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 13 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 160 135 106
Rank change year-on-year -25 -29 -40
Permanent jobs citing Data Science 1,000 1,000 2,201
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.36% 2.29% 2.62%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.74% 2.45% 3.00%
Number of salaries quoted 515 512 1,299
10th Percentile £44,317 £42,625 £41,250
25th Percentile £55,000 £52,500 £47,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £70,000 £67,500
Median % change year-on-year - +3.70% -6.90%
75th Percentile £90,000 £91,214 £88,750
90th Percentile £103,250 £115,000 £115,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £62,500 £62,500 £57,500
% change year-on-year - +8.70% -10.20%

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 57,551 40,867 73,360
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 78.05% 93.60% 87.39%
Number of salaries quoted 34,815 22,139 55,867
10th Percentile £29,750 £32,500 £29,000
25th Percentile £39,860 £45,000 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +9.09% -11.41%
75th Percentile £76,299 £80,000 £73,750
90th Percentile £97,500 £102,500 £94,006
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £55,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year -9.09% +10.00% -8.90%

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 13 March 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 13 March 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 -13 925 £70,000 - 839
London +22 490 £80,000 - 433
UK excluding London -62 442 £62,500 - 585
Work from Home -39 314 £66,720 +4.25% 249
South East +1 160 £65,000 +8.33% 207
North of England -69 93 £62,500 - 139
South West -38 74 £60,000 -14.29% 65
Midlands -32 70 £55,000 +10.00% 82
North West -9 64 £62,500 -2.15% 59
West Midlands -24 37 £65,000 +44.44% 28
East Midlands -25 33 £40,000 -44.83% 54
Yorkshire -83 24 £60,000 -5.74% 58
East of England -12 20 £84,288 +38.18% 47
Scotland -54 13 £90,000 +71.43% 32
Wales -7 9 £39,756 -51.81% 16
North East -28 5 £62,500 +11.11% 24
Northern Ireland -30 3 - - 8

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 73 (7.30%) Apache Spark
2 57 (5.70%) Apache Airflow
3 24 (2.40%) SharePoint
4 22 (2.20%) ArcGIS
5 21 (2.10%) Apache
6 10 (1.00%) Jupyter
7 7 (0.70%) SAS
8 6 (0.60%) Confluence
8 6 (0.60%) IIS
9 3 (0.30%) Apache Superset
9 3 (0.30%) CMS
9 3 (0.30%) GeoServer
10 1 (0.10%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.10%) Palantir Foundry
10 1 (0.10%) WordPress
Applications
1 63 (6.30%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 4 (0.40%) Chatbot
3 4 (0.40%) Microsoft Project
4 3 (0.30%) Microsoft Office
4 3 (0.30%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 6 (0.60%) Salesforce CRM
2 2 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.10%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.10%) FIS Private Capital Suite
3 1 (0.10%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.10%) Odoo
3 1 (0.10%) SAP PLM
3 1 (0.10%) Sprinklr
3 1 (0.10%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 297 (29.70%) AWS
2 290 (29.00%) Azure
3 181 (18.10%) GCP
4 145 (14.50%) Power Platform
5 71 (7.10%) Snowflake
6 43 (4.30%) dbt
7 42 (4.20%) Azure Machine Learning
8 38 (3.80%) Azure AI
9 34 (3.40%) Amazon SageMaker
10 31 (3.10%) Vertex AI
11 30 (3.00%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 29 (2.90%) Azure DevOps
