Senior Data Scientist Job Trends

Senior Data Scientist
UK

The median Senior Data Scientist salary in the UK is £83,774 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 4 August 2026.

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

6 months to
4 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 523 592 639
Rank change year-on-year +69 +47 +88
Permanent jobs requiring a Senior Data Scientist 275 91 178
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.27% 0.18% 0.21%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.28% 0.20% 0.22%
Number of salaries quoted 171 34 74
10th Percentile £65,000 £47,175 £49,613
25th Percentile £75,000 £70,000 £57,646
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £83,774 £85,000 £73,750
Median % change year-on-year -1.44% +15.25% +7.66%
75th Percentile £100,000 £90,000 £89,688
90th Percentile - £97,500 £113,875
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £85,000 £66,250
% change year-on-year -11.76% +28.30% +0.33%

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 97,595 44,677 79,563
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 94.20% 90.06% 94.91%
Number of salaries quoted 66,719 26,547 53,755
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,500 £30,000
25th Percentile £40,000 £37,000 £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 £71,991
90th Percentile £96,250 £95,000 £90,793
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,500 £50,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +5.00% - -6.54%

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 4 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 4 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 +103 259 £84,387 -0.72% 257
UK excluding London +20 139 £75,000 -11.76% 96
London +47 131 £95,000 +11.76% 172
Work from Home +23 100 £75,000 -11.76% 97
North of England +15 56 £77,513 -3.11% 28
North West +30 38 £80,000 -3.03% 14
Midlands -4 37 £75,000 - 14
East Midlands - 31 £75,000 - 2
South West -67 16 £58,497 -31.18% 8
Yorkshire -22 13 £75,013 +17.21% 14
South East -19 10 £90,000 - 35
Wales -44 8 £100,000 +17.65%
East of England - 7 £86,725 - 7
West Midlands -28 6 £75,000 - 12
North East - 5 £83,774 -
Northern Ireland - 3 - - 4
Scotland +5 2 £75,013 +7.16%

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

For the 6 months to 4 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.

1 275 (100.00%) Data Science
2 141 (51.27%) Machine Learning
3 112 (40.73%) AI
4 111 (40.36%) Python
5 78 (28.36%) Analytics
6 71 (25.82%) Mentoring
7 61 (22.18%) SQL
8 45 (16.36%) Degree
9 39 (14.18%) MLOps
9 39 (14.18%) Roadmaps
10 37 (13.45%) CI/CD
11 34 (12.36%) Software Engineering
12 33 (12.00%) LLM
12 33 (12.00%) PyTorch
13 32 (11.64%) Actionable Insight
13 32 (11.64%) Data Engineering
14 31 (11.27%) Statistics
15 30 (10.91%) AWS
15 30 (10.91%) TensorFlow
16 28 (10.18%) Azure
17 27 (9.82%) Natural Language Processing
18 26 (9.45%) Decision-Making
18 26 (9.45%) Master's Degree
18 26 (9.45%) PhD
18 26 (9.45%) Project Management
18 26 (9.45%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
19 24 (8.73%) Deep Learning
19 24 (8.73%) GCP
19 24 (8.73%) Hugging Face
19 24 (8.73%) Mathematics

