Data Science Job Trends

Data Science
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring Data Science skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 8 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 160 129 106
Rank change year-on-year -31 -23 -36
Permanent jobs citing Data Science 907 1,219 1,550
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.52% 2.25% 2.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.87% 2.49% 3.19%
Number of salaries quoted 475 535 977
10th Percentile £40,500 £42,500 £42,439
25th Percentile £55,000 £53,125 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £71,000 £70,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year +1.43% - -
75th Percentile £90,000 £87,500 £92,500
90th Percentile £115,000 £115,000 £120,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £60,000 £62,879 £62,500
% change year-on-year -4.58% +0.61% -

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Data Science falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 48,544 49,000 48,555
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 81.18% 90.28% 90.00%
Number of salaries quoted 28,525 24,011 36,948
10th Percentile £28,500 £35,000 £31,250
25th Percentile £37,500 £45,000 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -4.00%
75th Percentile £75,000 £80,000 £78,750
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £55,000 £52,500
% change year-on-year -9.09% +4.76% -4.55%

Data Science
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Data Science relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Data Science job vacancy trend in the UK

Data Science
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Science.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Science

Data Science
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Data Science over the 6 months to 8 January 2026.

Salary histogram for Data Science in the UK

Data Science
Top 17 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Data Science within the UK over the 6 months to 8 January 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 -18 860 £70,500 +0.71% 1,145
London +14 451 £85,000 +17.24% 346
UK excluding London -47 410 £60,000 -4.58% 974
Work from Home -40 265 £67,500 +3.85% 475
South East +11 177 £55,000 -12.00% 335
North of England -46 85 £60,000 -4.00% 173
North West +5 54 £62,500 -1.38% 73
Midlands -19 54 £60,000 -4.00% 117
South West -16 48 £60,000 -14.29% 130
West Midlands -13 29 £65,000 +13.04% 40
East of England +21 28 £65,000 -5.45% 138
Yorkshire -38 27 £57,500 +15.00% 74
East Midlands +3 25 £40,000 -48.39% 74
Wales +12 9 £40,000 -50.00% 44
Scotland -59 9 £100,000 +76.96% 40
North East -21 4 £62,500 +8.70% 27
Northern Ireland -6 1 £40,000 -52.94% 19

