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 26 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 108 133
Rank change year-on-year +28 +25 +81
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,556 746 745
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.06% 2.47% 1.71%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.60% 2.71% 2.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 953 450 522
10th Percentile £413 £393 £410
25th Percentile £490 £462 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £580
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -5.17% +0.87%
75th Percentile £675 £683 £738
90th Percentile £775 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £550
Number of hourly rates quoted 49 21 20
10th Percentile £40.28 £31.00 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.00 £45.00 £46.18
Median hourly rate £69.44 £75.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.41% +42.86% +50.00%
75th Percentile £83.75 £81.01 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.00 £88.00 £75.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.50 £78.10 £52.50
% change year-on-year -17.41% +48.76% +50.00%

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 43,249 27,546 37,029
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.99% 91.07% 85.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,953 17,432 23,598
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £502 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.54% -4.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £621 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,594 1,315 2,564
10th Percentile £14.81 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.44 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.95 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.71 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +82.48% -35.31% +17.65%

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 26 June 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 26 June 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 26 June 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 +29 1,292 £575 +2.72% 1,169
London +40 865 £575 - 706
UK excluding London +5 488 £550 - 638
Work from Home +18 452 £596 +8.27% 439
North of England +10 141 £575 +9.52% 131
Scotland +43 105 £489 +4.67% 33
South East -28 97 £600 +4.35% 228
North West -2 79 £599 +8.89% 82
Midlands -25 64 £550 +10.00% 67
Yorkshire -13 47 £550 -5.38% 34
West Midlands -27 47 £550 +10.00% 36
South West -27 46 £515 -16.94% 92
East of England -25 35 £550 -8.33% 80
Wales -11 18 £565 -1.83% 18
North East -21 18 £550 +37.50% 17
East Midlands -2 15 £650 +52.94% 31
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 6

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
1 105 (6.75%) Apache Spark
2 73 (4.69%) Apache Airflow
3 51 (3.28%) Apache
4 37 (2.38%) Jupyter
5 23 (1.48%) Confluence
6 8 (0.51%) Appian
6 8 (0.51%) SharePoint
7 6 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.32%) CMS
8 5 (0.32%) Headless CMS
8 5 (0.32%) SAS
9 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.13%) Luigi
10 2 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.064%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.064%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.064%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.064%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.064%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 32 (2.06%) Chatbot
2 13 (0.84%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.58%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Project
5 7 (0.45%) Microsoft Office
6 3 (0.19%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.13%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.13%) Simulink
8 1 (0.064%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.71%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.064%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.064%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.064%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.064%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.064%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 570 (36.63%) Azure
2 553 (35.54%) AWS
