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 25 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 81 101 162
Rank change year-on-year +20 +61 +64
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,379 758 669
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.14% 2.61% 1.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.66% 2.88% 1.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 848 499 489
10th Percentile £402 £375 £413
25th Percentile £492 £452 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £584 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.52% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £700 £738 £719
90th Percentile £788 £874 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £531 £525
% change year-on-year +3.53% +1.19% -10.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 21 23
10th Percentile £41.75 £25.25 £41.13
25th Percentile £50.00 £31.00 £42.50
Median hourly rate £56.63 £57.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year -1.51% +24.51% +31.94%
75th Percentile £79.90 £78.70 £66.25
90th Percentile £95.00 £81.01 £70.35
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £77.50 £53.09
% change year-on-year -17.42% +45.98% +51.69%

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 37,704 26,329 38,303
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.90% 90.53% 86.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,901 17,073 24,878
10th Percentile £313 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -1.13% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,218 942 2,338
10th Percentile £14.94 £15.20 £12.85
25th Percentile £18.50 £20.75 £16.00
Median hourly rate £32.50 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.72%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.31 £57.75
90th Percentile £75.12 £77.10 £71.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 £31.76 £31.50
% change year-on-year -5.54% +0.83% -12.50%

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 25 March 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 25 March 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 25 March 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 1,165 £575 -4.17% 1,115
London +21 777 £600 -4.00% 572
Work from Home +26 430 £600 +14.29% 467
UK excluding London +19 422 £550 +3.53% 731
North of England -23 99 £534 +4.20% 171
South East -6 93 £600 +9.09% 258
East of England -3 66 £550 -8.33% 61
Scotland +52 65 £463 +5.71% 37
Midlands -18 63 £550 +29.41% 89
North West -3 62 £542 +3.24% 95
West Midlands -18 42 £550 +29.41% 38
South West -15 36 £550 -17.60% 91
Yorkshire -43 28 £516 -1.67% 50
Wales -3 20 £738 +31.11% 25
East Midlands -19 19 £600 +33.33% 51
North East -7 12 £575 +60.61% 27
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 12

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
1 123 (8.92%) Apache Spark
2 79 (5.73%) Apache Airflow
3 58 (4.21%) Apache
4 29 (2.10%) Jupyter
5 13 (0.94%) Confluence
6 10 (0.73%) SAS
7 9 (0.65%) Appian
8 7 (0.51%) Palantir Foundry
9 6 (0.44%) CMS
9 6 (0.44%) GeoServer
9 6 (0.44%) Smallworld
10 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
11 3 (0.22%) Headless CMS
12 2 (0.15%) Luigi
13 1 (0.073%) Apache Superset
13 1 (0.073%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.073%) ArcGIS
13 1 (0.073%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.073%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 34 (2.47%) Chatbot
2 16 (1.16%) Microsoft Excel
3 14 (1.02%) Microsoft Office
4 12 (0.87%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 12 (0.87%) Microsoft Project
5 4 (0.29%) Simulink
6 3 (0.22%) LaTeX
7 1 (0.073%) CPLEX
7 1 (0.073%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.15%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 1 (0.073%) OpenText VIM for SAP
3 1 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.073%) SAP IBP
3 1 (0.073%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 614 (44.53%) Azure
2 487 (35.32%) AWS
3 263 (19.07%) GCP
4 145 (10.51%) Power Platform
5 119 (8.63%) GitHub
6 107 (7.76%) Azure Machine Learning
7 101 (7.32%) Azure AI
