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 20 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 94 92 109
Rank change year-on-year -2 +17 +81
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,579 927 815
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.89% 2.82% 2.12%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.43% 3.11% 2.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,007 594 550
10th Percentile £413 £400 £400
25th Percentile £490 £475 £494
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +2.13%
75th Percentile £685 £675 £731
90th Percentile £788 £775 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £539 £498
% change year-on-year +2.09% +8.29% -9.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 23 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.34 £13.06
25th Percentile £42.58 £44.42 £25.93
Median hourly rate £77.00 £62.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +23.20% +35.34% -
75th Percentile £88.62 £79.38 £53.75
90th Percentile £89.25 £87.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +2.67% +62.41% -

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 46,068 29,787 33,025
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.40% 90.53% 85.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,926 18,499 20,227
10th Percentile £325 £300 £309
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,164 1,816 1,455
10th Percentile £13.81 £14.23 £14.90
25th Percentile £17.25 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% -1.91%
75th Percentile £67.48 £44.05 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.03 £22.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +77.91% -47.67% +1.18%

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 20 September 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 20 September 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 20 September 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 -1 1,357 £575 +1.77% 5,611
London +18 902 £584 -2.67% 3,882
UK excluding London -17 513 £550 +2.09% 2,131
Work from Home -13 419 £600 +9.09% 2,038
North of England -25 142 £550 +13.11% 412
South East -6 138 £600 +6.67% 495
Scotland +10 97 £450 -14.29% 286
Yorkshire -10 65 £538 +4.57% 105
North West -41 60 £600 +26.32% 250
South West -17 50 £513 -10.87% 304
Midlands -47 47 £563 +8.28% 193
West Midlands -43 39 £575 +10.68% 105
East of England -29 36 £463 -19.57% 322
North East -31 18 £513 +20.59% 60
Wales -8 7 £530 -21.48% 54
East Midlands -19 6 £425 -8.11% 88
Northern Ireland +5 1 £334 -52.29% 85

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 90 (5.70%) Apache Spark
2 79 (5.00%) Apache Airflow
3 54 (3.42%) Apache
4 35 (2.22%) Jupyter
5 23 (1.46%) Confluence
6 11 (0.70%) SAS
7 7 (0.44%) IIS
8 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
9 5 (0.32%) SharePoint
10 4 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 3 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
12 2 (0.13%) Appian
12 2 (0.13%) CMS
12 2 (0.13%) Headless CMS
13 1 (0.063%) Apache Pulsar
13 1 (0.063%) Luigi
13 1 (0.063%) nginx
Applications
1 28 (1.77%) Chatbot
2 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.25%) CPLEX
4 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
4 2 (0.13%) Notion
4 2 (0.13%) NUKE
5 1 (0.063%) Adobe XD
5 1 (0.063%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.063%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.063%) Simulink
5 1 (0.063%) Sketch
5 1 (0.063%) Trello
Business Applications
1 10 (0.63%) SAP IBP
2 8 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
3 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
3 3 (0.19%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
5 1 (0.063%) Actimize
5 1 (0.063%) Endur
5 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.063%) OpenLink RightAngle
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.063%) SAP APO
5 1 (0.063%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 528 (33.44%) Azure
2 516 (32.68%) AWS
3 301 (19.06%) GCP
4 110 (6.97%) GitHub
4 110 (6.97%) Power Platform
5 103 (6.52%) Serverless
6 90 (5.70%) Amazon S3
7 89 (5.64%) Snowflake
8 83 (5.26%) AWS Lambda
9 73 (4.62%) Amazon SageMaker
10 62 (3.93%) dbt
11 61 (3.86%) Amazon Bedrock
