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

6 months to
14 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 89 94 107
Rank change year-on-year +5 +13 +87
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,573 891 822
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.91% 2.73% 2.14%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.44% 3.01% 2.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,002 571 560
10th Percentile £413 £400 £400
25th Percentile £490 £475 £499
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +4.35%
75th Percentile £688 £684 £731
90th Percentile £788 £775 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £544 £500
% change year-on-year +1.09% +8.81% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 22 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.75 £13.06
25th Percentile £45.50 £44.13 £25.93
Median hourly rate £77.00 £62.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +24.19% +34.26% -
75th Percentile £88.68 £78.44 £53.75
90th Percentile £89.38 £87.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £70.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +10.00% +51.58% -

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 45,698 29,594 32,877
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.42% 90.53% 85.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,784 18,388 20,318
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £403 £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 £726 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,048 1,782 1,485
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.23 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.44 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.50 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £66.95 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.00 £22.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +82.22% -47.67% +7.50%

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 14 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 14 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 14 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 0 1,352 £575 - 5,741
London +24 904 £589 -1.92% 4,044
UK excluding London -12 501 £550 +1.09% 2,268
Work from Home -7 415 £600 +9.09% 3,912
South East -1 136 £600 +4.35% 506
North of England -32 136 £550 +15.79% 437
Scotland +15 93 £450 -14.29% 357
Yorkshire +1 60 £538 +9.64% 114
North West -48 60 £600 +26.32% 278
South West -30 49 £513 -10.87% 308
Midlands -35 47 £500 -6.98% 187
West Midlands -33 40 £525 -4.55% 104
East of England -28 36 £463 -19.57% 313
North East -29 17 £488 +14.71% 49
Wales -8 8 £540 -20.00% 65
East Midlands -16 6 £425 -8.11% 83
Northern Ireland +4 1 £334 -52.29% 114

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 88 (5.59%) Apache Spark
2 80 (5.09%) Apache Airflow
3 55 (3.50%) Apache
4 33 (2.10%) Jupyter
5 24 (1.53%) Confluence
6 11 (0.70%) SAS
7 7 (0.45%) 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 (0.064%) Apache Pulsar
13 1 (0.064%) Luigi
13 1 (0.064%) nginx
Applications
1 28 (1.78%) Chatbot
2 10 (0.64%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.25%) CPLEX
4 3 (0.19%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
5 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.13%) Notion
5 2 (0.13%) NUKE
6 1 (0.064%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.064%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.064%) Simulink
6 1 (0.064%) Sketch
6 1 (0.064%) Trello
Business Applications
1 10 (0.64%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.45%) 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 (0.064%) Actimize
5 1 (0.064%) Endur
5 1 (0.064%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.064%) OpenLink RightAngle
5 1 (0.064%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.064%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.064%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.064%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.064%) SAP APO
