Data Scientist Job Trends

Data Scientist
UK

The median Data Scientist salary in the UK is £75,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 14 August 2026.

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

6 months to
14 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 340 480 545
Rank change year-on-year +140 +65 -24
Permanent jobs requiring a Data Scientist 580 204 278
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.55% 0.41% 0.33%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.58% 0.45% 0.35%
Number of salaries quoted 377 94 148
10th Percentile £50,000 £42,500 £40,000
25th Percentile £60,000 £49,313 £50,090
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £75,000 £70,000 £64,500
Median % change year-on-year +7.14% +8.53% +3.20%
75th Percentile £92,988 £87,500 £82,188
90th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £111,250
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £55,000 £61,250
% change year-on-year +36.36% -10.20% +2.08%

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 100,001 44,901 79,174
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 94.04% 89.94% 95.02%
Number of salaries quoted 68,291 26,543 52,845
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,250 £30,000
25th Percentile £40,000 £36,250 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £56,000 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +1.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £75,000 £75,000 £72,000
90th Percentile £96,250 £95,000 £91,250
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,500 £48,122 £50,000
% change year-on-year +9.10% -3.76% -6.54%

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 14 August 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 14 August 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 +158 537 £75,000 +11.11% 557
UK excluding London +88 317 £75,000 +36.36% 174
London +89 240 £80,000 +4.92% 413
Work from Home +31 164 £70,000 +7.69% 193
North of England +43 107 £77,013 +43.28% 42
Midlands +39 79 £60,000 - 24
North West +50 71 £75,000 +39.53% 23
East Midlands +34 65 £60,000 +0.07% 7
South West -51 59 £65,000 -23.53% 18
South East -2 34 £60,000 +41.18% 53
Yorkshire -14 24 £81,387 +47.98% 15
West Midlands -20 14 £60,860 +1.43% 17
Wales -48 14 £75,000 -11.76% 7
East of England -10 13 £75,863 +59.71% 14
North East -49 12 £80,000 +53.85% 4
Northern Ireland - 7 £55,000 - 8
Scotland +1 4 £75,013 +7.16% 8

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

For the 6 months to 14 August 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.

1 578 (99.66%) Data Science
2 307 (52.93%) Machine Learning
3 244 (42.07%) AI
4 229 (39.48%) Python
5 185 (31.90%) Analytics
6 120 (20.69%) SQL
7 84 (14.48%) MLOps
8 81 (13.97%) Actionable Insight
8 81 (13.97%) Degree
9 79 (13.62%) Statistics
10 75 (12.93%) Generative AI
11 74 (12.76%) Mentoring
12 72 (12.41%) AWS
13 69 (11.90%) Natural Language Processing
14 68 (11.72%) Azure
15 66 (11.38%) Decision-Making
16 64 (11.03%) LLM
17 58 (10.00%) Roadmaps
18 57 (9.83%) CI/CD
19 56 (9.66%) Mathematics
20 53 (9.14%) Deep Learning
21 52 (8.97%) PyTorch
22 51 (8.79%) GCP
23 50 (8.62%) Predictive Modelling
24 49 (8.45%) Security Cleared
25 47 (8.10%) Feature Engineering
25 47 (8.10%) Validation
26 45 (7.76%) Agile
26 45 (7.76%) Software Engineering
26 45 (7.76%) Visualisation

