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 4 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 82 96 160
Rank change year-on-year +14 +64 +64
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,401 777 677
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.10% 2.66% 1.53%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.63% 2.94% 1.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 872 508 500
10th Percentile £413 £375 £413
25th Percentile £500 £456 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £588 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.17% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £700 £725 £713
90th Percentile £788 £873 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £525
% change year-on-year - +4.76% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 50 21 19
10th Percentile £42.79 £25.25 £41.22
25th Percentile £50.06 £31.00 £42.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% +15.00% +42.86%
75th Percentile £83.75 £78.70 £66.25
90th Percentile £95.00 £81.01 £72.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.50 £77.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year -15.48% +24.00% +78.57%

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 38,631 26,466 38,100
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.54% 90.55% 86.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,504 17,183 24,720
10th Percentile £313 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £744 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.51% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,266 983 2,350
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.00 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.00 £20.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £35.96 £31.52 £33.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.07% -4.48% -11.53%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.83
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.10 £70.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £35.55 £30.00 £32.50
% change year-on-year +18.50% -7.69% -12.87%

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 4 April 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 4 April 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 4 April 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 +13 1,191 £575 -4.17% 1,132
London +20 800 £600 -1.23% 588
Work from Home +20 425 £600 +9.59% 460
UK excluding London +11 417 £550 - 725
North of England -21 103 £550 +4.76% 168
South East -17 89 £600 +4.35% 249
Scotland +46 65 £527 +14.00% 36
Midlands -26 61 £575 +21.05% 87
East of England -9 60 £520 -13.33% 60
North West -14 60 £550 +0.46% 94
South West -20 41 £550 -16.51% 97
West Midlands -27 40 £550 +10.00% 38
Yorkshire -35 34 £526 +0.21% 46
East Midlands -17 19 £600 +33.33% 49
Wales -9 18 £738 +31.11% 27
North East -8 12 £575 +60.61% 29
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 13

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
1 122 (8.71%) Apache Spark
2 81 (5.78%) Apache Airflow
3 58 (4.14%) Apache
4 32 (2.28%) Jupyter
5 11 (0.79%) Confluence
6 9 (0.64%) Appian
7 8 (0.57%) SAS
8 6 (0.43%) CMS
9 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
10 4 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.21%) Headless CMS
12 2 (0.14%) Luigi
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Superset
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.071%) ArcGIS
13 1 (0.071%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 33 (2.36%) Chatbot
2 13 (0.93%) Microsoft Excel
3 12 (0.86%) Microsoft Project
4 11 (0.79%) Microsoft Office
5 9 (0.64%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 4 (0.29%) Simulink
7 3 (0.21%) LaTeX
8 2 (0.14%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 7 (0.50%) SAP IBP
2 5 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
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
1 603 (43.04%) Azure
2 501 (35.76%) AWS
3 259 (18.49%) GCP
4 147 (10.49%) Power Platform
5 120 (8.57%) GitHub
6 104 (7.42%) Azure Machine Learning
