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

6 months to
12 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 82 113 138
Rank change year-on-year +31 +25 +94
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,496 722 735
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.99% 2.45% 1.68%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.53% 2.70% 1.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 912 441 522
10th Percentile £413 £393 £413
25th Percentile £487 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £555 £575
Median % change year-on-year +3.60% -3.48% -2.13%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £738
90th Percentile £774 £850 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £563 £525
% change year-on-year -2.22% +7.14% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 42 19 19
10th Percentile £40.54 £29.85 £41.25
25th Percentile £50.30 £45.00 £46.22
Median hourly rate £67.00 £75.00 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -10.67% +42.86% +50.00%
75th Percentile £87.81 £81.01 £66.25
90th Percentile £89.88 £88.00 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £78.10 £56.25
% change year-on-year -18.05% +38.84% +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 42,365 26,787 37,171
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.77% 91.01% 85.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,429 17,005 23,768
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £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 2,540 1,187 2,585
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £27.21 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +61.56% -25.45% +4.20%
75th Percentile £68.00 £56.00 £61.25
90th Percentile £81.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +15.02%

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 12 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 12 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 12 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 +25 1,240 £575 - 972
London +35 837 £575 - 522
UK excluding London +23 460 £550 -2.22% 620
Work from Home +23 433 £575 +4.55% 499
North of England +6 128 £554 +0.68% 160
Scotland +51 103 £515 +10.28% 25
South East -44 89 £630 +9.57% 206
North West +5 68 £575 +4.55% 102
Midlands -29 59 £550 +10.00% 59
Yorkshire -15 45 £550 - 41
South West -18 45 £500 -19.35% 97
West Midlands -31 43 £550 +10.00% 35
East of England -16 38 £525 -14.29% 64
North East -20 18 £550 +46.67% 17
Wales -14 16 £565 -1.83% 16
East Midlands -15 14 £675 +58.82% 23
Northern Ireland - 1 £334 - 10

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
1 108 (7.22%) Apache Spark
2 66 (4.41%) Apache Airflow
3 50 (3.34%) Apache
4 36 (2.41%) Jupyter
5 22 (1.47%) Confluence
6 11 (0.74%) Appian
7 8 (0.53%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.33%) CMS
8 5 (0.33%) Headless CMS
9 4 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
9 4 (0.27%) SAS
10 2 (0.13%) Luigi
10 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Exchange
11 1 (0.067%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.067%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.067%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.067%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.067%) NetWeaver
11 1 (0.067%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 30 (2.01%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.80%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.60%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.53%) Microsoft Project
5 7 (0.47%) Microsoft Office
6 3 (0.20%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.13%) Simulink
8 1 (0.067%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.74%) SAP IBP
2 6 (0.40%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.067%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.067%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.067%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.067%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.067%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.067%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 548 (36.63%) Azure
2 522 (34.89%) AWS
3 259 (17.31%) GCP
4 131 (8.76%) Power Platform
5 110 (7.35%) Serverless
6 98 (6.55%) Amazon S3
