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

6 months to
18 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 96 149
Rank change year-on-year +16 +53 +70
Contract jobs citing Machine Learning 1,379 784 692
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.99% 2.66% 1.58%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.52% 2.94% 1.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 856 514 509
10th Percentile £413 £377 £413
25th Percentile £499 £463 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.17%
75th Percentile £700 £725 £725
90th Percentile £788 £874 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £530
% change year-on-year - +3.77% -9.79%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 21 20
10th Percentile £47.12 £25.25 £41.24
25th Percentile £50.51 £45.00 £42.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £61.50 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +5.69% +17.14% +50.00%
75th Percentile £83.75 £78.70 £66.38
90th Percentile £90.00 £81.01 £75.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £76.25 £62.50
% change year-on-year -14.75% +22.00% +78.57%

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 39,180 26,703 37,785
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.95% 90.74% 86.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,749 17,293 24,471
10th Percentile £316 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £523 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.31% -0.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £483 £500
% change year-on-year +0.41% -3.40% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,327 1,032 2,410
10th Percentile £14.96 £14.85 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.80 £18.51 £15.85
Median hourly rate £37.50 £30.00 £33.78
Median % change year-on-year +25.00% -11.18% -5.92%
75th Percentile £65.25 £62.50 £57.83
90th Percentile £78.10 £75.00 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £28.75 £34.21
% change year-on-year +39.13% -15.96% -2.26%

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 18 April 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 18 April 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 18 April 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 +7 1,170 £575 -4.17% 1,720
London +20 779 £600 -2.44% 793
UK excluding London +18 419 £550 - 1,066
Work from Home +22 407 £600 +9.09% 417
North of England -7 109 £550 +11.11% 333
South East -9 90 £600 +4.35% 338
Scotland +41 69 £546 +17.54% 43
Midlands -20 62 £550 +15.79% 97
North West -17 59 £550 +0.46% 242
East of England -13 57 £520 -15.10% 163
West Midlands -33 42 £550 +10.00% 39
Yorkshire -23 40 £550 +10.00% 67
South West -30 38 £544 -15.04% 93
East Midlands -21 18 £625 +38.89% 58
Wales -7 14 £750 +33.33% 12
North East -7 13 £563 +57.12% 24
Northern Ireland - 1 £650 - 4

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
1 119 (8.63%) Apache Spark
2 74 (5.37%) Apache Airflow
3 59 (4.28%) Apache
4 28 (2.03%) Jupyter
5 11 (0.80%) Confluence
6 9 (0.65%) Appian
6 9 (0.65%) SAS
7 6 (0.44%) CMS
8 5 (0.36%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.22%) Headless CMS
11 2 (0.15%) Luigi
12 1 (0.073%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.073%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.073%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.073%) NetWeaver
Applications
1 30 (2.18%) Chatbot
2 12 (0.87%) Microsoft Project
3 11 (0.80%) Microsoft Excel
4 9 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
4 9 (0.65%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 4 (0.29%) Simulink
6 3 (0.22%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.15%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 8 (0.58%) SAP IBP
2 6 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.15%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.073%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.073%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.073%) SAP APO
4 1 (0.073%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 558 (40.46%) Azure
2 475 (34.45%) AWS
3 250 (18.13%) GCP
