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

6 months to
29 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 97 158
Rank change year-on-year +17 +61 +66
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,401 760 667
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.14% 2.60% 1.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.67% 2.87% 1.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 863 498 492
10th Percentile £410 £375 £413
25th Percentile £493 £454 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £585 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.74% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £700 £725 £714
90th Percentile £788 £874 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £548 £525
% change year-on-year +0.46% +4.29% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 51 21 19
10th Percentile £41.25 £25.25 £41.22
25th Percentile £50.00 £31.00 £42.50
Median hourly rate £64.00 £57.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +11.30% +15.00% +42.86%
75th Percentile £81.98 £78.70 £66.25
90th Percentile £95.00 £81.01 £72.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £77.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year -16.13% +24.00% +78.57%

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 38,187 26,485 38,260
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.72% 90.45% 86.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,174 17,211 24,849
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 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.51% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,246 968 2,341
10th Percentile £14.96 £15.04 £12.82
25th Percentile £18.86 £20.30 £16.00
Median hourly rate £35.00 £32.00 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +9.38% -1.54% -10.34%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.53 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £32.00 £31.52 £31.80
% change year-on-year +1.52% -0.88% -11.97%

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 +16 1,188 £575 -4.17% 1,132
London +26 793 £600 -2.44% 588
Work from Home +24 433 £600 +10.09% 460
UK excluding London +29 423 £550 +0.46% 725
North of England -10 101 £534 +1.71% 168
South East -9 91 £600 +6.67% 249
East of England -2 67 £550 -8.33% 60
Scotland +47 63 £496 +13.43% 36
North West -4 62 £542 -1.00% 94
Midlands -20 62 £550 +22.22% 87
West Midlands -24 41 £550 +18.92% 38
South West -19 40 £550 -16.51% 97
Yorkshire -42 30 £516 -1.67% 46
Wales -5 19 £738 +31.11% 27
East Midlands -16 19 £600 +33.33% 49
North East -6 12 £575 +60.61% 29
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 13

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 (8.78%) Apache Spark
2 82 (5.85%) Apache Airflow
3 60 (4.28%) Apache
4 29 (2.07%) Jupyter
5 12 (0.86%) Confluence
6 10 (0.71%) SAS
7 9 (0.64%) Appian
8 6 (0.43%) CMS
9 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
10 4 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.21%) Headless CMS
12 2 (0.14%) Luigi
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Superset
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.071%) ArcGIS
13 1 (0.071%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.071%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 34 (2.43%) Chatbot
2 16 (1.14%) Microsoft Excel
3 13 (0.93%) Microsoft Office
4 12 (0.86%) Microsoft Project
5 11 (0.79%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 4 (0.29%) Simulink
7 3 (0.21%) LaTeX
8 2 (0.14%) CPLEX
9 1 (0.071%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 6 (0.43%) SAP IBP
2 5 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.071%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.071%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.071%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 625 (44.61%) Azure
2 499 (35.62%) AWS
3 270 (19.27%) GCP
4 148 (10.56%) Power Platform
5 124 (8.85%) GitHub
6 107 (7.64%) Azure Machine Learning
7 102 (7.28%) Azure AI
8 96 (6.85%) Serverless
9 87 (6.21%) Azure DevOps
