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

6 months to
29 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 92 101 108
Rank change year-on-year +9 +7 +86
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,562 857 828
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.90% 2.60% 2.15%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.42% 2.88% 2.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,007 545 578
10th Percentile £413 £400 £399
25th Percentile £493 £475 £496
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £557 £600
Median % change year-on-year +3.23% -7.17% +2.13%
75th Percentile £700 £688 £731
90th Percentile £788 £788 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £498
% change year-on-year - +10.55% -9.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 39 24 18
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.92 £13.06
25th Percentile £37.75 £44.71 £31.13
Median hourly rate £77.00 £63.75 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +20.78% +38.05% -
75th Percentile £84.38 £79.06 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £86.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £49.34
% change year-on-year +2.67% +52.01% +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 45,621 29,800 32,930
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.64% 90.44% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,920 18,562 20,756
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
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 2,892 1,765 1,620
10th Percentile £14.10 £14.21 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.30 £18.50
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.03
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.16% +0.31%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.12 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.15 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.11 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +90.48% -47.37% +14.67%

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 +6 1,344 £575 - 4,671
London +27 906 £588 -2.08% 3,278
UK excluding London +2 480 £550 - 1,979
Work from Home +1 410 £592 +7.55% 1,769
South East -11 138 £600 +4.35% 449
North of England -24 129 £550 +13.11% 392
Scotland +18 82 £450 -14.29% 304
North West -48 60 £600 +21.21% 239
Yorkshire -8 58 £550 +13.11% 109
Midlands -31 52 £550 +2.33% 172
South West -29 45 £525 -6.67% 287
West Midlands -20 44 £550 -4.35% 106
East of England -28 29 £488 -13.33% 283
North East -32 12 £463 +8.82% 48
Wales -10 9 £540 -20.00% 50
East Midlands -15 7 £438 -1.41% 66
Northern Ireland +3 1 £334 -52.29% 69

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 82 (5.25%) Apache Spark
2 74 (4.74%) Apache Airflow
3 49 (3.14%) Apache
4 33 (2.11%) Jupyter
5 19 (1.22%) Confluence
6 11 (0.70%) SAS
7 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
8 5 (0.32%) Palantir Foundry
9 4 (0.26%) SharePoint
10 3 (0.19%) CMS
10 3 (0.19%) Headless CMS
10 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.13%) Appian
11 2 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.064%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.064%) Luigi
Applications
1 30 (1.92%) Chatbot
2 10 (0.64%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.26%) CPLEX
3 4 (0.26%) 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 (0.064%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.064%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.064%) Simulink
6 1 (0.064%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 10 (0.64%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
3 4 (0.26%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
4 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.064%) Actimize
6 1 (0.064%) NetSuite
6 1 (0.064%) Oracle Cash Management
6 1 (0.064%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.064%) Oracle Payables
6 1 (0.064%) Oracle Receivables
6 1 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
6 1 (0.064%) SAP APO
6 1 (0.064%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 547 (35.02%) Azure
2 517 (33.10%) AWS
3 306 (19.59%) GCP
4 123 (7.87%) Power Platform
5 115 (7.36%) GitHub
6 106 (6.79%) Serverless
7 90 (5.76%) Amazon S3