4 135 (9.79%) Power Platform
5 110 (7.98%) GitHub
6 99 (7.18%) Azure AI
7 97 (7.03%) Azure Machine Learning
8 89 (6.45%) Serverless
9 76 (5.51%) Azure DevOps
10 72 (5.22%) Amazon SageMaker
11 69 (5.00%) Amazon S3
11 69 (5.00%) Snowflake
12 64 (4.64%) Vertex AI
13 61 (4.42%) GitHub Actions
14 59 (4.28%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 57 (4.13%) Azure Data Factory
16 49 (3.55%) AWS Lambda
17 44 (3.19%) AWS CloudFormation
18 40 (2.90%) Amazon Bedrock
19 32 (2.32%) Microsoft Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.16%) Network Security
2 10 (0.73%) Firewall
3 8 (0.58%) HTTP
4 7 (0.51%) DNS
5 5 (0.36%) FTP
5 5 (0.36%) Internet
5 5 (0.36%) SMTP
5 5 (0.36%) SSL
6 4 (0.29%) Ethernet
6 4 (0.29%) InfiniBand
7 3 (0.22%) 5G
7 3 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
8 2 (0.15%) 4G
8 2 (0.15%) Bluetooth
8 2 (0.15%) Hyperconnected
8 2 (0.15%) LTE
8 2 (0.15%) Modbus
8 2 (0.15%) VPN
9 1 (0.073%) 3GPP
9 1 (0.073%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 107 (7.76%) Power BI
2 93 (6.74%) Data Lake
3 71 (5.15%) Big Data
4 64 (4.64%) Data Warehouse
5 63 (4.57%) BigQuery
6 58 (4.21%) Metadata
7 52 (3.77%) NoSQL
8 39 (2.83%) Tableau
9 36 (2.61%) Pinecone
10 33 (2.39%) Delta Lake
10 33 (2.39%) Hadoop
11 31 (2.25%) PostgreSQL
11 31 (2.25%) SQL Server
12 29 (2.10%) Amazon Athena
13 28 (2.03%) Weaviate
14 26 (1.89%) Relational Database
15 25 (1.81%) Mixpanel
16 22 (1.60%) Amazon Redshift
17 19 (1.38%) MongoDB
18 17 (1.23%) OLTP
Development Applications
1 94 (6.82%) Git
2 89 (6.45%) MLflow
3 31 (2.25%) Jenkins
3 31 (2.25%) JIRA
4 24 (1.74%) GitLab
5 8 (0.58%) Visual Studio
6 7 (0.51%) Gradle
6 7 (0.51%) SonarQube
7 6 (0.44%) PyCharm
7 6 (0.44%) Selenium
8 4 (0.29%) Android Studio
8 4 (0.29%) Claude Code
8 4 (0.29%) JMeter
8 4 (0.29%) Maven
8 4 (0.29%) Oracle APEX
9 3 (0.22%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.22%) Cypress.io
9 3 (0.22%) JUnit
9 3 (0.22%) Spinnaker
9 3 (0.22%) Vite
General
1 326 (23.64%) Social Skills
2 277 (20.09%) Finance
3 172 (12.47%) Analytical Skills
4 141 (10.22%) Public Sector
5 87 (6.31%) Banking
6 37 (2.68%) Marketing
7 32 (2.32%) Pharmaceutical
8 28 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 28 (2.03%) Legal
9 26 (1.89%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.81%) Front Office
10 25 (1.81%) Retail
11 23 (1.67%) Influencing Skills
11 23 (1.67%) Investment Banking
12 19 (1.38%) Presentation Skills
12 19 (1.38%) Telecoms
13 15 (1.09%) Aviation
14 14 (1.02%) Manufacturing
15 11 (0.80%) Aerospace
15 11 (0.80%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 201 (14.58%) Data Scientist
2 189 (13.71%) Architect
3 187 (13.56%) Senior
4 180 (13.05%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 136 (9.86%) Data Engineer
6 121 (8.77%) Lead
7 116 (8.41%) Developer
8 68 (4.93%) Analyst
9 60 (4.35%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 60 (4.35%) Software Engineer
10 58 (4.21%) Machine Learning Engineer
10 58 (4.21%) Python Engineer
11 54 (3.92%) Data Architect
12 45 (3.26%) Solutions Architect
13 39 (2.83%) Senior Data Scientist
14 36 (2.61%) Gen AI Engineer
15 35 (2.54%) Consultant
16 33 (2.39%) Azure Engineer
17 31 (2.25%) Python Developer
18 26 (1.89%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 210 (15.23%) PyTorch
2 163 (11.82%) TensorFlow
3 135 (9.79%) scikit-learn
4 112 (8.12%) Pandas
5 80 (5.80%) LangChain
5 80 (5.80%) NumPy
6 75 (5.44%) React
7 74 (5.37%) Kafka
8 58 (4.21%) PySpark
9 55 (3.99%) .NET
10 54 (3.92%) Node.js
11 51 (3.70%) REST
12 50 (3.63%) Hugging Face
13 48 (3.48%) LangGraph
13 48 (3.48%) Model Context Protocol
14 41 (2.97%) AngularJS
15 35 (2.54%) FastAPI
16 29 (2.10%) Faiss
17 28 (2.03%) RESTful
18 24 (1.74%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 182 (13.20%) Cloud Native
2 145 (10.51%) Algorithms
3 141 (10.22%) AI Agents
4 45 (3.26%) Product Ownership
5 43 (3.12%) Onboarding
6 32 (2.32%) Distributed Systems
7 26 (1.89%) Data Protection Act
8 20 (1.45%) Legacy Systems
9 19 (1.38%) Fixed Income
9 19 (1.38%) Hybrid Cloud
10 18 (1.31%) Enterprise Software
10 18 (1.31%) Management Information System
