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

6 months to
25 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 5 34 51
Rank change year-on-year +29 +17 +66
Permanent jobs citing AI 10,105 2,645 3,939
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 13.14% 6.43% 4.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 16.96% 6.88% 5.19%
Number of salaries quoted 2,714 1,420 1,877
10th Percentile £33,750 £32,950 £41,250
25th Percentile £50,000 £55,000 £48,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £72,500 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year -3.45% +3.57% -
75th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £92,500
90th Percentile £112,500 £118,780 £115,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £58,565 £66,206 £60,000
% change year-on-year -11.54% +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 59,591 38,445 75,955
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 77.47% 93.42% 86.89%
Number of salaries quoted 36,208 22,191 57,021
10th Percentile £30,000 £31,250 £29,250
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% -11.29%
75th Percentile £77,500 £80,000 £73,750
90th Percentile £97,500 £101,250 £93,750
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 25 March 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 March 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 +31 9,300 £70,000 -6.67% 2,826
UK excluding London +28 7,160 £58,565 -11.54% 1,756
North of England +36 2,618 £60,000 -5.90% 455
London +28 2,476 £82,500 -13.16% 1,477
Work from Home +30 2,215 £67,500 +1.93% 1,250
North West +34 1,956 £61,418 -10.66% 229
Midlands +66 1,579 £52,500 -17.65% 214
South East +31 1,432 £52,500 -27.59% 594
West Midlands +70 1,273 £52,500 -10.64% 110
East of England +18 747 £55,000 -16.95% 145
Yorkshire +34 556 £65,000 +44.44% 165
South West +8 379 £60,000 - 199
East Midlands +56 317 £50,000 -23.08% 103
Scotland +18 265 £70,000 +55.56% 95
Wales +31 120 £47,500 -25.05% 68
North East +38 106 £55,000 -24.14% 63
Northern Ireland 0 63 £90,000 -5.26% 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
1 113 (1.12%) Apache Airflow
2 108 (1.07%) Apache Spark
3 90 (0.89%) SharePoint
4 65 (0.64%) Jupyter
5 58 (0.57%) CMS
5 58 (0.57%) Confluence
6 42 (0.42%) Apache
7 30 (0.30%) ArcGIS
8 27 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
9 23 (0.23%) WordPress
10 18 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
11 17 (0.17%) Appian
12 13 (0.13%) JBoss
12 13 (0.13%) WebSphere
13 10 (0.099%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 9 (0.089%) SAS
15 5 (0.049%) Apache Pulsar
15 5 (0.049%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.049%) IIS
15 5 (0.049%) Umbraco
Applications
1 1,007 (9.97%) Microsoft Excel
2 609 (6.03%) Chatbot
3 86 (0.85%) Microsoft Office
4 53 (0.52%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 23 (0.23%) UserZoom
6 22 (0.22%) MS Visio
6 22 (0.22%) Spreadsheet
7 11 (0.11%) Maya
8 7 (0.069%) Adobe Premiere
9 6 (0.059%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 6 (0.059%) Microsoft Project
9 6 (0.059%) Photoshop
10 5 (0.049%) Adobe Illustrator