7 95 (6.35%) GitHub
8 88 (5.88%) Azure AI
9 82 (5.48%) AWS Lambda
10 79 (5.28%) Amazon SageMaker
11 72 (4.81%) Azure Machine Learning
12 71 (4.75%) Snowflake
13 69 (4.61%) Azure DevOps
14 54 (3.61%) Amazon Bedrock
14 54 (3.61%) GitHub Actions
14 54 (3.61%) Vertex AI
15 51 (3.41%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 48 (3.21%) Azure Data Factory
17 38 (2.54%) AWS CloudFormation
18 36 (2.41%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 12 (0.80%) Firewall
2 8 (0.53%) Internet
3 7 (0.47%) Network Security
4 5 (0.33%) DNS
5 4 (0.27%) DHCP
5 4 (0.27%) HTTP
5 4 (0.27%) NAS
5 4 (0.27%) SAN
6 3 (0.20%) VPN
7 2 (0.13%) 4G
7 2 (0.13%) 5G
7 2 (0.13%) Ethernet
7 2 (0.13%) MQTT
7 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
7 2 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
7 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
7 2 (0.13%) SMTP
8 1 (0.067%) 3G
8 1 (0.067%) InfiniBand
8 1 (0.067%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 105 (7.02%) Data Lake
2 104 (6.95%) Power BI
3 78 (5.21%) Big Data
4 72 (4.81%) Metadata
5 66 (4.41%) BigQuery
6 65 (4.34%) Data Warehouse
7 48 (3.21%) NoSQL
8 43 (2.87%) Tableau
9 42 (2.81%) Amazon Athena
10 38 (2.54%) Amazon Redshift
11 36 (2.41%) PostgreSQL
12 35 (2.34%) Hadoop
13 32 (2.14%) SQL Server
14 31 (2.07%) Relational Database
15 29 (1.94%) Delta Lake
16 28 (1.87%) Pinecone
17 22 (1.47%) MongoDB
18 20 (1.34%) Weaviate
19 19 (1.27%) Mixpanel
20 16 (1.07%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 91 (6.08%) Git
2 78 (5.21%) MLflow
3 47 (3.14%) JIRA
4 39 (2.61%) GitLab
5 27 (1.80%) Jenkins
6 9 (0.60%) Visual Studio
7 7 (0.47%) Selenium
8 5 (0.33%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.27%) Cypress.io
9 4 (0.27%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.27%) ERwin
9 4 (0.27%) JMeter
9 4 (0.27%) Maven
9 4 (0.27%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.20%) Gradle
10 3 (0.20%) JUnit
10 3 (0.20%) REST Assured
10 3 (0.20%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.20%) Spinnaker
10 3 (0.20%) Vite
General
1 316 (21.12%) Social Skills
2 294 (19.65%) Finance
3 185 (12.37%) Analytical Skills
4 156 (10.43%) Public Sector
5 91 (6.08%) Banking
6 36 (2.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 36 (2.41%) Marketing
7 27 (1.80%) Legal
7 27 (1.80%) Pharmaceutical
8 24 (1.60%) Documentation Skills
8 24 (1.60%) Retail
9 22 (1.47%) Aviation
9 22 (1.47%) Front Office
10 21 (1.40%) Influencing Skills
11 18 (1.20%) Telecoms
12 16 (1.07%) Investment Banking
12 16 (1.07%) Law
13 13 (0.87%) Financial Institution
14 12 (0.80%) Manufacturing
15 11 (0.74%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 219 (14.64%) Data Scientist
2 209 (13.97%) Senior
3 195 (13.03%) Architect
4 150 (10.03%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 139 (9.29%) Data Engineer
6 131 (8.76%) Lead
7 98 (6.55%) Developer
8 74 (4.95%) Analyst
9 69 (4.61%) Python Engineer
10 65 (4.34%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 64 (4.28%) Software Engineer
12 61 (4.08%) Data Architect
13 56 (3.74%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 56 (3.74%) Solutions Architect
14 41 (2.74%) Senior Data Scientist
15 40 (2.67%) Consultant
16 34 (2.27%) Platform Engineer
16 34 (2.27%) Python Developer
17 32 (2.14%) Senior Data Engineer
18 31 (2.07%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 174 (11.63%) PyTorch
2 124 (8.29%) TensorFlow
3 108 (7.22%) scikit-learn
4 91 (6.08%) Pandas
5 82 (5.48%) Kafka
6 70 (4.68%) LangChain
7 68 (4.55%) React
8 67 (4.48%) NumPy
9 66 (4.41%) PySpark
10 59 (3.94%) REST
11 53 (3.54%) .NET
12 43 (2.87%) Hugging Face
13 34 (2.27%) LangGraph
14 32 (2.14%) AngularJS
14 32 (2.14%) FastAPI
14 32 (2.14%) Model Context Protocol
15 30 (2.01%) Node.js
16 29 (1.94%) RESTful
17 22 (1.47%) pytest
18 19 (1.27%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 176 (11.76%) Cloud Native
2 145 (9.69%) AI Agents
3 115 (7.69%) Algorithms
4 56 (3.74%) Product Ownership
5 45 (3.01%) Onboarding
6 44 (2.94%) Distributed Systems
7 27 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
8 21 (1.40%) Data Structures
9 20 (1.34%) Enterprise Software
9 20 (1.34%) Fixed Income
10 18 (1.20%) Legacy Systems
11 17 (1.14%) Life Science
12 14 (0.94%) Low-Code
13 13 (0.87%) Hybrid Cloud