Data Science
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 70 (7.72%) Apache Spark
2 28 (3.09%) Apache Airflow
3 23 (2.54%) SharePoint
4 19 (2.09%) Apache
5 7 (0.77%) Jupyter
5 7 (0.77%) SAS
6 6 (0.66%) IIS
7 4 (0.44%) Confluence
8 3 (0.33%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.33%) Luigi
9 1 (0.11%) CMS
9 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.11%) OpenStack
Applications
1 72 (7.94%) Microsoft Excel
2 6 (0.66%) Chatbot
3 5 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
3 5 (0.55%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.33%) Stata
5 2 (0.22%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.11%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 6 (0.66%) Salesforce CRM
1 6 (0.66%) SAP S/4HANA
2 4 (0.44%) Elite 3E
3 2 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.11%) NetSuite
4 1 (0.11%) Odoo
4 1 (0.11%) SAP PLM
4 1 (0.11%) Sprinklr
4 1 (0.11%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 283 (31.20%) Azure
2 253 (27.89%) AWS
3 176 (19.40%) GCP
4 140 (15.44%) Power Platform
5 43 (4.74%) Snowflake
6 40 (4.41%) Azure AI
7 33 (3.64%) Azure Machine Learning
8 32 (3.53%) Vertex AI
9 31 (3.42%) Amazon SageMaker
9 31 (3.42%) SaaS
10 30 (3.31%) Serverless
11 27 (2.98%) Azure Data Factory
12 26 (2.87%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 24 (2.65%) AWS Lambda
14 23 (2.54%) Azure DevOps
14 23 (2.54%) GitHub
15 22 (2.43%) dbt
16 17 (1.87%) Microsoft 365
17 16 (1.76%) Amazon S3
18 14 (1.54%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 7 (0.77%) TCP/IP
2 6 (0.66%) Broadband
3 5 (0.55%) Firewall
4 4 (0.44%) Bluetooth
4 4 (0.44%) Intrusion Detection
4 4 (0.44%) Modbus
4 4 (0.44%) Network Security
4 4 (0.44%) VLAN
4 4 (0.44%) Wireshark
4 4 (0.44%) ZigBee
5 3 (0.33%) Kerberos
5 3 (0.33%) MQTT
6 2 (0.22%) Internet
7 1 (0.11%) BGP
7 1 (0.11%) DAB
7 1 (0.11%) DNS
7 1 (0.11%) IPv6
7 1 (0.11%) MPLS
7 1 (0.11%) TCAP
7 1 (0.11%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 133 (14.66%) Power BI
2 128 (14.11%) Data Warehouse
3 104 (11.47%) Tableau
4 78 (8.60%) Data Lake
5 49 (5.40%) BigQuery
6 47 (5.18%) NoSQL
7 46 (5.07%) Big Data
8 41 (4.52%) Metadata
9 34 (3.75%) SQL Server
10 32 (3.53%) Amazon Redshift
11 30 (3.31%) Hadoop
12 26 (2.87%) Data Mining
12 26 (2.87%) DynamoDB
13 23 (2.54%) Elasticsearch
13 23 (2.54%) MongoDB
13 23 (2.54%) MySQL
13 23 (2.54%) Relational Database
14 20 (2.21%) PostgreSQL
15 16 (1.76%) Delta Lake
16 14 (1.54%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 44 (4.85%) Git
2 32 (3.53%) MLflow
3 18 (1.98%) ERwin
4 14 (1.54%) GitLab
5 7 (0.77%) JIRA
5 7 (0.77%) PowerDesigner
6 5 (0.55%) Burp Suite
7 4 (0.44%) ER Studio
7 4 (0.44%) Metasploit
8 3 (0.33%) TeamCity
9 1 (0.11%) JUnit
9 1 (0.11%) MSBuild
9 1 (0.11%) Selenium
9 1 (0.11%) TestNG
General
1 338 (37.27%) Finance
2 254 (28.00%) Social Skills
3 203 (22.38%) Analytical Skills
4 127 (14.00%) Marketing
5 90 (9.92%) Banking
6 87 (9.59%) Law
7 66 (7.28%) Pharmaceutical
8 58 (6.39%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 58 (6.39%) Retail
9 50 (5.51%) Financial Institution
10 34 (3.75%) Manufacturing
11 27 (2.98%) Legal
11 27 (2.98%) Public Sector
12 22 (2.43%) Organisational Skills
13 15 (1.65%) Health Technology
13 15 (1.65%) Publishing
14 14 (1.54%) Influencing Skills
15 13 (1.43%) Tech for Good
16 12 (1.32%) Presentation Skills
17 11 (1.21%) Games
Job Titles
1 206 (22.71%) Senior
2 164 (18.08%) Data Scientist
3 143 (15.77%) Lead
4 122 (13.45%) Data Engineer
5 89 (9.81%) Analyst
6 72 (7.94%) Architect
7 67 (7.39%) Data Analyst
8 64 (7.06%) Developer
9 56 (6.17%) Senior Data Scientist
10 43 (4.74%) Data Architect
11 40 (4.41%) Consultant
11 40 (4.41%) Senior Data Engineer
12 39 (4.30%) Software Engineer
13 24 (2.65%) GCP Architect
13 24 (2.65%) Senior Developer
14 20 (2.21%) Cloud Architect
14 20 (2.21%) Platform Architect
14 20 (2.21%) Senior Manager
15 19 (2.09%) Senior Architect
15 19 (2.09%) Senior Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 64 (7.06%) PyTorch
2 62 (6.84%) TensorFlow
3 49 (5.40%) scikit-learn
4 44 (4.85%) Pandas
5 43 (4.74%) PySpark
5 43 (4.74%) React
