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

6 months to
2 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 86 114 141
Rank change year-on-year +28 +27 +82
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,418 699 715
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.91% 2.42% 1.66%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.43% 2.66% 1.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 858 428 516
10th Percentile £413 £391 £413
25th Percentile £492 £456 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £559 £580
Median % change year-on-year +2.95% -3.71% -1.28%
75th Percentile £675 £691 £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 18 19
10th Percentile £40.54 £29.28 £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 £80.76 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.13 £88.00 £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 41,283 26,327 36,811
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.64% 90.98% 85.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,781 16,819 23,635
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 2,472 1,115 2,532
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.91 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £27.99 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.84% -23.32% +0.29%
75th Percentile £67.84 £57.50 £60.75
90th Percentile £81.05 £74.50 £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 2 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 2 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 2 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 +16 1,182 £575 - 1,912
London +36 796 £575 - 1,135
UK excluding London +13 435 £550 -4.35% 970
Work from Home +27 407 £581 +5.68% 1,090
North of England -4 122 £554 +0.68% 234
Scotland +53 93 £518 +10.81% 42
South East -32 84 £650 +13.04% 299
North West -11 63 £588 +6.82% 159
Midlands -20 61 £550 +10.00% 77
Yorkshire -22 45 £550 - 45
East of England -23 44 £550 -13.73% 147
West Midlands -33 43 £550 +10.00% 37
South West -29 36 £500 -21.88% 141
North East -13 17 £550 +46.67% 31
East Midlands -18 16 £650 +46.48% 39
Wales -13 14 £650 +13.04% 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
1 113 (7.97%) Apache Spark
2 67 (4.72%) Apache Airflow
3 54 (3.81%) Apache
4 34 (2.40%) Jupyter
5 17 (1.20%) 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 (0.071%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.071%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.071%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.071%) NetWeaver
11 1 (0.071%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 27 (1.90%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.85%) 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 (0.78%) SAP IBP
2 6 (0.42%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.071%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.071%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.071%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.071%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 524 (36.95%) Azure
2 480 (33.85%) AWS
3 247 (17.42%) GCP
4 124 (8.74%) Power Platform
5 89 (6.28%) GitHub
6 85 (5.99%) Serverless
7 84 (5.92%) Azure AI
8 75 (5.29%) Amazon SageMaker
9 74 (5.22%) Azure Machine Learning
10 72 (5.08%) Amazon S3
11 67 (4.72%) Snowflake
12 64 (4.51%) Azure DevOps
13 55 (3.88%) AWS Lambda
14 53 (3.74%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 53 (3.74%) Vertex AI
15 49 (3.46%) GitHub Actions
16 48 (3.39%) Azure Data Factory
17 37 (2.61%) Amazon Bedrock
18 33 (2.33%) AWS CloudFormation
19 32 (2.26%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 13 (0.92%) Network Security
2 10 (0.71%) Firewall
3 9 (0.63%) HTTP
4 8 (0.56%) DNS
5 5 (0.35%) FTP
5 5 (0.35%) SMTP
5 5 (0.35%) SSL
6 4 (0.28%) Internet
6 4 (0.28%) NAS
6 4 (0.28%) SAN
7 3 (0.21%) InfiniBand
8 2 (0.14%) 4G
8 2 (0.14%) 5G
8 2 (0.14%) DHCP
8 2 (0.14%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.14%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.14%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.14%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.071%) 3GPP
9 1 (0.071%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 97 (6.84%) Power BI
2 95 (6.70%) Data Lake
3 75 (5.29%) Big Data
4 66 (4.65%) Metadata
5 65 (4.58%) BigQuery
6 52 (3.67%) Data Warehouse
7 48 (3.39%) NoSQL
8 41 (2.89%) Tableau
9 35 (2.47%) Hadoop
10 31 (2.19%) Delta Lake
11 30 (2.12%) SQL Server
12 28 (1.97%) PostgreSQL
13 27 (1.90%) Pinecone
13 27 (1.90%) Relational Database
14 25 (1.76%) Amazon Athena
15 23 (1.62%) Mixpanel
16 21 (1.48%) MongoDB
17 20 (1.41%) Weaviate
18 18 (1.27%) Amazon Redshift
19 14 (0.99%) Redis
Development Applications
1 88 (6.21%) Git
2 81 (5.71%) MLflow
3 38 (2.68%) JIRA
4 29 (2.05%) GitLab
5 22 (1.55%) 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
1 305 (21.51%) Social Skills
2 281 (19.82%) Finance
3 176 (12.41%) Analytical Skills
4 136 (9.59%) Public Sector
5 87 (6.14%) Banking
6 33 (2.33%) Marketing
7 31 (2.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 28 (1.97%) Pharmaceutical
9 25 (1.76%) Documentation Skills
10 24 (1.69%) Legal
11 22 (1.55%) Aviation
11 22 (1.55%) Retail
12 21 (1.48%) Front Office
12 21 (1.48%) Influencing Skills
12 21 (1.48%) Investment Banking
