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

6 months to
4 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 114 144
Rank change year-on-year +30 +30 +80
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,440 703 711
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.94% 2.44% 1.66%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.48% 2.68% 1.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 877 429 512
10th Percentile £413 £392 £413
25th Percentile £493 £458 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £555 £580
Median % change year-on-year +3.60% -4.31% -1.28%
75th Percentile £675 £690 £738
90th Percentile £775 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £575 £525
% change year-on-year -4.35% +9.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 48 19 19
10th Percentile £40.54 £29.85 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.97 £45.00 £46.22
Median hourly rate £65.50 £75.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -12.67% +42.86% +50.00%
75th Percentile £84.06 £81.01 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.13 £88.00 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £78.10 £56.25
% change year-on-year -16.77% +38.84% +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 41,432 26,234 36,612
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.66% 91.00% 85.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,858 16,712 23,486
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £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 2,493 1,127 2,523
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.71 £27.64 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +54.50% -24.27% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.84 £56.25 £60.75
90th Percentile £81.24 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +8.91%

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 4 June 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 4 June 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Machine Learning in the UK

Machine Learning
Top 16 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 4 June 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 +20 1,195 £575 - 1,783
London +33 804 £575 +0.88% 1,047
UK excluding London +9 446 £550 -4.35% 863
Work from Home +30 419 £581 +5.68% 1,028
North of England +1 124 £554 +0.68% 230
Scotland +50 98 £518 +10.81% 37
South East -31 87 £640 +11.30% 246
North West +3 65 £588 +6.82% 150
Midlands -24 61 £550 +10.00% 86
Yorkshire -21 45 £550 - 51
East of England -22 44 £550 -13.73% 108
West Midlands -32 43 £550 +10.00% 46
South West -32 36 £500 -21.88% 123
North East -15 17 £550 +46.67% 30
East Midlands -15 16 £650 +46.48% 39
Wales -15 15 £579 +0.70% 22

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
1 112 (7.78%) Apache Spark
2 67 (4.65%) Apache Airflow
3 53 (3.68%) Apache
4 34 (2.36%) Jupyter
5 18 (1.25%) Confluence
6 9 (0.63%) Appian
7 8 (0.56%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.35%) CMS
8 5 (0.35%) Headless CMS
9 4 (0.28%) Palantir Foundry
9 4 (0.28%) SAS
10 2 (0.14%) Luigi
11 1 (0.069%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.069%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.069%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.069%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.069%) NetWeaver
11 1 (0.069%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 26 (1.81%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.83%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.63%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 9 (0.63%) Microsoft Project
4 7 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
5 3 (0.21%) LaTeX
6 2 (0.14%) CPLEX
6 2 (0.14%) Simulink
Business Applications
1 11 (0.76%) SAP IBP
2 6 (0.42%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.069%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.069%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.069%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.069%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.069%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 533 (37.01%) Azure
2 488 (33.89%) AWS
3 248 (17.22%) GCP
4 124 (8.61%) Power Platform