8 85 (5.44%) Snowflake
9 80 (5.12%) AWS Lambda
10 69 (4.42%) Amazon SageMaker
11 62 (3.97%) Azure Machine Learning
12 57 (3.65%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 56 (3.59%) Amazon Bedrock
14 55 (3.52%) Azure DevOps
14 55 (3.52%) dbt
15 52 (3.33%) Azure AI
16 50 (3.20%) GitHub Actions
17 46 (2.94%) Vertex AI
18 44 (2.82%) Azure Data Factory
18 44 (2.82%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 18 (1.15%) Internet
1 18 (1.15%) Network Security
2 17 (1.09%) Broadband
3 15 (0.96%) Firewall
4 11 (0.70%) DNS
5 10 (0.64%) VPN
6 9 (0.58%) DHCP
7 4 (0.26%) NAS
7 4 (0.26%) SAN
7 4 (0.26%) SMS
7 4 (0.26%) TCP/IP
7 4 (0.26%) VLAN
8 3 (0.19%) HTTP
8 3 (0.19%) MQTT
8 3 (0.19%) SMTP
9 2 (0.13%) CTI
9 2 (0.13%) Modbus
9 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
9 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
10 1 (0.064%) OpenFlow
Database & Business Intelligence
1 113 (7.23%) Power BI
2 89 (5.70%) Data Lake
3 87 (5.57%) Data Warehouse
4 79 (5.06%) Metadata
5 76 (4.87%) BigQuery
6 65 (4.16%) Big Data
7 50 (3.20%) Amazon Redshift
8 48 (3.07%) Delta Lake
9 47 (3.01%) NoSQL
10 42 (2.69%) Tableau
11 36 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
12 31 (1.98%) Relational Database
13 29 (1.86%) PostgreSQL
14 22 (1.41%) MongoDB
15 21 (1.34%) Hadoop
16 18 (1.15%) Data Mining
16 18 (1.15%) Looker
16 18 (1.15%) Neo4j
17 16 (1.02%) Azure SQL Database
18 15 (0.96%) Redis
Development Applications
1 87 (5.57%) Git
2 51 (3.27%) MLflow
3 50 (3.20%) GitLab
4 43 (2.75%) JIRA
5 22 (1.41%) Jenkins
6 11 (0.70%) Claude Code
7 10 (0.64%) Vite
8 8 (0.51%) Selenium
9 6 (0.38%) ERwin
10 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
11 4 (0.26%) JMeter
11 4 (0.26%) PyCharm
11 4 (0.26%) RStudio
11 4 (0.26%) Spinnaker
12 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
12 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
13 2 (0.13%) Locust
13 2 (0.13%) Pylint
13 2 (0.13%) SonarQube
13 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 341 (21.83%) Social Skills
2 286 (18.31%) Finance
3 221 (14.15%) Analytical Skills
4 129 (8.26%) Public Sector
5 108 (6.91%) Banking
6 43 (2.75%) Marketing
7 35 (2.24%) Retail
8 31 (1.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 29 (1.86%) Pharmaceutical
9 29 (1.86%) Telecoms
10 26 (1.66%) Legal
11 24 (1.54%) Documentation Skills
12 22 (1.41%) Front Office
13 20 (1.28%) Aerospace
13 20 (1.28%) Manufacturing
14 19 (1.22%) Financial Institution
14 19 (1.22%) Influencing Skills
15 16 (1.02%) Aviation
16 15 (0.96%) Law
17 14 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 255 (16.33%) Architect
2 249 (15.94%) Senior
3 199 (12.74%) Data Scientist
4 169 (10.82%) Lead
5 162 (10.37%) Data Engineer
6 135 (8.64%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 96 (6.15%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 84 (5.38%) Developer
9 75 (4.80%) Python Engineer
10 74 (4.74%) Solutions Architect
11 69 (4.42%) Data Architect
12 61 (3.91%) Analyst
12 61 (3.91%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 57 (3.65%) Software Engineer
14 53 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
15 49 (3.14%) Security Architect
16 46 (2.94%) Senior Data Engineer
17 44 (2.82%) Consultant
17 44 (2.82%) DevOps Engineer
18 39 (2.50%) Senior Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 191 (12.23%) Terraform
2 125 (8.00%) PyTorch
3 109 (6.98%) Kafka
4 92 (5.89%) TensorFlow
5 87 (5.57%) PySpark
6 75 (4.80%) scikit-learn
7 69 (4.42%) REST
8 67 (4.29%) LangChain
9 65 (4.16%) Pandas
10 64 (4.10%) React
11 48 (3.07%) NumPy
12 39 (2.50%) pytest
13 37 (2.37%) .NET
14 35 (2.24%) LangGraph
15 32 (2.05%) FastAPI
16 26 (1.66%) Hugging Face
16 26 (1.66%) RESTful
17 23 (1.47%) Model Context Protocol
17 23 (1.47%) Node.js
18 22 (1.41%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 194 (12.42%) Cloud Native
2 173 (11.08%) AI Agents
3 99 (6.34%) Algorithms
4 67 (4.29%) Product Ownership
5 62 (3.97%) Onboarding
6 61 (3.91%) Distributed Systems
7 32 (2.05%) Enterprise Software
8 29 (1.86%) Data Structures
9 25 (1.60%) Hybrid Cloud
9 25 (1.60%) Life Science
10 22 (1.41%) Data Protection Act
11 19 (1.22%) CMDB
12 16 (1.02%) Social Media
12 16 (1.02%) Virtual Team
13 15 (0.96%) IoT
