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 11 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 89 98 106
Rank change year-on-year +9 +8 +89
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,588 883 833
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.91% 2.67% 2.16%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.44% 2.96% 2.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,008 562 570
10th Percentile £413 £401 £400
25th Percentile £490 £475 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +2.56%
75th Percentile £688 £680 £736
90th Percentile £788 £775 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £545 £500
% change year-on-year +0.92% +9.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 23 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.34 £13.06
25th Percentile £45.50 £44.42 £25.93
Median hourly rate £77.00 £62.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +23.20% +35.34% -
75th Percentile £88.68 £78.73 £53.75
90th Percentile £89.38 £87.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +2.67% +62.41% -

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 46,202 29,871 32,996
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.62% 90.47% 85.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,118 18,549 20,447
10th Percentile £325 £300 £311
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
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 3,059 1,786 1,512
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.23 £14.71
25th Percentile £17.36 £17.30 £20.09
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +3.61%
75th Percentile £67.50 £45.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +76.76% -47.37% +8.72%

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 11 September 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 11 September 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 11 September 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 +6 1,361 £575 - 3,594
London +27 910 £588 -2.08% 2,505
UK excluding London -7 503 £550 +0.92% 1,507
Work from Home -2 420 £598 +8.68% 1,342
South East -4 137 £600 +4.35% 369
North of England -25 137 £550 +15.79% 270
Scotland +22 92 £450 -14.29% 235
Yorkshire -2 61 £538 +10.26% 85
North West -35 61 £600 +26.32% 146
South West -34 48 £500 -11.11% 215
Midlands -36 47 £500 -6.98% 125
West Midlands -34 40 £525 -4.55% 59
East of England -29 36 £463 -17.78% 215
North East -37 16 £463 +8.82% 42
Wales -8 10 £550 -18.52% 41
East Midlands -13 6 £425 -8.11% 66
Northern Ireland +2 1 £334 -52.29% 53

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 88 (5.54%) Apache Spark
2 81 (5.10%) Apache Airflow
3 53 (3.34%) Apache
4 32 (2.02%) Jupyter
5 25 (1.57%) Confluence
6 11 (0.69%) SAS
7 7 (0.44%) IIS
8 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
9 5 (0.31%) SharePoint
10 4 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 3 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
12 2 (0.13%) Appian
12 2 (0.13%) CMS
12 2 (0.13%) Headless CMS
13 1 (0.063%) Apache Pulsar
13 1 (0.063%) Luigi
Applications
1 29 (1.83%) Chatbot
2 11 (0.69%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.25%) CPLEX
3 4 (0.25%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
5 2 (0.13%) Notion
5 2 (0.13%) NUKE
6 1 (0.063%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.063%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.063%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.063%) Simulink
6 1 (0.063%) Sketch
6 1 (0.063%) Trello
Business Applications
1 10 (0.63%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
3 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
3 3 (0.19%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
5 1 (0.063%) Actimize
5 1 (0.063%) Endur
5 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.063%) OpenLink RightAngle
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%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 541 (34.07%) Azure
2 516 (32.49%) AWS
3 305 (19.21%) GCP
4 119 (7.49%) Power Platform
5 114 (7.18%) GitHub
6 103 (6.49%) Serverless
7 93 (5.86%) Snowflake
8 89 (5.60%) Amazon S3
9 80 (5.04%) AWS Lambda
10 72 (4.53%) Amazon SageMaker
