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 21 August 2026.

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

6 months to
21 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 345 520 548
Rank change year-on-year +175 +28 -31
Permanent jobs requiring a Data Scientist 584 150 278
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.54% 0.30% 0.33%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.58% 0.33% 0.35%
Number of salaries quoted 376 91 145
10th Percentile £50,000 £42,500 £39,850
25th Percentile £60,000 £51,375 £49,396
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 £95,000 £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 101,140 44,848 79,070
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 93.97% 89.92% 95.08%
Number of salaries quoted 69,235 26,502 52,116
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 £75,000 £72,000
90th Percentile £96,250 £95,000 £91,250
UK excluding London median annual salary £53,712 £47,683 £50,000
% change year-on-year +12.64% -4.63% -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 21 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 21 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 +204 541 £75,000 +15.38% 104
UK excluding London +124 319 £75,000 +36.36% 72
London +88 241 £80,000 +3.23% 58
Work from Home +76 163 £70,000 +7.69% 43
North of England +48 109 £80,000 +45.45% 13
Midlands +30 78 £63,360 +5.60% 4
North West +33 69 £75,000 +36.36% 6
East Midlands +42 66 £60,000 +0.07% 3
South West -19 57 £70,000 -17.65% 9
South East -4 37 £62,500 +47.06% 34
Yorkshire -12 28 £83,774 +52.32% 6
Wales -42 14 £75,000 -11.76% 2
East of England -8 13 £75,863 +59.71% 2
West Midlands -27 12 £70,860 +18.10% 1
North East -43 12 £80,000 +53.85% 1
Northern Ireland - 7 £55,000 - 7
Scotland +9 4 £75,013 +7.16% 1

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

For the 6 months to 21 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.

