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 1 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 94 92 110
Rank change year-on-year -2 +18 +86
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,587 955 798
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.89% 2.89% 2.11%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.42% 3.19% 2.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,006 619 534
10th Percentile £413 £402 £390
25th Percentile £486 £475 £493
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +2.56%
75th Percentile £688 £677 £731
90th Percentile £781 £775 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £525 £494
% change year-on-year +4.76% +6.28% -10.18%
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 23 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.14 £13.06
25th Percentile £43.92 £36.93 £25.93
Median hourly rate £77.00 £55.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +40.00% +19.10% -
75th Percentile £86.06 £77.50 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £87.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £61.36 £46.18
% change year-on-year +25.48% +32.88% -

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 46,382 29,970 32,481
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.48% 90.66% 85.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,008 18,622 19,630
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £733 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,245 1,858 1,349
10th Percentile £13.70 £14.32 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.19 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £39.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +55.07% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £65.60 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.64 £65.00 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.50 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +77.01% -48.10% +1.18%

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 1 October 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 1 October 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 1 October 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 -4 1,364 £580 +2.47% 5,262
London +20 904 £597 -0.46% 3,556
UK excluding London -23 521 £550 +4.76% 2,049
Work from Home -16 421 £588 +6.82% 1,998
North of England -12 155 £575 +21.05% 408
South East -16 136 £600 +9.09% 455
Scotland +4 96 £475 -5.47% 238
North West -27 69 £650 +36.84% 264
Yorkshire -4 67 £525 +2.14% 92
South West -14 51 £528 -8.26% 341
Midlands -41 50 £575 +9.52% 181
West Midlands -31 40 £538 +2.38% 106
East of England -34 34 £463 -15.91% 274
North East -24 20 £550 +29.41% 53
Wales -13 7 £530 -21.48% 87
East Midlands -16 6 £425 -8.11% 75
Northern Ireland +7 1 £334 -52.29% 79

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 99 (6.24%) Apache Spark
2 80 (5.04%) Apache Airflow
3 65 (4.10%) Apache
4 35 (2.21%) Jupyter
5 25 (1.58%) Confluence
6 11 (0.69%) SAS
7 7 (0.44%) IIS
8 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
9 5 (0.32%) 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 Pulsar
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%) Luigi
13 1 (0.063%) nginx
Applications
1 30 (1.89%) Chatbot
2 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Excel
3 3 (0.19%) CPLEX
4 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
4 2 (0.13%) Notion
4 2 (0.13%) NUKE
5 1 (0.063%) Adobe XD
5 1 (0.063%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.063%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.063%) Simulink
5 1 (0.063%) Sketch
5 1 (0.063%) Trello
Business Applications
1 8 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
2 5 (0.32%) SAP IBP
3 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
3 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
4 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
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
Cloud Services
1 513 (32.33%) AWS
1 513 (32.33%) Azure
2 294 (18.53%) GCP
3 107 (6.74%) Serverless
4 106 (6.68%) Power Platform
5 102 (6.43%) GitHub
6 98 (6.18%) Amazon S3
7 90 (5.67%) Snowflake
8 86 (5.42%) AWS Lambda
