Senior Data Scientist Job Trends

Senior Data Scientist
UK

The median Senior Data Scientist salary in the UK is £85,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 24 July 2026.

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

6 months to
24 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 525 601 653
Rank change year-on-year +76 +52 +89
Permanent jobs requiring a Senior Data Scientist 236 94 195
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.23% 0.19% 0.21%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.25% 0.21% 0.23%
Number of salaries quoted 145 39 91
10th Percentile £63,500 £48,300 £50,000
25th Percentile £74,566 £70,000 £57,646
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £85,000 £85,000 £75,000
Median % change year-on-year - +13.33% +10.29%
75th Percentile £100,000 £90,625 £85,625
90th Percentile - £99,250 £111,250
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £80,000 £70,000
% change year-on-year -6.25% +14.29% +7.69%

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 94,832 44,261 86,457
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 94.34% 90.17% 94.75%
Number of salaries quoted 64,920 26,252 60,421
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,500 £30,000
25th Percentile £40,000 £37,500 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £55,000 £54,389
Median % change year-on-year - +1.12% -9.35%
75th Percentile £75,000 £75,000 £71,219
90th Percentile £96,250 £96,250 £90,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,500 £50,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +5.00% - -5.21%

Senior Data Scientist
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings featuring 'Senior Data Scientist' in the job title relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Senior Data Scientist job vacancy trend in the UK

Senior Data Scientist
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for Senior Data Scientist job vacancies in the UK.

Salary distribution trend for Senior Data Scientist job vacancies in the UK

Senior Data Scientist
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Senior Data Scientist over the 6 months to 24 July 2026.

Salary histogram for Senior Data Scientist in the UK

Senior Data Scientist
Top 16 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Senior Data Scientist within the UK over the 6 months to 24 July 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 +63 226 £83,774 -1.44% 136
UK excluding London 0 117 £75,000 -6.25% 70
London +45 116 £95,000 +11.76% 84
Work from Home +13 88 £75,000 -11.76% 77
North of England +5 48 £77,500 +7.64% 24
Midlands 0 36 £75,000 - 10
North West +27 35 £77,500 -6.06% 12
East Midlands - 32 £75,000 -
South West -72 14 £58,497 -31.18% 9
Yorkshire -27 8 £75,000 +17.19% 10
East of England - 7 £86,725 - 3
Wales -51 5 £100,000 +17.65% 6
North East - 5 £83,774 - 2
South East -15 4 - - 12
West Midlands -31 4 £70,860 - 10
Northern Ireland - 3 - - 1

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

For the 6 months to 24 July 2026, Senior 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 Senior Data Scientist in the job title.

1 236 (100.00%) Data Science
2 119 (50.42%) Machine Learning
3 100 (42.37%) Python
4 90 (38.14%) AI
5 68 (28.81%) Mentoring
6 55 (23.31%) Analytics
6 55 (23.31%) SQL
7 39 (16.53%) Degree
7 39 (16.53%) Roadmaps
8 37 (15.68%) MLOps
9 34 (14.41%) Software Engineering
10 33 (13.98%) PyTorch
11 32 (13.56%) CI/CD
12 31 (13.14%) TensorFlow
13 30 (12.71%) LLM
14 28 (11.86%) Actionable Insight
14 28 (11.86%) Statistics
15 27 (11.44%) AWS
15 27 (11.44%) Data Engineering
16 25 (10.59%) Project Management
17 24 (10.17%) Azure
17 24 (10.17%) Deep Learning
17 24 (10.17%) Hugging Face
18 23 (9.75%) Decision-Making
18 23 (9.75%) Master's Degree
19 22 (9.32%) GCP
19 22 (9.32%) Natural Language Processing
19 22 (9.32%) PhD
20 21 (8.90%) Data Quality
21 20 (8.47%) Mathematics

