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

6 months to
3 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 87 109 141
Rank change year-on-year +22 +32 +78
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,432 696 715
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.93% 2.42% 1.66%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.46% 2.66% 1.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 873 425 516
10th Percentile £413 £390 £413
25th Percentile £492 £456 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £557 £580
Median % change year-on-year +3.23% -3.97% -1.28%
75th Percentile £675 £690 £738
90th Percentile £775 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £575 £525
% change year-on-year -4.35% +9.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 48 19 19
10th Percentile £40.54 £29.85 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.97 £45.00 £46.22
Median hourly rate £65.50 £75.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -12.67% +42.86% +50.00%
75th Percentile £84.06 £81.01 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.13 £88.00 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £78.10 £56.25
% change year-on-year -16.77% +38.84% +60.71%

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 41,363 26,184 36,825
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.68% 91.01% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,810 16,717 23,641
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £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 2,496 1,118 2,535
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.98 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.69 £27.85 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +53.27% -23.70% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.84 £57.19 £60.75
90th Percentile £81.14 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +8.91%

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 3 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 3 June 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Machine Learning in the UK

Machine Learning
Top 16 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 3 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 +22 1,189 £575 - 1,702
London +33 799 £575 - 1,003
UK excluding London +13 444 £550 -4.35% 818
Work from Home +32 412 £581 +5.68% 1,039
North of England -4 123 £550 - 233
Scotland +58 97 £518 +10.81% 39
South East -32 87 £640 +11.30% 226
North West -4 64 £575 +4.55% 158
Midlands -18 61 £550 +10.00% 77
Yorkshire -20 45 £550 - 48
East of England -20 44 £550 -13.73% 96
West Midlands -30 43 £550 +10.00% 42
South West -27 36 £500 -21.88% 117
North East -17 17 £550 +46.67% 28
East Midlands -17 16 £650 +46.48% 34
Wales -12 15 £579 +0.70% 19

