Data Scientist Job Trends

Data Scientist
UK

The median Data Scientist salary in the UK is £75,026 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 11 September 2026.

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

6 months to
11 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 338 524 500
Rank change year-on-year +186 -24 +20
Permanent jobs requiring a Data Scientist 609 152 312
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.54% 0.31% 0.40%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.57% 0.34% 0.42%
Number of salaries quoted 393 90 143
10th Percentile £52,000 £42,500 £39,800
25th Percentile £62,333 £52,500 £49,698
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £75,026 £72,500 £62,879
Median % change year-on-year +3.48% +15.30% +0.61%
75th Percentile £95,000 £87,500 £80,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £95,250 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £55,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year +36.36% -8.33% -

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 106,082 44,571 74,889
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 93.45% 89.73% 95.26%
Number of salaries quoted 73,120 26,247 45,923
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 £77,500 £75,000 £73,750
90th Percentile £97,500 £95,000 £92,500
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 11 September 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 11 September 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 +186 563 £80,000 +8.11% 327
UK excluding London +124 328 £75,000 +36.36% 118
London +89 254 £90,000 +12.50% 241
Work from Home +75 158 £70,000 - 140
North of England +55 115 £80,000 +45.45% 28
Midlands +16 72 £66,720 +11.20% 14
North West +30 68 £75,000 +36.36% 15
East Midlands +27 65 £60,000 +0.07% 8
South East +3 52 £77,500 +82.35% 31
South West -32 52 £70,000 -17.65% 12
Yorkshire -12 35 £87,500 +59.09% 11
Wales - 14 £75,000 - 10
East of England -20 12 £65,000 +48.57% 12
North East -45 12 £80,000 +53.85% 2
West Midlands -29 7 £75,000 +25.00% 6
Northern Ireland -70 7 £72,500 +81.25% 3
Scotland +8 4 £75,013 +30.46% 8

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

For the 6 months to 11 September 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.

1 607 (99.67%) Data Science
2 324 (53.20%) Machine Learning
3 254 (41.71%) AI
4 232 (38.10%) Python
5 184 (30.21%) Analytics
6 121 (19.87%) SQL
7 90 (14.78%) MLOps
8 83 (13.63%) Degree
9 82 (13.46%) Statistics
10 80 (13.14%) Actionable Insight
10 80 (13.14%) Generative AI
11 78 (12.81%) Mentoring
12 77 (12.64%) Natural Language Processing
13 73 (11.99%) Azure
14 71 (11.66%) AWS
15 64 (10.51%) LLM
16 62 (10.18%) CI/CD
17 59 (9.69%) Roadmaps
18 58 (9.52%) Decision-Making
19 56 (9.20%) Predictive Modelling
20 55 (9.03%) GCP
21 54 (8.87%) Deep Learning
22 52 (8.54%) Mathematics
23 50 (8.21%) PyTorch
24 48 (7.88%) Validation
25 47 (7.72%) Feature Engineering
25 47 (7.72%) Problem-Solving
26 46 (7.55%) Agile
26 46 (7.55%) Software Engineering
27 45 (7.39%) Security Cleared