10 5 (0.049%) 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%) Notion
Business Applications
1 37 (0.37%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.19%) NetSuite
3 18 (0.18%) SAP S/4HANA
4 13 (0.13%) Oracle ERP
5 12 (0.12%) Oracle Payables
6 10 (0.099%) Workday HCM
7 8 (0.079%) Distributed Ledger
7 8 (0.079%) Shopify
8 7 (0.069%) Oracle EBS
8 7 (0.069%) Salesforce CRM
9 6 (0.059%) Endur
10 4 (0.040%) Dynamics AX
10 4 (0.040%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 4 (0.040%) Oracle Receivables
10 4 (0.040%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 3 (0.030%) Oracle Assets
11 3 (0.030%) Oracle General Ledger
12 2 (0.020%) Dynamics GP
12 2 (0.020%) Oracle Cash Management
12 2 (0.020%) SAP SCM
Cloud Services
1 4,162 (41.19%) Cloud Computing
2 1,995 (19.74%) Azure
3 1,304 (12.90%) Power Platform
4 1,013 (10.02%) Azure AI
5 826 (8.17%) AWS
6 473 (4.68%) SaaS
7 358 (3.54%) GCP
8 211 (2.09%) GitHub
9 193 (1.91%) Microsoft 365
10 176 (1.74%) Snowflake
11 169 (1.67%) Azure DevOps
12 152 (1.50%) Adobe Analytics
13 122 (1.21%) Microsoft Copilot
14 119 (1.18%) Azure Data Factory
15 111 (1.10%) Serverless
16 105 (1.04%) GitHub Copilot
17 103 (1.02%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 100 (0.99%) Entra ID
19 99 (0.98%) Power Automate
20 93 (0.92%) Figma
Communications & Networking
1 4,053 (40.11%) Internet
2 235 (2.33%) Broadband
3 53 (0.52%) Firewall
4 32 (0.32%) Unified Communications
5 28 (0.28%) Network Security
6 26 (0.26%) VPN
7 20 (0.20%) VoIP
8 19 (0.19%) TCP/IP
9 18 (0.18%) DNS
9 18 (0.18%) HTTP
9 18 (0.18%) WAN
10 15 (0.15%) DHCP
11 14 (0.14%) Telepresence
11 14 (0.14%) WebEx
12 8 (0.079%) VLAN
12 8 (0.079%) Wi-Fi
13 7 (0.069%) SD-WAN
14 6 (0.059%) DMZ
14 6 (0.059%) Intranet
14 6 (0.059%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1,168 (11.56%) Power BI
2 1,050 (10.39%) Tableau
3 196 (1.94%) Data Warehouse
4 148 (1.46%) Data Lake
5 118 (1.17%) SQL Server
6 93 (0.92%) Metadata
7 91 (0.90%) PostgreSQL
8 82 (0.81%) MongoDB
8 82 (0.81%) NoSQL
9 68 (0.67%) BigQuery
10 67 (0.66%) Big Data
11 59 (0.58%) Looker
12 58 (0.57%) Elasticsearch
13 46 (0.46%) Amazon Redshift
14 39 (0.39%) MySQL
15 38 (0.38%) Pinecone
16 35 (0.35%) Relational Database
16 35 (0.35%) Snowflake Schema
17 33 (0.33%) Azure SQL Database
18 32 (0.32%) Apache Hive
Development Applications
1 154 (1.52%) Git
2 98 (0.97%) JIRA
3 78 (0.77%) MLflow
4 58 (0.57%) Visual Studio Code
5 47 (0.47%) Jenkins
6 34 (0.34%) GitLab
7 26 (0.26%) Claude Code
7 26 (0.26%) Selenium
8 25 (0.25%) IBM UrbanCode
9 24 (0.24%) Cypress.io
10 16 (0.16%) Postman
11 12 (0.12%) SpecFlow
11 12 (0.12%) Visual Studio
12 11 (0.11%) Bitbucket
12 11 (0.11%) TeamCity
13 10 (0.099%) Octopus Deploy
13 10 (0.099%) Oracle Forms
14 9 (0.089%) Storybook
15 8 (0.079%) Gradle
15 8 (0.079%) Vite
General
1 6,089 (60.26%) Social Skills
2 4,479 (44.32%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 4,259 (42.15%) Banking
4 1,208 (11.95%) Finance
5 859 (8.50%) Analytical Skills
6 413 (4.09%) Marketing
7 325 (3.22%) Legal
8 313 (3.10%) Public Sector
9 283 (2.80%) Law
10 278 (2.75%) Games
