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 9 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 98 142
Rank change year-on-year +18 +44 +73
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,405 765 711
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.94% 2.62% 1.65%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.48% 2.88% 1.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 870 494 522
10th Percentile £413 £370 £413
25th Percentile £489 £455 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.17%
75th Percentile £679 £725 £736
90th Percentile £776 £875 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £575 £538
% change year-on-year -4.35% +6.98% -6.52%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 21 21
10th Percentile £50.00 £25.25 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.99 £45.00 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £61.50 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +5.69% +17.14% +50.00%
75th Percentile £83.75 £78.70 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.25 £81.01 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £76.25 £60.00
% change year-on-year -14.75% +27.08% +71.43%

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 40,321 26,530 37,209
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.49% 90.95% 86.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,358 17,078 23,948
10th Percentile £321 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.70% -1.00% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £744 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £479 £500
% change year-on-year +2.30% -4.20% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,401 1,077 2,439
10th Percentile £14.96 £14.47 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £18.50 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.00 £28.75 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +46.09% -21.23% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.25 £61.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.00 £27.13 £37.50
% change year-on-year +62.21% -27.67% +7.14%

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 9 May 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 9 May 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 9 May 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 +10 1,178 £563 -2.17% 1,111
London +24 782 £575 -4.17% 627
UK excluding London +11 433 £550 -4.35% 616
Work from Home +10 400 £588 +6.82% 520
North of England -6 106 £554 +13.01% 189
South East -32 89 £600 +4.35% 192
Scotland +48 85 £518 +10.81% 38
Midlands -19 65 £550 +15.79% 68
North West -11 54 £575 +4.55% 104
East of England -20 53 £500 -20.00% 57
West Midlands -26 47 £550 +10.00% 35
South West -31 42 £500 -19.35% 69
Yorkshire -17 41 £550 - 47
East Midlands -23 16 £675 +45.95% 32
North East -12 14 £575 +60.61% 38
Wales -14 12 £759 +31.96% 7
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 5

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
1 121 (8.61%) Apache Spark
2 73 (5.20%) Apache Airflow
3 58 (4.13%) Apache
4 28 (1.99%) Jupyter
5 12 (0.85%) Confluence
6 9 (0.64%) Appian
7 6 (0.43%) CMS
7 6 (0.43%) SAS
8 5 (0.36%) Headless CMS
8 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
9 3 (0.21%) Palantir Foundry
10 2 (0.14%) Luigi
11 1 (0.071%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.071%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.071%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 28 (1.99%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.85%) Microsoft Project
3 9 (0.64%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.64%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.50%) Microsoft Office
5 3 (0.21%) LaTeX
5 3 (0.21%) Simulink
6 2 (0.14%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 11 (0.78%) SAP IBP
2 5 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
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
1 553 (39.36%) Azure
2 482 (34.31%) AWS
3 243 (17.30%) GCP
4 134 (9.54%) Power Platform
5 102 (7.26%) GitHub
6 95 (6.76%) Azure Machine Learning
6 95 (6.76%) Serverless
7 89 (6.33%) Azure AI
8 73 (5.20%) Amazon SageMaker
