Model Context Protocol Contract Job Trends

Model Context Protocol (MCP)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Model Context Protocol skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 30 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 500 - -
Rank change year-on-year - - -
Contract jobs citing Model Context Protocol 95 0 0
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.25% - -
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 1.10% - -
Number of daily rates quoted 65 0 0
10th Percentile £355 - -
25th Percentile £460 - -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 - -
75th Percentile £650 - -
90th Percentile £697 - -
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £43.84 - -
Median hourly rate £44.90 - -
75th Percentile £45.95 - -
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - -

All Software Libraries and Frameworks
UK

Model Context Protocol falls under the Software Libraries and Frameworks category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills 8,621 7,054 9,302
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.30% 22.43% 20.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,738 4,472 6,586
10th Percentile £356 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £535 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.21% -0.47% -6.52%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £765 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 212 90 192
10th Percentile £35.00 £24.78 £25.78
25th Percentile £49.06 £38.31 £46.11
Median hourly rate £62.50 £62.50 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year - +13.64% -15.38%
75th Percentile £69.44 £65.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.95 £77.32 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year - +18.18% -15.38%

Model Context Protocol
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Model Context Protocol relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Model Context Protocol job vacancy trend in the UK

Model Context Protocol
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Model Context Protocol.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Model Context Protocol

Model Context Protocol
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Model Context Protocol over the 6 months to 30 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Model Context Protocol in the UK

Model Context Protocol
Top 10 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Model Context Protocol within the UK over the 6 months to 30 January 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 - 78 £525 - 3
London - 62 £525 - 2
Work from Home - 24 £525 - 1
UK excluding London - 22 £550 - 1
East of England - 11 £550 -
Scotland - 7 £413 -
Yorkshire - 3 - -
North of England - 3 - -
East Midlands - 1 £575 -
Midlands - 1 £575 -

