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

6 months to
14 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 4 52 64
Rank change year-on-year +48 +12 +54
Permanent jobs citing AI 9,396 2,580 2,349
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 15.66% 4.82% 4.22%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 19.33% 5.32% 4.69%
Number of salaries quoted 2,159 1,256 1,350
10th Percentile £34,250 £45,000 £42,500
25th Percentile £51,250 £57,500 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £77,000 £75,000
Median % change year-on-year -5.84% +2.67% +7.14%
75th Percentile £95,000 £98,750 £92,500
90th Percentile £118,750 £118,750 £120,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £60,000 £70,000 £65,000
% change year-on-year -14.29% +7.69% +4.69%

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 48,596 48,532 50,084
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 81.00% 90.69% 89.94%
Number of salaries quoted 28,664 23,590 38,164
10th Percentile £28,500 £35,000 £31,250
25th Percentile £37,500 £45,000 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -4.00%
75th Percentile £75,000 £80,000 £77,750
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £55,000 £52,000
% change year-on-year -9.09% +5.77% -5.45%

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 14 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 14 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 8,565 £72,500 -6.45% 4,059
UK excluding London +53 6,810 £60,000 -14.29% 3,611
Work from Home +63 2,704 £67,500 -10.00% 1,826
North of England +55 2,543 £62,500 -10.71% 634
London +34 2,179 £80,000 -11.11% 994
North West +42 1,979 £60,709 -13.27% 280
Midlands +103 1,502 £60,000 -7.69% 390
South East +29 1,390 £50,000 -33.33% 1,295
West Midlands +91 1,245 £65,000 +13.04% 150
East of England +88 620 £50,000 -35.06% 538
Yorkshire +56 459 £72,500 +11.54% 257
Scotland +48 346 £67,500 +13.45% 134
South West +35 325 £62,500 - 445
East Midlands +82 267 £42,500 -44.81% 230
Wales +41 118 £55,000 -12.00% 184
North East +58 105 £55,000 -27.63% 99
Northern Ireland -6 41 £86,250 -2.82% 82
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 91 (0.97%) SharePoint
2 53 (0.56%) Apache Airflow
3 52 (0.55%) Confluence
4 48 (0.51%) Apache Spark
5 40 (0.43%) CMS
6 20 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 19 (0.20%) Microsoft Exchange
8 16 (0.17%) Apache
9 15 (0.16%) WordPress
10 14 (0.15%) Appian
11 11 (0.12%) JBoss
11 11 (0.12%) WebSphere
12 10 (0.11%) Jupyter
13 9 (0.096%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.053%) Apache Pulsar
14 5 (0.053%) ArcGIS
14 5 (0.053%) IIS
14 5 (0.053%) nginx
14 5 (0.053%) Umbraco
15 4 (0.043%) Drupal
Applications
1 1,214 (12.92%) Chatbot
2 425 (4.52%) Microsoft Excel
3 93 (0.99%) Microsoft Office
4 41 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 21 (0.22%) Maya
6 10 (0.11%) Sketch
6 10 (0.11%) Spreadsheet
7 7 (0.074%) Adobe Premiere
7 7 (0.074%) Microsoft Project
7 7 (0.074%) MS Visio
7 7 (0.074%) Notion
8 6 (0.064%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 6 (0.064%) Adobe XD
