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

6 months to
24 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 83 107 130
Rank change year-on-year +24 +23 +76
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,632 822 771
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.09% 2.51% 1.89%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.64% 2.78% 2.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,022 514 543
10th Percentile £413 £400 £411
25th Percentile £492 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £553 £588
Median % change year-on-year +4.07% -5.96% -
75th Percentile £688 £675 £750
90th Percentile £780 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £514
% change year-on-year - +7.06% -6.59%
Number of hourly rates quoted 49 24 18
10th Percentile £36.00 £35.20 £13.06
25th Percentile £50.00 £49.29 £31.13
Median hourly rate £72.50 £70.00 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.57% +40.00% +8.27%
75th Percentile £83.75 £81.01 £53.75
90th Percentile £89.00 £88.00 £76.13
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.72 £76.25 £52.50
% change year-on-year -8.56% +45.24% +13.69%

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 44,871 29,543 34,928
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.02% 90.39% 85.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,803 18,563 22,435
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.46%
75th Percentile £625 £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 2,660 1,589 2,131
10th Percentile £14.85 £14.20 £13.46
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.44 £17.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -6.98%
75th Percentile £68.13 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £83.00 £69.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.34 £40.00
% change year-on-year +82.83% -39.15% -1.95%

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 24 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 24 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 24 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 1,371 £575 +1.41% 1,842
London +33 911 £589 +2.35% 1,233
UK excluding London -2 525 £550 - 810
Work from Home +7 438 £600 +9.09% 660
North of England +9 147 £561 +14.54% 195
South East -16 132 £600 +6.67% 253
Scotland +42 101 £440 -12.00% 69
North West -9 79 £600 +14.29% 122
Midlands -18 64 £550 +10.00% 63
Yorkshire -3 56 £525 +7.09% 48
West Midlands -31 50 £538 -8.51% 39
South West -36 46 £538 -6.52% 108
East of England -21 35 £513 -19.61% 88
Wales -8 16 £540 -20.00% 29
North East -28 14 £463 +8.82% 27
East Midlands -7 12 £700 +64.71% 24
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 18

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 92 (5.64%) Apache Spark
2 76 (4.66%) Apache Airflow
3 49 (3.00%) Apache
4 33 (2.02%) Jupyter
5 22 (1.35%) Confluence
6 8 (0.49%) SAS
7 6 (0.37%) ArcGIS
8 5 (0.31%) Appian
8 5 (0.31%) CMS
8 5 (0.31%) Headless CMS
8 5 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.31%) SharePoint
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 29 (1.78%) Chatbot
2 13 (0.80%) Microsoft Excel
3 6 (0.37%) Microsoft Office
3 6 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.37%) Microsoft Project
4 5 (0.31%) CPLEX
5 1 (0.061%) Adobe XD
5 1 (0.061%) Notion
5 1 (0.061%) Simulink
5 1 (0.061%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 11 (0.67%) SAP IBP
2 8 (0.49%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.18%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 1 (0.061%) Dynamics CRM
5 1 (0.061%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.061%) OpenText VIM for SAP
5 1 (0.061%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.061%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.061%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.061%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.061%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.061%) SAP APO
5 1 (0.061%) SAP ERP
5 1 (0.061%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 575 (35.23%) Azure
2 572 (35.05%) AWS
3 302 (18.50%) GCP
4 140 (8.58%) Power Platform
5 122 (7.48%) Serverless
6 114 (6.99%) GitHub
