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

6 months to
8 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 97 157
Rank change year-on-year +17 +60 +60
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,400 766 676
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.06% 2.62% 1.54%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.58% 2.89% 1.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 877 500 500
10th Percentile £413 £375 £413
25th Percentile £493 £459 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.17%
75th Percentile £700 £725 £714
90th Percentile £788 £873 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £525
% change year-on-year - +4.76% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 49 21 19
10th Percentile £42.79 £25.25 £41.22
25th Percentile £50.00 £31.00 £42.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% +15.00% +42.86%
75th Percentile £83.75 £78.70 £66.25
90th Percentile £91.00 £81.01 £72.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £77.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year -16.13% +24.00% +78.57%

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 39,061 26,469 37,905
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.38% 90.57% 86.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,736 17,183 24,573
10th Percentile £314 £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 £636 £638
90th Percentile £725 £743 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.51% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,329 996 2,365
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.00 £12.77
25th Percentile £19.10 £19.99 £16.00
Median hourly rate £36.00 £31.51 £33.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.25% -4.52% -11.17%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.38 £70.23
UK excluding London median hourly rate £36.00 £30.00 £32.50
% change year-on-year +20.00% -7.69% -10.34%

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 8 April 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 8 April 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 8 April 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 +12 1,192 £575 -4.17% 1,132
London +20 794 £600 -2.44% 588
UK excluding London +14 424 £550 - 725
Work from Home +25 421 £600 +9.09% 460
North of England -6 106 £550 +10.00% 168
South East -10 89 £600 +4.35% 249
Scotland +43 65 £537 +15.55% 36
East of England -8 63 £500 -16.67% 60
Midlands -15 63 £550 +15.79% 87
North West 0 61 £550 +0.46% 94
West Midlands -33 42 £550 +10.00% 38
South West -27 40 £550 -16.51% 97
Yorkshire -24 36 £527 +2.88% 46
East Midlands -16 19 £600 +33.33% 49
Wales -6 18 £738 +31.11% 27
North East -12 12 £575 +60.61% 29
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 13

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
1 122 (8.71%) Apache Spark
2 80 (5.71%) Apache Airflow
3 58 (4.14%) Apache
4 32 (2.29%) Jupyter
5 11 (0.79%) Confluence
6 9 (0.64%) Appian
6 9 (0.64%) SAS
7 6 (0.43%) CMS
8 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.21%) Headless CMS
11 2 (0.14%) Luigi
12 1 (0.071%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.071%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.071%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 33 (2.36%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.86%) Microsoft Excel
2 12 (0.86%) Microsoft Project
3 10 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
4 9 (0.64%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 4 (0.29%) Simulink
6 3 (0.21%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.14%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 7 (0.50%) SAP IBP
2 5 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.071%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.071%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.071%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 596 (42.57%) Azure
2 496 (35.43%) AWS
3 249 (17.79%) GCP
4 151 (10.79%) Power Platform
5 118 (8.43%) GitHub
6 102 (7.29%) Azure Machine Learning
7 101 (7.21%) Azure AI
8 95 (6.79%) Serverless
