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

6 months to
26 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 81 106 123
Rank change year-on-year +25 +17 +82
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,647 826 779
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.10% 2.51% 1.93%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.65% 2.77% 2.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,034 518 553
10th Percentile £413 £400 £413
25th Percentile £492 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £593
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -7.17% +0.85%
75th Percentile £695 £675 £750
90th Percentile £788 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £508
% change year-on-year - +8.37% -7.73%
Number of hourly rates quoted 49 23 18
10th Percentile £36.00 £33.80 £13.06
25th Percentile £50.00 £52.86 £31.13
Median hourly rate £72.50 £75.00 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% +50.00% +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 £77.50 £52.50
% change year-on-year -10.04% +47.62% +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 45,137 29,773 34,561
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.05% 90.43% 85.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,973 18,705 22,228
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £419 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.14%
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 2,675 1,607 2,050
10th Percentile £14.81 £14.20 £13.50
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.33 £17.50
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.80 £68.75 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.57 £40.00
% change year-on-year +86.55% -41.09% -

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 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 26 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 26 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 1,386 £575 +1.77% 1,702
London +33 922 £590 +2.61% 1,124
UK excluding London -5 529 £550 - 773
Work from Home +9 444 £600 +9.09% 613
North of England -5 148 £558 +14.36% 179
South East -25 133 £600 +6.67% 256
Scotland +41 101 £440 -12.00% 54
North West -15 79 £600 +22.45% 103
Midlands -16 65 £550 +10.00% 59
Yorkshire -6 56 £525 +7.09% 46
West Midlands -23 51 £550 -6.38% 36
South West -30 47 £534 -7.17% 103
East of England -28 35 £513 -19.61% 87
Wales -6 16 £540 -20.00% 28
North East -35 15 £463 +8.82% 32
East Midlands -9 12 £700 +64.71% 23
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 20

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 93 (5.65%) Apache Spark
2 77 (4.68%) Apache Airflow
3 50 (3.04%) Apache
4 33 (2.00%) Jupyter
5 22 (1.34%) Confluence
6 8 (0.49%) SAS
7 7 (0.43%) ArcGIS
8 5 (0.30%) Appian
8 5 (0.30%) CMS
8 5 (0.30%) Headless CMS
8 5 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.30%) 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 (1.76%) Chatbot
2 13 (0.79%) Microsoft Excel
3 6 (0.36%) Microsoft Office
3 6 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.36%) Microsoft Project
4 5 (0.30%) CPLEX
5 2 (0.12%) Notion
6 1 (0.061%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.061%) Simulink
6 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
1 579 (35.15%) Azure
2 577 (35.03%) AWS
3 305 (18.52%) GCP
4 142 (8.62%) Power Platform
5 122 (7.41%) Serverless
6 115 (6.98%) GitHub
7 105 (6.38%) Amazon S3
8 92 (5.59%) AWS Lambda
9 91 (5.53%) Amazon SageMaker
10 82 (4.98%) Azure Machine Learning
11 80 (4.86%) Azure AI
11 80 (4.86%) Snowflake
12 61 (3.70%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 59 (3.58%) Amazon Bedrock
