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 10 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 86 99 113
Rank change year-on-year +13 +14 +86
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,592 845 781
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.98% 2.55% 2.01%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.52% 2.82% 2.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,030 533 559
10th Percentile £413 £400 £412
25th Percentile £493 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £555 £600
Median % change year-on-year +3.60% -7.50% +2.56%
75th Percentile £700 £675 £738
90th Percentile £788 £798 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £500
% change year-on-year - +10.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 40 23 21
10th Percentile £28.50 £33.80 £13.06
25th Percentile £40.54 £52.86 £27.75
Median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +2.67% +62.41% -
75th Percentile £84.06 £83.01 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £88.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £77.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year -0.65% +67.82% -

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 45,268 29,990 33,185
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.86% 90.46% 85.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,853 18,764 21,291
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £729 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,826 1,696 1,837
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.05
25th Percentile £18.89 £17.30 £18.35
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -38.57% -3.67%
75th Percentile £68.00 £48.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £22.63 £42.50
% change year-on-year +94.26% -46.75% +13.33%

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 10 August 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 10 August 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 10 August 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 +12 1,367 £580 +2.65% 4,674
London +30 918 £590 +2.61% 3,269
UK excluding London +1 494 £550 - 1,826
Work from Home +13 415 £600 +9.09% 1,752
North of England -4 136 £558 +14.07% 360
South East -28 129 £618 +9.87% 451
Scotland +33 84 £450 -10.00% 268
North West -22 66 £608 +19.70% 217
Midlands -20 62 £550 +7.32% 158
Yorkshire -2 57 £550 +12.19% 95
West Midlands -24 49 £550 -6.38% 101
South West -37 44 £528 -4.09% 216
East of England -24 31 £500 -13.04% 277
North East -36 13 £463 +8.82% 50
East Midlands -6 11 £700 +64.71% 57
Wales -9 11 £540 -20.00% 57
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 63

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 84 (5.28%) Apache Spark
2 76 (4.77%) Apache Airflow
3 45 (2.83%) Apache
4 33 (2.07%) Jupyter
5 21 (1.32%) Confluence
6 8 (0.50%) SAS
7 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
8 5 (0.31%) CMS
8 5 (0.31%) Headless CMS
8 5 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.31%) SharePoint
9 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
10 2 (0.13%) Appian
10 2 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.063%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.063%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.063%) Luigi
11 1 (0.063%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 29 (1.82%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.75%) Microsoft Excel
3 6 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 5 (0.31%) CPLEX
4 5 (0.31%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Project
5 2 (0.13%) Notion
6 1 (0.063%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.063%) DaVinci Resolve
6 1 (0.063%) NUKE
6 1 (0.063%) Simulink
6 1 (0.063%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 11 (0.69%) SAP IBP
2 8 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.13%) Oracle ERP
4 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
4 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.063%) OpenText VIM for SAP
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Cash Management
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
1 552 (34.67%) Azure
2 543 (34.11%) AWS
3 311 (19.54%) GCP
4 127 (7.98%) Power Platform
