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

6 months to
30 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 109 139
Rank change year-on-year +24 +30 +86
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,433 700 719
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.92% 2.42% 1.68%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.44% 2.66% 1.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 867 432 523
10th Percentile £413 £393 £413
25th Percentile £491 £457 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £564 £580
Median % change year-on-year +2.00% -2.80% -1.28%
75th Percentile £675 £700 £738
90th Percentile £775 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -4.35% +4.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 50 18 19
10th Percentile £40.54 £29.28 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.38 £45.00 £46.22
Median hourly rate £65.00 £75.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -13.33% +42.86% +50.00%
75th Percentile £83.75 £80.76 £66.25
90th Percentile £88.88 £88.00 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.50 £77.50 £56.25
% change year-on-year -16.77% +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 41,610 26,282 36,757
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.67% 91.03% 85.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,026 16,812 23,631
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 2,481 1,100 2,513
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.91 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.30 £27.97 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.26% -23.38% -1.35%
75th Percentile £67.84 £57.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £73.88 £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 30 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 30 May 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 30 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 +24 1,194 £575 - 1,311
London +36 804 £575 - 757
UK excluding London +11 439 £550 -4.35% 696
Work from Home +20 410 £588 +6.82% 562
North of England 0 123 £550 - 197
Scotland +55 95 £518 +10.81% 37
South East -40 84 £650 +13.04% 196
North West -16 63 £588 +6.82% 121
Midlands -23 61 £550 +10.00% 70
Yorkshire -24 46 £538 - 42
East of England -20 45 £525 -17.65% 91
West Midlands -41 43 £550 +10.00% 33
South West -34 36 £500 -21.88% 82
North East -11 17 £550 +46.67% 35
East Midlands -13 16 £650 +46.48% 36
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
1 114 (7.96%) Apache Spark
2 68 (4.75%) Apache Airflow
3 55 (3.84%) Apache
4 34 (2.37%) Jupyter
5 16 (1.12%) 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 27 (1.88%) 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
1 532 (37.12%) Azure
2 484 (33.78%) AWS
3 246 (17.17%) GCP
4 126 (8.79%) Power Platform
5 91 (6.35%) GitHub
6 86 (6.00%) Serverless
7 84 (5.86%) Azure AI
8 76 (5.30%) Amazon SageMaker
9 75 (5.23%) Azure Machine Learning
10 72 (5.02%) Amazon S3
11 69 (4.82%) Snowflake
12 65 (4.54%) Azure DevOps
13 55 (3.84%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 54 (3.77%) Vertex AI
15 53 (3.70%) AWS Lambda
16 50 (3.49%) GitHub Actions
17 49 (3.42%) Azure Data Factory
18 37 (2.58%) Amazon Bedrock
19 34 (2.37%) AWS CloudFormation
20 31 (2.16%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 13 (0.91%) Network Security
2 10 (0.70%) 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 (0.070%) 3GPP
9 1 (0.070%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 98 (6.84%) Power BI
2 95 (6.63%) Data Lake
3 76 (5.30%) Big Data
4 66 (4.61%) Metadata
5 65 (4.54%) BigQuery
6 51 (3.56%) Data Warehouse
7 49 (3.42%) NoSQL
8 42 (2.93%) Tableau
9 35 (2.44%) Hadoop
10 30 (2.09%) Delta Lake
10 30 (2.09%) PostgreSQL
10 30 (2.09%) SQL Server
11 28 (1.95%) Pinecone
12 27 (1.88%) Relational Database
13 25 (1.74%) Amazon Athena
14 24 (1.67%) Mixpanel
15 21 (1.47%) MongoDB
15 21 (1.47%) Weaviate
16 17 (1.19%) Amazon Redshift
17 15 (1.05%) Redis
Development Applications
1 88 (6.14%) Git
2 82 (5.72%) MLflow
3 37 (2.58%) JIRA
4 28 (1.95%) GitLab
5 22 (1.54%) 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
1 308 (21.49%) Social Skills
2 284 (19.82%) Finance
3 177 (12.35%) Analytical Skills
4 135 (9.42%) Public Sector
5 88 (6.14%) Banking
6 32 (2.23%) Marketing
7 31 (2.16%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 28 (1.95%) Pharmaceutical
9 25 (1.74%) Documentation Skills
10 24 (1.67%) Legal
11 22 (1.54%) Aviation
11 22 (1.54%) Influencing Skills
11 22 (1.54%) Retail
12 21 (1.47%) Front Office
12 21 (1.47%) Investment Banking
13 18 (1.26%) Telecoms
14 13 (0.91%) Manufacturing
15 12 (0.84%) Aerospace
15 12 (0.84%) Financial Institution
15 12 (0.84%) Law
Job Titles
