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 20 September 2026.

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

6 months to
20 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 490 633 587
Rank change year-on-year +143 -46 +95
Permanent jobs requiring a Senior Data Scientist 341 50 197
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.29% 0.10% 0.25%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.31% 0.11% 0.27%
Number of salaries quoted 209 18 69
10th Percentile £65,000 £79,250 £49,975
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 £93,750 £80,000
90th Percentile - £97,500 £104,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £83,774 £85,000 £63,940
% change year-on-year -1.44% +32.94% -5.27%

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 108,283 44,200 74,178
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 93.18% 89.65% 95.24%
Number of salaries quoted 74,199 25,992 44,363
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,250 £30,000
25th Percentile £40,500 £36,250 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £58,500 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +6.36% - -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 20 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 20 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 +128 320 £90,000 +5.88% 350
London +64 168 £95,000 +11.76% 239
UK excluding London +8 163 £83,774 -1.44% 121
Work from Home +45 98 £75,026 -11.73% 159
North of England -7 67 £86,887 +5.32% 32
North West +11 38 £80,000 -3.03% 20
Midlands - 36 £75,000 - 21
South East -13 34 £90,000 - 32
East Midlands - 31 £75,000 - 9
Yorkshire - 25 £90,000 - 11
South West -66 9 £75,000 -11.76% 15
Wales - 8 £100,000 - 8
West Midlands - 5 £75,000 - 12
North East - 4 £91,887 - 1
Northern Ireland - 4 £90,000 - 5
East of England - 3 £86,725 - 6
Scotland - 2 £75,013 - 3

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

For the 6 months to 20 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.

1 341 (100.00%) Data Science
2 173 (50.73%) Machine Learning
3 133 (39.00%) AI
4 119 (34.90%) Python
5 96 (28.15%) Analytics
6 67 (19.65%) Mentoring
7 57 (16.72%) SQL
8 51 (14.96%) MLOps
9 50 (14.66%) Degree
10 49 (14.37%) CI/CD
11 43 (12.61%) Roadmaps
12 40 (11.73%) Software Engineering
13 38 (11.14%) Azure
14 37 (10.85%) AWS
15 36 (10.56%) Actionable Insight
15 36 (10.56%) Decision-Making
15 36 (10.56%) Natural Language Processing
16 35 (10.26%) Data Engineering
16 35 (10.26%) Statistics
17 34 (9.97%) Master's Degree
18 33 (9.68%) LLM
19 32 (9.38%) Apache Spark
20 30 (8.80%) GCP
20 30 (8.80%) PyTorch
21 29 (8.50%) Generative AI
21 29 (8.50%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
21 29 (8.50%) TensorFlow
22 28 (8.21%) Collaborative Culture
22 28 (8.21%) Predictive Modelling
23 27 (7.92%) PhD

