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

6 months to
22 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 104 143
Rank change year-on-year +20 +39 +77
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,391 715 716
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.88% 2.48% 1.69%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.41% 2.73% 1.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 851 445 520
10th Percentile £415 £368 £413
25th Percentile £498 £450 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £560 £580
Median % change year-on-year +2.68% -3.45% -1.28%
75th Percentile £675 £690 £738
90th Percentile £775 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -4.35% +4.55% -2.22%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 22 19
10th Percentile £50.00 £25.38 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.99 £45.00 £46.22
Median hourly rate £65.00 £63.25 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +2.77% +20.48% +50.00%
75th Percentile £83.75 £78.74 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.25 £81.01 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £77.50 £56.25
% change year-on-year -16.13% +37.78% +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 40,767 26,234 36,547
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.37% 91.05% 86.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,562 16,839 23,562
10th Percentile £325 £303 £300
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.49% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £497 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.66% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,395 1,067 2,440
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.36 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.96 £18.30 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £28.18 £36.05
Median % change year-on-year +50.82% -21.82% +0.13%
75th Percentile £67.50 £59.95 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -33.82% +8.57%

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 22 May 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 22 May 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 22 May 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 +19 1,159 £575 - 1,475
London +33 776 £575 - 771
UK excluding London +6 429 £550 -4.35% 944
Work from Home +16 393 £600 +9.09% 666
North of England -3 114 £550 +4.76% 247
Scotland +56 91 £518 +9.87% 55
South East -30 85 £600 +4.35% 278
Midlands -27 64 £575 +17.95% 98
North West -19 56 £575 - 153
West Midlands -24 46 £550 +10.00% 49
Yorkshire -13 45 £519 - 61
East of England -20 45 £525 -16.00% 121
South West -26 37 £500 -22.48% 121
East Midlands -14 16 £675 +52.11% 48
North East -17 16 £575 +60.61% 35
Wales -18 12 £759 +31.96% 20
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 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
1 114 (8.20%) Apache Spark
2 66 (4.74%) Apache Airflow
3 54 (3.88%) Apache
4 30 (2.16%) Jupyter
5 16 (1.15%) Confluence
6 9 (0.65%) Appian
7 5 (0.36%) CMS
7 5 (0.36%) Headless CMS
7 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
8 4 (0.29%) SAS
9 3 (0.22%) Palantir Foundry
10 2 (0.14%) Luigi
11 1 (0.072%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.072%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.072%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.072%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 26 (1.87%) Chatbot
2 11 (0.79%) Microsoft Project
3 9 (0.65%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.65%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.50%) Microsoft Office
5 3 (0.22%) LaTeX
6 2 (0.14%) CPLEX
6 2 (0.14%) Simulink
Business Applications
1 11 (0.79%) SAP IBP
2 3 (0.22%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.072%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.072%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.072%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.072%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 528 (37.96%) Azure
2 474 (34.08%) AWS
3 238 (17.11%) GCP
4 124 (8.91%) Power Platform
