AI Job Trends

AI
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring AI skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 2 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 5 33 51
Rank change year-on-year +28 +18 +69
Permanent jobs citing AI 9,933 2,663 4,148
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 12.45% 6.51% 4.61%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 16.24% 7.00% 5.34%
Number of salaries quoted 2,836 1,442 1,914
10th Percentile £33,750 £32,500 £40,000
25th Percentile £51,250 £53,750 £50,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £71,000 £72,500 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year -2.07% +3.57% -
75th Percentile £95,313 £100,000 £92,500
90th Percentile £115,000 £118,750 £115,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £60,000 £66,206 £60,000
% change year-on-year -9.37% +10.34% -7.69%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

AI falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 61,153 38,054 77,716
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 76.62% 93.06% 86.41%
Number of salaries quoted 37,653 22,322 57,935
10th Percentile £30,000 £31,250 £29,097
25th Percentile £40,000 £43,750 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +9.09% -10.57%
75th Percentile £77,500 £80,000 £73,500
90th Percentile £97,500 £102,500 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £55,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year -9.09% +10.00% -8.41%

AI
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing AI relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

AI job vacancy trend in the UK

AI
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing AI.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing AI

AI
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing AI over the 6 months to 2 April 2026.

Salary histogram for AI in the UK

AI
Top 18 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing AI within the UK over the 6 months to 2 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +27 9,198 £71,028 -5.30% 2,826
UK excluding London +26 7,004 £60,000 -9.37% 1,756
North of England +35 2,525 £61,418 -4.69% 455
London +27 2,494 £85,000 -10.53% 1,477
North West +32 1,911 £61,418 -15.29% 229
Work from Home +26 1,797 £68,000 +2.68% 1,250
Midlands +62 1,526 £52,000 -16.80% 214
South East +28 1,437 £55,000 -21.43% 594
West Midlands +61 1,229 £52,500 -12.50% 110
East of England +17 757 £55,000 -16.95% 145
Yorkshire +34 523 £65,000 +44.44% 165
South West +7 369 £60,000 - 199
East Midlands +44 308 £50,000 -23.08% 103
Scotland +8 235 £70,000 +55.56% 95
Wales +25 118 £50,335 -19.46% 68
North East +30 91 £55,000 -21.17% 63
Northern Ireland -1 65 £90,000 -7.69% 26
Channel Islands - 8 - -