5 89 (6.18%) GitHub
6 86 (5.97%) Serverless
7 84 (5.83%) Azure AI
8 76 (5.28%) Amazon SageMaker
9 73 (5.07%) Azure Machine Learning
10 72 (5.00%) Amazon S3
11 67 (4.65%) Snowflake
12 64 (4.44%) Azure DevOps
13 57 (3.96%) AWS Lambda
14 53 (3.68%) Vertex AI
15 52 (3.61%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 49 (3.40%) GitHub Actions
17 47 (3.26%) Azure Data Factory
18 39 (2.71%) Amazon Bedrock
19 32 (2.22%) AWS CloudFormation
19 32 (2.22%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 12 (0.83%) Network Security
2 10 (0.69%) Firewall
3 9 (0.63%) HTTP
4 8 (0.56%) DNS
5 6 (0.42%) Internet
6 5 (0.35%) FTP
6 5 (0.35%) SMTP
6 5 (0.35%) SSL
7 4 (0.28%) NAS
7 4 (0.28%) SAN
8 2 (0.14%) 4G
8 2 (0.14%) 5G
8 2 (0.14%) DHCP
8 2 (0.14%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.14%) InfiniBand
8 2 (0.14%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.14%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.14%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.069%) 3GPP
9 1 (0.069%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 97 (6.74%) Power BI
2 94 (6.53%) Data Lake
3 75 (5.21%) Big Data
4 66 (4.58%) Metadata
5 64 (4.44%) BigQuery
6 51 (3.54%) Data Warehouse
7 49 (3.40%) NoSQL
8 39 (2.71%) Tableau
9 35 (2.43%) Hadoop
10 31 (2.15%) Delta Lake
11 30 (2.08%) SQL Server
12 29 (2.01%) PostgreSQL
13 28 (1.94%) Pinecone
14 27 (1.88%) Relational Database
15 25 (1.74%) Amazon Athena
16 21 (1.46%) MongoDB
17 20 (1.39%) Mixpanel
17 20 (1.39%) Weaviate
18 19 (1.32%) Amazon Redshift
19 14 (0.97%) Redis
Development Applications
1 89 (6.18%) Git
2 80 (5.56%) MLflow
3 39 (2.71%) JIRA
4 31 (2.15%) GitLab
5 21 (1.46%) Jenkins
6 9 (0.63%) Visual Studio
7 7 (0.49%) Selenium
8 5 (0.35%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.28%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.28%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.28%) ERwin
9 4 (0.28%) JMeter
9 4 (0.28%) Maven
9 4 (0.28%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.21%) Gradle
10 3 (0.21%) JUnit
10 3 (0.21%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.21%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.21%) Vite
11 2 (0.14%) ER Studio
General
1 315 (21.88%) Social Skills
2 285 (19.79%) Finance
3 181 (12.57%) Analytical Skills
4 142 (9.86%) Public Sector
5 89 (6.18%) Banking
6 34 (2.36%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 33 (2.29%) Marketing
8 28 (1.94%) Pharmaceutical
9 27 (1.88%) Legal
10 25 (1.74%) Documentation Skills
11 23 (1.60%) Front Office
12 22 (1.53%) Aviation
12 22 (1.53%) Retail
13 21 (1.46%) Influencing Skills
14 20 (1.39%) Investment Banking
15 18 (1.25%) Telecoms
16 13 (0.90%) Law
17 12 (0.83%) Aerospace
17 12 (0.83%) Financial Institution
17 12 (0.83%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 211 (14.65%) Data Scientist
2 200 (13.89%) Senior
3 186 (12.92%) Architect
4 148 (10.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 131 (9.10%) Data Engineer
6 124 (8.61%) Lead
7 95 (6.60%) Developer
8 79 (5.49%) Analyst
9 68 (4.72%) Python Engineer
10 64 (4.44%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 62 (4.31%) Software Engineer
12 58 (4.03%) Solutions Architect
13 56 (3.89%) Data Architect
14 51 (3.54%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 40 (2.78%) Senior Data Scientist
16 39 (2.71%) Consultant
17 33 (2.29%) Python Developer
18 30 (2.08%) Business Analyst
18 30 (2.08%) Senior Data Engineer
19 29 (2.01%) Artificial Intelligence Specialist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 179 (12.43%) PyTorch
2 130 (9.03%) TensorFlow
3 108 (7.50%) scikit-learn
4 94 (6.53%) Pandas
5 81 (5.63%) Kafka
6 71 (4.93%) LangChain
7 67 (4.65%) NumPy
8 66 (4.58%) PySpark
9 64 (4.44%) React
10 55 (3.82%) REST
11 52 (3.61%) .NET
12 44 (3.06%) Hugging Face
13 34 (2.36%) LangGraph
14 32 (2.22%) Model Context Protocol
15 31 (2.15%) AngularJS
15 31 (2.15%) Node.js
16 29 (2.01%) FastAPI
17 28 (1.94%) RESTful
18 19 (1.32%) Faiss
18 19 (1.32%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 168 (11.67%) Cloud Native
2 142 (9.86%) AI Agents
3 118 (8.19%) Algorithms
4 55 (3.82%) Product Ownership
5 42 (2.92%) Onboarding
6 39 (2.71%) Distributed Systems
7 27 (1.88%) Data Protection Act