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 32 (5.52%) Apache Spark
2 6 (1.03%) SAS
3 3 (0.52%) Apache
3 3 (0.52%) Jupyter
4 2 (0.34%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.17%) R Markdown
Applications
1 6 (1.03%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.69%) Chatbot
3 2 (0.34%) SPSS
4 1 (0.17%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 72 (12.41%) AWS
2 68 (11.72%) Azure
3 51 (8.79%) GCP
4 25 (4.31%) Power Platform
5 18 (3.10%) SaaS
6 13 (2.24%) Azure Machine Learning
7 10 (1.72%) dbt
8 6 (1.03%) Amazon S3
8 6 (1.03%) AWS Lambda
8 6 (1.03%) Dataform
8 6 (1.03%) Dynamics 365
8 6 (1.03%) Serverless
8 6 (1.03%) Snowflake
9 5 (0.86%) Amazon SageMaker
10 4 (0.69%) Smartsheet
11 3 (0.52%) Azure Data Factory
11 3 (0.52%) Salesforce Service Cloud
12 2 (0.34%) Cloud Computing
12 2 (0.34%) GitHub
12 2 (0.34%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.86%) Broadband
2 4 (0.69%) Software-Defined Radio
3 3 (0.52%) 5G
4 2 (0.34%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 25 (4.31%) Power BI
2 21 (3.62%) Amazon Redshift
3 17 (2.93%) Data Warehouse
4 15 (2.59%) Tableau
5 10 (1.72%) Looker
6 7 (1.21%) Data Lake
7 6 (1.03%) Big Data
7 6 (1.03%) Metabase
8 5 (0.86%) Delta Lake
9 4 (0.69%) Data Mining
10 3 (0.52%) Amazon Athena
10 3 (0.52%) Apache Iceberg
10 3 (0.52%) Flink
10 3 (0.52%) Redis
10 3 (0.52%) Relational Database
11 2 (0.34%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
11 2 (0.34%) Geospatial Data
11 2 (0.34%) NoSQL
12 1 (0.17%) BigQuery
12 1 (0.17%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 28 (4.83%) Git
2 13 (2.24%) MLflow
3 2 (0.34%) Visual Studio Code
4 1 (0.17%) JIRA
General
1 134 (23.10%) Finance
2 71 (12.24%) Analytical Skills
3 58 (10.00%) Banking
4 53 (9.14%) Social Skills
5 41 (7.07%) Retail
6 36 (6.21%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 30 (5.17%) Marketing
8 27 (4.66%) Public Sector
9 21 (3.62%) Financial Institution
10 18 (3.10%) Games
11 15 (2.59%) Law
11 15 (2.59%) Legal
12 11 (1.90%) Advertising
13 9 (1.55%) Manufacturing
13 9 (1.55%) Pharmaceutical
14 7 (1.21%) Influencing Skills
15 6 (1.03%) Wearables
16 5 (0.86%) Presentation Skills
16 5 (0.86%) Publishing
16 5 (0.86%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 52 (8.97%) PyTorch
2 43 (7.41%) TensorFlow
3 33 (5.69%) scikit-learn
4 29 (5.00%) Pandas
5 24 (4.14%) Hugging Face
6 18 (3.10%) SpaCy
7 17 (2.93%) NumPy
8 13 (2.24%) XGBoost
9 12 (2.07%) LangChain
10 8 (1.38%) PySpark
11 6 (1.03%) LangGraph
11 6 (1.03%) SciPy
12 5 (0.86%) LlamaIndex
12 5 (0.86%) Streamlit
13 4 (0.69%) Seaborn
14 3 (0.52%) Kafka
15 2 (0.34%) FastAPI
15 2 (0.34%) Flask
15 2 (0.34%) LightGBM
15 2 (0.34%) Matplotlib
Miscellaneous
1 35 (6.03%) Algorithms
2 18 (3.10%) e-Learning
3 13 (2.24%) AI Agents
4 9 (1.55%) Cloud Native
4 9 (1.55%) Credit Risk
5 7 (1.21%) Hedge funds
5 7 (1.21%) Social Media
6 6 (1.03%) Life Science
7 5 (0.86%) Pricing Data
8 4 (0.69%) Data Structures
9 3 (0.52%) Clustering
9 3 (0.52%) Cyber Threat
9 3 (0.52%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 3 (0.52%) Legacy Systems
10 2 (0.34%) Distributed Computing
10 2 (0.34%) FMCG
10 2 (0.34%) Hackathon
10 2 (0.34%) Insider Threat
10 2 (0.34%) Product Ownership
10 2 (0.34%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 3 (0.52%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 578 (99.66%) Data Science
2 307 (52.93%) Machine Learning
3 244 (42.07%) AI
4 185 (31.90%) Analytics
5 84 (14.48%) MLOps
6 81 (13.97%) Actionable Insight
7 79 (13.62%) Statistics
8 75 (12.93%) Generative AI
9 74 (12.76%) Mentoring
10 69 (11.90%) Natural Language Processing
11 66 (11.38%) Decision-Making
12 64 (11.03%) LLM
13 58 (10.00%) Roadmaps
14 57 (9.83%) CI/CD
15 56 (9.66%) Mathematics
16 53 (9.14%) Deep Learning
17 50 (8.62%) Predictive Modelling
18 47 (8.10%) Feature Engineering
18 47 (8.10%) Validation
19 45 (7.76%) Agile
Programming Languages
1 229 (39.48%) Python
2 120 (20.69%) SQL
3 25 (4.31%) R
4 6 (1.03%) Julia
5 4 (0.69%) C
5 4 (0.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 4 (0.69%) T-SQL
6 3 (0.52%) C++
6 3 (0.52%) Java
7 2 (0.34%) Bash
7 2 (0.34%) VBA
8 1 (0.17%) C#
8 1 (0.17%) LookML
8 1 (0.17%) Scala
Qualifications
1 81 (13.97%) Degree
2 49 (8.45%) Security Cleared
3 36 (6.21%) DV Cleared
4 32 (5.52%) Master's Degree
5 28 (4.83%) PhD
6 13 (2.24%) DBS Check
7 7 (1.21%) SC Cleared
8 4 (0.69%) Computer Science Degree
9 3 (0.52%) CISSP
9 3 (0.52%) Numerate Degree
10 2 (0.34%) CompTIA Security+
10 2 (0.34%) GIAC
10 2 (0.34%) SANS
11 1 (0.17%) Azure Certification
11 1 (0.17%) CEH
11 1 (0.17%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (5.00%) Data Quality
2 5 (0.86%) Actionable Recommendations
2 5 (0.86%) EU AI Act
2 5 (0.86%) GDPR
3 4 (0.69%) QA
4 2 (0.34%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 18 (3.10%) Docker
Systems Management
1 15 (2.59%) Kubernetes
2 5 (0.86%) Terraform
3 3 (0.52%) Kubeflow
4 2 (0.34%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
4 2 (0.34%) Computer Incident Response Team
Vendors
1 36 (6.21%) Databricks
2 15 (2.59%) Google
3 14 (2.41%) Microsoft
4 8 (1.38%) LexisNexis
5 6 (1.03%) ServiceNow
6 5 (0.86%) OpenAI
6 5 (0.86%) Workday
7 3 (0.52%) Oracle
7 3 (0.52%) PeopleSoft
7 3 (0.52%) Revolut
7 3 (0.52%) Salesforce
8 2 (0.34%) SYSPRO
9 1 (0.17%) Cognizant
9 1 (0.17%) Dataiku