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 16 September 2026.

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

6 months to
16 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 491 629 606
Rank change year-on-year +138 -23 +67
Permanent jobs requiring a Senior Data Scientist 333 51 198
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.29% 0.10% 0.25%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.31% 0.12% 0.27%
Number of salaries quoted 206 19 70
10th Percentile £65,000 £76,000 £50,048
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 £92,500 £80,000
90th Percentile - £97,500 £102,625
UK excluding London median annual salary £83,774 £85,000 £65,000
% change year-on-year -1.44% +30.77% -3.09%

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 106,506 44,266 74,164
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 93.35% 89.67% 95.25%
Number of salaries quoted 73,200 26,014 44,625
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,250 £30,000
25th Percentile £40,000 £36,250 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £59,000 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +7.27% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £77,500 £75,000 £73,750
90th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year +15.79% -5.00% -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 16 September 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 16 September 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 +142 312 £90,000 +5.88% 431
London +73 162 £95,000 +11.76% 297
UK excluding London +31 161 £83,774 -1.44% 143
Work from Home +56 97 £75,026 -11.73% 188
North of England 0 68 £83,774 +1.54% 43
North West +19 39 £77,513 -6.04% 27
Midlands - 35 £75,000 - 25
South East -23 31 £90,000 - 34
East Midlands - 30 £75,000 - 11
Yorkshire - 25 £90,000 - 14
South West -65 9 £75,000 -11.76% 17
Wales - 8 £100,000 - 8
West Midlands - 5 £75,000 - 14
North East - 4 £91,887 - 2
East of England - 4 £86,725 - 6
Northern Ireland - 4 £90,000 - 6
Scotland +8 2 £75,013 +7.16% 5

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

For the 6 months to 16 September 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.

