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

6 months to
12 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 77 102 168
Rank change year-on-year +25 +66 +62
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,297 780 642
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.26% 2.52% 1.45%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.74% 2.81% 1.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 795 495 472
10th Percentile £402 £361 £413
25th Percentile £469 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £569 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -1.04% - -8.00%
75th Percentile £700 £731 £700
90th Percentile £780 £850 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £525 £543
% change year-on-year - -3.31% -9.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 14 26
10th Percentile £41.75 £22.45 £41.88
25th Percentile £50.00 £25.28 -
Median hourly rate £54.50 £35.75 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +52.45% -22.59% +31.94%
75th Percentile £73.93 £51.56 £53.44
90th Percentile £95.00 £63.13 £66.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £45.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +42.22% -2.56% -7.64%

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 34,652 27,713 38,573
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.01% 89.46% 87.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,939 16,970 25,283
10th Percentile £306 £306 £300
25th Percentile £408 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £498 £500
% change year-on-year -4.06% -0.35% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,087 853 2,111
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.28
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.05 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -1.71% +1.74%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £72.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.51 £35.00
% change year-on-year -20.18% -9.97% +9.38%

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 February 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 February 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 February 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 +20 1,087 £575 -4.17% 865
London +23 715 £603 -3.60% 431
UK excluding London +49 422 £525 - 628
Work from Home +27 411 £575 +9.52% 414
North of England -15 100 £514 +13.59% 142
South East +10 87 £550 +4.76% 230
Scotland +65 82 £510 +27.50% 43
East of England +10 70 £550 -8.33% 47
North West +7 59 £500 +11.11% 83
Midlands -8 57 £514 +34.38% 76
West Midlands -17 39 £514 +28.50% 32
South West -22 32 £550 -17.60% 74
Yorkshire -41 31 £520 -1.05% 42
East Midlands -10 18 £513 +43.96% 44
Wales -5 15 £738 +31.11% 19
North East -12 12 £575 +60.61% 17
Northern Ireland - 2 £675 - 5

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
1 118 (9.10%) Apache Spark
2 71 (5.47%) Apache Airflow
3 59 (4.55%) Apache
4 31 (2.39%) Jupyter
5 13 (1.00%) Appian
6 12 (0.93%) Confluence
7 9 (0.69%) SAS
8 8 (0.62%) Apache Pig
9 6 (0.46%) GeoServer
9 6 (0.46%) Palantir Foundry
9 6 (0.46%) SharePoint
9 6 (0.46%) Smallworld
10 4 (0.31%) CMS
10 4 (0.31%) IIS
11 2 (0.15%) Luigi
12 1 (0.077%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.077%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.077%) Headless CMS
12 1 (0.077%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.077%) nginx
Applications
1 41 (3.16%) Chatbot
2 15 (1.16%) Microsoft Project
3 14 (1.08%) Microsoft Excel
4 10 (0.77%) Microsoft Office
5 7 (0.54%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 5 (0.39%) Simulink
7 3 (0.23%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.077%) Adobe XD
8 1 (0.077%) Sketch
8 1 (0.077%) Spreadsheet
8 1 (0.077%) Trello
Business Applications
1 5 (0.39%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (0.23%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.077%) Shopify
3 1 (0.077%) Teamcenter
3 1 (0.077%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 571 (44.02%) Azure
2 456 (35.16%) AWS
3 240 (18.50%) GCP
4 134 (10.33%) Power Platform
