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

6 months to
11 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 103 133
Rank change year-on-year +23 +30 +76
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,631 820 769
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.08% 2.53% 1.79%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.62% 2.79% 2.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,011 511 541
10th Percentile £413 £393 £413
25th Percentile £493 £457 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £588
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -6.38% -
75th Percentile £675 £675 £750
90th Percentile £775 £825 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £523
% change year-on-year - +5.26% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 51 23 19
10th Percentile £36.00 £33.80 £37.35
25th Percentile £50.00 £47.86 £46.18
Median hourly rate £70.00 £65.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +7.69% +23.81% +21.14%
75th Percentile £83.75 £80.51 £66.25
90th Percentile £88.75 £88.00 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.22 £76.25 £52.50
% change year-on-year -9.22% +45.24% +29.63%

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 45,068 29,357 36,726
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.21% 90.46% 85.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,042 18,505 23,449
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.40% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £624 £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 2,667 1,497 2,458
10th Percentile £14.85 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.01 £17.45 £16.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -4.70%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% -2.91%

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 July 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 July 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 July 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 +24 1,366 £575 +4.55% 1,219
London +35 906 £584 +2.28% 728
UK excluding London -2 521 £550 - 635
Work from Home +15 455 £600 +9.09% 481
North of England 0 148 £565 +14.95% 139
South East -21 122 £600 +6.67% 222
Scotland +51 102 £463 -0.96% 25
North West -9 83 £599 +8.89% 81
Midlands -21 65 £550 +10.00% 73
Yorkshire -17 51 £550 +12.19% 35
West Midlands -34 49 £525 -2.33% 42
South West -30 47 £530 -7.83% 91
East of England -20 37 £525 -6.67% 74
Wales -12 18 £565 -1.83% 15
North East -23 17 £469 +17.19% 25
East Midlands -14 14 £575 +35.29% 31
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
1 105 (6.44%) Apache Spark
2 74 (4.54%) Apache Airflow
3 55 (3.37%) Apache
4 35 (2.15%) Jupyter
5 21 (1.29%) Confluence
6 9 (0.55%) SAS
7 6 (0.37%) Appian
7 6 (0.37%) Palantir Foundry
7 6 (0.37%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.31%) CMS
8 5 (0.31%) Headless CMS
9 3 (0.18%) ArcGIS
9 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.12%) OpenStack
10 2 (0.12%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.061%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.061%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.061%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.061%) Luigi
11 1 (0.061%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 32 (1.96%) Chatbot
2 14 (0.86%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.55%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
5 6 (0.37%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.12%) Simulink
8 1 (0.061%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.061%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.67%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.12%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.061%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.061%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.061%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.061%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.061%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.061%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.061%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 586 (35.93%) Azure
2 581 (35.62%) AWS
3 293 (17.96%) GCP
4 147 (9.01%) Power Platform
5 119 (7.30%) Serverless
6 108 (6.62%) Amazon S3
7 103 (6.32%) GitHub
8 90 (5.52%) Amazon SageMaker