13 18 (1.27%) Telecoms
14 12 (0.85%) Aerospace
14 12 (0.85%) Financial Institution
14 12 (0.85%) Law
14 12 (0.85%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 208 (14.67%) Data Scientist
2 198 (13.96%) Senior
3 185 (13.05%) Architect
4 147 (10.37%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 132 (9.31%) Data Engineer
6 119 (8.39%) Lead
7 95 (6.70%) Developer
8 76 (5.36%) Analyst
9 69 (4.87%) Python Engineer
10 62 (4.37%) Machine Learning Engineer
10 62 (4.37%) Software Engineer
11 59 (4.16%) Solutions Architect
12 56 (3.95%) Data Architect
13 51 (3.60%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
14 41 (2.89%) Senior Data Scientist
15 39 (2.75%) Consultant
16 33 (2.33%) Python Developer
17 30 (2.12%) Business Analyst
18 29 (2.05%) Artificial Intelligence Specialist
18 29 (2.05%) Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 180 (12.69%) PyTorch
2 131 (9.24%) TensorFlow
3 109 (7.69%) scikit-learn
4 95 (6.70%) Pandas
5 81 (5.71%) Kafka
6 70 (4.94%) LangChain
7 68 (4.80%) NumPy
8 66 (4.65%) React
9 65 (4.58%) PySpark
10 55 (3.88%) REST
11 53 (3.74%) .NET
12 45 (3.17%) Hugging Face
13 34 (2.40%) LangGraph
14 32 (2.26%) AngularJS
14 32 (2.26%) Node.js
15 30 (2.12%) Model Context Protocol
16 28 (1.97%) FastAPI
16 28 (1.97%) RESTful
17 19 (1.34%) Faiss
17 19 (1.34%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 166 (11.71%) Cloud Native
2 140 (9.87%) AI Agents
3 117 (8.25%) Algorithms
4 51 (3.60%) Product Ownership
5 40 (2.82%) Onboarding
6 38 (2.68%) Distributed Systems
7 23 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
8 19 (1.34%) Data Structures
8 19 (1.34%) Fixed Income
9 18 (1.27%) Enterprise Software
9 18 (1.27%) Life Science
10 17 (1.20%) Legacy Systems
10 17 (1.20%) Management Information System
11 15 (1.06%) Analytical Mindset
12 13 (0.92%) Hybrid Cloud
12 13 (0.92%) Low-Code
13 12 (0.85%) Public Cloud
14 11 (0.78%) Augmented Reality
14 11 (0.78%) Cyber Threat
14 11 (0.78%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.05%) Linux
2 15 (1.06%) Windows
3 11 (0.78%) 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 (0.071%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,131 (79.76%) AI
2 528 (37.24%) Data Science
3 442 (31.17%) CI/CD
4 417 (29.41%) LLM
5 398 (28.07%) Analytics
6 319 (22.50%) Data Pipeline
7 315 (22.21%) Generative AI
8 295 (20.80%) DevOps
9 282 (19.89%) MLOps
10 263 (18.55%) Data Engineering
11 261 (18.41%) Agile
12 210 (14.81%) Use Case
13 193 (13.61%) Problem-Solving
14 183 (12.91%) Software Engineering
15 177 (12.48%) Data Governance
16 176 (12.41%) Decision-Making
16 176 (12.41%) ETL
17 173 (12.20%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 154 (10.86%) Containerisation
19 146 (10.30%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 817 (57.62%) Python
2 367 (25.88%) SQL
3 104 (7.33%) Java
4 73 (5.15%) C#
5 64 (4.51%) R
6 48 (3.39%) TypeScript
7 45 (3.17%) JavaScript
8 26 (1.83%) C++
9 18 (1.27%) Bash
10 15 (1.06%) PowerShell
11 14 (0.99%) Bicep
12 11 (0.78%) Scala
13 10 (0.71%) 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
1 236 (16.64%) Security Cleared
2 162 (11.42%) SC Cleared
3 113 (7.97%) Degree
4 51 (3.60%) Master's Degree
5 38 (2.68%) BPSS Clearance
5 38 (2.68%) DV Cleared
6 35 (2.47%) Computer Science Degree
7 34 (2.40%) PhD
8 27 (1.90%) AWS Certification
9 19 (1.34%) Azure Certification
10 18 (1.27%) CISSP
11 15 (1.06%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 14 (0.99%) CISM
13 6 (0.42%) ISTQB
14 5 (0.35%) GIAC
14 5 (0.35%) Microsoft Certification
14 5 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 5 (0.35%) PMI Certification
14 5 (0.35%) PMP
15 4 (0.28%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 157 (11.07%) Data Quality
2 56 (3.95%) GDPR
3 50 (3.53%) QA
4 30 (2.12%) NIST
5 18 (1.27%) Accessibility
6 15 (1.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 13 (0.92%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.78%) Actionable Recommendations
9 10 (0.71%) 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 (13.47%) Docker
2 13 (0.92%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 10 (0.71%) Active Directory
4 5 (0.35%) Firmware
5 3 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.14%) Ceph
6 2 (0.14%) HDFS
6 2 (0.14%) Lustre
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 (0.071%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 225 (15.87%) Kubernetes
2 137 (9.66%) Terraform
3 21 (1.48%) Kubeflow
4 19 (1.34%) Grafana
5 13 (0.92%) Prometheus
6 12 (0.85%) Ansible
7 9 (0.63%) Podman
8 5 (0.35%) Istio
9 3 (0.21%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.21%) Rancher
10 2 (0.14%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.14%) Kibana
10 2 (0.14%) Packer
10 2 (0.14%) SCCM
11 1 (0.071%) Argo
11 1 (0.071%) HP Fortify
11 1 (0.071%) logstash
Vendors
1 194 (13.68%) Databricks
2 159 (11.21%) Microsoft
3 98 (6.91%) OpenAI
4 85 (5.99%) Google
5 55 (3.88%) Foundry
6 38 (2.68%) SAP
7 34 (2.40%) Oracle
8 21 (1.48%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.06%) IBM
9 15 (1.06%) UiPath
10 14 (0.99%) Informatica
11 12 (0.85%) Dynatrace
12 11 (0.78%) Automation Anywhere
13 9 (0.63%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.49%) NVIDIA
14 7 (0.49%) Sybase
15 6 (0.42%) Talend
15 6 (0.42%) Workday
16 5 (0.35%) Ariba
16 5 (0.35%) Splunk