8 6 (0.064%) Photoshop
9 4 (0.043%) InDesign
9 4 (0.043%) Weka
10 3 (0.032%) Final Cut Pro
10 3 (0.032%) Simulink
11 2 (0.021%) S-PLUS
12 1 (0.011%) Adobe Illustrator
Business Applications
1 52 (0.55%) 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 (0.085%) Endur
6 8 (0.085%) Workday HCM
7 7 (0.074%) Oracle EBS
8 6 (0.064%) Distributed Ledger
9 5 (0.053%) Elite 3E
9 5 (0.053%) Salesforce CRM
10 4 (0.043%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
10 4 (0.043%) 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 ERP
12 2 (0.021%) SAP SCM
Cloud Services
1 4,096 (43.59%) Cloud Computing
2 1,313 (13.97%) Azure
3 689 (7.33%) AWS
4 687 (7.31%) Power Platform
5 422 (4.49%) SaaS
6 388 (4.13%) Azure AI
7 319 (3.40%) GCP
8 220 (2.34%) GitHub
9 210 (2.23%) Azure DevOps
10 165 (1.76%) Microsoft 365
11 116 (1.23%) Snowflake
12 114 (1.21%) GitHub Copilot
13 101 (1.07%) Serverless
14 100 (1.06%) Azure Data Factory
15 99 (1.05%) Microsoft Copilot
16 86 (0.92%) Entra ID
16 86 (0.92%) Power Automate
17 74 (0.79%) Vertex AI
18 67 (0.71%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 60 (0.64%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 4,060 (43.21%) Internet
2 32 (0.34%) Firewall
3 25 (0.27%) Network Security
4 24 (0.26%) VoIP
5 22 (0.23%) Unified Communications
6 21 (0.22%) Broadband
7 17 (0.18%) VPN
8 16 (0.17%) WAN
9 15 (0.16%) Wi-Fi
10 14 (0.15%) HTTP
10 14 (0.15%) Telepresence
10 14 (0.15%) WebEx
11 13 (0.14%) DNS
12 12 (0.13%) TCP/IP
13 11 (0.12%) Wireless
14 10 (0.11%) VLAN
15 9 (0.096%) LAN
16 8 (0.085%) InfiniBand
17 7 (0.074%) DHCP
17 7 (0.074%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 542 (5.77%) Power BI
2 407 (4.33%) Tableau
3 154 (1.64%) Data Warehouse
4 112 (1.19%) NoSQL
5 108 (1.15%) SQL Server
6 99 (1.05%) Data Lake
7 82 (0.87%) MongoDB
8 80 (0.85%) PostgreSQL
9 70 (0.74%) Big Data
9 70 (0.74%) Metadata
10 48 (0.51%) MySQL
11 40 (0.43%) BigQuery
12 35 (0.37%) Relational Database
13 34 (0.36%) Hadoop
14 32 (0.34%) Pinecone
14 32 (0.34%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 29 (0.31%) Azure SQL Database
15 29 (0.31%) Looker
16 28 (0.30%) Elasticsearch
17 22 (0.23%) Data Mining
Development Applications
1 129 (1.37%) Git
2 128 (1.36%) JIRA
3 52 (0.55%) Jenkins
4 46 (0.49%) MLflow
5 26 (0.28%) GitLab
6 22 (0.23%) Octopus Deploy
6 22 (0.23%) TeamCity
7 18 (0.19%) Oracle Forms
8 16 (0.17%) Cypress.io
9 12 (0.13%) Visual Studio
10 11 (0.12%) Selenium
11 10 (0.11%) Bitbucket
12 9 (0.096%) Vite
13 8 (0.085%) Subversion
14 7 (0.074%) Burp Suite
14 7 (0.074%) Storybook
14 7 (0.074%) WebDriver
15 6 (0.064%) JMeter
15 6 (0.064%) JUnit
15 6 (0.064%) Postman
General
1 5,511 (58.65%) Social Skills
2 4,489 (47.78%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 4,214 (44.85%) Banking
4 1,105 (11.76%) Analytical Skills
5 1,087 (11.57%) Finance
6 392 (4.17%) Marketing
7 277 (2.95%) Public Sector
8 275 (2.93%) Law
9 252 (2.68%) Legal
10 198 (2.11%) Retail
11 119 (1.27%) Games
12 109 (1.16%) Telecoms
13 103 (1.10%) Manufacturing
