Data Scientist Job Trends

Data Scientist
UK

The median Data Scientist salary in the UK is £79,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 9 October 2026.

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

6 months to
9 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 322 539 478
Rank change year-on-year +217 -61 +23
Permanent jobs requiring a Data Scientist 667 141 313
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.57% 0.28% 0.43%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.61% 0.32% 0.45%
Number of salaries quoted 383 83 127
10th Percentile £51,400 £42,500 £39,448
25th Percentile £62,500 £52,500 £51,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £79,000 £70,000 £62,879
Median % change year-on-year +12.86% +11.32% +0.61%
75th Percentile £95,000 £87,500 £79,375
90th Percentile £100,000 £94,000 £112,750
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £55,000 £56,250
% change year-on-year +36.36% -2.22% -10.00%

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 109,260 44,699 69,182
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 92.68% 89.81% 95.36%
Number of salaries quoted 74,288 25,844 39,771
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,000 £31,250
25th Percentile £40,750 £35,500 £41,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £58,210 £53,688 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +8.42% -2.39% -8.33%
75th Percentile £76,250 £73,750 £75,000
90th Percentile £98,750 £95,000 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £46,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +19.57% -8.00% -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 9 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 9 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 +208 618 £80,000 +14.29% 773
UK excluding London +129 356 £75,000 +36.36% 258
London +106 285 £90,000 +20.00% 530
Work from Home +86 159 £70,000 - 328
North of England +14 107 £80,000 +45.45% 72
South East +17 73 £80,000 +88.24% 54
Midlands +18 71 £70,000 +0.54% 53
South West -14 69 £72,500 +3.57% 29
East Midlands +24 65 £67,500 -15.63% 20
North West +18 59 £75,000 +36.36% 43
Yorkshire +1 37 £85,000 +54.55% 24
Wales - 16 £75,000 - 12
North East -55 11 £80,000 +53.85% 5
Northern Ireland -71 9 £72,500 +81.25% 5
East of England -36 7 £60,000 +2.13% 23
West Midlands -38 6 £75,000 +26.58% 33
Scotland +11 4 £75,013 +66.70% 13

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

For the 6 months to 9 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.

1 665 (99.70%) Data Science
2 342 (51.27%) Machine Learning
3 272 (40.78%) AI
4 232 (34.78%) Python
5 193 (28.94%) Analytics
6 116 (17.39%) SQL
7 95 (14.24%) MLOps
8 92 (13.79%) Actionable Insight
9 88 (13.19%) Generative AI
10 81 (12.14%) Natural Language Processing
11 79 (11.84%) Degree
12 74 (11.09%) Statistics
13 73 (10.94%) Azure
13 73 (10.94%) Mentoring
14 66 (9.90%) Predictive Modelling
15 63 (9.45%) CI/CD
15 63 (9.45%) Decision-Making
16 62 (9.30%) Roadmaps
17 61 (9.15%) AWS
18 59 (8.85%) LLM
19 53 (7.95%) Deep Learning
20 52 (7.80%) GCP
21 50 (7.50%) Problem-Solving
21 50 (7.50%) Software Engineering
22 49 (7.35%) Validation
23 48 (7.20%) Agile
24 45 (6.75%) Feature Engineering
24 45 (6.75%) Mathematics
25 44 (6.60%) Data Engineering
26 43 (6.45%) Data Analysis

