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

6 months to
27 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 106 135
Rank change year-on-year +26 +29 +76
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,561 748 743
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.06% 2.47% 1.71%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.60% 2.71% 2.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 956 452 521
10th Percentile £413 £394 £410
25th Percentile £490 £459 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £580
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -5.17% -1.07%
75th Percentile £675 £676 £738
90th Percentile £775 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £550
Number of hourly rates quoted 48 21 20
10th Percentile £40.15 £31.00 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.00 £45.00 £46.18
Median hourly rate £69.72 £75.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.04% +42.86% +39.07%
75th Percentile £84.06 £81.01 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.13 £88.00 £75.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £78.10 £52.50
% change year-on-year -16.77% +48.76% +50.00%

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 43,335 27,616 36,962
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.01% 91.08% 85.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,981 17,460 23,548
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £414 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.98% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £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 2,593 1,327 2,546
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.72
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.44 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +4.17%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.95 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.77 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.83 £38.12
% change year-on-year +79.22% -34.86% +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 27 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 27 June 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 27 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 +23 1,298 £575 +3.42% 1,136
London +39 870 £575 +0.88% 683
UK excluding London +9 490 £550 - 642
Work from Home +16 455 £588 +6.82% 443
North of England +10 141 £575 +9.52% 127
Scotland +47 105 £489 +4.67% 33
South East -27 100 £600 +4.35% 222
North West -6 79 £599 +8.89% 80
Midlands -24 63 £550 +10.00% 69
Yorkshire -5 47 £550 -5.38% 32
South West -29 46 £515 -15.57% 98
West Midlands -32 46 £538 +7.50% 37
East of England -23 35 £550 -8.33% 76
Wales -12 18 £565 -1.83% 19
North East -26 18 £550 +37.50% 17
East Midlands -6 15 £650 +52.94% 32
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 16

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 (6.73%) Apache Spark
2 74 (4.74%) Apache Airflow
3 51 (3.27%) Apache
4 37 (2.37%) Jupyter
5 23 (1.47%) Confluence
6 8 (0.51%) Appian
6 8 (0.51%) SharePoint
7 6 (0.38%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.32%) CMS
8 5 (0.32%) Headless CMS
8 5 (0.32%) SAS
9 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.13%) Luigi
10 2 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.064%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.064%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.064%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.064%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.064%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 32 (2.05%) Chatbot
2 13 (0.83%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.58%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Project
5 7 (0.45%) Microsoft Office
6 3 (0.19%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.13%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.13%) Simulink
8 1 (0.064%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.70%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.064%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.064%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.064%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.064%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.064%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 571 (36.58%) Azure
