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

6 months to
14 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 98 80 109
Rank change year-on-year -18 +29 +83
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,590 1,016 775
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.88% 3.06% 2.07%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.40% 3.38% 2.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,003 664 510
10th Percentile £405 £400 £386
25th Percentile £475 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +4.80%
75th Percentile £688 £688 £731
90th Percentile £788 £775 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £514 £500
% change year-on-year +7.00% +2.80% -5.66%
Number of hourly rates quoted 43 26 17
10th Percentile £28.50 £27.59 £13.06
25th Percentile £39.91 £41.50 £17.50
Median hourly rate £77.00 £53.22 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +44.68% +15.24% -
75th Percentile £85.13 £80.00 £48.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £87.75 £53.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £63.11 £46.18
% change year-on-year +22.00% +36.67% -

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 46,826 30,024 32,246
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.73% 90.50% 86.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,144 18,679 19,408
10th Percentile £325 £294 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.42%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £737 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,407 1,886 1,245
10th Percentile £13.64 £14.38 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.00 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +49.11% -37.13% -10.11%
75th Percentile £65.00 £42.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.72 £65.07 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £22.27 £40.33
% change year-on-year +68.43% -44.79% -8.14%

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 14 October 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 14 October 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 14 October 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 1,362 £584 +4.33% 4,350
London +6 906 £600 -2.28% 3,041
UK excluding London -19 520 £550 +7.00% 1,520
Work from Home -20 430 £581 +5.68% 1,974
North of England -8 156 £550 +14.58% 375
South East -18 137 £600 +11.63% 333
Scotland +1 95 £450 -10.45% 184
North West -25 72 £600 +33.33% 227
Yorkshire -1 65 £513 -0.29% 101
South West -3 54 £525 -4.55% 154
Midlands -43 49 £600 +14.29% 154
West Midlands -39 39 £588 +11.90% 101
East of England -49 29 £500 -8.05% 228
North East -28 20 £550 +29.41% 48
Wales -12 7 £530 -21.48% 44
East Midlands -18 6 £425 -8.11% 53
Northern Ireland +7 2 £467 -33.29% 60

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
1 104 (6.54%) Apache Spark
2 81 (5.09%) Apache Airflow
3 70 (4.40%) Apache
4 35 (2.20%) Jupyter
5 25 (1.57%) Confluence
6 10 (0.63%) SAS
7 7 (0.44%) IIS
8 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
9 5 (0.31%) SharePoint
10 4 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
10 4 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 3 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
12 2 (0.13%) Appian
12 2 (0.13%) CMS
12 2 (0.13%) Headless CMS
12 2 (0.13%) nginx
13 1 (0.063%) Luigi
Applications
1 28 (1.76%) Chatbot
2 8 (0.50%) Microsoft Excel
3 3 (0.19%) CPLEX
4 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
4 2 (0.13%) Notion
4 2 (0.13%) NUKE
5 1 (0.063%) Adobe XD
5 1 (0.063%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.063%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.063%) Simulink
5 1 (0.063%) Sketch
5 1 (0.063%) Spreadsheet
5 1 (0.063%) Trello
Business Applications
1 7 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
2 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
2 3 (0.19%) SAP IBP
3 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
3 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.063%) Actimize
4 1 (0.063%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.063%) Endur
4 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
4 1 (0.063%) OpenLink RightAngle
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle Cash Management
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle Payables
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle Receivables
