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

6 months to
3 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 86 103 118
Rank change year-on-year +17 +15 +88
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,622 833 762
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.05% 2.52% 1.95%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.59% 2.78% 2.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,029 523 544
10th Percentile £413 £400 £407
25th Percentile £490 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +2.13%
75th Percentile £700 £675 £750
90th Percentile £788 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £500
% change year-on-year - +10.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 23 19
10th Percentile £29.77 £33.80 £13.06
25th Percentile £45.50 £52.86 £24.74
Median hourly rate £71.25 £75.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% +62.41% -
75th Percentile £82.86 £81.01 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £88.00 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.44 £77.50 £49.34
% change year-on-year -10.40% +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 45,145 29,940 33,399
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.95% 90.42% 85.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,873 18,766 21,491
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 £734 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,760 1,664 1,872
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.50 £17.30 £18.14
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.33
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.63% -5.12%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.63 £40.94
% change year-on-year +86.03% -42.28% +2.35%

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 3 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 3 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 3 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 +15 1,382 £580 +2.88% 2,219
London +34 919 £593 +3.04% 1,468
UK excluding London -4 510 £550 - 956
Work from Home +5 437 £600 +9.09% 925
North of England -8 141 £561 +15.13% 200
South East -22 133 £608 +8.09% 294
Scotland +35 84 £430 -14.00% 92
North West -28 71 £600 +22.45% 118
Midlands -13 66 £550 +7.32% 92
Yorkshire -6 56 £550 +12.19% 56
West Midlands -30 52 £550 -6.38% 56
South West -34 45 £528 -4.09% 106
East of England -21 31 £500 -13.04% 131
Wales -3 16 £540 -20.00% 27
North East -31 14 £463 +8.82% 28
East Midlands -11 12 £700 +64.71% 36
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 30

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 (5.43%) Apache Spark
2 75 (4.62%) Apache Airflow
3 46 (2.84%) Apache
4 34 (2.10%) Jupyter
5 21 (1.29%) Confluence
6 8 (0.49%) 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 (0.18%) Appian
9 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.12%) OpenStack
10 2 (0.12%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.062%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.062%) Luigi
11 1 (0.062%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 28 (1.73%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.74%) Microsoft Excel
3 6 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.37%) Microsoft Project
4 5 (0.31%) CPLEX
4 5 (0.31%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.12%) Notion
6 1 (0.062%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.062%) DaVinci Resolve
6 1 (0.062%) NUKE
6 1 (0.062%) Simulink
6 1 (0.062%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 11 (0.68%) SAP IBP
2 8 (0.49%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.18%) Oracle Assets
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 ERP
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
1 562 (34.65%) AWS
1 562 (34.65%) Azure
2 310 (19.11%) GCP
3 134 (8.26%) Power Platform
4 112 (6.91%) GitHub
5 109 (6.72%) Serverless
6 93 (5.73%) Amazon S3
7 84 (5.18%) Amazon SageMaker
7 84 (5.18%) AWS Lambda
8 81 (4.99%) Snowflake
9 79 (4.87%) Azure Machine Learning
