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

6 months to
24 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 76 107 134
Rank change year-on-year +31 +27 +83
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,555 750 743
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.05% 2.50% 1.71%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.60% 2.74% 2.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 950 456 525
10th Percentile £413 £397 £413
25th Percentile £489 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £553 £580
Median % change year-on-year +4.07% -4.74% +0.87%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £738
90th Percentile £775 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £550
Number of hourly rates quoted 48 21 20
10th Percentile £40.15 £31.00 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.00 £45.00 £46.18
Median hourly rate £69.22 £75.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.71% +42.86% +50.00%
75th Percentile £84.06 £81.01 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.13 £88.00 £75.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £78.10 £52.50
% change year-on-year -18.05% +48.76% +50.00%

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 43,234 27,342 36,961
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.93% 91.04% 85.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,976 17,315 23,545
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £502 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.09% -4.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,595 1,301 2,587
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.65
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.79 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £72.50 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.08 £38.12
% change year-on-year +77.47% -34.22% +17.29%

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 24 June 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 24 June 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 24 June 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 +26 1,287 £575 - 685
London +35 861 £575 - 299
UK excluding London +3 491 £550 - 570
Work from Home +19 453 £588 +6.82% 291
North of England -1 139 £575 +9.52% 112
Scotland +44 109 £505 +8.09% 28
South East -30 97 £600 +4.35% 207
North West -7 77 £590 +7.36% 68
Midlands -16 64 £550 +10.00% 64
Yorkshire -18 47 £550 -5.38% 30
West Midlands -25 47 £550 +10.00% 29
South West -25 46 £515 -16.94% 79
East of England -25 36 £550 -8.33% 66
Wales -9 18 £565 -1.83% 17
North East -25 18 £550 +37.50% 16
East Midlands -10 15 £650 +52.94% 35
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 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
1 106 (6.82%) Apache Spark
2 73 (4.69%) Apache Airflow
3 51 (3.28%) Apache
4 37 (2.38%) Jupyter
5 23 (1.48%) Confluence
6 9 (0.58%) Appian
7 8 (0.51%) SharePoint
8 6 (0.39%) Palantir Foundry
9 5 (0.32%) CMS
9 5 (0.32%) Headless CMS
9 5 (0.32%) SAS
10 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.13%) Luigi
11 2 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.064%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.064%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.064%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.064%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.064%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 31 (1.99%) Chatbot
2 13 (0.84%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.58%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Project
5 7 (0.45%) Microsoft Office
6 3 (0.19%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.13%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.13%) Simulink
8 1 (0.064%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.71%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.064%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.064%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.064%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.064%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.064%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 572 (36.78%) Azure
2 554 (35.63%) AWS
3 279 (17.94%) GCP
4 141 (9.07%) Power Platform
