Machine Learning Contracts

Machine Learning (ML)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Machine Learning skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Machine Learning over the 6 months leading up to 30 April 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Apr 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 96 155 217
Rank change year-on-year +59 +62 -20
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 779 692 739
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 2.66% 1.59% 1.24%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.93% 1.84% 1.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 515 508 510
10th Percentile £378 £413 £431
25th Percentile £463 £488 £511
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £575 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -4.17% -
75th Percentile £738 £725 £725
90th Percentile £874 £775 £875
UK excluding London median daily rate £575 £525 £575
% change year-on-year +9.52% -8.70% +4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 20 18
10th Percentile £25.25 £41.24 £21.51
25th Percentile £45.00 £45.26 £25.37
Median hourly rate £61.50 £52.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.14% +50.00% -6.67%
75th Percentile £78.70 £66.38 £53.75
90th Percentile £81.01 £75.38 £78.13
UK excluding London median hourly rate £76.25 £61.25 £35.00
% change year-on-year +24.49% +75.00% -40.68%

All Process and 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 26,551 37,621 53,662
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.82% 86.30% 89.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,137 24,254 37,244
10th Percentile £308 £300 £325
25th Percentile £413 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £521 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.86% -4.55% +4.76%
75th Percentile £630 £638 £650
90th Percentile £744 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.80% - +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,071 2,437 1,746
10th Percentile £14.70 £12.75 £11.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £16.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £29.00 £35.50 £37.30
Median % change year-on-year -18.31% -4.83% +49.20%
75th Percentile £62.00 £59.95 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.94 £36.50 £36.00
% change year-on-year -23.45% +1.39% +80.00%

Machine Learning
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Machine Learning as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Machine Learning in the UK

Machine Learning
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Machine Learning.

Daily rate trend for Machine Learning in the UK

Machine Learning
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Machine Learning over the 6 months to 30 April 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Machine Learning in the UK

Machine Learning
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Machine Learning.

Hourly rate trend for Machine Learning in the UK

Machine Learning
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Machine Learning over the 6 months to 30 April 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Machine Learning in the UK

Machine Learning
Top 16 Contract 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 30 April 2025. 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 +56 673 £588 +1.29% 3,051
London +30 447 £600 -1.23% 1,555
Work from Home +63 275 £550 -8.33% 1,856
UK excluding London +91 229 £575 +9.52% 1,590
South East +77 59 £575 -4.17% 425
North of England +26 44 £495 -10.00% 456
South West +73 39 £645 +17.27% 92
East of England +46 36 £625 +38.89% 123
North West +17 30 £548 +4.29% 232
Scotland -6 25 £467 +0.97% 86
Midlands +15 17 £475 -18.10% 404
Wales - 15 £575 - 17
West Midlands +6 11 £500 -13.79% 195
Yorkshire +6 7 £500 -9.75% 182
North East -1 7 £358 - 42
East Midlands +11 6 £450 -33.33% 209

