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 31 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 160 133 117
Rank change year-on-year -27 -16 -45
Permanent jobs citing Data Science 903 1,236 1,410
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.53% 2.23% 2.76%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.86% 2.48% 3.02%
Number of salaries quoted 467 559 957
10th Percentile £42,000 £42,500 £42,439
25th Percentile £55,000 £53,750 £53,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £71,000 £67,500 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year +5.19% -3.57% -
75th Percentile £90,000 £87,500 £90,000
90th Percentile £116,450 £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 48,537 49,891 46,757
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 82.05% 89.96% 91.45%
Number of salaries quoted 28,419 24,819 35,711
10th Percentile £28,500 £35,000 £31,750
25th Percentile £36,532 £45,000 £42,750
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 £80,000
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% -4.34%

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 31 December 2025.

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 31 December 2025. 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 -21 857 £70,000 - 990
London +19 450 £85,000 +17.24% 603
UK excluding London -49 407 £60,000 -4.58% 541
Work from Home -52 258 £67,500 +3.85% 355
South East +8 178 £57,500 -8.00% 197
North of England -60 82 £60,000 -4.00% 140
Midlands -11 55 £60,000 -4.29% 66
North West 0 51 £62,500 -0.60% 75
South West -14 45 £60,000 -14.29% 57
East of England +22 30 £65,000 -5.45% 39
West Midlands -8 29 £65,000 +13.04% 41
Yorkshire -35 27 £57,500 +15.00% 53
East Midlands -6 26 £40,000 -48.39% 25
Wales +10 9 £40,000 -50.00% 15
Scotland -54 8 £100,000 +76.96% 31
North East -19 4 £62,500 +8.70% 14
Northern Ireland -6 1 £40,000 -52.94% 3

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 69 (7.64%) Apache Spark
2 27 (2.99%) Apache Airflow
3 24 (2.66%) SharePoint
4 19 (2.10%) Apache
5 7 (0.78%) Jupyter
5 7 (0.78%) SAS
6 6 (0.66%) IIS
7 3 (0.33%) Apache Superset
7 3 (0.33%) Confluence
7 3 (0.33%) Luigi
8 1 (0.11%) CMS
8 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
8 1 (0.11%) OpenStack
Applications
1 73 (8.08%) 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 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
5 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
1 280 (31.01%) Azure
2 259 (28.68%) AWS
3 179 (19.82%) GCP
4 141 (15.61%) Power Platform
5 43 (4.76%) Snowflake
6 40 (4.43%) Azure AI
7 34 (3.77%) Serverless
7 34 (3.77%) Vertex AI
8 33 (3.65%) Amazon SageMaker
9 31 (3.43%) SaaS
10 30 (3.32%) Azure Machine Learning
11 27 (2.99%) AWS Lambda
12 24 (2.66%) Azure Data Factory
13 23 (2.55%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 23 (2.55%) dbt
13 23 (2.55%) GitHub
14 21 (2.33%) Azure DevOps
15 19 (2.10%) Amazon S3
16 17 (1.88%) Microsoft 365