4 1 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 533 (33.52%) Azure
2 520 (32.70%) AWS
3 303 (19.06%) GCP
4 113 (7.11%) Power Platform
5 105 (6.60%) Serverless
6 100 (6.29%) GitHub
7 94 (5.91%) Amazon S3
8 91 (5.72%) Snowflake
9 83 (5.22%) AWS Lambda
10 66 (4.15%) Amazon SageMaker
11 65 (4.09%) Amazon Bedrock
11 65 (4.09%) Azure Machine Learning
12 63 (3.96%) dbt
13 51 (3.21%) Azure AI
14 50 (3.14%) Azure DevOps
15 48 (3.02%) Vertex AI
16 47 (2.96%) SaaS
17 46 (2.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 45 (2.83%) Azure Data Factory
19 40 (2.52%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 23 (1.45%) Network Security
2 20 (1.26%) Broadband
3 19 (1.19%) Internet
4 14 (0.88%) DNS
4 14 (0.88%) Firewall
5 11 (0.69%) HTTP
6 9 (0.57%) DHCP
6 9 (0.57%) VPN
7 5 (0.31%) SMS
7 5 (0.31%) SMTP
7 5 (0.31%) TCP/IP
8 4 (0.25%) NAS
8 4 (0.25%) SAN
8 4 (0.25%) VLAN
9 3 (0.19%) CTI
9 3 (0.19%) MQTT
10 2 (0.13%) FTP
10 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
10 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
10 2 (0.13%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 103 (6.48%) Data Warehouse
1 103 (6.48%) Power BI
2 93 (5.85%) Data Lake
2 93 (5.85%) Metadata
3 73 (4.59%) BigQuery
4 61 (3.84%) Big Data
5 56 (3.52%) Delta Lake
6 53 (3.33%) Amazon Redshift
7 49 (3.08%) NoSQL
8 41 (2.58%) Tableau
9 39 (2.45%) PostgreSQL
10 32 (2.01%) Amazon Athena
11 29 (1.82%) Neo4j
12 28 (1.76%) Relational Database
13 26 (1.64%) Hadoop
14 22 (1.38%) Elasticsearch
15 21 (1.32%) MongoDB
16 20 (1.26%) Amazon RDS
17 18 (1.13%) SQL Server
18 17 (1.07%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 106 (6.67%) Git
2 56 (3.52%) GitLab
3 47 (2.96%) JIRA
3 47 (2.96%) MLflow
4 13 (0.82%) Jenkins
5 11 (0.69%) Claude Code
6 7 (0.44%) Vite
7 6 (0.38%) JMeter
8 5 (0.31%) Cypress.io
8 5 (0.31%) Postman
8 5 (0.31%) RStudio
9 4 (0.25%) ERwin
9 4 (0.25%) Pylint
9 4 (0.25%) REST Assured
9 4 (0.25%) Selenium
10 3 (0.19%) Newman
11 2 (0.13%) Cucumber
11 2 (0.13%) Locust
11 2 (0.13%) Oracle APEX
11 2 (0.13%) TeamCity
General
1 366 (23.02%) Social Skills
2 326 (20.50%) Finance
3 240 (15.09%) Analytical Skills
4 149 (9.37%) Public Sector
5 128 (8.05%) Banking
6 40 (2.52%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 39 (2.45%) Marketing
8 30 (1.89%) Retail
9 27 (1.70%) Pharmaceutical
9 27 (1.70%) Telecoms
10 25 (1.57%) Manufacturing
11 23 (1.45%) Aerospace
12 22 (1.38%) Influencing Skills
12 22 (1.38%) Legal
13 21 (1.32%) Financial Institution
14 18 (1.13%) Front Office
15 17 (1.07%) Documentation Skills
15 17 (1.07%) Investment Banking
16 16 (1.01%) Billing
17 15 (0.94%) Law
Job Titles
1 292 (18.36%) Senior
2 257 (16.16%) Architect
3 198 (12.45%) Data Engineer
4 190 (11.95%) Data Scientist
5 180 (11.32%) Lead
6 145 (9.12%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 110 (6.92%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 74 (4.65%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 71 (4.47%) Python Engineer
9 71 (4.47%) Solutions Architect
10 65 (4.09%) Developer
11 64 (4.03%) Data Architect
12 60 (3.77%) Analyst
13 59 (3.71%) Platform Engineer
13 59 (3.71%) Senior Data Engineer
14 53 (3.33%) Senior Data Scientist
15 48 (3.02%) Security Architect
16 46 (2.89%) Software Engineer
17 41 (2.58%) DevOps Engineer
18 38 (2.39%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 210 (13.21%) Terraform
2 108 (6.79%) Kafka
3 104 (6.54%) PyTorch
4 95 (5.97%) PySpark
5 78 (4.91%) TensorFlow
6 76 (4.78%) REST
7 74 (4.65%) LangChain
8 61 (3.84%) scikit-learn
9 58 (3.65%) React
10 55 (3.46%) pytest
11 51 (3.21%) Pandas
12 42 (2.64%) NumPy
13 40 (2.52%) LangGraph
14 37 (2.33%) FastAPI
15 29 (1.82%) .NET
16 27 (1.70%) JSON
17 25 (1.57%) Hugging Face
18 24 (1.51%) Model Context Protocol
19 22 (1.38%) RESTful
20 21 (1.32%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 206 (12.96%) Cloud Native
2 178 (11.19%) AI Agents
3 104 (6.54%) Algorithms
4 79 (4.97%) Onboarding
5 71 (4.47%) Distributed Systems
6 64 (4.03%) Product Ownership
7 41 (2.58%) Data Structures
7 41 (2.58%) Enterprise Software
8 30 (1.89%) Data Protection Act
9 29 (1.82%) Life Science
10 24 (1.51%) Management Information System
11 21 (1.32%) Hybrid Cloud
12 19 (1.19%) Legacy Systems
12 19 (1.19%) Social Media
13 18 (1.13%) CMDB
14 17 (1.07%) Clustering
14 17 (1.07%) Taxonomies
15 16 (1.01%) Analytical Mindset
15 16 (1.01%) Credit Risk
