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 25 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 4 41 66
Rank change year-on-year +37 +25 +56
Permanent jobs citing AI 9,886 2,610 3,050
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 14.23% 5.51% 4.05%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 17.99% 5.93% 4.59%
Number of salaries quoted 2,480 1,331 1,695
10th Percentile £33,750 £45,000 £42,500
25th Percentile £50,000 £60,000 £47,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £75,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year -6.67% +7.14% -
75th Percentile £95,000 £98,125 £92,500
90th Percentile £115,000 £117,500 £115,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £59,450 £66,253 £62,500
% change year-on-year -10.27% +6.00% -3.85%

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 54,960 44,026 66,518
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 79.09% 92.87% 88.40%
Number of salaries quoted 32,942 21,945 51,245
10th Percentile £29,000 £33,750 £29,494
25th Percentile £38,250 £45,651 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +9.09% -12.00%
75th Percentile £76,250 £81,250 £75,000
90th Percentile £97,500 £102,500 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £55,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year -9.09% +10.00% -9.09%

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 25 February 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 25 February 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 +37 9,041 £70,000 -6.67% 2,257
UK excluding London +40 7,105 £59,450 -10.27% 1,537
North of England +50 2,616 £60,000 -11.11% 362
Work from Home +36 2,522 £67,500 +1.85% 1,129
London +32 2,317 £80,000 -13.51% 1,153
North West +42 1,984 £61,418 -9.01% 193
Midlands +86 1,537 £55,000 -13.73% 175
South East +36 1,483 £50,000 -33.33% 590
West Midlands +81 1,256 £55,000 -4.35% 102
East of England +23 681 £55,000 -16.96% 149
Yorkshire +42 528 £61,250 -3.77% 116
South West +16 370 £62,500 -1.96% 160
Scotland +35 303 £70,000 +21.74% 80
East Midlands +65 292 £50,000 -23.08% 71
Wales +38 121 £50,335 +0.67% 34
North East +47 104 £55,000 -26.42% 54
Northern Ireland -8 56 £90,000 -5.26% 10
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 89 (0.90%) SharePoint
2 78 (0.79%) Apache Airflow
3 72 (0.73%) Apache Spark
4 59 (0.60%) Jupyter
5 51 (0.52%) Confluence
6 49 (0.50%) CMS
7 33 (0.33%) Apache
8 27 (0.27%) ArcGIS
9 24 (0.24%) Microsoft Exchange
10 22 (0.22%) Palantir Foundry
11 18 (0.18%) WordPress
12 17 (0.17%) Appian
12 17 (0.17%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 13 (0.13%) JBoss
13 13 (0.13%) WebSphere
14 7 (0.071%) SAS
15 6 (0.061%) Apache Solr
16 5 (0.051%) Apache Pulsar
16 5 (0.051%) IIS
16 5 (0.051%) Umbraco
Applications
1 961 (9.72%) Chatbot
2 755 (7.64%) Microsoft Excel
3 86 (0.87%) Microsoft Office
4 43 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 18 (0.18%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.16%) Maya
6 16 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 6 (0.061%) Microsoft Project
8 5 (0.051%) Adobe Premiere
8 5 (0.051%) Photoshop
8 5 (0.051%) UserZoom
