Senior Data Scientist Job Trends

Senior Data Scientist
UK

The median Senior Data Scientist salary in the UK is £80,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 21 May 2026.

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

6 months to
21 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 537 549 679
Rank change year-on-year +12 +130 +132
Permanent jobs requiring a Senior Data Scientist 196 113 211
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.21% 0.26% 0.22%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.23% 0.29% 0.23%
Number of salaries quoted 135 44 118
10th Percentile £59,617 £53,750 £50,000
25th Percentile £65,000 £68,750 £66,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £80,000 £80,000
Median % change year-on-year - - +16.79%
75th Percentile £95,000 £90,313 £95,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £104,000 £115,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £70,000 £77,500
% change year-on-year +7.14% -9.68% +19.23%

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 86,124 39,293 92,007
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 93.36% 89.47% 94.64%
Number of salaries quoted 56,991 22,669 67,426
10th Percentile £30,000 £30,000 £28,500
25th Percentile £40,000 £41,250 £38,500
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 £71,000
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £90,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £51,729 £50,000
% change year-on-year -3.34% +3.46% -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 21 May 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 21 May 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 +44 191 £80,000 - 72
London +25 100 £90,000 +5.88% 53
UK excluding London -9 93 £75,000 +7.14% 32
Work from Home +37 67 £70,000 -4.76% 37
North of England +1 40 £75,000 +17.19% 7
North West - 32 £75,000 - 6
Midlands -9 22 £75,000 +30.43% 5
East Midlands - 17 £75,000 - 4
South West -74 11 £58,497 -18.74% 3
East of England - 10 £86,725 - 1
South East -16 7 £40,000 -54.29% 14
West Midlands -39 5 £75,000 +30.43% 1
Yorkshire -40 4 £66,720 +4.25% 1
North East - 4 £83,360 -
Northern Ireland - 3 - -

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

For the 6 months to 21 May 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.

1 196 (100.00%) Data Science
2 88 (44.90%) Machine Learning
3 78 (39.80%) Python
4 75 (38.27%) AI
5 39 (19.90%) Mentoring
6 34 (17.35%) SQL
7 33 (16.84%) Analytics
8 32 (16.33%) Degree
9 29 (14.80%) Statistics
10 28 (14.29%) LLM
11 24 (12.24%) Mathematics
11 24 (12.24%) Security Cleared
12 22 (11.22%) MLOps
12 22 (11.22%) PhD
13 20 (10.20%) PyTorch
14 19 (9.69%) CI/CD
14 19 (9.69%) Software Engineering
14 19 (9.69%) Technical Leadership
14 19 (9.69%) TensorFlow
15 18 (9.18%) Azure
15 18 (9.18%) DV Cleared
15 18 (9.18%) Generative AI
15 18 (9.18%) Roadmaps
16 17 (8.67%) Visualisation
17 16 (8.16%) AWS
17 16 (8.16%) Data Engineering
18 15 (7.65%) Line Management
18 15 (7.65%) Natural Language Processing
18 15 (7.65%) R
19 14 (7.14%) Deep Learning

