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 17 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 4 51 63
Rank change year-on-year +47 +12 +55
Permanent jobs citing AI 9,497 2,584 2,473
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 15.58% 4.84% 4.18%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 19.28% 5.34% 4.67%
Number of salaries quoted 2,181 1,261 1,439
10th Percentile £35,000 £45,000 £42,500
25th Percentile £51,250 £58,000 £47,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £71,500 £77,000 £70,875
Median % change year-on-year -7.14% +8.64% +1.25%
75th Percentile £95,000 £98,750 £92,500
90th Percentile £120,000 £118,750 £120,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £59,450 £70,000 £61,439
% change year-on-year -15.07% +13.93% -0.10%

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 49,261 48,421 52,980
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 80.81% 90.77% 89.63%
Number of salaries quoted 29,011 23,517 40,505
10th Percentile £28,500 £35,000 £31,250
25th Percentile £37,500 £45,000 £42,439
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £58,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +3.45% -7.20%
75th Percentile £75,000 £80,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £97,500
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 17 January 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 17 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +46 8,649 £72,500 -6.45% 3,842
UK excluding London +55 6,872 £59,450 -15.07% 3,378
Work from Home +62 2,705 £67,500 -10.00% 1,735
North of England +55 2,550 £61,959 -9.22% 580
London +35 2,209 £80,000 -11.11% 997
North West +41 1,983 £60,000 -13.67% 256
Midlands +103 1,511 £60,000 -7.69% 370
South East +30 1,412 £50,000 -33.33% 1,242
West Midlands +92 1,248 £63,750 +10.87% 145
East of England +82 626 £51,250 -32.57% 499
Yorkshire +54 462 £70,000 +8.82% 234
Scotland +46 349 £68,750 +15.55% 121
South West +35 331 £62,500 - 409
East Midlands +82 273 £42,500 -44.81% 213
Wales +41 121 £55,000 -2.22% 173
North East +54 105 £55,000 -27.63% 94
Northern Ireland -1 47 £90,000 +1.41% 74
Channel Islands - 8 - - 1

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 92 (0.97%) SharePoint
2 57 (0.60%) Apache Airflow
3 52 (0.55%) Confluence
4 49 (0.52%) Apache Spark
5 40 (0.42%) CMS
6 20 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 19 (0.20%) Microsoft Exchange
8 16 (0.17%) Apache
8 16 (0.17%) WordPress
9 15 (0.16%) Appian
10 12 (0.13%) JBoss
10 12 (0.13%) WebSphere
11 11 (0.12%) Jupyter
12 9 (0.095%) Apache Solr
13 6 (0.063%) ArcGIS
14 5 (0.053%) Apache Pulsar
14 5 (0.053%) IIS
14 5 (0.053%) nginx
14 5 (0.053%) Umbraco
15 4 (0.042%) SAS
Applications
1 1,206 (12.70%) Chatbot
2 480 (5.05%) Microsoft Excel
3 97 (1.02%) Microsoft Office
4 43 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.22%) Maya
6 12 (0.13%) Spreadsheet
7 9 (0.095%) MS Visio
8 7 (0.074%) Adobe Premiere
8 7 (0.074%) Microsoft Project
8 7 (0.074%) Notion
8 7 (0.074%) Sketch
9 6 (0.063%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 6 (0.063%) Photoshop
10 4 (0.042%) InDesign
10 4 (0.042%) Weka