12 58 (3.67%) Azure Machine Learning
13 49 (3.10%) Azure AI
13 49 (3.10%) Azure DevOps
13 49 (3.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 48 (3.04%) Azure Data Factory
14 48 (3.04%) Vertex AI
15 43 (2.72%) SaaS
16 42 (2.66%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 20 (1.27%) Network Security
2 19 (1.20%) Broadband
3 18 (1.14%) Internet
4 12 (0.76%) DNS
4 12 (0.76%) HTTP
5 11 (0.70%) Firewall
6 9 (0.57%) DHCP
6 9 (0.57%) VPN
7 5 (0.32%) SMTP
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%) CTI
9 3 (0.19%) MQTT
9 3 (0.19%) SMS
10 2 (0.13%) FTP
10 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
10 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
10 2 (0.13%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 103 (6.52%) Power BI
2 94 (5.95%) Data Warehouse
3 92 (5.83%) Data Lake
4 86 (5.45%) Metadata
5 80 (5.07%) BigQuery
6 65 (4.12%) Big Data
7 52 (3.29%) Amazon Redshift
8 48 (3.04%) Delta Lake
9 45 (2.85%) NoSQL
10 42 (2.66%) Tableau
11 35 (2.22%) Amazon Athena
11 35 (2.22%) PostgreSQL
12 28 (1.77%) Relational Database
13 23 (1.46%) Neo4j
14 22 (1.39%) MongoDB
15 20 (1.27%) Hadoop
16 19 (1.20%) Data Mining
17 18 (1.14%) Elasticsearch
18 17 (1.08%) Looker
19 16 (1.01%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 102 (6.46%) Git
2 54 (3.42%) GitLab
3 44 (2.79%) JIRA
4 42 (2.66%) MLflow
5 17 (1.08%) Jenkins
6 13 (0.82%) Claude Code
7 7 (0.44%) Selenium
7 7 (0.44%) Vite
8 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
8 5 (0.32%) ERwin
8 5 (0.32%) JMeter
8 5 (0.32%) RStudio
9 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
9 3 (0.19%) Postman
9 3 (0.19%) Pylint
9 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
10 2 (0.13%) Locust
10 2 (0.13%) Newman
10 2 (0.13%) Spinnaker
10 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 349 (22.10%) Social Skills
2 304 (19.25%) Finance
3 233 (14.76%) Analytical Skills
4 144 (9.12%) Public Sector
5 117 (7.41%) Banking
6 40 (2.53%) Marketing
7 36 (2.28%) Retail
8 33 (2.09%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 29 (1.84%) Pharmaceutical
10 27 (1.71%) Telecoms
11 23 (1.46%) Aerospace
11 23 (1.46%) Documentation Skills
11 23 (1.46%) Legal
11 23 (1.46%) Manufacturing
12 22 (1.39%) Front Office
13 21 (1.33%) Influencing Skills
14 18 (1.14%) Financial Institution
14 18 (1.14%) Investment Banking
15 17 (1.08%) Law
16 14 (0.89%) Billing
Job Titles
1 283 (17.92%) Senior
2 260 (16.47%) Architect
3 192 (12.16%) Data Scientist
4 179 (11.34%) Data Engineer
5 176 (11.15%) Lead
6 148 (9.37%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 98 (6.21%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 73 (4.62%) Developer
8 73 (4.62%) Python Engineer
9 71 (4.50%) Data Architect
9 71 (4.50%) Solutions Architect
10 66 (4.18%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
11 61 (3.86%) Analyst
12 57 (3.61%) Software Engineer
13 54 (3.42%) Platform Engineer
14 51 (3.23%) Senior Data Engineer
15 50 (3.17%) Security Architect
16 48 (3.04%) Senior Data Scientist
17 45 (2.85%) DevOps Engineer
18 40 (2.53%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 195 (12.35%) Terraform
2 111 (7.03%) PyTorch
3 107 (6.78%) Kafka
4 89 (5.64%) PySpark
5 80 (5.07%) TensorFlow
6 71 (4.50%) REST
7 69 (4.37%) LangChain
8 65 (4.12%) scikit-learn
9 63 (3.99%) Pandas
10 56 (3.55%) React
11 47 (2.98%) NumPy
11 47 (2.98%) pytest
12 40 (2.53%) .NET
13 38 (2.41%) LangGraph
14 35 (2.22%) FastAPI
15 29 (1.84%) JSON
16 28 (1.77%) Hugging Face
17 26 (1.65%) Model Context Protocol
18 23 (1.46%) RESTful
19 19 (1.20%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 195 (12.35%) Cloud Native
2 172 (10.89%) AI Agents
3 95 (6.02%) Algorithms
4 68 (4.31%) Onboarding
4 68 (4.31%) Product Ownership
5 64 (4.05%) Distributed Systems
6 38 (2.41%) Enterprise Software
7 37 (2.34%) Data Structures
8 27 (1.71%) Life Science
9 25 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
10 22 (1.39%) Management Information System
11 21 (1.33%) Hybrid Cloud
12 18 (1.14%) CMDB
13 17 (1.08%) Social Media
13 17 (1.08%) Taxonomies
14 15 (0.95%) Analytical Mindset
15 14 (0.89%) Clustering
15 14 (0.89%) Cyber Threat
15 14 (0.89%) Public Cloud
15 14 (0.89%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 46 (2.91%) Linux
2 19 (1.20%) Windows
