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

6 months to
19 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 86 98 135
Rank change year-on-year +12 +37 +82
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,384 752 722
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.88% 2.58% 1.70%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.42% 2.83% 1.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 849 479 529
10th Percentile £413 £368 £413
25th Percentile £493 £450 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £565 £580
Median % change year-on-year +1.77% -2.59% -1.28%
75th Percentile £675 £708 £738
90th Percentile £775 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £575 £525
% change year-on-year -4.35% +9.52% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 22 19
10th Percentile £50.00 £25.38 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.99 £45.00 £46.22
Median hourly rate £65.00 £63.25 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +2.77% +20.48% +50.00%
75th Percentile £83.75 £78.74 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.25 £81.01 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £77.50 £56.25
% change year-on-year -16.13% +37.78% +60.71%

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 40,493 26,571 36,681
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.28% 90.99% 86.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,428 17,064 23,633
10th Percentile £325 £305 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £507 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.65% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £494 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.00% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,382 1,097 2,442
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.26 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.72 £18.13 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.40 £28.18 £36.02
Median % change year-on-year +50.46% -21.77% +0.06%
75th Percentile £67.25 £60.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.23 £37.50
% change year-on-year +78.39% -32.73% +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 19 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 19 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 19 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 +12 1,157 £575 - 1,317
London +24 770 £575 - 645
UK excluding London +4 431 £550 -4.35% 864
Work from Home +6 388 £600 +9.09% 572
North of England -4 113 £554 +9.11% 249
Scotland +55 90 £516 +9.61% 52
South East -34 86 £600 +4.35% 241
Midlands -23 64 £575 +21.05% 113
North West -15 56 £575 - 139
East of England -18 48 £500 -20.00% 88
West Midlands -27 46 £550 +10.00% 59
Yorkshire -14 44 £525 - 72
South West -26 37 £500 -20.63% 100
North East -13 16 £575 +60.61% 40
East Midlands -20 16 £675 +52.11% 54
Wales -15 12 £759 +31.96% 21
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 14

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
1 116 (8.38%) Apache Spark
2 69 (4.99%) Apache Airflow
3 55 (3.97%) Apache
4 30 (2.17%) Jupyter
5 15 (1.08%) Confluence
6 9 (0.65%) Appian
7 5 (0.36%) CMS
7 5 (0.36%) Headless CMS
7 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
8 4 (0.29%) SAS
9 3 (0.22%) Palantir Foundry
10 2 (0.14%) Luigi
11 1 (0.072%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.072%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.072%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.072%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 27 (1.95%) Chatbot
2 11 (0.79%) Microsoft Project
3 9 (0.65%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.65%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.51%) Microsoft Office
5 3 (0.22%) LaTeX
5 3 (0.22%) Simulink
6 2 (0.14%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 11 (0.79%) SAP IBP
2 3 (0.22%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.072%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.072%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.072%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.072%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 530 (38.29%) Azure
2 480 (34.68%) AWS
