Machine Learning Job Trends

Machine Learning (ML)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring Machine Learning skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 84 76
Rank change year-on-year +69 -8 +21
Permanent jobs citing Machine Learning 5,308 1,765 2,175
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 8.68% 3.34% 3.59%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 10.77% 3.67% 4.01%
Number of salaries quoted 703 947 1,302
10th Percentile £45,000 £45,000 £43,750
25th Percentile £57,251 £57,500 £51,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £77,500 £77,000 £70,576
Median % change year-on-year +0.65% +9.10% +0.82%
75th Percentile £100,000 £96,250 £92,500
90th Percentile £130,000 £112,500 £120,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £65,000 £70,000 £65,000
% change year-on-year -7.14% +7.69% +4.69%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Machine Learning falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 49,307 48,088 54,172
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 80.63% 90.91% 89.35%
Number of salaries quoted 29,027 23,255 41,501
10th Percentile £28,500 £35,000 £31,000
25th Percentile £37,500 £45,000 £41,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +4.35% -8.00%
75th Percentile £75,000 £80,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £96,539
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £55,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year -9.09% +10.00% -9.09%

Machine Learning
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Machine Learning relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Machine Learning job vacancy trend in the UK

Machine Learning
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Machine Learning.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Machine Learning

Machine Learning
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Machine Learning over the 6 months to 20 January 2026.

Salary histogram for Machine Learning in the UK

Machine Learning
Top 18 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Machine Learning within the UK over the 6 months to 20 January 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 +71 5,144 £79,000 +2.60% 1,717
UK excluding London +80 4,191 £65,000 -7.14% 1,512
North of England +105 1,715 £65,000 -15.58% 256
North West +85 1,542 £63,500 -17.53% 103
Midlands +123 1,099 £66,500 +2.31% 163
London +35 1,006 £85,000 - 450
West Midlands +109 955 £68,750 +25.00% 53
South East +34 734 £67,500 -12.34% 534
East of England +106 418 £62,500 -16.67% 225
Work from Home -38 361 £75,000 +7.14% 810
Yorkshire +64 166 £79,000 +2.60% 105
East Midlands +59 154 £61,250 -20.45% 105
South West +7 134 £62,500 -3.85% 202
Wales +30 44 £80,000 +63.27% 72
Scotland -39 40 £67,500 +8.00% 62
Northern Ireland -11 11 £80,000 -13.51% 31
Channel Islands +8 8 - -
North East -3 7 £62,500 -6.77% 50