11 16 (1.16%) Analytical Mindset
12 15 (1.09%) Data Structures
12 15 (1.09%) Distributed Computing
12 15 (1.09%) Life Science
13 14 (1.02%) Public Cloud
14 11 (0.80%) Credit Risk
15 10 (0.73%) Derivative
15 10 (0.73%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 32 (2.32%) Linux
2 11 (0.80%) VMS
3 10 (0.73%) Windows
4 8 (0.58%) Android
5 5 (0.36%) Apple iOS
5 5 (0.36%) Unix
6 4 (0.29%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 2 (0.15%) Ubuntu
8 1 (0.073%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,076 (78.03%) AI
2 514 (37.27%) Data Science
3 420 (30.46%) CI/CD
4 412 (29.88%) Analytics
5 383 (27.77%) LLM
6 300 (21.75%) Generative AI
7 297 (21.54%) Data Pipeline
8 276 (20.01%) DevOps
9 265 (19.22%) Data Engineering
10 262 (19.00%) Agile
11 259 (18.78%) MLOps
12 198 (14.36%) Problem-Solving
13 189 (13.71%) Use Case
14 178 (12.91%) Data Governance
15 176 (12.76%) Software Engineering
16 171 (12.40%) Natural Language Processing
17 166 (12.04%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 165 (11.97%) Containerisation
19 164 (11.89%) Decision-Making
20 157 (11.39%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 808 (58.59%) Python
2 346 (25.09%) SQL
3 101 (7.32%) Java
4 85 (6.16%) C#
5 69 (5.00%) R
6 54 (3.92%) JavaScript
7 49 (3.55%) TypeScript
8 24 (1.74%) C++
9 21 (1.52%) PowerShell
10 19 (1.38%) Bicep
11 17 (1.23%) Bash
12 16 (1.16%) Scala
13 9 (0.65%) Go
13 9 (0.65%) Kotlin
13 9 (0.65%) MATLAB
13 9 (0.65%) Rust
14 5 (0.36%) PL/SQL
14 5 (0.36%) SPARQL
15 4 (0.29%) Tcl
15 4 (0.29%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 238 (17.26%) Security Cleared
2 161 (11.68%) SC Cleared
3 146 (10.59%) Degree
4 70 (5.08%) Master's Degree
5 43 (3.12%) DV Cleared
5 43 (3.12%) PhD
6 39 (2.83%) Computer Science Degree
7 38 (2.76%) BPSS Clearance
8 23 (1.67%) AWS Certification
9 20 (1.45%) Azure Certification
10 16 (1.16%) CISSP
11 12 (0.87%) CISM
11 12 (0.87%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 11 (0.80%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 6 (0.44%) ISTQB
14 5 (0.36%) Microsoft Certification
14 5 (0.36%) PMI Certification
14 5 (0.36%) PMP
15 4 (0.29%) CEH
15 4 (0.29%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 142 (10.30%) Data Quality
2 62 (4.50%) GDPR
3 50 (3.63%) QA
4 32 (2.32%) NIST
5 19 (1.38%) Accessibility
6 15 (1.09%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 13 (0.94%) EU AI Act
8 9 (0.65%) Actionable Recommendations
9 7 (0.51%) HIPAA
10 6 (0.44%) NCSC
10 6 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 5 (0.36%) GRC
12 4 (0.29%) DO-254
12 4 (0.29%) PCI DSS
12 4 (0.29%) WCAG
13 3 (0.22%) GxP
13 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 3 (0.22%) SOC 2
14 2 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
14 2 (0.15%) NIST 800
System Software
1 197 (14.29%) Docker
2 12 (0.87%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 11 (0.80%) Active Directory
4 7 (0.51%) Firmware
5 3 (0.22%) Lustre
5 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (0.15%) Ceph
6 2 (0.15%) HDFS
7 1 (0.073%) Embedded Firmware
7 1 (0.073%) GPFS
Systems Management
1 209 (15.16%) Kubernetes
2 139 (10.08%) Terraform
3 20 (1.45%) Kubeflow
4 16 (1.16%) Grafana
5 12 (0.87%) Ansible
5 12 (0.87%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.65%) Podman
7 4 (0.29%) Istio
8 3 (0.22%) Rancher
9 2 (0.15%) Argo
9 2 (0.15%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.15%) Knative
9 2 (0.15%) SCOM
10 1 (0.073%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.073%) Kibana
10 1 (0.073%) logstash
10 1 (0.073%) Opsgenie
10 1 (0.073%) SELinux
10 1 (0.073%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 215 (15.59%) Databricks
2 178 (12.91%) Microsoft
3 113 (8.19%) Google
4 110 (7.98%) OpenAI
5 66 (4.79%) Foundry
6 38 (2.76%) SAP
7 31 (2.25%) Oracle
8 19 (1.38%) ServiceNow
9 15 (1.09%) Informatica
9 15 (1.09%) UiPath
10 13 (0.94%) IBM
11 11 (0.80%) Automation Anywhere
11 11 (0.80%) Dynatrace
12 9 (0.65%) Salesforce
13 7 (0.51%) Amplitude
13 7 (0.51%) NVIDIA
13 7 (0.51%) Pega
14 6 (0.44%) Siemens
14 6 (0.44%) Talend
15 5 (0.36%) Intel