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 1 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 80 102 176
Rank change year-on-year +22 +74 +25
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,127 859 648
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.15% 2.39% 1.42%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.54% 2.74% 1.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 752 573 473
10th Percentile £402 £376 £388
25th Percentile £475 £469 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £553 £600 £575
Median % change year-on-year -7.92% +4.35% -8.00%
75th Percentile £688 £731 £713
90th Percentile £775 £800 £790
UK excluding London median daily rate £513 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 28 20 29
10th Percentile £30.88 £13.06 £42.50
25th Percentile £42.66 £20.31 -
Median hourly rate £53.22 £27.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +93.53% -40.45% -7.64%
75th Percentile £84.63 £48.07 £47.50
90th Percentile £115.15 £54.88 £65.35
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £46.18 £46.18
% change year-on-year +40.75% - -9.89%

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 31,830 31,370 40,452
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.08% 87.18% 88.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,997 18,966 27,094
10th Percentile £300 £310 £310
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £534
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.59% -3.00%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,072 1,117 1,558
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.22 £14.33
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.24 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £33.00 £43.42
Median % change year-on-year -23.79% -23.99% +24.04%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.63 £32.50 £43.90
% change year-on-year -30.37% -25.97% +36.12%

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 1 December 2025.

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 1 December 2025.

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 1 December 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 +15 949 £575 -4.17% 1,254
London +10 616 £625 - 348
UK excluding London +49 372 £513 +2.50% 1,072
Work from Home +26 352 £563 +8.38% 1,638
North of England -14 92 £480 -1.84% 316
South East +30 85 £525 - 304
East of England +23 66 £523 -5.00% 91
Scotland +45 60 £503 +25.63% 25
North West -6 47 £465 -3.53% 130
Yorkshire -14 40 £520 -1.05% 171
Midlands -11 39 £511 +20.18% 222
West Midlands -2 29 £514 +11.14% 100
South West -13 25 £550 -15.38% 101
Wales -1 10 £700 +201.08% 16
East Midlands -10 10 £410 +15.17% 121
North East -18 6 £450 +4.05% 16
Northern Ireland -4 2 £675 - 3

