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

6 months to
6 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 82 103 118
Rank change year-on-year +21 +15 +82
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,600 836 767
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.00% 2.54% 1.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.53% 2.81% 2.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,034 528 545
10th Percentile £413 £400 £407
25th Percentile £493 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +3.45%
75th Percentile £700 £675 £750
90th Percentile £788 £791 £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 20
10th Percentile £28.50 £33.80 £13.06
25th Percentile £40.54 £52.86 £26.25
Median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +2.67% +62.41% -
75th Percentile £84.06 £81.01 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £88.00 £75.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £77.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year -0.65% +67.82% -

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 45,262 29,771 33,475
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.91% 90.46% 85.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,917 18,660 21,435
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
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 2,788 1,660 1,878
10th Percentile £14.46 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.33 £17.30 £18.15
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.33
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.63% -5.12%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £64.13
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.46
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.30 £40.94
% change year-on-year +88.67% -43.09% +3.38%

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 6 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 6 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 6 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 +15 1,372 £580 +4.13% 2,779
London +34 919 £595 +3.39% 1,884
UK excluding London -1 499 £550 - 1,116
Work from Home +5 426 £600 +9.09% 1,086
North of England -7 138 £558 +14.07% 236
South East -14 133 £618 +9.87% 309
Scotland +38 85 £440 -12.00% 121
North West -28 69 £608 +19.70% 140
Midlands -22 63 £550 +7.32% 111
Yorkshire -9 56 £550 +12.19% 63
West Midlands -28 50 £550 -6.38% 64
South West -40 44 £528 -4.09% 141
East of England -27 29 £500 -11.11% 152
North East -34 13 £463 +8.82% 34
East Midlands -4 11 £700 +64.71% 47
Wales -4 11 £540 -20.00% 36
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 27

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 85 (5.31%) Apache Spark
2 74 (4.63%) Apache Airflow
3 45 (2.81%) Apache
4 33 (2.06%) Jupyter
5 21 (1.31%) Confluence
6 8 (0.50%) SAS
7 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
8 5 (0.31%) CMS
8 5 (0.31%) Headless CMS
8 5 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.31%) SharePoint
9 3 (0.19%) Appian
9 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.13%) OpenStack
10 2 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.063%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.063%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.063%) Luigi
11 1 (0.063%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 29 (1.81%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.75%) Microsoft Excel
3 6 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 5 (0.31%) CPLEX
4 5 (0.31%) Microsoft Office
5 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Project
6 2 (0.13%) Notion
7 1 (0.063%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.063%) DaVinci Resolve
7 1 (0.063%) NUKE
7 1 (0.063%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 11 (0.69%) SAP IBP
2 8 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.13%) Oracle ERP
4 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
4 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.063%) OpenText VIM for SAP
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Cash Management
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
1 559 (34.94%) Azure
2 552 (34.50%) AWS
3 310 (19.38%) GCP
