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

6 months to
12 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 83 101 143
Rank change year-on-year +18 +42 +73
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,382 759 709
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.91% 2.60% 1.65%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.45% 2.86% 1.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 853 488 519
10th Percentile £413 £368 £413
25th Percentile £490 £455 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £725 £738
90th Percentile £775 £875 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -4.35% +4.55% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 21 19
10th Percentile £50.00 £25.25 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.99 £45.00 £46.47
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 £89.25 £81.01 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £76.25 £56.25
% change year-on-year -14.75% +35.56% +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 40,059 26,552 37,102
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.33% 90.94% 86.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,139 17,089 23,891
10th Percentile £321 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £519 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.69% -1.24% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £745 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £478 £500
% change year-on-year +2.93% -4.40% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,402 1,086 2,440
10th Percentile £14.97 £14.42 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.87 £18.50 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.40 £28.75 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +47.48% -21.23% +0.29%
75th Percentile £67.25 £60.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £26.50 £38.00
% change year-on-year +69.81% -30.26% +8.57%

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 12 May 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 12 May 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 12 May 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 1,160 £575 - 1,245
London +23 770 £575 -4.17% 634
UK excluding London +8 425 £550 -4.35% 797
Work from Home +5 395 £592 +7.55% 466
North of England -9 107 £566 +15.56% 219
South East -25 88 £600 +4.35% 245
Scotland +53 83 £518 +10.81% 51
Midlands -16 64 £575 +21.05% 100
North West -12 55 £575 +4.55% 121
East of England -17 49 £500 -20.00% 86
West Midlands -35 46 £550 +10.00% 53
Yorkshire -19 41 £550 - 59
South West -30 41 £500 -19.35% 89
East Midlands -24 16 £675 +45.95% 46
North East -12 14 £575 +60.61% 40
Wales -14 12 £759 +31.96% 12
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 8

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
1 117 (8.47%) Apache Spark
2 71 (5.14%) Apache Airflow
3 57 (4.12%) Apache
4 28 (2.03%) Jupyter
5 12 (0.87%) Confluence
6 9 (0.65%) Appian
7 6 (0.43%) CMS
8 5 (0.36%) Headless CMS
8 5 (0.36%) SAS
8 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
9 3 (0.22%) Palantir Foundry
10 2 (0.14%) Luigi
11 1 (0.072%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.072%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.072%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.072%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 27 (1.95%) Chatbot
2 11 (0.80%) Microsoft Project
3 9 (0.65%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.65%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.51%) Microsoft Office
5 3 (0.22%) LaTeX
5 3 (0.22%) Simulink
6 2 (0.14%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 11 (0.80%) SAP IBP
2 4 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.072%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.072%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.072%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.072%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 543 (39.29%) Azure
2 477 (34.52%) AWS
3 240 (17.37%) GCP
4 130 (9.41%) Power Platform
5 98 (7.09%) GitHub
6 94 (6.80%) Azure Machine Learning
6 94 (6.80%) Serverless
7 88 (6.37%) Azure AI
8 72 (5.21%) Amazon S3
