Senior Data Scientist Job Trends

Senior Data Scientist
UK

The median Senior Data Scientist salary in the UK is £80,939 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 22 June 2026.

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

6 months to
22 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 524 567 709
Rank change year-on-year +43 +142 +100
Permanent jobs requiring a Senior Data Scientist 225 107 204
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.24% 0.24% 0.19%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.25% 0.26% 0.20%
Number of salaries quoted 149 40 111
10th Percentile £59,617 £53,025 £50,000
25th Percentile £65,000 £70,000 £62,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,939 £82,500 £77,500
Median % change year-on-year -1.89% +6.45% +14.81%
75th Percentile £100,000 £90,000 £88,750
90th Percentile - £98,375 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £71,991 £75,000
% change year-on-year +4.18% -4.01% +15.38%

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 88,903 40,378 103,605
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 94.01% 89.46% 94.75%
Number of salaries quoted 61,009 23,013 74,813
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,750 £28,500
25th Percentile £40,000 £38,750 £38,620
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £57,500 £52,500
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% +9.52% -12.50%
75th Percentile £75,000 £77,500 £70,000
90th Percentile £95,000 £98,474 £90,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £50,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year - - -6.54%

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 22 June 2026.

Salary histogram for Senior Data Scientist in the UK

Senior Data Scientist
Top 15 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 22 June 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 +84 220 £80,939 -4.78% 38
UK excluding London +2 115 £75,000 +4.18% 22
London +36 107 £95,000 +11.76% 26
Work from Home +33 88 £70,000 -4.76% 14
North of England +12 49 £75,000 +17.19% 4
North West - 37 £75,000 - 4
Midlands +4 36 £75,000 +30.43%
East Midlands - 32 £75,000 -
South West -82 11 £58,497 -23.03% 3
East of England - 10 £86,725 - 2
Yorkshire -27 7 £70,860 +10.72%
South East -19 6 £40,000 - 11
North East - 5 £83,774 -
West Midlands -17 4 £70,860 +23.23%
Northern Ireland - 3 - -

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

For the 6 months to 22 June 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.

1 225 (100.00%) Data Science
2 111 (49.33%) Machine Learning
3 94 (41.78%) Python
4 85 (37.78%) AI
5 59 (26.22%) Mentoring
6 48 (21.33%) SQL
7 42 (18.67%) Analytics
8 38 (16.89%) Statistics
9 37 (16.44%) Degree
9 37 (16.44%) Roadmaps
10 33 (14.67%) Software Engineering
11 32 (14.22%) PyTorch
12 29 (12.89%) LLM
12 29 (12.89%) TensorFlow
13 28 (12.44%) MLOps
14 26 (11.56%) Actionable Insight
15 25 (11.11%) CI/CD
15 25 (11.11%) Project Management
16 24 (10.67%) Deep Learning
16 24 (10.67%) Hugging Face
16 24 (10.67%) Mathematics
17 22 (9.78%) Azure
17 22 (9.78%) PhD
18 21 (9.33%) Security Cleared
19 20 (8.89%) AWS
19 20 (8.89%) Generative AI
20 19 (8.44%) Data Engineering
20 19 (8.44%) Natural Language Processing
21 18 (8.00%) Technical Leadership
21 18 (8.00%) Visualisation

