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 26 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 82 102 184
Rank change year-on-year +20 +82 +17
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,122 849 641
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.11% 2.33% 1.40%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.48% 2.68% 1.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 744 565 469
10th Percentile £402 £384 £384
25th Percentile £475 £475 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £553 £600 £575
Median % change year-on-year -7.92% +4.35% -8.00%
75th Percentile £688 £731 £703
90th Percentile £775 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £513 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +2.65% -4.76% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 29 16 29
10th Percentile £29.03 £13.06 £42.50
25th Percentile £42.25 £16.39 -
Median hourly rate £51.44 £37.34 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +37.76% -19.14% -11.19%
75th Percentile £84.50 £48.07 £47.50
90th Percentile £114.60 £59.38 £65.35
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £46.18 £46.18
% change year-on-year +40.75% - -12.04%

All Process and 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 32,237 31,694 40,485
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.44% 86.89% 88.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,185 19,077 27,186
10th Percentile £300 £310 £308
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.41% -3.18%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,109 1,149 1,555
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.22 £14.31
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.24 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -28.14% -21.35% +27.14%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.85 £32.50 £44.50
% change year-on-year -29.69% -26.97% +48.33%

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 26 November 2025.

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 26 November 2025.

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 26 November 2025. 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 +16 949 £575 -4.17% 1,185
London +14 621 £625 - 480
UK excluding London +49 368 £513 +2.65% 931
Work from Home +39 357 £550 +6.13% 857
North of England -19 92 £480 -1.84% 218
South East +28 84 £550 +5.26% 366
East of England +23 64 £531 +1.19% 59
Scotland +40 61 £503 +26.02% 39
North West -6 48 £458 -5.08% 118
Yorkshire -11 39 £525 - 85
Midlands -11 37 £508 +12.78% 135
West Midlands -2 27 £520 +15.44% 72
South West -21 25 £550 -15.38% 92
Wales 0 10 £700 +185.71% 16
East Midlands -11 10 £410 +15.17% 61
North East -19 6 £450 +4.05% 17
Northern Ireland -4 1 £700 - 11