5 107 (8.25%) Serverless
6 106 (8.17%) GitHub
7 100 (7.71%) Azure Machine Learning
8 86 (6.63%) Azure AI
9 77 (5.94%) Azure DevOps
10 71 (5.47%) Amazon SageMaker
11 68 (5.24%) Snowflake
12 67 (5.17%) Amazon S3
13 61 (4.70%) Vertex AI
14 53 (4.09%) AWS Lambda
14 53 (4.09%) Azure Data Factory
14 53 (4.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 48 (3.70%) GitHub Actions
16 45 (3.47%) Azure AKS
17 40 (3.08%) AWS CloudFormation
18 38 (2.93%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.23%) Network Security
2 9 (0.69%) HTTP
3 6 (0.46%) DNS
3 6 (0.46%) Ethernet
4 5 (0.39%) FTP
4 5 (0.39%) Internet
4 5 (0.39%) SMTP
4 5 (0.39%) SSL
5 4 (0.31%) Firewall
5 4 (0.31%) InfiniBand
6 3 (0.23%) Cisco IPT
6 3 (0.23%) VPN
7 2 (0.15%) 5G
7 2 (0.15%) Cisco Nexus
7 2 (0.15%) Ethernet VPN
7 2 (0.15%) Hyperconnected
7 2 (0.15%) LTE
7 2 (0.15%) Mobile Backhaul
7 2 (0.15%) Modbus
7 2 (0.15%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 107 (8.25%) Power BI
2 92 (7.09%) Data Lake
3 74 (5.71%) Data Warehouse
4 62 (4.78%) Big Data
5 55 (4.24%) NoSQL
6 49 (3.78%) BigQuery
6 49 (3.78%) Metadata
6 49 (3.78%) PostgreSQL
7 37 (2.85%) Hadoop
8 35 (2.70%) Pinecone
8 35 (2.70%) Tableau
9 27 (2.08%) SQL Server
10 26 (2.00%) Weaviate
11 25 (1.93%) Relational Database
12 21 (1.62%) Elasticsearch
13 20 (1.54%) Mixpanel
14 19 (1.46%) Delta Lake
15 18 (1.39%) Amazon Athena
15 18 (1.39%) Data Mining
16 17 (1.31%) OLTP
Development Applications
1 99 (7.63%) Git
2 91 (7.02%) MLflow
3 41 (3.16%) Jenkins
4 28 (2.16%) GitLab
5 25 (1.93%) JIRA
6 16 (1.23%) Selenium
7 13 (1.00%) JMeter
7 13 (1.00%) Visual Studio
8 10 (0.77%) SonarQube
9 7 (0.54%) Gradle
10 6 (0.46%) PyCharm
11 5 (0.39%) Maven
11 5 (0.39%) MSTest
12 4 (0.31%) Android Studio
12 4 (0.31%) Bitbucket
12 4 (0.31%) Cucumber
12 4 (0.31%) Cypress.io
12 4 (0.31%) Oracle APEX
12 4 (0.31%) Robot Framework
12 4 (0.31%) RStudio
General
1 336 (25.91%) Social Skills
2 285 (21.97%) Finance
3 139 (10.72%) Analytical Skills
4 134 (10.33%) Public Sector
5 90 (6.94%) Banking
6 42 (3.24%) Pharmaceutical
7 41 (3.16%) Marketing
8 35 (2.70%) Retail
9 30 (2.31%) Investment Banking
9 30 (2.31%) Legal
10 27 (2.08%) Influencing Skills
11 25 (1.93%) Front Office
12 23 (1.77%) Manufacturing
13 22 (1.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 19 (1.46%) Documentation Skills
15 18 (1.39%) Presentation Skills
15 18 (1.39%) Telecoms
16 14 (1.08%) Electronics
16 14 (1.08%) Financial Institution
17 11 (0.85%) Law
Job Titles
1 188 (14.49%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 185 (14.26%) Data Scientist
3 174 (13.42%) Architect
4 158 (12.18%) Senior
5 135 (10.41%) Data Engineer
6 114 (8.79%) Developer
7 107 (8.25%) Lead
8 67 (5.17%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 61 (4.70%) Machine Learning Engineer
10 60 (4.63%) Python Engineer
11 57 (4.39%) Software Engineer
12 55 (4.24%) Analyst
13 47 (3.62%) Data Architect
14 41 (3.16%) Solutions Architect
15 37 (2.85%) Gen AI Engineer
16 35 (2.70%) Azure Engineer
16 35 (2.70%) Senior Data Scientist
17 33 (2.54%) Consultant
18 27 (2.08%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
19 25 (1.93%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 226 (17.42%) PyTorch
2 186 (14.34%) TensorFlow
3 125 (9.64%) scikit-learn
4 112 (8.64%) Pandas
5 84 (6.48%) LangChain
6 81 (6.25%) NumPy
7 79 (6.09%) React
8 73 (5.63%) FastAPI
9 63 (4.86%) Hugging Face
10 61 (4.70%) Model Context Protocol
11 58 (4.47%) PySpark
12 56 (4.32%) .NET
12 56 (4.32%) Kafka
12 56 (4.32%) REST
13 53 (4.09%) LangGraph
14 47 (3.62%) Node.js
15 44 (3.39%) RESTful
16 33 (2.54%) AngularJS
16 33 (2.54%) Flask
17 32 (2.47%) Faiss
Miscellaneous
1 183 (14.11%) Algorithms
2 173 (13.34%) Cloud Native
3 101 (7.79%) AI Agents
4 48 (3.70%) Product Ownership
5 47 (3.62%) Onboarding
6 41 (3.16%) Distributed Systems
7 34 (2.62%) Data Protection Act
8 32 (2.47%) Legacy Systems
9 27 (2.08%) Distributed Computing
10 23 (1.77%) Data Structures
10 23 (1.77%) Life Science
11 22 (1.70%) Genomics
12 20 (1.54%) Enterprise Software
12 20 (1.54%) Hybrid Cloud
13 19 (1.46%) Analytical Mindset