9 89 (5.46%) AWS Lambda
9 89 (5.46%) Azure Machine Learning
10 85 (5.21%) Azure AI
11 80 (4.90%) Snowflake
12 66 (4.05%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 63 (3.86%) Azure DevOps
14 58 (3.56%) Vertex AI
15 57 (3.49%) Amazon Bedrock
16 51 (3.13%) Azure Data Factory
17 50 (3.07%) GitHub Actions
18 43 (2.64%) dbt
19 40 (2.45%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 17 (1.04%) Firewall
2 12 (0.74%) Internet
2 12 (0.74%) Network Security
3 7 (0.43%) DNS
4 6 (0.37%) VPN
5 5 (0.31%) DHCP
6 4 (0.25%) HTTP
6 4 (0.25%) NAS
6 4 (0.25%) SAN
7 3 (0.18%) MQTT
7 3 (0.18%) SMTP
8 2 (0.12%) 4G
8 2 (0.12%) 5G
8 2 (0.12%) Broadband
8 2 (0.12%) CTI
8 2 (0.12%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.12%) Modbus
8 2 (0.12%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.12%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.12%) Remote Desktop
Database & Business Intelligence
1 120 (7.36%) Power BI
2 101 (6.19%) Data Lake
3 83 (5.09%) Big Data
4 73 (4.48%) Data Warehouse
4 73 (4.48%) Metadata
5 69 (4.23%) BigQuery
6 50 (3.07%) Tableau
7 49 (3.00%) NoSQL
8 44 (2.70%) Amazon Redshift
9 42 (2.58%) Amazon Athena
9 42 (2.58%) PostgreSQL
10 37 (2.27%) Hadoop
11 35 (2.15%) Delta Lake
12 34 (2.08%) Relational Database
13 28 (1.72%) SQL Server
14 25 (1.53%) MongoDB
15 24 (1.47%) Pinecone
16 20 (1.23%) MySQL
16 20 (1.23%) Neo4j
17 18 (1.10%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 101 (6.19%) Git
2 77 (4.72%) MLflow
3 49 (3.00%) GitLab
4 48 (2.94%) JIRA
5 27 (1.66%) Jenkins
6 9 (0.55%) Claude Code
6 9 (0.55%) Vite
7 8 (0.49%) Selenium
8 5 (0.31%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.25%) ERwin
9 4 (0.25%) Maven
9 4 (0.25%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.18%) Gradle
10 3 (0.18%) JUnit
10 3 (0.18%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.18%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.18%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.18%) Visual Studio
11 2 (0.12%) NUnit
General
1 339 (20.78%) Social Skills
2 307 (18.82%) Finance
3 209 (12.81%) Analytical Skills
4 156 (9.56%) Public Sector
5 111 (6.81%) Banking
6 46 (2.82%) Marketing
7 38 (2.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 33 (2.02%) Retail
9 32 (1.96%) Pharmaceutical
10 25 (1.53%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.53%) Legal
11 22 (1.35%) Front Office
12 20 (1.23%) Aviation
12 20 (1.23%) Influencing Skills
12 20 (1.23%) Telecoms
13 17 (1.04%) Financial Institution
13 17 (1.04%) Law
14 16 (0.98%) Investment Banking
15 15 (0.92%) Presentation Skills
16 13 (0.80%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 244 (14.96%) Architect
2 230 (14.10%) Data Scientist
3 227 (13.92%) Senior
4 152 (9.32%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 151 (9.26%) Lead
6 148 (9.07%) Data Engineer
7 110 (6.74%) Developer
8 75 (4.60%) Data Architect
8 75 (4.60%) Solutions Architect
9 73 (4.48%) Python Engineer
10 70 (4.29%) Software Engineer
11 68 (4.17%) Analyst
11 68 (4.17%) Machine Learning Engineer
12 58 (3.56%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 49 (3.00%) Platform Engineer
14 44 (2.70%) Consultant
15 43 (2.64%) Senior Data Scientist
16 39 (2.39%) Azure Engineer
16 39 (2.39%) Python Developer
17 37 (2.27%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 168 (10.30%) PyTorch
2 117 (7.17%) TensorFlow
3 107 (6.56%) Kafka
4 104 (6.38%) scikit-learn
5 90 (5.52%) Pandas
6 86 (5.27%) LangChain
7 72 (4.41%) PySpark
7 72 (4.41%) React
8 69 (4.23%) NumPy
9 66 (4.05%) REST
10 47 (2.88%) .NET
11 44 (2.70%) Hugging Face
12 32 (1.96%) LangGraph
13 31 (1.90%) FastAPI
14 30 (1.84%) Node.js
15 27 (1.66%) Model Context Protocol
16 26 (1.59%) AngularJS
16 26 (1.59%) RESTful
17 22 (1.35%) pytest
18 21 (1.29%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 197 (12.08%) Cloud Native
2 155 (9.50%) AI Agents
3 118 (7.23%) Algorithms
4 62 (3.80%) Onboarding
5 60 (3.68%) Product Ownership
6 54 (3.31%) Distributed Systems
7 28 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
8 27 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
9 23 (1.41%) Data Structures
9 23 (1.41%) Life Science
10 18 (1.10%) Fixed Income
10 18 (1.10%) Legacy Systems
11 17 (1.04%) Management Information System
12 16 (0.98%) Hybrid Cloud
12 16 (0.98%) Security Posture
13 14 (0.86%) Taxonomies
13 14 (0.86%) Virtual Team
