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

6 months to
1 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 92 101 110
Rank change year-on-year +9 +9 +80
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,553 855 832
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.89% 2.61% 2.15%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.42% 2.89% 2.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,000 544 578
10th Percentile £413 £400 £400
25th Percentile £493 £475 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £556 £600
Median % change year-on-year +3.42% -7.33% +2.13%
75th Percentile £700 £682 £731
90th Percentile £788 £788 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £498
% change year-on-year - +10.55% -9.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 39 24 18
10th Percentile £28.50 £26.92 £13.06
25th Percentile £37.75 £44.71 £31.13
Median hourly rate £77.00 £63.75 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +20.78% +38.05% -
75th Percentile £84.38 £79.06 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £86.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £75.00 £49.34
% change year-on-year +2.67% +52.01% +6.84%

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 45,369 29,617 32,996
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.56% 90.44% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,730 18,446 20,728
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £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 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,902 1,758 1,607
10th Percentile £14.10 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.78 £17.30 £18.82
Median hourly rate £41.09 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.39% -40.82% +2.41%
75th Percentile £67.88 £47.09 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.56 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +92.49% -47.37% +14.67%

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 1 September 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 1 September 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 1 September 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 +6 1,336 £575 +0.70% 4,725
London +27 901 £589 -1.92% 3,299
UK excluding London 0 477 £550 - 2,014
Work from Home +2 409 £598 +8.68% 1,820
South East -8 136 £600 +4.35% 432
North of England -19 128 £550 +13.11% 406
Scotland +21 82 £450 -14.29% 301
North West -45 60 £600 +21.21% 248
Yorkshire -1 57 £550 +13.11% 116
Midlands -37 52 £550 +2.33% 182
South West -27 45 £525 -4.55% 294
West Midlands -31 44 £550 -4.35% 117
East of England -27 29 £488 -13.33% 288
North East -40 12 £463 +8.82% 45
Wales -9 9 £540 -20.00% 51
East Midlands -14 7 £438 -1.41% 65
Northern Ireland +4 1 £334 -52.29% 85

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 82 (5.28%) Apache Spark
2 72 (4.64%) Apache Airflow
3 48 (3.09%) Apache
4 32 (2.06%) Jupyter
5 19 (1.22%) Confluence
6 11 (0.71%) SAS
7 6 (0.39%) ArcGIS
8 5 (0.32%) Palantir Foundry
9 4 (0.26%) SharePoint
10 3 (0.19%) CMS
10 3 (0.19%) Headless CMS
10 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.13%) Appian
11 2 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.064%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.064%) Luigi
Applications
1 29 (1.87%) Chatbot
2 10 (0.64%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.26%) CPLEX
3 4 (0.26%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
5 2 (0.13%) Notion
5 2 (0.13%) NUKE
6 1 (0.064%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.064%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.064%) Simulink
6 1 (0.064%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 10 (0.64%) SAP IBP
2 7 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
3 4 (0.26%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
4 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.064%) Actimize
6 1 (0.064%) NetSuite
6 1 (0.064%) Oracle Cash Management
6 1 (0.064%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.064%) Oracle Payables
6 1 (0.064%) Oracle Receivables
6 1 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
6 1 (0.064%) SAP APO
6 1 (0.064%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 546 (35.16%) Azure
2 514 (33.10%) AWS
3 301 (19.38%) GCP
4 121 (7.79%) Power Platform