9 4 (0.040%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 4 (0.040%) Weka
10 3 (0.030%) Adobe Illustrator
10 3 (0.030%) Final Cut Pro
10 3 (0.030%) Simulink
10 3 (0.030%) Sketch
11 1 (0.010%) Camtasia
11 1 (0.010%) CapCut
11 1 (0.010%) Notion
Business Applications
1 41 (0.41%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.19%) NetSuite
3 18 (0.18%) Oracle ERP
4 13 (0.13%) SAP S/4HANA
5 12 (0.12%) Oracle Payables
6 10 (0.10%) Workday HCM
7 8 (0.081%) Distributed Ledger
7 8 (0.081%) Endur
7 8 (0.081%) Shopify
8 7 (0.071%) Oracle EBS
8 7 (0.071%) Salesforce CRM
9 4 (0.040%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
9 4 (0.040%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.030%) Dynamics AX
10 3 (0.030%) Oracle Assets
10 3 (0.030%) SAP Business One
10 3 (0.030%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 2 (0.020%) Dynamics GP
11 2 (0.020%) SAP FI/CO
11 2 (0.020%) SAP SCM
Cloud Services
1 4,149 (41.97%) Cloud Computing
2 1,694 (17.14%) Azure
3 1,038 (10.50%) Power Platform
4 765 (7.74%) AWS
5 711 (7.19%) Azure AI
6 440 (4.45%) SaaS
7 330 (3.34%) GCP
8 225 (2.28%) GitHub
9 194 (1.96%) Microsoft 365
10 192 (1.94%) Azure DevOps
11 125 (1.26%) Snowflake
12 111 (1.12%) Azure Data Factory
13 110 (1.11%) GitHub Copilot
14 108 (1.09%) Microsoft Copilot
15 106 (1.07%) Serverless
16 104 (1.05%) Entra ID
17 97 (0.98%) Power Automate
18 70 (0.71%) PaaS
19 66 (0.67%) dbt
20 65 (0.66%) Adobe Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 4,059 (41.06%) Internet
2 108 (1.09%) Broadband
3 53 (0.54%) Firewall
4 33 (0.33%) Network Security
5 32 (0.32%) Unified Communications
6 26 (0.26%) VoIP
7 25 (0.25%) VPN
8 20 (0.20%) WAN
9 19 (0.19%) HTTP
10 17 (0.17%) TCP/IP
11 15 (0.15%) DNS
12 14 (0.14%) Telepresence
12 14 (0.14%) VLAN
12 14 (0.14%) WebEx
13 13 (0.13%) Wi-Fi
14 11 (0.11%) DHCP
15 8 (0.081%) Wireshark
16 7 (0.071%) DMZ
16 7 (0.071%) SD-WAN
16 7 (0.071%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 879 (8.89%) Power BI
2 754 (7.63%) Tableau
3 150 (1.52%) Data Warehouse
4 102 (1.03%) SQL Server
5 97 (0.98%) NoSQL
6 93 (0.94%) Data Lake
7 92 (0.93%) Metadata
8 82 (0.83%) PostgreSQL
9 77 (0.78%) MongoDB
10 74 (0.75%) Big Data
11 42 (0.42%) BigQuery
12 38 (0.38%) Pinecone
13 37 (0.37%) MySQL
14 34 (0.34%) Relational Database
15 32 (0.32%) Hadoop
16 31 (0.31%) GIS
16 31 (0.31%) Looker
17 30 (0.30%) Elasticsearch
18 28 (0.28%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 27 (0.27%) Data Mining
Development Applications
1 150 (1.52%) Git
2 108 (1.09%) JIRA
3 55 (0.56%) MLflow
4 51 (0.52%) Visual Studio Code
5 47 (0.48%) Jenkins
6 32 (0.32%) GitLab
7 19 (0.19%) Cypress.io
8 18 (0.18%) IBM UrbanCode
9 17 (0.17%) Selenium
10 16 (0.16%) Octopus Deploy
10 16 (0.16%) Oracle Forms
10 16 (0.16%) TeamCity
11 12 (0.12%) Visual Studio
12 11 (0.11%) Claude Code
12 11 (0.11%) Postman
13 10 (0.10%) Bitbucket
14 9 (0.091%) Storybook
15 8 (0.081%) Subversion
15 8 (0.081%) Vite
16 7 (0.071%) Gradle
General
1 5,854 (59.22%) Social Skills
2 4,493 (45.45%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 4,246 (42.95%) Banking
4 1,234 (12.48%) Finance
5 1,034 (10.46%) Analytical Skills
6 403 (4.08%) Marketing
7 309 (3.13%) Public Sector