Machine Learning
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 104 (13.35%) Apache Spark
2 18 (2.31%) Apache
3 12 (1.54%) Confluence
4 11 (1.41%) Apache Airflow
4 11 (1.41%) Jupyter
5 9 (1.16%) Microsoft Exchange
6 5 (0.64%) SAS
7 4 (0.51%) CMS
8 2 (0.26%) IBM Domino
9 1 (0.13%) Apache Pulsar
9 1 (0.13%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.13%) Camunda
9 1 (0.13%) Luigi
Applications
1 11 (1.41%) Chatbot
2 4 (0.51%) Microsoft Excel
3 3 (0.39%) Simulink
4 2 (0.26%) Adobe XD
4 2 (0.26%) CPLEX
4 2 (0.26%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.26%) Sketch
4 2 (0.26%) Weka
5 1 (0.13%) MadCap Flare
5 1 (0.13%) Microsoft Project
5 1 (0.13%) Siemens NX
5 1 (0.13%) SOLIDWORKS
5 1 (0.13%) Trello
Business Applications
1 6 (0.77%) SAP S/4HANA
2 4 (0.51%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 2 (0.26%) Workday HCM
4 1 (0.13%) Distributed Ledger
4 1 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.13%) Primavera
4 1 (0.13%) SAP IBP
4 1 (0.13%) SAP QM
4 1 (0.13%) SAP SRM
4 1 (0.13%) Shopify
4 1 (0.13%) Teamcenter
4 1 (0.13%) TrackWise
Cloud Services
1 263 (33.76%) Azure
2 219 (28.11%) AWS
3 106 (13.61%) GCP
4 72 (9.24%) Azure Machine Learning
5 69 (8.86%) Power Platform
6 57 (7.32%) Azure Data Factory
7 35 (4.49%) Cloud Computing
8 33 (4.24%) GitHub
9 29 (3.72%) Amazon SageMaker
9 29 (3.72%) Serverless
10 26 (3.34%) Snowflake
11 25 (3.21%) Azure DevOps
12 21 (2.70%) PaaS
13 20 (2.57%) AWS Lambda
13 20 (2.57%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 18 (2.31%) Azure AI
15 17 (2.18%) Amazon S3
15 17 (2.18%) GitHub Actions
16 14 (1.80%) IaaS
17 12 (1.54%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 16 (2.05%) DNS
1 16 (2.05%) SMTP
2 15 (1.93%) Firewall
3 14 (1.80%) Network Security
4 10 (1.28%) VPN
5 9 (1.16%) DHCP
6 7 (0.90%) Ethernet
6 7 (0.90%) FTP
6 7 (0.90%) HTTP
6 7 (0.90%) SSL
7 3 (0.39%) Intrusion Detection
7 3 (0.39%) LAN
7 3 (0.39%) LTE
7 3 (0.39%) WAN
8 2 (0.26%) InfiniBand
8 2 (0.26%) Internet
9 1 (0.13%) 4G
9 1 (0.13%) Modbus
9 1 (0.13%) MQTT
9 1 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 89 (11.42%) Big Data
2 67 (8.60%) Power BI
3 60 (7.70%) Data Lake
4 54 (6.93%) Tableau
5 47 (6.03%) Hadoop
6 46 (5.91%) Data Warehouse
7 27 (3.47%) Neo4j
8 26 (3.34%) Data Mining
8 26 (3.34%) Metadata
9 21 (2.70%) NoSQL
10 18 (2.31%) BigQuery
11 17 (2.18%) PostgreSQL
12 13 (1.67%) Amazon RDS
13 12 (1.54%) Elasticsearch
14 11 (1.41%) Delta Lake
15 8 (1.03%) Relational Database
16 7 (0.90%) Apache Hive
16 7 (0.90%) Data Vault
16 7 (0.90%) Looker
16 7 (0.90%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 40 (5.13%) Git
2 36 (4.62%) Jenkins
3 20 (2.57%) JIRA
3 20 (2.57%) MLflow
4 9 (1.16%) GitLab
5 8 (1.03%) ERwin
6 4 (0.51%) ER Studio
7 3 (0.39%) JUnit
7 3 (0.39%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.26%) Bitbucket
8 2 (0.26%) Cypress.io
8 2 (0.26%) MagicDraw
8 2 (0.26%) Visual Studio Code
9 1 (0.13%) CircleCI
9 1 (0.13%) CMake
9 1 (0.13%) Eclipse
9 1 (0.13%) NetBeans
9 1 (0.13%) PyCharm
9 1 (0.13%) Qt Creator
9 1 (0.13%) SonarQube
