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 28 August 2026.

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

6 months to
28 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 338 533 541
Rank change year-on-year +195 +8 -22
Permanent jobs requiring a Data Scientist 587 145 288
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.54% 0.29% 0.34%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.57% 0.32% 0.36%
Number of salaries quoted 375 89 147
10th Percentile £50,000 £42,500 £39,900
25th Percentile £60,000 £52,500 £50,060
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £75,000 £70,000 £63,000
Median % change year-on-year +7.14% +11.11% +0.80%
75th Percentile £95,000 £87,500 £80,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £95,500 £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 102,724 44,889 79,411
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 93.88% 89.80% 95.11%
Number of salaries quoted 70,515 26,591 51,705
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,250 £30,000
25th Percentile £40,000 £36,250 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £57,500 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £75,000 £74,258 £72,500
90th Percentile £97,500 £95,000 £91,250
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 28 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 28 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 +194 543 £75,000 +3.45% 519
UK excluding London +137 319 £75,000 +36.36% 178
London +100 244 £82,500 +3.13% 372
Work from Home +75 160 £70,000 +7.69% 186
North of England +44 111 £80,000 +45.45% 44
Midlands +35 74 £68,360 +13.93% 24
North West +30 68 £75,000 +36.36% 27
East Midlands +34 66 £60,000 +0.07% 8
South West -25 56 £70,000 -17.65% 17
South East -11 39 £62,500 +47.06% 61
Yorkshire -11 31 £83,774 +52.32% 13
Wales - 14 £75,000 - 7
East of England -15 13 £75,863 +59.71% 14
North East -42 12 £80,000 +53.85% 4
West Midlands -26 8 £75,000 +25.00% 16
Northern Ireland - 8 £55,000 - 5
Scotland +5 4 £75,013 +7.16% 7

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

For the 6 months to 28 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.

1 585 (99.66%) Data Science
2 310 (52.81%) Machine Learning
3 240 (40.89%) AI
4 226 (38.50%) Python
5 181 (30.83%) Analytics
6 117 (19.93%) SQL
7 83 (14.14%) MLOps
8 81 (13.80%) Degree
9 80 (13.63%) Actionable Insight
9 80 (13.63%) Statistics
10 75 (12.78%) Generative AI
10 75 (12.78%) Mentoring
11 72 (12.27%) Natural Language Processing
12 71 (12.10%) AWS
13 67 (11.41%) Azure
14 63 (10.73%) LLM
15 61 (10.39%) Decision-Making
16 58 (9.88%) Roadmaps
17 57 (9.71%) CI/CD
18 53 (9.03%) Deep Learning
18 53 (9.03%) Mathematics
19 52 (8.86%) GCP
20 51 (8.69%) Predictive Modelling
21 49 (8.35%) PyTorch
22 47 (8.01%) Feature Engineering
22 47 (8.01%) Validation
23 46 (7.84%) Security Cleared
24 45 (7.67%) Agile
24 45 (7.67%) Software Engineering
25 42 (7.16%) Data Engineering