11 265 (2.62%) Retail
12 173 (1.71%) Manufacturing
13 116 (1.15%) Presentation Skills
14 104 (1.03%) Influencing Skills
15 102 (1.01%) Telecoms
16 91 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
17 84 (0.83%) Financial Institution
18 79 (0.78%) Pharmaceutical
19 51 (0.50%) Advertising
20 47 (0.47%) German Language
Job Titles
1 3,158 (31.25%) Lecturer
2 1,102 (10.91%) Analyst
3 952 (9.42%) Data Analyst
4 907 (8.98%) Junior
5 882 (8.73%) Junior Analyst
5 882 (8.73%) Junior Data Analyst
6 774 (7.66%) Senior
7 560 (5.54%) Lead
8 525 (5.20%) Trainer
9 428 (4.24%) Developer
10 339 (3.35%) Architect
11 272 (2.69%) Consultant
12 203 (2.01%) Software Engineer
13 179 (1.77%) Data Engineer
14 155 (1.53%) Solutions Architect
15 147 (1.45%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 108 (1.07%) Data Scientist
17 92 (0.91%) Python Engineer
18 89 (0.88%) Full-Stack Engineer
19 86 (0.85%) Senior Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 258 (2.55%) React
2 194 (1.92%) PyTorch
3 162 (1.60%) .NET
4 161 (1.59%) REST
5 152 (1.50%) TensorFlow
6 134 (1.33%) HTML
7 131 (1.30%) scikit-learn
8 129 (1.28%) Node.js
9 127 (1.26%) RESTful
10 115 (1.14%) LangChain
11 109 (1.08%) Kafka
12 105 (1.04%) CSS
13 103 (1.02%) Pandas
14 91 (0.90%) Hugging Face
15 87 (0.86%) FastAPI
16 81 (0.80%) Django
17 77 (0.76%) NumPy
18 66 (0.65%) AngularJS
19 65 (0.64%) PySpark
20 63 (0.62%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 4,076 (40.34%) IoT
2 315 (3.12%) Cloud Native
3 214 (2.12%) Onboarding
4 203 (2.01%) Social Media
5 180 (1.78%) Algorithms
6 173 (1.71%) Product Ownership
7 170 (1.68%) AI Agents
8 144 (1.43%) Robotics
9 136 (1.35%) Self-Motivation
10 130 (1.29%) Blog
11 105 (1.04%) Distributed Systems
12 100 (0.99%) Management Information System
13 97 (0.96%) Low-Code
14 96 (0.95%) Enterprise Software
15 87 (0.86%) Life Science
16 82 (0.81%) Mobile App
17 79 (0.78%) Public Cloud
18 64 (0.63%) Virtual Team
19 60 (0.59%) Data Centre
20 59 (0.58%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 96 (0.95%) Linux
2 94 (0.93%) Windows
3 85 (0.84%) Android
4 60 (0.59%) Apple iOS
4 60 (0.59%) Unix
5 31 (0.31%) Windows Server
6 15 (0.15%) Ubuntu
7 9 (0.089%) Mac OS
8 5 (0.049%) VMS
8 5 (0.049%) 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%) Mac OS X
11 2 (0.020%) zOS
12 1 (0.010%) FreeRTOS
12 1 (0.010%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
12 1 (0.010%) Solaris
12 1 (0.010%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 5,180 (51.26%) Machine Learning
2 4,329 (42.84%) User Experience
3 4,319 (42.74%) Cybersecurity
4 4,073 (40.31%) Web Development
5 1,328 (13.14%) Business Intelligence
6 1,292 (12.79%) Analytics
7 998 (9.88%) Agile
8 781 (7.73%) Roadmaps
9 776 (7.68%) Problem-Solving
10 681 (6.74%) Conversational UI
11 669 (6.62%) CI/CD
12 660 (6.53%) Decision-Making
13 621 (6.15%) Continuous Improvement
14 600 (5.94%) Software Engineering
15 564 (5.58%) Data Science
15 564 (5.58%) Generative AI
16 556 (5.50%) DevOps
17 548 (5.42%) LLM
18 499 (4.94%) Mentoring
19 408 (4.04%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 2,146 (21.24%) Python