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 (8.00%) Apache Spark
2 3 (1.09%) SAS
Applications
1 4 (1.45%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.73%) SPSS
3 1 (0.36%) Trello
Cloud Services
1 30 (10.91%) AWS
2 28 (10.18%) Azure
3 24 (8.73%) GCP
4 12 (4.36%) SaaS
5 10 (3.64%) Power Platform
6 6 (2.18%) Dataform
6 6 (2.18%) dbt
7 5 (1.82%) Amazon S3
7 5 (1.82%) Amazon SageMaker
7 5 (1.82%) AWS Lambda
7 5 (1.82%) Serverless
8 4 (1.45%) Snowflake
9 2 (0.73%) Azure Machine Learning
9 2 (0.73%) Salesforce Service Cloud
10 1 (0.36%) Azure Data Factory
10 1 (0.36%) GitHub
10 1 (0.36%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 3 (1.09%) Broadband
2 1 (0.36%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (6.91%) Amazon Redshift
2 15 (5.45%) Data Warehouse
3 10 (3.64%) Power BI
3 10 (3.64%) Tableau
4 6 (2.18%) Looker
4 6 (2.18%) Metabase
5 4 (1.45%) Data Lake
6 3 (1.09%) Amazon Athena
7 2 (0.73%) Apache Iceberg
7 2 (0.73%) Data Mining
7 2 (0.73%) Delta Lake
7 2 (0.73%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
7 2 (0.73%) Flink
7 2 (0.73%) Redis
8 1 (0.36%) Big Data
8 1 (0.36%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 16 (5.82%) Git
2 4 (1.45%) MLflow
3 1 (0.36%) JIRA
General
1 90 (32.73%) Finance
2 33 (12.00%) Banking
3 31 (11.27%) Analytical Skills
4 20 (7.27%) Social Skills
5 18 (6.55%) Financial Institution
5 18 (6.55%) Public Sector
6 16 (5.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 11 (4.00%) Marketing
8 9 (3.27%) Retail
9 6 (2.18%) Wearables
10 5 (1.82%) Automotive
10 5 (1.82%) Influencing Skills
10 5 (1.82%) Law
10 5 (1.82%) Retail Banking
11 4 (1.45%) Games
12 3 (1.09%) Pharmaceutical
12 3 (1.09%) Publishing
13 2 (0.73%) Aerospace
13 2 (0.73%) Presentation Skills
14 1 (0.36%) Tech for Good
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 33 (12.00%) PyTorch
2 30 (10.91%) TensorFlow
3 24 (8.73%) Hugging Face
4 17 (6.18%) scikit-learn
4 17 (6.18%) SpaCy
5 11 (4.00%) Pandas
5 11 (4.00%) XGBoost
6 9 (3.27%) NumPy
7 8 (2.91%) LangChain
8 5 (1.82%) LlamaIndex
8 5 (1.82%) PySpark
9 2 (0.73%) Kafka
9 2 (0.73%) LangGraph
10 1 (0.36%) Kaldi
10 1 (0.36%) Keras
10 1 (0.36%) LightGBM
10 1 (0.36%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 17 (6.18%) e-Learning
2 11 (4.00%) Algorithms
3 7 (2.55%) AI Agents
4 6 (2.18%) Cloud Native
4 6 (2.18%) Credit Risk
5 4 (1.45%) Life Science
6 2 (0.73%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 1 (0.36%) Acoustics
7 1 (0.36%) Clustering
7 1 (0.36%) Educational Technology
7 1 (0.36%) FMCG
7 1 (0.36%) Product Ownership
Processes & Methodologies
1 275 (100.00%) Data Science
2 141 (51.27%) Machine Learning
3 112 (40.73%) AI
4 78 (28.36%) Analytics
5 71 (25.82%) Mentoring
6 39 (14.18%) MLOps
6 39 (14.18%) Roadmaps
7 37 (13.45%) CI/CD
8 34 (12.36%) Software Engineering
9 33 (12.00%) LLM
10 32 (11.64%) Actionable Insight
10 32 (11.64%) Data Engineering
11 31 (11.27%) Statistics
12 27 (9.82%) Natural Language Processing
13 26 (9.45%) Decision-Making
13 26 (9.45%) Project Management
13 26 (9.45%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
14 24 (8.73%) Deep Learning
14 24 (8.73%) Mathematics
15 22 (8.00%) Generative AI
Programming Languages
1 111 (40.36%) Python
2 61 (22.18%) SQL
3 17 (6.18%) R
4 6 (2.18%) Julia
Qualifications
1 45 (16.36%) Degree
2 26 (9.45%) Master's Degree
2 26 (9.45%) PhD
3 16 (5.82%) Security Cleared
4 9 (3.27%) DV Cleared
5 6 (2.18%) DBS Check
6 3 (1.09%) SC Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 22 (8.00%) Data Quality
2 5 (1.82%) EU AI Act
2 5 (1.82%) GDPR
3 3 (1.09%) Actionable Recommendations
4 2 (0.73%) QA
System Software
1 10 (3.64%) Docker
Systems Management
1 10 (3.64%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 8 (2.91%) Databricks
2 6 (2.18%) Google
3 4 (1.45%) LexisNexis
4 2 (0.73%) OpenAI
4 2 (0.73%) Oracle
4 2 (0.73%) PeopleSoft
4 2 (0.73%) Salesforce
5 1 (0.36%) Cognizant
5 1 (0.36%) Dataiku
5 1 (0.36%) Microsoft