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

6 months to
4 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 101 121
Rank change year-on-year +17 +20 +80
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,593 830 764
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.01% 2.52% 1.95%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.55% 2.79% 2.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,026 524 543
10th Percentile £413 £400 £406
25th Percentile £492 £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 £796 £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 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £33.80 £13.06
25th Percentile £40.54 £52.86 £24.74
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 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £77.50 £49.34
% change year-on-year -0.65% +57.07% +6.84%

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 44,879 29,748 33,534
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.93% 90.41% 85.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,704 18,653 21,488
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 2,741 1,659 1,873
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.50 £17.30 £18.14
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.91
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.05 £40.94
% change year-on-year +90.72% -43.70% +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 4 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 4 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 4 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 +14 1,362 £580 +4.50% 2,874
London +34 909 £595 +3.39% 1,928
UK excluding London +3 497 £550 - 1,162
Work from Home +8 427 £600 +9.09% 1,205
North of England +2 138 £558 +14.36% 257
South East -18 131 £617 +9.69% 327
Scotland +30 84 £430 -14.00% 119
North West -29 69 £608 +23.98% 161
Midlands -20 64 £550 +7.32% 116
Yorkshire -5 56 £550 +12.19% 64
West Midlands -29 50 £550 -6.38% 71
South West -39 44 £528 -4.09% 140
East of England -24 29 £500 -13.04% 159
North East -34 13 £463 +8.82% 33
East Midlands -4 12 £700 +64.71% 45
Wales -7 11 £540 -20.00% 32
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 29