2 559 (35.81%) AWS
3 281 (18.00%) GCP
4 141 (9.03%) Power Platform
5 113 (7.24%) Serverless
6 102 (6.53%) Amazon S3
7 100 (6.41%) GitHub
8 89 (5.70%) Azure AI
9 86 (5.51%) Amazon SageMaker
9 86 (5.51%) AWS Lambda
10 78 (5.00%) Azure Machine Learning
11 77 (4.93%) Snowflake
12 65 (4.16%) Azure DevOps
13 59 (3.78%) Vertex AI
14 57 (3.65%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 54 (3.46%) Amazon Bedrock
16 51 (3.27%) GitHub Actions
17 46 (2.95%) Azure Data Factory
18 40 (2.56%) AWS CloudFormation
18 40 (2.56%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.02%) Firewall
2 12 (0.77%) Network Security
3 10 (0.64%) Internet
4 7 (0.45%) DNS
5 5 (0.32%) DHCP
5 5 (0.32%) VPN
6 4 (0.26%) HTTP
6 4 (0.26%) NAS
6 4 (0.26%) SAN
7 3 (0.19%) SMTP
8 2 (0.13%) 4G
8 2 (0.13%) 5G
8 2 (0.13%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.13%) MQTT
8 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.064%) 3G
9 1 (0.064%) InfiniBand
9 1 (0.064%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 114 (7.30%) Power BI
2 103 (6.60%) Data Lake
3 79 (5.06%) Big Data
4 74 (4.74%) Metadata
5 70 (4.48%) Data Warehouse
6 66 (4.23%) BigQuery
7 49 (3.14%) Tableau
8 47 (3.01%) NoSQL
9 42 (2.69%) Amazon Athena
10 39 (2.50%) Amazon Redshift
10 39 (2.50%) PostgreSQL
11 35 (2.24%) Hadoop
12 32 (2.05%) Relational Database
13 31 (1.99%) Delta Lake
14 30 (1.92%) SQL Server
15 26 (1.67%) Pinecone
16 24 (1.54%) MongoDB
17 19 (1.22%) MySQL
17 19 (1.22%) Weaviate
18 17 (1.09%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 95 (6.09%) Git
2 80 (5.12%) MLflow
3 51 (3.27%) JIRA
4 48 (3.07%) GitLab
5 27 (1.73%) Jenkins
6 8 (0.51%) Claude Code
7 7 (0.45%) Selenium
7 7 (0.45%) Vite
8 6 (0.38%) Visual Studio
9 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
10 4 (0.26%) ER Studio
10 4 (0.26%) ERwin
10 4 (0.26%) Maven
10 4 (0.26%) PyCharm
11 3 (0.19%) Gradle
11 3 (0.19%) JUnit
11 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
11 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
11 3 (0.19%) Spinnaker
12 2 (0.13%) Oracle APEX
General
1 325 (20.82%) Social Skills
2 305 (19.54%) Finance
3 199 (12.75%) Analytical Skills
4 153 (9.80%) Public Sector
5 107 (6.85%) Banking
6 40 (2.56%) Marketing
7 38 (2.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 31 (1.99%) Pharmaceutical
8 31 (1.99%) Retail
9 25 (1.60%) Legal
10 24 (1.54%) Documentation Skills
11 22 (1.41%) Front Office
12 21 (1.35%) Influencing Skills
13 20 (1.28%) Aviation
14 18 (1.15%) Telecoms
15 17 (1.09%) Financial Institution
15 17 (1.09%) Law
16 16 (1.02%) Investment Banking
17 13 (0.83%) Manufacturing
18 12 (0.77%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 223 (14.29%) Architect
2 222 (14.22%) Data Scientist
3 217 (13.90%) Senior
4 152 (9.74%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 143 (9.16%) Data Engineer
6 134 (8.58%) Lead
7 103 (6.60%) Developer
8 75 (4.80%) Analyst
9 74 (4.74%) Python Engineer
10 72 (4.61%) Data Architect
11 68 (4.36%) Solutions Architect
12 66 (4.23%) Software Engineer
13 65 (4.16%) Machine Learning Engineer
14 60 (3.84%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 44 (2.82%) Consultant
16 42 (2.69%) Senior Data Scientist
17 37 (2.37%) Platform Engineer
18 36 (2.31%) Python Developer
19 35 (2.24%) Full-Stack Engineer
20 33 (2.11%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 174 (11.15%) PyTorch
2 121 (7.75%) TensorFlow
3 110 (7.05%) scikit-learn
4 92 (5.89%) Pandas
5 91 (5.83%) Kafka
6 84 (5.38%) LangChain
7 74 (4.74%) React
8 70 (4.48%) NumPy
8 70 (4.48%) PySpark
9 61 (3.91%) REST
10 51 (3.27%) .NET
11 44 (2.82%) Hugging Face
12 34 (2.18%) LangGraph
13 33 (2.11%) FastAPI
14 31 (1.99%) AngularJS
15 29 (1.86%) RESTful
16 28 (1.79%) Model Context Protocol
17 27 (1.73%) Node.js
18 22 (1.41%) pytest
19 21 (1.35%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 188 (12.04%) Cloud Native
2 151 (9.67%) AI Agents
3 114 (7.30%) Algorithms
4 61 (3.91%) Product Ownership
5 50 (3.20%) Distributed Systems
6 49 (3.14%) Onboarding
7 27 (1.73%) Data Protection Act
8 25 (1.60%) Enterprise Software
9 23 (1.47%) Data Structures
10 22 (1.41%) Life Science
11 19 (1.22%) Fixed Income
12 17 (1.09%) Legacy Systems
13 16 (1.02%) Management Information System
