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

6 months to
15 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 92 95 108
Rank change year-on-year +3 +13 +90
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,581 886 813
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.91% 2.73% 2.13%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.44% 3.02% 2.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,009 567 552
10th Percentile £413 £400 £400
25th Percentile £488 £475 £499
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +4.35%
75th Percentile £688 £680 £731
90th Percentile £788 £775 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £545 £500
% change year-on-year +0.92% +9.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 22 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.75 £13.06
25th Percentile £45.50 £44.13 £25.93
Median hourly rate £77.00 £62.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +24.19% +34.26% -
75th Percentile £88.68 £78.44 £53.75
90th Percentile £89.38 £87.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £70.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +10.00% +51.58% -

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 45,945 29,375 32,666
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.44% 90.50% 85.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,954 18,237 20,159
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,063 1,777 1,475
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.23 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.42 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.47 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £66.70 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.08 £22.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +78.13% -47.67% +6.17%

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 15 September 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 15 September 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 15 September 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 0 1,360 £575 - 6,759
London +26 908 £589 -1.79% 4,705
UK excluding London -18 504 £550 +0.92% 2,592
Work from Home -11 419 £600 +9.09% 2,590
South East -9 137 £600 +4.35% 553
North of England -24 137 £550 +15.79% 511
Scotland +20 93 £450 -14.29% 370
Yorkshire +3 61 £538 +9.64% 124
North West -41 60 £600 +26.32% 334
South West -32 50 £513 -10.87% 362
Midlands -31 47 £500 -9.09% 240
West Midlands -37 40 £525 -8.70% 139
East of England -27 36 £463 -19.57% 383
North East -28 17 £488 +14.71% 57
Wales -8 8 £540 -20.00% 70
East Midlands -11 6 £425 -8.11% 101
Northern Ireland +4 1 £334 -52.29% 125

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 89 (5.63%) Apache Spark
2 81 (5.12%) Apache Airflow
3 55 (3.48%) Apache
4 33 (2.09%) Jupyter
5 24 (1.52%) Confluence
6 11 (0.70%) SAS
7 7 (0.44%) IIS
8 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
9 5 (0.32%) SharePoint
10 4 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 3 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
12 2 (0.13%) Appian
12 2 (0.13%) CMS
12 2 (0.13%) Headless CMS
13 1 (0.063%) Apache Pulsar
13 1 (0.063%) Luigi
13 1 (0.063%) nginx
Applications
1 28 (1.77%) Chatbot
2 10 (0.63%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.25%) CPLEX
4 3 (0.19%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
5 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.13%) Notion
5 2 (0.13%) NUKE
6 1 (0.063%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.063%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.063%) Simulink
6 1 (0.063%) Sketch
6 1 (0.063%) Trello
Business Applications
1 10 (0.63%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
3 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
3 3 (0.19%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
5 1 (0.063%) Actimize
5 1 (0.063%) Endur
5 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.063%) OpenLink RightAngle
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.063%) SAP APO
5 1 (0.063%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 533 (33.71%) Azure
2 516 (32.64%) AWS