9 72 (5.12%) Amazon S3
10 70 (4.98%) Azure DevOps
10 70 (4.98%) Snowflake
11 60 (4.27%) GitHub Actions
12 57 (4.06%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 56 (3.99%) AWS Lambda
13 56 (3.99%) Vertex AI
14 54 (3.84%) Azure Data Factory
15 42 (2.99%) AWS CloudFormation
16 37 (2.63%) Amazon Bedrock
17 28 (1.99%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 14 (1.00%) Network Security
2 10 (0.71%) Firewall
3 9 (0.64%) HTTP
4 8 (0.57%) DNS
5 5 (0.36%) FTP
5 5 (0.36%) SMTP
5 5 (0.36%) SSL
6 4 (0.28%) InfiniBand
7 3 (0.21%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.14%) 4G
8 2 (0.14%) 5G
8 2 (0.14%) DHCP
8 2 (0.14%) Hyperconnected
8 2 (0.14%) Internet
8 2 (0.14%) Modbus
8 2 (0.14%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.14%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.071%) 3G
9 1 (0.071%) LTE
9 1 (0.071%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 105 (7.47%) Power BI
2 92 (6.55%) Data Lake
3 78 (5.55%) Big Data
4 63 (4.48%) Metadata
5 60 (4.27%) BigQuery
6 59 (4.20%) Data Warehouse
7 50 (3.56%) NoSQL
8 39 (2.78%) Tableau
9 36 (2.56%) Hadoop
9 36 (2.56%) Pinecone
10 35 (2.49%) Delta Lake
11 31 (2.21%) SQL Server
12 29 (2.06%) Weaviate
13 28 (1.99%) PostgreSQL
14 27 (1.92%) Amazon Athena
15 25 (1.78%) Relational Database
16 23 (1.64%) Mixpanel
17 19 (1.35%) MongoDB
18 18 (1.28%) Amazon Redshift
19 17 (1.21%) Redis
Development Applications
1 93 (6.62%) MLflow
2 92 (6.55%) Git
3 31 (2.21%) JIRA
4 28 (1.99%) Jenkins
5 27 (1.92%) GitLab
6 8 (0.57%) Visual Studio
7 7 (0.50%) Selenium
7 7 (0.50%) SonarQube
8 4 (0.28%) Claude Code
8 4 (0.28%) Cypress.io
8 4 (0.28%) Gradle
8 4 (0.28%) JMeter
8 4 (0.28%) Maven
8 4 (0.28%) PyCharm
9 3 (0.21%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.21%) ERwin
9 3 (0.21%) JUnit
9 3 (0.21%) REST Assured
9 3 (0.21%) Spinnaker
9 3 (0.21%) Vite
General
1 310 (22.06%) Social Skills
2 270 (19.22%) Finance
3 169 (12.03%) Analytical Skills
4 138 (9.82%) Public Sector
5 85 (6.05%) Banking
6 32 (2.28%) Marketing
7 31 (2.21%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 27 (1.92%) Documentation Skills
9 26 (1.85%) Legal
10 25 (1.78%) Influencing Skills
11 24 (1.71%) Pharmaceutical
12 21 (1.49%) Aviation
12 21 (1.49%) Retail
13 20 (1.42%) Investment Banking
14 19 (1.35%) Front Office
14 19 (1.35%) Presentation Skills
15 18 (1.28%) Telecoms
16 12 (0.85%) Aerospace
17 11 (0.78%) Law
18 10 (0.71%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 207 (14.73%) Data Scientist
2 193 (13.74%) Architect
3 186 (13.24%) Senior
4 169 (12.03%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 136 (9.68%) Data Engineer
6 116 (8.26%) Lead
7 101 (7.19%) Developer
8 74 (5.27%) Analyst
9 64 (4.56%) Python Engineer
10 58 (4.13%) Software Engineer
11 57 (4.06%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
12 56 (3.99%) Machine Learning Engineer
13 55 (3.91%) Solutions Architect
14 54 (3.84%) Data Architect
15 38 (2.70%) Senior Data Scientist
16 37 (2.63%) Consultant
17 34 (2.42%) Gen AI Engineer
18 32 (2.28%) Azure Engineer
19 31 (2.21%) Business Analyst
19 31 (2.21%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 203 (14.45%) PyTorch
2 149 (10.60%) TensorFlow
3 120 (8.54%) scikit-learn
4 102 (7.26%) Pandas
5 75 (5.34%) Kafka
6 74 (5.27%) LangChain
7 73 (5.20%) NumPy
8 70 (4.98%) React
9 63 (4.48%) PySpark
10 55 (3.91%) .NET
11 51 (3.63%) REST
12 50 (3.56%) Hugging Face
13 45 (3.20%) Node.js
14 40 (2.85%) LangGraph
15 37 (2.63%) Model Context Protocol
16 36 (2.56%) AngularJS
17 35 (2.49%) FastAPI
18 29 (2.06%) Faiss
19 25 (1.78%) RESTful
20 20 (1.42%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 171 (12.17%) Cloud Native
2 137 (9.75%) Algorithms
3 136 (9.68%) AI Agents
4 44 (3.13%) Onboarding
4 44 (3.13%) Product Ownership
5 34 (2.42%) Distributed Systems
6 29 (2.06%) Data Protection Act
7 19 (1.35%) Enterprise Software
8 18 (1.28%) Hybrid Cloud
8 18 (1.28%) Legacy Systems
9 17 (1.21%) Fixed Income
9 17 (1.21%) Management Information System
10 15 (1.07%) Analytical Mindset
11 14 (1.00%) Data Structures
11 14 (1.00%) Distributed Computing
12 13 (0.93%) Life Science
13 12 (0.85%) Public Cloud
