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

6 months to
30 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 89 110
Rank change year-on-year -4 +21 +96
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,577 948 797
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.87% 2.89% 2.12%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.40% 3.18% 2.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,002 614 533
10th Percentile £413 £400 £389
25th Percentile £486 £470 £493
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -8.33% +2.35%
75th Percentile £688 £675 £731
90th Percentile £788 £775 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £525 £494
% change year-on-year +4.76% +6.28% -10.18%
Number of hourly rates quoted 42 22 19
10th Percentile £28.50 £25.65 £13.06
25th Percentile £41.25 £34.67 £25.93
Median hourly rate £77.00 £58.11 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +32.50% +25.84% -
75th Percentile £87.69 £78.75 £53.75
90th Percentile £88.75 £87.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £61.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +25.20% +33.17% -

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 46,343 29,774 32,275
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.43% 90.67% 85.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,026 18,502 19,486
10th Percentile £325 £296 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £731 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,222 1,849 1,345
10th Percentile £13.70 £14.29 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.19 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £38.86 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +54.51% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £65.60 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.00 £74.48
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.27 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +75.98% -48.10% +1.18%

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 30 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 30 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 30 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 -5 1,355 £575 +1.77% 4,963
London +14 898 £590 -1.67% 3,412
UK excluding London -26 517 £550 +4.76% 1,820
Work from Home -19 416 £588 +6.82% 1,879
North of England -24 153 £575 +21.05% 378
South East -12 137 £600 +9.09% 411
Scotland +6 96 £463 -7.96% 223
Yorkshire -7 67 £525 +2.14% 93
North West -32 67 £650 +36.84% 238
Midlands -31 49 £588 +11.90% 158
South West -23 47 £528 -8.26% 302
West Midlands -39 39 £575 +9.52% 90
East of England -32 35 £475 -13.64% 242
North East -26 20 £550 +29.41% 48
Wales -11 7 £530 -21.48% 44
East Midlands -18 6 £425 -8.11% 68
Northern Ireland +3 1 £334 -52.29% 78

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 92 (5.83%) Apache Spark
2 80 (5.07%) Apache Airflow
3 58 (3.68%) Apache
4 35 (2.22%) Jupyter
5 24 (1.52%) Confluence
6 11 (0.70%) SAS
7 7 (0.44%) IIS
8 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
9 5 (0.32%) SharePoint
10 4 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 3 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
12 2 (0.13%) Appian
12 2 (0.13%) CMS
12 2 (0.13%) Headless CMS
13 1 (0.063%) Luigi
13 1 (0.063%) nginx
Applications
1 29 (1.84%) Chatbot
2 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Excel
3 3 (0.19%) CPLEX
4 2 (0.13%) DaVinci Resolve
4 2 (0.13%) Notion
4 2 (0.13%) NUKE
5 1 (0.063%) Adobe XD
5 1 (0.063%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.063%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.063%) Simulink
5 1 (0.063%) Sketch
5 1 (0.063%) Trello
Business Applications
1 8 (0.51%) SAP S/4HANA
2 5 (0.32%) SAP IBP
3 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
3 3 (0.19%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.13%) SAP ERP
4 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 1 (0.063%) Actimize
5 1 (0.063%) Endur
5 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.063%) OpenLink RightAngle
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 515 (32.66%) Azure
2 514 (32.59%) AWS
3 293 (18.58%) GCP
4 108 (6.85%) Power Platform
5 106 (6.72%) Serverless
6 103 (6.53%) GitHub
7 93 (5.90%) Amazon S3