14 55 (3.34%) Azure DevOps
15 54 (3.28%) Vertex AI
16 50 (3.04%) GitHub Actions
17 46 (2.79%) dbt
18 45 (2.73%) Azure Data Factory
19 43 (2.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 20 (1.21%) Firewall
2 16 (0.97%) Network Security
3 14 (0.85%) Internet
4 10 (0.61%) DNS
5 9 (0.55%) VPN
6 8 (0.49%) DHCP
7 6 (0.36%) Broadband
8 5 (0.30%) HTTP
9 4 (0.24%) NAS
9 4 (0.24%) 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%) 5G
11 2 (0.12%) CTI
11 2 (0.12%) PCoIP
11 2 (0.12%) Radio Access Network
11 2 (0.12%) Remote Desktop
Database & Business Intelligence
1 118 (7.16%) Power BI
2 97 (5.89%) Data Lake
3 78 (4.74%) Big Data
4 76 (4.61%) Data Warehouse
4 76 (4.61%) Metadata
5 75 (4.55%) BigQuery
6 52 (3.16%) NoSQL
7 46 (2.79%) Tableau
8 45 (2.73%) Amazon Redshift
9 41 (2.49%) PostgreSQL
10 40 (2.43%) Amazon Athena
11 38 (2.31%) Delta Lake
12 35 (2.13%) Relational Database
13 33 (2.00%) Hadoop
14 25 (1.52%) SQL Server
15 24 (1.46%) MongoDB
16 21 (1.28%) Looker
16 21 (1.28%) Neo4j
17 20 (1.21%) MySQL
18 19 (1.15%) Pinecone
Development Applications
1 103 (6.25%) Git
2 74 (4.49%) MLflow
3 51 (3.10%) GitLab
4 46 (2.79%) JIRA
5 27 (1.64%) Jenkins
6 10 (0.61%) Vite
7 9 (0.55%) Claude Code
8 8 (0.49%) Selenium
9 5 (0.30%) Cypress.io
10 4 (0.24%) ER Studio
10 4 (0.24%) ERwin
10 4 (0.24%) Maven
10 4 (0.24%) 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%) NUnit
12 2 (0.12%) Visual Studio
General
1 345 (20.95%) Social Skills
2 305 (18.52%) Finance
3 214 (12.99%) Analytical Skills
4 149 (9.05%) Public Sector
5 115 (6.98%) Banking
6 43 (2.61%) Marketing
7 35 (2.13%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 34 (2.06%) Retail
9 32 (1.94%) Pharmaceutical
10 30 (1.82%) Telecoms
11 25 (1.52%) Legal
12 24 (1.46%) Documentation Skills
13 22 (1.34%) Front Office
14 20 (1.21%) Aviation
15 19 (1.15%) Influencing Skills
16 18 (1.09%) Financial Institution
17 17 (1.03%) Presentation Skills
18 16 (0.97%) Law
18 16 (0.97%) Manufacturing
19 15 (0.91%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 247 (15.00%) Architect
2 246 (14.94%) Senior
3 233 (14.15%) Data Scientist
4 162 (9.84%) Lead
5 154 (9.35%) Data Engineer
6 153 (9.29%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 104 (6.31%) Developer
8 79 (4.80%) Solutions Architect
9 77 (4.68%) Python Engineer
10 75 (4.55%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 72 (4.37%) Data Architect
12 68 (4.13%) Software Engineer
13 63 (3.83%) Analyst
14 59 (3.58%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 54 (3.28%) Platform Engineer
16 48 (2.91%) Senior Data Scientist
17 46 (2.79%) DevOps Engineer
18 42 (2.55%) Security Architect
19 41 (2.49%) Full-Stack Engineer
20 40 (2.43%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 157 (9.53%) PyTorch
2 113 (6.86%) Kafka
3 109 (6.62%) TensorFlow
4 98 (5.95%) scikit-learn
5 84 (5.10%) Pandas
6 83 (5.04%) LangChain
7 77 (4.68%) PySpark
8 76 (4.61%) React
9 72 (4.37%) REST
10 64 (3.89%) NumPy
11 44 (2.67%) .NET
12 39 (2.37%) Hugging Face
13 37 (2.25%) LangGraph
14 33 (2.00%) FastAPI
15 31 (1.88%) Model Context Protocol
16 30 (1.82%) Node.js
17 29 (1.76%) AngularJS
18 26 (1.58%) RESTful
19 23 (1.40%) pytest
20 21 (1.28%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 196 (11.90%) Cloud Native
2 169 (10.26%) AI Agents
3 126 (7.65%) Algorithms
4 62 (3.76%) Product Ownership
5 60 (3.64%) Distributed Systems
5 60 (3.64%) Onboarding
6 29 (1.76%) Enterprise Software
7 28 (1.70%) Data Structures
8 26 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
9 25 (1.52%) Life Science
10 21 (1.28%) Hybrid Cloud
11 17 (1.03%) Legacy Systems
12 15 (0.91%) Fixed Income
12 15 (0.91%) Management Information System