13 28 (2.80%) Azure Data Factory
14 26 (2.60%) GitHub
15 23 (2.30%) SaaS
16 22 (2.20%) Microsoft 365
17 20 (2.00%) Dagster
18 17 (1.70%) PowerApps
18 17 (1.70%) Serverless
19 16 (1.60%) Amazon S3
Communications & Networking
1 68 (6.80%) Broadband
2 11 (1.10%) 4G
2 11 (1.10%) BGP
2 11 (1.10%) Cisco IOS
2 11 (1.10%) Ethernet VPN
2 11 (1.10%) IOS XR
2 11 (1.10%) MPLS
3 5 (0.50%) TCP/IP
4 4 (0.40%) HTTP
4 4 (0.40%) Kerberos
5 3 (0.30%) Internet
5 3 (0.30%) MQTT
6 2 (0.20%) Bluetooth
6 2 (0.20%) Firewall
6 2 (0.20%) Intrusion Detection
6 2 (0.20%) Modbus
6 2 (0.20%) Network Security
6 2 (0.20%) Tactical Data Link
6 2 (0.20%) VLAN
6 2 (0.20%) ZigBee
Database & Business Intelligence
1 137 (13.70%) Power BI
2 124 (12.40%) Data Warehouse
3 105 (10.50%) Tableau
4 86 (8.60%) Data Lake
5 59 (5.90%) BigQuery
6 52 (5.20%) Metadata
7 46 (4.60%) NoSQL
8 45 (4.50%) Amazon Redshift
9 38 (3.80%) Elasticsearch
10 36 (3.60%) Big Data
11 35 (3.50%) MongoDB
12 31 (3.10%) Looker
12 31 (3.10%) SQL Server
13 30 (3.00%) GIS
13 30 (3.00%) PostgreSQL
14 26 (2.60%) QGIS
15 25 (2.50%) Data Mining
15 25 (2.50%) Hadoop
16 24 (2.40%) Delta Lake
17 22 (2.20%) Spatial Data
Development Applications
1 67 (6.70%) Git
2 42 (4.20%) MLflow
3 14 (1.40%) GitLab
4 8 (0.80%) JIRA
5 7 (0.70%) ERwin
5 7 (0.70%) PowerDesigner
6 5 (0.50%) Jenkins
7 4 (0.40%) ER Studio
8 3 (0.30%) Burp Suite
8 3 (0.30%) Selenium
9 2 (0.20%) Metasploit
10 1 (0.10%) MSBuild
10 1 (0.10%) TeamCity
10 1 (0.10%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 275 (27.50%) Finance
2 263 (26.30%) Social Skills
3 213 (21.30%) Analytical Skills
4 91 (9.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 88 (8.80%) Banking
6 81 (8.10%) Marketing
7 58 (5.80%) Retail
8 56 (5.60%) Pharmaceutical
9 41 (4.10%) Financial Institution
9 41 (4.10%) Law
9 41 (4.10%) Public Sector
10 22 (2.20%) Legal
11 21 (2.10%) Manufacturing
12 19 (1.90%) Organisational Skills
13 14 (1.40%) Advertising
13 14 (1.40%) Influencing Skills
13 14 (1.40%) Telecoms
14 11 (1.10%) Documentation Skills
15 10 (1.00%) Investment Banking
16 6 (0.60%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 224 (22.40%) Data Scientist
2 204 (20.40%) Senior
3 152 (15.20%) Data Engineer
4 135 (13.50%) Lead
5 87 (8.70%) Analyst
5 87 (8.70%) Senior Data Scientist
6 72 (7.20%) Consultant
7 70 (7.00%) Data Analyst
8 60 (6.00%) Software Engineer
9 51 (5.10%) Developer
10 50 (5.00%) Senior Data Engineer
11 33 (3.30%) Artificial Intelligence Consultant
12 27 (2.70%) Architect
12 27 (2.70%) Data Consultant
13 26 (2.60%) Python Engineer
14 24 (2.40%) Scala Engineer
15 21 (2.10%) Machine Learning Consultant
16 20 (2.00%) Lead Data Scientist
16 20 (2.00%) Spatial Consultant
17 19 (1.90%) Principal Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 106 (10.60%) PyTorch
2 80 (8.00%) TensorFlow
3 40 (4.00%) scikit-learn
4 38 (3.80%) gRPC
5 34 (3.40%) LangChain
5 34 (3.40%) PySpark
6 32 (3.20%) Kafka
7 29 (2.90%) React
8 20 (2.00%) HTML
8 20 (2.00%) Pandas
9 19 (1.90%) RESTful
10 16 (1.60%) Django
11 15 (1.50%) CSS
12 13 (1.30%) .NET
12 13 (1.30%) FastAPI
13 12 (1.20%) REST
14 11 (1.10%) Jinja
14 11 (1.10%) NETCONF
14 11 (1.10%) YANG
15 9 (0.90%) Hugging Face
Miscellaneous
1 97 (9.70%) Algorithms
2 87 (8.70%) Life Science
3 62 (6.20%) Distributed Systems
4 50 (5.00%) Product Ownership
5 49 (4.90%) Video\Live Streaming
6 40 (4.00%) Over-the-Top Content
7 37 (3.70%) Management Information System
8 33 (3.30%) Self-Motivation