3 17 (1.08%) Unix
4 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.19%) Android
6 2 (0.13%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.13%) VMS
7 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,304 (82.58%) AI
2 573 (36.29%) Data Science
3 495 (31.35%) CI/CD
4 476 (30.15%) Analytics
5 433 (27.42%) LLM
6 394 (24.95%) Generative AI
7 350 (22.17%) Data Pipeline
8 331 (20.96%) Agile
9 321 (20.33%) DevOps
10 289 (18.30%) MLOps
11 278 (17.61%) Data Engineering
12 261 (16.53%) Software Engineering
13 248 (15.71%) Decision-Making
14 239 (15.14%) Use Case
15 238 (15.07%) Stakeholder Management
16 232 (14.69%) Roadmaps
17 215 (13.62%) Infrastructure as Code
18 202 (12.79%) Problem-Solving
19 199 (12.60%) Data Modelling
20 196 (12.41%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 848 (53.70%) Python
2 390 (24.70%) SQL
3 113 (7.16%) Java
4 76 (4.81%) JavaScript
5 58 (3.67%) TypeScript
6 40 (2.53%) C#
7 39 (2.47%) Bash
7 39 (2.47%) R
8 29 (1.84%) PowerShell
9 23 (1.46%) Scala
10 21 (1.33%) C++
11 18 (1.14%) Go
12 14 (0.89%) Bicep
13 12 (0.76%) Shell Script
14 11 (0.70%) Cypher
14 11 (0.70%) PL/SQL
15 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
15 7 (0.44%) SPARQL
16 6 (0.38%) Kotlin
17 5 (0.32%) Perl
Qualifications
1 315 (19.95%) Security Cleared
2 243 (15.39%) SC Cleared
3 123 (7.79%) Degree
4 57 (3.61%) DV Cleared
5 55 (3.48%) Computer Science Degree
6 47 (2.98%) AWS Certification
7 39 (2.47%) Master's Degree
8 38 (2.41%) BPSS Clearance
9 34 (2.15%) CISSP
10 28 (1.77%) PhD
11 27 (1.71%) Azure Certification
12 18 (1.14%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 15 (0.95%) CISM
13 15 (0.95%) TOGAF Certification
14 11 (0.70%) Cisco Certification
15 10 (0.63%) ITIL Certification
16 9 (0.57%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
17 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Certified Professional
18 6 (0.38%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 6 (0.38%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 222 (14.06%) Data Quality
2 60 (3.80%) GDPR
3 57 (3.61%) QA
4 31 (1.96%) NIST
5 18 (1.14%) Accessibility
5 18 (1.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (1.01%) EU AI Act
7 10 (0.63%) SLA
8 9 (0.57%) GRC
8 9 (0.57%) GxP
8 9 (0.57%) HIPAA
8 9 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 9 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 6 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
9 6 (0.38%) NCSC
10 5 (0.32%) Solvency II
11 4 (0.25%) Basel III
11 4 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
11 4 (0.25%) SOC 2
System Software
1 211 (13.36%) Docker
2 15 (0.95%) Active Directory
3 13 (0.82%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (0.63%) Hyper-V
4 10 (0.63%) IAG
5 8 (0.51%) Virtual Machines
6 7 (0.44%) NFS
7 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
8 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
8 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
8 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
9 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 2 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
9 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
10 1 (0.063%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 277 (17.54%) Kubernetes
2 40 (2.53%) Ansible
3 28 (1.77%) Kubeflow
4 26 (1.65%) Grafana
5 19 (1.20%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.38%) Istio
7 5 (0.32%) Podman
7 5 (0.32%) systemd
8 3 (0.19%) Argo
8 3 (0.19%) Kibana
8 3 (0.19%) Nagios
8 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
8 3 (0.19%) Puppet
8 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
8 3 (0.19%) vMotion
9 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 2 (0.13%) Packer
9 2 (0.13%) SCCM
10 1 (0.063%) QRadar
10 1 (0.063%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 205 (12.98%) Databricks
2 156 (9.88%) Microsoft
3 101 (6.40%) Google
4 61 (3.86%) OpenAI
5 44 (2.79%) SAP
6 34 (2.15%) ServiceNow
7 29 (1.84%) Foundry
7 29 (1.84%) Oracle
8 22 (1.39%) Informatica
9 17 (1.08%) Dynatrace
10 14 (0.89%) VMware
11 13 (0.82%) Splunk
12 11 (0.70%) IBM
12 11 (0.70%) Salesforce
13 10 (0.63%) Nexthink
13 10 (0.63%) UiPath
14 7 (0.44%) Cisco
14 7 (0.44%) Sybase
15 6 (0.38%) Pega
16 5 (0.32%) New Relic