Data Scientist Job Trends

Data Scientist
UK

The median Data Scientist salary in the UK is £80,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 2 October 2026.

The table below compares current salary benchmarking and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 333 534 482
Rank change year-on-year +201 -52 +12
Permanent jobs requiring a Data Scientist 652 144 322
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.55% 0.29% 0.43%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.59% 0.32% 0.45%
Number of salaries quoted 389 83 130
10th Percentile £51,850 £42,500 £38,620
25th Percentile £62,500 £52,500 £49,577
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £70,000 £62,879
Median % change year-on-year +14.29% +11.32% +0.61%
75th Percentile £95,000 £87,500 £79,688
90th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £111,625
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £55,000 £57,500
% change year-on-year +36.36% -4.35% -8.00%

All Permanent IT Job Roles
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of permanent jobs in our overall sample.

Permanent vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 109,690 44,526 71,445
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 92.87% 89.77% 95.29%
Number of salaries quoted 74,912 25,656 41,522
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,250 £30,750
25th Percentile £40,825 £36,250 £40,013
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £58,600 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +6.55% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £77,000 £73,775 £75,000
90th Percentile £98,750 £95,000 £93,750
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year +15.79% -5.00% -4.76%

Data Scientist
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings featuring 'Data Scientist' in the job title relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Data Scientist job vacancy trend in the UK

Data Scientist
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for Data Scientist job vacancies in the UK.

Salary distribution trend for Data Scientist job vacancies in the UK

Data Scientist
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Data Scientist over the 6 months to 2 October 2026.

Salary histogram for Data Scientist in the UK

Data Scientist
Top 17 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Data Scientist within the UK over the 6 months to 2 October 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 +194 604 £80,000 +14.29% 776
UK excluding London +121 348 £75,000 +36.36% 291
London +102 277 £90,000 +12.50% 519
Work from Home +84 166 £70,000 - 334
North of England +26 111 £80,000 +45.45% 73
South East +18 73 £80,000 +88.24% 54
Midlands +11 69 £67,500 -3.05% 51
East Midlands +19 63 £60,000 -25.00% 21
North West +11 62 £75,000 +36.36% 43
South West -16 61 £72,500 +3.57% 44
Yorkshire +4 37 £84,387 +53.43% 24
Wales - 15 £75,000 - 27
North East -51 12 £80,000 +53.85% 6
Northern Ireland -79 8 £72,500 +81.25% 10
East of England -36 7 £60,000 +2.13% 21
West Midlands -40 6 £75,000 +26.58% 30
Scotland +9 4 £75,013 +66.70% 14

Data Scientist Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 2 October 2026, Data Scientist job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all permanent job ads featuring Data Scientist in the job title.

1 650 (99.69%) Data Science
2 343 (52.61%) Machine Learning
3 270 (41.41%) AI
4 233 (35.74%) Python
5 190 (29.14%) Analytics
6 118 (18.10%) SQL
7 98 (15.03%) MLOps
8 89 (13.65%) Generative AI
9 86 (13.19%) Actionable Insight
10 83 (12.73%) Degree
11 81 (12.42%) Natural Language Processing
12 77 (11.81%) Mentoring
13 76 (11.66%) Azure
14 75 (11.50%) Statistics
15 65 (9.97%) AWS
15 65 (9.97%) Predictive Modelling
16 63 (9.66%) CI/CD
17 62 (9.51%) LLM
17 62 (9.51%) Roadmaps
18 60 (9.20%) Decision-Making
19 55 (8.44%) GCP
20 54 (8.28%) Deep Learning
21 51 (7.82%) Software Engineering
22 49 (7.52%) Agile
23 48 (7.36%) Mathematics
23 48 (7.36%) Problem-Solving
24 47 (7.21%) Validation
25 46 (7.06%) Feature Engineering
26 45 (6.90%) Security Cleared
27 43 (6.60%) PyTorch