8 20 (1.39%) Fixed Income
9 19 (1.32%) Data Structures
10 18 (1.25%) Enterprise Software
10 18 (1.25%) Life Science
11 17 (1.18%) Management Information System
12 16 (1.11%) Legacy Systems
13 15 (1.04%) Analytical Mindset
14 13 (0.90%) Hybrid Cloud
14 13 (0.90%) Low-Code
15 12 (0.83%) Public Cloud
16 11 (0.76%) Augmented Reality
16 11 (0.76%) Cyber Threat
16 11 (0.76%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 28 (1.94%) Linux
2 14 (0.97%) Windows
3 11 (0.76%) Unix
4 6 (0.42%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.42%) VMS
5 5 (0.35%) Android
6 2 (0.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 1 (0.069%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,148 (79.72%) AI
2 538 (37.36%) Data Science
3 448 (31.11%) CI/CD
4 424 (29.44%) LLM
5 397 (27.57%) Analytics
6 323 (22.43%) Data Pipeline
7 322 (22.36%) Generative AI
8 296 (20.56%) DevOps
9 289 (20.07%) MLOps
10 266 (18.47%) Data Engineering
11 264 (18.33%) Agile
12 212 (14.72%) Use Case
13 192 (13.33%) Problem-Solving
14 188 (13.06%) Software Engineering
15 184 (12.78%) Decision-Making
16 179 (12.43%) Data Governance
17 178 (12.36%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 175 (12.15%) ETL
19 154 (10.69%) Containerisation
20 149 (10.35%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 824 (57.22%) Python
2 368 (25.56%) SQL
3 105 (7.29%) Java
4 71 (4.93%) C#
5 62 (4.31%) R
6 47 (3.26%) TypeScript
7 43 (2.99%) JavaScript
8 26 (1.81%) C++
9 18 (1.25%) Bash
10 15 (1.04%) PowerShell
11 13 (0.90%) Bicep
12 11 (0.76%) Scala
13 10 (0.69%) Kotlin
14 8 (0.56%) Go
15 7 (0.49%) Rust
15 7 (0.49%) SPARQL
16 6 (0.42%) MATLAB
16 6 (0.42%) PL/SQL
17 5 (0.35%) Perl
18 3 (0.21%) Korn
Qualifications
1 242 (16.81%) Security Cleared
2 168 (11.67%) SC Cleared
3 112 (7.78%) Degree
4 49 (3.40%) Master's Degree
5 40 (2.78%) BPSS Clearance
5 40 (2.78%) DV Cleared
6 37 (2.57%) Computer Science Degree
7 33 (2.29%) PhD
8 29 (2.01%) AWS Certification
9 19 (1.32%) Azure Certification
9 19 (1.32%) CISSP
10 15 (1.04%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 15 (1.04%) CISM
11 6 (0.42%) DBS Check
11 6 (0.42%) ISTQB
12 5 (0.35%) CEH
12 5 (0.35%) GIAC
12 5 (0.35%) Microsoft Certification
12 5 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 5 (0.35%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 162 (11.25%) Data Quality
2 57 (3.96%) GDPR
3 50 (3.47%) QA
4 30 (2.08%) NIST
5 18 (1.25%) Accessibility
6 16 (1.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 13 (0.90%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.76%) Actionable Recommendations
9 10 (0.69%) HIPAA
10 8 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 7 (0.49%) GxP
11 7 (0.49%) NCSC
12 6 (0.42%) GRC
13 5 (0.35%) WCAG
14 4 (0.28%) COBIT
14 4 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
15 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
15 3 (0.21%) SLA
16 2 (0.14%) DO-254
16 2 (0.14%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 191 (13.26%) Docker
2 12 (0.83%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 9 (0.63%) Active Directory
4 4 (0.28%) Firmware
5 3 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
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 (0.069%) Ceph
7 1 (0.069%) Embedded Firmware
7 1 (0.069%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 227 (15.76%) Kubernetes
2 137 (9.51%) Terraform
3 21 (1.46%) Kubeflow
4 20 (1.39%) Grafana
5 14 (0.97%) Prometheus
6 12 (0.83%) Ansible
7 9 (0.63%) Podman
8 6 (0.42%) Istio
9 3 (0.21%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.21%) Rancher
10 2 (0.14%) Argo
10 2 (0.14%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.14%) Kibana
10 2 (0.14%) Packer
10 2 (0.14%) SCCM
11 1 (0.069%) HP Fortify
11 1 (0.069%) logstash
Vendors
1 194 (13.47%) Databricks
2 162 (11.25%) Microsoft
3 97 (6.74%) OpenAI
4 83 (5.76%) Google
5 56 (3.89%) Foundry
6 38 (2.64%) SAP
7 34 (2.36%) Oracle
8 20 (1.39%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.04%) IBM
9 15 (1.04%) Informatica
9 15 (1.04%) UiPath
10 12 (0.83%) Dynatrace
11 11 (0.76%) Automation Anywhere
12 7 (0.49%) Amplitude
12 7 (0.49%) Sybase
13 6 (0.42%) NVIDIA
13 6 (0.42%) Talend
13 6 (0.42%) Workday
14 5 (0.35%) Siemens
14 5 (0.35%) Splunk