5 111 (6.97%) GitHub
6 105 (6.60%) Serverless
7 90 (5.65%) Amazon S3
8 85 (5.34%) Snowflake
9 80 (5.03%) AWS Lambda
10 75 (4.71%) Amazon SageMaker
11 70 (4.40%) Azure Machine Learning
12 62 (3.89%) Azure AI
13 59 (3.71%) Amazon Bedrock
14 58 (3.64%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 52 (3.27%) dbt
16 51 (3.20%) Azure DevOps
16 51 (3.20%) Vertex AI
17 47 (2.95%) GitHub Actions
18 43 (2.70%) Azure Data Factory
19 37 (2.32%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.32%) Firewall
2 17 (1.07%) Internet
3 16 (1.01%) Network Security
4 12 (0.75%) Broadband
5 11 (0.69%) DNS
6 10 (0.63%) VPN
7 9 (0.57%) DHCP
8 4 (0.25%) NAS
8 4 (0.25%) SAN
8 4 (0.25%) TCP/IP
8 4 (0.25%) VLAN
9 3 (0.19%) HTTP
9 3 (0.19%) MQTT
9 3 (0.19%) SMTP
10 2 (0.13%) 4G
10 2 (0.13%) 5G
10 2 (0.13%) Modbus
10 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
10 2 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
10 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
Database & Business Intelligence
1 113 (7.10%) Power BI
2 85 (5.34%) Data Lake
3 79 (4.96%) BigQuery
4 75 (4.71%) Data Warehouse
5 70 (4.40%) Big Data
5 70 (4.40%) Metadata
6 50 (3.14%) NoSQL
7 48 (3.02%) Amazon Redshift
8 44 (2.76%) Tableau
9 43 (2.70%) Delta Lake
10 36 (2.26%) Amazon Athena
11 33 (2.07%) Relational Database
12 28 (1.76%) PostgreSQL
13 26 (1.63%) Hadoop
14 21 (1.32%) MongoDB
14 21 (1.32%) Neo4j
15 20 (1.26%) Looker
16 19 (1.19%) Data Mining
17 17 (1.07%) Elasticsearch
18 15 (0.94%) Redis
Development Applications
1 101 (6.34%) Git
2 58 (3.64%) MLflow
3 50 (3.14%) GitLab
4 45 (2.83%) JIRA
5 25 (1.57%) Jenkins
6 10 (0.63%) Claude Code
6 10 (0.63%) Vite
7 8 (0.50%) Selenium
8 5 (0.31%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.25%) ERwin
9 4 (0.25%) PyCharm
9 4 (0.25%) REST Assured
9 4 (0.25%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
11 2 (0.13%) JUnit
11 2 (0.13%) NUnit
11 2 (0.13%) Oracle APEX
11 2 (0.13%) Pylint
11 2 (0.13%) Visual Studio
General
1 335 (21.04%) Social Skills
2 294 (18.47%) Finance
3 216 (13.57%) Analytical Skills
4 137 (8.61%) Public Sector
5 112 (7.04%) Banking
6 41 (2.58%) Marketing
7 39 (2.45%) Retail
8 33 (2.07%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 32 (2.01%) Telecoms
10 29 (1.82%) Pharmaceutical
11 24 (1.51%) Legal
12 22 (1.38%) Front Office
13 20 (1.26%) Documentation Skills
13 20 (1.26%) Manufacturing
14 19 (1.19%) Aerospace
14 19 (1.19%) Financial Institution
15 17 (1.07%) Aviation
16 16 (1.01%) Investment Banking
16 16 (1.01%) Presentation Skills
17 14 (0.88%) Law
Job Titles
1 243 (15.26%) Architect
2 239 (15.01%) Senior
3 216 (13.57%) Data Scientist
4 169 (10.62%) Lead
5 162 (10.18%) Data Engineer
6 139 (8.73%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 98 (6.16%) Developer
8 85 (5.34%) Machine Learning Engineer
9 78 (4.90%) Python Engineer
10 76 (4.77%) Solutions Architect
11 69 (4.33%) Data Architect
12 66 (4.15%) Analyst
13 60 (3.77%) Software Engineer
14 59 (3.71%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 55 (3.45%) Platform Engineer
16 47 (2.95%) Security Architect
17 46 (2.89%) DevOps Engineer
18 42 (2.64%) Senior Data Scientist
19 40 (2.51%) Python Developer
19 40 (2.51%) Senior Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 142 (8.92%) PyTorch
2 107 (6.72%) Kafka
3 102 (6.41%) TensorFlow
4 95 (5.97%) scikit-learn
5 79 (4.96%) LangChain
5 79 (4.96%) PySpark
6 73 (4.59%) Pandas
6 73 (4.59%) React
7 64 (4.02%) REST
8 55 (3.45%) NumPy
9 41 (2.58%) .NET
10 38 (2.39%) LangGraph
11 30 (1.88%) FastAPI
12 28 (1.76%) Hugging Face
12 28 (1.76%) pytest
13 27 (1.70%) AngularJS
13 27 (1.70%) Model Context Protocol
14 25 (1.57%) Node.js
14 25 (1.57%) RESTful
15 19 (1.19%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 188 (11.81%) Cloud Native
2 169 (10.62%) AI Agents
3 110 (6.91%) Algorithms
4 65 (4.08%) Product Ownership
5 57 (3.58%) Distributed Systems
6 56 (3.52%) Onboarding
7 30 (1.88%) Data Structures
8 29 (1.82%) Enterprise Software
9 24 (1.51%) Life Science
10 23 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
11 21 (1.32%) Hybrid Cloud
12 16 (1.01%) Taxonomies
13 15 (0.94%) Legacy Systems
14 14 (0.88%) Enterprise Cloud
14 14 (0.88%) Fixed Income
14 14 (0.88%) Public Cloud
14 14 (0.88%) Security Posture