15 16 (1.01%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 45 (2.83%) Linux
2 21 (1.32%) Windows
3 16 (1.01%) Unix
4 4 (0.25%) Android
4 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.19%) Apple iOS
6 1 (0.063%) macOS
6 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
6 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,313 (82.58%) AI
2 571 (35.91%) Data Science
3 513 (32.26%) CI/CD
4 484 (30.44%) Analytics
5 433 (27.23%) LLM
6 399 (25.09%) Generative AI
7 363 (22.83%) Data Pipeline
8 341 (21.45%) DevOps
9 326 (20.50%) Agile
10 313 (19.69%) MLOps
11 294 (18.49%) Data Engineering
12 270 (16.98%) Software Engineering
13 255 (16.04%) Stakeholder Management
14 254 (15.97%) Use Case
15 243 (15.28%) Decision-Making
16 242 (15.22%) Roadmaps
17 221 (13.90%) Infrastructure as Code
18 214 (13.46%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
19 211 (13.27%) Problem-Solving
20 210 (13.21%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 845 (53.14%) Python
2 418 (26.29%) SQL
3 109 (6.86%) Java
4 75 (4.72%) JavaScript
5 65 (4.09%) TypeScript
6 42 (2.64%) Bash
7 33 (2.08%) R
8 31 (1.95%) C#
9 30 (1.89%) PowerShell
10 27 (1.70%) Scala
11 20 (1.26%) Go
12 18 (1.13%) C++
13 17 (1.07%) Bicep
14 14 (0.88%) Shell Script
15 11 (0.69%) Cypher
15 11 (0.69%) PL/SQL
16 10 (0.63%) Gremlin
17 7 (0.44%) SPARQL
18 5 (0.31%) Kotlin
18 5 (0.31%) Perl
Qualifications
1 310 (19.50%) Security Cleared
2 244 (15.35%) SC Cleared
3 133 (8.36%) Degree
4 59 (3.71%) Computer Science Degree
5 57 (3.58%) DV Cleared
6 52 (3.27%) AWS Certification
7 42 (2.64%) BPSS Clearance
8 41 (2.58%) Master's Degree
9 32 (2.01%) CISSP
10 30 (1.89%) Azure Certification
11 26 (1.64%) PhD
12 19 (1.19%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 15 (0.94%) CISM
13 15 (0.94%) TOGAF Certification
14 10 (0.63%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 10 (0.63%) Cisco Certification
14 10 (0.63%) ITIL Certification
15 9 (0.57%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 8 (0.50%) DBS Check
17 5 (0.31%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 234 (14.72%) Data Quality
2 55 (3.46%) GDPR
3 54 (3.40%) QA
4 31 (1.95%) NIST
5 21 (1.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 17 (1.07%) Accessibility
7 12 (0.75%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.69%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 10 (0.63%) NCSC
9 10 (0.63%) SLA
10 9 (0.57%) GRC
10 9 (0.57%) PCI DSS
11 7 (0.44%) GxP
11 7 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 6 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
12 6 (0.38%) HIPAA
13 5 (0.31%) Basel III
13 5 (0.31%) Solvency II
14 4 (0.25%) SOC 2
15 3 (0.19%) IFRS
System Software
1 218 (13.71%) Docker
2 16 (1.01%) Active Directory
3 13 (0.82%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (0.63%) Hyper-V
4 10 (0.63%) IAG
5 8 (0.50%) Virtual Machines
6 7 (0.44%) NFS
7 5 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
8 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
8 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
8 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
9 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 2 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
9 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
10 1 (0.063%) Firmware
10 1 (0.063%) zsh
Systems Management
1 291 (18.30%) Kubernetes
2 47 (2.96%) Ansible
3 30 (1.89%) Kubeflow
4 27 (1.70%) Grafana
5 19 (1.19%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.38%) systemd
7 5 (0.31%) Istio
7 5 (0.31%) Podman
8 3 (0.19%) Argo
8 3 (0.19%) Kibana
8 3 (0.19%) Nagios
8 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
8 3 (0.19%) Puppet
8 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
8 3 (0.19%) vMotion
9 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 2 (0.13%) Packer
9 2 (0.13%) SCCM
9 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.063%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 215 (13.52%) Databricks
2 159 (10.00%) Microsoft
3 112 (7.04%) Google
4 68 (4.28%) OpenAI
5 37 (2.33%) ServiceNow
6 36 (2.26%) SAP
7 35 (2.20%) Oracle
8 28 (1.76%) Foundry
9 21 (1.32%) Informatica
10 19 (1.19%) Dynatrace
11 14 (0.88%) VMware
12 11 (0.69%) Salesforce
12 11 (0.69%) Splunk
13 10 (0.63%) IBM
13 10 (0.63%) Nexthink
13 10 (0.63%) UiPath
14 7 (0.44%) Cisco
15 6 (0.38%) New Relic
15 6 (0.38%) Pega
16 5 (0.31%) HP