General
1 184 (23.62%) Social Skills
2 167 (21.44%) Analytical Skills
3 149 (19.13%) Finance
4 73 (9.37%) Banking
5 72 (9.24%) Public Sector
6 50 (6.42%) Investment Banking
7 39 (5.01%) Front Office
8 29 (3.72%) Marketing
9 25 (3.21%) Organisational Skills
10 23 (2.95%) Retail
11 20 (2.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 19 (2.44%) Financial Institution
12 19 (2.44%) Legal
13 18 (2.31%) Presentation Skills
14 17 (2.18%) Telecoms
15 14 (1.80%) Influencing Skills
15 14 (1.80%) Pharmaceutical
16 11 (1.41%) Manufacturing
17 6 (0.77%) Games
18 5 (0.64%) Law
Job Titles
1 118 (15.15%) Data Scientist
2 112 (14.38%) Developer
3 99 (12.71%) Senior
4 82 (10.53%) Architect
5 73 (9.37%) Data Engineer
6 63 (8.09%) Analyst
7 54 (6.93%) Lead
8 51 (6.55%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 50 (6.42%) Machine Learning Engineer
10 45 (5.78%) Python Developer
11 43 (5.52%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
12 34 (4.36%) Python Engineer
13 30 (3.85%) Business Analyst
14 28 (3.59%) Gen AI Developer
15 27 (3.47%) Senior Data Scientist
16 24 (3.08%) Consultant
17 23 (2.95%) Data Architect
18 22 (2.82%) Product Manager
19 21 (2.70%) Data Analyst
20 20 (2.57%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 83 (10.65%) TensorFlow
2 81 (10.40%) PyTorch
3 69 (8.86%) React
4 62 (7.96%) scikit-learn
5 60 (7.70%) Pandas
6 43 (5.52%) NumPy
7 41 (5.26%) FastAPI
7 41 (5.26%) PySpark
8 33 (4.24%) Django
9 31 (3.98%) .NET
10 26 (3.34%) Plotly
11 25 (3.21%) Kafka
11 25 (3.21%) LangChain
12 23 (2.95%) Matplotlib
13 20 (2.57%) CSS
14 17 (2.18%) HTML
15 16 (2.05%) Seaborn
16 14 (1.80%) AngularJS
17 12 (1.54%) Hugging Face
17 12 (1.54%) REST
Miscellaneous
1 130 (16.69%) Algorithms
2 47 (6.03%) Product Ownership
3 31 (3.98%) Distributed Systems
4 28 (3.59%) Distributed Computing
5 24 (3.08%) Management Information System
6 22 (2.82%) Data Structures
6 22 (2.82%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 22 (2.82%) Hedge funds
7 20 (2.57%) Derivative
7 20 (2.57%) Equities
7 20 (2.57%) Fixed Income
8 19 (2.44%) IoT
9 16 (2.05%) Data Centre
10 15 (1.93%) Cyberattack
11 14 (1.80%) Cloud Native
11 14 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
11 14 (1.80%) Public Cloud
12 13 (1.67%) Analytical Mindset
12 13 (1.67%) Multi-touch
13 10 (1.28%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 22 (2.82%) Linux
2 21 (2.70%) Apple iOS
3 18 (2.31%) Windows
4 9 (1.16%) Windows Server
5 4 (0.51%) Windows Server 2003
6 3 (0.39%) Android
6 3 (0.39%) Unix
7 1 (0.13%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 520 (66.75%) Artificial Intelligence
2 303 (38.90%) Data Science
3 235 (30.17%) Analytics
4 187 (24.01%) Agile
5 167 (21.44%) LLM
6 149 (19.13%) Problem-Solving
7 141 (18.10%) Generative AI
8 138 (17.72%) CI/CD
9 122 (15.66%) Visualisation
10 118 (15.15%) DevOps
11 116 (14.89%) Data Analysis
12 104 (13.35%) Decision-Making
13 103 (13.22%) Data Engineering
14 100 (12.84%) Computer Science
15 90 (11.55%) Data Pipeline
16 85 (10.91%) Data Modelling