9 71 (4.47%) Amazon SageMaker
10 64 (4.03%) Amazon Bedrock
11 63 (3.97%) dbt
12 59 (3.72%) Azure Machine Learning
13 48 (3.02%) Azure AI
13 48 (3.02%) Azure DevOps
14 47 (2.96%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 47 (2.96%) Vertex AI
15 45 (2.84%) SaaS
16 44 (2.77%) Azure Data Factory
17 41 (2.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.32%) Network Security
2 19 (1.20%) Broadband
2 19 (1.20%) Internet
3 13 (0.82%) DNS
4 12 (0.76%) Firewall
4 12 (0.76%) HTTP
5 9 (0.57%) DHCP
5 9 (0.57%) VPN
6 5 (0.32%) SMTP
6 5 (0.32%) TCP/IP
7 4 (0.25%) NAS
7 4 (0.25%) SAN
7 4 (0.25%) SMS
7 4 (0.25%) VLAN
8 3 (0.19%) CTI
8 3 (0.19%) MQTT
9 2 (0.13%) FTP
9 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
9 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
9 2 (0.13%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 99 (6.24%) Data Warehouse
2 98 (6.18%) Power BI
3 96 (6.05%) Data Lake
4 90 (5.67%) Metadata
5 77 (4.85%) BigQuery
6 65 (4.10%) Big Data
7 53 (3.34%) Amazon Redshift
8 49 (3.09%) Delta Lake
9 45 (2.84%) NoSQL
10 40 (2.52%) Tableau
11 38 (2.39%) PostgreSQL
12 35 (2.21%) Amazon Athena
13 29 (1.83%) Relational Database
14 25 (1.58%) Hadoop
15 24 (1.51%) Neo4j
16 20 (1.26%) MongoDB
17 18 (1.13%) Elasticsearch
18 17 (1.07%) Amazon RDS
18 17 (1.07%) DynamoDB
18 17 (1.07%) Looker
Development Applications
1 104 (6.55%) Git
2 55 (3.47%) GitLab
3 46 (2.90%) JIRA
4 39 (2.46%) MLflow
5 13 (0.82%) Claude Code
6 12 (0.76%) Jenkins
7 7 (0.44%) Vite
8 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
8 5 (0.32%) ERwin
8 5 (0.32%) JMeter
8 5 (0.32%) RStudio
9 4 (0.25%) Postman
9 4 (0.25%) Selenium
10 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
10 3 (0.19%) Pylint
10 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
11 2 (0.13%) Locust
11 2 (0.13%) Newman
11 2 (0.13%) Spinnaker
11 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 360 (22.68%) Social Skills
2 309 (19.47%) Finance
3 236 (14.87%) Analytical Skills
4 145 (9.14%) Public Sector
5 123 (7.75%) Banking
6 39 (2.46%) Marketing
7 35 (2.21%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 31 (1.95%) Retail
9 28 (1.76%) Pharmaceutical
9 28 (1.76%) Telecoms
10 24 (1.51%) Manufacturing
11 23 (1.45%) Aerospace
11 23 (1.45%) Legal
12 22 (1.39%) Front Office
12 22 (1.39%) Influencing Skills
13 19 (1.20%) Financial Institution
14 18 (1.13%) Documentation Skills
15 17 (1.07%) Investment Banking
16 15 (0.95%) Billing
16 15 (0.95%) Law
Job Titles
1 283 (17.83%) Senior
2 256 (16.13%) Architect
3 194 (12.22%) Data Scientist
4 188 (11.85%) Data Engineer
5 179 (11.28%) Lead
6 149 (9.39%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 104 (6.55%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 72 (4.54%) Solutions Architect
9 71 (4.47%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
10 70 (4.41%) Python Engineer
11 69 (4.35%) Developer
12 68 (4.28%) Data Architect
13 62 (3.91%) Analyst
14 56 (3.53%) Platform Engineer
14 56 (3.53%) Senior Data Engineer
15 52 (3.28%) Software Engineer
16 50 (3.15%) Senior Data Scientist
17 47 (2.96%) Security Architect
18 39 (2.46%) DevOps Engineer
19 38 (2.39%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 205 (12.92%) Terraform
2 110 (6.93%) PyTorch
3 105 (6.62%) Kafka
4 93 (5.86%) PySpark
5 81 (5.10%) TensorFlow
6 73 (4.60%) REST
7 72 (4.54%) LangChain
8 64 (4.03%) scikit-learn
9 60 (3.78%) React
10 58 (3.65%) Pandas
11 49 (3.09%) pytest
12 46 (2.90%) NumPy
13 38 (2.39%) FastAPI
13 38 (2.39%) LangGraph
14 33 (2.08%) .NET
15 28 (1.76%) Hugging Face
16 27 (1.70%) JSON
16 27 (1.70%) Model Context Protocol
17 21 (1.32%) RESTful
18 20 (1.26%) vLLM
Miscellaneous
1 208 (13.11%) Cloud Native
2 171 (10.78%) AI Agents
3 104 (6.55%) Algorithms
4 74 (4.66%) Onboarding
5 69 (4.35%) Distributed Systems
6 64 (4.03%) Product Ownership
7 39 (2.46%) Data Structures
8 36 (2.27%) Enterprise Software
9 30 (1.89%) Life Science
10 27 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
11 22 (1.39%) Management Information System
12 21 (1.32%) Hybrid Cloud
13 18 (1.13%) CMDB
13 18 (1.13%) Social Media
14 17 (1.07%) Taxonomies
15 16 (1.01%) Clustering
15 16 (1.01%) Credit Risk
