Senior Data Scientist Job Trends

Senior Data Scientist
UK

The median Senior Data Scientist salary in the UK is £90,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 10 October 2026.

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

6 months to
10 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 473 626 585
Rank change year-on-year +153 -41 +76
Permanent jobs requiring a Senior Data Scientist 359 41 169
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.30% 0.083% 0.23%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.33% 0.092% 0.24%
Number of salaries quoted 196 14 59
10th Percentile £65,000 £75,750 £54,459
25th Percentile £75,000 £80,000 £57,646
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £90,000 £85,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year +5.88% +21.43% -12.50%
75th Percentile £100,000 £90,000 £85,000
90th Percentile - £96,750 £104,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £90,000 £85,000 £62,879
% change year-on-year +5.88% +35.18% -13.98%

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 109,405 44,412 69,302
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 92.66% 89.84% 95.38%
Number of salaries quoted 74,287 25,750 39,695
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,000 £31,250
25th Percentile £40,750 £35,500 £41,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £58,396 £53,688 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +8.77% -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%

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 10 October 2026.

Salary histogram for Senior Data Scientist in the UK

Senior 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 Senior Data Scientist within the UK over the 6 months to 10 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 +152 336 £90,000 +5.88% 422
London +96 182 £95,000 +11.76% 287
UK excluding London +32 167 £90,000 +5.88% 140
Work from Home +32 93 £75,026 -11.73% 180
North of England -3 57 £90,000 +9.09% 38
South East -13 43 £90,000 - 33
Midlands - 37 £75,000 - 21
East Midlands - 34 £75,000 - 8
North West +6 30 £90,000 +9.09% 24
Yorkshire - 24 £90,000 - 13
South West -64 13 £75,000 -11.76% 22
Wales - 8 £100,000 - 8
Northern Ireland - 6 £90,000 - 2
North East - 3 £100,000 - 1
West Midlands - 3 £75,000 - 13
Scotland - 2 £75,013 - 6
East of England - 1 £65,000 - 10

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

For the 6 months to 10 October 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.

1 359 (100.00%) Data Science
2 183 (50.97%) Machine Learning
3 137 (38.16%) AI
4 122 (33.98%) Python
5 100 (27.86%) Analytics
6 65 (18.11%) Mentoring
7 58 (16.16%) SQL
8 56 (15.60%) MLOps
9 53 (14.76%) Degree
10 48 (13.37%) CI/CD
11 44 (12.26%) Roadmaps
12 43 (11.98%) Azure
12 43 (11.98%) Software Engineering
13 42 (11.70%) Actionable Insight
14 39 (10.86%) Natural Language Processing
15 38 (10.58%) Decision-Making
16 36 (10.03%) AWS
16 36 (10.03%) Master's Degree
17 35 (9.75%) Data Engineering
18 34 (9.47%) Generative AI
18 34 (9.47%) Predictive Modelling
19 33 (9.19%) Apache Spark
19 33 (9.19%) Statistics
20 32 (8.91%) PhD
21 31 (8.64%) Collaborative Culture
21 31 (8.64%) GCP
21 31 (8.64%) LLM
22 30 (8.36%) PyTorch
23 29 (8.08%) TensorFlow
24 28 (7.80%) Amazon Redshift

