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 11 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 156 132 102
Rank change year-on-year -24 -30 -31
Permanent jobs citing Data Science 900 1,203 1,658
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.52% 2.24% 2.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.87% 2.47% 3.30%
Number of salaries quoted 475 529 1,017
10th Percentile £40,500 £42,500 £41,250
25th Percentile £55,000 £53,750 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £70,000 £70,000
75th Percentile £90,000 £87,500 £90,000
90th Percentile £115,000 £112,500 £120,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £60,000 £64,750 £60,249
% change year-on-year -7.34% +7.47% -3.60%

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 48,096 48,629 50,303
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 81.07% 90.53% 89.95%
Number of salaries quoted 28,289 23,726 38,360
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 £52,000
% change year-on-year -9.09% +5.77% -5.45%

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 11 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 11 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 -11 853 £70,000 - 1,154
London +13 454 £82,750 +12.20% 298
UK excluding London -40 402 £60,000 -7.34% 1,040
Work from Home -35 275 £66,000 -1.49% 399
South East +5 168 £56,250 -10.00% 368
North of England -31 86 £60,000 -4.88% 179
North West +7 55 £62,500 -3.10% 75
Midlands -12 54 £60,000 +3.45% 128
South West -19 52 £60,000 -14.29% 138
West Midlands -1 28 £65,250 +18.64% 42
Yorkshire -41 27 £57,500 +1.19% 76
East Midlands -6 26 £40,000 -48.39% 85
East of England +11 24 £70,000 +7.69% 145
Wales +2 9 £40,000 -50.00% 46
Scotland -56 9 £100,000 +76.96% 41
North East -11 4 £62,500 - 29
Northern Ireland -12 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 (7.78%) Apache Spark
2 27 (3.00%) Apache Airflow
3 23 (2.56%) SharePoint
4 18 (2.00%) Apache
5 9 (1.00%) Jupyter
6 7 (0.78%) SAS
7 6 (0.67%) IIS
8 5 (0.56%) Confluence
9 3 (0.33%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.22%) Luigi
11 1 (0.11%) CMS
11 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 72 (8.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 6 (0.67%) Chatbot
3 5 (0.56%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 4 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
5 3 (0.33%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.33%) Stata
6 1 (0.11%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 6 (0.67%) Salesforce CRM
1 6 (0.67%) 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
1 274 (30.44%) Azure
2 241 (26.78%) AWS
3 161 (17.89%) GCP
4 138 (15.33%) Power Platform
5 44 (4.89%) Snowflake
6 39 (4.33%) Azure AI
7 35 (3.89%) Azure Machine Learning
8 32 (3.56%) SaaS
9 31 (3.44%) Amazon SageMaker
9 31 (3.44%) Vertex AI
10 27 (3.00%) Serverless
11 26 (2.89%) Azure Data Factory
12 25 (2.78%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 23 (2.56%) AWS Lambda
13 23 (2.56%) GitHub
14 22 (2.44%) Azure DevOps
15 20 (2.22%) dbt
16 18 (2.00%) Microsoft 365
17 15 (1.67%) Amazon S3
18 14 (1.56%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 15 (1.67%) Broadband
2 10 (1.11%) 4G