10 83 (5.92%) Snowflake
11 68 (4.85%) Amazon SageMaker
12 63 (4.50%) Azure Data Factory
12 63 (4.50%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 62 (4.43%) GitHub Actions
14 59 (4.21%) Amazon S3
14 59 (4.21%) Vertex AI
15 42 (3.00%) AWS CloudFormation
16 41 (2.93%) AWS Lambda
17 39 (2.78%) Amazon Bedrock
18 34 (2.43%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.14%) Network Security
2 11 (0.79%) Firewall
3 7 (0.50%) DNS
3 7 (0.50%) 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 (0.21%) Cisco IPT
7 3 (0.21%) LTE
7 3 (0.21%) VPN
8 2 (0.14%) 2G
8 2 (0.14%) 4G
8 2 (0.14%) Hyperconnected
8 2 (0.14%) Mobile Backhaul
8 2 (0.14%) Modbus
8 2 (0.14%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 114 (8.14%) Power BI
2 89 (6.35%) Data Lake
3 76 (5.42%) Data Warehouse
4 72 (5.14%) Big Data
5 59 (4.21%) NoSQL
6 54 (3.85%) BigQuery
7 49 (3.50%) Metadata
8 39 (2.78%) PostgreSQL
8 39 (2.78%) Tableau
9 36 (2.57%) Pinecone
10 35 (2.50%) Hadoop
11 34 (2.43%) Delta Lake
12 31 (2.21%) SQL Server
13 30 (2.14%) Relational Database
14 29 (2.07%) Weaviate
15 25 (1.78%) Amazon Athena
15 25 (1.78%) Mixpanel
16 20 (1.43%) MySQL
17 19 (1.36%) Amazon Redshift
18 17 (1.21%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 113 (8.07%) Git
2 96 (6.85%) MLflow
3 40 (2.86%) Jenkins
4 33 (2.36%) JIRA
5 28 (2.00%) GitLab
6 13 (0.93%) Visual Studio
7 11 (0.79%) Selenium
8 10 (0.71%) PyCharm
9 9 (0.64%) JMeter
10 7 (0.50%) Gradle
10 7 (0.50%) SonarQube
11 6 (0.43%) MSTest
12 5 (0.36%) Maven
13 4 (0.29%) Android Studio
13 4 (0.29%) Bitbucket
13 4 (0.29%) Cypress.io
13 4 (0.29%) Oracle APEX
13 4 (0.29%) RStudio
14 3 (0.21%) REST Assured
14 3 (0.21%) Vite
General
1 354 (25.27%) Social Skills
2 283 (20.20%) Finance
3 171 (12.21%) Analytical Skills
4 143 (10.21%) Public Sector
5 83 (5.92%) Banking
6 37 (2.64%) Marketing
7 36 (2.57%) Pharmaceutical
8 32 (2.28%) Legal
9 28 (2.00%) Retail
10 26 (1.86%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 24 (1.71%) Influencing Skills
12 23 (1.64%) Documentation Skills
12 23 (1.64%) Front Office
12 23 (1.64%) Investment Banking
13 20 (1.43%) Presentation Skills
14 18 (1.28%) Manufacturing
15 17 (1.21%) Telecoms
16 13 (0.93%) Aviation
17 12 (0.86%) Electronics
17 12 (0.86%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 199 (14.20%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 197 (14.06%) Architect
3 191 (13.63%) Data Scientist
4 184 (13.13%) Senior
5 136 (9.71%) Data Engineer
6 122 (8.71%) Developer
7 116 (8.28%) Lead
8 64 (4.57%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 63 (4.50%) Analyst
9 63 (4.50%) Machine Learning Engineer
10 60 (4.28%) Data Architect
11 58 (4.14%) Python Engineer
12 53 (3.78%) Software Engineer
13 44 (3.14%) Solutions Architect
14 40 (2.86%) Gen AI Engineer
15 39 (2.78%) Consultant
15 39 (2.78%) Senior Data Scientist
16 38 (2.71%) Azure Engineer
17 30 (2.14%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
18 26 (1.86%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 227 (16.20%) PyTorch
2 187 (13.35%) TensorFlow
3 143 (10.21%) scikit-learn
4 111 (7.92%) Pandas
5 83 (5.92%) LangChain
6 82 (5.85%) NumPy
7 80 (5.71%) React
8 71 (5.07%) Kafka
9 61 (4.35%) .NET
10 60 (4.28%) PySpark
11 54 (3.85%) Node.js
12 53 (3.78%) LangGraph
12 53 (3.78%) Model Context Protocol
13 52 (3.71%) REST
14 49 (3.50%) FastAPI
15 48 (3.43%) Hugging Face
16 45 (3.21%) AngularJS
17 39 (2.78%) RESTful
18 29 (2.07%) Faiss
19 28 (2.00%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 194 (13.85%) Cloud Native
2 168 (11.99%) Algorithms
3 131 (9.35%) AI Agents
4 49 (3.50%) Product Ownership
5 43 (3.07%) Onboarding
6 36 (2.57%) Distributed Systems
7 27 (1.93%) Data Protection Act
8 24 (1.71%) Hybrid Cloud
9 23 (1.64%) Legacy Systems
10 21 (1.50%) Enterprise Software
11 19 (1.36%) Analytical Mindset
11 19 (1.36%) Distributed Computing
11 19 (1.36%) Fixed Income
12 17 (1.21%) Life Science
12 17 (1.21%) Management Information System
13 16 (1.14%) Data Structures
14 13 (0.93%) Security Posture
15 12 (0.86%) Credit Risk