15 13 (0.82%) CMDB
15 13 (0.82%) Virtual Team
16 12 (0.75%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 50 (3.14%) Linux
2 13 (0.82%) Unix
2 13 (0.82%) Windows
3 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
3 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
4 3 (0.19%) Apple iOS
4 3 (0.19%) VMS
5 2 (0.13%) Android
5 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,280 (80.40%) AI
2 584 (36.68%) Data Science
3 508 (31.91%) CI/CD
4 458 (28.77%) Analytics
5 424 (26.63%) LLM
6 370 (23.24%) Generative AI
7 361 (22.68%) Data Pipeline
8 338 (21.23%) DevOps
9 335 (21.04%) Agile
10 294 (18.47%) MLOps
11 278 (17.46%) Data Engineering
12 251 (15.77%) Software Engineering
13 248 (15.58%) Use Case
14 232 (14.57%) Decision-Making
15 209 (13.13%) Roadmaps
16 206 (12.94%) Problem-Solving
17 196 (12.31%) Infrastructure as Code
18 189 (11.87%) Stakeholder Management
19 187 (11.75%) Data Governance
20 181 (11.37%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 877 (55.09%) Python
2 388 (24.37%) SQL
3 115 (7.22%) Java
4 75 (4.71%) JavaScript
5 64 (4.02%) TypeScript
6 47 (2.95%) C#
7 45 (2.83%) R
8 40 (2.51%) Bash
9 25 (1.57%) PowerShell
10 19 (1.19%) Bicep
11 18 (1.13%) C++
12 15 (0.94%) Go
12 15 (0.94%) Scala
13 10 (0.63%) PL/SQL
14 8 (0.50%) Cypher
14 8 (0.50%) SPARQL
15 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
15 7 (0.44%) Kotlin
15 7 (0.44%) Rust
16 6 (0.38%) Perl
Qualifications
1 276 (17.34%) Security Cleared
2 202 (12.69%) SC Cleared
3 123 (7.73%) Degree
4 55 (3.45%) Computer Science Degree
5 51 (3.20%) DV Cleared
6 45 (2.83%) AWS Certification
7 44 (2.76%) Master's Degree
8 33 (2.07%) BPSS Clearance
9 32 (2.01%) CISSP
10 28 (1.76%) PhD
11 22 (1.38%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 19 (1.19%) Azure Certification
13 14 (0.88%) CISM
13 14 (0.88%) TOGAF Certification
14 8 (0.50%) Cisco Certification
15 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
15 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 5 (0.31%) ITIL Certification
16 5 (0.31%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 190 (11.93%) Data Quality
2 64 (4.02%) GDPR
3 49 (3.08%) QA
4 31 (1.95%) NIST
5 21 (1.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.94%) EU AI Act
7 14 (0.88%) Accessibility
8 12 (0.75%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 9 (0.57%) GxP
10 8 (0.50%) GRC
10 8 (0.50%) HIPAA
11 7 (0.44%) Actionable Recommendations
12 6 (0.38%) SLA
12 6 (0.38%) WCAG
13 5 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 5 (0.31%) Solvency II
14 4 (0.25%) COBIT
14 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
14 4 (0.25%) NCSC
15 3 (0.19%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 221 (13.88%) Docker
2 12 (0.75%) Active Directory
3 7 (0.44%) IAG
4 6 (0.38%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 5 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
5 5 (0.31%) VMware Infrastructure
6 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.19%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
6 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 2 (0.13%) Firmware
7 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.13%) Virtual Machines
7 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.063%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 270 (16.96%) Kubernetes
2 187 (11.75%) Terraform
3 35 (2.20%) Ansible
4 26 (1.63%) Grafana
5 25 (1.57%) Kubeflow
6 19 (1.19%) Prometheus
7 8 (0.50%) Podman
8 6 (0.38%) Istio
9 4 (0.25%) systemd
10 3 (0.19%) Kibana
10 3 (0.19%) Nagios
10 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
10 3 (0.19%) Puppet
10 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
10 3 (0.19%) vMotion
11 2 (0.13%) Argo
11 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
11 2 (0.13%) Packer
11 2 (0.13%) Rancher
11 2 (0.13%) SCCM
Vendors
1 201 (12.63%) Databricks
2 164 (10.30%) Microsoft
3 103 (6.47%) Google
4 79 (4.96%) OpenAI
5 48 (3.02%) SAP
6 38 (2.39%) Foundry
7 34 (2.14%) ServiceNow
8 25 (1.57%) Oracle
9 20 (1.26%) Informatica
10 17 (1.07%) Dynatrace
11 14 (0.88%) IBM
12 13 (0.82%) Splunk
13 11 (0.69%) UiPath
14 7 (0.44%) Nexthink
14 7 (0.44%) Sybase
15 6 (0.38%) Pega
15 6 (0.38%) Salesforce
15 6 (0.38%) Workday
16 5 (0.31%) Palantir
16 5 (0.31%) VMware