Senior Data Scientist Job Trends

Senior Data Scientist
UK

The median Senior Data Scientist salary in the UK is £84,387 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 1 August 2026.

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

6 months to
1 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 511 587 648
Rank change year-on-year +76 +61 +89
Permanent jobs requiring a Senior Data Scientist 265 91 180
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.26% 0.18% 0.21%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.27% 0.20% 0.22%
Number of salaries quoted 164 36 78
10th Percentile £65,000 £47,625 £49,819
25th Percentile £75,000 £70,000 £57,646
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £84,387 £85,000 £72,500
Median % change year-on-year -0.72% +17.24% +7.41%
75th Percentile £100,000 £92,188 £88,750
90th Percentile - £101,875 £112,375
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £85,000 £65,000
% change year-on-year -11.76% +30.77% -1.57%

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 97,263 44,589 81,483
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 94.24% 90.05% 94.84%
Number of salaries quoted 66,554 26,541 55,776
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 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year - - -8.33%
75th Percentile £75,000 £75,000 £71,250
90th Percentile £96,250 £95,250 £90,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,500 £50,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +5.00% - -5.66%

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 1 August 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 1 August 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 +99 253 £83,774 -1.44% 190
UK excluding London +14 131 £75,000 -11.76% 75
London +55 130 £95,000 +11.76% 132
Work from Home +26 97 £75,000 -11.76% 83
North of England +9 54 £77,513 -3.11% 16
North West +33 38 £80,000 -3.03% 7
Midlands +5 38 £75,000 - 12
East Midlands - 32 £75,000 - 1
South West -80 15 £58,497 -31.18% 8
Yorkshire -21 11 £75,013 +17.21% 9
South East -29 7 £90,000 - 24
East of England - 7 £86,725 - 4
West Midlands -25 6 £75,000 - 11
Wales -56 6 £100,000 +17.65% 5
North East - 5 £83,774 -
Northern Ireland - 3 - - 4
Scotland +10 1 £75,026 +7.18% 2

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

For the 6 months to 1 August 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.

1 265 (100.00%) Data Science
2 135 (50.94%) Machine Learning
3 109 (41.13%) Python
4 107 (40.38%) AI
5 71 (26.79%) Analytics
5 71 (26.79%) Mentoring
6 59 (22.26%) SQL
7 44 (16.60%) Degree
8 39 (14.72%) Roadmaps
9 38 (14.34%) MLOps
10 35 (13.21%) CI/CD
11 34 (12.83%) Software Engineering
12 33 (12.45%) LLM
12 33 (12.45%) PyTorch
13 31 (11.70%) Actionable Insight
13 31 (11.70%) TensorFlow
14 30 (11.32%) Statistics
15 29 (10.94%) AWS
15 29 (10.94%) Data Engineering
16 26 (9.81%) Azure
16 26 (9.81%) Natural Language Processing
16 26 (9.81%) Project Management
16 26 (9.81%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
17 25 (9.43%) Master's Degree
17 25 (9.43%) PhD
18 24 (9.06%) Decision-Making
18 24 (9.06%) Deep Learning
18 24 (9.06%) Hugging Face
18 24 (9.06%) Mathematics
19 23 (8.68%) Data Quality

