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

6 months to
11 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 114 140
Rank change year-on-year +30 +26 +89
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,477 719 732
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.96% 2.45% 1.68%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.49% 2.69% 1.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 902 438 520
10th Percentile £413 £393 £413
25th Percentile £490 £460 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £556 £575
Median % change year-on-year +3.42% -3.30% -2.13%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £738
90th Percentile £775 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £575 £525
% change year-on-year -4.35% +9.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 42 19 19
10th Percentile £40.54 £29.85 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.30 £45.00 £46.22
Median hourly rate £67.00 £75.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -10.67% +42.86% +50.00%
75th Percentile £87.81 £81.01 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.88 £88.00 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £78.10 £56.25
% change year-on-year -18.05% +38.84% +60.71%

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 42,291 26,731 37,187
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.76% 91.01% 85.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,385 16,984 23,772
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,541 1,182 2,587
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £27.28 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +61.14% -25.26% +1.39%
75th Percentile £68.00 £56.00 £61.16
90th Percentile £81.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +8.91%

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 June 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 June 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 June 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 +18 1,228 £575 - 999
London +32 829 £575 - 532
UK excluding London +12 455 £550 -4.35% 618
Work from Home +22 426 £575 +4.55% 483
North of England -3 126 £558 +3.72% 165
Scotland +45 102 £515 +10.28% 28
South East -31 89 £630 +9.57% 206
North West -8 67 £575 +4.55% 104
Midlands -31 59 £550 +10.00% 56
Yorkshire -15 45 £550 - 43
South West -17 44 £500 -19.35% 83
West Midlands -32 43 £550 +10.00% 30
East of England -18 38 £525 -14.29% 69
North East -15 17 £550 +46.67% 18
Wales -12 15 £579 +0.70% 16
East Midlands -20 14 £675 +58.82% 25
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 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
1 109 (7.38%) Apache Spark
2 67 (4.54%) Apache Airflow
3 51 (3.45%) Apache
4 36 (2.44%) Jupyter
5 18 (1.22%) Confluence
6 10 (0.68%) Appian
7 8 (0.54%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.34%) CMS
8 5 (0.34%) Headless CMS
9 4 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
9 4 (0.27%) SAS
10 2 (0.14%) Luigi
10 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
11 1 (0.068%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.068%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.068%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.068%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.068%) NetWeaver
11 1 (0.068%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 29 (1.96%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.81%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.54%) Microsoft Project
5 7 (0.47%) Microsoft Office
6 3 (0.20%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.14%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.14%) Simulink
Business Applications
1 11 (0.74%) SAP IBP
2 6 (0.41%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.068%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.068%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.068%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.068%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.068%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.068%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 539 (36.49%) Azure
2 516 (34.94%) AWS
3 255 (17.26%) GCP
4 126 (8.53%) Power Platform
5 107 (7.24%) Serverless
6 94 (6.36%) Amazon S3
