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

6 months to
14 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 99 143
Rank change year-on-year +14 +44 +67
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,379 747 713
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.90% 2.58% 1.67%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.44% 2.83% 1.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 850 474 522
10th Percentile £413 £368 £413
25th Percentile £492 £450 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £575 £580
Median % change year-on-year - -0.86% -1.69%
75th Percentile £675 £713 £738
90th Percentile £775 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -4.35% +4.55% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 21 19
10th Percentile £50.00 £25.25 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.99 £45.00 £46.47
Median hourly rate £65.00 £61.50 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +5.69% +17.14% +50.00%
75th Percentile £83.75 £78.70 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.25 £81.01 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £76.25 £56.25
% change year-on-year -14.75% +35.56% +60.71%

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 40,111 26,361 36,876
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.33% 90.96% 86.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,183 16,941 23,723
10th Percentile £325 £305 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £516 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.13% -1.71% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £626 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £479 £500
% change year-on-year +2.71% -4.20% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,380 1,073 2,431
10th Percentile £14.89 £14.41 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.91 £18.38 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £28.60 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +48.60% -21.64% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.25 £60.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.78 £38.00
% change year-on-year +74.59% -32.17% +8.57%

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 May 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 May 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 May 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 1,158 £575 - 1,259
London +25 774 £575 - 638
UK excluding London +9 422 £550 -4.35% 802
Work from Home +8 387 £598 +8.68% 550
North of England -10 107 £566 +15.56% 226
South East -27 86 £600 +4.35% 248
Scotland +58 84 £518 +9.87% 48
Midlands -20 64 £575 +21.05% 97
North West -11 55 £575 +4.55% 124
East of England -21 50 £500 -20.00% 78
West Midlands -26 46 £550 +10.00% 52
Yorkshire -19 41 £550 - 66
South West -31 38 £500 -20.63% 93
East Midlands -21 16 £675 +45.95% 45
North East -11 14 £575 +60.61% 38
Wales -15 12 £759 +31.96% 17
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 9

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
1 117 (8.48%) Apache Spark
2 70 (5.08%) Apache Airflow
3 55 (3.99%) Apache
4 29 (2.10%) Jupyter
5 12 (0.87%) Confluence
6 9 (0.65%) Appian
7 5 (0.36%) CMS
7 5 (0.36%) Headless CMS
7 5 (0.36%) SAS
7 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
8 3 (0.22%) Palantir Foundry
9 2 (0.15%) Luigi
10 1 (0.073%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.073%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.073%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.073%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 23 (1.67%) Chatbot
2 11 (0.80%) Microsoft Project
3 9 (0.65%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.65%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.51%) Microsoft Office
5 3 (0.22%) LaTeX
5 3 (0.22%) Simulink
6 2 (0.15%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 11 (0.80%) SAP IBP
2 3 (0.22%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.15%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.15%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.073%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.073%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.073%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.073%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 540 (39.16%) Azure