4 133 (8.31%) Power Platform
5 113 (7.06%) GitHub
6 106 (6.63%) Serverless
7 92 (5.75%) Amazon S3
8 82 (5.13%) AWS Lambda
8 82 (5.13%) Snowflake
9 81 (5.06%) Amazon SageMaker
10 76 (4.75%) Azure Machine Learning
11 61 (3.81%) Azure AI
12 58 (3.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 57 (3.56%) Amazon Bedrock
14 54 (3.38%) Vertex AI
15 52 (3.25%) Azure DevOps
16 50 (3.13%) dbt
17 48 (3.00%) GitHub Actions
18 44 (2.75%) Azure Data Factory
19 39 (2.44%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.31%) Firewall
2 17 (1.06%) Internet
3 16 (1.00%) Network Security
4 11 (0.69%) Broadband
4 11 (0.69%) DNS
5 10 (0.63%) VPN
6 9 (0.56%) DHCP
7 4 (0.25%) NAS
7 4 (0.25%) SAN
7 4 (0.25%) TCP/IP
7 4 (0.25%) VLAN
8 3 (0.19%) HTTP
8 3 (0.19%) MQTT
8 3 (0.19%) SMTP
9 2 (0.13%) 4G
9 2 (0.13%) 5G
9 2 (0.13%) CTI
9 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
9 2 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
9 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
Database & Business Intelligence
1 116 (7.25%) Power BI
2 87 (5.44%) Data Lake
3 77 (4.81%) BigQuery
4 73 (4.56%) Data Warehouse
5 71 (4.44%) Big Data
6 69 (4.31%) Metadata
7 54 (3.38%) NoSQL
8 46 (2.88%) Tableau
9 45 (2.81%) Amazon Redshift
10 42 (2.63%) Delta Lake
11 37 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
12 34 (2.13%) Relational Database
13 31 (1.94%) PostgreSQL
14 26 (1.63%) Hadoop
15 25 (1.56%) MongoDB
16 22 (1.38%) Looker
17 21 (1.31%) Neo4j
18 19 (1.19%) Data Mining
19 17 (1.06%) Elasticsearch
19 17 (1.06%) Pinecone
Development Applications
1 100 (6.25%) Git
2 65 (4.06%) MLflow
3 50 (3.13%) GitLab
4 45 (2.81%) JIRA
5 26 (1.63%) Jenkins
6 10 (0.63%) Claude Code
6 10 (0.63%) Vite
7 8 (0.50%) Selenium
8 5 (0.31%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.25%) ERwin
9 4 (0.25%) PyCharm
9 4 (0.25%) REST Assured
9 4 (0.25%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
11 2 (0.13%) JUnit
11 2 (0.13%) NUnit
11 2 (0.13%) Oracle APEX
11 2 (0.13%) Pylint
11 2 (0.13%) Visual Studio
General
1 337 (21.06%) Social Skills
2 304 (19.00%) Finance
3 217 (13.56%) Analytical Skills
4 139 (8.69%) Public Sector
5 114 (7.13%) Banking
6 41 (2.56%) Marketing
7 39 (2.44%) Retail
8 33 (2.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 32 (2.00%) Telecoms
10 31 (1.94%) Pharmaceutical
11 24 (1.50%) Legal
12 21 (1.31%) Documentation Skills
12 21 (1.31%) Front Office
13 20 (1.25%) Financial Institution
13 20 (1.25%) Manufacturing
14 19 (1.19%) Aerospace
15 17 (1.06%) Aviation
16 16 (1.00%) Presentation Skills
17 15 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
17 15 (0.94%) Law
Job Titles
1 244 (15.25%) Architect
2 239 (14.94%) Senior
3 221 (13.81%) Data Scientist
4 167 (10.44%) Lead
5 159 (9.94%) Data Engineer
6 142 (8.88%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 100 (6.25%) Developer
8 82 (5.13%) Machine Learning Engineer
9 78 (4.88%) Solutions Architect
10 76 (4.75%) Python Engineer
11 68 (4.25%) Data Architect
12 67 (4.19%) Analyst
13 63 (3.94%) Software Engineer
14 58 (3.63%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 53 (3.31%) Platform Engineer
16 47 (2.94%) Security Architect
17 46 (2.88%) DevOps Engineer
18 44 (2.75%) Senior Data Scientist
19 40 (2.50%) Consultant
20 39 (2.44%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 151 (9.44%) PyTorch
2 108 (6.75%) Kafka
2 108 (6.75%) TensorFlow
3 98 (6.13%) scikit-learn
4 81 (5.06%) LangChain
5 78 (4.88%) PySpark
6 74 (4.63%) Pandas
6 74 (4.63%) React
7 64 (4.00%) REST
8 56 (3.50%) NumPy
9 41 (2.56%) .NET
10 36 (2.25%) LangGraph
11 32 (2.00%) Hugging Face
12 31 (1.94%) AngularJS
13 28 (1.75%) FastAPI
14 26 (1.63%) pytest
15 25 (1.56%) Node.js
15 25 (1.56%) RESTful
16 24 (1.50%) Model Context Protocol
17 21 (1.31%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 189 (11.81%) Cloud Native
2 168 (10.50%) AI Agents
3 110 (6.88%) Algorithms
4 64 (4.00%) Product Ownership
5 59 (3.69%) Distributed Systems
6 57 (3.56%) Onboarding
7 30 (1.88%) Enterprise Software
8 29 (1.81%) Data Structures
9 25 (1.56%) Life Science
10 23 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
11 22 (1.38%) Hybrid Cloud
12 16 (1.00%) Legacy Systems
13 15 (0.94%) Security Posture
13 15 (0.94%) Taxonomies
