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

6 months to
21 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 79 103 158
Rank change year-on-year +24 +55 +74
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,385 759 670
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.16% 2.59% 1.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.67% 2.86% 1.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 855 499 492
10th Percentile £401 £375 £413
25th Percentile £481 £456 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year - - -6.39%
75th Percentile £700 £738 £714
90th Percentile £788 £874 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £525 £525
% change year-on-year +4.76% - -9.68%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 17 24
10th Percentile £41.85 £23.65 £41.15
25th Percentile £50.00 £26.50 £42.50
Median hourly rate £57.77 £52.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +10.03% +13.69% +31.94%
75th Percentile £79.60 £78.70 £66.25
90th Percentile £95.00 £83.81 £69.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £79.69 £46.18
% change year-on-year -19.69% +72.56% +31.94%

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 37,710 26,528 38,308
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.02% 90.44% 86.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,926 17,086 24,905
10th Percentile £313 £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 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -1.28% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,216 926 2,329
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.25 £12.98
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £30.32 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -6.71% - -7.14%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.51 £57.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £76.72 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £28.50 £31.76 £31.25
% change year-on-year -10.26% +1.63% -10.71%

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 21 March 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 21 March 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 21 March 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 +13 1,163 £575 -4.17% 1,221
London +21 773 £600 -3.61% 629
Work from Home +29 438 £600 +9.09% 523
UK excluding London +38 433 £550 +4.76% 803
North of England -20 102 £531 +3.54% 177
South East -7 93 £600 +9.09% 300
Scotland +53 72 £450 +2.86% 39
East of England +6 68 £550 -8.33% 82
North West +3 63 £534 +1.71% 94
Midlands -11 63 £550 +29.41% 90
West Midlands -27 42 £550 +34.97% 36
South West -22 35 £550 -17.60% 99
Yorkshire -38 29 £516 -1.67% 54
Wales -1 20 £738 +31.11% 26
East Midlands -19 19 £600 +33.33% 54
North East -10 13 £563 +57.12% 30
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 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
1 123 (8.88%) Apache Spark
2 79 (5.70%) Apache Airflow
3 58 (4.19%) Apache
4 29 (2.09%) Jupyter
5 13 (0.94%) Confluence
6 10 (0.72%) Appian
6 10 (0.72%) SAS
7 7 (0.51%) Palantir Foundry
8 6 (0.43%) CMS
8 6 (0.43%) GeoServer
8 6 (0.43%) Smallworld
9 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
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%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.072%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 34 (2.45%) Chatbot
2 16 (1.16%) Microsoft Excel
3 14 (1.01%) Microsoft Office
4 12 (0.87%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 12 (0.87%) Microsoft Project
5 4 (0.29%) Simulink
6 3 (0.22%) LaTeX
7 1 (0.072%) CPLEX
7 1 (0.072%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.072%) OpenText VIM for SAP
3 1 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.072%) SAP IBP
3 1 (0.072%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 611 (44.12%) Azure
2 497 (35.88%) AWS
3 259 (18.70%) GCP
4 146 (10.54%) Power Platform
5 119 (8.59%) GitHub
6 107 (7.73%) Azure Machine Learning
7 103 (7.44%) Serverless
8 98 (7.08%) Azure AI
9 86 (6.21%) Azure DevOps
10 77 (5.56%) Snowflake
11 73 (5.27%) Amazon SageMaker
12 63 (4.55%) Amazon S3