8 297 (3.00%) Legal
9 275 (2.78%) Law
10 252 (2.55%) Retail
11 181 (1.83%) Games
12 165 (1.67%) Manufacturing
13 111 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
14 106 (1.07%) Telecoms
15 93 (0.94%) Pharmaceutical
16 88 (0.89%) Influencing Skills
17 86 (0.87%) Financial Institution
18 75 (0.76%) Organisational Skills
19 58 (0.59%) Electronics
20 48 (0.49%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 3,161 (31.97%) Lecturer
2 880 (8.90%) Trainer
3 842 (8.52%) Analyst
4 709 (7.17%) Senior
5 689 (6.97%) Data Analyst
6 627 (6.34%) Junior
7 607 (6.14%) Junior Analyst
7 607 (6.14%) Junior Data Analyst
8 460 (4.65%) Lead
9 430 (4.35%) Developer
10 292 (2.95%) Architect
11 248 (2.51%) Consultant
12 187 (1.89%) Software Engineer
13 159 (1.61%) Data Engineer
14 134 (1.36%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 123 (1.24%) Solutions Architect
16 102 (1.03%) Content Editor
17 100 (1.01%) Data Scientist
18 95 (0.96%) Senior Manager
19 91 (0.92%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 241 (2.44%) React
2 179 (1.81%) .NET
3 167 (1.69%) REST
4 165 (1.67%) PyTorch
5 129 (1.30%) TensorFlow
6 120 (1.21%) RESTful
7 111 (1.12%) Node.js
8 110 (1.11%) HTML
9 102 (1.03%) scikit-learn
10 95 (0.96%) Hugging Face
10 95 (0.96%) Pandas
11 91 (0.92%) LangChain
12 83 (0.84%) CSS
13 81 (0.82%) FastAPI
14 78 (0.79%) Kafka
15 76 (0.77%) Django
16 73 (0.74%) NumPy
17 69 (0.70%) AngularJS
18 64 (0.65%) Spring
19 58 (0.59%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 4,084 (41.31%) IoT
2 278 (2.81%) Cloud Native
3 187 (1.89%) Algorithms
4 186 (1.88%) Onboarding
5 172 (1.74%) Product Ownership
6 162 (1.64%) AI Agents
7 154 (1.56%) Robotics
8 136 (1.38%) Self-Motivation
9 122 (1.23%) Blog
10 109 (1.10%) Social Media
11 108 (1.09%) Enterprise Software
12 103 (1.04%) Management Information System
13 102 (1.03%) Distributed Systems
14 95 (0.96%) Life Science
15 89 (0.90%) Low-Code
15 89 (0.90%) Molecular Biology
16 71 (0.72%) Greenfield Project
17 66 (0.67%) Analytical Mindset
18 65 (0.66%) Mobile App
19 63 (0.64%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 85 (0.86%) Windows
2 84 (0.85%) Linux
3 76 (0.77%) Android
4 60 (0.61%) Unix
5 47 (0.48%) Apple iOS
6 28 (0.28%) Windows Server
7 18 (0.18%) Ubuntu
8 9 (0.091%) Mac OS
9 5 (0.051%) Kali Linux
9 5 (0.051%) VMS
10 4 (0.040%) Robot Operating System
10 4 (0.040%) Windows Server 2016
11 3 (0.030%) OpenWrt
12 2 (0.020%) Mac OS X
12 2 (0.020%) zOS
13 1 (0.010%) FreeRTOS
13 1 (0.010%) Solaris
13 1 (0.010%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 5,105 (51.64%) Machine Learning
2 4,332 (43.82%) Cybersecurity
3 4,321 (43.71%) User Experience
4 4,070 (41.17%) Web Development
5 1,138 (11.51%) Analytics
6 1,018 (10.30%) Business Intelligence
7 1,006 (10.18%) Conversational UI
8 946 (9.57%) Agile
9 731 (7.39%) Problem-Solving
10 686 (6.94%) Roadmaps
11 627 (6.34%) CI/CD
12 606 (6.13%) Decision-Making
13 587 (5.94%) Software Engineering
14 584 (5.91%) Continuous Improvement
15 565 (5.72%) DevOps
16 513 (5.19%) LLM
17 511 (5.17%) Data Science
18 495 (5.01%) Generative AI
19 445 (4.50%) Mentoring
20 432 (4.37%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 1,785 (18.06%) Python