5 115 (7.40%) Serverless
6 101 (6.50%) Amazon S3
7 99 (6.37%) GitHub
8 93 (5.98%) Azure AI
9 87 (5.59%) AWS Lambda
10 83 (5.34%) Amazon SageMaker
11 78 (5.02%) Azure Machine Learning
12 77 (4.95%) Snowflake
13 69 (4.44%) Azure DevOps
14 59 (3.79%) Vertex AI
15 56 (3.60%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 53 (3.41%) Amazon Bedrock
17 51 (3.28%) GitHub Actions
18 49 (3.15%) Azure Data Factory
19 39 (2.51%) AWS CloudFormation
19 39 (2.51%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.03%) Firewall
2 11 (0.71%) Network Security
3 10 (0.64%) Internet
4 7 (0.45%) DNS
5 5 (0.32%) DHCP
5 5 (0.32%) VPN
6 4 (0.26%) HTTP
6 4 (0.26%) NAS
6 4 (0.26%) SAN
7 3 (0.19%) SMTP
8 2 (0.13%) 4G
8 2 (0.13%) 5G
8 2 (0.13%) Ethernet
8 2 (0.13%) MQTT
8 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
8 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.064%) InfiniBand
9 1 (0.064%) LTE
9 1 (0.064%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 114 (7.33%) Power BI
2 102 (6.56%) Data Lake
3 78 (5.02%) Big Data
4 73 (4.69%) Metadata
5 69 (4.44%) Data Warehouse
6 66 (4.24%) BigQuery
7 48 (3.09%) NoSQL
8 46 (2.96%) Tableau
9 41 (2.64%) Amazon Athena
10 39 (2.51%) PostgreSQL
11 38 (2.44%) Amazon Redshift
12 35 (2.25%) Hadoop
13 34 (2.19%) Relational Database
14 31 (1.99%) Delta Lake
14 31 (1.99%) SQL Server
15 27 (1.74%) Pinecone
16 24 (1.54%) MongoDB
17 19 (1.22%) MySQL
17 19 (1.22%) Weaviate
18 17 (1.09%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 93 (5.98%) Git
2 79 (5.08%) MLflow
3 53 (3.41%) JIRA
4 48 (3.09%) GitLab
5 27 (1.74%) Jenkins
6 9 (0.58%) Visual Studio
7 8 (0.51%) Claude Code
8 7 (0.45%) Selenium
8 7 (0.45%) Vite
9 4 (0.26%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.26%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.26%) ERwin
9 4 (0.26%) JMeter
9 4 (0.26%) Maven
9 4 (0.26%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.19%) Gradle
10 3 (0.19%) JUnit
10 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.19%) Spinnaker
General
1 325 (20.90%) Social Skills
2 304 (19.55%) Finance
3 197 (12.67%) Analytical Skills
4 155 (9.97%) Public Sector
5 106 (6.82%) Banking
6 39 (2.51%) Marketing
7 38 (2.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 31 (1.99%) Pharmaceutical
9 29 (1.86%) Retail
10 26 (1.67%) Legal
11 25 (1.61%) Documentation Skills
12 22 (1.41%) Front Office
13 20 (1.29%) Aviation
13 20 (1.29%) Influencing Skills
14 18 (1.16%) Telecoms
15 17 (1.09%) Law
16 16 (1.03%) Financial Institution
16 16 (1.03%) Investment Banking
17 13 (0.84%) Manufacturing
18 12 (0.77%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 221 (14.21%) Senior
2 220 (14.15%) Architect
3 219 (14.08%) Data Scientist
4 152 (9.77%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 143 (9.20%) Data Engineer
6 135 (8.68%) Lead
7 104 (6.69%) Developer
8 78 (5.02%) Analyst
9 74 (4.76%) Python Engineer
10 68 (4.37%) Software Engineer
11 67 (4.31%) Data Architect
12 66 (4.24%) Solutions Architect
13 64 (4.12%) Machine Learning Engineer
14 62 (3.99%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
15 46 (2.96%) Consultant
16 42 (2.70%) Senior Data Scientist
17 35 (2.25%) Platform Engineer
17 35 (2.25%) Python Developer
18 34 (2.19%) Full-Stack Engineer
19 33 (2.12%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 176 (11.32%) PyTorch
2 122 (7.85%) TensorFlow
3 109 (7.01%) scikit-learn
4 90 (5.79%) Pandas
5 87 (5.59%) Kafka
6 82 (5.27%) LangChain
7 76 (4.89%) React
8 69 (4.44%) PySpark
9 68 (4.37%) NumPy
10 63 (4.05%) REST
11 55 (3.54%) .NET
12 44 (2.83%) Hugging Face
13 35 (2.25%) LangGraph
14 34 (2.19%) AngularJS
15 33 (2.12%) FastAPI
16 31 (1.99%) RESTful
17 29 (1.86%) Model Context Protocol
18 27 (1.74%) Node.js
19 23 (1.48%) pytest
20 21 (1.35%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 187 (12.03%) Cloud Native
2 150 (9.65%) AI Agents
3 113 (7.27%) Algorithms
4 60 (3.86%) Product Ownership
5 49 (3.15%) Distributed Systems
6 47 (3.02%) Onboarding
7 27 (1.74%) Data Protection Act
8 24 (1.54%) Enterprise Software
9 23 (1.48%) Data Structures
10 22 (1.41%) Life Science
11 19 (1.22%) Fixed Income
12 17 (1.09%) Legacy Systems
13 16 (1.03%) Management Information System
14 15 (0.96%) Hybrid Cloud
