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 17 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 87 99 112
Rank change year-on-year +12 +13 +84
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,586 844 806
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.96% 2.55% 2.08%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.50% 2.82% 2.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,029 537 575
10th Percentile £413 £400 £413
25th Percentile £490 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £557 £600
Median % change year-on-year +3.23% -7.17% +4.35%
75th Percentile £700 £675 £738
90th Percentile £788 £793 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £500
% change year-on-year - +10.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 40 23 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £33.80 £13.06
25th Percentile £38.50 £52.86 £34.50
Median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +2.67% +62.41% -
75th Percentile £84.06 £83.01 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £88.00 £58.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £77.50 £49.34
% change year-on-year -0.65% +57.07% +6.84%

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 45,350 29,954 33,125
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.75% 90.50% 85.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,857 18,668 21,203
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £424 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.31%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,845 1,726 1,796
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.03
25th Percentile £18.50 £17.31 £18.23
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £40.97
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -38.61% -1.28%
75th Percentile £68.00 £48.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.25 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.13% -45.88% +13.33%

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 17 August 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 17 August 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 17 August 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 +12 1,367 £575 +1.77% 2,635
London +31 910 £588 +2.17% 1,713
UK excluding London +2 497 £550 - 1,252
Work from Home +6 414 £596 +8.27% 1,096
South East -12 138 £600 +4.35% 339
North of England -16 137 £554 +11.53% 265
Scotland +31 82 £430 -14.00% 154
North West -22 66 £600 +11.63% 156
Yorkshire +4 58 £550 +12.19% 75
Midlands -23 58 £550 +4.76% 102
West Midlands -28 48 £550 -8.33% 63
South West -36 45 £525 -4.55% 147
East of England -26 30 £500 -13.04% 187
North East -36 13 £463 +8.82% 35
Wales -9 9 £540 -20.00% 31
East Midlands -16 9 £450 +5.88% 39
Northern Ireland +5 1 £334 -52.29% 46

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 84 (5.30%) Apache Spark
2 77 (4.85%) Apache Airflow
3 47 (2.96%) Apache
4 32 (2.02%) Jupyter
5 19 (1.20%) Confluence
6 8 (0.50%) SAS
7 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
8 5 (0.32%) Palantir Foundry
9 4 (0.25%) CMS
9 4 (0.25%) Headless CMS
9 4 (0.25%) SharePoint
10 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 2 (0.13%) Appian
11 2 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.063%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.063%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.063%) Luigi
12 1 (0.063%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 30 (1.89%) Chatbot
2 10 (0.63%) Microsoft Excel
3 5 (0.32%) CPLEX
4 4 (0.25%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
6 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
6 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Project
6 2 (0.13%) Notion
6 2 (0.13%) NUKE
7 1 (0.063%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.063%) Simulink
7 1 (0.063%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 11 (0.69%) SAP IBP
2 8 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
3 4 (0.25%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.13%) Cloudability
5 2 (0.13%) Oracle ERP
5 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.063%) Actimize
6 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
6 1 (0.063%) OpenText VIM for SAP
6 1 (0.063%) Oracle Cash Management
6 1 (0.063%) Oracle Payables
6 1 (0.063%) Oracle Receivables