Data Scientist Skill Set
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 41 (6.29%) Apache Spark
2 6 (0.92%) Apache
2 6 (0.92%) SAS
3 5 (0.77%) Apache Airflow
4 3 (0.46%) Jupyter
5 1 (0.15%) R Markdown
Applications
1 5 (0.77%) Chatbot
2 4 (0.61%) Microsoft Excel
3 2 (0.31%) SPSS
4 1 (0.15%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.15%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 1 (0.15%) Spreadsheet
4 1 (0.15%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 76 (11.66%) Azure
2 65 (9.97%) AWS
3 55 (8.44%) GCP
4 21 (3.22%) SaaS
5 19 (2.91%) Azure Machine Learning
6 11 (1.69%) Power Platform
7 7 (1.07%) dbt
8 4 (0.61%) Amazon S3
8 4 (0.61%) AWS Lambda
8 4 (0.61%) Azure AI
8 4 (0.61%) Azure Databricks
8 4 (0.61%) Serverless
8 4 (0.61%) Snowflake
9 3 (0.46%) Amazon SageMaker
9 3 (0.46%) Anthropic Claude
9 3 (0.46%) Azure Data Factory
9 3 (0.46%) Cloud Composer
9 3 (0.46%) GitHub
9 3 (0.46%) Salesforce Service Cloud
10 2 (0.31%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 3 (0.46%) 5G
1 3 (0.46%) Broadband
2 2 (0.31%) Firewall
2 2 (0.31%) Software-Defined Radio
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (4.29%) Amazon Redshift
2 12 (1.84%) Data Warehouse
3 11 (1.69%) Power BI
4 8 (1.23%) Tableau
5 7 (1.07%) Big Data
5 7 (1.07%) Data Lake
5 7 (1.07%) Looker
6 6 (0.92%) Flink
7 5 (0.77%) Delta Lake
8 4 (0.61%) BigQuery
8 4 (0.61%) Relational Database
9 3 (0.46%) Apache Iceberg
9 3 (0.46%) Redis
10 2 (0.31%) Data Mining
10 2 (0.31%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
10 2 (0.31%) Geospatial Data
11 1 (0.15%) Amazon Athena
11 1 (0.15%) MongoDB
11 1 (0.15%) Neo4j
11 1 (0.15%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 34 (5.21%) Git
2 10 (1.53%) MLflow
3 2 (0.31%) Visual Studio Code
4 1 (0.15%) Claude Code
4 1 (0.15%) JIRA
General
1 139 (21.32%) Finance
2 66 (10.12%) Banking
3 61 (9.36%) Analytical Skills
4 58 (8.90%) Social Skills
5 40 (6.13%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 35 (5.37%) Retail
7 29 (4.45%) Marketing
8 28 (4.29%) Financial Institution
9 24 (3.68%) Public Sector
10 22 (3.37%) Games
11 15 (2.30%) Legal
12 13 (1.99%) Law
13 11 (1.69%) Advertising
14 7 (1.07%) Influencing Skills
15 6 (0.92%) Telecoms
15 6 (0.92%) Wearables
16 5 (0.77%) Automotive
16 5 (0.77%) Pharmaceutical
16 5 (0.77%) Publishing
16 5 (0.77%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 43 (6.60%) PyTorch
2 40 (6.13%) TensorFlow
3 25 (3.83%) Hugging Face
3 25 (3.83%) SpaCy
4 23 (3.53%) Pandas
5 22 (3.37%) scikit-learn
6 15 (2.30%) NumPy
7 11 (1.69%) LangChain
8 10 (1.53%) PySpark
9 9 (1.38%) XGBoost
10 7 (1.07%) Terraform
11 6 (0.92%) LangGraph
11 6 (0.92%) SciPy
12 5 (0.77%) LlamaIndex
12 5 (0.77%) Streamlit
13 4 (0.61%) Seaborn