6 94 (6.36%) GitHub
7 86 (5.82%) Azure AI
8 79 (5.35%) Amazon SageMaker
9 78 (5.28%) AWS Lambda
10 72 (4.87%) Azure Machine Learning
11 69 (4.67%) Snowflake
12 67 (4.54%) Azure DevOps
13 54 (3.66%) Amazon Bedrock
13 54 (3.66%) Vertex AI
14 53 (3.59%) GitHub Actions
15 51 (3.45%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 47 (3.18%) Azure Data Factory
17 39 (2.64%) AWS CloudFormation
18 33 (2.23%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 12 (0.81%) Firewall
2 8 (0.54%) Internet
3 7 (0.47%) Network Security
4 5 (0.34%) DNS
5 4 (0.27%) DHCP
5 4 (0.27%) HTTP
5 4 (0.27%) NAS
5 4 (0.27%) SAN
6 3 (0.20%) VPN
7 2 (0.14%) 4G
7 2 (0.14%) 5G
7 2 (0.14%) Ethernet
7 2 (0.14%) InfiniBand
7 2 (0.14%) MQTT
7 2 (0.14%) PCoIP
7 2 (0.14%) Radio Access Network
7 2 (0.14%) Remote Desktop
7 2 (0.14%) SMTP
8 1 (0.068%) LTE
8 1 (0.068%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 101 (6.84%) Data Lake
2 99 (6.70%) Power BI
3 78 (5.28%) Big Data
4 69 (4.67%) Metadata
5 65 (4.40%) BigQuery
6 57 (3.86%) Data Warehouse
7 48 (3.25%) NoSQL
8 41 (2.78%) Tableau
9 40 (2.71%) Amazon Athena
10 35 (2.37%) Hadoop
10 35 (2.37%) PostgreSQL
11 33 (2.23%) Amazon Redshift
12 32 (2.17%) SQL Server
13 30 (2.03%) Relational Database
14 29 (1.96%) Delta Lake
14 29 (1.96%) Pinecone
15 22 (1.49%) MongoDB
16 21 (1.42%) Weaviate
17 20 (1.35%) Mixpanel
18 16 (1.08%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 88 (5.96%) Git
2 78 (5.28%) MLflow
3 41 (2.78%) JIRA
4 34 (2.30%) GitLab
5 25 (1.69%) Jenkins
6 9 (0.61%) Visual Studio
7 7 (0.47%) Selenium
8 5 (0.34%) Claude Code
8 5 (0.34%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.27%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.27%) ERwin
9 4 (0.27%) JMeter
9 4 (0.27%) Maven
9 4 (0.27%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.20%) ER Studio
10 3 (0.20%) Gradle
10 3 (0.20%) JUnit
10 3 (0.20%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.20%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.20%) Vite
General
1 313 (21.19%) Social Skills
2 286 (19.36%) Finance
3 182 (12.32%) Analytical Skills
4 155 (10.49%) Public Sector
5 91 (6.16%) Banking
6 37 (2.51%) Marketing
7 35 (2.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 27 (1.83%) Pharmaceutical
9 26 (1.76%) Legal
10 24 (1.62%) Documentation Skills
11 23 (1.56%) Retail
12 22 (1.49%) Aviation
12 22 (1.49%) Front Office
13 21 (1.42%) Influencing Skills
14 19 (1.29%) Investment Banking
15 18 (1.22%) Telecoms
16 15 (1.02%) Law
17 13 (0.88%) Manufacturing
18 12 (0.81%) Financial Institution
19 11 (0.74%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 218 (14.76%) Data Scientist
2 205 (13.88%) Senior
3 189 (12.80%) Architect
4 147 (9.95%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 136 (9.21%) Data Engineer
6 130 (8.80%) Lead
7 97 (6.57%) Developer
8 73 (4.94%) Analyst
9 70 (4.74%) Python Engineer
10 65 (4.40%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 64 (4.33%) Software Engineer
12 58 (3.93%) Data Architect
13 57 (3.86%) Solutions Architect
14 53 (3.59%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 41 (2.78%) Consultant
15 41 (2.78%) Senior Data Scientist
16 34 (2.30%) Platform Engineer
16 34 (2.30%) Python Developer
17 31 (2.10%) DevOps Engineer
18 29 (1.96%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 176 (11.92%) PyTorch
2 126 (8.53%) TensorFlow
3 107 (7.24%) scikit-learn
4 91 (6.16%) Pandas
5 81 (5.48%) Kafka
6 73 (4.94%) LangChain
7 68 (4.60%) React
8 67 (4.54%) NumPy
9 63 (4.27%) PySpark
10 57 (3.86%) REST
11 54 (3.66%) .NET
12 43 (2.91%) Hugging Face
13 35 (2.37%) LangGraph
14 34 (2.30%) Model Context Protocol
15 32 (2.17%) AngularJS
15 32 (2.17%) Node.js
16 31 (2.10%) FastAPI
17 28 (1.90%) RESTful
18 22 (1.49%) pytest
19 20 (1.35%) Faiss
Miscellaneous
1 176 (11.92%) Cloud Native
2 147 (9.95%) AI Agents
3 114 (7.72%) Algorithms
4 55 (3.72%) Product Ownership
5 43 (2.91%) Distributed Systems
6 42 (2.84%) Onboarding
7 27 (1.83%) Data Protection Act
8 20 (1.35%) Data Structures
8 20 (1.35%) Fixed Income
9 18 (1.22%) Enterprise Software
9 18 (1.22%) Legacy Systems
10 17 (1.15%) Life Science
11 14 (0.95%) Low-Code
12 13 (0.88%) Hybrid Cloud
12 13 (0.88%) Management Information System
13 12 (0.81%) Distributed Computing