6 1 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
6 1 (0.063%) SAP APO
6 1 (0.063%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 552 (34.80%) Azure
2 540 (34.05%) AWS
3 314 (19.80%) GCP
4 129 (8.13%) Power Platform
5 106 (6.68%) GitHub
6 102 (6.43%) Serverless
7 89 (5.61%) Amazon S3
8 87 (5.49%) Snowflake
9 80 (5.04%) AWS Lambda
10 72 (4.54%) Amazon SageMaker
11 68 (4.29%) Azure Machine Learning
12 59 (3.72%) Amazon Bedrock
13 57 (3.59%) Azure AI
14 55 (3.47%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 55 (3.47%) dbt
15 51 (3.22%) Azure DevOps
16 50 (3.15%) Vertex AI
17 44 (2.77%) GitHub Actions
18 42 (2.65%) Azure Data Factory
19 37 (2.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.32%) Firewall
2 18 (1.13%) Internet
3 17 (1.07%) Network Security
4 14 (0.88%) Broadband
5 11 (0.69%) DNS
6 10 (0.63%) VPN
7 9 (0.57%) DHCP
8 4 (0.25%) NAS
8 4 (0.25%) SAN
8 4 (0.25%) TCP/IP
8 4 (0.25%) VLAN
9 3 (0.19%) HTTP
9 3 (0.19%) MQTT
9 3 (0.19%) SMS
9 3 (0.19%) SMTP
10 2 (0.13%) CTI
10 2 (0.13%) Modbus
10 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
10 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
11 1 (0.063%) OpenFlow
Database & Business Intelligence
1 116 (7.31%) Power BI
2 88 (5.55%) Data Lake
3 83 (5.23%) Data Warehouse
4 80 (5.04%) BigQuery
5 74 (4.67%) Metadata
6 68 (4.29%) Big Data
7 51 (3.22%) NoSQL
8 48 (3.03%) Amazon Redshift
9 45 (2.84%) Tableau
10 43 (2.71%) Delta Lake
11 35 (2.21%) Amazon Athena
12 32 (2.02%) Relational Database
13 29 (1.83%) PostgreSQL
14 25 (1.58%) Hadoop
15 22 (1.39%) MongoDB
16 20 (1.26%) Looker
17 19 (1.20%) Data Mining
18 18 (1.13%) Neo4j
19 17 (1.07%) Elasticsearch
20 16 (1.01%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 91 (5.74%) Git
2 53 (3.34%) MLflow
3 47 (2.96%) GitLab
4 44 (2.77%) JIRA
5 22 (1.39%) Jenkins
6 10 (0.63%) Claude Code
6 10 (0.63%) Vite
7 9 (0.57%) Selenium
8 6 (0.38%) Cypress.io
8 6 (0.38%) ERwin
9 4 (0.25%) PyCharm
9 4 (0.25%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
10 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
11 2 (0.13%) JMeter
11 2 (0.13%) JUnit
11 2 (0.13%) NUnit
11 2 (0.13%) Oracle APEX
11 2 (0.13%) SonarQube
11 2 (0.13%) Visual Studio
General
1 335 (21.12%) Social Skills
2 292 (18.41%) Finance
3 211 (13.30%) Analytical Skills
4 130 (8.20%) Public Sector
5 110 (6.94%) Banking
6 41 (2.59%) Marketing
7 37 (2.33%) Retail
8 32 (2.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 29 (1.83%) Telecoms
10 28 (1.77%) Pharmaceutical
11 26 (1.64%) Legal
12 22 (1.39%) Documentation Skills
12 22 (1.39%) Front Office
13 20 (1.26%) Aerospace
14 19 (1.20%) Manufacturing
15 18 (1.13%) Financial Institution
16 16 (1.01%) Aviation
17 15 (0.95%) Influencing Skills
17 15 (0.95%) Investment Banking
18 14 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 243 (15.32%) Senior
2 239 (15.07%) Architect
3 208 (13.11%) Data Scientist
4 169 (10.66%) Lead
5 167 (10.53%) Data Engineer
6 143 (9.02%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 95 (5.99%) Developer
8 91 (5.74%) Machine Learning Engineer
9 79 (4.98%) Python Engineer
10 73 (4.60%) Solutions Architect
11 68 (4.29%) Data Architect
12 65 (4.10%) Analyst
13 58 (3.66%) Software Engineer
14 55 (3.47%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
14 55 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
15 48 (3.03%) Security Architect
16 44 (2.77%) DevOps Engineer
16 44 (2.77%) Senior Data Engineer
17 41 (2.59%) Consultant
18 40 (2.52%) Senior Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 140 (8.83%) PyTorch
2 107 (6.75%) Kafka
3 99 (6.24%) TensorFlow
4 90 (5.67%) scikit-learn
5 79 (4.98%) LangChain
6 78 (4.92%) PySpark
7 68 (4.29%) Pandas
8 66 (4.16%) React
8 66 (4.16%) REST
9 51 (3.22%) NumPy
10 37 (2.33%) .NET
11 36 (2.27%) LangGraph
12 31 (1.95%) pytest
13 30 (1.89%) FastAPI
14 28 (1.77%) Hugging Face
15 26 (1.64%) Model Context Protocol
16 24 (1.51%) Node.js
17 23 (1.45%) AngularJS
17 23 (1.45%) RESTful
18 21 (1.32%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 193 (12.17%) Cloud Native
2 170 (10.72%) AI Agents
3 110 (6.94%) Algorithms
4 65 (4.10%) Product Ownership
5 59 (3.72%) Onboarding
6 56 (3.53%) Distributed Systems
7 30 (1.89%) Data Structures
8 29 (1.83%) Enterprise Software
9 25 (1.58%) Life Science
10 23 (1.45%) Data Protection Act
11 22 (1.39%) Hybrid Cloud
12 16 (1.01%) CMDB