5 95 (6.83%) GitHub
6 91 (6.54%) Serverless
7 89 (6.40%) Azure AI
8 85 (6.11%) Azure Machine Learning
9 72 (5.18%) Amazon SageMaker
10 69 (4.96%) Amazon S3
11 67 (4.82%) Azure DevOps
12 64 (4.60%) Snowflake
13 55 (3.95%) GitHub Actions
14 54 (3.88%) AWS Lambda
15 52 (3.74%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 51 (3.67%) Vertex AI
17 48 (3.45%) Azure Data Factory
18 37 (2.66%) AWS CloudFormation
19 34 (2.44%) Amazon Bedrock
20 29 (2.08%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 14 (1.01%) Network Security
2 10 (0.72%) Firewall
3 9 (0.65%) HTTP
4 8 (0.58%) DNS
5 5 (0.36%) FTP
5 5 (0.36%) SMTP
5 5 (0.36%) SSL
6 3 (0.22%) InfiniBand
6 3 (0.22%) NAS
6 3 (0.22%) SAN
7 2 (0.14%) 4G
7 2 (0.14%) 5G
7 2 (0.14%) DHCP
7 2 (0.14%) Ethernet
7 2 (0.14%) Internet
7 2 (0.14%) PCoIP
7 2 (0.14%) Radio Access Network
7 2 (0.14%) Remote Desktop
8 1 (0.072%) Modbus
8 1 (0.072%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 94 (6.76%) Power BI
2 90 (6.47%) Data Lake
3 75 (5.39%) Big Data
4 61 (4.39%) BigQuery
4 61 (4.39%) Metadata
5 50 (3.59%) Data Warehouse
6 48 (3.45%) NoSQL
7 38 (2.73%) Tableau
8 36 (2.59%) Hadoop
9 33 (2.37%) Delta Lake
10 30 (2.16%) Pinecone
10 30 (2.16%) SQL Server
11 28 (2.01%) PostgreSQL
12 26 (1.87%) Relational Database
13 25 (1.80%) Amazon Athena
13 25 (1.80%) Mixpanel
14 23 (1.65%) Weaviate
15 20 (1.44%) MongoDB
16 16 (1.15%) Amazon Redshift
17 15 (1.08%) Redis
Development Applications
1 87 (6.25%) MLflow
2 86 (6.18%) Git
3 34 (2.44%) JIRA
4 24 (1.73%) GitLab
4 24 (1.73%) Jenkins
5 8 (0.58%) Visual Studio
6 7 (0.50%) Selenium
7 5 (0.36%) SonarQube
8 4 (0.29%) Cypress.io
8 4 (0.29%) ERwin
8 4 (0.29%) JMeter
8 4 (0.29%) Maven
8 4 (0.29%) PyCharm
9 3 (0.22%) Claude Code
9 3 (0.22%) Gradle
9 3 (0.22%) JUnit
9 3 (0.22%) REST Assured
9 3 (0.22%) Spinnaker
9 3 (0.22%) Vite
10 2 (0.14%) ER Studio
General
1 296 (21.28%) Social Skills
2 270 (19.41%) Finance
3 166 (11.93%) Analytical Skills
4 138 (9.92%) Public Sector
5 81 (5.82%) Banking
6 30 (2.16%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 29 (2.08%) Marketing
8 25 (1.80%) Documentation Skills
8 25 (1.80%) Legal
8 25 (1.80%) Pharmaceutical
9 23 (1.65%) Influencing Skills
10 22 (1.58%) Aviation
10 22 (1.58%) Retail
11 21 (1.51%) Investment Banking
12 20 (1.44%) Front Office
13 19 (1.37%) Telecoms
14 13 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
15 12 (0.86%) Aerospace
16 11 (0.79%) Law
16 11 (0.79%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 210 (15.10%) Data Scientist
2 188 (13.52%) Senior
3 185 (13.30%) Architect
4 158 (11.36%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 128 (9.20%) Data Engineer
6 118 (8.48%) Lead
7 94 (6.76%) Developer
8 72 (5.18%) Analyst
9 67 (4.82%) Python Engineer
10 60 (4.31%) Software Engineer
11 58 (4.17%) Machine Learning Engineer
12 56 (4.03%) Solutions Architect
13 54 (3.88%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
14 53 (3.81%) Data Architect
15 40 (2.88%) Senior Data Scientist
16 38 (2.73%) Consultant
17 31 (2.23%) Python Developer
18 29 (2.08%) Business Analyst
18 29 (2.08%) Full-Stack Engineer
18 29 (2.08%) Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 187 (13.44%) PyTorch
2 133 (9.56%) TensorFlow
3 110 (7.91%) scikit-learn
4 94 (6.76%) Pandas
5 80 (5.75%) Kafka
6 70 (5.03%) LangChain
7 67 (4.82%) React
8 66 (4.74%) NumPy
9 61 (4.39%) PySpark
10 53 (3.81%) .NET
10 53 (3.81%) REST
11 48 (3.45%) Hugging Face
12 34 (2.44%) LangGraph
12 34 (2.44%) Node.js
13 33 (2.37%) AngularJS
13 33 (2.37%) Model Context Protocol
14 29 (2.08%) FastAPI
15 26 (1.87%) RESTful
16 22 (1.58%) Faiss
17 20 (1.44%) Great Expectations
Miscellaneous
1 162 (11.65%) Cloud Native
2 133 (9.56%) AI Agents
3 124 (8.91%) Algorithms
4 47 (3.38%) Product Ownership
5 43 (3.09%) Onboarding
6 37 (2.66%) Distributed Systems
7 26 (1.87%) Data Protection Act
8 18 (1.29%) Data Structures
8 18 (1.29%) Fixed Income
9 17 (1.22%) Enterprise Software
9 17 (1.22%) Legacy Systems
9 17 (1.22%) Management Information System
10 16 (1.15%) Life Science
11 13 (0.93%) Analytical Mindset
11 13 (0.93%) Hybrid Cloud
12 12 (0.86%) Low-Code
