Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for permanent job vacancies requiring OCR skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the annual salaries offered in vacancies that cited OCR over the 6 months leading up to 31 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 695 901 904
Rank change year-on-year +206 +3 +291
Permanent jobs citing OCR 7 6 64
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 0.013% 0.006% 0.067%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.013% 0.007% 0.070%
Number of salaries quoted 5 6 40
10th Percentile £38,600 £44,424 £47,500
25th Percentile £46,250 £57,597 £65,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £57,500 £62,783 £90,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.41% -30.24% +56.52%
75th Percentile £61,250 £73,242 £100,000
90th Percentile £68,166 £95,000 £138,073
UK excluding London median annual salary £57,500 £62,783 £69,447
% change year-on-year -8.41% -9.60% +29.81%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

OCR 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 52,256 87,133 91,481
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 93.58% 84.04% 95.51%
Number of salaries quoted 25,854 60,896 54,581
10th Percentile £28,822 £29,250 £34,000
25th Percentile £41,250 £40,000 £45,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £57,000 £55,000 £60,899
Median % change year-on-year +3.64% -9.69% +1.50%
75th Percentile £75,000 £72,500 £81,250
90th Percentile £97,500 £92,500 £100,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £51,564 £50,000 £55,000
% change year-on-year +3.13% -9.09% +4.76%

OCR
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing OCR as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for OCR in the UK

OCR
Salary Trend

3-month moving average salary quoted in jobs citing OCR.

Salary trend for OCR in the UK

OCR
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing OCR over the 6 months to 31 May 2025.

Salary histogram for OCR in the UK

OCR
Top 8 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing OCR within the UK over the 6 months to 31 May 2025. 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 +171 6 £57,500 -8.41% 17
UK excluding London +184 5 £57,500 -8.41% 6
Work from Home +121 3 £57,500 -8.41% 6
Midlands - 3 £57,500 -
West Midlands - 3 £57,500 -
North of England +37 2 £59,769 -4.80% 1
North East +49 1 £67,037 +6.78% 1
North West +2 1 £52,500 -16.38%

OCR
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Applications
1 1 (14.29%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 2 (28.57%) Azure
1 2 (28.57%) Dynamics 365
1 2 (28.57%) Power Automate
1 2 (28.57%) Power Platform
1 2 (28.57%) PowerApps
2 1 (14.29%) Serverless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (28.57%) Power BI
1 2 (28.57%) SQL Server
2 1 (14.29%) MongoDB
2 1 (14.29%) Neo4j
2 1 (14.29%) NoSQL
2 1 (14.29%) Relational Database
2 1 (14.29%) TigerGraph
General
1 4 (57.14%) Social Skills
2 2 (28.57%) Billing
2 2 (28.57%) Finance
2 2 (28.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 1 (14.29%) Advertising
3 1 (14.29%) Legal
3 1 (14.29%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 4 (57.14%) Developer
2 2 (28.57%) Power Platform Developer
3 1 (14.29%) Applications Developer
3 1 (14.29%) Applications Support
3 1 (14.29%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
3 1 (14.29%) Automation Developer
3 1 (14.29%) Business Intelligence Developer
3 1 (14.29%) Data Scientist
3 1 (14.29%) IT Support
3 1 (14.29%) Lead
3 1 (14.29%) Power BI Developer
3 1 (14.29%) Product Developer
3 1 (14.29%) Robotic Process Automation Developer
3 1 (14.29%) Senior
3 1 (14.29%) Technical Leader
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (28.57%) OpenCV
1 2 (28.57%) PyTorch
1 2 (28.57%) TensorFlow
2 1 (14.29%) Hugging Face
2 1 (14.29%) Keras
2 1 (14.29%) NLTK
2 1 (14.29%) Node.js
2 1 (14.29%) NumPy
2 1 (14.29%) Pandas
2 1 (14.29%) Regular Expression
2 1 (14.29%) scikit-learn
2 1 (14.29%) Seaborn
2 1 (14.29%) SpaCy
2 1 (14.29%) SQLAlchemy
Miscellaneous
1 1 (14.29%) AI Agents
1 1 (14.29%) Algorithms
1 1 (14.29%) Blog
1 1 (14.29%) e-Learning
1 1 (14.29%) Greenfield Project
1 1 (14.29%) IVR
Processes & Methodologies
1 4 (57.14%) Artificial Intelligence
2 3 (42.86%) Machine Learning
2 3 (42.86%) Natural Language Processing
2 3 (42.86%) Problem-Solving
2 3 (42.86%) Workflow
3 2 (28.57%) Analytics
3 2 (28.57%) Business Intelligence
3 2 (28.57%) Computer Vision
3 2 (28.57%) Containerisation
3 2 (28.57%) Conversational UI
3 2 (28.57%) Data Validation
3 2 (28.57%) ERP
3 2 (28.57%) Generative AI
3 2 (28.57%) LLM
3 2 (28.57%) Open Source
3 2 (28.57%) Robotic Process Automation
3 2 (28.57%) Storage Management
3 2 (28.57%) Validation
4 1 (14.29%) Agile
4 1 (14.29%) Workflow Management
Programming Languages
1 4 (57.14%) SQL
2 2 (28.57%) JavaScript
3 1 (14.29%) C++
3 1 (14.29%) Java
3 1 (14.29%) Julia
3 1 (14.29%) Python
3 1 (14.29%) R
3 1 (14.29%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 2 (28.57%) Degree
2 1 (14.29%) BPSS Clearance
2 1 (14.29%) Master's Degree
2 1 (14.29%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (14.29%) GDPR
1 1 (14.29%) QA
System Software
1 2 (28.57%) Docker
Vendors
1 2 (28.57%) Microsoft
2 1 (14.29%) Automation Anywhere
2 1 (14.29%) Blue Prism
2 1 (14.29%) Citrix
2 1 (14.29%) UiPath