3 281 (18.06%) GCP
4 140 (9.00%) Power Platform
5 114 (7.33%) Serverless
6 101 (6.49%) Amazon S3
7 100 (6.43%) GitHub
8 90 (5.78%) Azure AI
9 87 (5.59%) AWS Lambda
10 86 (5.53%) Amazon SageMaker
11 78 (5.01%) Azure Machine Learning
12 77 (4.95%) Snowflake
13 65 (4.18%) Azure DevOps
14 59 (3.79%) Vertex AI
15 57 (3.66%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 55 (3.53%) Amazon Bedrock
17 51 (3.28%) GitHub Actions
18 48 (3.08%) Azure Data Factory
19 40 (2.57%) AWS CloudFormation
20 39 (2.51%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.03%) Firewall
2 12 (0.77%) Network Security
3 10 (0.64%) Internet
4 7 (0.45%) DNS
5 5 (0.32%) DHCP
5 5 (0.32%) VPN
6 4 (0.26%) HTTP
6 4 (0.26%) NAS
6 4 (0.26%) SAN
7 3 (0.19%) SMTP
8 2 (0.13%) 4G
8 2 (0.13%) 5G
8 2 (0.13%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.13%) MQTT
8 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.064%) InfiniBand
9 1 (0.064%) LTE
9 1 (0.064%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 113 (7.26%) Power BI
2 104 (6.68%) Data Lake
3 78 (5.01%) Big Data
4 74 (4.76%) Metadata
5 69 (4.43%) Data Warehouse
6 66 (4.24%) BigQuery
7 47 (3.02%) NoSQL
8 46 (2.96%) Tableau
9 41 (2.63%) Amazon Athena
10 39 (2.51%) PostgreSQL
11 38 (2.44%) Amazon Redshift
12 35 (2.25%) Hadoop
13 32 (2.06%) Relational Database
14 31 (1.99%) Delta Lake
15 30 (1.93%) SQL Server
16 26 (1.67%) Pinecone
17 24 (1.54%) MongoDB
18 19 (1.22%) MySQL
18 19 (1.22%) Weaviate
19 17 (1.09%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 94 (6.04%) Git
2 79 (5.08%) MLflow
3 53 (3.41%) JIRA
4 48 (3.08%) GitLab
5 27 (1.74%) Jenkins
6 8 (0.51%) Claude Code
7 7 (0.45%) Selenium
7 7 (0.45%) Vite
8 6 (0.39%) Visual Studio
9 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
10 4 (0.26%) ER Studio
10 4 (0.26%) ERwin
10 4 (0.26%) JMeter
10 4 (0.26%) Maven
10 4 (0.26%) PyCharm
11 3 (0.19%) Gradle
11 3 (0.19%) JUnit
11 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
11 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
11 3 (0.19%) Spinnaker
General
1 323 (20.76%) Social Skills
2 301 (19.34%) Finance
3 198 (12.72%) Analytical Skills
4 152 (9.77%) Public Sector
5 107 (6.88%) Banking
6 40 (2.57%) Marketing
7 38 (2.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 31 (1.99%) Pharmaceutical
8 31 (1.99%) Retail
9 25 (1.61%) Legal
10 24 (1.54%) Documentation Skills
11 22 (1.41%) Front Office
12 21 (1.35%) Influencing Skills
13 20 (1.29%) Aviation
14 18 (1.16%) Telecoms
15 17 (1.09%) Law
16 16 (1.03%) Financial Institution
16 16 (1.03%) Investment Banking
17 13 (0.84%) Manufacturing
18 12 (0.77%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 221 (14.20%) Architect
2 220 (14.14%) Data Scientist
3 218 (14.01%) Senior
4 153 (9.83%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 143 (9.19%) Data Engineer
6 135 (8.68%) Lead
7 102 (6.56%) Developer
8 75 (4.82%) Analyst
9 74 (4.76%) Python Engineer
10 70 (4.50%) Data Architect
11 68 (4.37%) Solutions Architect
12 67 (4.31%) Software Engineer
13 65 (4.18%) Machine Learning Engineer
14 60 (3.86%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 44 (2.83%) Consultant
16 42 (2.70%) Senior Data Scientist
17 35 (2.25%) Full-Stack Engineer
17 35 (2.25%) Platform Engineer
17 35 (2.25%) Python Developer
18 33 (2.12%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 174 (11.18%) PyTorch
2 120 (7.71%) TensorFlow
3 108 (6.94%) scikit-learn
4 90 (5.78%) Pandas
5 87 (5.59%) Kafka
6 84 (5.40%) LangChain
7 73 (4.69%) React
8 69 (4.43%) PySpark
9 68 (4.37%) NumPy
10 61 (3.92%) REST
11 51 (3.28%) .NET
12 44 (2.83%) Hugging Face
13 34 (2.19%) LangGraph
14 33 (2.12%) FastAPI
15 31 (1.99%) AngularJS
16 29 (1.86%) RESTful
17 28 (1.80%) Model Context Protocol
18 27 (1.74%) Node.js
19 22 (1.41%) pytest
20 21 (1.35%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 187 (12.02%) Cloud Native
2 151 (9.70%) AI Agents
3 113 (7.26%) Algorithms
4 61 (3.92%) Product Ownership
5 48 (3.08%) Distributed Systems
5 48 (3.08%) Onboarding
6 27 (1.74%) Data Protection Act
7 25 (1.61%) Enterprise Software
8 23 (1.48%) Data Structures
9 22 (1.41%) Life Science
10 19 (1.22%) Fixed Income
11 16 (1.03%) Legacy Systems
11 16 (1.03%) Management Information System
12 15 (0.96%) Hybrid Cloud