AI
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
1 115 (1.16%) Apache Airflow
2 105 (1.06%) Apache Spark
3 91 (0.92%) SharePoint
4 65 (0.65%) Jupyter
5 59 (0.59%) Confluence
6 57 (0.57%) CMS
7 41 (0.41%) Apache
8 30 (0.30%) ArcGIS
9 26 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
10 23 (0.23%) WordPress
11 18 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
12 17 (0.17%) Appian
13 13 (0.13%) JBoss
13 13 (0.13%) WebSphere
14 9 (0.091%) SAS
15 8 (0.081%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 5 (0.050%) Apache Pulsar
16 5 (0.050%) Apache Solr
16 5 (0.050%) IIS
16 5 (0.050%) Umbraco
Applications
1 1,058 (10.65%) Microsoft Excel
2 138 (1.39%) Chatbot
3 82 (0.83%) Microsoft Office
4 52 (0.52%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 30 (0.30%) UserZoom
6 22 (0.22%) Spreadsheet
7 20 (0.20%) MS Visio
8 7 (0.070%) Adobe Premiere
8 7 (0.070%) Maya
9 6 (0.060%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 6 (0.060%) Microsoft Project
9 6 (0.060%) Photoshop
10 5 (0.050%) Adobe Illustrator
10 5 (0.050%) Camtasia
11 4 (0.040%) Adobe After Effects
11 4 (0.040%) CapCut
11 4 (0.040%) Weka
12 3 (0.030%) Final Cut Pro
12 3 (0.030%) Sketch
13 1 (0.010%) InDesign
Business Applications
1 34 (0.34%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.20%) NetSuite
3 17 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 11 (0.11%) Oracle Payables
5 10 (0.10%) Oracle ERP
5 10 (0.10%) Workday HCM
6 8 (0.081%) Distributed Ledger
6 8 (0.081%) Shopify
7 7 (0.070%) Oracle EBS
7 7 (0.070%) Salesforce CRM
8 4 (0.040%) Dynamics AX
8 4 (0.040%) Endur
8 4 (0.040%) Oracle Assets
8 4 (0.040%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
8 4 (0.040%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 3 (0.030%) Oracle General Ledger
9 3 (0.030%) Oracle Receivables
10 2 (0.020%) Dynamics GP
10 2 (0.020%) SAP ERP
10 2 (0.020%) SAP SCM
Cloud Services
1 4,157 (41.85%) Cloud Computing
2 2,188 (22.03%) Azure
3 1,347 (13.56%) Power Platform
4 1,198 (12.06%) Azure AI
5 855 (8.61%) AWS
6 478 (4.81%) SaaS
7 374 (3.77%) GCP
8 216 (2.17%) GitHub
9 194 (1.95%) Snowflake
10 191 (1.92%) Microsoft 365
11 166 (1.67%) Azure DevOps
12 160 (1.61%) Adobe Analytics
13 126 (1.27%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 124 (1.25%) Microsoft Copilot
15 123 (1.24%) Azure Data Factory
16 113 (1.14%) Serverless
17 107 (1.08%) GitHub Copilot
18 102 (1.03%) Entra ID
19 100 (1.01%) Azure Machine Learning
20 96 (0.97%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 4,054 (40.81%) Internet
2 243 (2.45%) Broadband
3 54 (0.54%) Firewall
4 31 (0.31%) Unified Communications
5 28 (0.28%) Network Security
6 26 (0.26%) VPN
7 21 (0.21%) HTTP
7 21 (0.21%) TCP/IP
8 19 (0.19%) VoIP
9 18 (0.18%) DNS
9 18 (0.18%) WAN
10 16 (0.16%) DHCP
11 13 (0.13%) Telepresence
11 13 (0.13%) WebEx
12 9 (0.091%) VLAN
13 8 (0.081%) Wi-Fi
14 7 (0.070%) Intranet
15 6 (0.060%) DMZ
15 6 (0.060%) RTP
15 6 (0.060%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1,215 (12.23%) Power BI
2 1,107 (11.14%) Tableau
3 196 (1.97%) Data Warehouse
4 154 (1.55%) Data Lake
5 136 (1.37%) SQL Server
6 98 (0.99%) Metadata
7 96 (0.97%) PostgreSQL
8 81 (0.82%) MongoDB
9 78 (0.79%) NoSQL
10 71 (0.71%) BigQuery
11 61 (0.61%) Looker
12 59 (0.59%) Big Data
13 58 (0.58%) Elasticsearch
14 46 (0.46%) Amazon Redshift
15 42 (0.42%) Pinecone
16 41 (0.41%) Azure SQL Database
17 40 (0.40%) MySQL
18 35 (0.35%) Snowflake Schema
19 32 (0.32%) Relational Database
20 31 (0.31%) Redis
Development Applications
1 154 (1.55%) Git
2 95 (0.96%) JIRA
3 78 (0.79%) MLflow