8 96 (6.96%) Serverless
9 85 (6.16%) Azure DevOps
10 79 (5.73%) Snowflake
11 69 (5.00%) Amazon SageMaker
12 63 (4.57%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 60 (4.35%) Azure Data Factory
13 60 (4.35%) GitHub Actions
13 60 (4.35%) Vertex AI
14 58 (4.21%) Amazon S3
15 43 (3.12%) AWS CloudFormation
16 42 (3.05%) AWS Lambda
17 37 (2.68%) Amazon Bedrock
18 34 (2.47%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.16%) Network Security
2 11 (0.80%) Firewall
3 7 (0.51%) DNS
3 7 (0.51%) HTTP
4 6 (0.44%) Internet
5 5 (0.36%) FTP
5 5 (0.36%) SMTP
5 5 (0.36%) SSL
6 4 (0.29%) 5G
6 4 (0.29%) Ethernet
6 4 (0.29%) InfiniBand
7 3 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
7 3 (0.22%) LTE
7 3 (0.22%) VPN
8 2 (0.15%) 2G
8 2 (0.15%) 4G
8 2 (0.15%) Bluetooth
8 2 (0.15%) Hyperconnected
8 2 (0.15%) Modbus
8 2 (0.15%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 111 (8.05%) Power BI
2 91 (6.60%) Data Lake
3 77 (5.58%) Data Warehouse
4 68 (4.93%) Big Data
5 59 (4.28%) NoSQL
6 51 (3.70%) BigQuery
6 51 (3.70%) Metadata
7 39 (2.83%) Tableau
8 38 (2.76%) PostgreSQL
9 36 (2.61%) Pinecone
10 35 (2.54%) Hadoop
11 33 (2.39%) Delta Lake
12 29 (2.10%) Relational Database
12 29 (2.10%) SQL Server
12 29 (2.10%) Weaviate
13 25 (1.81%) Mixpanel
14 24 (1.74%) Amazon Athena
15 19 (1.38%) MySQL
16 18 (1.31%) Amazon Redshift
16 18 (1.31%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 111 (8.05%) Git
2 96 (6.96%) MLflow
3 39 (2.83%) Jenkins
4 33 (2.39%) JIRA
5 26 (1.89%) GitLab
6 13 (0.94%) Visual Studio
7 10 (0.73%) PyCharm
8 9 (0.65%) JMeter
8 9 (0.65%) Selenium
9 7 (0.51%) Gradle
10 6 (0.44%) MSTest
10 6 (0.44%) SonarQube
11 5 (0.36%) Maven
12 4 (0.29%) Android Studio
12 4 (0.29%) Bitbucket
12 4 (0.29%) Cypress.io
12 4 (0.29%) Oracle APEX
12 4 (0.29%) RStudio
13 3 (0.22%) REST Assured
13 3 (0.22%) Spinnaker
General
1 354 (25.67%) Social Skills
2 283 (20.52%) Finance
3 168 (12.18%) Analytical Skills
4 147 (10.66%) Public Sector
5 87 (6.31%) Banking
6 37 (2.68%) Marketing
7 36 (2.61%) Pharmaceutical
8 32 (2.32%) Legal
9 28 (2.03%) Retail
10 26 (1.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 26 (1.89%) Influencing Skills
11 25 (1.81%) Investment Banking
12 23 (1.67%) Front Office
13 21 (1.52%) Documentation Skills
14 20 (1.45%) Presentation Skills
15 19 (1.38%) Manufacturing
16 16 (1.16%) Telecoms
17 13 (0.94%) Electronics
18 12 (0.87%) Financial Institution
18 12 (0.87%) Law
Job Titles
1 198 (14.36%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 195 (14.14%) Architect
3 191 (13.85%) Data Scientist
4 176 (12.76%) Senior
5 131 (9.50%) Data Engineer
6 121 (8.77%) Developer
7 116 (8.41%) Lead
8 65 (4.71%) Analyst
9 64 (4.64%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 64 (4.64%) Machine Learning Engineer
10 58 (4.21%) Data Architect
11 55 (3.99%) Python Engineer
12 50 (3.63%) Software Engineer
13 43 (3.12%) Solutions Architect
14 41 (2.97%) Senior Data Scientist
15 40 (2.90%) Gen AI Engineer
16 37 (2.68%) Azure Engineer
17 35 (2.54%) Consultant
18 31 (2.25%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
19 25 (1.81%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 226 (16.39%) PyTorch
2 189 (13.71%) TensorFlow
3 143 (10.37%) scikit-learn
4 108 (7.83%) Pandas
5 83 (6.02%) LangChain
6 80 (5.80%) React
7 79 (5.73%) NumPy
8 68 (4.93%) Kafka
9 58 (4.21%) PySpark
10 57 (4.13%) .NET
11 54 (3.92%) LangGraph
11 54 (3.92%) Model Context Protocol
12 53 (3.84%) Node.js
13 52 (3.77%) REST
14 50 (3.63%) FastAPI
15 48 (3.48%) Hugging Face
16 45 (3.26%) AngularJS
17 38 (2.76%) RESTful
18 30 (2.18%) Faiss
19 26 (1.89%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 192 (13.92%) Cloud Native
2 166 (12.04%) Algorithms
3 129 (9.35%) AI Agents
4 47 (3.41%) Product Ownership
5 44 (3.19%) Onboarding
6 37 (2.68%) Distributed Systems
7 29 (2.10%) Legacy Systems
8 28 (2.03%) Data Protection Act
9 24 (1.74%) Hybrid Cloud
10 21 (1.52%) Enterprise Software
11 20 (1.45%) Distributed Computing
12 19 (1.38%) Fixed Income
13 18 (1.31%) Analytical Mindset
14 17 (1.23%) Life Science
14 17 (1.23%) Management Information System
15 16 (1.16%) Data Structures