13 13 (0.87%) Management Information System
14 12 (0.80%) Distributed Computing
14 12 (0.80%) Public Cloud
14 12 (0.80%) Taxonomies
15 11 (0.74%) Augmented Reality
15 11 (0.74%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 29 (1.94%) Linux
2 16 (1.07%) Windows
3 11 (0.74%) Unix
4 6 (0.40%) Apple iOS
4 6 (0.40%) VMS
5 5 (0.33%) Android
6 3 (0.20%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.067%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,205 (80.55%) AI
2 563 (37.63%) Data Science
3 476 (31.82%) CI/CD
4 434 (29.01%) LLM
5 417 (27.87%) Analytics
6 341 (22.79%) Data Pipeline
7 339 (22.66%) Generative AI
8 314 (20.99%) DevOps
9 297 (19.85%) MLOps
10 282 (18.85%) Agile
11 281 (18.78%) Data Engineering
12 233 (15.57%) Use Case
13 206 (13.77%) Problem-Solving
14 199 (13.30%) Software Engineering
15 194 (12.97%) Decision-Making
16 183 (12.23%) ETL
17 181 (12.10%) Data Governance
18 179 (11.97%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
19 164 (10.96%) Infrastructure as Code
20 159 (10.63%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 847 (56.62%) Python
2 385 (25.74%) SQL
3 106 (7.09%) Java
4 68 (4.55%) C#
5 66 (4.41%) R
6 48 (3.21%) TypeScript
7 47 (3.14%) JavaScript
8 24 (1.60%) C++
9 20 (1.34%) Bash
10 13 (0.87%) Bicep
11 12 (0.80%) PowerShell
11 12 (0.80%) Scala
12 10 (0.67%) Kotlin
13 8 (0.53%) SPARQL
14 7 (0.47%) Go
14 7 (0.47%) PL/SQL
14 7 (0.47%) Rust
15 6 (0.40%) MATLAB
16 5 (0.33%) Perl
17 3 (0.20%) Korn
Qualifications
1 257 (17.18%) Security Cleared
2 177 (11.83%) SC Cleared
3 116 (7.75%) Degree
4 48 (3.21%) Master's Degree
5 47 (3.14%) BPSS Clearance
6 40 (2.67%) DV Cleared
7 38 (2.54%) Computer Science Degree
8 37 (2.47%) AWS Certification
9 32 (2.14%) PhD
10 21 (1.40%) Azure Certification
11 19 (1.27%) CISSP
12 18 (1.20%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 15 (1.00%) CISM
14 7 (0.47%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 7 (0.47%) ISTQB
15 6 (0.40%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 5 (0.33%) CEH
16 5 (0.33%) DBS Check
16 5 (0.33%) GIAC
16 5 (0.33%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 182 (12.17%) Data Quality
2 62 (4.14%) GDPR
3 51 (3.41%) QA
4 31 (2.07%) NIST
5 18 (1.20%) Accessibility
6 17 (1.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 13 (0.87%) EU AI Act
8 11 (0.74%) Actionable Recommendations
8 11 (0.74%) HIPAA
9 10 (0.67%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 7 (0.47%) GRC
10 7 (0.47%) GxP
10 7 (0.47%) NCSC
11 5 (0.33%) WCAG
12 4 (0.27%) COBIT
12 4 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
13 3 (0.20%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 3 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 3 (0.20%) SLA
13 3 (0.20%) Solvency II
System Software
1 198 (13.24%) Docker
2 11 (0.74%) Active Directory
2 11 (0.74%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 4 (0.27%) Microsoft App-V
3 4 (0.27%) VMware Infrastructure
4 3 (0.20%) Firmware
4 3 (0.20%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.13%) BitLocker
5 2 (0.13%) HDFS
5 2 (0.13%) Hyper-V
5 2 (0.13%) Terminal Services
5 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
5 2 (0.13%) VMware ESXi
5 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
6 1 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 1 (0.067%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 237 (15.84%) Kubernetes
2 163 (10.90%) Terraform
3 23 (1.54%) Kubeflow
4 20 (1.34%) Grafana
5 14 (0.94%) Ansible
5 14 (0.94%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.60%) Podman
7 6 (0.40%) Istio
8 3 (0.20%) NetBackup
8 3 (0.20%) Rancher
9 2 (0.13%) Argo
9 2 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.13%) Kibana
9 2 (0.13%) Nagios
9 2 (0.13%) Packer
9 2 (0.13%) Puppet
9 2 (0.13%) SCCM
9 2 (0.13%) vCenter Server
9 2 (0.13%) vMotion
10 1 (0.067%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 188 (12.57%) Databricks
2 168 (11.23%) Microsoft
3 99 (6.62%) OpenAI
4 87 (5.82%) Google
5 57 (3.81%) Foundry
6 39 (2.61%) SAP
7 35 (2.34%) Oracle
8 22 (1.47%) ServiceNow
9 19 (1.27%) Informatica
10 15 (1.00%) IBM
10 15 (1.00%) UiPath
11 11 (0.74%) Automation Anywhere
11 11 (0.74%) Dynatrace
12 7 (0.47%) Amplitude
12 7 (0.47%) Salesforce
12 7 (0.47%) Sybase
13 6 (0.40%) Pega
13 6 (0.40%) Talend
13 6 (0.40%) Workday
14 5 (0.33%) Splunk