4 58 (0.58%) Visual Studio Code
5 51 (0.51%) Jenkins
6 36 (0.36%) GitLab
7 32 (0.32%) Claude Code
8 25 (0.25%) Cypress.io
8 25 (0.25%) IBM UrbanCode
8 25 (0.25%) Selenium
9 17 (0.17%) Postman
10 13 (0.13%) SpecFlow
11 11 (0.11%) Bitbucket
11 11 (0.11%) Visual Studio
12 10 (0.10%) Storybook
13 9 (0.091%) Oracle Forms
13 9 (0.091%) TeamCity
14 8 (0.081%) Gradle
14 8 (0.081%) Octopus Deploy
14 8 (0.081%) Subversion
General
1 6,257 (62.99%) Social Skills
2 4,487 (45.17%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 4,272 (43.01%) Banking
4 1,235 (12.43%) Finance
5 722 (7.27%) Analytical Skills
6 420 (4.23%) Marketing
7 328 (3.30%) Legal
8 313 (3.15%) Public Sector
9 278 (2.80%) Law
10 277 (2.79%) Games
11 245 (2.47%) Retail
12 180 (1.81%) Manufacturing
13 118 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
14 116 (1.17%) Presentation Skills
15 101 (1.02%) Telecoms
16 90 (0.91%) Organisational Skills
17 80 (0.81%) Financial Institution
17 80 (0.81%) Pharmaceutical
18 55 (0.55%) Advertising
19 49 (0.49%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 3,157 (31.78%) Lecturer
2 1,154 (11.62%) Analyst
3 1,006 (10.13%) Data Analyst
4 962 (9.68%) Junior
5 937 (9.43%) Junior Analyst
5 937 (9.43%) Junior Data Analyst
6 786 (7.91%) Senior
7 600 (6.04%) Lead
8 433 (4.36%) Developer
9 361 (3.63%) Architect
10 269 (2.71%) Consultant
11 263 (2.65%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 208 (2.09%) Software Engineer
13 186 (1.87%) Data Engineer
14 161 (1.62%) Solutions Architect
15 108 (1.09%) Data Scientist
16 97 (0.98%) Python Engineer
17 96 (0.97%) Full-Stack Engineer
18 90 (0.91%) Full-Stack Developer
19 88 (0.89%) Senior Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 271 (2.73%) React
2 199 (2.00%) PyTorch
3 164 (1.65%) REST
4 161 (1.62%) .NET
5 156 (1.57%) TensorFlow
6 141 (1.42%) HTML
7 134 (1.35%) scikit-learn
8 133 (1.34%) Node.js
9 131 (1.32%) RESTful
10 123 (1.24%) LangChain
11 113 (1.14%) CSS
12 106 (1.07%) Kafka
13 104 (1.05%) Pandas
14 95 (0.96%) FastAPI
15 93 (0.94%) Hugging Face
16 85 (0.86%) Django
17 78 (0.79%) NumPy
18 73 (0.73%) PySpark
19 65 (0.65%) AngularJS
20 63 (0.63%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 4,079 (41.07%) IoT
2 322 (3.24%) Cloud Native
3 218 (2.19%) Onboarding
4 213 (2.14%) Social Media
5 179 (1.80%) AI Agents
6 174 (1.75%) Algorithms
7 166 (1.67%) Product Ownership
8 150 (1.51%) Robotics
9 130 (1.31%) Blog
10 129 (1.30%) Self-Motivation
11 114 (1.15%) Distributed Systems
12 101 (1.02%) Management Information System
13 100 (1.01%) Low-Code
14 91 (0.92%) Enterprise Software
15 87 (0.88%) Life Science
16 85 (0.86%) Mobile App
17 84 (0.85%) Public Cloud
18 66 (0.66%) Virtual Team
19 61 (0.61%) Data Centre
20 56 (0.56%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 93 (0.94%) Linux
1 93 (0.94%) Windows
2 82 (0.83%) Android
3 57 (0.57%) Apple iOS
4 56 (0.56%) Unix
5 31 (0.31%) Windows Server
6 15 (0.15%) Ubuntu
7 9 (0.091%) Mac OS
8 5 (0.050%) VMS
8 5 (0.050%) Windows Server 2016
9 4 (0.040%) Robot Operating System
10 3 (0.030%) OpenWrt
11 2 (0.020%) Kali Linux
11 2 (0.020%) zOS
12 1 (0.010%) FreeRTOS
12 1 (0.010%) Mac OS X
12 1 (0.010%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
12 1 (0.010%) Solaris
12 1 (0.010%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 5,223 (52.58%) Machine Learning
2 4,333 (43.62%) User Experience
3 4,308 (43.37%) Cybersecurity
4 4,075 (41.02%) Web Development
5 1,375 (13.84%) Business Intelligence
6 1,307 (13.16%) Analytics
7 1,009 (10.16%) Agile
8 819 (8.25%) Roadmaps
9 770 (7.75%) Problem-Solving