2 478 (34.66%) AWS
3 241 (17.48%) GCP
4 126 (9.14%) Power Platform
5 97 (7.03%) GitHub
6 94 (6.82%) Serverless
7 92 (6.67%) Azure AI
8 87 (6.31%) Azure Machine Learning
9 72 (5.22%) Amazon S3
10 71 (5.15%) Amazon SageMaker
11 68 (4.93%) Snowflake
12 67 (4.86%) Azure DevOps
13 57 (4.13%) GitHub Actions
14 56 (4.06%) AWS Lambda
15 55 (3.99%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 53 (3.84%) Vertex AI
17 51 (3.70%) Azure Data Factory
18 41 (2.97%) AWS CloudFormation
19 33 (2.39%) Amazon Bedrock
20 28 (2.03%) Microsoft Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 13 (0.94%) Network Security
2 10 (0.73%) Firewall
3 9 (0.65%) HTTP
4 8 (0.58%) DNS
5 5 (0.36%) FTP
5 5 (0.36%) SMTP
5 5 (0.36%) SSL
6 4 (0.29%) InfiniBand
7 3 (0.22%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.15%) 4G
8 2 (0.15%) 5G
8 2 (0.15%) DHCP
8 2 (0.15%) Internet
8 2 (0.15%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.15%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.15%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.073%) 3G
9 1 (0.073%) Cisco IPT
9 1 (0.073%) Modbus
9 1 (0.073%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 96 (6.96%) Power BI
2 91 (6.60%) Data Lake
3 77 (5.58%) Big Data
4 61 (4.42%) BigQuery
5 60 (4.35%) Metadata
6 57 (4.13%) Data Warehouse
7 47 (3.41%) NoSQL
8 37 (2.68%) Tableau
9 35 (2.54%) Delta Lake
9 35 (2.54%) Hadoop
10 32 (2.32%) Pinecone
11 30 (2.18%) SQL Server
12 28 (2.03%) PostgreSQL
13 27 (1.96%) Amazon Athena
14 25 (1.81%) Relational Database
14 25 (1.81%) Weaviate
15 24 (1.74%) Mixpanel
16 19 (1.38%) MongoDB
17 18 (1.31%) Amazon Redshift
18 15 (1.09%) Redis
Development Applications
1 93 (6.74%) MLflow
2 89 (6.45%) Git
3 31 (2.25%) JIRA
4 27 (1.96%) Jenkins
5 24 (1.74%) GitLab
6 8 (0.58%) Visual Studio
7 7 (0.51%) Selenium
8 6 (0.44%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.29%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.29%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.29%) JMeter
9 4 (0.29%) Maven
9 4 (0.29%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.22%) Bitbucket
10 3 (0.22%) ERwin
10 3 (0.22%) Gradle
10 3 (0.22%) JUnit
10 3 (0.22%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.22%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.22%) Vite
General
1 296 (21.46%) Social Skills
2 262 (19.00%) Finance
3 160 (11.60%) Analytical Skills
4 135 (9.79%) Public Sector
5 81 (5.87%) Banking
6 29 (2.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 29 (2.10%) Marketing
7 26 (1.89%) Documentation Skills
8 24 (1.74%) Legal
9 22 (1.60%) Aviation
9 22 (1.60%) Influencing Skills
9 22 (1.60%) Pharmaceutical
10 21 (1.52%) Retail
11 20 (1.45%) Investment Banking
12 19 (1.38%) Front Office
12 19 (1.38%) Telecoms
13 16 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
14 12 (0.87%) Aerospace
15 11 (0.80%) Law
16 10 (0.73%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 205 (14.87%) Data Scientist
2 190 (13.78%) Architect
3 183 (13.27%) Senior
4 163 (11.82%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 134 (9.72%) Data Engineer
6 116 (8.41%) Lead
7 95 (6.89%) Developer
8 71 (5.15%) Analyst
9 64 (4.64%) Python Engineer
10 58 (4.21%) Software Engineer
11 56 (4.06%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 56 (4.06%) Solutions Architect
12 55 (3.99%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 53 (3.84%) Data Architect
14 38 (2.76%) Consultant
14 38 (2.76%) Senior Data Scientist
15 30 (2.18%) Azure Engineer
15 30 (2.18%) Python Developer
16 28 (2.03%) Artificial Intelligence Specialist
17 27 (1.96%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 194 (14.07%) PyTorch
2 140 (10.15%) TensorFlow
3 115 (8.34%) scikit-learn
4 100 (7.25%) Pandas
5 75 (5.44%) Kafka
6 71 (5.15%) LangChain
6 71 (5.15%) NumPy
7 67 (4.86%) React
8 65 (4.71%) PySpark
9 53 (3.84%) .NET
10 51 (3.70%) REST
11 50 (3.63%) Hugging Face
12 37 (2.68%) Node.js
13 36 (2.61%) Model Context Protocol
14 35 (2.54%) LangGraph
15 34 (2.47%) AngularJS
16 30 (2.18%) FastAPI
17 26 (1.89%) RESTful
18 25 (1.81%) Faiss
19 20 (1.45%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 167 (12.11%) Cloud Native
2 134 (9.72%) AI Agents
3 132 (9.57%) Algorithms
4 47 (3.41%) Product Ownership
5 43 (3.12%) Onboarding
6 35 (2.54%) Distributed Systems
7 28 (2.03%) Data Protection Act