1 211 (14.72%) Data Scientist
2 200 (13.96%) Senior
3 187 (13.05%) Architect
4 150 (10.47%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 131 (9.14%) Data Engineer
6 121 (8.44%) Lead
7 95 (6.63%) Developer
8 76 (5.30%) Analyst
9 70 (4.88%) Python Engineer
10 63 (4.40%) Software Engineer
11 62 (4.33%) Machine Learning Engineer
12 59 (4.12%) Solutions Architect
13 57 (3.98%) Data Architect
14 52 (3.63%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 42 (2.93%) Senior Data Scientist
16 39 (2.72%) Consultant
17 33 (2.30%) Python Developer
18 31 (2.16%) Platform Engineer
19 30 (2.09%) Business Analyst
20 29 (2.02%) Artificial Intelligence Specialist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 183 (12.77%) PyTorch
2 133 (9.28%) TensorFlow
3 112 (7.82%) scikit-learn
4 98 (6.84%) Pandas
5 82 (5.72%) Kafka
6 72 (5.02%) LangChain
7 70 (4.88%) NumPy
8 67 (4.68%) React
9 63 (4.40%) PySpark
10 56 (3.91%) REST
11 53 (3.70%) .NET
12 46 (3.21%) Hugging Face
13 36 (2.51%) LangGraph
14 32 (2.23%) AngularJS
14 32 (2.23%) Model Context Protocol
14 32 (2.23%) Node.js
15 29 (2.02%) FastAPI
16 28 (1.95%) RESTful
17 20 (1.40%) Faiss
17 20 (1.40%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 169 (11.79%) Cloud Native
2 141 (9.84%) AI Agents
3 120 (8.37%) Algorithms
4 51 (3.56%) Product Ownership
5 40 (2.79%) Distributed Systems
5 40 (2.79%) Onboarding
6 24 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
7 20 (1.40%) Data Structures
8 19 (1.33%) Fixed Income
8 19 (1.33%) Life Science
9 18 (1.26%) Enterprise Software
10 17 (1.19%) Legacy Systems
10 17 (1.19%) Management Information System
11 15 (1.05%) Analytical Mindset
12 13 (0.91%) Hybrid Cloud
12 13 (0.91%) Low-Code
13 12 (0.84%) Public Cloud
14 11 (0.77%) Augmented Reality
14 11 (0.77%) Cyber Threat
14 11 (0.77%) Distributed Computing
Operating Systems
1 30 (2.09%) Linux
2 15 (1.05%) Windows
3 11 (0.77%) Unix
4 7 (0.49%) Apple iOS
5 6 (0.42%) Android
5 6 (0.42%) VMS
6 2 (0.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 1 (0.070%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,143 (79.76%) AI
2 532 (37.12%) Data Science
3 446 (31.12%) CI/CD
4 423 (29.52%) LLM
5 399 (27.84%) Analytics
6 320 (22.33%) Data Pipeline
7 319 (22.26%) Generative AI
8 296 (20.66%) DevOps
9 283 (19.75%) MLOps
10 269 (18.77%) Data Engineering
11 264 (18.42%) Agile
12 210 (14.65%) Use Case
13 197 (13.75%) Problem-Solving
14 184 (12.84%) Software Engineering
15 180 (12.56%) Data Governance
16 175 (12.21%) Decision-Making
16 175 (12.21%) ETL
17 174 (12.14%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 156 (10.89%) Containerisation
19 148 (10.33%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 828 (57.78%) Python
2 368 (25.68%) SQL
3 105 (7.33%) Java
4 74 (5.16%) C#
5 65 (4.54%) R
6 50 (3.49%) TypeScript
7 46 (3.21%) JavaScript
8 26 (1.81%) C++
9 20 (1.40%) Bash
10 17 (1.19%) PowerShell
11 14 (0.98%) 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%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 235 (16.40%) Security Cleared
2 161 (11.24%) SC Cleared
3 116 (8.09%) Degree
4 52 (3.63%) Master's Degree
5 38 (2.65%) BPSS Clearance
5 38 (2.65%) DV Cleared
6 35 (2.44%) Computer Science Degree
6 35 (2.44%) PhD
7 26 (1.81%) AWS Certification
8 20 (1.40%) Azure Certification
9 18 (1.26%) CISSP
10 15 (1.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 14 (0.98%) CISM
12 6 (0.42%) ISTQB
12 6 (0.42%) Microsoft Certification
12 6 (0.42%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 5 (0.35%) GIAC
13 5 (0.35%) PMI Certification
13 5 (0.35%) PMP
14 4 (0.28%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 156 (10.89%) Data Quality
2 57 (3.98%) GDPR
3 50 (3.49%) QA
4 30 (2.09%) NIST
5 18 (1.26%) Accessibility
6 15 (1.05%) 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
1 193 (13.47%) Docker
2 13 (0.91%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 10 (0.70%) 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 (0.070%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 228 (15.91%) Kubernetes
2 141 (9.84%) Terraform
3 22 (1.54%) Kubeflow
4 19 (1.33%) Grafana
5 14 (0.98%) Ansible
6 13 (0.91%) Prometheus
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 (0.070%) Argo
11 1 (0.070%) HP Fortify
11 1 (0.070%) Knative
11 1 (0.070%) logstash
Vendors
1 198 (13.82%) Databricks
2 162 (11.30%) Microsoft
3 99 (6.91%) OpenAI
4 89 (6.21%) Google
5 56 (3.91%) Foundry
6 38 (2.65%) SAP
7 34 (2.37%) Oracle
8 21 (1.47%) ServiceNow
9 16 (1.12%) IBM
10 15 (1.05%) UiPath
11 13 (0.91%) Informatica
12 12 (0.84%) Dynatrace
13 11 (0.77%) Automation Anywhere
14 9 (0.63%) Amplitude
15 7 (0.49%) NVIDIA
15 7 (0.49%) Sybase
16 6 (0.42%) Talend
16 6 (0.42%) Workday
17 5 (0.35%) Ariba
17 5 (0.35%) Splunk