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 87 (7.75%) Apache Spark
2 68 (6.06%) Apache Airflow
3 31 (2.76%) Apache
4 24 (2.14%) Jupyter
5 9 (0.80%) Confluence
5 9 (0.80%) SAS
6 8 (0.71%) Apache Pig
7 6 (0.53%) GeoServer
7 6 (0.53%) Smallworld
8 4 (0.36%) Appian
8 4 (0.36%) IIS
8 4 (0.36%) SharePoint
9 3 (0.27%) CMS
10 1 (0.089%) Apache Solr
10 1 (0.089%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.089%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.089%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.089%) nginx
10 1 (0.089%) Red Hat Fuse
Applications
1 42 (3.74%) Chatbot
2 17 (1.52%) Microsoft Excel
3 12 (1.07%) Microsoft Office
4 8 (0.71%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 6 (0.53%) Microsoft Project
5 6 (0.53%) Simulink
6 1 (0.089%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.089%) GNU Octave
6 1 (0.089%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.089%) Sketch
6 1 (0.089%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.089%) Trello
Business Applications
1 10 (0.89%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (0.27%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.18%) Distributed Ledger
3 2 (0.18%) SAP ERP
3 2 (0.18%) Teamcenter
4 1 (0.089%) IBM Planning Analytics
4 1 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.089%) SAP GRC
4 1 (0.089%) Shopify
4 1 (0.089%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 473 (42.16%) Azure
2 391 (34.85%) AWS
3 221 (19.70%) GCP
4 106 (9.45%) Power Platform
5 95 (8.47%) GitHub
6 91 (8.11%) Serverless
7 87 (7.75%) Azure Machine Learning
8 70 (6.24%) Azure DevOps
9 64 (5.70%) Snowflake
10 62 (5.53%) Amazon SageMaker
11 59 (5.26%) Amazon S3
12 57 (5.08%) Vertex AI
13 52 (4.63%) Azure AI
14 48 (4.28%) AWS Lambda
14 48 (4.28%) Azure AKS
14 48 (4.28%) Azure Data Factory
15 45 (4.01%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 43 (3.83%) GitHub Actions
17 37 (3.30%) Amazon Bedrock
18 36 (3.21%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 14 (1.25%) HTTP
1 14 (1.25%) Network Security
2 13 (1.16%) DNS
3 9 (0.80%) SSL
4 8 (0.71%) FTP
4 8 (0.71%) SMTP
5 7 (0.62%) Ethernet
6 6 (0.53%) Firewall
6 6 (0.53%) Internet
7 4 (0.36%) VPN
8 2 (0.18%) 2G
8 2 (0.18%) BGP
8 2 (0.18%) Cisco IPT
8 2 (0.18%) Cisco Nexus
8 2 (0.18%) Ethernet VPN
8 2 (0.18%) InfiniBand
8 2 (0.18%) LTE
8 2 (0.18%) Modbus
8 2 (0.18%) OSPF
8 2 (0.18%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 95 (8.47%) Power BI
2 79 (7.04%) Data Warehouse
3 65 (5.79%) Big Data
4 60 (5.35%) Data Lake
5 54 (4.81%) PostgreSQL
6 53 (4.72%) NoSQL
7 45 (4.01%) BigQuery
8 39 (3.48%) Tableau
9 35 (3.12%) Metadata
10 28 (2.50%) Hadoop
11 24 (2.14%) MongoDB
12 23 (2.05%) Pinecone
13 20 (1.78%) Elasticsearch
14 19 (1.69%) Data Mining
15 18 (1.60%) Amazon Athena
16 16 (1.43%) Amazon Redshift
16 16 (1.43%) Relational Database
17 15 (1.34%) Delta Lake
18 13 (1.16%) Geospatial Data
19 12 (1.07%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 93 (8.29%) Git
2 64 (5.70%) MLflow
3 57 (5.08%) Jenkins
4 36 (3.21%) GitLab
5 24 (2.14%) JIRA
6 18 (1.60%) Selenium
7 16 (1.43%) JMeter
8 13 (1.16%) SonarQube
9 10 (0.89%) JUnit
10 8 (0.71%) Cypress.io
11 7 (0.62%) Visual Studio
12 6 (0.53%) Mockito
12 6 (0.53%) Postman
12 6 (0.53%) PyCharm
13 5 (0.45%) Artifactory
13 5 (0.45%) Cucumber
13 5 (0.45%) Gradle
13 5 (0.45%) MSTest
14 4 (0.36%) Robot Framework
14 4 (0.36%) RStudio
General
1 330 (29.41%) Social Skills
2 213 (18.98%) Finance
3 128 (11.41%) Analytical Skills
4 96 (8.56%) Public Sector
5 74 (6.60%) Banking
6 51 (4.55%) Marketing
7 43 (3.83%) Pharmaceutical
8 39 (3.48%) Retail
9 29 (2.58%) Legal
10 28 (2.50%) Telecoms
11 26 (2.32%) Investment Banking
12 25 (2.23%) Manufacturing
13 21 (1.87%) Front Office
14 19 (1.69%) Documentation Skills
15 17 (1.52%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 16 (1.43%) Influencing Skills
17 13 (1.16%) Electronics
18 12 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
19 11 (0.98%) Financial Institution
20 10 (0.89%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 167 (14.88%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 156 (13.90%) Data Scientist
3 149 (13.28%) Architect
4 118 (10.52%) Developer
5 116 (10.34%) Data Engineer
6 111 (9.89%) Senior
7 68 (6.06%) Lead
8 53 (4.72%) Machine Learning Engineer
9 52 (4.63%) Python Engineer
10 51 (4.55%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
11 49 (4.37%) Analyst
12 42 (3.74%) Software Engineer
13 37 (3.30%) Data Architect
14 34 (3.03%) Gen AI Engineer
15 32 (2.85%) Solutions Architect
16 31 (2.76%) Azure Engineer
17 28 (2.50%) Consultant
18 27 (2.41%) Python Developer
19 25 (2.23%) Full-Stack Engineer
20 24 (2.14%) Product Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 185 (16.49%) PyTorch
2 163 (14.53%) TensorFlow
3 107 (9.54%) scikit-learn