8 90 (5.71%) Snowflake
9 86 (5.45%) AWS Lambda
10 71 (4.50%) Amazon SageMaker
11 63 (3.99%) Amazon Bedrock
11 63 (3.99%) dbt
12 59 (3.74%) Azure Machine Learning
13 49 (3.11%) Azure AI
14 48 (3.04%) Azure DevOps
15 47 (2.98%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 47 (2.98%) Vertex AI
16 45 (2.85%) SaaS
17 44 (2.79%) Azure Data Factory
18 41 (2.60%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.33%) Network Security
2 19 (1.20%) Broadband
2 19 (1.20%) Internet
3 13 (0.82%) DNS
4 12 (0.76%) Firewall
4 12 (0.76%) HTTP
5 9 (0.57%) DHCP
5 9 (0.57%) VPN
6 5 (0.32%) SMTP
6 5 (0.32%) TCP/IP
7 4 (0.25%) NAS
7 4 (0.25%) SAN
7 4 (0.25%) SMS
7 4 (0.25%) VLAN
8 3 (0.19%) CTI
8 3 (0.19%) MQTT
9 2 (0.13%) FTP
9 2 (0.13%) PCoIP
9 2 (0.13%) Remote Desktop
9 2 (0.13%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 100 (6.34%) Data Warehouse
1 100 (6.34%) Power BI
2 95 (6.02%) Data Lake
3 87 (5.52%) Metadata
4 77 (4.88%) BigQuery
5 59 (3.74%) Big Data
6 54 (3.42%) Amazon Redshift
7 49 (3.11%) Delta Lake
8 45 (2.85%) NoSQL
9 42 (2.66%) Tableau
10 38 (2.41%) PostgreSQL
11 35 (2.22%) Amazon Athena
12 29 (1.84%) Relational Database
13 24 (1.52%) Neo4j
14 20 (1.27%) MongoDB
15 19 (1.20%) Hadoop
16 18 (1.14%) Elasticsearch
17 17 (1.08%) Amazon RDS
17 17 (1.08%) DynamoDB
17 17 (1.08%) Looker
Development Applications
1 104 (6.59%) Git
2 51 (3.23%) GitLab
3 45 (2.85%) JIRA
4 40 (2.54%) MLflow
5 13 (0.82%) Claude Code
5 13 (0.82%) Jenkins
6 7 (0.44%) Vite
7 5 (0.32%) Cypress.io
7 5 (0.32%) ERwin
7 5 (0.32%) JMeter
7 5 (0.32%) RStudio
8 4 (0.25%) Postman
8 4 (0.25%) Selenium
9 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
9 3 (0.19%) Pylint
9 3 (0.19%) REST Assured
10 2 (0.13%) Locust
10 2 (0.13%) Newman
10 2 (0.13%) Spinnaker
10 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 356 (22.57%) Social Skills
2 308 (19.53%) Finance
3 236 (14.97%) Analytical Skills
4 146 (9.26%) Public Sector
5 122 (7.74%) Banking
6 39 (2.47%) Marketing
7 36 (2.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 32 (2.03%) Retail
9 29 (1.84%) Pharmaceutical
10 26 (1.65%) Telecoms
11 24 (1.52%) Legal
11 24 (1.52%) Manufacturing
12 22 (1.40%) Front Office
12 22 (1.40%) Influencing Skills
13 21 (1.33%) Aerospace
14 18 (1.14%) Documentation Skills
14 18 (1.14%) Financial Institution
15 17 (1.08%) Investment Banking
16 15 (0.95%) Billing
16 15 (0.95%) Law
Job Titles
1 280 (17.76%) Senior
2 255 (16.17%) Architect
3 194 (12.30%) Data Scientist
4 183 (11.60%) Data Engineer
5 180 (11.41%) Lead
6 147 (9.32%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 99 (6.28%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 71 (4.50%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
8 71 (4.50%) Developer
8 71 (4.50%) Solutions Architect
9 70 (4.44%) Python Engineer
10 68 (4.31%) Data Architect
11 62 (3.93%) Analyst
12 56 (3.55%) Platform Engineer
13 52 (3.30%) Senior Data Engineer
13 52 (3.30%) Software Engineer
14 50 (3.17%) Senior Data Scientist
15 47 (2.98%) Security Architect
16 40 (2.54%) DevOps Engineer
17 38 (2.41%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 202 (12.81%) Terraform
2 109 (6.91%) PyTorch
3 106 (6.72%) Kafka
4 92 (5.83%) PySpark
5 80 (5.07%) TensorFlow
6 72 (4.57%) LangChain
7 70 (4.44%) REST
8 62 (3.93%) scikit-learn
9 60 (3.80%) React
10 58 (3.68%) Pandas
11 48 (3.04%) pytest
12 45 (2.85%) NumPy
13 38 (2.41%) FastAPI
13 38 (2.41%) LangGraph
14 33 (2.09%) .NET
15 28 (1.78%) Hugging Face
16 27 (1.71%) JSON
16 27 (1.71%) Model Context Protocol
17 22 (1.40%) RESTful
18 20 (1.27%) vLLM
Miscellaneous
1 208 (13.19%) Cloud Native
2 173 (10.97%) AI Agents
3 93 (5.90%) Algorithms
4 74 (4.69%) Onboarding
5 68 (4.31%) Distributed Systems
6 64 (4.06%) Product Ownership
7 39 (2.47%) Data Structures
8 36 (2.28%) Enterprise Software
9 30 (1.90%) Life Science
10 26 (1.65%) Data Protection Act
11 22 (1.40%) Management Information System
12 21 (1.33%) Hybrid Cloud
13 18 (1.14%) CMDB
13 18 (1.14%) Social Media
14 17 (1.08%) Taxonomies
15 16 (1.01%) Clustering
15 16 (1.01%) Credit Risk
16 15 (0.95%) Analytical Mindset
16 15 (0.95%) Virtual Team
17 14 (0.89%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 47 (2.98%) Linux
2 19 (1.20%) Windows
3 17 (1.08%) Unix
4 4 (0.25%) Android