Model Context Protocol
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 3 (3.16%) Apache Spark
2 1 (1.05%) Apache
Applications
1 3 (3.16%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 35 (36.84%) Azure
2 31 (32.63%) AWS
3 24 (25.26%) GitHub
4 22 (23.16%) Serverless
5 21 (22.11%) GitHub Copilot
6 16 (16.84%) Azure AI
7 15 (15.79%) Amazon Bedrock
7 15 (15.79%) Azure Functions
8 13 (13.68%) Azure AKS
9 11 (11.58%) Anthropic Claude
9 11 (11.58%) PaaS
10 10 (10.53%) Vertex AI
11 8 (8.42%) Power Platform
12 7 (7.37%) Azure Cosmos DB
13 6 (6.32%) Amazon SageMaker
13 6 (6.32%) AWS CloudFormation
13 6 (6.32%) AWS Lambda
13 6 (6.32%) Azure App Service
13 6 (6.32%) Azure Logic Apps
13 6 (6.32%) Google Gemini
Communications & Networking
1 2 (2.11%) 3GPP
1 2 (2.11%) Firewall
1 2 (2.11%) HTTP
1 2 (2.11%) Intelligent Network
1 2 (2.11%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 12 (12.63%) Data Lake
2 7 (7.37%) Pinecone
3 5 (5.26%) CockroachDB
3 5 (5.26%) PostgreSQL
4 4 (4.21%) BigQuery
4 4 (4.21%) NoSQL
4 4 (4.21%) Oracle Database
5 3 (3.16%) Redis
6 2 (2.11%) Amazon Redshift
6 2 (2.11%) Big Data
6 2 (2.11%) Data Mining
6 2 (2.11%) Hadoop
7 1 (1.05%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (1.05%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 11 (11.58%) Git
2 3 (3.16%) Claude Code
3 2 (2.11%) Jenkins
3 2 (2.11%) Selenium
4 1 (1.05%) Charles Proxy
4 1 (1.05%) GitLab
4 1 (1.05%) Snyk
4 1 (1.05%) SonarQube
General
1 18 (18.95%) Finance
2 17 (17.89%) Social Skills
3 6 (6.32%) Analytical Skills
3 6 (6.32%) Banking
4 5 (5.26%) Public Sector
5 2 (2.11%) Telecoms
6 1 (1.05%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 46 (48.42%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 14 (14.74%) Senior
3 10 (10.53%) Developer
4 9 (9.47%) Data Scientist
4 9 (9.47%) Gen AI Engineer
5 8 (8.42%) Full-Stack Engineer
5 8 (8.42%) Software Engineer
6 6 (6.32%) Implementation Engineer
7 5 (5.26%) Agentic Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 5 (5.26%) Architect
7 5 (5.26%) Lead
7 5 (5.26%) Python Engineer
8 4 (4.21%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
8 4 (4.21%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 4 (4.21%) Senior Full-Stack Engineer
9 3 (3.16%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
9 3 (3.16%) Java Developer
9 3 (3.16%) Python Software Engineer
9 3 (3.16%) Senior Developer
9 3 (3.16%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 31 (32.63%) LangChain
2 30 (31.58%) A2A Protocol
3 26 (27.37%) LangGraph
4 25 (26.32%) PyTorch
4 25 (26.32%) TensorFlow
5 16 (16.84%) RESTful
6 13 (13.68%) Pandas
6 13 (13.68%) scikit-learn
6 13 (13.68%) Semantic Kernel
7 12 (12.63%) .NET
7 12 (12.63%) React
8 11 (11.58%) FastAPI
9 10 (10.53%) CrewAI
9 10 (10.53%) Hugging Face
10 7 (7.37%) Keras
10 7 (7.37%) NumPy
11 6 (6.32%) boto
11 6 (6.32%) LlamaIndex
11 6 (6.32%) Microsoft Graph
11 6 (6.32%) pydantic
Miscellaneous
1 37 (38.95%) AI Agents
2 15 (15.79%) Cloud Native
3 13 (13.68%) Algorithms
4 6 (6.32%) Data Protection Act
5 4 (4.21%) Autonomous Agent
6 3 (3.16%) Distributed Systems
7 2 (2.11%) Greenfield Project
7 2 (2.11%) Virtual Team
8 1 (1.05%) Distributed Computing
8 1 (1.05%) Enterprise Software
8 1 (1.05%) Hackathon
8 1 (1.05%) Management Information System
8 1 (1.05%) Onboarding
8 1 (1.05%) Product Ownership
8 1 (1.05%) Smart City
8 1 (1.05%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 2 (2.11%) Apple iOS
1 2 (2.11%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 95 (100.00%) AI
2 74 (77.89%) LLM
3 67 (70.53%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
4 62 (65.26%) Machine Learning
5 38 (40.00%) Prompt Engineering
6 33 (34.74%) Generative AI
7 32 (33.68%) CI/CD
8 24 (25.26%) Software Engineering
9 23 (24.21%) Agile
9 23 (24.21%) Deep Learning
10 20 (21.05%) Data Science
11 19 (20.00%) MLOps
11 19 (20.00%) Problem-Solving
12 18 (18.95%) API Design
12 18 (18.95%) Data Pipeline
13 17 (17.89%) Data Privacy
14 16 (16.84%) Use Case
15 14 (14.74%) Full-Stack Development
15 14 (14.74%) Test Automation
16 13 (13.68%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 70 (73.68%) Python
2 11 (11.58%) Java
2 11 (11.58%) TypeScript
3 9 (9.47%) JavaScript
4 6 (6.32%) SQL
5 5 (5.26%) C#
6 4 (4.21%) C++
7 2 (2.11%) Ada
7 2 (2.11%) Go
7 2 (2.11%) R
8 1 (1.05%) PHP
8 1 (1.05%) Scala
Qualifications
1 29 (30.53%) Microsoft Certified Professional
2 11 (11.58%) Degree
3 9 (9.47%) Security Cleared
4 7 (7.37%) Master's Degree
4 7 (7.37%) SC Cleared
5 5 (5.26%) PhD
6 3 (3.16%) BPSS Clearance
7 2 (2.11%) Azure Certification
7 2 (2.11%) Microsoft Certification
8 1 (1.05%) Computer Science Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (15.79%) EU AI Act
2 14 (14.74%) NIST
3 3 (3.16%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 3 (3.16%) SOC 2
4 2 (2.11%) Accessibility
5 1 (1.05%) GDPR
System Software
1 9 (9.47%) Docker
2 2 (2.11%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 13 (13.68%) Kubernetes
2 11 (11.58%) Terraform
3 3 (3.16%) Prometheus
3 3 (3.16%) Single Sign-On
4 2 (2.11%) Istio
5 1 (1.05%) Grafana
Vendors
1 23 (24.21%) Microsoft
2 15 (15.79%) Foundry
3 12 (12.63%) Google
3 12 (12.63%) OpenAI
4 11 (11.58%) Databricks
5 4 (4.21%) Oracle
6 3 (3.16%) Dynatrace
7 2 (2.11%) NVIDIA
8 1 (1.05%) Amplitude
8 1 (1.05%) Apple
8 1 (1.05%) TOWER Software