17 15 (1.66%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 7 (0.78%) 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%) 4G
7 1 (0.11%) BGP
7 1 (0.11%) Cisco IOS
7 1 (0.11%) DAB
7 1 (0.11%) iSCSI
7 1 (0.11%) MPLS
7 1 (0.11%) TCAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 134 (14.84%) Power BI
2 128 (14.17%) Data Warehouse
3 103 (11.41%) Tableau
4 76 (8.42%) Data Lake
5 48 (5.32%) NoSQL
6 47 (5.20%) Big Data
6 47 (5.20%) BigQuery
7 41 (4.54%) Metadata
8 33 (3.65%) SQL Server
9 31 (3.43%) Amazon Redshift
9 31 (3.43%) Hadoop
10 27 (2.99%) DynamoDB
11 26 (2.88%) Data Mining
12 24 (2.66%) MySQL
12 24 (2.66%) Relational Database
13 23 (2.55%) MongoDB
14 21 (2.33%) PostgreSQL
15 20 (2.21%) Elasticsearch
16 15 (1.66%) DataStage
17 14 (1.55%) Apache Cassandra
Development Applications
1 43 (4.76%) Git
2 29 (3.21%) MLflow
3 18 (1.99%) ERwin
4 14 (1.55%) GitLab
5 7 (0.78%) PowerDesigner
6 6 (0.66%) JIRA
7 5 (0.55%) Burp Suite
8 4 (0.44%) ER Studio
8 4 (0.44%) Metasploit
9 3 (0.33%) TeamCity
10 2 (0.22%) Jenkins
11 1 (0.11%) JUnit
11 1 (0.11%) MSBuild
11 1 (0.11%) Selenium
11 1 (0.11%) TestNG
General
1 338 (37.43%) Finance
2 253 (28.02%) Social Skills
3 211 (23.37%) Analytical Skills
4 129 (14.29%) Marketing
5 97 (10.74%) Law
6 88 (9.75%) Banking
7 67 (7.42%) Pharmaceutical
8 62 (6.87%) Retail
9 59 (6.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 51 (5.65%) Financial Institution
11 36 (3.99%) Manufacturing
12 29 (3.21%) Legal
13 28 (3.10%) Public Sector
14 22 (2.44%) Organisational Skills
15 15 (1.66%) Health Technology
15 15 (1.66%) Publishing
16 14 (1.55%) Influencing Skills
17 13 (1.44%) Tech for Good
18 12 (1.33%) Games
18 12 (1.33%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 200 (22.15%) Senior
2 151 (16.72%) Data Scientist
3 142 (15.73%) Lead
4 117 (12.96%) Data Engineer
5 89 (9.86%) Analyst
6 71 (7.86%) Architect
7 67 (7.42%) Data Analyst
8 64 (7.09%) Developer
9 46 (5.09%) Senior Data Scientist
10 43 (4.76%) Data Architect
11 39 (4.32%) Senior Data Engineer
12 38 (4.21%) Consultant
12 38 (4.21%) Software Engineer
13 25 (2.77%) Senior Developer
14 24 (2.66%) GCP Architect
15 20 (2.21%) Cloud Architect
15 20 (2.21%) Platform Architect
15 20 (2.21%) Senior Manager
16 19 (2.10%) Senior Architect
16 19 (2.10%) Senior Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 62 (6.87%) PyTorch
2 60 (6.64%) TensorFlow
3 50 (5.54%) scikit-learn
4 44 (4.87%) Pandas
5 43 (4.76%) React
6 42 (4.65%) PySpark
7 26 (2.88%) LangChain
8 23 (2.55%) RESTful
9 22 (2.44%) NumPy
10 19 (2.10%) Kafka
11 17 (1.88%) Hugging Face
12 15 (1.66%) FastAPI
12 15 (1.66%) HTML
13 12 (1.33%) .NET
13 12 (1.33%) Swagger
14 11 (1.22%) CSS
14 11 (1.22%) Django
14 11 (1.22%) FHIR
14 11 (1.22%) Flask
14 11 (1.22%) REST
Miscellaneous
1 87 (9.63%) Algorithms
1 87 (9.63%) Life Science
2 50 (5.54%) Cloud Native
3 48 (5.32%) Product Ownership
4 43 (4.76%) Self-Motivation
5 38 (4.21%) Management Information System
6 35 (3.88%) Distributed Systems
7 27 (2.99%) Data Structures
8 24 (2.66%) Onboarding
9 21 (2.33%) Pharmacovigilance