11 61 (3.84%) Azure Machine Learning
11 61 (3.84%) dbt
12 59 (3.72%) Amazon Bedrock
13 51 (3.21%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 49 (3.09%) Azure AI
14 49 (3.09%) Azure DevOps
15 45 (2.83%) GitHub Actions
15 45 (2.83%) Vertex AI
16 44 (2.77%) Azure Data Factory
17 43 (2.71%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 20 (1.26%) Network Security
2 18 (1.13%) Broadband
2 18 (1.13%) Internet
3 12 (0.76%) DNS
3 12 (0.76%) Firewall
3 12 (0.76%) HTTP
4 9 (0.57%) DHCP
4 9 (0.57%) VPN
5 5 (0.31%) SMTP
6 4 (0.25%) NAS
6 4 (0.25%) SAN
6 4 (0.25%) SMS
6 4 (0.25%) TCP/IP
6 4 (0.25%) VLAN
7 3 (0.19%) MQTT
8 2 (0.13%) CTI
8 2 (0.13%) FTP
8 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
8 2 (0.13%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 111 (6.99%) Power BI
2 93 (5.86%) Data Warehouse
3 90 (5.67%) Data Lake
4 81 (5.10%) Metadata
5 78 (4.91%) BigQuery
6 67 (4.22%) Big Data
7 52 (3.27%) Amazon Redshift
8 47 (2.96%) NoSQL
8 47 (2.96%) Tableau
9 45 (2.83%) Delta Lake
10 34 (2.14%) Amazon Athena
11 33 (2.08%) PostgreSQL
12 29 (1.83%) Relational Database
13 24 (1.51%) MongoDB
14 23 (1.45%) Neo4j
15 22 (1.39%) Hadoop
16 19 (1.20%) Data Mining
17 18 (1.13%) Looker
18 16 (1.01%) Semantic Layer
19 15 (0.94%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 96 (6.05%) Git
2 52 (3.27%) GitLab
3 50 (3.15%) JIRA
4 48 (3.02%) MLflow
5 17 (1.07%) Jenkins
6 12 (0.76%) Claude Code
7 8 (0.50%) Selenium
8 7 (0.44%) Vite
9 6 (0.38%) ERwin
10 5 (0.31%) Cypress.io
10 5 (0.31%) JMeter
10 5 (0.31%) RStudio
11 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
11 3 (0.19%) Pylint
11 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
12 2 (0.13%) Locust
12 2 (0.13%) Postman
12 2 (0.13%) SonarQube
12 2 (0.13%) Spinnaker
12 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 342 (21.54%) Social Skills
2 299 (18.83%) Finance
3 232 (14.61%) Analytical Skills
4 136 (8.56%) Public Sector
5 113 (7.12%) Banking
6 41 (2.58%) Marketing
7 38 (2.39%) Retail
8 32 (2.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 28 (1.76%) Pharmaceutical
9 28 (1.76%) Telecoms
10 25 (1.57%) Legal
11 24 (1.51%) Documentation Skills
12 22 (1.39%) Aerospace
12 22 (1.39%) Front Office
12 22 (1.39%) Manufacturing
13 20 (1.26%) Influencing Skills
14 19 (1.20%) Financial Institution
15 17 (1.07%) Investment Banking
16 16 (1.01%) Law
17 14 (0.88%) Billing
Job Titles
1 273 (17.19%) Senior
2 258 (16.25%) Architect
3 203 (12.78%) Data Scientist
4 173 (10.89%) Data Engineer
5 169 (10.64%) Lead
6 142 (8.94%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 98 (6.17%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 79 (4.97%) Developer
9 74 (4.66%) Python Engineer
10 73 (4.60%) Data Architect
11 72 (4.53%) Solutions Architect
12 64 (4.03%) Analyst
12 64 (4.03%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 59 (3.72%) Software Engineer
14 53 (3.34%) Platform Engineer
15 51 (3.21%) Security Architect
16 49 (3.09%) Senior Data Engineer
17 47 (2.96%) Senior Data Scientist
18 45 (2.83%) DevOps Engineer
19 41 (2.58%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 188 (11.84%) Terraform
2 115 (7.24%) PyTorch
3 108 (6.80%) Kafka
4 89 (5.60%) PySpark
5 83 (5.23%) TensorFlow
6 73 (4.60%) scikit-learn
7 71 (4.47%) REST
8 67 (4.22%) Pandas
9 64 (4.03%) LangChain
10 59 (3.72%) React
11 51 (3.21%) NumPy
12 43 (2.71%) pytest
13 37 (2.33%) .NET
14 33 (2.08%) LangGraph
15 32 (2.02%) FastAPI
16 29 (1.83%) JSON
17 26 (1.64%) Hugging Face
18 25 (1.57%) RESTful
19 21 (1.32%) Model Context Protocol
20 19 (1.20%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 191 (12.03%) Cloud Native
2 164 (10.33%) AI Agents
3 100 (6.30%) Algorithms
4 69 (4.35%) Onboarding
4 69 (4.35%) Product Ownership
5 65 (4.09%) Distributed Systems
6 38 (2.39%) Enterprise Software
7 35 (2.20%) Data Structures
8 27 (1.70%) Life Science
9 23 (1.45%) Hybrid Cloud
10 22 (1.39%) Data Protection Act
11 20 (1.26%) Management Information System
12 18 (1.13%) CMDB
13 17 (1.07%) Taxonomies
14 16 (1.01%) Social Media
14 16 (1.01%) Virtual Team
15 15 (0.94%) Analytical Mindset
16 14 (0.88%) Clustering
16 14 (0.88%) Cyber Threat