9 85 (6.07%) Azure DevOps
10 76 (5.43%) Amazon SageMaker
11 75 (5.36%) Snowflake
12 67 (4.79%) Amazon S3
13 63 (4.50%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 61 (4.36%) Azure Data Factory
14 61 (4.36%) GitHub Actions
15 60 (4.29%) Vertex AI
16 48 (3.43%) AWS Lambda
17 43 (3.07%) AWS CloudFormation
18 41 (2.93%) Amazon Bedrock
19 33 (2.36%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.14%) Network Security
2 11 (0.79%) Firewall
3 8 (0.57%) HTTP
4 7 (0.50%) DNS
5 6 (0.43%) Internet
6 5 (0.36%) FTP
6 5 (0.36%) SMTP
6 5 (0.36%) SSL
7 4 (0.29%) 5G
7 4 (0.29%) Ethernet
7 4 (0.29%) InfiniBand
8 3 (0.21%) Cisco IPT
8 3 (0.21%) LTE
8 3 (0.21%) VPN
9 2 (0.14%) 2G
9 2 (0.14%) 4G
9 2 (0.14%) Bluetooth
9 2 (0.14%) Hyperconnected
9 2 (0.14%) Mobile Backhaul
9 2 (0.14%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 116 (8.29%) Power BI
2 93 (6.64%) Data Lake
3 73 (5.21%) Data Warehouse
4 71 (5.07%) Big Data
5 57 (4.07%) NoSQL
6 54 (3.86%) BigQuery
6 54 (3.86%) Metadata
7 43 (3.07%) Tableau
8 37 (2.64%) PostgreSQL
9 36 (2.57%) Pinecone
10 32 (2.29%) Delta Lake
10 32 (2.29%) Hadoop
11 31 (2.21%) SQL Server
12 29 (2.07%) Amazon Athena
13 28 (2.00%) Relational Database
13 28 (2.00%) Weaviate
14 25 (1.79%) Mixpanel
15 23 (1.64%) Amazon Redshift
16 18 (1.29%) MySQL
17 17 (1.21%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 98 (7.00%) Git
2 92 (6.57%) MLflow
3 39 (2.79%) Jenkins
4 30 (2.14%) JIRA
5 27 (1.93%) GitLab
6 13 (0.93%) Visual Studio
7 11 (0.79%) Selenium
8 10 (0.71%) PyCharm
9 9 (0.64%) JMeter
10 7 (0.50%) Gradle
10 7 (0.50%) SonarQube
11 6 (0.43%) MSTest
12 5 (0.36%) Maven
13 4 (0.29%) Android Studio
13 4 (0.29%) Claude Code
13 4 (0.29%) Oracle APEX
13 4 (0.29%) RStudio
14 3 (0.21%) REST Assured
14 3 (0.21%) Spinnaker
14 3 (0.21%) Vite
General
1 340 (24.29%) Social Skills
2 282 (20.14%) Finance
3 174 (12.43%) Analytical Skills
4 143 (10.21%) Public Sector
5 84 (6.00%) Banking
6 34 (2.43%) Legal
6 34 (2.43%) Marketing
7 33 (2.36%) Pharmaceutical
8 29 (2.07%) Retail
9 26 (1.86%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 24 (1.71%) Documentation Skills
10 24 (1.71%) Influencing Skills
11 23 (1.64%) Front Office
11 23 (1.64%) Investment Banking
12 19 (1.36%) Presentation Skills
12 19 (1.36%) Telecoms
13 16 (1.14%) Manufacturing
14 13 (0.93%) Aviation
15 12 (0.86%) Electronics
16 11 (0.79%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 192 (13.71%) Data Scientist
1 192 (13.71%) Senior
2 191 (13.64%) Architect
3 183 (13.07%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
4 135 (9.64%) Data Engineer
5 122 (8.71%) Developer
6 121 (8.64%) Lead
7 67 (4.79%) Analyst
8 61 (4.36%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 60 (4.29%) Machine Learning Engineer
9 60 (4.29%) Python Engineer
10 59 (4.21%) Data Architect
11 58 (4.14%) Software Engineer
12 47 (3.36%) Solutions Architect
13 40 (2.86%) Senior Data Scientist
14 39 (2.79%) Consultant
15 36 (2.57%) Gen AI Engineer
16 35 (2.50%) Azure Engineer
17 28 (2.00%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
17 28 (2.00%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 212 (15.14%) PyTorch
2 170 (12.14%) TensorFlow
3 140 (10.00%) scikit-learn
4 116 (8.29%) Pandas
5 85 (6.07%) NumPy
6 80 (5.71%) LangChain
7 73 (5.21%) Kafka
8 71 (5.07%) React
9 63 (4.50%) .NET
9 63 (4.50%) PySpark
10 54 (3.86%) Node.js
11 52 (3.71%) REST
12 46 (3.29%) Hugging Face
12 46 (3.29%) LangGraph
12 46 (3.29%) Model Context Protocol
13 43 (3.07%) AngularJS
14 40 (2.86%) FastAPI
15 35 (2.50%) RESTful
16 29 (2.07%) Faiss
17 25 (1.79%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 189 (13.50%) Cloud Native
2 155 (11.07%) Algorithms
3 134 (9.57%) AI Agents
4 51 (3.64%) Product Ownership
5 43 (3.07%) Onboarding
6 33 (2.36%) Distributed Systems
7 27 (1.93%) Data Protection Act
8 21 (1.50%) Hybrid Cloud
9 20 (1.43%) Enterprise Software
9 20 (1.43%) Legacy Systems
10 19 (1.36%) Fixed Income
11 18 (1.29%) Analytical Mindset
12 17 (1.21%) Data Structures
12 17 (1.21%) Distributed Computing
12 17 (1.21%) Management Information System
13 14 (1.00%) Life Science
