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

6 months to
5 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 81 101 121
Rank change year-on-year +20 +20 +80
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,604 830 764
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.02% 2.52% 1.95%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.55% 2.79% 2.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,035 524 543
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 45,167 29,748 33,534
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.91% 90.41% 85.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,886 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 2,759 1,659 1,873
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.47 £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 5 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 5 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 5 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 +13 1,372 £580 +4.50% 2,928
London +34 916 £595 +3.39% 1,964
UK excluding London 0 500 £550 - 1,186
Work from Home +6 428 £600 +9.09% 1,170
North of England -4 138 £558 +14.36% 256
South East -17 133 £618 +9.87% 329
Scotland +32 85 £430 -14.00% 120
North West -29 69 £608 +23.98% 159
Midlands -25 64 £550 +7.32% 123
Yorkshire -7 56 £550 +12.19% 65
West Midlands -30 50 £550 -6.38% 77
South West -42 44 £528 -4.09% 149
East of England -22 29 £500 -13.04% 162
North East -33 13 £463 +8.82% 33
East Midlands -5 12 £700 +64.71% 46
Wales -5 11 £540 -20.00% 38
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 86 (5.36%) Apache Spark
2 74 (4.61%) Apache Airflow
3 45 (2.81%) Apache
4 34 (2.12%) Jupyter
5 21 (1.31%) Confluence
6 8 (0.50%) SAS
7 6 (0.37%) 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 (0.12%) OpenStack
10 2 (0.12%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.062%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.062%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.062%) Luigi
11 1 (0.062%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 29 (1.81%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.75%) Microsoft Excel
3 6 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 5 (0.31%) CPLEX
4 5 (0.31%) Microsoft Office
5 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Project
6 2 (0.12%) Notion
7 1 (0.062%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.062%) DaVinci Resolve
7 1 (0.062%) NUKE
7 1 (0.062%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 11 (0.69%) SAP IBP
2 8 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.12%) Oracle ERP
4 2 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 1 (0.062%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.062%) OpenText VIM for SAP
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.062%) SAP APO
5 1 (0.062%) SAP ERP
5 1 (0.062%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 559 (34.85%) Azure
2 554 (34.54%) AWS
3 307 (19.14%) GCP
4 134 (8.35%) Power Platform
5 113 (7.04%) GitHub
6 108 (6.73%) Serverless
7 92 (5.74%) Amazon S3
8 84 (5.24%) AWS Lambda
9 82 (5.11%) Amazon SageMaker
9 82 (5.11%) Snowflake
10 76 (4.74%) Azure Machine Learning
11 62 (3.87%) Azure AI
12 58 (3.62%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 57 (3.55%) Amazon Bedrock
14 55 (3.43%) Vertex AI
15 52 (3.24%) Azure DevOps
16 50 (3.12%) dbt
17 48 (2.99%) GitHub Actions
18 44 (2.74%) Azure Data Factory
19 41 (2.56%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.31%) Firewall
2 17 (1.06%) Internet
3 16 (1.00%) Network Security
4 11 (0.69%) DNS
5 10 (0.62%) VPN
6 9 (0.56%) Broadband
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 (0.12%) 4G
9 2 (0.12%) 5G
9 2 (0.12%) CTI
9 2 (0.12%) PCoIP
9 2 (0.12%) Radio Access Network
9 2 (0.12%) Remote Desktop
Database & Business Intelligence
1 117 (7.29%) Power BI
2 87 (5.42%) Data Lake
3 76 (4.74%) BigQuery
4 73 (4.55%) Data Warehouse
5 72 (4.49%) Big Data
6 67 (4.18%) Metadata
7 54 (3.37%) NoSQL
8 47 (2.93%) Tableau
9 45 (2.81%) Amazon Redshift
10 41 (2.56%) Delta Lake
11 37 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
12 33 (2.06%) Relational Database
13 31 (1.93%) PostgreSQL
14 27 (1.68%) Hadoop
15 25 (1.56%) MongoDB
16 23 (1.43%) Looker
17 21 (1.31%) Neo4j
18 18 (1.12%) Data Mining
19 17 (1.06%) Elasticsearch
19 17 (1.06%) Pinecone
Development Applications
1 100 (6.23%) Git
2 65 (4.05%) MLflow
3 50 (3.12%) GitLab
4 45 (2.81%) JIRA
5 26 (1.62%) Jenkins
6 10 (0.62%) Claude Code
6 10 (0.62%) 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 (0.12%) JUnit
11 2 (0.12%) NUnit
11 2 (0.12%) Oracle APEX
11 2 (0.12%) Pylint
11 2 (0.12%) Visual Studio
General
1 336 (20.95%) Social Skills
2 304 (18.95%) Finance
3 215 (13.40%) Analytical Skills
4 142 (8.85%) Public Sector
5 114 (7.11%) Banking
6 40 (2.49%) Marketing
7 38 (2.37%) Retail
8 34 (2.12%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 32 (2.00%) Telecoms
10 30 (1.87%) 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 (1.18%) Aerospace
15 18 (1.12%) Aviation
16 16 (1.00%) Law
16 16 (1.00%) Presentation Skills