5 1 (0.064%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 532 (33.82%) Azure
2 512 (32.55%) AWS
3 301 (19.14%) GCP
4 117 (7.44%) Power Platform
5 111 (7.06%) GitHub
6 104 (6.61%) Serverless
7 90 (5.72%) Amazon S3
7 90 (5.72%) Snowflake
8 83 (5.28%) AWS Lambda
9 74 (4.70%) Amazon SageMaker
10 61 (3.88%) dbt
11 60 (3.81%) Amazon Bedrock
11 60 (3.81%) Azure Machine Learning
12 51 (3.24%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 49 (3.12%) Azure AI
14 48 (3.05%) Azure DevOps
15 47 (2.99%) Vertex AI
16 44 (2.80%) Azure Data Factory
16 44 (2.80%) GitHub Actions
17 43 (2.73%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 20 (1.27%) Network Security
2 18 (1.14%) Broadband
2 18 (1.14%) Internet
3 12 (0.76%) DNS
3 12 (0.76%) Firewall
3 12 (0.76%) HTTP
4 9 (0.57%) DHCP
4 9 (0.57%) VPN
5 5 (0.32%) SMTP
6 4 (0.25%) NAS
6 4 (0.25%) SAN
6 4 (0.25%) TCP/IP
6 4 (0.25%) VLAN
7 3 (0.19%) MQTT
7 3 (0.19%) SMS
8 2 (0.13%) CTI
8 2 (0.13%) FTP
8 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
8 2 (0.13%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 109 (6.93%) Power BI
2 94 (5.98%) Data Warehouse
3 92 (5.85%) Data Lake
4 81 (5.15%) Metadata
5 78 (4.96%) BigQuery
6 65 (4.13%) Big Data
7 52 (3.31%) Amazon Redshift
8 47 (2.99%) Delta Lake
9 46 (2.92%) NoSQL
10 45 (2.86%) Tableau
11 36 (2.29%) Amazon Athena
12 34 (2.16%) PostgreSQL
13 30 (1.91%) Relational Database
14 23 (1.46%) Neo4j
15 22 (1.40%) MongoDB
16 21 (1.34%) Hadoop
17 19 (1.21%) Data Mining
18 18 (1.14%) Looker
19 17 (1.08%) Elasticsearch
20 16 (1.02%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 95 (6.04%) Git
2 54 (3.43%) GitLab
3 48 (3.05%) JIRA
4 46 (2.92%) MLflow
5 17 (1.08%) Jenkins
6 12 (0.76%) Claude Code
7 7 (0.45%) Selenium
7 7 (0.45%) Vite
8 6 (0.38%) ERwin
9 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
9 5 (0.32%) RStudio
10 4 (0.25%) JMeter
11 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
11 3 (0.19%) Pylint
11 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
12 2 (0.13%) Locust
12 2 (0.13%) NUnit
12 2 (0.13%) Postman
12 2 (0.13%) Spinnaker
12 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 339 (21.55%) Social Skills
2 297 (18.88%) Finance
3 229 (14.56%) Analytical Skills
4 139 (8.84%) Public Sector
5 112 (7.12%) Banking
6 40 (2.54%) Marketing
7 38 (2.42%) Retail
8 30 (1.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 28 (1.78%) Telecoms
10 27 (1.72%) Pharmaceutical
11 24 (1.53%) Documentation Skills
11 24 (1.53%) Legal
12 22 (1.40%) Aerospace
12 22 (1.40%) Front Office
12 22 (1.40%) Manufacturing
13 20 (1.27%) Influencing Skills
14 18 (1.14%) Financial Institution
15 17 (1.08%) Investment Banking
15 17 (1.08%) Law
16 14 (0.89%) Billing
Job Titles
1 271 (17.23%) Senior
2 258 (16.40%) Architect
3 200 (12.71%) Data Scientist
4 175 (11.13%) Data Engineer
5 169 (10.74%) Lead
6 140 (8.90%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 97 (6.17%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 75 (4.77%) Developer
8 75 (4.77%) Python Engineer
9 74 (4.70%) Solutions Architect
10 73 (4.64%) Data Architect
11 63 (4.01%) Analyst
11 63 (4.01%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
12 58 (3.69%) Software Engineer
13 52 (3.31%) Platform Engineer
14 51 (3.24%) Security Architect
15 49 (3.12%) Senior Data Engineer
16 48 (3.05%) Senior Data Scientist
17 45 (2.86%) DevOps Engineer
18 41 (2.61%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 192 (12.21%) Terraform
2 110 (6.99%) PyTorch
3 108 (6.87%) Kafka
4 91 (5.79%) PySpark
5 79 (5.02%) TensorFlow
6 71 (4.51%) REST
7 68 (4.32%) scikit-learn
8 64 (4.07%) LangChain
9 63 (4.01%) Pandas
10 59 (3.75%) React
11 48 (3.05%) NumPy
12 44 (2.80%) pytest
13 39 (2.48%) .NET
14 34 (2.16%) FastAPI
14 34 (2.16%) LangGraph
15 29 (1.84%) JSON
16 26 (1.65%) Hugging Face
17 24 (1.53%) RESTful
18 23 (1.46%) Model Context Protocol
19 18 (1.14%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 187 (11.89%) Cloud Native
2 159 (10.11%) AI Agents
3 95 (6.04%) Algorithms
4 68 (4.32%) Onboarding
4 68 (4.32%) Product Ownership
5 65 (4.13%) Distributed Systems