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 40 (6.00%) Apache Spark
2 7 (1.05%) Apache
3 6 (0.90%) Apache Airflow
3 6 (0.90%) SAS
4 3 (0.45%) Jupyter
5 1 (0.15%) R Markdown
Applications
1 4 (0.60%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.45%) Chatbot
3 2 (0.30%) SPSS
4 1 (0.15%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.15%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 1 (0.15%) Spreadsheet
Cloud Services
1 73 (10.94%) Azure
2 61 (9.15%) AWS
3 52 (7.80%) GCP
4 24 (3.60%) SaaS
5 19 (2.85%) Azure Machine Learning
6 10 (1.50%) Power Platform
7 8 (1.20%) dbt
8 4 (0.60%) Azure AI
8 4 (0.60%) Azure Databricks
8 4 (0.60%) Cloud Composer
8 4 (0.60%) Snowflake
9 3 (0.45%) Amazon S3
9 3 (0.45%) Anthropic Claude
9 3 (0.45%) AWS Lambda
9 3 (0.45%) GitHub
9 3 (0.45%) Salesforce Service Cloud
9 3 (0.45%) Serverless
10 2 (0.30%) Amazon SageMaker
10 2 (0.30%) Cloud Computing
10 2 (0.30%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 3 (0.45%) 5G
1 3 (0.45%) Broadband
2 2 (0.30%) Firewall
2 2 (0.30%) Software-Defined Radio
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (4.20%) Amazon Redshift
2 12 (1.80%) Data Warehouse
3 10 (1.50%) Power BI
4 9 (1.35%) Tableau
5 8 (1.20%) Looker
6 7 (1.05%) Big Data
6 7 (1.05%) Data Lake
6 7 (1.05%) Flink
7 5 (0.75%) BigQuery
7 5 (0.75%) Delta Lake
8 4 (0.60%) Relational Database
9 3 (0.45%) Apache Iceberg
9 3 (0.45%) Redis
10 2 (0.30%) Data Mining
10 2 (0.30%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
10 2 (0.30%) Geospatial Data
11 1 (0.15%) MongoDB
11 1 (0.15%) Neo4j
11 1 (0.15%) Power Query
11 1 (0.15%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 33 (4.95%) Git
2 10 (1.50%) MLflow
3 2 (0.30%) Visual Studio Code
4 1 (0.15%) Claude Code
General
1 136 (20.39%) Finance
2 68 (10.19%) Banking
3 63 (9.45%) Analytical Skills
4 61 (9.15%) Social Skills
5 40 (6.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 37 (5.55%) Retail
7 30 (4.50%) Marketing
8 28 (4.20%) Financial Institution
9 22 (3.30%) Public Sector
10 21 (3.15%) Games
11 15 (2.25%) Legal
12 13 (1.95%) Law
13 11 (1.65%) Advertising
14 8 (1.20%) Influencing Skills
15 7 (1.05%) Telecoms
16 6 (0.90%) Wearables
17 5 (0.75%) Automotive
17 5 (0.75%) Publishing
17 5 (0.75%) Retail Banking
18 4 (0.60%) Manufacturing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 40 (6.00%) PyTorch
2 39 (5.85%) TensorFlow
3 25 (3.75%) Hugging Face
3 25 (3.75%) SpaCy
4 19 (2.85%) Pandas
5 18 (2.70%) scikit-learn
6 13 (1.95%) NumPy
7 10 (1.50%) LangChain
8 9 (1.35%) XGBoost
9 8 (1.20%) Terraform
10 7 (1.05%) PySpark
11 6 (0.90%) LangGraph
11 6 (0.90%) SciPy
12 5 (0.75%) Streamlit
13 4 (0.60%) Apache Beam
13 4 (0.60%) LlamaIndex
13 4 (0.60%) Plotly
13 4 (0.60%) Seaborn
14 3 (0.45%) Kafka
15 2 (0.30%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 38 (5.70%) Algorithms
2 25 (3.75%) e-Learning
3 15 (2.25%) AI Agents
4 9 (1.35%) Credit Risk
5 8 (1.20%) Cloud Native
6 7 (1.05%) Hedge funds
6 7 (1.05%) Social Media
7 6 (0.90%) Online Gambling
8 5 (0.75%) Life Science
8 5 (0.75%) Pricing Data
9 4 (0.60%) Data Structures
9 4 (0.60%) Self-Motivation
10 3 (0.45%) Clustering
10 3 (0.45%) Cyber Threat
10 3 (0.45%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 3 (0.45%) Legacy Systems
10 3 (0.45%) Product Ownership
11 2 (0.30%) Analytical Mindset
11 2 (0.30%) Blog
11 2 (0.30%) FMCG
Operating Systems
1 3 (0.45%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 665 (99.70%) Data Science
2 342 (51.27%) Machine Learning
3 272 (40.78%) AI
4 193 (28.94%) Analytics
5 95 (14.24%) MLOps
6 92 (13.79%) Actionable Insight
7 88 (13.19%) Generative AI
8 81 (12.14%) Natural Language Processing
9 74 (11.09%) Statistics
10 73 (10.94%) Mentoring
11 66 (9.90%) Predictive Modelling
12 63 (9.45%) CI/CD
12 63 (9.45%) Decision-Making
13 62 (9.30%) Roadmaps
14 59 (8.85%) LLM
15 53 (7.95%) Deep Learning
16 50 (7.50%) Problem-Solving
16 50 (7.50%) Software Engineering
17 49 (7.35%) Validation
18 48 (7.20%) Agile
Programming Languages
1 232 (34.78%) Python
2 116 (17.39%) SQL
3 17 (2.55%) R
4 7 (1.05%) Java
5 6 (0.90%) Scala
6 4 (0.60%) C
6 4 (0.60%) Shell Script
7 3 (0.45%) C++
8 2 (0.30%) Bash
8 2 (0.30%) VBA
9 1 (0.15%) C#
9 1 (0.15%) Gremlin
9 1 (0.15%) LookML
Qualifications
1 79 (11.84%) Degree
2 43 (6.45%) Security Cleared
3 42 (6.30%) Master's Degree
4 33 (4.95%) PhD
5 29 (4.35%) DV Cleared
6 8 (1.20%) SC Cleared
7 5 (0.75%) Numerate Degree
8 3 (0.45%) CISSP
9 2 (0.30%) CompTIA Security+
9 2 (0.30%) Computer Science Degree
9 2 (0.30%) GIAC
9 2 (0.30%) Postgraduate
9 2 (0.30%) SANS
10 1 (0.15%) Azure Certification
10 1 (0.15%) CEH
10 1 (0.15%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 25 (3.75%) Data Quality
2 7 (1.05%) Actionable Recommendations
3 5 (0.75%) EU AI Act
3 5 (0.75%) GDPR
4 3 (0.45%) QA
5 2 (0.30%) ISO/IEC 42001
6 1 (0.15%) Accessibility
System Software
1 18 (2.70%) Docker
Systems Management
1 14 (2.10%) Kubernetes
2 2 (0.30%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
2 2 (0.30%) Computer Incident Response Team
3 1 (0.15%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 39 (5.85%) Databricks
2 17 (2.55%) Microsoft
3 15 (2.25%) Google
3 15 (2.25%) LexisNexis
3 15 (2.25%) Workday
4 6 (0.90%) OpenAI
5 4 (0.60%) New Relic
5 4 (0.60%) Splunk
6 3 (0.45%) Oracle
6 3 (0.45%) PeopleSoft
6 3 (0.45%) Revolut
6 3 (0.45%) Salesforce
7 2 (0.30%) SYSPRO
8 1 (0.15%) Dataiku
8 1 (0.15%) Mistral
8 1 (0.15%) SAP