10 681 (6.86%) Decision-Making
11 677 (6.82%) CI/CD
12 629 (6.33%) Continuous Improvement
13 616 (6.20%) Software Engineering
14 583 (5.87%) Generative AI
15 570 (5.74%) Data Science
16 566 (5.70%) LLM
17 560 (5.64%) DevOps
18 493 (4.96%) Mentoring
19 421 (4.24%) Customer Experience
19 421 (4.24%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 2,342 (23.58%) Python
2 1,586 (15.97%) SQL
3 263 (2.65%) JavaScript
4 251 (2.53%) Java
5 225 (2.27%) TypeScript
6 170 (1.71%) C#
7 81 (0.82%) C++
8 76 (0.77%) Go
9 66 (0.66%) Bash
10 58 (0.58%) PowerShell
11 55 (0.55%) R
12 40 (0.40%) Kotlin
13 37 (0.37%) PHP
14 29 (0.29%) Scala
15 28 (0.28%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 26 (0.26%) Rust
17 22 (0.22%) Bicep
18 20 (0.20%) C
19 19 (0.19%) Apex Code
20 17 (0.17%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 4,922 (49.55%) Degree
2 4,242 (42.71%) Master's Degree
3 4,177 (42.05%) PhD
4 4,051 (40.78%) Postgraduate
5 1,108 (11.15%) Azure Certification
6 295 (2.97%) Security Cleared
7 191 (1.92%) SC Cleared
8 180 (1.81%) Computer Science Degree
9 119 (1.20%) AWS Certification
10 91 (0.92%) DV Cleared
11 68 (0.68%) DBS Check
12 64 (0.64%) ACCA
13 56 (0.56%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 47 (0.47%) PMP
15 45 (0.45%) CISSP
16 43 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
17 42 (0.42%) CIMA
18 32 (0.32%) PMI Certification
19 28 (0.28%) Cisco Certification
19 28 (0.28%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 332 (3.34%) Accessibility
2 268 (2.70%) Data Quality
3 174 (1.75%) GDPR
4 152 (1.53%) QA
5 69 (0.69%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 64 (0.64%) WCAG
7 50 (0.50%) EU AI Act
8 44 (0.44%) GRC
9 41 (0.41%) HIPAA
9 41 (0.41%) IFRS
10 39 (0.39%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 38 (0.38%) NIST
12 28 (0.28%) Actionable Recommendations
12 28 (0.28%) GxP
13 26 (0.26%) Solvency II
14 21 (0.21%) PMO
14 21 (0.21%) PSD2
14 21 (0.21%) SLA
15 17 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
15 17 (0.17%) GAAP
System Software
1 272 (2.74%) Docker
2 77 (0.78%) Active Directory
3 52 (0.52%) Virtual Machines
4 14 (0.14%) Firmware
5 13 (0.13%) VMware Infrastructure
6 9 (0.091%) vSphere
7 4 (0.040%) Lustre
7 4 (0.040%) Slurm Workload Manager
7 4 (0.040%) Virtual Desktop
8 3 (0.030%) Kamailio
8 3 (0.030%) VMware ESXi
9 2 (0.020%) Ceph
9 2 (0.020%) GPFS
9 2 (0.020%) Hyper-V
9 2 (0.020%) RACF
10 1 (0.010%) Apache Flume
10 1 (0.010%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 258 (2.60%) Kubernetes
2 209 (2.10%) Terraform
3 60 (0.60%) Ansible
4 41 (0.41%) Grafana
5 40 (0.40%) Prometheus
5 40 (0.40%) Single Sign-On
6 30 (0.30%) Microsoft Intune
7 13 (0.13%) Cisco CUCM
8 9 (0.091%) Argo
8 9 (0.091%) Kubeflow
9 8 (0.081%) Proxmox
10 7 (0.070%) vCenter Server
11 4 (0.040%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 4 (0.040%) Functional Safety
11 4 (0.040%) SolarWinds Orion
12 3 (0.030%) Control-M
12 3 (0.030%) RSA Archer
13 2 (0.020%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
13 2 (0.020%) HP Fortify
13 2 (0.020%) Microsoft Data Protection Manager
Vendors
1 1,768 (17.80%) Microsoft
2 284 (2.86%) Databricks
3 211 (2.12%) Adobe
4 209 (2.10%) Google
5 138 (1.39%) Dell
6 123 (1.24%) OpenAI
7 98 (0.99%) Oracle
8 92 (0.93%) Salesforce
9 75 (0.76%) Cisco
10 69 (0.69%) SAP
11 57 (0.57%) Foundry
12 49 (0.49%) Palantir
13 45 (0.45%) Alteryx
13 45 (0.45%) ServiceNow
14 44 (0.44%) Informatica
15 41 (0.41%) PayPal
16 32 (0.32%) Bloomberg
17 31 (0.31%) Apple
17 31 (0.31%) Red Hat
18 28 (0.28%) Fortinet