6 38 (2.42%) Enterprise Software
7 35 (2.23%) Data Structures
8 27 (1.72%) Life Science
9 23 (1.46%) Hybrid Cloud
10 22 (1.40%) Data Protection Act
11 20 (1.27%) Management Information System
12 18 (1.14%) CMDB
13 17 (1.08%) Taxonomies
14 16 (1.02%) Social Media
14 16 (1.02%) Virtual Team
15 15 (0.95%) Analytical Mindset
16 14 (0.89%) Clustering
16 14 (0.89%) Cyber Threat
16 14 (0.89%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 46 (2.92%) Linux
2 19 (1.21%) Windows
3 14 (0.89%) 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 (0.064%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.064%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,291 (82.07%) AI
2 574 (36.49%) Data Science
3 492 (31.28%) CI/CD
4 475 (30.20%) Analytics
5 422 (26.83%) LLM
6 384 (24.41%) Generative AI
7 348 (22.12%) Data Pipeline
8 329 (20.92%) Agile
9 320 (20.34%) DevOps
10 281 (17.86%) MLOps
11 276 (17.55%) Data Engineering
12 258 (16.40%) Software Engineering
13 245 (15.58%) Decision-Making
14 235 (14.94%) Use Case
15 230 (14.62%) Stakeholder Management
16 225 (14.30%) Roadmaps
17 210 (13.35%) Infrastructure as Code
18 203 (12.91%) Problem-Solving
19 200 (12.71%) Data Modelling
20 186 (11.82%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 848 (53.91%) Python
2 392 (24.92%) SQL
3 109 (6.93%) Java
4 77 (4.90%) JavaScript
5 56 (3.56%) TypeScript
6 41 (2.61%) R
7 40 (2.54%) Bash
8 39 (2.48%) C#
9 30 (1.91%) PowerShell
10 21 (1.34%) C++
10 21 (1.34%) Scala
11 17 (1.08%) Go
12 15 (0.95%) Bicep
13 11 (0.70%) Cypher
13 11 (0.70%) PL/SQL
14 9 (0.57%) Shell Script
15 7 (0.45%) Gremlin
15 7 (0.45%) SPARQL
16 6 (0.38%) Kotlin
17 5 (0.32%) Perl
Qualifications
1 311 (19.77%) Security Cleared
2 237 (15.07%) SC Cleared
3 120 (7.63%) Degree
4 58 (3.69%) DV Cleared
5 56 (3.56%) Computer Science Degree
6 44 (2.80%) AWS Certification
7 37 (2.35%) Master's Degree
8 35 (2.23%) CISSP
9 34 (2.16%) BPSS Clearance
10 28 (1.78%) PhD
11 25 (1.59%) Azure Certification
12 17 (1.08%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 16 (1.02%) CISM
14 15 (0.95%) TOGAF Certification
15 11 (0.70%) Cisco Certification
16 10 (0.64%) ITIL Certification
17 9 (0.57%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
18 7 (0.45%) Microsoft Certified Professional
18 7 (0.45%) PMP
19 6 (0.38%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 216 (13.73%) Data Quality
2 62 (3.94%) GDPR
3 60 (3.81%) QA
4 30 (1.91%) NIST
5 17 (1.08%) Accessibility
5 17 (1.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (1.02%) EU AI Act
7 10 (0.64%) 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%) COBIT
10 5 (0.32%) Solvency II
10 5 (0.32%) WCAG
11 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
11 4 (0.25%) SOC 2
System Software
1 207 (13.16%) Docker
2 15 (0.95%) Active Directory
3 13 (0.83%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (0.64%) Hyper-V
4 10 (0.64%) IAG
5 8 (0.51%) Virtual Machines
6 7 (0.45%) 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 (0.064%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 273 (17.36%) Kubernetes
2 40 (2.54%) Ansible
3 26 (1.65%) Grafana
3 26 (1.65%) Kubeflow
4 19 (1.21%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.38%) Istio
6 5 (0.32%) Podman
6 5 (0.32%) systemd
7 3 (0.19%) Argo
7 3 (0.19%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Nagios
7 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
7 3 (0.19%) Puppet
7 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
7 3 (0.19%) vMotion
8 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 2 (0.13%) Packer
8 2 (0.13%) SCCM
9 1 (0.064%) Cilium
9 1 (0.064%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 205 (13.03%) Databricks
2 161 (10.24%) Microsoft
3 101 (6.42%) Google
4 60 (3.81%) OpenAI
5 44 (2.80%) SAP
6 34 (2.16%) ServiceNow
7 30 (1.91%) Oracle
8 29 (1.84%) Foundry
9 23 (1.46%) Informatica
10 17 (1.08%) Dynatrace
11 14 (0.89%) VMware
12 13 (0.83%) Splunk
13 11 (0.70%) IBM
14 10 (0.64%) Nexthink
14 10 (0.64%) UiPath
15 9 (0.57%) Salesforce
16 7 (0.45%) Cisco
16 7 (0.45%) Sybase
17 6 (0.38%) Pega
18 5 (0.32%) New Relic