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 9 (4.59%) Apache Spark
2 3 (1.53%) SAS
Applications
1 4 (2.04%) Chatbot
2 2 (1.02%) SPSS
3 1 (0.51%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 18 (9.18%) Azure
2 16 (8.16%) AWS
3 12 (6.12%) GCP
4 9 (4.59%) Power Platform
5 6 (3.06%) Dataform
5 6 (3.06%) dbt
5 6 (3.06%) SaaS
6 3 (1.53%) Amazon S3
6 3 (1.53%) Amazon SageMaker
6 3 (1.53%) AWS Lambda
6 3 (1.53%) Serverless
6 3 (1.53%) Snowflake
7 1 (0.51%) Azure Data Factory
7 1 (0.51%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 4 (2.04%) Broadband
2 1 (0.51%) 5G
2 1 (0.51%) LTE
2 1 (0.51%) Software-Defined Radio
2 1 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
2 1 (0.51%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 9 (4.59%) Power BI
1 9 (4.59%) Tableau
2 7 (3.57%) Amazon Redshift
3 6 (3.06%) Data Warehouse
3 6 (3.06%) Looker
3 6 (3.06%) Metabase
4 3 (1.53%) Amazon Athena
4 3 (1.53%) Big Data
5 2 (1.02%) Data Mining
6 1 (0.51%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 11 (5.61%) Git
2 3 (1.53%) MLflow
3 1 (0.51%) JIRA
General
1 44 (22.45%) Finance
2 23 (11.73%) Analytical Skills
3 20 (10.20%) Social Skills
4 17 (8.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 11 (5.61%) Banking
6 9 (4.59%) Public Sector
7 8 (4.08%) Financial Institution
7 8 (4.08%) Marketing
8 7 (3.57%) Retail
9 5 (2.55%) Automotive
10 4 (2.04%) Influencing Skills
11 3 (1.53%) Wearables
12 2 (1.02%) Aerospace
12 2 (1.02%) Presentation Skills
13 1 (0.51%) Advertising
13 1 (0.51%) Digital Economy
13 1 (0.51%) Law
13 1 (0.51%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 20 (10.20%) PyTorch
2 19 (9.69%) TensorFlow
3 12 (6.12%) Hugging Face
3 12 (6.12%) scikit-learn
4 7 (3.57%) SpaCy
5 6 (3.06%) Pandas
5 6 (3.06%) XGBoost
6 5 (2.55%) EDI
6 5 (2.55%) NumPy
6 5 (2.55%) PySpark
7 4 (2.04%) LangChain
8 3 (1.53%) LlamaIndex
9 1 (0.51%) Kafka
9 1 (0.51%) Kaldi
9 1 (0.51%) Keras
9 1 (0.51%) LightGBM
9 1 (0.51%) NetworkX
9 1 (0.51%) SciPy
9 1 (0.51%) Streamlit
9 1 (0.51%) ZeroMQ
Miscellaneous
1 9 (4.59%) Algorithms
2 7 (3.57%) e-Learning
3 6 (3.06%) Product Ownership
4 4 (2.04%) Cloud Native
5 2 (1.02%) AI Agents
6 1 (0.51%) Acoustics
6 1 (0.51%) Clustering
6 1 (0.51%) Data Structures
6 1 (0.51%) FPGA
6 1 (0.51%) Life Science
6 1 (0.51%) Social Network
Processes & Methodologies
1 196 (100.00%) Data Science
2 88 (44.90%) Machine Learning
3 75 (38.27%) AI
4 39 (19.90%) Mentoring
5 33 (16.84%) Analytics
6 29 (14.80%) Statistics
7 28 (14.29%) LLM
8 24 (12.24%) Mathematics
9 22 (11.22%) MLOps
10 19 (9.69%) CI/CD
10 19 (9.69%) Software Engineering
10 19 (9.69%) Technical Leadership
11 18 (9.18%) Generative AI
11 18 (9.18%) Roadmaps
12 17 (8.67%) Visualisation
13 16 (8.16%) Data Engineering
14 15 (7.65%) Line Management
14 15 (7.65%) Natural Language Processing
15 14 (7.14%) Deep Learning
16 13 (6.63%) Actionable Insight
Programming Languages
1 78 (39.80%) Python
2 34 (17.35%) SQL
3 15 (7.65%) R
4 6 (3.06%) Julia
5 1 (0.51%) C++
Qualifications
1 32 (16.33%) Degree
2 24 (12.24%) Security Cleared
3 22 (11.22%) PhD
4 18 (9.18%) DV Cleared
5 12 (6.12%) Master's Degree
6 7 (3.57%) SC Cleared
7 6 (3.06%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (6.12%) Data Quality
2 2 (1.02%) QA
System Software
1 8 (4.08%) Docker
Systems Management
1 8 (4.08%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 6 (3.06%) Microsoft
2 4 (2.04%) Google
3 2 (1.02%) Databricks
4 1 (0.51%) Cognizant