11 3 (0.032%) Adobe XD
11 3 (0.032%) Final Cut Pro
11 3 (0.032%) Simulink
12 2 (0.021%) S-PLUS
12 2 (0.021%) UserZoom
Business Applications
1 55 (0.58%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.21%) Oracle ERP
3 18 (0.19%) NetSuite
4 12 (0.13%) Oracle Payables
5 11 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
5 11 (0.12%) Shopify
6 8 (0.084%) Endur
6 8 (0.084%) Workday HCM
7 7 (0.074%) Oracle EBS
8 6 (0.063%) Distributed Ledger
8 6 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
9 5 (0.053%) Elite 3E
10 4 (0.042%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 4 (0.042%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.032%) Oracle Assets
11 3 (0.032%) SAP Business One
12 2 (0.021%) Dynamics GP
12 2 (0.021%) Oracle General Ledger
12 2 (0.021%) SAP FI/CO
12 2 (0.021%) SAP SCM
Cloud Services
1 4,094 (43.11%) Cloud Computing
2 1,372 (14.45%) Azure
3 745 (7.84%) Power Platform
4 697 (7.34%) AWS
5 441 (4.64%) Azure AI
6 423 (4.45%) SaaS
7 319 (3.36%) GCP
8 224 (2.36%) GitHub
9 206 (2.17%) Azure DevOps
10 169 (1.78%) Microsoft 365
11 120 (1.26%) Snowflake
12 116 (1.22%) GitHub Copilot
13 104 (1.10%) Microsoft Copilot
14 102 (1.07%) Azure Data Factory
15 101 (1.06%) Serverless
16 89 (0.94%) Entra ID
17 88 (0.93%) Power Automate
18 73 (0.77%) Vertex AI
19 66 (0.69%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 64 (0.67%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 4,060 (42.75%) Internet
2 36 (0.38%) Firewall
3 31 (0.33%) Network Security
4 25 (0.26%) Unified Communications
4 25 (0.26%) VoIP
5 23 (0.24%) Broadband
6 20 (0.21%) VPN
7 16 (0.17%) WAN
8 15 (0.16%) HTTP
8 15 (0.16%) Wi-Fi
9 14 (0.15%) DNS
9 14 (0.15%) Telepresence
9 14 (0.15%) WebEx
10 13 (0.14%) TCP/IP
11 11 (0.12%) VLAN
12 10 (0.11%) Wireless
13 9 (0.095%) LAN
14 8 (0.084%) DHCP
14 8 (0.084%) InfiniBand
15 7 (0.074%) Intranet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 599 (6.31%) Power BI
2 465 (4.90%) Tableau
3 159 (1.67%) Data Warehouse
4 114 (1.20%) NoSQL
5 107 (1.13%) SQL Server
6 100 (1.05%) Data Lake
7 78 (0.82%) MongoDB
8 76 (0.80%) PostgreSQL
9 72 (0.76%) Metadata
10 68 (0.72%) Big Data
11 44 (0.46%) MySQL
12 42 (0.44%) BigQuery
13 35 (0.37%) Pinecone
13 35 (0.37%) Relational Database
14 34 (0.36%) Hadoop
15 31 (0.33%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 30 (0.32%) Elasticsearch
16 30 (0.32%) Looker
17 27 (0.28%) Azure SQL Database
18 24 (0.25%) Data Mining
Development Applications
1 132 (1.39%) Git
2 129 (1.36%) JIRA
3 51 (0.54%) Jenkins
4 48 (0.51%) MLflow
5 27 (0.28%) GitLab
6 21 (0.22%) Octopus Deploy
6 21 (0.22%) TeamCity
7 18 (0.19%) Oracle Forms
8 17 (0.18%) Cypress.io
9 13 (0.14%) Visual Studio
10 11 (0.12%) Selenium
11 10 (0.11%) Bitbucket
12 9 (0.095%) Vite
13 8 (0.084%) Subversion
14 7 (0.074%) Burp Suite
14 7 (0.074%) Storybook
14 7 (0.074%) WebDriver
15 6 (0.063%) ERwin
15 6 (0.063%) JMeter
15 6 (0.063%) Postman
General
1 5,572 (58.67%) Social Skills
2 4,495 (47.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 4,216 (44.39%) Banking
4 1,112 (11.71%) Finance
5 1,098 (11.56%) Analytical Skills
6 391 (4.12%) Marketing
7 282 (2.97%) Public Sector