Machine Learning
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 72 (1.36%) Apache Spark
2 45 (0.85%) Apache Airflow
3 21 (0.40%) SharePoint
4 15 (0.28%) Confluence
5 14 (0.26%) Appian
6 13 (0.24%) Jupyter
7 8 (0.15%) Apache
7 8 (0.15%) Apache Solr
7 8 (0.15%) Microsoft Exchange
8 7 (0.13%) CMS
9 5 (0.094%) Apache Pulsar
9 5 (0.094%) IIS
10 4 (0.075%) SAS
11 3 (0.057%) ArcGIS
12 2 (0.038%) Apache Qpid
12 2 (0.038%) CICS
12 2 (0.038%) Luigi
13 1 (0.019%) Apache Superset
13 1 (0.019%) Kinematics
13 1 (0.019%) WordPress
Applications
1 38 (0.72%) Microsoft Excel
2 15 (0.28%) Chatbot
3 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Office
4 6 (0.11%) Trello
5 5 (0.094%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 4 (0.075%) Fusion 360
6 4 (0.075%) Weka
7 3 (0.057%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.057%) Spreadsheet
8 2 (0.038%) S-PLUS
9 1 (0.019%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.019%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
2 10 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
3 8 (0.15%) NetSuite
4 6 (0.11%) Shopify
5 4 (0.075%) Distributed Ledger
5 4 (0.075%) Elite 3E
6 2 (0.038%) Adaptiv
6 2 (0.038%) SAP SCM
7 1 (0.019%) Fidessa
7 1 (0.019%) Odoo
7 1 (0.019%) SAP PLM
7 1 (0.019%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 4,056 (76.41%) Cloud Computing
2 462 (8.70%) Azure
3 397 (7.48%) AWS
4 190 (3.58%) GCP
5 142 (2.68%) Power Platform
6 64 (1.21%) SaaS
7 63 (1.19%) Azure AI
8 60 (1.13%) Vertex AI
9 57 (1.07%) Serverless
10 53 (1.00%) Azure Machine Learning
11 48 (0.90%) Snowflake
12 46 (0.87%) GitHub
13 44 (0.83%) Amazon SageMaker
14 41 (0.77%) Amazon Bedrock
14 41 (0.77%) Microsoft 365
15 40 (0.75%) Azure Data Factory
16 38 (0.72%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 36 (0.68%) Azure DevOps
18 34 (0.64%) Entra ID
19 31 (0.58%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 4,048 (76.26%) Internet
2 13 (0.24%) Network Security
3 7 (0.13%) Firewall
4 6 (0.11%) Broadband
5 5 (0.094%) Modbus
5 5 (0.094%) VLAN
6 4 (0.075%) Bluetooth
6 4 (0.075%) InfiniBand
6 4 (0.075%) Intrusion Detection
6 4 (0.075%) Kerberos
6 4 (0.075%) TCP/IP
6 4 (0.075%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.075%) Wireless
6 4 (0.075%) Wireshark
6 4 (0.075%) ZigBee
7 3 (0.057%) 802.11
7 3 (0.057%) LAN
7 3 (0.057%) VoIP
7 3 (0.057%) WAN
7 3 (0.057%) WLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 123 (2.32%) Power BI
2 90 (1.70%) Data Warehouse
3 72 (1.36%) NoSQL
4 68 (1.28%) Data Lake
5 62 (1.17%) Tableau
6 57 (1.07%) Metadata
7 54 (1.02%) SQL Server
8 51 (0.96%) Big Data
9 38 (0.72%) Amazon Redshift
10 36 (0.68%) Hadoop
11 28 (0.53%) BigQuery
11 28 (0.53%) PostgreSQL
12 27 (0.51%) Data Mining
13 26 (0.49%) MongoDB
14 25 (0.47%) Elasticsearch
15 24 (0.45%) MySQL
15 24 (0.45%) Pinecone
16 16 (0.30%) Looker
17 15 (0.28%) Azure SQL Database
17 15 (0.28%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 53 (1.00%) Git
2 52 (0.98%) MLflow
3 24 (0.45%) JIRA
4 16 (0.30%) Jenkins
5 10 (0.19%) GitLab
6 6 (0.11%) Visual Studio
7 5 (0.094%) Maven
7 5 (0.094%) Selenium
7 5 (0.094%) WebDriver
8 4 (0.075%) Burp Suite