7 102 (7.28%) Azure AI
8 95 (6.78%) Serverless
9 83 (5.92%) Azure DevOps
10 78 (5.57%) Snowflake
11 75 (5.35%) Amazon SageMaker
12 65 (4.64%) Amazon S3
13 62 (4.43%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 61 (4.35%) Azure Data Factory
14 61 (4.35%) GitHub Actions
14 61 (4.35%) Vertex AI
15 47 (3.35%) AWS Lambda
16 43 (3.07%) AWS CloudFormation
17 41 (2.93%) Amazon Bedrock
18 33 (2.36%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.14%) Network Security
2 11 (0.79%) Firewall
3 8 (0.57%) HTTP
4 7 (0.50%) DNS
5 6 (0.43%) Internet
6 5 (0.36%) FTP
6 5 (0.36%) SMTP
6 5 (0.36%) SSL
7 4 (0.29%) 5G
7 4 (0.29%) Ethernet
7 4 (0.29%) InfiniBand
8 3 (0.21%) Cisco IPT
8 3 (0.21%) LTE
8 3 (0.21%) VPN
9 2 (0.14%) 2G
9 2 (0.14%) 4G
9 2 (0.14%) Hyperconnected
9 2 (0.14%) Mobile Backhaul
9 2 (0.14%) Modbus
9 2 (0.14%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 113 (8.07%) Power BI
2 90 (6.42%) Data Lake
3 74 (5.28%) Data Warehouse
4 71 (5.07%) Big Data
5 57 (4.07%) NoSQL
6 56 (4.00%) BigQuery
7 52 (3.71%) Metadata
8 43 (3.07%) Tableau
9 36 (2.57%) Pinecone
9 36 (2.57%) PostgreSQL
10 32 (2.28%) Delta Lake
10 32 (2.28%) Hadoop
11 31 (2.21%) SQL Server
12 29 (2.07%) Relational Database
13 28 (2.00%) Amazon Athena
13 28 (2.00%) Weaviate
14 25 (1.78%) Mixpanel
15 21 (1.50%) Amazon Redshift
16 18 (1.28%) MongoDB
16 18 (1.28%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 111 (7.92%) Git
2 92 (6.57%) MLflow
3 39 (2.78%) Jenkins
4 32 (2.28%) JIRA
5 28 (2.00%) GitLab
6 13 (0.93%) Visual Studio
7 11 (0.79%) Selenium
8 10 (0.71%) PyCharm
9 9 (0.64%) JMeter
10 7 (0.50%) Gradle
10 7 (0.50%) SonarQube
11 6 (0.43%) MSTest
12 5 (0.36%) Maven
13 4 (0.29%) Android Studio
13 4 (0.29%) Bitbucket
13 4 (0.29%) Cypress.io
13 4 (0.29%) Oracle APEX
13 4 (0.29%) RStudio
14 3 (0.21%) JUnit
14 3 (0.21%) Vite
General
1 344 (24.55%) Social Skills
2 277 (19.77%) Finance
3 172 (12.28%) Analytical Skills
4 144 (10.28%) Public Sector
5 84 (6.00%) Banking
6 37 (2.64%) Marketing
6 37 (2.64%) Pharmaceutical
7 34 (2.43%) Legal
8 28 (2.00%) Retail
9 26 (1.86%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 24 (1.71%) Front Office
10 24 (1.71%) Influencing Skills
11 23 (1.64%) Investment Banking
12 22 (1.57%) Documentation Skills
13 21 (1.50%) Presentation Skills
14 17 (1.21%) Manufacturing
14 17 (1.21%) Telecoms
15 13 (0.93%) Aviation
16 12 (0.86%) Electronics
17 11 (0.79%) Law
Job Titles
1 198 (14.13%) Architect
2 193 (13.78%) Data Scientist
3 192 (13.70%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
4 186 (13.28%) Senior
5 134 (9.56%) Data Engineer
6 122 (8.71%) Lead
7 120 (8.57%) Developer
8 66 (4.71%) Analyst
9 64 (4.57%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
10 61 (4.35%) Data Architect
10 61 (4.35%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 60 (4.28%) Python Engineer
12 56 (4.00%) Software Engineer
13 47 (3.35%) Solutions Architect
14 41 (2.93%) Senior Data Scientist
15 40 (2.86%) Consultant
15 40 (2.86%) Gen AI Engineer
16 37 (2.64%) Azure Engineer
17 29 (2.07%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
18 28 (2.00%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 216 (15.42%) PyTorch
2 175 (12.49%) TensorFlow
3 139 (9.92%) scikit-learn
4 116 (8.28%) Pandas
5 85 (6.07%) NumPy
6 81 (5.78%) LangChain
7 78 (5.57%) React
8 72 (5.14%) Kafka
9 62 (4.43%) PySpark
10 59 (4.21%) .NET
11 54 (3.85%) Node.js
12 52 (3.71%) LangGraph
13 51 (3.64%) REST
14 47 (3.35%) Hugging Face
15 46 (3.28%) FastAPI
15 46 (3.28%) Model Context Protocol
16 45 (3.21%) AngularJS
17 36 (2.57%) RESTful
18 29 (2.07%) Faiss
19 27 (1.93%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 193 (13.78%) Cloud Native
2 158 (11.28%) Algorithms
3 130 (9.28%) AI Agents
4 51 (3.64%) Product Ownership
5 44 (3.14%) Onboarding
6 35 (2.50%) Distributed Systems
7 27 (1.93%) Data Protection Act
8 23 (1.64%) Legacy Systems
9 22 (1.57%) Hybrid Cloud
10 21 (1.50%) Enterprise Software
11 19 (1.36%) Fixed Income
12 18 (1.28%) Analytical Mindset
13 17 (1.21%) Distributed Computing
13 17 (1.21%) Life Science
13 17 (1.21%) Management Information System