7 105 (6.43%) Amazon S3
8 92 (5.64%) AWS Lambda
9 91 (5.58%) Amazon SageMaker
10 82 (5.02%) Azure Machine Learning
11 80 (4.90%) Azure AI
11 80 (4.90%) Snowflake
12 61 (3.74%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 59 (3.62%) Amazon Bedrock
14 54 (3.31%) Azure DevOps
14 54 (3.31%) Vertex AI
15 50 (3.06%) GitHub Actions
16 47 (2.88%) dbt
17 45 (2.76%) Azure Data Factory
18 43 (2.63%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 20 (1.23%) Firewall
2 16 (0.98%) Network Security
3 14 (0.86%) Internet
4 10 (0.61%) DNS
5 9 (0.55%) VPN
6 8 (0.49%) DHCP
7 6 (0.37%) Broadband
8 5 (0.31%) HTTP
9 4 (0.25%) NAS
9 4 (0.25%) SAN
10 3 (0.18%) MQTT
10 3 (0.18%) SMTP
10 3 (0.18%) TCP/IP
10 3 (0.18%) VLAN
11 2 (0.12%) 4G
11 2 (0.12%) CTI
11 2 (0.12%) Modbus
11 2 (0.12%) PCoIP
11 2 (0.12%) Radio Access Network
11 2 (0.12%) Remote Desktop
Database & Business Intelligence
1 116 (7.11%) Power BI
2 96 (5.88%) Data Lake
3 79 (4.84%) Big Data
4 76 (4.66%) Metadata
5 75 (4.60%) Data Warehouse
6 73 (4.47%) BigQuery
7 53 (3.25%) NoSQL
8 46 (2.82%) Tableau
9 44 (2.70%) Amazon Redshift
10 41 (2.51%) PostgreSQL
11 40 (2.45%) Amazon Athena
12 36 (2.21%) Delta Lake
13 34 (2.08%) Relational Database
14 33 (2.02%) Hadoop
15 25 (1.53%) SQL Server
16 24 (1.47%) MongoDB
17 21 (1.29%) Looker
17 21 (1.29%) Neo4j
18 20 (1.23%) MySQL
19 19 (1.16%) Pinecone
Development Applications
1 103 (6.31%) Git
2 74 (4.53%) MLflow
3 51 (3.13%) GitLab
4 45 (2.76%) JIRA
5 27 (1.65%) Jenkins
6 10 (0.61%) Vite
7 9 (0.55%) Claude Code
8 8 (0.49%) Selenium
9 5 (0.31%) Cypress.io
10 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
10 4 (0.25%) ERwin
10 4 (0.25%) Maven
10 4 (0.25%) PyCharm
11 3 (0.18%) Gradle
11 3 (0.18%) JUnit
11 3 (0.18%) REST Assured
11 3 (0.18%) SonarQube
11 3 (0.18%) Spinnaker
12 2 (0.12%) Oracle APEX
12 2 (0.12%) Visual Studio
General
1 340 (20.83%) Social Skills
2 299 (18.32%) Finance
3 212 (12.99%) Analytical Skills
4 149 (9.13%) Public Sector
5 113 (6.92%) Banking
6 43 (2.63%) Marketing
7 34 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 34 (2.08%) Retail
8 31 (1.90%) Pharmaceutical
9 29 (1.78%) Telecoms
10 25 (1.53%) Legal
11 24 (1.47%) Documentation Skills
12 22 (1.35%) Front Office
13 20 (1.23%) Aviation
14 18 (1.10%) Influencing Skills
15 17 (1.04%) Presentation Skills
16 16 (0.98%) Financial Institution
16 16 (0.98%) Law
16 16 (0.98%) Manufacturing
17 15 (0.92%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 245 (15.01%) Architect
1 245 (15.01%) Senior
2 231 (14.15%) Data Scientist
3 160 (9.80%) Lead
4 152 (9.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 150 (9.19%) Data Engineer
6 104 (6.37%) Developer
7 78 (4.78%) Solutions Architect
8 77 (4.72%) Python Engineer
9 75 (4.60%) Machine Learning Engineer
10 72 (4.41%) Data Architect
11 68 (4.17%) Software Engineer
12 63 (3.86%) Analyst
13 58 (3.55%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
14 54 (3.31%) Platform Engineer
15 48 (2.94%) Senior Data Scientist
16 45 (2.76%) DevOps Engineer
17 42 (2.57%) Security Architect
18 41 (2.51%) Full-Stack Engineer
19 40 (2.45%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 155 (9.50%) PyTorch
2 111 (6.80%) Kafka
3 108 (6.62%) TensorFlow
4 97 (5.94%) scikit-learn
5 84 (5.15%) Pandas
6 82 (5.02%) LangChain
7 76 (4.66%) React
8 75 (4.60%) PySpark
9 70 (4.29%) REST
10 64 (3.92%) NumPy
11 43 (2.63%) .NET
12 39 (2.39%) Hugging Face
13 37 (2.27%) LangGraph
14 32 (1.96%) FastAPI
15 30 (1.84%) Model Context Protocol
16 29 (1.78%) AngularJS
16 29 (1.78%) Node.js
17 26 (1.59%) RESTful
18 23 (1.41%) pytest
19 21 (1.29%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 194 (11.89%) Cloud Native
2 166 (10.17%) AI Agents
3 125 (7.66%) Algorithms
4 60 (3.68%) Onboarding
4 60 (3.68%) Product Ownership
5 59 (3.62%) Distributed Systems
6 29 (1.78%) Enterprise Software
7 28 (1.72%) Data Structures
8 26 (1.59%) Data Protection Act
9 24 (1.47%) Life Science
10 21 (1.29%) Hybrid Cloud
11 17 (1.04%) Legacy Systems
12 15 (0.92%) Fixed Income
12 15 (0.92%) Management Information System
12 15 (0.92%) Security Posture
13 14 (0.86%) Public Cloud
13 14 (0.86%) Taxonomies
14 13 (0.80%) Virtual Team
15 12 (0.74%) Distributed Computing