3 241 (17.41%) GCP
4 125 (9.03%) Power Platform
5 94 (6.79%) GitHub
6 92 (6.65%) Serverless
7 90 (6.50%) Azure AI
8 85 (6.14%) Azure Machine Learning
9 73 (5.27%) Amazon SageMaker
10 70 (5.06%) Amazon S3
11 66 (4.77%) Azure DevOps
12 65 (4.70%) Snowflake
13 55 (3.97%) AWS Lambda
13 55 (3.97%) GitHub Actions
14 53 (3.83%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 51 (3.68%) Vertex AI
16 49 (3.54%) Azure Data Factory
17 40 (2.89%) AWS CloudFormation
18 33 (2.38%) Amazon Bedrock
19 28 (2.02%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 14 (1.01%) Network Security
2 10 (0.72%) Firewall
3 9 (0.65%) HTTP
4 8 (0.58%) DNS
5 5 (0.36%) FTP
5 5 (0.36%) SMTP
5 5 (0.36%) SSL
6 3 (0.22%) Ethernet
6 3 (0.22%) InfiniBand
6 3 (0.22%) NAS
6 3 (0.22%) SAN
7 2 (0.14%) 4G
7 2 (0.14%) 5G
7 2 (0.14%) DHCP
7 2 (0.14%) Internet
7 2 (0.14%) PCoIP
7 2 (0.14%) Radio Access Network
7 2 (0.14%) Remote Desktop
8 1 (0.072%) 3G
8 1 (0.072%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 95 (6.86%) Power BI
2 90 (6.50%) Data Lake
3 76 (5.49%) Big Data
4 62 (4.48%) BigQuery
5 58 (4.19%) Metadata
6 54 (3.90%) Data Warehouse
7 48 (3.47%) NoSQL
8 38 (2.75%) Tableau
9 35 (2.53%) Delta Lake
9 35 (2.53%) Hadoop
10 30 (2.17%) Pinecone
10 30 (2.17%) SQL Server
11 28 (2.02%) PostgreSQL
12 27 (1.95%) Amazon Athena
13 25 (1.81%) Mixpanel
13 25 (1.81%) Relational Database
14 23 (1.66%) Weaviate
15 19 (1.37%) MongoDB
16 17 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
17 15 (1.08%) Redis
Development Applications
1 92 (6.65%) MLflow
2 87 (6.29%) Git
3 33 (2.38%) JIRA
4 26 (1.88%) Jenkins
5 25 (1.81%) GitLab
6 8 (0.58%) Visual Studio
7 7 (0.51%) Selenium
8 5 (0.36%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.29%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.29%) JMeter
9 4 (0.29%) Maven
9 4 (0.29%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.22%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.22%) ERwin
10 3 (0.22%) Gradle
10 3 (0.22%) JUnit
10 3 (0.22%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.22%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.22%) Vite
11 2 (0.14%) Bitbucket
General
1 298 (21.53%) Social Skills
2 266 (19.22%) Finance
3 160 (11.56%) Analytical Skills
4 137 (9.90%) Public Sector
5 78 (5.64%) Banking
6 30 (2.17%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 29 (2.10%) Marketing
8 26 (1.88%) Documentation Skills
9 24 (1.73%) Legal
9 24 (1.73%) Pharmaceutical
10 22 (1.59%) Aviation
10 22 (1.59%) Influencing Skills
11 21 (1.52%) Retail
12 19 (1.37%) Front Office
12 19 (1.37%) Investment Banking
12 19 (1.37%) Telecoms
13 14 (1.01%) Presentation Skills
14 12 (0.87%) Aerospace
15 11 (0.79%) Law
16 10 (0.72%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 208 (15.03%) Data Scientist
2 186 (13.44%) Architect
2 186 (13.44%) Senior
3 161 (11.63%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
4 131 (9.47%) Data Engineer
5 116 (8.38%) Lead
6 94 (6.79%) Developer
7 71 (5.13%) Analyst
8 70 (5.06%) Python Engineer
9 59 (4.26%) Software Engineer
10 58 (4.19%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 56 (4.05%) Solutions Architect
12 55 (3.97%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 52 (3.76%) Data Architect
14 39 (2.82%) Senior Data Scientist
15 38 (2.75%) Consultant
16 31 (2.24%) Python Developer
17 30 (2.17%) Azure Engineer
18 28 (2.02%) Artificial Intelligence Specialist
19 27 (1.95%) Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 190 (13.73%) PyTorch
2 136 (9.83%) TensorFlow
3 113 (8.16%) scikit-learn
4 99 (7.15%) Pandas
5 78 (5.64%) Kafka
6 70 (5.06%) NumPy
7 69 (4.99%) LangChain
8 66 (4.77%) React
9 65 (4.70%) PySpark
10 54 (3.90%) REST
11 52 (3.76%) .NET
12 48 (3.47%) Hugging Face
13 34 (2.46%) LangGraph
13 34 (2.46%) Node.js
14 33 (2.38%) AngularJS
14 33 (2.38%) Model Context Protocol
15 29 (2.10%) FastAPI
16 26 (1.88%) RESTful
17 22 (1.59%) Faiss
18 20 (1.45%) Great Expectations
Miscellaneous
1 163 (11.78%) Cloud Native
2 133 (9.61%) AI Agents
3 129 (9.32%) Algorithms
4 47 (3.40%) Product Ownership
5 43 (3.11%) Onboarding
6 35 (2.53%) Distributed Systems
7 27 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
8 18 (1.30%) Fixed Income