10 64 (3.95%) Azure AI
11 57 (3.51%) Amazon Bedrock
11 57 (3.51%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 55 (3.39%) Vertex AI
13 50 (3.08%) Azure DevOps
13 50 (3.08%) dbt
14 48 (2.96%) GitHub Actions
15 44 (2.71%) Azure Data Factory
16 41 (2.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.29%) Firewall
2 16 (0.99%) Internet
2 16 (0.99%) Network Security
3 11 (0.68%) DNS
4 10 (0.62%) VPN
5 9 (0.55%) Broadband
5 9 (0.55%) DHCP
6 4 (0.25%) NAS
6 4 (0.25%) SAN
6 4 (0.25%) TCP/IP
6 4 (0.25%) VLAN
7 3 (0.18%) HTTP
7 3 (0.18%) MQTT
7 3 (0.18%) SMTP
8 2 (0.12%) 4G
8 2 (0.12%) 5G
8 2 (0.12%) CTI
8 2 (0.12%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.12%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.12%) Remote Desktop
Database & Business Intelligence
1 116 (7.15%) Power BI
2 87 (5.36%) Data Lake
3 77 (4.75%) BigQuery
4 75 (4.62%) Data Warehouse
5 74 (4.56%) Big Data
6 70 (4.32%) Metadata
7 52 (3.21%) NoSQL
8 46 (2.84%) Amazon Redshift
8 46 (2.84%) Tableau
9 40 (2.47%) Delta Lake
10 37 (2.28%) Amazon Athena
11 35 (2.16%) Relational Database
12 34 (2.10%) PostgreSQL
13 29 (1.79%) Hadoop
14 24 (1.48%) MongoDB
15 23 (1.42%) Looker
16 22 (1.36%) Neo4j
17 19 (1.17%) Elasticsearch
18 18 (1.11%) Data Mining
18 18 (1.11%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 98 (6.04%) Git
2 66 (4.07%) MLflow
3 50 (3.08%) GitLab
4 45 (2.77%) JIRA
5 26 (1.60%) Jenkins
6 10 (0.62%) Claude Code
6 10 (0.62%) Vite
7 8 (0.49%) 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
10 3 (0.18%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.18%) Spinnaker
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
1 338 (20.84%) Social Skills
2 306 (18.87%) Finance
3 216 (13.32%) Analytical Skills
4 142 (8.75%) Public Sector
5 116 (7.15%) Banking
6 41 (2.53%) Marketing
7 36 (2.22%) Retail
8 33 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 33 (2.03%) Pharmaceutical
9 30 (1.85%) Telecoms
10 25 (1.54%) Legal
11 22 (1.36%) Documentation Skills
11 22 (1.36%) Front Office
12 20 (1.23%) Financial Institution
13 18 (1.11%) Aviation
13 18 (1.11%) Manufacturing
14 17 (1.05%) Aerospace
14 17 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
15 16 (0.99%) Law
16 15 (0.92%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 250 (15.41%) Senior
2 243 (14.98%) Architect
3 227 (14.00%) Data Scientist
4 169 (10.42%) Lead
5 160 (9.86%) Data Engineer
6 141 (8.69%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 103 (6.35%) Developer
8 81 (4.99%) Machine Learning Engineer
9 77 (4.75%) Solutions Architect
10 76 (4.69%) Python Engineer
11 68 (4.19%) Data Architect
12 67 (4.13%) Analyst
13 65 (4.01%) Software Engineer
14 58 (3.58%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 54 (3.33%) Platform Engineer
16 47 (2.90%) Security Architect
16 47 (2.90%) Senior Data Scientist
17 46 (2.84%) DevOps Engineer
18 41 (2.53%) Consultant
19 39 (2.40%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 152 (9.37%) PyTorch
2 111 (6.84%) Kafka
3 109 (6.72%) TensorFlow
4 99 (6.10%) scikit-learn
5 82 (5.06%) LangChain
6 79 (4.87%) PySpark
7 76 (4.69%) Pandas
8 73 (4.50%) React
9 62 (3.82%) REST
10 58 (3.58%) NumPy
11 42 (2.59%) .NET
12 36 (2.22%) LangGraph
13 35 (2.16%) Hugging Face
14 29 (1.79%) AngularJS
14 29 (1.79%) FastAPI
15 27 (1.66%) Node.js
16 25 (1.54%) Model Context Protocol
16 25 (1.54%) pytest
16 25 (1.54%) RESTful
17 21 (1.29%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 187 (11.53%) Cloud Native
2 170 (10.48%) AI Agents
3 117 (7.21%) Algorithms
4 61 (3.76%) Product Ownership
5 60 (3.70%) Distributed Systems
5 60 (3.70%) Onboarding
6 27 (1.66%) Data Structures
6 27 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
6 27 (1.66%) Life Science
7 23 (1.42%) Data Protection Act
7 23 (1.42%) Hybrid Cloud
8 15 (0.92%) Fixed Income
8 15 (0.92%) Security Posture
8 15 (0.92%) Taxonomies
9 14 (0.86%) Legacy Systems
9 14 (0.86%) Public Cloud
10 13 (0.80%) Enterprise Cloud
10 13 (0.80%) Management Information System
10 13 (0.80%) Virtual Team