10 19 (2.10%) Reinsurance
11 17 (1.88%) AI Agents
11 17 (1.88%) Credit Risk
12 16 (1.77%) Legacy Systems
13 15 (1.66%) Omics
14 13 (1.44%) Analytical Mindset
15 12 (1.33%) Hybrid Cloud
16 9 (1.00%) Enterprise Software
17 8 (0.89%) Greenfield Project
17 8 (0.89%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 11 (1.22%) Linux
2 7 (0.78%) 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 (52.49%) Analytics
2 465 (51.50%) Machine Learning
3 461 (51.05%) AI
4 228 (25.25%) Problem-Solving
5 219 (24.25%) Agile
6 203 (22.48%) Computer Science
7 197 (21.82%) Decision-Making
8 190 (21.04%) Business Intelligence
9 187 (20.71%) Data Engineering
10 173 (19.16%) Data Modelling
11 168 (18.60%) Mentoring
12 165 (18.27%) Roadmaps
13 164 (18.16%) Data Pipeline
14 161 (17.83%) Data Governance
15 159 (17.61%) Visualisation
16 154 (17.05%) ETL
17 144 (15.95%) Data Analysis
18 140 (15.50%) Statistics
19 134 (14.84%) Continuous Improvement
20 133 (14.73%) CI/CD
Programming Languages
1 524 (58.03%) Python
2 316 (34.99%) SQL
3 80 (8.86%) R
4 75 (8.31%) Java
5 44 (4.87%) Scala
6 29 (3.21%) Go
7 23 (2.55%) JavaScript
7 23 (2.55%) TypeScript
8 16 (1.77%) C#
9 15 (1.66%) VBA
10 13 (1.44%) C++
11 12 (1.33%) MATLAB
12 11 (1.22%) Rust
13 9 (1.00%) ANSI SQL
13 9 (1.00%) Bicep
14 7 (0.78%) PHP
15 5 (0.55%) C
16 4 (0.44%) PowerShell
17 3 (0.33%) Tcl
17 3 (0.33%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 353 (39.09%) Degree
2 163 (18.05%) Master's Degree
3 87 (9.63%) Computer Science Degree
4 86 (9.52%) PhD
5 76 (8.42%) Security Cleared
6 60 (6.64%) SC Cleared
7 45 (4.98%) Numerate Degree
8 17 (1.88%) DBS Check
8 17 (1.88%) MBA
9 16 (1.77%) DV Cleared
10 10 (1.11%) AWS Certification
10 10 (1.11%) BPSS Clearance
11 9 (1.00%) PMI Certification
12 8 (0.89%) Azure Certification
12 8 (0.89%) PMP
13 7 (0.78%) Postgraduate
14 6 (0.66%) APMP
14 6 (0.66%) CFA
14 6 (0.66%) Microsoft Certification
15 3 (0.33%) SAP Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 155 (17.17%) Data Quality
2 55 (6.09%) GDPR
3 39 (4.32%) GxP
4 30 (3.32%) Accessibility
5 28 (3.10%) QA
6 23 (2.55%) EU AI Act
7 22 (2.44%) HIPAA
7 22 (2.44%) Solvency II
8 21 (2.33%) PSD2
9 11 (1.22%) CDISC
9 11 (1.22%) HL7
10 7 (0.78%) 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 64 (7.09%) Docker
2 3 (0.33%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.22%) Hyper-V
3 2 (0.22%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 72 (7.97%) Kubernetes
2 23 (2.55%) Terraform
3 9 (1.00%) 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
7 2 (0.22%) Prometheus
8 1 (0.11%) Nagios
8 1 (0.11%) Salt
Vendors
1 108 (11.96%) Databricks
2 98 (10.85%) Google
3 76 (8.42%) Microsoft
4 34 (3.77%) Alteryx
5 31 (3.43%) Bloomberg
6 28 (3.10%) Oracle
7 25 (2.77%) OpenAI
8 23 (2.55%) Salesforce
9 20 (2.21%) SAP
10 16 (1.77%) Informatica
11 13 (1.44%) Foundry
12 12 (1.33%) Talend
13 8 (0.89%) Palantir
14 7 (0.78%) Cisco
15 5 (0.55%) BT
15 5 (0.55%) Red Hat
16 4 (0.44%) HubSpot
16 4 (0.44%) IBM
16 4 (0.44%) Intapp
16 4 (0.44%) Splunk