12 15 (0.91%) Security Posture
13 14 (0.85%) Public Cloud
13 14 (0.85%) Taxonomies
14 13 (0.79%) Enterprise Cloud
14 13 (0.79%) Virtual Team
15 12 (0.73%) Augmented Reality
Operating Systems
1 53 (3.22%) Linux
2 16 (0.97%) Windows
3 12 (0.73%) Unix
4 6 (0.36%) Apple iOS
5 5 (0.30%) Android
5 5 (0.30%) VMS
6 4 (0.24%) 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 1,317 (79.96%) AI
2 618 (37.52%) Data Science
3 524 (31.82%) CI/CD
4 474 (28.78%) Analytics
5 450 (27.32%) LLM
6 379 (23.01%) Generative AI
7 369 (22.40%) Data Pipeline
8 342 (20.77%) DevOps
9 327 (19.85%) Agile
10 306 (18.58%) MLOps
11 296 (17.97%) Data Engineering
12 263 (15.97%) Use Case
13 252 (15.30%) Software Engineering
14 235 (14.27%) Decision-Making
15 216 (13.11%) Problem-Solving
16 206 (12.51%) Roadmaps
17 198 (12.02%) Data Governance
18 194 (11.78%) Infrastructure as Code
19 193 (11.72%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
20 183 (11.11%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 909 (55.19%) Python
2 407 (24.71%) SQL
3 123 (7.47%) Java
4 69 (4.19%) JavaScript
5 63 (3.83%) TypeScript
6 56 (3.40%) C#
7 55 (3.34%) R
8 39 (2.37%) Bash
9 20 (1.21%) PowerShell
10 18 (1.09%) C++
11 17 (1.03%) Bicep
11 17 (1.03%) Go
12 12 (0.73%) 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 (0.30%) Perl
Qualifications
1 297 (18.03%) Security Cleared
2 207 (12.57%) SC Cleared
3 140 (8.50%) Degree
4 57 (3.46%) Computer Science Degree
4 57 (3.46%) DV Cleared
4 57 (3.46%) Master's Degree
5 47 (2.85%) AWS Certification
6 42 (2.55%) BPSS Clearance
7 37 (2.25%) PhD
8 31 (1.88%) CISSP
9 24 (1.46%) Azure Certification
10 23 (1.40%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 14 (0.85%) CISM
12 13 (0.79%) 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 (0.36%) Cisco Certification
15 5 (0.30%) Microsoft Certification
15 5 (0.30%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 197 (11.96%) Data Quality
2 65 (3.95%) GDPR
3 54 (3.28%) QA
4 30 (1.82%) NIST
5 19 (1.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 18 (1.09%) Accessibility
7 14 (0.85%) EU AI Act
8 12 (0.73%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 9 (0.55%) Actionable Recommendations
9 9 (0.55%) GRC
9 9 (0.55%) GxP
10 8 (0.49%) HIPAA
11 6 (0.36%) SLA
11 6 (0.36%) WCAG
12 5 (0.30%) Disclosure Scotland
13 4 (0.24%) COBIT
13 4 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 4 (0.24%) NCSC
13 4 (0.24%) Solvency II
14 3 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 224 (13.60%) Docker
2 12 (0.73%) Active Directory
3 8 (0.49%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 6 (0.36%) IAG
5 5 (0.30%) Microsoft App-V
5 5 (0.30%) 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
1 282 (17.12%) Kubernetes
2 189 (11.48%) Terraform
3 29 (1.76%) Ansible
4 26 (1.58%) Grafana
4 26 (1.58%) Kubeflow
5 18 (1.09%) Prometheus
6 10 (0.61%) Podman
7 6 (0.36%) Istio
8 3 (0.18%) Kibana
8 3 (0.18%) Nagios
8 3 (0.18%) NetBackup
8 3 (0.18%) Puppet
8 3 (0.18%) Rancher
8 3 (0.18%) systemd
8 3 (0.18%) vCenter Server
8 3 (0.18%) vMotion
9 2 (0.12%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 2 (0.12%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.12%) Packer
9 2 (0.12%) SCCM
Vendors
1 210 (12.75%) Databricks
2 176 (10.69%) Microsoft
3 106 (6.44%) Google
4 96 (5.83%) OpenAI
5 50 (3.04%) SAP
6 49 (2.98%) Foundry
7 34 (2.06%) Oracle
8 33 (2.00%) ServiceNow
9 25 (1.52%) Informatica
10 16 (0.97%) Dynatrace
10 16 (0.97%) IBM
11 14 (0.85%) UiPath
12 10 (0.61%) Splunk
13 7 (0.43%) Amplitude
13 7 (0.43%) Sybase
13 7 (0.43%) Talend
14 6 (0.36%) Automation Anywhere
14 6 (0.36%) Nexthink
14 6 (0.36%) Pega
14 6 (0.36%) Salesforce