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 (9.38%) Apache Spark
2 3 (0.88%) SAS
3 2 (0.59%) Apache
4 1 (0.29%) Apache Airflow
Applications
1 4 (1.17%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.59%) SPSS
3 1 (0.29%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 38 (11.14%) Azure
2 37 (10.85%) AWS
3 30 (8.80%) GCP
4 13 (3.81%) SaaS
5 9 (2.64%) Azure Machine Learning
6 5 (1.47%) Amazon S3
6 5 (1.47%) AWS Lambda
6 5 (1.47%) Power Platform
6 5 (1.47%) Serverless
7 4 (1.17%) Amazon SageMaker
7 4 (1.17%) Azure Databricks
8 3 (0.88%) dbt
8 3 (0.88%) Salesforce Service Cloud
8 3 (0.88%) Snowflake
9 2 (0.59%) Anthropic Claude
9 2 (0.59%) Azure AI
9 2 (0.59%) Dataform
9 2 (0.59%) Google Gemini
10 1 (0.29%) Cloud Composer
10 1 (0.29%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.29%) 5G
1 1 (0.29%) Broadband
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (7.62%) Amazon Redshift
2 12 (3.52%) Data Warehouse
3 5 (1.47%) Data Lake
3 5 (1.47%) Power BI
3 5 (1.47%) Tableau
4 4 (1.17%) Flink
5 3 (0.88%) Apache Iceberg
5 3 (0.88%) Delta Lake
5 3 (0.88%) Looker
5 3 (0.88%) Redis
6 2 (0.59%) Amazon Athena
6 2 (0.59%) BigQuery
6 2 (0.59%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
6 2 (0.59%) Metabase
7 1 (0.29%) Big Data
7 1 (0.29%) Data Mining
Development Applications
1 20 (5.87%) Git
2 3 (0.88%) MLflow
3 1 (0.29%) JIRA
General
1 96 (28.15%) Finance
2 42 (12.32%) Banking
3 29 (8.50%) Social Skills
4 25 (7.33%) Analytical Skills
5 24 (7.04%) Financial Institution
6 23 (6.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 17 (4.99%) Public Sector
8 15 (4.40%) Retail
9 11 (3.23%) Marketing
10 9 (2.64%) Law
11 7 (2.05%) Influencing Skills
12 6 (1.76%) Wearables
13 5 (1.47%) Automotive
13 5 (1.47%) Games
13 5 (1.47%) Retail Banking
14 3 (0.88%) Pharmaceutical
14 3 (0.88%) Publishing
15 1 (0.29%) Legal
15 1 (0.29%) Presentation Skills
15 1 (0.29%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 30 (8.80%) PyTorch
2 29 (8.50%) TensorFlow
3 24 (7.04%) Hugging Face
4 23 (6.74%) SpaCy
5 14 (4.11%) scikit-learn
6 11 (3.23%) Pandas
7 9 (2.64%) LangChain
7 9 (2.64%) NumPy
7 9 (2.64%) XGBoost
8 8 (2.35%) PySpark
9 5 (1.47%) LlamaIndex
10 4 (1.17%) LangGraph
11 3 (0.88%) Kafka
12 1 (0.29%) Apache Beam
12 1 (0.29%) Kaldi
12 1 (0.29%) Keras
12 1 (0.29%) LightGBM
12 1 (0.29%) Qwen
12 1 (0.29%) Streamlit
12 1 (0.29%) Terraform
Miscellaneous
1 23 (6.74%) e-Learning
2 14 (4.11%) Algorithms
3 11 (3.23%) AI Agents
4 8 (2.35%) Cloud Native
5 7 (2.05%) Credit Risk
6 4 (1.17%) Life Science
7 3 (0.88%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
8 2 (0.59%) Analytical Mindset
8 2 (0.59%) Product Ownership
9 1 (0.29%) Acoustics
9 1 (0.29%) Clustering
9 1 (0.29%) Educational Technology
9 1 (0.29%) FMCG
Processes & Methodologies
1 341 (100.00%) Data Science
2 173 (50.73%) Machine Learning
3 133 (39.00%) AI
4 96 (28.15%) Analytics
5 67 (19.65%) Mentoring
6 51 (14.96%) MLOps
7 49 (14.37%) CI/CD
8 43 (12.61%) Roadmaps
9 40 (11.73%) Software Engineering
10 36 (10.56%) Actionable Insight
10 36 (10.56%) Decision-Making
10 36 (10.56%) Natural Language Processing
11 35 (10.26%) Data Engineering
11 35 (10.26%) Statistics
12 33 (9.68%) LLM
13 29 (8.50%) Generative AI
13 29 (8.50%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
14 28 (8.21%) Collaborative Culture
14 28 (8.21%) Predictive Modelling
15 26 (7.62%) Deep Learning
Programming Languages
1 119 (34.90%) Python
2 57 (16.72%) SQL
3 9 (2.64%) R
4 2 (0.59%) Julia
5 1 (0.29%) Java
5 1 (0.29%) Scala
5 1 (0.29%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 50 (14.66%) Degree
2 34 (9.97%) Master's Degree
3 27 (7.92%) PhD
4 14 (4.11%) Security Cleared
5 5 (1.47%) DV Cleared
6 3 (0.88%) SC Cleared
7 2 (0.59%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (0.59%) DBS Check
7 2 (0.59%) Numerate Degree
8 1 (0.29%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 19 (5.57%) Data Quality
2 5 (1.47%) EU AI Act
2 5 (1.47%) GDPR
3 4 (1.17%) Actionable Recommendations
4 2 (0.59%) ISO/IEC 42001
5 1 (0.29%) QA
System Software
1 10 (2.93%) Docker
Systems Management
1 10 (2.93%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 18 (5.28%) Databricks
2 9 (2.64%) LexisNexis
3 8 (2.35%) Google
4 5 (1.47%) Microsoft
4 5 (1.47%) Workday
5 3 (0.88%) OpenAI
5 3 (0.88%) Oracle
5 3 (0.88%) PeopleSoft
5 3 (0.88%) Salesforce
6 1 (0.29%) Cognizant
6 1 (0.29%) Dataiku
6 1 (0.29%) Mistral
6 1 (0.29%) New Relic
6 1 (0.29%) Splunk