13 11 (0.79%) Augmented Reality
13 11 (0.79%) Distributed Computing
13 11 (0.79%) Public Cloud
13 11 (0.79%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 30 (2.16%) Linux
2 14 (1.01%) Windows
3 10 (0.72%) Unix
4 8 (0.58%) VMS
5 7 (0.50%) Apple iOS
6 6 (0.43%) Android
7 2 (0.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.072%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,101 (79.15%) AI
2 515 (37.02%) Data Science
3 430 (30.91%) CI/CD
4 405 (29.12%) LLM
5 378 (27.17%) Analytics
6 308 (22.14%) Generative AI
7 302 (21.71%) Data Pipeline
8 285 (20.49%) DevOps
9 268 (19.27%) MLOps
10 257 (18.48%) Data Engineering
11 249 (17.90%) Agile
12 195 (14.02%) Use Case
13 193 (13.87%) Problem-Solving
14 175 (12.58%) Data Governance
15 171 (12.29%) ETL
15 171 (12.29%) Software Engineering
16 168 (12.08%) Decision-Making
17 166 (11.93%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 154 (11.07%) Containerisation
19 145 (10.42%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 802 (57.66%) Python
2 352 (25.31%) SQL
3 102 (7.33%) Java
4 76 (5.46%) C#
5 64 (4.60%) R
6 50 (3.59%) TypeScript
7 47 (3.38%) JavaScript
8 24 (1.73%) C++
9 20 (1.44%) Bash
10 18 (1.29%) PowerShell
11 15 (1.08%) Bicep
12 13 (0.93%) Scala
13 11 (0.79%) Kotlin
14 8 (0.58%) Go
15 7 (0.50%) MATLAB
15 7 (0.50%) Rust
15 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
16 5 (0.36%) PL/SQL
17 4 (0.29%) Perl
18 3 (0.22%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 237 (17.04%) Security Cleared
2 164 (11.79%) SC Cleared
3 112 (8.05%) Degree
4 55 (3.95%) Master's Degree
5 40 (2.88%) DV Cleared
6 38 (2.73%) BPSS Clearance
7 36 (2.59%) PhD
8 30 (2.16%) Computer Science Degree
9 24 (1.73%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.37%) Azure Certification
11 18 (1.29%) CISSP
12 14 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 14 (1.01%) CISM
13 7 (0.50%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 6 (0.43%) ISTQB
14 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
15 5 (0.36%) GIAC
15 5 (0.36%) PMI Certification
15 5 (0.36%) PMP
16 4 (0.29%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 145 (10.42%) Data Quality
2 55 (3.95%) GDPR
3 51 (3.67%) QA
4 29 (2.08%) NIST
5 18 (1.29%) Accessibility
6 14 (1.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 13 (0.93%) EU AI Act
8 10 (0.72%) Actionable Recommendations
8 10 (0.72%) HIPAA
9 8 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 7 (0.50%) NCSC
11 5 (0.36%) GRC
11 5 (0.36%) WCAG
12 4 (0.29%) COBIT
12 4 (0.29%) Disclosure Scotland
12 4 (0.29%) GxP
13 2 (0.14%) DO-254
13 2 (0.14%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 2 (0.14%) ISO/IEC 42001
14 1 (0.072%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 187 (13.44%) Docker
2 11 (0.79%) Active Directory
2 11 (0.79%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 5 (0.36%) Firmware
4 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.14%) Ceph
5 2 (0.14%) HDFS
5 2 (0.14%) Lustre
5 2 (0.14%) Microsoft App-V
5 2 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
5 2 (0.14%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.14%) VMware Workstation
6 1 (0.072%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 219 (15.74%) Kubernetes
2 140 (10.06%) Terraform
3 21 (1.51%) Grafana
3 21 (1.51%) Kubeflow
4 14 (1.01%) Ansible
4 14 (1.01%) Prometheus
5 9 (0.65%) Podman
6 4 (0.29%) Istio
7 3 (0.22%) Rancher
8 2 (0.14%) Docker Swarm
8 2 (0.14%) Kibana
8 2 (0.14%) Knative
8 2 (0.14%) NetBackup
8 2 (0.14%) Packer
8 2 (0.14%) SCCM
9 1 (0.072%) Argo
9 1 (0.072%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.072%) logstash
Vendors
1 196 (14.09%) Databricks
2 160 (11.50%) Microsoft
3 100 (7.19%) OpenAI
4 90 (6.47%) Google
5 58 (4.17%) Foundry
6 39 (2.80%) SAP
7 32 (2.30%) Oracle
8 23 (1.65%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.08%) IBM
10 14 (1.01%) UiPath
11 13 (0.93%) Informatica
12 12 (0.86%) Dynatrace
13 11 (0.79%) Automation Anywhere
14 9 (0.65%) Amplitude
15 7 (0.50%) NVIDIA
16 6 (0.43%) Ariba
16 6 (0.43%) Siemens
16 6 (0.43%) Sybase
16 6 (0.43%) Talend
16 6 (0.43%) Workday