14 17 (1.31%) Management Information System
15 16 (1.23%) Fixed Income
16 12 (0.93%) Derivative
17 11 (0.85%) Greenfield Project
17 11 (0.85%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 36 (2.78%) Linux
2 12 (0.93%) Windows
3 9 (0.69%) Apple iOS
3 9 (0.69%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 9 (0.69%) VMS
4 8 (0.62%) Android
4 8 (0.62%) Ubuntu
5 4 (0.31%) Unix
6 1 (0.077%) CentOS
6 1 (0.077%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 995 (76.72%) AI
2 515 (39.71%) Data Science
3 359 (27.68%) LLM
4 354 (27.29%) CI/CD
5 349 (26.91%) Analytics
6 284 (21.90%) DevOps
7 279 (21.51%) Agile
8 271 (20.89%) Data Pipeline
9 260 (20.05%) Generative AI
10 253 (19.51%) MLOps
11 237 (18.27%) Data Engineering
12 223 (17.19%) Problem-Solving
13 197 (15.19%) Natural Language Processing
14 177 (13.65%) Software Engineering
15 172 (13.26%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 164 (12.64%) Use Case
17 160 (12.34%) Containerisation
17 160 (12.34%) ETL
18 159 (12.26%) Prompt Engineering
19 144 (11.10%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 814 (62.76%) Python
2 326 (25.13%) SQL
3 88 (6.78%) Java
4 74 (5.71%) R
5 70 (5.40%) C#
6 61 (4.70%) JavaScript
7 52 (4.01%) TypeScript
8 32 (2.47%) C++
9 31 (2.39%) Scala
10 27 (2.08%) PowerShell
11 18 (1.39%) Bash
12 15 (1.16%) Bicep
13 13 (1.00%) MATLAB
14 11 (0.85%) Go
15 7 (0.54%) Rust
16 6 (0.46%) Kotlin
17 5 (0.39%) C
17 5 (0.39%) SystemVerilog
17 5 (0.39%) Tcl
18 4 (0.31%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 206 (15.88%) Security Cleared
2 175 (13.49%) Degree
3 148 (11.41%) SC Cleared
4 75 (5.78%) Master's Degree
5 45 (3.47%) PhD
6 44 (3.39%) Computer Science Degree
7 35 (2.70%) DV Cleared
8 29 (2.24%) BPSS Clearance
9 23 (1.77%) Azure Certification
9 23 (1.77%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 15 (1.16%) AWS Certification
11 8 (0.62%) Microsoft Certification
12 7 (0.54%) ISTQB
13 6 (0.46%) CISSP
14 5 (0.39%) HNC
14 5 (0.39%) HND
14 5 (0.39%) TOGAF Certification
15 4 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 4 (0.31%) CISM
15 4 (0.31%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 109 (8.40%) Data Quality
2 55 (4.24%) GDPR
3 51 (3.93%) QA
4 36 (2.78%) NIST
5 28 (2.16%) EU AI Act
6 18 (1.39%) Accessibility
7 15 (1.16%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 7 (0.54%) GRC
9 6 (0.46%) HIPAA
9 6 (0.46%) NCSC
10 5 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
10 5 (0.39%) DO-254
10 5 (0.39%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 5 (0.39%) ISO/IEC 42001
11 4 (0.31%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 4 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
11 4 (0.31%) PCI DSS
11 4 (0.31%) SOC 2
12 2 (0.15%) EMIR
12 2 (0.15%) NIST 800
System Software
1 207 (15.96%) Docker
2 11 (0.85%) Active Directory
3 10 (0.77%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 8 (0.62%) Virtual Machines
5 7 (0.54%) Firmware
6 3 (0.23%) Lustre
7 2 (0.15%) Ceph
7 2 (0.15%) HDFS
7 2 (0.15%) Hyper-V
7 2 (0.15%) KVM
7 2 (0.15%) VMware Infrastructure
7 2 (0.15%) VMware NSX
8 1 (0.077%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 213 (16.42%) Kubernetes
2 127 (9.79%) Terraform
3 25 (1.93%) Grafana
4 23 (1.77%) Ansible
5 14 (1.08%) Kubeflow
6 13 (1.00%) Prometheus
7 9 (0.69%) Kibana
7 9 (0.69%) Podman
8 7 (0.54%) SCOM
9 6 (0.46%) logstash
10 5 (0.39%) Argo
10 5 (0.39%) ITRS Geneos
11 2 (0.15%) Istio
11 2 (0.15%) Knative
11 2 (0.15%) Single Sign-On
11 2 (0.15%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
12 1 (0.077%) HP ALM
12 1 (0.077%) Microsoft Intune
12 1 (0.077%) Progress Chef
12 1 (0.077%) SCCM
Vendors
1 190 (14.65%) Databricks
2 187 (14.42%) Microsoft
3 112 (8.64%) Google
4 97 (7.48%) OpenAI
5 67 (5.17%) Foundry
6 37 (2.85%) SAP
7 24 (1.85%) Oracle
8 19 (1.46%) ServiceNow
9 16 (1.23%) Splunk
10 15 (1.16%) Salesforce
11 12 (0.93%) Informatica
11 12 (0.93%) UiPath
12 11 (0.85%) Automation Anywhere
12 11 (0.85%) NVIDIA
13 9 (0.69%) Greenplum
14 7 (0.54%) Cisco
14 7 (0.54%) Palantir
14 7 (0.54%) Pega
14 7 (0.54%) TIBCO
15 6 (0.46%) ESRI