17 15 (0.94%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 243 (15.15%) Architect
2 242 (15.09%) Senior
3 224 (13.97%) Data Scientist
4 168 (10.47%) Lead
5 159 (9.91%) Data Engineer
6 141 (8.79%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 103 (6.42%) Developer
8 82 (5.11%) Machine Learning Engineer
9 78 (4.86%) Solutions Architect
10 77 (4.80%) Python Engineer
11 68 (4.24%) Data Architect
12 66 (4.11%) Analyst
13 63 (3.93%) Software Engineer
14 58 (3.62%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 53 (3.30%) Platform Engineer
16 47 (2.93%) Security Architect
17 46 (2.87%) DevOps Engineer
18 45 (2.81%) Senior Data Scientist
19 40 (2.49%) Consultant
20 39 (2.43%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 150 (9.35%) PyTorch
2 108 (6.73%) Kafka
2 108 (6.73%) TensorFlow
3 98 (6.11%) scikit-learn
4 81 (5.05%) LangChain
5 78 (4.86%) PySpark
6 74 (4.61%) Pandas
6 74 (4.61%) React
7 63 (3.93%) REST
8 56 (3.49%) NumPy
9 41 (2.56%) .NET
10 36 (2.24%) LangGraph
11 32 (2.00%) Hugging Face
12 31 (1.93%) AngularJS
13 28 (1.75%) FastAPI
14 26 (1.62%) pytest
15 25 (1.56%) Model Context Protocol
15 25 (1.56%) Node.js
15 25 (1.56%) RESTful
16 21 (1.31%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 189 (11.78%) Cloud Native
2 168 (10.47%) AI Agents
3 114 (7.11%) Algorithms
4 64 (3.99%) Product Ownership
5 57 (3.55%) Distributed Systems
6 56 (3.49%) Onboarding
7 29 (1.81%) Enterprise Software
8 28 (1.75%) Data Structures
9 24 (1.50%) Life Science
10 23 (1.43%) Data Protection Act
10 23 (1.43%) Hybrid Cloud
11 16 (1.00%) Legacy Systems
12 15 (0.94%) Security Posture
12 15 (0.94%) Taxonomies
13 14 (0.87%) Fixed Income
13 14 (0.87%) Public Cloud
14 13 (0.81%) CMDB
14 13 (0.81%) Enterprise Cloud
14 13 (0.81%) Virtual Team
15 12 (0.75%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 53 (3.30%) Linux
2 15 (0.94%) Windows
3 12 (0.75%) Unix
4 6 (0.37%) 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 (0.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.062%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,283 (79.99%) AI
2 598 (37.28%) Data Science
3 513 (31.98%) CI/CD
4 463 (28.87%) Analytics
5 431 (26.87%) LLM
6 371 (23.13%) Generative AI
7 360 (22.44%) Data Pipeline
8 337 (21.01%) DevOps
9 329 (20.51%) Agile
10 304 (18.95%) MLOps
11 280 (17.46%) Data Engineering
12 251 (15.65%) Use Case
13 247 (15.40%) Software Engineering
14 233 (14.53%) Decision-Making
15 209 (13.03%) Problem-Solving
16 208 (12.97%) Roadmaps
17 195 (12.16%) Infrastructure as Code
18 189 (11.78%) Stakeholder Management
19 188 (11.72%) Data Governance
20 185 (11.53%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 889 (55.42%) Python
2 399 (24.88%) SQL
3 120 (7.48%) Java
4 76 (4.74%) JavaScript
5 64 (3.99%) TypeScript
6 50 (3.12%) R
7 48 (2.99%) C#
8 40 (2.49%) Bash
9 25 (1.56%) PowerShell
10 19 (1.18%) Bicep
11 17 (1.06%) C++
12 15 (0.94%) Go
12 15 (0.94%) Scala
13 12 (0.75%) Kotlin
14 10 (0.62%) 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
1 284 (17.71%) Security Cleared
2 204 (12.72%) SC Cleared
3 126 (7.86%) Degree
4 56 (3.49%) Computer Science Degree
5 53 (3.30%) DV Cleared
6 46 (2.87%) AWS Certification
7 45 (2.81%) Master's Degree
8 36 (2.24%) BPSS Clearance
9 32 (2.00%) CISSP
10 31 (1.93%) PhD
11 23 (1.43%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 20 (1.25%) Azure Certification
13 14 (0.87%) CISM
13 14 (0.87%) 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
1 189 (11.78%) Data Quality
2 64 (3.99%) GDPR
3 50 (3.12%) QA
4 32 (2.00%) NIST
5 21 (1.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.94%) EU AI Act
7 14 (0.87%) 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 (0.37%) SLA
12 6 (0.37%) 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
1 220 (13.72%) Docker
2 12 (0.75%) Active Directory
3 7 (0.44%) IAG
3 7 (0.44%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 5 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.31%) VMware Infrastructure
5 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
5 3 (0.19%) Hyper-V
5 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
5 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 2 (0.12%) Virtual Desktop
6 2 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.12%) VMware Workstation
7 1 (0.062%) Embedded Firmware
7 1 (0.062%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 274 (17.08%) Kubernetes
2 184 (11.47%) Terraform
3 34 (2.12%) Ansible
4 27 (1.68%) Kubeflow
5 25 (1.56%) Grafana
6 18 (1.12%) Prometheus
7 9 (0.56%) Podman
8 6 (0.37%) 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 (0.12%) Argo
11 2 (0.12%) Docker Swarm
11 2 (0.12%) Packer
11 2 (0.12%) Rancher
11 2 (0.12%) SCCM
Vendors
1 204 (12.72%) Databricks
2 167 (10.41%) Microsoft
3 102 (6.36%) Google
4 80 (4.99%) OpenAI
5 48 (2.99%) SAP
6 40 (2.49%) Foundry
7 33 (2.06%) 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%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.44%) Nexthink
14 7 (0.44%) Sybase
15 6 (0.37%) Pega
15 6 (0.37%) Salesforce
15 6 (0.37%) Workday
16 5 (0.31%) VMware