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 22 (8.30%) Apache Spark
2 3 (1.13%) SAS
Applications
1 4 (1.51%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.75%) SPSS
3 1 (0.38%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 29 (10.94%) AWS
2 26 (9.81%) Azure
3 23 (8.68%) GCP
4 11 (4.15%) SaaS
5 10 (3.77%) Power Platform
6 6 (2.26%) Dataform
6 6 (2.26%) dbt
7 5 (1.89%) Amazon S3
7 5 (1.89%) Amazon SageMaker
7 5 (1.89%) AWS Lambda
7 5 (1.89%) Serverless
7 5 (1.89%) Snowflake
8 2 (0.75%) Salesforce Service Cloud
9 1 (0.38%) Azure Data Factory
9 1 (0.38%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 3 (1.13%) Broadband
2 1 (0.38%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 18 (6.79%) Amazon Redshift
2 14 (5.28%) Data Warehouse
3 10 (3.77%) Power BI
3 10 (3.77%) Tableau
4 6 (2.26%) Looker
4 6 (2.26%) Metabase
5 3 (1.13%) Amazon Athena
5 3 (1.13%) Data Lake
6 2 (0.75%) Apache Iceberg
6 2 (0.75%) Big Data
6 2 (0.75%) Data Mining
6 2 (0.75%) Delta Lake
6 2 (0.75%) Flink
6 2 (0.75%) Redis
7 1 (0.38%) BigQuery
7 1 (0.38%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
7 1 (0.38%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 15 (5.66%) Git
2 4 (1.51%) MLflow
3 1 (0.38%) JIRA
General
1 86 (32.45%) Finance
2 32 (12.08%) Banking
3 29 (10.94%) Analytical Skills
4 21 (7.92%) Social Skills
5 18 (6.79%) Public Sector
6 17 (6.42%) Financial Institution
7 16 (6.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 10 (3.77%) Marketing
9 6 (2.26%) Retail
9 6 (2.26%) Wearables
10 5 (1.89%) Automotive
10 5 (1.89%) Influencing Skills
10 5 (1.89%) Law
10 5 (1.89%) Retail Banking
11 3 (1.13%) Games
11 3 (1.13%) Pharmaceutical
11 3 (1.13%) Publishing
12 2 (0.75%) Aerospace
12 2 (0.75%) Presentation Skills
13 1 (0.38%) Tech for Good
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 33 (12.45%) PyTorch
2 31 (11.70%) TensorFlow
3 24 (9.06%) Hugging Face
4 17 (6.42%) scikit-learn
5 16 (6.04%) SpaCy
6 11 (4.15%) Pandas
6 11 (4.15%) XGBoost
7 9 (3.40%) NumPy
8 8 (3.02%) LangChain
9 6 (2.26%) PySpark
10 5 (1.89%) LlamaIndex
11 2 (0.75%) Kafka
11 2 (0.75%) LangGraph
12 1 (0.38%) Kaldi
12 1 (0.38%) Keras
12 1 (0.38%) LightGBM
12 1 (0.38%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 16 (6.04%) e-Learning
2 12 (4.53%) Algorithms
3 7 (2.64%) AI Agents
4 6 (2.26%) Cloud Native
4 6 (2.26%) Credit Risk
5 4 (1.51%) Life Science
6 2 (0.75%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 1 (0.38%) Acoustics
7 1 (0.38%) Clustering
7 1 (0.38%) Educational Technology
7 1 (0.38%) FMCG
7 1 (0.38%) Product Ownership
Processes & Methodologies
1 265 (100.00%) Data Science
2 135 (50.94%) Machine Learning
3 107 (40.38%) AI
4 71 (26.79%) Analytics
4 71 (26.79%) Mentoring
5 39 (14.72%) Roadmaps
6 38 (14.34%) MLOps
7 35 (13.21%) CI/CD
8 34 (12.83%) Software Engineering
9 33 (12.45%) LLM
10 31 (11.70%) Actionable Insight
11 30 (11.32%) Statistics
12 29 (10.94%) Data Engineering
13 26 (9.81%) Natural Language Processing
13 26 (9.81%) Project Management
13 26 (9.81%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
14 24 (9.06%) Decision-Making
14 24 (9.06%) Deep Learning
14 24 (9.06%) Mathematics
15 22 (8.30%) Generative AI
Programming Languages
1 109 (41.13%) Python
2 59 (22.26%) SQL
3 16 (6.04%) R
4 6 (2.26%) Julia
Qualifications
1 44 (16.60%) Degree
2 25 (9.43%) Master's Degree
2 25 (9.43%) PhD
3 16 (6.04%) Security Cleared
4 9 (3.40%) DV Cleared
5 6 (2.26%) DBS Check
6 3 (1.13%) SC Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (8.68%) Data Quality
2 5 (1.89%) EU AI Act
2 5 (1.89%) GDPR
3 3 (1.13%) Actionable Recommendations
4 2 (0.75%) QA
System Software
1 10 (3.77%) Docker
Systems Management
1 10 (3.77%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 8 (3.02%) Databricks
2 6 (2.26%) Google
3 4 (1.51%) LexisNexis
4 2 (0.75%) OpenAI
4 2 (0.75%) Oracle
4 2 (0.75%) PeopleSoft
4 2 (0.75%) Salesforce
5 1 (0.38%) Cognizant
5 1 (0.38%) Dataiku