14 15 (0.96%) Hybrid Cloud
14 15 (0.96%) Security Posture
15 13 (0.83%) Distributed Computing
16 12 (0.77%) Autonomous Agent
16 12 (0.77%) Low-Code
16 12 (0.77%) Public Cloud
16 12 (0.77%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 42 (2.69%) Linux
2 17 (1.09%) Windows
3 11 (0.70%) Unix
4 6 (0.38%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.38%) VMS
5 5 (0.32%) Android
6 4 (0.26%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.064%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,258 (80.59%) AI
2 582 (37.28%) Data Science
3 489 (31.33%) CI/CD
4 449 (28.76%) LLM
5 445 (28.51%) Analytics
6 362 (23.19%) Data Pipeline
7 359 (23.00%) Generative AI
8 322 (20.63%) DevOps
9 308 (19.73%) MLOps
10 299 (19.15%) Agile
11 286 (18.32%) Data Engineering
12 259 (16.59%) Use Case
13 214 (13.71%) Problem-Solving
14 212 (13.58%) Decision-Making
15 209 (13.39%) Software Engineering
16 192 (12.30%) Data Governance
17 190 (12.17%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 178 (11.40%) ETL
19 174 (11.15%) Roadmaps
20 171 (10.95%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 874 (55.99%) Python
2 392 (25.11%) SQL
3 109 (6.98%) Java
4 64 (4.10%) R
5 63 (4.04%) C#
6 59 (3.78%) TypeScript
7 56 (3.59%) JavaScript
8 30 (1.92%) Bash
9 22 (1.41%) C++
10 16 (1.02%) PowerShell
11 15 (0.96%) Bicep
12 13 (0.83%) Scala
13 12 (0.77%) Go
14 10 (0.64%) Kotlin
15 9 (0.58%) PL/SQL
15 9 (0.58%) SPARQL
16 7 (0.45%) Rust
17 6 (0.38%) MATLAB
18 5 (0.32%) Perl
19 4 (0.26%) Korn
Qualifications
1 275 (17.62%) Security Cleared
2 191 (12.24%) SC Cleared
3 123 (7.88%) Degree
4 48 (3.07%) Master's Degree
5 46 (2.95%) BPSS Clearance
6 45 (2.88%) AWS Certification
7 44 (2.82%) DV Cleared
8 41 (2.63%) Computer Science Degree
9 31 (1.99%) PhD
10 23 (1.47%) Azure Certification
11 21 (1.35%) CISSP
12 20 (1.28%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 15 (0.96%) CISM
14 7 (0.45%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 7 (0.45%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 5 (0.32%) CEH
15 5 (0.32%) CompTIA Security+
15 5 (0.32%) DBS Check
15 5 (0.32%) GIAC
15 5 (0.32%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 185 (11.85%) Data Quality
2 65 (4.16%) GDPR
3 54 (3.46%) QA
4 29 (1.86%) NIST
5 18 (1.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (1.02%) Accessibility
7 13 (0.83%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.70%) HIPAA
8 11 (0.70%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 10 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
10 9 (0.58%) GRC
11 8 (0.51%) GxP
12 7 (0.45%) NCSC
13 5 (0.32%) WCAG
14 4 (0.26%) COBIT
14 4 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
14 4 (0.26%) Solvency II
15 3 (0.19%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
15 3 (0.19%) SLA
System Software
1 211 (13.52%) Docker
2 12 (0.77%) Active Directory
3 11 (0.70%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.32%) VMware Infrastructure
5 4 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
6 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.19%) Firmware
6 3 (0.19%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.19%) IAG
6 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
6 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.064%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 262 (16.78%) Kubernetes
2 169 (10.83%) Terraform
3 23 (1.47%) Kubeflow
4 22 (1.41%) Grafana
5 18 (1.15%) Ansible
6 13 (0.83%) Prometheus
7 12 (0.77%) Podman
8 7 (0.45%) Istio
9 3 (0.19%) Nagios
9 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.19%) Puppet
9 3 (0.19%) Rancher
9 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.19%) vMotion
10 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.13%) Argo
10 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.13%) Kibana
10 2 (0.13%) Packer
10 2 (0.13%) SCCM
Vendors
1 196 (12.56%) Databricks
2 169 (10.83%) Microsoft
3 102 (6.53%) OpenAI
4 96 (6.15%) Google
5 55 (3.52%) Foundry
6 43 (2.75%) SAP
7 35 (2.24%) Oracle
8 28 (1.79%) ServiceNow
9 22 (1.41%) Informatica
10 17 (1.09%) IBM
11 14 (0.90%) UiPath
12 12 (0.77%) Dynatrace
13 9 (0.58%) Automation Anywhere
14 8 (0.51%) Salesforce
15 7 (0.45%) Amplitude
15 7 (0.45%) Sybase
15 7 (0.45%) Talend
16 6 (0.38%) Palantir
16 6 (0.38%) Pega
16 6 (0.38%) Workday