2 10 (1.11%) BGP
2 10 (1.11%) Cisco IOS
2 10 (1.11%) Ethernet VPN
2 10 (1.11%) IOS XR
2 10 (1.11%) MPLS
3 7 (0.78%) TCP/IP
4 5 (0.56%) Firewall
5 4 (0.44%) Bluetooth
5 4 (0.44%) Intrusion Detection
5 4 (0.44%) Modbus
5 4 (0.44%) Network Security
5 4 (0.44%) VLAN
5 4 (0.44%) Wireshark
5 4 (0.44%) ZigBee
6 3 (0.33%) Kerberos
6 3 (0.33%) MQTT
7 2 (0.22%) Internet
8 1 (0.11%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 131 (14.56%) Power BI
2 121 (13.44%) Data Warehouse
3 105 (11.67%) Tableau
4 77 (8.56%) Data Lake
5 44 (4.89%) Big Data
5 44 (4.89%) BigQuery
5 44 (4.89%) NoSQL
6 40 (4.44%) Metadata
7 35 (3.89%) SQL Server
8 32 (3.56%) Amazon Redshift
9 30 (3.33%) Hadoop
10 26 (2.89%) Data Mining
10 26 (2.89%) DynamoDB
11 24 (2.67%) Elasticsearch
12 23 (2.56%) MongoDB
12 23 (2.56%) MySQL
13 20 (2.22%) Relational Database
14 19 (2.11%) PostgreSQL
15 17 (1.89%) Delta Lake
16 14 (1.56%) DataStage
Development Applications
1 51 (5.67%) Git
2 33 (3.67%) MLflow
3 18 (2.00%) ERwin
4 12 (1.33%) GitLab
5 7 (0.78%) JIRA
5 7 (0.78%) PowerDesigner
6 5 (0.56%) Burp Suite
7 4 (0.44%) ER Studio
7 4 (0.44%) Metasploit
8 1 (0.11%) JUnit
8 1 (0.11%) MSBuild
8 1 (0.11%) Selenium
8 1 (0.11%) TeamCity
8 1 (0.11%) TestNG
General
1 335 (37.22%) Finance
2 268 (29.78%) Social Skills
3 199 (22.11%) Analytical Skills
4 113 (12.56%) Marketing
5 90 (10.00%) Banking
6 72 (8.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 70 (7.78%) Law
8 67 (7.44%) Pharmaceutical
9 58 (6.44%) Retail
10 49 (5.44%) Financial Institution
11 32 (3.56%) Manufacturing
12 27 (3.00%) Public Sector
13 25 (2.78%) Legal
14 22 (2.44%) Organisational Skills
15 17 (1.89%) Telecoms
16 15 (1.67%) Health Technology
16 15 (1.67%) Publishing
17 14 (1.56%) Influencing Skills
18 13 (1.44%) Tech for Good
19 12 (1.33%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 202 (22.44%) Senior
2 168 (18.67%) Data Scientist
3 144 (16.00%) Lead
4 122 (13.56%) Data Engineer
5 89 (9.89%) Analyst
6 67 (7.44%) Data Analyst
7 62 (6.89%) Developer
8 60 (6.67%) Senior Data Scientist
9 58 (6.44%) Architect
10 42 (4.67%) Consultant
10 42 (4.67%) Senior Data Engineer
11 39 (4.33%) Software Engineer
12 36 (4.00%) Data Architect
13 23 (2.56%) Senior Developer
14 20 (2.22%) Senior Manager
15 18 (2.00%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 18 (2.00%) GCP Architect
15 18 (2.00%) Python Developer
16 17 (1.89%) Data Science Engineer
16 17 (1.89%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 68 (7.56%) PyTorch
2 63 (7.00%) TensorFlow
3 47 (5.22%) scikit-learn
4 43 (4.78%) Pandas
4 43 (4.78%) PySpark
5 42 (4.67%) React
6 32 (3.56%) LangChain
7 23 (2.56%) RESTful
8 22 (2.44%) NumPy
9 18 (2.00%) Kafka
10 16 (1.78%) Hugging Face
11 15 (1.67%) FastAPI
12 12 (1.33%) Swagger
13 11 (1.22%) Django
13 11 (1.22%) Flask
13 11 (1.22%) HTML
14 10 (1.11%) AngularJS
14 10 (1.11%) Jinja
14 10 (1.11%) REST
14 10 (1.11%) Vue
Miscellaneous
1 89 (9.89%) Life Science
2 84 (9.33%) Algorithms
3 47 (5.22%) Product Ownership
4 43 (4.78%) Self-Motivation
5 41 (4.56%) Cloud Native
6 37 (4.11%) Management Information System
7 33 (3.67%) Distributed Systems
8 26 (2.89%) Data Structures
9 23 (2.56%) Onboarding
10 21 (2.33%) Pharmacovigilance