8 18 (1.31%) Fixed Income
8 18 (1.31%) Legacy Systems
9 17 (1.23%) Management Information System
10 16 (1.16%) Enterprise Software
10 16 (1.16%) Hybrid Cloud
11 15 (1.09%) Data Structures
12 14 (1.02%) Analytical Mindset
13 12 (0.87%) Distributed Computing
13 12 (0.87%) Life Science
13 12 (0.87%) Public Cloud
14 11 (0.80%) Augmented Reality
14 11 (0.80%) Low-Code
14 11 (0.80%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 30 (2.18%) Linux
2 12 (0.87%) Windows
3 8 (0.58%) VMS
4 7 (0.51%) Apple iOS
4 7 (0.51%) Unix
5 6 (0.44%) Android
6 2 (0.15%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,086 (78.75%) AI
2 512 (37.13%) Data Science
3 424 (30.75%) CI/CD
4 390 (28.28%) LLM
5 385 (27.92%) Analytics
6 308 (22.34%) Data Pipeline
7 300 (21.75%) Generative AI
8 272 (19.72%) DevOps
9 268 (19.43%) MLOps
10 261 (18.93%) Data Engineering
11 247 (17.91%) Agile
12 193 (14.00%) Use Case
13 191 (13.85%) Problem-Solving
14 175 (12.69%) Data Governance
15 168 (12.18%) ETL
16 166 (12.04%) Software Engineering
17 164 (11.89%) Decision-Making
18 161 (11.68%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
19 158 (11.46%) Containerisation
20 145 (10.51%) Natural Language Processing
Programming Languages
1 794 (57.58%) Python
2 353 (25.60%) SQL
3 102 (7.40%) Java
4 78 (5.66%) C#
5 63 (4.57%) R
6 50 (3.63%) TypeScript
7 48 (3.48%) JavaScript
8 25 (1.81%) C++
9 20 (1.45%) Bash
10 18 (1.31%) PowerShell
11 16 (1.16%) Bicep
12 14 (1.02%) Scala
13 11 (0.80%) Kotlin
14 9 (0.65%) Go
15 8 (0.58%) MATLAB
16 7 (0.51%) Rust
16 7 (0.51%) SPARQL
17 5 (0.36%) PL/SQL
18 4 (0.29%) T-SQL
19 3 (0.22%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 240 (17.40%) Security Cleared
2 164 (11.89%) SC Cleared
3 116 (8.41%) Degree
4 58 (4.21%) Master's Degree
5 41 (2.97%) DV Cleared
6 38 (2.76%) BPSS Clearance
7 36 (2.61%) PhD
8 32 (2.32%) Computer Science Degree
9 24 (1.74%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.38%) Azure Certification
10 19 (1.38%) CISSP
11 15 (1.09%) CISM
12 14 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 9 (0.65%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 6 (0.44%) ISTQB
14 6 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
15 5 (0.36%) GIAC
15 5 (0.36%) PMI Certification
15 5 (0.36%) PMP
16 4 (0.29%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 143 (10.37%) Data Quality
2 54 (3.92%) GDPR
3 52 (3.77%) QA
4 29 (2.10%) NIST
5 18 (1.31%) Accessibility
6 14 (1.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 12 (0.87%) EU AI Act
8 10 (0.73%) Actionable Recommendations
8 10 (0.73%) HIPAA
9 8 (0.58%) NCSC
9 8 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 5 (0.36%) GRC
10 5 (0.36%) WCAG
11 4 (0.29%) COBIT
12 3 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
12 3 (0.22%) DO-254
12 3 (0.22%) GxP
13 2 (0.15%) Def Stans
13 2 (0.15%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 2 (0.15%) NIST 800
System Software
1 184 (13.34%) Docker
2 12 (0.87%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 11 (0.80%) Active Directory
4 6 (0.44%) Firmware
5 3 (0.22%) Lustre
5 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.15%) Ceph
6 2 (0.15%) HDFS
6 2 (0.15%) Microsoft App-V
6 2 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
6 2 (0.15%) VMware Infrastructure
6 2 (0.15%) VMware Workstation
7 1 (0.073%) Embedded Firmware
7 1 (0.073%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 209 (15.16%) Kubernetes
2 140 (10.15%) Terraform
3 21 (1.52%) Grafana
3 21 (1.52%) Kubeflow
4 15 (1.09%) Ansible
5 14 (1.02%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.65%) Podman
7 4 (0.29%) Istio
8 3 (0.22%) Rancher
9 2 (0.15%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.15%) Kibana
9 2 (0.15%) Knative
9 2 (0.15%) Packer
9 2 (0.15%) SCCM
10 1 (0.073%) Argo
10 1 (0.073%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.073%) logstash
10 1 (0.073%) SELinux
Vendors
1 211 (15.30%) Databricks
2 166 (12.04%) Microsoft
3 103 (7.47%) OpenAI
4 94 (6.82%) Google
5 61 (4.42%) Foundry
6 40 (2.90%) SAP
7 31 (2.25%) Oracle
8 19 (1.38%) ServiceNow
9 14 (1.02%) IBM
9 14 (1.02%) UiPath
10 13 (0.94%) Dynatrace
10 13 (0.94%) Informatica
11 11 (0.80%) Automation Anywhere
12 9 (0.65%) NVIDIA
13 8 (0.58%) Amplitude
14 7 (0.51%) Workday
15 6 (0.44%) Salesforce
15 6 (0.44%) Siemens
15 6 (0.44%) Talend
16 5 (0.36%) Ariba