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

6 months to
22 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 83 99 151
Rank change year-on-year +16 +52 +69
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,387 783 682
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.99% 2.66% 1.57%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.53% 2.93% 1.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 859 513 503
10th Percentile £413 £377 £413
25th Percentile £493 £463 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.17%
75th Percentile £700 £725 £725
90th Percentile £788 £874 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £525
% change year-on-year - +4.76% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 48 21 21
10th Percentile £47.84 £25.25 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.64 £45.00 £42.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £61.50 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +5.69% +17.14% +50.00%
75th Percentile £83.75 £78.70 £66.25
90th Percentile £90.00 £81.01 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £76.25 £61.25
% change year-on-year -14.75% +24.49% +75.00%

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 39,324 26,741 37,503
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.82% 90.76% 86.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,807 17,298 24,232
10th Percentile £318 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.89% -0.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £480 £500
% change year-on-year +1.09% -4.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,359 1,048 2,416
10th Percentile £14.96 £14.84 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.88 £18.51 £16.00
Median hourly rate £39.00 £30.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +30.00% -14.29% -6.67%
75th Percentile £65.60 £62.50 £58.69
90th Percentile £78.31 £75.00 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.54 £28.75 £35.00
% change year-on-year +41.01% -17.86% -6.67%

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 22 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 22 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 22 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 +6 1,178 £575 -4.17% 1,456
London +20 784 £600 - 627
UK excluding London +16 420 £550 - 988
Work from Home +26 405 £600 +9.09% 530
North of England -7 110 £550 +11.11% 430
South East -18 90 £615 +6.96% 217
Scotland +40 69 £546 +17.54% 49
Midlands -19 63 £550 +15.79% 99
North West -13 59 £550 +0.46% 331
East of England -12 56 £510 -18.40% 94
West Midlands -25 43 £550 +10.00% 38
Yorkshire -21 41 £550 +10.00% 68
South West -39 39 £538 -16.02% 85
East Midlands -23 18 £625 +38.89% 61
Wales -9 13 £750 +30.43% 12
North East -13 13 £563 +57.12% 31
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 17

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
1 120 (8.65%) Apache Spark
2 75 (5.41%) Apache Airflow
3 60 (4.33%) Apache
4 26 (1.87%) Jupyter
5 11 (0.79%) Confluence
6 9 (0.65%) Appian
6 9 (0.65%) SAS
7 6 (0.43%) CMS
8 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.22%) Headless CMS
11 2 (0.14%) Luigi
12 1 (0.072%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.072%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.072%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.072%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 30 (2.16%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.87%) Microsoft Excel
2 12 (0.87%) Microsoft Project
3 10 (0.72%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 9 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 4 (0.29%) Simulink
6 3 (0.22%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.14%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 9 (0.65%) SAP IBP
2 6 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.072%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.072%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.072%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.072%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 564 (40.66%) Azure
2 480 (34.61%) AWS
3 252 (18.17%) GCP