16 15 (0.95%) Analytical Mindset
16 15 (0.95%) Virtual Team
17 14 (0.88%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 46 (2.90%) Linux
2 19 (1.20%) Windows
3 16 (1.01%) Unix
4 4 (0.25%) Android
4 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.19%) Apple iOS
6 1 (0.063%) Mac OS
6 1 (0.063%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
6 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,313 (82.73%) AI
2 582 (36.67%) Data Science
3 506 (31.88%) CI/CD
4 477 (30.06%) Analytics
5 436 (27.47%) LLM
6 396 (24.95%) Generative AI
7 363 (22.87%) Data Pipeline
8 327 (20.60%) Agile
8 327 (20.60%) DevOps
9 303 (19.09%) MLOps
10 282 (17.77%) Data Engineering
11 264 (16.64%) Software Engineering
12 246 (15.50%) Stakeholder Management
13 244 (15.37%) Decision-Making
14 239 (15.06%) Roadmaps
15 238 (15.00%) Use Case
16 221 (13.93%) Infrastructure as Code
17 207 (13.04%) Data Modelling
17 207 (13.04%) Problem-Solving
18 202 (12.73%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 841 (52.99%) Python
2 400 (25.20%) SQL
3 110 (6.93%) Java
4 75 (4.73%) JavaScript
5 61 (3.84%) TypeScript
6 40 (2.52%) Bash
7 35 (2.21%) R
8 32 (2.02%) C#
9 28 (1.76%) PowerShell
10 27 (1.70%) Scala
11 20 (1.26%) C++
12 19 (1.20%) Go
13 17 (1.07%) Bicep
14 14 (0.88%) Shell Script
15 11 (0.69%) Cypher
15 11 (0.69%) PL/SQL
16 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
16 7 (0.44%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.38%) Kotlin
18 5 (0.32%) Perl
Qualifications
1 316 (19.91%) Security Cleared
2 246 (15.50%) SC Cleared
3 129 (8.13%) Degree
4 58 (3.65%) DV Cleared
5 57 (3.59%) Computer Science Degree
6 50 (3.15%) AWS Certification
7 40 (2.52%) BPSS Clearance
7 40 (2.52%) Master's Degree
8 31 (1.95%) CISSP
9 29 (1.83%) Azure Certification
10 26 (1.64%) PhD
11 18 (1.13%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 15 (0.95%) TOGAF Certification
13 14 (0.88%) CISM
14 10 (0.63%) Cisco Certification
14 10 (0.63%) ITIL Certification
15 9 (0.57%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
15 9 (0.57%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 7 (0.44%) DBS Check
17 6 (0.38%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 225 (14.18%) Data Quality
2 56 (3.53%) QA
3 55 (3.47%) GDPR
4 30 (1.89%) NIST
5 19 (1.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (1.01%) Accessibility
6 16 (1.01%) EU AI Act
7 10 (0.63%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 10 (0.63%) SLA
8 9 (0.57%) GRC
8 9 (0.57%) NCSC
9 8 (0.50%) GxP
10 7 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 6 (0.38%) HIPAA
11 6 (0.38%) PCI DSS
12 5 (0.32%) Actionable Recommendations
12 5 (0.32%) Basel III
12 5 (0.32%) Solvency II
13 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
13 4 (0.25%) SOC 2
System Software
1 214 (13.48%) Docker
2 15 (0.95%) 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 (0.32%) 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%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
9 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
10 1 (0.063%) Firmware
10 1 (0.063%) zsh
Systems Management
1 286 (18.02%) Kubernetes
2 45 (2.84%) Ansible
3 26 (1.64%) Grafana
3 26 (1.64%) Kubeflow
4 20 (1.26%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.38%) Istio
5 6 (0.38%) systemd
6 5 (0.32%) Podman
7 3 (0.19%) Argo
7 3 (0.19%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Nagios
7 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
7 3 (0.19%) Puppet
7 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
7 3 (0.19%) vMotion
8 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 2 (0.13%) Packer
8 2 (0.13%) SCCM
8 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (0.063%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 199 (12.54%) Databricks
2 149 (9.39%) Microsoft
3 103 (6.49%) Google
4 62 (3.91%) OpenAI
5 36 (2.27%) SAP
6 34 (2.14%) ServiceNow
7 30 (1.89%) Oracle
8 26 (1.64%) Foundry
9 22 (1.39%) Informatica
10 17 (1.07%) Dynatrace
11 14 (0.88%) VMware
12 10 (0.63%) IBM
12 10 (0.63%) Nexthink
12 10 (0.63%) Salesforce
12 10 (0.63%) Splunk
13 9 (0.57%) UiPath
14 7 (0.44%) Cisco
15 6 (0.38%) Pega
15 6 (0.38%) Sybase
16 5 (0.32%) New Relic