14 11 (0.78%) Augmented Reality
14 11 (0.78%) Low-Code
14 11 (0.78%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 31 (2.21%) Linux
2 12 (0.85%) Windows
3 11 (0.78%) VMS
4 7 (0.50%) Android
4 7 (0.50%) Apple iOS
5 6 (0.43%) Unix
6 2 (0.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 1 (0.071%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,106 (78.72%) AI
2 518 (36.87%) Data Science
3 430 (30.60%) CI/CD
4 404 (28.75%) Analytics
5 391 (27.83%) LLM
6 312 (22.21%) Data Pipeline
7 310 (22.06%) Generative AI
8 270 (19.22%) MLOps
9 269 (19.15%) Data Engineering
9 269 (19.15%) DevOps
10 260 (18.51%) Agile
11 201 (14.31%) Use Case
12 200 (14.23%) Problem-Solving
13 177 (12.60%) Data Governance
14 170 (12.10%) ETL
14 170 (12.10%) Software Engineering
15 167 (11.89%) Decision-Making
16 165 (11.74%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
17 162 (11.53%) Containerisation
18 152 (10.82%) Natural Language Processing
Programming Languages
1 817 (58.15%) Python
2 356 (25.34%) SQL
3 108 (7.69%) Java
4 81 (5.77%) C#
5 68 (4.84%) R
6 51 (3.63%) JavaScript
7 50 (3.56%) TypeScript
8 27 (1.92%) C++
9 20 (1.42%) Bash
9 20 (1.42%) PowerShell
10 18 (1.28%) Bicep
11 15 (1.07%) Scala
12 10 (0.71%) Go
12 10 (0.71%) Kotlin
13 8 (0.57%) MATLAB
14 7 (0.50%) Rust
15 5 (0.36%) PL/SQL
15 5 (0.36%) SPARQL
16 4 (0.28%) T-SQL
17 3 (0.21%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 241 (17.15%) Security Cleared
2 164 (11.67%) SC Cleared
3 125 (8.90%) Degree
4 62 (4.41%) Master's Degree
5 40 (2.85%) DV Cleared
6 38 (2.70%) BPSS Clearance
7 37 (2.63%) PhD
8 36 (2.56%) Computer Science Degree
9 24 (1.71%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.35%) Azure Certification
11 17 (1.21%) CISSP
12 14 (1.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 13 (0.93%) CISM
14 9 (0.64%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 6 (0.43%) ISTQB
15 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
16 5 (0.36%) PMI Certification
16 5 (0.36%) PMP
17 3 (0.21%) GIAC
17 3 (0.21%) HNC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 144 (10.25%) Data Quality
2 58 (4.13%) GDPR
3 54 (3.84%) QA
4 28 (1.99%) NIST
5 20 (1.42%) Accessibility
6 13 (0.93%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 12 (0.85%) EU AI Act
8 10 (0.71%) Actionable Recommendations
8 10 (0.71%) HIPAA
9 9 (0.64%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 6 (0.43%) NCSC
11 5 (0.36%) GRC
11 5 (0.36%) WCAG
12 3 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
12 3 (0.21%) DO-254
12 3 (0.21%) GxP
13 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 2 (0.14%) Def Stans
13 2 (0.14%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 2 (0.14%) NIST 800
System Software
1 191 (13.59%) Docker
2 12 (0.85%) Active Directory
2 12 (0.85%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 6 (0.43%) Firmware
4 3 (0.21%) Lustre
4 3 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.14%) Ceph
5 2 (0.14%) HDFS
5 2 (0.14%) Microsoft App-V
5 2 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
5 2 (0.14%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.14%) VMware Workstation
6 1 (0.071%) Embedded Firmware
6 1 (0.071%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 213 (15.16%) Kubernetes
2 142 (10.11%) Terraform
3 22 (1.57%) Grafana
4 20 (1.42%) Kubeflow
5 15 (1.07%) Ansible
6 14 (1.00%) Prometheus
7 9 (0.64%) Podman
8 4 (0.28%) Istio
9 3 (0.21%) Rancher
10 2 (0.14%) Argo
10 2 (0.14%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.14%) Kibana
10 2 (0.14%) Knative
10 2 (0.14%) Packer
10 2 (0.14%) SCCM
11 1 (0.071%) HP Fortify
11 1 (0.071%) logstash
11 1 (0.071%) Opsgenie
11 1 (0.071%) SELinux
11 1 (0.071%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 214 (15.23%) Databricks
2 170 (12.10%) Microsoft
3 103 (7.33%) OpenAI
4 97 (6.90%) Google
5 59 (4.20%) Foundry
6 44 (3.13%) SAP
7 31 (2.21%) Oracle
8 21 (1.49%) ServiceNow
9 16 (1.14%) Informatica
10 15 (1.07%) UiPath
11 14 (1.00%) IBM
12 13 (0.93%) Dynatrace
13 11 (0.78%) Automation Anywhere
14 9 (0.64%) NVIDIA
14 9 (0.64%) Salesforce
15 7 (0.50%) Amplitude
15 7 (0.50%) Workday
16 6 (0.43%) Siemens
16 6 (0.43%) Splunk
16 6 (0.43%) Talend