4 136 (9.81%) Power Platform
5 110 (7.93%) GitHub
6 98 (7.07%) Azure AI
6 98 (7.07%) Azure Machine Learning
7 90 (6.49%) Serverless
8 76 (5.48%) Azure DevOps
9 72 (5.19%) Amazon SageMaker
10 70 (5.05%) Amazon S3
10 70 (5.05%) Snowflake
11 62 (4.47%) Vertex AI
12 61 (4.40%) GitHub Actions
13 59 (4.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 57 (4.11%) Azure Data Factory
15 50 (3.60%) AWS Lambda
16 44 (3.17%) AWS CloudFormation
17 40 (2.88%) Amazon Bedrock
18 31 (2.24%) Microsoft Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.15%) Network Security
2 10 (0.72%) Firewall
3 8 (0.58%) HTTP
4 7 (0.50%) DNS
5 5 (0.36%) FTP
5 5 (0.36%) Internet
5 5 (0.36%) SMTP
5 5 (0.36%) SSL
6 4 (0.29%) Ethernet
6 4 (0.29%) InfiniBand
7 3 (0.22%) 5G
7 3 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
8 2 (0.14%) 4G
8 2 (0.14%) Bluetooth
8 2 (0.14%) Hyperconnected
8 2 (0.14%) LTE
8 2 (0.14%) Modbus
8 2 (0.14%) VPN
9 1 (0.072%) 3GPP
9 1 (0.072%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 107 (7.71%) Power BI
2 93 (6.71%) Data Lake
3 71 (5.12%) Big Data
4 64 (4.61%) BigQuery
4 64 (4.61%) Data Warehouse
5 60 (4.33%) Metadata
6 52 (3.75%) NoSQL
7 40 (2.88%) Tableau
8 36 (2.60%) Pinecone
9 34 (2.45%) Delta Lake
9 34 (2.45%) Hadoop
10 31 (2.24%) PostgreSQL
10 31 (2.24%) SQL Server
11 29 (2.09%) Amazon Athena
12 28 (2.02%) Weaviate
13 26 (1.87%) Relational Database
14 25 (1.80%) Mixpanel
15 22 (1.59%) Amazon Redshift
16 19 (1.37%) MongoDB
17 17 (1.23%) OLTP
Development Applications
1 94 (6.78%) Git
2 90 (6.49%) MLflow
3 31 (2.24%) JIRA
4 30 (2.16%) Jenkins
5 25 (1.80%) GitLab
6 8 (0.58%) Visual Studio
7 7 (0.50%) Gradle
7 7 (0.50%) SonarQube
8 6 (0.43%) PyCharm
8 6 (0.43%) Selenium
9 4 (0.29%) Android Studio
9 4 (0.29%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.29%) JMeter
9 4 (0.29%) Maven
10 3 (0.22%) Bitbucket
10 3 (0.22%) Cypress.io
10 3 (0.22%) JUnit
10 3 (0.22%) Oracle APEX
10 3 (0.22%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.22%) Spinnaker
General
1 329 (23.72%) Social Skills
2 279 (20.12%) Finance
3 173 (12.47%) Analytical Skills
4 137 (9.88%) Public Sector
5 89 (6.42%) Banking
6 36 (2.60%) Marketing
7 31 (2.24%) Pharmaceutical
8 28 (2.02%) Legal
9 27 (1.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 25 (1.80%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.80%) Front Office
11 23 (1.66%) Influencing Skills
11 23 (1.66%) Investment Banking
11 23 (1.66%) Retail
12 19 (1.37%) Presentation Skills
13 18 (1.30%) Telecoms
14 15 (1.08%) Aviation
15 13 (0.94%) Manufacturing
16 12 (0.87%) Aerospace
17 10 (0.72%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 201 (14.49%) Data Scientist
2 194 (13.99%) Architect
3 189 (13.63%) Senior
4 182 (13.12%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 135 (9.73%) Data Engineer
6 121 (8.72%) Lead
7 115 (8.29%) Developer
8 68 (4.90%) Analyst
9 60 (4.33%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 60 (4.33%) Software Engineer
10 58 (4.18%) Machine Learning Engineer
10 58 (4.18%) Python Engineer
11 55 (3.97%) Data Architect
12 47 (3.39%) Solutions Architect
13 39 (2.81%) Senior Data Scientist
14 36 (2.60%) Gen AI Engineer
15 35 (2.52%) Consultant
16 33 (2.38%) Azure Engineer
17 31 (2.24%) Python Developer
18 26 (1.87%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 210 (15.14%) PyTorch
2 163 (11.75%) TensorFlow
3 130 (9.37%) scikit-learn
4 108 (7.79%) Pandas
5 80 (5.77%) LangChain
6 77 (5.55%) NumPy
7 76 (5.48%) React
8 74 (5.34%) Kafka
9 58 (4.18%) PySpark
10 57 (4.11%) .NET
11 53 (3.82%) Node.js
11 53 (3.82%) REST
12 50 (3.60%) Hugging Face
13 48 (3.46%) LangGraph
13 48 (3.46%) Model Context Protocol
14 41 (2.96%) AngularJS
15 35 (2.52%) FastAPI
16 29 (2.09%) Faiss
17 28 (2.02%) RESTful
18 24 (1.73%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 181 (13.05%) Cloud Native
2 144 (10.38%) Algorithms
3 140 (10.09%) AI Agents
4 45 (3.24%) Product Ownership
5 44 (3.17%) Onboarding
6 31 (2.24%) Distributed Systems
7 28 (2.02%) Data Protection Act
8 20 (1.44%) Legacy Systems
9 19 (1.37%) Enterprise Software
9 19 (1.37%) Fixed Income
9 19 (1.37%) Hybrid Cloud
9 19 (1.37%) Management Information System