11 18 (2.00%) Reinsurance
12 17 (1.89%) Credit Risk
13 16 (1.78%) AI Agents
14 15 (1.67%) Legacy Systems
15 13 (1.44%) Analytical Mindset
15 13 (1.44%) Omics
16 11 (1.22%) Hybrid Cloud
16 11 (1.22%) Social Media
17 10 (1.11%) Enterprise Software
18 9 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 10 (1.11%) Linux
2 6 (0.67%) Unix
3 4 (0.44%) Android
3 4 (0.44%) Kali Linux
3 4 (0.44%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.22%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 470 (52.22%) Analytics
2 456 (50.67%) AI
3 455 (50.56%) Machine Learning
4 222 (24.67%) Problem-Solving
5 218 (24.22%) Agile
6 209 (23.22%) Computer Science
7 196 (21.78%) Decision-Making
8 189 (21.00%) Business Intelligence
9 180 (20.00%) Data Engineering
10 167 (18.56%) Data Modelling
11 157 (17.44%) Data Governance
12 154 (17.11%) Data Pipeline
13 153 (17.00%) Mentoring
14 150 (16.67%) Visualisation
15 149 (16.56%) Data Analysis
15 149 (16.56%) Roadmaps
16 146 (16.22%) ETL
17 139 (15.44%) Statistics
18 131 (14.56%) CI/CD
19 126 (14.00%) Mathematics
Programming Languages
1 511 (56.78%) Python
2 307 (34.11%) SQL
3 78 (8.67%) R
4 68 (7.56%) Java
5 45 (5.00%) Scala
6 24 (2.67%) Go
7 22 (2.44%) TypeScript
8 21 (2.33%) JavaScript
9 16 (1.78%) VBA
10 14 (1.56%) C++
11 13 (1.44%) C#
12 12 (1.33%) MATLAB
13 11 (1.22%) Rust
14 9 (1.00%) ANSI SQL
15 7 (0.78%) Bicep
15 7 (0.78%) PHP
16 5 (0.56%) Bash
16 5 (0.56%) C
16 5 (0.56%) PowerShell
17 3 (0.33%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 350 (38.89%) Degree
2 159 (17.67%) Master's Degree
3 88 (9.78%) PhD
4 86 (9.56%) Computer Science Degree
5 85 (9.44%) Security Cleared
6 68 (7.56%) SC Cleared
7 42 (4.67%) Numerate Degree
8 22 (2.44%) DV Cleared
9 18 (2.00%) MBA
10 16 (1.78%) DBS Check
11 10 (1.11%) AWS Certification
11 10 (1.11%) Azure Certification
11 10 (1.11%) BPSS Clearance
12 8 (0.89%) PMI Certification
13 7 (0.78%) APMP
13 7 (0.78%) Microsoft Certification
13 7 (0.78%) PMP
14 6 (0.67%) CFA
15 5 (0.56%) Postgraduate
16 3 (0.33%) SAP Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 150 (16.67%) Data Quality
2 54 (6.00%) GDPR
3 41 (4.56%) GxP
4 33 (3.67%) Accessibility
5 27 (3.00%) QA
6 23 (2.56%) EU AI Act
7 22 (2.44%) Solvency II
8 21 (2.33%) HIPAA
8 21 (2.33%) PSD2
9 10 (1.11%) CDISC
9 10 (1.11%) HL7
10 7 (0.78%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 6 (0.67%) 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
15 1 (0.11%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 62 (6.89%) Docker
2 3 (0.33%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 60 (6.67%) Kubernetes
2 22 (2.44%) Terraform
3 7 (0.78%) Ansible
4 4 (0.44%) Kubeflow
4 4 (0.44%) Nessus
4 4 (0.44%) Nmap
5 2 (0.22%) Argo
5 2 (0.22%) Progress Chef
5 2 (0.22%) Puppet
6 1 (0.11%) Nagios
Vendors
1 115 (12.78%) Databricks
2 83 (9.22%) Google
3 78 (8.67%) Microsoft
4 33 (3.67%) Alteryx
5 31 (3.44%) Bloomberg
5 31 (3.44%) OpenAI
6 27 (3.00%) Oracle
7 25 (2.78%) Salesforce
8 19 (2.11%) SAP
9 18 (2.00%) Cisco
10 15 (1.67%) Informatica
11 11 (1.22%) Talend
12 10 (1.11%) Palantir
13 9 (1.00%) Foundry
14 5 (0.56%) BT
14 5 (0.56%) Red Hat
15 4 (0.44%) Fortinet
15 4 (0.44%) IBM
15 4 (0.44%) Palo Alto
15 4 (0.44%) Splunk