14 13 (0.93%) Public Cloud
14 13 (0.93%) Security Posture
15 12 (0.86%) Derivative
15 12 (0.86%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 35 (2.50%) Linux
2 12 (0.86%) VMS
3 11 (0.79%) Windows
4 8 (0.57%) Android
4 8 (0.57%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 7 (0.50%) Apple iOS
6 6 (0.43%) Ubuntu
7 4 (0.29%) Unix
8 1 (0.071%) CentOS
8 1 (0.071%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,096 (78.29%) AI
2 517 (36.93%) Data Science
3 422 (30.14%) CI/CD
4 411 (29.36%) Analytics
5 375 (26.79%) LLM
6 300 (21.43%) Data Pipeline
7 297 (21.21%) DevOps
8 296 (21.14%) Generative AI
9 272 (19.43%) Agile
10 269 (19.21%) Data Engineering
11 263 (18.79%) MLOps
12 208 (14.86%) Problem-Solving
13 187 (13.36%) Use Case
14 186 (13.29%) Natural Language Processing
15 183 (13.07%) Software Engineering
16 172 (12.29%) Data Governance
17 168 (12.00%) Data Modelling
18 167 (11.93%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
19 163 (11.64%) Containerisation
20 159 (11.36%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 829 (59.21%) Python
2 360 (25.71%) SQL
3 95 (6.79%) Java
4 89 (6.36%) C#
5 69 (4.93%) R
6 53 (3.79%) JavaScript
7 46 (3.29%) TypeScript
8 25 (1.79%) PowerShell
9 22 (1.57%) C++
10 19 (1.36%) Bicep
11 17 (1.21%) Bash
12 16 (1.14%) Scala
13 9 (0.64%) Go
13 9 (0.64%) MATLAB
13 9 (0.64%) Rust
14 8 (0.57%) Kotlin
15 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
16 4 (0.29%) C
16 4 (0.29%) Tcl
16 4 (0.29%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 243 (17.36%) Security Cleared
2 164 (11.71%) SC Cleared
3 161 (11.50%) Degree
4 74 (5.29%) Master's Degree
5 47 (3.36%) PhD
6 43 (3.07%) Computer Science Degree
7 42 (3.00%) DV Cleared
8 37 (2.64%) BPSS Clearance
9 21 (1.50%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.36%) Azure Certification
11 16 (1.14%) CISSP
12 13 (0.93%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 11 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 11 (0.79%) CISM
14 10 (0.71%) ISTQB
15 7 (0.50%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
17 5 (0.36%) PMI Certification
17 5 (0.36%) PMP
17 5 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 141 (10.07%) Data Quality
2 68 (4.86%) GDPR
3 53 (3.79%) QA
4 31 (2.21%) NIST
5 21 (1.50%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 19 (1.36%) EU AI Act
7 18 (1.29%) Accessibility
8 9 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
9 8 (0.57%) HIPAA
10 7 (0.50%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 7 (0.50%) NCSC
11 6 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 5 (0.36%) GRC
13 4 (0.29%) DO-254
13 4 (0.29%) PCI DSS
13 4 (0.29%) WCAG
14 3 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 3 (0.21%) GxP
14 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
14 3 (0.21%) SOC 2
System Software
1 198 (14.14%) Docker
2 12 (0.86%) Active Directory
2 12 (0.86%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 7 (0.50%) Firmware
4 3 (0.21%) Lustre
4 3 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.14%) Ceph
5 2 (0.14%) HDFS
6 1 (0.071%) Embedded Firmware
6 1 (0.071%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 214 (15.29%) Kubernetes
2 142 (10.14%) Terraform
3 21 (1.50%) Kubeflow
4 17 (1.21%) Grafana
5 13 (0.93%) Ansible
6 10 (0.71%) Podman
6 10 (0.71%) Prometheus
7 5 (0.36%) SCOM
8 3 (0.21%) Rancher
9 2 (0.14%) Argo
9 2 (0.14%) Istio
9 2 (0.14%) Kibana
9 2 (0.14%) Knative
10 1 (0.071%) Cilium
10 1 (0.071%) Docker Swarm
10 1 (0.071%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.071%) logstash
10 1 (0.071%) Opsgenie
10 1 (0.071%) Progress Chef
10 1 (0.071%) SELinux
Vendors
1 223 (15.93%) Databricks
2 189 (13.50%) Microsoft
3 115 (8.21%) Google
4 109 (7.79%) OpenAI
5 70 (5.00%) Foundry
6 37 (2.64%) SAP
7 29 (2.07%) Oracle
8 18 (1.29%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.07%) Informatica
10 14 (1.00%) UiPath
11 11 (0.79%) Automation Anywhere
11 11 (0.79%) IBM
11 11 (0.79%) NVIDIA
12 8 (0.57%) Dynatrace
12 8 (0.57%) Salesforce
13 7 (0.50%) Amplitude
14 6 (0.43%) MicroStrategy
14 6 (0.43%) Siemens
14 6 (0.43%) Splunk
14 6 (0.43%) Talend