10 16 (1.15%) Analytical Mindset
11 15 (1.08%) Distributed Computing
11 15 (1.08%) Life Science
12 14 (1.01%) Public Cloud
13 12 (0.87%) Data Structures
14 11 (0.79%) Credit Risk
15 10 (0.72%) Augmented Reality
15 10 (0.72%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 32 (2.31%) Linux
2 11 (0.79%) VMS
3 10 (0.72%) Windows
4 8 (0.58%) Android
5 5 (0.36%) Apple iOS
5 5 (0.36%) Unix
6 4 (0.29%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 2 (0.14%) Ubuntu
8 1 (0.072%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,083 (78.08%) AI
2 516 (37.20%) Data Science
3 424 (30.57%) CI/CD
4 415 (29.92%) Analytics
5 383 (27.61%) LLM
6 304 (21.92%) Generative AI
7 301 (21.70%) Data Pipeline
8 278 (20.04%) DevOps
9 268 (19.32%) Data Engineering
10 260 (18.75%) Agile
11 259 (18.67%) MLOps
12 202 (14.56%) Problem-Solving
13 192 (13.84%) Use Case
14 181 (13.05%) Data Governance
15 176 (12.69%) Software Engineering
16 168 (12.11%) Natural Language Processing
17 166 (11.97%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 165 (11.90%) Containerisation
19 162 (11.68%) Decision-Making
20 158 (11.39%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 812 (58.54%) Python
2 348 (25.09%) SQL
3 105 (7.57%) Java
4 86 (6.20%) C#
5 70 (5.05%) R
6 54 (3.89%) JavaScript
7 49 (3.53%) TypeScript
8 24 (1.73%) C++
8 24 (1.73%) PowerShell
9 19 (1.37%) Bicep
10 18 (1.30%) Bash
11 16 (1.15%) Scala
12 9 (0.65%) Go
12 9 (0.65%) Kotlin
12 9 (0.65%) MATLAB
12 9 (0.65%) Rust
13 5 (0.36%) SPARQL
14 4 (0.29%) PL/SQL
14 4 (0.29%) SystemVerilog
14 4 (0.29%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 236 (17.02%) Security Cleared
2 159 (11.46%) SC Cleared
3 144 (10.38%) Degree
4 70 (5.05%) Master's Degree
5 43 (3.10%) PhD
6 41 (2.96%) DV Cleared
7 39 (2.81%) BPSS Clearance
7 39 (2.81%) Computer Science Degree
8 23 (1.66%) AWS Certification
9 20 (1.44%) Azure Certification
10 19 (1.37%) CISSP
11 15 (1.08%) CISM
12 12 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 12 (0.87%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 6 (0.43%) ISTQB
14 5 (0.36%) Microsoft Certification
14 5 (0.36%) PMI Certification
14 5 (0.36%) PMP
15 4 (0.29%) CEH
15 4 (0.29%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 140 (10.09%) Data Quality
2 65 (4.69%) GDPR
3 50 (3.60%) QA
4 31 (2.24%) NIST
5 19 (1.37%) Accessibility
6 15 (1.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 13 (0.94%) EU AI Act
8 10 (0.72%) HIPAA
9 9 (0.65%) Actionable Recommendations
9 9 (0.65%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 6 (0.43%) NCSC
11 5 (0.36%) GRC
12 4 (0.29%) DO-254
12 4 (0.29%) PCI DSS
12 4 (0.29%) WCAG
13 3 (0.22%) GxP
13 3 (0.22%) SOC 2
14 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 2 (0.14%) ISO/IEC 42001
14 2 (0.14%) NIST 800
System Software
1 198 (14.28%) Docker
2 13 (0.94%) Active Directory
3 12 (0.87%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 7 (0.50%) Firmware
5 3 (0.22%) Lustre
5 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.14%) Ceph
6 2 (0.14%) HDFS
7 1 (0.072%) Embedded Firmware
7 1 (0.072%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 210 (15.14%) Kubernetes
2 140 (10.09%) Terraform
3 20 (1.44%) Kubeflow
4 17 (1.23%) Grafana
5 13 (0.94%) Ansible
5 13 (0.94%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.65%) Podman
7 4 (0.29%) Istio
8 3 (0.22%) Rancher
9 2 (0.14%) Argo
9 2 (0.14%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.14%) Kibana
9 2 (0.14%) Knative
9 2 (0.14%) SCOM
10 1 (0.072%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.072%) logstash
10 1 (0.072%) Opsgenie
10 1 (0.072%) SELinux
10 1 (0.072%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 216 (15.57%) Databricks
2 179 (12.91%) Microsoft
3 111 (8.00%) Google
4 109 (7.86%) OpenAI
5 65 (4.69%) Foundry
6 42 (3.03%) SAP
7 30 (2.16%) Oracle
8 22 (1.59%) ServiceNow
9 16 (1.15%) Informatica
10 15 (1.08%) UiPath
11 14 (1.01%) IBM
12 11 (0.79%) Automation Anywhere
12 11 (0.79%) Dynatrace
13 9 (0.65%) Salesforce
14 7 (0.50%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.50%) NVIDIA
14 7 (0.50%) Pega
14 7 (0.50%) Workday
15 6 (0.43%) Siemens
15 6 (0.43%) Talend