13 15 (0.95%) Enterprise Cloud
13 15 (0.95%) Legacy Systems
13 15 (0.95%) Public Cloud
14 14 (0.88%) IoT
14 14 (0.88%) Security Posture
14 14 (0.88%) Social Media
14 14 (0.88%) Taxonomies
15 13 (0.82%) Augmented Reality
Operating Systems
1 48 (3.03%) Linux
2 12 (0.76%) Unix
2 12 (0.76%) Windows
3 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
3 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
4 3 (0.19%) Android
4 3 (0.19%) Apple iOS
4 3 (0.19%) VMS
5 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
6 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,277 (80.52%) AI
2 581 (36.63%) Data Science
3 501 (31.59%) CI/CD
4 453 (28.56%) Analytics
5 429 (27.05%) LLM
6 377 (23.77%) Generative AI
7 358 (22.57%) Data Pipeline
8 332 (20.93%) Agile
9 326 (20.55%) DevOps
10 292 (18.41%) MLOps
11 275 (17.34%) Data Engineering
12 247 (15.57%) Software Engineering
13 241 (15.20%) Use Case
14 224 (14.12%) Decision-Making
15 210 (13.24%) Roadmaps
16 205 (12.93%) Problem-Solving
17 199 (12.55%) Stakeholder Management
18 193 (12.17%) Infrastructure as Code
19 189 (11.92%) Data Governance
20 183 (11.54%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 864 (54.48%) Python
2 384 (24.21%) SQL
3 117 (7.38%) Java
4 75 (4.73%) JavaScript
5 60 (3.78%) TypeScript
6 45 (2.84%) C#
7 44 (2.77%) R
8 40 (2.52%) Bash
9 25 (1.58%) PowerShell
10 21 (1.32%) C++
11 19 (1.20%) Bicep
12 16 (1.01%) Scala
13 15 (0.95%) Go
14 11 (0.69%) PL/SQL
15 8 (0.50%) Cypher
15 8 (0.50%) SPARQL
16 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
16 7 (0.44%) Kotlin
17 6 (0.38%) Perl
17 6 (0.38%) Rust
Qualifications
1 275 (17.34%) Security Cleared
2 199 (12.55%) SC Cleared
3 122 (7.69%) Degree
4 54 (3.40%) Computer Science Degree
5 53 (3.34%) DV Cleared
6 45 (2.84%) AWS Certification
7 43 (2.71%) Master's Degree
8 34 (2.14%) CISSP
9 29 (1.83%) BPSS Clearance
9 29 (1.83%) PhD
10 22 (1.39%) Azure Certification
11 21 (1.32%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 14 (0.88%) CISM
12 14 (0.88%) TOGAF Certification
13 10 (0.63%) Cisco Certification
14 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 7 (0.44%) ITIL Certification
14 7 (0.44%) PMP
15 6 (0.38%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 191 (12.04%) Data Quality
2 62 (3.91%) GDPR
3 51 (3.22%) QA
4 32 (2.02%) NIST
5 22 (1.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.95%) EU AI Act
7 14 (0.88%) Accessibility
8 11 (0.69%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 9 (0.57%) GxP
10 8 (0.50%) GRC
10 8 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 7 (0.44%) Actionable Recommendations
12 6 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 42001
12 6 (0.38%) SLA
12 6 (0.38%) WCAG
13 5 (0.32%) Solvency II
14 4 (0.25%) COBIT
14 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
14 4 (0.25%) NCSC
15 3 (0.19%) IFRS
System Software
1 216 (13.62%) Docker
2 12 (0.76%) Active Directory
3 8 (0.50%) IAG
4 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.32%) VMware Infrastructure
5 4 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.19%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
6 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 2 (0.13%) Firmware
7 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.13%) Virtual Machines
7 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.063%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 272 (17.15%) Kubernetes
2 182 (11.48%) Terraform
3 34 (2.14%) Ansible
4 29 (1.83%) Kubeflow
5 26 (1.64%) Grafana
6 19 (1.20%) Prometheus
7 6 (0.38%) Istio
7 6 (0.38%) Podman
8 4 (0.25%) systemd
9 3 (0.19%) Kibana
9 3 (0.19%) Nagios
9 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.19%) Puppet
9 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.19%) vMotion
10 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.13%) Argo
10 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.13%) Rancher
10 2 (0.13%) SCCM
Vendors
1 203 (12.80%) Databricks
2 160 (10.09%) Microsoft
3 107 (6.75%) Google
4 74 (4.67%) OpenAI
5 48 (3.03%) SAP
6 38 (2.40%) Foundry
7 37 (2.33%) ServiceNow
8 29 (1.83%) Oracle
9 22 (1.39%) Informatica
10 17 (1.07%) Dynatrace
11 14 (0.88%) IBM
12 13 (0.82%) Splunk
13 12 (0.76%) UiPath
14 8 (0.50%) Nexthink
15 7 (0.44%) Salesforce
15 7 (0.44%) Sybase
16 6 (0.38%) Cisco
16 6 (0.38%) Pega
16 6 (0.38%) VMware
16 6 (0.38%) Workday