9 71 (5.14%) Amazon SageMaker
10 68 (4.92%) Azure DevOps
11 67 (4.85%) Snowflake
12 58 (4.20%) GitHub Actions
13 57 (4.12%) Vertex AI
14 56 (4.05%) AWS Lambda
14 56 (4.05%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 52 (3.76%) Azure Data Factory
16 41 (2.97%) AWS CloudFormation
17 33 (2.39%) Amazon Bedrock
18 28 (2.03%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 13 (0.94%) Network Security
2 10 (0.72%) Firewall
3 9 (0.65%) HTTP
4 8 (0.58%) DNS
5 5 (0.36%) FTP
5 5 (0.36%) SMTP
5 5 (0.36%) SSL
6 4 (0.29%) InfiniBand
7 3 (0.22%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.14%) 4G
8 2 (0.14%) 5G
8 2 (0.14%) DHCP
8 2 (0.14%) Internet
8 2 (0.14%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.14%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.072%) Hyperconnected
9 1 (0.072%) LTE
9 1 (0.072%) Modbus
9 1 (0.072%) MQTT
9 1 (0.072%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 101 (7.31%) Power BI
2 91 (6.58%) Data Lake
3 76 (5.50%) Big Data
4 61 (4.41%) BigQuery
4 61 (4.41%) Metadata
5 57 (4.12%) Data Warehouse
6 47 (3.40%) NoSQL
7 39 (2.82%) Tableau
8 36 (2.60%) Pinecone
9 35 (2.53%) Delta Lake
9 35 (2.53%) Hadoop
10 30 (2.17%) SQL Server
11 29 (2.10%) Weaviate
12 28 (2.03%) PostgreSQL
13 27 (1.95%) Amazon Athena
14 25 (1.81%) Relational Database
15 23 (1.66%) Mixpanel
16 19 (1.37%) MongoDB
17 18 (1.30%) Amazon Redshift
18 15 (1.09%) Redis
Development Applications
1 93 (6.73%) MLflow
2 89 (6.44%) Git
3 31 (2.24%) JIRA
4 28 (2.03%) Jenkins
5 25 (1.81%) GitLab
6 8 (0.58%) Visual Studio
7 7 (0.51%) Selenium
8 6 (0.43%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.29%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.29%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.29%) JMeter
9 4 (0.29%) Maven
9 4 (0.29%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.22%) Bitbucket
10 3 (0.22%) ERwin
10 3 (0.22%) Gradle
10 3 (0.22%) JUnit
10 3 (0.22%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.22%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.22%) Vite
General
1 304 (22.00%) Social Skills
2 263 (19.03%) Finance
3 164 (11.87%) Analytical Skills
4 137 (9.91%) Public Sector
5 84 (6.08%) Banking
6 29 (2.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 29 (2.10%) Marketing
7 27 (1.95%) Documentation Skills
8 25 (1.81%) Influencing Skills
8 25 (1.81%) Legal
9 24 (1.74%) Pharmaceutical
10 21 (1.52%) Aviation
10 21 (1.52%) Retail
11 20 (1.45%) Investment Banking
12 19 (1.37%) Presentation Skills
13 18 (1.30%) Front Office
13 18 (1.30%) Telecoms
14 12 (0.87%) Aerospace
15 11 (0.80%) Law
16 10 (0.72%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 207 (14.98%) Data Scientist
2 186 (13.46%) Architect
3 185 (13.39%) Senior
4 168 (12.16%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 136 (9.84%) Data Engineer
6 115 (8.32%) Lead
7 96 (6.95%) Developer
8 73 (5.28%) Analyst
9 64 (4.63%) Python Engineer
10 57 (4.12%) Software Engineer
11 55 (3.98%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 55 (3.98%) Solutions Architect
12 53 (3.84%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
12 53 (3.84%) Data Architect
13 38 (2.75%) Senior Data Scientist
14 37 (2.68%) Consultant
15 31 (2.24%) Python Developer
16 30 (2.17%) Azure Engineer
16 30 (2.17%) Business Analyst
16 30 (2.17%) Gen AI Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 199 (14.40%) PyTorch
2 145 (10.49%) TensorFlow
3 119 (8.61%) scikit-learn
4 101 (7.31%) Pandas
5 75 (5.43%) Kafka
6 73 (5.28%) NumPy
7 72 (5.21%) LangChain
8 67 (4.85%) React
9 64 (4.63%) PySpark
10 53 (3.84%) .NET
11 50 (3.62%) Hugging Face
11 50 (3.62%) REST
12 42 (3.04%) Node.js
13 37 (2.68%) Model Context Protocol
14 35 (2.53%) LangGraph
15 34 (2.46%) AngularJS
16 33 (2.39%) FastAPI
17 29 (2.10%) Faiss
18 25 (1.81%) RESTful
19 20 (1.45%) Great Expectations
Miscellaneous
1 169 (12.23%) Cloud Native
2 133 (9.62%) AI Agents
2 133 (9.62%) Algorithms
3 44 (3.18%) Product Ownership
4 43 (3.11%) Onboarding
5 34 (2.46%) Distributed Systems
6 28 (2.03%) Data Protection Act
7 19 (1.37%) Legacy Systems
8 17 (1.23%) Fixed Income
8 17 (1.23%) Hybrid Cloud
8 17 (1.23%) Management Information System
9 16 (1.16%) Enterprise Software
10 14 (1.01%) Analytical Mindset