8 4 (0.075%) Metasploit
9 3 (0.057%) Browser DevTools
9 3 (0.057%) Charles Proxy
9 3 (0.057%) Fiddler
9 3 (0.057%) Postman
9 3 (0.057%) TestNG
9 3 (0.057%) Zephyr
10 2 (0.038%) Balsamiq
10 2 (0.038%) CircleCI
10 2 (0.038%) SpecFlow
General
1 4,443 (83.70%) Social Skills
2 4,107 (77.37%) Banking
3 4,101 (77.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 384 (7.23%) Finance
5 201 (3.79%) Analytical Skills
6 131 (2.47%) Marketing
7 87 (1.64%) Manufacturing
8 77 (1.45%) Public Sector
9 72 (1.36%) Pharmaceutical
10 69 (1.30%) Retail
11 61 (1.15%) Law
12 51 (0.96%) Legal
13 44 (0.83%) Telecoms
14 34 (0.64%) Electronics
15 29 (0.55%) Games
16 26 (0.49%) Financial Institution
16 26 (0.49%) Presentation Skills
17 24 (0.45%) Organisational Skills
18 21 (0.40%) German Language
19 15 (0.28%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 3,149 (59.33%) Lecturer
2 248 (4.67%) Senior
3 187 (3.52%) Lead
4 112 (2.11%) Data Engineer
5 111 (2.09%) Architect
6 105 (1.98%) Data Scientist
7 99 (1.87%) Developer
8 82 (1.54%) Software Engineer
9 80 (1.51%) Consultant
10 63 (1.19%) Analyst
11 57 (1.07%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 44 (0.83%) Data Architect
13 41 (0.77%) Senior Data Scientist
14 39 (0.73%) Senior Consultant
15 36 (0.68%) Solutions Architect
16 33 (0.62%) Data Analyst
17 32 (0.60%) Machine Learning Engineer
18 28 (0.53%) Senior Manager
19 26 (0.49%) Gen AI Consultant
20 23 (0.43%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 146 (2.75%) PyTorch
2 121 (2.28%) TensorFlow
3 78 (1.47%) LangChain
4 75 (1.41%) React
5 66 (1.24%) REST
6 63 (1.19%) scikit-learn
7 61 (1.15%) Kafka
8 54 (1.02%) Pandas
9 47 (0.89%) Node.js
10 41 (0.77%) FastAPI
10 41 (0.77%) RESTful
11 39 (0.73%) Hugging Face
12 38 (0.72%) PySpark
13 37 (0.70%) NumPy
14 32 (0.60%) .NET
14 32 (0.60%) AngularJS
15 30 (0.57%) Django
16 28 (0.53%) Vue
17 23 (0.43%) Spring
18 21 (0.40%) Keras
Miscellaneous
1 4,067 (76.62%) IoT
2 113 (2.13%) Algorithms
3 109 (2.05%) Cloud Native
4 96 (1.81%) Product Ownership
5 85 (1.60%) Life Science
6 73 (1.38%) AI Agents
7 66 (1.24%) Distributed Systems
8 49 (0.92%) Management Information System
9 46 (0.87%) Legacy Systems
10 39 (0.73%) Low-Code
11 31 (0.58%) Onboarding
12 29 (0.55%) FMCG
13 27 (0.51%) Data Structures
14 22 (0.41%) Greenfield Project
15 21 (0.40%) Pharmacovigilance
16 20 (0.38%) Enterprise Software
16 20 (0.38%) Self-Motivation
17 17 (0.32%) Analytical Mindset
17 17 (0.32%) Data Centre
18 13 (0.24%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 46 (0.87%) Linux
2 29 (0.55%) Android
2 29 (0.55%) Windows
3 13 (0.24%) Apple iOS
3 13 (0.24%) Unix
4 10 (0.19%) Ubuntu
5 9 (0.17%) Windows Server
6 5 (0.094%) Kali Linux
7 2 (0.038%) Mac OS
7 2 (0.038%) Robot Operating System
7 2 (0.038%) zOS
8 1 (0.019%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 5,053 (95.20%) AI
2 4,124 (77.69%) Cybersecurity
3 4,112 (77.47%) User Experience
4 4,057 (76.43%) Web Development
5 473 (8.91%) Analytics
6 451 (8.50%) Data Science
7 322 (6.07%) Computer Science
8 286 (5.39%) Agile
9 242 (4.56%) LLM
10 240 (4.52%) CI/CD
11 236 (4.45%) Generative AI
12 229 (4.31%) Decision-Making
