Degree
4 58 (3.56%) Master's Degree
5 56 (3.44%) DV Cleared
6 54 (3.31%) Computer Science Degree
7 48 (2.94%) AWS Certification
7 48 (2.94%) BPSS Clearance
8 34 (2.09%) PhD
9 30 (1.84%) CISSP
10 24 (1.47%) Azure Certification
11 23 (1.41%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 15 (0.92%) CISM
13 11 (0.67%) TOGAF Certification
14 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 5 (0.31%) AWS Certified Developer
15 5 (0.31%) CompTIA Security+
15 5 (0.31%) DBS Check
15 5 (0.31%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 190 (11.66%) Data Quality
2 68 (4.17%) GDPR
3 54 (3.31%) QA
4 29 (1.78%) NIST
5 18 (1.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 17 (1.04%) Accessibility
7 14 (0.86%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.67%) HIPAA
8 11 (0.67%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 9 (0.55%) Actionable Recommendations
9 9 (0.55%) GRC
9 9 (0.55%) GxP
10 7 (0.43%) NCSC
11 5 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
11 5 (0.31%) SLA
11 5 (0.31%) WCAG
12 4 (0.25%) COBIT
12 4 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 42001
12 4 (0.25%) Solvency II
13 3 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 219 (13.44%) Docker
2 12 (0.74%) Active Directory
3 10 (0.61%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 5 (0.31%) IAG
4 5 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.31%) VMware Infrastructure
5 4 (0.25%) Virtual Machines
6 3 (0.18%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.18%) Firmware
6 3 (0.18%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.18%) Terminal Services
6 3 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 2 (0.12%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.12%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.061%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 277 (16.99%) Kubernetes
2 180 (11.04%) Terraform
3 25 (1.53%) Kubeflow
4 24 (1.47%) Grafana
5 23 (1.41%) Ansible
6 15 (0.92%) Prometheus
7 12 (0.74%) Podman
8 6 (0.37%) Istio
9 3 (0.18%) Kibana
9 3 (0.18%) Nagios
9 3 (0.18%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.18%) Puppet
9 3 (0.18%) Rancher
9 3 (0.18%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.18%) vMotion
10 2 (0.12%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.12%) Argo
10 2 (0.12%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.12%) Packer
10 2 (0.12%) SCCM
Vendors
1 208 (12.76%) Databricks
2 171 (10.49%) Microsoft
3 101 (6.20%) Google
4 98 (6.01%) OpenAI
5 55 (3.37%) Foundry
6 46 (2.82%) SAP
7 36 (2.21%) Oracle
8 31 (1.90%) ServiceNow
9 25 (1.53%) Informatica
10 17 (1.04%) IBM
11 15 (0.92%) UiPath
12 14 (0.86%) Dynatrace
13 8 (0.49%) Salesforce
14 7 (0.43%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.43%) Automation Anywhere
14 7 (0.43%) Sybase
14 7 (0.43%) Talend
15 6 (0.37%) Pega
15 6 (0.37%) Splunk
15 6 (0.37%) Workday