5 114 (7.34%) GitHub
6 107 (6.89%) Serverless
7 89 (5.73%) Amazon S3
8 85 (5.47%) Snowflake
9 80 (5.15%) AWS Lambda
10 69 (4.44%) Amazon SageMaker
11 62 (3.99%) Azure Machine Learning
12 56 (3.61%) Amazon Bedrock
12 56 (3.61%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 55 (3.54%) dbt
14 54 (3.48%) Azure DevOps
15 53 (3.41%) Azure AI
16 48 (3.09%) GitHub Actions
17 45 (2.90%) Azure Data Factory
17 45 (2.90%) SaaS
18 44 (2.83%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 18 (1.16%) Broadband
1 18 (1.16%) Internet
1 18 (1.16%) Network Security
2 15 (0.97%) Firewall
3 11 (0.71%) DNS
4 10 (0.64%) VPN
5 9 (0.58%) DHCP
6 4 (0.26%) NAS
6 4 (0.26%) SAN
6 4 (0.26%) SMS
6 4 (0.26%) TCP/IP
6 4 (0.26%) VLAN
7 3 (0.19%) HTTP
7 3 (0.19%) MQTT
7 3 (0.19%) SMTP
8 2 (0.13%) CTI
8 2 (0.13%) Modbus
8 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
8 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
9 1 (0.064%) IPsec
Database & Business Intelligence
1 112 (7.21%) Power BI
2 88 (5.67%) Data Lake
2 88 (5.67%) Data Warehouse
3 82 (5.28%) Metadata
4 76 (4.89%) BigQuery
5 64 (4.12%) Big Data
6 50 (3.22%) Amazon Redshift
7 48 (3.09%) Delta Lake
8 47 (3.03%) NoSQL
9 42 (2.70%) Tableau
10 35 (2.25%) Amazon Athena
11 31 (2.00%) Relational Database
12 29 (1.87%) PostgreSQL
13 22 (1.42%) MongoDB
14 21 (1.35%) Hadoop
15 18 (1.16%) Data Mining
15 18 (1.16%) Looker
15 18 (1.16%) Neo4j
16 16 (1.03%) Semantic Layer
17 15 (0.97%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 86 (5.54%) Git
2 51 (3.28%) MLflow
3 50 (3.22%) GitLab
4 44 (2.83%) JIRA
5 22 (1.42%) Jenkins
6 11 (0.71%) Claude Code
7 10 (0.64%) Vite
8 8 (0.52%) Selenium
9 6 (0.39%) ERwin
10 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
10 5 (0.32%) RStudio
11 4 (0.26%) JMeter
11 4 (0.26%) Spinnaker
12 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
12 3 (0.19%) PyCharm
12 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
13 2 (0.13%) Locust
13 2 (0.13%) Pylint
13 2 (0.13%) SonarQube
13 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 337 (21.70%) Social Skills
2 289 (18.61%) Finance
3 221 (14.23%) Analytical Skills
4 128 (8.24%) Public Sector
5 108 (6.95%) Banking
6 43 (2.77%) Marketing
7 36 (2.32%) Retail
8 31 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 29 (1.87%) Pharmaceutical
9 29 (1.87%) Telecoms
10 25 (1.61%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.61%) Legal
11 21 (1.35%) Front Office
12 20 (1.29%) Aerospace
12 20 (1.29%) Influencing Skills
12 20 (1.29%) Manufacturing
13 19 (1.22%) Financial Institution
14 15 (0.97%) Investment Banking
14 15 (0.97%) Law
15 14 (0.90%) Billing
Job Titles
1 259 (16.68%) Architect
2 247 (15.90%) Senior
3 198 (12.75%) Data Scientist
4 169 (10.88%) Lead
5 162 (10.43%) Data Engineer
6 133 (8.56%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 94 (6.05%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 82 (5.28%) Developer
9 74 (4.76%) Solutions Architect
10 72 (4.64%) Data Architect
11 71 (4.57%) Python Engineer
12 63 (4.06%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 61 (3.93%) Analyst
14 56 (3.61%) Software Engineer
15 52 (3.35%) Platform Engineer
16 49 (3.16%) Security Architect
17 46 (2.96%) Senior Data Engineer
18 44 (2.83%) Consultant
18 44 (2.83%) DevOps Engineer
19 39 (2.51%) Senior Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 189 (12.17%) Terraform
2 120 (7.73%) PyTorch
3 109 (7.02%) Kafka
4 88 (5.67%) PySpark
5 87 (5.60%) TensorFlow
6 71 (4.57%) scikit-learn
7 69 (4.44%) REST
8 67 (4.31%) LangChain
9 64 (4.12%) Pandas
10 63 (4.06%) React
11 48 (3.09%) NumPy
12 39 (2.51%) pytest
13 37 (2.38%) .NET
14 34 (2.19%) LangGraph
15 32 (2.06%) FastAPI
16 26 (1.67%) Hugging Face
16 26 (1.67%) RESTful
17 23 (1.48%) Model Context Protocol
17 23 (1.48%) Node.js
18 22 (1.42%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 192 (12.36%) Cloud Native
2 169 (10.88%) AI Agents
3 95 (6.12%) Algorithms
4 67 (4.31%) Product Ownership
5 64 (4.12%) Onboarding
6 60 (3.86%) Distributed Systems
7 32 (2.06%) Enterprise Software
8 29 (1.87%) Data Structures
9 25 (1.61%) Hybrid Cloud
9 25 (1.61%) Life Science
10 22 (1.42%) Data Protection Act
11 19 (1.22%) CMDB
12 17 (1.09%) Social Media
13 16 (1.03%) Virtual Team
14 15 (0.97%) IoT
14 15 (0.97%) Taxonomies
15 14 (0.90%) Enterprise Cloud