17 77 (9.88%) Business Intelligence
18 74 (9.50%) Continuous Improvement
19 73 (9.37%) Data Visualisation
19 73 (9.37%) Natural Language Processing
Programming Languages
1 435 (55.84%) Python
2 212 (27.21%) SQL
3 80 (10.27%) Java
4 72 (9.24%) JavaScript
5 65 (8.34%) R
6 62 (7.96%) TypeScript
7 34 (4.36%) C#
7 34 (4.36%) Scala
8 25 (3.21%) C++
9 18 (2.31%) C
10 16 (2.05%) Rust
11 15 (1.93%) Shell Script
12 13 (1.67%) PowerShell
13 8 (1.03%) Clojure
14 7 (0.90%) Bash
14 7 (0.90%) Elixir
14 7 (0.90%) SystemVerilog
14 7 (0.90%) Tcl
14 7 (0.90%) T-SQL
15 5 (0.64%) MATLAB
Qualifications
1 146 (18.74%) Degree
2 122 (15.66%) Security Cleared
3 97 (12.45%) SC Cleared
4 51 (6.55%) Master's Degree
5 47 (6.03%) PhD
6 32 (4.11%) Computer Science Degree
7 24 (3.08%) DV Cleared
8 13 (1.67%) AWS Certification
9 10 (1.28%) Azure Certification
10 8 (1.03%) BPSS Clearance
10 8 (1.03%) CISSP
11 5 (0.64%) CISM
11 5 (0.64%) Numerate Degree
12 4 (0.51%) Postgraduate
13 3 (0.39%) HNC
13 3 (0.39%) HND
13 3 (0.39%) PMI Certification
13 3 (0.39%) PMP
13 3 (0.39%) TOGAF Certification
14 2 (0.26%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 89 (11.42%) Data Quality
2 31 (3.98%) QA
3 28 (3.59%) GDPR
4 17 (2.18%) Accessibility
5 12 (1.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 8 (1.03%) Actionable Recommendations
6 8 (1.03%) EU AI Act
6 8 (1.03%) NIST
7 6 (0.77%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 3 (0.39%) DO-254
8 3 (0.39%) HIPAA
8 3 (0.39%) ISO 20022
9 2 (0.26%) NCSC
9 2 (0.26%) PCI DSS
9 2 (0.26%) WCAG
10 1 (0.13%) 21 CFR Part 11
10 1 (0.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 1 (0.13%) SLA
10 1 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
10 1 (0.13%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 98 (12.58%) Docker
2 11 (1.41%) Active Directory
3 9 (1.16%) BitLocker
3 9 (1.16%) Hyper-V
3 9 (1.16%) Microsoft App-V
3 9 (1.16%) Terminal Services
3 9 (1.16%) VMware ESXi
3 9 (1.16%) VMware Infrastructure
4 3 (0.39%) Firmware
5 2 (0.26%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 2 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
6 1 (0.13%) Apache Flume
Systems Management
1 114 (14.63%) Kubernetes
2 48 (6.16%) Terraform
3 42 (5.39%) Ansible
4 10 (1.28%) Grafana
5 9 (1.16%) Nagios
5 9 (1.16%) Puppet
5 9 (1.16%) vCenter Server
5 9 (1.16%) vMotion
6 7 (0.90%) Prometheus
7 5 (0.64%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.26%) Argo
8 2 (0.26%) Proxmox
8 2 (0.26%) QRadar
9 1 (0.13%) Apache Ranger
9 1 (0.13%) Istio
9 1 (0.13%) Kibana
9 1 (0.13%) linkerd
9 1 (0.13%) logstash
9 1 (0.13%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
9 1 (0.13%) Zipkin
Vendors
1 96 (12.32%) Databricks
2 64 (8.22%) Microsoft
3 59 (7.57%) Google
4 21 (2.70%) OpenAI
5 16 (2.05%) SAP
6 12 (1.54%) ServiceNow
6 12 (1.54%) VMware
7 10 (1.28%) Dataiku
7 10 (1.28%) Oracle
7 10 (1.28%) Splunk
8 9 (1.16%) Citrix
8 9 (1.16%) HP
8 9 (1.16%) Symantec
9 8 (1.03%) Foundry
10 7 (0.90%) Intel
10 7 (0.90%) Xilinx
11 6 (0.77%) Palantir
12 5 (0.64%) Dynatrace
13 4 (0.51%) Alteryx
13 4 (0.51%) Talend