9 31 (3.10%) Cloud Native
10 25 (2.50%) Data Structures
11 23 (2.30%) AI Agents
12 21 (2.10%) Pharmacovigilance
13 19 (1.90%) Social Media
14 18 (1.80%) Greenfield Project
14 18 (1.80%) Onboarding
15 11 (1.10%) Clustering
15 11 (1.10%) Enterprise Software
16 10 (1.00%) Analytical Mindset
16 10 (1.00%) Public Cloud
17 9 (0.90%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 12 (1.20%) Linux
2 5 (0.50%) Unix
3 3 (0.30%) Windows
4 2 (0.20%) Android
4 2 (0.20%) Kali Linux
4 2 (0.20%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 520 (52.00%) AI
2 497 (49.70%) Analytics
3 490 (49.00%) Machine Learning
4 241 (24.10%) Problem-Solving
5 216 (21.60%) Decision-Making
6 214 (21.40%) Agile
7 212 (21.20%) Business Intelligence
8 208 (20.80%) Computer Science
9 191 (19.10%) Data Engineering
10 187 (18.70%) CI/CD
11 176 (17.60%) Data Pipeline
12 169 (16.90%) Data Modelling
13 156 (15.60%) Data Analysis
14 152 (15.20%) Visualisation
15 143 (14.30%) ETL
15 143 (14.30%) Mentoring
16 136 (13.60%) Data Governance
17 133 (13.30%) Generative AI
17 133 (13.30%) Use Case
18 132 (13.20%) Mathematics
Programming Languages
1 569 (56.90%) Python
2 298 (29.80%) SQL
3 82 (8.20%) Scala
4 68 (6.80%) R
5 66 (6.60%) Java
6 50 (5.00%) Go
7 30 (3.00%) JavaScript
8 20 (2.00%) VBA
9 16 (1.60%) C++
10 14 (1.40%) C#
11 12 (1.20%) Bash
12 11 (1.10%) TypeScript
13 9 (0.90%) Rust
14 7 (0.70%) ANSI SQL
14 7 (0.70%) PHP
14 7 (0.70%) T-SQL
15 5 (0.50%) Bicep
15 5 (0.50%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 5 (0.50%) PowerShell
16 4 (0.40%) C
Qualifications
1 356 (35.60%) Degree
2 134 (13.40%) Master's Degree
3 103 (10.30%) Security Cleared
4 85 (8.50%) Computer Science Degree
5 67 (6.70%) PhD
6 62 (6.20%) SC Cleared
7 42 (4.20%) DV Cleared
8 38 (3.80%) Numerate Degree
9 24 (2.40%) MBA
10 22 (2.20%) DBS Check
11 17 (1.70%) Azure Certification
12 13 (1.30%) APMP
13 9 (0.90%) Microsoft Certification
14 8 (0.80%) BPSS Clearance
14 8 (0.80%) PMI Certification
15 7 (0.70%) PMP
16 4 (0.40%) AWS Certification
17 3 (0.30%) SAP Certification
18 2 (0.20%) Postgraduate
19 1 (0.10%) MCSE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 168 (16.80%) Data Quality
2 58 (5.80%) Accessibility
3 56 (5.60%) GDPR
4 31 (3.10%) QA
5 30 (3.00%) GxP
6 22 (2.20%) Solvency II
7 21 (2.10%) EU AI Act
7 21 (2.10%) HIPAA
7 21 (2.10%) PSD2
8 11 (1.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 9 (0.90%) Actionable Recommendations
10 6 (0.60%) CDISC
10 6 (0.60%) HL7
11 3 (0.30%) 21 CFR Part 11
11 3 (0.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 3 (0.30%) PERC
12 2 (0.20%) ISO 9001
13 1 (0.10%) Disclosure Scotland
13 1 (0.10%) GMP
13 1 (0.10%) ISO 13485
System Software
1 103 (10.30%) Docker
2 5 (0.50%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.10%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 58 (5.80%) Kubernetes
2 42 (4.20%) Terraform
3 6 (0.60%) Ansible
4 5 (0.50%) Kubeflow
5 2 (0.20%) Argo
5 2 (0.20%) Nessus
5 2 (0.20%) Nmap
6 1 (0.10%) Nagios
Vendors
1 128 (12.80%) Databricks
2 86 (8.60%) Microsoft
3 74 (7.40%) Google
4 36 (3.60%) Typelevel
5 30 (3.00%) Alteryx
5 30 (3.00%) Bloomberg
6 27 (2.70%) Salesforce
7 24 (2.40%) Dell
7 24 (2.40%) Informatica
7 24 (2.40%) OpenAI
8 22 (2.20%) Oracle
9 21 (2.10%) Cisco
10 14 (1.40%) Palantir
11 12 (1.20%) Denodo
11 12 (1.20%) SAP
11 12 (1.20%) Teradata
12 8 (0.80%) Cloudera
12 8 (0.80%) Foundry
12 8 (0.80%) Talend
13 7 (0.70%) ServiceNow