8 281 (2.96%) Law
9 261 (2.75%) Legal
10 199 (2.10%) Retail
11 121 (1.27%) Games
12 105 (1.11%) Telecoms
13 104 (1.10%) Manufacturing
14 96 (1.01%) Pharmaceutical
15 93 (0.98%) Presentation Skills
16 76 (0.80%) Organisational Skills
17 74 (0.78%) Financial Institution
17 74 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
18 66 (0.69%) Aviation
19 64 (0.67%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 3,161 (33.28%) Lecturer
2 1,163 (12.25%) Trainer
3 671 (7.07%) Senior
4 543 (5.72%) Analyst
5 402 (4.23%) Data Analyst
6 392 (4.13%) Developer
7 376 (3.96%) Lead
8 354 (3.73%) Junior
9 331 (3.49%) Junior Analyst
9 331 (3.49%) Junior Data Analyst
10 262 (2.76%) Architect
11 216 (2.27%) Consultant
12 175 (1.84%) Software Engineer
13 155 (1.63%) Content Editor
14 149 (1.57%) Data Engineer
15 133 (1.40%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 106 (1.12%) Support Specialist
17 101 (1.06%) Solutions Architect
18 98 (1.03%) Customer Support Specialist
19 90 (0.95%) Research Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 230 (2.42%) React
2 175 (1.84%) .NET
2 175 (1.84%) REST
3 132 (1.39%) PyTorch
4 118 (1.24%) Node.js
5 117 (1.23%) TensorFlow
6 113 (1.19%) LangChain
7 107 (1.13%) RESTful
8 93 (0.98%) HTML
9 85 (0.90%) FastAPI
10 70 (0.74%) AngularJS
10 70 (0.74%) Kafka
11 68 (0.72%) Django
12 67 (0.71%) CSS
13 58 (0.61%) Vue
14 57 (0.60%) scikit-learn
15 53 (0.56%) Flask
16 51 (0.54%) Next.js
17 50 (0.53%) OAuth
18 49 (0.52%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 4,077 (42.93%) IoT
2 263 (2.77%) Cloud Native
3 188 (1.98%) Product Ownership
4 174 (1.83%) Onboarding
5 152 (1.60%) AI Agents
6 150 (1.58%) Robotics
7 127 (1.34%) Algorithms
8 125 (1.32%) Self-Motivation
9 121 (1.27%) Enterprise Software
10 111 (1.17%) Blog
11 97 (1.02%) Molecular Biology
12 93 (0.98%) Life Science
12 93 (0.98%) Management Information System
13 91 (0.96%) Low-Code
14 89 (0.94%) Legacy Systems
15 82 (0.86%) Distributed Systems
16 70 (0.74%) Analytical Mindset
16 70 (0.74%) Greenfield Project
17 63 (0.66%) Virtual Team
18 51 (0.54%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 74 (0.78%) Windows
2 73 (0.77%) Linux
3 59 (0.62%) Android
4 54 (0.57%) Unix
5 37 (0.39%) Apple iOS
6 28 (0.29%) Windows Server
7 12 (0.13%) Ubuntu
8 11 (0.12%) Mac OS
9 5 (0.053%) Kali Linux
10 3 (0.032%) OpenWrt
11 2 (0.021%) Mac OS X
11 2 (0.021%) VMS
11 2 (0.021%) zOS
12 1 (0.011%) Debian
12 1 (0.011%) Robot Operating System
12 1 (0.011%) Solaris
12 1 (0.011%) Windows Server 2016
12 1 (0.011%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 5,043 (53.10%) Machine Learning
2 4,330 (45.59%) Cybersecurity
3 4,312 (45.40%) User Experience
4 4,070 (42.86%) Web Development
5 1,253 (13.19%) Conversational UI
6 993 (10.46%) Analytics
7 900 (9.48%) Agile
8 743 (7.82%) Problem-Solving
9 732 (7.71%) Business Intelligence
10 588 (6.19%) Roadmaps
11 575 (6.05%) DevOps
12 567 (5.97%) Decision-Making
13 556 (5.85%) Software Engineering
14 555 (5.84%) CI/CD
15 553 (5.82%) Continuous Improvement
16 468 (4.93%) Generative AI
17 462 (4.86%) Data Science
18 448 (4.72%) Computer Science
19 437 (4.60%) LLM
20 395 (4.16%) Chemistry
