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

6 months to
19 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 77 109 134
Rank change year-on-year +32 +25 +82
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,523 732 744
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.01% 2.45% 1.70%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.55% 2.70% 1.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 926 445 526
10th Percentile £413 £396 £408
25th Percentile £488 £461 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £578
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -4.76% -1.70%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £738
90th Percentile £763 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £523
% change year-on-year - +5.26% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 45 21 20
10th Percentile £40.54 £31.00 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.00 £45.00 £46.18
Median hourly rate £69.44 £75.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.41% +42.86% +50.00%
75th Percentile £85.00 £81.01 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.50 £88.00 £75.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.50 £78.10 £52.50
% change year-on-year -17.41% +48.76% +50.00%

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 42,883 27,154 37,300
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.85% 91.05% 85.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,719 17,238 23,736
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £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 2,572 1,254 2,607
10th Percentile £14.70 £14.20 £12.70
25th Percentile £20.07 £17.79 £16.04
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.40 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +73.07% -32.27% +7.05%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.19 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.08 £38.12
% change year-on-year +79.46% -34.22% +17.29%

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 June 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 June 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 June 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 +26 1,263 £575 - 1,051
London +36 848 £575 - 554
UK excluding London +8 474 £550 - 702
Work from Home +27 442 £588 +6.82% 424
North of England +4 133 £575 +9.52% 165
Scotland +45 106 £515 +10.28% 32
South East -35 93 £630 +9.57% 237
North West +3 72 £591 +7.45% 108
Midlands -21 62 £550 +10.00% 77
Yorkshire -22 46 £550 -18.52% 44
West Midlands -30 46 £550 +10.00% 45
South West -17 45 £500 -19.35% 87
East of England -25 36 £550 -10.20% 88
North East -25 18 £550 +37.50% 14
Wales -13 17 £550 -4.35% 20
East Midlands -11 14 £675 +58.82% 32
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 15

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
1 108 (7.09%) Apache Spark
2 67 (4.40%) Apache Airflow
3 50 (3.28%) Apache
4 36 (2.36%) Jupyter
5 23 (1.51%) Confluence
6 9 (0.59%) Appian
7 7 (0.46%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.33%) CMS
8 5 (0.33%) Headless CMS
8 5 (0.33%) SAS
9 4 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.20%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.13%) Luigi
12 1 (0.066%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.066%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.066%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.066%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.066%) NetWeaver
12 1 (0.066%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 30 (1.97%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.79%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.53%) Microsoft Project
5 7 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
6 3 (0.20%) CPLEX
6 3 (0.20%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.13%) Simulink
8 1 (0.066%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.72%) SAP IBP
2 6 (0.39%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.066%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.066%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.066%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.066%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.066%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.066%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.066%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 562 (36.90%) Azure