4 4 (0.25%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.19%) Apple iOS
6 1 (0.063%) Mac OS
6 1 (0.063%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
6 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,309 (83.01%) AI
2 575 (36.46%) Data Science
3 501 (31.77%) CI/CD
4 476 (30.18%) Analytics
5 437 (27.71%) LLM
6 392 (24.86%) Generative AI
7 352 (22.32%) Data Pipeline
8 326 (20.67%) Agile
9 323 (20.48%) DevOps
10 300 (19.02%) MLOps
11 277 (17.56%) Data Engineering
12 264 (16.74%) Software Engineering
13 247 (15.66%) Decision-Making
14 246 (15.60%) Stakeholder Management
15 239 (15.16%) Roadmaps
16 236 (14.97%) Use Case
17 222 (14.08%) Infrastructure as Code
18 204 (12.94%) Data Modelling
19 203 (12.87%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
20 202 (12.81%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 838 (53.14%) Python
2 393 (24.92%) SQL
3 109 (6.91%) Java
4 75 (4.76%) JavaScript
5 61 (3.87%) TypeScript
6 40 (2.54%) Bash
7 35 (2.22%) R
8 32 (2.03%) C#
9 28 (1.78%) PowerShell
10 26 (1.65%) Scala
11 20 (1.27%) C++
12 19 (1.20%) Go
13 17 (1.08%) Bicep
14 14 (0.89%) Shell Script
15 11 (0.70%) Cypher
15 11 (0.70%) PL/SQL
16 7 (0.44%) Gremlin
16 7 (0.44%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.38%) Kotlin
18 5 (0.32%) Perl
Qualifications
1 313 (19.85%) Security Cleared
2 247 (15.66%) SC Cleared
3 124 (7.86%) Degree
4 56 (3.55%) Computer Science Degree
5 55 (3.49%) DV Cleared
6 49 (3.11%) AWS Certification
7 40 (2.54%) Master's Degree
8 38 (2.41%) BPSS Clearance
9 31 (1.97%) CISSP
10 29 (1.84%) Azure Certification
11 26 (1.65%) PhD
12 18 (1.14%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 15 (0.95%) TOGAF Certification
14 14 (0.89%) CISM
15 10 (0.63%) Cisco Certification
15 10 (0.63%) ITIL Certification
16 9 (0.57%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 9 (0.57%) Microsoft Certified Professional
17 7 (0.44%) DBS Check
18 6 (0.38%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 224 (14.20%) Data Quality
2 56 (3.55%) GDPR
2 56 (3.55%) QA
3 31 (1.97%) NIST
4 19 (1.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 17 (1.08%) EU AI Act
6 16 (1.01%) Accessibility
7 10 (0.63%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 10 (0.63%) SLA
8 9 (0.57%) GRC
9 8 (0.51%) GxP
9 8 (0.51%) NCSC
10 7 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 6 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
11 6 (0.38%) HIPAA
11 6 (0.38%) PCI DSS
12 5 (0.32%) Basel III
12 5 (0.32%) Solvency II
13 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
13 4 (0.25%) SOC 2
System Software
1 212 (13.44%) Docker
2 15 (0.95%) Active Directory
3 13 (0.82%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (0.63%) Hyper-V
4 10 (0.63%) IAG
5 8 (0.51%) Virtual Machines
6 7 (0.44%) NFS
7 5 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
8 3 (0.19%) BitLocker
8 3 (0.19%) Terminal Services
8 3 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
9 2 (0.13%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 2 (0.13%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 2 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
9 2 (0.13%) VMware Workstation
10 1 (0.063%) Firmware
10 1 (0.063%) zsh
Systems Management
1 280 (17.76%) Kubernetes
2 41 (2.60%) Ansible
3 26 (1.65%) Grafana
3 26 (1.65%) Kubeflow
4 20 (1.27%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.38%) Istio
5 6 (0.38%) systemd
6 5 (0.32%) Podman
7 3 (0.19%) Argo
7 3 (0.19%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Nagios
7 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
7 3 (0.19%) Puppet
7 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
7 3 (0.19%) vMotion
8 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 2 (0.13%) Packer
8 2 (0.13%) SCCM
8 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (0.063%) Cilium
Vendors
1 201 (12.75%) Databricks
2 152 (9.64%) Microsoft
3 102 (6.47%) Google
4 62 (3.93%) OpenAI
5 36 (2.28%) SAP
6 34 (2.16%) ServiceNow
7 30 (1.90%) Oracle
8 27 (1.71%) Foundry
9 22 (1.40%) Informatica
10 17 (1.08%) Dynatrace
11 14 (0.89%) VMware
12 10 (0.63%) IBM
12 10 (0.63%) Nexthink
12 10 (0.63%) Salesforce
12 10 (0.63%) Splunk
12 10 (0.63%) UiPath
13 7 (0.44%) Cisco
14 6 (0.38%) Pega
14 6 (0.38%) Sybase
15 5 (0.32%) New Relic