14 16 (1.14%) Data Structures
15 13 (0.93%) Security Posture
16 12 (0.86%) Derivative
16 12 (0.86%) IoT
16 12 (0.86%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 37 (2.64%) Linux
2 12 (0.86%) VMS
3 11 (0.79%) Windows
4 10 (0.71%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 8 (0.57%) Android
5 8 (0.57%) Ubuntu
6 7 (0.50%) Apple iOS
7 4 (0.29%) Unix
8 1 (0.071%) CentOS
8 1 (0.071%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,094 (78.09%) AI
2 510 (36.40%) Data Science
3 427 (30.48%) CI/CD
4 408 (29.12%) Analytics
5 380 (27.12%) LLM
6 303 (21.63%) DevOps
7 299 (21.34%) Data Pipeline
8 297 (21.20%) Generative AI
9 274 (19.56%) Data Engineering
10 272 (19.41%) Agile
11 267 (19.06%) MLOps
12 209 (14.92%) Problem-Solving
13 194 (13.85%) Natural Language Processing
14 190 (13.56%) Use Case
15 183 (13.06%) Software Engineering
16 172 (12.28%) Containerisation
16 172 (12.28%) Data Governance
17 171 (12.21%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 168 (11.99%) Data Modelling
19 156 (11.13%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 842 (60.10%) Python
2 356 (25.41%) SQL
3 95 (6.78%) Java
4 86 (6.14%) C#
5 71 (5.07%) R
6 58 (4.14%) JavaScript
7 51 (3.64%) TypeScript
8 26 (1.86%) PowerShell
9 22 (1.57%) C++
10 18 (1.28%) Bash
10 18 (1.28%) Bicep
11 16 (1.14%) Scala
12 10 (0.71%) Go
12 10 (0.71%) Rust
13 9 (0.64%) MATLAB
14 8 (0.57%) Kotlin
15 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
16 4 (0.29%) SystemVerilog
16 4 (0.29%) Tcl
16 4 (0.29%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 244 (17.42%) Security Cleared
2 171 (12.21%) Degree
3 167 (11.92%) SC Cleared
4 75 (5.35%) Master's Degree
5 48 (3.43%) PhD
6 44 (3.14%) Computer Science Degree
6 44 (3.14%) DV Cleared
7 37 (2.64%) BPSS Clearance
8 21 (1.50%) AWS Certification
9 19 (1.36%) Azure Certification
10 16 (1.14%) CISSP
11 13 (0.93%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 11 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 11 (0.79%) CISM
13 10 (0.71%) ISTQB
14 7 (0.50%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
16 5 (0.36%) PMI Certification
16 5 (0.36%) PMP
16 5 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 140 (9.99%) Data Quality
2 67 (4.78%) GDPR
3 51 (3.64%) QA
4 31 (2.21%) NIST
5 21 (1.50%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 18 (1.28%) Accessibility
6 18 (1.28%) EU AI Act
7 9 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
8 8 (0.57%) HIPAA
9 7 (0.50%) HMG Security Policy Framework
9 7 (0.50%) NCSC
10 6 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 5 (0.36%) GRC
12 4 (0.29%) DO-254
12 4 (0.29%) PCI DSS
12 4 (0.29%) WCAG
13 3 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 3 (0.21%) SOC 2
14 2 (0.14%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 213 (15.20%) Docker
2 12 (0.86%) Active Directory
2 12 (0.86%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 7 (0.50%) Firmware
4 3 (0.21%) Lustre
4 3 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.14%) Ceph
5 2 (0.14%) HDFS
6 1 (0.071%) Embedded Firmware
6 1 (0.071%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 218 (15.56%) Kubernetes
2 143 (10.21%) Terraform
3 21 (1.50%) Kubeflow
4 17 (1.21%) Grafana
5 14 (1.00%) Ansible
6 11 (0.79%) Prometheus
7 10 (0.71%) Podman
8 7 (0.50%) SCOM
9 3 (0.21%) Argo
9 3 (0.21%) Rancher
10 2 (0.14%) Istio
10 2 (0.14%) Kibana
10 2 (0.14%) Knative
10 2 (0.14%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (0.071%) Docker Swarm
11 1 (0.071%) HP Fortify
11 1 (0.071%) logstash
11 1 (0.071%) Progress Chef
11 1 (0.071%) SELinux
11 1 (0.071%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 224 (15.99%) Databricks
2 187 (13.35%) Microsoft
3 121 (8.64%) Google
4 111 (7.92%) OpenAI
5 69 (4.93%) Foundry
6 37 (2.64%) SAP
7 29 (2.07%) Oracle
8 18 (1.28%) ServiceNow
9 14 (1.00%) Informatica
9 14 (1.00%) UiPath
10 11 (0.79%) Automation Anywhere
10 11 (0.79%) IBM
10 11 (0.79%) NVIDIA
11 8 (0.57%) Dynatrace
11 8 (0.57%) Salesforce
12 7 (0.50%) Amplitude
13 6 (0.43%) Siemens
13 6 (0.43%) Splunk
13 6 (0.43%) Talend
14 5 (0.36%) Greenplum