10 14 (1.01%) Data Structures
11 13 (0.94%) Distributed Computing
11 13 (0.94%) Life Science
12 12 (0.87%) Public Cloud
13 11 (0.80%) Augmented Reality
13 11 (0.80%) Virtual Reality
14 10 (0.72%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 30 (2.17%) Linux
2 11 (0.80%) VMS
2 11 (0.80%) Windows
3 7 (0.51%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.43%) Android
4 6 (0.43%) Unix
5 2 (0.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,090 (78.87%) AI
2 511 (36.98%) Data Science
3 421 (30.46%) CI/CD
4 391 (28.29%) Analytics
5 390 (28.22%) LLM
6 308 (22.29%) Data Pipeline
7 303 (21.92%) Generative AI
8 267 (19.32%) MLOps
9 266 (19.25%) DevOps
10 263 (19.03%) Data Engineering
11 254 (18.38%) Agile
12 199 (14.40%) Use Case
13 193 (13.97%) Problem-Solving
14 173 (12.52%) Data Governance
15 169 (12.23%) ETL
16 167 (12.08%) Software Engineering
17 164 (11.87%) Decision-Making
17 164 (11.87%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 159 (11.51%) Containerisation
19 146 (10.56%) Natural Language Processing
Programming Languages
1 802 (58.03%) Python
2 351 (25.40%) SQL
3 107 (7.74%) Java
4 78 (5.64%) C#
5 63 (4.56%) R
6 50 (3.62%) TypeScript
7 48 (3.47%) JavaScript
8 25 (1.81%) C++
9 20 (1.45%) Bash
10 19 (1.37%) PowerShell
11 16 (1.16%) Bicep
12 15 (1.09%) Scala
13 10 (0.72%) Go
13 10 (0.72%) Kotlin
14 8 (0.58%) MATLAB
15 7 (0.51%) Rust
16 5 (0.36%) PL/SQL
16 5 (0.36%) SPARQL
17 4 (0.29%) T-SQL
18 3 (0.22%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 238 (17.22%) Security Cleared
2 162 (11.72%) SC Cleared
3 116 (8.39%) Degree
4 59 (4.27%) Master's Degree
5 39 (2.82%) DV Cleared
6 38 (2.75%) BPSS Clearance
7 36 (2.60%) PhD
8 32 (2.32%) Computer Science Degree
9 24 (1.74%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.37%) Azure Certification
11 17 (1.23%) CISSP
12 14 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 13 (0.94%) CISM
14 9 (0.65%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 6 (0.43%) ISTQB
15 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
16 5 (0.36%) PMI Certification
16 5 (0.36%) PMP
17 3 (0.22%) DBS Check
17 3 (0.22%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 143 (10.35%) Data Quality
2 56 (4.05%) GDPR
3 52 (3.76%) QA
4 27 (1.95%) NIST
5 18 (1.30%) Accessibility
6 12 (0.87%) EU AI Act
6 12 (0.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 10 (0.72%) Actionable Recommendations
7 10 (0.72%) HIPAA
8 9 (0.65%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 6 (0.43%) NCSC
10 5 (0.36%) GRC
10 5 (0.36%) WCAG
11 3 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
11 3 (0.22%) DO-254
11 3 (0.22%) GxP
12 2 (0.14%) COBIT
12 2 (0.14%) Def Stans
12 2 (0.14%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 2 (0.14%) NIST 800
System Software
1 184 (13.31%) Docker
2 12 (0.87%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 11 (0.80%) Active Directory
4 6 (0.43%) Firmware
5 3 (0.22%) Lustre
5 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.14%) Ceph
6 2 (0.14%) HDFS
6 2 (0.14%) Microsoft App-V
6 2 (0.14%) Virtual Desktop
6 2 (0.14%) VMware Infrastructure
6 2 (0.14%) VMware Workstation
7 1 (0.072%) Embedded Firmware
7 1 (0.072%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 209 (15.12%) Kubernetes
2 140 (10.13%) Terraform
3 22 (1.59%) Grafana
4 20 (1.45%) Kubeflow
5 15 (1.09%) Ansible
6 14 (1.01%) Prometheus
7 9 (0.65%) Podman
8 4 (0.29%) Istio
9 3 (0.22%) Rancher
10 2 (0.14%) Argo
10 2 (0.14%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.14%) Kibana
10 2 (0.14%) Knative
10 2 (0.14%) Packer
10 2 (0.14%) SCCM
11 1 (0.072%) HP Fortify
11 1 (0.072%) logstash
11 1 (0.072%) Opsgenie
11 1 (0.072%) SELinux
Vendors
1 210 (15.20%) Databricks
2 165 (11.94%) Microsoft
3 102 (7.38%) OpenAI
4 96 (6.95%) Google
5 59 (4.27%) Foundry
6 41 (2.97%) SAP
7 31 (2.24%) Oracle
8 19 (1.37%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.09%) Informatica
9 15 (1.09%) UiPath
10 14 (1.01%) IBM
11 13 (0.94%) Dynatrace
12 11 (0.80%) Automation Anywhere
13 9 (0.65%) NVIDIA
14 7 (0.51%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.51%) Salesforce
14 7 (0.51%) Workday
15 6 (0.43%) Siemens
15 6 (0.43%) Splunk
15 6 (0.43%) Talend