9 17 (1.23%) Data Structures
9 17 (1.23%) Enterprise Software
9 17 (1.23%) Legacy Systems
9 17 (1.23%) Management Information System
10 15 (1.08%) Life Science
11 14 (1.01%) Hybrid Cloud
12 13 (0.94%) Analytical Mindset
13 12 (0.87%) Distributed Computing
13 12 (0.87%) Public Cloud
14 11 (0.79%) Augmented Reality
14 11 (0.79%) Low-Code
14 11 (0.79%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 30 (2.17%) Linux
2 14 (1.01%) Windows
3 10 (0.72%) Unix
4 8 (0.58%) VMS
5 7 (0.51%) Apple iOS
6 6 (0.43%) Android
7 2 (0.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.072%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,091 (78.83%) AI
2 512 (36.99%) Data Science
3 425 (30.71%) CI/CD
4 396 (28.61%) LLM
5 379 (27.38%) Analytics
6 305 (22.04%) Data Pipeline
7 299 (21.60%) Generative AI
8 276 (19.94%) DevOps
9 266 (19.22%) MLOps
10 259 (18.71%) Data Engineering
11 247 (17.85%) Agile
12 191 (13.80%) Problem-Solving
12 191 (13.80%) Use Case
13 172 (12.43%) Data Governance
14 169 (12.21%) ETL
15 166 (11.99%) Software Engineering
16 165 (11.92%) Decision-Making
17 161 (11.63%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 158 (11.42%) Containerisation
19 145 (10.48%) Natural Language Processing
Programming Languages
1 801 (57.88%) Python
2 354 (25.58%) SQL
3 100 (7.23%) Java
4 75 (5.42%) C#
5 64 (4.62%) R
6 49 (3.54%) TypeScript
7 47 (3.40%) JavaScript
8 23 (1.66%) C++
9 20 (1.45%) Bash
10 18 (1.30%) PowerShell
11 15 (1.08%) Bicep
12 13 (0.94%) Scala
13 11 (0.79%) Kotlin
14 8 (0.58%) Go
14 8 (0.58%) MATLAB
15 7 (0.51%) Rust
15 7 (0.51%) SPARQL
16 5 (0.36%) PL/SQL
17 4 (0.29%) Perl
17 4 (0.29%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 239 (17.27%) Security Cleared
2 164 (11.85%) SC Cleared
3 114 (8.24%) Degree
4 55 (3.97%) Master's Degree
5 41 (2.96%) DV Cleared
6 38 (2.75%) BPSS Clearance
7 36 (2.60%) PhD
8 31 (2.24%) Computer Science Degree
9 24 (1.73%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.37%) Azure Certification
11 18 (1.30%) CISSP
12 14 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 14 (1.01%) CISM
13 7 (0.51%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 6 (0.43%) ISTQB
14 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
15 5 (0.36%) GIAC
15 5 (0.36%) PMI Certification
15 5 (0.36%) PMP
16 4 (0.29%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 144 (10.40%) Data Quality
2 54 (3.90%) GDPR
3 51 (3.68%) QA
4 28 (2.02%) NIST
5 18 (1.30%) Accessibility
6 14 (1.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 12 (0.87%) EU AI Act
8 10 (0.72%) Actionable Recommendations
8 10 (0.72%) HIPAA
9 8 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 7 (0.51%) NCSC
11 5 (0.36%) GRC
11 5 (0.36%) WCAG
12 4 (0.29%) COBIT
13 3 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
13 3 (0.22%) DO-254
13 3 (0.22%) GxP
14 2 (0.14%) HMG Security Policy Framework
14 2 (0.14%) ISO/IEC 42001
15 1 (0.072%) Def Stans
System Software
1 186 (13.44%) Docker
2 11 (0.79%) Active Directory
2 11 (0.79%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 6 (0.43%) Firmware
4 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.14%) Ceph
5 2 (0.14%) HDFS
5 2 (0.14%) Lustre
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 (0.072%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 216 (15.61%) Kubernetes
2 138 (9.97%) Terraform
3 22 (1.59%) Kubeflow
4 21 (1.52%) Grafana
5 14 (1.01%) Ansible
5 14 (1.01%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.65%) Podman
7 4 (0.29%) Istio
8 3 (0.22%) Rancher
9 2 (0.14%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.14%) Kibana
9 2 (0.14%) Knative
9 2 (0.14%) NetBackup
9 2 (0.14%) Packer
9 2 (0.14%) SCCM
10 1 (0.072%) Argo
10 1 (0.072%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.072%) logstash
Vendors
1 204 (14.74%) Databricks
2 162 (11.71%) Microsoft
3 102 (7.37%) OpenAI
4 92 (6.65%) Google
5 60 (4.34%) Foundry
6 39 (2.82%) SAP
7 31 (2.24%) Oracle
8 23 (1.66%) ServiceNow
9 14 (1.01%) IBM
9 14 (1.01%) UiPath
10 13 (0.94%) Informatica
11 12 (0.87%) Dynatrace
12 11 (0.79%) Automation Anywhere
13 9 (0.65%) Amplitude
14 8 (0.58%) NVIDIA
15 7 (0.51%) Workday
16 6 (0.43%) Siemens
16 6 (0.43%) Talend
17 5 (0.36%) Ariba
17 5 (0.36%) Salesforce