15 14 (0.90%) Legacy Systems
15 14 (0.90%) Management Information System
15 14 (0.90%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 47 (3.03%) Linux
2 13 (0.84%) Unix
3 12 (0.77%) Windows
4 4 (0.26%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.26%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.19%) Android
6 2 (0.13%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.13%) VMS
7 1 (0.064%) Robot Operating System
7 1 (0.064%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,260 (81.13%) AI
2 571 (36.77%) Data Science
3 494 (31.81%) CI/CD
4 453 (29.17%) Analytics
5 420 (27.04%) LLM
6 369 (23.76%) Generative AI
7 342 (22.02%) Data Pipeline
8 337 (21.70%) Agile
9 326 (20.99%) DevOps
10 285 (18.35%) MLOps
11 268 (17.26%) Data Engineering
12 246 (15.84%) Software Engineering
13 232 (14.94%) Use Case
14 224 (14.42%) Decision-Making
15 217 (13.97%) Stakeholder Management
16 215 (13.84%) Roadmaps
17 207 (13.33%) Problem-Solving
18 203 (13.07%) Infrastructure as Code
19 183 (11.78%) Data Governance
20 181 (11.65%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 842 (54.22%) Python
2 390 (25.11%) SQL
3 109 (7.02%) Java
4 73 (4.70%) JavaScript
5 56 (3.61%) TypeScript
6 44 (2.83%) R
7 42 (2.70%) C#
8 41 (2.64%) Bash
9 25 (1.61%) PowerShell
10 21 (1.35%) C++
11 19 (1.22%) Bicep
12 18 (1.16%) Scala
13 15 (0.97%) Go
14 11 (0.71%) PL/SQL
15 8 (0.52%) Cypher
15 8 (0.52%) Shell Script
16 6 (0.39%) Gremlin
16 6 (0.39%) Kotlin
16 6 (0.39%) Perl
17 5 (0.32%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 278 (17.90%) Security Cleared
2 204 (13.14%) SC Cleared
3 117 (7.53%) Degree
4 53 (3.41%) Computer Science Degree
5 52 (3.35%) DV Cleared
6 43 (2.77%) AWS Certification
7 42 (2.70%) Master's Degree
8 35 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
8 35 (2.25%) CISSP
9 28 (1.80%) PhD
10 21 (1.35%) Azure Certification
11 18 (1.16%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 16 (1.03%) CISM
13 14 (0.90%) TOGAF Certification
14 11 (0.71%) Cisco Certification
15 10 (0.64%) ITIL Certification
16 9 (0.58%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
17 7 (0.45%) PMP
18 6 (0.39%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 6 (0.39%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 205 (13.20%) Data Quality
2 61 (3.93%) GDPR
3 56 (3.61%) QA
4 31 (2.00%) NIST
5 21 (1.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 17 (1.09%) Accessibility
7 15 (0.97%) EU AI Act
8 10 (0.64%) SLA
9 9 (0.58%) GxP
9 9 (0.58%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 9 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 8 (0.52%) GRC
10 8 (0.52%) HIPAA
11 6 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
11 6 (0.39%) WCAG
12 5 (0.32%) NCSC
12 5 (0.32%) Solvency II
13 4 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 4 (0.26%) COBIT
13 4 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 212 (13.65%) Docker
2 11 (0.71%) Active Directory
3 10 (0.64%) IAG
4 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
4 5 (0.32%) VMware Infrastructure
5 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
5 3 (0.19%) Hyper-V
5 3 (0.19%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
5 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 2 (0.13%) Firmware
6 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
6 2 (0.13%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
7 1 (0.064%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 277 (17.84%) Kubernetes
2 38 (2.45%) Ansible
3 26 (1.67%) Grafana
4 25 (1.61%) Kubeflow
5 18 (1.16%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.39%) Istio
7 5 (0.32%) Podman
8 4 (0.26%) systemd
9 3 (0.19%) Kibana
9 3 (0.19%) Nagios
9 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
9 3 (0.19%) Puppet
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%) Packer
10 2 (0.13%) SCCM
11 1 (0.064%) Cilium
Vendors
1 207 (13.33%) Databricks
2 163 (10.50%) Microsoft
3 102 (6.57%) Google
4 72 (4.64%) OpenAI
5 45 (2.90%) SAP
6 36 (2.32%) ServiceNow
7 34 (2.19%) Foundry
8 29 (1.87%) Oracle
9 24 (1.55%) Informatica
10 18 (1.16%) Dynatrace
11 13 (0.84%) Splunk
12 11 (0.71%) IBM
13 10 (0.64%) Nexthink
13 10 (0.64%) UiPath
14 7 (0.45%) Cisco
14 7 (0.45%) Salesforce
14 7 (0.45%) Sybase
15 6 (0.39%) Pega
15 6 (0.39%) VMware
16 5 (0.32%) Palantir