2 539 (35.39%) AWS
3 271 (17.79%) GCP
4 140 (9.19%) Power Platform
5 113 (7.42%) Serverless
6 100 (6.57%) Amazon S3
7 96 (6.30%) GitHub
8 91 (5.98%) Azure AI
9 85 (5.58%) AWS Lambda
10 81 (5.32%) Amazon SageMaker
11 74 (4.86%) Azure Machine Learning
11 74 (4.86%) Snowflake
12 70 (4.60%) Azure DevOps
13 55 (3.61%) Vertex AI
14 54 (3.55%) Amazon Bedrock
14 54 (3.55%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 52 (3.41%) GitHub Actions
16 46 (3.02%) Azure Data Factory
17 38 (2.50%) AWS CloudFormation
17 38 (2.50%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 14 (0.92%) Firewall
2 9 (0.59%) Internet
3 7 (0.46%) Network Security
4 6 (0.39%) DNS
5 5 (0.33%) DHCP
6 4 (0.26%) HTTP
6 4 (0.26%) NAS
6 4 (0.26%) SAN
6 4 (0.26%) VPN
7 3 (0.20%) SMTP
8 2 (0.13%) 4G
8 2 (0.13%) 5G
8 2 (0.13%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.13%) MQTT
8 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.066%) 3G
9 1 (0.066%) 3GPP
9 1 (0.066%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 113 (7.42%) Power BI
2 105 (6.89%) Data Lake
3 79 (5.19%) Big Data
4 74 (4.86%) Metadata
5 65 (4.27%) Data Warehouse
6 64 (4.20%) BigQuery
7 49 (3.22%) NoSQL
8 47 (3.09%) Tableau
9 42 (2.76%) Amazon Athena
10 39 (2.56%) PostgreSQL
11 37 (2.43%) Amazon Redshift
12 36 (2.36%) Hadoop
13 32 (2.10%) Relational Database
13 32 (2.10%) SQL Server
14 30 (1.97%) Delta Lake
15 27 (1.77%) Pinecone
16 23 (1.51%) MongoDB
17 19 (1.25%) Weaviate
18 18 (1.18%) Mixpanel
18 18 (1.18%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 93 (6.11%) Git
2 76 (4.99%) MLflow
3 49 (3.22%) JIRA
4 44 (2.89%) GitLab
5 27 (1.77%) Jenkins
6 9 (0.59%) Visual Studio
7 7 (0.46%) Claude Code
7 7 (0.46%) Selenium
8 6 (0.39%) Vite
9 4 (0.26%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.26%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.26%) ERwin
9 4 (0.26%) JMeter
9 4 (0.26%) Maven
9 4 (0.26%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.20%) Gradle
10 3 (0.20%) JUnit
10 3 (0.20%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.20%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.20%) Spinnaker
General
1 314 (20.62%) Social Skills
2 299 (19.63%) Finance
3 193 (12.67%) Analytical Skills
4 154 (10.11%) Public Sector
5 99 (6.50%) Banking
6 37 (2.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 37 (2.43%) Marketing
7 30 (1.97%) Pharmaceutical
8 27 (1.77%) Legal
8 27 (1.77%) Retail
9 25 (1.64%) Documentation Skills
10 22 (1.44%) Front Office
11 21 (1.38%) Influencing Skills
12 20 (1.31%) Aviation
13 19 (1.25%) Telecoms
14 17 (1.12%) Law
15 15 (0.98%) Investment Banking
16 14 (0.92%) Financial Institution
17 12 (0.79%) Manufacturing
17 12 (0.79%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 217 (14.25%) Data Scientist
2 216 (14.18%) Senior
3 207 (13.59%) Architect
4 151 (9.91%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 140 (9.19%) Data Engineer
6 134 (8.80%) Lead
7 101 (6.63%) Developer
8 76 (4.99%) Analyst
9 73 (4.79%) Python Engineer
10 68 (4.46%) Software Engineer
11 65 (4.27%) Machine Learning Engineer
12 64 (4.20%) Data Architect
13 62 (4.07%) Solutions Architect
14 59 (3.87%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 45 (2.95%) Consultant
16 40 (2.63%) Senior Data Scientist
17 35 (2.30%) Platform Engineer
17 35 (2.30%) Python Developer
18 33 (2.17%) Full-Stack Engineer
19 32 (2.10%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 177 (11.62%) PyTorch
2 124 (8.14%) TensorFlow
3 108 (7.09%) scikit-learn
4 90 (5.91%) Pandas
5 84 (5.52%) Kafka
6 75 (4.92%) LangChain
7 73 (4.79%) React
8 68 (4.46%) NumPy
8 68 (4.46%) PySpark
9 58 (3.81%) REST
10 53 (3.48%) .NET
11 44 (2.89%) Hugging Face
12 34 (2.23%) AngularJS
12 34 (2.23%) LangGraph
13 33 (2.17%) FastAPI
14 32 (2.10%) Model Context Protocol
15 30 (1.97%) RESTful
16 28 (1.84%) Node.js
17 22 (1.44%) pytest
18 20 (1.31%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 181 (11.88%) Cloud Native
2 149 (9.78%) AI Agents
3 114 (7.49%) Algorithms
4 55 (3.61%) Product Ownership
5 47 (3.09%) Distributed Systems
6 45 (2.95%) Onboarding
7 27 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
8 23 (1.51%) Enterprise Software
9 22 (1.44%) Data Structures
10 20 (1.31%) Life Science
11 19 (1.25%) Fixed Income
12 17 (1.12%) Legacy Systems