13 225 (4.24%) DevOps
14 223 (4.20%) Problem-Solving
15 213 (4.01%) Roadmaps
16 196 (3.69%) Data Pipeline
17 182 (3.43%) Data Engineering
18 175 (3.30%) MLOps
19 169 (3.18%) Business Intelligence
20 166 (3.13%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 583 (10.98%) Python
2 286 (5.39%) SQL
3 111 (2.09%) Java
4 67 (1.26%) JavaScript
5 65 (1.22%) R
6 62 (1.17%) Bash
7 58 (1.09%) TypeScript
8 54 (1.02%) C++
9 52 (0.98%) C#
10 45 (0.85%) Scala
11 40 (0.75%) Go
12 37 (0.70%) PowerShell
13 28 (0.53%) PHP
14 23 (0.43%) Rust
15 22 (0.41%) Kotlin
16 13 (0.24%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 10 (0.19%) Bicep
17 10 (0.19%) C
18 9 (0.17%) T-SQL
19 7 (0.13%) ANSI SQL
Qualifications
1 4,487 (84.53%) Degree
2 4,227 (79.63%) Master's Degree
3 4,163 (78.43%) PhD
4 4,048 (76.26%) Postgraduate
5 139 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
6 120 (2.26%) Security Cleared
7 85 (1.60%) SC Cleared
8 41 (0.77%) DV Cleared
9 21 (0.40%) AWS Certification
10 19 (0.36%) BPSS Clearance
11 18 (0.34%) TOGAF Certification
12 15 (0.28%) Azure Certification
13 13 (0.24%) MCP
14 12 (0.23%) CISSP
15 11 (0.21%) CISA
16 10 (0.19%) CISM
17 8 (0.15%) Microsoft Certification
18 7 (0.13%) ACCA
18 7 (0.13%) CIMA
18 7 (0.13%) MBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 124 (2.34%) Data Quality
2 69 (1.30%) GDPR
3 43 (0.81%) GxP
4 30 (0.57%) QA
5 29 (0.55%) Accessibility
6 27 (0.51%) EU AI Act
7 22 (0.41%) HIPAA
7 22 (0.41%) Solvency II
8 21 (0.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 21 (0.40%) PSD2
9 13 (0.24%) SLA
10 10 (0.19%) CDISC
10 10 (0.19%) HL7
10 10 (0.19%) ISO 13485
11 8 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
12 7 (0.13%) Cyber Essentials
12 7 (0.13%) ISO 9001
13 5 (0.094%) NIST
14 4 (0.075%) IFRS
14 4 (0.075%) SOC 2
System Software
1 152 (2.86%) Docker
2 18 (0.34%) Virtual Desktop
3 15 (0.28%) Active Directory
4 12 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
5 4 (0.075%) Lustre
5 4 (0.075%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 2 (0.038%) Ceph
6 2 (0.038%) GPFS
6 2 (0.038%) RACF
6 2 (0.038%) vSphere
7 1 (0.019%) Firmware
7 1 (0.019%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 138 (2.60%) Kubernetes
2 85 (1.60%) Terraform
3 27 (0.51%) Ansible
4 19 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
5 13 (0.24%) Prometheus
6 12 (0.23%) Kubeflow
7 8 (0.15%) SCCM
8 7 (0.13%) Grafana
9 5 (0.094%) Argo
10 4 (0.075%) Nessus
10 4 (0.075%) Nmap
11 2 (0.038%) Microsoft Data Protection Manager
11 2 (0.038%) Progress Chef
11 2 (0.038%) Puppet
11 2 (0.038%) SELinux
12 1 (0.019%) Istio
12 1 (0.019%) Kustomize
12 1 (0.019%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 169 (3.18%) Microsoft
2 129 (2.43%) Databricks
3 106 (2.00%) Google
4 69 (1.30%) OpenAI
5 39 (0.73%) SAP
6 27 (0.51%) Palantir
7 25 (0.47%) Salesforce
8 22 (0.41%) Dell
8 22 (0.41%) NVIDIA
9 20 (0.38%) Oracle
10 13 (0.24%) Palo Alto
11 12 (0.23%) CrowdStrike
11 12 (0.23%) Fortinet
11 12 (0.23%) UiPath
12 11 (0.21%) Cisco
12 11 (0.21%) Foundry
13 10 (0.19%) Automation Anywhere
14 8 (0.15%) Adobe
15 7 (0.13%) ServiceNow
16 6 (0.11%) iManage