16 14 (0.88%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 46 (2.90%) Linux
2 19 (1.20%) Windows
3 14 (0.88%) Unix
4 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.19%) Android
6 2 (0.13%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.13%) VMS
7 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,301 (81.93%) AI
2 574 (36.15%) Data Science
3 497 (31.30%) CI/CD
4 473 (29.79%) Analytics
5 424 (26.70%) LLM
6 385 (24.24%) Generative AI
7 349 (21.98%) Data Pipeline
8 336 (21.16%) Agile
9 325 (20.47%) DevOps
10 282 (17.76%) MLOps
11 277 (17.44%) Data Engineering
12 257 (16.18%) Software Engineering
13 248 (15.62%) Decision-Making
14 237 (14.92%) Use Case
15 228 (14.36%) Stakeholder Management
16 226 (14.23%) Roadmaps
17 206 (12.97%) Infrastructure as Code
18 203 (12.78%) Problem-Solving
19 201 (12.66%) Data Modelling
20 188 (11.84%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 855 (53.84%) Python
2 397 (25.00%) SQL
3 112 (7.05%) Java
4 76 (4.79%) JavaScript
5 55 (3.46%) TypeScript
6 44 (2.77%) R
7 42 (2.64%) C#
8 41 (2.58%) Bash
9 30 (1.89%) PowerShell
10 21 (1.32%) C++
10 21 (1.32%) Scala
11 17 (1.07%) Go
12 15 (0.94%) Bicep
13 11 (0.69%) Cypher
13 11 (0.69%) PL/SQL
14 9 (0.57%) Shell Script
15 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
15 7 (0.44%) SPARQL
16 6 (0.38%) Kotlin
17 5 (0.31%) Perl
Qualifications
1 307 (19.33%) Security Cleared
2 232 (14.61%) SC Cleared
3 123 (7.75%) Degree
4 58 (3.65%) DV Cleared
5 55 (3.46%) Computer Science Degree
6 42 (2.64%) AWS Certification
7 41 (2.58%) Master's Degree
8 35 (2.20%) CISSP
9 34 (2.14%) BPSS Clearance
10 28 (1.76%) PhD
11 23 (1.45%) Azure Certification
12 16 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 16 (1.01%) CISM
13 15 (0.94%) TOGAF Certification
14 11 (0.69%) Cisco Certification
15 10 (0.63%) ITIL Certification
16 9 (0.57%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
17 7 (0.44%) PMP
18 6 (0.38%) CEH
18 6 (0.38%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 216 (13.60%) Data Quality
2 62 (3.90%) GDPR
3 60 (3.78%) QA
4 30 (1.89%) NIST
5 19 (1.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (1.01%) Accessibility
7 14 (0.88%) EU AI Act
8 10 (0.63%) SLA
9 9 (0.57%) GRC
9 9 (0.57%) GxP
9 9 (0.57%) HIPAA
9 9 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 9 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 6 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
10 6 (0.38%) NCSC
10 6 (0.38%) WCAG
11 5 (0.31%) COBIT
11 5 (0.31%) Solvency II
12 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
12 4 (0.25%) SOC 2
System Software
1 210 (13.22%) Docker
2 16 (1.01%) Active Directory
3 13 (0.82%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (0.63%) Hyper-V
4 10 (0.63%) IAG
5 8 (0.50%) Virtual Machines
6 7 (0.44%) NFS
7 5 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
8 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
8 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
8 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
9 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 2 (0.13%) Firmware
9 2 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
9 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
10 1 (0.063%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 274 (17.25%) Kubernetes
2 39 (2.46%) Ansible
3 26 (1.64%) Grafana
3 26 (1.64%) Kubeflow
4 19 (1.20%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.38%) Istio
6 5 (0.31%) Podman
7 4 (0.25%) systemd
8 3 (0.19%) Argo
8 3 (0.19%) Kibana
8 3 (0.19%) Nagios
8 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
8 3 (0.19%) Puppet
8 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
8 3 (0.19%) vMotion
9 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.13%) Packer
9 2 (0.13%) SCCM
10 1 (0.063%) QRadar
Vendors
1 207 (13.04%) Databricks
2 164 (10.33%) Microsoft
3 100 (6.30%) Google
4 63 (3.97%) OpenAI
5 44 (2.77%) SAP
6 34 (2.14%) ServiceNow
7 31 (1.95%) Foundry
8 30 (1.89%) Oracle
9 23 (1.45%) Informatica
10 17 (1.07%) Dynatrace
11 14 (0.88%) VMware
12 13 (0.82%) Splunk
13 11 (0.69%) IBM
14 10 (0.63%) Nexthink
14 10 (0.63%) UiPath
15 9 (0.57%) Salesforce
16 7 (0.44%) Cisco
16 7 (0.44%) Sybase
17 6 (0.38%) Pega
18 5 (0.31%) HP