13 61 (4.40%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 60 (4.33%) GitHub Actions
15 59 (4.26%) Vertex AI
16 58 (4.19%) Azure Data Factory
17 48 (3.47%) AWS CloudFormation
18 47 (3.39%) AWS Lambda
19 36 (2.60%) Amazon Bedrock
19 36 (2.60%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.16%) Network Security
2 11 (0.79%) Firewall
3 7 (0.51%) DNS
3 7 (0.51%) HTTP
4 6 (0.43%) Internet
5 5 (0.36%) FTP
5 5 (0.36%) SMTP
5 5 (0.36%) SSL
6 4 (0.29%) 5G
6 4 (0.29%) Ethernet
6 4 (0.29%) InfiniBand
7 3 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
7 3 (0.22%) LTE
7 3 (0.22%) VPN
8 2 (0.14%) 2G
8 2 (0.14%) 4G
8 2 (0.14%) Bluetooth
8 2 (0.14%) Hyperconnected
8 2 (0.14%) Mobile Backhaul
8 2 (0.14%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 112 (8.09%) Power BI
2 93 (6.71%) Data Lake
3 80 (5.78%) Data Warehouse
4 67 (4.84%) Big Data
5 60 (4.33%) NoSQL
6 53 (3.83%) Metadata
7 48 (3.47%) BigQuery
8 40 (2.89%) PostgreSQL
8 40 (2.89%) Tableau
9 36 (2.60%) Pinecone
10 35 (2.53%) Hadoop
11 33 (2.38%) Delta Lake
12 29 (2.09%) Relational Database
12 29 (2.09%) SQL Server
13 28 (2.02%) Weaviate
14 25 (1.81%) Mixpanel
15 24 (1.73%) Amazon Athena
16 19 (1.37%) Amazon Redshift
16 19 (1.37%) Elasticsearch
16 19 (1.37%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 112 (8.09%) Git
2 97 (7.00%) MLflow
3 38 (2.74%) Jenkins
4 33 (2.38%) JIRA
5 26 (1.88%) GitLab
6 13 (0.94%) Visual Studio
7 10 (0.72%) JMeter
7 10 (0.72%) PyCharm
7 10 (0.72%) Selenium
8 7 (0.51%) Gradle
8 7 (0.51%) SonarQube
9 6 (0.43%) MSTest
10 5 (0.36%) Maven
11 4 (0.29%) Android Studio
11 4 (0.29%) Bitbucket
11 4 (0.29%) Cypress.io
11 4 (0.29%) Oracle APEX
11 4 (0.29%) RStudio
12 3 (0.22%) REST Assured
12 3 (0.22%) Spinnaker
General
1 359 (25.92%) Social Skills
2 283 (20.43%) Finance
3 166 (11.99%) Analytical Skills
4 148 (10.69%) Public Sector
5 90 (6.50%) Banking
6 38 (2.74%) Marketing
7 35 (2.53%) Pharmaceutical
8 31 (2.24%) Legal
9 27 (1.95%) Influencing Skills
9 27 (1.95%) Investment Banking
9 27 (1.95%) Retail
10 26 (1.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 25 (1.81%) Front Office
12 20 (1.44%) Presentation Skills
13 19 (1.37%) Documentation Skills
13 19 (1.37%) Manufacturing
14 17 (1.23%) Telecoms
15 13 (0.94%) Electronics
16 12 (0.87%) Financial Institution
16 12 (0.87%) Law
Job Titles
1 198 (14.30%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 193 (13.94%) Data Scientist
3 191 (13.79%) Architect
4 179 (12.92%) Senior
5 137 (9.89%) Data Engineer
6 125 (9.03%) Developer
7 117 (8.45%) Lead
8 66 (4.77%) Analyst
9 65 (4.69%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
10 62 (4.48%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 56 (4.04%) Python Engineer
12 55 (3.97%) Data Architect
13 51 (3.68%) Software Engineer
14 43 (3.10%) Senior Data Scientist
15 41 (2.96%) Gen AI Engineer
15 41 (2.96%) Solutions Architect
16 37 (2.67%) Azure Engineer
17 35 (2.53%) Consultant
18 32 (2.31%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
19 28 (2.02%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 227 (16.39%) PyTorch
2 191 (13.79%) TensorFlow
3 144 (10.40%) scikit-learn
4 108 (7.80%) Pandas
5 84 (6.06%) LangChain
6 81 (5.85%) React
7 79 (5.70%) NumPy
8 66 (4.77%) Kafka
9 61 (4.40%) PySpark
10 56 (4.04%) .NET
11 55 (3.97%) Model Context Protocol
12 54 (3.90%) LangGraph
13 53 (3.83%) FastAPI
13 53 (3.83%) Node.js
14 51 (3.68%) REST
15 49 (3.54%) Hugging Face
16 45 (3.25%) AngularJS
17 41 (2.96%) RESTful
18 30 (2.17%) Faiss
19 28 (2.02%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 195 (14.08%) Cloud Native
2 171 (12.35%) Algorithms
3 127 (9.17%) AI Agents
4 44 (3.18%) Onboarding
4 44 (3.18%) Product Ownership
5 40 (2.89%) Distributed Systems
6 30 (2.17%) Data Protection Act
7 29 (2.09%) Legacy Systems
8 26 (1.88%) Hybrid Cloud
9 22 (1.59%) Distributed Computing
10 20 (1.44%) Enterprise Software
11 19 (1.37%) Fixed Income
12 18 (1.30%) Analytical Mindset
13 17 (1.23%) Data Structures
13 17 (1.23%) Life Science
13 17 (1.23%) Management Information System
14 12 (0.87%) Credit Risk
14 12 (0.87%) Derivative
14 12 (0.87%) Genomics
14 12 (0.87%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 36 (2.60%) Linux