1 582 (99.66%) Data Science
2 309 (52.91%) Machine Learning
3 239 (40.92%) AI
4 225 (38.53%) Python
5 183 (31.34%) Analytics
6 118 (20.21%) SQL
7 82 (14.04%) Actionable Insight
7 82 (14.04%) MLOps
8 80 (13.70%) Degree
8 80 (13.70%) Statistics
9 75 (12.84%) Generative AI
10 74 (12.67%) Mentoring
11 71 (12.16%) AWS
11 71 (12.16%) Natural Language Processing
12 66 (11.30%) Azure
13 64 (10.96%) Decision-Making
14 62 (10.62%) LLM
15 58 (9.93%) Roadmaps
16 56 (9.59%) CI/CD
17 53 (9.08%) Deep Learning
17 53 (9.08%) Mathematics
18 51 (8.73%) GCP
18 51 (8.73%) Predictive Modelling
19 49 (8.39%) PyTorch
20 47 (8.05%) Feature Engineering
20 47 (8.05%) Validation
21 46 (7.88%) Security Cleared
22 45 (7.71%) Agile
22 45 (7.71%) Software Engineering
23 42 (7.19%) 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 33 (5.65%) Apache Spark
2 6 (1.03%) 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 5 (0.86%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.68%) Chatbot
3 2 (0.34%) SPSS
4 1 (0.17%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 71 (12.16%) AWS
2 66 (11.30%) Azure
3 51 (8.73%) GCP
4 24 (4.11%) Power Platform
5 18 (3.08%) SaaS
6 13 (2.23%) Azure Machine Learning
7 10 (1.71%) dbt
8 6 (1.03%) Amazon S3
8 6 (1.03%) AWS Lambda
8 6 (1.03%) Dataform
8 6 (1.03%) Serverless
9 5 (0.86%) Amazon SageMaker
9 5 (0.86%) Dynamics 365
10 4 (0.68%) Snowflake
11 3 (0.51%) Anthropic Claude
11 3 (0.51%) Azure Data Factory
11 3 (0.51%) Salesforce Service Cloud
11 3 (0.51%) Smartsheet
12 2 (0.34%) Prefect
12 2 (0.34%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.86%) Broadband
2 4 (0.68%) Software-Defined Radio
3 3 (0.51%) 5G
4 2 (0.34%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (4.11%) Power BI
2 22 (3.77%) Amazon Redshift
3 17 (2.91%) Data Warehouse
4 15 (2.57%) Tableau
5 10 (1.71%) Looker
6 7 (1.20%) Data Lake
7 6 (1.03%) Big Data
7 6 (1.03%) Metabase
8 5 (0.86%) Delta Lake
9 4 (0.68%) Data Mining
10 3 (0.51%) Amazon Athena
10 3 (0.51%) Apache Iceberg
10 3 (0.51%) Flink
10 3 (0.51%) Redis
10 3 (0.51%) 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 27 (4.62%) Git
2 11 (1.88%) MLflow
3 2 (0.34%) Visual Studio Code
4 1 (0.17%) Claude Code
4 1 (0.17%) JIRA
General
1 136 (23.29%) Finance
2 70 (11.99%) Analytical Skills
3 60 (10.27%) Banking
4 54 (9.25%) Social Skills
5 42 (7.19%) Retail
6 33 (5.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 31 (5.31%) Marketing
8 27 (4.62%) Public Sector
9 22 (3.77%) Financial Institution
10 18 (3.08%) Games
11 15 (2.57%) Law
11 15 (2.57%) Legal
12 11 (1.88%) Advertising
13 9 (1.54%) Pharmaceutical
14 8 (1.37%) Manufacturing
15 6 (1.03%) 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 49 (8.39%) PyTorch
2 40 (6.85%) TensorFlow
3 30 (5.14%) scikit-learn
4 29 (4.97%) Pandas
5 24 (4.11%) Hugging Face
6 19 (3.25%) SpaCy
7 17 (2.91%) NumPy
8 11 (1.88%) LangChain
8 11 (1.88%) XGBoost
9 8 (1.37%) PySpark
10 6 (1.03%) LangGraph
10 6 (1.03%) SciPy
11 5 (0.86%) LlamaIndex
11 5 (0.86%) Streamlit
11 5 (0.86%) Terraform
12 4 (0.68%) Seaborn
13 3 (0.51%) Kafka
14 2 (0.34%) FastAPI
14 2 (0.34%) Flask
14 2 (0.34%) LightGBM
Miscellaneous
1 35 (5.99%) Algorithms
2 19 (3.25%) e-Learning
3 14 (2.40%) AI Agents
4 10 (1.71%) Credit Risk
5 9 (1.54%) Cloud Native
6 7 (1.20%) Hedge funds
6 7 (1.20%) Social Media
7 6 (1.03%) Life Science
8 5 (0.86%) 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%) FMCG
11 2 (0.34%) Hackathon
11 2 (0.34%) Insider Threat
11 2 (0.34%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 3 (0.51%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 582 (99.66%) Data Science
2 309 (52.91%) Machine Learning
3 239 (40.92%) AI
4 183 (31.34%) Analytics
5 82 (14.04%) Actionable Insight
5 82 (14.04%) MLOps
6 80 (13.70%) Statistics
7 75 (12.84%) Generative AI
8 74 (12.67%) Mentoring
9 71 (12.16%) Natural Language Processing
10 64 (10.96%) Decision-Making
11 62 (10.62%) LLM
12 58 (9.93%) Roadmaps
13 56 (9.59%) CI/CD
14 53 (9.08%) Deep Learning
14 53 (9.08%) Mathematics
15 51 (8.73%) Predictive Modelling
16 47 (8.05%) Feature Engineering
16 47 (8.05%) Validation
17 45 (7.71%) Agile
Programming Languages
1 225 (38.53%) Python
2 118 (20.21%) SQL
3 25 (4.28%) R
4 6 (1.03%) Julia
5 4 (0.68%) C
6 3 (0.51%) C++
6 3 (0.51%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 3 (0.51%) Java
6 3 (0.51%) T-SQL
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 80 (13.70%) Degree
2 46 (7.88%) Security Cleared
3 33 (5.65%) DV Cleared
3 33 (5.65%) Master's Degree
4 27 (4.62%) PhD
5 13 (2.23%) DBS Check
6 7 (1.20%) SC Cleared
7 4 (0.68%) Computer Science Degree
7 4 (0.68%) Numerate Degree
8 3 (0.51%) CISSP
9 2 (0.34%) CompTIA Security+
9 2 (0.34%) GIAC
9 2 (0.34%) SANS
10 1 (0.17%) Azure Certification
10 1 (0.17%) CEH
10 1 (0.17%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 30 (5.14%) Data Quality
2 5 (0.86%) Actionable Recommendations
2 5 (0.86%) EU AI Act
2 5 (0.86%) GDPR
3 4 (0.68%) QA
4 2 (0.34%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 17 (2.91%) Docker
Systems Management
1 14 (2.40%) Kubernetes
2 3 (0.51%) Kubeflow
3 2 (0.34%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
3 2 (0.34%) Computer Incident Response Team
Vendors
1 36 (6.16%) Databricks
2 15 (2.57%) Google
3 14 (2.40%) Microsoft
4 8 (1.37%) LexisNexis
5 6 (1.03%) OpenAI
5 6 (1.03%) Workday
6 3 (0.51%) Oracle
6 3 (0.51%) PeopleSoft
6 3 (0.51%) Revolut
6 3 (0.51%) Salesforce
6 3 (0.51%) ServiceNow
7 2 (0.34%) SYSPRO
8 1 (0.17%) Cognizant
8 1 (0.17%) Dataiku