13 15 (0.98%) Management Information System
14 14 (0.92%) Hybrid Cloud
15 13 (0.85%) Low-Code
16 12 (0.79%) Autonomous Agent
16 12 (0.79%) Distributed Computing
16 12 (0.79%) Public Cloud
16 12 (0.79%) Security Posture
16 12 (0.79%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 33 (2.17%) Linux
2 17 (1.12%) Windows
3 11 (0.72%) Unix
4 6 (0.39%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.39%) VMS
5 5 (0.33%) Android
6 4 (0.26%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.066%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,227 (80.56%) AI
2 574 (37.69%) Data Science
3 482 (31.65%) CI/CD
4 446 (29.28%) LLM
5 428 (28.10%) Analytics
6 354 (23.24%) Data Pipeline
7 348 (22.85%) Generative AI
8 319 (20.95%) DevOps
9 304 (19.96%) MLOps
10 293 (19.24%) Agile
11 283 (18.58%) Data Engineering
12 246 (16.15%) Use Case
13 208 (13.66%) Problem-Solving
14 207 (13.59%) Software Engineering
15 203 (13.33%) Decision-Making
16 189 (12.41%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
17 182 (11.95%) Data Governance
18 180 (11.82%) ETL
19 168 (11.03%) Infrastructure as Code
20 164 (10.77%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 862 (56.60%) Python
2 388 (25.48%) SQL
3 108 (7.09%) Java
4 68 (4.46%) C#
5 65 (4.27%) R
6 55 (3.61%) TypeScript
7 53 (3.48%) JavaScript
8 25 (1.64%) C++
9 22 (1.44%) Bash
10 14 (0.92%) Bicep
10 14 (0.92%) PowerShell
11 13 (0.85%) Scala
12 10 (0.66%) Go
12 10 (0.66%) Kotlin
13 8 (0.53%) SPARQL
14 7 (0.46%) MATLAB
14 7 (0.46%) PL/SQL
14 7 (0.46%) Rust
15 5 (0.33%) Perl
16 3 (0.20%) Korn
Qualifications
1 264 (17.33%) Security Cleared
2 183 (12.02%) SC Cleared
3 117 (7.68%) Degree
4 47 (3.09%) BPSS Clearance
5 46 (3.02%) Master's Degree
6 42 (2.76%) DV Cleared
7 40 (2.63%) AWS Certification
8 38 (2.50%) Computer Science Degree
9 30 (1.97%) PhD
10 21 (1.38%) Azure Certification
11 20 (1.31%) CISSP
12 19 (1.25%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 15 (0.98%) CISM
14 7 (0.46%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 7 (0.46%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 7 (0.46%) ISTQB
15 5 (0.33%) CEH
15 5 (0.33%) DBS Check
15 5 (0.33%) GIAC
15 5 (0.33%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 183 (12.02%) Data Quality
2 62 (4.07%) GDPR
3 50 (3.28%) QA
4 31 (2.04%) NIST
5 17 (1.12%) Accessibility
5 17 (1.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 14 (0.92%) EU AI Act
7 11 (0.72%) Actionable Recommendations
7 11 (0.72%) HIPAA
7 11 (0.72%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 8 (0.53%) GRC
9 7 (0.46%) GxP
9 7 (0.46%) NCSC
10 5 (0.33%) WCAG
11 4 (0.26%) COBIT
11 4 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
12 3 (0.20%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 3 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 42001
12 3 (0.20%) SLA
12 3 (0.20%) Solvency II
System Software
1 204 (13.39%) Docker
2 12 (0.79%) Active Directory
3 11 (0.72%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 5 (0.33%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.33%) VMware Infrastructure
5 3 (0.20%) BitLocker
5 3 (0.20%) Firmware
5 3 (0.20%) Hyper-V
5 3 (0.20%) Terminal Services
5 3 (0.20%) Virtual Machines
5 3 (0.20%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
6 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
7 1 (0.066%) Embedded Firmware
7 1 (0.066%) HDFS
7 1 (0.066%) IAG
Systems Management
1 247 (16.22%) Kubernetes
2 165 (10.83%) Terraform
3 23 (1.51%) Kubeflow
4 20 (1.31%) Grafana
5 15 (0.98%) Ansible
6 14 (0.92%) Prometheus
7 9 (0.59%) Podman
8 6 (0.39%) Istio
9 3 (0.20%) Nagios
9 3 (0.20%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.20%) Puppet
9 3 (0.20%) Rancher
9 3 (0.20%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.20%) vMotion
10 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.13%) Argo
10 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.13%) Kibana
10 2 (0.13%) Packer
10 2 (0.13%) SCCM
Vendors
1 187 (12.28%) Databricks
2 170 (11.16%) Microsoft
3 106 (6.96%) OpenAI
4 92 (6.04%) Google
5 56 (3.68%) Foundry
6 40 (2.63%) SAP
7 33 (2.17%) Oracle
8 24 (1.58%) ServiceNow
9 20 (1.31%) Informatica
10 16 (1.05%) IBM
11 14 (0.92%) UiPath
12 12 (0.79%) Dynatrace
13 10 (0.66%) Automation Anywhere
14 8 (0.53%) Salesforce
15 7 (0.46%) Amplitude
15 7 (0.46%) Sybase
16 6 (0.39%) Ariba
16 6 (0.39%) Pega
16 6 (0.39%) Talend
16 6 (0.39%) Workday