6 30 (3.31%) LangChain
7 24 (2.65%) RESTful
8 22 (2.43%) NumPy
9 20 (2.21%) Kafka
10 17 (1.87%) Hugging Face
11 15 (1.65%) FastAPI
12 14 (1.54%) HTML
13 12 (1.32%) Swagger
14 11 (1.21%) CSS
14 11 (1.21%) Django
14 11 (1.21%) FHIR
14 11 (1.21%) Flask
15 10 (1.10%) AngularJS
15 10 (1.10%) REST
Miscellaneous
1 87 (9.59%) Life Science
2 85 (9.37%) Algorithms
3 48 (5.29%) Cloud Native
4 45 (4.96%) Product Ownership
5 43 (4.74%) Self-Motivation
6 37 (4.08%) Management Information System
7 34 (3.75%) Distributed Systems
8 28 (3.09%) Data Structures
9 24 (2.65%) Onboarding
10 21 (2.32%) Pharmacovigilance
11 18 (1.98%) Reinsurance
12 17 (1.87%) AI Agents
12 17 (1.87%) Credit Risk
13 16 (1.76%) Legacy Systems
14 15 (1.65%) Omics
15 13 (1.43%) Analytical Mindset
16 11 (1.21%) Hybrid Cloud
17 10 (1.10%) Enterprise Software
18 9 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
19 8 (0.88%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 11 (1.21%) Linux
2 7 (0.77%) Unix
3 4 (0.44%) Android
3 4 (0.44%) Kali Linux
3 4 (0.44%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.22%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 474 (52.26%) Analytics
2 460 (50.72%) Machine Learning
3 459 (50.61%) AI
4 224 (24.70%) Problem-Solving
5 210 (23.15%) Agile
6 205 (22.60%) Computer Science
7 194 (21.39%) Decision-Making
8 191 (21.06%) Business Intelligence
9 187 (20.62%) Data Engineering
10 176 (19.40%) Data Modelling
11 167 (18.41%) Mentoring
12 164 (18.08%) Data Pipeline
13 163 (17.97%) Data Governance
14 161 (17.75%) Roadmaps
15 154 (16.98%) ETL
16 152 (16.76%) Visualisation
17 146 (16.10%) Data Analysis
18 138 (15.21%) Statistics
19 133 (14.66%) CI/CD
20 128 (14.11%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 516 (56.89%) Python
2 315 (34.73%) SQL
3 81 (8.93%) R
4 74 (8.16%) Java
5 46 (5.07%) Scala
6 30 (3.31%) Go
7 23 (2.54%) JavaScript
8 22 (2.43%) TypeScript
9 15 (1.65%) C#
9 15 (1.65%) VBA
10 13 (1.43%) C++
11 12 (1.32%) MATLAB
12 11 (1.21%) Rust
13 9 (0.99%) ANSI SQL
14 8 (0.88%) Bicep
15 7 (0.77%) PHP
16 5 (0.55%) C
16 5 (0.55%) PowerShell
17 4 (0.44%) Bash
18 3 (0.33%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 347 (38.26%) Degree
2 157 (17.31%) Master's Degree
3 88 (9.70%) Computer Science Degree
4 84 (9.26%) PhD
5 79 (8.71%) Security Cleared
6 63 (6.95%) SC Cleared
7 43 (4.74%) Numerate Degree
8 19 (2.09%) DV Cleared
9 17 (1.87%) DBS Check
9 17 (1.87%) MBA
10 10 (1.10%) AWS Certification
10 10 (1.10%) BPSS Clearance
11 9 (0.99%) Azure Certification
12 8 (0.88%) PMI Certification
13 7 (0.77%) Microsoft Certification
13 7 (0.77%) PMP
14 6 (0.66%) APMP
14 6 (0.66%) CFA
14 6 (0.66%) Postgraduate
15 3 (0.33%) SAP Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 158 (17.42%) Data Quality
2 55 (6.06%) GDPR
3 39 (4.30%) GxP
4 30 (3.31%) Accessibility
5 28 (3.09%) QA
6 23 (2.54%) EU AI Act
7 22 (2.43%) HIPAA
7 22 (2.43%) Solvency II
8 21 (2.32%) PSD2
9 11 (1.21%) CDISC
9 11 (1.21%) HL7
10 7 (0.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 6 (0.66%) Actionable Recommendations
12 4 (0.44%) NIST
13 3 (0.33%) 21 CFR Part 11
13 3 (0.33%) SOC 2
14 2 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 2 (0.22%) ISO 9001
14 2 (0.22%) PCI DSS
14 2 (0.22%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 66 (7.28%) Docker
2 3 (0.33%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.22%) Hyper-V
3 2 (0.22%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 72 (7.94%) Kubernetes
2 24 (2.65%) Terraform
3 9 (0.99%) Ansible
4 5 (0.55%) Kubeflow
5 4 (0.44%) Nessus
5 4 (0.44%) Nmap
6 3 (0.33%) Puppet
7 2 (0.22%) Argo
7 2 (0.22%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.11%) Nagios
8 1 (0.11%) Salt
Vendors
1 112 (12.35%) Databricks
2 93 (10.25%) Google
3 77 (8.49%) Microsoft
4 34 (3.75%) Alteryx
5 31 (3.42%) Bloomberg
6 29 (3.20%) OpenAI
7 27 (2.98%) Oracle
8 24 (2.65%) Salesforce
9 19 (2.09%) SAP
10 15 (1.65%) Informatica
11 11 (1.21%) Foundry
11 11 (1.21%) Talend
12 9 (0.99%) Palantir
13 8 (0.88%) Cisco
14 5 (0.55%) BT
14 5 (0.55%) Red Hat
15 4 (0.44%) Fortinet
15 4 (0.44%) IBM
15 4 (0.44%) Palo Alto
15 4 (0.44%) Splunk