14 15 (0.96%) Security Posture
15 13 (0.84%) Distributed Computing
15 13 (0.84%) Low-Code
16 12 (0.77%) Autonomous Agent
16 12 (0.77%) Public Cloud
16 12 (0.77%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 39 (2.51%) Linux
2 17 (1.09%) Windows
3 11 (0.71%) Unix
4 6 (0.39%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.39%) VMS
5 5 (0.32%) Android
6 4 (0.26%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.064%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,251 (80.45%) AI
2 582 (37.43%) Data Science
3 493 (31.70%) CI/CD
4 449 (28.87%) LLM
5 441 (28.36%) Analytics
6 364 (23.41%) Data Pipeline
7 357 (22.96%) Generative AI
8 329 (21.16%) DevOps
9 310 (19.94%) MLOps
10 302 (19.42%) Agile
11 289 (18.59%) Data Engineering
12 256 (16.46%) Use Case
13 213 (13.70%) Problem-Solving
14 209 (13.44%) Software Engineering
15 208 (13.38%) Decision-Making
16 192 (12.35%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
17 186 (11.96%) Data Governance
18 180 (11.58%) ETL
19 170 (10.93%) Infrastructure as Code
19 170 (10.93%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 870 (55.95%) Python
2 395 (25.40%) SQL
3 108 (6.95%) Java
4 67 (4.31%) C#
5 63 (4.05%) R
6 58 (3.73%) TypeScript
7 56 (3.60%) JavaScript
8 27 (1.74%) Bash
9 25 (1.61%) C++
10 15 (0.96%) PowerShell
11 14 (0.90%) Bicep
12 13 (0.84%) Scala
13 12 (0.77%) Go
14 10 (0.64%) Kotlin
15 9 (0.58%) SPARQL
16 8 (0.51%) PL/SQL
17 7 (0.45%) Rust
18 6 (0.39%) MATLAB
19 5 (0.32%) Perl
20 3 (0.19%) Korn
Qualifications
1 273 (17.56%) Security Cleared
2 191 (12.28%) SC Cleared
3 122 (7.85%) Degree
4 48 (3.09%) Master's Degree
5 47 (3.02%) BPSS Clearance
6 44 (2.83%) DV Cleared
7 43 (2.77%) AWS Certification
8 41 (2.64%) Computer Science Degree
9 31 (1.99%) PhD
10 22 (1.41%) Azure Certification
11 21 (1.35%) CISSP
12 20 (1.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 15 (0.96%) CISM
14 7 (0.45%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 7 (0.45%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 7 (0.45%) ISTQB
15 5 (0.32%) CEH
15 5 (0.32%) CompTIA Security+
15 5 (0.32%) GIAC
15 5 (0.32%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 184 (11.83%) Data Quality
2 63 (4.05%) GDPR
3 53 (3.41%) QA
4 30 (1.93%) NIST
5 17 (1.09%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 16 (1.03%) Accessibility
7 13 (0.84%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.71%) HIPAA
8 11 (0.71%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 10 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
10 8 (0.51%) GRC
10 8 (0.51%) GxP
11 7 (0.45%) NCSC
12 5 (0.32%) WCAG
13 4 (0.26%) COBIT
13 4 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
13 4 (0.26%) Solvency II
14 3 (0.19%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
14 3 (0.19%) SLA
System Software
1 209 (13.44%) Docker
2 12 (0.77%) Active Directory
3 11 (0.71%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.32%) VMware Infrastructure
5 4 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
6 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
6 3 (0.19%) Firmware
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%) IAG
7 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
8 1 (0.064%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 258 (16.59%) Kubernetes
2 168 (10.80%) Terraform
3 23 (1.48%) Kubeflow
4 22 (1.41%) Grafana
5 17 (1.09%) Ansible
6 13 (0.84%) Prometheus
7 10 (0.64%) Podman
8 7 (0.45%) Istio
9 3 (0.19%) Nagios
9 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.19%) Puppet
9 3 (0.19%) Rancher
9 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.19%) vMotion
10 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.13%) Argo
10 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (0.13%) Kibana
10 2 (0.13%) Packer
10 2 (0.13%) SCCM
Vendors
1 190 (12.22%) Databricks
2 171 (11.00%) Microsoft
3 107 (6.88%) OpenAI
4 97 (6.24%) Google
5 57 (3.67%) Foundry
6 40 (2.57%) SAP
7 35 (2.25%) Oracle
8 26 (1.67%) ServiceNow
9 21 (1.35%) Informatica
10 17 (1.09%) IBM
11 15 (0.96%) UiPath
12 11 (0.71%) Dynatrace
13 10 (0.64%) Automation Anywhere
14 8 (0.51%) Salesforce
15 7 (0.45%) Amplitude
15 7 (0.45%) Sybase
15 7 (0.45%) Talend
16 6 (0.39%) Palantir
16 6 (0.39%) Pega
16 6 (0.39%) Workday