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 33 (9.19%) Apache Spark
2 3 (0.84%) Apache
2 3 (0.84%) SAS
3 2 (0.56%) Apache Airflow
Applications
1 2 (0.56%) Chatbot
1 2 (0.56%) SPSS
2 1 (0.28%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.28%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.28%) Spreadsheet
Cloud Services
1 43 (11.98%) Azure
2 36 (10.03%) AWS
3 31 (8.64%) GCP
4 16 (4.46%) SaaS
5 13 (3.62%) Azure Machine Learning
6 4 (1.11%) Azure Databricks
7 3 (0.84%) Amazon S3
7 3 (0.84%) AWS Lambda
7 3 (0.84%) Salesforce Service Cloud
7 3 (0.84%) Serverless
7 3 (0.84%) Snowflake
8 2 (0.56%) Amazon SageMaker
8 2 (0.56%) Anthropic Claude
8 2 (0.56%) Azure AI
8 2 (0.56%) Cloud Composer
8 2 (0.56%) dbt
8 2 (0.56%) Google Gemini
8 2 (0.56%) Power Platform
9 1 (0.28%) GitHub
9 1 (0.28%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.28%) 5G
1 1 (0.28%) Broadband
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (7.80%) Amazon Redshift
2 10 (2.79%) Data Warehouse
3 5 (1.39%) Data Lake
3 5 (1.39%) Flink
4 3 (0.84%) Apache Iceberg
4 3 (0.84%) BigQuery
4 3 (0.84%) Delta Lake
4 3 (0.84%) Redis
5 2 (0.56%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
5 2 (0.56%) Looker
5 2 (0.56%) Power BI
5 2 (0.56%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 21 (5.85%) Git
2 3 (0.84%) MLflow
General
1 93 (25.91%) Finance
2 43 (11.98%) Banking
3 28 (7.80%) Social Skills
4 27 (7.52%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 26 (7.24%) Financial Institution
6 24 (6.69%) Analytical Skills
7 19 (5.29%) Retail
8 16 (4.46%) Public Sector
9 9 (2.51%) Law
9 9 (2.51%) Marketing
10 8 (2.23%) Games
11 7 (1.95%) Influencing Skills
12 6 (1.67%) Wearables
13 5 (1.39%) Automotive
13 5 (1.39%) Retail Banking
14 3 (0.84%) Pharmaceutical
14 3 (0.84%) Publishing
15 1 (0.28%) Legal
15 1 (0.28%) Tech for Good
15 1 (0.28%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 30 (8.36%) PyTorch
2 29 (8.08%) TensorFlow
3 25 (6.96%) Hugging Face
3 25 (6.96%) SpaCy
4 11 (3.06%) scikit-learn
5 9 (2.51%) XGBoost
6 8 (2.23%) LangChain
6 8 (2.23%) Pandas
7 6 (1.67%) NumPy
8 5 (1.39%) PySpark
9 4 (1.11%) LangGraph
9 4 (1.11%) LlamaIndex
10 3 (0.84%) Kafka
11 2 (0.56%) Apache Beam
11 2 (0.56%) Terraform
12 1 (0.28%) Kaldi
12 1 (0.28%) Keras
12 1 (0.28%) LightGBM
12 1 (0.28%) Qwen
12 1 (0.28%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 25 (6.96%) e-Learning
2 15 (4.18%) Algorithms
3 10 (2.79%) AI Agents
4 7 (1.95%) Cloud Native
4 7 (1.95%) Credit Risk
5 3 (0.84%) Blog
5 3 (0.84%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 3 (0.84%) Life Science
6 2 (0.56%) Analytical Mindset
7 1 (0.28%) Acoustics
7 1 (0.28%) Clustering
7 1 (0.28%) Educational Technology
7 1 (0.28%) FMCG
7 1 (0.28%) Product Ownership
Processes & Methodologies
1 359 (100.00%) Data Science
2 183 (50.97%) Machine Learning
3 137 (38.16%) AI
4 100 (27.86%) Analytics
5 65 (18.11%) Mentoring
6 56 (15.60%) MLOps
7 48 (13.37%) CI/CD
8 44 (12.26%) Roadmaps
9 43 (11.98%) Software Engineering
10 42 (11.70%) Actionable Insight
11 39 (10.86%) Natural Language Processing
12 38 (10.58%) Decision-Making
13 35 (9.75%) Data Engineering
14 34 (9.47%) Generative AI
14 34 (9.47%) Predictive Modelling
15 33 (9.19%) Statistics
16 31 (8.64%) Collaborative Culture
16 31 (8.64%) LLM
17 27 (7.52%) DevOps
18 26 (7.24%) Project Management
Programming Languages
1 122 (33.98%) Python
2 58 (16.16%) SQL
3 4 (1.11%) R
4 2 (0.56%) Java
4 2 (0.56%) Scala
4 2 (0.56%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 53 (14.76%) Degree
2 36 (10.03%) Master's Degree
3 32 (8.91%) PhD
4 14 (3.90%) Security Cleared
5 5 (1.39%) DV Cleared
6 4 (1.11%) SC Cleared
7 3 (0.84%) Numerate Degree
8 2 (0.56%) Computer Science Degree
9 1 (0.28%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (3.90%) Data Quality
2 5 (1.39%) Actionable Recommendations
2 5 (1.39%) EU AI Act
2 5 (1.39%) GDPR
3 2 (0.56%) ISO/IEC 42001
4 1 (0.28%) QA
System Software
1 9 (2.51%) Docker
Systems Management
1 8 (2.23%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 18 (5.01%) Databricks
2 10 (2.79%) LexisNexis
3 7 (1.95%) Google
3 7 (1.95%) Workday
4 6 (1.67%) Microsoft
5 3 (0.84%) OpenAI
5 3 (0.84%) Oracle
5 3 (0.84%) PeopleSoft
5 3 (0.84%) Salesforce
6 2 (0.56%) New Relic
6 2 (0.56%) Splunk
7 1 (0.28%) Dataiku
7 1 (0.28%) Mistral