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 34 (5.79%) Apache Spark
2 6 (1.02%) SAS
3 3 (0.51%) Apache
3 3 (0.51%) Jupyter
4 2 (0.34%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.17%) R Markdown
Applications
1 4 (0.68%) Chatbot
1 4 (0.68%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.34%) SPSS
3 1 (0.17%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 71 (12.10%) AWS
2 67 (11.41%) Azure
3 52 (8.86%) GCP
4 23 (3.92%) Power Platform
5 18 (3.07%) SaaS
6 13 (2.21%) Azure Machine Learning
7 10 (1.70%) dbt
8 6 (1.02%) Amazon S3
8 6 (1.02%) AWS Lambda
8 6 (1.02%) Dataform
8 6 (1.02%) Serverless
9 5 (0.85%) Amazon SageMaker
10 4 (0.68%) Dynamics 365
10 4 (0.68%) Snowflake
11 3 (0.51%) Anthropic Claude
11 3 (0.51%) Azure Data Factory
11 3 (0.51%) GitHub
11 3 (0.51%) Salesforce Service Cloud
12 2 (0.34%) Azure AI
12 2 (0.34%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.85%) Broadband
2 4 (0.68%) Software-Defined Radio
3 3 (0.51%) 5G
4 2 (0.34%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 23 (3.92%) Amazon Redshift
1 23 (3.92%) Power BI
2 17 (2.90%) Data Warehouse
3 15 (2.56%) Tableau
4 10 (1.70%) Looker
5 7 (1.19%) Data Lake
6 6 (1.02%) Big Data
6 6 (1.02%) Metabase
7 5 (0.85%) Delta Lake
8 4 (0.68%) Data Mining
9 3 (0.51%) Amazon Athena
9 3 (0.51%) Apache Iceberg
9 3 (0.51%) Flink
9 3 (0.51%) Redis
9 3 (0.51%) Relational Database
10 2 (0.34%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
10 2 (0.34%) Geospatial Data
10 2 (0.34%) NoSQL
11 1 (0.17%) BigQuery
11 1 (0.17%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 27 (4.60%) Git
2 12 (2.04%) MLflow
3 2 (0.34%) Visual Studio Code
4 1 (0.17%) Claude Code
4 1 (0.17%) JIRA
General
1 137 (23.34%) Finance
2 71 (12.10%) Analytical Skills
3 61 (10.39%) Banking
4 55 (9.37%) Social Skills
5 43 (7.33%) Retail
6 33 (5.62%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 31 (5.28%) Marketing
8 27 (4.60%) Public Sector
9 23 (3.92%) Financial Institution
10 18 (3.07%) Games
11 15 (2.56%) Law
11 15 (2.56%) Legal
12 11 (1.87%) Advertising
13 9 (1.53%) Pharmaceutical
14 7 (1.19%) Manufacturing
15 6 (1.02%) Influencing Skills
15 6 (1.02%) Wearables
16 5 (0.85%) Automotive
16 5 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
16 5 (0.85%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 49 (8.35%) PyTorch
2 40 (6.81%) TensorFlow
3 30 (5.11%) scikit-learn
4 29 (4.94%) Pandas
5 24 (4.09%) Hugging Face
6 20 (3.41%) SpaCy
7 17 (2.90%) NumPy
8 11 (1.87%) LangChain
8 11 (1.87%) XGBoost
9 8 (1.36%) PySpark
10 6 (1.02%) LangGraph
10 6 (1.02%) SciPy
11 5 (0.85%) LlamaIndex
11 5 (0.85%) Streamlit
11 5 (0.85%) Terraform
12 4 (0.68%) Seaborn
13 3 (0.51%) Kafka
14 2 (0.34%) Flask
14 2 (0.34%) LightGBM
14 2 (0.34%) Plotly
Miscellaneous
1 35 (5.96%) Algorithms
2 20 (3.41%) e-Learning
3 14 (2.39%) AI Agents
4 10 (1.70%) Credit Risk
5 9 (1.53%) Cloud Native
6 7 (1.19%) Hedge funds
6 7 (1.19%) Social Media
7 6 (1.02%) Life Science
8 5 (0.85%) Pricing Data
9 4 (0.68%) Data Structures
10 3 (0.51%) Clustering
10 3 (0.51%) Cyber Threat
10 3 (0.51%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 3 (0.51%) Legacy Systems
11 2 (0.34%) Analytical Mindset
11 2 (0.34%) Distributed Computing
11 2 (0.34%) Hackathon
11 2 (0.34%) Insider Threat
11 2 (0.34%) Product Ownership
11 2 (0.34%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 3 (0.51%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 585 (99.66%) Data Science
2 310 (52.81%) Machine Learning
3 240 (40.89%) AI
4 181 (30.83%) Analytics
5 83 (14.14%) MLOps
6 80 (13.63%) Actionable Insight
6 80 (13.63%) Statistics
7 75 (12.78%) Generative AI
7 75 (12.78%) Mentoring
8 72 (12.27%) Natural Language Processing
9 63 (10.73%) LLM
10 61 (10.39%) Decision-Making
11 58 (9.88%) Roadmaps
12 57 (9.71%) CI/CD
13 53 (9.03%) Deep Learning
13 53 (9.03%) Mathematics
14 51 (8.69%) Predictive Modelling
15 47 (8.01%) Feature Engineering
15 47 (8.01%) Validation
16 45 (7.67%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 226 (38.50%) Python
2 117 (19.93%) SQL
3 24 (4.09%) R
4 6 (1.02%) Julia
5 4 (0.68%) C
6 3 (0.51%) C++
6 3 (0.51%) Java
7 2 (0.34%) Bash
7 2 (0.34%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 2 (0.34%) T-SQL
7 2 (0.34%) VBA
8 1 (0.17%) C#
8 1 (0.17%) LookML
8 1 (0.17%) Scala
Qualifications
1 81 (13.80%) Degree
2 46 (7.84%) Security Cleared
3 34 (5.79%) Master's Degree
4 33 (5.62%) DV Cleared
5 28 (4.77%) PhD
6 13 (2.21%) DBS Check
7 7 (1.19%) SC Cleared
8 4 (0.68%) Computer Science Degree
8 4 (0.68%) Numerate Degree
9 3 (0.51%) CISSP
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 30 (5.11%) Data Quality
2 5 (0.85%) Actionable Recommendations
2 5 (0.85%) EU AI Act
2 5 (0.85%) GDPR
3 4 (0.68%) QA
4 2 (0.34%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 17 (2.90%) Docker
Systems Management
1 14 (2.39%) Kubernetes
2 3 (0.51%) Kubeflow
3 2 (0.34%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
3 2 (0.34%) Computer Incident Response Team
Vendors
1 37 (6.30%) Databricks
2 15 (2.56%) Google
3 14 (2.39%) Microsoft
4 8 (1.36%) LexisNexis
5 7 (1.19%) Workday
6 6 (1.02%) OpenAI
7 3 (0.51%) Oracle
7 3 (0.51%) PeopleSoft
7 3 (0.51%) Revolut
7 3 (0.51%) Salesforce
8 2 (0.34%) SYSPRO
9 1 (0.17%) Cognizant
9 1 (0.17%) Dataiku