14 97 (1.03%) Pharmaceutical
15 94 (1.00%) Presentation Skills
16 74 (0.79%) Organisational Skills
17 73 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
18 71 (0.76%) Financial Institution
19 66 (0.70%) Aviation
20 64 (0.68%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 3,162 (33.65%) Lecturer
2 1,173 (12.48%) Trainer
3 657 (6.99%) Senior
4 488 (5.19%) Analyst
5 393 (4.18%) Developer
6 370 (3.94%) Lead
7 347 (3.69%) Data Analyst
8 301 (3.20%) Junior
9 276 (2.94%) Junior Analyst
9 276 (2.94%) Junior Data Analyst
10 266 (2.83%) Architect
11 212 (2.26%) Consultant
12 173 (1.84%) Software Engineer
13 155 (1.65%) Content Editor
14 146 (1.55%) Data Engineer
15 131 (1.39%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 106 (1.13%) Support Specialist
17 102 (1.09%) Solutions Architect
18 98 (1.04%) Customer Support Specialist
19 90 (0.96%) Research Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 229 (2.44%) React
2 175 (1.86%) .NET
3 169 (1.80%) REST
4 128 (1.36%) PyTorch
5 118 (1.26%) Node.js
6 115 (1.22%) TensorFlow
7 113 (1.20%) LangChain
8 110 (1.17%) RESTful
9 92 (0.98%) HTML
10 83 (0.88%) FastAPI
11 69 (0.73%) Django
11 69 (0.73%) Kafka
12 68 (0.72%) AngularJS
13 66 (0.70%) CSS
14 58 (0.62%) Vue
15 55 (0.59%) scikit-learn
16 53 (0.56%) Flask
17 51 (0.54%) Next.js
18 48 (0.51%) OAuth
18 48 (0.51%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 4,075 (43.37%) IoT
2 263 (2.80%) Cloud Native
3 185 (1.97%) Product Ownership
4 176 (1.87%) Onboarding
5 149 (1.59%) AI Agents
6 148 (1.58%) Robotics
7 129 (1.37%) Algorithms
8 124 (1.32%) Self-Motivation
9 123 (1.31%) Enterprise Software
10 110 (1.17%) Blog
11 97 (1.03%) Molecular Biology
12 93 (0.99%) Life Science
12 93 (0.99%) Management Information System
13 89 (0.95%) Legacy Systems
14 88 (0.94%) Low-Code
15 81 (0.86%) Distributed Systems
16 72 (0.77%) Greenfield Project
17 71 (0.76%) Analytical Mindset
18 65 (0.69%) Virtual Team
19 51 (0.54%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 72 (0.77%) Windows
2 67 (0.71%) Linux
3 61 (0.65%) Android
4 52 (0.55%) Unix
5 39 (0.42%) Apple iOS
6 27 (0.29%) Windows Server
7 11 (0.12%) Mac OS
7 11 (0.12%) Ubuntu
8 5 (0.053%) Kali Linux
9 3 (0.032%) OpenWrt
10 2 (0.021%) Mac OS X
10 2 (0.021%) zOS
11 1 (0.011%) Debian
11 1 (0.011%) Robot Operating System
11 1 (0.011%) Solaris
11 1 (0.011%) VMS
11 1 (0.011%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 5,035 (53.59%) Machine Learning
2 4,327 (46.05%) Cybersecurity
3 4,307 (45.84%) User Experience
4 4,068 (43.30%) Web Development
5 1,265 (13.46%) Conversational UI
6 978 (10.41%) Analytics
7 889 (9.46%) Agile
8 741 (7.89%) Problem-Solving
9 673 (7.16%) Business Intelligence
10 584 (6.22%) Roadmaps
11 569 (6.06%) DevOps
12 554 (5.90%) Decision-Making
13 550 (5.85%) Software Engineering
14 547 (5.82%) Continuous Improvement
15 543 (5.78%) CI/CD
16 457 (4.86%) Generative AI
17 455 (4.84%) Data Science
18 439 (4.67%) Computer Science
19 435 (4.63%) LLM
20 406 (4.32%) Chemistry
Programming Languages
1 1,269 (13.51%) Python
2 867 (9.23%) SQL
3 246 (2.62%) TypeScript