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 (5.34%) Apache Spark
2 73 (4.58%) Apache Airflow
3 45 (2.82%) Apache
4 34 (2.13%) Jupyter
5 21 (1.32%) 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 (1.82%) 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%) 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 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%) SAP ERP
5 1 (0.063%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 554 (34.78%) Azure
2 549 (34.46%) AWS
3 304 (19.08%) GCP
4 133 (8.35%) Power Platform
5 112 (7.03%) GitHub
6 108 (6.78%) Serverless
7 92 (5.78%) Amazon S3
8 84 (5.27%) AWS Lambda
9 81 (5.08%) Amazon SageMaker
9 81 (5.08%) Snowflake
10 76 (4.77%) Azure Machine Learning
11 62 (3.89%) Azure AI
12 58 (3.64%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 56 (3.52%) Amazon Bedrock
14 55 (3.45%) Vertex AI
15 52 (3.26%) Azure DevOps
16 50 (3.14%) dbt
17 48 (3.01%) GitHub Actions
18 44 (2.76%) Azure Data Factory
19 40 (2.51%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.32%) Firewall
2 16 (1.00%) Internet
2 16 (1.00%) Network Security
3 11 (0.69%) DNS
4 10 (0.63%) VPN
5 9 (0.56%) Broadband
5 9 (0.56%) DHCP
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%) HTTP
7 3 (0.19%) MQTT
7 3 (0.19%) SMTP
8 2 (0.13%) 4G
8 2 (0.13%) 5G
8 2 (0.13%) CTI
8 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
Database & Business Intelligence
1 116 (7.28%) Power BI
2 86 (5.40%) Data Lake
3 76 (4.77%) BigQuery
4 72 (4.52%) Data Warehouse
5 71 (4.46%) Big Data
6 67 (4.21%) Metadata
7 52 (3.26%) NoSQL
8 46 (2.89%) Tableau
9 45 (2.82%) Amazon Redshift
10 41 (2.57%) Delta Lake
11 37 (2.32%) Amazon Athena
12 33 (2.07%) Relational Database
13 31 (1.95%) PostgreSQL
14 26 (1.63%) Hadoop
15 24 (1.51%) MongoDB
16 23 (1.44%) Looker
17 21 (1.32%) Neo4j
18 18 (1.13%) Data Mining
19 17 (1.07%) Elasticsearch
19 17 (1.07%) Pinecone
Development Applications
1 98 (6.15%) Git
2 64 (4.02%) MLflow
3 49 (3.08%) GitLab
4 45 (2.82%) 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
10 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.19%) Spinnaker
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
1 331 (20.78%) Social Skills
2 300 (18.83%) Finance
3 213 (13.37%) Analytical Skills
4 139 (8.73%) Public Sector
5 113 (7.09%) Banking
6 40 (2.51%) Marketing
7 37 (2.32%) Retail
8 34 (2.13%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 30 (1.88%) Pharmaceutical
9 30 (1.88%) Telecoms
10 24 (1.51%) Legal
11 21 (1.32%) Documentation Skills
11 21 (1.32%) Front Office
12 20 (1.26%) Financial Institution
13 18 (1.13%) Aviation
13 18 (1.13%) Manufacturing
14 16 (1.00%) Aerospace
14 16 (1.00%) Law
14 16 (1.00%) Presentation Skills
15 15 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 242 (15.19%) Architect
2 240 (15.07%) Senior
3 224 (14.06%) Data Scientist
4 166 (10.42%) Lead
5 158 (9.92%) Data Engineer
6 140 (8.79%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 102 (6.40%) Developer
8 81 (5.08%) Machine Learning Engineer
9 78 (4.90%) Solutions Architect
10 75 (4.71%) Python Engineer
11 67 (4.21%) Data Architect
12 65 (4.08%) Analyst
13 63 (3.95%) Software Engineer
14 58 (3.64%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 53 (3.33%) Platform Engineer
16 47 (2.95%) Security Architect
17 46 (2.89%) DevOps Engineer
18 45 (2.82%) Senior Data Scientist
19 40 (2.51%) Consultant
20 39 (2.45%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 149 (9.35%) PyTorch
2 107 (6.72%) Kafka
2 107 (6.72%) TensorFlow
3 97 (6.09%) scikit-learn
4 81 (5.08%) LangChain
5 78 (4.90%) PySpark
6 74 (4.65%) Pandas
7 72 (4.52%) React
8 62 (3.89%) REST
9 56 (3.52%) NumPy
10 41 (2.57%) .NET
11 36 (2.26%) LangGraph
12 32 (2.01%) Hugging Face
13 29 (1.82%) AngularJS
14 28 (1.76%) FastAPI
15 25 (1.57%) Model Context Protocol
15 25 (1.57%) Node.js
15 25 (1.57%) pytest
15 25 (1.57%) RESTful
16 21 (1.32%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 187 (11.74%) Cloud Native
2 168 (10.55%) AI Agents
3 112 (7.03%) Algorithms
4 62 (3.89%) Product Ownership
5 57 (3.58%) Distributed Systems
6 56 (3.52%) Onboarding
7 27 (1.69%) Enterprise Software
8 26 (1.63%) Data Structures
9 24 (1.51%) Life Science
10 23 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
10 23 (1.44%) Hybrid Cloud
11 15 (0.94%) Legacy Systems
11 15 (0.94%) Taxonomies
12 14 (0.88%) Fixed Income
12 14 (0.88%) Public Cloud
12 14 (0.88%) Security Posture
13 13 (0.82%) Enterprise Cloud
13 13 (0.82%) Virtual Team
14 12 (0.75%) CMDB
14 12 (0.75%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 53 (3.33%) Linux
2 15 (0.94%) 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 1,273 (79.91%) AI
2 596 (37.41%) Data Science
3 510 (32.02%) CI/CD
4 461 (28.94%) Analytics
5 430 (26.99%) LLM
6 370 (23.23%) Generative AI
7 357 (22.41%) Data Pipeline
8 333 (20.90%) DevOps
9 325 (20.40%) Agile
10 303 (19.02%) MLOps
11 278 (17.45%) Data Engineering
12 250 (15.69%) Use Case
13 246 (15.44%) Software Engineering
14 229 (14.38%) Decision-Making
15 207 (12.99%) Problem-Solving
16 206 (12.93%) Roadmaps
17 193 (12.12%) Infrastructure as Code
18 187 (11.74%) Data Governance
18 187 (11.74%) Stakeholder Management
19 183 (11.49%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 880 (55.24%) Python
2 393 (24.67%) SQL
3 120 (7.53%) Java
4 74 (4.65%) JavaScript
5 64 (4.02%) TypeScript
6 50 (3.14%) R
7 48 (3.01%) C#
8 39 (2.45%) Bash
9 23 (1.44%) PowerShell
10 19 (1.19%) Bicep
11 17 (1.07%) C++
12 15 (0.94%) Go
12 15 (0.94%) Scala
13 12 (0.75%) Kotlin
14 9 (0.56%) PL/SQL
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 (17.58%) Security Cleared
2 200 (12.55%) SC Cleared
3 126 (7.91%) Degree
4 56 (3.52%) Computer Science Degree
5 53 (3.33%) DV Cleared
6 46 (2.89%) AWS Certification
7 45 (2.82%) Master's Degree
8 36 (2.26%) BPSS Clearance
9 31 (1.95%) CISSP
9 31 (1.95%) PhD
10 23 (1.44%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 19 (1.19%) Azure Certification
12 14 (0.88%) CISM
13 13 (0.82%) TOGAF Certification
14 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 7 (0.44%) Cisco Certification
14 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 5 (0.31%) GIAC
15 5 (0.31%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 187 (11.74%) Data Quality
2 63 (3.95%) GDPR
3 49 (3.08%) QA
4 32 (2.01%) NIST
5 21 (1.32%) 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%) Actionable Recommendations
10 8 (0.50%) HIPAA
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%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 218 (13.68%) Docker
2 12 (0.75%) Active Directory
3 7 (0.44%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 6 (0.38%) IAG
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
1 270 (16.95%) Kubernetes
2 182 (11.42%) Terraform
3 32 (2.01%) Ansible
4 27 (1.69%) Kubeflow
5 25 (1.57%) Grafana
6 18 (1.13%) Prometheus
7 9 (0.56%) 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%) Docker Swarm
11 2 (0.13%) Packer
11 2 (0.13%) Rancher
11 2 (0.13%) SCCM
Vendors
1 203 (12.74%) Databricks
2 166 (10.42%) Microsoft
3 101 (6.34%) Google
4 80 (5.02%) OpenAI
5 48 (3.01%) SAP
6 40 (2.51%) Foundry
7 32 (2.01%) ServiceNow
8 23 (1.44%) Oracle
9 19 (1.19%) Informatica
10 16 (1.00%) Dynatrace
11 15 (0.94%) IBM
12 13 (0.82%) Splunk
13 12 (0.75%) UiPath
14 7 (0.44%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.44%) Sybase
15 6 (0.38%) Nexthink
15 6 (0.38%) Pega
15 6 (0.38%) Salesforce
15 6 (0.38%) Workday
16 5 (0.31%) VMware