14 13 (0.80%) Distributed Computing
15 12 (0.74%) Enterprise Cloud
15 12 (0.74%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 51 (3.13%) Linux
2 17 (1.04%) Windows
3 11 (0.67%) Unix
4 6 (0.37%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.37%) VMS
5 5 (0.31%) Android
6 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.061%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,308 (80.20%) AI
2 601 (36.85%) Data Science
3 518 (31.76%) CI/CD
4 479 (29.37%) Analytics
5 456 (27.96%) LLM
6 376 (23.05%) Data Pipeline
6 376 (23.05%) Generative AI
7 337 (20.66%) DevOps
8 316 (19.37%) MLOps
9 314 (19.25%) Agile
10 298 (18.27%) Data Engineering
11 271 (16.62%) Use Case
12 232 (14.22%) Software Engineering
13 225 (13.80%) Decision-Making
14 217 (13.30%) Problem-Solving
15 200 (12.26%) Roadmaps
16 196 (12.02%) Data Governance
17 193 (11.83%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 182 (11.16%) Data Modelling
19 181 (11.10%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 907 (55.61%) Python
2 408 (25.02%) SQL
3 118 (7.23%) Java
4 64 (3.92%) R
4 64 (3.92%) TypeScript
5 61 (3.74%) C#
6 60 (3.68%) JavaScript
7 35 (2.15%) Bash
8 19 (1.16%) C++
9 18 (1.10%) PowerShell
10 16 (0.98%) Bicep
10 16 (0.98%) Go
10 16 (0.98%) Scala
11 11 (0.67%) Kotlin
12 9 (0.55%) PL/SQL
12 9 (0.55%) SPARQL
13 8 (0.49%) Cypher
13 8 (0.49%) Rust
14 7 (0.43%) Gremlin
15 5 (0.31%) MATLAB
Qualifications
1 297 (18.21%) Security Cleared
2 202 (12.39%) SC Cleared
3 140 (8.58%) Degree
4 58 (3.56%) Master's Degree
5 56 (3.43%) DV Cleared
6 54 (3.31%) Computer Science Degree
7 48 (2.94%) AWS Certification
7 48 (2.94%) BPSS Clearance
8 34 (2.08%) PhD
9 30 (1.84%) CISSP
10 24 (1.47%) Azure Certification
11 23 (1.41%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 15 (0.92%) CISM
13 11 (0.67%) TOGAF Certification
14 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 5 (0.31%) AWS Certified Developer
15 5 (0.31%) CompTIA Security+
15 5 (0.31%) DBS Check
15 5 (0.31%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 190 (11.65%) Data Quality
2 68 (4.17%) GDPR
3 54 (3.31%) QA
4 29 (1.78%) NIST
5 18 (1.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 17 (1.04%) Accessibility
7 14 (0.86%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.67%) HIPAA
8 11 (0.67%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 9 (0.55%) Actionable Recommendations
9 9 (0.55%) GRC
9 9 (0.55%) GxP
10 7 (0.43%) NCSC
11 5 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
11 5 (0.31%) SLA
11 5 (0.31%) WCAG
12 4 (0.25%) COBIT
12 4 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 42001
12 4 (0.25%) Solvency II
13 3 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 219 (13.43%) Docker
2 12 (0.74%) Active Directory
3 10 (0.61%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 5 (0.31%) IAG
4 5 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.31%) VMware Infrastructure
5 4 (0.25%) Virtual Machines
6 3 (0.18%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.18%) Firmware
6 3 (0.18%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.18%) Terminal Services
6 3 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 2 (0.12%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.12%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.061%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 277 (16.98%) Kubernetes
2 180 (11.04%) Terraform
3 25 (1.53%) Kubeflow
4 24 (1.47%) Grafana
5 23 (1.41%) Ansible
6 15 (0.92%) Prometheus
7 12 (0.74%) Podman
8 6 (0.37%) Istio
9 3 (0.18%) Kibana
9 3 (0.18%) Nagios
9 3 (0.18%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.18%) Puppet
9 3 (0.18%) Rancher
9 3 (0.18%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.18%) vMotion
10 2 (0.12%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.12%) Argo
10 2 (0.12%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.12%) Packer
10 2 (0.12%) SCCM
Vendors
1 209 (12.81%) Databricks
2 172 (10.55%) Microsoft
3 101 (6.19%) Google
4 98 (6.01%) OpenAI
5 55 (3.37%) Foundry
6 46 (2.82%) SAP
7 36 (2.21%) Oracle
8 31 (1.90%) ServiceNow
9 25 (1.53%) Informatica
10 17 (1.04%) IBM
11 15 (0.92%) UiPath
12 14 (0.86%) Dynatrace
13 8 (0.49%) Salesforce
14 7 (0.43%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.43%) Automation Anywhere
14 7 (0.43%) Sybase
14 7 (0.43%) Talend
15 6 (0.37%) Pega
15 6 (0.37%) Splunk
15 6 (0.37%) Workday