2 1,220 (12.34%) SQL
3 259 (2.62%) JavaScript
4 245 (2.48%) TypeScript
5 237 (2.40%) Java
6 162 (1.64%) C#
7 85 (0.86%) C++
8 81 (0.82%) PowerShell
9 69 (0.70%) Bash
10 65 (0.66%) Go
11 58 (0.59%) R
12 39 (0.39%) PHP
13 37 (0.37%) Kotlin
14 34 (0.34%) Rust
15 27 (0.27%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 24 (0.24%) Scala
17 23 (0.23%) Apex Code
17 23 (0.23%) C
18 20 (0.20%) PL/SQL
19 16 (0.16%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 5,783 (58.50%) Degree
2 4,723 (47.77%) Master's Degree
3 4,658 (47.12%) PhD
4 4,050 (40.97%) Postgraduate
5 657 (6.65%) Azure Certification
6 342 (3.46%) Security Cleared
7 256 (2.59%) SC Cleared
8 192 (1.94%) Computer Science Degree
9 112 (1.13%) AWS Certification
10 87 (0.88%) DV Cleared
11 68 (0.69%) DBS Check
12 52 (0.53%) CISSP
13 49 (0.50%) PMP
14 48 (0.49%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 48 (0.49%) BPSS Clearance
15 42 (0.42%) ACCA
16 34 (0.34%) Microsoft Certification
16 34 (0.34%) PMI Certification
17 32 (0.32%) Cisco Certification
18 31 (0.31%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 240 (2.43%) Data Quality
2 224 (2.27%) Accessibility
3 147 (1.49%) QA
4 139 (1.41%) GDPR
5 79 (0.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 43 (0.43%) EU AI Act
7 40 (0.40%) GxP
8 39 (0.39%) NIST
9 36 (0.36%) IFRS
10 34 (0.34%) HIPAA
11 30 (0.30%) GRC
12 28 (0.28%) WCAG
13 25 (0.25%) Actionable Recommendations
14 23 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
15 22 (0.22%) PMO
15 22 (0.22%) Solvency II
16 21 (0.21%) PSD2
17 18 (0.18%) ISO/IEC 42001
17 18 (0.18%) PCI DSS
17 18 (0.18%) SLA
System Software
1 254 (2.57%) Docker
2 77 (0.78%) Active Directory
3 21 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
4 17 (0.17%) Virtual Desktop
5 16 (0.16%) Firmware
6 14 (0.14%) VMware Infrastructure
7 10 (0.10%) vSphere
8 4 (0.040%) Lustre
8 4 (0.040%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 3 (0.030%) Kamailio
9 3 (0.030%) VMware ESXi
10 2 (0.020%) Ceph
10 2 (0.020%) GPFS
10 2 (0.020%) NFS
10 2 (0.020%) RACF
11 1 (0.010%) Hyper-V
11 1 (0.010%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 251 (2.54%) Kubernetes
2 237 (2.40%) Terraform
3 53 (0.54%) Ansible
4 46 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
5 42 (0.42%) Microsoft Intune
6 39 (0.39%) Prometheus
7 35 (0.35%) Grafana
8 14 (0.14%) Cisco CUCM
9 11 (0.11%) Argo
10 7 (0.071%) Kubeflow
10 7 (0.071%) vCenter Server
11 6 (0.061%) Proxmox
11 6 (0.061%) SCCM
12 4 (0.040%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 4 (0.040%) Nessus
12 4 (0.040%) Nmap
12 4 (0.040%) RSA Archer
12 4 (0.040%) SolarWinds Orion
13 3 (0.030%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
13 3 (0.030%) Control-M
Vendors
1 1,440 (14.57%) Microsoft
2 874 (8.84%) PayPal
3 190 (1.92%) Google
4 174 (1.76%) Databricks
5 120 (1.21%) Adobe
6 116 (1.17%) OpenAI
7 114 (1.15%) Oracle
8 99 (1.00%) Salesforce
9 94 (0.95%) Dell
10 92 (0.93%) Cisco
11 72 (0.73%) SAP
12 48 (0.49%) Foundry
13 47 (0.48%) Alteryx
13 47 (0.48%) Blue Prism
13 47 (0.48%) Palantir
14 38 (0.38%) HubSpot
15 35 (0.35%) ServiceNow
16 34 (0.34%) Bloomberg
16 34 (0.34%) Fortinet
17 32 (0.32%) Apple