4 103 (9.18%) Pandas
5 85 (7.58%) LangChain
6 83 (7.40%) FastAPI
7 69 (6.15%) NumPy
8 64 (5.70%) Kafka
9 61 (5.44%) Hugging Face
9 61 (5.44%) React
10 56 (4.99%) RESTful
11 49 (4.37%) LangGraph
12 47 (4.19%) PySpark
13 45 (4.01%) REST
14 35 (3.12%) .NET
15 34 (3.03%) Flask
16 33 (2.94%) Node.js
17 31 (2.76%) pytest
18 22 (1.96%) AngularJS
19 20 (1.78%) OpenCV
Miscellaneous
1 178 (15.86%) Algorithms
2 141 (12.57%) Cloud Native
3 92 (8.20%) AI Agents
4 46 (4.10%) Product Ownership
5 38 (3.39%) Distributed Systems
6 37 (3.30%) Data Protection Act
7 34 (3.03%) Onboarding
8 31 (2.76%) Distributed Computing
9 29 (2.58%) Legacy Systems
10 25 (2.23%) Genomics
11 23 (2.05%) Life Science
12 22 (1.96%) Analytical Mindset
12 22 (1.96%) Data Structures
13 20 (1.78%) Hybrid Cloud
14 17 (1.52%) Enterprise Software
14 17 (1.52%) Management Information System
15 14 (1.25%) Greenfield Project
16 11 (0.98%) IoT
17 10 (0.89%) Cyber Threat
17 10 (0.89%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 30 (2.67%) Linux
2 11 (0.98%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 9 (0.80%) Ubuntu
3 9 (0.80%) VMS
3 9 (0.80%) Windows
4 8 (0.71%) Unix
5 5 (0.45%) Android
5 5 (0.45%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.18%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.089%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 823 (73.35%) AI
2 446 (39.75%) Data Science
3 324 (28.88%) LLM
4 303 (27.01%) CI/CD
5 300 (26.74%) Analytics
6 285 (25.40%) Agile
7 261 (23.26%) DevOps
8 213 (18.98%) Data Pipeline
9 203 (18.09%) Generative AI
10 197 (17.56%) MLOps
11 191 (17.02%) Problem-Solving
12 182 (16.22%) Data Engineering
13 165 (14.71%) Natural Language Processing
14 161 (14.35%) Software Engineering
15 145 (12.92%) Containerisation
16 134 (11.94%) Use Case
16 134 (11.94%) Visualisation
17 131 (11.68%) Computer Science
17 131 (11.68%) Data Modelling
18 127 (11.32%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 710 (63.28%) Python
2 269 (23.98%) SQL
3 78 (6.95%) R
4 73 (6.51%) Java
5 55 (4.90%) JavaScript
6 51 (4.55%) TypeScript
7 42 (3.74%) C#
8 36 (3.21%) PowerShell
9 35 (3.12%) C++
10 30 (2.67%) Scala
11 20 (1.78%) Bash
12 19 (1.69%) Bicep
13 14 (1.25%) MATLAB
14 13 (1.16%) C
15 11 (0.98%) Go
16 6 (0.53%) SystemVerilog
16 6 (0.53%) Tcl
17 5 (0.45%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 5 (0.45%) Shell Script
18 3 (0.27%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 179 (15.95%) Degree
2 155 (13.81%) Security Cleared
3 112 (9.98%) SC Cleared
4 68 (6.06%) Master's Degree
5 47 (4.19%) MCP
6 46 (4.10%) Computer Science Degree
7 40 (3.57%) PhD
8 29 (2.58%) DV Cleared
9 24 (2.14%) Azure Certification
10 15 (1.34%) AWS Certification
11 13 (1.16%) BPSS Clearance
12 8 (0.71%) CISSP
13 6 (0.53%) HNC
13 6 (0.53%) HND
14 5 (0.45%) TOGAF Certification
15 4 (0.36%) Cisco Certification
15 4 (0.36%) CISM
15 4 (0.36%) ISTQB
15 4 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 4 (0.36%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 69 (6.15%) Data Quality
2 55 (4.90%) GDPR
3 40 (3.57%) QA
4 39 (3.48%) NIST
5 32 (2.85%) EU AI Act
6 23 (2.05%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 21 (1.87%) Accessibility
8 8 (0.71%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 6 (0.53%) DO-254
10 5 (0.45%) HIPAA
10 5 (0.45%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 5 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 42001
10 5 (0.45%) SOC 2
11 4 (0.36%) Disclosure Scotland
11 4 (0.36%) NCSC
12 3 (0.27%) PCI DSS
13 2 (0.18%) EMIR
13 2 (0.18%) GRC
13 2 (0.18%) JSP 440
13 2 (0.18%) NIST 800
System Software
1 186 (16.58%) Docker
2 11 (0.98%) Virtual Machines
3 10 (0.89%) Active Directory
4 6 (0.53%) Firmware
5 3 (0.27%) VMware Infrastructure
6 2 (0.18%) GPFS
6 2 (0.18%) Hyper-V
6 2 (0.18%) KVM
6 2 (0.18%) Lustre
6 2 (0.18%) VMware NSX
7 1 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 187 (16.67%) Kubernetes
2 118 (10.52%) Terraform
3 33 (2.94%) Grafana
4 24 (2.14%) Ansible
5 21 (1.87%) Kubeflow
6 16 (1.43%) Prometheus
7 14 (1.25%) Kibana
8 11 (0.98%) SCOM
9 10 (0.89%) logstash
10 9 (0.80%) ITRS Geneos
11 8 (0.71%) Argo
12 5 (0.45%) Kustomize
13 4 (0.36%) Cilium
13 4 (0.36%) Progress Chef
13 4 (0.36%) Rsyslog
14 3 (0.27%) Single Sign-On
14 3 (0.27%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
15 2 (0.18%) Podman
16 1 (0.089%) HP ALM
16 1 (0.089%) SCCM
Vendors
1 163 (14.53%) Microsoft
2 144 (12.83%) Databricks
3 99 (8.82%) Google
4 66 (5.88%) OpenAI
5 41 (3.65%) Foundry
6 36 (3.21%) SAP
7 21 (1.87%) Splunk
8 14 (1.25%) Salesforce
9 13 (1.16%) ServiceNow
10 12 (1.07%) NVIDIA
11 10 (0.89%) Oracle
12 9 (0.80%) Solace
12 9 (0.80%) TIBCO
13 8 (0.71%) Palantir
14 7 (0.62%) Cisco
14 7 (0.62%) Informatica
14 7 (0.62%) Intel
14 7 (0.62%) Pega
15 6 (0.53%) Altera
15 6 (0.53%) Sage