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
1 112 (7.82%) Apache Spark
2 66 (4.61%) Apache Airflow
3 53 (3.70%) Apache
4 34 (2.37%) Jupyter
5 17 (1.19%) Confluence
6 9 (0.63%) Appian
7 8 (0.56%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.35%) CMS
8 5 (0.35%) Headless CMS
9 4 (0.28%) Palantir Foundry
9 4 (0.28%) SAS
10 2 (0.14%) Luigi
11 1 (0.070%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.070%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.070%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.070%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.070%) NetWeaver
11 1 (0.070%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 26 (1.82%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.84%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.63%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 9 (0.63%) Microsoft Project
4 7 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
5 3 (0.21%) LaTeX
6 2 (0.14%) CPLEX
6 2 (0.14%) Simulink
Business Applications
1 11 (0.77%) SAP IBP
2 6 (0.42%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.070%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.070%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.070%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.070%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 531 (37.08%) Azure
2 486 (33.94%) AWS
3 248 (17.32%) GCP
4 124 (8.66%) Power Platform
5 88 (6.15%) GitHub
6 86 (6.01%) Serverless
7 84 (5.87%) Azure AI
8 76 (5.31%) Amazon SageMaker
9 74 (5.17%) Azure Machine Learning
10 72 (5.03%) Amazon S3
11 67 (4.68%) Snowflake
12 63 (4.40%) Azure DevOps
13 57 (3.98%) AWS Lambda
14 53 (3.70%) Vertex AI
15 52 (3.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 48 (3.35%) GitHub Actions
17 47 (3.28%) Azure Data Factory
18 39 (2.72%) Amazon Bedrock
19 32 (2.23%) AWS CloudFormation
19 32 (2.23%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 12 (0.84%) Network Security
2 10 (0.70%) Firewall
3 9 (0.63%) HTTP
4 8 (0.56%) DNS
5 6 (0.42%) Internet
6 5 (0.35%) FTP
6 5 (0.35%) SMTP
6 5 (0.35%) SSL
7 4 (0.28%) NAS
7 4 (0.28%) SAN
8 2 (0.14%) 4G
8 2 (0.14%) 5G
8 2 (0.14%) DHCP
8 2 (0.14%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.14%) InfiniBand
8 2 (0.14%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.14%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.14%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.070%) SMS
9 1 (0.070%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 97 (6.77%) Power BI
2 94 (6.56%) Data Lake
3 75 (5.24%) Big Data
4 67 (4.68%) Metadata
5 64 (4.47%) BigQuery
6 51 (3.56%) Data Warehouse
7 49 (3.42%) NoSQL
8 39 (2.72%) Tableau
9 35 (2.44%) Hadoop
10 31 (2.16%) Delta Lake
11 30 (2.09%) SQL Server
12 29 (2.03%) PostgreSQL
13 28 (1.96%) Pinecone
14 27 (1.89%) Relational Database
15 25 (1.75%) Amazon Athena
16 21 (1.47%) MongoDB
17 20 (1.40%) Mixpanel
17 20 (1.40%) Weaviate
18 19 (1.33%) Amazon Redshift
19 14 (0.98%) Redis
Development Applications
1 89 (6.22%) Git
2 80 (5.59%) MLflow
3 38 (2.65%) JIRA
4 30 (2.09%) GitLab
5 21 (1.47%) Jenkins
6 9 (0.63%) Visual Studio
7 7 (0.49%) Selenium
8 5 (0.35%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.28%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.28%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.28%) ERwin
9 4 (0.28%) JMeter
9 4 (0.28%) Maven
9 4 (0.28%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.21%) Gradle
10 3 (0.21%) JUnit
10 3 (0.21%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.21%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.21%) Vite
11 2 (0.14%) ER Studio
General
1 313 (21.86%) Social Skills
2 282 (19.69%) Finance
3 178 (12.43%) Analytical Skills
4 140 (9.78%) Public Sector
5 89 (6.22%) Banking
6 33 (2.30%) Marketing
7 32 (2.23%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 28 (1.96%) Pharmaceutical
9 27 (1.89%) Legal
10 25 (1.75%) Documentation Skills
11 22 (1.54%) Aviation
11 22 (1.54%) Retail
12 21 (1.47%) Front Office
12 21 (1.47%) Influencing Skills
13 20 (1.40%) Investment Banking
14 18 (1.26%) Telecoms
15 13 (0.91%) Law
16 12 (0.84%) Aerospace
16 12 (0.84%) Financial Institution
16 12 (0.84%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 210 (14.66%) Data Scientist
2 200 (13.97%) Senior
3 186 (12.99%) Architect
4 148 (10.34%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 131 (9.15%) Data Engineer
6 121 (8.45%) Lead
7 94 (6.56%) Developer
8 77 (5.38%) Analyst
9 68 (4.75%) Python Engineer
10 63 (4.40%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 62 (4.33%) Software Engineer
12 58 (4.05%) Solutions Architect
13 56 (3.91%) Data Architect
14 51 (3.56%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 40 (2.79%) Senior Data Scientist
16 39 (2.72%) Consultant
17 32 (2.23%) Python Developer
18 30 (2.09%) Senior Data Engineer
19 29 (2.03%) Artificial Intelligence Specialist
19 29 (2.03%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 180 (12.57%) PyTorch
2 131 (9.15%) TensorFlow