15 12 (0.86%) IoT
16 11 (0.79%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 36 (2.57%) Linux
2 12 (0.86%) VMS
2 12 (0.86%) Windows
3 9 (0.64%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 8 (0.57%) Android
4 8 (0.57%) Ubuntu
5 7 (0.50%) Apple iOS
6 3 (0.21%) Unix
7 1 (0.071%) CentOS
7 1 (0.071%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,092 (77.94%) AI
2 514 (36.69%) Data Science
3 422 (30.12%) CI/CD
4 402 (28.69%) Analytics
5 381 (27.19%) LLM
6 309 (22.06%) DevOps
7 308 (21.98%) Data Pipeline
8 296 (21.13%) Generative AI
9 275 (19.63%) Data Engineering
10 272 (19.41%) MLOps
11 270 (19.27%) Agile
12 221 (15.77%) Problem-Solving
13 193 (13.78%) Natural Language Processing
14 191 (13.63%) Use Case
15 179 (12.78%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
15 179 (12.78%) Software Engineering
16 172 (12.28%) Containerisation
17 169 (12.06%) Data Governance
18 166 (11.85%) Data Modelling
19 156 (11.13%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 855 (61.03%) Python
2 362 (25.84%) SQL
3 96 (6.85%) Java
4 86 (6.14%) C#
5 73 (5.21%) R
6 58 (4.14%) JavaScript
7 53 (3.78%) TypeScript
8 28 (2.00%) PowerShell
9 23 (1.64%) C++
10 21 (1.50%) Bash
11 17 (1.21%) Bicep
11 17 (1.21%) Scala
12 10 (0.71%) Go
12 10 (0.71%) MATLAB
12 10 (0.71%) Rust
13 7 (0.50%) Kotlin
13 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
14 5 (0.36%) C
15 4 (0.29%) Tcl
15 4 (0.29%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 235 (16.77%) Security Cleared
2 180 (12.85%) Degree
3 157 (11.21%) SC Cleared
4 80 (5.71%) Master's Degree
5 50 (3.57%) PhD
6 44 (3.14%) Computer Science Degree
7 40 (2.86%) DV Cleared
8 36 (2.57%) BPSS Clearance
9 22 (1.57%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.36%) Azure Certification
11 18 (1.28%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 15 (1.07%) CISSP
13 11 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 10 (0.71%) CISM
14 10 (0.71%) ISTQB
15 7 (0.50%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
17 5 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
18 4 (0.29%) PMI Certification
18 4 (0.29%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 137 (9.78%) Data Quality
2 66 (4.71%) GDPR
3 50 (3.57%) QA
4 32 (2.28%) NIST
5 21 (1.50%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 19 (1.36%) EU AI Act
7 18 (1.28%) Accessibility
8 8 (0.57%) Actionable Recommendations
8 8 (0.57%) HIPAA
9 7 (0.50%) HMG Security Policy Framework
9 7 (0.50%) NCSC
10 6 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 5 (0.36%) GRC
12 4 (0.29%) DO-254
12 4 (0.29%) PCI DSS
12 4 (0.29%) WCAG
13 3 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 3 (0.21%) SOC 2
14 2 (0.14%) NIST 800
System Software
1 219 (15.63%) Docker
2 13 (0.93%) Active Directory
3 12 (0.86%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 7 (0.50%) Firmware
5 3 (0.21%) Lustre
5 3 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.14%) Ceph
6 2 (0.14%) HDFS
7 1 (0.071%) Embedded Firmware
7 1 (0.071%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 218 (15.56%) Kubernetes
2 141 (10.06%) Terraform
3 22 (1.57%) Kubeflow
4 19 (1.36%) Grafana
5 16 (1.14%) Ansible
6 12 (0.86%) Prometheus
7 10 (0.71%) Podman
8 7 (0.50%) SCOM
9 3 (0.21%) Argo
9 3 (0.21%) Kibana
9 3 (0.21%) Rancher
10 2 (0.14%) Istio
10 2 (0.14%) Knative
10 2 (0.14%) logstash
10 2 (0.14%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (0.071%) Cilium
11 1 (0.071%) Docker Swarm
11 1 (0.071%) HP Fortify
11 1 (0.071%) Microsoft Intune
11 1 (0.071%) Opsgenie
Vendors
1 223 (15.92%) Databricks
2 193 (13.78%) Microsoft
3 123 (8.78%) Google
4 112 (7.99%) OpenAI
5 73 (5.21%) Foundry
6 36 (2.57%) SAP
7 29 (2.07%) Oracle
8 18 (1.28%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.07%) Informatica
10 13 (0.93%) UiPath
11 11 (0.79%) Automation Anywhere
11 11 (0.79%) NVIDIA
12 10 (0.71%) IBM
13 8 (0.57%) Dynatrace
13 8 (0.57%) Salesforce
14 7 (0.50%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.50%) Greenplum
14 7 (0.50%) Pega
15 6 (0.43%) Splunk
15 6 (0.43%) Talend