16 12 (0.87%) Credit Risk
16 12 (0.87%) IoT
16 12 (0.87%) Security Posture
17 11 (0.80%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 35 (2.54%) Linux
2 12 (0.87%) Windows
3 11 (0.80%) VMS
4 8 (0.58%) Android
4 8 (0.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 8 (0.58%) Ubuntu
5 7 (0.51%) Apple iOS
6 3 (0.22%) Unix
7 1 (0.073%) CentOS
7 1 (0.073%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,080 (78.32%) AI
2 514 (37.27%) Data Science
3 412 (29.88%) CI/CD
4 397 (28.79%) Analytics
5 376 (27.27%) LLM
6 310 (22.48%) DevOps
7 298 (21.61%) Data Pipeline
8 292 (21.17%) Generative AI
9 272 (19.72%) MLOps
10 271 (19.65%) Agile
11 267 (19.36%) Data Engineering
12 223 (16.17%) Problem-Solving
13 195 (14.14%) Natural Language Processing
14 188 (13.63%) Use Case
15 177 (12.84%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 173 (12.55%) Software Engineering
17 169 (12.26%) Containerisation
18 167 (12.11%) Data Governance
19 163 (11.82%) Data Modelling
20 155 (11.24%) Prompt Engineering
Programming Languages
1 838 (60.77%) Python
2 356 (25.82%) SQL
3 96 (6.96%) Java
4 82 (5.95%) C#
5 72 (5.22%) R
6 58 (4.21%) JavaScript
7 53 (3.84%) TypeScript
8 28 (2.03%) PowerShell
9 23 (1.67%) C++
10 21 (1.52%) Bash
11 18 (1.31%) Scala
12 17 (1.23%) Bicep
13 11 (0.80%) Go
14 10 (0.73%) MATLAB
14 10 (0.73%) Rust
15 7 (0.51%) Kotlin
15 7 (0.51%) SPARQL
16 4 (0.29%) C
16 4 (0.29%) SystemVerilog
16 4 (0.29%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 231 (16.75%) Security Cleared
2 186 (13.49%) Degree
3 154 (11.17%) SC Cleared
4 85 (6.16%) Master's Degree
5 48 (3.48%) PhD
6 47 (3.41%) Computer Science Degree
7 40 (2.90%) DV Cleared
8 32 (2.32%) BPSS Clearance
9 23 (1.67%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.38%) Azure Certification
11 18 (1.31%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 13 (0.94%) CISSP
13 11 (0.80%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 9 (0.65%) CISM
15 8 (0.58%) ISTQB
16 6 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
17 5 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
17 5 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
18 4 (0.29%) PMI Certification
18 4 (0.29%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 138 (10.01%) Data Quality
2 64 (4.64%) GDPR
3 49 (3.55%) QA
4 31 (2.25%) NIST
5 20 (1.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 19 (1.38%) EU AI Act
7 18 (1.31%) Accessibility
8 8 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
9 7 (0.51%) HIPAA
9 7 (0.51%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 6 (0.44%) GRC
10 6 (0.44%) NCSC
10 6 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 4 (0.29%) DO-254
11 4 (0.29%) PCI DSS
12 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 42001
12 3 (0.22%) SOC 2
12 3 (0.22%) WCAG
13 2 (0.15%) GxP
13 2 (0.15%) JSP 440
System Software
1 215 (15.59%) Docker
2 12 (0.87%) Active Directory
2 12 (0.87%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 7 (0.51%) Firmware
4 3 (0.22%) Lustre
4 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.15%) Ceph
5 2 (0.15%) HDFS
6 1 (0.073%) Embedded Firmware
6 1 (0.073%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 213 (15.45%) Kubernetes
2 139 (10.08%) Terraform
3 20 (1.45%) Kubeflow
4 19 (1.38%) Grafana
5 16 (1.16%) Ansible
6 13 (0.94%) Prometheus
7 10 (0.73%) Podman
8 7 (0.51%) SCOM
9 4 (0.29%) Argo
10 3 (0.22%) Kibana
10 3 (0.22%) Rancher
11 2 (0.15%) Istio
11 2 (0.15%) Knative
11 2 (0.15%) logstash
11 2 (0.15%) Single Sign-On
12 1 (0.073%) Cilium
12 1 (0.073%) Docker Swarm
12 1 (0.073%) HP Fortify
12 1 (0.073%) Opsgenie
12 1 (0.073%) SELinux
Vendors
1 218 (15.81%) Databricks
2 187 (13.56%) Microsoft
3 121 (8.77%) Google
4 111 (8.05%) OpenAI
5 75 (5.44%) Foundry
6 32 (2.32%) SAP
7 28 (2.03%) Oracle
8 19 (1.38%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.09%) Informatica
10 13 (0.94%) UiPath
11 11 (0.80%) Automation Anywhere
11 11 (0.80%) NVIDIA
12 10 (0.73%) IBM
13 8 (0.58%) Dynatrace
14 7 (0.51%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.51%) Greenplum
14 7 (0.51%) Palantir
14 7 (0.51%) Pega
14 7 (0.51%) Salesforce
15 6 (0.44%) Siemens