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 (7.54%) Apache Spark
2 66 (5.86%) Apache Airflow
3 31 (2.75%) Apache
4 24 (2.13%) Jupyter
5 9 (0.80%) Confluence
6 8 (0.71%) Apache Pig
6 8 (0.71%) SAS
7 6 (0.53%) GeoServer
7 6 (0.53%) Smallworld
8 4 (0.35%) Appian
8 4 (0.35%) IIS
9 3 (0.27%) CMS
9 3 (0.27%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.089%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.089%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.089%) nginx
10 1 (0.089%) Red Hat Fuse
Applications
1 42 (3.73%) Chatbot
2 16 (1.42%) Microsoft Excel
3 12 (1.06%) Microsoft Office
4 8 (0.71%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.71%) Microsoft Project
5 6 (0.53%) Simulink
6 1 (0.089%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.089%) GNU Octave
6 1 (0.089%) Sketch
6 1 (0.089%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.089%) Trello
Business Applications
1 9 (0.80%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (0.27%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.18%) Distributed Ledger
3 2 (0.18%) SAP ERP
3 2 (0.18%) Teamcenter
4 1 (0.089%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.089%) SAP GRC
4 1 (0.089%) Shopify
4 1 (0.089%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 475 (42.15%) Azure
2 388 (34.43%) AWS
3 218 (19.34%) GCP
4 105 (9.32%) Power Platform
5 98 (8.70%) GitHub
6 96 (8.52%) Serverless
7 95 (8.43%) Azure Machine Learning
8 68 (6.03%) Azure DevOps
9 65 (5.77%) Snowflake
10 63 (5.59%) Amazon S3
11 62 (5.50%) Amazon SageMaker
12 58 (5.15%) Vertex AI
13 54 (4.79%) Azure AI
14 52 (4.61%) AWS Lambda
15 49 (4.35%) Azure AKS
16 47 (4.17%) Azure Data Factory
16 47 (4.17%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 46 (4.08%) GitHub Actions
18 37 (3.28%) Amazon Bedrock
18 37 (3.28%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 14 (1.24%) HTTP
1 14 (1.24%) Network Security
2 13 (1.15%) DNS
3 9 (0.80%) SSL
4 8 (0.71%) FTP
4 8 (0.71%) SMTP
5 7 (0.62%) Ethernet
6 6 (0.53%) Firewall
6 6 (0.53%) Internet
7 4 (0.35%) VPN
8 2 (0.18%) 2G
8 2 (0.18%) 5G
8 2 (0.18%) BGP
8 2 (0.18%) Cisco IPT
8 2 (0.18%) Ethernet VPN
8 2 (0.18%) Hyperconnected
8 2 (0.18%) LTE
8 2 (0.18%) Mobile Backhaul
8 2 (0.18%) OSPF
8 2 (0.18%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 92 (8.16%) Power BI
2 79 (7.01%) Data Warehouse
3 66 (5.86%) Big Data
4 62 (5.50%) Data Lake
5 54 (4.79%) PostgreSQL
6 53 (4.70%) NoSQL
7 43 (3.82%) BigQuery
8 39 (3.46%) Tableau
9 33 (2.93%) Metadata
10 28 (2.48%) Hadoop
11 24 (2.13%) MongoDB
11 24 (2.13%) Pinecone
12 20 (1.77%) Delta Lake
13 19 (1.69%) Amazon Athena
13 19 (1.69%) Data Mining
13 19 (1.69%) Elasticsearch
14 16 (1.42%) Relational Database
15 15 (1.33%) Amazon Redshift
16 13 (1.15%) Azure SQL Database
16 13 (1.15%) Geospatial Data
Development Applications
1 94 (8.34%) Git
2 70 (6.21%) MLflow
3 59 (5.24%) Jenkins
4 38 (3.37%) GitLab
5 24 (2.13%) JIRA
6 18 (1.60%) Selenium
7 16 (1.42%) JMeter
8 13 (1.15%) SonarQube
9 10 (0.89%) JUnit
10 8 (0.71%) Cypress.io
11 7 (0.62%) Visual Studio
12 6 (0.53%) Mockito
12 6 (0.53%) Postman
12 6 (0.53%) PyCharm
13 5 (0.44%) Artifactory
13 5 (0.44%) Cucumber
13 5 (0.44%) Gradle
13 5 (0.44%) MSTest
14 4 (0.35%) Android Studio
14 4 (0.35%) Snyk
General
1 325 (28.84%) Social Skills
2 213 (18.90%) Finance
3 130 (11.54%) Analytical Skills
4 101 (8.96%) Public Sector
5 72 (6.39%) Banking
6 50 (4.44%) Marketing
7 43 (3.82%) Pharmaceutical
8 38 (3.37%) Retail
9 27 (2.40%) Legal
9 27 (2.40%) Telecoms
10 26 (2.31%) Manufacturing
11 25 (2.22%) Investment Banking
12 21 (1.86%) Front Office
13 19 (1.69%) Documentation Skills
13 19 (1.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 17 (1.51%) Influencing Skills
15 13 (1.15%) Electronics
15 13 (1.15%) Presentation Skills
16 11 (0.98%) Financial Institution
17 10 (0.89%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 174 (15.44%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 162 (14.37%) Data Scientist
3 149 (13.22%) Architect
4 116 (10.29%) Data Engineer
4 116 (10.29%) Senior
5 113 (10.03%) Developer
6 70 (6.21%) Lead
7 55 (4.88%) Machine Learning Engineer
7 55 (4.88%) Python Engineer
8 51 (4.53%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 48 (4.26%) Analyst
10 41 (3.64%) Software Engineer
11 37 (3.28%) Data Architect
12 34 (3.02%) Gen AI Engineer
13 31 (2.75%) Solutions Architect
14 30 (2.66%) Azure Engineer
15 27 (2.40%) Consultant
16 25 (2.22%) Full-Stack Engineer
16 25 (2.22%) Python Developer
16 25 (2.22%) Senior Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 193 (17.13%) PyTorch
2 169 (15.00%) TensorFlow
3 112 (9.94%) scikit-learn
4 104 (9.23%) Pandas
5 88 (7.81%) LangChain
6 84 (7.45%) FastAPI
7 71 (6.30%) NumPy
8 63 (5.59%) Hugging Face
9 60 (5.32%) Kafka