11 12 (0.74%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 53 (3.27%) Linux
2 15 (0.92%) Windows
3 12 (0.74%) 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 1,297 (79.96%) AI
2 606 (37.36%) Data Science
3 515 (31.75%) CI/CD
4 466 (28.73%) Analytics
5 438 (27.00%) LLM
6 372 (22.93%) Generative AI
7 365 (22.50%) Data Pipeline
8 336 (20.72%) DevOps
9 328 (20.22%) Agile
10 308 (18.99%) MLOps
11 283 (17.45%) Data Engineering
12 251 (15.47%) Use Case
13 250 (15.41%) Software Engineering
14 230 (14.18%) Decision-Making
15 210 (12.95%) Problem-Solving
16 209 (12.89%) Roadmaps
17 193 (11.90%) Infrastructure as Code
18 188 (11.59%) Data Governance
18 188 (11.59%) Stakeholder Management
19 183 (11.28%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 900 (55.49%) Python
2 400 (24.66%) SQL
3 122 (7.52%) Java
4 75 (4.62%) JavaScript
5 67 (4.13%) TypeScript
6 52 (3.21%) R
7 48 (2.96%) C#
8 40 (2.47%) Bash
9 22 (1.36%) PowerShell
10 18 (1.11%) C++
11 17 (1.05%) Bicep
12 16 (0.99%) Go
13 15 (0.92%) Scala
14 12 (0.74%) Kotlin
15 9 (0.55%) PL/SQL
15 9 (0.55%) Rust
15 9 (0.55%) SPARQL
16 8 (0.49%) Cypher
17 7 (0.43%) Gremlin
18 5 (0.31%) Perl
Qualifications
1 288 (17.76%) Security Cleared
2 205 (12.64%) SC Cleared
3 133 (8.20%) Degree
4 56 (3.45%) Computer Science Degree
5 54 (3.33%) DV Cleared
6 51 (3.14%) Master's Degree
7 47 (2.90%) AWS Certification
8 40 (2.47%) BPSS Clearance
9 35 (2.16%) PhD
10 31 (1.91%) CISSP
11 24 (1.48%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 20 (1.23%) Azure Certification
13 14 (0.86%) CISM
14 13 (0.80%) TOGAF Certification
15 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
15 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 7 (0.43%) Cisco Certification
15 7 (0.43%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 5 (0.31%) DBS Check
16 5 (0.31%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 190 (11.71%) Data Quality
2 62 (3.82%) GDPR
3 53 (3.27%) QA
4 34 (2.10%) NIST
5 19 (1.17%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.92%) Accessibility
6 15 (0.92%) EU AI Act
7 12 (0.74%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 9 (0.55%) GxP
9 8 (0.49%) Actionable Recommendations
9 8 (0.49%) GRC
9 8 (0.49%) HIPAA
10 6 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 42001
10 6 (0.37%) SLA
10 6 (0.37%) WCAG
11 5 (0.31%) Solvency II
12 4 (0.25%) COBIT
12 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
12 4 (0.25%) NCSC
13 3 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 219 (13.50%) Docker
2 12 (0.74%) Active Directory
3 7 (0.43%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 6 (0.37%) IAG
5 5 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
5 5 (0.31%) VMware Infrastructure
6 3 (0.18%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.18%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.18%) Terminal Services
6 3 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 2 (0.12%) Firmware
7 2 (0.12%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
7 2 (0.12%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.062%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 271 (16.71%) Kubernetes
2 183 (11.28%) Terraform
3 31 (1.91%) Ansible
4 27 (1.66%) Kubeflow
5 24 (1.48%) Grafana
6 18 (1.11%) Prometheus
7 9 (0.55%) Podman
8 6 (0.37%) Istio
9 4 (0.25%) systemd
10 3 (0.18%) Kibana
10 3 (0.18%) Nagios
10 3 (0.18%) NetBackup
10 3 (0.18%) Puppet
10 3 (0.18%) vCenter Server
10 3 (0.18%) vMotion
11 2 (0.12%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 2 (0.12%) Docker Swarm
11 2 (0.12%) Packer
11 2 (0.12%) Rancher
11 2 (0.12%) SCCM
Vendors
1 202 (12.45%) Databricks
2 169 (10.42%) Microsoft
3 102 (6.29%) Google
4 81 (4.99%) OpenAI
5 50 (3.08%) SAP
6 41 (2.53%) Foundry
7 35 (2.16%) ServiceNow
8 25 (1.54%) Oracle
9 20 (1.23%) Informatica
10 16 (0.99%) Dynatrace
11 15 (0.92%) IBM
12 12 (0.74%) Splunk
12 12 (0.74%) UiPath
13 7 (0.43%) Amplitude
13 7 (0.43%) Sybase
14 6 (0.37%) Nexthink
14 6 (0.37%) Pega
14 6 (0.37%) Salesforce
14 6 (0.37%) Workday
15 5 (0.31%) New Relic