12 15 (0.96%) Security Posture
13 13 (0.84%) Distributed Computing
14 12 (0.77%) Autonomous Agent
14 12 (0.77%) Low-Code
14 12 (0.77%) Public Cloud
14 12 (0.77%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 40 (2.57%) Linux
2 17 (1.09%) Windows
3 11 (0.71%) Unix
4 6 (0.39%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.39%) VMS
5 5 (0.32%) Android
6 4 (0.26%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.064%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,253 (80.53%) AI
2 581 (37.34%) Data Science
3 488 (31.36%) CI/CD
4 448 (28.79%) LLM
5 443 (28.47%) Analytics
6 362 (23.26%) Data Pipeline
7 357 (22.94%) Generative AI
8 321 (20.63%) DevOps
9 307 (19.73%) MLOps
10 299 (19.22%) Agile
11 287 (18.44%) Data Engineering
12 258 (16.58%) Use Case
13 213 (13.69%) Problem-Solving
14 211 (13.56%) Decision-Making
15 209 (13.43%) Software Engineering
16 192 (12.34%) Data Governance
17 189 (12.15%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 177 (11.38%) ETL
19 173 (11.12%) Roadmaps
20 170 (10.93%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 870 (55.91%) Python
2 391 (25.13%) SQL
3 108 (6.94%) Java
4 63 (4.05%) C#
4 63 (4.05%) R
5 59 (3.79%) TypeScript
6 56 (3.60%) JavaScript
7 28 (1.80%) Bash
8 22 (1.41%) C++
9 16 (1.03%) PowerShell
10 15 (0.96%) Bicep
11 13 (0.84%) Scala
12 12 (0.77%) Go
13 10 (0.64%) Kotlin
14 9 (0.58%) SPARQL
15 8 (0.51%) PL/SQL
16 7 (0.45%) Rust
17 6 (0.39%) MATLAB
18 5 (0.32%) Perl
19 3 (0.19%) Korn
Qualifications
1 273 (17.54%) Security Cleared
2 191 (12.28%) SC Cleared
3 123 (7.90%) Degree
4 48 (3.08%) Master's Degree
5 46 (2.96%) BPSS Clearance
6 44 (2.83%) AWS Certification
6 44 (2.83%) DV Cleared
7 41 (2.63%) Computer Science Degree
8 31 (1.99%) PhD
9 23 (1.48%) Azure Certification
10 21 (1.35%) CISSP
11 20 (1.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 15 (0.96%) CISM
13 7 (0.45%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 7 (0.45%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 7 (0.45%) ISTQB
14 5 (0.32%) CEH
14 5 (0.32%) CompTIA Security+
14 5 (0.32%) DBS Check
14 5 (0.32%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 184 (11.83%) Data Quality
2 64 (4.11%) GDPR
3 56 (3.60%) QA
4 31 (1.99%) NIST
5 18 (1.16%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (1.03%) Accessibility
7 13 (0.84%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.71%) HIPAA
8 11 (0.71%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 10 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
10 9 (0.58%) GRC
11 8 (0.51%) GxP
12 7 (0.45%) NCSC
13 5 (0.32%) WCAG
14 4 (0.26%) COBIT
14 4 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
14 4 (0.26%) Solvency II
15 3 (0.19%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
15 3 (0.19%) SLA
System Software
1 208 (13.37%) Docker
2 12 (0.77%) Active Directory
3 11 (0.71%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.32%) VMware Infrastructure
5 4 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
6 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.19%) Firmware
6 3 (0.19%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.19%) IAG
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%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.064%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 259 (16.65%) Kubernetes
2 170 (10.93%) Terraform
3 23 (1.48%) Kubeflow
4 22 (1.41%) Grafana
5 18 (1.16%) Ansible
6 13 (0.84%) Prometheus
7 11 (0.71%) Podman
8 7 (0.45%) Istio
9 3 (0.19%) Nagios
9 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.19%) Puppet
9 3 (0.19%) Rancher
9 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.19%) vMotion
10 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.13%) Argo
10 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.13%) Kibana
10 2 (0.13%) Packer
10 2 (0.13%) SCCM
Vendors
1 193 (12.40%) Databricks
2 171 (10.99%) Microsoft
3 102 (6.56%) OpenAI
4 96 (6.17%) Google
5 56 (3.60%) Foundry
6 40 (2.57%) SAP
7 35 (2.25%) Oracle
8 28 (1.80%) ServiceNow
9 21 (1.35%) Informatica
10 17 (1.09%) IBM
11 14 (0.90%) UiPath
12 12 (0.77%) Dynatrace
13 9 (0.58%) Automation Anywhere
14 8 (0.51%) Salesforce
15 7 (0.45%) Amplitude
15 7 (0.45%) Sybase
15 7 (0.45%) Talend
16 6 (0.39%) Palantir
16 6 (0.39%) Pega
16 6 (0.39%) Workday