14 3 (0.46%) Apache Beam
14 3 (0.46%) Kafka
14 3 (0.46%) Plotly
15 2 (0.31%) Google JAX
Miscellaneous
1 38 (5.83%) Algorithms
2 25 (3.83%) e-Learning
3 16 (2.45%) AI Agents
4 9 (1.38%) Cloud Native
4 9 (1.38%) Credit Risk
5 7 (1.07%) Hedge funds
5 7 (1.07%) Social Media
6 6 (0.92%) Life Science
7 5 (0.77%) Pricing Data
8 4 (0.61%) Data Structures
8 4 (0.61%) Product Ownership
9 3 (0.46%) Clustering
9 3 (0.46%) Cyber Threat
9 3 (0.46%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 3 (0.46%) Legacy Systems
9 3 (0.46%) Self-Motivation
10 2 (0.31%) Blog
10 2 (0.31%) FMCG
10 2 (0.31%) Hackathon
10 2 (0.31%) Insider Threat
Operating Systems
1 3 (0.46%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 650 (99.69%) Data Science
2 343 (52.61%) Machine Learning
3 270 (41.41%) AI
4 190 (29.14%) Analytics
5 98 (15.03%) MLOps
6 89 (13.65%) Generative AI
7 86 (13.19%) Actionable Insight
8 81 (12.42%) Natural Language Processing
9 77 (11.81%) Mentoring
10 75 (11.50%) Statistics
11 65 (9.97%) Predictive Modelling
12 63 (9.66%) CI/CD
13 62 (9.51%) LLM
13 62 (9.51%) Roadmaps
14 60 (9.20%) Decision-Making
15 54 (8.28%) Deep Learning
16 51 (7.82%) Software Engineering
17 49 (7.52%) Agile
18 48 (7.36%) Mathematics
18 48 (7.36%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 233 (35.74%) Python
2 118 (18.10%) SQL
3 18 (2.76%) R
4 6 (0.92%) Java
5 5 (0.77%) Scala
6 4 (0.61%) C
7 3 (0.46%) C++
7 3 (0.46%) Shell Script
8 2 (0.31%) Bash
8 2 (0.31%) VBA
9 1 (0.15%) C#
9 1 (0.15%) Gremlin
9 1 (0.15%) LookML
Qualifications
1 83 (12.73%) Degree
2 45 (6.90%) Security Cleared
3 42 (6.44%) Master's Degree
4 33 (5.06%) PhD
5 29 (4.45%) DV Cleared
6 8 (1.23%) SC Cleared
7 5 (0.77%) Numerate Degree
8 3 (0.46%) CISSP
9 2 (0.31%) CompTIA Security+
9 2 (0.31%) Computer Science Degree
9 2 (0.31%) DBS Check
9 2 (0.31%) GIAC
9 2 (0.31%) SANS
10 1 (0.15%) Azure Certification
10 1 (0.15%) CEH
10 1 (0.15%) CISM
10 1 (0.15%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 26 (3.99%) Data Quality
2 6 (0.92%) Actionable Recommendations
3 5 (0.77%) EU AI Act
3 5 (0.77%) GDPR
4 3 (0.46%) QA
5 2 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 20 (3.07%) Docker
Systems Management
1 16 (2.45%) Kubernetes
2 2 (0.31%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
2 2 (0.31%) Computer Incident Response Team
3 1 (0.15%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 39 (5.98%) Databricks
2 18 (2.76%) Google
3 17 (2.61%) Microsoft
4 14 (2.15%) LexisNexis
5 13 (1.99%) Workday
6 6 (0.92%) OpenAI
7 3 (0.46%) New Relic
7 3 (0.46%) Oracle
7 3 (0.46%) PeopleSoft
7 3 (0.46%) Revolut
7 3 (0.46%) Salesforce
7 3 (0.46%) Splunk
8 2 (0.31%) SYSPRO
9 1 (0.15%) Cognizant
9 1 (0.15%) Dataiku
9 1 (0.15%) Mistral
9 1 (0.15%) SAP