4 240 (2.55%) JavaScript
5 189 (2.01%) Java
6 141 (1.50%) C#
7 82 (0.87%) PowerShell
8 74 (0.79%) C++
9 60 (0.64%) R
10 59 (0.63%) Bash
11 52 (0.55%) Go
12 33 (0.35%) PHP
13 31 (0.33%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 30 (0.32%) Rust
15 29 (0.31%) Scala
16 28 (0.30%) Kotlin
17 23 (0.24%) Apex Code
18 21 (0.22%) C
19 20 (0.21%) Bicep
19 20 (0.21%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 6,091 (64.83%) Degree
2 4,813 (51.22%) Master's Degree
3 4,736 (50.40%) PhD
4 4,049 (43.09%) Postgraduate
5 317 (3.37%) Azure Certification
6 304 (3.24%) Security Cleared
7 252 (2.68%) SC Cleared
8 211 (2.25%) Computer Science Degree
9 73 (0.78%) DV Cleared
10 56 (0.60%) AWS Certification
11 51 (0.54%) DBS Check
12 47 (0.50%) BPSS Clearance
13 46 (0.49%) PMP
14 39 (0.42%) CISSP
15 35 (0.37%) ACCA
15 35 (0.37%) Microsoft Certification
16 31 (0.33%) Numerate Degree
16 31 (0.33%) PMI Certification
17 28 (0.30%) CISA
18 26 (0.28%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 212 (2.26%) Data Quality
2 127 (1.35%) Accessibility
3 125 (1.33%) QA
4 106 (1.13%) GDPR
5 68 (0.72%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 43 (0.46%) GxP
7 39 (0.42%) EU AI Act
8 30 (0.32%) NIST
8 30 (0.32%) SLA
9 28 (0.30%) IFRS
10 25 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
11 24 (0.26%) Cyber Essentials
11 24 (0.26%) HIPAA
12 22 (0.23%) Solvency II
13 21 (0.22%) PSD2
14 20 (0.21%) GAAP
15 18 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
15 18 (0.19%) PMO
16 17 (0.18%) WCAG
17 16 (0.17%) GRC
System Software
1 232 (2.47%) Docker
2 59 (0.63%) Active Directory
3 22 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
4 18 (0.19%) Virtual Machines
5 16 (0.17%) VMware Infrastructure
6 15 (0.16%) Firmware
7 11 (0.12%) vSphere
8 7 (0.074%) Hyper-V
8 7 (0.074%) Lustre
9 5 (0.053%) GPFS
9 5 (0.053%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 4 (0.043%) VMware ESXi
11 2 (0.021%) Ceph
11 2 (0.021%) NFS
11 2 (0.021%) RACF
12 1 (0.011%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 224 (2.38%) Terraform
2 203 (2.16%) Kubernetes
3 50 (0.53%) Microsoft Intune
4 47 (0.50%) Ansible
5 41 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
6 26 (0.28%) Prometheus
7 17 (0.18%) Grafana
8 14 (0.15%) Cisco CUCM
9 9 (0.096%) Kubeflow
10 8 (0.085%) SCCM
11 7 (0.074%) Argo
12 4 (0.043%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 4 (0.043%) Nessus
12 4 (0.043%) Nmap
13 3 (0.032%) vCenter Server
14 2 (0.021%) Control-M
14 2 (0.021%) HP Fortify
14 2 (0.021%) Microsoft Data Protection Manager
14 2 (0.021%) Progress Chef
14 2 (0.021%) SELinux
Vendors
1 1,171 (12.46%) PayPal
2 1,057 (11.25%) Microsoft
3 186 (1.98%) Google
4 163 (1.73%) Databricks
5 112 (1.19%) OpenAI
6 101 (1.07%) Cisco
6 101 (1.07%) Oracle
7 95 (1.01%) Salesforce
8 91 (0.97%) Adobe
9 86 (0.92%) Dell
10 72 (0.77%) SAP
11 49 (0.52%) Alteryx
12 47 (0.50%) Blue Prism
13 46 (0.49%) Apple
14 45 (0.48%) Foundry
14 45 (0.48%) HubSpot
15 44 (0.47%) Palo Alto
16 39 (0.42%) Fortinet
17 35 (0.37%) Palantir
18 34 (0.36%) Bloomberg