14 14 (0.88%) Fixed Income
14 14 (0.88%) Public Cloud
15 13 (0.81%) CMDB
15 13 (0.81%) Enterprise Cloud
15 13 (0.81%) Virtual Team
16 12 (0.75%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 54 (3.38%) Linux
2 16 (1.00%) Windows
3 12 (0.75%) Unix
4 6 (0.38%) Apple iOS
5 5 (0.31%) Android
6 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
6 4 (0.25%) VMS
6 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,283 (80.19%) AI
2 592 (37.00%) Data Science
3 513 (32.06%) CI/CD
4 461 (28.81%) Analytics
5 432 (27.00%) LLM
6 372 (23.25%) Generative AI
7 358 (22.38%) Data Pipeline
8 337 (21.06%) DevOps
9 331 (20.69%) Agile
10 304 (19.00%) MLOps
11 281 (17.56%) Data Engineering
12 248 (15.50%) Software Engineering
12 248 (15.50%) Use Case
13 231 (14.44%) Decision-Making
14 209 (13.06%) Roadmaps
15 208 (13.00%) Problem-Solving
16 197 (12.31%) Infrastructure as Code
17 190 (11.88%) Stakeholder Management
18 188 (11.75%) Data Governance
19 183 (11.44%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 890 (55.63%) Python
2 398 (24.88%) SQL
3 118 (7.38%) Java
4 76 (4.75%) JavaScript
5 64 (4.00%) TypeScript
6 49 (3.06%) C#
7 48 (3.00%) R
8 40 (2.50%) Bash
9 25 (1.56%) PowerShell
10 19 (1.19%) Bicep
11 18 (1.13%) C++
12 15 (0.94%) Go
12 15 (0.94%) Scala
13 10 (0.63%) PL/SQL
14 9 (0.56%) Kotlin
15 8 (0.50%) Cypher
15 8 (0.50%) Rust
15 8 (0.50%) SPARQL
16 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
17 5 (0.31%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 280 (17.50%) Security Cleared
2 201 (12.56%) SC Cleared
3 125 (7.81%) Degree
4 56 (3.50%) Computer Science Degree
5 53 (3.31%) DV Cleared
6 46 (2.88%) AWS Certification
7 45 (2.81%) Master's Degree
8 36 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
9 32 (2.00%) CISSP
10 31 (1.94%) PhD
11 23 (1.44%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 20 (1.25%) Azure Certification
13 14 (0.88%) CISM
13 14 (0.88%) TOGAF Certification
14 8 (0.50%) Cisco Certification
15 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
15 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 5 (0.31%) AWS Certified Developer
16 5 (0.31%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 191 (11.94%) Data Quality
2 64 (4.00%) GDPR
3 50 (3.13%) QA
4 32 (2.00%) NIST
5 21 (1.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.94%) EU AI Act
7 14 (0.88%) Accessibility
8 12 (0.75%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 9 (0.56%) GxP
10 8 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 7 (0.44%) Actionable Recommendations
11 7 (0.44%) GRC
12 6 (0.38%) SLA
12 6 (0.38%) WCAG
13 5 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 5 (0.31%) 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
1 221 (13.81%) Docker
2 12 (0.75%) Active Directory
3 7 (0.44%) IAG
4 6 (0.38%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 5 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
5 5 (0.31%) VMware Infrastructure
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%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.13%) Virtual Machines
7 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.063%) Embedded Firmware
8 1 (0.063%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 274 (17.13%) Kubernetes
2 184 (11.50%) Terraform
3 34 (2.13%) Ansible
4 27 (1.69%) Kubeflow
5 25 (1.56%) Grafana
6 18 (1.13%) Prometheus
7 8 (0.50%) Podman
8 6 (0.38%) Istio
9 4 (0.25%) systemd
10 3 (0.19%) Kibana
10 3 (0.19%) Nagios
10 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
10 3 (0.19%) Puppet
10 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
10 3 (0.19%) vMotion
11 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 2 (0.13%) Argo
11 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
11 2 (0.13%) Packer
11 2 (0.13%) Rancher
Vendors
1 205 (12.81%) Databricks
2 167 (10.44%) Microsoft
3 101 (6.31%) Google
4 80 (5.00%) OpenAI
5 49 (3.06%) SAP
6 40 (2.50%) Foundry
7 34 (2.13%) ServiceNow
8 24 (1.50%) Oracle
9 20 (1.25%) Informatica
10 17 (1.06%) Dynatrace
11 15 (0.94%) IBM
12 13 (0.81%) Splunk
13 12 (0.75%) UiPath
14 7 (0.44%) Nexthink
14 7 (0.44%) Sybase
15 6 (0.38%) Amplitude
15 6 (0.38%) Pega
15 6 (0.38%) Salesforce
15 6 (0.38%) Workday
16 5 (0.31%) VMware