1 333 (100.00%) Data Science
2 166 (49.85%) Machine Learning
3 130 (39.04%) AI
4 117 (35.14%) Python
5 94 (28.23%) Analytics
6 68 (20.42%) Mentoring
7 57 (17.12%) SQL
8 49 (14.71%) Degree
8 49 (14.71%) MLOps
9 48 (14.41%) CI/CD
10 42 (12.61%) Roadmaps
11 39 (11.71%) Software Engineering
12 38 (11.41%) AWS
13 36 (10.81%) Actionable Insight
13 36 (10.81%) Azure
13 36 (10.81%) Data Engineering
13 36 (10.81%) Natural Language Processing
13 36 (10.81%) Statistics
14 35 (10.51%) Decision-Making
15 33 (9.91%) LLM
15 33 (9.91%) Master's Degree
16 32 (9.61%) Apache Spark
17 30 (9.01%) PyTorch
18 29 (8.71%) GCP
18 29 (8.71%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
18 29 (8.71%) TensorFlow
19 28 (8.41%) Collaborative Culture
20 27 (8.11%) Generative AI
20 27 (8.11%) PhD
21 26 (7.81%) 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 32 (9.61%) Apache Spark
2 3 (0.90%) SAS
3 1 (0.30%) Apache
Applications
1 4 (1.20%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.60%) SPSS
3 1 (0.30%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 38 (11.41%) AWS
2 36 (10.81%) Azure
3 29 (8.71%) GCP
4 12 (3.60%) SaaS
5 7 (2.10%) Azure Machine Learning
5 7 (2.10%) Power Platform
6 6 (1.80%) Amazon S3
6 6 (1.80%) AWS Lambda
6 6 (1.80%) Serverless
7 5 (1.50%) Amazon SageMaker
8 4 (1.20%) Azure Databricks
9 3 (0.90%) Dataform
9 3 (0.90%) dbt
9 3 (0.90%) Salesforce Service Cloud
9 3 (0.90%) Snowflake
10 2 (0.60%) Anthropic Claude
10 2 (0.60%) Azure AI
10 2 (0.60%) Google Gemini
11 1 (0.30%) Azure Data Factory
11 1 (0.30%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.30%) 5G
1 1 (0.30%) Broadband
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (7.81%) Amazon Redshift
2 13 (3.90%) Data Warehouse
3 7 (2.10%) Power BI
3 7 (2.10%) Tableau
4 5 (1.50%) Data Lake
5 3 (0.90%) Amazon Athena
5 3 (0.90%) Apache Iceberg
5 3 (0.90%) Delta Lake
5 3 (0.90%) Flink
5 3 (0.90%) Looker
5 3 (0.90%) Metabase
5 3 (0.90%) Redis
6 2 (0.60%) Data Mining
6 2 (0.60%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
7 1 (0.30%) Big Data
7 1 (0.30%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 18 (5.41%) Git
2 3 (0.90%) MLflow
3 1 (0.30%) JIRA
General
1 97 (29.13%) Finance
2 43 (12.91%) Banking
3 28 (8.41%) Social Skills
4 27 (8.11%) Analytical Skills
5 24 (7.21%) Financial Institution
6 21 (6.31%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 17 (5.11%) Public Sector
8 15 (4.50%) Retail
9 12 (3.60%) Marketing
10 9 (2.70%) Law
11 6 (1.80%) Influencing Skills
11 6 (1.80%) Wearables
12 5 (1.50%) Automotive
12 5 (1.50%) Retail Banking
13 4 (1.20%) Games
14 3 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
14 3 (0.90%) Publishing
15 2 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
16 1 (0.30%) Tech for Good
16 1 (0.30%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 30 (9.01%) PyTorch
2 29 (8.71%) TensorFlow
3 24 (7.21%) Hugging Face
4 23 (6.91%) SpaCy
5 15 (4.50%) scikit-learn
6 12 (3.60%) Pandas
7 10 (3.00%) NumPy
8 9 (2.70%) LangChain
8 9 (2.70%) XGBoost
9 8 (2.40%) PySpark
10 5 (1.50%) LlamaIndex
11 4 (1.20%) LangGraph
12 3 (0.90%) Kafka
13 1 (0.30%) Kaldi
13 1 (0.30%) Keras
13 1 (0.30%) LightGBM
13 1 (0.30%) Qwen
13 1 (0.30%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 23 (6.91%) e-Learning
2 13 (3.90%) Algorithms
3 11 (3.30%) AI Agents
4 8 (2.40%) Cloud Native
5 7 (2.10%) Credit Risk
6 4 (1.20%) Life Science
7 3 (0.90%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
8 2 (0.60%) Analytical Mindset
8 2 (0.60%) Product Ownership
9 1 (0.30%) Acoustics
9 1 (0.30%) Clustering
9 1 (0.30%) Educational Technology
9 1 (0.30%) FMCG
Processes & Methodologies
1 333 (100.00%) Data Science
2 166 (49.85%) Machine Learning
3 130 (39.04%) AI
4 94 (28.23%) Analytics
5 68 (20.42%) Mentoring
6 49 (14.71%) MLOps
7 48 (14.41%) CI/CD
8 42 (12.61%) Roadmaps
9 39 (11.71%) Software Engineering
10 36 (10.81%) Actionable Insight
10 36 (10.81%) Data Engineering
10 36 (10.81%) Natural Language Processing
10 36 (10.81%) Statistics
11 35 (10.51%) Decision-Making
12 33 (9.91%) LLM
13 29 (8.71%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
14 28 (8.41%) Collaborative Culture
15 27 (8.11%) Generative AI
16 26 (7.81%) Deep Learning
16 26 (7.81%) Project Management
Programming Languages
1 117 (35.14%) Python
2 57 (17.12%) SQL
3 10 (3.00%) R
4 3 (0.90%) Julia
Qualifications
1 49 (14.71%) Degree
2 33 (9.91%) Master's Degree
3 27 (8.11%) PhD
4 14 (4.20%) Security Cleared
5 5 (1.50%) DV Cleared
6 3 (0.90%) DBS Check
6 3 (0.90%) SC Cleared
7 2 (0.60%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (0.60%) Numerate Degree
8 1 (0.30%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 20 (6.01%) Data Quality
2 5 (1.50%) EU AI Act
2 5 (1.50%) GDPR
3 4 (1.20%) Actionable Recommendations
4 2 (0.60%) ISO/IEC 42001
4 2 (0.60%) QA
System Software
1 9 (2.70%) Docker
Systems Management
1 9 (2.70%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 17 (5.11%) Databricks
2 8 (2.40%) LexisNexis
3 7 (2.10%) Google
4 5 (1.50%) Microsoft
4 5 (1.50%) Workday
5 3 (0.90%) OpenAI
5 3 (0.90%) Oracle
5 3 (0.90%) PeopleSoft
5 3 (0.90%) Salesforce
6 1 (0.30%) Cognizant
6 1 (0.30%) Dataiku
6 1 (0.30%) Mistral