Programming Languages
1 1,334 (14.05%) Python
2 921 (9.70%) SQL
3 249 (2.62%) TypeScript
4 243 (2.56%) JavaScript
5 195 (2.05%) Java
6 144 (1.52%) C#
7 83 (0.87%) PowerShell
8 74 (0.78%) C++
9 63 (0.66%) Bash
10 60 (0.63%) R
11 57 (0.60%) Go
12 35 (0.37%) PHP
13 33 (0.35%) Rust
14 31 (0.33%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 31 (0.33%) Scala
15 28 (0.29%) Kotlin
16 23 (0.24%) Apex Code
17 21 (0.22%) C
18 20 (0.21%) Bicep
18 20 (0.21%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 6,090 (64.13%) Degree
2 4,800 (50.54%) Master's Degree
3 4,727 (49.77%) PhD
4 4,049 (42.63%) Postgraduate
5 374 (3.94%) Azure Certification
6 311 (3.27%) Security Cleared
7 252 (2.65%) SC Cleared
8 213 (2.24%) Computer Science Degree
9 74 (0.78%) DV Cleared
10 59 (0.62%) AWS Certification
11 53 (0.56%) DBS Check
12 47 (0.49%) BPSS Clearance
12 47 (0.49%) PMP
13 42 (0.44%) CISSP
14 35 (0.37%) ACCA
14 35 (0.37%) Microsoft Certification
15 32 (0.34%) PMI Certification
16 30 (0.32%) CISA
16 30 (0.32%) Numerate Degree
17 28 (0.29%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 220 (2.32%) Data Quality
2 129 (1.36%) Accessibility
3 124 (1.31%) QA
4 107 (1.13%) GDPR
5 72 (0.76%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 43 (0.45%) GxP
7 40 (0.42%) EU AI Act
8 33 (0.35%) NIST
9 30 (0.32%) SLA
10 28 (0.29%) IFRS
11 25 (0.26%) Actionable Recommendations
12 24 (0.25%) Cyber Essentials
12 24 (0.25%) HIPAA
13 22 (0.23%) Solvency II
14 21 (0.22%) PSD2
15 19 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 42001
16 18 (0.19%) GAAP
16 18 (0.19%) GRC
16 18 (0.19%) PMO
16 18 (0.19%) WCAG
System Software
1 235 (2.47%) Docker
2 63 (0.66%) Active Directory
3 22 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
4 19 (0.20%) Virtual Machines
5 16 (0.17%) VMware Infrastructure
6 15 (0.16%) Firmware
7 12 (0.13%) vSphere
8 7 (0.074%) Lustre
9 6 (0.063%) Hyper-V
10 5 (0.053%) GPFS
10 5 (0.053%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 4 (0.042%) VMware ESXi
12 2 (0.021%) Ceph
12 2 (0.021%) NFS
12 2 (0.021%) RACF
13 1 (0.011%) Kamailio
13 1 (0.011%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 227 (2.39%) Terraform
2 210 (2.21%) Kubernetes
3 51 (0.54%) Ansible
4 50 (0.53%) Microsoft Intune
5 41 (0.43%) Single Sign-On
6 29 (0.31%) Prometheus
7 21 (0.22%) Grafana
8 14 (0.15%) Cisco CUCM
9 9 (0.095%) Kubeflow
10 8 (0.084%) Argo
10 8 (0.084%) SCCM
11 5 (0.053%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 4 (0.042%) Nessus
12 4 (0.042%) Nmap
12 4 (0.042%) vCenter Server
13 3 (0.032%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
13 3 (0.032%) RSA Archer
14 2 (0.021%) Control-M
14 2 (0.021%) Proxmox
14 2 (0.021%) Puppet
Vendors
1 1,162 (12.24%) PayPal
2 1,119 (11.78%) Microsoft
3 184 (1.94%) Google
4 163 (1.72%) Databricks
5 114 (1.20%) OpenAI
6 101 (1.06%) Oracle
7 100 (1.05%) Cisco
8 99 (1.04%) Salesforce
9 88 (0.93%) Adobe
10 84 (0.88%) Dell
11 70 (0.74%) SAP
12 49 (0.52%) Alteryx
13 47 (0.49%) Blue Prism
14 44 (0.46%) Apple
14 44 (0.46%) Foundry
14 44 (0.46%) HubSpot
15 40 (0.42%) Palo Alto
16 39 (0.41%) Fortinet
17 37 (0.39%) Palantir
18 34 (0.36%) Bloomberg