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 38 (6.24%) Apache Spark
2 6 (0.99%) SAS
3 3 (0.49%) Apache
3 3 (0.49%) Jupyter
4 2 (0.33%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.16%) R Markdown
Applications
1 4 (0.66%) Chatbot
1 4 (0.66%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.33%) SPSS
3 1 (0.16%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 73 (11.99%) Azure
2 71 (11.66%) AWS
3 55 (9.03%) GCP
4 22 (3.61%) Power Platform
5 18 (2.96%) SaaS
6 16 (2.63%) Azure Machine Learning
7 9 (1.48%) dbt
8 6 (0.99%) Amazon S3
8 6 (0.99%) AWS Lambda
8 6 (0.99%) Serverless
9 5 (0.82%) Amazon SageMaker
9 5 (0.82%) Dataform
10 4 (0.66%) Azure AI
10 4 (0.66%) Dynamics 365
10 4 (0.66%) Snowflake
11 3 (0.49%) Anthropic Claude
11 3 (0.49%) Azure Data Factory
11 3 (0.49%) Azure Databricks
11 3 (0.49%) GitHub
11 3 (0.49%) Salesforce Service Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.82%) Broadband
2 4 (0.66%) Software-Defined Radio
3 3 (0.49%) 5G
4 2 (0.33%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 25 (4.11%) Amazon Redshift
2 22 (3.61%) Power BI
3 16 (2.63%) Data Warehouse
4 14 (2.30%) Tableau
5 9 (1.48%) Looker
6 7 (1.15%) Data Lake
7 6 (0.99%) Big Data
8 5 (0.82%) Delta Lake
8 5 (0.82%) Metabase
9 4 (0.66%) Data Mining
9 4 (0.66%) Relational Database
10 3 (0.49%) Amazon Athena
10 3 (0.49%) Apache Iceberg
10 3 (0.49%) Flink
10 3 (0.49%) Redis
11 2 (0.33%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
11 2 (0.33%) Geospatial Data
11 2 (0.33%) NoSQL
12 1 (0.16%) BigQuery
12 1 (0.16%) Neo4j
Development Applications
1 30 (4.93%) Git
2 12 (1.97%) MLflow
3 2 (0.33%) Visual Studio Code
4 1 (0.16%) Claude Code
4 1 (0.16%) JIRA
General
1 138 (22.66%) Finance
2 71 (11.66%) Analytical Skills
3 63 (10.34%) Banking
4 57 (9.36%) Social Skills
5 43 (7.06%) Retail
6 33 (5.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 31 (5.09%) Marketing
8 26 (4.27%) Public Sector
9 25 (4.11%) Financial Institution
10 18 (2.96%) Games
11 15 (2.46%) Law
11 15 (2.46%) Legal
12 11 (1.81%) Advertising
13 9 (1.48%) Pharmaceutical
14 7 (1.15%) Manufacturing
15 6 (0.99%) Influencing Skills
15 6 (0.99%) Wearables
16 5 (0.82%) Automotive
16 5 (0.82%) Presentation Skills
16 5 (0.82%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 50 (8.21%) PyTorch
2 41 (6.73%) TensorFlow
3 30 (4.93%) scikit-learn
4 29 (4.76%) Pandas
5 24 (3.94%) Hugging Face
6 22 (3.61%) SpaCy
7 17 (2.79%) NumPy
8 11 (1.81%) LangChain
8 11 (1.81%) XGBoost
9 9 (1.48%) PySpark
10 6 (0.99%) LangGraph
10 6 (0.99%) SciPy
11 5 (0.82%) LlamaIndex
11 5 (0.82%) Streamlit
11 5 (0.82%) Terraform
12 4 (0.66%) Seaborn
13 3 (0.49%) Kafka
14 2 (0.33%) Flask
14 2 (0.33%) LightGBM
14 2 (0.33%) Matplotlib
Miscellaneous
1 36 (5.91%) Algorithms
2 22 (3.61%) e-Learning
3 14 (2.30%) AI Agents
4 10 (1.64%) Credit Risk
5 9 (1.48%) Cloud Native
6 7 (1.15%) Hedge funds
6 7 (1.15%) Social Media
7 6 (0.99%) Life Science
8 5 (0.82%) Pricing Data
9 4 (0.66%) Data Structures
9 4 (0.66%) Product Ownership
10 3 (0.49%) Clustering
10 3 (0.49%) Cyber Threat
10 3 (0.49%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 3 (0.49%) Legacy Systems
11 2 (0.33%) Analytical Mindset
11 2 (0.33%) FMCG
11 2 (0.33%) Hackathon
11 2 (0.33%) Insider Threat
11 2 (0.33%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 3 (0.49%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 607 (99.67%) Data Science
2 324 (53.20%) Machine Learning
3 254 (41.71%) AI
4 184 (30.21%) Analytics
5 90 (14.78%) MLOps
6 82 (13.46%) Statistics
7 80 (13.14%) Actionable Insight
7 80 (13.14%) Generative AI
8 78 (12.81%) Mentoring
9 77 (12.64%) Natural Language Processing
10 64 (10.51%) LLM
11 62 (10.18%) CI/CD
12 59 (9.69%) Roadmaps
13 58 (9.52%) Decision-Making
14 56 (9.20%) Predictive Modelling
15 54 (8.87%) Deep Learning
16 52 (8.54%) Mathematics
17 48 (7.88%) Validation
18 47 (7.72%) Feature Engineering
18 47 (7.72%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 232 (38.10%) Python
2 121 (19.87%) SQL
3 24 (3.94%) R
4 5 (0.82%) Julia
5 4 (0.66%) C
6 3 (0.49%) C++
6 3 (0.49%) Java
7 2 (0.33%) Bash
7 2 (0.33%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 2 (0.33%) Scala
7 2 (0.33%) T-SQL
7 2 (0.33%) VBA
8 1 (0.16%) C#
8 1 (0.16%) Gremlin
8 1 (0.16%) LookML
Qualifications
1 83 (13.63%) Degree
2 45 (7.39%) Security Cleared
3 38 (6.24%) Master's Degree
4 31 (5.09%) DV Cleared
5 30 (4.93%) PhD
6 11 (1.81%) DBS Check
7 7 (1.15%) SC Cleared
8 4 (0.66%) Computer Science Degree
8 4 (0.66%) Numerate Degree
9 3 (0.49%) CISSP
10 2 (0.33%) CompTIA Security+
10 2 (0.33%) GIAC
10 2 (0.33%) SANS
11 1 (0.16%) Azure Certification
11 1 (0.16%) CEH
11 1 (0.16%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (4.76%) Data Quality
2 5 (0.82%) Actionable Recommendations
2 5 (0.82%) EU AI Act
2 5 (0.82%) GDPR
3 4 (0.66%) QA
4 2 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 17 (2.79%) Docker
Systems Management
1 14 (2.30%) Kubernetes
2 3 (0.49%) Kubeflow
3 2 (0.33%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
3 2 (0.33%) Computer Incident Response Team
Vendors
1 41 (6.73%) Databricks
2 17 (2.79%) Google
2 17 (2.79%) Microsoft
3 10 (1.64%) LexisNexis
3 10 (1.64%) Workday
4 6 (0.99%) OpenAI
5 3 (0.49%) Oracle
5 3 (0.49%) PeopleSoft
5 3 (0.49%) Revolut
5 3 (0.49%) Salesforce
6 2 (0.33%) SYSPRO
7 1 (0.16%) Cognizant
7 1 (0.16%) Dataiku
7 1 (0.16%) Mistral