3 109 (7.61%) scikit-learn
4 95 (6.63%) Pandas
5 81 (5.66%) Kafka
6 72 (5.03%) LangChain
7 68 (4.75%) NumPy
8 66 (4.61%) PySpark
9 64 (4.47%) React
10 56 (3.91%) REST
11 52 (3.63%) .NET
12 45 (3.14%) Hugging Face
13 35 (2.44%) LangGraph
14 32 (2.23%) Model Context Protocol
15 31 (2.16%) AngularJS
15 31 (2.16%) Node.js
16 29 (2.03%) FastAPI
17 28 (1.96%) RESTful
18 19 (1.33%) Faiss
18 19 (1.33%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 168 (11.73%) Cloud Native
2 140 (9.78%) AI Agents
3 118 (8.24%) Algorithms
4 54 (3.77%) Product Ownership
5 40 (2.79%) Onboarding
6 38 (2.65%) Distributed Systems
7 27 (1.89%) Data Protection Act
8 19 (1.33%) Data Structures
8 19 (1.33%) Fixed Income
9 18 (1.26%) Enterprise Software
9 18 (1.26%) Life Science
10 17 (1.19%) Management Information System
11 16 (1.12%) Legacy Systems
12 14 (0.98%) Analytical Mindset
13 13 (0.91%) Hybrid Cloud
13 13 (0.91%) Low-Code
14 12 (0.84%) Public Cloud
15 11 (0.77%) Augmented Reality
15 11 (0.77%) Cyber Threat
15 11 (0.77%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 28 (1.96%) Linux
2 14 (0.98%) Windows
3 11 (0.77%) Unix
4 6 (0.42%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.42%) VMS
5 5 (0.35%) Android
6 2 (0.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 1 (0.070%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,142 (79.75%) AI
2 533 (37.22%) Data Science
3 446 (31.15%) CI/CD
4 423 (29.54%) LLM
5 398 (27.79%) Analytics
6 322 (22.49%) Data Pipeline
7 320 (22.35%) Generative AI
8 295 (20.60%) DevOps
9 288 (20.11%) MLOps
10 264 (18.44%) Data Engineering
11 263 (18.37%) Agile
12 211 (14.73%) Use Case
13 192 (13.41%) Problem-Solving
14 186 (12.99%) Software Engineering
15 181 (12.64%) Decision-Making
16 180 (12.57%) Data Governance
17 178 (12.43%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 175 (12.22%) ETL
19 154 (10.75%) Containerisation
20 148 (10.34%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 821 (57.33%) Python
2 367 (25.63%) SQL
3 105 (7.33%) Java
4 71 (4.96%) C#
5 62 (4.33%) R
6 47 (3.28%) TypeScript
7 43 (3.00%) JavaScript
8 26 (1.82%) C++
9 18 (1.26%) Bash
10 15 (1.05%) PowerShell
11 13 (0.91%) Bicep
12 11 (0.77%) Scala
13 10 (0.70%) Kotlin
14 8 (0.56%) Go
15 7 (0.49%) Rust
15 7 (0.49%) SPARQL
16 6 (0.42%) MATLAB
16 6 (0.42%) PL/SQL
17 5 (0.35%) Perl
18 3 (0.21%) Korn
Qualifications
1 238 (16.62%) Security Cleared
2 164 (11.45%) SC Cleared
3 113 (7.89%) Degree
4 50 (3.49%) Master's Degree
5 40 (2.79%) BPSS Clearance
6 38 (2.65%) DV Cleared
7 37 (2.58%) Computer Science Degree
8 34 (2.37%) PhD
9 29 (2.03%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.33%) Azure Certification
10 19 (1.33%) CISSP
11 15 (1.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 15 (1.05%) CISM
12 6 (0.42%) DBS Check
12 6 (0.42%) ISTQB
13 5 (0.35%) CEH
13 5 (0.35%) GIAC
13 5 (0.35%) Microsoft Certification
13 5 (0.35%) PMI Certification
13 5 (0.35%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 161 (11.24%) Data Quality
2 57 (3.98%) GDPR
3 50 (3.49%) QA
4 30 (2.09%) NIST
5 18 (1.26%) Accessibility
6 16 (1.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 13 (0.91%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.77%) Actionable Recommendations
9 10 (0.70%) HIPAA
10 8 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 7 (0.49%) GRC
11 7 (0.49%) GxP
11 7 (0.49%) NCSC
12 5 (0.35%) WCAG
13 4 (0.28%) COBIT
13 4 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
14 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
14 3 (0.21%) SLA
15 2 (0.14%) DO-254
15 2 (0.14%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 191 (13.34%) Docker
2 12 (0.84%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 9 (0.63%) Active Directory
4 4 (0.28%) Firmware
5 3 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.14%) HDFS
6 2 (0.14%) Microsoft App-V
6 2 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
6 2 (0.14%) VMware Infrastructure
6 2 (0.14%) VMware Workstation
7 1 (0.070%) Ceph
7 1 (0.070%) Embedded Firmware
7 1 (0.070%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 226 (15.78%) Kubernetes
2 136 (9.50%) Terraform
3 21 (1.47%) Kubeflow
4 20 (1.40%) Grafana
5 14 (0.98%) Prometheus
6 12 (0.84%) Ansible
7 9 (0.63%) Podman
8 6 (0.42%) Istio
9 3 (0.21%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.21%) Rancher
10 2 (0.14%) Argo
10 2 (0.14%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.14%) Kibana
10 2 (0.14%) Packer
10 2 (0.14%) SCCM
11 1 (0.070%) HP Fortify
11 1 (0.070%) logstash
Vendors
1 195 (13.62%) Databricks
2 161 (11.24%) Microsoft
3 97 (6.77%) OpenAI
4 84 (5.87%) Google
5 55 (3.84%) Foundry
6 38 (2.65%) SAP
7 34 (2.37%) Oracle
8 21 (1.47%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.05%) IBM
9 15 (1.05%) Informatica
9 15 (1.05%) UiPath
10 12 (0.84%) Dynatrace
11 11 (0.77%) Automation Anywhere
12 7 (0.49%) Amplitude
12 7 (0.49%) Sybase
13 6 (0.42%) NVIDIA
13 6 (0.42%) Talend
13 6 (0.42%) Workday
14 5 (0.35%) Siemens
14 5 (0.35%) Splunk