3 304 (19.23%) GCP
4 117 (7.40%) Power Platform
5 112 (7.08%) GitHub
6 103 (6.51%) Serverless
7 91 (5.76%) Snowflake
8 90 (5.69%) Amazon S3
9 82 (5.19%) AWS Lambda
10 74 (4.68%) Amazon SageMaker
11 62 (3.92%) Azure Machine Learning
11 62 (3.92%) dbt
12 60 (3.80%) Amazon Bedrock
13 51 (3.23%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 49 (3.10%) Azure AI
15 48 (3.04%) Azure DevOps
16 47 (2.97%) Vertex AI
17 45 (2.85%) Azure Data Factory
17 45 (2.85%) GitHub Actions
18 43 (2.72%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 20 (1.27%) Network Security
2 18 (1.14%) Broadband
2 18 (1.14%) Internet
3 12 (0.76%) DNS
3 12 (0.76%) Firewall
3 12 (0.76%) HTTP
4 9 (0.57%) DHCP
4 9 (0.57%) VPN
5 5 (0.32%) SMTP
6 4 (0.25%) NAS
6 4 (0.25%) SAN
6 4 (0.25%) TCP/IP
6 4 (0.25%) VLAN
7 3 (0.19%) MQTT
7 3 (0.19%) SMS
8 2 (0.13%) CTI
8 2 (0.13%) FTP
8 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
8 2 (0.13%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 109 (6.89%) Power BI
2 95 (6.01%) Data Warehouse
3 92 (5.82%) Data Lake
4 82 (5.19%) Metadata
5 80 (5.06%) BigQuery
6 65 (4.11%) Big Data
7 52 (3.29%) Amazon Redshift
8 47 (2.97%) Delta Lake
9 46 (2.91%) NoSQL
10 45 (2.85%) Tableau
11 36 (2.28%) Amazon Athena
12 35 (2.21%) PostgreSQL
13 30 (1.90%) Relational Database
14 23 (1.45%) Neo4j
15 22 (1.39%) MongoDB
16 21 (1.33%) Hadoop
17 19 (1.20%) Data Mining
18 18 (1.14%) Looker
19 17 (1.08%) Elasticsearch
20 16 (1.01%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 102 (6.45%) Git
2 54 (3.42%) GitLab
3 48 (3.04%) JIRA
4 46 (2.91%) MLflow
5 17 (1.08%) Jenkins
6 12 (0.76%) Claude Code
7 7 (0.44%) Selenium
7 7 (0.44%) Vite
8 6 (0.38%) ERwin
9 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
9 5 (0.32%) RStudio
10 4 (0.25%) JMeter
11 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
11 3 (0.19%) Pylint
11 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
12 2 (0.13%) Locust
12 2 (0.13%) NUnit
12 2 (0.13%) Postman
12 2 (0.13%) Spinnaker
12 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 340 (21.51%) Social Skills
2 301 (19.04%) Finance
3 232 (14.67%) Analytical Skills
4 139 (8.79%) Public Sector
5 114 (7.21%) Banking
6 40 (2.53%) Marketing
7 37 (2.34%) Retail
8 30 (1.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 27 (1.71%) Pharmaceutical
9 27 (1.71%) Telecoms
10 24 (1.52%) Documentation Skills
10 24 (1.52%) Legal
11 22 (1.39%) Aerospace
11 22 (1.39%) Front Office
11 22 (1.39%) Manufacturing
12 20 (1.27%) Influencing Skills
13 18 (1.14%) Financial Institution
14 17 (1.08%) Investment Banking
14 17 (1.08%) Law
15 14 (0.89%) Billing
Job Titles
1 272 (17.20%) Senior
2 259 (16.38%) Architect
3 200 (12.65%) Data Scientist
4 177 (11.20%) Data Engineer
5 169 (10.69%) Lead
6 143 (9.04%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 97 (6.14%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 76 (4.81%) Python Engineer
9 75 (4.74%) Developer
10 74 (4.68%) Solutions Architect
11 73 (4.62%) Data Architect
12 65 (4.11%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 63 (3.98%) Analyst
14 58 (3.67%) Software Engineer
15 52 (3.29%) Platform Engineer
16 50 (3.16%) Security Architect
16 50 (3.16%) Senior Data Engineer
17 47 (2.97%) Senior Data Scientist
18 45 (2.85%) DevOps Engineer
19 41 (2.59%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 195 (12.33%) Terraform
2 109 (6.89%) Kafka
2 109 (6.89%) PyTorch
3 90 (5.69%) PySpark
4 79 (5.00%) TensorFlow
5 71 (4.49%) REST
6 68 (4.30%) scikit-learn
7 65 (4.11%) LangChain
8 64 (4.05%) Pandas
9 59 (3.73%) React
10 49 (3.10%) NumPy
11 45 (2.85%) pytest
12 39 (2.47%) .NET
13 35 (2.21%) FastAPI
13 35 (2.21%) LangGraph
14 29 (1.83%) JSON
15 26 (1.64%) Hugging Face
16 24 (1.52%) RESTful
17 23 (1.45%) Model Context Protocol
18 18 (1.14%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 190 (12.02%) Cloud Native
2 163 (10.31%) AI Agents
3 97 (6.14%) Algorithms
4 68 (4.30%) Onboarding
4 68 (4.30%) Product Ownership
5 65 (4.11%) Distributed Systems
6 38 (2.40%) Enterprise Software
7 36 (2.28%) Data Structures
8 27 (1.71%) Life Science
9 23 (1.45%) Data Protection Act
9 23 (1.45%) Hybrid Cloud