2 12 (0.87%) Windows
3 10 (0.72%) VMS
4 8 (0.58%) Android
4 8 (0.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 8 (0.58%) Ubuntu
5 7 (0.51%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.14%) Unix
7 1 (0.072%) CentOS
7 1 (0.072%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,079 (77.91%) AI
2 518 (37.40%) Data Science
3 418 (30.18%) CI/CD
4 394 (28.45%) Analytics
5 373 (26.93%) LLM
6 312 (22.53%) DevOps
7 299 (21.59%) Data Pipeline
8 285 (20.58%) Generative AI
9 273 (19.71%) Agile
10 271 (19.57%) MLOps
11 267 (19.28%) Data Engineering
12 227 (16.39%) Problem-Solving
13 200 (14.44%) Natural Language Processing
14 182 (13.14%) Use Case
15 177 (12.78%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 175 (12.64%) Software Engineering
17 171 (12.35%) Containerisation
18 164 (11.84%) Data Governance
19 163 (11.77%) Data Modelling
20 157 (11.34%) Prompt Engineering
Programming Languages
1 850 (61.37%) Python
2 358 (25.85%) SQL
3 98 (7.08%) Java
4 80 (5.78%) C#
5 72 (5.20%) R
6 61 (4.40%) JavaScript
7 55 (3.97%) TypeScript
8 28 (2.02%) PowerShell
9 24 (1.73%) C++
10 22 (1.59%) Bash
11 18 (1.30%) Bicep
11 18 (1.30%) Scala
12 11 (0.79%) Go
13 10 (0.72%) MATLAB
13 10 (0.72%) Rust
14 7 (0.51%) Kotlin
14 7 (0.51%) SPARQL
15 4 (0.29%) C
15 4 (0.29%) SystemVerilog
15 4 (0.29%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 228 (16.46%) Security Cleared
2 184 (13.29%) Degree
3 152 (10.97%) SC Cleared
4 84 (6.06%) Master's Degree
5 48 (3.47%) PhD
6 46 (3.32%) Computer Science Degree
7 39 (2.82%) DV Cleared
8 32 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
9 24 (1.73%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.37%) Azure Certification
10 19 (1.37%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 12 (0.87%) CISSP
12 11 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 9 (0.65%) CISM
14 8 (0.58%) ISTQB
15 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
16 5 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 5 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
17 4 (0.29%) PMI Certification
17 4 (0.29%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 137 (9.89%) Data Quality
2 64 (4.62%) GDPR
3 50 (3.61%) QA
4 31 (2.24%) NIST
5 20 (1.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 19 (1.37%) EU AI Act
7 17 (1.23%) Accessibility
8 8 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
9 7 (0.51%) HIPAA
9 7 (0.51%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 6 (0.43%) GRC
10 6 (0.43%) NCSC
10 6 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 4 (0.29%) DO-254
11 4 (0.29%) PCI DSS
12 3 (0.22%) SOC 2
12 3 (0.22%) WCAG
13 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 2 (0.14%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 2 (0.14%) JSP 440
System Software
1 219 (15.81%) Docker
2 12 (0.87%) Active Directory
2 12 (0.87%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 7 (0.51%) Firmware
4 3 (0.22%) Lustre
4 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.14%) Ceph
5 2 (0.14%) HDFS
6 1 (0.072%) Embedded Firmware
6 1 (0.072%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 213 (15.38%) Kubernetes
2 147 (10.61%) Terraform
3 18 (1.30%) Ansible
3 18 (1.30%) Grafana
3 18 (1.30%) Kubeflow
4 13 (0.94%) Prometheus
5 10 (0.72%) Podman
6 7 (0.51%) SCOM
7 4 (0.29%) Argo
7 4 (0.29%) Kibana
8 3 (0.22%) Rancher
9 2 (0.14%) Istio
9 2 (0.14%) Knative
9 2 (0.14%) logstash
9 2 (0.14%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.072%) Cilium
10 1 (0.072%) Docker Swarm
10 1 (0.072%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.072%) Microsoft Intune
10 1 (0.072%) Opsgenie
Vendors
1 214 (15.45%) Databricks
2 186 (13.43%) Microsoft
3 120 (8.66%) Google
4 108 (7.80%) OpenAI
5 73 (5.27%) Foundry
6 32 (2.31%) SAP
7 28 (2.02%) Oracle
8 19 (1.37%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.08%) Informatica
10 13 (0.94%) UiPath
11 11 (0.79%) Automation Anywhere
11 11 (0.79%) NVIDIA
12 10 (0.72%) IBM
13 8 (0.58%) Dynatrace
13 8 (0.58%) Greenplum
13 8 (0.58%) Salesforce
14 7 (0.51%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.51%) Palantir
14 7 (0.51%) Pega
15 6 (0.43%) Talend