14 14 (0.90%) Enterprise Cloud
14 14 (0.90%) Legacy Systems
14 14 (0.90%) Public Cloud
15 13 (0.83%) Augmented Reality
15 13 (0.83%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 47 (3.01%) Linux
2 13 (0.83%) Unix
3 12 (0.77%) Windows
4 4 (0.26%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.26%) 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 (0.064%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.064%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,267 (81.11%) AI
2 574 (36.75%) Data Science
3 498 (31.88%) CI/CD
4 451 (28.87%) Analytics
5 425 (27.21%) LLM
6 372 (23.82%) Generative AI
7 346 (22.15%) Data Pipeline
8 337 (21.57%) Agile
9 328 (21.00%) DevOps
10 289 (18.50%) MLOps
11 268 (17.16%) Data Engineering
12 248 (15.88%) Software Engineering
13 233 (14.92%) Use Case
14 221 (14.15%) Decision-Making
15 218 (13.96%) Stakeholder Management
16 212 (13.57%) Roadmaps
17 209 (13.38%) Problem-Solving
18 205 (13.12%) Infrastructure as Code
19 183 (11.72%) Data Governance
20 180 (11.52%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 848 (54.29%) Python
2 388 (24.84%) SQL
3 111 (7.11%) Java
4 73 (4.67%) JavaScript
5 56 (3.59%) TypeScript
6 45 (2.88%) C#
7 43 (2.75%) R
8 42 (2.69%) Bash
9 26 (1.66%) PowerShell
10 21 (1.34%) C++
11 20 (1.28%) Bicep
12 17 (1.09%) Scala
13 15 (0.96%) Go
14 11 (0.70%) PL/SQL
15 8 (0.51%) Cypher
15 8 (0.51%) Shell Script
16 7 (0.45%) Kotlin
16 7 (0.45%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.38%) Gremlin
17 6 (0.38%) Perl
Qualifications
1 279 (17.86%) Security Cleared
2 203 (13.00%) SC Cleared
3 118 (7.55%) Degree
4 54 (3.46%) Computer Science Degree
5 53 (3.39%) DV Cleared
6 43 (2.75%) AWS Certification
7 42 (2.69%) Master's Degree
8 35 (2.24%) CISSP
9 32 (2.05%) BPSS Clearance
10 28 (1.79%) PhD
11 22 (1.41%) Azure Certification
12 18 (1.15%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 16 (1.02%) CISM
14 14 (0.90%) TOGAF Certification
15 11 (0.70%) Cisco Certification
16 10 (0.64%) ITIL Certification
17 9 (0.58%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
18 7 (0.45%) PMP
19 6 (0.38%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 6 (0.38%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 202 (12.93%) Data Quality
2 62 (3.97%) GDPR
3 57 (3.65%) QA
4 31 (1.98%) NIST
5 21 (1.34%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 17 (1.09%) Accessibility
7 15 (0.96%) EU AI Act
8 9 (0.58%) GxP
8 9 (0.58%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 9 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 9 (0.58%) SLA
9 8 (0.51%) GRC
9 8 (0.51%) HIPAA
10 7 (0.45%) Actionable Recommendations
11 6 (0.38%) WCAG
12 5 (0.32%) NCSC
12 5 (0.32%) Solvency II
13 4 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 4 (0.26%) COBIT
13 4 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 214 (13.70%) Docker
2 11 (0.70%) Active Directory
3 10 (0.64%) IAG
4 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.32%) VMware Infrastructure
5 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
5 3 (0.19%) Hyper-V
5 3 (0.19%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
5 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 2 (0.13%) Firmware
6 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
6 2 (0.13%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
7 1 (0.064%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 277 (17.73%) Kubernetes
2 38 (2.43%) Ansible
3 28 (1.79%) Kubeflow
4 26 (1.66%) Grafana
5 18 (1.15%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.38%) Istio
7 5 (0.32%) Podman
8 4 (0.26%) systemd
9 3 (0.19%) Kibana
9 3 (0.19%) Nagios
9 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.19%) Puppet
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%) Packer
10 2 (0.13%) SCCM
11 1 (0.064%) logstash
Vendors
1 204 (13.06%) Databricks
2 164 (10.50%) Microsoft
3 104 (6.66%) Google
4 73 (4.67%) OpenAI
5 45 (2.88%) SAP
6 36 (2.30%) ServiceNow
7 33 (2.11%) Foundry
8 29 (1.86%) Oracle
9 24 (1.54%) Informatica
10 18 (1.15%) Dynatrace
11 13 (0.83%) Splunk
12 12 (0.77%) UiPath
13 11 (0.70%) IBM
14 10 (0.64%) Nexthink
15 7 (0.45%) Cisco
15 7 (0.45%) Salesforce
15 7 (0.45%) Sybase
16 6 (0.38%) Pega
16 6 (0.38%) VMware
17 5 (0.32%) Palantir