15 12 (0.74%) Enterprise Cloud
Operating Systems
1 52 (3.19%) Linux
2 16 (0.98%) Windows
3 12 (0.74%) Unix
4 6 (0.37%) Apple iOS
5 5 (0.31%) Android
5 5 (0.31%) VMS
6 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
7 3 (0.18%) Ubuntu
8 2 (0.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 1 (0.061%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,304 (79.90%) AI
2 613 (37.56%) Data Science
3 519 (31.80%) CI/CD
4 469 (28.74%) Analytics
5 448 (27.45%) LLM
6 376 (23.04%) Generative AI
7 364 (22.30%) Data Pipeline
8 339 (20.77%) DevOps
9 323 (19.79%) Agile
10 305 (18.69%) MLOps
11 291 (17.83%) Data Engineering
12 262 (16.05%) Use Case
13 246 (15.07%) Software Engineering
14 233 (14.28%) Decision-Making
15 213 (13.05%) Problem-Solving
16 202 (12.38%) Roadmaps
17 197 (12.07%) Data Governance
18 192 (11.76%) Infrastructure as Code
18 192 (11.76%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
19 181 (11.09%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 900 (55.15%) Python
2 401 (24.57%) SQL
3 124 (7.60%) Java
4 69 (4.23%) JavaScript
5 62 (3.80%) TypeScript
6 56 (3.43%) C#
6 56 (3.43%) R
7 38 (2.33%) Bash
8 19 (1.16%) PowerShell
9 18 (1.10%) C++
10 17 (1.04%) Go
11 16 (0.98%) Bicep
12 12 (0.74%) Kotlin
13 11 (0.67%) Scala
14 9 (0.55%) PL/SQL
14 9 (0.55%) SPARQL
15 8 (0.49%) Cypher
15 8 (0.49%) Rust
16 7 (0.43%) Gremlin
17 5 (0.31%) Perl
Qualifications
1 296 (18.14%) Security Cleared
2 206 (12.62%) SC Cleared
3 139 (8.52%) Degree
4 57 (3.49%) DV Cleared
4 57 (3.49%) Master's Degree
5 56 (3.43%) Computer Science Degree
6 47 (2.88%) AWS Certification
7 42 (2.57%) BPSS Clearance
8 37 (2.27%) PhD
9 31 (1.90%) CISSP
10 23 (1.41%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 23 (1.41%) Azure Certification
11 14 (0.86%) CISM
12 13 (0.80%) TOGAF Certification
13 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 7 (0.43%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 6 (0.37%) Cisco Certification
15 5 (0.31%) AWS Certified Developer
15 5 (0.31%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 193 (11.83%) Data Quality
2 66 (4.04%) GDPR
3 55 (3.37%) QA
4 30 (1.84%) NIST
5 18 (1.10%) Accessibility
5 18 (1.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 14 (0.86%) EU AI Act
7 12 (0.74%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 9 (0.55%) Actionable Recommendations
8 9 (0.55%) GRC
8 9 (0.55%) GxP
9 8 (0.49%) HIPAA
10 6 (0.37%) SLA
10 6 (0.37%) WCAG
11 5 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
12 4 (0.25%) COBIT
12 4 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 42001
12 4 (0.25%) NCSC
12 4 (0.25%) Solvency II
13 3 (0.18%) IFRS
System Software
1 221 (13.54%) Docker
2 12 (0.74%) Active Directory
3 8 (0.49%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 6 (0.37%) IAG
5 5 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
5 5 (0.31%) VMware Infrastructure
6 3 (0.18%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.18%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.18%) Terminal Services
6 3 (0.18%) Virtual Machines
6 3 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 2 (0.12%) Firmware
7 2 (0.12%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.12%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.061%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 278 (17.03%) Kubernetes
2 187 (11.46%) Terraform
3 29 (1.78%) Ansible
4 26 (1.59%) Kubeflow
5 25 (1.53%) Grafana
6 17 (1.04%) Prometheus
7 10 (0.61%) 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%) systemd
9 3 (0.18%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.18%) vMotion
10 2 (0.12%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.12%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.12%) Packer
10 2 (0.12%) SCCM
Vendors
1 207 (12.68%) Databricks
2 175 (10.72%) Microsoft
3 106 (6.50%) Google
4 96 (5.88%) OpenAI
5 50 (3.06%) SAP
6 49 (3.00%) Foundry
7 34 (2.08%) Oracle
8 32 (1.96%) ServiceNow
9 25 (1.53%) Informatica
10 16 (0.98%) Dynatrace
10 16 (0.98%) IBM
11 14 (0.86%) UiPath
12 10 (0.61%) Splunk
13 7 (0.43%) Amplitude
13 7 (0.43%) Sybase
13 7 (0.43%) Talend
14 6 (0.37%) Automation Anywhere
14 6 (0.37%) Nexthink
14 6 (0.37%) Pega
14 6 (0.37%) Salesforce