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 12 (5.33%) Apache Spark
2 3 (1.33%) SAS
Applications
1 4 (1.78%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.89%) SPSS
3 1 (0.44%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 22 (9.78%) Azure
2 20 (8.89%) AWS
3 15 (6.67%) GCP
4 9 (4.00%) Power Platform
5 6 (2.67%) Dataform
5 6 (2.67%) dbt
5 6 (2.67%) SaaS
6 3 (1.33%) Amazon S3
6 3 (1.33%) Amazon SageMaker
6 3 (1.33%) AWS Lambda
6 3 (1.33%) Serverless
6 3 (1.33%) Snowflake
7 1 (0.44%) Azure Data Factory
7 1 (0.44%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 3 (1.33%) Broadband
2 1 (0.44%) 5G
2 1 (0.44%) LTE
2 1 (0.44%) Software-Defined Radio
2 1 (0.44%) Wi-Fi
2 1 (0.44%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 10 (4.44%) Amazon Redshift
2 9 (4.00%) Power BI
2 9 (4.00%) Tableau
3 6 (2.67%) Data Warehouse
3 6 (2.67%) Looker
3 6 (2.67%) Metabase
4 3 (1.33%) Amazon Athena
5 2 (0.89%) Big Data
5 2 (0.89%) Data Mining
6 1 (0.44%) BigQuery
6 1 (0.44%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 14 (6.22%) Git
2 3 (1.33%) MLflow
3 1 (0.44%) JIRA
General
1 62 (27.56%) Finance
2 26 (11.56%) Analytical Skills
3 21 (9.33%) Social Skills
4 19 (8.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 17 (7.56%) Banking
6 12 (5.33%) Public Sector
7 11 (4.89%) Financial Institution
8 8 (3.56%) Marketing
9 7 (3.11%) Retail
10 6 (2.67%) Wearables
11 5 (2.22%) Automotive
11 5 (2.22%) Influencing Skills
12 2 (0.89%) Aerospace
12 2 (0.89%) Presentation Skills
12 2 (0.89%) Publishing
13 1 (0.44%) Advertising
13 1 (0.44%) Law
13 1 (0.44%) Legal
13 1 (0.44%) Tech for Good
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 32 (14.22%) PyTorch
2 29 (12.89%) TensorFlow
3 24 (10.67%) Hugging Face
4 12 (5.33%) scikit-learn
5 10 (4.44%) SpaCy
6 6 (2.67%) Pandas
6 6 (2.67%) PySpark
6 6 (2.67%) XGBoost
7 5 (2.22%) EDI
7 5 (2.22%) NumPy
8 4 (1.78%) LangChain
9 3 (1.33%) LlamaIndex
10 1 (0.44%) Kaldi
10 1 (0.44%) Keras
10 1 (0.44%) LightGBM
10 1 (0.44%) SciPy
10 1 (0.44%) Streamlit
10 1 (0.44%) ZeroMQ
Miscellaneous
1 10 (4.44%) e-Learning
2 9 (4.00%) Algorithms
3 6 (2.67%) Product Ownership
4 4 (1.78%) Cloud Native
5 3 (1.33%) AI Agents
6 1 (0.44%) Acoustics
6 1 (0.44%) Clustering
6 1 (0.44%) Credit Risk
6 1 (0.44%) Educational Technology
6 1 (0.44%) FPGA
6 1 (0.44%) Life Science
Processes & Methodologies
1 225 (100.00%) Data Science
2 111 (49.33%) Machine Learning
3 85 (37.78%) AI
4 59 (26.22%) Mentoring
5 42 (18.67%) Analytics
6 38 (16.89%) Statistics
7 37 (16.44%) Roadmaps
8 33 (14.67%) Software Engineering
9 29 (12.89%) LLM
10 28 (12.44%) MLOps
11 26 (11.56%) Actionable Insight
12 25 (11.11%) CI/CD
12 25 (11.11%) Project Management
13 24 (10.67%) Deep Learning
13 24 (10.67%) Mathematics
14 20 (8.89%) Generative AI
15 19 (8.44%) Data Engineering
15 19 (8.44%) Natural Language Processing
16 18 (8.00%) Technical Leadership
16 18 (8.00%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 94 (41.78%) Python
2 48 (21.33%) SQL
3 15 (6.67%) R
4 6 (2.67%) Julia
5 1 (0.44%) C++
Qualifications
1 37 (16.44%) Degree
2 22 (9.78%) PhD
3 21 (9.33%) Security Cleared
4 17 (7.56%) Master's Degree
5 15 (6.67%) DV Cleared
6 7 (3.11%) SC Cleared
7 6 (2.67%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (6.67%) Data Quality
2 2 (0.89%) QA
System Software
1 8 (3.56%) Docker
Systems Management
1 8 (3.56%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 6 (2.67%) Microsoft
2 4 (1.78%) Google
3 3 (1.33%) Databricks
4 1 (0.44%) Cognizant
4 1 (0.44%) Dataiku