Senior 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 19 (8.05%) Apache Spark
2 3 (1.27%) SAS
Applications
1 4 (1.69%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.85%) SPSS
3 1 (0.42%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 27 (11.44%) AWS
2 24 (10.17%) Azure
3 22 (9.32%) GCP
4 11 (4.66%) SaaS
5 10 (4.24%) Power Platform
6 6 (2.54%) Dataform
6 6 (2.54%) dbt
7 5 (2.12%) Amazon SageMaker
8 4 (1.69%) Amazon S3
8 4 (1.69%) AWS Lambda
8 4 (1.69%) Serverless
8 4 (1.69%) Snowflake
9 1 (0.42%) Azure Data Factory
9 1 (0.42%) Azure Machine Learning
9 1 (0.42%) Salesforce Service Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 3 (1.27%) Broadband
2 1 (0.42%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 16 (6.78%) Amazon Redshift
2 12 (5.08%) Data Warehouse
3 10 (4.24%) Power BI
3 10 (4.24%) Tableau
4 6 (2.54%) Looker
4 6 (2.54%) Metabase
5 3 (1.27%) Amazon Athena
6 2 (0.85%) Big Data
6 2 (0.85%) Data Lake
6 2 (0.85%) Data Mining
7 1 (0.42%) Apache Iceberg
7 1 (0.42%) BigQuery
7 1 (0.42%) Delta Lake
7 1 (0.42%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
7 1 (0.42%) Flink
7 1 (0.42%) Hadoop
7 1 (0.42%) Redis
Development Applications
1 14 (5.93%) Git
2 4 (1.69%) MLflow
3 1 (0.42%) JIRA
General
1 74 (31.36%) Finance
2 29 (12.29%) Analytical Skills
3 27 (11.44%) Banking
4 20 (8.47%) Social Skills
5 16 (6.78%) Financial Institution
6 15 (6.36%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (5.51%) Public Sector
8 9 (3.81%) Marketing
9 6 (2.54%) Wearables
10 5 (2.12%) Automotive
10 5 (2.12%) Influencing Skills
11 4 (1.69%) Retail
11 4 (1.69%) Retail Banking
12 3 (1.27%) Games
13 2 (0.85%) Aerospace
13 2 (0.85%) Law
13 2 (0.85%) Pharmaceutical
13 2 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
13 2 (0.85%) Publishing
14 1 (0.42%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 33 (13.98%) PyTorch
2 31 (13.14%) TensorFlow
3 24 (10.17%) Hugging Face
4 16 (6.78%) scikit-learn
5 15 (6.36%) SpaCy
6 10 (4.24%) Pandas
6 10 (4.24%) XGBoost
7 8 (3.39%) NumPy
8 6 (2.54%) LangChain
8 6 (2.54%) PySpark
9 5 (2.12%) LlamaIndex
10 1 (0.42%) Kafka
10 1 (0.42%) Kaldi
10 1 (0.42%) Keras
10 1 (0.42%) LightGBM
10 1 (0.42%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 15 (6.36%) e-Learning
2 10 (4.24%) Algorithms
3 6 (2.54%) Cloud Native
4 5 (2.12%) AI Agents
4 5 (2.12%) Credit Risk
5 3 (1.27%) Life Science
6 1 (0.42%) Acoustics
6 1 (0.42%) Clustering
6 1 (0.42%) Educational Technology
6 1 (0.42%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 1 (0.42%) Product Ownership
Processes & Methodologies
1 236 (100.00%) Data Science
2 119 (50.42%) Machine Learning
3 90 (38.14%) AI
4 68 (28.81%) Mentoring
5 55 (23.31%) Analytics
6 39 (16.53%) Roadmaps
7 37 (15.68%) MLOps
8 34 (14.41%) Software Engineering
9 32 (13.56%) CI/CD
10 30 (12.71%) LLM
11 28 (11.86%) Actionable Insight
11 28 (11.86%) Statistics
12 27 (11.44%) Data Engineering
13 25 (10.59%) Project Management
14 24 (10.17%) Deep Learning
15 23 (9.75%) Decision-Making
16 22 (9.32%) Natural Language Processing
17 20 (8.47%) Mathematics
18 19 (8.05%) Generative AI
19 18 (7.63%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 100 (42.37%) Python
2 55 (23.31%) SQL
3 16 (6.78%) R
4 6 (2.54%) Julia
Qualifications
1 39 (16.53%) Degree
2 23 (9.75%) Master's Degree
3 22 (9.32%) PhD
4 10 (4.24%) Security Cleared
5 6 (2.54%) DBS Check
6 4 (1.69%) DV Cleared
7 2 (0.85%) SC Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 21 (8.90%) Data Quality
2 4 (1.69%) EU AI Act
2 4 (1.69%) GDPR
3 2 (0.85%) Actionable Recommendations
3 2 (0.85%) QA
System Software
1 10 (4.24%) Docker
Systems Management
1 10 (4.24%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 6 (2.54%) Databricks
2 4 (1.69%) Google
3 1 (0.42%) Cognizant
3 1 (0.42%) Dataiku
3 1 (0.42%) LexisNexis
3 1 (0.42%) OpenAI
3 1 (0.42%) Oracle
3 1 (0.42%) PeopleSoft
3 1 (0.42%) Salesforce