9 60 (5.32%) React
10 53 (4.70%) RESTful
11 50 (4.44%) LangGraph
12 49 (4.35%) PySpark
13 45 (3.99%) REST
14 36 (3.19%) Node.js
15 34 (3.02%) .NET
15 34 (3.02%) Flask
16 31 (2.75%) pytest
17 23 (2.04%) AngularJS
18 21 (1.86%) Faiss
Miscellaneous
1 181 (16.06%) Algorithms
2 143 (12.69%) Cloud Native
3 97 (8.61%) AI Agents
4 44 (3.90%) Product Ownership
5 38 (3.37%) Distributed Systems
5 38 (3.37%) Onboarding
6 37 (3.28%) Data Protection Act
7 30 (2.66%) Distributed Computing
8 29 (2.57%) Legacy Systems
9 25 (2.22%) Genomics
10 23 (2.04%) Life Science
11 22 (1.95%) Analytical Mindset
11 22 (1.95%) Data Structures
12 21 (1.86%) Hybrid Cloud
13 18 (1.60%) Enterprise Software
14 16 (1.42%) Management Information System
15 13 (1.15%) Greenfield Project
16 11 (0.98%) IoT
16 11 (0.98%) Robotics
17 10 (0.89%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 30 (2.66%) Linux
2 11 (0.98%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 11 (0.98%) VMS
3 9 (0.80%) Ubuntu
4 8 (0.71%) Unix
4 8 (0.71%) Windows
5 5 (0.44%) Android
5 5 (0.44%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.18%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.089%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 829 (73.56%) AI
2 450 (39.93%) Data Science
3 328 (29.10%) LLM
4 306 (27.15%) CI/CD
5 299 (26.53%) Analytics
6 281 (24.93%) Agile
7 258 (22.89%) DevOps
8 212 (18.81%) Data Pipeline
8 212 (18.81%) Generative AI
9 199 (17.66%) MLOps
10 190 (16.86%) Problem-Solving
11 180 (15.97%) Data Engineering
12 168 (14.91%) Natural Language Processing
13 160 (14.20%) Software Engineering
14 148 (13.13%) Containerisation
15 135 (11.98%) Visualisation
16 134 (11.89%) Use Case
17 130 (11.54%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 129 (11.45%) Computer Science
19 128 (11.36%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 718 (63.71%) Python
2 271 (24.05%) SQL
3 79 (7.01%) R
4 72 (6.39%) Java
5 56 (4.97%) JavaScript
6 51 (4.53%) TypeScript
7 41 (3.64%) C#
8 36 (3.19%) PowerShell
9 33 (2.93%) C++
10 29 (2.57%) Scala
11 20 (1.77%) Bash
12 19 (1.69%) Bicep
13 15 (1.33%) MATLAB
14 12 (1.06%) Go
15 11 (0.98%) C
16 6 (0.53%) SystemVerilog
16 6 (0.53%) Tcl
17 4 (0.35%) Shell Script
18 3 (0.27%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 3 (0.27%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 175 (15.53%) Degree
2 165 (14.64%) Security Cleared
3 121 (10.74%) SC Cleared
4 69 (6.12%) Master's Degree
5 48 (4.26%) MCP
6 47 (4.17%) Computer Science Degree
7 39 (3.46%) PhD
8 29 (2.57%) DV Cleared
9 24 (2.13%) Azure Certification
10 14 (1.24%) AWS Certification
11 12 (1.06%) BPSS Clearance
12 8 (0.71%) CISSP
13 6 (0.53%) HNC
13 6 (0.53%) HND
14 5 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
15 4 (0.35%) Cisco Certification
15 4 (0.35%) CISM
15 4 (0.35%) ISTQB
15 4 (0.35%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 4 (0.35%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 69 (6.12%) Data Quality
2 55 (4.88%) GDPR
3 41 (3.64%) QA
4 39 (3.46%) NIST
5 32 (2.84%) EU AI Act
6 23 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 18 (1.60%) Accessibility
8 8 (0.71%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 6 (0.53%) DO-254
10 5 (0.44%) HIPAA
10 5 (0.44%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 5 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 42001
10 5 (0.44%) SOC 2
11 4 (0.35%) Disclosure Scotland
11 4 (0.35%) NCSC
12 3 (0.27%) PCI DSS
13 2 (0.18%) EMIR
13 2 (0.18%) GRC
13 2 (0.18%) JSP 440
13 2 (0.18%) NIST 800
System Software
1 189 (16.77%) Docker
2 11 (0.98%) Active Directory
2 11 (0.98%) Virtual Machines
3 6 (0.53%) Firmware
4 3 (0.27%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.18%) GPFS
5 2 (0.18%) Hyper-V
5 2 (0.18%) KVM
5 2 (0.18%) Lustre
5 2 (0.18%) VMware NSX
6 1 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 187 (16.59%) Kubernetes
2 122 (10.83%) Terraform
3 34 (3.02%) Grafana
4 25 (2.22%) Ansible
5 20 (1.77%) Kubeflow
6 17 (1.51%) Prometheus
7 13 (1.15%) Kibana
8 11 (0.98%) SCOM
9 10 (0.89%) logstash
10 9 (0.80%) ITRS Geneos
11 8 (0.71%) Argo
12 5 (0.44%) Kustomize
13 4 (0.35%) Cilium
13 4 (0.35%) Progress Chef
13 4 (0.35%) Rsyslog
14 3 (0.27%) Single Sign-On
14 3 (0.27%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
15 2 (0.18%) Podman
16 1 (0.089%) HP ALM
16 1 (0.089%) Opsgenie
Vendors
1 163 (14.46%) Microsoft
2 152 (13.49%) Databricks
3 100 (8.87%) Google
4 68 (6.03%) OpenAI
5 43 (3.82%) Foundry
6 38 (3.37%) SAP
7 21 (1.86%) Splunk
8 15 (1.33%) ServiceNow
9 14 (1.24%) Salesforce
10 12 (1.06%) NVIDIA
11 9 (0.80%) Oracle
11 9 (0.80%) Solace
11 9 (0.80%) TIBCO
12 7 (0.62%) Cisco
12 7 (0.62%) Greenplum
12 7 (0.62%) Informatica
12 7 (0.62%) Intel
12 7 (0.62%) Pega
13 6 (0.53%) Actel
13 6 (0.53%) Altera