13 12 (0.81%) Public Cloud
14 11 (0.74%) Augmented Reality
14 11 (0.74%) Security Posture
14 11 (0.74%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 30 (2.03%) Linux
2 16 (1.08%) Windows
3 11 (0.74%) Unix
4 6 (0.41%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.41%) VMS
5 5 (0.34%) Android
6 3 (0.20%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.068%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,188 (80.43%) AI
2 561 (37.98%) Data Science
3 469 (31.75%) CI/CD
4 433 (29.32%) LLM
5 410 (27.76%) Analytics
6 339 (22.95%) Data Pipeline
7 337 (22.82%) Generative AI
8 310 (20.99%) DevOps
9 296 (20.04%) MLOps
10 276 (18.69%) Data Engineering
11 271 (18.35%) Agile
12 229 (15.50%) Use Case
13 203 (13.74%) Problem-Solving
14 200 (13.54%) Software Engineering
15 191 (12.93%) Decision-Making
16 182 (12.32%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
17 178 (12.05%) Data Governance
18 175 (11.85%) ETL
19 161 (10.90%) Infrastructure as Code
20 154 (10.43%) Containerisation
Programming Languages
1 844 (57.14%) Python
2 380 (25.73%) SQL
3 108 (7.31%) Java
4 71 (4.81%) C#
5 65 (4.40%) R
6 50 (3.39%) TypeScript
7 47 (3.18%) JavaScript
8 26 (1.76%) C++
9 20 (1.35%) Bash
10 13 (0.88%) Bicep
11 12 (0.81%) PowerShell
11 12 (0.81%) Scala
12 10 (0.68%) Kotlin
13 8 (0.54%) Go
14 7 (0.47%) PL/SQL
14 7 (0.47%) Rust
14 7 (0.47%) SPARQL
15 6 (0.41%) MATLAB
16 5 (0.34%) Perl
17 3 (0.20%) Korn
Qualifications
1 251 (16.99%) Security Cleared
2 173 (11.71%) SC Cleared
3 117 (7.92%) Degree
4 49 (3.32%) Master's Degree
5 44 (2.98%) BPSS Clearance
6 39 (2.64%) Computer Science Degree
6 39 (2.64%) DV Cleared
7 34 (2.30%) AWS Certification
8 32 (2.17%) PhD
9 19 (1.29%) Azure Certification
9 19 (1.29%) CISSP
10 18 (1.22%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 15 (1.02%) CISM
12 7 (0.47%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 7 (0.47%) ISTQB
13 5 (0.34%) CEH
13 5 (0.34%) CompTIA Security+
13 5 (0.34%) DBS Check
13 5 (0.34%) GIAC
13 5 (0.34%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 172 (11.65%) Data Quality
2 58 (3.93%) GDPR
3 52 (3.52%) QA
4 32 (2.17%) NIST
5 18 (1.22%) Accessibility
6 17 (1.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 13 (0.88%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.74%) Actionable Recommendations
8 11 (0.74%) HIPAA
9 9 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 7 (0.47%) GRC
10 7 (0.47%) GxP
10 7 (0.47%) NCSC
11 5 (0.34%) WCAG
12 4 (0.27%) COBIT
12 4 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
13 3 (0.20%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 3 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 3 (0.20%) SLA
14 2 (0.14%) DO-254
System Software
1 198 (13.41%) Docker
2 12 (0.81%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 11 (0.74%) Active Directory
4 4 (0.27%) Firmware
4 4 (0.27%) Microsoft App-V
4 4 (0.27%) VMware Infrastructure
5 3 (0.20%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.14%) BitLocker
6 2 (0.14%) HDFS
6 2 (0.14%) Hyper-V
6 2 (0.14%) Terminal Services
6 2 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
6 2 (0.14%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (0.14%) VMware Workstation
7 1 (0.068%) Ceph
7 1 (0.068%) Embedded Firmware
7 1 (0.068%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 236 (15.98%) Kubernetes
2 161 (10.90%) Terraform
3 23 (1.56%) Kubeflow
4 20 (1.35%) Grafana
5 14 (0.95%) Ansible
5 14 (0.95%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.61%) Podman
7 6 (0.41%) Istio
8 3 (0.20%) NetBackup
8 3 (0.20%) Rancher
9 2 (0.14%) Argo
9 2 (0.14%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.14%) Kibana
9 2 (0.14%) Nagios
9 2 (0.14%) Packer
9 2 (0.14%) Puppet
9 2 (0.14%) SCCM
9 2 (0.14%) vCenter Server
9 2 (0.14%) vMotion
10 1 (0.068%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 188 (12.73%) Databricks
2 164 (11.10%) Microsoft
3 98 (6.64%) OpenAI
4 85 (5.75%) Google
5 57 (3.86%) Foundry
6 39 (2.64%) SAP
7 35 (2.37%) Oracle
8 21 (1.42%) ServiceNow
9 16 (1.08%) Informatica
10 15 (1.02%) IBM
10 15 (1.02%) UiPath
11 12 (0.81%) Dynatrace
12 11 (0.74%) Automation Anywhere
13 7 (0.47%) Amplitude
13 7 (0.47%) Sybase
14 6 (0.41%) NVIDIA
14 6 (0.41%) Salesforce
14 6 (0.41%) Talend
14 6 (0.41%) Workday
15 5 (0.34%) Splunk