2 1,519 (15.03%) SQL
3 253 (2.50%) JavaScript
4 250 (2.47%) Java
5 224 (2.22%) TypeScript
6 178 (1.76%) C#
7 84 (0.83%) C++
8 72 (0.71%) Go
9 65 (0.64%) Bash
10 64 (0.63%) PowerShell
11 56 (0.55%) R
12 40 (0.40%) Kotlin
13 37 (0.37%) PHP
14 29 (0.29%) Rust
15 27 (0.27%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 27 (0.27%) Scala
16 20 (0.20%) Apex Code
17 19 (0.19%) Bicep
18 18 (0.18%) C
19 17 (0.17%) Swift
Qualifications
1 5,413 (53.57%) Degree
2 4,469 (44.23%) Master's Degree
3 4,401 (43.55%) PhD
4 4,051 (40.09%) Postgraduate
5 940 (9.30%) Azure Certification
6 294 (2.91%) Security Cleared
7 194 (1.92%) SC Cleared
8 186 (1.84%) Computer Science Degree
9 117 (1.16%) AWS Certification
10 96 (0.95%) DV Cleared
11 71 (0.70%) DBS Check
12 56 (0.55%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 55 (0.54%) ACCA
14 50 (0.49%) PMP
15 44 (0.44%) CISSP
16 43 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
17 35 (0.35%) PMI Certification
18 31 (0.31%) CIMA
18 31 (0.31%) Numerate Degree
19 29 (0.29%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 328 (3.25%) Accessibility
2 264 (2.61%) Data Quality
3 167 (1.65%) GDPR
4 163 (1.61%) QA
5 69 (0.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 63 (0.62%) WCAG
7 49 (0.48%) EU AI Act
8 41 (0.41%) GRC
9 40 (0.40%) HIPAA
10 39 (0.39%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 38 (0.38%) IFRS
11 38 (0.38%) NIST
12 29 (0.29%) GxP
13 27 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
14 25 (0.25%) PMO
14 25 (0.25%) Solvency II
15 21 (0.21%) PSD2
15 21 (0.21%) SLA
16 18 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
17 16 (0.16%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 267 (2.64%) Docker
2 82 (0.81%) Active Directory
3 32 (0.32%) Virtual Machines
4 14 (0.14%) VMware Infrastructure
5 13 (0.13%) Firmware
6 9 (0.089%) vSphere
7 7 (0.069%) Virtual Desktop
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%) Hyper-V
10 2 (0.020%) RACF
11 1 (0.010%) Apache Flume
11 1 (0.010%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 252 (2.49%) Kubernetes
2 211 (2.09%) Terraform
3 61 (0.60%) Ansible
4 40 (0.40%) Single Sign-On
5 39 (0.39%) Prometheus
6 37 (0.37%) Grafana
7 33 (0.33%) Microsoft Intune
8 14 (0.14%) Cisco CUCM
9 8 (0.079%) Kubeflow
10 7 (0.069%) Argo
10 7 (0.069%) Proxmox
10 7 (0.069%) vCenter Server
11 4 (0.040%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 4 (0.040%) Control-M
11 4 (0.040%) RSA Archer
11 4 (0.040%) SolarWinds Orion
12 3 (0.030%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
12 3 (0.030%) HP Fortify
13 2 (0.020%) Microsoft Data Protection Manager
13 2 (0.020%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 1,695 (16.77%) Microsoft
2 514 (5.09%) PayPal
3 254 (2.51%) Databricks
4 205 (2.03%) Adobe
5 202 (2.00%) Google
6 144 (1.43%) Dell
7 115 (1.14%) OpenAI
8 107 (1.06%) Oracle
9 94 (0.93%) Salesforce
10 77 (0.76%) Cisco
11 71 (0.70%) SAP
12 59 (0.58%) Foundry
13 52 (0.51%) Palantir
14 47 (0.47%) Alteryx
15 44 (0.44%) ServiceNow
16 43 (0.43%) Informatica
17 35 (0.35%) Bloomberg
18 31 (0.31%) Apple
18 31 (0.31%) Red Hat
19 29 (0.29%) Fortinet