10 20 (1.27%) Management Information System
11 18 (1.14%) CMDB
12 17 (1.08%) Taxonomies
13 16 (1.01%) Social Media
13 16 (1.01%) Virtual Team
14 15 (0.95%) Analytical Mindset
15 14 (0.89%) Clustering
15 14 (0.89%) Cyber Threat
15 14 (0.89%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 46 (2.91%) Linux
2 19 (1.20%) Windows
3 16 (1.01%) Unix
4 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.19%) Android
6 2 (0.13%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.13%) VMS
7 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,299 (82.16%) AI
2 579 (36.62%) Data Science
3 493 (31.18%) CI/CD
4 479 (30.30%) Analytics
5 426 (26.94%) LLM
6 388 (24.54%) Generative AI
7 352 (22.26%) Data Pipeline
8 332 (21.00%) Agile
9 320 (20.24%) DevOps
10 283 (17.90%) MLOps
11 279 (17.65%) Data Engineering
12 260 (16.45%) Software Engineering
13 247 (15.62%) Decision-Making
14 236 (14.93%) Use Case
15 231 (14.61%) Stakeholder Management
16 227 (14.36%) Roadmaps
17 209 (13.22%) Infrastructure as Code
18 205 (12.97%) Problem-Solving
19 201 (12.71%) Data Modelling
20 187 (11.83%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 853 (53.95%) Python
2 395 (24.98%) SQL
3 112 (7.08%) Java
4 77 (4.87%) JavaScript
5 56 (3.54%) TypeScript
6 41 (2.59%) R
7 40 (2.53%) Bash
8 39 (2.47%) C#
9 30 (1.90%) PowerShell
10 22 (1.39%) Scala
11 21 (1.33%) C++
12 17 (1.08%) Go
13 15 (0.95%) Bicep
14 11 (0.70%) Cypher
14 11 (0.70%) PL/SQL
14 11 (0.70%) Shell Script
15 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
15 7 (0.44%) SPARQL
16 6 (0.38%) Kotlin
17 5 (0.32%) Perl
Qualifications
1 312 (19.73%) Security Cleared
2 239 (15.12%) SC Cleared
3 121 (7.65%) Degree
4 58 (3.67%) DV Cleared
5 55 (3.48%) Computer Science Degree
6 44 (2.78%) AWS Certification
7 38 (2.40%) Master's Degree
8 34 (2.15%) BPSS Clearance
8 34 (2.15%) CISSP
9 27 (1.71%) PhD
10 25 (1.58%) Azure Certification
11 17 (1.08%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 15 (0.95%) CISM
12 15 (0.95%) TOGAF Certification
13 11 (0.70%) Cisco Certification
14 10 (0.63%) ITIL Certification
15 9 (0.57%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 7 (0.44%) PMP
17 6 (0.38%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 220 (13.92%) Data Quality
2 62 (3.92%) GDPR
3 60 (3.80%) QA
4 30 (1.90%) NIST
5 17 (1.08%) Accessibility
5 17 (1.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (1.01%) EU AI Act
7 10 (0.63%) SLA
8 9 (0.57%) GRC
8 9 (0.57%) GxP
8 9 (0.57%) HIPAA
8 9 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 9 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 6 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
10 5 (0.32%) NCSC
10 5 (0.32%) Solvency II
10 5 (0.32%) WCAG
11 4 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 4 (0.25%) COBIT
11 4 (0.25%) SOC 2
System Software
1 211 (13.35%) Docker
2 15 (0.95%) Active Directory
3 13 (0.82%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (0.63%) Hyper-V
4 10 (0.63%) IAG
5 8 (0.51%) Virtual Machines
6 7 (0.44%) NFS
7 5 (0.32%) 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
Systems Management
1 277 (17.52%) Kubernetes
2 40 (2.53%) Ansible
3 26 (1.64%) Grafana
3 26 (1.64%) Kubeflow
4 19 (1.20%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.38%) Istio
6 5 (0.32%) Podman
6 5 (0.32%) systemd
7 3 (0.19%) Argo
7 3 (0.19%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Nagios
7 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
7 3 (0.19%) Puppet
7 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
7 3 (0.19%) vMotion
8 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 2 (0.13%) Packer
8 2 (0.13%) SCCM
9 1 (0.063%) QRadar
9 1 (0.063%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 206 (13.03%) Databricks
2 162 (10.25%) Microsoft
3 102 (6.45%) Google
4 60 (3.80%) OpenAI
5 44 (2.78%) SAP
6 34 (2.15%) ServiceNow
7 30 (1.90%) Oracle
8 29 (1.83%) Foundry
9 23 (1.45%) Informatica
10 17 (1.08%) Dynatrace
11 14 (0.89%) VMware
12 13 (0.82%) Splunk
13 11 (0.70%) IBM
14 10 (0.63%) Nexthink
14 10 (0.63%) Salesforce
14 10 (0.63%) UiPath
15 7 (0.44%) Cisco
15 7 (0.44%) Sybase
16 6 (0.38%) Pega
17 5 (0.32%) New Relic